Kingdom Falling | Gyuricky forty eight.

It was the first time Ricky Shen had ever experienced a feeling like this.

He didn’t have many memories of his early childhood, as most people didn’t. His earliest memories were of sitting in the schoolroom, in neat rows with the other six year olds in the sect, and learning how to meditate for the first time. It would take them five years to develop a spiritual core. Ricky didn’t have one until the year he turned thirteen.

He didn’t remember who his mother or father was. There were many other children in the sect who had one parent or less, like him, but unlike him, they were usually missing a parent because one or both of them had successfully cultivated to ascension, and now resided in the heavenly realm. It was not uncommon; the list of names of ascended disciples, carved into the bright crystal walls of the Hall of Reflections, was so expansive that if he stood far enough away, the characters would look like a snowstorm on the heaviest winter day.

But he’d asked Yookyung about his parents before. Yookyung had told him his father died in battle, some time before he was born, and he’d taken him to see his grave in the mountains behind the Palace. Ricky still went there every New Year, every Tomb-Sweeping Day, every Mid-Autumn Festival, to pay his respects to the father he’d never gotten the chance to know.

“What about my mother?” he’d asked.

He was younger then. Yookyung wasn’t much older than him, they were only a little more than ten years apart, but he took Ricky by the shoulders and said softly, “Your mother had a hard time dealing with your father’s death. After she gave birth, her body never recovered fully, and before the season could turn, she was gone.”

“Where’s her grave?”

“She doesn’t have one.”

“Why?”

“Ricky, I don’t have the answer to all your questions,” Yookyung had said. “I wish I did, but I don’t know either.”

After that, when Ricky went to sweep his father’s grave the next New Year, he noticed there was a new one next to it, bearing his mother’s name. Graves at Moonrise Palace were nothing elaborate, only a simple headstone marking the fallen cultivator’s name, their age, and recognizing that they had died with honor. He stooped lower, and looked more closely. The inscription on the headstone was somewhat crooked, and less polished than all the others, but he didn’t mind it.

From then on, every time he visited, he stayed twice as long, and paid his respects to both his parents. Only when he was much older did he realize that Yookyung had gone back that day, thinking about what Ricky had said, and spent the next few weeks learning how to engrave legible words onto stone tablets so he could make a headstone for Ricky’s mother. He’d silently gone back to the graveyard and hammered the gravestone into the ground in the midst of the bitter cold, just in time for New Year’s Day to come, just so Ricky wouldn’t grow up thinking he had no place to remember his mother.

After he’d made that realization, he still paid his respects to both headstones whenever he went, but it felt different. He knew his mother’s body hadn’t really been buried there. There had to have been a reason his mother was the only cultivator in Moonrise Palace without a grave, but by then he was old enough to know not to ask questions that might have unpleasant answers. So he accepted it, and life went on.

For Ricky, life in Moonrise Palace had always been the same. He followed the rules and did what he was supposed to and trained hard, and even though he’d been two years behind everyone else in developing a spiritual core, by the time he was sixteen, he had far surpassed them all. His weapon, Tianling, was more powerful in his hands than in anybody else’s. He stayed quiet and spoke little, focusing on clearing his thoughts and calming his mind, channeling all his energy into the exhilarating feeling of spiritual energy flowing like a bubbling creek through his veins and the deadly whistle of his blade as he swung.

The year he turned twelve, Yookyung became one of the sect’s specialized healers. Ricky had saved two little green-bean cakes from his dinner, and brought them to Yookyung’s quarters so they could celebrate, and they’d eaten them together under the moonlight. Ever since then, on the first day of every month, Ricky would visit Yookyung’s quarters, and Yookyung would give him a dose of medicine that in the earlier years took the form of a bitter-tasting clear liquid, and in the later years became a simple capsule he could swallow with water.

He’d asked why he had to take the medicine, back then. Having grown up in the Palace, he was unaccustomed to strong tastes, and naturally the bitterness of spiritual herbs was unappealing to him. Yookyung had explained to him that because his mother was already in so much distress before she gave birth, he’d been born very weak, and with a poor constitution. The medicine, he’d said, was to help strengthen him, so he could be on par with everyone else in the sect, or there was a great chance he would fall behind.

Ricky suspected that it was partly because of the panacea Yookyung had concocted specially for him that he was able to fully form his spiritual core less than a year later, and advance so quickly in the years that followed, such that he soon showed himself to be one of the finest talents Moonrise Palace was yet to see. As he grew up, Yookyung was like a father and an older brother combined into one. Ricky respected him and followed his advice, and Yookyung went out of his way to look out for him. Yookyung wasn’t taking his father’s place, because in Ricky’s heart his father had never really had a place, but slowly, over the years, he created a place of his own.

When the invitations for the Spirit Beast Festival Training Camp came around, Ricky knew he would receive one. The environment at the camp had been so different from the life he was used to; for one, it was always noisy. Ricky had grown up with his head down, learning that quiet was valued where noise was unnecessary, learning to find peace in silence. But the other cultivators were always talking, always laughing. He didn’t think those were bad things at all, but it felt sometimes like he was putting his face into the surface of a lake and looking into the water, like he was trying to observe a world that wasn’t his own.

Then came Kim Gyuvin. He liked to talk and laugh, and he followed Ricky around places like a puppy when he was bored, and he did curious things like leaving flower petals in Ricky’s hair when he was reading, or pretending to spar with him with tree branches and fallen leaves. The moment they crossed swords for the first time, Ricky knew he had to stay away from him.

Kim Gyuvin had an exceedingly strong cultivation core. Zhanghao and Yujin and the others had talked about it, on the long journey down from the Kunlun mountains to Raintree Town, about the people they were going to meet at the training camp, how there was a cultivator there touted by the commonfolk as the rival of the heavens because his core was said to be as strong as the most venerated seniors of their time. Ricky could feel it when they first met, like an aura that emanated off him. And when they sparred for the first time and he felt pain bloom in his chest like he’d never felt before, he knew to be near Kim Gyuvin was to pave the way to his own demise.

But he’d found himself so inexplicably drawn to him nevertheless, like a moth to fire; he found that as long as he could hear Kim Gyuvin’s bright laughter and hear him speak, even if it was something silly and inconsequential, he could forget about the pain. But sometimes he couldn’t, and on those days he had to turn away and wear no expression on his face, and disappear into his own quarters and isolate himself from everyone else.

He didn’t much care about isolating himself from everyone else. It hurt that he had to isolate himself from him.

But he would take his medicine and the pain would pass, and when he had rested enough and could leave his isolation Kim Gyuvin would be waiting, his eyes shining with so much brightness, and they would go on as if nothing had happened. Kim Gyuvin was endlessly patient, and time would wear away at all things, even the hardest of stone.

It was the first time he knew that grief could cut so deep it hurt to breathe. He’d never known loss, since he’d never known his parents. Moonrise Palace was a safe haven amidst the bitter tribulations of the world, and he’d found solace in its mundaneness. But on the eighth day of the eighth month of the year he turned seventeen, as he broke through the crowd of onlooking spectators and watched the executioner up at the Judgment Gallery bring his sword down onto golden robes he’d fought against and alongside so many times he couldn’t forget it even if he wanted to, he’d felt his heart crumble, like it was tearing itself open inside him. And as the early autumn wind shook the trees high above and the life began to bleed out of the boy in golden robes, he knew loss for the first time in his life, loss so devastating he felt the world grind to a halt around him.

I could have saved you, Gyuvin, I’m too late.

I could have saved you.

Kim Gyuvin left the world on the same day he came into it seventeen years ago. Ricky stayed at the Judgment Gallery until long after the crowds had cleared, until his body had been taken away and the sun had set.