Ten Years Ago.
Three minutes.
Three wretched, endless minutes.
That’s all it takes for laughter to choke on blood. For a family to beco wet at and broken bone. For a twenty-three-year-old woman to watch the only people she ever let herself love burn alive while she lives—because the universe decided her punishnt would be mory, not rcy.
The truck ca out of nowhere.
One mont they were driving—Seiryū laughing so hard his shoulders shook, i-Lin swatting his arm playfully, Phei in the back seat squealing with delight at lissa’s exaggerated monster faces in the rearview mirror.
Sothing stupid.
Sothing perfect.
Sothing her brain had already begun to murder: slicing the mory clean away, cauterizing it so she could never again know what joy tasted like before it was ripped out by the roots.
The next mont: car tal screaming like souls being flayed. Glass exploding inward in glittering sprays that sliced skin to ribbons. The world had flipped—upside down, sideways, wrong—gravity turned traitor, flinging her body like a ragdoll against unyielding steel.
Seatbelt carved into her chest until ribs gave with sickening pops. Her shoulder socket tore; she felt the ball grind free, cartilage shredding, bone grinding bone with every frantic movent. Her own screams drowned in the cacophony of the car tearing itself apart, steel buckling, plastic lting, lives ending.
Then silence.
Not the silence of peace. The silence of aftermath. The silence that presses against eardrums like wet cotton soaked in blood.
lissa didn’t rember crawling out.
Didn’t rember the way jagged glass sawedthrough both palms down to tendon and bone, peeling skin back in long, curling flaps. Didn’t rember asphalt chewing her knees raw, grinding flesh into hamburger until blood ran in warm rivers down her shins.
Didn’t rember the way her dislocated shoulder grated with every pull, the joint grinding like broken porcelain, fresh agony flaring white-hot each ti she dragged herself another inch.
Her body had hijacked itself—pure animal reflex overriding the shrieking nerves, the only command left: move or die here.
The car lay belly-up like a gutted whale. Seiryū’s car. The sleek black sedan he’d bought the week Phei was born, the one he’d called his "dad car" with that crooked grin even though it cost more than most people’s houses.
Now it wheezed and ticked, wheels spinning uselessly in the air, engine gurgling fluids that dripped like black bile onto the cracked pavent.
And the smoke.
Oh God, the smoke.
Thick black tendrilsunfurled from the crumpled hood like the fingers of sothing ancient waking up. The stench hit her in waves: burning oil, lting vinyl, scorched rubber—and beneath it all, sothing far worse. Salt. Brine. Wet rot and primordial sea.
The sll of endings that had felt like it had once drowned whole civilizations before humans learned to fear fire.
"SEIRYŪ!"
His na tore from her in a wet, shredded howl. She’d bitten through her lower lip soti during the roll; now the ragged flap of flesh flapped uselessly, copper and iron flooding her mouth until she gagged on it and scread again anyway.
"SEIRYŪ!"
She reached the driver’s side.
And wished—prayed—she hadn’t.
Seiryū hung suspended by the seatbelt, body weight pulling the nylon strap deep into his flesh until it disappeared into purpled at.
Blood stread from the gash splitting his forehead, thick crimson ribbons running backward across his face, pooling in his eyes, tracing the lines of his jaw like war paint applied by a butcher. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst was the tal.
A twisted, razor-edged spear of doorfra had punched through the driver’s door like a lance forged in hell. It entered just below his ribs on the left side—clean through skin, muscle, diaphragm—then erupted out his back, skewering him to the seat, pinning lungs and liver and spine in one obscene impalent.
The jagged shaft glistened black-red, pulsing faintly with each failing heartbeat. Every shallow breath he took made the tal shift inside him with a wet, grinding sound she would hear in her sleep for the rest of her life.
His once-white shirt was soaked scarlet, heavy and clinging, the fabric dark enough to look almost black in places.
So much red.
Too much red.
"No." The word fell out of her, cracked and useless. "No, no, no, no—"
"lissa."
His eyes opened.
Calm. Clear. Empty of terror, empty of pain. The eyes of a man who had already stepped through the door most people spend their last monts clawing to keep closed.
He was dying—organs rupturing, blood pressure collapsing, life leaking out in slow, hot pulses—and he was at peace with it.
That serenity broke her worse than any wound.
"Listen to ."
"I’m getting you out—" She lunged through the shattered window, glass teeth raking her forearms, blood—his, hers—slick and hot under her palms as she clawed at the seatbelt buckle. "Hold on, okay? Just hold on, I’m going to—"
His hand closed around her wrist.
The grip was impossible.
He was dying—lungs drowning in blood, heart stuttering, pupils already beginning to fix—but when Seiryū Tiamat took hold of you, the world stopped breathing.
Even now. Even like this.
"Save my son."
Then she heard it.
Crying.
Not hers. She had gone beyond tears into sothing colder, sothing that lived in the hollowed-out cavity behind her sternum where hope used to beat.
This was smaller. Higher. More terrified.
Phei.
She turned.
There he was.
Seven years old. Still strapped into his car seat exactly as his parents had taught him—shoulders hunched, tiny fists balled, face scarlet and streaming.
Surrounded by a jagged halo of broken glass and crumpled steel and the cooling body of his mother, yet sohow—impossibly—untouched. Not one scratch. Not one bruise. Not even a speck of blood on his soft cheeks.
As though sothing vast and wrathful had folded itself around him at the mont of impact and snarled at the universe: not this one.
He scread.
Just raw, baby animal sound. That primal, throat-tearing wail only a child can make—the sound of a small heart realizing the world has teeth and has already bitten.
"Mommy! MOMMY!"
lissa’s gaze slid—reluctant, horrified—to the passenger seat.
To i-Lin.
Beautiful i-Lin. The gentle curve of her smile that once made rooms feel safe. The kind eyes that always knew when soone needed quiet.
Now her head lolled at an obscene angle, neck vertebrae bulging against torn skin like snapped ivory under silk. The cervical fracture was textbook—swift, complete, the kind coroners call "clean."
Probably instantaneous. Probably painless.
Gods, please let it have been painless.
Her eyes were still open.
Staring at nothing.
Pupils blown wide, reflecting only smoke and fla and the end of everything.
i-Lin had probably been dead before the car finished rolling.
And three feet away, her son was still begging her to wake up.
"You know."
Seiryū’s voice cut through the horror—quiet, certain, almost gentle.
"You know who did this."
lissa’s head snapped back to him.
Did she?
The truck that appeared from nowhere. The road that had been empty when it shouldn’t have been. The angle. The timing. The precision.
Not accident.
Never accident.
"This won’t go unchecked. But also," Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth, thick and black, frothing with every word. The smoke coiled thicker now, pressing into the car like rising tide, filling lungs with salt and ash and sothing older than grief.
"This is the will of the heavens, lissa. Do you understand? The will of Tiamat."
The na landed like a curse burned into marrow.
"I don’t—I don’t know what that—"
"Save Phei."
His grip tightened on her wrist. Tightened. Fingers like iron cables sinking into flesh already torn open, grinding against exposed tendon and raw nerve. How? How was there still this much strength coiled in a body that had been gutted like fish, impaled like ga, leaking life in thick, sluggish rivers down the crumpled doorfra?
Death sat beside him now—patient, inevitable, already curling cold fingers around his throat—and yet Seiryū held her like the world still answered to him.
"He’s the only way."
"The only way to what?"
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