And I walk ever in your shadow. Ostensibly, to watch Wei Ying's back, where Suibian now lacks her old jurisdiction — from men, from fangs of long lost ghosts, from sabotage, from dagger and poison. From Wei Ying himself, though they toy with this truth, sand and submerge it.
"My pride does not take precedence to the dead." This, a strained clarification, tentative for how Lan Wangji brokers each word. Years dulling the blade of his temper at Zewu-Jun's feet, and he thinks some of the oils of his brother's diplomacy may well have infused him. He need not reduce Wei Ying, only to correct him. "It is not lessened by service."
With his help, his hand, his eyes, his strength — more than his piety, as if an orphan and a fool and a man who learned to spit upon the precepts before wooing their words can be trusted with the notion. Briefly, Lan Wangji pities him with the ancient condescension that anointed him vestige of his father's blood, skin and meat and bones his own, but heir of a school: the steel cog of a jewellery box, rust to never touch its enclosures. The whole of Gusu Lan will forever exceed the summed parts of its pupils.
And what of Wei Ying? Adrift between stones paler than the fire-veined teeth that entombed him. Did it ache to fall? But he learned from spirits before he did from artists of fine-carved healing, who peel gristle from the geometries of bone common to gentlemen and thieves: those who fall break before the landing. The heart, a weak thing, and Wei Ying's brittle beforehand.
( Here, close, spirits lap at his red fingers, lick at the screeching metal of his blood. What will, fed once, forever follow? )
"You have my help." A pause, but he walks on; sixteen years later, the critical progress of knowing that if he steps first, a red-eyed storm will follow him, thereafter.
"But if you are shelter, I am bait," he warns. The Patriarch's protection, the Lan purity. Which will lure them out quickest? "They will give chase."
no subject
"My pride does not take precedence to the dead." This, a strained clarification, tentative for how Lan Wangji brokers each word. Years dulling the blade of his temper at Zewu-Jun's feet, and he thinks some of the oils of his brother's diplomacy may well have infused him. He need not reduce Wei Ying, only to correct him. "It is not lessened by service."
With his help, his hand, his eyes, his strength — more than his piety, as if an orphan and a fool and a man who learned to spit upon the precepts before wooing their words can be trusted with the notion. Briefly, Lan Wangji pities him with the ancient condescension that anointed him vestige of his father's blood, skin and meat and bones his own, but heir of a school: the steel cog of a jewellery box, rust to never touch its enclosures. The whole of Gusu Lan will forever exceed the summed parts of its pupils.
And what of Wei Ying? Adrift between stones paler than the fire-veined teeth that entombed him. Did it ache to fall? But he learned from spirits before he did from artists of fine-carved healing, who peel gristle from the geometries of bone common to gentlemen and thieves: those who fall break before the landing. The heart, a weak thing, and Wei Ying's brittle beforehand.
( Here, close, spirits lap at his red fingers, lick at the screeching metal of his blood. What will, fed once, forever follow? )
"You have my help." A pause, but he walks on; sixteen years later, the critical progress of knowing that if he steps first, a red-eyed storm will follow him, thereafter.
"But if you are shelter, I am bait," he warns. The Patriarch's protection, the Lan purity. Which will lure them out quickest? "They will give chase."