Chapter 8: The Peak of Origins
I woke to silence, but it was the wrong kind of silence—the thick, waiting quiet of a held breath. The Phoenix Chamber was dark, the jade-framed lanterns dimmed to a sickly green ember-glow that cast long, skeletal shadows across the obsidian floor. The air tasted of cold copper and something sharper, like the metallic tang in the air just before a lightning strike.
My skin prickled. It was not from the draft off the balcony, but from the sensation of being watched. Not by eyes in the room, but by something behind my own eyes—a presence coiled in the space where thoughts became words.
Hou's presence. A cold itch I couldn't scratch.
I turned my head. Long Feng's side of the bed was empty. The silk sheets held the shallow indent of his body, but the fabric was cold to the touch. He had been gone for hours. On the pillow, a small slip of parchment lay, its edges curled by the humidity of the night.
The handwriting was jagged, as if his hand had been shaking:
*Do not trust the voice in your head. I am searching for a way to blind him. If I do not return before the Trial ends, know that I chose this. —Feng*
I crumpled the note, the dry paper whispering in my fist. I wanted to be angry—to scream at him for leaving me in this gilded cage—but I was too tired for fire. The gold filigree on my skin was humming with a new, aggressive frequency, vibrating against the black ink in my marrow.
*Good morning, little ghost,* a voice murmured.
It wasn't in my ears. It was inside, threaded through the machinery of my thoughts like silk through a needle. Hou was close enough to feel the shape of my fears before I had even named them.
"Get out," I whispered, pressing my palms against my temples until the bone ached.
*I am not your enemy, Mei,* Hou whispered back, his presence uncoiling with a terrifying gentleness. *The Empress is coming. She does not believe in 'Anchors.' She believes in tools. Let me help you sharpen.*
A ripple of amusement moved through the connection—not a sound, but a feeling, like distant laughter. I felt my stomach turn. *Help.* The word tasted like poison pretending to be medicine.
The bronze doors groaned open with a sound like a dying animal. The Empress Dowager did not enter with her usual retinue of monks. She came alone, draped in robes of such heavy, stiff brocade they didn't rustle—they clattered. Her face was a mask of pale powder and sharp lines, her eyes tracking something I couldn't see.
"The transport will be difficult," she said. Her voice was like two stones grinding together. "Hold your breath. If the Void enters your lungs during the fold, you will turn into ash before we arrive."
She didn't wait for my consent. She placed a hand on my shoulder. Her Qi was nothing like Long Feng's—his was heat and pressure, the weight of a sun barely contained. Hers was cold architecture, precise and inhuman, like the blueprint of a machine.
The world didn't just fade; it **fractured**.
I felt my body being pulled through a hole smaller than a needle's eye. My vision turned into a kaleidoscope of screaming faces and black ink. For a second, I felt the Loom—the massive, rhythmic *thrum-thrum* of the earth's heartbeat—and then I was slammed onto a surface of jagged, black glass.
The air here was thin. It smelled of copper and ancient, dried salt. We stood at the base of the First Peak: The Peak of Origins. It was a jagged spire that defied the Mandate of Heaven, its peak disappearing into a sky that wasn't quite sky—more like the absence of light given shape.
"This is not a hunt of flesh," the Empress said. She didn't watch me; she watched the mountain, her fingers interlaced so tightly behind her back that her knuckles had gone white. She was afraid. Not of me, but of the peak—as if it might judge her worthy of the same fate she'd prepared for me.
"You will hunt the echoes of what you have already lost. If you hesitate, they will devour you instead." She gestured toward the mist. "Go. Use the dark. If I see you reach for the light of the sun, I will leave you here to starve."
I stepped forward. The glass beneath my feet was translucent; looking down, I could see dark clouds moving miles below. I was on a needle in the sky.
Then, the growl started. It was a sound I knew from the Ash-Wastes—the sound of the Great Gray Wolves that prowled the salt-flats during the winter of the Great Famine. It stepped from the fog, its fur matted with ash, its eyes glowing with a hollow, silver luminescence.
"Mei," it rasped. It spoke with my father's voice.
"Look at your hands, Mei," the wolf said, its head tilting with a sickening, human grace. "They're soft now. Mine were bleeding when the roof collapsed. Why do you wear the gold of the people who crushed us?"
"It's not real," I choked out, my knees hitting the glass. My vision blurred. "You're a shadow. You're just a shadow."
The wolf lunged.
I tried to move, but my legs were stone. The jaws closed around my shoulder—not teeth, but memory—the crushing weight of my father's disappointment sinking into my flesh like venom. The pain wasn't physical. It was the ache of every time I'd failed him, compressed into a single bite.
*Stop crying, little ghost,* Hou's voice cut through the chaos, sharp as a razor. *It is not your father. It smells your fear, not your scent. Stop breathing. Let the Void make you invisible.*
I shouldn't have listened. I knew I shouldn't. But the wolf's teeth were in my shoulder, and Long Feng was gone, and Hou's voice was the only thing offering a way out.
I stopped breathing.
The gold filigree on my skin flared, burning with a hollow, blinding heat. The world around me dimmed—not darker, but less real. I passed through the space between atoms—it felt like drowning in cold static, every nerve screaming that I shouldn't exist in this form.
The wolf's head jerked up, confused. It couldn't see me anymore.
*Good,* Hou whispered. *Now, step through it. The Void is not a wall, Mei. It is a door. Walk through the wolf's heart, and it will collapse.*
I didn't think. I moved. My hand plunged forward—not into flesh, but into absence. I wasn't stabbing the wolf; I was erasing it.
The wolf's howl turned into my father's final, rattling breath. Then, it dissolved into black mist.
I fell to my knees, gasping. My shoulder was bleeding—dark, real blood.
I closed my eyes, reaching desperately for the memory—the way rain tasted on my tongue, the way it made the salt-flats shimmer like broken glass.
Nothing. Just the flat, dead certainty that the scent was gone. The wolf had taken it with him into the ash.
*One skin shed,* a new voice whispered. It was Hao-Ran, his voice high and clear as a temple bell. *Four more to go, little sister. When you are naked, the Loom will finally take you.*
*Well done,* Hou said, his voice humming with warmth. *Rest now. Soon, you will be perfect.*
---
### [The Archive: The Siphon]
Deep beneath the palace, in a chamber that had not been opened since the Crimson Purge, Long Feng stood before a slab of weeping obsidian. The walls were lined with Mirror-Scripts—thousands of etched symbols that bled when touched, the secret history of every Empress Dowager who had ever ruled from the shadows.
He pressed his palm to the stone. The pain was immediate—not physical, but psychic, a thousand betrayed women screaming their truths into his skull. His golden Qi turned sickly and pale, the color of old bones. Blood dripped from his nose, his ears, the corners of his eyes.
But he didn't stop. He couldn't. The script revealed itself in fragments:
*"The Soul-Stabilizing Pearl is a bridge, not a shield. It does not protect—it connects. When the circuit is complete, trigger the Collapse. The rebel and the vessel will burn together."*
Long Feng's knees buckled. The Empress hadn't given Hou the pearl to help him spy. She'd given it to him as bait. She was waiting for Hou to tie his soul so deeply to Lin Mei that they became a single living circuit. Then she would flood that circuit with the Loom's raw agony—ten thousand years of screaming compressed into a single pulse of celestial fire.
Hou would burn. Lin Mei would burn. And the Empress would have eliminated both threats without lifting a finger.
Long Feng reached into his robe and pulled out the Obsidian Dagger—the blade the Mirror-Scripts claimed could sever spiritual bonds. The text was clear: *"To break the Siphon, the host must be silenced. The dagger does not kill the body. It kills the thread."*
He looked at his reflection in the weeping stone. The gray shadow had crept past his collarbone, reaching toward his heart. He was a dead man on borrowed time, holding the only weapon that could save Lin Mei.
But using it meant cutting her thread to the pearl. And without the pearl stabilizing her memories, the Void would devour what was left of her mind in days.
To save the Empire, he had to let her die.
To save her, he had to let Hou tear the world apart.
Long Feng closed his fist around the dagger's hilt and felt the obsidian bite into his palm, drawing blood that the Archive greedily drank.
*Forgive me, Mei,* he thought. *I do not know which choice I will make when the moment comes.*