Some evenings I took over my mother’s task, lighting each lantern by hand, glad for the work to divert me—for the opportunity to indulge in my thoughts. As each lantern flared to life, I imagined the light of the moon shining brighter upon the world below, the mortals turning their heads up to the skies.

Those nights, I did not dread being alone with my memories—falling asleep, mercifully spent. For the light in my father’s eyes whenever they fell on my mother, the answering smile that spread across her lips—these things suffused me with joy and a nameless pain. For despite what I told myself, I could not help longing for the love they shared. The love I had disdained, discarded, and destroyed.

A YEAR FLEW BY and then another, sweeping like rainfall until I lost count of them altogether. Those were good years, when we grew as a family, in a way that we never had the chance to do before. The healing of the mind was slower than of the body, for these wounds cut deeper and it was harder to mend what was unseen. I did not know when it began, that these fractured pieces of me slowly began to come together again—healing, if not perfectly, at least enough so I felt almost myself. I no longer woke, gasping the names of those lost, reliving the fire searing my veins or the terror freezing my flesh when Wugang’s axe had descended upon me.

My memories were kinder, cruel remembrances blunted, interwoven with fragments of remembered joy: Ping’er, telling me the stories of the Immortal Realm as I sat rapt before her. Prince Yanming, his face alight as he swung his wooden sword.

And Wenzhi …

All the parts of him that had touched me not once but twice, even through the barriers I had built against him. His intelligence and indomitable will, his ruthlessness and tenderness, the softening of his expression when he looked at me. And most of all, how he had loved me and then died for me.

As the pain dulled, its edge worn off, something else stirred in its place. A restlessness—just as I had felt as a child, craving the horizons beyond. A relief, that this spark in my soul was rekindled, that the hollowness in me had begun to fill with a yearning … for more.

A simple truth, a cruel one, that this was no longer my home.