Zen was breathing hard. Lan was right: it had all been there, all along. Demons were beings formed of excess yin energies comprising wrath, ruin, and a will unfinished in life. Those emotions belonged to humans.
“They needed to be returned to the qì of this world with the Godslayer,” he said, “so that the yin they accumulated intheir cores was released, and so that no one lineage held on to that power for too long.”
“But the imperial family hid the Godslayer,” Lan continued. “That’s why the cycle was broken and their power grew out of balance, turning destructive. That’s why the Demon Gods remained in our world for so long, growing corrupted by the bloodshed and violence of endless wars. Their cores absorbed it all. Over thousands of cycles.”
“They were never meant to,” Zen supplied.“Dào’zihimself wrote it. In this classic as well as in theBook of the Way.Power can be created, so long as it is destroyed. We broke the cycle.”
He noticed that her hands were still draped in his; she seemed to have forgotten, staring down at the last page of thestory with that furrow in her brow.
Gently, Lan touched her fingers to the last painting, of the shaman gazing up to the quiet skies and the four gods looking down at the world below. “I understand now,” she said. “The truth the immortals spoke of. The intent behind the Godslayer.” She turned to him, her eyes bright with sorrow. “It is humans who bound the gods and turned them into demons. And the Godslayer…the Godslayer is not meant to destroy them but to release them.”
Destiny is an unfinished story of two souls linked by a red thread of fate. It spins across lives, times, and worlds, searching for an ending into eternity.
—Unnamed scholars of the Yuè clan,Theories on Reincarnation,Chapter 1
The doors to Lan’s chamber were open, as she had left them, the silk curtains stirring in a way that felt almost forlorn. Sand had blown in; their boots scuffed, Zen’s and hers, as they pushed the sliding doors shut.
Everything and nothing had changed.
Lan took in the normalcy of the chamber, the soft cushions and blankets draped across her kàng bed, the elaborate yellow rosewood furniture carved with intricate fretwork. The sliding doors at the other end of the room led to the hallways of Shaklahira, which had quieted into slumber. Lan imagined Dilaya sprawled across her kàng, boots still on and Falcon’s Claw cradled in her arm as a child might hold a doll. She thought of Chó Tài, who had the tendency to mumble in his sleep, perhaps in response to whatever ghosts he heard in his dreams. In a world without war, would their dreams come easier?
She wondered, then, what her and Zen’s lives might have looked like in a world without war. Whether they would have had more time.
She remembered the feeling of his fingers clasped between hers, firm and warm andright.
Her head hurt; the revelation from theClassic of Gods and Demonswas suddenly too much to bear.
Lan marched over to the chest at the foot of her bed. From within, she retrieved a jar of plum wine.
“What is that?” came the inevitable question from Zen. He had taken a seat at the other end of the room, shoulders slumped in exhaustion. He straightened slightly, and his tone shifted to incredulity as she unfastened the cord that held the cloth lid over the wine jar. “Are youdrinking?”
“In case you hadn’t realized, I don’t have much time left in this world to enjoy a jar of plum wine,” Lan retorted, and decisively tipped the mouth of the jar to her lips. The liquid was sweet and burned slightly as it went down, filling her with a satisfying warmth. She looked up to see Zen watching her with a slight frown.
She huffed. “If you’re going to lecture me, Mister Practitioner—”
“I wasn’t going to,” he said lightly.
She closed her eyes, all the implications of what they had just discovered swirling in her brain.The Demon Gods were never meant to be wielded without a check to their power,Dé’zihad told her. She had held on to the first part of that sentence but never stopped to consider the reverse: if there was a check to their power, was the Demon Gods’ power meant to be wielded for the greater good?
The fear of losing control, along with a lifetime of being taught that demonic practitioning was taboo, had led her to uphold an absolute: that the Demon Gods were meant to be destroyed, their power never to be touched. The path opposite from the one Zen had chosen.
ButDé’zihad taught her to seek the path of balance.Twosides of the same coin, Lián’ér, and somewhere in the center of it all lies power.
“What will you do now?”
Her eyes snapped open at Zen’s voice, the words coming as though he had heard her thoughts. Lan swirled the jar of plum wine. “Practice conjuring the Godslayer, then hunt down the Crimson Phoenix and the Azure Tiger. And then…” She trailed off, the unspoken end to their own lives hovering in theair between them. Somehow, it felt distant. Unreal.
“What will you do?” she asked.
“I told you, when we met in Nakkar, of the powerful army my great-grandfather once commanded, now preserved in an ancient magic. The Seal to summon them was partially in the half of theClassic of Gods and Demonsthat Hóng’yì’s ancestors stole.” His gaze settled on the rosewood cabinet by his side, where he had placed the tome. He withdrew it and opened itto a page he seemed to know by heart. Then he proffered it toher.
A gesture of trust. A message that this time, he would tell her everything.
Lan approached. Her every step was like a heartbeat between them. She set the wine down on the cabinet and took the book from him.
It was open to a page she could not read, of Seal syllabary that fell vertically down the parchment in elegant curves and loops. Lan flipped through the worn pages. She could sense Zen’s gaze on her like a burning flame as she studied the art of his clan, of his people.
Lan shut the book and brushed a finger over its title, embroidered in gold interwoven with feathers of a red-crowned crane. “Zen,” she asked quietly, “why would an army require a Seal from theClassic of Gods and Demonsto be summoned?”
