[ Year's turn, moon shine pale like glimmer catching on fresh forge of a new sword. Empty smile until the first kill.
The cold is a simple thing, flesh-searing, wakening the mind — in a strange new world of happenstance sophistication, where every tile underfoot glistens in pale enamel. Hardness, always on ground broken away from man: no dirt, no pebble, no rivulets to tease ankle or skin. Only blinks of grey bridging strips of the whimsy concoction, 'asphalt' beneath layers of hard shoe.
Earlier, in chase of memory and ghosts, Lan Wangji learned the difference between the glide on a river's bank and the uphill battle on tiles with no give, stone flattened through artifice. No quarry tonight, not even at the year's turn. What few spirits should have been restless have already found their sleep. It extinguishes the candle of hope he didn't know he'd protected against winds of uncertainty — they served no purpose here. Not as cultivators. Not as gentlemen of the foreign land.
One task failed, the other intrinsically beyond his means to win. He does not find Wei Ying. Will does not apply to step, eyes do not trail path under command of reason. The boy of Yunmeng Jiang is barely a man: still, he has crafted his gravity pull early, and Lan Wangji accepts the lure. Three hours past the midnight bell, the air on the rooftop is warm, somehow stifling — residue of firework scattered too low. Inelegantly, he has made the rare delayed appearance, drawn to Wei Ying with a gift of the new year, voice darker than the velvet that wraps the lone wine flask he offers out.
No seating. Not yet. ]
I asked Jiang Cheng to detain you. He declined.
[ Take his wine and the truth of his confession, sip down the bitter gulps of his apology. He asked, but he is here now, pledge-bearer. More can be requested of him, but not on a night when his head's long bowed. ]
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The cold is a simple thing, flesh-searing, wakening the mind — in a strange new world of happenstance sophistication, where every tile underfoot glistens in pale enamel. Hardness, always on ground broken away from man: no dirt, no pebble, no rivulets to tease ankle or skin. Only blinks of grey bridging strips of the whimsy concoction, 'asphalt' beneath layers of hard shoe.
Earlier, in chase of memory and ghosts, Lan Wangji learned the difference between the glide on a river's bank and the uphill battle on tiles with no give, stone flattened through artifice. No quarry tonight, not even at the year's turn. What few spirits should have been restless have already found their sleep. It extinguishes the candle of hope he didn't know he'd protected against winds of uncertainty — they served no purpose here. Not as cultivators. Not as gentlemen of the foreign land.
One task failed, the other intrinsically beyond his means to win. He does not find Wei Ying. Will does not apply to step, eyes do not trail path under command of reason. The boy of Yunmeng Jiang is barely a man: still, he has crafted his gravity pull early, and Lan Wangji accepts the lure. Three hours past the midnight bell, the air on the rooftop is warm, somehow stifling — residue of firework scattered too low. Inelegantly, he has made the rare delayed appearance, drawn to Wei Ying with a gift of the new year, voice darker than the velvet that wraps the lone wine flask he offers out.
No seating. Not yet. ]
I asked Jiang Cheng to detain you. He declined.
[ Take his wine and the truth of his confession, sip down the bitter gulps of his apology. He asked, but he is here now, pledge-bearer. More can be requested of him, but not on a night when his head's long bowed. ]