( 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
( 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. )