The Dead Princess's Mercy

General Wei stared at the pool of black water beneath his feet. In its reflection, he didn’t see his own battle scared face, but the faces of the three thousand men he had burned alive at the Siege of Yan. Their skin was translucent and their mouths were stitched shut with what looked like rusted wire.

The horror of Wei’s life was not the battle he fought by day, but the one he lost every night. The ghosts didn’t just haunt his tent; they invaded his senses. He smelled their charred flesh in his tea and he felt their cold, phantom fingers tracing the veins on his throat when he tried to sleep.

“General,” a voice whispered from the center of the room.

He looked up and standing there, in the midst of weeping spirits was a woman who looked like a porcelain doll- shattered and glued back together. Her name was Li-Mei. She had been buried alive thousands of years ago to ‘guard’ a tomb, and her rebirth had not been easy. She smelled of damp earth and ancient musk.

The Collision of Blood and Silk

She stepped toward him, her silk robes dragging through the mud. A ghostly soldier with no eyes lunged at her and in one swift movement too fast for a living thing Li-Mei caught the spirit by its throat. Her touch didn’t go through him, it burned him. The spirit screamed in agony and then dissolved into grey ash.

“You seek to appease them with salt and prayer,” she said, her voice a low, melodic rasp. “But that will not stop them from haunting you.”

She reached out with her pale, unnaturally long fingers, and touched Wei’s cheek. Her skin was freezing, not with the chill of winter but with the absolute zero of the void. Wei was taken aback by the chill in her fingers and for a moment he was unsure of what to say.

“Why help me?” Wei managed to choke out while his trembling hand hovered over the hilt of his sword.

“Because,” she whispered, leaning closer, until her cold lips were inches from his own. “Your soul is as scarred as my tomb walls. We are both monuments to things that should have stayed dead.”

The Night of the Crimson Moon

As the weeks passed their ‘courtship’ was a macabre dance. They didn’t walk through gardens, but through mass graves of the frontier. Li-Mei taught General Wei how to bind the restless dead into the earth using bone needles.

The horror intensified when a massive multi-limbed beast known as the Great Unbound rose from the battlefield, carrying within it the rage of the fallen. It was a tower of rotting limbs and screaming mouths, a physical manifestation of Wei’s guilt, something Li-Mei had seen many times.

As the Great Unbound lunged toward him, Wei refused to retreat. He looked in Li-Mei’s direction. She was definitely no damsel in distress, she was a fierce predator. She opened her mouth and a swarm of black moths, the souls of those she had guarded for millennia, poured out, clashing with the monster.

As they stood in the center of the carnage, General Wei grabbed Li-Mei’s hand. The contact wasn’t electric, it was agonizing. The ghosts around them cried out in terror as the barrier between life and death thinned to a razer’s edge. Wei felt his heart skip a beat, almost stopping under the weight of her ancient curse.

“Take it,” he said, pulling her closer to him. “If you need life to stay, take mine.”

“I don’t want your death, General,” she whispered as her eyes turned a solid, terrifying black. “I want your eternity.”

A Different Kind of Forever

The battle didn’t end in victory, it ended in a transformation. The ghosts didn’t vanish, they became the wind, silent and subdued.

Wei survived, but was no longer the man he used to be. The color had drained from his hair, leaving only bone-white strands, and his heartbeat had become a slow, heavy thud, beating once every minute. He stood quietly in the ruins of his camp, watching the morning sun rise, knowing it would never again bring him warmth.

Li-Mei stood beside him, her hand tucked into his arm. To those passing by they looked like a noble couple watching the dawn, but underneath the silk robes, their skin was the same marble-grey.

They had ended up together, but not in a charming palace. They reigned over the silent places. Wei was no longer a general of men, but a warden of the veil, and Li-Mei was his dark sovereign.

“Are you afraid?” she asked, her voice now the only thing that could make him feel a ghost of a pulse.

Wei looked at her, his beautiful, yet terrifying savior, and felt a love that was as heavy and permanent as a gravestone. “No,” he said, his breath no longer visible in the cold air. “I am finally home.”