She didn't sleep.
Sleep meant dreams. And dreams meant him.
---
Instead, Lianxin sat beneath the one living plum tree on the northern slope, blade across her knees, watching the blossoms fall.
It had once been their meeting place.
A hundred years ago.
Or was it longer?
In this life or the last?
Even now, time bent around him. Around them.
---
She caught a petal between her fingers. The edges were frayed. Burned slightly, as though the tree remembered the fire, too.
"You always wanted to plant plum trees on the border of the world,"
he'd once told her.
"So even if the realms fell apart… something beautiful would still bloom where they touched."
She crushed the petal in her fist.
---
Qin Yue approached quietly, carrying a cup of bitter spirit tea.
"You haven't left this spot since last night," she said gently.
Lianxin didn't look at her. "I was trying to forget."
"Did it work?"
"I remembered instead."
---
She accepted the tea.
The taste was sharp, numbing.
Good.
Numbness was safer than grief.
---
"He didn't run," Lianxin said.
Qin Yue nodded. "You expected him to?"
"I hoped he would."
"Because that would make it easier?"
"No," Lianxin said, staring at the ground. "Because it would mean he was still a coward."
---
The wind shifted.
Plum petals danced like ghosts around them, then scattered.
---
Qin Yue sat beside her.
"Everyone's waiting for your next command," she said softly.
Lianxin closed her eyes. "Let them wait."
"They're afraid."
"So am I."
---
A pause.
Then—
"You still love him."
Lianxin didn't deny it.
Didn't confirm it.
Because it wasn't a question.
It was a wound spoken aloud.
---
She opened her eyes.
"I don't love what he is," she said. "But I haven't figured out how to stop loving what he was."
---
Qin Yue's expression was unreadable.
She didn't judge.
She didn't reassure.
She just reached out and brushed a single petal from Lianxin's shoulder.
---
Then the ground trembled.
Only slightly.
But both of them felt it.
---
Qin Yue stood. "Was that—?"
"No storm," Lianxin said, already rising to her feet. "Something else."
Far in the distance, a low hum echoed.
Not thunder.
Not qi.
But something older.
---
Something rising.
---
Lianxin turned toward the eastern horizon.
Where the sacred ruins of the Heaven-Marked Tomb lay sealed by divine decree.
No one had been allowed near it for centuries.
But tonight...
She could feel it.
Something beneath the stone had stirred.
And whatever it was—
It remembered his name.
---
The cliff beneath Yanlong's feet was quiet, but it pulsed with something rotten.
He knelt slowly, one palm pressed flat to the stone. He didn't channel his qi. He didn't need to. The mountain told him what he needed to know.
A fracture had formed in the spirit vein below.
Not natural. Not recent.
Deliberate.
And old.
Older than even the first blood he had spilled in the celestial war.
---
His eyes narrowed.
The heavens had always feared many things.
The mortal world discovering their cruelty.
The truth of how the seals worked.
And most of all—
The thing they buried when they shattered his wings.
---
He rose, slowly.
He didn't tremble, but his flame thinned. He forced it back to a flicker.
Because he knew what would come next if it flared too brightly.
That tomb below the eastern ridge…
It didn't forget.
---
Long ago, the celestial generals had called it The Forgotten Fang. The mortals, in desperate myths, gave it kinder names: The Sleeping Phoenix, The Night Flame.
But Yanlong knew it by what it whispered into his soul the day Heaven betrayed them both—
Vengralis.
A cursed dragon born in the first war of the heavens. His twin in spirit. His equal in flame. And the one he helped burn.
---
"You should have stayed buried," Yanlong murmured to the wind.
But the mountain didn't answer.
Only the faintest vibration, like a heartbeat echoing from the stone.
---
He turned to leave, intending to descend toward the lower valleys, when something flickered at the edge of his senses.
A shape. Distant. Moving too fast for any ordinary cultivator.
He recognized the rhythm of her steps before he saw her.
Lianxin.
Of course.
---
He should vanish.
He should turn to smoke and disappear.
But he didn't.
He stayed.
Because part of him—something reckless, something stupid, something human—still wanted her to know.
Not just who he had become…
But what was coming for him.
---
She emerged through the veil of trees, robes windswept, the sleeve of her inner tunic streaked with dried blood.
They didn't speak.
Not at first.
She looked at him the way someone looks at a flame they once cupped in their palms.
Now too large to hold.
Too dangerous to love.
---
"You felt it too," she said.
Not a question.
He nodded. "It's stirring."
She lowered her eyes. "The tomb?"
"Yes."
"I thought it was just sealed," she whispered. "I didn't know it was alive."
"It isn't."
He met her gaze.
"It's worse."
---
Lianxin's hand drifted to the dagger at her side—not the sword. The dagger was for demons. For things that spoke lies wrapped in truth.
But her hand didn't draw it.
Not yet.
---
Yanlong looked out toward the horizon.
"I can stop it. Maybe. But not with Heaven's help."
"You think they'll abandon us again?"
"They already have."
He said it so simply, so coldly, it almost broke her again.
---
She walked closer. Just a few paces.
Then stopped.
Her voice was soft.
"If you go there… and face it… will you survive?"
He didn't answer.
She nodded. "Then I'll come with you."
Yanlong turned sharply. "No."
She raised her chin. "You don't give the orders."
"If you die down there—"
"I died the day you burned my name from your memory."
---
That silenced him.
And in the quiet that followed, something ancient howled deep within the tomb—far louder than before.
Even the wind bent back from the mountain.
---
Yanlong clenched his fists.
"I'll open the seal," he said. "Alone."
"If you fall—"
"Then let me fall."
Lianxin looked at him.
Really looked.
And something in her eyes cracked—not pity, not rage.
But sorrow.
The kind you only have for someone you used to call home.
---
He stepped toward the path that led east.
But before he vanished, she said one final thing.
"Yanlong."
He stopped.
"If you come back from this," she said, "don't come back for redemption."
"Why not?"
She didn't blink.
"Because there won't be any left to give you."
End of Chapter 8