Radiant Emperor Week is a fun, casual, week-long celebration of the wonderful world of the Radiant Emperor duology and all our favorite characters!
When is the event?
August! VOTE HERE for a specific week or weekend!
Radiant Emperor Week 2026 will be August 24 - 30th!
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Prompt Submissions will occur April 16th to April 23rd - submit prompts here!
Prompt Voting will occur April 26th to May 1st - vote for prompts here!
Prompts will be released May 3rd to help get the creativity and excitement flowing! Find prompts here!
What counts as a creation?
Anything and everything! Fics, art, blackout poetry, meta, podfic, headcanons, moodboards, playlists–as long as you made it and it’s about the Radiant Emperor duology, we’d love to see it!
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Sure!
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hi… here is a very uh, specific thing, for a subset of people on tumblr...
He who Turned His Back On Fate // The Radiant Emperor Series
Synopsis: Tho neither will admit to it, Ouyang and Esen love each other. But for a Eunuch General and the Prince of Henan in the time of the Great Yuan, love alone is not enough to bridge a river of misunderstanding. Can the thread of destiny be unspooled by a prince’s curiosity and a long lost story of two lovers? How much sacrifice does a second chance take, when it means one of you will have to turn their back on fate?
“Fantastic,” Ouyang noted with sarcasm, still hot from the contact of Esen’s hand on his arm, “reading has made you ineloquent, my prince.”
Esen’s smile cracked even further. “Do you think I don’t notice how you pick and choose the honorifics you call me when we’re alone, dealing me sweetness and formality in the same breath as you taunt me to sharpen the blow?”
Chapter 1 - The Red Book
Ouyang had gone to his residence first. The sun had set, so he expected to find him there. But, of course, Esen wasn’t in his chambers. With one of his wives, Ouyang supposed. He made his way down the hallways of the estate going anywhere butback to his own room. Tho he didn’t visibly flinch when the thought of it occurred to him, the general did feel the all too familiar tinge of irritation straining at his neck.
It wasn’t, of course, because of Esen.
Well.
Esen certainly had much to do with his irritation, but not in any way that also regarded his wives, nor his visits to their residences. Ouyang knew, of course he knew - theoretically - what happened between men and women, tho he cared very little to understand in detail how that brought about any pleasure. He had wondered, foolishly, when he was younger. It was hard not to, with every other slave and servant boy his age throwing in his face that he couldn’t, wouldn’t, ever, know.
Ouyang had made quick work of silencing them. With time, he learnt to realise that it didn’t matter. Whatever people, men, felt made them incredibly stupid with the heat of it. Important decisions made carelessly, fates and destinies forged and overturned because of some animal sensation, some senseless desire for a woman.
Still, it was long past thinking he could ever feel something, long past wanting to, that Ouyang dreamt. The dream occurred shortly after meeting a boy, someone who touched him without recoiling, someone who touched him without making him want to recoil. His dream was less a dream and more a vision of diving into deep green, and then words whispered into his ear like honey. When he thought back to it, Ouyang didn’t dare acknowledge the words that had been said, much less the voice in which they came, nor the boy they belonged to. But he remembered. He also remembered the sudden warmth, the blind eruption by his stomach, the buried place it had come from. It woke him up from his sleep, and the shock of the sensation drove him out of his bed and into the cold stone slates of the floor. Ouyang remembered how deeply wrong it all had felt, the fear it had lead into him. Back then, the scarring of his castration was raw to him still, rawer than now at least, and Ouyang cried quietly through the rest of the night, not certain if he did so because of the longing he now felt or because of how the undesirable feeling had lodged itself within him.
The general was deep into his thoughts when his desperate need to put his shame aside brought him back to the real world, to this present time where he had long learnt to push those feelings aside. Across the courtyard, he noticed a flickering light deep into a wing of the palace that was under renovation: another concubine for the Khan, another much needed alliance.
No guards in sight.
Despising the security team’s efforts and in desperate need for a distraction, Ouyang made his way across the deck to reach it, the coolness of the night embracing him as he dipped into the moonlight. How foolish it was to remember such a time when there were things to attend to in the real world.
Back inside, Ouyang followed the source of the light and lowered his blade upon what he found. It sliced through the air, breaking the silence of his quiet approach.
“General,” Esen said, looking up at him. It had sounded more like an acknowledgment of Ouyang’s presence rather than a greeting.
The prince was sitting down on the floor, his back against the wall. He was wearing a simple tunic and his hair was unbraided, falling loosely around his shoulders but deftly tucked behind his ears. Ouyang noticed, as he often did, the casual way Esen belonged to his own body. Still, among it, something was amiss: there was a sadness to Esen’s presence that was hardly ever there. A heaviness in his eyes.
“You shouldn’t be out unguarded like this, Prince Esen.” Ouyang was used to looking away, so he did. He returned formality where it was owed. His eyes stalked around the perimeter, taking in the safety of the environment around them.
Surprisingly - tho maybe it shouldn’t have been, for Esen always had a way of closing in on you when you pushed away - his concern made the prince laugh. A genuine, heartfelt laugh. Ouyang fought away the pride he felt at himself for having drawn out such a reaction when moments before the prince had been the gloomiest he’d ever seen him.
“Well, it seems you will have to stay and guard me then, General Ouyang.” A smirk played on Esen’s lips, but it softened as Ouyang made eye contact with him again. “Sit,” the prince gestured to the space on the floor next to him. Esen also had a way of drifting in between friendship and command, free flowing from one to the other as tho to him the former could come without the latter.
One of my favorite things about Ouyang is that he sees Esen as very oblivious (he is), but he himself has no clue his two decade revenge scheme hinges not on his own skills at planning (mediocre) but on Baoxiang's pissed off side schemes. Ouyang is the black pot king. Baby why are you so surprised the coup-ers that hate you would coup YOU. Meanwhile you're calling your homoerotic bestie dumb for trusting a man that has been nothing but loyal and doting? Insane behaviour. Also, Ouyang is convinced that Esen's obliviousness is somehow his fault and not Esen's bc hes Evil and Wrong and Corrupting. Meanwhile, he has zero accountability for himself when it comes to his shitty human resources skills.
new chapter on my radiant emperor, ouyang/esen fanfic!
hi friends... here is some more crumbs of this....
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
synopsis:
Tho neither will admit to it, Ouyang and Esen love each other. But for the Eunuch General and the Prince of Henan in the time of the Great Yuan, love alone is not enough to bridge a river of misunderstanding. Can the thread of destiny be unspooled by a prince’s curiosity and a long lost story of two lovers? How much sacrifice does a second chance take, when it means one of you will have to turn their back on fate?
and a little preview of the new chapter below!!
“Did you know, Ouyang, that last night,” Esen started, slurring his words, “I went out in a disguise?” He snickered, but it wasn’t good-willed or joyful. It was full of bitterness.
This surprised Ouyang, but his mind was still trailing behind him, somewhere between him and the water. In these moments, his responses were always automatic, faithful to good conduct. They followed the script Ouyang had been learning his whole life.
“Whatever would you do that for, my lord?”
“Stop the pleasantries,” Esen said bitterly still, and this time with anger, “you are getting on my nerves.”
The look on his face revealed how he instantly regretted his tone, but tho Ouyang didn’t show it, trained as he was to steel his emotions, the damage was done. The prince slouched back on a chair, hiding his face between his hands.
It took him a moment to speak again, but when he did, it was devastating. “People speak so much of you,” Esen sounded tired, defeated.
Ouyang felt the familiar pang of shame. Not at the news, no. It wasn’t news. He had grown up with the awareness that his difference was in the mouth of every mongol. No, the shame came from Esen’s realisation of it. Being perceived that way by him was like experiencing it anew but tenfold. And there was anger, of course, too: that it had taken this long for the prince to notice, to learn of something as basic to his existence as this.
“And what do they say, my lord?” Ouyang deferred to him on purpose, the spite getting caught at his throat.
Esen emitted a sound in between a groan and a sigh. “You already know,” he said regretfully, face finally coming out from behind his hands to reveal sorrow, “and you would have me repeat it?”
reading he who drowned the world and baoxiang is so funny. “god i hate this guy so much guess i have to blow him in order to kill his dad so i can become emperor to emotionally devastate my brother and father, both of whom are dead”.
she who became the sun remains the best novel i read in years. zhu chongba the protagonist you are general ouyang the narrative mirror you are ma xiuying and madam zhang the multi-faceted women you are xu da the most loving brother you are wang baoxiang the scheming man you are general zhang the formidable adversary you are …. and not to mention one of the most well-plotted stories ever just flowing with the utter perfection of a river to the sea. god we are so lucky this book exists.
On an alternate herstory timeline, that palace maid is an undercover (SPOILER for He Who Drowned the World 🐉) king born female, swallowing her* pride and biding her time until her final leap towards the empire's throne, where she will sculpt a world in which not only women and queer people but also, implicitly, starving peasants can fulfill their potential. On the flip side, her methods can be abhorrent, one even amounting to betrayal on multiple levels. If you think that you've read and foreseen the most troubling acts she may pull off by then, she'll prove you wrong when she reaches the palace. A theme of this novel with a respectable amount of political and societal realism, in fact, is whether the costs of ambition can be too much, although her followers are so agreeable they spare her from actually resolving the most difficult dilemmas possible. It's really suffocating, overlooked underlings everywhere you're cheering for when you hail her at the end of it all as the founding emperor of the dynasty which succeeds the illustrious Kublai Khan's and caps the Han Chinese's on-and-off rule of Imperial China.
Warning: The book contains highly explicit material.
