---
The moon was beginning to fall when the last bell rang.
Its pale light clung to the tiled roofs like the lingering hand of a ghost.
From the barracks, the city looked deceptively peaceful—lanterns floating on the lake, guards at their posts, the hush of a world pretending to sleep.
Shen Yi Rui stood at the edge of the veranda, armor laid aside, his robe unfastened at the throat. He had not removed his sword.
A general who learned to rest forgot how to survive.
He told himself that he had come to check the patrol routes.
But the truth was simpler, and far more dangerous.
He had been looking for her.
Lady Yan Ruo, the mysterious envoy from a foreign state—the one who spoke with measured grace yet carried storms in her eyes.
She was nothing more than a court scholar in name, but every instinct in him recognized a soldier's heartbeat beneath her silken calm.
Tonight, when he found her in the courtyard of echoing lanterns, something old and aching had stirred in him.
He could still see her standing in the wind, the hem of her cloak brushing against the stone.
For a moment, the centuries between his dreams and this night collapsed, and he saw not a court lady—but a battlefield ghost.
The girl in red who refused to die.
It had been years ago—snow up to his knees, an ambush at the northern ridge.
They had found her among the fallen, a single survivor, blood frozen on her lashes.
He remembered lifting her from the ground, her pulse weak, her whisper hoarse—
> "Don't let them burn the letters."
No name. No home. Only defiance.
And then she vanished from the records, as if heaven itself had erased her.
Until now.
---
He poured wine into a small bronze cup. It tasted bitter.
"Impossible," he muttered, staring into the reflection that wavered inside the cup.
People did not return from the dead.
And yet the way she looked at him—steady, unflinching—was the same as that girl's gaze on that frozen plain.
The same mixture of pain and pride.
> Could it be reincarnation? he wondered.
Or am I haunted by the ghost of my own guilt?
The sound of boots on gravel drew his attention. A guard approached, bowing low.
"General, His Highness requests your presence at dawn court tomorrow. Matters of the treasury."
Zhao Rong again, no doubt.
The Prime Minister's ambition was a snake in silk, and the Crown Prince had grown weary of its hiss.
Yi Rui dismissed the guard and remained alone. He looked toward the east, where the horizon faintly silvered with the coming dawn.
Duty to Li Yun had always been clear. They had bled together in border wars, sworn their oaths under the same banners.
The prince was not just his ruler—he was his brother-in-arms, his friend.
But tonight, standing beneath the fading stars, Yi Rui felt something fracture inside that loyalty.
Because when he'd found Lady Yan Ruo earlier, Li Yun had appeared soon after—and between them had sparked something raw and dangerous.
He saw it in the prince's eyes: a look that men carried only once in a lifetime.
And perhaps he envied it.
Perhaps he feared it too.
---
Later, when the courtyard emptied and silence fell, Yi Rui found himself pacing the training grounds.
His hand brushed the scar on his forearm—a souvenir from the same battle that had almost taken his life.
He drew his sword and began to move through drills, the motion automatic.
The blade hissed through the cold air, slicing moonlight.
But every thrust, every turn, brought her face back before him.
Lady Yan Ruo.
Her voice when she'd said his name—soft, but edged with something he could not name.
And her words—"Faces repeat across time."
He stopped mid-step, lowering the sword. His breath came fast, uneven.
No soldier liked being haunted. But some ghosts refused to stay buried.
---
A whisper broke the quiet—
"General."
It was his lieutenant, eyes wide with unease.
"A courier's hawk from the capital. Message encoded."
Yi Rui tore open the wax seal. The code was one he and Li Yun used during their campaigns—short, terse phrases.
> 'Prepare for dawn. Zhao Rong moves first. Betrayal within court ranks. Protect the Prince.'
Yi Rui's pulse quickened.
Betrayal. Within the court.
He looked up at the paling sky. The wind had turned colder.
So that was why his heart had been restless tonight.
He sheathed his sword and barked an order.
"Double the guards around the east corridor. And send word to His Highness—quietly."
The lieutenant saluted and ran.
Yi Rui lingered a moment longer, staring toward the palace roofs that shimmered faintly under the new light.
He thought of Li Yun, proud and unyielding.
He thought of Lady Yan Ruo, with her veiled secrets and those eyes that seemed to carry lifetimes.
And he thought, not for the first time, that heaven was cruel to make the same stars watch over both love and war.
"Tomorrow," he murmured to the wind, "something will break."
He did not know yet what it would be—
But when it came, he would be ready.
---
> In another corner of the palace, Li Cheng Cheng stirred in her sleep. Her dream was full of snow and fire, and a man calling her name in a voice that did not belong to this world.