The world smelled of ash and blood.

  Zhao Wei staggered through the smoke-wrapped grove, her breath shallow, her shoulder seared by a blade that should have ended her. Branches scraped her arms, but she welcomed the sting, it proved she was still alive.

  The ambush at Vale Crossing had been swift, merciless. One moment, her small scouting party was setting camp beneath whispering pine... the next, arrows sang like wraiths, and men in bone-white masks descended like phantoms from the mist.

  They moved without words, without mercy. Their swords gleamed like silver death, and their eyes, what little could be seen through slits in bone held no soul.

  Zhao Wei had fought like the demon they once named her. But even demons bleed.

  She pressed her back against a moss-covered boulder, teeth clenched against the throbbing pain. She had lost two of her Ember remnants, young warriors who had followed her with quiet loyalty. Gone, just like that. Another betrayal, this one from fate itself.

  A soft crunch behind her. She didn’t flinch. Her dagger was already in hand.

  “I’m not here to kill you,” a voice said, dry and low. Jian Yu stepped into view, his usually mocking expression replaced by something unreadable.

  “You’re late,” she muttered.

  “I held the rear flank. Or what was left of it.”

  They stood in silence. Smoke curled in the distance, and a hawk cried overhead, as if mourning the fallen.

  He crouched beside her, fingers brushing against the blood at her side. “You’re lucky. That blade missed your lung by an inch.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “No such thing as luck,” Zhao Wei replied. “Only miscalculation.”

  Jian Yu tilted his head. “You’re bleeding like a mortal, but talking like a general again.”

  She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Not when the faces of her fallen flashed behind her eyes.

  Zhao Wei’s hand tightened on the dagger until her knuckles turned white. She hated this... this feeling. Weakness. Regret. The same emotions that had ruined her once before.

  And yet, despite the searing in her ribs, her mind was already working. The masked men weren’t bandits. Their coordination, silence, the way they moved as one… It reminded her of something older. Something buried in the histories of the Seven Clans.

  Then it clicked.

  The Pale Order.

  A secret sect whispered about during her years as Wei Ning. Exiled spirit-weavers who delved into forbidden contracts, bonding not with elemental spirits, but with echoes, soulless remnants of gods long slain. They were supposed to have been purged. Wiped out in the War of Withered Banners.

  Apparently, not all ghosts stay buried.

  Her gaze met Jian Yu’s. “We need to move. Before they circle back.”

  He offered his arm. She didn’t take it. She rose on her own, biting back the pain.

  They limped through the grove, keeping low. But Zhao Wei could feel it, that prickling on the back of her neck. They were being watched.

  And high above, among the twisted branches of a charred cedar, a figure crouched in silence.

  His mask was different, black lacquer carved into the shape of a fox’s snarling face. One eye was covered by a strip of crimson cloth, and his robe fluttered with unseen wind.

  He had watched her fight. Watched her bleed.

  He had known her once not as Zhao Wei, the cursed child but as Wei Ning, the war tactician whose name once trembled through halls of strategy like thunder through the valley.

  The girl had changed. But her blade still carried the same fury.

  He touched the ring at his neck, a broken silver piece once gifted long ago and whispered, “So the flame still burns…”

  Below, Zhao Wei paused mid-step. She turned sharply, eyes narrowing at the trees. The watcher was already gone.

  But the echo of that presence lingered.

  She didn’t say a word. Just pressed forward.

  Tomorrow, the rumors would spread. That the cursed child had survived the massacre at Vale Crossing. That masked warriors of ghostly origin had risen from legend.

  And somewhere deep in Zhao Wei’s chest, something ancient stirred.

  Not hatred. Not vengeance.

  But memory.