Mountains and sky, one colour. Frost and wind, one cold. Across the vast northern plain.
Snow fell in torrents, as though the sky itself had capsized. Ancient pines, centuries deep in the earth, swayed on the edge of collapse. Layer upon layer of frost accumulated in silence, patient and relentless.
The great river wound across the land in boundless coils. But winter had seized it. Like a silver dragon caged, it could no longer surge and writhe, only press itself flat beneath the weight of white mountains, pinned and still.
Whooooooshh
A desolate wail tore out of the far north. It came with no warning and stopped for nothing, churning the clouds, swallowing the silence, driving itself against anything that dared to stand.
The gale swept everything before it.
Over distant mountain ranges, abandoned towns, battlefields stained dark beneath the snow, the bodies half-buried in it. And finally, sweeping low across the frozen plain, it found a column of figures moving fast through the white.
Beneath a thunder of hoofbeats, a mounted escort drove several large wagons at full gallop.
Ice and snow cut like blades, that merciless, brittle brightness, cold enough to reach the marrow and stay there. The trees lining both banks of the river stood encased in crystal, severe and unmoving, like sentinels who had forgotten what they were guarding.
The riders tore through the white expanse, sending ice crystals shivering to the ground. They plunged into the hushed stillness of dusk without slowing.
Their destination lay ahead: a great city backed against the mountains, at the edge of the northern frontier.
Mingshan.
Outside Mingshan. The refugee camp.
A handful of gaunt figures crouched around a bonfire, eyes fixed on the pot bubbling above the flames with the focused attention of people who have very little left to attend to.
The water inside was nearly boiling. Waves of meat-smell drifted outward, drawing passersby to slow and stop without quite meaning to, nostrils flaring, eyes sharpening with a want they hadn't chosen to feel.
The refugees squatting by the fire kept up a loose, idle chatter about nothing in particular. Anyone who drifted too close got a curse hurled at them; anyone foolish enough to answer back found the whole group rising to their feet. They gripped crude wooden spears, their eyes moving across the surrounding camp with a predator's patience, pale and cold in the firelight. Most people gave this corner a wide berth and kept walking.
The broth came to a rolling boil. The smell deepened. They swallowed, restless hands poking at the fire, eyes growing more urgent by the moment.
Then the earth began to tremble. Dark shapes in the distance, approaching fast.
By the time these starving people looked up, iron-shod hooves had already smashed through the flimsy wooden fencing. A horse cleared the makeshift shelter in a single leap and landed directly before them.
The refugees scattered with screams. The pot had no such luck. A hoof came down, crushing the fire, overturning the pot, flinging liquid in every direction.
The broth they had been tending for hours sloshed across the frozen ground and was gone.
From the upturned pot tumbled a lump of meat, soft and falling apart. By the shape of the bone, it was identifiable as a rat's leg.
The next hoof reduced it to pulp.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Not far away, in one of the makeshift shelters, a young man's ears pricked up.
He was lean, the kind of lean that goes past hunger into something structural, where the flesh has given up its claim to the bones and what remains is purely skeletal. But his frame was large and the bones themselves were something else: dense. He had been crouching over an earthenware pot on a simple clay stove, focused with the completeness of someone who cannot afford distraction. A few rough medicinal herbs lay scattered around him. From the simmering liquid rose the slow, bitter smell of a decoction.
At the sound of hooves, he rose, unhurried, and turned toward the noise. His hair hung loose and tangled. A blade was slung at his hip. Thin flesh lay taut over sharp bone, and though he looked half-wasted, there was something in him that the wasting hadn't touched, something angular and keen and prepared.
His eyes were startlingly alive. His breathing was slow and deep. Both fists rested half-clenched at his sides, the knuckles crosshatched with small scars and old calluses.
Anjing watched the mounted convoy push into the refugee camp. He did not blink.
These were tall, magnificent northwestern war horses, long-necked, powerfully built, their broad chests and iron hooves capable of shattering anything that dared stand in their path.
The riders brought the convoy to the centre of the camp, dismounted, and began unloading cargo from the wagons, laying out the shape of a rough encampment with quick, practiced efficiency.
"Jing'er *cough, cough* what are you looking at?"
A woman's voice, from behind him.
"Mother."
Anjing turned.
She was a tall woman. There had always been something distinguished about her, a quality of bearing that the northern frontier had not managed to grind away, even now. In this frost-ravaged wasteland it was difficult to find anyone who wasn't gaunt and hollow, but though she was thin, her eyes held a fierce brightness that the cold had not reached.
Those bright eyes, however, belonged to a woman who could only lie propped on a blanket, even a single sentence left her gasping, coughing.
She had not always been this weak. Five days ago, fleeing across the wasteland toward Mingshan, their column of refugees had been struck by bandits on horseback. She had killed seven of them. But in the final exchange with the bandit chief, she had miscalculated by a fraction, one palm strike to the chest had ruptured the meridians around her lungs.
Anjing had finished his own opponent and thrown himself at the bandit chief, bearing him to the ground, strangling him unconscious with his bare hands. Then he had seized the man's blade and taken his head. That had been enough to scatter the rest.
But the damage to his mother was severe. Her inner breath in chaos, her breathing laboured. In this camp with neither medicine nor food, how many days she had left was a question no one was asking aloud.
"I'm going to see if I can get some food."
Anjing turned back toward the convoy. Without thinking, he licked his lips — too cold and cracked to be moistened by it, the movement only split them further, and blood welled up. He licked that away too.
When he spoke, his voice was slow and certain. "That convoy is carrying grain. Rice."
"And perhaps medicine."
"My boy..." His mother's eyes dimmed. She understood, he was looking for a way to save her.
But she knew her own body better than any physician could. Without a powerful restorative medicine to heal her lungs and reorder her vital energy, she had three days at most. In this frost-plagued, war-torn northern frontier, even the most well-intentioned relief mission would never carry medicine of that quality. She did not want her son to exhaust himself chasing the impossible. She wanted him here, with her, in whatever time remained.
But Anjing had always had his own mind. He read her meaning before she could speak, and cut in gently, lifting a bowl toward her.
"Mother. Drink your medicine first."
"White-spot herb, chopped and simmered with old-breath root. Simple — but it should help restore some vitality and ease your breathing."
She took the bowl and drank it down in one go. Bitter as it was, the hot liquid settled in her chest, and some small warmth returned to her.
By the time she lowered the bowl, Anjing had already turned and was walking toward the convoy.
Anjing was no ordinary boy from the northern frontier.
From early childhood, strange dreams came to him.
Towering buildings, countless as trees in a forest, steel and concrete, each one dwarfing every structure in the county combined. Iron birds his dreaming mind named airplanes, climbing straight into the heavens, streaking across the sky faster than any living creature. And bombs. Bombs of a destruction so total that each one, on detonation, became its own small sun, hundreds of them, thousands, blooming across the earth until the world was nearly ash.
The empire of Dachen placed great stock in heavenly destiny. The notion of stars descending to be reborn as mortals was not superstition here but accepted truth, woven into the fabric of how the world understood itself. Anjing had awakened young, what people called ancestral wisdom, a fragment of knowledge carried over from some prior life, and the gifts that followed were unmistakable, in learning and in combat both. His family took it as confirmation: a star had come down into their midst. They gave him every advantage they could.
But even the sharpest mind and the strongest body cannot hold back the great Frost Calamity sweeping the northern frontier, nor the vast armies of the northern tribes massing to push south. Anjing was still a boy. There were things beyond his reach, and his mother's injury was the proof of that, plain and inescapable.
But what could be done, he would do.
However slim the chance, Anjing would fight for it. He would cure his mother.
Now, drawing close to the convoy's encampment, he heard a voice ring out, full-throated and carrying.
"Listen up!"
Among the mounted riders, one figure stood out: a one-eyed man, richly dressed, bellowing over the crowd.
On either side of him, the other riders sat armoured and bladed, expressions flat and lethal, their eyes moving across the surrounding refugees, people who didn't dare come closer, with undisguised contempt.
"My master, in his great compassion, cannot bear to watch you wretches die outside the city walls! He now offers grain in exchange for service, positions in his household!"
"Children and young people only. Fourteen and under preferred, though sixteen and under may qualify, provided the right aptitude!"
"For each one who meets the requirements: one dou of rice!"
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1. One dou of rice: a traditional dry measure of roughly ten litres.