Sweet Romance18 min read
The Fox Who Said He Was an Emperor
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I woke to a strange ceiling stitched with fabric and a chill that had nothing to do with weather. I said the first thing that came to me and it sounded perfectly ordinary in my mouth.
"I want to leave," I told the man lying beside me.
He turned, slow as a creature that had slept too long. "Why?" he asked, voice like someone unused to hurry.
"I think there's a ghost in the house," I said, and pointed at the rafters as if the beams might confess.
He blinked. "Nonsense. I've lived here for ages. No ghosts." His words were comfortable in the dark.
I watched him a long time. The room waited. He made the oddest small noise—like a held breath—and then, uneven and quick, he said, "You must be tired. Dreams make odd things."
I kept my eyes on the ceiling until something furry slid past my fingers. My hand closed without thinking on a warm, thick tail.
The man froze. For a month and more I had slept in that room, pretending to accept a title I did not remember, pretending that this house with its lopsided halls and strange cuisine was a palace. He pretended to be the emperor. He pretended in part because I had no better option and he had kindness in him, but that night I tested the kindness.
"You're not what you say you are," I said softly. I held his tail.
He swallowed. "I—it's only a cleaning duster," he mumbled, voice paper-thin. "I used it... and forgot to put it back."
"How is a duster warm?" I asked. My palm tightened around the soft plume. He could not breathe.
He flinched back. "It is hot because it's summer," he said.
I let go. He snatched the tail into the covers like a secret and edged away from me. In the dim light I could see it: ears high under his hair, a little too pointed. He kept speaking like a man but his green eyes went glassy now and then, caught and strange.
"I've eaten chicken for days," I said, watching his embroidered sleeping robe, a huge thigh of chicken stitched where a crest might be.
"It's unusual," he offered, almost offended. "Not unusual for you," I said. "You wear that sheepish look and call yourself an emperor, but who builds a 'palace' in the middle of a wasteland of glass and dead trees?"
He flinched when I touched his ears. "I'm not an emperor of the human world," he confessed finally, words tripping out like a child's. "I haven't ruled over people. I don't know the city ways."
"Then why lie?" I asked.
He folded his hands, looked smaller. "I was trying to protect you," he said. "You woke up frightened. If you thought you were in a palace, you wouldn't be so scared."
I listened. I had been told I was the consort—someone else's title seemed to stick to me like a second skin—but I remembered nothing. That blankness was a kind of exile of its own.
Before we could untangle anything, something slid from the darkness by the canopy.
"Fine," said a voice like silk against glass. "I was going to tell you sooner or later."
A pale white snake coiled into view, a thin ribbon of light. Its head perched like a question mark near the canopy rim. "Hello."
I had stopped being surprised by people who were not only people. I replied, "Hello," with the calm of a woman who has met worse.
"He didn't want to say it," the snake told me. "So I will."
"Go on," I said.
"He and I are exiles," the snake said. "Two hundred years trapped in the Mirror Wastes. We are not human, but we tried to keep you safe."
The snake's voice said 'we', and the fox at my side—who had a habit of looking at me the way a child looks at a new toy—ducked his head like someone trying to hide a guilty grin.
"This was not a human palace," the fox said finally. "This is the Mirror Wastes. We called it a palace so you would believe."
"Why that story?" I asked. "Why call yourself emperor?"
He ducked and put his face very close to mine, blushing as if words could melt like wax between us. "You are my empress," he said, small and earnest. "It sounds nicer. Besides, it's safer to guard a 'palace' than to explain to you that we cannot leave the Mirror Wastes."
They called the fox Everett and the snake Eli. I called myself Isabela. Once I gave them a name, both of them looked as if I had discovered treasure.
"You have a name?" they asked, amazed.
"Yes. Isabela Hawkins," I said. There was something ordinary in the name that made me feel steadier.
They explained in fits and starts: they had found me in a water jar in an abandoned farmhouse, a girl who had turned from something else—for the fox, a broken pale thing; for the snake, a miracle. "We thought you'd be frightened by the Mirror Wastes," Everett said. "So we said it was a palace. We didn't know you'd wake up human."
"But you knew I wasn't supposed to be human?" I asked the snake. He flicked his tongue, red and bright as a splinter of sunrise.
"Your body did not have a pulse when we found you," Eli said. "Stone, then warm. Strange. You woke like a story."
They told me the Mirror Wastes had a strange time—what was hundredfold in the Wastes might be but a day out there. Everett said he was a black fox from a mountain called Qinghu, that his kind were big and feared, and that once an old war had burned his family out. He spoke of being cast out, and I saw in him that stubborn tenderness that had first convinced me to stay.
I accepted them because I could not quite judge anything else. But I had a secret. A quiet, poisonous thing had been eating at me since the day I woke.
A small gray bruise had appeared on my belly. At first it was a dot like a birthmark. Then it spread. My breaths sometimes felt thinner, and one night I discovered that my chest made no sound at all when I listened for a heartbeat. I had been walking with no pulse, a clock with the hands glued.
I did not tell them. Everett noticed things, like how I moved to the edge of the bed when foxes curled, like how he flinched when I reached for his tail. But he did not know. Eli suspected, because snakes are clever in ways foxes are not. Eli watched me like a scholar with a petri dish, curious and always a fraction too blunt.
Eli had once been human, he said, who came from the Shu range and practiced in the mountain monasteries. Everett had been banished for a color of fur. They had been alone in the Mirror Wastes for two centuries, guarding a secret: a coffin disguised as a house. Inside and beneath it, pathways curled like roots into the world beyond. The fox said their kind had used the stone houses as shelter. "The eaves look like tails," Everett said childishly proud, "like we're supposed to be there."
It was when I walked with them to the place where trees grew like a roof that I realized there was a village—stone roofs curling like fox tails, small stone houses clinging to roots. There were bones in the soil and a half-buried skull snagged at my fingers when I dug. I pulled it free and the skull was not human; it had the teeth and shape of a fox. The villagers had not left. They had tried to walk out and never returned.
We pried open a stone coffin and found steps down, dark and wet. "Maybe it's a road out," I murmured.
Eli said, "No. It is a trap. They were tricked."
Eli told us—some things are better told in silence and some things are told in a rush—that the Mirror Wastes had been a hole in the world where foxes hid after a terrible thing, where a being came hunting, called by the old survivors "the Wind Man," because he moved with the wind and left nothing but bones. The foxes thought if they kept a coffin to mark the hole and the last one stayed to draw it shut, they could escape. One by one they went, following an illusion of sunlight, stepping onto that stair, and never returning. The graves had only swallowed them deeper into something else.
"Dead people there aren't all gone," Eli said, which sounded like a fact and a curse.
We should have left then. We should have forged a route that was not the trap the foxes had used. Instead, we studied the stone steps. Perhaps a living thing could go down and come up again. Perhaps the trick could be cheated. Everett, always bright with ingenuous hope, wanted to try—he wanted to prove that the world could be cheated with enough heart.
We did not know there were eyes watching us—shadowed ones that fed on fear and took the sound of children crying as sweetness. Towns beyond the Mirror Wastes had complaints: a widow hearing invisible children; a woman hearing whispers from her door, then waking to silence and a missing neighbor. At first the village in the human world called these the work of pests, but over two months more houses emptied, then someone drowned at the river near the market, then more vanished. People said it was superstition. People always say that.
At dusk, in a small town called Dazhou, we were taken in by a healer named Giovanni Clement and his bright, stubborn ward, Joanna Chan. Joanna was—at least she claimed to be—a child not yet old enough to be worn with sorrow. She chattered and scolded and ran with the nervous energy of someone not yet broken. She called me "sister" when she heard how Everett and Eli pretended to be my brothers for cover. They did that; they made me a tale that would fit human eyes.
We were safe for a time. I recovered from the worst of whatever infection had been in the Mirror Wastes. Eli, the scholar-snake, muttered about a thing men in towns whispered of—"rebirth charcoal"—a burned wood used in certain rites and whispered to bring back the nearly-dead. He said it was a folk remnant of something the ancients used; he said likely nonsense. And still he kept looking at my bruise.
"It moves faster now," he said, the night we lay under the open eaves. "Whatever that mark is, it is spreading. Isabela, you have less time than you think."
"How much?" I asked.
"Not three years, I'm sorry. Not long." He looked at the bruise where it had grown to the size of a palm. His red eyes went soft when he looked at me. "We will find a healer."
Everett, meanwhile, had fallen into the comfortable, clumsy habit of being tender. He cooked fish badly—threw whole trout at my face one morning; I laughed until I cried and later we were both in the stream playing like children. He called me "Isabela" with a kind of wonder that made the bruised place inside me ache less. He was so astonishingly honest that I would sometimes forget the lies he'd told. It was easier not to pull at the threads.
The town, though, watched its own shadows. Joanna told us of an oddness: people hearing a child's cry that wasn't there. People moving away. Giovanni spoke in a low voice and refused to let Joanna wander after dusk. "Seven days will mark the month," he said. "Be careful. The season is restless."
"What's restless?" Everett asked, naively.
"A thing that takes the living and turns them into echoes," Giovanni said, not unkindly. "Sometimes houses keep their shapes like masks, but the people vanish."
We were too new to grief to see the pattern until that night in Joanna's small room when she disappeared like a candle sucked quiet. There was a smell—a rotting, sharp smell—and then she was gone, a shadow at the eaves, a child's crying that turned razor-loud. A black thing hung at the roof, like oil spilled and made alive. It pulled, and Joanna dangled, tiny and pale, while her mouth made a noise I will not write in polite ears.
"Eli!" I screamed. "Get it off her!"
Eli moved first, his body a line of whipcord, coiling, hissing ancient charms. Everett grabbed a rope and tried to pull Joanna down. The shadow resisted like a living hunger. I ran and put my hands under Joanna's legs. She was no heavier than a child but lighter than air, one moment almost human, the next an empty shell. The darkness drank at her like smoke takes flame.
"Eli, cut it," I said. He did. He cleaved light with a conjured strip that was more heat than steel, but the thing merely bound and reknitted. Eels of darkness responded to blades of light. Everett screamed and I felt every scream through the ground.
Joanna's laughter, at one instant miraculously clear, said, "Go on a little farther—there's a world, see it?" and then the child's face sagged and she lost all warmth.
"Eli!" Everett bawled. "Don't let her go!"
He flung himself and slid; the rope cut into his palms. The black thing tightened. It moved like a current, and for a breadth of time it seemed the tide would take everything.
I had something I had not meant to give. I had thought my blood useless as a stone; instead, when I bit the skin at my arm and let it drip warm into the darkness, the shadow hissed and shrank a hair. The wound might have seemed small, but my blood had pulled at the thing like a tinderbox. It recoiled and Joanna fell limp into Everett's arms, a wet, sobbing child. The black thing burned like a ghost with damped wings. It howled and slid into the eaves, like smoke but sweeter in its sound. It left a little dark cinder at the beam and then nothing.
We revived Joanna. She coughed and coughed until the sound was only human. Giovanni came with his potions and scolded us for taking a child's life in our hands, but he did not scold meaningfully because Joanna clung to Everett's shirt and I held her by the hand and said things that meant little but felt like prayers.
Everett, however, changed in that night. He no longer was only clumsy joy. The fox who had once been baffled by human shoes had a grief in him so deep his face looked like carved stone. I had bled to stop a thing. My blood had warmth. That had a cost. I felt tired for many days, as if the warmth had been borrowed and the bill would come due.
The town heard about the vanishings and the shadow at the eaves. People whispered of an 'old wind' or a man at the river, a stranger in the market who sold charms. Gossip moves like wind; rumor grows legs. The truth is a murk we could not yet clear. But townspeople are more than rumor—they are witnesses—and in the end they gave me the chance to hold someone to account.
There was a man in the market who said many things: a peddler who wore charms and called himself a pilgrim, but in his wake he left houses emptied and children in nightmares. He had an easy smile and teeth not white but like stones rinsed in river mud. He had been seen at the places where people disappeared. Giovanni's network of patients and Joanna's streetwise friends named him: Cabot Daley.
We could have tried to drown Cabot quietly. Everett, who still had the fox's wariness, wanted to. Eli, quieter, thought of rites and deceptions. I wanted the town to know, because if he was what he was, he was not just a thief but a predator, and predators feed most dangerously when no one points.
We set a trap. The market at noon is a valley of witnesses. Cabot came with his stale grin, all flowery talk and hands that smelled of old oil. "Fresh charms today, ladies and gents," he whispered, and a woman who had once heard children's crying stopped in her stall and watched with a white face.
"Don't you dare," Giovanni hissed when he saw Cabot. "Stay back. Do not move."
Cabot bowed like a seasoned actor and told a story about how he had visited the “old river.” He breathed a story so sweet it made the bread seller wipe crumbs from his hands. When the bread seller turned, he was missing. A hush fell. Cabot's smile thinned into something brittle.
"Why would you come here?" I asked him quietly, voice barely a thread. The market din fell like a curtain.
He tilted his head. "Why shouldn't I? I am a merchant of luck." He laughed and it sounded like tin. "I give, therefore I live."
"You're a liar," said Everett, voice low.
Cabot gave an exaggerated regret. "Many call me such things. None have proof. Proof is a nasty business."
Proof is what market places give, because market places also give witnesses. A child came forward with torn sleeves and a voice like a bell. "He touched me at the river," the child said. Another woman raised a mug; she had been near the river and saw the shape of Cabot's raft. Giovanni's old patient, who'd heard the child crying in his doorway, came forward and said the pilgrim had bartered charms for silence. The crowd grew like a tide.
We took Cabot to the square. The market emptied onto cobbles and people—wives, bakers, clerks, a priest in a plain cassock—brought their stories like stones. "He sang to my door," said a weaver. "He offered me a comb for my girl's hair and then my girl got sick and never slept the same," said another. The witnesses became a wall.
Cabot's smile thinned until it was a knife's edge. He laughed. "You've made a circus," he sneered. "You are simple folk—small, hungry, bitter. You want a monster to name."
A child screamed and pointed at him. "You took my brother!" she wailed. The air sharpened like steel.
I had to make a choice. Walk away and hope men would rise against him later, or force a showing. The Mirror Wastes taught me that darkness works best unexposed. So I moved into the square's center and said, loud enough for the roofs to hear, "He is not only a thief. He makes shadows to eat. I saw it. He trades breath for coin."
A hush fell. Cabot's face contorted. "Who are you to speak?" he demanded. "A thief's beard, a liar-princess. You are no judge."
"Then let him show his proof or admit the crime," Giovanni said. "If you have any soul, Cabot Daley, speak."
Cabot laughed, and the sound ate like moths. "Proof," he said, "is a performance. Watch." He brought out an object wrapped in oilcloth—a little whorl of charcoal, a shrine bead. He burned it. The smell was sweet and maddening; the same tang I had smelled at the eaves. Someone gasped. He wove a tale that made the people sway like reeds.
He called on a demon, he said. He called on the old appetite of the wind, something lost and hungry. He promised the square's poor that he could ease grief. Women wept. Men fumbled for coins.
"Look what you do," said Giovanni. "You trade people's grief for power."
Cabot only smiled. He turned toward me like a snake and said, soft and oily: "What do you know of hunger? You are a courtesan of a shadow. What bargain have you made, Isabela Hawkins?"
The crowd's attention snapped to me. My face burned. I could have denied any bargain. Instead, I held out my hands.
"This man lures the desperate," I said, "and something follows him. You will know him by the hunger, the child's cry. He leaves something in the rafters. It feeds until the house is empty. He calls it trade. He calls it mercy. He calls it a chance to forget their loss. But he steals the living."
Cabot's grin went brittle. "Prove it," he said, and the people wanted proof.
That is when the punishment scene began. The square had become a courtroom of the whole town—women clutched children, the miller stood with his smudged sleeves, the priest had come with an iron cross, and Giovanni pressed a tired hand to my shoulder. I asked the crowd to stand back. I went to the house where the child's screams had been crude weeks ago—an empty, shuttered place whose lintel reeked faintly of the same smoke. Cabot followed, flanked by not a single friend.
I pushed the door. The rafters sighed. Everyone watched. I looked Cabot in the eye and said, "You will undo whatever you have left."
He laughed, but it was only a laugh now. Then he did something very stupid: he insisted on demonstration and, in his hunger to be believed and to show his power, he took the little burnt charm he always carried and started to chant. The people in the square crowded in. Even the priest had come to see. The market became a ring.
As the charm blackened, dust fell from the rafters and a thin curling thing—like a strip of smoked cloth—moved. The house re-echoed with a child's crying. Cabot's voice wove tighter, and the thing, hungry, reached down like winter.
At that moment, I stepped forward. I could feel my blood moving in me like a hidden river. I bared my wrist. "Stop!" I cried. "No more."
"Eli!" Everett whispered. Eli's tongue flicked as if tasting fear. Cabot's chanting grew thin. The creature rose in a shape of swirling soot and sadness. But the crowd watched—mothers, fathers, the old who had been robbed of their children. The creature latched toward the light, toward the warmth of people's faces. I thought of those black fox skulls under the Mirror Wastes and how burial meant a theft in another world.
"I will end this," I said.
I bit down hard and let blood fall to the pavement. It was a small thing but warm and alive. The creature hit the droplet like a moth to flame. It shrieked—not loud like sound but a crack across the air—and recoiled. Cabot's chanting faltered. "What—" he began. Giovanni stepped in with a bowl of chalk and salt. The priest bought out a string of prayers. The crowd began to chant, not for a show but for accusation: "You lie. You feed on our sleep. You will stop."
Cabot's bravado crumbled under the weight of the town's attention. He shrank as if the very eyes of the market were a steam that would cook him. His face went through phases: cool composure, then real fear, then the small animal bargaining stage. He said, "I never meant— I can help you! I can make a charm for your child—"
"Shut up," the miller spat. "You made us afraid. You took our women and men in whisper and trick. Now you will see your name at the rope—not by our hands but by your own confession."
The priest and Giovanni forced Cabot into the center square. He had no knife when he started; as he babbled apologies a group of women, once victims of the whispering, stepped forward. They pulled away his charm-wrapped cloth and showed the old, blackened fragments. "He called it 'exchange'," one of them said, "but we saw the shadows in the rafters. We were fools. We believed him. We fed his greed."
Cabot's bravado melted into pleading. "Please," he said. "I was hungry. I offered gratitude to the wind. I thought I could appease it, barter it. I did not mean—"
"Then confess what you did," said Giovanni, voice steady. "Liar, stand and tell the town. Tell them the child's name. Tell them where you took them. Tell them what you fed the wind."
Cabot's face collapsed into all the faces of a coward. He named those that he could, and as he named them the townspeople's faces contorted through stages: anger, then horror, then the common hardening into terrible justice. The market filled with low, broken cries. Joanna's mother—who had never known where her child went—grabbed Cabot's collar and spat in his face. "You took my boy's sleep," she said. "You took him and gave us black nights."
Cabot tried to beg, yet the law of the square is a different law: witness and shame. People made him stand on a small rising platform and list what he did. They stripped off his oilcloth cloak. When he stammered excuses, a chorus of small, clear voices read out their losses. The town had no formal court to drag him before; the people had themselves. They demanded penance in sight of everyone. Cabot was made to walk the market with a rope tied to his ankles, the children throwing handfuls of flour onto his back like snow. He was paraded like a beast he had been, stripped of the easy rhetoric that had once made it safe for him to move, and all the small cruelty he had sown returned to him, multiplied.
This is the part no thief expects: the crowd's retribution is not swift legal fairness but the slow, social undoing. People hissed and spat, and his name stuck to him as tar. He wheedled, "I can heal them! I can reverse it!" The priest pierced him with a single question: "Where did you learn to do these trades?" He turned and said the name of a ruined temple outside the city and of men who sell the wind in jars.
Then the final humiliation: they made Cabot sit before the market well and pour his black charm into the water. "You have built of our grief a favor," said Giovanni. "Now we will show you what our own hands can do."
He took the charred remnant and broke it into splinters, and the crowd hurled the pieces into the flames Giovanni fed. The charred fragments flared like angry moths and snapped. The market watched in silence as Cabot's face burned with the reflected fire, but the sacrifice was not simply to burn his lies. He was taken to the edge of the river where those missing had been seen, and forced to carry water for the kin left living. People spat watery contempt and cast herbs Giovanni offered into the current. They bound Cabot with cords not to hang him but so that he might carry the living's burdens—his public humiliation in exchange for communal healing.
He tried to bargain for life. People recorded his words and his pleas. The market, now a still court, had done what law could not: it had shown him how it felt to be watched with a thousand eyes, each eye a witness. He collapsed into tears that smelled of old oil and river rot. The children who had once shrieked now took the rope from his wrists and tied it into a coil on his neck, saying, "We will remember."
Cabot's face, with his last pride stripped away, collapsed through the stages the rules predicted: smugness, shrinking, panic, pleading. No soldier came to haul him away. The town had no jail. Instead they bound him to serve: he had to stand in the center square every market day and tell the story of what he'd done; he had to walk to each house and name the missing until no one would buy his charms again. The worst punishment in that place was being made utterly public, every lie unmasked, every hand put in a bowl of water to check for truth. His appeals for mercy became an offering for the townsfolk's safety.
As the weeks passed, the shadow that followed him seemed to shrink. Cabot's charm stove up in the market fires; his name became a warning, and the strange cold that had seeped into people's nights lightened. People came and patted Giovanni, then came and blessed me, and some touched Everett's sleeve with gratitude. The story of the market spread like a quick flame: "The peddler is punished." They would tell it in kitchens and by wells, and every telling unstitched a little of the shadow's thread.
We left Dazhou a month later.
"Why did you show them the city?" Eli asked me as we walked—his voice was a question that also felt like sorrow.
"Because shadows grow in darkness," I said. "Because people can do heavy things if someone points the way. Because I wanted them to see."
Everett squeezed my hand. "You were brave," he said. "You bled for us."
"I bled because I was selfish," I snapped back. "I didn't want to lose you."
He laughed softly. "Then don't."
We followed paths and bridges, mountain tracks and river bends. Everett taught me how to find edible roots and cover a wound with moss. Eli found a monk in the high monastery who taught us a slow chant to keep the dark off. Giovanni had pushed us to an escape route but said, "You are not cured." He had not seen the score write itself in the marrow of my ribs.
I kept my secret—how my blood could warm and wake—because secrets are sometimes refuge. But the bruise on my belly spread and I knew it had less than before. We had taken down a predator. The wind still prowled, but the market had learned to watch. The Mirror Wastes still kept its coffin houses for their bones and stories. The black foxes were dead, a scattered dust of bones and stone. We had pushed Cabot away from his appetite and into the public shame that made him weaker than a knife.
One evening, by a river under moonlight, Everett curled by my side and said in a voice only I heard, "Have you ever pictured yourself before all this? Who were you before the water jar?"
I thought of fog and voices and a man with a soft laugh telling me "you look well when you smile." Flashes of a memory, a face with steady eyes—someone else. I thought, "I do not know."
He took my face in his hands. "Then we will teach you new memories," he said simply. "We will be foolish and tender. We will make the rest worth a pulse."
I looked at him and for one small strange moment felt life press back into me like a tide. The bruise did not vanish. It pressed like a slow rumor beneath the skin. But in Everett's eyes the world shone like glass newly polished.
The Mirror Wastes remained a hole in the world, but there were roads now to the towns that burned char with prayers. There were punishments where before there had been only hidden bargains. Cabot was a lesson—one that made the market kinder because men had seen themselves reflected in his shame.
That night we slept with lamps low and hands clasped. I let myself be Isabela who could laugh at fish bones and be foolish under the stars. I let Everett whisper silly stories and promise to search every mountain. I let Eli murmur remedies.
The bruise grew, inexorable. It was a truth I could not bribe away. But there were other truths now: that my blood could coax life, that a town could force a name to shame and make a predator bow. I had been a stone and somehow found warmth and we all learned what to do with it.
And when dawn broke again over plain and river and a new market chattered like birds, I turned my face to the sun and said, "If this is my hour, let my hour be warm."
The End
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