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Lan Xichen woke to frantic voices calling his name loud enough to wake all of Cloud Recesses. He threw the previous day’s outer robe on over his sleeping robe and tied it hastily, summoning his sword to his side. He slid his door open in time to see three disciples come clattering up the stairs. They skidded to a halt, as though they hadn’t expected him to be awake, despite their shouts.
He waved his hand to shush them, choosing not to remind them of the rules they were breaking. These were senior disciples; if they’d come running to him, they’d decided it was more important. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
And they all started speaking at the same time.
“Zewu Jun—“
“The northwest storage room—“
“Hanguang Jun—“
Not a single one of them got a full sentence out, but it was enough. Lan Xichen sprinted past them, heedless of decorum and honestly not even sure if he’d closed the door behind him. He didn’t care.
Fortunately, the only people who saw Lan Xichen running pell-mell through Cloud Recesses well after curfew were a pair of pale-faced, wide-eyed juniors waiting at the storage room doors; everyone else either hadn’t woken up or had wisely decided to wait inside their rooms until an official alert was called.
The younger of the two had his hand on the hilt of his sword, but Lan Xichen didn’t think he’d have known what to do with it if he’d drawn it. Face Hanguang Jun? Even in his state, with thirty-three slowly healing lash marks on his back, he was more than a match if pressed into a fight.
The two of them let out audible sighs of relief when they realized who it was.
“Where is he?” Lan Xichen asked.
“Inside,” the one holding his sword’s hilt said. “He set off the wards when he broke in, but none of us dare face him—”
He cut off, seeming to go paler at the realization of what he’d almost said. Lan Xichen didn’t need him to say it.
Like this. None of us dare face him like this. Shamed for what he’d done for Wei Wuxian, dangerous for what he’d done to the elders, but lost most of all. Nobody knew what to do with their Hanguang Jun when his jade mask cracked and he was lost and alone.
A crash echoed from the storage room and the wrecked remains of a crate tumbled through the door; the juniors flinched away.
“Go,” Lan Xichen said. “If you see anyone, tell them to return to their beds.”
They bowed their acknowledgement, but Lan Xichen was already past them, stepping over detritus flung from boxes—robes beyond repair, wooden and metal practice swords, old bows, and other things that he couldn’t quite make out in the dim moonlight.
The moon did enough of its work to reveal his brother on his knees in the middle of the room. His normally proud shoulders and rigid spine were bent. His hair hung lank and loose down his back and fell forward around his face. He had one hand fisted in the hair near his temple. And now that Lan Xichen had stepped inside, he could hear a sound too quiet to breach the walls, but one that had grown horribly familiar the last years.
A broken, tortured, inhuman keening in the face of the kind of loss that Xichen couldn’t imagine. Couldn’t begin to imagine. He didn’t know what it was to lose someone who was more than your other half. The sound made the hairs on the back of his neck and his arms stand on end. He shivered.
Silently thanking the strict Lan guidelines that required all candles to be kept in the same place in every building, Lan Xichen lit a single candle with hardly a moment’s thought.
Parts of the store room had been ransacked, but there was no pattern to it. It was as though his brother had found one likely section and torn it apart, then found another and went to it without any thought for what was between.
And he could see his brother’s red-rimmed eyes and flecks of blood on his lips where he’d bitten down to try to bar the grief from leaving his mouth. He wasn’t crying now, but he had been recently. His cheeks were still damp. The hand near his temple was shaking as though he were straining either to release his hair or to tear it out and let it be another physical testament to his loss.
“Wangji?” Another soft, broken noise. Lan Xichen picked his way across the room and knelt at his brother’s side. “Wangji, what’s wrong?”
The question was as fraught as it was obvious. His brother, his strong, stoic, nearly perfect brother could only be so affected by one thing. One person, if he could have been called that at the end.
“Wei Ying.”
Lan Xichen had heard his brother’s anguished voice echoing across the battlefield over the sudden and baffling crush of clan member against clan member, clan leader against down his second. He remembered, could never forget, his brother’s shriek. It sounded still in Xichen’s nightmares. Worst of all in the ones where Wangji hadn’t been so shaken that all he could do was stumble away to safety and had instead followed the Yiling Laozu, his Wei Ying, over the cliff’s edge.
They’d grown up listening for one another across battlefields. They each knew their brother’s voice almost better than their own. The tides of battle—Yiling Laozu—had drawn them apart, and Lan Xichen was listening as hard as he dared for his brother shout for help or scream at a fatal wound. He’d heard the scream that meant death, but in his nightmares, the sound Wangji made as something tore him apart was only wordless agony. This was different. He was wailing for Wei Ying.
That sound of mortal hurt echoed now in Wangji’s cracked whisper.
His brother groped for something on the ground. Lan Xichen heard the clink of ceramic on stone floor, then found Wangji lifting a dark earthenware jug. He tilted his head back and poured the rest of the liquid into his mouth, letting the jar fall from suddenly lifeless hands. It dropped to the ground without so much as a tumble and cracked against the floor.
A jagged split ran up the center, rending the jug in half. For a moment, the pieces stayed where they were, teetering side to side, but gravity reasserted itself quickly enough. The halves fell away from one another, shattering into dozens of pieces on the floor. Wangji didn’t seem to notice.
The sharp scent of liquor from his brother’s breath and the droplets on the floor were a clear enough explanation for Wangji’s behavior.
“Oh, Wangji,” Lan Xichen said, at a loss for anything else he could do or say. He set his sword down at his side. “Wangji.”
Careful to avoid the lines of red staining Wangji’s white robes, he folded one arm around his brother’s shaking body and began the slow process of untangling Wangji’s fingers from his hair. Once that was done, and only a few strands of black hair stuck to his brother’s fingers, Lan Xichen gathered his younger brother fully into his arms, petting his head the way their mother had done when they were very young and distraught over some small childish thing.
As gentle as he was, he heard the sharp intake of breath when his arm brushed over the areas of raw, torn skin. He wanted to chastise Wangji. You’re meant to be recovering. If you’d asked, I would have gone to the Burial Mounds for you; I could have found A-Yuan.
He wanted to shake him. You’ve ruined your life, your reputation, any chances you had. The only reason you weren’t killed is because of our uncle—if you’d been anyone else, I’d be mourning you alone, because you’d never have been given a proper burial.
He wanted to take Wangji away from this and let him heal and mourn and grow strong again somewhere where the clan couldn’t touch him.
He’d expected Wangji to tolerate the touch for maybe five seconds at most, but he let himself stay wrapped up in Lan Xichen’s arms for maybe even up to half a minute. But in the end, Wangji shoved at his brother’s chest.
Lan Xichen let him go. It took Wangji two tries to get to his feet. The first time, he ended up crumpled right where he’d started, a hairsbreadth away from catching himself with a hand directly in the shards of broken ceramic. He managed it the second time, but he was so unsteady that Lan Xichen began to think it may have been drink rather than grief that had driven Wangji to his knees.
All his life, Lan Xichen had heard clan members and cultivators alike sing praises of Lan Wangji’s grace, his poise, his elegance.
Lan Wangji stumbled directly into a shelving unit that held practice instruments for the young disciples.
He caught his elbow on the shelf that held the guqin, sending some of them tumbling to the ground with discordant twangs. Lan Xichen winced at the sound, and then again when he heard several strings popping.
His brother didn’t seem to care. He began to dig mindlessly through the shelves, placing some things gently on the ground and letting others fall without a single thought for their relative values. He managed to clear about half the unit before something else caught his eye, and he moved further into the room.
Lan Xichen followed helplessly. He moved boxes out of his brother’s way when they threatened to trip him and caught his arm when he got tangled in his own feet. Every time he tried to slow him down, his brother shook him off and kept going.
Wangji left droplets of blood in his wake.
Lan Xichen was about to grab Wangji by the hair and hold him in place long enough to try to talk some sense into him, but Wangji pounced on a nearby crate before he had the chance.
He tore the lid off and began searching through it, slurring and mumbling to himself as he emptied out its contents. “It has to be here. It has to be. Has to be somewhere.” He paused long enough to scrub at his eyes with one hand. “Wei Ying, please.”
His voice cracked when he said Wei Wuxian’s name.
“Wangji?” Lan Xichen’s only response was a muffled sound of dismay from between his brother’s bitten-closed lips. He took a few steps closer and turned Wangji gently by the elbow. He searched his brother’s eyes for anything that might give him a hint at what to do. He’d never felt so helpless. “Brother, tell me. What are you looking for?”
“A flute.”
They were kept in a chest only a few feet away from the crate his brother had begun to dismantle. Lan Xichen urged his brother to sit on an unopened box, holding him in place when he tried to lunge clumsily toward something else that caught his eye, possibly having already forgotten their exchange.
“Wangji, sit, please. Let your xiongzhang help.”
Wangji crumpled in on himself, but stayed still. Lan Xichen popped the chest open with one eye still on his brother and dug through the instruments, briefly grateful that he’d gotten here before Wangji. These were the good flutes, all finely made and master crafted, to be selected by the disciples when their skills had grown enough that they were able to be trusted with something of such value.
He finally found the one he’d been searching for. It was made of white jade with silver etchings chasing their way down the body, twisting into the Lan clouds at the far end. He pressed the instrument into his brother’s hand and sat near him.
Wangji looked at it for a long moment, fingers tracing the pattern and alighting gently on the holes to some melody only he knew. The blank expression on his face twisted suddenly into something ugly and furious. He turned and threw the flute toward the far wall with all of his strength. Something cracked.
He knew what flute his brother was looking for, but it was gone. Lost with Wei Wuxian’s body at the base of a cliff at the Nightless City. Jiang Cheng had led the search party, desperate to assuage his guilt and fear and rage, although Lan Xichen hadn’t known whether the man had wanted to find his brother’s broken body or if he wanted him still clinging to life. And whether Jiang Cheng would have killed him if he had still been alive.
“It’s gone, Wangji,” Lan Xichen said as gently as he could. “You know it’s gone. We searched for days, and we found only bones.”
“A thousand instruments and there’s nothing here!” Wangji kicked at the corner of a nearby crate, grimacing when the pain wormed its way through the haze of alcohol to register in his mind.
“I know.”
“You don’t know!” Wangji stood, no more sober than a few minutes ago, but far more determined to put some distance between them. Lan Xichen let him move away before he stood up and began looking for the flute to give Wangji some space. “You can’t know. You can’t know this.” Wangji’s voice thickened like he was fighting off tears. “I don’t want you to ever know this.”
Lan Xichen swallowed against the hot rush of tears to his eyes. To buy himself time to blink them away, he crouched to pick up the flute and examine the damage. It would still make music, and an expert player could probably even make it sound almost unbroken, but it would never be the same again. The sound of shifting swords caught Lan Xichen’s attention, and he glanced up to see what his brother was doing.
Few of the store rooms in Cloud Recesses were locked while only clan was present, but those that stayed locked were kept that way for a reason. The reason the northwest store room was always kept locked and warded was bundled in a back corner of the room. Ugly metal rods that heated to burning with just a touch of spiritual power.
Wangji held one in his hand. As Lan Xichen watched, the sun-shaped brand glowed a gentle dark red. He couldn’t understand the horror growing under his skin, what his unconscious mind had already realized, until the brand flared cherry bright.
Lan Xichen dropped the flute as his brother brushed his robe off his left shoulder. It stuck to his back, held in place by fresh rivulets of blood he could see forming with his brother’s every movement.
“Wangji, no—”
The sickening scent of burning flesh filled the room. Wangji screamed and screamed, but he didn’t pull the brand away. Lan Xichen was at his side without knowing he had moved, ripping the iron away and throwing it behind him.
He cradled his brother in his arms as they sank to the ground and rocked him back and forth. “Wangji? A-Zhan, no. A-Zhan!”
The branding irons needed so little strength to heat, and Wangji was so strong. Lan Xichen hovered his hand above the burn, unsure of what to do. He knew he should at least try to ease the pain, but the younger man was barely conscious. If he had been so willing to press the brand to his skin and mark himself as Wei Wuxian had been, Lan Xichen wasn’t sure what he would do if he returned to full consciousness.
He was saved by a disciple drawn by the noise peering in the door. “Zewu Jun, is everything—”
“Get my uncle. Bring him to my home.”
The disciple gaped, but took off running. Lan Xichen gathered his brother in his arms. He weighed next to nothing, despite having gone fully limp. Lan Xichen managed to avoid running across Cloud Recesses only because Wangji couldn’t afford any more attention drawn to him, but every steady step was a struggle.
He stood above his bed, his brother in his arms. He couldn’t lay his brother on his back, not while he was bleeding. But he couldn’t lay him on his stomach with the new burn. He eventually managed to settle Wangji on his side, bending his knees to try to keep him in place. It mostly worked.
Lan Qiren arrived not long after, a deep frown on his face. The frown faded to shock when he saw Lan Xichen, and it took him a moment to realize that his robes were stained with his brother’s blood. Lan Xichen didn’t bother to explain, opening his brother’s robes enough for Lan Qiren to see the angry red brand on Wangji’s chest.
His uncle’s lips tightened in anger, but he set about helping Lan Xichen to tend to the wound. The brand didn’t seem to want to heal. It felt as if Wangji’s unconscious body was rejecting their attempts to help, but between the two of them, they were able to reduce much of the swelling. There was nothing they could do about the brand itself or the scarring that would come, but at least the pain associated with the swelling would be gone when Wangji woke up.
The wounds on Wangji’s back were left alone. There was nothing they could do to heal them, and Lan Qiren wouldn’t have allowed it even if there were.
“I will summon some disciples to move him to Jingshi—” Lan Qiren began.
“No.”
Lan Qiren’s eyebrows raised. “No?”
“No,” Lan Xichen repeated. “A-Zhan is all I have left, and I will watch over him.” A bit of a low blow, maybe, but since he was going for it, he might as well go all the way. “And A-Yuan must be allowed to stay as a full member of our family.”
“You’re ordering me to let him stay?”
“A-Yuan is all he has, Uncle. I know you never liked Wei Wuxian. Right now, I don’t like him much myself. I hate him. But look at Wangji.” They both looked down at Wangji’s sleeping form. Once they’d finished with the brand, they’d moved him to his stomach. He hadn’t moved since then, but his breathing had steadied. “It’s like he’s lost half of himself. Taking A-Yuan away just because of what the Qishan Wen clan did…You haven’t seen Wangji with him. It’s the only time I see life in his eyes. My brother is dying, and I can’t just let him. I won’t let him.”
He doesn’t need to remind Lan Qiren that even Nie Mingjue and A-Yao together wouldn’t be enough to save Lan Xichen if Wangji died and he could have done something to save him. That guilt would rip him apart before he could ever try to recover. It wouldn’t matter if he wanted to recover.
Lan Qiren was silent for a long, long while, his eyes fixed on Wangji’s face. He sighed. “The child can stay. Let me know when he wakes.”
Lan Xichen tended the wounds on his brother’s back and checked his vitals one last time before he settled down to sleep on a cot delivered after his uncle had gone. He kissed the top of Wangji’s head and smoothed his hair. “I love you, little brother.”