His mother's voice also echoed in his ears.
"Qing'er, you're a little man now. You mustn't cry every time your brother leaves. Come… let Mother hold you."
"Look over there—the ceremony is about to begin."
As these words reached Zi Qing's ears, his gaze traveled past his mother's gentle profile, over his father's broad shoulders, and beyond his younger brother's tearful, expectant eyes, finally settling upon the altar—and beyond it, upon the frozen, incomplete face hanging eternally in the nine heavens.
"The time has come," Zi Qing murmured softly.
Clutching the candied hawthorn skewer, he stepped forward like the most silent of observers, moving toward his family in this life—toward the altar he himself had chosen.
Upon the altar, a priest draped in crimson robes suddenly flung his arms wide. With a voice that pierced bone and marrow, cold and shrill as a harbinger of doom, he shattered the clamor of the marketplace:
