The settlers were ahead — happy, relieved, moving with the energy of people whose crisis had been resolved. Wei among them, accepting shoulder-pats and head-ruffles. He was laughing. Something someone said.

  I walked behind. And the something triggered in me.

  A young person standing in the center of grateful people, smiling, having just saved them. His face turned to the sun. Present-tense and past-tense simultaneously. The present was Wei. The past was—

  A city containing thousands of people. Stone walls, market squares. Under threat.

  I couldn't remember from what. Beast, sect, disaster — it doesn't really matter. The threat had dissolved into irrelevance in the acid of time, leaving only that there was danger and someone fixed it.

  A young man, a cultivator — mid-twenties, but young for what he could do. Powerful. Once-in-a-generation powerful. His qi was bright.

  He had saved the city. Alone. With the heroism that came from capability married to the stubborn refusal to let bad things happen to people who couldn't prevent them. His wiring. The same wiring.

  They cheered his name. Thousands of voices filling the square — the square that would be named after him, that would bear his name in stone for decades.

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  He stood in the center and smiled. A real smile.

  His core was already cold — not dark, but cold. Running, still running, but the heat depleted by what saving a city required. A fire that had burned too hot. The flame still visible. The wick consumed.

  Three weeks later, he collapsed — not in battle but in training. A basic form, nothing strenuous. His core failed and the qi-channels collapsed in sequence like dominoes. He was dead before they reached him.

  The city mourned. A hero who died of his own saving. A fire that burned too hot and went out.

  But they kept cheering his name. Keeping him alive in their thoughts.

  The memory released. I was back on the mountain path. The sun was present.

  "You okay?" Wei. Looking back. Over his shoulder. "You're quiet."

  "I'm always quiet."

  "Other than usual quiet." He studied me. The brief study of someone who was perceptive when he chose to be, which was more often than I credited him for. He shrugged. The shrug of someone who had decided that this was not the moment for investigation. "Come on. I'm starving."

  He turned forward. Auntie Huang's son appeared from somewhere and said something that made Wei laugh.

  He smiled. A real one.

  His core — I could feel it from here — was humming. Bright and warm.

  The gong from the cave was still resonating.

  I walked and carried the memory and the present in the same body. The memory saying: this is what happens. The present saying: this is who it's happening to.

  He's different. He has to be different.

  I don't remember the name of the square. I don't remember the city. I remember the smile. I remember the cold.

  Wei laughed ahead of me. Fourteen and alive and warm and unaware of squares or fires or the temperature of cores that had given too much.

  I walked.