Work Text:
She hears the forest cry every night.
It screams and screams and screams until it’s all she can hear. There are the spirits of burnt animals that are trapped, wrapped in the makings of unbridled cruelty. They cannot move on, they cannot find the peace that they need because someone took a flame and torched them to the ground for no reason more than power.
Her house was saved by the flames only by the curtsy of the luck of the gods and the buckets of water splashed on the house by the locals. It bleeds with the forest now, an ugly wound that she patched up herself, but it does not matter because there is the wound still there, burnt and charred. She can patch it up a thousand times and then once more, but that wound will be there still, and she will think of what caused it every time her eyes drift there.
The forest will grow back, and new trees will grow, and new animals will make it their home, but she knows that their ghosts will remain. Destruction from hatred is like tree sap - it’s sticky. It will lay this land to waste and will dig its talons into the shoulders of the soldiers that did this until they are ashes themselves.
It’s not enough. She knows that, and the screams of the trees every night know too. The winter solstice approaches, and with it so will Hei Bai and all it's rage. It’s rare, to see the Hei Bai spirit so full of rage. It loves the forest and the trees and the humans that reside in it, but it is a spirit, a spirit who is hurt and wounded, at the hands of humans. Hei Bai does not see the difference between Fire and Earth, and it will rage, until it has a justice, whatever form that may be. It will rage, until it gets its forest back - only there is no forest left to give, and the humans that took it are long gone, destruction in their wake and only the innocent towns people left to take the blame for its sins.
And still, the trees scream, and scream.
She hears about the fish attack the morning off. Hei Bai here, in their world, raging against the chains that keep them all tethered to their lands because it has been hurt and there is no one left to pay for it.
Hei Bai drags the villages into the trees that still stand, into the spirit world, and she knows she’ll be next.
Three days before the solstice she packs her bags, and she leaves the scar in the forest, and prays that the sins of another nation don’t follow her.