When Yuehwa came to, she felt as if her head had been pounded relentlessly with a hammer. Looking around, she realised that she was seated on the floor at one corner of the fabric storeroom, the surroundings still shrouded in the darkness of night.

"That bastard!" she scolded out loud the minute she remembered what had happened. The silver needle that Shoya had pricked her with was likely soaked in some sort of sleeping draught that knocked her out cold within seconds. She picked herself off the floor and searched around the storeroom for any sign of him, but he was nowhere to be found.

Ember, who had been patiently waiting for his owner to awake, now flapped his wings and perched himself on top of the chest of liquid gold. He went that way, the bird pointed his wing towards the tapestry on the wall.

"Ember, that's a wall. Human beings can't walk through walls."

Of course I know that's a wall, I'm more intelligent than you. Shaking his head, Ember flew over to one corner of the tapestry, where the curious snowflake emblem was printed. Using one of his wings, he gently lifted the corner of the fabric, gesturing towards something that was behind.

Yuehwa took his cue and lifted the tapestry altogether, peering curiously behind. Beneath the huge tapestry lay a heavy, stone door, hidden from view from any unsuspecting palace maid who came in to retrieve bolts of fabric. If not for the fact that Ember had seen Shoya disappear through that door with his own two eyes, neither of them might ever have realised the secret that lay behind the tapestry.

The door was made of granite and had a perfectly smooth surface with no handle, save for the engraving of the exact same snowflake emblem that was on the tapestry, right at the centre of it. Putting her weight behind the door, Yuehwa gave it as hard a shove as she possibly could, but the door did not budge.

"Are you sure he went in there?" Yuehwa turned to Ember and asked.

Her companion nodded his head.

"Wait a minute, this snowflake... I've seen it somewhere else before," she murmured. Running her fingers along the engraving, an epiphany struck. "The princess!"

Yuehwa flew out of the storeroom as quickly as she could, running back to the princess's quarters.

It was still a couple of hours before daybreak and everyone was fast asleep in their beds. Creeping into the princess's bedroom, she tip-toed towards the bed where the girl lay sleeping. Under the illumination of the dim moonlight that was streaming in through the windows, Yuehwa could see the jade snowflake pendant that hung around Naying's neck. Reaching out, she deftly untied the pendant, taking extra care not to awaken the girl in the process.

She held up the pendant in front of her eyes, studying it carefully. She hadn't been sure if it was an exact match with the engraving on the stone door, but now she was fairly certain it would be.

"I'm just borrowing this for a while, I'll return this as soon as I can," she whispered.

Standing in front of the stone door once more, Yuehwa took a deep breath as she placed the jade pendant against the engraving in the granite. Just as she expected, the pendant fit into the grooves perfectly. The minute the pendant was in place, she could hear the distant sounds of rotating cogs as some hidden mechanism kicked into action. Ember counted to five, and the heavy door slowly swung open, revealing a flight of stone steps leading downwards.

"A hidden passageway, of course." Yuehwa rolled her eyes and took a step down. "Come on, Ember, let's go see what the bastard is up to."

Do we have to? Ember wrinkled up his face at the smell of the mustiness that was coming from the passage. Great, let's go and get ourselves killed.

Man and bird descended down the stone steps, with Yuehwa lighting the way using one of the torches that had been lining the walls. At the bottom of the stairs was a long, narrow passageway that extended beyond the eye could see. Yuehwa quickly made her way down, observing curiously the puddles of water pooling at her feet. The walls of the passageway felt increasingly damp as they went along. Reaching out her hand, she swiped some of the water off the wall and dabbed it onto the tip of her tongue.

"Salty," she remarked. "Is it me or are we under the sea?"

Death by drowning, brilliant, her feathered friend replied.

As they neared the end of the passageway, Yuehwa could hear the sounds of swords clanging against one another. They emerged out of the passage and into a huge cavern, and the first thing that greeted their eyes was the sight of Shoya embroiled in a fight against eight soldiers dressed from head to toe in bronze armour. Shoya had already been in a bad state to begin with, but now his left shoulder was bleeding and he looked minutes away from collapsing altogether.

Yuehwa had spent the entire journey here thinking about what vicious swear words she wanted to throw at Shoya when she saw him, but her first instinct when she saw a bronze soldier swinging his spear towards the White Scorpion was to send her silks flying from out of her sleeves, knocking the spear from the soldier's hand.

"What are you doing here?" Shoya yelled when he registered her arrival. "Get out!"

"Is that how you thank the person who just saved your life?" Yuehwa stared at him incredulously. "Ingrate."

Sensing that there were now two intruders, the eight soldiers divided themselves into two groups of four, all of them focused on their mission of protecting the sanctity of this place. The loud clang of their metal boots against the ground as they marched created an intimidating racket that resonated across the walls of the cavern.

"Who are these—" Yuehwa started, but as the soldiers slowly approached, she realised that she needed to reframe her question. "What are these things?"

They were soldiers dressed in bronze armour, except there didn't seem to be anyone inside the armour. Looking through the slits of their helmets, Yuehwa saw no eyes peering out from within. Instead, there was only darkness. In her travels, she had seen such dark magic only once before, a mere remnant left behind in a long abandoned settlement, but it was enough to teach her that it was not to be trifled with.

"The kingdom of Dahai's bronze guardsmen," Shoya replied, backing away slowly from his attackers. "They are controlled by the talismans found within their armour, placed there by the king's shamans. The Dahai royal family uses these guardsmen to protect their most coveted treasures. Yuehwa, just leave now! This has nothing to do with you, I can handle this by myself."

"Do you take me for a coward?" Yuehwa shouted back. "I'm not leaving here without you."

Shoya didn't have time to argue with her any further, because the guardsmen had launched an attack on him from all four directions, leaving him with barely enough time to react.

It had been a long time since Yuehwa experienced a battle this intense.

In her travels and the occasional assassination job, the worst that she had ever come across was having to fend off over thirty highly skilled guards single-handedly. That was after having snuffed out the life of a wealthy merchant who owned a literal gold mountain. It had been a tough battle, but still her opponents had been human beings made of flesh and blood.

This—this was something entirely different.

The only time she had seen one of these things before was through a demonstration by one of her acquaintances, someone who happened to be well-versed in the dark arts. He told her that the only way to stop one of these was by getting rid of the talisman that controlled it, yet this was often no easy feat.

Yuehwa typically liked to use her silks as her weapon of choice, but that would not be enough to defeat these bronze guardsmen. She unsheathed the sword that she kept by her side at all times, a sword that rarely needed to show itself to the world. A blood red jade pendant hung from its hilt and its blade gleamed under the dim light, eager to be put to use.

Perched on a convenient ledge, Ember watched with trepidation as the duo took on the eight bronze guardsmen.

Working together, the two of them helped each other fend off the onslaught of attacks, covering each other's blind spots. It was a long drawn battle, with both of them stuck in a stalemate with the dreaded guardsmen for what felt like an eternity. Shoya was almost at his wit's end, his existing injuries weighing him down and putting him at a severe disadvantage. Yuehwa, on the other hand, finally managed to figure out a way to break through the formation. After dispatching one of the guardsmen, she learnt the trick of first knocking off the creature's helmet before stabbing her sword through the gaping hole left behind, thereby removing the dreaded talisman from within the suit of armour.

One by one, they finally started to make some progress, bringing down one guardsman after another.

Pre-occupied with trying to watch her own back, Yuehwa didn't realise that behind her, Shoya had his back up against the wall. "Shoya!" she cried out when she saw that he had been cornered by the two remaining guardsmen, who were now quickly closing the gap with their spears brandished in the air.

Shoya was looking past the shoulders of the guardsmen towards the far end of the cavern. A stone pedestal stood there, on top of which lay a sword whose blade glistened in the dim light, its crystal hilt shimmering in the distance.

So close, yet so far.

Yuehwa somersaulted through the air and stepped in front of him, forming a barrier between him and the two approaching guardsmen.

"Get out of the way," he hissed, though he only managed a bare whisper. He placed one hand on Yuehwa's shoulder to push her aside, but she held firm.

Staring straight ahead, Yuehwa sized up her opposition. Now that she had figured out how to deal with the bronze guardsmen, the initial apprehension at facing such an enemy had slowly faded away. A crooked smile appeared across her face as she readied her sword. Then, with one leap into the air and less than ten strokes of her sword, both sets of armour collapsed onto the ground in a heap.

The silence in the cavern was stifling.

Yuehwa surveyed the surroundings carefully, noting that all eight of the bronze guardsmen were now nothing but scrap metal waiting to be recycled. Her gaze fell briefly upon the sword on the stone pedestal at the opposite end of the cavern, but she quickly turned her attention back to Shoya.

He was sitting on the ground behind her with his back up against the wall, looking terribly pale as he tried to regulate his own breathing.

"Now are you going tell me what exactly is going on?" Yuehwa demanded, squatting down in front of him. "If I didn't manage to find my way down here then you'd be a corpse right now. I think you owe me an explanation."

"Like I said before, this is none of your business. You shouldn't have come."

"Is this how you repay me for saving your life? I could have just let you die!"

There were droplets of sweat lining her forehead from the amount of energy that she had exerted in facing the bronze guardsmen. If she had been alone, would she have done any better than Shoya? She wasn't so sure.

"Even at our level, it might not be possible to get past the eight of them singlehandedly. That's probably why the king was willing to leave this place unguarded by anyone else except these eight soldiers. Dark magic..."

The dark arts was a part of their shared history that the kingdoms hoped to bury, and its practice was strictly forbidden across the five kingdoms, so it surprising that the Dahai royal family still secretly made use of it to guard their treasures, even though it was the most eccentric of the five kingdoms.

Shoya picked himself off the ground with a groan. He walked over slowly to one of the collapsed suits of armour, picking up the helmet. "I wonder who this used to be," he said, shaking his head sadly.

Yuehwa knew what he meant.

The bronze guardsmen were not always empty suits of armour. Once upon a time, there were men of flesh and blood who lived within these suits, who fought for their home and kingdom. In order for a shaman to take a suit of armour and give it life via a talisman, it required the owner of the suit to give his life in exchange. Only when the living body went cold could the soul of the soldier be forever pinned to his armour, leaving nothing of his past existence behind except the desire to give his all for his king.

Shoya gently laid the helmet back down, saying a silent prayer for the deceased. Then, he walked across the cavern towards the stone pedestal.

"Is that what you've been searching for? The thing that belongs to your family?" Yuehwa asked, following behind. She peered curiously at the sword, marvelling at how its hilt was fashioned out of a single white crystal, the silhouette of a dragon exquisitely carved along its edge. Even though this cavern seemed untouched for years, still the sword's blade gleamed as though it had been polished every day.

Shoya didn't reply. Instead, he slid his fingers down the blade of the sword, coming to rest on its crystal hilt. Taking a deep breath, he lifted the sword from its pedestal, holding it up against the light of the torches.

"It's been a long time," he whispered.

"Hey, aren't you going to answer my question? We almost got killed because of—"

A loud, thunderous bellow cut her off in mid-sentence.

The roof of the cavern started to cave in and water began pouring in through the cracks that had formed in the rock ceiling. Yuehwa suddenly remembered the dampness of the passageway that she had taken to get here, and the pools of water that had formed on the ground.

"The cave is collapsing. The ceiling isn't going to hold the weight of the water above anymore," Shoya said quickly. "We need to go!"

Grabbing hold of Yuehwa's wrist, he sprinted towards the exit, dragging her along with him. There was no time to think, because all around them the boulders were beginning to tumble downwards and the sea was rapidly filling the space. Water swirled at their feet as they ran down the narrow passageway back towards the palace.

Even as they dashed up the stairs towards the stone door that would lead them back to the fabric storeroom from which they came, rocks continued to rain down upon them. Using his own body as a shield, Shoya kept Yuehwa protected beneath him as they climbed up the steps.

Yuehwa never thought she'd be this glad to see the inside of a fabric store.

Once the both of them had slipped through the door, they quickly swung the stone door shut, heaving a huge sigh of relief.

"Are you alright?" Yuehwa asked, looking over at Shoya with concern. Everything had happened too quickly for her to have processed things properly, but she knew that Shoya was always behind her and that he was the reason why she had managed to escape unscathed. Just looking at him now, she could see several patches of blood staining his usually clean, white clothes.

Shoya nodded. "I'm fine, it's only some scratches. Nothing that won't heal in a couple of days," he said. "I'm sorry. Removing the sword must have triggered some sort of mechanism that caused the cave to collapse. I should have been more careful."

Pointing at the sword in his hand, Yuehwa said, "Now will you tell me?"

"Why don't you answer a question for me first. How did you managed to get past the stone door?"

Yuehwa fished out the jade pendant that she had stolen from the princess, laying it out on the palm of her hand. "Princess Naying wears this jade pendant on her neck, so when I saw the engraving in the stone, I thought I'd just try my luck. Why? Is this pendant something special? You must have a similar one if you managed to unlock the door too. Unless there's another way?"

Shoya frowned and fell silent for a while. Finally, he said, "When my mother sent me away in secret, she sent me away together with this sword in hope that one day I would be able to return and claim my rightful place in this world."

"And how did the sword end up in the Dahai palace?"

"The servant girl that my mother entrusted me to was instructed to come here, to Dahai, in search of my aunt. My mother's older sister." Shoya reached into his sleeve and brought out an identical jade pendant, carved into the exact same pattern of a solitary snowflake. "This was the emblem of my mother's family. Each child of the family was given this pendant on the day that they were born. My mother had one, as did my aunt."

"Wait a minute." Yuehwa frowned, looking from one pendant to the other. "If the pendant that you have belongs to your mother, and your aunt had an identical one..." She rummaged through her mind to recall what she had been told.

She looked up at the man who was sitting opposite, his tired expression still partially obscured by his mask. Narrowing her eyes, she asked:

"Who exactly are you?"