[ Many-headed, the beast of cleansing flame. Parched, starving. Lan Wangji’s guide breaks dark with smears of waning ash and cinder. Sweat of his palm slickens his hold on the brazier — Lan Wangji wrenches back before fire, spilled, can lick the rim of his robes in the scant betrayal of seconds until the lamp is regained. Repurposed.
Later, he will say: it started so, Lan Wangji came unprepared. With escort dispersed in Lotus Pier, bones of old whim aligned into the bodies of new habit. He doe as he pleases, always did. But Jiang Wanyin gave invitation. One man’s absence is permissible, be him even the chief cultivator. An entire delegation cannot eclipse itself.
Later, he will say: too close to home, both homes, to sanctuary. North of Yunmeng, a quiet exhalation on the icy cheek of Gusu Lan. And who raises a shrine to lord ominously over peaks and deathly abyss? No man of sense, but then, Lan Wangji searches the site of two disasters.
Later, he will say: he was there, mouth a seared line, eyes glass-wild, head flung back in laughter. Wei Ying was there, haunting the hallways, in meditation quarters grazed by time like moth teeth. And he opened himself, arms deep in dirt, dark crescent of falling ceiling stone on his torn thighs, with a charcoaled tongue, like every other corpse they found on temple grounds when the first tragedy struck, six decades before, and the great westward peaks thundered their last breath, volcanic.
But Wangji blinked, in passing, and this Wei Ying was gone.
Hauntings, the guide tells him, were two for a rice grain, before. If he gave a name with his wit, Lan Wangji misremembers it. Barely sees him, now. They crawled together, like the fingers of a hand, lending help with moss and mould, with doors creaking in hinges and rubble spilling under thin-streamed sun, with ruins looking to claim a final set of cadavers in tame, organic decay.
This is no Qishan; the eruption was old. The second destruction lives, new: a sanctuary peopled until the latest festival of the turning year, a night of open doors at the hilltop shrine, for all who stumble in, or seek, or stray, for offerings and the giving of counsel, for admirers and men of the faith. Climaxing in ritual isolation for spiritual ablutions: eight priests, locked in the great upper halls, to set their eye and their mind on enchantment, incantation and meditation, to wish away the ills of the past year, and invite in the kindly breath of the new.
Come morning, cavernous corridors flayed themselves, silent and bare — still. The shrine attendants refreshed incense, prepared the pigments for the cinnabar writing of new year’s well wishes on talismans. Gave humble devotion on their knees to the memory of generous patrons. But turned, with midday, to beg instruction of their masters, only to find the quarters yet closed — and, withered under the push of four men’s shoulders, rusted hinges singing their last dirge, the doors gave way to nothing. No one inside.
No sign of transgression. No theft. No note of suicide. No blood, no remains.
Here they prayed, and here they were not found, says the guide with a new flick of his brazier, at hall rooms Wangji walks with the choice step of a vagabond, breathing the stretch of silence, and the air that cools between them. Pebbles and stone, and incense in each corner, scattered like leaves. From down below, the lake folk brought tribute, the nearest village remembering its holy keepers.
Bitter, the room finishes with the mouth of a terrace, grinning down at the abyss, thin rails lined like the soldiers of a frail denture. Beneath Lan Wangji’s foot, courting the rim, rubble surrenders in a gasped fall to depths of hard and distant stone.
In the halls, nothing. No one. Only, etched inside on hard stone, Remember the forbidden word, so maligned it escaped the notice of the nails that scratched their curse, sharp, thin. Curtains, tattered but fluttering with the morning chills. Bird bones on the terrace, dappled in the watery paints of fresh pallor at dawns.
Lan Wangji asks, Were the depths searched for bodies?
Yes, says the guide, And none were found.
Only this story, the possibility of suicide, the savage thought of theft ending in carnage, the superstition of priests claimed, a legion whole, so the village sins might be forgiven for the new year.
Above, the high call of white birds, watching. Beyond, the cluttered laughter of young foxes, wailing in their woods.
What thoughts crowds madness in his head? He asks to be alone.
He is, with wind and air and the gaping chasm, and the bubbling of magma that will never stoke again — until, the inevitable strikes.
He does not ask, Are you a haunting, as before? He knows the shadow before it inches, the silhouette before it coalesces, the scent before it spreads, death-like and crisp, clawed. Before Wei Ying, he defined himself foolishly, Lan Zhan, styled Wangji, a man occupying his own form. Now he knows himself better: the negative space arming Wei Ying, aware of him, of himself, of the world, in crepuscules.
Still facing the terrace, he raises Bichen and holds her drawn beside him, barring Wei Ying’s path to the terrace edge: ]
No step farther.
[ Wei Ying and troubled cliff-sides want no intimacies Lan Wangji can think of. ]
[ To the man carting around a child who has aged upward, and who seeks his own independence in his attempts to walk as he comes closer and closer to a year, many of the details Lan Wangji asks after, is haunted by, register only peripherally. A crawling child with ambitions to stand on wobbling legs doesn't make for an easy target, and the moment Wei Wuxian stops, holding their second son and blinking at Bichen's bared blade, he has to look past, to the edge beyond, and wonder for a moment if Lan Zhan will ever trust he has steady feet.
Falling had never been an accident. He hadn't slipped to his almost death.
And he had no intentions of repeating what the worst depths of despair had left him dangling over, unable to summon the energy to stand on his own two feet again. Here and now, he also has a child who is tugging on his hair and babble complaining for food, chattering and nattering and no more silent than a slow trickling slide of rock down a mountainside. ]
You know, when I thought we'd venture out of Gusu Lan for a week or two, I didn't imagine our second stay would be in someplace known for mysterious disappearances and unexplained hauntings.
[ Around their son's chubby fist, the carved beads of Wei Wuxian's protections, demanding avoidance by all things touched and tainted by curse or resentment. He's been the bearing target of it once, and it leaves him vulnerable in Wei Wuxian's mind, if not in fact. Just like he's insisted on the same carefully knotted carved beads for Lan Zhan, each one separated just enough to make no clicking sounds.
Does Lan Zhan need such a thing, a charm of formidable enough regard, but hardly a match for cultivation genius at his level? No, perhaps not. But Wei Wuxian has been more in Gusu Lan than not, and idle hands need occupying, and Lan Zhan had been touched those months ago by things which Wei Wuxian has already decided to forget without forgetting.
He smiles, shifting Xiao Qingshan out of his carrying sling and onto his hip. ]
Safe enough to let A-Shan eat? He's been wanting down for the last leg of all this. You know, keeping him occupied on Little Apple is easier than keeping him occupied when carrying him.
[ How did they end up here on serious business, where's he going to find an Auntie or child minder, is he going to have to strap Lan Qingshan to Lan Zhan if they get down to fighting, because he sure doesn't want a baby strapped to him if he's going to be funneling any amount of resentful energy, okay.
Then again, an Auntie might be amendable to laundry, too, so... hm. ]
[ Coward, he does not say, perk of his brows an open invitation to meet this new blade and parry. Stab deepest, where only words may infiltrate. Stab to bleed and salt the wounds. Stab and stab and swing again, flat of the blade equally eager — but Bichen, hunger bloomed and roiling, returns to her sheath. Wei Ying walks where he owns, a shadow upended. Slim as cloud wisps dispersing before the break of storm.
On his hip, plastered close like a bruise, the sullen, swollen, red face of his — their, through grudging and tacit concession — child, agitated imperiously from hours of travel. They journeyed slow on Lil Apple, lilt of the donkey's ungainly step lulling the infant to beggarly sleep. Wangji suspects, because in all things there is private belief, and candour, and treachery, that Wei Ying stood taller, spine steel, because of the care he might give this one creature. Not that different yet from the shades Wei Ying protects, guardian of little whispers and careless nothings in the night, as if, tip of his head, Lan Wangji might blink yet and miss him.
Refusing a sect leader's seasonal invitation, when Jiang Cheng has learned to restrain his requests to the scale of their mutual tolerance would have made a mockery of the chief cultivator's impartiality. The letter came as Wangji finalised the last of his audience assignments. No reason, then, to eschew duty, past pleasure and formality. Will the chief cultivator, who might be tempted to forget the good province of Yunmeng, kindly exercise his revered faculties and honour us with remembrance? Some time soon? Before we all croak? It might have taken less than Jiang Cheng's most teeth-stripping venom and best skilled scribe to assemble a letter addressed to Hanguang-Jun, but intended to the stray, Wei Wuxian. Courtesy commands all creatures: they set course, disciples first, Wangji thereafter. Wei Ying, bribed with the infant and bullied by the remainder of his family, in tow.
A credit to his clan: Qingshan comported himself flawlessly for the better part of the journey. Knows his manners even now that Wangji sweeps in, in the ways of a vulture, to claim him from Wei Ying, raising Qingshan against his chest, and pressing his mouth against the baby's forehead. Be good. Has he not been so, throughout? Only the shriek of their sibling charms rattling alive, when accident knocks their two wrists together? Barely a tear from him. Never a word. (Soon, Wangji senses, soon.)
And feeding? Lak Wangji knows the rites, spilling in the lake of his rippled silks, kneeling with a parting swipe to rescue the bearings of Wei Ying's travel satchel. Goat's milk, warm in the leather clasps of a thin pouch that will want replenishing from an inn tonight. He presents it for young Qingshan's grudging consideration, only after trying his bottom for greater emergencies (dry, clean; passable). Suckling starts timidly, but stokes.
In Lan Wangji's arms, a child soothing. At his side, another, grown and despondent. His eye trails from one to the next. ]
Wei Ying. Stretch your legs by the dais.
[ And catch the presumptuous scent of deadened laughter, the absent pour of dampness and the hollow trace of cresting cold. Traditional, the advent of hauntings: signs deepen with time, like fractures, but the roots of a riotous tree must first come in strong. If there is scope for ghostly visitations, Wei Ying will be first to hear that knock at their doors.
Besides, the child sweetens for Wangji, hands greedy after he's done with his milk: first, to the pale strip of Wangji's cheek, then the tug of his hair, the glint and glamour of his headpiece, when Wangji's head descends. Allowed now, he will prove merciful later. Let Qingshan learn him, as he learned the bleached red of Wei Ying's ribbon for weeks before, with joyous hands and petty teeth. ]
The silence deafens here.
[ A horror of paucity: no movement, no screeches, no stray remnants of energy, no gust of dust, no air. As if, the quarters twice deserted, they cannot robe in the trimmings of hospitality, one time more. ]
It's true, those roads have never had tolls. Not the waterways, either.
[ A thin smile, and nothing more said; Lotus Pier is a place he longs for in the ways of nostalgia and memory, but not one he treads toward directly. Only in increments that bring him closer and closer, testing out boundaries of a broken relationship neither one of them had fully given up on.
Chenqing is evidence enough of it, as are the cruelties employed in beating out every possibly flash of Wei Wuxian. That there'd been nothing to flush out for sixteen years was something Jiang Cheng and Lan Zhan both shared.
Regardless, to Lotus Pier he now goes, the lagging third who's spoken inanities to the babe only increase as the inevitable looms on their horizon. He dreads, to some extent. He longs to a greater one.
Thus the babe, thus his distractions, and thus now the headache that intrudes as their son exchanges arms, going from one loving flame to the next, consumed equally by both parents, left flushed and thriving in their wake. ]
If you say so, Lan Zhan.
[ Small quirk of his lips and a fond glance over the both of them, handsome man with the sharp enough edges, and rounded child with his ever-bright eyes. He looks healthy now in a way he hadn't, months ago.
Children recover quickly. Something he used to do, he knows, to greater success.
He does stretch, both legs and senses, lifting a hand to his forehead and pressing at its centre with the ongoing blossoming of a hollow there, pressure against his sinuses despite his health being perfectly hale. There is a weight of something here, and he follows, steps alongside an unseen line and draws him to frown, walking away from the cliff, from their son, from his esteemed spouse, from Lotus Pier as a brilliant bloom on a horizon still days in coming.
There is a tree, here, wizened and weathered, twisted by the howl of winds that come roaring in the evenings each autumn. There is a stone, corner peering up from a fall of needles and detritus from the trees and shrubs nearby. There is a feeling of what has no form, and it stretches forward, tests against him, rubs like a feral cat, moves away again. ]
Lan Zhan, [ he calls back, not all that loud since his voice doesn't need to carry far; he does not know his voice sounds further when he speaks than it should, with him still in visual line of sight by this tree, this hidden stone, this abundance of neglect. ] Did the guide mention what this place was built on top of?
[ Qingshan's grasping hand brings black strands to his mouth, gumming at hair he then delights on tugging on, babyfat cheeks round and rosy as he beams up, giggling at his cleverness, at having his father so close at hand. He doesn't fuss overmuch, no, but he does pull for attention, thrive in its embrace, and Lan Zhan is a comfort to him that the child knows by something like instinct. The one who breaks fevers; the one who breaks fasts.
That chubby hand, reaching out with hair entangled between fingers, to pat, pat, pat at Lan Zhan's jaw. He meant to aim for the cheek, but alas; coordination is not always as he pleases.
He, too, doesn't hear his other father, enamoured of his present game and the liveliness of it, compared to the rest of this unvibrant place. ]
[ The pawing, the smirching, the easy, fatuous laughter. These are the testaments of a child, oil glistened in water. Patience remoulds Wangji like ewers to rushed river water, half the making of his nascence, half the tempering of his use. He learned it with the guqin, first. Spells, after. The long kneeling, his peering, his education, Sizhui's growing pains, Wei Yi —
...and is that him, murmured like a spring bird's trill? By chance, he gazes up to nothing: the hall room, shrouded, beat of branches tapping the decayed railway. ]
...Wei Ying? [ On his feet, before he can help himself, a toy of the market boxes, sprung. He was there, Wei Ying was there, only just ahead, mere steps from the cli — ] Wei Yi —
[ Against the advice of any etiquette master, he rushes. Hollow, Wangji's step nearly stumbles, the child in his arm anchored against fine net of hair and the sugar-like spun figments of his crown's filigree, silver alive. He catches himself — catches sight of Wei Ying, absent one moment, a spell of stewing inks, the next.
Indifferent, Qingshan peers out, bauble-eyed, and smooth, arms hungering. The disrespect of this new cart is staggering. The one before remembered his dignity as a lord and a master and an infant, therefore rightfully immune to missteps. Let Wangji meditate on the lax foolishness of his service, while stirred breath carves path out of him like slices of his hidden lungs.
He blinks, longer than he should, correcting his sight to twilight, to Wei Ying, dappled before him. Here. Known. ]
You left sight.
[ No. No, shades only played their game, and Wei Ying eluded himself. He's done so before, one round in Yiling, another on a cliff so crisp, he knows the way of it. He's won.
A strange correction. One moment there, then... ]
Apologies. [ A reaction wrenched of him, like a wolf's howl. The child, agitated. Wei Ying himself, no doubt aggrieved. He owes... more of the blinking, distorting the picture before him. Wei Ying the man, Wei Ying the sum of shapes, Wei Ying nearly translucent.
As Wangji closes in, the sharpness of him peers and pearls, abrasive. The staleness of the room and Wei Ying's raw scent, piercing it. Death and deathliness. ]
...bathing halls. Before. For ablutions.
[ So the sainted might finish their pilgrimage to the sleeping volcano in fine, polished form. The waters ran warm here, sulphurous to the cusp of bearing — the reason plain.
He does not find himself delaying to think the matter over — only sets down Qingshan on wobbly feet, bent barely enough to offer him a helpful hand to anchor him. ]
Bind us, so we are not lost.
[ ...and certainly not so Wei Ying can't throw himself alone in the nearest ditch, at the next blink. Ah, the binding talisman, that sage invention. ]
( His named, called; he's turned back toward Lan Zhan with a furrowed brow, not wondering at the animation behind his actions, but at the stretch of shadows that mislead his eyes. Panic and worry, cemented by a time he remembers better than he admits, but never with the clarity that Lan Zhan does. Traumas wreak separate havocs, married in a moment of mutual destruction that only rectifies for someone else's machinations.
You left sight. Part of it by now is patently absurd, given his leavetaking months ago as Lan Zhan took up his mantle as Chief Cultivator, Grand Overseer of the chaos at low simmer amoung the clans. He doesn't think about the cliff scant paces away, feeling no love or destiny with it, so why would he? He's forgotten.
White noise, in his mental landscape, a snow that coalesces into form and is shoved off again as he smiles at Lan Zhan.
He has another answer he didn't seek, he supposes. What to do, what to do?
... Focus on the task at hand. Bathing halls gone barren, but the earth lives somewhere underneath it all, a hot and roiling richness, but the scent of sulfur has weakened with the sinking waters long since relegated to below the surface. Or were they? He wonders, interrupted from considering ways down, to where the ache of death and decay and the silence too austere to be normal might crack.
Instead, there's Lan Zhan, asking for binding, with Qingshan standing on legs that remember sometimes to place this foot, then that foot, desperate to follow the adults who teeter around him like magnificent gazelles. )
I left my ropes behind, ( he quips, but he comes closer, crouches down to be before both man and child, reaching out to grant Qingshan his hand so that his free one might find second anchor. A wave of a chubby fist and then the clutch as the babe toddles forward one step, two. Tugging on Lan Zhan's hand for support without consideration.
Wei Wuxian smiles at the child, then shifts his gaze, eyes more knowing than his tone. Extends his free hand to Lan Zhan, quirking his eyebrows a touch: he used binding, or bonding, an unnamed duality, in a time where he also had spiritual energy in excess. More a tease and demand for attention from a young man determined to fulfil his clan's request, and the tagalong determined to help, regardless of his asking. A later tool for guiding balancing acts in fights, for grounding the bloodthirsty, for being an all around creative manipulator: he's given credit and not credit enough.
It's the same now, conserving one energy by holding out another offer: his hand, fingers partly curled, palm open and empty of all but his own life. ) but if you wanted to hold hands, Lan Zhan, all you need to do is ask.
( Wiser anyway between them and an infant, because he does want to find a downward direction that stays on mountain but peers into its heart.
The holy people had disappeared somewhere, from that room, overnight. Not out doors, and not flying, but there are more directions than above earth and above the sky. )
[ Blind, leading the blind: here Qingshan fumbles, Lan Wangji will obediently wander. Was it so with Xiao Xingchen, seduced by the easy noose of trust and familiarity? Did Xue Chengmei apply himself with such diligent nonchalance?
He is taken where all roads converge, before light and laughter and Wei Ying. Rescued, between two pillars, Qingshan overextends himself immediately, stride long and swinging, absently, after a time between them — bitterly convinced that these two dark friends will not surrender him to detritus and stone.
Dust catches under the sweep of Wangji's boot, matte and tacky with membrane of lamp oil, bled out. Locked, the pillar of his gaze ravishes stains that seep into fractures, fractures that spider as vines on tile, tiles that melt and meddle in a confusion of unpolished nephrite —
And within them, dark, beyond them, dark, binding them, dark —
What was this place built on top of?
Wei Ying, offering his hand again, in a strange and likely unsuccessful contortion of his body, straining. Causality is a fickle concept. Mere weeks ago, the action of Wangji's impulse called for the consequence of Wei Ying's palm, softened and thawed, lashed by rain spells and young, rapid hail. Bruised for it.
Only a parched man tastes to excess on countless counts of the same river water. ( He has had his fill, oh, but Lan Wangji chokes on it.) ]
Shameless.
[ Two men, bound by blood spilled, if not formalities. No need for the indecency of hands held without cause between them. What else will this poor child learn, through ill-gained example? How to ignore duty for witless whim, how to forsake caution. Its heart, listen to it, Bichen's beats with the sibilant promise of danger waiting in the womb of restless void. The birthing will tear them all, whole.
He flinches, despite himself — has been, for the better part of an incense stick, the slave of distractions. Cliff-side, shadow play, the child, their gu — ]
I did not see our guide flee.
[ Only... sensed him disperse, like shade before the dawn hours that seep in, pale but gaining strength — a mirror of the babe that traps Wangji's fingers, start of his nails sketching out pulses of pain in the rare filigree where Wangji's skin lies unmarked by calluses. No malicious spirit, him. This much, Wangji can swear by, is enough of a cultivator still to remember. He would not shame Uncle with such ignorance, not a Lan of his training.
And what do the laws of observance recommend, in matters of spirits and exorcism? First, to limit and lessen the exposure of the unaffected, to bar the path of innocents, to ward the grounds. They have a child with them, curse-marked once already. Wangji sees him, all full cheeks and deep-carved smile, and shivers wreck him like waves, beating the shore. ]
...Wei Ying. We judged poorly. [ They judged hardly at all. ] He is too young to stay.
[ There were inns, down the path to the temple, places of shelter. Even the village keeper's home will suffice. If they have no mercy on their own bones, let them learn it for the child's. ]
( He has a small shake of his head, the twist of his lips and the sigh that passes them after, letting his gaze drift back to the small, dark head between them. Easier, this.
The mention of the guide has him look up, cast his eyes about, and sigh again, only this time with the long suffering of a man visited often enough by spectres to no longer be surprised at their sheer capriciousness. )
Some want their mysteries solved. Others linger because of a duty to that which has gone, we know this.
( The guide, a guide in truth, didn't flee so much as remove, it seems; Wei Wuxian would laugh, but it dies a half-amused gasp on his tongue, swallowed by his lips.
He's not opposed, or insensate, to Qingshan's safety; his sensibility on it forever warped by perimeter lines and poor rest and barriers and talismans all built to protect and keep out and keep away the damaging ones, the spirits who were anger and rage incarnate, murderous destruction. He knows what it is to guard the defenseless against that, and he wonders at it now; wonders at the safety of each house downward the mountain.
It was nice, raising a child in a village. It has been an education, having no same luxury now. )
Do you trust them?
( He asks, not watching Lan Zhan, but Qingshan, watching the child's each placement of foot and the wobble of the leg that follows. He walks with support, now, and soon, soon he will navigate the wonder of his own motion independent of them both. They grow so quickly, and never quickly enough on the bad nights, with the insatiable cries and the humming and bouncing and the eventual fall into sleep of two rather than one, cradled against a chest and collapsed atop a platform, exhausted. )
If so, you have the skill and the speed, Lan Zhan. I have no objections.
( To Lan Zhan sweeping Qingshan away, finding him a safe enough keeping, a port to weather the storm. This place aches with silence and deep, not grasping and devouring in ways of some haunted places. Quiet and waiting, wishing for its own unveiling like a shy bride anticipating her long awaited wedding night, invariably disappointed by something of the ceremony and acts which followed.
He is, as well, implying: let me stay. Haunts and hauntings, incorporeal demands and whispers, all these are part of his domain in a way that was his survival and damnation in that salvation, and he does not fear them, but does not believe himself their masters without cause. Go not gently into that dark night below the surface, and he suspects neither of them will, penetrating dead silences with their own living silences in turn. )
[ To be dismissed unfairly and alone, a stranded nuisance bound for inns and village shelter. If one of them must walk the coward's path alone, then it should be —
...ah. And is this the game of it, howled heated cat's yowls, screaming hypocrisy? He wears that sin, the sect's true colours. Let it stain him, let it spread. Infection, trueborn, foamed. Bustling.
One heartbeat, and he would send Wei Ying away with gladness, to shelter and to a night's rest, to ill-earned succour. How long has it been since Wei Ying has tasted of broth warmth and a tolerant bed? There is no gladness in his journeys, no privilege of a gentleman, once raised by the better sects. Of the two, they are both trained, within reason, but Lan Wangji has dressed himself as Wei Ying's sword arm because he stands the sturdier of the two, steel and unbending. He may kill, where Wei Ying only strikes. He may defend.
But his gaze sharpens, blade poised, trained on Wei Ying's jugular. Let him bleed, before he dismisses. They've struck swords before, when Wei Ying still deigned to carry, calculated loose footing and parrying. Together, they were stars colliding, trails of white dispersing in their wake — and he means to tell Wei Ying, to wrench his jaw free of its bearings, of the fixtures and formalities introduced between them, to push the sound out, One does not go where the other cannot follow. Not again.
What business is this of Wei Ying, to name their inquiry done? Past curious meandering, he was ever ill suited for investigation — lacked the appetite and patience for long and dainty searches, each day without fuss or turmoil, each day, knowing it might be the same as the last, and an end-result distant. He lacked, where Wangji thrives, and the temple opened its maws for him first, showed the teeth of its stone and the gasps of its moss, livened, and the empty, sprawling space of the balcony, waiting, of the abyss beyond.
The ghost of their guide answered Lan Wangji first. Let it learn his name. ]
Lead the way.
[ Beside him, Qingshan stumbles on, disciplined in the ways of cattle and petty animals, who know survival belongs to the luckiest or the fittest, and his fate must write itself beside his herd — for now.
Later, he will grow his presumption, let it heat his blood and soften his senses, remind him that he is young and fair, and already a pretty child, with beady eyes like every doll a maid's spared past childhood, for her sheer beauty. He will never want for admirers, or carer to stop in their step and coo at him, not under Wei Ying's watch and counsel — earlier, when he was yet Yuan, Sizhui preened. Already, Qingshan learns the way of it, bats his lashes and puffs his cheeks and answer one grin for his own, trembling.
Wei Ying teaches him this. Let him learn, then, all that this father must offer. ]
( His lips twitch at that statement, and he offers a mere: )
Ah.
( No one here is a fragile wife, or fragile husband. He can trace where Lan Zhan's thoughts flow with a rejoinder like that, where the trek down to deposit a child in a stranger's arms is something attributed to fragility, to worry, to weakness.
It's not Wei Wuxian's intent, but he understands it, and simply holds his tongue on the many small ways Lan Zhan's let it be implied that he, instead, is the fragile wife. It's no more true than the reverse, no matter the worries heavy in Lan Zhan's soul, or the ones that dog Wei Wuxian's heels like nightmares of gnashing, bloody teeth. He's good at ignoring them in the wakefulness of night or day.
He hums a note that is nothing but a sound, and acknowledgement in the stretching shadows of yes, lead the way. )
Even if you were, Lan Zhan, I wouldn't hasten away.
( He can follow an instinct first honed in pain and desperation, something tempered through rages and outrages, through tears and blood and sweat and vomit until it was an arrogance he later had to leech out of his bones. This place echoes, but deep, like the flowing water, something reaches back up. Wanting, burdened, but not cutting in the way of so much resentment. It's both older and deeper, more worrying in that sense. He keeps close to both the man and child, not because he needs to be the first draw of a flute or deflection of a sword, but because of a life precious and a life depended on, and how both interlink. )
This way.
( An overgrown path off the proper grounds of the abandoned seeming temple, made apparent as they walk, a winding path through sad rustling vegetation that ends, forlorn, in an open area. The ground beneath their feet compacted, the foliage that has waxed and waned with the season growing up to the face of boulders on the hillside. )
I may be wrong, ( he allows, conversational and staring at a point on the rock; ) but this reminds me of a certain barrier from our less wise years.
( Are his wise years truly here yet? Far more so now, he says, compared to before. He crouches down by Qingshan's side, steadying him with one hand and gesturing to the stone that rounds away before them. )
Qingshan, look. The art of concealment is as much in making things appear as people expect them to be as it is in the arrays one might build. That'll make sense to you one day, I'm sure, but for now we're looking silly staring at boulders, aren't we? Mm?
( The babe blinks up at him, mouth slightly agape, and he smiles, not quite giggling, because a grin for a grin is reassurance and social mimicry. Tools for survival, at any age. )
They bleed them in the old world, blood coin to pay for blood sin. He is slow — his nature, the water's course — to drift behind Wei Ying and the trotting menace, his (their) child. Slower, for how he minds Qinghsan's heavy step, cautious to position himself ever at three paces' distance, because he sways, the little one does, first forward where Wei Ying might grip him if he tumbles, then back, where Lan Wangji might intercede, just so.
Outside, the path is weeds and jungle, scattered greenery and ears of wild wheat cat, whipping the length of his calves. He tickles for it, sours, indulges, steps out of the wind's way to leave little of his scent. A garden in abandon does not require Wangji's intrusion. Let it live according to its own laws, a brimming wasteland and grown wonder.
But he is there, finally. There, with his two charges and the sets of overgrown stone protrusions. Earlier, he felt the call to leave nature to its doings, to fall like another note on the music sheet of a world that requires no screech or halt. Now, he is normalised more than he is a crass dissonance, feels wakefulness and alert and the silence of birds, biting.
There is something here, beyond this great boulder that stares them, like its brothers, daring them to wait until it erodes down. No man could hope to roll it, no legion, not a creature of its size. And is there something behind it? No, not to look at it right. Would Lan Wangji have even sensed the change in atmosphere, had Wei Ying not — ]
He is dignified.
[ This, to Qingshan, who only grins the brighter for his dignity> And Wei Ying... well. Well, then. It is hardly for Lan Wangji to criticise a master of the unkempt arts. Only to present himself with a step forward. ] Inquiry, or...?
[ The curse of him, he pauses. Later, Wei Ying will know, will say, will whisper, This was the moment when I knew you weak and untrue. When he bent the mind's knee to Wei Ying's will, and ah, but he is steadfast, before he crumbles, lines and corners, bereft the sweetness of a dewy curve. Posture, points of precision — Bichen, drawn — the better sweetheart, devout wife, where Wei Ying serve Lan Wangji false.
Fragile, when she peers, gleaming. Elegant, when the cut of her grazes the neat stretch of Lan Wangji's thumb. Discreet, when she returns to her sheath-shelter, one blink and the matter done, and his finger doused in earthly red, wet on the large exuberance of stone. Honour, then Commit, and lastly, Surrender. Characters and each drawn slowly, the whisper of seals gaining voice, huskiness accruing.
Open. Open. Ope —
And it does, of course it does, it would have been brazen cruelty if stone did not shift, like the tremulous gasp of an old crone, rehearsed for theatrics. If the boulder did not bind its brothers, then shift and bend and beat itself aside, leaving the gaping mouth of the beast's belly, a door sloping down — a hole like a well's spread — and stairs, down and down, and beneath in the sulphurous catacombs, where they can go, with no light for Hanguang-Jun's namesake.
Is the hole's mouth not bigger than anything the boulder might have hidden? Of course. Generous enough for two men to pass comfortably at each other's side, born like a rupture of the land. Illusions, concealment. Next round, the artists of this work should consider hiding their entrances with a lake.
At the last moment, his hand drips behind him, settled obedient at his lower back, a signal of old, performative carriage. He has incriminated himself enough here, where Wei Ying must always be right. Waits, then walks, but throws over his shoulder: ]
Light a path, master Wei.
[ He has worn enough of himself, breaking concealment in ways Wei Ying will burn to learn, moth to the flame of every trick he has yet to taste, but that Nie Huaisang may have conceded alongside the finest pickings of his library, to make amends. Wei Ying's resurrection was never bartered, but the price of the Unclean Realm came nearly close enough.
And Wei Ying does so love to make use of himself. ]
( He's nothing but a quirked brow to Lan Zhan's question, his trust firm in a man who is has become increasingly aware sees a shade as often as he thinks he sees Wei Wuxian himself. There are reasons, and he knows them, but what he owes dues for are things he's paid to the best of his abilities, and he can understand things now in this man he sees that had been a mystery, for all his having been known before.
Sixteen years is a long time to think you recalled a person, to hold onto an image of what and who they were. It may as well take sixteen more to stop finding the reality less and more than the memory, but if anyone suffers for it, it's only them. He'd spare Lan Zhan that stumbling block, but he really can't do more than remember what he's rediscovered in himself on the roads that have, in time, wound back to Lan Zhan, and onward, toward Lotus Pier.
His weaknesses are exaggerated in the eyes of understood but untrue fear. Time will be the only demonstration otherwise, and learning how not to be each other's reverse scale; time, he hopes, will help with that.
For now, he slips hands under arms and lifts Qingshan again, resting him on a hip and with an arm at his back. His arseonal of wards and talismans and charms are as evident as the beads, clacking, at Qingshan's wrist; the shadows beyond the revealed entrance seem to tremble, lose a depth of that inky blackness, as Wei Wuxian withdraws a ghost light talisman and lights it with a brief burst of qi.
This is easy enough a magic trick, as it's been called, to have this light that stays to his front and can be directed ahead, and the glow of it is both bright enough and soft enough not to sear their (his and Qingshan's) eyes senseless. )
My dead? In a sense, don't they belong to us all?
( Forefathers and foremothers and foresisters and forebrothers, though here, perhaps, mostly male in the time of their living. He steps forward, keeps Qingshan in his arms, because if he needs a last second voice to calm a lurking soul, he has his for now; and Lan Zhan requires freedom of movement if his sword's arm, his Bichen, is drawn to taste blood in the way that Lan Zhan tastes fear in the shadows that cling to Wei Wuxian's heels as he starts his descent, controlled, head cocked and listening for the sounds that go before them. Or for the echoes that don't come back.
Qingshan looks back over Wei Wuxian's shoulder, distracted from his view of the steady light overhead, fixing his pale face and dark eyes on Lan Zhan, forever expectant, his small fingers curling into the fabric of Wei Wuxian's outer robe as the light behind them mutates into something bleaching out the sky behind. )
The air's fresh through here, ( Wei Wuxian notes, murmuring rather than whispering, hand stroking over Qingshan's back, keeping him evermore to his side, protected. ) the breeze blowing back out. There's several air entrances, at least.
( And a scent of sulfur now, a skitter of stone as they reach the bottom of the set of stairs so misleadingly short, touching the first buried hall and its worn dirt and stone floor. He shifts to pull another of his tools from his waistband pouch, the compass a point that twitches then swirls in a lazy way the light overhead makes apparent, indicating vaguely to the south-south-west. No hall, no tunnel, leads their direct, but there's the potential of that avenue should he only go left. )
Some evidence of activity down here, but nothing strong enough to account for the missing men.
( Yet. He tips his head to the left wing, glancing to Lan Zhan. )
Unless it's lingering evidence of some other working.
[ There are habits of silence that Cloud Recesses wears, strategy of cadence, economy of words. Elegance in choice. Sophisticated frugality of bows, flickered glances, stolen gestures.
Then, the habits of loneliness: Wei Ying, the child draped on his chest, the thin greetings and absent farewells, the distracted sibilations. Whispered, his voice dresses one honeyed truth, then the next, until he has marked each memory his mind will string like careless beads in threadbare circuit. Now here, then — gone.
He does not speak for Qingshan, deadened weight barely stirring, now and then, to grasp at air and flicker of talisman flame, always more eruptive than natural fire or lightning spark. They descend, deep and deepening, like snakes infiltrating another creature's burrow, slithering with the obscene satisfaction of filling and stretching out space through their invasion.
Behind them, echo and the violence of Wangji's steps, washing Wei Ying's away like sea foam and salted water. He eases, falls in line. Obedient, where he is required: Wei Ying signals, he withdraws. Wei Ying perseveres, he inches forward. They are as music, aligned, if Wei Ying only allows it.
And then, there is the dust, come hard and keen and stifling about them. He breathes it first, gold-stale, corrosive. His lungs, burned. Then tastes it, dry on his tongue. Until, shifting to correct his posture, when the corridor narrows down, the wing span of his sleeve loses thread and wastes lace and glimmers, before hooking on stone — to pull away stainless. Left-ward. ]
Men passed here recently. Within reason.
[ Their walk cleaned the path. He does not direct Wei Ying left-ward, as much as he nods and greets the way, in subtle indication. Left, where the corridor spiders in, just as thin, and the walls bear down tall and the loom of them throttles — where there is spread of rock, and on it, carved, the pledge of modest writing in tongues older than Wangji speaks. Some words, new. Names. Affixed.
Wei Ying's light spreads too distant. Frown deep, he draws out Bichen to loiter the cold kiss of her glare over the nearest carving, challenging himself with a choice read. There. For Wei Ying's pleasure: ]
'First turn he comes called.' [ And yet, blood signs the instruction, bare. Blood seals it. ] 'Second turn, he comes named.' 'Third turn, he comes unasked.'
Yiling, where a mouth of dark stone yawns and gapes and its teeth stand strong, reedy — where he walks, white intrusion, ghost by appearance, servant of a sickly universe that coagulates its grudges into shrivelled fistfuls of form.
Where Wei Ying, adrift beside him, walks king.
Core of the sun’s season, skies should be sundered by white heat, stained lapis. Yiling forgets itself: wind beats, bruises like a butcher cleaving the meats of the day, fresh in preparation. Glacial resolve recommends stark, arid hardship — spirits do not surrender their palace. And Lan Wangji has seen the way of it before, dust and withered weeds and vermin's intrusion, and a barren spread beneath his feet.
Superstition ensures privacy. The village that watches over the Patriarch’s old keep brings yearly altar offerings for the dead that stir, aimlessly, seeking their armies — men of Qishan Wen and Lanling Jin and Yunmeng Jiang and Qinghe Nie, the handful of Lan. The lady, Jiang Ya —
Before, when they traversed Yiling, their time was borrowed from their own travel purse. Now, he allows himself to breathe: to taste the wet of foreign, death’s cold that clings in sticky sheen over rock at the cave’s entry. The blood that, years later, never reveals itself in rust-red, but comes conjured when Lan Wangji whispers the starting forms of summon, trickles his fingers over walls in idle imitation of talismans.
And the pond like a bottomless eye, a snake’s stare. He cannot meet it, not as he is, tolerated — not Hanguang-Jun, here to dole out justice, but a fitting guest enjoying the Patriarch’s hospitality. The Patriarch, a gaunt and flimsy thing, dancing between the bones of his old home.
Wise, to have abandoned the children in the nearby village. Alone, even Lan Wangji wavers, another layer of shade and ambiguity over the sharp truths of once slaughter. Too much pain here. A surplus of anguish, cresting like stormed sea. Under the weight of their screams, he barely keeps his balance.
He does not wait for Wei Ying’s pronouncement, knows it in his marrow. "Cleanse, appease or disperse them?"
He has fought this battle before. On his knees, bleeding, crying without registering tears. On his feet, stone faced, resolve the unshakeable thing he'd forced it to be by not allowing himself to remember anything else. Desperate, when the wailing spirits descended and strew their chaos into the light of the living, jealous and petty and horribly aching, confronted by what had been stolen from them. Creatures of the most basic, distilled human excess, the dead unable to rest, unable to let go.
Step by step, fighting for the space to claim as something like life, something minimally tainted, minimally decayed at the time of its fruition. Even lotuses, born of the mud on an arid mountainside under the tender love of the Wens for their Laozu, the only ones to use his name without the edge of the ridiculous, the mockery, the granted officiation of disdain. They had made this place vibrant, in spite of itself.
They are the only dead who do not rest here, those particular Wens. They are the only souls he'll never hear, does not hear, cannot fathom the breaking of them, knowing Wen Qing's soul shattered, as disdained for nothing but her clan's brutality, her healing forgotten before the ambitions of a man who had styled himself as Emperor of the cultivation world.
Injustice breeds, bleeds deep here. His fingers trail the stones by the pool, the red haze of it unchanged, darkened for the lack of light coming through the upper entrances. Dark, poorly congealed, the coagulation of blood that would have belonged in an enclosed system, pumping through the heart.
Cleanse, appease, or disperse them?
"Do you want the easy answer," he says, voice soft, the murmurs and the cries and the howls at fringes calling to him already, recognising him as theirs and as creature too vibrant, too alive, too intrusive. Familiar but not, from that one frenzied return, where machinations of the living had once more stirred them to horror, had shoved them into innocent farmers and wood gatherers, and sent them crashing up, up, after the life-pulse of the petty, the strong, the pretty: the cultivators.
Oh, the games this mountainside has seen played.
"Or the honest one?"
Oh, the cradles to rock until their contents drift off to sleep long eschewed.
And the heart quickens, stirs with tired quakes of easy, spuming fluctuation, red cresting, waves bright, and the mirror magic of the pond painting his reflection — monster, slanted-eyed, a vision of purity. His whites simper in plain billowing arcs beside Lan Wangji, settle down in tired lines.
He watches Wei Ying and means him close, like the children who trail after his skirts, step and stampede over pebbles, heedlessly. In battle, in tenuous investigation, they have this: Wei Ying measured, sincere, an extrapolation of Lan Wangji's own caution. What whispers between them was dead when they were born, but bleeds fresh now, and the pond's waters murmur.
One knee, the second. He sits as if he were Brother readying for tea, and prepares himself in full ceremony: drags the angry mouth of his sleeve and turns it once, then again, over the cradle of his elbow, safe from harm's way. Then, he extends the willow branch of his arm, dips a hand in the slaughter waters — recovers the thin, thickening, trickled stain of red, and feels the vibration of deaf screams against his skin.
He wants...? What does he want? I want to have not brought you here. "I want your truth." No. No, never that foolishness. "Their truth."
Truths, and what telling of them? He presses his palm to stone, watches Lan Zhan submerge long, calloused fingers into the waters of Wei Ying's once bathing pool. Warm, they are, and cold, upon the extraction. Haunted as surely as the rest has become once he was gone, when that knock-off had drained clusters to suppression of qi, and the juniors could stand against them, had not been played to that ending, as neither had he (so useless, half a wreck) or Lan Zhan been, in that instance of staged betrayal.
So many accusations. He feels them here, whispered and shouted, sometimes still in Lan Zhan's voice. Not as breaking as the ones that come as Jiang Yanli, pleading, then vicious as she never was.
His truth, and their truth.
"All three, in unequal measure. These are old deaths, and there's no vengeance any can find; some let go, some must be made to let go. Some need cleansing, to face the horror of how they died. Especially those dropped in," he says, not looking up, but at his hand, pressing it firmer and firmer against the stone, curious in an idle, unpleasant way as to which would break first. In an ideal world. In some other history.
"Those bones need little more than collecting, and the fractured spirits of the ghost-slain can heal, reincarnate. Delicate work," he says, and he smiles, looking to Lan Zhan. "But not hopeless."
Endless in ways, but not hopeless.
Wei Wuxian breathes in, breathes out, and pulls his hand away from the stone. Some scraping of flesh remains, and he'll discover the rawness later. Right now, he doesn't feel it or the thin trickle of his own blood at all. Not even the resentful dead can sing louder to that call, though they brush against him, shadows marring a pallid frame with dark eyes that drink in the world around him and find it as wanting as it ever revealed itself to be.
"At least this time, I can offer you tea." He smiles, crooked, and settles back on his heels. A lifetime ago, and a poor host he'd been, and that'd been what stuck to his ribs, that one lack, for the one visit he had stolen Lan Zhan away for.
Wei Wuxian had not neglected to purchase his own leaves before they made their way here, their sons entrusted to clean, honest hands, or at least caring ones that respected coin and reputation and children alike.
Old deaths, delicate work, fractured spirits, the token symptoms of the ancient sickness: idleness or fear in the rites, condemning a land to haunting. It is in the way of lonely things and creatures and places and coreless men to grow so, a little walked by death, reshaped in her footprints. Their estrangement, first visitor, then weapon, then a veiled shackling master.
And Wei Ying says, Those dropped in, and, Ah. This, then. Crepuscular pulse of pain like candle wick, flame-bitten, flaring — this is pain, the shape of it, longing. He remembers, distantly, being a creature carved of the negative space surrounding his grief, thin and gossamer. Sixteen years, and the reason spilled gushing like Wei Ying's blood from Wen Qionglin's mouth, forever young, and Jiang Wanyin knelt to receive it. He did not know what bled them all, then.
Sees, now, its absent repercussions in the tidal fragility of Wei Ying's skin, the way his fingers pull back, as if singed, and the touch consuming him. Do not play with talisman fire, Lan Wangji remembered to teach Sizhui once, and Wei Ying smiles through his burns. Their children will learn the lesson faster, keener, better, the one with his rabbit heart and his rabbit fears first of all. A new life, alongside them. Wangji did not earn this.
There is wet in this cave, long arteries of strange life, dense as muscle tissue, knitting and trickling down. Before he knows himself, Lan Wangji reaches for Wei Ying's hand, that old greed anchored in habit, affirmed as routine through sheer will and exercise. He pours qi, and what healing knots between them is Wei Ying's to know, and Wangji's to ignore, to shy his eyes from. A gift given freely need not be thanked, nor Wei Ying's due be acknowledged.
"Pour my cup," he murmurs instead. In his two hands, joined, or in sculpted stone plainly available, or twigs braided together to serve him goblet. What trinkets does the Burial Mound yet keep, what bowls of jade and ewers of porcelain veined like night skies in filigree of wanton, forlorn pattern? What chopsticks of precious zitan, worth gold's weight, sinking?
"Will she be here?" And why, so distant from the City? Why would she follow? A final, careful donation of Lan Wangji's strength, then his grip tightens. Do not stab him when he stands weak. And, Do not let him wander. "Jiang Yanli."
He doesn't find Lan Zhan's grasp startling in the way he once did. No, under it, and the qi in its familiar warmth. His hand itches, and his fingers twitch, curling around Lan Zhan's hand without him looking his way, not then. Gratitude not always coming in words, but the brief return of a touch that knows endurance and enduring, and when small wounds are healed for the sake of the larger ones which cannot be seen.
"When we reclaim our sons," he says instead, because this is not his home, this is not where he wishes to play host, in honesty or in memory. "Or any day we spend here, but not in this place."
Not the caves, not the history, not the sanctuary that had been repeatedly breached, no sanctuary at all. Much as the utterance of his shijie's name throws him so that he stills, his fingers slack in Lan Zhan's grip, then tightened. Tightening, and clinging, and he sees without seeing:
"No, Lan Zhan. She never lingered in this world. She was warded against it, as you are."
Not a recognised heir, but a child of the main clans. Wei Wuxian does not have the warding, does not have the spellmaking that would render his spirit sanctuary to its own reincarnation. One reason among so many that left Lan Zhan, Jiang Cheng, Wen Yuan bereft; Wen Ning, and a confusing parade of the juniors who were young men now and children, thigh high, then.
He wants to move, be free of this moment of ghosts, where Wen Qing and Fourth Uncle and each face he'd known decades ago can be found in motes of dust. Not the shadows that have shied away from him again, in the light of Lan Zhan's qi, but the dust that lays thick over everything, but for the smudged footprints of its transgressors months back, machinations aimed to disarm and misdirect the clans as easily as they had been led before. Tugs, turns, yearns for the narrow passage to the side, into the depths of his once-cave. There.
"Best." But Lan Wangji invades here, tolerated. Counts his steps and his breaths and the pulse of Wei Ying's shadow-rot, incandescent, the residue of Yiling's death like sand granules and ground seashell when waves retreat after beating the shoreline. Here, Hanguang-Jun is the armour of his qi, bones and flesh curtailing it — lives, a woken candle, yet stoked at the largesse of the Patriarch. Breathes his breath, burns bright in his presence, demure.
Wangji rises, first, wash of silks brushed long behind him. If there is dust to traverse across the universe of Wei Ying's Wen empire, let his robes carry it, let their lace soak, let his steps carve. Let part of him claw and claim all that is Wei Ying's own through brutal physicality.
If not Jiang Yanli, then the dead Wei Ying fears wear names he ill remembers — spilled like pearls from the fevered mouth of young Sizhui, torn from his past through sickness. Uncles, aunts, many not of the blood, but chained to him in the way of stewardship the only weedling of barren grounds earns from each of his elders. If they knew more, Wangji might have arranged their silent altar. Instead, they yield rice and wine and fruit to the nameless passed, to Wen Qing, and to Wen Ning, before they knew the truth of his survival. Now, the ghost shares their table.
He trickles past the teeth of stone, teases their pointed sharpness with his palm. Considers, then, in a fit of whim, gives ghosts what is Bichen's by right: a scratch, a line of red, feeding. Gestures over generosity, with the dead — this alone may yet sate them.
"Use me." This, absently, to Wei Ying. "The guqin will agitate them." They are too many, too old, too confused, too united in their cauldron. "Inquiry will offend." As ever, with victims of slaughter. "Name me as a disciple. I shall work as the Patriarch wishes worked."
And his hand recedes, bled palm tight at his back, righting his posture. A strange thing, to serve ever as Wei Ying's instrument, gladly giving of himself.
"What?" The pause, at that entrance, cast in shadow dark enough to plunge his features into stark relief. A cheekbone, his nose, a touch of his forehead, his chin; a sliver of neck, but then little else, the pale glimpse of his hands, all swallowed by the blacks of his robes. Softened at times by lighter linings, but not now, now when shadows seem poised to swallow him, but only shadows. Not the resentful masked within them, who lurk nearby, but stir, curious, hungry, forever angry, with the fresh offerings twice over.
One old, one new. Both fresh, both tantalising, and caution, oh, caution learned at a bright blade and a dark song, this pairing familiar in minds that have little cohesion or coherency left behind.
He laughs, but it's the exhalation of the surprised, and his smile is that confusion of hearing and disbelieving. Not for an absurdity, but for the willingness, and the ache that follows, boneshattering in his chest.
"Lan Zhan, I don't need, I don't want a disciple. I never did. Partners, right? Side by side. A disciple follows a step behind." He steps forward, shadows shifting, light falling across him in fractals. "I want your help, not your filial piety, Lan Zhan. Will you?"
He will lead every way he must, plunge into the depths he prefers to leave in the past, like every unpleasant memory he's tried to shove away over the course of his life. Sixteen dark years, and he's not whole or unwholly undone after. Merely more human than ever, and surrounded by ghosts, like every living person finds themselves. As Lan Zhan had found, in the time before.
How their sons have been, and it is telling in its way, their collection of haunted, loved children, and the pride that they can share without telling others, in the achievements of their children. Two generations, and wonderful, both.
And I walk ever in your shadow. Ostensibly, to watch Wei Ying's back, where Suibian now lacks her old jurisdiction — from men, from fangs of long lost ghosts, from sabotage, from dagger and poison. From Wei Ying himself, though they toy with this truth, sand and submerge it.
"My pride does not take precedence to the dead." This, a strained clarification, tentative for how Lan Wangji brokers each word. Years dulling the blade of his temper at Zewu-Jun's feet, and he thinks some of the oils of his brother's diplomacy may well have infused him. He need not reduce Wei Ying, only to correct him. "It is not lessened by service."
With his help, his hand, his eyes, his strength — more than his piety, as if an orphan and a fool and a man who learned to spit upon the precepts before wooing their words can be trusted with the notion. Briefly, Lan Wangji pities him with the ancient condescension that anointed him vestige of his father's blood, skin and meat and bones his own, but heir of a school: the steel cog of a jewellery box, rust to never touch its enclosures. The whole of Gusu Lan will forever exceed the summed parts of its pupils.
And what of Wei Ying? Adrift between stones paler than the fire-veined teeth that entombed him. Did it ache to fall? But he learned from spirits before he did from artists of fine-carved healing, who peel gristle from the geometries of bone common to gentlemen and thieves: those who fall break before the landing. The heart, a weak thing, and Wei Ying's brittle beforehand.
( Here, close, spirits lap at his red fingers, lick at the screeching metal of his blood. What will, fed once, forever follow? )
"You have my help." A pause, but he walks on; sixteen years later, the critical progress of knowing that if he steps first, a red-eyed storm will follow him, thereafter.
"But if you are shelter, I am bait," he warns. The Patriarch's protection, the Lan purity. Which will lure them out quickest? "They will give chase."
And so it is, just like he thought it would be, Wei Wuxian falling in step with Lan Zhan and flicking his fingers, a warning paired with a sidelong stare to the dead who lap at Lan Zhan, hounds coursing the hare.
He smiles, and there is more teeth than lip, more memory of violence than that of joy. Try him. To each of the dead who stretched to greedy outreach, try him. He is wise to the worst of the calling, and shelter, ah, shelter for whom may be the question. Shelter for what?
Hadn't that been the fear?
The shadows slip back, mill like the mindless, aimless collections of thinned emotion they are, and the wanting slips in, and Wei Wuxian lays hand to Chenqing.
"They already do," he says, "They'll hasten." No contest, no matter who sung them forth; they slip from one cavernous room in smooth stoned floors to the dark, dry insides of the cavern he'd slept in for the year and then some, called his home. Strands of straw can still be found molded and ossified along the cave's edges, but the thrum of the space is warmer, haunted by memory and not one glimpse of resentment or spirit or soul. Or warmer to him, in the bittersweet memories of a life fought for step by step, and the tears of backsliding into hopelessness because the world wanted the ease of his total, wholly evil guilt than truth, or honesty, or justice.
"Ward the entrance, ward as we clear each outward facing ring. Wards can't hold forever, but it delays, and time is what we need." Here, as he walks across floors thickening again with dust and debris of dead leaves, dead things, dead dreams, and feels the faintest hope. One day, to see Yiling bloom, to see it live, where it had been a condemnation of the damned.
There is no hunting, raw and cruel, like the pursuit of man.
He feels the shadows: growing, grazing, like ink-stained tulle stretched thin enough to moan out the birthing pains of translucence. Too absent for the likelihood of producing harm, though click of Lan Wangji's tongue — tch — and Wei Ying's parting wave, and lo. They disperse like breaking sea foam.
And he feels them again, more toxic in their aftermath, in the stench that drowns his silks now, his body, an inorganic, wistful petrichor. Lungs open to it, eyes brighten wild and feverish. Absurdly alarmed, his gaze ricochets each way, off the cave's edges. And Wei Ying asks, wards. Futile, in a space so narrow, where they entomb themselves alongside ghosts, where the great, groaning tumult of Lan Wangji's power sabotages more than sustains them.
But he pledged to work as disciples do, and no boy of Cloud Recesses would defy his master. Tradition favours parchment and the fast, flame-like ignition of seals. Whim and Wei Ying turn to blood-carved renditions of the same. Between them, testing the tumble of rubble under his boot, the screeching, creaking sounds of stone floor plates finding their balance — Lan Wangji only kneels to scry the symbols with fingers wet disgracefully on his tongue. Dust hindered, enforcements set: they stir alive only once they've passed into the next circle of... quarters, into the crumbling core of Wei Ying's cave. Without an active element, they are anemic: but they are instructed to leech on energy within their reach, to use that for their awakening.
"So they linger as precaution, once we've fled." This, before Wei Ying need ask his explanation. He has nothing to hide: less so than does the man who stripped himself of flesh and the riches of his body's beauty in this alcove, who gave up his likeness along with his fealty to Yunmeng Jiang. As if a Wei Wuxian in health and glory could not have abided to become the monster that the sects named him.
It slips from Wangji's mouth like a wretched thing, tongue slack. "Once, you were king here."
Crack. Wei Wuxian's head rises, turns, as he half turns as well. "Here?"
In this land, shadowed and horrified, a terror of its own deep in soil desperate for anything but the wasteland it became, not barren, growing longer and longer in the whispering grasses of its defeats. A thin harvest, leaving bones cleaving to flesh, nothing between.
"Once life ruled here," he says, and he gestures with his hand, steps forward toward the stone of his rest, toward the entrance out onto the dilapidated courtyard, and its fallow fallen fields. "Once Yiling wasn't a place where the dead drove themselves to madness in their own bitter company. King of that, yes, and warden."
Wards that activate, that bind. Seals that attract, not just repel. Compasses that spun to track down resentment and the shadowed pits of things which were evil for a lack of good, which were greedy with no regard for anything but their own satiation.
He was king, here, and his throne stripped bare, and only the ghosts to haunt it after, turning over loose stones, looking, always looking.
He smiles, circumvents the bones of a bird that had thought, perhaps, the failed lotus pond was a temporary haven. Deadly mistakes, if one is not wise to the way of the world's movement. Even when one is.
"Lan Zhan, shall we play in the courtyard?" Music to soothe, to push on souls.
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Later, he will say: it started so, Lan Wangji came unprepared. With escort dispersed in Lotus Pier, bones of old whim aligned into the bodies of new habit. He doe as he pleases, always did. But Jiang Wanyin gave invitation. One man’s absence is permissible, be him even the chief cultivator. An entire delegation cannot eclipse itself.
Later, he will say: too close to home, both homes, to sanctuary. North of Yunmeng, a quiet exhalation on the icy cheek of Gusu Lan. And who raises a shrine to lord ominously over peaks and deathly abyss? No man of sense, but then, Lan Wangji searches the site of two disasters.
Later, he will say: he was there, mouth a seared line, eyes glass-wild, head flung back in laughter. Wei Ying was there, haunting the hallways, in meditation quarters grazed by time like moth teeth. And he opened himself, arms deep in dirt, dark crescent of falling ceiling stone on his torn thighs, with a charcoaled tongue, like every other corpse they found on temple grounds when the first tragedy struck, six decades before, and the great westward peaks thundered their last breath, volcanic.
But Wangji blinked, in passing, and this Wei Ying was gone.
Hauntings, the guide tells him, were two for a rice grain, before. If he gave a name with his wit, Lan Wangji misremembers it. Barely sees him, now. They crawled together, like the fingers of a hand, lending help with moss and mould, with doors creaking in hinges and rubble spilling under thin-streamed sun, with ruins looking to claim a final set of cadavers in tame, organic decay.
This is no Qishan; the eruption was old. The second destruction lives, new: a sanctuary peopled until the latest festival of the turning year, a night of open doors at the hilltop shrine, for all who stumble in, or seek, or stray, for offerings and the giving of counsel, for admirers and men of the faith. Climaxing in ritual isolation for spiritual ablutions: eight priests, locked in the great upper halls, to set their eye and their mind on enchantment, incantation and meditation, to wish away the ills of the past year, and invite in the kindly breath of the new.
Come morning, cavernous corridors flayed themselves, silent and bare — still. The shrine attendants refreshed incense, prepared the pigments for the cinnabar writing of new year’s well wishes on talismans. Gave humble devotion on their knees to the memory of generous patrons. But turned, with midday, to beg instruction of their masters, only to find the quarters yet closed — and, withered under the push of four men’s shoulders, rusted hinges singing their last dirge, the doors gave way to nothing. No one inside.
No sign of transgression. No theft. No note of suicide. No blood, no remains.
Here they prayed, and here they were not found, says the guide with a new flick of his brazier, at hall rooms Wangji walks with the choice step of a vagabond, breathing the stretch of silence, and the air that cools between them. Pebbles and stone, and incense in each corner, scattered like leaves. From down below, the lake folk brought tribute, the nearest village remembering its holy keepers.
Bitter, the room finishes with the mouth of a terrace, grinning down at the abyss, thin rails lined like the soldiers of a frail denture. Beneath Lan Wangji’s foot, courting the rim, rubble surrenders in a gasped fall to depths of hard and distant stone.
In the halls, nothing. No one. Only, etched inside on hard stone, Remember the forbidden word, so maligned it escaped the notice of the nails that scratched their curse, sharp, thin. Curtains, tattered but fluttering with the morning chills. Bird bones on the terrace, dappled in the watery paints of fresh pallor at dawns.
Lan Wangji asks, Were the depths searched for bodies?
Yes, says the guide, And none were found.
Only this story, the possibility of suicide, the savage thought of theft ending in carnage, the superstition of priests claimed, a legion whole, so the village sins might be forgiven for the new year.
Above, the high call of white birds, watching. Beyond, the cluttered laughter of young foxes, wailing in their woods.
What thoughts crowds madness in his head? He asks to be alone.
He is, with wind and air and the gaping chasm, and the bubbling of magma that will never stoke again — until, the inevitable strikes.
He does not ask, Are you a haunting, as before? He knows the shadow before it inches, the silhouette before it coalesces, the scent before it spreads, death-like and crisp, clawed. Before Wei Ying, he defined himself foolishly, Lan Zhan, styled Wangji, a man occupying his own form. Now he knows himself better: the negative space arming Wei Ying, aware of him, of himself, of the world, in crepuscules.
Still facing the terrace, he raises Bichen and holds her drawn beside him, barring Wei Ying’s path to the terrace edge: ]
No step farther.
[ Wei Ying and troubled cliff-sides want no intimacies Lan Wangji can think of. ]
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Falling had never been an accident. He hadn't slipped to his almost death.
And he had no intentions of repeating what the worst depths of despair had left him dangling over, unable to summon the energy to stand on his own two feet again. Here and now, he also has a child who is tugging on his hair and babble complaining for food, chattering and nattering and no more silent than a slow trickling slide of rock down a mountainside. ]
You know, when I thought we'd venture out of Gusu Lan for a week or two, I didn't imagine our second stay would be in someplace known for mysterious disappearances and unexplained hauntings.
[ Around their son's chubby fist, the carved beads of Wei Wuxian's protections, demanding avoidance by all things touched and tainted by curse or resentment. He's been the bearing target of it once, and it leaves him vulnerable in Wei Wuxian's mind, if not in fact. Just like he's insisted on the same carefully knotted carved beads for Lan Zhan, each one separated just enough to make no clicking sounds.
Does Lan Zhan need such a thing, a charm of formidable enough regard, but hardly a match for cultivation genius at his level? No, perhaps not. But Wei Wuxian has been more in Gusu Lan than not, and idle hands need occupying, and Lan Zhan had been touched those months ago by things which Wei Wuxian has already decided to forget without forgetting.
He smiles, shifting Xiao Qingshan out of his carrying sling and onto his hip. ]
Safe enough to let A-Shan eat? He's been wanting down for the last leg of all this. You know, keeping him occupied on Little Apple is easier than keeping him occupied when carrying him.
[ How did they end up here on serious business, where's he going to find an Auntie or child minder, is he going to have to strap Lan Qingshan to Lan Zhan if they get down to fighting, because he sure doesn't want a baby strapped to him if he's going to be funneling any amount of resentful energy, okay.
Then again, an Auntie might be amendable to laundry, too, so... hm. ]
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[ Coward, he does not say, perk of his brows an open invitation to meet this new blade and parry. Stab deepest, where only words may infiltrate. Stab to bleed and salt the wounds. Stab and stab and swing again, flat of the blade equally eager — but Bichen, hunger bloomed and roiling, returns to her sheath. Wei Ying walks where he owns, a shadow upended. Slim as cloud wisps dispersing before the break of storm.
On his hip, plastered close like a bruise, the sullen, swollen, red face of his — their, through grudging and tacit concession — child, agitated imperiously from hours of travel. They journeyed slow on Lil Apple, lilt of the donkey's ungainly step lulling the infant to beggarly sleep. Wangji suspects, because in all things there is private belief, and candour, and treachery, that Wei Ying stood taller, spine steel, because of the care he might give this one creature. Not that different yet from the shades Wei Ying protects, guardian of little whispers and careless nothings in the night, as if, tip of his head, Lan Wangji might blink yet and miss him.
Refusing a sect leader's seasonal invitation, when Jiang Cheng has learned to restrain his requests to the scale of their mutual tolerance would have made a mockery of the chief cultivator's impartiality. The letter came as Wangji finalised the last of his audience assignments. No reason, then, to eschew duty, past pleasure and formality. Will the chief cultivator, who might be tempted to forget the good province of Yunmeng, kindly exercise his revered faculties and honour us with remembrance? Some time soon? Before we all croak? It might have taken less than Jiang Cheng's most teeth-stripping venom and best skilled scribe to assemble a letter addressed to Hanguang-Jun, but intended to the stray, Wei Wuxian. Courtesy commands all creatures: they set course, disciples first, Wangji thereafter. Wei Ying, bribed with the infant and bullied by the remainder of his family, in tow.
A credit to his clan: Qingshan comported himself flawlessly for the better part of the journey. Knows his manners even now that Wangji sweeps in, in the ways of a vulture, to claim him from Wei Ying, raising Qingshan against his chest, and pressing his mouth against the baby's forehead. Be good. Has he not been so, throughout? Only the shriek of their sibling charms rattling alive, when accident knocks their two wrists together? Barely a tear from him. Never a word. (Soon, Wangji senses, soon.)
And feeding? Lak Wangji knows the rites, spilling in the lake of his rippled silks, kneeling with a parting swipe to rescue the bearings of Wei Ying's travel satchel. Goat's milk, warm in the leather clasps of a thin pouch that will want replenishing from an inn tonight. He presents it for young Qingshan's grudging consideration, only after trying his bottom for greater emergencies (dry, clean; passable). Suckling starts timidly, but stokes.
In Lan Wangji's arms, a child soothing. At his side, another, grown and despondent. His eye trails from one to the next. ]
Wei Ying. Stretch your legs by the dais.
[ And catch the presumptuous scent of deadened laughter, the absent pour of dampness and the hollow trace of cresting cold. Traditional, the advent of hauntings: signs deepen with time, like fractures, but the roots of a riotous tree must first come in strong. If there is scope for ghostly visitations, Wei Ying will be first to hear that knock at their doors.
Besides, the child sweetens for Wangji, hands greedy after he's done with his milk: first, to the pale strip of Wangji's cheek, then the tug of his hair, the glint and glamour of his headpiece, when Wangji's head descends. Allowed now, he will prove merciful later. Let Qingshan learn him, as he learned the bleached red of Wei Ying's ribbon for weeks before, with joyous hands and petty teeth. ]
The silence deafens here.
[ A horror of paucity: no movement, no screeches, no stray remnants of energy, no gust of dust, no air. As if, the quarters twice deserted, they cannot robe in the trimmings of hospitality, one time more. ]
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[ A thin smile, and nothing more said; Lotus Pier is a place he longs for in the ways of nostalgia and memory, but not one he treads toward directly. Only in increments that bring him closer and closer, testing out boundaries of a broken relationship neither one of them had fully given up on.
Chenqing is evidence enough of it, as are the cruelties employed in beating out every possibly flash of Wei Wuxian. That there'd been nothing to flush out for sixteen years was something Jiang Cheng and Lan Zhan both shared.
Regardless, to Lotus Pier he now goes, the lagging third who's spoken inanities to the babe only increase as the inevitable looms on their horizon. He dreads, to some extent. He longs to a greater one.
Thus the babe, thus his distractions, and thus now the headache that intrudes as their son exchanges arms, going from one loving flame to the next, consumed equally by both parents, left flushed and thriving in their wake. ]
If you say so, Lan Zhan.
[ Small quirk of his lips and a fond glance over the both of them, handsome man with the sharp enough edges, and rounded child with his ever-bright eyes. He looks healthy now in a way he hadn't, months ago.
Children recover quickly. Something he used to do, he knows, to greater success.
He does stretch, both legs and senses, lifting a hand to his forehead and pressing at its centre with the ongoing blossoming of a hollow there, pressure against his sinuses despite his health being perfectly hale. There is a weight of something here, and he follows, steps alongside an unseen line and draws him to frown, walking away from the cliff, from their son, from his esteemed spouse, from Lotus Pier as a brilliant bloom on a horizon still days in coming.
There is a tree, here, wizened and weathered, twisted by the howl of winds that come roaring in the evenings each autumn. There is a stone, corner peering up from a fall of needles and detritus from the trees and shrubs nearby. There is a feeling of what has no form, and it stretches forward, tests against him, rubs like a feral cat, moves away again. ]
Lan Zhan, [ he calls back, not all that loud since his voice doesn't need to carry far; he does not know his voice sounds further when he speaks than it should, with him still in visual line of sight by this tree, this hidden stone, this abundance of neglect. ] Did the guide mention what this place was built on top of?
[ Qingshan's grasping hand brings black strands to his mouth, gumming at hair he then delights on tugging on, babyfat cheeks round and rosy as he beams up, giggling at his cleverness, at having his father so close at hand. He doesn't fuss overmuch, no, but he does pull for attention, thrive in its embrace, and Lan Zhan is a comfort to him that the child knows by something like instinct. The one who breaks fevers; the one who breaks fasts.
That chubby hand, reaching out with hair entangled between fingers, to pat, pat, pat at Lan Zhan's jaw. He meant to aim for the cheek, but alas; coordination is not always as he pleases.
He, too, doesn't hear his other father, enamoured of his present game and the liveliness of it, compared to the rest of this unvibrant place. ]
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...and is that him, murmured like a spring bird's trill? By chance, he gazes up to nothing: the hall room, shrouded, beat of branches tapping the decayed railway. ]
...Wei Ying? [ On his feet, before he can help himself, a toy of the market boxes, sprung. He was there, Wei Ying was there, only just ahead, mere steps from the cli — ] Wei Yi —
[ Against the advice of any etiquette master, he rushes. Hollow, Wangji's step nearly stumbles, the child in his arm anchored against fine net of hair and the sugar-like spun figments of his crown's filigree, silver alive. He catches himself — catches sight of Wei Ying, absent one moment, a spell of stewing inks, the next.
Indifferent, Qingshan peers out, bauble-eyed, and smooth, arms hungering. The disrespect of this new cart is staggering. The one before remembered his dignity as a lord and a master and an infant, therefore rightfully immune to missteps. Let Wangji meditate on the lax foolishness of his service, while stirred breath carves path out of him like slices of his hidden lungs.
He blinks, longer than he should, correcting his sight to twilight, to Wei Ying, dappled before him. Here. Known. ]
You left sight.
[ No. No, shades only played their game, and Wei Ying eluded himself. He's done so before, one round in Yiling, another on a cliff so crisp, he knows the way of it. He's won.
A strange correction. One moment there, then... ]
Apologies. [ A reaction wrenched of him, like a wolf's howl. The child, agitated. Wei Ying himself, no doubt aggrieved. He owes... more of the blinking, distorting the picture before him. Wei Ying the man, Wei Ying the sum of shapes, Wei Ying nearly translucent.
As Wangji closes in, the sharpness of him peers and pearls, abrasive. The staleness of the room and Wei Ying's raw scent, piercing it. Death and deathliness. ]
...bathing halls. Before. For ablutions.
[ So the sainted might finish their pilgrimage to the sleeping volcano in fine, polished form. The waters ran warm here, sulphurous to the cusp of bearing — the reason plain.
He does not find himself delaying to think the matter over — only sets down Qingshan on wobbly feet, bent barely enough to offer him a helpful hand to anchor him. ]
Bind us, so we are not lost.
[ ...and certainly not so Wei Ying can't throw himself alone in the nearest ditch, at the next blink. Ah, the binding talisman, that sage invention. ]
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You left sight. Part of it by now is patently absurd, given his leavetaking months ago as Lan Zhan took up his mantle as Chief Cultivator, Grand Overseer of the chaos at low simmer amoung the clans. He doesn't think about the cliff scant paces away, feeling no love or destiny with it, so why would he? He's forgotten.
White noise, in his mental landscape, a snow that coalesces into form and is shoved off again as he smiles at Lan Zhan.
He has another answer he didn't seek, he supposes. What to do, what to do?
... Focus on the task at hand. Bathing halls gone barren, but the earth lives somewhere underneath it all, a hot and roiling richness, but the scent of sulfur has weakened with the sinking waters long since relegated to below the surface. Or were they? He wonders, interrupted from considering ways down, to where the ache of death and decay and the silence too austere to be normal might crack.
Instead, there's Lan Zhan, asking for binding, with Qingshan standing on legs that remember sometimes to place this foot, then that foot, desperate to follow the adults who teeter around him like magnificent gazelles. )
I left my ropes behind, ( he quips, but he comes closer, crouches down to be before both man and child, reaching out to grant Qingshan his hand so that his free one might find second anchor. A wave of a chubby fist and then the clutch as the babe toddles forward one step, two. Tugging on Lan Zhan's hand for support without consideration.
Wei Wuxian smiles at the child, then shifts his gaze, eyes more knowing than his tone. Extends his free hand to Lan Zhan, quirking his eyebrows a touch: he used binding, or bonding, an unnamed duality, in a time where he also had spiritual energy in excess. More a tease and demand for attention from a young man determined to fulfil his clan's request, and the tagalong determined to help, regardless of his asking. A later tool for guiding balancing acts in fights, for grounding the bloodthirsty, for being an all around creative manipulator: he's given credit and not credit enough.
It's the same now, conserving one energy by holding out another offer: his hand, fingers partly curled, palm open and empty of all but his own life. ) but if you wanted to hold hands, Lan Zhan, all you need to do is ask.
( Wiser anyway between them and an infant, because he does want to find a downward direction that stays on mountain but peers into its heart.
The holy people had disappeared somewhere, from that room, overnight. Not out doors, and not flying, but there are more directions than above earth and above the sky. )
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He is taken where all roads converge, before light and laughter and Wei Ying. Rescued, between two pillars, Qingshan overextends himself immediately, stride long and swinging, absently, after a time between them — bitterly convinced that these two dark friends will not surrender him to detritus and stone.
Dust catches under the sweep of Wangji's boot, matte and tacky with membrane of lamp oil, bled out. Locked, the pillar of his gaze ravishes stains that seep into fractures, fractures that spider as vines on tile, tiles that melt and meddle in a confusion of unpolished nephrite —
And within them, dark, beyond them, dark, binding them, dark —
What was this place built on top of?
Wei Ying, offering his hand again, in a strange and likely unsuccessful contortion of his body, straining. Causality is a fickle concept. Mere weeks ago, the action of Wangji's impulse called for the consequence of Wei Ying's palm, softened and thawed, lashed by rain spells and young, rapid hail. Bruised for it.
Only a parched man tastes to excess on countless counts of the same river water. ( He has had his fill, oh, but Lan Wangji chokes on it.) ]
Shameless.
[ Two men, bound by blood spilled, if not formalities. No need for the indecency of hands held without cause between them. What else will this poor child learn, through ill-gained example? How to ignore duty for witless whim, how to forsake caution. Its heart, listen to it, Bichen's beats with the sibilant promise of danger waiting in the womb of restless void. The birthing will tear them all, whole.
He flinches, despite himself — has been, for the better part of an incense stick, the slave of distractions. Cliff-side, shadow play, the child, their gu — ]
I did not see our guide flee.
[ Only... sensed him disperse, like shade before the dawn hours that seep in, pale but gaining strength — a mirror of the babe that traps Wangji's fingers, start of his nails sketching out pulses of pain in the rare filigree where Wangji's skin lies unmarked by calluses. No malicious spirit, him. This much, Wangji can swear by, is enough of a cultivator still to remember. He would not shame Uncle with such ignorance, not a Lan of his training.
And what do the laws of observance recommend, in matters of spirits and exorcism? First, to limit and lessen the exposure of the unaffected, to bar the path of innocents, to ward the grounds. They have a child with them, curse-marked once already. Wangji sees him, all full cheeks and deep-carved smile, and shivers wreck him like waves, beating the shore. ]
...Wei Ying. We judged poorly. [ They judged hardly at all. ] He is too young to stay.
[ There were inns, down the path to the temple, places of shelter. Even the village keeper's home will suffice. If they have no mercy on their own bones, let them learn it for the child's. ]
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The mention of the guide has him look up, cast his eyes about, and sigh again, only this time with the long suffering of a man visited often enough by spectres to no longer be surprised at their sheer capriciousness. )
Some want their mysteries solved. Others linger because of a duty to that which has gone, we know this.
( The guide, a guide in truth, didn't flee so much as remove, it seems; Wei Wuxian would laugh, but it dies a half-amused gasp on his tongue, swallowed by his lips.
He's not opposed, or insensate, to Qingshan's safety; his sensibility on it forever warped by perimeter lines and poor rest and barriers and talismans all built to protect and keep out and keep away the damaging ones, the spirits who were anger and rage incarnate, murderous destruction. He knows what it is to guard the defenseless against that, and he wonders at it now; wonders at the safety of each house downward the mountain.
It was nice, raising a child in a village. It has been an education, having no same luxury now. )
Do you trust them?
( He asks, not watching Lan Zhan, but Qingshan, watching the child's each placement of foot and the wobble of the leg that follows. He walks with support, now, and soon, soon he will navigate the wonder of his own motion independent of them both. They grow so quickly, and never quickly enough on the bad nights, with the insatiable cries and the humming and bouncing and the eventual fall into sleep of two rather than one, cradled against a chest and collapsed atop a platform, exhausted. )
If so, you have the skill and the speed, Lan Zhan. I have no objections.
( To Lan Zhan sweeping Qingshan away, finding him a safe enough keeping, a port to weather the storm. This place aches with silence and deep, not grasping and devouring in ways of some haunted places. Quiet and waiting, wishing for its own unveiling like a shy bride anticipating her long awaited wedding night, invariably disappointed by something of the ceremony and acts which followed.
He is, as well, implying: let me stay. Haunts and hauntings, incorporeal demands and whispers, all these are part of his domain in a way that was his survival and damnation in that salvation, and he does not fear them, but does not believe himself their masters without cause. Go not gently into that dark night below the surface, and he suspects neither of them will, penetrating dead silences with their own living silences in turn. )
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[ To be dismissed unfairly and alone, a stranded nuisance bound for inns and village shelter. If one of them must walk the coward's path alone, then it should be —
...ah. And is this the game of it, howled heated cat's yowls, screaming hypocrisy? He wears that sin, the sect's true colours. Let it stain him, let it spread. Infection, trueborn, foamed. Bustling.
One heartbeat, and he would send Wei Ying away with gladness, to shelter and to a night's rest, to ill-earned succour. How long has it been since Wei Ying has tasted of broth warmth and a tolerant bed? There is no gladness in his journeys, no privilege of a gentleman, once raised by the better sects. Of the two, they are both trained, within reason, but Lan Wangji has dressed himself as Wei Ying's sword arm because he stands the sturdier of the two, steel and unbending. He may kill, where Wei Ying only strikes. He may defend.
But his gaze sharpens, blade poised, trained on Wei Ying's jugular. Let him bleed, before he dismisses. They've struck swords before, when Wei Ying still deigned to carry, calculated loose footing and parrying. Together, they were stars colliding, trails of white dispersing in their wake — and he means to tell Wei Ying, to wrench his jaw free of its bearings, of the fixtures and formalities introduced between them, to push the sound out, One does not go where the other cannot follow. Not again.
What business is this of Wei Ying, to name their inquiry done? Past curious meandering, he was ever ill suited for investigation — lacked the appetite and patience for long and dainty searches, each day without fuss or turmoil, each day, knowing it might be the same as the last, and an end-result distant. He lacked, where Wangji thrives, and the temple opened its maws for him first, showed the teeth of its stone and the gasps of its moss, livened, and the empty, sprawling space of the balcony, waiting, of the abyss beyond.
The ghost of their guide answered Lan Wangji first. Let it learn his name. ]
Lead the way.
[ Beside him, Qingshan stumbles on, disciplined in the ways of cattle and petty animals, who know survival belongs to the luckiest or the fittest, and his fate must write itself beside his herd — for now.
Later, he will grow his presumption, let it heat his blood and soften his senses, remind him that he is young and fair, and already a pretty child, with beady eyes like every doll a maid's spared past childhood, for her sheer beauty. He will never want for admirers, or carer to stop in their step and coo at him, not under Wei Ying's watch and counsel — earlier, when he was yet Yuan, Sizhui preened. Already, Qingshan learns the way of it, bats his lashes and puffs his cheeks and answer one grin for his own, trembling.
Wei Ying teaches him this. Let him learn, then, all that this father must offer. ]
We are not yet slow to follow.
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Ah.
( No one here is a fragile wife, or fragile husband. He can trace where Lan Zhan's thoughts flow with a rejoinder like that, where the trek down to deposit a child in a stranger's arms is something attributed to fragility, to worry, to weakness.
It's not Wei Wuxian's intent, but he understands it, and simply holds his tongue on the many small ways Lan Zhan's let it be implied that he, instead, is the fragile wife. It's no more true than the reverse, no matter the worries heavy in Lan Zhan's soul, or the ones that dog Wei Wuxian's heels like nightmares of gnashing, bloody teeth. He's good at ignoring them in the wakefulness of night or day.
He hums a note that is nothing but a sound, and acknowledgement in the stretching shadows of yes, lead the way. )
Even if you were, Lan Zhan, I wouldn't hasten away.
( He can follow an instinct first honed in pain and desperation, something tempered through rages and outrages, through tears and blood and sweat and vomit until it was an arrogance he later had to leech out of his bones. This place echoes, but deep, like the flowing water, something reaches back up. Wanting, burdened, but not cutting in the way of so much resentment. It's both older and deeper, more worrying in that sense. He keeps close to both the man and child, not because he needs to be the first draw of a flute or deflection of a sword, but because of a life precious and a life depended on, and how both interlink. )
This way.
( An overgrown path off the proper grounds of the abandoned seeming temple, made apparent as they walk, a winding path through sad rustling vegetation that ends, forlorn, in an open area. The ground beneath their feet compacted, the foliage that has waxed and waned with the season growing up to the face of boulders on the hillside. )
I may be wrong, ( he allows, conversational and staring at a point on the rock; ) but this reminds me of a certain barrier from our less wise years.
( Are his wise years truly here yet? Far more so now, he says, compared to before. He crouches down by Qingshan's side, steadying him with one hand and gesturing to the stone that rounds away before them. )
Qingshan, look. The art of concealment is as much in making things appear as people expect them to be as it is in the arrays one might build. That'll make sense to you one day, I'm sure, but for now we're looking silly staring at boulders, aren't we? Mm?
( The babe blinks up at him, mouth slightly agape, and he smiles, not quite giggling, because a grin for a grin is reassurance and social mimicry. Tools for survival, at any age. )
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They bleed them in the old world, blood coin to pay for blood sin. He is slow — his nature, the water's course — to drift behind Wei Ying and the trotting menace, his (their) child. Slower, for how he minds Qinghsan's heavy step, cautious to position himself ever at three paces' distance, because he sways, the little one does, first forward where Wei Ying might grip him if he tumbles, then back, where Lan Wangji might intercede, just so.
Outside, the path is weeds and jungle, scattered greenery and ears of wild wheat cat, whipping the length of his calves. He tickles for it, sours, indulges, steps out of the wind's way to leave little of his scent. A garden in abandon does not require Wangji's intrusion. Let it live according to its own laws, a brimming wasteland and grown wonder.
But he is there, finally. There, with his two charges and the sets of overgrown stone protrusions. Earlier, he felt the call to leave nature to its doings, to fall like another note on the music sheet of a world that requires no screech or halt. Now, he is normalised more than he is a crass dissonance, feels wakefulness and alert and the silence of birds, biting.
There is something here, beyond this great boulder that stares them, like its brothers, daring them to wait until it erodes down. No man could hope to roll it, no legion, not a creature of its size. And is there something behind it? No, not to look at it right. Would Lan Wangji have even sensed the change in atmosphere, had Wei Ying not — ]
He is dignified.
[ This, to Qingshan, who only grins the brighter for his dignity> And Wei Ying... well. Well, then. It is hardly for Lan Wangji to criticise a master of the unkempt arts. Only to present himself with a step forward. ] Inquiry, or...?
[ The curse of him, he pauses. Later, Wei Ying will know, will say, will whisper, This was the moment when I knew you weak and untrue. When he bent the mind's knee to Wei Ying's will, and ah, but he is steadfast, before he crumbles, lines and corners, bereft the sweetness of a dewy curve. Posture, points of precision — Bichen, drawn — the better sweetheart, devout wife, where Wei Ying serve Lan Wangji false.
Fragile, when she peers, gleaming. Elegant, when the cut of her grazes the neat stretch of Lan Wangji's thumb. Discreet, when she returns to her sheath-shelter, one blink and the matter done, and his finger doused in earthly red, wet on the large exuberance of stone. Honour, then Commit, and lastly, Surrender. Characters and each drawn slowly, the whisper of seals gaining voice, huskiness accruing.
Open. Open. Ope —
And it does, of course it does, it would have been brazen cruelty if stone did not shift, like the tremulous gasp of an old crone, rehearsed for theatrics. If the boulder did not bind its brothers, then shift and bend and beat itself aside, leaving the gaping mouth of the beast's belly, a door sloping down — a hole like a well's spread — and stairs, down and down, and beneath in the sulphurous catacombs, where they can go, with no light for Hanguang-Jun's namesake.
Is the hole's mouth not bigger than anything the boulder might have hidden? Of course. Generous enough for two men to pass comfortably at each other's side, born like a rupture of the land. Illusions, concealment. Next round, the artists of this work should consider hiding their entrances with a lake.
At the last moment, his hand drips behind him, settled obedient at his lower back, a signal of old, performative carriage. He has incriminated himself enough here, where Wei Ying must always be right. Waits, then walks, but throws over his shoulder: ]
Light a path, master Wei.
[ He has worn enough of himself, breaking concealment in ways Wei Ying will burn to learn, moth to the flame of every trick he has yet to taste, but that Nie Huaisang may have conceded alongside the finest pickings of his library, to make amends. Wei Ying's resurrection was never bartered, but the price of the Unclean Realm came nearly close enough.
And Wei Ying does so love to make use of himself. ]
Before we join your dead.
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Sixteen years is a long time to think you recalled a person, to hold onto an image of what and who they were. It may as well take sixteen more to stop finding the reality less and more than the memory, but if anyone suffers for it, it's only them. He'd spare Lan Zhan that stumbling block, but he really can't do more than remember what he's rediscovered in himself on the roads that have, in time, wound back to Lan Zhan, and onward, toward Lotus Pier.
His weaknesses are exaggerated in the eyes of understood but untrue fear. Time will be the only demonstration otherwise, and learning how not to be each other's reverse scale; time, he hopes, will help with that.
For now, he slips hands under arms and lifts Qingshan again, resting him on a hip and with an arm at his back. His arseonal of wards and talismans and charms are as evident as the beads, clacking, at Qingshan's wrist; the shadows beyond the revealed entrance seem to tremble, lose a depth of that inky blackness, as Wei Wuxian withdraws a ghost light talisman and lights it with a brief burst of qi.
This is easy enough a magic trick, as it's been called, to have this light that stays to his front and can be directed ahead, and the glow of it is both bright enough and soft enough not to sear their (his and Qingshan's) eyes senseless. )
My dead? In a sense, don't they belong to us all?
( Forefathers and foremothers and foresisters and forebrothers, though here, perhaps, mostly male in the time of their living. He steps forward, keeps Qingshan in his arms, because if he needs a last second voice to calm a lurking soul, he has his for now; and Lan Zhan requires freedom of movement if his sword's arm, his Bichen, is drawn to taste blood in the way that Lan Zhan tastes fear in the shadows that cling to Wei Wuxian's heels as he starts his descent, controlled, head cocked and listening for the sounds that go before them. Or for the echoes that don't come back.
Qingshan looks back over Wei Wuxian's shoulder, distracted from his view of the steady light overhead, fixing his pale face and dark eyes on Lan Zhan, forever expectant, his small fingers curling into the fabric of Wei Wuxian's outer robe as the light behind them mutates into something bleaching out the sky behind. )
The air's fresh through here, ( Wei Wuxian notes, murmuring rather than whispering, hand stroking over Qingshan's back, keeping him evermore to his side, protected. ) the breeze blowing back out. There's several air entrances, at least.
( And a scent of sulfur now, a skitter of stone as they reach the bottom of the set of stairs so misleadingly short, touching the first buried hall and its worn dirt and stone floor. He shifts to pull another of his tools from his waistband pouch, the compass a point that twitches then swirls in a lazy way the light overhead makes apparent, indicating vaguely to the south-south-west. No hall, no tunnel, leads their direct, but there's the potential of that avenue should he only go left. )
Some evidence of activity down here, but nothing strong enough to account for the missing men.
( Yet. He tips his head to the left wing, glancing to Lan Zhan. )
Unless it's lingering evidence of some other working.
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Then, the habits of loneliness: Wei Ying, the child draped on his chest, the thin greetings and absent farewells, the distracted sibilations. Whispered, his voice dresses one honeyed truth, then the next, until he has marked each memory his mind will string like careless beads in threadbare circuit. Now here, then — gone.
He does not speak for Qingshan, deadened weight barely stirring, now and then, to grasp at air and flicker of talisman flame, always more eruptive than natural fire or lightning spark. They descend, deep and deepening, like snakes infiltrating another creature's burrow, slithering with the obscene satisfaction of filling and stretching out space through their invasion.
Behind them, echo and the violence of Wangji's steps, washing Wei Ying's away like sea foam and salted water. He eases, falls in line. Obedient, where he is required: Wei Ying signals, he withdraws. Wei Ying perseveres, he inches forward. They are as music, aligned, if Wei Ying only allows it.
And then, there is the dust, come hard and keen and stifling about them. He breathes it first, gold-stale, corrosive. His lungs, burned. Then tastes it, dry on his tongue. Until, shifting to correct his posture, when the corridor narrows down, the wing span of his sleeve loses thread and wastes lace and glimmers, before hooking on stone — to pull away stainless. Left-ward. ]
Men passed here recently. Within reason.
[ Their walk cleaned the path. He does not direct Wei Ying left-ward, as much as he nods and greets the way, in subtle indication. Left, where the corridor spiders in, just as thin, and the walls bear down tall and the loom of them throttles — where there is spread of rock, and on it, carved, the pledge of modest writing in tongues older than Wangji speaks. Some words, new. Names. Affixed.
Wei Ying's light spreads too distant. Frown deep, he draws out Bichen to loiter the cold kiss of her glare over the nearest carving, challenging himself with a choice read. There. For Wei Ying's pleasure: ]
'First turn he comes called.' [ And yet, blood signs the instruction, bare. Blood seals it. ] 'Second turn, he comes named.' 'Third turn, he comes unasked.'
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i like how this is the horniest tag you're getting out of wifi so far
steers this thread back to the righteous salt path
hello wei ying's heavenly pillar................. of salt
i request an adult
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Where Wei Ying, adrift beside him, walks king.
Core of the sun’s season, skies should be sundered by white heat, stained lapis. Yiling forgets itself: wind beats, bruises like a butcher cleaving the meats of the day, fresh in preparation. Glacial resolve recommends stark, arid hardship — spirits do not surrender their palace. And Lan Wangji has seen the way of it before, dust and withered weeds and vermin's intrusion, and a barren spread beneath his feet.
Superstition ensures privacy. The village that watches over the Patriarch’s old keep brings yearly altar offerings for the dead that stir, aimlessly, seeking their armies — men of Qishan Wen and Lanling Jin and Yunmeng Jiang and Qinghe Nie, the handful of Lan. The lady, Jiang Ya —
Before, when they traversed Yiling, their time was borrowed from their own travel purse. Now, he allows himself to breathe: to taste the wet of foreign, death’s cold that clings in sticky sheen over rock at the cave’s entry. The blood that, years later, never reveals itself in rust-red, but comes conjured when Lan Wangji whispers the starting forms of summon, trickles his fingers over walls in idle imitation of talismans.
And the pond like a bottomless eye, a snake’s stare. He cannot meet it, not as he is, tolerated — not Hanguang-Jun, here to dole out justice, but a fitting guest enjoying the Patriarch’s hospitality. The Patriarch, a gaunt and flimsy thing, dancing between the bones of his old home.
Wise, to have abandoned the children in the nearby village. Alone, even Lan Wangji wavers, another layer of shade and ambiguity over the sharp truths of once slaughter. Too much pain here. A surplus of anguish, cresting like stormed sea. Under the weight of their screams, he barely keeps his balance.
He does not wait for Wei Ying’s pronouncement, knows it in his marrow. "Cleanse, appease or disperse them?"
A death of permanence, by any other name.
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Step by step, fighting for the space to claim as something like life, something minimally tainted, minimally decayed at the time of its fruition. Even lotuses, born of the mud on an arid mountainside under the tender love of the Wens for their Laozu, the only ones to use his name without the edge of the ridiculous, the mockery, the granted officiation of disdain. They had made this place vibrant, in spite of itself.
They are the only dead who do not rest here, those particular Wens. They are the only souls he'll never hear, does not hear, cannot fathom the breaking of them, knowing Wen Qing's soul shattered, as disdained for nothing but her clan's brutality, her healing forgotten before the ambitions of a man who had styled himself as Emperor of the cultivation world.
Injustice breeds, bleeds deep here. His fingers trail the stones by the pool, the red haze of it unchanged, darkened for the lack of light coming through the upper entrances. Dark, poorly congealed, the coagulation of blood that would have belonged in an enclosed system, pumping through the heart.
Cleanse, appease, or disperse them?
"Do you want the easy answer," he says, voice soft, the murmurs and the cries and the howls at fringes calling to him already, recognising him as theirs and as creature too vibrant, too alive, too intrusive. Familiar but not, from that one frenzied return, where machinations of the living had once more stirred them to horror, had shoved them into innocent farmers and wood gatherers, and sent them crashing up, up, after the life-pulse of the petty, the strong, the pretty: the cultivators.
Oh, the games this mountainside has seen played.
"Or the honest one?"
Oh, the cradles to rock until their contents drift off to sleep long eschewed.
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He watches Wei Ying and means him close, like the children who trail after his skirts, step and stampede over pebbles, heedlessly. In battle, in tenuous investigation, they have this: Wei Ying measured, sincere, an extrapolation of Lan Wangji's own caution. What whispers between them was dead when they were born, but bleeds fresh now, and the pond's waters murmur.
One knee, the second. He sits as if he were Brother readying for tea, and prepares himself in full ceremony: drags the angry mouth of his sleeve and turns it once, then again, over the cradle of his elbow, safe from harm's way. Then, he extends the willow branch of his arm, dips a hand in the slaughter waters — recovers the thin, thickening, trickled stain of red, and feels the vibration of deaf screams against his skin.
He wants...? What does he want? I want to have not brought you here. "I want your truth." No. No, never that foolishness. "Their truth."
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So many accusations. He feels them here, whispered and shouted, sometimes still in Lan Zhan's voice. Not as breaking as the ones that come as Jiang Yanli, pleading, then vicious as she never was.
His truth, and their truth.
"All three, in unequal measure. These are old deaths, and there's no vengeance any can find; some let go, some must be made to let go. Some need cleansing, to face the horror of how they died. Especially those dropped in," he says, not looking up, but at his hand, pressing it firmer and firmer against the stone, curious in an idle, unpleasant way as to which would break first. In an ideal world. In some other history.
"Those bones need little more than collecting, and the fractured spirits of the ghost-slain can heal, reincarnate. Delicate work," he says, and he smiles, looking to Lan Zhan. "But not hopeless."
Endless in ways, but not hopeless.
Wei Wuxian breathes in, breathes out, and pulls his hand away from the stone. Some scraping of flesh remains, and he'll discover the rawness later. Right now, he doesn't feel it or the thin trickle of his own blood at all. Not even the resentful dead can sing louder to that call, though they brush against him, shadows marring a pallid frame with dark eyes that drink in the world around him and find it as wanting as it ever revealed itself to be.
"At least this time, I can offer you tea." He smiles, crooked, and settles back on his heels. A lifetime ago, and a poor host he'd been, and that'd been what stuck to his ribs, that one lack, for the one visit he had stolen Lan Zhan away for.
Wei Wuxian had not neglected to purchase his own leaves before they made their way here, their sons entrusted to clean, honest hands, or at least caring ones that respected coin and reputation and children alike.
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And Wei Ying says, Those dropped in, and, Ah. This, then. Crepuscular pulse of pain like candle wick, flame-bitten, flaring — this is pain, the shape of it, longing. He remembers, distantly, being a creature carved of the negative space surrounding his grief, thin and gossamer. Sixteen years, and the reason spilled gushing like Wei Ying's blood from Wen Qionglin's mouth, forever young, and Jiang Wanyin knelt to receive it. He did not know what bled them all, then.
Sees, now, its absent repercussions in the tidal fragility of Wei Ying's skin, the way his fingers pull back, as if singed, and the touch consuming him. Do not play with talisman fire, Lan Wangji remembered to teach Sizhui once, and Wei Ying smiles through his burns. Their children will learn the lesson faster, keener, better, the one with his rabbit heart and his rabbit fears first of all. A new life, alongside them. Wangji did not earn this.
There is wet in this cave, long arteries of strange life, dense as muscle tissue, knitting and trickling down. Before he knows himself, Lan Wangji reaches for Wei Ying's hand, that old greed anchored in habit, affirmed as routine through sheer will and exercise. He pours qi, and what healing knots between them is Wei Ying's to know, and Wangji's to ignore, to shy his eyes from. A gift given freely need not be thanked, nor Wei Ying's due be acknowledged.
"Pour my cup," he murmurs instead. In his two hands, joined, or in sculpted stone plainly available, or twigs braided together to serve him goblet. What trinkets does the Burial Mound yet keep, what bowls of jade and ewers of porcelain veined like night skies in filigree of wanton, forlorn pattern? What chopsticks of precious zitan, worth gold's weight, sinking?
"Will she be here?" And why, so distant from the City? Why would she follow? A final, careful donation of Lan Wangji's strength, then his grip tightens. Do not stab him when he stands weak. And, Do not let him wander. "Jiang Yanli."
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"When we reclaim our sons," he says instead, because this is not his home, this is not where he wishes to play host, in honesty or in memory. "Or any day we spend here, but not in this place."
Not the caves, not the history, not the sanctuary that had been repeatedly breached, no sanctuary at all. Much as the utterance of his shijie's name throws him so that he stills, his fingers slack in Lan Zhan's grip, then tightened. Tightening, and clinging, and he sees without seeing:
"No, Lan Zhan. She never lingered in this world. She was warded against it, as you are."
Not a recognised heir, but a child of the main clans. Wei Wuxian does not have the warding, does not have the spellmaking that would render his spirit sanctuary to its own reincarnation. One reason among so many that left Lan Zhan, Jiang Cheng, Wen Yuan bereft; Wen Ning, and a confusing parade of the juniors who were young men now and children, thigh high, then.
He wants to move, be free of this moment of ghosts, where Wen Qing and Fourth Uncle and each face he'd known decades ago can be found in motes of dust. Not the shadows that have shied away from him again, in the light of Lan Zhan's qi, but the dust that lays thick over everything, but for the smudged footprints of its transgressors months back, machinations aimed to disarm and misdirect the clans as easily as they had been led before. Tugs, turns, yearns for the narrow passage to the side, into the depths of his once-cave. There.
"Best to move."
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Wangji rises, first, wash of silks brushed long behind him. If there is dust to traverse across the universe of Wei Ying's Wen empire, let his robes carry it, let their lace soak, let his steps carve. Let part of him claw and claim all that is Wei Ying's own through brutal physicality.
If not Jiang Yanli, then the dead Wei Ying fears wear names he ill remembers — spilled like pearls from the fevered mouth of young Sizhui, torn from his past through sickness. Uncles, aunts, many not of the blood, but chained to him in the way of stewardship the only weedling of barren grounds earns from each of his elders. If they knew more, Wangji might have arranged their silent altar. Instead, they yield rice and wine and fruit to the nameless passed, to Wen Qing, and to Wen Ning, before they knew the truth of his survival. Now, the ghost shares their table.
He trickles past the teeth of stone, teases their pointed sharpness with his palm. Considers, then, in a fit of whim, gives ghosts what is Bichen's by right: a scratch, a line of red, feeding. Gestures over generosity, with the dead — this alone may yet sate them.
"Use me." This, absently, to Wei Ying. "The guqin will agitate them." They are too many, too old, too confused, too united in their cauldron. "Inquiry will offend." As ever, with victims of slaughter. "Name me as a disciple. I shall work as the Patriarch wishes worked."
And his hand recedes, bled palm tight at his back, righting his posture. A strange thing, to serve ever as Wei Ying's instrument, gladly giving of himself.
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One old, one new. Both fresh, both tantalising, and caution, oh, caution learned at a bright blade and a dark song, this pairing familiar in minds that have little cohesion or coherency left behind.
He laughs, but it's the exhalation of the surprised, and his smile is that confusion of hearing and disbelieving. Not for an absurdity, but for the willingness, and the ache that follows, boneshattering in his chest.
"Lan Zhan, I don't need, I don't want a disciple. I never did. Partners, right? Side by side. A disciple follows a step behind." He steps forward, shadows shifting, light falling across him in fractals. "I want your help, not your filial piety, Lan Zhan. Will you?"
He will lead every way he must, plunge into the depths he prefers to leave in the past, like every unpleasant memory he's tried to shove away over the course of his life. Sixteen dark years, and he's not whole or unwholly undone after. Merely more human than ever, and surrounded by ghosts, like every living person finds themselves. As Lan Zhan had found, in the time before.
How their sons have been, and it is telling in its way, their collection of haunted, loved children, and the pride that they can share without telling others, in the achievements of their children. Two generations, and wonderful, both.
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"My pride does not take precedence to the dead." This, a strained clarification, tentative for how Lan Wangji brokers each word. Years dulling the blade of his temper at Zewu-Jun's feet, and he thinks some of the oils of his brother's diplomacy may well have infused him. He need not reduce Wei Ying, only to correct him. "It is not lessened by service."
With his help, his hand, his eyes, his strength — more than his piety, as if an orphan and a fool and a man who learned to spit upon the precepts before wooing their words can be trusted with the notion. Briefly, Lan Wangji pities him with the ancient condescension that anointed him vestige of his father's blood, skin and meat and bones his own, but heir of a school: the steel cog of a jewellery box, rust to never touch its enclosures. The whole of Gusu Lan will forever exceed the summed parts of its pupils.
And what of Wei Ying? Adrift between stones paler than the fire-veined teeth that entombed him. Did it ache to fall? But he learned from spirits before he did from artists of fine-carved healing, who peel gristle from the geometries of bone common to gentlemen and thieves: those who fall break before the landing. The heart, a weak thing, and Wei Ying's brittle beforehand.
( Here, close, spirits lap at his red fingers, lick at the screeching metal of his blood. What will, fed once, forever follow? )
"You have my help." A pause, but he walks on; sixteen years later, the critical progress of knowing that if he steps first, a red-eyed storm will follow him, thereafter.
"But if you are shelter, I am bait," he warns. The Patriarch's protection, the Lan purity. Which will lure them out quickest? "They will give chase."
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He smiles, and there is more teeth than lip, more memory of violence than that of joy. Try him. To each of the dead who stretched to greedy outreach, try him. He is wise to the worst of the calling, and shelter, ah, shelter for whom may be the question. Shelter for what?
Hadn't that been the fear?
The shadows slip back, mill like the mindless, aimless collections of thinned emotion they are, and the wanting slips in, and Wei Wuxian lays hand to Chenqing.
"They already do," he says, "They'll hasten." No contest, no matter who sung them forth; they slip from one cavernous room in smooth stoned floors to the dark, dry insides of the cavern he'd slept in for the year and then some, called his home. Strands of straw can still be found molded and ossified along the cave's edges, but the thrum of the space is warmer, haunted by memory and not one glimpse of resentment or spirit or soul. Or warmer to him, in the bittersweet memories of a life fought for step by step, and the tears of backsliding into hopelessness because the world wanted the ease of his total, wholly evil guilt than truth, or honesty, or justice.
"Ward the entrance, ward as we clear each outward facing ring. Wards can't hold forever, but it delays, and time is what we need." Here, as he walks across floors thickening again with dust and debris of dead leaves, dead things, dead dreams, and feels the faintest hope. One day, to see Yiling bloom, to see it live, where it had been a condemnation of the damned.
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He feels the shadows: growing, grazing, like ink-stained tulle stretched thin enough to moan out the birthing pains of translucence. Too absent for the likelihood of producing harm, though click of Lan Wangji's tongue — tch — and Wei Ying's parting wave, and lo. They disperse like breaking sea foam.
And he feels them again, more toxic in their aftermath, in the stench that drowns his silks now, his body, an inorganic, wistful petrichor. Lungs open to it, eyes brighten wild and feverish. Absurdly alarmed, his gaze ricochets each way, off the cave's edges. And Wei Ying asks, wards. Futile, in a space so narrow, where they entomb themselves alongside ghosts, where the great, groaning tumult of Lan Wangji's power sabotages more than sustains them.
But he pledged to work as disciples do, and no boy of Cloud Recesses would defy his master. Tradition favours parchment and the fast, flame-like ignition of seals. Whim and Wei Ying turn to blood-carved renditions of the same. Between them, testing the tumble of rubble under his boot, the screeching, creaking sounds of stone floor plates finding their balance — Lan Wangji only kneels to scry the symbols with fingers wet disgracefully on his tongue. Dust hindered, enforcements set: they stir alive only once they've passed into the next circle of... quarters, into the crumbling core of Wei Ying's cave. Without an active element, they are anemic: but they are instructed to leech on energy within their reach, to use that for their awakening.
"So they linger as precaution, once we've fled." This, before Wei Ying need ask his explanation. He has nothing to hide: less so than does the man who stripped himself of flesh and the riches of his body's beauty in this alcove, who gave up his likeness along with his fealty to Yunmeng Jiang. As if a Wei Wuxian in health and glory could not have abided to become the monster that the sects named him.
It slips from Wangji's mouth like a wretched thing, tongue slack. "Once, you were king here."
And beneath Lan Wangji's step, crackling bone.
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In this land, shadowed and horrified, a terror of its own deep in soil desperate for anything but the wasteland it became, not barren, growing longer and longer in the whispering grasses of its defeats. A thin harvest, leaving bones cleaving to flesh, nothing between.
"Once life ruled here," he says, and he gestures with his hand, steps forward toward the stone of his rest, toward the entrance out onto the dilapidated courtyard, and its fallow fallen fields. "Once Yiling wasn't a place where the dead drove themselves to madness in their own bitter company. King of that, yes, and warden."
Wards that activate, that bind. Seals that attract, not just repel. Compasses that spun to track down resentment and the shadowed pits of things which were evil for a lack of good, which were greedy with no regard for anything but their own satiation.
He was king, here, and his throne stripped bare, and only the ghosts to haunt it after, turning over loose stones, looking, always looking.
He smiles, circumvents the bones of a bird that had thought, perhaps, the failed lotus pond was a temporary haven. Deadly mistakes, if one is not wise to the way of the world's movement. Even when one is.
"Lan Zhan, shall we play in the courtyard?" Music to soothe, to push on souls.
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