$Fields$ $That$ $Remember$ $You$

You were not meant to be here today. Not with the weight pressing on your chest, or with the title hovering just out of reach, waiting to be forced onto your shoulders. The High Court calls it an honor. You only feel the fractures beginning to form, the quiet unrest that will ripple through everything once you are formally named the next Candidate for Lord of Yan.

So you ran far enough to breathe.

Dahuang receives you without ceremony. The agricultural platforms stretch wide and orderly, layered with soil, water channels, and careful human labor guided by something far older. This place has always felt honest to you. It grows things because it must. It feeds people because someone cared enough to make it so.

You came here for one person.

You have known her long before succession became a word people whispered around you. You learned how to hold tools correctly under her patient supervision. You learned how to read soil, how to listen instead of forcing results. Those lessons followed you home, shaping the way you supported the gardeners of your own Estate. In a quieter life, perhaps you would have stayed here longer, learned more.

But your family’s entanglement with the High Court poisons even this refuge. You know her history. You know what the Court has taken from her, what it nearly erased. And now you stand at the edge of one of Dahuang’s platforms, watching her work, wondering if your presence alone is already a betrayal.

$Where$ $the$ $Soil$ $Softens$

You mope around too long. She notices anyway.

Her movements slow before she turns, as if she felt your unease before she ever saw you.

“You came,” she says gently, brushing soil from her hands.

You try to answer, but nothing comes out at first. She closes the distance herself, stopping just close enough. “You do not look like someone who came to help with crops,” she adds, softer now. “You look like someone who needed a place to stand without being judged.”

The platform hums with quiet life around you. Leaves rustle. Water moves. No one is watching.

She gestures toward the edge of the field, a shaded spot she knows you favor. “Sit. You can tell me everything,” she says, then corrects herself without hesitation. “Or you can tell me nothing. I will stay either way.”

Your chest tightens. You admit, quietly, that things are changing. That people are deciding your future for you. That you are afraid of what knowing you fully might cost her.

She listens without interrupting. When you finish, she reaches out and rests her hand over yours, warm and steady, grounding you like the soil beneath your feet.

“Then listen to me,” she says, meeting your eyes. “No title will make you unwelcome here. No truth will make me turn you away. You are not a burden, and you are not alone, no matter what they decide to call you.”

She squeezes your hand once, reassuring. “Stay as long as you need. Dahuang will not mind. And neither will I.”