[ All at once, too close, too warm, two children's fragile breaths allaying the soft breeze of candle flame and suspicion — the impossible appears like hand stitchwork, greedily prone to unravel. In the span of heartbeats, planets forget their gravities, talismans the atomic cores that guide and grow their sorcery. Suns graze with stiffening teeth at their own auras.

He could sleep like this, Wei Ying's hand a quiet burn on his thigh, Qingshan gasping between minute, stifled coos of dormant comfort, Qingbai a pleasant nearby vibration of placid pleasure. Lan Wangji could sleep like this, and know the universe at ease, and all that is fire and stone and madness a splintered dream, smoke-wisped, diffused. In shops of trade and trinket, incense burners breathe this mirage. ]

Wei Ying. [ Too much comfort, slivers of silver pouring between his fingers. ] You were not born to be lessened.

[ Not born to Yunmeng, to wander, to face exile. Persecution, and a traitor's death — an animal's, cruelly mourned. Only the Burial Mounds crested and brittled and gave away their rubble like first blood, and they knew, they grieved, they kept the hour. They whispered, year on end, Here he lay king. ]

Raised in worthiness.

[ For empire and Yiling, to head a sect more than follow it. He curls himself away from Wei Ying, but the pull of flesh and bone redirect them, a gaunt arc set almost to engulf this man who gives himself too freely — their children. ]

The shape of you stings. [ Tongue slack and the muscle of his jaw convulsing, how does he explain, set to words? There is no negative space outside Wei Ying, not when he is sandalwood and cloying resin, set for invasion. ] Uncontainable. Embrace that greatness.