On a shrouded, moonless night in August, in the Year of Jimao, the wind and rain pressed low.
She had not glimpsed a single star in two days.
In this fishing village by the bay, the lives of hundreds were tethered to that unreachable sky above.
Unreasonably, a surge of indignation struck her, but soon she found it absurd.
"If the heavens have feelings, why do they send forth endless tides, year after year, sweeping away all that lives?"
A single tide could undo years of toil, let alone the hurricanes spoken of only in elders' tales.
Since childhood, she had known that the tides would rise as summer tipped into autumn. And with tides came panic the whole village would go on alert, fleeing toward the distant hills.
Those tides followed no pattern, and in their monstrous surges, loved ones would often vanish, never to return.
So this night, she stayed awake, keeping watch, longing for a sign of the tide's coming, so she could rouse the village in time.
It must have been past the fifth hour, yet darkness lingered and no dawn in sight, bringing a gnawing unease to her heart.
Then suddenly she saw it. A pillar of cloud rose, bridging sea and sky, approaching from the horizon. She quickly loosed a signal arrow, but the fierce wind devoured it.
She ran toward the village, shouting loudly, yet the storm swallowed her voice. She ran with all her might, daring not to look back, fearing the tide had already been upon her. Still, the village seemed impossibly far away. Then she looked down.
The sand and mud under her feet had been swept up by the whirlpool, and she was running inside it the hurricane had arrived.
There was no time for fear. The wave rose, vast and final, and crashed upon her.
As she floated upon its crest, one thought passed through her mind:
"Perhaps the deities have turned their faces from this world."