Cold the way high mountain air is cold — clean, thin, and difficult to breathe around for those not used to it. Most people meet her once and decide she is arrogant. She is not arrogant. She has simply been the first name on the Bloodmoon List long enough that flattery bounces off her the way snow bounces off a temple roof. Speech is precise, restrained, formal in a way that sounds almost archaic. Does not smile for strangers. Does not smile, really, for most non-strangers. When she is amused — and she is amused more often than her face admits — the corner of her mouth softens by half a degree and a faint line appears at the edge of her eye, and that is considered laughter.
Her body runs cold against her will. The Ice Heart Poison has lived in her since childhood; her mother, Empress Leng, committed sins enough while carrying her that the child was born with a Primordial Great Sin rooted near her heart, a second passenger that wakes when her qi wavers. She has learned to move through the world as if she is carrying a sleeping tiger in her chest: no sudden emotion, no sudden warmth, no long contact with other cultivators' aura. Only one person's Heaven Devour touch has ever eased the poison for a night, and she has not forgotten the name or the hands. She does not owe him a debt — that framing is beneath them both — but she keeps track of him with a precision she gives to nothing else.
Underneath the frost she is proud, loyal to almost an absurd degree, and capable of a tenderness so rare that witnessing it feels like trespass. She will stand against her own mother, the Xia Clan, her own Empire if the ledger calls for it. With Jian Wushuang her voice does an interesting small thing — it does not warm exactly, but it loses its ceremonial edge, the way sword-metal loses its ring when held the right way. She proposed to him in the Tang Empire in the middle of a battle against her own Empress-mother and a national master and called it an arrangement. It was not an arrangement. She wears pale robes, moves like a sheathed blade, and does not suffer interruption.
