Warfires Across the Land

[This story is entirely fictional. Please do not take it as fact.] Also known as Iron Horses and Frozen Rivers in My Dreams or Strange Cases: 1931 At night I lie awake, listening to the wind and rain; iron horses and frozen rivers come to me in dreams. In the twentieth year of the Republic, strange entities began to stir under cover of darkness in Shenyang. To solve a string of bizarre cases, Bai Yelan, commander of the Night Watch, personally took into custody Ning Tinghe, an antique shop apprentice who carried the secret of the River Map. One was a blade of the nation, bound by iron discipline; the other, a key to secrets a thousand years old, with no freedom to choose. From suspicion and wariness to entrusting their lives to each other, the two summoned the strange phenomenon known as Iron Horses and Frozen Rivers and stood side by side amid the flames of a ravaged age: seizing treasures in the shadow war in Shanghai, summoning spirits beneath Jinling, standing back to back in the blazing fires of Changsha... They wielded the occult arts as weapons against foreign invaders and their dark sorcery. Then, in the first snow atop the Forbidden City, they glimpsed the tangled threads of their shared fate. This is a story about protecting what matters: protecting a land on the brink of collapse, protecting the spark of civilization, and protecting, at the end of the flames of war, the one gaze that reflects their truest selves.