Disclaimer: Chang Ge Xing belongs to Xia Da. Many thanks to xNightDreamerx for the beta.
Truth in Wine
© 2015
Beautiful women will have difficult lives.
At sixteen, Chang Ge had shot down young girls who thought they had finally found their future husband, deliberately and unintentionally.
At eighteen, she was perilously three years into her marriageable age. She watched the scrolls of suitors pining for her burning a marvelous fire. Chang Ge had no time for follies, strategizing with her men and amassing allies to ensure their triumph.
At nineteen, she and all whom she cares for faced the most decisive turn of their lives.
At twenty-one, she, alongside her most loyal retinues acknowledge the fact that Li Chang Ge would never be wed, and be a lone master to them until her last breath. Not many women her age, not in the central plains nor the grasslands, were unwed.
At twenty-three, she found herself with a perfunctory promise with a brute of a man. Late spring the next year, she was married to him. By summer, she found that she was with a child. The news was unwittingly an explosive mess.
At twenty-four, she cried an embarrassing amount at the sight of her baby.
At twenty-six, she has survived a total of four assassination attempts. The most recent one left her left leg inept with a horrible limp.
At twenty-eight, she realized to her own horror that she had eight children.
At thirty, an unprecedented attack deprived her of two children. Her illness took a turn for the worse.
At thirty-one, she was bedridden. In the early winter's chill, Chang Ge laid beside her husband and her children who had cried themselves to sleep, she closed her eyes and slept.
After the clan's funeral rites took place, a party consisting of family and the closest of retinues raced to Chang An for a final tour.
Her remains lay next to her mother's.