Heaven's Bound: The Rise Of The Infernal Sage

Chapter 7

Jian Lei's POV

I didn't run.

I don't remember deciding not to. I remember my legs simply refusing the order, turning me back toward the yard instead of away from it, and I remember reaching Sun Hao's side just as his knees finally gave out beneath him.

"No, no, no," I said, catching him before he hit the ground, his weight far lighter than it should have been for a man who'd carried himself like something ancient just minutes ago. "Stay with me. Elder Sun, stay with me."

"Foolish boy," he said, and even now, blood dark across his robe, there was something almost fond in it. "I told you to run."

"I don't listen to good advice," I said, and my voice broke apart on the last word.

The rider who'd struck him down was already turning his horse for another pass, and beyond him I could see two more shapes closing fast through the smoke, drawn by the noise, drawn by whatever signal had told an entire raiding party that tonight was the night worth burning a village for.

"Jian Lei," Sun Hao said, and his hand found my wrist with a grip far weaker than the one that had stopped me by the fire hours earlier, "listen to me. The flame. It isn't a gift. It's a debt. Whatever you become because of it, you decide that. Not the sects. Not the men who come looking for it. You."

"Stop talking like this is goodbye," I said.

"It is," he said, simply, and something in the plainness of it hurt worse than if he'd screamed it. "I'm sorry I never told you sooner. I thought there was more time. There's never as much time as we think."

The rider's horse thundered closer.

"I won't let them touch you again," I said, and I meant it with something that had nothing to do with sense or strategy, something raw and furious that had been building in me since the moment the blade meant for me had found him instead.

"Jian Lei—"

His hand went slack around my wrist.

I don't know how long I stayed frozen there, his weight suddenly heavier in my arms in the specific way that only happens once a person has actually stopped being a person and started being just a body, but it couldn't have been more than a heartbeat, because the rider was already on top of us, blade swinging down in an arc meant to finish what the first strike had started.

Something in my chest tore open.

It didn't feel like the warmth from before, faint and waiting behind my ribs. It felt like a door that had been nailed shut for nineteen years finally giving way under pressure it could no longer hold back, and the heat that poured out of me wasn't warmth at all. It was fire, real fire, gold at the edges and something darker underneath, and it left my body before I even understood I'd asked it to.

The rider's scream didn't last long.

I watched, distant from my own body in a way I couldn't explain, as the flame took him apart from the outside in, cloth and flesh curling to ash faster than any normal fire should have burned, his horse rearing and bolting into the dark before the flame could reach it too. In seconds there was nothing left where a man had been sitting a moment ago except a dark smear on the scorched grass and the smell of something I knew I would never fully wash out of my memory.

I didn't feel triumphant. I didn't feel powerful. I felt sick, and terrified, and more alone than I had ever been in my entire life, kneeling in the dirt with Sun Hao's body cooling in my arms and a fire still crawling faintly along my own skin like it hadn't decided yet whether it was finished.

"Jian Lei!"

Mei Lin'er's voice, somewhere behind me, closer than I expected, raw with a fear I'd never heard from her before.

I turned, and the look on her face when she saw me told me everything I needed to know about what I must have looked like right then, kneeling over a dead man with flame still licking faintly along my arms and my eyes, she told me later, burning gold in a way that no human eyes were supposed to burn.

"Stay back," I said, my voice barely recognizable to my own ears. "Mei Lin'er, stay back, I don't know if I can stop it."

She didn't stay back.

She ran straight toward me instead, and reached out, and put both hands flat against my burning chest like she wasn't afraid of it at all.