Page 138 of The Immortal’s Mark

I almost smile. Almost.

Dumpling, who has wandered into the cavern through some route known only to cats and nightmares, begins grooming himself on a pile of gold coins. He looks entirely too pleased with himself. His orange fur is somehow immaculate despite three weeks of travel, and his expression suggests that he considers himself the apex predator of this particular food chain.

Tianlong watches with the expression of a creature who has accepted defeat on this particular front.

“I am fond of him anyway,” he admits, almost grudgingly. “Do not tell him.”

The cat pauses his grooming to stare directly at Tianlong. His yellow eyes are ancient and knowing in a way that a cat’s eyes should not be. Then he resumes licking his paw, apparently satisfied that his dominance has been acknowledged.

Silence settles over the lair. The comfortable kind—the kind that exists between beings who have shared space for decades and no longer need to fill every moment with words.

“She is staying,” Tianlong says finally. It is not a question.

“Yes.”

“Good.” He unfurls his wings, examines them for damage, folds them again with exaggerated care. His voice is different now—the theatrical edge softening into something more real. “You wrote poetry on the road.”

“You noticed.”

“I notice everything, little flame.” The nickname he has used since I was twelve, since he burned me alive and I rose from the ashes bonded to him. “You wrote poetry, and you laughed without catching yourself, and you slept through the night for the first time in twenty years.”

I do not know what to say to that. The accuracy of it catches me off guard. He has been in my mind for two decades—he feels what I feel, knows what I know, carries the weight of my emotions alongside his own ancient burden.

But hearing it spoken aloud is different.

“Is that counsel?”

“Do not lose this.” He lowers his head until his eyes are level with mine. Three thousand years of wisdom. Three thousand years of watching empires rise and fall, humans love and lose, bonds form and shatter. He has seen everything. “Whatever this is becoming. Do not lose it.”

The words land heavier than they should. I have spent two decades learning to lose things—joy, freedom, the brothers I taught to swim, the mother who gave me her comb. I have become skilled at losing. Expert, even.

“I am trying not to.”

“Try harder.”

I meet his eyes. Something ancient looks back at me—something that has chosen to stay with me for all these years, that has watched me suffer and grieve and close myself off from everything that might hurt. Something that is, perhaps, tired of watching me be careful.

“That is your counsel? You want me to ‘try harder’?”

“Would you prefer I enumerate the many ways you were smiling wrong over the last six weeks? I have notes. Extensive notes. The way your face attempted joy on day three of the road trip was particularly tragic—”

“I was not aware I smile.”

“Exactly.” Tianlong settles his head on his forelimbs, smoke curling from his nostrils in what might be a sigh. “That is the problem. You have forgotten how. She is reminding you.” His eyes drift to the entrance of the lair, in the direction of the palace above. “Do not forget again.”

Night. Jasmine blooming. Our bench.

She finds me before I find her—or perhaps we find each other, drawn by the same gravity that has been pulling us together since she tried to kill me and I refused to die. The garden is silver with moonlight, and she moves through it like she belongs to the shadows. Like the shadows belong to her.

She does not bow. She does not announce herself. She simply sits beside me, close enough that I can smell the road still on her clothes—dust and wind and something that might be freedom, or might just be her.

The bench is the same one we have shared before—the one by the jasmine trellis, the one that has become ours through repetition and unspoken agreement. The stone is cool through the silk of my robes. The night air carries the sweetness of flowers that bloom only after dark.

“It’s different now,” she says.

“Everything is.”

“You had to become him again. The Emperor.” She does not make it a question, but I hear the question underneath. Are you still in there? Under the crown? Under the duty?