4 MONTHS AGO.

When Loquat’s eyes began recording Yuhui, he was sitting on the edge of his bed, back turned to the bird, skin fully exposed. His shoulders were shaking and his breath was ragged, softly gasping, hairline choked. His hands were busy with something in his lap.

After a few moments, he took a deep breath to calm himself. The item he was fussing with was Lin’ai’s shirt and Yuhui slipped it onto his body, letting the fabric hang open over his chest. He turned toward the bird, folding his bare legs underneath him as he sat in the space he slept, still warm from his sleepless shifting.

For the most part, the technology that Loquat was descended from was too basic to capture the subtlety of shades. She didn’t quite present the full picture of that prince who’d worried himself into a morbid sort of pre-mourning, couldn’t render the reds of his enduring agony properly. Overnight, he’d watched all the salacious videos that his long distance lover sent, but all he could manage was to cry. For Yuhui, the yearning was too real to feign selfishness, their distance was growing too far for him to relax, palpable in the increasingly dire surroundings he saw that mercenary occupying.

Yuhui looked into the bird’s eyes and his face was a galaxy of sadness. Digitized glitter sparkled in the corners of his eyes and over his cheeks, his tears were rendered crystal, falling like a cataclysm of sinking stars. He sniffed and rubbed his face.

“Hi Lin,” Yuhui began. “I know you meant the best, but your last message made me really sad. I don’t like to hear that you are prioritizing me over your own safety—I don’t like knowing that you should be keeping you and your brother safe so you can come back to me, but are instead watching me ramble on about nothing. You looked miserable. Whatever you were huddled under looked like shit. Don’t spend time watching me when you’re supposed to be gathering supplies to help you survive. It doesn’t make me happy. It doesn’t please me at all!” Worked up anew, the boy brought his hands to his face to catch his breath again.

“I love you so much, don’t you understand? I’ve never loved someone like this before—I’ve never loved someone enough to feel my heart throbbing in my chest when I imagine the very real possibility that all I will have left of them are some simple recordings of them and an old shirt.” The prince wiped his eyes, smearing the cosmos of his woe across his skin. “I miss you. I told you to be careful, to not get careless. Do you know how hard it is to watch the person you love struggle in glimpses and not be able to do anything to help them? Aah—I didn’t want to send you a message like this. I’m sorry that I’m so upset. I’m really worried. Promise me that you are going to come back to me. Promise me that you are okay. Come back to me so I can kiss away the taste of frost on your tongue, come back to me so I can fill your bones with fire—”

Yuhui picked up Loquat. “Come back to me. I love you Lin’ai. I love you.”

x x x

Two weeks later, Loquat returned.

She was famished and exhausted, too drained to respond to any of her usual voice commands or even grace the Prince’s ears with her ancient number song. When she did manage to cough up a video, the image was stark: Lin’ai by a campfire, bundled up in all the clothes he owned, breath so cold it drifted like cigarette smoke even though the boy’s fingers were bereft. There was only woods about him—everything frozen, white, dead.

“Hey Yuhui,” the boy said with a grin that quickly faded. That trickster face was somber and he looked down; he remained quiet because Ao was sleeping nearby. “I didn’t mean to make you so upset. I was just playing. I wanted you to know how much I missed you. You’re the only thing keeping me alive up here, you get that, right? The only warmth I get is imagining being anywhere but here; anywhere with you. Watching you cry is… ah. You twist the knife in my guts real good, don’t you.” Lin ran his hands through his hair, scratched at the side of his head, then rubbed his neck, looking away from Loquat for a moment. He glanced back after a few moments. “I love you. I’m being as careful as I can be, I promise. You gotta know I’m doing everything to get back to you. You have to know that.”

There was a rumbling, low and distant. Lin’ai looked up, brows knotted in concern he did his best to veil with his charmer’s face, his carefree eyes.

“I’m sorry I made you cry. I’m sorry for everything. I’m—”

The rumbling grew louder, louder still, till there was only the roar of the avalanche. Lin’s head snapped to the side; he shouted Ao’s name, voice frayed between fear’s shriek and dismay’s warning. Loquat’s POV drew out and away, tumbling, tumbling, dropped and rolled, obstructed by the thick clot of snow that knocked both Lin and her over. The image she projected now was chaos, frantic searching, her own calls screaming, clipping overdriving her recording into waveform distortion. Without a command to end the recording, Yuhui was left to watch her search, to see what she saw, hear what she heard: the very tips of trees emerging from an endless sprawl of featureless white snow and the mourning call of a little blue bird left alone in the wild.

“Oh no, oh no—” The prince was working himself up to hyperventilation, breaths short and choppy on the sick sea of his emotion. “No, no, no…!” Bleary-eyed, he heard nothing but the static of tragedy, the cold wind of destruction chilling him to the bone through a vicarious vision. The sound of trees snapping in the distance were like his every limb, simultaneously broken by the weight of his heartbreak—his heart chuffing the algid rime of an ancient din. He was breaking down; he was a timorous mess of grieving tremors. Yuhui watched and watched for shapes to come back, but the blank white stare of the void was too consumptive. The atmosphere cracked, and so did he, crying out in a snowshorn sob, shrieking tears into the palms of his hands.

Heavy bootsteps quickly rounded the corner and the head of the King’s guard, Gao Erxun, tore open the Prince’s door, sword drawn, letting the night air spill into the royal boy’s quarters.

“Young Master, is there a problem?” the intimidating man asked as he swept into the room, searching for the intruder pulling the pained sounds from the Prince’s throat. He cut a broad figure, a threat even when he was simply walking, head shaved and always standing to his full towering height. Despite his size and reputation, Gao Erxun had kind eyes ever hidden beneath a suspicious brow. His armor gleamed in the moonlight, black damascus steel and midnight lacquer. “Is someone hurting you, my Prince?”

Yuhui bunched his knees to his chest, huddling into himself. He wrapped his arms around his legs as the recording continued to play nothing but northern landscape—all features erased for a new blanket of white.

“H-he’s gone,” the boy answered the guard, muffled by both his position and his frailty. “I love him and he’s gone.”

The warrior halted his search to look directly at the boy, the bird, the scene, the snow—

“Should I request the Queen’s presence, my Prince?” Gao Erxun knew when he encountered a problem he was not equipped to solve. The prince did as well, furiously nodding into his knees.

The King’s guard left just as quickly as he came, quick to go straight to the queen’s chamber to inform her of her son’s distress.

Soon, Yuhui was joined by his mother, silent as a ghost, cascade of transparent silk from her night dress pooling like water on the iron flecked bamboo floor. The queen was beautiful, pale with long narrow eyes and regal bones, black hair fading to a startling white in her bluntly cut forelock and along her temples, a brand she wore proudly from overtaxing her abilities during the war. She didn’t move to comfort her son; she simply sat at the edge of his bed and watched the scene that was unfolding before him, watched the endless drifts of nothing, watched the way he hugged his knees. She waited for Yuhui to make the first sound. She would wait as long as it took for her devastated child to find his voice.

“I love him so much.” Yuhui immediately confessed, chin lifting for the one person he was willing to talk to in his bleakest moments. Eyes rimmed with crimson watched a few more moments of the bird’s bleak footage, then turned to his mother. “My heart feels like a star dying in the darkest night. My blood is boiling but my fingers are cold and shaking.”

Still watching all the nothing Loquat had to offer, the flashing grid of the mountains followed by the safety of trees, the queen remained momentarily silent. She leaned forward and took her son’s hand in her own, chaos weaver calming chaos personified.

“My sweet child, my sweet Yu’er,” she said, voice like gold leaf thread. “It’s easy to assume the worst, isn’t it? To fall into the pit of dread love digs for us.” She held his hand in her lap, calm as Loquat began to investigate her. “Your little messenger is so good; she is such a faithful little creature. She has brought you a great many things but think: is what she showed you absolute? Is it proof?”

Yuhui scooted closer and leaned into his mother. He made her take more than his hand, needed more touch than fingers and palms.

“How could it not be? He didn’t end the recording, didn’t tell her to come back here. She just did. What else could that possibly mean?” He wiped his chin, damp with sorrow. “If she can’t connect to him, what else is she supposed to do? Loquat only knows him and here. If he was still there, she’d know where he was.”

“Did you see him unmoving in all that snow?” Taking her child in her arms, she rested her cheek upon his head, stroked between his shoulder blades with the tips of her nails like osprey talons. “There is always the chance that he survived. Surely you, bright eyed star of my endless night with your heart so faithful—surely you can let yourself hope till all means are exhausted.”

“What means?” Yuhui’s weeping was receding to a persistent tremble in the back of his throat, but his tears still fell from the bottomless well of his eyes. He stared ahead into the darkness of his courtyard. Of course he didn’t see Lin’s body—it’d been swallowed up in the earth’s ivory maw. “Loquat is all I have.”

“Silly child,” his mother replied. “There is an entire aviary not one hundred yards from where you sit.”

“You would let me send the palace birds?” Yuhui looked up to his mother, eyes wide as the world, wet as its oceans.

“To find the truth, to save a life, to follow each path to its very end, no matter what is revealed: these are all noble pursuits,” Weifeng replied softly, stroking Yuhui’s tear-streaked cheeks as she looked down upon him. The color of their eyes was so much the same: black as pitch, as null, as void. “Time is not on our side, is it? Gather your bird.”

Yuhui nodded and pulled away from the queen, wiping his face on the long sleeves of his robe, hands gripping the silk from inside. He sniffed and gathered Loquat, then pushed himself up from the bed.

“Thank you, mother.” The prince’s voice was still chilled from the gravesite he imagined his lover’s body to be buried, but surely the warmth of maternal love would help him thaw.

x x x

Later in the night, a hundred birds, all different yet all mirroring Loquat’s pairing to Lin’ai’s body signature, flew from Skyline manor. They blotted out the moon with their wings, filled the air with the sound of flight.

It took a week for the raptors to return without word. Then came the others: the doves, the songbirds, the cardinals and jays. The last to arrive home was Loquat herself, two weeks after the birds’ hunt had started, three days after the last of the palace’s keep returned from their mission. When she arrived home, exhausted and gaunt, barely able to sing her old preprogrammed song, she had nothing but old memories to offer. She was a vault containing the last weeks of Yuhui’s love affair with a boy who always warned of his impermanence.

Yuhui, silent in his persisting lamentation, made a home for Loquat in his compact courtyard. He was content to watch her hop among the camellia bushes, to hear her petite beak crush the clattering legs of needlepoint spiders setting spindle traps for smaller prey. She had food and water aplenty, the freedom to roam and shelter from bouts of heavy weather, a place to sleep inside if she was lonely. He played with her like a pet, showered her with an affection that was allowed to blossom since her retirement from fetch questing. He treated her like a treasure, a gift—a little sapphire gem given to him from that boy he loved, a vessel of reminders that he couldn’t bear to rewatch.

Every afternoon, Yuhui listened to her sing the song of that boy he missed so much, warmed by the setting sun and still as white as the grieving moon.