Page 153 of The Immortal’s Mark

Chapter 25

Toward

Chapter 644: In which our heroine discovers what she’s willing to burn.

I feel it the moment it happens.

Like a thread snapping. Like something breaking that shouldn’t break—something I didn’t know was holding me together until it tears loose and leaves a hole where my chest used to be.

I’m running before I understand why.

Through corridors. Past guards who shout something I don’t hear. My feet know where to go. My ribs are cracking around something cold and empty and wrong, and I can’t breathe but I’m still moving because stopping means feeling it, and I can’t feel it, I can’t—

The throne room doors are open.

They shouldn’t be open.

Inside: nothing. The throne sits empty. Ministers are scattered across the floor—breathing, I check, still breathing—but their faces are slack, their eyes unfocused. In the corners, shadows pool like oil. Thick. Lingering. The kind of dark that doesn’t belong in a room full of windows.

No Ren. No guards. Just absence where he should be.

And then Tianlong’s voice slams into my skull.

Not the dry commentary I’m used to. Not the ancient amusement. This is broken—fragmented, agonized, a three-thousand-year-old creature screaming through a bond that’s been half-severed.

He took him. The Hungering King. He came through the shadows and I couldn’t—the bond—he CUT the bond—

“Where.” I say it out loud. Doesn’t matter. Tianlong can hear me either way.

I don’t know. I can’t feel him. I can’t— The voice splinters. Reforms. Little dawn. I can’t feel him.

“WHERE.”

I’m not shouting. I’m not capable of shouting right now. This is worse than shouting. This is the voice of something that has stopped pretending to be human.

I don’t know. Tianlong’s voice shudders through my mind—fractured, wrong. He severed it. The bond. Cut it like—like a thread. I’ve never—never felt anything like—

My hands want to shake. I don’t let them.

“The temple,” I say. Out loud, but he can hear me. “Mei-Ling’s tomb.” I’m pulling the map from memory, every site Jing’s research identified, every location the cult has touched. “He’ll be at one of them.”

Silence. Not the comfortable kind. The kind where something ancient is trying to breathe through pain that shouldn’t be possible.

Little dawn. His voice is barely there. Find him.

I turn and walk out.

Jing finds me in the armory.

I’m pulling weapons from the racks. Knives. More knives. A sword—I haven’t used a sword in two centuries because swords are theatrical and I’ve never liked theater—but right now I want something with reach. Something that will let me cut through whatever stands between me and—

“Seven possible sites.” Jing’s hands shake when she spreads the scrolls across a weapons crate. Her voice doesn’t. Good. “Three within two days’ ride. Mei-Ling’s tomb is the most likely—here.” She points. “Southeast. Through the mountain pass.”

I memorize the route. Fold it into my head alongside the knives I’m strapping to my thighs.

Wei arrives next. Limping. Still healing from the battle at the mountain temple, arm in a sling, but standing at attention like I’m someone worth saluting.

“I can have fifty soldiers ready within the hour. More by morning.”