V
The Year of the Firebird

In Hare Moon, His Imperial Majesty Absolute Purity returned to his capital after a progress through more than half the provinces of the Good Land, an imperial inspection not matched since the previous dynasty. He was hailed everywhere as a warrior Emperor, conqueror of the Bamboo Banner, and the people rejoiced when he promised that he would be making similar tours in future.

Half his army had fled when the Portal opened. These men were rounded up, sentenced to death under military law, pardoned by imperial clemency, and marched off to work on repairs to the Grand Canal.

The Bamboo Banner dissolved in the light of the Portal, and few survivors returned to their homes. Bamboo himself was found about five li from his final camp with his throat cut.

In Fish Moon, a year after the great earthquake, Prince Silk Hand and his wife, with an armed escort of twenty men, rode into the village of Tutu to reclaim their son, Prince Silkworm. The young prince was not happy with the transition at first, but soon became reconciled to his new mother, father, and baby sister, and also his new home in Goat Haven. Many years later, he was to take the name of Prince Silk Hand 2.

In Harvest Moon, Clerk of Records Shard Gingko ascended on the ladder of worlds. His passing was peaceful, and Prince Silk Hand himself sang the farewell at his pyre. The scholar’s final request, made to Lady Verdant as he lay on his deathbed, was that his account of his travels with the Firstborn and of the opening of the Portal should be sent directly to the Emperor.

Few mortals could have honored that plea, but Prince Silk Hand had many influential friends, and the scroll was indeed laid before the imperial eyes undamaged. None of the multitudinous mandarins circling the throne had a chance to eviscerate the text to match traditional beliefs, for the Emperor read it in the original and ordered it printed that way by the new steam presses. The light it shed on much traditional scholarship caused a literary revolution, but its description of the opening of the Portal was dismissed as a poetic conceit.

Silkworm-Thunderbot lived to inherit Goat Haven from his father and his descendants ruled there for over a century, until Prince Silk Hand 5 lost it in a poker game.

Millennia will roll on, but the Urfather will never be reborn. The Portal cannot open again, for obviously it could never have existed, except in folktales. Mouse will be forgotten, the Firstborn will become a legend, and Shard Gingko remembered as a poet who collected the stories and created the epic.

Only Emperor Absolute Purity, founder of the Twelfth Dynasty, will be accepted as genuine.