Wude Year Nine, the fourth day of the sixth month, night. The upturned eaves of Taiji Palace looked like the ghastly bones of some beast beneath the pallid flashes of lightning, tearing through the thick, ink-black darkness. Seven-year-old Princess Jinyang, Li Mingwei, fled her bedchamber barefoot, stumbling like a startled fawn. The air was stifling with the smell of rust mingled with the damp earthiness that comes before a thunderstorm.
“Zizi! Come back!” A furious shout, choked with boundless panic, rang out behind her. It was her mother, the empress. But she could no longer stop herself.
At the end of the covered walkway, through the wildly swirling rain, she saw her eldest brother, Jiancheng, pulling a bloodstained saber from her second brother Shimin’s abdomen. A spray of glaring scarlet followed the blade!
Her second brother staggered backward. His face, usually so gentle and indulgent whenever he smiled at her, was now twisted with pain and a fierce resolve she could not understand.
“Second Brother!”
Her childish shriek pierced the rain. At that very instant, a violet bolt of lightning unlike any she had ever seen, as if the world itself had just been born, struck the chiwen ornament above her head, the symbol of imperial authority, without the slightest deviation. An irresistible, invisible force, like a giant hand reaching out from the underworld, seized her tiny body.
All she had time to do was clutch the chi-dragon jade token her father had hastily pressed into her palm when the thunder first began. Its warm touch was instantly overwhelmed by searing currents of electricity. Her consciousness was wrenched away completely, plunging into an endless void.
