( He holds a sustained note as he crouches down, pulling the rabbit-child to him and standing again, leaping backward out of the open cavern.
The muted horror in seeing that husk take hold of Lan Zhan's wrist becomes, without much thought, narrowed eyes and his flute shoved into his belt, second arm around the child. Shivering and clinging, both rabbit and boy, he's reassuringly alive in a field of shivering, unfurling husks of dead, possessed in a manner Wei Wuxian avoided, with the troubles that came along in preserving the original soul.
Unlike those, these lingering malevolences don't need to fight what isn't there, and they shudder at the sharp whistling Wei Wuxian produces, slowing, halting temporarily, but not stopped.
It's buying time. He shifts the child to pull a talisman free, tossing it at the second mummified corpse reaching for Lan Zhan, seeing it strike home and remembering how many he'd covered Wen Ning in while trying to pull his consciousness back from the roaring abyss of the resentful energies he'd been filled with to overflowing. It's similar here, in once sense, but the corpse responds with a shudder and draws back a step, too strong again to be unmade by one such thing, or even properly bound, but it reaches for its head and ears like the memory of listening can block out Wei Wuxian's retreating whistle.
Lan Zhan better be coming; he withdraws for the sake of the child more than himself, but he doesn't stop sounding, whistle eerie and disorienting for the waking dead in their rasping, clawing, strangely weighted manner.
Not all wake. Despite the lined walls of mummified forms, most don't stir, the focus remaining near Lan Zhan, and near the retreat Wei Wuxian makes. Sightless eyes turn their direction, darkness overflowing, and the scent of burnt fat and fur and hair and the sulphuric tinge to it all builds, a memory being called on for a greater hunger, a divesting, a recollection, a yearning.
Different forms stalled in their hauntings, but still bottomless hunger for accumulated, misshapen wants from lingering impressions of what had once been the thoughts of the living; now, however, simply a drive from the dead.
Not fire, this place. Fire has been here too often. Water; he has that heavy, ironic sense of it, but water may very well be part of what they need.
He doesn't even manage Lan Zhan's name, too busy in his whistling and protection of the child in his arms. )
no subject
The muted horror in seeing that husk take hold of Lan Zhan's wrist becomes, without much thought, narrowed eyes and his flute shoved into his belt, second arm around the child. Shivering and clinging, both rabbit and boy, he's reassuringly alive in a field of shivering, unfurling husks of dead, possessed in a manner Wei Wuxian avoided, with the troubles that came along in preserving the original soul.
Unlike those, these lingering malevolences don't need to fight what isn't there, and they shudder at the sharp whistling Wei Wuxian produces, slowing, halting temporarily, but not stopped.
It's buying time. He shifts the child to pull a talisman free, tossing it at the second mummified corpse reaching for Lan Zhan, seeing it strike home and remembering how many he'd covered Wen Ning in while trying to pull his consciousness back from the roaring abyss of the resentful energies he'd been filled with to overflowing. It's similar here, in once sense, but the corpse responds with a shudder and draws back a step, too strong again to be unmade by one such thing, or even properly bound, but it reaches for its head and ears like the memory of listening can block out Wei Wuxian's retreating whistle.
Lan Zhan better be coming; he withdraws for the sake of the child more than himself, but he doesn't stop sounding, whistle eerie and disorienting for the waking dead in their rasping, clawing, strangely weighted manner.
Not all wake. Despite the lined walls of mummified forms, most don't stir, the focus remaining near Lan Zhan, and near the retreat Wei Wuxian makes. Sightless eyes turn their direction, darkness overflowing, and the scent of burnt fat and fur and hair and the sulphuric tinge to it all builds, a memory being called on for a greater hunger, a divesting, a recollection, a yearning.
Different forms stalled in their hauntings, but still bottomless hunger for accumulated, misshapen wants from lingering impressions of what had once been the thoughts of the living; now, however, simply a drive from the dead.
Not fire, this place. Fire has been here too often. Water; he has that heavy, ironic sense of it, but water may very well be part of what they need.
He doesn't even manage Lan Zhan's name, too busy in his whistling and protection of the child in his arms. )