My heart fills with gratitude for Meadowsweet as I give the pendant a gentle stroke. Its soft light seems to pulse in response.
“Is this…” I glance around me, not daring to utter the words aloud. From the ancient trees with their twisted roots to the strange, wild flowers and the ancient, echoing peace, I can only guess it’s…
“The Realm of the Four Seas. Or what some might refer to as the Realm of Dragons.”
“How?” I breathe. “Hào’yáng told me that, to enter your realm, one had to pass a test—a form of sacrifice.”
“You passed it. You saved an heir of dragons and, in doing so, proved yourself worthy of entering our realm.”
A slow blink, which for dragons might constitute a smile.
“Not many in this world can say the same.”
I sit straighter, my hand on Hào’yáng’s shoulder. I’m afraid that if I do not hold on to him, he will vanish again.
The events of last night return to me in a rush. The blood-soaked stone pái’fang bearing the gateway between the demon realm and the mortal realm. Sansiran’s smile as she watched me drown. The breath leaving my lips and my immortality awakening as spirit energies illuminated my skin like the colors of sunrise.
The heartbreak in Yù’chén’s eyes as he watched me slip through the gateway.
I push those images away, focusing on the dragon before me, on Hào’yáng’s gentle breathing beneath my palms. Urgency shapes my voice as I ask, “How long have we been here?”
“Time does not work in this realm as it does in most others,” the dragon replies. “You have entered a temporary fold between the waves of time. It has not stopped, but…it can slow, or speed, at your wish. For some, what feels like years here may be the blink of an eye in their realm. Others spend days here and return to find centuries gone. The only thing it cannot do is flow backward.”
Time is one thing Hào’yáng and I were running short of with the Kingdom of Night’s advancement into the Kingdom of Sky. I know we would both wish it to slow during our stay.
I incline my head to the dragon and say, “I seek an audience with your kind, to discuss an alliance between the mortal realm and yours.”
It’s impossible to glean any emotion within that ancient, noble face. “The Dragon King is willing to see you in his underwater palace.”
“The Dragon King,” I repeat in wonder, thinking of all the childhood stories and legends we’re told of him in the mortal realm. “When? How do we get there?”
The dragon splashes a great tail as it rears up, so tall its head blocks out the sun for a moment, then dives effortlessly into the sea.
“When the time is right, the path shall reveal itself to you.”
The dragon begins to dissolve back into seawater, first its scales, then its antlers and its ears, until I’m staring at nothing but the gently murmuring ocean.
Something pink materializes in the periphery of my vision. Lying in the moss by my side is a hairpin the length of my palm. A lotus flower gleams at its head, petals of soft blush shifting with the sunlight. By the spirit energies emanating from it that match my own, I know this is Lady Shi’ya’s lotus—mylotus and vessel of power, made whole once more, now in the form of a hairpin.
I tuck it into the bodice of my gown.
A warm hand grasps my fingers, and I look up to a sight I have been dreaming of for so many days in the darkness.
Hào’yáng’s eyes are open, and he is looking at me. As I meet his gaze, all the weeks we have been apart melt away, and I am back at home in Xi’lín on that sunlit afternoon, the blossoms of my flowering plum tree whispering overhead in a gentle breeze as I listened to him confess his love for me for the first time.
For all of nine years.
“Àn’ying?” Hào’yáng murmurs huskily. “I have either died and gone beyond the Nine Fountains…or I am dreaming.”
The dam in my chest that I built to hold back the grief of watching him slip through my fingers that night—it cracks.Laughing and sobbing at the same time, I tackle him in a hug, and he wraps his arms tightly around me.
When I pull back, he studies me with a serious frown. “Goodness, I seem to have offended you greatly while I have been unconscious,” Hào’yáng says.
It takes me a moment to realize he’s teasing. “I thought youdied,” I whisper, my voice shaking again, and he sits up and gathers me to him. “I thought I’d never see you again, and I didn’t even have my jade pendant to remember you by—”
“I am here,” Hào’yáng says gently, tipping my chin to him. The same words he spoke to me when I first used the jade pendant and he wrote back. He trails his thumbs across my cheeks to wipe away my tears.
I drink in the sight of him, the same ink-brushed brows and straight nose, chiseled chin and intelligent, perceptive eyes. The only change is his hair, dark in certain lighting, yet shifting in mercurial silvers in others.
