What is regret, now that the bride is defiled, the incensed burned, the wine spilled? Sticks and stones and battered bones, a man cannot unmake himself. Lan Wangji feels like that which lingers, wind-swept, in the wake of summer storms: callous, tenuous, ground debris. Raw and brittled and slate-grey, scabs of the road quaked and released, trembled underfoot.
Strength still steels him here, now. Wei Ying — natters in the sickly, bird-like tongue of fear, and he nods along with each pleasantry, drawing the binds of the headband and pulling to briefly corset it. If he is rough, then: ) Bear it.
( No instruction, no explanation. They have navigated the waters of omission long enough to know Wei Ying will not drown. Wangji leads him ashore now, hand slack and cold and more crutch and the suggestion of presence than heartfelt companion. Work calls to him. In his stomach churns the anxiety of multitudes, truths battling to progress from fecund possibility into gravid probability. There is no space in him tonight for teasing and taunts, for the molten weight of Wei Ying's candour. His heart is too full.
Somewhere, water is dripping. When creaks the floor again, Lan Wangji waits and waits and waits and waits until his heel's bruised by rivulets. Rain drainage, poorly executed. No — a hole on high, in the tinder wall.
Wei Ying cannot spend another beggarly night here. Should not have lived through the first. it can be argued, he should not even struggle through the formalities of resurrection here, but Lan Wangji still guides him, one step and the next, positioned by the table, and sits Wei Ying's hands flat and readied on the bride's hips, her ribs, her sternum. )
A curse stitches two spirits to these bones.
( A marriage of minds, pestilential enslavement. The corpse is too aged to serve as a vessel, emptied of its warmth, of its meats. For the fox's spirit to coat and saturate these bones, there must be the familiar, welcoming cushion of an intermediary between them, and Lan Wangji knows what comes of the dead who perish to violence — how they float and dance and face a prophecy of fire: become the flame that burns strangers close, or the moth corrupted.
If the woman's spirit lingered, then it was entrapped, and now it bows its back before its guest, their mutual survival dangerously symbiotic. Like the mother the bride was never meant to become and the whispered shape of its unborn child. Absently, Lan Wangji intends both their collapse. )
We wake and exorcise the intruder. We release the girl. ( Will orthodoxy forgive him such deluded estrangement? The old rites would say, if one spirit has become intoxicated by the presence of evil, do not trouble yourself with extrication: both must burn. He will not waste — turns and weaponises Wei Ying, sits him before the corpse, with Wangji's hand a burning brand on his nape, bartering a gentle donation of qi. ) I welcome that.
no subject
What is regret, now that the bride is defiled, the incensed burned, the wine spilled? Sticks and stones and battered bones, a man cannot unmake himself. Lan Wangji feels like that which lingers, wind-swept, in the wake of summer storms: callous, tenuous, ground debris. Raw and brittled and slate-grey, scabs of the road quaked and released, trembled underfoot.
Strength still steels him here, now. Wei Ying — natters in the sickly, bird-like tongue of fear, and he nods along with each pleasantry, drawing the binds of the headband and pulling to briefly corset it. If he is rough, then: ) Bear it.
( No instruction, no explanation. They have navigated the waters of omission long enough to know Wei Ying will not drown. Wangji leads him ashore now, hand slack and cold and more crutch and the suggestion of presence than heartfelt companion. Work calls to him. In his stomach churns the anxiety of multitudes, truths battling to progress from fecund possibility into gravid probability. There is no space in him tonight for teasing and taunts, for the molten weight of Wei Ying's candour. His heart is too full.
Somewhere, water is dripping. When creaks the floor again, Lan Wangji waits and waits and waits and waits until his heel's bruised by rivulets. Rain drainage, poorly executed. No — a hole on high, in the tinder wall.
Wei Ying cannot spend another beggarly night here. Should not have lived through the first. it can be argued, he should not even struggle through the formalities of resurrection here, but Lan Wangji still guides him, one step and the next, positioned by the table, and sits Wei Ying's hands flat and readied on the bride's hips, her ribs, her sternum. )
A curse stitches two spirits to these bones.
( A marriage of minds, pestilential enslavement. The corpse is too aged to serve as a vessel, emptied of its warmth, of its meats. For the fox's spirit to coat and saturate these bones, there must be the familiar, welcoming cushion of an intermediary between them, and Lan Wangji knows what comes of the dead who perish to violence — how they float and dance and face a prophecy of fire: become the flame that burns strangers close, or the moth corrupted.
If the woman's spirit lingered, then it was entrapped, and now it bows its back before its guest, their mutual survival dangerously symbiotic. Like the mother the bride was never meant to become and the whispered shape of its unborn child. Absently, Lan Wangji intends both their collapse. )
We wake and exorcise the intruder. We release the girl. ( Will orthodoxy forgive him such deluded estrangement? The old rites would say, if one spirit has become intoxicated by the presence of evil, do not trouble yourself with extrication: both must burn. He will not waste — turns and weaponises Wei Ying, sits him before the corpse, with Wangji's hand a burning brand on his nape, bartering a gentle donation of qi. ) I welcome that.