[ Foxes and fallacies and curses and marriage rites. This is the legacy of Ke-Waihu, and they weave it like tapestry, drape it on his shoulders, to round his throat, and he feels the choke of it now, feels the breathless burn and toxic hold of impatience rueing him.
Farther ahead, the pearled white of three spirit foxes’ teeth is a snag of desaturation in a whirlwind of colour: greens of the forest, lavish, well-nurtured, a health so profound it can only be magically-wrought and artificial. The carelessly vibrant red paints and gilded tips of the foxes’ wind-ravished coats, and the shrapnel of sun-warmed and glistened stone that sits at the feet of the shrines.
All forty-two of them, on Wangji’s latest count. And the tally grows.
They have lured them in a merry chase, these foxes, fat and fair and plainly silvered, the grin of their long mouths at once cruel and sanguine. Earlier, they numbered six beasts, joyfully carousing and prancing between young growths of stone that stab skyward, growing. Before that, two animals. Heartbeats once more before that, eight foxes.
The game, Lan Wangji knows bitter on the tongue and rancid, is to show strength before starting barter — like a warrior eclipsing objection with a stolen glimpse of his unsheathing sword. The Huntress whispered, shrill, with breath barely stirred, that borrowed rock or crumbled wood from the raven’s shrine would protect those who face the Beastmaster’s hardships. The shrine withholds itself. Its keepers deny their path.
And the foxes have won. Only creatures secure in their victory can sit so brazenly, mere steps before Lan Wangji and his companion, tails trapped in lazy, playful wags, and beady eyes trained on the clutch and release of Wangji’s hands. Waiting, searching, wanting. For boons, when all Wangji owns are his bones and the magic that has, for years, broken them.
Carefully, then, to the side: ]
…apologies. I come bereft. [ As ever, deprived now of the means of Gusu Lan, no better than vagabonds. ] They appear to anticipate… gentle coercion.
[ A bribe by any other name, and Lan Wangji’s ledgers have long bled red for his debts already. They are two. Another may yet pay this round. ]
ii. SWEET HISSED NOTHINGS
[ In Ke-Waihu, they splinter and mill their rumours fine, more refined on the tongue than their well waters: ‘This mistress Qing, she is a harlot,’ ‘She must have eloped,’ ‘She beds a serpent?, ‘Who is she, mere days among us, in this wretched Ke-Waihu?,’ ‘Why did she sow trouble?’
Wangji wakes to the shrieks of the girl Hermione, a tempest who spills the truth of Wen Qing’s disappearance, words rushed like beads tumbling from a broken string. After, Lan Wangji scatters.
The forests, angular, predatory, dark. Crazed dusk and wind crackling against the gilded silver of his crown, like whipping. Speed favours him. The sour, starchy hum of a night that does not know itself obscures his path. He passes the Fetters to see hags and crones and deceived young girls among shed snake skins and ruins — he borrows their counsel, then their emptied direction, fists clenched and jaw tight and his sword Bichen like a thundering burn in his keep.
He is not first to reach the pit — by the depth and fresh distortion of the footsteps that embroider it, he is not the second, nor the third. Others must have found the ditch sooner, then despaired of it and fled for weapons.
It is… a crude thing. A burial ground, for snakes that coil and clamour, so deeply twinned and bound, Wangji sees them as a lattice around the shape of Wen Qing — smear of pallor between the flattened greens. She sleeps: in this, the heavens allow one blessing. Cradling her back and her knees, great scaled snake heads perch on the swell of her shoulder, and three creatures appear — and Wangji shudders, grip on his blade a torturous experiment in stubborn discipline, that Bichen should not in this heartbeat go unsheated — wrong. These beasts are estranged from the purity of nature and form, half men and half serpents, and the dark blemish of their slipped tongues hisses sweet secrets of sleep that only their lesser, snake brothers grasp.
They have married a beauty to a hundred beasts. And he cannot yet plunge to cut down the bounty of grooms and pay them his wedding greetings, not with the lady mired and entrapped, exposed to risk. ]
Those... creatures. [ Whispered aside, to the person who yet watches beside him, who must calculate with eyes as cold as Wangji’s own, how to negotiate an efficient descent. ] Where they so on your arrival, or did they spawn from snakes?
iii. THE BRIDGE | WEREWOLVES
[ Above him, the high calling of midnight birds stings like scratches of nail on fresh spun glass, on thinned ice, on the skins of a fat, ripened peach. Waiting for hurt.
Below, the pack that would deliver it: two wolves and two others, distorted — transient shapes shedding the clutches of human reservations. But for the sheer scale of the creatures, Lan Wangji might have drawn strength from their poverty of numbers. But the shortest… wolf stretches resolute and strong, spans a quarter of the tree’s length.
The beasts cannot climb. They know so now, Wangji and his companion — the wolves have made growled, gasped, jostling attempts, swaying the tree as if to tease it viciously free from its roots. No yield, despite this. In Wangji’s hand, the rope they deployed to climb up the tree is a heavy snake of tight knot, wet under evening’s chill — their misfortune, he knows, that they have travelled late, when the creature-humans of Ke-Waiar were freed of their human bearings, unleashed into wilderness.
It is a game he plays now, palm scuffed over the thick crust of the tree that bears them on high, alongside boards of hard lacquered wood and reddened walls washed by crawled moss. Among children, a treehouse would be a gift born of a doting parent’s affections. Here, the presence of suspended shelter condescends them with the sullen, hissed futility of contemplating an alternative to a wait-out.
He remembers, distantly, to murmur, beam of his long gaze still pinned on the creatures below, like an arrow to its target: ]
Sleep.
[ Soft; stench of his blood warm and organic, a lively note of discordance from the eerie, acidic cold of the land’s magic. He does not excuse the wound that has sundered his arm to the elbow in a clean, red gash — it mends already, the slow churned energies of his core stitching and sewing like a clan seamstresses presented with broken broderies.
The air stinks of his brief, metallic mortality. It arouses the creatures below, sharpens their hunt. It reminds Lan Wangji that the climb was arduous, unexpected, that he may yet be surprised. Can be surprised. That he owes protection to his companion, despite that, while the full moon draws breath long. ]
A full night awaits us.
iv. OLD MAN MOUNTAIN | DARK WATERS
[ Earth and turbulence: he wakes before the sun, to shivered gasps of soil unbound, where the forest’s rim kisses the volcano’s skirts. The hunt has husked and drained him, left him less master of his flesh than surreptitiously commanded. He wastes nights often in the creaks now, besides running rivers, sleeping on tumbled wood — as animals do, so he might yet give the village sanctuary from his body, made a weapon in foreign hands.
Five. Wei Ying. A list of painfully aggrieved. They need not witness him once more, enslaved by hunting whims.
When earth shudders again and swells, and greenery groans, ripping, while thin, short tectonic plates dance seismically — he does not think, eyes drenched with sleep, it is the volcano. Ke-Sanwon, Brother Sanwon. He has heard the rumours, listened to those who speak emptily beside him, for a man’s silence is his gold and they would steal it from Lan Wangji, trade him their chatter. He has felt the breath of watching, waiting, stirring warmth beneath his feet, the strange predatory anticipation that prickles the horizon.
When the ground’s tremors have passed, he is on his knees — adrift, the dark of Wei Ying’s robes matted by mud, while he searches the fresh cracks with itching fingertips, as if the ruptures were a constellation of red pox. Silhouettes and shadow, the suggestion of water. He has glimpsed this same wet in the village wells before.
Fists filled to scattered brim with filth and the skins of opened ground; they scathe and press moist and deep in his crevices. Water gushes out like blood of a belly wound, dark-thickened. He watches it, incredulous that the thickened smear might canvas his knuckles an opaque film, and he thinks, it will catch the light red, it will soften pale, it will not be this — tar and slick ink fresh brewed from strong pigment.
The dark keeps. Washes his fingers and the back of his hand, and he rakes ground until his fingers strip and break into blood and scratches, and the dark of the water seeps in, and heals him, and he does it again, and again, and once more, over and over, for he knows — knows, when he drags his hands to show the back of them, the barren stretch of his palms, soft and sweet-skinned like fresh snow for all their scavenging. Knows to show the inevitable visitor who has encountered him, or the earthquake, or the run of dark water beneath the ground that Lan Wangji has uncovered: ]
I have no qi. [ His mouth runs dry, emptied. No, the implication: ] This healing is not my own.
[ Therefore, they gaze in the face of something else, entirely. ]
no subject
ii. THE RAVEN SHRINE
[ Foxes and fallacies and curses and marriage rites. This is the legacy of Ke-Waihu, and they weave it like tapestry, drape it on his shoulders, to round his throat, and he feels the choke of it now, feels the breathless burn and toxic hold of impatience rueing him.
Farther ahead, the pearled white of three spirit foxes’ teeth is a snag of desaturation in a whirlwind of colour: greens of the forest, lavish, well-nurtured, a health so profound it can only be magically-wrought and artificial. The carelessly vibrant red paints and gilded tips of the foxes’ wind-ravished coats, and the shrapnel of sun-warmed and glistened stone that sits at the feet of the shrines.
All forty-two of them, on Wangji’s latest count. And the tally grows.
They have lured them in a merry chase, these foxes, fat and fair and plainly silvered, the grin of their long mouths at once cruel and sanguine. Earlier, they numbered six beasts, joyfully carousing and prancing between young growths of stone that stab skyward, growing. Before that, two animals. Heartbeats once more before that, eight foxes.
The game, Lan Wangji knows bitter on the tongue and rancid, is to show strength before starting barter — like a warrior eclipsing objection with a stolen glimpse of his unsheathing sword. The Huntress whispered, shrill, with breath barely stirred, that borrowed rock or crumbled wood from the raven’s shrine would protect those who face the Beastmaster’s hardships. The shrine withholds itself. Its keepers deny their path.
And the foxes have won. Only creatures secure in their victory can sit so brazenly, mere steps before Lan Wangji and his companion, tails trapped in lazy, playful wags, and beady eyes trained on the clutch and release of Wangji’s hands. Waiting, searching, wanting. For boons, when all Wangji owns are his bones and the magic that has, for years, broken them.
Carefully, then, to the side: ]
…apologies. I come bereft. [ As ever, deprived now of the means of Gusu Lan, no better than vagabonds. ] They appear to anticipate… gentle coercion.
[ A bribe by any other name, and Lan Wangji’s ledgers have long bled red for his debts already. They are two. Another may yet pay this round. ]
ii. SWEET HISSED NOTHINGS
[ In Ke-Waihu, they splinter and mill their rumours fine, more refined on the tongue than their well waters: ‘This mistress Qing, she is a harlot,’ ‘She must have eloped,’ ‘She beds a serpent?, ‘Who is she, mere days among us, in this wretched Ke-Waihu?,’ ‘Why did she sow trouble?’
Wangji wakes to the shrieks of the girl Hermione, a tempest who spills the truth of Wen Qing’s disappearance, words rushed like beads tumbling from a broken string. After, Lan Wangji scatters.
The forests, angular, predatory, dark. Crazed dusk and wind crackling against the gilded silver of his crown, like whipping. Speed favours him. The sour, starchy hum of a night that does not know itself obscures his path. He passes the Fetters to see hags and crones and deceived young girls among shed snake skins and ruins — he borrows their counsel, then their emptied direction, fists clenched and jaw tight and his sword Bichen like a thundering burn in his keep.
He is not first to reach the pit — by the depth and fresh distortion of the footsteps that embroider it, he is not the second, nor the third. Others must have found the ditch sooner, then despaired of it and fled for weapons.
It is… a crude thing. A burial ground, for snakes that coil and clamour, so deeply twinned and bound, Wangji sees them as a lattice around the shape of Wen Qing — smear of pallor between the flattened greens. She sleeps: in this, the heavens allow one blessing. Cradling her back and her knees, great scaled snake heads perch on the swell of her shoulder, and three creatures appear — and Wangji shudders, grip on his blade a torturous experiment in stubborn discipline, that Bichen should not in this heartbeat go unsheated — wrong. These beasts are estranged from the purity of nature and form, half men and half serpents, and the dark blemish of their slipped tongues hisses sweet secrets of sleep that only their lesser, snake brothers grasp.
They have married a beauty to a hundred beasts. And he cannot yet plunge to cut down the bounty of grooms and pay them his wedding greetings, not with the lady mired and entrapped, exposed to risk. ]
Those... creatures. [ Whispered aside, to the person who yet watches beside him, who must calculate with eyes as cold as Wangji’s own, how to negotiate an efficient descent. ] Where they so on your arrival, or did they spawn from snakes?
iii. THE BRIDGE | WEREWOLVES
[ Above him, the high calling of midnight birds stings like scratches of nail on fresh spun glass, on thinned ice, on the skins of a fat, ripened peach. Waiting for hurt.
Below, the pack that would deliver it: two wolves and two others, distorted — transient shapes shedding the clutches of human reservations. But for the sheer scale of the creatures, Lan Wangji might have drawn strength from their poverty of numbers. But the shortest… wolf stretches resolute and strong, spans a quarter of the tree’s length.
The beasts cannot climb. They know so now, Wangji and his companion — the wolves have made growled, gasped, jostling attempts, swaying the tree as if to tease it viciously free from its roots. No yield, despite this. In Wangji’s hand, the rope they deployed to climb up the tree is a heavy snake of tight knot, wet under evening’s chill — their misfortune, he knows, that they have travelled late, when the creature-humans of Ke-Waiar were freed of their human bearings, unleashed into wilderness.
It is a game he plays now, palm scuffed over the thick crust of the tree that bears them on high, alongside boards of hard lacquered wood and reddened walls washed by crawled moss. Among children, a treehouse would be a gift born of a doting parent’s affections. Here, the presence of suspended shelter condescends them with the sullen, hissed futility of contemplating an alternative to a wait-out.
He remembers, distantly, to murmur, beam of his long gaze still pinned on the creatures below, like an arrow to its target: ]
Sleep.
[ Soft; stench of his blood warm and organic, a lively note of discordance from the eerie, acidic cold of the land’s magic. He does not excuse the wound that has sundered his arm to the elbow in a clean, red gash — it mends already, the slow churned energies of his core stitching and sewing like a clan seamstresses presented with broken broderies.
The air stinks of his brief, metallic mortality. It arouses the creatures below, sharpens their hunt. It reminds Lan Wangji that the climb was arduous, unexpected, that he may yet be surprised. Can be surprised. That he owes protection to his companion, despite that, while the full moon draws breath long. ]
A full night awaits us.
iv. OLD MAN MOUNTAIN | DARK WATERS
[ Earth and turbulence: he wakes before the sun, to shivered gasps of soil unbound, where the forest’s rim kisses the volcano’s skirts. The hunt has husked and drained him, left him less master of his flesh than surreptitiously commanded. He wastes nights often in the creaks now, besides running rivers, sleeping on tumbled wood — as animals do, so he might yet give the village sanctuary from his body, made a weapon in foreign hands.
Five. Wei Ying. A list of painfully aggrieved. They need not witness him once more, enslaved by hunting whims.
When earth shudders again and swells, and greenery groans, ripping, while thin, short tectonic plates dance seismically — he does not think, eyes drenched with sleep, it is the volcano. Ke-Sanwon, Brother Sanwon. He has heard the rumours, listened to those who speak emptily beside him, for a man’s silence is his gold and they would steal it from Lan Wangji, trade him their chatter. He has felt the breath of watching, waiting, stirring warmth beneath his feet, the strange predatory anticipation that prickles the horizon.
When the ground’s tremors have passed, he is on his knees — adrift, the dark of Wei Ying’s robes matted by mud, while he searches the fresh cracks with itching fingertips, as if the ruptures were a constellation of red pox. Silhouettes and shadow, the suggestion of water. He has glimpsed this same wet in the village wells before.
Fists filled to scattered brim with filth and the skins of opened ground; they scathe and press moist and deep in his crevices. Water gushes out like blood of a belly wound, dark-thickened. He watches it, incredulous that the thickened smear might canvas his knuckles an opaque film, and he thinks, it will catch the light red, it will soften pale, it will not be this — tar and slick ink fresh brewed from strong pigment.
The dark keeps. Washes his fingers and the back of his hand, and he rakes ground until his fingers strip and break into blood and scratches, and the dark of the water seeps in, and heals him, and he does it again, and again, and once more, over and over, for he knows — knows, when he drags his hands to show the back of them, the barren stretch of his palms, soft and sweet-skinned like fresh snow for all their scavenging. Knows to show the inevitable visitor who has encountered him, or the earthquake, or the run of dark water beneath the ground that Lan Wangji has uncovered: ]
I have no qi. [ His mouth runs dry, emptied. No, the implication: ] This healing is not my own.
[ Therefore, they gaze in the face of something else, entirely. ]