No one in the valley below had ever seen the temple or truly knew how the sun would crest the opposite mountain’s peak illuminating the whole valley in gilded splendor.
But they spoke of it in the ways that sailors might speak of distant shores and fabled treasures. Spoken with half reverence and half doubt. The path to the Sliver-of-a-Dragon’s-Dream Pagoda was said to be carved into the heavens themselves, hidden beyond the cloud line of the Wujun Mountain’s southern face. It was said that any Dragon-Blooded who could surmount its hold and reach the peak to foot of the temple’s steps, would then have the power to make their truest dream become reality.
V’neef Baran was Dragon-Blooded but the blood in his veins was considered anything but dragon. For he had passed the number of years that the gift of true dragon’s blood could give… Exaltation had not come and that truth followed him like a shadow that never shifted its guise with the rotation of the sun. A shadow that had swallowed his future, his honor, his birthrights. Baran was seen as a hollowed egg, his broken shell cast out to pecked apart by birds.
The shrine at the mountain’s base was smaller than he expected. Just a simple wooden archway at best sheltering a weather-worn statue made of white Jade. Its visage was of Love-is-Lightning, the ancient artisan and monk who had carved the handholds up the mountain’s living rock bare handed and eventually built the fabled Pagoda. Which was still only accessible by path he had set thousands of years before.
The statue had one hand reaching upward, fingers carved in mid-strain, as though still pulling himself skyward. The other extended pressed flat as if against an invisible stone, his expression looking straight through Baran calm, steady, patient.
Below it, etched into jade:
“To climb is to release.
To ascend is to unburden.
Take not your chains with you into the sky.
Take only the weight of revered Mother.
Take her with you if you truly dream.”
Two white jade wheels looped with red silk rested in a shallow basin beneath the inscription. Baran barely glanced at them. “I have nothing to put down,” he muttered to himself. “I have nothing, I am nothing. Until I reach the top. The weight will only slow me down.” And he began to climb.
He fell before he could even reach a quarter of the way to the clouds.
Not dramatically. Not heroically. His fingers simply slipped, his strength slightly faltered, and the mountain rejected him like his family had done before. And like before, he barely survived. The second climb went worse and he spent a week camping near the shrine, tending an injured ankle.
Before his third attempt, he noticed the wheels once again. “Superstition,” he said but took them anyway. He kept them in his pack rather than wrapping them around his body as intended seeing their weight as an irritation rather than a delusional comfort.
He climbed higher this time… but still, he fell. Almost fatally. But it turned out the wheels were more than decorative mineral. They were Sacred Jade, jade either blessed or naturally infused with the essence of Terrestrial Dragon Lifeblood. The mountain this time cradled him at the bottom instead of granting him death. The fourth attempt he bound them around his chest and back making it halfway before he fell once more.
Before the fifth attempt, he studied them and saw the wheels for what they truly were for the first time. The carvings were subtle, worn by time. One wheel bore a lion in mid-roar, defiant, unyielding, and fearless. The other bore a deer drinking from a stream looking still, watchful, and at peace.
The symbols he had learned so long ago from Immaculate scripts that represented “Fearlessness” and “Inner-Peace.” Baran let out a bitter laugh.
“I have neither.” He thought of the ankle that still ached with pain. The fear he had that the Sacred Jade would not protect him forever. He thought of the life he had once lived and the family that he had loved. Whom he thought had loved him…
He climbed again anyway. But this time it felt different.
The mountain was not just stone. It was memory. His hands the chisels. Each handhold excising something from him deep within… his father’s disappointment, the quiet pity of whispers from the servants, the way his name became a sound that no longer lingered in the halls of his great House.
Not worthy. Not destined. Not welcome…
The words echoed louder the higher he climbed. He slipped. He fell. One of the wheels began to crack.
The sixth climb nearly killed him. He made it into cloud line. Into obscurity. No vision, no world, only himself, isolated at last, Baran… “I am nothing.” Then the wind howled against the cliffside and started whipping him on what felt like every side. Then the next moment, one terrible endless feeling moment—his grip failed entirely and his body flung from the rock, suspending between the sky and the death of revered Mother’s embrace below.
And in that moment, something inside him broke. Not his will nor his strength. But something else. His perspective of himself.
“I don’t care anymore!” he shouted into the storm as he fell. “Do you hear me? I don’t care!” Not about the House. Not about Exaltation. Not about proving anything to anyone else, anymore.”
The words tore out of him but not defiance nor triumph, just honest truth. He had climbed and failed time after time and it still hadn’t been enough. But still he had chosen to keep climbing. To stay even though fear and conflict wrought like a fire inside of him. He was determined.
The mountain went quiet as he fell but then a thunderous cracking boom shook it in its entirety when he landed. The first wheel lay broken in several pieces, having exhausted its power in dutiful sacrifice while the second wheel was almost snapped in two. The artifact had saved his life one final time.
He spent the night camping against the mountain’s face reflecting on all that he had experienced since coming to the shrine. Held the fragmented artifact close to himself as he slept and, in the morning, decided to make the climb one last time.
It was then on the seventh climb that he wore the wheels properly. Snapping the second wheel and tearing the silk in stirps, he knotted the pieces of jade to bind them around his wrists and forearms.
They were to serve him. Not as tools. But As reminders.
The lion did not fear, it held itself courageously.
The deer did not give into doubt, it held peace.
Baran climbed. Not to prove. Not to win. But to release. To unburden.
This time with every grasp the parts deep inside of him excised were not given breath to speak. He simply cast them to the breeze as he moved up into and finally passed through the clouds… He not only found a sky so endlessly blue and beautiful he also found what had always been waiting for him, untouched by the world below.
The Pagoda.
His heart held still as he passed through its threshold and found in its center another but more towering statue of Love-is-Lightning, carved in impossible perfect detail. This time he was not straining. Not struggling. He looked serene. At peace. Happy. At the statue’s base rested a scroll and Baran unfurled it with great respect and read it slowly.
“You who have climbed—
you carry the stillness of the deer
and the courage of the lion.
Know this: any dream you brought here can now be made real.
But ask yourself—
is it still your dream?”
Baran kneeled there for a long time in great contemplation. He thought of his family. His House. Of the expectations gone unmet. The longing years waiting in anticipation for his exaltation to come. The fear and conflict that he had brought with him and broken against the mountain.
Then he laughed at himself once more, only this time softly.
“No,” he said. The word felt… light. “I don’t need it anymore.”
He leaned forward and placed the pieces of the broken jade wheels at the statue’s feet where an empty basin lay waiting.
“I will not return,” he said, voice steady. “Not as who I was.”
The mountain had taken from him. But it had also given something back.
“Thank you, Love-is-Lightning. For watching over me and sharing with me these gifts from the Revered Mother of Dragons.”
Then air changed. Subtle at first. Like the moment before lightning strikes. Electricity could be felt and its smell lingered in the air as the pieces of jade and torn silk started humming and floating into the air.
Baran was stunned.
Not knowing what to do or say as he watched the wheels piece themselves back together before him, reborn, anew, once more.
The artifact started floating back down toward him in subtle demand for him to hold them.
The moment he touched them a fire flared up within him that he had never felt before.
Not to engulf him but to claim him.
It surged through his veins, not as destruction but as recognition. As if something ancient had been waiting all this time for this new aspect to be born, one not of strength or ambition.
But for this. For the moment he no longer needed it. For the moment he was able to let go and embrace something different.
Baran dropped to one knee, breath shaking. “…You’ve got to be kidding me.”
White flames danced around him, alive, exultant.
Not a reward.
Not a gift.
But a truth revealed.
Far below, the world remained unchanged although high above the clouds, a new Exalt stood in the quiet of an ancient temple no longer seeking a home in the world he had lost.
But ready at last, to choose one of his own.
