( ...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:
( ...they cannot continue as they have, sowing the seeds of enmity wherever they pass. Surely, one day lone and yet to come, they will earn warm welcome. Surely, this is no dream or myth or children's whim, and Lan Wangji may hold high hopes for a bed as people bask in, and not the withered bones of a worn-in cot, half desolation, half tatters.
(Send criers, Wei Ying said. Lan Wangji may well weep first.)
In truth, he should seek out his justice from the emperor, who yet misunderstands the nature of his — guests and their proficiencies, and he thinks himself clever, jaw locked like tree's roots during a storm, tight and taut. It is, he says, an ill omen to kill spirit speakers — they will invite only ire, to eradicate the emissaries of the heavens. The scribe, the eunuch murmurs with the greedy, buttery sycophancy of professional courtiers — the scribe will know.
Doors creak, howl open. Guards gather indiscreetly. Lan Wangji's hand, drawn to heed where Bichen whispers in her sheath, is all gilded live wire before the lightning's strike, an eel in water. Poised, prone to kill. Waiting. And an aside, to Wei Ying: )
Clear the room, or permit imprisonment?
( He thinks, more fool he, he could kill every enemy force in this room, to a man. Speak the word, only speak it — but then, his husband is half fox and wholly willy, and if he intends escape only after gathering fresh learning from their new whereabouts, they must play into their surrender.
Rank decrees, every choice should belong to the chief cultivator. Lan Wangji yields to Wei Ying with an aborted nod. Oh, the politics of matrimony. )
( How many times, caught in the crossfire of arrogance between powerful or would be powerful men? It's hardly that women cannot do the same, they know that well, but the consistent tendency of men to see little beyond what they wish the world to be hints at a failing they've needed to work through.
He is not, however, a mentor, a teacher, a master to anyone here. He never took disciples, and doesn't know that he ever will, for all he'd genuinely enjoyed teaching and training the youths of Yunmeng once, before the wars.
Lan Zhan speaks with such simple directness, this man used to power and position and having learned the frailty in that pride when surrounded by those who cannot, will not, know anything of those circumstances. He turns toward him, smiling, pressing a hand over his heart. Slipping into his own robes. Touching, after a moment, the specific talisman he'd prepared on poorly slept nights before their arrival even to the monastery. )
Close your eyes for a breath or three and don't let go.
( Because he activates that array without fanfare, the fog that seems to fill the room quickly spilling out of it, leaving voices raised as guards move only to be caught in the confusion of directions he's designed. There's no additional layers but that is which confuses and leads astray: he's buying time, not prisons.
Stepping in to press up against his husband, lauded jade of a world they've not seen for years, he says as simply in turn: )
Fly us to their rooftops, then away?
( Nothing here controls the skies but archers, and they won't know to look for what a core formed cultivator can do.
The fog surrounds and muffles sound beyond them and their breathing hearts, their breathing lungs. Wei Wuxian tilts his head back, indicating a direction where rafters gave indication of higher windows, paper and light wood, entry points improbable for most to reach. Simple for them even without flight, but to be away from where they've delivered solution, however unpalatable, sword flight is seamless, smooth.
Missed, at times, but he knows he's the luxury of clinging to Lan Zhan now which is not similar in skill or meaning, but is similarly pleasing.
It's as they go that he leaves his parking gifts: the confusion array on a rafter, ready to wind down after half a day, and his own beautiful barrier breaking spell: multitudes of sparkling butterflies flitting like fireflies through the fog.
And laughter, soft and muffled, weighed down by the resignation of acknowledgement that people are too often willingly blind, into his soulmate's shoulder. )
( It happens, in a haze — a fog. A wilderness of screams, of men who know nothing of cultivation and less of the finer things in sorcery life. Wei Ying, in his own fool's way, is a master, a prodigy, a perfect and pristine weapon Yunmeng Jiang surrendered in moments of abject pride. He strikes, the element of his surprise doubled, and the thickness of the cloying chasm takes even Lan Wangji aback, the scent of burning dust and motes drowned.
Fly us to the rooftop. Wei Ying beckons. Bichen comes, slight and pale and a coy maiden, for all her bite is more coquette than wedded virgin. He steps on first, half to secure his balance, half to illustrate to Wei Ying — his Wei Ying, but the burial mounds' first, and how they took and tore and buried him after flight fall — that no harm may come of this. After, Wei Ying joins him in a leap of trust and laughter.
And then, propelled by billowing gusts, they fly. It is no pretty thing, no gentle sequence of acrobatics or curbs. They dart through a balcony's half creaked doors, likely bruising the hinges in their wake, and perhaps lending their single kindness, that those they flee might also benefit from a breathing space. Then — and here, his arm rounds to fasten around Wei Ying's waist — they soar up, step after leap after li, and it is a palace, a creature of architectural monstrosity. They have only up to go, to the first slope of a rooftop, and Bichen however above it, no yet set to land those few paces down before they've secured that there are no waiting archers, to satisfaction. To that end, Lan Wangji sends two barrier wards that activate in a rounded dome and entomb them, as he springs down, belatedly turning to offer his arms. Jump.
Then, matter-of-factly: )
Abrupt activation burns qi inefficiently. ( ...truly, a scholar of Gusu Lan. ) Perhaps rework that part.
( And perhaps also inform your husband upon devising critical escape artefacts. )
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no subject
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. )
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
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.
no subject
( 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?
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
( 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.
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
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.
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
( 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? )
no subject
( 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. )
no subject
( ...they cannot continue as they have, sowing the seeds of enmity wherever they pass. Surely, one day lone and yet to come, they will earn warm welcome. Surely, this is no dream or myth or children's whim, and Lan Wangji may hold high hopes for a bed as people bask in, and not the withered bones of a worn-in cot, half desolation, half tatters.
(Send criers, Wei Ying said. Lan Wangji may well weep first.)
In truth, he should seek out his justice from the emperor, who yet misunderstands the nature of his — guests and their proficiencies, and he thinks himself clever, jaw locked like tree's roots during a storm, tight and taut. It is, he says, an ill omen to kill spirit speakers — they will invite only ire, to eradicate the emissaries of the heavens. The scribe, the eunuch murmurs with the greedy, buttery sycophancy of professional courtiers — the scribe will know.
Doors creak, howl open. Guards gather indiscreetly. Lan Wangji's hand, drawn to heed where Bichen whispers in her sheath, is all gilded live wire before the lightning's strike, an eel in water. Poised, prone to kill. Waiting. And an aside, to Wei Ying: )
Clear the room, or permit imprisonment?
( He thinks, more fool he, he could kill every enemy force in this room, to a man. Speak the word, only speak it — but then, his husband is half fox and wholly willy, and if he intends escape only after gathering fresh learning from their new whereabouts, they must play into their surrender.
Rank decrees, every choice should belong to the chief cultivator. Lan Wangji yields to Wei Ying with an aborted nod. Oh, the politics of matrimony. )
no subject
( How many times, caught in the crossfire of arrogance between powerful or would be powerful men? It's hardly that women cannot do the same, they know that well, but the consistent tendency of men to see little beyond what they wish the world to be hints at a failing they've needed to work through.
He is not, however, a mentor, a teacher, a master to anyone here. He never took disciples, and doesn't know that he ever will, for all he'd genuinely enjoyed teaching and training the youths of Yunmeng once, before the wars.
Lan Zhan speaks with such simple directness, this man used to power and position and having learned the frailty in that pride when surrounded by those who cannot, will not, know anything of those circumstances. He turns toward him, smiling, pressing a hand over his heart. Slipping into his own robes. Touching, after a moment, the specific talisman he'd prepared on poorly slept nights before their arrival even to the monastery. )
Close your eyes for a breath or three and don't let go.
( Because he activates that array without fanfare, the fog that seems to fill the room quickly spilling out of it, leaving voices raised as guards move only to be caught in the confusion of directions he's designed. There's no additional layers but that is which confuses and leads astray: he's buying time, not prisons.
Stepping in to press up against his husband, lauded jade of a world they've not seen for years, he says as simply in turn: )
Fly us to their rooftops, then away?
( Nothing here controls the skies but archers, and they won't know to look for what a core formed cultivator can do.
The fog surrounds and muffles sound beyond them and their breathing hearts, their breathing lungs. Wei Wuxian tilts his head back, indicating a direction where rafters gave indication of higher windows, paper and light wood, entry points improbable for most to reach. Simple for them even without flight, but to be away from where they've delivered solution, however unpalatable, sword flight is seamless, smooth.
Missed, at times, but he knows he's the luxury of clinging to Lan Zhan now which is not similar in skill or meaning, but is similarly pleasing.
It's as they go that he leaves his parking gifts: the confusion array on a rafter, ready to wind down after half a day, and his own beautiful barrier breaking spell: multitudes of sparkling butterflies flitting like fireflies through the fog.
And laughter, soft and muffled, weighed down by the resignation of acknowledgement that people are too often willingly blind, into his soulmate's shoulder. )
no subject
( It happens, in a haze — a fog. A wilderness of screams, of men who know nothing of cultivation and less of the finer things in sorcery life. Wei Ying, in his own fool's way, is a master, a prodigy, a perfect and pristine weapon Yunmeng Jiang surrendered in moments of abject pride. He strikes, the element of his surprise doubled, and the thickness of the cloying chasm takes even Lan Wangji aback, the scent of burning dust and motes drowned.
Fly us to the rooftop. Wei Ying beckons. Bichen comes, slight and pale and a coy maiden, for all her bite is more coquette than wedded virgin. He steps on first, half to secure his balance, half to illustrate to Wei Ying — his Wei Ying, but the burial mounds' first, and how they took and tore and buried him after flight fall — that no harm may come of this. After, Wei Ying joins him in a leap of trust and laughter.
And then, propelled by billowing gusts, they fly. It is no pretty thing, no gentle sequence of acrobatics or curbs. They dart through a balcony's half creaked doors, likely bruising the hinges in their wake, and perhaps lending their single kindness, that those they flee might also benefit from a breathing space. Then — and here, his arm rounds to fasten around Wei Ying's waist — they soar up, step after leap after li, and it is a palace, a creature of architectural monstrosity. They have only up to go, to the first slope of a rooftop, and Bichen however above it, no yet set to land those few paces down before they've secured that there are no waiting archers, to satisfaction. To that end, Lan Wangji sends two barrier wards that activate in a rounded dome and entomb them, as he springs down, belatedly turning to offer his arms. Jump.
Then, matter-of-factly: )
Abrupt activation burns qi inefficiently. ( ...truly, a scholar of Gusu Lan. ) Perhaps rework that part.
( And perhaps also inform your husband upon devising critical escape artefacts. )