Sixteen Lost Stars

The Ninth Wall

In those long years, the border outposts were often buried by snow before they could be taken by war. Many forts were not breached, but simply collapsed into thawed earth, unnoticed by anyone, like thoughts that vanish before being fully thought.

They called it the Ninth Wall, not because it stood on the ninth line of defense, but because its construction coincided with the ninth cycle of the imperial calendar. That year, it was said, every number written in red ink by imperial scribes bled black at the tips, as if some unspoken thing had seeped into the language itself.

The last time the wall was mentioned in an official record was in a nameless winter report, titled _Beneath the Frost Cracks_. No enemies were listed, no commanders mentioned. The only passage that survived read:

"At the fourth watch this morning, soldiers posted at the northern sentry heard something like bones breaking. No enemy sighted, no horn sounded. Snow at the base of the wall darkened, ink-like. By midday, the eastern tower leaned. The stone beneath turned pale, patterned like crawling serpents. At midnight, a brazier lit itself. The fire had no smoke. The light ran like water."

The archivist responsible was Harven Lue, an old man known to forget things by the time he remembered them. He marked the report as "Reviewed" in the corner, but the next day, added: "First read. Heaviness in the bones. Should be passed to the priests."

He never sent it. Instead, he slipped it into the draft of his unfinished chronicle _The Northern Years_, under the chapter titled _The Wind Never Stops_. The volume was never published. The Ninth Wall was not mentioned again in any document stored at the capital archives.

Years later, an early spring brought a thaw too quick. A farmer claimed to have seen fragments of old stone rising from the mud, not dislodged, but surfacing—as if something buried was stretching.

The land around it came to be known as Dream Soil. They said the wheat there grew only at night, and in daylight, stood perfectly still. Some claimed to hear hooves in the rustling grain, but when they turned, there was nothing—just crumbled walls exposed to light, like a beast pressed to the ground, exhaling quietly.

No one can say exactly when the Ninth Wall disappeared. Some believed it was never completed. Others swore it was the last true border the empire ever had.

In modern maps, the area is marked with a single broken line. A note beside it reads: "Wind-prone terrain. Locals say: the land remembers."

Perhaps the wall never fell. Perhaps it simply grew tired of being remembered. And so it stepped back, left the empire where it stood, and let the snow do the rest—layer by layer, covering whatever had once been known, until no one was sure whether it had ever been there at all.

The General Who Slept Through Winter

In the coldest year the northern frontier had ever known, the last general of the empire who had not betrayed his post did not wake for the entire winter.

His name had long been sealed within court records, no longer appearing in decrees or histories. Among borderland murmurs, only a few syllables remained—perhaps _Raem_, perhaps _Wu-Tien_. It was said he spoke slowly, each word dragging out of his throat like a lump of metal pulled from under ice. But that winter, he said nothing. Not out of silence, but because he was asleep.

On the day the first snow fell, he removed his armor and walked into the east chamber of his residence. He closed the door behind him. It did not open again for three months. A plate of food was placed outside each evening and found untouched in the morning. Only the snow around it had shifted. No one dared knock. The house itself had once been a bastion, and the general had left a standing order: the bronze lion by the door held a bell in its mouth—if the bell did not ring, there was no matter worth attending.

At first, some said he had suffered a stroke. Later, others claimed the Lornar had bound his soul in a dream. In time, the rumors stopped altogether. They were replaced by a quieter story: that he had built another frontier in his sleep, where he hosted feasts for former enemies, recited poetry over wine, and spoke of garrisons, lost brothers, and the proper way to die like a border general.

Spring was late that year. It moved slowly, as if unsure whether it was time.

When he finally awoke, the sky was still dim. He stepped out like a man rising from his own burial. He said nothing. He sat in the corridor, watching snow that had not yet melted. A deputy whispered that several villages had been lost. He lifted his eyes. It was the look of a man hearing a story whose ending he already knew.

After that, he no longer spoke. Perhaps he had used up all his words in the dream. Or perhaps nothing left in the waking world was worth responding to. He still wore his old armor. He patrolled the walls. He gazed across the frozen plains. Sometimes, when no one was watching, he nodded to the wind, as if answering a name that had ceased to exist.

At year's end, he was summoned back to the capital and granted an honorary retirement. No document mentioned the winter he had slept through. No one asked if the banquet in his dreams had been real. A court scribe left a quiet note at the bottom of the record:

"If the dream were real, it was not a bad one."

Years later, a traveler seeking shelter in the ruins of the northern estate stumbled into the east chamber. The hearth had not gone cold. In the ash sat a clean drinking cup. On the table lay a page, its ink faded but not erased. Only a few lines could still be read:

Snow in the cup—what makes a border? 

The one across the table was never an enemy. 

The waking ends where no border remains.

A Letter with No Address

The letter is still there, tucked inside a half-eaten book on the fourth floor of the old library in Yuzhen. The corners are curled, the paper brittle and yellowed, with wormholes tunneling through the margins. There is no heading. No name. Just a few slanted lines of pale blue ink scribbled along the bottom edge of a blank page, written as if the author already knew that no one would ever receive it.

"North unsettled. Sixth pass sealed by snow. People fleeing. Horses scattered."

They say it was the handwriting of a man named Shen Yue, an inspector once stationed on the northern line. In the last days of winter, he handed the letter to the last horse unit leaving the Sixteen Border Territories. He reportedly told the courier, "No need to rush. As long as you don't die on the road, someone will see it." The unit was lost in an ice gorge three days later. Only one rider, who had fallen behind after injuring his leg, made it back to the city. That's why the letter survived.

That year, the books in the library were being patched by a minor official named Qin Lu. He was forty-five, without rank or income, living in the back rooms with a sick wife and a child too small to write his own name. Qin Lu slipped the letter into a damaged copy of _Essential Rites of Governance_, hoping to use it to teach his son to read.

The boy struggled with the lines, especially one character.

"You read 'chaos' as 'peace' again." 

"You said it meant 'quiet'." 

"I said that by mistake." 

"But you never changed it."

No one asked about the letter again. No one asked where the collapse began. The child grew up, became a provincial clerk. That page from the letter became a calligraphy model. Students copied it from wall scrolls in the academy, praised for its steady brushwork.

Years later, a scholar reviewing the fragments of _Essential Rites of Governance_ noticed a strange irregularity: seventeen pages bore no numbers. They held no text, only blankness, but the paper matched the rest—same thickness, same stain, same time. Some called them "mourning pages"—left by men who had no way to speak. Others believed they were shrouds of the letter, covering parts of the country too fragile to be read.

"Why didn't he send it to the capital?" 

"Because no one was listening." 

"Then why write it at all?" 

"Because once written, something doesn't fully die."

The book remains today on the bottom shelf of the seventh column in the Imperial Atlas Library of Jingdu. No one opens it. Not because it is dangerous, but because it is too quiet.

Quiet like a war that never started.

The Day the Stars Were Not Counted

At the far end of the eastern corridor in the capital, atop a narrow tower with beams too thin to bear wind or time, stood a small chamber called _Sky Listening_. It had never been reinforced, and never been retired. Since the founding of the dynasty, three astrologers took turns each night climbing the creaking stairs to record the northern constellations, following a method older than the wars that erased its origin. Most names had faded into ceremonial noise—_The Broken Stag_, _The Northern Latch_, and a scattering of faint points once known as _The Border Lanterns_.

On the seventh night after the solstice, Yi Suan, the duty astrologer, climbed the tower as usual. The moon did not rise. The snow was waist-deep. He did not open the charts. He wrote a single line at the bottom of the logbook, so thin it scratched rather than inked:

"No stars in the northern sky."

No date. No footnote. He left the rest of the page empty.

At dawn, the clerk transcribed the entry as routine and submitted it with the morning briefs. The minister read it once, held it over the charcoal brazier until the ink set, folded the paper in four, and murmured, 

"Let it be."

No one climbed the tower for the next six nights. On the seventh, the door was locked. The key returned to the Ministry's rusted cabinet. No decree, no record, no mention in official correspondence.

A few weeks later, the academy revised its syllabus. _Northern Pattern Recognition_ was quietly replaced by _Celestial Aesthetics and Symbolism_. The lecturer explained, "Stars are no longer for navigation. Only for contemplation." No students raised questions.

The late compilers of the historical annals noted, simply:

"Observation suspended. Weather obscured sky."

Elsewhere, the explanation wandered.

In Xianlin's western town, a weaver recited what her grandmother once said: "When I was young, stars could show you the road. Then, one year, they fell asleep. And no one called them back."

No one panicked. No proclamations followed. No scholars protested.

Just as the passes had vanished without alarm, and the old maps yellowed without corrections, and the frontier towers had collapsed overnight without a single name etched into stone—none of it was considered lost. Merely withdrawn, like something borrowed and quietly not returned.

"Isn't it strange?" someone asked. "The whole northern sky… gone."

"Strange how?"

"Do you remember what it used to look like?" 

"No. And there's no need to."

And so that night, the northern sky resembled a drained well. 

Not dark, not bright. Just silent. 

The kind of silence that makes looking up feel like an error.

Sixteen Names on a Tattered Map

The map was found after the rain, curled in the corner of an old house, buried beneath a mildewed army chest. The paper had blistered, the edges frayed like moth wings, and the inked lines had all but disappeared. What remained were sixteen faint circles, drawn with a faded hand—marking places that might have once existed, though none dared say what they had been.

No one knew who had drawn them. The owner of the chest had died years ago, and even the name on his urn had been washed blank by the rain.

The scholar didn't ask questions. He simply broke a charred pencil stub, sat beneath the eaves, and began to restore what he could remember. Each stroke was a hesitation, not an act of repair, but something closer to a summoning.

"Have you been to those places?" 

"No." 

"Then how do you know the names?" 

"Some I heard. Others... I saw in dreams."

He didn't look up when he said it. Just tapped the map's corner with a knuckle and pointed to the eighth circle. That one had changed names, he said, and in the new maps drawn by the Lornar cartographers, it was labeled differently. He didn't speak the new name. Not because he'd forgotten it, but because saying it aloud would be an admission that the place no longer belonged to them.

Someone hung the map on the wall. Three days later, it fell. No one picked it up. No one hung it again.

Every autumn after that, the schoolchildren were told to trace the old map. They colored the sixteen names with bright pens, added tiny flags, arrows, and smiling towers. No one told them where the places were. Only that the lettering should be neat, and the margins clean.

One year, a girl went home and recited one of the names to her father, a retired soldier. He didn't reply. He just closed his rice bowl, took an old logbook from a drawer, flipped through a few pages, and stared at one for a long time.

"You know this name?" 

"That's not what it was called." 

"Then what was it?" 

"No one remembers."

The wind came in through a crack in the window. The map on the wall stirred faintly, as if something had exhaled. The girl said nothing more. Her father put the book away. The bowls cooled without a sound.

Later, the school announced the paper had become too brittle. A new map would be used. It would only show current official names. No circles. No lost places. The teachers agreed. No one remembered who had first rewritten the old one.

The map was moved to the supply room, then filed in the archive, then stamped _To Be Disposed_, and sealed in a thick paper envelope, left at the very bottom shelf. No one opened it again.

The last scholar who had helped restore the names died in a winter that was neither cold nor warm. He left no final words, only a blank sheet on his desk, with a broken line across the center and a note in pencil beside it:

"There were once sixteen names here."

No signature. No date.

And that was the end of it. 

No one asked again. 

No one tried to remember the order of the names.

Before the Treaty, There Were Graves

Three days before the treaty at Chanyuan was signed, the prince walked alone to the low hills north of the city.

There was no wind that morning. The fog lingered, dew clung to the grass, and the birdsong came in scattered threads—sometimes like the hum of old strings, sometimes like a cough someone meant to hide.

The graves lay crooked, without order, as if planted hastily in the dark and then left to tilt, inch by inch, across many winters. Each stone bore the same three characters: "From the North." The handwriting differed. Some were firm like a command, some trembled like letters written on horseback, and some had long been washed into the stone, leaving only a trace of pressure.

He wore no armor and brought no escort. He walked slowly, head bowed, as if taking inventory. Now and then, he knelt to touch the moss at a stone's edge, but he never spoke.

Someone later asked him, "Did you know who they were?"

"I did," he said.

"Then why did you go?"

"To see where they ended up."

He waited a moment, then added, "They were the ones who never had the chance to fail."

The hill had never belonged to any city. It had once been a post, then a refuge, then a place no map recorded. Court officials had proposed a shrine—three times—and each time it failed. The archive listed three reasons: terrain unstable, funds unavailable, enemy nation may object.

No one objected to the inscription: From the North. It began as a phrase of mourning, then became a formality, and later, an administrative term—for those who had died without being catalogued. A royal historian once filed a request to reconstruct the roll of the fallen; the reply came back with a single stack of blank forms. The clerk's note read: "Original records missing." Others said the records had never existed.

He walked the hill three times. By noon, he sat beside one of the stones and began to eat the food he'd brought. He ate slowly, as if someone might interrupt him. But no one came.

"Is he mourning?" asked one of the guards hiding at a distance.

"No," another replied quietly. "He's studying the terrain."

The day the treaty was signed, the prince was not present. The night before, a dispatch had ordered him to inspect the frontier granaries. His title wasn't even written in full.

When the emperor signed the parchment, it was still early morning. The scribe broke three pens in the process. The treaty mentioned nothing about the graves. No clause addressed the return of bones.

That night, as the envoys returned to the capital, a sudden thunderstorm began. It was the only one recorded that spring. No one wrote down the direction of the thunder. The almanac listed no cause.

The last time the hill was named in an official document was in a preliminary report on warehouse locations. It read:

"Site may contain old burial grounds. Relocation unnecessary."

A red circle was drawn around the line. A question mark beside it. No response. No signature.

The Stars Return Only in Ashes

No one wrote anything that afternoon. Even the tower clock stopped at one fifty-three. 

The wind came from the southeast, not strong, but purposeful, as if it remembered every passage through the crumbling barracks, the broken watchtowers, the rusted stove flues. It peeled open the earth like a scab, lifting the dust packed tight in the cracks, uncovering what had been quietly compacted by time.

No one had waited for this wind. No one spoke of it afterwards. 

The few who remained in the old encampment—if they could still be called people—covered the wells with cooking pots, stuffed door frames with threadbare felt, and recited childhood charms into their ears. The wind ignored them. It entered as if inscribed in the soil itself, like a family name never recorded, quiet, unrelenting, and immune to refusal.

The ashes hadn't started that day. They had always been there. But that day, they rose. 

Perhaps it was the heat. Perhaps the wind arrived on time. 

They drifted—onto the backs of sheep, onto warped roof tiles, across the charred grain store gates—until they settled on a child.

He wasn't the first to come to the ruined site. But perhaps the first to stop. 

He had come looking for a lost ox. 

Instead, he stepped onto something that wasn't dust or dirt, but the kind of fragment that makes you lower your gaze and think, "This place must have burned once." 

The kind of fragment that feels like skin, left behind by someone who didn't intend to return.

He picked up a piece of metal—rusted through, a sliver of what looked like a shield's rim. 

Only a faint circle remained. 

Sixteen stars, barely visible, drawn close together, like old names that no longer understood each other but had never fully parted.

He didn't scream. He didn't run. 

He tucked the shard into his shirt as if it were a family ring no one spoke about. 

Then he sat down in the ashes, leaned against the wall, and napped— 

As though he were waiting for something that only came once the cold set in.

No one remembered that scene. 

The boy died the following winter. Fever. 

Before the end, he said, "I saw the stars." 

His father, busy stirring porridge, replied, "That's just what the gods burned. Best forget it."

Years later, a page surfaced in a border report. 

It noted that in the late summer of that year, a wind had come from the south—carrying ash, and traces of metallic dust—possibly from "degraded imperial armament." 

The date had been washed away by water damage.

Another page, from a discarded military manual, listed sixteen formations by name. 

The final three lines were crossed out in black ink. 

No signature. 

No explanation.

"How did you know they were stars?"

"Because when they burned, they were brighter than night."

Even later, an old scholar recalled a dream in which a map caught fire on its own. 

When it was consumed, the ashes revealed names. 

They spoke to him. 

But when he woke, he remembered none of the names—only the heat of the page.

No one asked if the dream had been real. 

Just as no one asked where the wind had really come from, or whether the ashes had ever touched soldiers. 

Eventually, the archive closed the matter with a single line:

"The matter of the marked stars could not be catalogued. Treated as never extant."

True loss is not the absence of a thing— 

It is when no one bothers to ask if it ever existed.