"My men can give her a proper soldier's burial," General Teng offered, his voice regaining its composure, though a note of caution remained. He gestured vaguely toward a group of soldiers tasked with digging graves. "It is the least we can do."
Bai Shu's gaze, cold and sharp as a shard of obsidian, lifted from Mei's face to the General's. "You will not touch her," he said.
The words were quiet, yet they carried an authority that made the soldiers nearby pause.
It was not a request.
It was a command from a man who had nothing left to lose, and therefore, nothing to fear.
Teng's jaw tightened. He was a General of the Southern Army, a man whose words moved thousands. To be spoken to with such finality by a dirt-stained refugee was an affront.
But there was something in Bai Shu's eyes which is a void that promised nothing but consequence and that made him reconsider.
"As you wish," he said, his tone clipped. "We are marching at dawn. If you change your mind, my quartermaster will see to your needs."
He turned on his heel and strode away, leaving Bai Shu alone in his circle of grief, an island in the stream of military activity.
The army left him behind. They packed up their gear, formed their columns, and marched out of the valley, their banners receding into the distance.
They left him with the dead, the silence, and the crushing weight of his new reality. The sun climbed higher, a pale, indifferent eye in the sky.
The world continued, uncaring.
Bai Shu did not move for hours. He simply held Mei, committing every detail of her face to memory, a face now waxy and cold.
He traced the curve of her eyebrow, the line of her lips. He was trying to hold onto her, but she was already gone, a ghost in his arms.
The warmth of her life was a fading memory, and with it, the last warmth in his own soul was extinguished.
The depression that had been a creeping fog was now a suffocating ocean. He was drowning in it, and he didn't have the will to swim.
Eventually, a primal need forced him to move. He could not leave her here for the crows and the wolves.
He would not allow her final resting place to be this blood-soaked, treacherous ground. He gently laid her down and stood up, his limbs stiff and aching. He looked around. A short distance away, near the base of the ridge, was a small grove of silver birch trees, their white bark like silent sentinels.
It was a place of quiet dignity.
It would have to do.
He carried her there. She was so light. It felt as though he were carrying nothing at all. He laid her at the foot of the largest birch and began to dig.
He had no shovel. He used his bare hands. The scholarly hands, once accustomed to the delicate turning of pages and the graceful flow of a calligraphy brush, were now tools for tearing at the cold, unforgiving earth.
The soil was rocky and hard. He clawed at it, his nails splitting, his fingers bleeding. He didn't feel the pain. It was a distant, unimportant sensation, like an echo from another man's life.
Each handful of dirt was a penance. Each scrape of stone against his flesh was a confirmation of his loss.
He dug for hours, a mindless, repetitive motion. Dig. Scrape. Heave. His soft robes were torn and caked with mud. His face was a mask of dirt and dried tears.
The sun began its descent, casting long, mournful shadows across the valley. Finally, the grave was deep enough. It was a shallow, ragged hole, a pathetic monument to a love that had been as vast as the sky.
But it was all he could give her.
He gently lowered her into the earth. He hesitated for a moment, then untied the small, silk pouch she always wore around her neck. Inside was a single, smooth river stone he had given her on their first anniversary, and a lock of his own hair.
He clutched it in his hand, the last physical piece of their shared life. He then began to push the dirt back into the grave. The sound of the soil falling on her shrouded form was the most brutal sound he had ever heard. It was the sound of finality.
The sound of forever.
When it was done, he collapsed beside the small mound of earth, utterly spent.
He had no home. He had no heart. He had no name, for "Bai Shu" was the name of a scholar, a husband, a man who believed in things.
That man was buried in the grave beside him. He was nothing. A ghost. An empty vessel.
He lay there through the night, the cold seeping into his bones. He did not shiver. He did not feel. He was a stone.
When the first grey light of dawn touched the valley, he rose. He did not look back at the grave.
To look back would be to acknowledge the man he had been. That way was only pain.
He turned his face toward the direction the army had gone. He did not follow them out of hope. He followed them because they were the anchor of his hate. They were the last thing that connected him to the moment his world ended.
He walked for a day, fueled by a hollowness that felt like a kind of strength. He eventually came upon the army's massive encampment, a sprawling city of tents and campfires polluting the landscape.
He did not try to find the quartermaster. He did not seek aid.
He, who had once been respected and admired, walked past the sentries, his head bowed, his face smeared with grime, his robes in tatters.
They paid him no mind. He was just another piece of human refuse washed up by the war.
He found a filthy alley between a sutler's tent and a stinking latrine ditch. He slid down the muddy wall, pulled his knees to his chest, and disappeared.
He became a beggar, a shadow in the gutter, his eyes fixed on the gilded banners of the army that had murdered his wife and destroyed his world.