The scent of scorched earth followed them like a curse.

  Zhao Wei stumbled, blood smearing her palm as she braced herself against a tree blackened by time. Bark split beneath her grip. Her vision tilted, pulsing between red moonlight and memory. Behind them, the ruins of the Lantern Grave burned low, embers drifting like shattered prayers.

  Feng Ren caught her by the elbow. “That was reckless, even for you.”

  She let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You’re still alive. That’s new.”

  “I charmed death with my witty banter,” he said, helping her down beside a hollowed-out rock, half-swallowed by moss and root. “She blushed.”

  Zhao Wei sat, back to stone, and let her blade rest beside her. The wound in her side throbbed in time with her heartbeat—shallow but punishing.

  Feng Ren crouched in front of her, grim. “They’ll send more. The Messenger was only the first snap of the leash. The Creed doesn’t like escapees.”

  “I didn’t escape,” she muttered. “I died.”

  “And yet…” He glanced at her hand, where faint dark lines spidered across her skin like ink just beneath the surface. “Something followed you back.”

  Zhao Wei didn’t answer.

  A breeze passed. Cold. Carrying whispers that didn’t belong in this world.

  She closed her eyes.

  And fell inward.

  Then.

  Wei Ning knelt in chains. A hall of black glass stretched around her, lit by floating flames that whispered her crimes in voices that wore familiar faces.

  She bled from the mouth, the shoulder, the soul.

  Before her stood the tribunal: ten elders cloaked in white veils, each one a name she had once saved on the battlefield. Now their mouths moved not to praise, but to condemn.

  “Traitor.”

  “Manipulator.”

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  “Monster.”

  Their voices blurred together until only one voice mattered.

  The voice of the man who had held her heart once. The one who knelt beside her now, blade drawn.

  “Forgive me, Ning,” he whispered. “They said you would burn the world.”

  She smiled, bloody and bitter. “And you believed them?”

  “I wanted to believe you’d spare me.”

  “I did,” she said. “That was your mistake.”

  He hesitated but his blade did not.

  It sang through the air, clean and bright. Then darkness.

  But in that moment before the end, as the cold came for her and her blood pooled beneath her knees, a whisper touched her soul, not a god, not a curse. Something else.

  A promise.

  “You will return. But not as you were.

  And never as theirs.”

  Now.

  Zhao Wei gasped awake.

  The world blurred for a moment, colorless and full of teeth. Her fingers dug into the dirt. She could still feel the blade in her back, the betrayal.

  “Zhao Wei,” Feng Ren’s voice, sharp with concern. “You blacked out.”

  “I remember,” she breathed. “Everything. All of it.”

  He tilted his head, uncertain. “All of what?”

  “My death,” she said. “And the thing that spoke to me as I died.”

  She sat upright, gritting her teeth against the pain. Her hand rose to her chest instinctively and there it was, pulsing beneath her ribs.

  A burn. A tether.

  Her spirit had never bonded.

  Not because it was weak.

  Not because it was missing.

  But because something other had already claimed her.

  Something beyond the elemental balance. Beyond light and shadow.

  “Void,” she whispered.

  Feng Ren’s eyes widened. “That’s not possible. No one survives Void contact.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “Not then.”

  The trees around them groaned.

  The shadows deepened.

  Then something moved, a ripple across the forest, not physical, but felt.

  A resonance.

  Zhao Wei rose to her feet, and with every breath she took, the air bent around her. Branches shivered. The wind pulled away.

  And from deep within the ground, something responded.

  A flicker of music. Barely audible. Like a single note plucked from an ancient string.

  Feng Ren backed away slightly. “Wei… your eyes.”

  She looked at him.

  They were no longer fully brown.

  In the center of each iris swirled a fragment of black, like ink in water, spinning slowly—calm now, but growing.

  She blinked, and the effect vanished—but the damage was done.

  “You’re not just Zhao Wei anymore,” he said softly.

  “No,” she agreed. “And the Creed will learn that too late.”

  A rustle behind them. Bai crashed through the underbrush, panting, scrolls sticking out of his cloak at wild angles.

  “I found you!” he wheezed, then stopped as he looked at Zhao Wei. “You look like you… ate a thunder spirit.”

  “We’re leaving,” she said, brushing past him. “We need to move north.”

  “Why north?” Feng Ren asked.

  She paused only once, turning back slightly.

  “Because that’s where the remnants of the Ember’s core hide,” she said. “And because the next key… lies buried beneath the Ruins of Shuxian.”

  Feng Ren stiffened. “That place is cursed.”

  “I was cursed first,” she said.

  And then she walked into the night.

  The blood moon faded behind the clouds, but its echo lingered in her bones, in the wind, and in the hush of the trees that dared not speak her name.