Daughter of the Dawn #2
“To complete what he started. To fill the void.” The monk’s blind eyes turn toward Lián, and despite their milkiness, I would swear they see her clearly. “The ritual requires willing sacrifice. A death freely given, by someone of Mei-Ling’s blood, fueled by love. It will either restore him or—”
“Or?”
“Or end everything. The hunger consuming him will consume the world.”
Silence. The mist curls around the broken columns. Somewhere outside, a bird calls—incongruous, ordinary, belonging to a world that does not know what we have just learned.
“Well.” Lián’s voice is carefully flat. “That’s worse than I thought.”
My hand moves to my pocket without conscious decision.
The jade comb. I have carried it since my mother’s death, a talisman against the weight of the crown. Green jade worn smooth by generations of hands. Silver filigree tarnished to a soft grey. Plum blossoms etched along the spine, their petals so delicate they seem ready to fall.
I have pressed this comb to my lips in moments of despair.
Held it like a rosary when the weight of empire threatened to crush me.
Touched it before every battle, every treaty, every execution I was forced to order.
My mother gave it to me the night before she died, and I have never spent a day without it.
I don’t know why, but I retrieve it now.
The monk goes absolutely still.
“Where did you get that?”
“My mother. She gave it to me before she died. It was an heirloom—her grandmother’s grandmother’s, passed down through generations.” The jade catches the dim light, glowing faintly green. “Why?”
“That comb,” the monk says, and his ancient voice trembles, “was the Hungering King’s wedding gift to Mei-Ling. He carved it himself.”
The temple is silent.
I look at the comb in my hands. At the object I have treasured for twenty-two years.
Every time I touched it for comfort, I was touching the ghost of the monster who wants to consume the world.
Every time I thought of my mother’s love, I was holding proof that seven centuries of fate had been arranged to bring me to this moment.
“Everything is connected.” I do not recognize my own voice. “He has been moving us toward each other for centuries.”
Lián’s face is pale in the dim light. Her hand has dropped from my arm; she stands apart from me now, a careful distance that I recognize. She is calculating. Assessing. Deciding whether to run.
I have seen this look before. After our first kiss. After the night we held hands without sleeping. Every time something draws her closer, she measures the distance to the door.
“Does that change anything?”
The question hangs between us. A blade waiting to fall.
I think of what the monk has told us. A ritual that requires willing sacrifice, fueled by love.
The Hungering King has been cultivating this for nearly eight hundred years—the curse that preserves her bloodline, the dragon bond that would illuminate what her concealment magic hid.
Every thread of fate, every coincidence that brought her to my palace and my life, woven by hands that have been moving pieces since before my dynasty existed.
I should feel manipulated. Trapped. Used.
I look at her. At Lián. Not Mei-Ling’s echo. Not a bloodline. Not a ritual component. At the woman who makes jokes when she is afraid, who counts exits in every room, who falls asleep holding my hand and pretends not to notice in the morning.
“No,” I say. “It does not.”
Her expression flickers. Something cracks behind her eyes—disbelief, hope, fear.
“You didn’t even think about it.”
“I have been thinking about it since the moment I met you.” I close the distance between us. “The answer has always been no.”
The attack comes without warning.
One moment the temple is silent; the next, figures pour through the broken walls. Cult members in black robes, faces covered, blades drawn. They move with the coordination of soldiers, flanking, cutting off exits.
Seventeen. Tianlong’s voice is sharp in my mind. At least seventeen. More coming through the eastern breach.
“Behind you!” Lián shouts.
I do not have time to respond. My body moves before my mind catches up—years of training taking over, muscle memory that does not require imperial approval.
I spin, parry, feel steel screech against steel.
Lián is already moving, her knife clearing its sheath as she flows into the first attacker like water finding cracks in stone.
We fall into position back to back without discussion.
Her spine against mine. Her breathing, harsh and controlled, syncing with the rhythm of combat. I know where she is without looking, can feel the shifts in her weight as she pivots, strikes, kills.
We have fought together before. The warehouse ambush, but that feels like a lifetime ago. That was chaos, desperation, two strangers thrown together by circumstance. This is something else. This is trust.
She is a blur of violence. Efficient. Brutal.
Beautiful in a way that makes my chest tight with something that has no place on a battlefield.
I watch her kill a man with a movement so economical it seems almost gentle—a redirect of his own momentum, her blade finding the gap between armor and helm—and I forget to watch my own angles.
“Focus!” she shouts.
“I am focused.”
“You’re staring at me!”
“I’m watching your back!”
“You’re watching my—” She pivots, blade slicing across a cultist’s throat. Two more fall in the space between her words. Her voice does not even waver. “We’re having this conversation later!”
A sword comes for my head. I parry, riposte, feel my blade find flesh. The merchant’s clothes are wrong for this—too loose, too likely to catch on something—but my body knows how to compensate. Twenty-two years of war and assassination attempts since the dragon chose me.
Left!
I drop and roll. A blade whistles through the space where my neck was. I come up already swinging, and the cultist crumples.
I turn. Block. Strike. Turn again.
They keep coming. More than seventeen now—reinforcements through the broken gate, a seemingly endless supply of bodies to throw at us. My arms are burning. The sword grows heavy in my hands. A blade gets through my guard, slicing a line of fire across my ribs—not deep, but bleeding.
“Ren!” Lián’s voice, sharp with something I refuse to name.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“It’s superficial.”
“It’s distracting.” She cuts down the cultist who wounded me with a savagery I have not seen from her before. “If you die, I will never forgive you.”
“Noted.”
Tianlong manifests.
Not the eight-inch lizard who has been riding in my collar these weeks, complaining about dignity and the fundamental unfairness of having to share space with a cat.
The full dragon. Ancient and terrible, scales like hammered gold, eyes like twin suns.
He fills the temple with his presence, with a weight that presses against my chest, and when he opens his jaws, the world turns to fire.
Cultists scream. Cultists burn.
It costs him. Even as the golden flames consume our enemies, I feel the strain through our bond—a stretching, a fraying, a bone-deep exhaustion that is not my own. He shrinks back almost immediately, collapsing to his small form, coiling around my arm and trembling.
“Don’t do that again,” Lián snaps. She is breathing hard, splattered with blood that is not hers, alive and furious and magnificent.
“He was in danger.” Tianlong’s voice is faint.
“You almost—”
“I would burn a thousand times for him.” The dragon’s golden eyes find her, and there is nothing of humor in them. Nothing of the sardonic companion who has been commenting on my romantic failures for three weeks. “And for you, little dawn. Whether you like it or not.”
Lián stares at him. “Did you just call me ‘little dawn’?”
“It seemed appropriate.”
“Is this a dragon bonding thing? Should I be concerned?”
“You should be grateful, little dawn.” A pause. “The last mortal I named took three centuries to earn it.”
“Wonderful. I’ve been adopted by a reptile.”
“I am a dragon.”
“Same thing.”
“I will remember this insult.”
“You’ll remember everything. That’s your tragedy.”
The remaining cultists have fled. The temple is secure, its stones scorched black where Tianlong’s fire touched them. But the silence that follows is not peaceful. We have been seen. We have been found.
The Hungering King knows exactly where we are.
Night falls over the temple ruins.