The snow did not fall that night—it watched. Clouds hung low, swollen with ash and unfallen light. Across the ruined fields, men slept beside the weapons they no longer believed belonged to anyone. Horses stood with heads lowered, steam rising from their flanks. Somewhere in the dark, a wolf howled and was answered by silence.
Ziyan did not sleep. She stood at the edge of the river, where the ice had given up pretending to be whole. Behind her, Feiyan wrapped her wounds in strips of cloth cut from an enemy banner.
"Zhang will lick his wounds until dawn," Feiyan said. "Then he will decide whether to surrender to Xia or to drown them both trying to be emperor."
Ziyan's reflection trembled in the black water. "He has no throne left to sit on."
"Men like him build thrones out of corpses," Feiyan said. "They only need enough spine to nail the seat together."
Ziyan turned, eyes bright with exhaustion. "Then we stop the carpenters."
Li Qiang joined them, his armor dull with soot. "The men will follow you tomorrow," he said. "They already call you something."
Ziyan looked past him to where soldiers murmured by the fires. "Names are smoke. Tomorrow they need fire."
"Then give it to them," Wei said, limping toward them. He dropped to one knee and began tracing lines in the snow with his dagger. "Zhang retreats into the capital. Xia will strike from the east at first light. We strike with the dawn—while they kill each other."
Feiyan knelt beside him. "And when both sides realize they've been used?"
Ziyan studied the crude map: three rivers, two armies, one city that had forgotten mercy. "Then they'll have to remember what mercy looks like."
She turned to Shuye. "How many jars remain?"
"Five," he said. "Enough to collapse a gate or make a god blink."
"Save two," Ziyan said. "The others we'll place in the lower aqueducts. When the flood begins, we ride through it."
Feiyan frowned. "Through?"
"Yes," Ziyan said softly. "Let the city see us come through fire and water both. If they must crown someone, let it be the one who walks out of the river alive."
Morning came gray and without sound. The snow crusted hard underfoot. Ziyan mounted her horse at the front of the line. Her cloak had been torn; she left it that way. Her banner—plain cloth with a stitched phoenix—hung limp, waiting for wind.
From the walls ahead, Zhang's drums began, slow and deliberate. They echoed over the frozen fields like a heartbeat belonging to something too large to die easily. Behind him, Xia's horns answered, sharp and mocking.
Ziyan drew her sword. The edge caught what little light the sky could spare. "For Qi," she said quietly.
Feiyan's voice followed, low and sure. "For what Qi should have been."
They moved.
The charge broke the silence like a prayer shouted through stone. Arrows met them halfway, black streaks through the white. Li Qiang's shield line held; Wei's riders cut through the outer trenches, spearpoints red against snow. Feiyan's knives spun like brief arguments and found agreement in every throat they touched.
Zhang's defenders faltered. Some remembered her face from the parley, remembered the truth she had laid at their feet. Some threw down arms and ran. Others fought because the habit was older than conscience.
Then the first of Shuye's jars broke. Fire roared through the aqueduct, rolling under the walls in a rush of orange breath. Ice shattered, water rose, and the gate gave way—not cleanly, but with the stubborn protest of old wood dying with dignity.
Ziyan rode through the flood. Steam hissed around her horse's legs, turning the world into smoke. For a moment she looked carved out of it—a figure from an old prophecy dragged unwillingly into being.
On the wall, Zhang watched. His armor was unbuckled, his crown dented from haste. He gripped the parapet until his knuckles bled. "She cannot win," he whispered to no one. "She cannot win."
But below him, men were kneeling.
Not to the Regent. Not to the dying idea of an Empire that had forgotten its heart. They knelt because something in them recognized the shape of survival, and it looked like her.
Feiyan reached her side as the gates burned out. "The city is open," she said.
Ziyan's breath clouded in front of her. "No," she said. "The city is listening."
Inside the walls, civilians gathered—thin, hollow-eyed, faces gray with soot. None cheered. None cursed. They simply watched.
Ziyan dismounted. The water at her feet steamed where it touched the embers. She raised her hand, palm outward, not to command but to steady. "Qi is not dead," she said, voice carrying in the stillness. "It was murdered. I mean to avenge it."
Behind her, soldiers dropped their weapons. One by one, they knelt in the wet ash. Feiyan stood beside her, eyes on the high wall where Zhang's figure had vanished.
"Then the Regent?" Wei asked.
Ziyan looked toward the palace at the hill's crown, its banners tattered, its gate half-open like a wound. "He's already dead," she said. "He just hasn't fallen yet."
The sky broke open then—not with sunlight, but with snow turned golden by the fires below. It drifted over the city like the first soft breath of a world remembering how to begin again.
Feiyan smiled faintly. "Phoenix," she murmured.
Ziyan didn't answer. She was already walking toward the palace, each step leaving steam in the snow.