( He listens, even before Wangji explains, shifting the rabbit child's weight (and rabbit child he is, fingers curling into Wei Wuxian's robes, dulled nails on rounded toes poking out of a swaddle, then drawn back in, still showing fine white fur) at his hip, weighing his own ideas against the worth in simply saying yes. There's a world that ran forward while he was left in darkness; he'd meant it to be a more thorough break the once, but through some miscalculation, or someone else's success, it had become its own mystery.
Would you believe me if I said... )
Then you're asking for one to light once it goes dark, here, so pin it high up enough to not fall into early shadow or else remember tonight's a fuller moon... the moon's already up, isn't it? It should set for a while tonight, come back up again later.
( Not the moment for thoughts about rivers of stars spilling across the skies, just the conversation of light and dark; time passes in both directions, but if they truly want to claim responsibility, they'd test it more slowly, more surely. Even using their message paper, a count off that takes longer with the furthering of any distortion...
Really, in the end, this is why there should be some third party, but he doesn't mention it, just listens, and hums a considered note.
It reminds him of god realms and devil realms and ghost forests, that distortion: places where a day might pass, and yet a decade has flown by in the mortal realm. What a shudder inducing thought, that kind of total cut off from the heartbeat of the living world they currently embraced.
Then again, that's the condition they face: death, a sluggish, viscous flow, the decay of rot and the mummification of intent.
Here again at a boulder barrier that is only a suggestion, in the end, of something sturdy. A failing plug, because stone erodes, turns into rounded pebbles that eventually turn into dust lifted on the wind as surely as the ashes of their incense.
He shifts the rabbit-child for the umpteenth time, brow furrowed, an ache unfurling when he closes his eyes and opens himself up to that heat, the decay, the sulphur and cooking; a pause before he has the talisman meant for the outside ready for its affixing to stone, as if that anchors it any better.
There's a pulse of festering rot, a pustule and abcess left undrained and to calcify in the pressure of its covered, buried: terror. )
No... no, but the whole, not all of it needed it. Here did. Here, everything was lacking.
( Some places burn clean in their horrific disasters. Down the mountain, there's no such touch, but here, where it had been healing as much as a past buried beneath the grounds, there were longstanding stains and long lessened bounds of humanity or animal nature to hold any of it in.
No proper theatre, but also, no proper memories, no proper guidance for lives cut short in such an abrupt and violent way. Anger in things like those grows with time, nurses itself stronger.
He taps his outside talisman in place. Lowers the rabbit-child to the ground, and tugs his hand, his awkward legs, his rabbit face that's turned into something a little less grotesquely alien with familiarity, wraps child-rabbit fingers into the weave of his lower robes. )
Hold on.
( He tells a child that does not really understand language, and now, Chenqing in hand, he steps forward to the head of those stairs into darkness, and he plays an entreaty, a request, met with weeping and a shadow coalescing beyond the touch of light: white haired woman, without eyes, on her knees, tears like blood staining the planes of her face. Burns, across all of her; seen and then abruptly gone, glass reflecting different lights while spinning in place. )
I hear their screams, sense some intent, or else I dare Empathy.
( He doesn't dare Empathy. He needs better reason than "because," with a child at his leg, with Lan Zhan at his back, with no gaggle of disciples clustered in a makeshift safehouse, and all of them dancing at the end of someone else's strings. )
I ask, but give me a moment to parse what it is I hear when I listen.
( A step, then another, and he resumes his playing, and the white haired ghost is as burnt or smooth skinned as each note inquires further, and its more nuances of emotion that reaches out to say: Pain. Heat. Consuming. Go. Go. Go. Where do we go?
It's one note in a melody held darker in the caverns below, and the rabbit-child at his side shudders, but pushes closer, cleaving to his leg and burying his face into his robes. Where do we go?
He finishes a last haunting note on Chenqing, subtle shift in expression leaving his eyes looking for Lan Zhan. )
Trapped or greedy, what was never laid to rest sleeps fitfully now. We'll wake it, going further in, but cleansing won't work too far from its fattened centre.
no subject
Would you believe me if I said... )
Then you're asking for one to light once it goes dark, here, so pin it high up enough to not fall into early shadow or else remember tonight's a fuller moon... the moon's already up, isn't it? It should set for a while tonight, come back up again later.
( Not the moment for thoughts about rivers of stars spilling across the skies, just the conversation of light and dark; time passes in both directions, but if they truly want to claim responsibility, they'd test it more slowly, more surely. Even using their message paper, a count off that takes longer with the furthering of any distortion...
Really, in the end, this is why there should be some third party, but he doesn't mention it, just listens, and hums a considered note.
It reminds him of god realms and devil realms and ghost forests, that distortion: places where a day might pass, and yet a decade has flown by in the mortal realm. What a shudder inducing thought, that kind of total cut off from the heartbeat of the living world they currently embraced.
Then again, that's the condition they face: death, a sluggish, viscous flow, the decay of rot and the mummification of intent.
Here again at a boulder barrier that is only a suggestion, in the end, of something sturdy. A failing plug, because stone erodes, turns into rounded pebbles that eventually turn into dust lifted on the wind as surely as the ashes of their incense.
He shifts the rabbit-child for the umpteenth time, brow furrowed, an ache unfurling when he closes his eyes and opens himself up to that heat, the decay, the sulphur and cooking; a pause before he has the talisman meant for the outside ready for its affixing to stone, as if that anchors it any better.
There's a pulse of festering rot, a pustule and abcess left undrained and to calcify in the pressure of its covered, buried: terror. )
No... no, but the whole, not all of it needed it. Here did. Here, everything was lacking.
( Some places burn clean in their horrific disasters. Down the mountain, there's no such touch, but here, where it had been healing as much as a past buried beneath the grounds, there were longstanding stains and long lessened bounds of humanity or animal nature to hold any of it in.
No proper theatre, but also, no proper memories, no proper guidance for lives cut short in such an abrupt and violent way. Anger in things like those grows with time, nurses itself stronger.
He taps his outside talisman in place. Lowers the rabbit-child to the ground, and tugs his hand, his awkward legs, his rabbit face that's turned into something a little less grotesquely alien with familiarity, wraps child-rabbit fingers into the weave of his lower robes. )
Hold on.
( He tells a child that does not really understand language, and now, Chenqing in hand, he steps forward to the head of those stairs into darkness, and he plays an entreaty, a request, met with weeping and a shadow coalescing beyond the touch of light: white haired woman, without eyes, on her knees, tears like blood staining the planes of her face. Burns, across all of her; seen and then abruptly gone, glass reflecting different lights while spinning in place. )
I hear their screams, sense some intent, or else I dare Empathy.
( He doesn't dare Empathy. He needs better reason than "because," with a child at his leg, with Lan Zhan at his back, with no gaggle of disciples clustered in a makeshift safehouse, and all of them dancing at the end of someone else's strings. )
I ask, but give me a moment to parse what it is I hear when I listen.
( A step, then another, and he resumes his playing, and the white haired ghost is as burnt or smooth skinned as each note inquires further, and its more nuances of emotion that reaches out to say: Pain. Heat. Consuming. Go. Go. Go. Where do we go?
It's one note in a melody held darker in the caverns below, and the rabbit-child at his side shudders, but pushes closer, cleaving to his leg and burying his face into his robes. Where do we go?
He finishes a last haunting note on Chenqing, subtle shift in expression leaving his eyes looking for Lan Zhan. )
Trapped or greedy, what was never laid to rest sleeps fitfully now. We'll wake it, going further in, but cleansing won't work too far from its fattened centre.