Two marriages, one lifetime. Perhaps he has strayed too far from the sect's well-trodden path, after all.
For an exhalation between Wei Ying's startle and his stirring, only stupor stretches long between them, like cold-water seas. Spumed with half-gasps and brittle, tenuous confusion. If he shifts their hands, he will propel hefts of drowning wave.
On his wrist, the sleek, slithered thing of Wei Ying's blood, turned coarse-weaved cotton, strangles the harsh crest of bone. He hesitates — detains his breath as if such a minor transgression might upend them — and sees it sink on his arm, loiter taut, bridge Wei Ying's wrist, mount it. A claim, by any other name, its teeth sharp.
What is this, then? Yiling Wei names no rites. Wei Ying, already a mimicry of the boy before who wore his name, only imitates what he has seen before him. In a cold cave, you were taken without consent. And the ribbon rattles red, the wind sings against its anger.
"It is custom," Lan Wangji starts with the amused patience of a sprawled cat beneath summer sun, an educator, "to ask first."
Never mind similar failings on his part, sixteen years aged into their maturity. To be married, but not wedded before living family, eloped to all fittings of purpose. Dishonour unto his name, but this shame he wears well, like cloth of ramie, nettling skin.
Wei Ying, Wei Wuxian to a world at large, Yiling Laozu to the tongue in cheek nod at a ghastly horror lurking in the background only recently revealed to be less horror and more horrifically sad than widely believed, laughs. Unfettered, and with a wide grin, and he says:
"You know what they say about my memory."
Not an ownership of it, not when words swirl and spill, just a trickle of them, to say, "I'm willing to ask, Lan Zhan, but it's either arrogance to say marry into nothing, or to ask to marry into your clan. Besides," he says, eyes falling to the red that binds, the vein between them, "This is a promise. Whatever the formalities, whatever the other ties, there's us. Relearning what it is to know each other. It's your clan," he says, eyes lifting, searching Lan Zhan's face for something he doesn't know he needs to see, but curious, looking nonetheless. "That binds like this. Yunmeng Jiang is fond of proposals... and my parents, I presume, were fond of eloping."
A crooked grin, and a squeeze of fingers, if that's whatever weave their tapestry takes in time. Eloping, but there are ties to bind them should they wish them: to Yunmeng, to Gusu, and the ones they care for in each. Even to the Jins, for the one he loves there, in all his bright, burning glory, some unholy mixture of the men who raised him and Jiang Yanli's underlying kindness, given reason to understand emotions far better than his senior generation.
Their sons, three and counting, are worn as pearls around his neck, warm weights of a family he hasn't had for years, and won't shed for a lifetime, not by choice. Whatever they are, whatever they aren't, they're still father to three, and more to the legions of pained and raging dead of this land, even now only catching a hint of less claustrophobic air.
This, their promise. Wei Ying's own rite, fledgling and ill formed, a child nearly aborted. How Lan Wangji hungers for it, stomach cadaverous and rib bones piercing skin, through stench of damp and stale and old, through storm of mote dusts and crackled burning, through the marks and sounds and blurry stirrings of life within-after Yiling. How he wants novelty without heritage, without burden, without blood.
Twice married or betrothed or pledged, or merely intended. Once fated. He nods, less to seal the cinnabar of Wei Ying's calligraphy on their shared lives, than merely to acknowledge the inexorability of his conquest. Wei Ying wishes it so, the Patriarch has wispily rasped, and through his will, the earth quakes, the throbbing pulse of a land simmers and quickens and is.
He does not rip the red string off Wei Ying's wrist, but nooses two fingers within and around it once, and again in a second loop, and tungs to release the tie — to forcibly seize it, war spoils and fairly won, Lan Wangji's won. "I claim this as my binding price. Find another."
A beggar's sole possession, thieved. To remember this day by. Shivered, he remembers the correction, "This, your flute in name, and my children."
"Ours," he says, a quick, easy rejoinder, "Our children."
No, he will not concede that, not to this man, with all the guilt and gratitude in his heart for Lan Sizhui's raising, when Wei Wuxian had gone to his death believing him already dead. Ours, and he relents. Ours, and he forever has a stake in lives beyond his own, beyond Lan Zhan's, in a way still tenuous with his brother and nephew. A way that strengthens, but at a distance, still at cross ties all those tangled webs they stumble into, slowed further until they've struggled their way free.
Surrender a ribbon willingly, tie together two lives repeatedly, name two deaths as intertwined, even yet to claim children apace. His flute, certainly, on Lan Zhan's call as well, but Chenqing is not what he needs in this world. A tool, and one his shijie had called for the naming of, and that reminds him of importance in ways that any simply named bamboo flute otherwise might not. And yet.
The wind whispers, but only through leaves rasping against each other, too ossified to fall, spring a memory so distant it speaks as if legend among the roots of dying giants, and he gives another squeeze to Lan Zhan's hand.
"Bindings both ways. Though if I'm to find another ribbon, we'll be having to head into town."
No, spares he does not carry, does not see need for; had not, almost a lifetime ago, their eldest's lifetime ago, not even recalled to use it to bind Lan Zhan's leg. Funny now in retrospect, to not bind red with red, but red with white. Still, he does not yet shift, studies Lan Zhan like a face he does not know, relearning the planes of it, the shadows that fall, the lean lines of nose and jaw. He has aged well, where the generation above them had been less graceful, and for once, he really things about that, the time etched beneath that skin. Thinks of it, and doesn't linger in the guilt and pain, but wonder at the who, the will, the making of the Lan Zhan he sees today.
Wonders at himself, and the man he's remaking himself into, day by day.
"Pick it for me," he says, and it's pure whimsy, to tell Lan Zhan, do this for me. "When we get there." Red or black or white or blue or purple, ah, he doubts purple, but anything. Even a strip of repurposed lace.
"Ours," he hastens, in the way of an animal that learns late its nips and mouth's teasing have earned blood unduly spilled — in the way of an animal that might lick that hurt now, ease it. He did not intend — but Yiling is a coreless ground, made funerary hearth for misplaced intentions. Here, the twisting and turning of weeds in a space small, confined, is the reorganisation of pale geometries around dangers and weapons and cruel, timeless assault. Here, they suffer no feet's prints, only invasion, and what is Wei Ying, but Yiling lent flesh?
We worked you well, ground your bones, tattered your flesh. We worked until no more of you persisted.
"To town. We will want to see the reverberation. The spread of spiritual poison." Too much of the mark here, roots and forests and decay of shades grown and expansive, and Wei Ying, the deathless king, whose presence stokes them. In the low fluorescence of candid light, a brokered morning, Wei Ying is like threads of old silk, frayed at the ends of him, and each ghost comes to suckle at its mother's teat, and he has them, his children, his belly barren and his arms full. They must yet see what has become of the village, suffused so long in the toxicity of spiritual energies, cloyed and thickened.
Lan Wangji rises first. He has this, ever: back ripped, knee's joints that do not yield. One part of him, sustaining the whole, his hand drifting out less to anchor Wei Ying than make the victor's offer — come, then, be lifted. Make an attendant of the chief cultivator. "You will have a ribbon now, if I have a daughter later."
Stay, he needn't negotiate, then. It does not end with vows and territory, with pretty, worthless mimetism of rites Wei Ying smooths and folds and lays distantly cold across his body, like winter's mantle. Yiling is a step on long stairs, and no conclusion.
In all his mind's eye, the one that calculates and considers and sees problems from familiar angles and unfamiliar ones, shifting two steps over to see possibilities where others saw impassable walls. The echoes in people, the spirits that flee, the bleedover of raw intention that has claimed unprotected minds in so many cases. Yiling carries that poison heavy in its veins, but not alone in the ache of it, not when those who would play at being master to the dead claw their way through the shadows across these six realms and further afield.
The smallest villages carry their secrets, and some will always kill. He stands, absent clutch of Lan Zhan's hand, lift his gaze from his inward focus and the thought about which degree the resentment lingers as its own energy, independent of the spirits that birthed it and the case study that Yiling becomes for this unique depression of spirit, only to summon himself back to the moment. To promises, to chosen bindings, to unwritten ones, and to Lan Zhan, dark eyed, with his words a different sort of promise to a man starved for family as much as he's been starved for sustenance of the body. To glut, body and soul, at the same table, watching children scream and cry and fuss and quiet and grow, learning as they do. Teaching, yes, to be taught if fortunate, and they as fortunate for the opportunity.
Whatever men or manner of creature they become, under the power of their own progress in an uncaring, undisturbed landscape.
He smiles, lopsided, and then fully, laughing as he stands, clasps both hands around Lan Zhan's one. So the ribbon has been claimed, and so he finds it more odd in thought than odd in feeling; ties that bind break under enough testing.
Faith, to believe this one won't, too. They both know children are never binding enough.
"Haven't I promised you a daughter already? Dark of hair, pale of skin, temper either sweet or fiery, she's someone we'll have to know in time." No pattern of timing to the children left in their care, only the echo of pain, of loss, of despair that's slowly rinsed away with the affection they can spare. More, it turns, than they've known to give each other without fangs bared over open veins, thinking what if, what if they press down, break skin, let blood flow free.
"But know her, we will."
He won't be the one to break the contact of their hands, this time. Once, he'd held on to Jiang Cheng, to Jiang Yanli, and with them stepped forward into a world filled with light and possibility. Later it had been stability and pain and love and suffering in unequal measures, and one day, they'd all turned down different paths. Had died, or lived, or found some inbetween through no fault of their own. When A-Yuan's hands had disappeared, and reaching out meant clasping cold air, to wake with a cry broken in a throat, and eyes unseeing for the time it takes to recognise the prison of his own flesh.
No, he knows the trickery of his own senses at times, and he holds on until he's wrested away, a laugh easy on his lips as movement turns him toward the village, to taking steps forward and down, wind parting the twisted leaves on warped branches, sweeping aside yellowed grasses, tinder-thin creeping bushes that send spindly fingers flinching forward, teasing at the edges of their robes.
It is not a warm day, but it doesn't feel cold like it should. Nor is it warm, more tepid, like an uncertain spring morning where winter's claws still rake at the ground and whisper, Not yet.
The feeling lingers as they wind down toward the village beyond the collapsed barriers of near two decades before, people stepping through the measures of their day with little visible effect for it. Not that such things are needing to be obvious, and the spill of people past street venders, even at the corner he once favoured, bickering a note too high, and he thinks they might start to have the shape of the bleedthrough, the trickle down to the worst emotions, from the easiness of anger to the coldness of...
"Revenge." He turns his head, eyes finding Lan Zhan's. "Emotional spillover, carried in, flowing downhill. Do you think?" It's possible, he doesn't voice. Of course it's possible; of course a land can bleed feeling as much as it bleeds water from stone.
The sun can kiss her. Knife's edge, the parting thought: he watches Wei Ying with baleful, hawkish greed, sees his womb and its slow-baking work. After sixteen years' lull, consider haste.
"I think," he starts with the air of every petulant infant who has spotted the treat denied to him, of Sizhui when he was still Yuan, and sticky fingers trailed to catch the fineries stretched over merchants' stalls, "I shall have two."
Be warned, be wary. And Yiling, a widow, Wei Ying a mother, Lan Wangji their husband-witness, their cause, their resolution. The whip of his tongue stays, his hand ropes a quiet claw that clenches tight and pulsing at the plant root of his back, the bulb of his posture. He stifles his aches: counts milliseconds of yearning, then heartbeats, then moments whole, until he is the glass recipient of waters, roiling. And jasmine-bland, his gait slows, reshapes itself: he escorts, one hand on his sword's hilt, Bichen a shriek of hunger crystallised sharp, fettered.
Red, vibrant, bloodied beneath his sleeve — Wei Ying's string, trapped on his left wrist, shielded from the dangers of friction inherent in the bearing of the dominant hand. The Gusu Lan way, for all of Wei Ying's exceptions. It will serve. It has served well so far, served often.
The village is a world stitched together from patches of rags and misplaced thread, needles prickling. Each way, men turn with apprehension, the bright-eyed terror of creatures that know themselves hunted and small, and see their predators alive among them.
"I think," he murmurs, and concedes to the offensive inevitability of easing himself between Wei Ying and the nearest stranger, "you should call wards."
Not to arm or guard them, but for how people move, serpentine, how they gaze at each other with distrust mounting. How their touch lingers too often on blades held out, their eyes search jugulars. They are animals fed well with grudge and spite, to saturation. One flicker, and sparks will turn to effervescent flame and —
"...cleansing. Can you yet...?" In truth, he knows Wei Ying might be himself too deeply entrenched in startled energies to perform ablutions. Better, "Can you amplify what I anchor?"
The perimeter is too broad. Their watchers are too attentive of strangers. And the first taste of pure energy, when they come so drained, might prove...
His response as easy as the steps he takes, the glance back over a shoulder to Lan Zhan, the sway of his lashes when they descend and lift again, not coy, not trying, but fluttered nonetheless. All for:
"You better get busy then."
His womb is only producing so many. Lan Zhan can step in with some of the bearing of children of his blood, just as they match step, out of this unlikely landscape of bare truth to a barren heart at the centre of the village.
Says nothing to the shift in positions between them, too used to it when Lan Zhan is on high alert, in the moments before they're joined action, not just sword and shielded. He breathes in, inhales the scents of village life, of town existence, and the thrumming energies that should be within and are off kilter, present but off tempo.
He can feel them, brushing up against his head, a pressure like the weather's heft before the arrival of a looming storm.
"By music," he says, offering a truth and one that he doesn't think Lan Zhan understands to its depth; even pulling from himself, music is his weaving of control, of cleansing. The songs change, the pull turning from tidal to gentled downstream inevitability, but here... music on the living is hard, because it tries, too often, to direct.
"I'll anchor." Better in this to concede to Lan Zhan's capacities, where his aren't strictly as helpful in this case. Not when it becomes chancy, with the living and the drained poisons of the dead. "And ward, but Lan Zhan, it's for them."
The talisman comes as he wills it to, out of his holding pouch, and he shows it to Lan Zhan, body posture relaxed. Not yet inviting the snakes hidden in townsfolk to finding their target worth striking in their unaimed hunger. The red lines on yellow paper sketch out a familiar story to one who'd seen the many such decorating Wen Ning's neck in his hardest days, grotesque pearls strung on spider's webbing, calling a consciousness home from the chaos of the resentment that had driven it to drowning.
He knows the trick of it, spun fierce and glistened in Wei Ying's hand, itching for qi it has not yet been fed — a creature carved in parchment, contained. In a bustling street, they feel like two celestial bodies in a dark night, alone, known only to each other and the tired gasp of power flickered in Wei Ying's hands.
Sweeping by, a screeching cart nearly brushes the back of his silks. He drifts closer to Wei Ying, hand soft to shield away the sight of the talisman, as if the gesture alone might suffocate its strength and ambition. Empty precaution: few men here cultivate, a handful hardly read. Many will think it a missive, or a stall painting in cheap diluted inks. Still, the risk breathes long over his shoulders, bends his back into Wei Ying.
"Confinement will agitate them, if you do not overpower them absolutely." In short, the lesson long learned: aim the once, kill. Do not allow resentment to linger, bad blood to stew. A man on his rooftop should be touched once by arrow's tip, and downed. This, they bore witness to. This, Lan Wangji and a scant few others of a sprawled cohort survived to remember.
If they do this, suppression spread across a lattice of countless independent variables, men of unknown character and strength and disposition, perhaps even those possessed of intuitive skill to rebel against the sorcery — they must be certain, before they venture the first attempt. A second might yet elude them.
And if it worked in the marked territory of Wei Ying's cave, where he built of his two hands an empire, where he carved out an ally from the bones of a friend, the conditions were more suitable there, then. The task turned less feat of legend than breeze of inconvenience. "Can you?"
He tucks the talisman away following the lifted hand, the quietness of disguise following on the loud reality of the agitated, unrestful town around. Not the first time to have seen such things, not at Yiling's fringe, where people survived because people had to survive somewhere, somehow. Here, the forest edge was green still, the fields allowed for tilling no matter the salt carried in the souls of those who clawed at the living.
Resentment builds, festers. Given guidance, it can find its own means to let go, and some does, some wants resolution through whatever act that may entail, and to then leave, departing its hauntings for whatever cycled next. Cicadas, emerging from the earth years after their laying, to devour all they encountered in a brief period, then shed their skin for their next life.
His lips press into a line, considering fully before he answers the proposed certainty: can you less of a challenge and more of a negotiation of limitations.
One with answers he finds, and tastes bitter on his tongue.
"I can," he says, turning his face toward Lan Zhan, "No one plays counter to me here, Lan Zhan, and Chenqing sings true."
There are ways and ways to manage this, and containment needs storing, a target, a redirect. His hollowed core less holds resentment than allows it passage through him should it try to cling on, finding nothing to hold on to, no further energy to fuel them. He turns his hand palm up, offered toward Lan Zhan.
"Anchoring does not require the cleansing, but the stubborn ones, it'll come down to something like this if the true minds are driven too far down."
A warning for the unintentional consequences, in how resentful energies can resent their own thwarted purpose even as they might likewise embrace it.
If Wei Ying trusts, who is Lan Wangji to deny him?
The better sword hand, the more sophisticated exorcist, the consummate cultivator — all but a babe in swaddling, in matters of resentment. To cleanse a wound requires only the theory of how injury was dealt. Wei Ying's mouth speaks the poison, he watches its tendrils grow to root, sees it spread. Of the two, if one is worthy of wisdom, it is not he anointed by half of the cultivation world with ardour, the remaining half between grudging, broken-back bows.
The sun bursts through in empty pallor. In Yiling, all is listless, a silhouette of itself, as if energy is a scantly doled resource. It stains his hands sweet, dapples like blood smear. Electric, the air carries long scents of iron.
He readies himself, the quiet snap of limbs bargaining their learned place after eel-like, swollen undulation, precious seconds submitted to languor. He feels an animal, constricted by the negative space he must fill out at Wei Ying's side, bolstered by his presence. An extension of him, weapon drawn, hand soft when air and qi mingle and marry and summon his guqin in half-lidded blinks of efficiency.
Gasps bloom alongside him in quiet, volcanic eruption. What the minds of those touched by resent do not know, their instincts sharpen to acknowledge.
Wei Wuxian stands before each mental cliff with more surety than the one he'd embraced for an ending he'd been denied, a lifetime ago. One grown son, one world that dawned and dusked and didn't care for what was lost or found in its revolutions. Yiling, the fallow beast of its burdened lands, skin and bones and hungry maw yawning wide behind him.
Please. Oh, every plead, every demand, boils down to this:
Wei Wuxian lifts Chenqing, to the fizzle of excitement and resignation he knows too well, to the grounding gravitational pull of Lan Zhan at his side, blade bared like teeth he can only shiver before when set into the mouth of a dog. Sound flows from him, wrested from lungs and tongue and seen under the lowering of his lashes, crackling through the awareness of those hot tempers and tempered angers of the crowd. Resentment coiling in hearts and minds and stomachs, before the first notes strike: a quiet moment, an explosive cacophony that follows, shadows swallowing the light of day.
It's dramatic, the shivers and shudders that pass through people not yet turned to puppets to resentful whims, but getting closer, day by day. The tipping point is never far off, balanced on a blade's edge, ready to bleed.
It's the strongest resentment, that of a child's, that reaches them first. The man is a broad shoulders, stooped back individual, a caricature of strength to any which had been small and helpless. Fury, the unchecked hurt of a life cut short when death was not a real truth quite yet, not solidified, has the sheer uncoordinated attempt of violence as a throwing of body, no weapons, and the cry of, "No! Noooo! I don't want to, I want to be big!"
A child's lament, in a voice too old for it, with eyes too glossy and burning with enraged fear, the pressure of it scalding as his song rises in a sharp, uncompromising note, only to turn into the lulling apology to follow the acknowledgement that none of this was fair, and neither was this hold of the living, by the dead which had no more life to live.
It is a firm, sad cajoling, and the black pours out of the man's mouth, from his eyes, smoke that cries with a child's voice, until the sounds are swallowed, echoed in the distress calls of chickens in someone's yard, houses down.
The air is thick and heady with iron and hibiscus, with the blighting luminescence of song in dappled gold of groaned, ungainly earned translucence. Where filth sleeps, cleansing is colour, and Wei Ying calls it close, refracted, coils it, then unspools the spindle.
And Lan Wangji knows his part: the second instrument in this, cacophony of shrieks and distraction, the guqin suave for any man whose ear's never been scratched by snake's hiss. Behind his eyelids, violence flickers: the wrench of energy, of flesh bleached of resent, and Wei Ying's play soft for it like slip of silk before it twines and knots the noose, careful to extricate rot but leave the bodies unscathed.
He amplifies. It is his due, fingers gelid, but sliding, lending the burn of sandalwood, of true qi ablution. If Wei Ying is sea water, he is salt, and the wound of their anger weeps and weeps until the well dries, until the sting cauterizes.
And what lives in the wake of it? Precious little impressions, only the imprecations of merchants brokering the same trade as before, only easing. Clasps quieted. Smiles turned strat-laced, more than predatory. The immensity of the change, suffocated into nuance.
A simple thing, to dismiss the zither. Simpler still to blindly seek Wei Ying's hand, to round his grip on the known bite of his wrist bones, and — tug, less for Wei Ying's own sake, than that of Wangji. Alive. Alive, undisturbed, undispered. In his ear, This was our land first.
"You want wine," he rasps, and his tongue's dry, teeth tendered. Wei Ying wants his wine, or it would please a lost ache in Lan Wangji's soul to supply it. To find relief on the whetted edge of another man's gladness. "Come."
He basks, for a moment, in that joined presence, in the ease of finding music an aid and not just the weapon it also is, for Lan Zhan's clan, perched as egrets in the snows of their wintertime mountain peaks. Where the brilliance of it, sunlight cutting down in shafts through the clouds overhead and the dusts raised to swirl lazily through air grown softer, is that for a moment, light feels solid. Like he could reach out a hand, capture the length of it, wrap his fingers around that shaft, and slide.
Warmth, captured. Light, held close, then left to go its way again, to disappear and reemerge, bold and triumphant, with every cracking dawn.
He startles in that softness, the tired a pleasant nudge into his joints, the lassitude of fulfillment for now, an itch scratched to leave his skin reddened but gladdened for being alive. Lan Zhan pulls, and there are words as the land thrums beneath them, as people settle without knowing why it was they had not settled.
Come. He smiles, dusk creeping over a horizon to blue so dark it fades to blackness, and he is the night, the warmth of the summer's evening, where the insects sing and the frogs carol and the river burbles on, impatient and implacable. Wine, and thirst leaves his mouth parched and dry, and he smiles, fondly, but doesn't laugh as he once would have.
"Of course, Lan Zhan." To come, for wine or companionship or whatever feel between them in the ache of a smaller success weighed against the greater joy of living things, and the sons who wait, safe for now. Always for now, in a world where monsters live in the open, and kindness hides in shadows, and for now can be enough in small stretches. Like the walk to the teahouse, the winehouse, one and the same: the only place for stories and drinking and dining on small dishes, up three steps from the street they walk down. Lan Zhan holding to his wrist, and Wei Wuxian twisting his hand, until the fall of Lan sleeves swallows the curve of a hand that bends to turn and hold wrist in turn, much as it breaks the sanctity of Lan Zhan's circled grip.
"Tell me you'll try the tea, however much it might disappoint. They're bound to have something pickled, some rice—" He teases in degrees, eyes flicking around to watch with a master with known benevolence expecting an illusion to shatter. The town holds. The people hold. It is not resentment that rides highest, and he smiles again, a sigh without sighing. Looks to Lan Zhan as they mount the stairs as one more impossible task to master, unwavering.
"Some vegetables cooked in simple sauce, ah?" Dreams, perhaps, because they'll all be turnips and radishes, and he'll have to stare at them with hideous nostalgia and choke down the memory of them before he'd even eat.
Unbidden, he yields, until their hands meander, and it is only a soft grip, a negotiation of fingers gently bound and they are — teasing in open sight. As men who have earned the privilege do, as friends or lifelong companions. Past the study or interference of their witnesses, deep-scowled men who bargain the cost of legumes and trinkets, rickshaws that rattle their carcasses and the road in passing.
Wei Ying steers him. He feels light for it, adrift, an agglomeration of limbs without purpose. A stranger, and unburdened for it, as if, for once, his footprints may leave snow and mud without casting print. Unsaddled of the corset fettering that binds his breath, of Hanguang-Jun.
"This time, you have tea." He remembers. They both do. Scarcity, where now sleeps wealth. They walk up stairs where a door creaks and the tavern master gives welcome to a cracked, heavy wood table — empty, as most seating arrangements are, in a place devoid of clientele.
He sits, with all the straight-backed ceremony of a man who dignifies an establishment through sheer will and presence, the sea of his silks spread evenly about him. He waits for his tea, overly steeped. The wine, faintly clouded. The pickles, requested on whim, and the rice, the millet, the soup.
He pours Wei Ying's wine, unasked. Then, softened, "Pour my cup."
Part of him will be glad the day Lan Zhan graduates away from his horrific reliance on millet. It couldn't even be a proper congee, with the rice awaiting whatever spicing or change the day brought: no, it was the meal, the grain, and he might grimace (he does, lips thinned and twisted before it resolves into a smile, wry) before he smiles.
"More than water for guests," he says, and he lifts the tea, takes one cup, pours the tea within. Swishes it around, cleaning in the manner of a morning's tea house, poured into the spare bowl left for all things deemed unnecessary. But it means the second, proper cup pours clean, no historical detritus floating, and the cup itself cleansed in the way of heated water, the scathed cleansliness of borrowed moments made home; lifts and holds it in fingertips, examined, and offered out to Lan Zhan like this.
He sits at ease on his side of this table, and he offers with that same ease, languid but graceful, always something in him aware of what he could be, in different circumstances. A man grown again better used to living within his skin, better at ease with himself and the silences without finding them his guilty due.
"Lan Zhan." An exchange, cup for cup, alcohol and tea, room warmth and hotter still. Not a match in most any sense, but there'd be no other sensible one for the two who sit here now.
It is his due, Hanguang-Jun come in full regalia, accepting the trivial formalities of hospitality that only Yiling has ever denied him — a scion of Gusu Lan, envoy to Zewu-Jun, official of the sects, now their foremost servant, liege and mouthpiece.
And Wei Ying pours prettily, attentive in the way men accept readily and greedily at teahouses, a learned performance that Wei Ying's sister must have suffered great pains to convey, instant by borrowed instant, gesture by brokered gesture. Let Wei Ying be this: pond-water shallowness in his elegance, fleeting beauty. He has shown himself bloodied and raw long enough at cliff's side, spying the flickered golden sight of his fussing, fumbling, unrepenting nephew, or knelt to beg the dark dregs and embers of Jiang Wanyin's forgiveness. The transition will flatter his forgotten forms, will suit him.
At length, Lan Wangji rewards the care, beholden to bow his back to the appropriate depth and angle, to murmur his thanks as discreetly as a bird's wing touches lake water. He whisks away his sleeve, then receives the tea cup, and sips behind the modesty screen of his other hand, as if he partakes shamefully of the wine vice. Then, politely, "The leaf greens sweeter here."
Flattery, however poorly earned, a great, sweltering fondness in his chest for the morsel of a wrong suffered decades ago, now so poetically righted. It stung you then, he cannot say, gaze kind over the rim of his cup, as he drinks his fill, to the last drop, You still had pride.
Emptied, the cup arrives down with a faint clatter. He stills it with two fingers. "Yiling receives me well. I am humbled."
A twitch of his lips, for all there is a part of him that appreciates the salve of this, over an old, long healed scar; one of many small, unimportant things he could wish had been different, this simple ability to offer tea.
Lan Zhan had, of course, paid put to have it before, in that village of Yiling, below the mountains and the Burial Grounds. Yet there'd been nothing to offer but the lacklustre showing of caves and stone and oh, yes, the hard won, thin health and happiness of those who lived there with him. Lacking so much, but having at least that for comfort warm into the nights that could shriek into their ears with demands from the bodiless dead.
"Thank you," he says, lips pulling up into an easy smile, eyes catching light enough to reflect it back in brightness, "I'm sure the master of the tea house appreciates your praise for their efforts."
Efforts they are, procuring teas to offer when these towns are used as trade-stops more than places sought out for their own merits, excepting the foolish ones who claimed proximity to rights after a legacy that had been whipped out of this region a decade ago. Fewer false Patriarchs these days, until one went further afield, and new names and mythos took precedence.
Still, this is a warmth he basks in, this exchange of pleasantries and deeper meanings, and it's with that in mind that he lifts the cup poured for him, alcohol astringent but not unduly so, a bite promised for the warmth of blood it will draw to the surface on its way down.
"Yiling is humbled," he says in turn, smiling, "To have chance to host Lan Zhan again, after all this time."
Drains his cup in one long swallow, a semi-formal shield of his hand as he does: a cheer, a summation of respect, to the man sitting across from him. Not for his titles, though he has respect for those too, but for whatever he is, this one who could admit to having loved a shade long passed, and who had raised a son to be proud of.
He sets the cup to table surface, one contained and tiny click.
"There's a long road ahead, ah? On a pathway wider than I once thought it was." Perhaps not the broad throughways of the large cities, of places wearing the pride of their passageways in open streets and cheerful markets, but it was not the thin path of animals and mountain destitute eked out in the long shadows of the darkened forests. Broader than a single-log bridge, and sturdier footed, too.
"A second life," he agrees, and drinks his cup, his fill, his due. A road spanning one man's blinked eternity. A course, stone by stone and log by log, erected to last.
"What will you make of it?" Brilliance, hardship, disaster. Blood and war and all the wretched regalia of human misery, when greed and ambition take turns to wear governance. A new path, altogether — the farmer's way. Was this not Wei Ying's calling, by the end of it? The lotus flower was never destined to reflect him: only seemingly drift in still water, weighed down by the heft of its own majesty, anchored in crowns of flat-bodied leaves. He is a simpler, fairer flicker of translucence, flattered by ephemerality.
And Lan Wangji drinks to him, tea cup raised as if it were the courtesy weapon of wine consecrated to the worship of a living hero, a decorated elder. He bows with his back and his hands and his cup, like a moon forced from early wax to waning.
In a world that holds its breath, they are dangerously, exhilaratingly alone, even as the server comes to tempt their appetites with servings of the day's broth, to ask if Wei Ying's jar already wants replenished. "Who will you be?"
'Wei Ying.' 'Wei Wuxian.' A humble, if whimsical daozhang. Disciple to Yungmeng Jiang, renounced and defected. Protégé of Gusu Lan, paths strategically, diplomatically, mournfully divided. The Yiling Patriarch, when the wind breezes, the stars align, and Wei Ying's tongue would saturate in red and iron. Sizhui's father, always, and shared custodian of every child he produces and throws like weed after a summer's rain, in Wangji's path.
A cup raised in turn, in the knit silence and electricity of this dusty building, careworn and careful for the tending of what public comes through, desperate or greedy or anything inbetween, anything that might be better. The wine isn't the best he's had, and yet as he raising the cup to Lan Zhan, what's on his tongue after is sweet, smooth over his tongue and down his throat, and he smiles after, as if nights and days of careless imbibing was to lead to moments like these. Where the offer of a new jar, when for once, he's not drained his dry already, and if it's tempering or moderation or distraction in the moment, he feels light enough to breathe freely.
"I look forward to finding out," he says at last, pours for himself another cup of wine, though he doesn't drink it immediately. He is himself, Wei Ying to few, Wei Wuxian to most, and the bleeding shadow of the Laozu to a public that half believed he'd never been real, and half believed he'd the cause of their worst personal nightmares. He is not that man, in what he will bleed out of Yiling, lancing the abscess of its hurts, draining so that healing can take root the way the rot had.
He is a collection of half-finished thoughts, of better intentions better considered, of actions taken and paced and still only sometimes parallel to the well trod paths they'd all learned through the dawning years of their cultivation. A constructed family, found piece by piece, and it's easier then, easier now, to lift his cup and pause, head tilted to consider Lan Zhan through this all.
Drinks from the cup with his lashes lowered as he blinks, long and slow and carefully careless, the affection of a moment and two men who knew each other once, who may yet know each other again, and not just in the weaving of their children's lives. Yet first in that weaving, and the lancing of wounds, and the bindings of fates without the axe of some outside threat hanging over their heads.
"What of you, Lan Zhan? Who will you be, in this life of yours?"
Not new, not second, not follow-up, but cleared beyond the turgid mouth of its river, flowing to sea. Clarity, a chord for the soul, and not the demand, the enforcement, of anyone else's expectation. Unless he chose. Unless he wished it, anchored as he is, inevitably, by clan, by tradition, by ties to a brother he loves and a life he'd been born into.
Father, first before many things. Wei Wuxian feels he sees more of that in Lan Zhan than the rest, out of hands on throats or bones anchoring wrists, but instead the small smile when he sees Sizhui, the curve of his arms when he holds their younger sons, the daughters he's demanded.
For a moment, they are only geometries of courtesy, hands played and performed and cups traded, the careful tumble of their swarthy translucence: Lan Wangji's bronze with warm tea. Wei Ying's, threatening a mist that betrays a lesser calibre of alcohol, but that they forgive, forget, embrace. He thinks, more fool him —
And reaches, hand raining long shadow over the table's span, to gain the measure of the wine jar and the membrane of its residual wine, swishing it. Enough here to wet his lips, to steal taste and wake the blind, battered, amorphous thing, the slithered tendrils of the animal rooted beneath his skin. The wilderness alcohol brokers. But they keep the company of a young girl, trembled and dancing between tables, of a slew of pale-faced visitors, negotiating distance comfort.
They have not earned the dubious blessing of Hanguang-Jun, the drunken menace. Under the dusty, hazy pallor of dying light, he teases droplets of wine in his tea, gives the cup a swirl and drinks with an air of timid, carefree consternation.
"Not a teacher." A shortcut, they both know, to start with a negative definition, to sculpt purpose from the stone of his uncertainty. Then, softened, "Not the leading cultivator."
Not ruler of one sect, not liege of them all. Not a spider, casting his web long and meandering and glistened with dew-like silvered effervescence. Not tightening his spill.
"Too much of me belongs to others." A sect, a cause, a lifetime. The forehead that fetters him tighter than garotte. He wishes, distantly, to drift. "I forget where they begin, and I end."
A skip in his memory of breathing, watching Lan Zhan's advance, the slide of fingers around the wine jar flirting with the barest touch of a filled remembrance, dregs as mediocre as the first pour. He can recall when Lan Zhan had drank with full awareness, has a hazier recollection of the time he'd convinced, ordered, whatever it had been with that talisman he's forgotten with the sway of time, and things had been simpler.
He wonders if Lan Zhan's mind ever sits in knots of too busy chatter, of cross purpose and questions and doubts and further questions and endless, immense, insatiable curiosity; but he thinks that at times, Lan Zhan has clarity, and others, he's like the wine mixed in with his tea, and his answer, spilled past his lovely lips like the slide of his tongue over them.
A taste of what is, and what isn't. Listening to Lan Zhan's words, forming with his hands the script of his consideration. It feels rare still, even when Lan Zhan is less absolute in his trade of golden words than he once was, or often could be. Worth the extra consideration, the admittance of how he turns, caught within the web of their collective lives, of the realms, and even their chosen duties.
An empty cup, his fingers curled around its sides. Studying Lan Zhan's face, and offering a smile, without edges, without promises. Better natured, but wry, thoughtful.
"I might recommend travel," he says at length, "For starting to find the edges of an answer. When you don't need to be the leader," of realms through the handholding and the keen-eyed watch on the unfair and fair dealings of humanity and the inhuman. "You live up to your name, Lan Zhan. You fit Hanguang-jun, but that light doesn't need to shine as the sun does. Light enough to guide you fits. Lan Zhan fits. Finding the weave of who that man is... for yourself, who that man is. Tell me how to help, when you find you know."
Sound gains flesh within him, like every cancerous growth. He finds screams coagulate, the instinctive and visceral revulsion that rewrites the cage of his ribs, pushes thin the barrier of his diaphragm. He drinks, and the whimper drowns, and he seems no more murmured than the wash of patrons that negotiate their first few tastes of their meals alongside them. And he finds Wei Ying's face, cut of his gaze blanched:
"No." And softened snow, "I do not wish to meet you unfinished."
As if he were a puppet absent strings, a clay thing losing the shape of his moulding. Paper burned. He cannot be a fickle, feeble thing, not when the years have battered and turned him. Poetry, empty verse, the judgement of faint, aged philosophies. What has he learned, if not himself? How to drink (poorly) and precepts.
"To be another tribe for Wei Ying's salvation." By name of Wen, or in their chaotic impossibilities to pursue progress without reconciliation, Jiang or Jin. Let them follow, blind-eyed and aimless and know Wei Ying will deliver them to virtue and balance and the cleansing of blood once spilled, the erasure of sins committed. How many steps down the paths of Lanling? Carp Tower will learn new slopes and tumbles.
"This is not the way of equals." They cannot be as they are, and walk a line, one behind the next.
A trail he can follow, walk the line of progress over unfamiliar hills, in the learning of himself. Has he not but recently set out doing the same? Finding pieces of himself, pieced together, stitches that aren't pretty so much as patchwork and beautiful for their borrowed wholeness.
"It takes time for any person to know themselves. I'm still learning," he says, admitting it with the same cavalier grace in which he's named himself a half-wrecked cultivator, he who has the techniques and the teachings and the methods and the limitations of his body's own natural qi to use any of the above. Power in those moments, or the metred use of that finite resource. Time has given him the means of its effectiveness, even while he has not needed to fill his empty cup with resentful energies for years.
Oh, but he had, once. Had again when he'd sought out his own death, at the hands of those who had been so greedy for it, for the power they thought he held indiscriminate, so that they in turn could wield it with righteous terrorism.
"The young grow together, and the old, we learn to walk together. Companions, and not saviours. It's long past my turn to be the one who waits, Lan Zhan." A smile, small and true and tired, for sixteen dark years and sixteen years of plunging into chaos, and children, their numbers growing one by one.
He should not indulge, should not murmur, "Mmmm. On battered knees, counting ants and worms."
— but he remembers. Heavens have and hold him, he recalls, ancient and dust-licked steps, splintered by the heft of their grandeur. How the coarsened silk of Wei Ying's robes lent them polish, how he preoccupied himself with all that stood a flickered distraction on long, summer's youthful days, when the midday sun dappled fine white on his cheeks before they learned to fissure for tears.
They were children, once. Boys, before war. Hands do not recover their shape after knowing the sword's hilt. How must a tea cup now fill the strain of that absence? And yet he drinks, to the supervising smile of a child-server, relieved her patrons remember enough of their tolerance to promise no impatience or violence or words of anger.
"You have no patience." And Lan Wangji lacks the academic spirit to teach it. "Make no pledges. Walk the world. Where our paths intersect, they converge."
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For an exhalation between Wei Ying's startle and his stirring, only stupor stretches long between them, like cold-water seas. Spumed with half-gasps and brittle, tenuous confusion. If he shifts their hands, he will propel hefts of drowning wave.
On his wrist, the sleek, slithered thing of Wei Ying's blood, turned coarse-weaved cotton, strangles the harsh crest of bone. He hesitates — detains his breath as if such a minor transgression might upend them — and sees it sink on his arm, loiter taut, bridge Wei Ying's wrist, mount it. A claim, by any other name, its teeth sharp.
What is this, then? Yiling Wei names no rites. Wei Ying, already a mimicry of the boy before who wore his name, only imitates what he has seen before him. In a cold cave, you were taken without consent. And the ribbon rattles red, the wind sings against its anger.
"It is custom," Lan Wangji starts with the amused patience of a sprawled cat beneath summer sun, an educator, "to ask first."
Never mind similar failings on his part, sixteen years aged into their maturity. To be married, but not wedded before living family, eloped to all fittings of purpose. Dishonour unto his name, but this shame he wears well, like cloth of ramie, nettling skin.
"Wei Ying's memory fails him."
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"You know what they say about my memory."
Not an ownership of it, not when words swirl and spill, just a trickle of them, to say, "I'm willing to ask, Lan Zhan, but it's either arrogance to say marry into nothing, or to ask to marry into your clan. Besides," he says, eyes falling to the red that binds, the vein between them, "This is a promise. Whatever the formalities, whatever the other ties, there's us. Relearning what it is to know each other. It's your clan," he says, eyes lifting, searching Lan Zhan's face for something he doesn't know he needs to see, but curious, looking nonetheless. "That binds like this. Yunmeng Jiang is fond of proposals... and my parents, I presume, were fond of eloping."
A crooked grin, and a squeeze of fingers, if that's whatever weave their tapestry takes in time. Eloping, but there are ties to bind them should they wish them: to Yunmeng, to Gusu, and the ones they care for in each. Even to the Jins, for the one he loves there, in all his bright, burning glory, some unholy mixture of the men who raised him and Jiang Yanli's underlying kindness, given reason to understand emotions far better than his senior generation.
Their sons, three and counting, are worn as pearls around his neck, warm weights of a family he hasn't had for years, and won't shed for a lifetime, not by choice. Whatever they are, whatever they aren't, they're still father to three, and more to the legions of pained and raging dead of this land, even now only catching a hint of less claustrophobic air.
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Twice married or betrothed or pledged, or merely intended. Once fated. He nods, less to seal the cinnabar of Wei Ying's calligraphy on their shared lives, than merely to acknowledge the inexorability of his conquest. Wei Ying wishes it so, the Patriarch has wispily rasped, and through his will, the earth quakes, the throbbing pulse of a land simmers and quickens and is.
He does not rip the red string off Wei Ying's wrist, but nooses two fingers within and around it once, and again in a second loop, and tungs to release the tie — to forcibly seize it, war spoils and fairly won, Lan Wangji's won. "I claim this as my binding price. Find another."
A beggar's sole possession, thieved. To remember this day by. Shivered, he remembers the correction, "This, your flute in name, and my children."
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No, he will not concede that, not to this man, with all the guilt and gratitude in his heart for Lan Sizhui's raising, when Wei Wuxian had gone to his death believing him already dead. Ours, and he relents. Ours, and he forever has a stake in lives beyond his own, beyond Lan Zhan's, in a way still tenuous with his brother and nephew. A way that strengthens, but at a distance, still at cross ties all those tangled webs they stumble into, slowed further until they've struggled their way free.
Surrender a ribbon willingly, tie together two lives repeatedly, name two deaths as intertwined, even yet to claim children apace. His flute, certainly, on Lan Zhan's call as well, but Chenqing is not what he needs in this world. A tool, and one his shijie had called for the naming of, and that reminds him of importance in ways that any simply named bamboo flute otherwise might not. And yet.
The wind whispers, but only through leaves rasping against each other, too ossified to fall, spring a memory so distant it speaks as if legend among the roots of dying giants, and he gives another squeeze to Lan Zhan's hand.
"Bindings both ways. Though if I'm to find another ribbon, we'll be having to head into town."
No, spares he does not carry, does not see need for; had not, almost a lifetime ago, their eldest's lifetime ago, not even recalled to use it to bind Lan Zhan's leg. Funny now in retrospect, to not bind red with red, but red with white. Still, he does not yet shift, studies Lan Zhan like a face he does not know, relearning the planes of it, the shadows that fall, the lean lines of nose and jaw. He has aged well, where the generation above them had been less graceful, and for once, he really things about that, the time etched beneath that skin. Thinks of it, and doesn't linger in the guilt and pain, but wonder at the who, the will, the making of the Lan Zhan he sees today.
Wonders at himself, and the man he's remaking himself into, day by day.
"Pick it for me," he says, and it's pure whimsy, to tell Lan Zhan, do this for me. "When we get there." Red or black or white or blue or purple, ah, he doubts purple, but anything. Even a strip of repurposed lace.
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We worked you well, ground your bones, tattered your flesh. We worked until no more of you persisted.
"To town. We will want to see the reverberation. The spread of spiritual poison." Too much of the mark here, roots and forests and decay of shades grown and expansive, and Wei Ying, the deathless king, whose presence stokes them. In the low fluorescence of candid light, a brokered morning, Wei Ying is like threads of old silk, frayed at the ends of him, and each ghost comes to suckle at its mother's teat, and he has them, his children, his belly barren and his arms full. They must yet see what has become of the village, suffused so long in the toxicity of spiritual energies, cloyed and thickened.
Lan Wangji rises first. He has this, ever: back ripped, knee's joints that do not yield. One part of him, sustaining the whole, his hand drifting out less to anchor Wei Ying than make the victor's offer — come, then, be lifted. Make an attendant of the chief cultivator. "You will have a ribbon now, if I have a daughter later."
Stay, he needn't negotiate, then. It does not end with vows and territory, with pretty, worthless mimetism of rites Wei Ying smooths and folds and lays distantly cold across his body, like winter's mantle. Yiling is a step on long stairs, and no conclusion.
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The smallest villages carry their secrets, and some will always kill. He stands, absent clutch of Lan Zhan's hand, lift his gaze from his inward focus and the thought about which degree the resentment lingers as its own energy, independent of the spirits that birthed it and the case study that Yiling becomes for this unique depression of spirit, only to summon himself back to the moment. To promises, to chosen bindings, to unwritten ones, and to Lan Zhan, dark eyed, with his words a different sort of promise to a man starved for family as much as he's been starved for sustenance of the body. To glut, body and soul, at the same table, watching children scream and cry and fuss and quiet and grow, learning as they do. Teaching, yes, to be taught if fortunate, and they as fortunate for the opportunity.
Whatever men or manner of creature they become, under the power of their own progress in an uncaring, undisturbed landscape.
He smiles, lopsided, and then fully, laughing as he stands, clasps both hands around Lan Zhan's one. So the ribbon has been claimed, and so he finds it more odd in thought than odd in feeling; ties that bind break under enough testing.
Faith, to believe this one won't, too. They both know children are never binding enough.
"Haven't I promised you a daughter already? Dark of hair, pale of skin, temper either sweet or fiery, she's someone we'll have to know in time." No pattern of timing to the children left in their care, only the echo of pain, of loss, of despair that's slowly rinsed away with the affection they can spare. More, it turns, than they've known to give each other without fangs bared over open veins, thinking what if, what if they press down, break skin, let blood flow free.
"But know her, we will."
He won't be the one to break the contact of their hands, this time. Once, he'd held on to Jiang Cheng, to Jiang Yanli, and with them stepped forward into a world filled with light and possibility. Later it had been stability and pain and love and suffering in unequal measures, and one day, they'd all turned down different paths. Had died, or lived, or found some inbetween through no fault of their own. When A-Yuan's hands had disappeared, and reaching out meant clasping cold air, to wake with a cry broken in a throat, and eyes unseeing for the time it takes to recognise the prison of his own flesh.
No, he knows the trickery of his own senses at times, and he holds on until he's wrested away, a laugh easy on his lips as movement turns him toward the village, to taking steps forward and down, wind parting the twisted leaves on warped branches, sweeping aside yellowed grasses, tinder-thin creeping bushes that send spindly fingers flinching forward, teasing at the edges of their robes.
It is not a warm day, but it doesn't feel cold like it should. Nor is it warm, more tepid, like an uncertain spring morning where winter's claws still rake at the ground and whisper, Not yet.
The feeling lingers as they wind down toward the village beyond the collapsed barriers of near two decades before, people stepping through the measures of their day with little visible effect for it. Not that such things are needing to be obvious, and the spill of people past street venders, even at the corner he once favoured, bickering a note too high, and he thinks they might start to have the shape of the bleedthrough, the trickle down to the worst emotions, from the easiness of anger to the coldness of...
"Revenge." He turns his head, eyes finding Lan Zhan's. "Emotional spillover, carried in, flowing downhill. Do you think?" It's possible, he doesn't voice. Of course it's possible; of course a land can bleed feeling as much as it bleeds water from stone.
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"I think," he starts with the air of every petulant infant who has spotted the treat denied to him, of Sizhui when he was still Yuan, and sticky fingers trailed to catch the fineries stretched over merchants' stalls, "I shall have two."
Be warned, be wary. And Yiling, a widow, Wei Ying a mother, Lan Wangji their husband-witness, their cause, their resolution. The whip of his tongue stays, his hand ropes a quiet claw that clenches tight and pulsing at the plant root of his back, the bulb of his posture. He stifles his aches: counts milliseconds of yearning, then heartbeats, then moments whole, until he is the glass recipient of waters, roiling. And jasmine-bland, his gait slows, reshapes itself: he escorts, one hand on his sword's hilt, Bichen a shriek of hunger crystallised sharp, fettered.
Red, vibrant, bloodied beneath his sleeve — Wei Ying's string, trapped on his left wrist, shielded from the dangers of friction inherent in the bearing of the dominant hand. The Gusu Lan way, for all of Wei Ying's exceptions. It will serve. It has served well so far, served often.
The village is a world stitched together from patches of rags and misplaced thread, needles prickling. Each way, men turn with apprehension, the bright-eyed terror of creatures that know themselves hunted and small, and see their predators alive among them.
"I think," he murmurs, and concedes to the offensive inevitability of easing himself between Wei Ying and the nearest stranger, "you should call wards."
Not to arm or guard them, but for how people move, serpentine, how they gaze at each other with distrust mounting. How their touch lingers too often on blades held out, their eyes search jugulars. They are animals fed well with grudge and spite, to saturation. One flicker, and sparks will turn to effervescent flame and —
"...cleansing. Can you yet...?" In truth, he knows Wei Ying might be himself too deeply entrenched in startled energies to perform ablutions. Better, "Can you amplify what I anchor?"
The perimeter is too broad. Their watchers are too attentive of strangers. And the first taste of pure energy, when they come so drained, might prove...
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"You better get busy then."
His womb is only producing so many. Lan Zhan can step in with some of the bearing of children of his blood, just as they match step, out of this unlikely landscape of bare truth to a barren heart at the centre of the village.
Says nothing to the shift in positions between them, too used to it when Lan Zhan is on high alert, in the moments before they're joined action, not just sword and shielded. He breathes in, inhales the scents of village life, of town existence, and the thrumming energies that should be within and are off kilter, present but off tempo.
He can feel them, brushing up against his head, a pressure like the weather's heft before the arrival of a looming storm.
"By music," he says, offering a truth and one that he doesn't think Lan Zhan understands to its depth; even pulling from himself, music is his weaving of control, of cleansing. The songs change, the pull turning from tidal to gentled downstream inevitability, but here... music on the living is hard, because it tries, too often, to direct.
"I'll anchor." Better in this to concede to Lan Zhan's capacities, where his aren't strictly as helpful in this case. Not when it becomes chancy, with the living and the drained poisons of the dead. "And ward, but Lan Zhan, it's for them."
The talisman comes as he wills it to, out of his holding pouch, and he shows it to Lan Zhan, body posture relaxed. Not yet inviting the snakes hidden in townsfolk to finding their target worth striking in their unaimed hunger. The red lines on yellow paper sketch out a familiar story to one who'd seen the many such decorating Wen Ning's neck in his hardest days, grotesque pearls strung on spider's webbing, calling a consciousness home from the chaos of the resentment that had driven it to drowning.
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Sweeping by, a screeching cart nearly brushes the back of his silks. He drifts closer to Wei Ying, hand soft to shield away the sight of the talisman, as if the gesture alone might suffocate its strength and ambition. Empty precaution: few men here cultivate, a handful hardly read. Many will think it a missive, or a stall painting in cheap diluted inks. Still, the risk breathes long over his shoulders, bends his back into Wei Ying.
"Confinement will agitate them, if you do not overpower them absolutely." In short, the lesson long learned: aim the once, kill. Do not allow resentment to linger, bad blood to stew. A man on his rooftop should be touched once by arrow's tip, and downed. This, they bore witness to. This, Lan Wangji and a scant few others of a sprawled cohort survived to remember.
If they do this, suppression spread across a lattice of countless independent variables, men of unknown character and strength and disposition, perhaps even those possessed of intuitive skill to rebel against the sorcery — they must be certain, before they venture the first attempt. A second might yet elude them.
And if it worked in the marked territory of Wei Ying's cave, where he built of his two hands an empire, where he carved out an ally from the bones of a friend, the conditions were more suitable there, then. The task turned less feat of legend than breeze of inconvenience. "Can you?"
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Resentment builds, festers. Given guidance, it can find its own means to let go, and some does, some wants resolution through whatever act that may entail, and to then leave, departing its hauntings for whatever cycled next. Cicadas, emerging from the earth years after their laying, to devour all they encountered in a brief period, then shed their skin for their next life.
His lips press into a line, considering fully before he answers the proposed certainty: can you less of a challenge and more of a negotiation of limitations.
One with answers he finds, and tastes bitter on his tongue.
"I can," he says, turning his face toward Lan Zhan, "No one plays counter to me here, Lan Zhan, and Chenqing sings true."
There are ways and ways to manage this, and containment needs storing, a target, a redirect. His hollowed core less holds resentment than allows it passage through him should it try to cling on, finding nothing to hold on to, no further energy to fuel them. He turns his hand palm up, offered toward Lan Zhan.
"Anchoring does not require the cleansing, but the stubborn ones, it'll come down to something like this if the true minds are driven too far down."
A warning for the unintentional consequences, in how resentful energies can resent their own thwarted purpose even as they might likewise embrace it.
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The better sword hand, the more sophisticated exorcist, the consummate cultivator — all but a babe in swaddling, in matters of resentment. To cleanse a wound requires only the theory of how injury was dealt. Wei Ying's mouth speaks the poison, he watches its tendrils grow to root, sees it spread. Of the two, if one is worthy of wisdom, it is not he anointed by half of the cultivation world with ardour, the remaining half between grudging, broken-back bows.
The sun bursts through in empty pallor. In Yiling, all is listless, a silhouette of itself, as if energy is a scantly doled resource. It stains his hands sweet, dapples like blood smear. Electric, the air carries long scents of iron.
He readies himself, the quiet snap of limbs bargaining their learned place after eel-like, swollen undulation, precious seconds submitted to languor. He feels an animal, constricted by the negative space he must fill out at Wei Ying's side, bolstered by his presence. An extension of him, weapon drawn, hand soft when air and qi mingle and marry and summon his guqin in half-lidded blinks of efficiency.
Gasps bloom alongside him in quiet, volcanic eruption. What the minds of those touched by resent do not know, their instincts sharpen to acknowledge.
"I have you. Go."
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Please. Oh, every plead, every demand, boils down to this:
Wei Wuxian lifts Chenqing, to the fizzle of excitement and resignation he knows too well, to the grounding gravitational pull of Lan Zhan at his side, blade bared like teeth he can only shiver before when set into the mouth of a dog. Sound flows from him, wrested from lungs and tongue and seen under the lowering of his lashes, crackling through the awareness of those hot tempers and tempered angers of the crowd. Resentment coiling in hearts and minds and stomachs, before the first notes strike: a quiet moment, an explosive cacophony that follows, shadows swallowing the light of day.
It's dramatic, the shivers and shudders that pass through people not yet turned to puppets to resentful whims, but getting closer, day by day. The tipping point is never far off, balanced on a blade's edge, ready to bleed.
It's the strongest resentment, that of a child's, that reaches them first. The man is a broad shoulders, stooped back individual, a caricature of strength to any which had been small and helpless. Fury, the unchecked hurt of a life cut short when death was not a real truth quite yet, not solidified, has the sheer uncoordinated attempt of violence as a throwing of body, no weapons, and the cry of, "No! Noooo! I don't want to, I want to be big!"
A child's lament, in a voice too old for it, with eyes too glossy and burning with enraged fear, the pressure of it scalding as his song rises in a sharp, uncompromising note, only to turn into the lulling apology to follow the acknowledgement that none of this was fair, and neither was this hold of the living, by the dead which had no more life to live.
It is a firm, sad cajoling, and the black pours out of the man's mouth, from his eyes, smoke that cries with a child's voice, until the sounds are swallowed, echoed in the distress calls of chickens in someone's yard, houses down.
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The air is thick and heady with iron and hibiscus, with the blighting luminescence of song in dappled gold of groaned, ungainly earned translucence. Where filth sleeps, cleansing is colour, and Wei Ying calls it close, refracted, coils it, then unspools the spindle.
And Lan Wangji knows his part: the second instrument in this, cacophony of shrieks and distraction, the guqin suave for any man whose ear's never been scratched by snake's hiss. Behind his eyelids, violence flickers: the wrench of energy, of flesh bleached of resent, and Wei Ying's play soft for it like slip of silk before it twines and knots the noose, careful to extricate rot but leave the bodies unscathed.
He amplifies. It is his due, fingers gelid, but sliding, lending the burn of sandalwood, of true qi ablution. If Wei Ying is sea water, he is salt, and the wound of their anger weeps and weeps until the well dries, until the sting cauterizes.
And what lives in the wake of it? Precious little impressions, only the imprecations of merchants brokering the same trade as before, only easing. Clasps quieted. Smiles turned strat-laced, more than predatory. The immensity of the change, suffocated into nuance.
A simple thing, to dismiss the zither. Simpler still to blindly seek Wei Ying's hand, to round his grip on the known bite of his wrist bones, and — tug, less for Wei Ying's own sake, than that of Wangji. Alive. Alive, undisturbed, undispered. In his ear, This was our land first.
"You want wine," he rasps, and his tongue's dry, teeth tendered. Wei Ying wants his wine, or it would please a lost ache in Lan Wangji's soul to supply it. To find relief on the whetted edge of another man's gladness. "Come."
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Warmth, captured. Light, held close, then left to go its way again, to disappear and reemerge, bold and triumphant, with every cracking dawn.
He startles in that softness, the tired a pleasant nudge into his joints, the lassitude of fulfillment for now, an itch scratched to leave his skin reddened but gladdened for being alive. Lan Zhan pulls, and there are words as the land thrums beneath them, as people settle without knowing why it was they had not settled.
Come. He smiles, dusk creeping over a horizon to blue so dark it fades to blackness, and he is the night, the warmth of the summer's evening, where the insects sing and the frogs carol and the river burbles on, impatient and implacable. Wine, and thirst leaves his mouth parched and dry, and he smiles, fondly, but doesn't laugh as he once would have.
"Of course, Lan Zhan." To come, for wine or companionship or whatever feel between them in the ache of a smaller success weighed against the greater joy of living things, and the sons who wait, safe for now. Always for now, in a world where monsters live in the open, and kindness hides in shadows, and for now can be enough in small stretches. Like the walk to the teahouse, the winehouse, one and the same: the only place for stories and drinking and dining on small dishes, up three steps from the street they walk down. Lan Zhan holding to his wrist, and Wei Wuxian twisting his hand, until the fall of Lan sleeves swallows the curve of a hand that bends to turn and hold wrist in turn, much as it breaks the sanctity of Lan Zhan's circled grip.
"Tell me you'll try the tea, however much it might disappoint. They're bound to have something pickled, some rice—" He teases in degrees, eyes flicking around to watch with a master with known benevolence expecting an illusion to shatter. The town holds. The people hold. It is not resentment that rides highest, and he smiles again, a sigh without sighing. Looks to Lan Zhan as they mount the stairs as one more impossible task to master, unwavering.
"Some vegetables cooked in simple sauce, ah?" Dreams, perhaps, because they'll all be turnips and radishes, and he'll have to stare at them with hideous nostalgia and choke down the memory of them before he'd even eat.
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Wei Ying steers him. He feels light for it, adrift, an agglomeration of limbs without purpose. A stranger, and unburdened for it, as if, for once, his footprints may leave snow and mud without casting print. Unsaddled of the corset fettering that binds his breath, of Hanguang-Jun.
"This time, you have tea." He remembers. They both do. Scarcity, where now sleeps wealth. They walk up stairs where a door creaks and the tavern master gives welcome to a cracked, heavy wood table — empty, as most seating arrangements are, in a place devoid of clientele.
He sits, with all the straight-backed ceremony of a man who dignifies an establishment through sheer will and presence, the sea of his silks spread evenly about him. He waits for his tea, overly steeped. The wine, faintly clouded. The pickles, requested on whim, and the rice, the millet, the soup.
He pours Wei Ying's wine, unasked. Then, softened, "Pour my cup."
His tea. Their binding rites.
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"More than water for guests," he says, and he lifts the tea, takes one cup, pours the tea within. Swishes it around, cleaning in the manner of a morning's tea house, poured into the spare bowl left for all things deemed unnecessary. But it means the second, proper cup pours clean, no historical detritus floating, and the cup itself cleansed in the way of heated water, the scathed cleansliness of borrowed moments made home; lifts and holds it in fingertips, examined, and offered out to Lan Zhan like this.
He sits at ease on his side of this table, and he offers with that same ease, languid but graceful, always something in him aware of what he could be, in different circumstances. A man grown again better used to living within his skin, better at ease with himself and the silences without finding them his guilty due.
"Lan Zhan." An exchange, cup for cup, alcohol and tea, room warmth and hotter still. Not a match in most any sense, but there'd be no other sensible one for the two who sit here now.
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It is his due, Hanguang-Jun come in full regalia, accepting the trivial formalities of hospitality that only Yiling has ever denied him — a scion of Gusu Lan, envoy to Zewu-Jun, official of the sects, now their foremost servant, liege and mouthpiece.
And Wei Ying pours prettily, attentive in the way men accept readily and greedily at teahouses, a learned performance that Wei Ying's sister must have suffered great pains to convey, instant by borrowed instant, gesture by brokered gesture. Let Wei Ying be this: pond-water shallowness in his elegance, fleeting beauty. He has shown himself bloodied and raw long enough at cliff's side, spying the flickered golden sight of his fussing, fumbling, unrepenting nephew, or knelt to beg the dark dregs and embers of Jiang Wanyin's forgiveness. The transition will flatter his forgotten forms, will suit him.
At length, Lan Wangji rewards the care, beholden to bow his back to the appropriate depth and angle, to murmur his thanks as discreetly as a bird's wing touches lake water. He whisks away his sleeve, then receives the tea cup, and sips behind the modesty screen of his other hand, as if he partakes shamefully of the wine vice. Then, politely, "The leaf greens sweeter here."
Flattery, however poorly earned, a great, sweltering fondness in his chest for the morsel of a wrong suffered decades ago, now so poetically righted. It stung you then, he cannot say, gaze kind over the rim of his cup, as he drinks his fill, to the last drop, You still had pride.
Emptied, the cup arrives down with a faint clatter. He stills it with two fingers. "Yiling receives me well. I am humbled."
Wei Ying has redeemed himself.
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Lan Zhan had, of course, paid put to have it before, in that village of Yiling, below the mountains and the Burial Grounds. Yet there'd been nothing to offer but the lacklustre showing of caves and stone and oh, yes, the hard won, thin health and happiness of those who lived there with him. Lacking so much, but having at least that for comfort warm into the nights that could shriek into their ears with demands from the bodiless dead.
"Thank you," he says, lips pulling up into an easy smile, eyes catching light enough to reflect it back in brightness, "I'm sure the master of the tea house appreciates your praise for their efforts."
Efforts they are, procuring teas to offer when these towns are used as trade-stops more than places sought out for their own merits, excepting the foolish ones who claimed proximity to rights after a legacy that had been whipped out of this region a decade ago. Fewer false Patriarchs these days, until one went further afield, and new names and mythos took precedence.
Still, this is a warmth he basks in, this exchange of pleasantries and deeper meanings, and it's with that in mind that he lifts the cup poured for him, alcohol astringent but not unduly so, a bite promised for the warmth of blood it will draw to the surface on its way down.
"Yiling is humbled," he says in turn, smiling, "To have chance to host Lan Zhan again, after all this time."
Drains his cup in one long swallow, a semi-formal shield of his hand as he does: a cheer, a summation of respect, to the man sitting across from him. Not for his titles, though he has respect for those too, but for whatever he is, this one who could admit to having loved a shade long passed, and who had raised a son to be proud of.
He sets the cup to table surface, one contained and tiny click.
"There's a long road ahead, ah? On a pathway wider than I once thought it was." Perhaps not the broad throughways of the large cities, of places wearing the pride of their passageways in open streets and cheerful markets, but it was not the thin path of animals and mountain destitute eked out in the long shadows of the darkened forests. Broader than a single-log bridge, and sturdier footed, too.
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"What will you make of it?" Brilliance, hardship, disaster. Blood and war and all the wretched regalia of human misery, when greed and ambition take turns to wear governance. A new path, altogether — the farmer's way. Was this not Wei Ying's calling, by the end of it? The lotus flower was never destined to reflect him: only seemingly drift in still water, weighed down by the heft of its own majesty, anchored in crowns of flat-bodied leaves. He is a simpler, fairer flicker of translucence, flattered by ephemerality.
And Lan Wangji drinks to him, tea cup raised as if it were the courtesy weapon of wine consecrated to the worship of a living hero, a decorated elder. He bows with his back and his hands and his cup, like a moon forced from early wax to waning.
In a world that holds its breath, they are dangerously, exhilaratingly alone, even as the server comes to tempt their appetites with servings of the day's broth, to ask if Wei Ying's jar already wants replenished. "Who will you be?"
'Wei Ying.' 'Wei Wuxian.' A humble, if whimsical daozhang. Disciple to Yungmeng Jiang, renounced and defected. Protégé of Gusu Lan, paths strategically, diplomatically, mournfully divided. The Yiling Patriarch, when the wind breezes, the stars align, and Wei Ying's tongue would saturate in red and iron. Sizhui's father, always, and shared custodian of every child he produces and throws like weed after a summer's rain, in Wangji's path.
And beyond?
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A cup raised in turn, in the knit silence and electricity of this dusty building, careworn and careful for the tending of what public comes through, desperate or greedy or anything inbetween, anything that might be better. The wine isn't the best he's had, and yet as he raising the cup to Lan Zhan, what's on his tongue after is sweet, smooth over his tongue and down his throat, and he smiles after, as if nights and days of careless imbibing was to lead to moments like these. Where the offer of a new jar, when for once, he's not drained his dry already, and if it's tempering or moderation or distraction in the moment, he feels light enough to breathe freely.
"I look forward to finding out," he says at last, pours for himself another cup of wine, though he doesn't drink it immediately. He is himself, Wei Ying to few, Wei Wuxian to most, and the bleeding shadow of the Laozu to a public that half believed he'd never been real, and half believed he'd the cause of their worst personal nightmares. He is not that man, in what he will bleed out of Yiling, lancing the abscess of its hurts, draining so that healing can take root the way the rot had.
He is a collection of half-finished thoughts, of better intentions better considered, of actions taken and paced and still only sometimes parallel to the well trod paths they'd all learned through the dawning years of their cultivation. A constructed family, found piece by piece, and it's easier then, easier now, to lift his cup and pause, head tilted to consider Lan Zhan through this all.
Drinks from the cup with his lashes lowered as he blinks, long and slow and carefully careless, the affection of a moment and two men who knew each other once, who may yet know each other again, and not just in the weaving of their children's lives. Yet first in that weaving, and the lancing of wounds, and the bindings of fates without the axe of some outside threat hanging over their heads.
"What of you, Lan Zhan? Who will you be, in this life of yours?"
Not new, not second, not follow-up, but cleared beyond the turgid mouth of its river, flowing to sea. Clarity, a chord for the soul, and not the demand, the enforcement, of anyone else's expectation. Unless he chose. Unless he wished it, anchored as he is, inevitably, by clan, by tradition, by ties to a brother he loves and a life he'd been born into.
Father, first before many things. Wei Wuxian feels he sees more of that in Lan Zhan than the rest, out of hands on throats or bones anchoring wrists, but instead the small smile when he sees Sizhui, the curve of his arms when he holds their younger sons, the daughters he's demanded.
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And reaches, hand raining long shadow over the table's span, to gain the measure of the wine jar and the membrane of its residual wine, swishing it. Enough here to wet his lips, to steal taste and wake the blind, battered, amorphous thing, the slithered tendrils of the animal rooted beneath his skin. The wilderness alcohol brokers. But they keep the company of a young girl, trembled and dancing between tables, of a slew of pale-faced visitors, negotiating distance comfort.
They have not earned the dubious blessing of Hanguang-Jun, the drunken menace. Under the dusty, hazy pallor of dying light, he teases droplets of wine in his tea, gives the cup a swirl and drinks with an air of timid, carefree consternation.
"Not a teacher." A shortcut, they both know, to start with a negative definition, to sculpt purpose from the stone of his uncertainty. Then, softened, "Not the leading cultivator."
Not ruler of one sect, not liege of them all. Not a spider, casting his web long and meandering and glistened with dew-like silvered effervescence. Not tightening his spill.
"Too much of me belongs to others." A sect, a cause, a lifetime. The forehead that fetters him tighter than garotte. He wishes, distantly, to drift. "I forget where they begin, and I end."
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He wonders if Lan Zhan's mind ever sits in knots of too busy chatter, of cross purpose and questions and doubts and further questions and endless, immense, insatiable curiosity; but he thinks that at times, Lan Zhan has clarity, and others, he's like the wine mixed in with his tea, and his answer, spilled past his lovely lips like the slide of his tongue over them.
A taste of what is, and what isn't. Listening to Lan Zhan's words, forming with his hands the script of his consideration. It feels rare still, even when Lan Zhan is less absolute in his trade of golden words than he once was, or often could be. Worth the extra consideration, the admittance of how he turns, caught within the web of their collective lives, of the realms, and even their chosen duties.
An empty cup, his fingers curled around its sides. Studying Lan Zhan's face, and offering a smile, without edges, without promises. Better natured, but wry, thoughtful.
"I might recommend travel," he says at length, "For starting to find the edges of an answer. When you don't need to be the leader," of realms through the handholding and the keen-eyed watch on the unfair and fair dealings of humanity and the inhuman. "You live up to your name, Lan Zhan. You fit Hanguang-jun, but that light doesn't need to shine as the sun does. Light enough to guide you fits. Lan Zhan fits. Finding the weave of who that man is... for yourself, who that man is. Tell me how to help, when you find you know."
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"No." And softened snow, "I do not wish to meet you unfinished."
As if he were a puppet absent strings, a clay thing losing the shape of his moulding. Paper burned. He cannot be a fickle, feeble thing, not when the years have battered and turned him. Poetry, empty verse, the judgement of faint, aged philosophies. What has he learned, if not himself? How to drink (poorly) and precepts.
"To be another tribe for Wei Ying's salvation." By name of Wen, or in their chaotic impossibilities to pursue progress without reconciliation, Jiang or Jin. Let them follow, blind-eyed and aimless and know Wei Ying will deliver them to virtue and balance and the cleansing of blood once spilled, the erasure of sins committed. How many steps down the paths of Lanling? Carp Tower will learn new slopes and tumbles.
"This is not the way of equals." They cannot be as they are, and walk a line, one behind the next.
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"It takes time for any person to know themselves. I'm still learning," he says, admitting it with the same cavalier grace in which he's named himself a half-wrecked cultivator, he who has the techniques and the teachings and the methods and the limitations of his body's own natural qi to use any of the above. Power in those moments, or the metred use of that finite resource. Time has given him the means of its effectiveness, even while he has not needed to fill his empty cup with resentful energies for years.
Oh, but he had, once. Had again when he'd sought out his own death, at the hands of those who had been so greedy for it, for the power they thought he held indiscriminate, so that they in turn could wield it with righteous terrorism.
"The young grow together, and the old, we learn to walk together. Companions, and not saviours. It's long past my turn to be the one who waits, Lan Zhan." A smile, small and true and tired, for sixteen dark years and sixteen years of plunging into chaos, and children, their numbers growing one by one.
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— but he remembers. Heavens have and hold him, he recalls, ancient and dust-licked steps, splintered by the heft of their grandeur. How the coarsened silk of Wei Ying's robes lent them polish, how he preoccupied himself with all that stood a flickered distraction on long, summer's youthful days, when the midday sun dappled fine white on his cheeks before they learned to fissure for tears.
They were children, once. Boys, before war. Hands do not recover their shape after knowing the sword's hilt. How must a tea cup now fill the strain of that absence? And yet he drinks, to the supervising smile of a child-server, relieved her patrons remember enough of their tolerance to promise no impatience or violence or words of anger.
"You have no patience." And Lan Wangji lacks the academic spirit to teach it. "Make no pledges. Walk the world. Where our paths intersect, they converge."
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