Chương 25: The Road Back to the Mountain

Ch 25: The Road Back to the Mountain Ember did not, it turned out, travel well. I discovered this roughly ten minutes into packing, when a small indignant shriek announced that stuffing a newly hatched dragon into a satchel however gently, however briefly was a crime this particular hatchling intended to hold against me for the rest of both our lives.

It solved the problem itself a moment later by climbing, unbidden, onto my shoulder and anchoring all four tiny claws into the fabric of my robe with the grim determination of something that had already decided where it lived now and wasn't interested in renegotiating.

"Fine," I told it, wincing as one claw caught skin instead of cloth.

"Shoulder it is." It chirped once, smug, and settled in like it had won an argument I hadn't realized we were having. Dororo saw me off from the same unmarked door where our lessons had always begun, arms folded, sunglasses firmly in place despite the early hour and the complete absence of anything resembling glare inside the corridor.

"Try not to die at home," he said, in the tone of a man delivering a blessing disguised as an insult.

"I've only just started finding you interesting. It would be enormously inconvenient to lose that after so little return on the investment."

"I'll do my best not to inconvenience you, Senior."

"See that you do." He studied Ember for a long moment, head tilted, something almost fond crossing his weathered face despite his obvious effort to keep it off.

"A hatchling born from a dragon-slaying technique. There's a joke in there somewhere I'm too tired to finish properly." He waved a hand before I could respond.

"Go. Write, if something in that letter of yours ever demands more of my particular expertise than a Sunday's worth of translation. Otherwise come back with your head still attached, and we'll finish the rest of what your grandfather left behind."

"And if the recess runs longer than expected?"

"Then it runs longer than expected, and I'll have that much more time to argue with a book that refuses to speak to anyone but you." He paused at the threshold of his own doorway, and for one uncharacteristic moment, the dry performance slipped entirely.

"Your family needs you whole right now more than this library needs you patient. Go be whole for them first. The rest of it will still be waiting exactly where you left it." I bowed, deeper than I usually allowed myself with him, and he grunted something that might have been acknowledgment, might have been dismissal, and turned back through his door before I'd finished straightening. Ellia found me at the academy gates, which I hadn't entirely expected and, if I was honest, had quietly hoped for anyway.

"You're actually leaving," she said, arms crossed, doing an admirable job of sounding unbothered by it.

"Before the recess even officially starts. Very dramatic of you."

"Family business."

"Complicated family business," she said.

"Yes, I remember." Her eyes dropped to my shoulder, and whatever composed indifference she'd been holding onto slipped entirely.

"Is that did you hatch a dragon?" Ember, sensing an audience, puffed out its chest with all the dignity of a creature the size of a teacup and let out a small, self-important huff.

"His name's Ember."

"Of course it is." She reached out, hesitated, then scratched carefully under its jaw when it leaned into her hand without a shred of hesitation. Traitor.

"You disappear into libraries for weeks, come back with a duel scar's worth of rumors, and now you're leaving the academy with an actual baby dragon on your shoulder like that's a normal thing to casually acquire." She looked up at me, something more serious threading through the teasing now.

"Whatever you're actually walking into be careful. I'd rather you came back complicated than not at all." This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"I intend to."

"You'd better." She stepped back before either of us had to decide what to do with the moment stretching a beat too long between us, and offered a small, genuine smile instead.

"Go save your family, Len Fan. Try to have slightly fewer secrets by the time you get back. I'm keeping a list."

"A list."

"A long one," she said, already turning to go.

"Growing daily. You're doing remarkably little to shorten it." She was gone before I could ask exactly how long that list already was, and I stood there a moment longer than the situation strictly required, watching the space where she'd been the way I'd apparently taken to doing every time she left a conversation before I was ready for it to end.

The carriage ride out of Trigatia felt different than the one that had carried me in, months ago, a grieving boy clutching a jade pendant and a bracelet he didn't yet understand.

I watched the capital's spires shrink behind us with considerably more weight riding in my chest than curiosity this time, a bloodline two Courts of Creation had spent centuries trying to erase, a hidden sanctuary waiting somewhere with a grandfather who might or might not still be breathing inside it, and a mother, three days ahead of me by road, guarding walls that someone patient and invisible had been quietly bleeding dry for years.

Ember slept curled against my collar the entire first day, snoring with a volume entirely disproportionate to its size, utterly unbothered by any of it. I found myself watching the passing hills instead of resting properly, turning my grandfather's letter over in my head the way I once turned over a sword form looking for the shape underneath the words, the part that wasn't merely explanation. Earn it, the same slow way I would have earned yours.

I didn't know yet what earning a dead man's trust looked like in practice. I only knew I had considerably more urgent trust to earn first, three days up the road, from a mother who deserved to know what her son actually carried in his blood before some patient, hidden voice decided to tell her a worse version of it first. I envied Ember's sleep, a little, the whole first day.

On the second day, somewhere past the halfway point where the road narrowed between two low ridgelines thick with old pine, I felt it brief, faint, gone almost before I'd finished registering it at all. A presence, watching from somewhere well off the road, careful enough that the Divine God's Eye caught only the ghost of it before whoever it belonged to slipped back out of range entirely. Not hostile. Not yet. Just patient, the way something only ever learns to be patient after years of practice at exactly that.

Ember stirred against my collar, one eye cracking open, small nostrils flaring at something in the air I couldn't smell myself.

"You felt that too," I murmured. It let out a low, uncertain chirp, wings pressing flatter against its sides, and didn't go back to sleep for the rest of the afternoon. I kept one hand near my sword after that, watching the tree line without making it obvious I was watching, the way I'd learned to across two lifetimes now never let the thing observing you know exactly how closely you'd noticed it back. Whoever it was, they didn't approach that day, or the next.

But the feeling of being catalogued, weighed, and filed away for later never fully left either, not even once the pines gave way to open road and familiar rivers I half-remembered from a much younger, much less complicated version of this same journey. By the third evening, the mountains of home had finally started rising along the horizon smaller than I remembered them, the way places always seem to shrink once you've stood in front of a Divine Realm guardian or a duel arena packed with half a kingdom's nobility.

I sat at the edge of the campfire's light, Ember curled tight in my lap now instead of my shoulder, and found myself thinking less about the Greyhold or the presence on the ridge and more about a much smaller, much older worry. What do I actually tell her. Mother had spent months believing the worst of what happened to me had already happened a duel, a Tower, an assassin outside a hospital window she'd only heard about secondhand, well after the danger had already passed.

She didn't yet know her own son carried blood that two Courts of Creation had spent centuries trying to erase before it ever had the chance to matter. I turned that thought over for a long while, the fire cracking low beside me, and found no version of the conversation that made the truth sit any lighter in her hands than it currently sat in mine. Soon, I decided, the same word I'd given the bracelet in Dororo's study. Not tonight.

Not while she was already carrying a sect quietly bleeding out from the inside, a betrayal I hadn't even heard the shape of yet. Some truths, I was beginning to understand, deserved to wait for a mother who wasn't already shouldering more than her share. I didn't sleep well that night, one hand resting near my sword the entire time, watching the dark beyond the firelight long after the flames had burned down to embers of their own.

Whatever had been hollowing out my family's sect from a careful, invisible distance for years, it seemed, had finally noticed I was coming home to look for it. Good, I thought, watching the tree line without blinking. Let it notice. I was done being the only one caught unprepared.