Zen watched in horror as the emperor tipped his head back and gave a long, booming laugh.“What makes you think you have anything left to bargain with?”he asked. As he spoke, great fiery wings seemed to unfurl behind him, crimson as blood.“You forget that I, too, wield the power of a Demon God.”He lifted a hand; it fell like an axe.“Kill them all.”
Smoke swept across the scene, painting the army of imperial soldiers behind him…and the row of Mansorian warriors kneeling beneath shackles.
Blades flashed. Blood splattered.
The emperor’s laugh and Xan Tolürigin’s scream rang in Zen’s ears as the memory faded back into nothingness.
You see, child,crooned the voice made of darkness.The Nightslayer’s last act was an attempt at balance. Yet such is thenature of our world. An endless cycle of consumption, of the weak devoured by the strong. Now his clan lies buried in graves of winter snow, and his name is written in history as that of a villain, a madman. Remember this lesson.
Zen’s own scream was trapped in his chest, clawing into his heart and squeezing his head until he thought he might burst from the pressure. He opened his mouth—
Qì flared, bright and searing and unbearably hot, twisting quickly into a sturdy, earthen ring that churned and cast him in a cage of golden light. The Seal grew, wending its white-hot grasp around him. Clamping over each of his claws, chaining him down.
The darkness dissipated. He fell, his back against hard ground. Smells and sounds crept back to him: an evergreen forest, at night.
Someone crouched over him, hands on his shoulders.“Zen,”came a voice.“Wake up.”
Zen’s eyes flew open. A familiar face hovered over him. It was one he had recognized as a shelter, as belonging to someone who would protect him. “Shi’fù,” he whispered.
But everything was wrong, everything was different from the day this person had saved his life. Now his head pounded and something inside him writhed as his memories came spilling back. He had betrayed the protection of the grandmaster, the man he had viewed as a father for so long. He had lost the trust of the girl he loved. And now, he realized as he turned to look at the Most Hospitable Pine, the Boundary Seal to the place he had called home for the past eleven cycles had closed itself off to him.
The grief inside him began to burn. He sat up, touching his hand to his chest. “You put another Seal over me,” he said.
“To help you,” Dé’zireplied. His voice was soft, yet it wassomehow charged with authority, sincerity, and something like sadness.
He lies,came a faint voice inside Zen. A distant echo, from an abyss far away.The Boundary Seal closed to you. Your own master views you as a danger, a threat to be subdued.
Zen shook off his master’s hands and pushed himself to hisfeet. “You lie,” he said, though his voice shook. “You would repress the power inside me, as you have from the very beginning.”
“No,” Dé’zisaid. He, too, straightened. Though the grandmaster stood nearly half a head shorter than Zen, he was effortlessly commanding in his slight frame. “I seek to help youcontrolthe power inside you. Right now, you are lettingitcontrolyou.”
He thinks you weak. He thinks you incapable of wielding such power.
“You have never wished me to use this power,” Zen said coldly. “Why? Would you rather see Skies’ End, see our kingdom, fall to the Elantians?”
“You and I both know what will happen if I remove my constraint on that thing inside you. I wish not to have history repeat itself.” In spite of the grandmaster’s calm tone, a faint sheen of sweat had formed on his face. Zen sensed the qì to Dé’zi’s Seal flicker.
Dé’zimight be able to subdue the power of a regular demon, but he was far from a match for a Demon God.
“So you’re afraid of me. Of what I might do.” The anger inside Zen burned brighter, resentment forged from all the years of having hated a part of his heritage, having to bow his head each time someone mentioned his clan. “You and all the other masters judged me from the very first day I set foot in your school, for my bloodline, my ancestry, and my birthright.” Hisvoice rose. “You are afraid I will establish the next clan uprising; afraid that I can change the history of this kingdom into what it was meant to be.”
“I am afraid,” Dé’zisaid quietly, “that you will make your choices based on the hatred inside you instead of the love.”
See what he reduces your loyalty, your filial piety, to. See how he views your sacrifice.
“EverythingI did was out of love!” Zen’s voice broke; he couldn’t help it. “I loved our school. I loved our people, our land, our culture. I lovedyou.”His master drew a sharp breath, but Zen went on, words pouring from him in torrents. “But I also loved my clan. I loved my father, my family, my ancestry. I tried to deny that until now, but I will no longer. Is it so wrong of me to wish to use their legacy as a path forward for the Hin? To reestablish our kingdom as it was before, with the clans once again autonomous and free to practice their customs, their arts of practitioning?”
All along, perhaps it was the ones we loved most that we should have seen as our enemy,the Black Tortoise whispered.In the end, their true forms show. See how they all betray you. See how they all leave you. See how they all fear you.
“Your father and your family and your clan have passed beyond this world.” There was sorrow in Dé’zi’s eyes, but Zen knew his master’s tricks. “Live not for those whose souls rest in eternal slumber in the next world…but for those still struggling to find that peace in this one.”
There came a shift in the qì around them: a skittish curling of the passing breeze, an unease groaning through the roots of the trees all around them, echoed in the stones and the soil. The ground rumbled with the immutable march of a thousand footsteps. The air grew heavy with the presence of metal.
Impossible.
He had defeated them already, back at the shores of Black Pearl Lake. Had sensed the Demon God’s shadow roving over the bodies, lapping up the yin of their souls. There was no eternal rest and no crossing the River of Forgotten Death for those devoured by a demon.
Zen turned to view the pass between the Yuèlù Mountains and the pine forest that led to Skies’ End. What he saw there chilled his blood. A pale ribbon composed of individual, gleaming parts—like a mass of silver insects or the disjointed scales of a broken creature—wound into view.
