The valley lay shrouded in silver mist like a perpetual veil: a silence that lay between heaven and earth. The hills of Hubei rose solemn and unchanging, snow-clad summits reaching the horizon like the watchful stare of forgotten immortals. Time here did not move; it reflected. And among that quiet, under the rustle of pines and the soft patter of thawing frost, stood alone, constructed by shaking hands and unshakeable resolve, a lonely house.
It was tiny, and unpainted with anything of grandeur. Its walls were forest wood carved from, bound together by hemp cord, earth, and the will of two people who had found one another while the slow decay of sorrow wore them down. A fire burned in its heart, its flame modest, but warm—the only flame in a world otherwise blanketed with ice and memory.
Xiao Hua stood outside the house, his form no longer the ghostly tendrils of the boy from Wudang's halls, but yet not wide enough to create the shadow of strength he had gained. His shoulders straightened, his eyes pinned as it tracked the outline of the mist, where the past lay masked under the snow.
Within, Ling Yan sat motionless on a low wooden stool, her pale fingers knitting together strands of wool the delicate color of plum blossoms in spring. She was the sworn sister of Xiao Hua's deceased brother-at-arms, and though her spirit still bore the welts of sorrow, she had found in Xiao Hua not just comfort—but purpose. Her heart was a candle wick blazing in the gust of sickness, but somehow, it never burned out.
When her brother died, something in her had slipped—a slide not large and showy like a burning building, but gentle and irretrievable like a bridge carried away in a flood. It was Xiao Hua who built a road across that chasm—not with grand gestures, but with the quiet offering of presence. Of being there, day after day, like the moon, which never makes a sound, but never fails to arrive.
Ling Yan, Xiao Hua's tone soft and raspy as a calligraphy brush inscribing reality on vellum. "When we first came here, you asked me, what is life worth when the people we care for are engulfed in the silence. I did not know the answer at that time. But now, I think. perhaps it is the act of remembering which makes something worthwhile. Not in bereavement—but in building again.".
Ling Yan looked up at him, eyes vacant but full, like the air before it rains. "And if you have to leave again?" she asked.
Xiao Hua's fingers curled around a piece of silk he had crafted for himself. "Then you will remember me by what we have made. And I will remember you by the warmth of this home in my bones."
He leaned towards her, so that his face pressed against hers, forehead to forehead. There was a silence in the air around them—those words that love always has unspoken, in case speaking them makes them too vulnerable.
"I am to leave for Habin," he finally spoke. "The Ninefold Path's heritage is again awakening, and the warlords meet to grasp the pinnacle of authority. To walk this path, I will have to survive isolation—test not of flesh, but of spirit. I leave not to seek fame or victory, but the weight of the power that was given to me."
Ling Yan's hands froze in their knitting. Her lips trembled, not with fear, but with the gentle ache of knowledge.
She did not say goodbye.
Instead, she whispered, "Then I will knit you a sweater—not to keep chill from your bones, but to wrap around your soul when it begins to forget warmth."
Xiao Hua smiled, and for one moment, the fog parted wide enough for the stars to show their faces.
Outside, the mountains remained in solemn witness, as they did, to two hearts that elected to hold onto one another in a world framed by loss and impermanence.
And so the warrior descended from the mountain the next morning, with silence and the soft scent of plum blossom wool stored within the satchel at his hip.
He did not look back.
But Ling Yan, standing in the doorway with the mist curling around her ankles, knew he carried more than blades.
He carried the weight of love disguised as a promise.
And she-working beside the fire each night-carried a hope that the man who bloomed among snows would come back not only intact but free.