We were nine namedays old then. Too small for our feet to reach the floor when we sat upon our father's throne, yet already aware that it waited for us, patient as stone. Power has a way of recognizing its own.
There was a boy in those days, some months older than us, though the difference mattered little. He was not a servant's son, nor was he kin, merely someone who lived close enough to be useful for passing time.
He came to play when our tutors were absent, when they were not impressing upon us the weight of destiny and the inevitable greatness of the Heavenly Demonic Cult. He brought fruit with him, whatever scraps his father had failed to sell. Apples with soft spots, pears gone mealy, once a few plums wrapped too carefully in cloth.
We permitted his presence.
We tolerated him, and at times even found him agreeable. He was proud, in the small, untrained way of those who possess nothing else. He never asked for favors, which he would not have received regardless.
Want showed in his eyes often enough, lingering on things he was never meant to touch. Pride kept his mouth closed. We mistook that for virtue when we were young.
Everything ends. Some things simply end sooner than others.
The city patrol took his father one morning. They named him a spy for the Emperor. Whether it was truth or convenience was irrelevant. Guilt is a matter of declaration, not evidence. By midday the man was naked and bound to a horse, dragged through the streets so the city could learn what defiance costs.
We remember the sounds clearly. His family screaming themselves raw. His mother clutching at armored legs. His sister collapsing into tears. His grandparents sinking to the stones like sacks of grain.
The people were eager. They always are. They threw plates, broken vessels, anything that might cut or bruise. A knife flashed once. Needles were scattered in the road so the horse would grind them into his flesh. They wanted him to beg. They wanted his pride stripped before his skin.
It disappointed them.
He endured the first parade in silence. The second as well. By the third, his body failed where his will refused to bend. He died without pleading, without offering the crowd even the courtesy of fear.
We recall feeling a measure of respect for that. His stubbornness. His refusal to abase himself.
We recall feeling more strongly how foolish it was.
He died all the same. He died as men without power always do, publicly and for the instruction of others. Worse, his death ruined his family along with him, staining them with his defiance. Pride did not save him. Honor did not lessen the pain. All it achieved was a quieter death.
Some days later, the boy came to us again.
Whatever light he once carried had burned itself out. His eyes were dull now, his face drawn tight over bone, as if grief had eaten him and found little worth keeping. He sat with us as he always had. He played when we permitted it. He spoke of small, meaningless things.
At one point he broke and cried, his shoulders trembling while he tried and failed to keep his voice steady.
Still, he never asked us for help.
We took note of that. Pride, again. Foolish, but persistent. We thought him stronger than most for it. We believed he might endure what had been done to his family. Some people survive disasters the way cracked walls survive fires. Scarred, but standing.
That belief did not last.
He moved without warning. His hand closed around the sword displayed nearby, a ceremonial piece meant for show rather than use. He turned toward us with eyes red and swollen, rage leaking through the grief like pus from a wound.
His whole body shook as he raised the blade, shouting that it was we who had killed his family. That it was our grandfather, the Heavenly Demon, who had ordered it. His voice wavered even as he screamed, as if he feared the words might fail him before we did.
He truly believed killing us would give him justice.
Birth decides many things long before effort ever enters the conversation.
We struck him once. The blow was hard and simple. The sword slipped from his fingers and clattered uselessly across the floor. He fell, and we followed him down without haste. We struck again and again, not in anger, not in panic, but with the calm certainty of someone correcting a mistake.
His teeth scraped against our knuckles as they shattered. His jaw gave way beneath our fists. The sounds he made grew smaller, thinner, until they barely resembled speech at all.
When we finally stepped back, the floor was slick beneath our feet.
He lay there crying, tears running freely now, cutting pale paths through the blood on his face and staining the stone beneath him. He looked very small then. Smaller than he had even as a child standing beside us.
We felt little as we bent down and picked up the sword where it had fallen. It was heavier than it should have been, badly balanced, its edge dulled from years of hanging on a wall. It was not our sword. It was not meant to kill anyone.
It would do.
He struggled when we forced it against his throat. Of course he did. The blade did not go in cleanly. We had to push, our hands slipping as we leaned our weight forward. When it finally broke through, blood burst out in a sudden spray, hot and bright, soaking our hands and chest.
For a few moments he could only stare at us, his eyes wide with fear, his mouth opening and closing as if he wanted to speak but no sound came.
If we wished, we could have let him go then. Years of shared childhood stood between us. Games played in the courtyard. Fruit eaten together on warm stone floors. All of it passed through our mind and left just as quickly.
When a dog you have raised for years turns around and bites you, it stops being a pet. It becomes a thing that must be put down.
So we finished it.
The servants came running at the noise. They froze when they saw the blood, the body, the sword still in our hands. No one dared approach us. They fled instead, eager to report what they had seen to someone else.
We waited.
Nothing happened. No punishment followed. No questions were asked. No one spoke of it at all.
The next morning, our grandfather came to see us.
He stood before us like a mountain given flesh. He was easily over seven feet tall, broad and unmoving. He was as old as the turtle in our pond, yet his face was smooth and unlined, his body strong, his features handsome in a way that would have filled a maiden's dreams. Age had passed him by and left nothing behind.
He looked down at us for a long moment. Then he smiled.
"You passed the test," he said.
The smile was warm. Too warm. The kind of warmth that exists only to be believed in.
We felt surprise then, but we did not show it. Understanding followed close behind. This had all been his doing. The accusation against the fruit seller. The patrol. The execution. The boy's ruined family. None of it had mattered to him. Only the result did.
"Remember this," he said, straightening. "Never leave your sword unattended. In this world, not having your weapon in hand is a death sentence."
Then his gaze hardened.
"And never trust those close to you. Given enough benefit, anyone will betray you. We gave that boy the chance to avenge his family by killing you. You saw how eagerly he tried."
That was all.
He turned and left, already finished with us.
We remained where we were, knowing then that the world was not ruled by justice, nor by loyalty.
It was ruled by those who understood how little either of those things mattered.
If we had wished to, we could have spoken. We could have asked him, or dared to question how a man could be so cold as to destroy an entire family simply to measure a child. The words existed. The thought passed through us, faint and distant.
We did not voice it.
What he had done, he had done for us. And more than that, he was not a man to be questioned. He ruled the world in all but name. Supreme authority of the Heavenly Demonic Cult. Bearer of celestial blood, or so the world whispered. Titles clung to him like shadows, but none of them mattered as much as the fact that he stood above consequence.
And we were, in the end, only a boy.
So we took note. We stored the lesson away and never allowed it to fade. Trust too much, and you are ruined. Trust too little, and you arrive at the same end by a slower road. Ruin wears many faces, but it always recognizes hesitation.
No matter how cruel our grandfather was, no matter how casually he discarded lives, he was the wisest man in the Nine Realms. Wisdom, we learned, is not kindness. It is effectiveness. And effectiveness rarely concerns itself with mercy.
We followed the lessons he gave us. Every one of them. We shaped ourselves around his words, sharpened our instincts against them, tested the world the way he had taught us to.
But of all the things he impressed upon us, one lesson never loosened its grip.
Never leave your sword behind.
In this world, a man without a blade is already dead.
We never let go of our sword when we succeeded our grandfather as the Heavenly Demon.
We did not release it as we butchered the officials of the Heavenly Demonic Cult who tried to bar our path, men who believed position or seniority could outweigh blood and right. They died quickly once they understood how wrong they were.
We did not release it when the forces of Murim invaded, rushing in the moment word spread of our grandfather's disappearance. They came seeking chaos, spoils, and a weakened realm. They found only us. The sword never left our hand as we cut through them, stroke after stroke, until the ground could no longer drink the blood fast enough.
It did not leave us when we entered the Imperial City.
In broad daylight, before the court and the banners and the empty promises of protection, we beheaded the Emperor. His daughter watched it happen. She screamed for the guards until her voice broke, calling their names as if familiarity might resurrect courage.
No one came.
How could they? A dead man cannot answer a plea.
. . .
We still could not bring ourselves to let our sword leave our hand.
Before us rose the mountain, vast and green. Its slopes were strewn with corpses. Martial artists lay scattered everywhere. Some were missing arms. Some had lost their heads. For others, only scraps of skin and torn robes remained, all that was left of an identity that had once meant something.
The soil had turned red. The stone steps leading up to the temple were slick with blood, so soaked that they looked as though rain had fallen from the sky itself. Any ordinary man would have felt horror at the sight. He would have turned away, his legs carrying him from the place without thought.
A righteous man might have felt rage instead. Pain in his heart. A need for vengeance that would not quiet until every life here had been answered for.
As for us, we felt nothing.
It was, after all, our work.
With a single leap we crossed the thousand steps that climbed from the foot of the mountain to its peak. The air was thick with the stench of blood and rotting flesh. The only sounds were the wings and beaks of birds, already feeding on what remained.
From the summit, we finally saw it clearly.
The dead stretched as far as our eyes could see from that thousand foot height. Bodies layered over bodies. Pools of blood gathering where too many had fallen in one place, it was dark and still, reflecting the sky like broken mirrors.
"You… finally came. Hm… Tian Haeran."
The voice was weak and slow, scraping against the silence like stone dragged over bone.
We were still looking out over the mountain when it reached us. It came from behind, from the Taoist temple at our back. We turned.
The temple was small. Half of it had burned, its wooden beams blackened and split. From where we stood, we could see straight through to the far wall. That was not what held our attention.
An old man sat there, slumped against the wall, propped upright by stone and stubbornness alone. He was covered in blood. His eyes had been dug out. His legs were gone, cut cleanly away. His body was riddled with stab wounds, each one still seeping. A root like parasite clung to his flesh, burrowed into him, feeding slowly.
The sun was setting. Darkness crept in, but it did not trouble us. We could see him as clearly as if it were noon.
It was appropriate.
As before, it was our work.
"Old man," we said, our voice carrying easily across the distance. "Tang Yeran. Did you ever think you would meet your end here. Like this."
We began to walk toward him. He heard us coming. He smiled.
It was not the smile of joy. Nor of grief. It was acceptance. We rarely saw it. Fewer still earned it.
"I once held you in my hands," he muttered. "When you were just born. So small. So precious."
He tilted his head toward us, empty sockets meeting our eyes.
"You had so much hair on your body," he went on. "Like a rat. Just like that grandfather of yours."
His smile did not fade.
Neither did ours.
"Speaking of rats… we almost forgot."
A thin smile touched our lips as our hands worked the rope loose from behind our back. We tossed it forward. It landed in the old man's lap with a wet, lifeless weight.
"Here," we said. "Some rat heads. A gift."
We had never cared for the small cruelties, the kind that relied on drawn out screams or clever words. Mental torture was tedious. Inefficient.
But this man was different.
This was the one who had rallied the entire martial world to hunt us down like a beast. For him, preparation was warranted.
We waited for a sound. A gasp. A curse. Even a tremor.
Nothing.
"Did you not like it?" we asked softly.
His face meant nothing to us now. Whatever pride had once lived there had long since collapsed. He was only a broken man, held upright by stubborn breath.
"There are five heads on that rope," we continued, almost thoughtfully. "Let me see. Your wife. Your son. Your granddaughter. Your disciple. And your closest friend."
Still, he did not answer.
He reached down and touched the severed head of his disciple, fingers brushing the hair with careful tenderness, as though afraid to wake him. A final farewell, offered to something that could no longer hear.
Of course, we had taken them along the way. Every corpse had been earned. He had sent everyone he could to stop us. We simply collected what remained.
"When I was young," the old man finally said, his voice thin but steady, "I was happy."
He did not look at us.
"My father led the Tang Sect. My mother was the prime minister's daughter. I had a kind aunt. That was more than most men ever receive."
He exhaled slowly.
"I was alive then. In heart. In mind. But Heaven allows nothing to last."
At last, his eyes lifted. Empty sockets seemed to stare straight through us.
"He entered my life."
A pause.
"Your grandfather. Tian Haoran."
"I loved him," Tang Yeran said. "He was my aunt's only son. The closest thing I ever had to a brother. No matter what trouble he caused, I stood before him and bore the blame."
His fingers curled.
"I do not know when love curdled into jealousy. Was it when he mastered in a single glance what took me three years to learn? Was it when I discovered he was the heir to the Heavenly Demonic Cult, fated to rule the world? Or was it the day his father forced mine to kneel… over a misplaced joke?"
His breath shuddered, but his voice did not break.
"My entire life, I chased his shadow. I wanted him to look up to me. To see me as his elder brother."
A hollow smile touched his lips.
"But tell me. No matter how fiercely a firefly burns, can it rival the sun? Can it reach for the star that all men desire, only to be burned to ash before taking a single step?"
"I do not know the day, or the hour, when my love for him finally died," Tang Yeran said. "But I know precisely when hatred was born."
His fingers tightened, nails biting into his palm.
"It was the day of my wedding."
"The woman I had loved my entire life ran past me. She did not look back. She ran straight into his arms, as though she had always belonged there. She was crying when she smiled at him. Smiling, as if his embrace was the safest place in this godforsaken world."
A long silence followed.
"At that moment, even envy died."
He lifted his head slightly.
"Tell me, how can envy survive in the heart of a firefly when it stands before the sun? Sooner or later, it learns the truth. That it is nothing more than a brief flicker, while the other is the faith of the world itself."
His voice dropped.
"I wanted to kill him then. Truly. But I am ashamed to admit this."
He closed his eyes.
"I was captivated."
"If death had to come, I wanted it to come by that sword"
"The sword he drew that day carved its way through the Tang Sect as though men were mist. Elders fell. Disciples screamed. No formation held. No technique slowed him."
"No one could stop him."
Tang Yeran opened his eyes again.
"He looked at us once. Just once. A cold, passing glance, as if we were dust on the road he happened to walk."
"And in that moment, I understood."
"I had never mattered at all."
The old man was already out of breath from speaking so much. His ruined body could barely sustain even these few words. If it had been anyone else, we would have ended it already. There is no reason to grant an enemy the dignity of last words. You have already given them their final actions.
But he was speaking of our grandfather.
So we listened.
What we knew of Tian Haoran was no more than a drop compared to the ocean he represented. The thought of it was almost laughable.
"From then on," Tang Yeran continued, forcing the words out, "I tried my best. No… I went beyond my best."
He paused, swallowing blood.
"I married a good woman. Had healthy children. For a time, I was happy again. Truly happy. But the moment I heard that Tian Haoran had a child of his own, that happiness rotted away."
His hand trembled as it searched the rope. He found a head and drew it closer, fingers moving slowly through matted hair.
"The day of my marriage," he said, "my first… and only love."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I am ashamed to admit it," he went on, voice thinning, "but I was happy when I heard Haoran's wife died in childbirth. Happy, even if only for a heartbeat. I told myself it was karma. How could a woman who rejected me be allowed to live? Who humiliated me so thoroughly?"
A dry sound escaped him, something between breath and laughter.
"We comforted ourselves with that lie."
His empty sockets turned upward.
"Until she began to appear in my dreams. And even there, I could not have her."
He drew another strained breath.
"Then came word of the Heavenly Demon's daughter. Weak. Gentle. Unable to learn even basic martial arts. I took comfort in that as well. I told myself a dragon had given birth to an waste."
His life was slipping away. We could see it without effort. Each breath came slower than the last, as if his body were already negotiating its surrender.
"I once saw… your mother…" he said.
He had to pause, dragging air into his lungs between each word. We watched him with the same expression we had worn from the beginning.
"She looked… kind. Too kind. Too pure… for Haoran's cult."
A faint breath escaped him.
"I took pleasure in it, you know. Hearing Haoran mocked behind his back. Hearing men whisper that someone like him had birthed such a gentle daughter."
His empty sockets lifted toward us. And then, he smiled.
"Then… you came."
The smile widened, trembling at the edges.
"You were Haoran's pride. The son he never had." His voice thinned further. "You..... are everything I ever wished for."
Silence pressed down on the chamber.
"But Heaven is cruelly.... consistent," he whispered. "What I desire… has always belonged to Haoran."
His breath rattled.
"And so it was written."
He finally fell silent.
An expression we had never seen on any face settled upon him. Regret tangled with sorrow, envy clung to despair, every emotion a broken man could still muster pressing together without restraint.
"Go on…" he whispered at last. "Do your duty. End this pointless war."
For a moment, it seemed as though his life was replaying itself behind those empty sockets. Then it passed. What remained was emptiness. A smooth, lifeless calm.
We did not change our expression.
A faint smirk touched our lips as we stepped forward.
Our foot struck the rope, sending the severed heads tumbling from his lap. We rested the sword on his shoulder. Our grandfather's sword. The only thing of worth he had left behind before he disappeared.
"Yes," we murmured. "You are right."
We leaned closer.
"You will always stand beneath our grandfather."
For the first time, his face twisted. Hurt. Disbelief. Something ugly and emotional appeared, as though even at the edge of death he could not accept it.
That his entire life had been nothing more than an ant struggling against the heavens.
The blade slid closer, biting lightly into his neck. A thin line of blood appeared. His expression steadied again, as though surrender had finally arrived.
Then.....
BOOM.
Our left fist struck his face.
His head burst apart in a spray of blood and bone. We saw it clearly. The final expression frozen at the instant of impact.
Twisted.
Bitter.
Hideous.
Even now, even in death, he had not obtained what he wanted.
We kicked his corpse aside and sat there in silence.
It was a vast, terrible sight. From this height, the plains below stretched endlessly, soaked in blood from the battle. Bodies lay scattered across the land, twisted and broken, weapons half buried in mud and ash. The world looked spent.
We tightened our grip on the sword and lifted our gaze.
Stars had begun to appear through the burned roof, faint lights piercing the smoke-darkened sky.
"We wonder…" we murmured softly, "if what you said was true, Grandfather."
Staring at the heavens, memories surfaced unbidden. Nights long past, when our grandfather spoke of our lineage. He told us we descended from celestials. He would point toward certain stars and say they were forged by our ancestors, Haeran among them, watching from above.
Time slipped by.
Our body began to fail. Strength drained away, breath growing shallow. Death was coming for us.
Perhaps it came to weigh our sins, to judge the countless lives we had sent before it. Or perhaps it only wished to see how pitiful the boy who once dreamed of eternal life had become.
The thought made us chuckle.
We closed our eyes.
The sensation began in our legs. A dull numbness spread upward as flesh slowly crumbled into ash. It was not painful. It was patient. Inevitable.
Soon, what remained of our body collapsed forward. Our back disintegrated into dust as we turned our head one final time, looking down upon the mountain of corpses below.
If someone were to ask whether we regretted it.
We did not.
Given another chance, we would do it again. Even if it cost us our life once more. Again and again, until we no longer could.
All for the cult left to us by our grandfather and our mother.
Our vision dulled. Darkness swallowed everything. Sensation vanished completely.
Then something unexpected happened.
A point of light appeared within the void. Small at first, fragile. It grew, swallowing the darkness instead. Flesh returned before thought. Sight followed. Feeling followed.
. . . . . .
Our eyes opened again.
We did not know where we were, or how this was possible. But our senses had returned. Color flooded back into the world. Pain followed close behind.
Then our hearing returned.
"Lannisters send their regards."
Killing intent crashed into us.
We moved without hesitation.
Our hand shot forward, fingers driving into the man's eye sockets. We tore inward, ripping flesh and bone from within. We felt it clearly. The resistance. The heat. The scream that never finished forming.
Whatever death intended for us.
It would have to wait.
(Tang Yeran)
(The Mountain)
(Tian Haeran)