A single grain of offering rice rolled from the altar.
It turned once upon the stone and came to rest before the shoe of Chényuè, the Imperial Princess Chongning, daughter of the Heartland Empire. Above her, Shen's sun stood at noon. Beneath it, the five-coloured currents of the celestial rainbow streamed across the sky, joining the five continents to the Celestial Tower whose summit no mortal eye had ever found.
At the four corners of the high terrace, the masters of rites struck their bronze bells in turn. The notes passed over the palace roofs and answered the coloured rivers overhead. The Heartland Emperor bowed towards the distant Tower; his household, his ministers and the envoys of foreign courts bowed with him.
Chényuè stood among princes and military officers, a porcelain bowl of rice cradled in both hands. She was young, but already taller than many of the men beside her. When she saw the fallen grain, she bent without disturbing the ceremony, picked it up and returned it to the bowl.
Her father glanced sideways.
There was no rebuke in his face. Only the smallest smile.
Then the grain split between her palms.
The last bell-note died halfway through its ringing. The four masters raised their mallets and struck again. Bronze met bronze, yet no sound came. A fine line opened down the middle of Chényuè's bowl.
For one breath, the cosmic seas ceased to breathe.
Rice poured through her fingers, every grain catching a shard of broken rainbow. The bowl parted in her hands. Before either half reached the terrace, the fields beyond the capital folded into the earth. Ripe stalks of grain vanished row by row into a wound spreading beneath the soil.
The Emperor stared towards the Celestial Tower. Its rainbow currents writhed loose from their courses. A wind tore across the terrace, driving officials to their knees and sending ceremonial banners cracking against their poles.
Chényuè alone remained standing.
The rice had not yet struck the stone. In that long, impossible instant, the four corners of Shen flashed across her sight.
In the Far East Dominions, a young herb-gatherer knelt to straighten a sapling bent beneath her basket. Before she could bind its stem, every leaf and blossom upon the mountain crumbled into white dust. The dust swallowed her half-filled basket, then the people on the path behind her. When it touched the ground, it darkened into ink and slithered between the furrows in a hundred thin streams.
In the Vermilion South, a soot-cheeked apprentice worked the bellows while a hundred smiths raised their hammers. The fire drew one last breath and collapsed. A hundred hammers fell upon a hundred anvils without a sound. Black cloud spread its wings above the mountains, smothering the southern sky, and the last trace of warmth upon every face.
In the crystalline valleys of the Golden Country, disciples crossed the pass in formation. The youngest walked at the exposed edge, sheltering the wound of an injured spirit beast beside her. Their mantra had not reached its final word when the mountains hurled it back as a multitude of screams. The glassy cliffs broke from within. Snow and crystal descended together, burying prayer, pilgrim and beast beneath one white tomb.
Across the archipelagos of the Oceanic North, a young tally-keeper checked a ship's seal beneath the banners of a hundred clans. One bead of her abacus rested between debts, its account unfinished. The sea rolled over itself like a dragon biting its own tail. Waves launched up into the clouds; mooring ropes tore free; ships, cargo and harbour flags froze before the first spray could fall.
That northern cold crossed all the breadth of Shen and climbed Chényuè's outstretched fingers.
Of the five continents, only the stone beneath her feet still held.
The broken bowl struck the terrace and burst into fragments. A thousand grains of rice tapped the stone at once.
The world answered.
Space convulsed on every side. Black lightning tore open the air a few miles from the Celestial Tower, and the land sank around a fissure too deep for daylight. Wind roared upwards from it. Far below, pairs of eyes opened one after another—vast, furious eyes whose gaze pressed the grasses flat and silenced every living thing.
The High Sage of the Golden Country knew that gaze. He shrank upon his white-jade seat. The names of his ancestors dissolved upon his tongue, and the words of his mantra hardened in his throat.
One ancient title escaped him in a whisper.
"The Shadow Princes."
Something climbed from the abyss.
Its first step blackened a kingdom. Its second cracked the rivers from their beds. Claws rose out of the dark, each large enough to close around a palace, and above them arched a tail that divided the heavens like a second, poisoned sun.
Many eyes swept across Shen. His passed over the broken Tower, the mountains and rivers, the kings and their scattering courts. It settled upon Chényuè.
And did not move.
The Emperor seized his daughter's shoulders and drew her away from the terrace edge.
By nightfall, the palace had become a war council. Edicts flew towards the five continents; horses trampled the dew from the roads; beacon fires burned through dusk and dawn. Chényuè carried maps, counted provisions and listened while men who had never imagined the end of the world argued over how to meet it.
On the third morning, her father came to her in the armour of the Heartland sovereign. A few grains of rice still clung beneath one fold of his dragon-cloak.
"Chényuè," he said, fastening his helmet, "you will remain in the capital."
He spoke gently. He did not explain. No one in the chamber expected him to.
She bowed until her gaze met the floor.
"Yes, Father."
Before sunrise, the Emperor rode out at the head of his guard.
One more guard rode with him, silent beneath a lowered helmet.
For seven days, the rulers of the five continents brought every power they possessed to the plain before the Celestial Tower.
The armies of the Far East charged first. Thousands of blades climbed the gargantuan Scorpion's breathing shadow as ants might climb a mountain. Every wound closed before the sword that made it could be withdrawn.
The sages of the Golden Country spoke the names of a hundred ancestral houses. An unseen hand erased each name from their mouths. Clan leaders turned to one another and found that they no longer shared a language.
The Vermilion Emperor struck the corner from his council table rather than await an answer from the north. His comet-spears fell blazing towards the creature's throat. Their tails went dark one by one, as quietly as rain entering the sea.
The northern fleet arrived three days late. The ships had scarcely reached the shore when every hull gave the same low groan. Masts tilted into black water. No cry followed them down.
From within the Heartland guard, Chényuè watched her father stand among rulers who would not yield to one another and ministers who would not cease reassuring him. He watched the swords fail. He watched the fire vanish. He watched clans forget themselves and ships sink without a voice.
His hands still held the shape of fists, but his fingers could no longer close.
The Scorpion stepped again. The whole plain sank beneath its weight.
The Emperor removed his helmet. Beyond the quarrelling rulers, beyond the broken armies, he looked back towards the distant roofs of his capital.
Towards the daughter he believed was there.
The fortress wall collapsed above him.
The falling stones drove the breath from the world. When the shock reached the ground, the emperor disappeared beneath the ruin—and with him vanished the last grain of offering rice caught in his dragon-cloak.
Across the plain, five continents possessed five kinds of strength.
Not one of them met another.
For one moment, all Shen fell silent.
Into that silence, a colossal claw descended upon the Celestial Tower.
Its shadow covered the Tower first, then half the sky. The pincers closed upon stone. A crack flowered between them and raced upwards for a mile.
For the first time in all the ages of Shen, the Tower was wounded.
The sound that came from it was neither breaking stone nor twisting metal. It was the cry of heaven and earth after holding one breath too long. The cry plunged into the deep places of the world, then ran along every severed current of the Five Elements until it reached every river in every land.
Across five continents, millions stood amid the ruins of their homes and watched the constellations disappear.
Ancient lights withdrew from the edge of the firmament, one field of stars after another, as though the Celestials themselves were drawing their gazes away from the mortal world. When the final glimmer vanished, there was no moon, no flame, no reflection upon the sea.
There was only dark.
Then the four bronze bells upon the abandoned Heartland altar rang by themselves.
Their clear notes crossed the ruined capital and climbed into the firmament. Five stars answered.
They burned alone above the five lands, forming the ancient celestial array: azure in the east, vermilion in the south, white in the west, black in the north and yellow above the Heartland.
Five pillars of starlight fell.
Azure light found the herb-gatherer. The broken sapling in her arms thrust roots through the poisoned soil, and ten thousand leaves unfurled through the white dust.
Vermilion light entered the dead bellows. The apprentice raised her soot-streaked face as embers across the mountain opened into a thousand red lotuses.
White light pierced the buried valley. The spirit beast stirred beneath the young disciple's robe, and flying swords broke through snow and crystal in bright, circling streams.
Violet light entered the frozen harbour. One bead clicked beneath the tally-keeper's finger. The upturned ocean crashed back into its bed, and the tides remembered their course.
Yellow light descended into the ruined fortress.
Chényuè felt no stranger enter her. The light was hers. It had crossed a distance beyond mortal reckoning to return to the hands that had already chosen what they would protect.
She placed both palms beneath the fallen wall and lifted.
Stone rose as lightly as an old page turned. She cast it aside and found her father staring upwards, his face grey with dust and frantic with searching.
Chényuè removed her helmet.
He found her.
The face before him was no longer entirely the young girl he had left in the capital. Starlight had drawn from it the tall and ageless form of a Celestial maiden. Yet her eyes had not changed.
The Emperor's tears cut two clean paths through the dust.
She bent and offered him her hand. He took it. Once, that hand had been small enough to disappear inside his palm. Now it drew him from beneath a boulder.
Neither spoke.
Something touched the centre of Chényuè's palm.
A single grain of offering rice lay upon her lifeline.
She looked at it, then at her father. Supporting him with one arm, she placed the grain in his hand and folded his failing fingers around it.
When she released him, his fist remained closed.
Yellow light climbed her empty hand, passed along her wrist and kindled over her heart. Across Shen, four other lights turned towards the Heartland and inclined as one.
No summons passed between them. None was needed.
Yellow rose first. Azure, vermilion, white and black followed.
The five lights flew towards the wounded Tower.
The Emperor stood amid the ruin, holding one grain of rice as though it were the weight of all the earth. High above him, the celestial rainbow steadied.
"The Celestial Princesses," he whispered.
Five streams of light came to rest before the Tower.
Starlit petals gathered around their mortal forms. They washed over skin and cloth, hardened into scales and joined edge to shining edge. In a breath, celestial war-robes clothed the five sisters—not disguises for their power, but its declaration.
They stepped from the light as they had always been.
Four moved to their appointed places. The Earth Princess stood before them, tallest of the five, yellow radiance flowing from her shoulders like a mountain sunrise.
She brought one fist to the other palm and addressed the darkness with the courtesy due even to an enemy.
"I am the Earth Princess. Through ten thousand lives and thousand epochs, I have sworn to protect Shen. My sisters and I are reunited in fulfilment of that vow. Shadow Prince, have mercy upon the living. Return now to the place appointed to you."
The Scorpion emerged from among the towering shadows. Its claws rose; its poisoned tail blotted out the five remaining stars. Laughter shook the broken plain.
"Here I thought the beautiful celestial maidens have descended to welcome me. What honour could these crawling mortals possess, that beings such as you should stoop from heaven to dote them? Still, since the young ladies have come all this way, allow me—"
The Earth Princess struck first.
Yellow light rose before the Tower like a breaking sea and drove straight into the Scorpion Prince's heart.