His very first memories are dim and hazy, worn thin from all the times he’s turned them over and over in his thoughts. When he was little, thinking about them would make him feel warm and safe, like a blanket tugged up to his ears on a cold night. That he can still remember, like a reflection of the real memory. But when he tries to recall those long-ago sensations, the feelings all elude him – like reaching for a face but touching nothing but the cold surface of a warped mirror.
It was long ago and unimportant. He tells himself it doesn’t matter. What matters now is that he’s a young prince, son of the Empress herself, second only to the favored Crown Prince Qi. And yet – and yet he can’t help but wonder about it. Each Tomb-Sweeping Festival, the fragments of a melody come to him again when he bows down to honor his Imperial Ancestors, and he has to stifle the ache he feels knowing that she will never be counted among them.
A few times, he asks. His Imperial Father gives him no answers, and his Imperial Mother sighs and shakes her head. And so he feels like he has failed doubly in his filial piety – troubling Mother with inconsequential questions from a past she’d rather not revisit; returning empty-handed to the vague mirage of the past that is nothing but a child’s recollection of colorful robes and a captivating flower hairpiece. Knowing that there once was a voice that sang to him, that she gave him words and a melody that he has now carelessly lost to time.
For years, those memories stay buried. There are more important things. The Crown Prince falls; the Eastern Palace stands empty. It should be his, then, but isn’t. And so there is more work to be done. More careful plans to lay out, more alliances to forge and enemies to foil. He is rising, rising – so close to ascending to his rightful place – when it all comes crashing down.
And only when everything seems lost does what was long ago and inconsequential become the most important thing. His mother’s name. He learns his mother’s name; his mother’s fate. He still can’t recall her features, but he can feel the lifeblood that she gave him with every pounding beat of his furious heart, and so he rises like a phoenix from the ashes of what should have been his people. It is all fire and blood as he breaks through the years of lies and abandonment to take up his mother’s mantle into battle.
All is death and fury, and he hears no song at all for the wailing and the cursing and the silence of despair when his throat grows too raw to shout and too tight to cry. All is lost – until it isn’t. Until he learns that there is still a spark of hope – a drop of her blood alive in the world.
Only then does it comes to him again. That melody. It washes away the bitter, salt taste of defeat; wraps his shivering body in loving warmth. The lullaby his mother used to sing. Linglong’s lullaby for her only child; her beloved son. It lifts him from the darkness he lies in, raises him in a light so bright he can’t see anything at all anymore. But she sings to him, so he knows that she is there, waiting for him. And as the light fades, he reaches for her – after all these long years, he can finally see her face again.