[ To the man carting around a child who has aged upward, and who seeks his own independence in his attempts to walk as he comes closer and closer to a year, many of the details Lan Wangji asks after, is haunted by, register only peripherally. A crawling child with ambitions to stand on wobbling legs doesn't make for an easy target, and the moment Wei Wuxian stops, holding their second son and blinking at Bichen's bared blade, he has to look past, to the edge beyond, and wonder for a moment if Lan Zhan will ever trust he has steady feet.
Falling had never been an accident. He hadn't slipped to his almost death.
And he had no intentions of repeating what the worst depths of despair had left him dangling over, unable to summon the energy to stand on his own two feet again. Here and now, he also has a child who is tugging on his hair and babble complaining for food, chattering and nattering and no more silent than a slow trickling slide of rock down a mountainside. ]
You know, when I thought we'd venture out of Gusu Lan for a week or two, I didn't imagine our second stay would be in someplace known for mysterious disappearances and unexplained hauntings.
[ Around their son's chubby fist, the carved beads of Wei Wuxian's protections, demanding avoidance by all things touched and tainted by curse or resentment. He's been the bearing target of it once, and it leaves him vulnerable in Wei Wuxian's mind, if not in fact. Just like he's insisted on the same carefully knotted carved beads for Lan Zhan, each one separated just enough to make no clicking sounds.
Does Lan Zhan need such a thing, a charm of formidable enough regard, but hardly a match for cultivation genius at his level? No, perhaps not. But Wei Wuxian has been more in Gusu Lan than not, and idle hands need occupying, and Lan Zhan had been touched those months ago by things which Wei Wuxian has already decided to forget without forgetting.
He smiles, shifting Xiao Qingshan out of his carrying sling and onto his hip. ]
Safe enough to let A-Shan eat? He's been wanting down for the last leg of all this. You know, keeping him occupied on Little Apple is easier than keeping him occupied when carrying him.
[ How did they end up here on serious business, where's he going to find an Auntie or child minder, is he going to have to strap Lan Qingshan to Lan Zhan if they get down to fighting, because he sure doesn't want a baby strapped to him if he's going to be funneling any amount of resentful energy, okay.
Then again, an Auntie might be amendable to laundry, too, so... hm. ]
[ Coward, he does not say, perk of his brows an open invitation to meet this new blade and parry. Stab deepest, where only words may infiltrate. Stab to bleed and salt the wounds. Stab and stab and swing again, flat of the blade equally eager — but Bichen, hunger bloomed and roiling, returns to her sheath. Wei Ying walks where he owns, a shadow upended. Slim as cloud wisps dispersing before the break of storm.
On his hip, plastered close like a bruise, the sullen, swollen, red face of his — their, through grudging and tacit concession — child, agitated imperiously from hours of travel. They journeyed slow on Lil Apple, lilt of the donkey's ungainly step lulling the infant to beggarly sleep. Wangji suspects, because in all things there is private belief, and candour, and treachery, that Wei Ying stood taller, spine steel, because of the care he might give this one creature. Not that different yet from the shades Wei Ying protects, guardian of little whispers and careless nothings in the night, as if, tip of his head, Lan Wangji might blink yet and miss him.
Refusing a sect leader's seasonal invitation, when Jiang Cheng has learned to restrain his requests to the scale of their mutual tolerance would have made a mockery of the chief cultivator's impartiality. The letter came as Wangji finalised the last of his audience assignments. No reason, then, to eschew duty, past pleasure and formality. Will the chief cultivator, who might be tempted to forget the good province of Yunmeng, kindly exercise his revered faculties and honour us with remembrance? Some time soon? Before we all croak? It might have taken less than Jiang Cheng's most teeth-stripping venom and best skilled scribe to assemble a letter addressed to Hanguang-Jun, but intended to the stray, Wei Wuxian. Courtesy commands all creatures: they set course, disciples first, Wangji thereafter. Wei Ying, bribed with the infant and bullied by the remainder of his family, in tow.
A credit to his clan: Qingshan comported himself flawlessly for the better part of the journey. Knows his manners even now that Wangji sweeps in, in the ways of a vulture, to claim him from Wei Ying, raising Qingshan against his chest, and pressing his mouth against the baby's forehead. Be good. Has he not been so, throughout? Only the shriek of their sibling charms rattling alive, when accident knocks their two wrists together? Barely a tear from him. Never a word. (Soon, Wangji senses, soon.)
And feeding? Lak Wangji knows the rites, spilling in the lake of his rippled silks, kneeling with a parting swipe to rescue the bearings of Wei Ying's travel satchel. Goat's milk, warm in the leather clasps of a thin pouch that will want replenishing from an inn tonight. He presents it for young Qingshan's grudging consideration, only after trying his bottom for greater emergencies (dry, clean; passable). Suckling starts timidly, but stokes.
In Lan Wangji's arms, a child soothing. At his side, another, grown and despondent. His eye trails from one to the next. ]
Wei Ying. Stretch your legs by the dais.
[ And catch the presumptuous scent of deadened laughter, the absent pour of dampness and the hollow trace of cresting cold. Traditional, the advent of hauntings: signs deepen with time, like fractures, but the roots of a riotous tree must first come in strong. If there is scope for ghostly visitations, Wei Ying will be first to hear that knock at their doors.
Besides, the child sweetens for Wangji, hands greedy after he's done with his milk: first, to the pale strip of Wangji's cheek, then the tug of his hair, the glint and glamour of his headpiece, when Wangji's head descends. Allowed now, he will prove merciful later. Let Qingshan learn him, as he learned the bleached red of Wei Ying's ribbon for weeks before, with joyous hands and petty teeth. ]
The silence deafens here.
[ A horror of paucity: no movement, no screeches, no stray remnants of energy, no gust of dust, no air. As if, the quarters twice deserted, they cannot robe in the trimmings of hospitality, one time more. ]
It's true, those roads have never had tolls. Not the waterways, either.
[ A thin smile, and nothing more said; Lotus Pier is a place he longs for in the ways of nostalgia and memory, but not one he treads toward directly. Only in increments that bring him closer and closer, testing out boundaries of a broken relationship neither one of them had fully given up on.
Chenqing is evidence enough of it, as are the cruelties employed in beating out every possibly flash of Wei Wuxian. That there'd been nothing to flush out for sixteen years was something Jiang Cheng and Lan Zhan both shared.
Regardless, to Lotus Pier he now goes, the lagging third who's spoken inanities to the babe only increase as the inevitable looms on their horizon. He dreads, to some extent. He longs to a greater one.
Thus the babe, thus his distractions, and thus now the headache that intrudes as their son exchanges arms, going from one loving flame to the next, consumed equally by both parents, left flushed and thriving in their wake. ]
If you say so, Lan Zhan.
[ Small quirk of his lips and a fond glance over the both of them, handsome man with the sharp enough edges, and rounded child with his ever-bright eyes. He looks healthy now in a way he hadn't, months ago.
Children recover quickly. Something he used to do, he knows, to greater success.
He does stretch, both legs and senses, lifting a hand to his forehead and pressing at its centre with the ongoing blossoming of a hollow there, pressure against his sinuses despite his health being perfectly hale. There is a weight of something here, and he follows, steps alongside an unseen line and draws him to frown, walking away from the cliff, from their son, from his esteemed spouse, from Lotus Pier as a brilliant bloom on a horizon still days in coming.
There is a tree, here, wizened and weathered, twisted by the howl of winds that come roaring in the evenings each autumn. There is a stone, corner peering up from a fall of needles and detritus from the trees and shrubs nearby. There is a feeling of what has no form, and it stretches forward, tests against him, rubs like a feral cat, moves away again. ]
Lan Zhan, [ he calls back, not all that loud since his voice doesn't need to carry far; he does not know his voice sounds further when he speaks than it should, with him still in visual line of sight by this tree, this hidden stone, this abundance of neglect. ] Did the guide mention what this place was built on top of?
[ Qingshan's grasping hand brings black strands to his mouth, gumming at hair he then delights on tugging on, babyfat cheeks round and rosy as he beams up, giggling at his cleverness, at having his father so close at hand. He doesn't fuss overmuch, no, but he does pull for attention, thrive in its embrace, and Lan Zhan is a comfort to him that the child knows by something like instinct. The one who breaks fevers; the one who breaks fasts.
That chubby hand, reaching out with hair entangled between fingers, to pat, pat, pat at Lan Zhan's jaw. He meant to aim for the cheek, but alas; coordination is not always as he pleases.
He, too, doesn't hear his other father, enamoured of his present game and the liveliness of it, compared to the rest of this unvibrant place. ]
[ The pawing, the smirching, the easy, fatuous laughter. These are the testaments of a child, oil glistened in water. Patience remoulds Wangji like ewers to rushed river water, half the making of his nascence, half the tempering of his use. He learned it with the guqin, first. Spells, after. The long kneeling, his peering, his education, Sizhui's growing pains, Wei Yi —
...and is that him, murmured like a spring bird's trill? By chance, he gazes up to nothing: the hall room, shrouded, beat of branches tapping the decayed railway. ]
...Wei Ying? [ On his feet, before he can help himself, a toy of the market boxes, sprung. He was there, Wei Ying was there, only just ahead, mere steps from the cli — ] Wei Yi —
[ Against the advice of any etiquette master, he rushes. Hollow, Wangji's step nearly stumbles, the child in his arm anchored against fine net of hair and the sugar-like spun figments of his crown's filigree, silver alive. He catches himself — catches sight of Wei Ying, absent one moment, a spell of stewing inks, the next.
Indifferent, Qingshan peers out, bauble-eyed, and smooth, arms hungering. The disrespect of this new cart is staggering. The one before remembered his dignity as a lord and a master and an infant, therefore rightfully immune to missteps. Let Wangji meditate on the lax foolishness of his service, while stirred breath carves path out of him like slices of his hidden lungs.
He blinks, longer than he should, correcting his sight to twilight, to Wei Ying, dappled before him. Here. Known. ]
You left sight.
[ No. No, shades only played their game, and Wei Ying eluded himself. He's done so before, one round in Yiling, another on a cliff so crisp, he knows the way of it. He's won.
A strange correction. One moment there, then... ]
Apologies. [ A reaction wrenched of him, like a wolf's howl. The child, agitated. Wei Ying himself, no doubt aggrieved. He owes... more of the blinking, distorting the picture before him. Wei Ying the man, Wei Ying the sum of shapes, Wei Ying nearly translucent.
As Wangji closes in, the sharpness of him peers and pearls, abrasive. The staleness of the room and Wei Ying's raw scent, piercing it. Death and deathliness. ]
...bathing halls. Before. For ablutions.
[ So the sainted might finish their pilgrimage to the sleeping volcano in fine, polished form. The waters ran warm here, sulphurous to the cusp of bearing — the reason plain.
He does not find himself delaying to think the matter over — only sets down Qingshan on wobbly feet, bent barely enough to offer him a helpful hand to anchor him. ]
Bind us, so we are not lost.
[ ...and certainly not so Wei Ying can't throw himself alone in the nearest ditch, at the next blink. Ah, the binding talisman, that sage invention. ]
( His named, called; he's turned back toward Lan Zhan with a furrowed brow, not wondering at the animation behind his actions, but at the stretch of shadows that mislead his eyes. Panic and worry, cemented by a time he remembers better than he admits, but never with the clarity that Lan Zhan does. Traumas wreak separate havocs, married in a moment of mutual destruction that only rectifies for someone else's machinations.
You left sight. Part of it by now is patently absurd, given his leavetaking months ago as Lan Zhan took up his mantle as Chief Cultivator, Grand Overseer of the chaos at low simmer amoung the clans. He doesn't think about the cliff scant paces away, feeling no love or destiny with it, so why would he? He's forgotten.
White noise, in his mental landscape, a snow that coalesces into form and is shoved off again as he smiles at Lan Zhan.
He has another answer he didn't seek, he supposes. What to do, what to do?
... Focus on the task at hand. Bathing halls gone barren, but the earth lives somewhere underneath it all, a hot and roiling richness, but the scent of sulfur has weakened with the sinking waters long since relegated to below the surface. Or were they? He wonders, interrupted from considering ways down, to where the ache of death and decay and the silence too austere to be normal might crack.
Instead, there's Lan Zhan, asking for binding, with Qingshan standing on legs that remember sometimes to place this foot, then that foot, desperate to follow the adults who teeter around him like magnificent gazelles. )
I left my ropes behind, ( he quips, but he comes closer, crouches down to be before both man and child, reaching out to grant Qingshan his hand so that his free one might find second anchor. A wave of a chubby fist and then the clutch as the babe toddles forward one step, two. Tugging on Lan Zhan's hand for support without consideration.
Wei Wuxian smiles at the child, then shifts his gaze, eyes more knowing than his tone. Extends his free hand to Lan Zhan, quirking his eyebrows a touch: he used binding, or bonding, an unnamed duality, in a time where he also had spiritual energy in excess. More a tease and demand for attention from a young man determined to fulfil his clan's request, and the tagalong determined to help, regardless of his asking. A later tool for guiding balancing acts in fights, for grounding the bloodthirsty, for being an all around creative manipulator: he's given credit and not credit enough.
It's the same now, conserving one energy by holding out another offer: his hand, fingers partly curled, palm open and empty of all but his own life. ) but if you wanted to hold hands, Lan Zhan, all you need to do is ask.
( Wiser anyway between them and an infant, because he does want to find a downward direction that stays on mountain but peers into its heart.
The holy people had disappeared somewhere, from that room, overnight. Not out doors, and not flying, but there are more directions than above earth and above the sky. )
[ Blind, leading the blind: here Qingshan fumbles, Lan Wangji will obediently wander. Was it so with Xiao Xingchen, seduced by the easy noose of trust and familiarity? Did Xue Chengmei apply himself with such diligent nonchalance?
He is taken where all roads converge, before light and laughter and Wei Ying. Rescued, between two pillars, Qingshan overextends himself immediately, stride long and swinging, absently, after a time between them — bitterly convinced that these two dark friends will not surrender him to detritus and stone.
Dust catches under the sweep of Wangji's boot, matte and tacky with membrane of lamp oil, bled out. Locked, the pillar of his gaze ravishes stains that seep into fractures, fractures that spider as vines on tile, tiles that melt and meddle in a confusion of unpolished nephrite —
And within them, dark, beyond them, dark, binding them, dark —
What was this place built on top of?
Wei Ying, offering his hand again, in a strange and likely unsuccessful contortion of his body, straining. Causality is a fickle concept. Mere weeks ago, the action of Wangji's impulse called for the consequence of Wei Ying's palm, softened and thawed, lashed by rain spells and young, rapid hail. Bruised for it.
Only a parched man tastes to excess on countless counts of the same river water. ( He has had his fill, oh, but Lan Wangji chokes on it.) ]
Shameless.
[ Two men, bound by blood spilled, if not formalities. No need for the indecency of hands held without cause between them. What else will this poor child learn, through ill-gained example? How to ignore duty for witless whim, how to forsake caution. Its heart, listen to it, Bichen's beats with the sibilant promise of danger waiting in the womb of restless void. The birthing will tear them all, whole.
He flinches, despite himself — has been, for the better part of an incense stick, the slave of distractions. Cliff-side, shadow play, the child, their gu — ]
I did not see our guide flee.
[ Only... sensed him disperse, like shade before the dawn hours that seep in, pale but gaining strength — a mirror of the babe that traps Wangji's fingers, start of his nails sketching out pulses of pain in the rare filigree where Wangji's skin lies unmarked by calluses. No malicious spirit, him. This much, Wangji can swear by, is enough of a cultivator still to remember. He would not shame Uncle with such ignorance, not a Lan of his training.
And what do the laws of observance recommend, in matters of spirits and exorcism? First, to limit and lessen the exposure of the unaffected, to bar the path of innocents, to ward the grounds. They have a child with them, curse-marked once already. Wangji sees him, all full cheeks and deep-carved smile, and shivers wreck him like waves, beating the shore. ]
...Wei Ying. We judged poorly. [ They judged hardly at all. ] He is too young to stay.
[ There were inns, down the path to the temple, places of shelter. Even the village keeper's home will suffice. If they have no mercy on their own bones, let them learn it for the child's. ]
( He has a small shake of his head, the twist of his lips and the sigh that passes them after, letting his gaze drift back to the small, dark head between them. Easier, this.
The mention of the guide has him look up, cast his eyes about, and sigh again, only this time with the long suffering of a man visited often enough by spectres to no longer be surprised at their sheer capriciousness. )
Some want their mysteries solved. Others linger because of a duty to that which has gone, we know this.
( The guide, a guide in truth, didn't flee so much as remove, it seems; Wei Wuxian would laugh, but it dies a half-amused gasp on his tongue, swallowed by his lips.
He's not opposed, or insensate, to Qingshan's safety; his sensibility on it forever warped by perimeter lines and poor rest and barriers and talismans all built to protect and keep out and keep away the damaging ones, the spirits who were anger and rage incarnate, murderous destruction. He knows what it is to guard the defenseless against that, and he wonders at it now; wonders at the safety of each house downward the mountain.
It was nice, raising a child in a village. It has been an education, having no same luxury now. )
Do you trust them?
( He asks, not watching Lan Zhan, but Qingshan, watching the child's each placement of foot and the wobble of the leg that follows. He walks with support, now, and soon, soon he will navigate the wonder of his own motion independent of them both. They grow so quickly, and never quickly enough on the bad nights, with the insatiable cries and the humming and bouncing and the eventual fall into sleep of two rather than one, cradled against a chest and collapsed atop a platform, exhausted. )
If so, you have the skill and the speed, Lan Zhan. I have no objections.
( To Lan Zhan sweeping Qingshan away, finding him a safe enough keeping, a port to weather the storm. This place aches with silence and deep, not grasping and devouring in ways of some haunted places. Quiet and waiting, wishing for its own unveiling like a shy bride anticipating her long awaited wedding night, invariably disappointed by something of the ceremony and acts which followed.
He is, as well, implying: let me stay. Haunts and hauntings, incorporeal demands and whispers, all these are part of his domain in a way that was his survival and damnation in that salvation, and he does not fear them, but does not believe himself their masters without cause. Go not gently into that dark night below the surface, and he suspects neither of them will, penetrating dead silences with their own living silences in turn. )
[ To be dismissed unfairly and alone, a stranded nuisance bound for inns and village shelter. If one of them must walk the coward's path alone, then it should be —
...ah. And is this the game of it, howled heated cat's yowls, screaming hypocrisy? He wears that sin, the sect's true colours. Let it stain him, let it spread. Infection, trueborn, foamed. Bustling.
One heartbeat, and he would send Wei Ying away with gladness, to shelter and to a night's rest, to ill-earned succour. How long has it been since Wei Ying has tasted of broth warmth and a tolerant bed? There is no gladness in his journeys, no privilege of a gentleman, once raised by the better sects. Of the two, they are both trained, within reason, but Lan Wangji has dressed himself as Wei Ying's sword arm because he stands the sturdier of the two, steel and unbending. He may kill, where Wei Ying only strikes. He may defend.
But his gaze sharpens, blade poised, trained on Wei Ying's jugular. Let him bleed, before he dismisses. They've struck swords before, when Wei Ying still deigned to carry, calculated loose footing and parrying. Together, they were stars colliding, trails of white dispersing in their wake — and he means to tell Wei Ying, to wrench his jaw free of its bearings, of the fixtures and formalities introduced between them, to push the sound out, One does not go where the other cannot follow. Not again.
What business is this of Wei Ying, to name their inquiry done? Past curious meandering, he was ever ill suited for investigation — lacked the appetite and patience for long and dainty searches, each day without fuss or turmoil, each day, knowing it might be the same as the last, and an end-result distant. He lacked, where Wangji thrives, and the temple opened its maws for him first, showed the teeth of its stone and the gasps of its moss, livened, and the empty, sprawling space of the balcony, waiting, of the abyss beyond.
The ghost of their guide answered Lan Wangji first. Let it learn his name. ]
Lead the way.
[ Beside him, Qingshan stumbles on, disciplined in the ways of cattle and petty animals, who know survival belongs to the luckiest or the fittest, and his fate must write itself beside his herd — for now.
Later, he will grow his presumption, let it heat his blood and soften his senses, remind him that he is young and fair, and already a pretty child, with beady eyes like every doll a maid's spared past childhood, for her sheer beauty. He will never want for admirers, or carer to stop in their step and coo at him, not under Wei Ying's watch and counsel — earlier, when he was yet Yuan, Sizhui preened. Already, Qingshan learns the way of it, bats his lashes and puffs his cheeks and answer one grin for his own, trembling.
Wei Ying teaches him this. Let him learn, then, all that this father must offer. ]
( His lips twitch at that statement, and he offers a mere: )
Ah.
( No one here is a fragile wife, or fragile husband. He can trace where Lan Zhan's thoughts flow with a rejoinder like that, where the trek down to deposit a child in a stranger's arms is something attributed to fragility, to worry, to weakness.
It's not Wei Wuxian's intent, but he understands it, and simply holds his tongue on the many small ways Lan Zhan's let it be implied that he, instead, is the fragile wife. It's no more true than the reverse, no matter the worries heavy in Lan Zhan's soul, or the ones that dog Wei Wuxian's heels like nightmares of gnashing, bloody teeth. He's good at ignoring them in the wakefulness of night or day.
He hums a note that is nothing but a sound, and acknowledgement in the stretching shadows of yes, lead the way. )
Even if you were, Lan Zhan, I wouldn't hasten away.
( He can follow an instinct first honed in pain and desperation, something tempered through rages and outrages, through tears and blood and sweat and vomit until it was an arrogance he later had to leech out of his bones. This place echoes, but deep, like the flowing water, something reaches back up. Wanting, burdened, but not cutting in the way of so much resentment. It's both older and deeper, more worrying in that sense. He keeps close to both the man and child, not because he needs to be the first draw of a flute or deflection of a sword, but because of a life precious and a life depended on, and how both interlink. )
This way.
( An overgrown path off the proper grounds of the abandoned seeming temple, made apparent as they walk, a winding path through sad rustling vegetation that ends, forlorn, in an open area. The ground beneath their feet compacted, the foliage that has waxed and waned with the season growing up to the face of boulders on the hillside. )
I may be wrong, ( he allows, conversational and staring at a point on the rock; ) but this reminds me of a certain barrier from our less wise years.
( Are his wise years truly here yet? Far more so now, he says, compared to before. He crouches down by Qingshan's side, steadying him with one hand and gesturing to the stone that rounds away before them. )
Qingshan, look. The art of concealment is as much in making things appear as people expect them to be as it is in the arrays one might build. That'll make sense to you one day, I'm sure, but for now we're looking silly staring at boulders, aren't we? Mm?
( The babe blinks up at him, mouth slightly agape, and he smiles, not quite giggling, because a grin for a grin is reassurance and social mimicry. Tools for survival, at any age. )
They bleed them in the old world, blood coin to pay for blood sin. He is slow — his nature, the water's course — to drift behind Wei Ying and the trotting menace, his (their) child. Slower, for how he minds Qinghsan's heavy step, cautious to position himself ever at three paces' distance, because he sways, the little one does, first forward where Wei Ying might grip him if he tumbles, then back, where Lan Wangji might intercede, just so.
Outside, the path is weeds and jungle, scattered greenery and ears of wild wheat cat, whipping the length of his calves. He tickles for it, sours, indulges, steps out of the wind's way to leave little of his scent. A garden in abandon does not require Wangji's intrusion. Let it live according to its own laws, a brimming wasteland and grown wonder.
But he is there, finally. There, with his two charges and the sets of overgrown stone protrusions. Earlier, he felt the call to leave nature to its doings, to fall like another note on the music sheet of a world that requires no screech or halt. Now, he is normalised more than he is a crass dissonance, feels wakefulness and alert and the silence of birds, biting.
There is something here, beyond this great boulder that stares them, like its brothers, daring them to wait until it erodes down. No man could hope to roll it, no legion, not a creature of its size. And is there something behind it? No, not to look at it right. Would Lan Wangji have even sensed the change in atmosphere, had Wei Ying not — ]
He is dignified.
[ This, to Qingshan, who only grins the brighter for his dignity> And Wei Ying... well. Well, then. It is hardly for Lan Wangji to criticise a master of the unkempt arts. Only to present himself with a step forward. ] Inquiry, or...?
[ The curse of him, he pauses. Later, Wei Ying will know, will say, will whisper, This was the moment when I knew you weak and untrue. When he bent the mind's knee to Wei Ying's will, and ah, but he is steadfast, before he crumbles, lines and corners, bereft the sweetness of a dewy curve. Posture, points of precision — Bichen, drawn — the better sweetheart, devout wife, where Wei Ying serve Lan Wangji false.
Fragile, when she peers, gleaming. Elegant, when the cut of her grazes the neat stretch of Lan Wangji's thumb. Discreet, when she returns to her sheath-shelter, one blink and the matter done, and his finger doused in earthly red, wet on the large exuberance of stone. Honour, then Commit, and lastly, Surrender. Characters and each drawn slowly, the whisper of seals gaining voice, huskiness accruing.
Open. Open. Ope —
And it does, of course it does, it would have been brazen cruelty if stone did not shift, like the tremulous gasp of an old crone, rehearsed for theatrics. If the boulder did not bind its brothers, then shift and bend and beat itself aside, leaving the gaping mouth of the beast's belly, a door sloping down — a hole like a well's spread — and stairs, down and down, and beneath in the sulphurous catacombs, where they can go, with no light for Hanguang-Jun's namesake.
Is the hole's mouth not bigger than anything the boulder might have hidden? Of course. Generous enough for two men to pass comfortably at each other's side, born like a rupture of the land. Illusions, concealment. Next round, the artists of this work should consider hiding their entrances with a lake.
At the last moment, his hand drips behind him, settled obedient at his lower back, a signal of old, performative carriage. He has incriminated himself enough here, where Wei Ying must always be right. Waits, then walks, but throws over his shoulder: ]
Light a path, master Wei.
[ He has worn enough of himself, breaking concealment in ways Wei Ying will burn to learn, moth to the flame of every trick he has yet to taste, but that Nie Huaisang may have conceded alongside the finest pickings of his library, to make amends. Wei Ying's resurrection was never bartered, but the price of the Unclean Realm came nearly close enough.
And Wei Ying does so love to make use of himself. ]
( He's nothing but a quirked brow to Lan Zhan's question, his trust firm in a man who is has become increasingly aware sees a shade as often as he thinks he sees Wei Wuxian himself. There are reasons, and he knows them, but what he owes dues for are things he's paid to the best of his abilities, and he can understand things now in this man he sees that had been a mystery, for all his having been known before.
Sixteen years is a long time to think you recalled a person, to hold onto an image of what and who they were. It may as well take sixteen more to stop finding the reality less and more than the memory, but if anyone suffers for it, it's only them. He'd spare Lan Zhan that stumbling block, but he really can't do more than remember what he's rediscovered in himself on the roads that have, in time, wound back to Lan Zhan, and onward, toward Lotus Pier.
His weaknesses are exaggerated in the eyes of understood but untrue fear. Time will be the only demonstration otherwise, and learning how not to be each other's reverse scale; time, he hopes, will help with that.
For now, he slips hands under arms and lifts Qingshan again, resting him on a hip and with an arm at his back. His arseonal of wards and talismans and charms are as evident as the beads, clacking, at Qingshan's wrist; the shadows beyond the revealed entrance seem to tremble, lose a depth of that inky blackness, as Wei Wuxian withdraws a ghost light talisman and lights it with a brief burst of qi.
This is easy enough a magic trick, as it's been called, to have this light that stays to his front and can be directed ahead, and the glow of it is both bright enough and soft enough not to sear their (his and Qingshan's) eyes senseless. )
My dead? In a sense, don't they belong to us all?
( Forefathers and foremothers and foresisters and forebrothers, though here, perhaps, mostly male in the time of their living. He steps forward, keeps Qingshan in his arms, because if he needs a last second voice to calm a lurking soul, he has his for now; and Lan Zhan requires freedom of movement if his sword's arm, his Bichen, is drawn to taste blood in the way that Lan Zhan tastes fear in the shadows that cling to Wei Wuxian's heels as he starts his descent, controlled, head cocked and listening for the sounds that go before them. Or for the echoes that don't come back.
Qingshan looks back over Wei Wuxian's shoulder, distracted from his view of the steady light overhead, fixing his pale face and dark eyes on Lan Zhan, forever expectant, his small fingers curling into the fabric of Wei Wuxian's outer robe as the light behind them mutates into something bleaching out the sky behind. )
The air's fresh through here, ( Wei Wuxian notes, murmuring rather than whispering, hand stroking over Qingshan's back, keeping him evermore to his side, protected. ) the breeze blowing back out. There's several air entrances, at least.
( And a scent of sulfur now, a skitter of stone as they reach the bottom of the set of stairs so misleadingly short, touching the first buried hall and its worn dirt and stone floor. He shifts to pull another of his tools from his waistband pouch, the compass a point that twitches then swirls in a lazy way the light overhead makes apparent, indicating vaguely to the south-south-west. No hall, no tunnel, leads their direct, but there's the potential of that avenue should he only go left. )
Some evidence of activity down here, but nothing strong enough to account for the missing men.
( Yet. He tips his head to the left wing, glancing to Lan Zhan. )
Unless it's lingering evidence of some other working.
[ There are habits of silence that Cloud Recesses wears, strategy of cadence, economy of words. Elegance in choice. Sophisticated frugality of bows, flickered glances, stolen gestures.
Then, the habits of loneliness: Wei Ying, the child draped on his chest, the thin greetings and absent farewells, the distracted sibilations. Whispered, his voice dresses one honeyed truth, then the next, until he has marked each memory his mind will string like careless beads in threadbare circuit. Now here, then — gone.
He does not speak for Qingshan, deadened weight barely stirring, now and then, to grasp at air and flicker of talisman flame, always more eruptive than natural fire or lightning spark. They descend, deep and deepening, like snakes infiltrating another creature's burrow, slithering with the obscene satisfaction of filling and stretching out space through their invasion.
Behind them, echo and the violence of Wangji's steps, washing Wei Ying's away like sea foam and salted water. He eases, falls in line. Obedient, where he is required: Wei Ying signals, he withdraws. Wei Ying perseveres, he inches forward. They are as music, aligned, if Wei Ying only allows it.
And then, there is the dust, come hard and keen and stifling about them. He breathes it first, gold-stale, corrosive. His lungs, burned. Then tastes it, dry on his tongue. Until, shifting to correct his posture, when the corridor narrows down, the wing span of his sleeve loses thread and wastes lace and glimmers, before hooking on stone — to pull away stainless. Left-ward. ]
Men passed here recently. Within reason.
[ Their walk cleaned the path. He does not direct Wei Ying left-ward, as much as he nods and greets the way, in subtle indication. Left, where the corridor spiders in, just as thin, and the walls bear down tall and the loom of them throttles — where there is spread of rock, and on it, carved, the pledge of modest writing in tongues older than Wangji speaks. Some words, new. Names. Affixed.
Wei Ying's light spreads too distant. Frown deep, he draws out Bichen to loiter the cold kiss of her glare over the nearest carving, challenging himself with a choice read. There. For Wei Ying's pleasure: ]
'First turn he comes called.' [ And yet, blood signs the instruction, bare. Blood seals it. ] 'Second turn, he comes named.' 'Third turn, he comes unasked.'
( He's a chatty bird who chirps along the way, going silent as it's necessary, but silence for a child is more misleading and oppressive than an adult. Is it different at Qingshan's age? Wei Wuxian can't recall. His childhood is empty spaces only later filled by teeth and then his shijie and shidi, Jiang Fengmian and Madam Yu, the disciples of their sect. His own dark hours and kneeling and the cut of Zidian across his flesh.
It is what it is. It's forgotten, long ago.
Here is all immediacy of moment, life and death as entangled and inseperable as always. He hears: Lan Zhan, Qingshan, his own steps, the whistling of wind in a moment where it surges unseen. And then, Lan Zhan moving forward, a white-laced tide sweeping into sullen, dusty places, but not untouched.
Lan Zhan says left, and Wei Wuxian nods, moving in behind him when he pauses at the words spanning generations. A flick of his finger keeps the dancing light overhead just back, highlighting the area with its soft glow, and he follows along as Lan Zhan reads and speaks. )
Instructions, or a warning?
( The only line left unmarked, left unfinished, below: 'Fourth turn' and the character is sloppier than the rest, as if it had found its own death in the moment before its carver could find means to complete. Crass, if not related, but his eyes take on a serious cast as another shifting of pebbles down the way catches his ear.
The wind whines and whispers, and he stills, feeling more than thinking for an extended moment. The compass in hand whirls again, then steadies and shivers, still pointing its way. )
I feel a headache coming on.
( Seemingly offhand, but when was the last time he'd said that, at the Nie's tomb of sabers? Where his newphew had been lured into walls for a living burial, at the avaracious nature of blades longing for purpose long after their weilders were gone. Too alive, and not dead enough, even down decades of disuse.
There was something here, heavy and oppressive, an energy that swallowed and contained. The men? Caused by the men? The explanation for the missing, or explained by the missing?
The pebbles again in the dark, and he steps forward, waiting for Lan Zhan in that unspoken way that remains aware of him and where he moves, proceeding step in step, holding Qingshan tight. A flash of something in that darkness, was it white? Here then gone again, and he pauses, brow furrowed: )
There's something else.
( To the pressure, and to the brief flare of colour in his summoned light: a yao, something not human first, and also not of the dead. )
Outside, filth sleeps in dust drenching a slate, steel pathway, white birds and dark wings and the trail of them like weed in fishery nets, smearing the sky above.
He remembers it: how he woke, like dreaming, as dusk yawned and released in one ghoulish, serpentine inhalation, the look of the temple, and beneath it the village, and between them the road — and he walked it, teeth gritted and a spatter of strain, where fresh boots ate into his own, but his guide would not take the sword's flight, or hasten. His guide kept one pace, and one alone, and where did Lan Wangji encounter him, this stubborn, milling, conglomeration of darted dots and conjured lines, how did they come to be, together?
Wei Ying's head aches, but it's Wangji's temples that burn, the blinding white of his lids, lanced together. Bichen's tip that falls, with cold, hard panting, to scratch the scales of resolute pebble under foot, and Five, in lazy, wide scrawl, a schoolboy's gesture — unfinished.
He blinks. And he wakes —
And they are here again, where he left them for moments where his mind fled and his body soured and sored, and Qingshan's turned for him, hungry arm calling for his second toy, his distant father. He answers, absent, more out of habit — lends his hand, back bent to accommodate the boy's feebler height, trailed beside him. In the esophagus of the tunnel, each each beam and rod of stone announces descent further down, the signs of deepening contraction. There is a yearning in him, to turn back, like flinched steel and claustrophobia.
There's something else. So, they walk farther. ]
It reeks.
[ No. So raw and visceral, only to the nose estranged from daily tribute in bowls of broth and cups of stew. Fatty and animal, violent. Death, won through the knife's pains, slipped and easy. He knows this scent. ]
Meat. [ Charred, somehow, scent of burnt skin. Of incense, sickly sweet and rancid, to cover the cleaver's work. And farther out, scratched on Bichen's end, lifting peels of dried, red husk from the tripped floor — old blood. ] Sacrificial slaughter.
[ Enough of this. Enough of them. He tugs, first Qingshan closer, then his sword in her sheath, and he stares at Wei Ying with all the folly of a man who should know better. ]
We cannot risk the child's wellfa —
[ But the echild wails first, then the gallery, and there's ache in the blood of both, a roil of tumbling stone, and Wangji's sleeve barely a cold stretch of silk to repudiate dust in its tumble. It settles, when the groan begins, undulant and oiled, when it syncopates and crests, when it carries on and on and on, of lungs that cannot ever fill again, surely, cannot yet perform their function, for how long of a breath they keep. Silence, after, is thick as the soot that covers them, grieving.
He does not look to Wei Ying again. Does not need a necromancer to ascertain, there was no human's gasp in this. ]
( From where he kneels, Qingshan's feet on the ground, Lan Zhan anchored to their son, Wei Wuxian hums. In the stark emptiness of sound following that endless, breathless cry, it's Qingshan who freezes in basic terror; he gasps, eyes watering, small hands clutching tight, and then he turns, turns hard, tries to adhere himself to Lan Zhan, a pillar, a bright sight in the dust and dirt and gloom, living up to his name.
Wei Wuxian stays as he is, hand outstretched, arm a blockade against what exists down that tunnel, the flash of mirrored white and whine. )
Then we don't take risks.
( He says, as if it's that simple, but his eyes are on Lan Zhan's face, and his other hand has already pulled on Chenqing, sweeping it out and into place with a pause and on sounds played on the length of her. )
It's not the men who burn.
( Some other animal, some conglomerate that cries now, keens, and the lengthened pause that finally breaks between two things:
a distant human cry, and;
tears, a keening, like a child's but not of Qingshan.
His brow furrows as he regains his feet, slotting himself before Qingshan, but not to blockade Lan Zhan from movement forward. There was no human's gasp in the first unwavering, unending cry, but there's something human-like in that keen. The cry of a man, yes, that too, but humanity seeks its own vainglorious ends, and that keening, the clatter of small stones and scrape of nails against firm packed ground: )
Lan Zhan.
( There's something stirred and bound and called to by this sacrifice, and the sulfuric taint of it, the grief of the first call, the terror in the second, and the anger, the horror, in the human outcry that came between the two. )
You or I. Bind him to us.
( Qingshan, to them. Even if they turn their backs, even if they walk away, men going about business of their own and no business of disappeared monks, of inhuman griefs, of keening, young cries and the echo of distant human voices, they would yet be blamed.
But he asks, because the shadows that pool and ebb and flow and quiver are angry and sad, and they don't reach out for the light, but rub, cat like, around his ankles even without his song. )
There's an easing we can offer.
( A look, and this is a question, meant for Lan Zhan alone. Will we? You and I?
It's not as if he has much of an answer before that same keening call sounds off again, ending in a half sob and another skittering of claws. The white slips through shadows, bounds over them, and the shadows do what they can to disguise, to hide, but even the weak light of his still maintained orb, the shine of Lan Zhan's Bichen, is enough to highlight wide eyes and the malformed strangeness of what's heading their way: childsized, great drooping ears, a too flat nose, close-cropped fur in whites, and a ragged, dirty tunic draped over a body whose proportions are in every way the perfect gangliness of a child in their perpetual growing motions.
A rabbit headed child who stumbles, hits the ground, and skids forward, the sharp scent of blood in the air, a pathetic nub of a tail poking through the back of the tunic as they hit the ground, terrified keen turned into a breathless whimper. )
[ No breath between them, no heartbeat, no delay. Snagged, in this he is of the lesser talent, but the talisman holds, and it's crepuscular in beaten shades of ametrine and amber, when freckles of power combine to a bridge and the binding holds. Loose, dragged out like wisps of molasses; he tugs his wrist once, and Qingshan barely obeys in echoes of stumble — a mark, more than his noose. From the hallways below, the bayed wailing deepens. No time for apologies, for a child's dignity scorned: morsels of Lan Wangji's energy syphoned, when he lifts the infant on his bare arm, cradled to his hip, and stiches dark and dimmed the last of his cooed gasps with the silence spell.
Apologies, only in the merciless dip of Wangji's head, the traitor's absent kiss on Qingshan's soft, doughy cheeks, soothing the storm of his roiling temper. A child lacks the strength to relieve himself of this quiet, no matter the signs of his mother's curse, the fledgling glimpses of qi that poison his blood, unknowing. He cannot control himself enough to command. Cannot break the ministration.
Bound to Lan Wangji and muzzled, a cruel fate. ]
Done.
[ This, to Wei Ying, cavernous and resenting. Of the two, Lan Wangji has the energy to spare, but he has fettered their son in the ways of livestock, and it embitters him to have authored the deed. Alone, Wei Ying would have faltered. Efficiency recommended the chief cultivator. On Qingshan's slender, token ribbon-belt, where Wangji's thumb rests, beneath his thigh, where his palm cups, he feels flesh alive and a small creature in terror. What did Qingshan do, to be submerged in curse-work again?
They were fools, to adopt him. Selfish, and Lan Wangji above all, to blight his crib days with adventure within depths of rite and mystery that were bound to sing the same sweetened lullaby of misery that stained Qingshan infancy. If he is consigned already for the cultivator's path, so be it — but the great, greedy hand of spirits need not stroke his head at each turn.
And he is wanted. So very coveted and courted, the kitten licks of shadow grazing to climb Wangji's legs from below and braid with the lattice of his guan, great wreaths of the corridor's dripping soot, weeping down its children. He strikes them down, sweeps of Bichen in broad, cold arcs that slam the wall, abortively, to avoid hitting Wei Ying at the last moment. The space is too stifled for sword work. The deeper they descend, gut of the cave constricting, they'll want for their hunting knives.
No time. No need. Another wail, and their visitor creeps forward, a sinister mound of spooling limbs and heaved, laboured breath, and those final few pushes that drag his exoskeleton in view, then the abundance of his head, malformed and ill-fitted, barely contained by a body so crippled. Flinched, a gasp beats its way out of his lungs, danced between metal plates.
This is no kindness in this creature, how it agonises to crawl and its blind eyes sear under the cold glimmer of Bichen's glow — how long since it last beheld light? Since it has flattened itself, as a worm entombed, the makeshift product of rite masters Lan Wangji sweats, acrid and cold, to envision before him. Focuses to see the creature instead: the stitching of the child-rabbit's limbs, the rusting, tremulous machination of a surgeon's hand, inexperienced. No Wen Qing, this, no subtle and delicate touch like Wei Ying's, tender over Wen Ning's hurts. How his legs bend, dashingly, but nearly break, fur patched over skin, brittle and cinder-dark, as if the creature were submerged to experiment only after its —
...burning.
Lan Wangji steps back, hot spurt of fear and another cut of shadow around him, Bichen trained on the monstrous thing that approaches. ]
Restrain it. If it makes for Qingshan, it perishes.
[ Mercy, yes, and Wangji's heart made cunning and small, bound with thorn rope. He pulses and aches and knows the creature innocent of its pains, but the sickness of its body may spread, and the child in Wangji's arm is yet of the living. Priorities. He may prove selfish once more. Wei Ying knew, before Wangji's mouth spoke the words, traitorous. What he loves will survive the day, may the world rue it. ]
Is it of the dead?
[ Wei Ying knows, always. Wei Ying tastes their death first. ]
( No hesitation now, as he flows forward, blockade in this narrowing space, a man staring down at the heartbreak of one horror, smelling the burnt flesh, the fear. Something has died, has stained this poor creature, but: )
No. Partially touched by, but not possessed, either.
( A sickening feeling, what lags and tags behind, and he plays in that moment, commands the resentful spirit that tries to surge forward, wanting to lash out, an embodiment of smokey anger. It coalesces over the quivering, moaning creature, and it is his song that keeps that anger contained, that soothes what feels more and more like protective anger, possessive lashing out.
There is a too familiar thrum of that, Lan Zhan at his back with their son and his cutting direct to the sum of all threats: Qingshan defended, from all threats. This stalled and seething spirit hovering over the collapsed and painful child, the lines of stitching, the forcible nature of it, the living embodiment: he trails off to a pause, a stop that leaves him and the spirit in each other's periphery, waiting the next step of their dance.
A short phrase, to the point. For Lan Zhan, and warning what will follow. )
The child is a living construct of a yao. Surviving, but not survived by, a parent.
( He steps forward, shadows swirling and dancing along with him, pulling away from Lan Zhan and their small, silenced son, with his tears and the snot that leaks from his nose and he clings on to his light of a father, burying himself close, unhappy and scared that his mouth will not open, that the cries are stifled within it, and he doesn't know, cannot know why. Such distress leading to his clinging harder, the tears flowing free, and this is as much of what Wei Wuxian protects as the dead crouches over its progeny.
His song is no less iron under velvet, or kind in its awareness, than it might be otherwise. But it calls, and commands, and he steps forward, and: the men's voices echo, cries that should be words but warp in the roiling cry that rises from the resentful energy of what may well be called a monster, surging against Wei Wuxian's call not toward him, not toward Lan Zhan, but back toward the darkness and the pounding feat of those who pursued that which had escaped.
All of that which had escaped.
The crippled child claws at the ground, pulls themselves forward, eyes watering, or crying, or both. Everything in Wei Wuxian's chest feels stifled, his stomach sick, when the monstrous spirit pulls free, with a backlash that hits the child, lifting them just enough to send them rolling and crashing into Wei Wuxian's legs. He doesn't stumble, but does rock back, the shock of it more physical than spiritual, this conglomerate of mismatched features collapsed over his feet, wheezing out a breath and trying to curl up, to make itself small.
He grimaces, crouching down to lay a hand on fur, his other cleaving strong to Chenqing. There is life beneath his hand, and pain he can guess from the flinch to the sight of what his eyes take in at a close glance, fleeting. The touch of death he'd first felt has receded, put the potential for it remains. Still, that taste on his tongue fled with the monster of resentment that had been playing guard and hatred against those who consume, those who desire a power beyond themselves.
He can make guesses, and he strokes a hand over the malformed head, speaks simply: )
Be still.
( And who is to say if the creature understands, but it curls tighter, tucked against Wei Wuxian's legs, shivering.
Chenqing comes back up, but he pauses, asks of Lan Zhan without looking: )
Handling the spirit won't be an issue, but I don't know what the men will bring.
( This is not a good place for swordwork, but the work he does can work, but what benefit of what doubt needs to be given? This is a muddy situation, and there is something bent and broken in more than body in these depths. )
[ Together, they have fended off legions of men tomb-sworn, grudges alive. Apart, they crumble, cliff-bound. That lesson learned, how Wei Ying looks at him, when he is needed, and, Brother? When it was Jiang Cheng's turn to step forward, and silence, when rainwater soaked Wangji down to rags, to scent stale and mildew, to the infection of his steps for a fornight after he let the Wens pass.
Remembers: he held an umbrella then, stick, and now to his back lies stone, and it's Wei Ying who dispels the confusion. Am I to be as children, then? From now unto eternity? Thrice now, protected. First, divorced of reason, coaxed twice of possession, in the village of Qinghe — the bark and needle and prickling of young spirits, starved, sharing their hunger. One widower's grief mirrored unto another, but he never wore the stuttered whispers of another's folly well. Then, the second exorcism, Wei Ying, excusing him of the hour, the night-born refusal, the rushed, rounded moan of snow's wind, burying his shame.
Now, another intervention. Chenqing's song swells like the great, tidal pressure of a bruise, breaking and remoulding his body, until he is only shield, carved to carry Qingshan, to answer his grievance — trusting Wei Ying enough to turn his back, partly, flank bared to the serpentine crawl of spirits that claw and cling to their last, while his sleeve absconds the boy's dreading eyes, his wonder. Small hands, even for a babe's age, but they hang, and they hold well.
And he knows what he must do, what he should do, what Wei Ying cannot. Will not, heart overfilled with feeling, dancing in wounds, not for the life of him. Alone, Bichen begrudges him, the silent, easy sheathing — forgive him, a sword drawn but not tarried in life's wounds. She will have Wangji's thumb cut next, if no taste of her quarry presents itself again.
It's mercy, isn't it? That which does not live in Chenqing, never breathed its air, never spun its notes, never compelled it, as it strips the shadows of flesh and flays them, ugly and bitter and downtrodden things, and what were you, before the patriarch deigned to to honour you with glance? Bowing, like educated snakes for a merchant's trick in the market, kissing the rim of Wangji's robes, and Qingshan's shape through the undulating covers of Wangji's sleeve last — until the air cleanses, but stays stifled, heat accrued in the wake of all the cold that's gone expelled — dabs of sweat on Qingshan's forehead, and drips from stone above, like birthing waters.
Righting his back, he does not ask, Wei Ying, what have you done? Wei Ying, what could you ever do?
But lie down and low, to protect this second child, the distressed and tormented ball of thorns that can barely suffer to raise its own head, for the weight of it. How long has it been tortured so? He prays never to know — sets Qingshan, on ginger feet and unsteady hands that still find the back of Lan Wangji's calves, making haste. Clumsy, but fright will teach the lessons grace holds onto itself. Before him — between them, shielding — Lan Wangji reaches out in turn, first to the creature, but his hand stays hovered; then, the slow, too-thin composition of Wei Ying's ribs, his shoulder.
Something wicked this way comes, but no. Before that. Before them. Listen. ]
Wei Ying. [ And decides, in a heartbeat, the creature's gender as easily as he might lord over its fate: ] Look at him.
[ Frightened, small, humbled. Deformed, curled like a wetted knot, tight and limbs contracted — a spectre pain in isolated effervescence. This rabbit-child, this monster of the ground's belly hurts to breathe as he does, to move, to be. It's mercy again, isn't it? That which Wei Ying, blind to any purpose but salvation, cannot accomplish.
Bichen should not hiss as she does, drawn out again. Behind him, Qingshan should not hesitate. He shakes Wei Ying as if he were the dried branch of a dying tree. Listen, listen, listen. ]
Look at him. You cannot... he cannot... [ Nor Wangji, mouth dark, but he must. Sin in all things, but this is culling of kindness, only euthanasia. What will these men bring the creature, if they find him? What worse will life deliver it, if he survives? Lan Wangji, never as children, then. Set to the one purpose Wei Ying cannot bring himself to serve. ] Take Qingshan. Look away, if you must.
( He hears Lan Zhan moves, turns his head with a hand pressed to the fur on the head of this child-beast; looks to Lan Zhan with dark eyes whose depths know limits too far hidden for anything but the bright searing nature of heartbreak to expose to anything like light. Listens to his husband, his sword and shield, his defender and defended, the one who sees him and sees what Wei Wuxian will not do, and he says: )
Attempt the impossible.
( His sect motto, once upon a lifetime before, and so much of everything he has ever done: what he does every day, in learning himself, in learning their sons, in learning Lan Zhan without the pressure of the mystery or confusion of his own reintroduction to a world that'd wanted nothing of him.
Shake him, like leaves on the vine, when the winds yearn hungry out of so many well meant things, but attempt the impossible. He, once of Yunmeng Jiang, he who dreams of Lotus Pier still without speaking of it, who enjoys Caiyi Town well enough, the beauties of Gusu (not the least which is Lan Zhan, he knows, but that extends beyond him into the rocks and waters and trees and bushes and the small lives, rabbit or otherwise, that thrive within the speckled sunshine of its mountains), but his roots, born on the road, orphaned, adopted, abandoned, rogue once more: his roots are in Yungmeng. )
Leave his life to my hands. If it comes to that, Lan Zhan—Suibian does not grow dull.
( But it is Chenqing that he shoves into the layers of robes across his chest, his freed hand that reaches for Qingshan, that tugs and sweeps their son to his side, with a whistle that leaves them a shivering sort of calm before the storm brewing in this heat, pacing ahead of Lan Zhan like a stalking beast, some great feline or terrible canine, but shaped as one which hops through shadow. Runs, then stumbles, and cries again with that hollow, aching rage: and men cry out, not in terror, but in decisive action.
Action that spills into their section of passageway, cultivators perhaps, men with swords and focussed expressions, fighting against a fierceness of energy that isn't Wei Wuxian's design. He's watching it, he's a small, dark mountain that looms larger as the light shifts, and Lan Zhan is the cresting white of clouds or tide or avalanche, both a play on each other, both the targets as their hidden priests, perhaps, yes, it may be them, or may not, look from the held off spirit of fear and resentment to them, to the rabbit-child, and stares them down, condescends, ignores everything in both their countenances that should say abandon all hope, ye who cross swords here: condescends to them both, expressions as stone, eyes as avarice: The yao is ours.
Which, even in the loosest context of a night hunt, is an amusing enough thought. Wei Wuxian smiles, no mirth, and his arm around Qingshan is firm and reassuring, his voice light, his eyes older than he is. )
Oh, my. Were we in some sort of context, Lan Zhan? I don't seem to remember there being a hunt of any kind happening on this mountain. Do you?
[ Fight, flight, silence. You speak too much, but Wei Ying's mouth should never silence, after sixteen years of tomb.
Focus frays, threadbare and fractioned. Lan Wangji trades, one step forward, two back, then aside: swims and sinks in the miasma of energy that accrues in thickened ichor, indifferent to Wei Ying, like mirrored in its likeness, silver. Like cold twitching things, smoke pulses up Wangji's legs, tickles the easy line of Bichen, rested, off her balance; he wakes her, one pull and the deed done, raised when Wei Ying scratches sound from the corner of his mouth, unfriendly whistling — when there is answer moaned, and the wind howling, and the heartbeat of the beast-child, thumped so hard it seems to bruise the cavern of its bony chest, and what can Wangji do?
Dance, as Wei Ying asks of him. Farther, shivered, the image of a starveling legion, four men on the precipitous count. Known for the tally of their hands, more than their heads, lifted to talisman or crude, lesser cuttings of steel, market daggers: glistened artifices to pin gentlemen's sashes, darling honorary accoutrements to spill token blood between rites and orisons at temples on days of light and joy. ( He learned, during the Sunshot campaign, this difference: that the daggers dozing, sprawled in his set at Bichen's side would barely have done to cut the meat at his table, were it stirred to exercise. )
The mouth of the tunnel never opens. They are four, with green underwater shadows, four with slanted, wet eyes, four with violence of bloodied fingers and the ravenous appetite to claw him, to cut him down. He is one, trained — impatient, cuts of Bichen in hard, irreverent sweeps, determined and defended, now and then, with the turn of his back to protect his flank, the rare kick of legs that know the truth first: he expects slick and moans, hard hisses, because he has none of the commodities of space to strategise his movements and corral, sooner than killing his opponents.
And he labours each breath, retreating to one knee, one swirl and one strike more and landing — these men have no true bodies to break or burn, Bichen only dispels the husk of their raised corpses, animated by memory. Unlike Wei Ying's risen dead, they don't come slow, burdened or heavy, but coreless and restitched of dried things, skin and bone that cracks and rattles, and sits like unspooled thread on sickened earth. These are not men, but hollowed things, and they do not rest — the energy spills of their bodies, trudges against Lan Wangji's ankles again, kisses the start of skin, and retreats only to crowd itself in the house of its victims.
The men rise again. And again, when they are struck, and again, faster. Learning, if not Wangji's skill or dexterity to match him, then that pained advantage that all dead things hold over their abandoned states. What is dead need never again die, but the living tire in their flesh. He feels the drain, between Qingshan's two charms, and the lecherous consumption of the resentful energy that tests him, and the dance with corpses that rejuvenate to action even sooner than Wei Ying's most sophisticated creatures. Laughs, crackled, and bides his time, back of his hand shaking the sweat off his brow. And beside him: ]
Wei Ying. Out.
[ No. No, this will never do, not with a Yunmeng master. The impossible looks them dead and dark in its eyes, and Wei Ying won't concede to it, not to shameful retreat. But they have a child with them, and a... second complication. The stone that held its dead once will bar them again, if they're quick to leave and rally strength. ]
( Death's dolls, constructs that make no more than a surface pretense of life, filled and animated because without a focus, the energy would spill like ink across a desk, disturbed by the careless flail of a limb, or the jostle of the whole.
He watches, hikes Qingshan up to his side without comment at the abbreviated beauty in the brutal efficiency of how Lan Zhan moves, Bichen of him and extending him even as the dark walls and darker energies try to close in, to swallow. It's too tempting, the moths drawn to his flame, incessantly greedy, so sure that one or another of them might swallow his brilliance.
The rabbit-headed boy, petrified to the trailing groaning of an injured creature, is more difficult to gather, but he too surrenders to an adult's arm, Wei Wuxian standing with a child to either hip, one perfectly formed and echoing the clacking of carved wooden bracelet, the other mishappen and hurting, eyes slamming shut as he resigns himself to what fate follows.
Wei Wuxian sees the relentlessness that neither of them can meet with ruthlessness equal to the situation; so breathing in, he states back: )
All of us, now.
( His small light goes dark, his whistling command is stark and immediate in its sounded offense, four matched shrieks of rage, four checked motions, and the small stores of his qi are called on with the effective ruthlessness he does not further level against their paper mache evils, bearing down in their grasping claws and all too human voices to make up for what humanity had been stripped from them, eaten out from the inside.
Wei Wuxian can move like the cultivator he'd always been, swift and decisive, even in retreat. The ways in which he lingers are for the confirmation of Lan Zhan's retreat; he does not move alone, does not want to, in that sense, because some ends are not his to seek. The distance out of the dark to the light of a waning day and the striking, mismatched beauty of the skies pained in corals and pinks as delicate as a rabbit's nose.
He plants one foot on the ground, the other at the stone: a flash of white, he aches for mourning to slam shut the emboldened door, poised as he is like some awkward crane carrying his twin, uneven burdens. )
[ In the last stretch of it, the rush electric, he remembers bare particles: smoke, soot drifting, claws on his straggling silks, wrenched by strange hands. Scratch of the fortress scryed in his guan, silver grazing the soft palate of the tunnel's mouth, in abrupt incline. Shame to his birth name, shame to his clan, shame to the uncle that raised him: Lan Wangji runs, the tuoluo of his pursuers' wailed agonies spinning and spinning and set to never stay (behind him).
Bichen barely bites again, once. Twice, when they mean to have his leg. Again, when they set for his back, where the lace of the old river, hurt, dug its ravines deep. Wei Ying leads. Breath staggered, he follows, delayed by the practicalities of delivering a convoy of creatures to their untimely end, only to bless himself with fresh opportunity to master the skill once more.
Unseemly, his winding, rolled fall, but bracken breaks it. He half crouches, half ruins his balane, Bichen barely swept back when he remembers to lend his shoulder to Wei Ying's limbs and push the boulder until it eclipses the corridor once more, battle deferred to the quiet, insistent scratches of the four dead, like rats in their entrapment. He waits by the stone, ear pressed and at war with grit and gravel, friction tearing the young, spoiled lace of his gentleman's skin. Pushes in — until he hears, subaqueous and distant, the nothingness of sleep.
Watching and waiting, but they prowl at another door.
They distorted themselves into shadows to fit the walk within the temple, then the one beneath, barely at sunrise. Now, sundown, rusts deep and clean. And where have their hours gone?
But Wei Ying knows, sees, barely transported himself and the exotic convoy of their vulnerable children. One requires Wangji. Has, for a storm of heartbeats, Wangji's gelid and slow.
Two matters pull at him, like sweet, spun sugar string: the first, Qingshan's binding, obediently severed. Then — the... silence spell, lasting despite what should have been the burn of an incense stick. No. Not within the burrow. Then...?
Lethargic, Lan Wangji reaches before Wei Ying can steal his son away, and spares the awkward pass of his hand, fingers shivered and stiffening, steeled, on the head of the rabbit creature, in passing. There lives no enmity between them, nor easy, simple kinship. There, there. In this world, you may yet be loved.
But the human infant has earned his adoration, already. Wangji raises Qingshan, eyes bright and clean with unshed tears, and curls him against his chest, where he fits, a small furnace, and he grieves his father's absence with fists that seize, vicious and quick, the collar of his silks. ]
Forgive me.
[ And he releases the boy's silence, to a fury of sobbed coos that wrest and rattle and record every instance of the colossal indignity that is the world and being a child in it. Wangji means to weep with him. Laughs, instead, choked notes of it coarse, as if they've spent the past few hours in... fumigation. ]
Yes. Yes, I hear you. [ And doesn't that do wonders for you, Qingshan? Are you not appeased? No? Carry on, then, keep wailing, even as Wangji starts the slow measure of his step, half-limped for the ankle that decries his earlier landing. ] I hear, and I obey. Yes.
[ Let it never be said that negotiating the cultivation world's enterprises has not left Hanguang-Jun with the instruments of patience. Nod. Stare. Speckle the conversation with muttered, inoffensive platitudes. Carry on — this time, to the bustle and loud light of the ink stain that is the nearby village, sprawled and cavalier against lush meadow land — a tacit love letter of contrasts to the agglomeration of huts and filth and wetness of Qinghe, bringer of the boy who rests, soft like bent willow, gazing back at Wei Ying over Wangji's shoulder. Good boy. Watch him, so he might know his path.
The contrast betrays itself farther: the first inn they cross offers lodgings to spare, and stews of the day beside, Wangji's tea and the child's congee, and... milk and an assortment of vegetables for the creature Wei Ying brings, smuggled in under the guise of a second, wayward son. If the inn keeper suspects, there is enough silver that changes hands that, molten, it might crisscross and stitch her mouth in perpetuity.
At night, eyes of thieves and wolves and prostitutes sharp in the corners of the pleasure sector, he knows what they resemble — sophisticated gentlemen of cultivation, set in their peculiar ways, here to expend themselves of a burst of rare energies and pretend at achievement, when the temple they've sought proves already barren. No doubt, the inn keeper speculates, they will make scandal in the clean, lacquered confines of the room they're assigned in haste, and see themselves off, come the early morrow. (And to think, they bring children to witness their wickedness.)
Alone, Lan Wangji remembers: first his duty: fetching Qingshan and the set of cotton squares that another generosity of silver has purchased, and warm water to cleanse the child: first, of his folly business, then, once he has been salved, to set him steady and fussing, with the fatigue of a child kept up long past his latest hour, until the bathing water is brought.
It strikes Wangji, all at once, that he has worn the familiar yoke of their comfortable silence for an hour, sparing Wei Ying barely a glance, let alone a word. Subdues himself, turning: ]
We lost a day. [ Strangely, rapidly, in the burrow with its stench of burned things. And he nods, soft, at their second guest: ] But gained a visitor.
[ Forgive him, Wei Ying, if he only hastens to adopt your human-headed children. ]
( He is angry, on the way down. At those hollow, resentment filled paper men, at a mother's rage, at a child who is not human but looks half bred to it, and his hand against the rabbit-boy's back, his underweight burden, step by step soothed and murmured to as distraction for the anger that would otherwise rear its ugly head.
Qingshan sees him, and he starts to redirect the anger, smiles at his son, and tentatively sends his limited qi into the child he carries. It's not easy, and what he finds instead of the forced union of two different energies is this: he can coax the child's energy, that of the yao he'd named him before, into circulating and healing himself. It's fascinating, enough to fully distract him from his anger, so that he spends his time following along after husband and son with an innocent healing in hushed and pained little noises in his arms, and his own growing exhaustion. He's long past it, simply ignoring it, as the innkeep offers her silence purchased, and he summons up smiles and niceties that call on an extra portion of vegetables sent up with the milk, fresh, uncooked, all the more for the gentleman's pleasures. What they aim to do, she surely does not want to know.
The donkey waits on for now; another inn, another stables. If this one even had such, and Wei Wuxian realises he had not looked.
He's taken to cleaning this older child, with limbs that reveal a finer patterning of skin to fur, where some burns prove to be flesh that was not the child's own, but another's. Most, as it turns out, superficial, skin reddened and fur burnt away without blisters or puss or any indication of the truly terrible burns. Rope marks reveal themselves around ankles, and the anger flares again, giving him energy to continue in his tired ministrations, his response to Lan Zhan's broken silence slow. A beat, then two. Turning his head, swallowing against a dry throat and dry mouth. )
Been healing.
( The child, that is. His eyes drop, to Lan Zhan's ankle, the lift of his brows and the blink of his eyes slower than words. Lifts his eyes to rake them upward, concern at war, again, with anger, and both with creeping exhaustion. )
Stock.
( Take stock, of injuries and all else. He pauses, a minute shake of his head. )
Yourself, in what condition?
( He strokes a hand through the fur of the rabbit-child, earns the kick of a leg, the twitch of a nose rabbit soft. Those dark eyes, still living in a world of shock, and then he leans his head down, murmurs. You are here, they do not have you. And the child curls up, tucks himself at Wei Wuxian's side on the smaller of two platforms, the one less meant for sleeping than resting as one cits and contemplated their day. )
The greed, of some people.
( He says, and the rabbit boy shivers, shudders, seems to grow smaller. Quivers, and under the strokes of Wei Wuxian's hand, does shift in eye-frightening ways; a scalded rabbit of gargantuan proportions nosing against his side, then, fingers resolved into toes and paws, and Wei Wuxian can only stare down. )
Qingshan forgives you. ( He says, as if distracted. ) He loves you best.
( The indulgent father, and the bright father, and the fright of a father, but in the exciting ways. Wei Wuxian wants to simply lay down as he is now, curled around the rabbit child (rabbit? or child? so much more rabbit right now, is he fully so?), welcoming Qingshan in his overtired needs. But no, now is not yet time for rest. )
[ Wei Ying, like tide breaking in frothing effervescence, exhausting himself between quiet trades of words like maiden's knives, short and quick and their stab bloodied. Lotus-like, he withers with the peals and petals of his chatter pale beside him, testament to forlorn beauty.
The inn room does not suit them: sterile, it reeks of the throwaway practicalities of service, past pleasure. Lan Wangji requires no privileges his hands cannot deliver — this, the jingshi taught. Bathing water can be brought in tub and barrels, food procured alongside the gentle meanderings of a passing scholar, visiting the library domes, or an attendant, lent purpose. Wangji's possessions are extensions of his person, defined by the day's work: blood stains of friendly cinnabar jagged on strips of culled cotton, to spare blanched parchment. Lop-sided, the sophisticated stretches of costly silver worked in mirror glass, or coarser binds of polished brass, to practise his curse work. His books, his weapons, his finery — the packaging of Hanguang-Jun, rank preceding the person.
He did not know until he travelled alongside Wei Ying, who wears the scent of burned chestnut and home as he passes, how deeply Lan Wangji has grown summarily infected with wanderlust for the familiar.
Qingshan echoes him, cries plangent and crystalline, when the inn's maid delivers his bathing water and Wangji remembers to reward him with the flesh-pinkening rites of his ablution. Each limb stretched, each bone stroked, back and front and then the dip of him, like an ocean pearl, to bask in the brisk and happy dance of flailing arms and kicking feet, and half of his basin's water tumbled around him. If Lan Wangji should wear the better part of his son's rose and hyacinth salts, complimentary, as if Qingshan were but a visiting madam of a lesser clan — well, Lan Wangji has shrouded himself in half of the burrow's gravelly dark, already.
After, he retrieves the child, dresses him in only the necessities of his lower half, to enjoy the licking heat that diffuses in their quarters, sputtered in thin-smoke wisps by braziers. In his arms, Qingshan settles — further, when Lan Wangji resorts to the night's second weapon, the cup of milk carefully cradled against the child's mouth. He eats a peasant's fill, a starved man's. More than your three bowls of rice, Wangji does not not warn, because the particulars of precepts do not apply to those yet unable to whisper them alive.
He means to pass to child to the waiting bed, but stills in his step, hovered by Wei Ying, and remembers, the instinct to hide Sizhui beneath rabbits — and another, now to bury Wei Ying, curled and sweet, under children. Look at him, Qingshan's spider-lashed and wary blinks, and find an accomplice. Wangji nods to seal their pact, and carefully descends him by his father — watches Qingshan's majestic crawl over his rabbit friend, to land perilously flattened atop Wei Ying's hip. Ah. ]
Does he.
[ The lie betrays itself, his quirked brow notes, just as Lan Wangji dips down to occupy the edge of Wei Ying's seating, like a maiden attendant waiting to serve the master's cup or his wine, wasting trinkets of touch and lazy flows of qi when he passes a hand over the rabbit. Animal-like once more, returned to his nature. Long-eared, leathery nose, jittery paws. It shivers, when Wangji's touch first lands, when their energy streams bide their time to coordinate. Then, the lessening of its breath into quiet, soft sleep, nestled against Wei Ying. Heal, then. Heal, both of them, together. ]
You speak as we do when you tire.
[ With the stilted, rough-edged formality of the Gusu Lan dialect, chirped but unable to prosper the hope of further conversation. An empty observation, but Wei Ying's manhandled himself into too much exhaustion for strategy. ]
( He grunts, protests for the sake of tired comedy when Qingshan makes light of his bony hip or the dip of his hidden abdomen. He grows in size every day, and in consequence, such that the grunt becomes a hand lifted and set upon Qingshan's head, fingers stroking through hair when his human son snuggles his face into Wei Wuxian's clothing, and the rabbit sleeps, calmed under Lan Zhan's healing touch. )
He loves me best as furniture.
( He says, adding in as much of an arch tone to his voice as he can drum up with a half smile and a brief closing of his eyes. They slit open again not long after, lips twitching at the corners until he's left smiling into a chuckle, sounding lower than usual. Qingshan frowns at the disruption of his perch, nuzzling his face in harder and making his own tired babbling, a litany of complaints that start and end with why are you two like this.
Or perhaps just, stop moving, I want to sleep here, not on a wagon made of ribs and diaphragm.
Oh, but that chuckle is for Lan Zhan's words, and Wei Wuxian turns his head, better to look sideways and askance at Lan Zhan where he's perched, great white heron healing the same creature he'd tried to tell Wei Wuxian to allow, in mercy, a swift ending. Perhaps he'd be better as that kind of ruthless soul, but he thinks it's a tempering between them. Both can be ruthless, at differing times, or coinciding ones. Neither of them walks unstained by their choices or less bright for the fact they've also been shadowed, to differing degrees.
Playful, tired, distracting himself from the haunted worries of what lurks beneath that stone and beneath that temple and surrounded by the energy richness of those waters, over who made four paper-thin human constructs of holier men to hold an unholy power, one that threatened the sanctity of souls, that sought to unbind them from the reincarnation cycle, if the soul is pushed too hard, if it shatters.
Yes, playful, to avoid those thoughts, which will intrude again soon enough. )
Spending time in anyone's company, influence runs both ways. But don't worry, don't worry, Lan Zhan, I haven't forgone the art of conversation, just the non mumbled kind.
( In fact, ending in a mumble. He blinks, lifts his head to look both at the mop of black hair that is Qingshan, and then the large ball of white fur that's the oversized rabbit burden, in its most healing form. )
We've inherited a rabbit.
( They've stumbled directly into a problem, but the rabbit is innocent of that, as is the child. The rabbit child. This child sized rabbit. Or is he? He lets his head thump back, deciding that's tomorrow's problem. )
Or turned into moons. Seems poetic, if impractical.
( He shifts his arm, patting... the far side, all the unclaimed parts of a platform bed he's not even gracefully tried to occupy past the minimum. He's on the bed, the small lives heaped by and on him are there too, and what completes this comedy but the only one with a strict bedtime and his well behaved sleeping position being given the tiger's share? )
All for you. Wait, I'm mumbling chattier answers—Lan Zhan, we saved... at least half the bed for you! I hope rabbits don't kick when they sleep. Qingshan does, I think he's feeling more growing pains again... we'll need to find him a minder before we go back.
( Another pause, and then squinting up at Lan Zhan. )
Are we going back?
( Tomorrow, that is. In an immediacy, and without backup; are they not calling for a night hunt and its confusions, from either Gusu Lan or Yunmeng Jiang, but ah. Jiang Cheng having restraint when it smacks of curses of a perversion not often seen, of a manipulation of energies that might well be trapped and contained instead of redirected, perverting even what Wei Wuxian himself practises in the grand scheme of frightening things...
... Yes. Lan Zhan can make that call. Wei Wuxian, left to his devices, would puzzle through it, letting himself be the bait. He sighs out another inconsequential, less mumbled statement: )
Jade rabbit.
( Not the one at his hip: the one that had been protecting this confused child, in pain and terror and agony and meant for more of the sacrifice. The Jade rabbit. One who gave all of themselves, elevated after death to a second life.
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Falling had never been an accident. He hadn't slipped to his almost death.
And he had no intentions of repeating what the worst depths of despair had left him dangling over, unable to summon the energy to stand on his own two feet again. Here and now, he also has a child who is tugging on his hair and babble complaining for food, chattering and nattering and no more silent than a slow trickling slide of rock down a mountainside. ]
You know, when I thought we'd venture out of Gusu Lan for a week or two, I didn't imagine our second stay would be in someplace known for mysterious disappearances and unexplained hauntings.
[ Around their son's chubby fist, the carved beads of Wei Wuxian's protections, demanding avoidance by all things touched and tainted by curse or resentment. He's been the bearing target of it once, and it leaves him vulnerable in Wei Wuxian's mind, if not in fact. Just like he's insisted on the same carefully knotted carved beads for Lan Zhan, each one separated just enough to make no clicking sounds.
Does Lan Zhan need such a thing, a charm of formidable enough regard, but hardly a match for cultivation genius at his level? No, perhaps not. But Wei Wuxian has been more in Gusu Lan than not, and idle hands need occupying, and Lan Zhan had been touched those months ago by things which Wei Wuxian has already decided to forget without forgetting.
He smiles, shifting Xiao Qingshan out of his carrying sling and onto his hip. ]
Safe enough to let A-Shan eat? He's been wanting down for the last leg of all this. You know, keeping him occupied on Little Apple is easier than keeping him occupied when carrying him.
[ How did they end up here on serious business, where's he going to find an Auntie or child minder, is he going to have to strap Lan Qingshan to Lan Zhan if they get down to fighting, because he sure doesn't want a baby strapped to him if he's going to be funneling any amount of resentful energy, okay.
Then again, an Auntie might be amendable to laundry, too, so... hm. ]
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[ Coward, he does not say, perk of his brows an open invitation to meet this new blade and parry. Stab deepest, where only words may infiltrate. Stab to bleed and salt the wounds. Stab and stab and swing again, flat of the blade equally eager — but Bichen, hunger bloomed and roiling, returns to her sheath. Wei Ying walks where he owns, a shadow upended. Slim as cloud wisps dispersing before the break of storm.
On his hip, plastered close like a bruise, the sullen, swollen, red face of his — their, through grudging and tacit concession — child, agitated imperiously from hours of travel. They journeyed slow on Lil Apple, lilt of the donkey's ungainly step lulling the infant to beggarly sleep. Wangji suspects, because in all things there is private belief, and candour, and treachery, that Wei Ying stood taller, spine steel, because of the care he might give this one creature. Not that different yet from the shades Wei Ying protects, guardian of little whispers and careless nothings in the night, as if, tip of his head, Lan Wangji might blink yet and miss him.
Refusing a sect leader's seasonal invitation, when Jiang Cheng has learned to restrain his requests to the scale of their mutual tolerance would have made a mockery of the chief cultivator's impartiality. The letter came as Wangji finalised the last of his audience assignments. No reason, then, to eschew duty, past pleasure and formality. Will the chief cultivator, who might be tempted to forget the good province of Yunmeng, kindly exercise his revered faculties and honour us with remembrance? Some time soon? Before we all croak? It might have taken less than Jiang Cheng's most teeth-stripping venom and best skilled scribe to assemble a letter addressed to Hanguang-Jun, but intended to the stray, Wei Wuxian. Courtesy commands all creatures: they set course, disciples first, Wangji thereafter. Wei Ying, bribed with the infant and bullied by the remainder of his family, in tow.
A credit to his clan: Qingshan comported himself flawlessly for the better part of the journey. Knows his manners even now that Wangji sweeps in, in the ways of a vulture, to claim him from Wei Ying, raising Qingshan against his chest, and pressing his mouth against the baby's forehead. Be good. Has he not been so, throughout? Only the shriek of their sibling charms rattling alive, when accident knocks their two wrists together? Barely a tear from him. Never a word. (Soon, Wangji senses, soon.)
And feeding? Lak Wangji knows the rites, spilling in the lake of his rippled silks, kneeling with a parting swipe to rescue the bearings of Wei Ying's travel satchel. Goat's milk, warm in the leather clasps of a thin pouch that will want replenishing from an inn tonight. He presents it for young Qingshan's grudging consideration, only after trying his bottom for greater emergencies (dry, clean; passable). Suckling starts timidly, but stokes.
In Lan Wangji's arms, a child soothing. At his side, another, grown and despondent. His eye trails from one to the next. ]
Wei Ying. Stretch your legs by the dais.
[ And catch the presumptuous scent of deadened laughter, the absent pour of dampness and the hollow trace of cresting cold. Traditional, the advent of hauntings: signs deepen with time, like fractures, but the roots of a riotous tree must first come in strong. If there is scope for ghostly visitations, Wei Ying will be first to hear that knock at their doors.
Besides, the child sweetens for Wangji, hands greedy after he's done with his milk: first, to the pale strip of Wangji's cheek, then the tug of his hair, the glint and glamour of his headpiece, when Wangji's head descends. Allowed now, he will prove merciful later. Let Qingshan learn him, as he learned the bleached red of Wei Ying's ribbon for weeks before, with joyous hands and petty teeth. ]
The silence deafens here.
[ A horror of paucity: no movement, no screeches, no stray remnants of energy, no gust of dust, no air. As if, the quarters twice deserted, they cannot robe in the trimmings of hospitality, one time more. ]
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[ A thin smile, and nothing more said; Lotus Pier is a place he longs for in the ways of nostalgia and memory, but not one he treads toward directly. Only in increments that bring him closer and closer, testing out boundaries of a broken relationship neither one of them had fully given up on.
Chenqing is evidence enough of it, as are the cruelties employed in beating out every possibly flash of Wei Wuxian. That there'd been nothing to flush out for sixteen years was something Jiang Cheng and Lan Zhan both shared.
Regardless, to Lotus Pier he now goes, the lagging third who's spoken inanities to the babe only increase as the inevitable looms on their horizon. He dreads, to some extent. He longs to a greater one.
Thus the babe, thus his distractions, and thus now the headache that intrudes as their son exchanges arms, going from one loving flame to the next, consumed equally by both parents, left flushed and thriving in their wake. ]
If you say so, Lan Zhan.
[ Small quirk of his lips and a fond glance over the both of them, handsome man with the sharp enough edges, and rounded child with his ever-bright eyes. He looks healthy now in a way he hadn't, months ago.
Children recover quickly. Something he used to do, he knows, to greater success.
He does stretch, both legs and senses, lifting a hand to his forehead and pressing at its centre with the ongoing blossoming of a hollow there, pressure against his sinuses despite his health being perfectly hale. There is a weight of something here, and he follows, steps alongside an unseen line and draws him to frown, walking away from the cliff, from their son, from his esteemed spouse, from Lotus Pier as a brilliant bloom on a horizon still days in coming.
There is a tree, here, wizened and weathered, twisted by the howl of winds that come roaring in the evenings each autumn. There is a stone, corner peering up from a fall of needles and detritus from the trees and shrubs nearby. There is a feeling of what has no form, and it stretches forward, tests against him, rubs like a feral cat, moves away again. ]
Lan Zhan, [ he calls back, not all that loud since his voice doesn't need to carry far; he does not know his voice sounds further when he speaks than it should, with him still in visual line of sight by this tree, this hidden stone, this abundance of neglect. ] Did the guide mention what this place was built on top of?
[ Qingshan's grasping hand brings black strands to his mouth, gumming at hair he then delights on tugging on, babyfat cheeks round and rosy as he beams up, giggling at his cleverness, at having his father so close at hand. He doesn't fuss overmuch, no, but he does pull for attention, thrive in its embrace, and Lan Zhan is a comfort to him that the child knows by something like instinct. The one who breaks fevers; the one who breaks fasts.
That chubby hand, reaching out with hair entangled between fingers, to pat, pat, pat at Lan Zhan's jaw. He meant to aim for the cheek, but alas; coordination is not always as he pleases.
He, too, doesn't hear his other father, enamoured of his present game and the liveliness of it, compared to the rest of this unvibrant place. ]
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...and is that him, murmured like a spring bird's trill? By chance, he gazes up to nothing: the hall room, shrouded, beat of branches tapping the decayed railway. ]
...Wei Ying? [ On his feet, before he can help himself, a toy of the market boxes, sprung. He was there, Wei Ying was there, only just ahead, mere steps from the cli — ] Wei Yi —
[ Against the advice of any etiquette master, he rushes. Hollow, Wangji's step nearly stumbles, the child in his arm anchored against fine net of hair and the sugar-like spun figments of his crown's filigree, silver alive. He catches himself — catches sight of Wei Ying, absent one moment, a spell of stewing inks, the next.
Indifferent, Qingshan peers out, bauble-eyed, and smooth, arms hungering. The disrespect of this new cart is staggering. The one before remembered his dignity as a lord and a master and an infant, therefore rightfully immune to missteps. Let Wangji meditate on the lax foolishness of his service, while stirred breath carves path out of him like slices of his hidden lungs.
He blinks, longer than he should, correcting his sight to twilight, to Wei Ying, dappled before him. Here. Known. ]
You left sight.
[ No. No, shades only played their game, and Wei Ying eluded himself. He's done so before, one round in Yiling, another on a cliff so crisp, he knows the way of it. He's won.
A strange correction. One moment there, then... ]
Apologies. [ A reaction wrenched of him, like a wolf's howl. The child, agitated. Wei Ying himself, no doubt aggrieved. He owes... more of the blinking, distorting the picture before him. Wei Ying the man, Wei Ying the sum of shapes, Wei Ying nearly translucent.
As Wangji closes in, the sharpness of him peers and pearls, abrasive. The staleness of the room and Wei Ying's raw scent, piercing it. Death and deathliness. ]
...bathing halls. Before. For ablutions.
[ So the sainted might finish their pilgrimage to the sleeping volcano in fine, polished form. The waters ran warm here, sulphurous to the cusp of bearing — the reason plain.
He does not find himself delaying to think the matter over — only sets down Qingshan on wobbly feet, bent barely enough to offer him a helpful hand to anchor him. ]
Bind us, so we are not lost.
[ ...and certainly not so Wei Ying can't throw himself alone in the nearest ditch, at the next blink. Ah, the binding talisman, that sage invention. ]
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You left sight. Part of it by now is patently absurd, given his leavetaking months ago as Lan Zhan took up his mantle as Chief Cultivator, Grand Overseer of the chaos at low simmer amoung the clans. He doesn't think about the cliff scant paces away, feeling no love or destiny with it, so why would he? He's forgotten.
White noise, in his mental landscape, a snow that coalesces into form and is shoved off again as he smiles at Lan Zhan.
He has another answer he didn't seek, he supposes. What to do, what to do?
... Focus on the task at hand. Bathing halls gone barren, but the earth lives somewhere underneath it all, a hot and roiling richness, but the scent of sulfur has weakened with the sinking waters long since relegated to below the surface. Or were they? He wonders, interrupted from considering ways down, to where the ache of death and decay and the silence too austere to be normal might crack.
Instead, there's Lan Zhan, asking for binding, with Qingshan standing on legs that remember sometimes to place this foot, then that foot, desperate to follow the adults who teeter around him like magnificent gazelles. )
I left my ropes behind, ( he quips, but he comes closer, crouches down to be before both man and child, reaching out to grant Qingshan his hand so that his free one might find second anchor. A wave of a chubby fist and then the clutch as the babe toddles forward one step, two. Tugging on Lan Zhan's hand for support without consideration.
Wei Wuxian smiles at the child, then shifts his gaze, eyes more knowing than his tone. Extends his free hand to Lan Zhan, quirking his eyebrows a touch: he used binding, or bonding, an unnamed duality, in a time where he also had spiritual energy in excess. More a tease and demand for attention from a young man determined to fulfil his clan's request, and the tagalong determined to help, regardless of his asking. A later tool for guiding balancing acts in fights, for grounding the bloodthirsty, for being an all around creative manipulator: he's given credit and not credit enough.
It's the same now, conserving one energy by holding out another offer: his hand, fingers partly curled, palm open and empty of all but his own life. ) but if you wanted to hold hands, Lan Zhan, all you need to do is ask.
( Wiser anyway between them and an infant, because he does want to find a downward direction that stays on mountain but peers into its heart.
The holy people had disappeared somewhere, from that room, overnight. Not out doors, and not flying, but there are more directions than above earth and above the sky. )
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He is taken where all roads converge, before light and laughter and Wei Ying. Rescued, between two pillars, Qingshan overextends himself immediately, stride long and swinging, absently, after a time between them — bitterly convinced that these two dark friends will not surrender him to detritus and stone.
Dust catches under the sweep of Wangji's boot, matte and tacky with membrane of lamp oil, bled out. Locked, the pillar of his gaze ravishes stains that seep into fractures, fractures that spider as vines on tile, tiles that melt and meddle in a confusion of unpolished nephrite —
And within them, dark, beyond them, dark, binding them, dark —
What was this place built on top of?
Wei Ying, offering his hand again, in a strange and likely unsuccessful contortion of his body, straining. Causality is a fickle concept. Mere weeks ago, the action of Wangji's impulse called for the consequence of Wei Ying's palm, softened and thawed, lashed by rain spells and young, rapid hail. Bruised for it.
Only a parched man tastes to excess on countless counts of the same river water. ( He has had his fill, oh, but Lan Wangji chokes on it.) ]
Shameless.
[ Two men, bound by blood spilled, if not formalities. No need for the indecency of hands held without cause between them. What else will this poor child learn, through ill-gained example? How to ignore duty for witless whim, how to forsake caution. Its heart, listen to it, Bichen's beats with the sibilant promise of danger waiting in the womb of restless void. The birthing will tear them all, whole.
He flinches, despite himself — has been, for the better part of an incense stick, the slave of distractions. Cliff-side, shadow play, the child, their gu — ]
I did not see our guide flee.
[ Only... sensed him disperse, like shade before the dawn hours that seep in, pale but gaining strength — a mirror of the babe that traps Wangji's fingers, start of his nails sketching out pulses of pain in the rare filigree where Wangji's skin lies unmarked by calluses. No malicious spirit, him. This much, Wangji can swear by, is enough of a cultivator still to remember. He would not shame Uncle with such ignorance, not a Lan of his training.
And what do the laws of observance recommend, in matters of spirits and exorcism? First, to limit and lessen the exposure of the unaffected, to bar the path of innocents, to ward the grounds. They have a child with them, curse-marked once already. Wangji sees him, all full cheeks and deep-carved smile, and shivers wreck him like waves, beating the shore. ]
...Wei Ying. We judged poorly. [ They judged hardly at all. ] He is too young to stay.
[ There were inns, down the path to the temple, places of shelter. Even the village keeper's home will suffice. If they have no mercy on their own bones, let them learn it for the child's. ]
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The mention of the guide has him look up, cast his eyes about, and sigh again, only this time with the long suffering of a man visited often enough by spectres to no longer be surprised at their sheer capriciousness. )
Some want their mysteries solved. Others linger because of a duty to that which has gone, we know this.
( The guide, a guide in truth, didn't flee so much as remove, it seems; Wei Wuxian would laugh, but it dies a half-amused gasp on his tongue, swallowed by his lips.
He's not opposed, or insensate, to Qingshan's safety; his sensibility on it forever warped by perimeter lines and poor rest and barriers and talismans all built to protect and keep out and keep away the damaging ones, the spirits who were anger and rage incarnate, murderous destruction. He knows what it is to guard the defenseless against that, and he wonders at it now; wonders at the safety of each house downward the mountain.
It was nice, raising a child in a village. It has been an education, having no same luxury now. )
Do you trust them?
( He asks, not watching Lan Zhan, but Qingshan, watching the child's each placement of foot and the wobble of the leg that follows. He walks with support, now, and soon, soon he will navigate the wonder of his own motion independent of them both. They grow so quickly, and never quickly enough on the bad nights, with the insatiable cries and the humming and bouncing and the eventual fall into sleep of two rather than one, cradled against a chest and collapsed atop a platform, exhausted. )
If so, you have the skill and the speed, Lan Zhan. I have no objections.
( To Lan Zhan sweeping Qingshan away, finding him a safe enough keeping, a port to weather the storm. This place aches with silence and deep, not grasping and devouring in ways of some haunted places. Quiet and waiting, wishing for its own unveiling like a shy bride anticipating her long awaited wedding night, invariably disappointed by something of the ceremony and acts which followed.
He is, as well, implying: let me stay. Haunts and hauntings, incorporeal demands and whispers, all these are part of his domain in a way that was his survival and damnation in that salvation, and he does not fear them, but does not believe himself their masters without cause. Go not gently into that dark night below the surface, and he suspects neither of them will, penetrating dead silences with their own living silences in turn. )
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[ To be dismissed unfairly and alone, a stranded nuisance bound for inns and village shelter. If one of them must walk the coward's path alone, then it should be —
...ah. And is this the game of it, howled heated cat's yowls, screaming hypocrisy? He wears that sin, the sect's true colours. Let it stain him, let it spread. Infection, trueborn, foamed. Bustling.
One heartbeat, and he would send Wei Ying away with gladness, to shelter and to a night's rest, to ill-earned succour. How long has it been since Wei Ying has tasted of broth warmth and a tolerant bed? There is no gladness in his journeys, no privilege of a gentleman, once raised by the better sects. Of the two, they are both trained, within reason, but Lan Wangji has dressed himself as Wei Ying's sword arm because he stands the sturdier of the two, steel and unbending. He may kill, where Wei Ying only strikes. He may defend.
But his gaze sharpens, blade poised, trained on Wei Ying's jugular. Let him bleed, before he dismisses. They've struck swords before, when Wei Ying still deigned to carry, calculated loose footing and parrying. Together, they were stars colliding, trails of white dispersing in their wake — and he means to tell Wei Ying, to wrench his jaw free of its bearings, of the fixtures and formalities introduced between them, to push the sound out, One does not go where the other cannot follow. Not again.
What business is this of Wei Ying, to name their inquiry done? Past curious meandering, he was ever ill suited for investigation — lacked the appetite and patience for long and dainty searches, each day without fuss or turmoil, each day, knowing it might be the same as the last, and an end-result distant. He lacked, where Wangji thrives, and the temple opened its maws for him first, showed the teeth of its stone and the gasps of its moss, livened, and the empty, sprawling space of the balcony, waiting, of the abyss beyond.
The ghost of their guide answered Lan Wangji first. Let it learn his name. ]
Lead the way.
[ Beside him, Qingshan stumbles on, disciplined in the ways of cattle and petty animals, who know survival belongs to the luckiest or the fittest, and his fate must write itself beside his herd — for now.
Later, he will grow his presumption, let it heat his blood and soften his senses, remind him that he is young and fair, and already a pretty child, with beady eyes like every doll a maid's spared past childhood, for her sheer beauty. He will never want for admirers, or carer to stop in their step and coo at him, not under Wei Ying's watch and counsel — earlier, when he was yet Yuan, Sizhui preened. Already, Qingshan learns the way of it, bats his lashes and puffs his cheeks and answer one grin for his own, trembling.
Wei Ying teaches him this. Let him learn, then, all that this father must offer. ]
We are not yet slow to follow.
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Ah.
( No one here is a fragile wife, or fragile husband. He can trace where Lan Zhan's thoughts flow with a rejoinder like that, where the trek down to deposit a child in a stranger's arms is something attributed to fragility, to worry, to weakness.
It's not Wei Wuxian's intent, but he understands it, and simply holds his tongue on the many small ways Lan Zhan's let it be implied that he, instead, is the fragile wife. It's no more true than the reverse, no matter the worries heavy in Lan Zhan's soul, or the ones that dog Wei Wuxian's heels like nightmares of gnashing, bloody teeth. He's good at ignoring them in the wakefulness of night or day.
He hums a note that is nothing but a sound, and acknowledgement in the stretching shadows of yes, lead the way. )
Even if you were, Lan Zhan, I wouldn't hasten away.
( He can follow an instinct first honed in pain and desperation, something tempered through rages and outrages, through tears and blood and sweat and vomit until it was an arrogance he later had to leech out of his bones. This place echoes, but deep, like the flowing water, something reaches back up. Wanting, burdened, but not cutting in the way of so much resentment. It's both older and deeper, more worrying in that sense. He keeps close to both the man and child, not because he needs to be the first draw of a flute or deflection of a sword, but because of a life precious and a life depended on, and how both interlink. )
This way.
( An overgrown path off the proper grounds of the abandoned seeming temple, made apparent as they walk, a winding path through sad rustling vegetation that ends, forlorn, in an open area. The ground beneath their feet compacted, the foliage that has waxed and waned with the season growing up to the face of boulders on the hillside. )
I may be wrong, ( he allows, conversational and staring at a point on the rock; ) but this reminds me of a certain barrier from our less wise years.
( Are his wise years truly here yet? Far more so now, he says, compared to before. He crouches down by Qingshan's side, steadying him with one hand and gesturing to the stone that rounds away before them. )
Qingshan, look. The art of concealment is as much in making things appear as people expect them to be as it is in the arrays one might build. That'll make sense to you one day, I'm sure, but for now we're looking silly staring at boulders, aren't we? Mm?
( The babe blinks up at him, mouth slightly agape, and he smiles, not quite giggling, because a grin for a grin is reassurance and social mimicry. Tools for survival, at any age. )
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They bleed them in the old world, blood coin to pay for blood sin. He is slow — his nature, the water's course — to drift behind Wei Ying and the trotting menace, his (their) child. Slower, for how he minds Qinghsan's heavy step, cautious to position himself ever at three paces' distance, because he sways, the little one does, first forward where Wei Ying might grip him if he tumbles, then back, where Lan Wangji might intercede, just so.
Outside, the path is weeds and jungle, scattered greenery and ears of wild wheat cat, whipping the length of his calves. He tickles for it, sours, indulges, steps out of the wind's way to leave little of his scent. A garden in abandon does not require Wangji's intrusion. Let it live according to its own laws, a brimming wasteland and grown wonder.
But he is there, finally. There, with his two charges and the sets of overgrown stone protrusions. Earlier, he felt the call to leave nature to its doings, to fall like another note on the music sheet of a world that requires no screech or halt. Now, he is normalised more than he is a crass dissonance, feels wakefulness and alert and the silence of birds, biting.
There is something here, beyond this great boulder that stares them, like its brothers, daring them to wait until it erodes down. No man could hope to roll it, no legion, not a creature of its size. And is there something behind it? No, not to look at it right. Would Lan Wangji have even sensed the change in atmosphere, had Wei Ying not — ]
He is dignified.
[ This, to Qingshan, who only grins the brighter for his dignity> And Wei Ying... well. Well, then. It is hardly for Lan Wangji to criticise a master of the unkempt arts. Only to present himself with a step forward. ] Inquiry, or...?
[ The curse of him, he pauses. Later, Wei Ying will know, will say, will whisper, This was the moment when I knew you weak and untrue. When he bent the mind's knee to Wei Ying's will, and ah, but he is steadfast, before he crumbles, lines and corners, bereft the sweetness of a dewy curve. Posture, points of precision — Bichen, drawn — the better sweetheart, devout wife, where Wei Ying serve Lan Wangji false.
Fragile, when she peers, gleaming. Elegant, when the cut of her grazes the neat stretch of Lan Wangji's thumb. Discreet, when she returns to her sheath-shelter, one blink and the matter done, and his finger doused in earthly red, wet on the large exuberance of stone. Honour, then Commit, and lastly, Surrender. Characters and each drawn slowly, the whisper of seals gaining voice, huskiness accruing.
Open. Open. Ope —
And it does, of course it does, it would have been brazen cruelty if stone did not shift, like the tremulous gasp of an old crone, rehearsed for theatrics. If the boulder did not bind its brothers, then shift and bend and beat itself aside, leaving the gaping mouth of the beast's belly, a door sloping down — a hole like a well's spread — and stairs, down and down, and beneath in the sulphurous catacombs, where they can go, with no light for Hanguang-Jun's namesake.
Is the hole's mouth not bigger than anything the boulder might have hidden? Of course. Generous enough for two men to pass comfortably at each other's side, born like a rupture of the land. Illusions, concealment. Next round, the artists of this work should consider hiding their entrances with a lake.
At the last moment, his hand drips behind him, settled obedient at his lower back, a signal of old, performative carriage. He has incriminated himself enough here, where Wei Ying must always be right. Waits, then walks, but throws over his shoulder: ]
Light a path, master Wei.
[ He has worn enough of himself, breaking concealment in ways Wei Ying will burn to learn, moth to the flame of every trick he has yet to taste, but that Nie Huaisang may have conceded alongside the finest pickings of his library, to make amends. Wei Ying's resurrection was never bartered, but the price of the Unclean Realm came nearly close enough.
And Wei Ying does so love to make use of himself. ]
Before we join your dead.
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Sixteen years is a long time to think you recalled a person, to hold onto an image of what and who they were. It may as well take sixteen more to stop finding the reality less and more than the memory, but if anyone suffers for it, it's only them. He'd spare Lan Zhan that stumbling block, but he really can't do more than remember what he's rediscovered in himself on the roads that have, in time, wound back to Lan Zhan, and onward, toward Lotus Pier.
His weaknesses are exaggerated in the eyes of understood but untrue fear. Time will be the only demonstration otherwise, and learning how not to be each other's reverse scale; time, he hopes, will help with that.
For now, he slips hands under arms and lifts Qingshan again, resting him on a hip and with an arm at his back. His arseonal of wards and talismans and charms are as evident as the beads, clacking, at Qingshan's wrist; the shadows beyond the revealed entrance seem to tremble, lose a depth of that inky blackness, as Wei Wuxian withdraws a ghost light talisman and lights it with a brief burst of qi.
This is easy enough a magic trick, as it's been called, to have this light that stays to his front and can be directed ahead, and the glow of it is both bright enough and soft enough not to sear their (his and Qingshan's) eyes senseless. )
My dead? In a sense, don't they belong to us all?
( Forefathers and foremothers and foresisters and forebrothers, though here, perhaps, mostly male in the time of their living. He steps forward, keeps Qingshan in his arms, because if he needs a last second voice to calm a lurking soul, he has his for now; and Lan Zhan requires freedom of movement if his sword's arm, his Bichen, is drawn to taste blood in the way that Lan Zhan tastes fear in the shadows that cling to Wei Wuxian's heels as he starts his descent, controlled, head cocked and listening for the sounds that go before them. Or for the echoes that don't come back.
Qingshan looks back over Wei Wuxian's shoulder, distracted from his view of the steady light overhead, fixing his pale face and dark eyes on Lan Zhan, forever expectant, his small fingers curling into the fabric of Wei Wuxian's outer robe as the light behind them mutates into something bleaching out the sky behind. )
The air's fresh through here, ( Wei Wuxian notes, murmuring rather than whispering, hand stroking over Qingshan's back, keeping him evermore to his side, protected. ) the breeze blowing back out. There's several air entrances, at least.
( And a scent of sulfur now, a skitter of stone as they reach the bottom of the set of stairs so misleadingly short, touching the first buried hall and its worn dirt and stone floor. He shifts to pull another of his tools from his waistband pouch, the compass a point that twitches then swirls in a lazy way the light overhead makes apparent, indicating vaguely to the south-south-west. No hall, no tunnel, leads their direct, but there's the potential of that avenue should he only go left. )
Some evidence of activity down here, but nothing strong enough to account for the missing men.
( Yet. He tips his head to the left wing, glancing to Lan Zhan. )
Unless it's lingering evidence of some other working.
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Then, the habits of loneliness: Wei Ying, the child draped on his chest, the thin greetings and absent farewells, the distracted sibilations. Whispered, his voice dresses one honeyed truth, then the next, until he has marked each memory his mind will string like careless beads in threadbare circuit. Now here, then — gone.
He does not speak for Qingshan, deadened weight barely stirring, now and then, to grasp at air and flicker of talisman flame, always more eruptive than natural fire or lightning spark. They descend, deep and deepening, like snakes infiltrating another creature's burrow, slithering with the obscene satisfaction of filling and stretching out space through their invasion.
Behind them, echo and the violence of Wangji's steps, washing Wei Ying's away like sea foam and salted water. He eases, falls in line. Obedient, where he is required: Wei Ying signals, he withdraws. Wei Ying perseveres, he inches forward. They are as music, aligned, if Wei Ying only allows it.
And then, there is the dust, come hard and keen and stifling about them. He breathes it first, gold-stale, corrosive. His lungs, burned. Then tastes it, dry on his tongue. Until, shifting to correct his posture, when the corridor narrows down, the wing span of his sleeve loses thread and wastes lace and glimmers, before hooking on stone — to pull away stainless. Left-ward. ]
Men passed here recently. Within reason.
[ Their walk cleaned the path. He does not direct Wei Ying left-ward, as much as he nods and greets the way, in subtle indication. Left, where the corridor spiders in, just as thin, and the walls bear down tall and the loom of them throttles — where there is spread of rock, and on it, carved, the pledge of modest writing in tongues older than Wangji speaks. Some words, new. Names. Affixed.
Wei Ying's light spreads too distant. Frown deep, he draws out Bichen to loiter the cold kiss of her glare over the nearest carving, challenging himself with a choice read. There. For Wei Ying's pleasure: ]
'First turn he comes called.' [ And yet, blood signs the instruction, bare. Blood seals it. ] 'Second turn, he comes named.' 'Third turn, he comes unasked.'
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It is what it is. It's forgotten, long ago.
Here is all immediacy of moment, life and death as entangled and inseperable as always. He hears: Lan Zhan, Qingshan, his own steps, the whistling of wind in a moment where it surges unseen. And then, Lan Zhan moving forward, a white-laced tide sweeping into sullen, dusty places, but not untouched.
Lan Zhan says left, and Wei Wuxian nods, moving in behind him when he pauses at the words spanning generations. A flick of his finger keeps the dancing light overhead just back, highlighting the area with its soft glow, and he follows along as Lan Zhan reads and speaks. )
Instructions, or a warning?
( The only line left unmarked, left unfinished, below: 'Fourth turn' and the character is sloppier than the rest, as if it had found its own death in the moment before its carver could find means to complete. Crass, if not related, but his eyes take on a serious cast as another shifting of pebbles down the way catches his ear.
The wind whines and whispers, and he stills, feeling more than thinking for an extended moment. The compass in hand whirls again, then steadies and shivers, still pointing its way. )
I feel a headache coming on.
( Seemingly offhand, but when was the last time he'd said that, at the Nie's tomb of sabers? Where his newphew had been lured into walls for a living burial, at the avaracious nature of blades longing for purpose long after their weilders were gone. Too alive, and not dead enough, even down decades of disuse.
There was something here, heavy and oppressive, an energy that swallowed and contained. The men? Caused by the men? The explanation for the missing, or explained by the missing?
The pebbles again in the dark, and he steps forward, waiting for Lan Zhan in that unspoken way that remains aware of him and where he moves, proceeding step in step, holding Qingshan tight. A flash of something in that darkness, was it white? Here then gone again, and he pauses, brow furrowed: )
There's something else.
( To the pressure, and to the brief flare of colour in his summoned light: a yao, something not human first, and also not of the dead. )
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Outside, filth sleeps in dust drenching a slate, steel pathway, white birds and dark wings and the trail of them like weed in fishery nets, smearing the sky above.
He remembers it: how he woke, like dreaming, as dusk yawned and released in one ghoulish, serpentine inhalation, the look of the temple, and beneath it the village, and between them the road — and he walked it, teeth gritted and a spatter of strain, where fresh boots ate into his own, but his guide would not take the sword's flight, or hasten. His guide kept one pace, and one alone, and where did Lan Wangji encounter him, this stubborn, milling, conglomeration of darted dots and conjured lines, how did they come to be, together?
Wei Ying's head aches, but it's Wangji's temples that burn, the blinding white of his lids, lanced together. Bichen's tip that falls, with cold, hard panting, to scratch the scales of resolute pebble under foot, and Five, in lazy, wide scrawl, a schoolboy's gesture — unfinished.
He blinks. And he wakes —
And they are here again, where he left them for moments where his mind fled and his body soured and sored, and Qingshan's turned for him, hungry arm calling for his second toy, his distant father. He answers, absent, more out of habit — lends his hand, back bent to accommodate the boy's feebler height, trailed beside him. In the esophagus of the tunnel, each each beam and rod of stone announces descent further down, the signs of deepening contraction. There is a yearning in him, to turn back, like flinched steel and claustrophobia.
There's something else. So, they walk farther. ]
It reeks.
[ No. So raw and visceral, only to the nose estranged from daily tribute in bowls of broth and cups of stew. Fatty and animal, violent. Death, won through the knife's pains, slipped and easy. He knows this scent. ]
Meat. [ Charred, somehow, scent of burnt skin. Of incense, sickly sweet and rancid, to cover the cleaver's work. And farther out, scratched on Bichen's end, lifting peels of dried, red husk from the tripped floor — old blood. ] Sacrificial slaughter.
[ Enough of this. Enough of them. He tugs, first Qingshan closer, then his sword in her sheath, and he stares at Wei Ying with all the folly of a man who should know better. ]
We cannot risk the child's wellfa —
[ But the echild wails first, then the gallery, and there's ache in the blood of both, a roil of tumbling stone, and Wangji's sleeve barely a cold stretch of silk to repudiate dust in its tumble. It settles, when the groan begins, undulant and oiled, when it syncopates and crests, when it carries on and on and on, of lungs that cannot ever fill again, surely, cannot yet perform their function, for how long of a breath they keep. Silence, after, is thick as the soot that covers them, grieving.
He does not look to Wei Ying again. Does not need a necromancer to ascertain, there was no human's gasp in this. ]
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Wei Wuxian stays as he is, hand outstretched, arm a blockade against what exists down that tunnel, the flash of mirrored white and whine. )
Then we don't take risks.
( He says, as if it's that simple, but his eyes are on Lan Zhan's face, and his other hand has already pulled on Chenqing, sweeping it out and into place with a pause and on sounds played on the length of her. )
It's not the men who burn.
( Some other animal, some conglomerate that cries now, keens, and the lengthened pause that finally breaks between two things:
a distant human cry, and;
tears, a keening, like a child's but not of Qingshan.
His brow furrows as he regains his feet, slotting himself before Qingshan, but not to blockade Lan Zhan from movement forward. There was no human's gasp in the first unwavering, unending cry, but there's something human-like in that keen. The cry of a man, yes, that too, but humanity seeks its own vainglorious ends, and that keening, the clatter of small stones and scrape of nails against firm packed ground: )
Lan Zhan.
( There's something stirred and bound and called to by this sacrifice, and the sulfuric taint of it, the grief of the first call, the terror in the second, and the anger, the horror, in the human outcry that came between the two. )
You or I. Bind him to us.
( Qingshan, to them. Even if they turn their backs, even if they walk away, men going about business of their own and no business of disappeared monks, of inhuman griefs, of keening, young cries and the echo of distant human voices, they would yet be blamed.
But he asks, because the shadows that pool and ebb and flow and quiver are angry and sad, and they don't reach out for the light, but rub, cat like, around his ankles even without his song. )
There's an easing we can offer.
( A look, and this is a question, meant for Lan Zhan alone. Will we? You and I?
It's not as if he has much of an answer before that same keening call sounds off again, ending in a half sob and another skittering of claws. The white slips through shadows, bounds over them, and the shadows do what they can to disguise, to hide, but even the weak light of his still maintained orb, the shine of Lan Zhan's Bichen, is enough to highlight wide eyes and the malformed strangeness of what's heading their way: childsized, great drooping ears, a too flat nose, close-cropped fur in whites, and a ragged, dirty tunic draped over a body whose proportions are in every way the perfect gangliness of a child in their perpetual growing motions.
A rabbit headed child who stumbles, hits the ground, and skids forward, the sharp scent of blood in the air, a pathetic nub of a tail poking through the back of the tunic as they hit the ground, terrified keen turned into a breathless whimper. )
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Apologies, only in the merciless dip of Wangji's head, the traitor's absent kiss on Qingshan's soft, doughy cheeks, soothing the storm of his roiling temper. A child lacks the strength to relieve himself of this quiet, no matter the signs of his mother's curse, the fledgling glimpses of qi that poison his blood, unknowing. He cannot control himself enough to command. Cannot break the ministration.
Bound to Lan Wangji and muzzled, a cruel fate. ]
Done.
[ This, to Wei Ying, cavernous and resenting. Of the two, Lan Wangji has the energy to spare, but he has fettered their son in the ways of livestock, and it embitters him to have authored the deed. Alone, Wei Ying would have faltered.
Efficiency recommended the chief cultivator. On Qingshan's slender, token ribbon-belt, where Wangji's thumb rests, beneath his thigh, where his palm cups, he feels flesh alive and a small creature in terror. What did Qingshan do, to be submerged in curse-work again?
They were fools, to adopt him. Selfish, and Lan Wangji above all, to blight his crib days with adventure within depths of rite and mystery that were bound to sing the same sweetened lullaby of misery that stained Qingshan infancy. If he is consigned already for the cultivator's path, so be it — but the great, greedy hand of spirits need not stroke his head at each turn.
And he is wanted. So very coveted and courted, the kitten licks of shadow grazing to climb Wangji's legs from below and braid with the lattice of his guan, great wreaths of the corridor's dripping soot, weeping down its children. He strikes them down, sweeps of Bichen in broad, cold arcs that slam the wall, abortively, to avoid hitting Wei Ying at the last moment. The space is too stifled for sword work. The deeper they descend, gut of the cave constricting, they'll want for their hunting knives.
No time. No need. Another wail, and their visitor creeps forward, a sinister mound of spooling limbs and heaved, laboured breath, and those final few pushes that drag his exoskeleton in view, then the abundance of his head, malformed and ill-fitted, barely contained by a body so crippled. Flinched, a gasp beats its way out of his lungs, danced between metal plates.
This is no kindness in this creature, how it agonises to crawl and its blind eyes sear under the cold glimmer of Bichen's glow — how long since it last beheld light? Since it has flattened itself, as a worm entombed, the makeshift product of rite masters Lan Wangji sweats, acrid and cold, to envision before him. Focuses to see the creature instead: the stitching of the child-rabbit's limbs, the rusting, tremulous machination of a surgeon's hand, inexperienced. No Wen Qing, this, no subtle and delicate touch like Wei Ying's, tender over Wen Ning's hurts. How his legs bend, dashingly, but nearly break, fur patched over skin, brittle and cinder-dark, as if the creature were submerged to experiment only after its —
...burning.
Lan Wangji steps back, hot spurt of fear and another cut of shadow around him, Bichen trained on the monstrous thing that approaches. ]
Restrain it. If it makes for Qingshan, it perishes.
[ Mercy, yes, and Wangji's heart made cunning and small, bound with thorn rope. He pulses and aches and knows the creature innocent of its pains, but the sickness of its body may spread, and the child in Wangji's arm is yet of the living. Priorities. He may prove selfish once more. Wei Ying knew, before Wangji's mouth spoke the words, traitorous. What he loves will survive the day, may the world rue it. ]
Is it of the dead?
[ Wei Ying knows, always. Wei Ying tastes their death first. ]
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No. Partially touched by, but not possessed, either.
( A sickening feeling, what lags and tags behind, and he plays in that moment, commands the resentful spirit that tries to surge forward, wanting to lash out, an embodiment of smokey anger. It coalesces over the quivering, moaning creature, and it is his song that keeps that anger contained, that soothes what feels more and more like protective anger, possessive lashing out.
There is a too familiar thrum of that, Lan Zhan at his back with their son and his cutting direct to the sum of all threats: Qingshan defended, from all threats. This stalled and seething spirit hovering over the collapsed and painful child, the lines of stitching, the forcible nature of it, the living embodiment: he trails off to a pause, a stop that leaves him and the spirit in each other's periphery, waiting the next step of their dance.
A short phrase, to the point. For Lan Zhan, and warning what will follow. )
The child is a living construct of a yao. Surviving, but not survived by, a parent.
( He steps forward, shadows swirling and dancing along with him, pulling away from Lan Zhan and their small, silenced son, with his tears and the snot that leaks from his nose and he clings on to his light of a father, burying himself close, unhappy and scared that his mouth will not open, that the cries are stifled within it, and he doesn't know, cannot know why. Such distress leading to his clinging harder, the tears flowing free, and this is as much of what Wei Wuxian protects as the dead crouches over its progeny.
His song is no less iron under velvet, or kind in its awareness, than it might be otherwise. But it calls, and commands, and he steps forward, and: the men's voices echo, cries that should be words but warp in the roiling cry that rises from the resentful energy of what may well be called a monster, surging against Wei Wuxian's call not toward him, not toward Lan Zhan, but back toward the darkness and the pounding feat of those who pursued that which had escaped.
All of that which had escaped.
The crippled child claws at the ground, pulls themselves forward, eyes watering, or crying, or both. Everything in Wei Wuxian's chest feels stifled, his stomach sick, when the monstrous spirit pulls free, with a backlash that hits the child, lifting them just enough to send them rolling and crashing into Wei Wuxian's legs. He doesn't stumble, but does rock back, the shock of it more physical than spiritual, this conglomerate of mismatched features collapsed over his feet, wheezing out a breath and trying to curl up, to make itself small.
He grimaces, crouching down to lay a hand on fur, his other cleaving strong to Chenqing. There is life beneath his hand, and pain he can guess from the flinch to the sight of what his eyes take in at a close glance, fleeting. The touch of death he'd first felt has receded, put the potential for it remains. Still, that taste on his tongue fled with the monster of resentment that had been playing guard and hatred against those who consume, those who desire a power beyond themselves.
He can make guesses, and he strokes a hand over the malformed head, speaks simply: )
Be still.
( And who is to say if the creature understands, but it curls tighter, tucked against Wei Wuxian's legs, shivering.
Chenqing comes back up, but he pauses, asks of Lan Zhan without looking: )
Handling the spirit won't be an issue, but I don't know what the men will bring.
( This is not a good place for swordwork, but the work he does can work, but what benefit of what doubt needs to be given? This is a muddy situation, and there is something bent and broken in more than body in these depths. )
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Remembers: he held an umbrella then, stick, and now to his back lies stone, and it's Wei Ying who dispels the confusion. Am I to be as children, then? From now unto eternity? Thrice now, protected. First, divorced of reason, coaxed twice of possession, in the village of Qinghe — the bark and needle and prickling of young spirits, starved, sharing their hunger. One widower's grief mirrored unto another, but he never wore the stuttered whispers of another's folly well. Then, the second exorcism, Wei Ying, excusing him of the hour, the night-born refusal, the rushed, rounded moan of snow's wind, burying his shame.
Now, another intervention. Chenqing's song swells like the great, tidal pressure of a bruise, breaking and remoulding his body, until he is only shield, carved to carry Qingshan, to answer his grievance — trusting Wei Ying enough to turn his back, partly, flank bared to the serpentine crawl of spirits that claw and cling to their last, while his sleeve absconds the boy's dreading eyes, his wonder. Small hands, even for a babe's age, but they hang, and they hold well.
And he knows what he must do, what he should do, what Wei Ying cannot. Will not, heart overfilled with feeling, dancing in wounds, not for the life of him. Alone, Bichen begrudges him, the silent, easy sheathing — forgive him, a sword drawn but not tarried in life's wounds. She will have Wangji's thumb cut next, if no taste of her quarry presents itself again.
It's mercy, isn't it? That which does not live in Chenqing, never breathed its air, never spun its notes, never compelled it, as it strips the shadows of flesh and flays them, ugly and bitter and downtrodden things, and what were you, before the patriarch deigned to to honour you with glance? Bowing, like educated snakes for a merchant's trick in the market, kissing the rim of Wangji's robes, and Qingshan's shape through the undulating covers of Wangji's sleeve last — until the air cleanses, but stays stifled, heat accrued in the wake of all the cold that's gone expelled — dabs of sweat on Qingshan's forehead, and drips from stone above, like birthing waters.
Righting his back, he does not ask, Wei Ying, what have you done?
Wei Ying, what could you ever do?
But lie down and low, to protect this second child, the distressed and tormented ball of thorns that can barely suffer to raise its own head, for the weight of it. How long has it been tortured so? He prays never to know — sets Qingshan, on ginger feet and unsteady hands that still find the back of Lan Wangji's calves, making haste. Clumsy, but fright will teach the lessons grace holds onto itself. Before him — between them, shielding — Lan Wangji reaches out in turn, first to the creature, but his hand stays hovered; then, the slow, too-thin composition of Wei Ying's ribs, his shoulder.
Something wicked this way comes, but no. Before that. Before them. Listen. ]
Wei Ying. [ And decides, in a heartbeat, the creature's gender as easily as he might lord over its fate: ] Look at him.
[ Frightened, small, humbled. Deformed, curled like a wetted knot, tight and limbs contracted — a spectre pain in isolated effervescence. This rabbit-child, this monster of the ground's belly hurts to breathe as he does, to move, to be. It's mercy again, isn't it? That which Wei Ying, blind to any purpose but salvation, cannot accomplish.
Bichen should not hiss as she does, drawn out again. Behind him, Qingshan should not hesitate. He shakes Wei Ying as if he were the dried branch of a dying tree. Listen, listen, listen. ]
Look at him. You cannot... he cannot... [ Nor Wangji, mouth dark, but he must. Sin in all things, but this is culling of kindness, only euthanasia. What will these men bring the creature, if they find him? What worse will life deliver it, if he survives? Lan Wangji, never as children, then. Set to the one purpose Wei Ying cannot bring himself to serve. ] Take Qingshan. Look away, if you must.
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Attempt the impossible.
( His sect motto, once upon a lifetime before, and so much of everything he has ever done: what he does every day, in learning himself, in learning their sons, in learning Lan Zhan without the pressure of the mystery or confusion of his own reintroduction to a world that'd wanted nothing of him.
Shake him, like leaves on the vine, when the winds yearn hungry out of so many well meant things, but attempt the impossible. He, once of Yunmeng Jiang, he who dreams of Lotus Pier still without speaking of it, who enjoys Caiyi Town well enough, the beauties of Gusu (not the least which is Lan Zhan, he knows, but that extends beyond him into the rocks and waters and trees and bushes and the small lives, rabbit or otherwise, that thrive within the speckled sunshine of its mountains), but his roots, born on the road, orphaned, adopted, abandoned, rogue once more: his roots are in Yungmeng. )
Leave his life to my hands. If it comes to that, Lan Zhan—Suibian does not grow dull.
( But it is Chenqing that he shoves into the layers of robes across his chest, his freed hand that reaches for Qingshan, that tugs and sweeps their son to his side, with a whistle that leaves them a shivering sort of calm before the storm brewing in this heat, pacing ahead of Lan Zhan like a stalking beast, some great feline or terrible canine, but shaped as one which hops through shadow. Runs, then stumbles, and cries again with that hollow, aching rage: and men cry out, not in terror, but in decisive action.
Action that spills into their section of passageway, cultivators perhaps, men with swords and focussed expressions, fighting against a fierceness of energy that isn't Wei Wuxian's design. He's watching it, he's a small, dark mountain that looms larger as the light shifts, and Lan Zhan is the cresting white of clouds or tide or avalanche, both a play on each other, both the targets as their hidden priests, perhaps, yes, it may be them, or may not, look from the held off spirit of fear and resentment to them, to the rabbit-child, and stares them down, condescends, ignores everything in both their countenances that should say abandon all hope, ye who cross swords here: condescends to them both, expressions as stone, eyes as avarice: The yao is ours.
Which, even in the loosest context of a night hunt, is an amusing enough thought. Wei Wuxian smiles, no mirth, and his arm around Qingshan is firm and reassuring, his voice light, his eyes older than he is. )
Oh, my. Were we in some sort of context, Lan Zhan? I don't seem to remember there being a hunt of any kind happening on this mountain. Do you?
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[ Fight, flight, silence. You speak too much, but Wei Ying's mouth should never silence, after sixteen years of tomb.
Focus frays, threadbare and fractioned. Lan Wangji trades, one step forward, two back, then aside: swims and sinks in the miasma of energy that accrues in thickened ichor, indifferent to Wei Ying, like mirrored in its likeness, silver. Like cold twitching things, smoke pulses up Wangji's legs, tickles the easy line of Bichen, rested, off her balance; he wakes her, one pull and the deed done, raised when Wei Ying scratches sound from the corner of his mouth, unfriendly whistling — when there is answer moaned, and the wind howling, and the heartbeat of the beast-child, thumped so hard it seems to bruise the cavern of its bony chest, and what can Wangji do?
Dance, as Wei Ying asks of him. Farther, shivered, the image of a starveling legion, four men on the precipitous count. Known for the tally of their hands, more than their heads, lifted to talisman or crude, lesser cuttings of steel, market daggers: glistened artifices to pin gentlemen's sashes, darling honorary accoutrements to spill token blood between rites and orisons at temples on days of light and joy. ( He learned, during the Sunshot campaign, this difference: that the daggers dozing, sprawled in his set at Bichen's side would barely have done to cut the meat at his table, were it stirred to exercise. )
The mouth of the tunnel never opens. They are four, with green underwater shadows, four with slanted, wet eyes, four with violence of bloodied fingers and the ravenous appetite to claw him, to cut him down. He is one, trained — impatient, cuts of Bichen in hard, irreverent sweeps, determined and defended, now and then, with the turn of his back to protect his flank, the rare kick of legs that know the truth first: he expects slick and moans, hard hisses, because he has none of the commodities of space to strategise his movements and corral, sooner than killing his opponents.
And he labours each breath, retreating to one knee, one swirl and one strike more and landing — these men have no true bodies to break or burn, Bichen only dispels the husk of their raised corpses, animated by memory. Unlike Wei Ying's risen dead, they don't come slow, burdened or heavy, but coreless and restitched of dried things, skin and bone that cracks and rattles, and sits like unspooled thread on sickened earth. These are not men, but hollowed things, and they do not rest — the energy spills of their bodies, trudges against Lan Wangji's ankles again, kisses the start of skin, and retreats only to crowd itself in the house of its victims.
The men rise again. And again, when they are struck, and again, faster. Learning, if not Wangji's skill or dexterity to match him, then that pained advantage that all dead things hold over their abandoned states. What is dead need never again die, but the living tire in their flesh. He feels the drain, between Qingshan's two charms, and the lecherous consumption of the resentful energy that tests him, and the dance with corpses that rejuvenate to action even sooner than Wei Ying's most sophisticated creatures. Laughs, crackled, and bides his time, back of his hand shaking the sweat off his brow. And beside him: ]
Wei Ying. Out.
[ No. No, this will never do, not with a Yunmeng master. The impossible looks them dead and dark in its eyes, and Wei Ying won't concede to it, not to shameful retreat. But they have a child with them, and a... second complication. The stone that held its dead once will bar them again, if they're quick to leave and rally strength. ]
I will join you. We come again.
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He watches, hikes Qingshan up to his side without comment at the abbreviated beauty in the brutal efficiency of how Lan Zhan moves, Bichen of him and extending him even as the dark walls and darker energies try to close in, to swallow. It's too tempting, the moths drawn to his flame, incessantly greedy, so sure that one or another of them might swallow his brilliance.
The rabbit-headed boy, petrified to the trailing groaning of an injured creature, is more difficult to gather, but he too surrenders to an adult's arm, Wei Wuxian standing with a child to either hip, one perfectly formed and echoing the clacking of carved wooden bracelet, the other mishappen and hurting, eyes slamming shut as he resigns himself to what fate follows.
Wei Wuxian sees the relentlessness that neither of them can meet with ruthlessness equal to the situation; so breathing in, he states back: )
All of us, now.
( His small light goes dark, his whistling command is stark and immediate in its sounded offense, four matched shrieks of rage, four checked motions, and the small stores of his qi are called on with the effective ruthlessness he does not further level against their paper mache evils, bearing down in their grasping claws and all too human voices to make up for what humanity had been stripped from them, eaten out from the inside.
Wei Wuxian can move like the cultivator he'd always been, swift and decisive, even in retreat. The ways in which he lingers are for the confirmation of Lan Zhan's retreat; he does not move alone, does not want to, in that sense, because some ends are not his to seek. The distance out of the dark to the light of a waning day and the striking, mismatched beauty of the skies pained in corals and pinks as delicate as a rabbit's nose.
He plants one foot on the ground, the other at the stone: a flash of white, he aches for mourning to slam shut the emboldened door, poised as he is like some awkward crane carrying his twin, uneven burdens. )
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Bichen barely bites again, once. Twice, when they mean to have his leg. Again, when they set for his back, where the lace of the old river, hurt, dug its ravines deep. Wei Ying leads. Breath staggered, he follows, delayed by the practicalities of delivering a convoy of creatures to their untimely end, only to bless himself with fresh opportunity to master the skill once more.
Unseemly, his winding, rolled fall, but bracken breaks it. He half crouches, half ruins his balane, Bichen barely swept back when he remembers to lend his shoulder to Wei Ying's limbs and push the boulder until it eclipses the corridor once more, battle deferred to the quiet, insistent scratches of the four dead, like rats in their entrapment. He waits by the stone, ear pressed and at war with grit and gravel, friction tearing the young, spoiled lace of his gentleman's skin. Pushes in — until he hears, subaqueous and distant, the nothingness of sleep.
Watching and waiting, but they prowl at another door.
They distorted themselves into shadows to fit the walk within the temple, then the one beneath, barely at sunrise. Now, sundown, rusts deep and clean. And where have their hours gone?
But Wei Ying knows, sees, barely transported himself and the exotic convoy of their vulnerable children. One requires Wangji. Has, for a storm of heartbeats, Wangji's gelid and slow.
Two matters pull at him, like sweet, spun sugar string: the first, Qingshan's binding, obediently severed. Then — the... silence spell, lasting despite what should have been the burn of an incense stick. No. Not within the burrow. Then...?
Lethargic, Lan Wangji reaches before Wei Ying can steal his son away, and spares the awkward pass of his hand, fingers shivered and stiffening, steeled, on the head of the rabbit creature, in passing. There lives no enmity between them, nor easy, simple kinship. There, there. In this world, you may yet be loved.
But the human infant has earned his adoration, already. Wangji raises Qingshan, eyes bright and clean with unshed tears, and curls him against his chest, where he fits, a small furnace, and he grieves his father's absence with fists that seize, vicious and quick, the collar of his silks. ]
Forgive me.
[ And he releases the boy's silence, to a fury of sobbed coos that wrest and rattle and record every instance of the colossal indignity that is the world and being a child in it. Wangji means to weep with him. Laughs, instead, choked notes of it coarse, as if they've spent the past few hours in... fumigation. ]
Yes. Yes, I hear you. [ And doesn't that do wonders for you, Qingshan? Are you not appeased? No? Carry on, then, keep wailing, even as Wangji starts the slow measure of his step, half-limped for the ankle that decries his earlier landing. ] I hear, and I obey. Yes.
[ Let it never be said that negotiating the cultivation world's enterprises has not left Hanguang-Jun with the instruments of patience. Nod. Stare. Speckle the conversation with muttered, inoffensive platitudes. Carry on — this time, to the bustle and loud light of the ink stain that is the nearby village, sprawled and cavalier against lush meadow land — a tacit love letter of contrasts to the agglomeration of huts and filth and wetness of Qinghe, bringer of the boy who rests, soft like bent willow, gazing back at Wei Ying over Wangji's shoulder. Good boy. Watch him, so he might know his path.
The contrast betrays itself farther: the first inn they cross offers lodgings to spare, and stews of the day beside, Wangji's tea and the child's congee, and... milk and an assortment of vegetables for the creature Wei Ying brings, smuggled in under the guise of a second, wayward son. If the inn keeper suspects, there is enough silver that changes hands that, molten, it might crisscross and stitch her mouth in perpetuity.
At night, eyes of thieves and wolves and prostitutes sharp in the corners of the pleasure sector, he knows what they resemble — sophisticated gentlemen of cultivation, set in their peculiar ways, here to expend themselves of a burst of rare energies and pretend at achievement, when the temple they've sought proves already barren. No doubt, the inn keeper speculates, they will make scandal in the clean, lacquered confines of the room they're assigned in haste, and see themselves off, come the early morrow. (And to think, they bring children to witness their wickedness.)
Alone, Lan Wangji remembers: first his duty: fetching Qingshan and the set of cotton squares that another generosity of silver has purchased, and warm water to cleanse the child: first, of his folly business, then, once he has been salved, to set him steady and fussing, with the fatigue of a child kept up long past his latest hour, until the bathing water is brought.
It strikes Wangji, all at once, that he has worn the familiar yoke of their comfortable silence for an hour, sparing Wei Ying barely a glance, let alone a word. Subdues himself, turning: ]
We lost a day. [ Strangely, rapidly, in the burrow with its stench of burned things. And he nods, soft, at their second guest: ] But gained a visitor.
[ Forgive him, Wei Ying, if he only hastens to adopt your human-headed children. ]
Both unharmed?
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Qingshan sees him, and he starts to redirect the anger, smiles at his son, and tentatively sends his limited qi into the child he carries. It's not easy, and what he finds instead of the forced union of two different energies is this: he can coax the child's energy, that of the yao he'd named him before, into circulating and healing himself. It's fascinating, enough to fully distract him from his anger, so that he spends his time following along after husband and son with an innocent healing in hushed and pained little noises in his arms, and his own growing exhaustion. He's long past it, simply ignoring it, as the innkeep offers her silence purchased, and he summons up smiles and niceties that call on an extra portion of vegetables sent up with the milk, fresh, uncooked, all the more for the gentleman's pleasures. What they aim to do, she surely does not want to know.
The donkey waits on for now; another inn, another stables. If this one even had such, and Wei Wuxian realises he had not looked.
He's taken to cleaning this older child, with limbs that reveal a finer patterning of skin to fur, where some burns prove to be flesh that was not the child's own, but another's. Most, as it turns out, superficial, skin reddened and fur burnt away without blisters or puss or any indication of the truly terrible burns. Rope marks reveal themselves around ankles, and the anger flares again, giving him energy to continue in his tired ministrations, his response to Lan Zhan's broken silence slow. A beat, then two. Turning his head, swallowing against a dry throat and dry mouth. )
Been healing.
( The child, that is. His eyes drop, to Lan Zhan's ankle, the lift of his brows and the blink of his eyes slower than words. Lifts his eyes to rake them upward, concern at war, again, with anger, and both with creeping exhaustion. )
Stock.
( Take stock, of injuries and all else. He pauses, a minute shake of his head. )
Yourself, in what condition?
( He strokes a hand through the fur of the rabbit-child, earns the kick of a leg, the twitch of a nose rabbit soft. Those dark eyes, still living in a world of shock, and then he leans his head down, murmurs. You are here, they do not have you. And the child curls up, tucks himself at Wei Wuxian's side on the smaller of two platforms, the one less meant for sleeping than resting as one cits and contemplated their day. )
The greed, of some people.
( He says, and the rabbit boy shivers, shudders, seems to grow smaller. Quivers, and under the strokes of Wei Wuxian's hand, does shift in eye-frightening ways; a scalded rabbit of gargantuan proportions nosing against his side, then, fingers resolved into toes and paws, and Wei Wuxian can only stare down. )
Qingshan forgives you. ( He says, as if distracted. ) He loves you best.
( The indulgent father, and the bright father, and the fright of a father, but in the exciting ways. Wei Wuxian wants to simply lay down as he is now, curled around the rabbit child (rabbit? or child? so much more rabbit right now, is he fully so?), welcoming Qingshan in his overtired needs. But no, now is not yet time for rest. )
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The inn room does not suit them: sterile, it reeks of the throwaway practicalities of service, past pleasure. Lan Wangji requires no privileges his hands cannot deliver — this, the jingshi taught. Bathing water can be brought in tub and barrels, food procured alongside the gentle meanderings of a passing scholar, visiting the library domes, or an attendant, lent purpose. Wangji's possessions are extensions of his person, defined by the day's work: blood stains of friendly cinnabar jagged on strips of culled cotton, to spare blanched parchment. Lop-sided, the sophisticated stretches of costly silver worked in mirror glass, or coarser binds of polished brass, to practise his curse work. His books, his weapons, his finery — the packaging of Hanguang-Jun, rank preceding the person.
He did not know until he travelled alongside Wei Ying, who wears the scent of burned chestnut and home as he passes, how deeply Lan Wangji has grown summarily infected with wanderlust for the familiar.
Qingshan echoes him, cries plangent and crystalline, when the inn's maid delivers his bathing water and Wangji remembers to reward him with the flesh-pinkening rites of his ablution. Each limb stretched, each bone stroked, back and front and then the dip of him, like an ocean pearl, to bask in the brisk and happy dance of flailing arms and kicking feet, and half of his basin's water tumbled around him. If Lan Wangji should wear the better part of his son's rose and hyacinth salts, complimentary, as if Qingshan were but a visiting madam of a lesser clan — well, Lan Wangji has shrouded himself in half of the burrow's gravelly dark, already.
After, he retrieves the child, dresses him in only the necessities of his lower half, to enjoy the licking heat that diffuses in their quarters, sputtered in thin-smoke wisps by braziers. In his arms, Qingshan settles — further, when Lan Wangji resorts to the night's second weapon, the cup of milk carefully cradled against the child's mouth. He eats a peasant's fill, a starved man's. More than your three bowls of rice, Wangji does not not warn, because the particulars of precepts do not apply to those yet unable to whisper them alive.
He means to pass to child to the waiting bed, but stills in his step, hovered by Wei Ying, and remembers, the instinct to hide Sizhui beneath rabbits — and another, now to bury Wei Ying, curled and sweet, under children. Look at him, Qingshan's spider-lashed and wary blinks, and find an accomplice. Wangji nods to seal their pact, and carefully descends him by his father — watches Qingshan's majestic crawl over his rabbit friend, to land perilously flattened atop Wei Ying's hip. Ah. ]
Does he.
[ The lie betrays itself, his quirked brow notes, just as Lan Wangji dips down to occupy the edge of Wei Ying's seating, like a maiden attendant waiting to serve the master's cup or his wine, wasting trinkets of touch and lazy flows of qi when he passes a hand over the rabbit. Animal-like once more, returned to his nature. Long-eared, leathery nose, jittery paws. It shivers, when Wangji's touch first lands, when their energy streams bide their time to coordinate. Then, the lessening of its breath into quiet, soft sleep, nestled against Wei Ying. Heal, then. Heal, both of them, together. ]
You speak as we do when you tire.
[ With the stilted, rough-edged formality of the Gusu Lan dialect, chirped but unable to prosper the hope of further conversation. An empty observation, but Wei Ying's manhandled himself into too much exhaustion for strategy. ]
Ill-suiting.
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He loves me best as furniture.
( He says, adding in as much of an arch tone to his voice as he can drum up with a half smile and a brief closing of his eyes. They slit open again not long after, lips twitching at the corners until he's left smiling into a chuckle, sounding lower than usual. Qingshan frowns at the disruption of his perch, nuzzling his face in harder and making his own tired babbling, a litany of complaints that start and end with why are you two like this.
Or perhaps just, stop moving, I want to sleep here, not on a wagon made of ribs and diaphragm.
Oh, but that chuckle is for Lan Zhan's words, and Wei Wuxian turns his head, better to look sideways and askance at Lan Zhan where he's perched, great white heron healing the same creature he'd tried to tell Wei Wuxian to allow, in mercy, a swift ending. Perhaps he'd be better as that kind of ruthless soul, but he thinks it's a tempering between them. Both can be ruthless, at differing times, or coinciding ones. Neither of them walks unstained by their choices or less bright for the fact they've also been shadowed, to differing degrees.
Playful, tired, distracting himself from the haunted worries of what lurks beneath that stone and beneath that temple and surrounded by the energy richness of those waters, over who made four paper-thin human constructs of holier men to hold an unholy power, one that threatened the sanctity of souls, that sought to unbind them from the reincarnation cycle, if the soul is pushed too hard, if it shatters.
Yes, playful, to avoid those thoughts, which will intrude again soon enough. )
Spending time in anyone's company, influence runs both ways. But don't worry, don't worry, Lan Zhan, I haven't forgone the art of conversation, just the non mumbled kind.
( In fact, ending in a mumble. He blinks, lifts his head to look both at the mop of black hair that is Qingshan, and then the large ball of white fur that's the oversized rabbit burden, in its most healing form. )
We've inherited a rabbit.
( They've stumbled directly into a problem, but the rabbit is innocent of that, as is the child. The rabbit child. This child sized rabbit. Or is he? He lets his head thump back, deciding that's tomorrow's problem. )
Or turned into moons. Seems poetic, if impractical.
( He shifts his arm, patting... the far side, all the unclaimed parts of a platform bed he's not even gracefully tried to occupy past the minimum. He's on the bed, the small lives heaped by and on him are there too, and what completes this comedy but the only one with a strict bedtime and his well behaved sleeping position being given the tiger's share? )
All for you. Wait, I'm mumbling chattier answers—Lan Zhan, we saved... at least half the bed for you! I hope rabbits don't kick when they sleep. Qingshan does, I think he's feeling more growing pains again... we'll need to find him a minder before we go back.
( Another pause, and then squinting up at Lan Zhan. )
Are we going back?
( Tomorrow, that is. In an immediacy, and without backup; are they not calling for a night hunt and its confusions, from either Gusu Lan or Yunmeng Jiang, but ah. Jiang Cheng having restraint when it smacks of curses of a perversion not often seen, of a manipulation of energies that might well be trapped and contained instead of redirected, perverting even what Wei Wuxian himself practises in the grand scheme of frightening things...
... Yes. Lan Zhan can make that call. Wei Wuxian, left to his devices, would puzzle through it, letting himself be the bait. He sighs out another inconsequential, less mumbled statement: )
Jade rabbit.
( Not the one at his hip: the one that had been protecting this confused child, in pain and terror and agony and meant for more of the sacrifice. The Jade rabbit. One who gave all of themselves, elevated after death to a second life.
Ha. Ha. Haaaaa. )
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i like how this is the horniest tag you're getting out of wifi so far
steers this thread back to the righteous salt path
hello wei ying's heavenly pillar................. of salt
i request an adult
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