*FEATURED* Ao is a wrathful, ravenous former god trapped in a human body and sentenced to roam the Inner Empire for all eternity.
Eternity is rather dull, until she meets a green-eyed prince and his friends.
The prince offers her a deal; help him a...
形單影隻 Xíng dān yǐng zhīa Solitary form, a single shadow. Extremely lonely; solitary.
*~*~*~*~*~*
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Sanli watched the beads of water fall from the corner of the roof overhead to the wooden rail of the veranda just beside his face.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
The wood was cool beneath his cheek. The drops as they fell burst, sending even smaller fragments of water out with each impact, across the rail, some coming to rest on his face and cling to his eyelashes.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Sanli's silk robe, the black one trimmed with gold he used for sleeping, hung loosely off his shoulders. Rain sprayed across his exposed back, with a featherlight touch like that of a cautious lover.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
It had been a wet spring. And a wetter rainy season. Sanli wasn't sure when spring had ended and the rainy season began. There was too much rain to tell.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Sanli listened to the sound of drops pattering across the wooden shingles over his head. He was in Ao's room, that had been Kageyama's before. Ao's four stringed lute sat beside him on the cool deck, just out of reach of the spraying drops. He had tried to play it earlier, but had odd touching the strings, and quickly stopped.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
It had been nearly two months since Ao had gone north. Sanli had finished the duties required of him as head mourner, and then returned to the Valley, where none of his family waited for him, save for Ermi and Qingxi. Zhangyu was still patrolling the border, Xiangwu had gone to the capital to join his father and mother, and Erli was somewhere... else.
Sanli did not particularly care where she was, as long as she was not here.
"You're in here again?"
Sanli lifted his head from the rail and turned. Kageyama stood in the doorway. He must have just come back from somewhere, as he was in his military uniform.
Kageyama muttered something to the guard that stood outside, then came to join Sanli on the deck.
Kageyama glanced at Ao's lute, left on the deck. "What are you doing in here?"
"Contemplating the rain."
"How poetic."
Kageyama sat beside Sanli, after stripping off his military overtunic. The weather was grey and rainy, but there was a certain mugginess to the air that permeated the clothes and caused sweat regardless of the cool temperature.
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