Before she became Halcyon, she was a girl without a name. Born into the chaos of war, her parents fled throug…
Before she became Halcyon, she was a girl without a name.
Born into the chaos of war, her parents fled through the violence with neither the heart nor the means to give her one.
In desperation, her mother stripped off her own azure tunic, wrapped her daughter with tender care, and placed her inside a small dark chest, setting it adrift upon the water to go wherever the current would take it.
A final farewell, and yet, cradled in the last warmth her mother had left behind, she felt something strangely close to comfort.
Perhaps Heaven took pity on her: the current did not carry her to her death, but to a chance at life. A woman washing clothes by the river heard the crying from within the chest and took the infant in as her foster daughter. But fortune is fleeting. Before the child could even be given a name, famine came.
To keep them both alive, the young girl sought out a legendary broker of the jianghu, a man said to place a price on anything in the world. In his eyes, beast and man were worth exactly what they could fetch.
In times of chaos, life was cheap. At first, hers was worth no more than three feathers from a rare bird.
But she clenched her small fists and swung at him. She would prove her worth: the price of her fighting, the price of her life.
In the end, she earned her foster mother a pouch of coins and a sliver of lustrous white jade. From that day on, she traveled the jianghu at the broker's side.
The broker once told her that it was because she had no name that she had the audacity to go against fate. A nameless soul, even if she angered the Heavens, would leave the gods with nothing to strike down, and they'd have no choice but to let the thunder roll and go quiet.
Impressed by her fearlessness, the broker gave her a task at the age of nine that no one else would take: to assassinate a key figure of Mohist Hill.
She took the maps he tossed her and waited half a month along the appointed path, sleeping under open skies, scaling cliff faces, until she finally caught sight of her target.
And then she stopped.
He was just a child, two or three years younger than herself. In a world where life meant so little, was she really going to become someone who treated it the same way?
She thought of the broker's kindness. She thought of the small fish she'd rationed herself to only half of the night before.
She steadied herself and crept closer without a sound.
The boy was using a sharpened wooden dagger to carefully pry apart a tangled knot of vines.
"Ugh, you dummy... at this rate you'll be here all day. Here, use mine."
Before she even knew what she was doing, she had handed him her iron dagger.
The boy took it without any surprise, as if they had known each other for years.
Even with the better blade, his movements stayed slow and gentle, taking care not to harm the bird caught inside the vines.
That afternoon, two children and two knives worked through every last tangle. A bird burst into the sky, and two fates became bound together.
She never took that life.
At sunset, an angler arrived to collect the boy, and she realized she had the wrong person entirely.
The angler seemed to know exactly why she had come, yet he only smiled, asked for her name, and asked if she would come back to the mountains with him.
Back where?
To a place where, even in a world this broken, people would still stop to save a single bird?
She wanted to go. But she had to repay the broker first, for everything he had given her.
Fifteen days. Give her fifteen more days.
She completed a bigger job for him, killing a bandit chief who had plagued the region for years.
She hunted several jackals in the forest and brought back the pelts to keep him warm through winter.
Then she left.
On the sixteenth day, she arrived at the stone bridge south of the city and followed her new master toward a place where the world might be made better.
It was a shame: no matter how far she searched in the years that followed, she never found those kind souls from the mountains again.
The years after were hard ones, every step paid for in blood. She never stopped moving. But it was on Mohist Hill that she finally received a name.
From that day on, the world knew her as Halcyon.