The Crows Her Dragon's Gate
Before the end there would be love-songs to a passion so fierce that the offspring of my body turned into suns; tales of our courtship a wildfire that scorched the world.
The annals of heavens may not always be trusted. They were texts carefully edited, passed to chosen scholars; it did well to remind the warlords—and once empire dreams had come true, the monarchs calling themselves heaven's sons—that above them reigned paradise, and above paradise an everlasting emperor.
Much was elided and confused. But in the beginning, it was mostly that I was young.
The Huang He was new, freshly disgorged from a dragon's gullet, brimming with stomach-lizards and fish with scales thick as lamellar. The heat drew me, as it too must have drawn him. And so I found Dijun by
