Page 85 of The Immortal’s Mark

Tianlong takes a ceramic pot.

Defensible positions, he says, curling inside with exaggerated dignity. The lid, if you please.

I place the lid over the pot. He radiates satisfaction.

Now I am invisible. The creature cannot reach me here.

The creature is asleep.

The creature is pretending to sleep. I invented predator behavior. That cat is waiting.

Through the ceramic, I can still feel his warmth, the thread of our bond. Twenty-two years of this—the voice in my head, the constant commentary, the irritation that is actually comfort. I have never been alone since the fire chose me. Even in the most isolating moments of rule, he has been there, sardonic and eternal.

I have never slept in a room with another person. Not since childhood. The palace does not permit it. The emperor’s chambers are guarded but not shared, private in the most complete and isolating sense. A hundred guards outside the door, and no one within it. Protected and imprisoned in equal measure.

Lián’s breathing slows. She is asleep, or approaching sleep, her form a darker shadow against the darkness of the room. Dumpling purrs from the pillow, a rumbling sound that fills the silence in a way I did not expect to find pleasant.

I lie on the floor. The boards are hard beneath my back. The blanket smells of horses and woodsmoke.

I should be uncomfortable. I am accustomed to silk. To space. To the particular quiet of a room where no one is allowed to enter.

Instead, I feel something I cannot name. Something that has to do with the sound of breathing that is not my own, the warmth of another presence, the simple fact of not being alone.

At some point in the night, I wake.

Dumpling is on my chest.

The cat has abandoned the bed, abandoned the pillow, abandoned Lián entirely to settle his considerable weight across my ribs. He is purring. His eyes are closed. His paws are tucked beneath him in the position that suggests maximum comfort has been achieved and will not be surrendered for any consideration.

“Traitor,” Lián mumbles from above.

I do not move. I barely breathe. This is the most absurd moment of my reign. I am the Emperor, Dragon-Bonded, Voice of Heaven, and I am lying on the floor of a terrible inn being used as a sleeping surface by a cat I did not invite.

I am afraid to move in case he leaves.

There were no animals in my life that did not serve a purpose—the dragon is bonded, the horses are transport, the dogs that appear in the palace are guards. Everything in the palace serves the empire. Everything in my life serves the throne.

This is simply a cat. He has no purpose here except the one he chooses.

He has chosen me.

The weight of him is warm against my chest. His purring vibrates through my ribs. In the darkness, I can hear Lián’s breathing above me, slow and steady, and the faint rustle of Tianlong shifting in his ceramic pot, and the distant sounds of an inn settling into the night.

I lie in the darkness, the weight of the cat on my chest, and I think: I have never been happier.

The thought arrives without permission. I examine it. I should dismiss it—happiness is not a word I use, not a state I seek, not a thing that belongs in the vocabulary of empire. But it persists. Stubbornly. A warmth beneath my ribs that has nothing to do with duty and everything to do with this moment: a terrible room, a hard floor, a cat who will not stay where he is wanted.

This is absurd. This is undignified. This is everything an emperor should not feel, everything a ruler cannot afford to acknowledge.

I do not move the cat. I close my eyes.

I sleep.

Grey pre-dawn light.

I wake before consciousness fully forms—a skill learned from years of emergency war councils, assassination attempts, advisors who believed the emperor’s time belonged to them rather than to himself. My eyes open to a ceiling I do not recognize, walls I have never seen, the disorienting blankness of an unfamiliar space.

For a moment, I do not know where I am.