Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Jing Yuan hadn’t feared becoming mara-struck.

That was not bravery. It was not wisdom. It was only arithmetic, in the end. The Xianzhou had taught all its long-lived people the same calculation from the moment they were old enough to understand death as something that could be postponed but not escaped: years gathered into centuries, centuries into burden, burden into fracture. Memory rotted slower than flesh, but it rotted all the same. Every old grief remained somewhere inside the body, waiting for the mind to weaken around it. Every battlefield left its mark. Every name he had once loved became another weight in the scales.

So no, Jing Yuan had never feared that the mara would come for him.

He had only feared who would be standing in front of him when it did.

The first version of the contingency order had been written when he took the seat of Divine Foresight. It had been clean, clinical, and almost laughably arrogant in its simpleness. In the event of corruption, isolate the general. Remove civilians. Summon available Arbiter-Generals. There had been other names in that document once. Names belonging to people who had still been alive, then. Strong hands. Clear eyes. Friends he had trusted to stop him before he could become a disaster.

Most of those names were dead now. Some were worse than dead.

The second version of the contingency plan had been less neat. The third had included broader evacuation parameters. The fifth had allowed the Cloud Knights to assume enemy action if he became unresponsive in the field. The seventh had removed assumptions about external aid arriving in time. The ninth had added a note that no apprentice, ward, or minor officer was to be permitted within the engagement radius under any circumstances.

Jing Yuan remembered writing that line.

He remembered the brush hesitating over the page. He remembered Yanqing being small enough then that his training sword had dragged against the floor when he carried it, too proud to admit it was heavy, too stubborn to let anyone take it from him. He had been all bright eyes and sharper questions, still soft at the cheeks, still prone to falling asleep over military histories he insisted he was old enough to read. Jing Yuan had looked at the words minor officer and almost laughed at himself. Yanqing had not even been a lieutenant. Yanqing had not even learned how to hide disappointment from his face.

It had seemed safe, then, to write him out of the ending.

Years passed.

Yanqing grew.

The document changed.

By the seventeenth revision, the line had been removed.

By the twenty-third, his name appeared under possible responders.

By the twenty-sixth, it appeared under likely responders.

By the twenty-ninth, Jing Yuan sat alone in his office long after the lamps had burned low, reading the final probability assessment until the characters blurred in front of him.

Primary responder: Lieutenant Yanqing.

He had not moved for a long time after that.

Outside, the Luofu carried on in its ordinary rhythms. Couriers passed through the halls. Cloud Knights changed their watch. Somewhere beyond the shutters, the stars wheeled in their false and faithful silence. Jing Yuan had sat with one hand resting on the edge of the table, feeling the old ache in his fingers, the old weight behind his eyes, and thought with an almost absurd clarity that he should have stopped training the boy sooner.

A useless thought.

A very cruel one.

Yanqing’s brilliance had never been something Jing Yuan gave him. He had only opened doors and watched the child run through them too quickly, laughing, furious, hungry for every blade and every lesson the world could offer. Jing Yuan had tempered him where he could. Delayed him where he dared. Lied by omission, again and again, because truth was a battlefield too, and Yanqing had already been sent to too many of those.

But there was no delaying this.

This, he could only prepare for, for when it eventually came.

And there, at last, the Divine Foresight failed him in the most ordinary way.

He could prepare the Luofu for his fall. He could prepare the Cloud Knights for command disruption. He could prepare seals, formations, evacuation orders, false routes to draw himself away from civilian districts, and three separate kill-zones built into places no one would think to question. He could write his own death into policy with a steady hand.

He could not prepare Yanqing to kill him. Not without killing something in him first.

The residence was quiet after Yanqing left.

For a little while, the morning remained ordinary.

Jing Yuan washed. Dressed. Tied his hair with hands that moved through long habit rather than thought. The tea on the table had gone lukewarm by the time he remembered to drink it, but that was not unusual. Neither was the unfinished report waiting beside the cup, nor the pale spill of dawn through the latticework screens, nor the faint echo of training bells carrying from somewhere beyond the courtyard.

It was a painfully ordinary morning. Perhaps except Yanqing complaining at him first thing in the morning-

No.

Jing Yuan almost smiled.

Yanqing had been sitting at the table with both hands around his cup, glaring at the steam as though it were an enemy refusing to be cut down, still angry from the last time he burned his tongue on hot tea.

No.

Jing Yuan blinked.

Yanqing had not sat at the breakfast table that morning. Yanqing had not been small enough for his sleeves to cover half his hands in years.

The room returned.

Yanqing was a lieutenant now. He had left before dawn.

The cup was in his hand. The tea had spilled across his fingers.

He set it down carefully. For several breaths, he only watched the thin trail of liquid move across the table, darkening the grain of the wood. His hand did not shake. That seemed important. His hand did not shake at all.

Then a woman’s voice behind him said his name.

Jing Yuan closed his eyes. Not yet, he thought.

The voice laughed softly. Another voice laughed with it and Jing Yuan wasn’t sure it wasn’t his.

Not yet was not a refusal. It was not even a prayer. Jing Yuan knew within the first minute.

That was the mercy of it, if such a word could be used. There was no long uncertainty, no illness he could pretend was exhaustion, no gentle decline he might mistake for age

He stood.

There were procedures. There had always been procedures. He had written them himself, revised them more times than anyone living knew, buried them beneath seals and contingencies and polite legal phrasing. In the event of corruption. In the event of cognitive instability. In the event that the Arbiter-General of the Luofu became a threat to civilian life.

In the event.

How delicate a phrase. How… professional. How unlike the thing now beginning to uncoil behind his eyes.

Jing Yuan crossed the room to the terminal.

The first message was simple.

Or it should have been.

Priority alert. Divert from-

His fingers paused above the keys. From where? The room tilted, not physically, but somewhere deeper. For one breath he was not in his residence. He was standing in snow. No, ash. No, the battlefield outside Scalegorge Waterscape, the air wet with salt and old blood. Someone was shouting. Someone was laughing. Someone was dead.

His hand struck the keys.

priorityalert-

The letters blurred. He deleted them. Tried again.

access-

To the residence? No. Too many people nearby. The eastern training yards? Too many cadets. Seat of Divine Foresight? Unacceptable. Starskiff Haven? Catastrophic. He needed distance, but not too much. He needed to move before movement became hunting. He needed to choose somewhere reachable, somewhere open, somewhere he could be found before he reached civilians.

He typed.

Emeergny protcol seventeenth west gate no no no western-

The words fractured under his hands.

Jing Yuan stared at the line of gibberish. He deleted it again.

Behind him, the woman’s voice said his name a second time, closer now.

He did not answer.

Instead, he opened the sealed folder under the console.

There should have been a file. A command packet. A clean sequence of orders he had prepared for precisely this failure. He knew that with the part of his mind still capable of knowing things. There were evacuation maps. Authorization codes. Transfer of emergency command. Engagement parameters.

There was a letter.

Jing Yuan stopped.

The folder sat open before him, its contents neatly arranged by date and revision. Contingency orders. Medical waivers. Legal confirmations. Personal effects. A private message scheduled for release upon confirmed death.

Yanqing’s name was on it.

For a moment, Jing Yuan did not understand.

Then his breath left him with something too quiet to be called a laugh.

Of course. He had prepared a goodbye for the boy, because there had always been a chance he would not be granted one. Battle, assassination, political collapse, mara. So many ways to leave him. So many ways for Yanqing to be left standing in the aftermath with a sword in his hand and no answer that would satisfy him.

Jing Yuan had thought of that.

Jing Yuan had forgotten that he had thought of that.

He reached for the file. His vision slipped. Yanqing was small again.

Not a lieutenant with soldiers under his command and blood already written into the lines of his palms. Small. Barefoot in the hall because he had refused to wait for someone to help him find his shoes, dragging a wooden sword behind him.

“You cannot come to the strategy meeting,” Jing Yuan had told him.

Yanqing had drawn himself up to his full, unimpressive height. “Why?”

“Because you are four.”

“I am almost five.”

“A grave distinction.”

“I can listen!”

“You can fall asleep on the floor.”

“I won’t.”

“You did yesterday.”

“Yesterday was different!”

Jing Yuan had tried very hard not to laugh. He remembered that. He remembered failing. He remembered Yanqing’s offended little face, the sword clutched in both hands.

He thought, with a suddenness that had frightened him, that if he died, there would be no one to remember this properly.

The memory tore.

The room returned too bright.

The terminal chimed softly beneath his hand.

Open file?

Jing Yuan looked at Yanqing’s name until the characters seemed to rearrange themselves.

No.

Not now.

The letter was for after.

After required there to be a before.

He closed the file. His fingers felt numb. No, not numb. Distant. A tool responding after too long a delay. He flexed them once, twice, and watched the motion with detached interest.

Fu Xuan. He needed Fu Xuan.

That thought arrived with enough clarity that he almost trusted it.

Jing Yuan opened the comm channel manually. Voice authorization might fail. Worse, it might succeed after he was no longer the only voice speaking through his mouth. Manual was slower. Safer.

The first attempt connected to no one.

The second filled the room with static.

The third rang long enough that Jing Yuan began to forget what he had intended to say.

Then Fu Xuan’s voice cut through, sharp with irritation and sleep.

“General? Do you have any idea what hour-”

“Lady Fu?”

Silence.

It was, perhaps, the tone. Or the fact that Jing Yuan had called at all. When she spoke again, the irritation had thinned into something else.

“What happened?”

Jing Yuan looked toward the window. Morning hadn’t fully entered the room by now. The courtyard stones were pale with the early sunlight. 

He smiled. It felt almost natural.

“You may get your wish sooner than expected.”

Fu Xuan did not answer immediately. When she did, her voice was very quiet.

“Jing Yuan-” 

There it was. Not General. His name. For a moment, he hated her for that.

Then he forgot why.

“Tell me exactly what is happening.” she demanded

“Ah,” Jing Yuan said. “That would be somewhat difficult.”

“Do not do that.”

“Do what?”

“Pretend you are merely being difficult.” she sighed  “Is it poison? An assassin?” 

Jing Yuan nodded no. He wished it was. She made a face.

“Mara?” Jing Yuan’s stillness was enough of an answer. Fu Xuan was a brilliant diviner. A brilliant strategist. She probably understood before even asking about the poison, just hoping for a different answer. “How much time do you have?”

Jing Yuan looked at his hand.

That was wrong. 

He knew it was wrong. Something in him had become too still, as if the body had decided to save movement for later. For violence. For running. For reaching the roots deep-

“Less than I would like,” he said. “More than I deserve.”

“Do not speak like that.”

“I have no time to be scolded.”

“You will make time.”

It should have been funny.

Another morning, another report, another argument in which Fu Xuan accused him of laziness while he pretended offense and delayed giving her what she wanted. He reached for that familiar shape and found it half-buried beneath snow.

No.

Ash. Ash falling. Something burning-

No.

The table. The terminal. The tea drying in a dark line across the wood.

Home.

He was home. For a little while longer.

“Emergency succession authority,” he said. The words came too fast, then too slow. “Temporary command transfers to you until formal confirmation by the Six Charioteers. Seal the residence,no- before. No. After. Do not trap me here.”

“General-”

“If I remain here, people die.”

“I am sending an emergency call to General Feixiao.”

He laughed. It came out wrong.

“Fu Xuan,” he said, almost gently. “You do not have to be a master diviner to know there is not enough time for her to come.”

“There may be time to delay you.”

“No.”

“You do not know that.”

“I know my own strength.”

“You are not yourself.”

The room sharpened. For one terrible instant, he wanted to say, I am. That is the problem.

Instead, he closed his eyes.

A battlefield opened behind them. White hair beneath a red moon. A laugh like sunlight. A blade in his hand. A blade in his chest. Someone calling him by a nickname he had not used in centuries. 

“A-Yuan, come on, don’t sulk behind because your teacher was mean.”

“I was not.” Both him and Jingliu let out the same exhausted sigh, the same answer, Baiheng laughing.

He pressed his fingers hard against the desk.

Wood. Grain. Tea. Terminal edge. Present.

“Do not delay me,” he said.

“General-”

“If you delay me, I may not reach the-” he paused, his brain filling with voices and chimes, soothing and comforting like soft summer wind.

The channel went silent. Good. She understood anyway. Fu Xuan understood routes and consequence and failure states. She understood that some choices were not choices at all, only smaller disasters selected quickly enough to spare the larger one.

Jing Yuan opened his eyes.

The map was still there. Western artillery yard. Abandoned. Low civilian traffic. Three access routes. Wide engagement radius. Clear sightlines. They could monitor, box him in and cut him down.

Room enough for swords.

His stomach turned.

“Do not contact Yanqing yet,” he said.

Fu Xuan answered immediately. “No.”

“Fu-”

“No.”

“If he hears while I am still here, he will come to find me.”

“Then I will stop him.”

“You will try.”

“I will stop him.”

Jing Yuan almost smiled. Almost.

“He is very fast,” he said.

“He is not faster than the Divination Commission.”

“Do not wager the Luofu on that.”

“Then do not ask me to keep this from him.”

“I am not asking.”

There it was. The general’s voice.

It cut through the fracture cleanly enough that even Jing Yuan felt the shape of it. Command. Authority. The weight of centuries arranged behind a single sentence. He had used that voice on battlefields, in tribunals, in trials, in chambers where hesitation would have cost more lives than cruelty.

Fu Xuan fell silent.

He hated himself for the relief.

“He is to be notified only after I reach the designated zone,” Jing Yuan said. “Not before. If I lose control en route, contain me at a-at a distance. Do not permit engagement in a residential district.”

“And once you reach it?”

The map glowed in front of him.

“Once I reach it-” he said, and stopped.

The rest of the sentence would not come.

He looked toward the locked drawer beneath the desk. There was something there. A token. A drive. A letter. No, the letter was in the sealed folder. No, physical copy in the drawer. Had he sealed it? Had he written it? Had he already said goodbye?

Yanqing had left before dawn.

What had Yanqing said?

‘General, I’m heading out.’ or probably telling him he shouldn’t stay asleep all day and actually get up after he left. Or maybe just complained about patrols so early.

Had Jing Yuan answered?

“General,” Fu Xuan said. “Once you reach it, what do you want me to do?”

Want.

What an obscene word.

He wanted the morning back.

He wanted the cup of tea hot. He wanted the report boring. He wanted Yanqing in the doorway, impatient and alive and unaware, rolling his eyes at some mild warning to be careful he would pretend not to appreciate. He wanted the mara not to come now, where the only possible person in the Luofu who could stop him was Yanqing and he wanted it to come slower so at least someone else had time to reach him before he hurt Yanqing in more ways than one.

He wanted several hundred impossible things.

The thing behind him whispered his name.

Jing Yuan placed one hand over his eyes.

“Send Yanqing the order,” he said.

Fu Xuan understood.

“No,” she said.

“Emergency engagement authority transfers to Lieutenant Yanqing.”

“No.”

“The sealed orders will confirm it.”

“General-”

“He has the highest chance of success.”

“He is a child!”

“He is a Cloud Knight lieutenant.”

“He is Yanqing! He is your-”

For a moment, Jing Yuan could not breathe.

There.

Just Yanqing.

Not lieutenant. Not asset. Not responder. Not the highest probability in a failed set of calculations.

Yanqing, whose last words Jing Yuan could not remember.

Yanqing, who would come if called.

Yanqing, who would come even if not called.

Jing Yuan bowed his head.

“I know.” he said.

Fu Xuan’s voice changed. Barely. Enough. “Jing Yuan, do not make him do this. There must be another option,"

Jing Yuan almost laughed.

Almost.

Of all people, she should know better.

"You reviewed revision twenty-three."

No answer.

"Twenty-six."

Still nothing.

"Twenty-nine."

Years of meetings. Probability charts. Risk assessments. Contingency planning for catastrophes neither of them truly believed they would live to see.

Until now.

"You signed them," Jing Yuan said quietly.

"I know." The words sounded torn out of her. "I know exactly what the calculations say."

For an instant Fu Xuan's voice became another voice. Older. Dead. Laughing. Accusing. Proud.

Jing Yuan gripped the edge of the desk. Present. Stay present. Not yet.

"Then you know."

"Yes."

The answer came immediately.

Because she did know.

She knew that Yanqing had surpassed every projection they had written when he was younger.

She knew that every year another name disappeared from the list of viable responders while Yanqing's remained.

She knew that Jing Yuan himself loved him enough to make him capable of surviving the day Jing Yuan no longer could.

"I know," Fu Xuan said again. "I simply hate it."

Yanqing knew something was wrong before Fu Xuan said a word.

But at first, the morning had only been strange in the minor, irritating way some mornings often were. Patrol routes had been adjusted. Two units reassigned from Starskiff Haven under the excuse of maintenance congestion, which sounded made up, but okay. A courier had arrived with sealed instructions, then another correcting the first. The western approaches had been marked for restricted movement, though no one seemed able to say why.

Annoying.

Not alarming though.

The sort of thing that happened whenever the commissions decided to make their private inconvenience everyone else’s logistical problem.

Yanqing finished his warmup in the secondary training yard with sweat cooling at the back of his neck and frost still fading from the edge of his blade. The last practice dummy split cleanly down the center, its reinforced core cracking a breath later. Too slow. He clicked his tongue, adjusted his grip, and made a mental note to repeat the sequence after patrol inspection.

“Lieutenant!”

He turned. The junior knight at the gate saluted too quickly.

“Report.”

“Route adjustments from the Divination Commission, sir. Western paths are closed until further notice. Patrols redirected around the old artillery yard. No civilian alert issued.”

Yanqing frowned. “Reason?”

“Maintenance review?”

“That is not a reason.”

“No, sir.”

He sheathed his sword.

The yard was quieter than it should have been. People were moving with purpose, but without explanation. Officers spoke in low voices. Couriers passed messages hand to hand instead of broadcasting them through the standard channels. A pair of Cloud Knights near the far archway stopped talking when they noticed him looking.

Yanqing’s frown deepened.

“Who issued the order?”

The junior knight hesitated until Yanqing glared at him.

“Diviner Fu,” the knight said at last.

That made even less sense.

Lady Fu did not personally meddle with training-yard patrol routes unless she intended everyone involved to know she was displeased with something and exactly what that something was. If she wanted a road closed, she closed it from the Seat of Divine Foresight, attached three layers of justification, and made sure the paperwork was sharp enough to draw blood.

She did not move without explanation.

And she certainly did not come herself.

She stood beneath the eastern gate in full formal dress, surrounded by no escort at all. Fu Xuan’s expression was composed. Perfectly so. Too perfectly. Her hands were folded in front of her sleeves. Her posture was rigid enough that anyone less familiar with her might have mistaken it for annoyance.

Yanqing did not.

His stomach dropped.

He stepped toward her before anyone called him.

“Master Diviner! What brings you here?” he said.

She looked at him, for a moment, her face blank “Come with me.”

The junior knight shifted. “Sir, the patrol inspection-”

“Postpone it,” Fu Xuan cut him off before Yanqing even opened his mouth. She turned without waiting to see whether he followed. Yanqing matched her pace through the outer corridor, past the watch posts, past the couriers who looked away too quickly. No one stopped them. No one asked where they were going.

The restricted zone markers had already been placed along the western path.

Fresh.

Yanqing’s mouth went dry.

“What happened?” he asked.

Fu Xuan did not answer immediately. Yanqing frowned, impatient.

“Master Diviner-” 

“General Jing Yuan has activated emergency succession protocol.”

The words did not make sense.

They entered his ears cleanly enough. He understood each one separately. General. Jing Yuan. Emergency. Succession. Protocol.

Together, they formed nothing. The sentence didn’t make sense.

Yanqing stopped walking.

Fu Xuan stopped too, but did not turn around.

For a moment, the corridor held only the distant sound of redirected soldiers and the faint metallic ring of someone securing a gate.

The General was injured? Someone would have just said injured.

An assassination attempt?

Had there been an incident at the Seat of Divine Foresight?

A political crisis?

A coup?

The possibilities arrived one after another, each more absurd than the last.

None of them fit Fu Xuan's face.

“Yanqing,” Fu Xuan turned, and the use of his name struck harder than any title could have. “Listen carefully.”

“No.”

“You must listen.”

“Where is he?”

“Yanqing.”

“Where is the General?”

“The western artillery yard.”

“Why?”

Fu Xuan did not answer.

She did not need to.

Yanqing looked past her, toward the western route. The markers were already there. Fresh restrictions. Rerouted patrols. No alarms. No civilian evacuation order anyone would recognize as one and cause panic.

His hand went to his sword.

Fu Xuan extended her small arm in front of him. As if now anyone would stop him, much less a diviner smaller than him in size.

“Yanqing-”

“Move.”

“No.”

“Move.” the tip of his sword frosted over

“You will listen first.”

“I don’t have time to listen!”

“You will make time.”

The words struck too close to the General’s voice. Yanqing’s face twisted.

“Don’t-” he paused “Don’t do that lady Fu.”

Fu Xuan stopped. For one moment, the corridor held only the distant movement of soldiers and the faint whisper of formation seals being set along the western path.

Then Yanqing said, quieter, “What happened?”

Fu Xuan’s expression did not change.

That was how he knew it was bad.

“Mara.”

“No.” 

Mara, of all things. Not injury. Not poison. Not something that could be treated or subdued.

“Yanqing-”

“No, no, no-”

“I need you to understand-”

“He was fine just this morning!”

Fu Xuan’s eyes narrowed “You saw him?”

“I spoke to him.”

“What did he say?”

Yanqing opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

The memory was there. It had to be there. The screen half-open. Jing Yuan still half-asleep, hair loose over his shoulders, sunlight not yet through the windows. Yanqing saying he was leaving.

And then- And then- He did not answer, as he often did most mornings. 

His stomach turned.

“I…I spoke to him,” Yanqing repeated. Fu Xuan did not press. Yanqing looked at her. “He reached out to you?” Yanqing asked her instead.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

“And you did not call me?”

“He ordered that you not be informed until he reached the designated zone.”

“He ordered?”

“Yes.”

“And you just obeyed that?”

“Yes.”

Yanqing laughed. It sounded wrong even to him. “Of course.”

“Yanqing-”

“Of course he did that. Of course he turned it into orders,” Yanqing said, feeling his stomach churn and his breaths quicken. “Of course he did not call me. Why would he? It is only his life.”

“It is not only his life-”

“Don’t-”

“-It is the Luofu.”

“I said don’t.”

“If he loses control in a residential district-”

“Stop talking like that!”

His shout cracked down the corridor. This time, several Cloud Knights openly turned. Yanqing turned on them.

“What are you looking at!?”

They looked away. Let everyone look away. Let everyone pretend this was another orderly emergency, another neat command structure, another morning where the General had already thought of everything and left everyone else to execute the plan.

Fu Xuan lowered her voice.

“Jing Yuan chose the yard because he was still lucid enough to minimize casualties.”

Yanqing’s grip tightened around his sword.

“Was?” there was some desperation in his voice he couldn’t hide and Fu Xuan couldn’t hide the change in her expression “You said was.” Yanqing insisted

“He was lucid when he contacted me.”

“Is he lucid now?”

Yanqing stepped forward. Fu Xuan did not move, not answering.

“Is he lucid now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Liar.”

“I really don’t know.”

“You’re divining everything else.”

“Not him. Not now. It’s not…clear. And even if it was clearer, the chances are…”

That frightened him more than the word mara had.

Fu Xuan, who spoke of the future like a hostile document she intended to correct by force, suddenly empty-handed.

“No. No,no- you are wrong.”

“I am not.”

“You are.”

“I am not.”

“Then send someone else.”

“There is no one else.”

“Send Cloud Knights.”

“They are already surrounding the zone.”

“Then why are you here?”

Fu Xuan looked at him. He understood before she spoke.

“No.”

“Yanqing-”

“No.”

“He named you.”

“No.”

“The sealed order confirms emergency engagement authority transfers to you once he enters the designated zone.”

“No.”

“He prepared this contingency-”

“No!” This time panic filled his voice before he could stop it. It was so pathetic that even he heard it and hated it and could not pull it back.

Fu Xuan’s face changed, but not into pity. That was good at least - If she pitied him, he might actually draw his blade on her.

“He wouldn’t ask me to-”

His throat closed.

Strike him down.

Stop him.

Kill him.

He couldn’t say any of these. How could he even about raising his blade against Jing Yuan, let alone say or do any of these horrible things?

Fu Xuan seemed to understand anyway.

“He did not ask lightly.”

“I don’t care how he asked!”

“He did it because you are the only one here who can.”

Yanqing took a step back as if she had hit him. “Lady Fu-”

“Feixiao is too far. The other generals are even further away. The Cloud Knights can hold a perimeter, not win a direct engagement. I know this. He knows this. You know this.”

“No.”

“You do.”

“I said no!”

“You think I want this?” Fu Xuan’s voice sharpened.

Yanqing froze.

Fu Xuan’s hands were clenched inside her sleeves.

“You think I wanted to come here? You think I wanted to stand in front of you and say this?” Her voice did not rise, but something in it broke. “I read the contingencies. I signed them. I hated every revision where your name moved higher. I hated that the calculations were right.”

Yanqing could barely hear her.

“Is there…” He stopped, because the question was stupid. “Did he say anything?”

Fu Xuan hesitated. “He left you a letter.” 

A letter. Something he wrote calmly and cleanly when he decided to ask him to push a blade through his heart. As if Yanqing wasn’t about to kill him. As though this were some distant deployment. As though Jing Yuan were leaving on a mission and not-

“I don’t want it.”

Fu Xuan said nothing.

Yanqing’s fingers shook against the hilt of his sword.

“I don’t want a letter,” he said. “I don’t want sealed orders. I don’t want contingencies. I don’t want whatever nice, calm thing he wrote because he thought it would make this better.”

His voice failed. He forced the next words through anyway.

“I want him.”

Fu Xuan looked away then. Only briefly. Only enough to tell him she understood.

When she looked back, the jade token was already in her hand.

“Yanqing,” she said. “He is still moving toward the yard. If you go now, you may reach him before the perimeter closes.”

Yanqing looked at her.

“Is he still himself?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Yanqing took the token. His hand would not stop shaking.

“Take me to him.”

Lightning gathered in his hands. Jing Yuan did not remember summoning it.

He became aware of it in pieces- the white-gold crackle between his fingers, the smell of scorched air, the tremor running through the stones beneath his feet. His arm was raised. Someone was shouting. No, several voices were. No, one voice, repeating an order he could not understand.

General.

No.

Jing Yuan.

No.

Move.

That one remained.

Move.

He took another step.

Something struck his shoulder and broke apart in a shower of sparks. A binding talisman, perhaps. A restraint seal. Some careful measure designed by someone who had understood, in theory, what it meant to stop an Arbiter-General. Too bad it was weak.

Jing Yuan laughed. Or something wearing his lungs did.

A Cloud Knight flew backward across the path and struck the wall hard enough that the sound followed Jing Yuan for three more steps.

Alive? Dead?

He tried to turn his head.

The world smeared like a painting left in the rain.

A courtyard became a battlefield. A battlefield became a corridor. A corridor became snow beneath his boots, red spreading through it in branching veins.

Not snow.

Stone.

Not then.

Now.

Move.

There had been a place. He had chosen it. Wide ground. Empty ground. Room enough for-For what?

His fingers curled and lightning answered as simply as if he was just taking a breath. Someone shouted again, closer this time. Brave. Foolish. 

Jing Yuan tried to say stop.

His mouth opened. What came out was not language.

The knight in front of him faltered.

Jing Yuan’s hand moved. The body remembered war too well. It remembered angles, openings, the quickest path through armor. It remembered how to end resistance in the flesh and bone until it gave out. He felt the impact distantly, as if through water.

Then the knight was on the ground.

Jing Yuan stared down at him.

For one clear instant, he saw a boy with yellow eyes lying too still on the floor. He saw a monstrous abomination blooming out of Baiheng’s broken corpse. He saw Yingxing’s mara-struck body, red insides broken and falling out like spider lilies blooming and unable to die. He saw Jingliu’s brilliant, clear, unfaltering gaze become clouded with madness and her not bearing to look at the world anymore. He saw THEIR arrows raining fire.

No.

No.

No.

The lightning vanished.

His hands were empty.

His hands were covered in blood.

His hands were clean.

The thing behind his eyes surged forward, eager, starving, full of old grief sharpened into hunger. It offered him enemies. It offered him traitors. It offered him the dead, standing at the edges of his vision with faces he could not bear to name.

A woman laughed.

A man screamed.

A boy called, General, look!

Jing Yuan pressed one hand to the wall.

Stone cracked beneath his palm, crumbling it into dust.

Move.

He did not know why. But something in him, older than language and more stubborn than madness, dragged him forward.

Away from the houses.

Away from the voices.

Away from the place where Yanqing had left that morning, half-seen through a doorway, saying something Jing Yuan had already lost.

Move.

Before he forgot that too.

By the time Yanqing reached the outer perimeter, the western path no longer looked like part of the Luofu.

The civilian roads had been emptied. Formation barriers hummed low along the side paths, pale light threading between posts and walls. Cloud Knights stood at intervals with their weapons drawn and their faces carefully blank. Here and there, the stone had cracked beneath an impact. One section of wall was blackened from lightning. Another had been cut through so cleanly that the severed edge still steamed in the morning air.

Yanqing saw blood before anyone warned him.

A smear across the stone near the gate. A dropped spear beside it. Three medics crouched around a fallen knight, their hands moving quickly, voices clipped and low.

Yanqing stopped.

Only for a second.

Fu Xuan stopped with him.

The injured knight’s helmet had been removed. He was young. Not younger than Yanqing, but young enough that it could make people uneasy. His eyes were closed. One arm lay at an angle that made Yanqing’s stomach twist before he forced himself to look away.

‘General, what did you do?’ The thought came before he could stop it and just kept going. ‘Did you know? Did you feel it? Did some part of you see him fall and know what your hands had done?’

A captain approached from the perimeter line and saluted Fu Xuan first, then Yanqing. His eyes flicked to the jade token in Yanqing’s hand. His posture changed at once.

“Lieutenant. Emergency command confirms your authority.”

Yanqing did not answer. The captain swallowed and continued.

“The target entered the western approach approximately nine minutes ago. Contact was made by the third containment unit near the old supply wall. Restraint talismans failed. Twelve knights injured, three critically. One confirmed casualty, so far. The target is continuing toward the artillery yard at reduced but unstable speed.”

Yanqing stared at him.

The words had been delivered cleanly. Professionally. Exactly as they should have been.

Target.

Contact.

Restraint failed.

One confirmed casualty.

Yanqing heard the blood in his own ears.

“The target is continuing-”

Yanqing looked at him, feeling his fingernails dig into his palms. Every ounce of discipline he was ever taught was used to resist the urge to punch him in the throat. “Don’t call him that.”

Fu Xuan’s voice came from beside him, controlled and sharp enough to cut through the tension like a knife.

“Continue with the report.”

The captain’s throat moved.

“Yes, Master Diviner.”

Yanqing almost hated her for that. Almost.

The captain looked down at the report in his hand. “The old artillery yard perimeter will close once he crosses the inner marker. Support units are positioned at all three access routes. No civilian casualties reported.”

No civilian casualties.

That was what Jing Yuan had wanted. That was what mattered. That had to count for something, right?

Yanqing looked at the cracked stone. The blood. The medics. The frightened, rigid faces of soldiers trying not to look at him because everyone knew now. Everyone knew why he was here. Everyone knew what the jade token meant in his hand.

The General had succeeded.

The General had minimized damage.

The General had injured his own knights and kept moving.

All of those things were true.

None of them fit inside Yanqing’s chest.

“He is still moving west?” Yanqing asked.

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“Is he being pursued?”

“At distance.”

“Stop them.”

The captain hesitated. “Sir?”

“Stop them. Pull back any unit close enough for direct contact.”

“Lieutenant, if he turns-”

“He won’t.”

Maybe it was faith.

Maybe it was stupidity.

Maybe there was no difference left.

But something in Jing Yuan had kept moving west. Through confusion. Through blood. Through whatever horror was tearing through his mind. He had not turned toward the houses. He had not gone back to the residence. He had not gone where people were.

He had kept going where he meant to go.

Yanqing clung to that because there was nothing else.

The captain bowed once, then signaled the nearest unit to pull back.

His grip tightened around the jade token. For one moment, he wanted to throw it away.

He wanted to run past the perimeter without orders, without authority, without reports, without every formal word that tried to make this anything other than what it was.

That was the man who had raised him.

That was the man who tied his hair when his hands had been too small to do it. The man who had taken in an abandoned child with hazy memories and too many questions, ignoring every whisper it caused. The man who had confiscated his swords and then bought him better ones. The man who had sat beside his bed through fevers and scolded him for skipping meals and pretended not to notice when Yanqing fell asleep against his shoulder during long strategy meetings.

That was his general.

That was his teacher.

That was-

Yanqing’s breath caught hard enough to hurt.

His father.

Not that he ever said it. The word had no place in any report. No column for it. No emergency protocol. No sealed token with room enough to hold it.

And still it was the only word that really mattered in the end.

“Lieutenant?” the captain asked carefully.

Yanqing looked toward the artillery yard. Beyond the inner barrier, thunder rolled, but not from the sky.

His sword answered at his side with a low, eager hum.

Yanqing hated it.

Then he drew it anyway.

The artillery yard was larger than Yanqing remembered. Or perhaps it just only felt that way now.

The old training grounds had long since fallen out of use. Most of the equipment had been removed years ago, leaving behind little more than cracked stone, weathered walls, and enough open space for artillery drills that no one bothered conducting anymore. The western edge dropped away toward empty stretches of land, safely distant from the residential districts.

A good place for a battle.

A terrible place for this.

Yanqing crossed the final boundary alone.

No Cloud Knights followed.

No officers called after him.

And saw him.

The General stood with his back to him.

White hair spilled loose down his back, stirred by a wind that did not exist, static flowing through the strands in brief flashes of gold. His robes hung torn and scorched in places, one sleeve nearly destroyed. Lightning flickered lazily around his hands and vanished again. From a distance it was easy -dangerously easy- to pretend he had merely come from a difficult battle.

The relief was so sudden it hurt.

"General!"

The word slipped out before he realized he had spoken. Yanqing had to bite his lips before he called him again, as if he said it one more time, the General would sigh, turn around, and ask why Yanqing was shouting across an entire training ground.

Jing Yuan turned.

And for a moment, Yanqing saw only what he wanted to see.

White hair loose over his shoulders. Gold eyes catching the light. The familiar line of his mouth, tired and faintly amused, as though he had been caught napping through a meeting and was preparing to deny it. He almost looked normal - Not a monster, not some unrecognizable abomination with too many limbs or too wide teeth wearing the general’s face.

Then the rest arrived.

The gold cracks branching along his throat. They looked almost beautiful from a distance, like cracks filled with sunlight. A deep red growth curling from beneath torn fabric at his shoulder, small clusters of them blooming threaded through with veins of gold light. The lightning crawling under his skin like something alive. 

Still, Yanqing could not move.

Because Jing Yuan was looking at him.

Not through him.

At him.

The General’s eyes narrowed slightly. His head tilted, slow and strange, as though the thought had to travel from a very great distance before the body obeyed it. His gaze moved over Yanqing carefully, thoughtfully, as though he were trying to place a face glimpsed years ago.

Then he smiled.

Softly.

Almost fondly.

“Little swallow.”

Yanqing stopped breathing.

The name struck harder than any blow could have.

Jing Yuan had not called him that in years.

Yanqing had hated it. Loudly. Repeatedly. Jing Yuan had used it whenever Yanqing charged into something too quickly, whenever he sulked over being told to rest, whenever he insisted he was not tired while falling asleep upright at the table. When he was too young to mind and when he found it embarrassing and the general laughed as he messed up his hair.

Little swallow.

A stupid name.

An embarrassing name.

A name from mornings when he had still needed help tying his sleeves. For one second, Yanqing was seven again, furious and sleepy and safe.

Then Jing Yuan took one step toward him.

The stone beneath his foot cracked. The crimson leaves along his shoulder unfurled a little wider.

Yanqing’s hand tightened around his sword.

“General,” he said, and hated how small his own voice sounded.

Jing Yuan’s smile remained.

But his eyes were wrong.

Not empty. That would have been easier. They were full of too much. Too many years. Too many battles. Too many memories piled over one another until the present had been buried beneath them. He knew Yanqing was there. He knew him, perhaps. 

“My little swallow,” Jing Yuan said again, warmer now. “Look how you’ve grown.”

Yanqing’s throat closed.

No.

No, no, no.

Not like this.

He had tried to prepare himself for rage. For violence. For Jing Yuan not knowing him at all. He had not prepared for this terrible half-recognition, this fondness twisted through madness, this voice that sounded like home and spoke as though home had rotted around him.

“General… you need to stop.”

Jing Yuan’s expression shifted, flickering with confusion for a moment. Then it shifted to something…amused. Indulgent. As if Yanqing was asking him to spar again.

“Stop?” he repeated, as though the word amused him. “No. No, we do not stop. We endure. We grow. We take root.”

The branches at his shoulder pulsed gold beneath the red. 

Yanqing’s sword hummed at his side, sharp and ready and wrong. “General, please,” he tried, even though he knew there was no point to. “You’re not thinking clearly.”

Jing Yuan looked at him.

A woman’s eyes, cold and broken and beloved. A crescent of ice like a moon in the sky. The weight of a verdict in his mouth. The sound of his own voice naming someone guilty because the law required it, because the ship required it, because duty had no room for mourning until after the blade had already fallen.

Then a boy at breakfast, sleeves in his food, refusing to admit he could not tie his own ribbon.

Then Yanqing again, older now, sword in hand.

Always a sword.

Always someone loved at the other end of it.

Lightning gathered slowly around Jing Yuan’s fingers and Yanqing took one step back despite himself.

Jing Yuan noticed and his smile softened.

“You do not need to be afraid.”

“I’m not.” The lie came automatically.

Jing Yuan laughed, quiet and fond and so familiar.

“You always were.” he laughed.

Yanqing flinched.

Lightning gathered slowly around Jing Yuan’s fingers, but he did not raise his hand. Not yet. His gaze moved over Yanqing’s face with something like wonder, something like hunger, something like grief.

“You can stay,” Jing Yuan said. “No more leaving. No more growing old alone. No more swords pointed at the people who love you.”

Yanqing’s blood went cold.

“General-”

“By my side,” Jing Yuan said. “You always wanted that, did you not?”

Yanqing’s hand tightened around his sword.

“Not like this!”

Jing Yuan’s face changed and something colder moved behind his eyes.

“Always like this,” he said softly. The words were not meant for Yanqing alone. Yanqing knew that without knowing how. “Always a child with a sword. Always a soldier before you are ready. Always told to be brave enough to survive what others could not bear to finish.”

His voice began to fracture.

Past and present folding over one another until the names no longer aligned.

“You should have been spared. She should have been spared. We all should have been-”

The crimson leaves trembled. Seeds, small and gold-bright, loosened from the growths along his shoulder and drifted into the air between them. “Join me.”

Yanqing stared at the floating seeds.

He understood then, with a horror so complete it almost steadied him, that Jing Yuan was not asking him to stand down.

He was asking him to bloom.

The lightning came before Yanqing could answer.

There was no warning beyond the sudden lift of Jing Yuan’s hand and the sharp, impossible brightness gathering in his palm. Yanqing moved because his body knew how to move before his mind remembered. He threw himself sideways, blade flashing up on instinct, and the ground split open where he had been standing.

The impact struck the yard hard enough to tear stone from the ground.

Heat washed over him. Fragments cut across his cheek and shoulder. His boots skidded against broken rock as he caught himself, breath locked in his throat, ears ringing with the aftershock.

For a second, he could not hear anything.

Then sound returned all at once. The low hum of the perimeter barriers. The crackle of lightning crawling across shattered stone. His own breathing, too fast and too loud.

Jing Yuan stood across from him with one hand still raised.

Not angry.

Not sorry.

Watching.

Yanqing’s fingers tightened around his sword until the hilt hurt.

He was scared.

The realization came with brutal simplicity. He wasn’t alert before battle or cautious. Scared, in the old childish way, the way he had been scared of dark rooms and closed doors and waking from nightmares before he was old enough to call them anything else.

He did not want to do this.

He did not want to raise his sword.

He did not want to look at the man who had raised him and measure distance, reach, timing, openings.

Another flicker of lightning gathered beneath Jing Yuan’s skin.

Yanqing swallowed.

Beyond the yard, beyond the barriers, beyond the quiet evacuation routes and sealed access paths, the Luofu continued to breathe. Millions of lives tucked into streets and homes and markets and gardens. People who did not know how close disaster had come to them. People who would never know, if he did this right.

If he failed, they would die. It was as simple as that. His grip steadied as much as it could. “General,” he said, and this time the word came out like a wound. “Please.”

Jing Yuan smiled. The crimson leaves at his shoulder trembled, scattering gold-bright seeds into the charged air.

“Come here,” he said.

Yanqing closed his eyes for half a breath. When he opened them, frost had begun to gather at his feet.

One blade answered first.

Then another.

Then another.

Swords formed around him in pale light, ringing into place one by one, their edges cold and bright against the storm-gold air. They circled him like a vow. Like a funeral procession. Like every lesson Jing Yuan had ever given him returning at once.

Yanqing lifted his sword.

His hands were still shaking, but the blades around him were not.

“I’m sorry-I’m-so-” he was mumbling almost incoherently, his eyes watering.

Jing Yuan tilted his head, almost fondly.

“Little swallow,” he said, “you always apologize before you mean it.”

Yanqing flinched. Then he sent the first sword forward. The first sword crossed the yard in a flash of pale light.

Jing Yuan did not move until the last possible moment.

Then his hand lifted, almost lazily, and lightning caught the blade midair.

For one breath, the sword hung there trembling, frost hissing against gold. Then Jing Yuan closed his fingers.

The blade shattered.

Yanqing felt it like a bone breaking.

He sent the next three at once.

One low. One high. One arcing wide toward Jing Yuan’s exposed side.

Jing Yuan stepped through them.

Not around.

Through.

Lightning flared from his body in branching veins, catching the first sword by its edge, turning the second aside with the back of his hand. The third struck his shoulder where the crimson growth had bloomed, and for half a heartbeat Yanqing thought it had landed.

Then the branches opened around the blade. Red leaves curled over white steel, the golden roots tangling it. The sword cracked apart from the inside.

Jing Yuan looked at the fragments falling around him with something almost like interest.

“You have improved so much,” he said.

The praise made Yanqing’s stomach twist. He would have done anything to hear these words. He hated himself for that.

Jing Yuan moved.

There was no warning.

One moment he stood near the center of the yard. The next, he was in front of Yanqing, too fast for someone whose body was breaking open beneath mara growths, one lightning-wreathed hand coming down where Yanqing’s head had been.

Yanqing dropped, rolled, and brought his sword up toward Jing Yuan’s ribs.

Jing Yuan caught the blade barehanded.

Blood slid down his palm.

“Still too direct,” he murmured. Then Jing Yuan kicked him in the chest.

The impact threw him backward across the yard. He hit the stone hard, shoulder first, the air knocked from his lungs in a sharp, humiliating burst. Pain flared white through his ribs.

Again.

He rolled before the lightning struck. Stone exploded beside him.

Fragments tore through his sleeve. Heat grazed his neck. He scrambled to his feet, half-blind from dust and brightness, and called the scattered swords back with a motion that was less graceful and more desperate.

Jing Yuan was watching him again.

Patiently.

“You always rush the second exchange,” Jing Yuan said. “I told you that.”

Yanqing’s vision blurred. Not from physical pain entirely, though he’d guess it was a different kind of pain.

“You’re not allowed to teach me right now.” he snapped.

Jing Yuan smiled.

For one awful moment, he looked pleased. The sky above the yard seemed to darken around him, though the sun had not moved. Lightning gathered behind his back in a broken halo, half-formed and flickering, a shadow of the war-spirit Yanqing had seen only from a distance in true battle. Not the Lightning-Lord, not completely, but something made from its memory. A crown of storm and duty and centuries of slaughter.

Yanqing’s swords trembled in the air.

His own fear betrayed him.

Jing Yuan noticed. Of course he noticed.

“You are frightened,” he said.

Yanqing spat blood onto the stone.

“Yes.”

The honesty surprised them both. Yanqing lifted his sword again, forcing his stance into shape despite the pain in his ribs.

“I’m still here.”

The almost-smile vanished.

For the first time, Jing Yuan attacked like he meant it.

Lightning tore across the yard in a wide, branching arc. Yanqing threw four swords forward to intercept. Two shattered instantly. A third spun away, cracked and useless. The fourth bought him a second.

A second was enough for him.

He cut through the gap, low and fast, using the broken stone for cover, frost spreading under his boots as he shifted his weight. Jing Yuan’s next strike missed his shoulder by less than a finger’s width. The heat of it burned through the fabric.

Yanqing came up inside his reach.

He drove his blade toward Jing Yuan’s chest.

Jing Yuan’s hand closed around his wrist.

Jing Yuan’s grip was warm.

Not lightning-warm.

Human.

Familiar.

The same hand that had once corrected his stance by moving his wrist two inches higher. The same hand that had tied his hair when he was too tired to do it himself. The same hand that had rested briefly on his shoulder after his first real battlefield, steady and silent because there had been nothing useful to say.

Yanqing could not move.

Jing Yuan leaned closer.

Gold cracks glowed along his cheek. Crimson leaves brushed against Yanqing’s sleeve, soft as breath.

“Caught you,” Jing Yuan said.

A child’s memory. A game. A warning.

Lightning surged.

Yanqing screamed.

The pain ripped through his arm and shoulder, bright enough to empty the world. His knees hit the stone before he knew he was falling. His sword clattered from his hand.

Jing Yuan did not let go.

Seeds drifted down between them, gold and red.

“Stay,” Jing Yuan whispered.

Yanqing’s vision swam.

For one second, the word did not sound like a threat.

No more leaving. No more impossible standards. No more carrying a sword into every room because that was the only way to be useful. No more waiting for the day everyone else realized he was still too young after all.

Stay, and Jing Yuan would not leave either.

Stay, and the General would still be there.

Stay, and he would never have to watch Jing Yuan die.

Stay, and this could remain a terrible dream instead of a memory.

Stay, and the hand around his wrist would never let go.

A seed touched the back of Yanqing’s glove.

Frost hissed.

Yanqing stared at it.

He thought of the Luofu beyond the barrier.

Millions.

He thought of Fu Xuan’s face when she said, You are the only one on the Luofu with a chance.

He thought of the letter waiting somewhere behind them, sealed and useless.

Then he thought of Jing Yuan leaving it behind.

Yanqing bared his teeth.

“No.”

The remaining swords answered.

They drove down between them like falling stars.

The swords struck between them.

One pierced Jing Yuan’s shoulder, pinning crimson growth and torn fabric together. Another drove through the arm gripping Yanqing’s wrist. A third buried itself low through his side with a sound that made Yanqing’s stomach turn before he could stop hearing it.

Jing Yuan’s grip loosened.

Yanqing tore himself free and staggered back, clutching his burned wrist against his chest. Pain tore up his arm in sharp, electric pulses. His fingers would not close properly. His knees nearly gave beneath him.

Across from him, Jing Yuan looked down at the blades in his body.

For one breath, Yanqing thought it had worked.

Then the branches moved. Red leaves opened around the sword in Jing Yuan’s shoulder, soft and bright and obscene. Gold veins threaded through the wound. Roots curled over metal, under skin, through flesh, pulling torn muscle together with delicate, patient cruelty. The blade in his side trembled. Frost hissed. The wound closed around it as if welcoming it in.

Yanqing stared.

“No.”

Jing Yuan’s head lifted.

His smile was small, almost apologetic.

The sword through his arm cracked into pieces.

Gold growth pushed along the steel in fine branching lines. The metal split with a brittle, ringing sound, then fell in pieces to the stone.

The wound beneath it sealed.

Not cleanly.

Not humanly.

But sealed nonetheless

“Abundance,” Jing Yuan said, and his voice was soft with wonder. “How… generous.”

Yanqing stepped back.

His heel caught on broken stone.

He barely kept his balance.

No.

He had known. Everyone knew. Mara-struck bodies endured wounds that should have ended any ordinary soldier. Regeneration. Mutation. Corruption. All the clinical terms filed neatly in reports and lectures and battlefield manuals.

Knowing it was not the same as watching Jing Yuan pull himself back together around multiple sword wounds.

Jing Yuan reached for the blade lodged in his side and drew it out slowly, blood spilling to the ground in quantities that made Yanqing’s stomach twist. Then something gold flowed.

Then nothing.

The General let the sword fall.

“You must cut deeper than that, little swallow.”

Yanqing’s burned hand shook.

He forced it down.

More swords formed behind him, but slower now. The first ring had been instinct. This one needed more effort. Frost gathered at his feet in a widening circle, thin and pale against the scorched stone.

Jing Yuan watched him with dreadful patience.

Waiting for him to correct his stance.

Waiting for him to breathe properly.

Waiting, as he always had, for Yanqing to do better.

Yanqing hated him for that.

Then Jing Yuan moved.

Yanqing barely saw it.

Lightning burst across the space between them, not in a clean strike this time, but in branching lines that split and curved like roots seeking water. Yanqing threw up a wall of swords. The first line shattered three instantly. The second wrapped around the fourth and bent it out of formation. The third slipped through the gap.

It caught Yanqing on his side. Pain exploded white. He hit the ground hard and rolled before the next strike could pin him there. The world lurched. His ribs screamed. Something wet slid warm beneath his armor.

Get up.

He pushed one hand against the stone.

His burned wrist failed.

He almost fell again.

Get up.

Jing Yuan crossed the yard toward him, unhurried.

That was worse than the terrifying speed the general seemed to show at times. He almost looked like he was slowly crossing the courtyard in his house in the morning, yawning and complaining about having to get up already. 

Yanqing forced himself upright, breath coming ragged, and sent two swords toward Jing Yuan’s knees. Jing Yuan stepped over one. The other struck, slicing deep enough to stagger him.

For half a second.

Then gold threaded through the wound, and Jing Yuan kept walking.

Yanqing’s heart lurched. He was losing ground. Not only metaphorically. Literally.

Step by step, Jing Yuan drove him backward across the yard, toward the inner barrier, toward the edge of the designated zone. Yanqing blocked, dodged, redirected, called blades and lost them as quickly as they formed. Every successful strike bought him seconds. Every wound Jing Yuan took closed wrong and fast and hungry.

Every mistake Yanqing made stayed.

Burned wrist.

Cut side.

Bruised ribs.

Blood in his mouth.

A shallow slash along his thigh from a lightning-edged fragment he had not dodged quickly enough.

The difference became obvious with brutal clarity.

Jing Yuan could afford to be hurt.

Yanqing could not.

Jing Yuan raised one hand.

Yanqing felt the air change around him. Lightning spread outward across the cracked stone in branching veins, surrounding him before he could leap clear. Yanqing slammed three swords down at once, grounding the first surge, but the second crawled up through the metal and burst against his guard.

His arm went numb.

His sword nearly slipped.

Jing Yuan was there before he recovered.

A hand closed around his throat.

Yanqing’s back hit the barrier hard enough to make the formation flare behind him. For one moment, the entire yard vanished in gold light.

Then he was pinned between the barrier and Jing Yuan’s hand, boots scraping against the stone, one hand clawing at a grip on his neck he could not break.

Jing Yuan leaned close.

The crimson branches at his shoulder brushed Yanqing’s armor. Small gold seeds drifted between them, catching in the frost on his collar.

“Enough,” Jing Yuan said.

The word was gentle. Yanqing’s vision blurred at the edges.

Jing Yuan’s face swam in front of him - familiar, ruined, almost tender. Gold cracks pulsed beneath one eye. His hair floated around them both in the charged air, white as stormlight.

“You have fought so hard,” Jing Yuan said. “Always so hard.”

Yanqing tried to speak, but no sound came, the hand squeezing his throat too hard for anything but a wheeze to come out.

“You can rest now.”

No.

His fingers tried to find the hilt of his sword.

Too far.

No strength.

“You have done enough.”

No.

The Luofu beyond the barrier.

Fu Xuan waiting outside the perimeter, trying to divine this result, praying and planning for a favorable outcome.

The injured knights on the path.

The letter in the drawer.

Jing Yuan’s hand tightened.

Yanqing’s lungs burned.

“You can stay with me,” Jing Yuan whispered. “No more orders. No more fear. No more having to be strong enough.”

For one second, Yanqing wanted it. It did not matter.

Yanqing’s eyes flew open.

His free hand snapped up.

The sword he could not reach answered anyway.

It drove through Jing Yuan’s wrist from behind.

Jing Yuan’s hand opened.

Yanqing dropped to the ground, gasping, choking, half-falling onto one knee. He dragged air into his lungs as fast as he could.

Above him, Jing Yuan looked at the sword through his wrist.

Then at Yanqing.

For the first time, something like displeasure crossed his face.

The wound began to close around the blade.

Yanqing staggered backward.

His summoned swords hovered around him, fewer now, their light unsteady.

Jing Yuan flexed his impaled hand and the sword cracked into pieces.

“You really have gotten so much better,” he said.

Frost covered everything.

The ground. The broken pillars. The bodies half-buried beneath drifting white. Jing Yuan’s sleeves. Jing Yuan’s hair. Jing Yuan’s eyelashes, heavy with ice each time he blinked. 

Every breath hurt.

The cold had settled deep beneath his armor, biting past cloth and leather and skin until it felt less like weather and more like a blade pressed carefully between his ribs. His fingers had gone numb around his weapon. Blood from the cut across his brow had frozen before it reached his jaw.

Across from him, Jingliu stood untouched by the storm she had made.

Mara-struck.

And still herself enough to be terrible.

Her sword hung loosely at her side. Her expression was calm, almost bored, as though this were another training session and not the ruin of everything Jing Yuan had once believed would hold.

“You hesitate,” she said.

Jing Yuan’s laugh came out thin and white in the air.

“I had hoped you might appreciate the courtesy Master.”

She moved before the last word faded. He blocked, but too late. Her blade slid past his guard and opened a shallow cut along his side. Shallow by her standards. Deep enough that the pain nearly dropped him to one knee.

Jingliu watched him recover with that awful, measured patience she teached him the blade.

“Again.”

Jing Yuan lifted his weapon.

His arm shook.

The next exchange lasted longer. Three strikes. Four. Five. Then Jingliu turned his blade aside with contemptuous ease and drove her knee into his ribs. Air burst from his lungs. He staggered, boots skidding over ice.

She did not press the advantage.

That was worse.

“You are waiting,” she said.

“For what?”

“For me to make it easier.”

Jing Yuan’s grip tightened.

Frost cracked along the hilt.

Jingliu looked at him then, really looked, and for one instant he saw his master through the mara. Not saved. Not whole. But there, trapped behind red eyes and ice-cold certainty.

“You are waiting for me to become enough of a monster that killing me will make you feel better.”

The words cut deeper than her sword had.

Jing Yuan said nothing.

Because the answer was yes. Because it was her. Because she had taught him the angle of his wrist and the placement of his feet. Because he knew the sound of her footsteps in a training hall. Because he remembered her voice correcting him before he knew he was wrong. Because through all her coldness he’d seen her reluctant smile, warm enough to melt ice. Because somewhere beneath all that frost and mara and ruin was the person he had once trusted to shape him.

Jingliu’s mouth curved.

“That will not happen.”

She attacked. This time, she did not test him.

She drove him back across the ice with brutal precision, every strike aimed to punish hesitation rather than outright kill him, though Jing Yuan was certain lesser fighters would have succumbed long ago. Unfortunately for him, even if he could not reach her standards, she didn’t teach him to be a lesser fighter. A cut across his shoulder. A blow to his knee. A line of cold fire along his forearm when he failed to withdraw quickly enough. Jing Yuan blocked what he could and survived what he could not, each breath tearing through him, each movement slower than the last.

Still, when the opening came, he missed it.

No.

He let it pass.

Jingliu saw.

Her expression darkened.

The next strike shattered his guard.

Jing Yuan hit the ground hard, frost biting through his palms as he caught himself. His weapon skidded several feet away and spun once before stopping against a ridge of ice.

Jingliu’s blade touched the side of his throat.

Cold enough to burn.

“Why?” she asked.

Jing Yuan’s chest rose and fell too fast.

He could see the edge of her sword in the corner of his vision. See the frost curling from it. See the red of her eyes reflected faintly along the steel.

“Why do you still hesitate?”

He swallowed and her ice blade kissed skin.

A thin line of blood welled and froze.

“Because it is you,” he said.

For the first time, Jingliu went still.

Jing Yuan closed his eyes.

A mistake.

Her boot struck his chest and drove him flat against the ice. When he opened his eyes again, Jingliu stood over him.

“That is failure.”

Jing Yuan stared up at her.

Jingliu lowered her sword until the point hovered over his heart.

“You think love excuses weakness. It does not.”

His breath shuddered.

“You think grief makes hesitation noble. It does not.”

The blade descended a fraction.

“You think recognizing me means you must spare me.”

Her red eyes narrowed.

“You are wrong.”

Jing Yuan’s hand curled slowly against the ice.

His weapon was too far. Jingliu noticed the move anyway.

“Good,” she said. “Now decide.”

The cold pressed into him from every side. The blade above his heart. The frost in his lungs. The memory of her hand correcting his stance years ago. The reality of that same hand now holding a sword over him.

Jing Yuan reached.

Not for the weapon.

For lightning. It answered weakly at first, flickering beneath his skin, gold against white. He struck upward.

The flash threw her back.

Not that far.

Just enough for Jing Yuan to roll, seize his weapon, and stagger to his feet. His whole body screamed. Frost cracked off his armor in jagged pieces.

Jingliu rose across from him, blood running from the corner of her mouth.

She looked pleased.

“Again,” she said.

Jing Yuan lifted his blade. Jing Yuan reached for lightning.

It answered. Not so weakly this time.

The storm gathered behind him in a towering shape of gold and white, vast enough that the frost at his feet flashed bright beneath it. The air split with pressure. Snow tore upward from the ground. For one moment, even Jingliu’s expression stilled beneath the light.

Jing Yuan lifted his blade.

His whole body hurt. Frost sealed parts of his armor to his skin. Blood had frozen along his jaw. Every breath scraped through him like broken glass.

Still, the lightning came.

“Lightning spirit, hear my call.”

Jingliu’s smile began there.

Almost proud.

Jing Yuan’s grip tightened. The words caught in his throat.

He knew what came next.

He had said it before in battle, with command and certainty, with the calm authority expected of an Arbiter-General. It had never felt like this. It had never been aimed at someone whose hand had once corrected his stance, whose voice had shaped his sword, whose absence had already begun carving itself into him before she was even gone.

Jingliu watched him hesitate.

Then she smiled wider.

Jing Yuan understood.

A final lesson.

His voice broke over the words.

“Show no mercy.”

The lightning fell.

For one instant, the world became only gold.

Broken stone. Crimson leaves. Gold seeds drifting through charged air. Frost covering the stone. Frost covering Jing Yuan’s eyelashes though he no longer needed to blink. Jing Yuan advancing through the ruin of Yanqing’s shattered sword formation, smiling with bloodless warmth.

“That is why you’re losing,” he said.

Lightning exploded outward.

Every sword in the outer ring shattered at once.

Yanqing staggered beneath the backlash, pain ripping up his burned arm, frost cracking under his boots. The defensive circle collapsed around him in bright fragments. He had no time to rebuild it. Jing Yuan was already closing the distance, one hand raised, lightning gathering again beneath skin that kept healing wrong.

Yanqing tasted blood. 

He thought of Jingliu’s blade.

He thought of a direct sword beam tearing through him once before, cold and merciless enough to leave its shape in his bones.

Familiar, Blade had said.

Yanqing’s fingers tightened around his sword.

Fine.

Let it be familiar.

The frost around him drew inward.

Every broken blade fragment lifted from the ground, trembling in the air. Not whole swords. Not a shield. Edges. Splinters. Shards of white steel and ice, all turning toward Jing Yuan.

Jing Yuan slowed.

Recognition flickered across his ruined face.

Yanqing raised his sword. His arm was shaking. He felt pain shoot up from his wrist to his shoulder, feeling the burn of the lightning strike in a pattern, climbing like cracked ice on his arm. He raised it anyway.

The frost behind him unfolded.

Jing Yuan’s smile changed.

For one moment, horribly, he looked proud.

Then Yanqing struck.

The sword beam tore across the yard in a white arc, bright and brutal, carrying every shattered blade with it. Not elegant. Not clean. Not the perfect form Jingliu had once used. Yanqing’s version was younger, rougher, desperate around the edges.

But it cut. 

It drove Jing Yuan back for the first time.

Stone split beneath the force. Crimson leaves tore from his shoulder. Gold roots snapped and scattered like sparks. The beam struck him full across the chest and hurled him through the ruins of the inner yard wall hard enough to bury him in broken stone.

For one breath, the battlefield went still.

Yanqing stood with his sword extended, shaking so badly he could barely keep his grip.

His lungs burned.

His vision blurred.

Across the yard, dust rose.

Nothing moved for a moment, but Yanqing did not lower his blade.

He knew better.

A soft sound came from the rubble.

Then a laugh.

Quiet.

Warm.

So familiar it made Yanqing want to run away.

The stones shifted. Gold light bloomed beneath them. Jing Yuan rose slowly from the ruin, chest split open where the attack had landed, red branches already threading through the wound, pulling him back together.

His smile was radiant.

“There you are.” 

The frost spread outward in a widening circle.

Sword after sword answered Yanqing's call, filling the space between them until the air itself seemed edged with white steel. Some hovered close enough to intercept a strike. Others formed wider rings, layered defenses meant to slow, redirect, survive.

Anything but the final blow.

The shattered remains of earlier swords littered the yard around them. Frost clung to broken fragments. Blood stained the ice.

Yanqing's chest burned with every breath.

His burned wrist trembled.

He summoned another sword anyway.

Then another. Then another. Fragments of ice, broken metal, anything-

Across the yard, Jing Yuan watched.

The lightning around him had quieted for the moment. Gold still glowed beneath his skin. Crimson leaves still curled from his shoulder. The wound through his wrist had long since vanished beneath twisting roots and impossible regeneration.

Jing Yuan's gaze moved across the defensive formation surrounding him, taking note of everything as he always did.

The frost.

The swords.

The careful spacing.

The refusal to commit.

Understanding flickered behind those fractured gold eyes.

"You cannot cut anyone down like that." he said and Yanqing's throat tightened. "I’ve tried."

The wind shifted.

For one heartbeat, Yanqing saw another battlefield reflected in Jing Yuan's eyes.

"Do you know what happens?" Jing Yuan asked softly.

The swords around Yanqing hummed.

None of them felt like enough.

"You defend."

Another step forward.

The nearest swords darted to intercept.

Lightning shattered one.

Then another.

Then another.

The fragments never reached the ground.

"You survive."

A fourth sword broke apart.

A fifth.

Yanqing called replacements faster than they fell.

Jing Yuan kept walking.

"You retreat."

His voice remained calm.

Patient.

Teaching.

The same tone he had once used to correct footwork and sword forms.

The same tone that had praised Yanqing after victories.

The same tone that had comforted him after failures.

The distance between them shrank.

Twenty steps.

Fifteen.

Ten.

“But you can’t win if you don’t commit to the killing blow.”

The frost beneath Yanqing's feet thickened. His swords shifted around him and Yanqing's grip tightened around his sword.

"I don't want to kill you." The admission tore out of him.

Jing Yuan's expression softened. For one moment, he looked genuinely sad.

"I know." The words were almost a whisper.

Yanqing wished he had shouted.

Wished he had attacked.

Wished he had done anything except stand there while the man who raised him looked at him with that expression.

"I know, little swallow."

The nickname hurt.

Everything hurt.

"That is why you're losing."

Lightning exploded outward. Every sword in the outer ring shattered at once. Again.

Yanqing struck.

The frost beam carved across the yard, bright enough to turn the shattered stone white.

Jing Yuan met it head-on.

The impact split the ground between them.

For one second, Yanqing thought he had him.

Then the lightning came.

Gold crashed through white.

The backlash threw Yanqing backward hard enough that his shoulder struck the remains of the broken wall. Pain exploded through already-bruised ribs. His vision blurred.

He hit the ground.

Rolled.

Forced himself upright.

Again.

Jing Yuan's voice echoed through his head.

A thousand training sessions.

A thousand corrections.

Again.

Blood dripped from Yanqing's mouth onto the frost.

Too much.

There was a cut beneath his armor that burned with every movement. He could feel blood soaking through the layers beneath the plate.

Bad.

Not fatal, yet, but he’d sooner or later pass out from blood loss.

Yanqing drove his sword into the frozen ground. Ice crawled across the wound and it might had made it worse, but the bleeding slowed.

The cold bit so deep he nearly cried out.

Good.

Pain meant he was still moving. Pain meant he could still fight.

Across the yard, Jing Yuan watched him with an expression that was almost sad.

The wound through his chest had almost vanished.

Gold roots threaded beneath his skin. Crimson leaves unfurled from flesh that should have remained torn.

The damage was disappearing.

Yanqing's was not.

He pushed himself upright anyway.

His legs trembled.

His burned hand barely obeyed him.

Another ice sword formed.

Then another.

Then three more.

The formation was sloppier now, but it was still a formation. Yanqing wanted to scream. Instead he attacked.

The swords came from three angles.

Jing Yuan destroyed two.

The third barely grazed his neck.

Blood appeared for one moment, then roots followed.

Healing.

Always healing.

Always getting back up.

Yanqing's chest tightened.

No.

No.

Just a little longer.

Hold him here.

Someone would come.

Someone had to come. 

There had to be something.

Yanqing blocked another strike and felt the force tear up through his burned wrist. His guard slipped. Lightning grazed his shoulder, close enough to scorch through armor, close enough that the smell of burned fabric and skin made him want to throw up as he staggered back.

There had to be something.

The Alchemy Commission. Some emergency suppressant. Some impossible cure sealed away for exactly this kind of disaster. A technique no one had told him about because he was too young, too low-ranked, too close to the General to be trusted with it.

General Feixiao, the Marshal, some other general from even further away-

Maybe she was already on her way.

Maybe, the Astral Express, appearing with its usual impossible timing and some ridiculous answer no proper Luofu report would ever have accounted for. 

Maybe-

Lightning struck.

Yanqing barely blocked it.

The impact tore through his remaining sword formation and sent him skidding across the frozen ground. His knees hit the ground first. Then one hand, trying to steady himself.

His vision swam.

Jing Yuan crossed the distance slowly, with no rush, no urgency. 

Yanqing hated him.

For the first time in his life, he hated him. Not completely, but enough.

Enough to resent the impossible standards.

Enough to resent every lesson that had made him capable of surviving this.

Jing Yuan stopped several paces away. The branches at his shoulder shifted in the wind.

"You never cease to amaze me - even now, you are improving."

"I don't want your praise!"

Something flickered in Jing Yuan's eyes and his smile softened.

Almost human.

Almost.

"That was never true."

Jing Yuan knew him. Even now. Broken and Mara-struck, lost somewhere between memory and madness, he knew exactly where to cut.

Yanqing looked away.

His vision kept blurring.

Too much blood.

Too much pain.

His body was reaching its limit.

Not yet.

Not yet.

Just a little longer.

If he could hold on.

If he could keep Jing Yuan inside the yard.

If he could survive another minute.

Then another five. Then another ten after that.

Someone would come.

Someone would save them both.

There had to be something because the alternative was this.

Yanqing ducked beneath Jing Yuan’s hand and drove a sword toward his side. It struck deep. Too deep. The blade slid between gold-threaded roots and torn fabric, and Jing Yuan’s body jerked with the impact. The wound opened.

Red.

Gold.

Then significantly slower than before, the roots began to knit.

Yanqing saw it.

He wished he hadn’t.

The regeneration was slowing.

Not stopping, but - the wounds that had closed in heartbeats now took several breaths. The gold roots pulsed unevenly. The crimson leaves along Jing Yuan’s shoulder trembled, some blackened at the edges from frost and lightning backlash. The split across his chest had not fully sealed. Beneath the growth, beneath the Abundance, beneath the monstrous endurance, there were gaps.

Weaknesses.

Openings.

Yanqing’s mind supplied them with terrible clarity.

Chest. Throat. Spine. Heart.

No.

Jing Yuan attacked again.

Yanqing moved too late.

Pain tore across his thigh. He nearly fell. Frost burst from his own hand, sealing the wound before blood could spill freely. The cold was agony. His leg went half-numb, barely obeying him as he stumbled back.

Chest. Throat. Spine. Heart.

Stop.

Another sword formed beside him, shaking in the air.

He could end it.

Not win.

Just end it. Before it ended him.

Jing Yuan stood several paces away, breathing slowly. Too slowly. Gold light flickered beneath his skin in uneven pulses. His robes were ruined. His hair streamed loose around him. The branches growing from his shoulder had spread across one side of his chest like a general’s mantle made of red leaves and old wounds.

Beautiful.

Horrible.

Tired.

Jing Yuan was still stronger. Still faster. Still a disaster wearing a familiar face.

But he was also being worn down.

Yanqing had done that.

His hands had done that.

His swords.

His frost.

A sob tried to climb up his throat. He swallowed it until it hurt.

“No one is coming,” Jing Yuan said.

Yanqing’s grip tightened around his sword.

“Sh-Shut up.”

Jing Yuan’s smile softened.

“Still waiting.”

“I said - shut up!”

“For a cure.”

Yanqing flinched.

“For someone else to end this.”

Lightning flickered weakly around Jing Yuan’s fingers.

“For someone kinder than you.”

Yanqing’s eyes burned.

Jing Yuan took one step forward. The wound in his side pulled half-closed, then stopped. Gold roots trembled over exposed red.

An opening.

Yanqing saw exactly where to strike.

He did not move to try.

Jing Yuan’s expression changed.

Disappointment.

“You see it,” he said.

Yanqing shook his head.

“No.”

“You do.”

“No.”

“You always were quick.”

“Stop talking to me like that!” The shout broke out of him, furious and wrong. For one second, Jing Yuan looked almost pleased.

Then he lifted his hand.

Lightning gathered.

Slower than before.

Yanqing saw that too. He saw the delay. The instability. The way Jing Yuan’s weight shifted to protect the wound that was not healing fast enough. He saw how the next strike would leave his chest open for a second.

More than enough.

Jing Yuan had taught him to see openings exactly like that.

Yanqing’s sword rose an inch. Then stopped.

The lightning came.

He barely survived it.

The blast threw him across the yard and down onto one knee, smoke rising from his armor. His vision went white at the edges. His ears rang.

Across the yard, Jing Yuan lowered his hand. His voice, when it came, was almost gentle.

“That is the third time you let me live, little swallow.”

Yanqing could not breathe.

Jing Yuan looked at him through the drifting smoke.

The man who raised him.

The monster who would destroy the Luofu if Yanqing let him leave this yard.

“You will not get a fourth.”

The first time Yanqing asked about mara, he had been small enough to sit cross-legged on Jing Yuan’s home office floor and still have room to spread three picture scrolls, two practice manuals, and a stolen plate of sesame cakes around himself.

He was meant to be reading.

He was not reading.

Jing Yuan knew this because Yanqing had been glaring at the same page for a few minutes and was still too young and too honest to hide his feelings from showing clearly on his face.

At last, Yanqing looked up.

“General.”

Jing Yuan did not lift his eyes from the report in his hand. “Mm.”

“What does mara-struck mean?”

Jing Yuan paused for a second. “A serious question for so early in the morning.”

“It is almost noon.”

“Tragic. The day is lost.”

Yanqing scowled.

“Where did you hear that word?”

“From two knights in the hall.”

“Names?”

Yanqing’s mouth snapped shut. Jing Yuan sighed.

“Commendable loyalty. Inconvenient, but commendable.”

“They said it happens to long-life species,” Yanqing said, refusing to be diverted. “When you-they live too long...”

“In simple terms.”

“But what is it?”

Jing Yuan set the brush down.

That, more than anything, seemed to tell Yanqing he had asked the wrong kind of question.

“It is…like an illness,” Jing Yuan said at last. “And a corruption. And, sometimes, the place where those two words fail to be enough.”

"Then why don't they stop it sooner?"

"Stop what?"

"The mara."

"If only it were so easy."

"Well it should be."

Jing Yuan blinked.

Yanqing looked genuinely displeased, as though the entire concept had been so easy to fix and he was annoyed no one thought about it.

“Is it?”

“Yes. If living longer makes people sick, they should just go to the healer before that happens.”

Jing Yuan looked at him. Yanqing looked back, crumbs on one sleeve and his hair ribbon tied crookedly enough that it had begun to slide toward his ear.

For one painful second, Jing Yuan almost laughed.

Instead, he got up and sat down next to him on the floor, reaching over to brush the crumbs from Yanqing’s sleeve.

“It is not quite so simple.”

“It should be.”

“Most terrible things should be simple. They rarely cooperate.”

Yanqing frowned harder, clearly dissatisfied with this answer.

Jing Yuan leaned back and considered how much truth a child deserved, and how little mercy there was in giving him none at all.

“Mara is what happens when the body continues past the point where the mind and spirit can bear it,” he said at last. “Too many years. Too many wounds. Too many memories with nowhere gentle to rest.”

Yanqing’s expression shifted.

Not understanding, not fully at least.

“The blessing of Abundance grants life,” Jing Yuan said. “But life without end is not the same as peace. All things must come to an end eventually. Living forever is like a curse.”

Yanqing looked down at the page again. His small hands curled against his knees.

“So they don’t die.”

“No,” Jing Yuan said quietly. “Not properly.”

Yanqing seemed to think about that. “I don’t like it.”

Jing Yuan’s mouth softened.

“No.”

He reached out and ruffled Yanqing’s hair. Yanqing immediately ducked away with a noise of outrage.

“General!”

“All things wish to rest eventually,” Jing Yuan repeated, milder now. “Even very angry little swallows.”

“I am not little! Or a bird!”

“Of course not.”

“And I’m not angry.” Yanqing tried to fix his hair with both hands, making it worse.

Jing Yuan watched him for a moment longer than he should have.

“Remember this,” he said. “Continuing forever as a husk is not kindness. Not to yourself, and not to those who love you.”

Yanqing’s hands slowed in his hair.

“What should people do, then?”

“Hope someone loves them enough to let them rest.”

Years later, Yanqing asked a different question.

He was older then. Still a child, whatever protests he made to the contrary, but taller, sharper, already carrying himself with the stiff pride of someone determined to be mistaken for grown. He had begun to hear things by then. People talked. Knights talked. Officials talked most of all, and rarely with the sense to check whether the subject of their speculation was standing just around the corner.

Jing Yuan found him in the garden after dinner, cutting fallen leaves cleanly in half before they touched the ground.

Yanqing did not waste time once Jing Yuan stepped on the path.

“Do you only train me because I’m useful?” 

Jing Yuan was silent for one breath too long.

Yanqing’s grip tightened around his practice sword.

“So it is true.”

“No.”

“You paused.”

“I was deciding whether to answer gently or honestly.”

“I want honest.”

“Then no,” Jing Yuan said.

Yanqing’s shoulders did not loosen.

“But people say-”

“People say many things.”

“General-”

Jing Yuan sighed.

The wind moved through the garden, stirring gold leaves along the stone path. Yanqing stood among them with his jaw set and his eyes too bright, young enough to be hurt by rumors and proud enough to pretend he was only angry.

“So. What did you hear?”

Yanqing looked away.

“That I’m strong because you made me strong. That you keep me close only because I’ll be useful later. That I’m…” His mouth twisted.

“I am training you only because you wish to be trained,” Jing Yuan said. “You are useful because you are skilled, disciplined, stubborn, and relentlessly determined to involve yourself in matters I would much rather you avoided. That is not the same as being kept for use.” Yanqing did not look entirely convinced. “I give you responsibility because you fight for it relentlessly and because you are capable of bearing more than most. That is not the same as shaping you into my replacement or a weapon, contrary to what some people may speculate.”

“But if you needed one?”

Jing Yuan looked at him and Yanqing did not look back.

“If something happened,” he continued, quieter now. “If everyone said I was strong enough. If you needed me to…to do something terrible.”

Yanqing looked up. The practice sword dipped slightly.

Jing Yuan placed a hand on his head before Yanqing could duck away.

“I will not make my life into your burden Yanqing. I will not make you carry something simply because I failed to set it down in time. Anything you become will be because you choose it.”

Yanqing’s mouth tightened.

“Promise?”

A dangerous word.

Jing Yuan should have known better than to answer quickly.

He did anyway.

“I promise.”

Yanqing stared at him.

“And you won’t make me do something terrible just because everyone else says I’m strong enough?”

The garden went very quiet.

Jing Yuan’s hand remained on his head.

“No,” he said. But he had never been good at lying to Yanqing when it mattered “Not unless there is no other option.”

Yanqing made a face.

“I don’t like that last part.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then don’t add it!”

“I cannot promise the universe will always be kind enough to offer better choices.”

Yanqing looked down.

The practice sword hung loose at his side.

Jing Yuan bent slightly, enough to meet his eyes.

“But I can promise this. I will do everything in my power to make sure you are never asked unless there is no other option.”

For a long moment, Yanqing said nothing.

Then he stepped forward and pressed his forehead, briefly and fiercely, against Jing Yuan’s chest.

It was not quite a hug. Yanqing would have denied it if accused.

Jing Yuan rested his hand against the back of his head.

“You are not a weapon, little swallow.” 

Yanqing drew away first, face red with embarrassment.

“Don’t call me that General! I’m not a kid anymore-” he protested and Jing Yuan wanted very much to argue, but just smiled.

“If people keep saying things, I’m challenging them.” Yanqing added.

“You are absolutely not.”

“If they are wrong, they should get taught a lesson!”

“If you challenged every person in the Luofu who didn’t know how to keep their mouth shut, we’d have to build a whole new branch for the Alchemy Commission to accommodate the injured."

Yanqing looked away, still scowling, still young, still safe enough to believe promises could hold if they were made sincerely.

Jing Yuan wished, with sudden and terrible force, that sincerity was enough.

There was no final clash bright enough to split the sky. No clean strike. No perfect form. No elegant conclusion worthy of the General of the Luofu or the lieutenant he had raised.

There was only broken stone, frost melted into dirty water, and Yanqing on his knees beside Jing Yuan’s body with blood in his mouth and a sword in his hand.

He did not remember crossing the last few steps.

He remembered falling.

He remembered getting up.

He remembered losing his sword and finding another.

He remembered frost sealing wounds that should not have been sealed that way, cold biting deep enough that his own skin had gone pale and dead around the edges.

He remembered screaming.

Jing Yuan lay on his back among shattered stone, limbs bent at angles that made Yanqing’s vision blur when he looked at it too long. The red branches across his chest had been cut down to splintered roots. Gold still flickered beneath his skin, but weakly now, unevenly, like a generator running out of energy.

Not dead.

Not yet.

Yanqing knew where to strike.

That was the worst part.

He knew.

There were no more excuses left. No more distance. No more sword formations he could stand behind. No more hoping someone would arrive. The weak points were visible now, exposed by injury and exhaustion and the slowing pulse of Abundance trying to knit ruin back into a body that could no longer bear it.

Jing Yuan had taught him to see openings.

Jing Yuan had taught him not to waste them.

Yanqing’s sword shook in his hand.

The tip hovered above Jing Yuan’s chest.

He could not make it descend.

“I don’t want to,” Yanqing said. His voice was so small he almost did not recognize it. “I don’t-”

Jing Yuan’s eyes opened.

Gold.

Clearer.

Not whole. Never whole again.

Yanqing’s breath caught.

The General looked at him. “Yanqing,” Jing Yuan said. No smile. No nickname. No poison-sweet fondness. No Abundance whisper wearing his voice.

“General?” Yanqing sobbed.

Jing Yuan’s gaze moved briefly to the sword trembling above his chest. Even through the tears and the shaking, the sword was squarely above its target. Good.

Then he looked back to Yanqing’s face.

For a moment, grief crossed his expression so plainly that Yanqing wished the mara would take him again.

“There is no other option,” Jing Yuan said.

Yanqing shook his head.

“No.”

“Yanqing.”

“No.” His grip on the sword tightened until the hilt cut into his palm.

Jing Yuan closed his eyes.

“You promised you wouldn’t make me do something like this.”

“I know.”

“You promised.”

“I know.”

Jing Yuan’s breathing hitched. Gold light flickered under his throat, and for one horrifying second the roots along his chest twitched as though remembering how to grow.

His eyes opened again.

“Yanqing.”

“Please-”

“There is no other option.”

“Then make one!”

The shout tore out of him, raw and broken.

Jing Yuan looked at him as though he were seeing two versions of him at once: the lieutenant kneeling, soaked in blood and melting ice, and the child in the garden with a practice sword held too tightly in both hands.

“I tried.”

Yanqing’s face crumpled.

Jing Yuan lifted his broken hand.

For one second, Yanqing thought he was reaching for the sword. Instead, his fingers touched Yanqing’s wrist.

Not stopping him.

Guiding.

The same hand that had corrected his stance.

The same hand that had once rested on his head and made an impossible promise.

“I am sorry,” Jing Yuan said.

Yanqing could not see through the tears anymore.

Jing Yuan’s fingers tightened weakly.

“Now.”

Yanqing screamed.