James Swallow - Jade Dragon

Fixx shook his head. “Can’t let that happen.”

Rope smiled, bearing more teeth than a human mouth should. “Now you’re becoming interesting. ”

The samurai’s bike took him through a roadblock at breakneck speed, but none of the guards were watching; they were crying, singing, pointing into the dark and pregnant skies.

Ko rode around the edges of the crowd, the thunder of their adulation echoing. He tasted the tingling vapour on the wind, glimpsed shapes at the corners of his vision. Sinuous things, serpents and monstrous angels, ghostly and dancing. The rapturous chorus penetrated his mind, begging him to join in.

When the lightning struck, he thought for a moment the Vector was back, but then he turned his head upwards and the sight almost stopped his heart.

In the air over the city there was a rip in the sky, and from it fell huge emerald tears. As he watched, the clouds gave birth to a thing with claws and teeth and eyes of impossible angles. It was drenched in scintillating viridian shades, scaled with jewels so magnificent they took his breath away to see them. Out of the torn maw of cloud it came, borne on vestigial wings, ephemeral but gaining solidity by the second.

Ko joined millions of people across the city of Hong Kong, watching the end of their world begin as the colossus of the Jade Dragon fell screaming to earth.

Zen, zen

I’m the quiet mind inside, pretty voice

I’m the perfect smile

Touch my thoughts and flow

There’s no world we can’t know

Sea of stones, sand waves

Harmony, come with me

Taste the blue

Star at dawn

Bubble in the stream

“Touch”

Vocals: Juno Qwan

© RedWhiteBlue Inc. 2026.

In the corridors of the hospital, a thousand screaming babies tore at the broken minds of the adults. Dr Yeoh collapsed, plunging into hell. In her room, Nikita slept restlessly; she was already there.

Ko stared out over the shining pinnacles of the cityscape. Juno Qwan’s voice smothered everything in a warm fog of noise. He felt her words invading him; she was crying, but he registered this in only the most distant of ways. Down in the metropolis, he could see her face everywhere, on the massive street-screens in Central, on the flickercladding of the Hotel Metropolita; her song played from radios in every apartment, every channel carried her words. The sound was worming its way into him.

He left the bike and staggered up the summit, through people screaming and crying and weeping and laughing. The freakish, sickening high he had shared with Fixx in the hospital was coming back tenfold. He could taste the Z3N in the air, the thick haze washing through his pores. It swelled his heart, made his feet light. The ecstasy of the crowd around him spilled into his mind, getting louder, becoming stronger.

Ko stumbled, his thoughts heavy and indistinct. “Why am I here?”

“For the King!” shouted a reveller, bloody and naked. “He’s come for our love and pain!” A chorus of people mumbled the same words.

Ko looked away, afraid to look out over the bay where the phantom-serpent was forming, coalescing wings and fangs and lizard-skin. The gossamer thing resolved as the people gave it their attention. The Jade Dragon hooted, the sound flattening buildings, shaking the landscape. Ko could not look; his head turned. He could not help himself.

A stinging slap brought him about and falling to the marshy ground. Feng stood over him, fists balled and his scruffy face alight with fury. “Wake up!” he bellowed. “You must not gaze upon the beast! It wants your eyes, it needs your spirit!”

Ko was sluggish as he got up. “She was right… Nikita saw this coming.”

Feng grabbed him, pulled him close. “Sorcery, like the black man said! It lives only through the minds of others! The Dragon is the demon man makes for himself!”

The Road Ronin’s sword was heavy in his hands. “I can’t fight that…”

Feng pointed toward the stage, to a place half-hidden in pools of sickly light. Ko saw Tze up there, lurking in the wings. “Then fight him! ”

Sifu Bruce called the boys to him, had them bolt the doors to the dojo tight and close the storm shutters. They gathered sticky rice to scatter around the perimeter of the building while the old man worked with quick and deft movements, drawing wards on paper banners in sweeping strokes of his brush.

The Jade Dragon arched its back and threw off rimes of frozen interstellar hydrogen. Blood spilt from hundreds of willingly slit throats came together in a wet cloud for the beast to suck in through its teeth. Clawed feet found purchase on skyscrapers; they did not yet fully exist in the plane of flesh, and so they moved ghost-like through the stone and steel, cutting out the souls of those they touched but leaving animate flesh undamaged. The mere presence of the Desire God’s aspect caused spontaneous blood orgies across a ten-kilometre radius from the demon’s point of intersection. Emerald chemicals of a kind that had never existed in this dimension dripped from the tear in the clouds and burned like acid into the streets. The Dragon was slowly unfurling, shaking off the dust of eons. Newborn and yet impossibly ancient, the King of Rapture was pleased to be here once again.

The girl performing oral sex on Hung never surfaced from the shimmering water, and he tried to shift his bulk to see the source of the light flooding in through the windows of the bathhouse. One by one, the other girls turned to him, and where their pretty faces had been there were only nests of worms.

Fixx kept his hands steady, waiting. Rope crossed his eye-line, without apparent concern over the fact that Blue Snake had not disarmed him. The op understood. Rope clearly didn’t think that detail was of any import.

“I’m curious,” said the thin-faced man conversationally. “Do we know the same people?” He recovered the ghost knife from the Mask’s corpse with a sucking pop.

Fixx turned in place, watching him. “Could say that. Crossed paths with the Josephites once or twice.”

“And you’re not dead. That says something for your strength of character… Or perhaps that you’re good at fleeing.”

He shrugged. “Little from Column A, little from Column B.” Fixx shifted his weight. He could get the crossbow from the stance he was in, but he doubted it would do more than just piss the guy off. “Papa Legba always said there’d be a price to pay for that. Just didn’t think it would be today.”

Rope sniggered. “What sweet delusion. As if pieces of cardboard and chicken bones could augur the future!” He made a dismissive gesture. “You think your silly gutter godlings sent you here, is that it? To what end?”

“To stop Tze. I go where fate sends me. I’m the fly in the ointment. Monkey in the wrench.”

“Then we want the same thing, Joshua. It has been my honour to serve the vision of Elder Seth, who sent me on my way so long ago from the Promised Lands of Deseret to this festering anthill,” he bared teeth in a sneer, “here, where I lay in silence, waiting for the day that Tze would recruit me, just as Seth knew that he would. I made myself the perfect minion. We play a long game, Joshua, a very long game. I am here to disrupt the plans of Tze and his conclave of idiots.” He balanced the knife in his grip. “I will stop them from binding the Jade Dragon to their will.” Rope pointed at Frankie with the blade. “This poor wretch, bred from antiquity to be a vessel for the blood that will cage the Lord of Bliss. He’s the last, and when he’s dead, the ‘pattern’ will fall apart. Tze will have nothing. He has compounded his error in trusting me with so vital a facet of his plan. ”

Fixx’s eyes narrowed. “Missing a bit o’ the tale, I reckon. You left out the part where you take the reins of that monster instead. Step in at the last second and leash the beast for yourself. Am I close?”