Love Across Worlds: She and Her Chief Mage

[Forbidden sacred-and-secular romance, mutual salvation, one-on-one, both pure]

He entered the Buddhist order at the age of three and never let go of his prayer beads. The faint white mark around his wrist was the imprint of more than a decade of keeping the precepts.

Later, he gave her the beads. He wrapped them around her wrist three times, and they fit perfectly.

She was cursed as a bringer of misfortune, a witch, and a seductress. Her straw effigy was raised atop a stake for burning, while the crowd’s jeers shook the heavens.

Meanwhile, with one leg broken, he stitched up the last wound on a battlefield a thousand miles away. Looking up, he said, “You may curse me, but you may not curse her.”

The night the victory report arrived, he took off his bloodstained robes, mounted his horse, and rode east without stopping.

At last, amid wind and snow, he held her in his arms. His cloak wrapped around them both, and the prayer beads in his palm pressed against her waist.

She asked, “Master, haven’t you broken your vows?”

He lowered his head, the tip of his nose resting against the hollow of her shoulder. “No. I’ve left the order.”