She Came from the Mountain Pass

After Yanhuiguan fell, Huo Qingye lost her homeland, and her parents vanished without a trace. With a frightened girl who had lost her voice and a letter from twenty years ago, she knocked on the side gate of the Su residence in the capital, drenched in heavy rain.

The person who opened the gate was Su Mingtang, a talented young woman famed throughout the capital.

Born into an aristocratic family, Su Mingtang was gentle and refined. Her poems were copied and passed from hand to hand by everyone, yet she could not escape a marriage she did not want. Huo Qingye was born on the borderlands, proud and spirited, and brave enough to survive swords and snowstorms. Yet she had no choice but to live under the Su family's roof, struggling to find a place for herself under the scrutiny of others.

One had been taught from childhood to put everyone else first. The other, after enduring life and death, hated being abandoned more than anything.

Su Mingtang gave Huo Qingye a door to enter, but time and again she let go of her hand in the face of family, betrothal, and gossip. Huo Qingye was willing to stay by her side through endless nights and shield her from every hurt, but she could not accept being forever the person kept in the shadows, someone who could be cast aside at any moment.

They were separated by rank, by an engagement, and by an age that denied women the freedom to choose whom they loved.

At last, Huo Qingye stopped waiting.

The day she left the capital, she never looked back.

And Su Mingtang, who had always been gentle and proper, cast off the finery that marked her as the Su family's legitimate daughter for the first time and chased after her beyond the city that had imprisoned her for nineteen years.

"You were always the one who came to find me."

"This time, let me go beyond the mountains and passes to find you."