[ closed post: hold fast to the center ]

[lightbearinglord]

With Dark behind them, most of Lan Wangji's routine has managed to reassert itself. He awakens at mao hour and disentangles himself from his clinging cultivation partner, who tends to sprout several additional limbs in the night. He dresses and slips away for his morning meditation. He takes Bichen to the air, circles the grounds of the mansion and checks the woods for any changes beyond the known quantities of Ragnelle's nest and Magnus' camp, and runs through his sword forms. He stops in the kitchen and makes breakfast for his husband. By that point, his day can branch in several ways: he can, upon bringing the breakfast to Wei Ying, also opt to return to his bed, a perpetually tempting option. He can find Magnus and indulge in listening to him talking about whatever strikes his fancy. He can practice his qin, work on his calligraphy, retreat to the library for the endless project of educating himself, or embark on some more ambitious culinary endeavor.

Recently, however, Lan Wangji was reminded of a promise he made to someone important. Where possible, he prefers to keep his promises. So this morning, after he has sufficiently fed Wei Ying, made his apologies in the form of several lingering love-bites along his neck and shoulders, and changed his boots for house slippers, he approaches Claudius and Galahad's room. This route is one of the few persistently familiar paths that seem to exist in the ever-changing mansion.

It is early, but not so early. And Claudius did ask him for this, not once but twice. He lifts a hand and knocks crisply at the door.

Comments

[lightbearinglord]

"Mn." Lan Wangji is nearly wry in return. He considers how best to tell the next part of this tale. He promised the story of Nie Huaisang, and everything he has said so far does wind its way back to Nie Huaisang and his plans. But he's well aware of how specifically delighted Claudius becomes whenever he speaks of Wei Ying. And so: "Wei Ying still believed I hated him. He had forgotten my confession and that I fought for him. I took him back to Gusu anyway."

[wickedwit]

Claudius's eyebrows both shoot up. "Did you? What was the mood of that journey like?"

[lightbearinglord]

For a slightly embarrassed moment or two, Lan Wangji's expression, such as it is, can't quite seem to decide where to settle. "I didn't know Wei Ying had forgotten. I was certain he knew I loved him. He had also forgotten the origin of that song, and thought me fooled into seeing him as Mo Xuanyu." It seems such a simple tangle to explain now, but that set of misunderstandings carried them along for some time. "He determined that in order to escape me, he must appall me by behaving like a shameless cut-sleeve who was hopelessly attracted to Hanguang-jun. In my horror, I would release him."

[wickedwit]

Claudius laughs loud at that, just barely covering his mouth with his hand for a scrap of dignified reserve. "My, my. Wert thou horrified?" he teases, shameless. "What didst thou do?" He has a guess, which is freeze, and stare straight ahead, and not from horror.

[lightbearinglord]

In the years between Wei Ying's death and his return, Lan Wangji had changed. He knew precisely what he wanted. Although he had been looking down, flirting with the possibility of shame, he glances up at Claudius with renewed serenity. "I told him to mark his words. When he came into my bed and refused to leave it, I used my body-locking spell to keep him there until morning."

[wickedwit]

"A body-locking spell," Claudius repeats, impressed and delighted. "Thy first time sharing a bed, and already thou wert flirting with bondage."

[lightbearinglord]

"He had made his choice," Lan Wangji says, apparently unbothered, but there's a glint of self-satisfied humor in his eyes. "At the Cloud Recesses, my sect attempted to subdue the severed arm, but its resentful energy was overpowering. Uncle was injured. I settled it only with Wei Ying's help during a duet. In the aftermath, I realized that the arm was pointing us northwest, toward Qinghe."

[wickedwit]

"Qinghe," Claudius repeats, testing his knowledge of names and relations in this fascinating, interconnected story. "Where Nie Huaisang was sect leader?"

[lightbearinglord]

"Mn," Lan Wangji says, pleased with, but not surprised by, Claudius' attentiveness. "Near Xinglu Ridge, we were directed to what the people of Qinghe called the man-eating castles. It took some time to track Nie Huaisang so that he would speak with us." He pauses, just for a beat, thinking of Nie Huaisang and Wei Ying's reunion with all its dizzying layers of deception. "The castles were kept by the Nie clan to house the clan's sabers, whose violent natures persisted even after their wielders' deaths."

[wickedwit]

"Like a family crypt," Claudius ventures, envisioning the crowned sarcophagi at Roskilde Cathedral, each a monument to a past life and reign, many of them clutching swords in their stone hands. "Man-eating is quite descriptive. Were these sabers dangerous?"

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji nods. Family crypt is an apt description, despite the absence of any Nie family members in the castles themselves. "The saber spirits demanded continuous blood and battle. The Nie clan sealed them away and collected corpses, ones on the verge of turning fierce, to appease them. Any interloper who destroyed those corpses would become their replacement."

[wickedwit]

"Quite dangerous," Claudius confirms, rapt. "What did you do?"

[lightbearinglord]

"Wei Ying and I extracted his nephew from the walls of one of the castles." And not a moment too soon. "He had acquired a curse mark from within them. When I left in pursuit of Nie Huaisang, Wei Ying took the curse mark onto himself." Lan Wangji says this part just a little darkly, the way he can never be entirely unruffled about anything that involves Wei Ying sacrificing himself for another. "The arm in our possession reacted violently to the mark. We surmised that Wei Ying's nephew must have been in the presence of the arm's corresponding leg."

[wickedwit]

Wei Wuxian does seem to be in the habit of sacrificing himself for family members, whether giving up a golden core or taking on a curse mark. "Fascinating," Claudius remarks. "A sort of sympathetic magic. Like calls to like. Was that why the arm had led thee to Qinghe?"

[lightbearinglord]

Again, Lan Wangji nods. "The body wanted to reconstitute itself. Within those walls, we found both of its legs. Once we had them, it shifted course and pointed us to Yueyang instead."

[wickedwit]

It's a puzzle, which delights Claudius -- that it's a puzzle with body parts doesn't put him off at all. Anatomical books always mesmerized him. Even on the battlefield, it was envisioning those pages and diagrams that carried him through his first amputation. "The next arm, I suppose. Or something else?" A head? A torso?

[lightbearinglord]

"The torso, within the cemetery of the massacred Yueyang Chang clan. It was not until Yi City, where we encountered corpse poison, several of my junior disciples, and Xue Yang, the cultivator who exterminated Yueyang Chang, that I located the second arm." Explaining Xue Yang in his entirety would take an entire additional story.

[wickedwit]

It was the torso. Even hearing the story, there's a satisfaction in feeling the pieces come together, across a long journey (which Lan Wangji neatly elides). "From Qinghe to Yueyang to Yi City. The pieces sound quite deliberately scattered, as though to make the reassembly more difficult. Did you have any sense of what would happen, once they were united?"

[lightbearinglord]

"Only that it would be a fiercer corpse than any we had seen." Excepting, perhaps, Wen Qionglin, but the Ghost General was docile enough by then, and very forgiving of Lan Wangji's tendency to drunkenly shove him aside in pursuit of time with Wei Ying. "Before we could locate the head, it reassembled itself. Wei Ying led it away from the juniors. Xiongzhang had joined us. He subdued it with me, and realized that he recognized it." Here, Lan Wangji obligingly pauses so that Claudius may try his hand at guessing the corpse's identity.

[wickedwit]

Claudius considers the cast of characters. Naturally, it would have to be someone already dead before this particular leg¹ of the story began. There was a veritable cascade of deaths and inheritances, between Qinghe Nie and Lanling Jin. But the most important clue is someone Lan Xichen would recognize. Perhaps someone he was close to, all those years ago, when Lan Wangji failed to befriend Nie Huaisang.

"No," Claudius says with shock. "Not Nie Mingjue?"

¹ Heh.

[lightbearinglord]

"Nie Mingjue," Lan Wangji repeats, with another small nod of confirmation. He is surprised to find himself with just enough distance from this story to feel a little satisfaction at Claudius' apparent shock. "It was known that he had died of a qi deviation, but his corpse was powerfully resentful. Its ferocity could be explained only by a murder."

[wickedwit]

Claudius audibly gasps. Yes, he knew this was a revenge story from the beginning, but all the pieces start to come together like -- well -- like the reassembled corpse of a close friend with an unmistakable torso who died from a qi deviation. "Nie Huaisang," he says. "Nie Huaisang knew it was a murder, didn't he?"

[lightbearinglord]

"Nie Huaisang knew," Lan Wangji confirms again. "But we did not realize that until later, after Nie Mingjue's murderer had been discredited, disgraced, and then killed, too. Nie Huaisang's reputation cloaked him well."

[wickedwit]

“Who was it? Thou hast me on the edge of my seat,” Claudius says, as though he wouldn’t be inching towards it regardless. He’s given up that straight posture to lean eagerly forward.

[lightbearinglord]

Lan Wangji can hardly restrain himself from a fleeting look of affection at Claudius' eagerness. He is, of course, still sitting as straight as a brush, and he does return to some more overt somberness as he answers. "Wei Ying knew it. Xiongzhang was reluctant to believe. He and Jin Guangyao had been intimate friends since the Sunshot Campaign."