What does it mean to love someone?
I didn't know, before him.
At Mount Hua, I only ever felt safe with a handful of the old Masters—quiet people with weathered faces, who used to sit with my mother under the plum trees in spring, when she was still alive and I still split my years between the mountain and her palace on the northern sea. Their eyes creased when they smiled at me, a small girl trying to step exactly where her mother stepped. They were the only ones I never pushed away.
Then the palace fell, and she didn't come back.
My father didn't look at me when the news reached the mountain. He didn't kneel down. He didn't say anything at all. He turned away, and after that he hardly saw me again. He shut himself in his training halls with one thought left in him—the Martial King, the man at the top of the world, the man he had to surpass—and the Sect Leader's duties gathered dust on the shelves.
