Crossing the Midday Gate
A Xuya story published in Athena Andreadis’s To Shape the Dark. Companion piece to “In Blue Lily’s Wake”.
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Buy NowDan Linh had walked out of the Purple Forbidden City not expecting to return to it–thankful that the Empress had seen fit to spare her life; that she wasn’t walking to her execution for threefold treason. Twenty years later–after the nightmares had faded, after she was finally used to the diminished, eventless life on the Sixty-First Planet–she did come back, to find it unchanged: the Midday Gate towering over the moat; the sleek ballet of spaceships between the pagodas and the orbitals; the ambient sound of zithers and declaimed poetry slowly replacing the bustle of the city at their backs.
It was as if no time had passed.