Upon his waking, a shroud of darkness fell over Byuga, and for a heartbeat, he feared he had been struck blind. A strange tolling resonated in his ears, a rhythmic throbbing that defied understanding. A peculiar shiver, cold and invasive, had taken root in his marrow. Disoriented, he rose in his bed, his senses failing to register the touch of any garment upon his skin. He stood, straightening his back, only to find himself in a chamber not his own. Beneath his feet lay a rug where a bed had been but a moment before—of that he would have sworn an oath. He stood now in a hall of hewn stone, flanked by marble effigies and a hearth of monolithic proportions that stretched along the wall. Potted flora and artificial pools adorned the interior, while strange haloes, reminiscent of spectral butterflies, hung suspended in the stagnant air. The cloying scent of musk and lilac drifted to his nostrils, and from some unreachable distance, a haunting melody—a lament that bordered on a shriek—echoed through the silence.

  It was then he beheld the woman upon the bed. She lay unclothed, entwined in satin sheets that coiled about her waist and spiraled down to her ankles. Her back was turned to him. She possessed a skin more hairless than any Bahysa woman he had ever known, and a tail that cascaded almost to her heels. Her legs, from the curve of the heel to the pads of her paws, were fashioned with exquisite grace. Her hair was long, spilling down from between her ears as a woman’s should. He felt a stirring within him, a primal pull of desire.

  Then, she turned.

  As she smiled with an expression half-veiled by sleep and half-bright with mirth, Byuga recognized that beautiful visage. It was Lin-Shu’s eyes, her mouth, and her nose that met his gaze. His blood began to simmer; a flush of heat and frantic excitement overcame him. When she raised her hand, palm open toward the air, his feet seemed to carry him of their own volition. He moved toward her, nearing her side as if gliding through a dreamscape.

  "Oh, Byuga..." she whispered. He could not hear the words, yet he felt them. He could almost touch her lips with his eyes. Someone wanted him. Someone craved him. The mere thought had been enough to ignite his blood, and now she was there, manifest before him.

  Lin-Shu reached out, enveloping him in her embrace. She pulled him onto the bed, her lips pressing fervently against his. The interior of her mouth was so searing, so slick with moisture, that Byuga, like a parched wanderer in the wastes, thrust his tongue deep into that heat, seeking the solace of her dampness. He held her close, pressing his form against hers. A moment later, he too was bare. He felt the heat of her skin, the arch of her curves, and the pressure of her shoulder blades against his loins as she shifted beneath him. Then, just as she seemed poised to open her legs to him, Lin-Shu struck him across the face. Byuga recoiled, lifting his head in stunned silence. She struck him again.

  "Love me thus..." he understood her to say. "The more a Bahysa loves, the more pain they must give. Show me the depth of your devotion. Strike me, wound me—only then shall we be one."

  "No..." Byuga’s thoughts cried out. "I am weary of pain, I beg of you..."

  Yet, even in this vision, he was robbed of speech. While his words echoed only within the halls of his own soul, Lin-Shu began to rain blows upon him. She slapped him, pummeled him, and raked her nails down the length of his body. Byuga clawed for the shores of wakefulness, but he could not break the surface. For this was no mere dream; the realization hit him with visceral force. He was in pain, yet he could not truly feel the hurt. He placed his hands around her throat. He sought to kill the dream. He sought to end this heavy, suffocating illusion.

  But as he throttled Lin-Shu, he felt the air leave his own lungs. In a fit of desperation, he lashed out at his own throat, yet no hand gripped his neck. He thrashed in a tempest of confusion, fear, and horror. Sickened by her assault, he threw himself to the floor. The harder he choked her, the more violently he himself strangled. He was spent. He curled into a fetal position, shielding his belly, and moaned in a weeping cadence as Lin-Shu continued to strike him with increasing ferocity.

  Then, in a heartbeat, the world fractured and reformed.

  Now he was within Lin-Shu, his body entwined with hers. Yet, a moment later, the blows returned. No one was striking him, yet he felt the agony all the same. Suddenly, he felt three distinct existences, as if he were in three places at once. It was as though the woman before him, his own self, and the body from the previous vision were all puppets of a single mind, perceived by a single consciousness. Madness clawed at him. He screamed, scratching at his own flesh, trying to howl his way out of the nightmare, but he remained trapped, lost now in a fourth body. He could not cast off any reality; his own will was birthing new tortures for him.

  At last, in a fit of absolute exhaustion, he lashed out with his hand. This motion felt real; he felt his limb strike something solid. It was a sensation from beyond this fractured world. Everything he saw and felt shattered like glass, and Byuga found himself sprawled atop Laisen. The young Bahysa’s face was a mottled purple, his nose a ruin of gore—he was dead. Byuga’s hands were locked around his throat.

  The heir of Gaigon threw himself off the corpse in a state of sheer panic, a strangled cry escaping his lips. He stared at his palms, backing away until he hit the frame of his bed, his breath coming in jagged, uncontrolled gasps. The windows stood wide; the room was choked with snow. The fury of the blizzard had torn several shutters from their hinges. He felt the biting wind howling inward. He looked upon the broken, dying form of Laisen. He should have healed him, but he was powerless. He seized his cloak, wrapping it tightly around himself, and hovered by the bedside for a time. When the cold became unbearable, he threw open the door and fled into the corridor. Before he vanished, he glimpsed a distorted shadow upon the wall—a terrifying silhouette that seemed to watch him, its form flickering as its shadow leapt from one wall to the next.

  The Gaigon Shaolin practically threw himself into the hallway, slamming the door behind him and collapsing to his knees. He was adrift in a sea of unknown choices. He feared discovery, he could not fathom his own deeds, and a profound nausea rose in his gut.

  In that moment, he turned his head to the left and beheld the corridor lined with the dead. Blood seeped between the floorstones, and corpses with vacant, staring eyes were arrayed along the hall. One man’s neck was bruised black from strangulation; another had fallen upon his own blade; a third had hung himself from a lamp bracket above a doorway. Byuga wanted to wake. He could no longer distinguish the Quick from the Nightmare.

  He rose and moved through the graveyard of the hall. A frigid draft whistled through the passage. Clutching his cloak, he pressed on. The torches had guttered out; the flames of the oil lamps had thinned to mere threads of light. Byuga felt the cold hand of terror. He was truly alone. He hid his hands within his robes, unable to banish the memory of what he had done. The image of entering Lin-Shu returned to him, and his stomach churned with revulsion. What is happening? he wondered.

  At the corridor's end stood a man. He was a Bahysa, his garments tattered and torn. He stared directly at Byuga. When the Prince of Gaigon shifted to the left or right, the man’s focus remained unbroken. Byuga approached; he had to pass this way. Upon the walls, he saw elongated shadows—shadows of those who were not physically present. At every turn, he recoiled in dread. He could not grasp the nature of this haunting. The tension tightened like a bowstring. He wanted to escape, to cast the weight of this entrapment from his shoulders.

  He stopped before the standing man. Reaching out, he brushed his hand against the man’s eyelids, meeting that vacant, expressionless stare. In that instant, the vision of the corridor and the man shifted violently. Now, the entirety of the hall was carpeted in ash and blood. Before him, stretching to the point where the corridor turned toward the towers, stood a line of flayed bodies. The man he had touched smiled as his muscles tensed, and blood began to pour from his forehead, drowning his eyes as it cascaded over every sinew. He must have been blind. Byuga threw himself back in terror, only to collide with another skinless Bahysa behind him. He shrieked in loathing as he felt the slick, blood-soaked fibers of the creature’s muscles, and pressed his back against the wall. Every one of the flayed men was laughing. There may have been women among them; he could not tell.

  He began to sprint past them, desperate to reach the towers or the courtyard. But now, hands began to reach for him. A sharp, piercing pain stabbed into his skull, and the corridor began to spin, multiplying like a fractal. Byuga took his head in his hands and fell to his knees, screaming so loudly he could feel the vibrations even if he could not hear the sound. When he finally opened his eyes, despite the flaw in his vision, he saw that the corridor was empty. Only the man he had first seen remained. Byuga could no longer tell truth from hallucination. A vast sense of emptiness and desolation had settled over the path ahead.

  He ran, stepping through the door that led to the towers. But where he expected stairs, he suddenly plummeted. As he struck the ground hard, he simultaneously felt as though he were ascending. Without knowing how, he found himself at the tower’s summit. His clothes were shredded, his arms bathed in blood. He had no memory of how he had arrived. He collapsed and began to weep. He wanted out; he wanted salvation. He crawled toward the tower windows, hauling himself up despite the agony in his arms to look out upon the world. There was only the blizzard. Smoke and the scent of char drifted to him—fires must have been ravaging the city below. There was nothing but absolute whiteness, snowflakes lashing his face, and the frigid wrath of the storm. Nuwailiji had surrendered to the winter.

  Byuga simply sat atop the tower. He was too terrified to re-enter the palace, to walk its haunted halls again. He leaned out and looked down into the abyss. He contemplated the leap. He did not know if he could take that final risk. Ultimately, he turned back, abandoning the thought of the fall. No matter the cost, he had to reach Gaigon.

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  As he descended the stairs toward the corridor, he felt a phantom wail, a sensation of weeping. A tremor reached out to him. He did not know if it was another deception. He wrestled with his resolve, wavering in indecision. Yet, finally, he decided to investigate, moving toward the wing where the shimlyndvyen chambers lay. Indeed, as he drew closer, a strange sensation blossomed within him—a feeling that the exit might be found here. He tried the doors one by one, but found no escape behind any of them. At last, he stopped before a door left slightly ajar. A vibration pulsed beneath his feet.

  Pushing the door open, he found Lin-Shu. The poor, beautiful girl was on her knees against the wall. Blood dripped from her fingertips; her skin had been torn and shredded. She was writing upon the walls with her hands. The bones at the tips of her index fingers were exposed. Byuga rushed to aid her, but suddenly noticed a creature he had somehow missed upon entering. A gaunt, ebon thing—tall and spindly like a man—clutched her head with massive hands and long, tapering fingers. Its eyes were immense, consuming half its visage. From its brows to the nape of its neck, its head was encrusted with strange horns and protrusions. With its free hand, it opened and closed its maw. Perhaps it was speaking words that Byuga, in his deafness, could not hear.

  The heir of Gaigon recognized the shadows he had seen earlier. They belonged to this thing. This creature must have been the architect of the chaos, the one that had forced him to kill Laisen. He charged, drawing his whip, but in that instant, the creature vanished. It was gone as quickly as it had appeared. After a moment, Lin-Shu ceased her writing and turned her vacant gaze toward him. She stood, blood dripping from her ruined hands. A horrific smile played upon her lips, and a wild, feral light danced in her eyes.

  A moment later, as Byuga watched her, fearing an attack, her body collapsed. The Prince of Gaigon rushed to her side, taking her fingers in his hands. He searched the room for cloth, tearing a nightgown he found to bind her wounds, and then he hoisted her onto his back. He was weak, exhausted, and wounded, but he would carry her out of this place.

  He walked through the corridors for what felt like an eternity. He saw corpses, ghastly visions, and bizarre imagery; at times, he would forget the hundreds of meters he had traversed, only to find new wounds and pains manifesting on his body. He marched on, convincing himself that none of it was real, that it was all a fever dream. He felt as though he were being hunted slowly, worn down until he could be finished. When he finally emerged from the palace and stood in the center of the city upon the rock, he could go no further and laid Lin-Shu down. He could see nothing but the blizzard. His head throbbed; he was spent to the point of spiritual and physical collapse. He began to weep, his sobs turning into a rattling breath as he surrendered to the cold snow. He could sleep here; he could rest.

  Then, through the thinning veil of the storm, he saw two Bahysa. One was dead, sprawled on the ground. The other hovered over him, biting into his neck and tearing away chunks of flesh. Driven by a sudden surge of horror, Byuga forced himself up. He feared the madwoman would see him. With a grunt of exertion, he shouldered Lin-Shu once more. She felt heavier than before. As the blizzard intensified, he tried to find his way. The hollowed terraces of Nuwailiji, its streets, and the manors of the highborn were buried in white. A pale delirium surrounded him. The cold was so biting that even drawing breath became an ordeal.

  When he finally reached the end of the square, he saw a witch standing in the center of the chaos. He threw himself behind a frozen fountain, stifling a groan as Lin-Shu fell upon him. He was soaked through, his body covered in snow, and the blood from his wounds had frozen, turning his skin into a brittle husk. He left the woman by his side and peered through the storm to watch the witch and those around her. She brought her face close to the corpses, and as she drifted over them, strange haloes appeared from nothingness, hovering and rippling before merging into her form. A moment later, the bodies began to change, rising as the most hideous creatures a Bahysa’s eyes could behold. Byuga felt his stomach turn and slumped back behind the fountain in exhaustion.

  Before long, just as sleep threatened to take him again, he was jolted awake by a sensation of falling. He felt the cold, the sharp sting of pain. Lin-Shu had nothing to cover her; she would freeze. He gathered her up, straining his muscles, and let out an involuntary rasp as he hoisted her again. When he turned his head, the witch was gone. The horrific creatures had vanished into thin air. He trudged through the blizzard, but the path eluded him. His knees ached, and he could feel the cold seeping into his very marrow, making him leaden. He was going to freeze to death here. Yet, his only concern was Lin-Shu. He wanted no harm to come to her. He wanted her to live.

  Finally, standing in the heart of the storm, he closed his eyes. He sought that vision, that heightened awareness he had achieved in Gaigen. He knew he could find his way only through that. He surrendered himself to the words he had heard in Chaf-Chauin. He laid his soul bare. In those moments, he could touch everything around him once more. He felt the square, the beings around him, the buildings. He reached out with his soul and touched the gate.

  But in that same instant, he sensed creatures closing in on him with terrifying speed. One vanished instantly, but the others kept coming. Byuga broke into a run toward the gate. His speed was enough. He was faster, stronger—like a healthy, young Bahysa.

  When he reached the gate, he froze. Dozens of dead bodies were piled against it. They must have been trying to flee into the city, into the sheltered streets. There were claw marks on the door, and the surroundings were slick with frozen blood. Again, nausea rose. He was touching the blood, the dead, and everything else with his very soul. The sensation caused his spirit to recoil once more. He lost his vision, his strength. The feeling was utterly humiliating. Yet, the hardest part was the sudden realization of the agony in his joints. As Lin-Shu became too heavy to bear, he fell, dragging the girl toward the gate. It was warm here. Many of the Bahysa around them had only just died.

  Just then, he felt a pressure in his head, like a nail being driven into his skull. He grimaced, clutching Lin-Shu tightly. She was his only anchor to reality. The world began to spin; truth and lie bled into one another. He saw shapes and faces in the storm. He began to hammer on the gate. But the gate was iron, and it would not yield easily. He was terrified. Byuga was trapped. He saw Balbun and Bodhi. He knew they were dead. After what he had done to Laisen, he could not even trust his own senses. Lin-Shu was his only hope. He would stay with her; he would protect her. He struck the gate with renewed desperation. Through the snow, a horrific face appeared. It resembled the skull of a bison, yet it was vibrantly alive, like a Bahysa. Revulsion and a cold dread seized him. He knew he had to get through. He wanted to cry out. He hammered at the door with increasing violence. He would pass.

  Then, suddenly, as he struck the gate, there was a sound of an explosion—a thin, barely audible crackle. He realized he had felt the vibration of the sound rather than hearing it. Before his shock could fade, the gates swung wide. Lin-Shu, Byuga, and several corpses tumbled down the inclined threshold into the streets of Nuwailiji. Byuga lifted his head in a panic and saw hundreds of Bahysa staring at him—staring at the gate behind him. They were huddled together, paralyzed by fear. They must have been hiding here.

  He saw them shouting. Some pointed toward the gate. Despite his profound exhaustion, Byuga turned and tried to heave the iron gate shut. But his strength was gone. Suddenly, several Nyov-Moju soldiers and shimlyndvyen appeared at his side, helping him push the gate. Just as they were about to close it, an unbelievable gust of wind blew the blizzard in upon them. The gates were flung wide once more, and Byuga, the dead Bahysa, Lin-Shu, and the shimlyndvyen were scattered like leaves. The heir of Gaigon hit his back with a force that stole his breath, and he collapsed. When he managed to lift his head, the gates were open, but nothing was entering. The crowd below stared at the threshold in abject terror.

  It was then the slaughter began.

  Some within the crowd began to act with savage madness, butchering those nearest to them without mercy. Before Byuga could recover, he saw shadows drifting inside. As the torches were extinguished one by one, he heard the reports of rifles. He crawled toward Lin-Shu. She was still unconscious. As the cold pierced through the warmth of Nuwailiji, he used the slope to his advantage and pulled the young woman onto his back.

  What followed, he remembered only as a feverish haze. While the Bahysa tore each other apart, the cold spread inward as if possessed of its own dark will, flaying his skin. He nearly died several times as he descended the slope toward the gate. He remembered treading upon someone’s head, and then someone else’s arm, driven by a singular, desperate urge to escape. He had to leave this madness behind. At the bottom of the incline, the pain in his head returned. One of those strange demons must have been near. He furrowed his brow, gathered his resolve, and kept walking, his eyes flickering open and shut.

  As he neared the gate, he cut the rope. As the weights dropped and the city gates began to groan open, he prepared to carry Lin-Shu out. His calves, his loins, and his back were screaming in agony. The gate cracked open, and as he stepped toward the gap, he felt something splash onto his back. He turned just as a blood-drenched woman leapt upon him. He tried to fend her off, but felt her teeth sink into his neck. In a chorus of screams and pain, he dropped Lin-Shu and hammered at the woman’s head, throwing himself down so she was pinned beneath him. Her jaw slackened as her mouth was crushed between Byuga and the ground. The Prince of Gaigon rose to his knees, balled his fists, and began to rain blows upon her face. He did not stop until he felt her nose cave in, his mind lost to a berserker rage.

  Then, he saw several others. Corpses littered the square, and pools of blood shimmered and cracked in the freezing air. The few Bahysa still standing were charging at one another like lunatics. Two of them spotted Byuga and the woman. Their expressions were ghastly. They walked with stiff, convulsing limbs, their eyes wide and unblinking. One held a stone, the other a shovel. Instead of attacking each other, they turned and advanced toward Byuga with rapid, unsettling strides.

  The heir of Gaigon tried to stand, but collapsed. His strength had vanished. He realized his neck was bleeding profusely. His legs were trembling. Unable to lift Lin-Shu, he began to drag her. He passed through the gate and plunged into the blizzard, but he could still see the two maddened Bahysa closing in. He tried to move faster but fell again. This time, he landed atop Lin-Shu, soaking her in his blood. He felt the darkness of unconsciousness pulling at him. When he tried to rise, the world spun. He saw the snow turning crimson. The blizzard howled in his ears. He could not remember when his hood had fallen. They were almost clear. He slumped to the ground, and as he tried to push himself up one last time, he let go. He could see the man with the stone pulling ahead of the other, closing the distance with terrifying speed.

  Just as the man was only a few paces away, Byuga felt his head convulse. There was no strength left in his neck. As his eyes began to close, something struck the Bahysa with the stone, sending the madman sprawling. A blinding whiteness swallowed the storm. Byuga attempted to straighten up, driven by an unfathomable instinct for survival, but as he sought to see what had happened, he finally succumbed to the dark.