He applied mermaid balm, worth more than ten cities, to my skin with his own hands, praising my flawless, jade-like complexion as unmatched in all the world.
Yet he didn’t know that in the ruins of the Cold Palace, a rain-soaked family genealogy was sneering: “Su Wanniang, seven parts the late empress’s likeness. Bring her into the palace as a replacement.”
For three years I enjoyed his favor, the most exquisite counterfeit in the emperor’s hands.
Xiao Che’s fingertips were stained with the deep-blue balm, made from mermaid tears of the Eastern Sea. Inch by inch, it seared my skin, while the name he murmured was that of his dead wife.
In that splendid cage, a coarse mourning robe became the first blade I raised against imperial power. When the priceless mermaid-silk robe was torn to shreds before everyone, and the bloodstained genealogy was flung before the officials, the tiles of the Golden Throne Hall were spattered with the purplish-black poison I vomited up. “Your Majesty’s shattered jade hairpin cost a thousand times less than my tears, didn’t it?”
They carved the bones from my people. I’ll melt them down to make the white-jade steps to my throne!
The peacock-feather torture tore flesh from bone. The pregnancy coffin imprisoned my ruined body. Twin snow lotuses could not save the mermaid-eyed babies strangled at birth.
The eyes of my enemies were set into seventy-two blank tombstones. The blood of a hundred men flowed into the pool where their crimes would be washed away!
As she stepped onto the blood-stained jade lotus dais and drove a crown of white bones into her brow, blood from the new emperor’s coronet dripped onto the edict announcing the new era: “Ashen Dawn.”
And atop the throne, the broken jade hairpin melted into the morning sun, just like the lie he told the night he first favored me, as he placed a hairpin in my hair with his own hands.
A replacement? No. I want imperial power itself as my offering!
Crowned in blood, raised on bones, the pinnacle of power is also the beginning of an eternal night.
