The City Is Full of Begonias, Yet No One Returns

Begonias have no fragrance, the most regrettable flowers in the world. And yet someone loved her enough to give his life for her. Shen Haitang, daughter of a military family, was raised by the Grand Princess from the age of five. The man she waited for fell off a cliff. She wrapped herself in plain white clothes, shut herself away for three years, and locked her heart so tightly that no one could knock their way in. The year she returned to the capital, she crossed paths with Xiao Zhiyuan, clad in black and cold-faced. In the Western Market, his spooked horse nearly trampled a child in the street. She rescued the child, then looked up and called him heartless. He offered no defense, but he remembered her. In a pavilion in the Eastern Palace, he knelt before the court and asked for an imperial decree granting their marriage. In front of everyone gathered there, she said that the man she married had to be someone who knew how to love, and that the heir apparent could never be that man. She asked the emperor to rescind the decree, then turned and left. He remained on his knees and replied only, “This subject obeys.” Only later did she learn that the child had set off firecrackers, spooking the horse; the horse he had calmed first was a comrade who had shared life and death with him amid a forest of blades and arrows. He said, “Don't hide from me. Get to know me again.” War flames rose along the northern frontier. On the night the city fell, she was forced onto the city wall. Before a vast army, she shouted down to the city, “If there is another life, on that day in the Eastern Palace pavilion, I will... say yes to you sooner!” Then she bit through the pill hidden beneath her tongue and collapsed before him. On the day the army returned in triumph, begonias bloomed in full glory throughout the city. He rode through the city's cheers without smiling once. A city in bloom, one heart pierced with grief. His begonia drifted amid the endless flames of war on the northern frontier. Before the assembled court, he pleaded for an imperial marriage decree: “If she lives, she is my wife; if she is dead, she will forever remain my wife.” He erected a tombstone on the back hill of Foguang Temple. He kept watch over the empty grave, sitting from sunrise to sunset, from spring to autumn.