Chapter 35

Chapter 35: Chapter 35

Lanying raised the ice without a word.

She lifted her blistered right hand, and frost surged up from the stone around them in a thick, curving wall. It climbed past their shoulders, arched over their heads, and sealed above them into a heavy dome pressed flush against the base of the great crystal column at their backs. She made it thick and cloudy—so dense and white that the green glow of the vein filtered through only as a faint, soft haze. From the far side of the cavern, it would look like a drift of snow heaped against the crystal, and nothing more.

When it was finished, she sagged against him. Beneath her skin, the molten gold in her meridians had crept past her collarbone.

"He won’t come near the column," she whispered. "Not after what it just did to him."

"He’ll still hear us."

"Let him hear us." Her voice was ragged, fierce, and entirely unashamed. "Let him sit out there on his broken ice and listen."

’I’ll be deep in the jade,’ Qin Wuyue said quietly in his head. ’Listen to me first, brat, and then forget I exist. That column is the root of the entire vein. When your resonance opens, it will feel it, and it will reach for you both. Let it. Whatever it takes from you, give it freely, and whatever it gives back, take it.’ Her phantom voice softened. ’And hold onto her. I have never seen a place like this, and I don’t know what happens next.’

The pendant went cold and dead against his chest.

In the white hush of the ice dome, with the ancient vein humming at his back and the woman he loved burning alive in his arms, Yan Shuo was entirely alone with her.

He kissed her first.

He did it slowly, even though they had no time left, because he had decided that this would be done properly or it would not be done at all. Her lips were cracked from the cold and fever-hot from the fire. She tasted of woodsmoke and blood. She kissed him back with her blistered right hand twisted tightly in the front of his robe and her burning left palm pressed flat against his chest, and he felt her heart hammering beneath his ribs.

The resonance woke at once.

It opened between them wide and deep, and the fire came roaring through the door with it. Molten gold poured out of her meridians and straight into his, through her lips, through her palms, through every inch where their skin met, and the sheer agony of it stole the breath clean from his lungs. He did what he had done that first night in the burned chamber. He drew the fire into himself and stretched it thin across his three open meridians so that no single channel had to bear the weight alone.

This time, there was far too much of it.

It filled his three channels in a single heartbeat and kept coming. They were already brimming and searing hot, yet more poured into him from her side of the bond. He could feel the foreign fire hunting for somewhere else to go, battering violently against the nine sealed meridians his mother had locked away. The locks held firm, and the fire piled up behind them, hotter and hotter, like molten iron against a dam.

Lanying felt it through the bond. She tore her mouth from his and stared at him in terror.

"Shuo, you’re burning."

"So are you."

"Then stop taking it!"

"I won’t." He caught her face in both hands. "She said all the way. Every last part of what we feel, with nothing held back." He pressed his forehead hard against hers. "So give me all of it, Lanying. Your fear, the fire, and everything else. Give it to me, and I’ll give you everything I have."

Her pale eyes were swimming with tears. She held his gaze for one long, trembling breath.

Then she pulled him down to her.

What followed would always be tangled in his memory with the searing pain, and with the blinding light.

They undressed each other quickly and clumsily, with blistered fingers and shaking hands, tearing at sashes and damp ties until their ruined robes lay crumpled on the stone. When the pale silk parted from her shoulders, the dim green haze caught the soft, heaving swell of her bare breasts, flushed a deep, feverish rose from the fire coursing beneath her skin. Her body was scorching hot and freezing cold all at once. Frost bloomed across his ribs wherever her right hand gripped him, and harsh gold light flared wherever her left arm brushed against his bare chest.

When he laid her back on the spread wool of the cloak, he leaned down to press his mouth to her throat, then lower, kissing the burning skin directly over her racing heart where the gold threads were creeping. His calloused palm came up to cup her bare breast, his thumb brushing over the tight, rosy peak until she arched wildly into his touch with a broken, shivering gasp. As he settled his weight between her parted thighs, pressing his scarred chest flush against the soft, slick heat of her naked skin, she wrapped both arms tight around his neck and held on as though he were the only solid thing left in a collapsing world.

"Say it again," she whispered frantically against his mouth. "Please."

"I love you."

"Again."

"I love you, Lanying. I loved you on the terrace, in the fire, and in the frost. I’ll love you in thirty days, and I’ll love you in thirty years."

She made a ragged sound that was half a sob and half a laugh, her legs locking tight around his hips to pull him deeper, and as their bodies joined completely, the resonance opened all the way.

There were no walls left inside it. Not a single shadow. On their first night, she had held back her terror, and he had hidden his eyes. On their second, they had carried their fury in with them like a shield. This time, they carried nothing at all. Everything she felt poured straight into him, and everything he felt poured back into her. He felt her love for him filling her from crown to heel. She felt his love for her in answer, and she cried out against his shoulder, her nails biting deep into his bare back, and refused to let go.

He forgot to hide his eyes.

The silver light rose beneath his skin and flooded into his irises, and he looked down at her with it shining fiercely in the dimness. She looked straight back up into it. Her pale eyes went wide. Then she reached up, laid her palm gently against his cheek right beneath one glowing silver eye, and smiled at him through her tears.

"There you are," she whispered. "I always wondered what you were hiding."

She asked him nothing else. Her eyes stayed open, locked onto his, as they moved together.

They rocked together in the white hush of the dome, bare skin slick and straining against bare skin while the fire raged through them both—and deep beneath the stone, the vein began to answer.

He felt it wake beneath his knees. The massive crystal column at their backs began to hum, a low, grinding note that vibrated straight through the marrow of his bones. Beyond the cloudy ice, the green threads webbing the cavern walls began to brighten—faintly at first, then stronger, and stronger still. The crystal column grew warm against his bare shoulder.

Then it reached for them.

It rose up through the solid stone and slid straight into their bond the exact instant the resonance opened to its absolute depth. Starving, ancient, and impossibly gentle, the mountain drank the fire right out of them. He felt the molten gold drain from his searing meridians and from hers, pouring down through their tangled bodies, through the stone floor, and straight into the crystal root. Every drop of Chi Yao’s fire—everything the young master had forced into her wrist to break her—was swallowed whole by a vein that had been starving in the dark for a hundred years.

And then the vein gave back.

Qi flooded up out of the root and roared into their bond, ancient, heavy, and vast beyond measure. Caught between their joined bodies, they took that raw mountain strength and spun it into something entirely new. Frost and flame and the vein’s living green light twisted together through both their frames, circling round and round as she arched up to meet every ragged thrust, and with every pass through the bond, the current grew stronger.

Deep inside him, the locks began to give.

The first seal turned in a meridian along his spine and blinding qi flooded into a channel that had stood dark for six years. A low groan tore from Yan Shuo’s throat as he buried his face against her neck. Then a second lock turned. And a third, one right after another, until six of his twelve meridians blazed with silver light, and the torrent rushing through them lifted him clean past the eighth layer and set him down squarely at the ninth.

Beneath him, Lanying arched her back hard off the cloak, her bare breasts crushed tight against his chest as she cried out his name.

She was rising too. He felt her three-year bottleneck strain under the flood, creaking like river ice in a spring thaw, until her entire body pulled taut and she clung to him with both arms, both legs, and every scrap of strength she possessed.

On her left wrist, pressed hard against the back of his neck, the Sun Brand let out a long, splintering crack.

The fire inside it died completely. Only a thin, dull, ruined coin remained beneath her pale skin, fractured across its face in half a dozen places, so dark it could barely be seen at all.

They reached the peak together, shivering and gasping in the white dark, and the two currents that had been running back and forth between them for so long finally merged into one single, unstoppable river, and swept them both away.

Afterward, they lay tangled together on the wool cloak, slick with sweat and breathing hard, and did not speak for a long time.

The dome of ice around them had melted thin and clear as glass. Beyond it, the root cavern was brimming with light. The green cords in the stone walls burned so brightly that the entire cave looked like the hollow of a massive emerald. The crystal column at their backs had lost every trace of its sickly grey; it glowed a clean, living green from base to crown, humming with a deep, steady note that had never been there before.

Lanying lay naked against his side with her head resting on his chest, absently tracing the line of his collarbone with one cool finger. Her left arm lay draped across his ribs, the skin pale and completely whole once more, without a single trace of gold beneath it.

"It’s quiet," she whispered. "The brand. I can’t feel it at all."

"It’s broken."

"Will he know?"

"He’ll know a great deal has happened." Yan Shuo looked up through the clear pane of ice at the blazing green walls. "I think the entire mountain is about to find out."

She stayed quiet for a while, listening to his heartbeat.

"Your eyes," she murmured at last, very softly. "They’re grey again."

He held completely still.

"I won’t ask," Lanying said. She lifted her head from his chest and looked down at him, her pale face calm, open, and fiercely tender. "I gave you my word. Yet I want you to know that I saw them, and I am still right here."

He reached up, pulled her down, and kissed her and for a little while, neither of them said anything at all.

Then the stone floor of the cavern shook.

A long, rolling heave, rising straight up out of the deepest roots of the earth. The thin ice dome rang like a struck bell. Beyond the glass, the crystal column flared so blindingly bright that Yan Shuo had to throw an arm over their eyes, and the low hum in the bedrock swelled into a great, deafening roar. Every single thread of the vein in every wall of the cavern pulsed at the exact same instant.

Far above them, racing up through the burned chamber, up gallery seven, and straight up the long black throat of the mine shaft, the green light was climbing.

The dying vein of the Azure Cloud Sect had woken up.