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As a gesture of goodwill and a thank you for not flattening our kingdom with your combined powers, the emperor of Shuiyuntian has graciously allowed Xiao Lan Hua and her husband the Moon Supreme to go to Arbiter Hall and collect any items that she may have left before absconding so abruptly. Call it a wedding gift.
“We shouldn’t have bothered with that hypocrite,” Dongfang Qingcang grumbles, watching his wife rifle through the proliferation of creams and cosmetics on the dresser. Though he had recreated the room and its contents perfectly from the outside, what was in those opaque little bottles had frequently been guesses. Too often Xiao Lan Hua had opened a favorite powder or perfume and found it empty, or filled with sand.
“You shouldn’t have sent up that column of glazefire,” she chides gently. “I know he was testing our patience, but…”
“Hmph!” is his only acknowledgement.
Dongfang Qingcang prowls the room discontentedly as if Shuiyuntian itself puts him on edge, while Xiao Lan Hua happily puts things in a qiankun pouch borrowed from Jieli, muttering to herself while she does so.
“Oh, the figurines shifu brought back from the southern continent! That’s where they got to!”
“My Xiangyun-xianzi books! Wait, but these were in Cangyanhai too…”
“Oh, little seeds, I missed you too.”
“What’s this?”
Xiao Lanhua turns from the corner of the room where she’s been rummaging to see her husband pulling a lacquered rosewood box from the back of her treasures cabinet. He’s frowning at it
“I haven’t seen this before.” He thumbs the catch.
Xiao Lan Hua scrambles over piles of her abandoned belongings, tripping over a pile of clothes. “Wait! You—”
But it’s too late. The box is open.
“…won’t like what’s in it.”
“Changheng?” Dongfang Qingcang mutters as he glances inside. He takes out a piece of paper that has clearly been torn to pieces and mended. On it is a good likeness of the erstwhile God of War and a fairy maiden under a blossoming plum tree. Dongfang Qingcang looks to where his wife has palmed her forehead, and back to the fairy in the picture. “Is this you?”
“I was young,” she answers desperately. She hurries over and makes to close the box, but her husband sweeps it out of her reach. With his other hand he takes another paper out and looks at it. Xiao Lan Hua’s cheeks flame and she stamps her foot as if she were a young flower spirit again. “That’s enough! Stop looking!”
His eyebrows jump. “What kind of pose is this?”
Xiao Lan Hua jumps, straining for the box, but Dongfang Qingcang stretches his arm high and doesn’t let her get it. He tips another paper out. This one depicts Changheng slaying a fearsome beast with a sword of ice.
Changheng, Changheng, Changheng. One after another drawings of the former war god drift out for Dongfang Qingcang’s perusal while Xiao Lan Hua — little orchid spirit and goddess of life — jumps valiantly for the box. Changheng in full armor, in scandalously torn armor; slashing heroically with a sword, staring sultrily at the viewer, twisted in ways that show off his muscular thighs and abdomen. Dongfang Qingcang’s expression grows darker and darker with every picture.
“I told you not to look!” Xiao Lan Hua protests, panting. “I told you you wouldn’t like it!”
A final picture drifts out, the most well-preserved, and glazefire flares. On the page, a girl leans immodestly into Changheng’s arms while the fairy lord embraces her from behind, a girl who looks suspiciously like Xiao Lan Hua. The entire drawing is superlatively suggestive without sacrificing an ounce of propriety. It is visible for only an instant before glazefire devours it whole. Dongfang Qingcang’s eyes flash red as the ash falls to the floor.
“That cost me two spirit stones,” Xiao Lan Hua says in a small voice. But she doesn’t make a move to gather the fallen papers, scattered like autumn leaves around their feet.
“You paid for this—this—these Changhengs?” Dongfang Qingcang asks incredulously. Xiao Lan Hua thinks glazefire might well come from his nostrils next.
“You can throw them away,” she concedes a bit regretfully. She looks around at the pages on the floor.
“Wait.” A hand closes around her wrist and she’s hauled around to face the Moon Supreme. The brilliance of glazefire is gone from his eyes, but they are still burning.
“What?”
He pauses. Then he says roughly and a bit plaintively, “You don’t have any pictures of me.”
Xiao Lan Hua gapes at him a bit, her wrist still caught. “That’s because I have the real you,” she sputters. “I don’t need pictures.”
His grip gentles and a different sort of intensity enters his gaze. “We could have some made,” he says softly, caressing her hand.
“Have some…”
He steps closer, close enough to force her to look up at him, close enough for her to feel his body heat. “I’m sure we could contract someone discreet.”
“Da Mu Tou,” his wife says weakly.