Redeeming the Broken Stars.

CHAPTER 19: DAX, GO HOME.

Dax smiled arrogantly into Blind old Moth's face as he continued.

“There's no version of this that ends with you winning."

"Mmm," Old Moth said. Then: "You've been managing things in this district for, how long? Twelve years?"

The question threw Dax slightly off his rhythm. "Thirteen."

"Thirteen years. And in thirteen years, you've come to my door four times."

"We've had occasion…”

"The first time was nine years ago, when you wanted information about a demon-blooded child who'd been seen near my end of the street. I told you I hadn't seen her. You chose not to press the matter."

A very slight tension in Dax's expression. 

"I didn't press because there was nothing to press."

"The second time was six years ago. You wanted me to vacate this space because someone with more money than me wanted it for a storage facility. I declined.”

“You and four men attempted to convince me otherwise." Old Moth's voice was still pleasantly conversational.

"You left having convinced no one. You also left significantly faster than you arrived."

The tension in Dax's face had become something more visible now. Behind him, some of his men were exchanging glances.

"The third time was three years ago," Old Moth continued, "when your superior, a man named Regent Voss, came personally to inform me that I had been providing shelter to persons wanted by the Mortal Coil Authority, and that this constituted a violation of district law.”

“He arrived with twelve men and a formation array specialist." She paused. 

"He did not stay long."

"You're not a cultivator," Dax said, but the authority in his voice had acquired a small crack.

"The fourth time," Old Moth said, as if he hadn't spoken, "is tonight."

She stepped back from the door slightly, opening the space wider. An invitation, on the surface of it. But Kaelen, watching from the table, saw something in her posture change. Subtle. 

The way a river looks the same until the moment it reaches the drop.

"You've come to my home," she said, "with fifteen men, on behalf of a debt already collected in blood. You've called my student a corpse and a sorcerer.”

“You've threatened to have him turned over to Celestial Inquisitors, knowing full well that the Inquisitors in the Mortal Coil take the bounty money and salt-mine the alleged offender regardless of evidence."

Her voice remained pleasant. Entirely, unreasonably pleasant. 

"You've also accused me, on four separate occasions across thirteen years, of harboring fugitives, practicing dark cultivation, and generally being an inconvenience to the management of this district."

"That's right," Dax said, and took a step forward through the door.

"I think," Old Moth said, "it's time I addressed all four."

What happened next, Kaelen would spend considerable time afterward trying to describe accurately and consistently failing.

Old Moth immediately moved.

That was the most accurate statement. She moved, and the room, the door, the very space between her and the fifteen men outside seemed to reconfigure around the movement. 

Her walking stick, which had been a walking stick for four days and was apparently not always a walking stick, traced a pattern through the air that left something like an afterimage, a shape that Kaelen's eyes registered but his mind couldn't quite parse.

The first three men through the door met the pattern and stopped. 

That was the most clinical way to describe it. They were moving forward, and then they weren't, and they went down as if their legs had forgotten they were legs.

The formation array specialists outside activated their arrays.

Kaelen knew formation arrays. Had studied them under Typhon with the thoroughness of a student preparing for divine ascension. 

The arrays the six men outside deployed were low-grade by celestial standards, cheap mass-production techniques that created blunt-force spiritual pressure or basic elemental attacks, nothing that would give a real cultivator pause.

Old Moth walked into them.

The formations hit her, and he could see that they were hitting her, could see the spiritual pressure distorting the air around her, could see the elemental discharge sparking against whatever she had instead of conventional cultivation defense. And she kept walking. Through the formations. 

Through the men activating them, past them, the walking stick tracing its incomprehensible patterns with the economy of someone who had done exactly this a thousand times and found it slightly tedious.

The formation array specialists went down. Not dead. Kaelen noticed that, with the analytical part of his mind.

None of them were dead. They were incapacitated, specifically and deliberately incapacitated, in ways that would cause significant discomfort and an unknown recovery period but not fatalities.

She wasn't killing them. She was choosing not to.

The remaining men, the physical fighters, charged.

Old Moth stood in the middle of them like a stone in a river, and the pattern of the walking stick became something else entirely as they closed in.

Kaelen watched, forgetting everything else for a moment, because what he was seeing was technique beyond anything he'd encountered even in the upper heavens.

It was a technique that felt like it came from somewhere outside the Nine Heavens' standard cultivation framework, from a tradition older than the Celestial Order and not subject to its classifications.

One man went over her head. He wasn't thrown. There was no dramatic toss, no visible application of force. 

He simply arrived at a position that resulted in him being airborne, and landed outside the door with the confused expression of someone who couldn't identify the moment things had changed.

Three went sideways. Two folded at specific points. Four found themselves kneeling without having decided to kneel.

It took approximately forty seconds.

At the end of forty seconds, fourteen men were incapacitated in various attitudes around Old Moth's doorway and the immediate street outside, and Dax stood alone.

He stood very still.

His hands, which had been reaching for the formation array activation stones at his belt, were no longer moving.

The expression on his face was moving through several stages rapidly, arriving somewhere in the vicinity of the realization that the certainties he'd walked in with had departed without him.

"You're not a cultivator," he said.

It wasn't a challenge this time. It was a man trying to reconcile what he'd been told with what he'd just witnessed, and finding the reconciliation impossible.

"No," Old Moth agreed, walking back toward her door with the exact same unhurried pace she'd used leaving it. "I'm not."

"Then what…” Dax asked almost immediately, his face was etched in shock and disbelief.

"Something older." She reached the door and turned, looking at him with those white, sightless eyes.

"Thirteen years, Dax. Thirteen years you've been managing this district, and four times you've come to my door.”

“I've been patient. I've been willing to have conversations.”

“I've been available to negotiate an explanation and the occasional extended discourse about why a one-room home occupied by an old blind woman who bothers no one should perhaps be left alone." She tilted her head. 

"You've

consistently chosen to interpret patience as weakness."

Dax said nothing as he stared at her, he was now almost shivering.