( 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...
[ Waters boiling, rivers red. Ash and sulphur and the hard, lung-stripping ache of burn without finish. The eruption.
Its victims, unburied. Forgotten, and it's Wei Ying who makes a quilt of the weave-work of their evidence, Wei Ying who speaks with and unto the dead in their own tongue. The child-rabbit, who borrows the hybrid appearance of the human creature likelier to attract Wei Ying's sympathy, preying on his softened heart.
You know what you know, Wangji does not whisper, but remembers the glint of fear like festive silks, dressing the rabbit whole, like an unholy bride to the inevitability of Wei Ying's instincts to save and shelter. Remember, too, how Bichen was stayed then, before she could truly unsheathe for execution.
And he turns now, back rigid and body only lines, the sum of battle impulses — heated as the tunnels shake and groan, roiling. Ready to strike.
Water, Wei Ying says, and healing. Not locked away in the way of traditional bindings, but secured by the geology of the underground cave. >Distant from the burial rooms. He paces close enough to hover his hand over the exuding warmth of the wall, then — teeth gritting, body prepared for the hiss and the sharp surge of white pain when the burn strikes — rests his palm down. Beneath agony, the pulse of living water, of qi that can only thrive in cleanliness.
Breath laboured, he stands among a wreckage of dust and hot stone, and pivots to face Wei Ying unassuming — only his person and his fresh wounds and the quiet conviction of what must be done. ]
We reunite them. [ As true and indefatigable of a conclusion as the blood that thickens and sheds off his hand. ] Wei Ying. Bichen and talismans may rupture the wall. [ A mechanical deed, not without risk: they sit in labyrinths, without certainty of which wall's upheaval will seduce the ceiling down. ] Do we unleash the waters here, or bring the bones to water?
[ Can they lure so many bodies, mind? Which harm is greater, lesser? And he asks of Wei Ying, but gazes at the rabbit, and gleans too that the creature knows. That it will signal to Wei Ying, its chosen patron, the righteous path. ]
( He watches with brow furrowed, doesn't flinch at Lan Zhan's actions, for all part of him remembers burning underhand himself, which is odd: not one of his standard memories of pain that he has forgotten, but something borrowed. The rabbit-child clutching at him, partly tucked into his robes, and the soft hiss of a gasping inhalation, as the small one turns, rabbit-like nose twitching, ears long and shivering, the whole of his small body taunt.
Focussed on the chamber they'd escaped, and the husk waiting, thirsty, waiting to be filled.
He shifts his grip on the rabbit-child, whispers nonsense of reassurance he isn't cognoscente enough to remember what is in the saying even after the moment of its speaking. Thinks of their son, watched by a woman down the mountain, and the quakes, and the burning, and the flame. Of water, hot and quenching, cold and claiming, tepid and target of a dozen different ailments, swept and sundered. )
The altar. The waters flow above the altar, too.
( He looks to Lan Zhan, expression set. The child, rabbit and boy, stares down the hall too, as the sounds of the restless dead ebb and swirl as whispers and shadows, plucking at their periphery. Wash away, fill the emptiness, sooth the flesh that'd been made of nothing but ash from bone. )
We're going to have to do a lot of running if we bring down that, but... we might be able to shatter the altar, to reach down below.
( The unasked question: which, when both rely on Lan Zhan's strength paired with any talisman Wei Wuxian himself has made. The mechanics, and the brutality of strength, to sunder a ceiling, an altar, or perhaps the thickened walls of the same chamber. Only two perhaps fast enough to spare them from the overwhelming need of the wraiths that filled that chamber, thirst endless as the seas were vast. )
In his mind's eye, the construction abbreviates itself to sharp edges and dark corners and plain lines that insult the sophisticated architecture of a temple in aged luxury, but yield him the plan, plain: here, in the labyrinthine borrows, the dead wait their drops of holy water like heavens' alms. Above, the altar plugs flows, denies passage. Between them, the distinct but negligible separation of filth and gravel, tattered remains and detritus.
Crush the twinned ends, and the old masters' precaution to separate the temple attendants from the baths and the old graves, and hold on knife's blade, balanced, the living and the dead. Strike down, from the altar, or above from laired, chased ground. Better still.
He does not hold Wei Ying's starless gaze for the proposal. Would not presume, knowing it like a threadbare knot, fraying close to dissolution. ]
Take the child. [ The rabbit, once more elevated. Wei Ying's young, the crippled, the weak, the poor, those forever in want of salvation. ] Head to the altar.
[ And the shiver, the great, treacherous inevitability, that Lan Wangji should have to trust in Wei Ying to trick his pursuers out of the labyrinth, to reach the outside again, whole — as much, if not more than Wei Ying must trust in him to bide his time here, unharmed. Watching. Waiting.
His hand tickles the air surrounding the walls again, if only to feel the dragon's breath of captive heat, threatening its burn once more, to thrill himself with the delicious tangs of bearable agony. Quick, you are, to lick flame on him, but not quick enough. For he is of Gusu Lan, and the Lan are of winter, and ice will bear you down. ]
The talismans will alert me of sundown here. We strike at one time.
[ Time passes the quicker here, its many costs frail. He need not be exposed to the hunt of the dead as long as Wei Ying will wait above.
Tenuous, but he may prevail here. Wei Ying, for his part, must cut new path to reach above the grounds. ]
( He holds his gaze on Lan Zhan, the shadowed planes of it, the whites and blues and ice layered over a warmth he remembers to his own surprise, day after day. Not because it's new, the knowledge of it, but because he still comes to terms with if he, the man he's become, should want it as much as he does.
He cares, for the weak and unprotected, for the young and the old, for the sufferers and the suffering. Not with the blind persistence of his younger years, but he still feels the call to take action, has learned after months of travel on his own how to manage that, how to consider, how to move and not make himself the weightbearer for it all.
It is still a process of learning, to trust again, to allow himself the luxury of forgetting his own driving desire to carry more than he can or should. Even a child in his arms, recovering and frightened, half in his robes and shivering against his inner robes, ears long and covered in velvet soft fur, and he steels himself. Tips his head to Lan Zhan, Lan Wangji, Hanguang-jun. )
You too.
( Trust given, trust returned. He shifts the child on his hip and narrows his eyes, stepping forward on silent feet to flow into the dark, then hit stride, and he is everything he was said to be, and nothing like it at all in the moment where he is as alive as the husks of those who stir with his passage, as the blood of the child in his arms sings to them, as the scent of burning intensifies without flame, and Wei Wuxian recalls an older dance of survival and single minded belief, no room for worry, no room for anything but the efficiency of movement, the cold gaze that lacks forgiveness, no room for compromise.
It's not untouched that he emerges, but tattered in negligible ways; scratches as lacerations across his cheek, the backs of hands, the black robes that show little to nothing of their unwhole state. The rise of those final stairs find sunlight spilling over him and the child, protected and anointed in the blood of a man who bleeds clean, when he bleeds these days, and who gains the top, who hears the mournful howling cries of the undead at his back, who seals no entrance but finds they cannot, will not cross to the light, but creep forward greedy for the falling of it.
There is a framework in his mind, the geometry of architecture and energy flow, so that he bides each step its purpose as he says to the child, meant for ears below: )
Together, Lan Zhan.
( For the fall of the sun, for the moment that shadow reigns supreme, for when the fall of earth to shatter the dam holding back the cleansing this mountain has yearned for, pleaded for over an age might see its way through. Uneasy and destructive and healing, all these things and more. )
[ Together, but their pacing staggered, and Lan Wangji — stilted for longer than he will admit later, the hour and its danger passed. He sways, nausea striking his nape and his back, the cloying stench of burning inundating the passageway, drowning him past where he can draw true breath.
Still, he waits — and he waits — and keeps vigil, dancing around his site on firefly-light steps, ever circling without stilling long enough to give the dead cause for chase. Let his scent not catch, let his shadow not deepen, let him wander as his thoughts do, wander and stray like ghosts.
A prediction of some merit: time within the corridors is but a fraction of that passed in the outside world. Wei Ying's wards honour his name, fast, breezy, reliable. Within heartbeats of the first alarm drawn, Lan Wangji comes alive — that same breath, Bichen, her pallor sinking up and twisting, manipulate no more elegantly than a shovel, carving out the shape of stones, like every knife that aims the negative space between vertebrae.
He feels the tumult of coming water in the vibration of dirt, feels the raw ache of it bearing down before it splints rock like heavy needle, thrusting down, first in rivulet, then in stream, then in disaster —
And they scream for it, the dead who wait, who waited their lifetime, who waited no further, for the white roil of water catching sulphur, bathing bones, releasing heat off old volcanic plaques. They recoil, run, and it is to Lan Wangji's shame, withdrawing beside them, that he does not understand at first, they run for the water.
So many dead, spirits, bones. So many unburied. The scratched out terror of each breath nearly prevents the next. He dashes out, limbs protesting, Bichen all but a stringing decoration — until he reaches the outside world with a gasp, his clothes tattered, his fingers all grime and his nails worn. A beggar, returned to the temple, exhausted by the last step he takes before Wei Ying in the great chamber, nearly destroyed.
When he speaks, first, sound eludes him. Then, a wheeze. At long last, coughed, the reckoning: ]
They are grateful. [ He wants to laugh. Can't. ] Grateful.
( The dead had flowed backward, when at first they sought to flow forward with the shadow. He knows that for Lan Zhan's movement even as he tucks the child in tight and himself sets from the ambling motion of a man retaining the looseness of limbs to one who acts, quick and steady. From above, the vibrations, the calculated angle and then driving down with qi stored by merit of patience and awareness that he doesn't have sparing, only efficiency. He's learned those calculations, smiles grimly as the ground buckles from beneath, as a distant roar sends water hissing upward, too, a dry creekbed hidden in overgrowth and filled with the autumn rains filled now from below, one outlet of many.
There's fear in his heart, as the dead shift, and scream, and flow like tumbling rapids push boats downstream in their turbulence. He holds his position, holds the point of broken altar, and the landscape around him and the child alters. His heart, steady and rabbit quick in turns, breath inevitable in and out of lungs, until the age that separates their beginning and their end resolves to a battered, tattered living, breathing, dirtied haunt of a man crosses the threshold into this broken place. Freedom a song that doesn't sing sweet, precisely, but that can be felt as surely as the quaking, with how the hidden depths of this once beautiful place, this age-old sanctuary, drives out its own infection with the puncturing wounds they've decorated its most sanctified grounds.
Wei Wuxian waits, and he lowers the child down, lets him take his feet, and features arranged into something more and more human, as the hours have passed. The fur receding, the nose turning small and human round, the eyes less large, and pale, so pale regardless. Hair pale too, until it's a white haired child with drooping, rabbit ears and a twitch that trembles in his arms. Toddles on his feet, then more sure, the healing of burns from the night prior showing as shining and pink, flesh knitting over, memories being absorbed by young skin.
Wei Wuxian steps toward Lan Zhan as he speaks. When the words come as a wheeze, and before him, the child moves faster. The rabbit-boy, who cannot truly make himself all boy, or all bunny, barreling forward to cling to Lan Zhan's dirtied robes, the wet tatters, and cling like a different child, a lifetime ago. To bawl, heartbroken and with relief, loss and the break away from a fear he hadn't words for, clinging on.
Lan Zhan was the last one to come up, and the last missing piece of his equally small world. Loss might not mean to him what it will in a few more years, but Lan Zhan returns, and the scary world is scary, but a little less so, now.
Wei Wuxian studies his face, stepping closer, one hand coming to rest on top of the sobbing child's head, the other offered, palm up, for Lan Zhan. )
Yeah. ( He could feel it, had felt the shift. ) They are.
[ This child will never be of human-kind, butchered into incongruity. Fate, sorcery and shrivelled magic distorted him, lengthened bone and stripped flesh and painted fur where joints and ligament shouls have shrieked the aches of negative space. Yet Wei Ying cradles him as he would a second, third son, and Lan Wangji knows the truth of him: he will come, as their other children have followed, to earn his place at the Cloud Recesses. So be it.
Brows briefly perked up to flag the token resistance of his incredulity, he clasps Wei Ying's hand, sweat of his nerves to the grit of Lan Wangji's palm, binding their fingers together and taking shameful advantage. Weight lent, he uses the balance to drop to one knee, depositing Bichen to her fettering and straining to sling an arm out and welcome the child in his keep.
He comes, more eager than any living thing should, but innocent in the way of every rabbit that's sought Lan Wangji out to nestle, pale against pallor, its frailty near his mourning sickness, both bare before the sun. Wangji allows it soot and succor, the warmth of his body, a slow and bartered reassurance. A second child waits with his minder in the inn; this one, here, now, heart a deep gong's swing, merits the full measure of Lan Wangji's attention.
They paralyse just so for longer than he'd intended, one arm around the child-rabbit, Lan Wangji's hand still clawing around Wei Ying's. He tugs down. ]
...we should not have left the Burial Mounds as we did.
[ A lacklustre segue, but for their private understanding: they should have salted the barren lands, cleansed away their shadows, extricated their decay. Should have set the grief and regret they summoned and grew in those lands, should have cultivated to their peace.
Lest they become this: festered. A fantasy of regrets. Wronged. ]
We will return there for amends.
[ Together, Wei Ying's word of each day. Very well. ]
( Wei Ying has it in him to fold gracefully, arm firm and balance for Lan Zhan where so often its been the other way around. Watches their third child, for who else will have this one? Who will contest, not seek out death for the sake of eradicating a perversion that is still a life, a living being, finding his own space to fill within the tapestry of their lives?
Challenges are all they collect for themselves, or so life spins itself into becoming, and he finds the ground with his knees, and he shifts closer, circle of their joined arms and the resting of his hand on child's head moving into one that strokes reassuring down his back, over Lan Zhan's arm, settles in there as one pressure in passing over another.
Curled around like hamsters nuzzling into bellies as they sleep, content to let the world past swiftly while they stretch out and wait for the night and what safety it brings.
Yiling, another scabbing scar in his chest, and he picks at it gladly, worries at it and smiles without the shadows dragging behind to say the expression is for show. Hums before he speaks, a warmed note in his throat, held and carried. )
We will. Though for the sakes of the children, ( he says; ) make it a land that can heal, and grow, and allow them to play without its old concerns.
( Death not grasping, madness not seeping, possession of bodies too simple without the concentrated will to resist. A land made whole, out of its barren brutality, and he knows from a lifetime ago, it can be so.
With the time, the effort, the dedication, the resources, it will be so.
He stays as he is, their tightened circle, and only stirs as the child's sobs have long petered into quiet sniffles, the lines of his form softening into an exhaustion the adults must carry on from. Shifts, fingers tightening under Lan Zhan's grip: reassurance and question, his brow quirked, his lips softened into an almost curving line. )
One more son to collect.
( Here he stirs, and feels their own cleansing to be called forth, while his heart feels lighter than it has in some time over scarred lines, buried deep. He cannot wait to see their other child, cannot wait in this moment to see Sizhui, and can wait, for related reasons, for when Lan Zhan moves, to lend his support, and the tired child his side, as if he's a man who can bear the burdens of those he chooses just as much as they can choose to bear his burdens in turn. Together. )
[ ...another son. The third, already, reaped by their hands, seeded by misfortune. Against his chest, the rabbit sighs out the natural anguish of a small body learning the comforts of protection, trusting the next stroke of Wei Ying's hand will spark fires of lethargy to lick at his limbs.
Known for the sword, the guqin, the path of violence, but sacrificed as bed board for the epileptic pulse of a wayward, infant's heartbeat. Lan Wangji would protest, but Wei Ying falls first prey to their routine, and the hour softens to the gentle, febrile cooing of a child settling in place.
Sizhui might have stood so between them, learning the love of two and not passed as priceless burden between the members of the sect, until Lan Wangji returned to him from gelid confinement. They've stolen too much of him, reimbursed little and late. Now, second chances brokered —
And there's the stink of sulphur and hot stone, of moving, precious water. Grime on his legs, where they fold into finery and silk, blood flaked and crisp, deteriorating. Baths. ]
Yes.
[ An inn, a quarter, a night's succour after. Return tomorrow, when the bodies they unearth from the causeway will want their dues, their rites and their last words, shared. When there will be more than urgency and less than dread between them.
He lifts, sparing Wei Ying barely a nod, then a nudge of their joined hands around the child, and washes his mouth on the rabbit-fine fur, the tip of the creature's nose. Uncle will not want such a guest, but he will take a refugee, and so they will present him. No matter his soul's aches, Lan Qiren has never turned nose or walked away from a harrowed innocent.
But still, as they start the walk, even Lan Wangji must note: ]
( In motion, the thin peace that had enfolded their moment in the aftermath of chaos exhales and expires, and he smiles, for the child, for Lan Zhan, for the son waiting in hearth-home nearby, for the son waiting li further still. This rabbit child, who shifts and turns and starts to mold into the comfort of Lan Zhan's dirtied arms, once more sliding the scale toward leporine features, as if each inhalation and exhalation a shifting canvas makes.
Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps what this child of misfortune needs is what Gusu Lan provides even to the most fortunate of children, orphans taken in by nostalgia and offered safety in places that claimed impossible was only a state of mind.
Clarity, focus. There are other gifts delivered in the cool clinging fogs of Gusu, by the structured strictures of the Lan. Words like Lan Zhan's, a different kind of code, tip him into laughing, a tired roll of amusement that aches without hurting at all. )
Right, right. A daughter next time. I'll consult with the universe, it should be so kind as to provide.
( A smile, a wink, and the path spilling downward for the resolution of the evening: each step gains momentum if not energy, so that they're closer with each moment to their first safely minded Qingshan. They're welcomed with wide, curious eyes, a woman paid well and given to a sleeping child at her heart, curled up next to a cat, lean and muscled, and an older child minding the fire with the distraction of the young upon their arrival.
Roused from slumber, their waiting son rubs at his eyes, and beams, and holds out his arms: a demand with the sleepy presentation of the not fully awake, lapsing into mumbled complaint at his waking state and a burrowing nuzzle of his head against a collarbone, hidden. Asking after lodgings points toward another inn, one closer, facilities less polished, interiors carefully decorated, and bathing tubs of metal and kept warm through the ingenuity of the mortals not so blessed as to live in cultivation's finer tunings of work. Negotiated, three baths, and the child left in another's care for most the day demanding in increasingly less sleepy turn to come with, such that Wei Wuxian brings his nose to their human son's in a bop and nuzzle before turning his face to Lan Zhan, smiling tired and content, knowing tomorrow's mission and at ease with the straightforwardness of it: )
Do you have room for two?
( To mean: do you have the energy, because I'm happy taking him in for splashes and earnest attempts to scrub both of them clean in one small, dedicated radius before his childish attention span wanders away again. It means the shorter soak; and they now number two who need the time, and Wei Wuxian considers he can probably handle both. Or handle them first, to lay to rest, if Qingshan will cooperate in curling up with their rabbit-child and sleep the sleep of the young and growing. )
[ They retreat like scavenging hounds with broken scraps to fill concave bellies, the fractions of Qingshan's affection a thickened, stoked deluge after long hours of bone-blanching hunger. The nursemaid surrenders him easily, a beautiful boy for one day's love but fractious after, in the way of children spoiled by the radiance of undying devotion. At Cloud Recesses, in Caiyi, in travel, Qingshan is master and commander of every room he waddles, and he will not be denied. Today, he wishes his voice heard once more.
It's Wei Ying who answers him, while fresh accommodations go brokered. Wei Ying, who steps first, Wei Ying who flirts with toil unending, while Lan Wangji's shadow casts long and deep, a respectable distance behind him. Then, amid the fulmination of cloying, clawing incense, in a room far too expectant of a sophisticated traveller's tastes for a seating of the provinces —
...ah. May Lan Wangji suffer the presence of one of his children in the bathtub Arms steeled, he clings to their nameless rabbit son, then only raises his brow and calmly swoops in to wrest Qingshan free of Wei Ying, also. ]
Wei Ying. [ For how often he speaks the name, poison and honey, known and dissolving. Diluting. But granular, patient, seeding and present — humoured, perhaps, to serve reminders of the plain and the established. ] I raised a child.
[ Long years of dread and mourning and sickness and knee scrapes and bruising, when the first brushes with the sword turned an eruption of adolescent discoveries that heroes might win the wars of poetry, but they do not walk from combat of the living world entirely unscathed. That warriors are not born, but scrupulously crafted, and Sizhui, the hold on the hilt is weak, the turn of the calf too tense, the lines of defence too tender, and — there, the first blow bleeds into a wounding, and the boy (turned man) learns.
Perhaps there were nursemaids too, and a loving uncle, a fostering grandmaster. Perhaps a sect volunteered itself to pay the weak, strangled imprecation of a missing master's fatherhood, while he sought chaos in the wake of his soulmate's disaster.
No matter. He lays claim to Lan Sizhui's rearing, one moment and all. He will raise these two sons also, however dubious Wei Ying stands of his care. He pauses only the one moment: ]
Name your third son.
[ Let Wei Ying have his say of the one thing, while Lan Wangji retreats to shed grit and grime and silks for himself and his two children behind the modesty screen. ]
( He's sad, for the time he did not have to give to Sizhui, in his growing from the child who he'd been as A-Yuan to the young man he's become, under his father's care, and the attentiveness of a clan around him. He's happy, for knowing that A-Yuan had not died as senselessly as his aunts and uncles and cousin, that he had been granted all that by Lan Zhan, that he'd been loved, and had not lacked, and had become a young man of worthy regard.
Wei Wuxian regrets none of that. It had nothing to do with him, beyond an association, an introduction. Everything else had been on Lan Zhan and Wen Yuan, to end up with Lan Sizhui as the young man he is today.
So he smiles and laughs as Qingshan is liberated from his arms with Lan Zhan's I raised a child, because yes, and also, no. Differences in ages they've both been stumbling with, because neither of them had raised any child so young, and yet look at him: he grows, he commands, he is imperiousness in babbles and the first attempts at words that tumble off his tongue to the ground where, bending, his fathers gather them up like pearls to share with a world already rife with such things.
He doesn't say anything, just smile, let that fondness and his amused understanding of Lan Zhan's need to be with the children, more compelling and driving than the simplicity of affection and its depth that Wei Wuxian settles into. There, there goes his spouse, set to bathing and scrubbing and Wei Wuxian shakes his head, moving to the basin to wash his arms and settle on preparing clothing out of regathered packs from the donkey still stabled outside. Easy, when that reunion had only been a logical retreat for lodgings anyway. )
Are they both to be in the Shi generation when they're of age?
( Asked and curious, because he's not sure at what else that might be, where they join with their brother two decades beyond themselves. Still, he can give them something else, he supposes, and that brings a name to mind, simple. )
Qingbai.
( Meanwhile two sets of children's clothes, the one to be too short for the rabbit son, but warm and clean and soft. Not too tight, to rub fur poorly, though he doesn't know if that's a concern.
A pause, and then: )
Their sleeping robes are laid out, did you want me to fetch yours? My hands are clean!
( He's not smearing dirt and debris and blood and wraiths on cloth, for all they once sung it of him, the great Yiling Patriarch in all his devilish glory. )
[ Hands clean, mind dirtied. Wei Ying presents his achievements, the name and the spread of clothes, and Lan Wangji retaliates with the full regalia of Gusu Lan efficiency: first, to lay the children bare, Qingshan precious and easy with kicks and flustered punches of thin air, as if to punish the enemy Lan Wangji, who cannot resist to encroach in his villainy. As if he can, must be stopped, even as he inflicts on Qingshan the child-suffered indignity of stripping the short whip of his sash, first, then parting his layers and abandoning him cruelly unsupervised on the modesty bench, while Wangji progresses to his brother.
And then, the yao, a constant watery flux of shape and stability, fur and fast legs and his fluttered, shuddered pulse. Lan Wangji spares him the better part of his efforts, less to coax cooperation than to broker it soft, to ease him from bruised linens without inviting his panic. This, again, when Lan Wangji raises both children, Qingshan aggressive and imperial, perched on his lent father's shoulder, while the yao grapples with the inevitability of the waiting stillness of the bath water. Lan Wangji, reduced to one silk layer's obscenity for the bathing, a hesitant if coalescing shadow cast long over the bathtub's thick-polished wooden whirl.
Within: a whirl of hard salts and dried wisteria, and Lan Wangji does not say, You wasted coin, it is not of the season, not when each inn competes to recognise and gain the passing chief cultivator's favour. First, he means to dip his fingers, struggling to balance both children and grow a third limb. Then, fear forfeit, he only leans so the yao's foot might tease the water's rim, clicking his tongue when the boy-creature wrenches it back with a fuss, reminded of heat and scars and days of agony. ]
Qingbai will be of Shi.
[ A third son, so named. If not a child by the traditional account, then a creature in sore, striking need of care. The domesticity of the moment — of waving Wei Ying close, of handing over Qingshan, nearly blights his eyes blind.
He must ease Qingbai into subjecting himself to heat again, must trick and gently submerge him, as with the true rabbits, when they never encountered river waters before. Perhaps he should feel ill at ease, to welcome his... dubious husband at his side under the circumstances of transparent, road-worn garments, but here they stand, controlled by practicality, two parents solving the riddle of their ill-behaved children. ]
My third son is of discriminating taste. [ In fewer words than this indulgence: he objects, and Lan Wangji must wet his hand first, then cup Qingbai's limbs with it to prove the wetness brings no harm, only succor. But he pauses, midway, to search Wei Ying's gaze dark and Lan Wangji's own purpose baleful: ] Wei Ying. If he reverts to rabbit form...
[ ...and if Wei Ying is stolen his fresh son, what then? Wangji has born enough of Wei Ying's heartbreak to know its colours deep and true, to prepare in great advance for their arrival. ]
( Qingshan babbles his nonsense and its scattering of almost-words when bathed and handed back to Wei Wuxian's arms, divested a layer to not spread soot and all manner of what else on freshly bathed child. He's no more cooperative in being dressed again as to when he'd been undressed, keen to grip at hair, until he holds on to a lock of Wei Wuxian's with the ironclad certainty of his young self-centredness, unshakable and natural as the mountains of certainty his newest, longest parents become in his eyes.
Extensions of himself, he can continue in his imperious rule, though he relents at last, a gracious emperor, to allow Wei Wuxian to finish the single tie and leave him in his tunic-gown, ready for the night. Equally ready to be down and walking, which he's soon to try, only to be given hand and led, toddling, back toward new brother and scandalous, silk-clad father.
Qingshan watches Lan Zhan's coaxing with wide eyes and the first glimmers of a shared sense of possession, but poorly formed, the idea that all attention is his, too, but that he can be fascinated enough to allow a percent of this attention to fall elsewhere. Wei Wuxian has unearthed a comb, and coaxes it through Qingshan's hair with more success for his fascination with Qingbai's bathing. It's to this, to his pause matching Lan Zhan's, that Wei Wuxian lifts his face and meets dark eyes with his own.
If. He smiles, for Lan Zhan, for all of them. For the way his heart warms and aches at once, and for Qingshan, who turns to look up at Lan Zhan's face too, before grunting and gesturing back to Qingbai. )
Then he has a number of fine-furred friends to stay with, won't he? We can give them what we hope is best for them, but every child is responsible for choosing how they live, in the end. If that's his way... is he any less worth having pulled out of that place?
( Changed forms, reversion to four legs that touch earth and the nose that wiggles and an overlarge, scarred, sweet rabbit: he still lives. There is a weight to that Wei Wuxian holds as precious, for whatever other heartbreak it may herald.
Any child who does not cultivate is heartbreak for parents who may well see them go to white before their hair follows suit. Would that be so different? Is it even so different now? )
[ The noble miracle of teaching, the privilege of watching a young soul's bright eyes widen and capture and hold the terror before him — until it mellows into the safe and the known with each careful, calculated inclination of Qingbai's foot in clear, clever water. Lan Wangji teases more than he descends him, tips of Qingbai's limb — now pinked toes, now furred, at all times wriggling — grazing surface to write ripples.
In the end, the yao is submerged, and Wangji — possessed of that rare indignity only a parent brandishes when his child has finally acquiesced to cooperation or silence — follows shamelessly on his cue. On leg in, the second. Heat suffuses over Lan Wangji, one man turned island when Qingbai wrestles close and mounts him, clumsy and feverish, kicking at waves. The treasury of Lan Wangji's patience depletes itself in slow increments: he allows it, careful to soak both hands in salts and salve, to avoid the trappings of his floated, swollen sleeves, as he bathes clothed.
Qingbai is an easy compromise of cooing and muffled sound and the press of his sweet, milky cheek against Wangji's collarbone, defeated. He allows the torture and disgrace of Lan Wangji's diligent scrubbing, one leg, then the next, and the arms and the narrow, trembled span of his spine. Then, behind the ears — short or long &dmash; and in those parts rendered intimate. Soot, grime, blood. Half shed off Qingbai, half quickly deserting Lan Wangji's own form.
He finishes the child early, then completes his own ablutions and rises wing Qingbai cradles in his arms without care for the deluge of damp each footstep curses freshly on the floors. Merciless in this, as in everything, the military precision of his advance irrefutable. When he presents Qingbai to Wei Ying and his sullen-faced brother, his hands shake for the endeavour. ]
Thank you. For him. [ This, to Wei Ying, words trickled and mouth slow. ] For those who came before. Those who may follow.
[ They trade blows so much more often than gratitude, and yet here lies Lan Wangji's heart, bleeding. He has earned another son, whose hair whips against his arm, whose round bulk narrows in a pleased coil around Wangji's chest. Their heartbeats, war-drummed and matching.
Wei Ying made a gift to him of this. He does not hasten to return it. ]
One day, you will tire of gift giving.
i like how this is the horniest tag you're getting out of wifi so far
( The surge of waters as Lan Zhan stands, the rainfall of his approach, and tides shift for lesser things, like the moon. Qingshan lifts his head and pushes out his lower lip, he hinted start of a pout that doesn't press further, knowing its effectiveness in quiet more than the dramatics other children learn to throw in similar circumstances. He waves his arms, then opens and closes his fists, reaching for his soaking father, reaching for the furred then pink skinned brother he's taking in as part of his egocentric universe: this, too, is his, nevermind that until the day before, no such part of his world had been married in quite this form.
At least one child would wear the earnest possession of his father as a badge of honour due, and temper it in the time after with Lan considerations, but not lose it, no matter the anchoring.
He looks upon the dripping form of third son and singular husband, in whatever fractured way of it they had as a knowing between each other. There are times where he reflects Lan Zhan has unfairly beautiful genetics; that his reputation as a handsome man has only grown with his distinguishment, that his title, handed over in a war that did little service to their souls and much to the reforging of their world at the time, matched him for its matured meaning, and not simply the ruthless precision of his military might. Dry haired, outlined in unfairly sheered silk, all the angular planes of muscle hinted at with the steady drip that plasters cloth to skin. How many times now, over the years? How many times to see without understanding? When does admiration change forms? When did he start trusting in it, without that fatal leap so easy to concede: what wants for owing. No, it's a language of giving, and not to appease. Giving because one wants in turn, and not the dark, bleak belly of a want that cries out in lonely guilt and obligation, wretched as it was once inevitable.
He's saved from wandering thoughts by the words that find purchase on Lan Zhan's tongue, and Wei Wuxian blinks, swallows against a dry mouth and redirects his dark eyes to Lan Zhan's. Puts one hand to Qingshan, who holds his thumb, then ruthlessly tosses it away, to better offer both his hands forth again, for the father who holds his brother, and not him.
It gives him that moment to collect the drying cloths, to step forward and drape the first over Lan Zhan's arms and the crescent moon of Qingbai's cleansed form. He's healed further from his injuries the night before, and that may be part of his nature, not human and not animal, trapped as he is in this form of a yao most would consign to a death that lays undeserved, this child innocent. He will steady. Is steadying now, breathing in matched harmony to Lan Zhan. A gift in turn. )
I don't imagine, ( He says, smiling with the slow, seeping warmth of genuine and deep affection, turning to catch up the larger drying cloth to his dry hands, ) that will be any sooner than when you're tired of me.
( A step, and the toss of the cloth, settling over Lan Zhan's shoulders and draping down his back and sides. Qingbai's eyes flutter open and watch, rounded and curious. Qingshan stills in his silent pouting and clutching of fists, mouth opening into a perfect, curious circle. He steps closer, one hand reaching out to run over Qingbai's head. Then he reaches for Lan Zhan, but the sides of his neck, one hand coaxing his hair free and over to spill down directly on the cloth drier than he is. The barest brush of fingers against skin, and he scalds himself, without scolding. His other hand, catching hold of the cloth so it doesn't shift away for the short duration, drops away again, fingers lingering a second too long. )
You're welcome, Lan Zhan. Thank you, for accepting each one of them.
( Their sons, spanning decades, small celestial bodies pulled into their gravitational well. Fixing in steady orbit, steady and beautiful for Lan Zhan's hand on them, for his sect's in their raising, for the warmth that runs deeper than the chill of their cold spring's well. )
And for your answering affections for each, and all the ones to come.
( The curve of lips into silent amusement, and a warm promise, to not forget: a daughter, next. )
steers this thread back to the righteous salt path
[ The landscape, stripped of detail in increments: Wei Ying abstracts himself, more negative space of his passing and absence than shape coalesced, than flesh-being formed. He flickers, flits between child and yao and Lan Wangji, attending to one with cooing and distractions, to another with caresses, to the third with a drying cloth, like an honoured, trusted servant, or a — ]
Gratitude.
[ ...Lan Wangji nods his thanks before the thought suffocates him, before he might crown it with laughter. Like a wife, her household bustling under the white roil of domestic routine. As if they meet each day under this roof, a young family of four and their fifth member — an elder son — only departed to carve his own path in beauty, martyrdom, war or sweeping declarations. Youth propels Lan Sizhui, commands him. He will return to them a little scraped, a little worn, looser-jointed, more rounded at his edges. A jade piece cut and carved and polished splendid by Gusu Lan, relinquished by the heavens to be warmed, finally, by mortal hands.
And the rest of them, two parents and two brothers, like white birds calling in an empty sky, waiting for the flock's completion to head on for warmer winter pastures.
Each day, on waking, Lan Wangji carries the weight of a minute, reduced, cultivators' world on his shoulders. Tonight, readying for the disaster of rest in the close quarters of two children ignorant of one another, he wears his weight in water, mounted on his shoulders — narrowing them, shrinking his arms, licking at his ribs, kissing the lines of his webbed scars deeper than any paid concubine. Qingbai and Wei Ying's prepared dried robes in hand, he excuses himself behind the modesty screen long enough to trade his silks for coarse inn linens, then the yao's scant layers for comfort in kind.
They return back on stuttered step, drifting over dust-desaturated, chilled tiles to leave behind writings of condensation — and he takes again, catching Qingshan from Wei Ying's arms, dragging the boy beside his brother. They weigh less than armour, less than a fresh steel-tipped quiver, than the bearings of salt and stone and rice that Lan disciples must ferry with respectful obedience for each night hunt. Once, for all his rank, Lan Wangji delivered this burden, and his mouth pursed tight and curdled, and he complained not one step, not one word.
Now, he speaks even less of disgruntlement, not when Qingbai shakes his head and shuts his eyes and flattens himself to the side of Lan Wangji's chest, avoiding his brother's scolding swats. Not when Qingshan, ignored and unused to indifference, perseveres in babbling to attract his new playmate's attention, only to earn the click of Lan Wangji's tongue, and a one-armed rise above Lan Wangji's head, from where he kicks out his legs and arms in a delighted squeal. ]
Come here. [ He steals the babe back down and sets him too against his breast, where Qingbai retreats like oil from water, allowing coexistence — but not inviting it. He is too loud, Qingshan, too greedy. He has not spent the day in chase, has not worn himself. Lan Wangji's mouth, a fledgling thief, finds first the yao's distinctly human temple, then his brother's. ] Shhhhhhhh. You are my heart, quartered. My heart is disciplined.
[ Behave, both, while Lan Wangji walks the room with them with perfunctory twitches of each arm to mime cradling. Easier, perhaps, with two parents present, to surrender half his burden — but he has wasted a day deprived of touch, starved of it. He will steal more now, and stitch his eyes close, and wish Wei Ying merciful enough not to speak a word of Lan Wangji's indulgence.
He remembers to sit on the slow-yielding seating cushion, the sound of hard, milk-stained breathing a reassuring fixture from two soft mouths wetting his robe's rim and collarbone. Cute. And past the children and Lan Wangji's unseemly selfishness to claim them, stands Wei Ying — thawed, the common, frenetic electricity of his presence mellowed out in full. A beauty of a different kind, low candle light in rusted brazier. Trust it, and find your touch burned. ]
Wei Ying. Sit with us, before I think to offend you with cup rites. [ A choice, bittersweet moment when threatening to repeat an ill-timed marriage proposal can rouse laughter, sooner than cast fresh wounds. ] The temple. Shall we close it?
[ A tenuous proposal, to deprive the natives of their last vestiges of worship. And yet, more often, in villages that have not yet succumbed to the dread and despair of urgent survival, belief steers closer to spirituality than structured observance. Men wake and sleep too overcome by daily exhaustion to waste coin and breath on spirits and ancestors.
And the risk of leaving it open, for hapless visitors to invite whatever resent yet lingers, until the waters pacify the ghosts... ]
hello wei ying's heavenly pillar................. of salt
( He's at cross purpose with himself, once his arms are freed of Qingshan, once he's watching Lan Zhan in his linens and Qingbai and Qingshan nestled in his arms, one fussing for attention and the righteousness of play with the second, shoving his face further and further into Lan Zhan's shoulder. Watches, pinpricks of kitten claws sinking slow and effortlessly into his heart, one after another.
He'd gladly offer that up, for the moments of softened peace like these; for their slow increase, and for the warm oddity of gratitude and not just the sharp edges they both wear brushing against each other and not quite fitting right, off the battlefield.
Wei Wuxian doesn't have to think about his concept of family, or his security in seeing those he cares for being safe and cleaned and together in a moment that could be broken at any moment. He doesn't think about that, either, beyond the reflexive twitch of his fingers when he wants to place another ward, one more warning, one more turning away of all that is dark and ill and violent in the world, to guard each small sanctuary as he finds it.
For a moment, the feeling that settles over him is contentment, mellowing in the marrow of his bones. No more debts to be paid, and in two heartbeats, it feels freeing, almost true. To do as they may.
It slides away like sand in his fingers, but the greater contentment remains, winding around the lazy amusement and pleasure that is his watching Lan Zhan with their sons. With all things small and in need of love and care; for each wayward soul Lan Zhan has opened his arms to accept, will open his arms to accept in the future.
Called over, he blinks instead of starts, smiles and chuckles, allowing his weight to settle as he approaches. )
Not offended, Lan Zhan, never that. ( Seating himself, leaning forward enough so that he can behold the sleeping faces of both sons, only to find he can see barely more than babyfat cheeks and the moth's wings of lashes against their milk-white skin. The smile that follows softened and fond, affection unrestrained, remaining so when hsi gaze shifts to Lan Zhan. Tired, in linens, at the least of his largess, and rarely so humbly striking. ) I've already said yes.
( To slow shifted dynamics, to quick growing family. To tea in cups and alcohol to mind, but not in the mud of the unpleasant sadness of humanity at its worst, its most desperate, its most greedy. Not wearing trice borrowed robes, painted bride to be and digging to find bones in the forest, and Lan Zhan's hands, a memory around his throat.
A shudder that is not entirely fear travels down his spine. Ah, but a question, and an important one, stands asked, and he can direct his thoughts that way, shifting with a river's flow. )
For these people, I don't know how many would see it as different if we did. ( The cluck of his tongue, and: ) Yes, we shall. Are you willing to hand its monitoring to Yunmeng?
( Hanguang-jun doesn't have to, can state what he wishes, can leave it to coalitions of juniors, can grant it to any one sect for the scale of its festering. There are reasons and reasons why it would lay fallow for so long, and none indicate an inherent, malicious miscarriage of justice in recent decades, or even within the past times. No, only a broken landscape trying to heal itself while its darkness grew, contained by some passing practitioner of the better arts, then left for a later that only came on six feet and a small family's visitation of great heights and the beauty of what spanned out before them, before what lay underfoot took precedence.
He drops his gaze back to the children, reaches out, stills his hand in the moment before he touches one dark head. Then lowers it, stroking over hair still damp. )
When we return tomorrow, we can place a simpler barrier across the narrow section of the temple path. Or one around the whole; it wouldn't be too demanding.
( To keep humanity from intruding to unwarranted doom too soon; to allow nature to take its course as it was ever so inclined to do. )
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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.
no subject
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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Its victims, unburied. Forgotten, and it's Wei Ying who makes a quilt of the weave-work of their evidence, Wei Ying who speaks with and unto the dead in their own tongue. The child-rabbit, who borrows the hybrid appearance of the human creature likelier to attract Wei Ying's sympathy, preying on his softened heart.
You know what you know, Wangji does not whisper, but remembers the glint of fear like festive silks, dressing the rabbit whole, like an unholy bride to the inevitability of Wei Ying's instincts to save and shelter. Remember, too, how Bichen was stayed then, before she could truly unsheathe for execution.
And he turns now, back rigid and body only lines, the sum of battle impulses — heated as the tunnels shake and groan, roiling. Ready to strike.
Water, Wei Ying says, and healing. Not locked away in the way of traditional bindings, but secured by the geology of the underground cave. >Distant from the burial rooms. He paces close enough to hover his hand over the exuding warmth of the wall, then — teeth gritting, body prepared for the hiss and the sharp surge of white pain when the burn strikes — rests his palm down. Beneath agony, the pulse of living water, of qi that can only thrive in cleanliness.
Breath laboured, he stands among a wreckage of dust and hot stone, and pivots to face Wei Ying unassuming — only his person and his fresh wounds and the quiet conviction of what must be done. ]
We reunite them. [ As true and indefatigable of a conclusion as the blood that thickens and sheds off his hand. ] Wei Ying. Bichen and talismans may rupture the wall. [ A mechanical deed, not without risk: they sit in labyrinths, without certainty of which wall's upheaval will seduce the ceiling down. ] Do we unleash the waters here, or bring the bones to water?
[ Can they lure so many bodies, mind? Which harm is greater, lesser? And he asks of Wei Ying, but gazes at the rabbit, and gleans too that the creature knows. That it will signal to Wei Ying, its chosen patron, the righteous path. ]
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Focussed on the chamber they'd escaped, and the husk waiting, thirsty, waiting to be filled.
He shifts his grip on the rabbit-child, whispers nonsense of reassurance he isn't cognoscente enough to remember what is in the saying even after the moment of its speaking. Thinks of their son, watched by a woman down the mountain, and the quakes, and the burning, and the flame. Of water, hot and quenching, cold and claiming, tepid and target of a dozen different ailments, swept and sundered. )
The altar. The waters flow above the altar, too.
( He looks to Lan Zhan, expression set. The child, rabbit and boy, stares down the hall too, as the sounds of the restless dead ebb and swirl as whispers and shadows, plucking at their periphery. Wash away, fill the emptiness, sooth the flesh that'd been made of nothing but ash from bone. )
We're going to have to do a lot of running if we bring down that, but... we might be able to shatter the altar, to reach down below.
( The unasked question: which, when both rely on Lan Zhan's strength paired with any talisman Wei Wuxian himself has made. The mechanics, and the brutality of strength, to sunder a ceiling, an altar, or perhaps the thickened walls of the same chamber. Only two perhaps fast enough to spare them from the overwhelming need of the wraiths that filled that chamber, thirst endless as the seas were vast. )
There rests the heart of darkness.
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In his mind's eye, the construction abbreviates itself to sharp edges and dark corners and plain lines that insult the sophisticated architecture of a temple in aged luxury, but yield him the plan, plain: here, in the labyrinthine borrows, the dead wait their drops of holy water like heavens' alms. Above, the altar plugs flows, denies passage. Between them, the distinct but negligible separation of filth and gravel, tattered remains and detritus.
Crush the twinned ends, and the old masters' precaution to separate the temple attendants from the baths and the old graves, and hold on knife's blade, balanced, the living and the dead. Strike down, from the altar, or above from laired, chased ground. Better still.
He does not hold Wei Ying's starless gaze for the proposal. Would not presume, knowing it like a threadbare knot, fraying close to dissolution. ]
Take the child. [ The rabbit, once more elevated. Wei Ying's young, the crippled, the weak, the poor, those forever in want of salvation. ] Head to the altar.
[ And the shiver, the great, treacherous inevitability, that Lan Wangji should have to trust in Wei Ying to trick his pursuers out of the labyrinth, to reach the outside again, whole — as much, if not more than Wei Ying must trust in him to bide his time here, unharmed. Watching. Waiting.
His hand tickles the air surrounding the walls again, if only to feel the dragon's breath of captive heat, threatening its burn once more, to thrill himself with the delicious tangs of bearable agony. Quick, you are, to lick flame on him, but not quick enough. For he is of Gusu Lan, and the Lan are of winter, and ice will bear you down. ]
The talismans will alert me of sundown here. We strike at one time.
[ Time passes the quicker here, its many costs frail. He need not be exposed to the hunt of the dead as long as Wei Ying will wait above.
Tenuous, but he may prevail here. Wei Ying, for his part, must cut new path to reach above the grounds. ]
Go safely.
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He cares, for the weak and unprotected, for the young and the old, for the sufferers and the suffering. Not with the blind persistence of his younger years, but he still feels the call to take action, has learned after months of travel on his own how to manage that, how to consider, how to move and not make himself the weightbearer for it all.
It is still a process of learning, to trust again, to allow himself the luxury of forgetting his own driving desire to carry more than he can or should. Even a child in his arms, recovering and frightened, half in his robes and shivering against his inner robes, ears long and covered in velvet soft fur, and he steels himself. Tips his head to Lan Zhan, Lan Wangji, Hanguang-jun. )
You too.
( Trust given, trust returned. He shifts the child on his hip and narrows his eyes, stepping forward on silent feet to flow into the dark, then hit stride, and he is everything he was said to be, and nothing like it at all in the moment where he is as alive as the husks of those who stir with his passage, as the blood of the child in his arms sings to them, as the scent of burning intensifies without flame, and Wei Wuxian recalls an older dance of survival and single minded belief, no room for worry, no room for anything but the efficiency of movement, the cold gaze that lacks forgiveness, no room for compromise.
It's not untouched that he emerges, but tattered in negligible ways; scratches as lacerations across his cheek, the backs of hands, the black robes that show little to nothing of their unwhole state. The rise of those final stairs find sunlight spilling over him and the child, protected and anointed in the blood of a man who bleeds clean, when he bleeds these days, and who gains the top, who hears the mournful howling cries of the undead at his back, who seals no entrance but finds they cannot, will not cross to the light, but creep forward greedy for the falling of it.
There is a framework in his mind, the geometry of architecture and energy flow, so that he bides each step its purpose as he says to the child, meant for ears below: )
Together, Lan Zhan.
( For the fall of the sun, for the moment that shadow reigns supreme, for when the fall of earth to shatter the dam holding back the cleansing this mountain has yearned for, pleaded for over an age might see its way through. Uneasy and destructive and healing, all these things and more. )
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Still, he waits — and he waits — and keeps vigil, dancing around his site on firefly-light steps, ever circling without stilling long enough to give the dead cause for chase. Let his scent not catch, let his shadow not deepen, let him wander as his thoughts do, wander and stray like ghosts.
A prediction of some merit: time within the corridors is but a fraction of that passed in the outside world. Wei Ying's wards honour his name, fast, breezy, reliable. Within heartbeats of the first alarm drawn, Lan Wangji comes alive — that same breath, Bichen, her pallor sinking up and twisting, manipulate no more elegantly than a shovel, carving out the shape of stones, like every knife that aims the negative space between vertebrae.
He feels the tumult of coming water in the vibration of dirt, feels the raw ache of it bearing down before it splints rock like heavy needle, thrusting down, first in rivulet, then in stream, then in disaster —
And they scream for it, the dead who wait, who waited their lifetime, who waited no further, for the white roil of water catching sulphur, bathing bones, releasing heat off old volcanic plaques. They recoil, run, and it is to Lan Wangji's shame, withdrawing beside them, that he does not understand at first, they run for the water.
So many dead, spirits, bones. So many unburied. The scratched out terror of each breath nearly prevents the next. He dashes out, limbs protesting, Bichen all but a stringing decoration — until he reaches the outside world with a gasp, his clothes tattered, his fingers all grime and his nails worn. A beggar, returned to the temple, exhausted by the last step he takes before Wei Ying in the great chamber, nearly destroyed.
When he speaks, first, sound eludes him. Then, a wheeze. At long last, coughed, the reckoning: ]
They are grateful. [ He wants to laugh. Can't. ] Grateful.
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There's fear in his heart, as the dead shift, and scream, and flow like tumbling rapids push boats downstream in their turbulence. He holds his position, holds the point of broken altar, and the landscape around him and the child alters. His heart, steady and rabbit quick in turns, breath inevitable in and out of lungs, until the age that separates their beginning and their end resolves to a battered, tattered living, breathing, dirtied haunt of a man crosses the threshold into this broken place. Freedom a song that doesn't sing sweet, precisely, but that can be felt as surely as the quaking, with how the hidden depths of this once beautiful place, this age-old sanctuary, drives out its own infection with the puncturing wounds they've decorated its most sanctified grounds.
Wei Wuxian waits, and he lowers the child down, lets him take his feet, and features arranged into something more and more human, as the hours have passed. The fur receding, the nose turning small and human round, the eyes less large, and pale, so pale regardless. Hair pale too, until it's a white haired child with drooping, rabbit ears and a twitch that trembles in his arms. Toddles on his feet, then more sure, the healing of burns from the night prior showing as shining and pink, flesh knitting over, memories being absorbed by young skin.
Wei Wuxian steps toward Lan Zhan as he speaks. When the words come as a wheeze, and before him, the child moves faster. The rabbit-boy, who cannot truly make himself all boy, or all bunny, barreling forward to cling to Lan Zhan's dirtied robes, the wet tatters, and cling like a different child, a lifetime ago. To bawl, heartbroken and with relief, loss and the break away from a fear he hadn't words for, clinging on.
Lan Zhan was the last one to come up, and the last missing piece of his equally small world. Loss might not mean to him what it will in a few more years, but Lan Zhan returns, and the scary world is scary, but a little less so, now.
Wei Wuxian studies his face, stepping closer, one hand coming to rest on top of the sobbing child's head, the other offered, palm up, for Lan Zhan. )
Yeah. ( He could feel it, had felt the shift. ) They are.
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Brows briefly perked up to flag the token resistance of his incredulity, he clasps Wei Ying's hand, sweat of his nerves to the grit of Lan Wangji's palm, binding their fingers together and taking shameful advantage. Weight lent, he uses the balance to drop to one knee, depositing Bichen to her fettering and straining to sling an arm out and welcome the child in his keep.
He comes, more eager than any living thing should, but innocent in the way of every rabbit that's sought Lan Wangji out to nestle, pale against pallor, its frailty near his mourning sickness, both bare before the sun. Wangji allows it soot and succor, the warmth of his body, a slow and bartered reassurance. A second child waits with his minder in the inn; this one, here, now, heart a deep gong's swing, merits the full measure of Lan Wangji's attention.
They paralyse just so for longer than he'd intended, one arm around the child-rabbit, Lan Wangji's hand still clawing around Wei Ying's. He tugs down. ]
...we should not have left the Burial Mounds as we did.
[ A lacklustre segue, but for their private understanding: they should have salted the barren lands, cleansed away their shadows, extricated their decay. Should have set the grief and regret they summoned and grew in those lands, should have cultivated to their peace.
Lest they become this: festered. A fantasy of regrets. Wronged. ]
We will return there for amends.
[ Together, Wei Ying's word of each day. Very well. ]
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Challenges are all they collect for themselves, or so life spins itself into becoming, and he finds the ground with his knees, and he shifts closer, circle of their joined arms and the resting of his hand on child's head moving into one that strokes reassuring down his back, over Lan Zhan's arm, settles in there as one pressure in passing over another.
Curled around like hamsters nuzzling into bellies as they sleep, content to let the world past swiftly while they stretch out and wait for the night and what safety it brings.
Yiling, another scabbing scar in his chest, and he picks at it gladly, worries at it and smiles without the shadows dragging behind to say the expression is for show. Hums before he speaks, a warmed note in his throat, held and carried. )
We will. Though for the sakes of the children, ( he says; ) make it a land that can heal, and grow, and allow them to play without its old concerns.
( Death not grasping, madness not seeping, possession of bodies too simple without the concentrated will to resist. A land made whole, out of its barren brutality, and he knows from a lifetime ago, it can be so.
With the time, the effort, the dedication, the resources, it will be so.
He stays as he is, their tightened circle, and only stirs as the child's sobs have long petered into quiet sniffles, the lines of his form softening into an exhaustion the adults must carry on from. Shifts, fingers tightening under Lan Zhan's grip: reassurance and question, his brow quirked, his lips softened into an almost curving line. )
One more son to collect.
( Here he stirs, and feels their own cleansing to be called forth, while his heart feels lighter than it has in some time over scarred lines, buried deep. He cannot wait to see their other child, cannot wait in this moment to see Sizhui, and can wait, for related reasons, for when Lan Zhan moves, to lend his support, and the tired child his side, as if he's a man who can bear the burdens of those he chooses just as much as they can choose to bear his burdens in turn. Together. )
Baths?
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Known for the sword, the guqin, the path of violence, but sacrificed as bed board for the epileptic pulse of a wayward, infant's heartbeat. Lan Wangji would protest, but Wei Ying falls first prey to their routine, and the hour softens to the gentle, febrile cooing of a child settling in place.
Sizhui might have stood so between them, learning the love of two and not passed as priceless burden between the members of the sect, until Lan Wangji returned to him from gelid confinement. They've stolen too much of him, reimbursed little and late. Now, second chances brokered —
And there's the stink of sulphur and hot stone, of moving, precious water. Grime on his legs, where they fold into finery and silk, blood flaked and crisp, deteriorating. Baths. ]
Yes.
[ An inn, a quarter, a night's succour after. Return tomorrow, when the bodies they unearth from the causeway will want their dues, their rites and their last words, shared. When there will be more than urgency and less than dread between them.
He lifts, sparing Wei Ying barely a nod, then a nudge of their joined hands around the child, and washes his mouth on the rabbit-fine fur, the tip of the creature's nose. Uncle will not want such a guest, but he will take a refugee, and so they will present him. No matter his soul's aches, Lan Qiren has never turned nose or walked away from a harrowed innocent.
But still, as they start the walk, even Lan Wangji must note: ]
...next time, a daughter.
[ Truly. Break pattern. ]
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Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps what this child of misfortune needs is what Gusu Lan provides even to the most fortunate of children, orphans taken in by nostalgia and offered safety in places that claimed impossible was only a state of mind.
Clarity, focus. There are other gifts delivered in the cool clinging fogs of Gusu, by the structured strictures of the Lan. Words like Lan Zhan's, a different kind of code, tip him into laughing, a tired roll of amusement that aches without hurting at all. )
Right, right. A daughter next time. I'll consult with the universe, it should be so kind as to provide.
( A smile, a wink, and the path spilling downward for the resolution of the evening: each step gains momentum if not energy, so that they're closer with each moment to their first safely minded Qingshan. They're welcomed with wide, curious eyes, a woman paid well and given to a sleeping child at her heart, curled up next to a cat, lean and muscled, and an older child minding the fire with the distraction of the young upon their arrival.
Roused from slumber, their waiting son rubs at his eyes, and beams, and holds out his arms: a demand with the sleepy presentation of the not fully awake, lapsing into mumbled complaint at his waking state and a burrowing nuzzle of his head against a collarbone, hidden. Asking after lodgings points toward another inn, one closer, facilities less polished, interiors carefully decorated, and bathing tubs of metal and kept warm through the ingenuity of the mortals not so blessed as to live in cultivation's finer tunings of work. Negotiated, three baths, and the child left in another's care for most the day demanding in increasingly less sleepy turn to come with, such that Wei Wuxian brings his nose to their human son's in a bop and nuzzle before turning his face to Lan Zhan, smiling tired and content, knowing tomorrow's mission and at ease with the straightforwardness of it: )
Do you have room for two?
( To mean: do you have the energy, because I'm happy taking him in for splashes and earnest attempts to scrub both of them clean in one small, dedicated radius before his childish attention span wanders away again. It means the shorter soak; and they now number two who need the time, and Wei Wuxian considers he can probably handle both. Or handle them first, to lay to rest, if Qingshan will cooperate in curling up with their rabbit-child and sleep the sleep of the young and growing. )
I can manage them both first.
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It's Wei Ying who answers him, while fresh accommodations go brokered. Wei Ying, who steps first, Wei Ying who flirts with toil unending, while Lan Wangji's shadow casts long and deep, a respectable distance behind him. Then, amid the fulmination of cloying, clawing incense, in a room far too expectant of a sophisticated traveller's tastes for a seating of the provinces —
...ah. May Lan Wangji suffer the presence of one of his children in the bathtub Arms steeled, he clings to their nameless rabbit son, then only raises his brow and calmly swoops in to wrest Qingshan free of Wei Ying, also. ]
Wei Ying. [ For how often he speaks the name, poison and honey, known and dissolving. Diluting. But granular, patient, seeding and present — humoured, perhaps, to serve reminders of the plain and the established. ] I raised a child.
[ Long years of dread and mourning and sickness and knee scrapes and bruising, when the first brushes with the sword turned an eruption of adolescent discoveries that heroes might win the wars of poetry, but they do not walk from combat of the living world entirely unscathed. That warriors are not born, but scrupulously crafted, and Sizhui, the hold on the hilt is weak, the turn of the calf too tense, the lines of defence too tender, and — there, the first blow bleeds into a wounding, and the boy (turned man) learns.
Perhaps there were nursemaids too, and a loving uncle, a fostering grandmaster. Perhaps a sect volunteered itself to pay the weak, strangled imprecation of a missing master's fatherhood, while he sought chaos in the wake of his soulmate's disaster.
No matter. He lays claim to Lan Sizhui's rearing, one moment and all. He will raise these two sons also, however dubious Wei Ying stands of his care. He pauses only the one moment: ]
Name your third son.
[ Let Wei Ying have his say of the one thing, while Lan Wangji retreats to shed grit and grime and silks for himself and his two children behind the modesty screen. ]
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Wei Wuxian regrets none of that. It had nothing to do with him, beyond an association, an introduction. Everything else had been on Lan Zhan and Wen Yuan, to end up with Lan Sizhui as the young man he is today.
So he smiles and laughs as Qingshan is liberated from his arms with Lan Zhan's I raised a child, because yes, and also, no. Differences in ages they've both been stumbling with, because neither of them had raised any child so young, and yet look at him: he grows, he commands, he is imperiousness in babbles and the first attempts at words that tumble off his tongue to the ground where, bending, his fathers gather them up like pearls to share with a world already rife with such things.
He doesn't say anything, just smile, let that fondness and his amused understanding of Lan Zhan's need to be with the children, more compelling and driving than the simplicity of affection and its depth that Wei Wuxian settles into. There, there goes his spouse, set to bathing and scrubbing and Wei Wuxian shakes his head, moving to the basin to wash his arms and settle on preparing clothing out of regathered packs from the donkey still stabled outside. Easy, when that reunion had only been a logical retreat for lodgings anyway. )
Are they both to be in the Shi generation when they're of age?
( Asked and curious, because he's not sure at what else that might be, where they join with their brother two decades beyond themselves. Still, he can give them something else, he supposes, and that brings a name to mind, simple. )
Qingbai.
( Meanwhile two sets of children's clothes, the one to be too short for the rabbit son, but warm and clean and soft. Not too tight, to rub fur poorly, though he doesn't know if that's a concern.
A pause, and then: )
Their sleeping robes are laid out, did you want me to fetch yours? My hands are clean!
( He's not smearing dirt and debris and blood and wraiths on cloth, for all they once sung it of him, the great Yiling Patriarch in all his devilish glory. )
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And then, the yao, a constant watery flux of shape and stability, fur and fast legs and his fluttered, shuddered pulse. Lan Wangji spares him the better part of his efforts, less to coax cooperation than to broker it soft, to ease him from bruised linens without inviting his panic. This, again, when Lan Wangji raises both children, Qingshan aggressive and imperial, perched on his lent father's shoulder, while the yao grapples with the inevitability of the waiting stillness of the bath water. Lan Wangji, reduced to one silk layer's obscenity for the bathing, a hesitant if coalescing shadow cast long over the bathtub's thick-polished wooden whirl.
Within: a whirl of hard salts and dried wisteria, and Lan Wangji does not say, You wasted coin, it is not of the season, not when each inn competes to recognise and gain the passing chief cultivator's favour. First, he means to dip his fingers, struggling to balance both children and grow a third limb. Then, fear forfeit, he only leans so the yao's foot might tease the water's rim, clicking his tongue when the boy-creature wrenches it back with a fuss, reminded of heat and scars and days of agony. ]
Qingbai will be of Shi.
[ A third son, so named. If not a child by the traditional account, then a creature in sore, striking need of care. The domesticity of the moment — of waving Wei Ying close, of handing over Qingshan, nearly blights his eyes blind.
He must ease Qingbai into subjecting himself to heat again, must trick and gently submerge him, as with the true rabbits, when they never encountered river waters before. Perhaps he should feel ill at ease, to welcome his... dubious husband at his side under the circumstances of transparent, road-worn garments, but here they stand, controlled by practicality, two parents solving the riddle of their ill-behaved children. ]
My third son is of discriminating taste. [ In fewer words than this indulgence: he objects, and Lan Wangji must wet his hand first, then cup Qingbai's limbs with it to prove the wetness brings no harm, only succor. But he pauses, midway, to search Wei Ying's gaze dark and Lan Wangji's own purpose baleful: ] Wei Ying. If he reverts to rabbit form...
[ ...and if Wei Ying is stolen his fresh son, what then? Wangji has born enough of Wei Ying's heartbreak to know its colours deep and true, to prepare in great advance for their arrival. ]
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Extensions of himself, he can continue in his imperious rule, though he relents at last, a gracious emperor, to allow Wei Wuxian to finish the single tie and leave him in his tunic-gown, ready for the night. Equally ready to be down and walking, which he's soon to try, only to be given hand and led, toddling, back toward new brother and scandalous, silk-clad father.
Qingshan watches Lan Zhan's coaxing with wide eyes and the first glimmers of a shared sense of possession, but poorly formed, the idea that all attention is his, too, but that he can be fascinated enough to allow a percent of this attention to fall elsewhere. Wei Wuxian has unearthed a comb, and coaxes it through Qingshan's hair with more success for his fascination with Qingbai's bathing. It's to this, to his pause matching Lan Zhan's, that Wei Wuxian lifts his face and meets dark eyes with his own.
If. He smiles, for Lan Zhan, for all of them. For the way his heart warms and aches at once, and for Qingshan, who turns to look up at Lan Zhan's face too, before grunting and gesturing back to Qingbai. )
Then he has a number of fine-furred friends to stay with, won't he? We can give them what we hope is best for them, but every child is responsible for choosing how they live, in the end. If that's his way... is he any less worth having pulled out of that place?
( Changed forms, reversion to four legs that touch earth and the nose that wiggles and an overlarge, scarred, sweet rabbit: he still lives. There is a weight to that Wei Wuxian holds as precious, for whatever other heartbreak it may herald.
Any child who does not cultivate is heartbreak for parents who may well see them go to white before their hair follows suit. Would that be so different? Is it even so different now? )
We'll care for him all the same.
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In the end, the yao is submerged, and Wangji — possessed of that rare indignity only a parent brandishes when his child has finally acquiesced to cooperation or silence — follows shamelessly on his cue. On leg in, the second. Heat suffuses over Lan Wangji, one man turned island when Qingbai wrestles close and mounts him, clumsy and feverish, kicking at waves. The treasury of Lan Wangji's patience depletes itself in slow increments: he allows it, careful to soak both hands in salts and salve, to avoid the trappings of his floated, swollen sleeves, as he bathes clothed.
Qingbai is an easy compromise of cooing and muffled sound and the press of his sweet, milky cheek against Wangji's collarbone, defeated. He allows the torture and disgrace of Lan Wangji's diligent scrubbing, one leg, then the next, and the arms and the narrow, trembled span of his spine. Then, behind the ears — short or long &dmash; and in those parts rendered intimate. Soot, grime, blood. Half shed off Qingbai, half quickly deserting Lan Wangji's own form.
He finishes the child early, then completes his own ablutions and rises wing Qingbai cradles in his arms without care for the deluge of damp each footstep curses freshly on the floors. Merciless in this, as in everything, the military precision of his advance irrefutable. When he presents Qingbai to Wei Ying and his sullen-faced brother, his hands shake for the endeavour. ]
Thank you. For him. [ This, to Wei Ying, words trickled and mouth slow. ] For those who came before. Those who may follow.
[ They trade blows so much more often than gratitude, and yet here lies Lan Wangji's heart, bleeding. He has earned another son, whose hair whips against his arm, whose round bulk narrows in a pleased coil around Wangji's chest. Their heartbeats, war-drummed and matching.
Wei Ying made a gift to him of this. He does not hasten to return it. ]
One day, you will tire of gift giving.
i like how this is the horniest tag you're getting out of wifi so far
At least one child would wear the earnest possession of his father as a badge of honour due, and temper it in the time after with Lan considerations, but not lose it, no matter the anchoring.
He looks upon the dripping form of third son and singular husband, in whatever fractured way of it they had as a knowing between each other. There are times where he reflects Lan Zhan has unfairly beautiful genetics; that his reputation as a handsome man has only grown with his distinguishment, that his title, handed over in a war that did little service to their souls and much to the reforging of their world at the time, matched him for its matured meaning, and not simply the ruthless precision of his military might. Dry haired, outlined in unfairly sheered silk, all the angular planes of muscle hinted at with the steady drip that plasters cloth to skin. How many times now, over the years? How many times to see without understanding? When does admiration change forms? When did he start trusting in it, without that fatal leap so easy to concede: what wants for owing. No, it's a language of giving, and not to appease. Giving because one wants in turn, and not the dark, bleak belly of a want that cries out in lonely guilt and obligation, wretched as it was once inevitable.
He's saved from wandering thoughts by the words that find purchase on Lan Zhan's tongue, and Wei Wuxian blinks, swallows against a dry mouth and redirects his dark eyes to Lan Zhan's. Puts one hand to Qingshan, who holds his thumb, then ruthlessly tosses it away, to better offer both his hands forth again, for the father who holds his brother, and not him.
It gives him that moment to collect the drying cloths, to step forward and drape the first over Lan Zhan's arms and the crescent moon of Qingbai's cleansed form. He's healed further from his injuries the night before, and that may be part of his nature, not human and not animal, trapped as he is in this form of a yao most would consign to a death that lays undeserved, this child innocent. He will steady. Is steadying now, breathing in matched harmony to Lan Zhan. A gift in turn. )
I don't imagine, ( He says, smiling with the slow, seeping warmth of genuine and deep affection, turning to catch up the larger drying cloth to his dry hands, ) that will be any sooner than when you're tired of me.
( A step, and the toss of the cloth, settling over Lan Zhan's shoulders and draping down his back and sides. Qingbai's eyes flutter open and watch, rounded and curious. Qingshan stills in his silent pouting and clutching of fists, mouth opening into a perfect, curious circle. He steps closer, one hand reaching out to run over Qingbai's head. Then he reaches for Lan Zhan, but the sides of his neck, one hand coaxing his hair free and over to spill down directly on the cloth drier than he is. The barest brush of fingers against skin, and he scalds himself, without scolding. His other hand, catching hold of the cloth so it doesn't shift away for the short duration, drops away again, fingers lingering a second too long. )
You're welcome, Lan Zhan. Thank you, for accepting each one of them.
( Their sons, spanning decades, small celestial bodies pulled into their gravitational well. Fixing in steady orbit, steady and beautiful for Lan Zhan's hand on them, for his sect's in their raising, for the warmth that runs deeper than the chill of their cold spring's well. )
And for your answering affections for each, and all the ones to come.
( The curve of lips into silent amusement, and a warm promise, to not forget: a daughter, next. )
steers this thread back to the righteous salt path
Gratitude.
[ ...Lan Wangji nods his thanks before the thought suffocates him, before he might crown it with laughter. Like a wife, her household bustling under the white roil of domestic routine. As if they meet each day under this roof, a young family of four and their fifth member — an elder son — only departed to carve his own path in beauty, martyrdom, war or sweeping declarations. Youth propels Lan Sizhui, commands him. He will return to them a little scraped, a little worn, looser-jointed, more rounded at his edges. A jade piece cut and carved and polished splendid by Gusu Lan, relinquished by the heavens to be warmed, finally, by mortal hands.
And the rest of them, two parents and two brothers, like white birds calling in an empty sky, waiting for the flock's completion to head on for warmer winter pastures.
Each day, on waking, Lan Wangji carries the weight of a minute, reduced, cultivators' world on his shoulders. Tonight, readying for the disaster of rest in the close quarters of two children ignorant of one another, he wears his weight in water, mounted on his shoulders — narrowing them, shrinking his arms, licking at his ribs, kissing the lines of his webbed scars deeper than any paid concubine. Qingbai and Wei Ying's prepared dried robes in hand, he excuses himself behind the modesty screen long enough to trade his silks for coarse inn linens, then the yao's scant layers for comfort in kind.
They return back on stuttered step, drifting over dust-desaturated, chilled tiles to leave behind writings of condensation — and he takes again, catching Qingshan from Wei Ying's arms, dragging the boy beside his brother. They weigh less than armour, less than a fresh steel-tipped quiver, than the bearings of salt and stone and rice that Lan disciples must ferry with respectful obedience for each night hunt. Once, for all his rank, Lan Wangji delivered this burden, and his mouth pursed tight and curdled, and he complained not one step, not one word.
Now, he speaks even less of disgruntlement, not when Qingbai shakes his head and shuts his eyes and flattens himself to the side of Lan Wangji's chest, avoiding his brother's scolding swats. Not when Qingshan, ignored and unused to indifference, perseveres in babbling to attract his new playmate's attention, only to earn the click of Lan Wangji's tongue, and a one-armed rise above Lan Wangji's head, from where he kicks out his legs and arms in a delighted squeal. ]
Come here. [ He steals the babe back down and sets him too against his breast, where Qingbai retreats like oil from water, allowing coexistence — but not inviting it. He is too loud, Qingshan, too greedy. He has not spent the day in chase, has not worn himself. Lan Wangji's mouth, a fledgling thief, finds first the yao's distinctly human temple, then his brother's. ] Shhhhhhhh. You are my heart, quartered. My heart is disciplined.
[ Behave, both, while Lan Wangji walks the room with them with perfunctory twitches of each arm to mime cradling. Easier, perhaps, with two parents present, to surrender half his burden — but he has wasted a day deprived of touch, starved of it. He will steal more now, and stitch his eyes close, and wish Wei Ying merciful enough not to speak a word of Lan Wangji's indulgence.
He remembers to sit on the slow-yielding seating cushion, the sound of hard, milk-stained breathing a reassuring fixture from two soft mouths wetting his robe's rim and collarbone. Cute. And past the children and Lan Wangji's unseemly selfishness to claim them, stands Wei Ying — thawed, the common, frenetic electricity of his presence mellowed out in full. A beauty of a different kind, low candle light in rusted brazier. Trust it, and find your touch burned. ]
Wei Ying. Sit with us, before I think to offend you with cup rites. [ A choice, bittersweet moment when threatening to repeat an ill-timed marriage proposal can rouse laughter, sooner than cast fresh wounds. ] The temple. Shall we close it?
[ A tenuous proposal, to deprive the natives of their last vestiges of worship. And yet, more often, in villages that have not yet succumbed to the dread and despair of urgent survival, belief steers closer to spirituality than structured observance. Men wake and sleep too overcome by daily exhaustion to waste coin and breath on spirits and ancestors.
And the risk of leaving it open, for hapless visitors to invite whatever resent yet lingers, until the waters pacify the ghosts... ]
hello wei ying's heavenly pillar................. of salt
He'd gladly offer that up, for the moments of softened peace like these; for their slow increase, and for the warm oddity of gratitude and not just the sharp edges they both wear brushing against each other and not quite fitting right, off the battlefield.
Wei Wuxian doesn't have to think about his concept of family, or his security in seeing those he cares for being safe and cleaned and together in a moment that could be broken at any moment. He doesn't think about that, either, beyond the reflexive twitch of his fingers when he wants to place another ward, one more warning, one more turning away of all that is dark and ill and violent in the world, to guard each small sanctuary as he finds it.
For a moment, the feeling that settles over him is contentment, mellowing in the marrow of his bones. No more debts to be paid, and in two heartbeats, it feels freeing, almost true. To do as they may.
It slides away like sand in his fingers, but the greater contentment remains, winding around the lazy amusement and pleasure that is his watching Lan Zhan with their sons. With all things small and in need of love and care; for each wayward soul Lan Zhan has opened his arms to accept, will open his arms to accept in the future.
Called over, he blinks instead of starts, smiles and chuckles, allowing his weight to settle as he approaches. )
Not offended, Lan Zhan, never that. ( Seating himself, leaning forward enough so that he can behold the sleeping faces of both sons, only to find he can see barely more than babyfat cheeks and the moth's wings of lashes against their milk-white skin. The smile that follows softened and fond, affection unrestrained, remaining so when hsi gaze shifts to Lan Zhan. Tired, in linens, at the least of his largess, and rarely so humbly striking. ) I've already said yes.
( To slow shifted dynamics, to quick growing family. To tea in cups and alcohol to mind, but not in the mud of the unpleasant sadness of humanity at its worst, its most desperate, its most greedy. Not wearing trice borrowed robes, painted bride to be and digging to find bones in the forest, and Lan Zhan's hands, a memory around his throat.
A shudder that is not entirely fear travels down his spine. Ah, but a question, and an important one, stands asked, and he can direct his thoughts that way, shifting with a river's flow. )
For these people, I don't know how many would see it as different if we did. ( The cluck of his tongue, and: ) Yes, we shall. Are you willing to hand its monitoring to Yunmeng?
( Hanguang-jun doesn't have to, can state what he wishes, can leave it to coalitions of juniors, can grant it to any one sect for the scale of its festering. There are reasons and reasons why it would lay fallow for so long, and none indicate an inherent, malicious miscarriage of justice in recent decades, or even within the past times. No, only a broken landscape trying to heal itself while its darkness grew, contained by some passing practitioner of the better arts, then left for a later that only came on six feet and a small family's visitation of great heights and the beauty of what spanned out before them, before what lay underfoot took precedence.
He drops his gaze back to the children, reaches out, stills his hand in the moment before he touches one dark head. Then lowers it, stroking over hair still damp. )
When we return tomorrow, we can place a simpler barrier across the narrow section of the temple path. Or one around the whole; it wouldn't be too demanding.
( To keep humanity from intruding to unwarranted doom too soon; to allow nature to take its course as it was ever so inclined to do. )
i request an adult
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