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Her soul, a part of her, cannot move on.
Her son, her younger brothers — left behind.
Her husband called out to her, he reached out to her, but... she couldn't.
Not now.
So she stays.
Only to see the collapse.
Her brothers, her precious didi, are broken, in totally different ways, totally similar to each other.
Her A-Cheng is full of such anger, so much like their mother that it hurts; her A-Xian, her Xianxian, smiles: so wrong, so distorted, so forgiving that she wants to scream. But she is part of the soul, she is a faint ghost, she is an imprint of the person she was. There is nothing she can do.
And her little brother dies, her little brother shatters his soul into a thousand shards, and she would choke if she could.
And her other little brother looks so lost, so young, as he looks out to where the dead are tearing their brother's body apart and eating it, and she can't even turn him away from it, block him from it, block out the nightmare that has come to life, a vision worse than any fear; tell him it's not his fault, that their brother loved him, she knows it.
There is nothing she can do.
And, for the first time in a very, very long time, she's angry about it.
And she is angry, at so many people, at so many sects, at herself — never at her brothers.
And she stays, refusing her husband's last request to leave with him without looking at him — starting to pick up the pieces of her little brother's soul.
Time goes differently when you're dead, and maybe it's about the Burial Mounds when they help her, when they guide her, when they tell her about her brother, about the people he brought, about her brother's child who was taken away by the man in white while she collected, collected and collected.
It's hard — to stay in the world of the living when she knows the Burial Mounds are changing something in her, giving her the strength to go and go and go, to search and search, to sing them the lullabies that her A-Xian sang to them. She thinks she can feel the ground as she walks, and feels the pain in her whole being; she thinks she is suffocating, that the Burial Mounds are winding her up in a place forgotten by the gods; maybe unwittingly, maybe purposefully — she doesn't know, and she doesn't care. She stays for her brothers, to gather the soul of one and tell the other that none of this is his fault. She stays out of love for them.
She's not sure if she's always had this body when she sees her reflection in the water; familiar, exactly what she expected, but her eyes glow red like A-Xian's and she thinks it's very beautiful in its own way, she should have told her brother that.
Somewhere in the middle of this, she meets the first person in this place she could see. It's a man, he has red robes and a red umbrella and bloody rain around them — not something she's used to, but something she can ignore when he gets in the way of her search. What are you looking for? — he asks her when she feels ready to bared her teeth to keep him out of her way; she stops herself, not knowing where this anger comes from, perhaps from the place that feeds it; that which is dear to me, — she replies, looking away once to see the man's face, as pale as her own, as all the dead men who roam here but do not disturb her.
The man looks like she said something familiar to him, because he only wishes her well and disappears. She doesn't think of him anymore.
She doesn't know how long it takes her to pick up all the pieces of her brother's soul, but when she does, when she had no more than two pieces left — he is taken from her.
Hey-hey, did you hear? About the maiden in mourning white and purple who knows no peace? Saint of Sorrow?
They say she sings songs for children who are destined to die because she has lost her own.
They say her cries drain the lands and her whispers change the movements of rivers.
They say she stayed out of love and became mad with grief.