The forest east of the Red Moon Sect had no songs left. Snow had not fallen, but ash had, and the ash lay on every fern and blade of grass like a prayer someone forgot to finish. Between the trunks, the wind moved as if it were reading a scroll and could not find the next line.
Yan Ming moved with it.
The bone shard lay warm against Yan Ming's sternum, a pulse like a second heartbeat, violet under skin. His breath steamed; each exhale weighed more than the last. When he touched the cut on his upper arm where the spear had grazed him, his fingers came away dark. He bound the wound with a strip of his sleeve and a narrow leaf he knew by shape and smell, the one Master Yun had said was good for pulling heat from a fever and wickedness from a cut.
"Do not pretend you are not afraid," said the voice that was not a voice, companion to his breath. "Pretend nothing. See. Name. Eat."
Yan Ming looked at the fear and did not look away. It was not noble. It was a boy's fear—the kind that shivered in the joints where hands met wrists, the kind that wanted to lie down in the cold ferns and stop being a problem. He breathed it into the river of his spine. The vertebrae lit like stars under mud: one, two, three. His shoulders dropped. The air found him again.
A green flare arced up through the canopy in the west and hung, hissing, above the broken mountain. Azure flames, Azure Sky Pavilion's way of writing its will across the night. An answering whistle from closer by—a birdcall that was not a birdcall—bent the leaves.
Yan Ming dropped into a shallow irrigation trench long abandoned to roots. He pressed his cheek to cool soil and tasted metal in it, and waited.
Footsteps approached. Quiet ones, but the quiet of men who liked being listened to. "Tracks," said a low voice. "Light, south by east. He's bleeding."
"Yan Ming," another voice said, speaking his name the way some men speak the names of pests, "take three to circle to the stream. The rest with me."
The name snagged in Yan Ming's chest. He remembered Su Qian saying You're alive and how something had unwound in him at that simple mercy. He remembered her saying Live and running. He had run. He was still running.
Yan Ming breathed, and spoke the word that fit somewhere beneath his ribs.
Fear, obeying its own nature, slid two inches to the left inside him, and the rest of him followed. The trench held him. The sounds of men and steel and breath brushed past like the hem of a robe. One set of eyes paused above him; the gaze narrowed; the breath sharpened. The man frowned, uncertain, and then the uncertainty soothed itself with arrogance and moved on.
"Do not explain," murmured the echo of the Mad Immortal, pleased.
When their sounds dissolved into the black needles ahead, Yan Ming rose. He kept low, curved his body around saplings so nothing snapped. The trench led him to a moss-slick shrine stone with the moon goddess carved on it, riding her carp through stars. The goddess's face was worn smooth by the weathered hands of people who were likely dead now or pretending very hard to live.
Yan Ming touched the stone with his knuckles. "I do not know what I owe the old gods," he whispered, and hated how the words tasted like begging. "But if you watch..."
If you watch, then watch what I choose.
The forest had teeth. They arrived on quiet paws. The wolf was not a storybook beast but a low animal with a coat mottled by ash and its own winter. Two more shadows slipped to either side. Hunger eyes. Calculation eyes. Not demon wolves; only animals who understood what cold meant.
Yan Ming's fear lifted its head, alert, ready to bolt. He told it where to go instead. Breath. Spine. Word.
The first wolf lunged for Yan Ming's thigh. He stepped into the lunge, not away from it, because the fear made him see the away-step was a trap—the second wolf waited on that line. He set his palm on the wolf's skull and turned. The motion cupped the animal's momentum, poured it past him; the wolf snapped air and stumbled. The second wolf committed; Yan Ming's shoulder flared hot-white where it struck, teeth scraping cloth and skin, but the river down his spine took the pain and turned it into a pivot. The heel of his hand met the wolf's jaw; the angle was honest, and bone thudded. The third shadow slipped closer—a test of edges.
"Do not be braver than you are," said the not-voice, dry. "Be exactly as brave as truth requires."
Yan Ming picked up a broken branch. He did not bare his teeth. He did not roar. He spoke in the old way of bodies, telling the wolves without words: not easy meat. After a spell of weighing, the animals faded back into the undergrowth, hunger cursing his thrift.
The forest opened into a rocky lip that had never agreed to be a path. Beyond, a sudden drop where earth had cracked long ago and decided to keep the quarrel. A thin rope of ancient vine had been knotted across it, once upon a season when men believed in bridges. The rope had rotted, then remembered itself at the last joint of fiber.
Yan Ming swallowed. Behind him, a branch snapped—not by the weight of a wolf.
"Found him," said the voice that had spoken his name, crisp with satisfaction. "Deacon Zhou Liang of the Azure Sky Pavilion does not fail his lines twice."
The name wrote itself into Yan Ming's memory: Zhou Liang. tall; smoker's breath; voice that liked to order. Four men fanned out. Talismans gleamed in their fists like cheap stars.
Yan Ming did not argue with the cliff. He ran. The rotted vine proved its last loyalty, then gave up and came away with a sigh. For a heartbeat, there was nothing under him. The fear clawed upward, a wet hand in his chest.
A hand caught Yan Ming's wrist.
The shock of the grip ran bone-deep, familiar. Su Qian's face swam into sense, soot-streaked, hair hacked to uneven survival, eyes too bright in the dark. Su Qian was anchored to a boulder with a length of sash twisted into new rope around her waist and the waist of a scraggly pine whose roots had made a pact with stone long before either of them were born.
"Yan Ming," Su Qian said, breath three parts ragged, one part laughter. "Learn to fly later."
They scrambled together onto the far ledge while arrows whispered through where Yan Ming's shoulders had been. A talisman thudded against the rock and flared into a net of crackling blue light that pursued itself in a circle, seeking throats.
"Demon-brat!" Zhou Liang hissed across the gap. "Throw down the bone you stole and I'll petition to spare you a clean death."
"Do not explain," sighed the voice that had no breath.
Yan Ming didn't. He and Su Qian ran. The ledge narrowed, then widened, melted into a slope of scree that wanted to skate them back into the jaws of the gap. Su Qian moved like water cutting its own bed. Her footwork had a pattern that made the stones forget they were stones—three light steps, a twist of ankle, a sudden dead weight that collapsed under her and, in collapsing, lifted her. Threadcut Mist Steps, the outer form of it at least—the name came to Yan Ming because the movement told him its name.
"Su Qian," Yan Ming panted when the ground accepted them again, "I thought—"
"Dead?" Su Qian showed her teeth in something that was not a smile and not not. "I do not die today. Men who think they are righteous have poor aim and poorer imaginations."
Yan Ming wanted to hold her by both shoulders and shake apologies and relief into the air. He did not have the time to hold anything but breath and the present.
They ran until the forest thinned into a charcoal burrower's clearing—a circle of ground pressed to ash by years of burning wood into need. A low hut hunched there like a man thinking difficult thoughts. Su Qian ducked inside without asking the hut's permission. Yan Ming followed. The smell was old smoke and a child's idea of safety: a roof, even if the roof had holes; a door, even if the door was only shadow.
They listened. The sounds of pursuit broke against the trees and skittered off in wrong directions. Zhou Liang knew his work, but the land had decided to be complicated.
Yan Ming eased to a sit. His hands shook now, as if a debt had come due. The bone shard warmed again under his palm, responding to something he had not asked.
Su Qian watched him. The watching had weight. "That thing," Su Qian said softly. "I have seen its shadow. The masters sealed the black kiln with oaths and fire and the kind of silence that eats songs. They told me to stand on the west terrace when trouble came and smile at the wrong men. They told me to keep the door unremarked."
"You knew," Yan Ming said. He did not make it an accusation. He asked the truth to be named.
Su Qian's eyes did not flinch. "I knew it mattered. I did not know it would choose you. Or that the night would bleed so much it would flood the mountain."
The admission put air back into the hut. Yan Ming nodded. "It is an echo. The Mad Immortal's legacy. Or a mirror in which I look like a hunger until I admit that I am a hunger."
Su Qian's mouth tilted. "You always talk like this?"
"Since tonight," Yan Ming said, weary enough to joke. The weariness cracked and something raw came through. "Su Qian, they call it demonic."
"They would," Su Qian said. "If you refuse their grammar, you are always a curse to them."
Yan Ming let the words rest inside him, and in resting, they fit. He untied his makeshift bandage. Su Qian's hands—scarred, strong—took over the work without asking. She poured water from a blackened jar, tore a fresh strip from the lining of her outer robe, bound him with a competence that did not advertise itself.
"Why did you come back for me?" Yan Ming asked, and felt the smallness of the question's selfish need and did not apologize for it.
Su Qian tied off the bandage with a tight knot. "Because I gave you the bone and said live. If you died in a ravine, I would have to carry that lie in my mouth all my days. And because if we are hunted whether we are two together or two apart, I choose together." The last words came out as if they had learned to dress themselves in armor.
The not-voice, pleased again: Good. Honesty eats well.
Yan Ming took one slow breath, then another, the way the Eclipse Heart Sutra had taught him. The fear sat and did not fidget. He touched the bone shard and felt how its pattern wanted a shape in him—breath, spine, word, again and again, until the shape became his.
"Teach me the breath," Su Qian said, surprising him. "Not your secret word. I can see it is a blade best held by one hand right now. Teach me the part that steadies bones."
Yan Ming did not pretend to be wise. He showed Su Qian the counting Master Yun had taught them as children, and the way he had learned tonight to let the count go round the fear instead of tripping over it. They sat in a hut that had probably heard better vows in better years and breathed like people who had decided to be alive.
Outside, wind took a long time making up its mind about the door. When it finally came in, it did not demand anything.
"Yan Ming," Su Qian said, quieter than the wind, "we cannot go south or west. They own those roads now in their minds, and minds can be worse than swords. East, the stories say, is the Abyssal Frontier. If we go there, we might learn what the elders meant to hide and why. If we do not go there, we will be running in circles that end at knives."
Yan Ming thought of the river below the Red Moon Sect, how in spring it threw itself at boulders not because it was brave but because it was a river and it did not know how not to move. He nodded. "East."
"Then one small oath, Yan Ming," Su Qian said, and her voice did a very rare thing; it hesitated, not out of doubt but out of respect for the shape of a word about to be made. "No lies between us—not the kind that saves face and then eats the house from the beams. If we are to die, we die with our names holding hands. If we are to live, we live because our fear is named and does not have to steer us by surprise."
Yan Ming's throat tightened. It was not the kind of oath that bound Heaven's rings or summoned lightning. It was the kind that made a person into the sort of ground the world could build a road on.
"I swear," Yan Ming said. "No lies. If I cannot tell you a truth, I will say I cannot. No pretty curtains on ugly windows."
Su Qian's mouth did the almost-smile again. "Fair. No pretty curtains."
The not-voice said, as if noting a thing in a ledger: A vow is a knife. But a knife, if held with care, is also a handle.
They left the hut before dawn's rumor had time to wake birds. The old frontier road found them, stones laid so level by forgotten engineers that two centuries of roots had not taught them to buckle. The east breathed cold in their faces like a promise with teeth.
Behind them, in the woods, a hunter named Zhou Liang of the Azure Sky Pavilion swore that he would pry the violet secret from Yan Ming's ribs if he had to burn the forest tree by tree. He lifted his hand for a signal. No green flares answered; the men nearest him had gotten lost in the way that happens when a land decides to be loyal to those who walked it honestly.
Yan Ming did not know this. Yan Ming only knew that Su Qian moved beside him with a blade that wasn't whole but would still cut, that his spine was a river he could find with breath, and that the word he spoke inside fit, not because it made him safe, but because it made him real.
The road bent toward the Abyssal Frontier. Stories bent with it. They walked where stories thinned and had to be rewoven by whoever dared to step next.
They stepped.