"Wear the rouge. Wear what pleases you." And beneath red paints, the young stalactite of Wei Ying's fang glistens. One day, you will eat the world raw.
Wei Ying, the consummate prestidigitator: snap of his fingers, electric, and Lan Wangji comports himself with the dignity of every tail-tucked hound Wei Ying would sooner disperse like storm winds. Ice blinds when light spears sheets grousing, pellucid. Creaks and cracks and the angry drip of Wangji's wound blood, drip by drip, fissures ground like the fragile arteries of marble striations.
This is the worth of him, a vision of meat. Quarry, contained in trussed skins. Whatever the feats of his form, his cultivation, he remains subject and servant to stitches and frayed ends, the sum of his capacity, defined by his wounds. Stone shapes itself by the battering wind erodes it to. He stimulates the garden with jolts and kicks of idle, chilled stone in desultory arrangements. And breathes and heaves and confirms the constellation of detritus, of that which he yet retains the strength to leave behind.
"I've coaxed my creature." What is another dragon more? Here, now. He is intended to rescue a room — a tower's span — and envelop a captive audience in the benison of an accelerated last-minute besnison. They leave the throttled gasp of the main gates behind them, bodies charred at their steps — casualties of Bessis conviction. The scent of them animal in the ways of roasting to the vegetarian sensibility, a proteic exaggeration. He does not thank what will expedite their incursion, the climb up and up and heavens sundered, let them accept. The corridors break in nettle veins, screams warning where the traffic congests itself.
The choice, now: help or hurry on. The fewer deaths, or the greater gain. Bichen sleeps limp in his wake. And all he murmurs, nodding to neglect the fight and pivot for the balconies is, "Have you not tired?"
No. No, heed him. "Your pledge. Fight. Flight. Endless carnage. Do you tire?"
He feels at times, this: a body in motion. Celestial in his inexorable rotations, his routines. Perhaps he is weaker in this, carbon and moisture on his tongue. The burning.
no subject
Wei Ying, the consummate prestidigitator: snap of his fingers, electric, and Lan Wangji comports himself with the dignity of every tail-tucked hound Wei Ying would sooner disperse like storm winds. Ice blinds when light spears sheets grousing, pellucid. Creaks and cracks and the angry drip of Wangji's wound blood, drip by drip, fissures ground like the fragile arteries of marble striations.
This is the worth of him, a vision of meat. Quarry, contained in trussed skins. Whatever the feats of his form, his cultivation, he remains subject and servant to stitches and frayed ends, the sum of his capacity, defined by his wounds. Stone shapes itself by the battering wind erodes it to. He stimulates the garden with jolts and kicks of idle, chilled stone in desultory arrangements. And breathes and heaves and confirms the constellation of detritus, of that which he yet retains the strength to leave behind.
"I've coaxed my creature." What is another dragon more? Here, now. He is intended to rescue a room — a tower's span — and envelop a captive audience in the benison of an accelerated last-minute besnison. They leave the throttled gasp of the main gates behind them, bodies charred at their steps — casualties of Bessis conviction. The scent of them animal in the ways of roasting to the vegetarian sensibility, a proteic exaggeration. He does not thank what will expedite their incursion, the climb up and up and heavens sundered, let them accept. The corridors break in nettle veins, screams warning where the traffic congests itself.
The choice, now: help or hurry on. The fewer deaths, or the greater gain. Bichen sleeps limp in his wake. And all he murmurs, nodding to neglect the fight and pivot for the balconies is, "Have you not tired?"
No. No, heed him. "Your pledge. Fight. Flight. Endless carnage. Do you tire?"
He feels at times, this: a body in motion. Celestial in his inexorable rotations, his routines. Perhaps he is weaker in this, carbon and moisture on his tongue. The burning.