A signature was closing — broken, the frequency of a core shattered by something other than death, a forced disruption that produced a signature like a bell hit wrong, audible in the overtones.

  You — Xu Ran.

  You stopped in your torn coat at the edge of the clearing where I stood — the clearing a consequence of my standing there, the trees around it intact but the grass beneath me brown and dead.

  You saw me and I saw you — peripheral, unimportant, another body in a world of bodies that either lived or didn't.

  You must have felt my aura.

  I could see the physical response — your face going pale, then green with nausea. Your hands shook, not from cold but from the qi-emission hitting your already-broken system, additional stress on a structure with no tolerance for additional stress.

  Blood came in your mouth, the capillary disruption. You spat sideways, discreetly — the gesture of a person who maintained propriety even while their body rejected proximity.

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  You stayed — at fifty paces, at the edge of the radius, here, present, enduring. The trembling was continuous, the nausea continuous, the blood-taste continuous. You endured all of it by clenching your jaw and standing.

  You looked at me.

  I didn't look back. Your presence registered the way weather registered — atmospheric, environmental, a condition of the space rather than an occupant.

  You understood something. The shape of loss visible in the shape of a woman standing in dead grass in rain. The shape that did not require explanation because the shape was the explanation.

  Your core was broken. Nascent Soul, once — broken by me. Different mechanism. Different cause. Same result.

  You never asked what happened. That was the first thing about you I could stand.

  You stood there. At fifty paces. Offering nothing — no words, no comfort, no gesture. You had nothing to offer. Offering required having. Having required wholeness. Neither of us possessed it.

  The minutes passed, the rain drizzling, your coat wet, your hands trembling.

  Then you turned slowly — the way someone turns when turning requires reassembling the intention to move. You turned and you walked. Away. Your gait uneven — a body compensating for a broken core. The limp that was not a limp but close enough.

  You did not look back. You had not arrived. Arriving required an invitation. The host was standing in dead grass and the host was not hosting.

  Fifty paces.

  The distance of two broken things that recognized each other. The closest thing to comfort. Insufficient.