Chapter Text
Yiling is a border town, but there is nothing much to mark the boundaries of the town itself. He brushes aside a flower-laden branch and turns a corner and suddenly he is there. Nestled against the wet of the sudden spring growth is a name-marked stone. That is all. There are farmers here, ankle-deep in new thick mud, and there are sullen children working as hard as their parents. They cross the boundary a hundred times per day, tossing tools and shouting news and cursing the warm fetid heat. It runs through the field, an invisible squiggling line long before the township itself comes into view: now it is Yiling, and now it is not.
Lan Wangji stands frozen.
He cannot see the dead, but they will see him. There must be eyes everything, eyes and ears, for Wei Ying to have survived so long.
He is nervous. He has taken painstaking cares to do things differently this time: it is unusual for him, and uncomfortable, but he cannot bear the thought of the main thoroughfare with its crowded stalls and the merchants shouting their wares. And there are memories there too, of course.
He has not flown; he has walked, his footfall muddied with hundreds of other folk, and it has taken weeks. This time he did not stop in Lotus Pier. This time he is no one’s emissary.
If he took the scene and painted it as a picture, Lan Wangji thinks, it would sell well. The sky overhead is a bright hazy blue. The fields are green. The farmers dip and rise above the furrows in shocks of red and brown and deepest blue. The faraway hills fold over each other the rippling of silk, green and fading to blue, and as the town falls away around the curve of the river there is a darkening as forests of pine rise from its banks. And there -
He sees it. A great disease across the landscape, grey and withering. He has been there himself, of course, but still: he goes cold. The heat is dull, oppressive suddenly, and the shouts of the farmers make his head ache. He wants to sit down somewhere cool and quiet.
Yiling. Nobody else visits here.
He breathes: with purpose, for clarity. Then he walks.
As the town grows up about him and the slick mud of the country paths gives way to something wider and dry, the air changes. There is a stiffness, a tension to it. He is being watched. The locals huddle in whispered alleyways, clutching brooms, and shutters are slammed shut as he passes. It is a prosperous enough place - there is a little spread of paper kites and flax-woven toys across some rushes, and there is even a bookshop with some calligraphy stapled on boards outside - but the town is quiet, and the eyes on him are distrustful, hateful. He feels absurd, in his clear unmuddied white with his qin at his back and his sword at his hip. He is not welcome here.
At the first guesthouse he stops at he is spat at by a child from an upstairs window. Her black head vanishes before he can see her face.
At the second guesthouse the owner is sat at a guest’s table drinking with an elderly man. The tables are meticulously clean, and the place is empty. The man stands so fast he knocks his tea to the ground, and his face is white. He tells them there are no rooms.
At the third the door opens cautiously. There is a young woman behind it with a baby swaddled at her chest. She looks him over apprehensively - from head to toe, in nervousness and not approval - and opens the door a crack further.
‘You’re a cultivator.’
He bows. ‘Gusu Lan, courtesy name Lan Wangji.’
Surprises flashes across her face, but she does not bow.
‘Lan er-gongzi?’
In Yunmeng and beyond he had travelled discreetly. Now he is here he will be indiscreet, or as indiscreet as is possible for him. He will tell his name to anybody who asks, and perhaps even if they do not.
He dips his head.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I would like to stay overnight. Do you have any rooms?’
‘I mean - what are you doing in Yiling? What business does the Lan sect have here?’
Her jaw is set, but she is afraid.
‘I do not come on behalf of my clan or anyone else.’
His eyes are steady. The young woman hesitates, and then opens the door. She does not move from the doorway, and he takes a respectful step back.
‘Lan er-gongzi, you - there haven’t been any deaths, our taxes are paid. None of us are looking for any trouble.’
‘Neither am I.’
‘Then - forgive me but - why are you here? Are you here for him?’
Him.
There is only one man she could mean, spoken in such a tone. Lan Wangji is gripped tight by a swelling of something, so tight for a moment he cannot speak. At last he nods.
Something like fear crosses her face. ‘Will you hurt him?’
He stares.
‘Are you going to hurt him? What are you going to do to him?’
And he realises he has misjudged this town. They are not afraid of him because he is a cultivator like Wei Ying. They are afraid because he is a cultivator, and because every time the cultivators come to cleanse the land and rid them of this evil there is only death, and death, and the ones who do not die.
‘No,’ he says softly. ‘I wish to talk to him.’
The young woman looks at him. ‘That’s what Jiang-zongzhu said. And Nie-zongzhu. And Jin-zongzhu.’
‘He will wish to speak to me.’
She is unconvinced. He is not surprised; it had not sounded convincing to even himself.
‘Will he? Why?’
Lan Wangji hesitates.
‘He was,’ he says, haltingly, ‘my friend once.’
*
Yiling: a border town, a crossroads. The living pass through and the dead stay.
It was five years ago that the first reports came from Yunmeng. Shame-faced and terrified of Jiang-zongzhu’s wrath, the townsfolk had waited far longer than they should have. By the time the other clans know it is months too late.
Yiling. Many do not believe it at first. They call them liars, superstitious peasants, but their disbelief is forced and their faces are pale. It cannot be true.
And then the reports begin to trickle in from Lanling. The capital, the centre of culture and wealth and the slick healthy skepticism of the Jin. Children, mothers, families and brothers: they have all seen the dead folk, pale as shades in the night. Lianfang-zun calls a conference, and the sect leaders meet once more.
They are tense. On a knife’s edge. But the dead only walk. They do not seem to wish anyone any harm.
Lan Wangji has seen them himself. They walk in silence in an endless procession, bobbing like candle flames in the dark. Almost every night now for years he sits himself in the street like a stone in the midst of a current and plays to calm them. They will not speak to him, but a few stop and listen. Then they turn, snagged in the stream of hundreds, and walk on once more. From north, south, east and west they converge on a single point, flaring with spiritual energy like a beacon, irresistible and warm. As much as it pains him, he has little time to spend in the mountains of his youth. He lives five days out of seven in Gusu, and looks at dawn towards the Cloud Recesses. He misses the silence, and the cool air.
Yiling. It is a thorn in their sides, an impossibility. How many times over the last seven years has he written those characters - in missives, records, letters to the other sect leaders when his brother cannot?
If it is true -
(which it cannot be)
If it is true -
They were all at Nightless City, where he took on three thousand of them and lived. Some have lost their limbs and some their sight. Others have lost children. Of course it is true.
*
‘Wangji.’
His brother enters the jingshi, his footsteps almost silent. He is carrying a tray of steaming food and his eyes are apprenhensive.
But today is a good day. Today Lan Wangji can sit, and the silence that stretches between them is a silence of habit and rules and good food, and not because he is hollow with no words left to say. Lan Xichen places the tray down on the table, and rises to stand beside the bed. He waits as Lan Wangji pushes himself stiffly to his feet, but he does not try to help. It had hurt more than any wound could, the loss of his pride like that. And to be washed for and supported for almost a year, and to be watched when he takes the first steps again and to see the guilt in his brother’s eyes, the guilt that eats him and will not stop: that is the most painful thing.
Almost the most painful, perhaps.
His brother waits for him, his eyes vague and far beyond the jingshi.
‘What is it?’
Lan Xichen shakes his head. ‘Eat.’
He does not mind the silence of meal times. They used to do this, in one room or the other, when Lan Wangji was small. Only when he was older - older enough to be obedient, old enough to know better - did they eat together with their uncle. His father had never come. It had been nice sometimes, with the children of the other sects, to listen to them talk. But this is ritual and ritual is comforting.
Lan Wangji places his bowl down. Even in silence he could see his brother’s distraction: his eyes roaming, his brow knitted.
‘What is it?’
A tired smile. Lan Wangji waits.
‘You have heard about Wei-gongzi,’ he says eventually.
Lan Wangji stiffens.
‘Wangji, I know this is -‘
He stops. Hesitates. Then he smiles again, and shakes his head. Lan Wangji is absurdly grateful, somehow, to the rules that bind them both. He will not talk about this with his brother. He cannot, and his brother will not ask.
‘What news is there?’
‘I met yesterday with A-Yao. He has been in communication with the other sect leaders throughout the last month, travelling from Yunmeng to Qinghe.’ His expression softens. ‘He has been very busy.’
Lan Wangji pays him the same courtesy in turn. He will not ask.
‘The reports from Qinghe, from Yunmeng, from Lanling - the situation is the same as in Gusu. People are afraid. Some enterprising individuals have even taken it upon themselves to follow the procession, to see where it goes. They have descended upon Yunmeng.’ His brother’s voice is gentle. ‘Wangji, the shades are heading towards Yiling. It must be him.’
For a moment he is there again, delirious and clutching Wei Ying to him and crying out for someone, anyone. And when Wen Qing tries to take him from him, eyes sharp as daggers, he forgets why he is there and holds him all the tighter.
‘Wangji?’
‘I understand.’
Silence, and the curl of steaming tea.
‘And so -‘
He is a diplomat: not as adept as Jin Guangyao at delivering bad news, perhaps, but adept enough. It must be a difficult request to have him struggle so.
‘Xiongzhang.’
‘Wangji. A-Yao said -‘
He waits.
‘They want to ask if you would go.’
He is stunned.
He thinks: Wei Ying. There is nothing else: Wei Ying, Wei Ying, Wei Ying. It takes him a moment to compose himself. The blood throughout his body is suddenly singing.
Lan Xichen is smiling, but it is a worried smile.
‘I had hoped you would decline.’
His head snaps up. ‘Xiongzhang!’
His brother’s face is pained. ‘You are injured, Wangji. You cannot travel to Yiling like this, and you can less defend yourself.’ He sighs. ‘And you would not be going alone. The sect leaders wish to accompany you, in case anything goes wrong.’
Lan Wangji looks at his brother in silent reproach.
‘Wangji -’
‘He would not hurt me.’
Lan Xichen exhales. ‘He is dangerous, Wangji. We do not know what has happened to the Tiger Seal. For all we know he could still have it. He could still be using it. For all we know his temperament could be -‘
‘Wei Ying would not hurt me.’
Wouldn’t he?
There is sorrow on Lan Xichen’s face. Gently he reaches for Lan Wangji's cup, and refills his tea. ‘Wei-gongzi has always been kind to Gusu Lan. He helped us during the war, and he saved the Wens. When we could not - when I dared not not - he saved them. Without him the war could not have been won, and he - he saved your life too. Whatever happened in Nightless City, I will not forget that.’
There is a moment of pregnant silence.
‘But,’ his brother continues delicately, ‘he lives with the dead in the mass graves of Yiling. Every day, in the same resentful energy that drove - we cannot know how the Tiger Seal has affected him. It has been years. He could be -‘
Lan Wangji snaps his eyes up.
Lan Xichen stops.
‘Xiongzhang,’ he says. ‘I know him.’
In the quiet of the jingshi it sounds a little sad.
‘You knew him, Wangji. Time changes us all.’
His brother stands.
There would have been a time when Lan Wangji would have said nothing to that; a time when he would have stood instead, and bowed as stiffly as he could without scandal, and left to hurt in haughty silence. There would have been a time when he would have done instead of said, when he would have walked out abruptly, leapt over the rooftops and followed him, to leave his careful apologetic brother to deal with the aftermath. He had never spoken up for Wei Ying, and everything he did only made it worse.
‘No,’ he says. ‘They cannot come.’
He hates this hurting body, hates this room, hates how he is trapped.
‘Wangji, you are injured. You have no more idea than any of us what Wei-gongzi may do. You cannot go alone. I will not risk losing you.’
They stare at each other.
‘They cannot come,’ he repeats.
His brother turns away, and gazes out of the window. ‘A-Yao said that you would insist on going alone.’
It bothers him, a little, to have A-Yao know him so well. But it is also rooted in basic common sense, an understanding of Wei Ying that he cannot be the only one to have, and he supposes he should allow Jin Guangyao that. He tries again. ‘Xiongzhang. The last time they saw Wei Ying they were trying to kill him. He will not welcome them, no matter the reason.’
‘And he was trying to kill them.’
Lan Wangji breathes out sharply. ‘He -‘
‘I know. I know. But just as he does not have good reasons to trust them, they do not have good reasons not to trust him.’
‘There is only one of him.’
‘And there were three thousand of them, and that was not enough.’
It hangs there, in the silence.
Lan Wangji stands.
‘Wangji -‘
‘Thank you for dinner.’
‘Wangji -‘
With dignity he walks slowly to the door. He pauses, and looks over his shoulder. Lan Xichen is caught, an agonised expression on his face, and he snaps his hands back that were reaching towards him. He is built for touch, his brother, made to comfort, and he will never be allowed.
‘Wangji, I cannot lose you again. I will not.’
Lan Wangji will not look at him.
‘You will not be able to go alone. You cannot - even if you wish to, you cannot. If you want to see him at all it will have to be on their terms. It is for your own safety as much as theirs. We cannot take any risks, Wangji, you must understand that. There are not enough of us left.’
The pain in his bones is dull, and his back is aching. His brother is right, of course. And there is a dull hate for that, for all these men and women that pushed and pushed and couldn’t stop pushing until Wei Ying finally snapped, and blamed him for the carnage. It will be the first time he has seen Jiang Wanyin since he tried to kill his brother. The thought makes him sick.
‘Good night, xiongzhang.’
Lan Xichen swallows. ‘Rest well, Wangji.’
*
In his confinement he has had a lot of time to think.
The truth is he does not know the Yiling Laozu, this thing with red eyes that rips corpses from the restful ground. Sometimes he cannot see Wei Ying in him at all. That horrifies him, and for that he is ashamed.
It is how he failed. He had thought the problem was that none of them understood him, that they did not see the hurt inside of him, and what he was trying to do. Lan Wangji had thought he was better than that, because he always had. But maybe this was his own failing. When he tried to speak to that boy - the boy he knew, the boy he travelled with, the boy he watched at dawn and at sunset - Wei Ying had laughed, cruelly, and called him Hanguang-jun.
He’s still there. He’s still there, deep inside. He’s not in his right mind. The Stygian Tiger Seal is clouding his thoughts. Wei Ying would never -
Except he did, and had, and does. Wasn’t that the problem with thinking like that? He is all of the things they say he is. All of them and others he has not had the chance to see.
Wei Ying. The Yiling Laozu. He still thinks in these dualities. He knows it is wrong. But if he does not he only sees the dead and the dying and the harsh white of his strained laughing skin under the moon, and he cannot make sense of it at all.
Because if that man is Wei Ying -
If all of him is Wei Ying -
Then how could he ever ask Lan Wangji to leave?
*
‘You cannot stay here,’ the woman says, and then hesitates. ‘You understand that nowhere will take you in. It’s not - it’s not personal. You will have to sleep outside the town.’
He bows.
‘Wait,’ she says. ‘Give me your waterskin.’
He holds it out, and she disappears behind the door for a few moments. When she returns she thrusts it at him, bulging and full.
‘It’s not good to drink the water there. Do you have a pot? You will need to boil anything you get from the river.’
‘Thank you.’
She hesitates again, and Lan Wangji speaks.
‘I promise again I will not hurt him.’
‘You promise?’
‘I would never.’
There is a steady conviction in his voice.
For a moment she stares at him, narrowing her eyes. Then her brows furrow in confusion. ‘You are Lan Wangji, second Jade of Lan.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you will also know Lan Zhan?’
He blinks.
It takes a moment for the words to come. ‘Lan Zhan?’
‘Another of your clan. He used to speak of him often.’
He stares.
He is caught between the swift pleasure of hearing his name almost from Wei Ying’s lips and the sudden ache of used to. She has lived in Yiling all of her life, talk of the gentry couched in formalities. It is an easy mistake to make.
‘Used to?’
‘Yes.’ She frowns. ‘Who is he?’
He spreads his hands, helpless.
‘I am Lan Zhan. Courtesy name Wangji.’
Her dark eyes grow round.
‘I promise,’ he says again, and his voice is rougher. ‘I promise you I will not hurt him.’
It is her turn to stare. The silence between grows and stretches, and Lan Wangji can feel a trickle of sweat under his collar in the noontime heat. There is a cicada droning somewhere, sleepy and loud.
‘Is there anything else you can tell me? Anything else that could help?’
The woman looks troubled. She glances around. ‘When was the last time you came to Yiling, Lan er-gongzi?’
He lowers his head. ‘Four years ago.’
‘Four years,’ she says, and then narrows her eyes. ‘Was that when -‘
‘Yes.’
‘But this time you are alone.’
‘I am alone.’
She shakes her head. ‘A lot has changed in four years. You attacked. The river dried up. The traders stopped coming. The Jin came again. More people died.’ There is an accusation in the tilt of her jaw. ‘The boundaries of the Burial Grounds have changed too. They were originally much larger, but - many of the Wen left, and settled here in the end.’
So it is true.
‘And Yiling did not object?’
She looks at him sharply. ‘We had little choice. He stayed and the cultivators left, and we chose the side of the thing we had to live with. And they had a doctor.’
Wen Qing. She is alive then.
‘And…the dead?’
‘Everywhere has dead folk, Lan er-gongzi. Ours are just easier to talk to than most. What kind of dead are you asking about?’ She smiles bitterly. ‘We have every kind you’d like: walking corpses, ghosts, little unborn children, howling spirits - healing spirits - and the nightshades…’
‘That must be difficult,’ he says stiffly.
Her baby wails, and for a moment she hushes it, soothing it with quiet words and a smooth hand on its perfect little head. Then she looks him right in the eye.
‘Difficult? Nobody will trade with us, Lan er-gongzi. There is something in the water, and all the young folk leave as soon as they can. But we are alive, if that’s what you mean, and he keeps his dead well-controlled. Nobody is hurt if they stay in the town. As for the shades…they don’t do anybody any harm. They just pass through northwards.’
‘Where are they going?’
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know. It’s not like he can use them to pull his turnip cart.’
Lan Wangji frowns.
‘Never mind.’ She waves it away. ‘You - I can’t talk more now. My husband will be back soon.’
He bows. He does not ask if she has a room.
‘You should camp outside the town,’ she says eventually. ‘There’s a crag along the river. Nobody will see you there, and you can wash your things. If you need food it isn’t too far to return here, but -‘
‘I will manage.’
She nods, relieved.
‘Thank you.’
He means it: he is grateful to her, what little she has said, the message she has passed inadvertently along and quite by mistake.
She smiles, tightly. ‘I hope you find him.’
He turns and leaves. As he goes she watches him, a single dark eye behind an almost shut door. Then he is further down the road, shoes already muddied, and the door closes and she is gone.
It is a relief to leave the town behind. As he steps into the dappled woods, the solitude is as welcome as the shade. They had watched him leave. Like the road he took into Yiling, there is no gate or anything to mark what is a community closed off from the rest of the world, nothing but a stone: but they crowd up to it, the red and the browns of the Wens and the locals, and watch him go. It makes him feel uneasy, like they are the silent dead themselves, watching the living pass by. When he was younger he had trained together with the other disciples, before he had realised he was stronger than them, and they would stand in a line on two sides with wooden swords and hit him as he parried and darted through. It is calling running the gauntlet. This is how he feels, walking the silent gauntlet through the watchful townsfolk, only he cannot see yet what hurt they have given him. He wonders how many cultivators have gone this way for Wei Ying, and how many have come back.
The shades take the same road. He can feel them brush against him, cool and soft, and in the afternoon sun they are little more than breaths of wind.
The sun grows a little dimmer. The trees are taller here, and the path dry: he is climbing away from the river, despite what the young innkeeper said, cutting the slope up towards high land. The forest is quiet. There are no birds, and the heat is sullen and desultry, the kind that stays long after dark. Sweat trickles down his brow.
He has not flown. He has walked. He has taken a different path into the city. He is wearing his sect’s clothes, but as he has not worn them since the war: tight arm-braces and a light fabric, with a mud-spattered snagging hem. He could wash them tonight in the river - this is the sort of thing he has learnt since his confinement and his travels alone - but he is not sure he wants Wei Ying to see him clean and jade-like. He wants to be human for him, in whatever way he can. He wants -
Is he worrying about his clothes?
An hour or so of a deepening silence and he comes to a place where he must make a choice. The path crumbles, and he looks around, lost. At first he thinks he has missed it. But when he retraces his steps there is no splitting of the path that can be found; it simply grows narrower and narrower and finally stops. Like an animal trail, except that he has been following it for a long way outside the town, and it has been well tended, and so -
The unease he had felt when the villages watch him leave returns. There is something unnatural about the silence. He can hear every twig under his feet, every brush of his robes.
It doesn’t matter. There is a vantage point, an outcrop of rock somewhere to his left. If he stays close to the line of the hill he will find it. He keeps walking.
As he walks he can feels the coolness of the shades against his skin. He feels carried by them, buoyed by their sighing invisible sound, as they surge up the hill, pulling past him, faster and faster. The air itself is warm and wet, but where the shades touch him he shivers. It is a different kind of cold, a different kind of fear, but he is calm as he climbs. It is inevitable, this, a return to the beginning. It is the third time he has climbed this hill and he knows where to go.
Where he brushes against them some of them seem to turn, a glimmer in a shaft of falling light, and then they move onwards. Some touch him in curiousity with trembling smoke-like hands. He is not as perceptive as Wei Ying to this sort of dead, but he is still one of the finest cultivators that lives, and he has played for them nightly since he left his confinement in the streets of Caiyi: in smaller villages, at home in the mist-wreathed mountains of Cloud Recessses. He knows them well enough. And they are not like other ghosts, the ones on the roads to Yiling. He does not know what Wei Ying has done, but there is no harm in them at all. They seem lost, dreaming; whatever resentful energy ties them to the earth it is dampened, blissful, and they float northwards with no designs on the living whatsoever.
They will not harm him, and he is not afraid. For the most part they do not seem to notice him at all.
***
It is a spring day and the air is losing its crispness; the sun is warm, and kinder than Lan Wangji has felt it all winter. Inside the great hall there are voices, rising and falling with bows and laughter and drinks by the ever hospitable Jin. Outside on the dias, in the blessed quiet, there are only a few nervous servants. Their heads are down, hands folded over their orange robes, and he tries to pretend they are not there.
Lanling is spread out below him, tumbled and golden. He can smell the incense and meat on the air. He closes his eyes, and breathes in.
His brother would have fetched him inside once. Once Lan Wangji would have stood behind him and watched stiffly as his brother smiled and laughed and asked if they were well, an icy white-clothed monolith, counting down the time until he could sit and watch the empty space instead. But he is older now. Five years older almost to the day of Nightless City, and he can see the shock on the other sect leaders’ face: was that Hanguang-jun? Did you see? Hanguang-jun is here! It feels strange, like coming home after months of travel to find that nothing has changed. His brother is worried, gentle, but he is distracted too. This gathering is ostensibly Jin Guangshan’s, but he can barely stand. Everybody can see the axis of power is shifting. And after weeks of preparation, of travelling to meet the minor sect leaders and comparing notes - and of, Lan Wangji is sure, many a conversation about himself and Wei Ying - everybody understands that this is something the First Jade and Jin Guangyao have done together. Their gazes meet across the hall, triumphant.
‘Er-ge.’
‘A-Yao.’
His eyes are crinkled as he catches his bow.
Before they had come Lan Xichen had briefed him on the plan. He understands already everything which has been decided, everything which has been put into place. A-Yao has worked quickly. The invitaiton to the lesser sect leaders is a courtesy only, a gesture to help avoid the restlessness after Nightless City; Jin Guangyao will see to it that few compromises will be made, and none on what matters most. He will go first: he will have his time with Wei Ying, as long as he likes to persuade him, and outside the borders of the land the leaders of the cultivation world will wait in plain sight. It is not a trap; he does not need to feel so uneasy; he is not being used. The Yiling Laozu will already know they are there. And they do not mean to harm him; they merely wish to talk. To establish lines of communication.
To understand,he hears in the space between the lines, how he may be defeated if he ever leaves Yiling. They are living on borrowed time and borrowed grace, surviving only because he has not bothered to attack. It is not a situation the proud sect leaders are comfortable with at all.
His brother had promised him it would not be a repeat of last time. ‘Jin Guangshan’s health will not allow him to go,’ he said, ‘And A-Yao is not his father’. It is meant to reassure him, but Lan Wangji is not reassured. They stand, drinking and chatting and eating from their golden platters, and all he can think of is the field in the Burial Grounds where Wei Ying had grown his turnips, and the swords resting casually at these young men’s hips.
He is tense. His hand on his own sword is white-knuckled, and the ceremonial robes feel wrong, uncomfortable. He feels like he is playing a part and nobody can see.
Nobody will speak to him. That is one blessing at least. He had seen Jiang Wanyin as they had arrived, touching down at the other end of the dias with forty of his finest, and for a moment their eyes had met. Jiang Wanyin’s countenance had darkened, and Lan Wangji had realised with his brother’s sudden hand on his shoulders that he had stepped forwards without thinking, cold with fury. Then Jiang Wanyin turned with a snort and was gone.
There are many smaller clans here, sect leaders that his brother greets with pleasure by name and he does not. He feels lost, uncertain, a traveller from another time. Everything has moved on in the five years he has been gone. He does not know who stands with who, where, or why. The currents of the cultivation world that he used to disdain but understood deep in his bones are bewildering to him now. Under the smiles there is a nervousness and a tension in the air. Nobody says it - with both Jiang and Lan here, nobody would dare - but Lan Wangji can see they are all thinking it. It feels a repeat of last time, a return to full circle. There is a tension in Jiang Cheng especially, a fury. Nobody has seen Wei Wuxian for five years, but they wake up each morning under his shadow.
There are steps beside him.
‘Lan er-gongzi.’
He turns.
It is a Jin disciple, a boisterous girl who is not yet an adult. She bows deeply.
‘Lan er-gongzi, please enter.’
He nods distantly. And he goes in. And they talk, and they talk, and he says nothing at all.
***
It is difficult to explain why he left. Well, not the why: the why is painfully clear. The answer to that is the same as it always has been, and it begins and ends with a love so tight and so frightening he does not understand it at all. What is difficult to explain is what exactly about that day that was different. How it had been different to every other endless day beforehand, and why he had snapped.
It does not seem like the correct word to use. Snapped: that is something for Jiang Cheng, or, yes, maybe something for Wei Ying. Lan Wangji rarely loses control. And it makes it sound like a decision that is worth less, a spur of the moment choice that he cannot take back, and not something he has been moving towards for the past five years with all the steadiness and inevitability of the sea.
But there is no denying it is sudden.
The idea comes into his mind fully-formed and without warning, and instantly, as if he had been waiting poised like a soldier for command, he obeys. It is like a door which had been closed is suddenly open. It is almost dream-like. He finishes the line he is writing, and places the brush down, taking care to look after the tip. Then he bows to his students, their silence and the gentle noises of ink and paper, and stands up.
He walks back to the jingshi with quiet measured paces. He has never run and he does not run now. With hands that are now starting to tremble, he kneels at the foot of his closet and takes out a set of worn robes. He knows already, as if he has planned it for years, that he will not travel as Hanguang-jun. This time he will be Lan Zhan, for whatever that is worth.
There is a loud knock outside.
‘Hanguang-juuuuuuuuun!’
He rises, and opens the door. A young boy, eight or nine, is fidgeting there. He does not have the grace to look ashamed.
‘Jingyi.’
‘Are you coming back to class?’
The other students will be sitting still in terrified silence, glancing over their shoulders at the door. He should reprimand him, but he cannot find it in himself to do so. Lan Wangji is not coming back to class. He may never be coming back to class.
‘No. Finish the page, and then you may leave for lunch. Pack up your things well.’
Jingyi grins. ‘Yes!’
With a bow he scampers away - and remembers Lan Wangji is watching, and limits himself with visible and painful virtue to a brisk walk.
Lan Wangji closes the door.
I may never see him again.
The thought is electric, stupefying. Suddenly he is violently awake. There is a resolution hard and tempered as iron in him, a fierceness that he has forgotten he is capable of. He feels more alive than he has in years, and he draws in a sharp breath, taking a moment to feel the sudden strength of his hands, the warmth of his core. Lan Wangji is not usually a spontaneous person, and yet he knows. He will not wait one day, one hour longer. He must go now.
He packs his things with a swiftness and grace that is unconscious, clung to through years of brutal training. There is a jerkiness, a fizzling excitement in each thing he chooses. Everything he touches has a new meaning, because it will come with him into a new life. He has few possessions and he is attached to none save his sword and his qin, rightly Lan Yi’s. He smoothes its old and familiar surface for a moment, breathing in and out. He thinks of the cave; he thinks, absurdly, of the rabbits. Then with a wave of his hand a snapping of blue it is gone.
And that it is all it takes. He has his sword, has his guqin. He has his clothes. He has more money than he could ever spend and the name of Lan besides. He has nothing to stop him at all.
It is more than that. He thinks about what he has done for the last few years: reduced his responsibilities, supervised the training of the older disciples to teach the younger ones, withdrawn steadily from all and everything resembling politics. Almost every night he spends in Caiyi playing for the dead, and the townsfolk love him even more than the First Jade. But he is not the only Lan in the Cloud Recesses to play Inquiry well. What else is there? His brother? Lan Xichen will understand and his understanding will give be both hurt and balm. His uncle? He is not the same man he used to be. His uncle’s disappointment in his is a daily given, and the only thing that will change is the magnitude. What else?
Is there nothing else at all?
For a moment he stands, breathless and wide-eyed, in the middle of the jingshi. He is free. He has always been free. He sees, with a sudden clarity, how everything he has done for the past years was to make this possible, even if it he had not known it at the time. It was all for Wei Ying.
He will see him again. If it kills him, he will see him again.
As he leaves the jingshi he pauses. There are thousands of light trails in this place, thousands of flickers of his past life, where he had stepped and what he had thought in his childhood and his agonising adolescence and the dull pain of his wounds for three war-free years. He knows what he would have done each and every step of the way, and for once it is the same: at eight and at eighteen, he would have written a letter. Xiongzhang, it would have said in his careful formal hand. I am leaving to find Wei Ying. Do not follow me. I will be well.
He is not eighteen anymore, and he can be brave when it matters.
Even the day seems auspicious: it is not one of the days that Lan Xichen is so often away, and he does not have any guests to avoid either. The winding path to the hanshi is as familiar as his own, and he feels strange walking along it knowing, again and again, that this could be the last time. Everything he knows is painted in the light of memory, before he has even left, but the inevitability of it is not frightening. Instead he is calm.
He listens. His brother is alone.
‘Xiongzhang,’ he calls. His voice does not belong to him.
After a moment of rustling the doors slide open. His brother is in dark blue, his shoulders strong, and there is a smile tugging at his lips.
‘Wangji. Forgive me.’ He steps backwards. ‘Please.’
The room is pleasantly scented, a mixture of a tea that is Lan Xichen’s favourite and the acrid scent of watercolour.
‘You are painting.’
He is surprised.
‘Only something small. Please forgive the mess.’
It is hardly small. The painting is stretched out across half the floor, held in place by delicate stone carvings, and it is wider than he is tall. He looks closer, forgetting for a moment why he is there. It is unfinished, a daubing of grey and blue and green drying on the rippling paper, but he can see already it will be a mountain scene. There is the curve of the hill, the karst of the rock, and there is where the empty white space where a waterfall will be. Art is his brother’s strength and not his, but Lan Wangji knows enough to see that the composition is startlingly elegant. It will be beautiful when finished.
‘It is a gift,’ he explains. He is in an odd mood, glancing down at it and back up at Lan Wangji as if to gauge his reaction. ‘Presumptuous perhaps, but it is only my own work, nothing of any greater value, so it is surely still appropriate. I had thought that a scene of Gusu - mountains in the cold morning air - could be refreshing, maybe, and perhaps help to calm the mind -‘
Lan Wangji stares at him. He has no idea what he is talking about.
‘Xiongzhang,’ he says finally.
His brother blinks. ‘Sit, please.’
Lan Wangji remains standing.
His brother frowns in polite confusion, and the frown deepends as he notices his rough clothes. ‘Is there a problem with the morning classes? Wangji, are you returning to Caiyi so soon? What -‘
‘I am going to find Wei Ying.’
A beat.
‘I am leaving now. I do not know when I will return. Please do not look for me. I will be safe.’
‘Wangji -‘
But he has heard. His face is pale. He rushes forward, and grabs Lan Wangji’s arm with his hand. His eyes are wide.
‘You cannot go.’
Stiffly Lan Wangji pulls his arm free.
‘Wangji, you cannot go. Last time Wei-gongzi attacked you, and it will be worse now. You do not know how much of him is left. He could hurt you. He may not even - he may not even know you.’
Lan Wangji flinches.
‘He could hurt you,’ he says again, softly. ‘Wangji, he could - he could kill you.’
Last time he had protested. I know him. This time he knows better. He has the scar along his forearm, a jagged ugly thing, to prove his brother’s fears real.
He looks at his brother. Meets his eyes.
Something changes in Lan Xichen’s face, a slow sorrowful collapse.
‘You know that. I know you do. Wangji - knowing that, you will go anyway?’
He will no longer say: Wei Ying would never. With a sudden ache, he realises he has never truly understood what he would and would not do.
‘I should have gone before.’
Lan Xichen draws back a step. He closes his eyes in an agony of helplessness. ‘I cannot stop you, can I? You have already chosen. I can see that.’
‘I must find him.’
‘I know, I know. I always knew you would go at some point, though I - but why now? Why now, in the last two years? Wangji, why - what has happened? What has changed? Are you not happy here?’
He is silent.
‘Or have you heard something? Is there something that the clans need to know? Have the shades told you anything?’
He has told his brother with dull bitterness time and time again that Wei Ying does not contact him, that he has not seen him the last fateful time in the Burial Grounds when the soil had exploded with such sudden and astonishing brutality. But Lan Xichen hopes, just as he hopes, for his brother’s sake and the sake of the cultivation world at large.
He shakes his head.
‘Nothing has happened.’
‘I will not attempt to persuade you to stay. You are no longer a child. You have every right to go, to do as you wish. But is there not another way, another time that would be be -‘
He falls silent. They are both thinking of the last time he travelled to Yiling, the disaster of it.
‘This time I will reach him,’ Lan Wangji says.
‘Out of anyone you have the best chance of success. Isn’t that why we asked before? If I were reasonable, I would be less worried, it is only -‘
He falls silent. He is deeply distressed.
‘Xiongzhang.’
Lan Xichen takes in a deep breath. ‘You are leaving now?’
An indescribably love swells in his chest: that his brother will not stop him and never has, that he has always understood, always waited, always watched by his side. He thinks of the objects he picked up and placed back down, the people he contemplated and set aside. Leaving, the thought of leaving his brother, is the most painful thing of all.
‘Yes.’
He nods. ‘You have everything you need for the flight?’
‘I will walk.’
The decision takes him by surprise, as sudden as the first. The moment the words leave his mouth he knows it is the right thing to do.
‘Then let me walk with you.’
‘Xiongzhang -‘
He holds up a hand. ‘Only for a little while. Only to the boundaries of Gusu. I cannot be spared for long. Let me walk with you for a few days.’
Gratitude wells in Lan Wangji; his face softens.
‘Wait for me outside, please, for a short time. I will not be long.’
‘Xiongzhang -’
‘Go. I will be with you in a moment.’
The smile on his face is plastered, and not quite real. It is an expression so achingly familiar it hurts: the gentle, polite bewilderment that Lan Xichen shows whilst he waits for his guests to leave. His brother will only grieve alone.
He bows, grateful beyond words, and deeper than he has in years.
Startled, his brother catches him. ‘Wangji,’ he whispers.
For a moment he is frozen there, clasping his arms. It is the closest they will ever come again to an embrace, now that those dark years after Nightless City have passed.
‘Be safe,’ he says at last.
Lan Wangji nods. Then he turns to leave.
***
He reaches the summit long before the afternoon turns to evening. It is not a long walk, but he stops as often as he can to turn back and watch the crawling green of the landscape and the smudge of the grey smoke fade into the high distance. He knows the way down, can trace his path through the dirty blot of Yiling town and out across the fields towards the centre of Yunmeng. From there he is in familiar land, and he always had his sword. In a day he could be in Gusu. He could still turn back.
It is a laughable thought.
It is a novel pleasure to be in robes that do not need to be spread, elegantly, on the floor behind him. He pulls himself to the top of the rocky outcrop, and enjoys the simple feeling of his body working the way it should. With his sword propped against a boulder, his sleeves tight in armbraces and a simple white band in his hair he could be anyone: another man, another traveller. It is comforting to imagine it. By his side, just out of sight, is Wei Ying: a crinkled smile, a brilliant grin flashed at Lan Wangji across the marketplace. He lifts a turnip in one hand and a potato in another, pondering theatrically.
The air is fresh. He sits, and takes in a deep breath. There are things he must do for his nightly comfort - a tent, a meal, a pot, all nestled in the strange space that is his qiankun pouch - but first he will sit for a little while. He will go no further tonight. Before he crosses the border to the Burial Grounds he wishes to play for the shades one last time: there is something he would like to try. Breathing, inhaling the warm fragrant air, he knows there is little point reaching for meditation. He is too agitated, and there are things - practical things, and memories - that he must sift through. Decisions he must make. Silence, no matter how calming, will not help.
He will enter the Burial Grounds soon.
The stories he has heard over the last five years would be enough to last a professional for a lifetime, so long as their audience never grew tired of blood. It was the worst when he was confined in the Cloud Recesses. There he had listened to anything he could hear at all, whispers from the kitchen, the fear of the younger disciples, because his brother and his uncle had told him nothing and kept in the dark. The name of the Yiling Laozu in whatever fashion had been a subject of hesitancy and fear: and after the first few months, when it was clear that the situation had stabilised and there was no immediate threat, it had become a subject of strictest taboo. He knows it was done out of love, a desire to shield him. He is not a child; he understands that, even if it hurts. But it was done to help his reputation too, because no matter how tight they kept their counsels, the cultivation world knew soon enough that the Second Jade had done something unspeakable, reprehensible, and that his confinement was not only convalescence, but also punishment.
Each night-hunt is different: an accomplished cultivator relies on instinct and flexibility as much as any lore. But there are nevertheless certain things that every cultivator - or almost every cultivator, he corrects himself, thinking again of smoke and fire and corpses - always does. When he teaches the younger disciples he tells them this, that the most important ability of a cultivator is the ability to listen. It is not as easy as it sounds, and it is not something Lan Wangji is always adept at. It is not only listening, but also of listening to what is not being said. Of encouraging. Of knowing what is born out of fear and what out of scepticism; of asking the right questions and even, sometimes, knowing who to ask. No matter what information has trickled to Gusu, much and more of it will be wrong. It is their job as much as the slaughter of the undead to sit in a guesthouse and speak to the guests. Lan Wangji does not have his brother’s gift for people, but he is polite, attentive, and he pays well. It is the first step of any successful night-hunt.
He cannot bear their stories now.
When they talk he listens with a dull ache. He does not want to stay any longer in those rooms, sweating with the stink of bodies and alcohol. He should pay them and ply them with drink, and he sits instead in the corner, alone and well-fed. There he catches with sinking silence the name he dreads so much.
They call him Wei Ying too. It was his, once, and they have sullied even that.
But he listens, even when it makes him sick. He listens because his brother is right and he does not know this man, not really: the most he can lay claim to is a few years of his teenage life. And after last time -
After what happened last time -
He is wary. At night he practices his qin, and runs up and down his scales with brittle fingers.
After what happened last time, he is prepared. His three years in confinement were not entirely wasted; his guqin is better even than his uncle’s, and he thinks he has read the most of the library than anyone else alive. It has taken him a while to regain his strength, but eventually he does. In his nightly trips to the shade-stricken streets of Gusu he is stronger now and faster than he was even during the Sunshot Campaign, and with a calmness, a fortitude that he thinks, somewhat wryly, must only come with age. In the turning of the third year, the attack at the Burial Grounds did not take long to recover from. After that he turned to his training and his cultivation with a cold intensity that shocked his brother. Lan Xichen had thought - and he understands why he had thought this, and he feels a twinge of guilt - that after what happened he would sink back into stupor and despair. But that winter he was the first to rise each day, and the first to sweep the training yard of its flurried snow. When his brother joined him his cheeks would already be a delicate pink and his breath a hanging cloud in the air. He has a goal. He knows what the disciples and the servants say: that the Yiling Laozu does not fight fair, that his use of resentful energy is deceptive, tricky. In his head he can hear Wei Ying’s voice from that summer so long ago, bright-eyed and laughing: but is not resentful energy also energy? Why should we not also use it?
The truth of it - and the shame of it - is that Wei Ying had not fought him with any of his dead folk or any of his ghosts. He had faced him squarely, and fought him fairly. And Lan Wangji had been defeated.
So he wakes before the others, and trains harder than the rest of them. He spends time in the library and finds books that his uncle as an adolescent would not let him read; he reads what little of Lan Yi’s notes he can find, and what he finds disturbs him. After his fingers start to bleed, he siphons off a trickle of spiritual energy and helps them callous over. Then he plays again.
His brother is hesitant. ‘Wangji,’ he says, ‘I am happy you are focused, but…’
Of course there is the travelling too. He had never much liked this part of night-hunting - as difficult as the Cloud Recesses is sometimes it is also his home, and he understands what is expected of him - but the longer he stays in Gusu, the more he feels restless. The thin veneer of structure and propriety alongside his brother and his uncle is beginning to crack. He is not allowed to teach any more than he has to, and he will not engage in any politics. It seems his place is to be silent, and reflect. He is not sure that that is any place at all.
So he leaves. Leaving he has a chance to try the things he has learnt, the chords that Lan Yi has written in her tiny, meticulous hand. Leaving he is not Wangji, or Lan er-gongzi, or even Lan Zhan. He is a cultivator, first and only, and he has one duty. If he performs his job well, it is like it should be and the folk in the villages do not see him at all: instead they see a whole class of people, astonishing and benevolent and half a step from immortality, who, in return for their loyalty and sometimes also their taxes, will keep their families safe from their nightly terrors. He could be Zewu-jun; he could be Chifeng-zun; he could even be Sandu Shengshou. The anonymity and simpleness of that comforts him.
The spirits and demons he faces whilst night-hunting he handles with grace, if not ease. Whatever he must do to them, he tries to do when he can in a way that is new. He is sure his uncle would not approve, but he also knows that in protesting he has no ground to stand on. These things are Lan Yi’s. Nightly he speaks also with the shades, and grows adept in twisting and teasing words out of them that do not wish to speak. He learns, and he grows stronger, because he must.
If Wei Ying attacks him again, he must be able to hold his own. It is his only chance.
He breathes out. It is strange, sitting alone on the edge of a cliff knowing that tomorrow will come a confrontation of his own making, possibly the hardest he will ever face. And yet for now the world is still and ignorant. A warm breeze tickles his face.
He does not hold much hope. But even if he dies, it will be because Wei Ying wants it so. There is a gratitude in that, a release. He will not have to choose any more.
When he sleeps his dreams are strange and dark. The night is still, and filled instead of cloud with a smoke that is so heavy and oily that it quests into his nostrils like tar, tendrils searching for his mouth. It is cool and smooth. He sees a figure standing on the horizon, clothed in red. He walks towards it but his legs are caught, snagged in the tarry smoke. He calls out. The figure smiles - he cannot see from this distance, but he knows, he knows it - and turns away.
Lan Zhan…
He opens his mouth to shout, and chokes instead. The smoke pours greedily inside. Inside him it rushes past organs, shuffles his bones and moving his flesh, to make room for itself. He chokes, but he cannot close his mouth.
There is a name he wants to call, but he does not remember. There is so much he does not remember.
Lan Zhan!
He wakes violently, chest heaving. For a minute his hands twitch, defensive to ward off the attacker, and then he realises, gasping, that it is not real. He takes a breath, and feels the dream slip away like sand -
or smoke
- and he is awake.
The night is warm, and fragrant with nightly scents. He is intensely, exhaustedly alert; he is ram-rod straight, every muscle in his body so tense he feels his jaw ache. When was the last time he had a nightmare?
Slowly his eyes adjust to the dark. And he flinches backwards.
Very, very softly he gets to his feet.
Surrounding him in a circle are lines and lines of swaying shades. They flicker like grey candle-flames against the darkness, and lean and pitch and peer forwards almost as if they are curious. Standing they are taller than him by at least a head. They stand motionless in a circle around him, so close he does not dare to breath.
Hesitantly he raises a hand. The shades opposite him flinch in a rolling, exhuberant manner, like a swept hill of wind-blown grass, and cautiously they settle.
Eyes focused forward, slowly and deliberately, he bows. They flinch again, and sway drunk-like side to side. Then in a sight that is so astonishing he cannot believe he is seeing it, they bend like sheathes of grain and bow, flickering and roiling, in return. He can feel their coldness rolling off his skin in waves.
His lips part. He is not sure whether he should be afraid or in awe.
Deliberately, so they may see what he is doing, he spreads his hands in front of him. A pinch of spiritual warmth and he can feel the familiar whorl of the wood under his fingers. The guqin shimmers a lazy blue in the dark.
He plucks a single string. It hangs, deep, in the night.
The effect is immediate. It blows through the shades and they rise and sway, shuddering, like they are caught in a thundering mountain river. He has never seen them like this before.
He plays the invitation: three notes, low high lower, and a ringing silence.
Who are you?
They flicker closer, rapt with attention.
And then in a surge like an icy blast -
mei zhen lao er meng yi xiao chen a ning xu you xi xi
He flinches as if struck. He breaks it off with a single, hard chord.
His head hurts. Already it hurts. He will have to isolate them, catch them one by one.
With smooth decision he plays another three notes. This time there is a noticeable confusion; the shades tremble, jerking, but they are individual, alone. There is nothing unison about them.
Mei Zhen, he thinks, and plucks another note. Who are you?
The answer comes. Now that he can hear it singly and not in a deafening rush, there is something a little strange about it; distant, and old. There is none of the resentful energy that ties a spirit to the earth.
My name is Mei Zhen. I was a carpenter.
He has chosen well, but was? Astute to be so sure he is dead.
Why are you here?
There is a shiver. The shades shudder and flicker, grey and pallid against the pines.
He tries again.
What is your purpose in coming to me tonight?
For a moment he thinks it will not answer. Then his qin sounds - low, and richly sonorous - and he tenses.
We came to greet you.
He breathes in sharply.
Do you know who I am?
Playful, this sound.
Yes.
His eyes scan the flickering shades. Like flames their movement now is more vigorous, energetic, but he does not know if this is agitation or excitement or both. In any case he cannot see Mei Zhen.
Who am I?
You are the Second Jade of Lan. Welcome to Yiling, Lan er-gongzi.
He flinches. Carefully he plucks another question.
How do you know my name?
He is glad that he has done more than study. He is glad that he has had years in Caiyi, and years with the books of Lan Yi. He has never taught his students anything like this.
The whole of the cultivation world knows your name.
It may be the truth, but only just: the spirit is wily to give it.
What will you do next?
There is silence. Lan Wangji can feel their deathless stares prickling on his skin. Mei Zhen has gone. He hesitates, and then plucks another string, the same one twice.
Xixi, he thinks. There is a soundless wave again, a flickering as the shades murmur their silent conversations.
Who are you?
Almost instantly it comes.
My name was Xixi when I was alive. You can call me Xixi still if you like.
This spirit is lighter, brighter. But there is still the same strange detachedness, a careless knowledge, academic rather than emotional, that she is dead. And the way they talk: it is not like any spirits he has heard, the mindless answering. It makes him wary.
Why are you here?
A pause.
Yiling is a large place. You could get lost if you are not careful.
It is not a lie, but like the first shade neither is it a direct answer to his question. He is puzzled more than frustrated. These are laws, laws of the world.
What will you do next?
A twinkle of notes, fast and shimmering blue.
We are close now, Lan er-gongzi. Will you come with us?
With astonishment his hands grip the guqin. There is no doubt this time. It is not an answer, and not a truth.
It should not be possible.
Shaken, he brushes his trembling thanks. The presence, the brightness, vanishes like a skip from where it had pressed against his skull.
He lifts his head. The moonlight now is streaming through the pines, and the land is bathed in a strong and silvery calm. In the light the shades can almost hide themselves, slotting into moonbeams like they do in the sun, and he sees them most when they flicker and twist. He is alone, and he is surrounded.
Xiao Chen, he thinks. It will be the last one he asks. After this he will pack his things, and walk. He will not fall asleep again.
Who are you?
There is a sudden silence. The flickering stops; the shades still.
Slowly, impossibly, one of them steps out of the moonlight. It is a two dimensional facsimile of a human, a swaying shape cut and dripping with silvered light. As Lan Wangji watches, it raises his hands in what is undoubtebly a mocking, shocking bow.
There is a presence in his mind, aching and cruel. It hurts, and he grips his guqin.
Who are you?
Low, high, lower: his notes are loud and brash.
The figure stands, and shrugs off its moonlit firelit skin like a dress. A horror rises in Lan Wangji. Beneath the silvered exterior, curling and testing its strength, is a lurking figure of deepest black smoke.
‘You -‘
His fingers tense in the shape of a chord.
You’ve come so far.
He knows that voice. It spreads his dark smoking arms. The other shades are silent, turned once more to mute faceless shapes.
You’ve come so very far.
There is a dread, an electric rolling dread, in his stomach.
Did you come here for me?
The figure is striding towards him. At its feet curl wisps of moonlight, snagged and stolen from the sky.
Did you miss me, Lan Zhan?
His fingers curl, helpless.
Lan Wangji licks his parched lips. There is a terror in him, a terror and a hope too.
‘I’ll go with you,’ he whispers. ‘I’ll go.’
The shade flicker back into movement, a murmuring soundless ripple of an ocean, and the black figure stands before him, writhing and dark, and meets his gaze with its eyeless own. There is a shifting nothing in its face, whipped away by a wind that Lan Wangji cannot feel, and the cold rolls off it in waves. His skin is prickled by it, and there is a sickening nauseous feeling in his stomach. All the resentment that the shades have lost seems concentrated in it, a singularity of hate. He tastes iron, and the clammy touch of metal.
Come then, it says. Walk with me.
Numbly Lan Wangji obeys.