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Lan Wangji feels them, tight and teasing, around her wrists, around her ankles. Her robes provide little cushion against the insistent dark tendrils. They appear like smoke, but are not smoke. They are used as rope, but are not rope. She doesn’t know what they are, these snaking sinews that Wei Wuxian has conjured up from nothing. She doesn’t know anything except the dark of the cave, and the deep, sucking void.

Months before, Lan Wangji knelt before a low table in the grand hall of Jinlintai, refusing to initiate conversation with anyone and watching as the excess of the Jins overflowed like a flooded spring. Wine, in everyone’s cup, always refilled; courses, by the dozens.

Her brother had a way with people she never understood—nor did she want to. A skill she had decided against acquiring. He used it now nodding at a Jin cultivator while following Jin Guangyao with his eyes.

But Lan Wangji sat, and sat alone. It was not a conference, exactly. Instead its purpose, beside general indulgence, was to discuss the ongoing problem of the Yiling Patriarch. The day had bloomed glorious, early summer’s finest offering. The peonies and gardenias perfumed the air, near cloyingly. The gentlest breeze whispered at her neck.

And the sects schemed.

The Burial Mounds sealed themselves off—Wei Wuxian had, she corrected them in her head—months past, and they all waited for news. News of the Yiling Laozu, of her crimes, of her movement against them; news of Jin Zixuan at death’s door when a swift wind had stolen him from the path, trailing in the wake of Wei Wuxian. And for weeks, no news. None at all. Spring lengthened, grew into summer.

The Jin heir, wounded and kidnapped by Wei Wuxian, at the scene of mass slaughter.

Action must be taken, the cultivators said. We cannot allow for this insult to stand, for this whelp, this cur, this mere servant to murder our brethren and laugh on a mountain of their corpses. We must do something, they said.

It was catching, that thought. Do something, do something. She’s out there, the Yiling Laozu, laughing at us. We must act. We must end her.

If she were a different person—more like her brother, or more like Wei Ying—maybe Lan Wangji would be watching them, the schemers. Watching their bloodlust rise, and their greed with it. But Lan Wangji had no thoughts for the petty desires of small-souled men.

Instead, she thought of Wei Ying.

The last time she saw her, in her makeshift home, bare trees and bare ground and bare limbs, Wei Wuxian had laughed and joked and welcomed her into the most private, sacred home she could make, and Lan Wangji had left her there, alone. Left them all there.

She had thought it would be enough, the invitation to Jin Ling’s hundred days. That a gesture on one side, met with a gesture on another, could serve as the foundation of reconciliation. Lan Wangji imagined that Wei Ying would—Wei Wuxian could receive the help she needed. She imagined that she could help her.

Now, she thought of Wei Ying and wondered. Would they attack again, the cultivators around her, who yearned for a taste of Wei Wuxian’s glory, who wanted her destroyed, who insulted every aspect of her yet could not face her except with troops of thousands?

No, in fact. They would not have that chance. She heard Wei Wuxian, before she saw her. That bright laugh, gone sharp and raspy, still cut through the conversation quick as a blade. The room turned; Lan Wangji turned with them. Wei Wuxian stood, there before anyone knew.

Wei Wuxian sits on a stone jutting out from the cave wall, Chenqing twirling between her fingers. She’s not even playing it. Whistles suffice, for her purposes. What those purposes are, Lan Wangji does not know. She only feels, again, where the dark tendrils of energy have grasped her, have slipped between silk and flesh. They wrap around her arms, biting into her wrists while they hoist her in air. She feels the strain of it in her arm and shoulders, and she feels the cold ache where her qi flows down and out of her, into that darkness.

“Why, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, more to herself than to Lan Wangji. Lan Wangji floats, suspended above ground by the tentacles of resentment that restrain her, drain her qi. “Why would you agree to this?”

When Lan Wangji speaks, she pants, breathless. She has little left. “Why would you ask it, of anyone,” she says through gritted teeth. “How could you.”

Wei Wuxian snorts, indelicate, and jumps down from her rock perch. “I guess you’re right, Lan Zhan.”

The qi drained from Lan Wangji floats in air, a bright sphere tinged with gold. Spiritual energy. As requested and on display.

“If it was going to be anyone, might as well be you, right,” she murmurs to herself, long fingers guiding the ball of energy out of the tendrils of smoke. “One should not ask of anyone what they are themselves unwilling to do.”

It has the patoi of a quotation, because it is. Three hundred and forty seven, Conduct.

“You should not have asked at all,” Lan Zhan grits out. The darkness is gathering at the edges of her vision. She will not remain conscious much longer.

“Of course not,” she says. “I shouldn’t have asked. Demanded. Shouldn’t have done a lot of things, nope. Not to keep my—reputation—in good standing.”

They are spoiling for a fight, the both of them; unfortunately, the argument must wait, as Lan Wangji near-faints, against every conscious and unconscious wish of her will. Her body, gone slack, is guided to the pallet where she is kept, the same rough-hewn blanket as they all have. One of the tendrils draws up the blanket, up to her shoulders, and tucks the edges beneath her unconscious body.

Wei Wuxian disappears from the cave, the last thing Lan Wangji sees before losing consciousness. Disappears, with a bright sphere of yang energy, and for who knows what purpose.

“I come bearing gifts,” Wei Wuxian said, grinning wide. Her entrance is a plume of fire, a swirl of smoke, and there they were, Wei Wuxian and Wen Ning and—Jin Zixuan, standing on his own, and alive, which might have been unexpected had anyone thought that far.

She gestured at him, turned and bowed theatrically to the entirety of the hall, and produced a scroll, bound in simple twine and unsealed.

The resultant furor swept Lan Wangji up in it, and she found herself standing before she realized. Stood, watched, waited—Wei Ying, she thought to herself, desperate and empty and yearning. Wei Ying, what can I do?

“And an agreement,” she said, brandishing the scroll like Chenqing. Like a weapon.

Her robes were dark, the black and red she had taken to during the war, but threaded with energy, with enchantment, with something unbearable to watch for too long. They swirled around her as she paced up and down the length of the hall. She performed her villainy, and everyone watched.

“A terrible time, terrible, terrible,” she said. “My esteemed brother in law nearly perished—and all because of what? Some mediocre cultivator, bent on making his name by making a nemesis of me?”

Her eyes were red, or crimson, or something deeper—old blood, the last drop of heart’s blood, the blood both alive and dead. Something Lan Wangji wished she had never seen.

“How fortunate then, that we have the greatest medical mind of a generation,” she said, peacocking her way toward the Chief Cultivator, who had neither moved nor reacted since her arrival. “That Wen Qing could save him, after his cousin’s disastrous attack.”

“After your minion attacked him,” Yao zongzhu said.

“After I was ambushed, and he attempted to defend me,” Wei Wuxian said. “But I’m not here to quibble.”

She tossed the parchment on the table before Jin Guangshan. It bounced off a dish of braised tendon and splashed red oil onto his gold embroidered robes.

“I’m here to barter.”

Lan Wangji does not see Wei Wuxian in daylight, not anymore.

She recovers, mostly; a lifetime of habit rises her with the dawn, and by the time Wen Qing arrives to take her vitals, she is upright, seated, and meditating. Wen Qing does not treat her like a hostage, like a—prize of war. But that is what she is, and if the peace is dependent on her acceptance of circumstance, then Lan Wangji will bear it.

They lack food enough to give her more than her portion. She cultivates in sunlight, draws strength from firm ground and the warmth of summer. She pushes up her sleves; her pale skin soaks up sun until it is pink and tender. The air, dry and dusty as it is, breathes with a freshness in contrast to the musty air of the cave. It will be enough; it must be enough.

The terms the Yiling Laozu laid before the gathered cultivation sects—Jin, Lan, Jiang, Nie, and the rest of the sects under their umbrella—were these:

She returned Jin Zixuan, healthy, as a gesture of good faith. No further recompense needed from the Jin sect for the attack by Jin Zixun—‘let bygones be bygones, yeah?’

The entirety of Yiling was hers. She was, as they say, the Yiling Laozu—and it wasn’t as if anyone had been looking after its people or their welfare, yes?

This provoked conversation, mostly grumbles and hushed arguments, which soon subsided at the wave of the Chief Cultivator’s hand.

“A reasonable request,” he granted.

They all knew—at least, Wei Wuxian knew, and Lan Wangji watching, knew, what it was he would ask. The same thing he asked for since the end of the Sunshot Campaign.

“And for my own,” he began.

“Ah, let me offer exactly what you’re asking,” Wei Wuxian interrupted, dancing up onto the platform where he knelt. “I know, I know, let’s trade, let’s demand what we want, and cede what we’d already planned to. I’m sure we’ll all get what we’re here for, yeah?”

The crowd waited. Jin Guangshan smiled, narrow-eyed.

“So, Jin zongzhu,” Wei Wuxian said, lightning eyed, near manic. “This is what I have to offer.”

Lan Wangji watched her, the girl she knew, the woman who had become the Yiling Laozu, and grew concerned. This Wei Wuxian was not in a conciliatory mood; this was the Wei Wuxian who read Lan rules at the Wen indoctrination, who challenged Shufu against everyone else’s better judgment, who poked and prodded at Jin Zixuan until a fight was inevitable.

“Jin zongzhu,” Wei Wuxian said formally.

Lan Wangji felt the oncoming tide of dread, and saw it mimicked in the gathering dark energy at Wei Wuxian’s fingertips.

“We see what it is you want—and of course, it is the same as what we all want,” she said smoothly.

And Lan Wangji doubted that this was the case.

“And we are prepared to give you exactly this.” Wei Wuxian paused. Let the silence extend, like a drop of honey, waiting for it to break. “We are prepared to give you—”

The waiting breath was always the longest.

“Peace.”

Confusion, but not of the wrong kind. By peace did she mean—would the Tiger Seal then end up with—what would become of Wen—what’s in it for—the conversations, hushed as they were, rose like a fire and showed no sign of abatement, even as Jin Guangshan beat the low table with his hands for attention. As the babble quieted, he spoke.

“Peace,” he said. “A peace guaranteed, I assume, by your willing concession of the Tiger Seal. Then yes, we would be amenable.”

Wei Wuxian laughed, and Lan Wangji knew her fears would be realized.

“Ah, no, Chief Cultivator,” she said. “I’ll be keeping that one. The Tiger Seal. Yiling. All of it.”

The chittering that had ebbed at his urging rose once more, even as Jin Guangshan sought to control the gathered cultivators.

“No, you’ve misunderstood me,” she said, head cocked to one side. “If you give me what I demand, at this moment, I will refrain from doing exactly what you know me to be capable of: decimating your sect and any who would oppose me.”

The uproar was considerable, but Wei Wuxian had the trick of vocal projection and spoke over the din.

“Let’s play this out, shall we? You come, and you attack me, as I know you will—well, because you already have, haven’t you? You’ll attack and I’ll defend and oh, whoops, by some awful mistake one of your noble cultivators will have died! And oh, I suppose it’s all this one’s fault. Again.”

She paced up and down the length of the hall, for no one had the will to stop her.

“And then I am responsible for the death of a beloved son, or father, or uncle, or cousin, or mere acquaintance, whatever. Which then spurs on, you guessed it, another attack at my door.”

She conjured a loop of dark energy, turning over and around itself.

“So, here is my offer of peace,” she said. “A serious offer, unlike yours.”

A hush fell over the room.

“I control Yiling; cultivators who enter its boundaries answer to me. I keep my own creations—why wouldn’t I? And lastly, I keep you all in line.”

A cruel eye, maybe the cruelest she’d seen on her friend, and Lan Wangji could look nowhere else.

“I require a hostage,” she said, although Lan Wangji could barely hear her. Between the tumult of the room and the buzzing in her own ears, how could she?

“A hostage,” she repeated, louder. “A cultivator, strong in yang energy, a disciple of the powerful sects. To stay—indefinitely.”

To say that Lan Wangji had never heard anything like it would be, well, false. For she had fought in battle, in war, with all the accompanying horrors; she had watched the living and the dead both go to throw their bodies at the mercy of the Wen. But in peacetime—at least in a dining hall—no, nothing like this before.

But it was the buzzing in her head, more than anything else, that left her off kilter.

What she would remember afterwards didn’t include anyone else. She wouldn’t remember Jin Guangshan, advancing with a naked sword while Jin Guangyao held him back; she wouldn’t remember Xichen doing the same with an irate Nie Mingjue. She wouldn’t remember the purple spark of the Zidian, as Jiang Wangyin yelled at Wei Wuxian, or how Wen Ning paced around her, a tiger protecting his own. Nothing about that.

All she would remember later was the dread and the certainty that come with inevitability. As if there were nothing else for her to do. The slow strong pull of fate.

And this, clear as day: standing, walking into the fray. A fixed point between the struggling sect leaders behind her and Wei Ying before her.

“I will be your hostage,” she said, hearing herself from a great distance. “I volunteer and willingly submit to whatever you require.”

Wei Wuxian reclines on her stone bench, watching her with sunken eyes. The too-pale girls she had with her in Yunmeng hang about her. They giggle and whisper and play with the hems of Wei Wuxian’s threadbare robes.

Lan Wangji kneels. She waits. She gazes straight ahead, beneath the dais where Wei Wuxian sprawls. She cannot look at Wei Wuxian if she is to retain what stillness, what little dignity, that she has left.

They have not spoken in days.

Instead, Wei Wuxian talks to her ghost girls, and Lan Wangji listens, and they silently seethe in each other’s general direction.

“You know, for homemade liquor, Uncle Four really managed to hit the mark,” she says. She pours from the clay bottle into her mouth; her neck arches, her lips part, and a trail of clear liquor traces a path from her mouth to her exposed collarbone.

Lan Wangji is not watching. She is not. She must not.

“What does it taste like?” the ghost asks.

“Like apples and sunshine,” Wei Wuxian says, “and only a hint of bitter earth.”

They play with her hair; Lan Wangji does not watch.

Inside her seethes a sea of torment—the hottest anger, shot through with unbearable lust. Even now as she sits a statue, her mind plays two scenes, the second overlaid on the first: here, Wei Wuxian sits and laughs as her robe slips off one shoulder, drinks until her neck is wet with it, and sends a lazy tendril of resentment to steal Lan Wangji’s qi. And overtop of that, well. It’s a scene she’s watched in her mind before. Wei Wuxian, restrained. Struggling as she loses her robes. Crying until her skin shines with tears. Staring up at her as Lan Wangji takes, and takes, and takes.

The Wei Wuxian who sits before her is both: the Yiling Laozu with her grey-white ghosts tittering about her, and the Wei Wuxian of her teenage fantasies—laid upon one another, painted veil over painted veil. She sits there, laughing, a manic cruelty sparking in her eyes, and the bare flesh Lan Wangji always desired is now, horribly, on display. The small curve of Wei Wuxian’s breast, the thin depression of the line that ran from collar to navel, as if bisecting her. It is temptation; it is mockery.

So. She doesn’t watch.

Their argument is cued up once more, another night: the same words, the same anger, reverberating in that stone cave with nothing to soften, nothing to dampen the rising waves.

“This is a violation,” Lan Wangji says.

“Yes,” Wei Wuxian agrees, “one you agreed to.” Her eyes have that fleck of crimson to them. Not the deep red of blood she saw before, but the fire-bright red of embers peeking through ash.

Breathing through flared nostrils, Lan Wangji counts, one two three, before responding. “Wei Wuxian.”

Wei Wuxian’s eyes spark like spitting embers. She arches an eyebrow.

“Lan Wangji,” she says.

“This is not the only way—you can take up the sword path once more,” Lan Wangji says. “It is your choice to take this from me—“

“Choice? What choice do I have?” Wei Wuxian droops from it, weary of the same argument, said again and again. “They’ll keep coming. Hunt us down.”

“Then let me help you,” she argues, because she does not understand. “Of my own will. If you need spiritual energy, why must you take it from me like this?”

Wei Wuxian throws the clay cup at the dark, wet wall of her cave, and the pieces shatter and fall into darkness, disappearing.

Grief-stricken. That’s how Wei Wuxian looks. It passes after a moment, but Lan Wangji saw.

Struggling against her binds once more, Lan Wangji drags herself forward, kneeling all the while, as Wei Wuxian sits, head in hands.

“Wei Ying,” she says urgently. “I don’t understand.”

“No,” Wei Wuxian says, her face a picture of despair. “You won’t.”

Whatever it is that she’s trying to do isn’t working.

The Burial Mounds are as lifeless as ever—the clouds of dust that cling to anything moving, the barren shrubs that line the low hills. The radishes grow large but tasteless, and the crabapples that fall from the trees can only be eaten in stews or boiled down to sour sauce.

Lan Wangji knows less than the average person about farmland, but the dry dust that sits on the cracked earth seems a far distance from the black loam of Gusu. The plants that grow here—they survive, they continue onward, but that’s the best one could say of their meager existence. Thirst claims all of them as they grow desperate for water and so much more.

Meanwhile, the wards hold. Lan Wangji knows this, because the doctor knows this and tells her. Every morning, Wen Qing takes her pulse with two fingers, reaches for her core, checks her pupils by lifting her chin toward the sun. And she talks.

“Why are you helping her?” Lan Wangji asks her one morning. They’re sitting in the full sun, but the light seems sucked of its warmth. She shivers, a little.

“I won’t repeat the conversations I’ve had with Wei Wuxian,” Wen Qing says.

“You are a physician,” she says. “It is your duty to help those in need.”

“And, as I establish every morning, you are in no immediate or long term danger. You have no pressing need,” she says. “Someone tried to break in last night. She’ll be in a mood later.”

It’s not as if Lan Wangji is chained up during her days; no, instead, she finds herself attempting to be useful. As useful as a drained cultivator can be. They’re building another lean-to, expanding the shed that functions as a kitchen. Lan Wangji, given her relative lack of strength at the moment, is tasked with constructing shelves, for an ad hoc pantry.

She fails at this several times before asking Sixth Uncle for guidance. But as sunset arrives, there are three shelves, cut and shaped and nailed with her own hands.

That evening, falling asleep after watching another sphere of light be pulled from her abdomen, she shivers, cold seeping even deeper than her bones, and thinks of how accomplished she felt, building three small shelves. A person can become accustomed to desolation, she realizes. To hopelessness.

One night, she knows Wei Wuxian is drunk as soon as she sees them. The ghosts follow her around, watch her hungrily and play with her hair. They feed off Wei Wuxian and her buoyant life. When Wei Wuxian laughs, they giggle and fall to the floor. When she grows angry, they stand behind her and glare murder at Lan Wangji, or they rake their nails down the stone of the cave walls, leaving ghost trails of blood and tissue. And now, when Wei Wuxian is drunk—there they are, draped over her and each other, as Lan Wangji watches them fumble around with the uncertain swaying motion of the inebriated.

When Wei Wuxian slumps into a seat, her ill-fitting inner robe hangs open again, messy and red. One of the ghosts plays with the hem of it, tracing it up and down, the thin border between skin and linen. A pale finger against peach skin.

“Not tonight, er-jiejie,” Wei Wuxian says, waving her off. Her attention is on her lap, where she fiddles with a pot of dirt. She’s written on the side of it, in something dark. Lan Wangji hopes it’s ink. “I’m not in the mood.”

One lazy hand, holding a clay jar that smelled of rancid perfume, lifts, and her finger points toward the mouth of the cave. Wei Wuxian doesn’t look up. She hasn’t since before Lan Wangji approached.

It’s the gesture that starts a fire at the back of Lan Wangji’s neck—anger she can feel spread along her spine, up her neck and down to her tailbone, along the backs of her arms, in the tension of her shoulders. The gesture, the dismissal, the nonchalance of Wei Wuxian’s disregard. As if Lan Wangji were only a thing to be used and discarded at will.

“Wei Wuxian,” she says through clenched teeth.

Wei Wuxian ignores her, rising and walking to a rock that seems to function as a desk. It’s cluttered like one. Wei Wuxian doesn’t stumble, exactly, but her steps are careful and slow, as if she is not quite sure what will happen when her foot meets the ground.

“Lan Zhan,” one of the ghosts sing-songs at her. The other two laugh, and laugh. “Lan Zhan, won’t you play with us?”

“Lan er-jiejie,” another says.

She stands in the middle of the cave, with greasy candles as her only light. Lan Wangji tries to ignore them. They move closer, and they coax and beckon and plead—won’t you notice us? Won’t you play with us? What do we need to do?

The rising fire in her body moves her forward before she realizes. Wei Wuxian’s back is to her, has been since Lan Wangji rose to approach her, and Wei Wuxian doesn’t notice, not in the haze of potent fruit liquor, that Lan Wangji is behind her until—

Lan Wangji’s body moves, and she goes with it, almost a spectator of her own self: as if from a distance, she sees herself walk, run, and—attack, almost. They land on the hard ground, tipped to one side by Wei Wuxian’s drunken lack of balance, and Lan Wangji wrestles her down. Wei Wuxian’s limbs are long and spindly and seem to multiply as they tussle. Like wrestling an eel, a host of eels, that complain the whole time.

In the background, she hears the ghosts laugh, and laugh.

It’s only when she has Wei Wuxian’s wrists in one hand, and Wei Wuxian staring at her with wide, surprised eyes, that she comes back to herself.

“Wei Ying,” she scolds, urgently.

“What are you doing?” Wei Wuxian says, too confused to react otherwise.

Wei Wuxian pulls uselessly back, and Lan Wangji tightens her hold. Thin wrists, almost bird-boned, with soft skin stretched translucent. If the light were better, she could see the blue veins that branch underneath her skin.

Her anger has built and built, for weeks now, and Lan Wangji lets it burn away any objections she might feel to what she is about to do. Her—resentment, she understands, somewhere buried in her psyche. Tied, restrained, and drained of…everything, and for what?

Again, in her mind’s eye, there is Wei Wuxian, crying underneath her, and there is Wei Wuxian, laughing at her while she struggles.

“This is what you want,” Lan Wangji says, placing her free hand on Wei Wuxian, just above her navel. “This is what you wanted.”

“No—Lan Zhan,” and Wei Wuxian is pleading, pulling back, retreating. “You—you need to stop—”

Her anger has narrowed, transformed, like a wide band of light directed into a clear hot beam. The world drops away. There is only Wei Wuxian, twisting wrists in her grasp, hot beating pulse underneath her hand. Wei Wuxian, who took and took from her—Wei Wuxian, who is alive and under her.

If Wei Wuxian wants her inside of her, Lan Wangji will oblige her.

The energy she pours into her, through her hand and into Wei Wuxian’s ribcage, is a torrent of pure feeling. Her meridians sing as power runs through them, and they call out for Wei Wuxian’s own through the channel of energy that connects them. Once begun, Lan Wangji searches, searches. No room left in her for anger. But there is nothing—nothing responds.

She moves her hand downward, below the navel, into the softness of her underbelly; she presses it deep, and feels little give. Here, here is where it should be—

“Wei Ying,” she breathes. Gripping, searching, unanswered.

The realization comes on slowly and then hits all at once, like the gray sky before dawn that shatters when the sun breaks over the horizon..

“Wei Ying,” she says, in shock. They stare at each other, for the moment between two seconds, and Lan Wangji has no name for what she sees in Wei Wuxian’s eyes. Wei Wuxian flinches.

And Wei Wuxian twists, pulls, and wrenches herself free, free to escape through the mouth of the cave, and Lan Wangji lets her go. Wei Wuxian flees, and Lan Wangji kneels on the cold ground and tries to understand.

A memory that rises to the surface like the bloated dead—dark bruise on her mother’s wrist, and the same panicked expression she saw just now.

Lan Wangji kneels and collects herself. This is her heritage as much as anything: discipline, of breath and body and mind, and self-control. She has been unrestrained. She cultivates long, even breaths, longer on the exhale, and becomes conscious of the hard, chilled stone underneath her knees and shins, a contrast to the cloying humidity of the summer air. Even in the breeze of the evening, the sultry air clings to her skin, and the sweat that beads at her hairline declines to evaporate.

Wei Wuxian—there is a part of her that knows she mustn’t be alone. Or, maybe this is wishful thinking, of a sort; maybe it’s simply that Lan Wangji has her unanswered questions, and wonders at what Wei Wuxian will do, where she will flee, thus exposed.

Lan Wangji wanders. She follows a new path, one, and then several. The night buzzes with insect activity, and the ceaseless hum of it makes her search a monotonous, labyrinthine journey. She wanders, really—down this path and that, tracing old dirt known to her, and discovering new. The Burial Grounds expand, it seems, upon acquaintance; the same hills and cliffs hem them in, the same sky traps her down, and she cannot tell that she has traveled at all, except that the farther she walks from the desolate Wen compound, the more bones she sees—bones, and carcasses not yet stripped bare. The scent on the air has undertones of decaying meat, and the metallic tang of blood rests on the back of the tongue.

It is a graveyard, unhallowed. Death, the physical reality of it, the smell and sight of it, surrounds her as she never has been before. It wants to drink her in.

After hours, or maybe minutes, of searching, she hears singing, off key. The sound carries through the empty space, bounces off the bare rock and hard ground, and the dissonance deepens in accordance. A circuitous route to Wei Wuxian, but Lan Wangji finds her way, spiraling inward to her quarry. She moves onward, inward, tracking nothing but Wei Wuxian’s desperate voice.

The barren glen she finds at the end of her quest holds Wei Wuxian at its center. She names it barren, for it is lifeless, but from the dry earth spring corpses, pieces of them like young shoots in early spring. Wei Wuxian kneels before one arm that stretches upward, fingers grasping at nothing, and to this limb she sings, while her attendant ghosts echo in bone-chilling harmony. Lan Wangji thinks, puzzles, remembers—a whistle, a flute, as Wei Wuxian raised the aged and fresh dead against their enemies. The song is like that, like, but not the same. She is trying…something else.

The fingers of the sprouted arm twitch, a little, at the song; once they do, Wei Wuxian’s own fingers trace a sigil in the air, red and blazing against the dark, and then—from Wei Wuxian’s chest, her bare chest, a white-blue sphere of energy, that calls to Lan Wangji, even from her distance, coalesces. Wei Wuxian sends the ball of light into the ground, deep into the ground, with one hand; the other holds the red sigil constant.

A moment, stretched and thinned and strained, until resolution.

To Lan Wangji’s amazement, the palm of the corpse limb opens, offers…a seedling, a sprout. Time seems nothing at all, something forgotten, as she watches. The shoot grows, stretches upward, the fresh young green of spring, and—blossoms.

She hadn’t realized, until just now, how colorless this place was, until she saw the living green, even paled by moonlight. Desolate it was, it is. The flower is white, tinged with pink, and its leaves expand outward. A beautiful, precious thing.

When it wilts and dies, Lan Wangji expels the breath she hadn’t known she held. Wei Wuxian, slumped in a picture of despair, turns violently at the sound.

Her eyes burn red, coals in the deep of the evening. The shadows have gathered once again, as they do whenever Wei Wuxian is near. The moonlight, the starlight, they are gone. Instead, there is only the deep, desolate darkness of Wei Wuxian’s power, and the insatiable burning of her eyes.

“Leave,” Wei Wuxian commands with a hundred voices. The whole of the Burial Grounds speaks with her. Her despair is theirs; their rage is hers.

“Wei Ying,” she says, because she cannot leave her here, not like this—not without explanation. Not without…apology. Not without, well, the small comfort that Lan Wangji can offer. She has never been adept at that, comfort, but Xichen seemed to take strength from her silent presence, if nothing else. Maybe—

“Leave us,” Wei Wuxian says with a thousand voices, enough to crowd into her mind and force her back a step. “Begone.”

It isn’t flight, not Lan Wangji’s measured gait. Instead, it is the slow mournful walk of the bereft. There is no hurry in death, nor in mourning.

The Wen remnants are some three dozen elderly, infirm, or otherwise powerless adults, the majority of whom have no cultivation. Only a bare few have the level of cultivation seen in the outer disciples of Gusu Lan. There is Wen Qing, who spends her time, her literal energy, on aiding the many ailments of the community, but her cultivation is a rarity. A doctor, from birth, who poses no threat to anyone, except maybe Wei Wuxian when she feels tetchy.

And, there is A-Yuan.

Rich-jiejie, he still calls her, before he shows her his newest discovery: a wind weathered branch he uses as a miniature sword; a nest of lizards, whose tongues dart out to catch the gnats that swarm around her face; a knob of stone, smooth and white, that she hopes is not bone.

Lan Wangji has not known junior Lan disciples this young. As the head of discipline, she saw them first at nine, when self-control is thought to be within grasp. Before this, she can only remember her own education, sitting with Shufu, with Xichen, and mimicking their every move.

But A-Yuan is a joy all to himself. Clouds look like bunnies, and snakes, and tigers, while the cliffs that face the west of the Burial Grounds contain stone golems who bash each other with rocks.

“Violent,” she remarks.

“No!” He says, turning to her, shaking his head. “No, they just mean it for fun.”

Then he tells her about the golems, how they were born out of the ground, and how they had to hide from the wind golems who would wear them down into nothing, and how…they ate dirt for food, and sometimes little boys, but not ones who behaved well.

“I see,” she says, sagely. It seems there are a few missing strands to the tale, but A-Yuan is so delighted to tell her about it, just as he was to sit in her lap and taste all her dishes in Yiling. She can only encourage him to continue. “I have not heard about the stone golems before. Could you tell me more?”

His face wrinkles, puzzled, but soon smoothed into nothing. “No, but Wei-jiejie can tell you,” he says, matter-of-fact.

Lan Wangji nods serenely, even as she feels her heart begin to beat faster, and faster. Wei Wuxian, who has disappeared. Wei Wuxian, whose wards still hold. Wei Wuxian, whose experiments she has found, dozens of them, the wilted flowers, the dead life she tried to cultivate.

The Wens seem unconcerned with her absence. Maybe it is only Lan Wangji she avoids.

“That is good news,” she says. “Do you know where Wei-jiejie might be? I would like to hear more about the stone golems.”

Is it duplicitous to ask this of a child? She does not know.

“They like to eat bad children, because bad children crunch like rocks,” A-Yuan says. “But good children are bouncy, and aren’t any fun to eat.”

The wizened carrots that make up a large part of their diet come to mind. Unless cooked to mush. Bouncy is an apt descriptor.

“Hmm,” she hums in agreement. A-Yuan seems satisfied with her response. She tries again. “Where do you think Wei-jiejie has walked to? I wanted to ask her about the carrots, and how best to make them tasty, for little boys. They have grown so limp, in the heat.”

“Oh, Wei-jiejie can make them crisp again!” Which triggers a deluge of Wei Wuxian’s other talents specific to the interests of four year old boys.

“Hmm,” she hums again. “Very good.”

A-Yuan nods and smiles, smiles from ear to ear without abandon. Lan Wangji does not remember smiling like that, not ever; the placidity to which she had become accustomed suited her so well, and from such a young age. And yet, looking at A-Yuan, thinking about Wei Wuxian, she—yearns, almost.

To be a child, she thinks. To love, like a child, who believes only in the most immediate of pleasures, and of pain. To split in two, from joy.

“A-Yuan,” she says, ignoring a pang in her sternum, “do you know where I can find Wei-jiejie? I have…surprises for her.”

The biggest lie Lan Wangji can think of, the promise of a surprise, even if for someone else. But it takes root in A-Yuan, whose tiny body quivers with the expected joy of it, and asks and asks and asks, “Rich-jiejie, what is it? What’s the surprise?”

“For Wei-jiejie alone,” she says. She will not allow herself to rationalize—this is deception, plain and simple. Another person might say, well, it will be a surprise to Wei Ying when I find her, surely. And other cowardly excuses. But no, she will say to herself, I lied to a child, because I lack patience, and for this I will meditate on the evils of deception, Conduct eighty-seven through one fourty nine, every morning until autumn.

After she finds Wei Wuxian.

She’s with the stone golems who sit for tea, A-Yuan says, which Lan Wangji both believes and cannot imagine. That's where Wei Wuxian goes. A-Yuan points northward, and Lan Wangji follows. These cliffs, along the northern border of the Burial Mounds, take most of the day to get there; at night, longer.

A strange thing, to examine cliff faces, by the dozen, for their resemblance to a tea ceremony. And a task which she feels, well, uniquely ill-suited for. She does not have Wei Wuxian’s imagination; she does not see before her what is not there, except the manifestations of her own desire.

But a kind of meditation makes it possible, a seeing without seeing, letting the mind relax and the world fall away. When what one expects to see disappears, and one simply sees.

The rock face that she notices has visible layers of sediment, pressed into hard rock by time alone. But a certain irregularity has lent it possibility—three globular formations, in a line, before a rectangular platform. One can imagine, at least, Wei Wuxian grinning and saying, Lan Zhan, look, I bet they’re enjoying Emperor’s Smile, why can’t we?.

Lan Wangji remembers her, her and Nie Huaisang and Jiang Wanyin, empty bottles and dry shells, sitting around a table, and she can imagine, at least, what Wei Wuxian might have seen.

There, then.

No walking path upward, at least not directly, so Lan Wangji climbs up the far side until she’s two thirds up, where she can, at least, stand up against the rock face. She skirts around the south side, to the east, and then back again, a switchback to reach the top. High up, high as a Gusu tree. Bichen would make short work of it, but she takes the long route anyway.

Wei Wuxian sits on the edge, legs dangling down, her back facing Lan Wangji. Scattered bottles, empty, behind her on the clifftop.

If she were sober, she would know Lan Wangji was here, in an instant, in a heartbeat. Lan Wangji looks at the clay bottles strewn about, and thinks about—about too many things, the thoughts that have swept her up in a typhoon for days, what she could have—what she should have—what Wei Wuxian wanted, might have wanted—

She catches her hopeful heart and cautions herself. Wei Wuxian needs to do something. Accomplish a task. It is for that purpose she has brought you here, and she disapproved of it being you. Wei Wuxian did not want you to be here. She did not want you to know. She did not want you.

Since they parted, she has meditated, in her lonesome state, waiting for Wei Wuxian and filled to the brim with spiritual energy, ripe for the taking. There are things she does not know, that she cannot access. But these things she knows, from the depths of her moral soul: that the Wen refugees should live, and decently, if there could be justice in the world; that, however she has endangered herself, Wei Wuxian has saved them by what means she could, and incurred unearned hatred for it; that (and beneath her sternum a heart pangs with the thought) Wei Wuxian should not be alone, in whatever she tries to do.

If it is Lan Wangji she needs, her body, her cultivation, she will provide it. For just cause.

“Wei Ying,” she begins, the name a plea. Wei Wuxian cranes her head back, and falls back against the rock to look up at her. “I have given the matter some consideration.”

“Oh, have you,” Wei Wuxian says, blinking.

“I have, yes,” she says. Comes to sit beside her, leaning just a little over where Wei Wuxian sprawls on the ground. “I believe that we should talk.”

“Hah,” Wei Wuxian says, and sits up enough to pour clear liquor on her face, some of it in her mouth. “Talk, talk, Lan Zhan, talk. What do you wanna talk to me about? My—deviance?”

She laughs at that, bitter and hollow.

“I think we should discuss what you are attempting to do, Wei Ying.”

Wei Wuxian does not seem swayed by this. She scoffs, unkindly.

“When you are sober, we will talk,” she says. “I have—some ideas.”

Ideas that are not without their own considerations, their consequences, but the desperate do what they must.

“Lan Zhan, don’t, what the hell, why are you here,” she says, words tumbling out like falling rocks.

Lan Wangji is grateful, at the least, that it is only the two of them here. Here, over the Burial Mounds, in the soft silence above the barren, blackened fields. Before them, what Wei Wuxian has been watching, what Lan Wangji sees for the first time, the expanse of it—rolling hills and the remnants of vegetation, of life. She can almost imagine it, alive. She can almost imagine it, what Wei Wuxian must see. If only she could.

“We will discuss matters,” she says. Decisive. “In the morning.”

“Fuck,” Wei Wuxian says, “it is morning.”

She is not incorrect; the lightening gray that comes before dawn has begun. Lan Wangji’s search took longer than she believed it would.

“Afternoon, then,” she grants. “We will talk.”

“You can’t make me,” Wei Wuxian says, petulantly.

“I will.” She picks up the remaining bottle, half full, next to Wei Wuxian’s hand. Wei Wuxian yowls in protest, sits up after a delayed moment, but she fails; instead she is forced to watch as Lan Wangji hops off the cliff face, onto Bichen, and flies away.

She hears, in the distance, Wei Wuxian yelling.

“Lan Zhan, hey, Lan Zhan! That’s my well-earned liquor, you asshole, bring it back—”

In the afternoon, or at least past lunch, Lan Wangji invades Wei Wuxian’s cave, her room, her hermit enclave. If nothing else, from her few and pointed questions of the Wens, who are themselves both curious and somewhat embarrassed at her presence here, she discovered the grand reverence they hold for Wei Wuxian, as if she were an ancient fickle god-spirit whose whims could never be known. Still, they told her that Wei Wuxian mostly slept in the cave, with a carved entrance from the east side narrow enough to admit a single, slender person.

Lunch was, is, a stew of root vegetables, radish and carrot primarily. A spoonful of rice, to thicken it. The rice stores are diminishing, unreplenished. Lan Wangji guesses, although she does not ask, that no one ventures outside the wards anymore. No more cheerful trips into Yiling, to trade an excess of radishes for rice and a handful of spices or marrow bones. Instead, there is thinning stew and sinking cheeks.

Inside the dank dark of the cave, Wei Wuxian sleeps not on the nest of cloth that approximates a bed, but slumped over the stone lip of the pool in the back. The black pool that turns the air metallic when one nears. Wei Wuxian never—never said, but Lan Wangji could guess. Around her, three of her ghosts creep and crouch, and near hiss at her approach.

“Wake up, Wei Ying,” she says, approaching. She disregards the ghosts, whose teeth lengthen and nails sharpen and eyes glint, hungry for her..

“Urghh,” Wei Wuxian says, “nrggllhe.”

But Wei Wuxian does wake, with bleary eyes and an appetite. Lan Wangji departs from her and sits in the low light gifted by the cave entrance, waiting with stew and water.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji begins. “As I said. We should talk.”

It is against her very marrow to speak during meals, but she has Wei Wuxian there, eating and silent and listening. A captive audience.

Wei Wuxians swallows her gulp of stew. She is—wary.

Lan Wangji, generally unable to guess at the feelings of anyone, except Shufu and Xichen, recognizes this. Startling, that Wei Wuxian is wary of her. She is something to be—aware of.

“I have given your matter some consideration,” she says, once more.

“I see,” Wei Wuxian says. “And what matter is that.”

She searches for the words and finds herself unable. How can she—but she must.

“You are attempting to,” she starts, “to create life, here.”

“Is that right, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, steel eyed. “Am I a heretic, now, trying to create something from nothing?”

“Wei Ying,” she bites off.

“Should I be locked up for that, I wonder? Is that what your beloved precepts demand? Better, for you, for the Lans, for the whole world, if we starve to death, then?” Wei Wuxian is irate, beyond angry. The whites of her eyes seem to glow in the low light.

“You are…failing,” Lan Wangji says.

Wei Wuxian laughs, meanly. “Is that right.”

“There is no anchor,” she says. I watched you, she does not say. You cannot be both, you cannot be everything for everyone, for everything, all at once, she does not say.

“I know,” Wei Wuxian says, clipped.

“It must be done in two parts,” she says, “and one half needs an anchor. No matter how much yang energy you take, it will not hold in place. Without a core, it will only disperse.”

“I know,” Wei Wuxian says, angry.

“What you are attempting to do, you cannot, not as you are,” Lan Wangji says, because she is only what she is, and can only say the truth as she finds it.

“I know!” Wei Wuxian yells, and the cave is plunged into the deep dark once more. Cut off from the world, by shadows made manifest. “Lan Wangji. You are not here to tell me what I cannot do—you are here as a body, as nothing more than hostage and resource, for whatever freedom I have allowed you—”

“If you would only listen,” Lan Wangji responds in kind, but her beginning is cut off by Wei Wuxian’s cutting shadows. She continues, pushing forward. “The world of cultivation does not end with you, nor does it begin with you.”

“Then tell me, Lan Zhan,” she says, turning on her, eyes twin blood pools in the darkness, “what it is that you came here to say.”

The anger between them echoes, back and forth and building in volume. Lan Wangji finds herself spitting mad. In her morning meditation she had dedicated herself to stillness, to acceptance, to serenity; now, she feels nothing but the ants on her nerves, crawling along her limbs and spines up into her skull.

“With two people,” she says through narrowed teeth, “one could circulate qi—could have an anchor that serves to cleanse and replenish and hold fast.”

This cultivation rests on old principles, but Lan Wangji knew enough of them, and knows herself and Wei Wuxian capable of adapting this as necessary. In her mind this was simple, qi circulation: maybe sitting in lotus position, facing one another with fingers on opposing wrists, simple and unremarkable.

“Hah,” Wei Wuxian says, wild as a startled bird, “is that what the noble Lan Wangji suggests? What, what in hell—”

“It will work,” Lan Wangji says, confident of herself, at the very least. That she could hold fast in the maelstrom, for her. “And what choice do you have, beyond this?”

Deep darkness, they’re in. A darkness in which she cannot see Wei Wuxian at all.

“What choice do I have,” Wei Wuxian’s voice says, “what choice could I have.”

This is not a question, or, it is not directed at Lan Wangji. She waits.

“What we could do,” the voice says, and it echoes. Brittle, hollow, and the hard stone of the cave sent it back to them, again and again.

“What you’ll think of me,” she says, with a tone Lan Wangji can’t decipher—almost wistful, but not quite. Something else.

The darkness they find themselves in does not seem like night, nor void; instead, it is a waiting place, the space between breaths, the silence between words. The past stretches behind them, infinite and long, and the future is before them, even longer.

“Is this what you’re offering, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian’s voice, smaller than she’s ever heard it, asks. “Are you…sure?”

The desolation of the Burial Mounds; the sunken flesh of the refugees; A-Yuan, a candle’s flame in a blizzard. Wei Wuxian, Wei Ying—the sharp knob of her wrist, her cheek, her collarbone.

“Yes, I am certain,” she says.

A familiar feeling, the spine-harrowing touch of Wei Wuxian’s restraints, not-smoke, not-rope, darkness manifest. They creep around her wrists, her ankles, and yank her into place, wrists bound in the small of her back and ankles spread wide where she kneels. The skin they grasp burns with the cold of the dead.

Light seeps back in and, like smoke in air, disperses in a haze of visibility. Wei Wuxian, she sees, is pacing the length of the cave.

“Wei Ying—what,” she says, struggling against old restraints. “Why have you—”

“Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, far away and right before her all at once. Dim light, enough to see the shadow of her eyes and the decisive set of her jaw. “You’ll hate me.”

When Wei Wuxian kisses her, it is an open mouth on her own, sucking and teasing and probing. A pulse of energy, horrible and cold, from that same mouth.

I see, she thinks to herself. Yes, she thinks. Yes, yes, yes.

A wet slide of lips, as she responds. The pressure on her wrists annoys—if only she could reach out, cup Wei Wuxian’s chin in one hand and her neck in the other and drink down the whole of her, suck it down until she was empty of every dark thought. Lan Wangji pushes, struggles forward, kisses back. A surprise to them both.

A hand in her hair, and it yanks her head back. The strain of it sends an ache down her spine, sharp and grounding.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, wild-eyed and panting. “You’ll—you will, you’ll take it all. Everything I give you.”

The press of nails against her scalp. Lan Wangji glares. A wonder that she doesn’t bare her teeth like a trapped animal.

“Is this it, then,” Lan Wangji says. “Everything you have to offer?”

The flurry of robes, stripped without thought from both of them, Lan Wangji will not remember. Instead, when she wakes the next morning, sore and bruised and aching, she will only think in scattered images, like colored glass shards not yet made into mosaic.

Mouths on mouths. The slick glide of it, saliva smoothing the drag of their angry teeth. Their heartbeats, out of sync, pulsing against each other’s tongues. The cold, rancid energy that Wei Wuxian pours into her, from hands and mouth. She is drinking it in, chilled poison, rancid, and swallowing it down.

The warm, wet embrace around her breast, her nipple, and her angry gasp when bitten. The abyssal void, familiar now, when golden energy is drawn out from her, suckled from her teat like mother’s milk.

The smell of her, of Wei Wuxian, knees bracketing her face. She pushes Lan Wangji into her cunt; Lan Wangji is immersed in it, hot flesh and silken hair and the wetness, the perfume of her, as heady as a drug. Lan Wangji does not know what she should do, has never—but she does, now, teasing and sucking at her lips, outer and inner, searching with lips and tongue. Wei Wuxian gasps, groans when Lan Wangji finds her entrance and thrusts into her, as far as she can with tongue alone. Wei Wuxian rides her, and Lan Wangji lets her, sucking out resentful energy like an infection, like the venom of a snakebite, until nothing is left but the honeysweet musk of Wei Wuxian’s cunt smeared over her face, soaked into her hair.

Wei Wuxian presses her face into it, a painful grip on her hair, but Lan Wangji would not have pulled back for the world.

The last memory before unconsciousness, more scent and sound and feeling than anything else—two fingers, Wei Wuxian’s slender fingers, deep inside her, pulling, pulling from her golden core like unspooling thread. They are lying next to the blood pool, discarded robes under them both. Her wrists are drawn up, drawn tight, above her head, and Wei Wuxian kneels between her parted thighs, and her fingers are hooked into her.

“Yeah,” Wei Wuxian pants, as Lan Wangji feels the torrent escape her, a hot flood through her and into Wei Wuxian.

The smell of sex, everywhere, mixed with the copper tang of blood; the rhythm of Wei Wuxian’s coaxing fingers, pushing and pulling through her thick wet heat with a vulgar percussion; and the build, the ascent, as she is fucked higher and higher. Arousal, a cousin to rage, lights her body on fire, her skin alight with it.

“Yeah, yes, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says. She is only a pair of burning eyes, a pair of thrusting fingers, a voice in the darkness that coaxes, pulls, pulls Lan Wangji higher and higher—there is the simple pleasure of skin and slick but this is beyond that, absorbing, life-destroying. Between them, energy surges, in one, and then the other. And the precipice is near—ah, close, so close, and the smell of Wei Wuxian’s sweat dripping on her, over her.

A hard clench of her cunt, holding, swallowing, and Lan Wangji surges up to find Wei Wuxian’s mouth again, a circuit now complete. She comes around Wei Wuxian’s fingers, her body a conduit for herself, for the harnessed afterlife of the dead, cycling through them both; the feedback loop of her orgasm continues on and on, mind blanking, until there is nothing left of her, nothing put pure exquisite feeling.

And then, nothing.

She wakes to thin soup, nearly scentless, and a giggling A-Yuan waiting for her.

Lan Wangji is—uncomfortably aware, to say the least, of the state of her. The aches, the bruises. The muss, the tangle of her hair. Worse yet, the dried patches of fluid that pull at her skin in places she wishes fervently to ignore.

“Rich-jiejie,” he says, with his cheek laid on the ground parallel to hers. “You overslept! You can’t miss breakfast. If you don’t, you can’t grow high like a tree and reach all the bunnies.”

“Yes,” she says, embarrassed to hear the creak of her dry voice. Lan Wangji woke in her…tent, the nicer term for the makeshift shelter of wood and cloth and hope, and now, as she sits up to greet her young companion, she is disconcerted to realize that—no, she does not recall how she arrived here.

Flashes of it clamor to the surface of her mind, but no—she will not think of that now. Locked tight, those images, bound and restrained and hidden where they will bother no one until she can unwrap them, hesitantly. Reverently.

“Thank you for breakfast,” she says, rising to a seat. Aching muscles. A sip of broth, even tasteless radish soup, grounds her in the moment, to this mouthful, this seat, this earth.

“Shh,” he says, and his smile is so open and wide, Wei Wuxian’s familiar smile—“no talking during meals.”

Lan Wangji nods her assent and sips delicately at her breakfast. One mouthful at a time, tasted, held, swallowed, and then the next. Never too fast. One must savor the gift of nourishment, she recites.

It must be past nine, she thinks, given the angle of shadow on the hard packed earth. The morning light that slants through the slats of wood touches her arm, where her sleeve has fallen back to the elbow. Beautiful light, peaceful and warm, illuminating the aimless dust motes floating in the air, as well as the lurid bruise on her right wrist. Still a touch red, becoming yellow, hinting at green—the day’s soft light found every broken blood vessel beneath her skin and made them plain.

She finishes her breakfast in two long, audible gulps. Lan Wangji sets the bowl down, and her sleeve falls to cover her.

“A-Yuan,” she says, collecting herself, “if you can show me what your duties are today, I will help. Four hands are faster than two.”

A small distraction, but enough, she thinks.

Collecting twigs and small branches for kindling occupies them for, well, almost no time at all; a stray match could turn the Burial Mounds into an inferno, as dry as it is, as filled as it is with the remnants of old life. Maybe a good fire would help—clear the way for fresh shoots to reach the sun, and the ash of the old could nourish their roots.

At noon, she takes to carrying water for Granny, back and forth, from the only source of fresh water they have. A limping spout of water, from the low mountain due north, that feeds into a brook strangled with old leaves and debris. The Wens have two wooden pails. She walks carefully, rolling her feet so the water does not spill over the sides. Water for soup, water for the seedlings, water for drinking—every pail is gone by the time she returns with another.

Lan Wangji is strong, has always been strong; the Lan handstands are not for vanity. Even drained of spiritual energy, her muscles are full and ready. Still, hours of it, walking with that same path with that same weight pulling down on her wrists, her arms, her shoulders, her back and neck, and she is eleven again, in her first unbearable handstand. Montonous pain, annoying and unrelenting.

In the midafternoon, clouds gather, dark and low. The heat of the day oppresses them all, and Lan Wangji sits in Granny’s kitchen, two uncles arguing with Wen Qing as she watches the clouds move.

“All that watering, and it’ll rain for us anyway,” one says.

“What do you know, idiot? That’s fool’s rain, right there,” the other says. “Loud and bright and brash, but nothing’ll come of it. It sucks all the water from the hot ground, every day, and dump it anywhere else.”

“Well, sometime it’ll rain here,” he says, “if we wait.”

“Wait until we’re as dry and dead as our dirt,” he says, “but it isn’t raining here. You watch—the bottom’ll drop out over Yiling, right over town, and we’ll get nothing, not a drop.”

The afternoon darkens; Lan Wangji watches, peeling radishes with a dull knife in long red ribbons of skin. A-Yuan collects them all and tries to braid them, just as he’s watched her do with her hair in the mornings.

The uncle is right. To the east, the view disappears into the haze of storm. The Burial Mounds remain dry.

Choice? What choice do I have? An echo, reverberating. Lan Wangji watches the sunset, brilliant peach and orange and maroon, on a low ridge. The light sets the Burial Mounds afire.

Wei Wuxian is, to her surprise, still sober that evening. She has come out of the cave. She is—eating. Lan Wangji should not be surprised, or at least, should not register her surprise. But she watches Wei Wuxian scarf down a bowl of boiled vegetable stew and cannot pretend to look elsewhere.

A-Yuan tugs her forward, to the low table where Wei Wuxian sits. Her legs fold underneath her, without thought, and she sits. A-Yuan, as he has done since her arrival, climbs into her lap and mirrors the digital posture of her chopsticks in his shorter, stubbier fingers, squinting with concentration at the fine motor difficulty of it.

The Wens gather every evening for this meal, with the low, smoking light offered by candles rendered from animal fat, and Lan Wangji has joined them, every evening that she has been in residence. Quiet meals, though not the silent ones to which she is accustomed.

But Wei Wuxian’s presence lifts them all, just a bit, just enough to be noticeable. Uncle Four breaking out his newest apple liquor, its astringent, medicinal scent; Granny cracking a handful of peppercorns to dust Wei Wuxian’s bowl with; a cousin bringing her a wooden coin, whittled into a lotus flower. They love her, Lan Wangji knows, and sees herself mirrored in them. And Wei Wuxian, here in the light she does not control, is exposed: the dark circles under her eyes, the deep hollow between her collarbones, the thin wrists whose knobs Lan Wangji has felt with her own hands.

Uncle Four pours her a bowl of clear, perfumed liquor. She nods, and smiles, and when he moves on, pushes the bowl over for Wei Wuxian.

Wei Wuxian isn’t aware of her, maybe, which is why the brush of their hands is enough to startle her out of her seat.

“Ah, haha, Lan Zhan,” she says, looking down at the bowl, “of course, yeah. I’ll drink it for you, don’t worry. You wouldn’t want to—hurt his feelings, yeah.”

Granny serves her another portion of vegetables, a spoonful of rice, and Wei Wuxian accepts her bowl and thanks her and scoops it all into A-Yuan’s bowl before a breath can be had. Wei Wuxian says nothing else to her, but she smiles at the Wens and pretends to eat. And after dinner, disappears before Lan Wangji can catch hold of her.

It isn’t until the following afternoon that Lan Wangji finds... Finds her, she thinks to herself, for Lan Wangji doesn’t search at all. In truth, she waits outside the cave where Wei Wuxian poured death into her and fucked her to oblivion. She waits at the side entrance, the one hidden away, because she has guessed Wei Wuxian prefers it.

To wait in the cave itself, would be an exquisite kind of torture, and only bearable if release were assured from the onset.

The day is sultry, once again, wet heat choking her breaths. The clouds gather, heavy with rain, but without some outside force, they will carry their promised waters elsewhere, every day, until the thought of rain becomes more myth than memory.

She has promised Granny to weave a basket from rushes, or, more accurately, to attempt doing so. A rush basket to her left holds the rushes in question, and models what the end result might be. Over-under, she can do, and does, until there is a tight sheet of rushes before her, but, well, basket it is not. She looks between them, sheet and basket, and tries to imagine how one becomes the other.

“Ah, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, surprising her. Consideration of the basket must have occupied more of her mind than she realized. “I—what is that?”

“A basket,” Lan Wangji says, defaulting to literality.

“A basket,” she repeats, “and a…not-basket?”

“It will soon be a basket,” she says, more assuredly than she feels.

“A pre-basket,” Wei Wuxian says, finding the thought funny enough to laugh. She turns toward their little village, watching from around the bend. “Ah, Lan Zhan, you’re too good—you carry water and build shelves and help A-Yuan with his chores, and now, here you are making baskets, like a contented little wife.”

Whether meant or not, the words cut hard, deep.

The basket, and the un-basket, lie between them—the focus of their sight, anything but the other to look upon.

“But what else would anyone expect, haha,” Wei Wuxian says, staring away from her, “of Hanguang Jun—no evil too strong, no journey too distant, no task too small. The most righteous of our generation.”

“Wei Ying,” she says, but does not know how to respond. Is this, truly, what Wei Wuxian will say to her, after what they—

“And of course, Lan Zan, the just and noble Hanguang Jun, what wouldn’t she give for the common people,” Wei Wuxian says, a manic tinge coloring her voice.

“Stop it,” she says. “Listen to me.”

Spiraling out of control, always. Their conversations left her balancing on a single foot, the barest jostle sending her teetering off-kilter. There was a time when Wei Wuxian seemed to voice all her unspoken thoughts. Now, they cannot meet for a minute without argument.

“Am I wrong, Lan-er-jiejie,” she croons sweetly, soft-voiced, an echo of her own orbiting, devouring ghosts. “How can I be? Lan Wangji could follow anything but the most just possible path, and no one could say otherwise—”

“Wei Ying!” she shouts, and stands, and the remaining rushes fall to the ground alongside the basket. “Stop this.”

“Lan Zhan, who would endure the most humiliating of trials—”

But Lan Wangji will not, does not let her finish; a short Lan silencing, at the very least, allows her the moment she wants, she needs to say—something, anything. To attempt.

“It is willingly given, Wei Ying,” she says, eyes hard and blazing. “You do not ask, any longer. I have given, and will continue.”

Wei Wuxian’s eyes are wide, tear-bright with anger or fear or something else, and her nostrils flare, open and closed, heaving breath. Her lips, thinned to a border.

“It is willingly given,” she repeats. And thinks—what is acceptable. What might she accept, from Lan Wangji. Wei Wuxian turning away, again and again, except—

“For them,” she says, “for A-Yuan, and the Wens.”

She cannot know what Wei Wuxian thinks, not from that wide-eyed expression. It could be anything. Maybe this is the end. Maybe she will hear Lan Wangji’s offer, and, unbearable to think, will know.  

“I will, for them.” And releases her from the spell.

“Ah, ah,” Wei Wuxian says, stretching her mouth, her jaw. “Lan Zhan, you always—you’re surprising, you know that? Too just for your own good.”

She rubs at her cheek, the muscle just above her jaw, massaging there. As if stiff from something else.

“Lan Zhan, are you sure?” she says, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “Ah, who else? Who would break a precious Lan precept, and only for the principle of the thing?”

A question that does not require an answer, so Lan Zhan remains silent, and still, and as patient as she is able.

Wei Wuxian, for her part, is twirling Chenqing, pacing back and forth on the dirt path. The hot air presses down on both of them, the weight of heavy winter blankets, and the calm bright light of the morning has disappeared in favor of the disperse summer sun filtered through grey clouds.

“Ah, fuck,” she says, more to herself than Lan Wangji. “Shit.”

Turning to Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian considers her—a judgment on grounds Lan Wangji feels achingly ignorant of. Still, she seems to judge in her favor, and waves Lan Wangji onward, into the cave passage.

“Well, you might as well see,” Wei Wuxian says, resigned. “Considering you were, oh, I don’t know, half of it.”

Lan Wangji has not returned to the cave since. Since waking alone, on hard ground in a lean-to fit only for the meagrest existence, feeling the aches, the bruises, the remnant throbbing of a hard fucking. Used well, and discarded, she tried not to conclude. Her reticence to think of the night became a refusal to wonder what it was they had done, there in the night with life and death circling through them.

A narrow passage that she follows at Wei Wuxian’s urging and…before her, a transformation.

Green, vibrant green, plush green, blanketing the ground and walls.

The dark old stone that swallowed every shaft of light is hidden now, buried under fresh verdant life. A thick carpet of moss, a soft cushion under hand, spreads along the ground, wherever a crevice, a crack, can be found. Lan Wangji touches it, pets it like a docile bunny, and searches—for what, she isn’t sure, but she tries, before she realizes it, stretching out her awareness, and finding…nothing. Nothing, but the simple life before her.

Lichen coats the walls, clinging on; the pale, near-blue luminescence of it lightens the cavern while the moss softens it. It is not a cave any more, or not just a cave. Instead, it has become—a haven, almost, for life in this desolate place.

Lan Wangji wanders the periphery, touching, feeling the damp moss under one hand, the flaking, paper-thin lichen under the others. Under foot, the gentle rise and fall of vines, snaking across the stone floor. Once found, she follows them to their source, where they cluster and thicken.

Ah. The pool.

In her mind, the flash of sense-memory: the curl of fingers inside her and and the sound of her own gasps and the feedback loop, circling ever onward, building and building until the acme, the apex, the apogee, before the long fall into unconsciousness.

The vine tendrils crawl across the floor, up and over the stone lip of the pool. Lan Wangji follows, and kneels where she knelt before, and peers in. Clear—perfectly clear, like the small lake in the back hills of Cloud Recesses, how she could see down twenty, thirty feet to the rock bottom, could watch the gathering, darting schools of small fish, and the lonely crawfish who waited for them. Down, down, she can see, farther than she should be able. Along the well walls, the vines stretch and branch like the root system of an ancient tree, covering the stone in a dense webbing of pale white threads.

And, a latent thought, because it is always harder to articulate an absence than something present, she breathes and—nothing. Nothing, except the clean, damp, almost sweet smell of life and decay in cycle. No copper, no iron tang. If she closes her eyes, she can imagine herself in the forests of Gusu, the same intangible sense of life blooming and rising and falling, all together, in the background.

At the bottom of the well, as it is now a well, there are bones, wrapped in the same vine tendrils and cleaned of flesh. Pale, bare skeletons, cradled in the arms of living plants.

She turns to Wei Wuxian, wordless.

And Wei Wuxian, who has been watching her explore the lush burgeoning garden they created together, watching her touch and look and smell, flinches, just a little.

“It was successful, then,” Lan Wangji offers, as an opening.

“I—ah, uh, yeah,” she says, “yes. Successful.” She’s gathering stray paper, trash, bits of charcoal, all the remnants of her experiments strewn about by the surging growth. “It’s something, yeah.”

What they wrought is incredible, astonishing, almost unbearable in its power; it is also, for Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian, excruciating to behold, the undeniable evidence of what they did. Lan Wangji can still feel it deep in her flesh, and the place where her bruises were made now springs forth, fecund, before her eyes.

She thinks—a cultivator, strong in yang energy, Wei Wuxian said, striding back and forth before the sect leaders, before the whole of their shared world. Wei Wuxian needed a resource, a deep well of spiritual energy, and she named that need ‘hostage.’

“What next,” she says, and finds that her mouth has gone quite dry.

“What?” Wei Wuxian says, startled enough to look at her, eye to eye.

“This is why you brought me here,” Lan Wangji says, with the kind of patience she has cultivated since she could remember.

‘The strong willed require stronger prudence,’ Shufu said, again and again, training her out of the burning impulses that wanted to lash out, to grasp, to bite. She felt it, deep within her, the hungry mouth that yearned to consume, and she feels it still. Only patience, studied patience, has ever given her control over the beast that lives below her skin.

If this—what she cannot bring herself to name—is what is required of her, Lan Wangji will accept it; both the necessity, for the survival of a community of innocents, refugees, who have welcomed her without reservation, and the penance, as she has long known she needs to pay.

One cannot hold a person, cannot possess them, she knows in her heart of hearts. It is wrong, terribly wrong, and the beast within her, that sees Wei Wuxian and hungers, must be beaten back. If she must be restrained and—and, then, so be it. Service and penance both, and somehow, whatever Wei Wuxian will accept from her.

“I—brought you here,” Wei Wuxian echoes, hollow voiced.

“For this purpose,” Lan Wangji says, convinced now of what she must do, what is required of her—what use she might have to her Wei Ying. “How shall we continue?”

“Continue,” she says, then to herself, “continue.”

Her hands shuffle and organize her own notes, creating order where none existed, and the light rasp of paper on paper fills the air between them. Collecting her sticks of cinnabar ink, stray bits of metal, talisman paper, each in a small array around where she sits.

“Lan Zhan, do you really—” she begins, and stops herself. Lan Wangji thinks, well, I do, yes, with regard to many things.

Wei Wuxian will not continue. Will not look at her. Will only gaze forward, at the fertility of their coupling, the vast evidence of their conjoined power.

“They are starving,” Lan Wangji says. “And drought has set in.”

“I know,” Wei Wuxian says, with the flat voice of one resigned to pain, to failure, to the blow that is sure to come.

“Then we must—”

“What if it’s a fluke?” Wei Wuxian interrupts. “What if it doesn’t work again?”

Lan Wangji breathes out hot, angry breaths, sending it out and away from her and into the vast beyond.

“If it does not,” she says in a measured voice, carefully controlled, “then we will have more information.”

“Right,” Wei Wuxian says. “Right.”

It is a kind of acceptance—a common goal. This, Lan Wangji thinks, can be enough.

The sun sinks fast, as they leave the mouth of their cave; it has not rained. Wei Wuxian walks them both far afield, farther and farther, past sunset, past twilight, then moonrise. A bright, clear night.

“Wei Ying. Where are we going?”

Wei Wuxian laughs, high and shrill. “Well, I.”

They follow every path Lan Wangji knows, and far more beyond, tracing the spokes and oblong circumference of the whole Burial Mounds—hours’ work, to map it all. The nascent fields, close to the settlement; the barren fields, beyond. The dry wilds of remaining forest, and the curling, spined bushes that bordered the parched glens. Dried creek beds, carved throughout and waiting for water.

As they walk, Lan Wangji wonders—what is priority here? Is it the field? The forest, resurrected into a possible orchard? The earth deep down, spores unwoken? But she does not ask, in part, well, so as not to seem too eager.

When dusk falls and the sun sinks beneath the horizon, the creeping laughter of Wei Wuxian’s companions begins to echo across the landscape. Night, night they love; at night, they feel a welcome impossible in the light. Wei Wuxian, the star around which they orbit, summons them without thought, and they gladly follow.

She’s beginning to recognize them, now. The young furen in sage, the maiden in violet. And the other two, with painted faces, stained lips, decolletage on display; they are draped in pastels, a picture of every shame represented to her as a young girl, what she should never become. Lan Wangji only sees the youth in all four. Dead, before their time, and—as she is beginning to realize, tossed here as rubbish.

They materialize, the gathering smoke becoming tangible, beside Wei Wuxian as she walks on. As they appear, beside their mistress, they each turn an uncertain look toward Lan Wangji, and cling to Wei Wuxian, to her side, to the gravity of her very being.

And as they watch her, with narrow, suspicious eyes, Lan Wangji bows to each, in turn.  

They have missed dinner.

The trek, along the meandering route Wei Wuxian led them, only, in the end, led them home, to the dozen plus odd buildings in the settlement that lay due west of Wei Wuxian’s cave (the name of which Lan Wangji has never, and will never, willingly use).

The reasons for this exercise could be, well, almost anything. An assertion of dominance, that Lan Wangji would willingly follow her wherever she led. An exploration, of a sort; who could say what changes the Burial Mounds experienced each day? A gathering of resentful energy—Lan Wangji does not recognize, or understand, the mechanism by which Wei Wuxian taps into that source, and it seems possible that, even in a place of concentrated power like the Burial Mounds, Wei Wuxian would need to replenish, after their…activities.

Lan Wangji followed, no matter the rationale, and now they arrive, from the north, at the crossroads leading to the Wen settlement. When Wei Wuxian stops, she stops as well, the fifth of Wei Wuxian’s ghosts.

“We—we should be quiet,” she says, face in darkness, as she slips along the narrow path that leads to the mouth of their cave.

Lan Wangji will not be the one to make excessive noise, and she follows without concern.

Wei Wuxian turns and twists and finds her way to her destination: the mud pond that Lan Wangji has ignored, for she never understood its purpose. The narrow shoots that peek out of the muck promise something, but nothing Lan Wangji, native of Gusu, understands. The pond itself is tucked between entrance and paths, exposed to the world.

“Here,” Wei Wuxian says, and Lan Wangji cannot see her eyes, as the moonlight casts shadows down from above. She cannot tell—what it is Wei Wuxian intends. To be honest with herself, she has never been able to. It is only the certainty, sometimes confirmed, that Wei Wuxian holds fast to her lantern vow that grounds Lan Wangji where she stands.

“Here,” she repeats, watching Wei Wuxian settle on the steps above the mud pond, reclining on her elbows with knees splayed wide under her coarse robes. Her own pulse beats, sounding in her ears; it does not accelerate, but pulses harder, and deeper, until the quiet summer night is nothing but the hard drum of her heartbeat.

“As good a test as any,” Wei Wuxian says. “Right, Lan Zhan?”

Lan Wangji nods, but does not move. In part, a kind of belligerent resistance—to see what, exactly, it is that Wei Wuxian will do. Their first coupling was frantic, so frantic that she can barely remember. She means to remember their second.

She feels the first press of Wei Wuxian’s dark tendrils against the back of her neck, caressing, tender, and curling around her vulnerable throat. Another, against the small of her back—one touch that spiderwebs across the network of her nerves. Last, against the backs of her knees, and she moves forward unbidden. One leg and then two. Her regular posture, left fist behind her back, right hand at her hip, unchanged; she walks forward, resolutely herself, toward a watching Wei Wuxian and her halo of ghosts.

Her robes are slid gently, slowly, from her body. The energy, dark and cold, feels like fingers against her skin.

Their first time, they had the veneer of privacy. Here, they are exposed to the bare, still night air, with a near-full moon illuminating their scene in stark light.

Wei Wuxian summons her forward, without word or gesture, with only the relentless pull and push of her resentful energy. Her eyes are cast in crimson shadow, but her companions’ eyes burn red, bright blood red, and Lan Wangji feels their collective gaze on her, all at once.

“Kneel—” Wei Wuxian says, coughs, and says, “Lan Zhan. Kneel.”

She reaches the foot of the stone stairs, and obeys. The mud pit lies behind her. The night air clutches at her skin. Above her, at the top of the stairs, Wei Wuxian sits, half undressed. Her pink-clad ghost pulls the black robe back, and down, until Wei Wuxian’s small breasts greet the evening; her blushing blue ghost pushes her robes wide and open, until the only thing protecting her modesty is her own crossed legs, one foot arched up toward the heavens.

Wei Wuxian looks—eager, almost, and not quite. There is a wildness in her eyes Lan Wangji does not recognize, in Wei Ying or herself. She looks upward, at this half-bare Wei Wuxian, triumphant and wild and something she cannot name, cloaked by her own sycophants, and she—imagines, resonant of years past, an old fantasy, shameful and hidden and rejected, wherein Wei Wuxian, powerful as she was, became Empress and conquered the world and yet Lan Wangji, her compatriot of old, her general and advisor, was able to overcome her every resistance…

“Lan er-jiejie,” the ghost in blue croons at her, and winks. To Lan Wangji, the wink is the insult beyond all others, and the very liquid of her blood is set afire. “Jiejie, can’t you see how neglected our mistress is? Won’t you serve her?”

Her spectral companions join in a chorus of innuendo, calling and encouraging, won’t you, won’t you, she wants it. Meanwhile, Wei Wuxian watches, silent and still.

How easy it had been before, she realizes. The lush moss, the expanse of lichen, the cleansing vines. An insanity, it took, but it swept her with it as easily as the receding tide.

Lan Wangji does not, cannot, understand what hides in Wei Wuxian’s eyes. She crawls toward her, hand over hand up the stairs, nonetheless. Wei Wuxian watches, without response.

Her foot, Lan Wangji reaches first; so as not to be neglectful, she holds it, by the ankle, and kisses the sole of it. She hears an intake of breath, but continues as if she hadn’t. The knobs of ankle, on either side; the thin bones on the tops of her feet. She kisses them all, open mouthed, with just a touch of suction.

“Is this what you require,” she says, staring upward at Wei Wuxian—how can Lan Wangji know what it is she looks like, with her hard, strong, piercing gaze, meant to challenge and provoke rather than seduce?

“Ah, haha,” Wei Wuxian says, “yeah. Yes.”

Which is assent enough for Lan Wangji, who makes a passionate love to her foot and shin and knee, before fitting herself in the open space between Wei Wuxian’s spread thighs.

Lan Wangji wants them spread farther, wider, and does so—and finds her wrists restrained, once again. That same hateful dark energy curls around her and pries her wrists, her arms, far from her body until her chest hangs suspended in the air between Wei Wuxian’s tempting, spread legs.

“If you want it,” the whore in pink says, “prove you deserve it.”

“You’re terrible,” violet says, laughing, “just let her try.”

“As if she could,” sage says. “She thinks too much of herself, I’m sure.”

“No,” blue says, with a knowing look, “she’ll do what she needs to, to get what she wants.”

Her arms are suspended, from shoulder to wrist, and she maneuvers to move herself forward—chest, and neck, and head, until, yes, her quarry is before her.

The struggle has been hers, and hers alone; Wei Wuxian reclines as she has, watching, without words and without movement. Shadowed eyes.

Lan Wangji thinks—ask—but. She doesn’t.

Mouthing along her left thigh, Lan Wangji tastes the remnants of skin and sweat and slick, the scent of musk concentrating the higher she moves. Lick, and kiss, and suck—like she was born to it. The pulse jumps under Wei Wuxian’s skin, and she hears Wei Wuxian’s breath catch, the higher her mouth moves.

Even as she is, suspended in air and mouthing her way toward her quest, Lan Wangji is still—in control, and will soon—

The touch of her mouth against blood-flush lips, against slick-wet folds, against Wei Wuxian’s eager cunt—now, an almost welcome homecoming—and Lan Wangji feels it again, that same pulse of cold energy against her tongue. She laps at it, sucking greedily, and hears Wei Wuxian’s strangled scream.

Too much; it must have been too much. Vines up and along her limbs grip and lift and flip her, and she is prone, splayed wide against the rough stone staircase, the stars of the night sky her only landscape.

A chorus of laughter, mocking and cruel, but she listens only for Wei Ying—whom she does not hear.

Wei Ying, who appears, hovers above her, the shadow of her blocking out the moon’s light. “Lan Zhan, I—”

Whatever she has to say is lost to the night air.

“Take it,” Lan Wangji hears one of the ghosts say, and her face is lost under soft, succulent thighs, “and be grateful.”

Her tongue, finding home in Wei Wuxian’s soft lips, delving deeping inside, has no complaints; her lips, moving with Wei Wuxian’s rhythm, slip and catch and burn with the pleasure of it. She sucks, and sucks, and sucks, drinking down the wet—and again, the same old dead threads, and as she drank them down, she could feel them spooling outward into the Burial Mounds, the myriad dead waiting for their turn, please let me be, find my peace.

And against her breast, one fumbling hand plucking her long, hard nipple, and sucking out of it the energy of life, golden, blessed life.

She thrusts, futilely, up, again and again, and feels the hard clench of her cunt. It aches like a bruise. She can come from this—she has before. Pulse, and pulse, and pulse, and—there. Lan Wangji tries to match these, the narrow thrusts she can manage within her restraints, to the heartbeat she can feel through Wei Wuxian’s hot skin. Horrible, this, that she cannot lick and suck and thrust into her or do anything, everything else.

Still. Still, Lan Wangji feels it, against her tongue and mouth and face, while Wei Wuxian is riding her and molesting a single, unbalanced breast, the oncoming tide; one last suck, at her inner lips, drinking deep of everything she has to offer, and she noses upward, licking along this side, and the other, of the thin ridge of her clit, listening for her gasps and near-screams—and yes, yes, there, she clenches, and Lan Wangji sucks her clit, gently at first, into her mouth, and pulses her own cunt, and just as Wei Wuxian catches her breath—bites, gentle, enough only to take them over the edge.

The climax hits her, pouring into her, pulling her insides out, repeating their earlier cycle—on and on, upward and onward, their dual orgasm building and breaking like a tidal wave over them both.

Her breath returns, slowly, but the smell of—them—pervades the air. When she comes back to herself, Wei Wuxian is already standing, below her at the foot of the stairs. Disoriented, Lan Wangji counts her breath in, and out, and in, and out, until her mind begins to clear. Her eyesight begins to resolve, the overlapping images resolving into one. She can hear. She can breathe.

Sitting up with a wave of nausea she will ignore, Lan Wangji first sees Wei Wuxian, heaving with breath, staring beyond her

And second, the mud trough, whose struggling shoots flower into ripe lotus blossoms. Dozens of them, unfurling right before her watching eyes.

It’s different, this give and take, the cycle of energy hot and cold, light and dark, living and dead. Before, Wei Wuxian left her drained and weak (and angry). Now, when she comes out of it, their dual cultivation, her body thrums with something more; now, she feels the low hum of the earth beneath her feet, how it seems to reach for her.

Moss has begun to spread along the wide mouth of the cave, growing out into the world; the vegetation inside shows no sign of dying.

The following days, Wei Wuxian plucks a lotus flower and shows A-Yuan how to find and eat the seeds. Granny hangs the blossom to dry—‘petal tea makes for good digestion,’ she tells Lan Wangji, a hidden truth of the world—but otherwise, the Wens refrain from commenting, at least in her hearing, on the new growth.

Wei Wuxian often won’t meet her eyes. Lan Wangji finds her ears burning whenever they’re near. It isn’t shame, at least for her. She could not, she will not be ashamed of this, but it is a vulnerable thing between them, as fragile and blind as a new kitten, and Lan Wangji does not understand, exactly, how to feel.

In the evening, when all have retired in their makeshift homes, the pair of them continue their work. Lan Wangji waits for her in the deepening night and, wordlessly, follows.

One evening, Wei Wuxian pins her down like an insect against the blackened ground, what remains of a field given over to the wild decades past. Under the bright nearly full moon, the earth is cracked, choking on dust and ash, and Wei Wuxian makes her come once, twice with only her fingers, watching her every reaction—every gasp, every glare, every time Lan Wangji’s eyes lost focus or breath changed rhythm.

A pulse in the earth ripples, surges, spreads outward from them, each time she comes. Lan Wangji can feel it, stirring in the ground beneath her.

Wei Wuxian watches her with an inscrutable look. Her fingers, sticky-wet, caress Lan Wangji’s cunt like a treasure pet. She is quiet, and watching, and waiting—while Lan Wangji pants, furious and aroused.

“You do not have to—continue restraining me,” she says. She’s said it before.

“Oh, is that right,” Wei Wuxian says. “So you’ll be good, then? Obedient, giving into my every whim?”

Her fingers itch, palms ache to touch, to hold, to grab, to pry every breath and sound from Wei Wuxian. Instead, they grasp at empty air.

“It is not necessary,” Lan Wangji says, “for the purpose of dual cultivation.”

“Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan,” she says, tracing the valley between inner and outer labia with a slick finger, “don’t fix what isn’t broken, you know.”

Lan Wangji ignores her caressing finger. “The process will be more effective.”

“And how can you know that?” Two fingers circle her entrance, while her cunt aches like an old bruise, clenching on nothing.

“A single mind works better than split attention,” she says, as if they were discussing an academic matter over tea. Composure, or the appearance of it, begins to be difficult to retain. “You are—dividing your power, so as to keep me bound.”

“Two things at once,” Wei Wuxian says, dipping her middle finger inside, shallow. Lan Wangji squeezes, involuntarily. With her thumb, Wei Wuxian strokes the side of her clit. “Am I that weak then, that I can’t handle a couple tasks?”

Oversensitive as she is, Lan Wangji’s world is nothing more than the sound of Wei Wuxian’s voice and the exquisite pain and pleasure of her own pussy.

“It is not that you are incapable,” she says. She tries not to gasp.

“Oh, I hope not,” Wei Wuxian says. “Besides, it seems that I’m, well, quite capable of a few things.”

The drag of a thumbnail, just next to her clit, makes Lan Wangji choke back a scream.

“It is only that—” Lan Wangji pauses to breathe, “—that, we could be doing, ah, more.”

Wei Wuxian laughs, laughs and pushes energy through the pads of her fingers and into Lan Wangji’s yielding flesh. Beyond them, a low rustle, like countless insects, spreads through the earth.

“You want more, Lan Zhan,” she says, wicked and red-eyed and leaning over her like a mythic villain, “then I’ll give you more.”

Two fingers press against her walls—that thumb circles her clit, confident—and she chokes on nothing, vision whiting out as she comes the third time tonight and the torrent of energies inside her pours out into the waiting night. Higher and higher, each time Wei Wuxian pushed her to the peak, and this third time, the cultured power inside her breaks and washes over the land.

The earth is churning with movement. Blinking her unfocused eyes, she tries to see, to comprehend, but can’t, not immediately. The black bindings around her wrists and thighs loosen and dissipate, and she curls up, pillbug fashion, before pushing to her knees.

The desolate, blackened earth is gone. A fungal spread has covered it, growing tall mushrooms and wide ones and clusters, but even as she watches, they expand and peak and collapse in on themselves, an entire fungal life-cycle in the span of minutes. The remains of it, the low musty forest, fall apart. The dirt underneath her hands has turned soft and loamy.

The next time Wei Wuxian takes her, in a claustrophobic grove of hunched trees, Wei Wuxian grips her chin, her hair and smothers Lan Wangji with her cunt. The skeletal tree, when they finish, boasts new, pale green growths that erupt out of dead branches.

The dark tentacles have her trussed like prey, wrists and ankles pinned together where she kneels. Still, when Wei Wuxian, orgasm-drunk, reaches out toward her, laughing, and begins to trace her forehead ribbon, Lan Wangji can maneuver just enough to struggle and strike, biting the meat of Wei Wuxian’s forearm with the intent to bruise. At Wei Wuxian’s startled yell, she glares. Her teeth do not yield.

“Ah, ah, fuck,” Wei Wuxian says, “Lan Zhan, let go.”

In response, Lan Wangji only growls.

“Please,” Wei Wuxian says—like a match lit in the back of her mind, please. “Please, I’m sorry, let go.”

“You take liberties,” Lan Wangji says after releasing her. Drool escaped her mouth, when she gnawed at Wei Wuxian like a feral beast, and a trail of it slides down to her chin.

“I didn’t—” Wei Wuxian begins, but doesn’t continue. Her eyes dart this way and that, back and forth between Lan Wangji’s obstinate, spit-slick face and the angry red teethmarks on her arm. The forest has continued to grow, to renew, moving from the bright yellow-green of spring into the darker green of summer. There is shade now, above them, where just moments ago there had been none.

She is shocked, she thinks—why else would Wei Wuxian’s eyes be so wide, pupils so dark?

“I will,” Wei Wuxian says, still panting, almost trembling, “take whatever I want. It’s not like you can do anything about it.”

Lan Wangji kneels, restrained, but her spine is taut and long, her head lifted, and when Wei Wuxian meets her gaze, it is Wei Wuxian who breaks first. Who leaves first, fleeing into their nascent jungle, while the binding shadows slip off her limbs.

Lan Wangji chooses not to notice Wei Wuxian’s absence, in the days that follow, and instead applies herself to the construction of a set of rain barrels. They might be aspirational rain barrels, but it would be better to have them and wait, than to miss them when needed. A set of thin boards, a base, and braces for the corners. Trial and error, mostly error, as she discovers how to fit the joints to hold water without leaking, to seal the boards and strengthen the corners.

She has made twelve of them while Wei Wuxian has been gone. Her fingers and palms are evidence of her work, covered in scratches and blisters and raw skin.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Granny says one day, bringing her a bowl of thin stew. “She’ll come around.”

Wen Qing brings Lan Wangji with her into town. None of the Wens have been here in months–too dangerous. They go hooded in undyed linen cloaks, but the humidity of the day still draws sweat along the back of their necks. Lan Wangji carries the radish sack over one shoulder. Their trip is functional, and they talk only when discussion is necessary: what vendors to visit, how much rice to buy, whether a plum tree sapling is prudent at this time.

“It should have been planted months ago, if we wanted one,” Wen Qing says. Lan Wangji does not know enough about plum trees to argue, but. Well.

If it struggles to survive, there is always—

“Or you can do whatever it is you’re doing,” Wen Qing says, “and we can have a full grown tree overnight.”

She lifts a single, threadlike eyebrow.

“Yes,” Lan Wangji says, unwilling to be ashamed, “and it would be nice to have plums for A-Yuan.”

Wen Qing scoffs. “You’re too soft-hearted. You’ll spoil him, and then what will he do when you leave?”

It strikes Lan Wangji with the force of an arrow: that she has not considered leaving. But, she recalls, she is a hostage, at least in certain eyes; reconciliation, or a truce at the very least, would allow her the freedom—the necessity, from her brother’s perspective, from Shufu’s—of departure from Yiling.

She swallows against the thought of it.

“He will have plums,” she says, stubbornly, and buys the seedling.

Water, or the absence of it, remains a problem.

One trickling waterfall, enough for stews and rice and tea, cannot quench the thirst of a hundred new plant beds. They ration it out, cupful by cupful, and the Wens conspicuously do not talk about rain.

Wen Ning, gone with Wei Wuxian, returns and talks with his sister. Lan Wangji does not ask, but Wen Qing offers “some movement on the northeast border” for her edification. It does, and does not, explain Wei Wuxian’s absence, and Lan Wangji, past the point of resentment, worries anew.

When Wei Wuxian is there, tangible before her, it is easy to be angry, to confront her, to cut and bite with words. Her disregard for the consequences of her actions—but no, Lan Wangji thinks, that isn’t correct. It is her provocation that succeeds at raising Lan Wangji’s urgent anger. Neither of them want to see her deep and desperate concern. Worry. When Wei Wuxian disappears, there is only worry.

It builds enough, like the pressure that builds up against a dam, that Lan Wangji even says to Wen Qing, breaking their silence. “I wish to help.”

Eagle-eyed Wen Qing considers her before saying, “you won’t.”

And then, “you can’t.”

Which Lan Wangji categorically refuses to accept as true, or valid, or worth considering.

The drought continues, as it has for months, but Lan Wangji goes in search. She does not know if it will work. There is nothing, really, to suggest that it will. But the low, pregnant clouds that decline to rain on their thirsty fields, their waiting barrels, itch at her mind like a stray pebble in a shoe. The clouds hang in the air. She wants to claim them.

She follows the dry brook that runs near the settlement far westward, past the fields of burgeoning bushes and sprouts, past the strangely resilient, dense forest, to the path that wanders up and around to a high cliff overlooking the Burial Mounds. Wei Wuxian brought her there once before; maybe she will be there once again.

This is not the first time Lan Wangji has gone searching, but she declines to recall how often she tried. Sometimes, she took A-Yuan on a ‘walk,’ to see new sights, and once he tired she lifted him onto her broad shoulders and wound her way through all the paths Wei Wuxian had pulled her through. Sometimes, she wandered in the dim light of the newly waxing moon, looking, listening, feeling the energy of the ground. But, nothing.

It is, then, a surprise when her winding path does find Wei Wuxian. Lan Wangji might have expected her to be, as she was before, surrounded by her laughing girls and empty liquor bottles. But no, Wei Wuxian has no bottle at hand, and the wisps of her companions have nothing but pale, grave faces. The one in blush pink is crying spectral tears.

Lan Wangji approaches, and her footfalls make soft sounds in the quiet night air. Enough for Wei Wuxian to hear. The clifftop is broad, with enough short grass and moss to soften the ground underfoot, and Wei Wuxian reclines on her elbows as she looks out, away from Lan Wangji.

Lan Wangji stands, waits, and then kneels to sit, one palm resting over her bent knees, the other fisted in the small of her back. Patience, patience, she tells herself—patience is prudence, and prudence is wisdom.

So when Wei Wuxian says, “it’s all falling apart,” to the air, to Lan Wangji, to no one and nothing, she can sit and think and consider how to respond.

“Wei Ying,” she says, “tell me.”

“I don’t,” and she can’t see her, can’t read in Wei Wuxian’s face what she needs to know, “I can’t—they don’t stop coming.”

“Let me—”

“Fuck,” Wei Wuxian says, “if it meant they would live, I would just—give in. Die, or whatever, haha.”

“Wei Ying,” she says, her response like a whip crack.

“It’s useless, fucking useless,” she says, “and there’s nothing—”

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji interrupts, as she was taught never to do. Her voice cuts the still air, a sword through flesh. “I will help. Let me help.”

This, finally, gets Wei Wuxian to turn and look at her. Wide eyes, the whites catching the pale moonlight, drink her in.

“Oh, Lan Zhan,” she says with a deceptive calm. “You think that…you can help.”

“If you will only tell me—” but Wei Wuxian does not allow this.

“The great Lan Wangji,” she says, rising to her feet, stalking toward Lan Wangji like prey. Her robe hangs open; her chest is bare. The wisps of her companions grow stronger, starker. The sultry girl in blue raises a hand to her own neck, squeezes, chokes herself, as if possessed. “The noble Hanguang Jun.”

The young furen in jade rakes her fingernails down her cheeks, leaving trails of ghostly blood.

“You want to help,” Wei Wuxian says. “If only I would tell you. If only I would let you. Have you considered that, maybe, it’s not enough. Maybe—maybe, you aren’t enough. Will never be enough.”

The maiden in violet scratches at her own wrists, like an animal in a trap.

“Is this all you really have to offer, Lan Zhan?” She says, looming over Lan Wangji where she sits. Each word, drawn like an arrow, armed with a barb. “To—to succumb, to the terrible Yiling Laozu. It’s, it’s fucking weak. This is nothing. You’re nothing.”

The fist of her left hand, nails biting into her palm, jumps involuntarily. She feels the tips of her hair and the trailing ends of her forehead ribbon brush against her hand,.

More than a month that she has lived here. By Wei Wuxian’s request—demand—she lives here, she labors here, she has sacrificed her body and very self to the survival and flourishing of this place, these people, the very person who stands before her. Patience, her mind echoes, but there is none to be had.

For all that Wei Wuxian has ranted and postured, she is underfed, exhausted, and, most importantly, unprepared.

It only takes a grip, Lan Wangji’s hand on an unsuspecting ankle, and a strong yank to get Wei Wuxian prone, ass down and bewildered, on the barely cushioned ground of the clifftop. Lan Wangji grabs her other ankle, pulls her ribbon off, and pounces on Wei Wuxian. Wrists in hand, she wedges one knee under her waist, the other leg hooking under the opposite hip and flipping Wei Wuxian, chest down, onto the cold ground.

The work of a moment, to wrap her unblemished ribbon around both wrists and tie them against the small of Wei Wuxian’s back. Lan Wangji hauls her up by the back of the neck. Her thighs bracket Wei Wuxian’s own spread legs. They kneel, back to chest, in the moonlight.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says. She sounds choked. “What—what are you…”

There is no patience left in Lan Wangji. There is only the burning, the hungry beast, the one that ceaselessly aches for something she cannot have.

“Stop it,” Wei Wuxian says. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing but, you can’t—”

Lan Wangji turns her around, just enough, and slaps her, clear across the face. The hard sound breaks the air in pieces.

Wei Wuxian makes a sound, a kind of gargle, and Lan Wangji watches as one half of her face blooms a colorless red in the moonlight.

“Wei Ying,” she says, harsh and low. “The fields need water. We will give it to them.”

A matter of moments, a flurry of robes and limbs, and a stunned, pliable Wei Wuxian in her arms, gifts Lan Wangji this blessed vision: her Wei Ying, near naked beneath her, spread legs and arched back and trapped wrists, waiting to be devoured.

“I, what are you,” Wei Wuxian stammers, wide-eyed.

“This is what is necessary, yes?” Lan Wangji says, weeks of pent up worry and resentment spilling forth. “Is this not what you agreed to, when you asked for me?”

She hauls up Wei Wuxian’s legs, under the knees, and bares her ass to the night. She slaps her there, once, twice, and again, and again. Wei Wuxian yells, and pleads, and the air fills with the pungent smell of her sex.

Clouds begin to gather overhead.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian pants, breathless, tears already leaking from her eyes. “It’s too much.”

“Yes,” she agrees. “It will be.”

Sometimes, in the soft space between waking and rousing, Lan Wangji wondered at it, how little Wei Wuxian touched her. It was only her cunt, worked to orgasm; it was only her mouth, used for pleasure. Notable, mostly because of how far it departed from her own fantasies.

She takes her time with Wei Wuxian, who whimpers and pleads and begs. Caressing the skin of her stomach, her neck, the softness of her thighs. Kissing at her ankles, her collarbone, the crease between leg and torso. Licking the backs of her knees, the underside of each foot, the shell of each ear. Every inch of her, exposed and vulnerable, bared to her exploration, and Lan Wangji uses lips and hands and tongue to map it all, until Wei Wuxian is a trembling wet mess.

Her breasts, she leaves to savor. Wei Wuxian has, due to carelessness or cruelty, tempted her again and again with the curve of them, the suggestion of their shadows, their bare reality, and Lan Wangji means to claim them entirely.

Small, just a palmful, but they stand perky, with high brown nipples like edible fruit. Lan Wangji licks, kisses, nips, and bites, from the underside all around, and leaves Wei Wuxian’s sensitive nipples for last. Yes, Wei Wuxian is sensitive—this, at least, she knew from eating her out, again and again, how easy it was to make her come, and how she jerked away, hard and fast, right after orgasm.

Each nipple is hard, beckoning for her, and Wei Wuxian moans. She ceased to be intelligible back when Lan Wangji nipped at the soft underside of her left breast, and she babbles onward, pleading for anything. Lan Wangji lets her hand smooth downward, down the curve of Wei Wuxian’s waist, around her hip, to her thighs, open and waiting. When she takes a nipple in her mouth, sucking at first, she slides one finger inside and finds warm welcome from Wei Wuxian’s cunt.

The first orgasm is easy, fast, too sharp—one tooth at a nipple and two fingers, and Wei Wuxian comes and comes, and Lan Wangji pours into her what she can.

Before the second, Lan Wangji lets her catch her breath, kissing and biting at her inner thighs, sucking bruises into them. Wei Wuxian arches beautifully in the air for each of them, begging—“Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, please please please—” and writhing. Lan Wangji gives her a gentle orgasm, tracing her familiar entrance with tongue and lips and letting the indirect pleasure build and build until she shook and pleaded no more.

Lan Wangji can feel, inside her, a familiar, building energy. The air feels electric with it, potent and waiting. The moon has disappeared behind darkened clouds.

“One more,” she says, kissing just below Wei Wuxian’s jaw. Her pulse pounds against Lan Wangji’s lips. “Just one more.”

“I—” Wei Wuxian says.

“Another,” she says. “You’ve been so good.”

Flipped over, Wei Wuxian can’t hold herself up on her knees, so her pelvis is positioned over Lan Wangji’s thighs. A humiliating, exposing position. Lan Wangji wants to keep her here forever.

Three fingers inside, and Wei Wuxian objects, wordlessly, until Lan Wangji grips her by the roots of her hair and bends her. Her pleading whimpers soon turn to full-throated moans as Lan Wangji thrusts into her, again and again and again, feeling the slick of her cunt seep between her fingers. Lan Wangji is drunk off of it, the sounds of her, and her own pussy clenches in sympathetic pleasure, in the same rhythm. They are so close, together.

“Lan Zhan, La—please, please,” Wei Wuxian moans, “fuck, I, I need it, I need you—”

Everything, every bit of spiritual energy deep in her core, she fucks into Wei Wuxian. When Wei Wuxian grasps around her fingers, she clenches with her, and they come in perfect sync, exquisite, sublime, until there’s nothing left.

Lan Wangji comes back to herself with her head bowed over the plush fat of Wei Wuxian’s ass, as a gentle breeze blows against their bared flesh. The aftermath of it, like a battle, leaves them both devastated, and she turns Wei Wuxian in her arms and holds her through it, kissing, licking at the sweat on her temples. It is the closest she has ever been to—anyone, body to body, sweat on sweat.

Their breaths each, and in tandem, begin to even out. Their pulses settle. Their minds, their higher reasoning, returns. They are naked on a clifftop in the world’s largest graveyard—but before anything like shame or regret can take hold, the rain begins to fall. Their intertwined fingers against the ground had felt before, the pulsating life within the earth; now, the air crackles with it as well.

The rain falls, a pitterpattering of droplets that turns between one moment and the next to relentless, hard rain.

“We cannot stay here,” Lan Wangji informs Wei Wuxian, hoisting her in her arms, bridal style. Wei Wuxian, washed clean of their fluids, laughs in delight as Lan Wangji walks, then runs them home through the downpour.

It was, in retrospect, an idyll, as fragile as spun glass. Lan Wangji should not have expected—anything, except for it to end.

But for a time, it is utopia.

The lotuses bloom, again and again, and the vines explode forth from the cave, crawling up the sheer rock face and dropping a snowfall of tiny white flowers. The creekbed fills, and the fields yield, and everywhere life takes root. A-Yuan’s plum seedling matures overnight, and they plant seeds from its ripened fruits, and within a week, those too have grown into lush, fruit-bearing trees.

The rain comes, again and again; after the first time, after the torrential downpour that near flooded their houses and drowned their young fields, the clouds deliver a mother rain, gentle and misting, that nourishes the earth and cools the days.

There is water, and there is food. The plum grove flourishes, and the radishes ripen overnight, and the half-dozen peppercorn bushes that the Wens planned for a surprise for next autumn—the unspoken thought, if they still lived—burst with hard berries that bring tears to Lan Wangji’s eyes and make Wei Wuxian shiver and grin with pleasure. Uncle Four’s still overflows with liquor one evening, spilling out and soaking the ground with its pungent aroma. The Wens laugh about it, and at least one drunk uncle warns A-Yuan about the ‘spirits of fertility’ that have come to bless their crops.

Their small world flourishes, which is worthy enough on its own. But the cause of it, Lan Wangji is drunk off—the nights, hot and gasping, dripping life back on dead ground..

Soaked wet and laughing, high on adrenaline, they fell back into their cave that night. Wei Wuxian clasped her arms around Lan Wangji’s neck like a swooning maiden, half a joke, but she hadn’t let go, and Lan Wangji did not discourage her. Sodden and dripping onto the soft moss carpet of their cave, they rid themselves of clothing and dried themselves with old cloth and laid down to sleep in the still warm air of the cavern. And when they woke, late, rain still came down, and Lan Wangji took full advantage, curling around Wei Wuxian like a comma while she teased her to orgasm with two fingers around her clit and two worrying at a nipple.

It is most nights, and some days, that Lan Wangji finds Wei Wuxian, binds her, traps her. The beast in her breast slumbers, content for once, and Wei Wuxian sleeps deeply and routinely. Lan Wangji learns her body with the full attention of Gusu Lan’s most apt pupil, overwhelms Wei Wuxian with the knowledge of it, again and again.

If she uses her forehead ribbon for purposes that would scandalize any Lan elder—well. She knows what it means, and it means that to her. Even though she is alone in it, that can be enough; she lies to herself and says that will be enough.

One evening, fucked out on the soft and musty loam, Wei Wuxian asks if she can feel it—feel how silent it is, here. To Lan Wangji, the Burial Mounds were beyond desolate, abyssal, deathlike, but what they have done makes the earth hum, quietly, with the hushed mechanisms of life.

“I’m not sure,” she says, curled around Wei Wuxian. She pets her hair anyways.

“Soon,” Wei Wuxian says, with a wistful smile, “soon they’ll all be gone.”

“What do you mean?” She asks, pausing.

“Ah, Lan Zhan, don’t worry about it.”

She should have counted the days, probably. Lan Wangji has been here, what, half a season? Two months? But without the regularity of the Lan schedule, without the expectations of future events, what use is there for datekeeping, really? There is the rise and fall of seasons, and that is the life of their community. It was summer when she arrived, and it is summer still, late summer. What use does she have for date counting otherwise?

What Lan Wangji, in her youthful myopia, does not consider—that to everyone but her, her tenure at the Burial Mounds is temporary, and the expiration date of that tenure is, has always been, in question.

And so, Wen Ning brings a letter back from Yiling.

From Xichen, to—the Yiling Laozu. That’s what he has written: from Zewu Jun, Lan zongzhu, to the Yiling Laozu. As if he had never—as if Wei Wuxian were some—

Wei Wuxian left her the letter where she reclined, in the low light of the cavern, after an indulgent nap during the oppressive heat of the day. Where now she sits, rigidly upright, with the thin blanket they call theirs pooling around her hips.

She reads:

To the Yiling Laozu,

Since last we met, it has been nearly a season. I will wish your community well, if only because my sister must be considered part of that community.

For the sake of my own mental wellbeing, as well as the general peace of our society, I require news of my sister’s welfare. For this purpose, I must ask that Lan Wangji respond herself. No insult is meant; if offense is taken, I beg that you believe it only caused by the worry of a most cautious and anxious brother.

As for your own response, I write and repeat to you what the gathered sect leaders, under the direction of the Chief Cultivator, have requested me to ask.

First, what action do you and the Wen cultivators you host plan to take?

Second, that the Tiger Seal poses an ongoing threat to the welfare of our larger world; what plan do you have to dispose of such an item?

And third, that a host of cultivators have listed grievance against you, on account of your baseless attacks on them when they strayed into Yiling on accident; what redress do you have toward these wronged individuals?

I have left this letter with a reputable innkeeper in Yiling; in two weeks time, I will return, and I hope to have both your and Lan Wangji’s written replies. And, if I may be so bold, it would do a doting brother’s heart good to see a beloved sister.

Signed,

Zewu Jun, Lan zongzhu

“Have you decided what you’ll write,” Wen Qing says, apropos of nothing, as Lan Wangji is slicing radishes paper-thin. To be pickled, with dried peppercorn. Granny has chosen to repurpose one of her rain barrels, now a pickle barrel; the rain comes now, without fail, and their springs are flush full of clear sweet water. The vinegar from Uncle Four’s experiments—failures—is ready at hand, and they have more radishes than human mass at this point. When winter comes, she pictures Wei Wuxian piling the pickles on every dish, sour and spicy and pungent. Lan Wangji can picture her, eyes crinkling with pleasure while she eats and talks and eats, for Wei Wuxian always loves her pleasures layered, one over the other.

But. To the person at hand, Lan Wangji must respond. Wen Qing is taciturn by nature, something Lan Wangji has appreciated the entirety of their acquaintance. Still, she doesn’t, at this moment, particularly enjoy the full brunt of Wen Qing’s attention, nor her raptor eyes that watch for vulnerability. They might do this all day, waiting silently for the other to talk.

“I have,” Lan Wangji says, finally.

“And?” she asks.

 “I will assure him I am well.”

Wen Qing scoffs at her. Lan Wangji is used to seeing her scoff at Wei Wuxian, never at herself. She bristles, even though she should not take offense.

“And?” she repeats. “And what else? What answers will you give—what will you say, about Wei Wuxian? About the land?”

Their confrontation, silent as the lightning storm that you see far, far away, crackles the air.

“What will you say about us, Lan Wangji?” Wen Qing has the eyes of someone far older, and for a moment, Lan Wangji, who has never easily imagined herself in someone else’s place, thinks: trapped by Wen Ruohan, the surgery that still wakes Wei Ying up at night, Wen Ning’s stiff movements and bloodless skin, and the starving mass of survivors that included a wide-eyed smiling child. The stiff spine it takes to survive and protect.

She remembers—Wen Qing, caring for her, a patient she had not asked for, nor had any reason to care for.

“I will keep you safe,” she promises. “I will tell the truth.”

Wen Qing does not seem comforted by this statement.

“No,” she says. “The truth keeps no one safe.”

Wen Ning’s approach is not expected, but is not unwelcome either. He walks the perimeter most days; she sees him infrequently. When she does, he stammers through kind words. Ghost General, she remembers and finds the name distasteful. Wei Wuxian tells her, late at night, when the darkness is a cocoon around them, safe and warm, about their frequent assaults at her wards from each and every hidden spot.

“Hanguang Jun,” he says, bowing. The best mannered person in the Burial Mounds is a walking corpse.

She bows in return.

“Jie doesn’t mean anything by it,” he says, as if the sentence is a thorn he has to pull from his own foot. Large, black eyes—human and inhuman, alive and dead. He is a paradox in flesh. But he is the person in front of her. The person.

“It’s only that…she worries,” he explains.

“I understand,” she replies. “I will not willingly endanger any of you.”

“Yes,” he nods, and she sees so clearly, for a moment, the eager, unmarked young man he had been. “No one thinks that you would.”

The grand boogeyman of the cultivation world wrings his hands at her, searching for words.

“You know that I patrol the wards, right?”

She nods.

“And—well, I don’t know that she would have told you, not all the time, but. Since Qiongqi Path, the Jin haven’t, they haven’t stopped trying. They’re testing, I think, all of the different spots, trying to find the weakest place. Every few days, they try again.” His voices rasps and he swallows—a painfully slow motion, as if the muscles themselves have to remember how to function. “I can’t tell you what to say, but.”

He grimaces. She waits.

“They’ll never stop.”

One cut is trivial. A thousand is death, slow creeping death.

“So—jie just meant to ask you not to, uh, share too much with them. About, well, the details here.” He bows deeply. “And I’ll ask, too, that you not trust what they say. The Jins.”

Living evidence of their cruelty, their perfidy, asking this of her.

“Yes,” she says, bowing in return. “I will not write anything more than is necessary.”

He smiles, this half-corpse, and A-Yuan breaks into the small clearing where Wen Ning found her wandering. Granny chases after him, but A-Yuan has wrapped himself around Wen Ning’s legs, and they almost fall over in a tangle. A comedy, their kind and loving family. Open affection. Her heart yearns.

Wei Wuxian’s demon cave, now a riot of questing vines, of moss carpet and clinging lichen, is the only place where paper is kept. Where else, in their small compound, with its bare, meager supplies—why else would they have it?

The light is low, as it always is; sunlight has to turn and twist to find the grand cavern, and has always diffused before reaching the open air. She lights a low, greasy candle that cannot help but smoke.

Xiongzhang, she writes.

Sincerest greetings. I write to you in good health and full spirits, and I hope my letter finds you similarly well.

A clear beginning, which she believes is the best way to construct a letter. She is well, she writes, just as he requested to hear. How could he be anything but satisfied?

The rest of it is not—not hers to say, but she must. Well. Say to her brother, who in this case is brother and sect leader and, she understands, a conduit of news to their most relentless pursuers.

So, she considers. And it is during this consideration that Wei Wuxian finds her, kneeling before the shoddy desk Wei Wuxian uses and writing the cultivation world that has taken so much—too much—from her.

The last time she saw Wei Wuxian, she was glassy-eyed and wobbly, laughing dopily while Lan Wangji healed the worst of her rope burns with thin blue light. She licked at Lan Wangji’s jaw and said, ‘Lan Zhan, who knew you could sweat,’ and told her she was delicious.

A day later, she is burning coal in a dark room.

It is not a letter that soothes any wounds. Nor relieves any concerns. Worry, like the smoke that kills before the fire, clogs all of their lungs, but anger burns white, right through Wei Wuxian like kindling.

Wei Wuxian stalks toward her. That old smoke seeps from underneath her fingernails, out of her nostrils. She snatches the parchment from beneath Lan Wangji’s hand and reads. Lan Wangji lets her.

“Ah, Lan Zhan, what a diligent sister you are, writing Zewu Jun so dutifully.”

She leans over Lan Wangji, dark and looming. A threat, to anyone else.

“I guess you’ll tell him whatever you want,” she says. “Or should I shut you up, before you can?”

“Wei Ying,” she says, surprised.

“No, that wouldn’t serve, would it, Lan Zhan? We have to show him our dear hostage is well taken care of.”

“You are upset,” she says. “This is not the time—”

“Well, write whatever you want. Tell him, oh, everything.” It’s been weeks since the noxious air choked her, but the smoke roils off of Wei Wuxian in hot, heavy waves. The moss underfoot sickens, decays in a moment, rotting into nothing.

“Stop this,” she says, standing, wrapping her hands around familiar wrists. “Wei Ying, you must not—”

Those dark eyes, that darken further with arousal and pleasure, glow a sickly red, an echo of the smoking candle behind her. Wei Wuxian—something must have happened, she thinks, it’s only been a day, it hasn’t been this bad since, since they—

“Ah, Lan Zhan, tell him whatever you want,” she laughs, harsh in the still air of their cavern. Her blood-stained eyes are wide, frantic, like the rolling eyes of panicked horses, of rabid dogs. “Just, don’t forget to tell him—how well you’ve fucked me.”

Nothing, nothing could make a sound between their caught breaths.

“How you, how you’ve conquered the Yiling Laozu,” Wei Wuxian says, shaking in her grasp. Her throat working hard, as if to keep down the nausea. “Made me your bitch. Made me beg for it.”

“Wei Ying,” the only thing she can say, desperate and angry and pleading.

“Won’t he be proud,” Wei Wuxian says, trembling as toxic smoke disperses from her, a snuffed flame. “Don’t you think, Lan Zhan?”

Wei Wuxian kisses her like an assault and Lan Wangji welcomes it, drinks her in. They are raw and open and tumbling on the stone underfoot; Lan Wangji won’t let go of her, and Wei Wuxian doesn’t try to free herself. When Lan Wangji bites her shoulder, ripping her threadbare robe in pieces to reach her unmarked skin, she begs, ‘harder;’ when she pulls her hair, ‘more’, and when she hits her, open handed, on her spread thighs and the side of her torso and hard on the cheek, ‘is that all you have, Lan Zhan—don’t you mean it.’

This isn’t, this isn’t what she wants, Lan Zhan realizes, when she sees the seeping tears on Wei Wuxian’s face. The way she’s bracing for pain. She should be—overcome, overwhelmed, feeling nothing but what Lan Wangji would give her. These are not the tears she wants. These are the tears of the punished.

“No,” she says, kissing the tears from her face, “no, I don’t mean it.”

“Lan Zhan,” she whines.

“Hush,” she says. “Just let me.”

She works two spit-slick fingers into her hole, a dry drag compared to the welcome of her cunt. “Think about this,” she tells her trembling Wei Ying. And keeps them there, an anchor, while she maps the world of Wei Wuxian’s underfed, underloved body, kissing between ribs, beneath her knees, over the abdominal scar that makes her flinch when nothing else can.

Wei Wuxian takes everything she gives her, even this, but she’s begging, weeping, openly by the end. The unbearable intimacy of it, her ass filled and cunt empty, keeps her out of her mind and lets Lan Wangji—love her, the only way she can. She denies her nothing. When Wei Wuxian comes on her face, her fingers lose feeling.

Cleaning them up with the dampened rags of the robe she destroyed, Lan Wangji feels as tender as a new nerve. Wei Wuxian clings to her; maybe she feels the same. Their sleep, when it comes, is shallow and painful. Every dream wakes them both up, unsettled, clutching each other like drowning sailors. Even dawn, when it arrives, can’t clear the haunted air that lingers between them.

Her letter, finished that morning, reads:

Sincerest greetings. I write to you in good health and full spirits, and I hope my letter finds you similarly well.

The settlement that houses the Wen refugees flourishes, and I hold high hopes for its future progress toward stable agriculture. I continue to have concerns about the agreement struck months ago; as I have observed myself, many of the promises made to Wei Wuxian have not been honored, even while she honors those made before the gathered sect leaders. If you, brother, might remind your allies of these promises, peace may be better served.

I will allow Wei Wuxian to answer your questions, as she can do them more justice than I, due to my knowledge of their faulty premises, could answer with equanimity.

Regards to you, to Shufu, to all of Gusu Lan.

But the damage is done.

Days later, they’ve made a glen, plush with soft grass. Wei Wuxian lies underneath her, wrists tied around the thin trunk of a tree renewed, crying from her third orgasm; her flesh quivers, trembling to the touch, like the ripples from skipped stones on placid ponds. Feeling her skin move under touch, Lan Wangji finds that, that—now, just now, she is more content thatn she has ever been. They lie together in the soft moonlight on the velvet carpet of grass, and she wonders at it, the sleeping beast in her heart finally, finally soothed.

She pets Wei Wuxian’s flanks, strokes up and down. Their sweat, drying, makes the touch tacky, but even this has its own pleasure. It can be enough, whatever this is—unspoken, but maybe, if she said something, it could…

Wei Wuxian, rubbing blood back into her wrists, says into the quiet, “so, I guess you’re leaving soon, yeah?”

And. She can only think, ‘soon we’re leaving for bed.’ Sex-dumb as she is, love-drunk in the gentling moonlight, none of what Wei Wuxian said means anything to her. But some part of her has already received it, the blow. The rest of her is preparing, as if waiting to feel it.

Lan Wangji says, finally, “I don’t understand.” Because she doesn’t.

Wei Wuxian’s hollow laugh is not something Lan Wangji missed, but she resents it even more, at this present moment, than she had during any farcical performance of the Yiling Patriarch, that facade of a villain.

“Haha,” she laughs, badly, “Lan Zhan, it’s not like—you don’t have to pretend or anything. It’s, uh, it’s alright. Don’t worry about it.”

“What are you talking about,” she says, but the ripple force of the blow is beginning to spread, outward from her sternum. She can feel it in her shoulder blades, her gut—the dread, the nascent pain.

“It isn’t like, well, like I needed you forever. Indefinitely,” Wei Wuxian says. She sits up, and pulls a discarded robe, mended from another of their exuberant encounters, across her shoulders. “You have this whole, this whole life. That you should return to.”

“I should return to,” Lan Wangji says, a canyon that can only return an echo.

“Yeah, like—your brother. Your sect,” she laughs again, horrible.“The righteous Hanguang Jun. You could do anything.”

Their glen, lush and green and cushioned, begins to press in on her. The spreading realization hits her lungs, and she finds it hard to breathe. Sitting up, facing Wei Wuxian, seems to orient the newly cruel world in a way she understands. Because there she kneels, feet under her ass, tits swaying in the cool air, and she wonders if she might prefer being gutted to whatever this is.

“You wish me to go,” she says, trying to understand. And she hears it anew, ‘it isn’t like I needed you forever,’ and a wash of cold shame sinks into her bones. They sit in this, this glen, that their sex—dual cultivation, euphemistically named—brought to explosive life. And, well. Her usefulness in this, the renewal of the land, has been lost. Her utility is at an end.

Her very reasonable mind thinks, yes, it is good that the trapped, angry, resentful dead could find new purpose, could become the foundation for new life. This is good; it is what Wei Wuxian brought me here to do, and what we have accomplished cannot be undone. The freeing of lost spirits; the survival of the Wens. Their—work—has been for good.

Her very unreasonable mind thinks of her ribbon, wrapped around Wei Wuxian’s wrists. Let me keep you.

Wei Wuxian laughs softly. Lan Wangji can’t hear anything in it. “It’s for the best, don’t you think?”

Dressing helps. If nothing else, it gives her activity, while she hears, thinks, realizes—that Wei Wuxian wants her gone. Unbearable. But worse to stay, unwanted.

“Then I will be gone in the morning.”

Xichen will be here in days; knowing her brother as she does, he would likely come before the expected date. A simple thing, to leave, for what had she brought, really, except the healthy of her body and the power of her core? She is a resource, exhausted. She holds no value anymore, in this place.

Behind her, Wei Wuxian coughs a little. “Ah, ok, uh, so soon? Is that what you—ok, alright, Lan Zhan. In the morning.”

Wei Wuxian accepts her departure, and she knows, heart stuttering, that she has chosen correctly. A prolonged goodbye would only reveal, humiliatingly, the soft underbelly she wished to keep hidden.

“Well, we’ll have to send you off,” Wei Wuxian says, standing suddenly. “A party, for our—guest. Honored guest, Lan Wangji.”

She bows. Lan Wangji bows in return. She wants to die.

Her last dinner with the Wens, as she should have expected, is everything she values about them, distilled into one, excruciating evening—their welcome, easy and open, and their affection. How casual they are with each other, and with her. More casual even than they are with Wei Wuxian, whom they revere and respect and love, but wonder at as if she were a mythic figure striding among them. Lan Wangji knows better; Wei Wuxian’s genius is real, her character moreso, but she is horribly, tenderly, vulnerably human.

Lan Wangji toasts with them, clear spring water in her cup. The happy chorus of other voices gives her cover, and she says more than she means to.

“Wei Ying,” she says, reaching to hold her hand. “What you have done is…incomparable. I will always admire it, and you. I am honored to know you.”

Caught off guard, Wei Wuxian blinks. She throws back her bowl of fruit liquor and grins. That wide smile softens Lan Wangji’s heart, and brings her comfort. Even if she is not what Wei Wuxian wants, not forever, Wei Wuxian is herself again. Enough–it must be enough.

Wei Wuxian smacks her shoulder and says, “ah, you flatterer, Lan Zhan! Who’ll be left to tell me how great I am, after you go? It’ll just be Wen Qing, ripping me a new one every time I get a scratch.”

The evening deepens and darkens, and Lan Wangji speaks to each of the Wens in turn. Their gratitude is bearable only by forcing Wei Wuxian to remain with her, as their thanks are for Wei Wuxian more than her. And when the liquor runs out, when Wen Ning takes a conked out A-Yuan back to his bed, when Granny shoos them away from cleaning up, they retire.

She wasn’t sure—but, well. Wei Wuxian drops her clothing on the soft green ground of the cave. And winks.

It will hurt worse, she knows, but she wants to remember. Every bit of it, the way Wei Wuxian tastes, where she sweats, the varied songs of her pleasure. And it does hurt worse, with Wei Wuxian’s legs wrapped around her waist as they pant against each other, staring into each other. It hurts worse, because she can’t, she can’t say no when Wei Wuxian goes to touch her—and when they come, from inexpert fumblings as they roll over the ground, kissing, legs slotted together, they feel each other tremble and gasp and cry, simultaneously. And yes, it does hurt worse, knowing; Lan Wangji walks into Yiling the next morning with the full weight of it on her back, in her heart.

Cloud Recesses is just as she remembers. And less than she remembered.

The Jingshi is as it was, her haven. Still and serene. The wind rustles the thin trees, just as it has for centuries. Life here is old and staid. She loves it still, following the grooves worn into the mountain by hundreds of Lan disciples as they wind through the old growth forest. The old trees call to her, in a language newly hers, and the pulseless movement of sap within them fills the silent forest with a soundless hum of activity.

The rabbits, ensconced as they are on the back hills, flourish best with benign neglect. The most adventurous disciples have left them food in her absence, and the progeny of Wei Wuxian’s gifts hop toward her hopefully when she visits their small pasture.

And her family. Xichen, kind and loving and understanding, who asks nothing from her except confirmation of her welfare, and Shufu, who fusses over her in lieu of outright affection. She would give them up for nothing or no one, except for them. For a while, she had thought about how—but no, that is to be put out of mind, now. Lan Wangji is returned to the fold, and she slots back into Gusu Lan like a borrowed text, returned to their library.

Lurking in her mind, however, there are ghosts. In the space of the Jingshi, she remembers her lean-to, barely shelters from the hot wind that drove dust like needles into exposed flesh; she remembers the cave, where their bed was nothing more than a few layers of discarded cloth, how their moss had cushioned them like the softest mattress. In the glen of her rabbits, she finds the remnants of vegetables left by sweet young Lans—and a shadow, of A-Yuan, indulged by family that starved themselves to keep him full. Precious and adored. Yet her rabbits had the better diet.

Shame fills her, to feel cognizant for the first real time of poverty, and the comparative excess of Gusu Lan, for all its strictures. Is it righteousness, really, to cordon ourselves off in their idyll, while the world starves? How much of her own goodness is only ignorance, cultivated and privileged?

Wei Wuxian, lying next to her under a moonless sky, saying, thoughtlessly, it’s funny isn’t it, how I always end up digging for scraps? Like the rest of it’s just some aberration. Like I’m meant to be this stray thing rooting in the trash. And laughing, and falling asleep, like what she said was nothing.

There is no denying the other sect leaders, Xichen says. There are…grievances, he says with his kind eyes, as if it were all some grand misunderstanding. She knows it isn’t, and that Xichen will reserve judgment until the very end. Both the privilege and the burden of being Lan zongzhu. She does not envy him the title.

Within a week, they gather—Lan, Jin, Nie, Jiang. And the smaller sects, the ones decimated by Qishan Wen, and the ones who betrayed Qishan Wen at the very end. Ouyang, Yao, all the sects that cling to the skirts of power. Chief Cultivator Jin Guangshan presides like the loudest jay in a tree. She knows it now, how these are not people to be trusted; echoes of past scenes, the blackening of Wei Wuxian’s name by everyone who should thank her, cast shadows over the people before her.

She dresses, light blues and whites and creams, her most ostentatious lace overlay, as if going into battle.

The Lan reception hall does not have a raised dais, or a focal table; during wedding feasts, the newly married couple sits with one side half the meal, and moves halfway through, in order to better honor each family. Jin Guangshan is thus thwarted, and sits across from a dour Shufu, who cannot stand him.

The right of the central alley holds Jin Guangshan and Jin Guangyao with Jin Zixun behind them; a glowering Nie Mingjue with Nie Huaisang at hand, fanning himself. The left has Shufu and Xichen, Jiang Wanyin sitting alone and sullen, with nervous young Jiang disciplies behind him, and Ouyang-zongzhu gossiping with Yao-zongzhu across their narrow tables. Lan Wangji sits behind her brother and uncle and tries to see no one at all.

She is unable, to her great misfortune, to ignore them completely.

It is not long before the torrent begins. The gathered cultivators have decided to air their grievances, and she is forced to endure.

“Wei Wuxian has no shame!”

“What would you expect, from the trumped-up daughter of a servant?”

“She curses us,” one Jin cultivator says, “injures our sect’s heir, slaughters our innocent disciples—when will she learn her place?”

“Outrageous,” Yao-zongzhu says.

“Abominable,” Ouzang-zongzu says.

“Of course, of course,” Jin Guangshan says, a slick smile spilled over his face. “Wei Wuxian has much to answer for. With our noble Lan Wangji has been returned to us, we can take up the matter once again.”

He gestures, open-handed, and Jin Guangyao takes the cue.

“Hanguang Jun,” he says, dimples frozen in place, “our most sincere pleasure that you have been restored to your home.”

Jin Guangyao is like a mirror; Xichen sees his own kindness reflected back, and loves him for it. Thus, even though the skin of her palms and the bottoms of her feet itch in indignation, she does not react. Her face might as well be stone.  This congregation of pampered cultivators, the same ones who lauded Wei Wuxian’s ingenuity, condemning her, might make her hot with anger. But she will not give them anything. She kneels, behind her brother and uncle, and says nothing.

“There are many concerns we share,” Jin Guangyao says, to the civilized mob before him. “But what has changed since she was last before us?”

He invites it, the tide of baseless accusations, and they pour in. Lan Wangji listens as the worst company of her acquaintance accuse Wei Wuxian of—outright nonsense.

“—she’s training up an army of demonic cultivators—”

“—the Wen dogs bide their time, but they try to take Qishan back, just wait—”

“—whoever strays into Yiling is assaulted—”

It continues. The counterpoint in her mind is Wen Ning, saying in his quiet way, they will never stop.

She stands. Nothing about Lan Wangji is inconspicuous, and attention turns her way.

“No, that is not what is occurring,” she says.

“What isn’t happening?” Nie Mingjue frowns at her. He has been silent until now.

“None of it,” she says, simply.

“What about Jin Zixun,” someone shouts, “she cursed him—we all saw!”

“That was not Wei Wuxian.” Calm, calm, she cultivates—the serene mind offers the best prudence.

“How would you know?” She does not keep track who speaks. They are, to her, one mass of hypocrisy.

“I have seen her chest bare,” she says, “and it is marked only with the scars from the Sunshot Campaign. There is no rebound curse on Wei Wuxian.”

 “If she isn’t raising an army, why escape with the Wen cultivators?” Yao-zongzhu says. “Why defect from Yunmeng Jiang, the sect that elevated her from nothing?”

What will you tell them about us, Lan Wangji? Wen Qing’s desperate eyes.

“The Wen survivors are no threat to anyone,” she says. “They live as farmers. The have no higher ambitions than a productive crop yield.”

Frustrated anger sours the air. She is not satisfying them, nor does she wish to.

“And how much did you see of the Yiling Laozu?” Nie Mingjue asks. “What do you say to the reports of more demonic cultivators?”

“I saw Wei Wuxian regularly. She has taken on no disciples, nor did I observe her instruct any individual in her cultivation methods while I was in residence.”

Nie Mingjue snorts at that. Jin Guangyao takes up the dropped thread once more.

“While we could never call into question Lan Wangji’s integrity,” he smiles to the gathered cultivators and turns to her, “there is only the question, of course, whether there were certain activities for which you were not present. That Wei Wuxian hid from your view.”

What is there to say to that? Nothing.

“However innocent she might have made herself seem,” Jin Guangyao says, “our concerns about her activities remain.”

Wei Wuxian, make herself appear innocent. Laughable—ridiculous. She would make herself a demon in the eyes of the world, if only to live without regrets.

Jin Guangshan smiles like oil film on water. “My dear girl, whatever you did or didn’t see, of course she hid her vile practices from you—most likely because of your own strong conscience and high reputation. If she could only seduce—convince you of her moral standing, then her evil actions could continue without issues, yes?”

Black is white, and white is black, he says.

“Wei Wuxian is an enemy of the cultivation world. Jiang Wanyin named her so himself. It’s admirable, your defense of her, but we must act on what we know to be the case.”

They will keep coming, they will all keep coming, Wei Wuxian says in her memory. She’s been a fool. Here, before her is the relentless onslaught, and everyone understood it but her.

“I cannot speak to what Jiang zongzhu has said. I only report that Wei Wuxian has taken none of the actions that are commonly spread as gossip. She is not training new cultivators in her methods, nor is she marshaling power of any kind that poses a threat to this community.”

“I observed far more of Wei Wuxian’s daily actions than anyone present. None—adamantly, I say, none of the crimes that have been described here were passably close to what I saw her do, every day.”

Someone, a voice to her right buried in the throng, interrupts: “she held you hostage, so obviously she is a—”

Her eyes find him, and, in a deeply inappropriate use of her Lan training, she silences him.

“Wangji!” Shufu says, turning to her.

“As I have come to understand from personal observation, this was a necessary maneuver in order to secure the liberty and safety of the community over which she presides. While I lived in the Burial Mounds, the borders were routinely attacked by cultivators who sought to pierce the wards created by Wei Wuxian. In direct violation of the agreement she made with the people gathered here at this moment.

“So,” she continues, “I must again assert that Wei Wuxian is guilty of none of what she has been accused by this body.”

The tumult that results cannot shake her nerves. It is as if her anger has given her roots, deep into the earth, extending all the way into the village of forests they brought to life.

“You have to understand, Lan Wangji,” Jin Guangshan says, “how difficult this is to understand, given her refusal to make peaceful arrangements regarding her weapon. The Tiger Seal remains—”

Against all discipline, against all principles of civilized discourse drilled into her from the moment she began to speak, she interrupts him.

“The Tiger Seal is no more,” she says. “Wei Wuxian destroyed it.”

Wei Wuxian had ridden her hand with arms bound behind her back, struggling to keep her balance. Lan Wangji enjoyed it very much, the struggling. Underneath them, the hungry energy in the earth coiled like a snake, even as Wei Wuxian obeyed. A docile pet in her lap.

“Ah,” Wei Wuxian gasped, blinking hard when Lan Wangji’s fingers, three deep, curled inside her. “Ah, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan…”

Her sight cleared, and she swallowed, audible in the quiet of the dusk. “Are you, are you ready?”

She wasn’t talking to Lan Wangji. Instead, Wei Wuxian addressed them, her ghosts, the ones who remained. Her old companions, who loved her, who hated her, who raged with her and at her, fed off her and stroked her flesh when Wei Wuxian would let no else touch her. They, who have been the company that Lan Wangji had not been.

The four of them, in jade and violent, pink and blue, caressed her back. When they touched Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji felt the death chill of them.

“Ready?” Wei Wuxian said. Still seated around Lan Wangji’s fingers, wet and dripping.

“Yes,” they said, the last time Lan Wangji heard them. The airless hiss of falling cloth. Soothing, like falling water.

The Tiger Seal lay on a low blackened stump. It had been howling at them, the whole of the sultry afternoon. Even Lan Wangji felt its hunger, as she poured golden light into Wei Wuxian’s every attempt at orgasm. She has waited, now, tracing the edge, walking the precipice, for hours, and for hours the Tiger Seal beckoned, yearned, snapped with hungry jaws to be fed.

Lan Wangji didn’t know what they had done, really. If she had been back in Cloud Recesses, maybe some forbidden text would have told her about this kind of cultivation, and might have explained how they made a cauldron for life out of their bodies. Wei Wuxian had walked her way over her ground, and Lan Wangji had followed, and the land they had remade waited, prepared, for this moment.

In the future, Lan Wangji could not describe what they did. When she asked about the forging of the Tiger Seal, Wei Wuxian talked in metaphor: I made myself a river, and everything poured into it through me. Cultivation, the directed flow of energy. Any energy, it turned out. The unmaking of the Tiger Seal overwhelmed her, overwhelmed them both; for hours, there was no Lan Wangji and no Wei Wuxian, only the channels carefully carved by and through their meridians. Pure feeling.

The only memories she had other than total whiteout were of the ghosts, Wei Wuxian’s ghosts. They were, when the cycle began, waiting—they were ready, their goodbyes said. Each of them, in turn, was consumed where they stood in the clearing, ringed around the blackened stump, and as Lan Wangji lost herself to the flow, she saw small shoots where they stood before. They looked—at peace.

After, they came to in full moonrise, the silent dead of night. Wei Wuxian cried, quietly, on her breast, and Lan Wangji felt the thin tears fall and roll over her skin. Lan Wangji stroked her hair.

She told her, “this isn’t the end of them.”

“It’s sweet of you to say so,” Wei Wuxian mumbled into her neck.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

The dawn brought the familiar sight of explosive life, riotous verdant life. Ringed around the stump there were three trees, or four: pear and plum and twinned cherry. They were old and ancient and wide, too wide for the two of them to embrace.

Wei Wuxian whistled where she lay, a counterpart harmony to her haunting melodies. The branches of the trees stretched out to her. Beyond them, vines sprouted and slithered to curl around her ankles. It was not core magic, nor was it the harnessed energy of the dead. Something else—something they made, the two of them. The Burial Mounds teemed with life, cycling through decay and rebirth, again and again, fecund and blossoming. It was their work, reverberating through the land—the Burial Mounds now an energy well of something quite new.

The cresting wave crashes around them. Everyone speaks at once.

“Nonsense.”

“How could you—”

“You couldn’t know that…”

“What if she lied? Why would you trust anything—”

“I bet it’s just hidden.”

“A light show for its ‘destruction.’”

“Who knew Lan Wangji to be so gullible…”

She waits until the chatter is nothing but eddies around her ankles.

She says: “I was there. I saw it destroyed.”

“What…how was it destroyed?” Nie Huaisang, fluttering his pale sage fan before his mouth.

“It couldn’t be, without the kind of energy dispersion that we would—that any cultivator sensitive enough—would notice!”

She says, “I was present as the Tiger Seal was consumed.”

She wonders how much to say. Maybe this has been too much—if the Tiger Seal were the threat keeping the cultivation world out, would they not just redouble their attacks? Or would the loss of it be enough, finally enough, to let them alone?

The land remembers, she thinks. What they have created is something new. And maybe that can be enough, for their community to cling and take hold and flourish.

What to say, then, to the hostile sects that seek Wei Wuxian’s violent end? Even Xichen says nothing, even Shufu says nothing. Let alone any of the cultivators who have profited from Wei Wuxian’s work, from her body, from her life, only to remain silent while the world thirsts for her blood. The truth, then, in the face of this yearning—how could it hold up? The mob before her wants blood and flesh and teeth spilled on the ground, and they will not stop, not until the old, the infirm, A-Yuan and Wei Wuxian, have been run through with swords.

The only path forward is the truth. The truth, maybe, could deflate the swelling violence like air from a bladder. Hissing and undignified but dissipated into nothing.

“The dead of the Burial Mounds have been liberated. Their spirits have been cleansed, and their resentful energy removed from them,” she says. “The same mechanism by which Wei Wuxian liberated the masses of the dead has remade the Tiger Seal into something else.”

“Nonsense,” someone says.

“An absurd fiction,” another says.

“Made up,” yet another says.

“It is well within reason,” she says. “As we saw in the Sunshot Campaign, Wei Wuxian’s innovations worked, even if by principles considered heretical—resentful energy can be harnessed and employed just as we use the spiritual energy generated by our cores.”

She does not look at Jiang Wanyin, who sits, silent as carved marble. It takes effort. She had not asked, except through a series of roundabout questions. They had not agreed, she and Wei Wuxian, about any of it.

“But death is consonant with life, and a resilient and innovative cultivator could reconcile this mass of resentful energy, transform it into something living. which Wei Wuxian has done.” Alone, she implies, but feels sure that this minor deception falls within the bounds of prudence.

“Hah!” Ouyang-zongzhu scoffs. “Wei Wuxian, do what no one could? Generations have tried to exorcize the Burial Mounds, and all failed.”

“Yes,” she agrees, “Wei Wuxian has done what no one else is capable of.”

Lan Wangji is not politic, by nature. She has never sought to change the opinions of her peers. But they should respect—respect and fear—Wei Wuxian.

The Burial Mounds is no longer itself. Or, it has become fully itself—Wei Wuxian has made a paradise of a cemetary, the seething, roiling power of the dead now become the regular flush of sap and fluid and decay, a machine of perpetual motion. The land flourishes, living off the dead. And it remembers her, in the way that it can.

“Thus,” she continues, “my recommendation to all sect leaders present is this: a pact of nonaggression between yourselves and the Wen refugees who live under Wei Wuxian’s protection.”

The tumult, the chatter, bubbles and spits like simmering stew.

She says, overcoming the babble of nonsense, “the only barrier to peace that exists, now, is the continued breaking of previous agreements.”

What she will remember from what follows is not the continued statements, nonsense, of the minor sects jockeying for power; instead it is the harsh silence of those who could, and did not say anything. Many other things happen, of course. But Lan Wangji, who has never pretended at a forgiving nature, will remember their cowardice. The cultivators who eat without thought, who would condemn the Wens to the cruel death of starvation. She can feel Wei Wuxian’s ribs under her fingers, the blades of her collarbones; in her mind, she watches every adult at the table add to A-Yuan’s emptying bowl.

Jin Zixuan’s arrival is a boon, a fortunate one, that she could not expect. It is, from a distant point of view, a much better scene of support that his initial attempt on the Qiongqi Path, given that no one is currently attempting to murder anyone else. Wan and pale, his father and brother protest his arrival, but with that earnest belief in the importance of his own opinion, Jin Zixuan leans on Suihua in the center of the hall and demands an audience. He speaks for himself, for his wife, to say that—“it’s, it’s all gone wrong, but. She is still—” he gasps, and Lan Wangji realizes how serious his wound must have been, to keep him in recovery until now.

“She is Yanli’s family, and so must be mine as well. And Jin Ling’s.”

The Jins themselves devolve into a volley of internal accusations, but now the dam is broken. It is not Lan Wangji, the gullible, seduced hostage, who speaks alone. It is two, maybe three, who would advocate for Wei Wuxian.

Jin Guangyao sits statue-still for half a minute, then moves to whisper to Jin Guangshan under the cover of argument.

Nie Mingjue, who has watched Lan Wangji since she first stood, says, “you don’t think her a danger.”

“No,” she says.

The Jingshi, when she returns that evening to disrobe and bathe and free herself of the politics she so loathes, rests peaceful and quiet. Her haven.

It was a strange, tortured choice, to reside here. Shufu objected, of course, but even Xichen had cautioned her against it—too many memories, he said. Would it not be better to live in a…nicer place?

It has been hers since she was fifteen years old; it is where she imagined bringing Wei Wuxian, after the Sunshot Campaign, hiding her away and healing her and—keeping her. Her impotent, cruel wish, which now she wonders at. To become her father reborn, but convinced that this time, it was the righteous, the compassionate thing to do, to lock away her love where no one could touch her.

Her mother lived out her days here, in the Jingshi. She had no company but the monthly visits of her barely conversant children, and the silent, slow-growing trees that shade the house. To keep Wei Wuxian here, hidden from the world, forced to silence, forced to abandon every person who needed her help—it is a nausea, overwhelming, to even think of it.

Besides, did Wei Wuxian not do that for herself, and on her own terms? Exiled, hidden, protected, as much as she can be. Lan Wangji’s protection would have been worth so little, in comparison to what Wei Wuxian was able to make on her own. And how she would have regretted it, she thinks. Trapping Wei Wuxian in a cage.

Afterward, Shufu comes to visit her. The cultivators left, all of them but Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao. Xichen’s sworn brothers and he depart for the waterfalls one morning, to sit in meditation with one another before arriving at consensus. It is, she assumes, her brother’s notion.

Shufu, beloved uncle. He approaches her, and they share tea. Their common silence has always been a comfort to her; she assumes, to both of them. But now, he is worried, and straight-backed in his worry. The crease between his eyebrows deepens.

“Wangji,” he says, after they sip at white jasmine tea. She expects it, and finds it within herself to love him, deeply and warmly, for his concern. “Remember your precepts. You shall not associate with evil.”

She remembers that warm deep love, and says with the greatest compassion she is able: “Shufu. What is good, and what is evil?”

She bows her head to the ground, as he paces the room with agitation, but she continues nonetheless. “Shufu, I have watched her and judged her, and I believe only that she has made good out of the deepest evil, repeatedly. What she has done with the Wens, in the Burial Mounds, should not be condemned. Not by anyone, but especially by Gusu Lan.”

Their argument is long and loud, but she persists. How could she do anything else? Xichen will be kind but will not hear. It is only Shufu who she might convince—that the good thing is right here, at hand, and will slip through their fingers if they cannot act.

“The Burial Mounds have been a cauldron of the resentful, angry dead for centuries,” she tells him, when he pauses his recitation of precepts one seventy six through three sixteen, which mainly treat the matter of irreputable individuals. “But Wei Wuxian has liberated them, siphoned off their resentment and transformed it back into fertile life once more. There is nothing that could be more aligned with our purpose, our precepts, or the principles on which Gusu Lan is founded.”

Sometimes, Lan Wangji realizes, a person does not understand their own thoughts until spoken aloud. Conversation, she thinks, the way Wei Wuxian has it, using her voice to tease out this thought and that. She always thought it excessive and ungoverned, that a person should know themselves, know their own thoughts, before voicing their opinions aloud. But, just now, she hears herself speak and she understands..

Shufu, her beloved Shufu, more of a parent than any person she has known, continues to vituperate—but his objections, she knows, are not anything that cannot, will not, be overcome by time.

She said it herself, and she heard herself say it. The hearing of it made it real.

To fulfill their shared ideals: to stand with justice, to live with no regrets. She said it aloud; she cannot unknow herself. To leave them alone, unprotected, would be to become…the callous, the cowards she has herself condemned. To be Lan, as she has always known it, is to leave and to care for the refuse that the cultivation world has discarded without thought.  

She will not return as she had arrived, with nothing but weapons and instrument to her name. Cloud Recesses boasts of resources that could help a hundred burgeoning communities thrive, and she raids their stocks with the surety of a disciple born to it. Bags of seed, and she selfishly includes her favorite vegetables, packed deep in a qiankun pouch; fertilizer, cooking bowls, and rectangular chopping knives. Every item she can find that she heard Granny, or any of the uncles, yearn for. Bolts of cloth, used for hangings and tablecloths and runners, that will not be missed. Gauze, herbs, needles, and glass vials, for Wen Qing; grass toys, a wooden sword, a five string qin, for A-Yuan.

The last she gathers is for no one but—herself. Or, if it is for Wei Wuxian, it will be for them. She hopes, but does not expect. It is enough to be prepared.

The silk rope, an undyed cream, is buried as deep as she can manage.

When she departs, Shufu understands, but Xichen does not. Throughout her youth, it had been the opposite.

“He can—believe several people at once,” she said to Wei Wuxian, one night. “I have never developed the skill.”

Wei Wuxian laughed at her, but it was not a mocking laugh. They rolled around on their grass and kissed, and kissed, and kissed, in the shelter of the moon.

Later, Wei Wuxian rolled onto her side and gazed at her, dark eyed in the night. “Maybe you can’t match him in that, but I would rather have you, judging me, telling me every little thing I’ve done wrong, for all the world.”

A ghost haunts Yiling, a ghost named Lan Wangji.

If nothing else, she thinks, I can be a broker for peace. I can reside in Yiling. I can…negotiate. An awful thought, truly, given her first attempt with Jin Guangshan, but at the very least, she would be present and unable to be ignored or dismissed. She thinks that this might be acceptable, to her Wei Ying. She needn’t be there, with her, where she is not wanted. Lan Wangji will only—help, as she is able.

An odd place she finds herself. A no man’s land of duty. She cannot know, and not be there; but she cannot intrude, not without welcome. And so Lan Wangji, so used to the well-defined categories of her society, lives on the fringe. If she must be the last of Wei Wuxian’s ghosts, she will be.

It is a nontrivial number of cultivators she has encountered in or near Yiling. She asks their purpose and remains quiet; faced with the sheer force of silence, the slinking people she finds prevaricate, or attack, or flee. All of which are within the realm of what Lan Wangji, most honorable daughter of her generation, is able to handle without strenuous effort.

When she left Cloud Recesses, the sects were in conflict, letters flying in and out with a rapidity unknown since the end of the war effort. Her stand left Gusu Lan in an awkward position, but even beyond her own sect, the larger consensu has fractured by herself, by Jin Zixuan. Gusu Lan will, categorically, believe their own disciple, even though Xichen blinked at her with confusion and wondered if she could be quite sure, Wangji, whether the Jin attacks had really occurred? Lan Wangji maintained to him, yes, and that yes, the remaining Wens posed no threat to anything that wasn’t a vegetable pest.

Xichen did not raise the matter in conjunction with Wei Wuxian, but he did mention, how A-Yao is concerned about continued funding of the efforts to rebuild the library.

“Brother,” she said, unsure of how to continue. If she could live a life without this, the maneuverings of sect politics, she would gladly forgo all their conveniences. “This money cannot come with strings unattached.”

“Is it possible, Wangji, that your distaste for the sect has become a distaste for their support?” His knowing smile would frustrate her at another time, when he had seen her too clearly. It hurt, now, when he cannot see her at all.

“Jin Guangshan seeks to become a power no one can oppose without repercussion,” she said, because she did not have the skill of softening her blows. “Jin Guangyao aids him in this. They will corrupt Gusu Lan if you let them—as has already begun.”

“Do you really believe this?” He said, with very sincere concern.

“I do,” she said. “Your good nature will not be difficult to take advantage of.”

She did not say—you became their mouthpiece, the medium for their threat.

“Even if it takes decades, Gusu Lan can rebuild,” she said. “You should not believe their intentions to be pure.”

They did not agree, even as calm as quiet as their final discussion was. Lan Wangji stated her concerns, and her dear brother, who still believed her a little bit excitable, a little bit dramatic, listened. With a sinking feeling, Lan Wangji realized that Jin Guangyao had become more credible than herself in her brother’s mind.

“Be well,” Lan Xichen said, with his soft kind eyes, “and careful, for my sake.”

Now, in Yiling, she stays in an inn, the Peony that Falls, and skirts the edges of the Burial Mounds, and waits for news from any direction.

She is grateful, oddly enough, for the reports of a yao on the northern side of the territory. Lan Wangji assigns herself a set of disciplines for that relief, found in the suffering of others, that she meditates on in a handstand afterward. But long before that, she night hunts, old muscles unused since before Jin Zixuan was first attacked. The yao, skape grown fat on the angry corpse of a murdered landlord, has terrorized a smattering of small villages, and Lan Wangji stalks it.

What is different, now, than ever before? Nothing really. Lan Wangji is Lan Wangji; she is Hanguang Jun, and when she appears in the midst of chaos, she will end it, one way or another. For Lan Wangji herself, it is a reprieve, for she has never felt more herself than during her yao hunt now. Her every impulse, toward justice, toward violence, toward discipline and knowledge, converging toward one common purpose. How good it is that she is here—and that she has this to do.

The yao laughs at her, and snaps its overgrown jaws; it has climbed a tree, as if that could save it. In the back of her mind, she feels, rather than hears, a low whistle, a surge of urgent growth, but Lan Wangji knows her purpose—and how easy, too easy, it is to behead the skate, once it finds itself bound with emergent vines.

It is Wei Wuxian, standing behind the skate that keeps her from jumping gracefully out of the dark green blood spurt that erupts from the lizard yao’s empty neck. Blood spatters at her, on her, and Lan Wangji lets it hit.

“Ah, haha, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says.

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says, pregnant with a thousand unsaid statements.

“Ha, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this filthy,” Wei Wuxian says, meaning nothing by it. Even if Lan Wangji wishes, fervently, for innuendo. “You didn’t even try to dodge! I swear, you can’t get stains like that out of your robes.”

Wei Wuxian is beside her, before her, pinching green stained cloth with two fingers.

“Yes,” Lan Wangji agrees. She would agree to anything. It has been—well. Nearly a moon. Summer is almost at its end; the melons have passed their peak season, turning from crisp and bright into their pale, mealy shadows. All things fade; but many things recur.

“Are you here for—haha, Lan Zhan, what am I asking?” Wei Wuxian bats at her nose, and Lan Wangji aches at it.

It is—everything about her, she realizes. Full, flush face, well fed; bright eyes, unshadowed. A Wei Wuxian she knew, before, here again, twirling her tassled flute and circling Lan Wangji while shoots of green growth sprout around her feet, reaching for her, aching for her.

“Hanguang Jun,” she says, conspiratorial. “Here to rid our villages of their demons.”

She jokes, but Lan Wangji is included, somehow. Lan Wangji has never understood how that worked, exactly, only that she understood when she was excluded from it, the object of scorn. When Wei Wuxian first came to Cloud Recesses she had thought she was the same—but no, she soon knew it wasn’t that, not the casual cruelty of the young, that made her veins burn, her fingers grip hard, her heart clench in an ache she didn’t want to understand.

“Lan Zhan, I can’t leave you like this,” Wei Wuxian laughs, and Lan Wangji hopes. “You can—come on, follow me, we’ll get you cleaned right up. Even if we can’t get out the stains.”

Lan Wanghi, guiltily, agrees—is this not why she has haunted Yiling for weeks? And adds a set of precepts to her growing punishment, for the defense of the innocent should be a purpose unto itself, not an…excuse to see. A person.

Wei Wuxian, leading her southward, threading through the dense thicket of forest, much of which parts for her without prompting, asks her, “Oh, Lan Zhan. Are you why our borders are so quiet? If so, I have to thank you—a lot more sleep, I’ve been getting, haha.”

“I could not do much,” Lan Wangji says, thinking of her bare performance before the hungry crowd of cultivators.

“But?” Wei Wuxian asks. “Come on, Lan Zhan, you didn’t do much but you did…what?”

“I did speak,” Lan Wangji says. The woven forest ahead is coming apart; beyond, she sees land she recognizes, and that recognizes her. “The sects gathered for a meeting, and I spoke against the violation of the treaty.”

She had not realized—the pulse of it, the land, when she steps back inside the border, how it grips her and holds her and never wishes to let her go. I don’t want that either, she thinks, and steadies her gait.

“Ah, Lan Zhan! You’re too good,” Wei Wuxian laughs, ahead of her, back on familiar ground. “How are you so good? I bet they hated that.”

“It was not received with pleasure, no,” she says.

Wei Wuxian laughs, delighted. “If I could be a fly on the wall, watching them dash themselves against you—well, better that I wasn’t there, yeah?”

Her steps are light and her voice is light, and Lan Wangji is alight, following her. The distance feels like nothing—as if Lan Wangji could follow her, laughing, until time ends, and be content.

“Here,” Wei Wuxian says, proudly, when they round a bend to a familiar waterfall—one that had been little more than a trickle, at the beginning, and now falls heavy on the ground, sending up a thick cloud of mist. The edges of the pool sparkle with droplets of dew.

“You can jump in, if you want,” she points to the shallow pool, maybe thigh deep at most, “or, well. A bath.”

It is one of her very own water barrels, before her—repurposed, happily for bathing. She examines it; the talismans on its sides have the distinct character of Wei Wuxian’s calligraphy, that she knows and adores, and if she has to guess, she would name them heating talismans. The water falls clear and cool from the cliff face. It’s the work of a minute to drag her barrel under, until full, and shove it with full body weight out of the onslaught.

Within the mist of the waterfall, a steaming bath, she disrobes and steps in, shrouded in a fog cloud for modesty. Although she doesn’t need it, not from Wei Wuxian.

“Ah, alright, Lan Zhan,” she hears Wei Wuxian shout, as her robes slide down her shoulders, her back, “I’ll just—wait here, alright? I’ll get you, uh, fresh clothes.”

Once clean, she rises, and the water sluices over her skin in an echo of the waterfall behind her. Outside the white mist that hangs over the plunge pool, Wei Wuxian sits cross-legged on a jutting rock, twirling Chenqing in her fingers. A folded set of spare robes rests next to her. Lan Wangji ignores them and stands before her, bare and waiting.

Wei Wuxian’s strangled attempt at speech is swallowed in the roar of the waterfall. It does not matter—for when they see each other, when their eyes meet, no words are needed.

Their hands on each other, and their mouths slipping against each other, are urgent. They tug, pull each other to the ground, and grasp each other, their embrace wordless and frantic and necessary. They find each other, old friends and lovers. Wei Wuxian wraps the tail of her ribbon around a wrist and tugs, and laughs, and kisses her more and more and more.

Lan Wangji rolls her underneath; Wei Wuxian still smells of exertion, that deep musk most pungent on her nape, under her arms, at the hot juncture of her legs. Lan Wangji wants to live in it, to choke on the thick smell of her. She licks at it, an armpit, and Wei Wuxian squeals, screams almost, and pleads, “no, Lan Zhan, no there—I’m filthy,” but Lan Wangji continues. Licks at her like a contented cat, surely and slowly, feeling her smug delight at the taste of Wei Wuxian on her tongue. Wei Wuxian begs, as their bodies slide slick against each other, legs threaded together; Lan Wangji can’t tell which of them is wetter. Wei Wuxian begs, but she doesn’t know what for, over and over, “please Lan Zhan, please,” the culmination of so many fantasies, too shameful to count. Wei Wuxian begs, and Lan Wangji overwhelms her, sucking dark marks into her skin and sinking her teeth in pliant flesh—need, she needs, it is what they both need.

As Lan Wangji paints bruises on her skin, Wei Wuxian cries and laughs and smiles. “Ah Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan,” her mantra, “you’re good, so good.”

Lan Wangji pinches her nipple, pulling a deep scream from inside her. When she responds, her voice is thick, her throat tight. “You are—good. There is no one better.”

“No,” Wei Wuxian says.

“Good,” Lan Wangji says, digging her nails in. “Wei Ying is good.”

“Stop,” she pleads, “stop talking.”

Lan Wangji reaches under head to take a fistful of hair, tight against Wei Wuxian’s scalp. “You have to take it—you can take it.”

Wei Wuxian thrusts against her slippery thigh, desperate for a disappearing friction, and Lan Wangji lets her. “You need to take it,” she whispers, which might be the last sensible thing either of them manage for quite a time after.

Lan Wangji, walking the familiar paths of Cloud Recesses, had teased out a confession she would never deliver—Wei Ying, you are incomparable. Ideal. Immense. Without you, I would search the earth for anyone as good, as just, as you, and I would find the world lacking. If you would only let me have you. Please, let me—I will bind you and fuck you and serve you, for however long you allow.

Detangling that knot of threads, have and want, trap and free—how to love, without her love being oppression.

She says none of it now; even the protective shade of night cannot draw it from her. Deep in her breast below muscle and sinew and bone, she still flinches at herself, at her all-consuming hunger, that wants to grab and hold and never let go. She sees it, that dark impulse, and she recognizes it. She holds it in her palm, and considers it—a seed, with sprouting tendrils that want to bury themselves in her skin. She wants, and wants, and wants. And she is afraid of it.

They come, just as they are, thrusting inelegantly against each other. Lan Wangji swallows Wei Wuxian’s low moan with her mouth. They do not let go, and they sleep, curled around each other, sticky with sweat and come. Their flesh does not object; nor do they.

Their entrance the next morning, walking the back path southward, into the settlement causes no little commotion, not least because A-Yuan, for better or worse, is the first to see them. If Lan Wangji uses her gifts as a shield against questions, even the gentlest of them, at least the supplies she brings are well received. But, she knows, beyond her own discomfort these are matters of, well, life and death for the Wen. And for Wei Wuxian, although she seems to have slipped away when the crowd drew in.

The tenuous peace she reports lets them breathe. When you expect the worst, even neutrality feels like a blessing. They do not ask—although she assumes she will be, by Wen Qing—how long she stays. Or anything to do with her, really.

She finds Wei Wuxian in their cave, once more.

“You never did say,” Wei Wuxian says, “what was decided. About us.”

An ‘us’ that does not include Lan Wangji.

“The matter was settled to no one’s satisfaction,” she says. “Jin Zixuan pled your case as well, so not even the Jins could present a united front.”

“Huh,” Wei Wuxian says, tapping at her temple.

“The attacks on your border are treated as—mistakes,” she says. “Miscommunication.”

Wei Wuxian laughs at that.

“I do not know what Jin Guangshan plans next,” she says. “But they know the Tiger Seal is no more.”

“Well,” Wei Wuxian says, “maybe they’ll lose interest. If we’re quiet enough.”

“You will have my support,” Lan Wangji says, and does not include everything else of hers that Wei Wuxian has. “I will stay, in Yiling, as long as the incursions continue.”

Wei Wuxian startles at this. “What, stay?”

“Yes,” she says, because she knows better than to lie.

“Here?”

“I have patronized an inn in Yiling,” she says. “If you would prefer to have me elsewhere.”

“But you shouldn’t—you have other things,” Wei Wuxian says, “that you should be doing, right?”

“I do not.”

“I…Lan Zhan,” she says, voice creaking. “It’s not—you shouldn’t.”

Wei Wuxian steadies herself with a slow breath.

“It was a nice time,” she says, “last night, but. Uh, it’s not like you need to—”

“Was that all?” Lan Wangji is making a new habit of this, interruption.

If that were all it was, all it ever was—for companionship, or for dual cultivation, or even for pleasure alone, she needs to know. They have transformed a land saturated with death into fecund earth; they have pulled rain from the sky. She can hope, at least, for this.

Wei Wuxian seems surprised by her harsh tone. “I, yeah Lan Zhan, you don’t think it was nice, haha?”

Prevarication. She hates it with the sect leaders, and she hates it more in Wei Wuxian’s mouth. The sudden, urgent need to know—to hold confirmation either way immediately before her—overwhelms her better judgment.

She reaches for Wei Wuxian, who remains too surprised to pull back; she reins her in, by the back of the neck, and Lan Wangji holds her there while covering her mouth with a firm hand.

“Did you know, Wei Ying,” she says, “that I have wanted you since we were sixteen years old?”

Listening to herself, she sounds a thousand yards away, like hearing an echo from around a corner. She is, and isn’t, there.

“I wanted you. I lusted for you,” she says. “And I have had you, over and over, again and again. If that were all it was, wanting a nice time, do you not think it would be over now?”

Wei Wuxian’s reply is muffled by her hand, but she is not interested in listening.

“You were my first, and only, friend. I respected you. I wanted to help you,” she says, confession stripping her bare, “and I failed. I failed you so many times.”

Hot breath against her palm.

“I do not want to fail you again.”

All of this true, and real, but it isn’t—to put into words that immense feeling that fills her chest and crushes her and brings her alive.

“I want to stand with you,” she says, “together. I want to—be with you. Please, let me.”

Her soul, bare on the hard ground beneath their feet. Her heart, beating outside her chest. The beast within her howls, and she lets it.

Her hand drops from Wei Wuxian’s mouth. Her grip loosens.

“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, croakily, and swallows. Her lips are bitten-red and shine with spit. How easy it is to make a mess of her. How good she looks, undone.

“Lan Zhan,” she repeats, and reaches for her. Her hands find Lan Wangji’s in a clutching hold. "I—do you mean it?"

Her eyes search Lan Wangji's.

"How could I not?" Lan Wangji says. "You are the best person I have ever known."

"Lan Zhan!" she says, crying. “You’re so—stupid. I love you so much.”

She kisses her. It feels like home.

“I can’t believe you,” she says in between the press of their lips, “why would you—”

“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji whispers back.

“You’re such a sap,” she says, “the sappiest, the most—stupid, romantic person, how could you?”

Kissing, on and on, until the space between them disappears.

“My heart can’t take it,” she says. “Why did I fall in love with the sappiest person in the world?”

"I didn't give you a choice,” Lan Wangji says, and Wei Wuxian laughs and cries and kisses her. She keeps kissing her even while Lan Wangji lifts her up, easy as nothing, and carries her to their moss-cushioned bed.

The Burial Mounds cannot retain their name, but another does not come for many years hence. The land on which the Wens live is, now, fertile farming ground, a lush forest for foraging, a productive orchard. Wei Wuxian walks the length of it, and life yearns toward her. The people that live there want for nothing.

Hanguang Jun travels the land and liberates the desperate spirits, and she always, always returns.

“Do you miss them,” she asks, one day while they lie, naked, under the shade of their tree grove.

“I don’t know,” Wei Wuxian says. She’s quiet for a while. The wind rustles the leaves in gentle rhythm. “I felt them for so long—but it was rage, and pain, and cruelty. They were half me, and I was half them.’

“But I knew them. And they’re gone,” she says, with a half-smile.

“Here,” Lan Wangji says, thinking of their faces at the end.

“Yeah,” Wei Wuxian says, and reaches out for her hand. When they fall asleep, the branches above weave together to protect them from the sun, a haven of shade. They rest; they are at peace.

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