( The woods once more, a path now trodden — but younger, lavish, green beneath his step. He remembers, last Xichen and he walked it, the empty slate of skies above unending, like a blind eye gazing. How the forests sang barren, and now they thrum and thrive and every quiet exhalation of leaves, dancing, is perhaps the wind’s whistling or a withered heartbeat.
They saw the girl, together, receiving her gift of viscera and gore and the strange, slithered promises the Huntress shared between hisses and howls of a pain stabbing. He has never glimpsed a part surviving the absence of the whole, yet there, in Miang-Si’s hands, cuts thrived
Then, the girl fled. Would they might have followed, but a skirmish of the Beastmaster’s creatures and the young dead that rallied and salivated in the Huntress’ train barred their path. Pursuit was a distant ambition, cruel for how it tempted them with odds of great, indefatigable success.
Now, they give chase, and for all their merits, their knowledge, their skill — they are monks and soldiers, exorcists and scholars. Not hunters, not accustomed to track scents and stains. Still, the heart parts betray themselves: nature expels them, the ground that digested them barren and brittle and pale. Where they are dug, grass burns, the roots of a nearby tree have recoiled, withdrawing flinched and staying arrested away from the point of burial, as if to avoid contagion.
Lan Wangji kneels by, hound on the hunt, fingers suspended over the intelligent corruption that licks at the land, the scent and feel of its wrongness. )
More perverse than necromancy. Old sorcery.
( Primitive, base. Like metals spun off grit and gravel, ore startlingly glistened in deep-dug mines. He reaches a hand in, excusing Bichen’s chilled blade from the game afoot —
And finds, suddenly, his wrist shackled by the tree’s roots, binding. Ah. )
■■■ xichen
( The woods once more, a path now trodden — but younger, lavish, green beneath his step. He remembers, last Xichen and he walked it, the empty slate of skies above unending, like a blind eye gazing. How the forests sang barren, and now they thrum and thrive and every quiet exhalation of leaves, dancing, is perhaps the wind’s whistling or a withered heartbeat.
They saw the girl, together, receiving her gift of viscera and gore and the strange, slithered promises the Huntress shared between hisses and howls of a pain stabbing. He has never glimpsed a part surviving the absence of the whole, yet there, in Miang-Si’s hands, cuts thrived
Then, the girl fled. Would they might have followed, but a skirmish of the Beastmaster’s creatures and the young dead that rallied and salivated in the Huntress’ train barred their path. Pursuit was a distant ambition, cruel for how it tempted them with odds of great, indefatigable success.
Now, they give chase, and for all their merits, their knowledge, their skill — they are monks and soldiers, exorcists and scholars. Not hunters, not accustomed to track scents and stains. Still, the heart parts betray themselves: nature expels them, the ground that digested them barren and brittle and pale. Where they are dug, grass burns, the roots of a nearby tree have recoiled, withdrawing flinched and staying arrested away from the point of burial, as if to avoid contagion.
Lan Wangji kneels by, hound on the hunt, fingers suspended over the intelligent corruption that licks at the land, the scent and feel of its wrongness. )
More perverse than necromancy. Old sorcery.
( Primitive, base. Like metals spun off grit and gravel, ore startlingly glistened in deep-dug mines. He reaches a hand in, excusing Bichen’s chilled blade from the game afoot —
And finds, suddenly, his wrist shackled by the tree’s roots, binding. Ah. )
Draw back.