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Dark. Is what Xie Lian would say if he were ever asked what it’s like to be trapped within a coffin. Cramped, stale, and terrifying, he could go on for hours about what it was like if the thought of it all didn’t make him want to retch and hide away from the world.
So he didn’t, and nobody ever asked because the only person who knew he had ever been encased within a coffin, buried alive, was the seventeen year old boy he taught.
The boy who did it with reasons Xie Lian would never condemn or hate him for, because that was how he wanted it. So he let the boy believe in lies and assumptions because the truth would, well.. Xie Lian could not say he knew for sure what the truth would do to the boy.
It does not mean being in a coffin was ever an experience he’d wish upon anyone who wasn't him. Because Xie Lian deserved it, didn’t he?
-
“Please! Let me out please! I can’t breathe! It hurts! ” Were the words Xie Lian had cried out over and over within the suffocating darkness of the coffins. Coffins, plural, because his student had deemed him too dangerous to simply bury in one coffin.
No, he had been buried in three, each one sturdier than the last, he knew this because however much time had passed the first coffin had begun rotting. On top of Xie Lian.
He knew the first layer was wood, and had known as he desperately clawed at the side and roof, desperate to get out even as his movements only exacerbated the pain from the stake in his heart. The stake that pinned him to the decaying bottom of his punishment.
Over time the maggots and worms within the earth had slowly begun squirming their way in through the cracks and rotted parts of the coffin. Those little creatures always looking for nourishment and what was better than a person who could never die? A banished god with shackles that kept him alive through everything, the shackles that only healed him on the brink of death.
Even so, the maggots had never made it very far when burrowing into the festering wounds he had. No, Rouye, his lone companion in this torture would spend hours gently detaching each little bug from his wounds.
At first, the silk band had been hesitant the first time the maggots got in, scared of hurting its master in trying to dislodge them, but Xie Lian had long grown used to the pain. Eventually Rouye had learned it was better to finish it quickly than to draw it out by being afraid of hurting its master even a little.
Even with Rouye’s best efforts there were always more and more eager bugs, so eventually a few had slipped past Rouye, at that point there was nothing the silk band could do. So Xie Lian simply had to get used to the sensation of maggots crawling beneath his skin, slowly eating away at him.
-
Despite Rouye’s origins, Xie Lian could never resent the silk band, how could he? Rouye was the last thing left alive that cared about him after all, the band acted like little more than a small child. Eager to please in any way, and Xie Lian always had always had a soft spot for children.
The silk band was probably the only reason Xie Lian didn’t become more than a potential snack for the creatures in the dirt of the earth.
Rouye had kept him as clean as he could be, had gently rubbed the crusted up blood away from the stake. Had always noticed when Xie Lian had gotten desperate enough to scratch and claw at his confines roughly enough that the skin of his fingers had been worn down to fleshy pulps.
Had gently wrapped itself around those destroyed fingers when Xie Lian had finally calmed from his panic, falling back into disassociation. Patiently waited until his fingers had healed before unwrapping itself even as it became so caked with blood it could barely bend like a proper piece of silk should.
So Xie Lian in turn adored Rouye, tried to treat it the best he could in the circumstances, gently praises and affirmations. Because Rouye was the last thing that kept him sane in those coffins..
-
The second layer was a metal of some kind, he realized when the final parts of the wooden coffin had been eaten away at. Gratefully accepting the little extra space he’d been given as his knuckles weakly rapped against the side of the second layer of his hell.
It could’ve been iron, it could’ve been copper, Xie Lian wouldn't have been able to tell, it was still so dark . All he could rely on was his other senses because sight had long become obsolete in the utter darkness in the coffins.
His sense of smell had been skewed for awhile now, months maybe? Xie Lian couldn’t exactly tell how long it had been, could only guess based on the state of decay he could feel around him. It could’ve been 20, 30, hell 40 years. He didn’t know.
Everything smelled like stale blood, his mouth had long since gone dry because the water in the soils never reached him down here. So dry he could no longer gently thank Rouye for all it had done to help him. Couldn’t express gratitude as the silk band poked and prodded at the edges of the lid, trying to free him.
When the first layer had finally rotted away Xie Lian had finally been able to raise his upper body with help from Rouye. Even though he nearly instantly bumped his head harshly on the lid of the metal coffin he could’ve cried with relief. His chest was no longer pinned to the bottom of the coffin, he could move, even if it was only a few inches in his weakened state.
He could’ve cried. But his body had no water left to shed, only blood . So Xie Lian did cry, but he didn’t cry distantly familiar warm tears, no, he cried blood .
-
Xie Lian wonders how many times he ‘died’ within that coffin. He’d have these blips in his hazy memory, blank spaces he couldn’t fill in no matter how hard he thought about it.
He wonders if he died in those gaps in his memory, maybe he did, that first time he’d come back into hazy awareness by a frightened Rouye desperately poking and prodding at him. The band had only calmed after he’d gently pet it for as long as he could with his ever-diminishing strength
In a way, Xie Lian was grateful for those times his brain became hazy as those cursed shackles upon his neck and ankle struggled to keep him alive in the circumstances. It meant he didn’t feel the maggots beneath his skin or the sharp pangs of hunger as his stomach cried out for anything to fill it.
He may have just gone crazy without those brief reprieves from the world around him, though, he may already be crazy, he isn’t quite sure anymore.
-
Xie Lian could
breathe
. Wait, no, why can he breathe, why can he feel cool, crisp air enter his lungs? That isn’t right. He’s in the coffins isn’t he?
All at once the hazy blur in his mind retreated, his senses assaulting him with so many sensations he’d long since forgotten.
The fresh smell of greenery and grass not tainted with the coppery smell of blood, the feeling of the wind rustling his clothes, caressing his face for the first time in what could’ve been a century.
Except, he couldn’t feel anything beneath his feet, he couldn’t feel the ground, why can’t he feel the ground?
Oh, he was floating, he was floating above the ground!?
Within moments he was glancing below himself wildly, astonished to see his feet hovering above the ground by a few inches, above the long-since settled dirt he was buried beneath. Then Xie Lian realized something.
Rouye! Where was Rouye!? Was the silk band still in the coffin? Within moments of the though Xie Lian was digging desperately at the ground below him after a moments of struggling to adjust to the weightless feeling he was encased in.
Strangely enough Xie Lian wasn’t weak like he expected to be, no, he had quite a bit of energy in him as he dug and dug until finally his fingers scratched at something solid. Revealing a rusted and rotten coffin.
Originally he’d flinched back away from the sight of his prison but he took a deep breath and slowly pried the lid off of the third layer of the coffin trio. The coppery glint of the second layer glared up at him as Rouye darted out from one of the many rusty holes in the lid, instantly flitting around Xie Lian worriedly.
“Rouye! I’m okay, I'm okay, calm down..” He finally said under ceaseless mother-henning from the silk band, the first words he’d spoken in what was likely years. It felt good, to breathe, to feel and smell, and to see.
Oh god to finally be able to see, and view the world around him even if it was just dirt and grass. So caught up in the sensations he’d been deprived of he never noticed how cold his skin had become to the touch, how he couldn’t feel his own heart beat beneath his chest.
Rouye did, and while it startled Xie Lian to realize his heart hadn’t been beating, or now that he realized it, hadn’t even been breathing, he couldn’t find it in himself to care. Not if it meant he was finally free, able to feel and see and hear and breathe .
-
Xie Lian died that day in the coffin, without a soul left to mourn his once warm body. Xie Lian was dead but he didn’t mind, not in the slightest, he simply adjusted as he always did. In some ways it made life easier, he didn’t need to drink or eat, would never experience the pangs of hunger or thirst but for a sense of normalcy he did.
Though strangely enough unless he wasn’t actively thinking about it he always hovered just a few inches off of the ground, startling villagers as he seemed to glide through rather than walk. So he made an effort to stay put firmly on the ground when he stumbled into villages.
That doesn’t mean he hadn’t gotten curious to see if maybe he could float higher? He could. It was freeing in a way, unbound from the ground and simply floating along the wind with Rouye, playing silly little games even as the unpredictability of the wind left him tangled in tree branches more than once.
He took his own death in stride, afterall, wasn’t death just another form of immortality? At least, that’s what he thought, as he’d startled to realize the ever-present shackles on his neck and ankle were gone, leaving smooth unblemished skin behind.
He’d felt so free in the feeling of the spiritual energy brimming beneath his ghostly skin, so full of energy even as he followed the tug in his gut to incinerate his corpse until it was nothing but ash. He felt joyous as he freely used the spiritual energy that had been building in his now corpse, beneath the shackles that bound him.
And soon he felt complete as he prodded his own ashes into the form of a silvery shackle upon his exposed neck. A reminder of what he once was, of what he’d done, and as hope for the future. So with a shackle that did not bind him and spiritual energy brimming beneath his skin Xie Lian did what he did best and wandered.
Xie Lian was a ghost, but he’d never felt more alive.