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westwhere2021-03-27 06:48 pm
groundrules) wrote in westwhere2021-03-27 06:48 pm
sa-hareth | arrival (mingle log)
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.
no subject
"I wonder." When Wei Ying will remember, when Lan Wangji will forfeit the name. A world of nebulous and yawning uncertainty, glimpsed between even breaths, adjusting to fresh axis. Ground, shaking. The air, shedding weight, barely burdened by reverberation when the client's groan trickles out again, syrupy and diffused. 'Please,' 'Mercy,' 'Thank you.'
He is walking, morning sun trailing long shadows when he drags his husk from the wall, and Wei Ying, by limp wrist, like a child (Sizhui) behind him — excusing them both, tatters of a tug binding the parting courtesy. Discretion is the better part of misplaced value. He tires of sharing reunions with every soul of Dafan mountain, the cultivation world, a destitute institution of wanton pleasures.
"Fleeing already?" he murmurs with a sketched glance behind, delivering Wei Wuxian to the square of scrub-cleansed wood and idle straw, where Wangji's bowl of lathers waits, half-emptied. The cloak, Wei Ying's cavalier manner, the air of apologetic frenzy — outside, the weather weeps in trinkets of threadbare snow. Like it, Wei Ying proves flimsy.
Unbidden, he remembers the alms owed, thin rivulet of qi welling from his fingertips to the soft insides of Wei Ying's wrist. A tentative proposition, with Lan Wangji's own strength curtailed. More, to spare later.
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"Errands," he murmurs back, lips curled into a half-wry expression, "Information. Things we won't get just from being in here." Fleeing into an unknown world is not a lark he plans to indulge, not lacking all context, no matter how good he's been at adjusting on the fly in the past.
The familiarity of qi merits a blink and a widening of eyes; he shifts, brings his free hand to press down over Lan Zhan's, smiles and shakes his head. "How much has returned?" Of his gifts, of his cultivation. Wei Wuxian has no way to track it, only his own absence of a sense that slowly makes itself known again, but it doesn't carry with it much warmth, only understandings.
Lan Zhan remains injured at his temple. He doesn't need to offer what he has, for bruises that heal well enough on their own. "Did you come through the mines? Were you in the jail?" Two places he's heard about from others of their ragtag rescued group, so far all unfamiliar, but growing known in little ways. An array of ages, more skewed young, none elderly. If they're summoned, as was said on the plateau, perhaps that distinction is inevitable.
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Enough qi restored to Lan Wangji, then, to conclude the threats and conversations that matter. He... suspects, with a cautious glance and a brief assessment of the stretch of Wei Ying's limbs, lean, the fragile concavity of his wrists and ankles, prone to crumbled breaking. Most days, the simple teardrop of qi strength turns battle odds inevitably to Lan Wangji's favour — but here, now, brought to a level, Wei Ying's experience sharpens the sword of his quick wit.
The question of who would win the conflict Lan Wangji means to stoke on principle begs itself. Finds him accepting of compromise, sedate as he kneels, the span of his white silks weeping on the floors beside him. The truth: he is half returned to himself, a vessel unfilled. Aware of his body, more for its fatigue, its glimpsed recovering wounds, its failures. The little he offered Wei Ying was hardly Wangji's own to give, and yet.
A gentleman would find the better manner to refuse a gesture so freely awarded. Let no man mistake Wei Ying, styled Wuxian, of Yiling. Let Lan Wangji too remember, snorting once over his spoiled lather bowl, before dipping one cleansing cloth, rinsing it, and setting it aside for his own use, only to hold out its sibling and entrust it into Wei Ying's care. If he has progressed enough in his recoveries to deny qi, then he may set himself to honest work.
"Mines, emptied." No. He remembers the stench of the caverns, the lack of damp, the harrowing sickness of startled, dead energies. "Haunted. Wei Ying?" Another heartbeat. "Chenqing."
Absent, or unseen before Wangji's eye. As is Bichen.
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They don't need to waste energy on this, when neither of them appear to have all that much to spare.
He lifts his eyebrows at the offered cloth, but accepts it, kneeling down in turn and slopping it onto the ground with the awareness of how to do this correctly, and a reminder, "Errands, Lan Zhan. It wasn't an excuse." Before two hands meet one rag and push it forward in a familiar sort of manner, remembered through a growing boyhood, minimally.
Still, it's decent reason for murmured conversation, and he's not on a tight timeframe. He can choose to spend time without struggling through thin snows and slick streets and a foreign despair that feels familiar, seen from a certain perspective.
"Missing," he says, lips pressing into a thin line over the mines. Emptied of living, yes, but not of walking death, and he stares down at the floor before turning his head to the side, shifting his weight, scrubbing. "Along with anything else I'd had with me, last recalled. I came through the mines too. Haunted is one word for it." A realm of undeath he himself finds new, but the scent of all of it... he frowns. "Do you remember much of anything the ones who unchained us all said?"
Enough to be here, yes. Or someone he ran into in the mines remembered. There hadn't been much, but he's been picking at it, trying to understand and having not enough information to claim he really does.
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The other Wangji, a pale-faced coward, lives a long life sheltered between his body's bones. Silence stretches long between them before he admits, he will not ask — only imitates, grudgingly, Wei Ying's better work on the splintered board. Water, lather, wipe with the dried corner. Repeat. Repeat.
"We encounter our rescuers within..." Days? The sennight? A frown splinters his forehead, deepens. The rapids of failure near-drown him. He drenches in the knowledge of his uncertainty, drags his head left, then right with swerving care. Breathes. "Apologies."
Much returned to him in spider-webbed catches, in mouthfuls of rationed memories. Perhaps, given time, he will yet recall.
The coward raises his head again. Lan Wangji lends him his eyes, soft-trailed on Wei Ying's face, where he recalls the sting of garnet eyes, once. "The dead, here. Are they as... your creatures?"
Say no. Withhold. Abbreviate. Delude. This is the way of Wei Ying's truths, so scarcely given.
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"It'll come," he says instead, where his flickers include the quartz, now defunct, and a warning: for your strength. Summoned? Not his first time, but more dramatic this time than even waking on a floor riddled with Mo Xuanyu's blood, hundreds of seals in cinnabar and more blood, everything a desperation and curse. It was the first thing he checked himself over for when he arrived, when tucked aside to his own small abode. "Give it time."
Or worries, as he does, but the shoves them away as fruitless and pointless, dips his rag into the bowl, wrings from it excess water, returns without having to think overly much about it to the task at hand. He's mulling it over, what time their rescuers are to return, if he recalls anything more clearly, when the question comes. He pauses, head canting to the side, then offers a speculative hum.
"I don't know." He doesn't, not yet. "Controllable, yes, you must have seen that. I suspect some kind of ranking, Lan Zhan. If they're keeping consciousness, if spirits are retained..." A pause again, curled fingernails into rag, the push forward with arms, thinned lips. "I can't sense it yet. Just try to study, and the ones down there weren't cognoscente. I think—listening to talk here so far, the undead may be how these warlords fight."
Unsaid: those not culled while we were drugged and shackled may have been intended to join those undead ranks.
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Paired, they play their parts: Wei Ying, fluid and strong, river water cutting fresh path where it courses. Inventive. Brilliant. And Wangji, stalwart and dependable, thoughts and skill consistent. It is not Wei Ying, gallantly short of reproaches, who has failed between them. It'll come, but delays now. It'll come, too many breaths after Wei Ying has need of Lan Wangji's knowledge.
And then, the undead — ranked, as Wei Ying names them. In this, Wangji offers easy approval, a nod, and the matter agreed: what he saw of the creatures suggested pack-like behaviours, order, an understanding of either strength or command. Whether they ones that lacked conscience understood the seeds of their own subservience, or traded it as a matter of instinct, Wangji too could not say.
"Wei Ying. Think." As Lan Wangji cannot, voice cracked, sight diluting until it is only an agglomeration of splinters and striations in waiting wood, until he beats down floor board with another sweep of gelid, lathered water, and the wipe of Wangji's cleansing cloth, after. "Brother. Sizhui. I did not glimpse them. Did you?"
If they, too, were summoned — if they loiter, stranded in chains, or in the mines — if Lan Wangji thrives in the relative comfort of a warmed room and cleansed silks, while his family suffer. Qi pulses bright and blooming in his bloodstream, his hands yet turn and work. The heavens did not steal enough parts of him that the whole should not serve his family as a worthy death instrument.
"If..." They were there. Captive. Harmed. Worse, and there is ache that hollows him, carves out his meat and entrails, leaves him pale as parchment. "I would return for them, if."
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Lan Zhan's belated flinch is a different kind of familiarity, but the delay worries at Wei Wuxian, and he knows Lan Zhan is still struggling. Blow to the temple, yes, but eyes tracking. The ways they'd been kept under chained to stone when kept drugged by some means, it lingers more heavily on him. Had he been there days longer?
He pauses in his scrubbing when Lan Zhan brings up the possibility that had been worrying him in those dark, salt-framed tunnels, with the quickness and ferocity of their near blinded undead. His expression sets, focussed, before he looks to Lan Zhan, tone level, firm, unshaken.
"I did not see them. I did not see you. They're no less capable than you are, and both a great deal more capable than I am." Better fed, in better condition, bodies less attuned toward being broken and recovering without the aids of what Lan Zhan was trying to share here not more than a handful of moments ago, against a wall no longer inward dented by the pressure of their combined weight.
"They would be here if they'd been taken." He has faith in this. He's unshaken in it, because if any harm has fallen on them, he will raze the dead until it breaks him.
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They did not know of one another, for all the historical strength of their communion. What then of Zewu-Jun, too stifled by grief to remember perseverance? Of Sizhui, tested by reckoning and pulses of battle, but never war? Uncharitable, Lan Wangji will stain their honour with as much disservice as doubt insists on, ravenous.
Moments past Wei Ying's reassurance, he stays grim and sturdy, reduced to hands at work — battling wood where it's scarred white-deep with the marks of another's footstep, the indentation of iron-clad boot heel or dragged body or time. A borrowed house, never to serve as home. The old woman, Tamaiu, presides a deadened queen in her quarters.
"I seek them out tomorrow." Decisive, done. His gaze need not rise. The salt mines opened themselves like flower in nightly bloom before Wangji, when the eye of his mind barely blinked awake, and he slipped and contorted himself to fill the spaces of his shape, his body as he knew more than possessed it. The mines will welcome him again, when he may yet trust himself to hunt without foolishness.
And the wood stain again, the mean pass of fresh lather, scorching. "One man will suffice. Mind your matters."
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He wipes his hands on his 'new,' threadworn cloak, his better robes underneath preserved for the time being. He knows what it is to fear, and to not know. He knows for Lan Zhan this has to be in specific, calcified ways harder, the wondering, the uncertainty, the need for knowledge. He also knows it's not something they can guarantee. Not the appetites of these dead walking, but the ravishing desperation, and that they need not look just at the mines, but their place of captivity, study those grounds, observe the culled.
But senseless, to take those better minded and bodied for whatever perversion of purpose they'd been summoned here. He's not cursed, and where he'd hesitated before in asking, he wonders if he should now. He doesn't.
"Tomorrow, then. If I'm to mind my matters," he drawls, flashing a smile with sadder eyes before he turns them away, steeling over, "Then the dead, my friend, are mine. I've unknowingly left A-Yuan behind once before chasing after the ones I knew walked on to death."
He shifts to his feat, a stuttered grunt of effort.
"Never again."
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"My core stokes." Quickens, holds. Gold wisps of it licking his insides, like idle flame in winter lodgings. Friendly. Honed. Absent reminder in the milk-spattered darkness of a room livened by morning's tide: there dwells in Lan Wangji the seed of greatness, cultivated past dusty domesticity and subdued, urban routine. He may yet handle challenges that others — that the one man —
"What are you, without Chenqing?" he snarls, blood sawed where his teeth hunt the soft insides of his prized lower lip.
Wei Ying: a creature of wit and talismans and longings, of speed and ingenuity, on two bones playing the pretend of feet. Reduced but not annihilated, and Lan Wangji would never name Wei Ying the lesser, but for these moments, when his frailty serves. He can be weak and docile, if he lives, furious and insulted. No matter.
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He pauses, looks to Lan Zhan, expression more blank than it usually is. Chenqing wasn't a given, had been forged in a land so deeply mired in death that generations of cultivators had been unable to strip it of even a degree of its resentment. He was a sword held and thousands of screaming voices, some that pled with familiar tones, Wei Ying.
"I'm the one who survived the Yiling burial grounds, I guess." The impossible per some, the improbable by others who understood those energies, who had witnessed their thick spread even when he'd done all he could to scratch out a safe haven, to hold those energies at bay. He'd said it once, joking without joking, to his martial brother. What if I told you I found a cave with an old master's inheritance, and I studied it for three months? He hadn't had work to go off, not actually, but where else to learn demonic cultivation than in the bloody cradle of its inception, scrabbling for sanity in a world that screamed and raged in darkness?
No, he doesn't choose to remember much of that time, but he's been worse, he's been less, and found a way.
Lifting a hand to his lips, he smiles without much of mirth in it. Taps his lips with his fingers as he breathes in, audibly.
"Air in my lungs and lips. You know I don't need Chenqing to do what I do with less finesse." Nor would he rely on just one way of moving through that salt-encrusted realm. He cants his head to the side, fingers falling away from his mouth. "I may be a half wreck by comparison, Lan Zhan, but when and where has that stopped me before?"
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The necromancer. Such a charming boy, and such carnage before him.
Strange, how simple utterance unhinges Lan Wangji's jaw, raw and rusting and creaking, like iron submerged, how he aches for the memory, etched in the stone of days ill met. The first word is hardest, he knows this, speaks it, barely hears the paper-shredded rasps of his own voice over the cresting turmoil of white anger like sea foam, roiling, and the storm old since one banquet, gilded, "If you, Wei Wuxian, wish to kill someone, who can stop you?"
If Lan Wangji descends, serpent-like, who can stop him? When he catches the slippery-slick tremors of his cleansing cloth in both hands, turns to twist and strengthen it like wet rope, and to capture the waiting prey of Wei Ying's ankles and pull in, every breath in him treacherous, his lungs inundated — if he makes attempt to bring Wei Ying down to Lan Wangji's knelt measure, who can name him wrong?
What is right, and what is —
A third to seek down the mines would mark three too many.
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Which he wasn't yet, he was canvassing options! Maybe no one would need killing! Amazing how more of his solutions didn't involve murder, or even bloodshed!
He thought all of that in the few seconds before Lan Zhan moves, wrings his cleaning cloth, and down he goes, arms flailing, making a high pitched sound of protest before he hits the ground with a resounding thud. Enough so that a door nearby opens after a few heartbeats, two women peering out with different degrees of ravishment, one clearly flushed with her hair in obvious disarray.
"Oh my."
Then both pull their heads back in, giggling, with parting words filtering out of, "... tied down with the silk ropes again?"
Wei Wuxian, clever of tongue and charming of demeanour, wheezes.
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Wei Ying falls like every sack of rice Wangji has seen kitchen servants carry, hard, the body recalling its filling. As if ready, just one heartbeat more, to burst. Isolated, Wangji only pivots aside, leaving Wei Ying to the lion's share of pristine floor, while two women emerge from shared quarters, pinked and hasty of breath, exuding the disturbed indolence of bedfellows stirred before their time.
Lan Wangji blinks long intent, takes their measure — one of them, lean and sweet and seemingly tame, meets his eye with the lift of her brow. Wafting behind her retreat: thickened lavender.
Pushing upright, Lan Wangji straightens, knelt in obedient wait until Wei Ying... recovers from his coma of drunken laughter enough to bear questions, "What... manner of house of this?"
It seems to Wangji, from time to time, though the crone Tamaiu slithers down to survey him, and trace the length of her claws over his temples, raking his hair, and she is kind to him, gives him milk and offers wine, and he takes the one but would spit out the other — this is no ordinary house of encounters, where women of the softened arts merely approach their patrons to whisper poetry, dally in song or tease the zither to please the ear. There is... the possibility of deeper ill repute than Lan Wangji cares to contemplate, with his bed earth-bound and his bathing water shared, his virtue suffocated.
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Breathing in, then out, a cracked smile and quiet eyes. Lan Zhan asking after the house, and he almost wants to laugh at that, in a helpless way. If he could spare him half that knowledge... and bless Lan Zhan, for having been so out of it he wonders about it now.
"Pleasure house," he says, breathing in deeper and finally sounding less wheezed. "Carnal pleasures, artistic pleasures, I think." He rubs at his head, then shakes his foot at Lan Zhan. "Mah, now you wrestle? Lan Zhan! So energetic!"
He smiles, lips hitched higher on one side, and shifts as if to stand again. "Don't ask me to mind matters and ignore shared concerns. Please."
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Were he a disciple still, there might be a flush stuck to him, like sickness. Now, his ears threaten to colour, but he only breathes, reaches out and, cat-like, swipes at Wei Ying's sleeve — hooks and tugs to pull him down.
"Stay." He wonders, just once, if he may have this: a toy that sits where Wangji's mind eye pleases, a creature decisively not a pet that respects, nevertheless, those same inclinations. "The road gave you back with bruising."
Lan Wangji, self-satisfied, hopefully added at least two more. Earlier, a heartfelt thud. Promising. Wei Ying's earned the inks of a few hurts, for that cheek.
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"Lan Zhan." Staring at him, knowing the concerns, but unwilling to allow him this way over ones shared. "If bruises were enough to stop me, would you have ever heard my name in Gusu Lan?"
Easier to jest about things which are decades removed, things that had traveled in rumours across all five sects, enough that it was known what kind of conflict Jiang Sect's head disciple got into with its lady co-leader; his favouritism with the gentleman co-leader being the contrasting point. Easier to speak on those echoes of a childhood he'd partly made difficult on himself, partly allowed that there was no 'right' he could achieve that would soothe all tempers, than the others: when has being half alive stopped me from trying? When has grievous injury kept me from striving? He's not a man who has ever taken himself in kindness, but he's smiled through most of it, and he'll smile as he needs to for the days that come.
"Your brother, our son. One you have the sole claim to, but don't ask me to act as if I don't care about A-Yuan. I've lost him once."
Don't ask him to stay and risk losing him again.
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But the man doubles Lan Wangji's shadow now, pleasantly seated. Not his son.
"Never to be lost again," he pledges before he knows the words for what they are, before they reap poison on his tattered tongue. Heavy the rag that slips his fingers, drops down in slick, stubborn silence like grave soil. The afterthought: he brushes his fingers on the edges of it, to relieve the same wetness the cloth carries in full.
Then, he only sits, and regulates himself minutely, back straightening, shoulders squaring, knelt pose deepened. The casual, coy invitation of a human anchor, present and available to any errant cultivators, prone to slouching and lending more than carrying their own weight, as they sit. Wei Ying, the classical feline.
"We go tomorrow." When Lan Wangji is sufficiently mended, and Wei Ying alert. When they've finetuned themselves to each other again in battle synchrony. When the sun's risen to good advantage.
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(For him, it's A-Yuan. It's everyone he left behind, in a time where he'd finally broken in a way he didn't get back up after. For Lan Zhan—)
His eyes burn, and he twitches his fingers, reaches out, ends up taking a pinched hold of Lan Zhan's sleeve. "Thank you." With a few rapid blinks taking away the stinging in his eyes, he glances up, nodding to the statement. Tomorrow is reasonable, all things considered. "Lan Zhan, is there anything you need right now? Supply wise," he adds, flicking his gaze pointedly toward the servants quarters behind and around them all. "I can stay for a while today and help, but sometime before the skies darken, I've got to get to market and back."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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