A Dream Woven in Shadows

The willow fluff at Baqiao was silent, the waters of Qianjin Dam flowed on without end, hair once worn loose was now pinned up, and the seasons in the two capitals kept waxing and waning.

Ji Shao waited in Luoyang.

Zhang Fang waited in Chang'an.

Even when they occasionally looked up at the bright moon, their gazes never met. They did not yet know the other existed, and rank or family background meant nothing to them. They only felt a little lonely in the quiet of night, with no thought of foes or friends. The weary scholar-officials, their caps askew and flowers tucked drunkenly into their hair, lay waiting for the conquest to come, as heavy cavalry swept west through the dust... This was the tenth year of Taishi, before they had ever met! Whether drifting blindly or intently along their jagged paths, they had no idea they would one day meet at a narrow pass, or be pierced by a thousand arrows, or set Luoyang ablaze: eighty-one tales of famed scholars and bandits! Along with the daily records of an idiotic emperor and handwritten accounts of the Eight Princes, these stories were buried in the Yellow Sand Prison by an upright censor, carved into the Hall of Mirrors by a sword-bearing commandant, then silenced when the court was destroyed. The lives they consumed were like sparks struck from hard stone. How fleeting their youth was, and yet it was nothing more than a long-distance delusion, divided by both geography and physics!