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

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( 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

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