Lan Yi had a long time to think, while she was trapped in Cold Pond Cave suppressing the Yin Iron: about her relationship with her clan and her sect, about power, and about her lost lover, Baoshan Sanren.
Xue Yang is sewing. In the indecisive light of a single candle, the seam he's reinforcing wavers back and forth, merging with his fingertips until the stab of the needle separates them suddenly out: the thing that bleeds and hurts, and the thing that lets the sharp point pass through and through it, apathetic.
A character study of Xue Yang and his sewing skills, through the years in Yi City.
Two months after the night hunt at Phoenix Mountain, Lan Wangji visits Yunmeng to try, once again, to convince Wei Wuxian to come back to Gusu with him. Wei Wuxian is getting drunk with resentful energy for company, and would rather mess around with the esteemed Hanguang-jun than confront literally anything in his life.
Neither one of them expected their meeting to go like this.
He stood up and held his sheets of paper in front of him, imitating a month-by-month calendar bound at the top. Damn it, Nie Huaisang wasn't going to let this gnomic little vice-general embarrass him, not when he was actually an artistic genius.
"Imagine the appeal, to both the cultivation world and mundane society," he said grandly, "of The Most Recognisable Asses of the Sunshot Campaign, in calendar format!"
The weather's getting colder, so Xue Yang makes a healthy warm drink for Xiao Xingchen and A-Qing at the coffin home in Yi City. What they don't know won't hurt them (for now).
Lan Wangji will never tell Wei Wuxian what he did after the massacre at Nightless City—what his brother would call the only mistake he ever made. Nor will he forget it himself.