Toward
I feel it the moment it happens.
Like a thread snapping. Like something breaking that shouldn’t break—something I didn’t know was holding me together until it tears loose and leaves a hole where my chest used to be.
I’m running before I understand why.
Through corridors. Past guards who shout something I don’t hear. My feet know where to go. My ribs are cracking around something cold and empty and wrong, and I can’t breathe but I’m still moving because stopping means feeling it, and I can’t feel it, I can’t—
The throne room doors are open.
They shouldn’t be open.
Inside: nothing. The throne sits empty. Ministers are scattered across the floor—breathing, I check, still breathing—but their faces are slack, their eyes unfocused. In the corners, shadows pool like oil. Thick. Lingering. The kind of dark that doesn’t belong in a room full of windows.
No Ren. No guards. Just absence where he should be.
And then Tianlong’s voice slams into my skull.
Not the dry commentary I’m used to. Not the ancient amusement. This is broken—fragmented, agonized, a three-thousand-year-old creature screaming through a bond that’s been half-severed.
He took him. The Hungering King. He came through the shadows and I couldn’t—the bond—he CUT the bond—
“Where.” I say it out loud. Doesn’t matter. Tianlong can hear me either way.
I don’t know. I can’t feel him. I can’t— The voice splinters. Reforms. Little dawn. I can’t feel him.
“WHERE.”
I’m not shouting. I’m not capable of shouting right now. This is worse than shouting. This is the voice of something that has stopped pretending to be human.
I don’t know. Tianlong’s voice shudders through my mind—fractured, wrong. He severed it. The bond. Cut it like—like a thread. I’ve never—never felt anything like—
My hands want to shake. I don’t let them.
“The temple,” I say. Out loud, but he can hear me. “Mei-Ling’s tomb.” I’m pulling the map from memory, every site Jing’s research identified, every location the cult has touched. “He’ll be at one of them.”
Silence. Not the comfortable kind. The kind where something ancient is trying to breathe through pain that shouldn’t be possible.
Little dawn. His voice is barely there. Find him.
I turn and walk out.
Jing finds me in the armory.
I’m pulling weapons from the racks. Knives. More knives. A sword—I haven’t used a sword in two centuries because swords are theatrical and I’ve never liked theater—but right now I want something with reach. Something that will let me cut through whatever stands between me and—
“Seven possible sites.” Jing’s hands shake when she spreads the scrolls across a weapons crate. Her voice doesn’t. Good. “Three within two days’ ride. Mei-Ling’s tomb is the most likely—here.” She points. “Southeast. Through the mountain pass.”
I memorize the route. Fold it into my head alongside the knives I’m strapping to my thighs.
Wei arrives next. Limping. Still healing from the battle at the mountain temple, arm in a sling, but standing at attention like I’m someone worth saluting.
“I can have fifty soldiers ready within the hour. More by morning.”
“No.”
“Excuse me—”
“Don’t.” I don’t look up from the sword I’m testing.
The balance is wrong. I grab another. “He wants me. If I bring an army, Ren dies before I reach the door. If I bring anyone—” The next sword is better.
Not good. Better. “—they die. All of them. That’s not a maybe.
“That’s what happens when you face something that’s survived a thousand years by consuming everything in its path. ”
Wei’s jaw tightens. He wants to argue. He’s a general; arguing is what he does.
“Let me come with you,” he says. “Just me. One sword watching your back.”
I finally look at him.
He’s a good man. Loyal. The kind of soldier who would die for his emperor without hesitation, and right now he’s offering to die for me too—for the woman his emperor loves, the woman who might be able to bring him back.
I could let him come. He’d fight well. Die well.
He’d still die.
“I’ve done this six hundred and forty-four times.” My voice sounds strange. Flat in a way it hasn’t been in years. “Dying. I’m good at it. You’re not.”
Something moves in the doorway. Lady Mei. Her face is a mask of perfect composure, but her eyes are sharp and assessing.
“You’re going alone,” she says. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“That’s suicide.”
“Probably.”
I expect her to argue. She doesn’t. She just watches me with those calculating eyes, the ones that have survived three decades of court politics by knowing exactly when a battle is worth fighting.
This isn’t one of them.
“Bring him back,” she says finally. “The empire needs an emperor. I’d rather not have to train a new one.”
“That’s touching.”
“It’s practical.” A pause. “The touching part goes without saying.”
I almost smile. Almost. My face doesn’t seem to remember how.
“Watch Tianlong,” I say. “He’s hurt. I’ve never seen a dragon hurt like that before.”
Lady Mei nods once. Then she turns and walks away, and I’m left with Jing still clutching her scrolls and Wei still standing at attention and fifty soldiers who will never leave this palace because I won’t let them follow me into the dark.
I’m going alone.
That’s how it has to be.
Tianlong’s lair is colder than I remember.
The gold doesn’t gleam. The crystals that have glowed for milennia are dim, flickering. And Tianlong—
Tianlong is coiled around his hoard like he’s trying to hold himself together. Scales that should gleam like hammered gold are dull. Tarnished. Blood leaks from his eyes, his nostrils, pooling between the coins beneath his massive head.
Three thousand years old. Head the size of my chambers. And he looks like something that’s dying.
Golden tears have dried on his scales—dragons cry gold, apparently. The tracks cut through the blood like rivers through mud.
“I can give you something.”
His voice is stronger than before. Not strong. Just stronger.
“A thread.” Ancient eyes, wet and tired, that don’t quite meet mine. “Of the bond. Enough to find him.”
I stop. “You can do that?”
“The bond is not completely severed. There is still—” He pauses. A breath that shudders through his entire massive body. “—a fragment. A connection. Damaged but present. I can extend a piece of it to you. Let you feel where he is.”
“Why didn’t you lead with that?”
“Because it will hurt.” Now he looks at me. Those furnace eyes, dimmed to embers, full of something I’ve never seen on his face before. Fear. “Not me. You. Carrying a piece of a damaged bond is not—it will feel like a hook in your chest. Pulling. Constantly.”
“I don’t care.”
“I know.” Something that might be a smile, if smiles could be made of grief. “That is why I am offering.”
He lowers his head. The tip of his snout touches my forehead—cold, wrong, how is a dragon cold—and then something shifts.
Inside me.
A thread. Thin. Fragile. Pulling toward something in the darkness.
Toward Ren.
It hurts exactly like Tianlong promised. Like a fishhook buried behind my sternum, tugging with every heartbeat. But beneath the pain, beneath the wrongness, there’s something else.
Him.
Faint. Distant. Muffled by shadows and ancient power.
But there.
“Bring him back.” Tianlong’s voice cracks. When he speaks next, the humor is gone. The ancient dignity is gone. There’s nothing left but a creature who has loved the same person for twenty-two years and is watching him be stolen away. “He is the only flame I have left to guard.”
I can’t answer. There’s nothing to say that isn’t a promise I might not keep.
Something winds around my ankles. Warm. Insistent.
Dumpling.
He looks up at me with eyes that don’t understand anything—don’t understand why the palace feels wrong, why everyone is scared, why I’m armed to the teeth and standing in a dragon’s lair at sunset when I should be eating dinner.
I pick him up. Hold him too tight. He permits it.
“You’re in charge of Tianlong while I’m gone.” My voice breaks on the last word. Stupid. Eight centuries old and I’m crying into cat fur. “Make sure he doesn’t do anything dramatic.”
Dumpling mrps.
“Good chat.”
I set him down. He pads across the gold and curls against Tianlong’s massive forelimb. The dragon doesn’t protest—just shifts one great claw to curl around the cat like he’s holding onto the last warm thing in the world.
Maybe he is.
I leave before I can change my mind.
The gates are already open when I reach the courtyard.
Someone sent word. Of course they did. Jing, probably. She’s efficient like that.
A horse is waiting. Saddled. Provisioned. The kind of horse built for speed, not comfort, because comfort doesn’t matter when you’re riding toward something that wants to kill you.
Wei is there. Lady Mei. A handful of servants who don’t know what to do with themselves. They stand in a ragged line like a honor guard for a funeral procession, and maybe that’s what this is.
I don’t say goodbye.
There’s nothing to say. They know what I’m doing. They know why. They know I probably won’t come back, and if I do, I’ll be different—I’m always different when I come back—and the woman who rides out of these gates might not be the same woman who rides back in.
If she rides back at all.
Jing presses a package into my hands. Supplies. Research. A map with three locations circled in red ink.
“The thread will guide you,” she says. “But if you lose it—”
“I won’t lose it.”
She nods. Steps back.
Wei doesn’t salute. He bows. Deep. The bow of a soldier to a superior officer, and I want to tell him I’m not his officer, I’m not anyone’s anything, I’m just a woman who’s been dying for eight hundred years and finally found something worth living for—
But I don’t. Because I don’t have the words. Because the hook in my chest is pulling, pulling, pulling, and if I stop to explain myself I might not start moving again.
The gates open wider.
I ride.
The road is dark.
It’s been dark since I left the palace, even though sunset was only an hour ago. The sky above me should be purple, streaked with the last gold of day. Instead it’s grey. Flat. Like something has drained the color out of the world.
Or maybe the color is just gone for me.
The thread pulls.
Every mile is a mile closer to Ren. Every mile is a mile closer to the thing that took him—the ancient hunger, the grief made flesh, the monster that used to be a man who loved someone the way I—
I don’t finish that thought.
The horse runs. The road unspools. The thread hooks deeper into my chest and I let it, welcome it, because pain means he’s still there. Pain means the bond hasn’t broken completely. Pain means I still have a direction to run.
I’ve spent eight hundred years running from things. From people. From anything that might make me want to stay.
Now I’m running toward.
For the first time in eight centuries, I’m running toward.
The irony isn’t lost on me. The universe has a sick sense of humor—always has—and here I am, the woman who couldn’t stay for anyone, riding hell-bent through the darkness to save a man I’ve known for less than two months.
A man I tried to kill.
A man who makes me laugh.
A man who writes terrible poetry and thinks it’s good.
A man who said stay like it meant something, and I said yes, and I meant it, and now some ancient monster has stolen him away because love is a weapon and the Hungering King knows exactly how to use it.
I think about Ren’s hands.
The way they cup my jaw. Careful. Like I’m something precious, something that might break, something worth treating gently even though he knows I’ve survived worse than gentle handling.
I think about his voice.
The rare almost-smile that transforms his entire face. The way he said wife like he was tasting the word, deciding if he liked how it fit in his mouth. The way he laughed—actually laughed—when I told him his poetry needed work, and I realized I would do terrible things to hear that sound again.
I think about mornings.
Waking up next to him. His shoulder against mine. Dumpling between us, purring like a small motor, and for the first time, in too many years to remember, I didn’t want to leave. Didn’t count the exits. Didn’t calculate the fastest route out of someone’s life.
I wanted to stay.
So I’m going to get him back. And then I’m going to stay.
The thread pulls harder. Closer. The darkness ahead is absolute—not just absence of light but something more, something active, something that eats photons and hope and everything good.
I ride faster.
Chapter 644, revised.
In which our heroine stops running away.
And starts running toward.
In which she discovers that eight hundred years of practice at leaving doesn’t mean anything when you finally find a reason to stay.
In which she rides into darkness—not because she wants to die, but because everything she wants to live for is waiting on the other side.
The road narrows. Trees close in overhead, branches reaching like fingers, and the shadows beneath them are deeper than shadows should be.
The thread pulls.
I don’t look back.
Everything worth seeing is ahead.