Wu Ling had not been born cruel.
In the courtyard of the Lord Protector's estate, she once chased cranes across frost-crusted stones, her laughter carrying like bells struck by wind. She was a daughter then, no more, no less. She pressed wildflowers into her mother's palms and asked whether the world would always smell of spring.
Her mother smiled faintly, but her father's words were heavier, sharper. "A daughter's worth is measured not by her laughter, but by the shadow she casts for her clan."
It was the first time she understood that her life was not her own.
When she came of age, silk replaced plain cloth. Tutors pressed poetry into her memory, gestures into her wrists, silence into her tongue. She was taught how to bow not too deep, to smile not too wide, to listen without answering. She was told her beauty was not hers, but a vessel. Her body was not hers, but a seal. Her future, not hers, but the Lord Protector's design.
And so, when she was sent to the palace, she went without tears. She went as a gift — though no one asked whether the wrapping bled.
At first, she believed she could make a place there. The Emperor was young, uncertain, lonely. She tended to him gently, offering warmth as though he were her equal, not her master. She thought — perhaps — he might see her.
But he did not. He wore the dragon robe like a chain, his eyes always fixed on the shadows of others. He was polite, distant, unreachable. She was a wife in title, a stranger in truth.
The silken halls grew colder. The laughter she once carried in her chest rotted into silence. She faded into her veil, into her role, until she was no longer sure there was a woman beneath the silks.
Her father did not visit. His letters carried no tenderness, only command. "Hold the Emperor's gaze. Make him listen. Make him need you." Each phrase was a knife honed not for her protection but for his ambition.
She tried. And she failed.
It was then the monk came.
Not through the grand gates, not announced by trumpets, but as a shadow in the gardens, as if the earth had birthed him from its darker roots. His head was shaven, his robes threadbare, his eyes black as oil.
He spoke little, but his words clung. He told her of teachings once kept in the inner sanctums of Taoist halls, of prayers older than the Empire itself. He told her that she had been wrong to beg for affection, wrong to crave recognition. "The Emperor will love you when you cease to beg for it. Your father will acknowledge you when you are no longer a child. The world bends only for those who dare bend it first."
And then the promise: "Follow my rites, and he will see you. Both of them will."
Wu Ling listened. Not because she believed, but because she had nothing else left.
The incense he burned stank of the sea at low tide. The chants he taught her curled in the air like smoke that refused to fade. She whispered them beneath her breath until they no longer sounded foreign. She dreamed of corridors beneath the earth, endless and wet, where voices echoed without bodies. Once, she saw the Emperor's face dissolve into a tide of mouths — and in the morning, when he passed her without a glance, she almost wept, because at least in her dream he had looked at her.
She hardened.
The girl who chased cranes was gone; in her place was a woman who learned to move silence as if it were a blade. She studied the court, its rivalries and hungers. She let her beauty become her shield, her weapon. She whispered into Wu Kang's ear, not as a sister but as a falconer who feeds her hawk only enough to keep it sharp. She made allies of whispers, turned grudges into chains, and clothed herself in crimson veils so no one could see the emptiness beneath.
The monk encouraged her. "A serpent survives where a lamb is devoured."
She became the serpent.
But in her heart — deep, buried, unspoken — the abandoned girl still lingered, still yearned. Each cruel word, each manipulation, each dagger hidden behind silk was, at its root, still a plea. See me. Love me. Remember I was yours.
The last night of her true self came when she knelt before the incense burner, the monk's voice curling like smoke through the chamber. Her eyes were closed, her lips moving in rhythm with chants that no longer belonged to her tongue.
For the first time, she thought she heard the Emperor whisper her name.
But the voice was wrong. Too deep, too vast, echoing like waves crashing in a cavern that had no end.
It should have broken her. It should have driven her to scream, to flee.
But she did not. She welcomed it.
Because at last, something — anything — had spoken to her.
And in that silence after her prayer, when the shadows bent as though listening, Wu Ling was no longer alone.
This was the seed of the woman who would one day be accused of treason. Not a villain born, but a daughter abandoned. Not a schemer by nature, but a child who had learned too well that love was never freely given — only promised, only withheld, only earned through shadowed bargains.
And so, when the bells of the palace tolled for her, it was not just her death that echoed.
It was the death of the girl who had once believed spring would last forever.