westwhere | romeo is bleeding but nobody can tell (open)

“This is going to feel a bit disgusting,” Lily cautioned with an apologetic frown before she lifted her wand, tapping Wei Wuxian once on the forehead.

The Disillusionment Charm usually left the person it had been cast on with the rather gross sensation of having an egg cracked on the top of their head, the slippery sensation traveling downwards along with the charm, leaving them not invisible, but blended seamlessly with their surroundings, taking on its texture and color.

“It will wear off and I’ll have to recast it, so watch out for me and I’ll watch out for you. When we find them we can move them out like we did on the Stairs of Sighs, I’ve got a few boxes in my bag.” She gave the spot she knew he was a firm nod before turning her wand on herself in a looping motion as she disappeared from her feet up.

Edited 2021-12-24 23:53 (UTC)

Three tidy piles of magically replicated stones sat beside three plots of earth, while Lily stood at the foot of the space, wand out.

“Defodio!” Her wand sliced neatly through the air in a wide zig-zag before the first rectangle of earth split and widened slightly, loose soil mounding up along the sides. It was shallow for a grave, she knew, but it was a good start.

“I’ll come back to that one unless you can clear a little more, it so I can start on the next?”

After splitting the earth at the end of a new row of graves she’d been digging Lily tossed a small, well-used trowel onto the divide she had made. As she lifted her wand the little shovel’s handle rose along with it before it sprang into motion and got to work digging.

“You know, this isn’t too terribly difficult when there’s still some light out,” she said, turning to look at El. “Want a hand?”

She didn’t mean to sound so casual in the face of such grim work, but somewhere during her stay in Taravast, laying people to rest had become part of a long list of strange tasks she could have never imagined for herself but still ended up taking on. It was the right thing to do, and it had to be done - she had gotten used to doing it.

Despite everything that happened between the Bessis and the Attaryl, and then all of them, Xingchen held no real ill-intent toward the dead witches. From what he understood, they were only acting on their convictions and he couldn't fault them for that.

Besides, after learning what he'd done in his own world, Xingchen was particularly empathetic and desired to do for these dead what he couldn't properly do for those who died at his hand. It wouldn't fix anything, but maybe it could help heal his soul, little by little.

Lily spoke a strange word that meant nothing to him, the ground shuddering beneath his feet, but after a moment it became clear what she had done. So he gripped the small shovel he'd managed to find and nodded, carefully heading toward the grave. Kneeling at the side of the grave, he began to dig some more, doing his best to keep it as uniform as possible and not branch out any farther than necessary.

Lily would hear no complaints from him, not even as his efforts eventually made him breathe more heavily or as sweat fell from his face.

After working on the grave beside the one Xingchen knelt beside in silence for a while Lily stopped and straightened up in the dirt, letting go of the trowel she had in her hand to shake the ache out of her fingers from holding onto it for so long.

"Xingchen, do you fancy a break and a cuppa?"

Without waiting for an answer Lily drew her wand, conjuring a pot of tea on the ground between them before she turned her attention back to the trowel she abandoned. Charming it into motion it continued to work while she saw to dusting her hands off before pouring a cup of tea.

Truth be told, he could use a break, though, at the same time, Xingchen could keep working, too. They would have to get all of this done at some point, and it would be better to do it sooner rather than later. Yet, since Lily offered, Xingchen would be a poor companion to refuse. It wasn't as if their act was in immediate danger of being stopped.

So he straightened up, laying the little shovel on the ground beside the first grave, and started to wipe the dirt from his own hands. "That would be appreciated. Thank you." It wasn't long before he heard movement recommence, particularly that of tea being poured, that familiar initial splashing of liquid into a cup. Perhaps Lily had brought everything needed with her beforehand. She probably foresaw this. Smart, really. Everyone would have needed to drink something.

But then his ears picked up more sound, the same digging that had surrounded them just moments before. Xingchen cocked his head, trying to get a better read on the situation. Maybe he had misheard? But it continued and he knew he wasn't mistaken. "Has someone joined us?"

At some point, he should question more than he already does his willingness to immerse himself in foreign magics. At some point, but not yet at this one, wan with the exhaustion of a rebellion that felt as poorly seated as it felt both just and unjust, with no ending he would speak of with anything approaching warmth.

Wholesale slaughter was his way once, in losing control. Nothing in it found honour, and nothing in it was cleansing. Taravast had much to do, to pretend toward that hope, and the rot that lay within it was not new, simply somewhat exposed.

"Oh, we've been consorting with political beings long enough I'm not sure this can outdo them," he said, cheerful enough, meeting her frown with a wry and self-aware smile. The sensation that followed was novel for a man who'd been left to die in a land of corpses and resentment, not the only time he'd been bathed in slippery substances that clung to him, coating him like an unwanted skin. Curious, still, and so he absorbed it with the quiet sense of accomplishment with which he greeted more things these days.

The shape of himself when he looked down was visible in a slight distortion of his surroundings, but disconcerting in the same sense, as he could see his own blended nature, as if what behind him was also before him. "Fascinating," he said, smiling in spite of himself and the nature of what they were doing. "There's bound to be a way to do something to similar effect with charms that isn't just redirecting attention, this moves so smoothly."

Then a clap of his hands while Lily became the smudge against reality, difficult to see but from the corner of his peripheral vision, and to his senses, keen in the way of cultivators. That the witches better suited for detecting them had been murdered (whatever foibles, he would never believe in that wholesale slaughtering), leaving the fire branded ones to block the laying to rest that was due, at some point. He sighed internally, but spoke with a chipper tone of voice.

"We really do need to find some other bonding activity, fair Lily, this is macabre even for me. Now, let us go... on, toward our collecting of the dead for the living."

"Fair point." Huffing out a laugh through her nose Lily considered the politicians of Taravast, her expression souring in distaste as her thoughts meandered over Rigarda and the newly deceased Doxe.

Once they had both been concealed Lily looked down at herself, stretching out her arms to examine her lack of appearance before doing the same to Wei Wuxian. "It's a tricky charm, if you don't practice it wears off too quickly to be useful, but we ought to have about an hour before I'll need to sort us both out again."

Stashing her wand in her pocket Lily kept a firm hold of it, ready to draw it if they met with opposition. "Bit grim isn't it? The most relaxing time we spent together was on the night watch - and then it was raining blood." At least regardless of circumstance, Wei Wuxian always proved himself to be excellent company.

"Right then, here's hoping they keep the light low inside so we're harder to detect." She gave the space he occupied another invisible nod before creeping forward as silently as she could, checking this way and that for anything that might impede their progress inside.

Waiting for Xingchen to settle she passed the tea she had poured to him carefully before seeing to her own. "Someone else?" She looked around, confused before the jump of her trowel as it pogoed up and down, digging for her caught her attention.

"Oh! No that's just my little shovel. I've charmed it to work for me while I rest." It was possible to just keep letting the trowel dig the whole thing, but Lily was trying not to squander her magical reserves - not when there were so many graves to dig.

"Though I do expect our friend Wei Wuxian at some point to play for the witches we bury and send them off so they can't be brought back." It seemed as though resurrection were the unsettlingly common custom of this land, she was glad some precautions could be taken to ensure these dead could move on and rest.

"We need a better sense of when to drink tea," he said, musing, but it was a last nod to the oddities of their situations, before it was time for action again, and his solemn expression and narrowed eyes were as indistinguishable as ever other feature.

Their progress into the building was swift, if only because of expectation dulling guards and witches from truth to belief in possiblity. Heavier, the way scant words find them as they made careful way down cold rooms running antithetical to the heat of Bessis flame, but perhaps they'd learned from the undead witches, because while the bodies they found in an interior, cold room meet ends through violence, not even half were horrifically burned.

The cold, thankfully, dulled scent for those who were.

"Lily," he said, voice low, "Don't look. Please, let me handle the transferring... don't look."

Not at the indignity, the gross reality of death, unclean and bodies left abandoned to use by what, by whom, to justify one people's right to violence for the machinations of a few of the others. No people were monoliths. They were still murdered, left unwashed in the results of it, as if they were.

She had seen enough to bring her hands up to her mouth, stifling a gasp as she turned around at his behest, shuddering from the brief glance she had taken. This was certainly a far cry from the dusty bones they'd transported to Taravast, but that didn't mean she was going to back down from the work.

"Is it bad? No, don't tell me." Shaking her head as she tried to dismiss the quick peek she'd gotten from her memory Lily drew her wand, casting the Muffliato charm before warding the door they'd gone through. She knew it wasn't likely to hold if they were discovered, but it would buy enough time to grab him and disappear to safety if it came to it.

Going for her bag she took out a few small wooden boxes and set them on the ground, keeping her back to Wei Wuxian and the fallen witches she made them large enough to suit their purpose.

"I'll make them small enough to go back in my bag. Will you need more of them? I brought a few." Lily did her best to not think about how frequently she had needed to carry human remains in her makeup bag since arriving here.

With the way he'd been working, Xingchen's hands weren't cold, but the heat of the tea warmed his hands regardless. It was relaxing, grounding in a way that brought him back to the living after this time of dealing with the unfortunate realities of death. They had been digging in silence up till now and Xingchen could easily have gotten lost in it. He could dig a grave for a witch or a grave for himself if he weren't careful.

But Lily had spoken up in time and now offered some distraction, not just with the tea. Her abilities were new to Xingchen, but fascinating all the same. "You are able to do such things. That's convenient."

A sip of tea later had Xingchen relaxing a little more. He probably had been working too hard, letting himself fall too far within himself. His posture slumped a little at the mention of Wei Wuxian, too, a sigh of relief pushing past his lips. "I do believe Wei Wuxian is...one of the most qualified to do the job. At least that I know of." Dealing with the dead was kind of his thing, though putting them to rest was the opposite of what he tended to do. But that kind of knowledge went hand-in-hand, didn't it? "All should be well, then."

He had seen dead, had made people dead in horrendous ways a lifetime ago. It wasn't the same, but he had a certain clinical detachment from death, a reverence and silence around the shell of a life left, even were he not the necromancer he was.

So he smiled, knowing what it carried to his voice, while Lily placed the boxes, while her magic unspooled them to proper size for bodies.

Not enough, he knew, but that too was fine. They'd make it work. There were some disrespects to remains which would be endured, and this wasn't the end for it, not when there were further measures to take, to allow bodies to depart in honours of finalities.

"Oh, I suppose I will, but there's no rush. You'll have to forgive me, I'm going to start sounding very peasant farmer before long here!"

A jest, his strength not that weakened anymore, with weeks placed between his spat of necrolord insanity, and while his bones remain too easily defined, especially when compared to his better fed, better muscled twin of another world, he was a cultivator. Strength was his due.

Hauling the bodies of the dead, shutting down his sense of smell as much as he could, keeping himself cooler at the surface, Wei Wuxian set to the task of lifting dead bodies and settling them into the equivalent of transportation coffins.

"Though if you don't mind," he said, reflecting on how many ablutions he would necessitate, what bathing, before he knelt near Lan Zhan again, his erstwhile fiancé, his husband, by intent, twiceover, and to his ignorance, mocking by now. "Tell me how your potions have been going."

Moiraine had heard about the efforts that people were doing, things that she agreed with. She didn't usually stop and stay long enough in a place to help out, not unless there was something still holding her there but Moiraine had been brought here in the middle of the trouble and it was only right to help.

It's how she comes across the woman making graves, pausing to watch her efforts, to not disturb her concentration. And it was clearly magic, a different use of channelling than Moiraine had ever seen before. She'd known of tools as focusing objects but words said with it-- that was curious.

But apparently she's been caught, offering a small smile in response to the question. When she'd first arrived here she'd felt cut off from the Source but that had seemed to fade the longer she spent here and though her own power still felt weaker than she was used to she could at least use it.

"How many more do you have to do?"

Her hands start by her side as she draws her power to her, outstretched just slightly as she weaves in earth, raising her hands slowly as more soil lifts from the grave, joining what had already been started, an action she'll continue until it's deep enough.

"It makes the work go quicker, certainly - though I expect when I learned these charms at school none of my instructors would anticipate I'd use them to dig graves quickly." In fact, she was certain none of the people she'd gone to school with would believe the extent of the strange mess she'd gotten into - graves and all.

Humming lightly in agreement at the mention of Wei Wuxian's capabilities to handle laying the dead to rest, Lily nodded before having another sip of tea.

"You're a cultivator too, aren't you? Are you also from Lotus Pier?" While she knew a bit of Wei Wuxian's story from outings spent making conversation while digging different graves, she did not know much of Xingchen, save for the fact that the two of them were previously acquainted.

A school! Xingchen perked up a little at that, immediately curious as to what kind of establishment was able to teach people things like enchanting a shovel to dig on its own. Then again, it could have been similar to a cultivation sect, but asked anyway, "What might your instructors have expected of you then?"

Then it seemed to be his turn to answer curiosities. He took another sip and nodded. "I am a cultivator, but a rogue one. I don't belong to any cultivation sect, not like Wei Wuxian did. So, no, I don't come from Lotus Pier. I was raised somewhere secluded, but left to help those I came across in my travels."

"My potions? The healing ones have mostly gone now, I've been handing them out to the others to use or give away as they see fit. Before the house got so battered I was trying to brew something a little more complicated, it was meant to be a treat for you and me." Lily tilted her head from side to side, lamenting the loss of her potion-making room. "Someday we'll both have a vial of Liquid Luck to use as we see fit."

Wincing as she listened to him toiling away behind her Lily frowned as she continued to ready more boxes for him to use.

"If you let me look I'd be able to levitate the bodies into the coffins." She didn't want to look at all, and if the circumstances had been different Lily would have been more than glad to stand there and keep her back turned, but it wasn't right to leave Wei Wuxian with the ghastlier portion of this somber chore of theirs and as nice as it was not to be confronted with evidence of grisly death, it didn't sit well with her, sticking him with the brunt of it.

Edited 2021-12-29 01:13 (UTC)

Frowning at the question Lily looks down the length of the cleared ground, shaking her head. "I've got at least a dozen left to bury, though I'm not certain if more will be discovered before the day's over. I hope not though."

The way the other woman manipulated the earth caught her attention straight away, and Lily looked on, eyebrows raised in astonishment.

"Thank you," she began, relieved and happy to be met with a stranger who wanted to help her.

"I'm Lily. Are you from Taravast?" It was always hard to tell, especially now that everyone she came across, regardless of their place of origin always seemed to look out of sorts.

[.... Well then.

That's not like any power Xie Lian has ever seen before. He's not even sure the shovel of the Earth Master would be able to work as fast.

But it sure is efficient. Especially for someone who, aside from those powers, feels entirely human.]

Can you make it deeper? Or does it only work once?

"Moiraine."

It takes one more weave until she stops, the grave seeming deep enough, Moiraine turning properly to Lily now.

"And I'm not. I came through the beacon."

She still doesn't know how, she hadn't been near one but maybe something had happened as she'd been resting.

"There are sects?" Leaning back, Lily considered what that might entail. "Is that why Wangji and his son wear headbands?" Part of her couldn't help but equate them to school uniforms if that were the case.

The question about her professors sat oddly with her, it was strange to think about what people who had to be more than a million miles away thought of anything. "Before the war, I talked to a few of them about a career in Curse Breaking or healing, but," she laughed mirthlessly, rolling her shoulders in a shrug. "The war's put a bit of a halt on future plans that aren't fighting the good fight."

I can, but we've got a lot more left to dig.

[ Lily gestured towards the small wooden boxes she had arranged in neat rows on the ground. ]

I thought I'd get a few started and circle back around to finish them. Do you think you can help?

"Brilliant," Lily muttered under her breath, watching her new acquaintance finish the grave she'd started.

"Through the Beacon?" Whether she meant to or not, she made a face. That thing had been the source of a fair few headaches.

"I'm sorry, that must have been very jarring for you." If it had been anything like her arrival into this world, Lily could imagine the ordeal had been harrowing. Not wanting to pry she looked from the grave to the strange woman and back again before nodding with appreciation. "Thank you for helping me. Do you think you could do a few more? There are still quite a few that need to be buried."

She offers a smile, not confirming nor denying what her experience had been like but Lily's right -- it had been jarring if that word does the experience justice at all (it doesn't).

"Let's see what we can do."

Though Moiraine knows from the grave that they've already done that they'll be able to. Which is why once they've stepped on a little further she'll let Lily start it off again before continuing the weaves she'd started.

"I've never seen anyone use their power like you before."

She has yet to fully grasp or know the "from different worlds" aspect of the situation.

Her wand being met with a little puzzlement wasn't anything new, and she gave Moiraine a good-natured smile, looking towards the grave the other woman had managed to clear in such a short time.

"That makes two of us. Are you a witch?" To Lily's understanding while it was a standard word for her, to some it was nearly derogatory. Hopefully, the question would be taken in the conversational, non-accusatory spirit it was intended. It was clear this woman knew some sort of magic, and she couldn't help but be curious.

"Have you met any other of our little group of outsiders yet?" She asked before lifting her wand to split the earth of the next gravesite.

Edited 2021-12-30 03:39 (UTC)

romeo is bleeding but nobody can tell (open)

body smuggling, for wei wuxian

burials, open to all

always more digging, for eleven

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Re: burials, open to all

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