Work Text:
I shall dull my spirit, conceal my ailments,
Best to dwell upon no affair.
Approach things according to their nature,
Then each gains its own fulfillment.
Be it long or short, abide only in genuineness,
Then each may be equal to its destiny.1
𓆰
Lan Zhan’s daemon is not seen. For many years she is a field mouse or a butterfly or a sticky-toed lizard clinging to his wrist under his sleeves. In the privacy of his room she is almost always a rabbit, held on his lap or in the crook of his arm, perfectly still but for the twitch of her nose. She is always prey. She is invisible to anyone who would not know better than to remark on it.
After Lan Xichen’s naming, on their last night sleeping in their uncle’s home together, his brother’s daemon strolls over to his own in the form of a lithe, long-haired cat and threatens to press their noses together. She does not flinch, but she becomes almost nothing. She shivers from a white rabbit to a brown shrew to a sliver moth; she flutters up and shields herself on the back of his neck, behind the curtain of his hair, which reaches past his shoulderblades.
“A-Zhan,” Lan Xichen says, not quite hurt.
Lan Zhan does not look at him. It has been several years since his brother’s daemon has tried to touch his own. If they speak to each other, it is not where Lan Zhan can hear it. His skin crawls with the touch of her many legs on the back of his neck.
His brother’s daemon blinks at Lan Zhan with luminous yellow eyes, then returns to Lan Xichen’s side. Lan Xichen’s hand rests on the top of her head. She looks at him, shrugs in a feline sort of way, and Lan Xichen smiles.
“She is Wuhui,” his brother says. “We thought you should be the first to know.”2
Lan Zhan’s daemon does not yet have a name. In their clan, daemons are not given milk names. His daemon is simply your heart to anyone who speaks of her, until he is given his courtesy name, brought into the world, and can give her one in turn.
Lan Zhan rises and bows to his brother, and to Wuhui, who takes the shape of a small, grey songbird and flits to Lan Xichen’s shoulder.
“Xiongzhang,” he says, quietly. “This one is honored.”
His own daemon emerges, at least. She lands on his wrist, still horrifyingly fragile.
When they were very very young, his brother’s daemon was a comfort to her. She did not speak to Wuhui, as he did not speak despite the pleading and remonstration of his elders, but they touched frequently. She would imitate her zhangjie; they would be matched. A larger cat and a smaller — two twin-sized serpents around their wrists — indistinguishable orioles perched on a windowsill. It is acceptable, still, so long as Wuhui has not settled. Lan Zhan’s daemon does not change her form now, but she does fly to the same place on his shoulder.
She has not spoken to him in days. This is a relief.
Often, he hears Lan Xichen in low conversation with his daemon. Often the daemons of his elders speak in their ears. Rarely, in the Cloud Recesses, do daemons exchange conversation in public; he does not know how often they speak in private. He knows only the name of Shufu’s daemon, and now his brother’s, and neither are garrulous.
“The honor is ours,” Lan Xichen says to him. Wuhui whistles a song on his shoulder, startlingly loud in the quiet of Lan Zhan’s room.
When they leave, Lan Zhan’s daemon shivers her shape again and again and again. She is a dozen different, vibrantly-colored birds, almost obscene against the austerity of his bedchamber. She flies across the room. She perches on the windowsill, and becomes carrion-eater after carrion-eater. She makes him look at her. She does not let him look away.
His golden core is new. It fills up his meridians, his lower dantian. She can feel it too.
That night, for the first time, she flies out of the window as a silvery-black crow. She makes it an arm’s length out into the night before their tether pulls her back.
𓆰
Some cultivators’ daemons settle as birds. It is uncommon; it is remarked upon. The stronger one’s core, Lan Zhan learns in the years before his naming, the further one may stretch a tether. He does not speak his questions. He does not want his brother to know that his own daemon flees from him, as far as she is able.
He is still young, unnamed. She is still invisible during the day. She is often a moth, as he grows older, a whisper of a breeze. She changes her color and pattern and size nearly as often as he breathes. Shufu is concerned, and does not speak of it. Xiongzhang is better at not showing his own worry.
Wuhui settles in the autumn before Lan Zhan’s naming. She arrives on Lan Xichen’s wrist one evening to dinner, covered by the leather guard he has taken to wearing as her forms have become more predictable. She has been, most often, an eagle or an osprey, but today she is smaller, more delicate. Her eyes are bright, furious red, and when she launches herself from Lan Xichen’s wrist to take a soaring turn around the high-ceilinged dining hall, the room, already silent, goes perfectly still.3
Lan Xichen is the heir to Gusu Lan. He is named and now settled; he says to the gathered sect: “She will not change again.”
In his wide sleeve, Lan Zhan’s heart is a rabbit, trembling. Her nose is wet against the heel of his hand.
She does not change her shape the next day. She is motionless in his lap as he kneels. They are both blanketed softly in snow.
There is a vulture watching them from the trees. When night falls, she is prey in its talons, held still and separate from him across the length of the room. She has learned, as he has, not to struggle.
In the black night, returned to his own bedroom, she is an owl too dark to see. She will not come inside. She flies as far as she can, until his chest hurts from holding in a cry; only then does she relent and turn back. And then she soars out again, before he truly regains himself. In between her attempts to escape she perches on the windowsill, which is scored with marks from her talons. It is a concession hard-earned; if she thinks he will touch her, she will not even take a perch to rest.
They do not speak aloud. Lan Zhan knows that Xiongzhang finds it comfortable to speak with his daemon. Shufu does as well; he hears, sometimes, their murmur in the evening.
Lan Zhan’s heart has nothing to say to him. He can feel her, inside of him; it is wordless. They understand each other.
Of course they do. He shakes his head against the urge to crawl out the window and follow her out to where she beats against the thing that holds them together. Of course she understands him. He knows exactly what she is trying to do.
𓆰
The morning he is named, he wakes feeling strange.
His daemon sleeps with him, always. She curls as a rabbit on his pillow, or a snake around his arm. She is never not there when he wakes, unless they have not truly slept. Even when she spends hours flying from him she returns and makes herself small, something easy to protect.
He is eleven now. He will be named after breakfast. She is not on his pillow, or his wrist, or his neck.
She is a great, dappled predator on his windowsill. She says: “A-Zhan.”4
He does not speak. She does not need him to.
She will never again be a moth hidden behind the curtain of his hair. He does not have a leather guard for his wrist. It does not matter. She flies above the house during his private meal with Shufu and Xiongzhang, who make habitual assumptions. She is hidden in the trees when he walks to the courtyard of the lanshi, where the ceremony is held.
He is given the name. He is given the guqin. He is still numb with horror at it when she flies to him, startling Shufu badly.
She lands on his shoulder. Her talons shred his robes and break his skin. He holds Wangji in his arms as she pins his uncle with black eyes and speaks to him for the first time, and the last:
“I will not change again.”
𓆰
They have a single moment alone that day. She watches him with one eye. He considers reaching for her, to stroke her head, and does not.
“Your name is Yuyi,” he tells her.5
She does not speak. She does not have to. He feels her, as he always has; they are seamless inside.
𓆰
Their tether grows long.
When Lan Wangji is thirteen, it is the length of Xiongzhang’s; Wuhui and Yuyi fly together a li above them, and from that distance they are almost twins again. When they surpass Xiongzhang, they do not lie, but Yuyi does not flaunt it. When they fly together, they stay together; when she flies alone, she soars across the mountain until he feels like a child again, leaning out of his window to ease some of the pressure in his chest.
She is rarely seen, still. Her name is known to him, and to Xiongzhang, and to Shufu. Despite the rules of his sect, they are spoken of. He knows this only because of the way he is looked at, so he has no basis upon which to enforce discipline. It is also, he knows, not considered gossip to speak privately with one’s own daemon.
When he is fourteen, she can fly two full li from him. This approaches the longest tether he has ever found recorded in the clan archives. He has not demonstrated this to anyone, but he suspects that Xiongzhang knows something of it.
When he is fifteen, another series of guest lectures are held.
He walks a night patrol after a week of secluded meditation, which Yuyi spent wheeling in the crisp air above the back mountain, and he meets a stranger.
Yuyi is the one who sees it. She communicates this to him, without words, from her perch on a rooftop. There is a small, nimble daemon climbing the wall. There is a boy on the roof, swinging jars of wine from his hands. The daemon darts away as they fight; Lan Wangji senses Yuyi watching her as she sprints across rooftops, as she climbs quickly and confidently and carelessly, looking behind her until —
Yuyi could have moved. She had seen the daemon coming. Lan Wangji does not feel the impact, but he feels her assessment in the aftermath, as the boy slips between buildings and disappears, seemingly careless of the stretch of his tether.
Lan Wangji is not told what the boy’s daemon says, if anything. By the time he returns to his patrol route and can glimpse Yuyi in the low light of the few lanterns on the path, she has disappeared entirely.
The next day, Lan Wangji meets Wei Wuxian and the sable draped luxuriously around his neck, her paws batting cheerfully at the ends of his hair.6 She is dark, with a ruff of fiery orange at her throat. Lan Wangji sees her without moving his eyes or his head; he heard the crowd of them approaching. Gossip is forbidden. He heard Wei Wuxian ask, and what about his daemon, and Nie Huaisang reply, oh, she’s so scary, but you probably won’t even see her.
Yuyi is perched atop the mingshi, a habitual place. She ornaments the great bell. She can see the lanshi and the main gate and the top of the steps up the mountain. She is alone.
Lan Wangji has had lessons with other sect disciples before. He knows what to expect. He had been instructed by Lan Xichen, prior to this first session in the guest lectures, that other sects did not hold to such etiquettes as the Lan. He knows this well, now — he has been on night hunts, he has descended into the world more often than he had as a child, he is not so sheltered as Nie Huaisang likes to paint him as.
But he is not prepared for —
In the library, supervising another day of Wei Wuxian’s punishments, Wei Wuxian’s daemon slinks close to him under the table.
She’s curious. Habitually. Lan Wangji has had to ask Wei Wuxian to remove her from the bookshelves a dozen times or more, which Wei Wuxian sometimes attempts seriously and sometimes does not, the two of them playing in a semi-choreographed dance that usually ends with his daemon sticking out her tongue and darting out the window up to the rooftops, claiming boredom as loudly as Wei Wuxian does. She speaks, not particularly to anyone other than him, but loud enough that Lan Wangji hears her, often.
He is only free from the sound of their twinned, eager voices when he gives into his most base frustrations and silences Wei Wuxian, which does not silence his daemon but does, at least, hold her to propriety enough that she usually slithers her way around Wei Wuxian’s neck to glare blackly at Lan Wangji and whisper in his ear while he copies.
Today Wei Wuxian is focused on his paper, though the strokes of his brush do not indicate that he is writing, and his daemon settles on her back legs in the upright posture she takes while investigating and she looks at Lan Wangji, less than an arm’s length away.
He looks back. He is too stunned not to. No other’s daemon has been this close to him, but for Wuhui, in many years. Even Shufu’s daemon keeps her distance. She is a solitary creature, uncomforting, as pristinely untouchable as the white of her plumage.
Wei Wuxian’s daemon is not. She tussles with Jiang Wanyin’s flat-footed cormorant until the both of them squawk in outrage. She pushes her pointed snout close to Nie Huaisang’s unsettling snub-nosed monkey, which only ever blinks large, placid eyes back at her. She is constantly underfoot, unless she has wriggled her way into Wei Wuxian’s clothes or his hair, or she is entirely absent, exploring the Cloud Recesses on a tether that seems, on the ground, practically endless.
“Hm,” says Wei Wuxian’s daemon.
Wei Wuxian glances up from his paper, makes a strangled noise in his throat, and drags his daemon back under the table toward him by her tail.
Later, Yuyi takes her place on the perch carved for her in the jingshi, next to the door to the back meditation garden which he has never closed. She listens to him practice Inquiry until he is satisfied with the evening’s progress. When he looks up at her, she is already looking back.
He thinks of the questions he wants to ask her — why had she allowed Wei Wuxian’s daemon to touch her? He does not know if they have spoken. He wants to know, selfishly, why she will not tell him.
She does not answer anything that he does not ask. She shakes herself, a soothing motion which comes with a single beat of her wings that sends a gust of air billowing through the sitting room. She closes her eyes, and dips her head: dismissal.
𓆰
On the flight to Caiyi, Yuyi flies with him.
This too is familiar. Lan Wangji flies apart from his brother and disciples, enough space to accommodate the powerful breadth of her wingspan as she circles him. It is always quietly exhilarating to watch the spread of her wings below his sword. She banks, arches up around him, and the very tip of one wing brushes against his arm.
Lan Wangji lands again on the ground; Yuyi does not. She soars up with Wuhui in a dizzying spiral toward the sun, and he turns his face back down before he allows himself to be caught up in watching her.
Wei Wuxian is looking at him. Lan Wangji catches it again and again as they walk through the market toward the canals. His daemon is, too, perched on his shoulder. She’d spent the flight buried inside the chest of his robes, her head only poking out once. Wei Wuxian watches him and laughs and teases, and he dangles a jar of rice wine in Lan Wangji’s face and says Lan Zhan, what are you looking at me for?
Lan Wangji bites his tongue. Xiongzhang is watching, of course. Xiongzhang meets his eye as they step onto sampans and smiles, gently encouraging. Above them, two shapes against the sun.
On the lake, Wei Wuxian’s daemon hops up and down the length of his sampan, peering at herself in the water until the ghouls come out in earnest. Then she is nothing but a lump in Wei Wuxian’s clothing, and Lan Wangji is too focused to pay any attention at all until — until —
He holds Wei Wuxian by the collar. He looks down only once, and only his practiced self-control keeps his fingers from convulsing when he sees Wei Wuxian’s daemon clinging to his shoulder, mere cun away from Lan Wangji’s fingers. Her claws dig small drops of blood into skin. Her black eyes glitter up at him. When they reach land, Lan Wangji watches from the corner of his eye as Wei Wuxian clutches her tight in his arms, her head tucked under his jaw. She, unlike Wei Wuxian, gives very little away without meaning to.
During the flight home, Yuyi passes above Lan Wangji again and again and again, her belly scraping above the point of his guan. Wei Wuxian waits until she is finally a respectable distance away before he banks over to join Lan Wangji, briefly, saying something absurd about showing off his sword tricks to redeem himself — and then he goes quiet as Yuyi veers closer. As she passes beneath them, showing off the speckled spread of her wingspan, broad enough to bridge the distance between their blades. She meets Wei Wuxian’s eye when she arcs around them. She meets his daemon’s eye too.
“Wow, Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, when she has left them once again. “I bet no one knows you’re really a show-off until they fly with you, right?”
Lan Wangji’s face burns. He is grateful that his skin does not show a blush.
𓆰
Weeks later, when Wei Wuxian has left the Cloud Recesses entirely, Lan Wangji finds himself brave enough to ask.
He is sitting in the meadow, watching the rabbits Wei Wuxian had gifted him chase each other through the grass. Yuyi stands next to him in her ungainly way, unnoticed as she is by the natural animals of the earth; even rabbits, natural prey, hop past her to nibble at the hem of Lan Wangji’s robes. He pushes one, the more boisterous of the two, away gently; he rubs his knuckles along the top of its head.
“Did you spend much time with her?” He asks. He directs it to the rabbit, so similar to how he remembers her. She is a manifestation of him, the reflection of his soul made shape to cast a shadow, but her heartbeat had been powerful under his fingertips, as real and whole as this creature’s. He has not laid hands on her deliberately in a long time. Even now, she is not close enough for him to try.
“Yes.” She is economical with her words. She will make him ask, then. He thinks of the questions he has, the wordless ache of — he cannot untangle it. It defies articulation. It takes him a long time, long enough for the second rabbit to make its reluctant approach, to nose at his hand like he might bear more vegetables.
He gathers it into his lap. He remembers Wei Wuxian’s voice, they’re chubby, right? Want them? No? Well, I suppose you wouldn’t, your daemon would eat them right up! Hey, that gives me an idea —
“Do you miss her?”
It is the coward’s choice. He knows it even as she pins him with one black eye. He wants — he wants —
He does not want a daemon who would recount to him the intricacies of conversations not meant for his ears. He would not wish her to be anything but what she is, because he has needed her so badly that he can never summon anything but furious gratitude. What he wants —
“Wangji,” she says. This is a rebuke, gentle though it is. Lan Wangji unclenches his hands from his skirts. The rabbit in his lap noses at the heel of his palm. It is also his answer: of course she does. As he misses Wei Wuxian, foolishly, like a child deprived of dinner, a feeling in his stomach so strange that it must be hunger.
He hopes, fruitlessly, that Yuyi had found something more peaceful than Lan Wangji did in her acquaintance. He wonders if she knows Wei Wuxian’s daemon’s name. If hers is known in turn.
Lan Wangji heard that from his brother: that Wuhui shared her name with Nie Mingjue’s lumbering orangutan without even asking Lan Xichen’s opinion. He was young, then; he and Yuyi were not yet named, but he had been thinking of her endlessly; he had been certain that he would know her name when he found it. He was convinced that she would never do such a thing. That she would know how dear of a betrayal it would be. He had not said as much, but Xiongzhang had seen it in him anyway.
In the end he was right about one thing: he had not so much chosen her name as discovered it.
He does not know if he was correct about her. He can see in her eye the flinty stubbornness of his own that made Shufu so furious in his childhood. Neither of them have outgrown that. What is his recourse, if she has shared her name?
Lan Wangji has none. If it is done, it is done. It cannot be changed.
𓆰
The years pass. Their tether stretches. It surpasses the farthest distance he has found recorded in the clan archives, which speaks of an elder whose daemon, after decades of secluded meditation, was seen roaming on the far edges of Gusu city.
It is not enough. She flies farther and farther, until she disappears between the mountains. And then she returns. And then she tries again.
𓆰
The first time Yuyi fights is when the Cloud Recesses burn. He does not see it, but he feels the coldness of her fury. The satisfaction when she gets the small seabird in her claws. The cultivator Lan Wangji is fighting, as he moves toward the library pavilion, shrieks and buckles; Lan Wangji gives him the mercy of a swift death.
The smoke obscures the sky. But he looks for her, when he is put on his back. When his leg is shattered.
She is there. She is unharmed. She is far, far above the vulture that circles endlessly in her shadow. She is untouchable, in a way he will never be, and he watches her until the smoke stings his eyes and he has to look away, or else betray himself before he must.
Wen Xu’s daemon is a sparrowhawk with a pink belly and yellow eyes. It watches Lan Wangji intently from the leather guard fastened over his shoulder. It rarely flies far. It whispers in Wen Xu’s ear. It looks, frequently, at the empty skies. Lan Wangji ignores how his disciples murmur to their own daemons in the night; he gives them as much privacy as he can.
Yuyi never comes within a li of Nightless City. It is one small, private satisfaction.
𓆰
It is a curse, when Lan Wangji’s leg is caught between powerful, sharp-toothed jaws, and he thinks I am going to die.
No, he feels, but it is only the echo of an echo. Yuyi is somewhere in the mountain range above them. The entrance has been sealed. The only way out is through water; she cannot reach him. But he does not want to die alone. He does not want —
He does not die. Wei Wuxian drags him out of the water on his back. There is a dark, small shape by his feet as he runs; she is there when he puts Lan Wangji down, leaning close enough that it is terrifying and infuriating all at once. The cruelty galls him. He coughs up black blood. He wishes, in what must be delirium, that he had one of his rabbits here, to curl in his lap. To press a warm, wet nose against his hand.
He cannot think of Wuhui crumbling into Dust. He cannot think of his father. He is afraid that if he ever returns he will never stop seeing the vulture in the sky. Circling. Waiting for another corpse to scavenge.
For three days they wait and gather their energy. Wei Wuxian has quiet arguments with his daemon about whether or not she will join him in the mouth of the Xuanwu. Eventually he wears her down; their tether is no issue, and he will not risk losing her down its throat. So Lan Wangji perches on an outcropping of rock with Wei Wuxian’s daemon by his boot. She has been getting closer and closer to him as the days go by.
Wei Wuxian slips into the water with barely a ripple. Lan Wangji holds the bowstrings tight. He watches. He waits.
“Lan Wangji,” a voice says.
Impossible. Unthinkable. He blinks.
“Lan Wangji,” she says again, insistent.
He thinks: at least she is not calling him Lan Zhan.
Lan Wangji looks down. Wei Wuxian’s daemon is watching him, illuminated by the talismans Wei Wuxian stuck carefully to the cave’s driest wall. Her eyes glitter in the light. She is curled around herself, as small-looking as he has ever seen her.
For days he has watched Wei Wuxian finger-comb dirt from her fur. He has seen how meticulously the two of them care for each other. He has heard her voice as often as Wei Wuxian’s own.
“Don’t let him die,” she says. It is not a command. It is a plea.
He was raised to never speak to another’s daemon. To acknowledge them in the most correct and oblique of ways. This is the same kind of sacred as the forehead ribbon: one’s self-restraint, one’s soul. But there is fear in her voice that Wei Wuxian had not shown him; not for the first time, he wishes Wei Wuxian were a poorer actor.
“I will try,” Lan Wangji replies. He keeps his voice low.
She looks away. She places her head down on her paws, ears up and alert.
For those long hours spent bleeding his life into the black water, he is aware of her at his side. Her tail thrashes in agitation. She makes small, soft noises at any hint of progress. She does not speak to him again, but when the Xuanwu is dead she runs next to him, shrieking a-Ying as loudly as he calls for Wei Wuxian. He is not dead: that is all they know.
He is not dead, but he is not well. For days Lan Wangji nurses him as well as he can, even as they both grow weaker. He focuses on what he can change. Despite its futility he does not stop reaching for Yuyi, who can give him nothing but the faintest proof of her presence. When the tunnel in the lake collapsed, he lost something. There is a veil between them. An impenetrable fog. No matter how far she has gotten from him, he has never felt this before.
Wei Wuxian’s daemon is asleep on his chest, hardly more lucid than he is, when Wei Wuxian asks the name of the song. His head is warm and heavy in Lan Wangji’s lap.
Lan Wangji answers. It will not matter what Wei Wuxian remembers if they die here. If he dies severed from his heart —
Wangji, she says to him. Present. Overwhelming. He catches: endless relief. A stone rolled aside.
He climbs out of the cave after relinquishing Wei Wuxian to Jiang Wanyin’s care. He has breathed fresh air for hardly more than a moment when she strikes him, feathers against his chest. He has never held her, not in this shape; it is ungraceful and undignified and he does not care. He is whole. He is not broken from her.
The Jiang disciples stare. Lan Wangji realizes this only after he has released her, crouching to place her gently on the sloped earth. He is embarrassed by it for no good reason; it is not as if it is unusual. Many of them have daemons on or close to them, though none nearly so large, and many more suited for the water than the skies.
In the end, it does not matter. The next time he meets any Jiang at all, all of these disciples are dead.
𓆰
Their tether grows, and grows, and does not break. Over months of searching, and war, and blood, Lan Wangji becomes aware of exactly how useful this is.
𓆰
He follows Yuyi to Wen Chao. She has not returned to him since they discovered the latest supervisory office, full of mutilated corpses; she is nothing but a speck above the trees, leading Lan Wangji and Jiang Wanyin onward. She perches next to him on the rooftop as they peer in through the window.
So it is both of them who see the man who mounts the steps. Slim and black-clad and slouched to one side to balance his weight. There is a massive, black bird on his shoulder, with a humped back and a slender neck and a wicked, cruel beak. It is both of them who see Wei Wuxian, changed entirely.7
Jiang Wanyin is appalled. Wen Chao is broken beyond recognition.
Lan Wangji’s heart has fled. She is not a rabbit to hide in his sleeves; she is not a moth to perch behind his hair. She has gone where nothing can catch her, and she has left Lan Wangji behind to face Wei Wuxian and the vulture that he has become, the vulture that hops from his shoulder to the table to Wen Chao’s bloodied, quivering sunbear and tears a strip of flesh from its throat.
He says, as powerfully as he can: Return to Gusu with me.
It is not his place. He is reminded of that. But here is the evidence: something in Wei Wuxian has changed. His daemon stares with dead black eyes. Lan Wangji lurches backward to avoid being struck by her wing when she abandons her quarry with blood on her beak and returns to her place on Wei Wuxian’s shoulder. His outer robe is shredded. There are wounds scored into his skin. He does not notice, or he does not care.
Wei Wuxian has returned with a deviant cultivation path and a shifted daemon. Lan Wangji is afraid, and he is furious: with Wei Wuxian, who puts distance between them with perfect, edged words; with Wen Chao, who weeps and begs; with himself, for his weakness, for his failure of restraint.
Lan Wangji is dismissed. He will not stay where he is not wanted. But he turns his back, and he feels the eyes of a scavenger watching him.
Yuyi will not come. She flies; she pulls against their tether blindly, heedless of the pain they share.
Lan Wangji stands with his face tipped up to the sky. He lets her go.
𓆰
Wei Wuxian’s daemon does not fly.
She becomes notorious quickly. He is a demon; he is the terror of the Jiangnan front; he is the master of death itself, with the carrion bird who never strays more than an arm’s length away. Lan Wangji hears that she killed the daemon of an assassin sent to Wei Wuxian’s tent. Lan Wangji hears that she killed the assassin herself. Lan Wangji hears that she stood on the assassin’s shoulder as Wei Wuxian marched the corpse to join his army’s ranks.
There is little substance to the rumors. Gossip is forbidden. But the precepts are useless to his disciples; they are worthless to anyone not of Gusu Lan. There is no way to prevent them from spreading; he is unable to stop himself from hearing them.
When they find themselves on the same front, Lan Wangji follows Wei Wuxian to graveyards and battlefields, where his daemon flaps ungracefully from his shoulder and hops among the graves. He is berated, he is fought with. Wei Wuxian’s daemon looks at him, and she does not speak. She never speaks. She never laughs. Lan Wangji remembers her voice, how inescapable it was; he remembers her tether. She does not fly.
“Keep your daemon away from me,” Wei Wuxian says, once, in the aftermath of a battle. His fist trembles around his flute.
Lan Wangji is stunned silent. He does not question Yuyi about where she flies; they speak more than they ever have, yet never of anything that is not the war. She scouts behind Wen lines, she warns him of coming attacks. When he flies she is a heavy shadow above him; when he fights she keeps her eyes on his back. She strikes the daemons of Wen cultivators from above. She has been watching Wei Wuxian, he learns, from the trees.
He cannot ask her to stay away. The next time she comes to him, landing nearly silent on a branch above his head, he asks her why.
For a moment he thinks she will not answer, because he does not need her to. He knows why; it is why he asks Wei Wuxian to return with him to Gusu, over and over, no matter that he knows the reply will never change. She does not look at him. She shifts, as if she will take wing again. If she did, he would not blame her.
“She will not fly with me,” she says.
Lan Wangji stares at the dirt beneath his boots. He does not close his eyes.
He wants to know if she has asked. If she has spoken in front of Wei Wuxian, as Wei Wuxian’s daemon has spoken in front of him.
They spent long days in the cave together, as Wei Wuxian lost everything but the most basic grasp of his mental faculties to the fever. She spoke sometimes, aloud, to an invisible listener who was not Lan Wangji. She said, curled soft and sleek against Wei Wuxian’s branded chest, you are not alone, and it had been kind, and it had been cruel.
The war goes on. Men and women die. Men and women rise and fight again, veins crawled black, the flute calling them away from the great wheel.
If Yuyi watches Wei Wuxian still, she does not tell him what she sees.
𓆰
The war, as it must, ends. Lan Wangji does not recognize the world on the other side of it. He returns to Gusu, to the Cloud Recesses, and does not know where he fits. Yuyi soars to far peaks that he cannot see, which he has never visited. The sect is divided: those who had fought, those who had stayed, and those who had died. Their corpses were returned by Wei Wuxian; in Qishan they were laid out in rows and buried in groups. Lan Wangji played over them until his fingers stung, but did not bleed. His calluses have grown thick. His tether has stretched impossibly long, which is observed and remarked upon when he is not there to hear.
After the war, people keep their daemons close. They are used to tactical defense. Lan Wangji walks among them alone; he kneels alone. He and Yuyi do not speak. He does not know what to say.
𓆰
He will never forget the shape of Wei Wuxian underneath him. The slender strength of his wrists. The taste of his mouth, the sensation of it; the moment where Wei Wuxian surrenders to him, and allows himself to be kissed.
They are more alone than they have ever been. Yuyi observes his hunts from above. Wei Wuxian’s daemon is — gone. She is not on his shoulder. For a moment when he withdraws, every inch of him burning, he thinks that she has deigned, finally, to take flight. That if he looks up he will find them together; they will be two overlapping shadows in the sky.
Wei Wuxian’s neck is flushed pink. His mouth is open. Lan Wangji sees the soft wet dip of his tongue.
He releases Wei Wuxian’s wrists. He steps back once. Twice.
There is a vulture watching him from the tree above them. Her eyes are black and dead.
He runs.
𓆰
If Wei Wuxian’s daemon tells him what she saw, he does not mention it: a kindness that Lan Wangji does not deserve. He is unable to speak of it, even to make an apology; he cannot even admit what he has done to Yuyi. He has never kept a secret from her before. He does not know if he succeeds.
Wei Wuxian refuses him again in Yunmeng, and Lan Wangji cannot understand why he will not admit the harm his path is doing to him. Wei Wuxian stalks from the banquet at Golden Carp Tower, and then he is the enemy of the world. Lan Wangji fails to hold him, and he slips from between his fingers.
The next time he sees Wei Wuxian, he has sought him out. There was a night hunt, not close; he flew to Yiling with Yuyi below his sword, not guiding, not following. They are still seamless. It is blind, foolish hope that leads him to the marketplace, and it is blind, foolish luck that finds him close, once again, to Wei Wuxian’s laughter.
The laughter, even at his expense, is a relief. Wei Wuxian plucks the child from Lan Wangji’s leg and balances him on the hip opposite to the shoulder his daemon perches on; the boy protests being taken from Lan Wangji, but his daemon takes the form of a small grey squirrel and chatters happily close to Wei Wuxian’s ear. Throughout the meal, Wen Yuan’s daemon shifts: she is a mouse in his hair, she is a kitten in his lap, she is a sticky salamander on his wrist. Once, just briefly, she becomes a juvenile marten with a yellow throat, and Wei Wuxian looks away.
While they are in the teahouse, Yuyi waits on the roof. When they leave it, in a confused scramble, she takes to the sky seconds before Lan Wangji pulls Wei Wuxian onto his sword, careful of the boy, careful of his daemon.
For a moment he is confused, terribly: Wei Wuxian’s daemon stays on his shoulder as they rise. Her face is close to his. Her eyes, this close, are bright and alive. That difference does nothing to quell the fear that rises, which he extinguishes.
And then — Lan Wangji keeps firm control over his sword as she leaps from Wei Wuxian’s shoulder in a push that halts their momentum. They are already above the town. She is enormous — nearly twice Yuyi’s wingspan, nearly twice her weight. Wei Wuxian’s spine must have a terrible bow to it from bearing her as often as he does; Lan Wangji, with his hands around Wei Wuxian’s waist, resists the urge to check.
“Oh,” Wei Wuxian says. He looks below them.
Yuyi is there. Wei Wuxian’s daemon is there. They are flying together, a handspan below Bichen’s blade, their wings almost brushing. There is a sensation in Lan Wangji’s chest that is like nothing he has ever felt before.
It cannot last. When they land, Yuyi spirals back up, away from the gnarled trees and resentment-drenched forest; Wei Wuxian’s daemon lands on his shoulder again, talons digging viciously into the half-shredded leather guard strapped over his robe. There is no time to ask why she joins him, ungainly, in battle; there is time only for action. Lan Wangji acts. Wei Wuxian acts. Wen Qionglin is returned to himself, somehow, but he is dead. He has no daemon to temper his soul. For a single, disconcerting moment, Lan Wangji wonders if this is how he is observed: unnaturally and entirely alone.
That evening, Wei Wuxian walks him down the mountain. They have spoken civilly, or as close as they have gotten in years, all day. Lan Wangji has observed him in this place, with these people; he has seen the place Wei Wuxian has found for them to build the semblance of a life. Wei Wuxian asks him what other option he has, and Lan Wangji does not have an answer.
“We can’t all be as free as that,” says Wei Wuxian, and he looks up. Lan Wangji follows his gaze.
There is Yuyi, a black spot against the darkening sky.
“I believe everything is still within my ability to control.” Wei Wuxian is lucid; he speaks clearly. The vulture on his shoulder is silent. Lan Wangji remembers, years ago, the way she said his name.
He could ask Yuyi how it felt to fly together, close enough to touch. He could tell Wei Wuxian what he wants, and what he has done.
Lan Wangji dips his chin. He closes his eyes.
He understands, now, what Wei Wuxian has chosen, even if he cannot fathom why. There is nothing he can say; he cannot bear to hear Wei Wuxian tell him goodbye.
𓆰
A year later, Wen Qionglin and Wen Qing submit themselves to Jin Guangshan’s authority. Lan Wangji speaks against their execution, and he is dismissed. The yellow throated marten at Wen Qing’s side stares at him, teeth bared. Lan Wangji makes himself watch as Wen Qionglin is reduced to ashes, as Wen Qing’s marten dissolves into Dust. It is the least he can do. It is nothing.
He leaves his brother without a word. He follows Yuyi through the skies to Yiling, and traces Wei Wuxian’s path back to Qishan in a nightmarish echo of the war. Wei Wuxian travels quickly. He leaves panic and horror in his wake. Lan Wangji stands above a man with shattered legs, and is told of a demon with a monster on his shoulder, its wings blotting out the sun.
𓆰
Lan Wangji is too late. He will never forget this, either.
𓆰
In the cave at the foot of the burial mounds, he speaks. Too late, he knows; far too late. He had raised Wei Wuxian onto his sword and he has poured energy into him and he has shredded his own robes for bandages and it is not enough. It is never enough. Wei Wuxian is insensate on the stone. His daemon stands on his chest, pricking her talons into skin. She is bloodied too; she had been clamped in the jaws of a stranger’s daemon, a massive hound, when Yuyi struck from above to free her. For a moment Lan Wangji thought she did not have the strength to fly.
She managed it somehow. Not alone. Every time her wing gave out, every time she listed to the side, Yuyi moved beneath her to nudge her back on course. Yuyi spoke, when the two of them landed, a hard crash into the earth. She said a name.
Yuyi has not left. She will not abandon them again to darkness. She perches by the entrance; she watches the skies.
Please, Lan Wangji says, and more. He cannot listen as he lays himself bare. Wei Wuxian says nothing, until Lan Wangji’s grip convulses on his wrist, giving as much as he has through the tips of his fingers. The vulture on his chest beats her wings, and Lan Wangji flings himself back to avoid her. He will not perform this last violation. He will not.
“Go away,” Wei Wuxian tells him, delirious. Again and again and again. And Lan Wangji refuses.
Yuyi comes to him when Lan Xichen arrives. He has brought more of their clan than Lan Wangji hoped. They crowd into the cave, all of them wary, many of them still filthy from the massacre.
“Wangji,” says his uncle. “Stop this. He is not worth —”
He is too furious to continue. Lan Wangji wonders what he has stopped himself from saying. It does not matter; he does not agree. Wei Wuxian is worth his reputation. Wei Wuxian is worth his honor. Wei Wuxian is worth his life, but none of the clan members assembled will take it from him. Not here.
Lan Wangji is exhausted. He is worn. He has nearly depleted himself in the last days.
He curls his fingers around Bichen’s hilt. Yuyi flies to his shoulder. Her talons score into his skin. His clan members shift, uncertain, uneasy. He is tired of waiting.
“Come,” Lan Wangji instructs.
He meets them when they do.
𓆰
Lan Wangji submits himself for punishment. There is Xiongzhang, who tells him his sentence. There is Shufu, who watches him in silence. There is Yuyi, who spends her last hours of freedom in the thin, pale sky. He does not sleep. He walks himself to the appointed courtyard. He removes his layers, one at a time, and folds them, and places himself on his knees.
He knows Xiongzhang has arrived by the sound of wings. Wuhui takes flight in a burst of cold air; he looks up, an instinct borne of the years they have spent together.
In the time it takes for those seniors recovered enough to attend to gather, Wuhui pursues Yuyi through the skies. Lan Wangji keeps his head tipped up to watch them. Again and again Wuhui pulls against her tether. Again and again she falls back. Above her, a li or more, Yuyi circles, and circles, and circles. He is a child leaning out of his window, the ledge digging into his stomach. He is a man on his knees.
“Are you ready?” Lan Xichen asks.
“Yes, Zewu-jun.”
But for a moment, an endless age, there is nothing. Lan Wangji realizes that he is still watching the sky. He can no longer see her. There is only his brother’s daemon, who cannot help either of them.
He tips his chin down. He looks at the smooth, dark wood. He has chosen, he reminds himself. He accepts what is necessary.
“Begin,” he instructs.
This pain is simple. At first. Lan Wangji counts; he endures. He forces his body not to anticipate the next blow, or the next, or the next. There is only the sound and the impact. There is care in the placement. This is intentional. It is instructional. He is meant to be learning something.
He accepts the loss of dignity. He falls. He catches himself. He falls again.
Again. Again. There is a white hot whistling in his ears. He counts. He counts.
He is meant to be learning something.
He begins to scream. He begins to think he will die here under the lash. If he does, he will learn something. There is wind folding around him. Somewhere above him a piece of his soul has torn into a dive, an endless drop. He counts. He screams. He no longer knows which of them is on their knees and which of them is plummeting through cold, empty air.
Thirty, he says. The fall. Thirty-one, he says. The impact.
I am going to die, he says, or does not. He is on his stomach. There is a great bird in front of him, watching him with black and terrible eyes.
“No,” says his heart.
She has never lied to him.
Thirty-two.
Nothing.
𓆰
For the first time in three years, Lan Wangji opens the door to the jingshi.
This is what he was told: three years of seclusion. Three years without the sky. An elder had suggested jesses, to keep her down, to which Xiongzhang had replied: that will not be necessary.
It was not. Yuyi has stayed for three years. The farthest she has been from him is across the room. In the months he spent, after the Burial Mounds, on his stomach, delirious from infection, she was closer than that.
They have learned to live with it. They have had to. Lan Wangji stands, trembling from the effort, at his open door.
When was the last time she spoke?
To the child. Lan Yuan. The boy had been feverish. His daemon had been shivering smaller and smaller, a cricket clutched in his fist. Yuyi had said: you are safe, and Lan Wangji had said nothing at all. His jaw had been locked around pain.
The time before that —
Remembering it is a wound that has not yet closed. Xiongzhang at his bedside. The smell of blood, which would not abate for two full years. Wei Wuxian is dead, said Xiongzhang, and when he left Yuyi lifted her head from her chest.
Xinxiu, she cried. A name he had never been told.8
The door is open. He can leave, if he has the strength.
For a moment they wait together. It is spring again. He can see, in the distance, the peaks she had once circled.
Yuyi does not speak. She flaps her wings. She leaves her perch.
Like a child, who has no other choice, Lan Wangji follows.
𓆰
She flies quickly. She does not hesitate. She leaves no room for doubt.
Lan Wangji watches her until she vanishes through the morning mist.
They are seamless inside.
𓆰
Ten years later, he meets the eyes of a demonic cultivator on a mountain. The man’s face is caked in powder. His daemon is a huddled mass under his robes. He looks back with bright, intelligent eyes.
Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi make their bows and vanish up the trail, followed by a heron with a miniscule songbird fluttering along at its shoulder. They had explained Mo Xuanyu’s circumstance to him; Lan Jingyi called him a lunatic, and Lan Sizhui disagreed.
Lan Wangji sees no lunacy in those eyes. He sees no fear.
Lan Wangji nods, and Mo Xuanyu returns it: a man acknowledging an equal.
There is no need for him to stay, so he takes his leave. Yuyi watches from the trees, and does not follow him down.
𓆰
There is a song on the wind. There is a flute in a stranger’s hand. There is hope, pounding, crushing, terrifying, in Lan Wangji’s chest.
There is no longer a daemon huddled in the stranger’s robes. He walks backward, luring Wen Qionglin away from the panicked cultivators attempting to destroy him. He plays a song Lan Wangji had hummed, once, and then never again.
Lan Wangji catches his wrist. He meets those bright, intelligent eyes.
Wei Wuxian grabs him back. He has dropped the flute. He is hot, his palm is sweating; he is alive.
There is movement in the trees. There is Yuyi, perched on a low branch, a sable with a fiery ruff tucked in close against her wing.
𓆰
