Chapter 1
The Son of No One
The Hall of Meridian Sky was not built for the humble.
Its pillars rose forty feet, lacquered the deep red of old blood, carved with the twisting forms of divine beasts — the Azure Dragon of the East, the White Tiger of the West, the Vermilion Bird of the South, and the Black Tortoise of the North. Between them, human summoners stood immortalized in jade relief, figures frozen in eternal triumph with their bound beasts rearing behind them.
Wei Liang had stared at those carvings every morning for six days. Each time, his jaw tightened a little more.
"First-years, assemble."
The voice belonged to Senior Instructor Gao Ren, a broad-shouldered man in his fifties whose grey-streaked topknot and iron-tipped staff gave him the bearing of a general recalled from war. He walked the length of the hall without hurry, his gaze cutting across the assembled students like a blade testing its edge.
Wei Liang straightened. Around him, the other first-years of the Tianlong Imperial Academy stood in their rows — the sons and daughters of generals, merchant princes, regional governors, and legendary summoner clans. Their silk robes were embroidered with clan crests. Their jade pendants clinked against chest armor worn purely for ceremony.
Wei Liang wore a robe his mother had sewn before she died. It was clean. It had no crest.
"Today marks the end of your first week," Gao Ren announced with a measured tone. "By now you have learned the rules of this academy. You have memorized the five tiers of summoning, the classification of divine beasts, and the seven laws of the binding oath. Some of you—" his gaze lingered briefly, pointedly, on Wei Liang — "—have yet to complete your binding. That changes today."
Murmurs rippled through the hall. Heads turned.
Wei Liang kept his eyes forward.
"The boy with no summon," whispered a voice from the row behind him. Fen Zhu, son of the Northern Tiger Clan, whose own beast — a Thunder Leopard, third tier — had awakened when Fen Zhu was eight years old. "Seven days. Seven days and nothing. He really is empty."
"Hush," said another voice, though it carried no real weight of reprimand.
Gao Ren's staff struck the floor once. The hall went silent.
"The binding ceremony does not wait on sentiment. Those of you who have not yet awakened will ascend the Pillar of Heaven today, in front of this entire assembly. If your soul carries a beast — it will emerge. If it does not—" he paused with the patience of a man who has delivered bad news many times — "—then we will know."
Know. Such a clean word for such a ruinous thing.
Without a summon, a person was not a summoner. Without a summoner's rank, there was no place at Tianlong Imperial Academy. Without the Academy, the gates of imperial service — of any real future in the Tang world — were sealed.
Wei Liang had known this. He had known it when they accepted him on the merit of his father's name alone. Wei Changfeng, the Iron Spear General. The man who had held the Crimson Pass against a horde of demonic beasts for three days without sleep, buying time for the empire's eastern provinces to evacuate. A man who had died when Wei Liang was four, leaving behind a reputation vast enough to swallow his son whole.
"Wei Liang."
Gao Ren's voice again. He was looking directly at him.
"You will ascend first."
✦ ✦ ✦
The Pillar of Heaven was a column of pale stone that rose from the center of the outer courtyard, wrapped in carved scripture and crowned with a bronze dish the size of a wagon wheel. When a student ascended and placed their hands on the bronze, the pillar supposedly resonated with whatever divine essence lived within their soul — drawing out the shape of their bound beast for all to see.
Supposedly.
Wei Liang climbed the steps with his hands loose at his sides. Behind him, the assembled students of Tianlong filled three sides of the courtyard. He could feel their attention like heat.
He placed both palms flat against the bronze.
It was cold. It should not have been cold — the afternoon sun had baked the courtyard all day — but the bronze was cold as riverwater in winter, and the moment Wei Liang's skin touched it, a stillness moved through him. A hush. Not silence — something deeper. The cessation of something he hadn't known was making noise.
His eyes closed involuntarily.
The world that greeted him was not what he expected.
He had heard the descriptions a hundred times. Other students spoke of their soul-space as darkness scattered with stars, or a meadow humming with their beast's presence, or a cavern lit by the creature's own luminescence. Even his father's stories — whispered to him by his mother before she too was gone — described a vast plain where a great iron-antlered stag had stood waiting, patient and ancient.
Wei Liang stood on a beach.
The sand was pale gold, fine as ground bone. The sea stretched before him in every direction but one, its surface moving in slow deep swells, its color the impossible dark blue of the hour before sunrise. There was no sun, but there was light — even, sourceless, filling everything without shadow.
Behind him: a ship, beached and still. A vessel unlike any in the harbors of Chang'an. Its hull was dark wood, scarred and salt-stained, its single great sail hanging slack. Letters he could not read marked its prow.
And before the ship's hull, seated on a rock with his forearms resting on his knees, was a man.
He was not enormous. He was not what Wei Liang had imagined when he'd tried and failed to picture what lived inside his soul. He was perhaps twenty years of age in appearance, lean and hard-muscled, sun-darkened skin stretched over a frame built for war. His hair was light, an unusual amber-bronze, cut short at the sides and left to curl loosely at the crown. He wore armor that Wei Liang had no name for — bronze plates shaped to the torso, leather straps, bronze greaves strapped at the shins — and at his hip rested a sword unlike any blade Wei Liang had seen: long, straight, the grip wrapped in leather worn smooth by years of use.
The man looked up.
His eyes were grey. Not the grey of age or illness. The grey of flint.
He regarded Wei Liang for a long moment without speaking. Then, slowly, the corner of his mouth moved.
"You took long enough," he said.
His voice was accented strangely, the words shaped as if they had traveled a great distance to reach this language. But they were comprehensible. More than comprehensible — they arrived in Wei Liang's ears with a clarity that felt almost supernatural.
"Who are you?" Wei Liang asked.
The man rose from the rock. He was not much taller than Wei Liang, but the way he stood changed the scale of the space around him. He stood the way mountains stand — not by effort, but simply by being.
"Achilles." He said it simply, as a man states a fact that requires no proof. "Son of Peleus. Prince of the Myrmidons. Wrath of the Trojans." A pause. "Among other things."
Wei Liang stared at him.
"I have never heard of you," he said, which was not politeness, only truth.
Something shifted in those grey eyes — not offense, but something adjacent to amusement.
"That will change," Achilles said. He reached down, lifted the sword from his hip, and held it out hilt-first. "I waited long enough in this place. Let us go."
✦ ✦ ✦
The bronze disk blazed.
That was the word that would be used afterward, in every account, in every whispered retelling. Not glowed. Not shimmered. Blazed — the way a forge blazes when the bellows are worked, a fierce concentrated brightness that forced every student in the courtyard to raise a hand against the light.
The pillar vibrated. Not violently, but steadily, the way a great bell vibrates after being struck — a resonance that could be felt in the chest.
From the light, a figure descended.
He landed on the courtyard stones like a man stepping off a low wall — no ceremony, no drama — and stood at Wei Liang's side with his arms at his ease and his bronze sword resting loosely in one hand. The light faded. The courtyard stared.
Gao Ren, who had watched a thousand awakenings and claimed to be startled by none of them, had gone very still.
The woman beside him — Registrar Chen, who held the measuring stone for every awakening — looked at her instrument. Then looked at it again. Then looked at Gao Ren with an expression that could only be described as controlled alarm.
"Tier reading?" Gao Ren asked, his voice level.
"The stone is not giving a number."
"Explain that."
"I mean the stone is not giving a number, Senior Instructor. It is giving—" she held it up — "—a symbol I have never seen."
Gao Ren stared at the instrument for a long moment.
In the courtyard, Fen Zhu of the Northern Tiger Clan had lost the ability to close his mouth.
"What kind of beast is that?" someone whispered. "It looks… human."
"It's not a beast at all. It's a man. He summoned a man."
"That's impossible. There are no human summons. Even the legends—"
"Low tier," announced Registrar Chen, loudly enough to be heard, and Wei Liang understood immediately that she was lying. She was lying publicly and deliberately, and from the look Gao Ren gave he did not stop her. "The summon has yet to fully manifest. Classification: humanoid, incomplete. We will reassess in thirty days."
The murmuring in the courtyard shifted — from awe toward something more comfortable. Skepticism. Dismissal.
"Humanoid summons are the weakest classification. Everyone knows that."
"Makes sense. What else would the Iron Spear's useless son produce?"
Wei Liang heard every word. He said nothing. Beside him, Achilles turned his head slowly and regarded the crowd with the distant, assessing look of a man deciding which problems are worth his time.
He apparently decided none of them were.
"They are very loud," Achilles observed, "for people who have not yet been tested."
"Ignore them," Wei Liang said quietly.
"I intend to." The bronze warrior glanced at him sideways. "Show me where we live."