There's no elegance in his collapse on the same bench, wet and half-drowned looking, pale but not blue at the lips, uninjured in the major ways he is. Qi enough to guard against what would harm a man who could not access his natural body's reserves, who had never understood circulation, except as a matter of news or the blood in his veins.

Blood that, once upon many times, served as a crude ink for the necessary seals, but Lan Zhan's shoulder, the half-stripped horror of it merely meets pursed lips and long familiarity with what wounds on others felt like: empathetic pain that solves little, but worries enough. Not blood enough to kill, but enough to weaken still, and this no time or place for either. (There was never a time, a place, for both.)

"Right, talisman, talisman," he says, patting his drenched layer, slipping a cold hand into the cold bindings at his chest, extracting wet but not soaked through slips of paper that miraculously retain their sealscript, even while three talisman meld to one. He tugs them free with dexterous fingers, taking care when he presses the mass of them to Lan Zhan's chest and activates them to a stuttering suffusing of localised warmth: heat the core, be it not Golden, the body that bleeds and trends toward healing, and he wishes in no long-held way that he had more energy to give at once. But he tires, has been tiring, the control of witchy dead not leaving him suffuse in resources of the body, but he speaks a truth nonetheless:

"I've been learning healing."

One stage in a complicated dancing, the one that leads to understanding the means of resurrection that works here without stealing souls, without binding them. Healing itself being what it was as it was, and not something that he'd consider himself as leaning toward, when he did more damage than good to the body. Warriors often did, blade-sharp and flashing bone-white and muscle-red, 'til blood painted everything and the only resolution was to bathe in waters and hope they rain clear after long enough, preserving the illusion of serenity.

"If you'd let me."

Help, he says without saying it, tying the knot with a deepening frown at Lan Zhan's hissed exhalation, careful but not capable of compensating fully for the locked joints of his cold-clawed hands.

It's to another time, another injury, another beast of mythological proportions that Lan Zhan and he had faced, but now not alone, now not in desperation, now with equal obligation to defend those living and left in the same situation, and no screaming swords in improbable shells with cocooned people trapped inside. If this is an upgrade in situation, and he thinks it must be, then let it also be with a different ending.

Must this creature of their own contrived capturing die, for being held here as a show of pretentious power, as the richest of the rich struggle not to die while too many are willing to toss each other behind them as sacrifice to what hunts or swims behind.

"No," he says, "Not without all other ways exhausted. We're part of why it's here. We helped create this trap; and Lan Zhan, we'll balance the correcting of it with the safekeeping of those lives in the city beyond us."

Not to throw the richest of the rich, the most political of the political, the highest ranking witches of the living schools aside, but: to them, a burning ruin, far before he believes the people the dragon might harm if unleashed deserve that destruction rained down on them.

Belated, he finds another cluster clump of fire talismans, written for warming; tucks them back into his wrappings, activated, and gasps in shock of the warm that blooms, like molten sunlight chewing through skin to bathe his blood in heat like young men supposedly were wont to do. No passion there, not in this, but a purpose and a renewal, the spring creeping back in from the depths of winter to remember life finds a way.