un: heart-fluttering hummingbird | audio (forward-dated: 24 May)

[downswing]

( A silence to his mouth, begrudging. The words, when he does speak them, gravel between teeth: )

...apologies. The blood in the northern halls will want more hands for the washing.

We made insufficient attempt.


( ooc: posted today for ooc ease, but assume this comes up after Sizhui/Eleven/Mingyu speak with the miners, around 24 May. Alina and Lan Wangji have given the miners their mercy kill, before they could fully transition, and removed the bodies from where they were kept... but clean-up. )

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action;

[downswing]

[ Rites would have made this trial a ridicule. The miners do not contort themselves into figments of unrepentant, bestial husks, do not hiss and claw, do not skirt humanity. They shed their human skins only in aches and fevers and the shivered sibilation of pleas foe euthanasia.

For Lan Wangji, one hold straight, the other's back coiled like a music box spring. For Alina, he suspects — they raise their gaze, exalted. Wire and light, formidable, a gust of twitched, then smoothed sorcery cracked so smooth and refined in one whip's cut that Lan Wangji betrays himself, nearly forgetting his own act. Delivers, in the end, the basics of execution. One day, mistress, you will be too beautiful to bear.

Today, she is only trembled, young.

And then, the room's lacquered in carnage reds, walls grinning down, claustrophobic — demented. They are left with rusted pitchers and mildew-soiled rags, tending the floors. His hand runs too weak, grip diffused, not as Wei Ying illustrated. No matter. It will do — later. Now, he rises, barely enough to condemn them both to the final indiscretion: one hand's swing, the sash removed. The second, his first layer of silks. Then, another, less harmed by the red contagion of blood from above. He ties the outer robe back onto himself, but extends the second to Alina, weight dead and brittle, no better than the dead below. ]

Do not wear their grief.

[ Blood, showing on her garments. Let at least one of them prove pure, even if she must walk in the whites of Lan, and he... ill and obscenely served, only by six silk layers. ]