Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 219: Chapter 214: The Unfairness of Power

Location: Lower Realm - Farming Villages Along Trade Road

Date/Time: 7-8 Ashwhisper, 9938 AZI

The caravan wound through farmland that stretched to the horizon in every direction.

Jayde sat in their covered wagon, watching the world pass through the gap in the canvas. The Veil of the Forgotten hummed against her skin—a constant, barely-there sensation, like wearing a second pulse. To anyone who glanced her way, she was Jayde Ashford: black-haired, brown-eyed, unremarkable. Just another frontier girl heading toward the academy belt with her plain older sister and a pet kitten.

Fields of winter wheat spread out in brown and gold patterns, dotted with figures bent over endless rows. Smoke rose from distant farmhouses—low buildings of mud brick and thatch that looked like they’d been there for centuries.

Agricultural sector. Pre-industrial development. No visible mechanization.

The Federation assessment came automatically, cataloguing what she saw with cold precision. But beneath the tactical analysis, something else stirred. Something that had been growing for days as the caravan pushed deeper into the Lower Realm’s heartland.

Yinxin—traveling as ”Mei,” her features dulled by dragon glamour into something plain and forgettable—glanced up from the book she’d been pretending to read. The glamour did its work well: people’s eyes slid past her without catching, memories of her face dissolving before they could form. Her golden eyes, muted to muddy hazel, held a question she didn’t voice.

Jayde just shook her head slightly. Later.

In her lap, the kitten slept. Or appeared to sleep. The small white stray with blue-tipped ears had attached itself to their group somewhere in the first week of travel and refused to leave. Yinxin thought it was charming. Jayde thought it was one more thing to keep track of.

Behind closed eyes, Takara was not sleeping.

Day four on this rutted excuse for a road, he catalogued, maintaining perfect kitten stillness while his senses swept a two-kilometer radius around the caravan. No hostile cultivation signatures. No pursuit. Three Ashborn farmers to the east, one barely-Sparkforged merchant in the wagon behind us. Threat level: nonexistent.

The wagon hit a rut, and Jayde’s hand reflexively steadied him. Warm fingers against his fur. Gentle, despite the calluses.

She does that every time. Doesn’t even think about it. Just... catches me.

He hated how much he didn’t hate it.

Outside the wagon, Reiko loped alongside in the open, his lion-sized body keeping easy pace with the horses. His shadow-dark fur and dulled rune—the essence-muting salve Jayde reapplied every few days, keeping the mercury mark hidden beneath a barely-visible smudge—drew occasional glances from other travelers on the road. Just a big beast. Unusual, but not alarming. Beast companions were common enough that no one looked twice.

On the road, he could stretch. Run. Scent the wind and track movement for kilometers. He was happy on the road.

It was the villages he hated.

[How much further to the next one?] he sent through the bond, and Jayde felt the familiar edge of preemptive irritation.

(Another hour. Maybe less.)

Through the shared bond, Yinxin’s presence stirred—a cool silver thread woven alongside Reiko’s warmer one. [I can see rooftops ahead. Smoke from chimneys.]

[Great,] Reiko sent flatly. [Meld time.]

(You know why.)

[I know why. I still hate it.]

They’d had this argument on the second day of travel, when the caravan passed through its first proper settlement, and Jayde told him to shadow-meld before they reached the outskirts.

The logic was sound. The whole point of the Veil, of Yinxin’s glamour, of the cover identity—all of it was built around being forgettable. Plain frontier girl, plain older sister, pet kitten. Nobody worth a second glance.

A lion-sized shadowbeast with an apex predator’s build and sapphire eyes that glowed with bonded intelligence shattered that illusion like a boot through thin ice. Beast companions at Reiko’s level meant money, power, and connections. A girl with a beast like that wasn’t a frontier nobody—she was someone worth investigating. Worth reporting. Worth remembering.

And remembering was the one thing they couldn’t afford.

So Reiko melded in the villages. Dissolved into Jayde’s shadow or the wagon’s silhouette, his body becoming something between solid and smoke, invisible to anyone below Inferno-tempered. He could still see, still hear, still communicate through the bond. He just couldn’t be seen.

He hated every second of it.

[It feels like hiding,] he’d told her that second day, and through the bond she’d felt the specific shape of his objection—not the inconvenience, but the shame. Shadowbeasts didn’t hide. Apex predators didn’t dissolve into shadows because the world might notice them. His mother had never hidden from anything.

(It’s not hiding. It’s hunting. Predators use concealment all the time.)

[Predators conceal themselves to AMBUSH prey. Not to avoid being seen by farmers.]

Yinxin had settled it with three words through the bond: [Protect the wyrmlings.]

Because that was the chain that held them all. Every decision, every disguise, every swallowed pride led back to the same question: what happens if we’re discovered? And the answer always included three small dragons in a Pavilion sanctuary who couldn’t protect themselves.

Reiko hadn’t argued after that.

But he hadn’t stopped hating it.

Through the canvas gap, the village grew closer. Jayde felt Reiko’s resignation pulse through the bond like a sigh.

[Going under,] he sent.

His body rippled, shadow-dark fur losing its edges, and then he was gone—melded into the wagon’s shadow, a patch of darkness slightly too deep, moving at the exact speed of the wheels.

Takara cracked one eye open—just a sliver, maintaining the sleeping kitten facade—and assessed the approaching settlement with five millennia of tactical experience compressed into a body that weighed less than a sack of flour.

Small. Isolated. No defensive perimeter. No cultivation signatures above base Ashborn. Typical Lower Realm farming village.

He’d seen a thousand of them across a dozen worlds. They always looked the same. Always smelled the same—mud and smoke and the particular desperation of people who’d been ground down so long they’d forgotten what standing straight felt like.

***

They stopped at midday in a village that didn’t seem to have a name.

Or if it did, no one they asked could agree on what it was. The caravan master called it ”Three Wells” for the ancient water sources in the village square. The locals called it ”Eastfork” for the river junction a mile away.

Jayde stepped out of the wagon to stretch her legs. Takara, draped over her shoulder with the boneless grace of a sleeping kitten, was actually running a comprehensive tactical assessment of every structure, sightline, and potential threat vector in the settlement.

Reiko stayed melded, pressed into Jayde’s shadow like a second skin. She felt him everywhere—his senses overlaying hers through the bond, predatory awareness mapping the village in scent and sound and threat-potential. His nose was better than hers even in shadow form, and the data he fed through the bond added layers to everything she saw.

[Something smells wrong here,] he sent. [Not danger-wrong. Sad-wrong. Like... like the smell before my mother died. Sick. Tired. Giving up.]

Through the bond, Yinxin’s cool presence ached with recognition. [I know that smell. I knew it for ten thousand years.]

The village square wasn’t really a square—more of a muddy crossroads where three dirt paths met around the wells that gave the place its name. Buildings clustered around it in no particular pattern. A general store with a sagging roof. A blacksmith’s forge that looked like it hadn’t seen proper maintenance in years. Houses that were really just four walls and a roof, with gaps in the thatch that let in rain and cold alike.

No tools.

That was the first thing she noticed. In the fields surrounding the village, dozens of people worked—men, women, children—and not one of them had anything more sophisticated than a hand-hewn wooden hoe. No plows. No carts. No beasts of burden. Just human hands and human backs, bent over earth that had to be worked one painful inch at a time.

These were Ashborn, every one of them. She could sense the faintest flickers of Ember Qi in their cores—everyone on Doha cultivated, at least to the base level. But Ashborn was where you stayed when you couldn’t afford the resources to advance. When every Qi stone you scraped together went to ”protection fees” or healers or grain at triple the fair price. When the system that was supposed to lift you up became the boot that held you down.

Pre-agricultural revolution technology levels. Labor efficiency approximately five percent of mechanized farming. Caloric output per worker—

She cut the calculation short. She didn’t need numbers to see what was happening here.

A girl—maybe six years old, maybe seven—staggered past carrying a basket of stones twice her size. Her arms trembled with the effort. Her bare feet bled where the rough ground had torn them. No one helped her. No one even seemed to notice.

Because everyone was doing the same thing.

(She’s so small.)

The child’s voice rose unbidden, and Jayde felt her hands clench beneath her sleeves.

(We were that small once. In the mines. In the pits. Carrying loads that broke our back and killed our hope.)

Not the same situation. Different context. Different—

(How is it different?)

She didn’t have an answer.

From her shadow, Reiko’s presence went very still. Through the bond, Jayde felt something raw and jagged—not Federation analysis, not tactical assessment, just the primal recognition of a creature who’d been small and helpless once, whose mother had died protecting him because the world was too brutal for softness to survive.

[She’s bleeding,] he sent. Not angry. Worse than angry. Quiet. [Her feet are bleeding and nobody cares.]

Yinxin’s thread in the bond pulsed with old grief. [In the mountains where they kept me, there were human villages below. I used to watch them from above. I could see everything. The children carrying water up slopes that would break a mule. The old people left to die when they couldn’t work.] A pause, heavy with three thousand years. [I watched for a very long time before I understood that seeing wasn’t the same as helping.]

On Jayde’s shoulder, Takara watched through slitted eyes.

Six years old. Maybe seven. Carrying approximately thirty kilograms of limestone on a frame designed for someone three times her age. Bare feet on terrain that would challenge a soldier in boots.

He’d watched empires rise and fall. Had seen civilizations bloom and wither. Had guarded dimensional barriers against threats that would unmake reality itself.

None of it had ever bothered him like this.

Because I never had to look at it this closely before, he admitted. From the Oceanus Domain, everything mortal looks small. Everything mortal looks temporary. You don’t see the bleeding feet. You don’t smell the hunger.

You don’t hear the sounds a child makes when the basket is heavier than she is and there’s no one coming to help.

The girl stumbled. Nearly fell. Caught herself on raw, bleeding hands and kept walking.

Reiko made a sound through the bond—low, barely formed, vibrating with something that had no name. Not a growl. Something more like a whine pressed through clenched teeth.

[I want to carry it for her.]

(We can’t draw attention.)

[I know.] A pause. The bond trembled with suppressed emotion. [I know. But I want to.]

[So do I,] Yinxin sent quietly. [Every time. For three thousand years. So do I.]

Takara’s claws—tiny, kitten-soft, utterly useless—flexed against Jayde’s shoulder.

I could end every threat in this village in eleven seconds. I could shatter every chain, level every oppressor’s house, and be back in kitten form before anyone registered what happened.

And it would change nothing. Because tomorrow another village would look exactly the same.

***

The caravan stayed for an hour to water the horses and conduct what little trade there was to conduct.

Jayde walked through the village, keeping to the edges, just another brown-eyed girl stretching her legs. Reiko stayed in her shadow, feeding sensory data through the bond—every scent, every sound, every cultivation signature within range. Watching through her eyes when his own shadow-form vision wasn’t enough. Learning. Cataloguing horrors that weren’t supposed to bother them anymore.

A mother tried to pay the healer for medicine. Her daughter lay in the dirt outside the shop, coughing blood with each ragged breath. The coins she offered—copper, tarnished, barely enough to buy a meal—were brushed aside with contempt.

”Come back when you have silver,” the healer said, and closed his door.

The mother didn’t cry. Didn’t beg. Just gathered her dying daughter in her arms and walked away, head bowed, like she’d expected nothing else.

Medical care rationed by economic class. Survival probability for untreated respiratory infection in pre-modern conditions: less than twenty percent.

Through the bond, Reiko’s confusion hit her like a wave—not the cold analytical kind, but the bewildered fury of a young creature encountering cruelty for the first time and finding no instinct adequate to process it.

[He has the medicine. I can smell it through the walls. Three shelves of it.]

(I know.)

[Then WHY—]

(Because he can. Because no one stops him. Because the system rewards cruelty and punishes kindness, and everyone here has learned which side of that equation keeps them alive.)

[My mother would have healed her. She healed everyone in our territory. Even the prey animals, if they were hurt badly enough. She said sickness was worse than hunting—hunting was honest.]

Yinxin’s presence in the bond turned sharp with something Jayde rarely felt from her—anger. Not the cold tactical fury of a dragon queen, but the hot, helpless kind. [I could heal that child. One drop of my blood would cure every infection in this village. And I can’t. Because if anyone sees silver dragon magic, we’re all dead.]

(I know.)

[The irony,] Yinxin sent bitterly. [Ten thousand years ago, silver dragons healed freely. Any village, any creature, any time. That was our PURPOSE. And now the ability to save one child sits in my veins, and I have to watch her die because my own kind would enslave me for using it.]

Takara, still draped across Jayde’s shoulder, kept his breathing slow and even. His body limp and warm and perfectly kitten-shaped.

Lung infection. Advanced. The child will be dead within the week.

The healer has the medicine. More than enough. He just won’t sell it for copper.

In the Oceanus Domain, any creature sick or injured receives treatment. Lord Fahmjir’s law. Because even beasts understand that a healthy pack hunts better than a starving one.

These people don’t even have a pack.

At the general store, a man—not much older than Jayde herself—tried to buy grain for his family. The price was three times what it should have been. When he protested, the shopkeeper laughed.

”Protection fees went up this month. Take it or leave it.”

The man paid. He didn’t have a choice.

At the edge of the village, Jayde found the slavers.

They weren’t hiding. Weren’t even pretending to be something else. A wagon with iron bars, two guards with cultivation auras that marked them as Flamewrought, and a man with a ledger who was methodically testing children for essence affinity.

In her shadow, Reiko froze.

His entire presence in the bond went rigid, and through their connection, Jayde felt something she’d never felt from him before—not fear, not confusion, but recognition. The primal, bone-deep understanding of one caged creature looking at another. Iron bars and cold stone and the smell of blood and the sound of his mother’s breathing getting slower and slower and slower—

[Cages,] he sent, and the word fractured with memory.

(Reiko. Stay with me.)

[They’re putting CHILDREN in CAGES.]

Yinxin’s thread in the bond went diamond-hard. [Hold. Both of you. Hold.]

”This one’s got a spark,” the slaver announced, grabbing a boy of maybe eight by the arm. ”Strong enough for sect or temple screening. Fifty silvers.”

The boy’s mother wept. His father stood rigid, face blank, eyes dead. They’d known this was coming. Had probably known since the day their son showed the first signs of real talent.

In the Lower Realm, a child with strong essence affinity was a curse.

Because talented children got noticed. Got taken. Got sold to sects and schools and noble houses that needed bodies for their cultivation factories. The parents got compensated—barely—and never saw their children again.

If the child was lucky, they became a servant. A vassal. A tool.

If they weren’t lucky...

Jayde’s mind flashed to fighting pits. To blood on stone. To a five-year-old girl screaming as she was dragged away from everything she’d ever known.

Comparable institutional child exploitation. Different methodology, identical outcome. Systematic extraction of human resources for elite benefit.

(They’re taking him. They’re TAKING him and no one is stopping them.)

In her shadow, Reiko surged. Jayde felt the bond blaze as his body started to solidify from meld—Voidshadow essence roaring as every apex predator instinct in his bloodline screamed to lunge, to bite, to protect—

She clamped down on the bond. Hard.

(NO. Reiko, NO.)

[But they’re—]

Yinxin’s thread wrapped around both of them—not restraining, steadying. Three thousand years of grief compressed into a single sending: [I know. I KNOW. But we cannot save one child by losing everything.]

(If you attack them, they’ll know what you are. They’ll know what I am. They’ll come for us, and for Yinxin, and for the wyrmlings in the Pavilion, and everyone we’ve been trying to protect will die. Is that what you want?)

Silence. Ragged. Furious. The psychic equivalent of screaming into a pillow.

[No.]

(Then hold.)

[I’m HOLDING. But it’s wrong. It’s WRONG and you KNOW it’s wrong.]

[It is wrong,] Yinxin sent. [It has been wrong for ten thousand years. And we are going to change it. But not today. Not like this.]

Takara’s entire body had gone rigid against Jayde’s shoulder. Not from fear. From the very specific effort required to not transform into three meters of midnight fur and living lightning and tear the slaver’s arms off at the socket.

Two Flamewrought guards. The ledger man is Sparkforged. I could kill all three before Jayde’s next heartbeat.

But I won’t. Because Lord Fahmjir’s orders are clear. Because revealing myself compromises everything.

So I will lie here. On her shoulder. Looking cute. While they drag a boy away from his family.

Five thousand years, he thought, and the bitterness tasted like ash. Five thousand years of service, and I’ve never felt more useless than I do, shaped like a toy.

The slaver’s guards glanced Jayde’s way, assessing the black-haired girl who’d been staring too long. One of them smirked.

”Looking to buy? Plenty of options if you’ve got the coin.”

Engagement inadvisable. Cover identity compromised by confrontation. Tactical assessment: withdraw.

She withdrew. She pulled Reiko with her through the bond, dragging him away from the cage wagon like hauling an anchor through mud.

But she didn’t forget.

And neither did Reiko.

[One day,] he sent, and his mental voice vibrated with something older than his years. [One day, I’m going to come back here and break every cage in every village and eat every person who puts children in them.]

(One day.)

[Promise me.]

She couldn’t. She shouldn’t. Promises like that were the kind that got people killed.

(I promise we’ll try.)

Through the bond, she felt him accept it. Not happily. Not willingly. But the way a young wolf accepts that the hunt isn’t today—with teeth bared and patience stretched to breaking, and the absolute certainty that tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, the hunt would come.

From Yinxin’s thread, quiet and certain: [We will do more than try.]

***

The worst came in the afternoon.

The caravan had resumed travel, passing through another village that looked exactly like the last one. Same mud buildings. Same broken roads. Same bent backs in fields that stretched forever.

A cultivator stood in the village square.

He wasn’t much—Sparkforged, maybe early Flamewrought—but in a village of Ashborn who’d never had the resources to push beyond their base cultivation, he might as well have been a god. His robes were clean where everyone else wore rags. His face was fat where everyone else was gaunt. His eyes held the casual contempt of someone who’d never had to fight for anything in his life.

A farmer knelt before him, forehead pressed to the dirt.

”Please, honored cultivator. The harvest was poor this year. If we pay the full fee, our children will starve.”

”Should have thought of that before you bred so many mouths to feed.”

”Please—”

The cultivator kicked him.

It wasn’t a combat technique. Wasn’t cultivation enhanced. Just a boot connecting with ribs, sending an old man sprawling in the mud while his family watched and didn’t dare make a sound.

”Disrespect,” the cultivator announced to the watching villagers. ”You see what happens when insects forget their place?”

He kicked the farmer again. And again. And again.

Disengage. Cover identity paramount. You cannot intervene in local—

(STOP HIM.)

Tactical assessment indicates—

(I don’t CARE about tactical assessment! He’s KILLING him!)

Jayde’s hand moved before she could stop it. Essence gathered in her palm, golden fire tinged with phoenix heat, ready to—

A hand closed on her wrist.

Yinxin stood beside her, ”Mei’s” plain face betraying nothing, but her grip held the strength of three thousand years, and a dragon’s fury kept tightly leashed.

”Don’t.” The word was barely a whisper. ”If you intervene, you reveal yourself. If you reveal yourself, everything you’re trying to build dies with you.”

On Jayde’s shoulder, Takara had gone perfectly still. His tiny body pressed flat against her neck, a warm weight that anyone else would mistake for a frightened kitten seeking comfort.

He was not seeking comfort.

He was calculating the precise angle at which he could launch from her shoulder, transform mid-air, and land on the cultivator with enough force to crater the ground beneath him—all while making it look like a random beast attack rather than a targeted intervention.

Stop it. STOP calculating engagement vectors. Lord Fahmjir’s orders are explicit. No revelation unless her death is imminent. A moral injury is not a mortal one.

Even if it should be.

In Jayde’s shadow, Reiko was shaking. Not with fear. With the effort of staying melded when every fiber of his being screamed to solidify, to grow, to become the apex predator his bloodline had designed him to be, and rip the cultivator apart with shadow-enhanced claws.

[LET ME GO,] he sent, and the bond between them blazed with heat. [Jayde, LET ME—]

[No.] Yinxin’s sending cut through the bond like silver ice. Not cruel. Anguished. [No, Reiko. We hold. We ALL hold.]

The cultivator was still kicking. The farmer had stopped moving.

”He’ll kill him,” Jayde breathed.

”He might. But you can’t save this man. Not today. Not like this.”

She’s right. Logical assessment confirms. Single-target intervention accomplishes nothing. Systemic change requires a systemic approach.

(But he’s DYING.)

”Jayde.” Yinxin’s grip tightened. ”I know. I know what this looks like. I know what it feels like. But you cannot save one man by sacrificing everything you might become.”

The cultivator stopped kicking. Looked down at the broken form at his feet. Sneered.

”Let that be a lesson. Protection fees are due on time. No exceptions.”

He walked away, robes unstained, as if he hadn’t just beaten a man to death in front of his family.

Jayde watched him go.

And something cold and terrible crystallized in her chest.

Takara felt it happen. Felt the shift in her essence signature—subtle, almost imperceptible, but unmistakable to someone who’d spent months mapping every fluctuation in her cultivation. Something hardened in her core. Not rage. Rage burned hot and faded. This was colder. Deeper. The kind of quiet that came before tectonic shifts.

Oh, he thought. Oh, that’s not good.

That’s the sound of someone deciding to change the world.

I’ve heard it before. Usually, right before everything goes catastrophically, irreversibly wrong.

From Jayde’s shadow, Reiko pressed his melded form against her—not a physical contact, but a psychic one, his presence wrapping around hers through the bond like a creature curling protectively around something it loved. No words. Just presence. The steady pressure of a being who’d lost everything once and had decided, with the absolute conviction of youth, that it would never happen again.

Not to him. Not to her. Not to anyone.

The caravan moved on.

The dead farmer’s family didn’t.

***

That evening, they made camp in a clearing off the main road. Far enough from any village that their fire wouldn’t draw attention. Close enough that the smoke from a dozen hearths still smudged the horizon, a reminder of every broken place they’d passed through.

Once the perimeter wards were set, Reiko materialized from shadow with a full-body shudder, shaking himself like a dog shedding water. The meld always left him feeling compressed—his own body a surprise after hours of being nothing but awareness and instinct poured into someone else’s shadow.

He circled the clearing once in a precise patrol pattern, then settled at the fire’s edge, chin on his paws, sapphire eyes reflecting the flames.

He hadn’t said anything through the bond in over an hour. The silence wasn’t empty—it was full. Full of processing. Full of a young creature trying to fit what he’d seen into a framework that didn’t have space for it.

Jayde sat with her back against a fallen log, staring into the fire she’d built with her bare hands—no Sparkcasting, no techniques, just friction and patience and the muscle memory of someone who’d lived rough for sixty years.

On a flat stone near the flames, Takara curled in a tight ball, tail over his nose, watching them all through slitted eyes.

[Jayde?]

(Yeah.)

[Are all humans like that?]

The question hit her harder than the cultivator’s boot had hit the farmer. She felt the weight of it through the bond—the genuine confusion of a being who’d been raised by shadowbeasts, contracted to a human, and was now trying to reconcile the species that had given him a partner with the species that had put children in cages.

(No. Not all humans.)

[But enough of them.]

She couldn’t argue with that.

Yinxin’s thread stirred. [It’s not just humans. Dragons hoard territory and let lesser species starve. Demons wage wars that break continents. Elves built empires on the backs of races they called lesser.] A pause, weary with millennia. [Cruelty isn’t a species trait, Reiko. It’s a power trait. Give any being power without consequence, and most of them will use it exactly like that cultivator did.]

Reiko was quiet for a long time. The bond churned with something complicated—not just fury, not just grief, but the particular ache of a creature trying to build a clean line between good and evil and finding it wouldn’t stay straight.

[I want to say beasts are better,] he sent finally. [I want to say my mother’s pride would never do that. But...]

The bond wavered. Something raw surfaced—old pain, buried deep, the kind a cub absorbs before he has words for it.

[My mother’s pride threw her out. For mating with my father. He was a loner—a wanderer who crossed their territory. Only the alpha pair was allowed to breed, and she broke that law. So they drove her out.] A pause, heavy as stone. [And then they hunted my father down and killed him. Before I was born. Because he dared to love someone the pack said he couldn’t have.]

[So no. Beasts aren’t better. The strong take from the weak everywhere. My mother knew that. She ran from it. She spent her whole life running from it, and it killed her anyway.]

His mental voice cracked. Then steadied.

[But she never stopped being kind. Even after everything the pride did to her—to us—she still healed the prey animals in our territory. Still, protected creatures weaker than her. She chose to be good when the world gave her every reason not to be.]

Yinxin’s thread in the bond ached with recognition. [That’s the hardest thing any creature can do. Choose kindness when cruelty would be easier.]

[So it’s not about species,] Reiko continued, working through it in real time, each thought landing like a paw finding solid ground. [It’s about choice. That cultivator CHOSE to kick an old man. That healer CHOSE to let a child die. My mother’s pride CHOSE to kill my father. And my mother CHOSE to be different.]

(Yes,) Jayde sent softly. (That’s exactly it.)

[Then what are WE choosing?]

The question hung in the bond like a held breath.

(We’re choosing to change the rules. So that choosing kindness doesn’t cost people their lives.)

The fire popped, sending sparks skyward.

Jayde looked at the stars.

Tomorrow, there would be more villages. More bleeding children. More fat cultivators in clean robes. More cages and copper coins and doors slammed in dying faces.

And somewhere in the cold, quiet place behind her sternum, a plan was beginning to take shape.