💀Penumbral Lady💀

Wei Wuxian is not a squeamish man. He has seen bodies in all stages of decay and mutilation: dug from graves, strewn across fields, freshly killed or left to rot for weeks. But there is a difference between a living body and a dead one, a mutilation performed by another and a mutilation performed upon the self. His eyes widen when he sees what the Ninth has done to her mouth; he's faintly proud of himself that he recites the last line of the verse without faltering.

When she holds up the signal to move on, he nods, but does not return to the paper right away. Instead he turns his gaze to the skeletons to better gather himself. There is such a rawness to this magic, a carnality that fits with the way her thanergy works with the energy of the body. It is digging your fingers into the dirt of the grave rather than drawing down the mists of the sky.

Something shifts, beside the first skeleton. He frowns slightly.

As the haze thickens above the inlet, the rose embedded in the eye of the Seventh twists and grows. Its petals spread wider. They lighten, stretching into the points of a lotus blossom, as the stem winds downward in search of water. As it pierces the skeleton's ribs, blood drips down over bones as white as mourning robes.

The paper trembles in Wei Wuxian's hands. He cannot tear his eyes away as the stem stretches down, and down. He is suddenly terrified, beyond all comprehension, to look into the face of the skeleton that he knows is not a skeleton any longer. Its slender hands come to its chest to cradle the bloodied lotus stem, more red catching on the sleeves of its robes.

He looks up.

"Shijie," he croaks, as if his heart has shattered in his chest.

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Harrow's veil slips free, fluttering in the sea breeze at her feet, and Lan Wangji stares at her in horror.

Her mouth - her mouth is sewn shut, she has literally sealed her lips to keep her silence, why would she--

Despite his shock, he keeps playing automatically, all his attention on her, but then Wei Ying speaks, a single word filled with an agonizing pain he's heard before, and Harrow is forgotten. His head jerks toward Wei Ying, and then out to look where he's staring.

For an instant, the formerly skeletal figure is hard to see. He can see dark hair and flowers in her hands, and he thinks for a single heart-stopping instant that they are gentians--

--but even as he thinks that, the mist swirls once more and the figure becomes clear. Jiang Yanli stands there, looking at Wei Ying, her expression soft with a sister's love.

For a moment, he almost stops playing. Almost, but he catches himself in time. Whatever is happening here, if Harrow's magic has given his Inquiry the reach to bring Wei Ying's sister here somehow, the only thing that could hurt Wei Ying more would be to let it dissipate too soon.

Edited Date: 2020-09-13 01:22 am (UTC)

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The Ninth doesn't recognize the woman in the position of the Seventh, on the far side of the First and the box. Her features and clothing suggest someone from the men's world, and that should perhaps surprise her, but she feels only distant acceptance. Wei Wuxian speaks with her Voice; this ritual is no longer fully under her own control, and she is simply one part of it now.

She begins to move towards the edge of the water, the first touch of surf on her bare feet warm as the bathwater in her ritual purification. Yet in the distance, beyond Jiang Yanli, darkness is beginning to gather and ice to spread towards the Nine Houses.

The Fourth and the Fifth in their crowns turn towards her, with the faces of the dead of Canaan House. Silas Oktasiron and the Tridentarii are not dead, and the skeletons of the Eighth and the Third are still bone. The Third looks... smaller, somehow, dwindled into a shadow of itself, the gems of its eyes gleaming. That seems like it must mean something, but the fug of incense makes it hard to think.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus approaches the Locked Tomb, anticipating the prayers that will hallow her steps.

Edited Date: 2020-09-13 01:23 am (UTC)

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Jiang Yanli's face blurs before him. Tears slide down his cheeks, skirting the blood still painted across his mouth. More blood runs bright down her hands where she clasps them to the lotus stem, and her smile is so gentle, so loving, as she regards Wei Wuxian with her single eye not gored by the lotus blossom.

A-Xian, she mouths.

He takes a step closer to the water without thinking. His sister holds up a red palm to forestall him. Shaking her head, she gestures gracefully to the paper he clutches. Read.

Wei Wuxian looks at the Ninth, darkness swirling above her and ice beginning to crack around her bare feet. He looks back to Jiang Yanli; she nods, in silent encouragement, before turning her attention to the Ninth, waiting for him to continue.

(At the corner of his eye, he sees golden robes settle over the shoulders of the Third, and a handsome, haughty face emerge with a vermillion dot between its eyebrows. He does not want to look any closer and risk seeing the gaping wound in Jin Zixuan's chest.

But he is glad, in that moment -- fiercely, pathetically glad -- that his sister is not alone any longer.)

A tear drips onto the paper when he looks down. He scrubs a shaking hand across his eyes and breathes.

"I pray the rock is never rolled away," he whispers. "I pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate in perpetual rest with closed eye and stilled brain."

Gradually, as he continues, his voice steadies, though it remains hoarse.

"I pray it lives, asleep, between life and death, between sleep and waking, forever and ever. Amen."

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During the Eulogy and Consecration...

He shifts the melodic line seamlessly, transmuting Inquiry's call into the soothing, peaceful cadence of Rest.

(This is the final stage, from what Harrow had written in her instructions. He is glad, fiercely so.)

Lan Wangji envelops the hovering spirits, all who listen, with his music, evoking peace and comfort, shelter, sanctuary, and an end to pain.

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The spirits turn now, one and all, towards the darkness taking shape out on the water; except for the First, whose eyes stay locked on Harrowhark.

It's no one she knows, a man with brown skin and dark hair and black eyes--not black like hers, but wall to wall black, except for tiny rings of white.

She touches her face and realizes she's weeping for the Seventh. Her feet keep moving as Wei Wuxian pronounces the Eulogy for the Holy Corse, the prayer she has said every day of her life for fifteen years. If you cut Harrowhark Nonagesimus in two, those words would be written across her core.

(But since she was twelve years old, she hasn't meant it.)

Perhaps Wei Wuxian does; perhaps there is comfort for Lan Wangji in those words. Because in the darkness beyond the tableau, the Locked Tomb takes shape, opaque and freezing cold, and from it radiates enough resentful energy for a dead planet.

Perhaps it is best to hope whatever lies in that darkness will remain insensate, in perpetual rest, with closed eye and stilled brain.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus regards it with a look that would power Gideon Nav through a thousand upside-down press-ups. If there was any doubt in the mind of the onlookers that her affections might be cause for jealousy, let that suspicion be buried here in this tomb, beside the fiercest corpse in time and space.

She reaches the box and stares at it stupidly.

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The explosion of resentful energy nearly takes his knees out from under him. Everything wobbles; his vision goes grey, and he has to squeeze his eyes shut to catch his balance.

The paper still looks too washed-out when he opens his eyes again, as if the sun were covered by perpetual smoke. He thinks he hears whispers at the edge of hearing, and the urge is there, again, to grab hold of the resentful energy to protect himself from whatever monsters might lurk beyond sight.

(Wei Wuxian is falling, but he has been pushed, this time.)

"O corse of the Locked Tomb, beloved dead, hear your servants. We bring before you the cerements of the grave. The tools of effigy." (He is breathing just a little too fast.) "The face behind the one our mothers gave us. Consecrate them to our use and to the mortification of vanity, and to the reverence of thee, sleeper who must never wake."

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I miss the Tomb very much. My life has been dedicated to it.

From the look on Harrow's face, her words to him before, here, by the water, had been the greatest of understatements.

I have a duty to the Tomb, which I may not speak of.

Resentful energy pulses around them, thick and choking, as Wei Ying speaks of a sleeper who must never wake.

Lan Wangji's jaw sets, hard, and the amount of spiritual energy he pours into the music now is a river, a waterfall, surging clear and wild into the notes of Rest.

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Yes. Consecration.

That's what she was here to do. She stirs to life, painting a spiral on the lid of the box of the box in her own blood. Her right hand is beginning to coagulate and she rinses it in the salt water; slices a cut in her left as well.

The pain anchors her back in her body and the situation becomes clearer to her. How out of control the ritual has become, powered by the rampant thanergy of this place and the unfamiliar magic and this saltwater gap in time and space and mortality.

She can feel Wei Wuxian's reaction to the tomb, as strong and instinctive as hers at twelve, but less prepared, less mediated through the theology of the Ninth and the desperate loneliness of a child who was two hundred dead children. To him it is simply an avalanche of power, a test it is cruel beyond reason to subject him to.

What has she done?

She continues to paint the spiral, as quickly as she dares; if she errs now it was all for nothing. As soon as it's complete she raises the scalpel to her mouth and slices through the stitches, nicking the corner of her lips.

"I reclaim my Voice," she says, in the stentorian tones of the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh. "Lan Wangji, wipe the blood from his mouth and take him away from here. I must complete the ritual."

In the sky beyond the darkness, lights are beginning to appear in the purpling horizon. Without looking to see what happens behind her, she fixes her eyes on the only thing in the universe she truly loves and intones:

"May moon never beam without bringing us dreams of thee, Corse of the Locked Tomb;
May stars never rise but we feel the bright eyes of thee, beloved dead."

She feels she can see through the darkness now; the face, the hands, the chains, the sword.

"Neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from thee

My beloved," she says brokenly. "Sleep. Sleep."

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No, he wants to shout. I am fine. I am fine, Ninth, I will finish what you've asked --

It is too late.

He can no longer see his sister or his brother-in-law standing waist-deep in the ocean water. Resentful energy howls around them like a whirlpool. Head spinning, he grips the paper so tightly it almost rips in his hands, struggling to make out the last lines.

Do not let me fail --

His legs fold up beneath him, almost gently, and he sinks toward the sand.

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He does not reach it.

The instant Harrow calls out to him, Lan Wangji moves. With an abrupt jangling of strings, the guqin vanishes back into its hidden storage as he leaps to his feet and flies to Wei Ying's side, catching him before he can finish collapsing.

Panic is written in every line of him as he desperately scrubs the blood from Wei Ying's mouth with his own sleeve, searching his face--

--he is breathing. No signs of qi deviation, no blood but what Lan Wangji has just wiped away. Wei Ying looks semi-conscious and unsteady, but that is all.

He casts a single flat look in Harrow's direction, then slings one of Wei Ying's arms around his neck, holding it with one hand while he puts his other arm around Wei Ying's waist and leads him away, back to the room upstairs.

Edited Date: 2020-09-13 03:25 am (UTC)

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Harrow swallows, and brings the ritual to a close. A ritual that has run out of control sometimes resists cessation; can run wild and cannibalize the adept's own thanergy. Now that she knows the two cultivators are out of the way she embraces the possibility, psychically digging her heels and becoming a stone wall.

She tightens her fists, more blood curling in the surf; once there was an inhabitant of this lake that would have ended Harrowhark's distress for her, and perhaps even he would have choked on a meal that big. She scrubs the mark of the Ninth from her forehead with the back of her hand, and one by one, the skeletons fall like puppets with cut strings, in order from the First to the Eighth.

Finally, sullenly, the huge black shape of the tomb fades away, and the ice bobbing in the water begins to melt.

Dully, she tows her consecrated box of makeup to the shore and takes the bag, plodding back through the surf to retrieve the items the cultivators had brought. The rose and crown of branches has floated off, but the silver ring is easily found, and Lan Wangji's gems are still in the skull of the third. She snaps the bone filaments she created and tosses the skull aside to dissolve in the salt water, dropping the stones in the bag.

The scroll is very wet, which she regrets. Perhaps Wei Wuxian's paper magic can restore it. For now she sets it on a stone a little way away from the rest of the items. The bloody scrap of cloth used as a blindfold she wrings it out and saves as well. The helmet she leaves to rust.

She leaves the bag on the beach beside the box and walks a little way out in the water again, scrubbing the back of her hand over her mouth and smearing the blood from the nine tiny puncture marks around her mouth.

She sits down in the surf, the water up to her shoulders, as it was when the Second knelt in supplication, and stares at the horizon. The stars shine on her naked face and she feels, indeed, the burning eyes of her beloved. She is weeping and she doesn't know why anymore.

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Some time later....

Wei Ying is asleep.

Lan Wangji had stayed with him long enough to be sure that he was resting quietly, his sleep deep and peaceful with no sign of nightmare, before he had silently risen and just as silently left the room.

He stalks back through the common room, down to the lakeshore and then to the ocean inlet, tall and proud and coldly angry, although he is trying not to be - at least not yet, not until he knows.

Is she still here? He does not know, but if not, he will look for her tomorrow, and every day until he finds her.

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She is.

She has sat in the water past the point where it makes any sense, too physically and emotionally exhausted to move, and the longer she sits the more of her blood seeps into the saltwater, exhausting her more.

An excellent example of why necromancers need cavaliers, she thinks.

If she just laid back the salt water would run over her face and cover her entirely, but for now she sits here, a black lump in black water, and watches a tall white figure moving across the grass.

"Your belongings are in the bag on the shore," she says in a clear carrying voice.

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He ignores the bag and walks straight to the edge of the water to face her instead, heedless of the surf dragging at the hem of his robes.

"Did you know?"

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"Did I know what?" she says stiffly. Of all the questions he might (fairly) ask her, this one had not occurred to her.

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"What would happen. What your ritual would do."

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"I don't even know what it did," she says frankly. Her lips hurt.

"I have never seen it so strange. The Enumeration is normally pro forma. It is a mystical ritual, it is never meaningless, but the Eulogy and Consecration are where the power are. I have never seen that happen."

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Deep within, he is not sure whether he had been afraid of that or hoped to hear it.

"Then the fault is partly mine."

The cold anger has receded, but his determination has not. He paces to the side, so that he can better see her face.

"At the end. The vault. With the resentful energy."

A wave splashes, drenching his lower robes. He ignores it.

"Was that your Tomb? The one you spoke of, before?"

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"Yes," she says. "The Ninth was built to guard it. It is why I was born. Why my parents ended two hundred lives."

It comes out, just like that. Her mother's superstition had always irritated her, but the salt water does help. She licks her lips and tastes her own blood mixed with salt spray.

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Starlight shines down on them both, soft and gleaming.

O corse of the Locked Tomb, beloved dead, hear your servants--

"Your duty."

--to the reverence of thee, sleeper who must never wake--

At the horizon, the moon is beginning to rise, casting a silver path over the water. The icy darkness of before is no longer present.

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"My everything," she says, simply.

"Come a little closer, Hanguang-jun," she says, with chilly formality, "and hear the rest of the tale of a black nun of Drearburh. Learn why the other Houses call me heretic. Someone must be told. Why not you, why not now?"

The wounds around her mouth are bleeding again.

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He remains still for a moment, watching her, assessing.

My mother had a strict rule that if such things must be discussed, we did it in salt water--

Without saying a word, Lan Wangji walks forward into the ocean. The ebb and flow of the tide drags at his robes, but he continues until he reaches her side.

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He's so damn tall.

She inhales; exhales. She's soaked through, and the water is blood-warm. She feels like she's floating. (Maybe some of that's blood loss.)

"Ten thousand years ago, or a little less, God defeated... something. Something he could not kill, but only lay to rest. Something he could not defeat again. And so the Ninth House was built to hold the Tomb, and he set a seal on it that only he could open."

"Some say the Ninth was never meant to last this long; that the Tomb should have been left to itself long ago. Some say we are heretics who worship the creature that even God feared." She blinks; her eyelashes, long and ridiculously lush for someone so concerned with modesty, are crusting with salt.

"My parents wiped out a generation to ensure their child was a necromancer to continue our watch. They left it to me to figure out how the House would survive with only two children and average age of 65. I was told from the moment I could comprehend it what I had cost and what problem I had to solve."

"You pity me for this, I know. You should not. A head start is the only advantage you can claim by choice. And even with mine, I am not smart enough. Not good enough."

She stops to catch her breath.

"But by the time I was twelve years old I was smart enough to open the tomb."

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