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westwhere2021-08-20 07:55 pm
groundrules) wrote in westwhere2021-08-20 07:55 pm
feast and make merry
The following events should cover the span to 31 AUGUST. Feel free to make your own posts/logs, or use this one! Routes have been built based on previous plotting, but any last-minute questions can be asked here. Try to limit it to asking concrete outcomes for things you are definitely exploring in your tag-ins!
■ Don Macaluso has welcomed his suitors, including the party's very own Diego Hargreeves. And his wolves. He stretches Taravast's hospitality to a lavish masked fete, observed at the Palace of the Doxe. No expense spared, no opportunity to flaunt lost.
■ In attendance — sorcerers' schools, foreign dignitaries and suitors, prominent healers and academicians, artists and politicians, members of the Conclave and, somehow, the Merchant's hooligans. Good gossips, one and all. Show up or throw the gauntlet: those who do not come willing will be escorted in by guards.
■ Even Lady Vannozza and her supporters come to wish Macaluso well in his conjugal pursuit. She publicly gifts him a cryogenic rose, urging her cousin to award it to his intended. Macaluso calmly accepts the flower, then discards it on his table.
■ Out of respect for the nascent political contest, the supporters of Vannozza and Macaluso — yes, you — are seated at two different tables on each side of the fleetingly present Doxe Bonaccorso. The old man will appear in feeble health but firm dignity, excusing himself after a tremulous speech that ends, tenderly, "Citadels are for the living. They are for the gathering of means, of magic, for the making of families and legacies. They are not coin for commerce. I welcome you to my home."
■ For the grand finale, Macaluso's servants introduce a traditional fragile, sweet confection offered to his private guests. It can be refused. Those who consume the confection will find their strength and senses progressively deteriorate, threatening to kill them within five days.
■ A good showing by Fox, Mingyu, Wen Kexing, Zhou Zishu, Xie Lian and Alina earned the Lady Odile more of Macaluso's favour. In gratitude, her servants send word to these characters only that there is poison afoot, without mentioning which dish.
■ Within the hour, Macaluso calls the celebration to its end, pained to announce it has been stained by sabotage and poison. Macaluso's guests, including the characters in his employ are drawn into private quarters and examined by physicians, who name the cause of the sickness — winter lily mist — but offer no clear antidote.
■ Frustrated, two healers will list two superstitious cures: the elusive, shady 'fire water' of the necromantic district's underground
■ Characters assigned to Macaluso will spend the night huddled together, with healers. Fearing her people will be unfairly faulted for the poisoning, Vannozza will lock her attendants in her palace wing. The atmosphere is tense, with Vannozza's people accusing characters and each other. Overnight, some of Macaluso's drunk supporters will try to enter Vannozza's palace wing and cause a brawl. Defend the lady?
■ Come morning, the poisoning is blamed on the ringleader of one of the recent protests objecting to Macaluso's marriage to a foreigner. Characters may circulate freely.
■ The necromantic district is a... literally and metaphorically shady congregation of small, run-down houses and the city's 'finest': criminals, thieves, the mates of your horsecar friend Caspar, actual necromancers and sellers of flesh parts.
■ Those who ask for 'fire water' will face a few days of exploration until an old beggar finally takes pity on their cause and, in exchange for wine, offers them an introduction to a secretive
■ The Watch are an eerie group of grotesquely deformed necromancers, some of whom have clearly been stirred back from death a number of times themselves. They explain that the 'fire water' is a brew that can be obtained from two sources: the blood of either a man who has killed many innocents ruthlessly (such as the many murderers and slavers who travel the darker corners of the district) or of a...
■ ...harpy, not unlike those encountered in the Stairs of Sighs corridor: winged creatures dripping tar and harrowing sorcery, that crowd in flocks at the periphery of Taravast. The harpies of Taravast are ancient defenders of the city, who have forgotten their purpose and turned feral. Their claws run sharp, causing cuts that bleed without healing properly for hours.
■ The harpies are best faced in pairs, but beware: if you speak too long, they will learn your voice and imitate it to lure in your companions. They will also attune to emotions and mimic the voices of people characters remember.
■ Retrieve two blood vials from either man or creature to the necromancers, along with two vials of your own blood, and the Watch will prepare two batches of antidote. One cup for you, the other for their own purposes.
■ Wen Qing has brokered access to the hunting grounds, for an easy entrance point. Those who wish to find an alternative route can try to have their characters infiltrate Vannozza's quar ters and steal her keys — but only theft such offensive can be carried out, so unite forces.
■ The Spina hunting grounds are a few hours' ride away, and carriage drivers seem unwilling to make the journey. Help the local economy: steal a horse.
■ The forests are a magnificent spread of everything dark and haunted, drenched in mist and sporting minimal visibility. There is a pronounced air of death and the stench of decay, with perfect, eerie stillness during the scant sunlight and a torture of creaking sounds, whispers and ghostly chills at night.
■ In addition to the typical violent forest fare — wolves, foxes, bears — the grounds also host the first sign of true undead: less well composed than some characters might remember the men of Anurr, lacking true awareness. Their garb and occasional garbled talk will reveal them as former sorcerers and witches of Attaryl and Bessis, killed during the confrontation between the two schools. Their spirits have been bound to protect the grounds — and they give vicious chase, calling on fire magic and wooing animals to help their hunt of invaders.
■ Run. Run fast.
■ Only two antidote owls emerge at night, drawn to drink from the forest's (shallow, broad) lake water. They are a mated pair, highly sensitive to sound, likely to escape on the first few attempts of capture and indifferent to magic. Farmhouse lesson: careful with the lake waters. The hands of bound spirits might seek to pull innocents in.
■ Owl feathers, ground and thinned with water, can create a highly potent cure that will take days to return a patient to full health — their hearts, eaten whole, can give one person instant recovery. Up to you, if you want to be that asshole.
gently reverts to your preferred ways...!!!
So stubborn, yet what else but obstinacy keeps him straight as fresh arrow, waiting the first draw? He remembers himself, a collection of scattered bones a mother's wistful love gave purpose in the swell of her womb. Mud and marrow, blood and three-forked fire. He listens for the sound behind him, Is it the wind? Or the silvered shift of displaced air, of hunting birds seeking the shrill cacophony of withdrawing prey.
No hunting like the kill man. Senses ebb and tide and wane, but beneath physicality, qi lingers. What the body distrusts, decades of cultivation have jotted down in watered ink as tender familiarity. Wei Ying. Wei Ying's song, lessened, despite the gains of his mind's advantage — he will never again be as the amulet sharpened him. But a force no different than the visceral slide of Wangji's foot in dirt, a torrent of mystical, diluted white when the moon pulses in passage.
Light washes them now. The dead woman startles into a fresh permutation of limbs at odds with their natural collapse, the organic draws of movement. Strange, how bodies forget the fine-tuned habits of their function, once death claims and rags them. She has caught their scent, but remains divided — two men, hot-blooded, but one bearing the acrid, poisoned lure of Wei Ying's song. Or the bird.
"Wei Ying fares better in hunt." Faster now, also, though they need not speak the insult to scar his cheek so. "Claim the bird."
And leave the dead's keeping to Lan Wangji, hand softened when he delays Bichen in her sheath, starts instead for the chord. More, to untwine and replace this one in future service. Eleven must be troubled again for forging. A pitiful thing, to beg a child for weapon.
you are a kindness of ravens to my heart
Lan Zhan, armed by sword and chord, and the pointed words, the way his eyes lift to scan the forest where he'd seen the movement, and he reaches out, cutting off his song on a note that lingers between them, the three of them in tableau: the twice living dead, the living claimed dead, and the living reaching for death.
Those hands, he's determined, he'll cord around his own shoulders and into the bones of them, through the muscle, through to his marrow, before he lets them find death reaching back, entwining fingers like some sonorous promise.
"Don't fall behind."
Don't fall. Is that not an echo of a wish and a cry that scars Lan Zhan in ways deeper than the knotted, healed mass of lacerations across his back. A reminder, in turn, of more gifts, of healing salves, of eased aches in a land now more temperate than it had been, and here he is, mask lowered, and lowered, so the physical and the mental bare in unequal turns his concern and trust.
"I trust you."
Then he moves, swift and sure, his speed the familiar thing it had once been. Qi, conserved and used to best effect; he'd had time to perfect it, in the ways which required minimums, but not the swallowing greed of spiritual blades, forever parted. A universe away, and he still feels Suibian's sorrow like it is his own, and he's had enough of sorrows, burrowed into his marrow. He moves, and the dead woman jerks her head around, jerks her arms, and crumples at a knee that doesn't move as it should, her joints aligned but loose, not coordinated the way they would have been when pain warned against such unwise contortions.
A flutter of silent wings, perching on a tree. Wei Wuxian locks eyes on the dark shadow of one bird, or two, or the illusion of them, and braces as he moves from ground to tree, trunk to trunk a matter of symphonic movement, ignoring all but the tagged truth: cure.
Those feathers, sweet and soft and silence, a cure for a poison that could only be birthed here, to carry its cure in familiar and forbidden magics. To carry a cure in ancient things, and in the threadbare, chased to the ends of a world and left as one nesting pair, for whom he feels both overwhelming sadness and affection at once.
The bird, or birds, or the trick of light that becomes them, turn luminous eyes his way, and the woman in death is left to trade awareness for them, the one who fled with that taste so familiar the tongue could almost recollect it, and the one who burned like hazy, muggy sunlight, trapped in layers of muted daze.
/ s p a r k le s
And now, Wei Ying dances. At distance from himself, the haunts of his gelid body, he allows himself this moment: to look upon a partner of the hunt as if one were a limpid-eyed babe, to bathe in the strength of him, snapped muscle and strained sinew, as he dispenses with the pull of land to itself, with the carousing lashes of brittle branches. At his feet, only ferns and serpents' shadows darken the path, and above them, Wei Ying in flight from him stings.
Keep the watch of him. If not for the old possession, than the tepid dues of night hunt, shared. The woman strikes in a staggered arc, barely to tease lines on Wei Ying's leg, on Lan Wangji's after, when she threatens landfall. He recedes. One step, the other. Knows his mind divided between the convulsive twists of her, the spearing of an armless, deep-fanged brother from high grass, and Wei Ying motion.
A shield bears the battering. Unflinched, he serves as nothing without bruises. In his hands, chords thin and spider, silvered andbiting, braid with the veins they break at first hard pull. At night, the back of his hand glistens dark. He weeps it, wretched, coagulating spill, qi already swift to strangle what skin sunders to free, willing.
Wei Ying's way in this — the talisman of lure, drawn hastily on his collar, again on his sleeve, knowing he lacks in the power to reinforce it. It tears tissue of his patience to shout out for Wei Ying's hearing, their own tongue, indifferent to the communicator.
A difficult, sordid betrayal, lye-blanched. "How many li of land do you require?"
In health his own, he would name his answer — a scrupulous, cruel assessment of his partner's abilities, fattened to flatter any pearl's sheen of negligence. Huntsmen always require more: time, weapons, resource, recourse. A margin of error earns itself in calculation.
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"Three." The word returned to Lan Zhan, who asked for what he did not wish to say, but also must. For honesty. For the firm iron in his voice that says, also, "But one will do."
Fingers sink into bark, and pry, and loose it is in his hand before he sends it flying, smallest brush of qi to lend it weight and momentum that it could not procure on its own initiative.
A true strike, sending leaves and needles cascading down, and a flutter of wings back, not flying and soaring forward and off as it had been leaning, but directing back as Wei Wuxian clings to his tree, perched as an unsightly, unexpected raven, here as predicted to feast upon the dead. Oh, he must be; oh, for he is the old man of the dead, the young man of the fertile grounds, and no one, no one would argue death is not fertile grounds for everything that follows from it births life.
Stumbling out of the underbrush, a creature that was perhaps male, once, in partial armour so rusted it prevents natural movement for its intact arm, but the second, held in sling all but rotted through, grasps and twinges as he comes, pulled to Lan Zhan, pulled to life and seeing, then forgetting, Wei Wuxian in his tree.
Dead enough, to be forgotten, where the brightness of a dying man is more lure than the steady pulse of one who learned to live swallowed in the belly of a wailing beast. Wei Wuxian calls out, "A second comes, there's a third, further out," before he is motion to the twist of the passing dead soldier's head, sighting him for the first true time, and hesitating.
Wei Wuxian does not hesitate, leaping forward to touch the ground and bolt, to kick up again, off this smaller true, struggling sapling to clear the towering crowns around it, and there, the owl, the owls, they fly toward Lan Zhan, and they perch again, in the vaulted heights of the trees overhead. To where Lan Zhan, tongue sweetened by the burn of poison, had said, Loquats.
Those damn birds would not escape without the loss of feathers, this night. No, they would not, but they would escape with their lives. Xunxian needn't even ask, to have that guarantee. Lan Zhan, to think it, would know already: death be not proud, be not ruler, this frail, spindly night.
no subject
So be it. A third lure spell drawn in careful articulations of smears and flaked paint, on the flank of his robe, crude reinforcement of what his scarce qi cannot ignite, nor his mind ignore. And already, they hunger for him, come like starvelings, crawl, and Wei Ying warns —
More fool of a man, Wangji first looks to him, before scanning the forest with wild, limpid eyes, before spotting the bright shadow of erupting, inching creatures. One. Two, three, the fourth distant. A fifth, betrayed only by rustle of leaves, breaking ground.
— he whispers, "Gratitude."
For Wei Ying's ears, too far-out to hear him. In his hands, the bundle of cord glistens and pulls itself taut, and he does not assault as much as he sets down the web of it, awaiting the first bite. It comes, when they near him (hold), when they lunge (hold), when they nearly claw (hold) — and then the cord rises, snaps released, severing limbs and torsos in its path. The trouble of garrotte extended so loosely: when his hands do not apply pressure, the cut is thin. He sees them bleed, and speculates the traffic of qi his system requires to support itself, to land the killing blow.
Wei Ying blitzes around him like lightning failing to find the core of its outlet. Above, flash of wings, and birds settle in the previously visited tree. He cannot leave the ground — only sends Bichen to stab the husk of the tree and serve as step for Wei Ying's climb, inevitable. And he calls out, "Hasten."
...before pivoting on his back foot to deny a hunting ghoul her pleasure, swirling between another two, drawing the cord to himself and deploying it, this once as it is intended — a weapon of close combat. Behind him, Bichen quivers, prepared to extricate itself from the tree, then pirouette, rise farther, hook again and give Wei Ying a step further. Around them, the stirred dead growl, sound bursting from ribcages that pulverise with age.
"Wei Ying, speak, so you are known," he pronounces, and they know the dagger's struck, the poison's spread, they know it's to say, he cannot rely on sight of Wei Ying alone. Not when he is distant, and the call of blood, gurgling and close.
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Haste, and it matters to be precise, while bodies weave and lurch and shift and want, and that's his soulmate, down there, and these are the birds, who turn eyes his way with the innocence and arrogance of a predator too stupid to realise it's not the top of the chain of devouring that can define the world.
(The earth is. The crumbling haven of all forms, when water drains, when bodies unmake themselves. They look to the skies, but even in fires, their bodies are once more returned to the earth.)
There's nothing but the efficiency of targets. The smaller bird, which wavers, looking to follow the larger. He knows them, knows him in that moment, following his mate like mandarin ducks taking flight, and he the one bearing down.
He does not miss, this time. Hand clips the extended feathers of a wing, clasp around a tail. Jostles, jerks loose the ones looking already to shed, in the startled cry, shriek and bark in unholy matrimony, and the bird flies harder, wings beating over Wei Wuxian as the larger bird cycles, lashes out with heavy talons, and screech-yewls, a sound that shivers skimming over him.
The feathers fall, a mid-air collision, collusion of flight and fight and no will to kill from him, not so met in earnestness by those he's pursued. He falls, controlled arc, bleeding fresh from carved furrows through his forearm, unfelt.
"Lan Zhan, I'm to your side!" Bichen more than given time to reclaim, and now, two feathers left in hand, he admits: "Feathers fell, I can find them, with—"
Time, a duck and strike out with the flute that slides to his hand, featherless, and he tucks those two prizes into his chest as Chenqing defends him, stronger than it should be, and the cutting, rusted blade of one haunt's handling shrieks off again.
"Another few heartbeats!" Duck, shift, dive: he may as well coat himself in soil and death now, knowing it's so they live. Another feather, dirtied, clutched in his hand. Now there are three.
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Wei Ying, to his side. To hear him — the hollowed thud of him, land howling, beating itself ground in tattered welcome — to Lan Wangji's... ah, but he waves. Tips his head, just so, and nearly absents the moment when the creatures triangulate their positions, all the better to cover the ground of their surroundings around quarry shifting. Allegiances uncertain, do they know to ally? Or do they only obey the timid, but stoking instinct that pack so often prevails, where solitude leaves their concave bellies taut, their bones protruding?
To his left, he hears the shift, and escalates what he can of their defences. Bichen wrenches herself free, dashes in his hand, weighs it. Pillars him home, in the learned comfort of swordsmanship. The moment when he cuts, first distance, then the rot of flaking, crisp, dried flesh, he knows himself: here, turn. There, pivot. A dance, recall the steps with muscle memory, for all he little hears, less sees. Negotiate them time.
He recalls himself, between the drifting, impersonal procession of movements, of attacks, feints, culling. Slaughter, he was taught, and no chivalry thins the blood that washes his cheek. Strange, to think corpses yet held it to spare.
And more still come.
"Take what you can," strangled, behind him. Wei Ying. "Fall back. We have lingered too long."
Mere moments, and yet they are known and watched and learned and burning. They are the answer to every milling sound of starvation that quakes the corpses of the land.
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"I'm here, at your rear left," and uncertain of the number of feathers he's grasped. Enough, he thinks, for two, three, four doses; he has to hope. It's a start, and would half a dose make it survivable?
No, but only he would try, as the dead shift and sway and for improbable moments take turns, rather than rush again at Lan Zhan, the bared blade, their wounds nothing to their nature but an impediment to movement.
"The horses?" A pause in words, but not movement, not the brief, smooth staccato he trills, and the pause it buys them all, as the dead jerk and shudder and listen, as ordered, stop. No, a pause after that, too, and he asks, "Do you know where yours stays? No, it doesn't matter. Lan Zhan, fall back, this way."
A hand reached out, a sleeve grabbed, then sliding fingers to a wrist, to an arm, offered support in flight. This way, to the horse he knows, and to the tune of heartbeats purchased against Chenqing's dark weavings, and the cry of whoooooo they leave behind.
The one horse, found, stomps and throws its head, nostrils flared at the scent of blood. It stamps and dances away, but stays silent, capable of that much self preservation, and if any other horse is here, Wei Wuxian does not see it at first. Intends, in the way of men walking narrow bridges, to get Lan Zhan up first, saddled and before him, because speed and haste and other, deeper fears, the ones that have visited nights like these, and his own lacks highlighted against the Rembrandt shadows of his strengths, one and the same, inextricable.
"Lan Zhan, can you mount?"
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It drips of him, like the wet of mould, "You have not earned my burden." But Lan Wangji awards it like gold and tinsel on fine spread, and he does not stir past the rare occasion when he remembers himself — Hanguang-Jun — enough to let his core have its last punitive roar, feral, when he targets the rare talisman behind them. Fire — no, mere flame. A whisper of it, blighting dead eyes, a humble distraction they would know better than to heed in a night less darkened. Roam there, and not upon us.
Flame, distant, catapults the horse to terror. Fractionally blinded, and Wangji can still taste the aches of an animal stormed by confusion. In war, they were educated for this — the unexpected, tearing viciously at their skins, their flesh, their posture. Rain of arrows, puddles thick with ill coagulated blood. Screams, from the master commander, or the dying's shrieks, strident.
Here, this steed barely keeps position long enough for Wangji to drag the surrendering corpse of his body, strained, up one leg, then its brother, to laugh when the muscle of the creature pulls taut beneath his heel — and scoot obediently forward, ambivalent to the reins, possessed of enough discipline to give Wei Ying control of their escape. An absent, another talisman thrown hastily behind him. Let it never be said he does not work to purpose.
"You may steal the chief cultivator." And hissed, "If you make haste."
...because Wei Ying has stood at the heart of their delays, surely.
no subject
No, even now, it's a poor conversation neither one of them hold most days. They know each other, and in knowing, know best; terrible habit, and hard breaking, and they both have started to try. Wei Wuxian knows he tries, sharing what he wouldn't have one time, before. When he thought falling alone was better than dragging anyone else down with him.
Don't fall behind.
The horse shivers and sweats, eyes showing whites in its fear, and Wei Wuxian can hold steady its head after that first rearing surprise, as Lan Zhan makes his seat. There will be a time, hours or days from now, where Wei Wuxian will meet his exhaustion head on, and sleep, deep and troubled, but unstirring. That day is not today; that night comes not tonight.
"Steal the chief cultivator?"
He leaps up the horse with the grace trained into him in years past, an expanse of heat at Lan Zhan's back, feet hooking into the sides of their steed as his hands slip past Lan Zhan's waist, reaching blindly for the reigns and driving his heel and pulling back, low. Their horse wheels, comes close to rearing, and instead leaps forward, giving in to the trot that careens into a canter, but is held back from the gallop its legs strain toward, wanting distance from the fire and the fear and everything of the blood they come covered in.
"I'd have to give him back. I'd rather have Lan Zhan."
A jest, in seriousness; respect for the position that holds nothing in it here, and what it allows Lan Zhan to be, what it fills of his purpose and his divide. It's not Wei Wuxian's purpose, and it's not his life. No, he's as if born for these darker, dirty scuffles, these ridiculous moments and fleeing on horseback from the perpetrators of death and damning.
"Loquats, Lan Zhan. I'll find what I can, so you stay with me, okay? You will not be my first resurrection."
He won't allow the horse to wear itself thin, to snap legs on hidden branches or holes. Shoving the reins into one hand, his other braces across Lan Zhan's front, his slight lean back to accept the smoothness of a canter as he stares beyond Lan Zhan's shoulder and invitation for Lan Zhan to mimic the action, while he looks over their horse's head, to the path he intends them to take.
"Please, don't be that."
no subject
He stills. In a moment, waters limpid, he drowns. What lies at the bottom of wells dried, mud caking, but the splendour of anticipation that streams might fill cupped hands again? In his lungs, the creaking start of simmered wet. On his lips, crackled salt — blood, and knows it his own only with the languished, drooled release of scissored teeth.
Smears of ink, or branches above them. The tepid relaxation of wind that, momentum of the passing horse stoked, eases its whipping. On his chest, the embers of flagellation, borrowed memento of the Wen. Southwards, the feverish brand of Wei Ying's arm, chaining. On his back, lashed calligraphy of his sect, each precept a bleeding. He breathes, the sum of pale, pretty parchment contortions his fleeting owners have braided him in, taut to fine points of tearing.
And now — resurrection — Wei Ying would weave him again. Rather have Lan Zhan. To have chased sixteen years, only to be caught first. More fool the huntsman.
"I shall not be your first resurrection. I pledge." Air shrieks of him, a breath, a heartbeat. Another. He cannot think, so close to his man, their scents combine to arson — shrugs Wei Ying's arm loose, but sets himself against the lethargy of sickness that governs his body to stand purposefully, unnecessarily prim in riding position. "Ease me to breathe."
Under the foam-spattered sky, stars exonerate him. They take the better road: he remembers this, from the coming. Shorter. Remembers, too, to make himself pliable, to lean as Wei Ying instructs — deeper, at forfeit of balance, and catch the sweaty musk of animal living, of speed and warmth in the horse's mane. What will you do, when I oppose?
Wei Ying, the dark cavern of locust threats, his mouth. Remember again, a banquet thriving, the gold and glitter of cups raised, If I, Wei Wuxian, wish a man dead —
Want is the enemy, his father its champion. And gravity, in love with itself. He waits: this is his mercy. Waits until they've fled the forest, until they've long strewn searing steps on the common road, until, gaze slanted, he sees blinked lights of smoke and homes ahead. Not the citadel yet, but the dread in him, a beast pacing its circle, unfurls strong claws between his ribs.
He waits, until he the world waits for him. And he moves. No easy feat to unsaddle a horse in its run, riding astride. At the first shift right, his left thigh singes, pain spearing. But he forces it in a sibilance of hisses, brings his leg up, crosses over, and —
does not look back
— casts himself off the horse with teeth gritting, one arm braced against his eyes, the second bearing the brunt of agony on the wrist, when he rolls and coils to break his fall. Blood pulses inside him, calls him attentive. The rush of his thoughts and the rush of coming storm. Bruises will bloom, bones rebel. He is ache, lifted. Nearly forfeits his footing and knows, even as he raises his sword, pebbles rained of him, Bichen horizontal and unsheathed — more token than threat, for the diffusion of qi that still haunts him, how it bleeds of him —
Knows he is no match for Wei Ying at the zenith of his art, each breath a calamity, but he will be heard. "...leave. My death is not yours. Leave."
no subject
Wei Wuxian drops like a stone to the ground, one rein in hand, trailing the dancing horse that lowers its head and lips at grasses off the side of the road when he approaches his prone, splayed soulmate. The man he's supposed to know, and perhaps part of him does, even understands in that moment.
Part of him bleeds, and it's that ugly bleeding, that tear through him, that has made this hard, that he allows to make it harder.
Bichen he takes no pains to avoid. Doesn't turn aside, in his approach, in the dark wells of his eyes, playing at shadows in unfamiliar clothing, a jester's game. If the blade would not waver, he'd as soon pierce himself upon it, before he kneels, rein gripped and held. Horse skitting sideways with a snort, but lowering head to nose at tufts of grass, too tired to hold on to the same fear, no longer running on adrenaline. It breathes heavy.
Wei Wuxian barely breathes at all.
His free hand reaches into his layers, grasps the leaves and feathers and soil-stained reality of what is at his chest, pressed against his undershirt and staining it so horribly. No matter, that it better sells his purpose out in those woods. Debauched as he looks, would that not be enough? If his thoughts could circle there, he might have smiled, in all the clawing ache that follows, the scream of voices that wanted, that regretted, heard as long gone echoes in his ears.
The feathers, the leaves, he thrusts out in his hand. To Lan Zhan, and to nothing else, not Bichen or the rest of their shambles party, their consolations in never knowing who goes, who comes, or why.
Sizhui in the mines.
"Then not mine," he says, and there's something that cracks open in his chest. A defeat that he swallows. There are no smiles, only dirt and this, the handful of feathers thrust out. "But not just yours, Hanguang-jun. Not when you have a son. Don't consign yourself to die."
no subject
He thinks, along the way it batters the precarious possibility that Wei Ying would not do this: return to haunt him like a ghost, between dregs of blood salt and petrichor. The horse neighs distantly, weakly, shrill. He will remember this: the fear a hundred men before him have seeded in their soul, of this beautiful monster who takes his step before Lan Wangji.
Yiling Patrirarch. No. No, but Wangji inches back first, nearly staggers again — keeps Bichen flat and lifted, the symbol of eroded defences, a battlement conquered. She does not waver, and Wei Ying pushes close, bares himself like a common whore, or a nymph, or a summer dream. ( This is the pallor that shares your bed, beneath silks. ) And Wei Ying rips of himself his quarry, setting it, slick and filthied and so very small in Lan Wangji's free hand, a gift of sweat and strain.
Qi pulses through him, without sustenance. In his hands, Bichen gleams with the dignity of a weapon that knows herself her master's better — in spite of him, and not for his pleasure. He swallows.
"Resurrection." Of him, of his body, the puppet returned to strings. Is he as Wen Qionglin, then? The sunset remains of a better day, drenched in chaos? Jasmine and tea and the silhouette of madness, and leaves dragging forlorn cuts of grass shape against his yielding legs. Is this what the man who best knows him would make of him?
"You would..." He feels himself wet-eyed for unspilled tears, frustration that spikes the tremors of his body, stings. "Wei Wuxian."
The ache, then, of double-edged swords: he bleeds himself the better for Wei Ying's name, tortured in his mouth.
"Not to me, should the brew fail, vow it. I cannot..." And Bichen's silvered languor pulls yet free of Wei Ying's throat. Lan Wangji cannot perch her there. "Jin Guangyao held wire to your throat, I cannot..."
He has spoken in the span of moments more words wasted than in the past shi. They strip his teeth, burn his lips, spill out, avalanche. What is he left but this: the weight of his sword in hands that no longer tell texture, returning the gift of feathers, thrusting it on Wei Ying's bent knees. With Bichen's fall beside Wangji, the world hollows, rattles. His hands wash over Wei Yings's layers to mend them, as if he stands the near-corpse between them. Look. Look how well Wangji does, spare him for it. Do not presume to go against the dignity of the sect, his wishes, his honour, do not condemn him to —
He has flattened the last of Wei Ying's silks on his person, and look how well they fall.
"On your name as Wei Ying. On your ancestors. On whatever you yet honour." Sizhui, but speak not his name in vain. "No resurrection."
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His fears were well founded. If his body had been found, if he'd died true, he would have been burned, cast as ash, cursed to never be whole, never reincarnate. Eradicated, like the plague he was cast to be.
He remains impassive, with the feathers shoved back to his knees, the hands that busy themselves with making the mess of his clothing smooth, and the words, still. Himself, rein clutched and forgotten in hand, fingers tightening in reflex when the horse tests the limits, and his eyes meet Lan Zhan's.
"Let me go." Quoting himself, centuries ago. Giving those words, as his gaze drops, and he fumbles the feathers and picks out the leaves, left to rot about his knees. Let it go. Let it rot. Let it decompose, like his intentions, sweltering and hot. Bothersome.
"You have it on my parents' grave, on condition. After you heal, you reach out to the Merchant. You learn what hold this world has on souls."
It's not a condition he thinks will be met now, in Lan Zhan's weakened state. He has to have belief somewhere, and so if spills into the antidote, the itch of him calling to Wen Qing now, to start her on the making of it. He has to hope when hope has broken him time and again. What's left, if he stops turning to hope?
He stands, heavy, and reaches his hand out to Lan Zhan, mud smeared and with leaf speckling his fingers. All the careful work of flattening, and his silks already stir, a living creature. The horse behind them, stamping feet and cropping at the precious little vegetation, one swiveling ear kept turned to them, listening, always listening. Prey animal aware that fight or flight or inbetween, one needs to know it approaches to make any claim to action.
It does not like their bleeding. It does not like this day, this evening, and it sets back ears for second mounting, when that comes.
no subject
Leaves scatter on Wei Ying's knees, and if he could yet harm their martial arrangement, he would bat them away with broken fingers. This is what Wei Ying might have looked like, drenched in the filth of funerary ablutions, the final weave of rot and root and soot and stone, and how he means to say, eyes withered and tongue bound, Better bare among strangers than dressed in dirt, than buried.
But he has lost his step, his place. Whatever the congruence of their notes, they have failed, once more, to achieve melody. Earlier, in battle, they flowed like twin rivers coursing greedily to rash, if seamless confluence. And now —
Now, only the petty aches, the negligible agonies. He takes Wei Ying's hand, stabs Bichen in hard ground to serve him as pillar and crutch, and still nearly topples over when he rises. Then the walk on, joints stiff, arm locked over Wei Ying's shoulders, back a line of tense suspicion, distrusting his body yet holds the strength to preserve his balance. Harder, still, when they reach the horse. And bless the animal for its patience, allowing them to negotiate the minor compromises and cautions of logistics that perch Lan Wangji closest to the creature's strong, well-muscled neck once more. This time, when he leans, he remembers to pass hand gratefully on the side of the horse's long throat, to lean and follow with dry lips once after. Forgive him for the fright of earlier, the discourteous transition from honoured passenger to a hard, fainting well stone.
Were the mood not slaughter, and their tempers not shifted, he might ask if Wei Ying often allows himself to tarry when abducting chief cultivators. Instead, he waits — until Wei Ying returns to him, likely in disgust and frustration, but absent the alternative. One horse, and they mean a cruel pace. He cannot simply walk and lead the reins, condemned to Lan Wangji's presence — Wangji, who sequesters Wei Ying's arm, returns it to where it had fastened his waist before, only positioned to cross Wangji's core, precisely.
"There is time." Feel it. The warmth of it, volcanic, spanning. How a livened core breathes like a flower in spring's tender bloom. Mere days before, it might have scalded his bloodstream, but even a quieted flame still nips to inject strength in frailer flesh and galvanise it. Whatever sickness rests inside Lan Wangji, his core does battle even as the sleeper wakes. "I do not perish today. Trust in me."
As Wangji failed, bitter ginseng on his tongue, to trust in Wei Ying. He behaves, on the long ride, for it.