Page 151 of The Immortal’s Mark

The darkness shifts. Coalesces. Becomes something that is almost a shape, almost a man, though the edges refuse to stay fixed. Eyes that hold too many years look out at me from a face that suggests humanity without quite achieving it.

The Hungering King.

He is here.

“Let me go.”

My voice comes out steady. I am distantly proud of that. Whatever else I have lost, I have not lost the ability to speak without trembling.

“No.” A pause. Something that might be a smile on that too-fluid face. “But I am sorry. Genuinely.”

“You are going to kill me.”

“No.” The shape moves closer, and I want to recoil, want to fight, want to do anything except hang here helpless in this prison of shadow and cold. “I am going to use you. There is a difference. You will survive this, child. You have to. You are worthless to me dead.”

The cold presses deeper. I try to reach for Tianlong again, habit more than hope, and find only that terrible silence.

“I was you, once.”

The voice softens. The shape settles into something more solid, and for a moment I can see him clearly. A man’s face. Handsome, even. The kind of face that belongs on coins. Eyes that hold centuries of loss.

“Emperor. Dragon-bonded. In love with a woman who should have been impossible.” The voice carries something that sounds almost like nostalgia. “I know how this feels. The wanting. The terror of having something you cannot afford to lose.”

“You know nothing about me.”

“I know everything about you.” The shape leans closer, and the cold intensifies, and I cannot suppress the shudder that runs through me. “I know that you spent years convincing yourself you do not deserve happiness. I know that she walked into your palace and made you question everything you believed about duty and sacrifice. I know that you have been humming love ballads and staring at taxation reports without reading them and counting the hours until you can return to her.”

My jaw tightens. I say nothing.

“I know,” the Hungering King says softly, “because I was you. Before the loss. Before the hunger. Before I became—this.” The shape gestures at itself, at the darkness that comprises it. “I was a man who loved a woman. I was an emperor who found something worth more than empire. I was happy.”

The word lands strangely. Happy. I try to imagine this creature—this thing of shadow and hunger and ancient grief—happy. Try to imagine him young and whole and in love. Try to imagine him as anything other than the monster from the histories, the nightmare that devoured a dynasty.

I succeed, and the success is terrible.

Because I can see it. I can see the man he must have been, the emperor he describes, the lover who found something worth more than power. I can see him because I know him. Because I am looking in a mirror, a thousand years removed, and the reflection shows me exactly what I could become.

If I lose her.

If she dies, and I do not, and the grief consumes me the way it consumed him.

This is what I could become.

“What happened?”

“She died.” The words are simple. Final. The grief beneath them is oceanic. “She died, and I did not, and I have spent eleven centuries trying to unmake that mistake.”

Eleven centuries. The number settles into me with the weight of stone. Eleven hundred years of this. Eleven hundred years of grief and hunger and shadow. Eleven hundred years of becoming whatever this creature is, this thing that wears the memory of a man like an ill-fitting coat.

“Her name was Mei-Ling.” The Hungering King’s voice has gone distant, soft, the way voices go when they are speaking more to memory than to listener. “She had a laugh like bells. She used to tend flowers in the imperial garden—not because she had to, but because she loved the way they grew. She would get dirt under her fingernails and smile about it.”

I do not want to hear this. I do not want this monster to have a history, a love story, a humanity that mirrors my own. I do not want to understand him.

“She died saving people. A plague. She burned her own life force to heal them—too much, too fast, and she simply… faded.” A pause that stretches across centuries. “She died in my arms. Smiling. Telling me it was worth it.”

“You cannot bring her back.”

“Can’t I?” The shape smiles, and there is nothing human in it now. “I am very close, little emperor. Closer than I have ever been. I have waited so long. I have sacrificed so much. And now—” The cold pulses, and I feel the shadows tighten around me. “Now I have exactly what I need.”