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A “fierce” murdered one, a “malice” could murder a sect, a “wrath” could slaughter an entire city. As for the most fearsome “supremes,” once they were born into this world, they were destined to bring ruin to nations and people and complete disorder everywhere.
- Heaven Official’s Blessing, Seven Seas translation, Chapter 3: The Ghost Takes a Bride, the Crown Prince Mounts the Bridal Sedan
A young man falls and falls and falls. He does not survive the impact with the ground.
Oblivious to this fact, he gets up again.
It isn’t until he’s watching Wen Chao eat his own flesh that Wei Wuxian realizes he hasn’t had a bite to eat himself in months. He pushes down the terrible clawing fear at what that might mean and throws himself fully into the war that has recently been dubbed the Sunshot Campaign.
It’s a good thing, he thinks, that his new skills are perfectly suited for this.
It’s a bad thing, he realizes, that as the war progresses he discovers he might have enough power to shoot the real sun from the sky.
It’s a terrifying thing, he knows, that no one on either side could stop him.
What Lan Wangji understands is this:
Something has happened to Wei Ying.
This something most likely happened during the three months following the attack on Lotus Pier, the months during which Wei Ying was missing. Months that Wei Ying refuses to speak about.
After what happened, Wei Ying is powerful. So, so powerful. His methods are unorthodox, but he uses them to do things it would take entire armies of ordinary cultivators to accomplish. He does these things in the service of those who would likely die attempting such feats themselves.
The Sunshot Campaign would have so many more losses on the side of the allied clans without the strength of the man they are now calling the Light-devouring Lord.
No civilian or righteous cultivator has ever been harmed by the army of the dead that fights under Wei Ying’s command.
What Lan Wangji fears is this:
Whatever happened to Wei Ying, it has left him with no choice but to follow the path he now walks.
The world will turn against their Light-devourer when the sun they struggle against finally sets.
What Lan Wangji has always known is this:
Wei Ying is a good man.
In the ashes of the lives of an entire branch of the Wen family, Lan Wangji finds a small altar tucked away in a half-destroyed shrine behind a burnt out home. On the altar are two statues. The Lan do not pray to these particular deities, but Lan Wangji still recognizes them: the Scrap Immortal and the Red-Robed Ghost King.
It is a small surprise that this portion of the Wen Clan of Qishan revere such an odd and such an old pair of gods.
It is a much larger surprise that, right there on the altar just in front of the statues, a living, breathing baby sleeps peacefully.
Lan Wangji prays. His prayer is answered.
Wen Ruohan dies at the hands of his own nephew, not quite six months after the allied campaign against him officially began.
This nephew, Wen Qionglin, is the first fierce corpse the world has ever seen that appears to possess its own intelligence.
It’s also the first fierce corpse anyone has ever seen cry.
It was necessary for things to end this way. That doesn’t make Wei Wuxian any happier about it. He watches Wen Ning’s stiff face crumple and his body shake with sobs it is incapable of producing the tears for. He thinks about how nice it would still be if he was capable of at least that much himself. Maybe he can physically, maybe he could even summon real tears for it, but for a very long time now he has experienced his emotions as too far away for any of that.
A voice comes from behind him, quiet in the aftermath of what hasn’t actually been much of a battle at all. An assassination, led by an army of corpses and resentful miasma and a timid, gentle man people have begun calling the Ghost General.
“Wei Ying.”
He turns around and—oh. At least he’s still capable of genuinely smiling. He’s not too far removed from that. “Lan Zhan. Hi.”
He hasn’t seen Lan Zhan much over the past few months. This has, for the most part, been on purpose. Wei Wuxian hasn’t wanted the shining Second Jade of Lan, the newly titled Light-bearing Lord, tainted with the stain of his darkness. The Light-bearing Lord and the Light-devouring Lord don’t seem like a very good friendship match. They probably hadn’t been, even before this war gave them those titles, but it hadn’t stopped Wei Wuxian from trying. He thinks that he should probably stop trying now.
Lan Zhan looks tired and pale and far too beautiful to be standing in this dark throne room full of corpses. His light eyes flick between Wei Wuxian and Wen Ning, an unspoken question in them.
“It’s my fault,” Wei Wuxian confirms, even though that might not be the question Lan Zan is asking. “Wen Ruohan found out what he and his sister did to help me and then he had their entire branch of the clan killed. They… I was too late, getting there. Wen Qing’s body had already been burnt. But I was in time to reanimate him and. Well.” He spreads his hands, palms up, indicating the entire scene around them. The gesture feels a little helpless. A little desperate. What is there to even say about all this? It’s something everyone surely must already know. There is barely any sense in repeating it. “I made sure he was able to avenge them.”
“Wei Ying did a good thing,” Lan Zhan says. He sounds confident. So sure of himself.
All of a sudden, Wei Wuxian’s smile feels a little helpless too. Helpless and terribly brittle. “You shouldn’t say that. I might believe it.”
“Wei Ying did a good thing,” Lan Zhan says again.
His hands grasp Wei Wuxian’s own.
No living person has touched Wei Wuxian since Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu dropped him from the sky.
The months he spent in the Burial Mounds may be hazy and incomplete in his memories, but in the months since, Wei Wuxian has figured out what must have happened. What he must be now. He’s been very careful to keep anyone else from finding out, with the sole exception of Wen Ning who cannot help but intuitively know. Undeath is a horrible burden they bear together. The condemnation of the living who no longer need them to fight a war on their behalf will be their burden to bear together as well.
But. But.
Somehow, for some reason, the horror and revulsion he expects from Lan Zhan doesn’t come. He looks sad, yet in that sadness there isn’t even a little bit of surprise.
Wei Wuxian tries to jerk his hands away but Lan Zhan holds on tight.
“Don’t,” Wei Wuxian begs. “Don’t.”
Hands still clasped together, Lan Zhan takes a step closer. “You will leave,” he says, and it both is and isn’t surprising how he seems to already know Wei Wuxian’s plans. “You will leave, and I want… Take me with you. When you leave, take me with you.”
Wei Wuxian doesn’t respond to that. He will leave, yes, but he doesn’t know where he will be going. He doesn’t know if it would even be possible for Lan Zhan to go with him, even if his clan will allow it. And besides… “I heard you have a wife to get back to, don’t you? A son?”
“A son,” Lan Zhan confirms, a surprise dagger to Wei Wuxian’s unbeating heart, “but no wife.”
It’s easy to pull on an affectation of scandalized shock, mostly because he is shocked. Playing up that shock is the safest way to disguise the rest of what he feels, a hurt he doesn’t understand. “No wife? Lan Zhan, the scandal!” He does not know how to navigate this new knowledge that Lan Zhan is a father.
“Mn,” replies Lan Zhan. Wei Wuxian doesn’t know why Lan Zhan seems so satisfied about this. “You should meet him. When Qionglin should meet him as well.”
“I,” he begins, puzzled. He stops, starts again: “Why?”
“Come with me to meet him and I will explain.”
In the aftermath of Wen Ruohan’s death, it takes hours for anyone to realize that Wei Wuxian and Wen Qionglin have disappeared. It takes even longer for anyone to notice that Lan Wangji is nowhere to be found.
Another night and half of the next day pass before someone discovers that Lan Yuan, son of Lan Wangji, and his nursemaid are missing from Lan Wangji’s secluded home. No one has passed through the main gates of the Cloud Recesses. In the home, nothing is out of place and no items are missing.
It is as though all of them have simply vanished.
In a well-kept but modest shrine in a faraway village, a red-robed young man is finishing sweeping the floor. Just outside, a white-robed cultivator sits on the grass. He gently pries a crumpled leaf from the fist of the baby sitting in his lap.
“Ah, please don’t eat that! Your baba will be very upset with me if I let you eat leaves. How about a rattle toy, hmm?”
The red-robed young man leans against the shrine’s open doorway, a handsome smile on his pale face. “I don’t think that kid’s father knows how to be upset with someone like you, gege,” he says.
These two men are of course the Red-Robed Ghost King and the Scrap Immortal themselves. This is their oldest shrine, and one that the ghost king only reluctantly allowed to be dedicated to them both. It has been here for so long that most who stop to pray assume the village came up around it instead of the other way around. Very few humans know the importance this shrine holds in the hearts of both gods and ghosts; the god and ghost worshipped here both prefer things that way.
Xie Lian makes a sound of dismay as the baby rejects the rattle toy and tries to push himself out of the lap he sits in to get his hands on more greenery.
“Bah!” the baby says, resolute.
Hua Cheng strides forward, stepping down onto the grass. As he walks, his form changes: he grows taller and looks older as silver accessories jingle softly and an eyepatch covers his right eye. He drops to one knee in front of the god and the baby and offers a straw butterfly to the child. “Why not play with this?”
One of Wen Yuan’s little hands reaches out for the toy, his quest for delicious but forbidden grass all but forgotten.
Filled with both relief and dismay, Xie Lian deflates. “San Lang, how did you do that?”
“I can teach gege to weave straw butterflies if he wants,” says Hua Cheng, deliberately misunderstanding the question, “but I am surprised he doesn’t know.”
“How did you distract him? He’s been ignoring his toys since he woke up from his nap.”
“Maybe he can tell that his family is finally nearly here.”
Xie Lian’s delighted gasp is soft enough to not distract Wen Yuan. “Together?”
“En,” Hua Cheng confirms. “Can gege not feel it?”
“I suppose I’m not used to having a subordinate official,” Xie Lian says. “I didn’t recognize it at all.”
In the hundreds of years since their reunion, the uncomplicated joy that Xie Lian’s smile always brings to Hua Cheng has not diminished even the smallest amount. He basks in it, is warmed by it, is fulfilled by it. “I’m glad you chose the junior official you did,” he says, partly because it is true and partly because he wants Xie Lian’s to smile more.
From Qishan, they travel south.
Lan Zhan’s hand is warm in Wei Wuxian’s own. He does not let go, even in the places where the road narrows and it might be easier to walk single-file down the path. Wen Ning walks as their shadow.
Wei Wuxian has not truly needed to breathe since he fell to the ground in the Burial Mounds all those months ago. Even so, he finds the reflex action of it easier the further they are from what they have left in Nightless City. It is as though with every step a pressure eases, a heavy weight pried free from where it had settled between his lungs.
Walking for great distances is no struggle for him, now that he is what he has become. Unsurprisingly, it is no struggle for Wen Ning either.
They have been on the road for hours and hours before he realizes that Lan Zhan has not needed to stop their small traveling party even once for a break. He has paused to take a meal or to drink any water.
Wei Wuxian stops in his tracks.
It’s a little funny, he thinks in a nearly hysterical sort of way, how both Lan Zhan and Wen Ning stop with him. They all do it in the same step. Wen Ning follows his commands, but… Surely Lan Zhan doesn’t pay that much attention to him, to be able to anticipate his movements like that.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, the first words he’s spoken on this entire walk, “you should rest.”
Lan Zhan shakes his head. “No need yet. There is an inn in the next village; we will stop there.”
“I don’t think the two of us will be very welcome in an in,” Wei Wuxian says. “You can stop and we’ll… We’ll wait outside, or something. In the woods outside of town.”
“You will be welcome,” insists Lan Zhan, just as stubborn and noble and kindhearted as Wei Wuxian remembers from when they were young. Or, he realizes, from when they were younger. They are still young, all three of them. None of them are even twenty years old.
Amazing, what the young have done to shape the war.
He wants to tell Lan Zhan that he’s sure they won’t be, not in any reputable establishment. He doesn’t want to even allude to an admission of what he has become out loud, in case there is some small way that Lan Zhan has not yet figured it out. It would be very difficult for him not to, with the way he has been sending probing little bits of his seemingly endless spiritual energy into the black void that is Wei Wuxian through the connection of their joined hands. But. Maybe. Just in case.
He thinks he probably wants to hold Lan Zhan’s hand for longer than just this walk.
He knows he wants Lan Zhan to like him, even despite every reason there is that no one—especially no one like Lan Zhan, all righteous and pure and good—should like him.
What Wei Wuxian wants and what he gets are seldom the same thing.
What he says is:
“I think it’s time for the explanation you promised.”
Relief floods Lan Wangji when he hears Wei Ying speak again, easily superseding the personal anxiety of what Wei Ying has used those words to ask for. He realized a year ago, trapped together in that cave as Wei Ying’s fever rose and rose, that he would gladly answer a hundred uncomfortable questions if only it means Wei Ying is able to ask them.
Or, the beginning of the realization had formed then.
It had not become a fully fledged thing until the months Wei Ying was missing. It had not taken flight until he had seen Wei Ying again and made the decision to stand by him.
He is in a position now to stand by him for the rest of eternity.
He hopes they get eternity. He hopes that Wei Ying does not turn him away.
The coincidence of the titles bestowed upon them by people that cannot possibly know the truth of their situations or the nature Lan Wangji’s intentions gives him no small amount of comfort. There could be no better pair of names for them than Light-devouring Lord and the Light-bearing Lord who will fight for him. Yin and yang, resentment and righteousness, a ghost and a god. They are in many ways a reflection of Lan Wangji’s generous new patron, a hopeful mirror image.
“It will be easier to explain at our destination,” he tells Wei Ying truthfully.
Wei Ying looks at him for many long seconds. Lan Wangji wonders what he sees.
No one in the small roadside in seems to notice that one of the three polite young men who step in from a sudden rainstorm is a fierce corpse. Similarly, no one seems to care that the three request only one room and only two dinners.
Wei Wuxian considers objecting to the money being wasted on a meal for him. In the end, he decides it would be better just to eat it and avoid having to explain why he doesn’t need to. Or, perhaps not better but… Nicer. Easier. Safer, both for his feelings and for those around them who might be injured in a fight should Lan Zhan react poorly.
It’s not that he can’t eat, after all. It’s just that he doesn’t really need to.
Wen Ning, however, really should not eat at all. They tried it once, maybe a month ago. The results had been messy and rather disgusting.
Once inside the privacy of their room, Wen Ning bows to Lan Zhan. “This one thanks you for allowing him to travel with Master Wei,” he says, his voice slow and halting.
“There is no need for thanks. We are—“ Lan Zhan cuts off his own words. “There is no need for thanks,” he repeats.
Wei Wuxian really wants to know what he was going to say. We are both Wei Ying’s friends, maybe. That would be nice.
Their dinner is brought up right around the time his ability to remain quiet finally reaches its limits.
“I’m surprised the rumors of the great Lan Zhan having a son are true,” he says, and then he immediately regrets it. He could have started anywhere else. Maybe he could have asked after Lan Zhan’s brother or maybe about the progress being made in rebuilding the Cloud Recesses. He could have even started with how this dinner seems to have been made with far more spices than anything in Gusu. Somewhere, anywhere safer, even if no topic feels truly safe. But Wei Wuxian’s greatest talent since their first meeting has seemed to be provoking Lan Zhan’s ire, and there is no way out of this conversation but through. “I know the Lan methods of cultivation don’t require purity, but aren’t there rules against that sort of thing? A kid without being married?”
Somehow, Lan Zhan’s response to that is to pour Wei Wuxian’s a cup of wine. He hadn’t even realized Lan Zhan had ordered any.
“Mn,” he says, quiet and sure. “No rule is more important than love.”
Wei Wuxian stares at the pale liquid in the cup in front of him. For some reason, hearing Lan Zhan say something like that makes him feel strange. Sort of full and yawningly empty at the same time. “The person you love must be pretty special, if you’re breaking the rules like that.”
He looks up to find Lan Zhan staring at him.
“Mn,” Lan Zhan says, not breaking eye contact, and the yawning emptiness in Wei Wuxian grows.
When he lifts the cup and takes a sip, an excuse to look away again, the wine tastes just as it would have before… everything. The bite he takes of his dinner tastes strange. Maybe he’s the one unused to spices these days. “You’ll marry soon?”
“I hope to. If I am wanted.”
“Ah, Lan Zhan,” he says, “Lan Zhan. Who wouldn’t want you?”
Wen Ning knows that he has rarely been the smartest man in any room, save for rooms he has been in alone. It seems entirely inconceivable that he should ever understand a thing better than Wei Wuxian’s brilliant, fast moving mind can understand it.
And yet.
And yet.
Somehow, he is sitting at this table and watching Lan Wangji respond to Wei Wuxian reaching out to play with the long ends of his forehead ribbon by taking the ribbon off and tying it around Wei Wuxian’s forearm.
And he is listening to the way Wei Wuxian laughs a fake, strained sort of laugh and begins going on about how he hopes Lan Wangji’s beloved doesn’t ever see and get the wrong idea about their relationship. How if Lan Wangji treats that person the way he treats Wei Wuxian, there’s no way anyone could say no to a proposal. How Lan Wangji surely has this mystery lover’s heart secured.
Somehow, Wei Wuxian seems oblivious to both Lan Wangji’s feelings and his own.
There are two beds in this room for the three of them. Wen Ning needs no rest and will stand guard at the door all night, but he cannot help but wonder what would happen if he did require sleep. He knows that Lan Wangji would never share a bed with him, but which of their beds would Wei Wuxian want to crawl into? Would such a decision help him finally realize the difference between the brotherly affection he feels for Wen Ning and the ardent and amorous feelings he harbors for Lan Wangji?
Listening as Wei Wuxian talks on and on about how it is surely a law of the universe that the Second Jade of Lan is adored and wanted by everyone, Wen Ning decides that any lodging situation in which there weren’t enough beds would end in Wei Wuxian attempting to sleep on the floor.
If Lan Zhan finds it weird that Wei Wuxian was able to pry himself out of bed before the sun was barely above the horizon, he doesn’t say anything about it. He does put several pieces of his own breakfast into Wei Wuxian’s bowl, which is also weird but not something he’s going to complain about. He does tease him about how he must truly have a disdain for flavor, of course. Lan Zhan’s response to the teasing is to offer Wei Wuxian more of his food.
Setting out on the road again, it feels almost… Almost normal. Almost like they aren’t a strange triangle of almost-friendships, headed from a horrible battlefield and towards a destination only one of them knows.
Lan Zhan doesn’t seem to hate him, but how long will that miracle last?
Wei Wuxian tries to tell himself that it doesn’t matter.
He takes Lan Zhan’s hand and privately rejoices in the touch not being rejected. He starts talking about the first thing that comes to his mind—how some of the puddles on the road after last night’s rain seem big enough to swim in and oh, Lan Zhan, Lan Zhan, wouldn’t it be fun to go swimming together?—and does his best to put the ghost of Lan Zhan’s mysterious beloved out of his mind.
As the cultivation clans return to their homes and begin to rebuild, there are many dead and many missing from their ranks.
The Jiang Clan of Yunmeng has very few surviving members. Among those who remain, none have the time to search for their missing disciple Wei Wuxian.
The Lan Clan of Gusu fares somewhat better, but they too lack the manpower to mount a full and proper search for Lan Wangji. When the disappearance of Lan Wangji’s son is noticed, they are only able to search the Cloud Recesses and surrounding towns.
Clan leaders Jiang Cheng and Lan Xichen meet in private and console one another about their missing brothers. They vow to one another that they will search themselves, when they have the time and the resources for such a thing. They do not have either right now.
Six days and one night after Wen Ruohan’s death, three travelers arrive at a small building so old some might call it ancient. The wood of its walls have been smoothed to a shine by age; the tiles of its roof are covered in moss. A sign proclaims this to be Puqi Shrine.
Two men sit in the grass outside its entrance. A baby sits in the lap of the man wearing red, clapping and babbling happily.
The sight of this does something strange to Wei Wuxian’s unbeating heart.
When Lan Zhan drops his hand and strides ahead to kneel before the child and the child delightedly shrieks baba, Wei Wuxian thinks he might feel it start to beat again just so that it can break.
He had kind of always assumed Lan Zhan would end up with a woman when the time came. That he had ended up with a woman, and that’s how he acquired a son. Such is the normal way of things, isn’t it? Lan Zhan is perfect. Any woman would want him. It had just never occurred to Wei Wuxian that a man could want Lan Zhan like that too.
Watching Lan Zhan lift his son from the arms of the man who got there first is a hell of a time for him to be realizing this, but Wei Wuxian has never been very good at doing anything important at the appropriate time.
He runs a finger across the cloud patterned embroidery on the ribbon Lan Zhan has yet to take back and asks himself what the fuck he thinks he’s doing here other than carrying with him the potential to ruin everything good in Lan Zhan’s life.
“So, you’re reunited!” he says, awkward, voice too loud. “That’s good! Good! I think I should just… go, now, so—“
“You’re going nowhere,” says the man who must be Lan Zhan’s love, interrupting him.
A surge of jealousy and bitter, agonized wanting rises in Wei Wuxian’s throat like bile. It’s so, so much worse now that he knows the names for these feelings.
What a time for his emotions to suddenly no longer feel so far away.
These feelings pour from him as the black smoke of resentment he learned to control on the battlefield, a wordless and ravenous thing that flows easily around everyone but this stranger who has what Wei Wuxian wants and somehow thinks he can tell Wei Wuxian what to do.
“Kid,” the man says, and as he says it his presence grows into something dark and evil that meets Wei Wuxian’s resentment on its own level, “come over here and sit the fuck down.”
“Wei Ying,” Lan Wangji calls softly. Being afraid for him is nothing new, but it seems absurd that this might be the place Wei Ying would meet his match. It seems inconceivable that they made it through all that they have in the past year and yet this might be where Wei Ying falls.
He doesn’t know what he will do, if the husband of the god he serves tries to harm Wei Ying
As though a conflict between two supreme level ghosts is not brewing in front of him, the Emperor of the Heavens smiles warmly at Lan Wangji. “You’re back just in time. I think your A-Yuan is about to try taking his first steps. It would be sad if you missed it.”
“Yah bah ba!” A-Yuan agrees. He places his slightly sticky hand against Lan Wangji’s cheek.
“Thank you for waiting,” he tells A-Yuan. And then, to his god: “Thank you for watching him.”
“He’s a delight,” Xie Lian replies. “Think nothing of it.”
“He’s been trying to eat grass for days now,” Hua Cheng adds. His powerful aura still battles Wei Ying’s, but his tone of voice is as indulgent as it always is when he speaks to his husband. Lan Wangji would like to be known for the same kind of warm indulgence someday. “The delight for me has been gege’s attempts to stop him.”
Before lifting the infant Wen Yuan from that altar, Lan Wangji had known very little of babies. He still feels like he knows very little, thanks to how much time they have had to spend apart, but the speed at which this small boy will transfer something from his little hand to his mouth is a lesson he had learned the first time the child had grabbed hold of his new father’s long hair. It seems the sign of a bright and inquisitive spirit.
He is so wrapped up in A-Yuan’s smile that it both surprises and thrills him when Wei Ying’s voice comes from just beside his shoulder. “He looks like you.”
“He looks like Wen Qionglin,” Lan Wangji replies, once the surprise has left him. The thrill at Wei Ying’s closeness probably never will. “I believe that they are cousins.”
“Lan Zhan! I know what I’m seeing. A baby should look more like his father than any cousin, shouldn’t he? And your baby is very cute. Very handsome.”
Has he possibly been unclear about this? “The father he should look like is dead. Wen Qionglin is the only surviving relative to compare him to.”
The dark, hungry curls of resentment slowly recede. As they do, the pressure of Hua Cheng’s presence lessens until he again appears to be nothing but a man.
“I don’t think I understand what’s happening here,” Wei Ying says. There’s something in his voice that sounds like hope.
Lan Wangji loves Wei Ying’s hope.
Slowly, as they stand there together in the grass on the most beautiful sunny day that has ever been graced upon the world, Lan Zhan tells the story of his son.
“We didn’t, officially. Popo kept the shrine by herself,” Wen Ning says in reply to Lan Zhan’s comment about not having known the Wen revered these particular deities. He’s still standing back by Puqi Shrine’s gate like he’s afraid to come any closer. After the display of power from the man in red, maybe he is. “When I was small she showed me how to offer flowers and how to pray. She was Wen Ruohan’s paternal aunt. Wen Ruohan killed her along with the rest of our branch of the family.”
“You killed Wen Ruohan,” says the guy in red.
Wen Ning nods. “I… Yes. I did.”
“Good.”
Was it good? Really? It’s been a week and Wei Wuxian can’t forget the sight of Wen Ning sobbing beside the body of the man who raised and then betrayed him. It might be argued that Wen Ning and Wen Qing betrayed Wen Ruohan first, but the escape of one prisoner should not mean the destruction of your entire branch of the family tree. He didn’t even know about the golden core transfer but he killed them all anyway.
None of this insane war has been good. Wei Wuxian has spent months trying to figure out what made a man with as much power as Wen Ruohan had go mad enough to grab so brutishly for more. He’s no closer to an answer than he had been all the way back when the Wen had demanded disciples for indoctrination.
“Puqi Shrine…” Wei Wuxian rolls the words around in his mouth, thinking about that instead. “This is dedicated to them too?”
“It was a shrine to His Highness the Crown Prince first. But we couldn’t stop the villagers from adding that trash, so now both are worshipped here.”
The cultivator in white, still seated on the ground, laughs a little. The sound is happy and warm. “Only one temple dedicated solely to His Highness the Crown Prince remains, and even that goes against the god’s wishes. It’s nice that both are worshipped here. It’s as it should be.”
Huh. “Why are gods hanging out in their own shrine?”
Wei Wuxian can tell by the reactions to his question—silence from the god in white, uproarious lafter from the ghost in red—that he’s entirely correct about the identities of these two men. So, that explains that, he thinks.
It doesn’t explain why a god and a ghost king are babysitting Lan Zhan’s apparently adopted kid.
It also doesn’t resolve the fact that Lan Zhan still has a mysterious beloved out there somewhere. It definitely doesn’t resolve the fact that this mysterious person definitely doesn’t deserve Lan Zhan’s devotion, especially since this person isn’t even here.
“I’m not a god,” the Red-Robed Ghost King says. “And you, Light-devouring Lord, are just like me. But you skipped a lot of steps and hundreds of years of agony to get there. Supremes used to have to come from fire, from the kiln, not from a resentful little hill in Yiling.”
Wei Wuxian swallows convulsively, throat clenching with the agony of hearing it out loud.
“I’m,” he says, halting, slow. “I’m not.”
Even though he is. Even though he has been able to grasp the idea of it ever since he stood up after that impossible fall. Even though he has known the full truth of it for months now, months and months of no food and little sleep and power power power.
He casts his gaze desperately towards Lan Zhan, even though he doesn’t want to really see whatever look is on Lan Zhan’s face. “I’m not.”
Lan Zhan’s expression is at once both impassive and so, so open. A mask of sympathy and fear. He and Wei Wuxian are both eighteen years old and they are both a million. The war was six months long and the war lasted for a hundred years. His son sits placidly in his arms, wide-eyed and interested in the world. No matter what Lan Zhan says, they really do look alike. “You are. I love Wei Ying anyway.”
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says. He doesn’t know what to do with those words. Lan Wangji is not a man who lies, but Wei Wuxian wants and Wei Wuxian so rarely gets what he wants.
Lan Zhan isn’t done giving it to him. “Months ago I accepted an offer from His Highness to become a heavenly official of the Middle Court, so that I may have time with which to cultivate to immortality at your side. Wei Ying will last forever. I will as well.”
“You can’t,” he says.
But. He wants.
He wants and he wants and he wants.
He’s dead now, isn’t he? Why shouldn’t he finally get it?
The baby in Lan Zhan’s arms grabs a fistful of his father’s hair and tugs sharply. Lan Zhan, without ever looking away from Wei Wuxian, gently pries open those tiny fingers. Something about the gesture pries open Wei Wuxian’s shattered ribs.
All of his bones are shattered. All of his bones are held together by resentment and desperation and a frightened sort of exhausted determination. It doesn’t even hurt. It hurts very much.
“You can’t,” he says.
He means, You can’t love me. He means, You can’t abandon the living. He means, You can’t think I’m worth anything but what I can do as a weapon.
He means, Don’t you hate me? Haven’t my attempts at friendship always been one-sided and unwanted? Why did you bring me here to meet your son? Why are you allowing a monster with an army of monsters at his beck and call anywhere near that baby?
He means, I’ve only just realized I’ve been falling in love with you since the first day we met and I don’t know what to think about that.
“Wei Ying,” says Lan Zhan.
What Lan Wangji means is this:
I was foolish before. I did not know myself. I am foolish still, and I still do not know myself, but I understand better.
I am a Lan. I am my father. I am myself. I love fiercely and desperately and completely. I love with a ferocity that scares me. I am not scared right now.
I did not know until I lost you just how impossible I would find living without you. Do not make me learn how. Please, please do not make me learn how.
You are a ghost and I am on the path to godhood only because that is the path which will allow me to give that ghost everything. Someday, when I step off that path under my own power, I would like to stand beside you as an equal.
Let the light I bring be the light you devour.
I am young. You are young. We are young, but we do not need to suffer for decades and for centuries to earn our happiness. We are allowed to work towards it together.
What Lan Wangji actually says is this:
“Wei Ying, would you like to hold A-Yuan?”
Eleven months and nine days following the death of Wen Ruohan, Jiang Cheng and Lan Xichen meet in a tea house halfway between Lotus Pier and the Cloud Recesses.
Ostensibly, this is a meeting to discuss the progress of their mutual efforts in rebuilding their clans.
In actuality, this is a meeting to discuss their missing brothers.
People claim to care that Lan Wangji has vanished, but no one besides these two men have put real effort into looking. People do care that Wei Wuxian has vanished, but only these two men and one woman currently busy preparing for her wedding in Lanling seem to want him found.
Together, the two men get very, very drunk.
Sometime in the early hours of the morning, they fall together onto the same bed. They share the same dream.
In this dream, Lan Wangji tells his brother that he has become the servant of a god. In this dream, Wei Wuxian tells his brother that he has become a ghost king with enough power to rival the gods. With enough power to destroy nations. With enough power to shoot down the sun.
In this dream, a little boy chases silver butterflies. The fierce corpse that killed Wen Ruohan with his bare hands gently lifts the laughing child onto his hip.
“There’s a mountain,” Wei Wuxian says, “in Yiling. You know the one. Don’t go there unless you want to find me. But, uh, you can still come. If you want. It’s Wen Yuan’s birthday soon. He’s about to be two. You should come see him. You could. If you want.”
“We would like it if you came,” Lan Wangji adds. “But we are happy even if you do not.”
In the dream, Wei Wuxian laughs and gives Lan Wangji’s shoulder a gentle shove. His sleeve falls down far enough to reveal the ribbon embroidered with clouds that wraps around his forearm. “A-Yuan is a Wen,” Wei Wuxian explains, “and a Lan, and kind of a Jiang. And the most spoiled and the most polite and just the best kid in Ghost City. Probably in the entire world. And we are actually really happy.”
When they wake the light of day, hungover and determined and so, so relieved, Lan Xichen returns home and commissions an artisan for the embroidering of a new ribbon. Jiang Cheng returns home and commissions a silver bell.
A young man falls and falls and falls. Much too late and just in time, another young man catches him.