( 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?
( ...he has none, blinded between the physical reality of Wei Ying manhandling a fat cock with marrow-deep gumption and the figments of recalled revelation, of Jin Guangyao's careless, wrested admission that he murdered his own child in lizard's chilled blood. Could this emperor be cut of the same power-thirsting cloth?
In truth, they know nothing of the man, of his lineage or his convictions. In some empires, the death of all contenders is agreed by the freshly arrived king on ascension to secure his claim. In others, all heirs but the first are spares, serving behind prettier, wiser, more suitable faces, such as that of Zewu-Jun. Lan Wangji remembers his place in this. Remembers, too, the calls on his station.
And he only affords the rooster a fugitive stroke of his hand on the fowl thing's arched back, flinching to hear it croon in distinctly devoted attention. All that is cock leans towards Lan Wangji. How fitting. )
My mind is stormed. ( And perhaps there is an unkindness to him, in the keeping of his own counsel — but Wei Ying will hear his words when they break thunderously from him, inevitably imperious with all the misplaced, annulled authority of Gusu Lan in grounds indifferent to the hold of Cloud Recesses. He is still a second son. He is not for culling.
In the end, he drags Wei Ying and his bird after him, down treacherous shortcuts and futile paths, alleyways through an entombed citadel, the monastery cephalopodic in its artificial majesty. No architect thought the matter through: all the constant additions were done in stages, building on previous bones, switching styles with no appetite for harmony. It rankles to pivot through a spartan tunnel here and arrive in the highly aggrandized, overly sculpted corridor of the Reverend Mother's chambers.
They are not allowed in first. The two nun-acolytes, the youngest of all seen to date, must have been posted by the doors for rite and form alone. Surely, they cannot hope to bar his path — but the long, lean-muscled candles they hold send their despicably cloying swirls of incense, and Lan Wangji's head feels all at once laden, heavy. He does not question the root of his sickness now. Then, from inside, the old woman's guttered, creaking voice emerges — Let them in.They know.
He enters first. Nods to Wei Ying once, and he enters when called, and he meets the Reverend Mother not knelt, as a supplicant, but seating in her petty backless chairs, rightfully deprived of comfort to induce in guests a sense of urgency to depart.
He is not moved. Not when she offers them plain waters, in a room so dimmed and stale, each window thick-curtained and the furniture matted in a hood of burned dust, slick with accrued humidity. Not when she asks if their inquiries go well. Not when she seems all too eager to help, if he but speaks the words —
And he does. He asks of the emperor — a third son, she says, five seasons into his ascension. The offspring of a concubine, who by right should not have glimpsed the throne, but for his concubine mother's... politically poisoned machinations and the strategic demise of his elder brothers. May they rest well.
Here? No. Not at all. Interred in the imperial grounds.
And this new emperor has concubines? Of course, by the dozen, all fresh faced and pretty and some round with child, though an heir exists already, claimed.
They are here? They will come.
What came of the former emperor's concubines? The harem is not inheritable. The women were allowed their exile. Many, the gentlemen exorcists might have noticed, under this very roof.
Alone? Here, at long last, the loss of the Reverend Mother's greasy smile. With their children, first. The emperor was devoted to his younger brothers. Merciful.
Then? Then...
He should ask now, what came of the children. He should ask why they did not bury the bones well. He should ask — but she pre-empts him, rising to lead them from her quarters, because the hour of truths is done, and Lan Wangji is sickly from the incense and sickened by the world, and perhaps this is why the world of hard things is a woman's empire.
Mercy, the Reverend Mother says before waving her doors shut, wanes. )
( Lan Zhan lives with a stormed mind; Wei Wuxian so rarely sees the eye within his own mind, let alone the world, to know much of peace outside of the borrowed, borrowed comfort of their shared bed, whatever form that takes.
Shadows stretch and contract, light flickers and flutters and flashes, weaving in with voices before they inter first with the Abbess, her words which are not confessions so much as confessing.
Mercy, he knows, is a pretty word for an ugly impulse when it's self serving.
Mercy is only given by those with power. Until it's threatened.
Until it's no longer in the public eye.
He pats the chicken idly as they're lead back outside, doors closing behind them, Abbess now silent, into a small courtyard and the narrow alley connected. Lead by the Abbess, yet not following in the ways of complacency. Mercy ran thin when it could: those he could not use, who could threaten, were offered to use in ways that, conveniently, might not.
The Abbess speaks as they approach a plain door, uncertain in its origins: Some wanings are complete.
She leaves then, quick on ancient feet, fetid stench lingering after. Incense and blood, power and putrescence. Thick on his tongue, and his nose wrinkles in distaste even as he walks through the creaking doorway.
The chicken clucks out in a displeased manner, pulling it's neck back in, looking grumpy. Another absent pat from his free hand is what he spares before he allows his senses to expand, feeling, sensitive. He turns left abruptly, through the narrow, dusty shelves. Most are half empty, some half mildewed, and one shelf thick with dark energy, growling. The chicken struggles out from his arm, flapping wings and darting away towards Lan Zhan's robes.
Flicking out a talisman, it comes to rest on a singular stone tablet, cutting the energy exuding from it in half. )
Your cock requests consoling.
( The answer to what fed the mountain, what allowed it to glut on the fallen mercy of a far distant monarch. Consoling. )
( He murmurs absently, but welcomes the bird in the nest's bind of his pale silks, wrestles it, soft its feathers and scratch of its beak, to sit at ease and preen in the nook of Lan Wangji's elbow. He does not... know, instinctively, how to balance his passenger. Does not know how to mitigate its distress, past haphazard strokes for a chilled, slowed hand, or hushing whispers.
Rabbits enjoy their heads stroke tenderly, with even pressure. Chickens, it emerges, begrudge the flattening of their great reddened crowns, huff and puff and fluff up, swelling, and gaze upon their unworthy carriers with contempt, distrust and condemnation. They also peck with beastly aplomb.
Lan Wangji rescues the chicken, mechanically; Wei Ying applies himself and plays her to to Wangji's own steeping migraine, diluting the pressures on his temple, cleansing the air. He watches this man for a moment, as if he might something precious and passing and diffuse, like snow; now here, soon gone. This was Wei Ying once, also.
Thank you, he mouths at a saccharine pace, then comes back to himself in increments. )
Children slaughtered. An animal curse seeking breeding. ( The cause and shape of the curse reveal themselves. Of course the hungering grief of dozens of mothers would attract a beast wishing to take root and advantage and seed itself, predatory and vast, to devour more. ) But why now?
( After all, months have passed since the killings. Surely, a curse of this extent would take hold either immediately, for the intensity of the lands' grief, or within years, accruing power. A medium term is more surprising. )
Husband. ( This, the sweet traitor's tongue, betraying intent to coax. ) Let us go to the imperial city. Meet this emperor.
( Thoughtful in turns, each of them handing between the moments leading to mutual comprehension. He pulls the offending stone down into his calloused hands. Feels the weight of it, heavy on the soul, oddly warm. Recently cooled from molten memory.
Justice, he knows, is a concept. A point of view. People do rarely deserve the cruelties inflicted upon them, and the exceptions rarely suffer commensurate to their earnings. Not without will behind it.
He hums to the stone, and it fights him, pouring thin smoke and sparks of remembered fire. )
What is it that drove even the powerful among the righteous to hesitate at Yiling's lower hills?
( The emperor a cause, but he, who has bled and scrabbled and wept in the dirt of the massacre fields to render them fruitful, only to have them decay again in light of other men's jealousy and greed, seeks still in steps.
Save lives here. Being the curse back, and leave it's haunted memory as guardian. A holy place long turned haunted, and perhaps, in spite of one powerful man's failings in mercy, capable of more than the blood soaked grounds his greed has turned it into. )
( His... cock, a perfectly plump and carefree opportunist, still grudgingly tame and settling in the nook of Lan Wangji's arm, now gazes from his perch as if Wei Ying holds the last of his enemies and the worst of his prospects. As if he knows that, should they depart here and now, the bird will fall, a first casualty.
He hesitates. Considers the dark, their surroundings, the extent of the information yet available in the entombment of the monastery. They could bide days upon days and court the nuns for revelations, but he suspects that they will trickle fat droplets and shallow rivulets and give them but scant satisfaction.
Their answer does not sleep here, between the coy smiles of helpless dames. It is not lost and found, lost and found, dazed by miasma. )
A day's ride. ( Down a mountain. And hesitantly — ) Hours by sword.
( For all they both know Wei Ying's natural hesitancy, his learned dread. No matter. He will not insult his grown husband with demurring. )
Come with me, or linger to probe the nuns alone. ( Wei Ying is a pretty thing, miraculously bright, exuberant. Perhaps they will seem as no threat, reduced to one, where they imperil the monastery together. )
( Raised brows, he observes his husband, stone misleadingly light in his hands. )
Sleep.
( It hardly seems answer, no mention of horses or travel or swords cutting through both. He pulls another talisman from between his robes, touch and energy enough to tell him which he summons. )
Let this mountain sleep before we go.
( Innocently insidious, to set all into suspension, hibernating as bears do - yet the force of the curse is animal enough it might be turned this way for a time.
He lifts his brows, watching man and bird, waiting his consideration.
Because the energy for such comes within the swollen bounds of power already here. Delivered in the blood of children, in the waters of death and life sourced from the spring of this mountain. )
( Sleep, Wei Ying says, and it is as if the restlessness of the mountain woods corrupts him, as if Lan Wangji wakes to the heart palpitations of a world suddenly awry, alive. He feels too long he has stood as quarry and now presents himself, once more a consummate predator.
In his arm, the chicken startles; he sets it down, where it waddles by foot, seeming to put better faith in the energy of two cultivators sooner than the dark clutches of the monastery enclaves. Lan Wangji cannot fault him. )
You do not trust it to wait out our return? ( They have stirred something, quickened it. He knows, as Wei Ying knows, that intervening with spirits will either quiet them while they gather their forces again, or stimulate their aggression. If Wei Ying wishes the matter put to bed — )
We may ward to dally or forcibly extirpate. ( A temporary or permanent solution. The alternative... ) To pacify, we must know reasons.
( And muffled like spring rain: ) Lest you wish to make weapon of resentment.
( He considers the cost of such, the willingness of wild and wildness of children left to extreme emotion. His face grim, he shakes his head, slipping the stone tablet into his qiankun pouch. The remaining vileness dissipates like fast clouds across a summer's hot blue sky.
No, this is not a useful or needful directing of resentment. He had ever wished for children to be spared the worst impulses of the world. )
Warding. Wards for clarity and calm.
( Buy time. Misdirect, confuse. His skills aren't in confusion arrays, but one might have been useful in the woods, intended to return those who enter to their point of entrance alone. )
Bind resonance to the cock and bring it with us.
( The pause, polite and inviting, for his husband's further thoughts. It has taken years to be an even exchange, and he turns towards the discussion, the back and forth, as readily as flowers unfold to face the sun. Warm and life giving, satiated in its heated embrace.
The rooster, feathers fluffed, clucks in mild distress. )
( Wei Ying makes space for him, opens his arms and conversation like a flower's cup to the sun. He hesitates — considers the words, spoken and implicit, considers Wei Ying's appetites. Then, as if he is ripped from the Heavens, their judge passing reckoning, he pronounces: )
Your cock, foremost.
( A simple correction, breezy. He takes the knee by the creature, silks spilling beside him like scattering spumes, and he offers out his hand. The creature is finnicky, fumbling, wading. Naturally circumspect, educated into belligerence. It looks, for a moment's huff of anticipation, prone to peck at his thumb, beak cruising the line of Lan Wangji's hand before resignedly a soft head kisses his knuckles.
How strange that fellow men ever fail to understand him, but all other living things fall in line. Resonance is a cheapened trick after, a whispered sliver of nothing. The spell reduces itself, condenses, stabilizes, holds; he retains it, a trembling and shivered thing, latching to find purchase. He feels the magic snag, feels it breathe. Turns away.
Then, the wards, all at once: where the resonance bind was explicit, specific and singular, this is a dusting of snow, tepid and vast, undiscriminating. Depleting him in slowly draining increments, as a spate of parchment talismans dash from his hand in the cardinal directions, set to attach themselves at long, faraway distance.
He blinks away the strain of concentration. Rolls his shoulders. And he tells Wei Ying, with finality: )
Next time, your wards. ( They both know the caster must now do the tiring, irritating work of paying attention to every whisper of change in the magical environment that surrounds them. Every lick, every mote. Lan Wangji is owed. )
( Quick steps, silent and fond. To the pronouncement of efforts and parceled states of being, of ties that tire, and chains of reaction, he doesn't even allow himself a moment of surprise.
His hands find his husband's face, his cheeks, the line between bound hair and the freed waterfall that cascades down his back, then nails find scalp in tiny crescents. Wei Wuxian kisses Lan Zhan with the crashing weight of the waterfalls on Gusu's rear mountain: inevitable and breathtaking.
At least of his own breath, but he's grown into affection in ways that leaves him certain, deeply certain of what is allowed and wanted and welcomed, and so he pours himself into Lan Zhan as is tomorrow promises nothing.
Because he knows it doesn't, and so he must celebrate what he has in each day.
Breath eventually recalls itself, and he rests his forehead against Lan Zhan's that brief eternity later, uncaring of the bird now pecking at the edges of their robes. )
Promise?
( And he's not asking about wards for others. Only something of a personal promise of his own, after this haunted emperor's left exposed to the light and recriminations of his half siblings.
It doesn't take long to ensure they're packed, to find the buzz around this place calmed into a background hum that leaves teeth feeling strange, but doesn't breathe danger as surely as it had. For the moment, the mountain lies passive, appeased.
Wei Wuxian leaves three talismans as they make their way down the mountain, towards the branching path meant to lead them towards the capital and it's golden throne.
Promi — ( But he is kissed past measure, past decency, past earning. Kisses like a storm, destructive, consumptive, all-devouring. As if he is gristle, and Wei Ying still grazes his bones, and what was blood and meat of him has torn and sundered, and there is the Patriarch, red-mouth. There is the cleaved, crass, ravine smile of him, how it crumbles at its edges.
He licks his lips — raw — and feels the burdens of his hair untangle, relieved of the pins and pressures of his needle-binds. At his nape, tension builds; in his body, it's blossomed like the angry, prolific suns of a tree peony. He wants to bed this man, foolishly; they have no time. They should have no appetite. Certainly, they are men grown, hardly bereft of priorities.
He looks away first.
The packing is a simple thing, perfunctory. They bring little, take less. The cock is safe and fattened and pleased with the change in his unfortunate events, and Lan Wangji finds himself fond of its shrill peacocking. Their bags bound, their farewells whispered, the Mother Reverend's girls to deliver their courtesies.
No one stays their path. Behind them, gates groan closed, of iron cold.
And down the mountain, snows gather. A few days gone, but winter's broken, first powdered, then gelid. If Lan Wangji's boots were cut for the dessert, now unsuitable, Wei Ying must discover the drawbacks of his paralyzed core, leading to discomfort. They have few hurts of pride between them: Lan Wangji does not bleed ones fresh. Now and then, he offers blankets and a mantle, but no questions.
In the end, the emperor's palace is the emperor's city is the unblinking eye of the emperor's world. Gilded, quaintly excessive, predictably ritualistic. They arrive with a maudlin crowd, scattered: merchants, soothsayers, healers. The emperor, they say, has taken deathly ill of mysterious cause. A plague, a lover's sickness, a curse. Who's to say? He offers boon and rank and elevation to any who will help stay his frailty — and he receives one and all.
There is a moment, stranded before the great palace, when Lan Wangji turns to his husband and murmurs only: )
We cannot promise false hope. ( But must still ask to see the emperor under such pretenses, and they must pass the scrutiny of his eunuchs who triage those with true credentials as healers from mere charlatans. Lan Wangji, famously, cannot lie. With a nod between his husband and the inspectors: ) Work your sorcery.
( Winter bites with knife like teeth these years, but the bundling isn't so strange, once he figures out the merit of a hair destroying wool cap. Then it's the silliest forms of pride, mostly salvaged for the look in his husband's eyes: it's not so he wants, ever, but to know he's wanted, ah, he's so simple to find it balms his soul.
Civilization is as humming and energetic as always, too alive, too overwhelming in it's ways, but bright and thriving even in the depths of its stench and sprawl. The golden palace is every bit of ostentatious theatre, as so many rulers are, but the feel of wrongness wells even over its golden face, seeping out like mould and shadows.
His husband leaves him to do his work, and the truth is: truth is enough. For as long as it took him to understand his husband lied in omissions, Wei Wuxian always knew the pattern to incomplete truths, to gaps filled in by listeners, and, at core, the value of a truth versus what's made wholly from the cloth of invention.
At least when it comes to human truths. Engineering answers beyond stated limitations is something altogether different in his gaze.
There is healing, he says, and he's certified of a kingdom far from here but whose name still travels for the merchants who've dined upon its wares. He and his husband, stated and met with little more than a blink, are soothers of spirits, those who can see the ways of energies in the world and in individuals to trace causes, to at time purge what ails, to at other times simply be able to guide towards answers. It may, he says, tell much: it may answer little. Yet they have to offer what is different from their comrades in opportunity. There's no rush, he says with a smile. They await only the emperor's desires, and what can be done, shall be.
It earns them waiting, and he takes to pulling at Lan Zhan's sleeve and collecting his hand to write out individual characters, smiling idly. Spells out their names in their parts, spells out their son, their daughters. Approximations when those names hadn't shared a birth language, only the communal one granted to them all.
Nothing is offered. All is watched, until there comes the eunuch who says in his soft and steady way, the emperor would see you now.
It's not a request, and while his eyes crinkle at the corners as if he smiles, it's amusement at the consistent presumptions of the world, and the nuance always bereft in singular contacts.
The emperor lies in sumptuous sheets of silk in bright gold and purple. His heart aches at that, complicated, but the weight of the curse upon that room hinges on the laboured breaths of this great man, who even ill, has the audacity to look beautiful and wan and shy of middle age when he's well within it's grasp.
Lan Zhan he keeps behind him, wary of the particulars of this man and his husband's preferences and open, calloused heart. )
I have no joy in saying this, Your Eminence, Sun of the Sundered Skies, but you are beset upon by that which, once cast, has reflected upon its center.
( Solemn and quiet, he studies these features in their own ill tidings. )
I dare not suppose what this might be, only that at its heart, it's as if a child cries.
( Said softly, hard for his attendants to hear.
The emperor regards him, Lan Zhan, the room at large. When he next coughs, he waves all his attendants to the attached chamber once his breath returns.
Eyes shining like promises in a young woman's first gaze upon one who she believes she might love.
Fevered hope, imagination, and cunning, always cunning. The emperor says, then, that tears are never things which he's found have solved anything, but they're pretty enough, depending on the crier. )
( He had anticipate a ruin of truth, a gilded spectacle of hyperboles and deceptions — Wei Ying, armed with flourish, ransacking the shreds of their dignities for more kindle to burn. He was not prepared for an ode of weaponized shamelessness before a king of would-be Yunmeng.
Eyes bright and white and gaze unflinching, he watches Wei Ying erupt in a river of nonsense while the emperor — a man grown gaunt for his ailings, melancholy and bitter-strange — nods with ripe enthusiasm. Lan Wangji finds himself a thief in their pack, squirreling away slivers of indignation, like treats to let turn and radiate bittersweetness in his mouth.
Your Eminence, Sun of the Sundered Skies... are beset upon by that which, once cast, has reflected upon its center. When he groans, to the incandescent worry of the nearest eunuch that perhaps these alien miscreants have brought either insult or sickness or injury in the emperor's presence, it is all he can do to pretend a yawn, after. Better unmannered than a threat.
The room breaks for the emperor's privacy. Rows and rows of servants dissipate like spumes once spume-troubled waters sleep. The emperor sees them as the one benediction that will return strength sapped from his limbs, stolen from his soul. They are offered, to sweeten the arrangement, a seat on silken benches and wine. Then silver. Then, in the way of this realm, a thick-bodied, coiling narcotic smoked by pipe — lighter, a clearly more modern variant of what suffocated them in the monastery.
Lan Wangji waits out the game, Wei Ying's starting hand, the inevitable show of studied indifference that a ruler of the world performs in the face of the one force whose strength and reach finally exceed his own. Death becomes you, he might say, but Lan Wangji does not wish them put to the knife.
Instead, he asks in the measured but clean way of his people, after the children. )
Your siblings perished. ( They did. )
You knew. ( A nod; the emperor did. )
You approved. ( Hesitation — and here, the dregs of Lan Wangji's desirous sympathy wanes, and he reaches out for Wei Ying's hand beside him, to have and hold and anchor himself. )
Kin slaying can rouse the casting of curses. Did the emperor commit such a deed? ( A pause — then a shake of his head. )
Did the emperor give the word that led to bloodshed? ( No, not at all. Another pause: but he should have. )
Then, who? ( And here, now, they are two worlds sundered. Here, the emperor turns his glance aside, to where coloured glass paints fields and sunsets in minute mosaic. It is, in the end, a eunuch who speaks the words: His Imperial Highness, the previous emperor, gave order than upon his death, all his children but the heir must be slaughtered, where they stand. To prevent a civil war.
...ah. What primitive, tyrannical measures. What foolishness — )
...if his highness played no part in this, why do the cloud of these deaths linger over was him? ( Why was he cursed? )
( Silence that stretches long, the faded emperor studying the rich spoils of a legacy mired in pain. Wei Wuxian waits, slim and steel clothed in pleasant candor gone contemplative. He winds the fingers off his hand through Lan Zhan's, holds quiet as he waits.
Now the emperor sighs, a soft exhalation as long as his silence.
Truth: he did not give the command.
Truth: he removed all such persons from the imperial palace and the imperial city.
True: he stipulated years of grieving his late father emperor, in which he could not and they could not act upon decrees which would lead to conflicting remembrances.
True: he never rescinded the painful gluttony of his father, never thought long in it, tried not to think at all.
His voice grows thin, his words interrupted by coughing that leaves flecks of bright blood on his lips.
Wei Wuxian listens. Then like all heroes, he steps into the light from the shadows that embrace him with cold familiarity and sweetest grace. )
Bury them, remembering who they are. Cry for them, even if the tears aren't yours. You cannot evade responsibility for what you ignored, cannot be healthy with that weight of miasmatic death feeding you, at the heart of the curse of your emperor's line.
( Because the irony of being less ruthless than he was designed to be is killing him now, and he must, to live, break the very curse which has fed his dynasty for generations. )
Bury them, honour them, release their mothers with generosity. You desire life. To live, you must speak of and to death and the dead, and be yourself, emperor in recovery, and not that which feasts upon youth's sundered vitality.
( Hard gaze from a wan face in that massive, opulent bed. This is no help, that is no answer, how can he, what curse, this is a dynasty of strength — )
I can only suggest you send your criers to every city, town, and village announcing the funerals and honoring of those left in the dark and wild.
( A curse of greed disguised as a blessing of vitality. Wei Wuxian stands shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, with a man he trusts as much as he's learned to trust himself again.
What's been done cannot be undone. Yet addressing grief, addressing pain, addressing horror in the light allows it to soften in a way ignoring it, feeding it on further pain and death will never achieve.
The emperor lies quiet, dark eyes sunken. Lifts a hand, barely waves to the eunuch standing near. Both of them can hear him, while usual mortals would not, but he says nothing to the words that come:
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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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In truth, they know nothing of the man, of his lineage or his convictions. In some empires, the death of all contenders is agreed by the freshly arrived king on ascension to secure his claim. In others, all heirs but the first are spares, serving behind prettier, wiser, more suitable faces, such as that of Zewu-Jun. Lan Wangji remembers his place in this. Remembers, too, the calls on his station.
And he only affords the rooster a fugitive stroke of his hand on the fowl thing's arched back, flinching to hear it croon in distinctly devoted attention. All that is cock leans towards Lan Wangji. How fitting. )
My mind is stormed. ( And perhaps there is an unkindness to him, in the keeping of his own counsel — but Wei Ying will hear his words when they break thunderously from him, inevitably imperious with all the misplaced, annulled authority of Gusu Lan in grounds indifferent to the hold of Cloud Recesses. He is still a second son. He is not for culling.
In the end, he drags Wei Ying and his bird after him, down treacherous shortcuts and futile paths, alleyways through an entombed citadel, the monastery cephalopodic in its artificial majesty. No architect thought the matter through: all the constant additions were done in stages, building on previous bones, switching styles with no appetite for harmony. It rankles to pivot through a spartan tunnel here and arrive in the highly aggrandized, overly sculpted corridor of the Reverend Mother's chambers.
They are not allowed in first. The two nun-acolytes, the youngest of all seen to date, must have been posted by the doors for rite and form alone. Surely, they cannot hope to bar his path — but the long, lean-muscled candles they hold send their despicably cloying swirls of incense, and Lan Wangji's head feels all at once laden, heavy. He does not question the root of his sickness now. Then, from inside, the old woman's guttered, creaking voice emerges — Let them in. They know.
He enters first. Nods to Wei Ying once, and he enters when called, and he meets the Reverend Mother not knelt, as a supplicant, but seating in her petty backless chairs, rightfully deprived of comfort to induce in guests a sense of urgency to depart.
He is not moved. Not when she offers them plain waters, in a room so dimmed and stale, each window thick-curtained and the furniture matted in a hood of burned dust, slick with accrued humidity. Not when she asks if their inquiries go well. Not when she seems all too eager to help, if he but speaks the words —
And he does. He asks of the emperor — a third son, she says, five seasons into his ascension. The offspring of a concubine, who by right should not have glimpsed the throne, but for his concubine mother's... politically poisoned machinations and the strategic demise of his elder brothers. May they rest well.
Here? No. Not at all. Interred in the imperial grounds.
And this new emperor has concubines? Of course, by the dozen, all fresh faced and pretty and some round with child, though an heir exists already, claimed.
They are here? They will come.
What came of the former emperor's concubines? The harem is not inheritable. The women were allowed their exile. Many, the gentlemen exorcists might have noticed, under this very roof.
Alone? Here, at long last, the loss of the Reverend Mother's greasy smile. With their children, first. The emperor was devoted to his younger brothers. Merciful.
Then? Then...
He should ask now, what came of the children. He should ask why they did not bury the bones well. He should ask — but she pre-empts him, rising to lead them from her quarters, because the hour of truths is done, and Lan Wangji is sickly from the incense and sickened by the world, and perhaps this is why the world of hard things is a woman's empire.
Mercy, the Reverend Mother says before waving her doors shut, wanes. )
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( Lan Zhan lives with a stormed mind; Wei Wuxian so rarely sees the eye within his own mind, let alone the world, to know much of peace outside of the borrowed, borrowed comfort of their shared bed, whatever form that takes.
Shadows stretch and contract, light flickers and flutters and flashes, weaving in with voices before they inter first with the Abbess, her words which are not confessions so much as confessing.
Mercy, he knows, is a pretty word for an ugly impulse when it's self serving.
Mercy is only given by those with power. Until it's threatened.
Until it's no longer in the public eye.
He pats the chicken idly as they're lead back outside, doors closing behind them, Abbess now silent, into a small courtyard and the narrow alley connected. Lead by the Abbess, yet not following in the ways of complacency. Mercy ran thin when it could: those he could not use, who could threaten, were offered to use in ways that, conveniently, might not.
The Abbess speaks as they approach a plain door, uncertain in its origins: Some wanings are complete.
She leaves then, quick on ancient feet, fetid stench lingering after. Incense and blood, power and putrescence. Thick on his tongue, and his nose wrinkles in distaste even as he walks through the creaking doorway.
The chicken clucks out in a displeased manner, pulling it's neck back in, looking grumpy. Another absent pat from his free hand is what he spares before he allows his senses to expand, feeling, sensitive. He turns left abruptly, through the narrow, dusty shelves. Most are half empty, some half mildewed, and one shelf thick with dark energy, growling. The chicken struggles out from his arm, flapping wings and darting away towards Lan Zhan's robes.
Flicking out a talisman, it comes to rest on a singular stone tablet, cutting the energy exuding from it in half. )
Your cock requests consoling.
( The answer to what fed the mountain, what allowed it to glut on the fallen mercy of a far distant monarch. Consoling. )
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Has, for some time.
( He murmurs absently, but welcomes the bird in the nest's bind of his pale silks, wrestles it, soft its feathers and scratch of its beak, to sit at ease and preen in the nook of Lan Wangji's elbow. He does not... know, instinctively, how to balance his passenger. Does not know how to mitigate its distress, past haphazard strokes for a chilled, slowed hand, or hushing whispers.
Rabbits enjoy their heads stroke tenderly, with even pressure. Chickens, it emerges, begrudge the flattening of their great reddened crowns, huff and puff and fluff up, swelling, and gaze upon their unworthy carriers with contempt, distrust and condemnation. They also peck with beastly aplomb.
Lan Wangji rescues the chicken, mechanically; Wei Ying applies himself and plays her to to Wangji's own steeping migraine, diluting the pressures on his temple, cleansing the air. He watches this man for a moment, as if he might something precious and passing and diffuse, like snow; now here, soon gone. This was Wei Ying once, also.
Thank you, he mouths at a saccharine pace, then comes back to himself in increments. )
Children slaughtered. An animal curse seeking breeding. ( The cause and shape of the curse reveal themselves. Of course the hungering grief of dozens of mothers would attract a beast wishing to take root and advantage and seed itself, predatory and vast, to devour more. ) But why now?
( After all, months have passed since the killings. Surely, a curse of this extent would take hold either immediately, for the intensity of the lands' grief, or within years, accruing power. A medium term is more surprising. )
Husband. ( This, the sweet traitor's tongue, betraying intent to coax. ) Let us go to the imperial city. Meet this emperor.
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( Thoughtful in turns, each of them handing between the moments leading to mutual comprehension. He pulls the offending stone down into his calloused hands. Feels the weight of it, heavy on the soul, oddly warm. Recently cooled from molten memory.
Justice, he knows, is a concept. A point of view. People do rarely deserve the cruelties inflicted upon them, and the exceptions rarely suffer commensurate to their earnings. Not without will behind it.
He hums to the stone, and it fights him, pouring thin smoke and sparks of remembered fire. )
What is it that drove even the powerful among the righteous to hesitate at Yiling's lower hills?
( The emperor a cause, but he, who has bled and scrabbled and wept in the dirt of the massacre fields to render them fruitful, only to have them decay again in light of other men's jealousy and greed, seeks still in steps.
Save lives here. Being the curse back, and leave it's haunted memory as guardian. A holy place long turned haunted, and perhaps, in spite of one powerful man's failings in mercy, capable of more than the blood soaked grounds his greed has turned it into. )
Would that satisfy your cock?
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( His... cock, a perfectly plump and carefree opportunist, still grudgingly tame and settling in the nook of Lan Wangji's arm, now gazes from his perch as if Wei Ying holds the last of his enemies and the worst of his prospects. As if he knows that, should they depart here and now, the bird will fall, a first casualty.
He hesitates. Considers the dark, their surroundings, the extent of the information yet available in the entombment of the monastery. They could bide days upon days and court the nuns for revelations, but he suspects that they will trickle fat droplets and shallow rivulets and give them but scant satisfaction.
Their answer does not sleep here, between the coy smiles of helpless dames. It is not lost and found, lost and found, dazed by miasma. )
A day's ride. ( Down a mountain. And hesitantly — ) Hours by sword.
( For all they both know Wei Ying's natural hesitancy, his learned dread. No matter. He will not insult his grown husband with demurring. )
Come with me, or linger to probe the nuns alone. ( Wei Ying is a pretty thing, miraculously bright, exuberant. Perhaps they will seem as no threat, reduced to one, where they imperil the monastery together. )
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( Raised brows, he observes his husband, stone misleadingly light in his hands. )
Sleep.
( It hardly seems answer, no mention of horses or travel or swords cutting through both. He pulls another talisman from between his robes, touch and energy enough to tell him which he summons. )
Let this mountain sleep before we go.
( Innocently insidious, to set all into suspension, hibernating as bears do - yet the force of the curse is animal enough it might be turned this way for a time.
He lifts his brows, watching man and bird, waiting his consideration.
Because the energy for such comes within the swollen bounds of power already here. Delivered in the blood of children, in the waters of death and life sourced from the spring of this mountain. )
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( Sleep, Wei Ying says, and it is as if the restlessness of the mountain woods corrupts him, as if Lan Wangji wakes to the heart palpitations of a world suddenly awry, alive. He feels too long he has stood as quarry and now presents himself, once more a consummate predator.
In his arm, the chicken startles; he sets it down, where it waddles by foot, seeming to put better faith in the energy of two cultivators sooner than the dark clutches of the monastery enclaves. Lan Wangji cannot fault him. )
You do not trust it to wait out our return? ( They have stirred something, quickened it. He knows, as Wei Ying knows, that intervening with spirits will either quiet them while they gather their forces again, or stimulate their aggression. If Wei Ying wishes the matter put to bed — )
We may ward to dally or forcibly extirpate. ( A temporary or permanent solution. The alternative... ) To pacify, we must know reasons.
( And muffled like spring rain: ) Lest you wish to make weapon of resentment.
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( He considers the cost of such, the willingness of wild and wildness of children left to extreme emotion. His face grim, he shakes his head, slipping the stone tablet into his qiankun pouch. The remaining vileness dissipates like fast clouds across a summer's hot blue sky.
No, this is not a useful or needful directing of resentment. He had ever wished for children to be spared the worst impulses of the world. )
Warding. Wards for clarity and calm.
( Buy time. Misdirect, confuse. His skills aren't in confusion arrays, but one might have been useful in the woods, intended to return those who enter to their point of entrance alone. )
Bind resonance to the cock and bring it with us.
( The pause, polite and inviting, for his husband's further thoughts. It has taken years to be an even exchange, and he turns towards the discussion, the back and forth, as readily as flowers unfold to face the sun. Warm and life giving, satiated in its heated embrace.
The rooster, feathers fluffed, clucks in mild distress. )
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( Wei Ying makes space for him, opens his arms and conversation like a flower's cup to the sun. He hesitates — considers the words, spoken and implicit, considers Wei Ying's appetites. Then, as if he is ripped from the Heavens, their judge passing reckoning, he pronounces: )
Your cock, foremost.
( A simple correction, breezy. He takes the knee by the creature, silks spilling beside him like scattering spumes, and he offers out his hand. The creature is finnicky, fumbling, wading. Naturally circumspect, educated into belligerence. It looks, for a moment's huff of anticipation, prone to peck at his thumb, beak cruising the line of Lan Wangji's hand before resignedly a soft head kisses his knuckles.
How strange that fellow men ever fail to understand him, but all other living things fall in line. Resonance is a cheapened trick after, a whispered sliver of nothing. The spell reduces itself, condenses, stabilizes, holds; he retains it, a trembling and shivered thing, latching to find purchase. He feels the magic snag, feels it breathe. Turns away.
Then, the wards, all at once: where the resonance bind was explicit, specific and singular, this is a dusting of snow, tepid and vast, undiscriminating. Depleting him in slowly draining increments, as a spate of parchment talismans dash from his hand in the cardinal directions, set to attach themselves at long, faraway distance.
He blinks away the strain of concentration. Rolls his shoulders. And he tells Wei Ying, with finality: )
Next time, your wards. ( They both know the caster must now do the tiring, irritating work of paying attention to every whisper of change in the magical environment that surrounds them. Every lick, every mote. Lan Wangji is owed. )
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( Quick steps, silent and fond. To the pronouncement of efforts and parceled states of being, of ties that tire, and chains of reaction, he doesn't even allow himself a moment of surprise.
His hands find his husband's face, his cheeks, the line between bound hair and the freed waterfall that cascades down his back, then nails find scalp in tiny crescents. Wei Wuxian kisses Lan Zhan with the crashing weight of the waterfalls on Gusu's rear mountain: inevitable and breathtaking.
At least of his own breath, but he's grown into affection in ways that leaves him certain, deeply certain of what is allowed and wanted and welcomed, and so he pours himself into Lan Zhan as is tomorrow promises nothing.
Because he knows it doesn't, and so he must celebrate what he has in each day.
Breath eventually recalls itself, and he rests his forehead against Lan Zhan's that brief eternity later, uncaring of the bird now pecking at the edges of their robes. )
Promise?
( And he's not asking about wards for others. Only something of a personal promise of his own, after this haunted emperor's left exposed to the light and recriminations of his half siblings.
It doesn't take long to ensure they're packed, to find the buzz around this place calmed into a background hum that leaves teeth feeling strange, but doesn't breathe danger as surely as it had. For the moment, the mountain lies passive, appeased.
Wei Wuxian leaves three talismans as they make their way down the mountain, towards the branching path meant to lead them towards the capital and it's golden throne.
Evil spirits, evil beings, go away. )
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Promi — ( But he is kissed past measure, past decency, past earning. Kisses like a storm, destructive, consumptive, all-devouring. As if he is gristle, and Wei Ying still grazes his bones, and what was blood and meat of him has torn and sundered, and there is the Patriarch, red-mouth. There is the cleaved, crass, ravine smile of him, how it crumbles at its edges.
He licks his lips — raw — and feels the burdens of his hair untangle, relieved of the pins and pressures of his needle-binds. At his nape, tension builds; in his body, it's blossomed like the angry, prolific suns of a tree peony. He wants to bed this man, foolishly; they have no time. They should have no appetite. Certainly, they are men grown, hardly bereft of priorities.
He looks away first.
The packing is a simple thing, perfunctory. They bring little, take less. The cock is safe and fattened and pleased with the change in his unfortunate events, and Lan Wangji finds himself fond of its shrill peacocking. Their bags bound, their farewells whispered, the Mother Reverend's girls to deliver their courtesies.
No one stays their path. Behind them, gates groan closed, of iron cold.
And down the mountain, snows gather. A few days gone, but winter's broken, first powdered, then gelid. If Lan Wangji's boots were cut for the dessert, now unsuitable, Wei Ying must discover the drawbacks of his paralyzed core, leading to discomfort. They have few hurts of pride between them: Lan Wangji does not bleed ones fresh. Now and then, he offers blankets and a mantle, but no questions.
In the end, the emperor's palace is the emperor's city is the unblinking eye of the emperor's world. Gilded, quaintly excessive, predictably ritualistic. They arrive with a maudlin crowd, scattered: merchants, soothsayers, healers. The emperor, they say, has taken deathly ill of mysterious cause. A plague, a lover's sickness, a curse. Who's to say? He offers boon and rank and elevation to any who will help stay his frailty — and he receives one and all.
There is a moment, stranded before the great palace, when Lan Wangji turns to his husband and murmurs only: )
We cannot promise false hope. ( But must still ask to see the emperor under such pretenses, and they must pass the scrutiny of his eunuchs who triage those with true credentials as healers from mere charlatans. Lan Wangji, famously, cannot lie. With a nod between his husband and the inspectors: ) Work your sorcery.
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( Winter bites with knife like teeth these years, but the bundling isn't so strange, once he figures out the merit of a hair destroying wool cap. Then it's the silliest forms of pride, mostly salvaged for the look in his husband's eyes: it's not so he wants, ever, but to know he's wanted, ah, he's so simple to find it balms his soul.
Civilization is as humming and energetic as always, too alive, too overwhelming in it's ways, but bright and thriving even in the depths of its stench and sprawl. The golden palace is every bit of ostentatious theatre, as so many rulers are, but the feel of wrongness wells even over its golden face, seeping out like mould and shadows.
His husband leaves him to do his work, and the truth is: truth is enough. For as long as it took him to understand his husband lied in omissions, Wei Wuxian always knew the pattern to incomplete truths, to gaps filled in by listeners, and, at core, the value of a truth versus what's made wholly from the cloth of invention.
At least when it comes to human truths. Engineering answers beyond stated limitations is something altogether different in his gaze.
There is healing, he says, and he's certified of a kingdom far from here but whose name still travels for the merchants who've dined upon its wares. He and his husband, stated and met with little more than a blink, are soothers of spirits, those who can see the ways of energies in the world and in individuals to trace causes, to at time purge what ails, to at other times simply be able to guide towards answers. It may, he says, tell much: it may answer little. Yet they have to offer what is different from their comrades in opportunity. There's no rush, he says with a smile. They await only the emperor's desires, and what can be done, shall be.
It earns them waiting, and he takes to pulling at Lan Zhan's sleeve and collecting his hand to write out individual characters, smiling idly. Spells out their names in their parts, spells out their son, their daughters. Approximations when those names hadn't shared a birth language, only the communal one granted to them all.
Nothing is offered. All is watched, until there comes the eunuch who says in his soft and steady way, the emperor would see you now.
It's not a request, and while his eyes crinkle at the corners as if he smiles, it's amusement at the consistent presumptions of the world, and the nuance always bereft in singular contacts.
The emperor lies in sumptuous sheets of silk in bright gold and purple. His heart aches at that, complicated, but the weight of the curse upon that room hinges on the laboured breaths of this great man, who even ill, has the audacity to look beautiful and wan and shy of middle age when he's well within it's grasp.
Lan Zhan he keeps behind him, wary of the particulars of this man and his husband's preferences and open, calloused heart. )
I have no joy in saying this, Your Eminence, Sun of the Sundered Skies, but you are beset upon by that which, once cast, has reflected upon its center.
( Solemn and quiet, he studies these features in their own ill tidings. )
I dare not suppose what this might be, only that at its heart, it's as if a child cries.
( Said softly, hard for his attendants to hear.
The emperor regards him, Lan Zhan, the room at large. When he next coughs, he waves all his attendants to the attached chamber once his breath returns.
Eyes shining like promises in a young woman's first gaze upon one who she believes she might love.
Fevered hope, imagination, and cunning, always cunning. The emperor says, then, that tears are never things which he's found have solved anything, but they're pretty enough, depending on the crier. )
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( He had anticipate a ruin of truth, a gilded spectacle of hyperboles and deceptions — Wei Ying, armed with flourish, ransacking the shreds of their dignities for more kindle to burn. He was not prepared for an ode of weaponized shamelessness before a king of would-be Yunmeng.
Eyes bright and white and gaze unflinching, he watches Wei Ying erupt in a river of nonsense while the emperor — a man grown gaunt for his ailings, melancholy and bitter-strange — nods with ripe enthusiasm. Lan Wangji finds himself a thief in their pack, squirreling away slivers of indignation, like treats to let turn and radiate bittersweetness in his mouth.
Your Eminence, Sun of the Sundered Skies... are beset upon by that which, once cast, has reflected upon its center. When he groans, to the incandescent worry of the nearest eunuch that perhaps these alien miscreants have brought either insult or sickness or injury in the emperor's presence, it is all he can do to pretend a yawn, after. Better unmannered than a threat.
The room breaks for the emperor's privacy. Rows and rows of servants dissipate like spumes once spume-troubled waters sleep. The emperor sees them as the one benediction that will return strength sapped from his limbs, stolen from his soul. They are offered, to sweeten the arrangement, a seat on silken benches and wine. Then silver. Then, in the way of this realm, a thick-bodied, coiling narcotic smoked by pipe — lighter, a clearly more modern variant of what suffocated them in the monastery.
Lan Wangji waits out the game, Wei Ying's starting hand, the inevitable show of studied indifference that a ruler of the world performs in the face of the one force whose strength and reach finally exceed his own. Death becomes you, he might say, but Lan Wangji does not wish them put to the knife.
Instead, he asks in the measured but clean way of his people, after the children. )
Your siblings perished. ( They did. )
You knew. ( A nod; the emperor did. )
You approved. ( Hesitation — and here, the dregs of Lan Wangji's desirous sympathy wanes, and he reaches out for Wei Ying's hand beside him, to have and hold and anchor himself. )
Kin slaying can rouse the casting of curses. Did the emperor commit such a deed? ( A pause — then a shake of his head. )
Did the emperor give the word that led to bloodshed? ( No, not at all. Another pause: but he should have. )
Then, who? ( And here, now, they are two worlds sundered. Here, the emperor turns his glance aside, to where coloured glass paints fields and sunsets in minute mosaic. It is, in the end, a eunuch who speaks the words: His Imperial Highness, the previous emperor, gave order than upon his death, all his children but the heir must be slaughtered, where they stand. To prevent a civil war.
...ah. What primitive, tyrannical measures. What foolishness — )
...if his highness played no part in this, why do the cloud of these deaths linger over was him? ( Why was he cursed? )
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( Silence that stretches long, the faded emperor studying the rich spoils of a legacy mired in pain. Wei Wuxian waits, slim and steel clothed in pleasant candor gone contemplative. He winds the fingers off his hand through Lan Zhan's, holds quiet as he waits.
Now the emperor sighs, a soft exhalation as long as his silence.
Truth: he did not give the command.
Truth: he removed all such persons from the imperial palace and the imperial city.
True: he stipulated years of grieving his late father emperor, in which he could not and they could not act upon decrees which would lead to conflicting remembrances.
True: he never rescinded the painful gluttony of his father, never thought long in it, tried not to think at all.
His voice grows thin, his words interrupted by coughing that leaves flecks of bright blood on his lips.
Wei Wuxian listens. Then like all heroes, he steps into the light from the shadows that embrace him with cold familiarity and sweetest grace. )
Bury them, remembering who they are. Cry for them, even if the tears aren't yours. You cannot evade responsibility for what you ignored, cannot be healthy with that weight of miasmatic death feeding you, at the heart of the curse of your emperor's line.
( Because the irony of being less ruthless than he was designed to be is killing him now, and he must, to live, break the very curse which has fed his dynasty for generations. )
Bury them, honour them, release their mothers with generosity. You desire life. To live, you must speak of and to death and the dead, and be yourself, emperor in recovery, and not that which feasts upon youth's sundered vitality.
( Hard gaze from a wan face in that massive, opulent bed. This is no help, that is no answer, how can he, what curse, this is a dynasty of strength — )
I can only suggest you send your criers to every city, town, and village announcing the funerals and honoring of those left in the dark and wild.
( A curse of greed disguised as a blessing of vitality. Wei Wuxian stands shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, with a man he trusts as much as he's learned to trust himself again.
What's been done cannot be undone. Yet addressing grief, addressing pain, addressing horror in the light allows it to soften in a way ignoring it, feeding it on further pain and death will never achieve.
The emperor lies quiet, dark eyes sunken. Lifts a hand, barely waves to the eunuch standing near. Both of them can hear him, while usual mortals would not, but he says nothing to the words that come:
Lock them up. And send for the heavenly scribe. )
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