( He can, with music, call like to like, rattling bones in gentle horrors towards their partners, an aid to Lan Zhan's ministrations. There are too many small things in each body, the phalanges of hands and feet mysterious in the living, let alone in the scattered, pebble strewn basin of the spring's head, these imperial children, drowned and sacrificed by mothers who had been sacrificed by parents had been sacrificed by politics had sacrificed, in turn, a world's worth of regrets.
In what had become theirs, again, at such a cost.
It's worse, he knows, because this is not a loveless graveyard. It is simply proof, yet again, that love alone cannot be enough.
Fingers play through the ends of his hair, tug at his ribbon, pat at his robes. Pinch and tug and pull and, notably to him, cling. The youngest of spirits don't understand this enforced solitude and this silence and horror of a mountainside spring and the larger, darker forces that hold them here. They still cry for mothers who have, either directly or indirectly, determined their deaths.
He ceases the coaxing song that's won him his audience of emotions in vaguely child-shaped containers, clustered around the two men who were never destined to be their fathers, consumptively greedy. )
Of a living or dead emperor?
( He asks, sounding mild enough. Because if these are the women set aside, if these are the children who have bought them their youth and beauty, if this is what the monastery has crafted as freedom until there were not children coming in, until the mountain's darkness and the women's darkness collided in a dark lightning storm of thunderous interests and hopes, of particular powers and pressures...
He rests Chenqing against his shoulder, eyes cast down to the pools, to the wet edges of Lan Zhan's robes. )
It's beyond mattering for them, but it might inform on why the newest attempts have been... a certain kind of bestial.
( Soft, and his hair is pulled and braided by hands which are not there, but might have been, once. He lifts his gaze to Lan Zhan, not otherwise stirring, not yet. )
no subject
( He can, with music, call like to like, rattling bones in gentle horrors towards their partners, an aid to Lan Zhan's ministrations. There are too many small things in each body, the phalanges of hands and feet mysterious in the living, let alone in the scattered, pebble strewn basin of the spring's head, these imperial children, drowned and sacrificed by mothers who had been sacrificed by parents had been sacrificed by politics had sacrificed, in turn, a world's worth of regrets.
In what had become theirs, again, at such a cost.
It's worse, he knows, because this is not a loveless graveyard. It is simply proof, yet again, that love alone cannot be enough.
Fingers play through the ends of his hair, tug at his ribbon, pat at his robes. Pinch and tug and pull and, notably to him, cling. The youngest of spirits don't understand this enforced solitude and this silence and horror of a mountainside spring and the larger, darker forces that hold them here. They still cry for mothers who have, either directly or indirectly, determined their deaths.
He ceases the coaxing song that's won him his audience of emotions in vaguely child-shaped containers, clustered around the two men who were never destined to be their fathers, consumptively greedy. )
Of a living or dead emperor?
( He asks, sounding mild enough. Because if these are the women set aside, if these are the children who have bought them their youth and beauty, if this is what the monastery has crafted as freedom until there were not children coming in, until the mountain's darkness and the women's darkness collided in a dark lightning storm of thunderous interests and hopes, of particular powers and pressures...
He rests Chenqing against his shoulder, eyes cast down to the pools, to the wet edges of Lan Zhan's robes. )
It's beyond mattering for them, but it might inform on why the newest attempts have been... a certain kind of bestial.
( Soft, and his hair is pulled and braided by hands which are not there, but might have been, once. He lifts his gaze to Lan Zhan, not otherwise stirring, not yet. )
I cannot understand harming children.
( He has been broken by it, before. )