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“It’s getting late, Little Moon. Finish the song. It’s not that
late. You are my moon, Little Moon, and it’s late enough.
So climb down out of the tree. Is it safe? Safe enough. Are
you dead as well?
The night is cold, it is silver, it is a coin.
Not everyone is dead, Little Moon. But the big moon needs
the tree. There is a ghost at the end of the song. Yes,
there is. And you see his hand and then you see the moon.
Am I the ghost at the end of the song? We are very close
now, Little Moon. Thank you for shining on me.”
--from “The Worm King’s Lullaby” by Richard Siken.
***
There were a few things that Lan Sizhui knew about himself.
First, that he was not born in the Cloud Recesses, or in Gusu, or anywhere nearby. Zewu-Jun was apologetic and kind about it when he asked, as always, but was clear to the fact that he didn’t know any more about it than Lan Sizhui did.
“You are here now,” he said gently, “and that is what matters.”
He was here, in Cloud Recesses, first in his classes and pride of his father, old enough now to have a courtesy name and go on night hunts. He didn’t really remember anything before coming here, earliest memories washed away by time and a fever into a few sense memories that hit him sometimes when he least expected it. He didn’t remember his mother, or where he had been before his father had brought him home.
He knew that she was dead, and that he had lived somewhere else when he was very little, and that losing someone had been the reason for his father coming to find him and for his father’s seclusion when he was a child, and he could guess enough to know that all of these were related.
There was a vast abyss in Lan Sizhui’s childhood around the things they didn’t talk about, deep with his father’s grief, and that was one of those things. He hadn’t questioned it too much as a child, but the older he’d gotten, the more he’d wondered. He had always gone to Zewu-Jun first with questions because of that, because his uncle was more likely to answer him freely with what he felt comfortable sharing, even if he himself knew little about the mysteries of Lan Sizhui’s birth.
He had also always been clear that there were some matters that were only for Hanguang-Jun to tell, and that whatever he suspected was not his to tell because, after all, gossip was forbidden in the Cloud Recesses.
There was a song that his father played on his guqin sometimes, as far back as Lan Sizhui could remember. It wasn’t a cultivation song, like the others Lan Sizhui himself was learning along with guqin language, full of spiritual energy to lay spirits to rest or ask questions.
This song was wordless and nameless, longing and loving. He’d played it as a lullaby for Lan Sizhui when he was little and woke up crying from formless nightmares, missing something beyond reach of his memories. He had a sense memory of hands picking him up, sometimes, small weathered hands and larger strong hands, but he could never remember anything beyond that.
Hanguang-Jun played it sometimes on the days when he was more quiet even than his usual, when he couldn’t quite smile at Lan Sizhui and seemed to do better if Lan Sizhui stayed close. (Those were days when he was grieving, Lan Sizhui learned as he grew older, when the shape of what he had lost was a tangible thing like a tree that had grown around an object that was then removed. The tree would live and keep growing, but it would forever keep the shape of the thing that was lost.)
He started teaching the song to Lan Sizhui when he’d learned enough of the guqin to be able to play it, slowly and haltingly, nine years old and with a practice guqin of his own.
“What is this song?” Lan Sizhui had asked, as his father carefully guided him through the notes.
Hanguang-Jun’s face was pensive as his hands paused on the strings, and Lan Sizhui thought that perhaps this was something else that he would have to be content not having an answer for.
“It’s called Wangxian,” he said finally. “I wrote it for someone I loved, a long time ago.”
The second thing he knew was that it had been somewhat of a scandal when the great Hanguang-Jun had suddenly produced a child out of nowhere. No one knew who his mother was, or what had happened to her, but given that Hanguang-Jun had publicly claimed him as his own son no one was too willing to question it.
His own cloud-embroidered forehead ribbon was proof of that.
One of his earliest memories was of his father carefully tying it on him in the mornings, even when he had been deep in his seclusion and too weak to get out of bed. Lan Sizhui had been staying with Zewu-Jun at the time, because Hanguang-Jun had been in no shape to care for a child, but even so he and Zewu-Jun had gone over to the Jingshi every morning so that his father could tie it on him.
“Your ribbon is special,” Zewu-Jun had told him once, when he was still little, “only you or your father should touch it.”
That wasn’t to say that Zewu-Jun hadn’t ever tied it for him, because sometimes practicality won out, but his father was stubborn enough to do it almost every morning even when he probably shouldn’t have. And eventually his father had gotten better, and he himself had learned to tie his own ribbon, but the memory of those early days was still precious.
But regardless of the proof of his ribbon, no one knew the truth, and that led to speculation.
Lan Jingyi was, as always, his best source of information on this, because he was terribly prone to gossip and good at collecting it. He had gotten Lan Sizhui into a lot of trouble while they were growing up for his cheerful willingness to ignore the rules, but it was also incredibly useful.
“My mom thinks it must’ve been very romantic,” Lan Jingyi said once, when they were twelve years old and thought they were being incredibly sneaky by having Lan Jingyi ask his mother. Lan Jingyi was fascinated by the fact that Lan Sizhui didn’t know, and Lan Sizhui was desperate for any information he could find, and Lan Jingyi’s mother was kind enough to humor them. “She said that they probably met in the war, but it was secret and then your mom got sick or something so your dad had to come get you. Do you think she was a Wen?”
“I don’t know,” Lan Sizhui had said, even though he thought that was probably the answer. Everyone knew the Wen had been horrible, and now they were all dead, and it made an awful kind of sense. He also knew that his father had loved someone whose name he couldn’t speak aloud, who he had been mourning as long as Lan Sizhui remembered.
He was old enough now to know that she had given them the version of the story that was kindest and most likely to be true. At any rate, the older he grew, the more clearly he favored his father, and that quieted down some of the worst rumors. The rest of them didn’t matter, really.
Lan Sizhui has always been very good about keeping out of trouble, and Lan Jingyi has always been very good about getting into trouble, and between the two of them they managed to keep a balance.
The first time they’d gotten into trouble was shortly after Lan Sizhui had moved into the disciple quarters for the first time. He had been somewhat nervous about it, but he was moving in with the same disciples he’d been in classes with for years at that point, so it wasn’t quite as terrifying as it could’ve been. Lan Jingyi, for one, was ecstatic about the fact that they were now living in the same space, and was convinced that made them very nearly grown up even though they were all of ten years old.
It had been afternoon, in the respite between classes and dinner, and though it was the start of spring a late snow storm had pushed through and left a layer of powdery snow. Most of the disciples were outside enjoying the snow, but Lan Sizhui decided quickly that he preferred to be warm inside, and Lan Jingyi had followed him.
“What if they get cold?” Lan Jingyi was sprawled across the floor, which seemed uncomfortable, while Lan Sizhui sat cross legged on his bed and slowly read through a book of adventure stories that Zewu-Jun had given him.
“They’re rabbits,” he said, non-plussed. “They’ve been living outside all winter.”
“Yes, but what if they’ve been cold this whole time? There’s plenty of room in here, and we can let them go again in the morning.”
Lan Sizhui was dubious, but Lan Jingyi seemed convinced and really, Lan Sizhui was willing to try anything once.
Most of the rabbits were hiding, of course, but they managed to catch three and smuggle them inside without anyone noticing. Lan Jingyi made a nest for them under Lan Sizhui’s bed with a spare bedsheet, and the rabbits seemed happy enough to stay there.
They left the rabbits and went to dinner, and everything seemed fine until everyone came back and started getting ready for bed.
Lan Sizhui was halfway undressed when he heard a shriek from the other side of the room, and a small shape darted across the floor.
“Oh no,” Lan Jingyi said, and then the other two rabbits panicked as well.
They managed to catch the rabbits eventually, and it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The rabbits had chewed up the nest Lan Jingyi had made, along with some of the other students’ papers, and several of the juniors had come over to see what the commotion was which was horribly embarrassing and meant they were probably in trouble, but they’d caught the rabbits, after all.
But then he heard “a-Yuan,” and looked up to see Hanguang-Jun in the doorway, and froze.
Hanguang-Jun had his sleeve over his mouth and was making a noise that Lan Sizhui couldn’t figure out.
Then he snorted, undignified, and Lan Sizhui realized that he was laughing. He was immediately torn between feeling mortified and relieved, because someone had gone to get his dad, but Hanguang-Jun never laughed and that couldn’t be a bad thing if he was.
“The rabbits were cold,” Lan Jingyi said beside him. Hanguang-Jun finally stopped laughing and wiped his eyes, and came forward to take the rabbits from them.
“The rabbits have warm coats,” he said gently, “but I’m sure they appreciate that you care for them. I will take them back outside where they belong.”
He left with the rabbits, and the juniors calmed everyone down, and then they all went to bed as usual.
The next day they were both assigned to help Hanguang-Jun take care of the rabbits as punishment, but Lan Sizhui had a strong suspicion that it really wasn’t as much of a punishment as it could’ve been. Lan Jingyi was loudly grateful that he hadn’t been assigned more lines to copy, and Hanguang-Jun just seemed amused.
The third thing Lan Sizhui knew was that his father had been friends once with Wei Wuxian, and that part of his mourning was for him, as well. They had fought together in the Sunshot Campaign, and then Wei Wuxian had forsaken the cultivation world to go live in the Burial Mounds until the rest of the cultivation world rose up against him to strike him down.
The stories were that the Yiling Patriarch had been horribly wicked, and that was what had cause his demise, but Hanguang-Jun told him other stories.
“He was a good man who made difficult choices,” he’d said, one sun soaked afternoon in the Jingshi. As he had gotten older his father had started to go out on night hunts, so whenever he was in Cloud Recesses Lan Sizhui made sure to go visit him, if he wasn’t busy. It was nice, too, to spend a quiet afternoon with his father, working steadily through his school work while his father marked up night hunting reports.
He worried sometimes too that perhaps his father was lonely, because the older he grew the more he realized that Hanguang-Jun didn’t really talk to anyone outside of Zewu-Jun and Great-Uncle. He would talk to Lan Sizhui, when he came to visit, and always listened politely when Lan Jingyi tagged along and chattered at him, but he didn’t think that his father really had any friends, when it came down to it.
Not any more, at least.
“I did not agree with some of his choices,” his father continued, staring thoughtfully out the open window, “but I should have stood by him regardless.”
Lan Sizhui had already heard most of his other stories, of a boy with a bright smile who had turned his father’s life upside down when he came to study in the Cloud Recesses, and of a man who fought in a war with a flute and that same smile sharpened into something deadly and terrible.
There were stories, too, of a man who had tried to save the last of the Wen and failed, and ended up dying by the same resentful energy he’d tried to tame. It was a cautionary story, much like the ones Lan Qiren taught them in class, but with a sadder, more wistful edge.
“I couldn’t save him,” his father said, softly.
His father had been wounded for the first few years that he remembered, when he had been in seclusion and Lan Sizhui had been too little to question it. Even after he healed, the stripes of scarring remained.
He learned the story in bits and pieces, though he hadn’t dared to ask once he was old enough to wonder, and then at some point he’d learned enough that he didn’t want to.
Lan Wangji had stood with Wei Wuxian, once, and been punished for it. The kind of punishment that would keep a strong cultivator in seclusion for three years, that made Lan Sizhui feel sick to his stomach just to think about.
And even in the aftermath of that, he had pushed himself to take care of his son, when he could’ve easily left him in Zewu-Jun’s care or arranged for someone to care for him until he was old enough to move into the disciples’ quarters.
Lan Sizhui can’t imagine what it would be like to have to be that strong.
The fourth thing Lan Sizhui knew was that Lans only loved once, and his father has been in mourning for as long as he can remember.
“It’s a story,” Zewu-Jun had sighed and told him over tea in the Hanshi, the one time he’d been bold enough to ask, “but sometimes I think it’s a curse. Your father will carry that for the rest of his life, I think.”
“He said it was important to keep loving people even if they were gone,” Lan Sizhui said in return, picking at the edge of his sleeve and then picking up his cup again to give his hands something to do. Zewu-Jun preferred a more bitter tea blend than his brother, but Lan Sizhui sipped at it out of politeness anyway.
“That’s true too.” Zewu-Jun had smiled, soft and tired. “I can only hope that you avoid that fate.”
Mo Xuanyu’s arrival turned everything upside down, though there was something about him that was more familiar than it ought to have been.
Lan Jingyi was suspicious of him, of course, but Lan Sizhui didn’t think he was as bad as all that, especially considering that he’d been living as he had with family that clearly hated him. He was a cut-sleeve who had left the Jin Sect in disgrace and since gone crazy, though sometimes it seemed almost like he was playing the part on purpose like pulling on a mask.
Jin Ling certainly seemed disgusted by him, though Lan Sizhui privately thought that he was being ruder than Mo Xuanyu really deserved.
(Anyway, Jin Ling wasn’t even old enough for his courtesy name yet, and wasn’t old enough yet to go on night hunts without Sect Leader Jiang trailing after him either, so even if he was annoying Lan Sizhui was trying to be patient with him.)
At any rate they seemed to keep running into him, and Mo Xuanyu wasn’t what he would’ve expected, clever with quickly sketched out talismans that none of them would’ve thought to use.
Something tugged at the edge of his understanding, in the flutter of a red ribbon and shrill notes from a terribly played flute. Something that tasted like ash and decay, like the sense memories he couldn’t quite remember from when he was very little.
And Hanguang-Jun, unexpectedly, was softer and warmer around the man like a flower opening up to the sun. Perhaps it was just kindness, but he bore Senior Mo’s ridiculousness with a grace tinged with unexpected fondness that seemed more like indulgence than patience. He even insisted on bringing him back with them to Cloud Recesses, to the Jingshi of all places.
It didn’t make much sense at all.
Lan Sizhui should’ve been scared, when he and the other juniors were captured and then dragged up into the Burial Mounds. He had only heard horrible stories about the place, this dark mountain of piled up forgotten corpses where the Yiling Patriarch had once made his home.
But horribly, terribly, as they were finally left alone in the cave and he had a moment to take stock of his surroundings, he realized that he wasn’t scared at all.
“Ugh,” Lan Jingyi said from his right, “how are you so calm?”
Lan Sizhui blinked. “This isn’t ideal,” he said, “but someone is sure to come for us, there’s too many of us missing.” Hanguang-Jun would be looking for them, most likely, and he still had unfailing faith in his father. Besides, it seemed like juniors from all the sects had been captured, not just Lan, and they would all have someone looking for them.
“It’s not that, this place is awful!” Lan Jingyi was keeping his voice low, and gestured with his chin over to some of the other disciples. Lan Sizhui had noticed earlier that they were quiet and hadn’t thought much of it, but he realized now that it was less quiet and more that they were frozen with terror, some of them trying desperately not to cry and failing. He’d seen them do better in worse situations, like when they’d all been trapped in Yi City with Senior Mo, so there was really no reason for it.
“Hey,” he said, raising his voice a little to be heard. “We’re going to get out of here, okay? Here, everyone move over so we’re all together.”
After a small amount of shuffling, they finally got everyone gathered together into a smaller bunch, and that seemed to help. He finally got the more terrified among them to speak up, and the consensus seemed to be that this place felt dark and horrible and terrifying in a way that none of them could really explain.
He seemed to be the only one unaffected, so he kept himself on the outmost point of the group, closest to the entrance. Lan Jingyi stayed by him, because he was loyal like that, and Ouyang Zizhen, and Jin Ling who insisted that he wasn’t scared despite all evidence to the contrary.
Lan Sizhui should’ve been scared too, but although he wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone else, there was something about this place that just felt safe. It felt like the first time he’d come back to the Jingshi after moving into the disciples’ quarters, when he’d ended up crying because he hadn’t realized how homesick he was until he’d been tucked safely in his own bed listening to the familiar sounds of Hanguang-Jun getting ready for bed.
It felt like something he’d been missing for years that he hadn’t even remembered, the smell of ash and decay on the air familiar instead of cloying, the sounds of the cave like something from a faraway dream.
He’d be lying if he said that it made no sense at all, but there was something about it that he wasn’t really ready to think about yet.
Beyond his list, the one other thing that Lan Sizhui knew about himself was that he was loved.
He had known this for years, in the gentle way his father had tied his forehead ribbon and the way his hands had soothed him through nightmares and held him when he cried, in the way Zewu-Jun had always listened to him patiently and praised him for his successes. In the way his bed in the Jingshi had always been ready for him, in case he wanted to come home.
His father had been quiet and still and sorrowful for so many years when he was younger, growing around the shape of his grief, but Lan Sizhui had never doubted that he loved him, even if he rarely said so much out loud and there would always be a part of Lan Sizhui that was afraid to disappoint him. It was a lot to live up to sometimes, being Hanguang-Jun’s son, but that wasn’t his father’s fault.
And then there was Lan Jingyi, his first and still closest friend who was fierce and loyal and dazzlingly brave, who was brash and un-Lan-like even though by blood he had a greater claim to it than Lan Sizhui himself did. There was Lan Qiren who despite his gruffness had a tendency to look the other way when his grand-nephew broke the rules, even if he was never so lenient with Lan Jingyi.
And before that, long before he’d come to Cloud Recesses, he’d been loved too, he knew now, in the shape of a host of blood-red corpses that had come to protect them in the cave at the Burial Mounds, and especially the small hunched-over one that had reached out, who had once been the weathered hands that had picked him up when he was small.
They had loved him once in life, and loved him still in death, as did Wen Ning, who was the only other one left of all of them.
Wen Yuan was the only one left alive of the Wen, after all, but he would carry them for the rest of his life.
And then there was Wei Wuxian, who had come back as Mo Xuanyu in a story that Lan Sizhui had yet to hear. He was the missing piece that filled the void in Hanguang-Jun’s grief, the one who had been missing from their family for so many years.
He had loved Lan Sizhui once too, when he was simply a-Yuan, had been the red ribbon and the black flute that were the only things Lan Sizhui had remembered of him for so many years, though now he was starting to recall things that he had thought were forever lost.
Maybe Lans loved only once but it couldn’t be a curse when it was like this, the three of them together at dinner in the Jingshi sitting around the table, with Hanguang-Jun looking at Wei Wuxian like he held all the stars in the sky. Wei Wuxian had been telling them both about the night hunt he’d just returned from, but Lan Sizhui had lost the thread of it some time ago, content to watch the way Wei Wuxian and his father leaned into each other, like two trees that had grown into each other.
That was the shape his father had been growing around, all these years. Wei Wuxian had slipped back into it like he’d never left.
It was almost too much to look at, and Lan Sizhui was fully planning on escaping back to the disciples’ quarters as soon as possible, but it was also something beyond anything he’d ever dreamed of.
“Ah, my son,” Wei Wuxian said, interrupting himself, something mischievous in his smile that Lan Sizhui immediately distrusted, “you Lans are always so serious at dinner! Here, these will help you grow.”
He moved some of the vegetables from the dish in front of him, red with chili oil, to Lan Sizhui’s bowl.
“You do not have to eat that,” Hanguang-Jun immediately said. His face was fond, anyway, and unguardedly soft in a way that Lan Sizhui had rarely seen.
Wei Wuxian pouted, and Lan Sizhui rolled his eyes and gamely picked up the smallest piece. He regretted it immediately, the chili burning his mouth and throat and making his eyes water, and scooped some plain rice into his mouth to wash it down. It wasn’t quite as bad as the terrible congee in Yi City, but it was still stronger than anything he was used to.
“Sorry!” Wei Wuxian said laughing, but not unkindly. “You’re so cute, a-Yuan, it’s hard to believe you’re so grown up now!” Hanguang-Jun fished the vegetables out of Lan Sizhui’s bowl without comment, moving them to Wei Wuxian’s instead.
“Lan Zhan, you take such good care of me,” he said, ignoring the fact that he was the one who put them in Lan Sizhui’s bowl to begin with. Lan Sizhui carefully ate around the chili oil that had remained in his bowl.
Wei Wuxian slowly moved closer to Hanguang-Jun over the course of the rest of the meal, until he was practically in his lap and Lan Sizhui was almost too embarrassed to look at them. But there was something nice about it too, in the way Wei Wuxian chattered at them both without expecting a reply, and the way his father quietly responded and carefully pulled him into the conversation as well.
It was home, he realized, in the shape of the three of them, two fathers who had raised him and he himself who had grown in their love.