Chapter Text
The rain had returned, the same fine gray rain that had whispered on a stranger’s roof three autumns ago.
Xiao lit the lamp in the window of the house at the harbor’s edge, as he had every night for over a year. He told himself it was upkeep. Someone had to water the plants and pay the landlord, who had begun handing the bills to Xiao without being asked. That was all.
The lamp burned. The road outside stayed empty.
He sat at the low table and took out the box of tiles.
He set them in rows the way he had learned, turning one, considering another. The heart was there. The door was there. The mountain was not. Morax had taken it with him.
Keep the heart, he had said on the pier that dawn long ago, folding Xiao’s fingers around the tile. I will carry the mountain. Between us, we have the whole character.
“How long?” Xiao had asked.
“I do not know. I have learned not to trust such estimates.”
“Then promise you’ll come back.”
Morax had been quiet for a moment, the gray water behind him. “I will not promise what I cannot guarantee. I have never broken a contract, and I will not begin with you. I will write. I will try. It is the only kind of promise I know how to keep.”
“That’s not a promise.”
“No,” Morax had agreed gently. “It is something I can actually keep.”
Xiao had been furious. He was still furious. Furious, he had discovered, was only a very long way around the other thing.
The letters had come, at first, every week, carried from Wangsheng by a courier who would tell Hu Tao nothing. They were long and careful and elegant. About all kinds but never anything he needed to know. About tea, weather, an idle history of whichever town Morax was passing through, and always a riddle, which Xiao pretended not to enjoy. Then they came monthly. Then came the last one, two months ago.
He did not need to take it out. He knew it by heart. It began with a single word, the first time Morax had ever written it.
Alatus,
The road ahead runs where no post reaches. If the letters stop, it is the road, and not me. The tea here is poor. I would trade all of it for one cup of yours.
Xiao had read it until the folds went soft. If the letters stop, it is the road. He believed it. He did. It was only that belief and the long nights kept different hours.
A knock came at the door. Hu Tao stood on the step, dripping, with no umbrella and no letter.
“Nothing again,” she said, shaking out her coat. “Sorry. The courier says the same as before.”
“Thank you for asking.”
“Mr. Zhongli would want you to eat something.” She looked at the tiles, the lamp, and for once made no joke about any of it. “Can I say something? And you don’t stab me?”
“No promises.”
“It’s been over a year.” Her voice was oddly careful. “Nobody would say you waited too long if you stopped. You could take the lamp down. Go back to the inn. Just be… I don’t know. Fine? Maybe even with someone else.”
The words landed like a stone in water.
Fine. That hurt the most.
She meant it kindly. That was the worst of it.
“I’m not telling you to,” Hu Tao said at the door. “I’m just saying you could. Don’t tell anyone I was serious.”
Then she was gone into the rain.
Xiao crossed to the window and put his hand on the lamp.
It would be so easy. One breath, and the dark. He would stop hurting like this. He would be calm and whole and safe, and he would call it peace.
But it wouldn’t be.
He thought of the second path the mirror had shown. A tile in his fist, a lamp in the window, an ache that never once turned fine. He had looked at all of it on a mountain, with a crane watching, and thought: I choose that one. He had not thought it to be brave. It was only true.
He took his hand away.
He sat down and took a sheet of paper, and discovered he had never written to anyone in his life. The first attempt was too long. The second was too stiff. The third he burned. The fourth was three lines, in his plain, upright hand:
Morax,
The lamp is lit. The tea is waiting. So am I.
Xiao
He sealed it and set it aside. There was nowhere to send it to.
He set out two cups beside the heart tile, the way a shadow behind a screen had once done for him. Then he sat and listened to the rain.
Far beyond where any post reached, in a rain-dark room, Morax sat at a low table with a brush in his hand.
A stack of letters lay at his elbow, tied with a scrap of red string. None had been sent. Every one was finished. One day they’d all find their way to Xiao. Beside the inkstone sat a single wooden tile, the mountain.
He was in the middle of a sentence about the tea when something slid out from beneath his robe, a tail that had not stirred since the day he left, and thumped once against the floor.
Morax looked down at it. Then, slowly, he smiled. He had no way of knowing why. He did not need one.
He dipped his brush and went on writing.
Beside the inkstone, the mountain waited for its heart, but didn’t understand that the heart was slowly breaking.