A voice, sweet as rotting fruit, explained:
"Long ago, a dragon of rain and memory fell in love with a tea-picking girl. To court her, he learned to dance. But the girl was afraid. She called upon the seven magistrates of forgetting, who cursed the dragon into silence. The price? The magistrates must dance forever—but they have forgotten how. So they whisper."
The moment he read them, the world folded . The clearing became a tea house—ancient, vast, its ceiling lost in shadow. At a long table sat : seven figures in cracked porcelain masks, their bodies impossibly long and jointed like praying mantises. They did not move. They twitched .
He stumbled forward, clutching the obsidian. The trees began to warp. Their trunks twisted into spiral staircases. Their roots slithered like serpents. And there, in a clearing where the moon should have been, he found Mei. She stood perfectly still, her eyes open but white as eggshells, facing a circle of seven stone steles. hu hu bu wu. ye cha long mie
The insects were silent. The wind held its breath.
Lin Wei did the only thing a mapmaker’s apprentice could do: he drew a map. With a stick in the dirt, he traced the forgotten dragon’s last dance—the one the tea-picking girl described in her nightmares before she lost her voice. He drew arcs of rain, spirals of steam from a midnight kettle, the shiver of bamboo leaves before a storm.
Soon, they were all dancing. Not beautifully. Not gracefully. But truly . And as they danced, the phrase inverted itself. The steles crumbled. Mei gasped, color flooding back to her eyes. A voice, sweet as rotting fruit, explained: "Long
"It dances. It extinguishes."
The tea house dissolved into morning mist. Lin Wei found himself kneeling in a patch of wild tea plants, holding his sister’s hand. The obsidian shard had turned to warm ash.
He grabbed a paper lantern, a compass that spun uselessly, and his grandmother’s last gift—a shard of obsidian carved with a single eye. As he crossed the mossy stone bridge into the trees, the air changed. It grew thick, like breathing underwater. And the sounds… the sounds were wrong . She called upon the seven magistrates of forgetting,
(Hu hu bu wu) 夜 茶 龙 灭 (Ye cha long mie)
Then another.
It was a riddle. A lock. The dragon was not dead—he was trapped inside the phrase itself. To free Mei, Lin Wei had to break the curse. Not by fighting, but by dancing.
Each stele was carved with a single character. As Lin Wei watched, the characters rearranged themselves into the very words he’d heard:
But how do you dance for beings who have forgotten the meaning of motion?