The tickle of the hot flame beckoned her awake. Her flesh cracked and burned and her thighs uncovered by wool now recoiled and retracted into the long cloak the discovered around herself.
Her body rest on warm tatami with bamboo adorned inside clay black and orange pots at the corners of the room to soften the white rice paper walls. Inside this room was a hearth at the center, a flame that flickered and fluttered as she awakened and a masked man that stared through it from across the room.
Startled, she gathered the fabric and pulled back to discover two guards behind her. Adorned in black and orange with metal masks shaped like owls, or birds of some sort, she couldn't quite tell from the reflection of the fire that gazed down at her from their blank metal expressions.
Across the room, the man that sat on the throne atop a platform three steps from the floor she laid on, stood and then slowly approached. Step by step the black tabs quiet like a falcon dropped from the platform to the floor. Fabric drew to hide the throne and the chamber behind barely silhouetted by the fire.
He was tall, at least taller than her and he stood over her like a lord of metal and fire, but this was no man of the Shirai Ryu.
His voice carried weight and pulled her down deep with its gravel and gravity. He spoke with justice and spoke bluntly, "you have disturbed the great ice beasts that protect these mountains."
Beat.
Beat.
Like a club over her head her heart thumped against the tatami floor with each step he took toward her. He wore all black save for metal scale down his chest to protect his vital organs and the metal mask with a single solid slit across his eyes that carved like a scar down the center to his chin. Beyond that, orange tears like flames rippled across his sleeves to black gloves that now threw themselves to the floor as he peeled them from his bitter flesh.
"Guardians of the Lin Kuei, they are vigilante and do not allow any to pass through these mountains without permission."
This man was no Lin Kuei.
No Shirai Ryu.
She begged, "please, I'm only searching for my family!"
He had reached her in so few strides it frightened her. Soon he pulled her free of the cloak that kept her flesh hidden and inspected the fear etched across her face, the terror that shivered the very core of her soul deep within her ice blue eyes.
"She is a Cryomancer, like the Grandmaster."
As if he had suddenly lost interest in her alone, he shoved her to the guards that suddenly covered her with their strength. He tossed the cloak to her and turned his back to the woman as the fire danced across his mask like a sorcerer that whispered to him.
He listened carefully to the cackle and the murmurs of the flames that sizzled with intent across his face.
She watched with horror. What would become of her?
Would her brother even know she had tried so hard to find him?
"Find her a chamber to sleep in on the third floor. Give her a view of the mountains." He turned to her, and as the blank expression across the metal frightened her, what face may lurk deep beneath it made her tremble with greater for for though a monster stared her in the eyes, a man she knew nothing about was just beneath that harsh surface. "The fire has spoken, and the time has come for the Tengu.
"This is the way." The guards echoed.
The woman was pulled from his presence and the doors slid shut with haste as her screams filled the many floors of the ancient palace. Once she was merely an echo, a dream that could no longer seep into the black padding of his mask, the leader of the Tengu Clan, Wue Lae returned to the platform and slid open the door to his personal chamber.
Here a bed lay and a chest await, and a window called to him with wind that howled like the beasts of the mountains and snow the prickled and stabbed the palace like the teeth of the ice beasts that he could see still stalked outside of his clan's walls.
Never would they stray within even a toe through those walls, unless they knew just who he had captured.