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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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His face, his body. What is he, if not a vessel for water to cross and fill, for heat to beat and his mouth to snag on the edges of Wei Ying's fingertips, passing? Born so his brother might have a spare, his uncle a spoiled nephew, Wei Ying a pursuer, Sizhui and now the sects a father. What value is there to him but service to others? To fulfill a function, to hold a form.

It's a knot when Wei Ying revives his qi, more than a web, or stretching tendrils. One moment he eases, licks of heat and water clawing marks on the film of forest debris that Wei Ying unravels from him with linen cloth — the next, he curdles, skin on his nape like pebbled scales, and he cannot breathe for it, how his organs rearrange themselves, become tender and small, and a foreign intrusion propels and worms its way in him, he cannot refuse it. He gasps, audibly, suffocated, worn. Falls back, head knocked on the bath's rim until pain anchors him from where the surge of his qi has cast him at sea. He forgets what it is like, godliness beneath his leathers.

When he comes to himself, Bichen is a heavy, familiar, stalwart weight in his hand, cradled out of the bath's keep. He called her. Some part of him knew, the same that will stay amputated, unfinished until Yuan crosses his horizon. He set his mouth a hungry wet print on the sword's hilt and simply — hangs on. The tip of the clothed blade scryes sweet nothing on the waiting floor planks.

"At night, I gave empty chase to Five." The heavens smiled; he did not catch. "I thought, if he meant to have life's blood in vindication, it should be his. He did not claim it."

He could not have done so too. Bitter satisfaction swells in him like cave water, filling until it knocks at walls. The sixth and seventh rib stretch and contract. He retains the autonomy to do this, to offer himself to another man than those who claim him. What will you do, if I cheat you of this death?

He has stolen nothing in this life. His bare palm itches beneath a sheen of condensation. Catch, hold. His fingers curl, calling Wei Ying.

To lean is to coil is to shrink is to shrivel is to regress, babe-like, and bare his back when the weeds of his hair weep forward. I think not.

"Come here." And his mother's son remembers, "Please."

He feels the sword moving, glances up to watch it find Lan Zhan's hand, as unerring and right as his own had been, still craved to be, and he could not meet. He sighs, lips curling up, admiring what it is that he always has in Lan Zhan's skill with a sword, in that stillness, the white knuckled grip, the lips that had brushed his fingertips as careless as butterflies flitting from flower to flower pressing firm, intentional, to Bichen's length.

"He's too practical to want you dead," he says, and perhaps it's callous in its own way, to speak a truth not tied into tradition or grace, but cold, cutting ruthlessness. A part of himself that will remain colder than the springs in Gusu, knowing how to act that way, to make those calls. Knowing how to avoid them, too, even as he brushes his thumb against Lan Zhan's cheek, and cants his head, questioning, uncertain.

So often he doesn't feel he has a stake to claim in Lan Zhan's time or interest, not as the man he is now, versus the youth he once was. They've talked on this, how he who was had been loved, in secret or otherwise, and how he who is becomes a paradox, a complication. To try has been seeing each other as the men they've become even before sixteen years stretched dark and taunt between them, even since they'd wandered in each other's footsteps to strike into the shadows manipulating his return, the cultivation world's upheaval.

Lan Zhan, he thinks, can do better than whatever he is, but chooses not to. Not all of it comes from nostalgia now, he tells himself this. That as frustrating as they find each other at times, as frightened by broken gaps between them, they can reach across: that Lan Zhan can learn to let go of the fear that defines him, the one he cripples himself with, fetters himself with, and so Wei Wuxian reaches, slides his fingers between Lan Zhan's own, holding and clutching.

Like his own mother's son, the spectre of a woman he'd always been akin to, had always called upon in his actions, unknowing. Only one man loved him for that, in particular. More had resented him for the same.

Hand in hand, stilled for the moment, he breathes in, breathes out, adjusts how he kneels.

"Even at your worst, you weren't implacable. If we're all to be held only as our worst moments, Lan Zhan, then you should never forgive mine, mm? You carry guilt on strong shoulders, but have you ever learned how to forgive yourself for what was beyond you? I'm terrible at it, but I've been learning."

So many words, their flowing expanse over the deeper truth in rounded, smoothed stones below their surface. I care, you care. If you wish to give yourself up, give up on me, too.

"I want to be here," he says, after a pause and the dip of his lashes, eyes half shaded, words now difficult to parse. "With you, wherever you are. Wherever we are, and not wondering if I should feel that way, if you do, if it's gratitude I need to repay, a debt that can't be calculated. If you'd asked, before, it might have been. All of everything I could mold myself to be, for whatever I thought you wanted."

What does it mean, then, to qualify he wants to stay now, that he chooses, when his neck is ringed in damp and healing bruises, when his husband languors in the bath's sweet heat, when he shudders and collects himself from the grips of something larger, more compelling, more insidious than what stalked the depths of darkness back home. Still from a human heart, once. Now gone beyond, inhuman, feral. What does it mean, but to accept there are hurts they continue to cause, and healings they continue to foster, in spite of and because of who and what they are.

He was frightened of something like this, as a younger man, as one who worried over bonds that he had to uphold and find himself choked by, fettered and left less and less able to choose any path forward for all their contradictions. Bereft of them all, what then? To have and to hold, and to hold on to Lan Zhan's hand now, and to study his face, rather than let his eyes wander, because it can be admiration and curiosity and want and still be intrusion, too, whatever their titles, whatever their bond. He knows that, even in his carelessness for himself, for what a body is, what it gives, what it disguises.

Leans in, to press a kiss to Lan Zhan's forehead, dampened by cloth, and some perspiration perhaps in the heat. There is this, whatever it is, and while he can agree, I appear worth wanting, what he can only recently acknowledge is, I am worth wanting as I am. Close after, following, you see me, not who I was, and though it leaves them restless, though the scars of the past won't unmake themselves, they can loosen, snakes coiled that stretch slow and sumptuous under a summer's sun.

His lashes draw wetly together like spider's legs, shuddered in a death's dance. He listens. To understand is to turn base metals into gold.

Heat tames him, wafts and slinks and curls around them, diffuses the look of Wei Ying into a silhouette sixteen years soft. He has not gained the years, unlike the cracks and fractures where Wangji's skin has jotted down the start of time, offset by cultivation. Wei Ying will be beautiful in the way of flowers, for a spring's lifetime.

It aches Wangji, pores a well of pain the cloth clogs, briefly, that Wei Ying's mouth closes on his forehead. You are right, the world is wrong. His forehead slips, child-like, in the divot between Wei Ying's neck and collarbone, where the sharp of bone stabs at him, the telltale signature of years of starvation.

It strikes Lan Wangji, slap like sharp-fingered clawing, that he is loved.

"At Nightless City, I remember. His hand, your throat." Mid-air, limp and listless as a rag doll. Lan Wangji's hand, mirroring the clasp on Bichen then, steeling it now. She coos for him, pulse of friendly fire, the slow simmering of notes shaping a melody that does not crest. Of tension sustaining itself. Wei Ying, dancing in the skies of Nightless City, defying the pull down. Two images, juxtaposed. Lan Wangji lives so often in the here, the then, the combined now. "I learned. What is it to hold control of you? To have you for keeping. He squeezed. I think..."

He thinks, often, of men and of monsters. Brother downcast, brow like a summer tempest. Jin Guangyao, Meng Yao, a slip of coppered scales and a pale belly, slippery and moist, retreating behind garden stone. Thinks of Jin money, making Wen trials a mockery. Of the Wen, devising new perversities of torture and rape when their fires failed to shatter all into ashen crumbs.

"He was a man who was a ruin. Who understood decay." Motes and debris and haunting things and mirrors that showed him as smoke. Who led the Wen? And Wangji, when the beam of his gaze crosses the lavish spread of Wei Ying's mouth and he thinks, it's Wen Ruohan who moves it broad. "He wanted you fractured in pieces he could know and own."

A lesser man possesses in destruction. Whittles down beauty, until it comes at a level palatable, until it no longer blights his eyes. Ghosts shrieked silent and muttered discontent at each step on their brittle monument of bones. Wangji walked those stairs, knelt those men, knew Nightless City, knew the Wen, knows himself. "At times, I want you reduced in parts small enough to savour. I squeeze. I want to swallow whole."

Absorption is way for one person to breathe inside the skins of another. Cannibalism. Dual cultivation. Intercourse. Impregnation. It is safer to exist communally than as separate individuals. What are the merits of being, distinct? 'Soulmate' is a concept of fundamental division.

Neglected, Bichen slips free of his hand with a tired, sullen thud. The floors mourn, groan, under the perpetual gnawing of vermin. Lan Wangji's gaze drips up like morning light, pale and insincere. He thinks of foolish young shamelessness, of adolescent cultivators who chase to kiss a ghost. Thinks, if he lingers here, he will be pale and wooden and squalor.

He breathes Wei Ying. Five days, he has not breathed Wei Ying. Sixteen years of deficit, and now they compound it more. "I do not love well."

The weight of one man's head, and Wei Wuxian bids his eyes rise, not dip downward, not flirt with glances which might, somehow through the thickened curtain of the long, black tresses draped down over Lan Zhan's shoulders, bare skin. His husband has asked this much of him, and he speaks, further, thus listening is his duty. Hear.

Harken back to the weight his head must have been on his sister's lap, and there's a softened fierceness, a warmth, that floods through him even with the chill of water's kiss, of damp, of heat rising and inundating his pulled back sleeves. Scared of this, as a younger man. Strength is not always what he's understood it to be.

"Mm," he says, and the hum of soft assertion vibrates in his throat, the beat of dragonfly wings. Wen Ruohan and his greed, his inability to understand what command meant if it were not in the way he wished it, where the compromise of surrender and guidance called on horrifying possibilities, invited the sweeping gesture that was Wei Wuxian's bold claim to end a war, within proximity. Even the men who followed, tripping over their lowered robes as easily as their lowered sense of justice for any but themselves, could never quite grasp the sacrifice inherent in keeping from true demonic cultivation.

He does not mourn any of their lack of insight. Doesn't rejoice in it, either. Only considers where Lan Zhan might swallow, and what Wei Wuxian will accept, trusting those teeth across his throat will graze, not tear. They are each born greedy men, striving after different wholes destined to lack completeness.

Bichen's fall startles him from this quiet, from the room he makes for Lan Zhan's words alone, and their combined pulse, the weight of him not quite in his arms, the lapping water at the tub's sides, shush, shush.

"Learn with me," he says, any of the thousand of things that occur to him he might say. He does not love well either, but for different faultlines across the expanse of his heart. Too great, he supposes, his capacity to care, and love as a word from Lan Zhan's mouth strikes him hot, a brand invisible, heat rising to bleed a blush up his neck, flowing in reverse, to his ears, to the expanse of his cheeks. Love is not a word that sits easy in his flirtatious mouth, too direct, too honest, too private, but who are they now but private with each other?

"The only way we love better," he says, and he stumbles, throat thick and catching and dry all at once on that word, on the love he frames for being theirs, for being specific, particular, unique, "Is in learning."

Love, he thinks. What is love but a grand adventure, with the pains and trials that come along with breaking through to find that path ongoing, shared underneath the same skies, hand in hand as often as they're sundered by temporary circumstance? If they must be, he thinks to himself. If these days past, if the time he stood in fox's pelt, if the thousand tiny ways they cannot live within each other's skins aren't a lesson in and of themselves, learning to align two bodies, two hearts, two spirits, to fill in each other's spaces, invade by invitation, possess by permission, and settle, even when they stood shoulder to shoulder across a divide of time, space, agony.

The search for breath starts with starvation, then urgency, then fear, then inhalation. On Wei Ying, the weight of the cultivation world is tangle of dark-wetted weeds, Lan Wangji's head reduced to white noise and its ornaments. Scratch and scrape, where pins still bind back tresses loosened. Damp has triaged his hair, made noose of the half that it has not born a mourning shroud over his forehead, his heated cheeks.

He gasps with it, chases Wei Ying's pulse with eyes beaded and round, a cat set on prey.

"...a-Yuan? Safe" Between them they share the lacquered, temple beads of a secret, rolling like dull, hollow heartbreak. He does not reduce Sizhui to his infancy often, to the years of his innocence as if his identity among the Lan is unrepresentative. But they are family, Wei Ying frames him.

He presses the tip of his nose against Wei Ying's collar, then, calmly peels back, until he is alone, severed, distant — orbiting the bath's lip again, easing in until his hair succumbs and spreads like a wild net in lake waters. A lotus flower, unfurling. In Lotus Pier, they eat and bruise and wear the blossoms in their hair. What would they make of him, so vulnerably ready for the killing?

"If he asks of your marks, speak their truth." A man should not lie to his one son.

"He'll know, if he asks. He's been safe. He's been well." A sigh, but one in fondness, as Lan Zhan makes of himself a whole that possesses the space of the tub and its waters in the slow, spreading, unfurling manner of an easing.

Wei Wuxian reaches for the wash rag, left draped over the lip, and rewets it, sets to his work again, with a small turn of his lips, and a smaller shake of his head.

"Wen Qing, too, because I don't have the steel in me to lie to her, and Jiang Cheng can recognise what his hands might have once done." If Wei Wuxian had lacked a core at the time of Jiang Cheng's parent's murder, if the massacre of Lotus Pier hadn't been in that liminal space between an assurance of stability, of sanctity, and the gaping maw of war. More voracious than any one of them, and as blind as anyone could be. Blinder still than his martial uncle.

But he rubs cleansing circles down Lan Zhan's arm, strokes fingers through his floating locks of hair to coax them away, tend to his chest without undue lingering or ceremony. Pays no heed to the scar of the brand, beyond the fact of its existence, and says instead:

"Can we have tea with them all?" Meaning, moreso, the family I will not have once we are gone from here?

He is cared for. Webs of flimsy-thin oil in kaleidoscopic translucence, spume snagged on skin. Wei Ying weighs him with touch and teasing attention, wet of the rag enshrouding muscle where it's bloated, skin that's cracked, the deep-sculpted rivulets of his gashes. His bruises weep their gratitude. He leans into it, willow-like and soft, here to allow Wei Ying the greater expanse of work between his neck and clavicle, there to shudder like a breeze dancing leaves on string.

He is himself, absent ownership of his bones, accountability. Limbs move in familiar geometries Wei Ying yokes to whim, then the slipper gravity of his cloth, seeking shadows of filth. Enough on Lan Wangji, at first, to raise a palace of silt and debris. It scrapes off him in thin, crackled skins, polluting waters that roil and round, waves hard breaking.

When his moan crests, round, is when Wei Ying's cloth finds his temple, as if by accident, and the blackening there burns in pleasant waves of synchronised, dull torture. He is a child again, subject to uncle and large doting hands and attendants. His father's heir, his brother's spare, his mother's son.

"Enough." But he turns his head, so his lips spill rich and wet prints of stunted affection on Wei Ying's knuckles, when he catches them, in passing. Later, when he is armed with his ribbon again, he might pay this pale branch of a hand its due. "Fetch your wine."

Early, grey and slate and white morning. No hour for drink. Yet. "You wish to be my husband." I am, Wei Ying will curse him back, but there are notions to have, and notions to hold, and truths relative in this world, shaking. "Sit with me without purpose. Why do you want this? Tea."

The pretence of a happy, lost family, when Wen Qing does not meet their eyes, Xiao Xingchen cannot perceive them, and Jiang Cheng would sooner claw them out.

"Don't tell me you'll drink," he says, but the worry is there in his eyes, at the low growl of a sound that was, he supposed, a moan, but a different sort of animal than the man who'd chased him through this room, out to the threshold of the woods and into their prison of shadow and swallowed starlight. He breathes out, the cage of his lungs holding his heart in all its prickled, light bleeding finery, and he moves, looking for yes, one jar, though it does not remain here. The wash rag drapes again over the tub's lip, streaked in water and grime and polished with something like hope, but less acrid to the taste.

He heads for the door, glancing back before he reaches to open it, to step past sliding frame for anything else. Dampness beads on his fingertips, sliding down, pulled by gravity and happenstance to the boards underfoot, still holding strength despite the many millions of mouths chewing their way through them, one single breath at a time.

"You're my husband," as simple declaration. "If you're not decided on me yet, get around to it. The wine's downstairs, Lan Zhan, you really want it?"

Not he, who drinks more when he hides away from what he feels is beyond his grasping fingers to change, when his mind is too loud, his thoughts too inescapable, and he needs that freedom from the weight of himself. Drinking as he walks, as he sits, as he slips closer and closer to slumber, but doesn't quite tumble over into the sea of sleep. No words yet, on the why. Words that will follow with less reluctance than Little Apple under only his guiding hand on the pathways across the country spanning far beyond the realm of five clans fractured down into four, to where everything is not clan and birthing and birthright, where people remain as beautiful and crass as they've been here, as incredible and horrible as people might be in any mortal place, tied deeply to mortal concerns.

"For you. Wine, water, tea. Morning millet." More fat on jutting bones that all but spark when they connect with Lan Wangji's shoulders, his arms, his back, pained and painful in friction. "To ease Wei Ying sweet."

Because you are thorns, plague on my fingertips. Because I catch you and bloody myself wounded, because I peel away skins, I'd lend you bone. Pain is pedestrian, a whim slivered. To suffer for Wei Ying is no more a hardship than to dance his fingers on the bath's rim, to hold the beat. A learned peculiarity. He is silent when Wei Ying shifts, and the orbit of Wangji's world quakes and distorts itself around a new, gently eclipsed epicentre.

His hand curls on the bath's lip, thumb drifts into an opening that the softest provocation could transform into an anchor. He does not reach.

"Tea, with them." The witnesses, the clan and name-bound, the family. He knows how men are hungry: how they take and they take, starved, with both hands, and choke after, because want does not always find the body willing. "To what end?"

To conform, to be complicit. So that Wei Ying, who has awarded Lan Wangji the pretence of a marriage might give his chosen few the conceit of happiness. He subtracts himself so often from his own life that Wangji must wonder, in whole and part, how much of it he witnesses through clouded glass. How much he dreams. How much surprises him. An actor, at once performing and beholding his own play.

And hushed, before Wei Ying may hasten with retaliation, "This is no shame. I claimed you before ancestors and heavens. I ask to understand."

A pause at the threshold, and he smiles, shakes his head, turns around.

"You know me," he says, and there's enough truth there as he returns to the side of the tub, to where the warmth beckons, to where light slants in through the windows and speaks of early hours, not his known favourites for movement. "I'm going back to bed after you're cleaned up."

As if it's jesting, when it's also true: he'll finally catch more of sleep, elusive at the best of times, knowing Lan Zhan is safe, cared for, tended to, warm. He'll eat, he'll drink, he'll make whatever merry strikes after that, and so for this question asked as he kneels again, his husband's companion at his bathside station, his hand finding Lan Zhan's, to rest on it, to press down light, to pause.

"They're people who matter to me. We have enough sorrow we share with those we care about, those who care about us. I can't find it wrong to want to share some of the joy, too."

To see if Lan Zhan understands that, where Wei Wuxian's once bafflement, once brief born anger, long standing wrestling with the idea that he deserves anything like choice in a life he had no right to have been granted, sat, there is a hope that grows with roots deep in the earth, unfurling petals to an uncaring sky. A weed can be as tenacious, and no less important, no less part of what he wants to give, what he wants to share, to those who are his family. To those who are already gone, but are reachable now, where Wen Qing's body was rendered to ash and spread on the wind, her soul irreparably shattered. To where his martial uncle's soul is shattered too, from other heart-sad avenues.

Let there be some positive, some warmth, some indication of life that grows in the people who find each other through its worst, like his sister, visiting to share with him her wedding gown, the one he'd never see her married in, and with her soup. Fed, heart and body, by the warmth of her affection, her regard.

What is it men do, when they are neither children nor monsters, but the transient, mundane emptiness between these states? When they must decide, if, like planets, they can love themselves and pull and yoke and tether others close? When they are simply, intrinsically insufficient and their only chance of survival is not the autonomy of amputating half of their soul's yearnings, but finding a pair?

They marry in this life and the next, the heavens their sullen witness. He does not flinch when Wei Ying's fingers insinuate themselves, a warm blanket overlapped, when Lan Wangji's head roams in tumble, and his cheek crosses Wei Ying's knuckles on the bathtub's edge, and there is stillness between — that moment when a fissure must decide whether it will rot into breakage, or trip back into balance, whether the matter it sink or come afloat.

And he warns, pale ash in his mouth, "This is not a marriage they will understand."

A binding of fates and blood and curse and qi, and no sanctity of romance, no trinkets of gifting, no honeyed courtship. No beauty of youth swollen to great convexity with each conventional milestone marked, each merit earned.

He thinks, they are great proud fools, stones stabbing seas and failing to broker ships their passage. Their door game is carnage, their red was the war.

Softened, like the warmth of air beside him, an exhalation, "We shall have tea."

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