text: > look at your surroundings
  Hawks painted in gold and brown soar along the walls. It is strangely warm here, as though fires lived just beyond your perception. The entire hall is open and unobstructed except by your presence.
  
  > Up
  Cherry blossoms and lilacs, kite-flying auguries and newly-budding leaves: the trappings of spring are far beneath you now, though the kite is a red speck dancing in the storm. The moonlit tower lays open beneath you, and lightning and storm clouds gather around you.
  
  > examine the kite
  (the red kite)
  Caught in the grip of gale and rain, the kite dances, a last reminder of the human things you are leaving behind.
  
  > look at the tower
  In its way the moonlit tower is like any other tower, despite the strange things trapped within; you are part of them no longer.
  
  > fly
  The sky is yours, in a dance unending, and you have shed your past (her eyes, the hand upon the blade, the blood, your brother's white and anguished face) as you ascend to your place in the zodiac.
  
  > Break mask
  Suddenly and terribly inspired by the shadowed passage to the south, you smash the half-mask upon your own face. The pain nearly blinds you. When you can see again, both halves of the mask are gone--and the passageway stands open, free of shadow.
  
  > Go south
  At first, this place of polished surfaces seems like a profusion of mirrors and a kaleidoscope of doors. Looking more closely, though, all doors are one, save the one you came from. The peculiar translucence of the walls suggests that it is growing light out.
  
  Northward, a passageway no longer riven by shadow returns to the rest of the tower; across from it stands a door to the south.
  
  > examine the light
  The light here has a clarity rarely found except in dreams or childhood, through which everyone must pass eventually.
  
  > examine the walls
  The walls are smooth and polished, reflecting every chance movement.
  
  > examine the door
  The door is of the same strange stone that characterizes the tower.
  
  > feel the walls
  The silent, smooth perfection of stone.
  
  > open the door
  Swallows soaring and tumbling, the flowerfall of cherry blossom petals, a wind that needs no kites to augur good fortune. The paths you take are your own, now, no matter what jealousies you and your brother exchanged, knotted too deeply to be disentangled in past dreams.
  
  You leave the tower behind you, no longer trapped by the tyranny of moonlight. The rest of your story is your own to tell and cherish, as you walk past the tower's broken boundaries and into the rest of your awakening.
  
  > go to the east
  Spring's blossoms and budding trees are here in profusion. Your lantern gives the chamber a quality of sharp angles at odds with the careful arrangements. Metal and wood, painted and sculpted, the false garden is heedless of harvest, drought or rain.
  
  A jade compass rests at the garden's metaphysical center, between translucence and opacity, curve and line, and other dichotomies too subtle for your eye. A gentle warmth from the surface invites touch.
  
  Transactions of light show other rooms southward and westward.
  
  > Go south
  The lantern seems to have no effect on the shadows that reside here, which remind you of long nights standing sentry, straining your eyes against the darkness.
  
  Curiously, the only weapons here live amid light and cannot be worn: they are silhouettes flung against the walls. Stairs carved with bas-reliefs spiral upward.
  
  Northward and westward lie passageways unhindered by door or folding screen.
  
  > examine the shadow
  Weapons line the walls, writ in shadow--yet you know their heft and balance, the patterns of movement that make one deadly in attack and another impenetrable in defense. If only you knew, as well, the histories of blood, patronage and betrayal--or loyalty--that they represent.
  
  One of the weapons is more substantial than you realized at first, a bronze-hilted dagger with a tassel hanging from the pommel.
  
  > take the dagger
  Taken.
  
  > examine the dagger
  Such daggers rarely leave the hands of the justiciars who wield them as their symbol of office. A white tassel hangs from the pommel of the hilt.
  
  > examine the white tassel
  The silken strands are white, for death. The justiciar's last resort, someone said to you once--or did you say it?
  
  > cut it with the dagger
  The fan's blue tassel may serve you better.
  
  > cut the blue tassel with the dagger
  A few neat cuts free some strands from the tassel, and tying them together results in--a kitestring?
  
  For a second there is a dark-eyed boy beside you, whose laugh is yours, but wilder; whose smile is yours, but wider. If only you remembered the augury that you and your brother cast that spring in the kite-flying ritual, years before either of you met the woman who wore black and red and gold...
  
  > tie the string to the kite
  Though it takes some patience, you tie the kitestring to the kite. Surely a season of gales and newborn blossoms awaits you, even in this skyless tower.
  
  > go to the north
  Spring's blossoms and budding trees are here in profusion. Your lantern gives the chamber a quality of sharp angles at odds with the careful arrangements. Metal and wood, painted and sculpted, the false garden is heedless of harvest, drought or rain.
  
  A jade compass rests at the garden's metaphysical center, between translucence and opacity, curve and line, and other dichotomies too subtle for your eye. A gentle warmth from the surface invites touch.
  
  Transactions of light show other rooms southward and westward.
  
  > look at the swallow
  Spring is the swallows' season, when they return from their sojourn in distant lands and signal the kite-flying auguries. If only an augury could help you now...
  
  > turn the compass to swallow
  The needle points to the swallow now. You hear a clear chiming sound as the garden's trees and flowers move subtly, obedient to this new season.
  
  > Fly kite
  Spring: the season of augury. Red and black and gold, maple colors, kite colors; you no longer know which. A breeze stirs through the room, though the trees and flowers are no more affected by it than they would be by the sun's earnest light or a plague of locusts. Nevertheless, you hear the hollow sound of something being dislodged from one of the trees.
  
  It was spring when your kite and your brother's became too entangled for one glass-edged string to cut the other's, for one to conquer the other, though entangled they flew yet; and spring when you were first parted from your brother on his first campaign and yours, two fatherless boys entering the emperor's service as adults.
  
  The kite tugs from your hand, as impatient as a hawk winning free of hood; dances perilously upward upon the wings of this nowhere breeze; and disappears.
  
  The breeze swells to a gale that rears southward and upward, seeking the sky in this enclosed and skyless room.
  
  > examine the trees
  Bamboo groves, graceful though ungrowing.
  
  > Go south
  The lantern seems to have no effect on the shadows that reside here, which remind you of long nights standing sentry, straining your eyes against the darkness.
  
  Curiously, the only weapons here live amid light and cannot be worn: they are silhouettes flung against the walls. Stairs carved with bas-reliefs spiral upward.
  
  Northward and westward lie passageways unhindered by door or folding screen.
  
  A wind gallops toward the stairs, seeking the sky.
  
  > go up
  Moonlight diffuses through the walls, tracing out unreadable sigils in calligraphies of light and dark. Upwards, the sky is open to your eyes. The lantern brightens slightly, like a star as the night grows deeper. Stairs adorned with bas-relief motifs spiral downward.
  
  Wind flings itself up the walls and toward the sky; you have but to look up.
  
  > look up
  The night spreads her wings above you, and shows no sign of welcoming her sister of the sunborn day. Constellations jewel the sky, half-hidden by clouds like nestling feathers: the Heavenly Horse and the Imperial Chrysanthemum.
  
  > look at Horse
  The star-stallion rears like the chargers you once rode. The justiciar herself preferred such spirited mounts.
  
  > look at Chrysanthemum
  It is the first among constellations, open to the eyes of all people unlike the emperor himself. You and your brother saw him only once, when he called on you to stand together for your family's name.
  
  > look at the stairs
  Each step is carved upon the side in bas-relief, though the design is abstract.