kingdom falling | gyuricky

forty eight.

It was the first time Ricky Shen had ever experienced a feeling like this.

He didn't have many memories of his early childhood, as most people didn't. His earliest memories were of sitting in the schoolroom, in neat rows with the other six year olds in the sect, and learning how to meditate for the first time. It would take them five years to develop a spiritual core. Ricky didn't have one until the year he turned thirteen.

He didn't remember who his mother or father was. There were many other children in the sect who had one parent or less, like him, but unlike him, they were usually missing a parent because one or both of them had successfully cultivated to ascension, and now resided in the heavenly realm. It was not uncommon; the list of names of ascended disciples, carved into the bright crystal walls of the Hall of Reflections, was so expansive that if he stood far enough away, the characters would look like a snowstorm on the heaviest winter day.

But he'd asked Yookyung about his parents before. Yookyung had told him his father died in battle, some time before he was born, and he'd taken him to see his grave in the mountains behind the Palace. Ricky still went there every New Year, every Tomb-Sweeping Day, every Mid-Autumn Festival, to pay his respects to the father he'd never gotten the chance to know.

"What about my mother?" he'd asked.

He was younger then. Yookyung wasn't much older than him, they were only a little more than ten years apart, but he took Ricky by the shoulders and said softly, "Your mother had a hard time dealing with your father's death. After she gave birth, her body never recovered fully, and before the season could turn, she was gone."

"Where's her grave?"

"She doesn't have one."

"Why?"

"Ricky, I don't have the answer to all your questions," Yookyung had said. "I wish I did, but I don't know either."

After that, when Ricky went to sweep his father's grave the next New Year, he noticed there was a new one next to it, bearing his mother's name. Graves at Moonrise Palace were nothing elaborate, only a simple headstone marking the fallen cultivator's name, their age, and recognizing that they had died with honor. He stooped lower, and looked more closely. The inscription on the headstone was somewhat crooked, and less polished than all the others, but he didn't mind it.

From then on, every time he visited, he stayed twice as long, and paid his respects to both his parents. Only when he was much older did he realize that Yookyung had gone back that day, thinking about what Ricky had said, and spent the next few weeks learning how to engrave legible words onto stone tablets so he could make a headstone for Ricky's mother. He'd silently gone back to the graveyard and hammered the gravestone into the ground in the midst of the bitter cold, just in time for New Year's Day to come, just so Ricky wouldn't grow up thinking he had no place to remember his mother.

After he'd made that realization, he still paid his respects to both headstones whenever he went, but it felt different. He knew his mother's body hadn't really been buried there. There had to have been a reason his mother was the only cultivator in Moonrise Palace without a grave, but by then he was old enough to know not to ask questions that might have unpleasant answers. So he accepted it, and life went on.

For Ricky, life in Moonrise Palace had always been the same. He followed the rules and did what he was supposed to and trained hard, and even though he'd been two years behind everyone else in developing a spiritual core, by the time he was sixteen, he had far surpassed them all. His weapon, Tianling, was more powerful in his hands than in anybody else's. He stayed quiet and spoke little, focusing on clearing his thoughts and calming his mind, channeling all his energy into the exhilarating feeling of spiritual energy flowing like a bubbling creek through his veins and the deadly whistle of his blade as he swung.