Once, he might have knelt at his master’s feet and begged for forgiveness. He might have told Dé’zǐ of the Demon Gods, of his plan to stop the Elantians from taking them for themselves. Yet now, Zen realized, no matter how hard Dé’zǐ had tried to save him, Zen could not run from his fate—the one that had been written in the stars of a young child who’d lost everything on the frozen Northern Steppes of the Last Kingdom. His soul had been forsaken since the day he’d chosen to accept the demon’s bargain; his story could have had only one ending, one that Dé’zǐ could not rewrite no matter how hard
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