Only the Yànshī can read the future.
No one knows what future they are leading us toward.
They had finally arrived.
After sending countless messengers and losing countless offerings to the snow, the Yànshī priests had reached the palace.
Yet I felt no joy.
I had summoned them, yes but their coming was not a gift.
It was a debt.
And the price they demanded for reading the future was said to be more terrible than death itself.
The Yànshī were not paid in gold or land, but in breath in fragments of the soul.
There were three of them.
Three white silhouettes drifting through the blizzard, as though they did not walk but floated.
Their frost-covered robes merged with the snow already invading the palace threshold.
They looked like ghosts from another age.
Their faces were hidden behind veils of perfect white, marked with symbols I could not comprehend.
Thus concealed, they appeared identical as if a single being had divided itself into three bodies.
When they passed through the great doors, an icy breath followed them inside, and the torches went out.
None of them bowed.
Their footsteps barely echoed upon the stone.
They stopped several paces from the throne, silent and unmoving, like statues carved from salt.
A servant tried to speak, but I raised my hand.
The Yànshī cannot endure foreign voices.
They answer only to silence.
I watched them for a long time.
Their stillness unsettled me.
I had summoned men yet it was heaven that had entered my hall.
Despite the insult, I said nothing.
I remained motionless, facing three statues of flesh and snow.
Their veils trembled faintly in the frozen air seeping through the chamber, and not a single sound broke the quiet.
At first, I thought they were waiting for a sign from me.
But their unseen eyes already seemed to be probing the depths of my soul.
Time stretched thin.
The brazier's flames dwindled to embers.
The silence grew so dense it felt as though the world itself had stopped breathing.
Then, at last, the one standing at the center took a step forward.
His movement was slow, almost ceremonial.
When he spoke, his voice filled the palace a deep, weathered voice, worn smooth by centuries.
"What is your request?"
The words echoed long after he had spoken, as though they had traveled through time to reach me.
My knees weakened.
He did not ask why I had called them.
Nor what I wished to know.
No, he demanded that I shape my prayer,
as one wrenches a breath from the lungs of a dying man.
"I wish to die later," I said at last, my voice hoarse.
"My sons are not yet ready to take my place."
The words burned my throat.
In the silence that followed, I thought I heard the fire crackle and fade,
as though the flame itself were holding its breath.
The priest stepped closer.
The air around him began to tremble and suddenly, I felt time tear open.
Shadows multiplied.
Futures twisted and overlapped.
Before him, the whole of what was yet to come unfolded,
like a vast fresco of light and ash.
The other two remained perfectly still,
though their veils quivered faintly, stirred by a wind I alone could not feel.
The Yànshī raised his hand.
His voice rose, grave, deep, ageless.
"Old man… you already know the answer.
Follow your dreams.
Find the child.
Mark your name upon the Temple of Ashir."
Then he fell silent.
And the silence returned at once heavier than before.
I wanted to speak, to ask what his command meant.
But their silhouettes were already dissolving into the palace's frozen mist.
When I blinked,
nothing remained of them but a faint scent of wax and snow.
Yànshī priests cannot be killed by human hands unless they themselves will it.