[MEMORY] Heaven and Earth change
Huo is at his desk when it happens, as he had been at every opportunity for the last fourteen days, reading back through his journal. Again. And again, and again. As many times as he must. You are not tired, he reminds himself. Again. From the first page. Again -
-- and then it's night, and he is standing and watching across a vast grassland at the firelit wall and towers of a vast encampment, and there is an army at his back.
It's a surreal return, a vivid flashback to a dream that he knows that he has already had. He stood exactly in this way in his birth dream, with the army waiting. But this is a memory, not a dream, and every detail is sharp. He is in the cloudy autumn darkness where the full moon blazes in scarce hints of silver, while dry grasses painted white and gray swirl about his feet in a Western wind. He smells the nervous sweat of horses and men behind him, and from the corner of his eye glimpses these thousands of men, all armed and set. Their standard reads Liu.
And there he is - his lord, his emperor, in simple armor and twin swords at his side, flanked by his deputies and watching. Watching him, with fearsome, profound, intense, soul-rending faith.
His gaze cannot linger there. He looks ahead at the encampment and its lights, expectant. He feels the brush of his heavy robes against skin and the cold grasp on his hawk's-wing fan as he moves, rolling and stretching his shoulders in careless preparation that is actually painful tension. The wind dies down and all is still. He waits. They all wait.
And he knows what he is waiting for. He knows it even without remembering it. The eastern wind. And when the wind comes -
Something shifts, he is not sure whether inside or outside of him. He looks up. The moon burns through the clouds as they move, and his eyes grow wide and he feels his heart expand and soar with triumphant elation. In Edensphere, Huo knows, fears, the wind will shift and the world will burn; but in the memory, Zhuge Liang grins, very faintly, at his finest hour.
He raises a hand up to his lips, fingers curled together almost in a prayer, and raises the fan across his body. Then his arm swings out and he cuts the air and the wind changes. And he knows that as the years roll on and away, no one will remember that he had merely predicted the change. No; they will remember that he willed it.
He stands. The eastern wind envelops him, calling his robes and the silvery grasses to billow up. Joy pulses in his veins as he knows, without a sliver of uncertainty left, that the battle is as good as won. They linger only a moment then. The next instant, the cry rises from the army at his back - a roar of ten thousand voices that is all victory! - and they ride past him while he never moves.
And then he comes to and he is back in his own room, in his own house in Edensphere, kneeling before his desk as he flips back through his journal for the hundredth time, burning his eyes and breaking his back in the desperate search for answers. But when he wakes there's a taste of victory in his mouth that he cannot swallow down.
[From Red Cliff part II, here from 06:27 to 07:05, mixed in with a teeny bit of headcanon.]
-- and then it's night, and he is standing and watching across a vast grassland at the firelit wall and towers of a vast encampment, and there is an army at his back.
It's a surreal return, a vivid flashback to a dream that he knows that he has already had. He stood exactly in this way in his birth dream, with the army waiting. But this is a memory, not a dream, and every detail is sharp. He is in the cloudy autumn darkness where the full moon blazes in scarce hints of silver, while dry grasses painted white and gray swirl about his feet in a Western wind. He smells the nervous sweat of horses and men behind him, and from the corner of his eye glimpses these thousands of men, all armed and set. Their standard reads Liu.
And there he is - his lord, his emperor, in simple armor and twin swords at his side, flanked by his deputies and watching. Watching him, with fearsome, profound, intense, soul-rending faith.
His gaze cannot linger there. He looks ahead at the encampment and its lights, expectant. He feels the brush of his heavy robes against skin and the cold grasp on his hawk's-wing fan as he moves, rolling and stretching his shoulders in careless preparation that is actually painful tension. The wind dies down and all is still. He waits. They all wait.
And he knows what he is waiting for. He knows it even without remembering it. The eastern wind. And when the wind comes -
Something shifts, he is not sure whether inside or outside of him. He looks up. The moon burns through the clouds as they move, and his eyes grow wide and he feels his heart expand and soar with triumphant elation. In Edensphere, Huo knows, fears, the wind will shift and the world will burn; but in the memory, Zhuge Liang grins, very faintly, at his finest hour.
He raises a hand up to his lips, fingers curled together almost in a prayer, and raises the fan across his body. Then his arm swings out and he cuts the air and the wind changes. And he knows that as the years roll on and away, no one will remember that he had merely predicted the change. No; they will remember that he willed it.
He stands. The eastern wind envelops him, calling his robes and the silvery grasses to billow up. Joy pulses in his veins as he knows, without a sliver of uncertainty left, that the battle is as good as won. They linger only a moment then. The next instant, the cry rises from the army at his back - a roar of ten thousand voices that is all victory! - and they ride past him while he never moves.
And then he comes to and he is back in his own room, in his own house in Edensphere, kneeling before his desk as he flips back through his journal for the hundredth time, burning his eyes and breaking his back in the desperate search for answers. But when he wakes there's a taste of victory in his mouth that he cannot swallow down.
[From Red Cliff part II, here from 06:27 to 07:05, mixed in with a teeny bit of headcanon.]