Chapter 22
Haru
Iam falling again.
The dream always started the same way—the sky above me, endless and blue, my body weightless and tumbling through air that offered no resistance. Below, the ground rushed up to meet me, close enough now that I could see individual trees, their branches reaching like skeletal fingers.
My rational brain knew I should have been afraid. In the real world, falling meant death, meant impact and pain and the wet crunch of bones breaking against unyielding earth.
But in the dream, I just fell.
My gift wants to activate, wants to blur me sideways through space, to catch me mid-plummet and laugh at gravity’s impotent rage.
But dream-logic held me suspended between motion and stillness, falling forever without landing, moving at impossible speeds without going anywhere at all.
Was this the price of the gift? That’s what Father had once told me.
The speed-blessed dream of falling recurred because our minds couldn’t reconcile how we moved when awake. We slipped between moments, and our sleeping brains tried to make sense of it by showing us what it felt like from the outside.
Falling, falling, always falling—
The ground vanishes.
Not gradually. The world simply ceases to exist, replaced by darkness so complete it has weight and texture, a presence that presses against my skin like cold water.
I stop falling.
Or perhaps I’d never been falling at all. Perhaps I’d been sinking, drowning in an ocean of absolute void, and only now realized I couldn’t breathe.
“Haru.”
The voice rolls through the darkness like thunder through storm clouds—deep and resonant, older than mountains. It doesn’t speak so much as vibrate the space around me, making my bones hum with frequencies that shouldn’t exist.
I know that voice.
I’d never heard it before, but I know it with certainty, the way one knows his own heartbeat, the way one knows the sound of his mother’s breathing.
“Who—” My voice comes out small and childlike. I hate how afraid I sound.
Gold blazes in the darkness.
Two points of light, burning with the intensity of captured suns, fix on me with the weight of divine attention. As my eyes adjust—or perhaps as the darkness chooses to reveal itself—I see the shape that holds those eyes.
Then I see the scales.
Black as obsidian, black as the space between stars, black as the void before creation.
They catch the gold and swallow it, reflecting nothing, absorbing everything.
The head that emerges from shadow is massive beyond comprehension, each scale the size of a palace door, each tooth a blade forged by gods who had forgotten mercy.
A dragon.
Not Father’s dragon.
Nawa had been graceful as poetry, warm as summer rain.
This creature was something else entirely—ancient where Nawa had been eternal, terrible where Nawa had been magnificent, cold where Nawa had been gentle.
“Haru.” The dragon’s voice isn’t speaking my name so much as acknowledging my existence, confirming that I am real and present and witnessed by something that exists outside the normal flow of time. “You hear me.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
What else could I say? Deny reality? Pretend this was just another falling dream? I’d felt a divine presence before—all Imperial blood could sense it, could feel the tether connecting us to the gods’ realm, but this wasn’t a distant awareness of cosmic forces.
This was direct contact.
This was a god speaking to me as a person instead of an ant.
“Good.” The dragon’s eyes narrow, and I realize with creeping horror that it is pleased. “The bloodline endures. The tether, though severed, remains. You must restore it.”
“I—” My throat closes around words. “I don’t know how.”
“Take the throne. Complete the ritual. Bind yourself to the gods as your ancestors did before you.” The dragon’s head lowers, bringing gold eyes level with mine.
I can see myself reflected in them—small, fragile, and supremely insignificant.
“The gods’ will must be fulfilled. The balance must be maintained.
Magic must flow or all will fall into chaos. ”
“My brother—”
“Your brother journeys no longer. Your path is here, now, and written in blood and necessity.” The dragon’s voice holds no sympathy, no recognition that I might not want this, might not be ready for this. “You are the tether’s anchor now. Accept this or watch your world die.”
The weight of the dragon’s words press down on me—not metaphorical weight, but actual crushing pressure that make my ribs creak and my lungs struggle for air that doesn’t even exist in this void.
“I don’t—I’m not ready—I can’t—”
“You will.” The dragon’s certainty is absolute, carved from the same substance as inevitability itself. “There is no other. The Empire must have what you carry in your blood. The gods demand it.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then Mugen falls to others, and her people will be cast in darkness.”
“Others?” I force the word past the pressure. “What others?”
The dragon’s head turns sharply, as if hearing something I couldn’t perceive. Those gold eyes fix on something beyond my vision, beyond the darkness, beyond the dream itself.
When it looks back at me, something changes.
The certainty is still there, but underneath it I hear something new.
Urgency.
Fear.
“The others would have Mugen live in darkness,” it says, the words coming faster now, less thunder and more desperate warning.
“They move against you even now—in the seas, in the forests, above the clouds. They do not want balance returned. They seek to tip the scales, to own the scales for themselves. You must not allow this.”
“Who? Who is moving against—”
“Amaterasu will aid where she may.” The dragon’s voice is fading now, or perhaps I am being pulled away from it, back toward consciousness, back toward the waking world. “She sees what must be done. But her brother—”
“Which brother?” I try to move closer, but the darkness is dissolving around me. “Susanoo? Tsukuyomi? What are you—”
“Wake.” The dragon’s gold eyes are the last thing to fade. “Restore what was broken before they—”
The void shatters.
I gasped awake like a drowning man breaking the surface, my body jerking upright in the darkness of my chambers. Sweat has soaked through my sleeping robes, and my heart hammered against my ribs like it was trying to escape through bone and flesh.
It was just a dream, I thought. Just another falling dream that got weird because I ate too late or drank too much sake or—
Something warm trickled across my upper lip.
I reached up and wiped at it. My fingers came away wet. In the dim light filtering through the paper screens, I could see the dark stain coating my hand.
Blood.
And not a little blood.
This was flowing, pouring down my face in a steady stream that dripped onto my sleeping robes and stained them black in the moonlight.
“Damn it.” I grabbed for the cloth beside my sleeping mat, pressing it against my face. The fabric soaked through almost immediately. “Gods damn it all—”
“Haru?” Esumi’s voice, thick with sleep but sharpening with concern.
I heard him shift, heard the rustle of blankets being thrown aside.
“I’m fine,” I said, the words muffled by cloth and blood.
“You’re bleeding.” Suddenly he was there, kneeling beside me, his hands reaching for my face. “Let me see.”
“It’s just a nosebleed.”
“That’s not just a nosebleed.” His fingers were gentle as they tilted my head back and pulled the cloth away to assess the damage. In the darkness, I couldn’t see his expression, but I could hear the worry in his voice. “Gods, Haru. What happened?”
“I . . . I don’t know. It was a dream, a really bad dream.” The blood was slowing now, or perhaps I’d tilted my head back far enough that it was running down my throat instead of out my nose. Either way, I could taste copper and fear. “It’s stopping. See? I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” He held the cloth against my nose, applying pressure. “People don’t bleed like this from dreams.”
“Maybe I do. Maybe this is a speed-gift thing.”
“You know your father never woke up bleeding from dreams.” Esumi’s voice was firm. “And don’t try to deflect with jokes. I know you, remember? When you’re scared, you make light of things. So tell me—what really happened?”
For a moment, I considered lying and telling him it was nothing, just stress and exhaustion and the weight of an empire pressing down until something had to give way. He’d believe me, or at least pretend to, and we could go back to sleep and deal with it in the morning.
But Esumi deserved better than lies.
And I needed to tell someone before the memory faded in the way dreams did, slipping away until I couldn’t remember if it had been real or just my mind playing tricks.
“I saw a dragon,” I said quietly. “In my dream. It had black scales and gold eyes. It wasn’t Nawa. It was something . . . older, colder. It spoke to me.”
Esumi went very still. “What did it say?”
“That I need to take the throne and restore the tether. That there are others—and I don’t think he was talking about Eiko—who want Mugen to remain in darkness.
It said that Amaterasu will help but her brother .
. .” I trailed off, the words sounding insane even to my own ears.
“It said they’re moving against me even now. ”
“If not Eiko, who? Who is moving against you?”
“I don’t know. The gods, maybe? Other gods? Legend is forever telling tales of heaven’s wars.”
Esumi sat back, the bloody rag still clutched in his hand. “You think the gods are fighting over Mugen? You seriously believe that?”
“Never mind. It’s nothing.”
His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t challenge, only asked, “And then you woke up bleeding?”
“And then I woke up bleeding.”
Esumi was quiet for a long moment, the only sound my breathing and the distant chirp of night insects outside the window. When he finally spoke, his voice carried a weight I’d rarely heard from him.
“So it was real.” His words came out flat, empty of everything except exhaustion. “Not just a dream, an actual god or dragon or whatever trying to warn you?”
“Or something else trying to manipulate me using the form of a dragon.”
He looked at me sharply. “You think it was a trick?”
I swallowed down lingering fear. “I think we’re at war, and strange things happen during wars. I think there are forces at play we don’t fully understand.”
He examined my nose in the dim light. “The bleeding’s stopped, but Haru, if this happens again, if something tries to contact you through your dreams again, we need to tell someone. Maybe the priests or your mother, someone who might understand these things better than we do.”
“And tell them what? That I’m having prophetic dreams?
That dragons are speaking to me in my sleep?
” I laughed, but it came out bitter and afraid.
“They’ll think I’m mad. Worse, they’ll think I’m claiming some divine mandate, trying to use religion to justify taking the throne before my brother is confirmed dead. ”
Esumi eyed me again. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“What—?”“I see it in your eyes. When you mentioned Kioshi, something flickered, like you’re hiding something.”
My head bowed.
“Haru?”
“Fine,” I sighed. “The dragon said his journey had ended. I’m pretty sure that means he’s dead.”
Esumi swallowed as he nodded. “Okay, we already thought that was the case. It doesn’t change anything.”
“Doesn’t change anything?” I practically shouted. “Esumi, it changes everything. It makes me . . . gods above . . . it makes all this real.”
Esumi’s hands were on my shoulders faster than I could stand, steadying me, comforting me, holding me upright lest the world tilt again and I lose my place in it.
“Breathe, Haru. Just breathe.” His voice was a balm.
“We’ll tell them you had a nosebleed from stress and leave it at that.
The priests will fuss and want to feed you disgusting syrups, but your dreams will remain your own.
” Esumi set the cloth aside and took my hands in his.
“But between us, here in this room—do you believe it was real?”
Did I?
I thought about those golden eyes, the weight of that voice, the absolute certainty with which the dragon had commanded me to take the throne. I thought about the urgency in its final plea, the fear that something was moving against me—against our entire world—even now.
“Yes,” I said finally. “I believe it was real. I wish it was just stress or bad sake or too much training, but yes, something spoke to me. It was something divine, and it’s terrified of whatever’s coming. Es, if a god is afraid—”
“Then we’d better prepare.” Esumi’s voice was steady, calm, the voice of a man who’d decided on a course of action and wouldn’t be swayed from it.
“Tomorrow, you lay your father to rest, but tonight, and every night after, we watch for signs, we pay attention to what the priests are saying, and we listen for rumors of gods and divine intervention.”
“And if something tries to contact me again?”
“Then you let it, and you remember every word, because if the gods are choosing sides . . .” He squeezed my hands.
“Then this is much larger than you or the Asami or anyone else in Mugen could imagine. The Empire’s survival—the whole world’s existence—might depend on understanding which side we’re on. ”
I wanted to argue, to say that gods didn’t choose sides, that divine beings were above mortal conflicts, but Father had told me stories of the old wars, the ones that happened before the Empire unified, when gods walked openly among humans and chose champions to carry their will.
If those times were returning . . .
If the tether breaking had torn open barriers that should have remained closed . . .
“I’m not ready for this,” I whispered into the darkness. “I’m not ready to be Emperor. I’m not ready to have gods speaking in my dreams. I’m not ready for any of it.”
“I know. Who would be?” Esumi pulled me against his chest, and I let myself collapse into his warmth. “But ready or not, it’s happening, so we face it together, like we always have.”
“Together,” I repeated.