Last time. The array of talismans, like matchmaker portraits presented before him: this pleasing, that fair, the other lacklustre. One, scratched in lines Lan Wangji would name disaster, prone to sharp maws and an ill-ground bite. His part in silent things, road filth, flecked blood and paraphernalia: to slither fingers on each ward, temper the characters, dissect their purpose.
To choose among them, not the fairest, or the most competent, but the most willing — those of the wards whose stubbornness of cast could wage years of war against the natural environment of Yiling's inorganic deterioration and persist, victorious.
Wei Ying tips into him. A lesser set, he answers, tilting back into Wei Ying's orbit, until their shoulders neighbour, tap, collide. And he says, "It will not keep."
It wrenches something of him, resignation. Weaves with wind, and the dirge of a world unlearned to consider itself past the lens of its dead.
"Containment condemns to madness." They roil and ache and make of themselves a sea at storm, these unbound spirits, the fledgling violence of their unspent energy. To fetter them is to rip the last bones of their parted bodies, to give them empire to roam and yet no witness. Tentatively, he mouths the practised solution, dismissed, "Purification dissolves."
It will not keep, like rot dark in his flesh, taking root, building home. The shiver that traverses him could sunder the world. Unbidden, he begs Wei Ying's hand, ropes to round it, closes it on the wards he selects for reinforcement. This and this, and the folly of Lan Wangji's own qi, feeding the beast.
"What of destruction?"
Yiling. Burial Mounds. Eradicated, with the last of Wen Ruohan's legacy. Would Wei Ying bear the parting? The corner of Wangji's gaze snags on Wei Ying's boyish smile. You have endured worse.
no subject
To choose among them, not the fairest, or the most competent, but the most willing — those of the wards whose stubbornness of cast could wage years of war against the natural environment of Yiling's inorganic deterioration and persist, victorious.
Wei Ying tips into him. A lesser set, he answers, tilting back into Wei Ying's orbit, until their shoulders neighbour, tap, collide. And he says, "It will not keep."
It wrenches something of him, resignation. Weaves with wind, and the dirge of a world unlearned to consider itself past the lens of its dead.
"Containment condemns to madness." They roil and ache and make of themselves a sea at storm, these unbound spirits, the fledgling violence of their unspent energy. To fetter them is to rip the last bones of their parted bodies, to give them empire to roam and yet no witness. Tentatively, he mouths the practised solution, dismissed, "Purification dissolves."
It will not keep, like rot dark in his flesh, taking root, building home. The shiver that traverses him could sunder the world. Unbidden, he begs Wei Ying's hand, ropes to round it, closes it on the wards he selects for reinforcement. This and this, and the folly of Lan Wangji's own qi, feeding the beast.
"What of destruction?"
Yiling. Burial Mounds. Eradicated, with the last of Wen Ruohan's legacy. Would Wei Ying bear the parting? The corner of Wangji's gaze snags on Wei Ying's boyish smile. You have endured worse.