westwhere | arc iii: house of ravens

arc iii: house of ravens | arrival

Hi, everyone! Our Arc III arrival event covers 20 Feb-11 March and doubles as a test drive. Participants don’t need an invite to apply by 11 March. Reserves live here. Try to label if you’re a test drive tourist or an old timer — and have fun!

COTTAGEVORE

TDM TOURISTS | OLD TIMERS | COMMON PROMPTS | NOTES

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TDM TOURISTS: THE SCENIC ROUTE

You flinch awake, hand weighed by a sharp stick, stone, or makeshift torch. Your clothes sit stiff, splattered with dried dirt and dusted leaves. Here and there, scratches and shallow wounds litter your limbs, the marks of days of dazed survival alone that you mistily remember. Your strength and supernatural powers are currently largely depleted, but should recover within two to three days.

As they journey, characters discover stretches of the eerily silent forests briefly transform into woodlands or recognisable spots of nature from their home worlds — perhaps they’re now seeing the meadows outside their home towns, their backyard orchard, or a fondly remembered lake pier. These images are short-lived illusions that other characters can also see.

Mind your steps: the mirages try to lure characters deep into the forest, where unfriendly animals and hidden pits wait.

A. THE MORE, THE MERRIER

Trailing through the labyrinthine woods, you stumble upon a group of heavily armed bandits who are already herding several captives. Depending on how agitated you are, expect shackles, leashes and tusk pendants that allow characters to speak and glean local tongues — including the thugs' barked instructions. The outlaws are on a three-day voyage to cursed village Ke-Waihu, where they intend to sell their prisoners to the Hok-Shinn criminal clan.

■ Ensure fellow captives survive the trek, avoiding leg-hold traps, snares and hunting nets.

■ Beatings continue, but morale never improves: help mouthy prisoners with their tasks or wounds.

■ Capture or forage food — and stop naïve captives from going deeper into the forest to follow glimpses of beautiful (wo)men or cries for help. There’s nobody there.

■ At night, prisoners are locked in stitched-shut tents — get friendly quickly.

B. JUST CRUISING

The bandits never saw you coming — but you’ve been watching them collect their prey. Perhaps you’ve even found others like you — also spared enslavement, but condemned to trail after the thugs towards Ke-Waihu. Characters can pick up discarded translation and communication tusk pendants, scraps of food and frail weapons.

■ Beware: superstitious thieves frequently patrol at night, while woodland predators are emboldened by the absence of fires.

■ Leave messages or instructions to the bandits’ captives (tree husk carvings, anyone?) and maybe try to rescue them.

■ ...or leave them for dead and trot on to Ke-Waihu. You savage.

» GO CAMPING, THEY SAID

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OLD TIMERS: CURSES FOR ONE, CURSES FOR ALL

After a bumpy ride aboard the Salamera II, the party arrive at idyllic village Ke-Waihu.

They are greeted by Hok-Shinn Weisi, the slippery mayor who officially helms Ke-Waihu, while his brother Sairen leads the clan’s heavy underground ventures. Weisi’s flippant and spoiled son Taksui is the Merchant’s local liaison. The botanist Enam and his apprentices set out to explore, taking the group's baggage along.

■ Weisi was told the party members are families of Taravast refugees, seeking finer fates in Ke-Waihu. Each family has been assigned a humble but serviceable dwelling — see what luck has in store for you.

■ Weisi officially welcomes the newcomers in Ke-Waihu’s main bustling marketplace. Every merchant, fishmonger and beggar stops to watch as foreigners are briefly stripped of their ostentatious jewels, clothes or weapons, soaked in iced water and told to embrace the village by accepting its old, its new, its ugliness and its truths.

■ To join the community, characters must absorb and redeem the wrongdoings of a deceased ancestor. They are served flasks of a thick, bitter brew that slides down mildly corrosive and cold.

■ The brew’s effects vary: some drinkers feel only a sudden, electric awareness of the story behind the curse they inherited. Others feel scalded from the inside, agonising for hours. The ancestral curse effects start to take hold that night.

■ Characters are sent off to their new homes in Ke-Waihu — but are contacted within hours by one of Enam’s anguished apprentices. His master and his peers were captured by bandits while inspecting the elusive forests for plant specimens. These wicked men took everything: your goods, your Ellethian high fashion, your extra weapons, even your Sleeping Zenobius. Go get’em — but beware the deadly illusions of Ke-Waihu’s forest.

» DUDE, WHERE’S MY COMATOSE SLEEPER?

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ALL TOGETHER NOW

The thugs, the old timers, the test drive prisoners and their creepy watchers collide in the mist-drowned forests of Ke-Waihu.

A. BANDIT BANE

■ Infiltrate the thug group in, kick some outlaws’ teeth on the way out.

■ Release and escort roughened-up newcomers to Ke-Waihu, picking up strays along the way.

■ One of the thugs snitches that the remaining stolen loot is hoarded in a nearby secluded cave, drowned under foliage. The entrance is watched by large, agitated boars with startlingly hard, but not impervious skin. With gold, gems, guns within reach, anyone for pork dinner?

■ After speaking with the new arrivals, party botanist and guide Enam confirms they have been summoned to serve as weapons in this world’s ongoing conflict between warring undead factions. The Merchant, Enam’s collaborator and the party’s patron, is leading otherworlders east, where forgotten beacons might return them home.

■ The villagers Ke-Waihu, Ke-Waiar and Ke-Waicai reportedly know the location of such a beacon. They will unveil it if the party breaks the curse of the House of Ravens.

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B. THE BLUSHING BRIDE

When the group returns, Ke-Waihu is celebrating the joyous procession of dozens of lavish 'weddings.' The (false) rites are carried out to commemorate the marriage of a huntsman and his fox bride...

■ The roads are awash with flower petals and rice, houses extend their hospitality freely, and the rich give away coin. Even Hok-Shinn clansmen don their finest garments and hand out gifts and favours, while lawmen grant pardons to captives held for minor offences.

■ Villagers pose as 'brides' and 'grooms' to play act public weddings. Characters are asked to participate as brides and grooms, or to join the wedding retinue of a NPC villager. Characters can unknowingly marry, but not become foxes.

■ The evening culminates in a grand market fete, with stalls offering sickly sweets and strong alcohols. Poets recite love songs, professional weepers wail to strangers that they lost their children to insidious in-laws, and petty clashes erupt among merrymakers.

■ Some of the NPC fox 'brides' seem to grow wide-eyed and alert, suspicious of the many hunting dogs that watchmen walk around the marketplace.

■ Come nightfall, 'wedded' pairs are escorted to suites in a large and extravagant inn. For each 'couple,' accommodations comprise one room for the retinue and a linked conjugal bedroom.

IF CHARACTERS MARRY A (FOX) 'SPOUSE':

■ They are handed three pieces of parchment before they are locked into the marital suite with their consort and their retinue.

■ Once alone in their 'marital quarter,' characters first enjoy polite conversation with their spouse, whose eyes start to glimmer golden, while their teeth and claws lengthen, their mouths distort to snouts and their hair reddens. The fox brides do not seem aware they are, in fact, foxes, but try to scratch, bite or maim their partners. Viciously quick, strong and prone to thralling their victims into spells of lethargy, these foxes could get the best of you — happily, the little parchment papers you received can share some survival tips.

■ Fool the fox spouse into thinking you are already married or pledged to someone in your retinue. Affronted, the fox bride will exile you out of the wedding room. Refresh the salt lines that surround the conjugal room, and gently steer the fox back if it flees overnight.

■ Your retinue and you should impersonate a hunting hound, down to howling, running on all-fours and sniffling. The fox will hurriedly isolate itself in the conjugal room, but will actively try to escape at night. Keep every inn door and window closed.

■ Become a widow(er). Call your retinue and make the best of your fists and a butter knife. You will need to kill the spouse a few times before they stay fully dead, each time reviving more and more fox-like in appearance.

AS A WEDDING RETINUE MEMBER:

■ Awkwardly hold watch outside the conjugal bedroom of the dashing NPC ~~cannon fodder~~ groom and his fox bride.

■ The NPC groom might request help as above — or might fall deathly silent. If that happens, villagers instruct, character must loudly ask if the wine pleases the couple. The flushed, visibly fox-like bride will then open the door to complain their new consort — clawed dead in the marital bed — won’t even share a wine cup with them. The fox does not seem to grasp they have killed their groom.

■ Defeat the fox at drinking — the fox bride can hold its cups, but slipping in some of the relaxing opiates on hand will help the cause. Sneak the NPC groom's corpse out with a buddy when the fox drops asleep.

■ Or prove you are a fairer marital prospect by verbally wooing the fox or doing battle with your retinue companion, to prove your worth. Your wingman may wish to throw the fight, feed lines, or generally smoulder. The fox bride will offer the NPC corpse as a betrothal gift.

Come morning, the villagers open the now-delapidated inn. Those who survive fox weddings receive braided bracelets of red, golden and tangerine rope, earning good will in the village. The murderous fox brides have disappeared — in their place, yellowed and dust-drenched bones 'sleep' in the marital beds, covered by withered and torn wedding clothes.

Villagers share the whole story: a huntsman encountered a fox goddess in the forest, when she had taken the shape of a beautiful woman. Lovestruck, he brought her back to Ke-Waihu as his wife — but the horrified villager slaughtered her and her husband on their wedding night. The fox god cursed the village to relieve yearly 'fox weddings,' during which the bones of those murdered during the previous 'conjugal' festivities rise as brides to terrorise new spouses.

Skipping the fox wedding rites, villagers say, shrivels their crops and depletes their food stocks for several seasons.

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C. A-HUNTING WE WILL GO

It’s all fun and wedding games, until one of the victims of the recent nuptials is the son of influential wine merchant Saguk Chaomin. He vengefully sponsors a a hunt to finally lift the foxes’ curse.

■ Saguk Chaomin assigns weapons — from knives, spears and sharpened sticks to bows, arrows and rifles operating on gun powder — alongside lanterns and climbing rope to the brave adventurers. The contingent splinters into smaller groups to avoid detection.

■ The forests now aggressively conspire to lead characters to their deaths: whether it’s through fostering illusions that trip them into gullies, or decrepit bridges that crumble, sending travellers into whirling river waters. Animals (excluding wolves) attack travellers fiercely. Keep a hunting hound close.

■ Characters with unusual physical features or suspicious behaviours — from supernatural powers to a fear of dogs — are accused of being shape-shifting foxes.

■ Fox spirits assume a mortal but resilient shape the day after the wedding — strong, large, feral and willy. They’re quick to bite, and their presence dulls the senses of hunters.

■ To exorcise the foxes, kill their mortal bodies or obliterate or repair their small, decaying forest altars. These are stone rings the size of one’s hand, often hidden at the root of ancient trees. Cleanse the altars of filth, vermin and predatory creatures, and replenish the stones with fresh river pieces. Beware rare fox spirits that come to protect altars or hide their young.

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D. WELL, WELL, WELL

In the wake of the weddings, characters head to their abodes, while test drivers are garrisoned in communal temporary shelters. Over the next few days, everyone may notice:

■ Villagers have a marrow-deep fear of the Hok-Shinn clan, whose members behave as if they are immune from repercussions.

■ Villagers tell eerie tales of strange encounters in their locked stables, abandoned houses or wells — they have seen a creature with the head of a beautiful woman, whose hair braids to form her snake-like body. 'She' slithers away once discovered.

■ Word spreads across the marketplace that dark waters have returned. A farmer’s well has dried, leaving only a thickened, tar-like liquid at the bottom. Another villager shamefully admits his well also dried a month ago, clogged by dark filth — the fount was old, and he assumed it had naturally depleted.

■ Horrified villagers speak no more of this, but superstitiously volunteer flower and food tributes for the Ka-Sanwon volcano. Mayor Hok-Shinn Weisi intercedes to reserve the resources for the upcoming return of the patron lord of the volcano’s three villages — the undead Beastmaster.

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QUESTIONS

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

( A beauty, she, if not for her rags: a bundle of silks, filigree and decayed glory. He carries her, this makeshift wife, on the fourth or fifth occasion of her sacred matrimony, to go by the tally of scratches on her worn bones, depleted of cartilage. Death turns base biology into a rushed art of record-keeping, soothsaying futures in the scraps of a feral feast. She has lost even the animal quality of stench.

Last night, you walked, a vision. He remembers: beneath the teasing gossamer of her veils, she was the better catch of a tireless, stale procession of brides. And how did Lan Wangji not see the pain of her rustling, dulled steps then, how did he not wonder why grooms courted her with gelid, sweeping declarations? Men, who lose nothing, play act weddings. Women, who would gain all through matrimony, cannot presume. This is the imbalance of stations in villages shaped by poverty, gilded by the majesty of offices and wax seals that metabolise human pettiness as sterile bureaucracy.

They celebrated a wedding of glass, until its pieces shattered. Wangji’s palms sting, cut and scarred. Come morning, he stole the skeletal remains of the bride he served last night, drifted with them, delivers them now — finds Wei Ying like a beam of spooled light. And Lan Wangji has ever been a moth, he, greyed and browned, dirt in winter. Do thieves curse out the grunting gravity of their steps? His feet betray him.

He imposes, bruising the door of a strange house with a shoulder’s nudge. Look at it, how the wood of the walls seems to hang by an empty, lacquered thread. Look, but stare only at Wei Ying. Don’t blink. Lan Wangji is reduced to this: simple instructions, breathless after a white night’s ambitions, wrist red-ribbon-bound. Above it, a rim of blood, staining. He nods once at the weight in his arms — again in greeting. )

Last night, she stood a woman whole. ( And a softer voice, in the temple of his great, hollowed, worn body: ) Not possessed. Wei Ying, returned.

( There is a child’s sullen futility in this, in delivering a broken toy to a parent’s helpless hand and demanding it mended. What does he wish achieved here? Make her better, now, make her whole. She sleeps already. She will wake once more, in a year’s time. Wei Ying cannot cure this.

Wei Ying can win against all odds. )

Give her justice.

( Nightmares. Not the ones people might expect, nor those he was used to, spanning the months before them, since waking chained and drugged in a world that wanted from them their deaths and their gifts moulded into useable forms, but the ones of teeth, of barking, of a chase he cannot outrun despite the speeds he can attain as a fully trained cultivator, far faster than any canine.

There are fears that strip back down to childhood, to the time of helplessness, that weaken knees. Leaving through the doors is easier in darkness, when most kennel dogs in their homes, when he needn't flinch so visibly to others for each bark, each whine, each growl.

So he is here, yes, in this house of meandering, insect-riddled greatness, a once upon a time manor keeping this ragtag family of Fox Whisperers (he shivers, now, had shoved his fist into his mouth so that his screams were muffled last night, for every canine noise that sounded, and had not slept, wears the blue lines of it below his eyes) together, for their comings and goings.

He flinches, as the door sweeps open. Ignores it, hides it in the way he forces his shoulders back and down, not the man prepared to run, no, certainly not that. Would step forward, fingers twitching and seeking a shoulder, a sleeve, but Lan Zhan's arms are full, Lan Zhan is bedecked in blood and ribbon and dust and bones? Bones.

His eyes fall, studying what is in his husband's arms, brows lifting, lips thinning, eyes narrowing. Not at once, but a sequence of study, and he forcibly curves away the lingering fear, the terror that stole sleep as much as countless other things do from him, leaving him hollowed, and gestures to Lan Zhan, a sweep of his hand, follow. )

Enough to bleed?

( Oblique question, as to the origin of the blood, as to how much is Lan Zhan, how much is this woman who now is bones, but was a woman, returned to herself in some fashion before. The village dogs keep him hemmed in and running from shadows, between rooftops, looking toward a forest where he can only stand to investigate where they are not, and that means in all the fringe directions, in all the supposedly wrong ones.

Here, at least, there is the way to a kitchen, with a hearth that burns for the moment in merry mimicry of pleasantness, the scent of something gelatinous and grain-like in the covered wooden pot over the cooking stove's downward dipped surface, the scent of lacklustre tea gone from hot to warm to chilling on the broad expanse of the table more sturdy than the walls themselves. He sweeps up the cup, the half empty bowl, two plates, juggling them all and the half-rotted scroll besides, sets them to the side within the kitchen, and invites Lan Zhan to this homely place, to her bones laid out in the warmest part of this forsaken behemoth not yet informed that it should have fallen.

Asgeirr's cloak is draped over one chair, and he pats it in passing, as absently as some men pat the heads of children wandering by when there's work for the parent to do. )

( Organised chaos, storm contained in the blemish of uprooted bowls. This is Wei Ying, ink smear on fingertips after exquisite calligraphy, a mistake of discipline's own omission. Follow, and Lan Wangji drifts after him, step careful until his pace poisons with the gutting inevitability of failure, until his knee knocks the bird bone legs of a table, slanting. Already, he suspects a whisper, a breeze, an insinuation of weight will collapse it — but Wei Ying has made honoured choice, and the wooden tiles sneer under Lan Wangji's feet, and to leave the girl-bone-fox as she is, suspended in his keep, they might yet both fall down.

He decides he hesitated once, sixteen years before, enough by a rooftop to bide him another man's lifetime. He cannot play the same hand once more. Ring and ring and round and poised, the bells of the bride's bracelets chatter, shrill, when he descends her, cloth and sharp-pointed bone, to sit the table — flinching, when the dark of the wood threatens to spill, and the floors quake, and Lan Wangji readies, he is ever ready to capture — but needs not.

At the last moment, he relinquishes a kitchen cloth, repurposed to bridge and stitch where the fox's marital veils had broken, when a blade shrieked and groaned to find her absorbed snout. She is cleansed of mortal coil, supine in the stale air of a room paralysed by anticipation. Time waters dust into grease. He feels it thickened between his fingertips, turned ash where it dances carelessly on Wei Ying's lashes, to tease the white of his gaunt cheek. The bruises beneath his eyes, the mean set of his jaws, and he murmurs: )

You do not —

( Sleep, but the howls of a stray dog tatter the air, and the house growls back in tired quake. The foundations, Lan Wangji knows without want or need for the knowing, will not keep.

Of course, it cannot be otherwise: the curse of fear runs grave-deep. He pivots to find Wei Ying, seeping like dark water to fill the negative spaces of whatever furnitures will lair and hide him. He is frail, fragile. So much of him is Yiling, it is tempting to presume he must be as the land, hostile, hard, stalwart.

Wangji's headband unravels like snake's skin on cold stone — harrowingly inert. He spreads it taut, when he steps behind Wei Ying and introduces it, like reins to a horse, before sliding it over Wei Ying's eyes, yet to tighten. Work sight unseeing, elude your dread.

Once, Wei Ying asked the privilege of wearing it for archery. Let him bask in it now. )

The silence of our gardens screams. ( By way of nothing. ) Do not neglect your duties to stifle it, after.

( There are worse ways to invite a man to your infinitely more lavish home away from hounds' reach, he supposes. And yet, fewer protect Wei Ying's dignity. )

( To be human, and not to be landscape, means to have fault, to have fears. It speaks to what Jiang Cheng was not willing to do, that he never descended with hounds, that his household stood bereft of canine forms even when Wei Wuxian's had become shadow and missing bone. Here, he won't begrudge his brother's choice to go another way. Here, he hasn't, while the dog which once was, what, Anurr's? Like the goat? Or was it Karsa's contribution, or that of Anurr's not dead yet people, to bring a herding animal which has supped on the pleasure of chase at Wei Wuxian's heels?

No, now the hounds bay, and he shudders, and it's a pathetic weakness he's not purged from his system, doesn't know how to, doesn't know that he must.

(Come the day it is his son, his husband, his brother-not-yet-accepting, imperiled by canines; come that day, will fear tether him tighter, or will it break him in the process of saving what he loves?)

He's not surprised when Lan Zhan moves, tracks to find him in trailing off sentences that end when Wei Wuxian bolts away from windows, from doors. Bolted around to be at Lan Zhan's back, then found again, not having forsaken the requested duty, just remapped it to now, to this angle, to the presence of... a bride in bones, too old to be new, but still born anew.

He does not expect the headband, sixteen, seventeen years late, and he smiles with the awkwardness of a youth he isn't, though he doesn't fight it, lashes lowering to brush against silk as Lan Zhan ties his headband in place. It's warm, of course it's warm, but something in that still surprises, much like the weight of the metal where it hangs. )

Are you inviting me to show off, Lan Zhan? ( One hand up, fingers tracing the ribbon as it meets his temple, back toward the back of his head. But oh, he feels the shiver of the boards underfoot, and the gardens of his mind are not the ones of this village or a thousand other villages much like it, but ones of lotuses, ones of herons, ones of the peculiar stench of healthy, thriving decomposition and birth. Living things. )

It's alright to say you miss the sound of my voice. I don't mind. ( The admission? Or... ) Though this kind of play, ah, I ask doesn't get rough. Or does, gripping on. Darkness makes it easy to forget you ever felt at all.

( Sixteen years of it, and his eyes are open behind Lan Zhan's headband, because he needs light in the way some flowers track the sun across the skies, as proof that he is, as proof that he is not apart from and instead a part of it all.

Fluttered lashes, fluttered fingers, the fluttering of lungs, and his hand drops as he half turns, trailing down robes to an arm, and along an arm to a hand, and in that hand, grasping. )

You welcome this?

( The step toward offered bones, laid out on table; the life that has fled them, coaxed back for now, to a wholeness that Lan Zhan has witnessed, that Wei Wuxian has not. You find it defies and defiles; do you welcome this? Because I will, and we will, and she will, and that is not an easy truth to swallow. )

( I welcomed you.

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.

( This, a blind progression, and he does not think to say, I don't like this. Doesn't think to form the words, I know how to use my other senses, my ears, my hands, my feet, the taste of things, but I don't like to. Not if I can see.

Doesn't pause to think, this is the life of two men I know, and one died in darkness, and the other saw again at a cost he never knew. Not when purpose comes beneath hands grown used to different calluses, to thickened fingertips, to gentled palms.

To bone, brittle and singing, beneath his hands. He swats at Lan Zhan's hand at the back of his neck, the dismissal idle, his focus already beyond the man at his back, the qi offered. It isn't necessary. Not for this work, and not when all he's been is exhausted panic, not qi emptied vessel, hollow for reasons other than an endless, unceasing fear reintroduced with each pronouncement of canine intent from outdoors, from "hello" to "stranger" to "hungry" to "that dog is definitely in heat."

They, as Lan Zhan, are outside distractions. These bones, they're a simpler truth to follow, a known factor, his way of fumbling through a different landscape to bring different spirits to bear. Now, it isn't that knowledge alone, but the compiled logic, the understandings of bones and bodies and healing and summons, and he murmurs, trusting Lan Zhan will hear but not responsive to it even should Lan Zhan for once find words tumbling easily past his lips: )

Summoning isn't resurrecting, but if they're so tightly bound, they'll bleed together, Lan Zhan, it will take time.

( If spirits are interwoven, they may never separate at all. He leaves that truth unspoken, too awaare they both know it's astringent scent. What will come will be known, and here he works what is magic here, what is technique in their world, some marriage of the two with his fingers tracing bones, remembering a body never seen, and the workings of it. Traces to the breastbone, that cavernous ceiling, and lifts one hand to his mouth, sight unseen, blindly, metal and silk a reminder across his tired eyes.

Bites into the pad of his finger, and bless: had but it been forgotten, but he requires ink, and of his own body it floweth free in careful, unhurried strokes. Ink that does not lie smooth, but the intensity of it, the share of himself that becomes her, and spirit calls to body, body calls to spirit, and he feels the shift. He feels: )

Ward the walls when they're here. Lest others come spilling in after.

( Bones are one lure, but cursed as this is, cursed as they are, he doesn't believe in chancing that more will seek opening, seek redress. To Lan Zhan's eyes, watch the artistry of his blood on bone be lost to diaphanous layering, the hum he begins a gentler refrain over a steel core, come, as bones first regain luster, the illusion of marrow, and in reverse, terribly so, she is rebuilt, a memory of a body turning bones into a spirit's hale corpse.

Lan Zhan's carried bride becomes a woman in layers, silvered, dark smoke to outline tendon, muscle, and the organs that were long since dust, and skin, last of all, to fill out whatever tenderness she had, this create of mutilated wholeness, but to birth a fox-that-is-not-a-fox, this woman-no-more-only-a-woman, and Wei Wuxian cocks his head, listening, for the illusion of her breath.

A spirit summoned to bone that called like to like, that called home, and it is Lan Zhan's eyes who see her first, bared before him as the honesty of her condition, of the mother, the matriarch, the driving force who never was. )

( Bring the dead. Set them to table. Ward the walls.

He is xiandu to the sects, a young master to the Gusu Lan, an heir cultivator to errant village people, father to an honoured scion to all those who cross Sizhui's path — and a flush-eared, obedient disciple to Wei Ying. He thinks, on principle, to disagree, to dissolve his submission and substitute it for the quiet shrieks of quicksilver rebellion, waging. His fingertips would burn with the froth of carefree absolution. He brings one to his mouth, tastes the white heat of Wei Ying's absence. He had intended the loan of qi, only to —

He calls the wards, snake hiss of spells casting their net and the walls contracting, before they sprawl back.

Before him, resentment sleeps incandescent. Better, that Wei Ying should be spared the look of the girl's flesh reconnecting, muscle like tendon-vines choking the sunflower of her womb. A scholar might investigate the inevitable implications, that the life of the singular specimen can be so intrinsically connected to the potential survival of the species. In Lan Wangji's lungs, breath wars the world, savaging. He breathes — and she is crone — breathes — and she is mother — breathes — and she is maiden.

In this house, acoustics curse him. Crawl scratches and catches of whinnied snarls in his ear, whisper the jaw-jostling grind of insects at chew. He feels distanced — ambivalent, stalled want lurked inside him, immobile against the accelerated chaos of the waiting, watching landscape. He moves like overly steeped brew, dragging the dregs of his sleeves, of his gossamer, the regalia of Hanguang-Jun and Lily's sorcered paints. Beneath his hand, he entraps Wei Ying's and trails both until a swollen, young calf fills their bound grip, young flesh bouncing back like a palm slapped, like lone clapping. Drifts their touch, ankle until halfway to her knee, before academic impropriety can take the colours of defilement. Feel her, feel what you have achieved here. )

She was beautiful. ( In the way of flowers, alive for a spring's time. Then, the apology: ) And we must ruin her.

( Upstairs, in dark corridors uncrawled, a swarm of termites crowds and colludes and walks a funerary march on oil-slick, well-polished floors, back and forth, back and forth. Dripped, but Lan Wangji hears them, hears the start of inundation from open-mouthed walls, hears the house pivoting to jail from fortress.

Hears the corpse-girl scream, shrivelled like a summer storm, tearing herself in her path, making ruin of her body. The talismans are a quick indiscretion, one for each limb, pinning like thorns, and the fourth is Wei Ying's, the fourth is lent-learned, still wet with Wei Ying's thickened blood from the writing, when Lan Wangji stole it between gasps of dying candle night, on a night when privacy and possession were parts of Wei Ying's more attainable, honeyed whole. When the hostility of intrusion was laughter between friends, and how she grins, the fox-bride, shrieking, how her teeth could eat every thrashing fish of a river bank.

Before him, the guqin comes alive, unasked. The waters of its birth, his sorcery, drench the air electric. )

Wei Ying. If you have questions, now. ( If they have recourse past suppression and inevitable elimination, also now. )

( Parted lips, the indrawn breath, and he shudders as his brow furrows, fingers forced to outline the success of one tangled calling, the demand that turns to a shift in humming staccato, hands entwinned and pulled away from flesh that should not be, but is.

What this wroughts, Lan Zhan, what this is becomes marvel and horror, but why say the obvious? Marvelous, awesome, horrifying, because to call a spirit of any kind to bones like these is cruel without the — shrieks, the screaming, and he tilts back, hands lifted, a song on his tongue as he whistles. Calm.

Calm is hard for some, and for her, forced back with the talismans he does not see but sensed in their activation, and she fights, and he thinks, she still is beautiful, Lan Zhan, that's the tragedy, when you see even the most wretched of the resentful energies form into something that recalls the beauty of why life compels, but no, there's no room for those words, for the dark truth they unveil. Questions.

So many questions, and his mind has turned toward them, beyond his veil of dark, and her cries, and the sense of motion curbed, contained. )

Is there a way to break their curse?

( Not sustain it, year after bloody year, cruelty and horror nothing but a dead man's gain.

He supposes, on some level, that's why it might be his. )

( From across, on the table, there surges the distant, quiet snap of brutality — the fox body's rancid struggles against her restrictions. The talismans keep, then Wei Ying — whistles, and whatever fit of convulsions seized the resurrected bride passes like froth and spume with the settling of a stormed sea.

What can they achieve here? His hand walks the slope of the girl's ankle bone once more, sensing where thin rivulets of qi bloom into energies the fox phantasm has appropriated, then amplified. Too strong, for one so long depleted, a frail stalk born of riotous root. The tree wants cut. )

Death of the invader.

( But he knows Wei Ying's intrinsic objection, his constant aversion to the cruelty of resource wasted, when energy is so often better repurposed. It was arrogant to assume the Yiling Patriarch's ignorance of power while positing his addiction to the fount. So much of the sects' logic paled before the sun of honest judgement, like the cheek of a feverish courtesan beneath the thick, crackled paints of her debut.

But Lan Wangji prepares to argue the old way of orthodoxy now, its residual, stubborn dichotomies. Black, white. One, the other. Choose, Wei Ying. Choose. )

The curse is too aged. Too settled. ( And they possess Wei Ying's creativity and passion, and Lan Wangji's brute strength, but lack the scholarly, knowing guidance of a grandmaster. They need a firm, wrinkled hand to steer them, lest their ship should crash against stone. ) We cannot break it.

( A smile, rueful, set, and his hand moves, sketching her wholeness, lifting away to catch at Lan Zhan, whatever meets questing fingers and craven palms. Here is a man who has studied under the necessity of circumstance, whose grandmaster does not exist, could not, for all that the concepts of demonic cultivation were not born new, that he had not laboured to that birthing as a first child, but as one who was finding a knife's edge pathway forward through the dark.

So much narrower than a simple one log bridge, to make it seem spacious, a luxury. To pursuing what must, what one cannot, because one will. If it were only for his sake, his hubris, that would have been his own undoing.

Once, he'd had obligations and duties and justices to deliver. Once, he'd died in their low tide. Here, the waters swirl around their ankles, eddy over the floor boards in their creaking protests, susurrations of her stilled, combined complaints filling the spaces between them. )

We must do what we cannot.

( For its justice. For this woman, this combined spirit, and for all the others, the many weddings of the night prior that Wei Wuxian had not gone near, could not be near, would drown in the wines of terror overflowing his cup.

It is right to try. It is justice for a wrong done to make the attempt. Hundreds of precepts, of you cannot, and here, a deeper philosophy, to be obligated to do what one cannot. For what is not a personal gain, for what is better beyond themselves, for each set of bones and each tied, cursed tapestry of person and fox, they try.

They may fail, but they must try. )

Do you understand?

( We must do what we cannot. Was this woman so frail, mere heartbeats before, a tender addition of dust motes and tattered bone? And no more than the trodden wisps of illusion, she, a golden weight on the table that sighs her burden? She feels ephemeral, still in her chrysalis — as if, if only they wait and wait and wait, butterfly wings will tear and cannibalise her flesh, and push her birth-wide and wet open?

The spirit within her calls to Lan Wangji, half-mute, pale and waiting. He does not know which — gambles with the predatory tickling of one cord of the guqin, then the next, qi notes elliptical. What do you want? )

I am not of the Jiang.

( Attempt, and in the pale-tipped crown of their heaven-spearing mountains, the Gusu Lan only succeed. Lay stake, claim victory and glory. Attempt the impossible, but, Do not begin what you will not see finished.

How is it the men of Gusu Lan ever forgive themselves their own death? Red stains the inside of Wangji's eyes, rusts to starless dark. He wants to scream, but his jaws lock, young. )

Will the day come when you do not bleed me of the impossible?

( Past the gates of Cloud Recesses, where he is more than mere, sedate fixture and defender of the infant disciples, swarmed — he is abstracted to the print of his cruelties. Reduced like a drop of oil in a cup of water, rotating into the perfect form — a sphere of his own substance. Recalibrating.

He feels so often unfinished beside Wei Ying, who smells warm despite his death, lived-in. The sun trails after his nape — lands clean and crisp here, now, Wei Ying's hair briefly contracted by the headband's bind, then spilled. He plays, to avoid tickling the beam and its braid in Wei Ying's hair, resolute. )

You do not wish the spirit decimated. Then — ( And his palm passes the guqin strings, fingers pinch and dangle. ) Coax it free. I claim the girl.

( Let each mind his mission. )

You married what once was. It'll rub off.

( Association brings its benefits and its pitfalls, their elliptical orbit around each other paired with its own gravitational pull, it's own celestial means of altering the patterns of their movements, the inclinations of their bodies. He tilts, blinded by a ribbon with no more substance than society, tied in a manner that weighs, the tread of a feather on a bird's breast, insulating and beautiful and fragile all at once.

Beneath his hands, ah, here is the chaos he crawled through darkly, and his brow furrows, this concept of coaxing one vengeful spirit to its second birthing from the girl who had not been a mother, but is pregnant now in death with the possibility of vengeance serving an old pain, scarred tissue on the palms of hands rendering them incapable of deft motion.

Twined and twinned, they are beneath his hands, but he plays with those hands, as Lan Zhan does behind him, and he hums, both answer and beginning. Hums where music is a means of speaking, a means of tying emotion to place, of leading, cajoling, coaxing, commanding. He feels the warmth of sunlight, the ache of living, the violence of death, and to the spirit he cannot think of as a fox, he hums, then whistles.

You, you, creature of vengeance, creature who has died, spirit of curse, you. This cycle, this spinning, this sunset that rises once a year to bloody skies hung as banners overhead, painting the swollen bellies of clouds never fit to soothe your throat with their heavenly rains, to know no joys of binding bliss, to ache for them, to swallow another in that ache, to be bereft the forests and the petrichor of that land, when the rains come, when the fog hangs thick by the stream, you. For the wilds things, and the aching dens, and the cold on the bottom of one's feet, one's paws, no, he cannot think of this as a fox, cannot think to where this is, but still knows a predator. Still whistles to a memory of clean chase, a belly only half tingling with the terror of hunger, flesh filled with water-plenty, and the cacophony of bird and insect and bush and tree and wind and warmth that accompanies the pleasure of blood, fresh, in mouth, of the certainty of an earned meal, of something that is not, need not be human, and need not apologise for it.

He coaxes with his lips, tongue pressed to the back of teeth as she shivers, shudders, as the healthy beauty of the woman who once pales, as from her mouth, her eyes, ears, nose, from her perfect, precious pores, from the ducts that have known no tears when they should have been free to their finding, the fox rises, piece by piece, shadow by shadow, a mirror image to her, bound still at the same points.

To Lan Zhan, all seen. To Wei Wuxian, the ignorance that allows him his present trade, his calm: that the maw of a beast lurks within the lunging line of his face, his neck, the fear of attack that is held by their mutual bindings, but that he does not know.

He does not know, for he cannot, in this house creaking with decay, giving credence to the cyclic nature of creation, destruction, and the unknown, flitting stretch between. )

( She aches with her exorcism, with Wei Ying's intrusion, groans and howls out the detritus of her silences form, and she is grit, gravel, smoke — chasm, her jaws unhinging, dark and bold and all-encompassing.

He thinks, if she were a snake —

Thinks, if Lan Wangji were not sworn to the sword, if Bichen did not blink and peer and cut, when he inclines her —

Thinks, if he did not cleave the spirit's mouths in a thief's long smile, deep and restless —

But he precedes thought with action, and Bichen strikes once, true. The phantasm screams, yowling and crass madness and the nail-scratched shrieks of reedy dissolution. He listens to the silence descend and his breath tinny and raw, how it blunts the surface, and the angry welting drip of sweat on his nape.

One blow will not decimate a spirit, but she wears injury well.

To draw Wei Ying back would have stirred and stoked chase. He had no choice. This was not their agreement. He had no choice. His sword drifts down, and he turns, stiff and doll-like, limbs laden, and does not know how to speak this to Wei Ying, that he —

...he had no choice. )

It — ...apologies. ( The second motion, perfunctory containment: two plays of the guqin, and the spirit is loosely encased, isolated. ) Contained. She is contained.

( What he cannot know, he knows peripherally, as a movement caught in the forest but gone once his head turns. Here he holds still, hands up, fingers splayed, as if he intended to play upon the air as he might another instrument, more than his humming whistles or the whistling blade of Bichen cutting forward, or Lan Zhan's calloused fingers sliding over strings, and Wangji sings.

An apology, without the explanation, and what he says: )

You almost explained the why to me.

( And it's ludicrous, here in this house with the bones of a woman on this table sturdier than the floor it straddles, to feel warmth in his chest, for something he has not, does not expect. )

Without me asking, you almost explained why.

( But he doesn't ask, because here, to know is to lose a battle they don't have time for him to falter in, and he trust, contained, he leaves the ribbon thus tied, he allows himself to be blinded and fettered as a horse led from a burning barn, and: )

Contained for me, or contained for you?

( Sickness spills and stretches in him like the first blades of grass stabbing spring snow — unable to be fought or frailed, and he is himself lessened. He is sunlight, burst through a stale room of gilded greys, of shallow breaths and squalor. There is — division between them, Lan Wangji and Wei Ying, who rounds the pretty bloom of his pale mouth around paltry, unearned gratitude. You, you child of the streets, you never learned courtesy. You hypocrite, you pretend to care what you have won here. You think you have won aught at all..

The spirit of the girl lingers with them, clasped weakly on her bones, and he should — they should attend to it with the last rites owed to the embittered dead. But that is a sophisticated exercise for humans, and Lan Wangji is pure animal, feral bright glean of gluttony growling within him, filling him out like spoiled waters, to his brim.

It strikes him, absently, that he has wanted the last morsel of meat on the bones of this man for the better part of sixteen years. That his gums itch and bleed for him, that he tastes him, the air of him now, raw-electric on his tongue. You nearly let her touch you, and now you play. You fool. You careless fool.

He does not invite, does not woo, does not instruct. Man bound, eyes shuttered, Wei Ying is ever better than a mere victim of his absent core, but he is still a man, only one man, and Lan Wangji shoves his shoulder once, turns him, pushes the nigh-paper weightlessness of him into the ragged wall, until predatory satisfaction warms his gut and his wrists and the joints of his ankles, until he feels liquid and slithered and alert when Wei Ying is trapped between the solidity of wood and Lan Wangji before him. What do you think should be contained here? Who? )

It died with want of you in its mouth. ( Hear it, in the creaks and the growls, when Lan Wangji's palm slaps the wall beside Wei Ying's head, only a call to attention, hear the house heave — ) It died in agony. Shall I explain?

( — and flinch, when the wood starts to break and crumble, pressed dry and eroding, fault of the termites within and Lan Wangji's vicious, misused strength. )

( They were men born into the gasping end of a period of decades stretching peace, still raised orphans before orphans became of their juniors the uniting truth. Violence as a language has formed him, as have the interstices of gentleness that he finds harder to accept without swallowing himself whole, and here, too, he can understand this.

A hand, steel, at his shoulder. The shove of it, the fall broken, the chair cracking with meaning that warns of lessened sanctity of self; forgotten, because it is not the crack he anticipates, is not the pain a part of him presumes, assumes, embraces to follow. If his heart beats, it stutters along, adrenaline not a pleasant sensation in its inevitable, speeding rush toward precipice, blood howling in his ears. There is, however, the reassurance in it: the warmth of Lan Zhan's body, his heat in words, the wood at his back holding him up as words wrest past Lan Zhan's teeth, as if this is the first which sought to swallow Wei Wuxian whole using his voice.

He has no room for answering, between them. No room before the house quavers, cries out in the long, aching manner of the geriatric rousing from bed, and crumbles as completely as underbaked clay around them, on them, Wei Wuxian falling back before he flails his arms, clutching at Lan Zhan's robes to keep from pitching back into the gaping maw of the rotten house seeking to consume his flesh for his bones, for the sake of reinforcing itself as the sawdust rises over them, a malignant cloud, and the bound spirit of the once-fair-maiden shudders away in her containment, caught and captive to the destruction of the living. What a force, she might intuit, to be reckoned with, if she has anything left with which to intuit at all.

Here, he clings, here he ducks his head forward and presses his forehead, his right eye, too firmly against Lan Zhan's chest, too close to the nape of his neck, and violent is the movement of his head at an angle, pushing, brushing, forcing the lines of ribbon up, enough that one eye blinks free into settling dust, slamming shut again only to slit open, peering at a pulse too close, to a dark curtain of hair, and not the table beyond, not any of the rest.

He coughs, realises he's been coughing, and sighs, burying his face in Lan Zhan's robes and nuzzling to force the ribbon higher, away from his other eye. )

I can take your explanation, Lan Zhan, but the wall couldn't.

( Sharp, explosive force, and his body knows it, has endured it before, will endure it again. Yet still, spoken reasonably, as if this were a reasonable situation, as if he doesn't feel wood in his hair, down his collar, coating his lungs, lining his nostrils. A barrier spreading across his skin. )

I know how that tastes. Now I know how the wall tastes. Lan Zhan—

( There, on that table, in the settling detritus of a thankfully not structure supporting wall, a spirit shimmers, and the remnants of another wisp their destruction. That, too, needs dealing with. Requires reckoning. )

( Dust and debris rain wash down like feeble first snow, and his fingers lick the drip of it them, sweet-soft splinters. Wet in the way of time-accrued moisture, of summer swelter that's wormed its way in, of long winter's breath.

This house preceded them by generations. Before him, Lan Wangji leaves only this one man and another abyss. He has been — his father's creature, possessed by his fixation, his petty jealousy. Wei Ying's warmth brands his shoulder, and Wangji waits until he peels himself free, until distance divorces them once more into different persons.

On Wei Ying, the headband looks adrift now, a derelict intestine, something the body has expelled. Unbidden, Lan Wangji collects it, loosened from Wei Ying's eyes, dragged up over his forehead, and replaces to sit slowly on Lan Wangji's own. Apologetically, after — )

I require it.

( Its fetters, its discipline. The harrowing sense of Lan completion that makes a man of him, when he only recognises the animal.

And then, Wei Ying calls out — and he feels it, feels her in cold tremors, in speckled, diffused anger. In need, and he turns to answer it, the guqin a stuttered, startled growth of sorcery, pale under his hand. After, he knows the routine, the words qi translates into disasters of pressure, of vibration, of connection. Feels her answer back, and the exchange is a lonesome dance of unearned guidance — the spirit's, more often than that of the practitioner. He shudders, then remembers finally to whisper to Wei Ying truths that should be obvious, known. )

The bones are old. ( A light, blemished correction; first, he had intended to say, She is of age. The seasons have washed her remains more than they ever did her flesh. Decades yellowed them to crisp and dried her marrow. ) She feared. ( Still fears, incisive like stab wounds. ) She died poorly.

( Violently, before her time. They do not qualify murder, only signal its trespasses. )

She agrees to retreat.

( Lan Zhan, bedecked as is his clan's due, and for a moment Wei Wuxian only blinks in the aftermath, the dust and splinters embracing him, and then: this. Duty, where anything else confuses, where he's not sure what to make of violence except to rise to it the way he always does, following after Lan Zhan, speaking by his ear, staring down at the remains of a woman who had died horribly, and the horrible truth, of how many die like this, senseless, helpless, lingering.

Shedding particles of the walls, of rot and dry and wood barely fit for kindling: )

Astergere?

( To retreat, but also, to free her of what fear lingers, of what poor death mars. For her to go, if she can, if the destroyed, devouring spirit he still cannot think of with a shape, with a form, aided by Lan Zhan's blade and his own violent thirsts, ah, if that remnant remains gone. Banished, like a child's fears in the light of a room's night. )

( Absterge, the final pronouncement, elimination without hope of revival. Death to the spirit, a complete immolation of the self. The ripping of roots. That which the sect Gusu Lan has perfected for generation, tirelessly.

No finer, more orthodox, more politely criminal exorcists walk this world. Murderers, hands stained, spirits righteous. He suspects, a legion of the Lan could walk to the mouth of hell and it would torture them in short, slow wet swallows, before spitting them out. He thinks, they are poison, and the earth itself suspects them so, and there is a reason, resolute, why their remains are ashen, their limbs severed, why their shadows always disperse without rest. They have not earned it. )

Unnecessary to brutalise her.

( Now, he plays the decadence of notes the girl's spirit yet answers to, and there — there is the translucent, pale seeping of her bones, there is the slow, trickling departure of her remains. There, she begins to simply tessellate with the bright, moaning sheets of shifting air, to dilute and infiltrate through organic osmosis. She does not flee, as much as she becomes, and the next breath calls her inside Lan Wangji's own being, like water in a sinking ship's hull.

More termites graze loudly in the grotesque, lingered walls. He startles. )

I do not know all brides can heal thusly. ( Wei Ying, drawing the demonic spirits to him. Lan Wangji, sending on the victims' ghosts. ) But my husband often attempts the impossible.

( Wei Ying's will be done. )

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arc iii: house of ravens | arrival

that one thot wei ying

from the himbo, lan zhan

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