“K..Kunyi?” I gasped as I stumbled inside and saw my sister, my best friend, laying in a pool of blood at the feet of… “Father?”
He stared at me covered in the blood of our family. Seeing him like that…the bow in my hand dropped to the ground. The sword stained with royal blood tightened in his hands as he turned to face me crying, sobbing yet dazed.
“Why?” It was all I could ask. Why? Why had he given up? We could have escaped. Couldn’t we have escaped?
“Why must you be born into this family?!” He screamed at me and I was so stunned, so scared, that I lifted my arm and drew my sword and slowly its metal met my skin and sliced right through. I felt nothing but anger. Anger at myself for caring, for leaving him to save them…
MALACHI
September 26th 1646- Guáng an mén, Beijing, Ming Dynasty
“We made it Princess,” I whispered unable to look away from the blue waters in front of us. We were finally outside the city’s walls, facing away from the Forbidden City, the imperial palace that was once her own, but under the new emperor had become her prison. We even faced away from the sun as it set behind us, but she said nothing, and she’d never say anything in this life again.
Her last request had been to ride together, but in actuality she’d asked for me not to watch her die again. We were to ride as if we were trying to outrun our fate. Holding her now cold hand as they gripped my robes I used the other to cover my mouth as I
coughed so hard the horse was startled and birds flew from their nest above us. When I took my hand from my mouth I saw that it was stained with my blood. I smiled as I balled my hand into a fist and wiped the blood from my lips.
“Is it not amusing, beloved,” I whispered to her. “The emperor you served has killed you and the emperor I put to replace him has killed me. Is it not….” I bit back the sob that threatened to break through my lips. “Is it not a cruel but humorous fate?”
***
Waking up, I found my gaze clouded by my own tears. I wiped the tears from my eyes and sat up on my bed as a familiar throbbing headache rang throughout my head.
“Esther?” I called out when I did not see her beside me. “Esther?” I panicked and rose to my feet. When she’d collapsed, I brought her to the room but I must have had a memory after that.
Stepping out into the hall I found that she wasn’t there either but I smelled coffee.
“Esther?”
“In here.”
Her voice was soft, barely audible even. Following it, I walked straight towards the art room where I found her sitting in the center of the room with her old quilt around her shoulders and a coffee pot beside her. All the paintings I’d created for her were now uncovered. She looked at me over her shoulder and her face…she looked so exhausted yet she still smiled at me and lifted the cup beside her.
“Coffee?”
“Let’s go, you shouldn’t stay in here…it’s—”
“Creepy?” She snickered. “I thought it was romantic at first, when I didn’t know it was me, but now, yeah, it’s a bit odd, but I don’t mind it, you caught my good side each time.”
“It’s hard not when you have no bad side,” I said, leaning on the bedframe. She smiled and then looked back at one painting in particular.
“Princess Changping, daughter of Emperor Chongzhen, you warned me to get out. You told me that there’d be an attack and I ran to help my family, and he’d already killed most of them. He tried to kill me, but I lost my arm instead. That’s where I was. Where were you?”
“Two years after that, at the eastern gate of Beijing. Emperor Li was worried that I’d revolt against him and had been poisoning me. Ironically, he died before me. You died on the way, the infection from losing your arm had spread to your heart,” I answered honestly, not realizing we’d been seeing the same lifetime.
She hung her head and her hand shook. “Why are we tortured like this? We can’t even enjoy this life…”
“We can.”
“HOW?!”
Marching over to her I took the coffee from her hands and pulled her to her feet. She refused to look at me, but I lifted her chin and she glared at me in anger.
“We enjoy now by not getting caught up in then. If we miss a minute then we enjoy the next one twice as much. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s just...let’s go get food, let’s take walk. Let’s pretend it never even happened and keep going. We aren’t them. We are us.”
She looked at me for a long time before she took a deep breath and relaxed. Cupping her face, I kissed her gently. “Feel better?”
“I’d feel better if I could smack Emperor Chongzhen and Emperor Li!” she muttered and I couldn’t help but snicker.