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含光君，他不会回来了。
Hanguang-jun, he won’t return.
我会等。
I will wait.
如果一生不回来呢？
What if he doesn’t return in this life?
等一生。
Then I will wait this whole life.
Once, Wei Ying had asked, “How did you wait so long, even knowing I might never come back?”
A rhetorical question, like so many of his questions. Lan Zhan, did you miss me? Lan Zhan, do you want to hold hands? Lan Zhan, do you want to kiss me? How badly, Lan Zhan? Come here and show me, I’m afraid you’ll need to demonstrate just how badly you want.
But the first time he had asked, the night Lan Wangji had met him on the outskirts of Gusu after ten too-long moons, he’d meant it, curled up naked with only the blanket of night covering him. Summer. He’d murmured into Lan Wangji’s skin like he half hoped that Lan Wangji was already asleep, the same way that someone would say I love you when they thought their beloved couldn’t hear.
Sleep had started to come in tidal pulls, but Wei Ying’s question had dragged Lan Wangji back to the shore. He tightened his arm around Wei Ying’s shoulders.
“Even if I believed you were never to return,” said Lan Wangji, “I had to know that I left no stone unturned.”
“Did you ever believe it? That I would never return?” Wei Ying had shifted his head to rest his chin on the pillow of his hands. He had been lying upon him, frightfully light for a grown man, cheek pressed against Lan Wangji’s oceanic heart. The crash of it against his ribs still sang in the aftermath of meeting bodies.
“No.”
“How?”
“I believed that you may return,” said Lan Wangji. “But I did not always believe that you would want to be found.”
“Ah.” Wei Ying had shifted closer, tucking his head beneath Lan Wangji’s jaw until his hair spread in a fan over his shoulder. “Ah, Lan Zhan. I’d never be able to hide from you. I can’t hide anything from you. Maybe I’d find you first and just follow you forever in your shadow. Your own ghost. That’s a little romantic, don’t you think?”
“You would hide, then.”
Wei Ying was quiet. “No,” he said softly. “Not that. I guess I would be surprised.”
“Surprised that I would find you?”
“Surprised that you would want to.”
“Wei Ying…”
“Because even in the beginning I was invisible,” said Wei Ying. He traced the raised scars of Lan Wangji’s iron brand. Time had silvered his skin there. “When we first met. I made myself invisible, but you saw me. And you looked for me. And you would find me.”
If not for anything else, Lan Wangji will always find Wei Ying, no matter the lifetime.
The letter comes during Lan Xichen’s first week out of seclusion.
“‘To his most distinguished Excellency,’ ha, not for long,” Wei Ying reads aloud, spread out on his stomach, “‘we hope this letter finds you well. I am writing from the town of Tangshan to request your attention for a matter most ominous.’ Oh! A case?” He falls silent as he reads the letter to himself, eyes flying up and down the page. Just earlier he’d been swinging his feet back and forth as he plowed his way through a volume of Du Mu poetry that Lan Wangji kept in his room. Now they still, aloft in the air like sprouting branches. “Hmm.”
Lan Wangji pauses where he tunes his guqin at his writing desk, resting his fingers over the strings to silence them. The hum comes to an abrupt stop. “Go on,” he says. “A case?”
“Seems like a simple one,” says Wei Ying. “‘Wouldn’t bother you if we had a choice, don’t think inexperienced cultivators would be able to handle it,’ aha! A cursed object? Oh wait, several cursed objects. A cursed house—okay, now they’re just panicking.”
“They need us to take care of a house full of cursed objects?”
“Looks like it. I guess they’re really worried if they wrote directly to you? Cursed objects mostly fall under disciple work. Thank you to his most distinguished Excellency once again,’ bunch of formalities, ‘hope you and’—oh! ‘Hope you and your husband are well.’ Aw, they wished me well, Lan Zhan, you hear that? That’s a surprise.”
“Mm. As they should.” Lan Wangji had already begun making plans to speak to Sizhui and the senior disciple class to look into this first, until that line. “It may be a good time to let Xiong Zhang act as Chief Cultivator on his own. The councils are resistant to change.”
“People are resistant to change in general, change is scary,” says Wei Ying. The letter rustles when he folds it together again—coarse paper, not fine and noiseless as gold leaf like the letters from Lanling. “I’ve watched them give you a hard time for—what has it been, two years now, after I’ve gotten back? You really have the patience of a dragon, Lan Zhan. But I still know that it will take time before everyone comes around to your brother sitting at the head of the table.”
“Xiong Zhang is more agreeable than I am.”
“Mm, see, that’s why people will miss you.” Wei Ying pulls his book of poetry back towards himself and flips to the page he left off on. “You’re honest. You tell them what you’re thinking.”
“My brother is not one to withhold his opinion, either.”
“Perhaps. But your brother is a politician. Politicians are always trickier.”
“I am not a politician, then.”
Wei Ying purses his lips and shakes his head. He seems to have given this a lot of thought. “No. You’re a vigilante.”
“...I see,” says Lan Wangji.
“A sexy vigilante. Vigilantes are inherently sexy, they’re mysterious,” Wei Ying explains patiently. When Lan Wangji simply regards him in pensive silence, he goes on, “I must have told you about this fantasy, Lan Zhan.”
“Hmm,” says Lan Wangji. He had not. Lan Wangji would remember. Whatever Wei Ying’s fantasy must be, Lan Wangji is certain that it is a far tamer rendition than whatever he himself has imagined.
“Really? Never? Wow, I’m really bad at this.” Wei Ying swings his feet back and forth again in thought. “Okay, well, we would be on a night hunt together—this was around the time right after we met Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen and apprehended Xue Yang together—and I would do something reckless, and you would do something equally dangerous to assist me. But, of course being you, you’d pull it off without so much as ruffling a fold in your robes or tangling a single lock of your hair. And then,” says Wei Ying with a flourish, “we would make out about it.”
As Lan Wangji had correctly figured: tame.
“After we apprehended Xue Yang,” he repeats, because it is the least arousing part of this fantasy, and Lan Wangji has a meeting in less than a quarter shichen.
“Vigilante justice is so sexy.”
“Elaborate on the fantasy part.”
Wei Ying blinks. “The making out was the fantasy. We would be covered in grass stains, or dirt, or be soaking wet from a lake, or be bloody, and we would look at each other and simultaneously arrive at the conclusion that we had to kiss. And then we would pull each other close and do exactly that. The end!”
“Hm.”
“Well, what did you have in mind?” Wei Ying asks. He’s using his supplicant voice, the one he slips into when he’s mocking the other sect leaders—it should be funny, but it sends blood thundering through Lan Wangji’s belly and his temples at the same time, every time. He should also be more embarrassed about it, but he is not. “Most Distinguished Excellency, you seem to disagree. Please be frank with me, you’re so very honest. Do tell this humble husband of yours where he is wrong.”
“Not wrong—never wrong,” says Lan Wangji. “Perhaps missing a few details.”
“Oh? Enlighten me, Lan Zhan.”
“Come here.”
And Lan Wangji enlightens him twice before he even has to leave for his meeting.
Tangshan is a full day’s flight on sword from Gusu, and upon landing, the evening sees their walk up the mountain to a remote village where the house of cursed objects stands. Wei Ying shakes out his robes, damp from the clouds, with one hand, refusing to let go of Lan Wangji with his other.
“Are you hungry?” Lan Wangji asks. “We flew all day.”
“I’m fine,” says Wei Ying. “We should be on our way, we don’t want anything in that house getting out. It’ll be way stickier if we have to rescue someone and break curses at the same time, you know how it is, Lan Zhan.”
“But are you hungry?”
“I,” Wei Ying looks like he’s about to protest again until Lan Wangji raises pointed eyebrows at him. “I guess a sesame shaobing would be nice?”
So Wei Ying gets a sesame shaobing, and also an oil swirl biscuit and sesame wafers, there are really so many snacks to choose from, but he insists what he has is enough and that Lan Wangji should have some, too.
“I ate before coming,” says Lan Wangji.
“Yeah, you had like, a wintermelon soup, and I suspect it didn’t even have tofu in it. Have the sesame wafer, good heavens, Lan Zhan.”
They walk, munching, through the cold spring mud at the foot of the mountains, through the brush and the hollyhock. A lone footpath cuts a spinal groove up the hills, and the light of the fading city and the half-moon casts it in blue, orange, blue, orange. A snake with warning colors. Wei Ying has brought Suibian, like he’s taken to doing lately, but it’s tucked into his belt. He holds Chen Qing at the ready.
“Is the letter with you?”
“Safe and sound right here.” Wei Ying pats his collars. “Say, Lan Zhan, this reminds me of something. Tell me if I’m remembering wrong.”
“Hm?”
“When we first started night hunting together. I mean—when I first finished schooling in Cloud Recesses, all the way back then. You, leaving with the Yin Iron, alone. Me, trying to catch up, getting thoroughly ignored the whole time. I was really annoying, wasn’t I?”
A smile tugs on Lan Wangji’s mouth. “You were persistent.”
“Good thing I was. You had no street smarts,” Wei Ying sniffs. “I’m glad that my advice to glean town gossip from winehouses and restaurants has always stuck with you, though.” The crackle of sesame biscuit chitters between them. “But mountains, evening, cursed things—all of this reminds me of the time we first subdued the Dancing Fairy Statue in Dafan Mountain.”
“It does.”
“The details are fuzzy now,” Wei Ying kicks a pebble on the path, and it races ahead of them before it follows the pull of gravity, tumbling back the way it came. “But I remember Nie Huai—Nie zongzhu being there, and then Jiang Cheng coming out from behind the statue, thinking he was so cool, with his element of surprise. And then we ran into—into Wen Qing. And we ended up in the Unclean Realm…” He trails off. “Those were good times.”
“Mm.”
“And then you disappeared,” Wei Ying says. “The next time I saw you, it was. Well, it was at.” He swallows dry around his biscuit.
“Nightless City.”
“Nightless City,” says Wei Ying.
“Things happen as things do,” says Lan Wangji. The claws of memory are never kind, have sliced at Lan Wangji until his flesh peeled away, and he pulls Wei Ying back from the snap of its teeth. “The past cannot be changed. I am thankful for the today it has given me.”
“Do you mean that, Lan Zhan?”
Lan Wangji squeezes his hand when Wei Ying steps on tufts of dry fennel in the path and his footing slips. He waits for him to right himself again, laughing sheepishly as he does.
“Of course.”
“You wouldn’t change anything about the past?” asks Wei Ying.
“I…” says Lan Wangji, rummaging for his words. “have learned that one can drown in the wish to change the past, and forget to live.”
“Ah.”
Lan Wangji had thought about it so many times that, every morning, he’d open his eyes and be shocked to find that his body hadn’t caved, hadn’t purpled with decay overnight, that he was still traitorously breathing. How he could have changed things, how different everything might look if he had done something different. How far back did his mistakes begin? He should have been beside Wei Ying at Nightless City, if only to strike the blade that would sink into Jiang Yanli’s heart. Earlier: he should have begged Wei Ying harder when he encountered him in Yiling to go back to Gusu with him, A-Yuan and refugees and all; he would find a way, because that’s what people in love did. Earlier: he should have stopped him on Qiongqi Dao that night in the storm, and told Wei Ying that Lan Wangji would die before he could kill him. Earlier: he should have known, when Wei Ying smiled down at Suibian with that horrible melancholy in the Yiling Supervisory Office, three months starved with nothing behind the eyes.
Earlier.
“I have reconciled that the past had to happen the way it did,” he clarifies, “to have such a gift of a present.”
“Hmm. So you would change the past if you knew things would still end up like they are today?”
Lan Wangji would wake up with his back throbbing and his mouth dry as fine ash and wonder, would earlier have changed it? If Jiang Yanli hadn’t died, would Wei Ying have thrown himself from the cliff? If he’d stopped Wei Ying on Qiongqi Dao, would Wei Ying have used Chen Qing against him? If he’d begged, if he’d known, if he’d done everything right—?
“Perhaps. But perhaps things would not be as they are today if I did.”
Wei Ying hums thoughtfully. “A question whose answer is simply another question.”
“Mm. It does not do to dwell in that cycle.”
“My husband is so wise,” Wei Ying says. “You’re right, Lan Zhan. It doesn’t do.”
They make the rest of their trek in gentle silence, Wei Ying finishing his oil swirl, his wafers, his biscuit, wiping his palms on the seat of his robes before Lan Wangji can procure him a handkerchief. The mountain village finally comes into view where the land levels, squatting like a child at the edge of a pond looking for tadpoles to race. Sleepy firelight flickers in curtained windows.
Wei Ying relinquishes his hold on Lan Wangji’s hand when they locate the village head in a tumbledown hut with a brick oven in the front yard, handing Chen Qing to him so that he can dig in his robes for the letter. The light of the moon turns the grizzled village head’s hair white where he huddles beside Wei Ying, squinting with confusion through his spectacles until recognition dawns upon him.
“You are the venerable Excellency, the Chief Cultivator!” he says, clouded eyes huge.
“Ah, no,” Wei Ying says, chuckling. “That would be my husband. Lan Zhan?”
“Thank you!” the village head exclaims, folding his hands and bowing so low that Lan Wangji worries that his back will give. “We did not think you would even receive the letter, never mind read it, never mind care to come. We were wrong to doubt you, your Excellency, we are most indebted—”
“Please, at ease.” Lan Wangji touches the village head’s hands so that he will straighten. “It is our duty. Where is the house of cursed objects mentioned in your letter?”
Even farther up the mountain. Not by much, but enough that they can’t see it from the rocky village on the pass. It sits in the tangled gloom of trees overgrown, on a path that has clearly not been tread upon for a while now. They thank the village head, who wrings his hands on the edge of the huts until the darkness swallows them whole.
“Be careful!” he calls after them. “They say the inventor who lived there was mired in regret and grief for his lost beloved. There might be ghosts!”
“There better be ghosts, or else this will be so boring,” Wei Ying chunters.
The trees make a checkerboard out of the evening. Wei Ying has taken Lan Wangji’s hand again, face flashing in and out of broken shards of moon. “Bit of a recluse, this one, huh,” he finally says, breath coming hard. This climb is steep.
“Can you manage?” asks Lan Wangji.
“Yep, I’m fine!” Wei Ying chirps. “Just—maybe a little slower, Lan Zhan.”
“Mm.”
Then they round the corner, and the house in question raises its head in surprise at visitors. It has seen better days. Once, perhaps in its youth, it might have been crushed cherry red, cheerful in the way that only twigs and overgrown rangoon creeper and finch droppings could be. Now, it’s a burnt husk. One side of the house has been torn away, as if bitten, and the rawness had never healed. Around them the smell of rotting leaves settles on their clothes.
“Here we are,” says Wei Ying quietly. “Not really much of a looker, I think.”
“No, not at all.”
They stand before the house and take it in.
“Wei Ying, Chen Qing.”
Wei Ying misses, fingers brushing along Lan Wangji’s wrist as he takes his flute back. “Do you sense any resentment?”
“Not yet.”
“Neither do I, which I dislike.” In Lan Wangji’s leveled silence, he says, “Oh, I always would much rather feel the resentful energy upfront, Lan Zhan. It means that whatever the problem is hasn’t gone to the trouble of also concealing itself. Hidden things are more worrisome, because they expect something to come. They lie in wait for you.”
“Mm.” Lan Wangji taps his thumb twice on the backs of Wei Ying’s knuckles where their hands are still joined, soft roots which have grown together. “Do you want me behind you or beside you for this?”
Wei Ying’s hand tightens in his immediately. “Beside.”
“Then let’s go.”
The glass of the folding doors is cataract-grey, watching them owlishly as they come, and Wei Ying lifts Chen Qing to rap on the door. “Just to check, you never know,” he says, when Lan Wangji blinks in question. “Sometimes resentful energy will respond to sound, it’s better if those sounds aren’t your footsteps into their territory.”
Nothing responds to them, so Wei Ying puts his hands to the doors and pushes. They fold in his hands crisp as old leaves, and then they push their unwelcome way inside.
Immediately there are cobwebs, lacy, ghostly ones, some hanging low enough to catch in Lan Wangji’s hair. Wei Ying chuckles and reaches over to pick them out of his hairpiece—“it does not pay to be so beautiful in mucky places, does it, Hanguang-jun?”—and Lan Wangji takes the moment to produce a light over the swell of his palm so that they are not swallowed by darkness. Neither of them are particularly afraid of spiders, but Wei Ying clucks as he reaches overhead and knocks some more out of the way with his flute. The blue glow from Lan Wangji’s palm turns him into a sinewed shadow, face shapeshifting in the dim light. Forbidding then ghostly then dreamlike, and he turns, tugging on Lan Wangji’s hand.
“This way. I see some fun stuff.”
Wei Ying’s idea of fun stuff could mean anything from a mindbending round of xiangqi to sex in the Forbidden Chamber of the library to a dead body, so Lan Wangji does not know what he expects to see. Still, even inside this house full of allegedly cursed objects, there is an unusual lack of resentful energy, and Wei Ying’s hand is still calm and measured in his.
No resentful energy, however, is where the upsides end.
The house is sick with strange things. A cage full of wooden animals, features carved roughly save for their eyes, painted so lifelike that Lan Wangji expects them to shift when they walk past. A tank full to the brim with amber liquid, bulbous things suspended like pale, greasy fish. A wheel made of glass. A tombstone. There is neither a name nor a birth year, only a death year.
“Aha!” says Wei Ying. “This looks appropriately suspicious. Do you sense the energy on it, Lan Zhan?”
Lan Wangji leans around Wei Ying’s body, unsure how the rest of the house had not fallen under the heading of suspicious, but then he feels it—the uncomfortable throb of energy, coming off a contraption small enough to fit upon a writing desk. Lan Wangji nearly misses it where it’s crammed into a corner of a worktable beside a box of fabric, its ribboned guts spilling onto the surface of the wood.
“It is unusual,” Lan Wangji concludes. He raises his hand and passes it over the little apparatus, and does not pick up a disturbance. Up close it’s a collection of bulbs, some fluted, all made of glass, all of them filled with something—sand, water, the grotesque amber liquid from the tank in the hallway. One of them looks as though it’s filled with blood. Another with beads. Some of the bulbs are jeweled, some frosted with a thicker layer of dust than others. “What is it?”
In the center of the contraption stands a double-ended bulb with a gathered waist so narrow that a single needle would have difficulty passing through it. When Wei Ying leans in, his reflection upon it distorts, a round splatter of skin-paint on the glass. The lower bulb is full, nearly up to the narrowed waist, with a creamy ink.
“Hmm. Okay. A few ideas.” His hair is streaked grey with trailing threads of cobwebs, making him glow. Lan Wangji combs some of it out with his fingers. “My guess? It’s a clock.”
“A clock?” Lan Wangji casts a dubious glance upon it. “How so?” Most clocks use water, and even those are kept in undisturbed buildings so that the drip-drip of time couldn’t be rushed.
“I don’t think it necessarily tells time,” says Wei Ying. “I think it—keeps time.”
“That is...”
“That is, the inventor made this clock not to tell what time of the day it is, but to keep time—as in, to keep track of how much time has passed since…” He trails off.
“Since what?”
“I don’t think I know. What was the caution about the inventor that the village head told us? He who made it was mired in grief? I don’t know, I don’t sense any of it here.” Wei Ying runs gentle fingertips over the skeletal wooden frame. “I’m going to fiddle with it, Lan Zhan, okay? Hold onto me! Don’t let go, but maybe take out your sword in case it disturbs any energy, or we get any unsavory visitors.”
“Mm.” He unsheathes Bichen, the shine of a blade out of place in the dusty gloom. “Wei Ying, be careful.”
“Don’t worry. We’ve dealt with far nastier, haven’t we?” He presses his finger to the center, double bulb, and it tips forward.
The ink starts to drip into the empty bulb below.
“Oh. Hm, that’s,” Wei Ying squints. “What happens if all the ink runs from that end to this, then? What did the inventor—mired in regret. Regret, about what? They’re keeping time, but for what?”
“Wei Ying,” says Lan Wangji, “perhaps you should right the glass, until we know what we’re facing.”
“Yes, right.” But Wei Ying is distracted, and Lan Wangji can tell, because he tips it back so the ink can once again drip into the empty chamber. “But if we don’t address what comes when the ink does run out, how will we—?”
When he lets go, the fluted bulbs begin to spin. The largest one in the center, first, slow, followed by the smaller ones clustered tight as barnacles around it. Wei Ying backs away, alarmed, and his hand turns into thorns and razor wire in Lan Wangji’s hand.
“Okay, that—should not have happened,” he says. “Lan Zhan, let’s—”
But before he can finish speaking, the ground contracts beneath them, yawning and hungry. “Wei Ying!” Lan Zhan says, hand tightening, but it closes around nothing. The floor shakes, a big, living dead thing, and before panic has the chance to bind him, dark, sticky blue explodes across Lan Wangji’s eyes, and then—
In the darkness, there are voices.
“Wei Ying?”
Lan Wangji’s is smallest, a starling amongst ravens.
“You go first. I’ll be right there. There are a few more things I must finish alone.”
“Are you certain?”
“Very. Save up your stories for when I find you again. Promise you’ll wait for me?”
“Forever.”
“—think that Wei gongzi isn’t bad. Excessive and mischievous though he may be, he’s smart and lively, and his character is good.”
A silence that sounds like a warning.
Lan Wangji steadies himself with a hand along the railing of—a corridor in Cloud Recesses. His head swims like a bowlful of upturned fish, thoughts wheezing in a shattered puddle around him. Where is he? How is he back in Cloud Recesses? They’d left hours ago, and Wei Ying had been right next to him the whole time, in a decrepit house woven with spiders.
“Wei Ying?” he calls again, quietly.
There is no answer. He dares not call louder—if this is a curse, a dream world constructed by a demon, then the last thing he’ll want to do is call attention to either of them, least of all Wei Ying. Those voices in the gloom...
“Wangji, his skills are commendable, are they not?”
Now, it’s his brother’s voice. The full-bodied, warm sound of it, before the burning of Cloud Recesses, before the Sunshot Campaign, before Jin Guangyao. Before everything.
Oh—that is where he is. Before.
The clock in the house had been keeping time. Since, Wei Ying had said, and stopped short.
“In a duel, are you equals?”
It had been keeping time from the point where Lan Wangji’s life first began.
Another silence, this time punctuated with the vexed crunch of gravel. Lan Wangji realizes too late in which courtyard he stands—the one his younger self had zigzagged across in his irritation to put as much distance between himself and his brother’s knowing smile as quickly as he could.
And then, without preamble, Lan Wangji comes face to face with himself, nearly twenty years younger.
And more than twice as irritated. When he sees Lan Wangji, his expression clears into surprise, then suspicion, and then, finally, an unripe, neutral shade of respect as he bows.
Lan Wangji blinks. So he’s visible in this timeline, at least to himself. He inclines his head.
“Apologies, I am afraid I do not recognize you. To whom do I owe this meeting?” asks his younger self.
Lan Wangji opens his mouth. He closes it. He is blisteringly aware of how absurd it would sound for him to say, I am you, only happier. The truth, perhaps, is not always the best choice.
“Someone you will trust.”
“Will,” repeats his younger self. His youngself—an unusual word to ever need. “Our meeting is due after this encounter?”
Had he always been so easily ruffled? Lan Wangji nods mutely, waiting for the expression on his face to change. The corners of his eyes twitch, like he doesn’t really believe him, but he doesn’t know enough to tell him he’s wrong.
“You are from Cloud Recesses,” says his youngself. Not a question, but he flicks his gaze up and down along Lan Wangji’s body. He’s looking for weak spots in the lie, or this not-truth. Lan Wangji remembers being the person who would do that—the law enforcer. It’s like facing a stranger. “But not from this time.”
“I am.”
“You must have words for me, to have traveled such a long way.”
All at once, he does. At the same time, he doesn’t, for what could he possibly say to his youngself that would mean anything, anything, in the years to come? Savor every moment. Forget what you think you know, it will lessen the pain. There will be pain. It will hurt. Like a wound, it will get worse before it gets better. You have lived every day in cloud cover; you won’t know it until they break. The sun is coming. Look at the sky. Sun is coming.
Wei Ying had always been the one for words. Lan Wangji is—better with words, now, but not under circumstances as unwritten as these. In the time that has passed, his height has risen past that of his teenage body; he’d always been tall, but he hadn’t realized that he’d grown so much in these years past. It would seem impossible, especially in the thirteen years that Wei Ying had been gone, that his body could grow at all. An uninvited marker of time. Teenagers were saplings in the first hushes of spring.
Lan Wangji had gone to sleep with the winter.
“You will do well to make friends,” he says.
A shadow of a frown. “You spoke to Zewu-jun.”
“I did not, but you are troubled by his suggestion.”
His eye twitches.
“Solitude suits me.”
Lan Wangji looks at this boy—this boy, who will not understand his pain for months, months, years, decades. All he knows now is cold. When you are born in winter, when you are raised in winter, when you are planted and watered and nurtured in winter, all you can ever know is ice. All you will ever know are hands too frozen to bend, feet too cold to feel.
But the sun is coming. First it will climb over the roofs, dawn on the horizon, then into Lan Wangji’s heart. When the glaciers melt he will be horrified to learn there was a heart sleeping under all that snow.
“Wei gongzi,” the words feel so odd in his mouth, “is a righteous young man.”
“He has broken more sect principles within the hour than most disciples do in their life,” says his youngself with indignation. “However, both you and my brother have suggested I befriend him. I struggle to see what you both have found in him; he is supercilious and arrogant.”
“Mm.” Lan Wangji cannot say that’s inaccurate for the timeline. “He is, but there is more to him.”
The displeasure in his youngself’s eyes gives way to suspicion. “You speak as one who is familiar with him.”
“I am.”
The quartz beneath them grinds as he shifts his footing, which is as about as emotional as surprise gets for him. “Do…” he asks uncertainly. “Do we?”
“Do you what?”
“Become friends.”
Even though you’re usually taciturn, pedantic, and aloof, and honestly kind of boring—and in the beginning, I didn’t think much of you—but after two duels ending in draws with you, I, Wei Wuxian, approve of you! And I really want to be your friend!
No need.
You’re no fun! There are so many benefits to being my friend.
Lan Wangji nods.
“You do.”
Lan Wangji does not move, but the landscape morphs, changing around him without care for where he stands. Time diffracts around him and he wonders if he should be moving, if the timebending spell needs him to.
Then time flies past him, and the world gives him: the library pavilion in Cloud Recesses. It’s early afternoon, by the way the sun slants in a honeyed staircase through the windows. He remembers this whimsical angle, perfect for reading in until dinner. The floor, usually spotless, is strewn with the confetti of a torn book, like an oversized cat had gotten into the chicken coop and the only evidence of a murder was the scattered down.
His youngself is standing at the dais in the center of the pavilion, seething so ferociously that his anger is palpable. This day.
There are too many scraps on the floor to step quietly, and his robes drag across them as they would over autumn soil. Lan Wangji watches himself whirl in place, as if he’s expecting Wei Ying to round the corner with his sunray smile and shout Gotcha! You didn’t think you could get rid of me that easily, did you, Lan Zhan? Something in his face says that he half-wishes it were Wei Ying, and he himself doesn’t yet know why. When his eyes fall on Lan Wangji standing in the walkway between the dais and the writing desks, his youngself visibly struggles to rearrange his expression into one of respect and compunction. The cords in his jaw are still twitching, but he makes the effort, and even bows.
“What happened here?” asks Lan Wangji. He knows what happened, remembers it clearer than he does a single day in those thirteen years Wei Ying was gone, but he wants to hear how his youngself will tell this story.
“You were mistaken, Zhenjun,” he says. “The endeavor of befriending Wei gongzi is beyond the bounds of possibility.”
Lan Wangji swallows the laughter that tickles his throat. His youngself is practically vibrating with fury still, he knows he shouldn’t prod, but this reasoning ought to be especially amusing. “Oh?” he says. “And why is that?”
“He is unteachable, shameless, with an utter disregard for principles—if not those of the Lan Sect, then principles of conduct. He is crude and arrogant and insufferable. Once, in the middle of class, he questioned authority until he was thrown out, and seemed to take pride in it.” Then a pause to breathe in, as if surprised he had so many words to spare. Lan Wangji, too, is impressed. He didn’t think his youngself had it in him. He does now, with Wei Ying and Sizhui, mostly, but the seed had been planted as far back as this.
“Is it very wrong to question authority?”
His youngself regards him, mouth a line of red stinging nettle. “Isn’t it?”
“The authority is not infallible, Wangji,” he says, testing his own name on his tongue, spoken in the same cadence that his brother uses. He finds it fits well. “Law is not set in stone.” The irony of this is not lost on him; he knows that the principles of Gusu Lan very well are carved into basalt-veined slate, proud and looming just outside.
“But without law, what is there?”
“There is so much more than law,” says Lan Wangji. “Friendship. Loyalty. Courage to stand for what’s right in the face of unthinkable adversity. You have a lot to learn from Wei Wuxian.”
Whatever progress he might have made just now scurries at the sound of Wei Ying’s name. Irritation crosses his youngself’s face again at the mention of him, but when he speaks, he maintains his polite courtesy. Fifteen years of rigid training clearly hadn’t been lost on him.
They would, however, be lost for Wei Ying.
“If I may inquire, Zhenjun?”
“Yes.”
“Why have you come here? You told me during our first encounter that you are from this world, but not of this time. It must not have been easy for you to travel here, which means you have come with a purpose. But I struggle to understand your intentions.”
Lan Wangji chooses not to disclose that it was an accident.
“You seem to speak well of Wei gongzi, despite all reasons for me to think otherwise. May I know why?”
“Time is not a resource of which you can afford to waste,” says Lan Wangji. “I do not intend to change how the course of your relationship runs with him, but it will shock you how quickly and uncaringly time will slip through the hands of someone who believes they have more of it than they do.”
“What does that mean?”
Lan Wangji crouches low, picking up a shred of paper at his feet. It gives like an old fish scale in his fingers, and this piece has a naked, disembodied leg on it, bent in the throes of pleasure.
“It means, Wangji, that we do not recognize how short the time is that we have with the people we love until it has already run out.”
He hands him his scrap, and then he goes.
The first night Lan Wangji remembers ever breaking curfew, it had been for a song.
When the world comes to again, rubbing the silt of sleep from her eyes and pushing Lan Wangji back into his newly warped flow of time, he finds himself in the Jingshi with candles burning low. The scent of sandalwood incense has deepened in the late evening, the part for which he was never awake.
Lan Wangji shifts in the shadows, and his youngself springs to his feet, hand on his sword. “Who goes there?”
“It’s just me.”
The breath leaves all of his hackles at once. “Zhenjun.”
“Wangji.” He nods toward the open window over the bed, where the moon has climbed out of frame. Every night he’d be in bed by the time her body chafed along the mountain ranges. Now there was nothing but the blanket of endless night outside. “It’s very late.”
“I am aware.”
“What keeps you from sleep?”
His youngself does not answer immediately, setting Bichen down with a quiet clatter on his desk. Then, “A song.”
One to haunt him for weeks and months and years to come, one to haunt his dreams and his hazy waking hours. He remembers exactly what verse had kept him awake into the deepest part of the night, where everything moved through a thick, soupy porridge and his thoughts floated up through his skull before he could catch and commit them to paper.
“You must be having trouble with composition to stay awake so late.”
“Yes. I,” his youngself sits down again, swaying slightly from the deprivation of sleep. It was a little like being drunk without any of the pleasant buzz in his brain, just a dull, hollow roar in his ears. “I wanted to finish it before I slept.”
“A song for cleansing?” Lan Wangji prompts.
His youngself shrinks in on himself. He’d been so small, Lan Wangji had never realized. One never feels small as a child; it’s only looking back when you realize how breakable you were. “No.”
“An offensive piece, perhaps?”
“No, it isn’t. It is just a song. For—a person.”
“Your brother, then,” Lan Wangji reasons. He should not be giving his youngself all this grief, and dips his head to hide his smile. Look, Wei Ying, at how you’ve made a delinquent of me.
“Not Xiong Zhang, either.” His youngself’s ears have steadily surpassed pink and reddened to a shade of plum. “Wei gongzi.”
The title is still jarring in his own voice. “I see,” says Lan Wangji. “May I take a look?”
Wordlessly, his youngself slides the parchment across the desk, setting his brush down. The words march neatly in cascading rows, and Lan Wangji catches a few notes in the margins of changes that he would ultimately settle on, or get rid of. Some of them have been crossed out and rewritten. Lan Wangji had never been such a messy notetaker. Then, Wei Ying.
“You’re stuck on what comes after ‘with you, I would spend my life speaking to you over warm wine.’”
“Yes,” mumbles his youngself.
The candle flames flicker between them.
“What do you think of, ‘Ten years of dreaming feel cold no longer’?”
His youngself blinks at him. “Ten years?”
“Mm.”
“I have not known Wei Ying for ten years.”
“Perhaps,” agrees Lan Wangji, passing back the parchment. “At least, not yet.”
Wei Wuxian was wrapping up the tail ends of what he would call a very strange night—Lan Zhan was, evidently, a featherweight of a drunk, a truthful drunk, one that had sat and babbled in a disheveled fistful of silks before faceplanting back in Wei Wuxian’s pillow—and it had just gotten much, much stranger.
He was making sure that all of Lan Zhan’s limbs were firmly in place on the bed, and that he wouldn’t be climbing out of it for what would be the fourth time. Lan Zhan had a shocking capacity for antics on a single gulp of Emperor’s Smile, and Wei Wuxian wouldn’t say he regretted this, but he was much better equipped to clean up after Jiang Cheng, who at least fell asleep and stayed asleep.
“Long night, huh?”
“Agh!” He whirled, hand leaping to his heart. A tall, lanky man stood across the room, leaning carelessly against the side of the chest of drawers. There was a flute pinned in his crossed arms, tassel waving like a flag. “You scared me! Sneaky, I didn’t even hear you come in. And who are you?”
He ignored Wei Wuxian’s question to say, “That one.” The stranger jerked his chin at Lan Zhan on the bed. “Not much of a drinker, I take it?”
“No, not at all.” Wei Wuxian swilled his half-empty bottle of Emperor’s Smile thoughtfully, then brought it to his lips. The alcohol had settled pleasantly in his joints, three jugs in, and since Jiang Cheng and Nie-xiong were presumably still puking their guts out, he figured any conversation partner was better than none. “Want some?”
“No, I’m just here on a visit.”
Wei Wuxian puffed his cheeks out with his mouthful of wine, then swallowed. “You didn’t answer my question. I answered yours.”
“Which one?”
“Who are you?”
“A bloodthirsty demon.”
“Ha!” Wei Wuxian crowed. “Bullshit. This is Cloud Recesses, every square centimeter of this place is covered with cleansing talismans and every strain of breeze carries the Lan family’s cleansing music. And you’re far too solid to simply be a passing spirit. Spit up, who are you really?”
The stranger cast his eyes down and smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes, a quiet ripple across the water.
“A ghost,” the stranger said.
Wei Wuxian leaned forward. “Are you really?”
“Mm.”
“Are you part of the Lan Sect?” asked Wei Wuxian. Dubious. This ghost wore dragon-embroidered midnight blue and a flag of red in his hair, bright as a smudged rouge kiss.
“Yes.”
“Yes?” There was way more surprise than he intended. “You don’t look the part.”
“I don’t have to.”
“Ah, because ghost, I suppose,” Wei Wuxian said reasonably. “Well then, ghost, what are you here for? Now that you are, why don’t we have some fun. Do you like dueling with swords?” He’d never had a chance to face a ghost with such a corporeal form before, imagine the look on Lan Zhan’s face when Wei Wuxian tells him in the morning what he’d missed! Better that he was asleep now. Knowing the Lan Clan, he would probably have an aneurysm if he knew Wei Wuxian was making a point to cavort with ghosts.
The ghost hadn’t budged, bafflingly uninterested in Wei Wuxian’s verbal sparring. He always seemed to be a step ahead of what Wei Wuxian wanted to say. “Not anymore. I’m not interested in being exorcised. Best not try, young one.”
“How old are you, then?”
“Not sure.”
Hmm. “Do you remember how long ago you died?”
“About sixteen—seventeen?—years ago.”
“Was it really sad? Did anyone mourn you?”
The ghost held his gaze for so long that Wei Wuxian squirmed uncomfortably from his seat on the floor. He had his back against the cherrywood frame of the bed, and a long tendril of Lan Zhan’s hair hung from the edge where Wei Wuxian had messily arranged him upon the pillows. The ghost had endless black eyes—well, not black. No one’s eyes were truly, actually black; Shijie had told him that once. Just eyes so deep a brown that they were starcrusted night sky, the kind of sky you could put a hand up against and expect to feel grit instead of clouds.
“Death isn’t sad for the person it happens to,” the ghost said. “Death doesn’t really—happen, to you. You just go to sleep. A very long, dreamless sleep. Death happens to everyone who loves you.” Then he shrugged. “So I didn’t think it was sad at all.”
“Everyone has someone who loves them.”
“Do you think so?”
Wei Wuxian scratched an uncertain itch at the back of his neck. “I guess so.”
The ghost made a pensive noise. “Some more than others,” he said. He crossed one leg over the other where he stood, resting the toe of his shoe against the floor, taps it twice. Like he’s talking to someone below the wood.
“If there are people who loved you, then I’m sure they mourn you,” said Wei Wuxian.
“They would.”
“No one mourned you, did they?” Wei Wuxian tapped his chin with Suibian’s gnarled pommel. “Ah, I understand now. You must have been very lonely. That’s okay! You don’t have to be anymore. That’s why you’re here, right? That’s why I can see you? This is an auspicious meeting, indeed. You need a friend.”
Full-bellied laughter rolled through the ghost’s body this time. Maybe it was a little strained with disbelief, and Wei Wuxian wasn’t certain what part of it had been so funny, but he was glad to hear the sound of it. Clear, high, open. Resentful ghosts wouldn’t laugh like this.
“I’ll mourn you,” Wei Wuxian promised. He scrambled to his feet. “You won’t ever be lonely again. Wait here. I’m sure the Lan Sect has plenty of paper money to burn, I’ll be back in just a moment. Wait for me. Don’t tell Lan Zhan you’re a ghost, by the way, if he wakes, his family is allergic to them.”
“Are you sure that Lan Zhan of yours is okay? He looks unwell.”
“He’s just a lightweight. Can you believe all it took was one gulp of wine to do this? They’re all so boring. Unbelievable that anyone would marry into the Lan Sect willingly.”
“Astonishing, really,” the ghost agreed, but somehow, Wei Wuxian had the distinct feeling that he was being mocked.
“Anyway, just stay out of his sight if he wakes up. Tell me if he does anything funny when I get back. Got it, ghost?”
“Got it.” The ghost saluted him with a bow. “Gongzi, go carefully.”
But when he returned, the ghost was gone, and Wei Wuxian was alone again with only the cracked peanut shells and Lan Zhan for company.
Come morning, he had forgotten about the ghost entirely.
The next time Wei Wuxian met the ghost, he was nursing a bottle of the finest Qinghe wine on the rough-hewn shingles of the Unclean Realm. If Gusu had Emperor’s Smile, smooth and creamy as a mouthful of moonlight streaking down his throat, Qinghe had their Nine Knives, a fiery amber throat-punch that was sweet and cheeky as a street opera. Less refined, perhaps, more prone to fun. It fit.
“You like high places, huh?”
The voice startled Wei Wuxian so badly that he almost took a tumble from the roof. As such, he nearly dropped his bottle of wine, barely caught it in his sticky fingers.
“You scared me, ghost!” Wei Wuxian exclaimed. “What are you doing here so far from Gusu? Are you following me?”
“I’m not an earthbound spirit.”
“So you’re following me.”
“You followed Lan Zhan.”
Wei Wuxian frowned. “That’s totally different. He planned to take the road in search of Yin Iron alone. He’s been cooped up in a library all his life, he’d never make it on the streets, so following him was the obvious choice. When we were in Yueyang, he wanted to ask the gentry families for information about disturbances in the area. The thought.” He shook his head, tossing more wine back. Some of it wormed in rivulets out of the corners of his mouth.
“Lan Zhan’s got some grit. I wouldn’t underestimate him.”
The ghosts’s arms were crossed, again with his flute pinned in the curl between his hand and his chest. From here, Wei Wuxian could see that there was a bulky wrapped sword strapped to his waist, and wondered vaguely at who he must have been. “Why do you call him Lan Zhan? Did you know him? Wait, you can’t have, you died when he was born.” He shifted on his elbows to take him in. “Who were you? What was your name? You probably can’t remember, huh.”
“I remember. I just don’t want to tell you.”
Wei Wuxian sniffed. “Suit yourself, ghost.”
They shared a companionable silence.
“He’s leaving tonight,” murmured the ghost, after a while. “Lan Zhan. He’s taking the road again for the Yin Iron.”
“He is, huh?”
“You should go bid him farewell. He’d appreciate it.”
“Him? Nah,” Wei Wuxian took another drink. “Lan Zhan is the type to slip out quietly and without circumstance, he’d get all stiff if I tried. You’ve seen him, you know how he is.”
“You should always say goodbyes when you can, ahead of time,” said the ghost.
His mouthful of Nine Knives seared particularly hot down his throat this time, and Wei Wuxian winced around the burn that smoked into his ears. It was strong wine.
“Why?”
“Because when the time truly comes to say goodbye, we never have the chance to.”
“Hm,” Wei Wuxian chuffed. “I don’t believe in goodbyes.”
He expected the ghost to rebuff him and tell him he was foolish. Instead he simply turned back towards the mountains beyond the fortress, eyes dotted with little fires everywhere. “Yeah, I don’t think I do, either.”
“Anyway,” Wei Wuxian said, a little too loudly. He wasn’t good with sadness and this ghost had so much of it, it could swallow them both. “I would love to go with him, but Jiang Cheng and I really have to return to Lotus Pier. I’m certain that Yu Furen already has plenty of choice words for me once we get back. Probably a good smack or two. Her favorite lecture combination is criticizing what I’d done, followed by a couple of good smacks—” he paused to mine slapping someone, “—and then a good, strong attack on my character. Ooh, or my lineage. That’s one of her favorites. Classic Yu Furen.”
The ghost pursed his lips. The evening fires in the Unclean Realm cast him in flickering shadow, and for a moment, Wei Wuxian wondered what this ghost really knew, to follow him like this.
“You don’t like high places?” he asked, aiming for conversation. Maybe all that stuff about Yu Furen was too much. This ghost felt familiar, though, it had just come tumbling out of his mouth unfiltered.
“I did once.”
Then it clicked. Wei Wuxian swallowed and asked very quietly, “Did you die falling?”
The ghost’s face is unreadable. “I died smiling.”
“Smiling? Why?”
“Because I knew when the fall ended, it wouldn’t hurt anymore.”
A dark, swollen lump grew like a tumor in Wei Wuxian’s throat. Who was this ghost? Why was he so haunted? “Were you right?” he whispered.
“No.”
He wanted to ask more—so it hurt, then, death? How long, how much, in what ways? But then a gentle clack of sliding doors came from below, a single cricket-chirp in the weary hour of night, and Lan Zhan emerged from beneath the awning. He looked so small from up here, even more regal in moonlight, and Wei Wuxian smiled to himself.
“Say goodbye,” the ghost nudged.
“Lan Zhan!” called Wei Wuxian. “I’ll sleep on your roof for tonight!”
It wasn’t really a goodbye. Wei Wuxian didn’t believe in them; he always thought that, if two people were still alive in the world, they’d always find a way back together again. Fate had her plans. People had theirs. Fate usually had the last say.
Lan Zhan’s mouth might move, but an overwhelming darkwash of sleep dripped down from the crown of his head. Wei Wuxian tried to turn, to say something to his traveling ghost, but there was a brush to the hair at the back of his head, and then he was alone as a meteor burning, unseen.
The dungeon smells of sulfur and blood and even without light, Lan Wangji knows where time has planted him. Something moves in the corner when he finds his footing again.
“Who goes there?”
“Just me.”
“Zhenjun?”
“Yes,” he answers.
Memory comes back in brittle fragments as his eyes adjust to the darkness. His youngself isn’t alone in this cramped cell, but he remembers being the only person sitting upright. There were a few prisoners from minor sects imprisoned in the Nightless City cells beside his, ones whose eyes had widened at the sight of the Second Jade of Lan being shoved unceremoniously inside, strong enough only for a gasp but not conversation. Lan Wangji had been perfectly content with that. After the devastation of Cloud Recesses, the last thing he wanted to do was talk.
“Zhenjun,” says his youngself.
“Mm.”
But there is no reply. By now, Lan Wangji has learned how to see in darkness again. Fire flickers through the barred window near the foot of the door, the low flames illuminating the bruised face of an unconscious young cultivator in the next cell, facedown on the stone floors.
His youngself sits with his legs crossed, fingers still held in meditative position, but he stares ahead without seeing.
“Yes,” Lan Wangji prompts.
“Are you here to tell me something?”
“What do you need to know?”
“I,” his lips hang open around a tremble of a word, “I think Cloud Recesses is gone.”
Lan Wangji inclines his head. The first building that had gone up in flames had been the library. There is an unknowable horror in the way that people look when they run from things on fire, and the faces of Lan disciples, both his senior and junior, running with armfuls of books in hand, will never leave him. People perished in that fire.
He does not know if law and knowledge were worth dying for.
The intake of breath hits his lungs pungent and sooty. “What do you need to know?” Lan Wangji repeats.
“Is Xiong Zhang alive?”
“He is.”
“And...Shufu?”
“He will recover.”
His youngself bites on the soft inside of his lip, as if debating if he should ask the next question at all.
“And Wei Ying,” he says.
“What about him?”
“Is Lotus Pier—did they attack Lotus Pier?”
“No.”
Not yet.
His youngself breathes in shakily.
“Wangji,” he says, “it is not a sin to be afraid.”
“I am not afraid.”
“You are. You are afraid and you are angry. Fire and poison. It does not do to swallow either.” It will singe and burn you from the inside, it will find the oily parts of yourself and start at your liver first, eat away at all things dark and meaty until it hits tendon, hits marrow, hits fascia. It will find the deadspace in you and it will flay it open. “The world is burning. It will burn for a while, yet. You are allowed to feel fear that everything you think you know is falling apart. But you will weather this fire. You will weather more than just that.”
And then his youngself looks up at him with an expression he did not know he could make until Wei Ying returned no more than a ghost, and says, “I pledged to stand for justice and protect those who could not protect themselves. I fear that I have failed, Zhenjun. I fear that I will continue to fail.”
He will. “You will make mistakes. It is impossible to live a faultless existence, such is the nature of being something alive.” Lan Wangji sighs. “You will learn, Wangji, that there are greater things which feed fault and justice that are written of in your principles.”
The heavy locks of the cell doors clang as the sounds of Wen cultivators saunter through the dungeon, rattling bars and laughing drunkenly at wails and cries for mercy. His youngself sits up at attention, and shoots Lan Wangji a panicked glance.
“You best leave.”
“I shall. One more thing.”
“Hm?”
“The Wens will serve you stale buns. Save them for the third day.”
“Why?”
“For Wei Ying.”
Time has withheld Wei Ying from him until now, and Lan Wangji thinks it must be some kind of cosmic in-joke. He doesn’t get to see Wei Ying as he once was, and some part of him is okay with that. Every part of him had to learn to live with that. The Wei Ying he once knew, the Wei Ying before this cave, really did die. This Wei Ying, with a laugh that could steer ships lost at sea, never truly returned.
When someone makes it all the way to the other side, and all the way back, they lose some things along the way.
The smell inside this cave is not one Lan Wangji has missed. A distinct stench of blood wafts into the upper tunnel. Underfoot the ageless gravel crunches loud as rats’ skulls, and Lan Wangji slip-slides his way down the slope where the natural path gave way into the heart of the cave. Frayed rope lies pale and belly-up in his wake.
Then, there he is, there they are, huddled up against a nook in the caveside. Their eyes are shut. Wei Ying is unconscious, and his youngself is asleep—or meditating so deeply that he doesn’t move at the sound of Lan Wangji’s footsteps, holding Wei Ying’s head in his lap. One of his hands cradles it so it won’t loll, and the other rests upon Wei Ying’s chest, over his heart. Feeling for the flutter.
Blood has crusted around Wei Ying’s mouth. Lan Wangji sinks down beside them to tuck Wei Ying’s stray hand back across his stomach, but his fingers fall through Wei Ying’s body as if he isn’t there at all.
Ah. Right, time is ruled by unknown law, but Lan Wangji would be a fool to expect that he could interact with Wei Ying from this past. Still, he can sense heat. Wei Ying’s skin is on fire.
Then Wei Ying is jerked away from him, and Lan Wangji pulls back . His youngself has woken, and he clutches Wei Ying closer to himself, spooked as wild deer. “Who—?”
“It is me,” says Lan Wangji. “I did not mean to alarm you.”
His youngself stares, suspicion rising like a flood of angry spiders. “How did you get in here?”
“Time willed it.”
He’s holding Wei Ying so tightly that his face is pressed into Lan Wangji’s chest, and he has his knees drawn up as if to shield the tender spots on Wei Ying’s back. Without the light of the fire, Lan Wangji must look like a ghost in the blue gloom. After that ordeal with the tortoise, anyone would be skittish. “If you are here, can you help us?”
Lan Wangji eyes the marks along the stone nook they sit in. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen—he remembers notching them to keep track of the days. If it’s been fourteen days, Jiang Wanyin and Jin Zixuan must be in the mountains already, looking for the sealed mouth of the cave. They’ll tell him how hard it was to find, how many false mouths they happened upon when they do find them, and Lan Wangji will have never been and will never again be so happy to see Jiang Wanyin’s prickly scowl.
“Help is on the way,” says Lan Wangji.
His youngself’s hand trembles when he lays his knuckles over Wei Ying’s forehead, then recoils. “His fever.”
“Has it not broken?”
“Not for days. He slips in and out of consciousness.” His youngself squirms. “He calls for...his sister.”
Lan Wangji bites on his tongue. Wei Ying called for Jiang Yanli once—maybe twice, if he counts the mumble that he thought was the beginning of shijie, but was cut by a fit of dry coughing. He’d spent most of his fever dreams calling for Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, am I dead yet, Lan Zhan?
“Jiang gongzi and Jin gongzi are on their way.” Some law most likely dictates that telling a truth too early will shift the grains of the time. “They will find you.”
“Is that a promise or a wish?”
It has been an awfully long stretch of time in this cave. In his other encounters, he’d been whisked away like the fabric of time was yanking him back beneath her cloak.
Time has frozen. Grains of it hang unaccounted by reality in the balance.
“They will come.” Lan Wangji says, firmly. He remembers—Jiang Wanyin and Jin Zixuan appearing around the corner, eyes huge and blind in the dark as their voices ricocheted in echoes around the cave.
And then his youngself raises his head, beyond his years afraid, with a delirium that Lan Wangji remembers felt like fever and infection all at once, and asks him, “Is he going to die?”
It is a horrible question. It is, perhaps, the most horrible one he’s ever been asked, except for the one that Wei Ying had asked him once—is this the promise we pledged our lives to keep? He cannot say yes, nor can he say no, for neither are the truth, yet neither are lies.
Lan Wangji replies, “You will get to keep him.”
“You said we would be friends,” says his youngself, “but I fear that it was a mistake, Zhenjun.”
“Why do you say so?”
His breath shudders. “You did not say that befriending someone would hurt so much.”
“It hurts because it means something.”
“What does it mean?”
“That you have something to lose.”
His youngself’s hand glows blue as he lays his palm over Wei Ying’s forehead and begins feeding spiritual energy into him again. There had been no food, Lan Wangji remembers. Wei Ying had nudged him and said, “Ever go hungry for real, Lan Zhan? You know what it’s like? It’s not so bad, until it is. At first it hurts, and food is all you can think about, but you know you won’t get any. So it stops hurting, and then you just feel empty.” Then he’d nudged him again. “The empty stage isn’t so bad.”
It’s bad, Wei Ying. I was empty for thirteen years.
“Preserve your energy,” Lan Wangji says when his youngself does not stop, the energy transfer sucking him hollow and bloodless as he goes on. He won’t, Lan Wangji knows he won’t. In the absence of food, his youngself had nothing to give Wei Ying but his own energy. It hadn’t mattered if he scraped against the bottom of the well. The only thing monstrous enough to swallow the yawning hunger had been the singular goal of keeping Wei Ying alive. “You have a very long way to return to Gusu.”
“Zhenjun.”
“Help will be here soon.” Any moment now. Right after he’d taken his hand off Wei Ying’s forehead, he’d bent his head to listen to Wei Ying’s heartbeat, a child with his ear pressed to a door to listen for secrets. Then, it had been then that their shouts tumbled into the cave below.
“Zhenjun, no one is coming.”
You wouldn’t change anything about the past?
Perhaps things would not be as they are today if I did.
Lan Wangji is gripped with the sense that he must do something, because time will not—cannot—move forward without him.
Jiang Wanyin and Jin Zixuan are still not here.
Wei Ying will die.
Time waits with clipped wings for him.
He steps around them, sensing his youngself’s confusion as he traces his steps back the way he came. The gravel scatters in his wake when he kicks off hard, ascending the steep climb back up to the well-tread path that leads outside. The Wen cronies had stuffed the mouth of the cave until it choked with boulders, and he draws Bichen with a wide, glittering arc that sends them tumbling.
Lan Wangji inhales. If no one else except his own youngself can see him, then this might be as good as useless, but he must try, and aims two of his fingers towards the sky and sends out a distress signal. The evening is so clear that the blue light shoots overhead milky as a comet, then scatters in a muted light show.
It winks out, and only smoke is left. Smoke is the only evidence there ever lived a fire.
Then, in the distance: “There!”
“Did you see it too?”
“Yeah—do you think it was a trick, though? A lure?”
“The Wen Sect uses a bright red signal in the shape of an exploding sun.” Jiang Wanyin’s voice noses through the underbrush. “Even if they wanted to, I don’t think they’d be able to imitate the Lan Sect’s signal that well, it’d take an excellent cultivator to do it.”
A meandering compliment, one warped by time.
Lan Wangji stands at the mouth of the cave until he sees them—Jin Zixuan helps Jiang Wanyin climb down a particularly gnarled fist of stone, and aside from a few cuts and scrapes, they don’t look any worse for wear. Thinner, perhaps, scared, certainly. “Thanks,” Jiang Wanyin mumbles, brushing his sleeves.
They stare at the mouth of the cave. As Lan Wangji had predicted, neither of them can see him, and they trade apprehensive glances as they approach.
“Someone’s been here,” says Jiang Wanyin.
“Or maybe they made it out okay? Maybe they’re hiding.”
“Well, we have to go and look, at least.”
Jin Zixuan hesitates. They’re so close in front of Lan Wangji that he could reach out and put his hand on Jiang Wanyin’s shoulder. Right now he’s squinting at Jin Zixuan, a frown starting to throb at his temples.
“You’re scared.”
“We don’t have our swords,” Jin Zixuan points out pragmatically. “That tortoise…”
“Are you—? No. You’re kidding me, right? We made it this far and you’re going to choose cowardice now, really? Maybe Wei Wuxian was right about you.”
“Jiang gongzi,” Jin Zixuan snaps. “It would be prudent to remember that if not for me, we would never have gotten reinforcements to make it back out here. Tread carefully.”
“So I am to understand that if Wei Wuxian and the Second Jade of Lan die down there after we had them under our noses, you’ll have no problem facing the Jiang and Lan sects and explaining how we fucked up so grandly? Is that it?”
Anger rolls in dark thunderclouds over Jin Zixuan’s face, though he says nothing.
“Look,” sighs Jiang Wanyin. “I know my brother was a dick to you about our sister. I’m not exactly fucking leaping with joy at the idea, either. But if you ever want to gain A-Jie’s respect, then no easier way to do it than to rescue Wei Wuxian.”
Jin Zixuan stares at him.
“I’ll tell her you carried him, too.”
Without another moment’s hesitation, Jin Zixuan brushes past Jiang Wanyin and strides into the cave.
Lan Wangji does smile this time.
Jiang Wanyin makes to follow, then turns and looks over his shoulder. He focuses on a point some two armlengths to Lan Wangji’s left, but his pause is long and searching enough that the sticky silence is broken by Jin Zixuan’s call.
“Aren’t you coming, then!”
So they go. Lan Wangji watches until the gloom swallows them.
In Wei Wuxian’s defense, he was making sure his robe was tucked securely around Lan Zhan’s shoulders, otherwise he surely would have seen the ghost without being scared out of his hide.
“‘Do you like Mianmian’?”
“Agh!” Wei Wuxian nearly toppled into the open fire. “Heavens, ghost! Can you stop doing that? How did you even get in here?”
“Ghost.”
“Ugh.” Well. He supposed a ghost was better company than a murderous tortoise, and since Lan Zhan was asleep, he could do with a conversation partner. “So what sage advice have you come to impart on me now? If you have an escape plan, I would love to hear about it.”
The ghost didn’t take the bait. “That was a stupid question, and you know it.”
Wei Wuxian sat back, crossing his arms behind his head. The movement tugged painfully at the burn on his chest; the blisters had started already where the flesh hadn’t been charred black. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know the person he likes isn’t Mianmian.”
A sting pierces angry as birdsong in his chest and it has nothing to do with the burn. Sure, he’d thought about it—considered it, daydreamed about it, maybe, but he’d never put real thought to it. Wei Wuxian, like any other normal teen-something, would sometimes have an overly elaborate daydream about a nighthunt with Lan Zhan, whom he would follow unquestioningly, who would follow him with that same, quiet intensity with which he treated everything else, and then maybe in the evening they’d take dinner together, Lan Zhan eating some pathetic tofu dish and Wei Wuxian with something far tastier, and then they’d share a room, to save on money, and nothing would happen but it would be happy and mean something. He would mean something, to someone. Someone who he hoped would want him there.
But someone who likes him?
Lan Zhan? Lan Wangji?
Just months ago he’d been ready to put his sword down Wei Wuxian’s throat for showing him porn. Haha, sword—
“You’re doing the stupid denial face,” the ghost pointed out.
“Fine, then, ghost,” said Wei Wuxian, crossing his arms over his chest. “I would like to know how you would have addressed this. Would it have been wiser to say, ‘Lan Zhan, I never! Do you like me, is that why you’re so angry?’” He added a horrible bat of eyelashes with a flourish. “Would that have been much better?”
The ghost frowned. “That was repulsive.”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
Wei Wuxian didn’t feel particularly happy about having the last word. He was right, and both of them knew it, but for once he didn’t want to be.
“Even if it were true, nothing is going to happen. He has his place in the world and I have mine, and that’s just the way things are.”
“Things are changing.”
Wei Wuxian drew shapeless doodles in the loose dirt with a branch he’d broken from the shrubbery to set Lan Zhan’s leg. “How would you know? You’re dead.”
“I know enough.”
“Things might change, sure they will. Things always change, but in the end, he’ll always be the Second Jade of Lan, whose responsibilities lie with his family and his principles. I will always be Jiang Cheng’s subordinate, son of a servant, his right hand man by blood.” Wei Wuxian sighed. “I know there’s a war coming, ghost. I’m not an idiot. The way things are going, it’s the only way for anything to be solved. And when it comes and the lines in the dirt are drawn, Lan Wangji is not going to stand on the same side with me.”
The fire chewed low on its kindling.
“Do you really think so?”
“I don’t think, I know.”
The ghost seemed to have more to say, as if he wanted to press the matter. He didn’t. Wei Wuxian appreciated it because it saved him the mental gymnastics of dodging the ghost’s questions, which all were so pointed and eerie. He was a ghost; he’d been dead for nearly two decades. How could he possibly know what the world had in store?
“You should put his forehead ribbon back on,” said the ghost. “He’ll feel naked without it.”
Wei Wuxian agreed with this much. He checked Lan Zhan’s leg, which had started healing rapidly with the assistance of the blood-absorbing herbs that he’d packed in with his makeshift poultice. The bones were likely still brittle underneath, but at least they were setting. Scabs had begun to form over the wounds. Ice caps as winter returned.
“It’s dirty,” Wei Wuxian said, wrapping the silk gingerly in his fingers. It curled limp and wet as an eel in his palm. “I’m going to wash it. Mind keeping guard for me, ghost?”
The water was flat now that the beastly tortoise had settled back into sleep, with small pats of froth floating upon the surface like spittle and torn jellyfish. Wei Wuxian dipped his hands into the murk, and when the disturbance did nothing to make the tortoise budge, he unraveled Lan Zhan’s ribbon into the water and began to scrub.
“Ghost, can I be honest with you?” he said, after a long, unbearable stretch of silence. He also didn’t wait for permission. “You’re a funny one. You told me you were never mourned, then disappeared before I could mourn you. You call Lan Zhan by his birth name, but you died probably when he was born. You’ve followed me from Gusu, to Qinghe, and probably to Yunmeng, and now to Qishan. I know Lan Lao Xiansheng wasn’t too pleased with me suggesting that we use resentful energy to harness power, but I certainly haven’t done anything to summon you.” Lan Zhan’s blood pinks the water in soft blooms. “You’re not—really a ghost, are you?”
The ghost smiles into the darkness. “No. Not exactly. It took you longer than I thought.”
“I had a feeling, that night on the roof in Qinghe,” said Wei Wuxian. He wrung the ribbon out, then rinsed it again. It would probably stain, there wasn’t any soap. “But why help me?”
“Because I once wished and wished for someone to tell me what to do.” The ghost had his hands looped loosely behind his back. “I once cried for someone to tell me what to do, to get no answer.”
“Oh,” said Wei Wuxian. “Thank you. But I haven’t asked for someone to tell me what to do, though.”
“You will.” And this person might not be a ghost, but he was as haunted as any. “You will get on your knees and beg one day for someone to give you a path to walk.”
“Sounds like every day back in Lotus Pier because Yu Furen caught me with an expression she didn’t like.”
The ghost chuckled.
“Anyway, ghost, I hope you don’t mind if I keep calling you that,” Wei Wuxian gave the ribbon one final dunk and decided this was as clean as it was going to get, “is there anything else you wanted to tell me? Besides that bizarre threat.”
“Go for the jaw.”
“Huh?”
“The tortoise has a soft spot in the underside of its jaw.”
“I don’t understand.”
“And,” the ghost shifted to face him, “forgetting envies.”
“Okay, you’ve lost me,” said Wei Wuxian.
“Remember it. You’re going to need it.”
“I’m going to need envies?”
“You’re going to need it to get back home.”
Wei Wuxian blinked. The ghost was gone.
This was how the world ended.
Wei Wuxian’s world had always been small. Small and broken, he’d said to Shijie, like a bird that flew funny because it had been shoved out of the nest right out of the egg, or the teapot he’d smashed once and gotten beaten for, because it was one of Yu Furen’s favorites. His right cheek had never been quite the same after she’d backhanded him across the face for it. But however small and broken, it was good, still good, because flying funny was better than not flying at all.
And so all of it was a different kind of beautiful.
This was how his world ended: with a kite and a line.
This was how his world ended: Lotus Pier awash with blood, the walls crimson with it, the ponds black with bodies.
This was how his world ended: on a sunbaked roof.
Jiang Cheng trembled beside him. Tears welled up in Wei Wuxian’s eyes and streaked in wet comets down his cheeks and he couldn’t even feel them; his body no longer belonged to him. His body and his brain and every single shuddering thought had pulled apart, spun sugar wilting in rain. Yu Furen and Jiang Shushu lay in a pool of their own gore in the middle of Swords Hall, and Wen Chao and his horrendous mistress continued to laugh like jackals.
A dark figure shuffled down the walkway. When he looked up, Wei Wuxian sucked a rattling breath through his chest like pulling air from water.
“Ghost,” he said. “Ghost—”
His ghost simply stared at him, blood soaking through his shoes.
“Help us,” he whispered, too quietly for anyone but Jiang Cheng to hear. “Whatever you are, help us.”
Jiang Cheng fell. He crumpled, barely catching himself to land on his feet, and then he darted into the night. He ran, and Wei Wuxian followed him. His mind was quiet, his brain a terrifying, oppressive silence. On a good day, Wei Wuxian’s thoughts bounced off and against each other frantic as sidewalk tops, and now there was nothing. The sight of the ghost had helped in the way that a stone would clang on its way down a deep, dry well.
This was how his world ended: they ran from it.
Wei Wuxian saw his ghost behind every tree and bush and tall grass as he ran. Jiang Cheng never pulled too far ahead of him, and he was too afraid to call out to him lest there were Wen remnants left in the woods, sniffing for survivors.
No matter how far and how hard he ran, Wei Wuxian could not shake that ghost, could not scrub that horrible look on his face from memory. He appeared behind the trees. He stood behind the bushes. At one point he even stood right in Wei Wuxian’s way, so alarmingly solid when Wei Wuxian barreled through him without stopping.
Then his foot landed in a pleated cloud of oyster mushrooms, and he went sprawling. Wei Wuxian wheezed when the air was knocked from his lungs, and he clutched at his ribs until he saw a pair of shoes come to a stop in front of him.
“It’s not safe yet.”
The ghost’s eyes were red. Wei Wuxian took him in without seeing, adrenaline slicing his focus choppy, but he scrambled to his feet. His hands were at the ghost’s throat before he could register the ground beneath them.
“Who are you?” he snarled. “Who are you really? Tell me! Did you know? Did you know this would happen, ghost, and never told me?” He shook him, as if hoping he could hear a soul rattling around in him. “You knew, didn’t you? You didn’t do anything to stop it?”
The ghost gargled through his chokehold.
“You stood there and let them die!”
“Your brother,” wheezed the ghost.
“What?”
“Don’t let him out of your sight.”
Jiang Cheng! He’d vanished into the fog. Wei Wuxian shoved the ghost away from him, ignoring the retching coughs behind him, and sprinted on.
Eventually their bodies gave way to anger, and anger gave way to all-consuming grief, and then even that gave way, because there was nothing left. Like the hunger, it ended in empty blackness.
Wei Wuxian fell spread eagle into the grasses that danced in the winds.
“Help me,” he whimpered. “Help us.”
But his ghost watched silently on.
Wei Wuxian saw him everywhere. Some part of him wondered if it was a curse that tailed them out of Yunmeng, one that dictated he’d see more of this ghost because he’d seen death. Before, he might have asked. Now, he was too scared to, for fear that the answer would be yes.
He was in the forest when the rain came down in icy needles around them, and Shijie sobbed in a way she never had before in front of her brothers.
He stood on the other end of their canoe in the river. When they docked in a nondescript fishing town, he was gone.
He was there when Wei Wuxian was buying bing in the market, but this time he’d been looking elsewhere. The storm turned him into a slick black bead on the uneven streets. The Wen henchman ran past him, chasing a sodden figure disappearing around the corner like a pack of bloodhounds. Whoever it was would be done for, but Wei Wuxian couldn’t find the compassion to worry for them now, only relief that he’d been spared just long enough to get back to the inn.
In the rain, no one could see you cry. When the ghost turned, Wei Wuxian had the strangest feeling that he’d been weeping.
Yiling was windy.
Hills and mountains always were. Lotus Pier was warm and stagnant, lazy dragonflies and mud and toes in mud. The wind always sang off-tune in Yiling, whistling through cracked, bleeding lips, with none of the grace of the cool breeze that filtered through Cloud Recesses.
A figure stood in the doorway.
“I’m not hungry, Wen Qing. Give it to Shijie,” he said without lifting his head. She’d left a while ago, her books lying open on the writing desk in the middle of the study. Beside him was an untouched plate of almond biscuits and beside that was a plate of sesame brittle that he’d nibbled at briefly until he thought he’d found a promising chapter in his book, only to be crestfallen.
The footfalls were too heavy to be Wen Qing, too assured to be Wen Ning. Wei Wuxian looked up, neck creaking when he did. A drop of ink landed on his parchment where his brush was suspended over his scroll.
“Oh,” he said flatly. “It’s you.”
His ghost said nothing.
“What, haven’t seen enough? Wanted to come ogle some more tragedy? I don’t have time to play anymore. Leave.”
“Don’t do it.”
“Huh?”
“What you find out tomorrow. Don’t do it.”
“So you do know what happens in this sequence of events,” Wei Wuxian said. The quiet hush of paper crinkled between them when he put his brush down. “Don’t you?”
“Does it change if you will listen to me or not?”
“No, not really.” Then, “If you know, will you answer me if I ask you some questions?”
The ghost eyed him warily.
“I just. I just need to know.” Wei Wuxian wrung his hands, an uncharacteristically worried habit for him, something he’d seen Shijie do at Jiang Cheng’s bedside this entire past week. Her knuckles had tangled like matted knots in each other. “If he lives.”
“Jiang Cheng?”
Wei Wuxian nodded. Once his words grew from his chest, inside his heart-roots, but in a week they’d all withered in the hallways of his lungs. He couldn’t speak. He was afraid he’d cry.
“Yes.”
“As he once was?”
The ghost’s face was dreary autumn. He nodded.
“Then, can you tell me how?” Hope surged through him, intoxicating and dizzy. He stood up, holding out the book in his hands. The pages had been dog-eared where his fingers had been making dumpling skins out of the paper. “Please, you must know, then! How to restore Jiang Cheng’s core!”
Nothing.
“Say something!” He thrust the book at the ghost. His nerves had begun to fray in earnest. No sleep and no food grated him raw as stripped hide. “Please!”
“You didn’t fail,” whispered the ghost.
“‘You didn’t fail’?” Wei Wuxian said incredulously. Then he laughed. He felt insane. He was truly, genuinely unraveling. “That’s what you have to say to me? What use is that? Everything is my fault. Maybe Yu Furen was right, ghost. Maybe she was.” Wei Wuxian thumped back onto the floor, lost and small. His shoulders slumped, and the book lay open between his legs where he hadn’t bothered to arrange them back into a proper lotus. “You even gave me advice and I failed that, too. I let Jiang Cheng out of my sight. Hey, ghost, want to tell me how many more times I fail? How badly it goes? Since you know so much and I’ve already hit rock bottom, what’s a little harm telling me?”
“None of this was your fault. It wasn’t your fault, Wei Ying.”
Wei Wuxian looked up. No one called him Wei Ying, except—
“Do you think,” he said slowly, “that you could go and find Lan Zhan for me? He’s probably rebuilding Cloud Recesses right now, but there are books. There must be books, they must have saved some. They must have a book in that Forbidden Chamber I heard so much about that will tell me how to save my brother.”
“They don’t.”
“Then why can’t you—why won’t you just help me?” Wei Wuxian was on his feet again, the room spinning as vertigo turned the floor into a hop, skip, hiccup under him. He wanted to throw something. Maybe himself; pain would ground him. Lately, it felt like the only thing that was real. “Please. Please, tell me. I failed. I need to fix it. I can fix it. I have to fix it.”
“Wei Ying,” the ghost said, with this horrible, palpable sort of inevitability. Like watching that plunge when the broken bird that flew funny finally fell from the sky. “People cannot always be saved. You will try to save them all. You will only save a few. It won’t be a failure on your part.”
“I’m not a coward, I can accept when something was my fault. Maybe you are, ghost, but I’m not.” Wei Wuxian swallowed. His ears were still ringing with Yu Furen’s last words to him—protect Jiang Cheng with your life!—and he would have done it even without her command.
The ghost simply stared at him. Then he said, “None of us are strong alone.”
“I will be,” lied Wei Wuxian.
“You’re a child,” said the ghost.
Wei Wuxian laughed. It sputtered out of him like water from a rusty well pump, and he laughed again. “I’m not a child,” he said. “No. You know why? A child is what you call a young person who still has their family. No, still has their parents. That’s a child. But people knew, ghost, they knew that someone who lost both their parents needed a different word. Child isn’t enough, because someone who survives that needs another word entirely. It’s orphan. Lonely thing. We’re orphans.”
“Wei Ying,” said the ghost.
“I’ve done it once before,” said Wei Wuxian wildly, because his throat swelled, and he couldn’t speak. This was pathetic. He’d already cried in front of Shijie the night before, and now he was doing it in front of this half-stranger whose name he didn’t even know. Who had he even become? “I can do it again. I know how to be alone, ghost. You don’t have to tell me.”
And then he hiccuped, stiffening, because the ghost crossed the space between the table and—hugged him. He was slightly taller, not by much, and very cold. Wei Wuxian stood rigidly as a Lan, not comprehending the touch. The chill of this embrace should not have been so comforting, but Wei Wuxian leaned into it anyway. Like lying in a grave, just a bit more homey.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry this world will not be kinder to you.”
It will see your heart, sweet like a newborn, and hold it underwater until it stops thrashing.
“I don’t need its kindness.”
“No,” said the ghost. “But you will need your own.”
Wen Qing returned with another plate of soft steamed buns that Wen Ning had made. When she found Wei Wuxian standing alone behind his desk with tears washing clean streaks down his cheeks, she set the plate down on his desk and said nothing.
The wind sobbed on.
When Lotus Pier was falling, Lan Wangji had been pinning the clouds back in their skies.
“Good morning, Zhenjun.” His youngself greets him without hesitation now.
“Good morning,” says Lan Wangji, “Hanguang-jun.”
His youngself’s ears redden. “This title...”
“It is a title you have earned. Wear it well.” Lan Wangji nods to the fresh-built structures of Cloud Recesses, the air still rendered with the tang of sap. “You have led with a steady hand in times of adversity.”
“I did what I could.” He pauses. “I did not have a chance to thank you for what you did for us in the cave,” says his youngself. “Jin gongzi and Jiang gongzi both asked if I had sent the signal. I simply said yes, but…” He fixes his gaze on Lan Wangji. “We both know that’s not quite true.”
“You needed help,” says Lan Wangji simply.
“Then, my deepest gratitude.”
Wei Ying always used to bat off Lan Wangji’s thanks—he still does, quite a bit, but sometimes he lets Lan Wangji thank him, he lets it sit and settle, the sound of it shimmering between them. He understands it a bit, now. The sound of it is dissonant coming out of his own mouth.
“What is this structure you’ve been working on?” he asks. He knows what it is. He asks because the real reason time gave him this day, he remembers, is because he will meet Jiang Wanyin and learn what happened to Wei Ying after they escaped the cave in Muxi Mountain, and his youngself deserves one last kind conversation before he is thrown into a cold fear that would take him months to set down.
“A nursery.” His youngself inclines his head towards the entrance, where a pair of Lan doctors hurry up the steps at the sound of a wailing infant. “Many members of the sect with children perished while defending Cloud Recesses. The orphans needed a place to stay for all the healers to look after them.”
The baby’s cries crescendo. They are high and stuttering, heartbroken and bare. His youngself frowns. The noise is, admittedly, disturbing the serenity.
“Babies cry,” Lan Wangji says.
“That one is named Lan Jingyi,” his youngself says. “Colic.”
“Oh.” Oh, this he’d forgotten. How could he have? Lan Jingyi had always cried nonstop as an infant. The memory strikes him hard through the chest. “He will get better.”
His youngself does not look convinced. “It has been like this for weeks now.”
“He’ll change when he makes friends. Someone like him, who lost everything.”
“Will he?”
“A friend is a powerful thing to have.”
Once, Lan Wangji knew, his youngself would have argued. Or given him a dubious silence, one that tapered into a severe gash of a statement: “I have done fine without friends.” Now, he inclines his head, expression lost.
“It is strange without him.”
“Who?”
His youngself swallows. “Wei Ying. A...a friend.”
Inside the nursery, Lan Jingyi’s cries muffle in fabric. Someone must have picked him up, the quiet sound of Gusu lullaby filtering through the open windows. Lan Wangji allows the corner of his mouth to quirk. “Is that all he is to you?”
The expression his youngself levels him is unreadable.
“Zhenjun?”
“Hanguang-jun!”
The call comes from far away enough that it should be forbidden at Cloud Recesses, but war changes a world. All at once, the details of this day sharpen to bladepoint against his skin. His youngself turns to the disciple who hurries to them fast enough to scatter the quartz pebbles in his wake. They bow, hair asunder. “Hanguang-jun.”
“What is it?” asks his youngself.
“Jiang gongzi is at the gates,” they say. “He’s—he’s looking for you.”
“He’s looking for me?”
“He is, Hanguang-jun.”
His youngself nods curtly. “Let him in.”
“He…” The disciple bows again. “He requests that you go and meet him at once, for he cannot delay the matter any longer. He also requests that this disciple impress upon you the urgency of his request.”
“Has Lotus Pier been attacked again?”
“No, Hanguang-jun. He would not tell us what it was.”
“Understood. I will see to him right away.”
They bow one last time, and then leave Lan Wangji alone with himself.
“I don’t understand,” says his youngself, “why is Jiang gongzi here? After Lotus Pier was attacked, Lanling Jin reported that he and his sister and Wei Ying had fled towards Meishan. We could only hope that it meant they made it all to safety.”
The breath that Lan Wangji takes burns in the insides of his nose, like smoke and glass. “He is here to beg for your help,” he murmurs.
Jiang Wanyin had been wearing lilac and violet, more shades of indigo than Lan Wangji had ever seen him wear—granted, he never spent much time actually looking at Jiang Wanyin when he didn’t have to, but gone were the warm bunny browns and spring jades that he remembered seeing Jiang Wanyin wearing. The Jiang Wanyin that showed up at the gates of Cloud Recesses was lightning and the bruised pungence of ozone after rain. The storm had already come and gone. He was her carnage.
“My help,” his youngself repeats, eyebrows lifting. “Beg for it?”
“In the only way Jiang Wanyin knows how.” By saying he doesn’t need it.
“Do you know, Zhenjun, why he would beg me for help?”
Lan Wangji nods.
“And why is that?”
“Wei Ying is missing.”
His youngself bristles. He’s kindle lit aflame. At first his hand jumps to his waist, where Bichen should have been, but even three months later his youngself hasn’t gotten used to going empty-handed.
“Missing?” he says. “I was told he and Jiang gongzi—”
Lan Wangji shakes his head.
“Zhenjun, where is he?”
“I don’t know,” says Lan Wangji, and this much is the truth. He knows now that Wei Ying had been in the Burial Mounds, had dragged his broken body out of the land of ghosts and demons with nothing but a flute and a bloodlust on his tongue, but the missing time between his last day there and the encounter at the Yiling Office, years later, remains a dark fog of memory. Wei Ying hasn’t told him, and Lan Wangji will not ask.
“I must leave immediately.”
“Go to Qishan,” Lan Wangji advises after him as he goes. “You’ll need your sword.”
“I understand, Zhenjun.”
“Wangji.”
“Yes?”
“This Wei Ying,” says Lan Wangji, “what would you do for him?”
Around them, the larks dip in and out of the sea of cypress trees like jumping fish. The silence of the mountains rings. His youngself stares at him over his shoulder with a fiery glimmer in his face, like a moon shot out of his orbit.
Look at the sky. Sun is setting.
His youngself says, “I would die for him.”
And he would cry for him, so it seems, more than one, more than twice, more than three times.
Lan Wangji is alone when time swallows him, but she spits him back out half-chewed into the nightmare blue of an evening in Yiling. The air reeks of bodies gone bad, and amongst all that is filthy and rank, his youngself appears from the shadows. He walks stiffly, as his muscle has been peeled back and scraped, leaving nothing but a tangle of fine nerves.
He draws up short at the sight of Lan Wangji standing outside the gates. The doors to the Yiling Supervisory Office have been torn from their hinges, tongues ripped from mouths, the brutal dismemberment covering the dust and stone of the walkway into the building. Lan Wangji steps into the glare of the fires.
“Zhenjun,” greets his youngself.
“You are leaving.” It is not a question.
“I was asked to.”
“Did you find him?” prompts Lan Wangji.
“We did,” his youngself says.
“He asked you to leave?”
Silence.
The distant hoot of an owl settles spun-soft over them.
“Zhenjun,” his youngself says, tiny shakes wracking him all over, “who was that? Who was that, in there? It was Wei Ying. He had his face. He had his voice. He...smelled of death. He spoke as if he has never met—has never. He. Zhenjun.” He can’t stop shaking, the quiver of a fawn newborn. The world is suddenly very big, and much darker than his youngself has ever known. It is a cruel way to learn. “Zhenjun.”
Lan Wangji, no matter the version, did not stutter, but in his head, he had so much to fear.
“Yes?” he says.
“I do not think we are friends anymore.”
Just strangers with a red thread between them.
“He needs you more than you know. Friends don’t always say what they mean.”
He needs you to believe him.
“Zhenjun, I am afraid.”
“Of?”
His youngself’s throat bobs as he swallows, holding back tears that he is furious have pooled in his lashes. A flash flood. “Of losing him.”
Lan Wangji turns, head inclined, beckoning for his youngself to fall into step beside him. Movement helps him think; Wei Ying taught him that. Wei Ying taught him so much on his way to unearthing a smile from Lan Wangji’s quiet depths. “You will be amazed, Wangji, how easy it is to lose people.”
“I do not want to.”
“If you find someone you cannot bear to lose,” he says, “then hold onto them.”
On the twentieth day, Wei Wuxian saw his ghost.
“If you pull its tail skywards, real fast, and hold its head down, you’ll kill it before it even realizes it’s trapped. Helps with the mess.” A pause. “Helps with the squirm.”
Wei Wuxian heard him around the crunch. Rat blood was oily and grainy but alive alive alive, fresh, beating, hot. The taste stuck at the back of his throat and when he turned, every broken rib shrilled to remind him: you are just as dead as the things you put in your mouth, only difference is that you haven’t been buried yet.
He worked a tiny splinter of bone through his teeth, sharp edges carving lines into the soft insides of his mouth, and spat it into the dirt. Bits of sinew and tendon clung to it. There was still blood on it; he did not know if it was his or his dinner’s.
“Fancy seeing you in a place like this, ghost,” said Wei Wuxian. He let his hands full of slippery meat fall to his lap, vaguely aware that half of his face must be smeared with blood. A cold spot stung high on his cheek where the winds nipped at it. Some of it must have found its way up his face and he wiped at it with a filthy sleeve. “You must be right at home here.”
“Hmm,” the ghost hummed, as if agreeing. He picked his way over the stone and dirt without even needing to look, the same way a butcher knew how to skin an animal, picking apart muscle from bone. Noiselessly, and without mess. “You should ration the rats. They’re smarter than you think, they talk to each other. Soon they won’t be so easy to catch.”
“There’s nothing else to eat here.” It hurt to speak, the vibration of words jangling all his loose pieces like windchimes made of teeth. “I don’t even have to work to catch them. They crawl up to me, thinking I’m their dinner.”
The ghost gave him a funny look. “Have you tried digging?”
“For potatoes?” Wei Wuxian scoffed and that hurt in earnest. “Carrots? Nothing grows here, ghost, do you know where we are? This is Burial Mounds, in case you couldn’t tell. Best you get going before you’re stuck here.”
“Not potatoes.” The ghost paused, and Wei Wuxian watched as a swarm of particularly nasty spirits that he’d been avoiding for the last few days rose from their clutch of stones and rushed towards them.
He ducked, but the ghost didn’t even budge, and the writhing mass of black energy twisted in his presence, then scattered in his wake. As if repelled. “Potatoes aren’t the only things we bury in the ground.”
The dead rat was a wet, naked heart in Wei Wuxian’s hands.
“I will not eat a corpse,” Wei Wuxian said. There was no way this ghost was suggesting he eat half-decayed human bodies. Rats were bad enough, and they all tasted sick, greasy, gutloaded on the same rot that this ghost was telling him to eat. Even if he could find one, what was he supposed to do? Just sink his mouth into a leg, gnaw it like a chicken drumstick?
“When people are hungry enough,” said the ghost, “they will eat anything.”
He stood in a sliver of cliff-cut moonlight, only wide enough to lay a stripe of white blindfold over the line of his eyes.
“You don’t know hunger like I do,” Wei Wuxian spat. In answer, his stomach snarled, eating itself in the absence of more rodent gristle.
The ghost did not try to refute him. For a moment he stood there, and Wei Wuxian stayed kneeling on his shattered ankles, and then he reached for the sword that he always kept strapped to his back but never drew. A stroke of confusion flashed through him; was his ghost finally going to kill him, put him out of his misery, free him from a body that just wouldn’t let him die?
The blade unsheathed with a high, shrill noise, a whimper in the chaos of things, and he held the steel up to the moonlight. Wei Wuxian didn’t understand—this was the starting position for sparring practice. The ghost stood motionless, angling the blade until the light caught it. He wasn’t trying to duel. He wasn’t trying to kill him.
Then Wei Wuxian blinked, the fractured edges of his brain falling into their places all at once, and—
Suibian.
“Who are you?” he demanded unsteadily. “Who are you, ghost?”
“I think you know exactly who I am,” said the ghost. “I think you’ve known for a while.”
The ground rolled beneath him. For days now, Wei Wuxian had been a rogue lantern, caught in an updraft, floating into the dark waiting for his flame to go out. Until now, it still hadn’t. Now he stared up into the face of this ghost. Someone who seemed to know all his secrets before he even had a reason to keep them.
“We live?” he whispered.
“We will if you listen to me.”
Wei Wuxian shook. It wasn’t cold. He told himself it was, skin pricking with phantom blades and needles. The wound in his abdomen pulled against torn muscle, grim as a noose, tightening all the way up into his throat.
“Is Jiang Cheng—”
“He’s alive.”
He slumped. “Ghost,” he said, because it wouldn’t be right to call his own name aloud. Come morning, this might all be a fever dream. “Ghost, I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
Plenty of things scared him. Dying before he could exact revenge. The confirmation that he really was useless. Leaving Jiang Cheng alone in this world. Disappointing Lan Zhan. Was that what it was? When he heard Lan Zhan’s voice among the spirits, calling for him. Maybe that was disappointment. Somehow that hurt him, shocked feeling back into him.
“That I’ll never see Shijie again,” was what came out of his mouth.
His ghost—his futureself, he figured—slid Suibian back into her scabbard. “She’s worried that you haven’t come home.”
“Is she mad at us?” Wei Wuxian asked desperately.
The expression that flitted across his futureself’s face was a bloody handprint. Disembodied. He breathed in once. “I don’t think she is,” he said quietly.
“Good,” Wei Wuxian relaxed. “That’s good.”
“I have something for you,” his futureself said. “You’ll need it more than I do.”
There was always a curious flute strapped to his futureself’s waist, with a carved lotus tassel swinging pale as an eyeball from one end. It peered at him, angry and bloodshot, when his futureself tugged it free from his belt and held it out to him. An offer.
“For me?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, come on, ghost. I don’t know how to play the flute. Why won’t you give me Suibian?”
“You cannot wield her without a golden core,” said his futureself. “It will kill you. But the flute will lay your path out of this place. Play it, practice it, and use it to harness resentful energy.”
If Wei Wuxian’s body were not broken in so many places, he’d scramble to his feet. As it were, when he stared at his futureself in wonder, the crane of his neck made his spine creak and groan. His head was a tombstone full of ashes at the laddertop of his spine. “Resentful energy?”
“A shame to let it go to waste when you’re right in the thick of it all, isn’t it?” The wind tugged at his futureself’s robe until it flattened against his legs. “You’ll need to.”
He looked at his futureself—at the clothes that so clearly were not of Yunmeng Jiang, but not very Gusu Lan either, even if he said they were. Gusu Lan, his futureself had said. Wei Wuxian would not only live, but also be part of Gusu Lan one day in the future. He wanted to laugh and scream and then laugh some more, until the gashes in his throat opened up again. The mere idea that he could practice the ghost path and then be accepted by a sect like the Lans, who’d almost taken off his head for speaking hypothetically about using a single man’s resentment, was laughable.
“But what about you? Won’t you need it?”
“Her time with me ends here,” said his futureself.
“Are you going to use Suibian again? I thought a golden core was impossible to recultivate once lost.”
His futureself’s eyes glimmered. “Who said anything about recultivating it?” A massive dark spirit climbed along his back like a mutant spider, and Wei Wuxian shuddered as his futureself barely paid it attention, giving it a flick so it would release.
The flute is dark and cold in his palms, a single rib of a giant beast scraped clean. “How do I get them to listen to me, then?”
“Listen to them first.”
“I don’t under—” The lines of his futureself’s body began to crumble. “Wait, no—please, tell me how to—!”
“One last thing, Wei Ying,” but even now his words were falling apart, stone to sand, “when Lan Zhan asks you to go back with him, he’s not punishing you. He’s trying to save—”
“—you, didn’t he?”
Wei Wuxian couldn’t tell the voice wasn’t Wen Qing’s. He simply waited for the smack to the back of his head that never came, and he was almost sad that it didn’t, because pain seemed to be the only thing that was real anymore. Some days, Wei Wuxian felt like one of the rogue kites that he and Jiang Cheng would practice shooting back in Lotus Pier—pulled by the wind, nothing but a battered smear of color.
“Sleeping on your back is going to give you worse nightmares tonight. All that alcohol.” From very far away, Wei Wuxian registered that it wasn’t Wen Qing, wasn’t A-Yuan, wasn’t a Wen refugee at all. A dark shadow had perched itself on the edge of the Blood Pool. “Try your side.”
“Bad hip,” Wei Wuxian mumbled. Wen Qing had tried to do something for the pain, because she’d given him this lecture too when he woke A-Yuan with his nightmares one too many times. She’d done what she could. That was just what she did—her best.
“Hm.”
“Why are you here.”
His futureself was quiet. “Lan Zhan, he…”
Wei Wuxian groaned. “Not you too. Aren’t you supposed to understand me? You are me, I am you, we are one and the same?”
A silence long enough that he thought his futureself had gone. Wei Wuxian cracked open an eye and, nope, there he was, still sitting by the Blood Pool, resting his weight on the heels of his hands with his legs crossed. How could he do that? Wei Wuxian had fractured both wrists in the fall; they hurt if he put any weight on them and popped whenever he cast any spells too quickly.
“What was the question?”
“Lan Zhan tried once again to reason with you, didn’t he?”
Wei Wuxian grunted. “You know how he is.”
“Well.”
“Or maybe you don’t. I figure we’ll never see him again after this, huh?” He laughed and it felt hollow and wrong. “How’s it feel not to? Tell me now, I can take it.”
His futureself simply smiled, down at his own lap, as if amused by some unspoken joke the spirits in this place always told.
“Oh, no. Wait. You’re part of Gusu Lan, now, right? Then I suppose we do see him.” The world spun when Wei Wuxian shifted enough to fold his hands behind his head. “Does he ever get married to anyone? Are they anywhere near as illustrious and pretty as he is?”
“Yes. No.”
“Huh?”
“First part yes. Second part no.”
“Hmph. I don’t like this story.”
“You asked yes or no questions, not for a story.”
“Tell me a story, ghost.”
“What kind of story?”
“I don’t know.” Wei Wuxian shifted again. His head pounded uncomfortably on his moldy straw pillow, pulse throbbing in his temples like a war drum. “A happy one.”
“I don’t have many of those.”
“Then just make one up.”
The ghost sighed. “I knew a cultivator once,” he began, “whose beloved had been dead for thirteen years.”
“I said happy.”
“I know. We’re getting to that part.”
He did not often see his ghost in the afternoon, but when Wei Wuxian walked back into the Demon Subdue Cave just as the sun tossed its golden hair over the Burial Mounds, someone was already inside, leaning as he always did against the Blood Pool. He was reading.
“Give that back,” he said, snatching the letter out of his futureself’s fingers. “Don’t just go around touching other people’s things.”
“You had it stowed with all your nice things,” said the ghost.
Wei Wuxian folded the invitation back up, taking care not to tear the parchment and ruin Lan Zhan’s impeccable writing. “I don’t have nice things.”
“The lotus tassel Shijie gave us, I mean.”
“It’s an invitation from a friend. How many of those will I ever get again?” said Wei Wuxian. The day Wen Qing had handed it to him, Wei Wuxian had read and reread the letter at least a dozen times, until he could recite it by heart. Wei Ying, are you well today? Lan Zhan’s warm hand had floated across this parchment. If he closed his eyes and imagined it well enough, Wei Wuxian could just barely get a whiff of sandalwood. “I’m busy today, so I won’t have time to entertain you. What are you here for now?”
His ghost watched wordlessly as Wei Wuxian untied his bulky parcel, fiddling with the deadknots until they gave.
The day after the invitation arrived, Wen Qing had risen early to find Wei Wuxian sitting on the edge of the forest, listening for morning, and then had thrown a pouch full of silver dollars in his direction. It had been heavier than he was accustomed to.
“This is way more than I need for meat,” he’d said.
“It’s not for meat. Do you really plan on showing up at Koi Tower looking like a shabby ruffian? What would your Shijie think? Go get clothes. You look like a beggar.”
Wei Wuxian had wisely chosen not to say that he had started and would probably end his life as one, so at least he had consistency.
“Where did you even get all this—?”
“That’s for me to know and you to shut up about.”
So he’d listened, gone into the city, and walked into a seamstress’s stall to ask for robes in the nicest linens that the money could buy. She was right, Wei Wuxian knew, that if he wanted to take the target off his back that he would have to stop looking like a bulls-eye. The tailor had finished just in time for today’s banquet at Koi Tower. He would see Shijie again, and she might take his hands in hers, say nothing about the burns and calluses, and ask, “A-Xian, have you been well?”
And he could say yes, and at least look like he would not be lying.
Now his ghost said, suddenly, “I don’t know if you should go.”
Wei Wuxian scoffed. “I didn’t ask for your opinion.”
His ghost—his futureself—watched as Wei Wuxian shook out his new robes from their package. He hadn’t worn something this luxurious since he left Cloud Recesses, and even then, the best silks and satins went to Jiang Cheng’s clothes. This outer robe was lined in scarlet.
“I have to go see Shijie. I don’t know when I’ll ever get a chance again. And—Lan Zhan will probably be there, too.”
“Yes,” said his futureself. “He will be.”
“I figure I won’t be able to go to his wedding either, so this might really be the last time I see him.”
“Wei Ying.”
“What.”
His futureself breathed in, and for a moment, Wei Wuxian could see himself in this ghost.
“I forgive you,” he said, “for the things you have done to survive.”
Only thing was, he wouldn’t survive.
Maybe all of it had been for naught. A cosmic joke of a life, that was him! It would fall into place with everything else he had done in his short time on this small, rocky planet, except giving up his golden core.
The edge of a cliff was heady. It was tearing his own heart out of his body and watching as it glugged traitorously on in his slimy palm, waiting for a death that was so close but wouldn’t come. But you would need a heart to begin with to tear it out at all, and Wei Wuxian knew if he reached inside himself he might come up with nothing but rot and rat skulls.
He wanted to laugh again. It was freeing. Blood was in his mouth and in his nose, his guts were snakes in mud. He did laugh. Lan Zhan stood a stone’s throw from him, too close for Wei Wuxian to go peacefully, too far away to save him. His mouth moved. He said something. Wei Wuxian couldn’t hear him. His ghost stood behind Lan Zhan.
“Don’t do it,” he said.
“I’m so tired, ghost.”
“Don’t do it, go back to him.”
“He’s disgusted with me.”
“He’s trying to save you!”
“Not all of us want to be.”
Everything that lived and breathed had a body that knew how to stay alive even if it had a brain that did not want to. Wei Wuxian realized, here on this cliffside, that nothing but dizzying euphoria surged through him at the thought of a permanent, black end to all of this. His hands shook with it. All of his nerve endings crackled with it, a private firework show for only him to feel.
He tipped back.
Wei Wuxian was glad he chose to face the sky. Once he’d told Wen Qing, At least I’m lying on my back. If I die from this, at least I’ll have seen a sunrise and two more golden sunsets. I don’t think that’s such a bad way to go. Now he watched morning break over Nightless City, like the dawn finally washing away the nightmare of him, and—
Something grabbed him around his wrist, cutting his fall, and the discordant pop of his shoulder dislocating twanged through his body. Wei Wuxian stared at the cliff face, lines of magma a roadmap in the dark basalt, before he thought to look up—
Lan Zhan. Lan Zhan had grabbed him, and behind Lan Zhan was his ghost, holding Lan Zhan down so Wei Wuxian’s weight would not take them both over the edge.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked, voice brittle. “Ghost. Futureself. Me, whoever you are, exactly—you know if you save me in this timeline, the you that exists now will cease to be true? Time isn’t something you should meddle with. It will kill us both.” He said, “Lan Zhan. Let go.”
But Lan Zhan says nothing, blood sheeting down his arm in dark, sticky pearls, face breaking only for a moment when his grip falters on Wei Wuxian’s wrist. His ghost gasps, and digs his heels harder into the cliff, holding Lan Zhan tighter around the waist. Wei Wuxian wonders if anyone else in this world can see or even sense his ghost’s presence, for Lan Zhan doesn’t react at all to having someone hug him like this. Like a lover would.
“I’m not trying to save us,” said his ghost, even as Jiang Cheng appeared over Lan Zhan by the cliff, even as Lan Zhan turned to him and wheezed against the pressure on his lungs Desist. “We are going to save him.”
Things unspooled around them. Wei Wuxian’s vision swam. When he breathed his tongue was an open artery in his mouth. His ghost was yelling at him, fingers whitening as he held Lan Zhan away from the edge, but Jiang Cheng raised his sword. The blade edge caught the sun, the soft, charred dawn.
If he was lucky, Wei Wuxian would be dead before he hit the ground.
“Listen to me!” said his ghost. “Remember what I said in the cave—how to get home? Forgetting envies. Don’t forget it, don’t ever forget it!”
“Go die!” shouted Jiang Cheng, and then the sword came down, down, and Wei Wuxian waited for the pain of it—he knew with punishing clarity how a blade felt in skin, but it never came.
The clatter of metal against stone shook his eyes open.
Jiang Cheng flicked his wrist and loosened the basalt outcrop, and then Lan Zhan pitched forward as his body lost the support—
We are going to save—
And then it became so obvious that there was only one way this would ever end. From the moment he saw that unnamed ghost in the the guest room at Cloud Recesses and called him demon, elbow nudging into Lan Zhan’s wine-warmed side, to the time he lounged on the unforgiving shingles of the Unclean Realm and asked his ghost how he died, why he hated high places, to the day his ghost had stood in the Demon Subdue Cave and told him not to go, not to go, death is waiting.
Lan Zhan’s hand was so slick that it was easy to throw him off. Wei Wuxian watched his face flash from determined to horrified to untethered. He called his name, once,
“Wei Ying!”
in a cry so horrible that Wei Wuxian thought he must already be dead, because in no life would Lan Zhan ever make such a heartrending noise, never mind form it around his name. Wei Wuxian watched as he got smaller and smaller. Soon, Lan Zhan was just a smudge. A distant hint of winter. Then just a pinprick, a stupid, stubborn star that had forgotten to flee in the loom of morning.
He should have said goodbye.
His ghost was right.
How far was he from the ground?
Time pooled around him,
as if to stuff him back into her holey, moth-eaten pockets,
and then she ended.
(“There is nothing down there.”
“You did not search hard enough. He must be down there. Even if he’s nothing but—nothing but—”
“I’m telling you that there’s nothing down there but the bleached bones of the dead, Lan Wangji! I know what I was supposed to look for. I looked for a pile of unrecognizable brains and blood, and I found none! Go down there and look for yourself, what does it fucking matter to me? Don’t come crying if you see something that turns your stomach. I—I hope he’s dead. Yeah, that’s right! If he wasn’t, if that bastard had found some way to survive that fall, mark my words, I would make sure I finished what he didn’t.”
“He must be down there. He must—he. I saw him fall. I did not see him try to stop.”
“Because he deserved it. He fucking had it coming.”
“I should have saved him.”
“Why? What did he matter to you? He was supposed to be my brother. He was supposed to be Jin Ling’s uncle. What was he to you, then? Huh? What did you even lose? Tell me, then!”
Silence.
“The distinguished Second Jade of Lan, Hanguang-jun, weeping for Yiling Laozu. Pathetic.”)
From a distance, Koi Tower glitters in so much red and gold that it is a phoenix on the horizon.
When the morning sun spills over Jiang Yanli’s wedding, it looks as if the entire sect estate is aflame, only in the ways that fire is beautiful. Not destructive. Red silk hangings line every roof and awning, swaying in the wind. No one screams.
Lan Wangji stands on the steep staircase up to Koi Tower, remembers the blues of evening and dozens of swords aimed at him, remembers the blood that had streamed from Wei Ying’s mouth. A dark flood of rubies down his face. Behind him, footsteps.
“Zhenjun.”
“Good morning, Wangji.”
He is dressed for a wedding. Jiang Yanli was married in autumn, between the patchwork quilt of sun, cloud, rain, dusk. Lan Wangji had pulled on his nicest outer robe for the occasion—one that was reserved for things such as coronations and ceremonies—and he is alone. His brother had gone to speak with Jin Guangyao. Lan Wangji wonders how much chaos it would introduce to this world if he told his youngself to run to Lan Xichen and tell him everything that would happen. Wonders, again, if it would change anything.
His youngself stands beside him on the same step, watching as the bustle of the wedding swells. They are early, though the servants and handmaidens of the Jin sect have been awake and at work since before dawn.
“Jiang guniang is getting married today,” says his youngself.
“Mm.”
“I asked Xiong Zhang to negotiate an allowance.”
“Did you?”
His youngself stares at the steps, swept so clean that they’re gleaming. “In hopes that I could convince them to allow Wei Ying’s attendance. He,” his youngself searches for the words, “loves his sister more than anyone.”
“You did what you could.”
“He would have been so happy. I just wanted to—make him happy.”
One of the Jin sect servants purloins a peach from the top of a platter and bites into it, juice running through his fingers as he wipes sweat from his brow. No one else will notice. Jin Guangyao will.
In the year that he hadn’t seen Wei Ying, Lan Wangji felt like he’d had to relearn everything he thought he knew about family. About the ones you choose, and the ones you’re born into, and the ones that you feel you must protect no matter the burn mark on your body. He’d never questioned his own, until he had to, and then he questioned everything and everyone he knew.
“He would not have a robe,” Lan Wangji says now, just because it is the easiest thing to say. “Nor any money for one that the Jins would possibly allow.”
“Then I would buy one for him,” his youngself snaps, like this is dizzyingly obvious.
“You know how angry he would be if you showed up in the Burial Mounds with banquet-ready robes for him.”
The Wei Ying that Lan Wangji is married to now would shake out any set of new robes that Lan Wangji got him and say something to the effect of only ever putting clothes on just so Lan Wangji could take them off. That may or may not have happened a week before they received a letter for this odd case. But the Wei Ying of this time, the one steeped in so much blood and resentment that he smelled of death even when Lan Wangji was sitting as far across the table at a restaurant with him, would have been furious. He would have cast Lan Wangji out for what would have looked like unwanted pity, eyes flashing thick, gory red, and his youngself would have said nothing to explain himself.
He seems to realize this just as Lan Wangji ponders it, and wilts.
“Zhenjun,” he says.
“Yes.”
“We’ll never see each other again, will we?”
His youngself isn’t looking at him, nor is he looking at the steps or the bustle of activity at the peak of Koi Tower anymore. Instead he stares out into the city, eyes raking over the glittering sprawl of Lanling.
“You could visit him.”
“He doesn’t want me to.”
“He wants you to,” Lan Wangji murmurs. “He doesn’t think you want to.”
“How could he—?”
“You never said. And he will never assume.”
His youngself’s face is hard and blazing. “So we do see each other again?”
“Mm.”
“How?”
Like this: in uproar.
“Lan Zhan, I knew one day we would have to fight to the death.”
Like this: at night.
“Shijie, get out of the way!”
Like this: where time ends.
“Yin Tiger Seal? Seeing as you all want it so badly, then use what you’ve got to come get it!”
Of course time would not let him get off so easy; of course she would regurgitate him back onto the battlefield of Nightless City. In some ways, it has been long enough that Lan Wangji realizes he doesn’t recall all of the details anymore—exactly where Jiang Yanli fell, the crunch of arrows underfoot, the rough trail of blood that dripped from his fingers onto the skirt of his robes. His youngself stands immobile, the world hushing in breathless silence when Wei Ying casts his Yin Tiger Seal away from himself and into the chaos.
Time had sputtered here. Everything paused and slowed down as the Yin Tiger Seal absorbed all of the resentment and night into itself, shaking as it attempted to contain it all, then shattered.
All of this, Lan Wangji remembers. The blue, sickly tinge of Wei Ying’s skin where he stood, high and fragile, atop one of the pillars. Like a gargoyle, a ghost, a bit of both.
The flow of time stumbles around them again, drunken and injured, flying on a bad wing.
As the rest of the battlefield converges on the half of the Seal that remains intact, pewter-grey and bloodstained as it passes from hand to severed hand, Lan Wangji stands frozen with blood trickling down his arm. He and Jiang Wanyin, who’s still cradling his sister, are the only two that aren’t paying attention to the demented goose chase.
Wei Ying, though, watches, and from his perch he laughs manically. Blood spews from his mouth when he does, and he holds his stomach as he doubles over. His laughter falls apart around him until it turns into broken sobs. From here, in the yellow-sulfur morning, he’s a candle burnt too long, face a streak of wax.
“What happened to him?” asks his youngself, without looking away. “He’s...not himself.”
“Pain will eat you,” says Lan Wangji.
“I need to take him away from here.” His youngself catalogues their escape points, how many moments hang in the balance. Not enough, and it will never be enough. The fray rages on around them still; if his youngself moved faster this time, then perhaps things would be different. “I’ll take him back to the Burial Mounds, I can hide him there.”
“He will tell you to begone.”
“I don’t care.”
“They will find you.”
“I must try!”
But Wei Ying moves before his youngself can, and Lan Wangji has learned that he cannot stop him in this timeline. No one can see him, and he can touch no one. His youngself gasps, breath sucked quietly through his teeth, and takes to the air to follow Wei Ying to the edge of the cliffs. His youngself watches him, skin unwinding from muscle unwinding from bone. Lan Wangji takes his time to step up onto the outcrop from which Wei Ying will fall. He has relived this nightmare so many times that he can paint every moment of it from memory; he is in no rush to witness it again.
“Wei Ying,” his youngself breathes. “Come back.” He turns and grasps Lan Wangji’s uninjured arm with his bloodied hand, so tightly that it’s a rabbit trap on Lan Wangji’s elbow. “Zhenjun, please. Help him.”
Lan Wangji knows Wei Ying cannot see him. Knows that the past is irrefutable. Knows that he can try anything, and that he might be able to change infinitesimal things, but fate will always find a way.
When Wei Ying tips, his youngself, too, throws himself into the wind.
He knows what will happen, but then,
time
slows.
And Lan Wangji is the only thing that breathes.
He makes his way to the lip of the outcropping, where Wei Ying hangs from the edge, his own sleeve sodden with Lan Wangji’s blood. A dull light pounds behind his eyes, and Lan Wangji remembers the question in his face: Why are you saving me?
Because I—
“—love you,”
he never said.
No one can hear him.
Lan Wangji knows that Wei Ying must also be trapped in this time loop somewhere like he is. Did he come here, too, and see Lan Wangji try and fail to save him again? Would he forgive him for it?
There’s nothing to forgive, Lan Zhan. I threw you off. I made that choice, it was my last one, and it was the only right choice I made in my first life.
He cannot change the past.
But he channels his spiritual energy into the meridians in his legs and his feet anyway, and Lan Wangji steps off the edge of the cliff. Far, far below, the open wounds of the earth blow hot magma gusts against him, and he lowers himself slowly, gently, maneuvering himself until he hovers at the same height as Wei Ying dangling from the edge.
As he knew they would, his arms fall right through Wei Ying’s body. Still, he holds them in a loose circle around Wei Ying’s waist, resting where his navel should be, and then time
speeds again, and his youngself’s face is pink, red, crimson, straining with the pain of torn muscle, hand slipping where the blood worms its way between their hands and they lurch and Wei Ying gasps at the slight drop, more of his youngself’s torso hanging off of the cliff they will fall, they will fall, the bruised tower of Jiang Wanyin’s form appearing at the end of the cliff and oh, oh, Lan Wangji had never seen his face, he wasn’t looking, not when he was trying to say everything with his eyes to Wei Ying, Jiang Wanyin has never cried but he is crying now, shaking, “Wei Wuxian, go die!”
Sandu hits the loose stones.
“Zhenjun!”
And Lan Wangji looks up into his youngself’s expression of horror in the same breath before he knows Wei Ying will wrench his hand out of his grasp, and says,
“I will catch him.”
They
fall,
and it is long and heavy and hot.
“Wei Ying!”
The wind whistles through his hair, and it tangles with Wei Ying’s. Lan Wangji tightens his hold around Wei Ying’s waist and finds that he feels more solid than he did at the edge of the cliff, and when Lan Wangji clamps down, his hands meet unforgiving flesh and bone. Wei Ying squirms as if to turn around, but Lan Wangji only embraces him harder so that he won’t knock himself out of his grip, and he does not know why—time will make sure that Wei Ying will die, but Lan Wangji will catch him. He promised his youngself he would.
And so Lan Wangji waits for the impact, cradling his sun that fell from the sky.
He jerks awake in darkness.
Lan Wangji sits up so quickly that his head swims. His brain feels as though it has hit the front of his skull, his eyes are pounding drums in their sockets, and his mouth is dry, but he is alive and Wei Ying is—
—gone. Not here. His arms are empty, and beneath him is cold, packed dirt. His mouth is wool and sand.
What had happened? Lan Wangji waited for an impact, and he thought it would come. A vague shadow of a realization that they had been falling for a while had just crossed his mind when he woke up here. Wei Ying had been solid in his arms, and Lan Wangji could grip him. In their last moments, he might have even felt Lan Wangji’s touch upon his body.
But how? Where is he? And why has he been sent here?
He stands up and brushes the drifts of his robes down smooth.
“Wei Ying?”
His voice echoes, not closely. This cannot be a cave. No, a yawning darkness. Time has swallowed him whole.
In the distance: winking.
“Wei Ying?”
The winking becomes a light. Then a lantern. It is watching the slow descent of a star and Lan Wangji is the crater who will catch it. He leaves his hand on his sword’s handle, but he senses no dark energy, and the figure who carries the lantern moves so serenely that they cannot be here to attack him.
“Who goes there?”
In the dim lanternlight stands a figure cloaked in black fabric, wearing a ghost’s mask painted seafoam and lavender. The hood of their cloak is drawn over their head, but a cascade of ivory hair spills over their shoulder. “Hanguang-jun.”
Lan Wangji squints. “I’m afraid that I do not recognize you.”
The masked ghost chuckles. His lantern bobs with the quiver of his body, swinging from its carrying stick and cheerful as a poppy. “Walk with me.”
So Lan Wangji does. He holds Bichen between them, but he cannot sense any malintent from this stranger, and finds, against reason that he trusts them. Enough, at least, not to attack them. Something is peculiar about them; they walk quietly yet without reserve, gait sprightly, the hand on their lantern unmarred by age. The paper stretched around the lantern is patterned with a light, incomprehensible print, like a stone picked from ashes.
He asks, “Were you the voice in the darkness at the beginning?”
“Ah, so you did hear us.”
Lan Wangji wants to ask who the other voice belonged to, but he has more pressing matters to address.
“Are you the inventor of the clock in the house?”
“Hanguang-jun lives up to his name as one of the keenest living cultivators, I see,” says the masked ghost. “I knew you would figure it out, but I certainly did not expect you to do it so quickly.”
“I simply inferred.”
“Keen inference. How is your husband?”
Lost in here somewhere with me, no thanks to you, Lan Wangji thinks petulantly. “He is well.”
“No doubt enjoying the curse on my clock, I gather.”
“If you have caused him any harm—” Lan Wangji’s hand finds Bichen in the darkness.
“Nothing of the sort!” The masked ghost waves theatrically. “He is highly skilled in getting himself into all manner of trouble, but not this time. A bit stuck, as you have been. Just some good, clean fun.”
Making Wei Ying relive his past is not something that Lan Wangji would consider fun, but he’s also dealt with enough cases to know that being able to speak so plainly with the inventor of a curse is a privilege not often afforded to him. “You created this curse with him in mind.”
“Both of you, in fact.”
“Why?”
“Tell me, Hanguang-jun,” says the inventor, “why would anyone want to turn back time?”
You wouldn’t change anything about the past?
“There were moments,” Lan Wangji says haltingly, “where time seemed to wait for me. It waited for me to shift something in this unchangeable past. I fear that this will change the future I come from.” He pauses. “Will it?”
The inventor shrugs. “Time,” he says, “is not linear, Hanguang-jun.”
Well, Lan Wangji figured. He has lived through the proof of knowing that neither time nor reality operate within the laws set by humans or gods alike.
“Everything about your present is informed by your past. This much, we have learned well. But the thing is, the past, too, is informed by our now. By our futures. Maybe abstractly so, and sometimes very literally so. One cannot change the past once it has happened. But how we understand that past—that is always changing. It is written over, and over, and over, until it’s a story we can tell with our eyes closed, one we can bear to hear without crying.”
They hold their lantern higher, and the muted firefly glow throws their ghost mask into sharp relief. Lan Wangji can just barely make out the glitter of eyes behind it.
“Then, Wei Ying, the one who fell from the cliff—this time, when I held him as he fell, he grew solid the farther we plummeted. What does it mean?”
“You have wondered why no one could find his soul or his body. Why he never answered you in Inquiry. Haven’t you? He returned, but you never stopped wondering.” The inventor switches his lantern from one hand to the other, wrist growing tired. “He no longer exists in this timeline. In ‘the now.’ His soul is a long, long way from home.”
“Wei Ying didn’t have anywhere to call home then. The world made sure of it.”
The inventor laughs, as if Lan Wangji had said something particularly funny. “Home, as in you.”
“...I see,” says Lan Wangji, not at all seeing.
“You could not find him because time as you existed in it was not a plane that he occupied anymore. I know it is an odd, funny thing to understand. But when you took him into your arms, fell with him like that—the impact broke through the barrier of time. Sent him to a point of existence that, then, had not yet manifested. That’s where he would be waiting for you. The first time. This time. Every other time, in every other timeline. When he falls, you will be there. And he will wait for you. Without knowing why, he will wait for you. And that is why you, against any and all proof that he would return, would wait for him.” The inventor chuckles. “Two people who have and will and will always defy time again, and again, and again, just for a chance to walk this wretched earth in the same life.”
“And the next life, too.”
“Yes,” the inventor says, very quietly. “In the next one, too.”
Lan Wangji’s brain churns unintelligently. The fall hadn’t been painful, but his thoughts are scattered, and he struggles to collect them all. This inventor knows time like an old friend. They know time like Lan Wangji knows loss. Perhaps they know about loss themselves.
“My husband and I investigated the curse on this clock on special request to remove it safely from a village of civilians,” he says, changing his approach.
“I know.”
“We were told that this clock was made by an inventor who’d lost his beloved.” Lan Wangji chances a glance out of the corner of his eye again, but the masked ghost keeps walking with ease in their shoulders. “Would that be you?”
“I suppose it would be. I also see that people have not gotten any better at telling stories.”
“So it is untrue.”
“Some of it. Not all of it. Losing someone means you won’t see them again, and I needn’t worry about that.” The inventor bats his hand. “But have you figured out how it breaks, yet, this curse?”
Lan Wangji can feel himself shutter. “No.”
“Forgiveness.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“The curse breaks,” says the inventor, and even his voice is smiling, “when those trapped in time can forgive the people they once were.” Some part of this seems very funny to them, though Lan Wangji is not laughing. “Or, they can begin to, anyway.”
He digests this. Lan Wangji feels open and bared to this eccentric stranger, bleeding like a crushed pomegranate. “Why?” he asks, sounding so much like his youngself that he’s been trying to guide. “Why does it matter to you if my husband and I can forgive ourselves or not?”
“Because once someone smarter than I,” says the inventor, “told me that we should not get lost in hating the people we once were, and forget to live.”
It does not do to dwell in that cycle.
My husband is so wise. You’re right, Lan Zhan. It doesn’t do.
Lan Wangji’s chest goes still. Then it’s a frantic clatter of loose buttons. “Who are y—?”
“I’ll have to leave you here, Hanguang-jun.”
“Please, wait—”
“You’ll find him again, right? Your husband, you know where he’ll be waiting for you. You always have. I think you always will.” The inventor raises their lantern and for a wild, painful moment, Lan Wangji realizes it’s patterned with rabbits—hundreds of them, soft and pearly, winter dawn grey. “He Who Appears in Chaos. There’s no one quite like you.”
The first time Lan Wangji watched Wei Ying die, he screamed his throat raw and thought, if he was lucky, he might never speak again.
The second time Lan Wangji watched Wei Ying die, he kneeled on cool dawn redwood, unflinching as his own blood pooled around him.
The third time Lan Wangji watched Wei Ying die, he woke up.
“Who’s there?”
His youngself’s bandages are spilled cinnabar and oil paint across his back in the dark evening. When he looks up at Lan Wangji, eyes unfocused and glassy with fever, he blinks so slowly that Lan Wangji thinks he must have fallen back into haze. The haze, he remembers—the misty realm between sleep and wake where he thought he could hear Wei Ying in the fog, calling for him still.
The fine baby hairs that frame his face cling to his cheeks and jaw with sweat in wispy lines of ink. Bleeding; too much water.
Then he opens them again, stares at Lan Wangji, and says, “Wei Ying?”
This, Lan Wangji recalls none of. His chest pulses, tight and blistering. “Yes,” he whispers, anyway.
“Are you dead?” asks his youngself.
“No.”
His youngself closes his eyes. Says, “Then, I think I am.”
And then Lan Wangji comes face-to-face with himself again, in a cave of icicle hush. Aches spill out across his body, splintering at his joints and waist and every miserable inch of his back. The sting of the whip is suddenly not so far in memory at all. His youngself barely lifts his face to greet him.
“Wangji.”
His youngself says nothing.
“How are your wounds?”
Still, nothing.
Lan Wangji remembers being still; he does not remember having frozen.
He remembers this: thinking that if he held himself still enough that his body would eventually fuse with the ice of the Cold Pond Cave. A heart that doesn’t beat isn’t one that can feel pain. In some sick, childish way, he had wished for it. He had been the glacier all his life and it kept his blood inside his body, and then Wei Ying had thundered into his life the same way summer sun would gallop across the heavens, and he’d melted. He’d puddled. He didn’t know he needed ice to stay upright.
“He is dead.”
His youngself doesn’t even use a formality to address him. The books of Lan principles lie open upon the stone, fine as sheafs of mourning money. He’d wanted fire but there was nothing but water, water, everywhere.
“I know.”
“He is gone, Zhenjun.”
“Mm.”
“You lied.”
And finally, at this, his youngself raises his head and looks Lan Wangji in the face. His hairpiece glitters in the dull light, the webbing a network of false eyes upon the crown of his head. They all seem to be weeping.
“Did I?” asks Lan Wangji.
“I asked you, Zhenjun, if he dies. You said you were someone that I would trust, so I did. You said I would be able to keep him, so I trusted you. Now he is gone, and nothing will bring him back.” Then his youngself inhales harshly and it turns into a shudder. “You lied. You are from Gusu Lan, but you lied. I cannot bring him back. I cannot bring him back in a way that matters, in a way that means he would ever be the same. And even if I could—even if I could, perhaps he would not want to be brought back. Zhenjun. He threw himself off a cliff, Zhenjun. The last thing he did was to save me, and he smiled as he fell. He doesn’t want to live anymore. That is the most horrible part of this all.”
The sound of his own sobs claws the soft passage of Lan Wangji’s throat bloody.
“That I could not take away his pain in the end,” his youngself says. Pit, pit, his tears land in fat drops round as coins upon the stone. “What a horrible thing to learn, Zhenjun. That you cannot take away the pain of someone you love. Why did you suggest I befriend him?”
“Would you have wished never to have met him?”
The question brings his youngself up short. “Zhenjun?”
“Would you, then, have chosen if you could, never to have met him?”
After winter, the springs in the coves of Cloud Recesses would upwell—the cold, rich water pummeling through the stale surface, bringing with it the sand and crabs fine as eyelashes. It was the world’s way of saying that life was coming and the long sleep was over, traitorously cyclical with little care for the things living in it. Lan Wangji once could feel it happening inside him, in his belly-pond, but the things that rose to the surface were bloody and mangled and better left dead far beneath the surface until its bones were picked clean.
He spent three years in the Cold Pond Cave but the gore of what if and could have and earlier. I could have saved him if I had changed this about reality earlier never allowed him to freeze.
“No.”
“No?”
“In this life. In every life,” says his youngself, “no matter how brief, I would have chosen to meet him.” He inhales. “Even if he did not want to see me, even if I never saw him again. I would trade any happiness to know he could walk this earth.”
Silence. His youngself breathes around his tears, timing his breaths, dark blue smears of sound.
“What would you say to him now, if you could?”
“It matters not. It matters not, for everything one could say to a dead person is but a wish, is it not? A pipe dream. ‘I hope you are well, Wei Ying. I hope you are happy, Wei Ying. Wei Ying, in your next life, come find me again, promise?’” His youngself bows his head. “How can he be happy? How can he be well? How will he find me again when his soul and body are gone?” Silence, and then, “If he would even want me to find him again at all.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Tell him what.”
“You love him,” Lan Wangji says plainly.
A flicker of something more than just anger rolled into grief and molded by pain crosses his face. Then he averts his eyes again, glaring at his books.
“The last thing he needed was my...feelings,” he says, stilted.
Lan Wangji shakes his head. “The only thing he needed,” he murmurs, “was to know he was loved.”
His youngself shuts his eyes. He cannot bear to keep listening. “Why have you come, Zhenjun,” he says. “All this time. Every time. Why? You know so much, yet you have told me nothing. You knew Wei Ying would die.”
“The past is not something I can change to my heart’s desire, Wangji.”
“You cannot imagine what it is like, Zhenjun, to watch your beloved die. You did not see his face when he fell.”
The irony of this accusation is so absurd that laughter hums at the back of his throat. In the first year, when Lan Wangji could only bear to sleep on his stomach and put the loosest of robes on, he had nightmares of Wei Ying’s face every single night. On the nights he slept at all, anyway.
He lifts Bichen up in the dim light, vertical so that his youngself will be able to read the characters engraved into the sheath without needing to tilt his head. For a moment, his youngself blinks uncomprehendingly, irritation a flash of lit gunpowder behind his eyes.
Lan Wangji draws his sword just enough that his youngself can see the name in the folded steel.
Then there is the disbelief.
“‘Bichen’?” He glances down where his own sword lies quietly against the reading stone, then back up at Lan Wangji’s blade. “Zhenjun, you—we…?”
“I know what it is like, Wangji, for someone to come into my life and feel awake for the first time,” says Lan Wangji. The metallic clang of him sheathing his sword echoes in the empty cave and suddenly it feels huge and yawning around them. “I know what it is like to watch the bloom and then the wither. I know everything. I know you. Have you wondered why you speak so much to me?”
His youngself is dumbfounded. “Do you exist only in my mind?”
“Not exactly. I exist out of time, but to speak to me means, yes, you are speaking only to yourself. I believe that is what this spell does.”
His youngself stares at him, an uneven glow piercing through the fabric of him. Light filtering through a deep wood the first morning after a fire.
“Are you happy?”
Lan Wangji’s lips separate. He wants to say, yes. He can, and he would mean it; he is effusively happy whenever he is with Wei Ying. So many years he has bore light in his title and only for the last several has he felt like he deserved his name. Only for the last several has he felt like light was coming from inside him, rather than being blinded by the harsh glare of the world around him. He figures this is what love does when it grows in soil, and not ice: it glows.
But his happiness—it’s more like he is a suspended dawn. Morning has come, but night is not so far behind that it can be forgotten. Lan Wangji does not know if he constitutes what someone would call a happy person, but he is happy. He wakes up warm in the morning and wants to be awake. It counts for something.
“I am,” he confirms. “You will be.”
“You would not lie to me.”
Lan Wangji shakes his head, once. “I wouldn’t.”
The ice squeaks underfoot as his youngself sits back on his heels. “It is unfathomable right now, Zhenjun.”
“The pain will stop one day.”
“That is what I fear. I am afraid that it will stop one day, as my brother has told me.” A rabbit climbs into his youngself’s lap, puts its round paws on his waist as if it hopes to press out the grief deep enough to drown. “Without a soul, without a body, without mourners, my pain is the only evidence he ever existed.”
“Pain will eat you.”
“Let it,” his youngself says fiercely. “So be it.”
Time will not be kind. But Lan Wangji does not wait for it any longer.
He says,
“He will be waiting for you.”
And the air shifts inside the cave. The static hum of ice seems to cease, and the rabbit in his youngself’s lap senses it, and clambers off of his thighs and back onto the ice to join its small white kerfuffle, away from the sudden tension. Lan Wangji watches his own face blaze with disbelief, then suspicion, then quiet hope before he stands up. The warm air he must have puddled beneath his robes whooshes out around his knees, and the chill laughs up his legs, clamoring for flesh.
“Zhenjun,” his voice is a strained hush, “have you met him?”
Lan Wangji nods. “Mm.” Oh, my dear self. What you won’t know for years.
“Did he reply to you during Inquiry?”
“He will not.” Lan Wangji hesitates. “He is not—dead, in a way that we can understand. He no longer exists in this timeline, so he cannot answer where he does not exist. But where he does, he is waiting for you.”
He’s waiting for us.
“This is why you’re here, isn’t it?” Tired understanding has pulled his youngself’s gaze back to the snowfrosted floor between them. “I finally understand now, Zhenjun.”
“Hm?” Lan Wangji doesn’t even understand himself why he’s here. He’d only been trying to undo a curse on a clock and had encountered what Wei Ying might call a minor setback.
“I did not know what it meant, when someone traveled here from a time unknown simply to appear in times I could not understand the world to tell me to persevere,” says his youngself. “In many ways, I still do not, but. Meaning. That is what you came here for. To put meaning into time, is that not right?”
Lan Zhan supposes it is. “Mm,” he agrees. “And I hope I have.”
“I think so.”
So, then. “What do you plan to do, Wangji?”
His youngself meets his gaze like he has been caught up in a riptide. “Zhenjun?”
“What will you do for him?”
He says it as sure as how time first began.
“I will live for him.”
Living, as Lan Wangji has learned, is easier said than done.
His youngself recovers. Time shows him just a flash of it, standing outside Jingshi in the first week that the last whiplash wound has closed. His imprisonment in the back hill has just ended, and he remembers this day—being released back into the world, blinking in the harsh glare of reality, and realizing that time has moved on without him. His robes still hang off of him a little more loosely than they should so the fabric won’t chafe the new scar tissue.
Time shows him: lowering Sizhui into a horde of rabbits with a basketful of carrots. He says, “He’ll need more vegetables than just carrots.”
Time is not kind, but it is quiet.
Time brings him to a market just outside of Dalian, where there had been reports of an infestation of dark spirits, one that had overwhelmed the local cultivation clans. Lan Wangji had learned, two years after his recovery, how to follow talk. Most of it was a punishment to listen to, especially when talk always came back to pinning misfortune on Wei Ying, but he went wherever he thought he could get a lead.
This market was busy, painted in yellows. He remembers that cities overrun with resentment always held an uncomfortable buzz underfoot, like he was treading on bees. This village had been a wasps’ nest. Every breath stung.
“Good afternoon, Zhenjun.”
His youngself finds him before he does. Maybe it’s a sign that the curse is due to end soon, but Lan Wangji turns and there he is. He’s taller now, face drawn, and alone.
“Wangji.”
“I have not seen you in a while, Zhenjun.”
“How long has it been?”
His youngself averts his eyes. “Since we last spoke, five years. I had begun to believe that you had returned to your own timeline.”
“Not yet.” He casts his gaze around them. “Why here?”
“Word is that there is a problem concerning walking corpses with peculiar strength in this region. I thought, perhaps…”
Lan Wangji gestures to the path before them, so they walk. To everyone around them, they are just one cultivator. “Where did you hear so?”
“I was in Yunmeng.”
“Yunmeng?” This part has gone fuzzy. “Oh. It’s the fifth solar term right now, isn’t it?”
“Mm.” His youngself dips his head. “I was there for Qingming.”
Lan Wangji swallows around the cotton in his throat. “Did you remember to bring extra Emperor’s Smile?”
“Of course. I brought Nine Knives, too, in case he,” his youngself pauses, similarly smothered, “was tired of Emperor’s Smile.”
“How much money did you burn for him?”
“Five packs. One of the bottles that I brought of Emperor’s Smile was to pour around the ashes, so spirits won’t steal from him.”
“That sounds like it would be enough.”
“Mm.”
“And the food?”
“I brought lotus that I had planted in Cloud Recesses,” says his youngself, “but much of it got bruised during my travels, so I tried to pick some in the lakes around Yunmeng. He always said he would—he would. I did not imagine I would have to do it alone.”
“But you did.”
“One of the lake keepers came by and asked what I was doing.” They come to a stop in an intersection of a market, where a particularly stubborn heifer will only cross when goaded with slices of golden apples. “He told me that all the lakes in Yunmeng have owners, and that I had to receive permission to pick their lotuses.”
“What did you say?”
His youngself regards him with annoyance. “You have lived this part already, Zhenjun, you know what we said.”
“I have forgotten,” Lan Wangji says, untruthfully.
A sigh. “I said that my beloved had passed away,” says his youngself, ears pinking, “and that their favorite thing to eat was lotus.”
“You did well.”
“How much longer, Zhenjun?”
They’ve arrived at the mouth of a tavern. The restaurant boils over with patrons, a frantic cauldron of soup and bobbing mushrooms. His youngself appraises it for a long while, pained as several of them roughhouse drunkenly in the middle of the day.
“Wangji,” he says, “you remember the story about a decree in heaven that was passed over a village in drought, punished for offending the heavens. The Jade Emperor Yu Di dictated that there was to be a rooster assigned to a mountain of rice, a dog assigned to a mountain of flour, and a lock forged of bronze burning over a single candle flame. Only when the rooster ate all the rice, and the dog licked away all the flour, and the fire melted the bronze lock, would it rain. It was their way to ensure eternity.”
“I do. But I’m afraid I don’t understand, Zhenjun.”
“You have already made it far enough for the bronze lock to melt,” says Lan Wangji. “All that is left is the rice and the flour to disappear.”
When Lan Wangji is grounded in time again, the smell of burning flesh presses fingertips into his skin.
Night cloaks him; the only light comes from the fires outside, and the door to the safe where all spoils of war were locked up and kept safe, away from curious hands, stands ajar. Light falls in a thin, unforgiving needlepoint across the floor, where it comes to pierce the corner of a stray hand against the wood.
“Leave me.”
“Wangji,” he says. “Why?”
When Lan Wangji steps forward, his foot kicks the burning end of the Wen branding staff, and the reek of singed linen floats up into his face.
“It stopped hurting.” His youngself is still curled up on his side, staring aimlessly through Lan Wangji. “The scars don’t sting when I touch them anymore. Some of the healed skin has feeling again. You said pain would eat me, but I need it.”
“Why do you need pain?”
“To feel a fraction of what he felt. I should have held some of his hurt, and I wasn’t there when he needed me to. Some days,” his voice is ragged, the sound of it making Lan Wangji’s ears itch, frantic moths at his ears. “Some days I feel like my pain is the only proof his life was ever anchored in reality. In a world that rushes to forget him. In a world that is happy he is gone. If I stop hurting, then he really is gone.”
“Pain will not bring him back faster.”
His youngself sighs. “Leave me, Zhenjun.”
“I know you’re drunk. He took care of you the last time you were.”
“Why are you here, Zhenjun,” he snaps. “If not to bring Wei Ying back, if not to tell me how long I must wait, if not to tell me where I should go, why are you here?”
“To forgive you.”
A stained, thrumming silence.
“For what?” His youngself exhales like the breath is being yanked from his lungs. “I do not deserve forgiveness.”
“You need it,” says Lan Wangji, but his nose sears with the sour, peppery smell of unshed tears.
When Lan Xichen finds them, he sees only Lan Wangji’s youngself, can only see his youngself, a fist of crumpled parchment upon the floor, weeping alone. Lan Wangji stands and watches his brother fold his bloody youngself into his arms, hair moonsmeared and loose in the night. “Wangji, what have you done? Why did you do this?”
“For forgiveness.”
“Whose?”
Lan Wangji says, “Mine.”
And he knows Lan Xichen cannot see him. He cannot possibly, but his brother seems to turn his head into the shadowed corner in which Lan Wangji stands. Tall, quiet, unassuming, just another figure of Cloud Recesses come and gone. His eyebrows draw together for just a moment as he stares, and then Lan Xichen helps his youngself to his feet.
“If the ancestors have something to say to you, speak to them in the ancestral hall,” his brother chides gently. “Why have you come to the safe?”
His youngself says nothing. Lan Xichen casts one more glance towards Lan Wangji, at a spot a bit too much to his right.
“Wei gongzi,” he murmurs, and Lan Wangji startles, “you have made my brother weep in life. Please do not be reason for his tears in death.”
Then they are gone.
Time flickers in a thin, spidery burial shroud around him. When Lan Wangji leaves, he thinks he smells rangoon creeper.
“Hanguang-jun, who was that? Did you find them? They ran so fast!”
“Maybe it was just a spirit. Unless the Mo family has another member that we don’t know about. You saw what they did to Mo gongzi, who knows if they have other embarrassments locked up in these rooms?”
Lan Yingji snorts. “That reason is so boring.”
The streets outside Mo Manor, just as Lan Wangji had remembered, sleep under a frayed blanket of dead leaves and unswept litter. The world had tilted that afternoon, and he couldn’t figure out why, the shift of big things. The Sacrifice Summon has upended the city like a child shaking out their bag of toys, and Lan Wangji cannot take a step anywhere without straw crunching beneath his shoes, the sidewalk stubbled and unshaven.
The sky is big brushstrokes and wet ink above them. The stars could be dripping.
His youngself stares at him in wonder. It has been more than a while, he thinks, since the last time they crossed paths. For Lan Wangji, it has been moments. For his youngself, it must have been six years.
Then his face falls. “No,” whispers his youngself. “You’re still here.”
“Mm. I take this makes you unhappy.”
“As long as you are still here, it means that the flour and the rice have not gone.”
“Hanguang-jun?” Lan Sizhui looks from his youngself to the crooked path down their way. “What...what are you looking at, down there?”
“Tomorrow, go to Dafan Mountain, where the night hunt will be taking place,” says Lan Wangji.
“Jiang Wanyin will be there, and I have no interest in entertaining his company.”
“Your wait, Wangji, is at its end.”
His youngself turns his entire body to face him, mouth a cold, severe horizon. Only the dark of his eyes is abovewater. “What do you mean?”
“I may still be here, but the rice and the flour are almost gone.”
His youngself stares at him, mouth parted, the wind-rush of his breath a hollow ring through his lungs. Then he turns to the junior disciples—Sizhui looks so young, Lan Wangji has not yet processed just how much he’s grown in the last few years—and says, “Return to the inn. I have some unfinished work here at Mo Manor to address.”
“But Hanguang-jun, if there’s resentful energy down that way, we want to help!”
“He’s Hanguang-jun, what help does he need from us?”
“Jingyi.”
“What, do I lie?”
“Go now,” says Lan Wangji’s youngself, “and I will return soon. Do not provoke any energy if you sense it, and send a signal for me if you need.”
They go, silver headpieces bobbing in a merry chain in the evening. His youngself turns, and Lan Wangji has appeared at his youngself’s side. They’re the same height, now, eye to eye. His youngself is no longer so tightly wound, though he still has a ways to go—if Lan Wangji were to slit his skin, the chatter of taverns and tea kettles would slide out.
“Do you mean it, Zhenjun?”
“I know it.”
They walk. Lan Wangji is reminded of a dusty market, of stubborn cattle carts, of fruit vendors. The smell of overripe rangoon comes in gusts on the backs of the winds. “Zhenjun,” his youngself starts, “at the end of all this, now, I have a question for you.”
“Hm?”
“In these thirteen years,” he says, “I have gone to the south, I have traversed the north, I have trekked from east to west. I have searched the waters and I have searched the skies, I have forded every river and scoured every ravine.” He switches his sword to his other hand so that his weapon does not knock Lan Wangji’s leg as they take the wide, travel-beaten steps of the village that lead into the hutong pass. “Why now?”
“Because someone needs him.”
A long, sticky silence oozes between them.
“Was I…not enough?” his youngself asks quietly.
“Not that,” Lan Wangji says, and remembers Wei Ying pressing these words into Lan Wangji’s shoulder blade. He’d made him turn over so he could say it into his skin, the tight red scars. In the beginning, Wei Ying could only ask his questions and speak his heart when it was night, when Lan Wangji wasn’t looking at him. “We were the only ones who were content, if he so wanted, to let him go.”
His youngself’s face is a thundercloud. “Someone has brought him back to hurt him?” he asks, whipcrack angry in the balmy evening.
“To use him.”
“Why?”
“You will know soon.”
A tired, raspy breeze passes between them.
“This must be what I have lived for, Zhenjun, isn’t it?”
“This?”
“The chance to right the wrongs,” his youngself says. “This time, I won’t stand anywhere else but by his side.”
“Mm.”
“Do we protect him?”
Lan Wangji nods. “We do.”
“Does he,” his youngself hesitates. “Does he let us?”
“He does.”
“Good.”
Lan Wangji casts a sideways glance at his youngself. “Is that all?”
Does he still hate me? Did he ever hate me, truly, all the way down in his marrow, or was he just scared? Maybe we were both scared. If Wei Ying ever knew I loved him, would he let me protect him still? If we walked this world together again, would he let me walk by his side? How does Wei Ying feel about me? Did he ever feel at all? Would he ever, one day, in our unwritten, fleeting meadowlark future?
His youngself meets his eyes, confused, and asks,
“What else is there?”
The day that he had found Wei Ying was so cloudless that forever began in summer blue and the smoky, earthen burn of mountain air.
When time opens the palms of her hands and lets Lan Wangji down gently, he knows without understanding that this is her last stop for him. The dark in-between tugs its tendrils away and he is stationed outside a small, sitting cottage, where Jiang Wanyin stares resolutely into the sloping forests of Dafan Mountain, and his youngself is seated at another table over, tea untouched and still as a round spring pond. He had looked down into its dregs and watched the sandy flakes of tea leaves gathering in a button of black tar at the bottom of his cup. It was preferable to acknowledging Jiang Wanyin’s presence.
“Zhenjun,” his youngself greets stiffly.
“Today is the day.”
“Mm.”
Lan Wangji does not slouch, but the sitting cottage is so tight that he has to lean against a support beam so that his hip doesn’t knock the table. “How do you expect it shall go?”
“I,” his youngself puts his fingers to his tea, doesn’t lift to drink. “I do not know. Will I recognize him? Will he recognize me?”
Wei Ying had been staring at him already, tucked behind the gnarl of trees, mask a shard of broken pottery at the bottom of a lake. Lan Wangji had turned, looked at him, and assumed he was only Mo Xuanyu, curious and unfettered in his gazing. He could not bear to assume that Wei Ying stood so close, alive and whole, not a stone’s throw away.
“Yes.”
The air is jungle wet, spring leaving behind her pasty residue of humidity and eggshells and lazy skeeters before summer arrives. Jiang Wanyin stands, abruptly, nearly knocking his chair over—he has never existed quietly, much to Lan Wangji’s eternal chagrin—and strides away. A few Yunmeng Jiang disciples that had been unwinding in the shade of the trees leap to their feet in confusion as he takes to his sword. Catches of Jin Ling and gone too long flatten in the damp.
The air quivers.
“Perhaps you should go check on Sizhui and the others, as well,” suggests Lan Wangji.
“The disciples have expressed a desire to become more self-sufficient,” says his youngself. “It worries me, but I understand the need to demonstrate that one is not a child anymore.”
They are only fourteen, fifteen, now. “They will be children for a while, yet.”
“As they should. They should not have to grow up now.”
“They shouldn’t.” In the distance, the shaking footsteps of the Dancing Fairy Statue taking to mountain path scares flocks of starlings out of the forests. “Wangji. There is one last thing I have to say.”
His youngself turns and stares. “Last?”
“You asked me what we needed to be forgiven for,” says Lan Wangji. “And it is that I forgive you for not protecting him when he needed it most. You do deserve this forgiveness. He will give it to you over and over. Remember to accept it. Protect him in every way you know how.”
And then the sound of a flute—reedy, makeshift, true, playing a song only one other person alive could know—fills every corner of these mountains.
Lan Wangji finds Wei Ying under the tree which he once hid behind, masked and afraid, staring at him like he could not believe that they could ever find each other again. He’s slouched over, arms crossed, and Chen Qing is missing, but aside from a few grass stains he is unharmed. All of his hair is swept over one of his shoulders. When Lan Wangji touches him, his eyelids flutter, a shadow.
The veil of time pulses around them, shimmering. When Lan Wangji puts his feet down, the ground feels more like wood than dirt.
“Wei Ying?”
“Mmmh.”
“Are you okay?”
“Lan Zhan, I’ve been waiting for you.”
“I know.”
“Sleepy, Lan Zhan.”
“I will carry you. Are you hurt anywhere? Where’s Chen Qing?”
“Not hurt,” says Wei Ying, then reaches beseechingly for Lan Wangji, who guides his arms around his shoulders, tucks his grip under the fold of Wei Ying’s knees and around his waist, then hoists him up. “Ah, a little dizzy, maybe, but just sleepy. Chen Qing...it’s a long story, Lan Zhan. You’ll never believe who I met when I was looking for you. I think we got separated. I’ve never experienced a curse like this. Did you meet anyone funny? Were you looking for me?”
“I am always looking for you,” says Lan Wangji, and Wei Ying tucks his face into his neck. “And I did.”
“I met someone who needed Chen Qing more than I will,” Wei Ying whispers. “A dear old friend.”
Lan Wangji thinks he knows.
“Who?”
“Ah...tell you later?”
The wisp of clouds overhead has started to give way to cobwebs and rafters.
“Mm. Sleep. I will carry you until you wake.”
“Mmph,” Wei Ying mumbles, rubbing his eyes. “Is it morning? Oh no, wait—afternoon. Sorry, I overslept again, Lan Zhan. Weren’t we working on a case in a smelly old house? I could have sworn...never mind. I sat down here to wait for you. What happened? What time is it?”
“I shall tell you when you wake up,” Lan Wangji says into his hair. It smells of rangoon creeper and tree sap and clean, sweet Wei Ying. “For now, it is time for us to go home.”
含光君，你等到他了吗？
Hanguang-jun, has your wait for him ended?
恩。等到了。
Mm. It has.