Xi boa's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Xi boa had no fire to pass down, and that shamed him more than hunger. He was the last phoenix king, red eyes and fine face, but his bloodline had fallen the day the sacred eternal flame died. Every dynasty before his had carried that flame. His family had let it go out. Now he wanted one thing: to find where the flame last burned and light it again. He only lacked the one fact that mattered. No record said where it had died. He searched the old shrine on the mountainside until his hands bled from turning stones. Nothing. The stone altar held only ash and silence. Xi boa pressed his palms to the cold floor and asked it to speak. It did not. He had wasted three days here on a lie he told himself, that the answer waited in a holy place. Around his neck hung the fire jade pendant, the one heirloom his mother left him. Its gemstone held a frozen swirl of flame. It had never glowed, not once in his life. He gripped it and swore at it. "Show me something. Anything." A voice behind him said, "You're holding it wrong." He spun. A white fox stood in the doorway. Nine tails fanned behind it, each one burning with purple fire that gave off no smoke. The flames matched the purple eyes that watched him, calm and sharp. The fox walked past him, light on its paws, and sniffed the dead altar. "That stone forgot the flame long ago," the fox said. Its voice was a woman's. "But your pendant did not forget. It only sleeps because you ask it the wrong way." Xi boa stepped back. "What are you?" "A friend of your line, when your line still had friends." The fox circled him once. "The jade reacts to sacred fire. No fire burns here. So carry it to the place that still remembers heat. The grove where the willows drink the sky." "Riddles," he said. "A direction," she corrected. "The Whispering Sky Grove. Floating stone and hanging willow. Living things there drank the last warmth of the flame before it fell. The pendant will wake near that memory and point you true." He wanted to call it a trick. But the fox turned and stood in the doorway, waiting, and something in her steady purple gaze made him follow her out. They traveled until willows rose before him, their branches trailing like green rain beneath pale drifting peaks. The air hung heavy and strange. Xi boa lifted the pendant. The jade warmed in his fist. A spark lit inside the stone, then a slow pulse of gold. It tugged, faint but sure, toward a point past the farthest floating peak. "There," the fox said softly. "That is where it last burned." Xi boa finally knew his direction. But the pull led far beyond the grove, into peaks no phoenix had walked since the fall, and the fox's tails had already begun to dim.