headed straight for the witches' castle

[groundrules]

Welcome to the bashful event covering 17 September – 9 October, working double duty as a test drive meme (TDM).

Existing players can strut their stuff here, or make separate logs & network posts. Our TDMing guests are stranded in this playground, but can include network options among play prompts.

If you’re test driving a character, you can apply them until 8 October without a game invite. Apps stay open beyond that, but you might need an invite or please get in touch @ groundrules to figure something out..

SCALE THE TOWER

---

Cousins Macaluso and Vannozza Spina vie for the favour of the witches of Bessis, in their bid to succeed their grandfather Bonaccorso as liege of magical citadel Taravast. In exchange for their endorsement, the Bessis have asked both electoral candidates to present extraordinary sorcery at a fete commemorating the Bessis truce with fellow court witches of Attaryl.

On the day of the distasteful masque held in the upper levels of the Bessis tower, characters assigned to support Macaluso and Vannozza will split into two espionage missions — one upstairs alongside courtiers, charlatans and the Bessis, and another deep below, crossing abandoned aqueducts. Characters can participate in either effort, but should be discreet if they’re working against their patron.

It’s all fun and games if you’re enjoying Bessis hospitality upstairs — test drive characters might be rating their hotel stay a little less enthusiastically.

TDM TOURISTS | UPSTAIRS (TEAM MACALUSO) | DOWN BELOW (TEAM VANNOZZA) | COMMON TIMELINE | NOTES & MAP



TDM TOURISTS

Days ago, you woke up sequestered in an immense bird cage, chained near the ceiling of a tall, dark room that once served as a library or academic hall. Imprisoned with you are several strangers, equally warded from their supernatural powers and partly sedated — all the better to amuse the nearly two dozen (visibly) undead who roam the room, despite being loosely fettered to posts. They often swing for your cage, but fail to reach it.

■ Sorcerer sentries briefly release characters daily to feed or bathe in a repurposed nearby quarter with a large pool.

■ Characters receive basic devices that translate speech and writing, so they can understand their caretakers’ instructions. All along, the guards urge, Keep the animals distracted.

■ The undead reek of burning and wail their hurts. They are gifted in telepathy and often mentally share memories of carnage — two armies of sorcerers, one raining fire upon its enemies. At night, the undead seek to control the minds of caged characters, luring them to come down or harm others.

■ Necromancers sometimes visit to study the undead. The latest necromancer guest temporarily immobilises the creatures and throws three bundles of identical keys into the cage — he reveals he is employed by a Merchant, who wants the outsiders to travel east and return to their homes. They are currently in Taravast, captives of the witches of Bessis, who hold annual celebrations tonight. The keys will help with escaping the cage and accessing nearby tunnels.

■ The necromancer leaves behind rope, two daggers, and three potion vials that generate mist once smashed on the ground. Leave within an hour of your dinner, he says, before releasing the undead from his magic.

■ Get out. As soon as you can, running like hell from guards and the undead. If caught, the undead will rip you to bathe in your body’s waters and ease their burns.

■ The underground tower tunnels are patrolled by guards, who can be overpowered by groups. Characters will recover any supernatural powers within 40 minutes of leaving their prison. Escape tip? Steal the guards’ clothes.

■ The tunnels inevitably lead to the aqueducts, allowing you to meet Vannozza’s group.

» GET WET



UPSTAIRS

The halls of the Bessis sprawl over a pristine ivory tower, whose walls refract light in homage to the witches’ devotion to fire.

The tower receives guests today to celebrate the armistice between the sorcery schools of Bessis and Attaryl. The two groups futilely sought to slaughter each other many moons ago, with the Bessis notoriously gaining the upper hand — explaining the tense smiles of the Attaryl witches on premise.

The event is a standard Taravast masque: if there were coin to spare, someone poured it into the obscene dining displays and alcoholic fountains. Enjoy dimmed lights, the rare pickpocket or recreational narcotic — or test your luck at gambling tables, where winners can claim a forcibly extorted secret from losers over games of dice or cards.

Come masked and visibly unarmed — weapons are confiscated at the doors. Smuggle them in. Just outside the tower, take a walk through labyrinthine walled gardens surrounding a deep water moat and leading to abandoned aqueduct pipelines.

OF NOTE:

■ Magical sentries — armed with swords and fire spells — watch the banquet halls, stairs and outside grounds.

■ Bessis practitioners showcase fire, wind, water and air dances in the reception halls, along with performing token duels. Get involved, if you want.

■ Don Urbano, a respected Bessis sorcerer returned from abroad, announces his betrothal with Wen Qing, as orchestrated and financed by Beitang Moran.

■ Come sundown, Macaluso invites fete guests, Vannozza and the Bessis to join him on the balconies and behold the canal moats, where swims his recently captured white dragon. The creature is magnificent but tense, its ice power crackling.

ASSIGNMENTS:

■ Run recon of the halls. Keep track of guards, divert them from the aqueducts and alert your friends downstairs of their presence. Be obnoxious, loud and attention-grabbing when sentries get near the opened aqueduct entrance.

■ One of the night’s most profligate gamblers, Caterina Zalle, leads a coalition that produces magical weapons. She is allegedly in talks with forces abroad that fight their undead oppressors. Even tipsy, she only speaks with those who best her at the gambling table — pair up and figure out how to cheat improve your chances, then drop a line here to win donna Caterina’s answer(s).

» SMILE AND CARRY ON



DOWN BELOW

A jaded spirit, Vannozza knows Macaluso’s historical patronage of the Bessis makes them unlikely to favour her. Better to take advantage of leaked information: the Bessis hide a secret that’s required them to mysteriously invite necromancers each day. Learn what the Bessis are shrouding, so Vannozza can extort them later.

The lady offers her protegees — and anyone dragged along for the ride — a map to abandoned aqueducts accessible through the sentry-patrolled gardens that surround the tower of the Bessis. Guards will be thinner at the start of the evening festivities, but keep in touch with your counterparts upstairs, who can distract them while you infiltrate.

■ The aqueducts can be entered through a shielded gateway that will require characters to dig extensively for access. Divert the guards creatively: use magic, tricks, everyone is a hapless beggar or a drunk...

■ The intricate waterways once served Bessis sorcerers who specialise in water arts. The pipelines range from roomy and rusted to highly claustrophobic and slick with a coating of dark tar that gradually starts to follow you.

■ You find out quickly why the pipes were abandoned: the tar starts to accrue behind you, taking your shape and diplomatically doing its best to choke or drown you. Luckily, the creatures disperse after scant minutes — characters who traversed the Stairs of Sighs will recognise this is the same molten tar found in the rocky corridors.

■ Brace yourselves — for a short stretch, the canal dips into the moat surrounding the tower, home to Macaluso’s dragon. The creature is currently peaceful, but its constant chill has largely frozen the waters. Swim across the moat through ice pellets to re-enter the canals.

■ The aqueducts ease characters into pool quarters, which show signs of recent use for bathing. In the nearby corridors, guards are posted before a room that erupts in frequent howls. Get in, somehow —

■ ...and find a large study hall with an immense suspended cage, a series of freshly freed newcomers and undead witches, who use telepathy, levitation and light mind control to their advantage.

■ Now, you take your newcomer fools, choose between returning through the aqueducts or daring the heavily guarded tower corridors — and you run.

» UP WE GO



EVERYONE TOGETHER NOW

Nothing spices a party like nearly two dozen undead witches that seek to salve their burn wounds with the blood of the living. Some undead invade the banquet halls, others the gardens, while a few head into the aqueducts. They use telepathy, levitation and mind control diligently — and wear the decayed insignia of witches of Attaryl.

The chaos and the undead that enter the moat agitate the water dragon, who goes on hours of rampage, breathing sheets and walls of ice around the tower and effectively locking everyone within for two-three days.

...with the wandering undead. The witches of Bessis assist with fire magic and torches, but it’s every man for himself. Beware: the dragon starts with magical attacks, but quickly progresses to throwing itself bodily to topple the tower.

TO-DO LIST:

■ Calm or immobilise the berserk dragon to ease the ice storms
■ Capture the fire-fearing undead
■ Protect and evacuate Taravast’s useless 1%
■ Stay alive?

NOTES & MAP

■ Old timers: GO HERE to vote on the fates of the dragon and later, the undead! And ask any questions you might have.

■ TDMers: TDM events count as game canon if you app in! TDM questions here.

Comments

[weifinder]

Wei Wuxian, blinking sideways at him, hands entwined and other hand at Lan Zhan's elbow, fast to his side and shivering involuntarily with the cold that movement was saving him from succumbing to, almost stumbles as the words penetrate.

A lifetime ago, prying himself free. He doesn't know if Lan Zhan will ever be able to understand how he'd felt then; the collapse of all foundations in his world, his abject fear of losing the last two people alive who he cared for, simply dragging them down with him to a final ending. Not sane, not rational, but a pain filled panic in a time of pain filled reactions, where the thread of his sanity suffered to break, snapped line a branch in a windstorm, and had no time to recover, to find strength in putting down new roots.

Wonders if the world would have allowed it, would have allowed him, in that newness, that greediness, that had been the righteous cultivators there in Nightless City. The ones who to a person, did not object to the slaughter of people innocent of all crimes but a name, and the word of the Jin proven as worthless as fake jade within days of its issuing.

Those are a time past, a point in a faraway river long since left behind as the boat carried on, and the shores these days are jagged and filled with teeth behind rotting lips, and dragons that weave frost into beautiful, deadly patterns, and politics that stitch them into patchwork impressions of falsehood and truth, and you did not let go.

"No," he says, aching joints tightening fingers around Lan Zhan's hand, stumbling over a stone or a chunk of bottom-clinging ice as they make for the garden grounds, the slick and algae covered stones masquerading as relative safety, one some spanned with white that melts under the lapping waves of the disturbed moat's surface. Fabric clings to legs and arms and stomachs, and he almost laughs, "I won't let go again," as if that holds a meaning that either of them can understand, bone deep: I will not be that kind of broken, I will not be that kind of hopeless, I will not be the dregs of sanity that I had been, then.

It hurts like the cold that spikes through his system, and his teeth chatter, because it ties into everything between them going unspoken. He almost finds words in that moment, before his tongue is too thick in his mouth and he pulls himself up from the waters to the shore, now helping support Lan Zhan, the two of them white vestal maidens making their way forward. His mask has clung impossibly to his hair, but not his face, a bonnet of half-frozen lace and a few odd petals and leaves the moat has granted as part of their decoration, having survived the fall, the crash, the cold, and the burn: oh, but their work here is not yet done.

Hurts, unlike the ground underfoot, but like the breeze that strikes through to bone without pausing for the meat of flesh to hold it back, and shivers, hard, teeth chattering before he regains control of his tongue. Hurts, because he knows what loss is, in fearing it; he knows they fear the same thing, in each other, and in their son, and the peoples of their lives. That in some twist of fate, Wei Wuxian has perhaps let more by numbers into his heart, but only one as deep, and none this deep, without having words for how a soulmate can see him, can have known him, and still cannot understand him, as he fails to understand his in turn.

"Don't let go," is what he says in turn, stumbling as they are, looking for a lee in the wind of the grey skies, white looming disaster, and the screams and panic from the guards and the witches (bless, he thinks, bless that three still fall into the pattern of his order, that they harass only other witches, and play games dancing away from the dragon's maw) and the trampled garden expanse, the melting ice that crushes hedges and flowers and pots that had been dainty before, now in pieces. "Don't let go, either."

Because he is weak, and he is human, and he doesn't yet want to have to learn how to go on alone, as Lan Zhan has had to learn, as Jiang Cheng has had to learn.

"We need to get you out of those robes into something warmer—"

Moving on, moving forward, every the direction Wei Wuxian goes.

[downswing]

"Stay," he murmurs, and pleads with himself as much as with Wei Ying, to wear lethargy white-flowing in his limbs, to will them stilled and shuttered. Knees nearly buckle, at the next pebble's obstacle. He breathes like razor blades, between rapid incisions. The angry mouth of the garden's gates opens to them, thin and rattled by screeching wind, the doors fragile in their hinges. Beyond, land once green turned barren by the hound's marks of frost. They walk. They drag on. Until the first approximation of a bench for leisure, until Lan Wangji, knowing better than to stall in the face of nearby danger, simply collpses.

He feels weakness in granules, dissolving, blue on his mouth, pale on Wei Ying's cheeks. And he was beautiful before, a child-like, soft-stepped vision, dancing between the rains of uncle's incredulity and the blades of the Wen, and arrows, sharp and snapped and cruel on a rooftop where only blood allies faced him. In a remote land, Wei Ying is beautiful again, for the habit of it, in the way of animals hunted to the precipice of their last breath. The sight of him stings, proud, a small smiling beast. Wangji wants to see red on his teeth, Eat the dead.

Better than his arms before, Lan Wangji's mind swims. Blood wails from his shoulder's wound like a deep imprecation indifferent to scale, to the damage a cut of this gravity should, by lawful right, incur. Seated, he can focus — can drift his hands and peel down his third layer until it drapes only off his injured side, and he can start to strap the wet rips of it tight against his bone. Stay the blood.

"Fire a talisman." Or create a talisman to summon flames and warm them. Whichever. Whatever. Of the two, shockingly, Wei Ying has the qi to spare. Wangji hisses, and finalises the wrapping, but turns to Wei Ying with an expectant gaze, to complete the knot.

"In the Xuanwu cave, we..." Strangulated a creature that had run rabid and wrong, with the arrogance of children who knew nothing of preservation, of true respect for their elders. Of honouring life by saving it in whatever its most miserable forms. They killed, because death is cheap cunning and easy. "Here. We are armed with... that strategy."

If need be, Eleven's iron coils in his sleeve, could round the dragon's throat. This animal is thicker, garrotte might fail without an excess of force. But what else can they attempt? Perhaps what they failed to, before.

"Must this creature die?"

[weifinder]

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.

[downswing]

"I let you," cascades out between spills of narrow exhalation, slim and starved, skinned like prize quarry. Flickers and sparks of heat, and the trick, the true gift is surrender to Wei Ying's touch, clandestine, to the whispers of his qi's intrusion. The body knows its old truths, that this is energy uncleansed, tarnished for all years and death have filtered out the root of death dark and deadened things charcoal, and the smear of their mark indelible from Wei Ying's own soul. What was Lan Wangji before revulsion? Only soft, watery eyes and porcelain cheeks and knees bent at his mother's doors, unyielding, and perfect calligraphy spelling out gratitude and regrets.

He forces himself tame, rise and fall and the snake's undulation of his chest, in-out-in-out-clear, accepting Wei Ying's talismans, his heat. The start of his healing, should it come, when it comes, because when has brilliance excused itself of Wei Ying? The Patriarch is for the stretching silences, the nursing of corpses, the mothering of mute and deaf and shapeless children, for miracles like sand spilled between fingertips, like the white river-run pebbles that toss and flinch and ricochet down the garden path, that hit the root of the tower's clutching inner walls, ivory reshaped in a kaleidoscope of refracted colour.

Briefly, he keeps himself sane with the cruelty of voyeurism: with watching the dragon's body braid another loop, a circle imperfect. They have crowned the creature with ash and smoke and cinder. Above their heads, wisps clutter and curl.

"It is beautiful," he says, and sobs, once, but it comes like wet scratch, chaffing. He is tired, bone tired, gristle and cartilage and the white elasticity that weaves long legs between limbs. He is part and particle and tissue. His hand spoils the shallow lines of Wei Ying's knot, as if disbelieving that the deed, in its stillness, is done. His fingers come red, dripping. And he remembers, distantly, the blood that divides his palm is his own, thin on his wrist, glistened when he wipes it tacky on Wei Ying's mouth now, in passing. They will not kill the dragon on this day. So pledged.

( They say: feed a hunting hound raw meat and blood freshly spilled. It will grow a taste for it. )

He rises with the moat waters that pummel back down in an arc depraved by violence. Wei Ying, who has no core, but intends to heal him, who had the qi to spare for talisman — Wei Ying needs no help up.

"A count of a hundred, before I give chase?" A trifle to tease Wei Ying with a head start up the stairs. Only polite.

[weifinder]

Permission given, and the body accepts what his has to offer, the careful intrusion of qi that flows into form, seeking to knit and heal in the way he's been learning here, in the flesh and not the meridians which before had been his understood ways. He cannot fix without too much of a drain; blood encouraged to clot, skin guided toward its earliest reknitting, flesh that webs toward itself and remembers the dream of how it'd been whole, of one cloth, unsundered.

A distraction that furrows his brow, this concentration he offers, that looks up to hear the echo of the dragon's angered lament, Lan Zhan raw, his chest shadowed with the echo of a cry that doesn't quite form right. Wei Wuxian doesn't look toward the dragon, brilliant alabaster cutting through air and water with the finesse of a creature born to do both, and to offer no apologies for either. The tower shudders under its awe and bulk, protesting with the groan of ages and the staccato fall of decorative spikes, upthrust and crushed before the dragon's might. They hit the lower parts of the tower, the base, the moat, cracking off ice and into iced water.

"Yes," he says, but he looks at Lan Zhan, not the dragon, and long lashes have only lowered with the focus he finds he still needs in this new art, the healing that is different and yet akin to what he's witnessed, been subjected to, by the kindness of known hearts. Wen Qing, Lan Zhan.

Blood bound and binding, and he blinks, parts lips with his tongue held within, wet and cold and bittersweet. No dragon dies today by their hands, or by their help. Saving, and saving the innocents of the citadel, requires yet more of them still. The irreverence, when he's already accepted the binding, comes as expected:

"You should simply ask me to wear rogue for you sometime."

Though he lacks the energy to make it sound like he would in better situations, where they were not injured or wet or in such dangerous environs, where innocents in their gluttony lie ripe for the picking of a force of nature given form. A tease ahead of another tease as they rise, and he does laugh then, short and true.

"Two hundred if you want me believing I have a chance to win. Come, we've a dragon yet to coax." And always, always more innocents to help save, as much as they could. For all innocent could be relative, and for all the people trapped were fewer in count of the powerless and more often in the power and wealth of those who were not entirely innocent at all.

[downswing]

"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.

[weifinder]

A smile, teeth bared, bright, and he laughs. Wear what pleases him, and he'd have to know more about that, he supposes, outside of wearing what's convenient, what's purposeful, what masks and misguides. Purples and blues and blacks, the bruise he'd bear, white layered close to his heart.

Here and now, a wraith that moves with squelching footsteps, ushering water with each step forward, cold but shy of freezing, independent of the moat and its carnage. More ice shattered and rock and décor strewn across its surface, swallowed by the dragon's waves, and less of the blood, which would define it should those trapped inside be forced outward prematurely.

He can see them, in that moment. The torn panic of their masks and magnificent clothing; the scents of burning hair and paper, of smoke lingering and eclipsed by the acid bite of winter. Bodies that could crowd balconies, pressed up to gnarled and jutting thresholds to a fall that would end in splashed, shattered red.

Blinks the afterimage away, to find no shadows spilled so far, but their progress inexorable toward the screams that precede such shadows, thick and heavy and heady enough, were he another man, were this another era. The question asked, and he steps close, shoulder to shoulder, gaze on a wounded man's face before it shifts slowly away, looking forward. Always forward, in the end.

"I tired," he says, that it has happened and could happen, but he smiles, teeth bared, and it is a matter of his past. "I learned to find room to breathe, reasons for joy. Even in the worst of it, Lan Zhan, we have to find the light."

His dark eyes pulled by elliptic orbit to study Lan Zhan's face once more, and he reaches for him, a small shift of hand to brush fingers against knuckles.

"The carnage cannot be all that we allow to define us. And it tries. You know that better than I, I think." Sixteen years of chasing chaos, and the heart of it had always been light and blinding and as hollow as the centre of a lightning struck tree.

He fumbles for his flute, his instrument of horror in one era, his named and thoughtful companion, steadier than his own heart. Salvaged by Jiang Cheng once, and from a time of his worst darkness and desperation, named by the woman who had raised him in the only way that had taught him half of what it can be to love. Wei Wuxian plays, and steps forward, nods for Lan Zhan to take the balcony first. He will follow, but here, also, to clear some of the way for the panicked and the frightened, who will not recall him or thank him for it, when his song rises stronger than the melding of bone from sundered edge to sundered edge. The body that responds dead but living, and the witch that streaks past lingering with scents of burning despite no new burns in injury. She carries with her, always will, that haunting, that hatred.

But she carries with her that power, too, and it is hers that moves the wreckage that turns the screaming passage into louder shrieks before she's sent off again, giving survivors and avenue forward and across, away from whatever haunts the far side. Back to the dragon and its writing tantrums, merited and owed, and there is no life or unlife as sacred as hope in a moment where Wei Wuxian forgets what it means to breathe pain, and simply bolts sideways, away from the flame that reaches toward them, and looks for that balcony, each cliffside conquered in a spire's worth of shuddering near-relief.

[downswing]

Light. Optimism. Stitched by ignorance and prayer, coated by fresh integuments of hazard. Wei Ying advises — and flees, all flash and flicker and lightning bolt that swells and smites, bound up and up and scraping, scratching the dust skin off stones. Storm air shrouds him and crackles, electric and dispersing only when Wei Ying's creature tramples the ground before him, spearing the corridors.

And Lan Wangji, only drifting behind or before them, calculated in his step. Flitting, from side to side of the smoked corridor, in part to avoid — limbs shivered by the sinister crescendo of Wei Ying's song — playing the pale-garbed, strident target. In part, also, to steer clear of Wei Ying's vantage, to leave the room for him and his blind and undiscerning witch.

You have this under control, Wangji needn't say, and abandons Wei Ying to study the fine, weighted device that brokers their daily communications and the developments of their party. Eleven, rallying the people. Back to the wall, Lan Wangji hastens through his exchanges, concluding what reedy screams already sculpt as a plain priority — they must evacuate the people, remove them from beneath the range of the dragon's shadow, should the creature fall.

Wei Ying, wooing his ghosts, must hear the direction. More fool he and mouth yet dry, Lan Wangji intends to shout the instruction, choking on soot shrapnel, deafened by the wild, fractured yells of the civilian crowd. There are ways to draw Wei Ying's attention, from a distance — most of them rely on the subtlety of missives, the failing option of sound.

The time is nigh, then, for a heavier hand. What sentry corpse Wangji divests of his bow and arrows, he cannot say, only that the gear shines bright with the polish of castle make and castle wear. He weighs both with the brief unfamiliarity of every man who has long delegated an art as a lesser, secondary skill, and must now depend on it. Then, he unspools Wei Ying's heating talisman from his sleeve, binding it to the arrow's tip, while a second, plain parchment piece, his letter, is scribbled and braided into the feather fletching. Fed an excess of qi by the force of Wangji's intervention, the warming talisman catches flame — to the slanted scowl of undead, surrounding him. Sheer fortune: the witches of Bessis, casting stronger fire, helpfully distract them.

When Lan Wangji shoots, struggling to peer at distance, the flaming arrow lands like splintered sunlight in one of the narrow nooks that carve stone ground at Wei Ying's feet. Lan Wangji thinks, all considered, not his poorest mark. (Thinks too, if he were Jin Zixuan, he would suffer an embarrassment of the Patriarch's comeuppance, within heartbeats.)

On one side of the scribbled parchment by the fletching, Wei Ying.

On the other, They intend to cast the dragon asleep. Leave me to rally those civilians that left the tower. Mind those within. We meet at sundown.

[weifinder]

Sharp thud of metal in wood, or stone, or whatever forms this carapace of a tower takes, his eye caught by motion and flame and what else, further away: the man who sent the arrow flying, Lan Zhan, a tattered, beautiful living flame that flickers to white.

The message caught up in a motion down to his knee, and the collection of parchment woven in fletching; his name, such as it is, and the plan of action.

He lifts the paper to his lips, and lets it rest there, the closest thing to a blown kiss before he nods and slips into the interior shadows. He will be pulled out again, as the dragon becomes a settled beast, as magic collides and he's brought down to small size and even exhausted, he will find it in him to navigate the streets he's learned and guide two other men to the docks from the path of least obvious tracking, but that is for hours still.

Hours before the cold seas, hours before the sun sets, and he will live and stand and breathe and ensure he and Lan Zhan share that much of themselves, for whatever else they do not right now. Trust and faith, stitched together by circumstance that pulls the better out of them.

The chaos, and disaster, they both know how to most easily survive in the midst of, when silent.