---The Second Red Moon---
The messenger arrived at dusk, bleeding, half-dead from running: an Order column was marching on the western villages, burning as it went.
It was a good plan to intercept them. It was even the right plan. The Order had simply stopped needing plans — the Voice already knew where the Hollow was.
Shizui took the fighters. He left Ren as guard captain, because Ren counted the living, and someone had to.
He saw the smoke from six miles away, and he knew, the way you know in dreams.
He had seen this smoke before. At gates he had once cheered beneath.
The Hollow was embers. The Order had come out of the earth itself, it seemed — no banners, no horns, just white cloaks moving through the camp like a tide. In the root-cellar under the old barn, forty children survived, because one man had held the cellar door against a hundred.
They found Ren sitting against that door, propped upright by his own stubbornness, holding his side, still half-laughing — because of course he was.
"Don't be... so modest," Ren grinned through the blood. "You're the hero of this country. You always were."
"No," said Shizui, kneeling, his hands hovering over all the places a man cannot be wounded and live. "That was you."
Ren died smiling.
And Shizui stopped rationing the fire.
He let it all in — everything the seal had held back for twenty-two years — and the fire ate as it had promised it would. He fed it his mother's lullaby, and it was gone from the world. He fed it the smell of sawdust and the weight of an axe and the sound of stories told by firelight, and they were gone. He held each memory like a coal before releasing it, and the fire took them the way fire takes everything: gratefully.
The last thing to go was the sound of Diana's laugh.
Then there was nothing left between him and the rage but the work.
And in the roaring dark of his blood, he heard it — down beneath the world, beneath the throne of quiet: the harvest. Ten thousand souls of the Red Moon dead, and the purged, and the burned. All leashed. All waiting in the King's cellar like wine.
Shizui reached down through his own veins and tore the leash out by the roots.
"Come home," he told them. "All of you."
And the dead of the Red Moon climbed out of the earth with their old wounds and their old banners, four thousand ghosts in the armour they had been betrayed in, forming ranks around a white-haired boy whose body was now laced black from throat to fingertips. They had no voices. They did not need any. They knew the way home.
So did he.
That night the moon rose the colour of an old wound. Scholars would argue for a hundred years about dust, and ash, and the refraction of burning cities.
No one who marched beneath that moon ever argued about anything again.
Before the march began, Shizui went alone to the old battlefield and filled his palm with seed from the scarlet flowers that grew where the dead had fallen.
Ren would have asked why. Diana would have known.