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Entry tags:
(no subject)
WHO: Lan Wangji, Wen Qing, Emilia + others to be added...
WHEN: mid/just post-revolution.
WHERE: Palace of the Doxe, broader Taravast.
WHAT: Revolution, spiritual inquisition, the undue instinct to take inspiration from one old, Machievallian man's quest for immortality.
WARNINGS: descriptions of carnage, some roughening up of spirits during interrogation.
NOTE: so far, this houses a few follow-up or pre-discussed catch-up logs, but definitely please PM if you'd like to do something \o/
wen qing
( In the first hours, he bides sanity with cruelty. It is the way of war, nimble: sadism infiltrates as efficiency in slaughter, the butcher’s wary concern of blunting his blade as little as possible on resisting bone. Murder displaces detention, when hours thin down to heartbeats, anaemic, and dust-heat from crackled marble walked by furies of the ghostly revolution greet the slam-thud of bodies like graves.
He lingers, fingers spidered over Bichen’s hungry hilt, clashing, teasing, taunting the blade, and stale air shrivels stifling and tight like a wet knot in his lungs, track of road salt and charcoal smeared at his feet. In the Doxe’s palace, sterility was favoured — not the coarse, lived-in blackening of halls walked dailt, but the singing desolation of surgery quarters. Now, they know why: death travelled here, arm soft and braided with Bonaccorso Spina’s at the elbow, for a long stroll towards the niece Vannozza.
Shrieks, salved by revolutionary chants, by the slouched but heavy blades of other, darkened faces after. Vannozza’s people, he suspects. Those of her cousin. Politics so often precede and privilege execution. After, when Wangji’s boots scuff on corpses spewed like unfurled ribbon on hard floor, he does not ask which party bruised yellow the dignity of the Doxe’s defences. Does not spare moments or sympathy in corridors drenched in screams and Verdigris, only the knife, thin and cleansed on the width of his thigh, collected from a fallen soldier — a fine, balanced blade, light and fit and scarcely weathered, perhaps in its first ten draws.
He offers it to Wen Qing in passing, and learns her — how to walk beside her, shadow and extension, to mind her back and her flank and move, serpentine, to fill in the negative space of her physicality. It is natural in the way of night hunts, to speak the language of pairings and supplement a partner’s strength in battle.
They come with purpose. Watch the years mark Lan Wangji’s face with shadow and ripple of skin, watch the fear gut him. Find the witches of Attaryl, find a core’s alternative to a lengthened lifespan. They say, they granted the predecessors of the incumbent Doxe many years over. And why deny it to a brighter, red-ribboned, laughing cause? He suspects blades persuade more diplomacy than Beitang Moran would wish brokered.
Noise and pale light spool in gentle weave through a half-barred window. He catches himself — catches Wen Qing with the hasty barrier of Bichen before her — before stepping on innards bloomed on slate tile like red lilies opening the autumn season. )
Once, this was Nightless City. ( They do not grieve what Wen Qing has lost, the distant, bird call of her kin felled. Blood of her blood, and how the Wen gave it, hollowing meats and dried off bone. How her people paid their hubris. ) Perhaps Sizhui should learn the truths of that massacre.
( …and this, the grooming and sophisticated education of a blossoming gentleman is the precise, apt topic of conversation one should undertake in the middle of blade-born invasion. Why not?
But then he stills, breath punched, when the intestine of the corridor widens, when another hall breathes, and within it, a witch of the Bessis, descended on her sweet sister of Attaryl like a hawk, feeding. She has long passed, her enemy, her spirit storming beside her like a guttered candle.
Is this moment theirs to intercede in? Once, he contrived to peel Wei Ying from the Wen. And what did he learn? Who are you, you Lan, to interfere — …and yet. )
We see them.
no subject
Death is not her forte, although she trained as a cultivator, carried a sword, and was unafraid to use it. Her words to Wen Ning were not incorrect: their family was full of physicians trained to heal, not harm. Bits of her detach, as she slices through a body, noting the muscles she cuts through, the organs that the sword punctures. No help for them, as the lung deflates, the entrails spill out, the artery is severed.
It's madness, a massacre. The battles she remembers from Nightless City, before Wei Wuxian and Meng Yao and all of the others put a stop to the mindless cruelties of her uncle. Now they seek another man who chases immortality, who refuses to acknowledge the natural order of the world. Is she any better, what she demanded of Wei Wuxian, that night in the rain? When her heart shattered as Wen Ning lingered near death in her arms. Is Wei Wuxian any better, when he asked her to perform an impossible feat?
No matter, the right and the wrong: the Doxe will pay, Vannozza's body out of his grip, and the city in chaos. No sympathy burns in her for him. She can understand the madness, the search, living too close to Wen Ruohan for far too long to not understand what drove him. She even understands why people followed her uncle, why people sought to help the Doxe.
When Lan Wangji stops her, when she watches the witches feed, their bodies broken things, their spirits craven, she considers this. ]
The battle after Wen Ning and I died? [ Because the battles she remembers were not necessarily massacres, although gruesome. ] You have kept that knowledge from him this long. What changes?
[ It is enough, she thinks, that Sizhui knows his heritage, knows he comes from somewhere, that there are ancestors watching over him. There are ties to family even death cannot overtake, that are not replaced with adoption into another clan.
Does he need the knowledge of a slaughter? More wars? ]
no subject
( Courtesy slick and clammy on his tongue, he swallows wet against it. Breathes burning. Patience, with the knowing of it: that Wei Ying only cares for the martyrs of the heavens, for Jiang Yanli and Wen Qionglin and Lan Sizhui, whose coffers of kindness will never run emptied or dry. And that he loves too the worst plagues of the world, dark-eyed and haunting — Jiang Wanyin and Wei Ying's own maudlin pets, twined wisps of brittle shadow.
This ethical sundering of Wei Ying's affections leaves scant quarters for ambiguity. And where does Wen Qing fall? She knows herself — the syrupy beam of Wangji's gaze lands low — she took the blade. There is enough animal cruelty in her that she bares sharp teeth now and Lan Wangji concedes another step back — I hear you, in your silences — but hesitates to bear his throat.
Enough blood wets these rooms, slips under his feet. Let her quench her thirst elsehow. )
The Doxe's history will be written by his survivors. ( With diligent cruelty, for threat of violence and arson have their way of conscripting partisans to a cause Bonaccorso Spina might find — unflattering. At most, today, Wangji can hope to ease an elder's spirits; Bonaccorso's name is ripe for tarnish, oily and visceral. He will be — he is — anathema. ) As was that of the Wen.
( Wen Ruohan, defaced of his past glory, became a many-headed beast: mad or perverted or estranged from humanity. A fool or the face of brilliance. Cursed or sharply possessed of his senses, but lacking the dignity to tame them. A political starveling, or a tragic casualty of his own greed before powers he proved too weak to contain. Each scribe of renown wrote a different if sophisticated account of the Wen, when the ashes of their downfall had stilled safely cold — and each historian took his coin from a different sect master, keen to legitimise a skeletal claim to the looting of Nightless City. )
Is that all Sizhui should learn? ( Think. Best to have moderation, balance. Who can say what was right then, when the sun was shot from the skies, and what is wrong now, when they've buried Jin tyrants? The justice of battle does not excuse its means. At Nightless City, they fought bravely. They did not fight well. ) You know his people.
( Some might say, Wen Qing is that. )