Chapter 143: Lessons Learned(The Hard Way)

The roar did not stop.

It rolled out across the cliff face and bounced off the rock and came back doubled, and every vulture on every platform felt it in their hollow bones. The younger ones were already gone, launching off their perches in a panic, scattering into the sky like leaves in a storm.

The older ones held.

For about four seconds.

Dà Jiāo Huǒ descended onto the main platform with a landing that cracked the stone beneath his claws, and the ones who had held their ground reconsidered this decision immediately and comprehensively.

He did not let them reconsider for long.

The first one bolted left. His tail caught it mid-flight, a casual, almost contemptuous motion, and the vulture hit the cliff wall and slid down it and did not get up. The second one tried to go right. A single golden claw closed around its wing and held, and the sound it made was not dignified.

The lead vulture, the large one, the patient one with the old scars and the pale eyes, had not moved.

He stood in the center of his platform and looked up at the Burning Sky, his expression showcasing multiple emotions.

Dà Jiāo Huǒ lowered his enormous head until his eyes were level with the vulture’s.

“You,” he said, and his voice in dragon form was not a voice so much as a geological event, “should have known.”

The vulture said nothing.

“She is Bai Yue’s daughter.” Each word landed separately, with weight. “You knew this. You took her anyway.” He tilted his head, a motion that in a smaller creature might have seemed curious. In him it seemed like the moment before a verdict. “Explain to me what you believed would happen.”

“We believed—”

“No.” The word cut through the air like something physical. “You did not believe anything useful. You hoped. You hoped that enough time had passed. That she had become complacent. That her daughter was leverage.” The golden eyes moved, very deliberately, to where Zhen was standing at the edge of the platform. Then back. “You were wrong on every count.”

He pulled breath in.

“WAIT—”

“Grandpa,” Zhen said.

He stopped.

She was looking at him with her mother’s eyes, wide and urgent, and he had never been able to look at those eyes and not pause.

“Not— not right here,” she said. “Please.”

His gaze moved to Tao Zi, standing rigid beside her, his dark eyes tracking every movement with a terrifying stillness. A jaguar cub. Alone. In a vulture nest.

Dà Jiāo Huǒ made a sound deep in his chest that was not quite a scoff and not quite acknowledgment. He pulled the breath back.

“New friend?” he said.

“Yes,” Zhen said firmly.

“Hmph.” He straightened, the heat dialing back by a few degrees. He looked at Tao Zi the way he looked at most things: completely, cataloguing, arriving at conclusions. Tao Zi looked back with his jaw set and his hands loose at his sides.

“He bit the large one,” Zhen added. “To save me.”

Another sound from deep in his chest. Slightly different this time.

“Did he.”

“Very hard. There was a lot of blood.”

“Hmph,” Dà Jiāo Huǒ said again, but this time it landed differently.

Then the sound of wings.

Glimmer came over the cliff edge with Bai Yue already halfway off her back before they landed, and Bai Yue hit the platform at a dead run. Zhen had approximately one second of warning before her mother’s arms closed around her like the world ending and starting again simultaneously.

“ZHEN.”

“Mama—”

“ZHEN.”

“I’m okay, I’m—”

“ZHEN.”

“Mama I can’t breathe—”

Bai Yue pulled back just far enough to look at her, both hands on her face, turning it, checking, her eyes going over every inch with an expression that Zhen recognised as the one that came just before the other expression.

There it was.

Bai Yue’s fingers found her ear.

“OW—”

“What,” her mother said very quietly, “did I tell you. About running off.”

“Mama that HURTS—”

“I have been searching for you for HOURS—”

“I followed a BUTTERFLY—”

“You followed a—” Bai Yue stopped. Closed her eyes. Opened them. Her grip on Zhen’s ear did not loosen. “You followed a butterfly.”

“It was very pretty.”

“I cannot—” Her mother breathed. “I cannot believe you. I cannot believe that I— you left your bracelet in the MUD, Zhen, do you have any idea what I thought when I found it, do you have any idea—”

“I left it so you could find me,” Zhen said. “Like you taught me.”

Bai Yue’s face softened, and much to her dislike, her grip loosened.

Just slightly.

“I knew you would come,” Zhen said. Her voice had gone small without her entirely meaning it to. “I wasn’t scared. Not really. Because I knew you would come.”

Bai Yue looked at her for a long moment.

Then she pulled her back in, held her, and said nothing. Zhen pressed her face into her mother’s shoulder and breathed

“I’m sorry, Mama,” she said.

“You are in so much trouble,” her mother said into her hair. “So much trouble. Incomprehensible amounts of trouble.”

“I know.”

“We are going to have a very long conversation.”

“I know.”

“And you are not leaving my sight for a MONTH.”

“I kno— Mama!”

Because just then, everything happened at once.

The lead vulture moved.

He had been still, calculating, waiting for the exact moment that the dragon’s attention was divided and the woman’s guard was down. He was patient. He had always been patient. He reached back and drew the spear he had kept hidden beneath his wing. His pale eyes fixed on Bai Yue’s back, and he threw it.

Glimmer’s wing came up.

The spear hit scale and clattered away into the void below.

Glimmer’s eyes, gold-green and no longer remotely friendly, fixed on the vulture. She made a sound.

Bai Yue turned around.

She looked at the vulture. At the place where the spear had been. At Glimmer, whose wing was still raised, whose expression had shifted into anger.

Bai Yue handed Zhen sideways to Glimmer’s side without looking away from the vulture.

The Burning Sky descended until he was directly above the lead vulture, blocking the sky entirely.

“You had your warning,” he said. “You threw a spear at my daughter.”

“She is not your—”

“She is mine,” Dà Jiāo Huǒ said. “They are all mine. Every single one of them.”

He breathed in.

“WAIT—”

He did not wait.

Bai Yue’s hand came up over Zhen’s eyes.

There was light, even through her fingers. Heat. A sound like the world objecting.

Then silence.

Then a putrid smell.

Bai Yue lowered her hand, her eyes landing on a rather adorable jaguar cub.

“Hello,” she said.

He blinked.

“What is your name?”

A pause. “Tao Zi.”

“Where are your parents, Tao Zi?”

He looked at her, his jaw tight. Hmm, he did not want to respond. So they were either dead or…

Bai Yue looked at him for a long moment, thinking of what to do. Then she nodded once, as though he had said something. “That is all right,” she said. “Come with us for now.”

She looked up at Dà Jiāo Huǒ.

“Glimmer will take the three of you back,” the Burning Sky said. It was not a question.

“And you?” she asked.

His golden eyes moved across the cliff. Across the platforms. Across the nest that had existed for years in the spaces between territories, taking children, selling them, nursing grudges.

“I,” he said calmly, “will finish this.”

Bai Yue held his gaze for a moment. Then she took Zhen’s hand and Tao Zi’s arm and moved them toward Glimmer.

“Don’t look back,” she told them.

Zhen looked back.

Just once.

The Burning Sky spread his wings across the entire cliff face, his eyes were molten. He breathed in, and the light that came out of him was the colour of the sun looking directly at something it had decided was finished.

The cliff lit up like a second dawn.

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