Chapter 44 end

Dusk fell on the frontier, swirling the fog with bright reds and pale pinks, indigo and orange. The beach is empty, only the stone statues are still in place, gazing at the kingdom of the dead.Even the emperor eventually left, but no one knows where he went.He did not return to the palace, others were looking for him, and he was needed to announce the beginning of the various ceremonies in memory of his late wife. A palm tree, a tall, thin, smooth palm tree, stood at the edge of the grass by the beach.It started shaking, stretching, and then yawning. "Oh." Palm grumbled angrily. "I'm so stiff, I knew I shouldn't sleep standing up like this. I also stood in the sun all day, and my skin may have been sunburned!"

The palm shook its leaves and changed shape—into a young man with a mustache.His age was hard to tell, and he was flamboyantly dressed: leggings, silk stockings, a knee-length velvet coat trimmed with ostrich feathers and parted at the front to reveal a matching waistcoat—also embellished with Ostrich feather.Lace burst from feathered cuffs and puffed up his neckline.He has broad dark orange and red stripes all over his body. "Perfect funeral. I'm going to call this Rust Maroon." Simkin called up a mirror and examined himself critically.He stared intently at the tip of his nose. "Ah, I do have a sunburn. Now I'm going to have freckles." He dismissed the mirror with an annoyed wave of his hand.

Simkin stuffed his hands into his pockets (pockets that had apparently only appeared after he had put his hands in them) and dangled on the sand in a fit of temper. "Maybe I should get spots all over my body," he said into the empty sand.He floated across the beach, stopped before the stone statue of the catalyst saint, fell slowly, and stood in front of it. "It touched me!" After a while, Simkin was completely moved. "I'm so touched! Amazing! Bald." Sim'jin turned and looked into the mists of the afterlife.Mists billowed up the darkness of night, dimming their bright colors as the twilights let go of the world feebly.The fog crawled and writhed on the sand like an invading ocean tide, advancing a little with each coming.Simkin watched, laughed, and twirled his beard.

"Now the game is starting to get serious," he murmured. He pulled out the orange silk scarf from the air and tied it around the neck of the stone statue of Saryon.Then, Xin Jin hummed a ditty all the way and disappeared into the night, leaving the stone statue standing alone on the silent beach, an orange flag fluttering around its neck, like a star in the growing darkness Faint firelight.