A General's Bones, a Beauty's Oak

On the day snow fell deep in the apricot grove, Su Yu brought home a bloodstained suit of armor.

On the seventh night, with the scent of herbs lingering in the air, Lu Chenzhou clasped the hand she used to grind medicine amid the swirling mist. “Doctor Su, could those hands that save lives also save this general’s heart?”

He gave her a black-iron dagger, a twin lotus engraved on its blade, while inside its sheath lay a gilded wedding edict betrothing him to Commandery Princess Zhaoyang.

She gave him a sachet scented with acacia, angelica wrapped in brocade, only to discover when the imperial decree arrived that the incense ash hid a slow-acting poison.

“Your servant is willing to trade his military merits for an imperial decree dissolving the betrothal!” Lu Chenzhou struck the floor until the bricks cracked before the throne hall.

As blood soaked the thirty-two steps, Su Yu drove the dagger into her chest and cut out the acacia jade pendant poisoned into her heart. It was the shackle his mother had tied around her swaddling clothes on her deathbed.

When a crimson wedding gown surfaced beneath the ice on Mirror Lake, people unearthed two skeletons locked in an embrace from the ruins of the General’s residence.

Lu Chenzhou’s hand bones clutched half a hawthorn seed. It was the first sweet Su Yu had fed him at the Lantern Festival.

Black-iron chains wound between Su Yu’s ribs, engraved in his heart’s blood with the words: “If I die, I shall return to you.”

Later, mournful cries often drifted through the borderlands’ sandstorms. Old soldiers said it was a broken-stringed huqin singing:

“When angelica never returns, beauty turns to oak; the general’s bones become the guide, and a bitter bowl of rebirth is brewed.”