Fleeting Splendor, Carved to Life

Twelve exquisitely ornate yet utterly cold bas-reliefs, each one seeming to tell a story. Countless bodies drift in the Pool of Passing; an emperor's love and destruction, a scholar struggling to advance, a strange book made of people, a woman in red consumed by raging flames... What are these laws, like golden locks and iron chains, meant to imprison: the ways of the world, or the human heart? All things in this world, what can be done about love? What is love, that one would pledge one's life and death?