weifinder;

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previously, in a cursed village near you | after

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[downswing]

[ Many-headed, the beast of cleansing flame. Parched, starving. Lan Wangji’s guide breaks dark with smears of waning ash and cinder. Sweat of his palm slickens his hold on the brazier — Lan Wangji wrenches back before fire, spilled, can lick the rim of his robes in the scant betrayal of seconds until the lamp is regained. Repurposed.

Later, he will say: it started so, Lan Wangji came unprepared. With escort dispersed in Lotus Pier, bones of old whim aligned into the bodies of new habit. He doe as he pleases, always did. But Jiang Wanyin gave invitation. One man’s absence is permissible, be him even the chief cultivator. An entire delegation cannot eclipse itself.

Later, he will say: too close to home, both homes, to sanctuary. North of Yunmeng, a quiet exhalation on the icy cheek of Gusu Lan. And who raises a shrine to lord ominously over peaks and deathly abyss? No man of sense, but then, Lan Wangji searches the site of two disasters.

Later, he will say: he was there, mouth a seared line, eyes glass-wild, head flung back in laughter. Wei Ying was there, haunting the hallways, in meditation quarters grazed by time like moth teeth. And he opened himself, arms deep in dirt, dark crescent of falling ceiling stone on his torn thighs, with a charcoaled tongue, like every other corpse they found on temple grounds when the first tragedy struck, six decades before, and the great westward peaks thundered their last breath, volcanic.

But Wangji blinked, in passing, and this Wei Ying was gone.

Hauntings, the guide tells him, were two for a rice grain, before. If he gave a name with his wit, Lan Wangji misremembers it. Barely sees him, now. They crawled together, like the fingers of a hand, lending help with moss and mould, with doors creaking in hinges and rubble spilling under thin-streamed sun, with ruins looking to claim a final set of cadavers in tame, organic decay.

This is no Qishan; the eruption was old. The second destruction lives, new: a sanctuary peopled until the latest festival of the turning year, a night of open doors at the hilltop shrine, for all who stumble in, or seek, or stray, for offerings and the giving of counsel, for admirers and men of the faith. Climaxing in ritual isolation for spiritual ablutions: eight priests, locked in the great upper halls, to set their eye and their mind on enchantment, incantation and meditation, to wish away the ills of the past year, and invite in the kindly breath of the new.

Come morning, cavernous corridors flayed themselves, silent and bare — still. The shrine attendants refreshed incense, prepared the pigments for the cinnabar writing of new year’s well wishes on talismans. Gave humble devotion on their knees to the memory of generous patrons. But turned, with midday, to beg instruction of their masters, only to find the quarters yet closed — and, withered under the push of four men’s shoulders, rusted hinges singing their last dirge, the doors gave way to nothing. No one inside.

No sign of transgression. No theft. No note of suicide. No blood, no remains.

Here they prayed, and here they were not found, says the guide with a new flick of his brazier, at hall rooms Wangji walks with the choice step of a vagabond, breathing the stretch of silence, and the air that cools between them. Pebbles and stone, and incense in each corner, scattered like leaves. From down below, the lake folk brought tribute, the nearest village remembering its holy keepers.

Bitter, the room finishes with the mouth of a terrace, grinning down at the abyss, thin rails lined like the soldiers of a frail denture. Beneath Lan Wangji’s foot, courting the rim, rubble surrenders in a gasped fall to depths of hard and distant stone.

In the halls, nothing. No one. Only, etched inside on hard stone, Remember the forbidden word, so maligned it escaped the notice of the nails that scratched their curse, sharp, thin. Curtains, tattered but fluttering with the morning chills. Bird bones on the terrace, dappled in the watery paints of fresh pallor at dawns.

Lan Wangji asks, Were the depths searched for bodies?

Yes, says the guide, And none were found.

Only this story, the possibility of suicide, the savage thought of theft ending in carnage, the superstition of priests claimed, a legion whole, so the village sins might be forgiven for the new year.

Above, the high call of white birds, watching. Beyond, the cluttered laughter of young foxes, wailing in their woods.

What thoughts crowds madness in his head? He asks to be alone.

He is, with wind and air and the gaping chasm, and the bubbling of magma that will never stoke again — until, the inevitable strikes.

He does not ask, Are you a haunting, as before? He knows the shadow before it inches, the silhouette before it coalesces, the scent before it spreads, death-like and crisp, clawed. Before Wei Ying, he defined himself foolishly, Lan Zhan, styled Wangji, a man occupying his own form. Now he knows himself better: the negative space arming Wei Ying, aware of him, of himself, of the world, in crepuscules.

Still facing the terrace, he raises Bichen and holds her drawn beside him, barring Wei Ying’s path to the terrace edge: ]

No step farther.

[ Wei Ying and troubled cliff-sides want no intimacies Lan Wangji can think of. ]

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Yiling, where a mouth of dark stone yawns and gapes and its teeth stand strong, reedy — where he walks, white intrusion, ghost by appearance, servant of a sickly universe that coagulates its grudges into shrivelled fistfuls of form.

Where Wei Ying, adrift beside him, walks king.

Core of the sun’s season, skies should be sundered by white heat, stained lapis. Yiling forgets itself: wind beats, bruises like a butcher cleaving the meats of the day, fresh in preparation. Glacial resolve recommends stark, arid hardship — spirits do not surrender their palace. And Lan Wangji has seen the way of it before, dust and withered weeds and vermin's intrusion, and a barren spread beneath his feet.

Superstition ensures privacy. The village that watches over the Patriarch’s old keep brings yearly altar offerings for the dead that stir, aimlessly, seeking their armies — men of Qishan Wen and Lanling Jin and Yunmeng Jiang and Qinghe Nie, the handful of Lan. The lady, Jiang Ya —

Before, when they traversed Yiling, their time was borrowed from their own travel purse. Now, he allows himself to breathe: to taste the wet of foreign, death’s cold that clings in sticky sheen over rock at the cave’s entry. The blood that, years later, never reveals itself in rust-red, but comes conjured when Lan Wangji whispers the starting forms of summon, trickles his fingers over walls in idle imitation of talismans.

And the pond like a bottomless eye, a snake’s stare. He cannot meet it, not as he is, tolerated — not Hanguang-Jun, here to dole out justice, but a fitting guest enjoying the Patriarch’s hospitality. The Patriarch, a gaunt and flimsy thing, dancing between the bones of his old home.

Wise, to have abandoned the children in the nearby village. Alone, even Lan Wangji wavers, another layer of shade and ambiguity over the sharp truths of once slaughter. Too much pain here. A surplus of anguish, cresting like stormed sea. Under the weight of their screams, he barely keeps his balance.

He does not wait for Wei Ying’s pronouncement, knows it in his marrow. "Cleanse, appease or disperse them?"

A death of permanence, by any other name.