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When Jiang Yanli comes to, she is chained to a wall.
The manacles are made from iron and as thick as her wrist. She pulls on them anyway, panic rising like bile in her throat. Where did the plaza go? Where are her brothers?
“A...A-Cheng...A-Xian...” What is meant to be a scream comes out as slurred words instead. Her voice is hoarse and rough with disuse.
( Where is she? Where has time gone? She was bleeding out in the grand square of Nightless City, calling out for her little brother, and then the world turned black. )
A door creaks open. She whirls around, her chains rattling, and comes face to face with a man in dark green robes. He screams and drops the stack of talismans he was carrying. Yellow paper flutters all around them as they stare, each one at least just as confused as the other.
After a few seconds, she recognizes him. “Nie Huaisang,” Jiang Yanli croaks. What is A-Cheng’s classmate doing here? Her eyes follow the talismans, which is when she realizes that she, too, is covered in them. The ones sticking to her chest look older, though, the red ink on them faded from red to brown.
While she puzzles over this new information, Nie Huaisang seems to recuperate enough to speak. “Madam Jin,” he greets, bending down to gather his talismans. “Are you...are you feeling all right?”
Jiang Yanli gives her chains another experimental rattle. “Aside from these, yes.” In fact, she barely feels anything at all — neither cold nor warm, and the word separated from her by an invisible veil. Words still come to her frustratingly slowly.
She bobs her head and tries to bring a hand to her throat, only for Nie Huaisang to surge forward and stop just short of touching her. “Madam Jin, ah…careful with your neck. Don’t move, I’ll remove the shackles first.”
He pulls a set of keys out of his sleeve. After some struggling on his part, Yanli’s bonds clatter to the ground. Beneath them, her skin is gray and rubbed raw. It should hurt, but when she presses down on the bloodless wounds, she can hardly feel her own touch. She pokes at her neck - carefully, given his warning - and swears there is a row of neat stitches there, pulling together the seams of a wound she cannot see.
“I’ll go fetch Jiang Wanyin,” Nie Huaisang hastily says. “He’ll explain.”
She can only watch him go, a haunting thought swirling in her mind : I died in Nightless City.
She doesn’t need to see her reflection anywhere to know this. She knew from the moment the blade cut across her back, and she knew when she threw herself in front of her brother to shield him from that young boy’s blow. The only question that remains is how?
Hope blooms between her ribs. Perhaps A-Xian brought her back ⎯ but even as she entertains the thought, Jiang Yanli knows it’s unlikely. To rise again under his command is servitude, no matter the intention. He would not have done it.
If he had anyway, he would be here⎯
Wouldn’t he?
Footsteps down the hall distract her from going down that train of thought. The door bangs open, and next to Nie Huaisang stands her brother, red-faced and dishevelled and looking a breath away from falling apart. “...A-Jie?”
“A-Cheng!” She opens her arms. He hesitates at first, only walks to her and timidly leans into the touch of her hand, like he’s afraid she’ll disappear if he dares embrace her. But then Yanli cradles his head, rubbing soothing circles into his back like she used to when he came to her as a child, crying angry tears over Mother’s harsh words or Father’s indifference.
Something in Jiang Cheng shatters then and there, and the dam breaks. His shoulders shake with harsh hiccups as he sobs into her arms, clutching at the back of her dress, and she lets him, smoothing out his hair and murmuring reassurances. It’s all right. I’m here. I won’t leave you alone.
She loses track of how much time they spend standing there, holding on to each other. Nie Huaisang has politely turned away ; Jiang Yanli wonders if he knows how much her brother hates crying in front of others, how much trust is shown as he allows the other to stay at all.
Jiang Cheng is the first to pull away, wiping at his face like it’ll be enough to erase the evidence of his outburst. ( Or perhaps she gives him too little credit. He’s never been good at hiding anything from her, but it doesn’t mean his act won’t fool others. )
“I assume you want to see A-Ling too,” he says.
Jiang Yanli’s unbeating heart still feels like it stutters in her chest. “Please tell me he’s all right. I don’t know how long—”
It’s Jiang Cheng’s turn to catch her wrists, stilling her hands and steadying her. “A-Jie, he’s fine. He’s at home right now. The Lotus Pier,” he clarifies when his sister’s expression doesn’t clear. Koi Tower has that effect on people. “It’s been…”
“A year, four months and thirteen days,” Nie Huaisang’s soft voice pipes up.
So long? There are a million questions all shoving their way to the forefront of her mind, but the one that makes it first is “How did you do it?”
Jiang Cheng and Nie Huaisang look at each other. There seems to be a silent argument of you go first against no, you go before her brother sighs, shoulders slumping. “Fine!”
The story they tell goes all the way back to Nightless Day. They describe the plaza full of corpses again, Chenqing’s eerie melody weaving through the chaos. How the sight of Jiang Yanli’s lifeless body broke something in Wei Wuxian, making him bring the two halves of the Stygian Tiger Seal together. How her own corpse was among the ones to rise again under the Tiger Seal’s command, pulled into battle as their creator lost control of his own weapon.
From that point onwards, Jiang Cheng wavers, so Nie Huaisang picks up. He tells her about the two of them leaving Nightless City behind to bring her back to Yunmeng, then, three months later, about the siege of the Burial Mounds and its bloody end.
Fierce corpses cannot cry, but the aching emptiness remains. There is a hollow place between her ribs, somewhere that cannot believe the boy she raised as her own brother went as far as they all say he did, or that he’s gone at all. In her heart, he is a little child in a tree, gazing at her with fearful eyes as she holds her arms out and reassures him it’s safe to jump. He is a mischievous disciple dumping an armful of lotus pods next to her as she works, so overflowing with life it seems impossible death could ever lay a finger on him.
But it did, and she could not help him. That’s the tragedy of it all, Jiang Yanli supposes. They both died for it, even though she alone remains standing.
Her brother picks up the story again. He covers months in a matter of minutes, and describes the dreary aftermath of the siege, long hours of poring over whatever texts he could legitimately wrestle out of the Jin Sect’s hands, looking for a way to bring his sister back to consciousness.
“If it could be done for the Ghost General,” Jiang Cheng finishes, “it could be done for you, and it can be for Jin Zixuan.”
Impossible hope makes Jiang Yanli shiver. “You’d do it?” Then, that new light flickers. “A-Cheng, even I didn’t know where he was kept. They wouldn’t let me see him, no matter how much I begged.”
There was barely any time between her husband’s death and her own, but while she was going through it, she avoided thinking about it too much lest she go mad. There was something in the thought of her husband’s walking corpse locked somewhere by his own kinsmen, neither properly put to rest nor truly alive, that’d made her want to both weep and throttle Jin Guangshan herself.
They were trying to bring him back to consciousness too, she remembers, to make a weapon capable of going to to toe with the Ghost General. But now⎯ if she can save him from this like A-Cheng and Nie Huaisang saved her⎯
“I want my family back together,” Jiang Yanli declares. One of her brothers is beyond saving now, but the other is here with her, as is her son. I want to get away, is what she thinks but doesn’t say. She was always out of place in the cultivation world anyway, trying to slot herself into a role she wasn’t meant to fit ; if leaving sects and their politics behind is the price for living with her family - whatever kind of life lays in front of her now -, she will gladly pay it.
Jiang Cheng grins at her. She missed his smiling face, Yanli realizes. This one is not cheerful even by a long shot, sharp as a sword’s edge, but it brings her back to happier days anyway. “Then we’ll do it, and I hope it makes Sect Leader Jin so mad he foams at the mouth.”
No words about how it might be difficult given his own position as Sect Leader, or how defying Lanling Jin Sect, even leaving as little evidence as possible, is becoming more dangerous by the day. He must want it as badly as she does, to bring his loved ones together once again, succeed once to try and make up for all those who couldn’t be saved.
Nie Huaisang claps. “Well-said, Jiang- xiong , well-said.”
---
Six months later.
“Oh, A-Cheng, I love it!”
She dances from room to room with Jin Ling in her arms, marveling over the rows of plum trees by the front door and the lotus pond near the house. It is a small residence, but it’s plenty big enough for three people to live in, and most of all, it’s safe. The world is quiet here, without sect politics to muddle the waters or cultivators going only by what they think is righteous and disregarding the consequences.
Jiang Yanli looks at the little house and its flowers and thinks yes, this is where I would like to raise my child .
Jin Ling whines and tugs at a stray strand of her hair. As soon as she puts him down, he toddles forward and out into the garden. A few seconds later, she hears her husband’s voice and her son’s giggles, and guesses they must have started a tickle fight on the grass again.
Her brother hangs back a few steps behind her, hands behind his back. Jiang Yanli is reminded of a schoolboy waiting for approval. “I’m happy you like it.”
She turns around and takes his hands in his. “Of course I do! It’s wonderful, and so close to home too! You’ll come visit often, won’t you?”
“As often as I can,” he reassures her. Then he takes a deep breath, and she knows whatever he’s about to say will be important. “A-Jie, there’s something I want to show you.”
He leads her to the last door she hasn’t opened, tucked behind a curtain. It smells of incense, and Jiang Yanli guesses its purpose before she even steps foot in it. It must be her imagination, as it so often is these days, but her heart gives a painful thud in her chest.
“Since you can’t go back home to see them, I thought I should bring them to you.”
There are many tablets on the altar, but her eyes are immediately drawn to the ones in the forefront. Jiang Fengmian. Yu Ziyuan. They’re not the originals, which must still rest in the ancestral hall of the Lotus Pier, but they are here for her parents’ spirits nonetheless.
Together, the Jiang siblings light two sticks of incense and bow thrice before their ancestors. I hope life is kinder to you, wherever you are , Yanli wishes. I hope you will look after us in whatever trial life might bring.
They stand there in reverent silence for a few minutes more before she musters the courage to ask. “No one buried A-Xian, did they?”
Jiang Cheng scowls. She knows him well enough to tell it is more out of unwillingness to talk about it than true displeasure. “How could they? Even if they wanted to, there was nothing left to bury.”
Jiang Yanli hesitates. Perhaps it is thoughtless of her to want to put Wei Wuxian to rest, given the number of people who died at his hands, every tablet added to family shrines because of him. But the thought of her brother, alone and restless somewhere she cannot reach him, without the comforts other souls might have, saddens her to no end. Despite it all, she hates that he died alone, and she hates that he is alone even now.
She searches through the room until she finds a stack of paper money, flint and steel. Holding her findings, Jiang Yanli sweeps into the garden. She is greeted with the sight of her son sitting atop her husband’s shoulders, enthusiastically patting his head to try to get him to run, and Zixuan refusing with weakening will.
“Don’t do it,” she warns as she walks by. “What if you drop him?”
“I wouldn’t,” Jin Zixuan protests, but still sets down the toddler, who runs to Jiang Cheng instead and pulls at his robes, making noises about wanting to be picked up again.
Turning away from them, Jiang Yanli walks the small hearth she spotted earlier in a corner of their garden.
With a few strikes of flint against steel, she lights a fire and watches it grow before she begins feeding it the paper money.Jin Ling oohs and aahs as the paper shrivels and makes to grab at it before his uncle sweeps him back into his arms.
“Who’s it for?” Jin Zixuan asks. He lays a hand on her shoulder, she leans into him, and for that moment nothing has changed at all.
“My family,” she answers. “All of them.”
Her husband doesn’t say anything, only holds her hand and watches with her as the last of the papercraft collapses into ash.
She doesn’t blame him. He and Jiang Cheng have their own reasons to believe what they do about Wei Wuxian. Jiang Yanli herself might be wrong. But she has spent too much of her life holding her family together, through their failings and their flaws, to let go as they’re trying to.
It is like this : as long as her family lives on, she will be waiting for them to come home.