( ...death, walking dark around them. He does not feel it. Night-shrouded, smell of damp green lively and sharp in his nose, and the blood caked thick and crawling on his back and his limbs, he senses only himself. Rustling are leaves wind-cradled or his filth-stiffened silks, folding. He breathes, and waters ripple in a necklace of small puddle-ponds, and it is one of them, deafening, or the other.

He flinches at the boy's touch, revulsion immediate. Do not. But he watches, steadily, as alerted.

The dead are energy to Lan Wangji, an unsettling. The first one comes, bright and wild-eyes, like an animal, half-crawling — and the second after, peeling from a tree's skins, as if it can only hope to kill now that they're swarming. And look, its arm decimated. A third hefts up, half its torso dissolved in waters, from the marshes.

And beyond him, more swim towards ground. This particular lake-pier may have been more infested than most. A sound choice, for hunting.

Silvered, Lan Wangji's blade draws out in a tired, mute unwinding. He finds himself adjusting his pose, back settling behind the boy's.

The first wave of attacks is inevitable. Amid the swinging, at some turn, he hisses behind himself — )

Find lamp oil. Drench your sword. ( From one of the many braziers, downed with their men. ) We give it fire.

( A heated, devastating little skewer. Perhaps an improvement on what that needle of a sword can achieve on its own. )