Taken #2
They do not need to. They are wrong. I know they are wrong the way I know when a soldier is lying about his readiness or a minister is concealing bad news—some instinct beneath thought, honed by years of learning to read the currents of power. Something in this room is not as it should be.
But the court is watching and the business is routine, and I have been emperor long enough to know that wrongness does not always demand immediate attention. Sometimes wrongness waits. Sometimes it tests.
Ren.
Tianlong’s voice cuts through Chen’s recitation. Urgent.
I keep my expression neutral.
Something is—
Chen stops mid-sentence.
For a moment I think I have interrupted him, some gesture I made without intending. Then I see his face. His eyes have gone wide, his mouth open around a word he will never finish, and as I watch he simply—stops. Collapses forward with the boneless grace of a puppet whose strings have been cut.
He hits the marble floor and does not move.
Around the chamber, ministers shift. Murmurs rise. I am already standing, already moving toward the steps, when Minister Feng stumbles. His hand goes to his chest. His eyes roll back.
He falls.
Then the scribe beside him. Then the guard at the eastern door.
One by one, they drop. Not dead—I can see them breathing, see their chests rising and falling with mechanical regularity—but empty. Their eyes are open and there is nothing behind them. Nothing at all. As if someone has reached inside and taken what makes them themselves.
The temperature drops.
Not gradually. Not naturally. A cold that does not belong to weather or season, that settles into my bones with the patience of stone. A cold that belongs to—
I know what this is.
I have read about it. In histories so old they are half legend, in texts the archivists keep locked away because the knowledge they contain is too dangerous for casual study.
The presence that devours. The hunger that walks.
The shadow that consumed a dynasty four centuries before my grandfather’s grandfather was born.
Ren—
Tianlong’s voice is muffled. Like speaking through water. Like shouting across a vast distance that should not exist between us.
I reach for him through the bond—that thread of fire and consciousness that has been my constant companion since I was twelve—and find resistance. Something between us. Something blocking.
Ren, something is—
“Guards.” My voice cuts through the chamber. The remaining ministers are backing toward the walls, terror on their faces, and I need them out. I need to understand what is happening. I need—
No response.
The guards at the doors have fallen. Every one of them. The chamber is littered with bodies now, breathing but empty, and I am alone at the center of it with the cold pressing in and the bond going strange and the shadows pooling darker in every corner.
I reach for the dragon fire.
It has lived in me since I was twelve years old—since I walked into the heart of a fire and emerged changed, bonded, carrying a piece of Tianlong’s ancient flame in my blood. I have called it a thousand times. In battle. In ceremony. In the quiet moments when I need to remind myself what I am.
The fire sparks.
Sputters.
Dies.
Something is eating it. Something is swallowing the flame before it can catch, consuming the heat the way the cold is consuming everything else, and I cannot—
I reach for Tianlong. What is happening?
He is here. The words come fractured, broken, like Tianlong is fighting to push them through a barrier of stone. The Hungering—he is here—I cannot—
I reach for the doors.
They are not there.
I stop. Stare. Where the great bronze doors of the throne room have stood for more years than I can count, there is only wall.
Smooth stone, unmarked, as if the doors have never existed at all.
The windows are gone too. The chamber has become a cage, sealed, complete, and I am trapped inside it with the cold and the dark and the bodies of my court breathing their empty breaths around me.
Her name rises without permission.
The woman who sleeps in my chambers and laughs at my poetry and makes me want things I have spent twenty-two years refusing to want.
“Lián—”
I get the first syllable out.
The shadows move.
I do not wait for them to reach me.
The dragon fire will not answer, but I am not only fire.
I am years of training, of battle, of learning to survive when survival should be impossible.
My sword clears its sheath before conscious thought catches up—a blade I have carried since my coronation, steel folded a thousand times by the empire’s finest smiths, edge sharp enough to split a hair.
I swing at the nearest shadow.
The blade passes through darkness like smoke and comes out the other side trailing nothing. No resistance. No impact. I might as well have struck at fog.
The shadows continue their advance.
I back toward the throne, sword raised, mind racing through options. The doors are gone. The fire will not come. Tianlong’s voice is fading in my head, going distant, and I do not let myself think about what that means. There must be something. There must be a way—
Ren—
His voice breaks through, ragged, and I have never heard Tianlong sound like this. Not even when we faced the rebellion, when assassins breached the palace, when I took an arrow through the shoulder and felt him scream with shared pain.
He is cutting us apart.
I feel it then. The bond—that thread of fire and consciousness that has connected us since I was twelve—is fraying.
I can feel it the way I would feel a rope around my wrist being sawed through strand by strand.
Something ancient and patient is working at the connection, severing it with surgical precision, and Tianlong is—
Little flame—I cannot—
Hold on. I do not know if I say it or think it. HOLD ON.
I am trying—I am trying—
I can feel him fighting. Through what remains of the bond, I can feel Tianlong throwing himself against whatever barrier has risen between us.
Three thousand years of power and will and ancient fire, hurling itself against a wall of shadow.
I feel his rage. His fear. His desperate, clawing need to reach me.
It is not enough.
REN—
The bond tears.
There is no other word for it. Something that has been part of me since I was a child—something so fundamental to my existence that I cannot remember who I was before it—rips free like a limb being torn from its socket.
I feel it go. I feel the moment the connection breaks, the instant the fire that has burned in my blood for twenty-two years gutters and dies.
The shadows close. I swing again, uselessly, and the blade dissolves in my hands.
Simply dissolves. Metal becoming ash becoming nothing, running through my fingers like black sand.
I drop the hilt and back against the throne, and the cold is everywhere now, pressing in from all sides, and Tianlong’s voice is going to static, to fragments, to—
Ren—
I reach for him. In my mind, in my soul, in whatever part of me the bond lives in. I reach the way I have reached a thousand times before, across the distance between us, through the fire that connects us, and I find—
Nothing.
The bond goes dark.
I have never been alone in my head. Not since I was twelve years old.
Not since I walked into a mountain and walked out changed, carrying a piece of something ancient and magnificent in my consciousness.
Twenty-two years of his voice. His commentary.
His insufferable amusement at everything I do.
His wisdom when I need it and his silence when I do not and the constant, steady presence of another soul alongside my own.
I have complained about his intrusions for years.
His unsolicited observations. The way he comments on my heartbeat and my breathing and the things I refuse to say out loud.
I have wished, in moments of particular annoyance, for five minutes of quiet.
For a single thought that is entirely my own.
I did not know.
I did not know that his voice is the sound of not being alone.
That his presence—irritating, invasive, inescapable—is the only thing standing between me and a loneliness so vast I cannot comprehend its edges.
That the fire he gave me is not just power, not just the ability to summon flame, but warmth itself.
Connection. The knowledge that whatever happens, whatever I face, there is someone who will face it with me.
It is not silence. It is an amputation.
I reach for him—habit, instinct, desperation—and there is nothing there.
A hollow where his voice should be. An absence that weighs more than presence ever did.
I reach and I reach and I reach, and I find only emptiness, only cold, only the terrible understanding that I am utterly, completely alone.
The cold presses in and the darkness rises and I am alone, I am completely alone, I am—
I scream.
Not the controlled sound of a sovereign issuing commands.
Not the measured voice of an emperor who has spent his life learning to show nothing, to feel nothing that could be used against him, to be the throne rather than the man who sits upon it.
This is something else. This is raw. This is ragged.
This is the sound of a man who has just lost a part of himself he did not know he could lose.
The shadows seem to pause.
As if surprised.
Then they close in, and I have nothing left to fight them with, and the darkness swallows me whole.
The voice comes from everywhere.
And nowhere.
“You love her.”