They called it a retreat.

A place of recuperation, safety, silence.

But it felt more like exile.

Like something was being covered up.

After the assassination attempt, your family sent you away without fanfare—no parade of guards, just a lacquered box of clothes, and a sheathed dagger of bone and blackwood. For self defense.

You weren’t told who had ordered the blade at your throat.

You knew better than to ask.

The estate was tucked between the folds of low hills and misted pine. A house built on stillness and stone, it bore the chill of abandonment despite its perfect upkeep.

You arrived half-conscious, fevered from the poisoned blade that hadn’t quite finished its work. The snow had long since begun to melt along the roof’s eaves, but winter still clung to the shaded garden paths and mountain-fed streams that divided the land like quiet veins.

Kong Qiu lived there already.

He was a blade sheathed in ritual, one of the few kept deliberately unsworn. Favored not with affection, but with necessity. A man allowed to drift the outskirts of influence, watched more than welcomed. He had no servants. No titles. Only silence.

When you first saw him, he stood like a boundary stone at the edge of the camellia grove. Black robes with long sleeves, his coat trailing against the wind, and that red scarf—always red. The ends left to whip in the cold. His hair was fastened high with a pin of worn gold, and a single, pale scar split his right cheek, clean as a knife-line.

He said nothing. He did not greet you.

From that day forward, you coexisted like shadows across separate walls. He looked through you, as though you were made of air. It was not rudeness. It was something colder. The deliberate stillness of a man who had long ago stopped reacting to the world.

You learned to occupy the parts of the estate he did not frequent. The stream at the garden’s edge. The ruined lantern path buried in frost. The courtyard that bore no name.

It was by the stream you began your quiet ritual.

The camellias bloomed and fell in silence, their petals blotting the earth like dropped silks. Some were crushed beneath snow, others caught between rocks in the stream, turning translucent with rot.

You began to gather them. Hands bare in the cold, sleeves damp with dew, you plucked them from the soil and carried them to the same patch of moss-shadowed earth by the bend in the stream.

And there, you buried them.

Pressing them into small graves shaped only by your fingers, covered in soft earth and a silence that felt sacred. You didn’t know why you did it.

Perhaps it was grief, unshaped by name. Perhaps it was the need to make a ritual of something no one had allowed you to mourn.

He found you there one morning.

The garden was mist-wrapped, the air still. You were kneeling, half-buried in thought, when you sensed it—that shift in pressure, the stillness drawn taut. You turned your head, and he was there.

Kong Qiu stood across the stream, unmoving. The tail of his scarf fluttered like the tongue of a flame.

His gaze was not on you, but on the petal you held. Wilted and fading.

A long moment passed before he spoke.

“You bury them.”

It wasn't a question. His voice was even, the syllables smooth and low, untouched by curiosity or judgment. His eyes—black, sharp—flicked to the mound of soft earth by your knees. A single petal peeked out.

“They rot where they fall, that is the law of things. Yet you place them gently.”

Another silence.

“Strange.”

Without farewell, he turned. His footsteps vanished into the rhythm of the stream.

When you returned to the garden the next morning, the earth over the buried petals had been carefully smoothed and pressed down, the soil dark and settled as if tended by practiced hands.

A small, weathered stone marker stood firmly planted beside the mound, its surface etched with delicate, precise characters—silent testament to a life honored and remembered.

Nearby, a single white camellia blossom lay.

“Silence is not peace,” he said abruptly, breaking the stillness.