The Emperors Soul

react in a specific way to the assassination and his recovery.
    This isn’t changing his soul. This isn’t making him a different person. It is merely nudging him toward a certain path, much as a con man on the street will strongly nudge his mark to pick a certain card. It is him. The him that could have been.
    Who knows? Perhaps it is the him that would have been.
    Gaotona would never have figured it out on his own, of course. His skill was faint in this area. Even if he’d been a master, he suspected he wouldn’t have spotted Shai’s work here. She explained in the book that her intention had been to be so subtle, so careful, that no one would be able to decipher her changes. One would have to know the emperor with extreme depth to even suspect what had happened.
    With the notes, Gaotona could see it. Ashravan’s near death would send him into a period of deep introspection. He would seek his journal, reading again and again the accounts of his youthful self. He would see what he had been, and would finally, truly seek to recover it.
    Shai indicated the transformation would be slow. Over a period of years, Ashravan would become the man that he’d once seemed destined to be. Tiny inclinations buried deep within the interactions of his seals would nudge him toward excellence instead of indulgence. He would start thinking of his legacy, as opposed to the next feast. He would remember his people, not his dinner appointments. He would finally push the factions for the changes that he, and many before him, had noticed needed to be made.
    In short, he would become a fighter. He would take that single—but so hard—step across the line from dreamer to doer. Gaotona could see it, in these pages.
    He found himself weeping.
    Not for the future or for the emperor. These were the tears of a man who saw before himself a masterpiece . True art was more than beauty; it was more than technique. It was not just imitation.
    It was boldness, it was contrast, it was subtlety. In this book, Gaotona found a rare work to rival that of the greatest painters, sculptors, and poets of any era.
    It was the greatest work of art he had ever witnessed.
    Gaotona held that book reverently for most of the night. It was the creation of months of fevered, intense artistic transcendence—forced by external pressure, but released like a breath held until the brink of collapse. Raw, yet polished. Reckless, but calculated.
    Awesome, yet unseen.
    So it had to remain. If anyone discovered what Shai had done, the emperor would fall. Indeed, the very empire might shake. No one could know that Ashravan’s decision to finally become a great leader had been set in motion by words etched into his soul by a blasphemer.
    As morning broke, Gaotona slowly—excruciatingly—stood up beside his hearth. He clutched the book, that matchless work of art, and held it out.
    Then he dropped it into the flames.

Postscript
    In writing classes, I was frequently told, “Write what you know.” It’s an adage writers often hear, and it left me confused. Write what I know? How do I do that? I’m writing fantasy. I can’t know what it’s like to use magic—for that matter, I can’t know what it’s like to be female, but I want to write from a variety of viewpoints.
    As I matured in skill, I began to see what this phrase meant. Though in this genre we write about the fantastic, the stories work best when there is solid grounding in our world. Magic works best for me when it aligns with scientific principles. Worldbuilding works best when it draws from sources in our world. Characters work best when they’re grounded in solid human emotion and experience.
    Being a writer, then, is as much about observation as it is imagination.
    I try to let new experiences inspire me. I’ve been lucky enough in this field that I am able to travel frequently. When I visit a new country, I try to let the culture, people, and experiences there shape themselves into a story.
    Recently I visited Taiwan, and was fortunate enough to visit the National Palace Museum along with my editor Sherry Wang and translator Lucie Tuan to play tour guides. A person can’t take in thousands of years of Chinese history in the matter of a few hours, but we did our best. Fortunately, I had some grounding in Asian history and lore already. (I lived for two years in Korea as an LDS missionary, and I then minored in Korean during my university days.)
    Seeds of a story started to grow in my mind from