Chapter Text
Lan Wangji is greeted at the foot of the mountain by two lady dolls. They sway in the wind, paper-light, with bright red circles on their cheeks and painted-on smiles. One of them approaches him in an odd, floating gait and points at his guqin. Then, she makes an odd rattling noise that shakes her head like a bobblehead toy.
Confused, Lan Wangji stares at her, before she points at the guqin again. He unslings it from his back but then hesitates when she places her paper arms out.
The paper arms form a flat surface, like a table. Lan Wangji realizes with a pang of discomfort that she intends to take his instrument away.
“No,” he says. It comes out sounding a little hesitant, so he clears his throat and tries again, more firmly. “No, I’d like to keep this, please.”
The doll bobbles again, this time a little more insistently.
“This is mine,” Lan Wangji tries to explain to it. To her? He’s not sure that he’s ever seen a creature like this before.
In certain cities, paper effigies in the form of human women are often constructed to follow their masters into the next life. They are burned in a funeral pyre, and the richer households sometimes even designate certain ones to be handmaidens, wagon drivers, kitchen maids, or other useful servants. This one has a youthful appearance and a thin smile, but no other distinguishing features, so Lan Wangji has no way of telling where she was made.
The doll moves toward him, and the painted smile, the smiling eyes, and the strange gait combine to make Lan Wangji just uncomfortable enough to move back.
He doesn’t want to find it intimidating. It’s just one of Wei Ying’s creations, he tells himself.
Then the doll’s mouth stretches open into a gaping black hole, and it screeches. An awful sound comes out from the hollow interior of the doll, loud enough to ring throughout the entire mountain.
Lan Wangji flinches back from the shrill, high-pitched sound.
Instantly, black tendrils bloom from the cracked earth like twisted vines. They cover the foot of the mountain with writhing shadows that seem to reach up all the way from the barrier stones to the sky. The sky darkens, and for a moment, Lan Wangji sees the illusion flicker, revealing mountains of bones and ash.
A cold chill rips through him as the doll reaches out for him again. This time, its paper arms have sharpened into folded talons at the ends.
In the next instant, however, Wei Wuxian suddenly appears out of nowhere, barreling into sight past the screen of shadows.
“Sorry!” he yelps, waving his arms until the shadows dissipate like smoke. The scenery flickers again, returning to a normal, barren street and some withered, wintry trees. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t expect that to be so loud.”
The doll is still screaming, her jaw dropping inhumanly low. Her eyes have become pools of black ink, hollow and endless.
Wei Wuxian pats the doll gently on her shoulder. Instantly, the screaming stops. Slowly, her mouth closes shut. She seems to go lifeless somehow. The pale white of her face loses some of its lively sheen, and the red spots on her face go a little more flat.
Wei Wuxian, dressed in his dark red-and-black robes, doesn’t look anything like the newly minted Emperor of the cultivation realm. Instead, with that guilty look in his eyes and the panicked smile he is sending Lan Wangji’s way, he looks every bit a schoolboy caught red-handed doing something he shouldn’t be.
Lan Wangji stares at him, suddenly feeling disoriented and off-kilter. He had spent much of the last week’s journey wondering if he had accidentally fallen asleep and woken up in some kind of alternate dimension. Nothing makes sense, not the war, the demands, the summons, anything. He doesn’t know why Wei Wuxian would suddenly declare himself to be Emperor like this. He can’t understand why Jiang Cheng, of all people, would be calling for Wei Wuxian’s head. He had half-wondered if Wei Wuxian had been imprisoned, somehow, and if there was someone else sending out correspondences in his name. Otherwise, why would he be here?
But at the same time, seeing Wei Wuxian alive like this, he is so relieved that he doesn’t know what to think.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji says, more than a little stunned. “What are you doing here?”
“Why, receiving guests, of course!” Wei Wuxian pats the doll again in a slightly reassuring gesture. He smiles wanly at Lan Wangji. “I haven’t forgotten all of my manners, you know.”
As he speaks, the painted lady hunches down a little more. She folds her paper hands neatly in front of her and goes utterly still.
“Something you brought must have triggered an alarm,” Wei Wuxian says, still patting the doll a little awkwardly. “It must have been - ah! It’s your guqin, Lan Zhan. I’m sorry I didn’t mention it earlier. Weapons are prohibited here.”
Lan Wangji clutches the strap of his guqin. “This isn’t a weapon,” he says.
A flash of pain crosses Wei Wuxian’s expression. Lan Wangji knows it’s a lie as soon as the words fall out of his mouth. It is a weapon, especially in his hands. But why take it from him? Lan Wangji has never once turned this weapon on Wei Wuxian, not with malicious intent.
“It’s just for music,” he says.
“No music,” Wei Wuxian says with a tone of finality. He smiles apologetically at Lan Wangji. “I’m sorry.”
Lan Wangji stares at him, at a loss for words.
For the first time since coming here, he is keenly aware of his status as a prisoner and not a guest. On the deserted path up to the foot of the mountain, he had been able to pretend. Maybe this was all just one of Wei Wuxian’s games. Maybe he was just lonely, and this was his way of getting social calls. But now, facing him directly, it’s clear that reality is far more cruel.
“This is no different from what Wen Ruohan did,” he finally says, his voice flat.
It’s the wrong thing to say.
Wei Wuxian rarely gets angry. In fact, Wei Wuxian almost never gets angry. Lan Wangji has only seen it a few times before, during the war. Back then, it took genocide and the death of nearly everyone he loved. Now, it only seems to take a couple of words.
“So you think I’m the same as him?”
Lan Wangji watches Wei Wuxian go as cold as a corpse. His heart aches as if he had been stabbed.
He has been angry at Wei Wuxian before. He has even hated Wei Wuxian before, before he knew what he was really feeling. But whenever Lan Wangji gets mad, he is only ever met with a smile and a joke. Why is it that, when their positions are reversed, he can’t think of anything to say?
Wei Wuxian looks away from him. His whole demeanor has changed. Just like one of those dolls, he has become pale and lifeless and distant.
“I suppose you aren’t wrong,” Wei Wuxian says. “From your point of view, we’re all tyrants, aren’t we?”
Lan Wangji swallows. He wants to deny it, but the facts are clearly laid out: Both Wei Wuxian and Wen Ruohan had sought control over the cultivation world. Both of them had committed war crimes in order to achieve their goals. Both of them even had seats of power in some of the most protected fortresses in the world.
“I don’t want you to end up like him,” Lan Wangji says helplessly. He has watched Wei Wuxian take one step after another down this dark path, and he has never been able to say the right thing. Somewhere along the way, he had lost the ability to change anything about Wei Wuxian’s behavior. Somewhere along the way, he suspects, he had just given up. He had just stood by, silent, and stopped thinking of the right things to say. It’s too late for him to start now.
So instead he silently offers up his guqin in a formal surrender.
He had once traveled on the road for a month with nothing more than the clothes on his back and this instrument in his hands, asking every ghost he came across for Wei Wuxian’s whereabouts. It hadn’t helped him much back then, and it probably wouldn’t help him now. Still, it feels wrong to be giving it away.
Wei Wuxian reaches out for him but hesitates halfway.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you didn’t mean it like that.”
His fingers land on the guqin instead and settle against the polished wood as if he can’t decide to take it or push it away.
“It won’t be for long,” he says reluctantly. “Just until - until the world stops going mad. Once it’s safe.”
Lan Wangji knows that Wei Wuxian is being unrealistic.
The rest of the cultivation world will never forgive anyone from the Wen clan, not now, and not ever. Like bodies after a battle, their sins piled up one after another until the whole battlefield was cursed. First, they had backed Wen Ruohan into one of the worst tyrants the world had ever seen. Then, the capture of Wen Qing triggered one of the worst massacres the Nightless City had ever seen.
“When do you think that will happen?” Lan Wangji asks gently.
Wei Wuxian plucks idly at a string. For the first time since coming here, Lan Wangji notices the scars on his hands. There are burns on his palms, ridged and darker than the skin around it. His breath catches in his throat.
Wei Wuxian has been using an iron amulet, probably around the size of his palm, so often that the backlash has started to harm his body. Clearly, there is no price Wei Wuxian would not pay for this fragile peace.
“When the sun falls out of the sky, I guess,” he says with a bitter smile. “Or when I kill the whole world. Whichever comes first.”