The water is cold against my skin, but I no longer feel it the way a mortal does. The light above me fades, yet…a glow emanates from within me. That same blush glow—like the breath of spring, the first hint of dawn, the bloom of a flower—pulses from my chest.
Growing stronger.
From the depths of the ocean comes a resounding glimmer, like a faint heartbeat.
I don’t know how long I’ve been traveling when I spot it: the lotus from my vision in the spring, drifting in an ocean current. As I near, its light grows brighter, reflecting in my own skin—as though its magic draws out that of its other half within me.
Its petals open at my touch.
And there, lying within, is my boy in the jade.
Just as in my vision, nearly all color has leached from him; the frost has crept over his neck, framing his face and silver hair. When I press my palm to his cheeks, his skin is ice-cold.
I place my other hand over his heart.
And…there. A whisper of a flutter.
He is dying, and I know what I must do.
I close my eyes and touch my chest, searching through the woven strands of energies as Yù’chén once taught me to do. They glimmer in my vision like ten thousand magic threads of all colors and lengths.
This time, instead of searching for my life energies, I searchfor those threads of pure light: pink shot through with gold, resembling strands of sunlight. I gather them between my fingers, and I pull.
The lotus’s essence wells up in my throat as I lower myself to my boy in the jade. His lips are like ice, yet as I exhale, the lotus’s energies pour from my lips, their light dancing across his face. As they stream out into the currents, they first bloom into points, like the petals of a lotus flower. And then, slowly, the energies coalesce, shrinking into a gleaming pearl that glimmers gold and blush, the colors of a sunrise.
A pill of immortality.
I capture it in my palm and tip it into Hào’yáng’s mouth.
“Hào’yáng,”I whisper. My voice ripples through the water, echoing in the vast emptiness as my heart gives a responding cry. I am exhausted; my strength and energies are spent. The world begins to drift in and out of sight. And perhaps it is a dream, that light dances upon his face like the sun through water; that sparks ripple across his skin, spreading through his chest, pushing back the frost.
As darkness closes in on my vision, something strange happens.
A bright blue glow pulses through the ocean from beneath us, and the seaopenslike a great maw or a set of heavenly gates…to swallow us whole.
23
Àn’ying
The Four Seas, Realm of Dragons
I wake to sunlight, warm wind, and distant birdsong. I’m on a bed of soft moss in a gentle glade, the sound of rushing water threading through the canopy of leaves overhead. I have a knowing in my bones that I am somewhere else—somewhere foreign, somewhere my soul does not recognize.
When I turn to my side, I nearly stop breathing.
Lying in a pool of sunlight, bathed in gold, is Hào’yáng.
The blush has returned to his cheeks, the red to his lips, yet his hair remains the shifting silver I saw in the sea. I press a hand to his chest and nearly buckle with relief when I feel his heartbeat.
We’re both dressed in white robes of silk and gauze. The frost is gone from his body, and he wears a curious new pendant around his neck: one that appears to be carved of ice yet seems to glow from within. When I press a fingertip to it, it iscold to the touch, and I think I catch a glimmer of shadows and scales stirring within.
“That is a dragon’s heart,” comes a familiar echoing voice.
Beyond this glade, the great camphor trees yield to a white-sand beach and a bay of clear turquoise. As I watch, the waters ripple and a shape coalesces between the currents: long and serpentine.
A dragon forms from the ocean itself. Water sluices down its body, dripping back into the sea, and the creature drifts almost lazily in the currents, watching us with eyes of the clearest blue. I recognize it: It’s the same dragon that spoke to me when I was submerged in the crystal spring in the Court of the Aurora.
“She of the Moon-Frosted Sea gave most of herself to save her charge’s life; only her heart remains in this world. It will be a while before she regains her form. For now, she slumbers.”
