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1
The nights have been longer and more beautiful since their world began to bleed into ours. It also gives them more time to hunt. But tonight, I will not be prey.
Through the silk-spun mist, moonlight catches on the wicked curves of my crescent blades, two snug against my palms and six more tucked up my sleeves and bodice for quick access. My thumbs rest against the grooves of the unique talismans engraved on the hilts by my father. The magic of these talismans, activated with a touch of spirit energy, amplifies the power of my blades and makes them lethal weapons against demons.
I move quietly through the fog, each step carefully stitched between silvergrasses and pines, weaving in a manner that renders me ghostly on a mountaintop dulled to shadows and smoke. My senses are weaker than theirs—it’s hard hearing past my own breathing—so I don’t know if any are waiting for me out here in the dark. If they are, I’m prepared. I’ve spent years learning how to fight them.
Not by choice, of course. I once had a normal life as the daughter of a seamstress in our village. My sister and I grew up surrounded by fine needles and soft silks, in patterns both beautiful and ordinary, that we delivered all across the Central Province. But then the Kingdom of Night broke the Heavenly Order across the realms, destroyed the border wards that kept our realms separate, and demons—mo—began to invade the Kingdom of Rivers, the mortal world. Soon our emperor and his armies fell to the powerful demon queen, then province after province collapsed, and the immortals in the Kingdom of Sky raised the wards on their realm and left us on our own.
I was ten years old the night the ministry of my province dissolved. I swapped needles for knives, silks for talisman spells, and lost my father in a lesson I will never forget.
Nine years later, I am still alive.
And tonight, I will not be prey.
When the sound of rushing water threads through the trees and the ground begins to flatten, relief lightens my chest. I’ve survived another trip to the moon spring at the summit of the westernmost mountain range of our kingdom. I will harvest light lotuses: flowers that drink in the magic of stars and are rich with the life energy that fuels our mortal souls. I will return to my village of Xi’lin and grind the petals and seeds into an elixir.
And my mother will live for a few months more.
Waves lap at the root of a great willow, swallowing the grass and muddy banks at my feet. I push past the curtains of wisteria that grow thickly around the spring—and freeze.
Beneath the moonlight filtering through the fog, the water is red.
My senses sharpen. Too late, I catch the sweetly putrid stench in the breeze. Too late, I notice the shadow in the middle of the spring. As fear tightens my chest, I feel the press of its gaze upon me.
Demon.
Mo take on a human appearance; beneath their beauty are their true monstrous forms, yet on the surface, there isn’t much to differentiate them from mortals. This one has taken the form of a young man. Through the branches of the willow, I see the powerful muscles of his shoulders, the spill of his hair in the moonlight. He carries a fresh, half-eaten corpse in his arms, blood spattering his chest. I am relieved to see it. Only the young, lesser mo will consume mortal flesh. The Higher Ones are less inclined toward the taste of our flesh; they prefer our souls.
The young male holds his hand out toward me.
“Come.” His voice is song. The air heats with the signature dark energy of their kind, and I feel the power of his magic in that command. It’s a spell that mortals are powerless to resist.
Most mortals.
Unbeknownst to the mo, I’m holding Shield, the first of my father’s crescent blades that I learned to use. Shield has a talisman that blocks attacks—including magical ones.
I tap my thumb to the blade’s hilt and push a small spark of spirit energy against the engraved talisman. I sense it activate, its power flowing through me to resist the dark magic of the mo’s command.
I will my body to relax. As much as I hate it, I have to play the part of prey. In fighting the mo, I have only two advantages: that of surprise and that of being underestimated. I can’t let this demon know that I am armed against his magic . . . or that I have magic of my own.
Though all mortals are born with life energy flowing red in our veins, few of us are able to channel spirit energy: the life force and magic of immortals and, some say, the gods. Those of us with the ability to do so are named practitioners: warrior-magicians who dedicate our lives to learning the martial arts and cultivating our magic.
Most died in the war against the Kingdom of Night.
I brush aside the willow branches and step into the water.
Moonlight bathes me, almost too brightly. My reflection is silver in the bloody water, and as the mo’s gaze snaps onto me, I know what he sees. I’m dressed in the breezy gauzes and pretty silks of a village maiden. My hair is in a long, loose braid woven through with a chaste white ribbon, a few strands curling over my cheeks, the soft nape of my neck. My crescent blades are hidden away in sheaths sewn into my wide sleeves, courtesy of my sister’s clever design. Most important, a protective jade pendant hangs against my collarbone, safely tucked beneath the collar of my dress.
The mo watches with interest, and I return his gaze. This part isn’t hard. Like all beings of his kind, he is beautiful, the perfectly honed edge of a silver blade: black hair that falls like a living shadow down his back. Skin that looks sculpted, unmarred by scars or any of the traces that illness leaves on us mortals. It is a cruel design of nature that takes advantage of our most primitive instincts: create something so impossibly, perfectly beautiful to lure prey in, and give it unmatched power.
It is no wonder mortals are dying out.
The mo drops the corpse he’s been feasting on. I try not to glance at the flash of entrails and hair at the edges of my vision as his victim falls into the water with a splash. I only hope it does not ruin the lotuses that I need for my mother.
I keep my smile, hoping the mo does not hear my quickening heartbeat as he draws closer. It is unsettling, not knowing if my hunter will eat me or ravish my body or drink my soul. Or perhaps all three.
The mo rises from the water and approaches me. This one is naked, confirming my theory that he is young: more animalistic in nature, not yet having learned human customs. Water sluices off his powerful muscles as he stops before me. His tongue darts out, and his eyes roam over me with unabashed hunger.
Disturbing as it is that the mo mirror our bodies, I find it worse that they also mirror our physical needs: hunger, thirst, lust, exhaustion. The only difference is that they feast on our flesh and drink our souls.
The worst? They don’t even need them to survive. To them, our flesh and souls simply taste like honey. Like sunlight. Like sweet morning dew. I know this because one of them told me as she drank my father’s soul. I will never forget her smile and the way she licked her lips, the casual cruelty of her laughter while I watched.
I force myself to stand very still as the mo closes the distance between us. His smile is almost lazy as he lifts a hand and runs it down my cheek. I suppress a shiver at how warm his skin is, how human he appears despite being a creature of yin, of darkness and night and moon.
The mo catches my shudder and inhales, mistaking it for desire. His eyes—deep red like those of all beings from the Kingdom of Night—darken with want.
Two can play at this game. My maiden’s outfit has tricked him into lowering his defenses. He thinks me a powerless mortal girl—not a trained practitioner who is capable of putting up a fight.
As the mo lowers his mouth to my throat, I strike.
There are three key differences between mo and mortals. One slash to the major artery on his neck reveals the first: instead of blood, out pours a substance resembling black smoke. Mo’s ichor is poisonous to mortals, known to cause paralysis and pain. I pivot away, and my second crescent blade—Poison, named for its talisman—bites deep into his neck. The mo lets out a snarl, an inhuman sound reminding me of just exactly what he—it—really is. As he jerks away, my lips curl in grim satisfaction. It’s too late: poison has begun to spread through his veins.
The third crescent blade I select, which I’ve named Striker, is reinforced with a talisman that gives it extra power as I drive it into the demon’s chest—into the soft spot between the ribs. The second difference: in the place of a mortal’s heart, the mo have cores of dark magic.
The demon’s scream sounds uncannily human, but I grit my teeth and follow him like we are in a twisted dance as he stumbles back, trying to extricate himself from my blade.
My blade has cut through his core. I will my gaze to never stray from his face as his flesh cracks like porcelain, melting away into the smoke and shadows that make up these creatures. I savor the fear in his eyes, the ichor dripping down my blade, and for a moment, I’m ten years old again, crouched in the kitchen with my mother’s prone body in my arms, shielding my baby sister from the sight of the woman who was not a woman drinking my father’s soul. For a moment, the events of that night unwind, but I shake them off and know that I am not a helpless child anymore. I am powerful, and I am the hunter.
I twist Striker one more time, and the blade finishes its work. With a guttural scream, the demon’s body dissolves in a swirl of shadows, a melting face, a pair of glowing red eyes, twisting horns and pointed ears—its true form beneath its beautiful mortal skin, and echoes of the dark energy that once made up its core. In a last gasp, it rushes toward me.
I force myself to remain still. When I blink again, there is only wind in my face, the faint rustle of the willow leaves and wisteria at my back.
The final difference: mortals have souls, but demons don’t. Few of our souls make it to reincarnation, but the mo simply dissolve, leaving nothing of what they once were in this world.
I exhale sharply and examine my hands. My fingers tremble as I clean my blades in the water, careful not to touch the ichor steaming from their steel.
One day, I will be strong enough to no longer be afraid.
A flick of my wrists and Poison, Striker, and Shield are back in my sleeves. The water runs red, soaking me up to my waist and staining my dress, but I can’t help thinking there is a twisted beauty to the sight of the light lotuses drifting white against the crimson. My stomach tightens, though, at the sight of how meager their numbers have become.
I wade through the bloody water and harvest them, counting each one: six precious flowers, six months of my mother’s life. I will brew them tonight and store them—one vial for one month. Harvest them too early or store them for too long, and they lose their effectiveness.
This should be enough to last Ma for the next season.
These trips have come to define my life, as though my existence is meted out one season at a time, one vial of elixir for each cycle of the moon. Just one lotus can replenish the life energy of an injured practitioner, even bring someone back from the brink of death. They are rare. And with the ever-darkening night, they are dying out.
That’s why this is my last trip for the next few months. I can no longer depend on light lotuses to sustain my mother’s life. I need something stronger, something that will mend a half-devoured soul. Something that exists in the fabled realm of immortals, across the border in the Kingdom of Sky.
I cradle the lotuses against my chest. Tonight, though, this is enough.
I tuck them carefully into the concealed pockets in my bodice. Then I turn away from the blood-soaked spring and the dead human body and wade back up to the bank.
My sister will be so upset that I’ve ruined the dress she made me.
It’s nearing dawn when I return home. Unlike most other villages, Xi’lin did not fortify its walls in the war against the Kingdom of Night. Instead, my father and the other village practitioners set up magical wards all around the periphery to keep out anything non-mortal.
Nine years later, our village still stands, one of the last in the Central Province. The mo attacked our province first, breaking the wards between realms so they could take down our emperor and his army in the Imperial City. The devastation quickly spread throughout the province as the demon armies fed on us and our soldiers. But I’ve heard rumors that life remains somewhat normal in the Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Provinces, especially far out toward the borders of the mortal realm and the Four Seas of the dragon realms. As the months turned to years and the mo remained in the Imperial City, folks in the Central Province began to migrate to the outskirts of the kingdom.
I enter our village through the pai’fang, feeling the faint swirl of spirit energy as the wards’ magic brushes against my skin. Inside the gate, the rows of clay houses with their gray-tiled roofs and curving eaves sit silent on either side of the dusty road. Once, hawkers would have been setting up their tarps along the streets, ready to receive traders from the Silk Trail that wound through the Kingdom of Rivers.
Now the Trail is gone, as are most of the Xi’lin villagers. I don’t know why Ba didn’t just pack our bags and migrate south toward the sea in the early days. But I’m still here. I tell myself it’s because I’m not strong enough to take my mother and my little sister beyond the protected borders of Xi’lin on a journey through the mo-infested province. Yet there’s another reason, one that I’ve kept to myself. Leaving feels like abandoning the last traces of Ba that remain in this world. Leaving feels like giving up.
