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It won’t stop hurting . . .

Another chance . . .

Never again would I . . .

Return to the old place . . .

I won’t forgive . . .

The water rises up to his waist, then to his chest. He holds on to her and pushes his way slowly, painfully through the waters, on and on through those endless springs, the darkness stretched out all around him. He cannot see anything except the light of her soul flickering every now and then, as if saying something to him.

“Don’t be afraid,” he whispers, hoarse, tasting blood on his tongue. “I’ll carry you the whole way.”

Back inside the palace, he breaks everything.

Every vase, every ornament, every plate he can find. Every solid, whole thing. Magic is not satisfying enough; it is too elegant, too easy. He uses his bare hands instead, desperate to feel it, everything, the impact, the fallout, the ugly noise and chaos, the sheer, primal force of destruction. He flings a bowl at the closed door, watching it shatter with a bright tinkling noise. He knocks over the golden stands of candles, not caring when the melted wax drips onto his fingers, leaving behind perfect round marks of red, like the indentations of tears. He pushes the tables next, heaves the stone chairs over, one by one. He slices his skin open on all the sharp, broken edges until his hands are a mess of crisscrossing cuts, flesh and blood blurring together.

The pain is good. The pain is a relief.

He relishes the salt-on-wound stinging in his fingers, the insistent throbbing in his wrists, the bruises pressing into the spaces around his knuckles. This kind of pain is controllable. Manageable. Better to have his hands cut raw than to sit in the silence and confront that other, deeper, inarticulate pain, stretching out his heart further and further until one day, it might just crack open his ribs and push through his chest.

In the midst of the wreckage, he falls back onto the cold stone floor, his robes pooling around him like the aftermath of a fatal injury, and blinks up at the ceiling. He is bleeding. The knowledge means nothing to him except as further evidence that she is not here anymore. She would never let this happen. She would be rushing into the room now, kneeling next to him, taking his ruined hands into hers so gently he could cry. She would dab cool ointment onto the cuts and scold him for being this careless. And she would threaten to never help him again if he kept injuring himself, but of course, she still would.

“Aren’t you angry?” he whispers out loud into the empty room. “Aren’t you going to come stop me?” He reaches without looking for one of the clay shards and squeezes as tight as he can, feeling it slice into his palm.

More blood drips onto the floor, like footsteps sounding across an empty hall.

She does not appear.

A yellow butterfly flits between the two graves.

On one headstone, it reads: My beloved Junyi. And on the other: My beloved Ziyan.

The Death God stands before them, his shadow cast over the wildflowers, no offerings in his hands. Ziyan had lived to almost sixty, and when he had gone to collect her soul once more, in a courtyard less than a mile from Junyi’s home, she had made one final wish before he took her to the Yellow Springs, where the cycle of reincarnation would continue. He is not in the business of granting favors—that is far more suited for the gods of fortune or the gods of fame—but he had agreed nonetheless. Graves, grief, dying wishes: all things that were once both familiar and irrelevant to him. Yet everything has changed.

He stares at the grave of his old enemy and student a beat longer before he leaves. Sometimes, he will dream of those golden autumn days in the Mortal Realm, and when he wakes, he will briefly lose his grasp of time and place and think he is back in that small cottage: all he has to do is turn the corner, and he will find Junyi there, his head already buried in his books, and Rujia, fresh peonies gathered in her arms, bowls of century egg and pork congee laid out behind her, the corner of her mouth rising in greeting. I have the whole morning planned out, she will say. Listen to this.

But it is a different morning now, and he has not planned for anything. He only stands there, remembering until it burns.

He hadn’t understood it before.

Even after five hundred years, after all those nights he passed through the Mortal Realm, all the souls he had taken, he didn’t know what they meant when they spoke of beauty. He had seen the world’s most exquisitely carved sculptures, glistening jewels the emperors would envy, hills of wildflowers abloom, mountains painted silver by the light of a full moon. None of it mattered because he could not feel anything. A barren room was the same as a gilded one. A devastated city was the same as a thriving one. It was as if a veil had been draped around him, and so everything he touched, everything he gazed upon was muted, separated from him. But then—there she was, smiling at him. Holding a sword to his throat and still looking at him more tenderly than anyone ever had before. Stopping in the snow and breathing in the cold, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright. Brushing her fingers over a peony and showing it to him, the white petals smooth and glowing.

And suddenly, there was beauty in everything. He could not stop noticing it; he could not believe he hadn’t noticed it before. Beauty was present in the drops of rain glistening on the roof eaves, the rising blue air above a meadow, the molten reflection of candlelight over a marble floor, the sway of a lantern, the rich gold of a poplar leaf. Beauty was in the living; in the familiar, melodious ringing of laughter; in a glance across a crowded market at night; in the clatter of chopsticks set down on the same round table.

Beauty was her.

Now she is gone, and she has taken every beautiful thing with her.

“Are you looking for somebody?”

The Death God stops and stares at the withered old man blocking his way. He is one of many vendors in the overflowing marketplace, approaching potential customers with promises of the sweetest cherries, the softest fabrics, the sharpest knives—and, from this vendor in particular, a vision of the future. Fortune-telling. The Death God takes in the mortal, with his sparse gray beard and tattered robes and rheumy eyes, the tiny tent propped up behind him on the side of the road, and he wants to scoff. Even gods cannot tell exactly what the future holds. How could this frail man claim to, without even a speck of divinity?

But something keeps the Death God fixed in place, unable to do anything except frown down at the stranger.

Are you looking for somebody? he had asked.

The old man smiles. His teeth are half rotted, but the smile feels strangely sincere, and despite the yellow clouding his eyes, his gaze is clear, as if he can see right through the Death God.