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This log covers 7-25 April, drawing from previous discoveries. Feel free to tag in here or make your own posts/logs!

Sign-ups for NPC threads remain open until 23:59 GMT on 9 April.

THE LION’S DEN

WEN QING’S RESCUE | THE HUNTRESS’ CURES | THE HUNT | THE OLD MOUNTAIN

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SWEET HISSED NOTHINGS

CONTENT WARNING: MENTIONS OF SNAKES, SERPENT CREATURES

Prior to the Huntress’ arrival, the group’s healer Wen Qing is captured by a feral half human, half serpent creature. Characters might overhear visiting woodsmen who say a woman was heaved into the woods at night by a large serpent.

After journeying through the illusion-casting forests of Ke-Waihu, prospective rescuers discover that traces of struggle lead them to a 20m-deep, wide pit on brittle pale soil, close to the Fortune fetters ruins:

■ If you cross the Fetters, local prophetesses cryptically advise you to shed torches or clothes and to run to cold streams, if you encounter danger. A distressed Hyang-Tai pleads kindness for ‘ancients’ and ‘children.’

■ The surroundings of the pit are eerily silent.

■ Rescuers can spot a sleeping Wen Qing at the bottom of the pit, patches of her bared skin covered in a slick shine and showing the start of growing scales. She is surrounded by dozens of dormant snakes and nagas, tightly and peacefully coiled around her.

■ Wooden stakes have been thrust into the pit walls — serving as challenging, but workable steps.

■ Some snakes are poisonous — with many cures available in the forest or back in Ke-Waihu — but most bite viciously without venom. Some nagas emit phlegm that briefly impairs the vision or blinds.

■ Watch your step! The creatures are drawn to warmth, fire magic and sound. They stir and climb the pit to attack if they feel threatened.
■ Rusted weapons and broken shields litter the bottom of the pit, dropped in by previous… visitors.

OBJECTIVES

■ Remove Wen Qing from her dire straits.

■ Wen Qing is left with serpentine sensitivities, instincts and scales. To cure her, healers advise a seven-day brew treatment of widow’s lace — an opiate plant found in large forest bushes.

■ Grab a few flowers at a time and store them well — collectors exposed extensively to widow’s lace experience four-six hours of light euphoria, paranoia or bizarre visions — swindling foxes and philosophical parrots are apparently commonly imagined.

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THE MAIDEN’S WATCH

The Huntress joins the group, deprived of her powers and absent her steed. She pointedly stares at the ground, but those who meet her gaze may revisit harrowing moments in their lives.

Following group conversations, her shelter is rotated between two locations: a shallow forest cave and the now deserted snake pit that previously hosted Wen Qing.

Take turns shielding her from the animals that seem drawn to besiege her. The Huntress spends her time in tears or penitence and speaks in a maddened tongue. Voice coarse and wet, she summons the composure to share her knowledge:

■ The Beastmaster and she both seek to witness the imminent eruption of the Ke-Sanwon volcano, expected within a month. The Beastmaster will become more human as that time draws.

■ Ravens excepted, local animals obey the Beastmaster and spy for him.

■ To avoid the pull of the Beastmaster and his Hunt, seek out:

THE SHRINE

Trek through Ke-Waihu’s haunted forests and find the village’s only shrine devoted to ravens, outside of the elusive House of Ravens.

■ Wear pebbles or wood splinters from the shrine to disrupt the Beastmaster’s thrall on you. These items must be replaced after three days.

■ Fox spirits have raised dozens of illusionary copies of the shrine. The stone of the original altar is marked for ravens in a small wooden carving, while copy shrines worship foxes.

■ Young fox spirits imitate ravens or play distant bells to distract travellers from finding the raven shrine.

■ Sometimes, fox spirits swarm, offering to show the way if visitors perform a small dare or tell them a meaningful secret.

■ If asked, Ke-Waihu locals share the shrine was raised by a wanderer, who spent a month in the village many years ago. He was disgusted with the arrogance of Ke-Waicai’s zealots, who insist ravens are sacred and can only be worshipped in the House of Ravens.

THE BRIDGE

Ke-Waihu has briefly reopened its gates to the nearby village of Ke-Waiar — to which it is connected by a fragile and narrow bridge high above a misted abyss.

■ Wind gusts shake the ropes of the rickety bridge, and several wooden steps are putrid, dangling or loose.

■ Ad you near the bridge’s end to Ke-Waiar, you may find a couple of fox spirits are purposefully rattling the ropes to unsaddle travellers. Plead or barter: you can offer anything from riddles to treats, a good performance, a poem, a favour, a shouted confession of true love…

■ The village gates open between sunrise and sunset. Characters who arrive early find many villagers sleep until late in the day. By sundown, some locals become frantic, alert, increasingly irritable.

■ Water can be freely taken from any of the wells within Ke-Waiar to satisfy the quest. Villagers offer it gladly — they too suffer from resurging drought and dark waters.

■ If you arrive at sunset or night, you can see villagers turning to werewolves in various stages of transformation, between humanoid and large wolf beast. They are lured out of Ke-Waiar, gates closing behind them, and released into the thick, vibrant woods — with you.

■ Take cover in the forest, to escape the pack of werewolves and wolves. Some might prove lenient if they catch you, while others feel compelled to draw blood.

■ To wait out the night: climb the forest’s sturdiest trees with help of the ropes purposefully bound from tall branches. Some trees even host rudimentary treehouses.

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THE HUNT

The Beastmaster, his xenomorphic creatures and mutated animals arrive in Ke-Waihu to behold the ‘imminent’ volcanic eruption.

The Beastmaster’s creatures possess sharpened senses and hearing, intense speed and hard carcasses that provide additional but imperfect protection from blows and missiles. They often hunt in packs, but behave themselves in Ke-Waihu during daytime.

The Beastmaster excuses himself from the underground Hok-Shinn clan’s attempts at a welcome celebration, taking residence with his beasts in his village hut. He may be encountered walking the village beside five or six of his creatures, inspecting the markets and even advising new huntsmen — his manner slow, speech rough in a way that suggests oral injury beneath his facial bandages.

THE TRIBUTES

The Hok-Shinn and an envoy of Ke-Waiar each present 10 distinguished but eerily listless youths of their village to the Beastmaster.

■ These tributes are then held in groups of five across four abandoned homes, each closely watched by six-seven men of the Hok-Shinn.

■ Team up, rescue some tributes — and get out alive.

■ For easier infiltration, try the forest-facing back of the houses, or the generously large, defective chimneys. Beware slippery or broken roof tiles

■ Hok-Shinn guards possess great brute force… and gratefully accept liquor.

■ Some tributes might fight their rescuers and attempt to alert the guards. Some claim it is their privilege to join the Beastmaster, while others say they should be sacrificed to the volcano Ke-Sanwon for their families.

■ You can hide the rescued tributes in the witches’ huts or the Fetters — gather them coin so they can book seats on the next ship out of Ke-Waihu.

THE HUNTING SEASON

The Beastmaster’s creatures are mannered during the day, but join the Hunting season that kicks off after the full moon:

■ Participation is (OOCly) optional.

■ For five nights, come moonrise, some characters feel compelled to flee into the forests and run, hide or avoid detection — alternatively, they join the Beastmaster’s creatures as hunters, chasing this quarry and forest animals.

■ You can chase each other or ‘pack’ up against a common target or enemy.

■ Anyone can ‘hunt’ or ‘be hunted.' Roles can swap across the five nights.

■ Characters can develop overnight instincts akin to an animal of hunt or prey of your choice, and they will be helped by these animals for the night. Snakes and ravens do not participate.

■ Hunting can be vicious (seeking to injure, kill or consume prey) or symbolic (just violently giving chase).

■ Certain characters feel especially compelled to join the hunt and to protect the Beastmaster outside of it. These include characters who are given to war, hunting, violence, wrath, gluttony or feral/animal characteristics. It also applies to those who previously turned xenomorphic during the Beastmaster's trip in Taravast, or whom he marked.

■ To avoid the hunt, stay out of the forest, apply the Huntress’ cures or lock yourself firmly indoors.

A couple of fun locations for hunt participants:

■ A tree enclosure where characters can hide for up to an hour, invisible to their pursuers. They can still be heard or scented.

■ A small lake, silvered at night, in whose waters you can breathe freely.

■ A fox spirit shrine, where a group of four-five vulpine friends defend you alongside their territory.

■ Abandoned wells and the forest streams previously touched by dark waters. The Beastmaster’s creatures seem very curious about the liquid, but ultimately pull back, as if obeying instructions.

■ Areas with strong fire or utter dark deter the Beastmaster's creatures.

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OLD MAN MOUNTAIN

Dormant volcano Ke-Sanwon shows signs of upcoming eruption: soil swells, increases in local temperature and small, low-grade earthquakes.

■ Characters with magical powers may find their strength sometimes fluctuates, suddenly swelling or briefly waning completely.

■ Dark waters fill out some of the ground cracks that follow earthquakes. The liquid is cold, settling as if it were iced. This dark water heals shallow wounds on any skin it touches, or gently revives vegetation over one-three days on any ground it is set on.

■ The strength of the dark water fades over a week’s time.

■ Digging through the ground cracks reveals thin rivulets of the dark water are present all around Ke-Sanwon.They are more numerous the closer you get to the volcano. Dark water also smears the mouths of hell.

THE JEWELLER

A few days after the earthquakes state (after 20 April, for network posts), characters wake to distant screams, as a group of 10 of Ke-Waihu's masked concerned citizens drag handsome young jeweller Dong-Yun out of Ke-Waihu.

■ The group is taking Dong-Yun through the predatory forests.

■ You can play out finding the captors’ convoy separately, or tag into the jeweller’s rescue here.

■ Bring the jeweller back to Ke-Waihu. Dong-Yun can share that his abductors intended to sacrifice him to the Ke-Sanwon volcano. One of the participants in the rescue: please share with the rest of the class!

”I’ve heard, but I’ve never — they used to, when my mother was young… she told, me even when she had me, all the mothers hid their young. She told me, they used to give them to Sanwon. The prettiest, the smartest, the most skilled. Give it all to Brother Sanwon, give it to… so it won’t take everything else. Give it our best, and it will leave us the rest. But this doesn’t happen anymore. The mountain doesn’t want it.”

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QUESTIONS

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Tensions, the curdling edge of violence, suffused the village, each home, each person, each shadow reaching from within the forest thick with the promise of what might come, following in the lightened footsteps of the master of beasts who, reduced from what he was before, still lurked, still called, on the creatures of this wood, this village.

A pain in the side, and painful still the one who hunts not being hunted, and those are the thoughts in his head as fingers slide around the column of his throat, and Lan Zhan, dripping, a sheen of water that might as well have been perspiration, thrust him back, pulled lips back from teeth, and fevered at him, gnashing, with words.

What did you do to me?

One hand rose in reflex, holding behind the wrist of Lan Zhan's hand, the silence of an entreated no.

"Lan Zhan." You already know. Words with more gravel in them than light, his pulse steady against Lan Zhan's grip past its initial surprising presence. His voice, partly choked, a rumble danced into Lan Zhan's palm. His other hand, lifted, cups the side of Lan Zhan's face for as long as he's allowed, when Lan Zhan is moving, promised violence, lessened to levels called bearable for who he is, and who he will be, without these influences.

"You refuse any other measures?" What you once did to yourself for me, I have done to you. Sealed qi, sealed certain dangers, while leaving others open.

Blood beats a hollow drum beneath his skin. He sees it, a hypnotic pulse beneath Wei Ying's pallor, staggering his breath — trembled staccato. Fixates on it with eyes slanted and stung by the raw sharp scent of metals stripped of their grease with vinegars — crisp air of the waiting woods, and blood, flesh, prey, Wei Ying.

His teeth lance his lip, on the cusp of harm. He does not know — manicured wall's wood of the house groaning in pedestrian stretch as time around them leisurely passes — when he shifts from honoured guest to crude invader. When he leans in, so their foreheads knock and kiss and stay, pressed indelibly.

On Wei Ying's throat, his grip tightens like wet noose. It strikes him in a distant, gelid tongue, He will bruise.

Let him. Prey bruises, breaks, bone rupture, feathers storms, skins rip. Let Wei Ying, as he's left Wangji to this — abandoned him to this. "Have you not done enough to me? Was it insufficient?"

Of all the indignities, this. Of all theft, this. Of all that makes of man no more than the brush strokes that stumble into his name — this hollowing, this extraction of Lan Wangji's strength, this exorcism of his nature.

Forehead to forehead, and Lan Zhan's hand tightens just as Wei Wuxian's drifts down from his cheek, fingers flexing with purpose, voice ever the more strained. Like this, staring into eyes and a hunger that has nothing to do with where they meet, and everything to do with where they don't.

Pain is familiar, is grounding, is something that can try to swallow him whole, but doesn't manage. Fear can, but even now, even snarling, bearing teeth, even pressing forward and in and choking off air, Lan Zhan is human. Not a canine, for all he is erring toward one's grief.

"You wield a beautiful blade, Lan Zhan." A tug on Lan Zhan's waist, pulling him closer, and then the hand that slides up, between them, as if this is a kind of romance instead of a kind of violent dance on sword's sharp edge. Fingers that trail, distracting, before they flit into his own robes, reaching for one of the talismans kept there. "I won't have you weep once your mind calms."

Have you not done enough to me? He'd smile, in a way too genuine to hide the hurt, if he thought it was true. If they didn't tear into each other with words and actions, to turn and lick at each other's wounds, to bind them up and sew the tears, to pick at them again in a new way, later. If this were only Lan Zhan speaking as he would, or should, and not akin to Wei Wuxian in Taravast, straining under two different undead lord's sway.

"I am calm." It slips him as his chokehold unspools, like thread loose on a needle. Easy and negligent and a lived-in gesture, as if he wastes a portion of each day negotiating the next aggressions against the man he has deigned to marry.

Death might break us apart, but he shivers with the knowing of it, back of his hand surging to cage his mouth, while a gratifying groan of disgust blooms in him like hot fever. He is still himself in this, absent inhibition and ability, still enough of Lan Wangji in the ridges of his scars and the roiling damp of the Wen brand that is always destined to leave his skin in white-pinked, ripe sheen. Still here, sufficiently present for terror and turbulence to cannibalise any joy this — shift in him wishes to waken in Wei Ying's carnage.

He would blossom in blood like fields of summer-sweet poppy.

"I am calm," he murmurs again, and this time, when his hands reach, it's to catch Wei Ying's own where they've written a subtle growth in the caverns of his robes, to press on them over the stretch of Wei Ying's silks, to crunch what is doubtless the paper man or talisman in their keep. He speaks, he knows, to excess, with a large predator's appetite for gloating. Despair frays the ends of it, ladens his tongue. "Do you think your tricks unknown?"

The mouth of Wei Ying's daintiest, most sophisticated curses, is open and waiting and familiar like a ravished courtesan. His talismans, work of brilliance and deception, are no more unexpected than the lines and crevices that carve Wangji's palms. He could not have defended this man so long without learning him in battle.

"You should run." From Lan Wangji, from here. The door rattles and shrieks, when he pushes Wei Ying harder in, digs him a home. He breathes him in, a scent like burning. After, set his ground bones in an urn. "Run far."

He should feel threatened, a saner, perhaps wiser man would, not because of what Lan Zhan does, or even what he says, but for what hasn't happened. For the knife's edge of a promise leading toward the warmth of blood on teeth and nail, as if the body were to sing like steel does, tempered and folded, forged twice over, once in fire, once in blood. Instead the drive of inevitability, the solemn weight of it, settles heavier still over his shoulders, at the back of his neck, at the back of him, where wood of the door creaks and strains, but doesn't give. Two grown men pushing back against one door, as strong as any man in his prime but not stronger, have not yet defeated one door.

Run far.

Will not yet defeat two.

His fingers touch talisman, where his hand is stalled, crushed and held as intimately as anything else about the two of them, Lan Zhan at war with himself and Wei Wuxian too aware of those battles to seek to do less than undermine their opponent's successes. Lan Zhan is an unsettled thing, a predator with gnashing teeth tugging at the bit shoved between them, tongue caught and eyes darker than they should be.

He shouldn't find him beautiful, not like this. He doesn't bother wondering what it says about him that he still does.

An entreaty, following an accusation that didn't accuse, and the repetition of a statement that's not true, or else he'd breathe easier. One leg twines around Lan Zhan's, yanks him forward behind the knee, the door straining yet again to bear them both up. One turn of the latch and they'd both spill over, a cup overpoured, onto the floor of the hall. He drops his hand away from Lan Zhan's wrist, strains his neck forward, tenses as the bow of him stretches for release.

For a moment, they're close enough he can almost breathe his husband in. Then he smiles, eyes dark, catching pinpricks of light simply to swallow them whole, and shifts, his tongue lathing over the tip of Lan Zhan's nose.

"When you're running," he says, smiling still, "That implies something's chasing along behind."

His free hand finds the handle, turns: the door behind him loses stability, and spills them backward, and he turns with it, even as he hauls himself sideways, shifts the hold of his leg to pull Lan Zhan along, unbalanced. If his husband needs chase right now, Wei Wuxian is practised enough to give it.

He goes, untangling limbs, the door gaping open behind them as he leaps, catches the corner of a wall opening into another empty room, and vaults forward, dashing out, out, away, red ribbon trailing behind as his banner, run, run, as fast as you can.

Can you catch me? My hungry Lan Zhan.

If you want caught, run. And did he not urge it? Invite the madness?

Strange, to think of Wei Ying's mercuriality as the constant denominator of every war Lan Wangji has fought and won, and now he tinkers with it, turns it to base steel and sharpens it to blade. He flees instead of fighting, flute at hip, talisman drawn. The ink of Wei Ying's sacred cowardice stains Lan Wangji's fingertips.

He breaks his fall on one knee, then its brother. Watches Wei Ying run. Swats, indiscernibly, first at the wet on his nose, then the slow-blinked incredulity of his gaze, molten after Wei Ying.

Senses confused, saturated with rusted awareness — he peels himself up, the simple act of bones in obeisance leaving him adrift. This body is not his own, attuned to sound and movement, skin bumped and rashed by alarm. He shudders, and the long line of his limbs breaks after, in hot chase behind Wei Ying — delayed, and it will cost him when he crosses the house's threshold, taxes him already when a drop from the stair's start down on the ground floor does not recuse itself of hurt to his soles and his heels and his tendons. The burdens of a body unaltered by qi.

Come the forest, he dies the death of a thousand cuts, each to his pride: he had assumes, wrongly, that much of his tolerance and survival was owed to skill. But his core milled, his immunity raised invisible and protective. Like a mother's touch, ever shielding the child oblivious to her toil, in his crib.

The plenty of the woods is his deficit. Sound, strident. Damp, cascading down his back. The tactile urgency of leaves eating at the back of his knees, thorning his arms. He feels too much, too quickly. In the middle of a brewing night's storm, the crisp wet of cold embracing his shoulders, he is alone. This is what it means, to proceed without core, unstable — to be wholeheartedly, purely alone.

In the midst of a meadow, he follows Wei Ying through suspicion, not certainty, the depth of his step's indentations, the bruising he's left on shrub leaves. It could be another, it could be a beast. Bereft of speed, he cannot ascertain. Bereft of his sword, his self — he relies on trickery, on Wei Ying's learning: on the choice set of a dozen talismans that he releases outwardly to encircle him. Spirit lure parchment, now adjusted to hunt not the vibrations of spiritual energy, but its sheer, catastrophic absence, below the neutral level achieved by organic matter, plants and water murmurs.

"Come down of your trees, withered cat." Beneath him, to taunt, but Wei Ying will answer, Wei Wing ever answers, impossibly drawn to win the last word. "The cold will whiten your coat."

In his hands, not the cord that might yet require qi strength of him, but his belt untangled. Enough still to shackle and noose.

A year and more, a man wearing his own skin and his own constraints, well aware of how to use and misuse and abuse and enhance what he can of himself, breathe in air heavy with the rot of the forest, of animal scents, of oxygen burning pathways down his lungs.

Here are lures, and here he holds on to the branch of a tree, fingers flicking out a talisman that stirs to breeze, unsettling the sanctity of Lan Zhan's circle. A voice that calls from behind him, sing-song, "Laced white and blue, just like you?"

To drop down, kicking off the trunk, hitting the ground in a roll that he springs up from, back protesting, legs reminding him that joints are not as young as they once were. Another talisman, sent overhead, and a thousand red and orange fireflies burst in every direction, heading toward any paper, any talisman, they find, intent to break rather than immolate.

They don't last long, but they don't need to, not when Wei Wuxian is slipping forward, under low branched trees that rim the meadow, raking at hair, robes, roots tangling for feet, birds calling in the distance with the disrupted cries of tumbled nests, and hidden, the steep edge of a gully, its waiting arms of forest detritus, and Wei Wuxian's turn, too late, to evade his husband's pursuit. Red ribbon trailing after, caught on a branch, dancing near Lan Zhan's form.

He stops for the ribbon, bled on its wilted branch.

Tries it, with distant but remembered awareness, for shadow traces of magical residue, before he deigns to drag it close, scent of it sharp and familiar with fingers coiled and crystallised to retain it. A keepsake, like leathers and bones and antlers of a ruined beast, like blood spattered in the liminal space between fang and mouth's corner. This is his prey, learn him.

Around him, talismans catapult into petty explosions, motes of dust and tender flame. Enough bitterness lives in him to severe contact with the last of his spells, so that they no longer feed those parting few heartbeats before Wei Ying condemns them to callous explosion. Waste your own energies, Wangji has a scant rivulet to draw from, his found dry.

Before him, Wei Ying is a pale arrow, the smear of a weeping constellation. Fast. And was it Yunmeng who taught him the run, or was it despair at the feet of Yiling, after? No matter. Drawn to a knee, Lan Wangji sweeps the ground until pebbles reveal themselves wickedly thick and he collects the fattest, throws them in a fast, mean, strong fusillade, aiming for where Wei Ying's feet might next land —

And dashes after him, calligraphy a clumsy perversion of sweat and saliva on crude parchment, casting out the string binding talisman, should his prey fall. "Better for you to yield early."

Somewhere, out there, Wei Ying either curses the ingenuity of his own talisman creation, or laughs the Lan's work of mimicry.

The pebbles, as is the nature of pebbles, rolled and ached underfoot, but sure footed, part mountain goat leaping from precipice to precipice, it slows Wei Wuxian, does not see him falling. No, that follows with a mild curse and a shifted direction, his body twisting away only to be in reach of a familiar, different, strange mimicry of a technique he'd never settled on naming.

For he had seemed to be falling, and what he finds around one arm ties back to his husband, eyes fever bright, hair coming down in reckless tendrils from the binding on his head; and be it binding, or bonding, the soldier's clothes or his burial shroud, Wei Wuxian turns from seeming fall to backward spring, pulling Lan Zhan along, tied knots, two fishers, two fish, leaping free of the river caught moonlight.

One foot misplaced in rich loam gives way, and the absences of trees, roots deep, trunks thrust upward, branches reaching and rooting in the skies, leaves short shrubbery, stones, and dirt to break the pull of his falling, the stifled yelp as he hits the ground, the pull on qi string hard, fast, inexorable as the gravity well of the gully, and oh, Wei Wuxian knows how to fall in the way of adolescents and the aged. Steep banked, caught and catching, he rolls.

It is so in every dream he's had, from Nightless City thereafter: they fall together. Mimicry of paths untaken, of what they might have, should have, never pursued.

Wei Ying tumbles first, slithering and fast, and for the edges and snags of him, how he is no more than strings of bones, Lan Wangji might have thought, he would anchor on something — catch himself, catch them, heat and the groan of tired bone and brazen leaf yielding, and the rustle of branches. Splintered rock eats at his back. He hisses, fingers turned claws and their clasp deep, into the vine and the roots that hang, and any little perch might do, to stay them.

It takes no pity of them. Gravity notches petty triumphs on their backs. This, then, is what it means to bruise. At the last moment, he remembers, He lacks a core, the skins of his head my break —

— and fastens a hand on Wei Ying's nape, to draw him in, sweetening the landing on his back

( It strikes him, when aches come to haunt and live him like a husked home in abandoned market quarters, that he, too, all but lacks a core now. )

There is a moment, when he looks above, Wei Ying is safe, and he blinks, and he breathes, and he thinks, Thank you, and says only, "Hello."

...before promptly rolling Wei Ying beneath him, trying to sneak a hand between them and snake it around Wei Ying's throat again.

There's an art to tumbling alone, and an art to tumbling together that he recalls from forays into wrestling and the like with Jaing Cheng, two boys growing up confident in themselves as long as the shadow of parental expectation didn't eclipse Jiang Cheng's nascent heart. Then there's another sort of tumble, one neither of them are versed in as far as Wei Wuxian knows, the thought flitting through his head and gone again before so much as making another sound.

He blinks down at Lan Zhan in the stunned moment of their abortive ending, the hello meriting a twitch of his lips and raised brow before he's rolled again, trapped under Lan Zhan's bulk, a hand squirming for his neck intent on its rainbow of delivered bruises, adding to whatever peppered his back, sides, legs, in their usual arrays.

He rocks up, elbow slamming back, body a twist and struggle that latches onto the hand seeking to throttle him again, not so much managing to get back on top of his husband as to force them side by side.

"Lan Zhan—" breathing out, voice gaining solidarity out of a winded, bruised throat, "Lan Zhan."

Then, abstractly, and not usefully, he added, "Kneel." While both were on the ground, and no one was particularly close to being on anyone's knees.

[ Battered and bruised, and his rib — crack against corners, he feels the piercing stab, the swell of hurt spilling from him like river's waters. Does not shrivel beneath his hurts, so they must leave and breathe shallowly on him, must be survivable.

He is not the petty pastures of his war damage. He will endure, for all Wei Ying tumbles them down and rearranges them, and squirms within hands like a sea catch in the net, and his eyes and cheek and the straining parts where tree root has gashed silks reveal skins as pale as a fish's fat belly. When they sprawl, side facing side, crowning a bed of leaves, coppers and cool red and a blossomed heap of vibrant greens, Lan Wangji is already indulgent: anything to sate Wei Ying's frenzy, which sours his scent, no doubt contaminating the taste of his flesh.

An ugly spread, fear. If you treat me as a dog, be in agony of me.

He cannot kneel here, but his hands stray soft, one dangled limply by his face, wrist to the sun, the other drifting the peel hair off Wei Ying's face. Yield. ]

Wei Ying. [ Reasonable, plain. An arc cleaves his mouth that might poison lips to a smile on other, better men. ]

I would like to kill you. [ Then, patiently, like a gust of breezy wind, and his dark eyes no more than a starless sky, husked for it. ] Then, I would have to kill myself.

[ In turn, the bead string of sacrifice would end with Sizhui's own martyrdom or a lifetime's feud, attempting to avenge their deaths against the local curse-craft. He knows this coolly, iced over his nape. A certainty like winter, coming. ]

It is what I wish to do. Allow me.

( He reaches forward, fingers sliding against the landscape of Lan Zhan's cheek, the incidental brush of hair back and away part of the motion, where his touch traces, lingers, tugs, not painfully, but pointedly, on Lan Zhan's ear.

A tweak of reproach, in what used to be a very painful twisting. Here, only a mockery, because if it moves more, he needs to be ready to fend off his insatiable husband's dalliance with death, both of theirs, in a twisted double murder-suicide, at speed. So reasonable, Lan Zhan is, implacable after his present preoccupation. A small smile, a steady, silk-covered steel reply. )

You don't have my permission to die. So it stands to reason, Lan Zhan, that we both must live.

( In another mindset or time, this might seem more a threat to harken back to bitter words and dripped venom in another forest, run darker; another forest, filled with owls and decay slowed down to delicacy. They are not in that forest now, but death stalks here too, and he knows its taste, can feel its weight on the back of his tongue, coating his bruised throat with a cloying rot.

Another shift, fast and fleeting, to slide atop his husband, slam both hands down, holding wrists overhead. )

Find another wish. This is no rooftop, this is no trial by injustice. I won't ask you to be my death again.

( To have been glad it would be Lan Zhan, that not some squirming, putrid mass of self-satisfied hedonism would be his end, but instead a man he respected, had seen and understood and yet not fully understood at all, just as he had not been, just as their ways to reach out were blocked by their own choices, their own plodding steps down different paths.

Wells and rivers failing to mix, both quenching the thirsts of different lands. He'd lap him up, if it were a way through to a better understanding. Maybe it's what he's been doing, the last year, as they've nipped and torn at each other, as they've learned and unlearned, as they've fought and not forgiven, or forgiven and not forgot, or forgot, because it was easier than the fight.

Caring, whatever the form, is the hardest damn thing in the worlds. )

Play nice, Lan Zhan. Leave the staining to me.

( A second, a breath, and that talisman will be on him, with the drop of Wei Wuxian down that fractional distance, to press chest to chest. Body Stilling, Frozen, Stopped. A moment is all he needs to plant a suggest, and leave, swallowed by the shadows.

A moment, if it's his. )

He falls thundered under the thrall of three talismans, the fourth waging war with the resurging turbulence of his qi, before it may coagulate. There is a risk in casting spells on creatures that defy normal parameters, and Lan Wangji — stripped unnaturally of his energy to levels beneath even those recorded by pedestrians who can never hope to graduate to cultivation — is a cinnabar notch on that ledger. He wears defeat well, the instinctive struggle quickly simmering sedate, tight set of his jaw a feral clench, each breath hissed like water heating before it wilts tea leaves.

Fight deserts him like a war banner, downed. He will bide his time: he is Lan, he will wait. Pain and tragedy wash over him, drenches the talismans, ebbs and flows. Retreats before their mandate. Body stilling. Frozen. Stopped.

In the dead of rustling night, Wei Ying deserts him. After, when the spells yield and Lan Wangji wakes, more prowling animal and close to coaxing howls, chasing glances of the moon that aren't confused, hazy blindness — when he dashes after Five, a slanted line of vicious dark — when he fails and fails and fails to catch, and he bleeds for it, and leaves creatures of the woods collapsed in his wake.

After, he is not himself. Recovers that man with dawns tickling pale blemishes of warmth on his nape, come morning, itching his wounds. A body absent qi barely remembers healing. He understands now, the waste of qi when he cornered Wei Ying prior, to funnel his supplies.

He knows to crawl, dragging himself like a rag, to Wei Ying's old abode, a creaky, ill-standing thing, husked. It opens for him. It opens, he knows bitterly, for anyone. The termites that sleep within every lining and fitting of wound all but masticate as he passes. And then, he is for stairs, for Wei Ying's quarters, for slipping, one knee, and then the next, by Wei Ying's bed and coercing the line of his boot-fettered foot out.

Breath a dappled path of condensation that breaks lacquer on mite-grazed floors, he bows himself to an arc that flattens, until his shoulders collapse, and his head is a long dip, and the prostration is pure — sentiment leading form. He must do this, he knows, for Five, also, for eight days. In his hands, Wei Ying's foot feels a trembled line; with a sigh that vivisects him, he presses his mouth to the tip of Wei Ying's boot.

"This unworthy one begs your forgiveness."

He does not need to behold the bruises, to know where and how deeply they sleep on Wei Ying's throat.

A tired man might wake; an exhausted man, tensed and keyed for the feeling of dangers, of death come seeking, of thrilling bloodlust lapping at his throat, does not stir for the arrival of his husband. Not for that expectation, though it is strange, strange to be sleeping before Lan Zhan, stranger not to wake when his room intrudes with life, but telling. Exhaustion leaves his face thinned, leaves dark smudges under his eyes, makes him paler I'm his husband's robes, because tonight they were, this morning they are, imperfect inverted mirrors.

His leg twitches, foot knocks forward, a rabbit shivering electric in sleep, recalling motion. Not hard, but a sudden shift, the prelude to a monsters awakening, dark eyes slitting open, slurred moans crossing his lips but refusing to form the murmured words his brain convinces him he's said.

Strange, but familiar: not the man being at his feet, not the state he's in, but those features, that face. Cataloging details, his eyes close again, the furrow of his brow smoothing, a nonsense babble crossing lips he licks.

He shifts, squirms, languidly lifts the edge of his blankets, exhausted enough he never fully wakes, never questions what he should, only that of course, it is Lan Zhan, and if his throat aches, if the dozens of bruises he wears as badges acknowledging he lives still, they are inconsequential to the presence of Lan Zhan, who must be here for the reason they always find each other, except when cursed.

No, even then, his memory says, smoke and illusion as he drifts closer back to sleep, one word forming in the susurrus of every lapping hush of the ones that don't.

"Come."

No awareness of apologies or the stains off light across the dawning sky. No knowledge of kicking as a dreaming thing, a creature caught in nightmares, only relaxing some fraction now. Cavernous he makes the blanket, still holding it open, a maw for Lan Zhan to be swallowed by, if only he would.

This first morning, after this first night, exhaustion holds Wei Wuxian too close for his untimely waking, and this, a child's plea in the night meet with parental placation, he provides.

There is a moment, between strike and contact, when he thinks, This man's boot will shatter my teeth.

He does not shield from it. Trembles, with cowardly inexorability, when Wei Ying's heel draws slow and limp, and the convulsive beat of his kicks turns trickled by sleep, wholly flaccid. He has carved out on Wei Ying's skin a bloom of cadaverous bruises — deserves each of his own bones dug out, his skins flayed and flesh left to dry beneath scavenger birds, and even here, now, thin morning light cascading over Wei Ying's cheek like gossamer, Lan Wangji cannot have succour.

Guilt would have made a mockery of atonement. He accepts that what began in finer quarters with the iron of his knuckles shackled keen around Wei Ying's throat does not end here, in heartbeats of tender lethargy. And Wei Ying, compelled by the kindness of instinct more than by his fear, already unburies him a place between the covers, as he might do for a son chased by nightmares. Sizhui should be buried beneath rabbits, and Wei Ying beneath children.

Temptation itches his skin like pox plague. His fingers dance the edge lines of Wei Ying's boot, ride up his covered ankle. Shamelessly, he loosens their laces enough to tease the covers free and the boots released, set to guard Wei Ying's sleep by the bed's side. Linens stretch out meagerly in hand, ridiculing him with the scant warmth provided. He swaddles Wei Ying as he was before, and only lingers enough to powder his ink, make paste, slap strikes on reused parchment —

魏
婴

|

I entrust you my son, sword and apologies, until the curse's pull passes.

Give them care.

|

蓝
忘
机

Until, for far better to presume the ache of hunt that haunted Wangji for a night is fleeting. Better to remove himself, as Wei Ying did once, so he may pose no threat under the thrall.

He is silent in retreat, in parting glances. This too shall pass.

Vague memory forgotten by the time he wakes that first morning, sun climbing halfway to it's zenith in the skies overhead. No sign of his husband until the note consumes his gaze, until familiar script carries its intent, and he sees Lan Zhan, knows him qi sealed still, and there is Bichen, contained in white, and everything goes still.

Stupid. Himself of course, but also the fool he's married once, and been married to three times over. The man he had unwittingly widowed once.

This is not what they need to do. This is not solving things together. This is not even trying, and oh, he laughs, bitter the brew slipping down his throat, because he understands far too much, far too intimately, why this has seemed best.

Has been safer, and leaves his marrow cold with the weight of Anurr's seeking mountain winds.

He continues. He watches their son, notes their loss of Lily. He stakes what range he can independent of where the canids roam, and he returns to his room of rotting wood and clean sheets, even finally, forcibly attempting the mystery of laundry this fifth day, to eventually not horrific results. It's the bed he's made because the village washer women have their own busy preoccupations, and it is to this room, cleaned but hollowed into foreign, hidden patterns within the walls, that he stands, pouring another bucket of water into a round tub. Affixes the talisman to maintain the heat, and searches for the oil pressed from vegetable matter, without the strong scent, to brush through hair after it's cleaning.

He has acquired robes at least, Lan Zhan's borrowed set cleaned and draped over a chair, folded in thirds. Now he looks more to the local dressing, and he wants, more than many things, to rest with a semblance of peace in his soul. So rare the occasion when anything like it nestles in the curve of his ribcage, next to his beating, steady heart.

When will this curse pass?

A war has wrapped them in misused strips of talisman parchment paper and bandage ribbon and the red-coloured tinsels of disinfectant cloth, drenched in blood — they have crossed paths before, worse for their wear. But he knows the picture he cuts, a rag doll of beaten leathers, weathered and withered by lashing of branches, the claws of animals culled or calmed, his own now-broken fever of hunt, stoked by possessive appetites. Five days and their nights, crowned in bloodletting, have reduced him.

He crawls back to Wei Ying, feet stumbled, breath ill bartered. Neglected, bodies are as children, asking stewardship and guidance, when they have failed to direct themselves. He enters his soulmate's rooms like every ghost that's trampled the territory of its pray, drag of Wei Ying's dark silks weighed at the ends by the drench of lake water, shedding nests of leaves in wake.

Somnolence greets him in raw wafts of lavender. He thinks, at first, to fault Wei Ying's salts, but recalls the wealth of overgrown greenery in the gardens that lace the mouth of this stale, decrepit home, its teeth rotten. Drifting, he slows to a treacle before the calm rippling of the bath's waters, the lazy round circling of spumes and oils like a pretty moan spelled out in foreign calligraphy. He does not chance his filthy touch staining Wei Ying's ablutions. Does not chance, too, a rushed glance to the ring of bruises that likely still collars Wei Ying's throat.

"See to your needs. I intend..." But he has no business here, no empire, no right. Doubt and unease shrivel and quiver him like frissons of sickness. His mouth is slack drought, tame. "Only Bichen."

And his ribbon and his robes and his qi released, once Wei Ying has acquitted himself of his indulgence and may hold court over the petty matter of Lan Wangji's form.

"Half a shi. I shall return then."

Here stands his husband, bedraggled and drenched, wearing the detritus of the last handful of days as forlornly as the borrowed robes. Here he stands, swallowing, and clutching at one solid dependency, looking to slither away from the rest, lick his wounds.

Wei Wuxian points toward the waters, the coiling steam from its surface.

"Stay, Lan Zhan. You can make better use of this than I can."

He, wearing a wreath of healing bruises around his neck, and he stares, firm, at the one who this time, has been running.

He must look as he feels, a wreck of himself, firm collection of sharp bones and the long, tapered tapestry of his bruises stitched as skin. Before him, the bath water bubbles and boils in callous invitation, and the careful eye of the heating talisman blinks wide, stares inexorably.

How many increments of his pride has fate sundered him from already, that he cannot afford to lose a scant few more? He takes the knee at the bath's edge like flustered, crowd-shy children, two fingers dipping and strolling through waters — betraying his body's physical relief not in a deep moan, or the tip of his head back, but in the telltale crumbling of his shoulders, the rigidity of his lines in collapse.

A bath would be a fine cure for his aches, his chills, his sores, his filth — if he allows it. And yet Wei Ying's bruises have barely greened like spring. "Have I not stolen enough of your comfort?"

And what is the word Wei Ying weaponises like honeysuckle? It sharpens on Lan Wangji's tongue, then slashes it. "Husband.

Steps forward, and he's within touching distance of the wooden tub, steam wafting upward in patterns that shift as the air does, as Lan Zhan unwinds in fractions, as Wei Wuxian moves with feline grace. Two predators don't stalk each other so much as admit awareness and respect for each other's claws, their strengths, their aptitudes. Catalogue each others weaknesses, and decide, too often independently, what they mean, and how to relate, to excuse, to gloss over them.

"When something is given, Lan Zhan, you cannot steal it."

Steps around, and he broaches the foot, such as it might be, of this tub not as grand as those in Taravast, but leagues beyond Lan Zhan's condescension in Sa-Hareth. Around and toward one man, kneeling, to crouch, studying Lan Zhan's face in profile. To soften words, but not attempt disguises, not of his self, or the pain that was taken out of his flesh, the marks mistakable for nothing other than fingers, hands, which had marked flesh as surely as teeth did.

"When something is taken, Lan Zhan, you can apologise for it. Not always return it," he says, conceding a point where undoing is not within the nature of this world they're in, nor within the nature of the world they descend from, like roots from the tangled mud of a lotus's anchor. "There are things that can't be returned. For those, we can ask forgiveness, make reparations. We do." Facing what it is, perhaps lacking, perhaps adequate.

He reaches out, touching Lan Zhan's arm, watching what his weight does in one touch, and a glance that shifts from his husband's features to the alluring swirl of warm, hot water, of the soothing it promises, of the comfort in a worldly flesh, of a body that isn't beyond all awareness of ills done and received, immune to changes in temperature, in deprivations.

"Bathe, husband." Another shift, and his fingers travel fast paths, an intrusion of space and intent that unseals qi locked away from Lan Zhan's hands during the time where their dangers could make themselves known. Once, he'd watched Lan Zhan seal himself up, at the power-hungry fear of a man who could never forgive the world for treating him as his birthing, and not his capabilities, would provide. "Meditate. Grant me this," he says, and he searches for Lan Zhan's gaze, lifting his brows, canting his head a touch. "For having had to guard you against your own strength."

Grant him caretaking that is not brutal, ruthless, calculated clarity. A pause, and he adds, lips quirked upward, just a touch.

"I'll even wear a blindfold, if you like."

And he winks, because it's easy to grant that playfulness, that teasing, that sincerity in allowing barriers when others are removed, if it helps.

Lanterns burn mellow and cool, a dulcet, coppered exhalation. He thinks, a less fickle man, lent to care, might have coaxed himself to whisper the flame unwound, then dead. But this is Wei Ying, who crystallises chaos, who flits and blitzes from man to man and spell to spell and cliff to death and wanton abandon.

Who bids Lan Wangji bare. Are we yet so mercantile? That Wei Ying must wish to see what sixteen years of longing have bought him? He, who has scratched Lan Wangji's scalp like a kept cat and owned his ribbon and rationalised Lan Wangji's most intimate desires to inventory them like private, trinkets of possessions.

His mind clouds, whites like sea foam when waves crest. He thinks — not of savage lust, immature and sophomoric. His want is a simmered thing, an imprecise and foreign calculation. The empty desires of another man, dead sixteen years at a cliff's side. Need will not betray him.

Only — the husked sensation of coring, the temple of his body abandoned. The knowledge, as he strays his fingers silent, eyes catching Wei Ying's to hold them, keep them, watch him now — that he is purchased and owned, and collared. Fresh cuts riot against the friction of dark robes, slipping his shoulders. Bruises sing a swarthy gold, like a maiden's beads, drumming his collarbone. Restlessness swells in his joints, where cartilage has wounded and the bloat of his limbs threatens misalignment.

Wei Ying's lent robes whisper down the floors.

Morning searched him, clever, with diffuse light. It bathes him before the waters, casts him pretty and pale and wandered in the liminal space between captive and free. He knows, inks and poetry paint Hanguang-Jun beautiful. He knows, footing trembled as he enters the bath, and warm waters sway, and he stumbles more than he descends, until he settles, they settle — he is the sum of scars gaping, of sacrifice screamed. Bare, vulnerable before Wei Ying, like a war horse before its first rider, the paraded prime mistress of a flower house.

Waters singe his hurts. Cauterise them. In his belly, resent curdles. Do not ask, knowing you will not be denied. "I do not wish your eyes haunting my back."

For a constellation of reasons known, undying. "I do not wish..." And how to speak his truth? That his hands, curling beneath waters cloyed by salts should break, that he wishes his fingers dancing on fire, flesh festered and burned and paying at each turn the gasped ache he has given Wei Ying's throat. "To wear these skins."

Dry his throat, no longer aching, days ago ignored and forgotten, left to heal as healing will do, faster than if he were never once who cultivated, slower than if he possessed still within himself that central burning core. Lan Zhan holds his gaze, demands it, and he's helpless before the unspoken request, eyes on eyes, and swallowing down some sensation of improbability that has no place here and now.

He keeps his eyes locked with Lan Zhan's as robes slide down, cascading to the floor, puddling as rent shadows and gasping darkness in the first blush of morning's light. Banished from white shoulders, the white jade of his frame, but that in and of itself isn't unknown, isn't fully unfamiliar.

Steam wafts and washes over him, he who remains crouched, who follows his soulmate, his husband, to the waters run hot and deep enough for submerging, and he only blinks after, at the statement of wishes in their inversion, as his head tilts just enough to shift tendrils of hair to one side, accepting.

"Of course," he says to the first, because Lan Zhan did not wish to speak on the carving of his flesh by the discipline of his sect, and Wei Wuxian had not asked, never would have asked, does not when he carries his own carved hurts, some visible, some less.

He has the bathing rag in hand, and for one of those hands beneath the water, he doesn't so much reach as allow the clean rag to soak up the water's heat, drenched in moments of scattered heartbeats, breath indrawn.

"Which would you wish to wear?"

A question asked, and he starts, with care remembered from a cross of one child's bathing needs when barreling into the blood-red waters of his bathing cave, to the ablutions delivered by one who nursed when he was ill, more care taken to scrub down from Lan Zhan's shoulder toward his submerged, clenched fist than given to Wei Wuxian's own skin so addressed by proper bathing. Care taken for every scratch, and eyes that don't wander so much as catalogue, that liminal space between a desire he'd denied existing for longer than he wanted to realise, and a desire to understand a body's toils, its hurts and healings, but only as he's allowed.

Time also to not linger, to not send Lan Zhan flinching away as violently as he might, and so he hesitates on the consideration of mindless chatter versus silence to sit as lightly across their shoulders as it might, were hearts not heavy.

"Want me to talk through this?" He says instead, bent to his ministrations, kneeling now properly at the tub's side, facing Lan Zhan's front ongoing, as had been wished without wishing.

"Sixteen years silent. Always speak." And the silence spell, never again to be cast, not while Wangji and Sizhui live to unfetter it. Longing is lace waiting to unspool at the first catch of a nail's snag. Wei Ying has a generous mouth, unstitched wide for laughter. On Mian Mian, Lan Wangji remembers, it rounds as if it were a syrupy moan.

Heat cloys, inextricable. He feels at once armoured in fluttered spasms of warmth and suffocated. In Wei Ying's hand, a rag clots wet and prunes, and Lan Wangji, modesty a limpid but tenuous abstract, leans towards it, head a sloppy weight on the one arm he's slung molten and loose on the rim of the bathtub. His lids draw down heavy, leaden, the world reduced the blade's cut his slanted eyes still perceive, serpentine.

When he raises his hand, waters crash each way, as if he dreamed them high and crashed them down. Sound is absorbed in the heat that slackens his tongue. His fingers trip, knot in air, stretch out before they reach the column of Wei Ying's wreath-marked throat.

"I wish to be a mother's son." And not the father, written in the manacle that rounds Wei Ying's jugular now, in bruise and shadow and swell each time his pulse blooms. Lan Wangji's grip moulds over the marks, qin player's nails strong. He does not clasp down. Releases, nearly instantly, wet of his palm a glistened print, the only evidence of an accident of last night's nostalgia he seems too indifferent to accept and too transfixed to ignore.

"Release my core," he murmurs, but dips his head closer to the wash rag, so Wei Ying might proceed with Lan Wangji's ablutions.

Heat drips down his neck, soaking the collar of his local styled robes, beading and trailing away to be swallowed as tears in the rain. Dampening, cooled mark as he swallows, stills for a moment, passes his rag over Lan Zhan's chest, catching droplets which were never there.

"Seems like you can be," he says, and his wash rag traces the planes of Lan Zhan's face, just one side, from the line of his cheek toward its rise by his eye, to his temple, to his ear. "Seems you already decided to be a mother's son years ago."

Not for the shadows around his throat, but for having let go, for outrunning himself and his incessant need to hold. Come to Gusu Lan cannot be the sanctuary it has been, in brief times, without them both free to walk away from those haunting mountains and their legacy of restraint.

A home to come back to, and a home from which to leave. He sighs, switches the wash rag to his other hand, and as he carefully cleans Lan Zhan's face, his fingertips in their chilling reality tap down on each of the points of pressure across Lan Zhan's chest, down to the one that rests well below the water line, no lingering gaze needed to know its mark.

"You could have done so too," he says, says what they both know, as the qi is freed from its restrictions to allow the warm blossom of its plenitude to unfurl through Lan Zhan's aching form. "Lean forward, ah? Easier for me to pour water through your hair this way."

Not the lazed, slit eyed exhaustion that rested as surely predatorial as languid, but the one that catches more of the water within the basin than without, that he might pour water kept warm in its bucket down through dark locks, work out the dirt and leaves and twigs and filth that accumulates even without a forest's fingers raking through. Wei Wuxian settles the wash rag across the lip of the bath, shifting to take hold of the bucket tucked by its side. Water glistens at his neck, flecked diamonds in the morning's light.