Chapter 33 - What Remains After Silence

The Silk of Fate

Chapter 33 – What Remains After Silence

The koi didn’t gather at the edge of the pond anymore.

They swam deeper now, circling the shadows. As if they, too, had sensed the change.

Lianhua sat alone on the stone bench. No flute. No scroll. Just the ribbon he never returned—and the space where his letter should’ve been.

She had waited. For a message. A word. Anything.

But it never came.

Yenli noticed first.

“You haven’t played in days,” she said softly while brushing Lianhua’s hair.

“I haven’t had anything to say.”

“That’s never stopped you before.”

Lianhua didn’t answer.

Because Yenli was wrong.

This silence wasn’t emptiness.

It was strategy.

The court assumed she would grieve privately and comply publicly.

They believed she would smile. Nod. Accept the next chapter written for her without question.

And for three days, she did.

She poured tea. She greeted ministers. She recited verses at the Empress Dowager’s luncheon.

But on the fourth day, she entered the archive chamber.

And pulled out a scroll no one had touched in years.

It was a treatise on maritime trade routes.

But between the diagrams and dry language, she began to draft something else—coded into footnotes, disguised as commentary.

A cipher.

One Idran would recognize.

They had joked once—“If we ever go to war, we’ll send poetry instead of swords.”

Now, she wasn’t laughing.

She slipped the coded scroll into a bundle of diplomatic correspondence—destined for Tumapel via the court’s trade attaché.

No one would question it.

After all, she was just a scholar-princess, inserting a harmless observation.

That evening, she joined the Empress Dowager’s quiet reading circle.

It was hosted weekly, mostly for show.

But Lianhua had a plan.

She spoke softly, offered verses, and complimented the Dowager’s memory of ancient Buddhist poetry.

Then, casually—deliberately—she quoted an obscure line Idran had once recited aloud:

“Two shores may see the same moonlight, though their waters never meet.”

The Dowager blinked.

And for the first time… smiled.

Not politely.

But knowingly.

Yenli found her later that night, writing again.

“More poems?” she asked.

“Poems,” Lianhua said.

And beneath her brush, another message unfolded:

If the world will not wait for us, then we will move around it. One thread at a time.