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“Any second now,” the prince whispered, his black eyes glinting. “Trust me, you will know once they’ve found your heart.”
And he did know. He screamed and screamed and screamed and prayed as he never had before that he possessed no heart at all.
The prince came empty-handed this time.
One glance at his face, and it was obvious why.
“She’s dead,” the Death God said. Perhaps he should have spoken with more tact; perhaps he should have phrased it more gently, pretended it was a terrible shock. But there was nothing remotely shocking about the mortal’s death. It was as predictable and natural as the tides rolling in beneath the moon, as the sun rising over the mountains, as the petals fading and the leaves scattering when autumn came with its cold touch. Such was the flow of seasons: time moving through everything like fingers running through water. Life was fickle, fleeting; death was fixed.
The prince lifted his eyes. They were so dark that they could have trapped history within them, an endless spiral down into nothingness, into the extinction of all gods. So dark that even the souls of the underworld would have flinched away from that heavy, pitch-black gaze.
And the Death God had seen grief. He had observed it in all its forms, as an experienced curator would look over hundreds upon hundreds of paintings and note their various styles of expression, from the nostalgic and melancholy to the ugly and violent. But the portrait of the prince’s grief was sharper, more vividly delineated than anything he had gazed upon before. If the intensity of that feeling could be made into a blade, it would cut through forests and rend the earth in an instant.
“No. Not yet.” He spoke in a harsh rasp, as if he had cried or screamed his throat raw. The words would have been lost to the air had they not been the only ones in that locked room, the only sounds except the Death God’s breathing and the drip of water from some distant chamber. “You have not taken her soul. It does not count.”
“If you ever loved her at all, you would let me go and collect it,” the Death God said. “Her soul cannot be returned to her body. It will either float on in the Mortal Realm, restless and pained, or find peace in the Yellow Springs. You choose.”
“You’re lying,” the prince hissed. His lips trembled as he stepped closer, the purplish shadows under his eyes as deep as spoiled plums. “It’s not too late.”
“You know it is. That is why you mourn her,” the Death God said. “Just as you failed to prevent her death, you will fail to bring her back. She is gone, and nothing you do can save her—”
“No.” The prince’s arms shot out, and waves of vivid gold light cascaded toward the Death God. With a great shudder, the restraints around him broke free and clattered to the floor.
The Death God looked down in mild surprise, then up at the prince again, just as the prince lunged forward and attacked. He did not use his powers; he used only his bare hands. They squeezed around the Death God’s throat, his uncut nails digging into flesh, into the lines his swords had left. Fight back, a little voice urged in the Death God’s head. On a good day, he could have overpowered the prince. But right now, there were flames in his blood and holes in his heart. His very bones felt beaten and bruised. And the prince could not be stopped like this. He was possessed by the fervor of a man who has already lost the world, who would strangle the Yellow Springs into submission like it was a serpent, who would set the Three Realms on fire just to bring warmth back into his lover’s dead body. The Death God had seen grief, and he knew that the only thing more dangerous than desperation was despair. He knew, too, that some battles were not worth staying for, if you wanted to win the war.
So with his last remaining strength, he transported himself somewhere else. Anywhere else.
But in those few moments before here and there, before his powers swept over his body and carried him through space itself, the prince leaned closer, and the fingers around his throat turned unbearably hot, as if fresh flames were being pressed into his skin. The prince’s voice, echoing around him, sealing the curse in his blood:
“Now you will know how it feels.”
A terrible pain cracked through his skull like a whip, and then the pain was everywhere, even as the walls of the palace vanished and the air rippled, letting him through. But it barely even mattered where he was, because the pain had followed him, a shadow he couldn’t shake, a maze he couldn’t escape. It was like trying to find his way out of a bamboo forest; each stalk was a new blade of hurt, identical and never-ending and looming over his head, meeting him upon every turn. He stumbled, gasping, into the halls of the Night Realm. His feet touched solid ground; his fingers felt for the familiar ridges in the walls. Yet there was a sense of unreality to it all. Nobody came to welcome him back, to ask after him. Nobody was there to worry over where he’d gone, how he’d acquired those pearl-silver scars. Not that he wanted anyone to; it would have irritated him deeply if he had to explain himself and everything he’d endured. Still. The realization struck him, as cutting as the prince’s sword: He was utterly alone in the darkness.
In a grave in the home of a dead god, one century into the present, the darkness splits open.
Chapter Fourteen
Crimson light engulfs us, as bright as if the sun has fallen into the grave. The entire island shudders again, not from destruction, as it had before, but the way the Heavens shake to herald the birth of a new god. A buzzing noise reverberates through the soil and the trees up above, like tens of thousands of birds flapping their wings at once. Power in its purest, most divine form. And the source of it—beside me, tightening his grip around my waist.
The Death God murmurs something that could be my name, and then we are rising through it all, into the open, red-tinged air, the once-impenetrable barrier breaking as easily as if it’s made of silk. He could break anything, I am certain, any doubts that had once dwelled in my mind now vanishing as fast as the enchantment. Do anything. He could remake the world as though it were sand under his fingers. He could topple cities with one wave of his hand, wring the Long River dry, change its course by bending the land.
Yet as we land gently on the grass, our robes floating down around us, free at last, I do not feel relieved—
I feel only a clear-edged dread inside my stomach, like I have swallowed a sharp lump of ice.
The Death God lowers his arm and angles his head toward me, and through the unnatural wind blowing between us, I see him as if for the very first time. He is still bathed in that brilliant red glow. The whole island is, and I would not be surprised if it extended for miles in every direction, if mortal poets on the peaks of the Jiuyang Mountains are gazing at it in wonder at the same time I am, searching for the right rhyming couplets to describe it; if, years from now, we will still be hearing tales of the strange lights that appeared in the sky and changed the color of the world.
His eyes are unfathomably black with intent, and now that the canopy of his pain has lifted, I can see it written more legibly than ever in his gaze: revenge.
The ice in my stomach seeps into my bloodstream.
“Thank you,” he says, and even his voice is stronger, darker, as crisp as the night. “In return, let me tell you this: You do not want to follow.”
Without any further explanation, he takes one step away to the edge of the island, his midnight cloak trailing over his shoulders. By the next step, he is already gone, leaving me to stare at the empty space where he’d stood like a general about to march off to war, my pulse pounding in my ears to the beat of one horrified question—
What exactly have I done?
I had envisioned my return to the Celestial Realm to be a scene of triumph. One where I could lie down in the warmth of my blankets and look out at the calm sea from my cottage and await an invitation to the banquet, flushed with glee at having finally outsmarted the Death God and run away from him for good.
