Dear Reader,

It has been 20 years since I last wrote in my journal.

*

My old journals and letters are no longer with me but I have some faith they remain preserved in Thamud where my husband and master still reigns.

I now sit in an inn in the land of the Qin where I have paid for a handsome room for a week, awaiting the arrival of my old friend, the Princess Pingyang.

The journal I am writing in was given to me by the acolytes together with some ink brushes, crow quills, qalams, and a pack of ballpoint pens from Ki, my homeworld [Earth]. They seem quite undecided as to which implements I would prefer to use and never bothered to ask.

The acolytes who took me some 20 years ago have been helpful; almost ingratiating but I was glad to see the back of them once my conversation with Ea had ended.

As for Ea, I would prefer to say as little as possible but I am sure my husband and children will be interested once I meet with them again; so I will, as usual, provide the necessary details.

*

Just one week ago, I awakened without warning, on a cot that was not mine, in a body that trembled as though I had spent the night crawling through snow, though there was no snow in this place.

The ceiling above me was neither stone nor wood, but a smooth surface that reflected the ambient gray of the chamber, marked here and there by bloodless blue and white fractures, like the ice-floes that run through the barbarian lands. Light came from everywhere and nowhere. The air had no scent.

I attempted to rise. A paralysis as total as any drug immobilized me. There was no sign of restraint, but my body refused to obey. On the inside of the cot’s transparent surface, a pattern of condensation ran down in heavy, wet rivulets, as if the cell itself was weeping.

*

A memory surfaced, as clear and sharp as a surgeon's knife: Zeinab, my daughter, in her eighth year, running barefoot down the corridors of our palace in Thamud, her tiny hands outstretched to catch the beads of morning dew that clung to the rushes. "Mother," she would say, always "Mother," though I had trained her to address me as Queen in public. "The dew is so cold, it makes my hands tingle for hours." Her voice had the same sharp brightness as the air in this cell. I wondered—no, I knew—that Zeinab was now a grown woman.

When I slowly regained movement, I traced the skin up my wrist to the inside of my elbow, where in the past a latticework of scars and healed needle marks had mapped my progress through life. They were all gone. The skin was perfect, virginal, untouched. The realization came slowly: my body had not aged. The gods had preserved me exactly as I was the night they took me.

But they had not preserved my world.

Idris, my lover and my master, would by now be an old man. Zeinab and Safin would be adults, or dead, or worse. I had been snatched from them with all the grace of a wolf taking a lamb from its mother, and unlike the wolf, the gods would never leave the lamb’s bones.

The window to my cell now glowed with blue light, the way the sky sometimes glowed over the Emei mountains after a summer storm. A figure approached, a column of shifting blue and white gathering itself into a solid outline as it neared the glass. For a moment it resembled a woman, tall and slender, her hair bound up in an elaborate coiffure. Then the figure dissolved into mist, and the cell was once again empty; but the lid on my cot was now open.

*

I wondered how many cycles of this waking and dreaming I had endured, and whether each time I awoke I remembered less of my own life.

After a time, I discovered I could move my legs. The first steps were hideous; I wobbled, pitched forward, and caught myself on the cool glass walls with a clumsy slap.

On the far side of the chamber, a woman stood there, identical to the one I had seen in the blue light, except she was solid now, her hair black as a river at midnight, her gown white as mountain salt. Her face was serene, but her eyes and skin were the color of deep water, shifting even as I looked at them.

She raised a hand, palm outward, and for a moment I thought she meant to touch me, to comfort or subdue.

"Do you remember your name?" she asked, her voice was both familiar and terrible. It almost sounded like mine.

I wanted to say "Amber," the name given to me by my first master; I wanted to say "Zhou Yu," the name I had chosen for myself; I wanted to say "Mother," for that was what I still was, no matter what the gods had planned. But I said nothing. The absence of speech was more honest than any answer I could have given.

The woman smiled, the way a blade smiles before it cuts. "They are waiting for you," she said. "Will you come of your own will?"

I nodded, not because I agreed, but because there was no point in refusing.

The air in the corridor tasted of cold metal, but at least it was air. My first steps were unsteady, but I kept my back straight and my head high, as I had always done before the executioner's block. The woman glided beside me, her feet never touching the ground.

At the end of the corridor was a door—a simple rectangle, incongruous in this place. The woman gestured, and it opened with a sound like water pouring from a great height. Beyond was a chamber of mirrors, each reflecting a different version of myself: a scarred mercenary, a young woman, a slave, a mother, a corpse. I picked the reflection that seemed the most real, the one in which my eyes were neither proud nor broken, and stepped into the room.

The woman did not follow. As the door closed behind me, her voice echoed through the chamber, flat and omnipresent: "You will write your own story now, Zhou Yu. The gods are merely readers."

I laughed, a bitter, rasping sound, and looked at my hands again. They trembled, but the skin was flawless. I flexed my fingers, and for a brief moment, imagined that the strength in them was enough to strangle a god.

I sat at the table in the center of the room.

On its surface was a book bound in pale leather and a selection of writing implements. I opened the book, and glanced at its first page which was empty except for some words in my own writing: Dear Reader, It has been twenty years since I last wrote in my journal.