[ Lan Wangji's choice, and the searing, soaring, shrieks of pain in his knotted joints and straining limbs give it, each step a fickle rupture from hard ground that would sooner see him crashed, perhaps burned. He intends to follow. Gravity intends to deny him passage.
All wars must have their victor, and he ever wears his defeats well: this face, his face all crackling and marble, and his silks astray, and wind whispering clever, honeyed nothings in his ears, Why make attempt, why do you ever make it? Rot in his teeth, he will choke on this sweetness, and his arms twine, legs lead. When he blinks down, first there is the nearby temptation of Five's dressed foot, then the spatters of Lan Wangji's lake wet, then the blood of his graze wounds, of his scratches, then he blinks — and the boy is gone, and his world tumbles.
He does not know how long he sleeps. When habit wakes him, dawns have exasperated the last of the moon's diffused howls into silence. He haunts himself, like a man living a thief in a house abandoned — a patient forced to entreat gentle supplications from the body from which he has gone long parted. Waking, he drifts, and each stumbled, crawled step buries him into the village, under the scratches of stares of the few locals who wait without sleep.
And remembered: ghosts, gossip. Two. A teahouse, perhaps their servants or women of flower houses often called upon to — attend an affluent clientele. He knows the house for its crumbling gilt, the verdigris that eats hungrily at pillar edges. Fortune favours him to find Five and not his colleagues of quarters: to collapse, as much as take the knee before the elder-child, and bow down, back a fractured arc of tense pressures, until his lips and his palms and his elbows all touch ground in aligned, studied prostration. The old way of humility, filth returned to filth. ]
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All wars must have their victor, and he ever wears his defeats well: this face, his face all crackling and marble, and his silks astray, and wind whispering clever, honeyed nothings in his ears, Why make attempt, why do you ever make it? Rot in his teeth, he will choke on this sweetness, and his arms twine, legs lead. When he blinks down, first there is the nearby temptation of Five's dressed foot, then the spatters of Lan Wangji's lake wet, then the blood of his graze wounds, of his scratches, then he blinks — and the boy is gone, and his world tumbles.
He does not know how long he sleeps. When habit wakes him, dawns have exasperated the last of the moon's diffused howls into silence. He haunts himself, like a man living a thief in a house abandoned — a patient forced to entreat gentle supplications from the body from which he has gone long parted. Waking, he drifts, and each stumbled, crawled step buries him into the village, under the scratches of stares of the few locals who wait without sleep.
And remembered: ghosts, gossip. Two. A teahouse, perhaps their servants or women of flower houses often called upon to — attend an affluent clientele. He knows the house for its crumbling gilt, the verdigris that eats hungrily at pillar edges. Fortune favours him to find Five and not his colleagues of quarters: to collapse, as much as take the knee before the elder-child, and bow down, back a fractured arc of tense pressures, until his lips and his palms and his elbows all touch ground in aligned, studied prostration. The old way of humility, filth returned to filth. ]
I claim no right to forgiveness.