His second life began, appropriately, with death.
Pain came first, something that hooked into his infant heart and pulled, as though someone had threaded a chain through his ribs and now hauled him toward a distant shore. He tried to scream, but he was too new to the world for that. Air caught behind his toothless gums, and all he could manage was a thin, reedy sound.
The pain spread, claiming him piece by piece, until there was nothing left in all the world but the terrible, inexorable pull.
He had no thoughts, not really. Only instinct, and the instinct told him to push it away, to shove the agony back toward whatever dark shore had sent it.
But the attempt was worse than useless. The hooks only dug deeper, dragging at every nerve until white sparks burst behind his closed eyelids. His blood felt too hot for his skin. He was burning from the inside out.
A cornered animal, he had heard once in a life he could barely remember, will sometimes leap into the hunter's jaws rather than endure another moment of flight.
He made that leap. Instead of pushing the pain away, he pulled it toward himself. It was like swallowing fire. The torment flooded past skin and sinew, pouring into the hollow space behind his heart where something very like a soul might live. And there, in that secret place, it changed.
The pain split and spread, racing through his tiny body along paths he had not known existed. It traced patterns through muscle and bone, a latticework of cold fire that mapped routes beneath his flesh. Each thread left numbness in its wake, a blessed absence of agony.
By the time the last strand reached the base of his skull, the torment had bled away into a steady chill, and he found that he knew this feeling.
Somewhere, in the fragmentary memories that clung to him like cobwebs, he had felt this before. It was the hush that fell over hospice rooms in the dead hours of night. It was the pull he had sensed at a hundred bedsides, watching and waiting for that final breath.
Only now it was inside him, and it was vast.
He kept the strange current moving, coaxing it into slow circles: up his spine, across his shoulders, down his arms, and back again. The pain traded itself for weight, and the weight for strength. More of it came flooding in, an endless river that he had somehow opened a channel to, and he dared not let it pool and stagnate. So he breathed, infant lungs working like bellows, and with every breath the current flowed.
His muscles thickened. His vision sharpened. The frantic pounding of his heart slowed to something measured and strong. He was drinking death itself, he realized, and death was making him stronger. The pain became a distant bell fading down a long corridor he would never walk again.
Slowly, carefully, he opened his eyes.
The world was on fire.
He lay cradled in a woman's arms, swaddled in linen that was already dark with soot and blood. Just ahead, warriors in tattered robes and soldiers in ornate lacquered armour formed a desperate circle around what must have been a birthing litter. They faced outward, weapons drawn, and beyond them, the world had split open to show its horror.
The sky was wrong. It was red, the wet red of a fresh wound, as if the heavens themselves were bleeding. Black clouds roiled across that crimson expanse, and bolts of pale lightning cut through them in jagged arcs. The light it cast was sickly and strange, painting everything in shades of fever-dream.
The ground was worse. What should have been grass was churned mud and ash, trenches gouged deep where some terrible force had torn through earth and stone. Tattered banners clung to shattered spears, their sigils half-obliterated by smoke.
Bodies lay everywhere. He could not count them, but he could see the shapes of them, limbs twisted at sickening angles, armour torn open to spill viscera. A horse, still harnessed to a splintered cart, twitched in small circles of dying reflex, its eyes already fading while black flies gathered in anticipation. The smell of it reached him even through the smoke: blood and shit and burning flesh, the reek of a slaughterhouse.
And moving through the carnage with obscene grace, flooding towards the desperate defenders in an endless wave: demons.
They were not the demons of fairy tales. Some wore shapes that suggested wolves, but their fur had been peeled away to show muscle underneath, slick and pulsing as if it breathed on its own. Their teeth were too long, too many, crowding out tongues that lolled like slabs of wet leather.
Others skulked on two legs, hunched and cloaked in blue witchfire that burned without warmth. They had no faces, only smooth bone masks split by a single vertical eye, crimson and unblinking. Every step they took left footprints that simmered with caustic light, eating slowly into the soil.
The defenders fought them. A robed elder traced patterns in the air, and the patterns became whirlwinds of emerald swords that fell like rain on the demon horde. Another punched open a gate of light, and three of the creatures tumbled through it, shrieking, to some unknown fate. A third whistled, and the wind itself became a weapon, tearing through the enemy ranks.
It was beautiful and terrible, and Mingxuan watched it all through the haze of his infant vision, awe and terror colliding in his chest.
A fresh wail of agony, not his own, split the air. The midwife holding him turned, revealing to him another woman who lay on a makeshift pallet of straw and wood. Her robes had been white once; now, they were crimson with blood. Her midnight hair stuck to waxen cheeks, and even through his blurred vision, Mingxuan could see that something vital in her was steadily fading.
Death walked two steps behind her rattling breath.
The midwife carrying him moved forward, crouching low beside the dying woman. She said something in a language that registered as vaguely familiar. He caught the words
my lady
and little else. The midwife's voice shook, but her hands did not.
The woman's eyes opened. They were the color of storm clouds, and when they found him, Mingxuan felt something shift in his chest. Recognition passed between them, though it should not have been possible. She looked at him as if she had been waiting for this moment her entire life, as if she had known it would come.
She looked at him like the sun rose and set with him, like the world began and ended with him. It was love, absolute and unconditional.
"Mingxuan," she whispered, and even that effort seemed to drain her. "Bright... mystery."
The pull in his chest surged, powerful enough to steal his breath. He reached for her without thinking, one tiny hand stretching out toward hers. He wanted to touch her fingers, to feel her pulse the way he had felt so many others in another life, to offer whatever comfort he could at the end, because everyone deserved to pass on with someone at their side.
Their hands met. Her skin was ice-cold, but her eyes were twin stars of unquenchable joy.
The thread snapped.
Cold rushed out of her and into him, a wind that carried the scent of autumn rivers and sturdy oaks and heady incense. His skin cooled. His bones hardened. His vision sharpened enough to count the tears on the midwife's cheeks: seven large drops, two small.
A shadow fell across the corpse. His heart lurched, hoping against hope to see silver hair braided with stars, twilight robes, eyes like night skies. Perhaps Death herself would step from that bleeding sky to claim this soul and see him here, waiting.
Looking up, he saw only a passing ash cloud crossing the carmine sun. Thanara did not come.
Mingxuan looked back at the woman who had given him his name. Her eyes were empty now, staring at nothing. Something stirred in his fragmentary memories, a sense that this was not the first time a parent had left him too soon, but the thought dissolved before he could grasp it.
Mingxuan
. It did not feel quite right, but it would be his name now. He would wear it in her honour, this woman who had used her last breath to give it to him.
Around the pallet, the defenders were failing.
The eldest among them barked orders in a voice that tried to be strong and almost succeeded. His shoulders had begun to slump, and weariness threaded through his words like rot through timber. The other warriors answered him, clanging their swords together in affirmation, but Mingxuan could hear the brittleness in that sound. They were breaking.
The demons knew it too. They answered with a chorus of shrieks that briefly ripped the color from the world, and then they surged forward. The earth shook with their coming.
A man in black and gold robes raised a halberd that blazed with blue fire and rushed to meet them. He bought three heartbeats of time before the tide overwhelmed him. A crimson claw opened his throat, and he went down thrashing.
Mingxuan felt the death like a bell struck inside his own marrow. The river of energy bucked, trying to flood him with both sorrow and raw power. He caught it, folded it into the channels he had opened in his flesh and bone, and the pain ebbed. His strength grew.
Another guardian fell, her spine severed by talons. The demons piled atop her, muffling her screams, and more power spilled into Mingxuan. He reeled with it. The midwife holding him stumbled but did not drop him.
"Run!" someone barked, another word he recognised.
A spell flared, carving a corridor of blue wind through the demon horde. The midwife clutched him to her chest and ran. Three warriors and another midwife ran with her. Behind them, dozens of defenders remained, fighting with their lives to keep that corridor open.
The sky was blood-red overhead. The grass was scorched beneath their feet. Every death along their path—human, demon, even the horses—tugged at the chain in Mingxuan's chest. He drank it in because refusing meant drowning, because the power kept him conscious, because it felt holier to honour the sacrifice than to let it dissipate into nothing.
The corridor of wind shivered and collapsed. The demon horde poured through the gap like dark water through a cracked dam. One of the warriors, a tall woman in damaged white robes, barked an order. Another warrior, a man in black wielding a glaive, answered with a quick flick of his fingers that wove shimmering symbols in the air. It slowed the pursuit just long enough for the survivors to scramble over overturned wagons where rice had burned to ash in their beds.
Then a flayed wolf-thing bounded over the wreckage and came down on the third warrior. Steel flashed, but not fast enough. The beast's jaws sheared through the man's torso, and his life ended in a wet, startled gasp. Energy surged toward Mingxuan, and he forced it into the widening river inside himself, tamping grief beneath his newborn ribs.
The warrior in black cried out, but the woman snapped, "Lei!"
Steeling himself, Lei turned and ran with them, his eyes burning with fury.
The two remaining warriors dragged the midwives onward. Boots slid in mud that stank of scorched flesh and fouler things. A bone-masked demon leapt from a tangle of broken spears. Lei met it with a crescent kick, his halberd spinning in a blur. The weapon cleaved the mask in half, releasing a plume of violet fire that burned without heat, but the blade itself exploded into fragments. Splinters of the shattered blade drove into Lei's forearm with wet, grisly sounds, but he did not slow.
One of the midwives stumbled on a fallen banner. The woman warrior hauled her up and shoved her forward, then turned just as three lupine horrors crashed down upon her. Lei lunged back to help, crying, "Yun! Yun!" But he was too late. Her battle roar became a gargle. Within seconds, there was nothing left of her but torn cloth and blood.
Lei avenged her. His halberd, what remained of it, sundered the beasts that had killed her. More death energy spilled into Mingxuan, and his tiny body vibrated with the force of it. He was a cup too small for a pond, and still the ocean poured in.
They ran across a bridge that spanned a ravine where rainwater had once pooled. Now there was only smoke drifting around jagged rocks. Lei cut the ropes after they crossed, sending two pursuing demons tumbling into the chasm. Then he covered their retreat with shaky sigils, blood dripping from his mangled fingers, though his face showed no pain.
They burst onto a ridge road scattered with the dead. Clansfolk, merchants, even a squad of cavalry lay frozen in postures of disbelief, limbs twisted among the crimson dust. Fresh lightning split the sky, bleaching the corpses white for one terrible instant and painting the living in stark silhouette.
Then the chaos swallowed them whole.
Demons boiled over the ridge crest, claws skittering on stone made slick with blood. Lei roared—a sound more furnace blast than language—and planted himself between the women and death. His halberd, blade now little more than a splintered stump of metal, whirled in a blistering arc that sheared the nearest wolf-thing in two. The midwives rushed away, skirts catching on broken armour, clutching Mingxuan tight against heat and clamour.
A faceless horror wreathed in violet flame broke past Lei’s guard from another angle and hurled a gout of fire at them. The older midwife—a woman with speckled hair and calloused hands—spun with a scream of warning, shielding her companion and the child with her own body. The blast struck her square in the chest and hurled her back. She folded to the stones, smoking, and did not rise.
The surviving midwife's scream of grief was a terrible thing. Mingxuan echoed her with a smaller, warbling cry, though his gaze stayed locked on the burning woman as the familiar river of power surged into him, scalding and bright.
Lei saw her fall. His face twisted with something beyond rage, beyond grief, some emotion too large for any single word. Crimson light erupted from his wounds, flaring outward until he looked wrought from molten iron. With a howl that shook loose stones from the cliffs, he hurled himself at the demon host.
Each punch crushed bone. Each kick split spines. Demons burst apart like rotten fruit against that incandescent wrath. Hundreds died in the space of heartbeats, littering the ridge with steaming viscera, but the tide did not break. It bent around the wreckage of his fury, heedless of loss, endless and patient.
Lei fought on. The red aura ate at his flesh as surely as his blade carved theirs. Strips of skin peeled free, exposing muscle that hissed and smoked in the open air.
The midwife holding Mingxuan cried out words he could not understand, choked with tears, and then she turned and ran. Mingxuan knew little of the ensuing moments, the consciousness of a newborn flickering in and out. When awareness returned, they staggered into a side ravine choked with thorny vines, the demon horde shrieking somewhere behind them.
Lei had returned to them somehow in the chaos, robes tattered, hair escaped from its topknot. His aura had guttered low, but it still burned. Every jerking step left a smear of scorched skin on stone.
They scrambled through the ravine until the road curved out of sight. Here, for a single breath, the pursuit thinned, slowed by their own dead and the narrow passage.
Lei's knees buckled. The midwife caught him, half-carrying, half-pulling him forward. Mingxuan could feel the warrior's life sputtering like a candle in the wind.
Then Lei stopped. He turned, placing himself between the midwife and the shadowed path behind them, and barked a command when she froze in shock.
Tears carved muddy tracks down her face. She whispered something desperate, pleading. Mingxuan caught only two words:
I
and
you
.
Lei's laugh broke into a ragged cough. Then he straightened his shoulders, squaring them in a way that said everything words could not, and spoke a single word: "Run."
Mingxuan stretched one tiny hand toward the warrior. Their fingers brushed, and the current of death leaped between them.
Lei looked down at him and smiled. He touched a finger to Mingxuan's forehead; a blessing, or perhaps an apology. And then his body erupted in red light once more. He turned and walked back down the ravine to meet the demons.
The midwife hesitated for a moment longer, eyes wide and wet. Then she turned and fled down the vine-choked slope, clutching Mingxuan to her sobbing chest.
Behind them, the ridge erupted in shrieks and crimson light. When Lei fell beneath the demon tide, his death slammed into Mingxuan with the force of a hammer blow. With it came a flash of light so blinding it might have been the sun itself, summoned from the sky to witness a warrior's last stand. Mingxuan's vision went white. The midwife hunched over him, clutching him tighter, murmuring prayers between sobs.
Night found them staggering through undergrowth that glowed sickly red beneath a crimson moon. Demons howled in the distance, but the pursuit had faltered. The price Lei had paid had bought them a fragile pocket of safety, and the woman used every second of it. She ran and ran and ran.
Behind her, a final crimson flare rose above the trees. Then it guttered out, and the darkness swallowed its echoes.
Her sandals gave up first. Then her knees found mud. Above them, stars blinked dimly through the smoke. There were no demons here, no guardians. Only the rustle of leaves and the shared, terrible weight of survival.
The midwife cradled Mingxuan to her chest, rocking him. Her tears soaked his brow. He had no words to give her, so he offered what sound he could, a thin wail that rose into the red night. It startled birds from the branches and shattered the hush, but it joined with hers, a duet of grief and bare, stubborn life.
They mourned for Yun and for Lei. They mourned for unnamed soldiers and for the woman who had given him his name with her dying breath. Mingxuan mourned, too, for the quiet hope that Death herself might step from the bleeding sky to claim her due and exchange a glance with the newborn who knew her.
When the grief ebbed enough to allow breath, the midwife kissed his forehead. She spoke then, and though he did not understand the words, he heard the conviction in them. It was an oath. The world itself seemed to shiver, as if some higher power had turned its attention their way to bear witness. The vow seemed to give her strength, if not in body then in resolve.
Mingxuan blinked up at her through the film of tears, his own and hers, mingled together. She could not have seen many more summers than twenty. Likely fewer. Yet the night had carved years onto her features. Smoke shadowed her cheekbones, and a cut across her brow had congealed into a crooked line the colour of rust.
Her robe had been a quiet grey once, suited to birthing rooms and peaceful work. Now it looked like storm clouds dragged across a battlefield. Mud and blood had stiffened the fabric, but the darker stains gathered only at her knees and forearms—proof of every fall, every time she had thrown her body over his to shield him. A sash the colour of faded lavender still cinched her waist. Its knot remained tight, a small testimony to hands that remembered dignity even while fleeing from hell.
Those hands fascinated him. Callouses rimmed her palms, and her knuckles were swollen and split where she had punched aside brambles or perhaps a demon's jaw. Yet her grip on him remained gentle.
He could see a tremor running along her arms, the aftermath of holding too much fear for too long, but her spine stayed straight. In her dark, almond-shaped eyes shining with tears, he read an exhaustion so deep it might drown her. And still, duty held it at bay.
Respect bloomed in him then, and gratitude. She was no warrior hurling jade lightning, no magician commanding storms. She was only a midwife with calloused hands and a will like iron, and she had crossed the valley of death armed with nothing but resolve and a child she refused to surrender.
His first priority, when words became available to him, would be to learn her name.
The sky overhead still burned the colour of fresh wounds, nothing like the tender blues he half-remembered from some other world. Yet there was a strange beauty in its fury, he thought. A terrible, honest beauty.
The midwife rose on unsteady legs and pushed deeper into the forest. Her eyes shone with tears and determination both. Mingxuan's own eyelids sagged, heavy with too many absorbed endings. The world swam as if seen through water. But the river inside him remained full, humming with restless potential.
He tried to picture it, this current of death he had somehow learned to drink. Perhaps it was a pale ribbon, sliding through tunnels of flesh. But the image kept slipping away, replaced by grey hospital walls and the slow chime of machines his fragmentary memory could not quite comprehend. He knew he had watched people die many times before, yet those recollections had holes in them, gaps where important things should have been.
Here, in this new world, the energy did not hover politely at a bedside waiting to be acknowledged. It crashed into him, demanding shelter.
Was this how the warriors felt when they hurled jade lightning and sword storms at the demons? Did power blaze in their bones too, or did theirs belong to some kinder element that did not smell of grave soil and autumn leaves? He had felt their deaths coil inside him, each one a note in a swelling chord, and he wondered if living strength could be borrowed as easily as the strength of endings.
The thought thrilled and chilled him.
He breathed, guiding the river in slow loops through his infant body. Up the spine, across tiny shoulders, down arms no bigger than kindling. Each circuit left a shimmer of quiet where fear had lived a moment before.
More subtle strands trickled in from the night. He gathered them all, pressing each drop against the bright ache where his fragmentary memories said a soul should be.
Above them, the crimson clouds began to thin. A shard of spectral moonlight broke through. He stared up at it, dazed and strangely exultant. So much death lingered in the air that the night itself seemed to breathe with him.
He let the river circulate, gentle now, polishing his soul and attuning it to the resonance of endings. And as the forest swallowed the midwife's footsteps, the sky bled slowly toward dawn, ushering endings into beginnings once more.