Rio

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Things were quiet – and things were never quiet.

A time that should have made her feel at leisure, made the Empress feel ungrounded. When orders and responsibilities did not make up every hour of her day, then she simply did not know what to do with the time. She sat, listless, feeling as though something must be amiss – and she, oblivious to it entirely! The weight of it was, at times, enough to crush her.

This was when she used prayer like meditation. Free moments reduced to prostrate position, repeating her deepest desires to the crystal dragon again and again and again; resorting to a higher being to guide her movements, even down to what filled her life between duty and religion. Yue was relieved when her pious pleading led her to a small grove, where there existed a lake, bubbling from some invisible underground aquifer.

The Empress bathed, and she heaved a sigh as the chill of the water caused her muscles to contract involuntarily – then to relax entirely, as if she were melting into the very basin itself. She floated, she dove, and when she was finished, the woman exited the water and proceeded to wring it from her silken, argent coat.

The early night was nearly the only time a chill settled into the jungle, and it wouldn’t be impossible to catch a cold of the late season. Stuck in her palatial bedroom all day to convalesce – how truly useless she would be, then!

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the young woman approached the pool with a leaf satchel, the petals it carried bouncing with each trot. if she left behind a trail, she did not notice.

her and the rest of the ichimonji clan had acclimated to their lives. it still felt like such a precarious tight rope to walk on, versus the freedom of the world beyond the palace walls — but with freedom always came risk and danger.
her mind wanders to the past — the furthest past — how were mother and father now? and izaiah and richie? a loneliness, usually reserved for night, clogged her mind in the brief silence.

her mind had wandered so far ahead of her, she hadn't realized there was someone else in the pool already — let alone the empress!
rio's spine shoots straight up, and a rare moment of quick thinking, decides to let the petals drift into the water, bumping the flowers with her nose so they glide across the crystaline surface.

for you, my Empress. lady kaede's warning ran through rio's mind again.

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Yue might never become accustomed to solitude. She was raised with many handmaidens, each nobility in their own right. She had been raised with them, became a woman alongside them, spent every night sleeping in the same room together, and when she married Shenlei, her court had come with her. They were her closest friends and confidants,

and now, they were memories.

Yue could not bring herself to cry about it. She had long since thought she had cried every tear that she might ever cry – as far as sorrow went, she was plumb out. One could not lose as many children as she had, and still mourn for every creature that came in and out of her life. Mayhaps that was why the Empress had adopted a strange behavior of keeping to herself. So, so many of them were strange to her. However…

They were only strangers for as long as she allowed them to be strangers.

The gentle, chiming echo of water reached her ears, which responded instinctively by swirling towards Rio mere moments before her eyes followed. The Empress acknowledged the chestnut woman with a smile and a wave of her sodden tail – and her attention was only ushered downward when she felt something gently brush, bump against her arm.

It was a flower, soft and pale and succulently fragrant. Now her expression was something more like childhood wonder, when one could be delighted by something simple. However, simple it was not – to float, plump vegetation spinning against fresh aqueous current, fractured webs of light; it was akin to poetry, and Lady Rio, the poet.

In fact, so inspired was the Empress that she uttered a poem she remembered from childhood about the spiritual essence of a thing. "Bamboos could die but the joints will stay," she uttered, lowering her nose to the flower to breathe deeply, taking the chemical composition of the scent within. Then she looked upward at Rio. "Flowers could fall but the fragrance will linger."

The Empress spoke Mandarin, as she now did with all who called themselves Tianlong.

It was no surprise the gentle lady had brought flowers. How fortunate she had been to have been blessed with a family of perfumists in lieu of her friends and family of old.

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