Prisoner of Zhaohua

No one was reading, so I’ve put this on hiatus for now. I’ll finish it someday.

Retitled: Southbound Branch Facing North: The Cage of Zhaohua, the Fallen Empire’s Princess, The Tale of Zhaohua

My name is Zhao Ningxi. I am Princess Zhaohua of Great Yan.

My Changle Palace was filled with crabapple trees and peonies. When the spring breeze blew, the whole courtyard smelled sweet. I once thought I would spend my life as the happiest princess in all of Bianjing: coming of age, marrying, and living in peace.

That was until the cavalry of Beihan shattered Bianjing’s walls, burned my palace, slaughtered my people, and dragged my family and me thousands of miles away to the grasslands like livestock.

Wanyan Heng, the man who had destroyed my country with his own hands, became my only lifeline.

He gave me fine clothes and lavish meals, protected my family, and promised me the position of Khatun in the future. He said that wherever he was, that would be my home.

I learned to please him, to depend on him, and to become the obedient woman he wanted. I kissed him first, acted coy with him, begged him to protect the few family members I had left, told him I wanted to return to Changle Palace, and promised I would behave for the rest of my life.

The look in his eyes grew more and more obsessed, more and more lost in me. He thought he had finally tamed me, the branch from the south facing north.

But he did not know that every night, when I closed my eyes, I saw the humiliation in the golden tent, my mother’s cold body, and the flames filling the skies above Bianjing.

The branch from the south faced north not because it wanted to, but because one day it hoped to ride the northern wind back to its homeland.

Everything I lost, I will take back one day, with interest.