"What are you smiling at like that...?"
The voice was soft, tinged with sleep and suspicion.
From the high walls of a dark stone citadel, jagged and ancient, overlooking the world like a corpse staring down from a throne, a man stood at its edge, gazing into the crimson-stained horizon. He chuckled softly to himself, as though the world below was a stage… and he alone remembered all the endings.
Behind him, she approached.
A single black silk ribbon barely covered her body, more temptation than clothing. Her hips swayed like serpents dancing beneath moonlight, her bare feet silent against the cold shinny obsidian floor.
Yanyan.
Once broken, now whole, or at least, pretending to be.
She had long stopped counting years. Like him, she now understood that a hundred years meant nothing. A thousand was a blink. The old him used to say "not much time has passed" when she was still mortal.
Now, she said the same to herself.
