Some Star Fragments [Part 1.]
Wei Zhiruo had spent most of her life like a rootless duckweed – afloat a seamless dream. Seldom stopping to refrain her heart and listen to its quiet voices, or to its urgent protests. As a result, when silence did dawn upon her, by chance and by good fortune, she was left overcome with resounding discomfort, fixed stiff with speechlessness.
As the only child of her father, with a crown to claim – more than that, a dream to fulfil, a dream that had been dreamt by so many souls, by so many minds that its brevity was only more obvious, its enamor all the more grievous - a life with only her own wants and needs was completely foreign to her. Her birth was a callous cause; she was told that she was to be the hope since day one.
Growing up, she had heard of this grandeur of her fate, of its wonder and how much luck she had because she was the last and the only one who held the key to this glamourous fate! She was to be the enigma, the only hope – a hope for her clan, and the people inside her kingdom alike. A hope that could bring them out of their senseless mortality and make them all immortals - place them at a pedestal from where the horizon would never shrink, and where the day would in its glory and glamour encapsulate power and eternal life for all eternity. Everyone had a share in that enigmatic dream. Maybe, in the beginning she might have held a place in it too-! Now, no more of that.
For a while she couldn’t help but refrain from remembering things from her past life. She tried to stop thinking altogether – a desperate move to shirk thoughts that never left her, but couldn't succeed for long. The urgent need to sort out every possible mystery of her new life was eating her up from inside.
Alas! finally defeated by efforts that were going nowhere, she let her temporal self with an exiled soul and equally wandering consciousness, lay wordless – floating, amidst huge blooms of violet water lilies – while her consciousness floated in spatial drift far away from any attachments. All while still refraining to recapture that faint loss of connection her death had brought to her.
The flowers though, in her eyes, were blooming spectacularly. Splattered amongst lotuses of warmer hues – blossoming so sagaciously in their unaltered grace and purity, so brightly and breathtakingly in their bewitching potency, that it seemed for a moment at least, as if they were ready to transcend their mortal ties!
Wei Zhiruo straightened her neck. She had her back cradled against a seldom used canoe. Probably abandoned by the shore. It's worn out almost rotten wood spoke of its constant disuse. It was found laying in almost disrepair by the shore of this tiny little pond inside the manor’s premises. In fact, it was all chance encounter that she could have even found such a spot, so well-hidden and quietly tucked between abandoned courtyards, and ghostly looking chambers and corridors. Such was the state of abandon that, she had even spotted a pillar almost leaning down, just awaiting a simple push for the whole building to come toppling down with all its roof and walls! She had never seen such a state of ruin before. Not in an inhabited place at least.
Wei Zhiruo continued to struggle in her control of her thoughts. Her body petrified almost, not due to the cold of the night but her mind entering a state of meditation. If there was a person standing by the shore at this moment, he would in all faith - after ignoring those random flickers of agony, or twinges of great forbearance that emerged on her features – take that child as the most fairylike observer of that beautiful nightscape and its various pleasures: the moon, and enchanting breezes swimming over senses...everything. Or maybe even a reluctant part of it. From afar a glimpse of her reverie filled desolation looked something of a lore. If one followed her tiny shadow flickering on moonlit water, they might even hastily declare her a phantom or a nymph! Neither of these description would have matched her in her detachedness of her soul entirely though or done justice to the workings of her consciousness embroiled in a storm.
Even in that state of half abandon she had all the leisure to ponder. Although the risk of letting loose her thoughts were great, with tasteless aftereffects, she couldn’t help but let loose. The floodgates opened and crushed through her pores. It was sudden, and several shock waves raged through her body. Wei Zhiruo hit the bottom boards with a thwack, falling right on the back her head. She stifled a cry -
And all she could do for some while was think…and think some more! Thoughts filled the crevices of her unaligned soul, some echoing with harsher intensity than others. If she were to escape from their clutches, she might as well have a better chance to just abandon her bodily cage. Thoughts fed her, clothed her and watered her self – drowning her in them. What it exacted, it echoed and with unwavering force in belief. The cacophony of its rage dawned over a worn-out Wei Zhiruo. As she tried to balance her aching feverish body against the boat, a torn and crushed soul thrummed. Trying to accommodate all that pain with another tremulous storm in her mind, she almost cried in pain! Shivers never ceased wreaking havoc inside her body, she was shaking quite badly.
It was pain, all white for some while, before she could get a hold of herself. The implications weren’t good – a strong shock thundered through her body, almost dislocating her from her languid repose. If she hadn’t been alert, the silent night might have echoed with her resentful cry like a vengeful ghost.
Fortunately, she had suffered worse - this little bit of discomfort could still be suffered through without crying. Wei Zhiruo opened her red eyes, filled with traces of water and flooded with pain. She had a hard time concentrating, but finally settled on one stream of thought rather then letting her mind do its thing and jumble up all sorts of information!
She thought of the past betrayals; some of them imprinted on her mind, her heart still burning with anger. Eyes flushed with stale disbelief, and a mind winding through events of past, painting each scene, each conversation, each insult she had hear. Wei Zhiruo tried to make out what had happened just a day ago, but which now was a matter of a previous lifetime. Hilarious-!
Wei Zhiruo knew for a fact that all those who had drove her to madness where somewhere else, not even here. And god forbid-! if ever there was a time which brought them in front of her again, it would never be the same. It will be long past her current suffering! It was worthless to chase a fate so clearly set in stone, right? She couldn't just go back in time and make them suffer a fate worse than death?! Could she?
The small boat swayed to left and to right, with gentle ripples of the pond under the gentle starry sky, lulling its occupant to sweet slumber. But sleep must not come. It might even have turned into a foreign notion to Wei Zhiruo at this point. She sorted out the ailments of her body and mind, and to her surprise, found various wounds that had left traces on her soul in the sudden awakening.
Before waking up, she recalled, she was under the cursed altar of that pond. Chains abound, her feet and hands were dragging her down to drown in that water. Not only pain, the shame of inevitability of all that had happened – purging of the Sangchi clan, the mutiny and her father’s death, the enthronement of her step-brother, or the council of elders decision to make her a sacrifice – all while no voice appeared to oppose it, no hand rose with arms to symbolize a protest...nothing.
These wounds wouldn’t heal on their own, would they? No. But the thoughts must settle down to a silent whisper. Something magical had happened in between all those betrayals. She was awake again, in this mortal shell. But how and why – magical indeed, were the chains of fate which had dragged her to this bizarre place.
A strange song seemed to have raptured amongst the night wind, amongst the grasses by the shore, and by the leaning willow’s tresses; as if resounding with her wandering thoughts it rippled seamlessly and fed to her soul, easing some of its burden. The breeze though felt sweeter with the gentle voice of rippling water, the moonlight – like a heady mead. Wei Zhiruo peeked at the shore, her eyes a little less cold.
'Jinghai was it?', she wondered. The people called it that. A small settlement of some thirty thousand people. She didn’t know much – but the rain filled much of her first impressions. The continuous rain from morning to dusk had been a nuisance, as well as a strange phenomenon inside her mind. The cold winds, the frequent snowfalls and untimely springs of her own city made it all the more fresh. The humidity, the mourning in the air – a strange melancholy that comes accompanied by shower, rooted in no time, slipping down to her bones. Everyone of these sensation was new.
The rain had finally stopped in Jinghai. The night sky was uncharacteristically clear. The several weeks downpour had grumbled down. From rolling mists and tumbling grey clouds, its majestic rage had softened to an amiable shower at noon and then, like a bad-tempered friend on his grumpy day off, it had swiftly flown off to distant lands, carried along by distant winds, in some delirium of an adventure, perhaps.
On his leave, though, the weak sun had certainly dried off some of the earth’s surface back to its original appearance. Yet some bespattered weeds and swamps of wet land, wet corners remained here and there. Some carriages carried by grumpy horses could still, by ill-fortune of their master or by their good-humor of the horses themselves, find several pits of their choices to overturn into. Though such a situation would be tasteless for most, such accidents were far from being settled along with the stopping of the rain.
Wei Zhiruo observed two special accidents in a single day. These carriages were particularly headed to this manor; among five and six specially crafted and suited carriages with elaborate emblems of clan holdings, of which one had overturned around the peripheries of Jinghai, while the other had successfully driven off nearer to town gate, but collapsed horrifically with oncoming carriage just a little away from the manor. The mansion and its vicinity, buzzing with onlookers of every kind and nature had caught her attention for some time, especially the hullabaloo and festive shock it had generated in the surroundings. She had observed them as some had waited and welcomed guests inside the manor, while some others had run around to arrange for a rescue and look after the terror-struck occupants who had escaped, fortunately, unscathed.
“Strange day,” Wei Zhiruo surmised, a little light heartedly, recalling the faces of some peculiar men in humble clothes and their guffawing faces as they pointed straight at noble men smattered in mud, with noisy chatters of crowd and neighing of an angry horse in the background.
Shaking off those amusing scenes from the noon, she started looking around wherever her consciousness could reach at present. Wei Zhiruo knew all too well that in such moments of thoughts exploding in her head, her thoughts dared not leave her sight and she of them, but in the midst of this tussle for power and sovereignty between themselves she had to find a distraction to ease some of those ravenous observations and stop thinking of at least some things. And such wanderings and musings as looking at mundane, unthinkable things like grasses, the blooms - it was all too well suited for her distraction. As such she fancifully chased a wild fish jumping to the reflection of moon in the water.
In the mirror-like water filled fields, some small fishes and their fries had imperceptibly broken into hinterlands. Unconsciously she recalled back some more memories from home. Once, and only once, she had got the chance to observe them – her subjects from up close. The human in their breast, the culture and traditions of their humble selves, and the strange pride and vanity that divided them into groups – she had found their children to be the most peculiar of the bunches. Children, who used to be delighted by the simplest of gifts and rejoiced in its easy gains – particularly when the bounty had anything to do with hunting, climbing trees or catching bird’s egg from the trees of their liking. She recalled back those simple faces and hearty smiles with a strange bewilderment.
If this world had children who entertained in similar pleasures, Wei Zhiruo felt that the coming morning, with its warmer hues and softer showers and its uncountable promises of goods in form of warmer sunlight – in all likelihood was going to welcome a hoard of children and all of them eagerly ready, prancing and rushing about those muddy waters in no time. They will be eager to catch some of fries and fishes: a game which promised them a taste of one-time meal which would be filled with meat. A luxury in hard times. And hard times for some people seemed to never end. It was always hard times.
‘The world is brimming with vitality, and yet strangely the spring is so far away,’ Wei Zhiruo couldn’t help but sigh out aloud, as she swept her spiritual senses all around Jinghai.
Her eyes swept past the farmers in their hot-beds, curled to early comfort. There were archers up in the high towers of fortress castle with their longbows polished and ready to move, gazing with their hawk-like gazes in ponderous doubts. And also those stiffly clothed guards yawning and scrunching their faces, walking around the town gate unbothered; every one of them appeared unaware of the other and of her. Yet the moonlight was mellow and all embracing.
Wei Zhiruo recalled with difficulty. Like people seldom do to call back certain deeply closeted and forgotten memories, seemingly kept under locked up chests burrowed deeper into layers of forgetfulness – she tried hard to paint those hazy figures perseveringly. She had a premonition that if she didn’t settle all her thoughts, or put them in order she wouldn’t be able to do the same in near future. What she was expecting to happen, she herself didn’t knew – but the gist of upcoming storm lingered under her nose. People like her hardly let go of such building premonitions.
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