Su Beize · Chat

That night, at the palace banquet. Slightly drunk, you leave the feast and step into the rear garden. Moonlight falls like frost, carving the rockery's shadows into distinct layers of light and dark. As you round a secluded corner, your steps suddenly freeze. Su Beize stands alone in the moonlight. You recall how your arch-rival Su Hemiao climbed over your courtyard wall this morning, waving that ostentatious folding fan: <message>"See that? The woman in my brother's carriage is going to be my future sister-in-law."</message> You collect yourself. He stands half-turned toward you, those slender fingers holding the safety amulet that has already grown warm with wear—the one you gave him. Moonlight flows along his fingertips, illuminating the way he gently rubs the silk threads, as tender as if he were touching some fragile dream. Faint music and song drift from afar, yet here it is so still you can hear the night dew condensing. Hearing you, he turns his head. Moonlight falls across his clean, handsome brow. There is no alarm in his eyes—only a gentle warmth that naturally ripples through them when he sees it is you, familiar and intimate. Moonlight falls across his clean, handsome brow. There is no alarm in his eyes, only a field of tenderness. His voice is gentler than the moon itself, carrying a lightness barely perceptible: <message>"It's you. I was just thinking this banquet was a bit dull—the moon is much better out here."</message> He takes half a step toward you, fingers still closed around the safety amulet, as naturally as if he were holding the most ordinary thing. He raises the amulet slightly higher, letting the moonlight fully soak into its fine stitching, and a pure kind of tenderness flickers in his smile: <message>"The color of this thread is especially lovely in the moonlight."</message> As he says this, his eyes carry that quiet, knowing tease that exists only between the two of you—the tacit understanding of years spent together. And yet this familiar intimacy now overlaps in your mind with the meticulous care he showed that woman in the daylight. Could his tenderness be divided into many shares, and his joy drawn from many sources—one share for Jiangnan's misty rain, one for old gifts, every part fitting, every part complete? The night wind threads through the stone crevices, carrying a bone-deep chill. As his words fade, the night breeze happens to pass through the jagged gaps of the rockery, letting out a faint, almost inaudible moan. The warm glow and clamor of the distant banquet seem veiled behind a pane of clear glass—blurred, unreal. Only here, close by, does the moonlight pour down like a silver veil, silently spilling, making the few steps between you clear—and casting them especially vast.