Chapter 26
Haru
They came for me when the sun reached its zenith. Solemn women with faces carved from decades of Imperial service moved in silence, like priestesses performing a sacred rite that had been interrupted and must now be completed with twice the weight.
The robes were pure white, but now they felt different, heavier, as though they carried the weight of both deaths, both losses, both futures that would never come to pass.
They dressed me with careful hands, adjusting what was already perfect, their fingers trembling slightly. One of them—the eldest—paused as she tied my sash. “Heika,” she whispered. “We grieve for your loss, for both losses.”
I could only nod. If I spoke, I might break.
When they finished, they bowed and left, and I stood alone in my chambers. Outside, I could hear the drums beginning.
The Hour of the Goat.
Not dawn as I’d commanded, but afternoon—because Father’s funeral had already been scheduled, already prepared, and we were simply adding Kioshi to it, augmenting grief with more pain, making the unbearable somehow worse.
I picked up Kioshi’s sword, held it, then leaned it back against the wall.
Tomorrow’s emperor would need it.
Today’s mourner could not carry blades.
The courtyard was already filled when I emerged. The court stood in their white robes, hundreds of them. Their faces showed fresh shock layered over exhausted grief.
Two palanquins waited in the center of the courtyard, draped in black and gold silk.
Father and Kioshi were dressed in Imperial purple robes, a golden dragon soaring across their chests.
Father’s face looked peaceful in death, his hands folded with the Imperial seals resting on his chest. The poisoning hadn’t marked him visibly, so he looked like he was sleeping, like he might wake at any moment and resume ruling.
The servants had worked miracles in just hours, washing Kioshi, dressing him in the silk of emperors, and arranging him to hide the worst of what had been done.
But I could still see it.
The gray cast to his skin.
The way his robes didn’t lay right over the wound in his chest.
They’d tried, but one could not make desecration look dignified, no matter how much silk was used.
Behind the palanquins, the court stood by rank. Ministers. Generals. Advisors. Guards.
All in white. All silent.
Their faces showed everything: shock at Kioshi’s murder, grief for Father’s death, fear for what came next.
Mother stood near the front, supported by two ladies-in-waiting.
She’d changed from the robes I’d seen her in this morning.
The ones she now wore were fresh, pristine white, the formal robes of the Empress Dowager mourning both her husband and son.
Her face was still that terrible gray. Her eyes were still empty.
She stared at Kioshi’s palanquin and didn’t blink, didn’t weep, didn’t even appear to breathe.
Grandmother stood beside her, ancient and upright, her face carved from stone. She shed no tears either, simply held my young sister’s hand and stared with the ageless sorrow that came from having lived long enough to bury too many loved ones.
Uncle Ryuji waited, his armor polished to mirror brightness despite everything. He was every bit the Dai Shogun in formal mourning, ready to lead the military procession. His eyes met mine across the courtyard, and he nodded once.
“Heika.” A servant bowed. “It is time.”
I took my place at the front of the line.
Alone.
As was the tradition—the highest-ranking mourner walked alone. He led the dead to their burning.
The Emperor was dead.
I was all that remained.
So I walked alone.
The gates opened.
The drums continued their steady, heartbreaking rhythm.
And so we began.
The streets had been lined with citizens since dawn. They’d come to mourn their emperor, to witness his funeral procession, to pay respects to the man who’d led them for three decades.
They wore white.
They held white flowers.
They stood in respectful silence, then kneeled with foreheads to the ground as we passed. The silence as we strode by felt charged with grief, fear, and uncertainty.
Every ten paces, braziers burned incense. Smoke rose in wavering columns, thick enough to taste, sandalwood and cedar and something else, something sacred that only the priests knew how to blend. The air became heavy with it, dreamlike, as though we walked through another world.
Behind me, I heard monks chanting, low voices that sounded like they came from somewhere beyond the mortal world. Underneath jingled the bright ting-ting-ting of Shinto bells, notes hanging in the air like liquid silver.
I walked, and kept walking, because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant breaking.
One foot in front of the other.
White robes swirling.
Incense smoke burning my throat.
Drum beats marking time I couldn’t reclaim.
My father was dead.
My brother was dead.
And I was walking them both toward the fire.
The sun beat down, hot and merciless, despite the late autumn chill. Sweat ran down my back beneath the layers of silk. My feet ached. My legs trembled.
Still, I walked.
Citizens began throwing flowers, white lotus petals that landed at my feet, crushed beneath my next step. White chrysanthemums. White peonies. Soon the entire path was covered in a carpet of blooms, like snow that bled across the streets.
Someone called out: “Blessings on the Emperor!”
Another voice: “May Kioshi-sama find peace!”
More voices, building: “Blessings on Haru-sama! May Heaven guide us!”
A child’s voice, high and clear: “Don’t be sad! They’re going to Heaven!”
The prayers washed over me like water. The people wanted to believe, wanted to think that burning Father and Kioshi would somehow fix everything, would restore order, would make the world right again.
I wanted to believe it, too.
But I’d seen Kioshi’s body.
I’d heard the dragon’s warning.
I knew that fire alone wouldn’t save us.
Still, I walked.
Kinkaku Temple blazed against the afternoon sky.
The golden roof caught the sunlight and threw it back like a mirror, bright enough to hurt.
Beneath, the cremation grounds waited, two pyres, already built, already blessed.
One had been prepared for Father days ago.
The second had been added in desperate haste, but the priests had done their work well—both were perfect mountains of sacred wood, stacked with geometric precision, ready to burn.
The High Priest waited at the temple steps.
He was ancient, older even than Grandmother, with white robes and a white beard that seemed to glow in the sunlight.
The wonders of mahou had extended his life, allowed him to serve five emperors.
He’d burned three of them already. He’d watched dynasties rise and fall and rise again.
When he looked at me, his eyes held the kind of sorrow that transcended individual grief. He mourned for the Empire itself.
He bowed—not the deep bow he’d give an emperor, only a slight incline, the bow for a prince who wasn’t quite Emperor yet, who stood in that liminal space between identities.
“Akira Haru-sama,” he said, his voice surprisingly strong for someone so old. “The gods welcome your father and brother home.”
-sama. Not -Heika, not Your Majesty.
Until I bound to the tether tomorrow, I was still just a prince, still just Haru.
The old priest was not wrong.
I bowed back, deeper than he had. “Thank you, Sosai.”
“Heaven will not wait,” he said, and his eyes held understanding. “Neither should we.”
The procession filed into the cremation grounds as the palanquins were carried to the bases of the pyres with ceremonial slowness.
Father to the right—the one that had been prepared for him, Kioshi to the left—the one built in haste but with no less care.
Both palanquins remained open, both bodies visible for a final viewing.
I took my place between the pyres with Mother to my left, still supported by her ladies because she looked like she might fall if they released her. Grandmother stood to my right, her ancient hand gripping my arm with surprising strength.
The entire court stood arrayed behind us, silent ranks of white stretching back to the temple gates.
And before us, the priests began.
The ceremony seemed to last forever.
Prayers. Offerings. Sutras chanted in three-part harmony.
Incense burned until the air was thick with it.
Bells rung in complex patterns that supposedly guided souls to Heaven.
The priests moved through rituals so old that no one remembered their origins, only that they must be performed exactly right or the dead would wander, lost and unable to find their way home.
I watched it all and felt nothing.
No—that wasn’t true.
I felt everything.
I felt too much.
Grief and rage and exhaustion and terror all churning together into something too large to name. It pressed against my ribs, filled my throat, made my hands shake where I’d clasped them together.
But I couldn’t show it, couldn’t let it out.
Because emperors didn’t break down.
Emperors stood steady while the world burned around them.
So I stood.
Beside me, Mother made soft sounds, not crying, just breathing wrong, as though every exhale hurt, as though her body was rejecting the air because Kioshi no longer needed it.
Grandmother’s hand tightened on my arm, anchoring me, keeping me from floating away on the smoke.
“We commit these souls to flame, that they may rise pure into the Heavens,” the High Priest said, his voice cutting through the chanting.
He handed me the ceremonial torch. Somehow, my hands didn’t shake as I took it. There was some mercy in that, some small grace that my body knew how to perform this function even while my mind screamed.
I approached Father’s pyre first, looked at him one final time. Even in death, even with the poison’s subtle marks, he looked like an emperor, a god. I’d never really known him, not as a father, only as a force of nature, an Imperial presence that shaped my life without ever truly seeing me.
“I’ll try, Father,” I whispered, quiet enough that only he could hear. “I’ll try to be what you need me to be.”
I touched the torch to the base of the pyre, and the sacred oils caught, flames racing up the carefully stacked wood with a sound like angry wind. Heat washed over me, sudden and fierce. I stepped back, still holding the torch.
Then I turned to Kioshi’s pyre.
My brother, my best friend—the Crown Prince who’d been everything I wasn’t—confident, certain, prepared.
He was the one who’d been groomed from birth to rule while I’d been left to find my own way, who’d never been unkind to me, who’d protected me since the moment I’d drawn my first breath.
Now he was dead.
Now I stood where he should have stood.
Now I carried the torch that should have been his.
“I’m so sorry,” I told him, and my voice finally cracked. “I’m sorry it’s you lying there and it’s not me. You would have been better at this, better at everything.”
I started to touch the torch to his pyre.
But I couldn’t.
My hand froze.
The torch wavered.
Smoke stung my eyes, or maybe it was tears. I couldn’t tell anymore. All I knew was that once I lit the pyre, once I burned my brother, it was real. It was all real.
Final and irreversible.
Kioshi would be gone.
And I would be alone.
“Little fish.” Grandmother’s voice, soft, her hand landing on my shoulder. “You must.”
I knew it. She was right. I knew I must.
But knowing didn’t make it easier.
“Remember what I told you,” she whispered. “You are Emperor now. Emperors do what must be done.”
I closed my eyes and took one breath, then a second.
Then I opened my eyes and lit the pyre.
Flames consumed my brother, consumed the silk, the carefully arranged dignity, the illusion that he’d died peacefully. Within moments, there was nothing but fire and smoke and heat fierce enough to sear.
I stepped back, handed the torch to the priest, and watched.
We all watched.
Two pyres climbed toward heaven, smoke rising like prayers. The heat was immense, the light blinding, the sound like a living thing—crackle and roar and the deep, hollow boom as green wood exploded in the flames.
Mother made a sound, something worse than a scream. It was a low, broken keen that came from somewhere deeper than her chest. Her knees buckled, and her ladies caught her, held her upright while she stared at Kioshi’s pyre with those terrible, burning eyes.
I wanted to go to her, wanted to hold her hand, to share her grief, to be her son one final time before tomorrow came.
But emperors stood alone.
So I stood alone and watched my family burn.