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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.
Imported from Archive of Our Own. Original work id: 24966538.
Chapter 1
By the time Lan Wangji finds a cave deep enough, on a mountain secluded enough, that he feels it's safe to stop, the sun has long since set. The air that resists his passage on Bichen has grown thin. His face is no longer flecked by occasional raindrops, but hit by sharp-edged ice crystals; nonetheless, the bundle in his arms has stopped shivering. When he realised that, his heart plunged so hard he thought briefly that he was actually falling from the sword.
He pushes through the cave's chambers bent over his burden, Bichen sheathing itself almost without a thought from him. Deep at the back, the ground is dry though cold. Lan Wangji lays Wei Wuxian down on the bare rock and lights a fire talisman. There is nothing here to build a campfire with. Later, he'll have to gather up last autumn's dead leaves from further out in the cave, but he can't leave him alone yet. In the flickering, short-lived light from the talisman, he examines Wei Wuxian's slack face and holds his fingers up to his nose, making sure he's still breathing. Then he opens his own outer robes and pulls the other cultivator towards the only available source of warmth: his own body.
He listens to the wind in the trees outside the cave, the sounds filtered strangely by the rock chambers in between. Even he doesn't know where they are, thanks to his efforts to shake off any cultivators who might have followed them from the carnage in Nightless City, but he still expects to be discovered at any moment. He can't risk another fire talisman. The reassuring glow of Bichen's blade, even an inch unsheathed, is out of the question. Lan Wangji sits in the dark, supporting Wei Wuxian's dead weight, ready to defend them both.
The first night passes that way, and much of the first day. Wei Wuxian begins to shiver again, and later to shudder, his limbs jerking like a man trying to stop himself from falling, but his eyes don't open. Lan Wangji passes spiritual energy to him. At one point in the night, he finds his arms trembling and realises that he is holding Wei Wuxian too tightly, clinging to him more to get comfort than to dispense it. With an effort, he loosens his grip.
He makes calculations—who is left alive to pursue them, who knows what, which avenues are still left for them to run down—forcing his mind to stay rigidly in the future, because if it drifts towards the past he will see Nightless City again. He will find himself looking into the greying faces of Lan disciples he had grown up with, now with blank eyes and jaws twisted open, bellowing incoherently. One of his shidis' chests was ripped open with five parallel, bleeding gouges. Another had a dark hole for an eye, and a flap of his cheek hanging wetly down over the rest of his face, swinging as he moved. Others were merely slashed open at the neck or pierced with arrows whose shafts caught on the robes of cultivators they attacked. They were uncoordinated, disoriented; their sword strokes held to no official patterns, which only made them harder to predict. All that the cultivators of the Four Clans could do was fight back, but each one of their attacks only strengthened the forces of the Yiling Patriarch.
After an hour, Lan Wangji was the only one who still fought to gain ground, to get closer to their sole living enemy. Everyone else, the disciples who had been so keen on the demonic cultivator's destruction, was now desperate only to survive or to escape. Clawing his way deeper into the thicket of puppeted corpses stroke by stroke of Bichen, sending out chords from his guqin whenever he could make the space to do so, he had almost forgotten that there were living men and women on the battlefield. His boots slipped on soft matter that he did not dare to identify. He felt like a beetle in an anthive, being pulled inevitably down by a mass of weaker opponents.
Over everything floated the nagging, unnatural tones of Chenqing—and occasionally, worse even than that, laughter.
Lan Wangji blinks. Twice. He wrests his mind ungently towards the future.
When the dim glow of daylight from outside has reached its brightest and started to recede again, Wei Wuxian's head rolls to the side, away from Lan Wangji's chest. His eyelashes flutter on the sallow cheeks and his lips close and part again, the lower lip sticking briefly to the upper one before peeling away. He looks, for less than a heartbeat, like a little boy waking from sleep.
Then he squints up at Lan Wangji's face, his mouth distorts and he says, "You."
Lan Wangji nods.
Wei Wuxian twists away, struggling out of his arms to spill in an ungainly pile on the rock floor. There is a rattle as something hard, perhaps his flute, falls from his sleeve and rolls away into the shadows. His feet are tangled in the layers of ragged black robes and his head droops under its own weight. Eventually, he speaks again, directing his words to the dust and grit beneath him. "Lan Zhan. Get lost."
Lan Wangji waits until he has stopped moving before rising to his own knees and aiding Wei Wuxian to sit back, against the cave wall. He holds the other man's chin and tilts his face upwards to examine it. He extricates one filthy hand from within a mass of red and black sleeves and feels for the pulse in the wrist. "You need to rest," he says.
He doesn't venture far from the cave, that afternoon. By good fortune, there is a mountain stream that runs down from above their position, the water clinging to the vines that half-cover the cave mouth and carrying on along a narrow gulley between the trees. He pulls an empty gourd from his sleeve and fills it, drains it into his own mouth and refills it for Wei Wuxian. They are many miles from Gusu but the plants that grow here are familiar. When he dares to take more time away, he will dig up edible roots and search for berries that might have started ripening early. For now, he pulls off strips of bark that he knows has medicinal powers and plucks green herbs from the grainy soil nearby. Wei Wuxian will have tea to drink, at least, and he must clean him up in order to find any injuries hidden beneath the grime.
If Wei Wuxian doesn't cooperate with this process, he at least doesn't really resist. He lies bonelessly as Lan Wangji wipes at his skin with a soaked pad torn from his own robes, the white cloth coming away brown and black and red impossibly many times. The dirt clings in particular to his hands, where it blackens his fingernails and is ground into the lines of his knuckles and even the grain of his skin. It's as if he has been digging with his bare hands—digging in grave dirt—ever since Lan Wangji last saw him.
His hair is tangled, stiff and dull, not the glossy strands Lan Wangji remembers flying out as a slender boy ran through the Cloud Recesses, breaking six Lan principles at once for the joy of it. He pulls it back into a ribbon so that at least it's out of Wei Wuxian's face.
Apart from superficial cuts and bruises, he finds no real damage from the battle on Wei Wuxian's body. The only truly worrying signs are older: thin patches of skin on his arms and lower legs, shadows around his too-prominent collar bones and elbows, as if his flesh were slowly giving up on rebuilding itself. Lan Wangji's fingers hover over the long-healed Wen brand on his chest, an unreadable pattern of rippled pink. Does it still hurt, after so long? When Wei Wuxian makes a grumbling noise in his throat, he yanks his hand away, pulls the undershirt back into place and starts drawing his robes back together, one at a time. It's a ridiculous number of layers, even after the unrescuable outer coat has been discarded, but at least it will keep him warm. At least it will save Lan Wangji from having to see how thin he is.
He allows himself a short time, while the sky behind the trees is still softly alight, to wash in the stream and run through sword forms. His aching limbs need to move if he is to stay ready. Bichen's weight in his hand is a promise to himself that he will win the battles to come.
Wei Wuxian is silent and indifferent to his presence. He accepts a bowl of tea, which is to say he lets Lan Wangji place it in his hands and then seemingly forgets all about it until the liquid is cold, at which point he swallows half of it in an absent-minded gulp. Lan Wangji has been waiting for his complaint about its bitterness. It doesn't come; his lip barely curls. A few minutes later, the bowl slips out of Wei Wuxian's grasp as he tries to roll onto his side, and cracks in two.
In the back of his mind, Lan Wangji tallies the contents of his qiankun sleeves and how many things they can afford for Wei Wuxian to break. He pours the last of the tea into his own bowl and sets it between them.
Wei Wuxian falls asleep next to the fire, on the thin cushion of cloth and leaves that Lan Wangji has scraped together for him. One moment he is awake, sullenly staring into the flames, and the next he is snoring, a scowl still on his face, as though he hadn't wanted to fall asleep but accepted it as the marginally better choice over being here with Lan Wangji.
For a short while, the atmosphere in the cave is lighter. It turns out, though, that Wei Wuxian asleep is more talkative than Wei Wuxian awake and exhausted from battle. Before long, he is rolling from side to side, kicking feebly at the white outer robe draped over his lower body. Lowering his ear to the chapped lips, Lan Wangji hears his repeated hoarse calls for his shijie. Other names surface at intervals: Wen Qing (to whom he pleads not to be stuck with any more needles), his shidi Jiang Cheng, A-Yuan, a Fourth Uncle and a Sixth Uncle. Did Jiang Fengmian or Madame Yu have brothers? The question is half a minute's welcome distraction.
He has to walk to the cave's entrance to listen out for any approaching pursuit. The last time he returns to take his seat against the rock wall, the sleeping man is silent again and he feels a brief signal-flare of panic. Before he knows it, he has grabbed Wei Wuxian again, his fingers pressing against the pulse beneath the tense jaw. Wei Wuxian's skin is hot and his spiritual energy is almost indiscernable. Without letting him go, moving by touch alone, Lan Wangji pours cold water on a cloth and holds it to his forehead.
His own name is never called until the deepest hours of the night, when Lan Wangji has permitted himself to fall into a brief meditation, to preserve his strength. Even a whisper would pull him out of it. When Wei Wuxian jerks double in his arms and wails, "Lan Zhan!" he is immediately alert.
"I am here," he says softly.
"Lan Zhan! Lan Zhan!" Wei Wuxian cries. His eyes are open but unfocused. Sweat stands out on his brow, the droplets rolling into his fine black eyebrows.
"Wei Ying, I am here," he repeats, but Wei Wuxian doesn't seem able to hear him. He keeps calling out the name until his voice cracks into sobs that shake him painfully against Lan Wangji's chest, and at last he cries himself back to sleep.
Chapter 2
The next morning, Lan Wangji rolls Wei Wuxian down onto the ground at his side before he is really awake, to spare them both discomfort.
While the light through the trees is still too weak to show the colours of the foliage, he leaves to explore the mountainside around them. He finds tubers that should be edible, if bitter even to his Cloud Recesses-trained taste, and green leaves, freshly budded and still sticky. Though he does not spot any of the tiny deer that live in the forests this high up, he sees where they have scratched at the trees, and keeps his eyes open. Wei Wuxian should have meat, if he can get some. (Wei Wuxian would probably like liquor, too. If he asks for some, that's when Lan Wangji will be able to relax a little.)
Back in the cave, Wei Wuxian is still almost as mute as Lan Wangji himself, and it feels eerie: as if only part of him is here, the irreverent spirit whose existence Lan Wangji has come to rely on discarded somewhere in the air between Nightless City and this mountain. For the first time in his life, he finds himself speaking to break a silence.
"When you are well, I will take you back to the Cloud Recesses," he says. That's wrong, though. Those are words he prepared for another version of this conversation, before all his calculations in the dark hours. The Cloud Recesses, if there are still Lan disciples left alive there at all, are closed to them now. The Yiling Patriarch will never be permitted to recover under the learned healers of his sect, or to make up the damage to his heart and spirit with the knowledge stored in the Library Pavilion. Nor will the Yiling Patriarch's companion be welcomed there again.
He has accepted all that, but not thought how to convey the new plan to Wei Wuxian.
"When you are well, we will go somewhere new entirely." There is no response. "We can become wandering cultivators. The Four Clans need not concern themselves with us, if they do not know where we go."
Wei Wuxian mutters something under his breath before turning his face away. It sounds like, "Get lost."
Lan Wangji's spiritual energy has recovered somewhat, in the day and a half since the massacre. Taking Wei Wuxian's hands in his, he begins to send it towards him, as much as he can while keeping himself upright. Somehow it never seems to be enough. Sitting with his fingers pressed against the other's acupoints, he visualises the flow of qi, through his meridians and into Wei Wuxian's and then—where? Like a bucket with a hole in it, Wei Wuxian leaks the spiritual energy straight back out again. Lan Wangji thinks desperately of the scrolls in the Library Pavilion, trying to remember any treatment that might help him, however obscure. He is starting to be very afraid.
When Wei Wuxian shakes himself free with a sigh, he plays the guqin instead: at first songs for physical healing, and then Tranquility, hoping to ease the tension that lurks like black blood in Wei Wuxian's throat, keeping him silent and resentful. Eventually, when he can no longer hold himself back from it, he plays Wangxian.
It reminds him too much of the aftermath of the Xuanwu of Slaughter. Those were the worst days of Lan Wangji's life up until that point: more devastating than the Cloud Recesses burning down, more painful than his leg being broken by soldiers of the Wen, and more frightening than the combat with the monstrous snake-turtle, because all of those things had already happened and yet here he was, still losing something more. His love for Wei Ying was years old by then, but it still felt like something new and unexamined, a secret kept hidden in the very pit of his chest. There were no words to give it a tractable form, and to a boy brought up as a scholar in the Cloud Recesses, something that couldn't be strung around with words could not really exist. His love was a motion, an instinct. Like the second position following the first, when he practised the sword forms, and the third and fourth flowing naturally from that, all he knew was that seeing Wei Ying meant he had to be near him, to grab him, to bite him...
He never did, of course. Almost never.
The notes of Wangxian pull his fingers across the guqin strings as powerfully as that old, still-resonating compulsion. He sees a doubled image: Wei Ying lying on the cave floor back then, shivering, the brand seeping through his clothes; and Wei Ying now, pallid and shrunken in a nest of black and red rags, leaning his chin on his knees and staring emptily ahead.
In the late afternoon, he seals the cave mouth with wards and walks further up the mountain than he has before. The trees become shorter and more twisted as he climbs, until they are barely taller than the scrubby bushes between them. The clinging chill of the morning has been burnt off by the spring sun, and his muscles gain a pleasant warmth from the exercise. When he reaches a flat, stony clifftop, he pauses to stretch them out.
From this vantage point, on such a sunny day, the view stretches out much wider than he had expected. Lan Wangji shades his eyes with a flat hand, working his gaze across the horizon in a search for landmarks. In Gusu, any of the lopsided hills he sees around him would be distinctive, but he is less familiar with the terrain so far from home. Suddenly, he stops. One of the peaks looks out of place, as if it's intruding from another day in a different season.
The sky is clear in the direction he faces, excepting a few cotton-flower puffs drifting slowly from west to east. Above the strange hill, however, there should be an enormous thundercloud, or perhaps even a fleet of them, advancing like great ships with sails full of rain. The hillside has been thrown into deep shadow, the vegetation drained of its colour and rippling with deep gusts of wind—but how?
He realises it after a puzzled moment. Of course, that's Burial Mound. The mass grave Wei Wuxian's little village of Wen refugees is built on is perpetually overshadowed by a roil of resentful energy, visible even from here. Lan Wangji shudders.
What are they doing right now, without the Yiling Patriarch? Are they scared, hiding in their cottages, terrified even to dig in the fields or meet in the shared dining hall? Are they searching for him, or have they already given him up for dead? Are they preparing for the cultivation world to finish the job it started with the Sunshot Campaign?
And if the war comes for them, one last time, is there anyone there who can mount a defence?
Lan Wangji makes a roster of the people he met on his one trip up the Burial Mound, his final failure to save Wei Ying from himself. Wen Qing, the doctor, who had met his eyes over Wei Wuxian's shoulder with such a knowing look of shared affection that he had been afraid his feelings were written out on his face for all to read. She was dead, now, and so was her brother the fierce corpse, although not without killing dozens of Jin disciples. Had Wei Wuxian ordered him to do that? If so, he should have known he was signing his people's death warrant. (Lan Wangji's love does not waver at the thought, despite the fact that one of the Two Jades of Lan should not love a man who could do such a thing.)
Aside from those two siblings, there were no other cultivators on the hill, only farmers who had once been administrators; maidens and grandparents and young men who could, perhaps, copy a talisman but not read it. Last of all, there was A-Yuan, most likely the last Wen child who would ever be born.
If Wei Wuxian returns to them, he might bring an even greater catastrophe down on their heads, but Lan Wangji can't see any way that his presence can protect the villagers—not even with an entire mountain of corpses at his disposal. The time when cultivation could have helped the Wen remnants has passed. All he and Wei Wuxian can do is creep out of the cultivation world, where they were once ranked second and fourth on the list of young masters, and hope that all of them are forgotten.
He practises what to say on the way back down the mountain. After days of having his view constrained by rock walls and pine trees, seeing the horizon has cleared his mind like the cold water of the springs near the Cloud Recesses. Their priorities are clear to him, now. He only hopes he can explain everything to Wei Wuxian.
There's a faint noise from the back of the cave as he ducks under the dripping green vines to come inside. A low note that wavers and breaks raggedly off. Another, higher tone that should be followed by a ripple like birdsong—he's heard it before, from a wallow of mud and viscera—but that doesn't come. A harsh breath that catches in the back of someone's throat.
Lan Wangji's strides lengthen; he dashes through the cave to see Wei Wuxian with Chenqing in his hands. The flute wavers in front of his chest. Before he can think, he's pushing it down, away from Wei Wuxian's mouth, and reaching out for his pulse and his acupoints. "You'll hurt yourself," Lan Wangji says. "More."
Wei Wuxian shows his teeth. His expression might be related to a smile. His spiritual energy is so low, Lan Wangji doesn't understand how he can be standing, let alone trying to play the black flute. "Sit down," he says, kneels in front of him, and begins transferring his own.
"Wei Ying," he says, after a while. "I have made my decision."
Wei Wuxian looks down and to the side, but his eyelids are fluttering and Lan Wangji can tell he is listening.
"My fate is tied to yours," he says. "I am no longer part of the Lan Sect, and you... you have done all you can for the Wen. If you go back to them, you will only hurt them."
A hank of hair slides forwards over Wei Wuxian's shoulder as he shakes his head, sheltering his face from Lan Wangji's gaze. "If you think I can leave them now, Lan Zhan..." he says in a monotone, "what is the point of you even being here? Get lost!"
"I am here to save your life." His hands tremble on Wei Wuxian's now frighteningly cold skin. He speaks with a dry mouth, unable to stop: "Wei Ying. I am here because I love you. I have loved you since—" A whirl of images rises in front of him, because it's impossible to say when, exactly, it began. A swordfight on a moonlit rooftop; the tweak of his forehead ribbon at the shooting range in Qishan and, far more upsetting, the awareness that Lan Qiren had seen how hard he had blushed; the irresistable relaxation of a blindfolded youth lying on a low branch in the sun. He's tongue-tied. He's losing what he meant to say.
"Wei Ying, you are my life," he chokes out in the end. "And my life is yours. Wherever you go, I must go with you."
A boot scrapes on the gritty floor, ten feet behind him.
Instantly, he spins around, blocking the intruder's line of sight with his body. Bichen is in his hand, fully drawn.
"Wangji," says Lan Xichen, from the entrance to the chamber. His hands are empty, slightly raised on either side. The noise of his boot was an obvious courtesy, one Lan Wangji should not have needed.
"Brother," he replies slowly. He does not lower his sword.
Now that Wei Wuxian's presence is at his back, a fire behind him rather than an inferno before his eyes, he can hear the jangling of the wards he set up earlier. Lan Xichen has not come alone to find him. Between the three of them and the open air, hidden around the bend in the cave passage, are the tense breaths and gently rustling robes of at least twenty cultivators, probably more.
"We could not find you after the battle, Wangji," Lan Xichen says in a carefully neutral tone. "I thought you must be hurt, and lost. I've been searching for you for days." When Lan Wangji does not reply, he adds, "Will you come back to the Cloud Recesses with me?"
Recognition flashes across his mind: so this is how it feels, to be asked that. Out loud he says, "No, I will not."
There's a sussurus of voices that stills as quickly as it rises. Lan Xichen's eyes flicker to the side and back to him. "Wangji, that was not a request," he says softly.
"Brother, I have made my decision. I am no longer part of the Lan Sect." The words are easy to reach for, still there after he rehearsed them for Wei Wuxian.
"What meaning could this possibly have?" Before Lan Xichen can respond, a new voice rings out. Lan Wangji notices the crease that briefly appears between his brother's brows. Their eyes meet for an instant as their uncle sweeps into the chamber, and Lan Xichen's are almost apologetic.
"This has gone far enough," Lan Qiren says adamantly. "Explain this outrageous behaviour, Wangji, either now or at the Cloud Recesses."
Lan Wangji doesn't bow, because his sword is in the way. "Uncle, I am sorry, but I can no longer remain in our sect." He feels as if he's running out of ways to explain the same thing. "Wei Wuxian and I are bound together. This is the commitment I have made."
The older man is too affronted to speak. His mouth moves like a carp's. It's not the first time Lan Wangji has seen him this way, but it's unfamiliar to be the target. "That you would even consider this—this 'Yiling Patriarch' the kind of person one makes a commitment to—!"
"Wangji. I don't want you to make this mistake!" Lan Xichen interrupts him, suddenly in motion. It's only two steps forward, but he's holding his hands out towards his brother and Lan Wangji has to make a quarter turn, moving his own feet, to keep Bichen raised between them without directly threatening Lan Xichen. Behind him, he hears Wei Wuxian's layers of robes dragging against one another as he, too, changes position.
How can he get them out of here without injuring Lan Xichen? As he raised his arms in that pleading gesture, Lan Wangji noticed that one of his shoulders is stiffer than the other, padded with extra fabric underneath his outer coat. He's already hurt from Nightless City.
He's still searching for the right thing to say when three things happen at once.
Lan Xichen's eyes slam wide in alarm.
A low, trilling note is blown behind him, with no hesitation left in the player at all.
And the first of thirty-three Lan seniors charges into the space, his blade lifted high and the sword glare bouncing off the rugged walls.
Chapter 3
Lan Wangji's body is moving before his mind has fully ordered his priorities. Luckily, both agree that the senior disciple ahead of him, with a killing intensity in his eyes, is the most important threat to disarm. Bichen sweeps out in an arc that rips the senior's lesser blade from his hand, before swinging back to carve a deep rift along the sword arm. He kicks the man towards the oncoming disciple behind him, buying himself a breath so he can deal with his brother. Lan Xichen might not intend to kill Wei Wuxian, but he nonetheless cannot allow him to get close enough to try.
Against his older brother and Shuoyue, he is much closer to his match. The two swords clash and shriek against each other, sword glare throwing distorted shadows back and forth across the cave. Two more seniors are pressing in towards them, and he is pulled away from Lan Xichen to respond to their attacks.
Fighting three cultivators at once, while both defending and finding a way to disarm the man who should be his ally, is not the way he had hoped to start his new life. Crowding impatiently into the chamber, some of the other Lan seniors have started flinging talismans over the shoulders of the men who are actually fighting. They are minor charms so far, things he can deflect and dispel with Bichen, and they create as much difficulty for his opponents as for him. The oddly jaunty tune that Wei Wuxian is pulling out of Chenqing, however, is screwing the tension in the enclosed space higher and higher.
Lan Xichen is acting under a disadvantage that the other men don't have, he notices. They want to kill the Yiling Patriarch, and if Hanguang-jun stands in their way—he's chosen his side and must accept the consequences. That is to say, they've taken him at his word.
(He slides Bichen between the ribs of a grey-haired disciple, one of his distant cousins. The man coughs blood and begins to fall, but Lan Wangji is already moving backwards to parry a blow from Shuoyue and his cousin's face slips from his mind like water.)
His brother, meanwhile, is fighting like they did while training, back in the Cloud Recesses. There's no question of him giving quarter, or insulting Lan Wangji or himself with less than his full effort, but it's equally impossible that he would seriously injure him, let alone kill. As for Lan Qiren, he has stepped back to let the others subdue his wayward nephew.
The memory of Lan Xichen and himself as students gives him an idea.
Spinning in the transition from one attack to another, he raises his offhand to shoulder height and makes the gestures for a spell he could invoke in his sleep. Any teacher of the Lan sect could, if they'd thought of it.
Chenqing's voice is abruptly cut off. Wei Wuxian forces out the muffled wail of a bad student subjected to the Lan silencing spell.
Into the sudden silence, Lan Xichen shouts, "Peace!"
Swords clatter to a temporary halt. Lan Wangji knows the violence will pick up again at the slightest provocation, and hopes his brother can turn the moment to their advantage.
His heart drops as he remembers: they aren't on the same side.
Lan Xichen is already speaking.
"Look," he tells the seniors, several of whom are pressing their own acupoints to stop blood pouring out from their wounds, "Hanguang-jun has stopped Wei—has stopped the Yiling Patriarch from playing. He still stands against demonic cultivation. This is a misunderstanding." He looks meaningfully at Lan Wangji. "We will bring him back to the Cloud Recesses for healing and discipline, and everything will be handled properly."
Lan Wangji has not moved. Lan Xichen narrows his eyes at him. "Wangji," he prompts. "Your sword. Lower it."
Bichen's blade, held in front of his chest, is already clean of blood. He hesitates. Taking a risk, he cautiously turns his head back to glance at Wei Wuxian, whose pantomimed response eloquently conveys, Do what you want. It's none of my business any more!
"Brother, take our uncle and the seniors back to Gusu," Lan Wangji says. His voice is low but steady. "Wei Wuxian and I will go into the mountains. Do not follow us."
"Enough." Lan Qiren's tone is final. It's the voice of a man setting down something he has cherished for over twenty years. "Finish this now."
This time, the fight doesn't feel quick. The Lan disciples rush towards him like the spring meltwater swelling a river, a force that ought to overpower him and press him, both of them, down to the bottom to drown. To him, though, their movements are so slow that in the time between seeing where a strike is aimed and the blade's collision, he could block it three times over. He sends swords spinning and dodges magical attacks with a dreamlike lack of effort.
Time slowing down during battle is not a new phenomenon. Lan Wangji has fought enough in the Sunshot Campaign that he is familiar with what the immanence of death does to the mind and the body. When he looks back on these moments, though, he will feel that something more was happening. There is an inevitability to each lunge, each slash or parry. He must defend Wei Ying and get both of them out through the ranks of cultivators, so every movement is predestined, with no alternative possible.
Once again, he is inflicting bloody violence on body after body wearing Lan robes and cloud-patterned forehead ribbons.
These aren't fierce corpses, though. These are men he has studied under, nighthunted with, eaten alongside, his entire life, and as he cuts into their flesh, they know exactly what he's doing to them.
He uses the cave's narrow, uneven form to his advantage; the hours he spent in thought while Wei Wuxian sagged against him have paid off. In close combat, he shoves his opponents onto the blades of their brother-disciples or feints so that they dash their own heads into the rock. He drags Wei Wuxian behind him by the upper arm, step by tortuous step towards their freedom. When he wobbles and falls, Lan Wangji catches him. When he can't—or won't—regain his feet, Lan Wangji hoists him onto his shoulder and uses the extra momentum to bring Bichen down diagonally across the face of a disciple who had lunged forward to run the Yiling Patriarch through.
The snap of a forehead ribbon, its two ends flying apart in a spray of blood, is an image he'll see many times in his mind's eye.
By the time they reach the vine-shrouded cave mouth, Lan Wangji has almost begun to believe that this carnage will go on forever; that his punishment for having defied the Lan is an eternity of mutilating his own people. When the last man falls to his knees and no one surges up to replace him, Lan Wangji almost stumbles. It's quiet, all of a sudden. Groans drift towards him from the carpet of casualties, mixed with the words of simple spells for battlefield medicine. No one seems to have any more appetite to pursue him.
Ducking his head to walk out into the forest, he is completely unprepared for the lightning bolt of pain that hits him.
The spiritual barrier in front of him stretches like a spiderweb as Lan Wangji slowly collapses. It's a crueler spell than the one that guards the entrance to the Cloud Recesses, which kicks an intruder smartly back onto the path: all the way to the ground, he stays in contact with the seal, and it hurts the entire time. He tries to keep Wei Wuxian clear, but knows he's failed from the way he flinches against his shoulder.
They lie together on the grit and stones, for how long he doesn't know, until white forms swim in the air above him. Blinking, Lan Wangji makes out his older brother and uncle looking grimly downwards.
"Wangji," Lan Xichen says sadly, "you knew we couldn't let you leave."
They keep him immobilised beside Wei Wuxian, with a stronger variant of the silencing spell, until they have finished triaging the wounded and planning their next steps. Lan Qiren, who is waxen with shock but apparently uninjured, is going to send up a firework to summon whatever help the depleted Lan sect can muster. Lan Xichen will escort him back to the Cloud Recesses. The question of his discipline is left as a matter for later discussion. The unspoken implication is that it depends on how many of the senior disciples' lives Lan healing can save.
"Will you be able to ride Bichen?" asks Lan Xichen, after he has bowed a farewell to Lan Qiren. Having set off the signal flare, the older man has retreated back into the cave to sit down, and Lan Xichen is visibly relieved.
Lan Wangji nods. He has not taken his eyes off Wei Wuxian since he was released and told to stand up, ready to leave. Now he opens his mouth, but it's empty: words are completely inaccessible. An unbridgeable gap has opened up between the need to tell his brother something very important and his ability to speak at all. Sometimes when this happens he can get out useless words, phrases that he's prepared or heard before that aren't relevant, but clear the way for what he really needs to say. This time, though, even that recourse is gone. He's too tired. He's too full of despair.
"We could let him go, here, on this mountain," Lan Xichen says gently, for all the world as if replying to a question Lan Wangji had actually asked. "He would have a fair head start before the others get here. It's possible no one would find him."
The thought of a head start making any difference to the slumped figure in front of them, his head on his knees and his black robes covered in dust, is absurd. Lan Wangji shakes his head. He pulls his gaze away from Wei Wuxian and meets his brother's eyes instead.
"He absolutely cannot return with us." There's a warning in Lan Xichen's voice, as if Lan Wangji needed it. Then he sighs. "But Burial Mound is not so far out of our way, I suppose."
They fly abreast of one another through the fading light. In the lowlands, the sun would still be setting, but here they're in the long shadows of the mountains and the stars are already lighting up above them, one at a time. With Wei Wuxian draped across his shoulders, Lan Xichen's posture and balance on Shuoyue are exemplary; all that gives away how exhausted he must be is a certain rigidity in his limbs. Lan Wangji follows him automatically, adjusting Bichen's speed and altitude without any conscious decision of his own. This detour from their journey home is a gift to him, one he knows he doesn't deserve. Both he and Wei Ying are alive and near one another, for now. He keeps his mind blank to avoid spoiling the moment with thoughts about the future or the past.
At the foot of Burial Mound, his brother squats to lay Wei Wuxian on the discoloured wild grass and takes several deliberate steps away. He stands with his arms crossed, Shuoyue sheathed at his side, looking up at the impenetrable gloom between the trees as Lan Wangji kneels down.
Resentful energy is rising from the ground beneath Wei Wuxian like wisps of smoke, even here at the edge of his territory. Although he doesn't look any healthier, his face relaxes, the deeper lines of stress fading away. The looseness of his limbs is a mockery of the boy on the tree branch. He lifts his eyelids just enough to give Lan Wangji a long, dark, somehow dangerously inviting look.
"Wei Ying," Lan Wangji whispers. It's not at all unusual that these are the first words that come back to him.
"Lan Zhan." He draws a breath to say something more, but the silence stretches out between them for a long time. His expression changes, a barrier falling between them. "Lan Zhan—thank you." The scratch of a laugh. "Now, get lost!"
"You're not... staying here?" Lan Xichen seems surprised when Lan Wangji approaches him, eyes downcast.
"I took up my sword against you, against Uncle and against thirty-three of our sect," he says. "I injured them gravely, even after the losses we suffered in... recent years." He was going to say, in battle against the Wens, or perhaps, in the Nightless City, but both of those were too painful. "If I am permitted to bear the consequences of my actions, then I must."
He can't bear to look at his brother's face, so Lan Xichen's reaction is hidden from him. "Come on, then," he hears at length, and the Two Jades of Gusu mount their swords and turn their faces away from the charnel hill.
Beneath them, the spirits are welcoming home Wei Wuxian, who has made his decision as well.