The Northern Steppes
The plateaus yawned beneath an eternal blue sky, and the boy was lost. He stood knee-deep in snow, looking over a landscape of glittering white, unbroken but for silver birches stripped bare and standing like skeletons. A turn of seasons, a whole clan gone, an entire bloodline erased from the pages of history.
The snow lay thick over the grasslands he’d once called home, burying what had been left of his family. One cycle ago, there had been yurts flying black banners with red flames blazing atop; flocks of sheep dappling the lush green like clouds; lines of camels casting long shadows as merchants streamed to and from the Jade Trail. He could almost see it all, ghosts of figures weaving through the landscape, hear the phantom shouts of children as they danced on the endless feathergrasses.
They had been the last of their clan. After the fall of the Nightslayer, the remaining clans had either pledged fealty to the Imperial Court or faced mass execution. Yet there hadbeen vestiges of clans that had gone into hiding, fleeing pursuit from the imperial army. The boy’s father had led one such faction—the last of their bloodline—hiding deep within the unforgiving steppes in an attempt to disappear from the gaze of the Imperial Court.
It hadn’t been enough.
The Imperial Army had been clever to attack in the midst of summer. Winter in the steppes was too cold, even for northern Hin; now the boy shivered as he staggered forward in his cotton garb, too thin this far north, his sheepskin boots a half size too small.
It had begun to snow. He used to love the snow; born in the thick of winter on the cusp of a new cycle, he’d spent each turn of age watching flakes fall like goose feathers.
Now he thought only of the father impaled by a golden sword, the mother’s body used by the imperial soldiers, the cousins and aunts and uncles laid in a smoldering pile, flames licking up their bodies until they disappeared into a column of thick, choking smoke.
For some reason, the air shifted as he drew closer to their birthplace and deathbed. There was something in the atmosphere that twined around his chest, made it difficult for him to breathe, as though a stone pressed upon his heart. The closer he drew, the thicker the feeling grew, until he thought he might choke on grief and rage.
Then he saw the top of the yurt, sticking out like a grave marker, the black silk banner with the fire symbol half buried in snow. The clan leader’s sigil.
His father’s banner.
The winds rose into a howl, the snow flurried around him, and he sank onto the ground right where his family yurt had once sat and let out a long, anguished scream.
In the growing blizzard, something answered.
The fury in his blood froze into fear. The boy looked up. Between the plumes of his breath and the shifting curtains of snow, something moved. It was neither shape nor shadow, but something that filled the gaps ofin-between.Something with no form but the vague edges of a presence made of the rotten aura of blood and bone and broken things.
The thing watched the boy, and the boy stared back. The initial fright gone, he was now overtaken by only curiosity—and a resigned fatalism that nothing in the world could hurt him more than what he had already been through.
He would be wrong.
“What are you?” He spoke in the language of his ancestors instead of the Standard Hin decreed by the Imperial Court. His voice scratched, rusty from disuse.
The wind crested, and a voice found him from everywhere and nowhere at once.“I am anger. I am grief. I am born of death and destruction and an unfinished will.”
He knew. He had read the forbidden tomes of his ancestry locked in his father’s birchwood chest, had heard whispers of what the ancients had once been capable of. As he spoke his next words, he found himself reaching into the side of his boot where he kept a small dagger that cut the spaces between stars. “You are a demon. Know that this dagger can slice through your core and break your energies.”
“Did you not call for me?”the bodiless voice murmured.“Did you not cast an unspoken wish for power? For revenge? For the chance to do to them what they did to your family?”A jagged chuckle, the sound of nails scraping against bone.“Gaze not upon me with such disgust, mortal, for I am summoned by the yin of grief and rage and death. Like calls to like, and like it or not, you called me.”
The boy gripped his dagger tightly. “Have you a name?” heasked.
“They call me He With Eyes of Blood,”came the reply. The name rang no bell of familiarity for the boy—a lesser demon, then, one not important enough to be marked down in the history books. The demon continued, its tone crooning and obsequious.“What is it you wish for? Your deepest, darkest desire? That which has been eating away at your bright flame of a soul for the past cycle?”
The boy knew—knew—better than to trust it, for he had read of demons as wicked creatures to be vanquished by only the most experienced of shamans and practitioners. But he looked to the yurt buried in the snow, to the black flame banner that had once flown high and mighty over the sprawling steppes of his homeland. And that rage and helpless despair sharpened into something else inside him.
Better to be burned by the fire of his own fury, to taste the bitterness of his wish for revenge, than to feel that devastating emptiness ofnothingnesshis loss had left him.
He looked up into the formless creature. “I want power,” he said. “I want enough power that I will never experience this again. I want enough power to makethemunderstand what I have gone through, what my family has suffered.”
The response was immediate.“And what would you give for that power?”
He recognized the sly edge to the demon’s voice, but it did nothing to stop his answer. “Anything.” A small price, he thought, for one who had nothing left.
The snow falling before him had begun to take shape—or, rather, it had begun tofleefrom something taking shape in its midst. A hulking mass the size of a camel, made only of darkness.
“I would grant you more power than any ordinary mortal holds,”the demon said.“Together, we could take down that Imperial Army in the blink of an eye; we could collapse palaces into smoke withnaught but a thought. All I ask in return is the blood of a hundred souls.”
The boy was already picturing a capital city wreathed in red and gold, pagodas and curved rooftops gleaming beneath a clear blue sky, the plated armor of its army glinting like the sun. A hundred souls—he would bring the demon a thousand if that meant taking down the Imperial Army.
