Ablutions. Again and again and once more, like flood waters raining away slaughter. Red spumes on his fingertips, and he reaps only what sects before him have sown, sin of the ancestors thickened on tired tongue. Swallows, to taste burgeoning bile.
Toils of bodies tortured here, of broken joints and ached minds and the sport of their hunt, pricked by serendipity. He thinks corpses were needle once, and fate bludgeons them in hard land, breaks it in littered wells of unended hurt. Water will sprout of it. The rains did not always avoid Yiling.
He is knelt already, a servant in attendance. When he bows, it's to the song of wild wind and a rusted sky, the whispered, winding devastation of a moment's anticipation, a breath held — his own, and his body contracts, lessens itself to the boy who begged pittance at his mother's doors, the youth who rescued dreams of estival rebellion from Wei Ying's praying hands. Firestorm breathes and evaporates in him. Earth crackles, welcoming less than the humility of Hanguang-Jun, but the might of Gusu Lan discipline, ghosting until a sirocco summons aged blood and sorcery and debris, stripped of land.
In cupped hands, he welcomes it, brings it up, until it smokes and mulches his fingers, his sleeve, until it greases him like a door at its hinges, begging his mouth open — until he kisses dirt and gravel, first on his fingertips, then, wilted as his body breaks, on trembled land. Yiling. Let him come a petitioner, then, a worshipper, let him show himself faint. There's a devastation in this dirt that answers him, one widower and mournful soul, bare before another.
He cannot breathe. Blisters, "I beg of you, pardon. I beg of you, peace."
How fails him, the root of disaster? Sects upon sects and this ground trampled, by foot and hooves, and their glory earned on castles of corpses. What use is the mortal coil of Lan Wangji in feeble retribution? He cannot house a thousand spirits, barely contains the soul he names his own. Storm inundates him. Fresh bundle of crumbled dirt in his grasp, the land's core, and he raises it — sets his thumbs stained to write long vertical lines of printed turbulence on Wei Ying's cheeks, in their wake.
"We beg." A simple rite, a careless giving. Uncle would never approve.
no subject
Toils of bodies tortured here, of broken joints and ached minds and the sport of their hunt, pricked by serendipity. He thinks corpses were needle once, and fate bludgeons them in hard land, breaks it in littered wells of unended hurt. Water will sprout of it. The rains did not always avoid Yiling.
He is knelt already, a servant in attendance. When he bows, it's to the song of wild wind and a rusted sky, the whispered, winding devastation of a moment's anticipation, a breath held — his own, and his body contracts, lessens itself to the boy who begged pittance at his mother's doors, the youth who rescued dreams of estival rebellion from Wei Ying's praying hands. Firestorm breathes and evaporates in him. Earth crackles, welcoming less than the humility of Hanguang-Jun, but the might of Gusu Lan discipline, ghosting until a sirocco summons aged blood and sorcery and debris, stripped of land.
In cupped hands, he welcomes it, brings it up, until it smokes and mulches his fingers, his sleeve, until it greases him like a door at its hinges, begging his mouth open — until he kisses dirt and gravel, first on his fingertips, then, wilted as his body breaks, on trembled land. Yiling. Let him come a petitioner, then, a worshipper, let him show himself faint. There's a devastation in this dirt that answers him, one widower and mournful soul, bare before another.
He cannot breathe. Blisters, "I beg of you, pardon. I beg of you, peace."
How fails him, the root of disaster? Sects upon sects and this ground trampled, by foot and hooves, and their glory earned on castles of corpses. What use is the mortal coil of Lan Wangji in feeble retribution? He cannot house a thousand spirits, barely contains the soul he names his own. Storm inundates him. Fresh bundle of crumbled dirt in his grasp, the land's core, and he raises it — sets his thumbs stained to write long vertical lines of printed turbulence on Wei Ying's cheeks, in their wake.
"We beg." A simple rite, a careless giving. Uncle would never approve.