For many minutes, the only sound in Entry hall 378 was the ragged, weeping breath of the scroll-keeper kneeling at her ancestor’s feet.
Yan Zhiqiu cried not merely for Empress Huaisu, but for the entire tragedy of human history: for the millions of mortal lives that had been burned up to fuel the void-ships of false gods. For the thirty thousand years of royal lies that had turned saviors into mythical ghosts. And for the sheer, crushing loneliness of surviving when an entire great realm had been turned to ash.
Qiao Ming did not try to stop her tears.
He stood with his bare feet planted upon the green-stone dais, his shoulders squared, his grey eyes calm and patient as the lightless depths. He knew that the grief of a scroll-keeper was like the flood tide. It had to reach its high-water mark, expend its violent striking force against the stone, before it could recede and leave the floor clean for the work of the day.
When her sobs began to slow, dying into long, shuddering exhalations that hitched against her ribs, Qiao Ming stepped forward.
He knelt beside her upon the wet green stone.
From his leather cross-harness, he unhooked his second boar-bristle brush—a soft, wide brush with bristles trimmed short to provide firm, non-gritty scrubbing power. Beside it, he laid a small clay pot cup filled with clean, deionized water drops water and a square of fine, raw, unwhitened linen.
