One month before impact, 26th Year of the Palsho Era

Snow melted into his socks, but Jinku saw the glow of lanterns and his stomach groaned, half in agony and half in pleasure, at the smells of roasted fowl and candied tree nuts drifting over the shifting crowds in the town streets below. It had been almost a full cycle since he’d been outside the temple. He’d been good. The best. A bit whiny, but not as bad as Tiechal. No one would blame him for breaking out for just one night. And it was Winter Festival Night. The night everyone pulled out their dried sweets and richest sauces and killed their fattest hogs for a feast to tempt even the gods with their steaming decadence. And he wasn’t a god. He was just a boy with a silver coin in his pocket and a hungry belly.

An appetite of a small boar with the snobbish sensibility of a pixie, was what Master Kenhai had said. Which was ridiculous, considering Master Kenhai couldn’t tell the difference between salt and pepper if she drowned in one or the other. Jinku doubted the old hag even ate food.

It had been a long, mournful year.

The music started just before he picked out his first snack: rousing, wild music, beating drums that made the ground shiver. He moved towards the sound, fried sugar dough forgotten, as the crowd began to clap along with the clattering, riotous music. Breaking through the front line, his eyes drank in the thick flowering brocades of Songhan dancers and the puppets that moved like real animals, but bright and silken and laughing. Ribbons spun in a thousand colors as acrobats leapt across the ground as if it was made of netting instead of mud and could push them up into the sky without a spell. Jinku was enraptured.

Nothing in the temple would ever compare to this.

Gasps in the crowd drew his attention upwards, to the moon, which sat like a large golden coin against a tarp of night. And against the moon’s light, a dark shape writhed–long as a snake, a pearl shining beneath its mane.

Dragon! It’s the north dragon! hushed the people. He’s come to bless the night.

A mother held her hands over her child’s eyes. Don’t look, Talden. He’s bad luck.

He’s dancing with the moon, a little girl cried.

But it was not excitement or fear or shock that lurched in Jinku at the sight of the thin black line roiling against the soft glow of the moon. He felt, instead, a whisper at his spine, a susurration of voices ears could not hear. Jinku stepped back into the crowd, letting the closeness of people’s elbows and dark heads obscure his view of the sky and knew, without a doubt, that he was about to panic.

His masters had warned him. The border between the dead and the living thinned in the year of the Kilgana Star’s passing. It’s why they’d locked the apprentices in their rooms for the Winter Festival, warded them with charms and spells. And he’d broken those wardings. Now, unguarded and exposed, the young Jinku tried to deflect the spirits’ attentions, weaving through the stalls blindly, chanting his temple’s Ordin Mantra even as the spirits drained the festival of color and smell and taste.

He should have stayed inside the temple. He should have finished writing out the tenets and meditated through the night alongside the other novitiates. He should have–

His feet clung to the ground. Inertia tugged at his body, but his arms would not swing, knees would not bend. His fingers were stone in skin. All movement around him stilled, each person bled of color like tablets on a grave as the flood of spirits broke against Jinku’s soul–an ocean riptide, a force of cold static bursting like blood vessels across his skin. A small halfling boy, face sticky with sugar and with raw red hands, watched him struggle against their power, his face shifting in and out of focus as each spirit tried to imprint themselves on him. A middle-aged human woman in long, winter gapata solidified and spoke, eyes gray with fog.

it’s coming.

An empty sound. He heard the words, spikes through the chest, a dagger to his eyes, peeling away the layers of his conscious mind.

it’s coming.

His teeth cracked as he strained against their power, helpless.

it will destroy the world.

The child, the woman, the crowd all turned their heads to watch the writhing dragon in the sky and Jinku heard them scream.

DO NOT LET OUR CHILDREN DIE.

The dragon slipped into the clear night, calligraphy against the stars. The tide of the spirits lifted, lightened, sound returning into softer noise. But the woman in gapata would not release Jinku’s gaze. She held him in her eyes, all storm and shadow without light before he blinked and her words and the spirit within her were gone, mist into ocean spray.

She was color again, eyes wrinkled, laughing. Alive. All the people moved, unaware of what had passed. Lanterns swung, warm light through a rainbow of colors. Snow lighted on mud and the sound of the world was a blanket he could rest in.

The ghost-speaker’s last words remained. He spoke them to himself all the way back to his temple, repeating the words over and over until they lost their meaning, but not their sound. Words for him. Words for all of them. Words to save them all.

“Reclaim the sky.”