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The siege of the Burial Mounds was successful. Wei Ying…is dead.
As soon as the tears that those words had brought dried, Lan Wangji knew what he was going to do. Perhaps even earlier than that, the second after dead passed Xichen’s lips in a whisper, he knew where they would lead them.
It was good fortune Bichen rested so close to his bed. Lan Wangji did not trust himself to have the strength to cross the entire Jingshi.
Yet despite his wounds and his weakness—or perhaps because of the desperation they spurred—none of it stopped his sword from lifting him into the night air and spiriting him swiftly away from Cloud Recesses.
The pain cracked along the lines of reopened scabs, but it didn’t matter. He had been living with it for three months now. Flying always brought with it the chill of higher altitudes, but Lan Wangji was born among winter clouds. Not even inadequate coverage nor blood loss made it worth noticing.
He bled through his bandages. He bled through the thin underrobe he managed to pull around himself. If it flew even farther than that and fell to the ground below in crimson droplets, he did not turn to watch them go.
His focus on his destination was unassailable. It needed to be, or else he would not have been able to make the journey.
It only faltered at the end.
Lan Wangji could not truly say what had caused it. Perhaps it was the taxing of his still-replenishing spiritual reserves from flying so far so fast. Perhaps it was a sudden, particularly vicious throb of pain from his back. Perhaps it was the watery blur that clouded his vision once the black mountain came into view.
One of them must be to blame for his graceless landing.
Bichen wavered and wobbled beneath his feet. Lan Wangji didn’t have the balance to steady it or himself. Flung forward, his only saving grace was that he was only a mere few meters above the forest floor. Distantly, he heard Bichen clang to the ground somewhere behind him. It was a small mercy that he landed on his front and not his back.
His whole life, people had extolled the virtues of his refinement, his purity. His robes, his face, his eyes. Jade, untouchable and incorruptible and untainted.
The trees around him are blackened and twisted and dead. The wind sighed of ruin with every gust. Here, facedown in dirt that reeked of freshly spilled blood and still-smoldering ash, not an inch of him would go unstained, and he was glad for it.
It was more noble to feel the grime of failure and sin cling to him, rather than pretend it was so easily washed away as everyone else did.
The pain wracked him in jarring, jagged waves. Lan Wangji counted them with each ragged breath, and with what strength that left him with, he shouted.
“Wei Ying! Wei Ying!”
His bloodied and broken back would not have borne the weight of his guqin, so he had not brought it with him. How arrogant, to think that he could call a spirit forth with his voice alone.
Though in truth, he had not been hoping for a spirit. Beneath the wild, unthinking animal of grief, his naïve heart begged that Wei Wuxian had once more proven him wrong.
“Wei Ying! Wei Ying, answer me!”
He did not know when his calls crossed the line from beckoning to lamentations, but he did know they were finally stop by a hitch in his throat, and the only sounds he made after that were hoarse sobs. He was not wearing his forehead ribbon. He did not need to be restrained.
He had not cried like this since his mother. It was a relief. It was a resignation.
The first time another cry hit his ears, he thought it was just his own sorrow echoed back at him through the trees. Then it came again, and he stopped. Listened.
They were weak and plaintive. If he had not been sat in the silence of a mass grave, he would not have heard them.
“Xian-gege! Xian-gege!”
It was the cry of a child.
The agony of forcing himself to his feet was nothing in the face of his newfound determination. With Bichen to support himself, he limped his way to a wide, gnarled tree split that had been split by lightning and peered into the hollow.
The hope he found in there wore a different face than he had sought, but he did not hesitate to sweep it into his arms regardless.
A-Yuan was small, trembling, and precious in his arms. His forehead was hot against Lan Wangji’s shoulder. When he blinked his eyes open, they were bleary and unfocused.
“Rich-gege?” His little fists clench in Lan Wangji’s robe. “Where’s Xian-gege?”
Lan Wangji held him tighter, tried to shush him. Tears mingled with bloodspots on cloud-white cotton.
A-Yuan babbled against his shoulder—for Xian-gege, for his Granny, for people Lan Wangji never learned the names of. Lan Wangji combed his hair like he was one of his rabbits until they quieted into murmurs.
“I am here,” he whispered for two little ears only. “I am here.”
He was here. Wei Wuxian was not. That injustice nearly shattered him anew, but it was the only truth the world had left him.
He was here, and so was A-Yuan.
As gently as fallen snow, he stepped onto Bichen again. A-Yuan slept fitfully on his shoulder.
The entire way back to Cloud Recesses, Lan Wangji’s arms did not slacken. Not even once.