Per 
It was my first dream in centuries. We stood, my fellows and I, in the smoldering remains of our home. The lake of ash stretched so far you couldn’t see its end from the tallest mountain. We wailed and wept at our loss—in this dream we had not yet grown old.
A hand sprang from the charred earth and grabbed my leg. Our king, our savior, the Equal of Heaven, rose up out of the ground, laughing at my terrified reaction to his prank.
“The forest is gone,” I told him. “Help us. We beg you. We will die without the trees.”
Sun Wukong’s smile was all teeth. “I can make you a new forest,” he replied. “Would you like that?”
Cheers rang up through the crowd.
“Yes, Monkey!”
“Please do!”
“Make us a forest!”
The king bowed, and his smile overtook his face. “Very well! I will make you a forest!”
He put his hand to my chest and I felt a pain like no other. I could not move or speak. My ribs cracked one by one and my spine pushed up against my throat. Tendons snapped and sinews burst. Slowly, too slowly, I saw the ground move farther away. My eyes fell on the smile that once had a monkey underneath it, then on the staff it held in its hand: Ruyi Jingu Bang. The legendary weapon would change its size and shape in compliance with its owner’s wishes. I realized that I, too, was compliant.
“And what a fine forest you will be,” said the smile.
My arms were pulled toward the sky, and new ones sprouted along my trunk to join them. From those, I found hundreds of elongated fingers protruding out of me like so many branches. My toes dug deep into the earth with newfound thirst. The seasons cycled around me like a storm, years passing in moments as I grew, and soon I bore fruit. Buds of flesh bloomed into curled infants. They ripened and fell by the dozen to rot and burst on the ground. Time sped to a blur and I watched the world vanish in the distance beneath me.
When I woke, I found my body raked all over and my fingertips worn raw. My fur was matted with my own blood.
* * *
Zhelan had no interest in the scientist or his vaccines. I watched, mortified, as she scooped a mound of fresh feces in her bare hand. Even from a distance I could see blood and parasites mottled in the filth. I turned away as she readied her pitch, my stomach burning with shame and disgust. So many lessons. Countless hours pleading for health, hygiene, weapon-forging, anything, and what do we have to show for the effort? A fistful of bloody shit.
I longed for death.
“Zhelan,” I yelled toward the trees, unwilling to look at my daughter. “Leave the tall one alone and wash your hands.”
“My name is Yazhu, you horrible old man!” she yelled back.
It hardly needed move to dodge the feces she flung at me. She’s right, I thought. Zhelan had better aim. She was dead now, I vaguely recalled, though I couldn’t say how many winters it had been.
“You missed him!” screeched another vaguely-familiar child. “You missed! You missed!”
“You missed!” yet another little one chirped in. I wondered to myself what possessed us to spawn so many.
“The sun was in my eyes!” Yazhu snapped back. “You think it’s so easy, you get him yourself!”
And that, it turned out, is all one needs to say to turn a dozen disrespectful, unvaccinated monkeys into a shit-wielding mob. I was old, but luckily not aged, and managed to scrape a few moments head start. I moved as quickly as I could, ducking and weaving through brush and trees. Over a branch. Across a stream. Through the grass. Not an inch was unfamiliar. The voices of our children fell far behind me, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t running from them. I was running from everything—at least as far as the tall ones would allow.
I came, as I knew I would, to the fence they erected. It was decently imposing, but not a real obstacle. The machine under my skin was the real issue. Any further and they’d be after me. Not that it mattered—nowhere I’d go even if I could. So I turned back.
And I saw him.
He stood on a rock, shoulders square and chest proud, head slightly cocked as though in thought. Jingu Bang flipped and spun out from his fingers and back again in an effortless dance. Sunlight skittered at the edge of fur in a ring around his head. He hadn’t added a single day to his face since I'd seen him last. The Handsome Monkey King, we used to call him. And he was handsome, you know, as far a monkey can be, and maybe then a little more. He never would have gotten as far as he did if he wasn’t.
Long-forgotten reflexes shot to life and snapped me into a low bow, but only for an instant. That was the old me. The new me, I decided, was spitting pissed and out for blood.
“Happy sunrise!” said our king, finally noticing me. “Are you from around here? Perhaps you can help me; I recall there being a grove of the most sumptuous loquats around a hill just like this one, and the memory has been itching at my tongue. I’m confident were two boulders in the valley right below that were the spitting image of my own awe-inspiring posterior, and just above, a canopy full of these neat little birds that—”
He raised his hand toward the sky in a sweeping gesture. His eyes, for a fraction, flickered upward. I leapt further and quicker than ever in my ancient life. Instantly he was under me. My mind went white. In that moment I was no longer a thinking creature. I was only claws and teeth and thumping limbs. Some quiet place in the back of my mind registered a pair of huge, round eyes looking up at me in bewilderment.
And then, as if in an instant, the scene changed, the ground slamming against my back, a stonelike column pinning my chest to the forest floor. The king stood over me, grinning with a kind of wild excitement.
“We’ve met before,” he said, “haven’t we?”
It took some effort with no room for my ribs to expand, but I made my request. “Let us die.”
His grin became a smirk of puzzlement. Then, in a way I can barely describe, an avalanche of years fell on him. The curl on his lips and the jaunt on his hips seemed to fall away from him like leaves from a tree. “I gave you immortality,” he said. There was an uncharacteristic uncertainty to his voice, as though searching for confirmation.
A weight, literal and otherwise, was lifting from my chest. “Take it away. Please.”
“That’s preposterous.” With a flip and a twist, he sat on the ground beside me, his rod tucked back at his side. “Surely you haven’t run out of things to do.”
“We have.”
“Do you not like playing games anymore?” he asked. There was a clench in his voice—the words offended him.
“We don’t.”
“And your children?”
“Dead in a blink. They last only long enough to bring us shame.”
Sun Wukong frowned. The creases in his expression squirmed like awkward houseguests. “Shame? Who taught you shame?”
“No one taught us. It just happened.”
“That’s terrible,” Sun said. He seemed to mean it. “A tragedy.”
I grabbed his leg again. He recoiled, but I didn’t care. “Let it end,” I begged. “It’s too much. Too much life.”
“Well, not really,” Sun mused under his breath, just loud enough for me to hear it. “Not if you know what to do with it. I meant to teach you at some point.”
“But you didn’t. You left us.”
I gazed up at our king, my face streaked with mud where my tears had met the soil. I prayed I looked like the most pitiful thing I’d ever seen.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” he said, perhaps a little too quickly. “Got busy with the whole nirvana thing. The thing nobody tells you about release from desire? It gets boring real fast. So I’m back now!”
Before I could ask follow-up questions (I had many), he slipped from my grasp and did a strange jump-thing with his heels I’d never seen before. His smile had returned—he was Sun Wukong again.
“Nothing to worry about when you have me around,” he said. “I’m your king and you’re my people. If my people want to die, then you’ll have a death that will be envied for generations!”
* * *
We stood, all eighteen, at the edge of the reserve. There had been doubt, of course, but desperation beat out skepticism. I found myself on the receiving end of several menacing glances as the night wore on. If we didn’t all end up dead, there was an unspoken guarantee one of us would at least end up thoroughly injured. Thankfully, it never came to that.
He came to us on two legs, like a tall one. He had donned his gold chain mail and phoenix-feather cap just for the occasion, and they shimmered every time he moved into the moonlight. There were murmurs, gasps, sobs—exclamations of every sort, but everyone grew quiet when he drew close.
“Hello, my subjects!” he greeted us. His tone was friendly, perhaps even casual, but something about the reflection of the moon in his eyes made it easy to remember what sort of king they were dealing with. “I heard you’ve come to die.”
Excited voices rose up from the crowd.
“Please, kill us!”
“Thank you, king!”
“Release us!”
Sun Wukong grinned. “Ask, and you shall receive! Though I can’t help but wonder if you’re not all as prepared as myself. You remembers the stories I’ve told you of Diyu, yes?”
We did.
“And you recall how I walked out with the Ten Kings of Hell clutching at my heels for forgiveness?”
We did.
Sun Wukong’s mouth stopped grinning, but his eyes did no such thing. “But! But. But. Do you remember what treatment awaits those in Diyu who aren’t glorious me?”
We exchanged glances.
“Well,” the King continued, “there’s eighteen levels, give or take. The first is the Hell of Three Tongues, where they make two long cuts to give you, well, three tongues. Used to just rip the whole thing out, but apparently that affected the quality of the screams too much.”
He perched himself on Jingu Bang, semi-solemn, the threat of a punchline at his lips.
“The second is the Hell of Scissors, then the Hell of Knives, the Hell of Tooth-Pulling, the Hell of Burning Ingots, the Hell of Thumbtacks, the Hell of Jaw-Wires, and the Hell of Dismemberment. Following that, there’s the hells of Finger-Crushing, Knee-Buckling, Slicing, Boiling, Ripping, Gouging, Flaying, Mauling, Slicing—no, wait, I said that one—I’ve lost count now. Where was I?”
Silence. I decided I’d step up. “Your majesty, we had hoped, and continue to hope, that you’d make arrangements to skip all those.”
Sun’s eyes shined a mite brighter. “I’m afraid the Jade Emperor doesn’t return my calls these days. You’ll have to take whatever punishment they throw at you.”
“Count me out!” said Meilin, aghast.
“Me too!”
“Don’t kill me, please!”
The king smiled down at us from his perch, his hands folded. I was angry, obviously, and very afraid, but I noticed something curious just above his smile. There was a slight sheen, a flicker of moonlight reflecting off him in a way that seemed not quite furred, but… feathered? Were those black feathers peeking out from his phoenix-feather cap?
“If you want out, I’m afraid I’m not the one you should be talking to,” he said, and pointed his finger behind us.
Two large men stood right at our backs. They resembled the tall ones except for their heads—one an ox, the other, horse. Soldiers of Diyu. True to their reputation, we barely had breath to scream before they had us in their sacks.
* * *
A poster reading “PARDON OUR DUST” was peeling from the door to the Hell of Three Tongues, though you could barely see it with all the scaffolding in the way.
“I’m afraid you’ve caught us at a bit of a bad time,” said Ox-Head, shaking his ox head woefully.
“Everything’s built to code,” Horse Face reassured us. “We’re just taking precautions. These places weren’t built with ice in mind. You see, water expands when it freezes, and these old foundations…”
I slipped away from the group and walked around a bit. The streets of Diyu were largely empty; most people opted to keep warm indoors, but the cold didn’t bother me much. There were guards, but they seemed to mind the chill more than my presence. They were bare-chested, poor devils. I wondered if they’d get new uniforms soon. I heard one of them let out a long, breathy groan when the first flecks of snowfall started coming down.
“We’re warming back up, though,” I heard Ox-Head explain. “Should be up and running again within the millennium if all goes well.”
“I think we’re only scheduled to for a century of purgatory or so,” said Meilin. “Well, three hundred for Qiang, but that’s her own fault, really.”
Horse Head huffed in dismay, causing his lips to do a little horse-raspberry. “You ought to come back when it's all sorted. God, it’s great. You’re really missing out. Maybe by the time you’ve reincarnated once or twice we'll be back in business.”
Further on, I saw some poor lackey trying to pull the pliers off a stone table at the Hell of Tooth-Pulling, but their hands kept slipping off the frozen handles. The Hell of the Mountain of Ice, I’m told, was the only Hell had that remained open for a time, but even that one had to be shuttered after it collapsed from overcapacity. They’d given up on the Hell of Boiling entirely. And apparently the ninth King of Hell had converted the Hell of Dismemberment into an ice sculpture garden to keep the economy afloat.
I stared up at a huge, white likeness of Sun Wukong. He still had his gold headband in this depiction. I remembered how he would gripe when it squeezed his head every time he was naughty. It’s a miracle he had a head left at all. For someone who’d attained Buddhahood, the king had quite the mischievous streak.
THUNK!
The snowball hit me square in the head and knocked me off my feet. When I brushed the frost from my head and got a look at the person who’d thrown it, I was pleased to learn that Zhelan’s aim was sharp as ever.
