The silence was a taut string, stretched to the breaking point over the town of Anping.
The first scream was the sound of it snapping. It came from the northern wall, a high, thin shriek of agony that was brutally cut short, as if a hand had been clamped over the mouth of a dying man.
It was followed by a chorus, a cacophony of death cries that blended with the splintering, groaning crash of the main gate giving way under the assault of a battering ram. The invasion of Anping had begun.
Bai Shu and Lian were in their small, dark cellar, a space that smelled of damp earth, stored winter vegetables, and the cloying sweetness of fear.
lian had dragged him there the moment the bell had stopped, her survival instinct a powerful, undeniable force he was now powerless to resist.
His world of abstract thought had collapsed, and her world of physical reality was all that was left. They were not alone. Their neighbors, the elderly carpenter Old Wu and his wife, had scrambled in with them just as Lian was barring the cellar door, their faces ashen masks of terror.
The four of them huddled together in the oppressive darkness, listening. The world became a symphony of horror, heard but not seen, an auditory nightmare that painted pictures more vivid and terrible than sight ever could. The sounds from the street above formed a brutal, unfolding narrative. The thunder of heavy hooves on cobblestone, a sound Anping had never known, was the opening percussion.
Then came the clash of steel one sharp, professional, and efficient, the other clumsy, desperate, and quickly silenced. The defiant shouts and screams of the town military were brief and extinguished almost as soon as they began.
There was no heroic battle, no prolonged clash of armies as described in Bai Shu's histories. It was the sound of a harvest, where the reapers were armored men and the crop was human life.
Bai Shu, the man of letters, found his mind, even in its state of shock, cataloging the sounds with a horrifying, academic clarity: the wet, percussive thud of a blade hitting flesh and bone; the guttural, triumphant shouts of the invaders in their harsh, alien northern dialect, the splintering of door after door being kicked in, followed invariably by new screams, sharper and more desperate than the last.
He was huddled against a damp stone wall, his arms wrapped around himself as if to hold his shattering mind together, his body wracked by uncontrollable tremors. Every scream that echoed from the streets felt like a physical blow, a phantom blade striking his own flesh.
This was not the sanitized death he read about in his histories, the "fall of a thousand men" recorded by a dispassionate court scribe centuries later. This was the sound of his world being torn apart, one neighbor, one friend, one life at a time.
This was the wet, gurgling, intimate sound of murder. Lian was beside him, her body rigid, her hand clamped over her own mouth to stifle any sound. Her eyes, wide and stark in the gloom, were filled with a terror that was focused and immediate.
She was not mourning a dying world; she was listening for footsteps, for the specific sound of their own door giving way. Old Wu was muttering a prayer to the ancestors, his voice a barely audible, shaking drone, a fragile mantra against the encroaching savagery.
His wife sobbed silently into his shoulder.
Through a small, grime-covered grate set high in the wall at street level, a sliver of the nightmare outside was visible, illuminated by a sky that was beginning to glow with an unnatural, flickering orange light. Bai shu found himself drawn to it, a moth to a flame of pure horror. He crawled over, his body moving against the frantic commands of his own will, and pressed his eye to the cold iron bars. He could see a narrow slice of the lane in front of his house. The air was already hazy with smoke, carrying the scent of burning thatch and something else, something sickeningly sweet.
A body lay in the street the baker, a cheerful, round man who always gave the neighborhood children free sweets and whose laughter was a daily occurrence. His eyes were open, staring at the smoke filled sky with a look of terror.
Then, figures entered his sliver of vision. Two of Li Wei's soldiers, hulking shapes dressed in black leather and fur, their faces smeared with dirt and blood, looking like demons from a forgotten hell.
They were laughing, a harsh, guttural sound, as they dragged a young woman from the house opposite. It was the weaver's daughter, a girl named Lin. She was fighting, kicking and screaming, her cries raw and animalistic, stripped of all humanity.
Bai Shu knew her; he had taught her to write her own name just last spring, praising the delicate grace of her brushstrokes. One of the soldiers, annoyed by her resistance, struck her across the face, a casual, brutal backhand blow that sent her sprawling into the mud.
Li Wei felt a surge of something utterly different a white-hot combination of rage, horror, and a desperate, useless impulse to act. He made an involuntary sound, a choked gasp of protest.
In an instant, Lian's hand shot out and clamped over his mouth, her nails digging into his cheek with painful force. Her eyes, inches from his, were blazing with a fierce, desperate warning. *Be silent, or we die.* The message was clear, absolute. He froze, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird, the coppery taste of his own blood in his mouth where her nails had broken the skin.
He watched, paralyzed, a prisoner in his own body, as the soldiers laughed again at the girl's crumpled form. They were not monsters from a story. They were real monsters with their cruelty was casual, bored, utterly mundane.
That was the most horrifying thing he had ever seen. They were about to drag the girl away when a figure burst from the house she had been pulled from which is her father, the weaver, a quiet, gentle man, now armed with nothing but a heavy wooden shuttle from his loom. He ran at the two armored soldiers, a wordless roar of paternal fury tearing from his throat, his love for his daughter transformed into a suicidal rage.
It was over in an instant that seemed to stretch into an eternity. The first soldier turned, his movements fluid and practiced, utterly devoid of panic. He didn't even seem to break stride.
His longsword flashed in the smoky, fire-lit air, a single, elegant arc of polished steel. The weaver's roar ended in a wet, choked gurgle. He staggered forward a step, a dark, blossoming line appearing across his chest, and then collapsed onto the cobblestones like a puppet with its strings cut.
The soldiers didn't give him a second glance. They grabbed the now limp, weeping girl and dragged her out of Bai Shu's field of vision.
Her sobbing was the last thing he heard before they were gone, leaving only the dead and the dying in the lane.
Bai Shu pulled back from the grate, a violent wave of nausea washing over him. He retched, his body convulsing, but nothing came up.
The scene was burned into his mind, an image seared onto the back of his eyelids, a permanent scar on his soul. The scholar who believed in reason, in the inherent goodness of humanity when guided by virtue, had just witnessed an act of such pointless, brutal nihilism that it shattered his entire worldview into a thousand irreparable pieces.
There was only the sword, and the man who wielded it with casual indifference.
He huddled back in the darkness of the cellar, the sounds from outside continuing their brutal chorus. But he was no longer just listening with fear. He was changing.
The terror was still there, a cold, heavy stone in his gut. But it was mixing with something else, something he had only ever read about in tales of vengeance: hatred. It was a pure, black, and exquisitely simple emotion, a clarifying fire in the confusing fog of his broken ideals.
He looked at Lian, at the tear tracks on her dusty cheeks, at the silent, praying form of Old Wu, and he felt it solidify within him, cooling from a liquid rage into a hard, sharp crystal. The world was not a place of reason. It was a place of violence.
And in that moment, hiding in the dark while his neighbors were slaughtered, Bai shu understood a new, terrible principle: to survive in such a world, one could not be a scholar.
One had to be something else entirely.