sa-hareth | arrival (mingle log)

[groundrules]

WHO: Everyone ever + the local Sa-hareth squad.
WHEN: Arc I: Sa-Hareth arrival.
WHERE: Sa-Hareth citadel, salt mine, the old jailhouse,
WHAT: Our intrepid heroes get commandeered into the frosty unknown.
WARNINGS: the glorious undead, background House of Dew mentions, at least one person's terrible sense of humour.

Comments

[downswing]

You do not have to do a thing. No man compels you. Not one creed possessed the Yiling Patriarch, no sect leader commands him. No spirit weighs his flute or taunts his soul. He carries himself, a monument, indestructible — heart as stone.

Crumbling, where Lan Wangji can see it. Tattered earth beneath his step, if he does not rise above. Stills, instead, stranded, anchor between the sea foam of his dangled silks. Sixteen years ago, Wei Ying jumped to gem spread of littered flame. Now, he means to drench himself in Wangji's disaster. What he requires is this: Wei Ying's fingers, gently peeled from Wangji's sleeve. His posture, corrected. The balance of the room restored, so Wei Ying might prioritise his own person.

Shadow of a borrowed smile bright-burn on his lips, the old conceit — he is, here, as everywhere, exalted beauty and nodded grace, the chief cultivator. "I dismiss you."

Go without guilt or fear, then. Be gone, now. Shoo.

[weifinder]

He blinks as his fingers are pried off Lan Zhan's sleeve, and he starts to cant his head to the side as he studies each small adjustment before him. Including the ending by dismissal, one that has both his brows lifting and his lips curled upward before he laughs.

"Right now? So mean, you've just invited me to sit!" Twice, and forcefully. He doesn't think it's mean, of course, but he does lean forward to try and press a finger to the tip of Lan Zhan's nose.

"Just a reminder, Lan Zhan, not me needing to go now. Did you know, they'll even pay you to run errands?" He's still smiling, lopsided, because there's nothing really surprising about this. "Not much, but when you have nothing, each bit helps."

He glances to Lan Zhan's temple, smile fading. "Are there any of the things you usually use that I can help find for you? I'm a little more used to going without, it's almost nostalgic."

The saddest part being it wasn't a lie.

"Plus, if you get creative with the eating utensils, you can find all sorts of uses for the odd ones!" Like the multi tined ones not big enough to use over fires.

[downswing]

He knows himself, in the paints of Wei Ying's pity: wreckage, temple a hard bruise, hand ruined by feverish eruption of need to crumble salt in the mines and cleanse the unburied dead. More shell than man, a familiar travesty.

He knows, too, the sight before him: Wei Ying, protective as he stood once before the young Sizhui, voice figments of carefully crafted tenderness, combined. Hands, hesitant. Words immature, traded only for the reassurance that he is here, beside Lan Wangji, alive and well and paying mind.

Bopping Wangji's nose, with a freedom so cavalier that Lan Wangji blinks at the offending hand, too paralysed to flee it.

"We are not in Cloud Recesses." Where he is royalty of the white mountain, served hand and foot by docile disciples and willing attendants, revered as brother to Zewu-Jun by sect members and chief cultivators by a cohort of squabbling children, the remaining clans. Here, he is stone weight on an ill-cleansed floor, hand curled tight and hot on tile and panel, frown deep-carved and infantile. He has no entitlements.

"I want for nothing," he pronounces, staggered. But lacks, notably, for everything. Foremost:

"...stay." More fool him, he only just said — "Until the floors dry. Footprints."

That old excuse, then.

[weifinder]

Having managed his nose bop, and feeling obscurely like he's seeing a giant, human-shaped rabbit in the form of Lan Zhan, he smiles and settles himself in more at the request, whatever its framework, than the rest. He doesn't address the thinness of the pretext, benefitting from it himself, as long as he allows it.

"As long as we like," he says, agreeing with a nod, and curbing his thoughts that keep trying to turn toward worries and plans for the salt mines and the faces they have yet to see here&mdsah;what if. Wondering at possibilities didn't solve them, and practicalities would be the only responses viable, if they found any familiar among the dead.

They wouldn't. He believes that so firmly he'd swear by it, but he also won't fail to go searching. Not again.

He stares down at the bowl of dirty water, and the rags therein, before lifting his gaze to Lan Zhan where he sits, lap to abdomen to face, concerned. Also feeling his new bruises with a sort of amused nod, ignoring them and the gentled pounding at the back of his head.

"Have you tried using this thing?" He asks after a pause, pulling a crystal out of his waistband and holding it up for Lan Zhan to examine at his leisure, if he wished to at all.

[downswing]

That, pale and rose and a sliver of adornment brother might have pinned at the corner of a wide, generously laughing mouth. Strange, to know the same yearnings of a defunct war slap him, ghost glimpses of Zewu-Jun in passing, alive and well and resolute in battle — prospects that stab his heart.

He is the child before his mother's home, cold with his faults: his head mute pulse, his qi redacted, his limbs mellowed down. Only Wei Ying, quiescent and slow to anchor him. Have Lan Wangji's better possessions, his feeding, his human warmth — only, linger.

Have his attention, first, soft over the quartz fragment, knowing.

"Ill suits me." Given to speech more than the written word, for all Lan Wangji imposes on his interlocutors to conspire with him in calligraphy. "We have no alternative."

And he lends the knocked jade strips of his fingers, fumbling and crossing and curling around Wei Ying's crystal piece, extending the tendril-roots of his magic to bury in the fertile soil of any deviation in the stone. No stirrings of shadow or crepuscule chime in answer. He releases the piece back to Wei Ying.

"Safe." Searched, to the best of Lan Wangji's curtailed ability. No possession, no curse, no lingering shadow. No danger. "Use it without qualms."

If he can do nothing for Wei Ying now, he can do this little.

[weifinder]

"Certainly a little more two way than what I can do," he says, small paper men running around and performing mischiefs from a time long before and a time not even a handful of months in the past now. A thought he considers with a frown, thinking of salt encrusted walls and the cut of them against his palm, supplies strewn and torn, decay hinted at but not followed through on.

Tomorrow, yes. For now, he watches Lan Zhan twitch and clutch his fingers around the stone, and hums acknowledgment before the words follow.

"Thank you." It was not a necessary check, perhaps, but it is its own kindness, offered in a way that doesn't have him as inclined to stare at the still healing injury at Lan Zhan's temple. Look to yourself, only something he reflects on as strikingly unfair for either one of them to think the other man incapable of, but strikingly fair to presume both compromise their own selves for the sake of each other. A lifelong problem of his own, and his fingers twitch in turn to capture the stone so deemed as safe within his palm, tucked away.

"They have attached names, have you discovered yours?" A beat, as Wei Wuxian keeps his hand closed, not looking to the curious spelling of a stone utterly new to his experience. "This one," he says, leaning in a touch for the idleness of dramatics, tone turning wry at the admission that follows, "Is 'old dog turning new tricks.'"

The grimace following is unfeigned and unexaggerated. An absurdity and a jest of its own, extended between them, as something so silly as to not be worth noting, that the greatly feared Yiling Patriarch's fear of dogs might hound him across realms.

[downswing]

...wonderfully canine. The small-toothed smile of fate, cautiously upturned. Old, but Wei Ying wears his years like jade pieces, with the stolen dignity of a hawk or hunting bird, a crone. Half a lived life, half borrowed. The whole, patchwork of craft and strain. What new tricks can a creature learn whose entire existence is perverse, blaspheming novelty?

"A hummingbird." Heart-fluttering. A quiet, shy and softened thing. He does not know himself in the name. Sharpens it, dulled first, but finding edge and tip and blade's side, steel, into the trade instrument Wei Ying requires.

"Apologies. If we trade," and he does not offer it, not with this traitor's mouth, not with the shivered line of his pressured shoulders, "Wei Ying will fear me."

Better to suffer the ridicule of a savage reminder than recoil in base fear from the written sight of the one lingering ally. Wei Ying need not witness his name as often as others will, surely.

[weifinder]

Ah, but the new tricks here are insidious in nature, new workings of waking death, now bodies attached and enslaved to a continued existence in a way that hadn't been feasible in their own world. He'll hope to learn more on the morrow, but as the water dries to his pointed lack of attention, and Lan Zhan claims they cannot exchange quartz for fear, he's both touched and amused.

Worried, still, aching and feeling new and old bruises settle, but so too settles something else of the absurd that's easier to swallow than a second summoning. If he was going to fear Lan Zhan, if he'd drum up that emotion from the sea of those he chooses to examine or ignore, it would be long before now.

He laughs, a low chuckle and a tooth baring grin as he looks to Lan Zhan, dropping his named quartz into his lap without much concern. Wagging a finger, he gives a small shake of his head. "Lan Zhan, you're this unexpectedly cute! Words may influence enough, but even that one can't leave me, ah, indisposed." Annoyed, yes, but life is filled with irritations he shrugs off for the sake of moving forward and not being weighted down by things that do nothing for him. "If you started sneaking up on me and barking, that, that would be worse."

He pouts, saying this, but the shiver he doesn't quite manage to hide thinking about that also translates into thoughts of the walking dead in the mines, to the stranger shapes he barely remembers from their chained up days on the plateau, and to teeth, bared and dripping, and the surging worry: are the walking dead only human.