Page 152 of The Immortal’s Mark

“I will not help you.”

“You will not have to.” The Hungering King moves back, and the darkness begins to swirl around us both. “She will. That is what love does, little emperor. That is what it is for. She will come for you. She will find you. And when she does—”

The shadows wrap tighter. Warmer, almost. Like an embrace from something that has forgotten what embraces feel like.

“When she does,” the Hungering King says softly, “she will make a choice. The same choice every woman in her bloodline has made. The same choice I have been waiting over a thousand years to offer.”

“If you hurt her—”

“I will not hurt her.” The voice is patient. Kind, almost, in a terrible way. “I will give her a choice. That is all I have ever wanted. That is all I have ever done. The choice is hers to make.”

The darkness is rising now, filling my lungs, filling my eyes, and I try to speak, try to say something, try to—

Her name. I try to say her name. To hold onto something—anything—before the darkness takes me completely.

Lián.

I get one syllable out.

One syllable.

Then darkness.

Then nothing.

The throne room empties of shadow.

One moment the darkness is absolute, pooling in every corner, pressing against every surface. The next, morning light streams through windows that have returned from wherever they went, and the great bronze doors stand open as if they have never been closed.

Ministers stir. Blink. Sit up slowly, confusion on their faces, hands going to heads that ache without explanation. The guards at the doors shake themselves awake, reaching for weapons that have not left their sheaths.

The emperor’s throne is empty.

For a long moment, no one moves. No one speaks. The court stares at the vacant seat where their sovereign should be, and the silence is thick enough to cut.

Then, from somewhere far below—from the dragon caves that tunnel beneath the palace, from the ancient chambers where fire has burned since before the empire was born—a sound rises.

It starts low. A rumble that could be earthquake, could be thunder, could be the palace collapsing. It builds. Grows. Becomes something that shakes the foundations of the palace itself, that sends dust cascading from ceilings and servants stumbling in corridors.

Tianlong roars.

Not the controlled flame of ceremony. Not the measured fire of imperial ritual. This is something else. This is older, and wilder, and terrible in ways that have no name.

The sound shakes the throne room to its foundations. Ministers cover their ears. Guards drop their weapons to clutch at the walls. In the eastern wing, a woman who has killed six hundred and forty-five times stops in the middle of dressing and goes absolutely still.

This is a sound no one in the palace has heard in a thousand years.

The sound of a dragon whose bonded has been stolen.

The sound of a declaration of war.