Yiling, where a mouth of dark stone yawns and gapes and its teeth stand strong, reedy — where he walks, white intrusion, ghost by appearance, servant of a sickly universe that coagulates its grudges into shrivelled fistfuls of form.
Where Wei Ying, adrift beside him, walks king.
Core of the sun’s season, skies should be sundered by white heat, stained lapis. Yiling forgets itself: wind beats, bruises like a butcher cleaving the meats of the day, fresh in preparation. Glacial resolve recommends stark, arid hardship — spirits do not surrender their palace. And Lan Wangji has seen the way of it before, dust and withered weeds and vermin's intrusion, and a barren spread beneath his feet.
Superstition ensures privacy. The village that watches over the Patriarch’s old keep brings yearly altar offerings for the dead that stir, aimlessly, seeking their armies — men of Qishan Wen and Lanling Jin and Yunmeng Jiang and Qinghe Nie, the handful of Lan. The lady, Jiang Ya —
Before, when they traversed Yiling, their time was borrowed from their own travel purse. Now, he allows himself to breathe: to taste the wet of foreign, death’s cold that clings in sticky sheen over rock at the cave’s entry. The blood that, years later, never reveals itself in rust-red, but comes conjured when Lan Wangji whispers the starting forms of summon, trickles his fingers over walls in idle imitation of talismans.
And the pond like a bottomless eye, a snake’s stare. He cannot meet it, not as he is, tolerated — not Hanguang-Jun, here to dole out justice, but a fitting guest enjoying the Patriarch’s hospitality. The Patriarch, a gaunt and flimsy thing, dancing between the bones of his old home.
Wise, to have abandoned the children in the nearby village. Alone, even Lan Wangji wavers, another layer of shade and ambiguity over the sharp truths of once slaughter. Too much pain here. A surplus of anguish, cresting like stormed sea. Under the weight of their screams, he barely keeps his balance.
He does not wait for Wei Ying’s pronouncement, knows it in his marrow. "Cleanse, appease or disperse them?"
no subject
Where Wei Ying, adrift beside him, walks king.
Core of the sun’s season, skies should be sundered by white heat, stained lapis. Yiling forgets itself: wind beats, bruises like a butcher cleaving the meats of the day, fresh in preparation. Glacial resolve recommends stark, arid hardship — spirits do not surrender their palace. And Lan Wangji has seen the way of it before, dust and withered weeds and vermin's intrusion, and a barren spread beneath his feet.
Superstition ensures privacy. The village that watches over the Patriarch’s old keep brings yearly altar offerings for the dead that stir, aimlessly, seeking their armies — men of Qishan Wen and Lanling Jin and Yunmeng Jiang and Qinghe Nie, the handful of Lan. The lady, Jiang Ya —
Before, when they traversed Yiling, their time was borrowed from their own travel purse. Now, he allows himself to breathe: to taste the wet of foreign, death’s cold that clings in sticky sheen over rock at the cave’s entry. The blood that, years later, never reveals itself in rust-red, but comes conjured when Lan Wangji whispers the starting forms of summon, trickles his fingers over walls in idle imitation of talismans.
And the pond like a bottomless eye, a snake’s stare. He cannot meet it, not as he is, tolerated — not Hanguang-Jun, here to dole out justice, but a fitting guest enjoying the Patriarch’s hospitality. The Patriarch, a gaunt and flimsy thing, dancing between the bones of his old home.
Wise, to have abandoned the children in the nearby village. Alone, even Lan Wangji wavers, another layer of shade and ambiguity over the sharp truths of once slaughter. Too much pain here. A surplus of anguish, cresting like stormed sea. Under the weight of their screams, he barely keeps his balance.
He does not wait for Wei Ying’s pronouncement, knows it in his marrow. "Cleanse, appease or disperse them?"
A death of permanence, by any other name.