They baited the trap with chains.
A column of "corrupted kin" — old men, widows, children of Red Moon soldiers — marched in irons along the King's Road, because the Order had finally learned the one law of the Red Ghost: he always comes for the wagons.
He came. He knew it was a trap. Of course he came. That was the entire point of him.
And Yuri was waiting.
He wore the ash-steel openly now, and his eyes had gone fully black, and he was stronger than any man had a right to be. They broke the King's Road apart beneath them, two monsters in a world of running, screaming mortals, and even as they fought, Yuri talked — the way drowning men talk.
"The order came sealed with the Voice's mark! No trace, the King said — but the Voice whispered the truth, boy! The blood is the prize. Bring him grieving. Your family was the leash! Grief breaks seals faster than blood — it was alchemy, you understand? Pure alchemy—"
Shizui went very, very quiet. It was the quiet the Order's survivors had learned to fear more than the red eyes.
"Wouldn't you have done the same?" Yuri's voice cracked at last. "For yours? To save your own daughter from the pyre?"
"Yes," Shizui said. "That's why you'll die forgiven."
He broke ash-steel with his bare hands. He broke the man inside it just as thoroughly.
But as Yuri fell, the black in his eyes began to boil — and the shadows under the wagons stood up like hungry dogs. The Hollow King collected his failures. Yuri screamed things Shizui would not remember by morning, and the dark took him an inch at a time.
"The Gate," Yuri gargled through the last of his mouth, clawing at the mud. "It opens under the red moon — the capital — the King is already half-throne—"
Then he was gone, and the road was quiet.
Shizui stood over the smoking place where a captain used to be. He had promised himself he would feel something.
He felt the wind.
Behind him, Ren was cutting the chains off the prisoners, and the prisoners were staring at Shizui the way people stare at avalanches. By winter, they had all told their stories, and the burned villages of the Dragon Realm had a new direction to walk.
The camp in the hidden valley was called the Hollow, and it grew like fire itself. The dead-eyed families of the Red Moon flowed to him out of every corner of the realm. He stopped counting at four hundred.
Ren counted for him. Ren always counted the living.