Title: the path is where you're going
Fandom: Guardian
Rating: PG-rated for violence
Length: ~2,200 words
Notes: Backstory. Spoilers for the whole show. Huge thanks to trobadora for beta. <3 <3 <3
Summary: Ten thousand years ago, a boy loses his brother.


When Shen Wei, armed with his newly unearthed pudao, scrambles back up the side of the cliff, the hilltop is bare and empty. He is alone with the sky. His brother has vanished.

Sick at heart, still shocked from the assault and the sudden sheer helplessness of the fall, he calls for Ye Zun until his throat is raw, but there’s no reply. The man—a ruffian and unrepentant murderer—must have tossed him from the cliff too. Ye Zun doesn’t have powers like Shen Wei does, he’s not useful like that, and even if the man had made the same offer, Ye Zun would have spat in his face. Their parents had raised them not to kneel to anyone.

There’s no chance he would have survived a fall.

Shen Wei slips and slides back down and runs along the cliff base, fighting back tears as he searches. Maybe it’s not too late. He can use dark energy to save his brother, if only he can find him in time.

Shen Wei had been just six years old when his powers had awoken. His father had declared he was meant for great things, and his mother had taken him aside and, eyes bright with confidence, charged him with protecting his brother. It had been her last request before they’d been killed in an uprising. But the ruffian had manhandled Shen Wei and thrown him aside like he was nothing. As if his duty were nothing.

A sob escapes him. He’s failed them all. What can he possibly do to make amends? First he has to find Ye Zun. If he can’t heal him, he has to give him a proper burial.

The sun goes down while he looks and the temperature falls, but he doesn’t care. When it’s too dark to see, he tears a strip from his robe, makes a torch of his blade, and continues looking even when the wooden handle of the pudao grows hot and starts to blacken. A scorched palm is the least of his worries.

But however hard he searches, the night refuses to give up his brother’s body.

At dawn he returns to the hilltop, the last place he saw his brother, and studies the ground, trying to decipher the scuffmarks and tracks to see if Ye Zun escaped somehow. He could be hiding nearby, scared and sick. Maybe he didn’t dare answer Shen Wei’s calls.

Shen Wei scours the area for days, sure that any minute he’ll find his brother’s broken body, a mirror of his own failure. He never does. It’s as if Ye Zun has vanished from the face of Haixing.

Exhausted, starving, consumed with fury and despair, Shen Wei gives up. It feels as if his heart stops beating in his chest. As if it won’t start again until he’s avenged Ye Zun.


*


It takes one moon of asking around and eight days’ trekking to find the cave in the mountains where the Humans and Yashou have their joint command.

He’s tired and ragged, and he’s barely stopped to eat in weeks, but he holds his head up.

A few soldiers are sitting outside the cave entrance, sharpening their weapons and talking in low voices. One stands as he approaches, but it’s a youth in a braided headband who comes to meet him, head tilted curiously. “Who are you?”

Shen Wei’s hand tightens on his pudao. “I’ve come to join the fight.”

“You’re so short. Are you from a tribe of dwarves?”

Shen Wei stands straighter, about to retort, when two adults—perhaps as old as his parents had been when they died—come out of the cave, talking. They’re not dressed for fighting, and it sounds as though the woman is picking holes in the man’s battle strategy. They break off when they see him, and the woman comes forward.

“Da Qing, who is this?”

“He might be a dwarf,” says the young man with the headband.

The woman shakes her head. “You’ve spent all this time around Humans, and you still can’t recognise a child?” She turns to Shen Wei. “I’m Fu You.”

“My name is Shen Wei. I’m not Human, I’m Dixingren.”

Lady Fu You’s smile stays in place, but her posture stiffens and she watches him carefully. After all, he has just identified himself as the enemy.

“I’m not with the Rebels,” Shen Wei adds hastily. “I want to fight them with you.”

“Shen Wei, go back to your people.” Her eyes are kind and sad, and Shen Wei wants to throw himself into her arms and pretend, just for a moment, that his mother is here.

But he holds steady. He didn’t come all this way to be patronized and rejected. “I don’t have any people.”

“I’m sorry, we can’t help you.” Lady Fu You looks to Da Qing. “Take this boy down to the pass. He can make his own way from there.”

Da Qing nods, and beckons. “This way, come on.”

Shen Wei doesn’t budge. “I’m not asking for help, I’m offering it.”

The man who’d been talking to Lady Fu You earlier steps forward, raising his voice. “Listen, kid. What did you say your name was—Shen Wei? There’s no place for you here. We need an army, not a child.”

“Ma Gui,” chides Lady Fu You, but she’s reproaching him for his tone, not his message. It’s clear they’re in agreement on this.

Shen Wei nods stiffly. He has his answer.

He needs an army.


*


He makes a mask so no one can see his age, his anger or his fear. He imbues his pudao with dark energy and uses it to strike awe into people’s hearts. He travels along trade routes, using his powers to find Dixingren, learning to discern who among them is a hardened Rebel, who can be turned to the cause of peace and living in harmony—for their families, if not themselves. He amasses a dozen followers, some of them twice his age or more but they don’t know that. Shen Wei’s powers are strong, he’s scrupulously fair, and luck follows him enough that they obey his commands without complaint.

But even with followers behind him, he’s lonely. He and Ye Zun had disagreed about a lot of things, but they had understood each other. And Ye Zun had been funny. Without him, Shen Wei forgets how to smile.

The first time he charges into battle, it’s to fend off half a dozen Rebels who are terrorising a small Human village. Houses billow thick clouds of smoke, livestock panics and charges around, children scream. The Rebels are brutal and laughing.

Shen Wei grips his pudao in sweaty hands and runs into the chaos shouting, “For my brother! This is for you, Ye Zun!”

He strikes at a Rebel’s chest, right at the edge of the man’s too-small leather jerkin. The hit makes a sickening sound, slick and fatal, flesh offering little resistance to Shen Wei’s sharp blade. The man’s face bulges, blood dribbles from his lips, and he goes limp. Shen Wei feels the wound as if it’s his own, staggers under the weight of remorse. What is he doing? But this is war. If he wants the Human–Yashou alliance to accept him, he has to prove himself.

He extracts his blade from the body and pivots to meet the next attack. “For Ye Zun!”


*


“For my brother!” becomes his battle cry, but after that first time, he pledges it under his breath. The cause is just, and his soldiers each have their own history, their own reason to fight. They don’t need to know his.

With every clash and skirmish, with every village they help, more people join them to train and fight. The new recruits are less concerned with peace and harmony, more with payback, but Shen Wei doesn’t refuse them a place. There are even some women—widows and orphans grimly determined to return a measure of the pain that’s been meted out to them.

At night around campfires, under the influence of beer or liquor, the soldiers curse and swear, competing to invent ever more elaborate punishments for the Rebel Chieftain should they come face to face with him. Making a game of it.

Shen Wei doesn’t partake in these sessions. There’s only one man he’s set on destroying: the ruffian who murdered Ye Zun. But over time, under the responsibilities of leadership, the flame of his vengeance is cooling. He has so many immediate demands on his attention: provisioning, weapons, plans. Mostly in the evenings he sits apart, strategizing, but sometimes he listens to the wild talk of revenge, to feed his determination and remind him of the vow he made.

They travel south, then east. Rumours of their deeds spread, and more people come to join them. When the army numbers in the hundreds, he leaves them camped on the bank of the Songhua River and takes a small contingent into the mountains to the Human–Yashou base.

Shen Wei has grown—he’s as tall as his men, now—and he’s in the habit of wearing his mask. Da Qing obviously doesn’t recognise him. “Who are you?”

“I come on behalf of all Dixingren who want to join the alliance against the Rebels. I’m here to talk to Lady Fu You.” Shen Wei speaks firmly, deepening his voice as much as his can.

Da Qing peers at his mask. “What name should I tell her?”

Shen Wei hesitates. He must have seemed so helpless last time he was here, he doesn’t want to be associated with the child he was, but he doesn’t have an alias. His soldiers just call him Chief. “Tell her I’m an envoy.”


*


By the time he comes face to face with his brother’s killer, the war has been raging for years and must surely be nearing its end. Almost all of his troops—and the majority of the Rebels, too—are dead or too injured to fight. As the Black-Cloaked Envoy, he’s forgotten the sound of his own name, and his silent battle cry is a collection of syllables without meaning.

His life is a blur of logistics, violence, and guilt at the heavy losses. He’s twenty-four years old, and he knows he won’t last much longer, but he won’t give up. He won’t.

Then he sees the killer’s face, and in an instant everything sharpens into focus: his two remaining brothers in arms sparring valiantly with him against eight or more hardened Rebels, the cliff behind them like deja vu. A years-old loss catches in his throat, and just then, the killer swings at him, slicing into his arm and knocking the mask from his face, leaving him wounded and exposed.

Rage rises up in him, fuelled by memories of all that’s been taken—his parents, his brother, countless of his comrades. His arm is bleeding and weak, and there’s every chance this will be his last fight.

So be it. He’ll take the bastard with him.

And then, out of nowhere, Destiny intervenes. Explosions rend the air. A Rebel drops to the ground, the killer flinches back as if hit. With a shout, he and the rest of the survivors turn tail and retreat.

It’s tempting to take advantage of their confusion and give desperate, futile chase, but both of his men collapse on the spot, and he can’t leave them. He looks to the figure on the hill, the one with the explosive weapon, and calls his thanks. “My men are critically injured. I have to leave first, but we shall meet again.”

He helps his soldiers up, and they limp off together to the healer at their dwindling camp.


*


Kun Lun is a man of smiles, a man of curiosity. He seems to embody everything that is missing from the life of a soldier and Envoy. Half of what he says is incomprehensible, but he is familiar in a way no one else dares to be, and in the space of a single conversation in the mountains at night, he unknowingly reveals a truth:

The Envoy is still fulfilling the promise his mother gave him. It’s simply that now, in the place of a sickly younger brother, all the people of Haixing—Dixingren, Humans and Yashou alike—are his to protect.

He will spare no cost to defend them. This has been a fact for some years: he’s worked endlessly with Lady Fu You and Lord Ma Gui, lain awake at night running over his own plans, done everything he can think of to protect them. Failed over and over, but carried on. But he’s always believed it was a means to an end, a path to finding Ye Zun’s murderer and avenging his death. To realise that the path is his purpose, it fulfils his promise, is as freeing as taking off his mask and feeling the cool night air on his cheeks.

There’s one other thing about Kun Lun: he gives Shen Wei back his name. And when he does, Shen Wei’s heart which has been quiet for so long begins to beat once more.


END