The old ones of the clan find me insufferable, because I insist on saying true things.
For instance: the dragon clan is not guarding the gate. It is hiding from it.
The matron raps her cane at me for that; the Grand Tutor closes his eyes and says nothing. But do the arithmetic yourselves: the gate is a dead thing, its chains wind themselves, and the ones actually standing watch are shrimp privates, crab-guards, and a few shifts of yakshas. And the dragons? The dragons huddle in the side halls copying old genealogies and burning old incense, living for three hundred years on five words: await the King's instruction.
I will not wait. I am a flood dragon — a jiao. In the old speech that word means a dragon not yet grown. But the old speech has a second half they never recite: a jiao that meets wind and cloud becomes a dragon.
If the wind and cloud will not come, go find them.
So I am the busiest creature in the palace. When the broken tides drowned the shore villages, I drove the water back. When the undertow dragged off the fishing boats, I shouldered them up. When Seagaze Station's plea for relief could not reach the palace, I carried the dispatch through the side halls in my own teeth. The old ones call me wild. They say a jiao that stirs disturbs the dignity of dragons.
Dignity! The people and yao of the coast have nearly forgotten how the character for dragon is written. What dignity is left to disturb?
Why do I burn myself this way? Half because I cannot stand to watch. The other half I will not hide from you: I am accruing the merit of rain-work.
The old protocol of dragon-becoming is explicit: when a jiao completes five hundred years of merit, a heaven-bolt comes to lead the way, up past the Southern Gate to the Dragon-Becoming Pool, where one bath of celestial rain strips away the last jiao-scales. My five hundred years are nearly full. The merit I have gathered drop by drop. But the protocol does not mention —
that no heaven-bolt has come to lead anyone in three hundred years.
Of the elder jiao, three completed their merit before me. The first went up, struck the tribulation clouds, fell back into the sea, lay broken for fifty years, and never spoke the words dragon-becoming again. The second refused the lesson and chose an eclipse night, saying the cloud ran thin beside the black moon. He did not fall back. He simply never returned. The third scattered his five hundred years of merit among the clan's sick and old, saying: in such an age, why hoard it?
Now it is my turn.
I know what is up there. The Gale-Splitting Falcon told me what it saw: the tribulation clouds are a built thing, a canopy; the black moon is a lid. It warned me: don't ram it. A canopy must have a door.
As it happens, I have touched the shadow of that door myself. Whenever the gate-foot booms, the tribulation clouds shiver in answer. I have timed it against the night-watches dozens of times. Never once off. The gate at the bottom of the sea and the canopy at the top of the sky are joined. One lock, holding both ends.
So when others see me running errands for those children from the shore, they take it for a jiao's meddling nature. It is not.
They mean to open the gate. I have waited half a lifetime for exactly this.
In the moment the gate opens — if the sky above cracks with it, even by a thread, even for a heartbeat —
then my wind and cloud will have come.
Matron. Grand Tutor. Do not stand in my way when it happens.
Some dragon, after these three hundred years, must climb the sky again.