out you go, shoo

[groundrules]

READY TO ROLL OUT

That awkward moment when even a brothel won’t have you.

Characters will end their sojourn at the House of Dew early morning, helmed by Haltham (and his murderous goat, chomping on his prosthetic wooden hand for splinter nutrients). Courtesans and attendants will send the group away with parting gifts: a few sacs of grains, handfuls of spice, a small barrel of brew, several of water, thin blankets and four fat chickens.

The decrepit farm stands an hour’s walk east of Sa-Hareth, bordering the forest at the foot of the mountain. ...and it has not wanted for company. Monstrously overgrown wolves prowl the region, with some of the pack settled inside the farm. The wolves are halfway between dead and living, instantly aggressive, sharper, faster, smarter and blue-eyed beyond natural expectation. The wolves are drawn to heat and fire-bearers. They can be slain, or pushed back into the forest. If the brawl drags on, the wolves may receive reinforcements. Distantly, characters can observe silhouettes of pale-eyed, humanoid creatures in the forest, covered in animal skins. They seem to speak to the wolves, though it is unclear if they soothe or set them to attack.

Once an elaborate woodsmen’s station, the 'farm' is a generous, sprawling outpost built, home to now-barren inner garden. The farm spreads across kitchens, bathing rooms, hefty storage barns, a handful of isolated rest halls and broader communal areas. A study room has been crammed with accountancy tomes, papers and other books, many torn alongside glass shards on the floor. A shakily furnished barn was coarsely repurposed for banquets. Set up, inspect, repurpose. There’s enough dust and mildew to go around, and several walls and roof stretches will need reinforcements. “Ah,” characters say innocently, “Surely the cold will keep away vermin —” You have rats. Large, uncuddly, distinctly violent, prone to swarming once the sun’s downed. Enjoy that first night. Haltham will provide some base construction supplies over a few deliveries, along with a personal gift: a herding dog, to watch over two fluffy sheep. Flex those green thumbs: many moons ago, enchantments were set in place to warm the garden to a tolerable level that will allow the expedited harvest of an arctic patch. These spells will need to be activated and periodically recharged every few days by characters donating recoverable amounts of magic or physical stamina, by touching a nearby rune. But, hey: potatoes, turnips, kale, mmmmmmmmm, a balanced diet.

“Never open your doors at night,” Haltham says on parting. Lend him an ear — and, once the moon rises, hear the forest whispers. Some voices will beg rescue from the cold, others will tease and taunt, a few will imitate enemies or kin. Some will even disrupt dreams. The voices will seek to lure characters out of their shelter. Those who heed will find themselves compelled to walk into the forest, entranced and ignorant of the cold that slowly envelops them. They will be vulnerable to the elements, tundra predators and the woodland creatures, growing increasingly feral. Those who survive the night in the forest will wake to find themselves floating in a chilled, but strangely not-yet frozen lake in the morning. They can have faint recollections, as if they themselves lived any of the following events: a friend taking a dark path, the loss of a dear skill, years in a coffin, a close friend parted, a beloved reunion, a lost brother, a tender romance and rare bliss in poverty. At the bottom of the lake, they may spot the still corpse of an undead that feels too heavy for anyone to lift. His arm has a tattooed red sleeve. During the day, characters who visit the forest will find it eerily silent, with some trees showing signs of scratches and lingering rope. The lake can still be found, but entering it during daytime will not allow characters to experience foreign memories.

Karsa will reconfigure everyone’s quartz pieces to translate outside of the House of Dew and communicate in a private channel. Still nothing like individual inboxes at this time! Up to player discretion if Karsa had the time and humour to change their usernames, or stranded them to their House of Dew identities a little longer. Characters will also be able to access a secondary local fishermen’s network and listen in on their schedules, local gossip and daily weather updates. Woodsmen, tradesmen and miners will be surprised to see anyone inhabiting the farm, with some men pulling away, calling the place cursed.

Comments

[downswing]

And he...? 

The moment draws out, thickened with anticipation, prickling his fingers, his tongue. What does he make of them, this makeshift, imbalanced medley of characters, rather than comrades? Most have introduced themselves by name. A handful, by nature.

With certainty, he knows only this: too many children stand among them. Frightful or frightened or distant shades of themselves, distorting their hearts to fit in lead and iron and become instruments, to carry out the merchant's design. Weak, not for the absence of their strength in prospect or potential, but the for time stolen of them, to ripen that prowess. Unprotected.

Seamlessly, Lan Wangji transitions, from one score of empty notes to the next, muscle memory both saving and disgracing the performance: he plays equitably, each string pulled with pained mathematical precision to the same distance and angle as its predecessor, afforded similar strain and weight. No heat in it, only perfunctory distraction. Wei Ying deserves better than the sterile knife blade of his absent mind. 

"I trust." Sizhui. Wei Ying. The names implicit and complicit, foregone conclusions. He raised one, from his milk name to his adulthood. Bore the other, heartbeats before, on his own back. There can be no question, no aggression beyond the sudden, limpid pinch of a note out of order, more to wake himself with the violence of the juxtaposition, than to improve the score. Wei Ying and Sizhui, close to heart. And the others — at inevitable sword's length. 

Make friends, but Zewu-Jun isn't here to guide his hand. Make friends, but summer is when happiness comes easily, and this winter draws long. He should not make its ice sting.

"The dead are hard of hearing here." They do not heed, hardly listen. And Wei Ying, at the cusp of barely revived power, a river finding the heart its flow, only to temper its beat before the artificial limitations of a world unprepared for its majesty. "Tell me in honesty you are defended."

And Lan Wangji will not ask again, will not presume to injure with the conceit of his concern. He will let eyes wander in the wake of Wei Ying's magical effervescence, subdued by his lacking core, like the desaturating bloom of a tepid sunset, come twilight. He will tolerate the lack of guarantees, Wei Ying's penchant to shroud himself in risk and ambiguity, so long as he has at least the one weapon that isn't his embittered mind or sweetened tongue. If a swordsman cannot wield a blade, and a necromancer cannot trust in the dead, what is he? ( Prey. ) 

[weifinder]

"Against what?" he says, not flippant, though he has been in the past. He's gone from a half false lounging into a slow and collected sit, until his legs are crossed and his hands rest on his knees and he's staring at the man playing guqin, moving from that regard for his fingers and his hands to his wrists, his chest, his chin. He eventually looks to Lan Zhan's eyes, not a protracted assault on visual stimuli as much as a measured way to work himself to the point of looking him eye to eye.

"What's at play in this world is different. Resentful energies... those listen. Maybe decaying ears make it harder for the bodied," he says, and it's with a faint twist of his lips, a jest that he doesn't find an explanation to the why, but amuses him nonetheless. "But here... Lan Zhan, you must wonder, too. The high ranked creatures, did you ever catch sight of them when..."

He rubs at his wrists, both shying away from their period of bondage and an older memory, a different set of chains, different salivating animals locked in rooms he could not escape. The haunt of the farm here, the herder of the two sheep with their tendency to ball snow in their fur when they inevitably escape their warmer holding, bah-bah to this place, bleating weakening reprimands before inevitably nipped and herded in close, shivering.

He, who makes binding or bonding an undecided name for twenty years, knows chaining as something else again. His expression tired, eyes a touch more sunken now when he doesn't smile to make the whole of his face at least look more warmly welcoming. He is not easy with this playing, but he's steady through it and the considerations, as he says, "I will need a blade," and he means, a common one, soulless, and he does not look pleased. "Bow and quiver, arrows to match. That, at least, I can make." A boyhood and training and the necessity of invention; a decent bow can be coaxed into existence, a decent sword does not simply spring forth of the lands and fall, gently rusted, at his feet.

"If I remember there are... there is no reason to pretend I am what I'm not," that he isn't half a wreck, that he is not the cultivator they once knew him to be, "Then I'm better armed, and defended, than when pretending for the sake of protecting the people I was desperate to save."

When the cultivation sects would have swarmed over him, feeding like locusts, stripping him down to fragments of bone far sooner than they had while they feared his power and his perversion, to turn away from the sword to walk the dark, narrow road brushing against the condemned, then slipping off entirely into that darkness. He is free of that pretense here, and months leaned into the knowing of his limits.

His fingers curl into his palms. He inhales, closes his eyes, exhales.

"I can convince these undead minds to listen, Lan Zhan, but I'm not sure we can survive their attention. Better a foot soldier than a general." Easily overlooked, versus the targeted figurehead, given what they were brought here for, and what dangling temptation before the starving, freezing cold will do.

"I'm defended, but not for what we've yet to see." Circling back to what he'd touched on before, the ones who drove the Unhalad foot soldiers, the haunts which were not quite as human seeming, if they'd ever been human at all. The mermaids, their obsession, is a fishy, cloying memory at the back of his tongue. "Nor are my defenses against the elements what yours are, but they're better yet than an army man's."

He pauses, fingers slow to relax, lips twitching into a frown and neutral to a smile, then to nothing again.

"Lan Zhan... How are you?"

[downswing]

...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.

He wavers, but, "Do not tell him so."

[weifinder]

The nod of his head, acceptance of a sword in the future, one with a name because blades deserve names, even when they're not spiritual weapons. Jiang Yanli had named Chenqing, but the reasoning for it stays with him even now, without Suibian, the blade he could not use to its fullest extent.

Here, he could wield another blade. The secrets he'd once been keeping didn't apply; the way of dealing death in defense here was simpler in some ways, easily delivered even if he was out of practise by two years, three years, and sixteen of darkness inbetween.

He closes his eyes, opens them again to watch Lan Zhan, the one who knows him. The one who expects him, sometimes, to be the man he was a lifetime ago, and who to blame for it? That's the man he lost, and the years that spanned between them were filled with phantoms that Wei Wuxian hadn't known, in his dark existence of passing time and nothing, nothing else.

Selfishness, censure. Not brought on by one man's wish, but the wishing changes the feel of it, and that's a story he knows.

"I wouldn't." Even unasked, the heart of what it said, that a father preferred to know his son, to stand by him, with him, even in this situation, that he could be safe and not left walking the salt caverns... it's not as simple as a wish, or a deliverance. Were Lan Zhan not here, Lan Sizhui might still have been. Were Wei Wuxian not here, any one of them might still have been. "... Foundations rebuild, Lan Zhan. You're his rock; I wouldn't change that."

Not in Sizhui's eyes, though with those words, he deflates, turning into the tired husk he's been that fills again with the pale sips of slumber padding out the flesh stretched over his bones. Night after night, with the winds...

"This is a very bothersome sanctuary," he says, "And I forced Yiling to yield to the living."

[downswing]

"It welcomed you." Truth for truth, let no man shortchange the Patriarch. Let no voice presume. When no other rose to accept the Patriarch, the Burial Mounds opened like a peony, war petals blood-stained, but forgiving. The sects failed, where a wasteland triumphed.

It strikes him, hand paused over the strings, watchful of Wei Ying's half-resting face at close distance, he should speak the apology, due. Does not. What indulgence, to give it only to assuage his own guilt? Instead, he shift:

"Shhhhhhhhhh." Silence. Be soft and stilled and a shadow, dissipating into darkness. Sleep.

Lan Wangji pivots, from the serenity of his play to a fresh, mundane, unsophisticated score — a set reserved for the flute, better suited in gladness to brother's xiao. There is a warm, ephemeral, butterfly-like quality that the guqin mistranslates into the rigors of mourning, coaxing out grief. A petulant, sullen, sophomoric instrument, compared with Zewu-Jun's mastery. Inflexible.

Now, he forces it into mountain song, a chirped, negligent melody, the rise and fall of easy notes known. He remembers the words — every man of Caiyi might — and though it would scratch at all of Uncle's sensibilities to sully the guqin with a crude performance, there are matters likely to earn Wei Ying's comfort, his laughter. "Share your burden."

A pause. Then, to sweeten the endeavour, "I cannot burn your paraphernalia tomorrow, if I am holding the wards."

The feral nest, ransomed.

[weifinder]

He huffs laughter, lips curling up in a smile that's less haunted than it once would have been. Emerging from the Burial Mounds had not left him feeling good, it had been anger fueling him; rage that directed, that made him sharp and jagged, that had left a trail they'd followed until he was once more among those who gave a damn about him, and he felt how poorly he fit, the secret filling the hollow of his dantian making him less than what they expected, making him other than he was before. Or was he?

Was he?

The Burial Mounds welcomed everyone, really, too ravenous to not, but in the end he had done the impossible. Yunmeng Jiang, to the core. Hah.

The smile lingers, with the hush and the music that Lan Zhan coaxes, fitting and otherwise, from his instrument; in another space and time, Wei Wuxian might tease for it, but this is Lan Zhan trying, and he does more than enough, doesn't he?

Laughter, its own reward. A chuckle that rumbles in his chest and finds its way out his throat, over his tongue and between his lips, his eyes fluttering open as he offers, "Want me to sing along?"

To face sharing a burden, to feel himself bartered and bribed, and to find it warm, amusing, and... welcome. "You have too much fun burning what you do," he says, summoning up a pout better suited to his younger years, and equally unconcerned. "Hold the wards, and have your fun with fire. I'm not taking that away from you."

The playful amusement behind it, when yes, he's frustrated with it at times, but Wei Wuxian has his own gravitational chaos, and it does take others reminding him to have it organise into anything less than the sprawl his temporary lodgings quickly become.

[downswing]

"You could not take from me," he says with the smug satisfaction of a man who knows himself seen, understood for the wickedness of his needs. He may burn Wei Ying's nest, yes, with petty gladness, until the scraps and chords and chipped trinkets and drying paints and the drafts of Wei Ying's latest aborted talisman combine as a gasp in tireless flame. If Wei Wuxian, the Yiling Patriarch, wanted a man dead, who could stop him? And if Lan Wangji, styled Hanguang-Jun, wants the universe at balance, who might stay his hand?

...Wei Ying. Wei Ying, mouth soft and shaping the swelling, overly joyous cadence of the countryside song. Wei Ying, who never breathes a note, but teases, Want me to —

Yes. Sixteen's years worth of ridicule and teasing, and isn't Lan Wangji owed? A lifetime of an equal's judgement. Wei Ying's. Ledger red, You never honoured your obligations to your soulmate.

He rushes, foolishly, and slaps his hand from the hills and valleys of the guqin strings beneath him to Wei Ying's forehead, sliding down to shield the dark of his eyes. Sealing there, as if Wei Ying were young Sizhui, cantankerous before his bed time, yearning for the good, undisciplined life of the Burial Mounds.

Lan Sizhui has learned obedience, since. He unlearns it now. A good boy. A lesser one stands before Lan Wangji now. ( He will learn too, Wei Ying was ever the superior scholar. ) "Want you rested."

[weifinder]

He laughs, twice over: for the smugness of you could not take, and for the hand that finds his forehead, that covers his eyes. He can't remember if Yanli ever did this, and that's the extent of childhood that can emerge from the murky depths of a past he more often forgets than lets himself linger on, but he can imagine she did, in their injuries, in their fevers.

It's surrender, one he doesn't fight and push and instead settles back, humming a two-tone note that follows from the end of Lan Zhan's playing, lips still curled, but eyes closing under Lan Zhan's touch. The curl of his eyelashes plays against the other man's palm, capitulation.

"Okay, okay. I'll rest," he says, but not promise. Promises feel weighted and worthless, and he's tired enough he can sink down into the sea of it, a blackness barren of ill will beyond whatever dreams might strike, lying in wait. "For a while."

Before called back to wakefulness, be it due to cold or his own sleep rising to the realm of nightmares and waking him hence; be it habit now to move around in the hours of light they have, to trek down to the citadel and trek back, as if the hour each direction is a joy and not tiring on its own.

For now, however, sleep, and the fall of breathing to more even cadences, the wash of wakefulness from langly limbs, and stilled, Wei Wuxian slumbers for just this bit longer, by his soulmate's wish.