"Ice remembers what fire forgets."
Lan Xueyi's breath steamed in the air as she descended through the icy winds toward the high gates of Frostveil Sect. Her white cloak whipped behind her like a trailing banner, the snow-choked peaks of her homeland rising all around her. Beneath her boots, the narrow skybridge shimmered with thin frost.
She had not returned since her appointment as envoy to Emberheart.
Now, she was summoned back—not with honor, but with urgency.
The summons had been brief, sealed in glacial script:
Return at once. The heir is not what he seems. – Taixu.
Elder Taixu. Her master. Her mentor. The man who raised her after her parents fell during the Sect Purge. She owed him everything—yet she felt only apprehension.
At the glacier gates, cloaked disciples bowed to her.
But their eyes lingered with suspicion.
Within the Glacier Court, where perpetual frost clung to pearlwood pillars and snowflakes never melted, Lan Xueyi approached the high dais where Elder Taixu waited. His presence was like a cold pressure in the air—elegant, unmoving, sharp as a blade buried in snow.
He regarded her with a calm that bordered on contempt.
"You've been gone too long."
"I came as soon as I received your letter."
His gaze narrowed.
"You serve the heir of Emberheart too well. You speak like his sword. Not our own."
Lan did not bow.
"I serve the truth."
"That is not a virtue," Taixu said, rising. "It is a liability."
He gestured with one frost-ringed hand. From behind the throne, two attendants wheeled forward an obsidian case sealed in layered spiritual ice.
Inside: a slab of glacial jade inscribed with five ancient sect crests.
Her eyes widened. The Flame Covenant Tablet.
Frostveil. Emberheart. Skyroot. Iron Shroud. Cloudshadow.
Bound by fire. Severed by betrayal.
Taixu's voice was quiet. "This is what Kaiyuan buried. What Huolong sealed away. And what the Mirror now threatens to reveal."
Lan Xueyi stepped forward slowly. Her voice faltered. "Why do we still keep this?"
"Because Frostveil remembers," Taixu said. "And now we prepare."
Taixu waved his sleeve, and the ice shifted, revealing another artifact: a long crystal vial sealed with silver thread. Inside swirled a sliver of Phoenix Flame, flickering softly within the frost.
Lan Xueyi stepped back. "That flame—it's from the origin pact."
"The last embers of the Lotus Fire," Taixu said. "Given in oath when the Covenant was formed. Each sect took a piece."
"And the others?"
"Burned. Sealed. Forgotten."
He looked down at her.
"Emberheart's heir is not just a boy, not just a leader. He is the flame's culmination. The prophecy calls him Flamebearer.Do you understand what that means?"
"That he'll decide the path of fire," she whispered.
"No," Taixu said. "That he is the path."
Taixu led her into the Frozen Vault, where the deepest secrets of Frostveil were entombed in eternal ice.
From a mirrored pedestal, he lifted a scroll sealed with three emblems: Frostveil, Emberheart, and the Mirror Sect.
Flamebearer's Fate – Restricted Revelation.
Lan Xueyi read the first lines and paled.
When the heir awakens the flame below, the world will burn anew. Only one born of two pacts—fire and frost—may temper the coming blaze.
She looked up slowly. "Two pacts…"
Taixu said nothing, but the silence was thunder.
She felt the meaning sink in like a blade.
"You knew," she whispered. "You knew this involved me. That the Mirror recognized me too."
"You were born to serve balance," he said. "Not to lose yourself in his flame."
She turned, voice shaking. "I chose him. I chose his truth."
"Then your choice may doom us both."
At the Ice-Reflecting Pool, under the still gaze of a frozen moon, Elder Taixu gave her one final gift—a pendant shaped like a blooming lotus, carved from ancestral frost.
"When the Flame Mirror flares again," he said, "this will open the Ice Gate beneath Emberheart. Frostveil will act. The balance must be maintained."
Lan clenched the pendant in her fist.
"If you move against him, I will stand in your way."
Taixu's gaze was sorrowful, yet resolute.
"Then I pray it does not come to that."
Lan Xueyi departed that night.
The winds howled along the mountain ridges. She walked with quiet purpose, her frost-burnished armor layered beneath her travel cloak. Snow caught in her lashes as she looked back at the towers of Frostveil one last time.
She clutched the lotus pendant, still faintly cold.
Her thoughts were a storm:
Shen Li's determination.
Her master's warning.
The Flamebearer prophecy.
And her own heart, now caught between two ancient pacts.
"I will find a third path," she whispered.
And the wind seemed to answer:
Or be burned trying