Late one night, as the city slept under a lattice of lantern light, Yù told me her story. She ate a fish the size of a child and watched the smoke uncurl before she spoke.
She had been present when the first pacts were made between dragon and man. Men called dragons omens then, invited to courts to predict floods, to sign on contracts with clawed ink. In exchange, they received refuge and fragments of the world dragons kept: maps of currents, old songs, and, once, a promise that human greed would be tethered by honor.
But men forgot honor as men do. Trade committees came with sharper teeth. Rivers of coin began to look like rivers of power. Dragons withdrew, one by one, until Yù was the last who had not turned into legend. She watched as her kin were seduced by promises of safety — and then saw the safety used as a cage. She remembered a night when a dragon gave a king a map, and that king used it to knead a people into servitude. She remembered swearing never to give her knowledge again.
And yet she had let my brother in. He came, she said, like sunlight slipping into a cave: curious, patient, and full of questions. Where other men bowed and took what they could, he sat and braided threads of thought with dragons and then left them in the world so others could find them.
"He touched things the rest of you would never see," Yù said. "He reminded me of the world we once promised to keep for more than ourselves. He mattered."
I had come for vengeance and found in the dragon's confession a new layer of grief: not only the loss of my brother but the loss of an ancient trust. The ledger that connected magistrates and merchants was not just pages and ink; it was a set of keys that opened doors between greed and ruin. My brother had been trying to make those doors visible.
"Why would they bury him?" I asked.
"Because some secrets are currency," Yù said. "And currency is often guarded with claws unafraid of blood. He upset the balance."
I should have felt satisfied. I should have felt the neat thrill of knowing where to aim my wrath. But Yù's eyes — old and patient and full of a history that made the city's power plays look like children squabbling over marbles — made me see a choice.