The Cold Palace stood at the farthest edge of the imperial city — a forgotten ruin behind a rusted gate and crumbling corridors swallowed by vines. Once the residence of disgraced consorts and fallen royalty, it now held ghosts more real than the living.
And one of them was Lady Zhen.
Her beauty had faded. Her once-glorious robes had been traded for plain linen. But her eyes — sharp, burning, dangerous — remained unchanged. Madness laced her voice like silk soaked in arsenic.
"You've come," she rasped from her cot as the guards stepped aside to let the Emperor in.
She hadn't been summoned.
He had come on his own.
Alone.
He stood at the doorway, silent, watching her through the dust and the gloom.
"I had to see for myself," he said. "Why you hated her."
Lady Zhen gave a hollow laugh, coughing blood into her sleeve. "It wasn't hate. It was jealousy. That's the part no one understands. You looked at her… the same way you once looked at me."
"I never looked at you like that."
She tilted her head. "No? Then why did I dream of another life where you sat behind glass walls and I—" she stopped, laughing bitterly again. "Ah. Maybe I was only ever meant to be the woman watching from behind the curtain."
The Emperor said nothing.
But something in her words struck him. The dreams. The fragments of modernity she had no reason to know. She spoke of glass walls. She had seen something, too.
A flash of a memory returned — a hallway in the university building. A woman walking past, perfume too sharp, voice too polished. Was it possible… she had been there too?
"You were never meant to take her place," he said finally.
Lady Zhen smiled, tired. "No. I was just the placeholder fate used to remind you of who you'd already lost."
While the Emperor met with ghosts, Eira sat in the Phoenix Palace gardens, rereading her own letter under the warm sun.
A part of her wanted to throw it into the koi pond.
But another part of her still feared losing him. Forgetting again. Being forgotten.
She pressed it against her chest.
"I lived a life where no one saw me," she whispered, "but now… he sees me."
Still, a question gnawed at her:
What if this world stole her again, too?
She thought of the old scroll. The lost Empress's warning.
Even when he loved me, it was too late.
She could still feel the tremble in his hands. The way he'd said her name like it was an apology stitched into a prayer.
Kai Ren.
Not Emperor. Not His Majesty. Just him.
Would she be forced to leave him, just as the Empress had?
Would she vanish again?
That evening, when the Emperor returned, he didn't wear his crown.
Eira met him under the plum tree, where petals fluttered in the warm wind like paper memories.
He looked tired. More man than monarch.
"She dreamed it too," he said. "Lady Zhen."
Eira looked up. "What?"
"She saw the world we came from. She remembered. Not all of it, but enough to know it wasn't this."
Eira's heart sank.
"How many of us were brought here?" she whispered. "Are we puppets of some divine story?"
"No," he said. "We're something worse. We're people who were given a second chance… and punished for it."
They stood in silence.
Then he took her hand — not the way an Emperor takes a consort's hand, but the way Kai Ren had once held a girl's trembling fingers before she disappeared into traffic and time.
"I want to change the ending," he said. "I don't care what came before. I don't care what dreams say. I choose this life, here, with you."
Tears welled in her eyes. "But we're not the only ones who remember. And if they remember too, they might come for us."
"Then let them come," he said. "We've been running through centuries. Let's stand still. Just this once."
That night, a shadow passed through the palace gates — cloaked, quiet, watching.
Far in the shadows, someone else had started remembering.
But not with love.
With vengeance.
And this time, the next dream would be blood.