Outside, filth sleeps in dust drenching a slate, steel pathway, white birds and dark wings and the trail of them like weed in fishery nets, smearing the sky above.
He remembers it: how he woke, like dreaming, as dusk yawned and released in one ghoulish, serpentine inhalation, the look of the temple, and beneath it the village, and between them the road — and he walked it, teeth gritted and a spatter of strain, where fresh boots ate into his own, but his guide would not take the sword's flight, or hasten. His guide kept one pace, and one alone, and where did Lan Wangji encounter him, this stubborn, milling, conglomeration of darted dots and conjured lines, how did they come to be, together?
Wei Ying's head aches, but it's Wangji's temples that burn, the blinding white of his lids, lanced together. Bichen's tip that falls, with cold, hard panting, to scratch the scales of resolute pebble under foot, and Five, in lazy, wide scrawl, a schoolboy's gesture — unfinished.
He blinks. And he wakes —
And they are here again, where he left them for moments where his mind fled and his body soured and sored, and Qingshan's turned for him, hungry arm calling for his second toy, his distant father. He answers, absent, more out of habit — lends his hand, back bent to accommodate the boy's feebler height, trailed beside him. In the esophagus of the tunnel, each each beam and rod of stone announces descent further down, the signs of deepening contraction. There is a yearning in him, to turn back, like flinched steel and claustrophobia.
There's something else. So, they walk farther. ]
It reeks.
[ No. So raw and visceral, only to the nose estranged from daily tribute in bowls of broth and cups of stew. Fatty and animal, violent. Death, won through the knife's pains, slipped and easy. He knows this scent. ]
Meat. [ Charred, somehow, scent of burnt skin. Of incense, sickly sweet and rancid, to cover the cleaver's work. And farther out, scratched on Bichen's end, lifting peels of dried, red husk from the tripped floor — old blood. ] Sacrificial slaughter.
[ Enough of this. Enough of them. He tugs, first Qingshan closer, then his sword in her sheath, and he stares at Wei Ying with all the folly of a man who should know better. ]
We cannot risk the child's wellfa —
[ But the echild wails first, then the gallery, and there's ache in the blood of both, a roil of tumbling stone, and Wangji's sleeve barely a cold stretch of silk to repudiate dust in its tumble. It settles, when the groan begins, undulant and oiled, when it syncopates and crests, when it carries on and on and on, of lungs that cannot ever fill again, surely, cannot yet perform their function, for how long of a breath they keep. Silence, after, is thick as the soot that covers them, grieving.
He does not look to Wei Ying again. Does not need a necromancer to ascertain, there was no human's gasp in this. ]
no subject
Outside, filth sleeps in dust drenching a slate, steel pathway, white birds and dark wings and the trail of them like weed in fishery nets, smearing the sky above.
He remembers it: how he woke, like dreaming, as dusk yawned and released in one ghoulish, serpentine inhalation, the look of the temple, and beneath it the village, and between them the road — and he walked it, teeth gritted and a spatter of strain, where fresh boots ate into his own, but his guide would not take the sword's flight, or hasten. His guide kept one pace, and one alone, and where did Lan Wangji encounter him, this stubborn, milling, conglomeration of darted dots and conjured lines, how did they come to be, together?
Wei Ying's head aches, but it's Wangji's temples that burn, the blinding white of his lids, lanced together. Bichen's tip that falls, with cold, hard panting, to scratch the scales of resolute pebble under foot, and Five, in lazy, wide scrawl, a schoolboy's gesture — unfinished.
He blinks. And he wakes —
And they are here again, where he left them for moments where his mind fled and his body soured and sored, and Qingshan's turned for him, hungry arm calling for his second toy, his distant father. He answers, absent, more out of habit — lends his hand, back bent to accommodate the boy's feebler height, trailed beside him. In the esophagus of the tunnel, each each beam and rod of stone announces descent further down, the signs of deepening contraction. There is a yearning in him, to turn back, like flinched steel and claustrophobia.
There's something else. So, they walk farther. ]
It reeks.
[ No. So raw and visceral, only to the nose estranged from daily tribute in bowls of broth and cups of stew. Fatty and animal, violent. Death, won through the knife's pains, slipped and easy. He knows this scent. ]
Meat. [ Charred, somehow, scent of burnt skin. Of incense, sickly sweet and rancid, to cover the cleaver's work. And farther out, scratched on Bichen's end, lifting peels of dried, red husk from the tripped floor — old blood. ] Sacrificial slaughter.
[ Enough of this. Enough of them. He tugs, first Qingshan closer, then his sword in her sheath, and he stares at Wei Ying with all the folly of a man who should know better. ]
We cannot risk the child's wellfa —
[ But the echild wails first, then the gallery, and there's ache in the blood of both, a roil of tumbling stone, and Wangji's sleeve barely a cold stretch of silk to repudiate dust in its tumble. It settles, when the groan begins, undulant and oiled, when it syncopates and crests, when it carries on and on and on, of lungs that cannot ever fill again, surely, cannot yet perform their function, for how long of a breath they keep. Silence, after, is thick as the soot that covers them, grieving.
He does not look to Wei Ying again. Does not need a necromancer to ascertain, there was no human's gasp in this. ]