[ He counters, and there's an edge to it, the silent, acrid satisfaction of a double-edged blade's thirst, sated each way. To him, the fabric of the moment seems gossamer, faded: it ruptures, hangs by lone stitches, lingers frayed. Under the dour, dimmed light of candles burned past simmer, he watches Wen Qing present herself and experiences all at once the possessive arrogance of every man who has instructed a concubine, or beheld a war horse. Of Wen Ruohan, king over corpses. Power, among those who should not wield it, is the simple act of commanding to see the deed helplessly done.
She is pale, too pale, in the way of full-bellied fish who course the rivers and do not flatten at the ocean's seat. Moisture beads on her back, condensation. No, he understands with late difficulty: light, catching and blinding in reflection, on the plague spread of her — scales. Pretty pearls of monstrous nothing. He presses a finger on one, to understand its weight. Flinches, when it threatens to snap back in a sharp arc, and the skins beneath flush for his violence.
The sibilance of snakes, of wood crackling, serpentine. How the floors quake, tired, for the tentative increments of their shifting weight. How he converges, behind her, like a ghost haunting the shrapnel of opportunity: life in her blood, seize it. Will she scream? There is enough instinctive empathy dwelling damp within him to spare pity for women and children, screaming. She must not, then. If they are to do this — if he is to do this, and Bichen is a mournful castaway, he needs the smarter, smaller tool, accepts one of her surgical blades — she cannot betray herself with the white heat of vocal hurt.
Slapped, the fall of his palm might have reassured a stallion on his flank. He breaks the fall, thumb scattered on the stairwell of her spine. Agile, his fingers lick slow prints down. Urgency is heat shared violently between them: burning dust, liquid metal coagulating. What is it to be a woman, but sickness and stillness? To know life is a trickle-down of sand granules of time that only set out to stab? Each day wounds the currency of a maiden's fleeting beauty. Each season cripples it. By her twentieth summer, a flower of Jinlintai begins to wilt. In Nightless City, her thorns might grant her two years more. In Yunmeng, she trades her smile for thickened doll paints. In Qinghe, for each of her years, she must beget more children, and more, and more, for who is she without service? In Cloud Recesses — ...but he is his mother's son. A woman is allowed no haste, never that impropriety: despair is the death of form.
To be a woman in the cultivation world is to await your choices. Breath stutters out of him in tentative imprecations that fail the test of shape. He does not know from where he dismantles the thick strips of linen, when he bundles them in hand — later, he will remember: this is the cloth he had intended to catch the drip of his own wound — then simple coaxes them near her, to her mouth. A bit, for her pleasure. ]
Bite when hurt seizes. [ Care for your tongue. But he does not impose it. He has light and fireflies and a knife he passes at length by the kiss of a candle's flame, until the edge bloodies at tip, and the purity of metal is known. And it is a simple thing, a butcher's work, the Nie of Qinghe thrived off cleaving —
When his blade cuts in to carve scales out of meat, one after the other, in symphony. ]
no subject
[ He counters, and there's an edge to it, the silent, acrid satisfaction of a double-edged blade's thirst, sated each way. To him, the fabric of the moment seems gossamer, faded: it ruptures, hangs by lone stitches, lingers frayed. Under the dour, dimmed light of candles burned past simmer, he watches Wen Qing present herself and experiences all at once the possessive arrogance of every man who has instructed a concubine, or beheld a war horse. Of Wen Ruohan, king over corpses. Power, among those who should not wield it, is the simple act of commanding to see the deed helplessly done.
She is pale, too pale, in the way of full-bellied fish who course the rivers and do not flatten at the ocean's seat. Moisture beads on her back, condensation. No, he understands with late difficulty: light, catching and blinding in reflection, on the plague spread of her — scales. Pretty pearls of monstrous nothing. He presses a finger on one, to understand its weight. Flinches, when it threatens to snap back in a sharp arc, and the skins beneath flush for his violence.
The sibilance of snakes, of wood crackling, serpentine. How the floors quake, tired, for the tentative increments of their shifting weight. How he converges, behind her, like a ghost haunting the shrapnel of opportunity: life in her blood, seize it. Will she scream? There is enough instinctive empathy dwelling damp within him to spare pity for women and children, screaming. She must not, then. If they are to do this — if he is to do this, and Bichen is a mournful castaway, he needs the smarter, smaller tool, accepts one of her surgical blades — she cannot betray herself with the white heat of vocal hurt.
Slapped, the fall of his palm might have reassured a stallion on his flank. He breaks the fall, thumb scattered on the stairwell of her spine. Agile, his fingers lick slow prints down. Urgency is heat shared violently between them: burning dust, liquid metal coagulating. What is it to be a woman, but sickness and stillness? To know life is a trickle-down of sand granules of time that only set out to stab? Each day wounds the currency of a maiden's fleeting beauty. Each season cripples it. By her twentieth summer, a flower of Jinlintai begins to wilt. In Nightless City, her thorns might grant her two years more. In Yunmeng, she trades her smile for thickened doll paints. In Qinghe, for each of her years, she must beget more children, and more, and more, for who is she without service? In Cloud Recesses — ...but he is his mother's son. A woman is allowed no haste, never that impropriety: despair is the death of form.
To be a woman in the cultivation world is to await your choices. Breath stutters out of him in tentative imprecations that fail the test of shape. He does not know from where he dismantles the thick strips of linen, when he bundles them in hand — later, he will remember: this is the cloth he had intended to catch the drip of his own wound — then simple coaxes them near her, to her mouth. A bit, for her pleasure. ]
Bite when hurt seizes. [ Care for your tongue. But he does not impose it. He has light and fireflies and a knife he passes at length by the kiss of a candle's flame, until the edge bloodies at tip, and the purity of metal is known. And it is a simple thing, a butcher's work, the Nie of Qinghe thrived off cleaving —
When his blade cuts in to carve scales out of meat, one after the other, in symphony. ]