Chapter Text
This is a tale of trust won and lost, of melodies played and love mourned, of happiness earned and lives saved.
This is a tale of a thousand years, and this is how it begins.
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Trembling hands caught on the stone before him, pressing white-knuckled into the worn surface. He fell forward against the rock, found his purchase on the cold ground before him only to fall again.
He broke and became new; he fell and grew bruises. The rustle of cloth against the ground reached slow ears, echoed into the miasma filling his mind.
Was that him, with shoulder pressed into garden-rock? Were those his fingers, pressed into the wet stone of a bathing pool?
He took a breath, reality cracking open with the twitch of his hand. That was his palm, calloused and strong against the stone. But he didn’t know the stretch of his own skin, and as he raised the heavy weight of his head, he didn’t know the garden around him either.
It was a tranquil thing, filled with the cool glades of summer and the well-tended curves of a stream. A forest crept into the distance, dense with thick green growth.
Where was he? He pulled himself upright. The rocks beneath his hands pressed hard lines into his palms, ground into the cloth of his robes. He stared down at calloused fingers and felt no glimmer of recognition.
Who was he?
Memory escaped him, the thick fog of amnesia clinging to his veins. He struggled still, mind fluttering against his skull like a swallow.
But no name came to him, and he hardly knew the hands holding him up.
A breath, a breaking place. He was willful as a mountain but who was he?
The thought caught and held, but the sweet pull of sleep swept over him as implacable water.
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“Wake.” The command was sharp, echoing through the weariness clinging to his skin. He blinked slow eyes, vision creeping into understanding. A regal man stood before him, robes glinting with wealth and a red sun standing stark on a broad chest.
Cruel eyes shone from a sharp face, looking like the curve of a sword and twice as deadly. He felt anger coil in his stomach, restless as a stirring dragon.
This sun had burned him, though he didn’t know when.
He shifted, moving to stand on shaking feet, blood pounding through his skull staccato. It was painful to breathe, but he refused to die on his knees.
He struggled to stand, but the tip of a sword stopped him, edge pressing deep into the soft skin of his throat.
He froze there, mid step, muscles screaming with the halted motion. The man’s eyes were dark with satisfaction, filled with an inescapable malice. Blood welled up from his neck, pain flashing through his mind.
He could die here, without knowing even his name.
“Now, how did you get here?” The tone was steel given sound, cruel and calm. He felt his hair rise, a swirl of emotion making him shake. Why did this man bring rage but no memories?
“I don’t know.” It was the truth, but it sounded hollow even to his own ears. What man didn’t know his path?
Red eyes narrowed and the sword glinted like death in the noon-day sun. He clenched his jaw, staring up to meet the man’s gaze head-on.
It was a good thing he had never feared death.
The thought echoed to him like a stream of bubbles, and even as he reached for it, it slipped away. Where had that grown from?
“A weak answer.” There was something incomprehensible in the man’s face, something breaking beyond his skin.
He had seen this before.
“Who are you?”
“I don’t know.” It was the truth, ringing against his breath.
The man burned a stare into his face, watching him like a hawk. He looked considering and malicious, a murderer’s hunger in his eyes.
A breath, a pause, and then the man sheathed his sword in a motion smooth and lethal.
“You stepped foot here, in my garden, and so your life is forfeit. You are an unlucky man.”
His skin broke, his bones burned, breath bent out of him. He had no words, no sound to express this pain. His skin was a wash of pain and he had no escape from it.
Still the man was not finished. The man— Wen RuoHan if the few scraps of words he’d heard were true— had an artist’s talent for torture, could surely play people like a musician, pull screams from their throats in a never-ending symphony.
A breath, the aching press of bruised ribs. He would give the man nothing.
A hundred cuts lined his body, placed with the precision of a surgeon. All stung, but none would let him die. He had clenched his jaw through it all, felt the pain but did not let out a sound.
Vicious, he wondered what would be left of him, at the end. Would his skeleton hang here, grow into a resentful ghost? Though his name was gone to him and his past a wash of broken memories, he had never wanted death before.
Did he now? He didn’t know, but he knew he craved vengeance.
It had been at least a day since he had been found in that garden. He had been dragged into this room made for pain, with knives of all sizes lining the walls and unnamed horrors filling the floor. Chains bound him to the ceiling, fine iron heavy across his wrists.
It was a scene from nightmares, but it did not make him uneasy.
Beside him lay a broken man, bleeding out on the floor beside him, arms bent unnaturally behind his back. Plop plop sang the blood, as the man died. The sting of iron crept into his nose, but still he did not flinch away.
This all felt familiar.
Heavy steps and the swish of expensive silks brought his attention burning back to the door, to the shape of Wen RuoHan stepping over the threshold. A cruel smirk twisted the man’s lips, made his face glow sickly-happy. He stopped before the body on the floor, kicked it roughly.
A weak moan threaded the air. Would there be another? The man with no name did not know.
What did he know?
Wen RuoHan turned malicious eyes to him, assessing gaze made steely.
“A day and not a single scream. You have a flimsy golden core, far too weak to resist, and yet you stay quiet. Are you mad as well as stupid?”
He didn’t respond, determined to give him no screams.
A cunning smile crept over Wen Ruohan’s face, bright in the eerie light of the room. He picked up a knife off the wall, felt its weight. It glimmered in his hand, the blade fine and perfectly sharp.
The man with no name tried not to flinch back.
“Or perhaps you simply lack the will. I don’t see enough fire in you. Not fire, not steel— what weak thing are you?”
He bit down on the words swelling across his tongue, let them turn to ash.
In all his life, through broken dreams and the twinge of betrayal, he had known only one thing. When it came to the last strand of fate, when everything hung on a single, shimmering string. Then, above all else, he would be relentless. Without memories or name, he knew this still.
And the man called him weak. His pride burned through him like magma, simmering with a pit of resentful energy.
And so, with cuts lining his body and his name stripped from him, he laughed.
“If the honorable leader thinks me weak, he is a fool.”
A terrible smile curled at the edge of the man’s lips, cold as the first frost.
“You have potential.”
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You don’t remember your name— it is no matter. Your life became mine when you entered my garden, and the right to name you, mine.
You shall be called Wen Longniao, and you shall be grateful for it.
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“Why have you kept me?” The words slipped out of a weary throat, out of a healing body. The cuts lining his skin were days old but still stung, and only the gentle care of the regal Wen healer had kept him from death.
He almost wished it hadn’t. In death he could feast on the bones of Wen RuoHan as a ferocious ghost, could haunt this palace with a fury beyond the depths of the ocean.
But here he was, skin sewing itself back together and medicine bitter on his tongue.
Wen RuoHan didn’t look up at his words, not shifting from his careful examination of the man who was to be called Wen Longniao. Cruel eyes scanned the expanse of his wounds, clinical but not uncaring.
It was an owner’s look, the look of master to property. He looked and saw a curiosity to be coveted, and oh how that made Wen Longniao’s blood boil.
It was not his name, Wen was not his name. He was not Wen RuoHan’s trapped bird but the Patriarch—
“Why?” The word was louder now, ripped from his throat with wrath and desperation for answers. This time, Wen RuoHan paid attention.
Red eyes snapped to him, overflowing with a psychopath’s malice and a madman’s interest. It was a look that made Wen Longniao bare his teeth against a flinch.
The last time he had seen that look had been before the knives.
“You are a curious thing, you know. You do not bow before me, you snarl like a dog to my face— but you have felt my wrath and know what I can do.”
“You entertain me, Wen Longniao.” The words were heavy with threats unsaid and unneeded, but the man now called Wen Longniao heard them anyway.
On the day you stop entertaining me, your insolence will no longer be tolerated.
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Wen Longniao brushed long fingers across the water, felt it move beneath his hand. The pond was spring-cold, cooling the garden even in the brutal summer heat. The smooth surface was perfectly tended, free of leaves and debris and so mirror-clear. He let the ripples curl over his nails and flicked the water up over his face.
Had anyone seen the move, he would have received a brutal scolding and a back flayed into oblivion.
Had anyone else done this, they would have been killed.
This was the private garden of the leader of the Wen Sect, and no one but Wen RuoHan was allowed to rest between these cultivated pools and gentle streams. Even children knew to stay far away, no one daring to risk his temper and cruel pleasures.
But Wen Longniao had been an exception since he first stirred to wakefulness on the very rock beneath his feet. Here was where he had first opened his eyes to a life without memory, here was where he had borne fresh thoughts.
Two months later, with the scars of Wen Ruohan’s knives healed across his skin, he was permitted this impudence.
But it was no honor— he was not man but dog, owned by the Wen leader as a curiosity. He had resisted Wen RuoHan’s knives and not given him screams, and so he was made entertainment. This leash had given him access beyond even the most trusted servant, allowed him to roam the halls of the palace and garden at his leisure.
He was owned but untame.
Rage curled in his belly at the thought, pride snarling and tongue bitter. The leader knew all this, and let it happen.
Wen Longniao felt helpless.
The sun had burned him, but he didn’t know why. Until a name returned to him or he knew the path forward, he would stay in this complex, fed and housed and leashed.
No matter how much he disliked it, his face was thick with survival, and something in his gut told him to hold fast.
So he sat in the forbidden garden and flicked water into the air, trouble lining his bones as it always had.
“Wen Longniao!” The words cascaded into the air like breaking glass, echoing over the high walls of the garden. The voice was familiar, that of the angry cultivator Meng Yao, disciple and servant of Wen Ruohan. It pitched over the wall and into the garden but no closer.
The tone was annoyed, pitched into something angry, but the man could not enter.
What had Wen Longniao done to earn his ire this time, he wondered? The man held a grudge like no other and bore him no love. Impudent,he called him, voice raised in frustration and a snarl of jealousy on his lips.
Pathetic, he did not say, but Wen Longniao could hear it in his silence. Long fingers lingered on the surface of the water for a moment, a heartbeat, and then he rose.
A smile grew over his face like an oil stain, and he leapt over the garden wall with a careless grace. He landed in a swirl of crimson and bone-white robes.
They splayed around him like a sunburst, beautiful and terrible as the dawn. He hated them. Each morning, he looked at embroidery crawling up his collar like a leash and felt fury. He donned them anyway, the lingering cuts of Wen Ruohan curling across his skin like brutal marks.
“Disciple Meng, how delightful to see you! Have you come to admit defeat?” His words were equal parts teasing and sharp, laced with old insults.
No disciple here had beaten him in archery, and he would take every chance to goad the graceless in defeat.
The man’s face colored with shame, but he merely twitched in response, mask sliding over his eyes. Wen Longniao eyed the sleek expression, the easy change of face. Had the man learned restraint? That just made Wen Longniao want to tease him all the more.
“Sect Leader Wen has ordered you to his side.”
Wen Longniao hummed, mouth set into a thoughtful twist. Why was his leash being pulled today? He took quick steps forward, legs moving him through the statuesque paths and into the main body of The Palace of Sun and Flames.
For such a wicked place, it truly had a lovely name.
It was only a few steps from this garden to the leader’s study, only a few steps for his dog to travel. If he hadn’t been drawn to the garden like a lodestone, if he wasn’t owned, Wen Longniao would have moved to the opposite edge of the Nightless City.
But for now, this was convenience and not curse. He tossed teasing words over his shoulder, let his mouth curve into a smirk.
“What are you waiting for, then? So slow!”
Meng Yao’s smile was colder than the first frost of winter.
The room was open and warm with light, imperious walls covered in jade made tapestry. A great table was sat on the floor, ink and brushes laid on it with neat precision. Here an ink stone, there a brush rest, here a cruel tyrant: Wen RuoHan sat straight as a sword, warrior’s body held fast.
At first glance he looked the picture of a senior cultivator, a master of the Six Arts and man of refined tastes. But there was cruelty in his smile and malice in his fingers, and Wen RuoHan made no effort to mask it.
Wen Longniao had the itch of his scars to prove it, wrapping from foot to neck and across his arms. He took a step inside without hesitation anyway.
Wen Ruohan did not raise his eyes at his entry, did not cease the sleek motions of his brush. Wen Longniao was unimportant as always, not worth the respect of a nod. Teeth bared, he crossed his hands into the barest hint of a bow, the curve of his back impudent and rebellious.
The clan leader just smirked in response, lips quirking at this small rebellion.
A tiger with no claws could do no damage, and Wen Longniao was only ever entertaining.
“You called?”
The brush flicked characters into being, long strokes confident and quick. There was a moment of silence, and then, finally, Wen RuoHan looked up.
Wen Longniao would not break at the cruelty he saw there, but oh did the scars lining his body itch.
“You have remembered nothing?”
It was a familiar question, asked each day with the casual grace of an emperor. Still, the man had madness in his eyes.
Flashes of a calm face, serene and beautiful and beloved. Red energy gathering at his fingertips. The view of clouds from a scroll filled pavilion.
These were the things he remembered, and these were the things he kept to himself.
Love had no place in the Wen clan, and Wen Longniao knew the leader would use it against him if they found the man with the golden eyes.
“No, leader.”
The man nodded, eyes flickering across sunburst robes for deceit. They found none, but this was no surprise— Wen Longniao could lie with a master’s conviction, and smile through it.
Where had he learned that, he wondered?
“Report to the northern courtyard.” The tone was imperious and dismissive, an order with steel in each syllable.
Wen Longniao felt his spine go hard with unease, and even as he leaned forward into that impudent bow, his mind whirled.
Only disciples practiced in the northern courtyard, training their cultivation and sword work alike. But his core was weak, unimportant and untalented.
What entertainment was he to be now?
He didn’t know, he didn’t know. Why did he know nothing?
With a sigh and light feet, he moved to find out. In this he would be an obedient dog, or the leash around his neck would tighten to a noose. He walked quickly, and soon the Northern Courtyard loomed before him.
There was only one path forward. His steps into the courtyard resounded with a confidence he didn’t feel, body moving swift and relentless into the open air. The stares of a thousand disciples met him, the metallic clang of a hundred swords, the resonant grunts of fighting men.
An army practiced before him.
He stood still for a moment, marveling in the show of force. This was a display only the Qishan Wen Sect could summon, and to see it done so casually—
The dragon slumbering in his stomach shifted, uneasy and furious as a storm. This was an army to be feared.
“Wen Longniao.”
The man behind the words was familiar to Wen Longniao, stern face calm as the night sky. Wen Zhuliu was famous beyond words, the lethal touch of his fingers feared across the land.
Core-Melting Hand, they called him, and oh did Wen Longniao hate him. A chill crept up his spine, rage twirling with a bitter quiet to leave him breathless. This man’s face echoed into the space where his memories should be, striking a cord both strong and dissonant.
He looked at this man and felt only fury. With a swirl of quick feet and an easy charm, he smiled.
“Core-Melting Hand! So is it you who takes my leash now? What have I done to deserve such a master?” His tone was biting and insolent, said through a smile but not meant.
If it bothered Wen Zhuliu, his stone face did not show it. A nod was his only answer, the motion yet reproving. “Come.”
“Ah, no explanation? How am I to obey without reason, Core-melter?”
A hard look curled into his skin, but still the man’s hands had no tension. He was well-trained and disciplined.
Wen Longniao wanted to rip him to pieces.
He died the way he lived, serving a fool master until the end.
Heavy eyes weighed him for a moment, before he spoke in a deep voice. “The Sect Leader would like to see your skill.”
Wen Longniao felt ice settle into his veins, the coming storm rising above him. It was time, then. For two months, he had been kept from all weapons save a bow, bound to Wen Ruohan’s side and left defenseless.
Stripped of name and memories, even he didn’t know what training lived in this body. But now it was time to find out. He smiled, began to walk forward, follow the tug of his leash. “I’d hate to disappoint him then.”
A nod, nearly mocking in its banality. “It would be to your detriment.”
Wen Longniao felt the scars lining his body itch like poison. Truer words had not been spoken.
A sword was placed in his hand, metal cool against his fingertips. Without thinking, he raised his fingers to run across the blade, felt it tremble in his hands. His core was weak and shaky, but still the blade reacted to his commands.
It would do.
Moving on muscle memory and instinct, he slashed the air, felt a comforting weight settle into his palm.
He felt right with a sword in his hand.
Dead men walking, chains around the wrists of Wen Ning, a corpse carved and broken. La—
Like smoke, the memory slipped from his grasp, fading into the air and leaking from his mind. Who had he been about to call, with a joyful tone? Who was Wen Ning? His knuckles went bone-white across the hilt, skin taut and furious.
He would not shake and could not show this.
Wen RuoHan could not know.
A shing pulled him from painful thoughts, drew his attention up and up and a sword was swinging down and down. Quick as a snake he raised the blade in his hand, caught the sword and flipped up above it, motion done without thought or pause.
An extra jump had him swinging through the air and striking, sword flashing out as silver lightning. Wen Zhuliu darted away, but his speed wasn’t quite fast enough.
Wen Longniao scored a tear in the man’s ink-black robes, slicing a sleeve in two.
For a moment, there was silence between them, appraising and surprised. Though Wen Longniao lacked memory, couldn’t even understand the instincts guiding him, he had fought back.
The motions had been smooth as spun silk, effortless as breathing— a sword belonged in his hand, and Wen Longniao had never felt more alive.
Wen Zhuliu raised his blade, the tip shimmering in the sunlight like a beacon. “Again.”
Wen Longniao didn’t bother suppressing the smile that curled up his face.
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Sect Leader.
Report.
He has skill with a blade, but not the strength.
Oh?
He could best me, should his core be stronger.
How interesting. Train with him then. Discover the extent of his skill. Force core development if you must.