By the ninth night of the He Lian Dynasty, the city began to dream while awake.
The courtiers noticed first. The ink on their decrees refused to dry, spreading like veins across parchment until the characters joined into a single word that no one could read. When the scribes tried to burn it, the paper did not blacken—it wept.
By dawn, half the ministers in the Lotus Hall had vanished. Their servants found only robes folded neatly on the marble, as if the bodies had stepped out of themselves. The remaining officials knelt trembling before the throne while the false sun's light leaked through the roof like blood through gauze.
Wu Jin kept his composure with effort. "It is fatigue," he told them. "Our reforms strain the court. The gods test our devotion."
His voice echoed strangely, the last syllables returning in a tone that was not his own. The ministers bowed lower, afraid to breathe.
From her seat beside the throne, Wu Shuang said nothing. Her hands rested on her knees, but her fingertips tapped the floor to the rhythm of a distant pulse only she could hear. The same rhythm haunted her dreams—sometimes gentle, sometimes thunderous, but always calling downward.
That evening, when the hall emptied, she touched the tiles where the missing ministers had knelt. The stone was warm. Beneath it, something breathed.
In the corridors beyond, the servants whispered of mirrors that lied. They claimed the reflections in the bronze panels still moved after the watchers turned away. One steward slit his own throat after insisting he saw the Emperor's face smiling from his cup of wine.
At the great gate, soldiers stood in perfect ranks even after death. Their skin had hardened into porcelain, their eyes replaced by lotus seeds that sprouted faint green light.
The city guard burned the bodies. By morning, the ashes had re-formed into silhouettes against the walls—still standing, still armed.
Wu Jin ordered silence. "If unity is tested, we answer with obedience."
But his council chamber reeked of incense though no censers burned, and the wax on the imperial seals pulsed faintly, as if still alive.
Far below, in the hollows beneath the palace, Wu An knelt within a circle of bone and salt. His eyes were closed, yet he saw everything above: the fear, the obedience, the denial. The city was inside him now; every tremor of its walls matched the rhythm of his veins.
Around him, the shadows of his army murmured. Their mouths opened, but the sound came not as words—it was the sigh of stone settling, of water drawn backward before a wave.
He whispered, "Patience."
The voice within him stirred. The roots spread fast.
"I know."
He looked upward, toward the layers of earth and palace and heaven. "When she comes, the bloom will open."
The voice laughed softly, an echo that made the air vibrate. And what will you do then, little vessel?
He smiled without warmth. "Break it."
That night, Wu Shuang could bear it no longer. The tremor under her bedchamber walls had grown constant, a heartbeat she could not drown out. She rose without attendants, barefoot and silent, and followed the sound through the corridors of the sleeping palace.
Her footsteps left faint prints of light that vanished after she passed. The guards she met stared through her, unblinking. One bowed; his head slipped from his shoulders and rolled softly down the stairs, whispering prayers until it stilled.
She did not stop. The scent of rust and myrrh thickened as she descended.
The stairway ended in darkness that breathed warm air. When she stepped into it, the light from her skin dimmed, swallowed by a deeper glow ahead—the same crimson luminescence she remembered from her brother's chains.
She entered the cavern.
Wu An knelt in the center, surrounded by ranks of motionless figures—his soldiers, but not as she remembered them. They stood fused with their own shadows, skin thin as parchment, veins like ink strokes. When she moved, they moved; when she stopped, they froze again.
"Brother," she said.
His head lifted slowly. His eyes shone colorless, reflecting her face but reversed—as though the world within him turned the other way.
"I wondered," he said, "how long you would wait before descending."
"Why are you doing this?" Her voice trembled between fury and grief. "You swore to protect this land."
"I am."
"This is not protection. This is—"
He rose. The motion seemed to tilt the air itself. "They built an empire upon corpses and called it order. You built another upon prayers and called it peace. I will build nothing. I will show them the truth beneath both."
The ground beneath them rippled like water struck by wind. The soldiers' mouths opened in silent chorus.
Wu Shuang stepped forward. "You think you can destroy the world and survive it?"
He smiled faintly. "No. But the thing that dreams through me will."
A low hum filled the cavern. The veins in the walls glowed red, spreading upward like roots reaching for light. From above came muffled screams—the court, the guards, the ministers—each sound dissolving into laughter and then into nothing.
Wu Shuang drew breath to call his name again, but the syllables twisted in her mouth. She coughed, choking on air that had turned heavy as ink. The soldiers closed ranks around her.
Wu An watched her struggle, eyes calm, almost gentle. "Do you hear it now? The unity you wanted?"
She gasped. "Stop this. The gods—"
"The gods are only what grows in our blood when we forget to be human."
He stepped closer. The light from his skin illuminated hers, and for a moment their faces seemed carved from the same material. "You wanted an empire that could not die. I am giving you one."
The ceiling cracked. Dust rained down, glittering like ash in sunlight. Through the widening fissure poured the glow of the false sun—bleeding downward, drawn as if by gravity reversed.
Wu An spread his hands. The light touched him, and he did not burn. Instead, the radiance dimmed, consumed, leaving only a faint outline of gold around his form.
Wu Shuang fell to her knees. "You'll kill us all."
He looked down at her with a strange tenderness. "Perhaps that's what mercy finally means."
He turned toward the deeper dark beyond the cavern, where the whispering grew louder, forming words that no tongue could hold. The soldiers followed, fading as they walked. One by one, their shadows detached and flowed into the cracks of the earth.
Wu Shuang remained kneeling, trembling, watching the last trace of her brother dissolve into the glow.
Above, the palace bells began to toll without hands to ring them. Their sound bent into something like chanting—soft, endless, patient. The false sun over Ling An flickered once, then steadied, burning with the color of old bone.
From the southern walls came the faint echo of distant horns—the war still raging, forgotten for a moment by both gods and men. And in the heart of the capital, beneath the He Lian throne, the first bloom opened.
Its petals were made of shadow.