No, not a circle—a character.
ASeal.
HerSeal.
Lan gasped as the darkness withdrew, tendrils shifting their attention to the looming Seal that glowed as bright as the moon itself. Behind it, something writhed.
The shadows shot out, latching onto the Seal, twining over its strokes and dimming its light. Cracks appeared along the Seal’s surface as the black flames ate away at it.
Then it shattered.
Lan screamed as her mother’s Seal dissolved into the darkness, her vision flitting between reality and illusion. The scar on her arm, once pale and puckered, had grown dark as a rotting scab. Beneath it, the pulsing glow strengthened until the scar tissue fell away altogether.
Light fractaled from her. She had the impression that she stood on the peak of an icy mountain or a frozen lake, waters aglow. Across from her, Zen’s shadow cut a black arc over her light. He reached up and cupped her cheek in one hand.
“Forgiveness, Lan,” he said. “I wish it didn’t have to come to this. I sensed from the start that your mother’s Seal was powerful, with many layers: at first to suppress your qì, then to lead you to Guarded Mountain and find the ocarina. But it was only after I met the Black Tortoise that I realized there was one final secret hidden within.” His grip tightened. “Perhapsnow your stance on the Demon Gods will change.” His eyes darkened and his nails dug into her chin as he turned her face to look back.
Rearing up before the Boundary Seal of Skies’ End, stretching higher than the summit of the mountain itself, was the white serpentine shape that had loomed over her in an illusion of a night sky.
This time, it was not an illusion.
Lan looked up at the phantom shape of the Silver Dragon of the East, towering above the Yuèlù Mountains.
Now, it looked back at her.
The emperor feared not the sword of his enemy pointed at his breast, but the poison of a lover administered in his bed.
—Grand Historian Si’ma,Records of the Grand Historian
Zen’s demon had whispered warnings to him, of thethingthat lay coiled at the heart of Lan’s core of qì. He’d seen it: in the inexplicable way she’d killed that Elantian soldier back in the Teahouse, then again in the Chamber of Waterfall Thoughts when Dilaya had threatened her. And at last, the answer had come to him when his own Demon God spoke.
Another of us lies within that girl. Another Ancient—the one you mortals refer to as the Silver Dragon.
It had all clicked, then. Why he had sensed Lan’s release of demonic qì early on. Why her regular qì contained no traces of it whatsoever.
Her mother had Sealed the Silver Dragon inside her, and one condition of that Seal was to defend Lan’s life should it ever be in danger. It explained Lan’s prodigious grasp of practitioning, the astonishing rate at which she had learned to manipulate qì into Seals…the power of a Demon God, even fettered, embellished her own abilities.
Emotions and thoughts warred within him, the lines between his thoughts and his Demon God’s thoughts blurring. His hand was still wrapped around the girl’s jaw, and he saw her terror as the light of the Silver Dragon reflected in her eyes. He tightened his grasp on her and her mouth fell open, gasping for air as her fingers scrabbled against his. He watched this with no more feeling than one might have toward a fish drowning on land or an insect at the end of its life.
The glow of the Silver Dragon flickered and began to dim.
He tightened his claws against the girl’s flesh and felt a responding wave of nausea and fury in his stomach—directed at him. The boy, his binder. The boy was still fighting for control of his body—and he was furious.
Humans. So soft, so fragile. So sentimental.
Yet his claim to this boy’s body was still tenuous, let alone to his mind and soul.
He withdrew.
Zen’s thoughts drifted, shadows to light, and he found himself blinking as rain continued to wet his cheeks. His fingers were pressed so tightly against Lan’s windpipe that her eyes had rolled into the back of her head. By now, the light of the Silver Dragon was no more than a speck in her left wrist, a dying ember.
With a gasp, he tore his hands from her. Lan fell forward. He caught her and held her against him, her head resting against his neck, her arms dropping to her side.
“Forgiveness,” he whispered. “Please, Lan, forgiveness. I never meant to hurt you.”
He sensed her shift against him. Then, without warning, pain split his chest.
Zen coughed. Black spots dotted his vision. Inside him, another voice was screaming, its shrieks tearing against his mind. The shadows of his qì flickered around him. Fading.
