Wei Wuxian stands before each mental cliff with more surety than the one he'd embraced for an ending he'd been denied, a lifetime ago. One grown son, one world that dawned and dusked and didn't care for what was lost or found in its revolutions. Yiling, the fallow beast of its burdened lands, skin and bones and hungry maw yawning wide behind him.
Please. Oh, every plead, every demand, boils down to this:
Wei Wuxian lifts Chenqing, to the fizzle of excitement and resignation he knows too well, to the grounding gravitational pull of Lan Zhan at his side, blade bared like teeth he can only shiver before when set into the mouth of a dog. Sound flows from him, wrested from lungs and tongue and seen under the lowering of his lashes, crackling through the awareness of those hot tempers and tempered angers of the crowd. Resentment coiling in hearts and minds and stomachs, before the first notes strike: a quiet moment, an explosive cacophony that follows, shadows swallowing the light of day.
It's dramatic, the shivers and shudders that pass through people not yet turned to puppets to resentful whims, but getting closer, day by day. The tipping point is never far off, balanced on a blade's edge, ready to bleed.
It's the strongest resentment, that of a child's, that reaches them first. The man is a broad shoulders, stooped back individual, a caricature of strength to any which had been small and helpless. Fury, the unchecked hurt of a life cut short when death was not a real truth quite yet, not solidified, has the sheer uncoordinated attempt of violence as a throwing of body, no weapons, and the cry of, "No! Noooo! I don't want to, I want to be big!"
A child's lament, in a voice too old for it, with eyes too glossy and burning with enraged fear, the pressure of it scalding as his song rises in a sharp, uncompromising note, only to turn into the lulling apology to follow the acknowledgement that none of this was fair, and neither was this hold of the living, by the dead which had no more life to live.
It is a firm, sad cajoling, and the black pours out of the man's mouth, from his eyes, smoke that cries with a child's voice, until the sounds are swallowed, echoed in the distress calls of chickens in someone's yard, houses down.
no subject
Please. Oh, every plead, every demand, boils down to this:
Wei Wuxian lifts Chenqing, to the fizzle of excitement and resignation he knows too well, to the grounding gravitational pull of Lan Zhan at his side, blade bared like teeth he can only shiver before when set into the mouth of a dog. Sound flows from him, wrested from lungs and tongue and seen under the lowering of his lashes, crackling through the awareness of those hot tempers and tempered angers of the crowd. Resentment coiling in hearts and minds and stomachs, before the first notes strike: a quiet moment, an explosive cacophony that follows, shadows swallowing the light of day.
It's dramatic, the shivers and shudders that pass through people not yet turned to puppets to resentful whims, but getting closer, day by day. The tipping point is never far off, balanced on a blade's edge, ready to bleed.
It's the strongest resentment, that of a child's, that reaches them first. The man is a broad shoulders, stooped back individual, a caricature of strength to any which had been small and helpless. Fury, the unchecked hurt of a life cut short when death was not a real truth quite yet, not solidified, has the sheer uncoordinated attempt of violence as a throwing of body, no weapons, and the cry of, "No! Noooo! I don't want to, I want to be big!"
A child's lament, in a voice too old for it, with eyes too glossy and burning with enraged fear, the pressure of it scalding as his song rises in a sharp, uncompromising note, only to turn into the lulling apology to follow the acknowledgement that none of this was fair, and neither was this hold of the living, by the dead which had no more life to live.
It is a firm, sad cajoling, and the black pours out of the man's mouth, from his eyes, smoke that cries with a child's voice, until the sounds are swallowed, echoed in the distress calls of chickens in someone's yard, houses down.