Sleep, when it came, was no mercy.
Feng Lian drifted in and out of it like wreckage in a black tide, carried from one jagged shore to the next. Sometimes the Cold Palace was gone, and she stood again upon the Vermilion Steps, sun blazing on gilded tiles, her hair pinned with phoenixes that were not yet a mockery. Sometimes Li Wei turned toward her at the altar, crown heavy, smile light, and she almost believed—
Then steel. Always steel.
Always the dark shimmer of Grand General Huo's blade descending.
Only sometimes it cut through her husband's chest.
Sometimes it cut through hers.
Sometimes it hovered between them, quivering in midair, held in place by nothing but his last command.
Forget me and fly.
She would wake with the metal taste of that sentence on her tongue, fingers numb, lungs struggling against the frost the Spirit-Numbing Ash had built around her core. Her own pulse sounded strange to her, as if it beat in someone else's throat.
Tonight was worse.
Tonight the ash did not lie still.
It shifted. Listened. Answered.
When she startled from another drowning dream, she was not gasping. She was… aware.
The darkness around her seemed to breathe.
The Cold Palace's stone floor hummed faintly against her bare feet, as if some buried artery had remembered blood. The air was brittle, but beneath its bite crawled a thin warmth, not enough to comfort, only enough to taunt.
Lian sat up slowly, joints arguing with the motion. The coarse blanket fell in a heap, shedding dust. Her cell was as it always was; empty, damp, its single high slit of a window offering a square of night painted with frost.
Yet nothing was as it had been.
The line between them—between her and that low-born soldier with a king's memory—vibrated like a bowstring.
She had no name for it. No technique, no scripture. Her masters had called it "resonance" when she was a girl of thirteen, knuckles raw from failed meditations, room filled with the smell of singed silk where her control had slipped.
Two flames, they had told her, if they are born of the same fire, will always feel each other.
She had thought they meant ancestor and descendant.
She had not known they meant Empress and dead Emperor, split and scattered, still somehow refusing to cool.
"Li Wei," she whispered, voice hoarse with disuse.
No answer, of course. Only that unseen string thrumming faintly in response, which was worse than silence.
Far away—how far, she could not say—steel struck something unyielding. The echo shivered down that invisible line and into her bones. Her fingers curled involuntarily, as if around a hilt.
He was still fighting phantoms, then.
"Stubborn man," she muttered, though the insult had softened into something perilously close to prayer.
She swung her legs fully off the pallet. The stone leached heat through her soles, but no longer felt entirely victorious in the exchange. A pulse of faint warmth rose through her veins like smoke from a dying coal.
The ash inside her hissed.
She closed her eyes and followed the sound inward.
It was a slow, ugly thing, this turning inwards. Once, she could have submerged into her core as easily as stepping into a hot spring. Now the descent snagged on old injuries, on cold crusts of grief, on the ragged edges where power had exploded and then been frozen, jagged as shattered glass.
Behind her ribs, behind the cracked cage of bone and muscle and what remained of her heart, lay the Phoenix Core.
It had been a blazing sun, once.
Now it was a charred pearl, veined with dull ember and clotted ash.
Under her attention, one thread of ember brightened, the faintest flare. Pain lanced outward, sharp enough to steal her breath. The ash surged up defensively, choking the spark.
Lian's eyes snapped open. Sweat had gathered at her temples despite the cold.
"Too deep," she told herself softly, palm pressing against her sternum as if she could hold the pieces in place. "Not all at once."
In her youth, the masters had lectured endlessly on restraint. A wildfire consumed its own forest, they would say. A hearth-fire fed its home.
She had burned like a wildfire anyway. For him. For them.
Now she would have to learn the slow cruelty of the hearth.
A hiss, sharper, cut across her thoughts.
Not from within.
From the door.
Metal scraped wood, a bolt being drawn. No guards announced themselves; in the Cold Palace, courtesy was considered waste. The hinges whined in protest as the door scraped open, letting in a blade of colder air and the faint glow of a lantern.
Grand General Huo stepped in first, ducking slightly beneath the low lintel. The lantern haloed his iron-grey hair, threw the hollows of his face into sharp relief. His armor was absent; instead he wore dark civilian robes, the plainness of them somehow more menacing than any battle regalia.
Behind him, like a petal glued to the edge of a sword, drifted Consort Mei Yin.
Lian's lip almost curled.
Mei came swathed in pale lavender silk, shawl drawn tightly around slender shoulders as if she might shatter from a stray gust. Her hairpins were modest, her cosmetics artfully blurred to suggest she had cried recently and nobly. In her hands she carried a lacquered tray, upon which sat a covered bowl. Steam slipped from beneath the lid in thin, curling strings.
The smell reached Lian only after the door shut and the lantern's glow pooled into their little world.
Rice gruel, thin and over-boiled, tinged with bitter herbs.
And beneath that, a whisper of something chalky, of cold iron and old smoke.
Spirit-Numbing Ash.
Her core recoiled.
Mei Yin saw it. A flicker of satisfaction passed through her gaze before her lashes fluttered, smothering it.
"Your Majesty." Mei's voice trembled with practiced fragility. "You look… thinner."
Lian did not stand. She rested her back against the damp wall and folded her hands in her lap, as if receiving some minor petition instead of poison.
"You brought me a gift," she said. Her throat was rough, but her tone was smooth enough. "How thoughtful, Consort Mei."
Huo set the lantern on a rusted hook embedded in the wall. The flame steadied, its light catching on his scarred knuckles as he crossed his arms.
"Her Grace complained you have been neglected," he said. "I would not wish the court to accuse me of cruelty."
"It would have to remember I exist first," Lian replied.
Mei Yin flinched delicately, as though struck on the Empress's behalf. She set the tray down on the floor, careful not to let the bowl rattle against the wood.
"The Empire has not forgotten you," she murmured. "We pray for you every day in the Inner Palace. For your peace. For your acceptance."
"Acceptance." Lian tested the word. "Is that what the priests call it now? When a phoenix is buried alive?"
Huo's mouth twitched, the ghost of a frown.
"Phoenixes," he said, "are stories men tell themselves so they can excuse burning the world. The Empire cannot afford stories."
"And yet it burns," Lian said quietly. "With or without permission."
The invisible string thrummed again, stronger this time. Somewhere, Li Wei's blade bit into a practice post, wood cracking. The echo rolled through her chest. Her fingers tingled against her will.
Huo's eyes narrowed, as if he had felt something too, though he could not have put a name to it. He took one step closer, boots grinding softly against stone.
"You seem more… alert, Your Majesty," he observed. "Has solitude sharpened you, or is it resentment?"
"Does it matter?" Lian asked.
"It always matters what fuels a fire."
Mei's gaze flicked from Huo to Lian, quick, assessing, like a bird watching the space between two tigers. She folded her hands at her waist, letting her sleeves fall to hide their tension.
"I begged the General to let me come," she said. "When I heard you had been speaking to yourself in the dark."
Lian regarded Mei with a new, almost clinical curiosity. "Have I?"
"In your sleep," Mei said gently. "Whispering his name. His Majesty's."
The word landed between them like a dropped blade.
His Majesty.
Li Wei.
The dead emperor. The man whose soul had slipped the noose. The man whose absence was the only reason Mei could wear any shade of lavender at all.
Mei bit her lip, letting it redden. "You torture yourself with his memory," she continued. "It hurts me to know you suffer so."
Lian smiled, a slow, humorless thing. "Does it?"
Mei's lashes lowered. "He loved you very much," she said.
"And yet he died."
For me, hung unspoken in the air.
Huo shifted, hand resting briefly against the hilt of the short sword at his belt. "The late Emperor made his choice," he said, voice granite. "He knew what you were. What you could become. He knew the cost to the Empire if you lost control. He trusted me to… manage the aftermath."
"Manage," Lian repeated. "Is that what you call it when your blade misses its mark?"
It was the only time she had ever seen him hesitate.
A thin crack, no more than a heartbeat, but there.
He had aimed for her. She remembered the arc of the sword, its glittering promise, the way the world had seemed to peel back to a single line of steel.
Then Li Wei.
Always Li Wei.
Stepping between. Catching the blow with his own body, as if it were nothing more than rain and he a man made of roof tiles.
Huo's jaw tightened. "The Emperor stepped into the path," he said. "He chose to die."
"For you," Lian said. "So you would not have to live with the memory of assassinating your own sovereign."
Mei made a small sound, horrified. "Your Majesty—"
"It is the truth," Lian said, without raising her voice. "Those are the only kinds of words left to me."
For the first time, she saw something like anger flicker behind the General's composure.
"I have killed kings before," Huo said. "An Emperor is a man before he is a title. Men die. Empires endure."
"Do they?" Lian asked softly. "Empires rot. Names are forgotten. Even stone breaks. But some fires…" She paused, hand unconsciously pressing against her breastbone, where the ash lay coiled. "Some fires remember."
The line between her and Li Wei sang.
Just a single ringing note, bright and reckless, reverberating through marrow and memory. She saw, as if through someone else's eyes, a courtyard drenched in dawn, practice posts splintered, common soldiers staring as a low-born man in a rough hemp tunic drove his blade forward in a thrust that was too precise to be learned in any village.
Huo's head snapped a fraction to the side, as if he had heard a distant shout.
"Do you feel it?" Lian asked, before she could stop herself.
"Feel what?" He was all iron again.
"The crack," she said. "In your Empire."
Mei Yin took a quick step backward, silk whispering. "Enough," she said, voice thin. "Speaking like this… it is dangerous. Your Majesty, you must let him go. Clinging to ghosts will only—"
"Ghosts don't swing swords," Lian murmured.
Mei's fingers clenched, nails digging into her palms beneath her sleeves. For an instant, the mask slipped and something small and sharp peered out—fear, perhaps, or greed, or a hatred that had nothing performative about it.
Then the consort's eyes filled dutifully with tears.
"I only want peace for you," she whispered. "You cannot rise again. The priests say the Phoenix line is broken. Your core is… damaged. If you would only accept your place, you could live out your days in quiet. Safe from the world. Safe for the world."
Spirit-Numbing Ash steamed faintly from the bowl between them, its perfume a lullaby to the senses, a garrote for the soul.
Lian looked at it long enough to feel its pull. The ash in her veins, forged of the same bitter material though of a different birth, stirred anxiously.
Quiet would be easy.
Safety would be easy.
Forget me and fly.
Li Wei's voice slid through the crack in her resolve, threaded along the invisible string, quiet but stubborn as ever.
Not: Forget me and sleep.
Not: Forget me and wither.
Forget me and fly.
"I dreamed," Lian said, as if confiding in Mei, though her gaze had drifted to Huo. "Of a field beyond the palace walls. Soldier's barracks. Mud. Straw. A man who does not belong there."
Mei froze.
Huo's eyes sharpened to points. "You have not left these walls since your confinement," he said. "There are no windows that face that direction."
"No," Lian agreed. She tilted her head. "And yet I smelled the sweat. Heard the wood crack. Felt his hands blister."
"Whose?" Huo asked.
She smiled again, this time not at all pleasant.
"A ghost's sword," she said. "Swinging in your barracks."
For a heartbeat, the lantern flame guttered, as if something unseen had exhaled.
Mei moved first, snatching up the bowl, hands trembling in a way that was no act now. "You are feverish," she insisted. "You speak nonsense. The ash will help. Please, Your Majesty, drink. It will ease the… visions."
"And the fire," Lian said.
Mei's lashes fluttered. "There is no fire."
Lian leaned forward, the movement small, yet charged. The ash in her veins writhed, some threads recoiling from the bowl, others reaching toward it in confused hunger.
This was the knife-edge.
If she drank, the Spirit-Numbing Ash would thicken the crust around her core, smothering the delicate glow that had begun to stir. It would quiet the line between her and Li Wei until even the echo of his phantom sword fell silent.
Peace. Obedience. A slow, pale drowning.
If she refused, Huo would see more clearly what he had always suspected: that the Phoenix was not yet dead. That the Cold Palace had failed to freeze her completely.
He would tighten the chains. Shorten the leash. Bring sharper tools.
"You said you pray for my peace," Lian said.
"Yes," Mei whispered, hope flaring too quickly in her eyes.
"Then keep your offering," Lian replied.
Her hand lifted. Not much—just enough to nudge the bowl's rim with two fingers.
The gruel sloshed, lid slipping, a puff of steam bursting upward. The smell of ash hit them, thick and unmistakable.
Mei recoiled as if burned, almost dropping the bowl. She swallowed, throat bobbing, eyes shining with confusion and something like panic. "Your Majesty—"
"I will keep my grief," Lian said, voice low and even. "It is warmer than anything you have brought me."
Huo studied her in silence.
In the dim, his expression had the stillness of carved stone. Only his eyes moved; slow, measuring, as if mapping the contours of a battlefield.
"I could force you," he said at last.
"Yes," Lian agreed. "You could hold me down. You could pour it down my throat. You could have your men pin my jaw until it shatters."
She met his gaze, letting him see the thin, new shimmer behind her darkness.
"It would not make me obedient," she added. "Only thirsty for something else."
The word hung there. Else.
Elsewhere.
Outside. Beyond.
In the barracks, a wooden post finally gave way under Li Wei's assault, splitting with a sharp crack. Laughter and jeers rose, blurred by distance, but he stood in the center of the wreckage, chest heaving, blade steady, eyes fixed on some invisible target no one else could see.
Huo's fingers twitched once on his sword hilt, then loosened.
"No," he decided. "Not yet."
Mei stared at him, outraged. "General—"
"Leave the bowl," he ordered. "If Her Majesty grows… wiser, she may change her mind."
He took the lantern from its hook but did not immediately turn away.
"Dream of what you like, Phoenix," he said quietly. "Dream of ghosts, of flames, of broken kings. In the end, walls are walls. Steel is steel. I know both better than anyone alive."
"In the end," Lian murmured, "all steel remembers is heat."
Their eyes locked.
For one heartbeat, the ash in her veins glowed—a brief, defiant ember. His pupils constricted, as if the reflection of a fire had brushed them.
Then he broke the gaze, turning toward the door.
Mei hesitated a fraction longer, looking back, lips parted as if she would say something—plead, threaten, confess. Whatever it was, she swallowed it like poison and followed him out, skirts whispering anxiously.
The door groaned shut.
The bolt slid home.
Darkness reclaimed the cell, save for the faint, grey outline of the untouched bowl on the floor, steam thinning into ghosts.
Lian sat very still.
The invisible string between her and Li Wei hummed, no longer a distant tremor but a steady, stubborn vibration.
"You burn your path," she had told the empty air.
Now, in the hush left by her enemies' footsteps, she answered herself.
"And I will burn mine."
She closed her eyes, turned inward again, and this time, when she found the charred pearl of her Phoenix Core, she did not press, did not claw. She circled it with her breath, with her stubborn, deliberate refusing-to-yield.
The ash hissed.
For the span of a single pulse, a vein of ember within the core shone bright enough to hurt.
Not enough to warm.
Not yet.
But enough to promise.
Far beyond stone and frost and the Cold Palace's buried heart, a common soldier straightened from his ruined practice post. His hands were blistered and bleeding; he felt nothing but a strange, fierce clarity.
He turned his face toward the unseen palace, toward ice and memory.
His sword, slick with his own blood, felt… lighter.
He did not know why his chest ached.
He did not know why the wind, cold and mean, tasted suddenly of smoke and plum blossom.
He only knew, with the unshakable certainty of a man who had died once already, that somewhere, behind walls and steel and lies, a fire had refused to go out.
In the moment between sparks and blaze, in the thin silence after defiance and before retaliation, the world held its breath.