This is a story my grandfather told me. He heard it from his father, who heard it from a man who claimed to have been there when it happened.

I do not know if it is true. But I have never been able to forget it.

The old man’s name was Yang. He lived in a small village in the northern part of the province, where the winters were long and the soil was thin and the only thing that grew reliably was regret.

He had one son. The son had passed the imperial examination at a young age and had been appointed magistrate in a distant county. The old man was proud of him. He showed the appointment letter to everyone who visited his home.

“My son,” he would say. “Magistrate of the eastern district. He sits in judgment. He dispenses justice.”

The neighbors nodded. They smiled. They went home and whispered about how the son had not visited his father in three years.

The old man did not notice. Or if he noticed, he did not mention it.

The dream came in the autumn.

He was sitting in his courtyard, shelling beans into a bowl. The sun was warm. The air smelled of dust and drying leaves. He was half-asleep, the bowl in his lap, his hands moving by memory.

Then the courtyard was gone.

He was standing on a road. A wide road, paved with stone, lined with torches that burned with a green flame. The sky above was the color of a bruise.

He did not know where he was. But his feet knew. They carried him forward, past the torches, past the gates, into a city he had never seen.

The buildings were tall. The streets were empty. The only sound was the wind, which carried something on it—a low, continuous rumble that might have been voices or might have been growling.

He followed the road to a large building at the center of the city. A government office. The doors were open. The windows were dark.

He walked inside.

The hall was filled with wolves.

They stood on their hind legs, wearing the robes of clerks and secretaries. Their fur was gray. Their teeth were yellow. Their eyes followed him as he walked past, but none of them moved to stop him.

At the far end of the hall, behind a long table piled with scrolls, sat a tiger.

It wore the cap of a magistrate. Its paws were on the table. Its claws had left deep grooves in the wood.

And beside the tiger, scattered across the floor, were bones.

Human bones. Skulls. Rib cages. Fingers still wearing rings. The piles reached the height of a man’s waist. They lined the walls. They filled the corners. The smell was sweet and thick and unmistakable.

The old man stood in the center of the hall. The wolves watched. The tiger watched.

And then the tiger opened its mouth and spoke with the voice of his son.

“Father.”

The old man woke.

The bowl of beans had fallen from his lap. The beans were scattered across the ground. A chicken was pecking at them. The sun was still warm. The air still smelled of dust and drying leaves.

He sat in his chair for a long time.

That afternoon, he wrote a letter to his son. He did not mention the dream. He asked about the son’s health, his work, his household. He said he was thinking of visiting.

The reply came a month later. The son wrote that he was busy. The county was large. The cases were many. Perhaps in the spring.

The old man read the letter three times.

Then he packed his bags.

The journey took two weeks. He traveled by cart and by foot and by boat. The roads grew worse as he went east. The villages grew poorer. The faces of the people he passed grew thinner.

He arrived at the county seat on a gray afternoon.

The city was smaller than he expected. The streets were empty. The buildings were shabby. The only grand structure was the magistrate’s office, which sat at the center of the city like a spider in its web.

He walked to the gate. Two guards stood on either side. They were well-fed. Their uniforms were new. They looked at the old man in his patched traveling clothes and did not move aside.

“I am the magistrate’s father,” he said.

They looked at each other. One of them laughed.

“Step aside,” the old man said.

They did not step aside. But a clerk appeared from inside, thin and nervous, and whispered something to the guards. They moved.

The old man walked in.

The hall was clean. The floors were swept. The walls were white. The clerks who sat at the desks wore neat robes and wrote with steady hands.

But the old man looked at their faces.

He saw sharp teeth behind their smiles. He saw yellow eyes that glanced at him and looked away too quickly.

And at the far end of the hall, behind a long table piled with scrolls, sat his son.

The young man stood when he saw his father. He smiled. He came around the table and embraced him.

“Father. You should have told me you were coming.”

“I wrote.”

“Did you? The letter must have been lost on the road.”

The old man looked past his son’s shoulder. The table was covered in documents. Deeds. Petitions. Judgments. Each one signed in his son’s hand.

“I had a dream,” the old man said.

“A dream?”

“About this place.”

His son’s smile did not waver. “Dreams are dreams, Father. You have traveled a long way. Let me find you a room. Something to eat.”

The old man stayed for a week.

He walked through the city. He talked to the people. He listened.

And what he heard made the dream come back to him every night.

The magistrate took bribes. The magistrate favored the rich. The magistrate had a man beaten to death for failing to pay a debt. The magistrate had seized land from widows and orphans and given it to his friends.

The old man heard these things and said nothing.

On the seventh night, he dreamed again.

He was back in the hall. The wolves were there. The tiger was there. The bones were there.

But this time, his son saw him.

The tiger stood. It walked around the table. It approached the old man with slow, heavy steps.

“You should not have come here, Father.”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Now you have seen.”

The tiger opened its mouth. The teeth were long. The breath was warm and wet.

“Do you know what happens to those who see too much?”

The old man woke.

He left the next morning. He did not say goodbye. He walked out of the city before dawn, retracing the road he had traveled two weeks before.

He did not speak about the dream again.

But he wrote a letter to the provincial inspector. He wrote down everything he had seen. Everything he had heard. Everything the people of the county had told him in whispered voices and averted eyes.

He sealed the letter and sent it.

Then he waited.

Months passed. Nothing happened.

The old man grew thinner. He stopped eating. He stopped sleeping. He sat in his courtyard and stared at the wall.

The neighbors brought him food. He did not touch it.

“He is dying,” they said. “Of old age. Of grief. Of something that has no name.”

But I know what killed him.

He told my grandfather the story on his deathbed. His voice was thin. His eyes were fixed on something no one else could see.

“I saw the bones,” he said. “I saw what he had done. And I could not stop it.”

“What did the inspector say?” my grandfather asked.

The old man shook his head.

“The inspector never wrote back. But I heard, months later, that the magistrate had been promoted. He was transferred to the capital. A larger office. More power.”

He closed his eyes.

“The bones are still there,” he said. “They do not go away. They stay in the hall. They stay in the dream. They stay.”

My grandfather asked him what happened to his son in the end. He did not know. The son had stopped writing. The son had stopped visiting. The son had become a stranger who wore his name and sat behind a table covered in paper and bones.

The old man died that night.

My grandfather told me this story when I was young. He told it to warn me.

“Power turns men into animals,” he said. “And the worst part is, they do not see it happening. The son did not know he was a tiger. The clerks did not know they were wolves.”

“What about the bones?” I asked.

“The bones are the people they destroyed along the way. The people who trusted them. The people who believed that a magistrate was a just man.”

I thought about that story for a long time.

I am grown now. I have seen enough of the world to know that my grandfather was not telling a supernatural tale. He was telling a story about something that happens every day, in every province, in every county.

The tiger does not know it is a tiger.

The wolves do not know they are wolves.

They wake up in the morning, put on their robes, sit behind their tables, and do not see the bones piled around their feet.

But someone always sees.

Someone always dreams.