[ Fight, flight, silence. You speak too much, but Wei Ying's mouth should never silence, after sixteen years of tomb.
Focus frays, threadbare and fractioned. Lan Wangji trades, one step forward, two back, then aside: swims and sinks in the miasma of energy that accrues in thickened ichor, indifferent to Wei Ying, like mirrored in its likeness, silver. Like cold twitching things, smoke pulses up Wangji's legs, tickles the easy line of Bichen, rested, off her balance; he wakes her, one pull and the deed done, raised when Wei Ying scratches sound from the corner of his mouth, unfriendly whistling — when there is answer moaned, and the wind howling, and the heartbeat of the beast-child, thumped so hard it seems to bruise the cavern of its bony chest, and what can Wangji do?
Dance, as Wei Ying asks of him. Farther, shivered, the image of a starveling legion, four men on the precipitous count. Known for the tally of their hands, more than their heads, lifted to talisman or crude, lesser cuttings of steel, market daggers: glistened artifices to pin gentlemen's sashes, darling honorary accoutrements to spill token blood between rites and orisons at temples on days of light and joy. ( He learned, during the Sunshot campaign, this difference: that the daggers dozing, sprawled in his set at Bichen's side would barely have done to cut the meat at his table, were it stirred to exercise. )
The mouth of the tunnel never opens. They are four, with green underwater shadows, four with slanted, wet eyes, four with violence of bloodied fingers and the ravenous appetite to claw him, to cut him down. He is one, trained — impatient, cuts of Bichen in hard, irreverent sweeps, determined and defended, now and then, with the turn of his back to protect his flank, the rare kick of legs that know the truth first: he expects slick and moans, hard hisses, because he has none of the commodities of space to strategise his movements and corral, sooner than killing his opponents.
And he labours each breath, retreating to one knee, one swirl and one strike more and landing — these men have no true bodies to break or burn, Bichen only dispels the husk of their raised corpses, animated by memory. Unlike Wei Ying's risen dead, they don't come slow, burdened or heavy, but coreless and restitched of dried things, skin and bone that cracks and rattles, and sits like unspooled thread on sickened earth. These are not men, but hollowed things, and they do not rest — the energy spills of their bodies, trudges against Lan Wangji's ankles again, kisses the start of skin, and retreats only to crowd itself in the house of its victims.
The men rise again. And again, when they are struck, and again, faster. Learning, if not Wangji's skill or dexterity to match him, then that pained advantage that all dead things hold over their abandoned states. What is dead need never again die, but the living tire in their flesh. He feels the drain, between Qingshan's two charms, and the lecherous consumption of the resentful energy that tests him, and the dance with corpses that rejuvenate to action even sooner than Wei Ying's most sophisticated creatures. Laughs, crackled, and bides his time, back of his hand shaking the sweat off his brow. And beside him: ]
Wei Ying. Out.
[ No. No, this will never do, not with a Yunmeng master. The impossible looks them dead and dark in its eyes, and Wei Ying won't concede to it, not to shameful retreat. But they have a child with them, and a... second complication. The stone that held its dead once will bar them again, if they're quick to leave and rally strength. ]
no subject
[ Fight, flight, silence. You speak too much, but Wei Ying's mouth should never silence, after sixteen years of tomb.
Focus frays, threadbare and fractioned. Lan Wangji trades, one step forward, two back, then aside: swims and sinks in the miasma of energy that accrues in thickened ichor, indifferent to Wei Ying, like mirrored in its likeness, silver. Like cold twitching things, smoke pulses up Wangji's legs, tickles the easy line of Bichen, rested, off her balance; he wakes her, one pull and the deed done, raised when Wei Ying scratches sound from the corner of his mouth, unfriendly whistling — when there is answer moaned, and the wind howling, and the heartbeat of the beast-child, thumped so hard it seems to bruise the cavern of its bony chest, and what can Wangji do?
Dance, as Wei Ying asks of him. Farther, shivered, the image of a starveling legion, four men on the precipitous count. Known for the tally of their hands, more than their heads, lifted to talisman or crude, lesser cuttings of steel, market daggers: glistened artifices to pin gentlemen's sashes, darling honorary accoutrements to spill token blood between rites and orisons at temples on days of light and joy. ( He learned, during the Sunshot campaign, this difference: that the daggers dozing, sprawled in his set at Bichen's side would barely have done to cut the meat at his table, were it stirred to exercise. )
The mouth of the tunnel never opens. They are four, with green underwater shadows, four with slanted, wet eyes, four with violence of bloodied fingers and the ravenous appetite to claw him, to cut him down. He is one, trained — impatient, cuts of Bichen in hard, irreverent sweeps, determined and defended, now and then, with the turn of his back to protect his flank, the rare kick of legs that know the truth first: he expects slick and moans, hard hisses, because he has none of the commodities of space to strategise his movements and corral, sooner than killing his opponents.
And he labours each breath, retreating to one knee, one swirl and one strike more and landing — these men have no true bodies to break or burn, Bichen only dispels the husk of their raised corpses, animated by memory. Unlike Wei Ying's risen dead, they don't come slow, burdened or heavy, but coreless and restitched of dried things, skin and bone that cracks and rattles, and sits like unspooled thread on sickened earth. These are not men, but hollowed things, and they do not rest — the energy spills of their bodies, trudges against Lan Wangji's ankles again, kisses the start of skin, and retreats only to crowd itself in the house of its victims.
The men rise again. And again, when they are struck, and again, faster. Learning, if not Wangji's skill or dexterity to match him, then that pained advantage that all dead things hold over their abandoned states. What is dead need never again die, but the living tire in their flesh. He feels the drain, between Qingshan's two charms, and the lecherous consumption of the resentful energy that tests him, and the dance with corpses that rejuvenate to action even sooner than Wei Ying's most sophisticated creatures. Laughs, crackled, and bides his time, back of his hand shaking the sweat off his brow. And beside him: ]
Wei Ying. Out.
[ No. No, this will never do, not with a Yunmeng master. The impossible looks them dead and dark in its eyes, and Wei Ying won't concede to it, not to shameful retreat. But they have a child with them, and a... second complication. The stone that held its dead once will bar them again, if they're quick to leave and rally strength. ]
I will join you. We come again.