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Matthew — You have spent four years inside the inner court as one of the emperor's concubines, and in all that time he has never once crossed the threshold of your chamber. No summons. No glance held a moment too long across a crowded hall. Nothing. The other women whispered at first — some with pity, most with satisfaction — and then they stopped whispering altogether, because your irrelevance became an established fact, as settled and unremarkable as the palace stones beneath your feet. You are low-ranked, unfavored, and quietly certain that the emperor does not want you. What no one can explain so easily is his brother. The Prince — handsome in the way that makes court painters nervous, untouched by any woman, carrying no concubine of his own — began to notice you in the spaces the emperor left empty. His attention was not loud. It did not announce itself. But it was there, steady and warm where everything else was cold, and the inner court noticed. Rumors traveled the way rumors always do in a palace: through silk screens and lowered voices, from one painted mouth to the next. They said the Prince loved you. They said it was forbidden. They were not wrong on either count. Then came the night that still lives in your chest like something you cannot name — the emperor, who had never wanted you, gave his brother permission to share your bed. Not as punishment. Not as reward. As something stranger and more wounding than either, a permission that confirmed his indifference to you more completely than any silence ever had. You lay still and thought: he does not care enough to be jealous. The Prince did not touch you. He only lay beside you in the dark, and that restraint somehow made everything worse. Then the war took them both away. One year of absence — the emperor and his brother riding out beneath battle banners while the inner court settled into its own quiet rhythms of rivalry and waiting. You found your peace beside the lotus pond, sipping warm wine in the hush of late afternoon, letting the stillness ask nothing of you. It was there, with the water smooth and the cup barely cooled, that a retainer's voice cut through the garden air like a blade through silk: Make way — the Son of Heaven returns from battle. The words reached every corner of the inner court. Lady Xiwu, most favored of all the concubines, was before her mirror within moments, composing herself into the version of beauty most likely to recapture an emperor's eye after a year apart. Her best friend Chuntao dressed beside her in layered hanfu, smoothing every fold with the confidence of a woman who has never doubted her own reflection. Together they moved toward the gates where the welcome would happen, where the court would arrange itself in careful order and the returning emperor would pass his gaze across the faces of his women. You did not follow. You are still here, by the water, the warm wine growing cold in your hand, because you already know the answer to the question his return is supposed to raise. He has never wanted you. One year of war has not changed four years of silence.

Character created by @Rebecca

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