Sorrow In Autumn

Chapter 43. Winter

Note: zhangfu means husband.

Each section is a prompt actually.

Next chapter will be Sang Zan and Kunlun separately meeting Shen Anujin.

The last chapter will be the alternative that's really its own short story now....

--------------------- Winter

Ten winters have come and gone, unyielding and filled with echoes as if the snow covered earth hid more than dead branches and orange burnt leaves. As if it was a blanket of sorrow rather than snow. The cold is a desolate seeping thing that cannot be outrun, cannot be defended against even with the thickest layers and roaring fires.

Shen Wei had never minded winter, even with all its dangers and hardships. The cold never affected him with his own icy gifts but it slowed his armies down, rendered them weaker in wartime. But he never cursed it as others did, never resented it or looked at the encroaching season with dread. Not until the snows came and the renegades murdered his family, nearly obliterating a city.

Now, it is a time when loss is potent and multilayered. A tree that bears fruit, cruel and bitter when the world is stark, lifeless. When failure is all that lives in his heart, another journey drifting through the brittle grey land, the only sound his boots and breaking heart.

The shores of a river, a cry still echoing in his throat. A pause in the flow of the world when he remembers his brother is no longer here.

It is a dismal time, lonely and bitter. No distractions from guilt, no distractions filled with life either. The truth sits like a stone behind his breastbone, a time lived but not chosen.

Better then that his child is away during the worst of it, for it is not winter that hurts Wang Zheng, except for the dangers to her health. In recompense he makes more effort in summer, tries for distractions and respects her need for quiet. Their child know this, knows the twisting power of the seasons. Knows and tries to help, to be quiet and away or present and loud. She is such a blessing, and Shen Wei thinks this nearly every day.

Autumn was when he lost Kunlun, to the earth, to the skies, to some unknown. When he lost his mother and the city of Ye lost everyone, it was deepest winter before they recovered all of the bodies.  The new year just beginning was when he lost Ye Zun. Every anniversary was when he was forced to realize another year was dying and a new one had begun, all without answers.

By you shi, the light has drained from the sky gone as if morning had never come, a false nighttime, sometimes accompanied by the silent yawning darkness of a sky in crisp cold, sometimes an endless grey howling wind that sounded too much like the sounds his own throat wanted to make.

His heart aches and bleeds, lonely footsteps trailing through snow and the cold, hard earth is dead like he feels.

Felt.

A past tense. His past.

A line in the sand that Shen Wei's body doesn't seem to understand. Part of his mind wonders if this reality is a dream, if that dissonance he always feels has become madness, if you can really disassociate yourself from life and live in a dreamworld.

Winter is far from quiet, far from silent but every time his new reality snaps into the past, he is rendered mute, shocked and painfully hopeful. So utterly ridiculous but inescapable.

Every time he is reminded that Kunlun has returned, all he feels his joy and hope. He tries to be bold, but sometimes his legs wobble like a newborn fawn, sometimes he chases proof and fears waking. He has yet to stop fearing Kunlun falling asleep, that he might become entrapped still.