Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
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Piandao & Sons., Master Atelier, had for three generations been known as Singapore’s finest house of bespoke jewelry. Not the loudest name, nor the largest, but the most quietly trusted by those who understood the difference. In recent years, the house had passed into the hands of Piandao’s two sons, both capable men in their own right, though anyone within the trade would have told you the true master had simply chosen to step back, not to step away.
Piandao himself was, by most accounts, retired.
And yet in the rare moments, and entirely by his own choosing, he still took up the tools himself. Such a commission could not be requested. It could only be bestowed, and only upon those he found worthy of it.
In fifty years of practicing his craft, Piandao had made jewelry for royalty, for presidents, for those whose names appeared in history books long after their diamonds had been passed down.
But engagement rings, always, were different.
Rarer.
He had made only eighteen of them in his lifetime, not because the demand did not exist, but because he had never been the kind of man who could bring himself to build something untouched my love, passion.
There was a waiting list for his name that stretched, more often than not, past a year. Some who wrote to him were met, simply, with:
Piandao & Sons respectfully declines this commission.
No explanation. No apology beyond the courtesy of the reply itself.
So when one Mr. Zuko Sy called, Piandao had answered immediately. For the Sys, quiet and untouchable, were something like royalty to Piandao, though of a kind that never wore a crown. He had, after all, once made a ring for Zuko’s own mother. It was a rare crimson stone, later known to those who loved her simply as the ‘Firelily’.
The stone Piandao chose for the son, or perhaps, more truthfully, the stone that seemed destined for the young Mr Sy, was a diamond the colour of the sea at the exact hour the sky turns tranquil with dusk.
Its price was not a number Piandao liked to speak aloud. Historians, however, would soon find that this particular stone was worth a fortune only a whisper beneath two million. Though one cannot, in the end, truly put a price on love.
Vivid. Flawless. Cut with a clarity so rare that even Piandao, who had spent his life around beautiful things, found himself briefly, uncharacteristically speechless the first time he held it to the light.
He believed, in the way man would in Spirits and Gods, that the stone held something like stillness inside it, as if the ocean itself had been bent, gently, to stop moving, caught forever at that same tranquil, dusk-blue hour.
Zuko had chosen it for his beloved. A woman whose name, in its oldest root, simply meant water.
It remained, long after, the finest thing Piandao ever made. His sketches for it still hang in the atelier today. If you looked closely enough, in the corner of the page, you will find the name he gave the diamond in his own private script.
A name he didn’t need to tell his client. Simply because by the time the ring was finished, Zuko Sy already understood exactly what he was holding:
‘THE LAST WATERBENDER’