When jade is broken into pieces, it can still be melted into iron. Iron is heavier and rougher than jade, but iron can be quenched, sharpened, and rolled in a furnace to become harder than before.
It took them a long time to understand: What the previous generation left behind was never hatred, but a fire that has not yet been quenched. What they have to do is not to put out the fire, but to burn it into something else - into iron, into a ring, into a lamp that can light up every Lantern Festival night.
What is buried under those two monuments is not a shocking mystery.
This is a sentence that two mothers said after seventeen years of burning and finally burned it clean:
"Children, move forward. Don't look back at the ashes, look back at us, we are all in the wind."
The determined female general ✖️The sinister and affectionate prince
