( 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.
[ At least, until Lan Wangji has completed his petty rituals, and is at liberty to resume this conversation.
He is not as Wei Ying, an animal easily contented to retire for the evening without licking away his hurts, righting the many-headed wrongs of his violated presentation. Luck money and talismans come neatly packaged, for all the humility of the folded paper they bear within. So too, the human body, the chief cultivator: only a man married to rites, bereft of particular merit or creativity, raised to rank by popular agreement that he is of least prickling convictions — showered in lace and finery and the regalia passed down by dubious predecessors, now gradually entertained, for no reason beyond the tolerance of the heavens, as divine. Lan Wangji wakes each day mortal, saunters out of the jingshi a man above men. A product of the Sunshot campaign's legacy.
The guan, first, spider legs of silver absconded between tresses and binds, gently wrestled. His layers, silk and cotton and filigree of glittered thread. His boots, a quick dismissal. Then the modesty screen, splash of his bathing water, the incense stick to mind his wounds and his trailing ankle, to remember the practicalities of healing his own indiscretions. Poorly done, if he is but one, and three mouths — four, the rabbit's joined — depend on him. The athleticism of his golden core will only keep warm and alive if he factors in a certain, inevitable lability of recuperation.
No matter. He returns cleansed, ensconced in his the lesser layers consigned to sleep, with the afterthought of consideration — an ewer, heavy and lukewarm only through the grace of talisman work, scryed in salt and suds (more expenditure) and he discharges it alongside two of the inn's bathing cloths, on Wei Ying's half of this great debate, their sleeping arrangement.
There is a larger accommodation, mere steps away, he conveys with the idle, slow rise and fall of his brows, to an inattentive audience of three. One, he rescues from the swarming, cradling the rabbit in his arms despite its unambiguous heft and lying down on his... side of the cumbersomely smaller, narrower wood and stone slate. The sigh that tortures his lungs does so with the love and care of Zewu-Jun, who has warned him, time and time again, against the dangers (a multitude) of pinning his fate to that of men who are possessed of finer hair than sensibilities.
Not for the first time, tickling the periphery of Wangji's cheek as he settles down, Wei Ying's glistens, raven-feathered and smooth. Irritating. And compounded, when the rabbit nuzzles, viciously pleased when Wangji resumes his strokes and the subtle drain of his energy for healing — Wei Ying brought their new visitor into their lives. Wei Ying and jade rabbits. ]
We return tomorrow. [ A pause, weighed and bartered between the tell-tale pleasantries of his hand on stunted fur. ] The rabbit, also. [ And another breath, hard laboured. Listen. ] We do not surrender him.
[ But what better bait for their own prey, than the life denied to them? Men that defied death to trail after this one creature, desiccated, will not forfeit it when it presents itself so freely before them once more. This much is plain.
And yet, another complication, lingered like sugared thread between them: ]
We will need a time reference for the outside. We lost a day.
[ An hour's incursion in dark depths, and a spring day's passage, from sunrise to sundown, in the waiting world. They cannot afford to lose track in their journey. ]
( Ah, then his eyes slowly creep open, just to watch nothing more than Lan Zhan's return, the steady breaths on him and to his side a lull and lullaby, his own steady breathing sending one son to slumber, and then; Lan Zhan making quiet commentary on Wei Wuxian's choice in resting places, and he brings to himself the energy to snort, a softer sound than usual, less convincing and more action. )
We've slept on worse.
( Is his idle comment, not a helpful reasoning for why they ignore the platform of the bed for the narrower one of the seat, but still, this is also not so cumbersome or uncomfortable a place. He shifts after Lan Zhan makes his own settled piece, Qingshan drooling and deeply slumbering already, small fist curling in and uncurling to pat, in his sleep, his uncooperative pillow. Wei Wuxian handles the sudden assault on his chest with a fond pat, then shifts child and tips him sideway, until he's framing Lan Zhan and his armful of rabbit and the visible relaxation that speaks of healing injuries, more peaceful fates.
All this so he might sit up, look to his own attempts at libations that never make it beyond washed hands and a washed face, a damp wipe at the back of his neck, the column of his throat. Qingshan snuggles into the firmness of his father's side, encounters the fur of the rabbit, frowns and mutters baby nonsense before patting and sneezing, then settling back down.
Wei Wuxian watches this from peripheral vision, heart warmed. Chilled in turns by a seriousness that follows, as he glances down to Lan Zhan as he speaks, bathing cloth against his throat.
Words. Parceled out as Lan Zhan's usually are, weighted as they always will be, meaningful and not empty, most often. He might say always, but he's heard words that have lesser meanings than intended out of Lan Zhan's lips. He remembers those with a sort of fondness that says nothing about their context, and everything about the joy and challenge in discovering just how Lan Zhan could be found to throw his wit and the sharpness of his tongue against those as he saw fit.
That's not tonight's thought. Right now, it's simpler, met with a firm, slow blink of his eyes, drifting from Lan Zhan's face to the rabbit yao, all rabbit now. )
I have an idea. ( Several, really. ) In tracking the time, where it warped. We return, with the rabbit. Qingshan—
( One child in danger is enough. Two is foolhardy, and nothing he wants to risk, not when he'd fought so hard raising A-Yuan and knowing the nature of children is to give their parents room for fear and surprise and hurried dashes to prevent disasters that might be prevented, and observe the learnings of what might not. )
Will not.
( Something known already, but also: )
Jiang Cheng needs to know.
( About this place? About Qingshan. Wei Wuxian, king of delivering his fosterling adopted sons to others stoops?
No, no, not that, and never intended. Never knowing who had lived, when so many had marched to their death for the sake of a powerful man's greed and his paper thing promise.
He sets the towel aside, having held it like an absent thought for too long, then settles again, curved inward, only by circumstance toward Lan Zhan. Qingshan is who settles into the space between chest and stomach and Lan Zhan's side, and that rabbit, such a large presence, is almost comedic in this little group. Jade rabbits, moon rabbits, and rabbits of another kind. )
Lan Zhan... how's your ankle?
( Said as he strokes fingers over Qingshan's mussed, dark hair, looking from child to fellow parent. Sleep is hemming in again, but so are busy thoughts, puzzles for the solving, the very source of so many sleepless nights while Lan Zhan's better habits meant regular resting, not chasing after concepts and possibilities on a midnight wind, as Wei Wuxian is still tempted toward. )
[ They've slept on worse, in beggars' travel beds and tattered inns and ruins. They've slept beside bodies, and Wei Ying among bones. They've slept under Jin Guangyao's roof, absorbing the sweet, cloying scent of his fermenting, poisoned machinations.
They need not settle only for their worst encounters. There are beds in Cloud Recesses better equipped to welcome them — and their companion, the lone and shivered swell of the rabbit that spans Wangji's side, curled without self-preservation, finding the nook of his flank and the perch of his hip, snatched and pale and the cage of its furred body, matted. It yearns for the roiling, calm sorcery at Wangji's fingertips, the healing he doles out between cautious strokes, aware, distantly, that some creatures yearn for qi to their own demerit — that just as the resent that haunted Wei Ying's core despised and expelled his energy, others bask in it without control and measure.
And then there lies Qingshan, a perfect tyrant, condemning Wei Ying to a fraction of the slate's land he might claim, if nothing else, than for having happened upon their makeshift bed first. He nestles, then stretches out, settles his breathing; behind him, sketched in pallor under the very dead and dying of the brazier light, Wangji allows himself this one indulgence, to reach in and nuzzle at his second son's nape, and take in the sweet, milky scent of children. He is beautiful, harmless yet, innocent before he's learned the sword that will spell his path as much as it did that of his fathers, inexorably. Let him stay so, only a little while longer.
Wei Ying's gaze finds him too readily, too soon. Even here, before a man who knew him before he knew himself, Lan Wangji can allow himself only so much indulgence. Exhibitionism ill suits his kind and his clan. And the inn's room rises white and soulless, wind rearing its noxious head to carry in the quiet, questioning shivers of midnight. The eye of fireside flame blinks, long and idle, but sputters on. ]
Better, come morning.
[ His ankle, a needles' cushion of pulsing hurts. Earlier, he supplied it enough of his qi that the wound should be a petty inconvenience in the morning, but no disadvantage in combat. This much, he still recalls: never be so spartan that you make a nuisance of your person. Never let censorship reduce your use — or hurt, or old wonder, or that heinous, dogged thing, bitter vengeance. It lives in him, stoked; warms him better than flame, keeps his hand on the rabbit's back firm, undaunted. ]
What words is he owed? [ The creature, monster, the distantly inherited pain of Yunmeng, uncle removed to Wangji's true son. ] Jiang Wanyin.
[ Better than 'Jiang Cheng', courtesy the noose that steals breath, ransoms it for slivers of well-invested resent. He remembers: Yunmeng, north or south or lake water, calling — Jiang Cheng's territory. By right, the matter falls under his stewardship. And though no lesser gentleman would ask a written report of the chief cultivator, protocol entitles the lord of a realm to understanding the plagues that storm his province.
All the same. All the same, and Wangji's lower lip catches under half-dead bite, teeth combing for blood that never yields to him. Not even this is his. Not even petty pain. ]
You wish him in attendance?
[ Of all the sicknesses, the fleas, the parasites. To think Lan Wangji should expose another son to the sickness of Jiang Cheng. A gift, as any of the others Wei Ying has ever asked of him: humble. Cruel. He is hollowed at times, by these reminders — that every man in Wei Ying's life occupies a place of privilege, where Lan Wangji's steadfastness writes a foregone conclusion. ]
( He sighs, on his side and watching Lan Zhan, watching their son, watching the swell of rabbit visible across the expanse of him. There are things not for him to mend, even if he is, at part, a kindling in a fire that burned to ashes over the years he was in no man's world.
It isn't what he was asking, to bring Jiang Cheng along; he misses what he and his brother were, once, but he doesn't refute the striking out, or the way it's calmed in that confrontation of tears from Jiang Cheng where he still held himself back. Facing the past, facing the present, how does he account for both?
He barely's managing with Lan Zhan.
He reaches out, pokes at Lan Zhan's cheek with a lopsided smile and serious eyes. )
Lan Zhan.
( This isn't his to fix. He can't make a soulmate and a brother find common ground unless and until they want to; and he knows them both too well to believe in much of their capitulations.
Owning affections, he supposes, is hardest with adults. Children, the weak, the animal, it's so much easier without the complication. )
We're within Yunmeng's reach. He should know to keep an eye out, later.
( He at least didn't keep pressing at Lan Zhan's cheek, instead hand falling to brush over Qingshan's head, stroking his hair. Qingshan grunts and presses himself closer to Lan Zhan's side. The rabbit, warm in his touch, and soothed by his qi; Wei Wuxian reaches out to pat that shoulder with the hand resting on the rabbit. )
Rest. It's what heals.
( For all of them, even more than qi. )
Better come morning, right?
( His ankle, the other hurts and hits, the planning for Qingshan's safety, the rabbit yao child now sharing their seated bench turned bed.
If anything, let him be the one to fail to rest. Lan Zhan will always wake too early. )
[ Each wound sears, bleeding stills, flesh mends — or gives, and the body with it, and he aches to know, foreign heartbeat so close, he shares a bed with a killer.
Turns, abrupt like summer storm, to shift the head that contained the rabbit's bellied roundness before and splay it, proprietary, over the land of Wei Ying's breast, slipped down — to the core that waits, a haunting of itself, house and home to wasted potential. Nothingness, consuming the qi Wangji directs senselessly, without reason. Most energy will separate and eradicate itself before reaching its intended target. Only a fraction survives the resentment's filter, and yet he feeds, stubborn and fond and joints twitching, holds Wei Ying's gaze for gelid drifts of time and dares him to object. ]
Better. [ Cartilage broken and splinters of bone, between grit-gravel of teeth. ] Come morning.
[ Presume, then, to intercede: to deny Lan Wangji the invasion of a healing hand, but accept Jiang Cheng's dauntless intrusion. Presume to summon him from the dead, limp mouth of Lotus pier's strength here, to share Wangji's bed. Enough of him, his sickness, the cut of his poisoned mouth like a coiled snake's, waiting to strike at Nightless City — turmoiled, when Wei Ying let go, as if his sword had not wished it so, had not struck the opportunity.
Jiang Cheng is lord here, but no king is always welcome.
He sleeps, steadfast, still seeding energy squandered first on the rabbit, then on Wei Ying, two recipients unlikely to dismiss him — startles awake, with a jolt and dried mouth and stiffness of his back, where the slate's eaten its home against his spine. Sun seeps in like tea infusion, shy with early spring — pale as Lanling Jin's maidens, crafty with their powders.
He stirs, considered: knowing that not all creatures wake with mao shi, that Wei Ying will want a handful of incense sticks further. That Qingshan barely blinks to brief awareness, then curls into his stilled father, patting Wei Ying's arm with a disgruntled fist, as if to punish the one man who stays within reach of his aggression. The rabbit, traitorous, reshapes itself as a sickle against Wei Ying's hip, grazing in sleep.
Better, come morning: Wei Ying at peace, Qingshan refresh, the rabbit aglow with a full coat of fur. Protesting, Wangji's limbs negotiate his release of the slate, the morning rituals of cleansing, meditation, a choice few stretches through the forms. A torpid binding of his clothes, then a slow walk beyond their quarters, once the inn is abuzz with enough life to sketch the course of the morning servants.
Early milk for Qingshan, barely spilled. A request for Wei Ying's fresh water, a proper meal, some vegetables for their... furred visitor. And a lengthier interview, a few choice conversations, the inevitable logistics.
He returns a man victorious, thick doors whispered to a close behind him, step light on ill-lacquered floor. Knelt by the bed-side, he dares the final act of bravery: stirring Wei Ying awake, with barely the suggestion of his hand on a willowy back, two fingers tapping the starting notes of a once-upon-a-time lost song on the pale stretch of Wei Ying's cheek. ]
Wei Ying. [ Wake. Wake, now. Come. He waits until there's the start of light behind Wei Ying's eyes, when they open, until there is wit enough in them that he might yet hope for answer. ] Outside waits Lian Hua. Sixteen of age. Elder sister to four. She mends inn cloth and visitors' robes.
[ Her name, her happenstance, her occupation. Her credentials. Listen. ]
She offers to mind Qingshan. Rise. [ Wake one eye, then the other, and the bones that carry this carcass whole. ] Give blessing.
[ Bathe swiftly. Meet her, one child grateful to attend to another, for a wealth of silvered shrapnel. Unlikely, that Wei Ying should scrape the rust off his dark heart and mine within the resent to reject her, once Lan Wangji has tried the girl, only to find her worthy and true. All the same, one parent's courtesy, extended to another: he may pass judgement of her, before they entrust her with a loved son. ]
( He wants to; wants to say, don't exhaust yourself, and also, this has never worked. He's broken in that emptiness, and the filling of it with resentment ebbs and flows with nothing but Chenqing to call it. He doesn't travel with resentment tied to his body, though he could. He could turn every bag of holding for some spiritual malevolence into a source of strength, as he's done before. Carries touches of borrowed ills and knows how to contain them as pearls within his body, blood-dark and puss-filled, lanced to heal again and again in ceaseless circles.
He wants to say what he knows Lan Zhan already knows, so instead he says nothing, just offers the ghost of a smile, that says, he understands this, too. It was his choice. Digging this out, replanting, seeding someone else's soil.
Some things will not be better come morning. He chooses to only think of those that will, and so that smile, on his lips, and the nod of his head, shifting his hair, is all the answer he gives under Lan Zhan's hand. )
Come morning.
( And he does not sleep, not for longer than he pretends to at first, eyes closed, surrounded more by the warmth that is unimpeded breathing, so many sighs and signs of life around him he feels fully encased in the opposite of the nightmares that still look to take hold. Curbed by living sounds, until he's lulled past the bemoaning of midnight winds, the witched hours of a night that he welcomed once, as easier to move within, as a haunting of his own.
He wakes, slow, to warmth and noise and light, and wants to linger in that lasting illusion of everything perhaps for a moment being somewhat closer to okay.
Tap.Tap tap tap. Is he being tapped out, and he mumbles something as his eyes slit open, sleep hazed and unfocussed, staring then at Lan Zhan uncomprehendingly. Awareness spills past the lingering warmth, and he starts to stretch, coming alive and alert to Lan Zhan's statements and a stretch of limbs that leaves toes curling and arms pressing down against the slate that's likewise left back and joints aching, but the better kind. The aches that wear off with a warmed up body and a series of stretches, which he'll engage in as soon as he stands up, instead stifling a yawn.
Lan Zhan is nothing if not efficient. He smiles, lopsided, and brushes at the shifting mass of his hair down his back from his seated position. )
Leaving him with a tracking talisman?
( Not for her, this well credentialed young lady. Not for Qingshan, exactly. More for both of them, a sort of alarm to set them in motion, if it comes flying to find them. Tracking them down as warning that something unpleasant this way came, and a callback to find him.
Wei Wuxian, paranoid? Let it be known between the two of them that his fears in loss run deeper than he ever lets show. There was a greater careless trust in A-Yuan's life that does not rest with A-Shan, and long years run short imagining children's graves leave shadows against his heart.
All of them with these shadows of losses; basking better in the sunlight, aware of what might chill the marrow.
He near fumbles his way off the not-bed they'd made a make-shift sleeping surface, rubs at his hip with a grimace as ends up with: a rabbit, large, cautiously nosing after him, and Qingshan, avidly walking here and there. He only seems to remember Wei Wuxian once Wei Wuxian remembers water, and there comes he who toddles, latching onto his leg to stare up and mouth the words again and again, up, up, up, and then the basin and washcloth for one man's face turns into morning ablutions with man and child, water dripping down Wuxian's front, child in his arms once they're both patted dry.
It's swift, as much as anything with children can be. The rabbit has watched, has at one point stretched out a furred arm that ended in a human hand to tug on robes; Wei Wuxian tamping down a shudder at the strangeness in order to smile down at the long eared face that settled back into only rabbit form after, twitching a sweet nose up at him, eyes dark as tar. The rabbit moves, then, in search of Lan Zhan; and Wei Wuxian carries A-Shan forward, seeks to meet this Lian Hua, offers her sweet words and apologies for waiting, and sharper eyed catalogues, but he has her blushing even without meaning to, and her youthful belief in good deeds paying in good merits and good coin enough of a reassurance that she will mind, for the sake and hope of what else comes after: what more coin, with so many younger siblings, at least two also girls.
Qingshan is entrusted to the domesticity of this life, while the rabbit is gathered in loaned robes, and Wei Wuxian carries him forth at his hip as if he's hiding yet another child from a world too vast to be lost within. Ill he says all of once, his own features pulled into a tired, grave sort of understanding met by the old woman who asks.
Poor little thing, she says, and with her blessings, they continue down the road.
He doesn't ask if Lan Zhan's arranged for any word to fly toward Jiang Cheng. He holds off for the day, after a night of ache and hollow. Word tomorrow, after this progresses, will be enough. The lightning needn't strike when he who travels for the chaos has already arrived; and Wei Wuxian is he who takes the resentful, commands, contains, redirects; Jiang Cheng is one more blade and one more blunder, one more division of attention and affection.
He's divided twice as it is. Trice, when by Qingshan, and more, as the donkey rejoins, but those two are for later, and he thinks again on the problem of time. )
Mm, Lan Zhan. Tracking the time, linked talismans might help to function. Like with message papers, only the talisman carries the instruction to send each marking of time as it passes.
( It's one thought, with more percolating, ready to drip into a cup of possibility at any particular time. )
[ In step, aligned like forest crown trees. They walk, step slack with fatalistic indifference, interrupted now and then by the garbled talk and curious eye of crones who know their satchel of hundred-years have bought them the filial, rapt attention of strangers, five times over.
There's a bustle and buzz, Wangji supposes, a quiet and private and proprietary exhilaration in witnessing strange novelty paraded down one's market place. Two young gentlemen, and cultivators — and their sickly child. What wonder, in a village reduced. Can Wangji fault them? He took a young bride, mere months before, in the drowned village. Now, with him walks a new mother, and Wei Ying's conceit of a sickly child. At this pace, Wangji will wear, soon, his uncle's whites and behold nephews frolicking with their tempestuous first loves across rooftops and awnings.
( And Wei Ying, so heartbreakingly domestic — a tracking charm, imbued silently on the bell string he gifted their son with premature caution. It cost Wangji so little to allow the whim. )
He bears the inevitable road conversations as he did his childhood fevers, the burst of his first sword calluses: quietly, absently, with slack-jawed indifference. Knowing Wei Ying will maraud through the crowd, and he might yet follow after, swift to intercede only with Bichen's sheathed length when a man's touch comes too close, by accident, to Wei Ying's flank, or a child means to tug at the swaddling of the 'babe', when merchants would stay Wei Ying's step to seduce him to smooth, sheening displays of spice, laid out like quarry gains after an ample hunt.
Before, he was wasteful: Wei Ying spread the seed of his idle, empty chatter in the wind. Sixteen years of silence have taught Wangji to hold his hand out and catch each word.
Time tracked through twin talismans — a curious, make-shift solution combining old artistry, the mundane, and Wei Ying's taste for homey invention. Fair, but for one miscalculation. ]
Set one talisman to burn once a day's passed. Its twin, to burn with us.
[ After, he remembers to explain himself, as with his students of Cloud Recesses — aware, distantly, that Wei Ying knows him in all the ways that shape him from root to branch as a man, but has missed the precarious, splintered sophistication of his progress as a cultivator. They were unequal once, Wei Ying the brazen prodigy, mind blade-sharp but scattered. Time's cheated him of righteous advantage, his knowledge divided and doled out, Wangji's among the many hands to benefit of the Yiling Patriarch's learning. ]
The act of communication between talismans will take seconds on one plan, half a shi on the other.
[ A lag that will only accrue with each transport of an hour's passage. Better to have only one measure, and turn back when their time's done. A day in the world of lights. Mere hours, in the nether lands — four to one, if he evaluated well enough, on their past encounter.
No matter. They will learn soon. Past the village, the temple, the twisted, turning garden roads like thinned rib bones leading below, to an earthly spine: the stone's as they left it, flat and warming under spring sun, frantically beaten. He splays a hand over it, fingers spidering and open, pressure thin as if he expects the reciprocation of a beating heart, the kick of a growing child through a gravid mother's womb.
Nothing. No one.
And when he rips the fetters of yesterday's wards free and jolts the stone over, in a stuttered succession of rolls — only silence. Dark, crackled tar, sulfur's breath. Again, as before: charred meat, ashes, heat cloying. And it strikes him, then: the nether depths. The temple, built hastily above distant eruption.
He does not step. Readies the talisman, one half of parchment, for Wei Ying to bind to its fellow, left outside. A donation of Gusu Lan's wealth, expended on strange cause. He hesitates: ]
Wei Ying. The mountains bled fire, decades ago. Did they... purify after?
[ Collect their dead, bury them well. Salt the grounds and sage the air, and offer amnesty to spirits after. Four times, four years of mourning, and each death named, and each spirit thanked, each altar served with rice and wine, and mourning — great tragedy requires theatre. Did they carry out the functions?
No. No, they would not be here, Wei Ying and he, were the rites well performed. They are, as ever, married to the chaos bound in the world, made flesh in each other. ]
Ask. [ Better the honeyed, sweet tongue of the voluble Patriarch, than the Lan approach to sterile interrogation. Inquiry subjugates spirits, brokers no opportunity for diplomacy or negotiation — wins truth, but not good will. Wei Ying walks a more sinewy, treacherous path. ] Or I shall.
( He listens, even before Wangji explains, shifting the rabbit child's weight (and rabbit child he is, fingers curling into Wei Wuxian's robes, dulled nails on rounded toes poking out of a swaddle, then drawn back in, still showing fine white fur) at his hip, weighing his own ideas against the worth in simply saying yes. There's a world that ran forward while he was left in darkness; he'd meant it to be a more thorough break the once, but through some miscalculation, or someone else's success, it had become its own mystery.
Would you believe me if I said... )
Then you're asking for one to light once it goes dark, here, so pin it high up enough to not fall into early shadow or else remember tonight's a fuller moon... the moon's already up, isn't it? It should set for a while tonight, come back up again later.
( Not the moment for thoughts about rivers of stars spilling across the skies, just the conversation of light and dark; time passes in both directions, but if they truly want to claim responsibility, they'd test it more slowly, more surely. Even using their message paper, a count off that takes longer with the furthering of any distortion...
Really, in the end, this is why there should be some third party, but he doesn't mention it, just listens, and hums a considered note.
It reminds him of god realms and devil realms and ghost forests, that distortion: places where a day might pass, and yet a decade has flown by in the mortal realm. What a shudder inducing thought, that kind of total cut off from the heartbeat of the living world they currently embraced.
Then again, that's the condition they face: death, a sluggish, viscous flow, the decay of rot and the mummification of intent.
Here again at a boulder barrier that is only a suggestion, in the end, of something sturdy. A failing plug, because stone erodes, turns into rounded pebbles that eventually turn into dust lifted on the wind as surely as the ashes of their incense.
He shifts the rabbit-child for the umpteenth time, brow furrowed, an ache unfurling when he closes his eyes and opens himself up to that heat, the decay, the sulphur and cooking; a pause before he has the talisman meant for the outside ready for its affixing to stone, as if that anchors it any better.
There's a pulse of festering rot, a pustule and abcess left undrained and to calcify in the pressure of its covered, buried: terror. )
No... no, but the whole, not all of it needed it. Here did. Here, everything was lacking.
( Some places burn clean in their horrific disasters. Down the mountain, there's no such touch, but here, where it had been healing as much as a past buried beneath the grounds, there were longstanding stains and long lessened bounds of humanity or animal nature to hold any of it in.
No proper theatre, but also, no proper memories, no proper guidance for lives cut short in such an abrupt and violent way. Anger in things like those grows with time, nurses itself stronger.
He taps his outside talisman in place. Lowers the rabbit-child to the ground, and tugs his hand, his awkward legs, his rabbit face that's turned into something a little less grotesquely alien with familiarity, wraps child-rabbit fingers into the weave of his lower robes. )
Hold on.
( He tells a child that does not really understand language, and now, Chenqing in hand, he steps forward to the head of those stairs into darkness, and he plays an entreaty, a request, met with weeping and a shadow coalescing beyond the touch of light: white haired woman, without eyes, on her knees, tears like blood staining the planes of her face. Burns, across all of her; seen and then abruptly gone, glass reflecting different lights while spinning in place. )
I hear their screams, sense some intent, or else I dare Empathy.
( He doesn't dare Empathy. He needs better reason than "because," with a child at his leg, with Lan Zhan at his back, with no gaggle of disciples clustered in a makeshift safehouse, and all of them dancing at the end of someone else's strings. )
I ask, but give me a moment to parse what it is I hear when I listen.
( A step, then another, and he resumes his playing, and the white haired ghost is as burnt or smooth skinned as each note inquires further, and its more nuances of emotion that reaches out to say: Pain. Heat. Consuming. Go. Go. Go. Where do we go?
It's one note in a melody held darker in the caverns below, and the rabbit-child at his side shudders, but pushes closer, cleaving to his leg and burying his face into his robes. Where do we go?
He finishes a last haunting note on Chenqing, subtle shift in expression leaving his eyes looking for Lan Zhan. )
Trapped or greedy, what was never laid to rest sleeps fitfully now. We'll wake it, going further in, but cleansing won't work too far from its fattened centre.
[ Trapped. Greedy. Cleansing won't work. And where did it last fail them, but the embers that brokered Wei Ying's resurgence, the cracked, shade-moistened ground of the burial mounds. Where else would death compound and deepen itself, core to flesh and skin made new, a body hollowed?
Beneath his feet, gravel betrays itself, slips and sinks like sea water, churning. He cuts his path, knowing his place throughout Wei Ying's communion — a steadfast, but silent companion, the hand that reaches for Wei Ying's talisman to cordially replicate it, weave of faint and foreign sorcery coalesced in the borrowed cinnabars of qi, spelling calligraphy on a second parchment. No crude blood's spill, no waste of the body's waters. Only Wangji's half of the bound talismans, husband to the waiting wife on the vacant, sterile stone. A dutiful pair.
He'd laugh, but a pair of striations end Wei Ying's song, and he's stranded, briefly — wrenching himself awake from Chenqing's thrall, discovering new depths to the song's flavour. Bitter, now, with a hint of melancholy. Ephemeral, where before it was once moist and fertile ground, cardamom.
To know a man is to know his magic, his music, his core's flow. To marry one is to marry all. The spectre of his guqin looms, translucid beside him. He dispels it, before it can gain flash. ]
I take responsibility.
[ For the spirits they wake, the torment they invite, the tightness of his lungs, wrung and sickly when he enters the corridor once more first, thrust in damp heat and slick, suffocating madness, in the impossibility of a breath taken easily. If he suffers one heartbeat, Wei Ying endures its stop. He knows the difference between them, knows better than to complain. On his nape, sweat glides down like beads on string.
Lethargy is not an option, not with hours giving chase outside for each long moment within. He makes good time to a destination that withholds itself, vacuous and imperceptible, the liminal space between sleep and dripping awake. Too warm, and the burn moulding with his core, the deeper down the burrow he buries himself, barely recalling to turn back, now and then, to listen — flinching to the scent of burned flesh, the unambiguity of murder —
And stops when he nears it hole like a heart and a core, a waiting cavern with a bounty of tunnelled exits. At the heart of it, slate of stone spread endless like a hopeful maiden, painted in thin, rusted rivulets of blood dried and mud passed. Time, gone with it. And remains, beside and beneath and around it: dust and stone, shadow and fat, burning — and bodies, like paper marionettes, husks of dried skin guarding the walls, sleeping.
Dead, before he need inquire. Dead, perhaps, before Wangji was even a man grown. He dips down, whites scattered about him, drenching in ash, and raises soil in cupped hands, blows it tenderly in the crisped, empty face of one of the waiting cadavers. Sees not a flinching, not breath caught or moving the dirt particles that settle down, not a final gasp. After, the second investigation: hand to the mummified corpse's, tickling the wrist, extending himself subtly to catch a sense of energy that never reveals itself.
Ah, but he is ready to confirm the verdict, head turned to gaze after Wei Wuxian and — ]
They are harmle —
[ — less, until the arm he'd held turns, clawed, livened husk's hand catching Wangji's wrist now. Dead, but different from Wei Ying's creations — possessed. ]
( He holds a sustained note as he crouches down, pulling the rabbit-child to him and standing again, leaping backward out of the open cavern.
The muted horror in seeing that husk take hold of Lan Zhan's wrist becomes, without much thought, narrowed eyes and his flute shoved into his belt, second arm around the child. Shivering and clinging, both rabbit and boy, he's reassuringly alive in a field of shivering, unfurling husks of dead, possessed in a manner Wei Wuxian avoided, with the troubles that came along in preserving the original soul.
Unlike those, these lingering malevolences don't need to fight what isn't there, and they shudder at the sharp whistling Wei Wuxian produces, slowing, halting temporarily, but not stopped.
It's buying time. He shifts the child to pull a talisman free, tossing it at the second mummified corpse reaching for Lan Zhan, seeing it strike home and remembering how many he'd covered Wen Ning in while trying to pull his consciousness back from the roaring abyss of the resentful energies he'd been filled with to overflowing. It's similar here, in once sense, but the corpse responds with a shudder and draws back a step, too strong again to be unmade by one such thing, or even properly bound, but it reaches for its head and ears like the memory of listening can block out Wei Wuxian's retreating whistle.
Lan Zhan better be coming; he withdraws for the sake of the child more than himself, but he doesn't stop sounding, whistle eerie and disorienting for the waking dead in their rasping, clawing, strangely weighted manner.
Not all wake. Despite the lined walls of mummified forms, most don't stir, the focus remaining near Lan Zhan, and near the retreat Wei Wuxian makes. Sightless eyes turn their direction, darkness overflowing, and the scent of burnt fat and fur and hair and the sulphuric tinge to it all builds, a memory being called on for a greater hunger, a divesting, a recollection, a yearning.
Different forms stalled in their hauntings, but still bottomless hunger for accumulated, misshapen wants from lingering impressions of what had once been the thoughts of the living; now, however, simply a drive from the dead.
Not fire, this place. Fire has been here too often. Water; he has that heavy, ironic sense of it, but water may very well be part of what they need.
He doesn't even manage Lan Zhan's name, too busy in his whistling and protection of the child in his arms. )
[ They do not retreat, but fumble. Later, he will think: they fought a war side by side, toppled Jin Guangyao after. Found step in each other's shadow, learned the shape of where their instincts began, and their knowledge ended — and perfected the synchrony that deepens them now in their cowardice.
Once, retreat was hasty, crude like a blunt sword's cut, but tolerable bitterness for even the most sensitive palate. Twice, makes the harder swallow: Wei Ying plays, the child erodes down to trembled lines, and Wangji, rescued of his one assailant, pulls back, ashen and resolute.
He trips, nearly, step ungainly, pebbles and gravel beneath his foot too — warm. This, the sulphurous scent of heat brewing, the bubbling of his boiling blood in veins too dilated to contain it. The creatures, mummified and sallow, thicken their movements, tamed also by the darkened tempo of temperatures, rise and fall and tongue-lulling madness.
Look: the white of his eyes, bright and cruel, the fright in it that sweeps when the spirits make for Wei Ying with that sickened, proprietary greed Wangji has never allowed himself to forget since he first glimpsed it in full at Nightless City. Look again, only, at the child, cradled in Wei Ying's arms, contained. And do not look, when Lan Wangji's arm turns fierce on Wei Ying's waist, dragging him to pivot — not back, as might be admirable and wise, but down another of the linked corridors, half lifting, half pushing Wei Ying farther, quickening their pace. ]
The heat here. It burns them. [ A nod at the child. Keep running. ] And they burned him.
[ He felt it, blaze and scar on his qi when it poured a night's span, to wrestle the creature's hurts. Behind him, they give chase, slowly: Wei Ying's fast friends, the moaning, pained dead, until Wangji recalls Wei Ying's own trickery and casts a warding wall behind them. Enough to stall, if not stay their pursuers.
They cannot bring an offensive attack here, not in the squirming, narrowed belly of the tunnel, not with stone and warmth stifling them, burying them alive. Think. Think. ]
It did not wake until it sensed me. [ A pause, a thick swallow. Both, more than he can afford. The dead here might be... intelligent. Waited, until Wangji was lured, for all even so little base strategy has avoided Wei Ying's creations in the past, barring the more sophisticated Wen Ning. No. More likely: ] It answered movement. Life. Blood water.
[ ...water. Burning. Too much heat. He thinks — ]
Wei Ying. How did they die?
[ He knows, Wei Ying always knows, communed with them even now to subdue them. Cannot look away. ]
( Wei Wuxian finds himself caught and turned, hastening the lift and fall of his feet down the side passage Lan Zhan has selected, lips pursing for a moment that slides past as quickly as they do, child half tucked into his outer robe trembling and ducking his head down further still.
Two kinds of burning, he thinks, listening to Lan Zhan as they run; the one caused by fires, where wood or stone might burn or flow, and the heat carried by water. )
They didn't burn him in the same way. Those weren't blisters from water, those were burns from fire.
( Something is being chased here, other than them, with raspy footsteps and echoes of voices that aren't voices, shouts and screams from a time removed from their own. Similar and different to the ones from the day before, calling for blood, chasing down their rabbit boy.
Lan Zhan wards behind them, and pours over the facts, Wei Wuxian bouncing the child closer, fur tickling at his throat. Or was it hair? He doesn't glance down to check, feeling chubby fingers holding tight to his inner robes. )
Ash. Heat they couldn't breathe through. Waters boiling over and off, rivers running red.
( These tunnels around them now, striated lines from their hip level downward. Outflows of lava buried this deep, forming the tunnels below, a landscape where the mountain had been reshaped in the wake of what natural disaster had fallen. Or what triggered disaster? Had an earth dragon turned over, or something else? The mountain carries an echo of a roar and booming, and there is water beyond these walls: source of heat, source of scent, but cut off from direct access? )
The waters.
( Shifting the child, slowing down to reach out with one hand to touch the wall. )
The ones used for healing, they've been locked away. Lan Zhan, the shifts with what happened left them burnt and buried in ash and fire and heat. The waters—none of them have access to the waters anymore.
( But they want them. They crave them, the life's blood of this place, something thriving and close, close, but no matter how they summon, no matter what husks throwing themselves forward do, they can't find it. Can only find and steal and burn out the vitality in other hapless creatures who stray into their territory...
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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. )
no subject
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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[ At least, until Lan Wangji has completed his petty rituals, and is at liberty to resume this conversation.
He is not as Wei Ying, an animal easily contented to retire for the evening without licking away his hurts, righting the many-headed wrongs of his violated presentation. Luck money and talismans come neatly packaged, for all the humility of the folded paper they bear within. So too, the human body, the chief cultivator: only a man married to rites, bereft of particular merit or creativity, raised to rank by popular agreement that he is of least prickling convictions — showered in lace and finery and the regalia passed down by dubious predecessors, now gradually entertained, for no reason beyond the tolerance of the heavens, as divine. Lan Wangji wakes each day mortal, saunters out of the jingshi a man above men. A product of the Sunshot campaign's legacy.
The guan, first, spider legs of silver absconded between tresses and binds, gently wrestled. His layers, silk and cotton and filigree of glittered thread. His boots, a quick dismissal. Then the modesty screen, splash of his bathing water, the incense stick to mind his wounds and his trailing ankle, to remember the practicalities of healing his own indiscretions. Poorly done, if he is but one, and three mouths — four, the rabbit's joined — depend on him. The athleticism of his golden core will only keep warm and alive if he factors in a certain, inevitable lability of recuperation.
No matter. He returns cleansed, ensconced in his the lesser layers consigned to sleep, with the afterthought of consideration — an ewer, heavy and lukewarm only through the grace of talisman work, scryed in salt and suds (more expenditure) and he discharges it alongside two of the inn's bathing cloths, on Wei Ying's half of this great debate, their sleeping arrangement.
There is a larger accommodation, mere steps away, he conveys with the idle, slow rise and fall of his brows, to an inattentive audience of three. One, he rescues from the swarming, cradling the rabbit in his arms despite its unambiguous heft and lying down on his... side of the cumbersomely smaller, narrower wood and stone slate. The sigh that tortures his lungs does so with the love and care of Zewu-Jun, who has warned him, time and time again, against the dangers (a multitude) of pinning his fate to that of men who are possessed of finer hair than sensibilities.
Not for the first time, tickling the periphery of Wangji's cheek as he settles down, Wei Ying's glistens, raven-feathered and smooth. Irritating. And compounded, when the rabbit nuzzles, viciously pleased when Wangji resumes his strokes and the subtle drain of his energy for healing — Wei Ying brought their new visitor into their lives. Wei Ying and jade rabbits. ]
We return tomorrow. [ A pause, weighed and bartered between the tell-tale pleasantries of his hand on stunted fur. ] The rabbit, also. [ And another breath, hard laboured. Listen. ] We do not surrender him.
[ But what better bait for their own prey, than the life denied to them? Men that defied death to trail after this one creature, desiccated, will not forfeit it when it presents itself so freely before them once more. This much is plain.
And yet, another complication, lingered like sugared thread between them: ]
We will need a time reference for the outside. We lost a day.
[ An hour's incursion in dark depths, and a spring day's passage, from sunrise to sundown, in the waiting world. They cannot afford to lose track in their journey. ]
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We've slept on worse.
( Is his idle comment, not a helpful reasoning for why they ignore the platform of the bed for the narrower one of the seat, but still, this is also not so cumbersome or uncomfortable a place. He shifts after Lan Zhan makes his own settled piece, Qingshan drooling and deeply slumbering already, small fist curling in and uncurling to pat, in his sleep, his uncooperative pillow. Wei Wuxian handles the sudden assault on his chest with a fond pat, then shifts child and tips him sideway, until he's framing Lan Zhan and his armful of rabbit and the visible relaxation that speaks of healing injuries, more peaceful fates.
All this so he might sit up, look to his own attempts at libations that never make it beyond washed hands and a washed face, a damp wipe at the back of his neck, the column of his throat. Qingshan snuggles into the firmness of his father's side, encounters the fur of the rabbit, frowns and mutters baby nonsense before patting and sneezing, then settling back down.
Wei Wuxian watches this from peripheral vision, heart warmed. Chilled in turns by a seriousness that follows, as he glances down to Lan Zhan as he speaks, bathing cloth against his throat.
Words. Parceled out as Lan Zhan's usually are, weighted as they always will be, meaningful and not empty, most often. He might say always, but he's heard words that have lesser meanings than intended out of Lan Zhan's lips. He remembers those with a sort of fondness that says nothing about their context, and everything about the joy and challenge in discovering just how Lan Zhan could be found to throw his wit and the sharpness of his tongue against those as he saw fit.
That's not tonight's thought. Right now, it's simpler, met with a firm, slow blink of his eyes, drifting from Lan Zhan's face to the rabbit yao, all rabbit now. )
I have an idea. ( Several, really. ) In tracking the time, where it warped. We return, with the rabbit. Qingshan—
( One child in danger is enough. Two is foolhardy, and nothing he wants to risk, not when he'd fought so hard raising A-Yuan and knowing the nature of children is to give their parents room for fear and surprise and hurried dashes to prevent disasters that might be prevented, and observe the learnings of what might not. )
Will not.
( Something known already, but also: )
Jiang Cheng needs to know.
( About this place? About Qingshan. Wei Wuxian, king of delivering his fosterling adopted sons to others stoops?
No, no, not that, and never intended. Never knowing who had lived, when so many had marched to their death for the sake of a powerful man's greed and his paper thing promise.
He sets the towel aside, having held it like an absent thought for too long, then settles again, curved inward, only by circumstance toward Lan Zhan. Qingshan is who settles into the space between chest and stomach and Lan Zhan's side, and that rabbit, such a large presence, is almost comedic in this little group. Jade rabbits, moon rabbits, and rabbits of another kind. )
Lan Zhan... how's your ankle?
( Said as he strokes fingers over Qingshan's mussed, dark hair, looking from child to fellow parent. Sleep is hemming in again, but so are busy thoughts, puzzles for the solving, the very source of so many sleepless nights while Lan Zhan's better habits meant regular resting, not chasing after concepts and possibilities on a midnight wind, as Wei Wuxian is still tempted toward. )
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They need not settle only for their worst encounters. There are beds in Cloud Recesses better equipped to welcome them — and their companion, the lone and shivered swell of the rabbit that spans Wangji's side, curled without self-preservation, finding the nook of his flank and the perch of his hip, snatched and pale and the cage of its furred body, matted. It yearns for the roiling, calm sorcery at Wangji's fingertips, the healing he doles out between cautious strokes, aware, distantly, that some creatures yearn for qi to their own demerit — that just as the resent that haunted Wei Ying's core despised and expelled his energy, others bask in it without control and measure.
And then there lies Qingshan, a perfect tyrant, condemning Wei Ying to a fraction of the slate's land he might claim, if nothing else, than for having happened upon their makeshift bed first. He nestles, then stretches out, settles his breathing; behind him, sketched in pallor under the very dead and dying of the brazier light, Wangji allows himself this one indulgence, to reach in and nuzzle at his second son's nape, and take in the sweet, milky scent of children. He is beautiful, harmless yet, innocent before he's learned the sword that will spell his path as much as it did that of his fathers, inexorably. Let him stay so, only a little while longer.
Wei Ying's gaze finds him too readily, too soon. Even here, before a man who knew him before he knew himself, Lan Wangji can allow himself only so much indulgence. Exhibitionism ill suits his kind and his clan. And the inn's room rises white and soulless, wind rearing its noxious head to carry in the quiet, questioning shivers of midnight. The eye of fireside flame blinks, long and idle, but sputters on. ]
Better, come morning.
[ His ankle, a needles' cushion of pulsing hurts. Earlier, he supplied it enough of his qi that the wound should be a petty inconvenience in the morning, but no disadvantage in combat. This much, he still recalls: never be so spartan that you make a nuisance of your person. Never let censorship reduce your use — or hurt, or old wonder, or that heinous, dogged thing, bitter vengeance. It lives in him, stoked; warms him better than flame, keeps his hand on the rabbit's back firm, undaunted. ]
What words is he owed? [ The creature, monster, the distantly inherited pain of Yunmeng, uncle removed to Wangji's true son. ] Jiang Wanyin.
[ Better than 'Jiang Cheng', courtesy the noose that steals breath, ransoms it for slivers of well-invested resent. He remembers: Yunmeng, north or south or lake water, calling — Jiang Cheng's territory. By right, the matter falls under his stewardship. And though no lesser gentleman would ask a written report of the chief cultivator, protocol entitles the lord of a realm to understanding the plagues that storm his province.
All the same. All the same, and Wangji's lower lip catches under half-dead bite, teeth combing for blood that never yields to him. Not even this is his. Not even petty pain. ]
You wish him in attendance?
[ Of all the sicknesses, the fleas, the parasites. To think Lan Wangji should expose another son to the sickness of Jiang Cheng. A gift, as any of the others Wei Ying has ever asked of him: humble. Cruel. He is hollowed at times, by these reminders — that every man in Wei Ying's life occupies a place of privilege, where Lan Wangji's steadfastness writes a foregone conclusion. ]
Your brother excels at war.
[ Not exorcism. ]
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It isn't what he was asking, to bring Jiang Cheng along; he misses what he and his brother were, once, but he doesn't refute the striking out, or the way it's calmed in that confrontation of tears from Jiang Cheng where he still held himself back. Facing the past, facing the present, how does he account for both?
He barely's managing with Lan Zhan.
He reaches out, pokes at Lan Zhan's cheek with a lopsided smile and serious eyes. )
Lan Zhan.
( This isn't his to fix. He can't make a soulmate and a brother find common ground unless and until they want to; and he knows them both too well to believe in much of their capitulations.
Owning affections, he supposes, is hardest with adults. Children, the weak, the animal, it's so much easier without the complication. )
We're within Yunmeng's reach. He should know to keep an eye out, later.
( He at least didn't keep pressing at Lan Zhan's cheek, instead hand falling to brush over Qingshan's head, stroking his hair. Qingshan grunts and presses himself closer to Lan Zhan's side. The rabbit, warm in his touch, and soothed by his qi; Wei Wuxian reaches out to pat that shoulder with the hand resting on the rabbit. )
Rest. It's what heals.
( For all of them, even more than qi. )
Better come morning, right?
( His ankle, the other hurts and hits, the planning for Qingshan's safety, the rabbit yao child now sharing their seated bench turned bed.
If anything, let him be the one to fail to rest. Lan Zhan will always wake too early. )
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Turns, abrupt like summer storm, to shift the head that contained the rabbit's bellied roundness before and splay it, proprietary, over the land of Wei Ying's breast, slipped down — to the core that waits, a haunting of itself, house and home to wasted potential. Nothingness, consuming the qi Wangji directs senselessly, without reason. Most energy will separate and eradicate itself before reaching its intended target. Only a fraction survives the resentment's filter, and yet he feeds, stubborn and fond and joints twitching, holds Wei Ying's gaze for gelid drifts of time and dares him to object. ]
Better. [ Cartilage broken and splinters of bone, between grit-gravel of teeth. ] Come morning.
[ Presume, then, to intercede: to deny Lan Wangji the invasion of a healing hand, but accept Jiang Cheng's dauntless intrusion. Presume to summon him from the dead, limp mouth of Lotus pier's strength here, to share Wangji's bed. Enough of him, his sickness, the cut of his poisoned mouth like a coiled snake's, waiting to strike at Nightless City — turmoiled, when Wei Ying let go, as if his sword had not wished it so, had not struck the opportunity.
Jiang Cheng is lord here, but no king is always welcome.
He sleeps, steadfast, still seeding energy squandered first on the rabbit, then on Wei Ying, two recipients unlikely to dismiss him — startles awake, with a jolt and dried mouth and stiffness of his back, where the slate's eaten its home against his spine. Sun seeps in like tea infusion, shy with early spring — pale as Lanling Jin's maidens, crafty with their powders.
He stirs, considered: knowing that not all creatures wake with mao shi, that Wei Ying will want a handful of incense sticks further. That Qingshan barely blinks to brief awareness, then curls into his stilled father, patting Wei Ying's arm with a disgruntled fist, as if to punish the one man who stays within reach of his aggression. The rabbit, traitorous, reshapes itself as a sickle against Wei Ying's hip, grazing in sleep.
Better, come morning: Wei Ying at peace, Qingshan refresh, the rabbit aglow with a full coat of fur. Protesting, Wangji's limbs negotiate his release of the slate, the morning rituals of cleansing, meditation, a choice few stretches through the forms. A torpid binding of his clothes, then a slow walk beyond their quarters, once the inn is abuzz with enough life to sketch the course of the morning servants.
Early milk for Qingshan, barely spilled. A request for Wei Ying's fresh water, a proper meal, some vegetables for their... furred visitor. And a lengthier interview, a few choice conversations, the inevitable logistics.
He returns a man victorious, thick doors whispered to a close behind him, step light on ill-lacquered floor. Knelt by the bed-side, he dares the final act of bravery: stirring Wei Ying awake, with barely the suggestion of his hand on a willowy back, two fingers tapping the starting notes of a once-upon-a-time lost song on the pale stretch of Wei Ying's cheek. ]
Wei Ying. [ Wake. Wake, now. Come. He waits until there's the start of light behind Wei Ying's eyes, when they open, until there is wit enough in them that he might yet hope for answer. ] Outside waits Lian Hua. Sixteen of age. Elder sister to four. She mends inn cloth and visitors' robes.
[ Her name, her happenstance, her occupation. Her credentials. Listen. ]
She offers to mind Qingshan. Rise. [ Wake one eye, then the other, and the bones that carry this carcass whole. ] Give blessing.
[ Bathe swiftly. Meet her, one child grateful to attend to another, for a wealth of silvered shrapnel. Unlikely, that Wei Ying should scrape the rust off his dark heart and mine within the resent to reject her, once Lan Wangji has tried the girl, only to find her worthy and true. All the same, one parent's courtesy, extended to another: he may pass judgement of her, before they entrust her with a loved son. ]
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He wants to say what he knows Lan Zhan already knows, so instead he says nothing, just offers the ghost of a smile, that says, he understands this, too. It was his choice. Digging this out, replanting, seeding someone else's soil.
Some things will not be better come morning. He chooses to only think of those that will, and so that smile, on his lips, and the nod of his head, shifting his hair, is all the answer he gives under Lan Zhan's hand. )
Come morning.
( And he does not sleep, not for longer than he pretends to at first, eyes closed, surrounded more by the warmth that is unimpeded breathing, so many sighs and signs of life around him he feels fully encased in the opposite of the nightmares that still look to take hold. Curbed by living sounds, until he's lulled past the bemoaning of midnight winds, the witched hours of a night that he welcomed once, as easier to move within, as a haunting of his own.
He wakes, slow, to warmth and noise and light, and wants to linger in that lasting illusion of everything perhaps for a moment being somewhat closer to okay.
Tap. Tap tap tap. Is he being tapped out, and he mumbles something as his eyes slit open, sleep hazed and unfocussed, staring then at Lan Zhan uncomprehendingly. Awareness spills past the lingering warmth, and he starts to stretch, coming alive and alert to Lan Zhan's statements and a stretch of limbs that leaves toes curling and arms pressing down against the slate that's likewise left back and joints aching, but the better kind. The aches that wear off with a warmed up body and a series of stretches, which he'll engage in as soon as he stands up, instead stifling a yawn.
Lan Zhan is nothing if not efficient. He smiles, lopsided, and brushes at the shifting mass of his hair down his back from his seated position. )
Leaving him with a tracking talisman?
( Not for her, this well credentialed young lady. Not for Qingshan, exactly. More for both of them, a sort of alarm to set them in motion, if it comes flying to find them. Tracking them down as warning that something unpleasant this way came, and a callback to find him.
Wei Wuxian, paranoid? Let it be known between the two of them that his fears in loss run deeper than he ever lets show. There was a greater careless trust in A-Yuan's life that does not rest with A-Shan, and long years run short imagining children's graves leave shadows against his heart.
All of them with these shadows of losses; basking better in the sunlight, aware of what might chill the marrow.
He near fumbles his way off the not-bed they'd made a make-shift sleeping surface, rubs at his hip with a grimace as ends up with: a rabbit, large, cautiously nosing after him, and Qingshan, avidly walking here and there. He only seems to remember Wei Wuxian once Wei Wuxian remembers water, and there comes he who toddles, latching onto his leg to stare up and mouth the words again and again, up, up, up, and then the basin and washcloth for one man's face turns into morning ablutions with man and child, water dripping down Wuxian's front, child in his arms once they're both patted dry.
It's swift, as much as anything with children can be. The rabbit has watched, has at one point stretched out a furred arm that ended in a human hand to tug on robes; Wei Wuxian tamping down a shudder at the strangeness in order to smile down at the long eared face that settled back into only rabbit form after, twitching a sweet nose up at him, eyes dark as tar. The rabbit moves, then, in search of Lan Zhan; and Wei Wuxian carries A-Shan forward, seeks to meet this Lian Hua, offers her sweet words and apologies for waiting, and sharper eyed catalogues, but he has her blushing even without meaning to, and her youthful belief in good deeds paying in good merits and good coin enough of a reassurance that she will mind, for the sake and hope of what else comes after: what more coin, with so many younger siblings, at least two also girls.
Qingshan is entrusted to the domesticity of this life, while the rabbit is gathered in loaned robes, and Wei Wuxian carries him forth at his hip as if he's hiding yet another child from a world too vast to be lost within. Ill he says all of once, his own features pulled into a tired, grave sort of understanding met by the old woman who asks.
Poor little thing, she says, and with her blessings, they continue down the road.
He doesn't ask if Lan Zhan's arranged for any word to fly toward Jiang Cheng. He holds off for the day, after a night of ache and hollow. Word tomorrow, after this progresses, will be enough. The lightning needn't strike when he who travels for the chaos has already arrived; and Wei Wuxian is he who takes the resentful, commands, contains, redirects; Jiang Cheng is one more blade and one more blunder, one more division of attention and affection.
He's divided twice as it is. Trice, when by Qingshan, and more, as the donkey rejoins, but those two are for later, and he thinks again on the problem of time. )
Mm, Lan Zhan. Tracking the time, linked talismans might help to function. Like with message papers, only the talisman carries the instruction to send each marking of time as it passes.
( It's one thought, with more percolating, ready to drip into a cup of possibility at any particular time. )
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There's a bustle and buzz, Wangji supposes, a quiet and private and proprietary exhilaration in witnessing strange novelty paraded down one's market place. Two young gentlemen, and cultivators — and their sickly child. What wonder, in a village reduced. Can Wangji fault them? He took a young bride, mere months before, in the drowned village. Now, with him walks a new mother, and Wei Ying's conceit of a sickly child. At this pace, Wangji will wear, soon, his uncle's whites and behold nephews frolicking with their tempestuous first loves across rooftops and awnings.
( And Wei Ying, so heartbreakingly domestic — a tracking charm, imbued silently on the bell string he gifted their son with premature caution. It cost Wangji so little to allow the whim. )
He bears the inevitable road conversations as he did his childhood fevers, the burst of his first sword calluses: quietly, absently, with slack-jawed indifference. Knowing Wei Ying will maraud through the crowd, and he might yet follow after, swift to intercede only with Bichen's sheathed length when a man's touch comes too close, by accident, to Wei Ying's flank, or a child means to tug at the swaddling of the 'babe', when merchants would stay Wei Ying's step to seduce him to smooth, sheening displays of spice, laid out like quarry gains after an ample hunt.
Before, he was wasteful: Wei Ying spread the seed of his idle, empty chatter in the wind. Sixteen years of silence have taught Wangji to hold his hand out and catch each word.
Time tracked through twin talismans — a curious, make-shift solution combining old artistry, the mundane, and Wei Ying's taste for homey invention. Fair, but for one miscalculation. ]
Set one talisman to burn once a day's passed. Its twin, to burn with us.
[ After, he remembers to explain himself, as with his students of Cloud Recesses — aware, distantly, that Wei Ying knows him in all the ways that shape him from root to branch as a man, but has missed the precarious, splintered sophistication of his progress as a cultivator. They were unequal once, Wei Ying the brazen prodigy, mind blade-sharp but scattered. Time's cheated him of righteous advantage, his knowledge divided and doled out, Wangji's among the many hands to benefit of the Yiling Patriarch's learning. ]
The act of communication between talismans will take seconds on one plan, half a shi on the other.
[ A lag that will only accrue with each transport of an hour's passage. Better to have only one measure, and turn back when their time's done. A day in the world of lights. Mere hours, in the nether lands — four to one, if he evaluated well enough, on their past encounter.
No matter. They will learn soon. Past the village, the temple, the twisted, turning garden roads like thinned rib bones leading below, to an earthly spine: the stone's as they left it, flat and warming under spring sun, frantically beaten. He splays a hand over it, fingers spidering and open, pressure thin as if he expects the reciprocation of a beating heart, the kick of a growing child through a gravid mother's womb.
Nothing. No one.
And when he rips the fetters of yesterday's wards free and jolts the stone over, in a stuttered succession of rolls — only silence. Dark, crackled tar, sulfur's breath. Again, as before: charred meat, ashes, heat cloying. And it strikes him, then: the nether depths. The temple, built hastily above distant eruption.
He does not step. Readies the talisman, one half of parchment, for Wei Ying to bind to its fellow, left outside. A donation of Gusu Lan's wealth, expended on strange cause. He hesitates: ]
Wei Ying. The mountains bled fire, decades ago. Did they... purify after?
[ Collect their dead, bury them well. Salt the grounds and sage the air, and offer amnesty to spirits after. Four times, four years of mourning, and each death named, and each spirit thanked, each altar served with rice and wine, and mourning — great tragedy requires theatre. Did they carry out the functions?
No. No, they would not be here, Wei Ying and he, were the rites well performed. They are, as ever, married to the chaos bound in the world, made flesh in each other. ]
Ask. [ Better the honeyed, sweet tongue of the voluble Patriarch, than the Lan approach to sterile interrogation. Inquiry subjugates spirits, brokers no opportunity for diplomacy or negotiation — wins truth, but not good will. Wei Ying walks a more sinewy, treacherous path. ] Or I shall.
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Would you believe me if I said... )
Then you're asking for one to light once it goes dark, here, so pin it high up enough to not fall into early shadow or else remember tonight's a fuller moon... the moon's already up, isn't it? It should set for a while tonight, come back up again later.
( Not the moment for thoughts about rivers of stars spilling across the skies, just the conversation of light and dark; time passes in both directions, but if they truly want to claim responsibility, they'd test it more slowly, more surely. Even using their message paper, a count off that takes longer with the furthering of any distortion...
Really, in the end, this is why there should be some third party, but he doesn't mention it, just listens, and hums a considered note.
It reminds him of god realms and devil realms and ghost forests, that distortion: places where a day might pass, and yet a decade has flown by in the mortal realm. What a shudder inducing thought, that kind of total cut off from the heartbeat of the living world they currently embraced.
Then again, that's the condition they face: death, a sluggish, viscous flow, the decay of rot and the mummification of intent.
Here again at a boulder barrier that is only a suggestion, in the end, of something sturdy. A failing plug, because stone erodes, turns into rounded pebbles that eventually turn into dust lifted on the wind as surely as the ashes of their incense.
He shifts the rabbit-child for the umpteenth time, brow furrowed, an ache unfurling when he closes his eyes and opens himself up to that heat, the decay, the sulphur and cooking; a pause before he has the talisman meant for the outside ready for its affixing to stone, as if that anchors it any better.
There's a pulse of festering rot, a pustule and abcess left undrained and to calcify in the pressure of its covered, buried: terror. )
No... no, but the whole, not all of it needed it. Here did. Here, everything was lacking.
( Some places burn clean in their horrific disasters. Down the mountain, there's no such touch, but here, where it had been healing as much as a past buried beneath the grounds, there were longstanding stains and long lessened bounds of humanity or animal nature to hold any of it in.
No proper theatre, but also, no proper memories, no proper guidance for lives cut short in such an abrupt and violent way. Anger in things like those grows with time, nurses itself stronger.
He taps his outside talisman in place. Lowers the rabbit-child to the ground, and tugs his hand, his awkward legs, his rabbit face that's turned into something a little less grotesquely alien with familiarity, wraps child-rabbit fingers into the weave of his lower robes. )
Hold on.
( He tells a child that does not really understand language, and now, Chenqing in hand, he steps forward to the head of those stairs into darkness, and he plays an entreaty, a request, met with weeping and a shadow coalescing beyond the touch of light: white haired woman, without eyes, on her knees, tears like blood staining the planes of her face. Burns, across all of her; seen and then abruptly gone, glass reflecting different lights while spinning in place. )
I hear their screams, sense some intent, or else I dare Empathy.
( He doesn't dare Empathy. He needs better reason than "because," with a child at his leg, with Lan Zhan at his back, with no gaggle of disciples clustered in a makeshift safehouse, and all of them dancing at the end of someone else's strings. )
I ask, but give me a moment to parse what it is I hear when I listen.
( A step, then another, and he resumes his playing, and the white haired ghost is as burnt or smooth skinned as each note inquires further, and its more nuances of emotion that reaches out to say: Pain. Heat. Consuming. Go. Go. Go. Where do we go?
It's one note in a melody held darker in the caverns below, and the rabbit-child at his side shudders, but pushes closer, cleaving to his leg and burying his face into his robes. Where do we go?
He finishes a last haunting note on Chenqing, subtle shift in expression leaving his eyes looking for Lan Zhan. )
Trapped or greedy, what was never laid to rest sleeps fitfully now. We'll wake it, going further in, but cleansing won't work too far from its fattened centre.
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Beneath his feet, gravel betrays itself, slips and sinks like sea water, churning. He cuts his path, knowing his place throughout Wei Ying's communion — a steadfast, but silent companion, the hand that reaches for Wei Ying's talisman to cordially replicate it, weave of faint and foreign sorcery coalesced in the borrowed cinnabars of qi, spelling calligraphy on a second parchment. No crude blood's spill, no waste of the body's waters. Only Wangji's half of the bound talismans, husband to the waiting wife on the vacant, sterile stone. A dutiful pair.
He'd laugh, but a pair of striations end Wei Ying's song, and he's stranded, briefly — wrenching himself awake from Chenqing's thrall, discovering new depths to the song's flavour. Bitter, now, with a hint of melancholy. Ephemeral, where before it was once moist and fertile ground, cardamom.
To know a man is to know his magic, his music, his core's flow. To marry one is to marry all. The spectre of his guqin looms, translucid beside him. He dispels it, before it can gain flash. ]
I take responsibility.
[ For the spirits they wake, the torment they invite, the tightness of his lungs, wrung and sickly when he enters the corridor once more first, thrust in damp heat and slick, suffocating madness, in the impossibility of a breath taken easily. If he suffers one heartbeat, Wei Ying endures its stop. He knows the difference between them, knows better than to complain. On his nape, sweat glides down like beads on string.
Lethargy is not an option, not with hours giving chase outside for each long moment within. He makes good time to a destination that withholds itself, vacuous and imperceptible, the liminal space between sleep and dripping awake. Too warm, and the burn moulding with his core, the deeper down the burrow he buries himself, barely recalling to turn back, now and then, to listen — flinching to the scent of burned flesh, the unambiguity of murder —
And stops when he nears it hole like a heart and a core, a waiting cavern with a bounty of tunnelled exits. At the heart of it, slate of stone spread endless like a hopeful maiden, painted in thin, rusted rivulets of blood dried and mud passed. Time, gone with it. And remains, beside and beneath and around it: dust and stone, shadow and fat, burning — and bodies, like paper marionettes, husks of dried skin guarding the walls, sleeping.
Dead, before he need inquire. Dead, perhaps, before Wangji was even a man grown.
He dips down, whites scattered about him, drenching in ash, and raises soil in cupped hands, blows it tenderly in the crisped, empty face of one of the waiting cadavers. Sees not a flinching, not breath caught or moving the dirt particles that settle down, not a final gasp. After, the second investigation: hand to the mummified corpse's, tickling the wrist, extending himself subtly to catch a sense of energy that never reveals itself.
Ah, but he is ready to confirm the verdict, head turned to gaze after Wei Wuxian and — ]
They are harmle —
[ — less, until the arm he'd held turns, clawed, livened husk's hand catching Wangji's wrist now. Dead, but different from Wei Ying's creations — possessed. ]
Turn the child back.
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The muted horror in seeing that husk take hold of Lan Zhan's wrist becomes, without much thought, narrowed eyes and his flute shoved into his belt, second arm around the child. Shivering and clinging, both rabbit and boy, he's reassuringly alive in a field of shivering, unfurling husks of dead, possessed in a manner Wei Wuxian avoided, with the troubles that came along in preserving the original soul.
Unlike those, these lingering malevolences don't need to fight what isn't there, and they shudder at the sharp whistling Wei Wuxian produces, slowing, halting temporarily, but not stopped.
It's buying time. He shifts the child to pull a talisman free, tossing it at the second mummified corpse reaching for Lan Zhan, seeing it strike home and remembering how many he'd covered Wen Ning in while trying to pull his consciousness back from the roaring abyss of the resentful energies he'd been filled with to overflowing. It's similar here, in once sense, but the corpse responds with a shudder and draws back a step, too strong again to be unmade by one such thing, or even properly bound, but it reaches for its head and ears like the memory of listening can block out Wei Wuxian's retreating whistle.
Lan Zhan better be coming; he withdraws for the sake of the child more than himself, but he doesn't stop sounding, whistle eerie and disorienting for the waking dead in their rasping, clawing, strangely weighted manner.
Not all wake. Despite the lined walls of mummified forms, most don't stir, the focus remaining near Lan Zhan, and near the retreat Wei Wuxian makes. Sightless eyes turn their direction, darkness overflowing, and the scent of burnt fat and fur and hair and the sulphuric tinge to it all builds, a memory being called on for a greater hunger, a divesting, a recollection, a yearning.
Different forms stalled in their hauntings, but still bottomless hunger for accumulated, misshapen wants from lingering impressions of what had once been the thoughts of the living; now, however, simply a drive from the dead.
Not fire, this place. Fire has been here too often. Water; he has that heavy, ironic sense of it, but water may very well be part of what they need.
He doesn't even manage Lan Zhan's name, too busy in his whistling and protection of the child in his arms. )
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Once, retreat was hasty, crude like a blunt sword's cut, but tolerable bitterness for even the most sensitive palate. Twice, makes the harder swallow: Wei Ying plays, the child erodes down to trembled lines, and Wangji, rescued of his one assailant, pulls back, ashen and resolute.
He trips, nearly, step ungainly, pebbles and gravel beneath his foot too — warm. This, the sulphurous scent of heat brewing, the bubbling of his boiling blood in veins too dilated to contain it. The creatures, mummified and sallow, thicken their movements, tamed also by the darkened tempo of temperatures, rise and fall and tongue-lulling madness.
Look: the white of his eyes, bright and cruel, the fright in it that sweeps when the spirits make for Wei Ying with that sickened, proprietary greed Wangji has never allowed himself to forget since he first glimpsed it in full at Nightless City. Look again, only, at the child, cradled in Wei Ying's arms, contained. And do not look, when Lan Wangji's arm turns fierce on Wei Ying's waist, dragging him to pivot — not back, as might be admirable and wise, but down another of the linked corridors, half lifting, half pushing Wei Ying farther, quickening their pace. ]
The heat here. It burns them. [ A nod at the child. Keep running. ] And they burned him.
[ He felt it, blaze and scar on his qi when it poured a night's span, to wrestle the creature's hurts. Behind him, they give chase, slowly: Wei Ying's fast friends, the moaning, pained dead, until Wangji recalls Wei Ying's own trickery and casts a warding wall behind them. Enough to stall, if not stay their pursuers.
They cannot bring an offensive attack here, not in the squirming, narrowed belly of the tunnel, not with stone and warmth stifling them, burying them alive. Think. Think. ]
It did not wake until it sensed me. [ A pause, a thick swallow. Both, more than he can afford. The dead here might be... intelligent. Waited, until Wangji was lured, for all even so little base strategy has avoided Wei Ying's creations in the past, barring the more sophisticated Wen Ning. No. More likely: ] It answered movement. Life. Blood water.
[ ...water. Burning. Too much heat. He thinks — ]
Wei Ying. How did they die?
[ He knows, Wei Ying always knows, communed with them even now to subdue them. Cannot look away. ]
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Two kinds of burning, he thinks, listening to Lan Zhan as they run; the one caused by fires, where wood or stone might burn or flow, and the heat carried by water. )
They didn't burn him in the same way. Those weren't blisters from water, those were burns from fire.
( Something is being chased here, other than them, with raspy footsteps and echoes of voices that aren't voices, shouts and screams from a time removed from their own. Similar and different to the ones from the day before, calling for blood, chasing down their rabbit boy.
Lan Zhan wards behind them, and pours over the facts, Wei Wuxian bouncing the child closer, fur tickling at his throat. Or was it hair? He doesn't glance down to check, feeling chubby fingers holding tight to his inner robes. )
Ash. Heat they couldn't breathe through. Waters boiling over and off, rivers running red.
( These tunnels around them now, striated lines from their hip level downward. Outflows of lava buried this deep, forming the tunnels below, a landscape where the mountain had been reshaped in the wake of what natural disaster had fallen. Or what triggered disaster? Had an earth dragon turned over, or something else? The mountain carries an echo of a roar and booming, and there is water beyond these walls: source of heat, source of scent, but cut off from direct access? )
The waters.
( Shifting the child, slowing down to reach out with one hand to touch the wall. )
The ones used for healing, they've been locked away. Lan Zhan, the shifts with what happened left them burnt and buried in ash and fire and heat. The waters—none of them have access to the waters anymore.
( But they want them. They crave them, the life's blood of this place, something thriving and close, close, but no matter how they summon, no matter what husks throwing themselves forward do, they can't find it. Can only find and steal and burn out the vitality in other hapless creatures who stray into their territory...
... or who are fed there. )
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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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