*FEATURED* Ao is a wrathful, ravenous former god trapped in a human body and sentenced to roam the Inner Empire for all eternity.
Eternity is rather dull, until she meets a green-eyed prince and his friends.
The prince offers her a deal; help him a...
饕餮大餐 Tāotièdàcān Great meal fit for a dragon's son. A sumptuous banquet.
Kageyama Sho paced the veranda of his room, hands behind his back.
He had been feeling disquieted the last couple of days. Since they had returned to Linjing. A truth was pushing against his reality that he could not ignore.
Around him his reading room was in a state of chaos, at least compared to its normal orderliness. His casual robes were slung across the couch, and a military uniform that needed to me cleaned and pressed was hanging from a chair. On the large map table to one side of the room not one but two books lay open, and a scroll was unfurled, filled with news from one of the information sellers he kept correspondence with.
Nothing I don't know already, thought Kageyama, glaring at the scroll.
He continued pacing. His eyes caught on the single mauve lotus that stood in the vase placed in the ornamental alcove. It was the only decoration in the room.
The flower was Kageyama's favorite. It was a symbol of purity, of rising above the sin and temptation of the world, just as the lotus bloom itself rose from the mud and muck of the pond to bloom, brilliant, above the water.
The current occupant of the vase however did not look very pure. The lotus's smooth purple petals had started to brown, and curl inwards. Usually, Kageyama would have replaced the flower long before it started to brown, traded it for another that he picked from the pond himself.
However, recently he had been preoccupied, with the unrest in the Central Kingdoms, with Zhangyu's growing influence in the family, and with...
Kageyama stopped his pacing, to face the garden before him. A pond filled with lotuses like the one in the vase sat directly before him. Around the lotuses, circling orange fish made ripples in the dark water of the pond.
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Kageyama followed the movement of the fish as he thought.
He thought of Ao. Of her sly smirks and smiles. Of the unnatural speed with which she had healed from her ordeal with the dragon. Of how she knew things far beyond what her range of experience should allow.
He thought of how she always seemed to be laughing at him, as though the girl knew a joke the kitsune hadn't quite caught onto yet. How her eyes mocked him, hiding a secret she was daring him to find out.
Then Kageyama thought of Sanli. The way the prince's green eyes followed Ao. The way Sanli seemed to relax around her, smiling, laughing openly.
Content at last. As though the prince had finally found what he was looking for.
The fish Kageyama's eyes had been following suddenly flicked its tail, breaking the surface with a splash, and then dived down into the black depths of the pool, orange fading into nothingness.
