Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

Bai Qing told me about her teacher on the night before the quarterfinals, and afterward I understood her completely. I never again thought of her as a rival after that.

We were on the wall of the competitors’ quarter, late, the Arena dark below us and the great fold of the Records glowing faintly overhead. She’d come to find me — to teach me to hold a sword, she said, which we both knew was an excuse, because she sat down next to me instead and didn’t draw her blade at all.

"You asked me once why I chase it so hard," she said, looking out at the dark. "The glory. The recognition. You said you’d give yours away in a heartbeat, and you meant it, and I called us a matched pair of fools." She was quiet a moment. "I want to tell you why I’m the kind of fool I am."

And she told me.

She’d been raised in a sword school. Not a famous one — and that, she said, was the whole point, that was the wound. It was a tiny thing, up a forgotten valley nobody had a reason to visit, run by one old man. He had no sect behind him, no banners, no bards. His school was so small and so unknown that it had never even been given a proper name. People in the nearest village just called it "the old man’s place."

"And he was the best, Lin Bo," Bai Qing said, her voice fierce and low. "I have been to this tournament. I have seen the Iron Sovereign and the Frost-Widow and every great name on the continent. Not one of them — not one — was the blade my teacher was. He could do things with a sword that I will spend my whole life chasing and never reach. He was the finest swordsman alive." A bitter breath. "And nobody knew. Nobody ever knew. He didn’t care about fame, you see. He thought the sword was its own reward. He thought skill spoke for itself."

I felt the shape of the ending before she said it. That was the cruelest thing about this whole cruel world.

"A famous sect wanted the valley," Bai Qing said flatly. "Some sponsored thing, expanding its holdings. They came to take it. And my teacher — the best blade alive — stood at the gate of his nameless little school, and he was unknown, Lin Bo, and in this world the unknown have no power, because power is being believed in, and nobody believed in a man they’d never heard of." Her hands closed into fists. "So when they cut him down, nobody came. Nobody rallied. There was no outcry, no song, no record. How could there be? You can’t mourn a man the world never knew existed. They erased him, and the school, and everyone in it, and it was as if none of it had ever been. The finest swordsman who ever lived, and he’s not in a single song. He’s just... gone. Forgotten. Like he was never real at all."

The dark gap at the top of the sky. The thing Yun Shu wouldn’t look at. The thing the Scroll feared most. Being forgotten is the only true death. I’d known it was the law of this world. I hadn’t known it had a face until now — and the face was an old man at a gate that no one remembered.

"I survived because he made me hide," Bai Qing said. "A twelve-year-old in the woods, watching the only person who ever saw what I could be get erased for the crime of being unknown." She turned to me, and her eyes were dry and burning. "So I swore I’d never be powerless like that again. Never be so unknown that I could just be wiped away. I’d get famous. So famous that what happened to him could never happen to me. That’s the glory I’m chasing, Lin Bo. It was never vanity. It’s the most frightened thing in the world. I’m running from the gate."

We sat in silence for a while. I thought carefully before I spoke, because she’d handed me something fragile and I didn’t want to break it.

"Can I tell you what I think," I finally said, "from the inside of the thing you’re running toward?"

She nodded.

"I have the glory you want. More of it than your teacher’s killers ever had. And it didn’t make me real, Bai Qing. It made me less real — buried the actual me under a legend that isn’t mine, until even I have trouble finding the clerk underneath." I looked out at the dark. "Fame wouldn’t have saved your teacher. Not really. Because the thing that made him worth saving was never going to fit in a song. The songs would’ve made him a hero who out-dueled armies — and the truth, the realer and better truth, is that he was a quiet old man up a valley who could do impossible things with a sword and gave his whole life to teaching one frightened girl to do them too. That’s what was real. And it didn’t get erased." I met her eyes. "Because you remember it. You’re carrying the realest version of him there is — not a song, not a legend, the actual man — and you’ve carried it all the way here. He’s not gone, Bai Qing. He’s sitting on this wall with me right now, in everything you are. That’s not nothing. That might be the only kind of remembering that’s actually worth a damn."

Bai Qing didn’t say anything for a long time. When I looked over, there were tears on her face, finally — the ones twenty years of glory-chasing had never let her cry. She let me see them. I think that was the bravest thing she’d done at that whole tournament.

"I’ve been trying to make the world remember him," she said, very quietly. "When I’m the only one who actually can."

"Yeah," I said gently. "I think maybe you have."

She wiped her face roughly, and something shifted in her — not healed, but loosened. A knot pulled tight for twenty years giving up a little of its tension.

"There are a lot of nameless old men at gates," she said slowly, like the thought was new and she was turning it over. "All over this world. People the famous step on because no one would notice. People like him. People like you, before your ghost, or whatever it is." She frowned, working it out. "Maybe being remembered isn’t the thing to chase. Maybe... being the one who does the remembering. The one who stands at the gate for the people no one knows." She shook her head. "I don’t know. I’ve spent twenty years pointed the other way. But for the first time, the glory feels — small. And that feels bigger than the glory ever did."

On my shoulder, the Scroll, which had been silent and still through the whole story, said one thing, very softly. It was not about engagement. It was not for anyone but me.

"That’s what they erase, talent," it murmured, and there was forty thousand years of grief in it. "The real ones. The quiet ones. The ones who could’ve been remembered, if anyone had bothered." A pause. "Don’t let them. Whatever it costs. Don’t let them."

I didn’t know yet who the Scroll was really talking about.

I was starting to think it was the same person it always was. The one at the top of the sky, in the gap, with no name left.