“A demon horde?” Qing Liao coughed. Strange feelings, full of confusion, fear, and disorientation mingled together. He'd known there were demons. The gongs had tolled several times in the past week, but the creatures had been swiftly dispatched and he'd thought that the end of it.

  A horde was different from a handful of wandering demons. It was a story, in Liao's understanding, the attacks by demon hordes part of a series of linked tales. Twenty-three battles between the sect's champions and demonic cultivators. Mother's Gift had little else to mark its eras of history.

  Despite this, Liao, like most, knew very little of such battles. The great conflicts were fought on the far side of the Starwall, in the Killing Fields. Mortal eyes never observed anything of those battles. Though cultivators of the performance pavilion worked to immortalize these events, the versions told by mortal storytellers and traveling shows were pale imitations of those works. Their truths and exaggerations all muddled together.

  It had never mattered before. Mortals did not fight demons. Could not, if the sect was to be believed, and Liao had no reason to doubt that. Even the most dedicated members of the hereditary serving families only worked in support, repairing the walls, bringing provisions, and storing weapons against future need. An ancient law existed by which the sect could call for the general assembly of a popular militia, but it had never been so much as practiced.

  None of the mortal residents of Mother's Gift's had ever even experienced a horde before. The last one had been over a century ago. Only the cultivators remembered.

  Lack of comprehension must have shown on his face, for the flame-edge interrogatory glare of the grand elder shifted from harsh to cautious. “Youth,” she murmured, shaking her head slowly. “It makes you ignorant. I am not used to it.” Her eyes moved in a slow circle, focus elsewhere. “Twenty-three times a proper horde, over one hundred thousand demons with traitors of the old world at its head, has attacked has attacked us here. In time, if you survive, you get used to it.” She even smiled then.

  “Normally, one in the body refining realm like yourself would face this attack from the ramparts of the walls,” she checked this off as if it were perfectly simple and fully explanatory. “But normal is not your fate, as it seems you know.”

  Liao's fingers had involuntarily reached up and grasped the circlet resting on his brow, absolute evidence of the truth behind those words.

  “This horde, it's a big one,” Uzay continued without pause. “Half a million demons. Probably three demonic cultivators. Messy and deadly. Itinay thinks you can help save lives, maybe she's right, but I'm not sure. So, now we get to find out if you can handle it.”

  Though mathematics was far from Liao's strongest field, simple arithmetic was well within the young cultivator's grasp. “How can three be a threat to fifteen?” That made no sense to him, especially if the twenty-eight elders in the soul forging realm were added to the order of battle. The idea that he could play any role at all in such a conflict, a battle between immortals, seemed preposterous.

  Even standing on the wall shooting arrows until his shoulder tore, which he supposed would be the normal posting, seemed pointless considering the overwhelming power of the grand elders. Uzay, standing before him now, was the master of the Bow Hall. He'd seen her practice, once. She could launch hundreds of arrows, perhaps thousands, to his one, and every shot many times more potent. It was as if the sky turned to screaming flame when she released her thumb ring.

  The grand elder sighed, visible annoyance spread across her gorgeous features. “A simpleton's objection,” she spoke with real rancor for the first time. “Secrecy, that's why. Sayaana, explain the rest to him, since you clearly haven't already.” She practically spat out her exasperation.

  “Once a demonic cultivator learns the location of a hidden land, they must die,” the voice that resonated through the bones of Liao's skull was infinitely more patient, but also equally more grief-stricken. “Should they escape, they could rally dozens of immortal allies, overwhelming any defense. The sect must hide its strength, its own immortals, until the enemy advances far enough to envelop and entrap all enemy cultivators. Otherwise, even victory is simply a slow doom.”

  From these words Liao learned two truths. One was the nature of battle in the post-plague age. The other revealed the fate of the Endless Needles Land.

  Looking back to Uzay, he met those burning, many-layered eyes. “How can I possibly help?”

  “Simple, you get to be a living alarm.” Orange lips offered up a dangerously predatory smile.

  It took a moment for these words, tumbling through the tempest within the youth's mind, to make any sense whatsoever. Conceptually, it was not complex, and he made the connection soon as he was able to reason properly. If the demons truly could not sense him, and he had no reason to doubt the tests conducted by the grand elders, then he could signal from within their ranks, a role similar to that of a fisherman's float on the line.

  Hardly a glamorous role suited to a teenager's dreams of their first battle, but faced with Uzay's domineering presence, the very idea of challenging the elder's plans vanished from his head. Besides, he understood enough of the Killing Fields to recognize that his invisibility to demonic qi would be useless atop the Starwall, with thousands of eyes upon him. A different role, if not this one, made much sense.

  “You will not be risked, physically,” Uzay continued. The predatory gleam expanded out from her eyes to encompass her entire lithe frame. “But placing you in the center will strain your mind. So, a test instead. Do try to stay still.”

  Without further warning, the grand elder took a single step.

  Fire shot out from her heels. It burst into a wide circle, forming a ring of towering flames that locked them within. The dark soil blackened further, the dust of previous days vaporized in an instant. Strange music, the sound of cascading bells, began to ring out low and barely audible in the background, a metallic murmur. At first barely audible, it grew louder over time, becoming as peels of thunder. Haze shifted the air and all the sky above. Color blurred and reformed, an impossible surreal palette that belonged not to the waking world but instead the province of dreams and nightmares.

  A second step. The flames rose high, whirling and furious as they screamed in flares to treetop height. Lashing and coiling in nonexistent wind, those tongues whipped and scourged the ground on all sides. Black whipcord marks stained the dark soil with ashy char.

  Liao's eyes watered, his skin broiled, and he struggled to stay upright. Dizziness threatened to overwhelm him completely.

  Three steps. Then four.

  More and more followed as Uzay moved with impossible speed. The elder's footfalls blurred. Her body transformed into a whirling green serpent wrapped in coils of liquid fire endlessly swirling around her shifting form. Wordless song, a carol of terrible bells, spilled from her lips. The ornaments in her hair took flight, spinning about her head and bathing the world in lurid false color glows as they slashed back and forth across burning tresses.

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  Charcoal scents choked the air. Heat radiated across Liao's skin, sparking sweetly only to strip away the flesh in pulses of repeating chill. Chaos overtook all as the furious dance of fire and flow came to encompass all that was, all that had ever been, and all that would ever be.

  The Flame-Kissed Art of Passionate Invocation, that was the name of Uzay's artistic path. Once an obscure method of dance developed for dark nights around the bonfire, she had made of it an illusory world of fire and fury capable of cleansing doubt, heralding possibility, and scourging away all hypocrisy. A bright star on the edge of transformation to expansive redder days, she revealed all through the reflection of the ending that flames bring.

  Fire swallowed awareness of the real world and cast Liao into the tableau formed out of the dancer's flames. Utterly seamless, it matched all he knew perfectly. Sensations streamed into his mind with perfection to surpass any memory or dream.

  All of them bathed in fire, with everything that entailed.

  Liao returned to his village only to watch it burn. Fire, caused by an errant bolt of lightning in the forest, consumed home, hearth, and health. Lives were lost, the houses and terraces obliterated, and a line of melted and scarred faces took the place of the images of everyone he'd known in boyhood. He raised pyres for his family, the elderly priest, and all those who'd stood beside him to be tested at New Year's while watching white-gray flakes rain down slowly through a gray sky.

  Next, he stood the walls as demons stormed across the ramparts. Turning back, toward sect and city, as the gongs sounded the call to retreat, he watched the last great urban settlement of humanity immolate within chaos born of panic. Bodies spilled into the streets still alight. Desperate screams came from beneath collapsed and smoldering buildings. Animal cries joined the cacophony of human pain.

  He turned to act, to offer aid, a simple, primal impulse to fight the flames, all to no avail. He could not touch, could not help, could only watch as the fires burned on and on, until all of Mother's Gift was consumed. His hands passed uselessly through everything, a ghost of one lost in the futile defense of the Starwall.

  The sect burned. Demons ravaged the countryside. Every person they found was ripped apart by red claws and teeth, blood stained the ground as the monsters drank in the qi of a million souls. The sky turned black with smoke and the vitality of the land faded away as the living qi needed to sustain it collapsed and the red film of the plague coated all surfaces. Plants browned, helplessly twitching insects fell to coat the ground, streams dried up, and then the flames flashed across the landscape one final time as the sky cracked open.

  Even the demons, all that remained, perished as Mother's Gift was consumed entirely and ceased to be.

  Red, orange, and yellow, this was the world. Burning, charred, and ravaged, over and over, until nothing but black remained.

  “Why are you doing this? Why is this happening?” Liao screamed. “This is not the world! It can't be!” Some base instinct denied this possibility, refused to accept this vision of a world on fire. Yet it could not be denied, not truly. No other evidence, no other sensation, existed.

  The burning air was all. It filled the eyes, scorched the lungs, and ripped away the skin.

  The flames took vision, touch, smell, and even taste, until in the end nothing but their crackling emanation, the only sound left, remained to his senses. Endless, that slow sputtering symphony, all attached to the memories of scourging rain. All his mind knew and all he contained. A blurred wheel of wrath and obliteration, the destruction of the world, unending. Inexorable, inevitable, it was pointless to resist, to defy. The flame had been there before it all. It would remain when all of this was done. Surrender, forget, accept that nothing stood in the face of that fiery oblivion.

  Such was the message of the final cacophony that burst before all guttered out.

  Liao crumpled before this. The pointlessness of it all. He felt ruined, devastated, and drained. His dreams shattered, reduced to nothing beneath this unstoppable force. It made mockery of all that he was, all he intended, all he desired. Nothing mattered, nothing but the flames, and he was not of them. Merely an irrelevancy, doomed to be consumed and forgotten.

  Thrash and rage, dive into the flames and let go; the crackling sounds whispered these things into his thoughts. Nothing will stop the end. There is no point to resistance. Eventual immolation is the destiny of all things.

  He was trapped. He knew it. There was no escape from the flames. Nothing to reach beyond them. All that remained was to dash through that burning embrace, accept the ultimate cost. Simple, logical, inescapable.

  Throw yourself against the burning wheel. The final step, demanded now.

  Something held him back.

  Something buried deep in recollection, deep, subsumed beyond, below, flame and ash. It recalled an earlier time, one he no longer understood, no longer recognized as truly real. But even as a dream, a phantom, it remained invested with import. A simple thing, barely more than an image.

  A small creature, fuzzy and brown, trapped in a wire snare.

  It tore and pulled and fought that binding, this animal. Eye mad with pain and loss as it struggled. The end had already come for it, doom certain, no matter how long the struggle might last, minutes of hours. Even should the wire be cut, the mortal wound had been dealt prior, no recovery would follow.

  In that moment, Liao recognized that little animal in himself.

  Trapped. He was trapped. The flames bound him, a burning wire, without escape.

  But, at the same time, there was a difference. He was unharmed. His end had not been declared. The flames still asked it of him, all the proof necessary.

  At this thought, this instinctual realization, something unlocked in his mind. “I am a trapper.” He heard the words without ever realizing he'd said them. “I will not thrash and kick. I will have patience.”

  Black ash fell from his eyes. Light streamed in and all the horrors vanished, flushed from the body in a rush of thumping heartbeats. Swiftly, a fevered nightmare come to sudden end in waking. As the dawn breaks, it was all gone.

  By the time vision cleared and Liao looked up at the face of Uzay, for he had somehow ended up sprawled on his back in the dirt, all that remained were flashes, images of strange colors and distant burning.

  Such obscuration was welcome, but it did little to remove the overall recognition that grim horrors had been inflicted upon him. Fade though they might, he could not help but cringe back when the grand elder approached. Decorum forgotten, he even scrambled back several steps at he advance, finding desperate strength to impel stiff limbs into motion.

  “Stop,” Sayaana appeared before him, her green-tinted form offered a momentary source of succor. Familiar, welcome, and diametrically opposed to Uzay's eternal flame, she served to root his mind back to his body. “I do not know what illusion she crafted in the dance of flames,” though the remnant soul shared his perceptions, they did not perceive all things in precisely the same way, a soft sensory barrier that apparently shielded her from this assault. “But it was never more than that, and it's done now. Forget it. It never happened. Make that your truth.”

  Sound advice, and so far as the remnant soul's intent could be read, offered fully in genuine support. That did not make it easy to enact. Liao looked away from the grand elder as he struggled to stand. Stiffness afflicted every limb, rendering even this simple action slow and difficult. The unfamiliar nature of the feeling compounded his lurching, irregular motions. He did not get stiff and sore, not from anything short of extreme training, not anymore. It was part of being a cultivator, of the constant circulation of qi through his body.

  A state that had lapsed while enraptured by the horrific fascination of Uzay's dance.

  “It seems you will suffice,” Uzay muttered after Liao managed to pull his body upright and offer an apologetic bow. “I will tell my sister to proceed.” She did not sound pleased, but neither was she openly angry. The grand elder walked away with easy contentment, as if she was assessing a pot just removed from the kiln. Without further word she took a step on beams of light and was gone. Her flame-kissed form vanished toward the horizon in a blink.

  “Nothing,” Liao found he was whispering the word over and over. “Nothing, nothing, she showed me everything gone, everything destroyed, and then says nothing at all. Why? Why did she do this?”

  “Because they deemed it necessary,” Sayaana moved from the edge of his vision to stand before him, her exotic face was grim. “And, I cannot say she was wrong to do it.” A green finger pointed upwards, arrow-straight. “The path to the heavens strips out gentleness. You have been pulled up, before you should have been, and they have forgotten how fragile young people are, physically and otherwise.”

  These words, gentle though they were, offered small comfort. “And you?” He knew Sayaana was little different, despite her varied origin compared to the Twelve Sisters.

  “I am tied to you,” green lips offered up a gentle, reassuring smile. “It reminds me of what I used to be. Now, let's go back. It's time to store some sleep again the future to come.”