Dev Shadows of Atrisia

[Junko Ike]

She approached the palace's eastern wing, the structure growing larger with each step until its white stone exterior filled her field of view. The stone caught the dying light and reflected it in faint waves, the surface having been polished to a subtle sheen that made the entire structure appear to breathe as if the walls themselves expanded and contracted with the sunset's shifting hues. Intricate carvings along the lower walls, running in a continuous frieze that wrapped the entire wing at knee height, depicted onna-bugeisha leading charges under moonlit skies: formations of women in layered armor, their katana raised, their faces carved in profile with expressions of calm determination.

The gemstone inlays that formed their eyes and the stars above them tiny chips of lapis lazuli, moonstone, and white jade caught the fading light and winked like distant stars awakening in a twilight sky. Junko passed beneath an arched gateway framed by living wisteria, the vines trained over a cedar trellis so old that the wood had turned silver-gray and the trunk of the oldest vine was as thick as her thigh. The purple clusters of blossoms hung heavy with scent, each cluster a cascade of individual flowers that brushed her shoulders as she passed, releasing their fragrance in a fresh wave. Beyond the arch, she entered the quieter corridors reserved for her personal quarters.

 

[Junko Ike]

Here the black ebony walls, polished to a mirror finish, glowed softly with their aurodium veins thin traceries of gold that ran through the dark wood like lightning frozen in stone, pulsing in a slow, regular rhythm like a heartbeat, the light waxing and waning in a cycle that matched no clock but seemed to respond to the presence of living beings within the walls. Hidden chimes, their source concealed somewhere in the vaulted ceiling, sounded once a single low, resonant note that vibrated through the soles of her feet as though the palace itself acknowledged her return, a sentient house welcoming its occupant home.

She moved through a series of antechambers, each one smaller and more private than the last, the progression designed to gradually separate the ruler from the public spaces of governance. In alcoves set into the walls at regular intervals, sacred trees grew from carved stone planters, their roots visible through transparent panels of crystal that showed the soil beneath. One bore crystalline pears that glowed with a soft golden light, their facets catching the illumination and scattering it across the polished floors in tiny rainbows. Another held apples that pulsed with a gentle blue-white luminescence, their surfaces smooth as glass and cool to the touch.

 

[Junko Ike]

The prismatic light cast by these trees was the only illumination in the antechambers, and it shifted subtly as Junko passed, the fruits seeming to brighten in acknowledgment of her presence. Attendants had already prepared the path: low braziers of cast bronze, each one shaped like a crouching kirin with smoke curling from its open mouth, burned with sandalwood and myrrh, releasing thin curls of fragrant smoke that drifted upward in lazy spirals to mingle with the ceiling's painted constellations a map of the Atrisian night sky rendered in gold leaf and powdered lapis on the dark plaster overhead. Junko's steps slowed as she neared the innermost chamber, the bedchamber itself.

The door was a single slab of ebony inlaid with aurodium in the pattern of a flowering cherry branch, and it swung open silently at her approach, propelled by a mechanism hidden in the frame. Beyond it lay a spacious room whose ceiling rose in a shallow dome of translucent alabaster, thin enough that the last of the twilight filtered through in pale lavender tones, bathing the entire space in a soft, diffuse light that seemed to come from no single direction.