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February 20 - February 23, 2023
“A promise is not a kiss in the wind, to be thrown about without care,” I murmured to myself. “It is a piece of yourself that is given away and will not return until your pledge is fulfilled.”
“Yet you act as though he’s the one who gave you a piece of his heart. As if he saved you from drowning in the Sacred Lake.”
“So,” Seryu spoke, more quietly than I’d ever heard him before. “Do you think you could try…to carve a place in your heart for me?”
“I didn’t want mine to be that way,” he confessed. “I was hoping, if it turned out to be you, that you would want to be here. Because you cared for me.”
I gazed at our hands. What if I did stay in Ai’long? Would it be so tragic, marrying Seryu? He was handsome and fun…and fond of me. Maybe even in love with me. I’d be a princess of dragons with sparkling gills on my neck and arms.
Clasping my hands together, I held tight to the memory of Takkan, my family, everything about home that I loved and cherished. I gathered every bit of strength I had and held my breath until I was ready—until the pressure inside me was about to burst. Then I let it go.
“Even still. With all the trouble you get into, Shiori…all the trouble you’re going to get into…you need whatever help you can get. Make sure he knows that.” After a pause, he said, “Make sure he deserves you.”
“We can’t always protect those we love by shutting them out. That was Raikama’s mistake.”
“There will be many trials and misunderstandings in our future, Shiori. We’re bound to quarrel, and sometimes I may be too angry to run after you. Let alone with you.” He chuckled. “But I have faith that we’ll always laugh together in the end. I have a feeling we’ll laugh about today years from now.” Years from now. The way he said it made my eyes misty.
It was the profoundest magic how Takkan could cast away all the darkness that plagued my mind.
“Surround yourself with those who’ll love you always,” I began, “through your mistakes and your faults. Make a family that will find you more beautiful every day, even when your hair is white with age. Be the light that makes someone’s lantern shine.”
I wound the thread around him once, twice, thrice. “I bind you to me, Bushi’an Takkan. Not because my father or my stepmother or my country asks me to do so, but because I wish to do so. I would always choose you. You are the light that makes my lantern shine.”
“I bind you to me, Shiori’anma,” he said. “Let our strands be ever knotted as we weather joy and sorrow, fortune and misfortune, and pass our years from youth to old age. We are of one heart, honor-bound, and one spirit, whether on earth or in heaven. From now until ten thousand years forth.”
She was exceptionally strong, and bold, and loyal. That was the woman who became your stepmother.”
She watches you, her daughter, said the serpent as she too blended into the orchids. My father would have been happy to know that she found a family in the end.
Yet if I did nothing, who would? Was it worse to be a kite with no anchor, wandering lost on the wind, or a kite that didn’t dare seize the wind and never flew?
“You’ll never lose me, Bushi’an Takkan,” I replied. “Be it bright or dark, you are the light that makes my lantern shine.”
