The moon bled crimson over the canopy of the eastern woods.

  Beneath it, Zhao Wei stood still, her breath shallow as she stared into the shifting shadows. Lantern Grave’s whispers still clung to her skin, and Jian Yu’s footsteps faded behind her. She had told him to wait. This moment wasn’t for eyes dulled by sympathy.

  A flicker stirred in the darkness, a blur of black, a flash of red, the curve of a fox-shaped mask.

  “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten how to walk in silence,” Zhao Wei murmured, her voice colder than the night wind.

  The figure stilled beneath a crooked cedar, limbs light as mist. A boy, barely older than she appeared now, though something in his stillness reeked of old blood and older memory. The mask glinted, lacquered ivory with crimson strokes curling like laughter.

  “You still speak like a tactician,” he replied. “But now you wear the face of a ghost.”

  Her hand twitched toward her sash where blades once hid. She had no steel now. Only memory.

  “And yet, you followed that ghost here.”

  He didn’t deny it. Instead, he tilted his head, and the moonlight kissed the edge of his mask.

  “They say the cursed child wanders the south again. That the Ember remnants stir. That a girl with no spirit beast survived a trap laid by the son of the Cloudborne.”

  Zhao Wei didn’t flinch. “Do they also say she once razed the north with a fire no clan dared name?”

  The figure chuckled, soft and sharp. “No. That part of the story was erased.”

  A silence stretched between them like taut string, fragile, deadly. The wind rustled the leaves, whispering names that had long since burned.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Wei Ning. General of the Crimson Tithe. Ghost of the Unbowed Blade.

  She had once trusted this boy.

  Once.

  Ten Years Ago.

  In the palace gardens of the North, under snow-dusted cherry trees, Wei Ning stood with her back turned to the winter.

  “You didn’t show up for the council meeting,” she said without looking.

  “I had nothing worth saying,” came the voice younger, but already laced with venom too soft to taste at first.

  She turned, her cloak whipping around her boots. “Nothing to say? When the Cloudborne propose to sever our grain lines to the south?”

  The boy leaned against a stone lantern. No mask then. Just sharp eyes and a mouth that smiled too easily.

  “I thought the Great General didn’t need help from children.”

  She stared, the insult brushing past her skin like dry wind. “And yet you’ve always stood close to the fire.”

  “I enjoy watching it burn.”

  Those words would return to her, years later, as she bled at the execution altar — betrayed not by steel, but by the silence of those who once called her comrade.

  Now.

  “You were there that day,” she said.

  The masked boy didn’t answer.

  “You watched them bind me. You said nothing.”

  Still, silence.

  “So why now?” Zhao Wei asked, stepping forward. “Why follow me like a shadow without a name?”

  He finally spoke, low and unreadable.

  “Because something worse is coming. And I remember what you said at the gates of the Hollow War.”

  Her breath caught.

  “If I die, then I’ll haunt every blade that draws breath in my name.”

  “You think I walk to avenge you?” he continued. “No. I walk because your ghost is louder than the living.”

  He stepped back, his mask gleaming like the pale grin of a demon.

  “Feng Ren has moved to the Inner Court. The Council whispers of purges. Someone in the Cloudborne knows the name Wei Ning.”

  Zhao Wei’s hands clenched.

  “They will come for you again, this time not with honor, but poison. And if you fall now”

  “I won’t.”

  The words cut sharper than any blade she once wielded.

  “I am no longer Wei Ning bound by treaties and oaths. I am the silence after the flame, the ash that remembers.”

  The masked boy bowed slightly.

  “Then I will watch. But not interfere.”

  “Good,” she said. “Because when the reckoning comes, there will be no audience. Only participants.”

  As she turned to vanish into the trees, the moon shifted. And behind her, the fox-faced mask watched.

  A relic of her past.

  Or perhaps a herald of the war yet to come.

  In the far-off Cloudborne Citadel, under veils of silk and perfumed smoke, a scroll was unfurled before a lord in pale blue.

  A name once buried. A name written in red.

  "Wei Ning…?"