stage iii

[groundrules]

THE ASHES

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Rathakku’s forces deepen their siege, with sharp-clawed harpies, fire-bearing catapults and archers raining hell upon Alem. The last two watch towers collapse, along with half the roof of the Keep. Several structural pillars dissolve and most windows shatter.

The Lord Who Waits has tired of patience.

HIGH CASTLE

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■ Attack is vicious and perpetual: Rathakku’s creatures descend from above, harpies make lairs in dark corners, and the fallen rise as undead enemies. Rathakku now necromances even the recently deceased, who retain a sense of personhood. Characters with mind control and necromantic abilities can take over these units. The recently resurrected have yet to decay substantially and hide they perished in order to infiltrate.

■ The dragon Irenia dips in to breathe frost onto Rathakku’s forces, but never lingers long. She disappears on March 20 but will return post-Arc.

■ Aware of his native Ellethia’s implicit role in raising Rathakku, Zenobius offers to teach you how to use the rare metals and saltpetre of Alem to create generous explosives — a set that triggers a very high blast, and a smaller shipment that can annihilate any magic — including death and summoning sorcery — in a 20-metre radius for two hours. Zenobius is a hard, curmudgeony taskmaster: expect to be worked and criticised to the bone.

■ Expect frequent quakes in the fortress, as catapults strike and the roof and pillars wobble. A hard winter is no longer contained by shattered doors and windows. Fire kindle and other supplies run scarce. Huddle together.

■ Paladins fall into zealotry, calling to sacrifice young princess Cle-Florens to ensure their success in battle. Deimar does not dissuade them, but lowers the number of guards protecting Cle-Florens’ quarters.

■ The voices that haunted Alem now multiply, increasingly likely to drag you into a dream-like state to descend into the glacier lakes underground. Spy thereabout at night, and you spot demonic fire sirens of golden scales, who gather in the fourth glacier lake’s cave to urgently complete their task before Alem falls. Their leader produces a purse of dark glass shards. A siren painfully transforms her tail into human legs by consuming such glass — she intends to infiltrate the fortress as a refugee. Sign up for a RNG thread to interrogate this mermaid.

■ With a few more shard crumbs, the sirens summon a ‘Jatharin’ — a fast dispersing silhouette that floats ethereally. They give it a white-silver string punish Prince Haiva for wronging a sister.

■ The Jatharin survives only two hours in the human realm. It lacks human consciousness and memory, remembering little of its target’s description and pursuing what ‘young men (with pale hair)’ it finds in the Wards. It is invisible to all who did not witness its birth — so keep your companions out of its way. It approaches a target and chains itself to them with a shadowy ‘umbilical chord,’ before sucking dry their life force. It can also deplete energy through... mouth-on-mouth action. Clean executions: Victims make no sound and barely shudder throughout their entrapment. Some say, these are painless deaths.

■ Sirens summon a Jatharin for three nights.

	HARPIES Fast, perpetually furious, prone to consuming human flesh. Deterred by loud noise and vibrations. Imbue their claws with poisons that prevent blood coagulation, extending bleed-outs.
	CATAPULTS Deliver projectiles of stone, fire and minor explosives. Rathakku’s most ferocious instrument, taking down Alem’s foundations. Manned by four undead apiece. Sturdy but slow, best targeted aerially.
	FIRE SIRENS Native to Hell. Deeply bound to ‘sisters’ and ‘family.’ Possess golden scales and shards of the previously encountered dark water mirrors. Their song is tinny but compelling. Their speaking voices are crackling and gravelly. Survive the glacier lakes’ cold by exuding flame. Skin burns to touch.
	JATHARIN Smokey, dispersing silhouette. Invisible to those who did not witness its birth. Kills by consuming life energy. Descended from the Motherless of Hell. Cannot be outright stopped, only avoided, enslaved or consumed. Can be distracted if you take an aspect similar to Haiva. Leaves a golden string on unintended victims.

THE DEPARTING

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■ King Deimar orders caravans to urgently evacuate, carrying refugees and provisions through mountain routes into a new settlement. Able men, guards, healers and merchants make preparations around the clock and will gladly accept, command or guilt your assistance. Help them.

■ Courtesy of Jimmy and Nacho, merchants Batthour and Eles provide some last-minute wagons and resources. An Alison-coached Deimar strikes a tenuous agreement for supplies.

■ Having received ‘healing’ flowers, Prince Haiva seems entirely recovered — far more confident, he menaces guards to assist the caravans. Deimar watches uneasily. Haiva asks the party to lead the refugees through the icy mountain passageways, where Rathakku’s immense bat demons loom.

■ The caravans journey to a well-warded settlement near the base of the mountain — former paladin monastery Hassir. Those who wish to avoid conflict can remain here. Prepare to kill any wandering pursuers, before they may alert Rathakku of the settlement's location.

	MOUNTAIN BATS Monstrous, blood-thirsting. To the size of 1.5-3 metres. Bulky, quicker to use their brawns than their speed. Stalk together, but compete for food and want to drag their prey to some great distance before consuming it, for privacy. Use that time to escape.
	HUNTSMEN Undead forces, typically old resurrections of Rathakku. Once human natives of Alem. Excellent knowledge of hiding spots and the mountain. Hostile, take perverse pleasure in the game. Will prolong a chase for sport and give their hungering hounds the chance to catch you. Unusual kinship with local animals, who sometimes obey them. Some scent blood.

COME HELL, THEN DARK WATER

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Hell is ruthless, but pragmatic — and must be sealed, before Rathakku controls Alem and weaponises it.

The growing cracks in Alem’s underground Room of Seals widen to reveal full-fledged stairs. More and more demons emerge as the rifts broaden. You have mere days to close Hell, ICly starting on 18 March.

■ Back/forward date your posts and logs as needed. Network access is spottier in Hell. Deimar’s paladins accompany the group.

■ To prevent the outpour of Hell, you must reach Level III and record disrupting at least three Motherless.

■ Each level of Hell shows shallow stains or streams of the familiar ‘dark water.’

LEVEL I

■ The Room of Seal leads into an underground stone passageway. Demons and skeletons are chained to stones or pillars, begging water. The dead are fickle: some offer directions, others answers to your questions. Most lie for their own gain.

■ The stairwell to Level II is behind locked gates, on a stone dais framed by a wall of flames. To reach it, cross a threadbare walkway of bones in a large hall room that has largely submerged into lava.

■ If the bridge ruptures, jump onto the nearby talking floating skeleton heads. Skeletal hands reach out to destabilise or drag you into the fire waters, as do demonic lava mermaids.

■ As you near the dais, the wall of flames might depict either the time when Thyvault’s people slaughtered the lava sirens, or your worst memory of betraying or failing someone. That same person is found shackled with long chains on the dais. If you never wronged anyone, this is someone to whom you are dearly indebted. At times plaintive, at others incensed, they appeal to your guilt or goodwill, bartering the gate key for their release. Their chains will only open if someone agrees to take their place in imprisonment.

■ You can steal their key, kill them — at which point, they return to their true form as a reptilian shapeshifter, or offer to take their place. Do so, and your character is stuck in Hell, suffering the intense heat and occasional clawing of mermaids, until Hell closes.

■ Up to you if anyone else can see your character’s memory in the flame wall. Please trigger warn adequately if you are describing sensitive memories.

LEVEL II

You descend deeper, into an underground urbanscape infested with flesh-like structures. Some stretches of land and stone are covered in membranous, dense, thick surfaces, letting you feel the faint, distant heartbeat of Hell. Other landmarks — lairs, adornments — are made of the remains of fallen demons.

■ Step lightly and rapidly. Flesh-eating demons roam these lands, as do hungering hell hounds and golems that chase you for parts to patch their limbs.

■ The next stairwell is guarded by a deathly groom or bride, their tentacles barring your path.

■ To proceed, you must gain the ring they are safe-keeping for a future ‘intended.’ You’ll need to persuade a local demon, assemble a passing corpse bride, sell a companion or offer yourself to betroth them — and negotiate a dowry.

■ The groom is crafty, cunning, eager to manipulate you into offering your soul as a dowry; the bride is cruel but irresistible, stirring you and your companion to violently compete for her hand.

LEVEL III

Behold true hell, an endless wasteland, its horizon fathomless and grey. Your mouth tastes of perpetual ash, bone dust scattered at your feet. You walk aimlessly for hours in fields of gravel, haunted by stone snakes and shapeless bone creations.

■ Demonic creatures rally as armies, fighting each other for crumbling territory or for overground dominion, as they prepare to invade Alem. Some drag rows of sullen, depressed or bellicose dead men behind them, whose souls you can liberate furtively when the demons make camp, or are assaulted by Deimar’s paladins. These captives did not all originate from Alem.

■ Some of the lesser demons may part with information, if you give them memories, important trinkets or a taste of your soul.

■ Most paladins are on this level and will shield you. You hear from them or from passing demons that Hell is now able to seep into Alem because of the Motherless — dark and flickering silhouettes, two-three times the size of a man, who float high above ground. They send down thick ropes like umbilical cords that consume the energy of whatever they attach to. They redeliver this energy as tectonic blows against Alem above.

■ Beyond a hatred of the Room of Seals, the Motherless lack conscience, speech or allegiance. They are drawn to the warmth of living things, or the purity of their spirit. Their ropes are broken easily — but the presence of a Motherless can quickly drain you.

■ The Motherless are briefly visible when they fling their ropes down, but otherwise roam invisibly and can only be recognised by the trails of barren land and aridity in their wake. You know a Motherless has stopped above you when you are suddenly paralysed by chilling fear — run, at all costs.

■ The Motherless swarm when endangered. They cannot be killed.

■ Deimar’s paladins share that, hundreds of years ago, their brethren committed ritual suicide, so their spirits could perpetually hunt the Motherless in Hell. You find ghostly paladins walking listlessly in lakes of dark water, seeming to remember nothing of their mission or their former selves. Try to remind them of their duties without entering the water and stranding yourself.

NOTES

■ Hell demons can recognise if your character is canonically connected to hell. Up to you if that’s a (dis)advantage!

■ Everyone should eventually make their way to the Hassir monastery.

■ Sign up for a RNG thread with an unexpected travel companion on the trek to Hassir.

NPC THREADS

QUESTIONS

Comments

[downswing]

( Never useless. But reduced, perhaps. Thinned down to a shadow of himself, kitten-like and slowed. He has seen and collected the scraps of Wei Ying, scattered like ashes on Wen Ruohan's war grave, before settling him to blissful sleep for days, lost to the count.

But he wakes. Bright and dark-eyed, skittish, brimming with unspent energy. Wei Ying wakes, and it is a kindly and heart-wrenching indulgence, to be he who first greets him.

Now, to mind the dangers at his back, sword turning — first to parry, then stab, and steering Wei Ying gently with the sweep his arms to rotate and swap positions, so that Lan Wangji might interject against the threats that assail them. They have done this before: Wei Ying knows his part. Easier to defend him, when he is not static, when he falls in step with the dance. )

What can you command of them? ( To join, by the look of them. To serve as meat shields? Cannon fodder? To attack? How far can these dead be trusted? )

[weifinder]

( He hums, and it's a note of consideration, the faintest tremor of what he does to call, to command, to coax. Here and now, the coaxing is not the necessity it once was. Now, the recent dead have memory enough, and if horror paralyses some, he can call them past that.

It is a sick thing. He isn't used to this yet, the bodied dead, that he holds sway over them to any degree, though it's not so different, really. Spirits alone, energies that linger, resenting what they cannot or had not managed to do. Spirits and souls trapped in bodies that don't know how to die. That don't live properly, don't feel the same pains but what killed them, crushed them, slaughtered them, burned them, froze them to pieces of what once was, and came back again, impossible, to this day that bleeds each dusk into equally frigid night. )

Whatever we need, short of living.

( These are not those he's resurrected. The woman he had, that he and Wen Qing had spent so much of themselves bringing back, died, days ago. His gaze grows darker, heavy with grief not just for that, not just for what he remembers of their too recent to him youth, now further worn down by the passage of two years. No, it's also the love that remembers loss, that refuses to lose more when he yet breathes. Without sacrificing himself, here he stands, asking the dead to do more than die where Ratkinkuu's power allowed them no sanctity of final rest.

He shifts without having to think about it, giving Lan Zhan freedom in movement when a swirl of energy and intent cuts close by, and he ducks, flute at his lips again while he rises and looks down over this broken domain. He doesn't want this place. Not one stretch of land they've traveled, and he's peaceful in that acknowledgement. For tomorrow, he thinks, and he says: )

The last of the catapults will fall.

( One promise, between him, his husband, and the dead. The question, eyes tinged red: )

What else, Hanguang-jun?

( Not to estrange, but to ask the man who earned that name in the war that followed the end of their youth, for the name honed and sharpened over years of living at the heart of chaos where it was dredged up in darkness or in light, what do you see, matched self, matched spirit? Where two are, in the end, strong in ways where one alone cannot be for his own foibles. )

[downswing]

( Whatever they need. A miracle, loose yet insufficient. The keep grounds are rattled, gravel and fractures, utterly compromised. They breathe, and the land breathes with them, and the silent rippling of that exhalation brings pillars down. Cannons sing and roar, projectiles distant in landing.

He defends Wei Ying in instinct, much as he might a hunting paired partner, a child, a companion bereft of skill. With a red-stained glance, Wei Ying might sunder this world, might bring Hanguang-Jun to his knees. Let there be no question, no opportunity for empty wonder between them.

In passing, the lone indulgence: to slip a half-step back, until the stretches of their arms press fleetingly together in needle points of warm contact. Until Lan Wangji unpeels, with a soul-shattering sigh, to plunge ahead and stab cleanly, to call Bichen back to hilt.

A fool's elegance. Mere vanity, to clean the sword in the scabbard's womb, between instances of deployment. Were this not the set of robes Wei Ying had conspired to retain untouched and unstained, resolutely clean, Lan Wangji might begrudge the ablutions of his linens after. Now, simople, he takes crude advantage — unsheathes — and grits his teeth as Rathakku's reinforcements crash in through crumbling gates. )

The north. Send men — ...forces. ( They are not men, no longer. No matter the dignity Lan Wangji wishes to afford them. It must be known and accepted how they are used and deployed. ) To hold the gates, while we ward enforcement.

( To be as pillars and shields, for all it pains Lan Wangji in grounds his Uncle has watered with kindly mercy to know just how they purpose cadavers. )

[weifinder]

They go.

( A flick of his eyes, and the flute, again, Chenqing in all her glory as the one named by his sister in the moments following his first frightening, visible victory, the start of a decline that the shadows manipulated unto his own death, smiles. Grim, determined, swallowing down what this has become, the manner of bodies in exchange for purpose, and the awareness that he's directing, that he can lend purpose to flagging remnants of memories once lived, or he could command. Overwrite.

He chooses suggestion, a general aware his troops are not trained for this, but can fight in the way no living troops can. They're beyond new pain. Not old ones, not killing ones, but those memories can be overwhelmed in the now.

He tells his husband what the result will be, and it's true, in the call of his flute and the wrenching of a few more who recall, this is what we defended. Who turn, not in perfect tandem at first, and then move as ones called. To the north. To hold the gates, as the greater forces of the dead slam up and up and up, forward without the consideration of endurance or feedings or hydration or the countless truths of a living body's necessities.

It's the last thing those who died for this fortress, or simply died within it, can offer while they retain memory of self. While he holds their control, and Rathakku presses with an insatiability formerly reigned in, no longer patient. Hold the gates, and lift the stones that fall, build again barriers, the crush limbed holding weapons and dragging themselves to perch and wait and hold the gates, whatever that means now, under bombardment that collapsed all towers, that rendered the face of Alem unrecognised to all who held it in esteem.

Arrows fly toward them, fletched and wobbling, uncertain of their own goals, wishing to be by force of numbers overwhelming. One more invitation for a rattling, but he, who stood to be struck again and again by the offenses of far more lively men, fails to flinch even as it grazes his cheek. The only he that is likely to have reached him, for his faith in Lan Zhan, or simply his faith in how few recognise what he does in truth. He's life touched deeply by death, pale compared to the giants of their death lords and their war machinations, but he stands here nonetheless: a death lord who yet breathes, who was cursed by his own lands to survive by every means considered unsanctified, crossing barriers here he never had back home.

Wei Wuxian is not ignorant of the reality of his own appearance of danger, or the true danger of ever being swayed into the ease of arrogance. He's faced that cost. He already knows his weakness here, before these lords: was locked and wrapped in chains twice by a husband afraid of failing him yet again on the count of his own susceptibility to death lords calling, calling, commanding.

The ground beneath shudders and bucks again, lines through the stone branching and reaching toward them, falling short. He holds the gates. Collects new dead with a flick of his fingers and a shift in his tune when this or that one is crushed, when he sends the feeling of his own prayers up, and calls... oh, he calls the remnant of spirits to him, away from this starved landscape, where they swirl around his feet like so many errant slips of wind. Hold the gates, send the dead, burn what's left behind.

Perhaps in this, at least, Lan Zhan can help, should the onslaught slacken.

Perhaps. )

[downswing]

( They go.

And it is too little, and it is too much, and everywhere all at once. The storm of the dead rages and roars leonine, and bodies build themselves a barrier before the gates. Beneath the weight of his summoned world, Wei Ying strains.

It plays out almost thespian: a performance so raw and sophisticated that it could only ever be manicured, purposefully contrived. But Wei Ying does not preserve himself, like a trained sorcerer might, like cultivators do in the common martial practice of their routine arts. He moves, and his dead strike twice as fast.

Around him, like lightning, Lan Wangji can only venture to achieve the same — can only fissure himself in however many parts are required to parry, to deflect, to hold back. His sword raised here. An arm flinging to push a man down, there. A kick, a whirlwind of plunges. He moves too much, makes waste of his own energy, but Wei Ying is too — stagnant, the one certain target upon which every arrow and stray creature throws itself, gladly.

Once, he might have smeared blood on the canvas of Wangji's lent silks to write himself a bait to such purpose. Now, he need only — sing. Power escalates, stokes, blooms around him. Sweat beading on his nape, Lan Wangji can only defend so long.

He does not recall reaching out, gravel ands grime and red wet of his palm seeking out Wei Ying's fingertips, nearly distorting his music. )

Wei Ying. We must fall back. ( They will come for you. They ever have. ) Wei Ying, come.

[weifinder]

( He's swift, as he learned to be, decades ago: a melody that turns into a final command with the exhaustion sweeping through him after only hinted at now, held off by circumstance. It's the electricity of contact with the living, the familiar, when Lan Zhan finds his fingers with his red-stained palm. Blood is so thick in the air its moved past cloying to clotted, and brought to bear on Lan Zhan, on the pale skin streaked in red and grime and everything that comes out of sweat and blood and the savage artistry of war, he stares.

He blinks, and nods, and the flute lowers, the song left resolved in its anticipation of what comes next.

The fall comes next. They all know it, either side. This game of attrition was in how much loss would succeed in delivering them less of what they didn't wish the other side to hold.

Rubble, ground meat, the dredges of what lived once or twice or still clung to everything, everywhere, all at once. Tenacity of existence in the face of the inevitable. )

Lan Zhan?

( Still caught up in what he's been, but tethered, focussed, now reaching back as Chenqing slides into the broad band at his waist, fingers catching the top of Lan Zhan's shoulder, the stray locks of battle-winded hair. )

Where?

( He steps forward as stone crumbles, not underfoot yet to their left, within their realm and shaking enough of it to send him stumbling, losing coherency of motion in stutters and gasps before he's sliding down and into Lan Zhan's legs, left unchecked.

The world roars around them, incoherent noise and the raining beat of twinned hearts, twining exhaustions. Where? )

[downswing]

( Where can they yet go that the world will not chew and spit them out? Like foul hunting game, like grime and acid? He feels unambiguously masticated in the maws of war, flesh torn from bone, the petty stubbornness to live stripped from noble skills of survival.

At his feet, Wei Ying — swoons. If you had learned your notes half as well as you did this, you would rank among the guqin's foremost masters. Lan Wangji steps back, then aside, then, cleanly, the arc of his arm downing to sweep, to catch and bend around his husband's waist, to bear him up.

A simple, thespian artifice: the trick was not in the preservation of balance, but in rescuing Wei Ying efficiently, to occupy only the cradle of his left hand. The right stays on Bichen, grip trained, as he pivots on his feet to push Wei Ying facing to where Wangji had stood, to plunge against the stirring sickness of endless, unyielding attack.

To their rare luck, Wei Ying's necromancy yet holds, and the spirits that have not yet made a fortress around him devote themselves like mothers to claw down and shred those who would besiege their only living son. Demons die, cruelly. In ways Lan Wangji cannot begrudge but flinches from.

And around them, the shivered ground moans, craters and fractures rattling the ripe surface. He does not wait - clasps Wei Ying's wrist, and sets Bichen down to hover at their feet, and he cannot soothe this shrivelled half of his heart, cannot warm him to the pains of his proposition. Now, or never. )

We may fly. ( If you will board a sword once more, in pained reminder of the last flight that Wei Ying must have suffered, surely. The Wen. The Burial Mounds. This is not how Lan Wangji had intended to reintroduce him to blade voyage. Much does not accommodate his wishes. ) You have purchased time. But they will swarm on land. Bichen flies high. ( Trust in it. ) Play from above.

( Where neither quake nor enemy may reach him, only arrows, only harpies, only a fraction of the same threat they face below. )

[weifinder]

( Profound stillness hollows him, renders him inert, in first his husband's arms, then the shattered screams of war, all around them. He had said, he knows, he did say, let us fly. Let us, sometime, try, for the joy of it, for the brightness, and it coats his tongue with acrid bitterness that it is now, it is in this horror of stench and decay and death coating them both, that necessity declares now.

Now, and not in the joys of their decisions. Now, in the fetid corpse of this fortress, crumbling and sickened, hell stirring far below, a different hell gasping and grasping from above.

Interminably silence stretches two seconds, a blink, his heart's beat, and he smiles, smiles soft and sweet and sad, for Lan Zhan. Eye to eye, and watches him, watches nothing below, not even Bichen, not the sword and her length and the blood she's shed as surely as Suibian ever did.

Says nothing, but steps in, eyes flashing fierce and tired with a frustration he doesn't give words to. Latches fingers in Lan Zhan's robes, splattered and torn and oh but they'd been whole and hale and clean, once, two lifetimes, nine eons ago, and kisses him, fast and fleeting and needing the absurdity, the wholeness of a moment so broken out of the pattern of their pasts, to ground him before he takes flight. To send him soaring, before it's the air that flies past them both, and harpies, arrows, death on wings, but death comes in all forms.

Life takes more to grasp, more to grapple. Thus his parched lips leave his husband's, and he says: )

I trust you.

( In this, and in many other things, if not absolutely. Too much of him is aware that he calculates, weighs, balances, but not in this. Not for Lan Zhan or his steadiness in all things battle, his willingness to try as they navigate the moving domesticity two years and change have cultivated between them.

He steps to Bichen, the stance familiar, the length of her certain underfoot. He does not look down as if to see where he stands; he does not wait before he lifts Chenqing, balanced as if he's spent lifetimes perched upon other cultivator's swords, and not scant times where it has ended in tragedy and heartache.

Demons, the dead, the scant living who persist. Most are gone. To death or to escape, and still, it's until the last of them breathe free or breathe to cessation that they stand, best they can. No Wen Ruohan to strangle him in the aftermath, for Meng Yao to thrust sword through back, and oh, but what were they once, if not all these things in tandem? )

[downswing]

( This is no dragon, no adventure, no flight of romance bled in sunset reds. His mouth aches as if unstitched, as if a scream's gone ripped from it. Singed by Wei Ying's touch, the fleeting ghost of his affection. Alone, abandoned, he might have slid the smear of his fingertip to chase the last of Wei Ying's proximity.

Does not. Cannot. The air around them crackles, burns and breathes itself. Stench of saltpeter soiling and wet, he inhales poison, exhales anticipation. War wages like a storm, stoking. )

You should not.

( Wei Ying steps on Bichen — on instinct, and Lan Wangji's will alone, she floats up without guidance. He remembers, at the last moment, to step up himself, to fetter an arm around to corset Wei Ying' waist from behind, to hold him at balance. Then, Bichen surges, another silver arrow in a sky slashed by enemy steel. The rapid violence of projectiles deafens.

Then, Chenqing plays.

Then, the dead below wake.

Then, the tide of battle changes.

He feels bereft and futile, reduced to his part of ferrying Wei Ying, of protecting him. The spectator of a tragedy that once unfolded before him in three destructive acts of progressive downfall. Watching in, breathing, surviving.

Tremors shake him, just as an arrow grazes his shoulder, barely earning a scratch. He hisses and wills Bichen attentive, her flow serpentine in heated air. Then, a hand loosens free of Wei Ying — do not fall, do not presume, do not think — just long enough to call forth a ward talisman, protections encircling them in a tight sphere. )

Will your dead know to spare the forces of Alem?

( Or will they kill, kill, kill anything and everything, kill resolutely and without discrimination? )

[weifinder]

( What part of him notices Lan Zhan's arm around his waist notes it clinically, firm and steady before it, not flinching, not leaning in. Two disproportionate responses, two disproportionate inclinations, one memory, one dream.

These are the steps he takes. These are the choices he makes. This is the trust that sings through him as true as his song plays, commands, directs, when Lan Zhan tells him he shouldn't trust him, and Wei Wuxian knows, That's precisely why I must.

He is as steady when that arm unwinds, missing the warmth of it, tensing with a lifetime ago's remembrance of what comes next. Only it does not: he does not feel the hand in his back, does not feel the kitten weakness in his legs, does not feel gravity take hold as resentful energies reach up and up, cancerous and thick, to wind around him, welcome him down. With his aching, empty core, and his aching, bright hopes for his brother, his sister, his friends.

The ones he loved, long before he'd claim the word. To make the claim is to have a weakness. To have something to lose. Love them in action, in deed, in smiles shared and burdens buried communally, love them without the words to call it what it is. )

We break so many promises.

( Isn't his answer, but it's the thought that finds breath and tongue to it before his head turns, just enough to see some flicker of Lan Zhan over his shoulder. )

Nevermind that. They know, yes. Until he steals them back from me, there's enough of who they were to know.

( Caught in the rough amber of this moment, moving with the sword by simply not needing to move at all. He can hold himself to it when his energy isn't what powers it, and he laughs to himself, deep within his heart, and cries, somewhere deeper. )

I can play through, Lan Zhan. Then we burn them. This is not our world, and that is not their shattering. Will you trust? Will you catch me after?

( That sometimes, the support he needs is this: defense, and the arms grown used to guiding his falls to the ground, to not slam down and weep but for the damage he won't be aware of until he claws back from the depths of his unconsciousness and breathes in the free air, changed.

The dead rend, and numbers atrophy, piece by piece. The time of contempt is nigh, but lo, in the screams of stone and slit throats and harpies clawing at the air for purchase they cannot find on rended wings, it has been here ever since, and low, low this place seeks to fall still. )

[downswing]

( Sweetheart, not to you. But then, they are not men of saccharine endearments, of vulgar intimations, of open, aggressive, demanding possessiveness. There are words that sunder them, that trickle lost between them, that would poison the well of waters that have cleansed them of coy, perfunctory formality — that have stripped them down into their tender truths.

This, wind lashing their cheeks and tangling their hair and loosening their balance on the sword — this, then, is who they are. Small, for how much power they hold in greedy hands, between Wei Ying's mastery of death-anointed armies and Lan Wangji's direction of the blade.

Beneath them, Wei Ying's legions rally, and it is resentment that coaxes and directs them, that routes their ferocity and their spindly, clawing hands to turn on Rathakku and his creatures, that keeps them attentive and ferocious, cruel. The stench of blood blooms, corrosive.

He did not think they had yet their waters to spill.

We can burn them, says Wei Ying, and he means to bite back, But they are not husked. Only, he reconfigures his efforts — turns, air shifting, to summon his namesake guqin and wield it one-handed, the groaning vibrations of qi joining in to detract from the hostilities waged against Wei Ying's rising contingent. He cannot spare time and energy towards the war effort, not with so much of himself set to the task of holding Wei Ying steady, one arm belting his waist. But still, before the guqin is dismissed: )

You shall not fall to require catch. ( Lan Wangji, embittered by sudden purpose, will not allow it. ) Make haste, Patriarch. Earn your name, its reputation.

[weifinder]

( It sings, rancid and sweet in the manner of decay, whispers and screams and the vestiges of memories are enough to hold onto, the way resentment lingers. Anger, despair, indignation. It's not the beautiful emotions that hold longest, that refuse to cross the river in yellow and drink from Meng Po's bowl, her soup a balm for the next life, and the one after, the one after that.

Resentment cloys and clots and coalesces, and it kills, and he breathes out as he feels the shape of it shift, the ebb and flow. What he senses from Ratcatcher's army of death is a different quality, a change that doesn't recollect humanity, varied depth and permutation of emotion, even regret, obsession, rage. He calls, and it responds. Wei Wuxian plays, and the world of the dead, the remainder of those who lived, respond.

It is chaos. It is slaughter. It is without sprays of blood for the bodies have no hearts to beat, but the limbs tear, the bodies break, and it is just as terrible as if they'd had the ability to weep with eyes as well as words.

They are the spear point, and hell rages below them. Hell rages lower still, and the last count down, the last vestiges of resistance, break, fracture, are reinforced.

Wei Wuxian spends himself as a man three times his reserves, turning the energies that should, would overwhelm him if he let them, would use him as a tool as they'd use anything here in this carnage if it carved from it what they wished.

He chooses relentlessness. Not possession, aside from self-possession, and the burden of so many dead lingering in the tips of his fingers, each note he plays to sing more beautifully than before. And he sings them to focussed riot, to pointed rage, to the song of their own desire, the defense, the wish to never fall without desecrating the rubble with putrescence and entrails.

To a breaking point, the cleaving, the final calls, the retreat of those who survive. Fire, he thinks. They need fire. Fire, and someone to call for it, but he can't spare the air, not before the rest are out, but will he know, what can he say, leave nothing for them to take, to use, set them free of these confines. For Lan Zhan, in his breathing, in the quiet of him leaning back into his husband to draw his attention while his eyes, dark and red rimmed and fathomless, survey this domain he claims: )

Time, Lan Zhan. To set them to rest. Before he claims them, consumes them. Remember Taravast.

( Remember what three war lords of the dead had wrought in a city so filled with the appearance of life, rotting through with the reality of death. Remember how he came near to lost. Remember why. Remember the witches, sent to final resting death, the grandfathers, stripped and gone. Only one had been his doing. )

[downswing]

( He remembers: Taravast, Ellethia, the worlds walked since. Sa-Hareth, where hunger took the shape of men and lived in their bodies, corrosive.

He remembers that what is at liberty is free to be claimed, and that what Rathakku attempts here is only a plainer vulgarity, a more obvious game than the one death lords have performed since their arrival.

Wei Ying calls for fire, for flame. For incineration. For the complete eradication of everything the dead may use as instruments. And he is in learned in this, the lesson of necromancing, the stirring of dead bones. Even below, the dead heed him.

Lan Wangji's mouth is filled with ashes and expectation, with dread. With cruel, callous hopelessness. He grits his teeth, before he nods, and the tinny wind that billows his silks and whips their backs might well be flame. )

Your wish be done.

( His uncle will never forgive him this. No matter. )

[weifinder]

( There is in that moment, a shift, a quiet heaviness that slides into his playing. The music changes as the purpose does, and the call then, the one to send on, to cleanse, is one he knows Lan Zhan understands as well as he does. Better, even, for years more in the pursuit of its application.

There's a difference between the resentful energies which resist, which shriek, which sob, before this peace contrasting the chaos, the heartbreak, the horrors below. This is not a song for them: it is a song for the bodies trapped with some awareness, some memory. Some knowledge of who they were, and who they aren't, not anymore.

Those are the spirits, the souls, to send onward, to command beyond the grasp of greedy mouths and clawed hands, while Rikkitikkitaktu is distracted by his slow creeping hunger, patience worn to the burnt nubs of the destroyed ground underneath his unbreathing army.

Sing them home, to bodies left bereft of any spark, and to them, oh, to them, bring fire. Bring the flames. Bring the call to those with the means for it, the hearts for it, and let them burn. )

[downswing]

( He wilts, he weakens, like every flower comes the turn of seasons — like a sketched silhouette of himself, dissolving. Wei Ying was ever this, the fleeting, frail memory of his flight. Here, then gone. Dispersed.

The dead roil and crest like turbulent seas, breaking. He watches them, more claws and breaking bones than men, hears the hawkish creaks of their bodies rattling in the unnatural jolts and contortions they stir to perform. They move faster than they should, in ways that defy the comfort of their necromanced flesh to prioritise efficiency. It is no pretty sight, no heartfelt sound.

Fire starts without Lan Wangji needing to call it. Later, when Wei Ying's song begins to die, when flames lick the ledge of his sword, when he brings them down — he finds the arson was partly the work of catapults, a whirlwind of arrows, and a simple, graceless misfortune of saltpetre and explosive salts. Their dead meats burn.

He lands them on hard ground, trailing Wei Ying after him, one hand under his husband's arm, over his back, holding him steadied. It's a slow drag, too often interrupted by legions who burst out to attack, by refugees seeking sanctuary. Inside, where the fortress is quaking, inside, uprooting Wei Ying in the belly of its halls, where Hell sleeps. Inside, where there is warmth, and he stays them briefly in the Wards, lips cold to wash Wei Ying's hard temple. )

You have done well. This is no Nightless City, you have done well.

( He must know this, if nothing else. He must not doubt. )

[weifinder]

( He doesn't think, by this point. By the time he's been brought to ground, when the chaos rings in his ears as memory more than the incessant press of it, near. The pressure at his back, the hand under his arm, the warmth and direction Lan Zhan provides is the anchor that keeps his wandering exhaustion from simpler collapse. Is what summons a smile, hah, smiles, and stumbles, and walks again with the deliberate reminder to himself: lift foot. set foot down. lift, ah, yes, lean.

He stands still when prompted, blinks at the touch at his temple. Focuses, the effort of his eyes dilating and oh, he smiles beatifically, eyes red from effort, from loss, and from emotion.

He feels them. All those dead twice and dying, and Nightless City, he knows this too. )

I won't leave. ( Not acknowledgement, because doing well is the ache in his chest that Yanli had spoken to him once, that Lan Zhan exists the only other living person to do the same, and oh. Oh, how he leans into his husband then, forehead lowered, seeking to rest on Lan Zhan's shoulder. ) This is no Nightless City. I won't go.

( Confronted with greed, the avarice of the dead, but not the heartbreak, the gutting, of every precious thing he fought for. Sizhui lives. Lan Zhan lives. The members of their chaotic company persist.

Wei Wuxian speaks into Lan Zhan's shoulder. Mumbles, eyes closed, fingers clutching. Squeezing. He's not sure what he's holding, but it must be, it is, something of Lan Zhan. )

I'm here. I won't go.

( Don't let go of me, and this time, I won't let go of you. )

[downswing]

( The moment feels somehow fraught, fragile, as if the thousand-fragment porcelain of Wei Ying's veneer threatens, at any moment, to break. More fool he, between breaths of earth that quivers: Lan Wangji had not anticipated that Wei Ying could yet be sundered, could slip-slide-fall. )

You will not go. ( Mantra, reassurance. Once step and, skidding on viscera, the next. You will not go. ) Not down a cliff's lip. Not into the mouth of hell.

( And has Wei Ying not done so, before? He remembers in whole what lives with Wei Ying only in part, the fissure of a heartbeat that marked the unbinding, when Wei Ying peeled himself free of his husband's hand and descended, crashed like stormed waves, into the belly of Nightless City.

They hold on to each other, to that distant flicker of remembrance. He drags Wei Ying and lets him lie and sits him down where the clutter of the Wards has thinned and there are bandages discarded to spare like the silks of a ghost — and he knows it is because no doubt they were intended for a victim of war who failed, who fell, who never woke again.

No matter. Knelt beside Wei Ying, he dips them in stale water and cleansing salts and passes the bandage, soaked, to rim Wei Ying's temples and forehead with wet, to stir him. )

Mo Xuanyu did not perish so that you might follow in his steps. Of the man you were, only memory lingers.

[weifinder]

( His laugh is sparse, then low, a rumble that flows from his throat and turns into rasps as he leans in to the press of the cool bandage to his forehead, his temples, Lan Zhan's ministrations both foreign and not. Welcome in a way he's not used to welcoming, even knowing how he's been tended to by Lan Zhan over the years. Layers, peeled back as their robes are, and so it goes. )

Mo Xuanyu didn't perish, is the worst of it. Lan Zhan, no curse holds without a living presence. Mine held. He lived for long enough to see it through.

( Or longer, but that's nothing he wants to grapple with, the darkness and a space that was not a space, a place that was in and out of time, where grief stretched endless, and exhaustion consumed him, and numbness, eventually, settled in. He will never remember much of that time, of sleep that gave no rest, of time that passed without moving, of awareness, and the lack thereof.

It's not the point. It's exhaustion speaking, it's improbabilities spilling off his tongue, it's the pain of a time dulled to him now where it had been still so different, two years ago, two and a half? Time flows and flows, a river that feeds itself in a grand loop that stretches far beyond what he can see on the horizon. )

Memory is strong. We're stronger. We are.

( No matter that he's weakened in this moment, hollowed out, played thin. His forehead, hot, feels cooler for Lan Zhan's touch, tepid water his post-battle ablutions. )

Memory fades. We won't.

( Startling, a touch, a flinch as he realises he's been sitting, and can't remember when Lan Zhan led him to sit. The Wards he recognises, bleariness stealing clarity of vision, of thought. He has something to ask, or thinks he does, and he whispers: )

If my vision dims, I'll wake. No worrying. No guilt.

( From Doctor Wuxian, in his poor trappings of uneasy medic over the month and more they've been here. His husband may not heed this, but he must say it anyway. )

[downswing]

No guilt.

( He murmurs back, like trading coin, his silver scarce. Mouth dry when it lands on Wei Ying's forehead, when he nudges his husband to wilt, back straight and stiff against the wall, and rest like a boneless kitten.

The is sorcery to whisper, words to ground. Sleep, a command that qi could implement through drainage. He does not insult his soulmate with that strike.

Instead, long slide of his back, like dripping lichens, he collapses down on hard ground — one leg folded beneath him in seiza, the other before him, grounding Bichen where she anchors in rubble.

Wei Ying must sleep. Wangji will hold vigil.

It is done. It must be done. )