“I don’t think the dead will mind, do you, Fusan?”
The horse snorted and nosed a nearby crate. The box rattled and buzzed, startling Mulan. She waited until the noise stopped then slowly approached. The box rattled again, but despite her uncertainty, she lifted the lid.
Four cages sat nestled inside, each one holding tiny creatures that appeared as vibrant lights. She lifted one, counting three separate colors inside. Pixies. She’d heard of the magical creatures, of course, but she had never seen one before, as they originated from the kingdom to the north. Lanfen had once told her pixie wings made a potent powder for many alchemical mixtures, but she never used them.
“You’re very far from where you belong,” she murmured. The bandits must have brought them down the river from the forests bordering Cairn Ocland. “I can’t take you home, but I can give you a chance to make it back on your own.”
Holding her breath and hoping they would go without hassle, she opened the cage. Three pixies burst out and circled around her head. Their voices sounded like chiming bells. She remained very still and waited, until the creatures swooped to their imprisoned friends. Mulan took it as a sign of faith and lifted the next cage, repeating the process until every pixie had been freed. The colorful swarm danced over her head and drifted upward into the trees, until they finally vanished from her view.
“Safe journeys,” she whispered.
Only one other item remained in the crate, a wrapped bundle nestled in a pile of smelly rags. Once she unrolled it, she discovered a jade dragon statuette. It was a beautiful piece, slightly longer than the length of her palm and carved with remarkably realistic detail. The stone felt warm in her hand. It was the perfect gift to bring home to her mother.
Help me!
Mulan fumbled the statuette, dropping it on the soft soil. Thankfully, a patch of clover cushioned it. Tension filled her shoulders and straightened her spine, tightening every muscle and preparing her to spring away. Her hand lingered on the hilt of her sword.
Nothing happened.
Her trembling fingers lowered from the hilt, and she reluctantly crouched to reclaim the statuette. Nothing happened when she scooped it up again.
“Did you…speak with me?” she asked, feeling increasingly insane by the second. Probably her imagination.
Able to laugh at her own paranoia, she wrapped the figurine in a clean towel and stuffed it into her travel bag. Tomorrow was the start of a new day.
Sometimes, a noise penetrated the gloom. A familiar voice, muffled, but present, reminded him that he lived. Hours became days and weeks stretched into months. Decades. Centuries. Time lost meaning.
Life itself lost meaning.
Did he have a name?
Darkness. Eternal black. He floated in a shadowed womb without sensation or awareness. Disembodied. Lost, save for intermittent moments of sheer agony breaking through the void without rhythm to their frequency.
He wondered if this was hell.
Light flashed. Brilliant and magnificent life-giving light engulfed him and the world turned upside down, inside-out, twisting and warping and glowing all around him.
Time passed, and a gradual sense of awareness expanded and grew. Though he couldn’t move, he perceived clear skies of blue above him, and sensed, as well as heard, the movement of the wind through verdant leaves in the trees.
Several nightfalls came and went, the sun rising overhead and casting its gilded light that touched him without warming his jade skin.
“Guys. I think I found something expensive! Look at this lyin’ in the dirt.”
“Think a merchant dropped it off his wagon?”
“Maybe. Wrap the shit in some rags. It’s no good to us if it breaks during our travel.”
A grease-darkened rag wrapped around his petrified body, and darkness swam over him once more.
Gradual awareness emerged from the fog, but the name to accompany his conscious mind remained lost in a centuries-old abyss.
Did he have a name? Was he even a person at all?
The girl certainly was. He knew not when he had come into her possession, only that wherever she traveled, she hurried to the aid of others. In a village, she drove away a wild beast preying on livestock. In another town, she rallied the militia to fend off bandits hoping to capitalize on all the men away at war.
Her voice comforted him in the darkest hours as she traveled across familiar lands he had seen in his dreams. So green. So warm.
Though no one else the female encountered appeared to see through the masculine facade, he felt it. Did that mean something?
It may have been days or weeks before some understanding returned and a name emerged from the nebulous fog of his memories.
Cheng. He was once a prince.
More than a prince. He’d been an emperor long ago, and fleeting moments of recollection returned to him on the tide of his awareness. He remembered his mother’s eternal, unchanging beauty, and he recalled his father’s wrinkled smile as the years caught up to him and he faced death with courage.
And he remembered…an uncle whom he had loved dearly. Nothing else surfaced.
Yet on the darkest days when he loathed the imprisonment of his consciousness within a statue, she was there, a stalwart champion who hid her true self beneath the armor and uniform of an imperial soldier. It made him feel less alone.
He listened to her prayers every night before bed and each day prior to battle, either from a pouch she wore beside her sword sheath for luck, or from the altar beside the cot in her small tent. From Yüying, she prayed for her parents’ safety as much as she pleaded for the chance to bring them honor.
One day, Cheng hoped his memories would return. But more than he wanted to remember the life he had lost, he wanted her to survive—he wanted to help.
So he found a way.
5
5 years later
Snarls and growls traveled through the air, the eeriness of each feral noise amplified by the unnatural blanket of fog billowing from the opposite side of the enchanted wall. Mulan continued forward with her small company of handpicked men, their footsteps muffled with thick cloth and leather.
They had been tasked with the most difficult mission of all: breaching the enchanted thorn wall and destroying the witches who maintained it. None of the aerial scouts had seen the king and queen in days, otherwise the chance of success in their task would have plummeted.
It was already a suicide mission.
And it was also the point that would turn the war in Liang’s favor, if they could pull it off.
The precious scrolls and charms in her pack were a physical as well as an emotional burden, but as the detachment commander, their safety was her priority. Above all else, the objects couldn’t fall into enemy hands. Their placement mattered more than anything else.
If she perished in enemy lands after accomplishing her mission, her family name would be doubly honored forever in the Imperial City. Failure meant she’d be forgotten, and one day, should the war still rage by the time her little brother came of age, they would take him next. The youngest soldiers of the Imperial Army were no older than sixteen.
During an earlier scouting mission, she had discovered a single weakness in the strange barrier that separated their two kingdoms. Every man in her detachment had been picked for their slighter build, a necessity for navigating a path through the maze of thorns and stalks dividing the two nations.