Hào’yáng reaches into his storage pouch. “I brought back gifts for you,” he says, and presses something into my palms.
It’s a lacquered sewing box, decorated with fine golden patterns: dragons and oceans, mountains and forests, and a great river winding through it all. When I open it, I gasp in delight.
Threads of every color lay nestled within: rolls and rolls, gleaming like rows of jewels. As I press the tips of my fingers to them, I can tell that they are no ordinary threads.
I look up at Hào’yáng. “These are…”
“Silk threads spun with the magic of different provinces, realms, and beings,” he says. He points to one that shimmers like strands of light caught beneath the ocean. “That was gifted by the Dragon King of the Western Sea. This,” he continues, indicating one with the luster of sun-kissed sands, “by the tribes of the Golden Desert known for raising sand silkworms. This one”—like clouds racing across an azure sky—“from our immortal friends. This”—he points to a thread lit with the flicker of flames—“from the empress of the Realm of Phoenixes.”
I listen to him name the allies we’ve made, beings from realms I’d once only known from storybooks and myths, back before everything happened, when I thought I was destined to be a local seamstress of the Central Province.
“Àn’ying.” Hào’yáng takes my hand and presses a kiss to it. “You deserve these tributes, and more. You’ve irrevocably shaped lives and realms and the fate of the world we live in. That, as someone very wise once told me, is destiny.” From his sleeve pocket, he draws out my half-sewn handkerchief. The ocean and the glinting dragon scales gleam beneath the sun as he hands it to me. “Now, your own destiny awaits you. Perhaps it simply starts with finishing this piece of sewing; or perhaps you’d like to start a new piece.” He meets my gaze, eyes asbrown and as steady as the earth. “No matter what you choose, I will be there with you through all of it.”
I smile as I take the handkerchief, the landscape around us blurring into a golden haze of warmth, snow, and blossoms. A laugh bubbles from my lips. “Why choose?” I say. “Come with me as I sew them all. From every realm, every corner of this world. Together, in this lifetime.”
—
The years rushed by like the currents of a great river. Some were gentler waters, years of peace and calm and love; some were torrential and imbued with major events. There were years of rainfall and years of sunshine; times of sorrow and times of joy. And all of it, I experienced knowing that this was mortal life in the realm of red dust. Knowing that one day, I would turn to the path my birth mother had walked, gazing from the skies into the warm fires of a past life. When that time came, I knew I wished to face it with only joy.
I experienced all of it with Hào’yáng: the blissful love of raising a family, the trials and tribulations of running a kingdom…and the world, the entirety of the vast, endless world we lived in, with realms enough for many lifetimes. I did not age as they did. When Méi’zi wed a yao’jing ambassador of the Northern Province and began her family, when Ma’s hair grew white and her skin wrinkled, when my children grew past my mortal age—I held the same countenance of the young woman I had been the night my immortality was unsealed.
And, inevitably, when all those I loved in my mortal lifetime were swept away by the currents of time into the gentle after of the Nine Fountains, I remained. When spring rains meltedthe winter snows and the earth bloomed with orchids; when cicadas sang in the lush greens of summer; when autumn burnished the larches in fiery bronzes and golds; and when the silent goose-feather snows of winter returned the world to slumber…I remained.
I chose to wander the realms, making good on my first promise to myself, to the young girl I had once been. The one who had wished to see the world. I was searching for something—though I didn’t know what it was.
And one day, a day as ordinary as any other, I found it.
—
Dawn has swept a soft radiance over the cathaya forest. Mists pull in from the nearby seas, gently dressing the trees and blanketing the soil in a shifting haze that catches the faint golds of a rising sun. That light reflects on the glint of my crescent blades.
Today, I am searching. I woke to find a silver-tailed fei’fei watching me, a mythological creature the size of a cat, with a mane and tail as white as if dusted with snow. Its countenance reminded me of an old friend, and I set off in its direction, determined to find it and capture its likeness in my sewing.
My storage pouch swings from the belt at my hips, carrying within a curious variety of items for an immortal: sewing kits, threads, and handkerchiefs bearing carefully stitched designs of oceans, flower fields, and the portrait of a family sitting beneath a sunlit plum blossom tree. Keepsakes from a past life many centuries ago. The only other items on me, apart from my pale silk dress and my blades, are two hairpins: one bearing a lotus, and another a cherry blossom.
I crouch, sweeping a hand over the fallen leaves and flower petals. There, a single, tiny paw print, delineated by drops ofdew.
I grin, following the track farther along—and that’s when something catches my eye. A vivid streak of color, jarring and bright against the tranquil corals of the forest at dawn.
A red scorpion lily.
For several moments, I forget to breathe. I’m aware only of the pounding of my heart against my chest, the surge of hope and the inevitable letdown that always follows. In the centuries since the Battle of the Imperial City, I have learned to stop looking for these flowers. They appeared to me after his death, and always in the accompaniment of a red-and-black-winged butterfly, in the Imperial Palace gardens, and at times when I was traveling the realms alone. As though a part of him had never left, and what remained of his soul was returning to the mortal realm to see me. As the years passed, as the trauma of the war and all that had happened in that time faded from me, so, too, did the red scorpion lilies.
Until now.
Hardly daring to draw breath, I approach it. My steps are velvet against the soil, my movements cautious in the way I would approach a small animal, afraid of startling it.
But the flower does not vanish. As I come to a stop before it, I search for a butterfly perched on its petals, as it so often had presented to me in those early days.
I find none.
I let out a long breath. Perhaps loneliness has addled my mind; perhaps the knowledge that my story with him never truly ended has led me to hope in ways beyond all possibility.
Perhaps this is just a regular scorpion lily, blooming from the red dust of our realm.
I crouch by the flower, a faint smile curving my lips even as a familiar ache rises deep in my throat. Foolish, for I had thought that after all these centuries, my once-fiery heart would have frosted over and my emotions would no longer be stirred by such nostalgia.
I touch a finger to stroke a petal of the scorpion lily—just as a voice rings out through the trees.
