As the Crows Fall | ONC 2020 Grand Winner

iii | Blood for Vengeance

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Ruwei has an artist's heart.

She is twenty years old and selling both paintings and signatures at a coffee bar by the university on the river's edge when she is told her sister is dead.

Her paintings are genuine, sold rarely if ever. Her signatures are forged, sold time and time again.

Her most common buyers are those desperate for reprieve from the damning judgement of society, and more often than not, that comes in the form of a signature from someone who could not care less about what they need it for.

It is interesting, Ruwei thinks, to see what becomes of a desperate person's morals.

There are a great many things the desperate want. Money. Approval. Ignorance.

But they do not want her paintings.

Strange, they tell her. Too twisted. Too messy. Too unusual.

Too ugly.

Ugly. That is the word she hears most often. To describe her artwork. To describe her clothes. To describe her personality. To describe her.

Ugly.

That day, it does not rain. It is overcast, the soft aftermath of a storm that fell the day before casting gold light through the clouds to the mountains and rivers below. It feels like every moment of waiting crammed into the hours of sunlight, every gentle liminal space folded into a single day.

It is this day that Ruwei sits behind the counter, sketching the passing crows, when she receives the letter.

She opens it. Reads it once. Reads it twice. Reads it three times.

Then she folds it and tucks it away in her pocket.

There are many words on the page, but there only three that she engraves in her heart.

Yin Ruyue si le.

Yin Ruyue has died.

When Ruyue lived, she spilled her own blood far too often, but this day is the first time Ruwei willingly does the same. She does so with the knife they use in the shop to cut bread, a jagged, wretched sort of thing. She cuts longways down her arm and calls the crows.

They gather, then, on the streets outside, small heads turning about, paying both too little and too much attention to the people passing by. Ruwei watches them for just a moment, just until the clouds begin darkening overhead.

And then she paints.

Her style changes that day. It becomes what it is now. Violent. Lilting. Bitter. Precise.

This day marks the first time someone shows interest in her paintings, but still, they do not buy one.

It is not until Ruwei vows vengeance for a death too young, until she sells what's left of her heart to a god, until she gives up all that is not revenge, that people want her paintings.

It is not until she kills that they call them beautiful.

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Ruwei casts the necklace to the dirt with vicious abhorrence.

It hurtles into the grit of the cave floor, spewing dust and dirt as she stalks towards the pool at the back of the cavern.