Waiting is always agony. Pure torture. Zhu Ling felt like he was waiting for his hair to turn white, watching that distant line of fire creep closer with each agonizing breath.
He stood on the shattered ramparts of the ancient capital. The night air bit like a blade. His armor offered no warmth. It felt less like protection and more like a casing of solid ice pressed tight against his skin. The moon climbed higher, spilling pale ghostly light across the desolate plains stretching out all around the city.
Far off in the darkness, that winding ribbon of fire crept steadily onward. A column of torches marching through the night. Zhu Ling stared without blinking. He barely breathed. His hands locked onto the broken stone parapet, frozen in place.
Was it General Xiahou Yuan coming to save them? Or the rebel leader coming to finish the job?
That winding line of fire crept forward with agonizing slowness. Hours seemed to drag by. Zhu Ling shivered uncontrollably in the biting wind. His stomach twisted and roared with hunger. He paid it no mind. His eyes never left the horizon.
At long last, the vanguard drew near Chang'an's outer perimeter.
The great gate below blazed with light. Torches flared in iron brackets fixed to the stone walls. Their harsh flickering glow fell full upon the approaching riders.
Zhu Ling squinted hard through the dark. One glance was enough. The man riding at the very head of the column was unmistakable. Broad shoulders. Proud, unyielding bearing. It was General Xiahou Yuan.
Relief crashed over him like a flood. The terrible tension drained away. He let out a long, ragged breath. He smoothed his disheveled hair as best he could and raced toward the stone steps.
He had to warn the general at once.
The city swarmed with rebels. This was clearly a trap. They had left the gates wide open to lure Xiahou Yuan straight inside. A classic, desperate ambush.
Zhu Ling flew down the steps. His lungs burned. He gasped for air in the freezing night. Exhaustion didn't matter. General Xiahou stood right outside the walls.
A few rebel sentries spotted him racing down the ramp. They shouted for him to halt. Zhu Ling ignored them completely and ran even harder.
He reached the ground. The great wooden gates stood swung wide open. Proof. A blatant, deadly trick.
Zhu Ling shot through the archway like an arrow. He sprinted out across the open ground beyond the walls. He reached the lead horse of the approaching column. Threw himself headlong into the dry dirt. Bowed low, his hands striking the earth. And screamed at the very top of his voice.
"GENERAL! STOP! Chang'an has already fallen! The city is a trap! There are enemies inside! Don't trust the gates! Turn around and FLEE!"
He kept his face pressed low to the dust. He waited for Xiahou Yuan to shout the order to fall back. Braced himself to hear the great column turn and wheel away.
He heard nothing.
The night stayed still. Dead silent.
Zhu Ling knelt there for what felt like forever. Bewilderment gnawed at him. Why didn't the general say anything? Why was no one moving?
Then a great voice boomed out, shattering the quiet. Someone was laughing. A deep, rolling laugh that shook the air and hummed in Zhu Ling's chest.
"Easy now. That General Xiahou you're so eager to see? He's been taken too."
The voice belonged to a man built like a mountain.
Zhu Ling blinked hard in utter shock. He lifted his head slowly and peered past the lead horse's legs.
And then he saw everything he had missed in his desperate rush. General Xiahou Yuan wore no armor. Just a plain cloth tunic. No weapon either. His hands rested loosely on the pommel. He stared down at Zhu Ling with an expression of deep misery. His lips parted as if to speak. No sound came. He just closed his mouth and turned his gaze away into the dark.
Beside him sat a figure that turned Zhu Ling's blood to ice. A warrior with skin the color of dark forged iron, mounted on a towering black steed. A wicked curved spear rested across his shoulder. And he looked down at Zhu Ling with open mocking delight.
"Now then. Who exactly are you?" Zhang Fei boomed. "Come to surrender? Or do you want to get smashed right here?"
Zhu Ling knelt frozen in the dust. His mind had completely stopped working. Xiahou Yuan said nothing. Zhang Fei waited. The entire vanguard stood silent, watching the lone man kneeling in the road. The silence grew painfully awkward.
The tension broke a moment later. Another rider trotted forward to the head of the column. Liu Bei.
Liu Bei wore a warm gentle smile. He looked completely at ease.
"My apologies for the delay, Miaocai. You've been waiting out here in the cold. I stopped to examine our Chief Strategist's siege engines. Truly fascinating contraptions. I lost track of the time. Please forgive my discourtesy."
He gestured casually toward the open gates. "Shall we proceed inside the city?"
Then he reined in his horse and looked down. Only then did he notice the panicked man still kneeling in the dirt.
"Hm? And who is this fellow down here?" Liu Bei asked.
Zhang Fei quickly recounted the whole strange scene. He chuckled as he described Zhu Ling's frantic, breathless dash out from the walls to warn his general about a trap.
Liu Bei threw his head back and laughed heartily. No malice. No cruelty. Genuine amusement.
"What courage and devotion to duty! Truly admirable." He turned to his guards. "Disarm this brave fellow. Help him remove his armor. Let him ride alongside Miaocai. Keep them together for tonight."
Zhang Fei smacked his lips in visible disappointment. He had clearly been hoping for permission to start smashing things. But he offered no protest against his elder brother's word.
He waved one massive hand toward his officers.
"Fan Jiang. Zhang Da. Go help our brave little friend out of that heavy gear."
That terrifying high-stakes night raid had ended up feeling like nothing more than a very polite organized robbery. A small absurd twist in the grand course of war. The column reformed and moved on. The victorious force flowed steadily through the gates and into the ancient capital.
As they passed along the quiet dark streets, Xiahou Yuan kept glancing back over his shoulder. He burned with curiosity to see those wondrous siege engines Liu Bei had spoken of. What kind of device could shatter Chang'an's famed walls so swiftly?
But the night was too dark. The land beyond the gates lay swallowed in shadow. Xiahou Yuan gave up trying to make out the engines. He lowered his gaze instead to Zhu Ling walking beside his horse.
Zhu Ling gave his account of the battle, short and sharp and deeply humiliating. Great stones raining down from the sky. Getting struck senseless by flying debris. Waking alone to find the city already lost.
Xiahou Yuan listened in silence. At the end, he breathed a long, heavy sigh of utter defeat.
"So that's exactly how it came to pass."
Zhu Ling claimed he couldn't tell the full tale because he had been knocked unconscious. But Xiahou Yuan was a veteran of a hundred campaigns. He could fill in every gap easily enough.
Weapons that struck from above like the wrath of heaven would shatter any garrison's will to fight. Pure terror made flesh and blood falter. Add a commander struck down in the very first hour of bombardment? The defenders would have broken. They would have scattered and fled in panic through the streets.
And Zhu Ling had said plainly each stone weighed hundreds of pounds. If those engines had been turned upon the wooden gates instead of the stone ramparts, they would have smashed through timber as easily as tearing wet paper.
Chang'an had not fallen to sorcery in a single day. It had fallen to cold, hard, calculated force.
Zhu Ling slowed his steps. He stared down at the cobblestones. "And Zhong Yao..."
Another captive walked quietly beside them in the dark. The scholar Du Xi. He shook his head slowly, a faint knowing smile touching his lips.
"Zhong Yao will be Zhong Yao. He'll come through this perfectly well. That man has weathered storms that would have crushed ten lesser men. A change of rulers won't trouble him in the slightest. If anything, he's probably already drafting tax reforms for the new administration."
Since his humiliating defeat in the river valley, Xiahou Yuan had carried a heavy gloom upon his brow. Hearing Zhong Yao's name darkened his mood still further.
"Zhong Yao served the Han with honor and integrity," Xiahou Yuan muttered bitterly. "It's my cousin Cao Cao who failed him."
Du Xi sighed and smoothed his sleeves with deliberate care. "Indeed. A most unfortunate chain of errors. One might observe that our present ruin was sealed not on the battlefield but in the council chamber. Specifically, when those who knew the west best were not heeded. But I wander. What is done is done. And here we are. Walking. In the dark. As captives. A most educational moment, would you not agree?"
The defeat in the Wei River valley had been total catastrophe. His entire northern army wiped from existence. Now he rode prisoner through Chang'an. The great city that had fallen in a single afternoon. Every step his horse took felt like another blow struck against his heart.
The campaign had been fundamentally broken from the very start. Xiahou Yuan saw it all now with perfect clarity. Even had he held the valley. Even had he broken through and retreated within these walls with thirty thousand elite troops. The end would have been the same. They would simply have starved more slowly behind stronger stone.
The war had been lost years ago. The moment Cao Cao stubbornly rejected Zhong Yao's grand plan. Zhong Yao had begged him to secure Guanzhong first. To firmly establish supply lines before ever marching south. Cao Cao had ignored him.
That single arrogant, short-sighted choice had led them all to this night.
Xiahou Yuan looked ahead at Liu Bei riding calmly at the column's head. One question burned within him. Where had this commoner found such terrifyingly capable men to advise him?
Du Xi appeared not yet finished.
"And so we stand and consider the anatomy of failure," he continued. "Most illuminating. The ancients taught that timing and order are everything. Had Lord Cao Cao, and I mean no disrespect to your cousin, General, properly ordered his priorities in the west, we would not be walking this road tonight. But history, as they say, belongs to the victors. And tonight it seems the victors are simply the ones who brought the larger stones."
Xiahou Yuan tuned out Du Xi's rambling. Let the man have his moment. If endlessly dissecting their defeat helped soothe his wounded scholar's pride, so be it. Everyone coped in their own way.
He looked up at Liu Bei riding ahead of the column. A question gnawed at him, sharp and bitter. Where in the world did this peasant upstart find such terrifyingly competent advisors? Did they come with a buy-one-get-one deal? Was there a sale on genius strategists that he somehow missed?
---
Liu Bei had no time to dwell on the heavy gloom of his prisoners. He rode at the very head of the victorious column, urging his horse forward at a brisk trot. He was practically vibrating with excitement in the saddle.
He gazed eagerly across the dark sprawling city of Chang'an.
This place was legendary. Once the brilliant heart of the known world. A center of unimaginable wealth and splendor. And also of fire and ruin and darkest tragedy. Now it stood broken and scarred yet magnificent, his at long last.
As he rode past shattered foundations and hastily repaired walls, a strange feeling washed over him. A vision rose unbidden before his eyes. A great city of ages yet to come. Wide avenues laid out in perfect order. Markets thrumming with merchants from every corner of the earth. Scholars writing verses that would echo down eternity, singing of a capital built upon thirty thousand miles of hope. A golden age made real.
Then the vision faded. Reality rushed back.
He remembered the hardship he had seen in Hanzhong. Standing upon the walls at Yangping Pass, watching endless streams of refugees stumble down from the northern mountains. Most were folk from Hanzhong. But many more had journeyed all the way from the Guanzhong plains. Proud people of Chang'an driven from their own homes.
These people had walked through hell. They had endured the burning of the capital under Dong Zhuo. They had survived years of cruel warlords tearing the land apart. They had crawled through mud to escape raiding cavalry. They had stripped bark from trees when grain ran out. They had fled deep into the freezing mountains seeking only a place to breathe in peace.
And in time, even the mountains had grown unsafe. So they had fled further south into the basin of Hanzhong. Weary. Starving. Broken.
These people from Chang'an and the surrounding lands, from every corner, looked up at Liu Bei with the same desperate hope in their eyes. As if he were heaven's answer to their prayers. They placed all their faith beneath his banner. They longed for the days of peace and plenty under the old Han to somehow return.
Liu Bei felt a great fire rise within his breast. It burned bright and clear. A reminder that taking this city was not the end. He could not pause. He could not grow complacent.
Chang'an was merely one great bloody step toward something far greater. A dream still distant and difficult beyond measure.
But tonight? Tonight he would allow himself to taste victory.
He rode onward down the broad central avenue. And there, near a newly raised command tent standing quietly in the lamplight, he saw a familiar welcome figure. Zhuge Liang.
Liu Bei gave his horse the spur and galloped forward. He leaped from the saddle before the beast had even fully slowed. He marched straight up to his chief strategist, wearing a face of exaggerated outrage.
"Kongming! You went and captured the imperial capital, and you couldn't even bother waiting for me at the gate?"
Zhuge Liang laughed openly. He waved his feather fan lazily through the cool night air.
"If you truly take offense at my efficiency, my lord, we can walk right back outside at once. I'll ask Mister Zhong Yao to arrange a mock siege for your benefit. We can even pretend you battered down those great gates with your own bare hands."
The courtyard lay dimly lit. Shadows hung thick all around. Liu Bei followed the tip of the feather fan and only then noticed an old man standing quietly apart in the dark. Zhong Yao.
Zhong Yao had braced himself for arrogance. He fully expected the conqueror to puff out his chest and demand submission.
Instead, Liu Bei stepped forward at once, cupped his hands, and bowed low at the waist.
Zhong Yao panicked instantly. He hurried forward to stop the gesture. "Lord Liu! You mustn't do this! A victor doesn't bow to the defeated!"
Zhong Yao was advanced in years and frail. Liu Bei was a warrior in his prime. The old scholar simply had no strength to resist. Liu Bei completed the bow slowly and with great reverence.
He straightened and looked the old administrator steadily in the eye.
"All the while I was stationed in Hanzhong, I heard your name spoken again and again by the common folk. Even the starving refugees spoke of you. They said you held this crumbling land together with nothing but your own hands. A single pillar holding up a falling sky. That you gave of your very self to keep your people alive."
No more words were needed. The respect between them was clear and unmistakable.
Zhong Yao looked at the warlord standing before him. He let out a long, weary sigh that seemed to carry twenty years of toil. He gestured weakly toward the city beyond.
"If you have matters of state to discuss, Lord Liu, perhaps we should speak properly inside."
Liu Bei smiled gently. "Pray wait here in the courtyard a moment, Mister Zhong. I have only just entered Chang'an. And there is one thing I must do first."
Zhong Yao frowned, confused. The ruined imperial palace. Surely Liu Bei didn't mean to rush inside and plant himself on the dusty throne to declare victory, right?
A short while later, Zhong Yao and Xiahou Yuan stood in the courtyard, gazing upward at the great gate's towering walls.
They watched Liu Bei climb the steep stone steps all the way to the very top of the gatehouse. Zhuge Liang walked close at his left hand. Zhang Fei strode heavily at his right.
Liu Bei reached the highest point of the massive structure. He stood firm at the rampart's edge. The bitter night wind whipped his dark cloak sharply about his ankles.
He looked down across the wide dark land spreading out before him. He watched the endless winding river of torches flowing steadily into his new city.
Those flickering lights marked his victorious army. But to the man standing upon the wall, they meant something far greater. And the three men beside him understood the full weight of that fiery line.
In their minds, they traced its source backward through time and distance. That ribbon of fire stretched across the Guanzhong plains. It wound through the high, treacherous Qinling Mountains and down into the basin of Hanzhong. It followed the rivers further south into Jingzhou and the rich lands of Yizhou. And if one looked far enough back, that flame had first been kindled decades ago.
In a peach orchard far to the north in Zhuo Commandery.
Liu Bei drew a long, deep breath. He filled his lungs with the ancient, biting air of the capital.
He spread his arms wide toward the night sky. He lifted his voice and cried out with every ounce of strength within him. His great voice rang out sharp and clear across the stone, carrying over the cheering soldiers and the silent captives alike.
"Today Chang'an is restored! The Three Qin are at peace!"