Chapter 5 · free to read
Tam took me down where no empress had ever walked willingly: the undercity, the sweating stone gut of Cindercrown, where I had once carried my own coal.
Every corner held a life I had stepped into and erased. Somewhere up there, the real empress had a mother, a bed, a name — and I had swallowed all of it whole.
The old woman's words landed like a dropped cup. The empress before me had not simply died. She had come back — again and again — exactly as I did.
She was a transmigrant. A looper. A borrowed soul in a cracked crown — and she finally ran out of returns. I was not chosen. I was only the next in a long, doomed line.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.