Phuwin's sandals made no sound on the stone corridor. He had learned to walk like that years ago—soft, deliberate, a ghost in his own palace. But now the silence felt like a lie, because his heart was pounding so loud he was certain the walls could hear it.

He had meant to go to the nursery. He had meant to check on Lunara, to let the baby's warmth settle something in his chest. Instead his feet had carried him past the healer's chamber, and the door had been open just a crack, and he had seen them.

Clove and Star. Their hands laced together on the cot, fingers intertwined like they had always belonged that way. Clove's face was open in a way Phuwin had never seen it—not guarded, not watching, just present. And Star was looking at her like she was the only thing in the room that mattered.

Phuwin's throat closed.

It wasn't jealousy. It wasn't. It was something rawer, something that lived in the space between his ribs and hollowed him out. Because they had found each other in the middle of all this wreckage, and they were holding on, and Phuwin was so glad for them—he was—but it made the loneliness in his own chest feel like a physical wound.

He forced a smile. He was good at that. Fifteen years of being empress had taught him how to arrange his face into something gentle, something that wouldn't worry anyone.

"Phuwin." Star looked up first, her dark eyes soft, and she didn't let go of Clove's hand. "Come in. Sit with us."

"No." The word came out too fast, too bright. He heard it and hated it. "No, I—the healer needs me. Pond needs me. I should—"

Clove's head turned. Her eyes, the ones that had watched everything for thirty years, saw straight through him. That was the thing about Clove. She never missed anything. And right now she was seeing Phuwin's cracks, the ones he was trying so hard to hide.

"He's stable for the moment," Clove said quietly. "The healer is with him. You can breathe."

"I know." Phuwin's smile ached. "I just—I need to go see him. I need to—"

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't know how to finish it. I need to not be here. I need to not see you happy while I'm falling apart. I need to scream until my lungs give out.

He turned and walked away before either of them could stop him.

The corridor stretched ahead of him, long and cold, and Phuwin's steps grew faster and faster until he was almost running. The weight of his belly made it awkward, made his breath come in sharp gasps, but he didn't stop. He couldn't stop. If he stopped, he would crumble.

The palace stairs spiraled down, down, down—forty floors of stone and shadow and the echo of his own frantic footsteps. His hand slid along the railing, then let go, needing the speed more than the safety. He almost fell twice. He didn't care.

The gardens burst around him in a blur of green and gold, the afternoon light slanting through the trees, and Phuwin ran through them like a wounded animal—not graceful, not composed, just running. His silk robes caught on a branch and tore; he didn't stop. He couldn't stop.

The forest swallowed him next. The trees closed overhead, the air growing cooler and damper, and Phuwin's lungs burned as he pushed through the undergrowth. His hands scraped against branches. His pretty slippers soaked through with mud. None of it registered beyond the roar in his ears that grew louder and louder until it was all he could hear.

The waterfall.

It crashed before him, a curtain of white water thundering into the dark pool below, spraying cold mist onto his bare arms and dampening his hair. Phuwin stopped at the edge of the bank, chest heaving, and stared at it.

This was the place he came to think. To breathe. To speak the words he couldn't say anywhere else. The waterfall had heard his hopes for each of his daughters, his tears at the loss of the ones who never made it, his desperate, impossible prayers. And now it was going to hear him break.

Phuwin's hands went to the ties of his dress. His fingers shook, fumbling with the silk, and a sound came out of him—a sound he didn't recognize, halfway between a sob and a growl. He ripped at the fabric. The dress tore, the sound sharp and violent in the open air, and he yanked it off his body and threw it onto the bank.

A heap of silk and lace. Ruined.

He stood there in his shift, the cold air raising goosebumps on his pale golden skin, the swell of his belly round and heavy between him and the water. His daughters' long hair—his hair—hung loose and tangled around his shoulders. He didn't remember unbraiding it. He didn't remember anything beyond the need to get to the water.

He waded in.

The cold hit him like a slap. It seized his ankles, his calves, his knees, and Phuwin gasped, water splashing up onto his thighs. He kept going. The rocky bottom sloped unevenly beneath his bare feet and he stumbled, caught his balance, kept moving. He didn't stop until the water reached his waist, until the spray soaked through his thin shift and plastered it to his skin, until the roar of the falls was so loud it seemed to live inside his skull.

Then Phuwin screamed.

The sound tore out of him, ragged and raw, and the waterfall swallowed it whole. He screamed until his throat burned, until there was nothing left, and then he crumpled. His knees hit the rock beneath the water. His hands went down into the cold current, finding the smooth stone, and he gripped the grass and moss at the pool's edge until his knuckles went white.

"Please," he said. The word was barely a whisper, lost in the noise, but he said it anyway. "Please, please, please."

He didn't know who he was begging. God. The gods. The waterfall itself. The emperor of ten thousand kingdoms who was rotting from the inside, his hands green with poison from a mountain that had killed every man who ever climbed it.

Pond was dying.

The healer said it could be fatal. Phuwin had heard it in her voice, the careful, clinical distance that meant she was already preparing for the worst. Pond's fever had broken, but the poison had spread deep into his wounds, and his lungs were filling, and the healer had looked at Phuwin with those apologetic eyes like she was telling him to say goodbye.

Fifteen years. Fifteen years of loving that man, of arguing with him, of craving the son he couldn't give him through his own omega body. Fifteen years of daughters—three, then six, then Lunara—and Terrence, his boy, the son Pond had claimed and raised before dying at five. Fifteen years of watching Pond's hand hover over his newborn girls with something like fear, unsure he had the right to touch them, as if he expected them to break under his imperial hands.

And now those hands were rotting.

"He didn't have to go," Phuwin sobbed into the spray. "He didn't have to—but he did. He did it for me. For Ovoale. For Star." He pressed his palm to his own chest, feeling the frantic cadence of his heart. "He climbed a mountain that kills men because I asked him to. Because I couldn't bear to lose another child."

The cold of the water seeped through his soaked shift and into the swell of his belly. His hand moved there, pressing flat against the taut skin, and inside the warmth, beneath the water and the cold and the violent roar of the falls, the baby stirred.

She was quiet, this one. Settled. Carried so differently after the trauma of the earlier ones. Phuwin had thought, at first, that her stillness meant something was wrong. But the healers listened and felt her strong heartbeat, and Ovoale had put her small hand on her mother's belly and the baby, just then, had turned toward her. Every time. That little convergence of light that washed her field with something honeyed.

They were expecting a daughter. Another daughter. The fifth that he carried now, the eighth living child; the entire kingdom still waiting for their imperial son and heir.

The day they all found out Phuwin had done it again—she'd started off strong, he breathed milk-sweet as he pressed her forehead—the crowd stampeded like Braavi in heat on the open showfield. Kian, the elder of the omegas who walked so happily hooded and collared in Public Access. Kian who kicked her: kicking your one and only dress would get you that. And her triple three—Lorriel, Fallen one after another, then she simply stayed home and braided the living chaos's loppy locks for days.

One sister took no prisoners: Ovoale's dark curls ended up threaded with a wide rainbow of cheap ribbon in honour of every scrap of dress the seamstress got torn from her mother's belly if they so much as caught her mouthful across a noisy gap. Even tonight weeks after all of them descended from three cots, silence swept when she wheeled in to take her porridge, licking batter straight two bramble-high circles around those damp black curls.

Wait, stop, breathe: Kian let it reel her calm once more. They almost lost everyone here.

"God," Phuwin whispered, pressing harder against the place she had moved. "Please. Just. Please don't take him from me. Don't make me raise this one without him. Don't make me—" His voice broke. He dipped his entire face into the cold spray, letting it coat him as if the falls themselves might swallow his words too, from her young face slack in that false sleep—he never learned to dream past Star or Ovoale for weeks at a while now—

The air snapped shorter, like a burn right beneath the breath.

The crash beneath him churned, deepened, and dragged at his spent, swaying calfs.

No, knees. Knees scraping lower rock already. So tired. The pull of it skittered blue lines all up and inside him and took away and pushed the night as he breathed it, thick and deaf to everything but the ache inside.

Something heavy kept his hand laced when he tried to pull one free: his own white wedding ring, glinting through the film of tears and thrown green light denser here; catching that single low, dim red through the sheaf and leaf pines. He stared down where metal had sunk warmth from every unflowered year until the stone had finally warmed his finger to its first true burn.

When the last hot tear folded its way down both sun-hard edges of his cheeks, the ring flickered with a light that wasn't for the thrall of it: a quiet light, from inside their oldest handful of words—things passing like water at this ebbing at banked dark sand that squeezed through willpower so each sob rose staler and colder but was pulled to leave: ' I love you, Mr. Emperor,'—

he had said it at night.