Books. Reading. Writing.

It had been her life, her death, the written word. The spoken word was something much more foreign.

Shyness was insufficient to express how she behaved, however. She'd been silenced before she even learned to speak. She stuck to the shadows, her existence defined by the words and actions of others. It was easier that way. Easier that she should merely float. In so many years she may have spoken as many words.

It was why she'd been of such interest in the first place. Her father had fashioned her into an invisible servant who was only alive in so much as she should suit his whims.

She read about glorious ancient times. She read about an Emperor's Daughter raising an army to solidify the dynasty for centuries. She wondered how much of that glory was real, and how much manufactured. So bizarrely ethereal, these words seemed on the page. How much good news is really carefully groomed bad news? Good things inspire so much less than the bad. Good things bred contentment.

She'd seen men lose themselves, important men, to their contentment. They liked to blame women when that happened, but at least one or two were far more in love with their hobbies than their mistresses. They were too stupid to know this about themselves, of course, too cloyed and dull. Suffering abounds beyond their walls, so in their studies they while away their hours. At their desks, in their shops, kiln, forge, and bed are all the same. And ultimately all a palace was, and ever could be, was a place to warp the nature of suffering. A place of silent suffering pretending at luxury.

Why it was that she kept going was a mystery to her; thousands of tiny characters debated the subject with each other for years. But now her sloth and silence, her harshest sentence, were inverted. Her old blessing of nothingness was replaced with greater hunger.

Her strangest moment was seeing her twin seek safety successfully amid the final throes of a violent shift. She heard her older sister had died, but it passed right by at first. for such was inevitable. But seeing her twin for the first time since before her wedding, and certainly before her own dramatic life changes. It was incredibly strange, seeing a healthier reflection walking down the street. She'd been breathing, living longer. Two children, thicker limbs, a husband who seemed reasonably decent. She was radiant. It was a marvelous thing to behold what she should have been.

But that was a delusion. She should not be anything but the shadow she was. And that meant she could not keep seeing her sister. She could not witness her own blood, her own face, die. And she certainly could not find the words to explain why she never would, and why she had not aged in five years. Why she never could again. Why she said farewell for the last time as a walking murder to someone who she so desperately knew she wanted to see again, but should not ever be seen by.

Lifetimes later, reminiscing through the fog of years as she reviewed her extensive records, she chose her new name, Mingmei - "Radiant."

It was then she grasped what it meant to never truly weep again.