Chapter : Four
The Phoenix Chamber was not a sanctuary; it was a jade-lined tomb.
I sat on the edge of the bed, the silk beneath my palms slick with cold sweat. The black blood had dried under my nose—a crusty reminder that the crack in my soul was growing. Every time I breathed, I heard it: a wet, dragging sound at the edge of my hearing.
It's coming closer, Yue whispered. Her voice was no longer a memory; it was a resonance in my marrow. The Mirror is hungry, Mei. Don't let them take you to the Mirror.
I pressed my hands over my ears, but the voice wasn't coming from the air. It was coming from the silver-black ink pulsing beneath my skin, creeping higher toward my collarbone. I was becoming a library of dead girls, and Yue was the only one who still knew how to scream.
The heavy bronze doors groaned open.
I expected Long Feng. I expected the golden heat of his presence to burn away the cold. Instead, I saw Grand Chancellor Wei and six monks in robes the color of dried scabs. They didn't look at me like a person. They looked at me like a hazardous spill that needed to be contained.
"The Emperor is occupied with the Ministry of War," Wei said, his voice a dry rattle. "The Blight's remission has left him... volatile. He struck three generals this morning for suggesting the northern campaigns continue. Clearly, the tether has introduced complications. The Tribunal must ensure the vessel has not contaminated the Seal."
"Long Feng forbade anyone from entering," I said, standing. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else—someone much older and much more tired.
"The Emperor's word is law," Wei agreed, his eyes flicking to the ink on my neck. "But the Ancestral Laws are the foundation upon which that law sits. A Void-Born in the palace is an infection. We must see if the vessel is cracked."
Two monks stepped forward, raising yellow talismans.
I didn't wait. I reached for the tether—that invisible hook beneath my ribs. I pulled, hard, trying to scream through the bond—to tell Long Feng that his Anchor was being cut loose.
Nothing.
Not silence. Absence. Like reaching for a limb that had been amputated. The hook was still there, embedded in my soul, but the line was slack. Dead.
My knees buckled. I hadn't realized how much I'd been leaning on that connection, that faint heat from Long Feng's end of the thread. Without it, I was just a girl from the Ash-Wastes, and these men were about to pull me apart to see what was inside.
"He can't hear you, little ghost," Wei whispered, leaning in. His breath smelled of stale incense and rot. "In this chamber, you are exactly what you have always been. Nothing."
The monks seized my arms. Their grip was iron, but it was the coldness of their intent that froze me. They didn't drag me like a prisoner; they carried me like a sacrificial goat.
We passed through the winding corridors of the Inner Palace, the servants bowing and averting their eyes as if I were already a corpse. We stopped before the Hall of Mirrors—a circular room lined with polished obsidian. The walls didn't reflect our shapes, only our shadows, stretching and twisting as if the stone were pulling them down into the floor.
In the center stood the Ancestral Mirror. It was a slab of black glass that seemed to pulse, its surface rippling like a dark pond.
GIVE IT BACK. The voices weren't whispering anymore—they were screaming, a hundred throats shredding themselves in unison. THE MIRROR WANTS THE DEBT PAID.
"Begin the Extraction," Wei commanded.
The monks began to chant. I felt it like fishhooks pulling at the threads holding my soul together, one syllable at a time. I felt a tugging behind my navel, dragging my very essence toward the black glass.
I looked into the Mirror. I didn't see my face. I saw the Void looking back.
The black glass cracked. A sound like ice splitting echoed through the chamber. I watched—frozen—as a hand emerged from the surface. Grey. Skeletal. Dripping with ink that hissed where it hit the stone floor.
It reached for my throat.
I couldn't move , nor scream. I could only watch as the Void's fingers wrapped around my neck—not squeezing, but pulling, dragging me toward the glass.And then, I began to forget.
Not everything at once. Just... one thing. Something small. Something I would only notice later, when I reached for it and found nothing but a hole where the memory should have been.
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[ THE SHATTERING REFLECTION]
The hand on my throat was colder than the Ash-Wastes in midwinter. My breath came in shallow gasps, each one fogging in the freezing air around the Void's fingers.
As it pulled me toward the Mirror's surface, my mind began to flicker like a candle in a gale. I saw a flash of my mother's face—not her face as it was now, but her face whekn I was five. She was laughing. She was holding a small wooden bird she'd carved for my birthday, painted a bright, beautiful—
The skeletal fingers tightened. The memory dissolved into gray smoke. I tried to grab it, to shove it back into the corners of my brain, but it was gone. I couldn't remember what color the bird had been. The joy of the gift remained, a hollow shape in my chest, but the detail—the soul of the memory—was devoured.
"Look at her," Wei's voice came from far away, distorted. "The Void is reclaiming its own. She is not a vessel; she is a doorway. We must seal the hall before she brings the darkness through."
The hand pulled me closer. My nose was inches from the black glass. I saw them now—the girls. Yue was at the front, her eyes weeping silver. She wasn't trying to save me. She was reaching for me, her fingers clawing at the boundary, desperate for a new soul to share the weight of the ink.
Help me, I thought, reaching for the dead tether. Long Feng, help me.
The hall exploded.
It wasn't the sound of a door opening. It was the sound of reality shattering. The gold-leafed wards on the walls burst into flame. The Spirit-Dampening lead melted into puddles.
Long Feng stood in the entrance.
He didn't look like an Emperor. He looked like a storm that had taken the shape of a man. His hair was loose, whipping around his face, and his eyes were no longer molten gold—they were white-hot, pouring light into the dark room.
"Your Majesty!" Wei gasped, dropping to his knees. His voice was steady, practiced—the reflex of a man trying to weave a net out of words even as the world burned. "The ritual was necessary—the Void was pulling her through. We were sealing the breach, not—"
"I told you," Long Feng said. His voice was a low, vibrating growl that made the Ancestral Mirror tremble. "Do not touch her."
Wei's face went white. He opened his mouth—whether to beg or justify, I never found out. Long Feng raised a hand, and the air itself bent. The six monks were thrown against the obsidian walls like dolls, their ribs shattering as the chanting was choked out of them.
He was across the room in a single step. He seized the skeletal arm that was dragging me into the glass and snapped it.
A sound that wasn't a scream—more like the wind howling through a graveyard—ripped from the Mirror. The skeletal hand dissolved into black mist.
I collapsed, my knees hitting the stone. My mind felt like a house that had been robbed; I knew something was missing, but I couldn't remember what I was looking for.
Long Feng knelt in front of me. His aura was so violent it was bruising my skin.
"Mei," he rasped. He grabbed my shoulders, his fingers digging in. "Look at me. What did you lose?"
I looked at him, and for a second, I didn't know who he was. Just a man with burning eyes reaching for me. I felt a terror so deep I tried to crawl away.
"Stay," he commanded, his voice breaking.
He did something then that the Court would have called a suicide. He tore open his robe and pressed his bare palm to the silver-black ink on my throat.
"Open the tether," he whispered. "Drink, Mei. Take it all. If you hollow out, take my light to fill the gaps."
The golden Qi flooded into me, and with it came a heat that burned behind my eyes. Images flashed—not mine, his. I saw a young boy standing in a rain of gold, being told he was the Son of Heaven. I saw the first day the black ink appeared on his wrist. I saw the ten years of screaming in the dark.
And he saw me. He saw the mud of the Ash-Wastes. He saw Xiao.
I took a shuddering breath, the gold and the black swirling together in my chest. My mind stabilized. The holes stopped growing.
I looked up at him. His face was pale—paler than it had been in the carriage. The golden light in his eyes was dimming, a gray shadow creeping back toward his temples.
"You're giving me your life," I whispered.
"I am giving you my time," he corrected, his grip on my shoulders loosening as he slumped forward. His forehead rested against mine. "Do not... do not forget who you are, little ghost. If you forget, I have no one left to remind me that I am still alive."
Outside, I heard the heavy tread of the Imperial Guard. And beneath that, the soft, silk-on-stone sound of Prince Hou's footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. The walk of a man assessing the wreckage.
I sat there, cradling the Emperor's head against my shoulder, the silver ink on my neck glowing with a faint, golden light. I had survived the Mirror. But as I looked at my hands, I realized I couldn't remember the color of my mother's favorite wooden bird.
The hole was there. And it was never going to be filled again.