Chapter 113: The Grandma Chronicles

They scrambled up Cāng Jì’s foreleg, finding familiar perches between his golden scales. Yòu Lín tucked himself against the warm curve of the dragon’s neck. Ruì Xuě settled behind him, his small hands fisted in his brother’s fur.

“Hold on,” Cāng Jì warned. “This will be fast.”

He launched.

The cavern dropped away beneath them. The tunnels, the crystals, the bouncy rocks, Zhàn Yù’s cold voice and colder eyes, all of it fell behind them, swallowed by the rush of wind and light.

They burst out of the mountain into sky so blue it hurt to look at.

Yòu Lín’s ears flattened. His eyes watered.

“WEEEEEEEEEE!”

The sound tore out of him before he could stop it. Behind him, Ruì Xuě was making a sound too The wind whipped past them. The peaks of the Dragon Mountains rose like spears around them, their white caps catching the sun.

Cāng Jì banked. Hard.

Yòu Lín’s entire body pressed against the dragon’s scales. The world tilted sideways. The sky and the mountains and the distant, glittering waterfalls all blurred together into something that was less a view and more a feeling. A feeling like falling. Like flying. Like being the only thing in the world that mattered.

“AGAIN!” Yòu Lín shrieked.

Cāng Jì laughed. He folded his wings and dropped.

The air screamed past them. The peaks rushed up to meet them. Yòu Lín’s stomach was somewhere above his head and his heart was somewhere below his feet and his face was split into a grin so wide it hurt.

At the last possible moment, Cāng Jì’s wings snapped open.

They soared.

The wind caught them and carried them up and up, past the peaks, past the clouds, into a part of the sky that was so high it was almost purple. The world spread out beneath them like a map: the jungles of the lowlands, the rivers that cut through them like silver threads, the distant smudge of green that was Thousand Fang territory.

Yòu Lín looked down at it and thought, for one perfect moment, that he could see everything.

“Mama would be so mad,” Ruì Xuě said, but he was laughing.

“Mama doesn’t have to know,” Yòu Lín said.

Cāng Jì’s voice rumbled through them. “Mama will absolutely know. She knows everything. It’s very inconvenient.”

He circled once more, slow and lazy, letting the cubs see the peaks from every angle. The floating waterfalls. The palaces of jade and gold. The tiny specks of dragons flying between them, too far away to be anything but light.

“Now,” Cāng Jì said, “shall we go back? Your mother will be wondering where you are. And I would very much like to be there when she discovers you’ve been exploring dangerous tunnels without supervision.”

“You said we weren’t telling her!”

“I said we weren’t telling her about Zhàn Yù. I said nothing about the tunnels.”

“UNCLE SPARKLES!”

Cāng Jì laughed again and tipped his wings, sending them into a long, lazy spiral back toward the guest quarters.

Yòu Lín leaned into the wind and watched the world spin beneath him. Ruì Xuě’s grip on his fur had loosened. He was laughing too, the sound swallowed by the rush of air, and when Yòu Lín looked back at his brother’s face, he saw something there that he hadn’t seen in a long time.

Not fear. Not caution. Not the careful, watchful quiet that Ruì Xuě had worn like armor for so long.

Just joy.

“Thank you,” Yòu Lín said to the wind. To Cāng Jì. To the sky.

Cāng Jì didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. His wings beat once, twice, three times, carrying them home.

~

The Dragon Peaks had survived wars. They had survived storms that could shatter mountains. They had survived the death of kings and the birth of legends and the slow, patient erosion of time itself.

They had not, however, ever survived Gū Gū with nothing to do.

“I’m bored,” the old fox announced, slamming her stick against the crystal floor of the guest quarters. “This place is too quiet. Too clean. Too—” she waved a hand vaguely, “—dragon.”

Hán Bīng, seated by the window with a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago, did not look up. “The peaks are never quiet. You simply don’t know how to listen.”

“I know how to listen. There’s nothing worth hearing. All they do is talk about alliances and territories and whose scales are shinier. It’s exhausting.”

“The kitchen dragons have been quite friendly,” Wēn Jìng offered from her corner, where she was knitting something that looked like it might be a scarf and might be a trap. “They showed me their spice stores. Very organized. Alphabetical, even. I’ve never seen spices organized alphabetically. It was beautiful.”

“Spices,” Gū Gū said flatly.

“Alphabetical spices.”

“We’ve been here for days. Days. The cubs have made friends. The baby has adopted a terrifying ancient dragon. The cursed female—” she caught herself, “—Bai Yue has made friends with the storm princess. And what have we done? Sat here. Drinking tea. Watching the light change.”

“Some of us,” Hán Bīng said coolly, “are resting.”

“You’ve been resting for three days. How much rest does one snow leopard need?”

Hán Bīng’s eyes flickered. It was the only warning Gū Gū got before the temperature in the room dropped several degrees.

“I am not resting,” Hán Bīng said, and her voice was very quiet, very calm. “I am waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For something worth my attention.”

Gū Gū’s eyebrow shot up. A slow smile spread across her weathered face.

“Well,” she said, “in that case.”

She grabbed her stick, marched to the door, and flung it open.

“Where are you going?” Wēn Jìng asked.

“To find something worth her attention.”

~

The tunnels of the Dragon Peaks were, Gū Gū had to admit, impressive.

She had lived a long time. She had seen the great fox temples of the Eastern Hills, the crystal caves of the snake clans, the forests of the Thousand Fang that had been growing since before her grandmother’s grandmother was born. But these tunnels were something else entirely.

“You’re going the wrong way,” Hán Bīng said from behind her.

Gū Gū didn’t stop walking. “I’m not going any way. I’m exploring.”

“Exploring requires a destination.”

“Exploring requires curiosity. A destination is just an excuse to stop.”

Behind her, she heard Hán Bīng make a sound of…maybe annoyance or amusement. It was hard to tell with the ice queen.

Wēn Jìng, at least, was enjoying herself. The gentle scholar-woman had her hands outstretched, trailing her fingers along the crystal walls, her face lit with wonder.

“It’s beautiful,” she breathed. “The crystals. They’re not just decorative. They’re—” she paused, frowning, “—alive?”

“Everything in these mountains is alive,” Hán Bīng said. “That’s what makes them dangerous.”

“Everything in every mountain is alive,” Gū Gū countered. “You just don’t usually notice until it’s trying to eat you.”

They walked in silence for a while. The tunnels branched and twisted, leading them deeper into the mountain. Gū Gū paid attention to the turns, the way she had learned to pay attention to forests and battlefields and the shifting alliances of the beast world. Left at the blue crystal. Right at the one that looked like a frozen waterfall. Straight through the passage where the walls glittered like starfall.

“I’m not lost,” she announced.

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You were thinking it.”

“I was thinking,” Hán Bīng said, “that we have been walking for quite some time. And that I am beginning to suspect you have no idea where we are.”

“We are exactly where we need to be.”

“Which is where?”

Gū Gū stopped.

The tunnel ahead of them opened into a cavern. It was not like the others they had passed. Those had been grand, vast, built for the scale of dragons. This one was smaller. Warmer. Filled with things that had no business being in a dragon’s hoard.

Books.

Shelves of them, carved from the crystal itself, rising up the walls in spiraling tiers. Scrolls in cases of polished obsidian. Tables covered in papers that rustled gently in a breeze that had no source. And in the center of it all, hunched over a desk so covered in notes it was barely visible beneath them, was a dragon.

He was old.

That was Gū Gū’s first thought. Not old like the Burning Sky, who was ancient and terrifying and made the air itself feel heavy. Old like a forest that had been growing for a thousand years. Old like a river that had worn down mountains. Old like something that had been here so long it had forgotten it could be anywhere else.

His scales were the color of dying embers, rust and copper and the faintest hint of gold that might have been bright once, a very long time ago.

He did not look up when they entered.

“I don’t have anything for you,” he said, and his voice was the same as the rest of him, old and tired and worn smooth by centuries of use. “If you’re here for the records, I filed them. If you’re here for anything else, come back in a century. I’m busy.”

Gū Gū looked at Hán Bīng.

Hán Bīng was looking at the dragon.

It was not the look she had worn for the past three days, the mask of ice and distance that made her seem carved from the same mountain as the peaks. It was something else. Something Gū Gū had never seen on the ice queen’s face before.

Interest.

“You’re a scholar,” Hán Bīng said.

The dragon’s pen paused.

He looked up.

His eyes were the same color as his scales, embers that had cooled but not quite died. They swept over Wēn Jìng first, dismissing her as harmless. Over Gū Gū, lingering for a moment on her stick. And then they landed on Hán Bīng.

And stopped.

“You’re a snow leopard,” he said.

“I am.”

“In the Dragon Peaks.”

“I am.”

He set his pen down. Very slowly, he turned in his chair to face them.

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