An hour later, Abrial returned from bathing in the steaming spring hidden within the paradise garden. She wiped her face with a soft cloth as she walked back towards the house, spring water dripping down her neck and dampening her pale wash robe. By instinct, she chose the most winding, turbulent path back to the house, passing every species of pine in the garden, grazing her palms against the petals of blossoms, which filled the warming morning air with fragrance. She paused briefly by the lotus pond to grudgingly admire the flowers’ luster as they bloomed again in the morning light.
Inside the house again, she began to wander aimlessly as her hair dried, avoiding the east wing, where her parents slept. Her father always left before she woke up, so it was just her mother she had to worry about. But given the choice between running into her mother or her father, she’d run to her father in a heartbeat. Which meant, no way was she stepping anywhere near the east wing if she didn’t have to.
She aimlessly treaded down wide hallways, peering into rooms briefly as she passed: grand sitting rooms with dark wooden floors and cushioned seats, a dim room with a collection of expensive calligraphy hanging on the walls, guest bedrooms with wide beds and silken curtains. All empty and silent, like ghosty images frozen in time.
“Gloomy, gloomy, gloomy,” she muttered to herself subconsciously.
As she passed by her father’s study, she saw that the door had been left a crack open by accident again. Unlike her mother, her father was sometimes careless and forgetful.
Which meant that he sometimes left interesting opportunities around the house — for example, this unlocked study.
Eyes sparkling with mischief, Abrial pulled the door further open and slipped inside. Her footsteps were silent.
The office was spacious, with dark wooden panels lining the walls. Much of it was set up like a sitting room, but in the back right corner, beneath the high-set windows, sat a large, dark desk with nothing on its sparkling clean surface. Behind the desk stood two tall, wide bookcases reaching nearly to the ceiling and all along the wall.
There was not a single book in the cases.
Of course there wasn’t. Abrial hadn’t seen a book in this house once in sixteen — cough, seventeen — years.
Like a panther, Abrial approached the desk. She yanked open drawers, hoping they would open and reveal some interesting, forbidden thing. She was sorely disappointed. As usual, they didn’t budge an inch, remaining stubbornly closed. The few that did open were bare and gathering dust.
Boring.
She reached for the handle of the last drawer. To her surprise, it glided open smoothly. Sometimes, though very rarely, her father left drawers open by accident on account of his forgetfulness — but there was never anything inside. Expecting empty space, she began to close the drawer immediately.
Then she froze. Her mouth fell open slightly, and her eyes sparkled with excitement.
Inside the drawer sat a piece of paper.
Abrial snatched it up without a second thought, nearly crumpling it in the process. She held it up to the light, squinting at the words. It was a thick, expensive-feeling paper, made even more extravagant by the golden swirls trailing down the sides. A bird-shaped shadow fluttered across the page; there must have been a sparrow passing by the window.
“Han Abrial Chae-young,” she read with some difficulty. Even though she’d had so many tutors over the years, never being allowed to read a book had prevented her from reading fluently, so it always took a lot of energy to read. As she pieced the next words together, a frown creased her forehead. “This document certifies that the person stated above was birthed to mother Lee Geum-song and father Han Chuanli on the first day of the eighth month of…what?”
Abrial rubbed her eyes fiercely with one fist and re-read the words, piecing together the characters one by one.
“That can’t be right…” she muttered. Her frown deepened, and she scowled. “I wasn’t born in the Year of the Lotus. I was born in the Year of the Magnolia…and I’m not turning eighteen, I’m seventeen…I must’ve read it wrong…”
However, the more she stared at the paper, and the more she studied the following information about her birthplace, her place of residence, and her characteristics, the faster her heart began to beat. It accelerated and intensified until it thumped in her ears like an excited and disoriented drum, blood roaring through her veins. Her mind was racing, both perplexed and thrilled, but her eyes traced that phrase over and over, widening each time:
Year of the Lotus.
Year…of the Lotus?
“Was I…really born in the Year of the Lotus?”
“Han Abrial Chae-young.”
Abrial jerked violently, dropping the birth certificate. Her hand stung and began to bleed; she had gotten a paper cut.
“M-Mother?”
The office door flung open violently.
Standing in the entrance was Abrial’s mother. She was slender and towering, and she had a gaze of pure, ice-cold fury directed straight at Abrial like a frozen spear. She swept towards Abrial in a roaring wave, her stone-blue robes swirling over the floor. Abrial’s body froze, her heart pounding in her chest.
Her mother seized her wrist, squeezing it tightly enough that it began to go numb. Her dark, stormy eyes darted to the certificate on the floor, then to Abrial’s face.
“Get. Out,” she hissed, her voice sharp as a knife.
She released Abrial’s wrist.
Abrial ran.
She sprinted out the door and skidded down the hall, bare feet squeaking on marble. Up the stairs, nearly tripping halfway up, and around the west wing she fled. She didn’t stop until she had slid into her room, slammed the door, and locked it behind herself.
Then she stood with her back against the wood, gasping for air.
She sank to her knees. They knocked loudly as they hit the wooden floor, which would bruise them for sure, but she couldn’t care less. She slid down until she was lying flat, limbs thrown about. Her heart still pounded in her ears, a harsh drum. Her eyes were shocked wide, pupils shrunken to disoriented dots.
As she lay in silence, her body tensed as a hot surge of hatred burst from her chest. Her vision flooded red for a moment.
Why did you run?
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
You idiot. You should have fought back instead.
You should have screamed at her.
She gritted her teeth. After a moment, the fury dissipated into mist and left.
She pushed herself to a sitting position. She looked very desolate, slumped there against the wall, drawing in shallow, long breaths, shining dark hair obscuring her face. A single drop of springwater dripped from the tip of a strand of hair onto her palm, cooling it.
“Was I…born in the Year of the Lotus?” Abrial repeated to herself under her breath at last. The words felt peculiar in her mouth. Both electrifying, and alien.
The image of her mother’s eyes flashing with rage flickered in her mind.
“No way,” breathed Abrial, heart heartbeat accelerating. An excited grin spread over her face, which then morphed into a look of awe. “No way would she react so much if I hadn’t found something I wasn’t supposed to. She would’ve just scolded me and sent me to my room. But she freaked out…I must have been born in the Year of the Lotus! I was born in the Year of the Lotus! But…” She glanced up at the windows, through which pale morning sunlight streamed cryptically, piercing through the shadows.
“Why would they hide that from me?”
----------------------------------------
“Finley, my parents have been lying to me! A big lie! And a weird one, too!”
“...May I ask what the lie is, Abrial? Please sit still, or I will not be able to get the ointment on.”
The two girls were sitting on Abrial’s wide bed, half-sunken into the covers. Finley was leaning over Abrial’s legs, where her washrobe had been pushed up to reveal her bruised, scraped knees. Finley was attempting to apply a shiny ointment to the reddish purple spots, but Abrial kept shifting around in excitement and frustration and making it impossible to do so.
“They’ve been lying to me about the year I was born for some reason. I was born in the Year of the Lotus, not the Magnolia!”
“Sit still.” Finley grasped Abrial’s calves and forced her fidgeting legs down. At last, she successfully smeared the ointment on. Abrial winced; it stung like salt in the wounds. “It may burn a bit — I am sorry if it does.”
“I’m fine. It’s not a big deal. Doesn’t really hurt. But, don’t you think it’s strange? Why the heck would they lie about something silly like that?!”
“I also think it is odd…however, I am sure your parents had a reason.”
Abrial snorted, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. “They have their reasons for everything. For never letting me outside of the house, for never letting me read books, for locking the windows and the doors. I don’t care about their stupid reasons anymore. I’m not a child. If their reasons made sense, they should have explained them to me by now and showed me why it makes sense to keep me locked up here like a criminal in a nice, big prison with a pretty garden.”
She stood and began to stretch, rolling her neck as she liked to do and listening to it crack.
“Abrial.”
Abrial froze. Finley’s voice sounded serious, but hesitant — a tone Abrial didn’t often hear from her.
“Yeah?”
There was a pause of Finley. She looked troubled. “...You are planning to run away, are you not?”
Abrial’s jaw sharpened as she clenched her teeth. She didn’t turn around.
The few star charts scattered around the floor glinted.
“Why’re you asking?”
“...I can tell that you have become more discontent in this house than I haver ever seen you before. I…am worried that you may do something reckless to escape.”
Abrial’s obsidian eyes glinted in the bright noon light. She turned around to look at Finley, looking very solemn.
“I won’t do anything stupid,” she said firmly. “So don’t worry about me.”
They held each other's gaze for a moment, hazel on obsidian.
At last, Finley looked away, pursing her lips.
A short knock sounded on the door, breaking the silence.
“Come in!” called Abrial.
The door squeezed open. A woman’s head poked through, her brown hair tied in a bun and her eyes searching for Abrial. When they found her, she smiled a quick, tight-lipped smile.
“Your mother wanted me to relay a message to you,” she said, her voice clipped.
Abrial’s stomach dropped, but she drew herself up and clenched her fists.
“All right, what is it?”
“She has scheduled a blade fighting lesson for you with Instructor Wei at the first hour. Please eat lunch before then, and do not be late. That is all.”
Abrial’s heart leapt. Her whole body perked up eagerly. Her eyes sparkled with stars, and a bright firework seemed to have gone off in her chest.
“Really? Instructor Wei?” she exclaimed, a grin spreading across her face. “Thank you, Anna!”
Anna nodded curtly and was gone, the door closing silently behind her.
Abrial whirled around immediately on Finley, her face lit up like a child who’d just been told they were getting a lifetime supply of sugar candy.
“I’ve gotta eat quickly! Something substantial — but also light, or I’ll barf during the lesson. I haven’t seen Instructor Wei in ages! He’s really back!”
Finley smiled slightly in return, though her eyes were still serious from their previous unfinished conversation. “I will go and prepare a light lunch.”
She stood from the bed and strode to the door, careful not to step on any silk robes or star diagrams or velvet pillows. As she reached for the door handle, her hand paused midair.
“...Abrial.”
Abrial, who was hopping about like an overly energetic cat and throwing robes onto her bed at the speed of light, paused precariously on one foot and looked up. She was still grinning crookedly.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
Finley inhaled a deep breath, her shoulders remaining tense. She placed her hand on the door handle firmly, facing away from Abrial.
“In the case that you end up outside of this house…” Her knuckles tightened on the door handle. “I want to remind you that doing magic in public is a crime punishable by public humiliation, torture, and death. If you are seen so much as healing a cut…” Her voice caught. “...You will end up dead. I do not want that to happen.”
Oh, Finley. She was always worried that Abrial was going to go off and do something so stupid it’d get her killed. Abrial smirked slightly, eyes sparkling. Solemnly, she raised a hand like she was making an important oath.
“I, Han Abrial Chae-young, promise to not do anything stupid that will get me killed. If that means I can never do magic in front of other people, I guess I won’t do that either.”
Finley let out a small breath of relief. But it was very, very small.
“And anyways,” added Abrial, her voice teasing, “Who says I’m going to run away without you? If I ever left this place, I wouldn’t forget to bring you, too. How would I live without Finley Fellner?”
Finley smiled to herself, a tiny smile. “You would survive sufficiently without me.”
“Ha! I’d probably be dead in a couple hours. But it’d be something like silly falling out a window. If anyone attacked me, I’d just HA!” Abrial swept her hands violently and swiftly through the air like she was holding a dagger, imitating slicing open someone’s neck. She grinned up gleefully at Finley. “And that’d be that!”
Finley smiled slightly back at her, stepping outside of the door. “Just do not forget to never perform magic in the sight of others.”
“Yeah, yeah! I’ve got it, heh.”
Finley left. In her absence, Abrial hurried around, searching for her favorite set to wear while exercising — that black and scarlet set. As she hummed randomly and off-pitch, a thought occurred to her, and she frowned darkly.
“I don’t understand why such a useless law exists,” she muttered. “Magic, punishable by death? And torture? And public humiliation? It makes no sense.”
What was wrong with magic, anyways? His Majesty the Emperor and her parents would get along great, Abrial thought sourly. They both liked to spew suffocating nonsense laws without explaining their reasons.