"Every beginning carries its own echo. Some echoes last a lifetime."
The moon sat low and heavy over the county, a cold coin nailed into the sky. It made the rooftops gleam, turned frost into silver, and bent all shadows into thin, suspicious things. Nights like this left Lin Wuji restless; sleep would untie itself from him and wander elsewhere.
He lay awake for much of it, tangled in sheets, listening to the house breathe. The dreams were back in staccato: teeth in the dark, a swirl of red water, hands reaching and nothing to grasp. He woke with his heart banging like a trapped animal and the taste of old iron on his tongue. The light through the window made bars on the floor. In the deep hush he swore something watched him, patient and far.
He padded barefoot into the kitchen. Morning promises dissolved in the cold glow; his parents had left a stew cooled to a gray skin over the pot. Baozhai, his mother, sat at the table with her robe pulled closed, fingers wrapped around a chipped mug. She had the weathered patience of someone who had held too many nights together.
"You awake again," she said without surprise, as if she had expected the sleep to desert him again.
"Dreams," Wuji answered. He tried to make it light, but the words felt like stones. "The ones with teeth."
Baozhai's eyes flinched. She reached for his hand and squeezed, a small attempt at lace over the fear. "It's the cold months. They come worse then. Your grandmother used to say the woods remember things that should have been buried."
"Wolves?" he asked, because the stories had never left the hearthtalk, because the county bartered old shadows for old warnings.
"Not the kind we feed on bread," she said. "Not simple beasts."
Renwu, his father, appeared in the doorway with a lantern, the circle of light making hard the lines around his mouth. He carried himself like a man who could fix anything with a flat hand and a square-jawed order. He'd been working since sunrise and yet he moved as if the day had just begun.
"Your mother's bedtime tales," Renwu said, a smile that did not reach his eyes. "She means to keep us cautious, not scared."
Wuji's sister Meilin padded in, sleepy and curious, the kind of child who still expected the world to remain kindly if you promised it. She hopped onto the bench and leaned against their father.
"That lantern's been dim," Renwu said, rubbing the metal rim. "The nights feel different. Wind's thin, too quiet. Makes a man itch." He looked at Wuji then, as if he could see the dreams bleeding from the boy. "You've been distant."
"I heard things," Wuji said. "Out in town. Men talking. Missing folks."
Renwu's gaze darkened. "Then we'll not talk of it more than needed. You listen, sleep when there's sleep to be had. Keep the door shut. I'll check the traps come morning."
There was a rough comfort in his father's plan, however small. It tethered the household to routine, to a muscle of control. Still, the silence under the lantern's halo felt impatient, like a held breath waiting to be released.
When the conversation thinned, Wuji went outside to the porch. The moon washed his hands in silver, made the trees look like sleeping giants. Meilin followed, curl of blanket around her shoulders. "Are you scared?" she asked, half teasing, half earnest.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "Sometimes I think the trees know secrets I don't."
She nudged him with a small, childish bravado. "You always say that. You're a big boy. Our Renwu will keep us safe."
He wanted to believe it. He wanted the small faith that kept children from seeing the underside of the world. But there was the way the village men had lowered their voices in the shop that afternoon. The way folks in the square moved like animals that sensed a hunter's shadow. "They say someone went missing by the river," he told Meilin. "Three families this month."
She shivered. "Then we should move. To the city. To Aunt Xue."
Renwu, returning from inspecting tools, overheard and shook his head. "We don't run from our fields. We're not paupers who scatter at the first sound. We plant, we harvest, and we stand for our land."
That night, under the watch of the low moon, there was a tension like taut braided rope across the county. People shuttered windows earlier. Dogs kept tight by fires. The Silver Order's patrols passed through with the kind of calm that was trained into men who knew how to hold death at bay. Even they, Renwu had said, cannot throw a blanket over what the woods might carry.
Renwu left before dawn to check the traps he maintained up along the ridge and the riverbank. He kissed Baozhai lightly, told Wuji not to wander. The boy stood at the doorway and watched his father's silhouette recede into mist—the lantern a tiny orbit, then swallowed.
Hours dragged. The sun rose like a pale coin, and there was still no Renwu. Baozhai paced, the motion of her feet like a prayer. Meilin's eyes grew wide and vacant, the way a child's eyes do when they hold a fear too big to speak. Wuji sharpened his ears; townsmen's whispers reached their ears through the thin clatter and the distant thud of wagon wheels.
Around midday, the first howl reached them—thin and apart, not the careless cry of wild beasts but a tone threaded with purpose. They exchanged a look that needed no words.
Wuji grabbed his jacket and went into the woods, down a path his father had walked that morning, following the small signs Renwu left—boot marks, a snapped twig, a hat pushed onto a rock. The river ran quick with melted run-off and the pale sun hit its skin and made it look like moving metal. Near a fallen trap, he found Renwu crouched, hands on knees, face pale but alive. He looked up when he heard Wuji's breath.
"Go home," Renwu said sharply. His voice had the brittle edge of a man who had been close to something old. "Don't—" He shut his mouth and stood. "It was close. I felt watched. I left the traps tangled because I thought to lure them. Let's leave it at that."
They walked back in silence, heavy boots folding the path. That night they locked doors and drew curtains. Meilin slept between parents in the old way, and something of the household's ordinary rhythm returned. They ate without speaking much. The stew grew cold and then vanished. Renwu kept his lantern close.
When the wind picked up and threaded teeth through the eaves, a sound threaded through the home—a low, distant vibration that set teeth on edge. Wuji pressed his palms to his knees and told himself he could not be the child who would lose everything; he would be the son who answered.
Later, when the house finally hushed and the moon hung like a thin coin, Wuji stood by the window and whispered, as if the words could be a warning or a weapon, "They're coming."
It was not bravado. It was not a child's story. It was not superstition anyone in the family would laugh away. It was a simple, cold truth that made the house feel suddenly too small.
Outside, beyond the glass, the trees listened.