The Yunqiu garrison burned through the night.
The flames glowed orange against the black mountains, painting the snow with shifting shadows. The surviving soldiers moved like ghosts among the wreckage, their voices low and strained.
Mo Lianyin stood apart from them, leaning on his sword. He could still hear the bell in his mind, faint but insistent, like a memory he couldn't quite shake.
---
Qingxue approached, her boots crunching through the thin crust of ice. She stopped a few paces away.
"They've counted the dead," she said quietly. "Thirty-seven soldiers. Six of them were cut down by your… by it."
Lianyin didn't look at her. "They were already dying."
"That's what you tell yourself?" Her voice was sharp, but beneath it lay exhaustion. "Because I saw some of them still standing when you rang that bell."
---
Silence stretched between them, taut as a bowstring.
Finally, Lianyin said, "If I hadn't ended the summoner, we'd all be dead."
"I know," Qingxue admitted. "But there's a difference between killing the enemy and letting the power choose who lives and who dies."
---
That night, when the camp finally slept, Qingxue left her tent and made her way to the supply wagon. From the depths of a weather-worn chest, she pulled out a scroll bound in black silk. Its seal was stamped with the sigil of her old sect—the Moon-Silencing Seal.
She had taken it years ago, thinking she'd never use it.
The scroll contained a ritual. One that could lock a forbidden art away forever. But to do it, she would have to catch Lianyin off guard. And she would have to be certain.
---
The next day, they traveled in silence. The road wound through jagged peaks, where avalanches sometimes whispered from the higher slopes. The air was thin, but the cold kept Lianyin alert. His eyes darted constantly to the horizon, but never to her.
By nightfall, they reached a frozen ravine. The wind funneled through it, carrying the scent of snow and stone.
Qingxue unrolled her bedroll a little apart from the fire. She kept her sword close.
---
"Why are you watching me?" Lianyin asked suddenly, his voice carrying over the crackle of the flames.
She didn't answer at first. "Because I don't know if you're going to save me or kill me."
He chuckled, but there was no warmth in it. "Maybe I don't know either."
---
In the darkness, she traced the outline of the Moon-Silencing Seal in her mind.
She thought of the man she had once trusted without question. She thought of the way his eyes had looked in the valley—black, empty, as if he had already decided life and death before the battle began.
If she failed to act, she might one day have to face him across a battlefield.
If she acted too soon, she might kill the last friend she had left.
---
Somewhere deep in the night, when the fire was low and the mountains were nothing but hulking shadows, Lianyin's voice broke the silence.
"If you ever try to take this power from me," he said, not turning his head, "make sure you succeed."