The first arrow took the soldier beside him through the throat. The man was still smiling when he died — still waiting for his family.
For one heartbeat, nobody understood. They had carried their wounded to the gates. They had wept at the sight of home. Then the sky filled with arrows, the cheering turned to screaming, and the soldiers of the Red Moon learned that they had survived the underworld only to be murdered by heaven.
"SHIELDS!" Shizui roared, dragging men behind the wagons. Above them, on the wall, stood Yuri — and behind Yuri stood figures in white-and-ash cloaks, bowmen whose eyes had gone dark and twisting, like oil dropped in water.
The young soldier who had hugged him that morning — Ren — hauled the wounded through the mud, screaming their names like the names could save them.
An arrow meant for Ren's back struck Shizui instead. Then a second. He went down on one knee, blood filling his mouth, the world slowing around him like honey — and somewhere beneath his heart, something that had slept for twenty years opened its eyes.
Heat climbed his spine like a rising flood. His veins turned black up his neck. And in a tongue he had never been taught, something ancient inside him whispered the words his mother had died whispering.
"His eyes!" a guard screamed from the wall. "The boy's eyes—!"
They were red.
What happened next, the survivors would tell for the rest of their lives, and no two of them told it the same way. They spoke of a boy climbing the gate wall with three arrows in his body, of archers firing until their strings snapped, of the Red Moon's hero walking through their volley like a man walking through rain.
At the top of the wall, Yuri met him with a blade of ash-grey steel. He was strong — far too strong — but his hands were shaking.
"You don't know what you are, do you?" Yuri breathed, backing away. "You will."
"YURI!" Shizui's voice was no longer entirely his own. "WHY?!"
But an horn sounded from the keep, and the white cloaks pulled their captain back like men retrieving a net. From below came the order, clear in the sudden quiet, meant for the bowmen's ears — and Shizui heard it anyway:
"The Voice wants him alive. Take the blood. Burn the rest."
Shizui held the wall until the ravine swallowed the last of the living. Then the fire in his veins guttered out all at once, and he fell — off the wall, through the dark, into the cold river below.
The hero of the Dragon Realm died at the gates that night.
What the river carried away before dawn was something else.