Heaven's Bound: The Rise Of The Infernal Sage

Chapter 8

Jian Lei's POV

Her hands should have burned. I remember thinking that even as it happened, some distant, screaming part of my mind certain I was about to watch her palms blister against my skin the same way that rider had turned to ash in seconds.

They didn't burn.

"Jian Lei, look at me," Mei Lin'er said, her voice steady in a way I didn't understand how she managed. "Look at me, not at what's happening to your hands."

I looked down anyway. Fire was crawling up both my forearms now, gold shot through with threads of something darker, almost black, and it didn't hurt, that was the worst part, it didn't hurt at all, it just felt like something enormous was waking up inside my chest after a very long sleep and didn't much care what got knocked over on its way up.

"I can't stop it," I said. "Mei Lin'er, I can't feel where it ends anymore."

"Then don't stop it," she said. "Just don't let it decide who you're pointing it at."

More riders were coming, I could hear them, three, maybe four sets of hooves closing through the smoke, and some part of me that wasn't entirely my own anymore turned toward the sound the way a hunting dog turns toward a scent. The flame surged in response, climbing higher, and for one terrifying second I felt the ground itself start to answer it, grass blackening in a widening circle around my knees.

"They're going to burn the whole farm down," I said. "Everyone still hiding in the Zhou house, the Hu family, they're right there, if I can't control this—"

"Then control it," Mei Lin'er said, and grabbed my face in both hands, forcing me to look at her instead of the approaching riders. "You're still you. I don't care what that thing inside you wants. You are still you, Jian Lei, and you get to decide what happens next, not it."

Her hands on my face were the only thing in the entire burning world that felt real.

I don't know how to explain what happened after that to anyone who wasn't standing there. It wasn't like closing a door or pushing something back down. It was more like standing at the edge of a flood and choosing, with everything I had left, to build a wall instead of letting the water go wherever it wanted. The flame didn't disappear. It simply stopped reaching, folding back toward my chest like something that had been told, finally, exactly where its edges were supposed to be.

The riders broke through the smoke a heartbeat later, three of them, weapons already raised, and I felt the fire in me strain hard against the wall I'd just built, desperate to answer the threat the way it had answered the first one.

I held it.

It cost me something to hold it, I could feel that immediately, a wrongness settling into my bones like I'd asked a muscle to hold a weight it wasn't built for, but I held it, and when the lead rider saw Sun Hao's body, saw the ash where his companion had been standing minutes earlier, saw me still glowing faintly gold in the eyes with Mei Lin'er's hands still pressed to my face, he did the only sensible thing a man could do in that moment.

He turned his horse and fled, the other two close behind him, shouting something back toward the ridge that I couldn't make out over the roar still fading from my own ears.

The flame went out almost all at once, like a candle pinched between two fingers, and my knees finally gave out the way they should have minutes ago. Mei Lin'er caught me before I hit the ground, her arms shaking as badly as the rest of me.

"You did it," she said, into my hair, her voice cracking. "You didn't hurt anyone who didn't deserve it. You did it."

I didn't answer. I was looking past her, at Sun Hao's body lying still in the scorched grass, at the dark smear where a man had been standing not five minutes before, and somewhere in the wreckage of that yard I understood, clearly and completely, that whatever I'd just become, there was no version of tonight where I got to go back to simply being the boy who failed his root test six times.

"He's really gone," I said, and it wasn't a question.

"I'm so sorry," Mei Lin'er said.

I didn't cry, not then, though I would later, alone, in a way I never let her see. Right then all I felt was the enormous, empty quiet that comes after something too big to understand happens too fast to properly feel, and underneath that quiet, a low, steady hum in my chest that hadn't been there yesterday, patient, waiting, like it had all the time in the world to see what I'd let it become.