SU TANG (素醣)

  Day 7, 5th Month of the Lunar Calendar, 6000th Year of the Yun Dynasty, Taishan Province, Tian’an Sect

  Sunlight.

  Moonlight.

  From where I was wedged, ribs grinding against jagged rock, I couldn’t tell the difference. Just a single shaft of pallid light broke through the cracks in the prison walls, slicing through the gloom and falling on a patch of mouldy straw like a golden spotlight for decay.

  It smelled like piss and regret. The rot of unwashed stone, rusted blood, and iron saturated the air until it pressed like a second skin over mine. My real one was flayed in places, scraped raw or burned shut. Chains bound my wrists, but I wasn’t straining against them anymore. That required hope. Or stupidity. Or both.

  Everything hurt. Breathing. Seeing. Existing.

  My throat burned like an arid desert.

  I blinked.

  My arms were still attached. I flexed my fingers. Nothing broken.

  No blood.

  I tried to move my legs, but they refused to obey. Dull aches rolled through me like distant thunder, but no sharp stabs as I expected. Just the heavy drag of soreness.

  I tugged at my clothes, half-expecting to find tears or stains. Nothing. Not even a smear of dried brown.

  But the memory…it had been vivid.

  The first nail drove into my palm. Hammered in place with a silvery mallet.

  The second pierced my left wrist. My breath ceased in that moment.

  The third shattered my kneecap.

  The next one…somewhere in the soft meat of my side.

  Then another.

  And another.

  And then too many—

  and I woke up here.

  Sunlight.

  Moonlight.

  But there was nothing. No wound. No blood. Just the dull, persistent ache that had become disturbingly normal.

  Keys jingled.

  The prison door creaked open, a long, gnarled sound that rippled down the bare stone corridor like a death bell ringing underwater.

  She entered like a pillar of fire.

  Sleeves dyed blood red, juxtaposed with fabric that sucked all light. Gold-threaded peonies bloomed across her skirts, each petal hand-sewn, no doubt by a seamstress who feared for her own fingers. Light bent around the black folds of her gown, swallowed by fabric designed to devour. Red spider lilies fanned out from the knots in her raven-black hair, each strand pinned with hair ornaments that chimed delicately with every movement.

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  A crimson sash wrapped snuggly around her waist, drawing attention to her perfect proportions.

  She clicked forward, her heeled shoes making her even taller.

  She stopped in front of me.

  The scent of plum blossom and perfume-drowned blood soaked the air between us.

  “Let’s begin shall we?”

  Her voice could’ve served tea on its own.

  Servants appeared so suddenly, they could’ve been hiding in the walls. They unshackled me with more violence than the chains had ever shown. I was yanked forward, dragged like an offering.

  Towards that place. The place I didn’t know if I had been or I hadn’t been. It’s going to be okay.

  They hurled me into the crystal prison, and my spine hit the cold glass wall with a dull thunk that echoed through marrow. The candles inside flickered; dim, restrained, nothing that would challenge the shine of suffering.

  The motion awakened a memory.

  My legs twitched. I pressed them together, but the trembling didn’t stop. Couldn’t. Because the body always remembers, even when the wounds are missing.

  The Empress approached like a deity performing ritual.

  She placed her palm on the glass wall, and the threads of her magic slithered out. They found my throat first, curling like silk ribbons into a noose.

  “You know,” she cooed, “it doesn’t have to be this way.”

  The magic snapped taut. I choked. My spine straightened against my will. I made the mistake of trying to pull it away, and it answered with more pressure. A crushing weight blooming in my windpipe, crawling behind my eyes.

  Stars flickered at the edge of my vision.

  “You just have to release it. Show me it.”

  It?

  Oh, of course. báilián again.

  A force pulled at my rag doll body from opposing directions, holding my arms and legs taut. It stretched me out and then some more, tugging and jolting, desperate to rip my limbs from their sockets. Pain, burning pain, started in my joints as the force continued to cleave me apart. I blinked and a familiar face appeared.

  Ying Yue.

  Widow’s peak, tied hair, dressed in scarlet linen. She looked the same Back when we traded dreams like secrets. Back when I thought her silence meant safety. Back then I thought she was my friend.

  Her face was blank.

  Her hands were cold as she grasped my face.

  Her blade skimmed my cheek. Down to the chin. Slid along the neck, tracing a path like it was following a familiar map. When it pressed into the hollow of my collarbone, I stopped breathing again. Not out of fear. Out of memory.

  Ying Yue’s icy blue stare said one thing alone:

  I’ll gut you if that’s what it takes.

  No regret. No confusion. Just iron resolve.

  All those years…I suppose the signs had always been there. Her cold demeanour. That no nonsense attitude. The way she followed Ju Ying everywhere.

  People wear faces like masks. But the eyes never lie.

  I closed mine. Tried to breathe deep.

  Tried to picture someplace else. A different timeline. A world where I hadn’t been born with this thing rotting inside me.

  It’s going to be okay.

  I should give it up.

  The flower.

  It’s all they want. The reason for the torment. The reason for everything.

  That flower demon, whispering in my dreams, threading petals into my nightmares. I hated it. I hated it.

  How many times had I prayed for someone to rip it out of me?

  Isn’t that what they’re trying to do now?

  “It will make you feel better if you let go,” the Empress said.

  Her voice burrowed in. Sweet, syrupy, venomous.

  It wrapped around my ribs, trying to coax the truth from my bones. But she was right.

  She was so right.

  Why did I hold onto it?

  Su Tang…

  Where are you?

  Su Tang~

  Come to me~

  You owe me. Are you going to pay it back?

  But it wasn’t for me to decide this.

  Something deep in my body—some fragment of a self I barely recognised—clung to that cursed flower with a stubborn, visceral will. Not me, but mine. A survival instinct etched into marrow, a raw and wordless refusal buried under the wreckage of thought. It wrapped around the thing like roots refusing to let go of a rotten seed, holding fast with fingers that weren’t my own. Clenched tight with a grip that screamed: No. Not yet.

  I could feel it: that unrelenting tether, slippery with pain, slick with memory. Sticky like dried blood, like the sap from a poisonous tree. There was no language to reason with it, no logic to dislodge it.

  I scrunched my face, not because I thought it would help but because I needed to feel something that belonged to me. Even if it was just the twitch of a brow, the sour pinch of refusal.

  The Empress sighed. It was almost gentle. Almost bored.

  As if I were the one being difficult.

  As if she were the one forced to clean up someone else's mess.

  Ying Yue smiled. It’s going to be okay.

  The knife drove straight through my collarbone.

  And a howl shattered from my throat.