Fear cracked through Lan’s bones, along with a horrible, sickening premonition. She had thought herself different, the exception to the rule; thought that she would be able to dictate the power of a god. Power always came at a cost, and victory never without loss.
“Stop!”she gasped, clapping a hand over her temples.“STOP IT!”
A soft, silky laugh echoed in her head.Your wish is my command,the Silver Dragon said. She saw, in the darkness of her own vision, half-lidded eyes watching her with faint amusement.And you wished to destroy them.
“I wished to protect Skies’ End!”Lan yelled.
That is not what you demanded of me.
“I command you now to stop!”Below, the mass of earth, soil, and trees crested toward the base of the mountain like an immutable wave. It blocked out the sky, silenced even therain—a silence wrought with screams of the dying. Of the rumbling of the earth as it continued to tear itself up by the roots.
Any closer, and Skies’ End would be swallowed along with the Elantian army.
Lan clapped her hands to her waist and found two objectsstrapped to her side. The smooth shell of her ocarina. And then a familiar hilt engraved with stars dancing amidst flames.
Lan slid That Which Cuts Stars from its sheath.“STOP!”she screamed, and plunged the dagger into her side.
There was a hiss like water meeting fire as the blade bit into the stream of power flowing from her core. In her mind’s eye, the Silver Dragon’s serpentine form twisted away from the pain. The destructive Seal it had conjured, which had glowed bright as a full moon before her, flickered and died.
Far below, the mass of earth collapsed with a sound akin to an explosion and the snapping of thousands of tree trunks.
Then pain whitened her mind. Lan was only aware of herlegs buckling beneath her. She did not fall to the ground. A pair of arms caught her, firm with steel-plated armor. Heldher.
“You did well,” Yeshin Noro Ulara said.
Lan looked up at the Master of Swords. “I didn’t think I’d live to hear you compliment me,” she croaked.
And there it was, an image that would remain etched in her memories: the faint tug of a corner of Ulara’s lips. A half smile.
Boots rang out in the night, and Dilaya alighted on the steps next to Lan, followed by Master Nóng. The Master of Medicine conjured a Seal that wound itself over Lan’s and Tai’s bodies, lifting them gently. It felt like being wrapped in a warm blanket.
The steps wove in and out of Lan’s focus. The next time she blinked, she was lying on flat ground. Someone held a lamp over her, illuminating a familiar face.
“Master Nóng,” she croaked. He was bent over her wound, applying salves and herbs—yet Lan also recognized the shimmer of a newly applied Seal. There was much earth to its composition, and it was warm with yáng. Leaning against a pillarnext to her, gauze wrapped around his neck, was Tai. He sat in silence, face devoid of any emotion, hair and clothes dripping water.
“I have stanched the bleeding and the pain with a Seal,” the Master of Medicine said to Lan. “Now the flesh must do its own work. You are low on your lifeblood.” He held up a bowl. “Drink this.”
She sat up, wincing only slightly at the dull ache of protest between her ribs. They were in the Chamber of Waterfall Thoughts, she realized, yet the lotus lamps that had always lent their light to the hall were absent. Rain fell in steady drips down the curved clay eaves outside.
Lan took the clay bowl and drank. She was back in Skies’ End, yet it no longer held the same warmth for her, like a firepit with the flames gone cold, a courtyard house with no mother. Dé’zi, the life and soul of this school, was gone. Shàn’jun, who should have been sitting in a corner with a bowl of his disgusting concoctions, was absent. And Zen…
“Zen,” she blurted, her chest squeezing so tight she couldn’t breathe. “The Black Tortoise—Master Ulara should have—”
“Slow down.” Master Nóng raised a hand. “We have not detected any indication that the Black Tortoise has been released—yet. The masters are gathered outside, discussing the path forward from here. Come.”
She pushed herself to her feet and, with Master Nóng in her wake, hobbled through the open-air hallways of the Chamber of Waterfall Thoughts. Behind, Tai got up and followed, quiet as a ghost.
Outside, Skies’ End was alight with the fires of battle. At the highest vantage points, Archery disciples loosed arrows as Master Cáo directed them. Masters Ulara and Ip’fong stood inthe courtyard with their disciples of Swords and Fists. Their gazes were uniformly directed upward.
High above, the invisible barrier that was the Boundary Seal glowed bright, with streaks of broken qì bleeding across it like veins. Even as Lan watched, another resounding explosion added several more fissures. She had once seen glass break at a stall in the evemarket: a vendor from one of the lands in the Near West had brought a pane of Masyrian glass, with which he’d made art. Lan had watched him bring a stone hammer to its surface, watched spiderweb cracks spread across the smooth, translucent surface until, at last, it splintered.
She thought of this as she watched the Boundary Seal take blow after blow from the Elantians.
The Seals disciples lined the edge of the terrace, their bodies and hands shifting as though in an invisible dance. Qì flowed upward, replenishing the Boundary Seal. Yet the disciples shivered in their páos from the rain, the glow of the dying Boundary Seal casting a colorless light on their pinched, exhausted faces. Their entire battle strategy—the lines of defense, the Linked-Chain Attacks—had been upheld by a group of children and was being torn apart at the seams.
She closed her eyes and reached inside herself. There was a wound where she had met her Demon God: a gash, bleeding qì profusely, from That Which Cuts Stars. She could sense some strange combination of qì clotted there—left by the knife wound—blocking her access to her Demon God. Beyond it, the Silver Dragon’s pale silhouette hovered.
Even with her Demon God’s attack, there were still so many Elantians. Too many.
