Chapter 15

Chapter 15

When Glimmersnow Palace collapsed, the sound echoed through all of Baili City.

Some said it sounded like spring thunder. Some said it sounded like ten thousand children crying out in the night at once. Others said it was the river beneath the Royal Palace, frozen for centuries, finally cracking open.

I couldn’t hear anything anymore.

The moment the ice cave crumbled, Yan Zhichuan gave me a violent shove outward. I tumbled into the passage, my forehead slamming against the stone wall, my vision blurring with blood. He, however, was dragged back by the snapping chains. In that final glimpse, I only saw him half-kneeling amidst the flames and shattered ice, looking up toward me.

That look lasted only a moment.

A moment as brief as the final flicker of a match before it burns out.

He said something. I didn’t hear his voice, but I understood the shape of his lips.

He was saying: Go.

I ran out with everything I had. Behind me, the roar of the collapse filled the air. The blue fires flickered out one by one, only to flare up again. The faces of the children sealed within the walls of the passage faded from the firelight, one after another. Some were laughing, some were crying, but most just watched me quietly, as if they could finally go where they were meant to go.

By the time I burst out of the Furnace Room, the outside was already in total chaos. Noblewomen screamed as they tripped over their skirts, officials scrambled to flee upward, and Bai Linye led the guards in a desperate attempt to brace the collapsing doors. When he saw me emerge, he froze for a second, his gaze immediately darting past me to look behind.

I shook my head.

He understood instantly.

Wind rushed up from the fissures in the ground, carrying a true chill. It wasn’t the cold of the Royal Palace, which smelled of balms and blood; it was a clear, hard, sharp cold. It felt like a blade, and it felt like waking up.

“Go!” Bai Linye roared, shoving the two nearest children into my arms. “Get them out of here!”

I caught them instinctively. They were the only two children left from the Greenhouse-one was unconscious, and the other could do nothing but cry. My arms shook violently, yet I held them tight, surging upward with the crowd.

By the time I broke out of Glimmersnow Palace, the horizon was beginning to pale.

It was still snowing, but it was different now.

For the first time, it was just snow. It no longer carried that suffocating grayness that weighed people down. On the streets, people stopped in their tracks, reaching out in a daze to catch the flakes, as if they couldn’t believe this stuff truly didn’t hurt. From the distant clock tower, the long-absent morning bell began to toll. The sound rippled out stroke by stroke, carrying the fiery glow of the palace’s collapse to every corner of the city.

I pressed the children into the arms of a bakery owner on the street, wanting to tell her to hide quickly, but my mouth was full of blood, and I couldn’t make a coherent sound. The woman recognized me as Jiangxue, the match girl; her eyes widened, seemingly wanting to ask what had happened.

I couldn’t say it.

I only opened my hand to show her the blackened ring in my palm.

Then I turned and walked slowly along the long street toward the clock tower.

I didn’t know why I was going there. Perhaps when a person is about to die, they always want to return to where the story began.

The stone steps beneath the clock tower were still there. The spot where I had crouched last night was still there too, covered in a layer of snow, as if someone had carefully laid out a white shroud for me. I sat down against the wall and lined up my empty matchboxes one by one. Ah Qiao’s, Ming Yinxing’s, my mother’s, and mine.

In that last box lay a black silver ring, warped by the heat.

I clutched it in my palm, and suddenly, I smelled the faint scent of bread.

In the wind, someone sat down beside me.

I didn’t turn my head. Because I knew that whether it was a hallucination or not, this was the last time.

“Baili City will be very cold from now on,” I whispered.

There was a moment of silence by my ear, followed by what sounded like a very soft chuckle.

“If it’s cold, then light a fire.”

The voice was so faint, it felt like something I had imagined myself.

My vision grew increasingly blurry, but the snow no longer stung. In the distance, people were shouting about a fire, children were crying, and others were gasping in shock, saying that so many wooden boxes had been dug out from under the Royal Palace. More footsteps ran toward me, but I no longer had the strength to look up.

In a daze, I saw the bridge tunnel again, the old house, and the quilts my grandmother used to dry in the sun. I saw Ming Yinxing wearing her sheepskin boots, waving to me by the river that hadn’t frozen over. My mother stood beside her, opening her arms to me.

This time, I knew it wasn’t a dream meant to trick me into feeding the fire.

Because behind them, there was no Royal Palace, and there was no furnace.

There was only the dawn.

Later, the people of Baili City found me beneath the clock tower.

Yi Jiangxue, the match girl, was curled up in her old spot, clutching a few empty boxes in her arms, looking as if she had simply fallen asleep against the wall because she was too tired. No one knew she had been to the deepest Furnace Core of Glimmersnow Palace the night before, and no one knew which single match had started the fire that consumed half the Royal Palace.

They only knew that Crown Prince Yan Zhichuan never made it out of the ruins. Queen Mo Yaoshuang and that man-eating Warmhouse Yard were buried underground along with it.

Even later, the authorities excavated the Furnace Core and carried out hundreds, thousands of matchboxes. Names were written on every lid. When those names were read aloud one by one, for the first time, no one in the plaza dared to speak.

After that winter, the snow in Baili City finally began to melt in the spring.

There were no more children selling matches on the streets at night. Every year on the night of the first snowfall, the bakery would give out free hot soup to the homeless. A tiny stone tablet was added beneath the clock tower; it didn’t list any great deeds, but only bore a line of unrefined gossip:

*The Royal Palace only buys frozen dreams.*

*But when the dreams are burned out, the sun always rises.*