Page 171 of The Immortal’s Mark

Another step. The shadows seem to pull back from me, like even darkness doesn’t want to touch what I’m becoming.

“I’m tired of counting deaths.”

Another. I’m close now. Close enough that I can feel the cold radiating off him, the absence of warmth that marks where his humanity used to be.

“You want a willing sacrifice? Fine.”

Another step.

“I choose him.”

The words ring in the tomb like bells. Like promises. Like the sound of eight hundred years of walls finally crumbling to dust.

“I choose mornings with him. Waking up to his face, his warmth, his heartbeat under my ear. I choose the way he looks at me when he thinks I’m not watching—soft, unguarded, like I’m something he wants to keep.”

Another step.

“I choose fights with him. Arguments about politics I don’t understand and policies I don’t care about. The way he gets quiet when he’s angry, quiet and still, and the way I needle him until he cracks and actually tells me what’s wrong.”

My voice is breaking. Shattering. I let it.

“I choose his terrible poetry. The poems he writes in the margins of official documents, the ones he thinks I don’t see. The way his whole face changes when he’s writing something that matters to him—soft and focused and young, like he’s remembering who he was before the crown.”

Another step.

“I choose his awful cooking. The dumplings that always come out lopsided. The rice that’s somehow both burnt and undercooked. The way he looks so pleased with himself when he presents something edible that I don’t have the heart to tell him the salt is wrong.”

I’m crying harder now. Laughing too, maybe. It’s hard to tell the difference.

“I choose the way he looks at me like I’m something worth staying for. Like I matter. Like I’m not just a weapon or a tool or a footnote in someone else’s story.”

Something flickers across the Hungering King’s face.

Recognition.

Memory.

Pain so old and deep it’s become the foundation of everything he is.

“I choose the cat who screams for dinner every night at exactly the wrong time. The way he looks at me like I personally invented food and am withholding it out of spite. The warm weight of him on my chest when I can’t sleep, purring like a broken engine.”

One more step. I’m close enough to touch the Hungering King now. Close enough to see every line of grief etched into his ancient face.

“I choose the archivist who brings me tea even when I forget to ask. Jing’s quiet kindness. The way she hovers, worried, trying so hard not to care and failing completely.”

I spread my arms. Open. Vulnerable. The opposite of everything I’ve been for eight hundred years.

“I choose the dragon who calls me ‘little dawn’ and pretends he doesn’t care. Tianlong’s grumbling and his warmth and the way he threatens to incinerate everyone who annoys him but never actually does it.”

The Hungering King is staring at me. Through me. At something that isn’t quite me—a ghost, maybe. The woman he lost, reflected in the woman who’s about to give him everything he’s wanted.

“I choose the palace that’s too big and the politics that make no sense and the empire I never wanted to be part of. I choose all of it. Every ridiculous, frustrating, beautiful piece of the life I built without meaning to.”

“You sound like her,” he says quietly. So quietly I almost don’t hear it. “Mei-Ling. When she chose to save our people. When she chose to burn herself out for love.”

“I know.”

I stop. Close enough to touch him. Close enough to see the tears still tracking down his face, the grief that’s eating him alive even after eleven centuries.