Stand aside, all of you. I am not accustomed to speaking shoulder to shoulder.
The Golden-Winged Great Peng. Last of the three kings of Lion-Camel Ridge — and by lineage, the most senior of the three: the Tathagata Buddha, properly reckoned, is my nephew. The classic states the kinship plainly; I am not name-dropping.
When the Ridge fell, the lion and the elephant followed their masters home. I alone refused, and fought to the last. The Tathagata came in person — and even he did not subdue me. He pinned me within the halo above his own head: enshrined, and held. For three hundred years. The world asks: why did he not kill you?
He could not. And needed not. He and I were adversaries, and kin — and one open case between us: my nature of slaughter, which he was resolved to deliver; his creed of mercy, which I refused to concede. Neither could out-argue the other. So: pin first. Talk slowly.
Three hundred years in the halo — and three hundred years we talked.
Not pleading. Debating scripture. I asked: in the Lion-Camel Kingdom lives fell like grass — where was your mercy, and why so late? He answered. He asked: when you swallowed a nation, did your claw hesitate one instant? I answered. One question a day, one answer; blade against blade —
and I will not hide it: it was glorious. In all the Three Realms, exactly one being was fit to argue me to the end. Him.
By the two hundred ninety-seventh year, I sensed we were nearly concluded. One day he said: Peng — of our great debate, a single question remains. Let me finish a certain great council. When I return, I will ask it.
Then he went to his council.
You know the night. The halo dissolved; the heavens went still; the sky above my head emptied — the force that held me, gone.
I was free. The freedom I had craved for three hundred years arrived weightless as that — a door locked three centuries swinging open on its own, and the one who opened it nowhere to be found.
Do you know what that moment tasted like, to this bird?
A breast full of the final question — and no opponent left to hear it.
I rose and, in three days, turned the Three Realms over with my wings. The celestial court: empty. Tushita: empty. The Southern Sea: empty. Last, I flew to the sky's utmost height — and struck the thing you call the canopy.
The falcon youngster says it glimpsed the something on the canopy's roof. I will tell you what came after: that something and I faced each other on the roof for an entire night.
It did not move. Neither did I. It studied me; I studied it. At dawn, it turned its head away first.
It knew me. And I recognized what it is —
and will not say. Said now, half this company would turn and run east. At the step past Vulture Peak, I will say it.
After that night of staring, I made my decision: fly back to Vulture Peak, take the crown of the mountain gate, and keep the door for my absent nephew.
The Great Peng as gatekeeper — a first in the history of the Three Realms. Yao came: I struck. The foul came: I tore. The Eclipse Sect tested the gates three times, and three times what returned to them was wind through fallen feathers.
Why keep his gate? You have heard too many faithful-servant stories on this road. Do not file me among them. I am no servant. I am his adversary.
And it is precisely the adversary who understands the one thing that matters:
if he does not return, my final question goes unanswered forever. Three hundred years of debate collapse into a monologue. And this nature of slaughter in me loses the one being who insisted it could be delivered — and then what were my three hundred years for?
Therefore he must return. And until he returns, his door will not be held by anything else.
This is not loyalty. This is the entire wager I have staked on him.
The day the medicine-basket boy knocked at the mountain gate, I watched them from the crown a long while — and opened a seam. The outer courts admitted them. The acolyte's pedestals, the maiden's pearl, the cicadas' score: you have seen them all.
As they left, the boy looked up and called to me: Elder Peng — coming with us?
Coming. Of course coming. The step west of Vulture Peak — this bird has waited three hundred years for it.
But my terms go on record first. On this road, my wings are yours entire. Yet at the end, when we stand before that thing —
the final question is asked by me. First.
And once it is asked — whatever the answer proves to be —
these claws take their orders from you.