Modesty. ( He hisses it out, but Wei Ying is blitzing across the forest glade in brazen, thorough nudity, sparing no care for Lan Wangji's petulant griefs or the colour of his concern. Thorns, needles, rocks and prickling branches. There is a wealth of torturous possibilities lining the woodland floors, prone to teething on Wei Ying's fresh-skinned soles, the choked width of his ankles. Not to speak of his bird bones.
No time to waste, not with the monastery's world in decadent fragility. Lan Wangji only hesitates to collect the bundle of their combined silks, like brittle, shed snake skins — and calls Bichen from where she sleeps, flying to hand. Then, the hard run, quickening hunger in him, the yearning to hunt.
They arrive, Lan Wangji less delicate in his descent, the excess of his speed carrying a weight of momentum, on a crown of branches. Huddle, and witness... true debasement, a man deprived of wit and the will to raise himself from the primitive state in which curse and misfortune have arrived him. Defiled, dirtied, starved. And possessing, somehow, of enough qi or derived magic to have called a ward of semen and spittle and urine on the ground, netting birds that cannot lift themselves further. Disgusting, if efficient.
Their... intruder kills his prey with a stick, little sharpened, or crushes their throats with his hands, and binds them with hemp rope to slink back in the depth. He is fast, at least, with his work. Timid, almost, if not terrorised: as if fearing he will be caught, scolded and banished, but not injured. He scuttles away.
And Lan Wangji, faced with his own bare barbarian, politely extends the mountain of their layers, unfolded on his arms, for Wei Ying to have his pick, once they drop down. Only then: )
Assuredly. ( Then, measured, attempting and perhaps failing not to seem every piece of him a privileged gentleman assessing the less fortunate as if he were an animal: ) Unless... he is lesser in the ranks, turned to domesticity. If they are all — ( And there must be more. ) — in such state, they are as if... cattle. Kept.
( For... nightly congress? Strange, if not the first distortion he has witnessed of men to passion. Why should women be any better? ) We must take fire within.
no subject
Modesty. ( He hisses it out, but Wei Ying is blitzing across the forest glade in brazen, thorough nudity, sparing no care for Lan Wangji's petulant griefs or the colour of his concern. Thorns, needles, rocks and prickling branches. There is a wealth of torturous possibilities lining the woodland floors, prone to teething on Wei Ying's fresh-skinned soles, the choked width of his ankles. Not to speak of his bird bones.
No time to waste, not with the monastery's world in decadent fragility. Lan Wangji only hesitates to collect the bundle of their combined silks, like brittle, shed snake skins — and calls Bichen from where she sleeps, flying to hand. Then, the hard run, quickening hunger in him, the yearning to hunt.
They arrive, Lan Wangji less delicate in his descent, the excess of his speed carrying a weight of momentum, on a crown of branches. Huddle, and witness... true debasement, a man deprived of wit and the will to raise himself from the primitive state in which curse and misfortune have arrived him. Defiled, dirtied, starved. And possessing, somehow, of enough qi or derived magic to have called a ward of semen and spittle and urine on the ground, netting birds that cannot lift themselves further. Disgusting, if efficient.
Their... intruder kills his prey with a stick, little sharpened, or crushes their throats with his hands, and binds them with hemp rope to slink back in the depth. He is fast, at least, with his work. Timid, almost, if not terrorised: as if fearing he will be caught, scolded and banished, but not injured. He scuttles away.
And Lan Wangji, faced with his own bare barbarian, politely extends the mountain of their layers, unfolded on his arms, for Wei Ying to have his pick, once they drop down. Only then: )
Assuredly. ( Then, measured, attempting and perhaps failing not to seem every piece of him a privileged gentleman assessing the less fortunate as if he were an animal: ) Unless... he is lesser in the ranks, turned to domesticity. If they are all — ( And there must be more. ) — in such state, they are as if... cattle. Kept.
( For... nightly congress? Strange, if not the first distortion he has witnessed of men to passion. Why should women be any better? ) We must take fire within.