We Must Also Make a Vow: May All Humanity Receive True Happiness

When the eleven-year Century War ended, He Rong Weidehewa stood on the ravaged land of Yerevan. Before her lay three thousand miles of grief and a hundred million lives of suffering. She stood at a turning point in her fate. Should she cut away her knees, surrender her dignity, and become a speck of dust nourishing history's withered grass, or choose kindness, honesty, and hope, watering tomorrow's flowers with her own blood? She chose to rush into the flames like a moth, to save Yerevan.

Forty-seven years passed like a dream, and three thousand days and nights awake cut like knives. When the winds of history brushed the face of the aged He Rong Weidehewa, she would recall the knife-sharp years of her seventy-six-year life. She would touch her scars, cough with a hoarse throat, and wait to become a flower called Death. She would remember her poor childhood and impoverished youth, the long years when war and exile intertwined, the distant places without end and the people without number, the tears wiped away and the smiles of liberation. She would peacefully close her now-clouded eyes, for she knew her death was the triumph of dialectics. If she had even a shred of strength left, just as in her youth, she would swear to the sky, the sea, the earth, to cruel history and merciless time: "We must also make this vow: that all humanity shall enjoy the happiness they deserve!"