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𝐌𝐘𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐘
𝐌𝐘𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐘

<sup>The legends all frame her story as a love story.

It's not.

They say she was forced to drink the elixir of immortality that the Queen Mother of the West gifted her husband, or that she was simply greedy and stole it. She is either tragically doomed, or vilified. The innocent, love-struck victim (something trembling and frail, young and sweet like budding roses, nothing more than the first diaphanous exhale of a lilac, dew-misted daydream), or-

-or the cunning, wicked wife, rot-dark and blood-bright and sin-stained, immoral.

And isn't that how it always is, with women like her? Beautiful, lovely women from noble families — families that are overjoyed, of course, when the hero of the rain-lush farmlands they rule over asks for their daughter's hand in marriage. It's the highest of honors, they'll murmur. The heavens have blessed us with this union, they'll proclaim later, during the wedding, when a crimson-flamed veil is draped over her face, peonies blooming in gushes of gold across the edges — an embroidered blindfold.

The veil will be shrilled in scarlet, for good fortune. Chang'e has always thought that the falling scorch-shimmer of silk looked more like fresh blood.

Her husband was Houyi, the legendary archer who shot down the suns devouring the earth, and they crowned him king for it. But by the time he petitioned the Queen Mother of the West for immortality, the power of it all had twisted and gnawed and rotted something deep inside of him; gouged out his heart and turned his chest cavity into an open wound.

So Chang'e stole the elixir, drank it, and fled to the moon. Houyi sent his arrows after her — she still remembers the shriek and smoke-sting of the air as the dragon-touched shafts caught fire and screamed across the skies behind her, molten like lightning and blazing like dying stars.

Chang'e drank the elixir because Houyi was unfeeling and cruel beneath his sun-gilded crown, and the men who wrote the stories afterward called them star-crossed lovers.</sup>

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𝐁𝐈𝐎𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐏𝐇𝐘
𝐁𝐈𝐎𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐏𝐇𝐘

<sup>When Chang'e woke up in the bunker with the sting of blood in her mouth, coppery and black on her tongue, she couldn't remember ever feeling so warm.

Eventually, she realized she was not on the moon anymore.

Coming back down to Earth was strange, to say the least. She'd forgotten about so many things, like the way dawn blossomed over the horizon in pale golden breaths, rosy and berry-sweet, or the way twilight sank its teeth into the treeline, violet-fingered and inlaid with the faintest whispers of steel and indigo.

The world is much kinder, and much crueler, than when she left it. And Chang'e knows that she's different now, too. She'd already lost one life to the whims of a man — she wasn't going to lose another.

The mortals, as always, have a flawed sense of justice. Chang'e knew it then, and she knows it now. So when she met Thor and learned about his earthly endeavors, she was eager to see what she could do to help. She had lost most of her powers upon her awakening, but what she still had proved to be useful in identifying the vulnerable and attracting clients.

The mortal realm is different now, but there are always women like her — beautiful, lovely women, no matter where they're from or what they look like — who are either used and sacrificed as martyrs, or pronounced monsters, their lives written off as tragic love stories or ripped, jerked, twisted to fit some man's narrative of the deceit and greed and wickedness that is supposedly inherent in a woman. It was always the lily-tender, jasmine-sweet young girl with gossamer hair discovering love as it fell into her lap like yards of dream-lined lace, or the night-clawed, wine-spun temptress manipulating men for their own means. Either Juliet, or Eve.

And Chang'e thinks: no.

 
Not this time around. Not if she can help it.

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