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There is a broken thing at the heart of the Burial Mounds.
The dead welcome it. The dead are kind. Let us help, they say. Every cruel thought you’ve ever had, let us help make them real.
They rebuild the shattered remains of the body that was Wei Wuxian. One of them gives up a femur. Another repairs the hole in his skull with woven grass and mud. Hand upon bony hand helps to fill the hollow of his chest cavity with grave dirt and shards of bone, patted into place with tender care. The wind whistles down his throat and he breathes.
~
Death cannot satisfy the dead. He leaves a trail of corpses in his wake as he pursues his prey, and still the dead surround him with starving mouths. Once, his prey strikes back, a lucky hit. The gash in his skin bleeds shadows and is soon silted over.
To touch the living is to plunge his hand into an open flame. There is something about these two, though, the purple and the white, something on the distant edge of memory. The one in purple holds him and the chill of the grave recedes a little as he burns.
They are saying something, over and over. A name? His name?
He has a name.
It doesn’t help. Now he knows his debt is not just to the dead, but to these people too. He lets them lead him away, feed him and bathe him. His thoughts are strung out, a scatter of starlings on the breeze.
They bring so many tubs of water, but the dirt will not wash off.
~
War comes and no one is who they once were.
At first it helps, being around his family, people who had known him once. Their touches remind him where his body ends; help him gather the parts of himself that are drifting. But he begins to notice things. A streak of blood and dust on his sister’s cheek after she hugs him. The way dirt builds up under his brother’s nails if they spend too much time together. They are at war and war is a filthy business, but he doesn’t think he imagines the way thornbushes angle their points to snare the robes of anyone who gets too close to him. He owes the earth a debt—who knows what interest he’ll be charged?
So he keeps his distance and his thoughts grow wilder.
When he plays Chenqing, he feels something unknot inside him. Not a release, but an unravelling, great tattered strips of himself flapping loose in the wind that follows him everywhere now. He stands on high and commands the dead, a tangled silk skein against a bloodstained sky, harder every day to wind back in to himself.
He keeps his distance, but he cannot avoid his newfound shadow in white, Lan Zhan, Lan Wangji, always there to parry the blow meant for Wei Wuxian’s heart.
He hasn’t told him there’s no point to it. That a Wen sword is as likely to spill dried grass from him as blood. That the dead will come to repair him, no matter what.
Let everyone believe that they have their Wei Ying back for a little while longer.
~
The war ends and things get worse.
Death does not satisfy the dead, but it interests them. Now, there is nothing to distract them from Wei Wuxian himself. They comb fleshless fingers through his hair, his thoughts, and whisper suggestions in the soughing of the trees. The body that once was his wanders alone along the riverbanks of Yunmeng, and what remains of Wei Wuxian watches from a distance.
Let us help, the dead say as he nocks an arrow on Phoenix Mountain. Let us help, they say again in the rain at Qiongqi Way, and Wei Wuxian’s body smiles until its lips crack.
Yes, he says.
After, when the guards’ bodies lie in sodden heaps and the surviving Wens huddle together a little way off, the dead say, Come home.
~
The Burial Mounds have been awaiting his return. Paths open up before his feet and trees knot their branches together behind them as the miserable little cavalcade passes by. The Burial Mounds take the Wens into their heart and settle around them with no trace to show their passage.
For the first time since he crawled out of this place all those months ago, Wei Wuxian feels rooted. His mistake is to imagine this helps.
The Wens exclaim over their good fortune in finding tillable land in a place like this and Wei Wuxian smiles, a bare showing of teeth. What do they think fertilises this barren soil?
He has not dreamed since the last time he was here, but now he stretches out at night and feels the creep of insects, the slow strangulation of roots throughout his flesh. He tries to remember the taste of fruit, but his mouth is always full of dust these days.
The next day the foraging party returns with a bag of apples. They found them, they report with sidelong looks, in a circle of hands upthrust through the soil, an apple on each palm. No one even hesitates to eat them.
The Burial Mounds are so pleased to have their creation back. They offer courting gifts: the apples. Scrawny rodents in bone cages, found at dawn on the edge of the Wens’ camp. When Fourth Uncle slices open his hand on a jagged spur of rock, his blood vanishes into the stone and bindweed springs from his flesh to stitch the wound shut. He does not scream. Grandmother butchers the squirrels for stew. Everyone, it seems, has decided to accept the strange bargain that grants them this life-in-death.
Wei Wuxian knows this is simply the continuation of an agreement made long ago. He has laid claim to the Wens and the Burial Mounds have laid claim to him. They will all be one and the same in the dirt eventually.
Wen Ning wakes up and Wei Wuxian thinks at first that this is due to his own cleverness—though his thoughts are more often a snarl of branches or a choke of weeds than anything that might pass for human these days.
The dead love this new creation just as much as their first. Wisps of shadow twine through Wen Ning’s hair, delicate and full of want. They have plugged the hole where the lure flag pierced him with river pebbles, tamped down with clay.
Stay, the dead whisper, whenever someone attempts to leave. You are here. You are ours. Only Wen Qing can cut her way through the surrounding thickets to visit Yiling now.
Far too late, Wei Wuxian realises that the dead have tired of their bargain. What is one patchwork ex-cultivator worth against the bright spark of life that is little Wen Yuan, after all?
They are mine, he tries to insist, breathing it out in skirling winter winds. You are ours, the Burial Mounds agree.
I am yours, not them.
All, all, comes the answer, the cry of some distant beast.
It is hard to collect his thoughts these days. There are some he left buried in the hollow space beneath the tree roots; others silted down at the bottom of a muddy stream; still more that have tangled with a cloud around some far-off peak. Still, he tries. This will work only once.
Wen Ning comes with him. Wei Wuxian is not sure he wants a witness for this, but when he leaves, Wen Ning is at his side. Death has only made him more stubborn.
The distance they walk has no measure. Neither of them tire like the living, and so they walk, far enough that the hills cast unfamiliar shadows and the moon has changed above them.
This may not work, all that is left of Wei Wuxian tells what remains of Wen Ning. I’m sorry.
He lies down and the dirt flows over him, its cloying taste familiar, a homecoming. He feels an insect beginning to burrow somewhere, before he lets slip the careful barriers he’s placed on his thoughts and gives himself over to the land.
When Wen Ning leaves, his footsteps scrape at Wei Wuxian’s skin, but he is not Wei Wuxian any longer and he is everything in this place.
Gradually, he turns his focus outwards. There is much work to be done on the borders of himself; why trouble about the little knot of life at his heart?
~
When the threat arrives, it comes in a swarm of golden sparks and shrill voices carried on the wind. Tiger seal, says one spark. Ghost path, another. Take it from his corpse, says a third.
The dead want and want and hunger, but that is as nothing compared to this burning, living greed.
Some of the gold sparks cut a way through the thorn trees that ring this land. Others soon follow. The Burial Mounds have not thought about that little core of warmth at the heart of them since the ground was frozen; now the sky burns hot and bronze overhead. The scurrying sparks do not know where they are heading, but some will find what they seek by accident, no doubt.
That cannot be permitted. This land belongs to those whose bones line its paths, whose blood feeds its plants. These greedy, scared little fireflies have no place here.
The Burial Mounds shrug. The sparks blink out.
~
The ground freezes again and thaws, and with the spring comes a figure in white, picking its way along a path that was not there yesterday. A crow wheels above, watching, as the figure reaches the thornbush barrier and goes to its knees. The ground is little more than sucking mud here, but the figure gives no indication that it has noticed.
It speaks but its words are torn to shreds on the thorns and the wind. Only a name remains, given mocking echo by the carrion bird overhead.
That name again, and the figure presses its— presses his fingers into the cold mud at his side, and the Burial Mounds remember.
A gust of wind smooths the figure’s hair back from his forehead and he startles. Brings one filth-encrusted hand to his cheek as though tracing a caress. Glares out into the gathering dark and calls that name a third time.
So little remains to be called back, but on a distant hillside, far below the earth, something shifts and stirs.