Taken #3
I cannot move. The shadows hold me like a shroud—gentle, almost, the way a parent might wrap a sleeping child—but absolute.
I can feel my heart beating. I can feel the hollow where Tianlong used to be, that awful empty space in my consciousness.
I cannot feel my hands. I cannot feel my feet.
I cannot feel anything except the cold and the dark and the voice that seems to come from the very air itself.
“I can taste it.”
The voice is soft. Almost tender. There is something beneath it that I recognize—grief, I think, old and vast and terrible—but the surface is calm. Patient. The voice of someone who has waited a very long time and has learned to find peace in waiting.
“I have been waiting for you to love her. I have been cultivating it.”
The darkness shifts. Coalesces. Becomes something that is almost a shape, almost a man, though the edges refuse to stay fixed. Eyes that hold too many years look out at me from a face that suggests humanity without quite achieving it.
The Hungering King.
He is here.
“Let me go.”
My voice comes out steady. I am distantly proud of that. Whatever else I have lost, I have not lost the ability to speak without trembling.
“No.” A pause. Something that might be a smile on that too-fluid face. “But I am sorry. Genuinely.”
“You are going to kill me.”
“No.” The shape moves closer, and I want to recoil, want to fight, want to do anything except hang here helpless in this prison of shadow and cold. “I am going to use you. There is a difference. You will survive this, child. You have to. You are worthless to me dead.”
The cold presses deeper. I try to reach for Tianlong again, habit more than hope, and find only that terrible silence.
“I was you, once.”
The voice softens. The shape settles into something more solid, and for a moment I can see him clearly. A man’s face. Handsome, even. The kind of face that belongs on coins. Eyes that hold centuries of loss.
“Emperor. Dragon-bonded. In love with a woman who should have been impossible.” The voice carries something that sounds almost like nostalgia. “I know how this feels. The wanting. The terror of having something you cannot afford to lose.”
“You know nothing about me.”
“I know everything about you.” The shape leans closer, and the cold intensifies, and I cannot suppress the shudder that runs through me.
“I know that you spent years convincing yourself you do not deserve happiness. I know that she walked into your palace and made you question everything you believed about duty and sacrifice. I know that you have been humming love ballads and staring at taxation reports without reading them and counting the hours until you can return to her.”
My jaw tightens. I say nothing.
“I know,” the Hungering King says softly, “because I was you. Before the loss. Before the hunger. Before I became—this.” The shape gestures at itself, at the darkness that comprises it. “I was a man who loved a woman. I was an emperor who found something worth more than empire. I was happy.”
The word lands strangely. Happy. I try to imagine this creature—this thing of shadow and hunger and ancient grief—happy. Try to imagine him young and whole and in love. Try to imagine him as anything other than the monster from the histories, the nightmare that devoured a dynasty.
I succeed, and the success is terrible.
Because I can see it. I can see the man he must have been, the emperor he describes, the lover who found something worth more than power. I can see him because I know him. Because I am looking in a mirror, a thousand years removed, and the reflection shows me exactly what I could become.
If I lose her.
If she dies, and I do not, and the grief consumes me the way it consumed him.
This is what I could become.
“What happened?”
“She died.” The words are simple. Final. The grief beneath them is oceanic. “She died, and I did not, and I have spent eleven centuries trying to unmake that mistake.”
Eleven centuries. The number settles into me with the weight of stone. Eleven hundred years of this. Eleven hundred years of grief and hunger and shadow. Eleven hundred years of becoming whatever this creature is, this thing that wears the memory of a man like an ill-fitting coat.
“Her name was Mei-Ling.” The Hungering King’s voice has gone distant, soft, the way voices go when they are speaking more to memory than to listener.
“She had a laugh like bells. She used to tend flowers in the imperial garden—not because she had to, but because she loved the way they grew. She would get dirt under her fingernails and smile about it.”
I do not want to hear this. I do not want this monster to have a history, a love story, a humanity that mirrors my own. I do not want to understand him.
“She died saving people. A plague. She burned her own life force to heal them—too much, too fast, and she simply… faded.” A pause that stretches across centuries. “She died in my arms. Smiling. Telling me it was worth it.”
“You cannot bring her back.”
“Can’t I?” The shape smiles, and there is nothing human in it now. “I am very close, little emperor. Closer than I have ever been. I have waited so long. I have sacrificed so much. And now—” The cold pulses, and I feel the shadows tighten around me. “Now I have exactly what I need.”
“I will not help you.”
“You will not have to.” The Hungering King moves back, and the darkness begins to swirl around us both. “She will. That is what love does, little emperor. That is what it is for. She will come for you. She will find you. And when she does—”
The shadows wrap tighter. Warmer, almost. Like an embrace from something that has forgotten what embraces feel like.
“When she does,” the Hungering King says softly, “she will make a choice. The same choice every woman in her bloodline has made. The same choice I have been waiting over a thousand years to offer.”
“If you hurt her—”
“I will not hurt her.” The voice is patient. Kind, almost, in a terrible way. “I will give her a choice. That is all I have ever wanted. That is all I have ever done. The choice is hers to make.”
The darkness is rising now, filling my lungs, filling my eyes, and I try to speak, try to say something, try to—
Her name. I try to say her name. To hold onto something—anything—before the darkness takes me completely.
Lián.
I get one syllable out.
One syllable.
Then darkness.
Then nothing.
The throne room empties of shadow.
One moment the darkness is absolute, pooling in every corner, pressing against every surface. The next, morning light streams through windows that have returned from wherever they went, and the great bronze doors stand open as if they have never been closed.
Ministers stir. Blink. Sit up slowly, confusion on their faces, hands going to heads that ache without explanation. The guards at the doors shake themselves awake, reaching for weapons that have not left their sheaths.
The emperor’s throne is empty.
For a long moment, no one moves. No one speaks. The court stares at the vacant seat where their sovereign should be, and the silence is thick enough to cut.
Then, from somewhere far below—from the dragon caves that tunnel beneath the palace, from the ancient chambers where fire has burned since before the empire was born—a sound rises.
It starts low. A rumble that could be earthquake, could be thunder, could be the palace collapsing. It builds. Grows. Becomes something that shakes the foundations of the palace itself, that sends dust cascading from ceilings and servants stumbling in corridors.
Tianlong roars.
Not the controlled flame of ceremony. Not the measured fire of imperial ritual. This is something else. This is older, and wilder, and terrible in ways that have no name.
The sound shakes the throne room to its foundations. Ministers cover their ears. Guards drop their weapons to clutch at the walls. In the eastern wing, a woman who has killed six hundred and forty-five times stops in the middle of dressing and goes absolutely still.
This is a sound no one in the palace has heard in a thousand years.
The sound of a dragon whose bonded has been stolen.
The sound of a declaration of war.