Yes, a fleeting dream, or fantasies should be transient. Washed off by the next wave of the ocean called reality. And her mind had never ebbed to set or froth at its edges. It had always maligned herself to grapple with the deepest, darkest secrets all at once.

Her bloodline had always had its own thoughts, and it liked to resonate with things and people around her. She liked it too. Since she shed off her human layer, it was more overwhelming than ever. She was never given a chance to study restraint, or find if such restraint was even possible. There was no chance to grow up and bottle up the excess thoughts that were eating her up. It was always the hope of others, the dragging force in her life that had defined her sole purpose that never gave her a moment to breathe – let alone the pleasure to quiet down and learn a skill or two to tame her wild thoughts and spirits!

So, her dead clansmen, her revenge, her bloodline became her sole concern. Nothing should have mattered anymore, now that she was dead.

The moment she ceased to be something she was, she lost the remaining reason to pursue the past. She knew she wasn't eternal and she knew that for a fact. She had seen death, played with it, felt its fangs and brittle wounds. So many days she had woken up to attempts at assassination rather than to a birdsong, or a mother's sweet chidings. So many hours she had spent arranging the little games of revenge between her elders. She played well – in that game of power, of control, but she lost too many times.

Each time was more humiliating than the other, each loss more dangerous than the previous one had been. Not being a human was no longer a statement of pride but rather, she was turned into a pariah, the other to their altruistic selves! Sacrificing her pleasures was called a duty. She was sanctified, going against her was sacrilegious - yet, only she knew she was there to bear that assigned role as all-forgiving, a dignified saint, and to swallow all pains and harm they caused, because she was not one of them. She could never be one of them!

She played their games. She wasn't petty and returned what was due at the right time and in the right amount. What should come to them was only a matter of time. But in all this, she had never imagined her own death.

In a world where her wishes were perfectly realized, she would have been wandering in space, like many of her ancestors had, with no abode, no destination in sight – eternal as time. But she was chained and drowned, and drowned so well that all her plans couldn't catch up with those people's sinister cold hearts!

She had forgotten how close it was – that fang named death, how closely it had always placed its forefingers over her jugular veins. She had died so inconspicuously that it was funny and ironic.

Some of the threads of her past had been severed, cruelly cut off by an invisible hand, and she now lay gasping for breath like a drowning man, with only a shred of will remaining. The storm she had seen coming had come and gone long ago, but her battered self, it had no respite. She wanted to ask someone, was this the end? Was this the honor she was promised?

How could she dare take a deep breath of ease when she didn't get any closure? What about her dreams? What about that 'hope' that had defined the majority of her past life – why couldn't her blood save her or itself in the last moment, when so many people had placed their endless hope and faith in it? Why wasn’t it still with her? Leaving her behind to fend for herself?

"Look, father. This is the result of your dreams - how pitiful. Not mine, but haven't I accepted that dream of yours as if it were mine? But, here I am. Dead and alive - I can hardly tell. Your bloodline, your hope, my blood and everyone's hope, like dust has settled in some past land. Somewhere so strange…"

The song continued.

She could try. Try to sleep off the past tiredness. Try to forget, a life spent on a knife's edge, with lingering fear of being pushed down the cliff at any moment by her own ignorance. She could try to forget all the malice her blood had churned, and crystallized into her blackened heart. Forget the pain, the agonies…caused by her mind.

Forget the nervousness, the powerlessness of watching her clansmen die one after another, butchered in cold-blood. Forget that piece of earth washed red, with her soles drenched in innocent blood as she screamed and begged an unknown god for help. Forget the shame, forget the pain and innocuous laughter of her enemies – those burning forts and those wailing of her infant cousins, the wailing of that infant's mother and the lamenting silence of that aftermath – her demon, her nightmare. Just because they were now some tales of a past life, must she forget? Shouldn't it be high time to let it all rest? Her past life.

'Should I forget?' A tiredness flickered on her face, muted in anger. She closed her eyes as her heart opened to that ancient rhythm, burning it in her soul, in her human blood. "Why? Why must I forget that shame? Though my revenge is already exacted and made into a thing of the past– but does that wash away the pain left in the aftermath?" What a joke! Should she suddenly stop being herself if she had died once? For each day of her life, she will remember those faces - and curse and pray for those departed souls! She had a right to that.

She was no more the Crown princess of her dynasty, the last of her lineage. But here, she was Wei Zhiruo. But she was a Wei Zhiruo who hadn't forgotten her past. This life could only carry that extra burden of a past life's memories and hatred!

She didn't know why she came to this world. There were some suspicions, and she did feel it floating in the air, lingering in the wind and the petals of the flower, in the cold walls of her new chambers, surrounding her, the strange vehement emotion that was not her own. Or in the mystery of that malicious thought.

Every karma has its bearer. If fate has brought her here, then she must be needed here. Or had intercepted someone's fate who was needed here. A fate, like a spider's web, was weaving invisibly. The rotten stench surrounded the air as if blurring her figure out from the heavens eye, telling her, she had stolen someone else's fate. This was not a life of her own keeping; someone's fate was left unfulfilled to awaken her own. She wasn't Wei Zhiruo who should have lived.

But it was Wei Zhiruo who survived! If there was any stealing, it was a matter of chance. Her intentions were never included in any event – as far as she was concerned, that made her innocent of charges of theft!

She had no qualms in occupying a body that was not done with her own initiative. And who could surely tell that she wasn't Wei Zhiruo born in this soil, with an alien soul brought from another world? She had seen the workings of her own mind in this – a strange set of enchantments had sealed her own memories. She was sure, only she could have done that! So here was the question? If she had just occupied this body, only this morning - then what could explain those intriguing Rune’s over this body left behind in past and which looked so much like something she would have done? Only she could have achieved this - but now she had completely forgotten when she sealed up her own memories and why.

The song came upon a turn. It swelled like in the breast of a swallow, awakened at dawns-break. It was ready to prance, to emerge and spring forth the most luscious of bushes and amongst the greenest boughs. Suddenly the canoe jerked to a stop, awakening Wei Zhiruo from her stupor. Wei Zhiruo' s eyes turned round in surprise.

All around her, wherever her eyes could reach, she saw an expanse of surface covered in more and more fragments of shining crystal-like stars or was it ice now, she wondered.

Burning against the murky darkness, emanating the softest, mildest of milky whites, as if dripping with grace and purity, floating around in some strange patterns.

Wei Zhiruo, although a bit distracted by her own musings, didn't forget to seal all these images in her mind and burn them into its deepest recesses. These were all virgin rules, so primitive and violently chaotic that there was nothing on par with them. If she lost this chance to capture their essence, she will not get another chance like this again!

She was swift in her actions. She opened up all the apertures of her soul and mind together, and then unsealed the highest level of sense perception that a human could allow in her own apparatus.

But what she didn't know was that, unknown to her, her blood had been boiling and burning all that it could find in the patterns in the sky, in the waters and the clouds independent of her consciousness. It worked like a thinking being, merging the highest rules and mysteries in itself – as if sealing a memory!

There were several of them, uncountable patterns to observe – like firmament on an autumn's clear night, these fragments danced, swirled and floated over the water like the clearest, brightest and most resonant pieces of stars conjoined in visible constellations.

She exerted and stretched the limits of her consciousness, reaching as far as possible while taking in all that she could. But her blood was faster than her, quicker at perceiving than her and more far reaching than her. While Wei Zhiruo had seen and captured but a small encirclement of those rules, her blood was already touching the edges of the ocean, the horizons where the purple firmament and the black sea merged into one and had even extended its filament down below!

Unconsciously, Wei Zhiruo's blood had escaped its bounds and overreached human conception. It was like a hungry and thirsty beast, crawling on all fours, struggling to reinvigorate itself-! Pushing boundaries after boundaries as if it were its last struggle and after which, if it failed to succeed in it, it will be a a lost cause, an existence with no remaining value.

The bloodline sang along the ancient rhythm, merging and manifesting its music in itself – becoming one with that ancient behemoth. Soon it was all rules and runes. Wei Zhiruo's blood unknowingly recaptured those traces of patterns and etched it in itself, preserving the spectacular phenomena in itself: those mysteries of time and space, the rhythm of the dawn of time, the marvelous infant runes with no parallel in the world and several incomprehensible phenomena! Everything, while she remained ignorant.

The heavenly song erupted once more, swelling sweeter and sweeter, with a heady affect over its listener. Its rhythm got mixed up in the waves, in the lolling of the canoe adrift a humongous ocean, and those unknown fragments emanating light. The star light from her surroundings, though, reached her strikingly. She comfortably smelled of home, of belongingness in the mellow whiteness of the star like ice fragments, contrasted brightly with black water current.

If she spent the rest of her time wandering in space, would it be as blissful as this moment? So fulfilling? Would she have been free like never before, accompanied just by her bloodline -?

"Plop!"

Another sound jerked Wei Zhiruo awake. Something else had fallen into the pond – the actual pond. She was back to reality before she could do anything.

She didn't know what had caused that splashing noise, but couldn't help feeling frustrated at being disturbed at such a pivotal moment.

Was this the magic of fate that the space travelers often talked off? The space and time of entrance into such spaces was fixed, perhaps even a rule in itself, longer than which she could never stay? Was staying longer beneficial for her if she could, or was this sudden interruption her fortune or loss? She dwelled on these random thoughts for a while before fully awakening to the coldness of midnight.

The song had died down abruptly, with no sign of awakening again. Wei Zhiruo couldn't help feeling a little disappointed. Her connection to the mellow power of those stars– was still there!

"What…" She felt a strange connection between herself on the earth, and the stars above in the sky. As if she was drawing their light into her body, melting them into herself!

Her connection with the outside heaven, with the stars and skies…

She jerked back to attention. 'Yes,' clear headed now, Wei Zhiruo stiffly closed her eyes, as if the mountain had descended over her shoulders, pushing her downwards.

'My affinity with the stars…is still there. The bloodline!'