The walls came first.
Vast. Crimson. Stretching in both directions until distance made them abstract — their surfaces smooth and unbroken, crowned with dark eaves that curled toward the sky with the particular authority of things that have lasted long enough to forget when they were built.
Heavy, he thought, without slowing his pace as he glanced around in his peripheral vision making sure not to attract attention to himself.
The little eunuch sent to receive him moved ahead with the practiced efficiency of someone who spent most of their life navigating these corridors and had long since stopped just seeing them after all most of the eunuchs working in the imperial palace had been taken there at a young age, so they basically grew up and were cultivated there. Shen Yao remembered that it was how the plot in those dramas his little sister used to watch so he wasn't shocked. He glanced around noting everything — the guards positioned at intervals in the kind of perfect stillness that was trained rather than natural, their armor catching the early light in brief cold flashes. The stone beneath his feet pale from years of use, worn smooth by the passage of people who had stood where he was standing. He glanced up at the palace walls always having this weird feeling.
The atmosphere here feels wrong, he thought as his glanced at the walls
He had this feeling, but he just couldn't tell what it was at least not yet. The feeling of a space where the performance of power had been running so long it had become indistinguishable from power itself. Where the distance between what was said and what was meant had been carefully maintained for so many years it had its own architecture.
Familiar, he thought. Unpleasant, but familiar.
His thoughts flashed back to a memory he'd rather forget a massive giant made of glass and steel rising clean and sharp, tall enough to pierce the sky catching light in cold flashes.
Shen group - a place we'd known as home for the whole of his previous life a sort of coldness flashed in his eyes its presence fleeting.
He quickly pushed those thoughts away like a bad dream. His expression remained neutral. His pace remained steady. He catalogued and filed and kept moving on.
Arriving to his destination he first noted, courtyard where he and the others waited was open and wide, the stone steps rising behind it toward the hall where court would be held. Everyone turned as he arrived — the assembled officials and their sons and the various categories of people for whom this morning was routine.
He received the nods. Returned them with the same cutesy. The late generals' only heir — whatever the original's reputation had been, the name carried weight that preceded the person, and no one present was foolish enough to disrespect it openly.
Some of them are considering it, he noted as his eyes briefly scanned the faces around, reading the small adjustments in posture and expression that people make when they're calculating rather than simply standing.
He was still reading the room when the scoff arrived.
"You have some nerve."
The voice came from the direction of the stone steps — positioned there deliberately, Shen Yao noted, for the angle it gave over the courtyard. Someone had to have arrived early specifically to be standing there when he walked in.
Throwing comments in the royal palace smart, he thought. Or very foolish
"Daring to step into the royal palace, Young Master Shen." The light brown-haired average looking young man in green court robes let the title land with the particular weight of someone who meant it as an insult. The civil rank symbol on his chest placed him clearly — minor but affiliated with something larger. The arrogance of someone who feels superior. "I thought last time's lesson might have taught you something. Or did you come to flaunt your wealth and status in front of me again?"
Shen Yao reached into the original's memory.
Liu Chen. A minor figure on his own. Significant only in the way that tools are significant — a sword held in someone else's hand to harm the original owner. And the hand that held this one—
Li Chang.
The name arrived with everything attached to it. The dark street. The hired men. The original Shen Yao — grieving, drunk, alone, the protection of his parents' names not yet cold before someone decided to test its limits.
One of the culprits, he thought, with a calm that had nothing gentle in it, behind the original's death.
He was still completing that thought when Li Chang himself appeared — green robes, court cap held in one hand, a fan in the other, moving with the comfortable ease of someone who expected space to be made for him. His gaze found Shen Yao and the disgust that crossed his face was the specific kind that doesn't bother to hide itself because it doesn't believe the subject is worth the effort of concealment.
Shen Yao looked at him.
Then he lazily raised one hand and cleaned his ear with his pinky finger — the gesture of a man so thoroughly unbothered by his surroundings that he was attending to personal maintenance.
"You talk too much," he said, in the tone of someone making a factual observation rather than a complaint.
He let the pause sit exactly long enough.
"Has anyone ever told you your voice is too squeaky to be a guy's?"
Lui Chen's face distorted in anger
"You...."Lui Chen stuttered but couldn't find a single word to retort him