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There was a spot, not technically outside of the Unclean Realm, but so full of lush greenery that it might as well have been.
Nie Huaisang loved this spot.
His brother rolled his eyes whenever he found him here, but had still made sure a table was installed. One that was just the perfect size, the perfect height, for painting.
Meng Yao sometimes joined him, and they would look out together over the valley below, giggling over new sect gossip. They watched as birds swooped down from the trees surrounding them and plunged down the cliffs below, only to rise back up on an updrift. Nie Huaisang might show Meng Yao a new painting. Meng Yao might share one of the stories his mother used to tell him – sometimes with a twist of Meng Yao’s creation, suited perfectly to Nie Huaisang’s love for high stakes drama, always resolved by the end with cathartic tragedy or perhaps a hard-earned happy ending.
Nie Huaisang loved to paint by the cliffside. He was fascinated by the birds, by the trees. He wanted to get every detail right – each leaf, each feather. Sometimes, when the wind wasn’t too strong and he was sure no one would catch him, he’d climb the trees. He marveled at each bud, the subtle differences in each blossom’s shape – not just tree to tree, but branch to branch.
He inspected a bird’s nest, smiling to himself at the baby birds’ mouths, opening instinctively at his movement nearby – still too young to know the difference between parent and stranger. Between kin and predator.
But the birds didn’t need to worry about Nie Huaisang. The most he would do was immortalize them, committing them to page, where they would live on, regardless of their fates.
As the spring drew to an end, as the birds left one by one, as the blossoms fell, painting the ground instead of the canopy, Nie Huaisang mourned its passing. But at least he knew that he had a whole gallery through which he could revisit this time, whenever he wanted.
--
The sun beat down on him. The leaves were not dense enough to shield him from the summer heat.
The trees were alive, vibrant. Full of life, yes, but life that seemed to be lying in wait. Waiting for the sun to go down, for the heat to cool to night. The vegetation of the Unclean Realm seemed to prefer to doze until then.
Nie Huaisang wondered where his brother, where his friends, might be now. He got the occasional letter, but he knew better than to trust his brother’s constant reassurance that it was all fine. All going to plan.
Meng Yao was still missing, and though Wei Wuxian had been found, there had been something… different about him since his return. Something that Nie Huaisang didn’t know how to help with, or even if he should if he did.
It was harder to paint the leaves now. Too hot during the day to climb the branches, too dark at night to see the subtle details that he so loved to capture. For now, he painted the trees as a whole, adapting, learning how to make it look right, at least from afar. He painted from his little studio, set up in the shade, where the air flow was just slightly better, just that much more bearable, than out in the sun.
He painted the trees and hoped that his memories would be enough to unify the brushstrokes, make them fit together in a passable imitation of his favourite place, even if it may not stand up to inspection.
--
The summer had passed, inviting a perfect cool breeze to step in, taking the place of the blazing heat. Nie Huaisang sat at his table overlooking the mountains again, happy to be amongst the trees.
The celebration of da-ge’s return, of the victorious war heroes, had lasted well into the night, and Nie Huaisang still felt the vaguest sense of a headache as a reminder of festivities. But that hadn’t stopped him from coming out here, when, that morning (or afternoon if he was honest) he’d looked outside and seen that – seemingly overnight – greens had changed to reds, to golds.
He got to work, seeking to capture this moment of blazing glory with his brush before the wind came to sweep it away.
He spent one day, then two out here. On the third day, he came out to find a leaf sitting at his table. He looked at it for a long while, wondering at the similarities a leaf’s face had with the palm of his own hand, lines branching out, reaching for the edges, on both. With such a wonderful, willing model, approaching him to ask for its portrait, he was unable to resist spending the day painting that leaf. He did his best to capture the colours detailing the leaf – the greens still clinging to its veins, the red, then gold reaching out towards the edges.
By the time he looked back up, he realized that this leaf had only been the first. The wind that had picked it up, brought the leaf to Nie Huaisang from the trees above, had not ceased its work.
He watched as the reds, golds, browns fell like rain from above, were swept into the swirling currents below. Twisting down, down, and out of sight.
By the end of the week, the branches were mostly bare. A moment of beauty, of perfection after the summer heat. A flash of colours had burst before him, but even as he had tried to paint it, to preserve some portion of it for himself, it was gone. Reds and golds replaced the greens, and all too soon, the wind stripped the branches of their foliage entirely.
And the world seemed just that much emptier.
--
Winter drew near. The chill had arrived long before the snow. Sometimes, at first glance, it looked like a tree might still be holding on to its last breaths of the warmer months, keeping every inch of each branch covered.
But Nie Huaisang knew better.
It only took the smallest sound, the briefest rustle of the branches, before one, then another, then the whole flock of birds took off, revealing just how barren, how lifeless the branches below actually were. If Nie Huaisang had cared to, he could have named each one of the departing birds. Could have anticipated which direction they would set off in, after their brief stop in Qinghe. But that only emphasized their absence and so he chose not to.
No one visited him back here anymore. No one ranked high enough to come, uninvited into the sect leader’s private spaces.
Maybe, one day, the overlook and the valley below would once again be full of blossoms, full of birds, friends, even, who called this place their home.
But he knew that the only way to get there would be through the long, dark, cold and bitter winter ahead.