The air in the embassy's receiving chamber is still. Naci Khan turns her attention to the two men who stand as living monuments to the empire's fractures. She does not sit, forcing them to stand in her presence, a subtle test of their posture and patience.

Her gaze sweeps over them, a general inspecting new, potentially treacherous terrain. She acknowledges Jin Na first with a slight tilt of her chin, a nod between warriors that acknowledges the scar and the eye without flinching. Then her amber focus shifts to Zhou Liwei. The young nobleman offers a bow so perfectly executed it is an insult in its lack of soul—a mechanical, court-trained gesture that acknowledges her station while refusing to acknowledge her humanity.

"The Wind-Khan of Tepr," Liwei says, his voice a calm, precise instrument. It is devoid of warmth, each syllable placed with the care of a surgeon's scalpel. "Your reputation is a storm that reaches even the quietest courtyards of the capital."

"And you are a son of those quiet courtyards," Naci replies, her tone neutral. "You carry its silence with you. It is… heavy."

A flicker of something passes behind Liwei's frozen lake eyes before vanishing. "I carry the consequences of its noise, Great Khan. I come to you as a victim of the same rot that threatened to consume the empire from the throne down. The eunuch who fell from grace, Yile. He used me, twisted my circumstances to his own ends, and when my utility was spent, he intended to discard me into a silent, permanent oblivion," Liwei states, the only hint of emotion a slight tightening of the skin around his eyes.

Naci listens, her expression unchanging. She is a raptor listening to the chatter of field mice, waiting for the one piece of information that signifies food. "A familiar story. Yile specialized in creating victims. What is it you seek from the Khan of Tepr? Revenge is a dish best served with your own resources."

"Not revenge." Liwei's gaze intensifies, locking onto hers. "There was someone close to him. A person who held his confidence, who knew the architecture of his deceit. When Yile's house of cards trembled, this person fled. I have spent eight years tracing whispers, following the scent of fear and opportunity through the empire's underbelly. All paths, eventually, lead north. All whispers speak of Tepr as a final refuge."

The room seems to constrict. Borak, leaning against the doorframe, ceases his bored examination of his fingernails. Naci's own history with the eunuch, a tapestry woven with threads of manipulation and violence, stretches taut in her mind. She braces herself, expecting to hear the name she has long associated with Yile's most intimate treachery.

"The name," Naci commands, her voice low.

Zhou Liwei does not blink. "Meicong."

There is a minuscule, almost imperceptible release of tension in the line of Naci's shoulders. A breath she had not realized she was holding escapes silently. Her face, however, remains a mask of carved stone. The name is not the one she feared, but it is a thread, a connection to a different part of the web.

"Meicong," she repeats, tasting the name, testing its weight. She allows a silence to stretch, a void for Liwei's hopes to echo in. "The winds of Tepr carry many names. The desperate, the ambitious, the lost. They find shelter in our storms." She takes a single step forward, her eyes holding his. "It is a vast land. But if the gale should whisper this particular name to me, Zhou Liwei," she says, her tone shifting into one of cordial, yet utterly non-committal, diplomacy, "you will be the first to know."

The silence that follows Naci's non-committal promise to Liwei is a fragile thing, stretched thin over the chasm of their mutual distrust. She lets it linger, her gaze drifting from the courtier's frozen composure to the mountain of scarred flesh and silent fury beside him. She studies Jin Na not as a potential ally, but as a geological formation—a cliff face that has weathered unimaginable storms, its fissures and striations telling a history of cataclysm.

She takes a single, deliberate step toward him, the soft sound of her boot on the rug unnaturally loud. Her eyes, those twin suns of amber, trace the ravaged landscape of his face, from the sunken, lidless hollow where his eye once was, down the furrowed trench of glossy, twisted tissue that marred his cheek.

"You wear your history with more honesty than any court chronicle, General," she says, her voice not pitying, but analytical, like a smith assessing the quality of tempered steel. "A man's deeds are often written in gold leaf and lies. Yours are carved directly into the flesh." Her head tilts. "Those are years of pain on a face too young to bear them. Such eloquent reminders do not come from a single, clean strike. They are a story. How did you come by them?"

Jin Na's single eye does not waver from hers. He accepts her scrutiny as another natural phenomenon, like wind or rain. When he speaks, his voice is a low, gravelly rumble, the sound of continents grinding against one another deep beneath the earth.

"The story is not a pleasant one, Wind-Khan."

"I did not ask for a pleasant story," Naci replies, her tone flat. "I asked for the truth. Pleasant stories are for children and fools. I am neither."

A grim approximation of a smile, more a twitch of facial scar tissue, touches Jin Na's mouth. "Then you shall have it." He draws a slow breath, as if steeling himself to descend once more into a personal hell. "I was a lieutenant. Young, proud, and stupid with faith. My commander was a man whose name was once synonymous with the empire's unbreakable will: General Li Song."

The name hangs in the air, a relic from a more certain, if brutal, age.

"We were sent to quell the Siza revolts. It was butchery dressed as duty. We broke them at every turn, herding the ragged remnants of their hope toward the city of An'alm. We laid siege. For forty days and forty nights, we starved them, pounded their walls, and waited for their will to crumble into cannibalism and despair. We very nearly exterminated them. Their leader, a fiery zealot named Linh, was cornered, wounded, bleeding out his life in the ruins of his own rebellion."

Jin Na's eye loses focus, staring at a horror only he can see. "It was there, in the reek of death and defeat, that Li Song walked into the ruins. He was meant to deliver the final blow. Instead, he looked upon the dying man—his face pale as moonlight, his eyes burning with a fever that was not entirely of this world—and he saw something else. He saw the reincarnation of his own personal goddess. The White Mother."

Borak, from his post by the door, lets out a soft, disgusted grunt. "And there is no fanatic so dangerous as a converted one."

Jin Na's nod is a slow, heavy thing. "He who was sent to be the empire's hammer became the rebellion's anvil. In a single, catastrophic moment of apostasy, he knelt. He proclaimed Linh the divine son of the White Mother, the Scourge who would cleanse the world. The loyal imperial troops became the nucleus of a new, terrifying faith. The Hluay Dynasty was born not from victory, but from a single general's madness."

He pauses, the memory a physical weight on his shoulders. "I was one of the few who refused to kneel. I stood against my mentor, my father-in-arms, as he pledged his sword to a fanatic he had been sent to kill. The look he gave me… it was not hatred. It was pity. The pity a god shows a mortal who cannot perceive his divine plan."

The air in the room grows cold. Naci does not move, her entire being focused on the story.

"The battles that followed were… unspeakable," Jin Na continues, his voice dropping yet gaining a sharper, more painful edge. "We knew their tactics, their strengths. They knew ours. It was a war of mirrored horrors. But the final, defining lesson was taught at the Scarlet River."

His hand rises, almost involuntarily, to trace the worst of the scarring. "Linh, with Li Song's strategic genius now at his disposal, laid a trap. He let us push him to a river crossing, then sprung his forces upon us from three sides. They used fire—pots of naphtha and quicklime—launched from barges. The water itself began to boil and burn. The bridge we held was the only retreat for five thousand loyalist troops."

His single eye bores into Naci's. "I held that bridge. My company and I. We stood in fire and burning water, our armor melting into our skin, as Linh's new disciples, our former brothers-in-arms, charged us again and again. A pot of liquid fire burst at my feet. This," he says, his fingers finally touching the ruined flesh of his face, "is what remains of a man who stood between his comrades and a prophet's hell. The river ran black with ash. We held long enough for the rear guard to cross and burn the bridge behind them, stranding us with the enemy."

He lets his hand fall. "I was pulled from the water, more corpse than man, by a soldier who died dragging me to shore. The scars are not just from the fire. They are from watching the world I swore to defend be unmade by the very faith that was meant to uphold it. They are from the face of my former commander, a man I admired as a father, looking down at my burning body with the serene smile of a saint."

The tale ends, leaving a silence heavier than any stone. Naci does not offer sympathy. She offers a verdict, her voice flat and cold, the sound of a tomb sealing shut.

"Linh and the traitor Li Song are not a political faction to be negotiated with or a rebellion to be crushed. They are a spiritual plague that turns reason to ash and loyalty to kindling." Her eyes are chips of frozen amber. "They cannot be reasoned with. They must be excised. By any means necessary."

Jin Na's head inclines in a slow, grave nod. The shared understanding between them is a tangible force, a bridge of grim necessity built over a chasm of suffering. "The Wind-Khan sees clearly. They are a blight that will consume everything if left unchecked." He shifts his weight, the floorboard creaking in protest. "But the Yanming Emperor's strategy is one of triage. The imperial view is that the most immediate, bleeding wound is the Yohazatz front. Puripal's consolidation have created a precarious balance. The throne believes it must secure its northern frontier before it can turn its full attention to the southern fever."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

He delivers the next part with the blunt force of a warhammer. "The official priority is to deal with the 'Seop revolution' in its cradle, before it can consolidate its hold on the coastal slumps and, most critically, before Linh can open a dialogue with them. A land-based fanatic with a navy is a threat the empire cannot countenance."

The word "Seop" hangs in the air, a new variable entering the equation.

It is at this precise moment that the door to the chamber shudders as if struck by a small, frantic battering ram. It flies open to reveal Sen, her hair a chaotic nimbus around a face smudged with soot and alchemical excitement. She is breathing heavily, clutching a scroll covered in frantic, explosive diagrams. Borak, who had been leaning by the doorway, makes a belated, grasping lunge for her, but she is a wisp of manic energy, slipping under his arm with the ease of a greased piglet.

"Seop?" she screeches, her voice shredding the funereal atmosphere like a saw through silk. "What's happening in Seop? Is it the ports? I told Saya the western dredging was insufficient! The silt patterns are all wrong for a proper blockade-runner, but would she listen? No! 'Sen,' she said, 'stop calculating the tidal drag on hypothetical ships and help me count the barrels of rotten fish!'"

She rushes into the center of the room, completely oblivious to the stunned expressions of the two imperial representatives. Her eyes are wide, shining with a frantic, internal light.

"The Seop slump is a festering pit of bureaucratic neglect and superior mineral deposits!" she announces to the room at large, as if delivering a state report. "My sister, Saya, she watched all the ports! She knows which harbormasters can be bribed with wine and which require a more… percussive negotiation!" She jabs a finger at her scroll. "But the real secret isn't the ports! It's the Serpent's Tooth! A cliff face west of the main channels! The currents there will smash a imperial war junk to splinters! No patrols ever go there! The echo is magnificent! I've tested my best—and loudest—inventions there! The resonance frequency of the rock is perfect for measuring blast yield!"

She beams, a picture of proud, unhinged accomplishment, surrounded by the grim visages of war and politics. Zhou Liwei watches her with the detached curiosity of an entomologist studying a new species of brightly colored, potentially venomous beetle. Jin Na simply stares, his single eye wide, his catastrophic scars seeming to pale in the face of this whirlwind of incomprehensible energy.

Naci, however, does not look annoyed. Her gaze now rests on Sen. The gears of her mind, which had been calculating troop movements and warfare, now click into a new, terrifying configuration. The frantic, comical rant about cliffs and echoes and testing grounds is not noise to her. It is a key.

A slow, predatory smile spreads across Naci Khan's face. She turns from the generals to the engineer, her voice dropping into a tone of gentle, deadly conspiracy.

"Little engineer," she says, the words a silken trap. "It seems you are due a trip home."

The chamber holds its breath. Sen's frantic energy seems to freeze mid-air, crystallized by the weight of Naci's proposition. The engineer's head cocks, her eyes narrowing with the focused intensity of a hound on a fresh scent.

Jin Na breaks the spell. His voice is a low rumble of disbelief. "A trip home? To do what? Grand Admiral Bimen of the Southern Bureau has already commandeered every seaworthy war junk from here to the Pearl Delta. They are marshaling a fleet the size of a floating city to blockade the Seop coast and burn any rebellion in its harbors. You have no navy. You have… what? Fishing boats? River barges?"

Naci turns her head slowly, her predatory smile not fading but deepening, transforming into something akin to radiant, terrifying joy. She stares at Jin Na, and then a sound escapes her—a low, genuine, rolling laugh that seems to startle the very dust motes in the sunbeams. It is not a laugh of mockery, but of pure, unadulterated revelation, the sound of someone who has just seen the solution to an impossible puzzle.

"General Jin Na," she says, her voice rich with amusement, her amber eyes gleaming like those of a wolf that has just found the unguarded side of the sheepfold. "You think in the old ways. Wooden hulls. Oars and sails. Men packed like salted fish, vulnerable to storm and flame." She takes a step toward him, her gesture sweeping dismissively, as if brushing the entire Moukopl fleet from the board. "I do not need a navy. I have something much, much better."

...

Charms clack under the beam—shells, bent nails, a prayer written backward by someone who meant well. The boy wakes in a bed too big for him and too small for the world he fell out of. He listens. Pumps groan. Tar breathes. Women laugh like knives sheathed badly.

He sits up. The blanket is a shawl stolen from a festival and requisitioned by hardship. His fingers trace the stitched carp that swim nowhere. His mouth is dry, sweet with the ghost of honey cake.

Outside, Lizi argues with her eviction. "Why him? Why my bed? He is tiny! Fold him and put him in a drawer!"

Shan Xi answers with the patience she never remembered to grow. "Congratulations, Lizi. You have been promoted to floor. A prestigious posting. The floor is everywhere."

"I hate everywhere."

"Everywhere hates you back. Harmony."

Snorts. Thuds. The crew's irritation scuffs by like bare feet. The boy stands, sways, pretends he did not sway, and opens the door. Light slices in. He squints and follows it.

On deck, the Red Cliff Survivor sulks in her wound. The sea chews its lip and spits foam. The crew spots him in the same instant, a ripple of heads turning like field grass tilting toward wind.

"Ghost's awake," Na'er says, balanced on a spar that has no business supporting a person.

"Not a ghost," Auntie Fang grunts. "Ghosts don't wrinkle sheets with that much entitlement."

"Hey!" Lizi appears from a nest of coils where she has been demoted to citizen of rope. "You! Bed thief! What do you call a person who steals someone's—"

"Home," Shan Xi says without looking at her. "A colonizer."

The boy pads to the bridge, bare feet mute on salt-wet boards. He does it like he has practiced walking on things that will not hold him if he doubts them. He keeps his chin level. He is very good at being someone else's idea of brave.

"Twins," someone shouts. "Bring the witches!"

Pragya arrives with a mortar, Pragati with a needle still threaded through sailcloth. They stand like mirrors cracked in the same place.

"So," Pragya says. "Object recovered from sea resumes objecting."

"Object is still aristocratic," Pragati notes. "Note the effortlessness of that pulse."

The boy bows to them, a calculation performed by ribs and chin. "Thank you for your care," he says—in Moukopl lacquered so precisely it makes the crew's eyebrows argue with each other.

Pei the Drummer taps two curious beats on a barrel, as if the syllables have a time signature she'd like to keep. "He speaks better than the Captain," she announces.

Shan Xi flicks her fan open without enthusiasm. "The Captain speaks a language with fewer lies. Boy. Name. Why were you sleeping in a jewelry box."

He looks at the circle of rough faces and meets each in turn as if collecting signatures. "I am…" A small pause, the shape of a lesson swallowed. "I was studying at court. In Seop." His tongue resides on the right syllables. "Revolutionaries broke the palace. My father was executed. My mother and sisters—" The breath leaves him without asking permission. He catches it, sets it back where it belongs, continues. "They put me in a boat. My aunt said the tide carries what it loves. I don't know if it loves me. I woke here."

A silence. It is not a gentle one. The sea fills it until the ship complains again.

Na'er squints. "You paddled from Seop to our hole?"

"Paddling was discouraged," he says. "There was…a tonic. For sleeping. And not crying."

"Efficient," Pragya murmurs. She tilts the boy's jaw, checks his pupils with annoyance. "Any vomiting?"

"Only when people ask about vomiting," he says. It lands like a joke. Lizi laughs too loud to make up the difference.

"Why Moukopl?" Auntie Fang asks. "You're Seop. Your mouth is a tax ledger."

"My tutors were Moukopl. Trade." He gestures helplessly at the air. "Empire."

"Empire," Shan Xi repeats, as if tasting an old grudge. "Do you have any other skills? Can you hammer? Tie a bowline? Influence the weather?"

"I can recite the Three Salts," he offers, then adds, "I can also sweep."

"Everyone can sweep," Lizi declares. "Not everyone can be evicted with dignity. Watch and learn."

He lacks a laugh for that. He stands straighter instead. "My father—King—" The word snags. He corrects: "He was king. The Hluay and those who fancy themselves the tide cut his throat at dawn. They made the square watch." His gaze slides off the ship and sees something far, hot, and terrible. "They made the palace lions lick the blood. Then they burned the books that made us ourselves."

Pei's sticks rest. Auntie Fang's earrings still. Pragati's needle hangs between stitches.

The twins exchange a look. Pragati's hand disappears into her sleeve. The jade seal is not in it; prudence keeps it elsewhere. But knowledge presses at their throats.

Pragya clears hers. "Your father's name." She gives him the lifeline in the tone of a noose.

"Cha'e U Jin" He gives it. The crew will not remember the syllables later, but they feel the room tilt around them.

"Your name," Pragati says.

"Yotaka" He gives that too. It sits on the boards like something alive and unwilling to obey them. "My mother called me her little king when she was not supposed to." He forces a smile up where it does not want to be. "She said that was a joke, because small kings are eaten by big kings."

Auntie Fang grunts. "Bad joke."

"Do you know her fate?" Na'er asks, all edges gone blunt.

He shakes his head. His hair settles back into expensive order, ridiculous on a deck that bleeds tar. "The palace was claws."

"Enough elegy," Shan Xi says, flapping the fan as if clearing smoke no one else smells. "Proof. There are many boys who say father and king in the same sentence. Most of them are liars or playwrights."

"Witches," Pei calls. "Show-and-tell."

Pragya produces the lacquered tube. The scroll slides into daylight with a sound like skin leaving skin. The crew hunches closer without admitting they are curious. Pragati does not reveal the seal; not yet. She watches the boy instead.

Pragya unrolls the vellum. The script walks across it clean as a blade. She reads phrases in dry Moukopl for the folk who trade in that tongue: petitions for sanctuary, the genealogy stitched like wounds closed with gold thread, line upon line of who begat whom and which sea blessed which marriage. It builds and builds until even Lizi stops trying to reach a pun through it.

"'Right of salt and sword,'" Pragya translates. "'By tide and treaty. Heir named during the last high water before dawn.'"

The boy stares at the characters as if they spoke a language only his bones remember. His hand lifts toward the paper and stops. "My aunt wrote that," he says.

Pragati finally brings out the jade. The dragon rests in her palm like a living decision. Jet eyes catch the gray light and make it mean something. She does not pass it to him; she holds it where he can see what it thinks of him.

His throat moves. He bows—not to the twins, not to the crew, to the weight. "It was in my father's desk," he says. "We were not allowed to touch it because it remembered who we were. He touched it and said it burned if you were not true." He looks up. "It will not burn me."

Lizi leans in, earnest despite herself. "What do you call a jade thing that burns people?"

"Government," Auntie Fang says.

Shan Xi's fan stills. Her mouth does something almost like a smile, then reconsiders. She regards the boy the way a cat regards a bird that has politely asked to be adopted. "Crew," she says. "It appears the tide has delivered us an answer to a question we did not ask."

Pei's drumsticks knock once, involuntary, a heartbeat that forgot to be modest.

"What answer?" Na'er asks.

"The kind with flags," Shan Xi says. "And firing squads."

Pragya rolls the scroll up with surgical care and looks at the boy over the tube, eyes unreadable. "Say it," she tells him.

He swallows. The deck waits. The wind forgets itself for the space of three words.

"I am heir." He does not whisper it. He doesn't raise it to a shout either. He sets it down in the middle of their lives like a heavy bowl no one ordered. "To the Seop throne."

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