The snow fell early that year, blanketing the Jade Court in a silence so complete it seemed to swallow sound itself. Seven-year-old Wei Li pressed his small palms against the frost-laced window, watching his breath bloom and fade against the glass like a ghost trying to speak.
"Father's late," he whispered.
Behind him, his mother Zhang Li looked up from her embroidery, the silver needle hovering above silk the color of dried blood. Her dark eyes—so like his own—reflected the candlelight with a worry she tried to hide. "The Emperor's business never runs on schedule, little wolf. You know this."
But Wei Li did know. He knew the way his father's boots sounded on the marble floors, the heavy tread of a man who carried the weight of an empire's secrets. He knew the particular rhythm of Ren Li's stride—three quick steps, a pause, then two more. A code, his father had once laughed, so his son would always know when he was coming home.
The footsteps never came.
The Li Dynasty had ruled the northern provinces for three centuries, not through divine right or military might, but through knowledge. They were the keepers of the Hidden Archives, the only family in the realm permitted to read the forbidden texts that spoke of what lay beyond the mortal veil. Wei Li's ancestors had served as advisors to seventeen emperors, walking the narrow path between the seen and unseen worlds.
Ren Li was the greatest of them all. Or so everyone said.
"Go to bed," Zhang Li said, setting aside her embroidery. The half-finished dragon on the silk seemed to writhe in the candlelight, its eyes stitched from golden thread that caught the flame and held it. "Your father will wake you when he returns."
Wei Li didn't move. "He's not coming back tonight."
"Wei Li—"
"I can feel it." The boy turned from the window, and in his young face was something ancient, something that had no place in a child's expression. "The threads are wrong, Mother. Can't you feel them? They're... fraying."
Zhang Li went very still. She crossed the room in three silent steps and knelt before her son, taking his small hands in hers. Her fingers were cold. "What do you see, my heart?"
Wei Li closed his eyes. When he was very young—too young to remember—an old woman in the market had grabbed his chin and stared into his face with milky, blind eyes. "This one," she had cackled, while his mother's guards drew their swords. "This one has the sight! The gods have touched him! Mark my words, Lady Li—this boy will either save your house or destroy it!"
The old woman had been paid and sent away. But Zhang Li had never forgotten.
Now, in the quiet of the winter evening, her son's eyelids fluttered like the wings of a dying moth. "There's a door," he whispered. "In the Eastern Garden. Father found it. It's... it's not supposed to be open, Mother. It's not supposed to be open yet."
"What door? Wei Li, what door?"
But the boy's eyes snapped open, and he gasped as if surfacing from deep water. His face was pale, his small body trembling. "He's gone," Wei Li said, and his voice was empty of everything—fear, hope, even sadness. Just a hollow certainty that made Zhang Li's blood run cold. "Father walked through, and the door ate him. It's still hungry."
---
They found his father's cloak first.
It lay in the snow of the Eastern Garden like a shed skin, the heavy brocade already stiff with frost. Zhang Li ran to it, her silk slippers sinking into the drifts, her hair coming loose from its elaborate pins. She lifted the fabric to her face and inhaled, and the sound she made was not quite human.
Wei Li stood at the garden's edge, his small hand clutching the jade pendant his father had given him on his last nameday. The stone was warm against his palm—unnaturally warm—and when he looked down at it, he saw something that made him want to scream.
The carved dragon on the pendant's face was weeping.
Not figuratively. Not poetically. Actual tears of liquid jade ran from the creature's eyes, pooling in the crevices of its scaled body before dripping onto Wei Li's fingers. Where they touched his skin, they burned like acid and froze like winter, both at once.
"Mother," he said, but his voice was too small, too lost in the wind that had begun to howl through the garden's bare trees.
Zhang Li didn't hear him. She was staring at something in the snow beyond the cloak—something Wei Li couldn't see from where he stood. When she turned back to him, her face had transformed. The worry was gone, replaced by a terrible resolve that made her look like a stranger.
"Go inside," she commanded. "Now."
"But—"
"Wei Li." His name in her mouth was a blade. "If you love me, if you love the memory of your father, you will go inside and you will lock every door. You will not open them for anyone. Not the Emperor. Not the gods themselves. Do you understand?"
He understood. He didn't want to, but he did.
That night, while the household guards searched the grounds with lanterns that threw shadows too long and too dark, Wei Li sat in his father's study and watched the jade pendant weep until its tears ran dry. The dragon's eyes were hollow now, empty sockets that seemed to stare at something he couldn't see.
On his father's desk lay an open book—one of the forbidden texts, its pages made from something that wasn't quite paper, its ink that wasn't quite ink. Wei Li couldn't read most of the characters, but he recognized his father's handwriting in the margins. Notes. Warnings.
*The Door opens for blood,* one read. *The Door opens for need. But most of all, the Door opens for those who do not fear what lies beyond.*
Another, scribbled in haste: *They lied about everything. The immortals aren't gods. They're prisoners. And they're so very hungry.*
Wei Li closed the book. He was seven years old, and in that moment, he aged a hundred years.
---
Five winters passed.
The Li Dynasty endured, though diminished. Without Ren Li's guidance, the Emperor found other advisors, other keepers of secrets. The family's influence waned like the moon in its final quarter, and whispers began to circulate in the capital's teahouses and shadowed alleys.
*The Lis have lost the mandate of heaven.*
*Their luck has run out.*
*The son is cursed. Marked by whatever took his father.*
Wei Li heard none of it, or pretended not to. At twelve, he was tall for his age, with his father's sharp cheekbones and his mother's watchful eyes. He trained with the sword masters every morning, studied the forbidden texts every afternoon, and every night, without fail, he walked the Eastern Garden.
The door his father had found was gone. Or rather, it had never truly been there—not in any way that stone and mortar could contain. But Wei Li could still feel it, a thinness in the air, a place where the world wore thin like threadbare cloth. Sometimes, if he stood very still and emptied his mind of everything, he could almost see it: a rectangle of deeper darkness, a threshold that led somewhere else.
He never tried to open it. His father's notes had been clear enough about that.
But he watched. He waited. And he learned.
"You're becoming obsessed," his mother told him one evening, finding him in the garden as snow began to fall. She was thinner now, the bones of her face too prominent, her hair streaked with silver that hadn't been there five years ago. Grief had carved her into something elegant and fragile, like porcelain held together by will alone. "Your father wouldn't want this life for you."
"What life would he want?" Wei Li didn't turn from the empty space where the door existed. "To forget? To pretend the world is simple and safe?"
"To be happy."
The word hung between them, foreign and almost obscene. Happy. As if happiness were something that could be chosen, like a robe or a meal. As if the universe allowed such luxuries to those who had seen what they had seen.
"The Emperor summons me tomorrow," Zhang Li said quietly. "There's been... an incident. In the western provinces. Something that shouldn't exist has been found."
Wei Li finally turned. "What kind of something?"
"The kind that makes immortal deacons wake screaming in their temples." His mother's smile was thin and sharp. "The kind that makes the Emperor remember he once needed our family."
"I'll come with you."
"No." The word was absolute. "You will stay here. You will lock the doors, just as I told you five years ago. And you will not open them for anyone."
Something cold settled in Wei Li's stomach. "Mother—"
"I love you," she said, and kissed his forehead. Her lips were ice. "Never forget that. Whatever happens, whatever you learn, whatever you become—know that you were loved. That you are loved. That love is the only truth in a world of lies."
She walked away before he could respond, her silhouette dissolving into the falling snow like a figure from a dream.
---
He found her the next morning.
The summons had been a trap. Of course it had. The Li Dynasty had enemies—too many enemies, accumulated over three centuries of keeping dangerous secrets. And someone, something, had decided that the family had outlived its usefulness.
Zhang Li lay in the center of the main hall, arranged with a precision that suggested ceremony rather than murder. Her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling with an expression of terrible wonder, as if she had seen something beautiful and awful in her final moments. Her skin was unmarked. No blood, no wounds, no sign of violence.
But her soul was gone.
Wei Li knew this the way he knew his own name, the way he knew the sound of his father's footsteps. He knelt beside her body and touched her face, and where his fingers met her cooling skin, he felt the absence like a physical thing—a hole in the world where his mother had been.
"She fought well."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, resonating in the bones of the ancient house itself. Wei Li looked up, and for a moment, he saw nothing.
Then the air itself seemed to tear, and something stepped through.
It wore the shape of a man, but it was not a man. Its skin was the color of old parchment, inscribed with characters that moved and shifted like living things. Its eyes—its eyes were wrong. Too many pupils, arranged in patterns that made Wei Li's head ache to look at them.
"You are the son," it said, and its voice was the sound of temple bells and breaking glass. "The last of the blood. How... convenient."
Wei Li didn't speak. He couldn't. His body had frozen, every instinct screaming at him to run, to hide, to do anything but stand in the presence of this thing.
But he was his father's son. And his father had never run from anything.
"What are you?" The words scraped from his throat, raw and inadequate.
The thing smiled, and its teeth were too numerous, too sharp, arranged in spirals that led down into darkness. "I am what your family kept locked away for three hundred years. I am the secret behind the secrets, the truth your ancestors buried so deep they forgot it themselves." It tilted its head, a gesture almost human, almost curious. "Your father found the Door. He opened it. And in doing so, he broke the seal that kept me sleeping."
"My father is dead."
"Is he?" The smile widened. "How little you know, child. How little any of you mortals know. Ren Li didn't die. He simply went somewhere death cannot follow. A place between places, a threshold without end." The creature stepped closer, and the air around it rippled with heat and cold, pleasure and pain, every opposite bound together in impossible union. "He thought he was being brave. Noble. He thought he could sacrifice himself to keep the Door closed. But doors, once opened, never truly close again."
Wei Li's hand found the jade pendant at his throat. It was warm again, burning with a heat that should have been painful but wasn't. The dragon's eyes—wept-out and hollow—suddenly blazed with inner light.
The creature paused. For the first time, something flickered across its inhuman face. Something like... recognition? Fear? now, anchored by the warmth spreading from the pendant through his chest. "What shouldn't be possible?"
But the creature was backing away, its form blurring at the edges like ink in water. "The dragon weeps for no mortal. It wept for your father, and he was taken. It weeps for you now, and that means—" It stopped, its too-many eyes widening. "Oh. Oh, I see. The bloodline isn't broken. It's... changing. Evolving."
"I'm going to kill you," Wei Li said. He didn't shout it. Didn't scream. Just stated it as fact, as inevitable as sunrise. "Whatever you are. Whatever you did to my mother. I'm going to find you, and I'm going to end you."
The creature laughed, but the sound was hollow, uncertain. "You? A child? You don't even know what I am, little mortal. You don't know what waits beyond the Door your father opened. The things that are coming, the hungers that are waking—your vengeance is a candle flame in a hurricane."
"Then I'll become a hurricane."
The pendant flared, and light—pure, searing, the color of jade and blood and starlight—erupted from Wei Li's chest. The creature shrieked, a sound that shattered windows and cracked stone, and then it was gone, fled back through whatever tear in reality it had emerged from.
Wei Li stood alone in the ruins of his family's home, surrounded by the bodies of servants and guards who had died without understanding what killed them. His mother's hand was cold in his. The jade pendant had gone dark again, its dragon's eyes empty holes that seemed to watch him with something like expectation.
Outside, he could hear the city awakening. Soon, the Emperor's soldiers would arrive. Soon, there would be questions, accusations, the endless machinery of power grinding forward to erase what remained of the Li Dynasty.
Wei Li kissed his mother's forehead one last time. Then he stood, and he walked to the Eastern Garden, and he stood before the place where the Door existed without existing.
"I'm coming," he whispered to the empty air. "Father. Mother. Whoever's listening. I'm going to find out what you knew. I'm going to learn what you learned. And then I'm going to burn it all down—the Door, the creatures behind it, every immortal thing that thinks it can play with mortal lives."
The wind answered, carrying words that might have been real or might have been his imagination:
*Unbound.*
The first step was the hardest. The second was easier. By the third, Wei Li was running, and the world was opening around him like a flower made of knives, and somewhere in the distance—beyond death, beyond time, beyond everything he had ever known—something vast and terrible turned its attention toward the boy who refused to kneel.
The Rogue's Ascent had begun.
---
*End of Chapter One*