Yue's been in all kinds of storms before, almost always on purpose. I mean, sometimes you're out on errands and it just starts to rain, but like, usually it's a choice you make to keep going and not just knock on someone's door or cozy up in a little cave or under a tree or whatever happens to be handy, y'know? The rain falls and the wind stings and you're just like... well, that medicine still needs gathering! Well, those tea leaves'll be ruined after this anyway! Well, I promised Ms. Water Deer I'd watch her children today! Well, I just plain don't feel like not dancing in the grove tonight! And so on, see? That's who Yue is. 

One time she forgot what season she was in and she shrugged off the darkening clouds only to catch the fury of a summer storm, full of hail the size of a fox's paw. And Yue, she had nowhere to go but forward, so that's what she did. She dipped and ducked and dodged as best she could. She fought the sky with her umbrella and her silly wooden sword together, twin-blade style! Sometimes she was enough to avoid the falling ice, and other times it thwacked her so hard on the head or her back or her legs or her arms that she thought she was gonna die! There was no end to it, just Mama Sky unleashing blows so fast and furious she was helpless, like I said, to do anythin' but walk through 'em. 

And so she did. And when she finally stumbled home she needed a blanket. And a very soft chair. And a bucket of hot water to rest her feet in. And a whole hot bath to soak the rest of herself in after that. And soft towels to wrap herself in after. And an empty house with only little fox friends to not judge her when she didn't put on clothes the rest of the night. And a whole bowl of warm onion broth to slowly, loudly slurp. It was a rough time, ok? She needed a lot to feel better after. But because she did it, she made it to the top of a new hill that day, and she'd never felt more accomplished about anything in her life. So nobody could tell her it wasn't worth the trouble.

Yue's never been in a proper duel before, it turns out. All her ones before were practice. Or they were play. Or very special dances with people whose stories she already understood, once or twice even before they did. But she's never [i]dueled[/i] before, never fully figured out her very first lesson from her very first fighting instructor. She's never felt the rush of the dance of dares and daggers, where footwork is almost more important than swordplay, where grim smiles turn into flirty ones at the drop of a stone or vice versa, where the space of a wink is enough to get your head cut off because you're walking chest to chest in slow circles with your sword pressed against your opponent's neck, and hers on yours. 

It's scary. It's so scary that she can't keep swallowing, gulping and gasping. It's so scary she drops into two completely unrelated flop sweats. It really ruins her attempts to be a flashy and charming dancer for this girl who was, in spite of everything and everyone she's known, the first to ask her if she wanted a challenge. The first to [i]push[/i] her, to try and swallow her whole, to fight her for really really realsies and not because they wanted to teach her something. She's never done a dance of death like this and been forced to be so aware, so very incredibly aware of how sharp a sword really is. What it's really like to hold a blade to somebody else and just how much she's asking of herself and her partner every time she picks it up. 

But it's also exciting. It's so exciting that her heart flutters like a dancing flame on a candle wick, and with her chest squeezed so tight against Qiu's there's no way she doesn't feel it too. And [i]that's[/i] exciting, too. The warmth inside of her is hot and sticky. It's in her chest, it's running up and down her arms, it's welling in her stomach. It's between her legs. And so she dances, to make the flame burn brighter. To feel hotter and hotter and hotter until it's not sweat she has to worry about dripping everywhere. To share the feeling. To rise to the challenge. To be a figure from "the stories" and dance like she was born for it. To not let down her teachers or falter in front of this girl who was a hurricane, but instead take her warmth and share it.

Their feet cross in such a way that, for a fleeting instant, Yue's got control of the tempo. In this one second, she could do anything. A flick of her sword could disarm Qiu, or she could twist her hip and bring her to the ground. She could flourish her sleeve and blind Qiu for a decisive strike neither of them had a name for yet. Infinite possibility, inside this one little step.

She takes her chance. She leans forward and kisses this other girl full on the lips. Her face opens in a wide and very flustered grin, while her neck dribbles blood along the blade she'd pressed it into. And together they walk through a door, backwards in time.

(Don't worry, Hyra. Wolves mate for life. But your girlfriend is experiencing, like, twelve awakenings right now and how many times is she going to get the chance to kiss a Princess? I promise you, she will not begrudge you any of these same opportunities for as long as you live <3)

I think it's fair to say that Yue's danced before. With many, or against many, or however you want to say it. And I don't just mean on her way here, with the knights and the demons and the piles of assault ribbons! Though that was a lot of fun, too! But real warfare, erm... dancing is when you're dealing with a warren full of extremely antsy rabbits (EARs). There's so many! Hippity hop! Ity! And they're fast, wowzers they are [i]fast[/i] and just, goshies, you'd think they wouldn't be very threatening but those teeth are actually terrifying and ouchie?

So just imagine, not a city but an entire society of bunbuns, all of them mad as all get out and flustered because they think you're there to hurt them and even speaking their language doesn't help any because they are just Extremely Anxious and Also Not Listening Rabbits (EAANLRs) and also you are much bigger than they are, which makes you untrustworthy by default. So you run and you zip and you dodge, you dance with the poor little buns and you don't even let your adorable forest fox best friend come out and... ok look I see the conflict of interest here, I'm just saying an extra pair of pawsies would, oh come on! It's boring in the bag! What do you think made me take up hobbyist narration in the first place?

Anyway. Qiu becomes armies, cities. She expresses them with a sweep of her blade. Yue responds by becoming the woods and the plains, and the gorgeous stretch of land by the river, and she dances through them as a single person might when she knows them all like the back of her hand, and suddenly there's nothing more to fear. It's not the feeling of being many, that's not a move that's in her fight vocabulary, but it [i]is[/i] the feeling of infinity. When she's her own Terraced Lake, you see, it doesn't matter how many angles the dance takes place from, because the water has a place for them all. S'kinda funny this is how she approaches it, but you asked who Yue is, didn't you? Well here she is. She's a sillyhead who can do anything so long as she doesn't stop to think about how impossible it might be. And she reaches the end of another dance, and winds further back in time. 

She's never been the villain in someone's story, unless you count Tianic. And Yue does [i]not[/i] count Tianic as the kind of person who needs or wants to go about creating villains out of heroes. So she's never done it before. She's never been asked to rise this high, to storm this hard, to hold so much power in her body. It's new to her. It's a tingly sort of thrilling, actually. But only because it's temporary. If she had to hold this sort of energy and the expectation that she could bring ruin and calamity and disaster, or that she might be expected to stroll into a diner at odd hours and steal the smiles from everybody's hearts just for funsies, well if that was her life she'd just sort of dissolve into an ugly puddle, wouldn't she? But like this, right now, with someone safe to throw herself against? It's amazing. 

Yue's dress glitters with all the seeming of the sun. Her sword sparkles against its terrible radiance as her hair pulls loose and flutters majestically behind her. Her back is straight, and she stands a hundred feet tall. Her delighted, dorky grin expresses itself as a deliciously evil smirk that calls lightning from the sky. She plants her sword in the ground and it lifts underneath her to form a shrine dedicated to love with water pouring from a thousand pipes in endless waterfalls and pools. 

Do you think you can bring her death, silly Princess? Show her! Only the worthiest technique from the most pure hearted maiden can carry a blade all the way to her heart! Where Yue strikes, storms follow. She etches her entire soul into the land around her because it's fun. She leaps, and where her body passes it creates a whirlwind. She falls, and her body is a meteor that could purge the land clean, if it wanted to. 

She does this all with the zeal of a girl who's never had power she could even think about abusing before. She spends money as somebody who's barely had enough to get by her whole life suddenly waking up to discover she's inherited a fortune and is afraid that if she doesn't blow it all at once she'll wake up again the next day to find it's all gone back to how it was. She falls farther and faster than any of her friends could probably think her capable of.

But it's a trust fall, y'know? She does it because there's someone there to catch her. There's a god-slaying sword she'll get to see, that'll fix everything and make all of indulgences turn harmless, but only if she storms hard enough, cackles darkly instead of giggling, and duels with the full fury of the proper Demon Swordswoman. The duel is about the duel, Princess Qiu. We move like this. Then like this. Now like this. Finishing like this. Again! Strike harder! The fight isn't won till you've knocked her from the skies and lifted her blushing head up with your blade!

She falls. She crashes through the final barrier. And on the other side she, she, she!

Oh ouchies. Ooooof. Mommy can she sleep in today? Sis said it's kay if she's got a good excuse, and her whole body feels like bruises now. Yue stumbles toward Qiu with, well, not so much determination as a lack of idea of what else to do. Her training has all been beaten out of her arms, her legs, her brain. She's got no stance except the ones she dreamed she might have when she was a little girl, reading the same four books in an endless loop instead of going to bed like a sillyhead.

She doesn't hold a sword anymore, but a stick. She's not ready for the real thing yet, and she couldn't afford one anyway. Swords are things for fancy city folk with access to good iron and lots of hot and skilled artists to beat all that metal into a pretty thing just for flyin' and dancin' and stealin' pretty girls' hearts with. But when you don't know what you're doin', a stick's as good as Excalibur. Anything she can pick up and swing could be a legendary blade in her arms.

Her lungs are burning. Her body is so drenched in sweat that four baths wouldn't be enough to clean her. Her gorgeous, perfect battle dress has been torn and cut up bad enough that she's gonna have to find a sewing wizard to put it back together again because it is so utterly, [i]stupidly[/i] beyond her or even her sunshine to fix it by herself. And it's weird, right? Because it should make her want to cry, but all she does it fight. She ignores her aches, she ignores the blood and the way her cuts sting where they're covered with dirt and mud, and the twigs caught in her hair, and the sand in her... everything, ack, goshies, it's even in her mouth, ptui ptui pfeh! No wait, she's ignorin' it, ignorin' it I said! She just fights, because there's someone here in front of her who loves it more than anything, someone who's shown her so many stories in so short a time that it'd be rude to give up until she's good and ready.

Besides, it's not like there's anything left of Qiu the Threeshard Princess, either. This is not a legendary battleground for suave and sophisticated duelists. This is not a fight that anybody will sing of, where skills and powers they'll need new words to describe clash against each other like raindrops on a windowpane. This is not a place where experience and talent even exists to trump a useless novice like our precious, pretty Yue. This is just a couple of girls, all the way back at the beginning of the journey, waving tiredly at one another 'cause it's fun to do so.

The Wandering Tales of Yue the Sun Farmer, the final, strongest secret sword: Yes, I Love you! The Sword of Validation! Yue does not dance or duel because she has a story she wants to tell. Not one she wants to impose on anyone she meets, from the greatest fighter on the planet to someone who's picking up a weapon for the very first time in their life. It's a harder path she's born to walk, one cultivated from a lifetime of running with animals and caring for plants, and only ever taking what she needs. Do you know how Yue wins duels? The only way she can win and still stay herself? Well I'll tell you. She has to finish when her opponent's heart is fuller than she found it. She wins when they smile, she loses when they frown. 

But that's not why her knees give out on her. That's not why she tumbles into a heap in front of Qiu. That happens for a much simpler reason: she's just not as good. Not as strong or fast or in as good of shape. She hit her limit before the Threeshard Princess. It [i]is[/i] her face being lifted up, in the end. And she's got nothing left in the tank. Nothing she's got it in her tired, battered body left that she can to respond. Nothing except to sniffle, and then to cry. She punches the dirt.

"Darn it," she says, "Darn it! I almost had you! I swear I almost had you! I wanted... I wanted to win!"

She sniffles, loud and nasally and super duper undignified. And the true, final power of her Secret Sword is unleashed at last. She lifts a shaky hand to wipe her tears away as her face lights up in the sunniest smile she's got inside her. She laughs. She laughs so hard she snorts.

"Next time," she giggles this time, "Next time I'm gonna kick your butt. Or the next next time. Or the next next next next time. But I'mma get you! And when I do, you'll... owe me... a..."

Yue. Plain old silly Yue, flops forward just as tired as it's possible for a girl to be. She falls straight into Qiu's arms, and closes her eyes. See, sillyhead? She took your worst. [i]And[/i] your best. She's still here. When you, when you get right down to it, a dragon's not any scarier than a tiger. You... dummy...

Tell me. Come on, tell me. Who [i]really[/i] won today?