The cold woke her.
Not the gentle cold of morning, where you pull blankets tighter and drift back to sleep. This was bone-deep. This was wrong. Like someone had packed ice into her chest and left it to melt inside her lungs.
Her eyes opened.
Ceiling. Stone. Familiar.
The Quiet Wing.
She knew this ceiling. Knew the crack that ran from the eastern corner toward the center like a river on a map. Knew the way the morning light fell through the single high window, too narrow to climb through, too high to offer any view but sky.
She was in her bed. Her room. Her cage.
But that was impossible.
The last thing she remembered was the altar. The Keepers in their white robes, mouths moving in words she couldn't understand. The Emperor watching from his elevated seat, face blank, eyes hungry. The knife.
The pain.
Her hand flew to her chest. She expected wet. Expected the gaping wound she'd felt, the sensation of being opened like a fruit. Her fingers pressed against fabric. Against skin. Against a heartbeat.
Whole. She was whole.
Her breath came too fast. The room spun. She sat up and immediately regretted it — her head pounded like something was trying to claw its way out from behind her eyes.
"Careful."
She froze.
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Low. Amused. Like someone watching a child try to walk for the first time.
"Who's there?"
Silence. She scanned the room. The same sparse furniture she'd known her entire life. The wooden table with the chipped corner. The basin for washing. The narrow wardrobe with three identical gray dresses inside. No one else. No shadows that shouldn't be there.
"Who's THERE?"
"Inside."
The word slithered through her skull. Not heard through her ears — planted directly into her mind like a seed that had already taken root.
"Inside... me?"
"You offered. I accepted. Don't tell me you've forgotten already. That would be disappointing."
Fragments. The altar. The pain. Something vast and dark reaching toward her as she screamed into nothing. A hand extending from the void. A voice asking—
*Do you want to live?*
She'd said yes. She'd said yes without hesitation, without thought, without anything but the desperate animal need to NOT end.
"What are you?"
"Many things. Old things. But you can call me Kaelan. It's not my name, but your tongue couldn't shape the real one anyway."
She pressed her palms against her temples. This was madness. She'd died and now she was mad. The ritual had broken something in her mind and this was the result — a voice that claimed to live inside her, a body that felt real but couldn't be.
"You're not mad," Kaelan said. "Though I understand why you'd prefer that explanation. It's simpler."
"Get out of my head."
"No."
The refusal was casual. Almost cheerful.
"I can't leave even if I wanted to. And I don't want to. We made a deal, little vessel. You wanted to live. I gave you life. Now we're bound until the terms are fulfilled."
"What terms?"
Silence.
She waited. The pounding in her head began to fade, leaving behind a strange clarity. She was breathing. Her heart was beating. The crack in the ceiling was exactly where it had always been.
But she remembered dying. She remembered the knife. She remembered—
Wei.
His face surfaced in her mind like a corpse rising from water. Wei, with his gentle smile and his whispered promises. Wei, who had mapped every guard rotation, who had counted every step between her room and the gap in the eastern wall. Wei, who had held her hand in the dark and sworn they would run together.
Wei, who hadn't been there.
She'd waited. The designated time came and went. She'd stood in the shadows by the wall, heart pounding, trusting him to appear. And when the guards came instead, when they dragged her to the altar she hadn't known existed, some part of her had still expected him to rescue her.
He never came.
"Ah." Kaelan's voice was softer now. Curious. "There it is. The rage. I was wondering when it would surface."
Her hands were shaking. She looked down at them — the same hands, the same bitten fingernails, the same small scar on her left thumb from when she'd cut herself on a broken dish at seven years old.
Young hands.
Too young.
She scrambled out of bed, nearly tripping on the tangled sheets, and rushed to the basin. The water inside was still. She leaned over it, staring at her reflection.
The face that looked back was hers. But softer. Rounder. The hollows under her eyes that had deepened in her final months were gone. The sharpness that hunger and fear had carved into her features had been smoothed away.
She looked like she had... before.
"When is this?" she whispered.
"That's the right question." Kaelan sounded pleased. "You're learning already. Time, little vessel. I gave you time. You asked to live. But the life you had was already spent. So I gave you the life you hadn't used yet."
The life she hadn't used yet.
"How far back?"
"Eight months and sixteen days before you bled on that altar. Give or take. The calculations are... complicated."
Eight months. Eight months before the escape that never happened. Eight months before she died.
The Century Alignment. The ritual. The sacrifice.
All of it was still coming. She hadn't escaped anything. She'd just been given time to watch it approach.
"No," Kaelan said, and his voice had lost its amusement. Something harder underneath. Something ancient. "You've been given time to CHANGE it. That's not the same thing. You're not a passenger anymore. You're the driver. And I'm sitting beside you, making sure you don't crash us both into oblivion."
She gripped the edges of the basin. Her knuckles went white.
Eight months. Wei hadn't betrayed her yet. Her mother hadn't pretended she didn't exist yet — well, she had, but not in the specific way that came later. The Keepers who would strap her to the altar were going about their daily rituals, not knowing her face, not caring about her name.
She didn't have a name.
She'd never had a name.
"I'm going to change that."
She didn't realize she'd spoken aloud until Kaelan responded.
"Change what?"
"Everything." The word tasted like iron in her mouth. Like blood. Like the beginning of something that couldn't be taken back. "I'm going to change everything. They used me because I was empty. Because I was nothing. They threw me away like I was already dead."
"And now?"
She looked at her reflection again. The same face. The same unnamed Void-born princess locked in her comfortable prison, waiting to be useful, waiting to be opened and drained.
But behind her eyes, something had shifted. Something that hadn't been there before.
Something that would never be empty again.
"Now I'm going to make them remember me."
The morning light shifted. Somewhere in the palace, miles away, her mother was probably eating breakfast with the son who got to have a name. Somewhere, Wei was going about his day, not knowing that the woman he would abandon was already planning his reckoning. Somewhere, the Emperor sat on his stolen throne, confident that his power would last another century.
None of them knew.
But they would.
A knock at the door.
She turned, heart hammering. The knock came again — three short raps. The morning servant with breakfast.
"Answer it," Kaelan whispered. "Smile. Be what they expect. We have work to do, little vessel. And the first rule is this: they can never know what you've become."
She crossed the room. Paused with her hand on the door.
"Kaelan."
"Yes?"
"Call me little vessel again and I'll find a way to make you regret it."
A pause. Then laughter — low, genuine, startled.
"Oh," he said, and something in his voice shifted. Warmer. More interested. "I think I chose well."
She opened the door.