Reasons to Live
Third morning in a row.
I barely make it to the washbasin before my stomach turns itself inside out. Cold porcelain bites my palms. Bile burns my throat. The morning light coming through the silk screens feels personal, like it’s trying to hurt me specifically.
Behind me, the sheets rustle. Ren’s awake. I can feel him watching, that weight of attention I’ve learned to recognize over the past weeks. Months. However long it’s been since I stopped counting days and started counting something else entirely.
I spit. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. Very dignified. Very imperial consort. The court would be horrified.
“You’ve been sick every morning.”
“I’m aware.” I grip the basin’s edge, waiting for the room to stop tilting. “I was there.”
“Three days now.”
“Resurrection does strange things.” I push myself upright, move toward the window, away from the basin, away from him. The cool air helps. Slightly. “Death #412. Couldn’t eat fish for a decade after that one. The curse has opinions about—”
“You can’t stand the smell of ginger anymore.”
My feet stop before I tell them to.
“You used to drink ginger tea constantly.” His voice is quiet. Observational. The tone he uses when he’s fitting pieces together, building a picture I’m apparently too stupid to see. “Now you leave the room if someone brings it in.”
“Tastes change.”
“You keep putting your hand on your stomach.”
I look down.
My palm is pressed flat against my abdomen. I don’t remember moving it. Don’t remember deciding to touch myself there. It just—happened. Like my body knows something my mind refuses to look at directly.
“And you cry at things that aren’t sad.” He’s sitting up now. I can hear the sheets shifting. “The sunset yesterday. Dumpling yawning. That song the kitchen girl was humming.”
“That was—come on, it was a nice song—”
“Lián.”
My name in his mouth. Soft. Patient. Waiting.
The cold starts in my spine and spreads outward.
I’m counting before I realize I’m doing it. Weeks. Backwards. When did I last— The festival? No, before that. The temple? I bled at the temple, didn’t I? Or was that— No. That was the wound. That was different. When did I actually—
Can’t remember.
“No.” The word scrapes out of me. “That’s not— I can’t—”
“Can’t?”
“I’m immortal.” My voice sounds wrong. High and thin and nothing like mine. “Eight hundred years. I’ve never— not once— I didn’t think I could—”
The word sticks in my throat like a bone. If I say it, it becomes real. If I say it, I can’t unsay it. If I say it—
“Pregnant.”
It falls out of me. Just drops, like something I couldn’t hold anymore.
“I think I’m pregnant.”
The silence that follows has a texture. Heavy. Impossible. The kind of silence that changes the shape of everything that comes after it.
Ren’s face does something I’ve never seen before.
Fear and hope fighting for the same space, neither one winning, both of them written across features I’ve memorized without meaning to.
He crosses the room. Takes my hands. Both of mine in both of his, and my fingers are shaking, when did they start shaking?
“Tianlong has been looking at you strangely since you came back.”
“I noticed.”
“Lady Mei said you looked ‘different.’”
“I noticed.”
“Dumpling keeps shoving his face into your stomach.”
“He’s a cat.” A laugh bubbles up, tastes hysterical. “He sniffs everything.”
“Not like that.”
The laugh cracks into something else. Not crying. I’m not crying. I’m just—leaking. From my eye ducts. Completely different.
“So everyone figured it out before me. Wonderful. That’s exactly how I wanted this to go.
” I pull one hand free to gesture at nothing, at everything, at the absurdity of my own body betraying secrets I didn’t know I was keeping.
“Diagnosed by a dragon, a terrifying spymaster, and a cat with no concept of personal space.”
“And me.”
“You didn’t know.” I meet his eyes. Force myself to hold there. “You suspected.”
Something shifts in his expression. Goes soft in a way that makes my chest hurt.
“I hoped.”
The word lands like a knife between my ribs.
Hoped. Not worried. Not feared. Hoped. Like this was something he wanted. Like the possibility of a— of a—
“You hoped?”
“When you came back and nothing made sense. When the ritual failed and he couldn’t hold you.” His thumbs trace circles on my palms. Slow. Grounding. “I thought perhaps the blessing protected something. Someone.”
His hands guide mine back to my stomach. Both of us touching the place where something impossible might be growing.
“I didn’t want to say anything. Not until you figured it out yourself. Not until you were ready.”
“And if I wasn’t ready?”
“Then we’d figure out what that meant together.”
I search for a joke. Something sharp, something to slice through this unbearable tenderness before it swallows me whole. My mouth opens. Nothing comes out. For the first time in eight hundred years, I’ve got nothing. No quip. No deflection. No armor.
Something cracks open in my chest. I let it.
“I don’t know how to do this.”
My voice shakes. I hate that it shakes. I’ve faced down armies. I’ve looked the Hungering King in the eye and cracked jokes while he tried to consume my soul. And here I am, trembling because of a word. Because of a possibility. Because of a clump of cells that might not even—
“I’ve never— I didn’t think I could—” The words come out jagged. “I don’t know how to be someone’s mother.”
“I don’t know how to be someone’s father.”
I look up. His eyes are bright. Wet at the edges. The Emperor of the Jade Throne, crying in the morning light, and somehow that makes it easier to let the tears track down my own face.
“My family destroyed itself.” His voice is quiet.
Careful, like he’s handling something fragile.
“My brothers killed each other. I was twelve years old and everyone I loved was dead or had done the killing. What if that’s what family means for me?
What if I don’t know how to build something that doesn’t—”
“Wait.”
His lips make an ‘O’, a word caught in his mouth.
“You said family.”
He blinks. “What?”
“You said family.” My voice catches on it, cracks on it. “You called this— us— a family.”
“That’s what it is.”
“I know, I just—”
Eight hundred years. Eight hundred years of burying everyone I ever loved. Eight hundred years of leaving before I had to watch them leave first. Eight hundred years of telling myself that alone was safer, that alone was better, that alone was the only thing I could survive.
“I haven’t had one of those in a very long time.”
He pulls me into him. I let myself be pulled. My face against his chest, his heartbeat under my ear, his arms around me like he’s trying to hold all my broken pieces together.
“You have one now.”
I laugh. It comes out wet, broken, nothing like a laugh at all.
“I’m crying because you used a noun correctly. This is humiliating.”
“It’s human.”
“Same thing.”
We stay like that. I don’t know how long.
The light shifts across the floor, warm to warmer, morning bleeding toward midday.
My tears dry on his shirt. His hand moves in slow circles on my back.
At some point Dumpling jumps onto the bed and tries to wedge himself between us, offended at being left out of whatever’s happening.
I don’t pull away.
The running instinct doesn’t come. I keep waiting for it—the familiar itch under my skin, the desperate need to go, to put distance between myself and anything that matters. It’s kept me alive for eight centuries. It’s the only response I know.
It doesn’t come.
“What if he has your mouth?”
His voice is soft against my hair. I don’t lift my head.
“She.”
“We don’t know—”
“I know.”
He pauses. Accepts it the way he accepts everything about me—without pushing.
“The bloodline?”
“All daughters. All the way back to Mei-Ling.” I shrug against his chest. “Don’t ask me how. I just know.”
He studies me for a long moment. Then nods, like that’s all the explanation he needs.
“What if she has your mouth, then?” His thumb traces circles on my back. “The one that never stops?”
“Then you’ll have two of us to deal with.”
“The empire isn’t ready.”
I snort. “The empire can deal with it.”
Something loosens in my chest. Not fixed. Not okay. But breathing.
“She’s going to be a nightmare.” The words come easier now. Still raw, but easier. “Your political enemies. Tianlong’s flair for dramatic entrances.”
“Dumpling’s conviction that he owns everything,” he says.
“He’s going to be unbearable about this.”
“More than he already is?”
I almost smile. Almost.
But the warmth doesn’t hold. It never does. Underneath the banter, underneath the impossible softness of this moment, something cold is waiting.
“Another daughter.” The fear creeps back in, cold fingers at my throat. “Another target. Another dawn in a long line of them, another girl the Hungering King will hunt.”
His hand tightens on mine.
“Another girl cursed to live forever. To watch everyone she loves—”
“Stop.”
“I’m just—”
“I know what you’re doing.” His voice is steady. “You’re building walls. Thinking of reasons to run.”
The words hit like a slap. True. Completely true. Eight hundred years of practice, and he sees right through me.
“I’m not going to tell you those fears aren’t real.
They are. She’ll be hunted. She’ll carry the blessing and the curse both.
” His hand moves to my face, tilts it toward him.
“But she’ll also have a dragon who would burn the world for her.
A general who’s already doubled the palace guard.
A spymaster who’s probably started a file on potential threats.
An archivist who will bury her in research about everything she could ever need to know. ”
“And a cat who thinks he’s a god.”
“And a father who will never stop protecting her.” His thumb traces my cheekbone. “And a mother who’s survived eight hundred years of everything the world could throw at her.”
I want to argue. Want to point out all the ways this could go wrong, all the reasons this is terrifying, all the evidence that loving things only leads to losing them.
Instead I say: “Our daughter is going to be impossible.”
“Our daughter.” He says it like he’s tasting the words. Like they’re something precious. “Yes. She probably will be.”
“We’re going to be terrible at this.”
“Probably.”
“We’ll argue about everything. How to raise her, what to teach her, whether Dumpling counts as a responsible guardian—”
“He absolutely does not.”
“See? Already arguing.”
He kisses my forehead. Soft. Deliberate.
“We’ll figure it out.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it’s true.”
I close my eyes. Let myself breathe. Let myself feel the impossible thing growing in my belly, the impossible man holding me together, the impossible future stretching out ahead like something I might actually want to see.
“I’m not running.”
The words surprise me. But they’re true.
“I know.”
“How?”
“Because you’re still here.”
My journal is where I left it. The ink dried on the last entry, something about the tomb, about the ritual, about dying. That feels like a different person now. A different story.
I find a fresh page.
Chapter 644: The one where everything changed.
I died for love. I came back carrying it.
Apparently the universe decided that eight hundred years of running meant I’d earned something. I’m not sure I agree with its logic, but I’m not going to argue.
I have a dragon who calls me “little dawn” and has already threatened to incinerate anyone who looks at my stomach wrong.
I have an archivist who appeared this morning with a pregnancy research file. Three hundred pages. She apologized that it wasn’t longer.
I have a general who doubled the palace guard and pretends it’s about something else.
I have a cat who has claimed my stomach as his new territory. He purrs directly onto it. The physician says this is fine. I remain skeptical.
I have—
I stop. My hand moves to my stomach without permission. Stays there.
I have a daughter. I think. I’m terrified.
But I’m not running.
“What happens next?”
Ren’s voice, warm with sleep. He’s reading over my shoulder, one arm wrapped around me, chin hooked on my shoulder. Dumpling is trying to fit himself into the nonexistent space between us.
“I have no idea.” I set down the brush. “We prepare for a very angry, very patient immortal who wants our daughter. I get increasingly large and uncomfortable. You write terrible poetry about it.”
“My poetry isn’t—”
“I’ve read your poetry.”
“You could give constructive feedback instead of—”
“It’s bad, Ren. It’s very bad.”
“I have seven months to improve.”
“She shouldn’t be subjected to bad metaphors. It’s formative.”
“Then I’ll write her good ones.” His arms tighten around me. “I promise.”
I lean back into him. Let myself be held. Let myself want this, all of it, the terrifying uncertain impossible all of it.
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
“I know.”
Chapter 645, first entry: In which our heroine rides toward danger with an emperor, a dragon, and a cat.
In which she stops counting deaths and starts counting reasons to live.
In which she discovers that some stories aren’t solo adventures.
In which found family becomes real family.
In which something small and impossible is growing.
In which she finally understands why her mother cursed her to live forever:
So she’d be here for this.