Page 120 of The Immortal’s Mark

The remaining cultists have fled. The temple is secure, its stones scorched black where Tianlong’s fire touched them. But the silence that follows is not peaceful. We have been seen. We have been found.

The Hungering King knows exactly where we are.

Night falls over the temple ruins.

We cannot return to the inn—our cover is compromised, our faces known. Instead, we make camp in the least damaged corner of the sanctum, building a small fire from fallen timbers. The stars are visible through the collapsed roof, sharp and cold and indifferent to everything we have learned.

Lián has barely spoken since the battle. She sits across the fire from me, her knees drawn to her chest, her face unreadable. Dumpling has curled in her lap, purring with the aggressive contentment of a creature who has no idea that the world might end.

I do not know how to bridge the distance between us.

“He’s been hunting my bloodline for seven hundred years.” Her voice is quiet, almost conversational.

“Yes.”

“He loved someone who looked like me.”

“He was a man, once. Before.”

“And now he wants to—what? Use me to eat the world because she died?”

“Grief makes monsters of us all.”

She looks at me then. The firelight catches in her eyes, turning them to amber, and I see something shift behind them. A calculation. A test.

“What would you become?” she asks quietly. “If I died and didn’t come back?”

The fire pops. Sparks rise toward the broken roof, toward the stars.

I think of the Hungering King. A man who loved someone enough to trade his humanity. A man who became a void when she was gone.

I think of watching Lián die in the warehouse, the light leaving her eyes. The moment before she breathed again. I did not know, in that moment, that she would return. I did not know anything except that something inside me was breaking.

She is watching me. Waiting for an answer I do not have.

“I do not know,” I say finally. The words feel insufficient. “I know what I would want to become. I know what duty demands. But—”

“But?”

“But I think I understand him somehow. The Hungering King.” I meet her eyes. “I understand how a man could unmake the world for love. I understand the hunger.”

The fire crackles. The silence stretches.

“That’s honest,” she says finally.

“You asked.”

“I did.” She unfolds slowly, dislodging Dumpling, who yowls in protest before relocating to her abandoned bedroll. “I regret it a little.”

“Why?”

“Because now I have to live with the answer.” She crosses to my side of the fire, settles beside me close enough that our shoulders touch. The warmth of her against my side is a counterpoint to the cold truth we have uncovered. “Because now I know.”

“Know what?”

“That you’re dangerous.” Her head drops to my shoulder, a weight I did not know I was waiting for. “That I might be in love with something that could end the world.”

The words land somewhere beneath my ribs. I am afraid to breathe, afraid to move, afraid to do anything that might break this moment.