HOW TO LIVE AGAIN (girlxgirlxgirl)

One; The plum blossoms

"The tree that we planted, it still stands"
27

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⚠️ blood, death, weapons, swords, fighting, violence ⚠️

What happened?

It seemed like, for a moment, Fei completely forgot what happened.

Thyra's eyes lingering on her from the other side of the crowd, the memory is dull. Just for a second, she felt the assassins eyes move over to her as she was leaving, and she just had to meet the taller's gaze. Why?

Now that memory burns in her mind. Fei has no idea if Thyra let her go, or if she wanted her to stay. She left faster than the assassin could follow. But all of their recent arguments are making her head spin. Could it be so, that Thyra wanted her to go? They didn't argue just for fun after all, they didn't seem to get along during their last few days together. Traveling alone is taking a toll on her.

It's been two weeks.

Shocking, right?

It wouldn't have taken so long, but Fei doesn't know anything around here, so she ended up getting lost time and time again. She doesn't know which roads to take, which places to stay at, which villages and cities are near and which ones are not. She has no idea who to trust and who is what. But it's been two weeks, and she has finally arrived. As she trudges up the green hill, Fei can smell the familiar plum blossoms and camellia flowers from her childhood.

Everything reminds her of the past.

Together with her elder sister Meilin, they planted plum trees in one of the gardens. That was the day before the elder got married to her husband far away in the capital, the last day Fei wasn't the only one locked inside the mansions wooden walls. The tree grew very quickly. It blossomed into a heaven of pink and red in the spring, and then grew small plums later on. The fruits were not nearly as good as the flowers were beautiful, but the most important part of the tree were the memories. The pink blossoms always reminded Fei of Meilin.

She never saw Meilin after she got married. By horse, the distance between the capital and her home is a weeks constant travel. That's what she heard. And that's the only information Fei needed to calculate where her home is now. After all, she never bothered to check up on it after her death.

She never imagined it to be so beautiful outside her home. The village below the hills is not a fancy one, but it doesn't make it any less wonderful. Low clay and wooden houses lay near each other, surrounded by different fruit trees and flowers. There is a river passing through the village, and the water is clean and azure blue. And up on the hill, lays her family's ancestral mansion. It's surrounded by a small forest, one which she could see from the window of her own room in the mansion. The trees have leaves in a very vibrant green, no matter how patently she tried to paint them, the trees never looked as good in the picture as they did in reality. It's a miracle the forest has stood here another three hundred years.

The villagers claimed her mansion to be haunted, and abandoned. Fei had only smiled at them. She didn't want to lie anymore, so she told them what they deserved to know.

She is apart of the Lion family. A distant relative. And she's here to take back the mansion.

The villagers were shocked, but the fact that they didn't try to stop her shows that they were happy to have the ghostly building occupied again. It's never safe for a village to be without a leader, for the land to be unclaimed. Thieves, raiders and foreign soldiers easily ruin such places. It's been three hundred years, and the people in the village now are much different from the ones that were before. But they have the same blood, they are the children of those who walked before and that it's why Fei feels a sense of protectiveness over them. Essentially they were her family's people, and now she will finally give them the protection they deserve.