Chapter 2

The dragon's name was Tianhuo—Heavenly Fire.

He was, he explained over the course of a long and increasingly surreal conversation, the last of the Imperial Dragons. Nine hundred years ago, when the First Emperor died, the Seal of Command had been buried. The dragons, bound by the seal, had faded. Most had died. A few—Tianhuo among them—had slept, waiting for the seal to resurface.

"And now it has," Tianhuo said. "And you hold it."

"I'm a scribe," Wei Chen said for the fourth time.

"You're a scribe who holds the Seal of Command," Tianhuo corrected. "The seal does not care what you were. It cares what you are. And what you are, whether you like it or not, is the Commander of Dragons."

Wei Chen looked at the seal in his hand. It had stopped glowing, but the warmth remained. The weight of it was impossible—not physical weight, but the weight of what it represented.

"What can I command you to do?" he asked.

"Anything within my power. Fly. Fight. Burn. Build. Destroy. The bond between Commander and Dragon is absolute. Once you command, I must obey."

"And if I command you to do something wrong?"

Tianhuo was quiet for a moment. "The seal does not judge. It only binds. The moral weight of command falls on the Commander."

Wei Chen set the seal down. He sat on the dusty floor of the sub-basement. He put his head in his hands.

"I don't want this," he said.

"Irrelevant," Tianhuo replied. "You have it. The question is not whether you want the seal. The question is what you will do with it."

Wei Chen kept the seal secret.

This was, he knew, insane. A lowly scribe in possession of an artifact that could shift the balance of power between empires—this was the kind of secret that got people killed. The smart thing to do would be to report it. To hand it over to the proper authorities. To let someone with power and responsibility deal with it.

But the authorities were the problem.

The current emperor was weak—a puppet controlled by the Chancellor, a man whose ambition was matched only by his cruelty. If the Chancellor obtained the Seal of Command, he would not hesitate to use it. Dragons would become weapons. The Nine Provinces would drown in fire.

Wei Chen could not let that happen.

So he kept the seal. He hid it in his quarters. He spoke to Tianhuo in whispers during his lunch breaks. And he tried, desperately, to figure out what to do.

"You need allies," Tianhuo told him on the fifth day. "You cannot do this alone. You are a scribe, not a soldier. You need people who understand power and politics."

"I don't know anyone like that."

"Then you need to find them. Or make them."

The opportunity came three days later.

Wei Chen was cataloguing a collection of tax records when he overheard two guards speaking in the corridor outside the Archives.

"—the Chancellor's moving against the Prince. Another purge."

"Who?"

"The Prince's supporters in the Ministry of War. Three generals, arrested last night. The Chancellor says they were plotting treason."

"Was they?"

The guard spat. "Does it matter? The Chancellor says they were. That's enough."

Wei Chen's hands stilled on the scroll he was holding. The Prince—the emperor's younger brother—was the only person in the court with both the motive and the means to challenge the Chancellor. If the Chancellor was moving against him, the balance of power was about to shift violently.

And the seal in Wei Chen's quarters suddenly became very, very relevant.

He finished his work. He went home. He sat in the dark and held the seal.

"Tianhuo," he said.

"Yes, Commander."

"I need to meet the Prince."

The dragon's laugh was low and dangerous. "Now you're thinking like an emperor."

Wei Chen did not smile. He was not thinking like an emperor. He was thinking like a scribe who had spent twenty-one years watching powerful people destroy each other.

He was thinking that someone needed to stop the Chancellor. And that someone, whether he wanted it or not, held the seal.

The weight of command settled on his shoulders.

And Wei Chen, for the first time in his life, lifted it.