The weather was moderately warm. The weather was tolerable, not being too hot or too cold. The weather at Yecheng was nothing like the weather of her home.

Zhen Ji stopped at one end of the terrace, her arms loosely wrapped around her waist as she examined the empty courtyard of her father-in-law's palace. It was a grotesquely square shaped building, two large and empty floors comprising the entirety of the strange, dead place. The courtyard was empty, white stones dimly shimmering in the noontime sun while the palace's dark rooftops rippled with heat. In the distance, the surrounding village bustled with life. Zhen Ji stared a long time at the ant-sized homes with their miniature owners.

Yecheng was nothing like her home.

She turned her back to the village and the empty courtyard, refusing to acknowledge that she had fallen from such high heights, but the painful reminder floated through her mind with each passing day. The daughter of a small-town governor, so comfortable and safe and secure back in her small, rural home country, loved by her families' people and appreciated and wanted more than anyone she knew.

That was before the world tipped and stood on its head. Now there was an uncertain future dancing in front of every person's open and closed eyes, a filthy tyrant living lavishly in a palace and in power that did not belong to him, threatening the tradition and life style of what everyone knew so well. The disgusting ball of a man who dared raise a hand at the Imperial Family and remove them from their rightful place was causing quite the stir, threatening to move the Imperial court to a place and for reasons no one understood.

Zhen Ji felt goose bumps rise on her arms despite the bland warmth. She hugged her arms around her waist and left the terrace as a wind started up. Retreating into the castle, she listened to the soft padding of her silken slippers as she glided across the stone floors, passing empty rooms and fluttering curtains as she went. The barrenness of the palace at Yecheng seemed to match the mood of the area and the depression and void of the day and age. She remembered quite well the strange welcoming feeling of the palace when she had first arrived some odd years ago; the palace was alive, throbbing with people and voices, laughter and conversations drifting to and from on the air like a birds chirp.

Now, there was nothing. There were no joyful voices carrying on the wind, there were no interesting conversations to overhear and engage in, and there were no people to fill the large halls and rooms; there was nothing left of the former glory that was Han. Not even her new family remained. Her father-in-law, the tall and mighty Yuan Shao, had gone off to conspire with other warlords about the issue of the hideous man known as Dong Zhuo. Her husband had subsequently been sent off to govern some out of the way place to, what Zhen Ji assumed, as to keep the man out of trouble and harm's way.

Really, Zhen Ji had married quite the useless bundle of sticks. She had lamented being married to someone so plain for she had imagined herself being swept off her feet by a handsome warrior who would protect her and treasure her-such as all young girls dream-but instead was graced with quite the regular looking man with nothing more than his father's name to live off of. Easing into such a marriage was relatively simple. Yuan Xi was timid and afraid of nearly everything and was too frightened to take his wife to bed for fear of injuring her. He was nothing like his brothers. They too were also away on war-matters.

Zhen Ji slowly allowed herself in through half-way opened doors made of heavy wood. The room she had entered wasn't decorated as she thought it would be. When she had first arrived, she had expected the wife of Yuan Shao to have jade literally falling from the ceiling. She was surprised to find minimal luxuries and the most simple of furniture.

Her feet padded on the floor, careful to give the simple bed with its simple sheets a wide birth, and Zhen Ji sat herself on a little wooden stool. Yuan Shao's wife lay quiet in her bed, thin sheets tucked up to her chin and her face a deathly pale. The healthy Zhen Ji reached into a shallow basin and rung out a piece of silk, gently dabbing her mother-in-law's forehead with the soft cloth. Zhen Ji did not find it fitting to accompany her husband to his new abode when her mother-in-law lay wasting away in a prison-like palace.

A prison...

Zhen Ji placed the cloth back into the water and watched the older woman sleep. She had been having a fever for quite some time, and her health had been poor for some time-it had been teetering on the edge of oblivion a long time before Zhen Ji had even reached adulthood; it was only a matter of time before the woman finally passed on.

Staying at the home of her husbands' father, attempting to ease the pain of her mother-in-law in a palace void of life, her own life becoming more and more empty with each passing day, Zhen Ji often wondered what her father would think of her if he had been alive. She knew little about him and lived off fantasies of what he was like. To Zhen Ji, her father was a strong and proud man, filled with life and energy and passion that couldn't be matched by a man, but perhaps a deity. Perhaps her father was some sort of mythical being? No, that was silly, falling into a fantasy of her childhood husband of gallantry.

Zhen Ji reached over and dabbed at the older woman's forehead once again.

Her father would not have wanted this sort of life for his daughter. The father Zhen Ji imagined would have wanted his daughter not rotting away in a stone cage, caring for a hopeless bundle of flesh and blood, but instead wanted her fighting and striving for something more, something imarvelous/i.

He would have wanted her to create a name for herself, to step up to the frontlines in such a time and take this strange fate by the neck, twist and turn until it broke, and then to break free and create something new for herself as he might have done in his dreams.

Zhen Ji allowed herself to think thoughts as such for quite some time, allowing a fantasy to wash over her about the future. She imagined herself beautiful, more beautiful than she was already proclaimed to be, and strong with a strong man at her side instead of a weak little thing.

She looked at her fragile mother-in-law in distaste. She had never known the woman, they had never met as she was perpetually asleep; if she awoke, Zhen Ji was never there and was never summoned to the woman's bedside. Perhaps this strange bareness, courtesy of Yuan Xi, kept the woman from inquiring about her new daughter-in-law. It would be a lie to claim that it did not hurt when she was never summoned, and Zhen Ji found herself dabbing at her eyes with long sleeves of her gown when no one came just outside the bedroom and beckoned her inside, but it would not be so much a lie to say that Zhen Ji really cared whether or not she really knew the woman lying a few inches away from her.

Zhen Ji's stare narrowed and she looked down at the woman with contempt. Really, she wondered as she fingered the silk over the bowl, how could someone as fragile as Yuan Xi come from such a hateful person, and how could Yuan Shao bear staying with such a creature? Perhaps that is why the lord had left and why his son was removed from the palace. Perhaps that is why the woman is confined to the state of illness and slumber, a punishment for her awful actions and words towards others.

Zhen Ji's father would not have wanted her to live such a life, and Zhen Ji agreed. She was not destined to be married to a boneless fish for a man, nor serve under his arrogant, albeit kind and strong, father in an age where nothing was certain and power was up for grabs; power that Zhen Ji found herself thirsty for.

The servants and handmaidens were not tending to the lady this day, busy loitering around in the village getting provisions for the upcoming week. There were guards, of course, posted around the palace, but none were allowed into the lady's room.

Ever so quietly, Zhen Ji balled the silk cloth up and slowly opened her mother-in-law's mouth. She slipped the hazy blue fabric passed the woman's wilted lips and slammed her jaw upwards. The lady's body twitched and Zhen Ji leaned over and pressed her arm over the woman's nose while her hand kept her jaw shut and her mouth closed. Strangely, there was no sound, but instead Zhen Ji felt the old body twitch and jerk underneath her and it used all her weight to keep the woman from flopping off the bed and preventing Zhen Ji to begin her journey.

It was relatively quick, but then Zhen Ji did not know how long it took to kill a person by suffocation, and Zhen Ji quickly pulled the silk out of the woman's mouth and repositioned her and made the bed back to the way it had been prior to the rustle and bustle. Placing the silk into the bowl, Zhen Ji thought of her father-she thought about how he'd be proud of her and how he'd pat the top of her head fondly, praising her for beginning to break from the bonds she had been placed into-and started to cry. She rubbed at her eyes with her delicate fingers and croaked out a call for the guards, for a physician, for anyone to help.

Once the diagnosis of death had been made, the guards escorted Zhen Ji to her chambers and some of the younger maidens in service of the Yuan's stayed within Zhen Ji's rooms to mourn with the lovely woman while the news was delicately worded to be sent off to Yuan Shao and his sons.

Lying in her large bed, Zhen Ji stared at her darkened ceiling, imaging her life up until this point. She imagined it as a multitude of thread dancing around and around in the wind, united far off in the distance by her far off childhood back at her home, and dangling loosely and uselessly in front of her soft face. She envisioned herself reaching out and taking hold of all the threads with both her hands, long fingers wrapping around and keeping the soft fabric bound to her. Zhen Ji imagined herself weaving and weaving, pulling everything back together and turned to look at the threads ahead of her. They were invisible but she could feel them pulsating. They were waiting for her to step out and search for them.

She was ready to take that walk into the unknown, ready to seize the world by the collar and bend it to her will. She was ready to make a name for herself that would reverberate throughout time and would live on, somehow, when time had come to its eventual end. Yes, Zhen Ji was absolutely ready to create something absolutely marvelous.