...So this was supposed to be one of the 2 or 3 final chapters! But...in order for those chapter to make sense I've added this one.
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This was born from a friend pointing out after reading all the remaining chapters (listening to my ideas more like!), "Kunlun seems a little too calm for a reunion Lightning. The action was too quick and I got whiplash! Slow down a little!"
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If you would like to skip to the action, go past the cherry blossom picture! :)
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In legend there are few descriptions of dread in the context of the battle hardened. A myth that those who have seen the worst of all horrors, can somehow be immune to such things.
Shen Wei once walked his men through a village, on a bright hot day. A detour unplanned after a battle, successful and brief with Southern Haixing's forces. This was before Kunlun, when only whispers of his exploits had just begun to filter down the mountains to the ears of the Allied armies. Stories around campfires and a something like white-hot hope surging in his heart.
That village was something he wishes he could forget. The horror of it choking, but painfully diluted and rendered dry fact in the reports. That seemed as unforgivable as traipsing through a graveyard that had once been an home to near a hundred people.
Every single life that once walked the simple pathways, the children who once played, the elders who once sat by the great tree in the afternoons....all of them were dead. Corpses strewn across the ground stained by dried blood, the smell of rot putrid in the air and the flies...
Years later, Shen Wei's stomach still clenches at the memory.
He felt dread when he heard the strange buzzing, the sound so loud in the quiet. It settles now like a stone in Shen Wei's heart. It meets rage and the forever storm of grief that howls and snarls, creating a distracting loop that only experience can suppress. Perhaps there will be a time when he doesn't feel this cold rage, that coils in his heart and burns.
Perhaps when he knows Kunlun is safe, when he is happy and stretched out in the sun like a cat, tired and lazy, for once not needing to rise to face off some crisis.
Focus is important. It is vital if he wants Kunlun to live.
He's held onto that image for ten years. Longer if he is honest. Somewhere along the road to this point, an unfathomable, unimportant moment for all it is momentous - he fell in love with this foxfire eyed champion. He fell in love and everything shifted. Everything became balanced on the knife-edge of Kunlun. If he breathed, Shen Wei could breathe.
Right now, tension seeped rapidly into the deceptively relaxed stance of the man he loves. Those eyes are polished black diamonds glinting with sharp edges and the light of the cosmos. As he watches the tension becomes predatory stillness, poised for action.
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Sorrow In Autumn
FanfictionShen Wei never wanted to be an Emperor, but on the anniversary of the peace deal he discovers that Kunlun might be alive. Part 1 of the The Leaves Of Autumn Are Memories series