Lanterns blazed across the eaves of the Imperial Palace like captive stars, their golden light catching on silken banners that danced in the wind. Crimson pennants embroidered with phoenixes fluttered against a night sky veiled in incense smoke and drifting peony petals. The celebration was vast, decadent, and hollow. Every shadow along the jade-tiled corridors whispered secrets, and every smile beneath the towering arches bore teeth. The Palace of Heavenly Harmony, long untouched by such opulence, had been transformed into a stage of splendor for the ascension of the Emperor’s future bride.

Feng Yan stood at the center of that stage, her figure composed beneath layers of ceremonial silk. The phoenix coronet rested heavily atop her head, woven with rubies and golden feathers so intricate they shimmered like flame. Her robe trailed behind her, scarlet threaded with nine curling dragons, each claw reaching toward the embroidered seal at her breast. It was a garment meant for history—a robe worn only once, to declare a woman not merely a wife, but a symbol of imperial virtue.

Though her expression remained poised and gentle, every muscle in her body had long since turned to stone. She had spent years sculpting herself into this image—graceful, compliant, untouched by scandal or ambition. Yet tonight, as she stood beneath the carved lattice of the ceremonial hall, all she could feel was the silence within her chest. Not fear. Not joy. Something far quieter, and far more final.

The court surrounded her, a sea of ministers and consorts, noble daughters and masked courtiers. Behind every fan and every bow was calculation. She had been taught to smile at them all, and so she did, her mouth curving with practiced serenity. Her eyes swept the crowd only once before they landed on the man whose life she had entwined with hers for the sake of survival.

Ji Rong, Third Prince of the Empire, stood robed in gold at the base of the Emperor’s dais. He was beautiful in the way all the paintings captured him—slim and tall, with a scholar’s hands and the face of a romantic hero. His eyes, dark as inkstone, held no warmth when they met hers. Still, he smiled. It was the same smile that had once convinced her of his love, the one that had drawn her in years ago when she was young and desperate to secure her family’s place.

She had once looked at that smile and seen her future. Tonight, she would learn what it truly meant.

The air shifted as a bell chimed three times, and the great doors opened. The Emperor entered, borne on a gilded platform by silent eunuchs. His presence silenced the hall instantly. All fell to their knees, including Feng Yan, whose forehead touched the marble floor with flawless precision. Behind closed lids, her thoughts drifted to her father, once a high general, now long dead. Her family's legacy would be sealed tonight—or so she had believed.

The Emperor’s voice, thin and rasping with age, rose over the kneeling assembly. He praised her lineage, her virtue, and her years of silent service within the palace. Then, with a final flourish of the sacred scroll, he proclaimed her the first wife of his third son. Not yet Empress, but closer than any woman dared hope. As she rose, guided by the cold, dry hand of her betrothed, a weight seemed to settle around her shoulders like iron cloaked in silk.

Ji Rong leaned toward her, his voice low enough to escape the ears of the court. “You’ve never looked more beautiful, Yan’er.” His breath carried the faintest trace of cassia wine.

Her lips parted in a smile that barely reached her eyes. “Nor you, my Prince,” she replied, and together, they turned toward the gathered nobles, receiving their bows and empty blessings with the serenity demanded of a royal bride.

Hours later, within the heavily guarded bridal chamber, Feng Yan sat in silence beneath a canopy of red gauze and candlelight. The ceremonial attendants had long since withdrawn, leaving her in a thin robe embroidered with bridal lotuses, her hair still pinned by a single jade comb. Around her, the air was heavy with incense and expectations. Her dowry, placed carefully in rows of lacquered boxes, gleamed in the candlelight: silk bolts, gold ornaments, her mother’s heirloom mirror, and scrolls bearing her family’s ancestral records. She waited, as custom required, for her husband to arrive.

The door opened with a soft groan.

Ji Rong stepped inside, his expression unreadable beneath the glow of flame. The robes of ceremony still adorned him, though his sash had been loosened, revealing the pale line of his throat. He crossed the room in measured steps, stopping a few paces from where she sat. When she rose to meet him, he took her hands gently into his own.

She looked into his eyes, trying to read the emotion there. “It’s done, then,” she said quietly. “After all these years.”

He tilted his head slightly, studying her as if seeing her for the first time. “Yes. It’s done.”

The warmth in her chest flickered and died at the tone of his voice. Something was wrong. His grip, while soft, felt like iron beneath silk. She opened her mouth to ask what troubled him, but the words never came.

A sharp sting pierced her side.

Her breath caught. She looked down and saw a thin black needle protruding from beneath his sleeve, pressed directly into her ribs. Her knees gave way, and the world tilted as her vision blurred. He caught her before she fell, lowering her gently to the floor with the care of a man laying a beloved to rest.

“I truly did admire you, Yan’er,” he whispered, brushing a strand of hair from her cheek. “You were always too clever. But ambition is a dangerous thing. And you, my dear, wanted too much.”

She wanted to scream, to strike, to ask why—but her limbs would not respond. Her heart fluttered in her chest like a bird trapped in a dying cage. Footsteps approached, and the chamber door opened once more.

A woman entered, her scent arriving first—orchid, amber, and cold sweetness.

Feng Yan forced her eyes to lift. Standing above her in a gown of pale rose was Hua Lanyue, the woman she had once called sister, though no blood tied them. Lanyue’s smile was exquisite. It did not reach her eyes.

“You always did dream too high,” she said softly, as if speaking to a child. “But you’ve done us a favor, in a way. The empire will pity a dead bride far more than a live one.”

Candlelight flickered above them, shadows stretching long across the floor. The last thing Feng Yan saw was the phoenix coronet slipping from her head into Lanyue’s waiting hands, and then, at last, darkness rose like a tide to swallow her whole.

It was not a peaceful death.

The cold returned first. Not the simple chill of air against skin, but the soul-deep numbness of something buried and disoriented. Her lungs seized as breath returned to them. Her fingers twitched against silk. She inhaled the scent of camellias—not incense, not blood—and the familiarity of it struck her like a blow.

She opened her eyes.

Sunlight filtered through a paper screen marked with plum blossoms. The room was small, unfamiliar. The sheets beneath her hands were coarse, not the brocade of the bridal chamber. Her hands—slender, unmarked, no ring, no calluses—belonged to a girl, not a woman.

She stumbled from the bed toward a bronze mirror resting atop a simple table and stared.

The reflection that met her gaze was her own, but not as she had last seen it. Her cheeks were fuller, her eyes less shadowed, her skin untouched by the quiet ravages of palace life. This was a version of herself she had not seen in a decade. Seventeen. Unmarried. Still outside the main court.

A knock at the door startled her, and a maid’s voice called from beyond the screen, “Miss Feng? Are you awake?”

Not Consort. Not Wife. Not the First Lady of the Court.

Just Miss Feng.

She backed away from the mirror, her heart thundering in her chest. This wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a delusion brought on by fever or poison.

She had died.

And now—somehow, impossibly—she had returned.

The heavens, it seemed, had given her another chance.

And this time, she would not waste it on trust.

This time, they would all burn.

The morning air bit sharper than she remembered. It coiled around the paper windows and slipped beneath the hem of her robe as she stood barefoot in the center of the room, every sense acutely alert. The scent of camellias, sweet and waxy, mingled with the faint tang of ink and dust. The subtle creak of floorboards announced the approach of the maid before she even knocked.

When the girl slid the door open, sunlight spilled in across the wooden floor in a thin, trembling line. The servant was young—sixteen at most—with a round face and uncertain eyes. She carried a tray bearing warm rice porridge, salted vegetables, and a bowl of sweetened ginger tea. All simple, all unadorned. The tray’s plainness confirmed what Feng Yan already suspected.

This was not the palace. This was one of her father’s outer estates, likely the summer residence they had used before being recalled to the capital. She had not stood within these walls since she was seventeen.

“Miss Feng,” the maid murmured, bowing low. “Your mother says you’ve been ill with a fever. She asks that you rest, but she’ll be coming to see you shortly.”

Feng Yan nodded slowly. Her movements were deliberate, careful not to reveal how disoriented she still felt. Every detail of this moment hovered between reality and memory—her own past now returned to her, vivid and raw. She accepted the tray with both hands and sat near the window, allowing the light to strike her face as she took a slow sip of the ginger tea. The heat burned across her tongue, anchoring her to the present. It was not the same as that final night—no incense, no poison—but the bitter edge still made her stomach twist.

“Has anything changed in the household lately?” she asked, her voice soft but commanding.

The maid hesitated. “There was a letter from the capital last week, my lady. Your father seemed troubled, but he hasn’t spoken of it. He’s left early each day and returned late. There was talk… rumors perhaps, that the Emperor may summon you for court selection this season.”

That single sentence landed like thunder in her mind. Of course. That year, the Emperor had summoned noble daughters to the palace for what was publicly called the "Spring Selection"—a polite term for evaluating suitable wives and consorts for the imperial sons. It had been the beginning of everything. That selection had placed her in Ji Rong’s path. The path that led to her death.

She forced a smile and nodded, then dismissed the girl with a wave. When the door slid closed again, she pressed the tips of her fingers to her temples and tried to steady her thoughts.

She had died.

That fact could not be softened or rationalized. She remembered every detail with the clarity of a blade held to her throat: Ji Rong’s cold voice, Lanyue’s smile, the way her lungs had filled with nothing and her sight had dimmed until the world vanished.

She was not dreaming. Not insane.

This was real.

She was alive again, and the world had rolled back ten years.

The question was not “why.” She no longer cared about the heavens’ whims or divine mercy. What mattered now was what she intended to do with it.

A bird called outside the window—a bright, shrill cry—and it startled her more than it should have. She rose and pulled aside the curtain to see the garden beyond. Camellias bloomed in careful rows, red and white interspersed like blood on snow. She remembered planting those with her mother as a child. The sight of them now filled her with something complex: not nostalgia, but fury cloaked in familiarity.

A decade. Ten years. She had spent ten years surviving a palace where survival was a matter of reading silence, where her every breath had to be measured against someone else’s ambition. And she had done it for what? To die as a pawn in someone else’s game.

Never again.

The maid’s mention of the letter from the capital echoed in her mind. Her father must have already been maneuvering to position her for the court selection. He would not yet know that his own political decline had already been seeded, or that his allies would abandon him when scandal came to court.

She had no intention of waiting for his strategy to unfold.

A quiet knock came again—this time softer, more familiar. Before she could respond, the door opened and her mother entered, dressed in a pale lavender robe, her long hair tied back with a simple silver pin. Madame Feng looked younger than Feng Yan remembered—her face less worn, her spine straighter. Her features were delicate, but there was a perpetual line of tension in her brow, the mark of a woman constantly listening for danger.

“Yan’er,” she said gently, closing the door behind her. “The fever broke at last. I was afraid you wouldn’t recognize me.”

“I recognize you,” Feng Yan replied, her voice controlled. “And this place. This… year.”

Madame Feng tilted her head. “Still some confusion, then. You’ve been speaking strangely in your sleep. Saying names I don’t recognize. Places you’ve never been.”

Feng Yan lowered her gaze. So she had spoken. Dangerous, but not unexpected.

“It was a dream,” she murmured. “A very long dream.”

Her mother sighed, moving to sit beside her. She reached out to brush a hand along Feng Yan’s cheek, the gesture familiar and distant all at once. “There will be summons from the palace soon. I expect your father will want you to begin preparing. He’s been speaking with envoys. They say the Third Prince will be looking for a bride.”

Feng Yan’s stomach turned, but she kept her face calm.

“And what do you want, Mother?” she asked, watching the woman’s eyes carefully.

Madame Feng hesitated. “I want what’s best for you. But that doesn’t always come in a golden robe or a high seat. I hope you remember that.”

Feng Yan smiled faintly and took her mother’s hand in her own. It was warm. Real. Still alive.

“I remember.”

But she remembered far more than her mother could ever guess. She remembered how her family would be destroyed within four years. How her father would be accused of falsifying battle records, framed by ministers working with Ji Rong. How her mother would fall into illness and fade away in exile, left with only rumors of her daughter’s disgrace.

Not this time.

As the sun climbed higher and cast long shadows through the lattice, Feng Yan rose and crossed the room to a low chest at the foot of her bed. She opened it, revealing the scrolls and silks of her girlhood, untouched by time. Beneath them, hidden in a wrapped cloth, was a small silver comb carved with phoenix feathers.

She lifted it carefully, and as her fingers brushed the metal, she felt something shift—barely perceptible, like the prick of static against her skin.

There had been whispers, in her former life, about objects tied to fate. Relics of women born under rare stars. She had never believed in them.

But now, holding that comb in her hand, she was no longer certain what she believed.

She only knew one truth.

The past had returned to her not as a gift, but as a weapon. She had been weak once. Now, she would become something else entirely.

And Ji Rong—sweet, treacherous Ji Rong—would never see her coming.

That night, sleep eluded her.

Feng Yan sat beneath the half-open lattice of her chamber window, bathed in moonlight sharp enough to etch lines into her skin. The garden beyond was silent, the camellias asleep beneath silver dew. A single paper lantern hung near the doorway, its flame flickering faintly, casting long shadows that danced across the wooden floor. She had asked the servants not to light more.

She needed the quiet. The dark.

A thousand memories stirred behind her eyes, none of them belonging to this time. Not yet.

She had spent the day in measured silence—smiling when spoken to, nodding in all the right places, allowing her parents to mistake her stillness for the weakness of illness. In truth, her mind had never worked faster. She had reconstructed every move that had led to her downfall in her past life. The court selection. The whispered promises. Ji Rong’s kindness, rehearsed to perfection. Hua Lanyue’s rise. Her own naïve trust.

Now, she thought of what had been ignored. Forgotten. Unnoticed.

It was not Ji Rong’s betrayal that came to her mind first, nor even Lanyue’s poison.

It was a memory of a storm, ten years ago.

A blood moon rising over the capital. Screams in the eastern temple. The sudden, unexplained suicide of an imperial astrologer whose last words had been censored from the court record. She remembered seeing the imperial guards hauling his body away in silence, and hearing vague whispers of madness, of a broken mind shattered by "visions."

Back then, she had dismissed it as court gossip.

But tonight, she remembered the exact date—and the chill it had left in the palace halls for weeks.

It had been just before the Spring Selection began.

She rose from her seat and crossed the room. Her fingers traced the edge of a scroll chest. It had not been opened in years, but she knew precisely what lay within. Her childhood had been filled with reading. Her father, a general, had never encouraged superstition, but her mother had stocked the family libraries with older texts—ritual manuals, half-forgotten folktales, even banned records from the southern mountains where the old cults once ruled.

She pulled out a scroll near the bottom. The silk was frayed, the writing faded, but the emblem pressed on the binding—a phoenix surrounded by nine falling stars—was unmistakable.

The Prophecy of the Fire-Star.

A relic she had once thought nothing of, dismissed as folk myth. But she had never forgotten the symbol. It had been etched into the ruined pillars of a collapsed temple on the palace outskirts, just behind the astrologer's tower. A temple no one visited. No one spoke of.

Her hands trembled slightly as she unrolled the scroll.

The ink was old, charred around the edges. The characters bled slightly into the cloth, as though scorched rather than written. The text was a mix of archaic poetry and prophetic riddle, but the central verse leapt at her, sharper than memory, deeper than dream.

“When fire is swallowed by blood, and the phoenix devoured by kin,

The broken crown shall turn, and the Dragon kneel within.

The one who rises from ash shall not rule beside, but above.

The empire shall wear a woman's name.”

She read it again. And again. Until the lantern’s flame flickered lower, and the moon had tilted westward in the sky.

It sounded impossible. But she had already died. She had already returned.

What was impossible now?

The phoenix devoured by kin—herself, betrayed by Lanyue, who had grown up beside her as close as a sister.

The broken crown—the dynasty itself.

And the fire swallowed by blood.

She lifted her sleeve and saw, to her quiet surprise, a faint red mark along her inner wrist. A crescent shape, smooth-edged, like a burn that had never fully healed. She had not noticed it earlier. It had not been there in her last life.

The mark was cool to the touch, but the skin around it pulsed faintly. A remnant. A brand. Something left behind by her death.

A price, perhaps, for returning.

She rolled her sleeve down and stood in silence for a long time, gazing at the open scroll before her.

This time, she would not walk into the court blind.

The blood moon had returned once. It would come again. And the next time, she would be ready.

She would dig beneath the stories. She would find that ruined temple. She would unearth every truth the court had buried.

The imperial palace played its games in gold and poison.

But it had forgotten what a phoenix truly was.

Not a bird to be caged.

Not a pet to be crowned.

A creature that burned itself to death and rose again—sharper, stronger, hungrier than before.