The girl’s jaw tightened. She nodded.
Sòng Lián clenched her teeth and lifted her ocarina to her lips. She made sure the connection between her and the Silver Dragon was cut off, then dipped her mind back into the currents of the story she had seen in the Godslayer and began to spin it into song.
Time seemed to slow, the world rendered in crimson andsilver, blood and steel, fire and song. Embers rained from the sky, and light lanced across Hóng’yì’s face as he looked in her direction, catching on to the tune of her Seal. There was shock and utter disbelief in his expression. The reaction of one who had thought himself invincible. Beyond power, beyond laws, beyond all constraints of this world.
Seals came to Lan naturally through music, through the Art of Song that ran in her bloodline. Whenever she played, she entered a trancelike state, whether it was the tunes she performed back at the Rose Pavilion Teahouse or the melodies she unspooled with her ocarina. It was akin to the meditation the masters at the School of the White Pines had encouraged: a state of interacting with the world that transcended the physical, as though she’d been untethered from her body and opened her mind to a world of song.
Now Lan searched for the same feeling as she attempted to summon the Godslayer, hearing the qì in the strokes of the Seal and transposing them into song with her instrument. Yet this time, she was attempting something far beyond her grasp. The notes came discordant and clumsy; slowly, shakily, the Seal started to form.
The Crimson Phoenix shrieked in fury as the Godslayer began to twine around it, cutting into its energies. Its glow dimmed as qì seeped from it like blood from a wound.
“What are you doing?”
Lan faltered; the qì to the beginnings of her Seal trembled as her focus began to split.
Hóng’yì had appeared before her. His expression was livid, his handsome face twisted into something beyond ugly.
Without warning, he lunged.
The ocarina was ripped from her lips as he slammed her into the sand, hard enough to rattle her teeth. Overhead, thehalf-composed Godslayer hung, wrought in her silver qì, like a liquid moon.
Tears salted her eyes, though not only from the pain. Before her was half of what her mother had searched for, her father and the masters at the School of the White Pines had given their lives for, and the peoples of this forsaken land needed to break the cycle of war, death, and destruction that greed for power had subjected them to.
I am so close.
Zhào Hóng’yì crouched over her. His hair was mussed, his face red and his eyes furious. “How dare you,” he spat. “This is my family’s birthright, my heritage.MyDemon God andmysource of power. I won’t let you take it!”
Lan scrambled in the sand for her ocarina, but the crown prince slammed his elbow into her wrist, pinning her with his limbs. She clenched her teeth and met his gaze.
“All along,” Lan said, “I thought it was the Crimson Phoenix that corrupted the hearts and minds of the emperors of this land, drove them to prioritize power above the well-being of their people. But I saw what you did to your father. I saw howyou chose to flee rather than defend this kingdom. And how you’d step on your own people and take their lives to maintain your own. All along, it wasyou.”
“Foolish girl,” Hóng’yì snapped. “How could the Phoenix have forced my ancestors to make a bargain with it? From the very first step to the last, it is achoice.We may be required to sacrifice parts of ourselves, but…you’ve studied the classics of practitioning.” His lips curled in a sneer as he began to recite. “ ‘Practitioners of the Way engage in equivalent exchange, for there is no give without take. Borrowed power must be returned, and power itself requires payment.’ Wechosethis, Sòng Lián, and we gladly paid for it.”
She was numb, as though ice were spreading inside her, freezing her heart and bones and blood. The only thing Lan could think to say was “Why?”
“Why?” The prince grinned, his teeth slicked red with blood, as he lifted his arms to the sky. “Because I would rather burn down the Heavens than pass through this world without making a mark.” Something went deadly still in his gaze. “Without power, we are nothing. And I refuse to be nothing.”
She did not see the dagger that appeared in his hands until it was too late. It flashed, arcing through the light of the flames overhead as he plunged it toward her heart.
Metal whistled through the air. With a sharpplink,Hóng’yì’s dagger fell to the sand. The imperial heir looked up. His expression twisted; with a burst of qì to his heels, he leapt back across the battlefield to the safety of his Demon God.
Qì cloaked Lan, bringing the relief of velvet midnight and snow across vast, vast plains. Blink, and he was there, fingers cool as he steadied her. Blink, and the world came back into focus: sand and sky and Zen. His lips were pressed together, ashen, with just a red trickle of blood from his nose as he lifted her into a sitting position.
Zen held out her ocarina to her.Keep going,he mouthed.
Her gaze flitted from her instrument to him. Zen had chosen a different path from her because he did not believe in using the Godslayer to destroy the Demon Gods; he wanted to use their power to fight for this kingdom. Yet now he was handing her the key to doing exactly what he opposed.
She palmed the ocarina and looked toward Hóng’yì, standing beneath the glow of his Demon God. The Phoenix writhed within the confines of Lan’s half-formed Godslayer.
One more chance. Perhaps the last.
Lan raised the ocarina to her lips again. She closed her eyes and found the memory of the Godslayer that had been searedinto her mind. Notes stumbled from her fingers. The remainder of the Seal formed, black qì twining around the shining white from earlier.
Yin, yáng,she thought faintly, and then she was done, the last note of her song wrung from her cracked lips. Zen’s face was tipped toward her Seal in a look of near-reverence, bifurcated by light and dark that poured from it. Together, they watched the final circular stroke close the Seal. Beginning to end. Start to finish.
The instant the two ends met, the world cracked.
Hóng’yì opened his mouth and screamed, and the air around them was filled with the sound, amplified ten thousand times by the silhouette of the Demon God that had reappeared behind him. The Godslayer’s black and white qì had wrapped around the Crimson Phoenix and was beginning to tear it apart.
