Stone Cold

Chapter 1: Marble

Chapter 1: Marble

Tao Shung Temple, Hongkong; 3 years earlier

Ember looked at the full moon above. Bulbous by anyone's standards. The temple was celebrating the mooncake festival below. Patrons and old chinese families had come from all over the city to celebrate at her home, The Tao Shung Temple.

 The mooncake festival is held on the 15th day of the eighteenth month of the Chinese Calendar,the Mid-Autumn Festival. It was an evening intricately linked to the Chang E, the immortal moon goddess of immortality. The mooncake festival celebrated the use of mooncakes to send coded messages throughout the city that would eventually overthrow the Mongol dictator.

Her grandparents were the keepers of the temple. They were the ones who had taken her and Jesse in when their parents went missing. 

She swung up the banister to the front gate. Ember loved the night. She felt it on her skin like a promise. Like a cloak woven of freedom and danger.

Later the stars would be paled by the glaring lights of the fireworks, but for now they stood strong against the lights of the city. She sat at the back of the stone dragon that guarded the gates of the temple. Every night, she'd find herself touching the carvings on the walls or the statues that stood in the temple. The dragon on the gate was her favorite.

She climbed until she stood on its head. It was unreasonable but it sometimes felt like they were alive. They didn't make her feel as if she was the only one who stood frozen and alone. The only one who didn't feel a thing besides the incessant void she could never fill. She saw them in her mind clearly. Majestic slivers of red, silver and gold that would break out of the marble.

Live! Ember wrote it with her finger on the dust that accumulated on the dragon's face. But it remained silent-empty. She was fifteen and had no passion. She jumped off the dragon's back and landed hard on the concrete.

Live! She wanted to scream it through the streets that cut through the city below, scream it at the thousand chinese laterns that punched red circles of light into the night.

She blew on the dragon's face to erase her words. Her breath rippled silver light throughout the statue. She heard a rustle of leaves behind her.

Ember turned around- and her glance was met by a pair of copper eyes that penetrated the night. The moonlight painted patterns on his skin, his naked feet stood on the forest floor covered with acorn shells and gnawed bones of bird. The bloody feathers of a bird stuck to his shirt.

She could see herself reflected on those eyes, and in it she saw the fear on her face. Fear was an emotion she had grown to like. It lured her to dark places, through forbidden doors, and away from herself, even the yearning inside her could be drowned in it. Gone were the sea of houses, the bright lights of the festival-- everything she knew gone. Instead she saw cities fall and towers crumble, death, destruction but strangely also life, beauty and happiness. Through it all, she felt a longing that rivaled her own.

"Ember? Are you there?" her sister called.

It barely registered over the beating of Ember's heart. Ember gasped for air and backed away from the boy. She straightened her red cheongsam and stepped out of the statues shadow.

Jesse's eyes were wide with fear. She had always been afraid of statues especially at night. 

"Grandpa warned you not to go out here."

"I just went out to clear my head."

Ember thought she could feel the copper stare like ice on the back of her neck. Jesse tried to look past her but quickly looked away. Too scared of what lay in the shadows. Ember took her little sister's hand and led her back to the party below.

What those copper eyes had shown her were hers and hers alone.

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