Chapter : Five
I woke with a gasp, my lungs feeling as though they were filled with crushed glass. A warmth I had not known since the Ash-Wastes radiated against my back—steady, golden, almost human.
Long Feng was asleep beside me, his arm draped over my waist, his hand resting directly over my heart.
The tether had changed. It was no longer a jagged hook; it was a bridge. Through the contact of his skin, I felt the low, thrumming frequency of his pulse, but beneath that, I felt a crushing, silver-gray weight of grief. Through the soul-merge, I felt his remorse—a centuries-old sorrow for the girls whose lives had been fed into his flame.
I closed my eyes, a small spark of hope flickering in my chest. Maybe the merge stabilized me, I thought. Maybe I am whole again.
To test it, I reached for my father.
I saw the shape of a man standing in the doorway of our hut in the salt-flats—my father, back from the mines for the last time. Tall. Broad-shouldered. His hand was raised—was he waving goodbye? Or was it a warning? I tried to hear his voice, the last thing he said to me before the recruiters took me.
Nothing. Just the hiss of the Void, wet and wrong, filling the gap.
I opened my mouth to say his name. My tongue moved, but no sound came. I tried again, my throat tightening until I was choking. I did not just forget his name; I forgot the shape of it. Was it two syllables? Three? Did it start with the hard 'K' of the northern clans or the soft 'S' of the coast?
He was a void now. A faceless silhouette standing in a doorway that led to nowhere. The moral compass I had used to survive the salt-mines was spinning wildly, its needle broken.
Long Feng's eyes snapped open. The gold was dim, the gray shadow on his temples deeper than it had been an hour ago. He saw the terror in my face and knew.
"What is gone?" he rasped.
"His name," I whispered, the words tasting like ash. "My father. He is just... a shadow now."
Long Feng's grip on my waist tightened. He looked at his own hands, the veins beneath his skin dark and swollen. "I gave you five years. Maybe three." He looked away, his jaw set. "The Blight does not wait."
"So if I die—"
"I die within days," he said, his voice flat. "But if I die, you dissolve into the Void within seconds. We are a mutual execution now."
I sat up, pulling the silk sheets to my chest. "Then make it count. If I am to be your Anchor, I want a price. My brother, Xiao. I want him granted the Heavenly Dragon Seal. I want him untouchable."
Long Feng's jaw tightened. "I can make him untouchable to assassins. I cannot make him untouchable to politics. By giving him my seal, I turn him into a symbol. Hou will use him as a lever against you."
"You are saying I just painted a target on his back," I said, my voice trembling.
"I am saying you cannot protect what you love without making it valuable," Long Feng said, standing and pulling on his robes. "And valuable things are always targeted."
The heavy bronze doors were thrown open. It was not the Chancellor's monks this time. It was a phalanx of guards in white-and-silver silk—the personal retinue of the Imperial Matriarch.
The Empress Dowager stepped into the chamber.
She was small, almost frail, but the air around her was suffocating, heavy with the scent of dried lilies and incense so old it tasted like dust. She looked at me the way a butcher looks at livestock—assessing the weight, calculating the value.
"You are the first vessel to survive the night," she said. Her voice was soft, almost kind, which made the hair on my neck stand up. "The Court is unsettled, Feng. They believe this girl is a corruption of the bloodline."
Long Feng stood his ground, his killing intent flickering like a dying candle. "Mother—"
"Sit, Feng." Her voice did not rise, but he flinched as if struck. "I did not raise you to be sentimental. The girl has shared your soul. To the Mandate, she is no longer a peasant; she is a complication that must be legitimized."
She turned her cold, pale eyes back to me. "You will enter the Inner Palace as the Consort of Shadows. You will be taught, groomed, and eventually... bred. We will see if your womb can produce Anchors that do not wither as quickly as your predecessors."
I felt bile rise in my throat. "I am not a broodmare."
"No," the Empress agreed with a thin, sharp smile. "You are a solution to a problem that has plagued this Empire for ten thousand years. You should be grateful."
As the guards stepped forward to lead us toward the Induction Hall, I caught my reflection in a polished obsidian window. The black handprint the Void had left on my throat was pulsing, its edges writhing like smoke.
Then I heard it. A new voice. Not Yue. Not the girls. Something older, echoing from the other side of the crack in the world.
She did not save the world, little ghost, the voice whispered. It was gentle, like a teacher guiding a child. She buried the evidence.
I stopped walking, my heart hammering against my ribs. Long Feng continued ahead, his back retreating, unaware that I had frozen. The gray shadow on his neck had spread, darker than before.
Ask her what she found beneath the First Palace, the Voice urged. Ask her why the Void screams when it touches gold. You are not his Anchor, child. You are his replacement. And when you have drunk deep enough, she will bury him beside the others.
I looked at Long Feng's retreating back and realized the True Voice was right. The Empress Dowager was not building a dynasty. She was building a graveyard.