1
Àn’yīng
Xī’lín Village, Central Province, Kingdom of Rivers
My mother always told me the sunrises were the most beautiful part of our realm. A sky on fire in shades of rose and persimmon, clouds streaked with flame, and the breath of a world waking to the light.
I remember Mā’s words as I move through the pine forest on velvet tread. I hold a bow and arrow—but my crescent blades are tucked in the bodice and sleeves of my black gauze dress, like quiet companions in the predawn silence.
This morning, I am hunting.
Dew from pine needles wets my sleeves as I slip past, a trailing shadow. I hear a slight rustling, and a speckle-coated hare darts through the brush.
I squint through the foliage, following glimpses of the hare’s coat as it skitters through the browning leaves, unaware of my pursuit. Méi’zi will cry that I’ve killed a rabbit, but Mā needs the nutrients as her body returns to full health.
Autumn has arrived, bringing a crisp bite to the morning air. The flowers are beginning to lose their bloom; soon, winter’s snows will cover everything in white, and my realm will be made anew with the turn of a year. Yet ever since I’ve returned here to the mortal realm, its colors have seemed duller, the landscapes imperfect, compared with the ethereal beauty of the immortal realm.
Real, a voice in the back of my mind whispers. It’s real.
The hare leaps into a small clearing and stops, nose twitching, as though scenting for danger. I, too, stop in my tracks. It’s a long shot from here, but I might make it.
As I raise my bow and arrow and take aim, a sudden gust of wind stirs, shifting the clouds overhead. The clearing fills with the warm glow of dawn, and my mind conjures a dreamlike memory.
He stands in the clearing, turning toward me as though time has slowed.
Hair, billowing like swirls of ink.
Eyes, flashing like golden embers.
The phantom of a smile on his face as his gaze lifts to meet mine—
I take a swift step back. Blink and the vision’s gone—there’s only an empty clearing, leaves falling like the wings of dying butterflies.
The hare starts at my movement and shoots off into the brush again.
My heart is in my throat. I have the strangest feeling that I’m dreaming and that I’ve had this dream before. The setting changes: Sometimes it’s a bamboo forest, sometimes a field of flowering cherry trees, other times a vast mountaintop . . . but the person I’m chasing is always the same.
The clearing before me blurs.
I hate him.
I miss him.
I hate myself for missing him.
Yù’chén is the son of the Kingdom of Night’s demon queen, Sansiran—and the mortal emperor, as I found out a few days past. Half mó and half mortal, he tricked the wards of the immortal realm, sneaking in to compete in the Immortality Trials in the guise of a mortal . . . and enabling the Kingdom of Night’s demonic army to cross into the previously impenetrable Kingdom of Sky.
He is also the man who saved my life more times than I can count.
And the man I thought myself in love with.
No. I release an arrow into the brush where the hare disappeared, imagining it to be Yù’chén’s heart instead. “I hate him,” I mutter, as though speaking the words aloud will render them true. “And I’ll kill him.”
“Admirable attitude, but your bow-handling skills leave much to be desired.”
I whirl around. Hào’yáng strides toward me between the pines. He’s shed the golden armor that once marked him a captain of the guard of the Kingdom of Sky, but light still wraps around him, teasing out the gold-stitched patterns on his pale shift. It catches on the silver hilt at his waist—the longsword named Azure Tide, gifted to his lineage by the dragons in a time long past.
Hào’yáng, my boy in the jade. Rightful heir to our realm, the Kingdom of Rivers.
And now, my betrothed.
He studies me as he approaches. “Nock your arrow and take aim again,” he says coolly, and I obey, pivoting to face the clearing. My pulse is still racing, but in moments I feel a warm hand at my elbow.
“Lift it to be level with your chin.” Hào’yáng’s voice is low by my ear, and as his other hand comes to meet mine, steady and firm, the tumult of my memories dissolves. My mind clears, sharpens like a blade. “Draw . . . and release.”
Swoosh. My arrow whizzes through the clearing, lodging firmly in the trunk of a pine.
Hào’yáng makes a satisfied hum. “Whoever your prior instructor was did not do you justice.”
I turn to him and find his eyes narrowed, the corner of his mouth ghosting into a smile that I’ve seen only a handful of times. “It isn’t the instructor who’s at fault but the student who is lacking,” I reply.
His gaze dances with light as it meets mine. “I find that difficult to believe,” he says as he steps away, his hands coming to rest behind his back.
“You humor me.”
It’s been only two days since we arrived back at my village, Xī’lín—and less than a week since we escaped the battle between the demonic army and the immortals in the Kingdom of Sky that interrupted the Immortality Trials. Though the Kingdom of Night began its war against the Kingdom of Sky nearly ten years ago, the mortal realm is less safe than it’s ever been.
Yet now, with Hào’yáng’s return, we have a plan to take it back from the demons.
Before the Immortality Trials ended, I learned my true heritage. I am the daughter of Lady Shī’yǎ—one of the legendary Eight Immortals—and as her sole surviving heir, I have the right to call upon an army of immortals pledged to her name.
Hào’yáng needs this army to defeat the Kingdom of Night and take back the Kingdom of Rivers from their clutches. And so we agreed to an alliance.
A marriage alliance. Political in nature.
I touch the broken jade pendant resting against my chest. My father gave me its other half when our kingdom fell to the demon realm, telling me there was a guardian at the other end of it; all I had to do was ask for their help. In the years after he died, my guardian in the jade was the person I turned to as war ravaged our land. Whether it was to treat my sick mother—who was slowly dying after an attack by a mó—or learning to care for and feed my baby sister, the guardian in the jade always had an answer.
I lost mine, but just weeks ago, I found the owner of its other half that I now wear: my guardian in the jade, Hào’yáng.
We have had little chance to be together in the past few days—me, focused on nursing my mother back to health; Hào’yáng, on strengthening the wards of our village with talismans.
Even so, we both know it’s only a matter of time until Sansiran will realize that the heir to the Kingdom of Rivers is missing from the Kingdom of Sky, and she’ll come searching—right into my village, I’m sure of it.
I glance up. Gold-tipped clouds are scattered across coral-hued skies—yet beyond them, storm clouds linger. The weather has been tempestuous since our return; there are whispers in my village that the gods are angry.
Only a handful of us know the truth: that war has arrived at the immortal realm . . . and salvation for our world is more precarious than ever.
Hào’yáng follows my troubled gaze to the distant skies. The morning sunlight is a reminder of how little of it we have left—and how an eternal night awaits us should we fail.
“I have a better idea than hunting on land,” he says lightly, but I know the time has come to take the first steps of our plan. He holds out his hand to me. “Besides, your sister wanted fish for her breakfast congee.”
The sky over the river glows a luminous blush through the storm clouds, and a pale mist shrouds the silhouettes of the distant mountains. The Pearl’s Claw is an offshoot of the river that runs through the mortal realm: the Long River, sprung from the bones of the Azure Dragon, who once upon a time lay down to slumber and birthed our land.
In the past, our village fishermen sailed the Pearl’s Claw’s abundant waters and returned with fresh fish, trading across the other villages and cities in the province. Bà, my father, brought me here once by horseback when I was small. I recall the wooden fishing boats with their webbed sails navigating the river’s currents, the song of the fishermen as they cast their nets into the water and praised the dragons for their gift.
I never had the chance to return; the Pearl’s Claw was farther from my village than I dared venture after my father died. But by dragonhorse, the journey takes less than an hour.
I know Hào’yáng deliberately selected this location for the two rites we are about to perform to begin our offensive. I slide off Meadowsweet’s back after him. The dragonhorse whinnies as she leaps back into the air, kicking off into the skies. Her body lengthens and scales grow over her coat, and soon I watch her dragon form grow smaller until she’s a tiny stitch of silver among the clouds.
I follow Hào’yáng to the river’s bank. The rulers of the Kingdom of Rivers have always been tied to this land. Long ago, when our realm came to life from the springs of the Azure Dragon’s bones, she gifted a drop of her blood to the first mortal empress. That divine dragon’s blood bound the empress and her descendants to the land: to love it, to serve it, and to protect it. And in return, the land, too, would accept them and only them.
Hào’yáng told me that if the land of the Kingdom of Rivers was the blood and bones, then its emperor was its beating heart.
I watch him step into the river, and I have no doubt this is true. The waters rise in a whirl of blue ribbons, cradling him, as the sun gilds him in a halo of light. Only the true bloodline of our emperor, blessed with the blood of the dragons, has the power to control water. I have seen him call upon oceans, yet the sight never fails to steal my breath. Outlined against the turquoise, he is beautiful in a way poems cannot capture: a fairy-tale prince risen from the river. And in that moment, I have the sudden, hollow feeling that my boy in the jade is far away, the distance between us one that I can never close.
He turns to me and holds out his hand, and the feeling dissipates.
The river sweeps me up, and Hào’yáng draws me against him with the confident familiarity we developed throughout the weeks he trained me for the trials. The air is chill, though Hào’yáng is warm as he shields me.
Copyright © 2026 by Amélie Wen Zhao. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
