Prologue
Our lost friend, the moon, peeled the insides of the small stone house into halves of dusty silver light and indeterminable shadow, with forgotten toys and drying earthenware in a rack hinting at the lives of the inhabitants asleep all in the same bed- a frame made of stone covered with a soft downy mat and blanketed with a plush indigo-dyed comforter. When a sudden tear occurs in this sort of silence and peace, one does not wake with the soft snowy haze of half-remembered conversations or a midnight piss. When a night like this is broken in a house like this very one, all of your past lives rouse in you simultaneously, your eyes burst open like yolks from an chicken pig eggshell, and all your worst fears combine into an impossible monster.
In any other house, that would be the story of the night: disruption, fear, possibly overreaction, more fear, and then someone might have ended the tale with a serious injury. But the two young women who gouged the quiet with their knocking on the door had arrived at the Beifong house deep in the towering pillars of the Wulong Forest, and their approach, their heaving of three small bags, and the lifting of the larger women's arm had already reverberated through the earth and woken a perturbed Toph before the loudest rupture of the knocking door stirred the lovely night. Her two young daughters only turned in bed at the sound, too young and trusting of their mother for concern.
"What do you want?" Toph grumbled as the door slid down with the gesture of her pressed-down and crooked hand revealing her glowering face and her slumped, tired, but still intimidating stance.
They both stared, catching the flies that surrounded Toph's stink in their open mouths.
Toph growled, "Well if you thought you could come to someone's house in the middle of the night without even a prepared monologue to grovel with, I think I won't be pulling my coin sack out to buy whatever it is you're selling. Instead, I'll just head back to bed." With a raising of her gnarly hand, the thick granite door began to resurrect from the ground.
"Toph!" shouted the smaller of the two finally coming out of shock to continue in the trend of desecrating the silence that Toph valued so much. "We're here because we're in love!"
I don't know if anything else might have stopped Toph from closing that door for good. Actually, I'm surprised that declaration did any good (with Toph's tempestuous relationship to the subject). Still, the three of them stood there, the stone block frozen, leaving only a window of that uncertain darkness and Toph's face, metallic and unreadable in that bright moon, uniting the light and the dark in equal displays of obscurity.