An explosion of demonic qì caught her attention. On the other end of the mountaintop, the sky was aglow in flashes of light. Even from here, their glow refracted on the snow clouds: red and blue, silver and black, dividing the world into four quadrants. The gods, come down to dance with mortals.
And she was tasked to return them to the skies.
She could see two figures beneath the light of the Demon Gods. Hóng’yì, as bright as a flame in his blood-red hàn’fú. He was laughing as he twirled his fingers, commanding attacks with an insouciance bordering on delight. And opposite him, like night incarnate: Zen, in a whirl of black and silver, the shapes of the Tortoise and Dragon weaving and lunging over him as he fought.
Another burst of demonic qì tore across the sky and raised tremors in the ground. In the clouds, the red and blue glowwas rapidly gaining ground, the black and silver seeming to retreat.
Zen dug his heels into the snow, shaking with the effort of holding his ground. Of defending her.
She recalled his voice as she’d reeled from the pain of breaking the bargain.I will buy you time, but you must use the Godslayer. You will have one chance to end it all.
Lan pushed herself into a sitting position. Without the strength of the Silver Dragon, she was suddenly aware of how vulnerable she, a human, was in the face of these gods. Her hands shook as she fumbled for her ocarina.
Hóng’yì struck out, and a flaming wingtip of the Phoenix sliced through the Black Tortoise’s qì. Thunder cracked through the heavens as the Tortoise reared back.
Zen staggered. With a wave of his hand, he directed the Dragon, which surged forward in a shell of glittering ice and writhing water. The energies of the Tiger met it, and the two intertwined in flashes of white and blue.
Hóng’yì laughed. His eyes were the color of blood, his entire being drenched in the light of his Demon God. “Despicable Mansorian,” he shouted. “Our ancestors fought like this at the end of the last era. You already know how the story ends.”
Zen said nothing. His body was rigid with exertion, and as he dipped his chin, Lan caught sight of his eyes: the black had nearly swallowed the white.
He was losing control to his Demon Gods. There was no telling how long he had before the Black Tortoise—and now the Silver Dragon, too—took complete command of his body, mind, and soul.
It was now or never.
You will have one chance to end it all.
Zen yielded a step, and the Dragon hissed a scream as theAzure Tiger bit into its neck. The Black Tortoise roared as the fire from the Phoenix closed in on it.
Use the Godslayer.
Lan lifted her ocarina to her lips. Closed her eyes.
And began.
Time flowed past her as though she were a stone in a river, watching the tides of her kingdom pass by. This land as it had been without humans at first: endless stretches of yellow grasses and ice-capped mountains to the north, lush pine forests interspersed with hills and rivers at the center, bamboo oceans and mist-shrouded lakes in the south, and glittering golden deserts and basins of aquamarine blue as though carved from the skies in the west. She saw the sun and the sky, the moon and the stars, the forces that shifted through them to sculpt this earth.
The gods, she realized, had existed long before this world. They had laid down their bones to form this land, the earth and mountains and deserts; they had blown a breath across and given it wind; they had shed tears and gifted it rivers and lakes. And then they had spilled a few drops of their blood to gift to humans, to the shamans who had come to know how to wield the qì of this world.
The Godslayer was a story, and now Sòng Lián knew its beginning and its ending.
She coaxed the song from her ocarina and, in her mind’s eye, watched her land’s history unfurl. The first shaman practitioners who had reached to the heavens and made their pacts with the gods. The sons, daughters, and children of their lineages who received the blessings of power and grew greedy, casting aside the truth of the origins of the Demon Gods generation after generation as humans warred for power…until one day, the truth was forgotten.
The era of bloodshed during the Warring Clans Era…the unification of the First Kingdom, the rise and fall of dynasty after dynasty thereafter…the eradication of the clans descended from the first shaman practitioners…. Familiar faces and stories emerging in the great gray river: The Dragon Emperor Yán’lóng, binder of the Crimson Phoenix, facing off against Mansorian High General Xan Tolürigin, binder of the Black Tortoise. The generations of imperial heirs who grew up within the Heavenly Capital in an empire held by the iron fist of their regime and the power they held. The birth of a squabbling infant on the most auspicious summer’s day, soothsayers exclaiming over a destiny that stretched toward the future like samite. Another spoke in the wheel of power and inheritance that continued to churn, churn, churn.
And then: a baby born to a sky of snow that fell like goose feathers in the ghost bells of the morning with only the embers of a dying fire to light his way. A dark fate, one made to walk in the shadows, the clan’s last fortune-teller had predicted as he read the alignment of stars overhead and listened to the rattle of the wild horse’s bones.
Another twelve moons and four seasons, into the spring when a second babe wailed in the kàng bed of a great courtyard manor, the willows sweeping over a stained-glass lake where lotuses bloomed brightly. A mother leaning over her to play a familiar melody with a woodlute, whispering that one day she would grow up to serve her land and her people, not the throne….
Lan watched the prince grow up just as the oracles had foretold: a filigreed life made for monarchs and kings within the walls of palaces, protected by the source of power his family had jealously guarded over the cycles. Seated on a throne of blood and gold, guarded by a great phoenix even as its flames burned down the kingdom.
In the plains of the north, the Mansorian boy knew apeaceful life of sun and sky and grass, of herding sheep and riding wild horses with what remained of his clan. And the girl—Lan knew exactly how her story went in the sheltered courtyard manor.
She followed the tale of the Mansorian boy and the Sòng girl, knowing how they would each come to lose everything they loved, how they would spend cycles apart beneath the hand of another ruling monarch, yearning for that blue sky and freedom again. Watched their paths speed toward each other, two stars fated to an inevitable collision: the boy now a young man clad in black and the girl as a young woman in a páo of white gauze, their gazes clashing across a crowded teahouse. Yin and yáng, coming together, at last.
Power is always borrowed,Dào’zihad written.It exists to be used—so long as we remember to return it. It may be created, so long as we know to destroy it.
The balance,Dé’zihad told her with his dying breath.Yin and yáng. Good and evil. Great and terrible. Two sides of the same coin, Lián’ér, and somewhere in the center of it all liespower.The solution is to find the balance between them. Do you understand?
