But all Lan could think of was the Elantian outpost, the starved Hin behind bars—fathers, mothers, and children—and how there had only been blood, and bones, and broken things afterward. Unfettered, power devoured the mind of its wielder, paving the path to violence, destruction, and death without discernment. History had shown this, over and over again.
She would not fall into that trap. If she were to seek out power, she’d ensure that she be the one in control. And she would use it to serve her people. The common songgirls, the pawn shop owners and widowed landladies, the voiceless masses of her kingdom.
She shook her head. “Zen…”
Zen saw the answer in her eyes. He brought his hands to his face. A violent tremor passed through his body.
And then he stilled.
When he straightened, his hands slipping from his face to curl into fists at his sides, the wild, frenetic look had left his eyes. They were cold, black, and inscrutable, a night without stars.
“I have chosen my path. If you are not with me, then you are against me,” he said, and she knew she had lost him.
The cowherd and the weaver girl were banished to opposite ends of the skies, separated by the River of Forgotten Death, never to hold one another again.
—“The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl,”Hin Folktales: A Collection
They came like a stretch of clouds, spilling over the mountain pass that curved onto the shores of the lake. Their armor was bone white beneath the trembling moon. The color of tombs. The color of death.
Zen meant to stop them here, tonight.
But he couldn’t turn away, couldn’t stop himself from gazing at the girl who had become his anchor to this world, the one that had stood between him and the darkness that now lingered at the edges of his mind.
Lan stepped back from him as though she’d been burned. Her eyes wavered, searching his face. Whatever she found there cast a shadow of fear and hurt across her expression.
Zen steeled his heart. He had seen that before, too many times.
Lan turned. With one burst of qì she was kneeling by Dilaya’s side, wrapping her arms around the unconscious girl’s waist; with the next, she was airborne, a smudge of pale páo against the cloud-covered sky as bright and as brief as ashooting star. Then she was gone, swallowed whole by the night.
Once again, Zen was alone.
It would have been so easy to take off after her. To call out to her:Since when did you become so good at the Light Arts?and to hear her witty response. The thought nearly brought a smile to his lips as he turned to face the army on the shore.
The incident at the Elantian outpost had changed him. Skies’ End had been a flower in a vase even as the world around them turned to ashes, and now it was Erascius himself who had cracked open the porcelain for Zen.
If you forever adhere to the path between two extremes, then you will end up with nothing.
Zen opened his arms to the great core of power that had taken root inside his heart: a core that seemed to hold an entire world, from sky to sea. A coreroilingwith energies and bloodlust at the onslaught of Elantians.
The time had long passed since he was a child at Skies’ End, yearning for approval, for something to hold him steady in the fresh loss of everything in his life. He had tried his master’s way, and he had failed. In the end, his attempts to repress his power had resulted in a tragedy, when it should have been a victory.
Power was a blade, and the only blame was in that its wielder’s hand was too weak.
This time would be different, he thought as yin began to churn in his veins, seeping into the air and soil around him and stirring even the waters of the lake behind him.
This time, he would control it.
This time, he wouldmasterit.
Zen called on the power of his Demon God.
The world at once expanded and flattened. He could feel everything: the crash of waves against sand, the sigh of windthrough mountains, the rattle of every leaf and the movement of every living creature, from great snow leopards prowling the icy peaks up north to the chorus of cicadas in the golden ginkgoes down south. At the same time, he felt nothing at all anymore.
He was a Demon God, and this world was his to play with, his to conquer. And all those lives across the water, his for the taking.
He surged over to them, landing at the very head of the foreign army, robes fluttering in a strong wind.
With the first clap of thunder, he began to lay waste to the humans. The storm swelled in harmony with his power as blood spilled from humans so arrogant that they thought the thin coating of metal they wore could stop him. When lightning flared across the sky, he called upon his qì of black fire, a terrible, beautiful thing that had once devoured the entire world.
