( A part of his heart breaks at the sight, the sound, the smells. These are not well people. These are not people kept in a healthy state even for the animals their tendencies seem so similar to, and this, he thinks, is the "cure." Abandoning them to live in a way unfit for any reality, but trying regardless to live in any way they can.
Palpable as well, an oppressive air, a force of presence behind it that hovers over all the men arrayed below, features distorted by ears and tails and fur that may be the clotted coverings of their bodies, or may be sprouted from their skin true. He narrows his eyes, lifting his gaze to the dark ceilings, letting his senses extend further. Concentrated purpose, not so much dark as feral, uncaring, wild, thrums along with the deeper thumping of the mountain. Of... ah. The mining. The tunnels here might not be directly linked, not in a way to move between, but the sounds of it, the cranking rumbles of rock and ore brought out, the striking of metal against stone.
His fingers curl towards his palms, nails biting into skin. Blood, he knows, has sway here, and not just from the bodies of the men or birds or other paltry hunted creatures below. More than what runs in his veins, or his husband's, or every human shaped being on this mountain.
The talisman he coaxes free is simple, old: following the source of a negative qi. He holds it up, for him and Lan Zhan to see in their flickering light. )
I have a feeling they were closer to the source, but that the infection's spreading. Feeling up for this hunt?
( Turning his head, serious and sincere. There's mishaps enough that can happen under the weight of this much mountain, and he won't make that call for the both of them. Not right now, and hopefully not in the future. )
( Wei Ying's hunger apparent, predictable, blatant. They must seek out the root of a sickness that appears to have eroded swathes of good, strong, standing men — reducing them to... animals. Base renditions and emulations of a human skin.
Wei Ying wants them to go, illicit hunger glistening in his gaze. He shutters his eyes, lets the wave of fermented, stoking stench wash over him. Bites down his tongue. Then, murmuring, he starts to draw their protection talismans. )
We will require defense.
( And it cannot be guaranteed. The risk to their persons is inevitable and terminal. He acknowledges it so, pragmatically, unflinchingly, already simulating the bravado required to slink further, taking their lead. Whatever the illusions of control Wei Ying crafts around himself — this will remain. He must go first. Must expose himself foremost.
Firm ground beneath his feet, despite the makeshift, crafted nature of the stairwell. He feels secure, hovering over the beds of bodies dishevelled and drowning in their debasement — as if a master overseeing a herd of fresh horses, crop at the ready.
He calls Bichen before he knows his own mind, her silver cutting in a hard, dashing line. She slips brazenly by his knees, and he mounts one foot, before simply waving Wei Ying forward. )
Swifter to cross the halls without exposure. ( But they would require a perfect silence that Wei Ying's developed hesitations towards sword flight might not guarantee. They can walk the grounds deeper into the mines, if Wei Ying is unwilling — but this way is their natural, unquestionable advantage. )
( What Lan Zhan says is true enough, and his desire to take front understood. Wei Wuxian lacks the youthful arrogance of one who has yet to fail so unutterably he cannot breathe: he's surfaced from depths of knowing that knowledge cannot save you, at all times.
Preparation is never fully complete.
So he steps upon his husband's sword, letting his talisman fly, holding fire out to their sides: a close bound star above the heads of the restless sleepers.
Trust and faith and awareness of self all help him balance expectations as they fly, his gaze locked over Lan Zhan's shoulder, his hand now freed off talisman burden circled around familiar waist.
Ahead the slip of paper twists and curls on unseen eddies of energy, dark and devouring. Across the cavern it flies, turning sharp into a shadowed alcove from which another narrow tunnel extends, falling to narrower ends. Flight remains necessary and expedient for the moment, stalactites bumps that start to reach from above, stalagmites glimmering with beautiful death in reflected firelight below.
In time they reach a ledge, beyond which they cannot fly: the talisman shivers before it departs into the interior, swallowed by the miasma within.
Sounds have grown louder and then distant in their pursuit. Here, it thrums like a massive beast's hibernating heart. Stepping from Bichen, he pauses to breathe in: dry rot, greed, and anger.
Longing, too. His fire burns quietly, mellowed, but he allows still his husband the due of first stepping entrance.
Into a cavern of unknowable depth and height, thin, cracked lines of sunlight far above, light swallowed long before it reached them. Here, instead, decays many, many things: hides stretched over bones, dangling from whichever ledge they landed on, the whole suffused with suffering more animal than human, old death stagnant in the air.
And the sound, unmistakable between the slow, thudding heartbeats of the mountains awareness, of water flowing. )
( Trickling flight, steadied. Between the dangers of exposure to the resting men — and he will not deny them their names, for all they deny themselves their nature — and Wei Ying's learned inhibition towards sword flight, best to keep their progress stifled, pace measured. He guides Bichen as far into the subterranean maws as she'll weather, before they descend in timid plunges to study the mouth that opens to reveal a lichen-poxed, stone-jutting jugular.
The stench is foul, old rot, desiccated and slow, and the quieted pulse of waiting water. He thinks, where there is a source, there will be creatures to drink of it — and where, carcass crushed beneath his step, there are bones, animals feed. He sees on walls the narrow depths of claw marks, irascible and inevitable, and somehow, in their crass brutality, benevolent. He recalls, with silent shudder, the stripping of flesh and the yielding to scar of many of the men who sleep.
Magic crackles in their surroundings, whispers old, ancestral, waiting. He turns to pass his hand over the walls and take inventory of their surroundings, to sense and immerse himself within, and soon enough, he returns to Wei Ying with his discoveries: a stretch of linens, straddling the ground, tattered and thinned — most likely, he presumes, given the red that lines its edges, once worn by one of the men. Silver bells on string, some bereft of clappers. The dregs of incense sticks, root still carrying the scent of raw musk. And a scratch-marred doll of wood and twine, depicting a wild feline.
He offers one and each in unwavering hands, as if a student presenting his findings to a critical professor. Then: )
Whatever this creature, it was summoned, sooner than found.
( It's the doll which gives him most pause. The scratches are undeniable. The twine harkens to its origins, organic and recent for the way it doesn't rot away under their touch. The wood? )
This is wood turned stone.
( Stone can be shaped, yes, but this looks carved, not hewn and polished. He offers it back to Lan Zhan, even as the weight of the darkness grows, as dozens of nictating eyes open and blink in a disturbing lack of coordination, dripping down from further inside. Claws unseen click and drag and tap, and he looks up, unblinking in turn.
Summoned, yes. Yet found, also. )
What are you?
( He murmurs, and the low growl that reverberates to the clanging bangs of mining happening nearby, muffled by separating stone, rolls over them both.
Perhaps surprising, yet feeling inevitable, the darkness responds: )
Greed. Lust. Perverted natures. Hunger. Sorrow. The flooding rivers. All of these, none of these. What are you?
( Down closer and closer it tumbles, spilling past ledges, viscous and slow. Bones disturb in it's passage. Death and musk and crisp scented spring water gust down with each flowing movement, until it ceases, both perched and held, before the weaving form of the energy seeking talisman. Darkness coalesces into a paw with digits too long and almost finger-like, reaching out to scrape one claw across the paper, missing by less than a hairs width. )
( Wood turned stone. A man-made carving, the human intervention. He accepts the token again, and the crackling pulse of energy awakened greets him. Whatever lingers here answered Wei Ying, activated by a necromancer's presence. As everything else in this great, horrible abode.
Then, even he senses the cloud-agglomeration of thousand-blinking eyes, the same one-that-is-hundred creature watching. He stirs, hand on Bichen, and lets Wei Ying carry the thread of their conversation to start, until — they must give answer. And he knows this: he to engage a demon is beholden to it. He speaks before his husband must: )
The quieting.
( Death, exorcism, silence. They are end to that which this place names birthing cradle. At once inimical and inevitable, that which all that lives is resigned and all that is dead embraces.
And he asks: ) Were you found here?
( The miners, he remembers. A house of stone, built to uncover the core and depths of the world. Something emerged from these grounds. By his feet, roiling but never touching, rot rallies and surges in caked and matte layers, a clawed hand tickling stone to touch paper.
He kicks the parchment handily away, but does not scold the creature. As long as they do not acknowledge its incursions, they may pretend diplomacy and communal understanding. It cackles, sharp and tinny, bright-blinding: )
Born... of a... womb. ( Fertility, he remembers. There is a root to this cause, amorous. Asking: )
Whom do you answer? ( And the laughter is trickling, then tenebrous, then like water bursting through a dam, nearly rattling the cave or waking those who sleep. Lan Wangji's breath catches — and he turns to capture the parchment in hand, strategically removing it from any wandering claws. )
Do you know, gentleman... there were so many children on these... grounds... before. So many... children...
( ...gone. In a monastery that —
The cave, once more, shakes and erupts in quakes, floors pulverized crumble. He steps away to avoid the spiderwebbing ripple of a fresh fissure — and the parchment is snatched of his hand. )
( It cradles the parchment close, as one might a doll, held between those elongated toes which cannot decide if they're handlike or pawlike, the claws at their tips unconcerned with the disquieting uncertainty. Fascinated as the ground cracks further, as heat and steam rise in unequal proportions. )
They all... fell... down... down, down, down...
( Those eyes in their multitude stay focused on the talisman, even as bones bounce and rattle and fall, brittle and cracking before they disappear into the yawning maw so close to his and Lan Zhan's feet. )
They can't see the children... can't see... more children...
( Its shaggy shadow mass lifts, a number of those eyes blinking out of rhythm, focussing on the two of them where they stand. )
No more.
( Breathed out, and he finally listens to Lan Zhan's request, the one made by the use of Wei Wuxian's name: go.
He steps back even as the creature before them appears to melt into eyes and darkness, the water and steam and everything falling and roiling as a cauldron bubbles over fire becoming thick and hazy and acrid, seeking to invade nostrils, lungs. He shoves backward, as much to find Lan Zhan and to flee out into the area behind them as it is to puzzle over what's been said.
No more.
Can't see the children.
Oh, but he does not think this monastery was ever polite. He can't say so once they're free, coughing and eyes weeping, but the difference in air quality is stunningly immediate, for all that the air outside of the creature's residence is still musty with the dust of a mountain's age. )
He wishes himself the better man, a hero. The one who might have considered this a priority, sooner than a distant goal, work unachievable. Instead, he is the fool and coward, who stumbles back, accepting Wei Ying as if a catapulted weight in his arms, dragging and binding him.
Bichen spills silver frost at his feet, and they are for air again, for blitzing, storming surrender and an immediate evacuation that barely permits glimpses of the beds of flesh and savages who sleep still in the mines. Scant still in number, he notices this much, and scuttling: whatever the rotting, dark, effusive miasma that spreads now to flood the quarters, it does not carry out its first incursion. These men know where to retreat, and it strikes him now that the numerous nooks and holes in dead, fattened, groaning walls must house them during similar tides.
It will break, he thinks, and cannot say whether he speaks of the wave of magic and misfortune that gives them chase, or the mine's battered bones. It will break, but we need not bear witness.
White light slants blinding through needlepoints of entry, then Bichen sunders a curtain of fresh thicket to deliver them back up on the hill's flattened side, fair distance from the river's susurrations. Out, where air punches their lungs with every exhalation and midday has yet to wholly expiate the chills of dawns.
This mountain smells of damp and incense, of perpetual animal warmth. They land, half-thrown onto grass, and Lan Wangji breathes in its unclean ferocity, dirt and gravel stranded in the hook of his hands. On them, on his knees also. He waits, then turns to face Wei Ying, rolling over to cover him and calling Bichen within grasp just in case pursuers follow. None, but he watches the entrance point, hawkishly, indifferent to the tremulations of weeds or Wei Ying or the cutting voice of a nun, behind them: )
If the honoured guests can bear to disentangle from the meadows, the midday meal will be served shortly.
( The abbess, it appears, would be grateful to host them.
Lan Wangji still has enough dregs of his dignity to flush. )
( Fire burns out behind them as Lan Zhan rides the airs through to the cave's entrance; Wei Wuxian breathes shallow against the taste of copper in his mouth, the heaviness in his lungs, watching behind and below them. The skittering of nothing, before they emerge into the cavern where the men dwell, and they too have skittered, tucked into cracks and nooks and crannies barely big enough to hold them.
This is not new to them.
He drags his eyes forward, to the blinding light before they too fly out and meet the ground with the reverence it demands, and their bodies caving before it. Caught, held, and thrown all in part, he rises with his hands dusting off his robes and smiles guilelessly at the nun courting them on demand of the abbess, dark eyes swallowing light even as they give the illusion of sparkling. )
The meadows are so lovely! The whole mountain, really, miss, it settles a longing in my soul.
( Her eyes, squinting and discerning, likewise glint as she turns away, hands folded to her middle, precise and proper. Not one of the felinoid sisters. Yet.
She's sure, and she says as much, if only they'd follow. Contemplation crossing her features before she schools them back to studied neutrality, not exactly calm.
He considers, too, smile easy, gaze dense. When he tugs on Lan Zhan's sleeves, two fingers catching at the fabric, he makes as if to pout at his husband, murmuring words: )
I love you. Those who lead here aren't innocent.
( A smile, again, as the nun glances back at them, and he leans in, beseeching: )
Will you feed me at the midday meal?
( He's been carried out already today, and it doesn't harm him to create the sort of daft and self-involved mask which allows people to believe, between the two of them, Lan Zhan the superior in sensibility. A lack of obvious affectation does wonders for perceptions, just as an overabundance can do the same.
The trails they follow back start off fresh, then rejoin with the one they walked the evening before. Only one feather, lingering on pine needles, pinned through the centre.
Activity levels have gone towards stillness in the monastery as they return, but not eerily so - distant the sounds of shuffling and clacking and the scent of cooking food gives indication to the current preoccupations. Only one hint suggests otherwise: two of the enrobed women without visible faces, near leaping out of the way when they walk down a narrower alley. The nun leading them stills, momentarily hesitating, before she continues on, towards the large hall with the rising rooftop. Not the main area for worship, but a side chamber, connected directly to the kitchens.
Inside, the scents of soup: vegetables, too, baked or thrown into a pan with or without butter. Platters being brought out by younger nuns, likely still appreticing to their holy craft, and simple fair, but plentiful, and hot, and..
... unseasoned but for the soup, which is the telltale red of some interfering tomato or chili.
They're lead to one long bench, closer to where the abbess already sits waiting. She eyes them both, unsmiling, but says nothing while the food is laid out, and then the rest of the nuns take their places, including the final stragglers from the kitchens themselves. )
— fissures his mouth, reaping a brief smile of burning incandescence. He catches himself on the cusp of foolishness: Wei Ying only invokes his pleasantries to shield subterfuge. Still, rising to his feet, one hand drifting to assist his woefully fragile husband after, he cannot sabotage the trickle of amusement that settles his mouth taut.
Then, they are herded, back into the mouth of a regimented hell for a different enterrement. At least they are welcomed by clutter, a tinny relish and bursts of movement, an institution alive. Here and there, young nuns walk at brisk pace, sparing them wandering glances and hushed conversation. Farther on, veteran nuns yet observe their vows of silence, heads bowed and long veils drawn over their faces.
He thinks to ask their guide, Why do they pray so strictly?
They have lost loved ones, he hears, and dedicate each day to honourable grief that might elicit pity from the skies and mercy upon those already gone.
They are herded into fresh hall quarters, where tables spread in tight configurations to house far more nuns than Lan Wangji had assumed the monastery sheltered, all sharing their midday meal. At least, to thank the Heavens, the meal looks safe but for the punitive copper of a soup Lan Wangji wisely defers to Wei Ying, sat primly beside him. And will Lan Wangji feed his husband?
...certainly, thick, blunt-carved wooden spoon lifted tenderly to transport a sturdy mouthful of the fragrant soup, its spices already sufficient that their very smells rouse the start of wet in Wangji's eyes. He blinks once, again. Then, as he leans in to deliver Wei Ying's meal, murmured: )
More than half of these women mourn. ( If they go by their veils, only primly shed and folded at their side to avoid contamination during the meal — or elegantly pinned up against a nun's ear, to reveal only her mouth. And another matter even Lan Wangji can surmise, in his otherwise studied ignorance: ) All have beauty.
( Wei Wuxian opens his mouth, uncaring, his cleaned hands reaching out to cradle his husband's face, swiping at the not-tears building at their corners. There's no playacting in this, not for either of them: surely he'd be fussy if everything were millet or the like, but while such is present here, it's not the sum total of what they're eating.
Besides, sweetened by the burn of spice, he swallows, and licks his lips. A reminder to himself: they need tending, as the traces of heat on them state calmly and without confusion. )
Were all blessed in marriage? With that beauty? Some of us are more than others, in the turnings of any world.
( Pad of his thumb tracing the arc of Lan Zhan's cheek, before he lets them fall away, to settle in Lan Zhan's lap, leaning towards him for ease of unconventional feeding far, far away from the sickbed, only place he'd previously allow. It's... strangely nice.
Very strangely nice, in the way of a wanted touch at the small of his back, in the care behind a loved one brushing hair back off his face, freeing his eyes to greater clarity.
The bell at his waist rolls as he shifts closer, the clang a gentle ting that cuts underneath the quiet prayers and mastication of a meal well met. The abbess aborts a startled look, eyes narrowing after, glaring around, but the lack of repetition settles her poorly into an accounting of her own meal.
He considers that, too, mouth opening as prompted, chewing as needed, swallowing because spitting out food that does not, as of this point, technically taste...
...
...
...
He sighs. )
Lan Zhan. I think you'll need to tie me down for the hour after sunset.
( Because one can taste nothing through the heat, and reds mask reds, and he has an inkling about what they were served the night before, and a certain disinclination to dance according to the whims of the manipulators here. )
( He offers back between unsuccessful attempts to arm another spoonful with enough red swill to plunge the monastery's reserves of cinnabar or hemorrhage a dozen fowl. There is a stench to the meal entirely too acrimonious, at once chalky and moulding and lacking in the stereotypical, gut-binding acidity that so often condemns spiced dishes.
Beside him, a nun gasps, shrill. Another farther down begs her leave and waves two distant sisters to fly the room in a cloud of resurrected veils and silence. Far more flush feverishly and their gazes seem suddenly, inexplicably affixed onto their soup.
It strikes Lan Wangji, thunder in wake of lightning, what he has said. He blinks down, first at the spoon in his hand and its rancid poison. Blinks again, at the waiting bowl-sized cesspool of much the same. Blinks with finality at Wei Ying, custodian of his never-ending affections and now, decisively, the last dregs of Lan Wangji's dignity.
And he politely whispers: ) I was a man of honour once.
( Before the Yiling Patriarch successfully punctured his poise and eradicated Hanguang-Jun's hopes of a future aligned with perfect purity and the sect's precepts. He does not accuse Wei Ying for his part in this.
...it is, all things considered, implicit. )
Hereby, shall cut you off from the cock. ( The feathery root of all evil, abolished in a sentence that, shockingly, seems to not cleanse his reputation across the table. )
( He smiles, brief and sharp, amused because of the wording and Lan Zhan's statement about honour as if this world and their own wasn't prone towards making mockery of the concept. He knows bone deep his husband is the kind of honourable that cannot turn away from itself, but can stand eventually before the torrents of expectations around.
He, however, knows that honour is disposable when it isn't something felt in the heart, guiding a soul. Breathed and understood for the ups and downs the world demands, and the cost of compromise, in which directions.
Wei Wuxian slides closer, then into his husband's lap, half closing his eyes as he sighs. Long. And. Slow. )
Will that really satisfy?
( He doesn't know that the living chicken will matter, cock or hen, but the magics at use are simply carried as easily by their bloods and last night's magics as any other way. Easiest still to make it part of what stew spiced so hot; the nuns flutter and fluster, but the abbess is unmoved by now, even as Wei Wuxian curls into Lan Zhan fully. He plays with the hairs at the back of Lan Zhan's neck, leaving Lan Zhan's arms as unimpeded as he can. )
Whatever happens, it strengthens at night. But if they think I'm incapacitated already, we might learn more of why this came to be, and how they woke up the mountain.
( Nothing, he decrees to himself and his own honour, what scant few scabs of it remain, will satisfy this very moment beyond Wei Ying's tacit surrender, spread and disheveled in tarnished silk, bare of the perversions of his mouth and the inconvenience of his linens. But that revelation is for a different wise man, who did not pledge to his husband the answer to monastery's sinuous secrets.
For moments syrupy and long, he weighs Wei Ying's words, then scalds 你是马? in crisp lines with his fingertips on Wei Ying's nearest wrist, to ask that to which his mouth cannot be overtly complicit: Are you? Incapacitated, he need not say. Affected. Compromised.
Already, the abbess has drowned them in the dark waters of her unerring scrutiny, making neither light nor secret of her attention scathing Wei Ying's shape, dripping onto Lan Wangji's after. Her mouth, a tight-stitched line, barely parts to hiss out her greetings, welcoming her visitors beneath her roof, before inquiring whether the... condition of the monastery has met their expectations.
They are largely women here, she adds, helpless but for the handful of sainted men who were hand-picked to protect them, under the seal of the imperial palace. This is a holy house for widows, wise women, girls who have forbidden themselves the joy of matrimony and former palace concubines, retired from their function. The emperor has been kind in his patronage of the lands. They have no enemies and angered no one. They have even struck bargain with nearby villagers to allow them to continue mining and reap the rewards. She does not understand why their monastery has attracted the wrath of the gods above, or the peculiar interest of mortal emissaries — but she hopes they may find what answers they wish.
And unspoken, but clear, even as Lan Wangji raises himself to bow and grudgingly collect his spouse, Do not come to her for help or with grievances. They are tolerated in their mission, because the imperial palace does not wish the current... trials to stain the monastery's virtue. But the abbess need not indulge these whims past reason.
So warned, feet of his stool scratching and mewling as they slide back abruptly, he arms himself with the better part of Wei Ying's weight, dragging an arm around his amorous spouse's waist. He does not speak until they have started for the corridor, waves of veiled nuns drifting beside them. )
We are not wanted here. ( But where the abbess was rigid, foul-tempered and chilled, the nuns that take note of Wei Ying's state seem drawn to them with compassion, steps stuttering at the sight of them to check in. )
( Languid, in his husband's arms, boneless, until they move. He smiles, chuckles, plays with hair, and then they're moving, and while he's sad for the loss of spice, he's not sad for the space to breathe. The only word he'd been able to give his husband's careful writing on his hand was encapsulated by a sigh: Yes.
Not much, but he can tell, can sense the energies within himself are altered, and shifts them even as he circulates his qi. More than he... he pauses, enough to bring them both to a standstill in the timing it takes for the nuns to come forth and overcome reticence for concern.
Then it's smiles, reassurances, and passing that concern with grace, walking at Lan Zhan's side, arm looped around his waist. )
We're a threat to whatever they're hiding. To what keeps them as this. To what supports their lifestyle. Of course we're unwanted.
( But it isn't to their cell he returns, and it isn't to the cavernous entry, where the men constrain and confine themselves. It's back into the forest, towards the river. At its banks, where they'd so recently played, he dipped his hand in water and brought it to the back of his neck. Breathing in, then out, he stands, looking up stream. )
I can work most of it out of my system, but it calls to something.
( Still looking upstream, he gestures forward, then steps along the riverbank. )
In the water. It's not heat, it's not evil, but it's immense.
( Further and further, to the chattering of birds that muffles as he goes, as the creek turns and curves and circles and burbles, up the mountain in an incline more gentle than the world around them rises. The trees are more scant the higher they go, but still concentrated near to the creek itself, lush with grasses and thickened bushes, until: a ravine, slowly looming over, and footsteps carrying them right into it. )
Up ahead. Do you feel that?
( There's a flush across his face and ears now, but his skin is cool to the touch. Not cold, not clammy, but cool. His qi continues circulating, and stutters through his core, not as bereft as usual. He notes this, offhand, but the thrumming pulse ahead calls him, louder, more demanding. )
( He feels it, dark and tenuous, slithering beneath skin and seeking to claw its way out. More deliberate a sickness in him, he suspects, than in Wei Ying, where it has spread like a consumptive fever, and the water's clean susurrations whisper him to stay, stay and away, stay.
He walks, and his stomach storms and clenches, and the river's bed twists and turns and chokes itself in trembling configurations. Up now, where trees thin, up in soft incline, up and up and up, and the ravine —
Blight his eyes. Tear them off. It's wrenched of him, sound like a skinning and a beating, like a peeling thing that forgot what it was meant to be shaped as. The cry of a creature that has never shed tears.
He is first, close to this cliff's edge, and his arm holds to the side, curtains of his sleeve failing to hide what the river wishes shown: where the waters fall, muttering spumed waves into silent trickle, at the feet of the ravine, a shallow pooling. And within it, dozens of bodies, all small. )
Do not look.
( But his mouth is desiccated, torn and tattering and slow, and he knows intrinsically that Wei Ying will not heed him — that Lan Wangji too, in his stead, would only walk forward to seize whatever revelation the fresh day may deliver forth. It will hurt Wei Ying somehow deeper, a cancerous growth gaining ambitions of metastasis: he has ever removed from himself all pretense of entitlement, all conceit of ownership, all delusions of being spared the cruelties of the world. Wei Ying, who thinks nothing is owed to him, does not anticipate kindness.
And even still, he is never prepared to witness the suffering of the young. And truths, at once, align: there were children here, once. They perished. And whatever was engaged in the mines now seeks to breed fresh ranks.
He comes to his knees in one sweep, as if scythed. Then, clumsily, he slips down.
Bodies, so many bodies, skinned and bones blanched. There are creatures in these woods, he knows dearly, but few that climb hard stone and bear the air of the forest plateau, paralysed among slate clouds, nearly suspended. And there is no meat left, no scratches mar or contort bone, and the great yawning evil of rot has yet to make house in the dirt-wet joints. They have sought to bury them, he sees, and the marks of fingers carry in troubled, brittle ground, no better than gravel; but it is a silty, wretched earth's skin, up here and high, and it slipped and scrambled in the crags and trenches between bones, and the burial ground is only a hell's mouth of bodies at rest and divots and anemic river's waters.
They were so young, he does not say, because the bones speak it: infants, small children, not the one looking as if they might rise past Lan Wangji's knee. )
( He is gentle when he comes to Lan Zhan's side, an immensity of grief within him, a ringing song of sorrow and rage. Unfocused, to everyone's thankfulness, so he circulates that, too, until it calms enough his breathing likewise gentles.
These are not children of horrors. Horrors have been visited on them, but these bones were home to healthy young, no contortions, no chewing after death, no breaks, no crushing. No true burial, but the power here, oh, this is the sickness that chased them from beneath this mountain.
This wellspring of stolen youth. Bought at the inconvenient convenience of monastic considerations. It is, after all, no place to raise children. )
Together.
( He says instead, knowing there will be a fight from the lingering fears of the children who died here, who even still aren't ready to know they've faced death, who were too young to understand the concept. No, they're closer to understanding the instincts of animals, complex or efficient, and this as much as the other magics have fed the swollen dark.
Impossibly, the sound of mining from below, deep below. The sound of water falling, of tears. )
Going there alone won't spare us.
( Not this task's necessity, not his imagination which will only grow and embrace and feast in terrible sadness injustice invites, and the cold, calm handling that follows.
They must settle to rest those they can. Chenqing comes to his hand, summoned from it's pouch, and he kneels in the water and bones and brittle, broken silence, and he waits for Lan Zhan, imperious to the cold. )
( Together, and there is a justice in this, in letting Wei Ying bask in the horror and bloodshed he was spared sight of in his first denouement. And it is ugly work, gristle and bone and screeching, and the wind dragging whispers from hollows and husks and the rounded, pained agonies discipled to live in the shadows of splintered remains.
First, the base trimmings of care, his hands twined and the blunt cleansing: to the best of his ability, he strives to return each bone to the whole that once hosted it, to make right the lines so that the spirits might recognise their house. A care in this, fingertips trailing and the filaments of his motions nearly surgical. To their luck, these murders did not target defilement, and what parting of limb from limb was done was accidental and immaterial.
He bides his time, all the same, breath only catching then releasing in silent, measured exhalations when resentment coils and tickles his calves, rises up his bowed back. A child's touch, teasing. Many of them behind him, humming and chattering words too long lost now to be deciphered, some cooing in the way of those who never learned to speak. He feels fine silks, hears gold rattling. Speaks with quiet certainty to Wei Ying: )
These were imperial children. ( Just as their mothers were imperial concubines. Though their reasons for twisting their transparent fingers to pinch at Lan Wangji's sleeve are decidedly base and playfully child-like. )
( 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 say. ( The bones are too young, the spirits too feeble. Among the dregs and tatters of conscious spirits that dally, few ever possessed speech, and far fewer still retain it in the wake of — )
A violent death. ( This, the remains spoke of. No poison, no arson, no curse. Battery, splintered bones, the loose, blunt and negligent indications of stabbing, of tearing, of breakage. These were not the victims of artful assassination, but the butchery fodder of brutal execution.
He hears what Wei Ying says, coarse and snagging, like sisal. Hears too, what he does not speak — and drifts his hand out to catch on the raining rim of his husband's sleeve, then his wrist. First, raising himself to crouch, then stand. After, only to hang, limp and idle, before pulsing a few choice, ashen squeezes. There is nothing in the harm of children to be understood. )
The nuns will know. ( But they may not speak a bitter truth. Already, their abbess circles them like a marauding, feral cat spying prey it is too slight to assault in broad daylight and must instead wear down through the attrition of its stamina. She hopes, if they are left to blunt the edges of their curiosity on the haunted grounds without intervention, they will neglect to attack the intimacy of the monastery.
He is slow, after: to draw his energies in a moderate, balanced flow without fluctuations, a perfect harmony to avoid stirring wrath or opposition. Inevitably, his guqin must answer summons, called to sleep hovered before him, a testimony to devotion. No other instrument would come so softly bidden to a sea of dead.
The first few notes are off-tune, shrill. The songs of cleansing feel too violently barbaric in a place already watered in aggression. He eases the melody, slows it, until the territories answer in a tired, wrenched hum, and he begins to carefully portion their soporific. )
( He finds it in himself to smile, in the way that never quite reaches his eyes: those smiles as masks for the horrors and horrible certainty of horrors within a world that had, for ages, as much care for his concerns as it did concern for its cares. The dead so rarely fight him in the haunted halls of their home world. Here, the dead are more liberal at intermingling with the living, more vicious in their claims against those who have not plunged through the bone-searing cold and terror of dying.
Children should not have to know this. Children should not have to be intimately familiar with brutality. Yet they are, and that cannot be undone. What can be persuaded is, perhaps, within their hands, and so he inclines his head to the solemn form of his husband, his soul's partner, his Lan Zhan.
Lifts Chenqing to his lips, with his eyes closing: he never needs to see for these things, does not wish the distraction. For music like this, the red darkness behind his eyes is more than sufficient.
Water burbles and sings, tinkling onward as glass baubles tumbling over each other, poised always as if just one more motion shall send them shattered to the floor, cutting and broken.
His music is calming, to start. A lullaby to souls, asking again and again for the littles to come, to attend, to consider: sleep. Compelling for its familiarity despite the lack of any familiarity of such a tune to this world, to these people, small hands push close, small heads nuzzle in, small ghostly nails dig into fabric and skin and hold on, clinging, dreaming still.
Stilled dreams, all of them.
The lullaby becomes in stages a quiet, playful suggestion: follow, run, frolic, be free. Be away from pain, from agony's memory, from the tortured repetition of final thoughts, final cries. Hear the water, moving, carving mountains over time. Hear the birds that dart and sing and drink of the waters, that live in the branches and the skies and the bushes, part of a world and ephemeral within it as all living beings are.
Light, from the sun, from within, to weightlessness, and oh, he does not care if he weeps without stumbling in his music, because tears are water too, and they all flow, carve, resist, he does not care for tears as he feels those unseen fingers relax, as he hears the haunted reflection of a hiccuped laughter, of burbles and shrieks not in terror and horror and angry fear, but in brighter, beautiful emotions. Like the birds, the souls of children carried away into whatever this world considers its patterns, its intermingling, of the living and dead. Had they not spent two years caught up in the trailing patterns of that break? Does it not predate them? Was it not in the fierce chilling winds of a mountain far from home, laden with more salt than any even his husband has felt over the years stretched thin and grievous between them.
It takes a blinking eye; it takes an eternity. One breath to the next, one note woven into the qin's song, teasing and bolstering and leading and married, always, to the skill of broken, bleeding fingers, the shades, the resentment, the dregs of souls, of spirits, of something that lingered to fuel the horrors of this place flies away, until they're left with the memories of bones, and tears, and one distant, weeping bird's cry.
He lowers his flute, head turning, eyes opening, regarding the dark presence of the monastery, of the painful cavern with its beguiled and altered boys and men, of the fecundity turned into gaping, hungry ambition for fickle, faithless power. )
Will this be a bloodless ending?
( He may hope, even as he knows how often these things only end in the violence of their birthing. Into the world they all came with blood; out of the world too many left the same. )
( In the eye of the storm, survival is fittest. There is an element of brutality to Wei Ying's play, an intrinsic unleashing of power fetid that envelops Lan Wangji's body and makes home in his scars and house in his scabs and roots deep and old in the blinking, plumed flame of his core, hoping to reduce it to fumes. He is suffocated, allergic, shuddering, raw. Vulnerable, in the wake of play, in ways he should one day entrust to his husband — but beats back down like a forge's steel, until the shape of his resilience turns to conviction.
Wei Ying lowers the flute. Lan Wangji's hand glides over it, over the hand that holds it, squeezes. Smell of heat and sawdust and ashes burned again, the echo of decimation. He turns, and flicks blooded motes of revenant and shadow off Wei Ying's cheek, and he kisses his mouth like a roaring wave, like a man meted his justice. There is a limit, gripping and gutting and silent, to how much he can take from the well of this man, his spouse, before the waters of his strength muddy and run dry. And still, Lan Wangji steals from and of him again. )
They are too many children.
( Too many to go unavenged, without blood price. Too much to ask of Lan Wangji, truer monk than those who raised a monastery of graveyard bones. Would that they were holy or devout, that he might honour himself with guilt or hesitation, but he sees only witnesses, hears only new soles creaking and silken robes rustling, and they are accomplices, to one. Accomplices all. )
Let me speak to the reverend mother once more. ( But with finality, with teeth and bite showing. ) You may rest here, if you wish.
( But should not. Because these are children stirred and woken and orphans cling to skirts and sleeves, and they are half blind and wholly animal, their appetites know no filial piety. What is Wei Ying but another hearth, fire running slow and dry? He will be tatters before them. He will be their grave — and they will drain him in gratitude. )
( He should expect by now this thrumming awareness, the heat and inevitability of awareness that comes with his husband's touch. He's yet surprised, grounded in the press of an open mouth against his, in the sudden, stark remembrance of his own grounded form, warmed and anchored by Lan Zhan's want. There's a powerful lifeline caught between their chests, and the echoes of pain soften, quiet.
There are always too many children, as soon as there is one. That the righteous world still didn't acknowledge this perhaps sang the song of his bloodied conviction, but at least now, at least twenty years in the refining, does he trust in the faith and steady nature of this man: one to agree with actions, not simply passify with words.
He nods, allowing the concern that follows in suggestions of staying, of going, of retiring to chambers where the stench might try fail to penetrate him fully. Speared through or not, they are each other's accompaniment. His flute finds the give of his waistband, his hand the stretch of skin and bone and strength and heat of Lan Zhan's hand. Held, then tugged as he steps forward, as the day crashes over them in sounds and brightness.
May the waters carry only good will further: may they be cleansed of the gluttony of pain purchased power. )
Lan Zhan, where won't we walk together? Have your conversation. I'm curious what words she'll weave to the succinct beauty of your own.
( Another smile, yet given in sincerity: belief and trust, delivered in kind. That he's launched them into motion, claiming their way back while hand in hand, lacing fingers between fingers, lacking shame for the desire to keep anchored to his soul mate's sky cloaked warmth, goes without saying.
It's as they approach the monster of the monastery yet again that glimpses of the women who live there flashes between trunks, that mouths stretch to accommodate teeth too long and pointed, lips blood red, then again little but the chapped redness of lips exposed to a world at such elevation with no soft excess.
( Shameless, only he needn't speak it, the open vulgarity of their clasped hands pronouncing the audacious exhibitionism of a wedded pair. Outside, in the open world, only the Heavens may find against them. But there are questions rusting and unasked within the confines of the monastery, gazes that trailed after them, murmurs and gasps.
He sees girls, pretty girls, and this strikes him: not their physical prowess, for it is known that some gods only accept devotees of the finest persuasion, a testimony to their own appetites. But the ages leave to wonder: women barely of marrying age, some past, some riper. Few past the threshold where the moon of monthly womanhood begins to wane, and child bearing years are past. A fresh-faced cohort, spanning at most two decades, past the mother reverend. A strange consideration. )
They are... young. ( He whispers to Wei Ying, the giggling of two cascading tinny and low in their wake, as they advance into the belly of the beastly infrastructure, down the winding paths of stables and pantries, oh so many pantries, and granaries despoiled, because the damned cats get everywhere, but at least no mice, besides them. Efficient, as episodes of hysteria and mass-possession go. Good for the household.
Then they've come before their loaned quarters, and Lan Wangji is struck again: first by the coldness of their rooms, their spartan welcome. Certainly, riches and exaltation are unlikely in a holy abode, but there are more light-brimming quarters, rugs to be dragged in, the rare vase to borrow. Guests can be accommodated, when they come bearing potential salvation.
He opens their gate with a creaking gulp of rustling chains falling, leading the way to where their chicken stands riotous and sullen, peering from a sphere of feathers in the nest of Wei Ying's intended bed. )
Mind my cock, he is agitated. ( This, somehow, spoken with a prevailingly dry tone and an unblinking gaze, while Lan Wangji repositions himself to stand as if sentinel by the nearest wall, once more surveiling the quarters. )
Why did their emperor request exorcists the nuns evidently reject?
( Laughter tinkling as shattered glass brushed off the table in carelessness, and he smiles, and fans his lashes down, and leans not so subtly into his husband's warmth. It could be play, but he needs that proximity, that closeness, to remind him that he's earned this, when the murders of multitudes run fingers through his hair, tugging like hungry fingers on the sleeves of his memories.
To the point that he hums agreement, lifts their held hands to his lips to press a set, lingering kiss to familiar knuckles, before his banishment to attend his husband's little bird is complete. Oh, he would, he knows. After bathing away this place, he would love to lose himself with the finding of their conjunction, but it must breathe, pause, and follow.
The bird, on the other hand, he scoops up with both hands and tucks under an arm, scratching fingers into feathers and rewarded by a clucking coo, and a shifted neck, further separation of feathers. Dusty wax sides under his fingers: the rooster growing new feathers, irritated by their caps. He's less aware of this than of repeatedly handling fowl gifts, and being inclined to robust, careful attention. )
They did his dirty work. Now he wishes them cleansed and buried. Asking the matron, whose beautiful daughters are these, and why are their progeny not allowed to live? What worship of power clings here, in debauchery and despair?
( Glancing up as his feet carry him close, chicken under arm and looking grumpy yet gratified, until Wei Wuxian pats his head like he would the horse's. A head turns and beak snaps and his fingers flee the warning, his gaze descended to this lucky, feathered fool. )
Or maybe he simply suspects. I just find it harder to believe this came to be without his consent. We still don't know the mountains howled intent, not the monster of the monastery, nor his. Thoughts?
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no subject
( A part of his heart breaks at the sight, the sound, the smells. These are not well people. These are not people kept in a healthy state even for the animals their tendencies seem so similar to, and this, he thinks, is the "cure." Abandoning them to live in a way unfit for any reality, but trying regardless to live in any way they can.
Palpable as well, an oppressive air, a force of presence behind it that hovers over all the men arrayed below, features distorted by ears and tails and fur that may be the clotted coverings of their bodies, or may be sprouted from their skin true. He narrows his eyes, lifting his gaze to the dark ceilings, letting his senses extend further. Concentrated purpose, not so much dark as feral, uncaring, wild, thrums along with the deeper thumping of the mountain. Of... ah. The mining. The tunnels here might not be directly linked, not in a way to move between, but the sounds of it, the cranking rumbles of rock and ore brought out, the striking of metal against stone.
His fingers curl towards his palms, nails biting into skin. Blood, he knows, has sway here, and not just from the bodies of the men or birds or other paltry hunted creatures below. More than what runs in his veins, or his husband's, or every human shaped being on this mountain.
The talisman he coaxes free is simple, old: following the source of a negative qi. He holds it up, for him and Lan Zhan to see in their flickering light. )
I have a feeling they were closer to the source, but that the infection's spreading. Feeling up for this hunt?
( Turning his head, serious and sincere. There's mishaps enough that can happen under the weight of this much mountain, and he won't make that call for the both of them. Not right now, and hopefully not in the future. )
no subject
( Wei Ying's hunger apparent, predictable, blatant. They must seek out the root of a sickness that appears to have eroded swathes of good, strong, standing men — reducing them to... animals. Base renditions and emulations of a human skin.
Wei Ying wants them to go, illicit hunger glistening in his gaze. He shutters his eyes, lets the wave of fermented, stoking stench wash over him. Bites down his tongue. Then, murmuring, he starts to draw their protection talismans. )
We will require defense.
( And it cannot be guaranteed. The risk to their persons is inevitable and terminal. He acknowledges it so, pragmatically, unflinchingly, already simulating the bravado required to slink further, taking their lead. Whatever the illusions of control Wei Ying crafts around himself — this will remain. He must go first. Must expose himself foremost.
Firm ground beneath his feet, despite the makeshift, crafted nature of the stairwell. He feels secure, hovering over the beds of bodies dishevelled and drowning in their debasement — as if a master overseeing a herd of fresh horses, crop at the ready.
He calls Bichen before he knows his own mind, her silver cutting in a hard, dashing line. She slips brazenly by his knees, and he mounts one foot, before simply waving Wei Ying forward. )
Swifter to cross the halls without exposure. ( But they would require a perfect silence that Wei Ying's developed hesitations towards sword flight might not guarantee. They can walk the grounds deeper into the mines, if Wei Ying is unwilling — but this way is their natural, unquestionable advantage. )
no subject
( What Lan Zhan says is true enough, and his desire to take front understood. Wei Wuxian lacks the youthful arrogance of one who has yet to fail so unutterably he cannot breathe: he's surfaced from depths of knowing that knowledge cannot save you, at all times.
Preparation is never fully complete.
So he steps upon his husband's sword, letting his talisman fly, holding fire out to their sides: a close bound star above the heads of the restless sleepers.
Trust and faith and awareness of self all help him balance expectations as they fly, his gaze locked over Lan Zhan's shoulder, his hand now freed off talisman burden circled around familiar waist.
Ahead the slip of paper twists and curls on unseen eddies of energy, dark and devouring. Across the cavern it flies, turning sharp into a shadowed alcove from which another narrow tunnel extends, falling to narrower ends. Flight remains necessary and expedient for the moment, stalactites bumps that start to reach from above, stalagmites glimmering with beautiful death in reflected firelight below.
In time they reach a ledge, beyond which they cannot fly: the talisman shivers before it departs into the interior, swallowed by the miasma within.
Sounds have grown louder and then distant in their pursuit. Here, it thrums like a massive beast's hibernating heart. Stepping from Bichen, he pauses to breathe in: dry rot, greed, and anger.
Longing, too. His fire burns quietly, mellowed, but he allows still his husband the due of first stepping entrance.
Into a cavern of unknowable depth and height, thin, cracked lines of sunlight far above, light swallowed long before it reached them. Here, instead, decays many, many things: hides stretched over bones, dangling from whichever ledge they landed on, the whole suffused with suffering more animal than human, old death stagnant in the air.
And the sound, unmistakable between the slow, thudding heartbeats of the mountains awareness, of water flowing. )
no subject
( Trickling flight, steadied. Between the dangers of exposure to the resting men — and he will not deny them their names, for all they deny themselves their nature — and Wei Ying's learned inhibition towards sword flight, best to keep their progress stifled, pace measured. He guides Bichen as far into the subterranean maws as she'll weather, before they descend in timid plunges to study the mouth that opens to reveal a lichen-poxed, stone-jutting jugular.
The stench is foul, old rot, desiccated and slow, and the quieted pulse of waiting water. He thinks, where there is a source, there will be creatures to drink of it — and where, carcass crushed beneath his step, there are bones, animals feed. He sees on walls the narrow depths of claw marks, irascible and inevitable, and somehow, in their crass brutality, benevolent. He recalls, with silent shudder, the stripping of flesh and the yielding to scar of many of the men who sleep.
Magic crackles in their surroundings, whispers old, ancestral, waiting. He turns to pass his hand over the walls and take inventory of their surroundings, to sense and immerse himself within, and soon enough, he returns to Wei Ying with his discoveries: a stretch of linens, straddling the ground, tattered and thinned — most likely, he presumes, given the red that lines its edges, once worn by one of the men. Silver bells on string, some bereft of clappers. The dregs of incense sticks, root still carrying the scent of raw musk. And a scratch-marred doll of wood and twine, depicting a wild feline.
He offers one and each in unwavering hands, as if a student presenting his findings to a critical professor. Then: )
Whatever this creature, it was summoned, sooner than found.
no subject
( It's the doll which gives him most pause. The scratches are undeniable. The twine harkens to its origins, organic and recent for the way it doesn't rot away under their touch. The wood? )
This is wood turned stone.
( Stone can be shaped, yes, but this looks carved, not hewn and polished. He offers it back to Lan Zhan, even as the weight of the darkness grows, as dozens of nictating eyes open and blink in a disturbing lack of coordination, dripping down from further inside. Claws unseen click and drag and tap, and he looks up, unblinking in turn.
Summoned, yes. Yet found, also. )
What are you?
( He murmurs, and the low growl that reverberates to the clanging bangs of mining happening nearby, muffled by separating stone, rolls over them both.
Perhaps surprising, yet feeling inevitable, the darkness responds: )
Greed. Lust. Perverted natures. Hunger. Sorrow. The flooding rivers. All of these, none of these. What are you?
( Down closer and closer it tumbles, spilling past ledges, viscous and slow. Bones disturb in it's passage. Death and musk and crisp scented spring water gust down with each flowing movement, until it ceases, both perched and held, before the weaving form of the energy seeking talisman. Darkness coalesces into a paw with digits too long and almost finger-like, reaching out to scrape one claw across the paper, missing by less than a hairs width. )
no subject
( Wood turned stone. A man-made carving, the human intervention. He accepts the token again, and the crackling pulse of energy awakened greets him. Whatever lingers here answered Wei Ying, activated by a necromancer's presence. As everything else in this great, horrible abode.
Then, even he senses the cloud-agglomeration of thousand-blinking eyes, the same one-that-is-hundred creature watching. He stirs, hand on Bichen, and lets Wei Ying carry the thread of their conversation to start, until — they must give answer. And he knows this: he to engage a demon is beholden to it. He speaks before his husband must: )
The quieting.
( Death, exorcism, silence. They are end to that which this place names birthing cradle. At once inimical and inevitable, that which all that lives is resigned and all that is dead embraces.
And he asks: ) Were you found here?
( The miners, he remembers. A house of stone, built to uncover the core and depths of the world. Something emerged from these grounds. By his feet, roiling but never touching, rot rallies and surges in caked and matte layers, a clawed hand tickling stone to touch paper.
He kicks the parchment handily away, but does not scold the creature. As long as they do not acknowledge its incursions, they may pretend diplomacy and communal understanding. It cackles, sharp and tinny, bright-blinding: )
Born... of a... womb. ( Fertility, he remembers. There is a root to this cause, amorous. Asking: )
Whom do you answer? ( And the laughter is trickling, then tenebrous, then like water bursting through a dam, nearly rattling the cave or waking those who sleep. Lan Wangji's breath catches — and he turns to capture the parchment in hand, strategically removing it from any wandering claws. )
Do you know, gentleman... there were so many children on these... grounds... before. So many... children...
( ...gone. In a monastery that —
The cave, once more, shakes and erupts in quakes, floors pulverized crumble. He steps away to avoid the spiderwebbing ripple of a fresh fissure — and the parchment is snatched of his hand. )
Wei Ying. ( They should, perhaps, leave. )
no subject
( It cradles the parchment close, as one might a doll, held between those elongated toes which cannot decide if they're handlike or pawlike, the claws at their tips unconcerned with the disquieting uncertainty. Fascinated as the ground cracks further, as heat and steam rise in unequal proportions. )
They all... fell... down... down, down, down...
( Those eyes in their multitude stay focused on the talisman, even as bones bounce and rattle and fall, brittle and cracking before they disappear into the yawning maw so close to his and Lan Zhan's feet. )
They can't see the children... can't see... more children...
( Its shaggy shadow mass lifts, a number of those eyes blinking out of rhythm, focussing on the two of them where they stand. )
No more.
( Breathed out, and he finally listens to Lan Zhan's request, the one made by the use of Wei Wuxian's name: go.
He steps back even as the creature before them appears to melt into eyes and darkness, the water and steam and everything falling and roiling as a cauldron bubbles over fire becoming thick and hazy and acrid, seeking to invade nostrils, lungs. He shoves backward, as much to find Lan Zhan and to flee out into the area behind them as it is to puzzle over what's been said.
No more.
Can't see the children.
Oh, but he does not think this monastery was ever polite. He can't say so once they're free, coughing and eyes weeping, but the difference in air quality is stunningly immediate, for all that the air outside of the creature's residence is still musty with the dust of a mountain's age. )
no subject
( How will they save the men —
He wishes himself the better man, a hero. The one who might have considered this a priority, sooner than a distant goal, work unachievable. Instead, he is the fool and coward, who stumbles back, accepting Wei Ying as if a catapulted weight in his arms, dragging and binding him.
Bichen spills silver frost at his feet, and they are for air again, for blitzing, storming surrender and an immediate evacuation that barely permits glimpses of the beds of flesh and savages who sleep still in the mines. Scant still in number, he notices this much, and scuttling: whatever the rotting, dark, effusive miasma that spreads now to flood the quarters, it does not carry out its first incursion. These men know where to retreat, and it strikes him now that the numerous nooks and holes in dead, fattened, groaning walls must house them during similar tides.
It will break, he thinks, and cannot say whether he speaks of the wave of magic and misfortune that gives them chase, or the mine's battered bones. It will break, but we need not bear witness.
White light slants blinding through needlepoints of entry, then Bichen sunders a curtain of fresh thicket to deliver them back up on the hill's flattened side, fair distance from the river's susurrations. Out, where air punches their lungs with every exhalation and midday has yet to wholly expiate the chills of dawns.
This mountain smells of damp and incense, of perpetual animal warmth. They land, half-thrown onto grass, and Lan Wangji breathes in its unclean ferocity, dirt and gravel stranded in the hook of his hands. On them, on his knees also. He waits, then turns to face Wei Ying, rolling over to cover him and calling Bichen within grasp just in case pursuers follow. None, but he watches the entrance point, hawkishly, indifferent to the tremulations of weeds or Wei Ying or the cutting voice of a nun, behind them: )
If the honoured guests can bear to disentangle from the meadows, the midday meal will be served shortly.
( The abbess, it appears, would be grateful to host them.
Lan Wangji still has enough dregs of his dignity to flush. )
...apologies. We shall arrive.
no subject
( Fire burns out behind them as Lan Zhan rides the airs through to the cave's entrance; Wei Wuxian breathes shallow against the taste of copper in his mouth, the heaviness in his lungs, watching behind and below them. The skittering of nothing, before they emerge into the cavern where the men dwell, and they too have skittered, tucked into cracks and nooks and crannies barely big enough to hold them.
This is not new to them.
He drags his eyes forward, to the blinding light before they too fly out and meet the ground with the reverence it demands, and their bodies caving before it. Caught, held, and thrown all in part, he rises with his hands dusting off his robes and smiles guilelessly at the nun courting them on demand of the abbess, dark eyes swallowing light even as they give the illusion of sparkling. )
The meadows are so lovely! The whole mountain, really, miss, it settles a longing in my soul.
( Her eyes, squinting and discerning, likewise glint as she turns away, hands folded to her middle, precise and proper. Not one of the felinoid sisters. Yet.
She's sure, and she says as much, if only they'd follow. Contemplation crossing her features before she schools them back to studied neutrality, not exactly calm.
He considers, too, smile easy, gaze dense. When he tugs on Lan Zhan's sleeves, two fingers catching at the fabric, he makes as if to pout at his husband, murmuring words: )
I love you. Those who lead here aren't innocent.
( A smile, again, as the nun glances back at them, and he leans in, beseeching: )
Will you feed me at the midday meal?
( He's been carried out already today, and it doesn't harm him to create the sort of daft and self-involved mask which allows people to believe, between the two of them, Lan Zhan the superior in sensibility. A lack of obvious affectation does wonders for perceptions, just as an overabundance can do the same.
The trails they follow back start off fresh, then rejoin with the one they walked the evening before. Only one feather, lingering on pine needles, pinned through the centre.
Activity levels have gone towards stillness in the monastery as they return, but not eerily so - distant the sounds of shuffling and clacking and the scent of cooking food gives indication to the current preoccupations. Only one hint suggests otherwise: two of the enrobed women without visible faces, near leaping out of the way when they walk down a narrower alley. The nun leading them stills, momentarily hesitating, before she continues on, towards the large hall with the rising rooftop. Not the main area for worship, but a side chamber, connected directly to the kitchens.
Inside, the scents of soup: vegetables, too, baked or thrown into a pan with or without butter. Platters being brought out by younger nuns, likely still appreticing to their holy craft, and simple fair, but plentiful, and hot, and..
... unseasoned but for the soup, which is the telltale red of some interfering tomato or chili.
They're lead to one long bench, closer to where the abbess already sits waiting. She eyes them both, unsmiling, but says nothing while the food is laid out, and then the rest of the nuns take their places, including the final stragglers from the kitchens themselves. )
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( In the end —
I love you.
— fissures his mouth, reaping a brief smile of burning incandescence. He catches himself on the cusp of foolishness: Wei Ying only invokes his pleasantries to shield subterfuge. Still, rising to his feet, one hand drifting to assist his woefully fragile husband after, he cannot sabotage the trickle of amusement that settles his mouth taut.
Then, they are herded, back into the mouth of a regimented hell for a different enterrement. At least they are welcomed by clutter, a tinny relish and bursts of movement, an institution alive. Here and there, young nuns walk at brisk pace, sparing them wandering glances and hushed conversation. Farther on, veteran nuns yet observe their vows of silence, heads bowed and long veils drawn over their faces.
He thinks to ask their guide, Why do they pray so strictly?
They have lost loved ones, he hears, and dedicate each day to honourable grief that might elicit pity from the skies and mercy upon those already gone.
They are herded into fresh hall quarters, where tables spread in tight configurations to house far more nuns than Lan Wangji had assumed the monastery sheltered, all sharing their midday meal. At least, to thank the Heavens, the meal looks safe but for the punitive copper of a soup Lan Wangji wisely defers to Wei Ying, sat primly beside him. And will Lan Wangji feed his husband?
...certainly, thick, blunt-carved wooden spoon lifted tenderly to transport a sturdy mouthful of the fragrant soup, its spices already sufficient that their very smells rouse the start of wet in Wangji's eyes. He blinks once, again. Then, as he leans in to deliver Wei Ying's meal, murmured: )
More than half of these women mourn. ( If they go by their veils, only primly shed and folded at their side to avoid contamination during the meal — or elegantly pinned up against a nun's ear, to reveal only her mouth. And another matter even Lan Wangji can surmise, in his otherwise studied ignorance: ) All have beauty.
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( Wei Wuxian opens his mouth, uncaring, his cleaned hands reaching out to cradle his husband's face, swiping at the not-tears building at their corners. There's no playacting in this, not for either of them: surely he'd be fussy if everything were millet or the like, but while such is present here, it's not the sum total of what they're eating.
Besides, sweetened by the burn of spice, he swallows, and licks his lips. A reminder to himself: they need tending, as the traces of heat on them state calmly and without confusion. )
Were all blessed in marriage? With that beauty? Some of us are more than others, in the turnings of any world.
( Pad of his thumb tracing the arc of Lan Zhan's cheek, before he lets them fall away, to settle in Lan Zhan's lap, leaning towards him for ease of unconventional feeding far, far away from the sickbed, only place he'd previously allow. It's... strangely nice.
Very strangely nice, in the way of a wanted touch at the small of his back, in the care behind a loved one brushing hair back off his face, freeing his eyes to greater clarity.
The bell at his waist rolls as he shifts closer, the clang a gentle ting that cuts underneath the quiet prayers and mastication of a meal well met. The abbess aborts a startled look, eyes narrowing after, glaring around, but the lack of repetition settles her poorly into an accounting of her own meal.
He considers that, too, mouth opening as prompted, chewing as needed, swallowing because spitting out food that does not, as of this point, technically taste...
...
...
...
He sighs. )
Lan Zhan. I think you'll need to tie me down for the hour after sunset.
( Because one can taste nothing through the heat, and reds mask reds, and he has an inkling about what they were served the night before, and a certain disinclination to dance according to the whims of the manipulators here. )
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As ever, in the company of a fattened cock.
( He offers back between unsuccessful attempts to arm another spoonful with enough red swill to plunge the monastery's reserves of cinnabar or hemorrhage a dozen fowl. There is a stench to the meal entirely too acrimonious, at once chalky and moulding and lacking in the stereotypical, gut-binding acidity that so often condemns spiced dishes.
Beside him, a nun gasps, shrill. Another farther down begs her leave and waves two distant sisters to fly the room in a cloud of resurrected veils and silence. Far more flush feverishly and their gazes seem suddenly, inexplicably affixed onto their soup.
It strikes Lan Wangji, thunder in wake of lightning, what he has said. He blinks down, first at the spoon in his hand and its rancid poison. Blinks again, at the waiting bowl-sized cesspool of much the same. Blinks with finality at Wei Ying, custodian of his never-ending affections and now, decisively, the last dregs of Lan Wangji's dignity.
And he politely whispers: ) I was a man of honour once.
( Before the Yiling Patriarch successfully punctured his poise and eradicated Hanguang-Jun's hopes of a future aligned with perfect purity and the sect's precepts. He does not accuse Wei Ying for his part in this.
...it is, all things considered, implicit. )
Hereby, shall cut you off from the cock. ( The feathery root of all evil, abolished in a sentence that, shockingly, seems to not cleanse his reputation across the table. )
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( He smiles, brief and sharp, amused because of the wording and Lan Zhan's statement about honour as if this world and their own wasn't prone towards making mockery of the concept. He knows bone deep his husband is the kind of honourable that cannot turn away from itself, but can stand eventually before the torrents of expectations around.
He, however, knows that honour is disposable when it isn't something felt in the heart, guiding a soul. Breathed and understood for the ups and downs the world demands, and the cost of compromise, in which directions.
Wei Wuxian slides closer, then into his husband's lap, half closing his eyes as he sighs. Long. And. Slow. )
Will that really satisfy?
( He doesn't know that the living chicken will matter, cock or hen, but the magics at use are simply carried as easily by their bloods and last night's magics as any other way. Easiest still to make it part of what stew spiced so hot; the nuns flutter and fluster, but the abbess is unmoved by now, even as Wei Wuxian curls into Lan Zhan fully. He plays with the hairs at the back of Lan Zhan's neck, leaving Lan Zhan's arms as unimpeded as he can. )
Whatever happens, it strengthens at night. But if they think I'm incapacitated already, we might learn more of why this came to be, and how they woke up the mountain.
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( Nothing, he decrees to himself and his own honour, what scant few scabs of it remain, will satisfy this very moment beyond Wei Ying's tacit surrender, spread and disheveled in tarnished silk, bare of the perversions of his mouth and the inconvenience of his linens. But that revelation is for a different wise man, who did not pledge to his husband the answer to monastery's sinuous secrets.
For moments syrupy and long, he weighs Wei Ying's words, then scalds 你是马? in crisp lines with his fingertips on Wei Ying's nearest wrist, to ask that to which his mouth cannot be overtly complicit: Are you? Incapacitated, he need not say. Affected. Compromised.
Already, the abbess has drowned them in the dark waters of her unerring scrutiny, making neither light nor secret of her attention scathing Wei Ying's shape, dripping onto Lan Wangji's after. Her mouth, a tight-stitched line, barely parts to hiss out her greetings, welcoming her visitors beneath her roof, before inquiring whether the... condition of the monastery has met their expectations.
They are largely women here, she adds, helpless but for the handful of sainted men who were hand-picked to protect them, under the seal of the imperial palace. This is a holy house for widows, wise women, girls who have forbidden themselves the joy of matrimony and former palace concubines, retired from their function. The emperor has been kind in his patronage of the lands. They have no enemies and angered no one. They have even struck bargain with nearby villagers to allow them to continue mining and reap the rewards. She does not understand why their monastery has attracted the wrath of the gods above, or the peculiar interest of mortal emissaries — but she hopes they may find what answers they wish.
And unspoken, but clear, even as Lan Wangji raises himself to bow and grudgingly collect his spouse, Do not come to her for help or with grievances. They are tolerated in their mission, because the imperial palace does not wish the current... trials to stain the monastery's virtue. But the abbess need not indulge these whims past reason.
So warned, feet of his stool scratching and mewling as they slide back abruptly, he arms himself with the better part of Wei Ying's weight, dragging an arm around his amorous spouse's waist. He does not speak until they have started for the corridor, waves of veiled nuns drifting beside them. )
We are not wanted here. ( But where the abbess was rigid, foul-tempered and chilled, the nuns that take note of Wei Ying's state seem drawn to them with compassion, steps stuttering at the sight of them to check in. )
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( Languid, in his husband's arms, boneless, until they move. He smiles, chuckles, plays with hair, and then they're moving, and while he's sad for the loss of spice, he's not sad for the space to breathe. The only word he'd been able to give his husband's careful writing on his hand was encapsulated by a sigh: Yes.
Not much, but he can tell, can sense the energies within himself are altered, and shifts them even as he circulates his qi. More than he... he pauses, enough to bring them both to a standstill in the timing it takes for the nuns to come forth and overcome reticence for concern.
Then it's smiles, reassurances, and passing that concern with grace, walking at Lan Zhan's side, arm looped around his waist. )
We're a threat to whatever they're hiding. To what keeps them as this. To what supports their lifestyle. Of course we're unwanted.
( But it isn't to their cell he returns, and it isn't to the cavernous entry, where the men constrain and confine themselves. It's back into the forest, towards the river. At its banks, where they'd so recently played, he dipped his hand in water and brought it to the back of his neck. Breathing in, then out, he stands, looking up stream. )
I can work most of it out of my system, but it calls to something.
( Still looking upstream, he gestures forward, then steps along the riverbank. )
In the water. It's not heat, it's not evil, but it's immense.
( Further and further, to the chattering of birds that muffles as he goes, as the creek turns and curves and circles and burbles, up the mountain in an incline more gentle than the world around them rises. The trees are more scant the higher they go, but still concentrated near to the creek itself, lush with grasses and thickened bushes, until: a ravine, slowly looming over, and footsteps carrying them right into it. )
Up ahead. Do you feel that?
( There's a flush across his face and ears now, but his skin is cool to the touch. Not cold, not clammy, but cool. His qi continues circulating, and stutters through his core, not as bereft as usual. He notes this, offhand, but the thrumming pulse ahead calls him, louder, more demanding. )
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( He feels it, dark and tenuous, slithering beneath skin and seeking to claw its way out. More deliberate a sickness in him, he suspects, than in Wei Ying, where it has spread like a consumptive fever, and the water's clean susurrations whisper him to stay, stay and away, stay.
He walks, and his stomach storms and clenches, and the river's bed twists and turns and chokes itself in trembling configurations. Up now, where trees thin, up in soft incline, up and up and up, and the ravine —
Blight his eyes. Tear them off. It's wrenched of him, sound like a skinning and a beating, like a peeling thing that forgot what it was meant to be shaped as. The cry of a creature that has never shed tears.
He is first, close to this cliff's edge, and his arm holds to the side, curtains of his sleeve failing to hide what the river wishes shown: where the waters fall, muttering spumed waves into silent trickle, at the feet of the ravine, a shallow pooling. And within it, dozens of bodies, all small. )
Do not look.
( But his mouth is desiccated, torn and tattering and slow, and he knows intrinsically that Wei Ying will not heed him — that Lan Wangji too, in his stead, would only walk forward to seize whatever revelation the fresh day may deliver forth. It will hurt Wei Ying somehow deeper, a cancerous growth gaining ambitions of metastasis: he has ever removed from himself all pretense of entitlement, all conceit of ownership, all delusions of being spared the cruelties of the world. Wei Ying, who thinks nothing is owed to him, does not anticipate kindness.
And even still, he is never prepared to witness the suffering of the young. And truths, at once, align: there were children here, once. They perished. And whatever was engaged in the mines now seeks to breed fresh ranks.
He comes to his knees in one sweep, as if scythed. Then, clumsily, he slips down.
Bodies, so many bodies, skinned and bones blanched. There are creatures in these woods, he knows dearly, but few that climb hard stone and bear the air of the forest plateau, paralysed among slate clouds, nearly suspended. And there is no meat left, no scratches mar or contort bone, and the great yawning evil of rot has yet to make house in the dirt-wet joints. They have sought to bury them, he sees, and the marks of fingers carry in troubled, brittle ground, no better than gravel; but it is a silty, wretched earth's skin, up here and high, and it slipped and scrambled in the crags and trenches between bones, and the burial ground is only a hell's mouth of bodies at rest and divots and anemic river's waters.
They were so young, he does not say, because the bones speak it: infants, small children, not the one looking as if they might rise past Lan Wangji's knee. )
...Wei Ying. Go. Go to the monastery.
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( He is gentle when he comes to Lan Zhan's side, an immensity of grief within him, a ringing song of sorrow and rage. Unfocused, to everyone's thankfulness, so he circulates that, too, until it calms enough his breathing likewise gentles.
These are not children of horrors. Horrors have been visited on them, but these bones were home to healthy young, no contortions, no chewing after death, no breaks, no crushing. No true burial, but the power here, oh, this is the sickness that chased them from beneath this mountain.
This wellspring of stolen youth. Bought at the inconvenient convenience of monastic considerations. It is, after all, no place to raise children. )
Together.
( He says instead, knowing there will be a fight from the lingering fears of the children who died here, who even still aren't ready to know they've faced death, who were too young to understand the concept. No, they're closer to understanding the instincts of animals, complex or efficient, and this as much as the other magics have fed the swollen dark.
Impossibly, the sound of mining from below, deep below. The sound of water falling, of tears. )
Going there alone won't spare us.
( Not this task's necessity, not his imagination which will only grow and embrace and feast in terrible sadness injustice invites, and the cold, calm handling that follows.
They must settle to rest those they can. Chenqing comes to his hand, summoned from it's pouch, and he kneels in the water and bones and brittle, broken silence, and he waits for Lan Zhan, imperious to the cold. )
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( Together, and there is a justice in this, in letting Wei Ying bask in the horror and bloodshed he was spared sight of in his first denouement. And it is ugly work, gristle and bone and screeching, and the wind dragging whispers from hollows and husks and the rounded, pained agonies discipled to live in the shadows of splintered remains.
First, the base trimmings of care, his hands twined and the blunt cleansing: to the best of his ability, he strives to return each bone to the whole that once hosted it, to make right the lines so that the spirits might recognise their house. A care in this, fingertips trailing and the filaments of his motions nearly surgical. To their luck, these murders did not target defilement, and what parting of limb from limb was done was accidental and immaterial.
He bides his time, all the same, breath only catching then releasing in silent, measured exhalations when resentment coils and tickles his calves, rises up his bowed back. A child's touch, teasing. Many of them behind him, humming and chattering words too long lost now to be deciphered, some cooing in the way of those who never learned to speak. He feels fine silks, hears gold rattling. Speaks with quiet certainty to Wei Ying: )
These were imperial children. ( Just as their mothers were imperial concubines. Though their reasons for twisting their transparent fingers to pinch at Lan Wangji's sleeve are decidedly base and playfully child-like. )
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( 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. )
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I cannot say. ( The bones are too young, the spirits too feeble. Among the dregs and tatters of conscious spirits that dally, few ever possessed speech, and far fewer still retain it in the wake of — )
A violent death. ( This, the remains spoke of. No poison, no arson, no curse. Battery, splintered bones, the loose, blunt and negligent indications of stabbing, of tearing, of breakage. These were not the victims of artful assassination, but the butchery fodder of brutal execution.
He hears what Wei Ying says, coarse and snagging, like sisal. Hears too, what he does not speak — and drifts his hand out to catch on the raining rim of his husband's sleeve, then his wrist. First, raising himself to crouch, then stand. After, only to hang, limp and idle, before pulsing a few choice, ashen squeezes. There is nothing in the harm of children to be understood. )
The nuns will know. ( But they may not speak a bitter truth. Already, their abbess circles them like a marauding, feral cat spying prey it is too slight to assault in broad daylight and must instead wear down through the attrition of its stamina. She hopes, if they are left to blunt the edges of their curiosity on the haunted grounds without intervention, they will neglect to attack the intimacy of the monastery.
He is slow, after: to draw his energies in a moderate, balanced flow without fluctuations, a perfect harmony to avoid stirring wrath or opposition. Inevitably, his guqin must answer summons, called to sleep hovered before him, a testimony to devotion. No other instrument would come so softly bidden to a sea of dead.
The first few notes are off-tune, shrill. The songs of cleansing feel too violently barbaric in a place already watered in aggression. He eases the melody, slows it, until the territories answer in a tired, wrenched hum, and he begins to carefully portion their soporific. )
Play. They will not fight you.
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( He finds it in himself to smile, in the way that never quite reaches his eyes: those smiles as masks for the horrors and horrible certainty of horrors within a world that had, for ages, as much care for his concerns as it did concern for its cares. The dead so rarely fight him in the haunted halls of their home world. Here, the dead are more liberal at intermingling with the living, more vicious in their claims against those who have not plunged through the bone-searing cold and terror of dying.
Children should not have to know this. Children should not have to be intimately familiar with brutality. Yet they are, and that cannot be undone. What can be persuaded is, perhaps, within their hands, and so he inclines his head to the solemn form of his husband, his soul's partner, his Lan Zhan.
Lifts Chenqing to his lips, with his eyes closing: he never needs to see for these things, does not wish the distraction. For music like this, the red darkness behind his eyes is more than sufficient.
Water burbles and sings, tinkling onward as glass baubles tumbling over each other, poised always as if just one more motion shall send them shattered to the floor, cutting and broken.
His music is calming, to start. A lullaby to souls, asking again and again for the littles to come, to attend, to consider: sleep. Compelling for its familiarity despite the lack of any familiarity of such a tune to this world, to these people, small hands push close, small heads nuzzle in, small ghostly nails dig into fabric and skin and hold on, clinging, dreaming still.
Stilled dreams, all of them.
The lullaby becomes in stages a quiet, playful suggestion: follow, run, frolic, be free. Be away from pain, from agony's memory, from the tortured repetition of final thoughts, final cries. Hear the water, moving, carving mountains over time. Hear the birds that dart and sing and drink of the waters, that live in the branches and the skies and the bushes, part of a world and ephemeral within it as all living beings are.
Light, from the sun, from within, to weightlessness, and oh, he does not care if he weeps without stumbling in his music, because tears are water too, and they all flow, carve, resist, he does not care for tears as he feels those unseen fingers relax, as he hears the haunted reflection of a hiccuped laughter, of burbles and shrieks not in terror and horror and angry fear, but in brighter, beautiful emotions. Like the birds, the souls of children carried away into whatever this world considers its patterns, its intermingling, of the living and dead. Had they not spent two years caught up in the trailing patterns of that break? Does it not predate them? Was it not in the fierce chilling winds of a mountain far from home, laden with more salt than any even his husband has felt over the years stretched thin and grievous between them.
It takes a blinking eye; it takes an eternity. One breath to the next, one note woven into the qin's song, teasing and bolstering and leading and married, always, to the skill of broken, bleeding fingers, the shades, the resentment, the dregs of souls, of spirits, of something that lingered to fuel the horrors of this place flies away, until they're left with the memories of bones, and tears, and one distant, weeping bird's cry.
He lowers his flute, head turning, eyes opening, regarding the dark presence of the monastery, of the painful cavern with its beguiled and altered boys and men, of the fecundity turned into gaping, hungry ambition for fickle, faithless power. )
Will this be a bloodless ending?
( He may hope, even as he knows how often these things only end in the violence of their birthing. Into the world they all came with blood; out of the world too many left the same. )
Unmaking what has been wrought here.
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Wei Ying lowers the flute. Lan Wangji's hand glides over it, over the hand that holds it, squeezes. Smell of heat and sawdust and ashes burned again, the echo of decimation. He turns, and flicks blooded motes of revenant and shadow off Wei Ying's cheek, and he kisses his mouth like a roaring wave, like a man meted his justice. There is a limit, gripping and gutting and silent, to how much he can take from the well of this man, his spouse, before the waters of his strength muddy and run dry. And still, Lan Wangji steals from and of him again. )
They are too many children.
( Too many to go unavenged, without blood price. Too much to ask of Lan Wangji, truer monk than those who raised a monastery of graveyard bones. Would that they were holy or devout, that he might honour himself with guilt or hesitation, but he sees only witnesses, hears only new soles creaking and silken robes rustling, and they are accomplices, to one. Accomplices all. )
Let me speak to the reverend mother once more. ( But with finality, with teeth and bite showing. ) You may rest here, if you wish.
( But should not. Because these are children stirred and woken and orphans cling to skirts and sleeves, and they are half blind and wholly animal, their appetites know no filial piety. What is Wei Ying but another hearth, fire running slow and dry? He will be tatters before them. He will be their grave — and they will drain him in gratitude. )
Or inside. Better, Wei Ying. Better inside.
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( He should expect by now this thrumming awareness, the heat and inevitability of awareness that comes with his husband's touch. He's yet surprised, grounded in the press of an open mouth against his, in the sudden, stark remembrance of his own grounded form, warmed and anchored by Lan Zhan's want. There's a powerful lifeline caught between their chests, and the echoes of pain soften, quiet.
There are always too many children, as soon as there is one. That the righteous world still didn't acknowledge this perhaps sang the song of his bloodied conviction, but at least now, at least twenty years in the refining, does he trust in the faith and steady nature of this man: one to agree with actions, not simply passify with words.
He nods, allowing the concern that follows in suggestions of staying, of going, of retiring to chambers where the stench might try fail to penetrate him fully. Speared through or not, they are each other's accompaniment. His flute finds the give of his waistband, his hand the stretch of skin and bone and strength and heat of Lan Zhan's hand. Held, then tugged as he steps forward, as the day crashes over them in sounds and brightness.
May the waters carry only good will further: may they be cleansed of the gluttony of pain purchased power. )
Lan Zhan, where won't we walk together? Have your conversation. I'm curious what words she'll weave to the succinct beauty of your own.
( Another smile, yet given in sincerity: belief and trust, delivered in kind. That he's launched them into motion, claiming their way back while hand in hand, lacing fingers between fingers, lacking shame for the desire to keep anchored to his soul mate's sky cloaked warmth, goes without saying.
It's as they approach the monster of the monastery yet again that glimpses of the women who live there flashes between trunks, that mouths stretch to accommodate teeth too long and pointed, lips blood red, then again little but the chapped redness of lips exposed to a world at such elevation with no soft excess.
Near the monastery doors, he remarks: )
We should probably collect your cock first.
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( Shameless, only he needn't speak it, the open vulgarity of their clasped hands pronouncing the audacious exhibitionism of a wedded pair. Outside, in the open world, only the Heavens may find against them. But there are questions rusting and unasked within the confines of the monastery, gazes that trailed after them, murmurs and gasps.
He sees girls, pretty girls, and this strikes him: not their physical prowess, for it is known that some gods only accept devotees of the finest persuasion, a testimony to their own appetites. But the ages leave to wonder: women barely of marrying age, some past, some riper. Few past the threshold where the moon of monthly womanhood begins to wane, and child bearing years are past. A fresh-faced cohort, spanning at most two decades, past the mother reverend. A strange consideration. )
They are... young. ( He whispers to Wei Ying, the giggling of two cascading tinny and low in their wake, as they advance into the belly of the beastly infrastructure, down the winding paths of stables and pantries, oh so many pantries, and granaries despoiled, because the damned cats get everywhere, but at least no mice, besides them. Efficient, as episodes of hysteria and mass-possession go. Good for the household.
Then they've come before their loaned quarters, and Lan Wangji is struck again: first by the coldness of their rooms, their spartan welcome. Certainly, riches and exaltation are unlikely in a holy abode, but there are more light-brimming quarters, rugs to be dragged in, the rare vase to borrow. Guests can be accommodated, when they come bearing potential salvation.
He opens their gate with a creaking gulp of rustling chains falling, leading the way to where their chicken stands riotous and sullen, peering from a sphere of feathers in the nest of Wei Ying's intended bed. )
Mind my cock, he is agitated. ( This, somehow, spoken with a prevailingly dry tone and an unblinking gaze, while Lan Wangji repositions himself to stand as if sentinel by the nearest wall, once more surveiling the quarters. )
Why did their emperor request exorcists the nuns evidently reject?
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( Laughter tinkling as shattered glass brushed off the table in carelessness, and he smiles, and fans his lashes down, and leans not so subtly into his husband's warmth. It could be play, but he needs that proximity, that closeness, to remind him that he's earned this, when the murders of multitudes run fingers through his hair, tugging like hungry fingers on the sleeves of his memories.
To the point that he hums agreement, lifts their held hands to his lips to press a set, lingering kiss to familiar knuckles, before his banishment to attend his husband's little bird is complete. Oh, he would, he knows. After bathing away this place, he would love to lose himself with the finding of their conjunction, but it must breathe, pause, and follow.
The bird, on the other hand, he scoops up with both hands and tucks under an arm, scratching fingers into feathers and rewarded by a clucking coo, and a shifted neck, further separation of feathers. Dusty wax sides under his fingers: the rooster growing new feathers, irritated by their caps. He's less aware of this than of repeatedly handling fowl gifts, and being inclined to robust, careful attention. )
They did his dirty work. Now he wishes them cleansed and buried. Asking the matron, whose beautiful daughters are these, and why are their progeny not allowed to live? What worship of power clings here, in debauchery and despair?
( Glancing up as his feet carry him close, chicken under arm and looking grumpy yet gratified, until Wei Wuxian pats his head like he would the horse's. A head turns and beak snaps and his fingers flee the warning, his gaze descended to this lucky, feathered fool. )
Or maybe he simply suspects. I just find it harder to believe this came to be without his consent. We still don't know the mountains howled intent, not the monster of the monastery, nor his. Thoughts?
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