Chương 26

It was Lorn. It was Lorn's voice, a few feet from his ear. It was Lorn's hand, shaking his shoulder. Lodin blinked his eyes open, and it was Lorn's face he saw. Pains wracked his body from head to toe from that fall. But the instant Lorn's pale face began to come into focus, they all dissolved. It felt like he was reliving the past few months in an instant.

A pressure he had carried so long it had become part of him broke loose in his chest, and for a moment he could feel all of it: the salt air on the deck of that ship, the aches in his body after all that fighting, the silence of every night he had spent staring at the ceiling and wondering if his brother was still alive. It hit him in a single wave, and then it passed, and Lorn was here. He made it. Lodin laughed. He scrambled to his feet in a skirl of dust and threw his arms around Lorn.

"I found you," he croaked.

"You son of a bitch I found you." Lorn let out a little laugh and returned Lodin's embrace. Lodin hugged him tighter.

"We didn't know if you were dead or alive," he stammered, and his voice began to shake, to choke up.

"Or if something had a hold of your mind. We–" Lorn pulled back from the hug, a wry smile on his face, his hands on Lodin's shoulders.

"I'm sorry I didn't get the chance to explain anything," he said.

"Now that you're here I'll take a swing at it." Lodin nodded, but then he noticed how many more tattoos Lorn had; the original yantra Master Yan had inked onto him were now small parts of a system that covered his body all over. Lines of tightly written script climbed all the way up his arms and neck, like the ribs of serpents, leaving his face the only part of him uncovered. Lodin took the image in.

"What happened to you? The last time I saw you…"

"I looked a little different, I know," Lorn said.

"If memory serves, it was like this." Lorn let his aura flare, and Lodin stepped back from him, his eyes wide. It was indeed like the last time. Lorn's eyes burned with blue flame. His aura towered over him, a nimbus of the same staggering power, and as Lodin watched, the aura took the shape of a blue dragon that coiled around his brother's body. The dragon's head came up over Lorn's right shoulder, and its eyes burned with the same fire.

"Lodin, I'd like you to meet Huihun." Lodin shifted his gaze toward the dragon's face.

"What is that…" Lorn gave him that wry smile again.

"Walk with me. I'll tell the story as best I can." Lorn turned and walked toward a gap in the rock wall. The ghost-flame dragon coiled close around his shoulders, and its blue light pushed the dark ahead of them. Lodin followed. Lodin's body reminded him of the fall with each step. Pain flared in his left hip, deep and hot, and both shoulders ached where they had struck stone on the way down. The cold of that demonic qi still clung to his ribs like frost on iron, but he breathed through it and kept pace.

The gap opened into a tunnel of rough, unworked stone, the kind of passage underground waterways naturally carve out over the course of centuries. The ceiling hung low enough that Lodin had to duck, and the walls pressed close on both sides. Lorn moved through it without trouble. He was thinner, the span of his shoulders a little narrower, and the dragon's light smoothed the path ahead of him.

"Some centuries ago, there was a young dragon called Wandering Flame," Lorn began. His voice echoed off the tunnel walls. The blue light of the ghost-flame dragon rippled across the wet stone ahead of them, and Lodin watched his brother's silhouette as he walked and talked.

"Wandering Flame was avid for territory to call his own, as all young dragons have a tendency to be. He set his sights on Huidao, on account of its abundance of natural treasures. But such domains are hotly contested, so Wandering Flame had to test his fangs and claws against many of his own kind. And he prevailed." You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

The tunnel widened, and as it did the roughness of the walls gave way to dressed stone, pale and smooth, and Lodin straightened to his full height for the first time since they'd entered. Iron braziers lined the walls at even intervals, and as they walked toward them they lit themselves with blue flames, one by one. Lorn didn't flinch when the flames caught. He didn't even glance at them. Lodin watched his brother's back, and a sliver of something cold began to thread through the relief he felt at the sight of him.

"Wandering Flame enjoyed a brief season of peace after that. The world was good to him. He watched over the spirit beasts, kept the waters clean, drove off demons that tried to establish a foothold. For a short while, Huidao was everything he'd fought for." Lodin stopped at the entrance to the next room, looked around warily. A chamber spread before them, long and high ceilinged, a straight corridor of polished stone, wide enough for one person at a time.

Steel pendulum blades hung motionless above the path, a dozen of them along the corridor's length, each one broad as a man's chest, their lower edges honed to a line that caught the blue firelight and held it. Dark stains discolored the metal near the tips. Between the pendulums, stone heads jutted from the walls on both sides, carved in the likeness of snarling lions. Their mouths gaped wide, and the throats behind those open jaws were black and hollow.

Soot caked the stone around each mouth in thick streaks, and the floor beneath them was scorched pale where the original color of the rock had burned away. These traps had fired before. Repeatedly, from the look of it. The stains on the blades, the soot, the scorched floor; all of it spoke of repeated use. Lodin's eyes moved from the pendulums to the lions and back again. This was a training ground. But for what purpose. Everything was still. The blades hung plumb. The lions stared with dead eyes and cold throats.

The mechanisms that drove the whole apparatus sat visible at the base of each iron arm: gears, chains, counterweights, all frozen in place.

"It's safe," Lorn said, a smirk on his face.

"Come on." Lodin nodded.

"So you were talking about the dragon."

"Yeah. And we're at the important part. One day, Wandering Flame spotted a ship in the harbor. Three figures on the sand, humans. Cultivators. So, knowing well what the average cultivator is like, he threw himself off the peak of Iron Mountain and the wind screamed around him as he came down over the beach, so low his shadow swallowed the shoreline. He roared at them hard enough to blast sheets of sand from the shore, and he told them in no uncertain terms that they had trespassed and should leave, at once."

They emerged from the far end of the corridor into a juncture where five passages met. Lorn chose the one in the center without hesitation. The tunnel beyond was round, bored through the rock in a perfect circle, and a narrow iron gantry ran its length down the middle. The curved walls were pocked with holes, hundreds of them, each one the width of a finger, arranged in spirals that wrapped the full circumference of the tunnel. Some of the holes were dark.

Others held the glint of metal at their throats, arrowheads or dart tips that caught the ghost-flame light and winked. Every angle of approach to that gantry was covered. A man on the walkway would have no blind spot to hide in, no direction from which a bolt could not find him. Lorn kept his pace. The ghost-flame dragon coiled at his shoulders.

"The three of them were strong. Credit where it's due. The man with the jian took the lead, and the other two flanked wide, and for a while they made a real contest of it. But Wandering Flame was a dragon on his own ground, and he had fought worse than three bold children with sharp toys." The fondness in Lorn's voice raised the hair on Lodin's forearms.

"He swatted the big one off the beach and heard him break against the cliff face. The woman tried to pin him with some kind of binding formation, and he tore through it and raked her across the chest and she went down. That left the one with the jian. He stood alone on the sand, and his sword arm shook, and Wandering Flame came for him." The gantry led them through to the far side, and the tunnel opened into a square chamber with a low ceiling.

Stone blocks the size of ox carts filled the space, some set into the walls, some into the floor, some into the ceiling. Deep grooves scored the surfaces where each block met the surrounding rock, and the grooves ran in different directions: lateral, vertical, diagonal. The floor was made of the same blocks, and the grooves between them ran at angles to each other. Everything in this room moved. Or could. One of the ceiling blocks hung a fraction lower than its neighbors.

Its underside was dark, stained so deep that no amount of scrubbing had been able to pull it from the stone.

"The leader of the trio shouted at his companions to stay back. Wandering Flame thought the man meant to die well. He respected that. He came in low and fast to make it quick." Lorn stopped for a moment, looked down at nothing. There was a stricken expression on his face.

"The cuts were so fine as to be nearly imperceptible. One moment Wandering Flame was whole. The next he was somewhere above his own body, and he watched it fall. Tons of scale and bone were aloft one moment, and the next they crashed through the treeline and plowed a trench across the beach to the waterline." The ghost-flame dragon at Lorn's shoulders coiled tighter, and its light dimmed.

"Then came… Unspeakable pain. There is no word for it in any language Wandering Flame has ever known. Pain far beyond anything physical. Everything that made him what he was came apart at the seams." Lodin noticed with some unease that his brother spoke about this the way a man describes a wound he still carried. Lorn resumed walking. His voice had gone quiet.

"The second cut set his soul on fire. Blue fire, the color you see now. It ate through him and the world bent around it, twisted, and the sky turned the color of a bruise and the sand turned to glass beneath his body. He burned, and he could not stop, and all he could do was try to scream without a mouth." The chamber of crushing blocks gave way to a simple hallway, which sloped downward after a few feet. Lodin couldn't see what was at the end, but he still followed Lorn, who walked at the same unhurried pace.

"He felt the fall before he saw it. The ground opened beneath him, or he sank through it; he could never tell which. And the last thing Wandering Flame saw of the world above was the other half of himself. A knot of flame that thrashed and wailed as the woman crawled to her feet and pulled it into a box she wore on a chain around her neck. She bled from the wounds he had dealt her, and her hands shook, but she held that box open until the last of the light was inside. Then she closed it."

Lorn stopped at the bottom of the passage. A door stood ahead of them, old wood banded with iron, and Lorn placed his palm flat against it but did not push.

"The death of Wandering Flame was the birth of Huihun, he who seeks to become whole again."