In all his mind's eye, the one that calculates and considers and sees problems from familiar angles and unfamiliar ones, shifting two steps over to see possibilities where others saw impassable walls. The echoes in people, the spirits that flee, the bleedover of raw intention that has claimed unprotected minds in so many cases. Yiling carries that poison heavy in its veins, but not alone in the ache of it, not when those who would play at being master to the dead claw their way through the shadows across these six realms and further afield.
The smallest villages carry their secrets, and some will always kill. He stands, absent clutch of Lan Zhan's hand, lift his gaze from his inward focus and the thought about which degree the resentment lingers as its own energy, independent of the spirits that birthed it and the case study that Yiling becomes for this unique depression of spirit, only to summon himself back to the moment. To promises, to chosen bindings, to unwritten ones, and to Lan Zhan, dark eyed, with his words a different sort of promise to a man starved for family as much as he's been starved for sustenance of the body. To glut, body and soul, at the same table, watching children scream and cry and fuss and quiet and grow, learning as they do. Teaching, yes, to be taught if fortunate, and they as fortunate for the opportunity.
Whatever men or manner of creature they become, under the power of their own progress in an uncaring, undisturbed landscape.
He smiles, lopsided, and then fully, laughing as he stands, clasps both hands around Lan Zhan's one. So the ribbon has been claimed, and so he finds it more odd in thought than odd in feeling; ties that bind break under enough testing.
Faith, to believe this one won't, too. They both know children are never binding enough.
"Haven't I promised you a daughter already? Dark of hair, pale of skin, temper either sweet or fiery, she's someone we'll have to know in time." No pattern of timing to the children left in their care, only the echo of pain, of loss, of despair that's slowly rinsed away with the affection they can spare. More, it turns, than they've known to give each other without fangs bared over open veins, thinking what if, what if they press down, break skin, let blood flow free.
"But know her, we will."
He won't be the one to break the contact of their hands, this time. Once, he'd held on to Jiang Cheng, to Jiang Yanli, and with them stepped forward into a world filled with light and possibility. Later it had been stability and pain and love and suffering in unequal measures, and one day, they'd all turned down different paths. Had died, or lived, or found some inbetween through no fault of their own. When A-Yuan's hands had disappeared, and reaching out meant clasping cold air, to wake with a cry broken in a throat, and eyes unseeing for the time it takes to recognise the prison of his own flesh.
No, he knows the trickery of his own senses at times, and he holds on until he's wrested away, a laugh easy on his lips as movement turns him toward the village, to taking steps forward and down, wind parting the twisted leaves on warped branches, sweeping aside yellowed grasses, tinder-thin creeping bushes that send spindly fingers flinching forward, teasing at the edges of their robes.
It is not a warm day, but it doesn't feel cold like it should. Nor is it warm, more tepid, like an uncertain spring morning where winter's claws still rake at the ground and whisper, Not yet.
The feeling lingers as they wind down toward the village beyond the collapsed barriers of near two decades before, people stepping through the measures of their day with little visible effect for it. Not that such things are needing to be obvious, and the spill of people past street venders, even at the corner he once favoured, bickering a note too high, and he thinks they might start to have the shape of the bleedthrough, the trickle down to the worst emotions, from the easiness of anger to the coldness of...
"Revenge." He turns his head, eyes finding Lan Zhan's. "Emotional spillover, carried in, flowing downhill. Do you think?" It's possible, he doesn't voice. Of course it's possible; of course a land can bleed feeling as much as it bleeds water from stone.
no subject
The smallest villages carry their secrets, and some will always kill. He stands, absent clutch of Lan Zhan's hand, lift his gaze from his inward focus and the thought about which degree the resentment lingers as its own energy, independent of the spirits that birthed it and the case study that Yiling becomes for this unique depression of spirit, only to summon himself back to the moment. To promises, to chosen bindings, to unwritten ones, and to Lan Zhan, dark eyed, with his words a different sort of promise to a man starved for family as much as he's been starved for sustenance of the body. To glut, body and soul, at the same table, watching children scream and cry and fuss and quiet and grow, learning as they do. Teaching, yes, to be taught if fortunate, and they as fortunate for the opportunity.
Whatever men or manner of creature they become, under the power of their own progress in an uncaring, undisturbed landscape.
He smiles, lopsided, and then fully, laughing as he stands, clasps both hands around Lan Zhan's one. So the ribbon has been claimed, and so he finds it more odd in thought than odd in feeling; ties that bind break under enough testing.
Faith, to believe this one won't, too. They both know children are never binding enough.
"Haven't I promised you a daughter already? Dark of hair, pale of skin, temper either sweet or fiery, she's someone we'll have to know in time." No pattern of timing to the children left in their care, only the echo of pain, of loss, of despair that's slowly rinsed away with the affection they can spare. More, it turns, than they've known to give each other without fangs bared over open veins, thinking what if, what if they press down, break skin, let blood flow free.
"But know her, we will."
He won't be the one to break the contact of their hands, this time. Once, he'd held on to Jiang Cheng, to Jiang Yanli, and with them stepped forward into a world filled with light and possibility. Later it had been stability and pain and love and suffering in unequal measures, and one day, they'd all turned down different paths. Had died, or lived, or found some inbetween through no fault of their own. When A-Yuan's hands had disappeared, and reaching out meant clasping cold air, to wake with a cry broken in a throat, and eyes unseeing for the time it takes to recognise the prison of his own flesh.
No, he knows the trickery of his own senses at times, and he holds on until he's wrested away, a laugh easy on his lips as movement turns him toward the village, to taking steps forward and down, wind parting the twisted leaves on warped branches, sweeping aside yellowed grasses, tinder-thin creeping bushes that send spindly fingers flinching forward, teasing at the edges of their robes.
It is not a warm day, but it doesn't feel cold like it should. Nor is it warm, more tepid, like an uncertain spring morning where winter's claws still rake at the ground and whisper, Not yet.
The feeling lingers as they wind down toward the village beyond the collapsed barriers of near two decades before, people stepping through the measures of their day with little visible effect for it. Not that such things are needing to be obvious, and the spill of people past street venders, even at the corner he once favoured, bickering a note too high, and he thinks they might start to have the shape of the bleedthrough, the trickle down to the worst emotions, from the easiness of anger to the coldness of...
"Revenge." He turns his head, eyes finding Lan Zhan's. "Emotional spillover, carried in, flowing downhill. Do you think?" It's possible, he doesn't voice. Of course it's possible; of course a land can bleed feeling as much as it bleeds water from stone.