The sanctum burned for three days. On the fourth, it merely smoked, like a body refusing to admit it was already ash. The Lantern Keepers' hall, once a fortress of secrets and scripture, had collapsed into itself, ribs of blackened stone arcing out of the ruins like the bones of a giant beast. The air stank of cinders and human fat. The banners—once white, marked with the lantern sigil—had shriveled into thin ropes of charcoal that fluttered whenever a gust threaded through the ruins.
Xuemei moved through the wreckage the way one moves through a battlefield after carrion birds had already had their feast: careful, practical, with a ledger in her head instead of grief in her chest. Others knelt and wept. Others clawed through rubble searching for loved ones or fragments of relics. Xuemei had eyes only for words.
Scrolls lay half-charred, papyrus curling into tongues, parchment stuck to stone like old skin. Each fragment she touched was weighed silently. Useful, useless, dangerous, laughable. She murmured under her breath as if balancing accounts. "This one, no one will believe—too dry, too cryptic." She flicked it away. "This, ah, yes. Short, sharp, and contradictory. Contradiction sells." She tucked it into the sleeve of her robe.
Around her, refugees fought like dogs over syllables. A woman clutched a ragged scrap to her breast, shrieking when a man tried to pry it from her hands. A boy sobbed, holding a strip of burned hide that bore only three legible characters. Fire. Return. Witness. To him it was prophecy enough. They were tearing language into relics, turning half-sentences into gospel. Xuemei merely watched, lips pressed thin.
"Scavenger." The word spat behind her, sharp enough to cut.
She turned slowly. Agent Nakamura stood there, face streaked with soot, jacket torn open at one shoulder. He held himself like a soldier who had lost too much sleep and too many comrades. His eyes were knives, and all of them pointed at her.
"You're grave-robbing faith," he said. His voice had the flatness of exhaustion, but anger threaded it like steel wire. "The Keepers are dead. Their words are not yours to trade."
Xuemei raised a single brow. "Trade? I am only counting what remains. Faith was rubble the moment this place burned. I'm simply cataloguing bricks."
He stepped closer, ash crunching beneath his boots. "You cheapen memory."
"I preserve it." She plucked a page from the ground, brushed soot from it with delicate fingers, then let it fall again. "Tell me, Nakamura—when the next zealot rises, will they care for memory? Or will they only care which words can be shouted loudest? I intend to choose which words those are."
His jaw tightened. He looked at the mourners fighting over scraps, at the sky blackened by smoke. "This is not preservation. It's theft."
Xuemei gave him a smile, the kind merchants give to buyers who haggle too long. "Everything is theft, Agent. The Keepers stole from Alexandria, from Babylon, from Chang'an. Why should I play innocent?"
For a moment, Nakamura looked as if he might strike her. But then the fight drained from him. He muttered something bitter in Japanese—she caught only the cadence of a curse—and turned away, leaving her alone among the bones of words.
She crouched again, fingers brushing rubble until she felt the stiffness of parchment wedged between two collapsed stones. She pried it free with a grunt. The fragment was charred along the edges but intact enough to read. Her eyes widened. There, in spidery ink, a name leapt at her. The Seeker's name. Clear, unambiguous, impossible to mistake.
Her breath caught, a soft hiss of disbelief. She folded it quickly, slipping it into the hidden pouch sewn into her sash. When Nakamura glanced back, she was already straightening, face composed, dusting ash from her knees as though she had found nothing more than rubbish.
"Did you find what you wanted?" he called, suspicion edging his tone.
Xuemei smiled faintly. "Nothing but smoke."
⸻
The refugees built makeshift shrines out of rubble that night. They piled fragments like bricks, set candles between them, and knelt in the open air, praying to contradictions. Xuemei sat apart, legs folded, the pouch pressed close to her stomach. She whispered the Seeker's name into the dark, tasting the syllables like contraband wine. The fragment burned against her ribs, hot as if it carried an ember inside.
She thought of the Seeker—not the myth, not the whispers, but the man who had sat in her bookshop once upon a time, dripping rainwater onto her floor, asking for texts she did not stock. His scar had glowed faintly that night when the lantern light hit it at the right angle. She remembered mocking him for his obsession, remembered feeding him scraps of rumor. She had thought herself his anchor. Now the world anchored itself on the shadow of his name.
She lay back, staring at the night sky veiled in smoke. The constellations had been smothered. Even stars could be erased. What chance did truth have?
⸻
By dawn the sanctum had become a marketplace of ruins. Families camped in its courtyards, lighting small fires in urns and cooking meager meals of beans and millet. Children darted through rubble, playing games of Prophet and Betrayer, one shouting lines from charred parchment, the others jeering or bowing in turn. Xuemei watched and noted how easily children adopted fragments, how quickly they made them rhythm and rhyme.
She moved among the ruins again, silent, quick, like a thief who had convinced herself she was an archivist. She sought not wholeness but potency. A single word might be enough: flame, ascend, betray. The more ambiguous, the more powerful.
At one point, she came across an old Keeper still alive, half-buried in stone. His chest rose shallowly. His fingers clutched a scroll tube. Blood matted his beard.
Xuemei crouched, pried the tube from his hands with gentle insistence. His eyes fluttered open.
"Please," he rasped. "Keep the light…"
Xuemei tilted her head. "I intend to. But light is not kept—it is wielded."
He groaned once, then died. She rose, carrying the tube, and did not look back.
⸻
Later, Nakamura confronted her again. He had gathered a handful of survivors into a semblance of order, organizing food distribution, creating a perimeter. He looked like a soldier reassembling discipline from chaos.
"You should leave," he told her flatly. "There's nothing here for you."
She glanced at the pouch at her side. Nothing here for me? She nearly laughed.
"On the contrary," she said. "There is everything here. Words enough to build a city. Maybe even a world."
He frowned. "You're not a prophet, Xuemei. You're a bookseller."
She leaned in, eyes glinting. "And what is a prophet but a bookseller who refuses to admit it?"
⸻
That night, when the mourners slept fitfully under collapsed arches, Xuemei lit a single taper and unfurled the fragment. The Seeker's name gleamed darkly on the page, smoke stains surrounding it like an aura. She traced the letters with her finger. The air seemed to thrum, as if listening.
She whispered: "Are you alive? Dead? Or both?"
No answer came, but the flame bent toward the parchment, flickering strangely.
She laughed softly to herself. "Ah, so even gods lean to a name."
She folded the fragment once more, sealing it close. She knew already she would not share it, not with Nakamura, not with the orphans, not with anyone. Names were too precious to waste. Names could topple empires.
⸻
When dawn broke again, smoke lifted from the ruins like incense. Xuemei rose, her face smudged, her eyes bright with calculation. Around her, people clutched their pitiful scraps, clung to fragments as if they were life rafts. But she—she alone carried a ledger in her mind.
She whispered under her breath as she walked: "This phrase will spark hope. This one breeds conflict. This one, contradiction enough to be quoted endlessly." She smiled faintly. "The Seeker once thought truth was a flame. He was wrong. Truth is ash. It drifts, it coats everything, it suffocates. And if you're clever, you can shape it into bricks."
She looked toward the smoking ruins of the sanctum. For the first time since it fell, she bowed her head—not in reverence, but in acknowledgment. Not to the Keepers, not to the Seeker, but to the ledger only she could see.
⸻
By the end of that week, word spread through the refugee camps that someone was collecting. Not hoarding—collecting. People whispered of a woman with sharp eyes and a tongue sharper still, who weighed fragments not by age or authenticity but by how they might stir a crowd. Some despised her. Some sought her. All spoke her name in tones mingling suspicion and respect.
Xuemei never confirmed or denied these rumors. She merely smiled and kept counting bricks.
In her pouch, the Seeker's name burned silently.
And far away, in temples not yet fallen, gods shifted in their sleep.