palace misc

[laughitoff]

cw for memories: gore, whipping, torture, war crimes, emasculation, cannibalism, lots of undead/ghost/zombie nonsense, lots of body horror, lots of corpses and corpse bits in uncomfortable places

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the first rule (dockside pagoda)

[laughitoff]

[Stepping inside the pagoda feels peaceful, and the view is very lovely indeed, despite the disconcerting quiet and the ashen smell. You feel like you could sit and look at the lake for hours, here in the shade.

It is actually mostly empty, though! There's only one thing of note here: a small stuffed donkey in the middle of the floor.]

-

[You experience a memory, distant and hazy.

You are very small, and you and your family are at a wayside inn on your way to somewhere or other. You are sitting on your father's lap to be able to have your whole head above the level of the table; he is feeding you from his bowl of meat and rice. One bite for him, one bite for you. It's good.

He and your mother are talking. There was some incident the previous day between your mother and some other cultivators on the road, where they'd hailed her in a friendly familiar way and called her a strange title, and she'd returned the friendliness, but with the particular bright smile that meant she had no idea why they were doing this. It had gotten you a free stay here and this free meal, whatever it was.

"Why, I still don't know!" she laughs now over her own bowl. She tries to tempt you with a bite, but you shake your head -- she likes her food much less spicy than you and your father do. "They're from one of the local sects. I think I recognized the balding one in the grey robes--what was his name?"

Your father reminds her.

"--yes, him. It must have been on my way through to Yunmeng, but really, dear! I was young and testing my sword on everything in sight then; I was on hunts for more than twenty nights every moon, with all sorts of other cultivators tagging along! If I tried to keep them all straight my head would come off my shoulders with the weight!"

Your father acknowledges this. "It's a good thing your mother's such a charmer, eh, A-Ying?" he remarks over your head. "She forgets almost everyone and offends almost no one. Papa was lucky his pretty face was one of the ones that stuck in her head, like a little stone."

The thought of your father as a pebble makes you giggle. It is lucky your mouth is not full. Your mother rolls her eyes and twirls a lock of her hair around her finger, married half a decade now and still sometimes coquettish. "I also owed you," she says, "so don't flatter your face too much!"

Your father droops. You reach up with one hand to push his chin up and away from your head, because his head is heavy. He must be making a funny face where you can't see, though, because your mother laughs again.

"It's what my teacher taught me," she says, and this gets your attention, because your mother very rarely talks about her life on the immortal Baoshan Sanren's fabled mountain, though she makes little enough secret of having descended from there. Her voice falls into the cadence of memorized text. "Remember the things that are done for you, not the things you do for others. Keep a light heart, and it will set you free."

-

[In the wake of the memory, the pagoda has filled with a faint, unseasonal mist.

The pale figures of a man and woman stand handsclasped at the railing, sun shining through their forms...they are indistinct, ghostly and unmoving. Parts of their bodies and limbs seem to have been eaten away, though the details of the damage are vague.]