Page 65 of The Immortal’s Mark

I’m not going to.

A bird calls beyond the walls. Once. Twice. Gone.

When he speaks, his voice is soft.

“What was it like? The first time you died?”

No one has asked me this. Not in eight hundred years. Scholars have studied me. Mages have poked at me. Emperors have demanded answers. They ask how—how does it work, how long, how much does it hurt.

No one asks what it was like.

I should deflect. Joke about the afterlife having terrible service. Change the subject.

My mouth opens anyway.

“My mother cursed me.”

The words taste like copper. Like something I’ve been swallowing for eight hundred years.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t lean in or pull back. Just waits.

“She was celestial-blooded. Last daughter of a fallen house.” I’m not looking at him. Can’t. My eyes fix on the jasmine instead. “There were hunters. Something that wanted her line erased. She never told me what.”

One breath. Two.

“The curse was supposed to hide me. She didn’t mention the part about dying and coming back.”

I stop. That’s enough. That’s already more than I’ve told anyone in three centuries.

But he’s still waiting. Still quiet. And something in that silence pulls more words out of me like thread from a wound.

“I was twenty-five the first time. Bandits on the road.” The memory surfaces—wet heat of blood, strange peace of fading, violent shock of waking in the dark with dirt in my mouth. “I clawed out of my own grave three days later. My mother was already dead. She’d killed herself to fuel the final working.”

The jasmine smells too sweet.

“That was the first death. Alone in the dark, choking on grave dirt, with no one to explain what I’d become.”

Silence. The garden holds its breath.

I should stop there.

I don’t.

“There was a boy.”

Don’t.

“Chen.” His name feels strange in my mouth. I haven’t said it aloud in—I don’t know how long. “He found me after. Wandering the roads, half-feral. He thought I was an injured traveler.”

I stare at my hands. The same hands that touched his, all those centuries ago.

“He was kind. Stubborn about it.” My voice roughens. “He had these hands—worker’s hands, callused from the fields. But gentle. He’d bring me wildflowers. Terrible poetry. The worst dumplings I’ve ever eaten.”

Something cracks in my chest. I shove it down.

“We married in year three. I told myself I’d leave before he noticed the difference. Before he had to ask why his wife still looked twenty-something while he—”

I stop.