...when. But their eyes bear into one another, baleful, and dark and the sun of early morning seeps too cold and resolute in pinches and stabs and washes over Wei Ying until the depth of his strain shows, the white of his knuckles incandescent. Too frail for storm and confrontation.
"You will have a blade," Lan Wangji speaks the words with the conviction of a man who has yet to earn his keep, but trusts inevitably in the forgery, direct and metaphorical, of others. Supine, coiled like a serpent's ring-bracelet, the boy Eleven's garotte wire hangs limp and light in the treasury of his sleeve. There is skill among them, opportunity. And if Wei Ying wishes a sword, there is also —
But she shivers for him, corrects him in faint turbulence. Bichen, deserted to the follies of her sheath, yet to be drawn out past the routine forms of training or swift, artless execution. Wait, wait.
And then — how is he. The entity that remains, shadow-like and diffused, when the crown is removed, the laced paraphernalia, the insignia of his silks. When the chief cultivator deftly excuses himself, when Hanguang-Jun absents from wars he cannot riddle for their rights and their wrongs once more. When Lan Wangji lacks trailing licks of dusk dark in his hand, bereft Yin iron.
Lan Zhan, beneath his layers, a stripped and relative unknown. A painful, electric necessity, a soft binding of particles. How is Lan Zhan, unasked since childhood, spared inquisition even from his brother's tongue?
"...eroded." Defenceless, hand thoughtless over the guqin, watching it watch him, finding its balance. His fingers dance the edge of it, and he releases the summon with an empty exhalation. "I wished, selfishly, for my son beside me. Now he is here."
Facing their hardships, the chills, the battles, the unknown. The dead and their sleeplessness.
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"You will have a blade," Lan Wangji speaks the words with the conviction of a man who has yet to earn his keep, but trusts inevitably in the forgery, direct and metaphorical, of others. Supine, coiled like a serpent's ring-bracelet, the boy Eleven's garotte wire hangs limp and light in the treasury of his sleeve. There is skill among them, opportunity. And if Wei Ying wishes a sword, there is also —
But she shivers for him, corrects him in faint turbulence. Bichen, deserted to the follies of her sheath, yet to be drawn out past the routine forms of training or swift, artless execution. Wait, wait.
And then — how is he. The entity that remains, shadow-like and diffused, when the crown is removed, the laced paraphernalia, the insignia of his silks. When the chief cultivator deftly excuses himself, when Hanguang-Jun absents from wars he cannot riddle for their rights and their wrongs once more. When Lan Wangji lacks trailing licks of dusk dark in his hand, bereft Yin iron.
Lan Zhan, beneath his layers, a stripped and relative unknown. A painful, electric necessity, a soft binding of particles. How is Lan Zhan, unasked since childhood, spared inquisition even from his brother's tongue?
"...eroded." Defenceless, hand thoughtless over the guqin, watching it watch him, finding its balance. His fingers dance the edge of it, and he releases the summon with an empty exhalation. "I wished, selfishly, for my son beside me. Now he is here."
Facing their hardships, the chills, the battles, the unknown. The dead and their sleeplessness.
He wavers, but, "Do not tell him so."