[ Wei Ying drifts to him, crashing like wave and water against his shoulder, and Lan Wangji anchors himself to bear against the collapsed force of a grown man prey to his exhaustion.
You have no core, he breathes and aches and thinks, for all he seldom speaks it. Wei Ying lacks, and this one privilege is never the chief cultivator's to award, hand docile and cruel when it snakes to imitate the obedience of Jiang Yanli's measured strokes, as he remembers them. Wei Ying has no core, flesh chilled for the spell of evening breeze, in a way Qingshan — a babe in name, but ghost-touched, thriving and cuddling shamelessly to curl his fingers in the ink stream of his Yiling father's hair — already begins to dismiss. One that the yao, a compound of aggregated magic, never knew.
It stings, to glimpse sixteen years of mourning in each of Wei Ying's bruises that slows in passage, each of the fine-shaping shadows of his wrinkles. ]
You owe nothing.
[ To strange lands, however distantly chained to Yunmeng. To Jiang Che — Wanyin, blissfully alienated from the straying, haunted peripheries of his own territory. To Lan Wangji, a silent despot, ruling steel-handed over two children and a fettered guqin.
Here, Wei Ying's ledgers bind themselves of paper untattered, parchment fresh, calligraphy in lampblack, soot. Fat and full and flattered by another mystery resolved, another death defied — the priests', sooner than his own, but intent keeps. If action is owed, it need not be a strangled, pale-faced miracle of Wei Ying's performance.
Guilt and obligation may wear other faces. The stark crude carvings of his mask too ill-fitted him to hand out his own features so easily. ]
no subject
You have no core, he breathes and aches and thinks, for all he seldom speaks it. Wei Ying lacks, and this one privilege is never the chief cultivator's to award, hand docile and cruel when it snakes to imitate the obedience of Jiang Yanli's measured strokes, as he remembers them. Wei Ying has no core, flesh chilled for the spell of evening breeze, in a way Qingshan — a babe in name, but ghost-touched, thriving and cuddling shamelessly to curl his fingers in the ink stream of his Yiling father's hair — already begins to dismiss. One that the yao, a compound of aggregated magic, never knew.
It stings, to glimpse sixteen years of mourning in each of Wei Ying's bruises that slows in passage, each of the fine-shaping shadows of his wrinkles. ]
You owe nothing.
[ To strange lands, however distantly chained to Yunmeng. To Jiang Che — Wanyin, blissfully alienated from the straying, haunted peripheries of his own territory. To Lan Wangji, a silent despot, ruling steel-handed over two children and a fettered guqin.
Here, Wei Ying's ledgers bind themselves of paper untattered, parchment fresh, calligraphy in lampblack, soot. Fat and full and flattered by another mystery resolved, another death defied — the priests', sooner than his own, but intent keeps. If action is owed, it need not be a strangled, pale-faced miracle of Wei Ying's performance.
Guilt and obligation may wear other faces. The stark crude carvings of his mask too ill-fitted him to hand out his own features so easily. ]
You need not save each land.
[ And each sect, each people. ]