Chapter Three
Stumbling onto Sunfire Isle covered in blood and in the body of a child alarmed everyone within sight. Despite losing over a foot in height and aged down quite a bit, his people recognized their king.
Two palace guards rushed down the island jungle path and supported either side of him as they led him up the trail. They traveled beneath a large stretch of waterfall, each of his labored footsteps drowned by the roar of the water. On the other side lay a sprawling village filled with his people.
The non-shifters lived in hales built on the ground while many phoenix shifters chose to live among the towering trees.
His own home, called the Roost, was a series of housing structures in the tallest trees, each structure connected by a wooden bridge.
One of these structures was where he lived and slept, while the others were for the purpose of holding court and other necessary meetings.
Weiyu’s strength failed him, and his legs gave out beneath him. Through his hazy vision, he was vaguely aware of people crowded around him and shouts asking after his welfare. He’d barely managed to make it back to Sunfire Isle on drooping wings. He was so tired...
A blur of images passed through spurts of darkness. One moment, he found himself surrounded by soldiers. And the next, he blinked his eyes open slowly to realize soft blankets covered him, and rhythmic chirping of cicadas echoed in the waning light of dusk.
His body ached something fierce as if the process of rebirth had destroyed him once and then again until nothing lingered but exhaustion and pain. His mind remained unaltered, but everything else? He’d taken a good beating in more ways than one.
He blinked several times until he realized he lay in his own bed at the Roost. His treehouse home was built on one of the largest trees on the island forest, three separate stories curving upward on a winding staircase.
The room in which he slept rested on the top floor, large and spacious as it wrapped around the trunk of the enormous tree, creating a rectangular shape on the outside of the structure and a circular shape on the inside.
A place to sleep. A place for his jewelry and clothing.
A rooftop balcony to practice his water magick and shift.
Slowly, his gaze scanned the room until it rested on the older man with furrowed black-gray brows, crafting medicine with his healing magick beneath the lantern light at the nearby table. Everyone in the clan called him Ye-Ye, as he was like a grandfather to all, watching over and helping others.
Weiyu pushed himself into a sitting position, wincing at the strain on his weakened body.
“Try to rest,” Ye-Ye cautioned, more gray in his dark hair than even a few months ago. “You have a long recovery ahead of you.”
A beautiful woman with a brave soul and a heart of steel came to mind, as well as the promise he’d made her. He’d promised to return for her, and he vowed to honor his word. Which meant he couldn’t sit in bed all day.
But as he tried to push himself to his feet, his body only collapsed further against his pillows. There was no energy left to spare.
“What happened?” Ye-Ye asked as he handed him a vial of blue, sparkling medicine.
Shimmers of healing magick lay within, and in a single gulp, he downed the entirety of its contents.
The tingle of magick filled him after a few moments, the healing elixir traveling to the more affected parts of his body.
“We were ambushed.” He almost jumped at the sound of his own voice, younger than he was used to. “No one survived. I was killed twice. Someone rescued me at the expense of herself.” He hoped for her safety. That she wouldn’t get caught.
“But you took many guards with you. How could this have happened?”
“The promise of peace was a pretense. They planned to betray me all along.”
“If all of your men were killed, how did you escape?”
Weiyu placed a small hand against his chest, his Aquatic Core flickering with warmth inside him. It pulsed hotter, faster, stronger at the thought of the woman who had risked everything to save him.
He owed her many lives over. Without her, he may have been killed a hundred times more and his Aquatic Core stolen. His life was now hers, a debt he would spend forever repaying.
Absently, his fingers stroked over the place his Core heated inside his chest. A part of it now lay clasped around the woman’s neck.
If unnoticed by the would-be usurper, the Core offered her protection, and it marked her as Weiyu’s.
No one from the blue phoenix clan would harm her.
It was more likely they would bow to the mate he had chosen.
Rather than answering the man’s question, Weiyu’s head snapped up in a bout of panic. “How long will I look like this? Please tell me it won’t take over a decade to become an adult again.”
The man chuckled and shook his head, his long black beard streaked with gray brushing against his shoulder.
“After the first death, you will age much more quickly until you reach adulthood. Within a couple months, you should appear nineteen again. From there, you should age normally until you reach your prime, in which you should stop aging altogether as long as the Core lay within your body.”
“And if I speed up my aging process right now?”
Concern rested between the man’s brows. “Exhausting your Core in such a way may kill you, and you’d have to start the process from scratch once more. Two months is not long to wait. I advise against such extreme methods.”
Yet, extreme methods greatly tempted him. Once he rescued the female servant from the Perch, she wouldn’t look twice at him in his childish form. But he’d rather take the risk than hide because of fear. He’d chosen this woman to become his mate. Only time would tell if she would choose him back.
He lifted his head, quietly studying the man who had stayed by his father’s side his entire life. An infinite well of wisdom and experience. It would be a shame to let that knowledge go untapped.
“How many times did my father die?” Sure, he’d been curious in the past but had thought it rude to ask. But after experiencing death twice himself? He longed for someone to understand his hurt and his fear, even if they were long gone.
“Five times throughout his life, as far as I am aware.”
Five times...
To die for one’s people over and over again was a heavy burden to bear.
With great effort, he pushed himself into a sitting position, his legs dangling over the side of the bed. “Tell me more about the day he died. I need to know. To understand.”
The older man nodded, expression somber and eyes unfocused as if he found himself sixteen years in the past. “For many decades, discontent and strife drove a wedge between the blue and red phoenix clans. On a smaller island off the coast of Sunfire Isle, the red phoenix clan attacked members of the blue phoenix clan. The massacre was so terrible that there would be no survivors.”
“But I survived.”
“Mm.” The man used his fingers to reach for something invisible as if snatching a star from the midnight sky.
“Your father plucked out his Aquatic Core and set it into your three-year-old body before hiding you away. He gave it to you to save you rather than to save himself. Your parents didn’t survive, but you did. ”
Weiyu pressed his lips together, his small, childish hands running over the bedspread as he tried to recall anything about that fateful day.
Anything at all. But his memory shied away from his parents’ faces, from the fighting and terrible massacre.
Since the age of three, he’d held the Aquatic Core within his body, residing as king over Sunfire Isle. It was all he’d ever known.
But he dearly wished to remember the sound of his mother’s voice or the strength of his father’s arms. If only tragedy hadn’t struck, then he’d still know the love of his parents.
However, he’d found another family, ones he’d met along his journey as king.
As if attuned to his thoughts...
“Yu Yu!” someone shouted outside the door.
Weiyu’s eyes shot wide open. He reached for his blankets and barely managed to pull them over his head to hide himself from view just as the door opened. His three close friends entered judging by Kai’s obnoxious voice, Shanmei’s light footsteps, and Yinyu’s deep grunt of dissatisfaction.
He’d rather die for a third time than allow his friends to see him like this.
“Come on,” Kai insisted and grabbed onto the blankets, a grin showing through the sound of his voice. “Let’s see it.”
Weiyu held on as tightly as the strength in his little fingers allowed, trying to keep his face hidden. “Don’t look at me!”
“Aww! You sound so cute. Lemme see!” More tugging.
“Leave him alone,” Yinyu ordered, his tone as sharp and serious as the angles on his usually stoic face. “Or have you forgotten he’s only this way because he was killed? Twice?”
Kai sighed. “I was only trying to lighten the mood. Why do you always have to put a damper on the atmosphere?”
When his closest friend relinquished his grip on the sheets, Weiyu relaxed. But he realized he never should have let his guard down. Kai once more grabbed the sheets and yanked them off him entirely, exposing his small, child-like frame to the room at large.
Everyone gawked at him, and across the room, Shanmei gasped, pushing a strand of white hair away from her youthful, dark skin, figurative hearts in her icy blue eyes. “I could pinch your cheeks right now! Can I pinch your cheeks? Please?”
Weiyu snatched the nearest pillow and chucked it at Kai, hitting him in the face. He pointed toward Shanmei with a stern expression, silently telling her she was next if she continued her line of thought.
“It’s uncanny,” Kai said, strands of his shoulder-length red-brown hair falling over his eyes as he bent over the bed and hovered his finger over Weiyu’s face, nearly poking his cheek. “You look just like how I remember you from our childhood.”
Yinyu rolled his light golden eyes, a blue phoenix shifter like himself. Although they were friends, he acted more like a bodyguard than a confidant. “Maybe because he’s the same person.”
Kai tried to poke his face regardless. Weiyu smacked his hand away. He attempted a second poke, only for him to smack it away again.
An irritable twitch found its way beneath Weiyu’s youthful eye, but he refused to lose his composure. Especially when he needed to conserve his energy for gaining back the years he’d lost.
“I need your help,” he said, speaking to his three friends. “There’s someone trapped at the Perch, unable to escape. We need to break her out.”
“We as in us, right?” Shanmei asked, absently pulling out two daggers at her waist and twirling them between her fingers.
“Right.” Kai grinned, a mischievous look in either eye. “Children have no place on the battlefield.”
And just like that, Weiyu lost his composure. He found just enough energy to leap up from the bed and jump onto Kai’s back, holding him in a vice grip around the shoulders.
“Take it back!” Weiyu cried. But Kai only laughed while trying to fling him off his back. Weiyu held tighter, wrapping his small legs around the other man’s waist and refusing to let go.
Weiyu flashed his teeth, threatening to bite before Kai shrieked with laughter one final time and conceded. “Fine. Fine! You’ll come with us. Who is this person, anyway?”
He dropped to the floor, his head spinning when his body wanted to collapse into a prolonged state of recovery. Ye-Ye was right. He needed to rest. But he feared if he waited too long, the red phoenix servant might get discovered and punished for aiding him.
“She’s someone who helped me.”
Ye-Ye chimed in. Unfortunately. “Part of his Aquatic Core is missing. I just thought I should point that out.”
All eyes in the room turned on Weiyu again.
As everyone burst into shocked exclamations and relentless questions, Weiyu rubbed a hand over his face and shook his head in exasperation at the old man’s brazenness.
How had Ye-Ye figured out he’d chosen a mate?
He hadn’t said a word about it to give himself away.
Kai struck a fist against his palm, determination in the deep green of his eyes. “A mission to rescue King Weiyu’s mate.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Have you two...you know...” He danced suggestively, moving his hips in a bold enough way to get even Ye-Ye to sigh and shake his head.
Weiyu ignored his friend and turned to the other two.
“I have an idea. If you are willing to follow me into a dangerous situation.” He would never forgive himself if any of them got hurt because of him.
But the four of them worked well together.
Secretly entering the enemy’s territory between the four of them would yield a higher success rate than if he brought a hundred or more soldiers.
One by one, they agreed to help him, each more enthusiastic than the last.
He released a shaky breath at the impossibility of success. But no matter what, he needed to try.
Without glancing up from where he was creating a second healing concoction, Ye-Ye said, “I caution you against shifting until you recover a little further.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Weiyu jested.
He opened the window, but then a jolt of surprise traveled up his body and settled into his quickened pulse.
Far below on the ground and on the branches surrounding the Roost, beads of candlelight flickered in the darkness, illuminating the worried expressions from those of his clan.
Emotion touched his heart at how much they cared about their king. He pressed a hand to his heart to show his acknowledgement and made a silent vow not to let them down again. He would deal with the red phoenix clan leader.
And bring his future mate home while he was at it.