CHAPTER 15 — THE ACCOUNT OF RUKE
Dr. J'an
Most of what survives of the Tàiyáng Empire's history was written by men, or written about men, or written in service of men who wanted a particular version of themselves preserved.
This account is different.
Ruke was, by any objective measure, one of the most capable people in the empire — a magic'e practitioner whose depth of understanding exceeded her father's by her mid-twenties, an administrator whose involvement in the Sensō integration shaped outcomes that Marrick got credit for, and a woman who had, from the moment she met Marrick, understood him more completely than he understood himself.
She wrote this in her private record, not for posterity. For herself. The way people write things down when they need to understand them before they can live with them.
I have not edited it.
I want to note one thing before it begins: this is, among everything I have assembled for this history, the account I return to most often. Not because it contains the most information. Because it contains the most truth — the specific kind of truth that only becomes available when someone who loves a person also sees them clearly, without the protection of either illusion or distance.
Marrick, in every other document in this archive, is a force. A decision-maker. A presence that other people orbit and respond to and are shaped by.
In this account, he is a man who is afraid.
That is the thing worth understanding. Not because fear diminishes him — it doesn't — but because without it, you cannot understand what comes next. And without understanding what comes next, you cannot understand why it cost what it did.
— Dr. J'an
Private Record of Ruke, Empress of the Tàiyáng Empire
Let me tell you what I know about my husband before I tell you what happened.
Not what everyone knows. Not the version that moves through the territories in the mouths of soldiers and tribal leaders and the people whose villages we passed through on the unification campaign, the version that has hardened over the years into something almost mythological. I mean what I actually know. What you only know about a person when you have shared a bed with them and watched them sleep and learned the specific sound of their breathing when they're at rest versus when they're performing rest.
Marrick loves three things with the same absolute completeness that he brings to everything else he does.
He loves this empire. Not abstractly — not the idea of it, not the symbol of it. The actual, specific, flawed thing he built, stone by stone and battle by battle, over years of work that I know the full cost of because I was there for most of it. He loves it the way a person loves something they made with their hands when they had almost no material to work with and managed to make it stand anyway.
He loves his family. His mother, who endured things that would have ended most people and got up the next morning anyway. His sisters — May, who built this city in the parts that don't show; Ki, who has never in her life accepted a limit she didn't test personally; Han, who keeps people alive through sheer refusal to let their bodies do what bodies do when they've taken too much damage. All of them. Completely.
And he loves me.
I am not going to be modest about this. I know he loves me because I have watched him make decisions, over years, that only make sense if I am weighted correctly in the accounting. He is not a man who makes decisions that don't make sense. Every choice he makes, he makes having calculated the outcome. The fact that I appear in his calculations as something he will not sacrifice — something that changes what he is willing to do and what he won't — is the closest thing to a declaration he is capable of, and it is enough.
But here is the thing about loving Marrick.
His love is not soft. It doesn't have soft edges, doesn't come with flexibility built in, doesn't leave room for the people it covers to be anything other than what he needs them to be. He loves his family the way a person loves their own survival — completely and without any particular willingness to examine the cost to everything outside it. The things he has done, and the things he will do, are not contradictions of his love. They are expressions of it. The love is the reason. The destruction is the method. In his mind these are not two different things.
I understand this. I have understood it since before I agreed to marry him, which I want to be clear was a genuine agreement — not a political arrangement, not a capitulation, not anything other than two people who had been paying close attention to each other for long enough to know that this was what they wanted.
I chose him.
I am telling you this because what follows is going to sound, at points, like a story about a woman who married something she didn't fully understand. That is not the story. I understood him. I understood exactly what I was agreeing to.
What I didn't understand — what I don't think anyone understood before it happened — was what he was like when he was afraid.
The day Fay was born, I was with May.
She had been painting all morning. May always paints — it's the thing she does when she needs to be somewhere that isn't the administrative reality of helping run an empire. She paints war, which is an interesting choice for someone whose primary contribution to this empire has been organizational rather than military. She always paints war like it's beautiful. Bodies and ash and fire arranged with the same careful attention that someone else might give to a landscape.
I've never agreed with that rendering. But I've never told her that, because the paintings are hers and they're not for me to have opinions about.
I was standing behind her, watching the painting take shape and thinking about something else entirely, when the pain arrived.
Not building pain. Not a warning. It arrived fully formed, immediate, and absolute, and I dropped without deciding to drop, and the word I managed to produce before May reached me was just: my water.
Everything after that was not a sequence I participated in so much as something that happened to me and around me. May's voice changing register completely, going from careful and quiet to something that moved fast. The sound of the door, people coming in, hands that were efficient rather than gentle because efficiency was what the situation required. The trip to the healing chambers — the palace's west wing, where Han works and where the preparation had been made weeks ago because we had known this was coming, we had simply not known it would come now.
By the time we got there I couldn't think clearly. Not from panic — I don't panic, it's not a mode I operate in. From pain, which is different. Pain doesn't ask you to respond. It simply occupies everything.
"Where is Han—"
"She's coming—"
The doors opened.
Not Han.
Marrick.
I don't know how he knew. He was in a meeting — I found out later that the meeting was with three tribal leaders and that he walked out of it mid-sentence when a guard came to the door, and the three tribal leaders sat there for forty minutes before someone thought to tell them that the meeting was over.
He came in already moving fast, already scanning the room, already doing the assessment that he does automatically in any situation — what is happening, what are the variables, what do I need to do.
He found me.
"Ruke."
"Yes," I said. "I'm here." I was trying to keep my voice steady, which was something I was doing for him, not for me. I could hear something in his voice that I had never heard before and I needed it not to get worse.
"Are you alright?"
"Yes," I said.
A breath.
"No."
That almost made him laugh. I saw it — the thing that would have been a laugh if the situation had been different, if he'd had any space for it. He doesn't laugh easily or often and this was one of those moments where he almost did.
Almost.
"Han." He didn't shout it. He said it the way he says things that need to happen immediately, with the specific weight that comes from someone who is used to what he says becoming true. "Han."
"I'm working on it, Marr." Han was already there, already moving through the room with the focused efficiency she brings to medical situations, which is different from the controlled efficiency she brings to everything else — medical efficiency has an edge of something animal to it, some deep-body understanding of stakes. "Don't rush me."
"…Sorry."
He meant it. That's worth noting. There are very few people in this world who Marrick apologizes to and means it, and Han is one of them, and the reason is simple: she is the person who decides whether people live or die in this palace, and he respects that absolutely.
He came to my side.
He took my hand.
He did not let go.
My father arrived not long after — Fuxi, who had been in the city and who came quickly and quietly and positioned himself where he was useful, which is what my father always does. Between him and Han the room became organized around purpose — sigils drawn precisely, words spoken at specific intervals, the kind of controlled magic'e that looks, to someone who doesn't know what they're watching, like ritual, but is actually just technical work performed by people who know exactly what they're doing.
Marrick stayed at my side through all of it.
Not performing staying. Not enduring it. Just — there. His hand around mine, which is not a thing he does easily, physical contact as an expression of emotion rather than as a functional action. He was there because he needed to be there, and that need was visible in a way that most things about him are not visible.
Hours.
I won't account for all of them.
At a certain point — a specific moment, not gradual — everything stopped, and then Fay was in my arms.
I'm not going to try to describe what that felt like. I've thought about it many times since and I don't have language for it that isn't either inadequate or dishonest. The closest I can come is this: something that had been theoretical became real, and the gap between theory and reality turned out to be much larger than I had understood, and on the other side of that gap was something that reorganized everything around it.
She was real.
She was small and real and making the specific sounds of something that has just arrived somewhere and has opinions about it, and she was in my arms, and everything else — the pain, the hours, the room, the war that was being planned in the rooms below us — went to a distance that felt, in that moment, like it belonged to a different world.
I held her for a long time.
Then Marrick said my name. Just my name. Quiet.
"…May I?"
I want to write about that pause. The one before I gave her to him.
It wasn't doubt. I want to be clear about that — I have never doubted Marrick as a father, which is a strange thing to say about a person whose capacity for violence is as total as his. But I know him. I know what he is capable of and I know what is inside him, and there was never any question in my mind that Fay was safe with him. That's not what the pause was about.
The pause was because letting go felt wrong in a way that had nothing to do with him. She had been part of me for months and she was no longer part of me and the adjustment was simply — not finished yet.
I gave her to him.
And I watched his face.
This is the part I think about most.
He held her the way people hold things they are afraid to break — not tentative, not uncertain, but with a specific carefulness that is different from his normal precision. His normal precision is efficient, purposeful, aimed at an outcome. This was different. This was carefulness for its own sake, for the value of the thing being held, with no purpose beyond the holding.
He looked at her.
And his face — which is, under almost all circumstances, a controlled thing, a managed surface — became something else entirely.
It was love. Immediate and total and not managed at all.
I recognized it because I had just felt it myself. That exact quality. The thing that reorganizes everything.
And then, so quickly that I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't been watching him with my entire attention, it shifted.
Not away from love. Alongside it. Something else arrived in the same space.
Fear.
Not the kind that looks like fear from the outside — not widened eyes or a changed posture or any of the visible signals. The kind that lives in the jaw. In the way the breath arrives. In the specific set of the eyes that belongs to someone who has just understood what it means to have something they cannot afford to lose.
And with the fear — determination. Cold. Absolute. The same determination I had seen on his face before battles, before difficult decisions, before moments where he had resolved to see something through regardless of what it cost.
But directed inward.
Directed at the child in his arms.
He had decided something, in that moment, that I was not privy to. Something about what he was going to do and what he was not going to allow. Something about the war and this child and the specific relationship between those two things.
I didn't ask him about it then. The room was full of people and the moment wasn't the moment for it. But I filed it carefully in the part of my mind where I keep the things about him that I'm still in the process of understanding.
We named her Fay. Fay Jūnfá.
She was born with his red skin and my white hair and four wings that were unmistakably Tengu in structure — slim and articulate, gray-feathered, folded against her small back with the instinctive neatness that Tengu wings have even from birth. One horn, centered, small, the pale color that horns start before they darken with age.
She was exactly herself from the first moment. I don't know how else to say it. Some children arrive and seem to be waiting to become something — held in potential, not yet formed. Fay arrived already formed. Already in possession of her own specific presence. I noticed this immediately and filed it the same way I filed everything about her — carefully, with the conviction that the details mattered.
The months that followed the birth were when I first understood that something was wrong with Marrick.
Not with his care of Fay — that was, if anything, excessive in its thoroughness. He would not allow any slave to touch her, which was his prerogative to decide and which I didn't object to, though the practical implications required adjustment. He fed her himself, held her himself, watched her sleep with the specific quality of attention that belongs to someone who is performing a guard function and also genuinely cannot look away. He was always there.
And he never slept.
I noticed this gradually and then all at once. The first few weeks I attributed it to what it appeared to be — the natural wakefulness of a new parent, particularly one who has taken on more of the physical care than most people in his position would. This was plausible. This was, in fact, the explanation I wanted.
Then I started watching more carefully.
Three days. Three nights. I tracked it deliberately, waiting for the moment when he would concede to sleep. Waiting for the point at which his body would simply override the decision.
It didn't happen for three days.
On the third day he collapsed on the way to the bathhouse. Not dramatically — he didn't fall, didn't lose consciousness. His body simply stopped complying and he had to sit down against the wall of the corridor and stay there until it agreed to continue. A guard found him and sent for me, and by the time I arrived he was upright again and telling the guard it was nothing.
It was not nothing.
I started watching him differently after that.
Not obviously. Marrick is observant enough that obvious would have produced a conversation I wasn't ready for yet. I watched the way you watch something you're worried about when you can't let the thing know you're worried — from the corner of attention, cataloguing without appearing to catalogue.
I noticed the staring first.
He would stop — mid-sentence, mid-task, mid-movement — and look at something that wasn't there. Not the distant look of someone thinking about something. Something else. Something that had a quality of direction to it, like he was looking at a specific point in the air in front of him rather than through it. And the expression was not the expression of thought. It was the expression of someone who has seen something and cannot stop seeing it even when it isn't there.
Like the seeing had gotten into the memory and was replaying.
Then the flinching. Small, brief, controlled — he managed it well enough that most people wouldn't have called it flinching. But I know his body's relationship with space. I know how he holds himself and how he moves and the specific language of his physical responses to different situations. He was flinching at something only he could see.
Like it saw him back.
When he slept — which was rare and never long — he would wake suddenly, gasping. The gasping bothered me most. Marrick doesn't gasp. He is not a person whose body produces involuntary sounds of distress. He has trained himself past that over years of being in situations where distress is information you don't give to the people around you.
But at night, alone in the dark, when the only person who could hear it was me, his body stopped managing it.
I asked him. Every time he woke that way, I asked him.
"What is it."
"Nothing."
"Tell me."
"I'm fine. Go back to sleep."
"Marrick."
"It's the war. There's a lot to coordinate. I'm not sleeping well."
He is a very good liar in the technical sense — precise, consistent, delivered without the tells that most liars produce. The lies were good enough that if I hadn't known him as well as I do, they would have worked.
Marrick only lies to protect something.
He never lies for himself. He lies for the people he loves — to keep them from worrying, to shield them from things he has decided they shouldn't carry, to maintain in their minds a version of reality that he has deemed better for them than the true one. He lies with an intention behind it that is, in its own way, a form of love.
Which meant the lies were real. Which meant there was something he was protecting me from. Which meant something was very wrong.
A week after Fay was born, he told me he was leaving.
The unification campaign — the journey through the mountain territories to bring the remaining tribes and kingdoms into the alliance before the war began. He and my father and a delegation large enough to be impressive without being provocative. He had been planning this for months. I knew it was coming.
I asked to go with him.
He said no. Too quickly, and too firmly, and with the specific quality of a person who has already thought about this question and decided the answer before I asked it.
"It's too dangerous," he said.
I looked at him.
He knew I was looking at him. He met my eyes for a moment and then looked somewhere else, which is also not something Marrick does — he meets eyes, always, because looking away is a concession he doesn't make.
"Fay needs you here," he added.
Better. More true. But still not the real reason, and we both knew it, and he knew that I knew it, and neither of us said that part out loud because saying it would have required him to explain what the real reason was.
I let it go.
Instead I went to my father.
"Watch him," I said. "Whatever is happening to him — watch it. Help him where you can. And send word if anything gets worse."
My father looked at me for a moment with the look he has when he knows more than he is saying and is deciding how much to bridge the gap.
"Yes," he said. Just that.
He was gone for six weeks.
My father's messages came every few days — brief, factual, written in the careful language of someone who was aware that messages could be read by people other than the intended recipient and who was adjusting the content accordingly.
I read between what was written.
The campaign was working. The tribes were joining. The structure that Marrick had planned was assembling correctly — the alliance taking shape the way he had envisioned it, the pieces moving into the positions he needed them in.
But Marrick was not himself.
This was never stated directly. What was stated: he was efficient. He was fast. He was not spending time on persuasion that he judged unnecessary. Several meetings that my father had anticipated taking half a day took less than an hour because Marrick arrived with the choice already stated — join or don't, here are the consequences of each — and waited for an answer with the patience of someone who has fully accepted both possible outcomes.
This was Marrick at his most ruthless. This was Marrick with the parts of him that slow down removed.
When they met King Sha'le — one of the more established mountain rulers, a man who had survived decades by understanding which forces he could not resist and adjusting accordingly — Sha'le made the mistake of beginning the meeting as though it was a negotiation between equals. He had a position, he had leverage, he was prepared to use both.
Marrick listened to the opening for approximately three minutes.
Then he gave him the choice.
Sha'le, being a man who understood survivable situations, chose to join. My father noted that the speed of his compliance suggested he had correctly read Marrick's state in that meeting, which meant it was visible to people who were paying attention.
But the message that stopped my sleep — the one I read three times before I put it down — concerned King Tiy.
Tiy was a fool, which my father stated plainly. A man with a strong position and poor judgment about when that position was actually strong. He began the meeting confidently. He spoke at length. He made points he expected to be engaged with.
And Marrick, mid-meeting, simply stopped.
Not paused. Stopped. Present in the room but no longer in the conversation — somewhere else entirely, looking at something only he could see, while a king continued making his case to someone who had left.
My father had to take over. He constructed a set of arguments about the Elder Beast, about what it would do to the unprotected territories, about why joining the alliance was the only survivable option. He built it quickly and sold it well, which is my father's specific skill, and Tiy — being a fool — believed it.
The meeting succeeded.
But Marrick had not been in it for the last half of it. He had not been anywhere anyone else in that room could reach.
My father's note about this was the most direct thing he wrote in six weeks: something found him on the mountain and has not fully let go. I am watching it. I don't know yet if it gets worse.
He came home on a night when the volcanic terrain was unusually quiet — the deep rock settling rather than active, the glow along the ridgelines lower than usual, the air dry and still in the way it gets sometimes in the late season.
I was awake when he arrived. I had been awake.
I had Fay in my arms, which was where I preferred to have her in the hours when the empire wasn't requiring me to be somewhere or doing something, and I was sitting near the window of the east room when I heard his footsteps in the corridor. Heard them stop outside the door. Heard the pause before the door opened.
He came in and looked at us and something in his face did what it always does when he sees her — that thing I watched happen the night she was born, the same thing every time. The reorganization.
I didn't speak first. I've learned when to wait.
He crossed the room and sat down beside me and looked at Fay for a while. She was asleep. She sleeps with the serious concentration of someone doing important work.
"She's bigger," he said.
"Six weeks will do that."
He looked at her for another moment. "She has your mouth."
I looked. She didn't, particularly. But I understood why he said it. "Does that bother you?"
"No." He said it immediately. "No. I like it."
He reached out and touched her hand very gently — his hand, which can press through stone, holding one small finger as lightly as he would hold something made of glass. She shifted slightly in her sleep and made a small sound and did not wake. He withdrew his hand slowly.
We sat in the quiet for a while.
"How was the campaign," I said, even though I already knew.
"Complete," he said. "Everything is in place."
"And you?"
A pause.
"Also complete," he said.
I looked at him.
He was looking at the window. At the ridgeline. At the lower-than-usual glow of the volcanic activity in the mountains he had spent his entire life inside.
"Marrick."
"I'm tired," he said. "It was a long journey."
"I know." I shifted Fay carefully and reached out and put my hand over his. He went still — not pulling away, just still, the way he goes still when something physical surprises him. "I know you're tired. That's not what I'm asking."
Silence.
I waited.
This is the part of loving Marrick that requires the most patience: the part where you have identified the thing that needs to be said and you understand that he is also aware of it and you both know that the conversation has to happen and you are simply waiting for him to arrive at it in his own time, because pushing him toward it never works. You can only make yourself available and wait.
Three minutes. Maybe four.
Then, quietly:
"I had the dream again."
He hadn't told me about the dream. But the fact that he said again told me it had happened more than once, that he had been having it for long enough that it had accumulated enough instances to be referred to as recurring. During the campaign. Before the campaign. Probably since the mountain.
"Tell me," I said.
He was quiet for long enough that I thought he wouldn't. Then:
"It's not really a dream. It doesn't feel like a dream. It feels like — a memory. Something that actually happened. And I'm back in it."
"The mountain," I said.
He looked at me.
"My father told me," I said. "Not details. Just that something happened."
He looked back at the window. "It wasn't something that happened to me. It was — something that I was part of. For a moment. Something I don't have a word for." He stopped. "You know how I described it to your father."
"He told me some of it."
"Then you know I don't have better language than what I gave him." He paused. "In the dream I'm back there. And this time — I don't come back. This time it just — keeps going. And I stop existing. Not dying. Stopping. Like a thought that ends."
His hands were on his knees. Still. Too still.
"And every time I wake up from it I have to — find myself again. Remind myself that I exist. That I'm here. That I'm — me." His voice was flat in the way it gets when he is managing something closely. "It takes longer every time."
"Marrick—"
"I'm not telling you this so you'll worry," he said. "I'm telling you because I'm tired of not telling you, and because you already know something is wrong, and because lying to you is — I don't like it. I don't like what it costs me to do it."
I didn't say anything. I held his hand and I waited.
"I'm scared," he said.
Those two words.
I have heard Marrick say many things in the years I've known him. I have heard him threaten, plan, command, deceive, grieve privately in the way he grieves — which is silent and brief and followed immediately by the next thing. I have heard him be funny, which is rare, and I have heard him be cruel, which is not, and I have heard him be honest in the specific way that he is honest, which is total when he decides to be and completely absent when he decides not to.
I have never heard him say I'm scared.
"I'm scared I'll lose myself," he said. "Not to the war. Not to anything on this mountain. To that." He stopped. "To whatever it is that I saw. Or that saw me. I don't know which one it was, and that's part of what scares me — that it might not be a distinction that matters."
He turned to look at me.
"I wake up and for a moment I'm not sure I exist. Not sure I'm real. I have to — construct it. Remind myself of my name, my hands, the feeling of the floor, the sound of your breathing. I have to build it back up from the parts because whatever happens in that dream takes it apart." His voice was steady. That was the thing that undid me — not the words but the steadiness, the effort behind the steadiness. "And I don't know when it stops getting worse. Or if it does."
"Does it feel worse than it did?"
"Yes."
Just that. Honest.
"I'm scared for you," he said. "For Fay. For my mother and my sisters. For your father." He looked down at where my hand was covering his. "Everything I'm doing — the war, the campaign, the offering — it's not for me anymore. I don't care about my name being remembered or what I can build or how far the empire reaches. I care about — this. About all of you being here when it's over. About Fay growing up in something that I built to last."
"And you?" I said. "Do you care about you being here?"
A pause.
"I care about not losing myself before she's old enough to know me," he said. "I care about her knowing me. Not the version that the histories will produce. Me. The actual thing." He looked at Fay — asleep, serious, present. "I want her to know that her father was afraid sometimes. That he was a person, not just a force. That he loved her specifically. Not the idea of her. Her."
My eyes burned.
I don't cry easily. This is not a matter of control — I simply don't produce it often. But in that room, in that quiet, holding our daughter while my husband told me the truest thing he had ever told me, something in my chest found its way out.
I didn't make a sound.
But he felt my hand tighten on his and he looked at me and understood.
He didn't apologize for it. He doesn't apologize for things that don't require apology. He just moved slightly closer and we sat there in the quiet with Fay between us and the mountains outside the window and the war being planned in the rooms below.
After a while he said: "I won't let it take me."
Not a promise to me. A statement of fact about himself. The same tone he uses when he says things that are simply going to be true because he has decided they will be.
"I know," I said.
"But if something happens—"
"Marrick."
"If something happens," he continued, "I need you to know that everything I did was for this. Not the empire. Not my name. This. You and Fay and the people I love. That's the whole of it."
I held his hand.
"I know," I said.
And I did. That was the thing — I already knew. Had known since before he said it. But he needed to say it, and I needed to let him, and the saying of it was its own kind of completion. A Covenant of the most human kind. Not enforced by reality. Held by the people who made it.
We sat there until Fay woke up and made her opinions about being awake known, and Marrick took her with the same careful precision as always, and the moment closed around itself like water closing over a stone.
I have thought, in the time since, about what it means that the strongest person I have ever known is afraid of becoming nothing.
I don't think it diminishes him. I think it reveals something true about the nature of what happened on that mountain — that whatever looked at him was large enough that its attention alone was sufficient to destabilize the most stable person I know. That is not a small thing to have survived.
He went back to war.
He went to war afraid, which is a thing most people who follow his history will never know, because that part didn't make it into the records that generals write. It made it into this one. Because I was there. Because I was the only person he trusted enough to tell.
He went to war for us.
I have to believe that's enough. That it was the right reason. That the things built out of the right reasons are stronger than the things built from any other material.
I have to believe that.
Because the alternative — that love is not sufficient armor against what is coming — is not something I can hold and also continue to function. So I don't hold it.
I hold her instead.
And I wait.
2 MONTHS AND ONE YEAR UNTIL WAR