[ In step, aligned like forest crown trees. They walk, step slack with fatalistic indifference, interrupted now and then by the garbled talk and curious eye of crones who know their satchel of hundred-years have bought them the filial, rapt attention of strangers, five times over.
There's a bustle and buzz, Wangji supposes, a quiet and private and proprietary exhilaration in witnessing strange novelty paraded down one's market place. Two young gentlemen, and cultivators — and their sickly child. What wonder, in a village reduced. Can Wangji fault them? He took a young bride, mere months before, in the drowned village. Now, with him walks a new mother, and Wei Ying's conceit of a sickly child. At this pace, Wangji will wear, soon, his uncle's whites and behold nephews frolicking with their tempestuous first loves across rooftops and awnings.
( And Wei Ying, so heartbreakingly domestic — a tracking charm, imbued silently on the bell string he gifted their son with premature caution. It cost Wangji so little to allow the whim. )
He bears the inevitable road conversations as he did his childhood fevers, the burst of his first sword calluses: quietly, absently, with slack-jawed indifference. Knowing Wei Ying will maraud through the crowd, and he might yet follow after, swift to intercede only with Bichen's sheathed length when a man's touch comes too close, by accident, to Wei Ying's flank, or a child means to tug at the swaddling of the 'babe', when merchants would stay Wei Ying's step to seduce him to smooth, sheening displays of spice, laid out like quarry gains after an ample hunt.
Before, he was wasteful: Wei Ying spread the seed of his idle, empty chatter in the wind. Sixteen years of silence have taught Wangji to hold his hand out and catch each word.
Time tracked through twin talismans — a curious, make-shift solution combining old artistry, the mundane, and Wei Ying's taste for homey invention. Fair, but for one miscalculation. ]
Set one talisman to burn once a day's passed. Its twin, to burn with us.
[ After, he remembers to explain himself, as with his students of Cloud Recesses — aware, distantly, that Wei Ying knows him in all the ways that shape him from root to branch as a man, but has missed the precarious, splintered sophistication of his progress as a cultivator. They were unequal once, Wei Ying the brazen prodigy, mind blade-sharp but scattered. Time's cheated him of righteous advantage, his knowledge divided and doled out, Wangji's among the many hands to benefit of the Yiling Patriarch's learning. ]
The act of communication between talismans will take seconds on one plan, half a shi on the other.
[ A lag that will only accrue with each transport of an hour's passage. Better to have only one measure, and turn back when their time's done. A day in the world of lights. Mere hours, in the nether lands — four to one, if he evaluated well enough, on their past encounter.
No matter. They will learn soon. Past the village, the temple, the twisted, turning garden roads like thinned rib bones leading below, to an earthly spine: the stone's as they left it, flat and warming under spring sun, frantically beaten. He splays a hand over it, fingers spidering and open, pressure thin as if he expects the reciprocation of a beating heart, the kick of a growing child through a gravid mother's womb.
Nothing. No one.
And when he rips the fetters of yesterday's wards free and jolts the stone over, in a stuttered succession of rolls — only silence. Dark, crackled tar, sulfur's breath. Again, as before: charred meat, ashes, heat cloying. And it strikes him, then: the nether depths. The temple, built hastily above distant eruption.
He does not step. Readies the talisman, one half of parchment, for Wei Ying to bind to its fellow, left outside. A donation of Gusu Lan's wealth, expended on strange cause. He hesitates: ]
Wei Ying. The mountains bled fire, decades ago. Did they... purify after?
[ Collect their dead, bury them well. Salt the grounds and sage the air, and offer amnesty to spirits after. Four times, four years of mourning, and each death named, and each spirit thanked, each altar served with rice and wine, and mourning — great tragedy requires theatre. Did they carry out the functions?
No. No, they would not be here, Wei Ying and he, were the rites well performed. They are, as ever, married to the chaos bound in the world, made flesh in each other. ]
Ask. [ Better the honeyed, sweet tongue of the voluble Patriarch, than the Lan approach to sterile interrogation. Inquiry subjugates spirits, brokers no opportunity for diplomacy or negotiation — wins truth, but not good will. Wei Ying walks a more sinewy, treacherous path. ] Or I shall.
no subject
There's a bustle and buzz, Wangji supposes, a quiet and private and proprietary exhilaration in witnessing strange novelty paraded down one's market place. Two young gentlemen, and cultivators — and their sickly child. What wonder, in a village reduced. Can Wangji fault them? He took a young bride, mere months before, in the drowned village. Now, with him walks a new mother, and Wei Ying's conceit of a sickly child. At this pace, Wangji will wear, soon, his uncle's whites and behold nephews frolicking with their tempestuous first loves across rooftops and awnings.
( And Wei Ying, so heartbreakingly domestic — a tracking charm, imbued silently on the bell string he gifted their son with premature caution. It cost Wangji so little to allow the whim. )
He bears the inevitable road conversations as he did his childhood fevers, the burst of his first sword calluses: quietly, absently, with slack-jawed indifference. Knowing Wei Ying will maraud through the crowd, and he might yet follow after, swift to intercede only with Bichen's sheathed length when a man's touch comes too close, by accident, to Wei Ying's flank, or a child means to tug at the swaddling of the 'babe', when merchants would stay Wei Ying's step to seduce him to smooth, sheening displays of spice, laid out like quarry gains after an ample hunt.
Before, he was wasteful: Wei Ying spread the seed of his idle, empty chatter in the wind. Sixteen years of silence have taught Wangji to hold his hand out and catch each word.
Time tracked through twin talismans — a curious, make-shift solution combining old artistry, the mundane, and Wei Ying's taste for homey invention. Fair, but for one miscalculation. ]
Set one talisman to burn once a day's passed. Its twin, to burn with us.
[ After, he remembers to explain himself, as with his students of Cloud Recesses — aware, distantly, that Wei Ying knows him in all the ways that shape him from root to branch as a man, but has missed the precarious, splintered sophistication of his progress as a cultivator. They were unequal once, Wei Ying the brazen prodigy, mind blade-sharp but scattered. Time's cheated him of righteous advantage, his knowledge divided and doled out, Wangji's among the many hands to benefit of the Yiling Patriarch's learning. ]
The act of communication between talismans will take seconds on one plan, half a shi on the other.
[ A lag that will only accrue with each transport of an hour's passage. Better to have only one measure, and turn back when their time's done. A day in the world of lights. Mere hours, in the nether lands — four to one, if he evaluated well enough, on their past encounter.
No matter. They will learn soon. Past the village, the temple, the twisted, turning garden roads like thinned rib bones leading below, to an earthly spine: the stone's as they left it, flat and warming under spring sun, frantically beaten. He splays a hand over it, fingers spidering and open, pressure thin as if he expects the reciprocation of a beating heart, the kick of a growing child through a gravid mother's womb.
Nothing. No one.
And when he rips the fetters of yesterday's wards free and jolts the stone over, in a stuttered succession of rolls — only silence. Dark, crackled tar, sulfur's breath. Again, as before: charred meat, ashes, heat cloying. And it strikes him, then: the nether depths. The temple, built hastily above distant eruption.
He does not step. Readies the talisman, one half of parchment, for Wei Ying to bind to its fellow, left outside. A donation of Gusu Lan's wealth, expended on strange cause. He hesitates: ]
Wei Ying. The mountains bled fire, decades ago. Did they... purify after?
[ Collect their dead, bury them well. Salt the grounds and sage the air, and offer amnesty to spirits after. Four times, four years of mourning, and each death named, and each spirit thanked, each altar served with rice and wine, and mourning — great tragedy requires theatre. Did they carry out the functions?
No. No, they would not be here, Wei Ying and he, were the rites well performed. They are, as ever, married to the chaos bound in the world, made flesh in each other. ]
Ask. [ Better the honeyed, sweet tongue of the voluble Patriarch, than the Lan approach to sterile interrogation. Inquiry subjugates spirits, brokers no opportunity for diplomacy or negotiation — wins truth, but not good will. Wei Ying walks a more sinewy, treacherous path. ] Or I shall.