“ ‘Our land is one of war and rebirth,’ ” Lan read aloud, tracing her fingers down the lines. She flipped to the next page, where the painting showed armies swarming the grasslands. Zen could almost hear the ground thundering with the beat of hooves, the clash of steel, and the screams of clans as they clashed.
“ ‘It is one of life and death,’ ” he read, continuing. “ ‘Of yin and yáng, of power and vitality cycling through in the rises and falls of civilization. And at the center of it all is qì.’ ”
So the scripture began. They worked through the pages, taking turns reading, their voices and the paintings and the text blending together like a story being breathed to life.
“ ‘A beam of sun fell like liquid embers,’ ” Lan whispered, wonder seeping into her voice. “ ‘A shard of the moon like white jade, a drop of the stars like tears, and a swirl of the night like ink.’ ” She looked up in amazement. “Zen, this is just like the ‘Ballad of the Last Kingdom.’ Do you remember? The song my teahouse performed the night we met.”
How could I forget?he wanted to say, but he only managed a nod. Did she remember every detail of that evening as he did? Was it carved into her heart as it was into his—the moment things seemed set in motion, the beginning of it all?
The Beginning and the Ending,he thought, recalling the name of the story in the book, and his chest tightened. So he read on. “ ‘The shaman reached up, and the power of the godsentered his veins. At once, the winds gusted and the tides of a nearby ocean surged; the earth cracked open beneath his feet, and flames rose at his bidding. The gods had blessed the mortals with qì, with the power of the world and the energies from which they were made. They showed humans how to harness that qì, lending drops of themselves to the first shamans. Yet it was not enough.’ ”
On the next page, black smoke billowed across the plains as armies clashed, pennants waving in the wind before becoming splattered in blood. Bodies burned, children screamed, widows sobbed, and still, the four gods lingered in their corners of the skies, watching.
Lan read on: “ ‘So the first shamanic practitioners reached to the Heavens and proffered their souls to the gods’ ”—she inhaled sharply; she had not removed her hand from his wrist, and now he felt the squeeze of her fingers—“ ‘and from there, the shamanic practitioners created the Demon Gods.’ ”
Zen shifted his hand so their fingers became interlaced. He held on tightly to her, his heart in his throat. They were in this together, had been from the start. Here it was at last, the piece to the story that they had been missing all along.
The Demon Gods had once beengods.
And they had fallen to the earth and become bound by mortals seeking their power.
We created the Demon Gods,he thought, marveling at the simplicity of the truth.
Four shapes were drawn on the page in ink—four shapes that Zen knew all too well—emerging from the cosmos: The Crimson Phoenix, taking flight from the flames of the sun. The Silver Dragon, emerging from the light of the moon. The stars plummeting like rain to form the figure of the Azure Tiger. And when all that was left was night, the Black Tortoise taking shape from the shadows.
Practitioners danced beneath them, intertwining with the Demon Gods. War broke out, blood spilled, and the forms of the Four Demon Gods grew violent as they surged over the armies, absorbing the souls lost to war, the yin energies that came with grief and wrath and death.
“Time in the mortal world corrupted the Demon Gods,” the text continued. “Fettered by the greed of their binders and subjected to the wrath of the wars they fought, their power turned destructive.”
Fires ravaged the earth; mudslides buried villages; and the Demon Gods surged in size, now sowing chaos throughout the mortal world.
Atop a snowcapped mountain, one of the very first shamanic practitioners appeared again. He thrust his hands into the skies, which began to glow with his qì.
Lan made a noise.“Dào’zi,”she whispered, and Zen felt his heart quickening at the epiphany. The writer behind theBook of the Way,the philosopher behind so many principles of practitioning, one of the first shamanic practitioners known to this land.
HadDào’ziwritten the first principle of practitioning—that power could not be created, only borrowed—becauseof the dangerous history of the Demon Gods?
“Zen,” Lan said, and her tone caught his attention. She had turned the page, and now he saw why she was squeezing his hand so tightly.
The entire page had been inked black but for the Seal, hanging as brightly as a moon in a night sky.
“The Godslayer,” Zen said. He recognized it from having seen her conjure it earlier that afternoon.
“Power is always borrowed,” the scripture continued, “so long as it is returned. It may be used, so long as it may be destroyed.”
Beneath the Godslayer crouched images of the Four Demon Gods. Their heads were bent to its light. And as Lan and Zen flipped to the next page of the classic, it was as if they watched the story reverse. The Crimson Phoenix shrank back into a droplet of the sun as the Silver Dragon returned to the crescent moon; the Azure Tiger dissolved into the stars, and the Black Tortoise faded into the night.
And on the final page of the story was the same painting as the first: that shaman in a páo, standing on a hill looking into the night sky. In the constellations, the shapes of four gods burned.
“The Ending and the Beginning,” came the last words of the story, and that was that.
Zen blinked as though he had stepped out of a long dream. Around them, the dunes were silent, and when he looked up at the stars, he half expected to find four distinct shapes among them.
“Gods,”Lan exhaled, her breath coming out in a pale stream. Her face, too, was tilted to the skies.
They were quiet for many breaths, words alone inadequate to express the weight of what they had just learned.
As usual, Lan was first to speak. “It was us all along,” she whispered. “It was the yin energies of our human souls, the destruction and devastation of the wars of our world, that corrupted their cores.Weturned the gods into…demons.”
