As the mó reluctantly slink back to their master, Niefuzan grins at me in a nearly apologetic fashion. “Oh, come. You can’t blame me for allowing them a treat. Thanks to your mother’s war, we’ve been in the Kingdom of Sky for nearly a week now, and the immortals we capture just don’t bleed like mortals do.”
As soon as the doors close behind them, I shut my eyes and let my smile fall.
I don’t know how much longer I remain lying on the floor, unmoving. The room blurs before me, and I feel a strange warmth on my face. Gingerly, I test my right arm—the flesh has mostly knitted back together, though the ache is not yet gone from my bones—before reaching into the folds of my robes. My fingers close around a small hilt, and I retrieve it.
The crescent blade sits in my palm. From this angle, it catches the moonlight just right, rendering the entire thing silver.
It’s one of Àn’ying’s blades. Each, I’ve observed, bears a different practitioning talisman carved into its peachwood hilt. This one is strange; I’m not able to decipher it, but the part Icanread of it suggests that it obeys the heart’s desire.
It’s the blade she tried to kill me with the night everything ended, only she missed.
She never misses.
I draw my knees to my chest and curl around the blade, pressing it to my cheek. If I inhale deeply, I think I can make out her scent on its hilt: the faint tang of blossoms mixed with something sweet and sharp. And if I close my eyes, I can take myself back through every single memory I have of her, indelibly seared into my mind. I can see her pale shift, her long hair braided through with that ribbon, the blades in her hands and cautious, tight lines at the corners of her eyes as she beholdsme.
My life changed the moment I met her in that clearing. Forso long, all I’d known was war, hunger, and desire; the cruel necessities of the Kingdom of Night, the hierarchy of power and cycles of bloodshed.
Àn’ying showed me kindness when she saved that halfling fox spirit in the clearing. She showed me courage, and most of all, she showed me love, in the relentless way she fought for her family. Before her, I didn’t think a creature like me—half demon, half mortal—was capable of being loved.
I still don’t. But she gave me hope. Perhaps that is the cruelest affliction of them all.
Slowly, I draw the crescent blade to my chest. Feel its tip against the beat of my heart.
Something sparks between my fingers and the hilt of the blade. A flash of heat, and then a vision blooms, white, into my mind. Àn’ying holds me, her hair falling over her shoulders, her outline haloed by the sun—and she’s smiling. She’s smiling as she gazes at me, as she’s never smiled at me before.
“Yù’chén…”
The blade clatters to the floor as though it has leapt away from me. I blink in the darkness, disoriented, reaching for the empty space before me where she was just moments ago.
“Àn’ying?” My voice is raw with disbelief. What was that? It wasn’t a memory; it looked so real, it felt like a vision, but I don’t know how my mind could have conjured that. “Àn’ying—”
But she isn’t here, and I’m alone again in the dark.
Loving her was like drawing a blade deeper into my heart. Now she is gone, and so is the pain in my heart.
Now I find that I no longer feel much of anything at all.
—
The Temple of Dawn is a flurry of motion when I depart my chambers. Since the mó captured it as their stronghold, the place has undergone a transformation, so that it is barely recognizable from the ethereal, sunlit structure I first set foot in when I arrived for the Immortality Trials. The gauze curtains have been enchanted with scenes of the night, of a sickle moon hung lone and cold in a black sky. Any fires that burned and lanterns that once lit the halls have been smothered, for the mó are creatures of darkness.
All the strongholds the Kingdom of Night has managed to capture in the Kingdom of Sky have gone through similar changes. When I look out between the gauze-draped pillars, the skies of the immortal realm are now peppered with patches of night.
My sword is strapped to my hip, and the long black robes my mother had made for me billow behind me as I walk. The silk is stitched with patterns of stars that form the shapes of dragons—a joining of the symbols of the Kingdom of Night and the Kingdom of Rivers, a reminder of my position as heir to the mortal throne.
I trace the familiar path down to the great hall, where candidates once gathered in anticipation of the next trial. Back then, my greatest concern was to follow Àn’ying and learn the identity of the mortal heir to the Kingdom of Rivers through her.
The identity of my half brother.
Hào’yáng.
She let it slip in the healing chamber, right before everything fell apart. I recall the sorrow bright in her eyes, the feel of her hand against my heart, as she whispered,I’m going to make a safer world, for mortals and for halflings alike. For you.
And I betrayed her. I tricked her, did everything in my power to get close to her, all the while knowing I was the reason she had lost her family and her kingdom.
An old pain flares in my chest. My steps falter, and I press a hand to it briefly. Then I straighten as I approach the hall. Voices—loud, heated, accompanied by snarls and growls—drift to me.
Immediately, I sense the presence of my mother amongst the loitering courtiers. There is no way to explain it, this bond between mó and their offspring. While mortals can turn against their own blood and their history is riddled with such familial betrayals, the mó have seen less turmoil within their own lineages. We are flowers blooming from the same tree, roots inextricably intertwined. It is an age-old magic unique to our kind.
