Farewell on the Jade Steps

Prologue “A Farewell on Jade Steps” Violet lightning bites the jade hairpin; jade tears pierce the night’s pounding cloth. A furrowed brow in swaddling clothes, still not awake. Who can judge? The bamboo horse cracks its green jade; snow buries it deep. Iron riders batter the spirit of Wu’s gardens; bones lie in heaps. Blood drips onto the jade before the steps, colder than a broken ring. In a prosperous age, a lone lamp sways, casting the emperor’s shadow. None can overcome it. The transfer of power is never free of bloodshed, whether great or small. In the twenty-third year of Yuanqi, the snow fell harder than ever, as if desperate to bury Luoyang’s filth beneath frozen earth. In the Tawei’s manor, a cry from the birthing chamber shattered the silence and opened the floodgates of fate for three generations. The elder brother’s joy was genuine: the light in the ten-year-old boy’s eyes reflected his earnest resolve to be “a father in all but name.” The father’s worry was genuine, too. The violet lightning that split the clouds in the twelfth lunar month had also pierced the trust between sovereign and subject, thin as a cicada’s wing. Back then, Wang was still humming lullabies, believing her milk could soothe every fear. Xiao Chengyi could not yet speak; he could only gaze silently at this dim and uncertain world with eyes black as a frigid abyss. He did not know whether he had come to end it or to be buried alongside it. The lanterns in Zhuque Lane still shone. Snow rustled as it fell on the rooftops, like countless blunt knives slowly sawing through the bones of the realm. That year, someone furrowed their brow in swaddling clothes, someone made a vow beneath the covered walkway, and someone sharpened the blade of suspicion behind the palace walls. And history, amid cries and laughter, quietly turned another page.