When a leaf alights on the still water, Si Yinan imagines that the ripples split the very air around her, that she splinters around the disturbance. The moment passes as the leaf bobs away on its own invisible current. Her reflection solidifies; the world tends towards stability. Usually, it’s a comforting thought, but today it’s unnerving. There is no breeze, no warmth of sunlight, no hum of life.
Yinan closes her eyes. Through a muted haze, as if muffled by several layers of silk, she can sense the lukewarm ground by her hands, the cool pebbles beneath her, the whispers of cold from the ebbing waves at her feet—shh, shh. The quiet coaxes her away from consciousness.
Like a fish weaving through the currents, Yinan slips into a daydream.
It’s become a familiar, well-trodden memory, and it always starts here—here, in the liminal space between the stage-shy edge of water and the serene beach. Here, in the fleeting space between the crash and fall of a wave, between the systolic beats of water throwing itself onto shore, it’s easy to shed her role as third prince and become someone—different. Someone grounded in vagueness and unsurety, someone unafraid of instability.
In her daydream, she becomes a person she wishes she knew.
Once again, she finds herself on the threshold before an unlit room, the promise of light behind her. She stays like this for a while, half-swallowed by darkness, her hand braced against the doorframe. Eventually, she steels herself and steps into chaos.
What is she steeling herself for? Yinan doesn’t know. The room is eerily intimate, like a love long forgotten. And yet there’s a nagging feeling in the back of her head that becomes colder and more pervasive the further she walks into the room. Like a tightrope walker, suspended by her own uncertainty, there’s no way out but forward.
Wind howls at her feet. Light spills like oil across the threshold, bravely illuminating the ground. Her shadow, made alive, stretches up and outwards, thrown into sharp relief against the bare walls. She takes another step. Her eyes pass haltingly over the nondescript features of the room until, like thorns, they catch on the corpse on the bed.
The temperature drops. The light sours and fades. Darkness floods the room again, yet the body becomes clearer, more real, as if her eyes have calibrated for the sole purpose of seeing it—its quietness, its mouth still shaped around a secret she was meant to hear. All at once, with a rush of sick conviction, she realizes who it is.
It’s—
Yinan tears herself from her thoughts with a violent shudder. Her breath comes out short, panicked, aborted. Her heart throbs behind her teeth, too much for one person and too little for two. It thrashes in the deadness of the room; it struggles in vain.
What defines a heartbeat in the absence of life? What weight does it hold when there’s nothing to anchor it to? Life must be tethered. Yes—the world is better without chaos.
She knows this. She reaches for the body anyways.
Just as she touches its stony jawline, her thumb instinctively searching for a pulse against its throat, the light yanks at the back of her collar.
She gasps, but no sound comes out.
The darkness spits her out, expelling her from the daydream. She grabs for the door and finds nothing. The threshold gives out under her. Yinan throws her head back, trying to relive the corpse’s face—to hold onto any memory, anything—but she falls anyway—
She has overstayed her welcome.
When Yinan wakes up, the water is lapping against her feet and she dissolves into it, unraveled, unspooled.
After what feels like an eternity, the world rights itself. The ground is soft and moist against her neck, but she can’t bring herself to sit up; her breath might get stuck between her ribs if she folds herself in half like that. She stays on her back, eyes closed. She tries to remember what it’s like to be alive.
Gradually, she pulls herself out of the daydream. She digs her fingers into the dirt, grime settling under her fingernails. A reflexive sense of discomfort forces her eyes open. They start to water as she stares at the gray expanse of the sky, the veiled sun just bright enough to hurt. The tear that trails unevenly down her cheek is warm. She pokes her tongue out to catch it as it traces past her lip; its saltiness makes her cough.
Her heartbeat expands back into her chest. As she lies there, reorienting herself, it grows surer, more confident, until its rhythm is even again. Finally, she returns to tranquility.
Her brief repose is cut short by the soundless rustle of reeds, alerting her to the concealed presence of another person. Yinan feels rather than hears the footsteps behind her. The silence is, again, unnerving; it is only because of her familiarity with this person, with the hushed cadence of their movement, that she doesn’t startle.
“San-dianxia, it’s me,” her guard says, voice quiet and even. “I bear a message from your father.”
Yinan exhales, sits up, chases down the last dregs of her daydream and tries to swallow them. “Wu Yexing.”
“Were you asleep? I apologize for disturbing you.”
“No—just resting. You couldn’t disturb a skittish pheasant with how silently you move.”
Yexing pauses. Yinan imagines her wrestling with a response, torn between accepting her prince’s words as a genuine compliment or a thorned observation, before she chooses a different route entirely. “May I deliver huangshi’s orders now, san-dianxia?”
Such an obvious redirection would seem cowardly on anyone else. On Yexing, though, it sounds calculated, almost chastising. It’s not enough to make Yinan’s composure slip—or maybe it is, because she has to bite back an amused smile. Yexing’s boldness, however discrete, is inexplicably refreshing.
Sometimes, Yexing seems too perfect. She fits next to Yinan too well, knows her playful insults and barbed witticisms too intimately, matches the rhythm of her step too closely. In the tumultuous, oppressive politics of the court, Yexing remains singularly unmoved and undisturbed, her eyes always turned towards Yinan—eye contact vague enough to convey deference, yet direct enough to keep Yinan’s attention on her.
If Yinan believed in reincarnation, she’d think Yexing has known her twice—and that she has been left stranded in this life, blindly waiting for her guard to find her.
“Give me a moment,” she murmurs. “I can’t meet him like this, can I?”
“…How long were you lying on the ground?”
“Long enough to get my skirt stained,” Yinan says. Her futile attempt to wipe her hands clean only leaves more smudges on the fabric. “Could you prepare another outfit?”
“Of course,” Yexing says. Yinan can hear the sigh in her voice. She would tease her about it if she couldn’t still feel the stirrings of that daydream under her ribs, writhing and alluring. Instead, she takes pity on her guard and pushes herself up.
She doesn’t take the steadying arm that Yexing offers to her. She isn’t ready to look back, not quite yet—the daydream has left her unbalanced. If she blinks, she might find herself back with that corpse, fumbling for a sign of life. Fumbling for someone she doesn’t know.
She looks down at the pool and doesn’t see Yexing reflected back at her. The thought makes her smile, her nerves settling somewhat; Yexing, someone who only exists in a world that tends towards stability, who can’t be bothered with disordered waters and fragmented air. But then the clouds shift, the sunlight refracts, and Yexing’s wavering, unwilling form appears next to her.
“San-dianxia?”
Yinan turns to face her. “This is better,” she replies. “You look much more alive like this.”
She watches Yexing’s face, the small expressions that flicker across it—confusion, exasperation, consideration, and finally, as always, settling into something secure, something familiar, something flat and devoid of emotion.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Yexing says, deflecting again. “Why don’t you return to your quarters? I’ll meet you once you’re dressed.”
“You don’t have to trouble yourself with that,” Yinan says. Before she can stop herself, she glances back over her shoulder. She watches the undulating surface of the water for a moment, transfixed by the way it strips away her practiced poise, the image of her posture warped and quivering. Again, she has to strain to find Yexing’s reflection.
Yexing shakes her head. “It’s no trouble at all.”
“If you insist.” Yinan tugs at the wrinkles in her skirt. “Could you let Father know I’ll be late? So we don’t both get in trouble.”
Yexing bows low, her murmured Yes, san-dianxia stifled behind her thick sleeves. Yinan sweeps past her. Her guard doesn’t raise her head until she’s out of the courtyard.
With each step she takes, the daydream loosens its hold on her, replaced by her well-crafted role of third prince. She knows that this steadiness, this stability, is better; she knows life is better without chaos. She knows this intimately.
And yet, if she strains her ears—if she puts her hands on the ground and grasps for its warmth, if she turns around—she can still hear it: the wind clutching at her legs, the yawning loneliness of her own heartbeat, the whisper of water—
Shh, shh.
Translation & Cultural Notes:
– san-dianxia: third (san) highness/prince (dianxia). In this context, third means third-born; sometimes the number can also signify order of claim to throne.
– huangshi: emperor–this is a term that is used to refer indirectly to the emperor.
– In Chinese, names are written in family name-given name order. Si = family name; Yinan = given name.
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