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The Altar of the Heavens was quiet in the morning, snow crunching beneath my boots as I made directly for the courtyard built to the side—the most recent addition. I eyed the frozen lotus pond as I passed, lips quirking as I recalled my manic attempts at ‘destroying’ Heqing’s memorial in a bid to lure the traitor Huang out. It had been childish of me, but I’d had no dignity I needed to preserve. Now, however…
The phoenix crown I wore at our wedding said enough. My dignity was not just my own anymore.
The tomb was an exact replica of our home in Taoyuan Village and I couldn’t stop the memories of our short time there even if I wanted to. They were happy memories, before I was drawn back unwillingly into the battlefield between conqueror and conquered. Before I was forced to cut my own throat.
It was odd, seeing the sarcophagus and realizing that’s my body in there. I should be dead—I was dead. But impossibly I had been given yet another chance. The body I inhabited now was nothing like the previous one, but like each life I had been given I had felt no strangeness in finding myself in a stranger’s body. But the time between each reincarnation only seemed to grow longer and I feared for the next time. Heqing had mourned me for a year before I even regained life this time, and that thought haunted me. I had left him alone when I had sworn to never leave his side. And in the future it might be longer. How long do I have to wait for you to come back? A year? A decade? Twenty years maybe? Or do I have to stop waiting altogether?
Xiang Tian’s story of how Heqing had buried my former self in my wedding clothes stayed with me even after our real marriage, sinking its claws into me. I didn't want to think how close we had come to truly losing each other. A red veil was draped over the dark wood of the sarcophagus, gold embroidery glinting in the cold morning sunlight. The tablet set on the altar beneath it bore my name, and his. As if he already counted himself among the dead. Even in death he had refused to let us be parted.
And set on the altar before the ironwood coffin, alongside the tablet that bore both my name and Heqing’s, were the shattered pieces of the jade flute.
It had been my carelessness that had broken it, but Heqing hadn’t made any attempt to have it repaired since my reincarnation. I wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it, leave it as it was perhaps.
I cradled the shorter half in my hands, feeling the cool slickness of the polished jade. It had been a whim of mine, when I bought it. It had caught my eye, and my only reasoning behind it was that if I bought it for Heqing, he would remember it as a token of friendship and not kill me. I’d been a fool at that point. I hadn’t realized the depth of what he felt for me, hadn’t understood at the time why he had given his mother’s hairpin to me in return. Perhaps I had already subconsciously been in love with him, but there was no place for what-ifs now.
My fingers curled around the flute piece and I set it back in the casket with its other half. His gift to me. My gift to him. Both broken into so many shards by the ones who had given them, pieced back together through determination and desperation.
I rose to my feet and picked up the small case that rested on the altar. A coffin for the lover’s tokens we had given and had broken in exchange.
And like that jade hairpin, smashed under Heqing’s boot when I had first spurned him, I would piece it back together like I had his heart.
And on the next anniversary of our wedding, I would give the flute to him, one more time. Worn and showing the fissures and cracks of the suffering that it had undergone these years, but repaired and all the stronger for it.