The servant brought rice porridge with pickled vegetables. The same breakfast she'd eaten a thousand times. The same chipped bowl. The same wooden spoon worn smooth by years of use.
She stared at it like she'd never seen food before.
"Eat," Kaelan said. "Your body hasn't been fed since yesterday. Fainting from hunger would be inconvenient."
She picked up the spoon. Her hand trembled. She forced it steady and brought the porridge to her mouth.
It tasted like nothing. Like ash. She swallowed anyway.
"Good," he murmured, and she felt something like warmth spread through her chest — not physical warmth, but the sensation of approval, of being watched by something that was pleased with her.
It should have been disturbing. A voice in her head, commenting on her eating. Praising her like a child learning to use utensils.
She took another bite.
"You have questions," Kaelan said. "I can feel them. Your mind is... loud."
"You can read my thoughts?"
"Not exactly. I feel what you feel. The shape of your emotions. Right now you're confused, frightened, and angry. The anger is the loudest. It's been the loudest since you woke."
She set down the spoon. The porridge sat heavy in her stomach.
"How is this possible? How am I here?"
"You made a deal. I pulled you back."
"Pulled me back how? I died. I felt the knife. I felt—" Her voice cracked. She pressed her palm against her chest again, that reflexive need to confirm the wound was gone. "I felt everything."
"You did die. That body, that timeline — it's gone. But your soul didn't dissolve. It should have. Void-born souls are empty. They scatter like smoke when the body fails." A pause. Something shifted in his tone, curiosity threading through the amusement. "Yours didn't. You held on. Screamed into the nothing. I heard you."
"And you just... happened to be listening?"
"I'm always listening. The Void is my cage. Every Void-born who dies passes through it. Most of them are whispers. Brief flickers of existence and then nothing." Another pause. "You were a hurricane."
She didn't know what to say to that. She picked up the spoon again, ate mechanically, trying to organize her thoughts into something coherent.
"The deal," she said finally. "What exactly did I agree to?"
"You agreed to carry me. To be my vessel in the mortal world. In exchange, I gave you power and time."
"That's not specific."
"No. It isn't."
She waited. He didn't elaborate.
"What do you want from me? Eventually. When this is over."
Silence stretched. She felt him considering — not the answer, but how much to reveal.
"There are things that need to be destroyed," he said finally. "The Book of Stars. The bloodline that carries the star god's power. The seal that keeps my kind — what's left of my kind — trapped between worlds."
"Your kind?"
"I am not the only thing that lives in the Void. Or I wasn't, once. Most are gone now. Starved. Faded. I've endured longer than the others, but even I have limits." His voice dropped, something old and tired surfacing beneath the amusement. "The seal must break. And you are the first vessel capable of helping me break it."
She absorbed this. A devil in her soul, wanting to destroy the foundations of the empire. Wanting to unmake the very system that had tried to unmake her.
It should have frightened her. It didn't.
"The Emperor," she said. "The ritual that killed me. That's connected to all of this?"
"The Emperor uses Void-born sacrifices to extend his life. Has for centuries. The power he drains comes from the same source I come from — the space between stars, the emptiness your alignment touches. He's been feeding on my world to sustain his."
"So destroying him..."
"Weakens the seal. Ends the sacrifices. Frees what's left of the Void." A beat. "And gives you revenge. Our interests align, little vessel. That's why this works."
She flinched at the name. "I told you not to call me that."
"You did. I found it amusing."
"Find something else amusing."
Low laughter echoed through her skull. Not mocking exactly. Surprised. Like she'd done something unexpected.
"Very well. What should I call you?"
She opened her mouth to answer and realized she didn't have one. She'd never been named. The servants called her "girl" or "you" or nothing at all. Wei called her — had called her — "love" or "darling" or other soft words that meant nothing now.
"I don't know," she admitted.
"Then I'll wait. Until you decide."
---
After breakfast, she tested the boundaries of her cage.
The Quiet Wing was a small estate on the palace grounds, separated from the main buildings by high walls and locked gates. She'd lived here her entire life. Eighteen years of the same rooms, the same gardens, the same faces rotating through on schedules designed to prevent attachment.
She walked the perimeter now, seeing it differently. In her first life, she'd looked for beauty — the way light fell through the plum blossoms, the koi in the small pond, the distant sound of palace music on festival nights. Small comforts to make the cage bearable.
Now she looked for weaknesses.
"The eastern wall," she murmured, passing it. "That's where Wei said the gap was."
"Your lover mapped this place well," Kaelan observed. "For all his other failings."
The word *lover* stuck in her throat. They'd never — she'd never let him — but the word felt wrong anyway now. Tainted by knowledge of what he would become.
"He wasn't my lover. Not really."
"You cared for him."
"I thought I did."
"And now?"
She reached the eastern wall. Touched the stones. They were old, weathered, the mortar crumbling in places. Wei had been right about this much — there was weakness here. A place where someone determined could break through.
She'd waited at this wall. The night of the escape. Standing in shadows, heart pounding, trusting him to appear.
He never came.
"Now," she said quietly, "I want to understand. Why he did it. What happened in his head that let him walk away."
"Does it matter? He left you to die. The reason changes nothing."
"It matters to me."
Kaelan was silent for a moment. Then: "You want to know if he was always a coward. Or if something made him one."
She nodded, forgetting he couldn't see her. But he felt the motion somehow, the shift of her body, the direction of her thoughts.
"I'll help you find out," he said. "When you're ready to face him."
"Not yet."
"No. Not yet."
She turned away from the wall and continued her circuit.
The afternoon brought familiar rhythms. A servant collected her breakfast dishes. Another brought lunch. A third checked that she hadn't damaged anything or harmed herself — the Quiet Wing's residents were too valuable to lose to despair.
She performed her role. Quiet. Compliant. Empty.
Inside, Kaelan taught her.
"Close your eyes," he instructed. "Feel for the shadows."
"I don't understand what that means."
"You're connected to the Void now. Through me. The shadows are thinnest where reality is — they're the places where my world touches yours. If you focus, you can sense them."
She closed her eyes. Felt foolish. Stood in the middle of her room with her eyes shut, reaching for something she couldn't see.
Nothing.
"You're trying too hard. Stop thinking. Just... feel."
She breathed. Let her thoughts quiet. Let the darkness behind her eyelids become something other than absence.
And there — faint, so faint she almost missed it — something cold. A whisper of sensation near the corner of her room where the afternoon light didn't reach.
"Good," Kaelan said, and that warmth again, that approval spreading through her. "You found one."
"What do I do with it?"
"Nothing yet. You're not strong enough. But eventually, you'll be able to step into that shadow and emerge from another one anywhere in this building. Anywhere in the palace. Anywhere in the empire, if you grow powerful enough."
The possibilities unfolded in her mind. No more locked doors. No more walls. No more cages.
"What else can you do?"
"Many things." Was that pride in his voice? "I can hear conversations through shadows. See through them. In time, I'll be able to manifest — first as darkness, then as form. I can feed on life force, drain it slowly from your enemies. And through you, eventually, I can touch the mortal world directly. Decay what I touch. Unmake it."
"That's... terrifying."
"Yes." No apology. No softening. "I am terrifying. Don't forget that."
She opened her eyes. The room looked the same as it always had. But she could feel the shadow in the corner now, that faint cold, that whisper of something other.
"I won't forget," she said. "But you're also the only reason I'm alive. So I suppose I'll have to live with the terror."
That surprised laugh again. "You're strange. Most mortals would be groveling or bargaining by now. Trying to find a way out of the deal."
"Is there a way out?"
"No."
"Then what's the point of groveling?"
Silence. Then: "I chose well. I wasn't certain before. Now I am."
She didn't ask what he meant. She wasn't sure she wanted to know.
---
Evening came. The servants brought dinner, collected the dishes, locked her door for the night. The familiar ritual of imprisonment dressed up as protection.
She lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling. The same crack. The same stone. The same cage.
But not the same her.
"Kaelan."
"Yes?"
"In my first life... how long did I have? From now until the ritual?"
"Eight months and sixteen days. The Century Alignment occurs on the winter solstice."
Eight months. It had felt like nothing before. An endless stretch of the same days blurring together until suddenly they weren't, until suddenly there were soldiers and altars and knives.
Now it felt like everything. Eight months to learn. To plan. To build something that could tear down an empire.
"It's not enough time," she said.
"No. It isn't. But it's what we have."
She rolled onto her side, facing the shadow in the corner. That cold presence. That doorway to something vast and dark.
"Tell me about you," she said. "Before the seal. Before you were trapped."
Another pause. She was learning his rhythms — the silences that meant he was deciding what to share, how much to reveal.
"Why do you want to know?"
"Because you're inside me. Because we're bound together. Because if I'm going to trust you with my life, I should know who you are."
"You shouldn't trust me."
"I know. Tell me anyway."
The silence stretched longer this time. She thought he wouldn't answer.
Then:
"There was a place. Before your empire, before your star god, before names meant power. A place between places. We called it the Void, though that word doesn't capture it — it wasn't empty, it was... other. Different. A realm that existed alongside yours but never touched it."
She listened, barely breathing.
"There were others like me. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. We didn't count ourselves the way you do. We simply existed. Fed on the energy that leaked between worlds. Watched your realm sometimes, curious but never invested."
"What happened to them?"
"The star god happened. It came from somewhere else — I don't know where — and it decided your world was chaos that needed ordering. It created the naming system, the alignments, the structure your empire is built on. And it sealed the Void away. Cut us off from the energy we needed to survive."
His voice had changed. The amusement was gone. Something older underneath, something heavy with time.
"They died. One by one. Faded into nothing because there was nothing left to sustain them. I watched. For centuries. Millennia. Until I was the last."
She didn't speak. Didn't know what to say.
"So when you ask who I am," he continued, "I am the one who endured. The one who refused to fade. The one who waited thousands of years for a vessel strong enough to carry me into the world. That's who you're bound to.The last of my kind."
She thought about that. About millennia of solitude. About watching everything you knew disappear.
"I understand," she said finally.
"Do you?"
"I spent eighteen years alone in a cage. I watched other Void-borns disappear and knew I was next. I don't understand thousands of years, but I understand waiting. I understand being the one who's left."
Silence. But different this time. Warmer.
"You're strange," he said again. Softer now.
"So are you."
She closed her eyes. Sleep tugged at her, the first since waking in this impossible second chance.
"Kaelan?"
"Yes?"
"I'm going to change everything. I don't know how yet. But I'm going to do it."
"I know."
"And when I do — when I break the seal and destroy the Book and end the Emperor — you'll be free. You won't need me anymore."
A long pause. She felt something shift in the air, something she couldn't name.
"You think I'm only here because I need you."
"Aren't you?"
He didn't answer.
She fell asleep with the cold presence watching over her.
She dreamed of the altar. The knife. The pain.
But this time, when the darkness came, it had a voice.
I have you, it said. I have you. You're not alone anymore.
She woke with tears on her face and Kaelan's presence wrapped around her like armor.
Morning light crept through the window. Day two of her second life.
Outside her door, she heard footsteps. A knock. A voice she recognized.
Wei's voice.
"Good morning. May I come in?"
Her heart stopped. Started again. Slower. Colder.
Kaelan stirred inside her. Watchful.
"Remember," he murmured. "Smile and Lie."
She wiped her face. Arranged her expression into something soft and welcoming.
"Come in," she called.
The door opened.
And the man who would leave her to die walked in with a smile and a ribbon in his hand.