The night he died, the city was made of glass.
Streetlights stretched into pale ribbons on rain-slick asphalt, and the reflections trembled as if the ground itself was unsure what it wanted to be. Chu Yan sat in the back seat with his coat folded on his lap, fingertips resting on the fabric like he could press his pulse into it and make the world slow down.
He had been thinking about peace.
Not the kind that belongs to speeches and memorials, not the kind people hang on walls as if words can block bullets. He'd been thinking about the kind that happens after, when the noise finally stops and you realize the hardest part isn't surviving war.
It's teaching a world that only knows violence how to live without it.
Outside the window, headlights smeared into comet tails. The driver said something he didn't catch, the radio muttered low, and the rain ticked on the roof like impatient fingers.
Chu Yan blinked once.
A small, ordinary moment, the kind that should have disappeared into the rest of his life. But fate—if fate existed—was never interested in the ordinary.
The impact came from the side.
Metal screamed. The world folded. A violent brightness erupted behind his eyes, and then there was the sharp, intimate sensation of weight leaving him, as if his body had been a coat he could no longer keep on his shoulders.
Sound became distance. Rain became memory.
For a breathless instant he was aware of everything at once: the taste of copper, the cold shock of air, the car's frame twisting like a dying animal, the way someone's name tore out of a throat—maybe his, maybe not.
Then the lights went out.
And in the dark, something opened.
He did not wake to heaven or hell.
He woke to a place that felt like a corridor built out of sighs.
There was no ceiling. There was no floor. Yet he stood.
Mist rolled across an unseen ground, pale and endless. Far away, figures moved in slow streams as if they were being poured into somewhere that did not need them to remember how they got there.
The air smelled like nothing. Not clean, not dirty. Simply emptied. Like a room after everyone has gone home.
Chu Yan lifted his hand.
It looked like his hand. Pale skin, a faint scar near his knuckle from a kitchen accident years ago. He flexed his fingers, and the movement was too crisp, too easy, as if pain had been removed from the world as a concept.
"Chu Yan," someone said.
The voice was close, and when he turned, there was a woman standing there.
She wore a plain robe the color of ash, and her hair was pulled back without ornament. Her face was neither young nor old. Her eyes held the calm patience of an institution. In her hands was a bowl.
Steam curled from it, not warm, not cold. Just present.
"This is the last step," she said, holding it out.
Chu Yan did not reach for it.
He had read about this. He had laughed about it once, half-superstitious, half amused. A bowl of soup to wash away a life like ink from paper.
"Drink," the woman said, still patient. "And you will not suffer the weight of what you were."
It sounded kind. It sounded merciful.
Chu Yan stared at the bowl.
In the steam, he thought he saw brief flickers of memory: his mother's hands, the smell of summer pavement, a friend's voice calling his name across a station platform, the exhausted eyes of people who had survived and still didn't know how to live.
He thought of his own life, small and human and already gone.
Then he thought of everything he had not done.
Peace is an idea, he had told himself many times. But ideas don't move without people willing to be hurt by them.
"I don't want to forget," he said.
The woman's expression did not change. Only the mist shifted, as if the place itself had exhaled.
"You will regret it."
"Maybe," Chu Yan said.
He could still remember the impact. The tearing metal. The sudden cruelty of the world deciding it didn't need him anymore. If he could remember even that, he could remember anything.
"Why?" the woman asked, and there was a thread of something in her voice that sounded almost like curiosity.
Chu Yan lowered his gaze to the bowl and then looked past it, into the slow river of figures moving in the distance.
"Because forgetting is easy," he said. "And I'm tired of easy things that leave the same world behind."
A pause.
Then the woman withdrew the bowl by an inch, not in anger, not in surprise. Like a clerk making a note.
"Very well," she said. "Then you will carry what you were."
The mist thickened.
The corridor deepened.
And the world tilted.
The sensation was not falling. It was being pulled, as if invisible threads had caught his bones and were drawing him through something narrow and unavoidable.
Chu Yan tried to breathe, and the air turned heavy and sweet, like a scent he had no name for.
Sound returned in fragments: a distant pulse, a low throb, a wet warmth that was not warmth but living.
Then there was a pressure around him, all sides at once.
He understood before he saw.
A womb. Or something that served the same purpose. A cradle built of biology and will.
The first thing he heard was not a human voice.
It was a vibration through fluid, a resonance that spoke directly to nerves rather than ears. It was vast, layered, and impossibly close.
Two presences.
One like a storm held behind bone.
One like a sea that knew every tide.
Emperor, his mind supplied, absurdly, because the word arrived with certainty.
Empress.
He could not see them. He could not move. His body was too small, too new, not made for intention yet.
But he could feel them.
They pressed their attention against him like hands against glass.
And he realized, with a clarity that would have terrified him if he had been able to panic, that he was not going to be born into a human family.
He was going to be born into power.
Into a species that did not smell like cities and rain.
Into something ancient and hungry.
The fluid around him shivered.
A pulse answered his pulse.
A rhythm, steady and insistent, like a drumbeat calling him into a life he had not chosen.
Then the world cracked open.
Light flooded.
Sound became sharp.
He was expelled into air that tasted of metal and sweetness and something feral.
He tried to scream.
What came out was not a scream.
It was a thin, wet sound, too small to carry the weight of his fear.
Hands—or appendages—lifted him.
He could not see clearly. His vision was milk and shadow. But he felt warmth close around him, and the pressure of attention that was almost physical.
A voice vibrated through the air, not words but meaning that his mind translated anyway.
Beloved.
There was another presence, nearer, bright and excited, like a young sun.
First Prince, his mind supplied again, and the word felt wrong because this was not a human prince. This was something that should not have fit into a palace. Something that had never needed names to be itself.
Yet it leaned close.
Its breath—or whatever counted as breath—stirred the air over his face.
And then the two vast presences pressed in again, Emperor and Empress, their attention locking onto him so hard it felt like being seen into existence.
Chu Yan could not move his mouth properly.
He could not lift his hands.
But inside, his mind was clear as a blade.
He thought: I'm alive.
He thought: I remember.
He thought: If I'm here, then this world can be changed too.
Something brushed his cheek.
A gesture that was not human, and yet was unmistakably tenderness.
The Emperor's presence pulsed with something like satisfaction, like a storm acknowledging a new center.
The Empress's presence wrapped around him like the sea around a drifting thing that had finally been found.
Beloved, the meaning came again.
Not earned. Not tested. Simply given.
Chu Yan's eyelids drooped, heavy as stone.
As he slipped toward the first sleep of his second life, one thought remained, stubborn and bright.
If a monster species could love like this, then perhaps peace was not impossible.
Not here.
Not anywhere