Xi's hand hovered above the manuscript. "I am at the end, Sayewa."

For days he fought the temptation to peek at the end of the scroll like a curious child. Instead, he forced himself to assimilate the inane details of the suitable site selection, the interminable discussions on the advantages of certain materials over others for the joints, and so much more.

Sayewa rose from her cushion by the window, letting her share of scrolls snake down to the floor. "Remarkable, Xi. Let me see."

The shiver of anticipation run through him. "That's it. I can leave for the war."

"Yes." The flower-scented breath warmed his cheek, but Xi turned the faery glamour away as reflexively as she oozed it. Two weeks of working in the same room from dusk to dawn sharpened his awareness, and blocking it became trivial.

"Yes? Just 'yes', Serene Mother?" Xi spurted out a bitter laugh. "I was torn for weeks. It felt such a frivolous thing to do, studying the Celestials's texts in a quiet monastery when the noose tightens around Sutao."

She placed a calming palm on his shoulder. "We could no more afford the delay and mistakes here than your brethren do in the fighting, Xi."

How, how could he had been so blind as to take her affection for romantic! She'd always treated him like a sweet child. A salty taste of blood coated his tongue when he bit through his lip to keep his objections at bay. No matter what she thought, he was not a boy, and the sky turned black in the middle of the day with the haze of the burning countryside.

The faery's fingers kneaded his shoulders, but he sensed her unrest underneath the comforting movements. The fluffy yellow buds dropped one by one on the scroll. They bounced off the rolled paper and kept on skipping across his lap-desk's surface. Their tiny thuds all but echoed in the quiet room. The flowers had their own faint smell, not unpleasant, but it was overpowered with Sayewa's stronger jasmine scent.

"Let us see how the Ascension Forge functions," she murmured at last satisfied with his slowing heart rate.

All her earnest efforts went to waste.

He took one look - and the scroll fell out of his trembling hand. The last cursed page faced the floor, but it was no use. One glance was enough, his memory grasped every detail. He could not un-see it, could not close the eyes of his soul.

Xi did not remember tossing the desk away, only the crushing sound it made in the stillness of the monastery. Sayewa was hefty, but he pushed her aside too in his scramble to run.

The faery chased him, the scent of jasmine chased him, growing so strong that it threatened to give him a headache. A headache! He squeezed his skull to hold it together. It felt like a ripe melon, ready to crack at a single tap.

Xi's legs felt numb after bending over the scrolls for days, but soon the warm lifeblood surged through his limbs, raced past his heart, pulsed his head free of terror.

He could not unsee the things he saw, but his running made the revelation fainter. Let his calves burn, it was better than his mind exploding.

Alas, his legs could not move fast enough to outrun his thoughts.

His hisn refused to accept the truth.

"No!" he wailed, scaring away the begging refugees on the outskirts of Sutao.

"Beloved!" called the familiar voice from above.

Xi skidded to change his direction and trotted up the familiar trail. For a terrifying moment, he suspected that he had gone mad, lured away by the imaginary voices from his past.

He checked his head again - it was still whole. Fenghuang landed in front of him, in the flesh. If it were a delusion, he wouldn't know, would he? I don't care, I need her to be real.

He burrowed his face into the golden feathers on the bird's blossom. "My enigma..."

After a spike of joy, he clawed his way back to calm. With his hsin settling, came understanding.

"You knew..." he whispered. "You tried to show me, all the faces of beautiful maidens... you wanted me to guess I was meant for your sisters."

"I am the Bird of Prophecy, Beloved."

Xi whimpered. The nickname, too, was a dead giveaway. It was on the nose, for years and years. "Why didn't you just tell me my fate?"

"I am the Bird of Prophecy. If I gave out all the answers to the seekers, I would break the world," she cooed. "Why are you crying, beloved? You were born to soar with us."

He wiped his eyes dry, but a sobbing laugh shook his body. The hysteria prickled his throat with a thousand needles. The words, such as he could muster, came out barely above a whisper. "All I want to be is a war mage. A human war mage."

"My clutch of eggs did hatch for centuries until we felt hope. And that hope was you," Fenghuang said. "We all looked, but I found you. I guarded you. Now I want to see the colour of your scales. I want to see your knowledge grow, lifting the others into our skies."

"Others..." Xi muttered. "Others!"

Surely, Sayewa and he could find someone willing, someone older, someone dreaming of ascending to the ultimate incarnation of mystical power!

Fenghuang's thoughts dimmed, in her trying to protect his desperate hopes.

He clung to them, stubbornly. "There must be someone else, there must be a way, there must be..."

"Lord Maeng sends his regards," the bird interrupted his mumbling.

The loop of miserable thoughts exploded like a firework. "Minh?! Minh is here? In the North? How? When? Did you see him?"

"He is the first officer on the castle ship 'Glorious Dragon-Emperor'. He told me you have no right to die until you've apologized for every chilly night he had endured."

Incredulity won over giddiness. He did not even care that the bird dangled Minh like a juicy worm in front of his face to calm him down. "Wait. Minh said that?"

Fenghuang giggled like a mischievous brat too cute to ever be punished by her doting parents. "Give or take a few colourful adjectives, but that's the gist of it."

His thoughts raced, bumping one another out of the way. He had an inkling that Fenghuang's magnanimous attitude towards Minh was odd, but what wasn't odd about their bond? How Minh had changed in two years? Did his upper lip still quivered with amusement, and were they still too far apart even though they were so much closer now?

So close, no more than a day as Fenghuang flies... but I cannot run off to war like an adolescent.

"I must return to Sayewa before she sends out search parties," Xi said thickly. "Could you take me to the Hill of Five Seasons, my enigma?"

The bird gave another silvery chuckle and did not say anything while they flew. Her thoughts that trickled through the bond to Xi were all aglow with the anticipation of glory. My glory... no, the dragon's glory, not mine.

Yours, Fenghuang thought back, yours for the taking.

***

"Ah," Sayewa said as if he'd just stepped out to use an outhouse. "You are back. I had almost finished with this tricky passage on the female bloodline for the Ascendant. I am not sure yet—-"

She interrupted herself and watched him walk past her to pick up the drawing that destroyed him.

The Dragon Ascendant in the Forge smiled enigmatically from the scroll, despite being pierced with sixteen hundred needles each linked to the energies of the world by the Ascendant's magic. Yes, in some ways it was glorious. So was the illustration of the dragon surging into the sky.

"We must find someone else," Xi told Sayewa. "This cannot be my fate."

Her eyes smiled as enigmatically as that of the Ascendant. "Every word I read points to you. Even this latest piece about a female blood relation being alive. How many mages do you know with a mother within an easy reach right now, during the times of war?"

Xi shook his head at the faery's misdirection. "My mother? Why do we need my mother?"

"I am not sure yet," Sayewa admitted with a noticeable chagrin. "But leave it to me to find out. I counted on you to build the Forge—"

He took a deep breath in to object, but she raised her voice, uncharacteristically.

"-- I counted on you, IF the prospect of emerging as the saviour of the nation, and the most powerful being on Tiandi appeals to you, my friend—"

"Friend!"

The pent up breath burst out with the word. Xi stared at her speechless with outrage for a moment. "I would hate to be your enemy! Right here, right now, you are manipulating me with your words and with your glamour into abandoning myself to this dream of yours. You want me to surrender what I am to burn down the demons."

Four gray eyes squinted in him in an attempt to understand. "You will become more, not less."

Xi looked around for a suitable wall to beat his forehead upon. First Fenghuang, now Sayewa. Was there anyone around these parts who would understand why a man would not want to transform into a dragon?

Sayewa absently picked out a few yellow buds from her brow and rubbed them between her fingers. "Once you ascend to the dragon form, you will no longer be confined by the demands that the magic understanding exacts on humans. You will be free to feel and to start the Dynasty of Heavens."

"Oh, I figured out that much! You will have me breed with the magic birds." He dropped his blushing face into his palms and his posterior - onto the closest cushion. It was not much of a relief seeing how his whole body was burning. "Almost my entire life I was closer to Fenghuang than to anyone else, but I know now what love is. It is more than being close in spirit."

He had never seen Sayewa this flabbergasted. "I did not realize it mattered to you if your children hatched from eggs, had scales or feathers."

"It does matter!" A few days ago he shouted at Master Jiang, now he was shouting at a faery. So be it! To save himself from the dragonhood he'd shout at Rustam Bei, the Emperor, the Celestials and the assembled spirits of his ancestors from the Dynasty of First Dawn till present day. If this could be resolved by shouting, he'd yell long and loud.

A shower of yellow flowers cascaded down Sayewa's forehead. "Do not look to me for understanding. Faeries are created to love something other than they are, the humans."

He blinked away the inconvenient moisture from his eyelashes. "Minh, I stand to lose Minh, without ever telling him what he means to me."

"I cannot understand that either," said Sayewa without inquiring further about Minh, though Xi thought she squinted, not recognizing the name.

"I think you can." Xi pointed at a red flower that popped up among the yellow ones. This time he managed to keep his secret, and she did not. Under any other circumstances, it would have pleased Xi.

Sayewa clasped her hand over the tell-tale flower and said nothing.

"A flying serpent the size of a castle, as magnificent as they look, they are not me. I am not your Dragon Ascendant, Sayewa. My hsin rejects the notion," Xi went on. With every tick of the heart, more and more arguments came to him. He started to sound like a man of cold logic, a war mage. Maybe I should have started with that instead of running out in tears.

The faery pondered something, then got to her feet with an energy of a bolt launched from a crossbow. "My counsel is not impartial... come with me, you must see why."