The air is rich with cookery smells, burned fat, a wealth of condiment to mask the dubious freshness of ingredients. It stirs him to wrinkle his nose, the waft astringent. Unpleasant in ways not dissimilar to men's inertia, when the righteous path glistens bright before them.

He hears Anduin. Knows him, dip of Wangji's nod a mirror of sympathy. Knows Anduin's youth, his muted voice, his reservations. There is a pallor to men confronted with the grave silhouettes of the monsters they might become. It drains the eyes, paints them dry. Wine serves its purpose.

"It is said," and scryed deep in the bones of his shrinking, pained skull, Do not gossip, "She traded lives for those of her people."

Many have spoken of this, at length, like crones unspooling a knotted bundle of twine, before taking a blade to the tangle. Never satisfied, even as the end coalesced, certain.

"But a lord breathes to give his justice." They have overstepped and trampled, and only weed will yet grow in Taravast's great gardens in their wake, and perhaps it's a cowardly thing, to defer to the boy Macaluso Spina — perhaps Lan Wangji is become that craven. "We are not he."