The Mask And The Honeydew

The sky was burning.

Not metaphorically — it was burning literally. The smoke rose thick and black from the villages at the foot of the hill, swallowing the stars one by one, like a hungry mouth chewing through the light. The smell of charred wood and scorched flesh drifted over the plain like a damp blanket, clinging to skin, to hair, to the throat of every survivor still breathing.

The Yèhé tribe had fallen in less than a single night.

It had not been a battle. It had been a surgical execution. The Qi cavalry had come from three directions at once — north, east, and south — leaving only the west open. The west with its raging river and jagged cliffs. Run or die. And even running was just another form of death.

* * *

Zhào Yù rode at the front, fifty paces behind the prince. His sword was clean — not because he hadn’t used it, but because he wiped it after every strike. Methodical. Calm. As if he’d been chopping wood, not men.

The prisoners were lined up along the road — knees in the mud, hands tied behind their backs with rough rope, heads bowed. Elders, women, a few warriors left without weapons and without pride.

The Qi soldiers moved among them like buyers at a cattle market, counting, sorting. This one works. This one doesn’t. This one dies.

* * *

And then they saw her.

Two soldiers were dragging her by the arms — not because she couldn’t walk, but because she refused to walk their way. They pushed her, they hauled her, and she made their job impossible with every step. Her clothes were torn at the shoulder, dried blood on her left temple, mud on her knees.

But her back was straight.

They threw her into the line of prisoners, at the end. She fell to her knees in the mud, and they laughed — short, vulgar, the way men laugh when they don’t know what else to do with a woman who doesn’t cry.

* * *

Zhào Yù noticed her first.

Not her face — not yet. But the color. Her skin, white, almost translucent in the firelight, glowing strangely among the dusty, olive faces of the other prisoners. Like a jade stone dropped into a fistful of dirt.

He frowned.

He stopped his horse and studied her more closely. Green eyes. Fine, almost unreal features. A beauty mark above her lip — a small detail that gave her a strange, almost aristocratic air. Blue-black hair, plastered with sweat against her slender neck.

What is this woman?

He didn’t ask out loud. But the question stayed on his face long enough for the lieutenant beside him to see it.

— That one… what’s her story? the lieutenant muttered. She’s from the Yèhé tribe? She doesn’t look like…

— Quiet, Zhào Yù said curtly.

* * *

And then he came.

No one heard him approach — or perhaps everyone did, but the silence that preceded him was so dense it swallowed every other sound. The soldiers stopped laughing. The horses whinnied nervously. The air grew heavy, like the moment before a storm.

His horse’s hooves were the only sound — slow, rhythmic, deliberate.

LánLíng Wang passed along the row of prisoners like a specter. His black armor was spattered with blood, his dark cloak dragging through the dust, and the mask —

The mask.

A grotesque sculpture of a demon, with gaping jaws and hollow eyes. Lacquered in black and red, with sword scratches across the cheeks. It didn’t hide a face — it replaced one. As if the man beneath it didn’t exist, and only this remained. The creature. The weapon.

His horse stopped directly in front of her.

* * *

Absolute silence.

LánLíng Wang looked down at her from the saddle, through the hollow eyes of the mask. He didn’t examine her — he dissected her. Green eyes in a sea of black ones. Skin like moonlight in a field of ash. A beauty mark above her lip — a small sign, absurdly delicate for a battlefield. Yèhé tribal garments on a body that did not belong to the Yèhé tribe.

Zhào Yù rode closer, stopping two paces behind the prince.

— My lord, he said quietly. She was found in the chieftain’s tent. She’s not a servant. She’s his daughter.

The mask did not move. LánLíng showed no visible reaction.

But the horse took one step forward — just one — as if its master had pressed with his knee without meaning to.

A soldier lunged forward and grabbed her hair, forcing her head back so the prince could see her face more clearly. Her white throat arched in the firelight, and the beauty mark above her lip seemed to pulse in the play of shadows.

— On your feet, bitch, the soldier snarled. Look your master in the eye.

* * *

She did not stand.

But neither did she lower her gaze. Her green eyes — blazing, full of fire and something that had no name — rose through the smoke and ash and locked onto the black void of the mask.

And stayed there.

Like a challenge. Like a curse. Like a promise.

* * *

The fires flickered. The smoke burned in her lungs. The mask watched her with eyes of nothing.

And she opened her mouth.

“Be cursed, you wretch…! I curse you… I curse you and your army…!”

* * *

The words fell over the battlefield like a stone thrown into a lake of blood.

The soldiers froze. Some of them blinked in confusion — not at the words, but at her tone. It wasn’t the desperate scream of a defeated woman. It was a verdict. Cold. Precise. Like a blade drawn across stone.

The lieutenant next to Zhào Yù let out a short, nervous laugh.

— Did she… did she just curse the prince?

No one answered.

* * *

The soldier holding her hair yanked her head back harder, almost brutally. Her throat arched even more, exposing the white line of her skin, the thin veins pulsing visibly in the firelight.

— Say that again, the soldier hissed through his teeth, leaning toward her. Go on. Repeat what you said, you little wh—

The mask moved.

Just a tilt — slight, slow, almost imperceptible. LánLíng Wang tilted his head to the right, just a few centimeters. Like an animal hearing a sound it cannot classify.

The soldier fell silent instantly. His hand released her hair as if it had burned him.

* * *

Zhào Yù watched the scene without moving, one hand on the pommel of his saddle. He noticed how the prince’s fingers — covered in black leather gloves — tightened a fraction on the reins. That was all. A small gesture. Involuntary.

Interesting, the general thought. And he immediately disliked that he’d thought it.

* * *

LánLíng Wang did not dismount.

He did not say a single word.

But after five seconds of perfect silence, his voice came from beneath the mask — low, filtered, almost inhuman:

— Her name.

It was not a question. It was an order addressed to Zhào Yù, but the mask’s eyes had not moved from her face.

— Mì Lù, Zhào Yù replied. That’s what the prisoners called her. Daughter of Yèhé Kùn, chieftain of the tribe. Born to him and his wife — both of pure Yèhé blood. And yet…

Zhào Yù didn’t finish the sentence. There was no need. And yet — look at her.

* * *

LánLíng remained still a moment longer than was normal. Then, without a word, without a gesture, he turned his horse and left. His black cloak swept the dust like a wing.

But five paces away, he stopped. Without turning back, he said:

— General Zhào.

— My lord.

— Hostage of rank. The tent in the east wing. Untouched.

Untouched.

A single word that changed everything. The soldiers who had been eyeing her with filthy thoughts swallowed hard. Zhào Yù gave a short nod, but something passed through his eyes — a shadow of curiosity that had no place there.

* * *

LánLíng Wang vanished into the smoke of the night, and the mask melted into the darkness as if it had never existed.

But Mì Lù remained on her knees in the mud, her green eyes fixed on the place where he had been, the curse still hot on her lips.

And somewhere, beneath the mask, where no one could see —

LánLíng Wang had smiled.

— End of Chapter 1 —