Chapter 23 Àn’yīng
àn’yīng
The Four Seas, Realm of Dragons
I wake to sunlight, warm wind, and distant birdsong. I’m on a bed of soft moss in a gentle glade, the sound of rushing water threading through the canopy of leaves overhead. I have a knowing in my bones that I am somewhere else—somewhere foreign, somewhere my soul does not recognize.
When I turn to my side, I nearly stop breathing.
Lying in a pool of sunlight, bathed in gold, is Hào’yáng.
The blush has returned to his cheeks, the red to his lips, yet his hair remains the shifting silver I saw in the sea. I press a hand to his chest and nearly buckle with relief when I feel his heartbeat.
We’re both dressed in white robes of silk and gauze.
The frost is gone from his body, and he wears a curious new pendant around his neck: one that appears to be carved of ice yet seems to glow from within.
When I press a fingertip to it, it is cold to the touch, and I think I catch a glimmer of shadows and scales stirring within.
“That is a dragon’s heart,” comes a familiar echoing voice.
Beyond this glade, the great camphor trees yield to a white-sand beach and a bay of clear turquoise. As I watch, the waters ripple and a shape coalesces between the currents: long and serpentine.
A dragon forms from the ocean itself. Water sluices down its body, dripping back into the sea, and the creature drifts almost lazily in the currents, watching us with eyes of the clearest blue.
I recognize it: It’s the same dragon that spoke to me when I was submerged in the crystal spring in the Court of the Aurora.
“She of the Moon-Frosted Sea gave most of herself to save her charge’s life; only her heart remains in this world. It will be a while before she regains her form. For now, she slumbers.”
My heart fills with gratitude for Meadowsweet as I give the pendant a gentle stroke. Its soft light seems to pulse in response.
“Is this…” I glance around me, not daring to utter the words aloud. From the ancient trees with their twisted roots to the strange, wild flowers and the ancient, echoing peace, I can only guess it’s…
“The Realm of the Four Seas. Or what some might refer to as the Realm of Dragons.”
“How?” I breathe. “Hào’yáng told me that, to enter your realm, one had to pass a test—a form of sacrifice.”
“You passed it. You saved an heir of dragons and, in doing so, proved yourself worthy of entering our realm.”
A slow blink, which for dragons might constitute a smile.
“Not many in this world can say the same.”
I sit straighter, my hand on Hào’yáng’s shoulder. I’m afraid that if I do not hold on to him, he will vanish again.
The events of last night return to me in a rush.
The blood-soaked stone pái’fāng bearing the gateway between the demon realm and the mortal realm.
Sansiran’s smile as she watched me drown.
The breath leaving my lips and my immortality awakening as spirit energies illuminated my skin like the colors of sunrise.
The heartbreak in Yù’chén’s eyes as he watched me slip through the gateway.
I push those images away, focusing on the dragon before me, on Hào’yáng’s gentle breathing beneath my palms. Urgency shapes my voice as I ask, “How long have we been here?”
“Time does not work in this realm as it does in most others,” the dragon replies.
“You have entered a temporary fold between the waves of time. It has not stopped, but…it can slow, or speed, at your wish. For some, what feels like years here may be the blink of an eye in their realm. Others spend days here and return to find centuries gone. The only thing it cannot do is flow backward.”
Time is one thing Hào’yáng and I were running short of with the Kingdom of Night’s advancement into the Kingdom of Sky. I know we would both wish it to slow during our stay.
I incline my head to the dragon and say, “I seek an audience with your kind, to discuss an alliance between the mortal realm and yours.”
It’s impossible to glean any emotion within that ancient, noble face. “The Dragon King is willing to see you in his underwater palace.”
“The Dragon King,” I repeat in wonder, thinking of all the childhood stories and legends we’re told of him in the mortal realm. “When? How do we get there?”
The dragon splashes a great tail as it rears up, so tall its head blocks out the sun for a moment, then dives effortlessly into the sea.
“When the time is right, the path shall reveal itself to you.”
The dragon begins to dissolve back into seawater, first its scales, then its antlers and its ears, until I’m staring at nothing but the gently murmuring ocean.
Something pink materializes in the periphery of my vision.
Lying in the moss by my side is a hairpin the length of my palm.
A lotus flower gleams at its head, petals of soft blush shifting with the sunlight.
By the spirit energies emanating from it that match my own, I know this is Lady Shī’yǎ’s lotus—my lotus and vessel of power, made whole once more, now in the form of a hairpin.
I tuck it into the bodice of my gown.
A warm hand grasps my fingers, and I look up to a sight I have been dreaming of for so many days in the darkness.
Hào’yáng’s eyes are open, and he is looking at me.
As I meet his gaze, all the weeks we have been apart melt away, and I am back at home in Xī’lín on that sunlit afternoon, the blossoms of my flowering plum tree whispering overhead in a gentle breeze as I listened to him confess his love for me for the first time.
For all of nine years.
“àn’yīng?” Hào’yáng murmurs huskily. “I have either died and gone beyond the Nine Fountains…or I am dreaming.”
The dam in my chest that I built to hold back the grief of watching him slip through my fingers that night—it cracks. Laughing and sobbing at the same time, I tackle him in a hug, and he wraps his arms tightly around me.
When I pull back, he studies me with a serious frown. “Goodness, I seem to have offended you greatly while I have been unconscious,” Hào’yáng says.
It takes me a moment to realize he’s teasing. “I thought you died,” I whisper, my voice shaking again, and he sits up and gathers me to him. “I thought I’d never see you again, and I didn’t even have my jade pendant to remember you by—”
“I am here,” Hào’yáng says gently, tipping my chin to him. The same words he spoke to me when I first used the jade pendant and he wrote back. He trails his thumbs across my cheeks to wipe away my tears.
I drink in the sight of him, the same ink-brushed brows and straight nose, chiseled chin and intelligent, perceptive eyes. The only change is his hair, dark in certain lighting, yet shifting in mercurial silvers in others.
My boy in the jade, against all odds.
Hào’yáng cranes his neck to look around. “Speaking of ‘here’…where are we?”
I bite back a smile. “The realm of dragons,” I say, and I tell him about my encounter with the dragon just before he woke.
Just beyond where we sit is a little spring, the surface of which has begun to bubble.
Two teacups surface, wrought in oyster shells and filled with clear water.
They drift toward us on a gentle current.
I take one and hand the other to Hào’yáng.
The instant the water touches my lips, an exhilarating rush of warmth fills me. My mind is sharper than I can remember; my body hums with energy, as though I have woken from the best sleep in years and had the most resplendent meal.
Suddenly, everything looks bright and vibrant, the world is once again filled with sunlight and hope…and the heir to our realm is here, alive and well.
We have a chance at restoring our kingdom. At chasing away the night and returning to days in the sun.
Unbidden, a memory resurfaces: Yù’chén lying on the ground, his grip tight around my wrist despite his wounds. The devastation to his voice as he’d said, àn’yīng. Stay.
I swallow as the familiar ache flares in my heart. Choosing Hào’yáng is the only way we can banish the Kingdom of Night’s hold on our home. The only way I can bring back those hazy, golden afternoons with Mā and Méi’zi beneath our plum blossom tree.
Hào’yáng catches my arm. “àn’yīng,” he says. “I made the mistake of letting you go once, and I’m not doing it again.”
The air between us shifts, churning with unfinished conversations and half-answered questions. Yet as I stare back at him, he doesn’t look away, doesn’t evade my gaze.
“I let you fall,” I whisper.
Hào’yáng takes both of my hands in his and pulls me closer. Close enough that our knees touch and I can see my reflection in his eyes.
“You saved my life,” he replies. “I could feel the lotus’s magic as I slipped through your grasp: the whispers of it, of you, twining around me and sinking into my blood and bones.
When I fell, I was dying, bleeding out from the wound the hellbeast inflicted upon me.
The last thing I saw before I lost consciousness was a glow, like the sun beginning to rise after a long, dark night.
“And then everything froze—as if I had entered a strange sleep filled with dreams, a land of eternal winter.
I was cold and alone in that darkness, but…
at the end of the night, far away at the edge of the horizon, was a speck of light.
I heard a voice in the wind, calling my name…
so I kept following that light. Because I knew that if I stopped, it would vanish. I would vanish.
“And then, one day, in the phantom wind, I heard you calling my name. Your voice was faint, so faint, and so far away, but…it was you.” His voice cracks, and I squeeze his hands.
That must have been when I saw him through the spring in the Kingdom of Night.
“I was so tired and so cold. But I told myself I had to hold on, just one more heartbeat, and then another… because you were out there, somewhere.