xuanya | (no subject)

( Where white mountains scream with unending vastness, and the great, groaning gaze of the abyss blinks away through the cataract of dawns, clouding. It might be the slate sky of dead dry twilight or a winter’s morning; might be the height of it, inexcusable, inexorable, and their legs burned alive with the quiet, simmering pulse of ache-ache-ache, building.

Travel has been costly where the slope turned mean and glacial up the peak, steep enough to stand erect like a proud man’s throat for the noosing. He obliged Wei Ying to accept their horse, after some time — less for the chivalry of sparing his husband, more so the opportunity to wade through the cartilage of forests run thick and slimy with perpetual frost on Bichen’s back, scouting. In the end, they arrive, the monastery a cold sprawling disaster, upheld by the dignity of its repute and the beautiful haunting of trilling birds. Beneath, the mines that once burst with the maw-churning sounds of hard, bitter work traded for nuggets of — ...dark, dreary things.

Not water, he is told. He asks, thoroughly. Embers for warmth and pigments and stone. Iron, also — but Lan Wangji suspects, more.

They are welcomed cleanly, discreetly, with the transactional facility of merchants or petty predators symbiotic with a household: doors open, doors close. The first nun to see them by the gates takes their introduction papers, a cheaply recommendation from the leader of a settlement exorcised during travel. She does not remove her skins of fawn veils, does not wash them in hospitality.

Only opens her doors through the work of code and levers, and the beastly jaws of the gates come undone, and they must rush in — yes, even their horse, and it is a tongue-tied youth who takes the reins in his trembling hands.

And they are bidden in.

No quarters, at first, not until the spiritual leader of establishment seizes them: sister Sorrow, a name chosen in blunt-bladed sacrifice for her mourning grief. She does name why, does not seem perplexed by the brazen theatrics of her appellative. She accepts it, as she tolerates them, wordlessly and seamlessly and entirely — at ease.

In the end, they receive rooms, at the very tunnel’s end of a deserted western wing, long abandoned after the season’s first floodings seeped in through elderly vents. This part of the monastery, he learns, was erected just above the mines’ hollows. There are yet

Some of the lubricious condensation has turned to spears of ice. Dried now, she says, and the brazier flames will keep strong, and the shaky bed and floors will weather, and the ruinous bathing halls will not collapse for a handful of nights. No longer. But then, she tells them, passing on the evening’s meal of rice gruel and thick spice stew and a seaweed soup, they cannot be seated among the women. Aged concubines, exiled princesses, scholars secluded among tombs, wise women who no longer bear the world — and young, lively girls, sent by the affluent for a handsome schooling, away from modern temptations.

This is no home, says Sister Sorrow, for the base and the disbelieving. They wake to prayer and flagellation, long fasts and ablutions, six hours of lessons for the young long before the midday bell. The religion, Lan Wangji attempts but fails to decipher: local, possessed of an ambitious pantheon, embracing the beauty of pain through deprivation. As in hunger, bone reveals its beauty, so too does virtue shine through lacking. Each day, the sisters seek less.

And at night, at least half their number yowl.

They have been cat-like for three weeks hole. It was the men first, he remembers, and now they’ve cleansed of their evil. And he sees them: women shrouded in robes like ghosts haunting, veils heavy and drawn to a tight bind, steps licking stone as they cluster together. Their eyes cross over him, gaze cruel and limber but snagging, their hostility tactile. They do not speak to them; only Sister Sorrow, who passes them by and sketches with her clasping hands the half-bow of greeting that they answer with deeper, more persistent interest. They do not greet.

They have meowled, says Sister Sorrow, and taken a vow of silence to make amends.

With so little time allowed to them, Lan Wangji had anticipated the opportunity to interrogate at least a number of the sisters — formally, during a collective dinner. Privately, in dark corners. No such fortune. They are isolated in the abandoned dining halls of their wing, the only rattling the rare footsteps of the adolescent who intrudes to deliver their meal, his gaze downcast — and the relentless, seismic grinds of the mines.

Some of the mine’s gears, the boy murmurs, are still turning.

Then they are alone, truly lone, only diffuse candlelight and the ever-blinding swell of Wei Ying’s laughter to tide them. Lan Wangji gratefully attacks his rice gruel, spurning the spice stew. And then, in the worst of his husband’s corruptions, he speaks during dinner-time. )

Your charms have waned. ( Certainly, failed this once to win them favour. )