The rain over the southern front was black. It stained the banners, slicked the armor, and turned the earth into something that chewed on men's boots when they tried to stand.
From the walls of the River Hei fortress, the Lord Protector watched his empire drown one heartbeat at a time. The southern legions moved through the fog like a tide of glinting teeth, their banners bright as open wounds. Beyond them, the jungle smoked from a hundred burning villages.
"Three days since the last convoy," said General Han Rui, his face hollow from sleeplessness. "The grain stores are ash. If the supply lines don't open soon—"
The Lord Protector cut him off with a gesture. "Men can starve and still swing a sword. They only forget how to fear."
He turned back to the river. The surface was calm, too calm; the current had slowed, choked by the corpses of beasts and men alike.
Behind him, the officers muttered prayers to old spirits — half military superstition, half desperation. Even the camp priests burned incense for the wrong gods.
The Lord Protector ignored them, though the smoke bit his lungs.
His thoughts were elsewhere — north, in Ling An.
Wu An's name had become a whisper again, the way a wound remembers pain. Every message from the capital came warped — pages damp with blood or ink, the words smearing into spirals. The scouts who carried them refused to speak of what they'd seen. One had bitten off his own tongue rather than describe the city's sky.
My son, he thought, staring into the storm. You were supposed to bring order, not awaken ghosts.
And yet, some part of him — the part that had built an empire from corpses — admired the madness.
"Send what remains of the Seventh Legion to the northern pass," he said finally. "If the Southern Kingdom crosses the Hei, they'll march straight for Longzhou."
Han Rui hesitated. "But if we split our forces—"
"Then we die slower."
Thunder rolled. It wasn't thunder. The sky rippled with crimson light. For an instant the Lord Protector saw shapes in the clouds — vast, shifting, faceless — like gods trying to remember the bodies they once wore.
The wind changed. It smelled of lotus.
He closed his eyes. "It's begun."
In Ling An, the rain never reached the ground. It evaporated mid-fall, consumed by the heat of the living city.
Wu An stood in the ruins of the Lotus Hall, his cloak soaked with ash instead of water. Around him, the soldiers who had marched north now stared at the world as though it had peeled its skin away.
A man screamed when his reflection stepped out of the puddle to strangle him.
Another tore open his own chest and found words instead of lungs — black, crawling characters that hissed prayers backward.
The city's walls had grown taller in the night. Faces pressed outward from the stone, whispering names that hadn't existed since the first dynasties fell. The ground pulsed beneath every step, veins of light running like molten rivers.
Shen Yue staggered beside him, blade shaking in her hand. "What are they?"
Wu An's voice came out hollow. "Remnants of gods — or memories that forgot they died."
One of the creatures — a thing that had once been a soldier — lurched toward him. Its armor had fused with flesh; talismans crawled under its skin like worms seeking light. Its mouth opened and kept opening until the jaw cracked.
Wu An met it with steel. His blade sang once, bright as thunder. The thing fell apart — but instead of blood, mist poured from the wound, and within the mist floated a hundred whispering faces. They smiled as they faded.
Every kill birthed another whisper. Every heartbeat drew more shadows from the walls.
He moved through them like a storm given human shape, his strikes too precise to be mortal. The demon within him laughed, dragging his limbs faster than thought. For the first time, Wu An felt the boundary between himself and the thing dissolve. Every scream, every death, every echo became a chord in the same unholy song.
When he blinked, the city blinked with him.
Shen Yue shouted his name, but the air swallowed sound. The sky had cracked into spirals of light. From those wounds poured wings made of scripture and teeth — angels of a dead faith, descending in silence.
The soldiers broke. They ran into the streets that now led nowhere, swallowed by alleys that breathed.
Wu An dropped to one knee, gasping, his sword trembling in his grip.
The whisper came again, from inside and everywhere at once: You cannot end what was never born.
He looked up — and saw the palace dissolving into light. In that radiance stood Wu Shuang, or what she had become — arms outstretched, hair floating like ink in water, her body a lattice of runes burning from within.
The city bowed to her.
Wu An's vision blurred with tears, blood, and something that might have been awe.
Far to the south, the Lord Protector's horns called retreat across the Hei River.
Far to the north, the Emperor of Zhou stirred from centuries of silence.
Between them, the Northern Kingdom — his kingdom — tore itself apart like paper set aflame.
And Wu An laughed, just once — a broken, breathless sound — because the horror inside him was singing, and for the first time, he almost understood the words.