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audio | un: yiling laozu
In further Lumberjack related deductions between Lockwood and myself: our local ghosts were cultivated by the ladies of the lake after a strange woman and the dead appeared. As Wrath and several others have indicated, this is likely the Huntress, historically. Hatisse advises she's left something of herself behind to fuel what's happening.
The Lumberjack sincerely does not wish to disappoint the ladies of the lake. What he acts for has that in mind, ah? Not to speak on the rest of our haunts. How many of us continue our nightly hauntings?
The Lumberjack sincerely does not wish to disappoint the ladies of the lake. What he acts for has that in mind, ah? Not to speak on the rest of our haunts. How many of us continue our nightly hauntings?
no subject
Mmm.
( the quiet inhalation. the slow exhalation. )
Once, I thought to gift a child a bracelet, an amulet for protection, success.
( another bead, another name. no order to it. this one reads "uncle fourth." )
I'm visited by it nightly, with the names.
no subject
( Visited, nightly. It nearly slips of his hands, tumbles and twirls. He catches it between the hard blunt blade-edges of his nails. )
You did not say.
( Until, pressed like sand turning to glass. )
no subject
Mmm.
( the same hum, leaning. waiting for him to steady to hand him another implication of a life ended.
the bead reads wen qing. )
I like that you sleep the nights through.
( he doesn't wake his husband for any of his nightmares. it's hard, to consider sharing burdens, he knows that. isn't he meant to handle them alone. )
no subject
...whoever said sincerity is advisable in matrimony in truth was never wed. If he nods, it need not be assent, only the quiet, gentle reverberation of neutral understanding.
So he supposes. )
Not all who died for you died because of you.
no subject
( peace, watching someone else in slumber. a heartbeat, the steady breathing, the warmth, and eventually he falls again. on other nights. )
Technicalities.
( plink. another bead, to touch the rest. this one another wen, but not from dafan mountain.
a certain son of a certain dead leader. )
The problem is one of regret.
( and what if it he lacks. )
no subject
( Regret: mountainous, corrosive. Dead squirming, squelching at their feet. Flesh is for trampling, for decay. He keeps his hand netting Wei Ying's light, like gossamer. )
What is it your silences do not say? ( To him, here, now. In this moment, dragging. )
no subject
( He blinks, long and slow, studying Lan Zhan's hand, netting him, netting the beads like so many strange pearls unearthed by his tongue. )
The Yiling Laozu doesn't regret his entrance into the war.
( Other parts, yes. His unraveling when he'd finally returned. The alcohol he drowned himself in. The promise to handle the puppet problem, his harnessing of the resentful energies of the dead.
His bones ache. Maybe that's what's left when his heart runs too tired. )
no subject
( He stills, and it is a slowed and gelid thing, a trickling acquiescence. The beads slip between them like scratches of nail on hard ground, clinking.
Wei Ying, like a lizard sunning, watches and blinks long. )
And his kills?
( Numerous, at his feet and splayed. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. Were they fairly won, deserving? )
no subject
( The silence of his breathing, the long inhalation, the controlled, long exhalation. )
Not the ones in Yunmeng.
( The revenge for the sect and family slaughtered. Too cruel, yes, age tells him that now. Yet it was not something less than what was owed, what was presupposed, for those people who had tormented and murdered every last member of the Jiang Sect at Lotus Pier.
No, even now, he does not regret their deaths, merely the manner of his ferocity. Not, he supposes, his best work, his best mind, his best time. )
Perhaps... some of the manner. But not their deaths.
( Vengeance had healed nothing. It had, however, settled accounts. )
no subject
Wei Ying, a creature of cruelty. He looks upon his soulmate's face as if he we were a new sunrise, transcending the shape and warmth of the old.
As if Lan Wangji now no longer knows what to do with him. )
Rancor sleeps within you. ( Retaliation, ache. Perhaps not undeserved. )
no subject
It did.
( Out of Yiling, the Burial Mounds and their endless thirst for vengeance, the voices of the dead that whispered and screamed and mimicked those he knew and love as much as their own pain and misery and hatred. Sanity was a slippery thing at times, and there, it had been as misleading as honest.
Survival did not make him kinder. Stepping foot outside Yiling, tracking after the ones who dropped him there, who would have had his core if his had not already been transferred to his brother, oh, he knows it was not kindness that stepped out. It was not kindness that clipped words and names to formality. It was the stuttered, shuttered defense of months to stand and smile and act in any small part like normal, when he had been left to die, and had lived instead.
Unlike his self-sought death later, the one which had also failed to take.
He drops the rest of the beads, letting them fall, half in his lap, partly between them, partly still in hand. )
I haven't had the stomach for it in years.
no subject
( He recoils, first, sound scratching and metallic and shallow, hand instinctively hunting to break the beads in idle fall.
Then, a shuddered breath — no stomach for it in years — and some part of him knew, always and forever knew, that Wei Ying had shed that old, soured, black and bad blood that created him a villain, suspected and monstrous.
That he was not the man too many accused, the easy, simple, waiting target. )
You renounced the moment. Need not forget it. ( A pause, then: ) A sister fell. Between the world and Wei Ying, there was blood. Is blood.
no subject
Lan Zhan speaks, and the words are a wound to his heart, the intake of a breath that tells, more than he ever has, what he still hasn't allowed himself the easy mourning of. Is he allowed? He still wonders. Has knelt before their tablets and been chased from Yunmeng after, ask for the sake of his brother in this place, still walking on pebbled robes of shifting stability after.
His head tilts forward, hair falling off shoulders, a waterfall to hide and live within, without his hair knot to help keep some of the mass of it back. )
There always will be. Asking for more blood won't stop those wounds from scarring. Nothing brings back the past, excepting the curse of this place and they relive what's already happened again and again, ah? Should I?
no subject
( No; relive nothing. Forgive, forget, draw the line of cinnabar and do not see it deepen to blood. Enough is enough. One lifetime of terror, another one at the expense of Mo Xuanyu's perpetual suffering.
He does not wish Wei Ying to revisit that which already carved out his body and dwindled his soul to fit in the abstract shapes of hurt. Enough, and his hand reaches over that of his husband, his friend, thumb rolling prints and needle's pricks of warmth against Wei Ying's knuckles and bones. )
You have dead. Here, elsewhere, we have coin sufficient. ( In Cloud Recesses, wealth past measure. ) Let us gather rice and wine.
( And make offerings to Wei Ying's dead and see them, at long last, appeased and silent. )
no subject
( He hums, as if that's answer, and it is after a fashion. The acknowledgement of hearing, and the lowering of his head, until he rests fully and unshakeably at Lan Zhan's shoulder, at his neck, at the side of his head. A palatial collapsing, liquid to liquid, reformed as metal remembering it held shape once, that it might recall that form again.
Bones and tendons, sinews that stitch, muscle that layers, skin that holds. Hair that tickles, tendrils drawn to parted lips and tongues without invitation. He grimaces, as if to spit out his own hair, then simply leaves the irritation as it sits. There are more important things, he supposes. No strangeness in ignoring the small and ignoble things as much as the large and breaking ones. )
When?
( Comes the question, the exhalation. When, in time, in their tumbling through it even before it was a literal, brokered and balanced against ledgers they'd never seen. )
no subject
( They cannot wait out cleansing, purification, exile from these wretched, torn lands. Time is never suitable, only strangled and meagre, only delayed.
They shall feed a hundred ghosts from a paltry, chipped clay bowl. They will cup broken hands and deliver wine to mother gravel. It will be done, among poverty and sickness, and fragility will leave the rite no less divine. )
A day. Two.
no subject
Wish any other rites observed?
( For the funeral, yes, for memory of those lost, time and again; the beads fade as the sun rises, as the Man in Black glances within in his silence and withdraws as silently, ever as it has been since their haunted arrival. Nothing left, held or otherwise, but the memory of what had been.
His eyes close, and he breathes in tempo with Lan Zhan's inhalations, his exhalations. Listens for the beating of his steadier, living heart.
Rites for mothers, as much as anyone else. Ones he's never offered in depth to his forgotten parents, outside of the shape of his name, the sketching lines of his personality. )
no subject
( Wei Ying's meaning cruel, self-evident. His mother. The... complications of Lan Wangji's previous fixation on remains not her own. On the likeness of her proximity. He knows his own mind, its terrors.
Know the colour of his longing. )
Nothing. ( He should look away. Shutters his eyes. ) To no one.
no subject
( He lifts his head with that, turns his face to press a kiss to Lan Zhan's temple, accepting the implausibility of one truth for the implication of another. Lies are nuanced creations, both in the words said blatantly by so many others, and what is not said, in other cases.
He's not ready. Maybe with Lan Xichen here, maybe then he will be. Maybe he never will.
Wei Wuxian hopes against that dark thought, but says nothing, simply lets his lips linger as they do, asking for nothing more, nothing less. )