In the formal protocols of the Yan-Luo Imperial Court, names were not merely labels. They were legal deeds of responsibility.
To speak one’s true name in an unmapped hall was to place one’s old family tablets, one’s skilled honor, and the moral weight of one’s lineage upon the floor as a pledge of non-aggression.
Yan Zhiqiu set the clean badger-hair brush upon the stone table, folded her hands within the wide sleeves of her giant hemp tunic. Then it shifted her stance from the defensive huddle of a patient into the upright, dignified kneeling position of a royal official. Despite the bare stone floor, her torn bandages, and the salt-weathered clothes that hung loosely from her thin frame, her carriage was impeccably regal.
She looked directly across the three paces of soapstone flags into Qiao Ming’s grey eyes.
“I am Yan Zhiqiu,” she said, her voice clear, ringing, and formal as the striking of a jade chime in an empty throne room. “Seventh-Rank Chief Cataloger of the Grand Royal Repository of the Yan-Luo Sovereign Dynasty. Daughter of Yan Bofang, Grand Preceptor of the Iron Brush. Keeper of the Ninth Seal of the Submerged Registers.”
She bowed her torso forty-five degrees, her hands flat upon her knees, holding the stance for three full heartbeats before rising to meet his gaze once more.
