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Achlys was the result of a disaster. Where her mother (born destruction) and her father (born death) collided, only unadulterated chaos could be born. Achlys was a sinner before she was born, and it was her parents' past that she wore as a pennant of the redemption she hoped to experience. Her sin was her own birth.
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ACHLYS WAS BORN the compendium of broken ties.
Lī Hàoyū, barely eighteen, was widely considered a nobody in Shanghai. He hadn't been a good student, and neither could he live off his parents (an already old couple well under the economic level of the Middle Class). His job as a stagehand in the Shanghai Grand Theatre paid him just enough to survive, and he didn't have any wide prospects for his future — it was at that ripe age when he decided he could only harbour a small hope to survive.
Wáng Ruòxī, aged twenty, was widely considered perfection in Shanghai. A growing ballerina, she was not only graceful and lithe, but intelligent and cunning. Her future promised her only the stardom. She was the main dancer of all the ballets she participated in, and the sole thing that rivalled the jealousy people felt for her, was the adoration. She had everything — it was at that ripe age when she decided she could only harbour the expectation to be the best.
Still, Lī Hàoyū believed that, when Wáng Ruòxī said she wanted him with her whole being, she was telling the truth.
He would later be berated for his actions, disinherited, and ostracised, but Hàoyū would never be ashamed of believing her that one time in the theatre's hallway, when she threw himself on top of him and bellowed, voice dripping with honey, "Love me before I leave!"
When he asked her what she meant, her answer brought an awkward blush to his face. When he asked if she was sure once, twice and then thrice, she suggested for them to visit a bar, for him to drink and for the night to take its natural path — Hàoyū admittedly made a bad decision by agreeing to drink, when she didn't touch a glass, after the proposition she had made.
Yes, he was aware that, in reality, it could only be a product of his imagination that China's rising star had fallen in love with him in the few times their paths crossed in the theatre, but he did believe that he was still worth something more than what everyone told him. Plus, what Ruòxī would later call a mistake had brought to Hàoyū's hands real happiness: a daughter to love and protect.
For third parties, what had happened between young Hàoyū and Ruòxī was obvious enough: Hàoyū was a naïve and newly hired stagehand, while Ruòxī (a year older and much smarter) was the rising star of Chinese ballet.
