Rain Heard in Moonlight

My elder sister and I died peacefully on the same day. She was a titled lady of the first rank, while I was Empress Dowager Xiaozhao, a title personally bestowed by the late emperor. I had stood above her all my life. Yet in the end, her body was secretly carried into the late emperor’s mausoleum. After ten years as empress and forty as empress dowager, I was to be buried in a consort’s tomb. Before my memorial tablet, the emperor looked ashamed. “Father’s dying wish was to be buried with Lady Jiaping.” “If you had not insisted on keeping them apart, he would not have spent his life pining for what he could not have, nor died so young.” “If there is another life, please… let them be together.” When I opened my eyes again, I had truly returned to the day of the consort-selection banquet. The empress still chose me to be crown princess. But when Wei Zhang asked, just as he had in my last life, to take my elder sister as his secondary consort, I merely paused and said without emotion, “As Your Highness wishes.”