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And then someone points at me. A younger official, with a face as round as a plate and disproportionately narrow shoulders, as though he’s spent most of his life hunched up. I remember him. He had come to me once, complaining about a constant ringing in his ears. He was training to be a god of art, he’d told me while I examined him. Do I look the part? he’d asked hopefully. Yes, I had assured him. You do.

“She showed up here with the Death God,” he says now, in a high, clear voice that I most certainly recall is not his normal speaking voice. “Just now, when we tried to stop him—she stepped in and defended him. We all saw it with our own eyes; anyone can tell you. If she hadn’t intervened, His Highness would never have fallen through the portal.”

This isn’t real. I bite down hard on my tongue in an attempt to control my chattering teeth. This cannot be real.

“The Healer God,” the Celestial Emperor says, throwing the full weight of his attention onto me. “Rujia, is that correct?”

I manage a faint nod. Then, still confused, still too stunned to register what is unfolding right in front of me, only that everything is wrong, I shake my head. In the very distant back of my mind, I remember how I’d hoped to see him in time for the banquet, how I’d imagined him reading out my name, announcing me as the Celestial Healer. He should have been smiling. Everything should have worked out.

He frowns at me. “Is that correct, or not?”

“Y-yes, about my name,” I say, my throat painfully dry. “But I did not want this—I have nothing against His Highness, and I am sorry—”

“You’re sorry?” the same official repeats in an even higher tone. “Only the guilty are sorry. Are you confessing, then?”

“Do not be ridiculous.”

The mere sound of the Death God speaking shocks everyone into silence. He tosses one last baleful look at the closed portal, as if he can see the crown prince on the other end of it, then strides forward so that he is blocking me from view. I have no idea what he intends to do, whether he plans to help me or harm me. Twice now, he has stood before me like this. I can only stare up in his shadow, at the perfect pitch-black of his robes, the silk stream of his hair down his back. There is a thin tear in the fabric below his shoulder blades, but otherwise, he appears unscathed from the fight. Not even a drop of blood spilled.

The relief that shudders through me feels almost embarrassing.

“She is a minor god of no consequence,” Keran continues without so much as glancing my way. “Why would I need someone like her to enter the Celestial Realm and attack your prince? She is nothing. If you are to believe she’d been defending me, then you must be overestimating her abilities. The far more plausible explanation here is that she’d wanted to help you defeat me and had simply misaimed.”

Even though I understand why he is saying it—to distance himself, to protect me, to prove I am not an accomplice—the words still sting. She is nothing. He wouldn’t be able to make such claims to begin with if they were unfounded in reality.

And besides, it is too late to try to spare my name. His actions alone have already doomed me.

“She was helping you,” the official speaks up again, though he sounds less certain. “We all saw it—”

“And why ever would she do that?” Keran asks on a scoff. “Who would be so utterly foolish as to help Death? I know you are no god of intellect, but please, at least attempt to think before drawing upon such absurd conclusions. What could she stand to gain from turning against her own and endangering your prince? Or do you imagine, perhaps, that she has fallen for my dark powers and quiet charm?” he asks flatly.

Murmurs drift through the crowd.

But the Celestial Emperor hardly acknowledges any of this. He is still glaring down at me. “Do you have evidence?” he asks.

“Of—of what?”

“Of your innocence,” he says, with some impatience. “Proof that you were not conspiring with the Death God, that you are not acting in his interests even now. What were you doing in the moments before he stormed the palace? Who were you with?”

I open my mouth, but no words emerge. I cannot tell the truth—that I had been with the Death God. That I had helped him, and in helping him, allowed him to come here, but I couldn’t have anticipated the damage. And I cannot tell a lie either. There is nobody here who would take my side, and any story I spin now would surely be riddled with holes, loose threads, tangled lines. But when I lift my eyes to meet the emperor’s stony gaze, I realize that it doesn’t matter. It never mattered. The emperor is not looking for a true culprit—he is looking for a scapegoat, somebody to answer for the destruction. He cannot punish the Death God, because Death lies just outside the emperor’s realm of power. Without Death to collect the souls of gods and mortals, the underworld would fall into chaos, and the balance of all realms would be disrupted. For as much as everyone hates the Death God, they are also at his mercy. No, that is precisely why they hate him so much. Because none can outrival him.

It is so much more convenient to blame the minor god. The god who is the daughter of exiles, who is already shunned, who has long been cast off into isolation, who must grovel just for the chance to be seen as good. The deity who is never remembered until she is needed and is forgotten immediately after. I am overcome by the wild urge to laugh aloud at myself. How delusional I’ve been, how falsely convinced of my own importance, to think that by being the best healer of them all, I could truly change my life and my position. That I could elevate myself, somehow, from the ranks of the smaller gods, the fate of my parents.

The Celestial Healer.

Such a pretty title, such a lovely dream. But every dream must end.

“I may not have any immediate proof of my innocence, but—but I have helped many here,” I say. There is something sharp stuck in my throat. I try to swallow. To strengthen my voice. “I would never willingly harm any of them, and certainly not His Highness—”

“Do you know what it means, now that Junyi has fallen into the Mortal Realm?” the emperor interrupts, those dark, inhuman eyes flashing. He waves his sleeve again, and a vision shimmers high above all our heads in a haze of gold. An infant appears, pink-faced and bruised, its hair still damp and plastered to its forehead. Hands stretch out to swaddle it in thin, dirty cloths. A torch burns low in the corner, illuminating the cramped room, no bigger than one of the closets in the Celestial Palace.

“Now that he has been reborn a mortal, his fate has already been written,” the emperor says grimly. “He must face two great tribulations before he can ascend to godhood once more, or else his soul will shatter, and he will never be able to reincarnate again. And if that happens—do you know the punishment for those who hurt the crown prince, Rujia?”

The water dungeons.

If being reincarnated into the Mortal Realm is the second most feared punishment to exist, then this is indisputably the first.

When we were still new healers, young and inexperienced, fumbling with our powers, we had been invited to test out our remedies on the prisoners inside. The stench of rot had hit us first in those dark, crowded dungeons, then the bone-chilling cold. The prisoners were barely alive. Their bodies were bloated beyond recognition, their skins soaked in the freezing waters for so long that they had started to wrinkle and peel in long strips like parchment. They were kept chained to the floor, the water designed to rise just above their nose so they had to constantly lift their heads and struggle to breathe, even in sleep—if they could sleep at all. Many lost their sense of sight first, for either they had not seen light since they were first thrown into the dungeons, or their eyes had melted out of their sockets. Then they lost their sense of hearing. Then smell. Then taste. When we tried to speak to them, to reach out to them, many shuddered away, or remained frozen in place, unable to respond. But it was the final prisoner we’d passed that has haunted me since. He had latched on to my arm so tightly I could feel the soft, clammy give of his flesh, the stubs where his nails ought to have been. He couldn’t quite speak through the water, but violent bubbles had burst forth from his mouth. Help me, I thought he said. Help me. But I could not. None of us could. They’d been sentenced to spend the rest of their lives there, and what a long, excruciating, drawn-out life it would be for the gods who’d upset the Celestial Emperor. Mortality would have seemed a mercy to them.