Empire’s Curse (Drakkon #1)

Chapter 41

Daiyu spun around to stare at the ornately decorated halls, with its polished tile floors and the metal latticed windows and the servants running back and forth. But something about it was wrong. It took her a second to realize what it was—the banners throughout the palace had the MuRong insignia of the moon and the serpent plastered on them, instead of the dragon symbol she was so used to seeing. And instead of hues of red and black—the Drakkon colors—the palace had subtle shades of vibrant green and silver—the MuRong colors.

“Excuse me—” Daiyu tried to grab the forearm of a passing woman, but her hand slipped right through the woman as if she wasn’t there. She gasped, taking a step back. Her hands, feet, her whole body, shimmered like she was a spirit.

Was she … in Feiyu’s memory?

She tried to step forward to investigate further, but she found that she couldn’t walk more than two feet around herself. It was as if there was an invisible barrier barring her from exploring. She was a bystander, she realized, and there must have been something she was supposed to see.

She watched the hallways for anything amiss. For any clue to piece together who Feiyu was. But there were only servants milling about. Nothing was abnormal?—

A little boy with shoulder-length hair walked down the hallway holding a serving tray with four silver-veined teacups balanced atop it. His face was a blob of darkness. As if someone had painted over the memory, overriding it with a shadowy rendition of itself.

That … must have been Feiyu?

Right? It was his memories, after all.

A maidservant stayed close behind him. She opened her mouth and said a name, but no matter how much Daiyu strained her ears or tried to read the woman’s lips, she was unable to.

“You’ll have to go to His Royal Highness’s room next,” the woman said, her voice ringing out clearly now.

The boy’s shoulders stiffened. “But … I don’t like?—”

“Shh.” The woman’s tone sharpened and she looked around herself in the hallway, but nobody else was paying attention to them. All the servants were focused on their own tasks. “The prince requested you to bring him his afternoon tea.”

“But, Mother, he?—”

“I know.” The woman’s face tightened with emotions Daiyu could read very well. It was an expression she had witnessed many times on her own mother’s face whenever her siblings or herself were about to dive headfirst into trouble. The same expression Mother had worn when Daiyu announced she would go into the palace and rescue Lanfen herself.

The scenery began to shift again and Daiyu was whisked away into another memory. This time, the boy with the shadowy face was in a closed room with his mother holding his hand and a larger man poking his forearm with a sharpened bone. The boy screamed and cried, trying to yank his arm away, but his mother held him firmly, even though she looked like she wanted to cry just as much as he did.

“Please, make it stop! Mother, make him stop!”

His mother’s lips trembled. She was still dressed like a maidservant, her hair pulled back simply with a silver ribbon, and her faded green and white robes appearing too simple. “I know, my sweet boy, but you must bear with the pain.”

“No, no!” He thrust his head one way, then the other. “I’m not a prince! I’m not a prince!”

The man with the bone continued to whittle into the young boy’s flesh, tapping in ink and magic and tattooing the royal symbol into his forearm. The boy’s pained screams continued to echo against the walls.

“Listen—” The man formed words, likely the boy’s name, but once again, Daiyu was unable to hear it, nor was she able to decipher his lips. “His Majesty has claimed you as his. Neither of us can refute it. I understand it’s painful, but it’s either this or your mother is flogged. Which would you rather have?”

“It’s not her fault?—”

“I understand she didn’t do anything, but she’s your mother, and if you misbehave, she will be punished for it.” He pointed the sharpened, bloodied end of the bone to the woman and gave the boy a stern look. “So what will it be? Will you make this more difficult than it has to be?”

The boy sniffed and his body went slack. He seemed to have accepted his fate. “No.”

“Good.” The man went back to piercing his skin and the boy cried silently. The woman holding him eased her iron-like grip on her son, but the tenseness of her shoulders didn’t go away. She wiped the little boy’s face with trembling hands.

“How much longer?” she whispered.

“Another hour.”

The boy made a choking sound. “B-But?—”

The man gave him another stern look and the boy shrank back.

“It’s not fair,” he said after a moment, his breaths coming in short inhales as he sniffled and held his cries in. “I’m not a prince?—”

“You are,” his mother said firmly. “And your father has finally accepted you. Don’t anger him by saying otherwise. You’ve heard the rumors your whole life, haven’t you? This should be a joyous occasion.”

“And besides,” the tattooist said, “if you didn’t have MuRong blood, this magicked ink would have killed you. So you are a prince, Your Highness.”

The memory was changing again and Daiyu was once again carried away to a different section of the palace. The little boy was older now, maybe twelve, and he was on the ground in the palace, his body curled up into a ball as an older teenager kicked him in the stomach. The young man laughed, kicking him harder and harder, while a group of well-dressed youth watched with amusement.

“You think you’re on the same level as me?” The young man laughed, high and grating, and kicked the shadow-faced boy with a grunt. “You. Are. Nothing.”

Daiyu stepped forward, ready to stop the violence, but she was hit with an invisible shield again. She could only cringe as the young man—who wore a gold hair crown and whose rich red robes told her he was royalty—continued to beat the younger boy.

The memory was evolving again, the grass disappearing and changing into polished wood, and the sky warping into walls. She was in a small room. The shadow-faced boy was a bit older, she would guess, by the deepness of his voice.

“Mother! Wh-What are you doing?” He was standing by the doorway of the room, his body quaking in barely suppressed rage or horror—Daiyu wasn’t sure.

His mother was lying in bed, a blanket covering her naked body, and a similarly clad man beside her. She yelped something and pulled the sheets to cover her body. Clothes and a guard’s uniform were strewn on the floor haphazardly.

“G-Get out!” his mother whisper-shouted, pulling herself into a sitting position. She tried to protect her modesty, but it was clear what had happened. “You should knock before you enter a room. You know?—”

“You get out,” he roared at the guard and then turned to his mother. “What are you thinking?”

The guard sheepishly jumped to his feet and began dressing. The shadowed boy turned around as the two adults quickly pulled their clothes on, grumbles on their tongues.

“You know what will happen once he finds out, don’t you?” the boy said, his voice tight and panicked. Daiyu didn’t need to see his expression to know he was terrified out of his mind.

“We don’t plan on staying here that long, kid,” the guard said with a low chuckle. “Or should I call you Your Highness?”

“Get out,” the young man snapped.

“We’re going to leave this place,” the woman said, smoothing down her skirts. “He won’t be able to find us?—”

“You don’t know that?—”

“That’s enough,” she said firmly. “I understand you’re worried and confused, but I’m an adult and I can make my own decisions. I also want to fall in love and have a relationship, but your father will never allow it since I’ve had his child. He may think that I belong to him, but I don’t.”

“But, Mother—” His voice became more strained—more frightened.

“We’ll find a way to make it work. Sooner or later, we’ll leave this place.”

Daiyu shivered at the parallels in her own situation. How she had been taken by the emperor as well, but how things were vastly different between her and Muyang, and this woman and the emperor of this time period.

All at once, the background began to warp again. Daiyu was beginning to become accustomed to the discombobulating feeling of the whole world changing in the blink of an eye, and the dizzying effect it had on her for the first few seconds. But nothing could have prepared her for the next sight.

She inhaled sharply and fell backward. In the center of the room, the shadow-faced boy’s mother was tied to a wooden post. Daiyu recognized the throne room almost immediately, but she could barely focus on that. Not when the woman was beaten and bloodied to a pulp, her hair missing in chunks as if someone had ripped it out, and her threadbare clothes barely hanging onto her thin frame. The room was crowded, the people speaking to one another casually while they sipped their drinks as if unaware of the battered woman in the center of the room.

The shadow-boy screamed and cried, held back by two guards who held a spear to his throat. But he was unaffected by the pain, not even when they stabbed his leg or kicked him down. On a dais at the end of the room, an emperor with silver streaks in his midnight hair sat on a throne, his entire body bedecked in glimmering gold and silver.

“Let me go! Let me go!” the young man screamed. “Mother! Mother!”

Daiyu covered her mouth at the brutality. At the twisted, awkward positions the woman’s limbs were bent in. At the blood splattering the floor around her. At the broken teeth by her feet. At the way the nobles chuckled and conversed so indifferently.

Her heart ached for the woman and again for the young man, whose cries fell on deaf ears.

Below the emperor, a young man was lounged on a velvet seat, watching the scene with an amused grin on his face. Daiyu recognized him as the man who had beaten the shadowy-faced boy in one of the earlier memories. He must have been a prince, judging by the way he was dressed and the arrogant attitude.

“She did this to herself.” The prince snickered, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Whore.”

“You—You—” The shadow-boy began shouting, but one of the guards slammed him to the floor, pinning his face down so he couldn’t speak coherently.

“Yan, don’t bother speaking to him,” the emperor said in a gravelly voice. He peered down at the young man with narrowed eyes. “He’s scum just as much as his mother, but he is still your brother.”

Prince Yan only sniggered. “Yes, Father.”

Daiyu turned away from the violence, her stomach twisting painfully. She had no idea why she was witnessing this, why Feiyu wanted to show her this gruesome, heartbreaking scene. But she had another clue to go off on—this cruel prince was Yan, who would later become Emperor Yan. He was Yat-sen’s father and the previous emperor in current times, she realized. But then who was the shadow-boy? She couldn’t remember anything about any younger brothers Emperor Yan had. They were all dead by the time he took the throne anyway.

The setting shifted again and Daiyu was more than happy for the change. She waited, with bated breath, for another piece of the puzzle to fall into place. But instead of finding a memory that was more pleasant than the previous one, her heart sank as another horrific scene took over.

This time, she was in a small cellar. The young shadow-faced boy was chained to the wall, his tunic ripped off to reveal a crisscross of scars along his pale body. Prince Yan stood a few feet away from him, a whip in his hand. He laughed and tortured the young man. Daiyu could barely watch, and it was only when the prince uncorked a small vial or red blood that Daiyu could look again.

The prince waved the glass vial in front of the youth’s face. “Do you know what this is? It’s dragon’s blood. Said to be the most painful way to torture a man. Your blood will boil from within you. Your organs will melt, your skin will peel, and you will feel unimaginable pain until you die days later.”

“I’ll kill you one day,” the shadow-faced youth whispered weakly.

“No, no, you won’t.” Yan took ahold of the young man’s jaw and tried wrestling his mouth open. They both struggled, the chains smacking into the walls as the shadowed youth tried to wriggle away. But he was tied up, beaten and bloodied, and he was no match against the other prince, who smashed the vial into the youth’s mouth. The shards cut into his mouth and tongue and cheeks, the thick blood coating his tongue.

“There!” Yan breathed out deeply as his half-brother writhed against the wall, trying to spit the blood and pieces of glass from his mouth. “Now I’ll finally be rid of you, you cursed rat. Do you know how much of an eyesore you’ve been all these years? How incredibly embarrassing it is to see such a disgusting lowlife like you reach the same position as me? You are not a prince. You will never be anything more than a lowlife.”

Once again, everything began to change. Daiyu was blinded by a bright light and she blinked back at the new memory. Except, it wasn’t a memory. She was back where they had last been. Her hand was still placed on Feiyu’s dragon face and she was in the clearing in the mountains, the sun bearing down on her. Birds tweeted in the background, insects chirred, and there was an early morning dew still clinging to the grass.

Daiyu backed away, her legs weak. “Wh-What?”

That couldn’t be it. There were still so many memories she had to go through, so many more clues she had to figure out.

But Feiyu was staring at her now as if expecting her to have an answer.

“There … There must be more,” she said quickly. This couldn’t be it. She had to see more. She couldn’t guess anything by what she had seen. “Feiyu?—”

“What is my name, Yin Daiyu?”