This, the quieter pronouncement, Wei Ying's eyes blinding-bright with the feverish agitation of a man who knows his despair misplaced, his pleas pointless. Lan Wangji has tasted the ginger acridity of salted supplications, among petitioners who deal themselves a hundred cuts only to present the blood and bone to the chief cultivator and damn their offenders.
A pledge to their children: one, a heartache of a boy grown his own man, shadowed silhouette drifting after the tatters of his Wen uncle. Two others, unlikely earnings of the road, both carved from rift and suffering, from the pain of their flesh or their forbearers.
"I cannot stay time." Not even in this, for Wei Ying. Beneath the clatter of his falling hand, Wei Ying's fingers scratch the table's sticky lacquered wood, when Lan Wangji drags them. "Qingshan already learns words."
Time is the province of children, wasted without sense or reason. Wangji tallies it in every li of folded, vibrant silk the seamstresses stitch to broaden Qingshan's robes, with every ten days' passage. Children are wet things, made for and of drenching: like lichen and weeds and mould, they grow senselessly, poisoning those who neglect them.
"Come and go as you please. You have claim to Cloud Recesses." Needs must, the wards can disperse like spring's snow and yield the patriarch an open path. "But choose your hours wisely."
no subject
A pledge to their children: one, a heartache of a boy grown his own man, shadowed silhouette drifting after the tatters of his Wen uncle. Two others, unlikely earnings of the road, both carved from rift and suffering, from the pain of their flesh or their forbearers.
"I cannot stay time." Not even in this, for Wei Ying. Beneath the clatter of his falling hand, Wei Ying's fingers scratch the table's sticky lacquered wood, when Lan Wangji drags them. "Qingshan already learns words."
Time is the province of children, wasted without sense or reason. Wangji tallies it in every li of folded, vibrant silk the seamstresses stitch to broaden Qingshan's robes, with every ten days' passage. Children are wet things, made for and of drenching: like lichen and weeds and mould, they grow senselessly, poisoning those who neglect them.
"Come and go as you please. You have claim to Cloud Recesses." Needs must, the wards can disperse like spring's snow and yield the patriarch an open path. "But choose your hours wisely."