Visions danced before him. Her great yellow eyes pulsed in his gaze; suddenly gigantic, they filled his entire field of sight to the periphery, drew him into her world.
He saw shapes without names. He saw colors beyond description. He saw faceless women dancing through vermilion and cobalt, bodies curved like the silk ribbons they spun in their hands. Then, as her prey was entranced, the Vipress slammed down into him with her fangs and flooded him with poison.
The psychospiritual assault was devastating and immediate.
She shattered Tyr’s world like glass, like he existed in a mirror and she had dashed it against a sharp corner, and he was arrested in the moment of breaking so that it was not over in seconds but took place over eons. Somewhere a shriek began and grew higher and higher in pitch, and did not stop. The Vipress’s eyes turned a colorless white that bored into his vision and turned everything into pain. Tyr sought refuge in the shadows, but his goddess was nowhere, and those hypnotic eyes were everywhere. Everywhere he turned, the eyes looked upon him; the great Snake hissed, her gaze trained on him, boring into him, paralyzing him—
Tyr called out for his goddess again, but still she was silent, she had been driven away by a power that was infinitely stronger than darkness itself.
Su Daji had channeled something older than the Empire. Something as old as time.
Tyr’s world ceased to spin. He and the Empress drifted alone together in the eye of the hurricane of colors, stabilized only by her generosity. He took a form again, and so did she; no longer a viper but a goddess in the shape of Su Daji, the woman.
“Do not resent me for this. There are forces at play you could not possibly understand, against which your life is irrelevant.” Although she appeared mortal, her voice came from everywhere, originated within him, vibrated in his bones. It was the only thing that existed, until she relented and let him speak.
“Why are you doing this?” Tyr whispered.
“Prey do not question the motives of the predator,” hissed the thing that was not Su Daji. “The dead do not question the living. Mortals do not challenge the gods.”
“I killed for you,” Tyr said. “I would have done anything for you.”
“I know,” she said, and stroked his face. She spoke with a casual sorrow, and for an instant she sounded like the Empress again. The colors dimmed. “You were fools.”
She pushed him off the ship.
The pain of drowning, Tyr realized, came in the struggle. But he could not struggle. He was every part of him paralyzed, unable to blink even to shut his eyes against the stinging assault of salt water.
Tyr could do nothing then but die.
He sank back into the darkness. Back into the deep, where sounds could not be heard, sights could not be seen, where nothing could be felt, where nothing lived.
Back into the soft stillness of the womb.
Back to his mother. Back to his goddess.
The death of a shaman did not go unnoticed in the world of spirit. The shattering of Tyr sent a psychospiritual shock wave across the realm of things unknown.
It was felt far away in the peaks of the Wudang Mountains, where the Night Castle stood hidden from the world. It was felt by the Seer of the Bizarre Children, the lost son of the last true khan of the Hinterlands.
The pale Seer traversed the spirit plane as easily as passing through a door, and when he looked for his commander he saw only darkness and the shattered outline of what had once been human. He saw, on the horizon of things yet to come, a land covered in smoke and fire. He saw a battalion of ships crossing the narrow strait. He saw the beginning of a war.
“What do you see?” asked Altan Trengsin.
The white-haired Seer tilted his head to the sky, exposing long, jagged scars running down the sides of his pale neck. He uttered a harsh, cackling laugh.
“He’s gone,” he said. “He’s really gone.”
Altan’s fingers tightened on the Seer’s shoulder.
The Seer’s eyes flew open. Behind thin eyelids there was nothing but white. No pupils, no irises, no spot of color. Only a pale mountain landscape, like freshly fallen snow, like nothingness itself. “There has been a Hexagram.”
“
The Seer turned to face him. “I see the truth of three things. One: we stand on the verge of war.”
“This we’ve known,” Altan said, but the Seer cut him off.
“Two: we have an enemy whom we love.”
Altan stiffened.
“Three: Tyr is lost.”
Altan swallowed hard. “What does that mean?”
The Seer took his hand. Brought it to his lips and kissed it.
“I have seen the end of things,” he said. “The shape of the world has changed. The gods now walk in men as they have not for a long, long time. Tyr will not return. The Bizarre Children answer to you now, and you alone.”
