For a moment, they are only geometries of courtesy, hands played and performed and cups traded, the careful tumble of their swarthy translucence: Lan Wangji's bronze with warm tea. Wei Ying's, threatening a mist that betrays a lesser calibre of alcohol, but that they forgive, forget, embrace. He thinks, more fool him —
And reaches, hand raining long shadow over the table's span, to gain the measure of the wine jar and the membrane of its residual wine, swishing it. Enough here to wet his lips, to steal taste and wake the blind, battered, amorphous thing, the slithered tendrils of the animal rooted beneath his skin. The wilderness alcohol brokers. But they keep the company of a young girl, trembled and dancing between tables, of a slew of pale-faced visitors, negotiating distance comfort.
They have not earned the dubious blessing of Hanguang-Jun, the drunken menace. Under the dusty, hazy pallor of dying light, he teases droplets of wine in his tea, gives the cup a swirl and drinks with an air of timid, carefree consternation.
"Not a teacher." A shortcut, they both know, to start with a negative definition, to sculpt purpose from the stone of his uncertainty. Then, softened, "Not the leading cultivator."
Not ruler of one sect, not liege of them all. Not a spider, casting his web long and meandering and glistened with dew-like silvered effervescence. Not tightening his spill.
"Too much of me belongs to others." A sect, a cause, a lifetime. The forehead that fetters him tighter than garotte. He wishes, distantly, to drift. "I forget where they begin, and I end."
no subject
And reaches, hand raining long shadow over the table's span, to gain the measure of the wine jar and the membrane of its residual wine, swishing it. Enough here to wet his lips, to steal taste and wake the blind, battered, amorphous thing, the slithered tendrils of the animal rooted beneath his skin. The wilderness alcohol brokers. But they keep the company of a young girl, trembled and dancing between tables, of a slew of pale-faced visitors, negotiating distance comfort.
They have not earned the dubious blessing of Hanguang-Jun, the drunken menace. Under the dusty, hazy pallor of dying light, he teases droplets of wine in his tea, gives the cup a swirl and drinks with an air of timid, carefree consternation.
"Not a teacher." A shortcut, they both know, to start with a negative definition, to sculpt purpose from the stone of his uncertainty. Then, softened, "Not the leading cultivator."
Not ruler of one sect, not liege of them all. Not a spider, casting his web long and meandering and glistened with dew-like silvered effervescence. Not tightening his spill.
"Too much of me belongs to others." A sect, a cause, a lifetime. The forehead that fetters him tighter than garotte. He wishes, distantly, to drift. "I forget where they begin, and I end."