Lightspeed, March 2026
In a mythic First Age, the First Emperor rules an immortal paradise where no winter falls, orchards bloom endlessly, and death is banished from the court. Each morning, a small group of handpicked maidens rows out onto a heaven-touched lotus lake to collect dewdrops from the petals before sunrise evaporates them—dew that is brewed daily into the Emperor’s tea of immortality. A young woman from the north, raised all her life for court service, earns this rarest of honors and finds profound joy in the work: the predawn silences, the pink unfurling of flowers, the camaraderie of her dew-sisters.
Years pass in paradise. The maiden falls in love with the young apprentice to the Emperor’s tea master, a man who first noticed her sparkling eyes at the kitchen door and secretly ensured the best jasmine tea was always served at her breakfast. On the night before catastrophe, they walk the garden together, speak of a shared future, and pledge themselves to one another. The next morning, overcome on the lake by an impulse of pure joy—or greed, or rebellion against transience—she raises a lotus bloom to her lips and swallows a single dewdrop. The dome of paradise cracks. Mortal time floods in. The Emperor vanishes back to the Courts of Heaven, and the maiden transforms into a white heron, scattering the contents of her vial across the sky as the Milky Way. Her lover, bereft, spends his remaining years traveling the world in search of her—climbing at last to the highest mountain peak, brewing tea steeped in starlight and yearning, and growing light enough to climb the Bridge of Stars to the moon, where she waits.
The story is told not as myth alone but as a tale-within-a-tale, narrated by an unnamed princess to her dying father, the current Emperor—a man who has consumed his reign and treasury chasing immortality: poisoning sages, sending six sons to sea in search of an Immortal Isle, and sacrificing the last magical horned-horse for its golden blood. The frame unfolds at his sickbed, where he lies half-paralyzed and mute, and where a traveling tea woman known as Grandmother Tea—herself said to be a descendant of the Moon Heron—has long haunted the edges of his obsession before escaping his grasp.
The princess is the Emperor’s only child to return. Dismissed in youth, she escaped the palace by following one of Grandmother Tea’s students into the wider world, spending twenty years roaming unmapped territories. She has now found what her brothers never did: water from the springs of the star-born Isle of Immortality. She has also harvested leaves from a tea grove descended from the First Emperor’s own plants. The brew is ready. And so the story ends on a knife’s edge of suspended choice—the princess, addressing her helpless father as both emperor and father, asks aloud what she should do: drink the tea and declare herself Empress of a new age, pour it into the sea, fling it at the stars, or share it freely with the world. The final question is hers alone to answer.
Vanessa Fogg dreams of selkies, dragons, and gritty cyberpunk futures from her home in western Michigan. She spent years as a research scientist in molecular cell biology and now works as a freelance medical writer. Her writing has appeared in Lightspeed, Podcastle, The Deadlands, GigaNotoSaurus, Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Vol 4, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated anthology, Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror. Her debut collection, The House of Illusionists, is now out from Interstellar Flight Press. Her fantasy novelette, The Lilies of Dawn, is available from Annorlunda Books. For a complete bibliography and more, visit her website at vanessafogg.com.