un: absterge | video

[downswing]

( Dark and damp and Lan Wangji's pallor strained under moonlight. Behind him, flickers of broad, long temple columns — and the smoke smears of... ghosts, gathered. He seems short of breath, the silvered sheen of his sword half drawn from her scabbard, a spate of parchment papers littering the walls: active talismans. )

They have crowded their halls of the dead, to excess.

Here, the key withholds itself. Who hunts the other locations?

( And a pause, hesitant — whether to find his words or, absently, slap another talisman on the spirit that looms with a gaping maw behind him. ) Ke-Waihu stands safe?

( ooc: forwarded dated to the group's incursions in Ke-Waicai. Feel free to run into him in person, if you're also chasing the haunted temple key! )

Comments

[downswing]

Jiang Yanli cared for all. ( A hitch to his breath, the careful choice of recollection. Ever a game not to startle Wei Ying. ) A beautiful bride. Smiling beneath her veil. The Jin were overwhelmed.

[weifinder]

Her grace was more than our world merited. Too few understood how incredible she... was.

( a thickened note, but the swallow, the fondness, the need to move forward so that sixteen years of darkness and months flooded by light and threat of death to learn why she had died, what had set the stage for the tragedies that swept his carefully tended world off its cliffside into the roiling seas below... warmth wins. affection wins. loss is swallowed, not only for his sake, but for any others who listen. )

As they should have been. She was beautiful in her wedding reds. She and Jiang Cheng snuck into Yiling's small towns to show me. I've never seen anyone more radiant than she was in those robes.

( no failure to understand why, even if zixuan was still in the proving of his deserving her. he had, months and months later, given a good accounting of himself.

and he had died, and that was that, the crack felt to the marrow, the nicked artery, the beginning slide to a violent end for many. the invention of another, brief war. )

[downswing]

( Balm on open wound, to know at least this was shared: that Wei Ying tasted the brilliance of his sister in her bridal silks, draped in reds and gold and wonder. That trickles of family were still permitted to him. )

You will see your son in his nuptial reds. I pledge.

[weifinder]

( family was as unwilling to let him go as he was them; yet he maintained that exile, self selected. he's always known that. he always will.

to a future, wreathed in light. softly voiced, he smiles, the bare lift of his lips that grows as a flower unfurls to welcome the sun. )

You remain well named, Hanguang-jun.

( on the breath in, with the breath out, not for the nuptials of their yet engaged son: )

Thank you.

[downswing]

Unnecessary. He is for gladness.

( Wei Ying may savour it, but Sizhui's happiness is not brokered for his purpose. )

[weifinder]

I'm thanking you for caring, Lan Zhan.