Archive of Our Own

In the silence that reigns over the hollowness of victory, Lan Wangji walks the battlefield alone.

It is not the first time he has walked through a battlefield, the sole living thing among the mounds of unburied dead, nor will it be the last. Once, he walked the ruins of empires with another at his side, the silence of their footsteps twinned in their nonexistence. But that was long ago, another time, another reality, and now, his footfalls pass in solitude.

This is one of the messier sites he’s been to, though none of the gore and carnage sticks to the white of his robes. This battle is far enough upstrand that victory is still calculated by the rending of flesh, the reweaving of history performed with entrails and sinew. He used to disdain the muck and grime of these assignments, preferring instead the clean, post-atomic sterility of downstrand warfare, where battles were fought in ships and starlight or, even later, through numbers and code.

Now he finds himself wading more often through seas of corpses, tides of gore, and finds that he does not mind it. There is something about the way bone breaks under his heel and between his teeth that speaks of a struggle, a fight, an attempt to assert the breakable thread of one’s will against the inevitable arc of fate.

He walks through a swampland irrigated with blood and remains pristine. The dust of this mortal world cannot fall upon him—he is a strand-dancer, a weaver of time’s tapestry, dispatched by Gusu Lan’s Symphony to climb upwards into the knots and gnarls of alternate timelines and coax them towards the future in which Gusu reigns, benevolent and peaceful and supreme—the future in which Lan Wangji himself is sung into existence.

He is here to change the past and deliver the future into being. It would not be wrong to call him fate.

He sees his hand in the patterns of destruction, piled swords and corpses flung against each other like seawrack tumbled onshore after a storm: here, a flight of arrows had whistled through the silence. Here, the flash of a fallen torch set clothing and canvas ablaze. Here, a pincer movement was broken before it could bite, foiled by the stealthy advance of a vanguard. Here, a cavalry charge intended to reinforce beleaguered lines foundered, succeeding only in fueling their own funeral pyres.

Lan Wangji’s design, all of it. If he has done his work correctly, there will be no survivors.

He picks his way delicately, unhurriedly, through a nest of tangled spears. There is no reason to rush. The dead have the gift of patience.

And yet—and yet. That may not be true. He thinks he sees signs: of shadows that bend the wrong way, of winds that do not blow with the direction of the storm. Signal flares burst into the air minutes before Lan Wangji intended; a discordant pitch has been threaded through the harmonies he’d composed, arranged for ten thousand swords.

Someone else had been here—a real player, a creature of unmoored time and fluctuating potentialities, like him. An enemy agent, here to sow the charred battleground of Lan Wangji’s victory with the seeds of his own defeat.

And so he searches for the proof that his work has been unraveled.

He finds it at the edge of a cliff, over which he’d driven a squadron of horses still carrying their riders. The dirt there is mucked up and churned around an elegant tombstone, gunmetal gray and newly cut, sleek and elegant and thoroughly out of place. It is several centuries out of style, or several centuries before its invention, depending on how one looked at it. Boldly carved on the face of it:

EVERYONE YOU’VE EVER KILLED.

Lan Wangji blinks at it, nonplussed. Is he supposed to feel guilt?

Agents like Lan Wangji do not feel guilt. When one’s work requires clambering up and down the weave of time, of detangling the strands of one reality to braid it to another, the worth of a life dwindles to insignificance. Lan Wangji does not mourn when he unmakes entire civilizations at the Grandmaster’s request. All lives are bound to end, all fires to flicker and die out, all songs sung to their final, quavering notes.

And yet—this tombstone-out-of-time, this memorial immemorial, equal parts accusation and challenge and—

Oh. Lan Wangji tilts his head. That is new.

Temptation.

Before the tombstone lies a bundle of paper—money, Lan Wangji realizes as he leans in closer to look. A bundle of paper in the fashion of ghost money from strand 112’s fourteenth century. He picks up the bundle and thumbs through it, examining it with eyes that see in radio, ultraviolet, infrared, searching for the wavelength that will unlock its secrets.

There is no clever key. It’s just a stack of paper money, flimsy and fake and not intended to survive long in this world, or any world, superstitious or spiritual.

Lan Wangji sits back on his haunches, considering. He is a whisper-length away from the answer, close enough to feel a breath on his face before his lips close on a kiss.

What did people do with paper money on strand 112?

He exchanges his fingernails for ones made of flint, and strikes them against the blade of a sword pulled free from a nearby corpse. The sparks rain down, puttering out against reddened mud, until one of them finds its mark and the paper money begins to burn.

Lan Wangji reads the letter in the curling smoke that rises from the embers.

His lip curls—he does not smile, but the expression is one he might wear the moment after he pulls the blade from a target’s back.

He leaves, his work made and unmade, and the battlefield sighs with the exhaustion of defeat. Heavy rainclouds loom, bellies filled with unshed tears. In a few minutes, the downpour will wash through the wreckage and send murky red rivulets coursing into a turbid river. In a few minutes, the small mound of ash before an anachronistic grave will turn into sludge, slough off into the dirt, all evidence of enemy action erased.

The sky rumbles. The leaves on the trees whisper fretfully.

The seeker rises from the earth, shedding his disguise. His skin is pale, the shadows around his eyes deep enough to pass for someone who has already gone down to that dark city and hailed the watchers at the gates. And yet his footfalls are light, professionally so, barely leaving a mark upon the churned-up ground. The seeker drops to his knees beside the pile of ash as the embers flicker and die in the humid air.

The seeker produces a glass vial and scoops the ashes into the mouth. He works quickly; the electric hum of the approaching storm sending nervous skitters of wind around the battlefield. When all the ashes are collected, the seeker caps the vial, stows it in his sleeve, then stands. He closes his eyes and raises both hands, like a conductor in the moment before he assumes command of an orchestra.

For a moment, nothing happens. And then, with subtle movements, the air begins shuddering, coalescing around the seeker’s form. His fingers pluck delicately at nothing, until the smoke begins to spiral downwards, time shimmering and rewinding under the deft movements of his hands as he coaxes the abstract tendrils of a letter back towards legibility.

This was a letter meant for a single pair of eyes, to be read only in the act of its destruction.

The seeker draws all the smoke burnt from a pile of paper money back into the palms of his hands, where it quivers, barely held together.

The seeker closes his eyes and breathes it in, just as the skies break open above him.

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Greetings, from the ghost in your machine!

Perhaps that is a gauche reference, considering that it will be another one thousand six hundred and thirteen years before an idling philosopher coins the phrase four strands over, but I couldn’t resist, because your work is a thing of beauty—armies wheeling and flanking and falling into place with the meticulous precision of clockwork that has yet to be invented. I applaud you and your mastery of military minutiae, even as I regretfully inform you that all your work was for naught.

I don’t know if your Symphony ever informed you of the purpose of your mission, so let me tell you now—all of this death and destruction, the months of fomenting rebellion and the years of famine that will follow, were all to kill a single woman, dressed in the armor of a man, who will one day be memorialized in a song to move the heart of an explorer who will discover a landbridge that will bring silk and gunpowder and opium to places that wouldn’t have seen them until the next millennium. This will serve to reshape the ebb and flow of international trade in this strand, lend power where there was none, and undermine the hegemonies of strands 112 and 342. All of which is to say—

Haha, suck it, we’re winning this time war.

It may mollify your wounded pride to know that you haven’t technically failed your directive—that young woman did, in fact, die in this battle (that is a real tombstone, even if the stone doesn’t bear her name). Rather than an instantaneous death via arrow-through-the-eye-socket, however, she spent her last moments drowning in her own blood—lungs are such messy things. That left just enough time for me to slip in, consume her whole, and bury what was left of her. I wish I could say her last moments were peaceful, but consumption rarely is. People often forget the bloody price of becoming a legend.

I had great fun playing her—the eyepatch adds a particularly dashing element to her story, I should think. If you’d like to hear a version of her ballad, I would recommend visiting Yiling Teahouse in two hundred and thirty-six years from now. It’s not the same version as the one that makes history, but there is something about the harmonies that sound better.

Oh! Look at me—daring to make music recommendations to an agent of Gusu Lan. You must forgive my impertinence. I’ve been told more than once by a certain grumpy shidi that I must have been raised by wolves. Untrue, but I will concede that I am Yunmeng’s very best at the hunt. If it’s any consolation, in all my years of service—and trust me, they are many—you’ve come the closest to my heels.

Better luck next time, my dear Lan.

Fondly,

your ghost

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Well, Wei Wuxian thinks ruefully, watching the warehouse go up in flames before him. The heat is powerful enough to melt the thin layer of snow around his feet. At least that had style.

Wei Wuxian is reckoned a virtuoso, a prodigy, a genius, even, by the measure of any era, and he has the accolades of history to prove it. He has played far more than his fair share of eccentric inventors, enchanting performers, and charismatic leaders at the behest of his handlers; often donning a body and cultivating a voice to shake civilizations and shape the threads of time towards a future that ensures the sole survival of Yunmeng Jiang.

All of which is to say—Wei Wuxian is unaccustomed to being thwarted. It has been so long since anyone, time-bound groundling or time-travelling enemy agent, could even pose a challenge to him.

The experience, he finds, is quite unmooring.

He also finds a dangerous thrill in the idea of someone who can keep up with him. Someone who might be his match.

He had taken no more than three steps into the warehouse where the last writings of a late author had been housed—and then, the smell of lamp oil, the hollow rush of air igniting. Immediately, Wei Wuxian had known he was too late, barely even had time to scramble out the doors before the entire building had gone up in flames. Now, he stands outside, letting the unnatural fire warm him as he considers his next move.

A thick beam cracks and topples into the blazing interior, sending sparks streaking skywards. He can hear another shelf of books and scrolls groan before collapsing beneath the roar of flame. There are shouts from the city guard; buckets of water and sand are passed from hand to callused hand. None of it will be enough to recover the lost repository of texts within, including the final installment of one of the greatest novels in the literary tradition.

Perhaps some stories were never meant to end, Wei Wuxian muses, tucking his hands beneath his arms against the biting cold. Future generations will brandish their brushes and flourish their pens, spilling ink into the ashen grave of forty chapters lost to arson or accident, depending on the personality of the author’s cousin. For now, Wei Wuxian watches the falling snow sublimate into steam against an invisible ceiling of heat overhead, and weighs the risks of attempting an extrication of the lost book in a neighboring strand.

His foot grinds crystals against stone as he turns away, and he is careful to step over a scrap of smoldering silk, coughed out by the initial explosion. Its edges shrivel inwards as embers eat away at the fibers.

The message lingers in dark afterimages, spider-like and shivering on his retinal memory. The opening of the warehouse door had triggered a fuse, one that had sent flames racing along the curves of truly exquisite calligraphy. Someone had painted a poem on the floor in lamp oil and accelerant. Three steps into the warehouse, and the fire had already eaten through the message. Within five steps, the flames had moved onto the shelves—dried, dusty, and eminently flammable in their contents.

It was a clever move, Wei Wuxian has to admit—he had no choice but to commit the pattern of fire to memory in order to read the letter in its entirety, and in doing so, opened his mind to possible enemy infiltration. To gather this fragment of insight, he has to allow the words into his consciousness. To appraise enemy intelligence, he has to allow for the possibility of being turned himself.

He pauses, silhouetted against the fire behind him, and lets his retinal memory unspool the calligraphy onto the blank surface of a nearby wall. Wei Wuxian reads it, tilts his head, and reads it again.

He smiles—all mouth, all challenge—and walks away with the afterimages of a poem laced through his shivering shadow.

When the warehouse fire has died away, a layer of snow mixing with the ash of manuscripts and the frame that had housed them, the seeker picks his way through the remains. He crouches by a fragment of silk, rubbing the fibers between his fingers. He examines a blank wall, runs a hand across the rough surface. He paces the streets of the city, empty at this late hour.

When his search pattern yields nothing, the seeker, too, vanishes into the thin, wintry air.

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Alone, standing against the vaults of heaven, surveying the four seas,

Unceasing, wind and waves roil restlessness into the heart.

Spring waters, eastward surging, bring you only grief,

Only my song can release you from sorrow.

As for the time war—it is ours to win.

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Lan Wangji scans the crowd in the opulent reception hall, searching for his mark.

His third flute of champagne rests between delicate fingers, and he draws more than a few appreciative looks from other partygoers in his white robes. In this century, in this strand, modern fashions favor sleek, sweeping lines in the sharp cut of a dress, prioritizes the angular challenge of cuffs and skirts. Lan Wangji stands out for the traditional, almost archaic style of his clothes, tailored perfectly to the trim of his waist, the flare of his shoulders. It is only by virtue of the frostiness of his expression that other partygoers have refrained from approaching him just yet.

He downs the champagne in a swift, efficient movement, and a waiter appears as if summoned, accepting the empty flute with downcast eyes and murmured words. Lan Wangji nods his thanks and refuses a fourth glass. He’s worn one of those anonymizing server’s outfits often enough to know never to offend the staff.

Lan Wangji is not frustrated—it is unprofessional to be frustrated—but he burns away the alcohol in his system with an afterthought and goes hunting for his prey, who should have made an appearance by now. The crowd parts unconsciously before him in deference to the easy, lethal grace of his movement.

Tonight, he seeks the young composer who is being celebrated at the reception of her first concert. Drunk on her success, pink-cheeked and rosy-palmed, she will listen to the words of a tall, mysterious stranger in white and forget them; his words will drift, unattended, in the depths of her memory until years later, when she watches a pair of butterflies dance over the flowers in an overgrown garden and thinks about scrolls and tombs and stars crossing over two souls.

Lan Wangji does not personally favor the songs about butterfly lovers, but he cannot deny their influence, or his obligation to fulfill his assignment.

He’s made it halfway across the ballroom when the composer stumbles into him, laughing and apologetic. “Oh, pardon me,” she says, and when he steadies her with one arm, he sees that she’s not remotely drunk at all.

Something is wrong. She should be tipsy and pliant by now, but her eyes are bright and focused, already looking over his shoulder, eager to be away before he’s even finished congratulating her.

“I’m sorry, but I really need to go and find some paper,” she says, slipping back into the crowd. “Idea!” she calls behind her. “You know how it is!”

Lan Wangji just stares after her, nonplussed, then sighs and begins composing a report in his head. He could try reentering this strand further down in the timeline and introduce the idea then, but the numbers collected by the Symphony’s research department had clearly indicated that other junctures suffered from high probabilities of failure. Artistic journeys were such fickle things—nudge them gently, and the parabola of momentum could swivel in the opposite direction, launch unexpected careers or bitter, endless wars.

Lan Wangji turns at a tap on his elbow to see the waiter once more, bearing another flute of champagne. He takes it, after a moment of thought. At least it’ll give him an excuse not to talk to anyone.

As he raises the glass to his lips, he catches a glimpse of deep purple in the crystalline facets. He hesitates, raises the glass to the light, turning it this way and that. Yes—there it is: subtle swirls of color caught in the glass, bright ribbonlike bursts flaring into translucency. A letter surfaces, coyly hidden in the shift and flash of refracted light. The pale gold of champagne masks it well, but not fully.

He laps at the drink delicately to see if it’s poisoned, then downs it in one gulp.

Long after the reception has ended, dim light creeps over paper and streamers strewn across the floor. In the small hours of the morning, the seeker unfolds himself from the shadows beneath the grand staircase. He steals across the vast hall until he finds the slivered shards of what used to be a champagne glass. He picks them out from the dust and grit, sliding each of them beneath his fingernails.

The seeker flexes his palm and crushes the glass into blood and bone.

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My most merciless correspondent—

A poet! Fortune favors me so, that I have struck up a conversation with a poet! Mere words cannot contain my delight, even if the aftermath and cleanup was hellish to go through.

Get it? Because of the fire?

Oh, of course you’ll get it—you’re a poet after all, even if your parallelism leaves something to be desired. Where has all that vaunted Lan subtlety gone?

Ah, but I’m stereotyping your future, full of monkish asceticism, pleasantly chiming wind-bells, secluded mists and musty books. You, however, have never been subtle—I saw you tear open Vice-minister Huai’s carotid at Chuhan-337. A roomful of men and women with their state-of-the-art discorporation guns, and you and your simple dagger the most dangerous of them all. Don’t try guessing which one was me. I’m too good for you to have noticed my presence.

I hope you’ll forgive our young composer friend; I enjoy the “Butterfly Lovers” as much as the next person (which is to say, only at very specific moments—it’s so dreadfully maudlin), but what I’ve sent her dreaming about instead are drunken chrysanthemums and ghost girls. Much more exciting, don’t you think? History is already so full of tragic romances and mistaken identities, moments-too-late and trains slipping out of stations. I don’t know about you, but I could always use a little more magic in my music, and after a spirited debate and one of my most winning smiles, our young composer agreed with me.

Do you ever get sick of music, over in Gusu? I’m sure you grew up with only the best of a thousand musical canons, received a conservatory education in temporal composition alongside your training to become a fearsomely competent agent. And I do mean fearsomely competent—it’s a compliment I deliver with all of my borrowed heart (though it isn’t much one of one, considering that I’ve been playing an indolent merchant lately). It’s been a long time since anyone’s been able to get the drop on me like that; I confess that I’ve been getting complacent from lack of competition.

And so, consider this glass a toast—I shall not underestimate you next time.

Fondly,

Ghost

P.S. I hope you like the champagne flute! I did a brief stint as a glassblower’s apprentice a few lifetimes back, and it was good to try my hand at it again.

P.P.S. We’re still going to win the war.

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Wei Wuxian shuffles forward in the line of pilgrims, visitors to the Gusu Museum of Classical History. His skin tingles, equal parts exhilaration and nerves, though he makes sure that his heart rate remains impeccably calm. The museum monitors the basic vitals of its visitors, to ensure the appropriate meditative mindset in this sacred space.

Here he is, standing in the heartstrand of the braid that will lead to a future that belongs to Gusu Lan. Around him, display cases glimmer with the fossilized compression of time.

He inches through a hall of wonders, though its official name on the museum map is the Hall of Ancestral Artifacts. Each object is encased within three-inch crystalline walls, harder than diamond, clearer than glass—a marvel of strand 613 technology, which is probably why Gusu had chosen this timeline in the first place to house their sect treasures.

Wei Wuxian takes another step forward as the line moves, keeping his eyes respectfully downcast, right fist tucked behind the small of his back in the traditional Lan pose of self-restraint. The soft murmurs of other visitors, the quiet whisper of cloth and shoe, swirl upwards into the recesses of the tall, soaring ceilings, vanishing overhead in the gloom.

He passes the guan of Sect Leader Lan Jinghua from the seventeenth century. The craftsmanship of the silver is exquisite, morphing seamlessly from the sinuous quality of melting water into the sharp and brittle edges of slivered ice. It was said that Lan Jinghua had infused the ornament with decades of their own spiritual energy, until it held enough power to flatten a city.

But Wei Wuxian is here for more than mere trinkets tonight.

Eventually, their slow, hypnotizing steps bring him face-to-face with the main exhibit of the hall: Sect Leader Lan Yi’s guqin, priceless artifact and legendary origin of Gusu’s Symphony. Wei Wuxian steps forward, maintaining the appropriate ritual distance of respect, and performs the obeisance of a disciple with perfect form.

The softly glowing body of the guqin seems haloed in a celestial, reverent light—fitting for such a significant symbol. It is a shame that this one is a fake, but Wei Wuxian knows where the real one is hidden.

Wei Wuxian lets the docent usher him out of the exhibition hall, waits until the edge of her white robes has vanished back around the corner, then ducks into a service hallway through a door disguised as architectural flourish. It was incredible how much you could hide in plain sight, if you simply trained your museumgoers to look away from what they weren’t supposed to see.

A cool blue light immediately arrests him before he’s taken more than two steps, and he holds his breath as the security system peers into his eyes, tracks the origin of his bones and hair.

The blue light vanishes, and he can move again. An elegant scrawl of ink surfaces on the blank white wall beside him: Welcome, Lan Weiren.

It had taken Wei Wuxian the better part of a lifetime to track down the original Lan Weiren, to embed himself in the strand and cultivate the man’s friendship, his affection, and finally, his trust. In Lan Weiren’s old age, when he had done everything history required of him, Wei Wuxian consumed him gently, thoroughly, until there was no trace left but a myth of ascension and a corpse-less grave.

The first test passed, Wei Wuxian navigates the identical white hallways until the next door he tries is locked. Wearing the body and blood of Lan Weiren, it seems, can only get him this far. The elegant ink-scrawl surfaces on the wall once more, and Wei Wuxian imagines an ageless, eldritch thing following him through walls, watching, assessing, testing him at every gate.

Name your offerings, the wall says, then fades back into blankness.

Wei Wuxian lifts a hand and writes—mugwort, angelica, fragrant thoroughwort—and golden sparks trail his fingers until the characters hover before him in the air. The golden light lingers for a moment, before an unseen vortex drinks them in. The door shudders open.

Wei Wuxian steps into the room beyond. It’s dark, save for a solitary wooden case, barely large enough to hold a guqin. A column of light illuminates the pedestal where the artifact rests.

Wei Wuxian has barely passed the threshold before a shimmering forcefield flickers into existence. Tests, it seemed, always came in threes.

Present the key, the words shimmer, over and over, woven into the fabric of light. Wei Wuxian takes a deep breath, then reaches into his wide sleeves and pulls out a flute.

The central practice of Gusu Lan has always been music, its primary language the speech of instruments. There are an infinite number of musical permutations to choose from for this final test, an infinite number of ways to go wrong if he does not play the melody that the musical lock is primed to.

So he doesn’t even try—he shrills a new song, one of command and urgency, making his plaint to the walls.

The forcefield vibrates, glowing a brilliant, blinding white. Then it shatters, like a dream pierced by a gunshot.

This move will trigger every alarm the Symphony has in place, and Wei Wuxian has no doubt that all Gusu agents within five centuries are converging on his position. Before the last note has died away, he bounds up the steps to the pedestal, running his hands along the guqin case, fingers pressing the clasps open.

The lid falls back with a muffled thump, and for three shocked seconds he can barely afford, Wei Wuxian stares at its contents.

Then he grabs the painting that is most decidedly not a guqin, and runs.

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The crafty hare, each step swift as swallow-flight,

The fierce hawk plummets, like lightning’s strike.

If one desires to retreat, safe and whole,

Not coming would be better than successful escape.

You should stay farther away from Gusu strands.

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In every strand, in every timeline, Lan Wangji observes, there are walls being built.

Walls of wood and walls of steel; walls of words and walls of code. There is something chillingly universal about the human need to keep others out.

At this moment, the wall Lan Wangji is working on is to be made of stone. In fact, where he is working, the wall is but a distant, foolish dream of an emperor who aspires to immortality, his most lasting architectural legacy slowly growing into a sprawling stone dragon that will hunker over the hills and passes like a grudging guardian.

He raises his hand, and the men following him stop. The echoes of their footsteps peter away in the dark of the quarry. None of the men so much as whisper as Lan Wangji closes his eyes and stretches out his senses.

He listens to the drip of distant water deeper in the tunnels, the growl and scrape of gravel underfoot, the guttering of the torch in his hand. He reaches past the thump of thirteen heartbeats behind him, beyond the soft sighing of a distant breeze flavored with the barest hint of moonlight from a world miles overhead.

Lan Wangji slows himself down, bidding heart to cease beating, lungs to cease breathing, tuning every fiber of his being to respond to—

—there. The song of stone.

In some tenth century strands, the philosophers of Greater Tang become obsessed with the principle of ganying, the phenomenon that makes the string of one guqin shiver when its counterpart is plucked on a sister instrument across the room. The idea that heaven and earth would respond in kind to appropriate human action, not unlike a plucked guqin string, would lead some strands to great flourishing, others to charred and smoldering ends.

Lan Wangji slows time to an aching crawl until he can hear the whisper of air through the pores of stone.

In this century, a great wall is being built; in this century, part of the wall will collapse in a thunderstorm, and the bones of those who built the wall will spill out in response to a young woman’s heartrending cry—or so the story goes.

The reality will be stranger, a collision of events too coincidental to be anything but the meddling of those who walk through time.

He opens his eyes, and time resumes its usual brisk pace between one blink and the next. “Here,” he says, and taps out the dimensions of the stone block. The men swarm around him, tools and pickaxes at the ready.

This block of stone will look like every other, until it is struck by a pre-ordained bolt of lightning at just the right moment. Widow Meng will cry out—the heavens roaring in response—and a legend, ten myths, a hundred poems will be spawned.

The sound of hammer and chisel fills the passageway, and Lan Wangji moves to join them. Before he can lay hand to tool, though, a sliver of stone on the ground edged in torchlight catches his eye. When he picks it up, its jagged edge slices cleanly, easily through the skin of his fingertips, and Lan Wangji pauses for a moment, considering the summons.

A month later, he stands miles away before a towering stone façade as a block is lifted into place. He stands there, long after the day workers have dispersed, long after the sun has set, until even the moon, too, ducks beneath the horizon.

After he commits the words to memory, Lan Wangji shifts form, becomes something part myth, part monster, part natural disaster, and sands away all traces of a letter no one in this century can read. He is gone before the stone-dust can even settle.

Not long after Lan Wangji’s departure, another figure makes its way through the hazy cloud of fine powder. The seeker tilts his head, considering, as stone-dust coats his lips and eyelashes, grates against his throat and lungs in an attempt to smother any witnesses.

After a moment, a resonant note from a guqin freezes every particle of dust mid-motion. A waterfall of notes ripple through the air, and an unseen wind rises, swirling the dust into a vortex that funnels itself into a waiting silk pouch.

The seeker seals the pouch and tucks it into his sleeve before departing from the foot of the wall.

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To the most poetic hawk ever to grace the skies—

Your parallelism is improving, even if you gave it up to lecture me in the last couplet. It’s quite sweet of you, really, to be concerned for my well-being, considering both the line of work we’re in and the fact that you have seen my work. You know as well as I that the words best used to describe what we do are written more readily in blood than ink.

I would ask what gave me away in the museum, but I suspect that will come too close to operational secrets. A little mystery always makes the chase more exciting.

But I am shying away from the point of your last poem (woven beautifully into the fabric of that painting—did you do it yourself? I shan’t be surprised, there’s so little you Lans cannot do), which is this: you were warning me. And not just in the manner of a bee’s sting, or the rattle of a tail before the bite. You and I both know that I stood in the heartstrand of Gusu territory, and you could have easily trapped and killed me there.

And yet, you didn’t—you let me walk all the way into the deepest, most secret sanctum of your Symphony, and let me off with no more than a painting and a poem.

Your first poem spoke of a deep and abiding loneliness, of standing alone, gazing out at a vast and uncaring ocean, restlessness churning in your heart. Hidden, of course, beneath the words of a taunt, but haunting, lingering.

Your second poem scolds, paints you the fierce hawk, me the crafty hare, the rivalry between our opposing timelines as inevitable and natural as the cycle of predation. And yet, I fail to discover an interpretation of its context that does not emerge from a place of concern.

What do you want, my poet-hawk? What do you dream of when the Symphony lets you rest? What songs fill the silences between the stars of your future skies?

What do you want from me, to preserve my life? I’m very touched, but know that I won’t go easy on you.

Tell me a truth, so deep and hidden in your own heart that the words of it have never seen even the light of a sleepless night.

Regards,

Ghost

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There is a long tradition of daggers hidden in fish, of knives hidden in maps, of lead weights hidden in instruments, but seldom has the tradition seen a master of the art as Wei Wuxian.

He slinks, soundless, through the monochrome patterns of light and shadow on the moon base. Guards do not detect him; infrared cameras do not see him. He carries no weapon because his entire being is one; this whipcord body is only human on the surface.

Tonight’s mark is unfortunate: he has the choice of twins, born already with a predisposition towards tragedy. Kill one, and the other will become a poet. Kill the poet, and their sibling will become a prophet, gifted with a feverish vision and destructive charisma that will send armies to their silent drowning in the corpselight of dying suns.

Prophecies, like daggers, are also sometimes hidden in the bellies of fishes.

He is not the first assassin to come for the twins—such is the dubious privilege of being the children of a diplomat and a general from opposite sides of an ongoing conflict. This war already ranges across solar systems, has burned through more than a few stars. No, Wei Wuxian is far from the first assassin, but he is the best.

The twins’ parents are high-profile enough that one of their governments has dispatched an advanced robotic prototype to protect the beating hearts in their home. The prototype is a sleek thing of chrome and copper, smooth and seamless, and it hunkers in Wei Wuxian’s path like an obstinate boulder in the path of spring meltwater. Lights flicker across its plated face as it registers a threat. With a soft subsonic whir, the chrome plating cracks open to reveal far more weaponry than one might expect from this segment of the strand—the invention of transdimensional storage is, after all, some centuries down the line.

The robot levels no less than six firearms and twelve blades at him. Three of the blades are even motorized and rotating, made to slice through alloy-enhanced bone.

Wei Wuxian disassembles the robot neatly, meticulously.

He wrecks the communications module first, trapping the distress signal within its shell. The blades flash towards him, quicker than thought, and Wei Wuxian catches each of them between thumb and forefinger. With an elegant twist of his wrist, he snaps the blades from their mounting points and lays them out, a neat row of razors. The six guns—one an early experiment in laser weaponry, another a charmingly updated blow-dart laced with some rather unpleasant neurotoxins—join the blades on the ground within seconds.

When Wei Wuxian is done, he lets the lethal parts of himself fold back under his skin until he is human-shaped once more, robed in flowing shadow. He is barely breathing hard.

He ascends the stairs to the twins’ room and pushes open their door. Under the moonlight from high, bulletproof windows, he sees two bodies.

No.

Only one.

Wei Wuxian pads in, a whispered breath in the dark. A closer vantage point only verifies what he already saw—only one of the twins lies there, breathing deeply, peacefully.

He hesitates for a moment, the window of opportunity drawing close, noose-like, around him. His directive had been to kill the poet and turn the arc of this strand’s future towards Yunmeng Jiang, but now, only the poet is left. Had someone slipped in before him, spirited away the prophet to deploy in another timeline? Does he take the risk of launching this strand towards uncalculated entropy by cutting the throat of unwritten poems?

Agents who spun and danced through time did not feel guilt, but Wei Wuxian is not unfamiliar with the concept of mercy.

He is about to step out of this strand when he sees, nestled on the bed, the soft glow of moon-white fur, the glint of starlight off tiny red eyes. He blinks, then has to stifle a laugh. Really! A rabbit on the moon!

The rabbit snuffles, and in its fur Wei Wuxian sees the scrape and whorl of words, the shadowy intimations of a letter.

The child shifts in their sleep, and Wei Wuxian considers that losing a pet rabbit is, in the scope of things, a small price to pay for a life. With deft movements, he scoops the rabbit up into his arms, cradling its delicate heart against his own, and darts sideways from the world.

Once Wei Wuxian has vanished, the shadows beneath the bed pool and ooze, stretching ink-dark and void-like beyond their natural borders. The seeker rises by the child’s bedside and regards the future poet with unreadable eyes.

He teases a few strands of discarded rabbit fur free from the fabric of the blanket, and is gone before the child blinks bleary eyes awake.

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O vengeful ghost—

Do not come looking for the other child. If you must know, they are well cared for, living a life of middling privilege and comfort in another strand. You may rest assured, on my word as an instrument of the Symphony.

Here is another truth, though likely not as deep and dark as you’d like: lying is forbidden in Gusu’s symphonic heartstrands.

It may seem a preposterous premise to those in our line of work: how can we accomplish anything, the subtle rethreading of fate’s needle, the reweaving of the fabric of reality and truth, if we cannot tell lies?

This is the way of Gusu Lan—the synthesis of unspeakable amounts of data, the cyber-blue crunch of possibilities and conditionality, the elegant, precise solution, calculated with surgical exactitude, distilled into a single mission within the parameters of truth. When we act, we act with the surety of foreknowledge that the inevitability of our future will ensure our success.

And this is why we will win the time war.

Your Yunmeng Jiang seeks to rewrite the strands of time by retelling the narratives that direct it, mixing truth and falsehood in intoxicating vintages until your future becomes dizzy with possibility. Gusu Lan prunes away the falsehoods of alternativity to cleave close to the singular truth—a future that leads to us.

You asked, in your previous letter, what I wanted from you. The answer is nothing; it is you, after all, who reached for me first, tailoring a shapely and delicate defeat for my taste. I suppose I might thank you for how much thought you put into the unravelling of my work. The gesture really is quite intimate.

But then I recall the headaches back at headquarters as our technicians scrambled to deal with the fallout of your intervention and must withdraw any gratitude, though the grudging appreciation remains.

You asked why I preserved your life, and I confess that I had no grand, strategic reason for it. It seemed a shame to let a mind like yours go to waste, even if you work for another timeline. Consider your defeat, and my mercy, a courting gift.

Do not think that I have not noticed your coy seduction—you ask about the silences in the dark, the dreams in my rest; you seek to insert yourself at the seams, tease at the composition of my being, the places where the Symphony does not hold complete sway over me. Allow me to save you some time: I cannot be turned. All Gusu agents go through a trial, to test them for potential weaknesses and points of corruption. I can tell you now that mine is not a wavering heart.

Nevertheless, unlooked-for correspondent, unrestful spirit of the strands, I must admit: your overtures were sweet, if misguided. Let it not be said that a Lan did not appreciate the artistry in your work.

Until the next haunting, then—

the hunter in your skies

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Lan Wangji steps out of the strand, thoughtful, as a grass butterfly crumbles to dust in his fingers. He begins picking his way across the strand-weave of time, watershed moments compressed beneath his feet like flattened worlds drowned below the surface of a frozen lake in winter. The words of a letter, cleverly folded and knotted into the delicate wings of the grass butterfly, sink into his contemplation.

Lan Wangji has completed his mission well within the temporal parameters given to him—there would be no need to assassinate the leader of a peasant rebellion if one simply ensured that her parents never met, after all—and so, rather than angle his feet downthread towards headquarters, Lan Wangji instead moves laterally across strand-space, heading past the twist of Yunmeng Jiang and deeper into the braid that glows Gusu-blue. He treads lightly—it would not do to leave traces that enemy agents could follow.

On the way, he skirts the edge of the Burial Mounds—a blackened, necrotic stretch of strand-space where the timelines lay dead and inert, all life and mortality absent from them. To compare the Burial Mounds to the ashen waste after a wildfire would be poetic euphemism: that would imply that the Burial Mounds could one day regain its former vitality, might yet become a green, growing thing instead of the dead corpse it is now, rotting in the strands.

Even the Grandmaster didn’t know how the Burial Mounds had come about—one day, those strands had been hale, healthy, harvestable, and then the black rot had bloomed forth, all-consuming, all-corrupting.

Lan Wangji has seen timelines terminated before, knows well the sear and curl of a strand cauterized short, and still the Burial Mounds defy understanding. No one fights over these strands. No one who has dispatched agents into the Burial Mounds has gotten their people back, either.

So Lan Wangji maintains a wary distance from the Burial Mounds, ducking his head and hurrying past. There is a thread beyond it, woven deeply into the braid of Gusu Lan, and there Lan Wangji steps into linear time on the side of a lush, forested mountain.

As he passes a gate made of white stone, he rings the bell hanging just behind it to announce his arrival. The sweet chimes of silver, winter-clear and water-bright, follow him up the mountainside, reverberating impossibly against the wood and stone.

Lan Xichen meets Lan Wangji at the hidden pass, pale dust still caked on his fingers—flour, Lan Wangji identifies on reflex, relaxing. He wonders at how swiftly his brother must have flown to greet Lan Wangji at the door.

“Wangji,” Lan Xichen says warmly, his eyes indulgent as he lets Lan Wangji take stock of him in that swift, practiced look both of them know well. Lan Xichen is the picture of health, though his physical recovery had ceased to be a concern years ago. There is now a glow in Lan Xichen’s cheeks, a light in his eyes that had been worryingly absent during the early months.

Retirement suits his brother well, Lan Wangji decides, and follows his brother between the trees, towards the remote courtyard that Gusu Lan had gifted Lan Xichen for his service upon his retirement.

“How was your assignment?” Lan Xichen asks, a courtesy. Shop talk.

Lan Wangji shrugs. “Class four termination. It barely took a shicheng.”

Lan Xichen frowns. “Terminations are a waste of your time, much less a class four termination.”

“The larger assignments all require musical cultivation,” Lan Wangji says, careful to keep his voice flat and uninflected, but still Lan Xichen flinches.

“I see,” Lan Xichen says. With a visible effort, he throws back his shoulders, drags a smile onto his face. “Let us not speak of work, then. Tell me, Wangji—what is new? What brings you joy?”

They used to be two halves of one thing, Lan Wangji thinks. Two voices, in duet; the warp to each other’s weft. Those questions fall strange and unpracticed from Lan Xichen’s lips because once, both of them would have known the answers without asking.

It is precisely this new and unfamiliar distance between the two of them that allows Lan Wangji to reach past the words of a letter that twine about his thoughts and pick out something harmless. “They are singing a new song in the wine-houses of Bianjing,” Lan Wangji says. “Liu Yong may realize his ambitions yet.”

A crow wings by overhead, unnoticed. Hidden in the forest, hunkered down behind the treeline, the seeker follows the bird’s flight, considering, before he vanishes into deeper shadows.

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My dearest Lan,

It is fascinating to hear you describe what you think of us—dissolute storytellers, it would seem, drunken and disposed towards the weaving of fanciful tales like tavern-dwellers, tongues loosened by drink. I cannot help but wonder if this has something to do with our fundamentally different beliefs in the nature of sentience. Gusu—and you’ll have to correct me if I overstep in my generalizations, I’m afraid I may have napped during this segment of our training module—with all your rules and regulations, prohibitions and particularities, seeks to shape each individual in the mold of a Lan model of appropriate conduct, demanding perfection and conformity at once. One need only observe your cold elegance, the austere beauty of your mercilessness, to see the shape of the music that made you.

Yunmeng, in contrast, believes in the inherent completeness of being. Our task, then, becomes the illumination of each person’s uniqueness, the gentle guidance towards the fulfillment of individual potential. This is why some have called us by the semantic meaning of our name, the River—we do not seek to change the nature of water as it floods from mountain snowmelt in the spring. We merely seek to place a stone in its path, to observe how the waters divert around it, and thus guide it towards the future that calls to us with the siren song of homecoming.

You say that Gusu prunes away the falsehoods of alternativity in pursuit of a singular truth, which naturally begs the question—how can you know truth from falsehood, or from other truths? How can you tell black from white?

Do not answer me with dry recitations of physics and theory, the ways of optics and pigments. Tell me your truth. Convince me, if you can.

Signed, sealed, in all sincerity this time,

Ghost

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Wei Wuxian trails his fingers in the river, and imagines ghosts coming up to nibble at his fingertips like fishes in the void-dark water.

In some strands, Sanxia is an unmitigated disaster—the dam floods the mountain valleys and applies pressure on tectonic plates, catalyzing a cascade of catastrophic earthquakes across the central floodplain. In other strands, Sanxia is an engineered miracle—the hydroelectricity generated launches the area towards a solarpunk future, drowned villages paving the path to utopia.

In another lifetime, Wei Wuxian walked the narrow canyons a hundred feet below, drifting in birdsong and the exuberance of foliage. Some of the valleys were so narrow he could stretch his arms out to either side and touch stone. Small villages daydreamed the centuries away in verdant, sunlit peace.

Wei Wuxian does not mourn the loss of the Sanxia gorges—grief is a pursuer he has long left behind, and for him, Sanxia is never truly gone, not when he can climb upstrand and go for a hike, should he ever be possessed by the desire to do so. Besides, he prefers moments like this—lounging alone in a flat-bottomed boat, its steering oar kicked up by his loosely-crossed ankles. The moon shines, reflected in the water, and Wei Wuxian toasts it silently with his wine. He’ll embrace it in the river another night, when the alcohol burns lazily in his veins and his ink spills black into midnight water.

The letter comes to him in the form of a carp, its rippling form nosing up to Wei Wuxian’s fingers. He scoops it up in a swift, careless motion, and the carp wriggles for a moment, scales flashing silver in the cold light. Then, it shudders and splits into two—halves of a letterbox, cracking open to reveal its secret.

He reads the letter, then returns it to its box. When he fits the two halves of the carp back together like an imperial seal, it immediately squirms in his hand, suffocating and alive once more. Wei Wuxian watches the arc of its body as it leaps upriver, towards some elusive dragon gate.

A mile upstream, the seeker snatches the fish out of the water by its tail. Moonlight catches on the shape of its muscles, the edge of its desperation.

The bones of the letter pierce the seeker’s mouth as he chews and swallows the entire fish, leaving no scale behind.

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Unrestful spirit of the waters—

You asked me, in your last letter, about the nature of truth, and I must admit that I almost laughed. You asked me to explain the nature of truth in a letter, when centuries of scholars have already dashed themselves to pieces on the shoals of metaphysics. But you asked, a genuine gesture, and so I must answer, as best as I can.

There is a thing, chaotic and complete, that came into being before Heaven and Earth, and some schools of thought took it as their way. From the way was born one, and from one, two was born. Two bore three, and three gave rise to the ten thousand material things. You speak of a multiplicity of truths—these are your myriad truths.

And so when we seek to return to the one, we seek to prune away distractions, cut away falsehoods, from ten thousand to three, three to two, two to one, and one to that nameless thing that came into being before Heaven and Earth. There, we find the singularity that drives Gusu Lan.

Or so I am told.

It occurs to me, while I try to explain a fundamental truth of being that defies capture by words, that the heart of loyalty does not reside in the mind. I am loyal to Gusu Lan, yes—this is a fundamental truth I know. All Gusu agents go through trials—I knelt in a frozen wasteland of a cave for three years, to test the purity of my resolve. Formless monsters that fed on doubt, that became blood-crazed at the scent of disloyalty, swam beneath the ice and never once disturbed my meditation.

But when I examine myself and search for the ties that bind, the threads that anchor, the melodies that call me home to a future exclusive from yours, none of them have the slightest relationship to the nature of truth. I return to Gusu because it is my home—a place, a space, a song, a symphony. I return to Gusu because my brother is there. I return to Gusu because it was the place that made me, the only place I can truly belong.

I can only imagine, despite the differences between the two of us, that you understand this sentiment, the feeling of home, unless your future is so alien, the movings of your world and your mind so foreign, that the concepts of home and loyalty are not intertwined in the future Yunmeng imagines. If so, I would mourn for you, enemy agent or not. I could not imagine a greater tragedy than to lack a place where one’s feet can rest.

Until next time, one supposes—

A Lan, in motion

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Lan Wangji tends to a cabinet of poisons, doling them out day by day.

Depending on the preparation and incorporation of ingredients, the percentage of cinnabar and other heavy metals, the library of rare roots and herbs he presides over can sometimes become medicine when they leave the threshold of his workroom. The arts of healing and hurt have long walked hand in hand.

Lan Wangji manages a fraction of the imperial storerooms, and watches the bitterness of rear palace intrigue consume lives like fire feasting upon flowers.

His work here is a delicate, far-reaching game of xiangqi—the stilling of a womb and the quickening of another, a day of illness or years of slowly deteriorating health. Lan Wangji manipulates the threads of procreation and power from his distant storeroom on the southwestern edge of the imperial city, and no one suspects him if an ailing concubine passes away after long years of illness, or if the empress dowager’s headaches lessen when he adjusts the composition of this month’s incense cakes.

It is as the prophets say: the tides rise, the tides fall, enmeshed in gratitude and grievances.

Despite the drama and intrigue of his assignment—the fates of dynasties are often engendered in the rear palace—his days are mostly busywork. He mixes prescriptions transmitted to him by the imperial physicians; he takes inventory and submits lists for restocking. He tests the ginger roots for age, scrapes at ginseng to judge whether this entire shipment must be thrown out. Lan Wangji finds that he enjoys the tedium, although overindulgence in linear time is, of course, unprofessional.

He is taken by surprise when a eunuch arrives from the rear palace bearing not a request, but a gift for him.

Lan Wangji blinks. Lowly storeroom clerks did not receive gifts, especially from the inhabitants of the rear palace. And yet the eunuch insists, proffering the lotus pouch with both hands.

Lan Wangji’s suspicions are confirmed when he brings the finely-embroidered silk to his nose and sniffs. Layered between the sharp tang of medicinal herbs and the softening notes of floral fragrances—chrysanthemum, yes, some osmanthus as well—Lan Wangji finds the words of a letter. He spends the rest of the afternoon meticulously teasing out each line, and when he finishes, he pulls open the drawstrings on the lotus pouch and scatters the letter across twenty different incense burners, to be dispatched to various courtyards and bedrooms of the imperial palace.

That night, the seeker flits in and out of windows, replacing cultivated fragrances with the empty chill of the night’s air, the subtle taste of the coming winter.

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My wandering Lan,

I cannot say that I have ever had a mind for philosophical thought, but perhaps I might have learned the ancient schools better had you been there to teach me. I’m afraid that my head remains unconvinced by the logic of your truth. Do not be dismayed, it was a noble attempt. ‘Once you and I have started arguing, if you win and I lose, then are you right and am I wrong? If I win and you lose, then am I really right and you really wrong?’

My head, then, unswayed—but my heart, my dear Lan. You called them idle musings, and yet I was moved. You went looking for the heart of loyalty, and found yours beating in other people.

Perhaps you will understand, then, when I say that I have my own people, who hold the beating heart of my loyalty as well. The prophets knew well the gravity-pull of loyalty and homecoming—gently, I must leave them behind for each assignment, and always I miss them in the storms.

It has been so long since I have written a letter that I confess myself quite out of practice, though it seems strange to apologize for my own clumsiness since barely any time might have passed at all since our last correspondence for you. Letters are tricky like that, and the exchange of our letters even more so.

Yunmeng Jiang has me doing specialized embedments, most of the time—it’s delicate work, living entire lives within the strictures of linear time-space, retaining just enough awareness to rebraid history but sacrificing enough of yourself to play a part convincingly. I should think I sacrificed most of my wit this time around—a good thing, too. I would have been wasted on all the imperial memoranda I drafted.

Oh, but even if I was playing possibly the dullest of academicians this lifetime, I feasted so. Do you Lans ever throw a good feast? Do you Lans even still eat, or is it the hyperconcentrated nutrient sludge we feed the young, the pure, sterile compression of necessities into nanoseconds, minor annoyances in a post-material existence?

This assignment found me among the streets of Chang’an with regularity, and if you ever find yourself there in the tenth century, I cannot recommend their roujiamo enough. Stop by any old vendor on the street—look out for the ones bearing fragrant clouds of steam—and grant yourself this indulgence. There is an art to eating roujiamo, I’ve discovered—a messy one, all hot oil spilling out of a bun valiantly fighting a soggy entropy, spilling over the backs of your hands in a way that will leave your skin tantalizing for hours afterwards, tempting with the memory of its savor. But they’re onto something here, the street vendors of Chang’an; I think they’ve unlocked some sort of great secret of the universe in the flavor of their lamb, all open sky and grassfire dirt, the sharp slice of onion and the warm burn of barbarian pepper.

Oh, but I’ll chatter on endlessly if left to my devices. This past life was truly boring, Lan er-ge. Am I correct in guessing ‘er-ge?’ You mentioned a brother, and I guessed you were the younger. Don’t ask me how I know, I have my ways.

Until next time—

Ghost

P.S. Not that I do not enjoy calling you ‘my dear Lan,’ but do you have a name? Does Gusu still do things like give names to its agents? A genuine question. I feel like, now that we’ve both tried to suborn each other, we should at least be on a courtesy name basis by now, no?

-----------

Wei Wuxian lies on his belly, chin propped on crossed arms, idly watching the sunlight reflect off the choppy waters of a fish-scaled sea far below.

These are his favorite assignments—though he is indisputably Yunmeng’s best at specialized timeline embedment, he cherishes the times when he is sent to deal with affairs that do not involve another soul but rather matters natural and elemental. The positioning of a boulder that will sink into the earth and offer refuge during a landslide; the walking of continents, treading gentle suggestions for future curves of oxbow rivers into unmarked dirt.

Today, he is weaving together a storm that will one day crackle electric-white against a darkening sky at the precise moment to suggest an ill omen, thereby shifting the inclination of this strand away from war and towards peace. That storm will not be for another half year, but Wei Wuxian had stepped into this strand early, to get some practice in and ensure that the final performance will need no encores.

Another agent might have borrowed anachronistic technology to fake the appropriate lightning strike. Wei Wuxian prefers his methods to be natural and inevitable as the breaking of mountains under root and water, the fated fall of a raindrop to earth.

It’s part of what makes him the best.

For now, he teases a wisp of mist out of the puffy cloud he’s sprawled out on, collecting the sparks of energy between his fingers and stowing it in a vial. If he combs enough of the fluffier clouds, he can make a respectable thunderstorm by seeding the appropriate cumulus with the electricity.

A boat cuts across the water beneath him, and he frowns. It’s not the right century for transoceanic ventures, but as he looks closer, he sees a small, sleek ship, slicing through the waves with efficient beauty, quick and decisive as a well-sharpened blade sliding between ribs. There’s a small figure on it, piloting the vessel with enviable ease.

His eyes track the movement of the boat’s skips and scuds as it tacks first against the wind, now with it. Wei Wuxian blinks as a pattern emerges from the wake of the ship, dissolving as swiftly as the foam that flecks the waves. He laughs quietly to himself.

After the ship has sailed away and the setting sun has thrown red paths across the water, no trace of the letter remains. The seeker lies in the waves, floating face-up with his hands crossed neatly over his stomach. He blinks, salt crusting crystalline on his eyelashes, before the sea closes over his head.

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Nameless guest—

How does one write a letter to someone in the sky? I will tell the truth, even if it might make you laugh—I borrowed the idea from skywriters in twenty-first century culture, a quaint and wasteful practice that nonetheless has a baffling kind of charm. I write my words in water, not because I do not mean them, but because it would not do to leave behind traces for either the Symphony or the River to collect.

I can only trust that you are being appropriately wary on your own side, but since you’ve informed me that you are the best Yunmeng has, I hope that your words have more spine and substance to them than hollow sweet nothings.

I knew that in writing back, your letters would grant me great insight into the ways of Yunmeng Jiang, but I must profess my astonishment, expected and gauche as it is. You write of embedment as if it were the simplest of routine missions when, in the Symphony, embedment is perhaps the most dangerous assignment we undertake. The strategic crippling of oneself, the flattening and hobbling of our four-dimensional beings into the constraints of chronological occurrence, not to mention the very real threat of being trapped, killed, and buried there like so many other faceless bodies throughout history—and to you, a mere chore! I could not tell you how many agents Gusu has lost to embedment, or the price such dangerous assignments have exacted from fellow agents. I don’t know where to begin asking, so perhaps—will you be safe? And how can you be sure?

The composition of this letter feels hasty and rushed when I imagine that you must live an entire lifetime between letters. I fear my words are inadequate.

In your last letter, you offered me the sensory onslaught of a Chang’an roujiamo, which quite undid me in the mere reading of it. No, really—we are not raised in the Symphony with an attention to sensation beyond its role as information and data, and taste is more often useful as a metric of lethal intent rather than pleasure. The bitterness of poison, the saccharine quality of hidden betrayals, the tart anticipation of traps waiting to spring. On most missions, if I am required to eat, I burn the food away almost as soon as it touches my tongue. Food—and alcohol—is often a distraction we cannot afford to tolerate.

But I do eat. I have eaten. I am working on the slow reconciliation of food and my upbringing, though you and your fondness for spice and oil will likely laugh at the plain fare I consume. But have you observed the thousand different tastes in a twist of huajuan? Of all handheld delicacies, it is close to the humblest one—only the slightest smear of oil and salt setting it apart from mantou. And yet, in huajuan alone, I could spend centuries—the light, spongy tear of layers coming apart on your tongue. The chase of salt and green onion over the hiss of steam and steel. The aroma of bamboo or the tang of metal, depending on the century and your steamer. The minutes of sunlight you can taste, the hours the dough spent rising.

A million different variations—crushed sesame paste between the layers. Husked wheat hulls lending a richer kind of hollowness to the way it rests in your mouth. Last time, my brother added ground almonds to the batch and I could barely finish one, so overwhelming were the tastes.

I would like to try your roujiamo some day, I think. And yet the day I can handle the full-bodied sensation of oil and spice, meat and marinade, might be a day I can no longer discern the vast spectrum that exists in the play of flour and water and yeast alone, and that feels like a shame. I hope you will understand, then, if I do not hasten to that day.

In the afterthoughts of your last letter, you asked me for a name. And yet you haven’t offered me one of your own. Shouldn’t you heed your own words before you ask others to heed yours?

But the sea is fair today, and the salt breeze puts me in a good mood. I will give you a hint, or several—you may ask the gulls and egrets who they sing with. And if you listen very carefully, you can listen to the flameless hearth doused by water, or find a rain-soaked cliff’s edge without the strength of stone.

Happy hunting—

A Lan, in waves and water

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His brother is waiting for him at the gate when Lan Wangji ascends the stairs to the hidden pass. “Wangji,” Lan Xichen says, a hint of a smile in his voice. “Have you eaten?”

Lan Wangji shakes his head, though both of them know that Lan Wangji does not need to eat, not when the infrastructure of his being runs on starlight and uranium, liquid lunarity and the slow movement of celestial music. Lan Wangji keeps pace with his brother as Lan Xichen turns and leads them up the path. The house rests on top of a hill, all clean lines and paper windows, filled with sleek hallways and elegantly furnished rooms. A set of gently steaming plates awaits them on a low table as Lan Wangji carefully steps over the threshold.

They eat in silence, as they always have, relearning the spaces around each other. The lack of conversation allows Lan Wangji to focus on the overwhelming sensations of taste. He knows that his brother’s cooking is relatively bland, but the subtle fragrance of the jielan leaves, the undertones of earth and stone, the barest hint of oil all burst across his tongue with crystalline brightness, so far removed from his usual subsistence drinking in the eastern winds and lapping at morning dew.

Wordlessly, he helps Lan Xichen stack the dishes and carry them outside, where they settle beside each other and rinse the dishes in the burbling of spring water redirected from the waterfalls further up the mountain. This strand is quiet, sparsely populated, and beloved by Gusu Lan; it is, in all senses, a peach-blossom spring in both its idyllic remove and its isolation.

Lan Xichen ties back his sleeves, and the Twin Jades of Lan set about cleaning up their dinner with hands that have built empires and ended civilizations.

“A letter came for you,” Lan Xichen says to him, handing him a plate.

Lan Wangji freezes. “Did you open it?” he asks, voice sharper than he intends.

Lan Xichen glances at him, though he does not pause in his movements. “Of course not,” Lan Xichen says, voice even and unhurried, but Lan Wangji is still frozen, plate clutched far too tightly in his hands, breath trapped in his throat from the shock of fear that runs electric through him.

The plate shatters.

Lan Xichen leaps away, all fluid grace and survival instinct. “Wangji!”

Once more, Lan Wangji can move again. He stoops swiftly to gather the broken shards of the plate and shuffle them together into a pile. When the largest, sharpest fragments are out of the way, he reaches for Lan Xichen, fingers darting all over his brother’s deep blue robes to check for injuries.

Lan Xichen catches Lan Wangji’s hands in his own. “I’m fine,” he says, pressing his large, warm hands over Lan Wangji’s shaking fingers. “I’m fine, Wangji, what’s wrong? What’s so special about that letter?”

Lan Wangji shakes his head wordlessly, the tremors of after-fear stealing his words. The danger settles in, like a night’s worth of snow—gentle and light at first, he realizes now, but slow and suffocating if left unheeded. How close Lan Wangji came to discovery, how close Lan Xichen came to danger. They could have been exposed, and Lan Wangji would have lost everything he’s ever fought for, would have had his greatest sacrifice rendered meaningless.

They cannot keep going, Lan Wangji realizes. This… flirtation, whatever relationship he has with this ghost, leaving letters for each other across all of the braided strands of time. The risk of discovery is too great, and Lan Wangji has too much to lose.

“It’s okay,” Lan Wangji says finally, voice a rasp. “I’m okay. Just—” He gestures vaguely, knowing that Lan Xichen will see the movement and interpret it appropriately.

The corner of Lan Xichen’s mouth tightens. “I will put in a request to the Grandmaster to extend your leave,” Lan Xichen says, resolute. “You’re working too hard.”

Lan Wangji blinks. That’s not exactly true, but neither is it untrue. He is one of the Jades of Gusu Lan, precious stone hardened under heat and pressure, carved through careful honing and craftsmanship. He was trained to be, no, made to be superior to other agents.

But then again, he was never made to work alone, and he catches his brother’s wrists as Lan Xichen pulls away from him.

Lan Xichen goes very still, then softens, pulling Lan Wangji into an embrace. “We’re safe,” he murmurs into his brother’s hair. “I’m safe. I’m alive, we’re alive.”

Lan Wangji fists his hands in his brother’s robes and just breathes.

Later, Lan Wangji opens the handsome wooden box in the seclusion of his room, dressed for the half-sleep, half-meditative trance that qualifies as rest for weapons like him. If there is something intimate in reading a letter from an enemy agent while stripped down to the softest parts of himself, he does not let himself dwell on it.

He scans the letter swiftly, almost perfunctorily—the speed is critical, because the ink is a unique blend of oil and obsidian, one that glitters and curls into flame mere heartbeats after he’s unrolled the scroll. He begins, holding paper; he finishes with a handful of ash.

Lan Wangji scoops the ashes back into their container and sets it on a shelf. Tomorrow, he will scatter them in his brother’s garden, to be mulched and digested by the hunger of growing roots. But for now, he reaches for a brush, grinds some ink, and sets anonymous pen to untraceable paper.

-----------

My dear Lan,

I thought we had progressed past the stage where we try to kill each other, but I have been puzzling over the riddles of your name and can construe only murderous intent from ‘a cliff’s edge without the strength of stone.’ It would take more than a fall to kill me, but I don’t particularly relish the prospect, so I will have to hunt for answers elsewhere.

(Have asked every egret I’ve run into, to no avail. Gulls are horrible, horrible creatures, and extort me wildly for crumbs of my lunches before cawing rudely and flying away.)

But you, as always, have the better of me when it comes to etiquette and propriety—I should have introduced myself first. You may call me ‘baby,’ or ‘babe’ for short, if you’d like.

Oh, what I wouldn’t give to see the expression on your face as you read that. I’m sure it must have been a delightful shift in microexpressions. Alas, I am a professional, and long gone from this strand by now.

Your concern for my well-being is very sweet, even if the answers you seek do tread dangerously close to operational secrets. You can rest easy—I will be safe, and I know this because I am Yunmeng’s best. I know I’ve said that before, but this time I do mean it in earnest, more than mere boasting—there is something about me that makes it easier for me to bounce back from embedments. I don’t know what it is, but I suspect it might have something to do with my early years. None of us who dance the strands are particularly normal, but I am stranger than most.

This life ended young, nameless, agonized, but sometimes that is what the broad strokes of history demand—the delivery of crucial information, or misinformation, forced from the mouths of the unwilling. I will spare you the details—I sampled no local delicacies of note in my time in that strand, either, so I am afraid I have only empty words to offer in this letter.

Your brother was a most pleasant host, and offered me some of his cooking for the road. I managed to fend off most of it, but I did concede and eventually tried one of his huajuan, out of curiosity. It is indeed the kind of subtle flavor that could inspire a fealty of centuries, though I would likely defect for a good chili pepper paste. In the end, we are both creatures of our own tastes, I suppose.

And if I may be so presumptuous—you should visit him more often. I know what it’s like to not be able to see the ones you love, and I get the sense that he misses company.

Yours,

Ghost

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After the short, one-sentence command has gone up in flames in his face, Wei Wuxian does not hear from his Lan correspondent for years.

He had stepped from the strand into the silence of a desert night, catching the drifting paper on instinct rather than intent. There was little time for him to do more than widen his eyes before the paper flared bright in its own self-immolation.

For a moment, Wei Wuxian had just stood there, trying to untangle the unexpected wellspring of emotions within him. The feelings absorbed him fully, as if they’d sprung from every muscle in his body simultaneously. It felt like disbelief, the shock of free fall from a cliff’s edge that lay closer than expected.

Half a year later, it occurs to him that this may be grief.

Wei Wuxian does not mourn often—someone once told him that he has a face meant for smiling, though he cannot remember who, and whether he should mourn for that forgotten voice. He is an agent of Yunmeng Jiang, quite possibly the best. He does not have the time for petty things like regret. But as he carries out sacrifice and sabotage, changes the outcomes of marital consummations and military campaigns, dances elegantly through strand-space while weaving the future that his commanding officers decree, he sometimes pauses when he hears a melody on the wind, the cry of a hooded hawk in the distance, and feels the vast emptiness within and around him echo with his solitude.

He takes to leaving apologies wherever he goes: sweeping sand-patterns brushed over the tips of dunes, visible only from satellite in eras too far upstrand to have orbital technology; with the edge of a dagger, carved into a graffitied pole, to be lost amidst crowds of scribbles and scratches. He visits some old thunderheads, combs cloud-swirls into the patterns needed for omens, weaves cumulus with a collection of caged sparks to dispatch on dark and stormy nights.

The rain, though, he keeps for himself, kisses his regret into the droplets, sends them to drum morosely against palace rooftops and thatched huts alike.

He receives no reply, and does not let himself hope for one either.

Though their correspondence has ended in no uncertain terms, Wei Wuxian cannot stop writing letters. He composes them at the same time as the intelligence briefs he is to disseminate among a court of devious ministers. He reworks paragraphs while watching the Sima clan tear itself to pieces, burning arrows falling from the sky. He kneads letters into dough, stretching the lines between his hands like the elastic lamian he sells. He lies in a mass grave beneath a pyre of scrolls, and whispers phrases into the dirt with fading exhalations.

After that particular horrorshow, he is embedded in a nice, quiet life in a monastery, copying sutras and intertextual commentary, scrupulously inserting the clerical errors that will generate centuries of disagreement in the next dynasty. His eyes burn and blur, hand spasming painfully from hours of careful brushwork. He must be careful, lest he let lines of his own slip from his grip into the footprints of history.

He does not stop writing letters.

-----------

Do not write again.

-----------

“Thank you,” the monk says, which Lan Wangji expected. “I’ve been waiting for you,” the monk adds, which Lan Wangji did not expect.

The two of them have made it a safe distance away from the robbers, losing them among the scattered rock formations that punctuate the dry, scrubby desert this far out west. Lan Wangji’s sword gleams in the sunlight, touched only by dust—he wipes it against the white of his robes, and sheathes it before the glare from the metal attracts attention.

Lan Wangji pats his horse’s neck, and she blusters at him, delicate gray nostrils flaring as she pants in the heat, flanks heaving from the run. “You shouldn’t travel alone, fashi,” Lan Wangji says. “The lands out here are not like the ones bound within the borders of Great Tang.”

The monk slants him an amused glance, and Lan Wangji is reminded that, no matter the lingering cultural importance of the stories spun about this monk, the man was neither as innocent nor as naïve as the stories painted him to be. Those eyes belonged to a keen scholar, one whose texts and commentaries would be studied for centuries; the set of his jaw betrayed a steely determination, which had led him to defy imperial edict and sweet-talk his way out of the gates of Yumen Pass.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” the monk says again. “The other one said you’d come.”

Lan Wangji does not flinch as he uncaps his waterskin, pouring out just a little into a shallow pan for his horse to snuffle and drink. When her tongue scrapes metal with no reward, she lifts her head and nudges Lan Wangji in the stomach, eyes reproachful. He pushes her head away, gently. It would not do to overwater her so soon after exertion, no matter how huffily she stomps her hooves.

“What other one?” he asks, voice even.

“Another wandering xiake,” the monk says, rummaging in his jiasha. “We shared the road for a week through the Tianshan Ranges, and he said much the same as you.”

Lan Wangji tilts his head in question.

“‘You shouldn’t travel alone, fashi,’” the monk repeats back at him, that unreadable smile still hovering at the corner of his mouth. “But I do not travel alone now, do I?” The monk holds out something in his hand for Lan Wangji to take.

It is a scroll of fine, durable paper, wrapped tightly around a burnished rod of light paulownia wood. Lan Wangji’s eyes are drawn to the pale blue ribbon tied around it, the seal of red wax.

Lan Wangji had heard the rain, listened to the whisper of sands. Once, he had stood in the courtyard of a high mountain temple and watched a thunderstorm advance across the floodplains below, lightning striking in irregular bursts.

Despite his resolve, he still looks for letters in unlooked-for places. Now a monk holds one out to him in a sun-browned hand, moments after they’d escaped from a roving band of robbers in the middle of the desert, and Lan Wangji wants to—

Lan Wangji wants to take it.

His eyes return to the blue ribbon binding the scroll in a tight coil; it is a subtle color, and Lan Wangji does not doubt that, under the right moonlight, the ribbon would glow Gusu-blue.

“No,” Lan Wangji says, coming back to himself. “You are right. You do not travel alone.”

He whispers into his horse’s ear, and she flicks it at him in acknowledgment and annoyance. This time, it is the monk’s turn to blink in surprise as Lan Wangji hands him the reins.

“This is too generous,” the monk protests. “I cannot possibly—”

Lan Wangji takes the letter and presses the reins into the monk’s hands. “This one humbly begs that you accept his payment,” he says, folding his hands around the scroll and bowing. “And though this one’s feet must take him down a different path, this one offers a paltry gift to speed fashi’s journey.”

Long after Lan Wangji and the monk finish their courtesies, long after the dissatisfied bandits scuff over any tracks in the sand, the seeker steps through the shadows of lengthening twilight, following the memory of hoofsteps and a mysterious, white-robed traveler.

The seeker comes to the base of the cliff where two travelers had sought shelter and kneels in the dust. He begins sifting through every grain of sand.

-----------

To—well—the one who listens,

You said not to write, and I promise, I promise to respect your wishes, but it felt wrong to leave our correspondence like that because I owe you an apology. Well, I owe you more than an apology, but it is what I should begin with:

I’m sorry. I overstepped. I was so caught up in the delight of our private duet, this little scavenger hunt across centuries and dynasties, that I quite forgot we were more than friendly rivals, that we are still enemies on opposing sides. And so I miscalculated, and you had every right to respond the way you did. I understand. I know what it’s like, to love someone so dearly that sometimes you can barely breathe from the need to keep them safe.

Perhaps, now, a confession: I misled you in an earlier letter by letting you think embedments were but a mere chore for me. That I have an uncanny ability to endure them is no lie. But there is no glory in taking on some of the most dangerous tasks an agent can be assigned. Not for me.

They are my punishment.

The details are unnecessary: suffice to say that, because of my carelessness, someone that I care deeply for was hurt. She was the best of us—taught me everything I knew, really—and I all but destroyed her with my own arrogance.

What I’m trying to say is that I think I understand. Protectiveness is love given a sword, and shield, and the power to act, and I know what it’s like to bear a love so fierce it threatens to suffocate.

I am not trying to excuse my actions. I give this to you freely as a demonstration of my earnestness, along with this letter. It won’t catch on fire or dissolve into dust on the desert wind; the ink is normal ink, and it will fade as slowly as the ink on any other letter written in this century. You may do with this letter as you wish—burn it, bury it, tear it to shreds and let it dance with the sandstorms. Keep it, preserve it, let its worm-gnawed words mystify scholars in future civilizations. Or leave it intact in a time where Yunmeng’s agents will find it, if you prefer the threat of me unmade. There is enough here to incriminate me and set the seal on my execution, if that is what you wish. I wouldn’t hold it against you.

Is it pure folly of me, to hand a knife tailored for my own death to an enemy agent? Likely. But the number of unsent letters I’ve burned since I wrote you last could have fed a wolf-pyre beacon and warned a state of invasion, and I felt I owed you something.

Thank you for the letters you have given me. And for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.

Sincerely,

Ghost

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Wei Wuxian is squatting by a firepit, rolling the bronze divination rod in his palms when it happens. By his feet, the pile of soft-turtle shells, smooth and bone-pale and goreless, are ridden with hairline heat-cracks that guide the decisions of history, reshape the formlessness of tomorrows.

He presses the heated end of the divination road to the last turtle shell, hearing the hiss and the break of keratin under heat. He stares down at the question carved into the shell, the answer splitting the surface in fractal patterns.

“Well?” his general asks, impatient. “What do the signs say?”

Wei Wuxian’s eyes race across the words that manifest in the shell, characters completed by the lightning-strike severance of divinatory heat. “Auspicious,” he manages to choke out, while words press against the back of his throat, threatening to overwhelm him. “Very auspicious.”

His general huffs, then commands his subordinates to clean up the place. Wei Wuxian reads the letter again, committing it to memory, then joins the attendants in sweeping up the fragments of coal and bone, hurling the shell into a pit with the rest of the divinations. The bones will be dug up millennia later in caches so bountiful that they are archaeologically worthless. Wei Wuxian works swiftly, efficiently, and none of the others notice the odd fluidity of his movements, the distance in his eyes as he teases apart the lines of a letter concealed in bone.

After the campaign departs in a mist-heavy morning, the seeker paws through the refuse pit of discarded shells. When he finds one filled with familiar handwriting, he ponders the shape and heft of it for a moment. Eventually, the letter vanishes into an impossible sleeve, and the seeker leaves, unnoticed, undetected.

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Ghost—

Let me tell you a story.

When we were young, we thought ourselves fearless, because the Symphony raised us to be so. We were elegant, deadly, genius, unstoppable—we were the ocean storm making landfall, the fissure of earth during volcanic eruption, the silent lash of star-stuff before a supernova. We were forces of nature first, agents second, and individuals a distant third—we feared nothing, not even death, because what was death in the face of knowing that our lifetimes were only infinitesimal flares against the movements that straddled all of time and space?

You will notice that I speak in the mono-we. Perhaps you have heard of the Twin Jades of Lan.

You may recall that the time war was once a battle fought on many fronts, not just Yunmeng against Gusu, the vast currents of your river against the orchestrations of our symphony; this was once a war waged against the double-headed firebird, the snarling taotie, the elegant peony blooming amidst snow. You may recall, not long ago, the future of Lanling Jin seared and melted into a sterile, charred dead end. You will not know the details, because the truth of the matter is known to fewer people than the average unenhanced human can count on their fingers.

It was, by all calculations, an undisputed victory for Gusu Lan—the defeat of a rival timeline for the small, small price of a single agent. We have lost more, fought more costly battles, for lesser victories.

They embedded my brother, and when the wick of that strand caught aflame, I waited for him, just outside in strand-space. He did not emerge.

I know—you are frowning, brows knitting together in that way you have when complications arise in your plans. You met my brother that time you asked him to deliver a letter, but how could you, if he was trapped in a burning timeline, a world collapsing around him?

I defied direct orders and went back to extract him. The Grandmaster forbade me from intervening, but I held a sword, and shield, and when I watched a world ignite with my brother still inside, I found that I had the power to act.

I think you understand.

I was punished for it, afterwards—a near-impossible feat pales in comparison to such a flagrant display of disloyalty—but I have asked my heart, and I find no regret there. We do not dance the strands of time together any longer, the echo to each other’s song, the shadow to each other’s motion, but he lives—happily retired, as you’ve observed—and I visit him. That is enough.

You were right. It was supremely foolish of you to give me that letter. The ease with which I could have removed you as a threat to Gusu is as breathtaking as the possibility that I could have come home to find my brother’s entrails painted across the walls of his home. I find that I do not savor either outcome.

(I’ve concealed your letter somewhere safe, where neither Gusu nor Yunmeng should stumble across it. Do not ask me where. I tell you so that, if you have been holding your breath ever since you sent that ill-advised letter, you may breathe easy. I will not use it against you without provocation, but if provoked, I will march into Yunmeng’s headquarters with it in hand.)

And so, what now? What becomes of the two of us, swords at each other’s throats, mutual destruction assured by our own doing? What happens when two adversaries hold victory over the other in their hands, and turn away from it?

Perhaps you can tell me in your next letter.

Sincerely,

The Second Jade of Lan

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Lan Wangji walks briskly through the empty halls of the minor palace, his dark robes fluttering with the speed of his passing. The mask settles over his face, heavy and reassuring, and a few servants blanch and scurry away into shadows in deference to his position.

He is the last giftbearer of the Song emperor, the masked face of an executioner who never stains his hand with blood.

In the chambers he had just left, the body of a poet-king is rapidly cooling, the finely-engraved pitcher of poisoned wine still half-full. Lan Wangji will go back for it soon, to pour its contents over the unmarked grave of a dynasty, but for now he lets himself into a darkened storeroom in a side courtyard, the last, life-taking poem of a man who was never meant to rule folded in his hand.

Inside, he searches the shelves and scrolls until he finds both of the items he seeks: the first, a twine-tied bundle of loose-leaf paper, crackling and delicate with ink. To this sheaf he adds the poem in his hand before tucking the bundle securely into his sleeves.

The second item hides in plain sight: a lovely letter-box, carved with the graceful swirls of willow leaves trailing in running water. It falls open easily at a touch, and Lan Wangji examines the silk scroll hidden within. A fond letter, from a former lover to a distant friend—nothing of particular note.

He fits the two halves back together, and closes his eyes, fingers questing over the surface of the puzzle box, gently probing at the intricacy of the leaves, the detail-work of the rippling water.

He finds two leaves that need to be gently rotated and presses on the bend in the river with his thumb. When he takes a deep breath and hums dalü, the pitch-standard for the third month of winter, the puzzle box falls open, revealing its secret.

There is dirt, and roots, and the delicate sprig of a young plant, too newborn and tender to tell its species. A tiny slip of paper curls next to the plant, and Lan Wangji flattens it with careful fingers to read it:

WATER WITH WINE.

Lan Wangji reassembles the puzzle box, composes his excuses for detouring by his brother’s place before debrief, and departs. He will plant this letter in the ashes of another, and read the letter in the unfurling of the petals.

Once Lan Wangji has left, the seeker steps out from an adjoining hallway, gazing into the storeroom. He ghosts through the shelves, touching unbound scraps of poetry, neatening stacks of scrolls as he passes.

He sits among the shelves in the darkness for a long time, breathing in the stillness of disbelief that follows in the wake of death.

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To the esteemed Lan er-gongzi,

You wrote back. I wasn’t sure you were going to, but you did, and in both word and action, you continue to surprise me. First, your inventiveness at the thirty-first watershed in strand 268; then, your brilliant savagery at Chuhan-337. We all think that you Lans are so pure and unstained by the petty affairs of the mortal world, but that’s not true at all, is it? I have seen you covered in blood like anyone else, and it makes you as dangerous and untouchable as ever.

And your letters, too—in the beginning, I confess that I thought you cold, unfeeling, that superhuman archetype of a Lan. Imagine the twin creatures of my surprise and delight in hearing your thoughts, your genuine responses.

(Thank you. For not turning me in. I find myself rather fond of living, still.)

As for the collected poems you are retrieving, I took the liberty of collating them for you as I left this letter. Li Yu was a fascinating figure, and his poetry strums a particular heart-chord, like two guqin strings echoing each other on opposite sides of the room—‘in dreams, I forget this body is a guest.’ How could he, mortal groundling that he was, still speak to the wordless, nameless parts of my heart so well?

Ah, but he knows—he knows what it is like to lose a home. And of course, thoughts of home had me thinking of your words again—‘a place, a space, a song, a symphony.’ You have such a beautiful relationship with your home, and I can tell that you love it very much. I think it would be nice to know a place like that.

Yunmeng Jiang is my home, don’t get me wrong, but it is more so for the people in it than the place it represents. I would die for my shidi and shijie in a heartbeat, and at the same time, I am fundamentally disconnected from the place. I lack that easy confidence that comes from being born somewhere you can point to on a map, that sense of ownership and entitlement and protectiveness.

I am a foundling, you see—if I were to call any place my true birthright, my oldest hometown, it would be the Burial Mounds.

They tell me I was found just outside its borders; I imagine another agent coming back from Spring-Autumn and tripping over my body. What a windfall: another soul, a costless being, already unmoored from time. I became the best of all of them, which I think Madam never forgave me for—that I could be an outsider and still dance the threads of time as well as I do.

I don’t remember anything of the time before. No more than faint memories and hazy recollections at best. I like to think of it as one hell of an origin story, though. A little private vanity for myself. I don’t think it’s an operational secret, but I suspect that my ability to shrug off embedments is related to this. We carry little between assignments beyond mission parameters and that substanceless kernel of identity; I’ve never had trouble finding my way back to myself after the termination of an embedment. True north has always been easy to locate; just follow it home to the source of all decay and void.

What is it about letters that makes us want to entrust secrets to their pages? I have never carved a hole in a tree to whisper my confessions into (it seems such a waste, and wholly unprovoked by the tree), and yet give me brush and paper, knife and stone (or in this case, petal and perfume), and I’ll press the untold story of myself between flower and stalk, bloom and wither. Secrets want to be told, I think—it makes the carrying of them easier.

Send my regards to your brother, in whatever form you deem appropriate. I saw the smoke rising from Lanling Jin back in the day, and admired the work.

Sincerely,

Ghost

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Wei Wuxian stands, silhouetted against the sunrise, above a city about to fall.

Arrayed on the floodplain before him is the artful scatter of war tents, blooming like canola flowers on the grasslands. Their banners lie quiescent in the stillness of the dawn, before the winds pick up to fan the flames that will be lit later in the day. The ashes will be carried a hundred miles to the west, where they will snow gently upon the surface of a lake too tear-filled to sustain any life, salt rinds crusted and crackling upon its sandy shores.

In the future, they will say that this city fell because of a woman. In myths and idioms and fables, they will say that the king squandered his beacons of aid, foolishly, for the chance to see her smile.

The red dust tumbles, entranced we are by love, the prophets say. The days of our reunion and separation are preordained.

The truth is, the fall of this city has nothing to do with Bao Si and everything to do with Wei Wuxian.

Far below his feet, the blood of a man blooms, fractal-flowering, at the foot of the wall. Foolish, really, to fortify the ramparts with railings and crenellations yet leave the sheer length of stairs unguarded. An unexpected spill of water on the last step, frozen over in the chill of the autumnal night, compounded with the exhaustion of the strategist himself, the siege exacting its toll on both mind and body…

A small tragedy, a mere prelude compared to what this city will face today. The fall of states and rise of kingdoms have always been thus.

All things considered, Wei Wuxian’s presence is more insurance than anything, but he lingers, watching the sunrise seep over the horizon, lazy tendrils of smoke drifting into the sky as morning cookfires are lit. It has been a while since the last letter, but he is patient. He has faith that it will find him.

He hears the high whistling shriek before he sees the arrow streaking straight at him. He sidesteps neatly out of the way and catches the arrow midflight. When he darts to the edge of the wall, peering over the crenellations, the archer is nowhere in sight.

Everything about this arrow is impossible—no bow existed that could launch it from the distance of the enemy camp to the top of the city walls, and even if it had, no mortal man or woman could have drawn it. The wood of the arrow is smooth and dark and not native to this continent. Likewise, the arrowhead is far too sharp for this century, the fine white-feathered fletching plucked from some rare bird not seen for at least ten reigns.

Wei Wuxian reads the instructions buried in microscopic grooves whittled along the length of the arrow shaft, pricks a finger with the tip and smears the blood over the white feathers. Blood beads on his finger and drips, unnoticed, to the stone below as he reads the letter that unfolds in the slow spread of red on white. When he is done, he snaps the arrow in half and places it in the smoldering coals of last night’s brazier, leaving the ramparts without a backwards glance.

Moments later, the seeker’s breaths puff white as he crests the top of the stairs. He drops to his knees, examining the spots of blood, then scrapes them off the stone with a fine scalpel. Once done, he straightens up and looks at the brazier.

The seeker reaches into the coals, and lets the flames burn his hands.

-----------

Ghost—

Your question about the nature of letters, and secrets, had me thinking for a long while about the purposes of form and the blurring of boundaries. Compare a letter to, say, a poem: both may write of the edge of moonlight against the lip of a well, or about one’s dinner of cold noodles the previous night, but what sets the letter apart from the poem (beyond its form, naturally) is its intended audience of one. A poem may speak to a party of dinner guests, an imperial court, a panel of judges, generations of those who come after. In letters, there is an unparalleled intimacy in knowing that these words are meant for one person and one person alone, no matter how distant, regardless of how unreachable.

But to think: I first wrote you poems. Were those not letters as well? I certainly intended them for no other audience.

Letters, one thinks (one hopes) are confidential, and so they have permission to be unformed, imperfect, immediate (there is a kind of time travel in letters too, isn’t there?). The act of letter-writing necessitates that I entrust the footprints of my thoughts to my correspondent, and in the face of that depth of vulnerability, what are a few more secrets to line the page?

You mentioned secrets and the bearing of them, the way sharing them seems to distribute the weight across backs; indeed, now the knowledge that this correspondence is no longer the secret kept separately by you and me, but our secret, carried together, brings a strange kind of relief. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, it is a relief to know that I have someone else to check my work and eliminate the evidence. But the sharing of secrets, which would otherwise be whispered to long-suffering trees…well.

Gusu Lan is called the Symphony for good reason—music forms our way of life, gives substance to the very structure of society, sings each one of us into being as part of its grand orchestration. Music is reality, is function, is power.

And I am cut off from it.

I can hear it, still—see the vast, sweeping movements as Gusu conducts the counterharmonies of temporal parameters towards our coda—but I am forbidden to contribute. The last time I touched fingers to string, played music fit to halt an apocalypse in its tracks, was when I waited for my brother outside a world on fire.

Thirty-three strokes, carved into my back. They follow me, body to body, form to form—they are scars, tattoos, curious patterns of feathers and mottled scales. I knew that there would be consequences to defying the Symphony, but it still hurts. I am less of myself, with my music locked away. All of my brilliance, all of those moments you found so rapturous—a pale shadow, a paltry fragment of the way I used to make time and space tremble before me.

Why do I tell you this? Perhaps it is like what you mentioned—a little private vanity, the desire for you to know how much more there is to me beyond my words and my actions. Perhaps it is like you said—secrets want to be told, and letters are meant only for the eyes of one other.

And so—here. A secret. Is it odd that I feel like this letter should breathe? Secrets seem to me to be pregnant with the silence of held breath, the moment in abeyance, the second before discovery.

Regards,

A Lan, in flight

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Lan Wangji steps off the colony ship and breathes in deeply, tasting the rich, damp-earth smell of the newly-discovered exoplanet.

He has inserted himself among the refugees aboard this colony ship with a forged background in bioengineering and a history of political disobedience. Along their voyage, he has gently guided the ship of refugees to a lush, hospitable exoplanet, hidden from most casual sensor sweeps by a particular accident of solar wind confluence. The community that will eventually come to thrive on this planet will be renowned for their generosity and musical genius, which Gusu hopes to benefit from farther downthread—thus, Lan Wangji’s presence.

This community will only thrive, however, if they can survive the deadly native viruses.

When Lan Wangji breathes in deeply, he gathers samples, drawing them into the core of his being. The implants beneath his skin whir to life, investigating the preternatural ability of this virus as it seeks to unwind the twists of his genetic information. Lan Wangji himself has no expertise in viral engineering, but he does not need to—he has the entire future at his disposal.

When the colonists begin falling sick and dying, Lan Wangji will work day and night to develop a solution. And he will succeed—preserving the lives of all the other settlers—but succumb himself, the disease’s last victim. It will all be very melodramatic, but someone had once told Lan Wangji that origin myths needed to be larger than life, flavored with just enough tragedy to sway hearts and inspire song.

Lan Wangji passes the rest of the landing party, walking into the forest. The trees here are towering things that will become highly prized in a few centuries for the rich, melodic quality of their wood. Lan Wangji’s own guqin will be made from one of the trees in this forest, long after this planet has perished in the distant future. He feels a pang, thinking about the years stretching long between the last time he had felt its strings beneath his hands.

The scars on his back burn.

He makes a show of examining the foliage, though he knows little about it. This exoplanet is uninhabited, untouched; they are the first sentient life to set foot on it.

Which is why the grove of peach trees, planted in neat, orderly rows, shocks him to stillness midstep.

It is something out of a painting, or a storybook, or a legend. It is impossible, beautiful, enchanting—an exquisitely cultivated paradise out of a Tao Qian story.

It is such an extravagant gesture that Lan Wangji cannot help shaking his head, letting a small smile surface on his lips. The grove of peach trees speaks to an unimaginable amount of time spent cultivating the trees, first to flower, then to fruit.

Lan Wangji passes beneath the canopy of leaves, searching. He runs his hand across trunks, leans in to smell the fruit—ripe to bursting, ready to fall—and nearly steps on the letter when he finds it. He leans down, picking up the half-eaten peach, and keeps the blush threatening to creep up his ears exclusively internal.

The peach is as sweet as the stories promise.

That night, when the colonists are all asleep around the smoldering remains of their campfires, the deep, restful sleep only possible after a long flight to a safe haven, the seeker slips through the patterned shadows of the peach grove. He finds the pit of a peach, picked utterly clean, and grinds it into powder. The seeker sprinkles it across water, a poor man’s tea, and lets the gravel of it rub his throat raw.

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My spacefaring Lan,

‘During the reign of Taiyuan in the Jin Dynasty, a man of Wuling followed a creek until he forgot the distance to the road. Suddenly, he came upon a grove of peach blossom trees, flanked on either side by riverbanks a hundred paces tall. Fragrant grasses grew fresh and beautiful, fallen flowers a riot of color. At the end of the grove, there was a spring—beyond the spring, a mountain.’

Have you thrown away this letter in disgust yet? I hope you haven’t; I spent half a lifetime in the twenty-fifth century of strand 612 researching different species of peach trees to find the sweetest kind, and then the rest of that lifetime figuring out how to cultivate a letter into the taste of a peach. All to make one of the most overdone references in the tradition, but imagining your face as you step into a peach blossom spring on an uninhabited planet was worth it. I offer you an entire orchard of trees for you to whisper secrets to while you do whatever work you are assigned to here—aren’t I considerate, Lan er-ge?

I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit puzzling over Tao Qian’s utopia—what is it about his Peach Blossom Spring that called to scholars, made the literary tradition decide the name ought to be synonymous with paradise? There is the pastoral, idyllic quality of the place, of course—the fields are fertile, the people generous, the homes hospitable, yes. But I should think it is the distance of it all, the intoxicating dream of a place untouched by war, or change, or even the passage of time. Not just ‘Peach Blossom Spring,’ but specifically the hiddenness of it, the ‘world outside-worlds.’

Well, here you are, my dear Lan—in a peach blossom spring, in a world beyond worlds. You will have to let me know how living in utopia treats you, and if it’s as wonderful as all the stories make it out to be.

Thank you for your thoughts about poems, and letters. I wish I had more insight to add, but you seem to have laid claim to most of them. Tao Qian’s poems did always feel rather performative to me: ‘I have tilled, I have planted / from time to time, I read my books’—as if life could be that easy for the rest of us! Tending this grove alone took me years between assignments, and I certainly had no time to lie in the grass with a copy of King Zhou’s Tales.

Though perhaps when he wrote: ‘gazing up, I reach the vast universe / if this is not joy, what is it?’ there might have been something to his words. When I finished my work here, I lay on my back and watched the clouds between the branches.

Sincerely,

Ghost

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Wei Wuxian dips his fingers absently in the clear spring, waters burbling cold and crystal from the fissure in the rocks. The rivulet runs downhill, where it will join other streams underground and course through a cavern network, all limestone and darkness and ageless frost, before it emerges to leap through waterfalls and eventually run down to the sea.

It was, Wei Wuxian muses, like the prophets said—I look down at the mountain streams, chasing the passing years and months. He lets the slightest smile pull at the corner of his mouth.

The mission, this time, is simple—an unspeakable amount of time in the past, Yunmeng Jiang had seeded the earth here with a carefully distilled destructive force, formed from the darkness of teethed riverbeds and the nightmares that haunted restless waters, decanted through earth and spring to send a steady stream of corruption into the cavern network. There, in the lightless caves, a nameless horror will form for the sole purpose of eradicating some faceless future threat to their timeline. A formless monster will spring from the waters and make short, bloody work of its victim before subsiding, dissolving, ceasing to exist upon the completion of its task. Wei Wuxian has been monitoring its progress for days, and is looking forward to its completion.

He hears footsteps on the mountain below, and sits up, blowing leaves out of his face. When he sees who is walking up the path, time stops, despite the fact that Wei Wuxian did not expressly command it to do so.

Climbing towards the mouth of the cavern, is a young man—no more than sixteen, from the way youth still resides in the smoothness of his face. He walks up the path into the mountain, shoulders an elegant line beneath snowy robes, one hand tucked neatly behind his back.

There is nothing about his features that suggests his identity, though that kind of preternatural beauty would have immortalized him in the Songs of Chu; there is nothing about his robes that tells Wei Wuxian which city he hails from, which altars he kneels at, what gods he prays to, what king he swears fealty to.

And yet, Wei Wuxian knows. This is no groundling.

This is a Lan.

His Lan.

In the swirls of foam-white fur, the words: All Gusu agents go through a trial, to test them for potential weaknesses and points of corruption.

He thinks about the monstrosity he has been watching over, the way it flows between ice and rock, malevolent and murderous, its only purpose to destroy.

Beneath the ribs of a fish: Formless monsters that fed on doubt, became blood-crazed at the scent of disloyalty, swam beneath the ice and never once disturbed my meditation.

Wei Wuxian acts.

He shifts form, diving into the water and following the darkness to where it pools. It draws a throttling strength from the bitter chill of the water, and Wei Wuxian is keenly aware of how little time he has, how foolish of a decision this is, but in the moment, it does not feel like a choice he has made—only the inexorable pull of gravity to the polestar of his life.

The fight is vicious, brutal, and utterly silent. The darkness is confused—it has the scent of its prey, and Wei Wuxian is not it. Wei Wuxian presses his advantage savagely, letting all of his sharp edges unfurl from beneath his skin and scissor into the shapeless mass. The darkness fights back, lashing out and scoring hits across Wei Wuxian’s skin. Blood and shadow leak into the water.

When it is over, Wei Wuxian lets himself float in the water for a few moments, drifting. There is no air left in his lungs, but he does not drown like ordinary men. His brow furrows slightly in concentration before his fingers twitch, twisting through the muddied and polluted eddies of the freezing spring.

Slowly, the water begins flowing backwards.

When Wei Wuxian finally drags himself out of the water and onto the stone, the water is clear again. He fights to stay quiet; his nerves are so raw and exposed from the adrenaline of the fight that he can almost taste his correspondent in the next cavern over. There, his Lan will be settling into the trancelike meditation that will prove both his loyalty and prowess to Gusu Lan, shift the path of his future towards agency and change and collision with Wei Wuxian himself.

And Wei Wuxian lies on the cold, unforgiving rock, swallowing back any sound of pain, his soft pants drowning in the murmur of spring-fresh water flowing by. His wounds brim with a teeming shadow, the shreds of waterborne abyss absorbed back into the thin vessel of this body and barely contained. When Wei Wuxian thinks his Lan is deep enough in meditation, he lets all of his deadliness and lethality fold back under his skin until he is something like human again, deep gashes tearing through muscle straight down to bone. He levers himself off the ground and begins to slowly, laboriously limp his way out of the cavern network the long way.

Wei Wuxian spends the time weaving together his excuses—the waterborne abyss had failed, fouled by enemy interference upthread, no doubt. It had turned on him, its handler, rather than its target, and the ensuing fight had left him in a condition quite unable to fulfill its original purpose. It was a shame that Yunmeng Jiang’s work had gone to waste, but this happened, sometimes. The price of waging a time war with the very future at stake.

When Wei Wuxian finally emerges from the cavern network into a small pool, sheltered by a copse of trees, he blinks rapidly. He can’t have seen that right. Wei Wuxian takes a moment to recalibrate his sensors for the watery moonlight that sears like incandescence after the unending night of the caverns.

No, he sees correctly—a letter, an honest-to-god letter, tucked into the roots of a tree squarely in view of the exit from the cave. It glows slightly with wax and luminescence, warded against the elements. There is no name, no indication of its intended recipient, but Wei Wuxian wades across the shallow pool, tears it open without hesitation, still soaking wet and chilled to his alloy skeleton.

He laughs, then goes silent, then laughs again. He reads, rereads, and rereads the letter. The blood dries on the jagged ridges of his flesh, shadow bubbling in his wounds, and still he clings to the words more desperately and deliriously than the present pain of any reality around him.

Later, the seeker comes splashing through the glacial waters, kicking up flowers of spray in his haste, but Wei Wuxian is long gone.

The seeker stares at the blood, still smeared over the tree roots, for a long time.

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Ghost—

You cannot know this, so I will tell you: I wrote your name, then sat, paralyzed, the ink drying out on my brush, the shadows lengthening across paper windows, for the rest of the afternoon.

How does one begin a letter to the enemy agent who saved his life? How is one to think, to feel, when one realizes that he does not even know his savior’s name?

With the truth, then—I am still a son of Gusu, after all.

My name is Lan Zhan, courtesy name Lan Wangji, and I owe you my life. I do not know what possessed you to protect my younger self at such high cost; nevertheless, I must thank you for it.

Another truth, perhaps obvious, but yet unspoken: I like writing you. On every assignment, in every world, I look for your next letter, anticipating the delight of discovery, the savor of reading. If you sauntered up to my younger self in that cavern and told him that one day, he would scour the annals of history to search for your every word, he would likely have run you through with his sword at the mere suggestion.

Now, I am not so sure. Perhaps I would hand you the sword, and let you hold it at my throat, as all of these letters do. Oh, we burn them to ash, pulverize them to dust, scatter the remains across centuries and continents to erase our tracks, but if either of us still clung to the possibility of weaponizing these letters against each other, we’ve already passed up opportunity after opportunity. How quickly trust breaks through the glacial stillness of our past wariness, leaping gladly over a cliff’s edge. I once watched an avalanche fall from Zhumulangma’s peak—it began with a small chunk of ice, skittering down the frozen expanse. It ended with the mountain sloughing off an entire snowfield, burying the cracks and crags below.

The irreversibility of it. The swiftness of its tipping point.

There is an entire letter of yours to respond to, but I find it difficult, in the face of all you have done for me. What can I offer, except my names, my trust, and the shallowness of my thoughts?

I shall endeavour. I confess that I, too, had little patience for the centuries of scholarly yearning after some transient, liminal Peach Blossom Spring. It has always seemed a foolish dream to me, the desire for an escape into an easier world, a simpler life. That is not how life works, and to seek to slip away from confrontation, to turn one’s head and step around a problem, does not solve it. It goes against something fundamental in my nature.

And then I stepped into a Peach Blossom Spring of my own (look, there—another thing I have to thank you for). In the moments between my work, I, too, plucked chrysanthemums beneath the eastern fence and gazed leisurely on the southern mountains. The air of the mountains at dusk is lovely, and birds take wing together, returning home.

Within this lies true meaning, Tao Qian writes, and for the first time, I am inclined to agree.

We are always in movement, we dancers of strands and weavers of time—we spider our way down into the future, climb our way back into the past, and rarely rest. I had not known what slowing down could be like, and I think that may lie at the heart of a peach blossom dream.

If this is not joy, what is it?

Yours,

Lan Zhan, Lan Wangji

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It is raining, for once, in Chang’an.

Lan Wangji sits out on the balcony of a teahouse under the sheltered overhang; most patrons have deserted the outdoor tables in favor of drier seats inside, which suits Lan Wangji just fine.

Inside, he can hear musicians setting up for the evening—the plaintive whistle of a qiang flute, the occasional twang from a tuning guzheng. They have been singing the poems of Li Bai for the past four nights, but that is only to be expected. This is Chang’an, after all, and the poetry is Li Bai’s.

An attendant steps carefully over the threshold, carrying a fresh pot of tea. Lan Wangji thanks her, politely refusing her offer to bring him more dishes. She throws a questioning look at the grease-stained paper lump on his table, but departs.

Lan Wangji pours himself another cup of tea, and thinks idly of some prophecy as he waits for it to cool—the skies are still the skies, the rain still the rain.

He takes another tentative bite of his roujiamo, and barely stifles a cough from the overwhelming spice. He resists the urge to simply burn the food into tasteless, harmless ash, and dutifully swallows it. He doesn’t know how his ghost can handle the searing flavor, much less enjoy it.

As he reaches for his tea to wash away the taste, he blinks. Lan Wangji pulls the cup closer, sniffs it delicately, then tilts it against his mouth. The fragrance kisses his lips before the warmth of the tea does. He sits there for another hour, swirling the tea with graceful motions of his wrist, savoring the curious taste-aroma of the words hidden in the brew.

He toys with the idea of calling the attendant back, to ask if there have been any unusual visitors lately—perhaps a new face making a delivery—but he decides against it. When Lan Wangji finishes his tea, he lays a few hollow-center coins on the table, the teapot drained to its dregs, the tea leaves disposed of through no explainable means.

The seeker follows after, and licks the inside of the tea set clean.

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Lan Zhan, ah, Lan Zhan—

Oh, the thrill of being able to write your name. A rain-soaked cliff’s edge without the strength of stone, indeed. How, pray tell, was I even supposed to begin guessing at that riddle?

(The Oulu Wangji, I admit, was very clever. That one is on me.)

I suppose it is my turn to introduce myself—I am Wei Ying, Wei Wuxian, a child with no envies, a collector of ghosts—and I am most delighted to make your acquaintance, Lan er-gongzi.

I offer you this tea as a gift—it is a close cousin of the brew I drank almost every day as a Tang minister of state, and it kept me awake through more long afternoons of debate than I can count. It is a blend of pu-er and a few other deep-roasted teas, and while I appreciated the dash of spice I could obtain from the markets thanks to our proximity to the Silk Road, I thought you would rather try it without.

To recover from my injuries, Yunmeng Jiang has placed me in a fairly quiet life, in a thread beloved by our heartstrand—not a formal embedment, more of an extended in-dwelling and thus much more suited to my convalescence. My days are domestic, idyllic, peaceful—I spend much of them fiddling my way through occasional chores (we have servants, so I’m really just getting in the way), draping myself lazily over various daybeds, and being rather atrocious at needlework. I am looking forward to the point in my recovery where I will be able to go wandering in the mountains outside the gates. As such, your musings on what makes a Peach Blossom Spring are timely. Every morning I wake up slowly, and it seems an unfathomable luxury to do so.

My husband is a good man, though distant; he comes from a family wealthy enough to keep us in comfort despite his lack of a civil position, and—bless his heart—still a few more decades to go until he reaches the status of gongshi. Most days, he leaves the manor after breakfast to sit at the crossroads where he offers tea to any travelers who will tell him a story of the strange—ghosts and spirits and the like. A husband could have more wasteful hobbies, of course, so I encourage him.

You’ve figured out who he is by now, haven’t you, my clever Lan? Truth be told, this is a bit of a dream assignment of mine: domestic bliss as the amanuensis of a collector of folktales. It is taking me a great deal of restraint when I transcribe his notes for him—I mustn’t project the version I know (and love, and cherish, and memorized, word-perfect) into this timeline.

I shan’t bore you with the monotony of petty groundling life any longer. Know that despite all the placid, sunlit joys, I count the hours until I can return to the strands, to the point-counterpoint of our cosmic duet.

Yours, in return,

Wei Ying, Wei Wuxian

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Wei Wuxian walks through woods threaded with sunshine, thinking of lines and letters, humming quietly to himself.

It is not often that he is given time to wander at his leisure—they are, after all, still at war, though these days he idles the time away in secluded tranquility. Yunmeng Jiang hadn’t even assigned him research to perform while he was time-bound, moving slowly and linearly downstrand, carried along on the vast currents of history like any other groundling. His days are his own, to spend in unhurried pursuit of poetry or calligraphy or painting or music or anything that can catch his attention for longer than the span of a few days.

He thinks he seems something of an apology in Yunmeng’s gesture, a respite from the relentless assignments. He wonders who he should thank, when he is fully recovered and returned to headquarters.

For now, though, he follows the familiar path from the manor’s back gate, where it winds around the foot of the mountains. The trees here are numerous, deciduous; they turn brilliant firework reds and oranges in autumn, shed thick blankets of leaves for winter. Wei Wuxian knows—he has watched them grow, and turn, and fall for the past twenty years.

He passes a lone peach tree, growing on the side of the path. He can recognize them on sight now, and not for the first time he idly wonders if he should make this peach tree a project, fertilize it and tend to it so that next year it would bear fruit.

Oh, he is growing too idle.

Before long, he reaches the banks of the nearby stream—too wide to be a creek, too shallow to be a river, the water is clear and slow-moving, glinting in the late summer sun. He glances about—the waterside deserted—and pulls off his boots, then socks, and hikes up the skirts of his robes before wading out to the middle of the stream.

He stands there for a while, closing his eyes and letting his senses pool and unspool around him. Sound reaches him in layers, from birdcall to leaf-rustle to the babbling of water and the slow murmur of a distant breeze. The smell of sun-baked rock, the richness of silt and loam. Water swirls about his ankles and calves; if he puts his mind to it, he could tease the stories from each droplet, recount their journeys from freefall to snowmelt to rushing rivers to gentle streams—has done so, in fact, on afternoons past.

Today, however, the waters bring him a gift. Something light tickles his skin, and he opens his eyes to find a brilliant red maple leaf caught in the eddies swirling about his ankles. Before it can be washed away, he reaches down and plucks it out by its stem. It must have washed down from farther up in the mountains, where autumn has come already to the higher slopes. Wei Wuxian lifts it above his face to let the sun shine through its veins, illuminating the words within it.

His robes grow heavy—he had dropped them in his haste to retrieve the leaf—and he knows he’ll get an earful when he returns to the manor in the evening, but for now, he reads the letter and smiles.

Years later, on the night of the third day in the ninth lunar month, the seeker stands on the edge of the stream, watching a path of wounded sun unfold across the water, turning half of the stream emerald green, the other half a glowing red. He watches the colors intensify, then fade as the sky dims. He does not wait for the bow-curve of the moon’s rising.

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Wei Ying—

Recently, I passed through a small mountain village on a floating lantern night. The exact nature of the holiday I couldn’t quite ascertain—you know how it is with these small villages and their own peculiar calendars—but when they discovered that I could write, and write well, they begged me to write their prayers for them on the sky lanterns. I spent the rest of the day sitting in what passed for the central square, villagers coming up to me eagerly, sheepishly, brazenly, shyly to ask, recite, demand, whisper what they wanted written.

This has never happened before. I think it is usually because something in my manner is forbidding to a casual conversationalist, but now that I think back, I may have been smiling when the village head hailed me on the outskirts of the village.

What can I say? I was thinking of your letter, and how to write back.

I wanted to send you a sky lantern with the rest of them—I had grand visions for how it would look, like a flock of stars coming to rest around you—but Yunmeng Jiang’s defenses around your safe haven are quite formidable, and I had to discard that idea in order to confront the more pressing issue of how to get correspondence through to you at all. A letter sewn into the lapel of a winter coat was far too clumsy and imprecise. I thought to ask the south-flying swan geese to bring my words, but I seem to lack a way with the birds.

So you must not laugh at me, for scribing my letter onto a red leaf and setting it adrift on a high mountain stream like some court lady of the rear palace who still harbors romance in her heart. Your guardians are jealous, and I cannot begrudge their concern for your safety, even if it makes getting a letter through to you that much more difficult.

You are missed in the strands, though Yunmeng Jiang hides it well. It seems glaring to me, like hearing the harmony of a song without melodic direction—but I have always been sensitive to your movements, can recognize the sound of your footsteps from centuries away. I miss you, like a phantom limb—your absence unbalances me.

You could never bore me with your daily monotony—tedium, as it turns out, is a guilty pleasure of mine, and I suspect that I’d grow to love anything, so long as it was clothed in your words.

And—I do not mean to alarm you—have you noticed anyone following you? Recently I have begun noticing shadows, lurking behind me, following in my footsteps. They vanish when I turn around, and I am confident that I have left no traces of our correspondence that an outside party could find, but still—I worry.

Yours,

Lan Zhan

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In seventeenth-century Hebei, Lan Wangji opens the gates of Shanhai Pass and lets the Manchu Qing forces pour into the central provinces. Later generations will fabricate a love story of destructive proportions between a general and a courtesan, recite tales of the sky-breaking rage that brings the Ming Dynasty to an ignominious end until it becomes wild history, myth, idiom. For now, Lan Wangji slips away into the shadows, the embers of war flaring in his wake.

In thirty-sixth-century Xukong, an uninhabited star sector with an asteroid field rich in precious minerals and the raw components of starship fuel, Lan Wangji guides a scouting ship towards a fateful discovery that will bring the powerful merchant empires flocking to stake out their claims. After the initial report has been transmitted back via Tianwang, the intergalactic communication system, Lan Wangji departs quietly, leaving behind a minor mystery of how an engine technician managed to disappear from the steel trap of a starship.

A shadow follows him from time to time, war to war, and Lan Wangji begins to feel the glimmerings of unease. He glances over his shoulder more often, triple-checks his tracks, and still catches the fluttering edges of something, like a figure turning a corner beyond his sight.

He visits his brother again, climbs the slope of a secluded mountain, steps over the wooden threshold into the simple courtyard. The cool caress of a mountain breeze gently brushes his cheeks, scented with mist and pine and clouds and bamboo, welcoming him home.

He thinks of home, and homecoming—that easy confidence, that sense of ownership and entitlement and protectiveness. His brother looks at him across a dinner table, a question in the space between the playful glint of his eyes and the dark lines of the eyebrows they share, and Lan Wangji pretends not to notice.

Lan Xichen has his ways, however, as elder siblings through all of time and space do. That night, Lan Wangji, too restless for sleep, climbs onto the rooftop to gaze at the waxing gibbous moon, the light of it turning the nearby clouds pale green.

Moments later, Lan Xichen appears beside him, and Lan Wangji, who has singlehandedly massacred entire armies and toppled great dynasties, absolutely does not jump. Lan Xichen hands him a stone cup, weighty and textured and soothing in its gentle warmth. The two of them sit on the ridge of the roof, taking sips of buckwheat tea while Lan Xichen’s unanswered question grows heavier in the silence between them.

“I think I’m being followed,” Lan Wangji says, finally.

Lan Xichen doesn’t look away from the moon. “Enemy agent?” he says, voice as even and composed as always.

“Perhaps,” Lan Wangji says, letting the implication settle in the expanding silence.

Lan Xichen glances sharply at him. “That is not our way, Wangji, you know that.”

“Mn.” Lan Wangji does—if Gusu were to investigate his actions, he would be notified and recalled, brought in for questioning. It is not the Lan way to dance around the issue and send spies after one of their own.

“Be careful,” Lan Xichen says finally, and that is all either of them say on the matter.

In third-century Shaanxi, Lan Wangji hacks his way through forested mountains, cutting open a new path for Liu Bang’s troops to come tearing out of the mountains after a short-lived exile. In twenty-fifth-century Anjia, he hacks into a corporate database and releases his findings under a pseudonym, laying the foundation for mass plutocratic reform. In eighteenth-century Suzhou, he dances in the private courtyards of the wealthy.

After one of his performances, a patron approaches him with a gift of wine. By reflex, Lan Wangji nearly refuses, but pauses when he sees the label on the white porcelain bottle.

Instead of drinking the wine immediately that night, he tucks it away, relishing the heady mixture of anticipation and satisfaction, the buzzing excitement of an unopened letter, the settling feeling of having it in hand and heart. Over the low murmur of the wind, the rise and fall of cicada-tide, he thinks he hears footsteps on a tile roof.

He does not sleep at all that night, waiting for a shadow in the darkness of his room. His eyes glitter with more than reflected moonlight.

After he is finished with his assignment in Suzhou, he requests a short leave from headquarters and goes searching for his afterimage. The scars on his back burn as he follows a faint trail into a range of mountains so tall that their peaks scrape knifelike against the sky. The wine burns, hidden away in his chest where a blood-pumping organ might reside on a groundling, waiting for him to open it. Lan Wangji will not read his ghost’s latest letter until he is sure that the act of reading it will be safe, and so—he hunts.

For three days and nights, Lan Wangji tracks the shadow across a stark, desolately beautiful no-man’s-land. This high up, the conditions are too harsh, the land too unforgiving for human settlement. He passes herds of shaggy, large-eyed yaks and flighty, long-horned antelope. Thick-furred Himalayan wolves pad beside him, recognizing a fellow hunter in the highlands.

Even those animal companions abandon him, however, when he begins trekking up the side of a nameless peak. The air is too thin to sustain more complex forms of life, and even Lan Wangji feels the pluck of dizziness at the edges of his awareness. Implants beneath his skin whir to life, sustaining him where his body cannot. His nerves wind tighter as he climbs, senses tingling as he strains to hear sounds beneath the soughing wind, to spot movements beyond the skitter of snow crystals over stone.

He scales a cliff face with his bare hands, taking a moment to line his palms and fingertips with alloy to better grasp the flakes of rock and rimed crags that serve as his handholds. When he heaves himself over the lip at the top, he turns and surveys the landscape below, all jagged mountain spines and the distant green of the high-altitude basin he’d traversed days earlier.

It occurs to him that all of this—this lonely pilgrimage, this seeker’s trail—may be a trap.

A hand lands lightly on his shoulder.

Lan Wangji whirls around, a blade already in his palm and lashing out, but the shadow merely catches his wrist, twists it, disarms him with an ease that would be breathtaking if there had been enough oxygen to spare this high up. The blade clatters onto the stone, glinting in the pitiless sunlight, as Lan Wangji uses the leverage on his wrist to his own advantage, yanking the shadow towards him and throwing it over his shoulder. The shadow goes easily, though its grip on Lan Wangji’s wrist tightens, and the two of them hit the ground, landing on a patch of snow so hard it might as well be ice.

The fight is messy; Lan Wangji casts aside considerations of sophistication and technique in favor of vicious savagery, and yet the shadow slips through his hands, dances away from his blows, refuses to be pinned down. Step and counterstep, strike and counterstrike—there is something familiar in the shadow’s skill, the way it shapes its movements, but before Lan Wangji can identify where he has seen it before, the shadow kicks his feet out from under him, sends him skidding downhill on a slope of black, bulletproof ice.

Lan Wangji’s fingers scrabble uselessly against the ice, metallic fingernails scraping long furrows of shredded snow in its wake. Something primeval, instinctive, rises in his throat, screaming to be let out.

The ground vanishes beneath him as he slides right over the edge of the cliff, and he twists in the air, bracing for an impact that he will survive, timeless creature that he is. The fall, though, will be sure to shatter even titanium-enhanced bones—

He is jerked to a stop by an iron band latching around his right wrist, bending the delicate bones with the ferocity of its grip. His momentum, arrested suddenly, dislocates his shoulder from its socket, and the pain of it punches the air out of Lan Wangji’s lungs.

The shadow heaves him back to safety in a superhuman feat of strength, and the two of them collapse against each other, breaths fogging crystalline in the sparse air.

“Who—” Lan Wangji begins, then coughs. The movement sends pain singing sharp through his dislocated shoulder, and for a moment, he thinks he feels fingers, a phantom pressure hovering against his back. He shies away from the shadow, locking eyes with it.

He freezes.

No.

It couldn’t—

Between one breath and the next, the shadow vanishes, melting beneath the ice, and Lan Wangji’s left hand closes on empty air. He closes his eyes and breathes deep, body shuddering from adrenaline and shock, failure and desperation. It has been a long time since he has been defeated so soundly. Has he ever lost like this before?

The cold sends needles lancing into the marrow of his bones, and Lan Wangji shivers, violently. He wants to feel warm again. He wants to know.

On the side of a mountain yet untrodden by man, Lan Wangji excavates the wine from his heart, breaking the seal around the bottle’s mouth with one shaking hand. He tips the porcelain bottle back, and drinks down the wine in one long pull.

He crumples against ice and stone, and feels the letter begin to burn.

-----------

Lan Zhan—

You once told me that alcohol—like flavorful foods—was a distraction you burned away most of the time. I think that is a crying shame—drink (both the alcoholic and the nonalcoholic variety) is one of the finer joys of sensory life, not inferior to food! I have spent more than a few research trips sampling the different wines of the nine provinces, which was what passed for an extracurricular hobby before I began writing you.

Looking backwards, I find foreshadowing where there was none—in a way, isn’t alcohol another kind of poem? It, too, may speak to a party of dinner guests, an imperial court, a panel of judges, and generations who come after. This vintage, however, is a letter of my own—it was only ever intended for an audience of one.

It excites me to imagine that this may be the first drink you don’t immediately burn away, though of course I wish I could be there in person to guide you through the experience. Let me assure you that the warmth, the dizziness, and that pleasant, floating feeling are all very natural.

I hope you’re somewhere comfortable, Lan Zhan, with the open sky above you and the Silver River scattered across the heavens. If you can see the moon, salute her with your cup—it’s a tradition among poets and sages, scholars and hermits, emperors and song-girls and generals alike.

You asked for tedium in your last letter, but did you pause to consider what that would actually look like on paper? Would you truly love page after page of exhaustive detail about the hours I spend sorting through grain baskets, the candlelit nights spent balancing account books, the wrinkling of my hands after a morning of laundry? Would you care for a comprehensive catalog of every memory my muscles have learned, from cooking to cutting wood to cleaning to carrying? Would you really want to read a litany of shapes and items and spaces that ingrain themselves into the habits of my being and the fabric of my memories? In a hundred years, Lan Zhan, this house will be gone, these people gone, this way of life gone, and yet they will live on still, I imagine, because my feet will remember the number of steps it takes to travel down this hallway when all the lights are doused for the night.

I could give you tedium, Lan Zhan, but I think I’d rather give you dreams.

I move through the motions of this mortal life, let the time-light slip by like flowing water, and I dare to daydream of you. What would it be like to wake up beside you; to armor each other for the day, in worn leathers or dragon robes, in sweeping court pao or layers of silk dresses. I imagine roaming through the forested mountainsides, chasing the echo of a seven-stringed guqin with you, light-footed and hunt-ready. I imagine standing together in a deep grove of bamboo, listening to the long histories the leaves whisper to us. I imagine us exploring the caverns beneath the earth, perhaps hearing those Zhuangzian pipes creak and bellow.

I wonder what songs we’d hear the world sing to us; I wonder if those songs would be the same.

Am I being too forward? Perhaps—but wine has always been a friend of truth and a loosener of lips. With me now, Lan Zhan—we’ll raise our cups to the sky. ‘All I wish for now is long and full lives, a thousand miles apart, gazing together at the moon.’

Yours,

Wei Ying

P.S. No shadows here. Be careful out there.

-----------

When Wei Wuxian returns to war, the strands shake with the seismic force of his arrival.

Yunmeng dispatches him on a series of precision strikes—the strategic manipulation of history’s pivot points down a single timeline, an assignment for which speed is of the utmost importance. He whispers slander into the ear of a gullible king while states go to war; he throttles the career of a would-be ambassador in its cradle. He darts out of linear time, sprints a decade down the line, and engineers a decisive defeat by destroying the only bridge over a river swollen with spring melt, delaying the arrival of critical reinforcements.

A kingdom falls, and three states remain. His actions catalyze a temporal shift, the arc of this strand bending closer to the future of Yunmeng Jiang.

He cuts bowstrings nocked with arrows meant for the hearts of princes or generals or common footsoldiers who later go on to pioneer new techniques in terraced farming. He fells trees, builds houses, starts fires, halts floods. His next tasks arrive close on the heels of previous ones, and instead of growing fatigued, Wei Wuxian feels invigorated, exhilarated.

He tilts the antenna of a radar transmission system a few degrees northward, so that an outgoing message strikes the sun. Doing so magnifies humanity’s call for extraterrestrial life into an unexplored galaxy, precipitates a cascade of events that will define the twenty-second century. Four hundred years later, he helps land a damaged colony ship on the surface of an exoplanet, deftly selecting the precise mathematical settings that will keep the ship from being burned up in the atmosphere upon reentry. Three decades after that, he sends an asteroid crashing into a planet in the next star system over, knocking both of them out of their orbits and into a new one. Now, the planet and its new moon hover just on the edge of the habitable zone, revolving around a cold blue star, slowly preparing itself for a group of refugees that will flee a dying star system in a thousand, ten thousand years.

And then the call comes to him from headquarters.

Wei Wuxian.

He is drifting between the gaseous arms of a nebula, thinking about natural disasters and supernovas, dreaming of songs filling the silence between suns. A small purple flower, more star-stuff than substance, presses into his palms.

Come home, Wei Wuxian.

He blinks, and wakes up. He steps out of time.

It has been a long time since Wei Wuxian has returned to Yunmeng Jiang’s headquarters. It sits at the convergence of a thousand timelines, an estuary of temporal streams running into a vast, inchoate ocean. Despite the interim, his feet still remember the way, and when he comes closer, he breaks into a run—there is a figure, familiar and beloved, waiting for him at the doors.

“A-Xian,” says Jiang Yanli, when he is close enough to see the smile on her face.

“Shijie,” Wei Wuxian breathes, and flings himself into her arms.

Later, when they have recomposed themselves and mostly wiped away any tears, Wei Wuxian sighs happily and leans against his sister, kicking his feet idly as they sit on the pier behind headquarters. The movement sends eddies swirling through the misty gray vapors of unformed time, and though it’s not quite the same as sunlight glinting off the waters of a lotus lake, Wei Wuxian is happier than he’s been in a long time.

Jiang Yanli laughs softly, patting his head indulgently as he tilts it against her shoulder. Wei Wuxian would be embarrassed at how shamelessly he cuddles up to her, except that he is Wei Wuxian, she is his shijie, and it’s just been so long.

“You look well,” Jiang Yanli says.

“I am well,” Wei Wuxian says, letting the force of his joy brighten his voice. “The past few assignments were easier than breathing, and I haven’t been given a single embedment since I’ve come back.”

“Mm,” she says. “You have A-Cheng to thank for that.”

Wei Wuxian sits up straight. “I do? I didn’t think—I haven’t actually—it’s been so long since we’ve spoken—”

So much had gone wrong between them in the series of events that had led to Wei Wuxian’s long exile, and the last Wei Wuxian had heard from Jiang Cheng was his shidi’s voice, raised in anger, yelling it’s all your fault—

“He’s been working very hard these past few years rehabilitating your reputation, A-Xian,” Jiang Yanli says. “He’s trying to bring you home.”

Wei Wuxian’s heart trips, just a little, at that word. Home. The truth-untruth of it. “Where is he?” Wei Wuxian asks.

Jiang Yanli sighs. “Out,” she says, a little rueful. “I think he might be hiding, but he won’t admit it. I made him promise to be here the next time you come back.”

Home. Next time. Wei Wuxian can’t take all of these joys, is unused to coping with a bounty of blessings rather than his usual fare of solitude and sorrows. He buries his face in his hands.

“A-Xian?” Jiang Yanli says, gentle.

“I’m fine, shijie, I’m fine,” Wei Wuxian says, and thinks, for once, that it might be true.

The quiet, shimmering happiness of that afternoon-out-of-time carries Wei Wuxian into his next assignment—nothing complex, the observance of a crossroads, the direction of one merchant caravan onto a path that will collide with a wandering Daoist priest, leading to a heartfelt conversation by firelight, the conversion of another soul, the slow tipping of scales towards a future with more systematized spiritualities. As Wei Wuxian chats with a fabric merchant in the caravan, the fabric merchant stops in the middle of their conversation, narrowing his eyes and reaching back into his wagon. The merchant pulls out a ribbon.

Wei Wuxian tilts his head, a confused smile surfacing on his face. “What’s this, Shang-xiansheng?”

The merchant presses the ribbon into his hands, and it unravels, silky and long and red as a fire’s heart. Wei Wuxian’s breath catches as he sees the words, woven through the subtle shift of color, the thousand hues of crimson and the way they catch in the light.

Wei Wuxian looks up, searching the fabric merchant’s eyes. “Why?” he asks.

The fabric merchant just shrugs. “I’ve got a good feeling about this,” he says, “and my feelings have yet to lead me astray.”

For that, and for the letter, Wei Wuxian introduces the fabric merchant to a wealthy patron in Luoyang six years later.

Across the street, hidden in the shadow of a doorway, the seeker watches, an unreadable expression on his face.

-----------

Wei Ying—

We do not often begin our letters to each other with the usual pleasantries, do we? In a way, that speaks to the understanding of our minds, the synchronicity of our songs—we can do away with the frivolous trappings of conversation, the layers padding the distance between unfamiliar interlocutors. There are few things in existence as excruciating as awkward small-talk; it ranks up there right along with vivisection, scorpion-snake venom, and concerts for inferior musicians.

I say this, so that you can appreciate my earnestness behind this statement: I hope this letter finds you well.

Before my family became musical cultivators, the Lans were famous for their weaving—in some tenth-century strands, Gusu silk is the most prized textile in the markets of Kaifeng, a luxury item worn by imperial consorts. What you hold in your hands is an inferior product—I’m afraid I have not dedicated my life to the art, unlike the true artisans of Gusu silk—but I enjoyed the time spent weaving it. It gave my hands something to do, while I decided how I wanted to write back.

First, a report: alcohol is a strange and treacherous substance, and I shall henceforth regard it with the wariness it is due. You promised warmth, and dizziness, and a pleasant, floating feeling, but you failed to warn me of the morning after. Conceptually, I understood the phenomenon of hangovers—us Lans are as well-read as you might expect—but no amount of conceptual understanding can prepare you for that gut-deep nausea and sand-gravel headache.

However, your wine did keep me warm on a very cold night, and for that, I thank you.

Secondly, I would take your tedium, and your laundry lists, and your dreams. I would take mornings by your side, meals in your company, lifetimes in your shadow. You underestimate, Wei Ying, how much I would take from you.

To think that I used to scoff at the stories of song-girls falling in love with the poet-lyricists they sing for, or the tales of a young lord falling in love with a dancer at a banquet. You cannot know the chambers of another person’s heart simply by the words they leave behind, I thought. Dance and music and art are beautiful, assuredly—but they are not reliable indicators of personhood, or moral character.

I know now that I was wrong. It is possible to fall in love with someone through their letters alone.

Am I being too forward? Perhaps—but when I woke up that morning, the warmth of your letter vanished from my veins, I nearly tore out my insides from the sickness that I felt. I woke up that morning to an absence of you, and the loss was maddening. It nearly undid me. Is it any wonder, then, that our words for love and loss are shaped the same way in our mouths? How close those two are that they tread on each other’s heels and begrudge the space the other occupies.

Lastly, I’ve run into my shadow. We fought, actually, and I lost. Badly. I cannot think of the last time I have been so soundly defeated aside from, well, the early stages of our correspondence, and even then you and I never crossed blades directly, never tested each other hand-to-hand.

I do not know why the shadow was following me, though it seemed to possess no killing intent. It had ample opportunity to kill me, or at least severely incapacitate—and yet it saved me. And because of that, I can only assume that this shadow is not our enemy.

You have returned to the strands; I can hear your footsteps, decades down, worlds away. And so I find myself making this trite, humble request:

Take care, Wei Ying—for me, if for no one else. I could not bear to lose you.

Yours,

Lan Zhan

-----------

Lan Wangji walks through a forest in the wake of a fire and thinks of centuries gone up in smoke.

The ash beneath his feet deadens the sound of his passing, springy and softer than forest loam. The world around him has become a monochrome canvas, all charred, slender trunks and feathered, downy dust.

And somehow, in spite of it all, there are birds chirping in the barren canopy above, somewhere high and unseen.

In a matter of weeks—days, even—a fall of rain will bring new shoots, spearing upwards from the ashen bed. In a few years, saplings will huddle at the foot of their skeletal elders, a new generation emerging from fire and flame. That is the way of these conifers, Lan Wangji knows—only in the heat of an inferno do the pine cones crack, seed pods bursting open. Phoenix-like pyriscence—the violent immolation of the old world, the slow building of the new.

But for now, the old trees still stand—bark blackened, hearts hollowed—and Lan Wangji takes a moment to wonder at all of these sentinels around him, looming silent, solemn, thanatotic. In years, in decades, in centuries, each and every one of these charred husks will fall, and the lucky ones will make a sound.

The Grandmaster awaits him in a clearing, hands clasped behind his back, gazing up at the cracked charcoal trunks of two trees, joined at the roots. Today he wears the form of an aging patriarch, or perhaps a distinguished sage—his robes sweep, rich and sapphire-hued, over shoulders squared against the weight of a thousand worlds. He turns, and Lan Wangji immediately bows to him, left hand folded over right. “Grandmaster.”

“Hanguang-jun,” the Grandmaster says in acknowledgement, and Lan Wangji straightens. Those ageless, age-old eyes study him, though the face is unfamiliar. “We have heard favorable reports of your recent successes, Wangji.”

So the composite is letting his uncle take the lead in speaking to Lan Wangji today. Lan Wangji lowers his eyes, displaying the appropriate deference. “This one has been fortunate to be favored by the temporal harmonics.”

“You always did have a gift for symphonic modulation,” the Grandmaster says.

Lan Wangji remains silent, though his back burns.

“We have called you here today because we have noticed a discordance in the strands.” A low wind rises between the trees, brings a creak from damaged wood, protesting against the movement. “It is a discordance that seems to follow your footsteps in particular.”

Briefly, Lan Wangji’s mind races through a drowned lantern, a broken arrow, a butterfly made of words and grass—had he slipped up? Left traces where he should not have? Carefully, he smooths away the disruption, conceals a stack of letters beneath other thoughts. “If this one is informed of his improprieties, he will take pains to correct them,” he says, and if there is any urgency in his voice, it is nothing more than the distress of a son of Gusu Lan in the face of his own misconduct.

“You mistake our intent,” the Grandmaster says, raising a dignified hand. “We believe it to be enemy action—the work of a Yunmeng agent. An individual, singularly talented, who seeks to launch an attack on our entire braid by targeting and unravelling your work.”

“I might have noticed their presence before,” Lan Wangji says, cautious. “Chuhan-337.”

“Among others,” the Grandmaster agrees. “We believe he is trying to use you to subvert the entire Gusu strand. Turn you, and unknot all the work you and your brother have done for the Symphony.”

“This enemy agent has failed to do his research, then,” Lan Wangji says. “I passed the trial of the Cold Pond Cave.”

“Indeed. But in his oversight we find our advantage. In choosing you as his target, he leaves himself vulnerable to a counterstrike.”

Lan Wangji does not say anything. He keeps his mouth shut, and cages a ghost between his teeth for its own safety.

“You’ve been reassigned,” the Grandmaster says. “Other agents will pick up your missions. For now, your priority will be strategic composition. We have discussed, and agreed that you have proven yourself worthy once more. Your symphonic seal will be revoked.”

Though Lan Wangji’s mind is spinning, whirling dizzily through calculations and deducing the implications of that statement, his voice and body perform the appropriate courtesies drilled into him by long habit. “Thank you, Grandmaster,” Lan Wangji’s voice says, as his body bows.

The Grandmaster does not smile—that is much too excessive—but the light in his eyes shifts. “Your immediate task,” he says, “is to compose an overture to this enemy agent. Draw him in with the temptation of turning you. Write him a song so beautiful that he will drown in it, and with him, the discordance he threatens to bring.”

The Grandmaster will see Lan Wangji’s shock as happy disbelief from having his symphonic seal undone so swiftly, so soon. The Grandmaster does not know of the way Lan Wangji has suddenly become cousin to the trees—coreless, hollowed out. “This one humbly accepts his task,” Lan Wangji says, because how can he not? He knows the kind of song he is being asked to write, one that sings an exquisite death to the one it’s written for.

He knows the melody of the song already.

“You will return to Gusu headquarters to lift your exile,” the Grandmaster says. “There, rooms have been prepared for your convenience.” Lan Wangji will have to move swiftly to warn Wei Wuxian, and his mind races—what would be the quickest way to send a letter, undetected? “You will have the wisdom of all our symphonic masters to aid you in your task.” Lan Wangji’s letter will be dissected, proofread, checked and rechecked to ensure that it has the killing power needed to slay an enemy agent of this caliber. The danger is breathlessly, imminently real.

“Understood,” Lan Wangji says, and bows in farewell.

Before Lan Wangji turns away, the Grandmaster raises a hand, and Lan Wangji pauses in his movements, surprised to see emotion on that impassive, sagely face. “Xichen,” Lan Qiren says softly. “How is he?”

Lan Wangji feels a surge of anger sweep through him, hissing and spattering like water against the hot iron of a symphonic seal carved into his back. “You can visit him yourself, shufu,” Lan Wangji says, voice clipped.

Lan Qiren closes his eyes, an expression of pain. “But he is well?”

“He misses the ones who have left him behind,” Lan Wangji informs his uncle. “And his heart forgives more than it should.”

Lan Qiren nods once, and when he opens his eyes again, he is the Grandmaster once more. “You should proceed downstrand to headquarters immediately,” he says, voice brusque and dispassionate. “You may detour to inform your brother of your reassignment.”

The Grandmaster turns away in dismissal, and Lan Wangji leaves.

He does not detour to the quiet, secluded strand where his brother lives—instead, he crosses several strands, moves through millennia, dreamlike, until he is standing on top of a mountain on the day after a solar eclipse. He gazes out over another forest, leaves whispering of speed and darkness, untouched by fire. Over the ridge, he knows, a man sentenced to death is bleeding into the dust of a dying court.

Lan Wangji stands there until the sun begins to set, the wind rising in concert with it. As he watches the light wash the bank of clouds red, casting glowing embers against the curves of wooded slopes, a bird labors its way up the side of the mountain to him. He sees why as he holds out a hand for the biyi bird to land upon; immediately, it shivers and falls apart into two living halves, quivering and feathered and warm in his palms.

He reads the letter in the erratic doubled heartbeats, fluttering desperate and urgent between his fingers. When he finishes, he breaks their necks and buries them side by side, two halves pressed together into a whole. In the dirt, he arranges a grave marker, a barely decipherable pattern of fallen leaves and snapped twigs, to be smudged into illegibility by a passing breeze.

In the coldest hour of the night, the seeker unearths the grave with bleeding hands. Carefully, reverently, he brushes the dirt from the feathers of the biyi bird, tucks its wings in close to its lifeless little body.

The seeker unhinges his jaw and swallows the bird whole.

-----------

Lan Zhan—

Some mercy on my poor heart, please. You write letters as ruthlessly as you destroy armies, and I’ve seen you in action. The Xiang Admiral never stood a chance, not even with a fleet of thirty voidmoths, and the incandescence of their star-pyres was glorious to behold.

You have always been dangerous in your beauty, and I would be lying if I said that hadn’t drawn me to you in the first place.

Your last letter: sweet, charming, disarming words (am I well indeed! Lan Zhan, I am never as well as when I hold a letter from you, half-read) paired with such vicious, cutting humor; a declaration of—oh, I can’t write this—that left me quite breathless, immediately followed by an unsolved mystery of a shadow capable of getting the drop on you? You are terrifyingly competent, Lan Zhan—you are the best Gusu has ever trained—and you tell me, in a casual, matter-of-fact manner, that this shadow held your life in its hands, and in the next sentence muse that it might not be an enemy? Tell me, Lan Zhan, how am I to feel? Do I cry or laugh, rejoice or mourn, tremble in fear or joy at everything you’ve told me?

I hardly know what to write, so I steal from the poets and send you a biyi bird in flight. If you will be patient—if you will wait for me—I’ll give you intertwined branches as well, travel the cosmos planting trees in pairs for the sole purpose of weaving their limbs together to let you know, everywhere you go, how much you are loved.

There. I said it. I love you, Lan Zhan, and though your brother may have gotten there first, please do not think that I love any less. Send my regards to him the next time you visit: last time, I bowed at his feet in admiration of his work in the strands. This time, send my awe and wonder that he knew to love you first.

Speaking of siblings, Lan Zhan—I write your name often, because the thrill of using it has yet to die away—I’d like for you to meet mine, someday. I have no idea how. I have no idea when. Jiang Cheng would probably stab you as soon as look at you, but I hope you won’t hold that against him—you and I were once so inclined towards each other, after all. But I think you would love my shijie—both because she is the most perfect person to ever exist, but also because I think the two of you would get along well. I can’t put it exactly in words, but trust me.

Ah, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan—the possibilities are dizzying, far more intoxicating than any wine I’ve ever sampled. I must end this letter here, before I’m possessed to write something truly embarrassing. I’ve had to hold back my words in this letter, Lan Zhan. At this rate, you’ll make a poet of me, or a prophet.

Yours,

Wei Ying

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Wei Wuxian hums to himself as he leans against a tree stump, chewing on grass and watching the clouds. He is, for once, waiting rather than seeking—he is far upstrand, and the newly-risen dynasty has yet to get around to addressing the roving bandits in distant corners of its empires, so today, Wei Wuxian is here to help with that.

While he waits for the unlucky souls to arrive, he hums to himself amiably, prophetically—the ground walks beneath my feet, the water by my side flows on.

He sits upright when a frantic rustling sounds from the tree line of the forest, a few meters away—as Wei Wuxian watches, a plain forest rabbit pelts full-speed from the underbrush and crashes headfirst against Wei Wuxian’s stump.

He stares at it, nonplussed. He’s fairly confident that he’s not in a strand where all idioms are literal—spears and shields clashing in contradiction, bamboo shoots growing skyscraper-high in springtime—but still.

The force of the collision seems to have broken the rabbit’s neck. Wei Wuxian picks it up carefully and slides a blade-sharp fingernail into its spine, severing it completely.

Wei Wuxian is calculating the odds that he’ll have to coin an idiom in this strand after he’s done with the bandits when he notices a pale, glowing dot on the rabbit’s forehead, right between its eyes. He leans closer, probes at it with a finger made of more than flesh and blood.

The small light pulses, emitting a faint, pure note.

Without hesitation, Wei Wuxian slices the rabbit open, chin to belly, reading the letter in the messy sprawl of entrails and soft steam. It is crude, hasty, but effective—he watches the blood seep into the dirt, and thinks of blood oozing from scars, the cost of a single note of musical compulsion, glistening still between the rabbit’s glassy eyes.

With a flick, he dispels the fading magic, and after a moment’s consideration, begins slicing and gutting the rabbit properly.

He learned a long time ago never to let a gift go to waste.

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Wei Ying—

They know.

Not enough to incriminate either of us, thankfully, but they’ve found the traces of our movements, the way our footprints intertwine upon the strands. They think that you wish to suborn me, to unpick my work through the cunning application of illusion and falsehood, and thus strike at the heartstrand of Gusu Lan.

How little they know of the truth.

And yet, the danger is real—I write to you in haste, on my way downstrand to headquarters. I apologize for the crassness of this letter. It was the best I could do on short notice.

Do not, under any circumstances, read my next letter. I can tell you now that it will be poison, a vicious thing designed to unmake you, to unravel the threads of who you are and shred the remains. The Symphony seeks to score a victory against Yunmeng Jiang by eliminating its best agent. Do not let them. The figure of you holds so much space in my heart that I had forgotten how cheap your life is—how cheap both of our lives are—in the calculus of war.

It pains me to write this a second time, and I curse the thoughtlessness of the first, but Wei Ying—we cannot continue our correspondence. The axe looms too close to both of our necks; the hunting hawk has its eyes pinned on our every move. After we evade this calamity, we can go back to the way we were before—chasing the echoes of each other’s footsteps through time, dancing our duet on the opposite sides of stars. It isn’t what I want for us, but it is what we can save.

Do not read the next letter you receive from me—do not even open it. Burn it as soon as you receive it. Fling it into the nearest ocean. Feed it to a monster—I don’t care. Just don’t read it. I can live with never hearing from you again, so long as I know that you are alive, so long as I can catch the breath of your passing in the strand. Foil my missions a thousand times—I will watch you destroy my work, and smile.

These days of ours were always borrowed. Thank you, Wei Ying, for every letter.

Be safe. Be well.

Yours,

Lan Zhan

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Lan Wangji returns to Gusu’s headquarters to compose.

It seems wrong, somehow—the melody of his heart should be coaxed gently from the strings of his guqin amidst mountains and water, forest light and low-hanging clouds. In daydreams he does not allow himself to have, he imagines the guest room in Lan Xichen’s remote residence, the papered windows propped open, the night’s fog creeping in to curl by his knees, sleepy and watchful.

But this is not meant to be the song of his heart—this composition is meant to be a weapon, engineered to kill, to unmake. And in that sense, the sterility of the labs at headquarters is the most appropriate setting for such work.

But first, the breaking of the symphonic seal carved into his back. Lan Wangji wakes up on the day he is to begin composing and finds the skin stretched over his shoulder blades whole and unbroken. He cannot decide if it is a mercy for them to sand away the scars while he was asleep—he had been conscious, after all, while receiving them. Now his body feels slippery, unfamiliar, unconstrained by the lock that had sat like weights in his muscles for years, lain heavy and burdensome on his bones.

He does not weep when he lays trembling fingertips on his guqin and plucks a blissfully blood-free note from its strings. That first day, he sends away all of the experts and plays, wearing new calluses into the soft skin of his hands where the old ones had faded from years without practice.

Lan Wangji had not forgotten what music had meant to him during his exile, but he had perhaps grown distant from it. Now, spending his every waking hour at work on a masterpiece, he slides back into the comfort of mathematics and melodies, almost forgetting the horrific nature of what he is creating. He gets into debates with members of the committee designated to oversee his work—all of them are experts in musical cultivation, and he challenges their formulations even as he catches up on the new theories and breakthroughs made in his absence.

At night he returns to the rooms assigned to him down the hall, and dreams. Night after night he dreams, and in his dreams, he does not stop composing. There is a song within him, demanding to be sung.

On the day he finishes, he looks upon his work and is sickened. The committee had examined it, tested each note, declared it worthy—none of them noticed the letter Lan Wangji had slipped into the silences between the seams of melodic phrases, the hints of a counterpoint harmony. He hopes the hidden song will never be played. Wei Wuxian is clever—he will see the trap for what it is, and discard it unsprung. The Grandmaster will be disappointed, but the success of this assignment has never been guaranteed.

After the letter is sealed and sent, Lan Wangji is given permission to rest and visit his brother. He brings his guqin out to the waterfall on the back mountain and plays for an entire afternoon, a rare luxury even before his exile. By the time the sun reaches red fingers through the spray and foam of the water, Lan Wangji’s playing has devolved into moody plucking, a meaningless exchange with the roar and crash of the water, the echoes of ever-present wind.

A stone comes tumbling over the edge of the cliff, leaping into the air amid the hiss and crash of the waterfall. On its way down, the stone bounces against the cliff face—once, twice, thrice, loud clacks! cutting through the constant stream of static.

Lan Wangji stills, his fingers tightening on the strings before he stands in a fluid motion. He wipes the wooden body of his instrument with a soft cloth and slings the guqin over his shoulder for the journey back over the mountain, to the place where his brother waits for him.

-----------

As you wish.

-----------

Wei Wuxian is stacking scrolls in the western wing of the Han archives when his death catches up to him.

A new shipment of texts had arrived that morning, and he had loaded them into the hamper before setting off for the western wing, where he is to organize each text by category and author before another archivist begins the painstaking work of collating the alternative manuscripts. Wei Wuxian tugs the hamper along behind him—a wood-and-canvas contraption, rolling along on precisely cut axles that he had checked and double-checked to make sure were invented already—as he begins another section for Yijing variants, rearranging the tightly bound bamboo scrolls lest they slide off the shelves.

He has his nose buried in an apocryphal commentary on poetry when he reaches down and touches it; the jolt that shoots through his body is palpable, numbing, and he nearly drops the Kongzi shilun before he notices what had caused his reaction.

He finds a bundle wrapped in plain, well-woven cloth, and he can feel the outline of a score with an instrument of some kind, nestled carefully in its padding.

Was it to be so soon? Already, the temptation to unwrap the package, to read Lan Wangji’s letter and to draw its words into his heart, rises in Wei Wuxian’s throat. He fights it back, setting the package back down in the hamper and before covering it with a few volumes of Sunzi. He’ll transfer it to the music bureau in the Court of Virtuous Wind, and stay away from it—that will be better than gazing at it every day, forever fighting the desire to tear it open and see what it says.

A vicious thing designed to unmake you, Lan Zhan had written, to unravel the threads of who you are and shred the remains.

Wei Wuxian spends the next few months assembling a new edition of the Xunzi, slowly and painstakingly sifting through the pile of scrolls that all purport to transmit the man’s teachings. He unbinds and rebinds bamboo strips until he’s fairly certain the text makes semantic sense at the very least.

Xunzi and his craftsmanship can only keep Wei Wuxian occupied for so long, however, and after Wei Wuxian returns from delivering the volumes to the scholar-official who will annotate them, his banked curiosity flickers and surges back in full force. Wei Wuxian has to lean on his writing desk for a few minutes just to breathe and rein himself back in. He sits down heavily, shuffling his notes and his dried-out brush to one side. He grinds more ink, and begins working on the backlog of cataloguing paperwork he has to do. Compiling a library is hard work, and far more difficult than any assassination Yunmeng has ever asked of him.

He keeps his head down. He works diligently. He ignores the unopened letter, blazing beacon-bright even from three courtyards away, where it lies buried in the backlog of the music bureau.

One day, Liu Xiang discovers that Wei Wuxian can not only decipher the bronzeware script on the library’s collection of bianzhong but also play the vast instrument, and transfers him immediately to the music bureau, where Wei Wuxian transcribes a ballad about a one-eyed warrior maiden for a harmony of flute and guqin.

The next day, on top of the pile of musical scores stacked for his perusal, an unwrapped cloth package waits for him, and he cannot decide if he wants to cry or laugh.

He does neither. He stares at the doom that dogs his footsteps, thinking about what it means for a time traveller to embrace his fate. He clears his desk, bars the door, lays out brush and ink and cloth close by in preparation. There is a draft from the window where the wind worms its way in through a loosely papered corner—a welcome guest in summer, one to be fended off in winter.

He was always going to open Lan Wangji’s letter, warnings be damned.

Inside the package there is a transverse flute, whittled from black bamboo and cored with silvery steel. He takes it in his hands, reverent. It is cool to the touch, a princely gift.

Beside it, tied with neat white ribbon, is a rolled-up music score, and Wei Wuxian laughs this time, a little helpless. Lan Wangji couldn’t have made it any more obvious that this was a trap, even without his letter of warning.

At the same time, Lan Wangji couldn’t have piqued Wei Wuxian’s curiosity more effectively. Wei Wuxian unrolls the scroll and skims the music. He shudders, feeling bodiless claws settling into the seams of his being.

He lifts the flute to his lips, and plays.

Had it been a normal song, produced by the flare of human ingenuity seen perhaps once every ten thousand years, Wei Wuxian thinks that this song could still kill him. It is a flirtation and a warning, temptation and admonishment, a song of love, a song of battle, a song of loss, a song of mourning. Set loose to the tea-shops and song-towers of Chang’an, it would be sure to send patrons to tears, musicians to their wine. If there were ever a song to command all under Heaven, Wei Wuxian thinks, it might sound something like this.

There is no good way to die—just some that offer more peace than others. Being unraveled by a song, Wei Wuxian thinks dizzily, might be the sweetest, though it is not the kindest. He can feel the clear, piercing notes of the song cleave under his ribs, levering them wide open to expose his heart; he can feel the creep of numbing cold beginning to nip at the calluses of his heels, the tips of his ears. He can feel the music slide into his veins and begin the slow, relentless process of his unmaking, and yet he continues playing.

A passing breeze, let in by the draft, runs fingers through the strands of hair that have slipped loose around his face. The touch of wind feels clammy on his face as this body sweats and bleeds its life away. Wei Wuxian closes his eyes—he has no need for the sheet music any longer. He thinks that he has always known how this song would end.

When he has finished, Wei Wuxian makes sure to burn the score—one last act of possessiveness.

Then, the melody of their hearts writhing in the pathways of his body, he sits down and writes a letter.

-----------

Wei Ying—

My love, stop.

Put down the flute.

Please. You know what this letter will do to you.

I have never begged for anything in my life, but I beg you now: put down the flute. Walk away from this letter. Burn this score, and everything that comes with it.

Don’t make me survive an existence without you.

I love you, I love you, I love you. Please, live for me.

Forever yours,

Lan Zhan

-----

And yet, you are still reading. And yet, I am still writing. I wish I could stop, because I know you, you and your curiosity, your brilliant, quicksilver mind that would not stop reaching out across time and space to know me. You, who listened long and close enough to hear the melody of my heart.

I should stop. I should tell you that I will write no more, and you should stop playing, and you will still have time to destroy this letter, to limp back home and lick your wounds, and we will no longer have these exchanges in letters made from flame and folly and feathers and fur. If you stop now, we will have each other alive, if wordless. We will chase each other through the strands of time, dance to the same song that we both know in our hearts. We did this before the first letter; we can do it again.

But I cannot bear the thought of letting this moment pass, if it is my last chance to speak to you. And so, I write. I hope you can forgive my weakness, Wei Ying. As always, I remain undeserving.

You once asked me for a truth, and I told you that truths were trite, too commonplace in the symphonic strands. What I did not tell you is that I have lied before.

Here is a lie I have told—it was not my first lie, nor will it be the last. But it lingers with me, and it reminds me of you, so I suppose that is all that matters.

The mission itself was laughably easy, far below the threshold of what would ordinarily be considered worthy of the Twin Jades of Lan, but my brother and I were in the area, passing by the twilight years of prehistory on our way downstrand. It was a moment’s work to slip into the Xia palace, to steal a scroll, to lace an astrologer’s drink with powder and make him sleep through the sunlight hours. And yet, when my brother turned to leave, I told him that I had another task to take care of. That I would remain for a day, and then follow him back to Gusu headquarters soon after.

The truth was, I wanted to see the eclipse the next day—a total solar eclipse, the first in written history. It would plunge the capital into chaos as ritual officers scrambled about, soldiers banging spear and shield while the emperor offered increasingly ludicrous sacrifices to chase the tiangou away from the sun. All the while, the court astrologer slumbered, derelict in his duties. I wanted to see an eclipse, and I was so young, then—I’ve learned how to hide my indulgences better. I hid you, for so long, and—

No. I will not write of that now.

Have you ever seen an eclipse, my love, my shadow? The way the land falls silent save for a growing wind, an onrushing wall of darkness flying wingless across the land? The moment of totality, when it comes, strikes you like a physical blow—suddenly the world around you dims into a timeless, nameless sunset, everything silvery and ghostly and washed out with a pale immateriality, until you think that even a groundling can see the thinness of the fabric that separates temporal strands. The stars wink back into the sky. The world goes silent, then goes mad. And when it all washes away, when light returns to the sky, you remain, for a moment, still trapped in that liminal departure—an immaterial thing, to be blown away like the dust beneath your feet.

Falling in love with you, Wei Ying, was like watching that solar eclipse alone on that mountaintop, and when the light returns to a sky that shines down on a world with you no longer in it, I hope that this time I, too, will dissolve into the wind—it would be a kindness. Because you will take both the light and the shadow, the wind and the stars, the music and the silence of the world with you.

What I am trying to say is—I love you. I think I have always loved you. You were my entire world before I ever walked it; you were every song I knew before I plucked them from a string. What will I do when you have taken light from my world, Wei Ying? What will I do without shadow and song?

There is only so much I can hide in a song, and this song, like all others, must end. I am sorry, Wei Ying. I love you.

Thank you for everything.

Yours,

Lan Zhan

-----------

Lan Wangji should not have come, but he hears the vibrations in the strands and can do nothing else.

With any luck, Wei Wuxian will see the obvious trap for what it is. Wei Ying is smart, and clever, and brilliant, and careful—he has seen Lan Wangji’s warning, will know how to turn away from the dagger before it is plunged into his chest.

And yet—Lan Wangji hears the echo of a song on the strand, and his heart crumbles. He drops the glass he’s holding—a scientific breakthrough, shattered on the ground into ten thousand glittering pieces—and tears upwards through the threads of time, unheeding of the destruction he leaves in his wake.

It doesn’t matter. He has to know. He will not wait for the brushstrokes of history, the dry report of Gusu’s spies.

He has to see.

Lan Wangji does not burn down the Han dynasty archives with his arrival, though it is a near thing as he rips a hole in time and space wide enough to barrel through. He grabs the nearest scholar by the collar of his robes, about to demand where Wei Ying is, then realizes that he does not know what name Wei Wuxian goes by in this era, what face he might be wearing. With a frustrated growl, Lan Wangji casts aside the hapless archivist before tilting his head back and closing his eyes, searching for the echoes of a song.

There.

He whirls through courtyards until he is striding past a set of bianzhong, unearthed centuries earlier than it should have been. The doors to the bureau of music are shut; Lan Wangji slams through them anyway, and sees him—hunched shoulders, back bent like a drawn bow. Wei Ying looks like he’s just fallen asleep at his desk, face pillowed on folded arms, if not for the thin trail of blood running from the corner of his mouth. The ink staining his fingertips is still wet.

With a wordless noise of hurt, Lan Wangji gathers Wei Wuxian to his chest and thinks he should feel something. This is the first time they’ve touched, after all their indirect caresses pressed through paper and glass, through fire and ash. But there are no sparks, no forbidden thrill—just a vast, endless breaking as he shatters, falls, shatters again. Just the looseness of a motionless body, fading in warmth.

Only in moving Wei Wuxian does Lan Wangji see the letter—ink on cloth, the invention of paper still a decade away. Something crackles and burns nearby. Lan Wangji’s fingers tremble as he reaches for the letter.

Outside, the sky is darkening, though it is only midday. The light falling through the windows is wrong; sunset-orange, smoke-tinged and peculiar. Beyond these walls, the world is coming to an end, the path of destruction Lan Wangji carved too much for this strand to survive. Cai Lun will never invent paper, Li Yu will never pen his poems, and Lan Wangji will never look up and lock eyes with an enemy agent before tearing out the throat of a vice-minister on some far-future starbase. Not in this strand, at least; already, the fabric of this reality shrivels and curls with the fire of Lan Wangji’s passing.

For a brief, crazed moment, Lan Wangji considers staying here, holding Wei Wuxian’s still-warm body, until the world cracks and sunders around him, until he, too, is unmade with the cauterization of this strand. For a brief, painfully clear moment, he understands what his brother faced all those years ago.

But the letter—it calls to Lan Wangji, the promise of another moment worth living, if only to sear Wei Wuxian’s last words upon his heart. Even now, he thinks bitterly, Wei Wuxian is saving him.

Lan Wangji presses a dry kiss to Wei Wuxian’s forehead. “My love,” he whispers against closed eyelids, the curve of his cheek.

Then he grabs the letter, and is gone.

-----------

Lan Zhan, ah, Lan Zhan—

Of course I’d play your song. Of course I’d read your letter. In this, as in all things, I am a selfish coward—I will take everything you give me, poison and thorn and all. Give me an inch, and I’ll take a mile; you’ve known this from the first poem.

And because I am greedy, because I am afraid, I’ll take the last word, too.

Did I know, when I left you that first letter in a riddle on a battlefield, who we’d end up becoming for each other? I don’t think so, and yet I think I’ve always known how we must end—in blood and ashes, as we began.

I hope you don’t mind that I’ve burned your score, Lan Zhan, but I have seen the hoarding tendencies of you Lans, and I would not have the instrument of my death become a museum piece, even if it was a very good song.

Hah. A very good song, I say, as if it weren’t a piece to rend the heavens and split the earth. You must pardon me, Lan Zhan, but your Symphony is composed of irredeemable idiots to ban you from music. They could have won the time war ages ago with you unleashed.

Well—what they’ve lost, I’ve gained. And try as I might, I cannot bring myself to regret this game. I’ve asked my heart, and found no regret there. I hope you can say the same, Lan Zhan. You even won, in the end.

Ah, I’m sorry. You will take no comfort in those words. But my thoughts are sputtering out, like sparks struck from flint with no tinder to set ablaze. It took me unforgivably long to piece that metaphor together, so I think that must be the last one.

My hands are shaking badly enough that I won’t be able to write soon.

Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan. I love you. I love you.

Thank you for everything. And I’m sorry, for the end.

Yours, forever, always,

Wei Ying

-----------

Lan Wangji has watched more than one world end, and so he knows the truth of this—time moves on regardless, ruthless.

So when his world caves in and crumbles around a cold, lifeless body, a collapsed pile of scrolls, a trickle of blood from the corner of an unkissed mouth, a ghost flute and a love song written to kill, he knows that the next day will dawn for him, and the next, and the next, cruel and uncaring, because such is the nature of time, even for one who weaves its strands.

After he visits the scene of death, after he’s read and reread the last letter Wei Wuxian will ever write for him, he throws himself into his work with a ferocity that unnerves his handlers. Music unleashed once more, he strides up and down the stranded lengths of time and assassinates dictators with a single strummed chord, splits continents with a song, rewrites weather patterns into symphonies harmonious with the intent of Gusu Lan. Other times, he unsheathes his sword in both war and peace to kill, and kill, and kill, and kill. He stains his robes rust-red, and hardly pauses between massacres.

How did people stand it? he wonders. The aching, the yearning; the loving, the burning.

He stands amid the ashes of civilizations, and cannot bring himself to care.

They begin to whisper about him back at headquarters, heads tilted close together, brows furrowed. Lan Wangji hardly spares them a sidelong glance when he passes through the pure white halls. Wherever he goes, the electric silence of a storm before a lightning strike settles in his wake.

Even the Grandmaster begins to make pointed comments that Lan Wangji should consider taking some of his well-earned time off, to which Lan Wangji’s only response is a blank look. He is the most competent agent they have, and there is work to be done. Why delay the inevitable, their victory?

The Grandmaster nods his silent acquiescence—even he cannot refute Lan Wangji’s logic, though his dark, ageless eyes still seem to hold words unspoken as Lan Wangji rises to bow and leave.

Lan Wangji is familiar with words unspoken. They linger, hidden in the eyes, beneath the tongue, in undusted corners of the heart, and the truly blessed are those who can manage to utter all of the words before their fated window of time has closed.

Lan Wangji is not one of the blessed. He goes back to work.

-----------

He is crossing a field of salt and snow when his heart catches up to him—one moment, his footsteps implacable and assured against the sun-streaked crunch of crystal underfoot, and the next, he is on his knees, struggling to breathe, hands clawing his chest at the fabric and skin and steel beneath.

The air is cold and spare enough that no one can survive up here to hear his voice—this saltfield, high on an unnamed mountain range, centuries before mankind crawls out of the ocean or after it has annihilated itself in nuclear winter. It does not matter. Wei Wuxian is still dead, and Lan Wangji still killed him.

He screams—he cries—he beats the ground, until his palms and knees come away bloody and stinging, the mixed salt and snow anesthetic and disinfectant at the same time. The wind rises, harbinger of some deadly mountain tempest, the kind that claims the lives of climbers in a freak storm, and Lan Wangji screams at the storm, too, in sorrow and rage.

The storm spits him up by a high mountain lake—he lies on the sandy shore, salt crusting in his eyelashes, his hair. The water, still unfrozen, laps gently at the tips of his fingers.

The sands sob dimly in the wind. The words of the prophets, mocking him. They long ago predicted our parting.

Lan Wangji lets one hand curl slowly into a fist, the fine, silky grains of sand squeezing glasswards in his grip.

He lies there for a long time—long enough to watch the sky turn every shade, to watch snow slough off a nearby peak. After night comes, and he has named all of the visible constellations, he levers himself to his feet with a quiet huff of pain. With a flare of energy, he steps sideways from this strand straight into the Grandmaster’s office.

“I will be taking time off,” Lan Wangji announces with no ceremony.

The Grandmaster eyes him, snow-frosted head to salt-streaked toe, and huffs. “I should think you are.”

-----------

Lan Wangji drifts aimlessly, ghostlike, through the halls of his brother’s home.

Not that there are many halls to begin with; Gusu had accepted his brother’s retirement with grace and gratitude for his service, embedded him in a place of quiet courtyards. Uninterrupted by strand-dancers, Lan Xichen could live out a human lifespan in secluded peace, in the midst of bamboo groves where mist crept over the mountains at night.

Lan Wangji takes to leaving early in the morning, spending all day traipsing over the land on trails barely there. He tries not to hear the echoes of bright laughter beneath the brilliant calls of unseen birds seeking their mates. He returns late, after his brother has already extinguished the lights, save for a single, flickering candle waiting for him in a window.

Some nights, he does not return at all.

“Wangji.” Lan Xichen is waiting for him at the gate tonight, right hand tucked neatly behind his back. The fingers of his left hand twitch—the remnant of an instinctive movement—which is how Lan Wangji knows that his brother is nervous, hands longing for Liebing, for something solid to hold, since Lan Wangji has been anything but.

“Xiongzhang,” Lan Wangji says, crossing left palm over right and bowing slightly.

Lan Xichen’s eyes catch his as Lan Wangji rises, refusing to let him go. “Tell me about him,” Lan Xichen says, and Lan Wangji is reminded of the swiftness and mercilessness of his brother’s blade, back when they were the Twin Jades, twin hurricanes unleashed upon the strands, dancing with such beauty and skill that none dared retread their footsteps until the fires they lit had flickered out and faded into cool, downy ash.

“About who?” Lan Wangji says, face impassive, blank, a smooth façade of precious stone.

“Wangji,” his brother says again, and Lan Wangji reels from the melodies his brother has woven into his name.

It’s do not insult me and do not shut me out, two edges of the same sword; it’s you can trust me and you have never been able to hide from me in chordic harmony. It’s the splashes of sunlight in bygone childhood memories and the long, congealing silence of years meditating at each other’s sides. It’s Lan Xichen’s hand guiding Wangji’s as he slides his dagger into the heart of his first target; it’s the joined voices of a xiao and a guqin, mesmerizing masses, atomizing armies.

“Tell me,” Lan Xichen says, and his voice returns to normal, his brother to normal. Lan Xichen is just a solitary man who wears his sorrow in the slope of his shoulders, carries sadness in the shape of his eyes.

“I killed him,” Lan Wangji whispers finally. The broken truth cuts his lips on the way out.

“I know,” says Lan Xichen, and takes him by the hand, pressing Lan Wangji’s knuckles between his callused palms, and oh, if anyone in all of time and space could understand the pain of killing the one who knew the melody of your heart, it was Lan Xichen. “Let’s go inside.”

Lan Wangji’s words failed to save Wei Wuxian, and his words fail him now. He nods, a tight hum escaping his throat, and lets Lan Xichen lead him inside.

-----------

“You will have to stab me,” Lan Xichen says, musing, when Lan Wangji finishes. “Preferably somewhere lethal, but in a matter of hours rather than minutes, you understand.”

Lan Wangji recoils. He does not understand. “Xiongzhang,” he says, aghast. “What are you saying?”

Lan Xichen lifts his eyes from the gentle curl of smoke rising from the stick of incense on the low table between them. “You are going after him,” he states, like it’s the simplest thing in the world.

Lan Wangji stares. “He’s dead,” he says, again, the repetition of truth drawing another bead of blood from his lips, and he wipes it away with a finger.

“Oh, Wangji,” Lan Xichen says, unbearably fond. “You and I both know that such truths can be changed.”

A slow, creeping realization steals over him, like ice frosting over the skin of a formerly living thing. Wei Wuxian is dead, now, yes—but Wei Wuxian is also alive in other moments, spidering up and down the strands of time. His words are written, memorized, carved onto the walls of Lan Wangji’s heart.

It was ludicrous. It was experimental. It danced on the edge of impossibility and madness.

“We will have to fight,” Lan Xichen says conversationally. “So that when they come for you, they’ll find me bleeding out in the courtyard and you long gone.” He reaches into his sleeve and hands Lan Wangji a small, crystalline flask filled with a rich, golden-purple liquid. “You’ll need this.”

Lan Wangji holds it against the light, and sees familiar, beloved words swirling in distilled chrysanthemum wine.

“Xiongzhang,” Lan Wangji says again, unmoored by the sudden shifting of his world. “I cannot—”

“You can,” Lan Xichen says firmly. “Gusu will come for me. You need not worry.”

Their fight is a thing of beauty with no audience, a masterpiece meant for no one but themselves. It is a fight, a flight, a farewell.

Lan Xichen grazes his arm, bright blood beading on Shuoyue’s blade; Bichen slides smoothly, surgically into Lan Xichen’s torso, a gut wound that would mean death on a groundling in a matter of hours, and agony until then. And yet, Lan Xichen offers him a smile, blood running from the corner of his mouth. He drops Shuoyue to the ground with a clatter as he applies pressure to the rapidly spreading bloodstain on his robes.

Lan Wangji takes a step towards Lan Xichen, helpless, involuntary. “Xiongzhang, I am—” Sorry? No. Penitence was not the name of the emotion welling behind Lan Wangji’s eyes.

Grateful. He gazes into Lan Xichen’s eyes, seeking some kind of solace that had everything and nothing to do with the cracks in his heart.

Lan Xichen reaches out and cups Lan Wangji’s face with a hand, tacky with his own blood. “I’ll be fine, Wangji,” he says, a lovely, loving lie. “They’re coming already. You should go.”

Lan Wangji nods, and his brother’s blood smears all over his face, his hands. Gusu’s agents will arrive, and once they get the story from Lan Xichen, it will be a foxhunt across timelines, through woven and unwoven strand-space.

“Be brilliant,” Lan Xichen says, because both of them know that careful is not a luxury Lan Wangji will have.

Lan Wangji nods once more, runs his eyes over his brother, drinks in their farewell—

—and steps sideways into the strand.

-----------

Lan Wangji returns to the beginning.

In the wreckage of a vicious battle beneath a troubled sky, he collects the ashes of a letter, convinces time to unspool just enough to breathe the smoke of a dead fire into his lungs. He sifts through the carnage of a celebration and drives glass shards beneath his fingernails. He smothers himself with stone dust, scrapes his throat raw with gravel and bone, scours the inside of teacups and the earth of freshly unburied graves. Piece by piece, letter by letter, he gathers scraps of Wei Wuxian to himself and cradles them close, possessive.

He crosses paths with a younger Lan Wangji, and knows exactly how to dislocate his own shoulder, to leave himself desperate and furious and unanswered on an icy mountaintop.

Lan Wangji is swift, but he is not subtle. Gusu’s agents have been gaining on him since he left his brother bleeding out, but as he retraces his own steps, revisits the sites of his greatest failures and successes, Yunmeng Jiang, too, takes notice of his movement. They send agents to hem and box him in, thirsting for the blood of the one who snuffed out their best and brightest.

But he is Lan Wangji, one of the Twin Jades of Lan, and his music has been unbound.

In the earlier parts of the chase, Lan Wangji deals with his more troubling pursuers with silent, deadly efficiency, leaving no tracks to follow, no traces to distort the weft of time. As more agents join the hunt, he turns to his guqin, lashing out with chords of precision and power, inflicting no damage that cannot be mended by careful tending of the strands. Twice, he uses this to his advantage, forcing his opponent to choose between pursuing him and putting out the fires Lan Wangji sets in his wake.

But eventually even that is no longer enough, and Lan Wangji throws caution and discretion to the wind. Agents from Gusu and Yunmeng alike converge on him as he emerges from a burning archive, a ghost flute searing an ember-bright brand across his palms. There is one more place he needs to go now, one more piece of Wei Wuxian he needs to retrieve. This is the madness amid the impossibility of his quest. And yet, as Lan Wangji nurses that warm, nebulous collection of memories living in his chest, it is the most vital part of his plan.

Baring his teeth at the agents silently ringing him, Lan Wangji runs.

He sends the ones closest to him flying with a note on his guqin, tearing through the gaps in their ranks. His footprints leave fire and flood behind him, a trail of natural disasters marking his passage. He races through temporal tripwires, past naval blockades and secret passageways; he sets off alarms, upending delicate balances of historical tipping points in his heedless flight.

And still, his pursuers gain on him.

Not long now—Lan Wangji can sense his destination, feel the unnerving creep of decay and necrosis in the strands beneath his feet and fingers. His pursuers do not falter when his destination becomes obvious, but they hesitate when they see that he does not slow. One by one, they peel away, horrified, but Lan Wangji only increases his speed, heart pounding as his feet take the last few steps. He closes his eyes, takes a flying leap—

—and flings himself bodily into the Burial Mounds.

-----------

He is falling.

He is falling, and there is black smoke around him.

He is falling, and there is black smoke around him, and it is the thick kind, the kind that bursts out of volcanoes or nuclear fission, the kind that grows fat because it is fed on flesh.

He is falling, and there is black smoke around him, and it is the thick kind, the kind that bursts out of volcanoes or nuclear fission, the kind that grows fat because it is fed on flesh, and this black smoke curls about him, wreathing his arms, legs, face, hands, plucking at his edges, and Lan Wangji knows with a bone-deep terror, instinctive and primeval, that this black smoke would like nothing more than to shred him into tatters, the way it has done to so many who came before him.

Please, thinks Lan Wangji, who has only ever begged once in his life. Please bring him back.

Who are you, croons the black smoke in a voice like the sound of powder falling onto a tin roof, like sand blowing through the carcasses of civilization. Who is he, to make you beg so sweetly?

Lan Wangji uncurls, just enough, to reveal the ember he cradles in his heart.

The smoke hisses. He is ours, it says, growing agitated around Lan Wangji. He is still falling, though the smoke seems to dampen the sound of the wind hurtling past, the rapid approach of a punctuated end. What would you give for his return?

Some of him, Lan Wangji says, and all of me.

Please, he adds for good measure.

Lan Wangji is still falling, but now, he begins to hear the high whistling sound of air screaming past a falling body. He twists, panic unfurling through his limbs.

These terms, the black smoke says, are accepted.

Lan Wangji hits ground.

-----------

Lan Wangji wakes up in a cell.

This has already far exceeded his wildest expectations, since he hadn’t expected to wake up at all. And yet, against all odds, in defiance of his plans, he is awake. He is awake, and therefore alive, though upon further thought, he is not sure he prefers this outcome.

He is in a Gusu cell—he recognizes it from its sleek austerity, its smoothed whiteness, its seamless walls. Food appears as if by magic, as does air—there are no visible vents, and yet, he has not suffocated. His skin lies slack and loose against his bones, concave where his weapons have been excised from his body.

The symphonic seal remains mercifully absent, though he comes to discover that it is not a mercy.

For all the room’s impermeability, it remains porous to the most important thing: sound. They ask him questions with a disembodied, anonymous voice that emerges from everywhere and nowhere, though all the questions are simply guises for a single one: why?

Why did you turn on Gusu Lan?

Lan Wangji folds his legs underneath him, closes his eyes, and does not answer. He may even smile, slightly.

He does not smile when they begin using music upon him—first gentle, sweet persuasions, lulling him towards peace and contentment and placid obedience. He lets his contempt show in the corner of his mouth; even stripped of all his weapons, he is still one of the Twin Jades of Lan. The boundaries of musical cultivation lie where they are today because he pushed them there.

When they try deploying some of the darker melodies against him, he is ready, though the destructive force of them arrows straight to his core, leaves him weak and shaking after a week of ministrations.

And still he does not speak.

He would have cut out his own vocal cords to declare his intent and save them all some time, but of course, they could simply install new ones, and they never let him come close to anything sharp enough anyway.

When the destructive melodies seem more likely to kill him than make him talk, they switch to playing Cleansing without pause—an extravagant feat and use of resources. They must have recalled half of the musical cultivators in the field to do this; Lan Wangji would be flattered, if he weren’t so terrified. It was said that playing Cleansing for seven-times-seven, forty-nine days could sanctify even the most corrupted souls, render them pure and blank and malleable as the heart of an infant. If they are cleansing him, it means that they have given up on Lan Wangji, seeking only to wipe him clean and start over—a raw piece of jade, uncarved, unresisting.

Lan Wangji does not want to be rewritten.

He curls up on the floor of his cell, clinging ferociously to what scraps he still possesses: the flare of fire in darkness. The bite of stone into skin. An echo of light. The ghost of a brush, sweeping across paper. The taste of chrysanthemum wine on his tongue. The melody of a song, hidden in another, played only once in all the myriad strands of time and space.

The tendril of smoke he keeps cradled in his heart, though the ember it belonged to no longer burns there.

He clings to these, even as other parts of him slip away. Vast swathes of memory smudge out like a hand passing through drawings in the sand, like waves beating the land back into uniform smoothness. He holds onto these fragments fiercer than he holds onto himself, unswerving in his belief that these are the most important parts of himself. It doesn’t matter if Hanguang-jun, Lan Wangji, even Lan Zhan are erased from this hollowed body; so long as those parts of Wei Ying remain, he would still know to love him.

He thinks that it is the twentieth day, or perhaps the twenty-first, when the music stops and one of the walls turns clear. Lan Wangji does not register it for a moment, after-echoes of Cleansing’s melody rocketing horribly around his skull. It takes another few moments for him to uncurl himself from the floor, his muscles screaming pain at him, but he rises, shakily, and goes to the window where the Grandmaster waits, dark eyes large and sorrowful.

“Wangji,” the Grandmaster says, which is how Lan Wangji knows that it is his uncle on the other side of the glass. “Please. This is your last chance.”

Lan Wangji regards him silently. Was it possible, in the Grandmaster’s many lives, that not one of them understood what drove Lan Wangji to and past the annihilation of his self?

“I had to beg them to give you one more chance,” Lan Qiren says. “Please. I would not lose you.”

For the first time in the months since he’s woken up in a featureless white room, Lan Wangji speaks. His voice is raspy, barely intelligible from disuse. “Xiongzhang?” he asks.

Lan Qiren’s face does something complicated. There is pain there, but also relief, and perhaps just the slightest bit of hope. “He was severely wounded, but he is recovering.”

Lan Wangji lets out a long breath—one that he’s been holding since his brother had offered him a vial of chrysanthemum wine, since Lan Xichen had cupped his face in a bloody palm and smiled at him, terribly gentle and infinitely forgiving.

He has not forgotten that yet, Lan Wangji realizes with a glimmer of defiance. He inclines his head to his uncle, a nod of thanks.

“Wangji,” his uncle tries, one last time. “Will you speak to me? Whatever it is, you must know that Gusu Lan cherishes you very much. It is not too late.”

Lan Wangji lowers his gaze and steps back from the window-wall, bowing deeply to his uncle from the waist. A bow of farewell. It hurts, that he will not be able to do the same for his brother.

When the music begins again, Lan Wangji’s entire body shudders against his will, but even he cannot step between stimulus and conditioned response.

Moments later, his eyes snap open.

Another musical cultivator, even one of Lan Wangji’s caliber, might not have noticed it, but Lan Wangji had practically invented the technique, the hidden skill of weaving one song into another, of concealing a letter where all could hear.

Lan Wangji almost laughs out loud. What would you give? A question, the darkness, the impact of hitting ground.

Music wreaths around him, insistent, demanding.

Some of him, and all of myself.

He closes his eyes, smiles, and reads the letter.

-----------

My foolish, wonderful, impossible Lan—

You dastardly genius. You reckless fool. You twice-cursed, lovesick, desperate man. You thrice-blessed, breathtaking force of nature. You just couldn’t let me have the last word, could you?

I’ve much more of these sweet nothings where they came from, so expect an earful when I get to you. We are, however, on a schedule, so I’ll keep things brief.

First of all, I’m truly sorry that I took so long to get to you. Turns out resurrection comes with one hell of a headache, especially when you are brought back to life with a thousandfold increase in deathly powers. I know, I know—you did all the hard work of resurrection, and all I had to do was sit back and enjoy my ride back to the realm of the living. Thanks for the ride, by the way.

Secondly, once you finish this letter, you’ll have a five-minute window to escape. Yes, I know it’s tight, but someone did once tell me that you were one of the vaunted Jades of Lan. How did it go, again? ‘The ocean storm making landfall, the silent lash of star-stuff before a supernova?’ Five minutes is more than enough time for you to break yourself out of your own headquarters. I have faith.

Thirdly, I have been having the most outlandish thoughts lately, and no, they’re not a side effect of the resurrection. After you get out, and after we run—believe me, there’ll be no shortage of running—I was thinking of what we could do together. You are the best Gusu Lan has ever made; I am the best Yunmeng Jiang has ever trained. Suppose we joined forces, you and I. Suppose we took all of our skills in dancing the braids, in starting coups and ending revolutions, in twisting and pulling and twining and weaving the strands of time and the fabric of history until there is a place for us, somewhere within-among-between-beyond the exclusivity of our origins. Suppose, Lan Zhan, that we made a future for ourselves.

This strategy is, of course, untested. We could make fatal mistakes—send our pitiful little lives up in smoke and fire, an inkspill on the histories of our separate timelines, a warning against arrogance and disobedience and folly.

But I’ve found that, frankly, I no longer care. The risk of possible self-destruction is preferable compared to the despair of a future without you.

I think you understand how that feels.

Your five minutes will start soon, Lan Zhan—and I’ll be waiting. Be brilliant. Be bold. Come back to me.

Because this? This is how we’ll win.

Yours, in love, in life, and beyond—

Wei Ying