29
Zizi
Zizi stepped into the heart of the First Court, his boots echoing on pale polished stone. It was empty—hauntingly so, as if the air itself was holding its breath. The throne stood silent, untouched by its ruler. But a single moonflower rested on the royal seat.
A clue or a warning?
Frowning, he picked it up, twirling it between his fingers. There was only one place in the underworld where moonflowers grew.
The Garden of Tongues.
The sanctuary was in full bloom when Zizi arrived, the perfumed air reminding him of The Reverie’s garden. He recognized Madam Meng as the Lady of the Pavilion now, albeit in a different form. And he’d grown fond of the old lady and her teas. Still, he didn’t know why the immortal had taken on the burden of raising him in the mortal realm when he had not made it her duty.
Just as he was unsure of his own origin, he realized he was uncertain of the Lady’s as well. He’d heard a rumor that she had been mortal once, and her tears and grief over her deceased husband had brought down the great wall of a great nation, exposing its tyrannical Emperor. It was strange to think of her—or any of the Kings or the underworld’s immortals—as having a past life before their present existence. But Zizi was realizing that he knew much less about the underworld’s mysteries than he’d thought.
He tugged at the black silk around his neck, that strange voice he’d heard in the Elder Gods’ palace repeating in his head.
He may have descended from our realm for a reason, but we cannot interfere with things that fate has set in motion....
What had fate supposedly set in motion? And was the owner of thevoice implying that Zizi—thatFour—hadn’t always been in the underworld? All Zizi remembered of his own birth as the Fourth King was that he’d opened his eyes one day and felt the wondrous beauty of the world for a single moment. Almost immediately, something had tightened around his neck and reined him in.
His crown. His collar.
With a vexed sigh, Zizi pulled the moonflower from his lapel and strode to the swing in the middle of the Garden. It wasn’t a night of convergence, when the realms would align for a few minutes and the Garden hovered between them. The sky above was dark and empty.
What would you wish for?
To see the stars forever.
To purge his memories of Lei Ying and the pain they’d caused him, he’d brought chaos to a world she had fought to protect. But Zizi was different now. He’d learned from his mistakes. Love wasn’t possession. It wasn’t a caged bird never spreading its wings or never feeling the sun on its feathers. Love was the act of freeing the bird without the hope that it would return. An image of a scowling Rui appeared in his mind, and he laughed to himself. She would hate to be called a bird.
He sobered quickly. The problem with finally understandinglovewas that he now knew thatlosswas the inevitable result of having once loved.
The First King arrived a moment later. Their sharply cut green pantsuit blended with the verdant garden, and the dewdrop jewel hanging from their necklace sparkled like a song.
Zizi waved the moonflower. “I got your message. How’d you know I’d look for you?”
“I assumed you would wake with many questions,” One said, their tone giving nothing away. They looked as serene as ever.
Unbuttoning his cuff and pulling up his sleeve to his elbow, Zizi said, “My memories returned in the cavern, and I remembered I showed you this.” A glowing line rose to the surface of his exposed forearm, starkly red among green-blue veins. “You knew about the love thread when yousummoned me for help that night eighteen years ago. The soul in need, the one that was to be reborn, you knew it washers, didn’t you? That’s why you asked me to save her mother.”
One smiled. “I see you have been piecing things together.”
“Did you know about the second light trail from the dying star?”
“I did.”
“And you assumedIwould see it too because it was a night of convergence, and I’d be here in the Garden staring at the sky. What I don’t know is why you got involved when you knew my actions would destabilize the realms and cause the Nothing to proliferate in ours.”
One’s smile turned enigmatic. “I am merely an instrument of fate. In this case, I acted on the belief that I was playing a role I was meant to play.”
“Not that crap about fate again,” Zizi muttered.
“What is fate, if not the universe conspiring?” One mused, turning to the gleaming horizon. “As I once told you, Fate connects us through the past, present, and future. It does not care if you have faith in it or not. It simply is, and we are mere moments in its timeline.”
The pendant on One’s necklace twinkled distractingly as they spoke. As Zizi stared at the jewel, he thought he saw a myriad of worlds. Of possibilities and impossibilities, of the past and the present, and threads crossing and uncrossing on a weaver’s loom. A peculiar sensation came over him, as if he was floating in emptiness. As if he was, as One said, an inconsequential flicker in the vastness of space and time.
“There were other things that convinced me that something larger was at work,” One said, their voice pulling Zizi from his trance. “The twin vessels appearing so conveniently, the car accident, the fact that you had in your possession thatveryspecial relic... But the most important sign was this.”
