“My father is dead,” I told him flatly, quelling the pang in my heart.

He flinched like I had struck him. “He might as well be.” The man swung around, his robe flaring as he strode away.

I stared at the bow slung over his shoulder, intricately carved from silver, the points of its limbs curved like fangs. Something pulsed through me, reminiscent of the first time I had seen the Jade Dragon Bow—though there was no pull this time, just the thrum of power.

This was no mortal weapon.

“Wait!” I cried out. “Your bow. Where did you get it from?”

He halted but did not turn. “It was given to me.”

“By whom?” I found myself bracing for his answer.

“You know him as the Celestial Emperor,” he said slowly. “Though it was poor recompense for everything else he took.”

It was as though the breath was knocked from me, the strength sapped from my limbs. I sank down, shaking, though I was not cold—battling the reckless hope surging within when all I wanted was to unleash it, to write my future anew. One with my family whole, with both my mother and father.

“Impossible,” I whispered.

His eyes creased with sorrow. “Daughter, you are mortal-born, yet immortality flows in your veins. Your home should be here, yet you live on the moon. You, more than anyone, should have learned that nothing is impossible.”

I forced my mind to clear, to piece together the fragments of my thoughts. He was an archer. A mortal in the early winter of his life. He carried the silver bow from the legends—the one painted on my mother’s book, upon this very grave. He knew who I was. And as I stared at his features, at the cleft in his chin … I knew him too.

This was no trick. More than anything I had reasoned, this was knowledge that sprang from within. There were so many things I wanted to say, countless more I had whispered in the solitude of my mind, and yet nothing emerged except this one, halting word from my throat.

“Father.”

I bowed, fighting back the emotions that flooded me, the hot tears surging into my eyes. He was almost a stranger; he had never been a parent to me, as I had never been his daughter. We lacked the memories, the living, that gave such a bond its strength. And yet, deep down, there was this undeniable link between us—forged through flesh and blood and something more profound, impossible to decipher.

A brightness glazed his own eyes, a smile breaking out, softening the harsh angles of his face.

“My name is Xingyin. Mother named me for the stars.” A strange thing for a daughter to tell her father, but perhaps he did not know and was unsure how to ask.

“A good name,” he said hoarsely. “You’re taller than your mother, though you have her look about you.”