Willing to Burn #2
“Fair.” He moves to one of the ancient columns, runs a hand along the stone as if remembering something carved there long ago. “After Mei-Ling died, I hunted her descendants. Her children. Her grandchildren. Every branch of the bloodline, scattered across the empire and beyond.”
“They ran.”
“They ran. They hid. They changed their names, married into obscure families, fled to distant provinces.” A pause. “They died rather than give me what I needed. Generation after generation. The women of Mei-Ling’s line are... stubborn.”
I think of Lián. The way she threw herself between me and a crossbow bolt without hesitation. The way she fights, jokes, refuses to break.
Stubborn is one word for it.
“Lián’s mother was the last guardian of the bloodline,” he continues. “The last who knew what they were—descendants of the House of Ascending Dawn. A celestial house, fallen now, destroyed when I began my hunt. She carried the old knowledge. The old magic.”
“Celestial.” I turn the word over. “Lián carries celestial blood.”
“Diluted by generations, but yes. The House of Ascending Dawn was one of the great celestial lineages—beings who walked between heaven and earth before the current order. Mei-Ling was their last princess. Her descendants carry echoes of that power.”
I think of Tianlong’s words when he first saw her. You carry old magic, daughter of dawn. I had not understood. I am beginning to.
“Her mother knew I had found them again,” the Hungering King says. “She had perhaps a day’s warning. Not enough time to run. Not enough time to hide in the usual ways.” His voice softens. “So she did something desperate. Something that should not have worked.”
“The curse.”
“The curse.” He turns to face me. “She poured everything she had into hiding her daughter. Not just from my eyes—from my senses. Every way I have of tracking the bloodline, every thread of connection I can follow—she severed them all. Made her daughter invisible to me in a way no one had ever managed before.”
“For eight hundred years.”
“For eight hundred years, I could not find her. Could not sense her. Could not even confirm she still existed.” Something flickers across his face—frustration, old and festering. “I searched. I sent agents. I waited. Nothing. It was as if Mei-Ling’s line had finally ended.”
“But the immortality,” I say. “Lián cannot die. That is not hiding—that is something else.”
“The immortality was not intended.” He says it simply, as fact. “Her mother was desperate. The magic she worked was older than she fully understood—celestial magic, from before the current order. She meant only to hide her daughter. But the concealment magic... it caught. Held. Refused to let go.”
“She cannot die because the curse will not release her.”
“She cannot die because the magic that hides her requires her to exist. If she dies permanently, the concealment ends. So the curse brings her back. Again and again. A side effect her mother never anticipated.”
I think of Lián. Six hundred and forty-four deaths. Eight centuries of pain, of loss, of watching everyone she loves turn to dust while she remains. All because her mother tried to save her.
“Does she know?” I ask. “What she is? Why she cannot die?”
“No.” The word is soft. Almost gentle. “Her mother died casting the curse. There was no one left to tell her. She knows only that she cannot stay dead—not why, not how, not what she carries in her blood.”
“The House of Ascending Dawn.”
“Gone now. She is the last. The last of Mei-Ling’s direct line, the last of the celestial house, the last daughter of dawn.
” He meets my eyes. “And she does not even know her true name. The curse took that too. Took her memories of her mother, her heritage, her history. She chose the name Lián because she did not remember any other.”
Something cold moves through me. Not for myself—for her. Eight centuries of not knowing who she is. Of being hunted for reasons she does not understand. Of dying again and again for a curse she never asked for.
“Then how did you find her?” I ask. “If the curse hid her so completely—”
“Dragon fire.” He smiles, and there is no joy in it. “Her mother designed the curse to hide her from me. From my senses, my magic, my ways of seeing. But she did not design it to hide her from dragons.”
I understand now. The night Lián poisoned me. Tianlong’s fire erupting from my chest, burning through the wound, illuminating the room with ancient light.
“When your dragon’s fire touched her—when she witnessed the bond between you—the magic recognized something older than the curse. Something it could not conceal.” He spreads his hands. “She lit up like a beacon. After eight hundred years of darkness, I could finally see her.”
“So you arranged for her to find me.”
“I arranged for her to try to kill you. I knew she would fail—the dragon bond protects you from death. But I needed her close to dragon fire. Close enough, long enough, for the curse to crack.” He tilts his head. “I did not expect her to stay. That part was... fortunate.”
Fortunate. He calls it fortunate. He calls the slow destruction of our lives a piece of good luck in his centuries-long game.
“You have studied this curse for eight hundred years,” I say. “You understand how it works. How it hides her. How it brings her back.”
“Yes.”
“Then you know how to break it.”
Something shifts in his face. Subtle. Most would miss it.
I do not miss it.
“The ritual will—”
“I am not asking about your ritual.” I keep my voice steady. “I am asking about the curse itself. You have studied it for eight centuries. You know what it does. You know how it works.” I pause. “You know its weaknesses.”
He is silent.
“Unless there are parts you do not know.”
The silence stretches. I watch him carefully—the way his jaw tightens, the way his eyes slide away from mine for just a moment before returning.
“The curse was created by her mother,” he says finally. “Built on older foundations. Magic passed down through the bloodline for generations—protections laid by Mei-Ling’s mother herself.”
“Mei-Ling’s mother.” Not Lián’s mother. A different woman entirely. “She knew what you would become.”
“Before I even met her daughter. Before I even knew Mei-Ling’s name.
” Something cracks in his voice. “She looked at me across a crowded hall—a young prince, a man who studied philosophy and loved poetry, a man who had never harmed anyone—and she knew. And she spent the rest of her life preparing for what I would do after her daughter was gone.”
“She wrote protections into her bloodline.” I say.
“Warnings. Safeguards. Instructions for her descendants, passed down through generations.” He is not looking at me anymore.
He is looking at something I cannot see—something centuries past. “The curse Lián’s mother cast was built on foundations her ancestor laid.
Magic designed specifically to defeat me. ”
“And you have studied it for over a thousand years.”
“Every fragment I could find. Every echo. Every variation.” His hands clench at his sides. “But there are passages in Mei-Ling’s mother’s hand. Written in the old tongue. About what I was. What I would become. What I would do to her bloodline.”
“You have not read them.”
“I could not.” The admission comes hard, dragged from somewhere deep. “To read her words would be to accept what she saw. To acknowledge that the woman I loved came from someone who looked at me and saw a monster. Not a man who might become a monster—a monster already, waiting to emerge.”
I file this away carefully.
Over a thousand years of studying the curse.
Every fragment, every echo—except the parts that might defeat him.
Because reading them would mean accepting what Mei-Ling’s mother saw when she looked at him.
Would mean acknowledging that his beloved’s family knew exactly what he would become, and built protections against him before he even understood himself.
Grief made him skip the parts that predict his defeat.
I do not know yet how this helps me. I do not know what those unread passages contain. But I know they exist. I know he cannot bring himself to face them.
And I know that somewhere in those words, there may be a way to save her.
“The ritual,” I say. “If she comes for me—”
“When she comes for you.” He sounds certain. Patient. “She will. I know her bloodline. They love fiercely, the daughters of Mei-Ling’s line. They love until it destroys them.”
“And when she offers herself—”
“Willingly. For you. Fueled by love.” His voice softens into something almost tender. “She will make the choice her ancestor made. She will die for someone she loves. And I will finally have what I have been waiting for.”
The chamber feels smaller. The shadows press closer.
“You could let her go,” I say. “Let us both go. Whatever Mei-Ling was, whatever you had with her—she would not want this.”
“You did not know her.”
“I know her descendant. I know the woman who carries her blood, who laughs like—” I stop. The comparison feels too intimate, too precious, to share with him. “She would not want someone to die for her resurrection. She would not want you to become this.”
For a moment—just a moment—something flickers across his face. Recognition. Grief. The ghost of the man he used to be.
Then it passes.
“Perhaps,” he says. “But I have come too far to stop now, little emperor. Centuries of sacrifice, of hunger, of becoming this.” He gestures at himself, at the shadows, at the ancient terrible place where we stand. “If I stop now, it was all for nothing. All of it.”
He moves toward the darkness at the edge of the chamber.
“She is coming,” he says without turning. “I can feel her on the road. Following the thread. Racing toward the trap I have been building.”
“She will not give herself willingly.”
“She will.” Absolute certainty. “Because that is what love does. It makes you willing to burn.”
He pauses at the threshold of darkness.
“You wonder,” he says, “why I am telling you this. Why I explain my plan to the man I intend to use as bait.”