More of Sang-ro
Author: Sark
Rating: PG-13
Challenge:
Sangria # 23 - “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” - TS Eliot
Teaberry #26 - “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.” - Robert Frost
Extras / Toppings: None
Word Count: 396
Story: The Wind and Rain Chronicle (yay, it has a name!)
Summary: Sang-ro’s brief encounter with the Dragon’s previous host.
Potter Cho, who gave Sang-ro an empty storage room to sleep in and three decent meals a day in return for her labor at his workshop, didn’t tell her anything about the old man, but his daughter Ah-vong did. Ah-vong and Sang-ro had been friends once, before Sang-ro’s mother died and she became Ah-vong’s father’s good deed. It was hard to maintain a friendship when one of the people involved slept in a storeroom and ate thin congee with the bond servants and the other was engaged to the headman’s son. There was too much awkwardness involved. Nonetheless, Ah-vong was still kind to Sang-ro, and told her that Potter Cho had accepted five copper coins to allow an old traveler to share Sang-ro’s room.
He was asleep on her bedroll when Sang-ro went to the storeroom after dinner with the bond servants. She couldn’t object, since he was clearly her elder, but she did pull one of the thin blankets off him to wrap herself in. She told herself he didn’t need it, and went to sleep listening to his ragged breathing.
The breathing was gone when she the she woke. The predawn light cast a shadow on the door in the shape of the lattice of the high window on the back wall. Sang-ro disentangled herself from her blanket and dressed in her loose trousers and tunic. She turned to the door and saw that the man had left her bedroll loose and rumpled.
Grabbing the the blanket she’d left the old man off of the thin straw pad, she found that the pad was covered in a mound of dust.
“What in the hells?” Sang-ro muttered, kneeling down to scoop up a handful of the stuff. It was warm and a little clingy, but so fine that it slipped through the cracks between her fingers like water. Where she had scooped up her handful, new dust slid in to cover the empty dip, but not before Sang-ro caught sight of something shining like polished ivory underneath. rush of blood in her ears. Something white-hot ran up her spine like water flowing the wrong way.
She brushed away the dust, telling herself as the shape emerged that she had found an ivory bowl, a bowl with a strange handle with two holes for fingers.
When she found the jaw bone, she could no longer lie.