The ash had settled.
That was the first thing Lin Yue registered when the grey pre-dawn light began to press through the high, shuttered windows. Not warmth or relief. Only the ash, thin, pale, already beginning to merge with the grain of the old wood floor, and the understanding that Zhang Wei would continue to exist in the hall as residue, as matter without memory, as something the others would eventually stop seeing entirely.
The joss paper flame in the brazier had caught and held, small and determined.
No one else had fed it.
Lin Yue did not look at the coffin.
This required a specific, sustained quality of effort that no one outside the hall would have understood. The coffin was in his peripheral vision at all times, black, lacquered, older than anything in the room had a right to be, and the lid was open. A finger's width of darkness between wood and wood, exhaling cold air in a slow, patient rhythm that had nothing to do with wind.
