The morning mist clung to the palace grounds like a lover unwilling to part. Beneath its veil, plum blossoms stirred gently in the breeze, their pink petals falling like snow across the stone pathways.
Eira stood under the twisted branches of the oldest plum tree in the palace garden. A servant had called it Xue Mei — "Snow Plum" — a tree said to have bloomed even during the dynasty's bloodiest winters.
She reached out and touched the bark, rough and knotted. Cold. Solid. Real.
Just like the tree she used to sit beneath at her university's courtyard — the one that grew beside the back library, where she'd often cry after a long shift, overwhelmed by loss, by loneliness, by a world that felt like it kept going without her.
Her eyes blurred. This world was so far from that one, but this moment... this tree...
It felt the same.
Had fate looped her back to a place she'd already known?
Or had she never really left?
A breeze tugged at her sleeves, and a faint sound caught her ear — the clicking of boots on the stone path. She turned.
The Emperor stood behind her, dressed in a simple indigo robe, his hair down, eyes unreadable in the pale morning light.
She lowered her gaze instantly, heart pounding.
"You rise early," he said.
"I could not sleep," she answered quietly.
His gaze shifted to the tree. "This tree was planted by the founding Empress. Legend says her soul resides in it still — because she died without seeing her child grow."
Eira's fingers tightened around the branch. "How cruel," she murmured. "To live a life written by others, only to die before finishing your own sentence."
The Emperor tilted his head slightly. "You speak strangely, Lady Yan."
"Strangely," she echoed, then turned to face him fully. "Or honestly?"
That caught him off guard.
For a brief moment, Eira saw the Kai Ren she remembered — the prideful man who hated being questioned, the one who once sneered at her trembling voice during a thesis defense and told her, 'If you can't stand in truth, don't stand at all.'
And yet, this Emperor did not scold her.
Instead, he stepped closer. "You changed. Since you fell ill."
She nodded. "I changed because I… died. Or maybe I lived for the first time."
He studied her with unnerving intensity, as though trying to peel apart the layers of who she was.
"Last night," he said suddenly, "I dreamed of a woman in strange robes. She called me by a name I did not know."
"What name?" she asked softly.
"Kai," he said.
The syllable split through her like lightning. Her knees nearly gave out.
He took another step forward. "And in that world… there were no palaces. No thrones. Just glass towers and silver cages. And pain."
Eira's throat dried. "And was I there?"
He didn't answer at first. His eyes locked onto hers.
"Yes."
The wind rustled the branches above them. Petals fell between them like the sand of an hourglass running out.
"You," he said slowly, "you were crying. And I held your hand. And I told you not to fall."
Eira's breath trembled. "But I did fall."
His brow furrowed. "Yes. You did."
And she could see the confusion in his eyes — that he was fighting against a world he couldn't name, remembering a future that had already passed.
"I think," she whispered, "we are two pages of the same book… caught in different chapters."
Silence.
Then, the Emperor turned away, clasping his hands behind his back.
"Lady Yan," he said. "You are either a sorceress… or something far more dangerous."
She bowed her head, voice steady despite the ache in her chest.
"I'm just a girl who loved in silence. In another time. In another world."
He said nothing more. Just walked away, leaving her alone with the falling blossoms.
But for the first time, she knew.
He remembered something.
And in a palace built on control, perhaps memory was the most dangerous rebellion of all.