Strenght

Alice May: “Alice in Wonderland” (1915 silent film)

This silent Alice has an interesting history, and it’s a real shame that it only survives in an incomplete form. The original film was two hours long, and it adapted both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland andThrough the Looking-Glass: as in other early Alice adaptations, the first half seems to have adapted the first book, while the second half covered the sequel. But circa 1920, the film was rereleased in two separate hour-long installments, WonderlandandLooking-Glass. Unfortunately, all but the last reel ofLooking-Glass is lost, as is the original cut of the film that featured both parts. The very scene on the 1915 movie poster, Alice’s meeting with Humpty Dumpty, is sadly one of the lost scenes. So are the scenes in Wonderland where Alice shrinks or grows. Still, the truncated Wonderland that still exists is a charming version; we’re lucky that it survived at all.

For the most part this is a faithful adaptation. The main embellishment is an opening sequence of Alice playing in the kitchen, then going for a walk with her sister before they sit down on the riverbank, and seeing various things – the cook baking tarts, a deck of cards, a white rabbit, Dinah the cat in a tree, and a piglet in the farmyard – that influence her dream. In Wonderland, all the animal characters wear full-body suits and masks with articulated eyes and mouths, as do the Duchess, the Cook, and the Mad Hatter to make them look like Tenniel’s illustrations. While by modern standards these costumes are fairly clunky and grotesque, it’s clear that great love and care was put into creating them, and they most definitely create a fanciful atmosphere. Meanwhile, the lively, endearing Alice of 15-year-old Viola Savoy excellently holds the picture together. She and the other performers bring the story to life despite the fact that the film direction is bare-bones, with no closeups and very little editing.

Despite its incompleteness and its slightly primitive qualities, this is still an appealing Alice, which anyone who loves both the books and the genre of silent film should see.

@ariel-seagull-wings,@superkingofpriderock,@faintingheroine,@the-blue-fairie,@amalthea9

I got partway through before giving up. I hate the Japanese language. I actually made this cover myself because the original’s cover was so bland and simple.

https://exhentai.org/g/895419/a2a129d609/

degraman:

Degraman: Act I. Vincent on Steam

Fantastic otome visual novel with romance, rich story and drama (´• ω •`)

The full version is available on Steam -> https://store.steampowered.com/app/1189680/Degraman_Act_I_Vincent/

Version for other platforms will be available later. For all the bugs, plz fill the form here -> https://forms.gle/qrTCcyRLFn1usFFJ9

incomplete wip. 9034 words, rated t.

wangxian court intrigue + wuxia + wingfic au, in which wwx is the lost phoenix and lwj is royal scholar. this is actually a collection of scattered scenes through the first act of the fic!

dwell too long in the fire and even the phoenix will burn.

Wei Wuxian holds a rotting mango in his hand. 

Pungent, slippery as an oiled wok and twice as dangerous, it’s just a few days too old for optimal flavor—but he does not plan to eat it. No, he’s going to throw it. 

A well-aimed piece of fruit and the right audience and a stomach just empty enough that the metallic edge of hunger has begun to bite makes for a good show. Wei Wuxian teeters like a gargoyle on the upturn of a roof, all his weight balanced in a crouch, waiting for the fishmonger to pass by beneath him. The market teems with citizens who have come early to buy the freshest kills and produce that the morning has to offer, the smell of frying jianbing wafts in thick curls up to Wei Wuxian’s perch. His belly rumbles. His last meal had been during sunrise the day before. 

“Fresh fish!” shouts the fishmonger. His mule’s head bobs dark and feisty as it tugs his cart along. Behind them, their wagon is crammed with quivering tubs full of water and writhing fish. “Fresh from the docks this morning! Fresh caught! Carp and eel and shrimp! Killed and scaled and gutted if you ask! Fresh fish!”

Wei Wuxian rocks up onto the knobs of his knees. The tiled roof digs into his skin–what are you doing here, flightless bird? His weapon of choice bleeds a thin, honeyed line of juice from his wrist to his elbow. He takes aim. 

A little commotion in a crowded market goes a long way. One spooked mule, one fishmonger, and a wagon full of uncovered tubs of live catches? What could go wrong? The sun hammers on his back, asking him what he’s waiting for. The mule’s flanks are exposed around its saddle and harness. Wei Wuxian screws one eye shut and sticks the tip of his tongue between his lips as he raises his mango, and–

“I’ll bet my daughter!”

A disturbance rises above the cheerful twang of the market below. It comes from the gambler’s stall, tucked away by the liquor stand. What a smart, slimy placement. 

“Is this man crazy?”

“What kind of father are you?”

“How disgusting, to gamble with your daughter’s life!”

Wei Wuxian frowns. Below him, the fishmonger passes, and the crowd molds around his wagon like ants around a snail. A pustule of a man hunches over the gambler’s stall with a girl of no more than nine or ten in his grip as he snarls in the proprietor’s face. His clothes are stained and dirty, and his eyes are yellow with jaundice. Anger flares hot as a kicked hornet’s nest in Wei Wuxian’s belly, muting the hunger, when the drunkard yanks on his daughter so hard that she trips into the table. 

Without thinking, Wei Wuxian shouts, “Hey, you, ugly dog at the gambler’s table!”

Dozens of heads turn to stare. 

Wei Wuxian lobs the mango with all his might. 

It whistles over the street like a lumpy, bulbous pigeon, dripping as it goes. The man is too drunk, or too hungover to move out of the way–he simply watches, jaw slack, not seeming to realize that he’s in the way until it splatters him square in the face and explodes in a shower of golden muck. He howls, clawing at his skin, and in the process lets his daughter go. She falls because she’d been unbalanced, hard into the street on her elbows. Some of the mango carnage had splattered onto her. Orange-brown bits drip off her chin like fat, gummy tears. 

The drunkard points a trembling, furious finger at Wei Wuxian. “You–!” 

“Me? What about me? Worry about yourself first. Worry about your daughter!”

A small crowd has gathered to watch the spectacle–this man, covered in sticky mango goo and attracting flies, and this vagrant shaking with laughter on the roof. He is so close to the edge, yet balances in place without any unsteadiness, with the surety of someone who is always in high places. 

“You are a coward, staying on the roof! Get down here and fight me with your fists, like a man!” shouts the drunk. His daughter tugs on his sleeve behind him as the crowd thickens.

“A-die, A-die, let’s go–”

“Let go of me, you useless girl.” He shakes her off. “Good for nothing, waste of space. Not even good enough for gambling money.”

Wei Wuxian frowns. A hushed gasp races through the bodies below as he stands and tips from his perch on the roof, tumbling once before alighting in the street. His shoes stick to the pavement from the tack of juice. The man barely makes it up to his chin, and his skin is splotchy from alcoholism; his clothes are patches which means he had family members whose kindness he did not deserve at home. 

“What,” says Wei Wuxian, tucking his hands behind his back. He’s not above mango-throwing, but he’s not going to fight a man in front of his young daughter. Now that’s just bad manners. “You really want to fight me? Just take my advice, sir. Go home. Take your daughter and your money and buy some food, and go home. Don’t make me throw another mango at you. That was going to be my lunch.”

“I’m not scared of men like you. Arrogant and scornful, just looking for a fight! I ought to break your–”

Wei Wuxian intercepts the man’s fist before it can connect with his face.

He fights like a commoner would, crude and unpolished, with his thumb tucked inside his fingers. Rookie mistake. His eyes bulge like a frog stepped on as he tries to force his way through Wei Wuxian’s grip, face turning the color of puce as he fails comically. Wei Wuxian digs his nails into the back of the man’s hand, trembling with the effort of holding him in place, and then he shoves him back. 

The man goes sprawling in the street, and the crowd shuffles back, as if to avoid a particularly filthy swine. 

“A-die,” says his daughter, trying to help him up, but he swats at her. “A-die.”

“Go.”

Not without spitting at Wei Wuxian’s feet. He simply laughs, because it’s such a silly, juvenile thing, and then, like an infection clearing, the citizens around him scatter back into the day. 

Wei Wuxian claps his hands together, then wipes his palms on the seat of his robes. “You really ought not to entertain patrons who have clearly started to lose their control,” he says to the proprietor of the gambling stall. They wipe down the edges of their table with a dusty rag where the carnage of fruit clings. “Soon he will trade his whole family away for nothing but a nugget of gold.”

The proprietor scoffs. “And who are you?”

“Someone nice enough to clean his mess up. Sorry for this, by the way,” says Wei Wuxian. He starts straightening sacks full of supplies–coin bags, a set of rings, vases clinking fluted and musical against each other. They must run a games stall elsewhere in the city; Wei Wuxian has seen these prizes before. 

“Who asked you to be a vigilante, anyway.” The proprietor shakes his head. “You look for trouble, boy.”

“The only thing sweeter than trouble is justice,” says Wei Wuxian, laughing at the distaste the proprietor levels at him. He chases a few escaped scrolls that have tumbled from their sack.  “Ah, don’t be like that. I really am sorry, I didn’t mean to interfere with business, okay? I just don’t like to see–”

One of the scrolls has unfurled enough for Wei Wuxian to catch a glimpse of the ink painting. Beneath the glimmer of midday sun the paper is so buttery that Wei Wuxian expects for his fingers to come away slick when he picks it up, letting the scroll’s weight pull the painting the rest of the way open. 

The brushwork is unfamiliar. Mountains studded with frosted clouds, a lake, a tiny figure of a man at the silver waterline. A spray of peonies cradles the scene in its petals, done with a brush so fine that the artist could have drawn it with a single human hair. Wei Wuxian doesn’t recognize it–not the art. He hadn’t opened it for the art. 

A red seal dots the corner of the painting like a button of blood. Wei Wuxian would recognize it anywhere–anyone should recognize it anywhere. Being in possession of something with a seal like this, without explanation, could earn an axe to the neck. 

“Sir,” he asks, staring at the painting, “how did you come across a painting done by the imperial family?”

The proprietor’s eyes widen, and they make a wild lunge for it. Wei Wuxian is taller, though, and jerks it out of reach, rolling the scroll back up so the paper won’t tear. “Give it back!”

“Aha! What is it? Tell me. How did you come across a treasure like this?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Hmm. So if I simply walk away with it, you will also simply shrug, and let me be on my way?” Wei Wuxian raises his eyebrows when the proprietor glowers. “Ah, so it mustn’t be nothing. Not with a look like that. Do tell.”

“It’s none of your business.”

Wei Wuxian chews on his lip, smiles. His stomach rumbles, already two cartwheels ahead, but he needs to slow down and think. “Can I pawn it from you?”

“I’d like to see you try, boy. Give it here!”

Wei Wuxian sighs. “I would not try. I would give it back to you, if you asked nicely, but oh–oh, the danger of another person knowing that you have a painting with an imperial stamp on it, with no way to explain how. Unless you’d like to tell me. But you’ve made it clear as day that you’re not interested in letting me know, so you’ll just have to let a stranger go, knowing he carries this secret, not knowing who he is, not knowing what he’ll do.” He holds the scroll out now. “But of course, I cannot take what’s mine. Shame. Here you are.”

The proprietor had listened to him speak with a vague, mounting fear in his eyes, and when Wei Wuxian shakes the scroll at them, they shrink back as if he’s shaking a dismembered arm at them.

“What, don’t want it now? Didn’t you want me to hand it over?”

“What are you playing at,” the proprietor asks. “Are you a palace spy? What do you want?”

Laughter leaps from Wei Wuxian’s mouth. “Me, a palace spy? Oh, no, no, no. I’m afraid not. Palace spies have much more important things to do than to sniff out thieving proprietors. Tell you what. I take this off your hands and you don’t have to worry about your neck, or your family’s necks, and in return, I won’t tell them where I found it. Hm?”

“You plan to give it back to the imperial family?”

“Of course,” says Wei Wuxian. “All things return to where they belong in the end.”

So as it goes, Wei Wuxian is one mango poorer, but one imperial painting richer, and he cannot tell if he is better off for it. He tucks the scroll into his knapsack and the key that hangs around his neck back into his collars and scans the market for weak spots, opportunities to win more food than he has money for. The rotten mango had been stupid luck, and luck is a finite resource which Wei Wuxian does not have much of to begin with, so he’s going to have to work for the rest of his food today. 

A surreptitious scrap of pink peeks out from behind the liquor stall and Wei Wuxian only catches a glimpse of the girl before she tucks herself behind the wooden beams again. Oh–the drunk’s daughter. She’s alone now. Irritation bubbles in the pit of Wei Wuxian’s stomach when he pictures the man shaking her off, lumbering towards another gambling stall that will entertain his time, and he has half a mind to–

“Fresh meat buns! Made this morning. Pork and chicken and mushroom!”

Wei Wuxian catches up to the bun cart, falling into step with the vendor. “Shifu, how much for one?”

“One bronze piece for three.”

“Can I get five for one bronze piece?”

“Are you deaf or just stupid? No. Get lost.”

“Please, shifu,” Wei Wuxian says, he gestures behind himself in the direction he’d seen the little girl, “my daughter, she hasn’t eaten in days, and we’re here to see the doctor and he turned her away on account of the fact that we have no money, and she’ll only get sicker if she doesn’t have any food in her system, our family is still waiting at home, please have mercy–”

“Heavens! Good heavens, fine, here! Take these misshapen ones, they’re an eyesore, anyway.”

“Thank you!” Wei Wuxian fishes the bronze piece out of his money pouch, fingertips poking through the holes in the bottom like eyes, and collects his spoils. “Thank you, Shifu!”

“Get outta my sight.”

Wei Wuxian holds his armful of buns to his chest, and their heat warms him through his clothes down to his bones. It’s a relatively cool day, even for autumn. When he turns around again, the girl scrunches herself back into the safety of the shadows, and he chuckles to himself. The liquorist eyes Wei Wuxin warily when he approaches, but he simply seats himself on the other end of the stall and opens his carrying cloth full of lopsided buns. Ugly, unwhole, but still good for hunger. Still good. 

“Could I interest you in a bottle of rice wine?” 

“Ah, no, it’s fine,” Wei Wuxian flaps his hand. “I am not wont for liquor, but perhaps some company to share these buns with. I have far too many to finish on my own. But I don’t know who’d want these ugly buns. Certainly not you, Shifu, I’m sure?”

The girl peeks out from behind the stall, and Wei Wuxian smiles. “Want one?”

She scampers to sit down in front of him, reaching out with sooty hands for a bun at the top of the bile. The skin of it is pearly in the noon sun, giving under touch, the way only fresh steamed buns are. Then she hesitates, looking into Wei Wuxian’s face as if expecting to be struck.

“Go ahead,” he says, holds the bun out. “Eat.”

She snatches it and crams half of it into her mouth, and Wei Wuxian chuckles again. He knows hunger like this, and takes his own portion to tear into. The sweet smell of pork and mushroom and oil floats up into his eyes, and for a moment the meat sears on his tongue before it settles into a taste. 

“Is it good?” he asks.

She nods. 

So it’s good.

“Where have you been? Wei Wuxian, I ought to cut you off at the kneecaps! A-Jie’s been worried sick, you were supposed to be back over a shichen ago.”

“I ran into a friend, Jiang Cheng. Lighten up, will you? Here, I got buns.”

“Keep your stupid buns. Where’s the fish you were going to get?”

Wei Wuxian scratches at the back of his neck. “Ha. Well, about that.”

“Seriously? I can’t believe you. If it weren’t your birthday, I really would cut you off at the legs.”

“But it is, so instead, you need to be nice!” Wei Wuxian crows triumphantly. 

Jiang Cheng sighs, a gust of hot summer wind that picks up stinging sands. A wisp of his hair flits with his breath. He’s wearing his nice clothes, no doubt because A-Jie made him, with a polished belt tucked around his waist like the coil of a sleeping snake. It’s a formality that they hardly ever bother with anymore, not in such a provincial town as this, leading a life as threadbare as theirs. The shine of the buckle comes off of him in bright flashes. 

“Whatever. Come on, A-jie made noodles. Where’d you get buns?”

“Oh, so you do want one. Here, I know you like chicken.”

“Don’t tell me you managed to snatch all of these,” Jiang Cheng asks, but he takes the one Wei Wuxian offers anyway. “Who likes chicken,” he mutters, mostly to himself.

“I just harnessed a talent that you have never quite mastered, Jiang Cheng,” Wei Wuxian says. “Charm.”

“I ought to smack you.”

“There was a hungry kid. I didn’t want her to go hungry.”

Jiang Cheng is quiet. “We all are, why go help a stranger?”

“Wouldn’t you have wanted someone to help us back then?”

At this, a grunt. Which, coming from Jiang Cheng, is as enthusiastic a yes he’ll give, so Wei Wuxian smiles to himself and slings his sack of food over his shoulder. He’s down to two now, and he figures he’ll just give both of them to A-Jie who deserves much more than two pork buns, but it’s the best he has. One day he’ll get her expensive candied mangoes and hawthorn berries that the baker makes in the market in the next city over–the one that glitters.

“A-Cheng, A-Xian! You’re back!”

“Found him scaling the wall back into the hutong,” Jiang Cheng grumbles. “Punk.”

Jiang Yanli, too, is wearing her nicest set of robes today, with a hair ornament that Wei Wuxian hasn’t seen her with since the new year. Her face clears of worry when she sees them, and she reaches up, straightens a lock of Wei Wuxian’s hair where it’s caught over his ear. “A-Xian, you’re not–you know that you shouldn’t–” 

“Scale walls, climb to great heights, jump off roofs, I know, I know,” Wei Wuxian says, vividly recalling that he has done all of the above and then some today. “Sorry to make you worry, A-Jie, I’m fine! I got you buns. You can have them both.”

“But what about the fish? A-xian, we were going to make one for dinner for you.”

“Ah, fish or no fish, it’s no matter. Noodles are good enough. As long as I can live a long life, luck will always come back around.” 

“What if your whole life is plagued with bad luck?” asks Jiang Cheng as they duck back into their hut of clay and brick. The curtains are open, a rare moment of Jiang Yanli letting daylight peek inside, and it lights up their matchbox home in a wash of sunset. Bowls of steaming noodles are set out on the rickety slice of table, with the biggest in front of the seat where Wei Wuxian always sits. His heart swells. He’ll be forcing mouthfuls of noodles into his siblings’ bowls when they sit down, he’s sure, but for now his heart is the pulse of afternoon sun in the window. 

“Then my next life,” says Wei Wuxian. “My next one won’t be nearly as bad.”

The Lost Phoenix is lost.I think that’s the point. No one will ever find them. You will die looking for them.

Wei Wuxian is built from broken things. 

He sees rubble and thinks, that is a home. He sees blood and thinks, that is a heart. He sees himself reflected in the slow meanders of swamp-green lakes lazy with dragonflies and skeeters and tries to remember, that is a human, that is a human, that is a human.

“You may not be human, but that is what makes you worth loving,” is what A-Jie says. 

“You? A human? With an appetite like that? It’s like trying to feed a void with you,” is what Jiang Cheng says, which is basically the same thing. 

Wei Wuxian is built from broken things, but the uglier, eyesore-pork-bun truth is that he is born from destruction. He is born from the fire of things, and the ashes of himself; his body waits for the wither. 

The Lost Phoenix is dead. His ashes were scattered in mountain, sea, and sky.

The Lost Phoenix is alive! Everyone knows that leaving behind but a single ember can spark a wildfire. Fire has wings.

No human, ghost, or demon has ever seen the Lost Phoenix. If they had, wouldn’t we have heard by now? They are only a legend.

There are scars on his back to prove what he once was and never will be again, and Jiang Yanli tells him, The world was not ready for you. The world, perhaps, will not be ready for the Lost Phoenix to return for as long as we still walk upon it, A-Xian, but maybe when one day when everyone is gone, when A-Cheng and I are gone, you’ll–

He always cuts her off there. Usually he can’t see her face, because she’ll be sitting behind him and rubbing oil into the muscles that can never seem to loosen around his shoulder blades, the ones that line the edges of the scars like mottled mountain peaks. Just two of them, in straight lines as long as a hand, glaring at each other over the expanse of his back, the winding groove of his spine. Phantom pains. Human or not, the body will miss limbs when they are gone. 

Tonight, Jiang Yanli does not tell him the world isn’t ready for him. It hurts to listen to her say it, because it’s not a pain that Wei Wuxian can beat away with his fists or even his words. There’s a quiet noise of the bottle being unstoppered, then the cloying scent of liniment oil wreathing around him as he sits with his back bared to her, hair swept over his shoulder. 

“A-jie,” he says. 

“Hmm?” Her hands are small and warm against his back, and he hisses in pain when her finger catches on a tight knot immediately. “Sorry, Xianxian.”

“It’s okay. Uhm, I have a stupid question.”

“I’m sure it isn’t. Ask.”

“Which birthday did we celebrate tonight?” he asks quietly. 

The inside of their hut is a dark, uneven indigo now, the fires of the village filtering in through their window. Jiang Cheng has gone to bathe, so the only answering noise above the sound of a city settling in evening is Jiang Yanli’s soft laughter. 

“Your thirty-first, A-xian.”

“How many years have passed in this life?”

Her hands disappear as she dabs more liniment oil onto her fingers. “Since your reincarnation?”

“Yeah.”

“Thirteen.” 

“Thirteen,” Wei Wuxian repeats. “Thirteen.” He rolls it over his tongue, trying to figure out how it tastes. Bitter, a little. like medicine. Maybe it’s the liniment. Jiang Yanli runs her thumb down the edge of one of the scars, massaging out a few particularly gnarly knots there. 

“Is there something wrong?” she asks. 

“Not wrong, exactly.” Wei Wuxian pushes his fingers into his folded robes in his lap, pretends the fabric is sand and silt at the bottom of a lake. He almost expects handfuls of snails when he pulls them back out. “It’s just that, with every passing year, I think maybe this is it–this is the year I’ll remember. This is the year I’ll remember the things about my life before this one. Remember when I tried to teach you and Jiang Cheng how to catch fish with your hands, in the river, A-Jie? You said you could see them beneath the surface, but when you’d reach in to grab it, it was like the fish were never even there.” 

“I remember,” says Jiang Yanli. She is quiet, waits for him to go on. 

“Trying to recall my first life is like that. I know it happened. I can see it right there, flickering under the water, but. But each year comes and goes, and not only do I not remember anything, it feels like more and more of what I thought I could remember slips away,” says Wei Wuxian. “I was excited in the eighth year of this life. Then I was excited in the twelfth. Thirteen is no good, is it, A-Jie? I’ve run out of lucky numbers to count on.”

“Would it make you happy to remember, Xianxian?”

“I think so. When I think about it–it’s funny, you know. Maybe you know. I can’t recall memories from it, exactly, but when I think about my first life, I think I remember being happy. Like when you roll over and the sun is already up. You can feel the warmth on you even if you don’t see the light.” Then Wei Wuxian snorts. “That doesn’t make any sense. Sorry, ignore me, A-jie.”

“It makes sense. Of course it makes sense. Is that all you remember, a feeling?”

They’ve been over this before. A hazy, murky image of something from Before, dredged up from packed soil. Jiang Cheng will always say, “Who knows? Why do you think I would remember?” waspish, and Jiang Yanli would always give him a soft, “Perhaps it was, A-xian.”

“I remember,” he says, “that we were in a noble family, once.”

This is an easy one. She always says yes to this one. “We were.”

“I remember that the palace walls were lined with bronze, not gold like a lot of the common folk think.”

“Yes, they are.”

“The accident.” The one that has turned him into this. 

“I wish you did not,” says Jiang Yanli.

“I don’t–not really. I just remember the pain. My body does, anyway.”

“Muscle has memory,” she says. “But because you are who you are, so does your blood and bones.”

Wei Wuxian fiddles with the gap-toothed key that swings from his neck. It thunks hollowly against his bare chest without the robes to hold it in place, and he tugs the deerskin rope that loops around his neck so that the knot tying it together comes down, down, down, through the hole in the key, up, up, back up again, a miniature comet’s orbit. 

“You were a princess,” he says, quiet again.

“Princess is a strong word.”

“But you were.”

“In my own way.”

And then, the most solid memory he has—a figure in white, with hair that fell to their waist, holding a smudge of pink in their hand. Solid, but blurred, like Wei Wuxian is trying to see them through a sheeting waterfall. The lines of their body were straight and crisp, except for the pink. The pink was always soft, parting the mud of his memory. 

He doesn’t mention this one, usually. Wei Wuxian holds it close to his heart where it has roots. Year after year, no matter the rains, nothing has flowered. Seasons have passed. 

“A person,” Wei Wuxian murmurs. 

Jiang Yanli’s hands slow. “Who?”

“I don’t know,” says Wei Wuxian. “Just a person. Their back is to me, so I can’t see their face, but it’s too blurry for me to see them, even if they’d been right in front of me. And they were just standing there–just standing. Nothing else. I don’t even really know if they’re real, but it’s the best memory I have.” He digs his nail into an indent in the key’s teeth. “Do you think they were real, A-Jie?”

“As real as the Lost Phoenix is.”

Wei Wuxian laughs weakly. “The Lost Phoenix is as good as myth.”

A myth meant to scare people.

A cautionary tale.

“The Lost Phoenix needs to stop squirming, or I will poke the sensitive parts of his scar, and I know he hates it when I do,” Jiang Yanli says. 

A story about a monster.

“Maybe it’s better to forget some things, A-Jie.”

“A-Cheng and I only want you to be happy, Xianxian. Whatever that means to you. Whether that means remembering or forgetting.”

“I want to remember, because your happiness is my happiness,” Wei Wuxian insists, turning around. Jiang Yanli lifts her hand away as he rearranges his legs in a half-lotus, one foot stretched out onto the floor. “I want to remember because I know this life isn’t one you and Jiang Cheng would have chosen if you both had a choice. You can’t say I’m wrong about that. No noble family member would choose to live in a rundown hutong if they had a choice.”

“A-Xian–”

“I know you won’t tell me what happened before my reincarnation,” says Wei Wuxian. “I know you want to forget. But if anything ever happens that means we can go back to it–you have to say so, okay? You both are the only family I have left. Let me do something for the people who have somehow kept me alive for thirty-one years. I can’t remember eighteen of them. As if I started reading in the middle of the story. There are things I know without knowing how I know them.”

Whether it be a story, a tale, legend, or myth, one thing was certain: the Lost Phoenix is the last known survivor of the Phoenix Rising, once the most revered noble family of the imperial city, the warrior family that protected the throne. 

Forged from the Sacred Fires of Scarlet Mountain, the Phoenix Rising once was so formidable that simply meeting one of them in their true form was a sign of luck and good fortune. They were, as their family name suggested, bewinged humans who lived and died and rose again from their own ashes. They were skilled in combat, nimble in war, with the ability of flight. They harnessed Taoist magic that was only spoken of in books. 

A secular world did not have room for magic.

“Our A-xian,” says Jiang Yanli, shaking her head, “always hurts himself trying to make us happy before he remembers he has a heart, too.”

“Ah, what good is a heart if I can’t deal it out in pieces for my didi and my jie?” says Wei Wuxian. “It’s not like anyone else has any use for it.”

“That’s not true,” Jiang Yanli murmurs. 

“Hm? What’s that?”

“Nothing, Xianxian.”

“You have my promise, A-Jie,” says Wei Wuxian. “It’s us three until the end. Never apart. If I can bring you and Jiang Cheng back to the glory days before this life, then I’ll do whatever it takes.”

She’s quiet, then dabs a light gauze over his skin to absorb the excess liniment oil. Both of them know it won’t be possible–even if they were a lower noble family, there wasn’t a ticket back into the royal city unless you saved the emperor from death or something equally as momentous. Save the empire, or something. Wei Wuxian dreams big, but he’s realistic. 

“Thank you, Xianxian,” she says, finally. 

“It smells like old people in here,” Jiang Cheng announces, as absurdly loud as new year firecrackers when he comes back inside. He smells of freshwater and sand, and he tracks an inky line of water where his wet shoes stamp footprints into the floors. “I know you’re another year older now, but you’re really getting started early.”

“If I’m so old, then you better talk to me with respect, punk,” Wei Wuxian says. Jiang Cheng may be loud, may be messy, but he chases away the strange, yearning sadness that tugs like a deep saltwater current on Wei Wuxian every time his birthday comes and goes. He loves his stupid, loud brother for it. “Hey! Where’s my kowtow? Where’s my ‘ge,’ then? Where’s my ‘Wei qianbei,’ huh? I’m so old, Jiang Cheng, pay your respects!”

“Screw you, Wei Wuxian. I’d sooner call you Old Man Wei. You’d have to rip out my tongue first.”

“Okay, come here then, my hands are free.”

“Gross! What’s wrong with you?”

And so night falls on another day, another year, and Wei Wuxian feels a little empty and a lot full, like a planet is breathing inside him. Jiang Yanli tugs on Jiang Cheng’s hair, makes him sit down so she can wrestle the tangles out of his drying frizz, and Wei Wuxian holds the lantern for light.

It’s enough. 

So what happened to them, the Phoenix Rising? Why have they disappeared?

Because they had power. Because they were loved, feared, and respected, all things an emperor should be.  

In the beginning, it was an honor to be the emperor that controlled the Phoenix Rising, for it took an equally distinguished ruler to command such a family, and for generations, the Phoenix Rising served the throne with grace. For generations, the empire was a glowing, golden city upon which the sun glittered, and the common folk called it the City of Gods. 

But at the end of a weak dynasty, the throne was seized by a bloodthirsty family that feared the Phoenix Rising and the power they held. People, monsters, kings, or gods? Did the citizens respect the throne? Or did the loyalty of their hearts lie with the strange, winged family that had for centuries been revered as the beacon of luck and fortune?

 Humans fear what they do not understand. Humans seek to destroy what they fear. 

And so the Phoenix Rising paid the steepest price.

“Did he mention it to you at all yesterday?”

“No! He never brought it up. That punk. I’m gonna wring his sorry little neck.”

“A-Cheng.” A rustle of wind through paper. Then, “We need to ask him where he found this. He could’ve been caught. He could’ve been killed.”

Wei Wuxian wakes to his siblings whispering. Whispers always come through dreams like shouts, and he’s having a very strange dream about walking through wire, except instead of coals at his feet, there is ash, and in the ash there are hundreds and hundreds of keys glinting red as squirting cherries. His feet are burnt and blistering, but he can’t run, can’t turn back, can only walk forward. 

There are no secrets in a single-room shack. No matter how quietly Jiang Yanli whispers, Jiang Cheng speaks loud enough to wake the whole town. 

“Nicked it, probably,” says Jiang Cheng now. A grudging respect colors his voice. “That’s probably why he took so long to get back yesterday.”

The bamboo sleep mat crackles beneath him as Wei Wuxian rolls over, then sits up. For a moment the world is a spinning top. Jiang Yanli turns, lowering something, and smiles when she sees him awake. Jiang Cheng, of course, is already swinging. 

“You dumbass! Where did you get this? If someone comes looking for it and finds it with us, do you know how dead we are?”

Then Wei Wuxian sees it–the painting that he’d charmed out of the hands of the gambling proprietor at lunch yesterday. Jiang Yanli holds it like a broken bird in her lap, and Wei Wuxian ducks when Jiang Cheng aims another swat at him. Mostly half-hearted, but he leaps to his feet and skips out of reach. 

“I was going to surprise you!” he says. “I didn’t even have a chance to tell you what I was planning. You don’t know how much money this could bring in the black market, Jiang Cheng, an imperial painting? Just think about it. I can just disguise myself, go at night–cover my face, you know–and we could stop living here. We could live in a real house, and we wouldn’t have to all share one sleeping mat.”

“A-Xian,” Jiang Yanli gets to her feet, too. Always graceful in a stark contrast to her two brothers, the lantern from which two wild tassels would dance in the wind. She lifts the painting up high so that she can point to the red seal in the corner. “Do you recognize this?”

“The imperial seal, right? Sure. Everyone does.”

“I’m going to puke blood,” says Jiang Cheng. 

Jiang Yanli ignores him. “You’re not wrong, A-Xian. But this is an imperial seal of a concubine.”

Wei Wuxian blinks. “Of the emperor?”

“Yes. Judging from the seal design, not just any concubine–she must be a consort, at least.” Jiang Yanli holds the paper closer to her face, trying to discern the characters. “Mo,” she mutters, unsure. 

“So we could sell it for even more money,” Wei Wuxian concludes.

“No, we are not going to sell it for money,” says Jiang Cheng. His face has darkened. 

“Are you crazy?” Wei Wuxian asks. “You said it yourself, if someone finds us in possession, it’ll be our heads. The faster we get rid of it, the less likely anyone is to know it ever passed through our hands at all.”

“Yeah, well, you probably should have considered that before you nicked it, genius,” Jiang Cheng snaps. “It doesn’t matter. Now that we have it, we’re going to use it.”

“Use it how, if not for money, then?” Wei Wuxian struggles to keep his voice low. Jiang Cheng is not making any gods damned sense–isn’t he the one who constantly talks about leaving this hutong under the guise of hating how cramped it is, when really, he and Wei Wuxian agree that they should move closer to the imperial city where there would be better houses and perhaps a respectable man for their sister to marry if she so wanted? 

“We’re going to use this to return to the imperial city.” 

A silence falls like a tree toppled in storm between them. 

“A-Cheng,” Jiang Yanli begins. 

“We are?” asks Wei Wuxian. “How would that even work?”

“You’re the best at telling lies.”

“Well, yes, I’m glad you have seen the light.”

“Think about it,” says Jiang Cheng. “An emperor’s consort. It means she must have been in favor with the sitting emperor, Jin Huangshang. A painting with her seal on it. How would a painting by a favored concubine of the emperor end up out here?”

“Wound up in a gambling stall, no less,” Wei Wuxian says. Now that Jiang Cheng puts it that way–it’s more than a little strange. “Fine, say that we could use it as our golden ticket back into the imperial city. We’ll be lucky if the consort is dead. She won’t be around to ask any questions if there are holes in our story. What if she’s alive? What if she’s not a consort? What if she was hated, what then?”

“A-Xian,” says Jiang Yanli, setting her hand on his shoulder, and the touch is firmer than he’s used to. “Stop. You too, A-Cheng. Returning would be dangerous for us.”

“Dangerous how?” asks Wei Wuxian. There it is–that gap of the first eighteen years of his life rearing its mangled head. Sometimes it’s like trying to read a page of text with half the words blacked out, the ones left behind still beautiful, but without meaning. “A-Jie, I thought we were…”

“We were a lower noble family then, Xianxian. But it does not mean that the court is a safe place for any of us.”

“Jie!” says Jiang Cheng. 

“No, A-Cheng. We’re not going back. It’s not just for A-Xian’s safety, it’s for all of us.”

“Would we really be in that much danger?” asks Wei Wuxian. “If no one knows I’m the Lost Phoenix but the three of us, nothing would happen.”

Right?

“Jiejie,” says Jiang Cheng, his voice quieter than Wei Wuxian has ever heard it, “the Crown Prince has never married.”

Jiang Yanli’s face, for a dizzying heartbeat, is stricken. Something like pain and longing flashes through her eyes quick as the swing of an axe in cloudy morning, but then it’s gone, and she sighs. 

“What does the Crown Prince have anything to do with A-Jie?” asks Wei Wuxian. 

“That isn’t any of our business. Not even yours, A-Cheng,” she says. Wei Wuxian has never seen his sister like this, drawn up tall with her chin held high, and for a moment he sees the princess that she must once have been. Jiang Cheng, who is easily a head taller than her and twice as broad, crumples under the weight of her gaze. “We left because we wanted to. We’ve lived by this choice and we will continue to live by it. Now, both of you listen–A-Xian will do as he planned, sell this painting for whatever sum that traders will offer, and we won’t speak of it again. Understand?”

The tension swells like a fever between them. 

Wei Wuxian should be happy that his sister is on his side for this–when is it that she ever picks sides whenever he and Jiang Cheng argue? Any other time, he’d be hooting with laughter, rubbing it in Jiang Cheng’s face, but there is a deeply strange, melancholy expression on his brother’s face that does not suit him at all. 

“Fine,” says Jiang Cheng. He takes the scroll from Jiang Yanli, rolling it up with care, then shoves it into Wei Wuxian’s chest with considerably less care. “Get this shit out of my sight. I’m going out.”

Wei Wuxian watches helplessly as Jiang Cheng moves around their hut with jerky movements, jaw set with the pulse of anger. He gathers his knapsack and what meager rations of buns left over from the day before, no doubt stale and hard by now, and loops it around his shoulder. 

Then he’s gone, without another word. 

Wei Wuxian gnaws on the soft inside of his cheek. “A-Jie–”

“Don’t think too much about what A-Cheng said, Xianxian,” says Jiang Yanli. “He won’t show it, but he worries. You needn’t take what he said to heart.”

Jiang Yanli will say no more, no matter how hard he presses. He’ll press anyone until they give, but not her. She ducks her head when Wei Wuxian turns to her with his confused, hurt silence, as if she is waiting for his anger. He’d never be angry with her. 

“I don’t understand, A-Jie.”

“A-Cheng and I simply have different ideas of what it means to keep our family safe. He thinks it means returning. I think it means to stay.”

“But why would we be in danger?” he asks. “Does this have something to do with the Crown Prince? Did he know who I was? I guess so, or else why would Jiang Cheng bring him up? Did you know him? Could he help us?”

“No, he couldn’t.”

Wei Wuxian sets his mouth in a line. “Well, I should be off too,” he says. The sun has already started to burn back the clouds; he needs to find tonight’s dinner for the three of them. Maybe he should go after Jiang Cheng, press him for more details. Their sister, despite what anyone might think, gives far less easily than either of them. 

“Be careful, Xianxian,” she says. “Oh, are you taking the painting with you?”

“There’s no way I’m going to leave it here in case anyone finds it and you’re here by yourself. Worst case scenario, I throw it away, and we can pretend none of this ever happened.” He takes Jiang Yanli’s hands in his, squeezes them ruefully. “I’m sorry, A-Jie. I just thought it would help. I didn’t want you to argue with Jiang Cheng.”

“It’s okay.” She tucks his stray hairs over his ear. “Go. Come back safe, A-xian.”

He waves at her once when he steps out, and once more when he makes it to the end of the hutong and she becomes little more than a quilted patch of terrycloth in the distance, as he does every morning when he leaves. Jiang Cheng can’t have gone far in the time that he’s gone, unless he took off at a sprint, so Wei Wuxian lets the scented chill of autumn fill his lungs.

The Crown Prince. What a strange person to bring up. Wei Wuxian rifles through what he remembers hearing in taverns and pubs, filtered through the thick veil of alcohol. The Jin family sits upon the throne now, after staging a coup against the Wens and seizing power just over a decade ago. The Crown Prince would have to be a Jin prince. The Jin Emperor was said to be quite the philanderer and had more than enough sons from too many concubines to choose from. The Crown Prince must be quite a favorite, for an emperor with so many sons would not pay any mind to choosing the Empress’s sons if he so liked one from his concubine better. 

And this Crown Prince, according to Jiang Cheng, has never married. 

The look on Jiang Yanli’s face–frozen, bruised, a bird shot from the sky before it begins to plummet–was not one Wei Wuxian expected to see when she heard this news. If they’d known this prince, then he must have been around even before Wei Wuxian’s reincarnation. Jiang Yanli must have spoken of him. 

But all his memories can offer him are vague smudges of color and a person with pink like a fire in their hands. 

It’s too early for the fishmongers just yet, but the market brims with life as it always does. Wei Wuxian narrowly dodges a cart full of fresh flowers, a toothless grandfather with a bamboo hat pulling it along weakly. One of the wheels is crooked, wood squeaking against the stone pavement. 

“Shifu, your wheel,” says Wei Wuxian, plucking the canteen of oil tucked low against the cart. It dribbles out in a black splash. “There, that’s better, isn’t it?”

“Thank you, young man,” says the grandfather, and Wei Wuxian waits for him to turn his back to the street before plucking a lotus from the back of his cart and tucking it into his knapsack. For A-Jie, as penance for upsetting her so early in the morning. 

Jiang Cheng is not hard to find. He is poor at concealing himself, both in body and in voice, and he really is very bad at haggling. Wei Wuxian sidles up to him at a fruit stall, arguing with the vendor over a particularly ugly dragonfruit that looks more like a leathery handful of meat left too long in the sun than any respectable fruit. 

 “Now I think,” says Wei Wuxian, plucking it out of Jiang Cheng’s hand and ignoring his indignant scoff, “shifu, if you let this fruit sit out in your display, it would ruin the look of all the rest of your fruits. ‘Ah, look at this lovely display of dragonfruit. But what do we have here? A misfit! A miscreant! A monstrosity, really!’ And then you lose business. So really, we’re doing you a favor.”

“A favor?” says the vendor with disbelief. “What gall.”

Wei Wuxian laughs, then tosses the fruit back and forth between his hands and gives a quick jerk of his chin. “What do you say? Half off?”

“I can’t believe you weaseled him into giving it to us for less than half off,” says Jiang Cheng five minutes later. “You could talk your way out of your own–”

Wei Wuxian tosses his dragonfruit from hand to hand. “My own what?” Jiang Cheng’s knapsack hangs flat and sad against his back, crumpled like a dead leaf, so Wei Wuxian holds it open and drops the fruit inside. 

“Nothing. Never mind. What are you doing out here with that–thing?”

“Do you think I was going to leave it with A-Jie? No way. Imagine if she were alone and someone found her with it.”

Jiang purses his lips, nods. He tucks his thumb into the strap of his knapsack, a deadknot slung over his shoulder. “Have you thought about any stories?”

“What stories?”

“About what we’d say, if we brought it back to the imperial city.”

Jiang Cheng resolutely does not meet Wei Wuxian’s stare. 

“You want to go?”

“I just think that if we have a plan, A-Jie might be more willing to go. To be honest with you, if it were just to the two of us, it wouldn’t matter as much. We could sell the stupid painting, use the money. We could eke out an existence. It would fucking suck, but we could, and I wouldn’t feel guilty about it.”

“Ah, Jiang Cheng. You’re finally talking sense!” Wei Wuxian claps him on the back. When Jiang Cheng doesn’t shake his hand off, his smile falters. He must actually be worried. “Okay. We have to consider multiple scenarios, then, if we want this to be foolproof. We don’t want to make up a story where the concubine is alive when she’s dead. Or vice versa. So the first order of business is to figure that out.”

Jiang Cheng nods. “And what kind of favor she’s in with the emperor. The better, the easier for us.”

So, like peddlers, they spin their stories. 

+

The night blooms blue and foggy, the moon dropping light in handfuls of glass through the forest, and Wei Wuxian straightens to see that he is not alone. 

Someone else is in the mist with him. It’s thick enough that he cannot see their feet, so they could be floating. A man–just a bit taller than Wei Wuxian himself. His sword is drawn, lowered, as if he’d been pointing it before Wei Wuxian sensed him and stopped. The folded steel blade flashes. 

Blood sheets heavily down Wei Wuxian’s leg where the muscle has torn around the arrowhead, and haze sloshes in his skull. His brain is an upended bowl of goldfish. He grasps for words, for his thoughts, but they slip through his fingers. The stranger stares at him a bit in shock, a bit in horror, mostly in surprise. He opens his mouth. He closes it. He is wearing so much white he could be glowing, a star abandoned by its galaxy, and Wei Wuxian is the only one to find him. 

They stare at each other in the gloom. 

Wei Wuxian’s scattered goldfish thoughts say, Pink.

“Are you here to kill me?” asks Wei Wuxian. His words come out slurred even to his own ears. He needs to find Jiang Cheng. They need to get back to A-Jie. He needs to get out of here. 

“No.” The stranger steps towards him. “We mistook you for a prey animal. Are you badly hurt?”

“This? No, no. I’m fine. I need to go.”

“Your leg is injured.”

“It’s fine. I need to get back to–my wards,” Wei Wuxian says, catching himself before he says anything too revealing, pats himself on the back for staying in line even as his thoughts unravel. He picks his favorite story and sticks with it, hopes to any god that is listening it won’t get any of them killed. “My wards. They were with me. I was looking for Jin Bixia.”

The stranger has come so close that Wei Wuxian can make out every stitch of his robe. “What business do you have with the emperor?”

“I have a painting,” he mumbles around the haze. It’s a dark one, now. “My mother’s painting.”

Then darkness kisses his eyelids, and the night pulls him under. 

+

The scroll unfurls with the quiet hush of paper that has gone undisturbed too long. Even mounted on fine silk, the edges of the hemp and mulberry fibers have begun to wither, time nibbling as cruel and hungry as moths. The paper stretches on forever, nearly as tall as him fully unfurled. The cherrywood stick clacks upon the floor. 

Wei Wuxian’s mouth goes dry. He stares with seeing, then without comprehending, then without believing. 

The ink color has faded, like the paper, with age. Once the red might have leapt off the page, the greens so bright that spring grew from the painting itself, but all of it has flattened. It’s a simple composition. Where Mo Fu Ren had let her human subject be lost among the trees and sweeping landscapes, this painting is only one person, draped in textured golds and silk brocade embroidered with dragons. 

Simple, perhaps, but done by the hand of someone who held them beloved. 

His fingers shake when he reaches out. They hang back, and he pulls away, afraid that touching it might make the entire painting dissolve in his hands. 

Smiling serenely back at him is his own face, thirteen years younger, thirteen years less hungry—but it is him. His eyes are downcast, with a rabbit cradled in the crook of his elbow and a bird perched upon his shoulder. Without a doubt it is him. Even if he could not recognize his own face, the characters that march in little terracotta soldiers down the paper leave no room for guessing. 

The black ink is fresh, as if someone has run a brush through the strokes every year so that they can never fade. 

Wei Wuxian, they say. 

This can’t be right. He must be misreading. He blinks hard. 

His thoughts trip over each other’s ankles. They come in a clamoring flood, each wanting to be heard first, pored over first. Wei Wuxian. Had there been another before him? It is not a common name. It is not a name that would show up twice in the royal city if every noble family had the names of their descendants planned out for generations, no matter if the Phoenix Rising had been slaughtered by order of the emperor. Why is there a painting of him rolled up and locked away in the private study of Hanguang Gexia, second head of the scholar house to Emperor Jin? 

Did they once know each other?

How could it be that a key that Jiang Yanli gave him would unlock this desk?

There are corpses sleeping under their feet. This earth has been burnt and salted. 

An old ache starts in his spine. 

We were a lower noble family then, Xianxian.

Fire without coals. 

There was a person. Just a person.

Do not exhume these bodies. 

We left because we wanted to.

Something terrible must have happened to him. 

1633 words, rated t.

a complete chapter 2 in an incomplete series of oneshots titled 一日三秋; one day, three autumns, in which wwx is the autumn king and lwj is the winter prince.

ch 1.

they say that missing someone is the most powerful force of pain a person will know. a pain that can wilt the heart. a pain to carry. a pain that can turn one day into three autumns.

In the middle of Lan Wangji’s left thigh is a scar, round and hollow in the center, like a coin. It had been a burn once, angry blisters deadening into a purple keloid into, now, a little white moon on his skin. 

Of the five floors of the castle, Lan Wangji is only allowed in three. Evidently, little does it matter that he is the only other heir to the Winter Throne should his brother ever be incapable of holding it; he’s often pictured how woefully unprepared he would be should the Kingdom of Summer ever revolt again, or, as the Defectress Luo Qingyang had promised, if the Autumn King showed up seeking revenge. 

For what, Lan Wangji doesn’t know. 

“You don’t need to know,” has always been his uncle’s reply. 

“You won’t need to know if I have any say in it,” is what his brother says, kind, still double-edged.

“You should know,” said the Defectress Luo Qingyang, over her teacup, and jade has never looked so threatening, “that your kingdom is still carrying out the crimes of war right under your nose, and if your family does not wake up, the Autumn Kingdom will leave the decade-long peace treaty in the dust the same way you have.” She said it all like she was simply commenting on the races. The Jin Imperial Family was winning. 

“How do you know? What kind of war crimes?” asked Lan Wangji. He’d spoken too brusquely, but Luo Qingyang hadn’t been fazed. All around them, the Dragon Boat Festival surged on, air humid and painted green-red-blue, an overfull tea kettle of a day. “Why is it your concern?”

“That you think it shouldn’t be my concern is the same line of thinking that got your Kingdom into this mess,” she said, and her words have been ringing in Lan Wangji’s ears ever since, an unwelcome jabber of sparrow song and raven squawks that won’t leave him hours later. The telltale signs of spring. She holds her position well. 

“What kind of war crimes?” he repeated.

She’d taken her time sipping the rest of her tea before placing her empty cup on the table to be taken away. “Do you recall, when the Wen Imperial Family went rogue and the Snowfire Wars tore the lands apart,” she said, “there was a division of mages known as the Core Reapers?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t really believe, do you, that they simply vanished after those wars?”

Lan Wangji had stared at her. 

The Core Reapers hadvanished after the Snowfire Wars. They’d ridden through the war-torn battlegrounds after blood had been spilled like red ghosts, gathering the dying bodies of civilians and mages alike to, as Lan Wangji had heard, harvest their cores. Word was that the Wen Imperial Family was creating elixirs, weapons, medicines out of them. Hearsay had it that they were creating monsters. 

He stares at his scar now, where his jade pendant had burned him through three layers of clothing thirteen years ago, and had never lit up again. In the dusk of the evening, it’s almost invisible, as if it had  never existed—vanished, like the Reapers, after the war. 

Lan Wangji stands up and shrugs his outer robe back on. Unthinkingly, he opens the drawer where he keeps that pendant, like it’ll have answers for him. It doesn’t. Jade does not dull with age, but in the red velvet of the drawer it could be leached bone. A small one—a skull bone. 

Lying beside it is its bonded match. Once they had been identical, though Lan Wangji’s pendant was wrapped in blue ribbon. The other is broken on one side and missing a segment, red knotting and tassels unraveled, the jade circle incomplete like a horseshoe. When the Snowfire Wars raged around him, Lan Wangji wore his half of the pair with more attention and care than when he carried his sword.

“Wangye,” his attendant inclines her head when he opens his pavilion doors. 

“I have some personal work to attend to. Can you see to it that, if any of my family seeks me, to let them know I will greet them accordingly when I return?”

“Yes, Wangye.”

So he goes. 

Three of the Kingdom’s floors are aboveground. Two are below. He’s been to three in the middle—never the topmost, never the bottomost, and he’s not sure what he’s looking for. He has to look, to be sure, or else it will be another evening of Luo Qingyang’s voice in his head, jerking him awake long before dawn.

Strange dreams have been plaguing him since the Dragon Boat festival, the sorts of dreams that someone would tell themselves didn’t mean anything. The night of the festival Lan Wangji had gone to bed and found himself in a place where the sun never set, simply bobbing up and down in the sky, turning from green to gold and back again as the days and nights passed. Then, the next night, the scar on his thigh had opened up and begun bleeding afresh, and no matter what magic he used, it would not stop. The more magic he used, the more blood poured down his leg. 

Last night, he dreamed of Wei Ying. Not in the way he’d been in life, so bright that Lan Wangji couldn’t bear to look at him sometimes. 

The Kingdom of Winter had been blanketed in snow for their cycle, and Lan Wangji was in the woods outside the royal walls alone. A dark sweep of Core Reapers had passed by. Their hoods had been drawn over their heads. It looked as if the entire forest was bleeding. 

One of them in the center of their tight pool of red had paused and turned their heads, and under the scarlet, mink-lined hood had been Wei Ying’s face. 

Lan Wangji shakes himself as he greets the guards that stand outside the gates into the Kingdom’s undergrounds. A question floats through their expressions but they open the gates for him without question, bowing again as he passes. 

He picks his way through the first underground level without wasting his time. Here they keep their forbidden texts, their spoils of war, here they hold sensitive political meetings. A damp, sweet smell of soil clutches fat little hands at his robes, happy for visitors, and he raises his hand to upright some of the overgrown vines and planters that line the walls. His hand glows a dim blue, and the drooping foliage picks its flower heads up again. Blooms are coming. 

Even if he’s never made the descent into the lowest floor of the Kingdom, Lan Wangji knows there are two ways to get there—the prisoners’ entrance in the Pavilion of Discord, and the one he faces now. The jailers’ entrance, through the Hall of Justice. 

He doesn’t feel particularly just, facing the round door that he knows will take him down the staircase into the Kingdom’s dungeons.  

Blue fires light his way. 

In times of peace, there aren’t many prisoners to speak of. The few that the Kingdom of Winter persecutes are petty thieves, suspected spies, and the occasional revolutionist, all of which are bent into fearful submission before they ever even make it to the dungeons. Lan Wangji knows it. He’s seen it. 

And he’s right, almost, for at least part of the dungeon. It’s bright and clean, with mainly empty cells, but the blue fires end abruptly in the middle of the long walkway between the rows. There are scuffles, noises of things living, hushed in the gloom. He pauses and strains his eyes. Then he lifts his hand, summoning some of the fires in the torches to his palm to light his way. 

He doesn’t know what he expects to see. Prisoners, perhaps, curled up like hungry mice. 

The icy sheen of his fire falls over the bodies in the cells, and Lan Wangji frowns before he steps back, breath stuttering in his chest. 

They are prisoners. It’s the most human thing left about them. Some of them have lost all their hair, ragged clumps gathering in rolls thick as dead cats beside them. Others have clawed their own backs bloody, as if they’d been trying to dig their own spines out of their bodies, and still others were covered in a thick, tarry ooze, as if blood and lymph had leaked out of them and gained its own sentience. One of them lay in silence with a stained white strip of cloth over his eyes, a line at his neck like his head had been stitched back on. 

Lan Wangji’s stomach writhes, hot and sick, in his belly. 

The end of the walkway widens into a larger chamber where no one is kept, but as he passes his fire over the space he can make out the outlines of odd contraptions—long rods with fluted holes, boards with three holes in them—one larger, two smaller, for a neck and hands. A splintered wooden gurney like a rotting log. Old blades sprout off of it like oyster mushrooms. They blink sleepily back at him, eyes in the night. A bizarre device like a chair, outfitted with two horns on both sides. Anyone sitting in it would have their head position between the mouths of both. 

He frowns. A long skein of red fabric has been tossed carelessly over the back of the chair, wrinkles rounded and warm. A cloak. Someone’s just taken it off. 

“Wangji,” a voice comes from behind him, “what are you doing down here?”

1348 words, rated t. 

a complete chapter 1 in an incomplete series of oneshots titled 一日三秋; one day, three autumns, in which wwx is the autumn king and lwj is the winter prince. 

they say that missing someone is the most powerful force of pain a person will know. a pain that can wilt the heart. a pain to carry. a pain that can turn one day into three autumns. 

Spring sends her first letter with a lilac rainshower, the kind that drifts more than it falls. 

Today is the Dragon Boat Festival. 

Lan Wangji overhears when he’s finishing the last of the five-silk braids for the children. In the past week he’s made more than he has bothered to count and has been told more times than he cares to remember by the weavers of the Kingdom of Winter that an imperial prince has no reason to lift a finger to braid their clan’s five-silk bracelets.

He knows. He doesn’t care. This is the thirteenth year after the secession of the Wen Imperial Family from the Kingdom of Summer, and Lan Sizhui is the same age as he had been when—

“What is the meaning of this?”

“Huangshu, let us discuss elsewhere.”

“Is it not enough that we have let the Autumn Kingdom exist in its decrepit filth? For what reason do we owe them anything? And what audacity, for another young kingdom to demand anything of us!” There’s something towards the bottom of the letter that turns his uncle’s face the color of puce and plum, and Lan Wangji wonders vaguely at what it could be. The paper is plain, too plain to be of the Jin or Jiang Imperial Family, and neat around the edges, the kind of no-nonsense to be expected of the Nie Imperial Family. 

“They might have allied.” To anyone else, the Emperor of Winter sounds as undisturbed as the quiet hum of fresh snow, but worry bleeds into Lan Xichen’s voice. “And if such is the case, we will want to discuss it somewhere that curious ears might not be listening.”

Lan Wangji stands up so fast that his chair drags its nails across the wood. “Huangxiong,” he says, “I would like to read the letter.”

Their uncle regards him with distaste. “Your duty is to represent our kingdom during the festival later. You are not needed for this discussion, it is a political matter to be discussed with the council of scholars.”

“Huangshu,” says Lan Xichen, “I think it would be prudent for Wangji to be aware of the political movements of our kingdom.” When their uncle says nothing, he adds, “Should anything ever happen to me before I produce an heir.”

A sigh. “Fine,” says Lan Qiren. “I would prefer to make this quick, for there is a festival waiting for us this morning. If we do not show it will be the talk of every imperial family and I am uninterested in inviting talk about our position on the throne.”

Lan Wangji crosses the Hall, watching as his brother’s face creases with concern, and takes the letter. It’s not long, with delicate, spidery calligraphy, as if its writer had dipped a green-bellied dove in a pot of ink and let it skitter across the page. 

To the Kingdom of Winter:

May this find you and your people in good health. 

This letter will serve as formal written demand that the Kingdom of Winter cease all attacks upon the Kingdom of Autumn. It has come to our attention that the Kingdom of Winter has continued to pursue experimentation of human and mage subjects of the Autumn Rogues, which in the Treaty of Lanling was agreed would be considered a war crime and could be tried as such. 

It is our duty to protect the sanctity of this agreement or we shall be forced to revisit some of our most shameful and unsavory history. Should it be that there are further crimes being carried out against the Autumn Rogues through exploitation or other inhuman means of torture, be it by the Kingdom of Winter or the Reformed Kingdom of Summer, you will leave me with no choice but to treat the standing treaty as null. 

You will find that the Autumn King will not be so diplomatic when the time comes. 

The Defectress

Kingdom of Spring

Lan Wangji’s brain is a warning bell. He looks up from the letter, eyebrows drawn. His brother is studying the floor with unbidden fascination; his uncle has his arms crossed, body turned away, hunched in on his own armor as if he knows what Lan Wangji will say. 

“Human experimentation?” he asks. “Mages? Huangxiong, what do you know about this? Who is the Defectress? How do they know?” 

How could he not?

He casts his eyes back down to the letter. Lan Wangji’s stomach sours at the implications. Human and mage subjects. The torture could run deep. He’s seen what the Kingdoms of Summer and Winter were capable of when the Snowfire Wars fractured the kingdoms, and he saw the carnage. He saw the bodies. He did what he was told because it meant he would keep his head: he fell into line. 

“Wangye,” says Lan Xichen, “I will tell you everything at a better time. For now, you must attend the Dragonboat Festival in our stead, and we will join you shortly. If this letter is real, then we mustn’t risk any talk from other kingdoms if none of us show.”

“But—”

“Go,” commands his uncle, and Lan Wangji bites down on his tongue until iron paints the soft insides of his cheeks. “I don’t want to hear another word from you, Wangye.”

He obeys. Lan Wangji brings his basket of woven bracelets so that no child will be left without one, and by the time he has reached the docks he has tied half a basket’s worth of thread and ribbons around fat, tender wrists, around bony ones, around children who didn’t recognize him and hugged his legs in thanks when he stood up, only to be pried away with apologies from their parents. He’s flagged down on a bridge that arches its weary back over a trickling inlet that meanders its way into the city, a slow, lazy green python winding itself between buildings. 

Dragon boats are already on the water. 

“Lan Er Wangye,” greets the Lanling heir, Jin Zixuan. He looks older than Lan Wangji remembers, draped in fine, gossamer fabrics and a particularly severe gold hairpiece like a caged lightning bolt. “Respectful salutations from the Kingdom of Summer, Jin family.”

“Jin Taizi,” Lan Wangji returns, feeling unwoven by the morning. His uncle’s voice is a whipcrack in his ears. Don’t let them have a reason to talk. Still, a question buzzes dully at the back of Lan Wangji’s brain—what if Jin Taizi had gotten a letter like theirs? There’s a muted, thoughtful set to his shoulders that Lan Wangji is unfamiliar with. 

He can’t put much more thought to it. The morning sun breathes fire into the boats and the dragons’ eyes move at their helms, ruby, russet, the black smoke of an oil fire puffing in clouds from their snouts. Lan Wangji greets every crown prince and imperial family until his mouth is sandy, neck catching from so many bows. 

He takes tea alone as the boats begin to fill with their racers. A young woman that he only vaguely recognizes comes by to join him, a jade bracelet woven with flowers on her wrist when she pours herself a cup. 

“Racers, oars in hand!” 

“Lan Er Wangye,” she greets. “You look well on this day of the Dragon Boat Festival.”

“I am,” he lies. “I should hope my lady is as well, though I am afraid I do not recognize from which imperial family you hail.”

She laughs, and it’s not unkind. Playful, perhaps, pollen and green tree-sap on the wind. “No need for titles. My name is Luo Qingyang, and I no longer hail from an imperial family. Do tell me, Lan Er Wangye,” she sips, lip rouge pinking the teacup, “did you brother receive my letter this morning?”

“Get ready!”

Lan Wangji turns to stare at her. 

“You’re—?”

“Race!”

incomplete wip. 2744 words, rated t. 

originally drafted for the wangxian weddings for maubrey collection. a sequel to baby’s first wangxian fic 蓝色生死恋; a blue love (to live and to die for)

Wei Wuxian wakes up the morning after his wedding a little cold and a lot sore, skin tingling like it’s new. He’s spent a lot of both lives waking up feeling like his skeleton had sneakily rearranged itself overnight in the worst way—a rib in his throat, a femur jammed up through his belly, vertebrae scattered around him like loose gravel. 

But today he wakes up with the sun in a crescent on his hip, smiling at the edge of the window, feeling like every part of his body for once is in the right place. Brain in his head, head on his shoulders, heart in his chest. Lan Zhan is, of course, already awake, staring up at the canopy of their wedding bed. Not wide-eyed, and possibly for the first time in Wei Wuxian’s life, lazy. 

“Lan Zhan.” He can hear his own voice vibrate against Lan Zhan’s body. 

“You’re awake.”

“What were you doing up, earlier?” Wei Wuxian presses a deep yawn into the side of his husband’s—husband’s!—neck, the kind that sends shivers all the way down into his ankles and feet. “It was barely dawn. Don’t tell me you weren’t tired? I can’t believe I didn’t tire you out last night. I don’t even know if I was awake for our last round.” The thought makes heat flare in Wei Wuxian’s cheeks. They’ll have to revisit that.

“Hm,” Lan Zhan says, and the low thrum of laughter runs through him. It’s mostly silent; Wei Wuxian feels it more than he hears it. “You were, but only just.” Then, “I thought of a song.”

“A song?”

“Yes.”

“About what?”

“You,” Lan Zhan says, both fondly and in a way that says this should be obvious.

“About my oral prowess, I hope.”

“It was not.”

“Is it happy, at least?”

Lan Zhan is quiet. “My other song for you is not very happy, is it?” 

“Well,” Wei Wuxian pushes himself upright so that he’s lying on top of Lan Zhan, rests his chin on his folded wrists. A constellation of hickeys and bruises stretches across Lan Zhan’s neck, and Wei Wuxian takes his time studying them. He hasn’t seen his own skin yet, but he can tell the violet blooms are already fading on Lan Zhan, burnt back by the heat of his golden core. “I think someone a lot lonelier than the Lan Zhan I married wrote that song, is all.”

“Mm.” Lan Zhan holds Wei Wuxian by the waist, steady, steady, like balancing the weight of the world on him in the cradle of his palms. “But you’re here now. To have you like this, it would be impossible to feel lonely again.”

“To have me like how?” Wei Wuxian asks, propping his chin in his palm, wide-eyed with mock wonder. “Will the esteemed Hanguang-jun care to elaborate?”

Lan Zhan’s eyes darken, narrowing for a flicker of a moment before he moves, and Wei Wuxian ends up on his back so fast that ah, there, there’s that feeling that his bones are all in the wrong places—in the best way, in the only way he hopes to know it again, with Lan Zhan’s hands on his body  and heart against his. Beating, beating, beating.

☄

For some reason, Wei Wuxian is surprised when he gets up and Lan Zhan offers him clothes that look virtually identical to the ones he’s always worn—dark, red accents, wristcuffs laced with ribbons. Everything is a little nicer, and even for someone who never cared to notice, the fabric folds heavy and well-made in his hands. There are cloud patterns embroidered in black thread along the collars, and peonies in the shoulder patches. 

He stands in the middle of their wedding chamber, naked as the day he was born, turning them back and forth without slipping them on. 

“Do you not like them?” Lan Zhan asks, already decent with his satin underrobe on.

“I love them, they’re just so—me?” Wei Wuxian lowers them. 

“Would you like me to put them on?”

“Yes!” Wei Wuxian says. He lifts his arms helpfully when Lan Zhan comes to him, slipping the sleeves of a new red underrobe over him and leaning close to do the ties at Wei Wuxian’s waist. He’s so close that Wei Wuxian simply leans forward and kisses the crown of Lan Zhan’s head. Then his temple. Then he stops, because if he doesn’t, they will never leave this chamber. 

“These were commissioned from a different tailor,” Lan Zhan says when he slips the black outer robe onto Wei Wuxian’s body. “I was concerned that they wouldn’t get your measurements right, but I’m glad to see it fits.”

It fits like a hug around Wei Wuxian’s body. 

“The collars of the underrobe are quite high?”

Lan Zhan looks at him. “That was intentional.”

Wei Wuxian stares blankly until the faint ache of hickeys registers, and he puts his hands over his face and groans, “Ohhh. Oh, I won’t make it through the week like this.”

“Wei Ying.”

“I love you, Lan Zhan, I really do, with all the force of ten thousand weeping mountains—a hundred thousand—but my heart will give out. It will cave.”

Lan Zhan ignores his theatrics and turns him around to run his hairbrush through Wei Wuxian’s hair. He’s always so gentle when he does it for Wei Wuxian—not that he’s rough on himself, but he certainly doesn’t seem to take as long, brushing out every lock of hair between his fingers. 

“I can’t believe the Chief Cultivator can’t even take a few days to himself. After his own wedding!” Wei Wuxian says as Lan Zhan twists his hair up into a soft knot. It’s elegant and something Wei Wuxian will likely never learn how to do himself. “I want to stay with you all day. I want to lie in the sun with you and then go running by the beaches at sunset. Well—I’ll run, you can walk gracefully, as you do. I want to sit in the grass with you and feed the rabbits until the wet seeps up into my robes.”

“Mm. So do I.” Lan Zhan pushes his hairstick through the base of the knot. “But it will be a short meeting. Just a report and a written acknowledgment that we are married, that the sects have bore witness that we are married. And that any assault upon you would be considered an offense to the Lan Sect.” 

Wei Wuxian’s knees go soft and it has nothing to do with the exhaustion from the night before. “Lan Zhan…”

“You could come if you like, but I would not ask you to.”

“Because you’re flawless and perfect.”

Lan Zhan exhales. It’s his favorite way to laugh. Then he smooths his hand down the free length of Wei Wuxian’s hair. “I’ll meet you in the Jingshi for lunch.”

“Come back to me soon.”

“Always.”

☄

For two weeks after the wedding, Lan Zhan has reduced duties and Wei Wuxian a leave of absence from classes, but it has been a while since he watched the sun turn the sky blue, then grey, then lace-white as it rises over the blanket of clouds. Once, on a night hunt, Wei Wuxian had climbed high enough in the Cloud Recesses that the clouds were finally under him, and he looked over the endlessness of it, feeling like he was standing at the edge of existence. 

By the third day, after all the guests leave, Wei Wuxian finally gets some much-needed solitude. It’s a weird thing to need, for him, anyway, considering how much time he’s already spent alone. When he sits in the meadow of rabbits in the back hills of the Cloud Recesses, he lies down with his arms spread until he can feel rabbit nosing at his pockets.

“I haven’t brought anything for you,” he says, eyes closed. The sun is orange and veiny against his closed eyes. “Since when did you guys even like me enough to look for snacks?”

There are voices coming down the mountain path, though, so Wei Wuxian sits up and brushes stray bits of grass off his back and knees, tries to pick some out of his hair. Before his wedding, he would not have cared, but he’s husband to the Chief Cultivator now. He needs to look the part. 

“Morning,” he greets, and blinks when it’s a handful of older Lan women carrying the rabbit feed today. Tending to the rabbits is disciple work, usually, but vaguely, he knows they had to change the structure of classes for the two weeks he isn’t teaching. 

“Oh! Wei gongzi. We didn’t expect to see you out here.”

“Hanguang-jun isn’t with you?”

“He’s busy in the mornings,” says Wei Wuxian, hands jumping to the collars of his robes. They’re bound tight, thank heavens. “I’ve simply been unwinding after a wedding like that. It really takes everything out of you, doesn’t it?”

“Being married does that to you,” says one of the women, sagely. Lan Danyi if Wei Wuxian’s memory serves him correctly. The other women nod, murmuring their assent.

“It…takes everything out of you?” he asks. That doesn’t sound pleasant, but he hasn’t been anything but happy since being married. Is he doing something wrong?

“When does it not?” says another. Lan Ruyi, who looks so much like her sister that they could be mirror images. “You’re lucky you married Hanguang-jun, Wei gongzi. Marriage is hard work. The first year of a marriage is the hardest year of any relationship.”

“It—it is? Why?”

“Well, of course,” they say, like this should be common knowledge. Lan Danyi bends down and begins feeding the rabbits their carrots. “You will probably have it better than we do, but when you get married, who do you become? You lose your sense of self. Before this, you’re your own person, but you don’t just belong to you anymore, don’t you? Of course, Hanguang-jun would never be so uncouth, I see that he doesn’t mind that Wei gongzi continues to wear his own robes. Which is as it should be, do you remember that Zhao Xiaohong that Lan Hongqi married a few years ago?”

“Oh,” says Wei Wuxian. He hadn’t thought of that. 

“Of course, of course,” says the third woman. Wei Wuxian well and truly cannot remember her name, which is going to be a problem if he’s going to be part of the Lan Sect now. “But your future isn’t your own anymore, either. You walk a two-person path now. When one person hurts their feet, you must check your own for thorns. Sometimes the path diverges and you want to take a different one than the one they choose.” She sighs. “And you have to choose the one they want to take.”

“I think learning how to walk one, honest path is romantic in and of itself, Jianying.”

“Perhaps. But not all of us can marry Hanguang-jun, so really, how romantic could it be.”

“So you can’t be headstrong, it’ll be such a pain,” Lan Ruyi says. “It’s easier for someone who grew up in the Lan Sect, but marrying in is always harder.”

“Which is what makes the first year of living together the hardest,” says Lan Danyi, nodding. “You don’t want to be someone difficult to share space with. But, Wei gongzi, I’m sure you and Hanguang-jun won’t have a problem at all. Right?”

“Right,” he says faintly. A morning with the rabbits is almost always calm and soothing, but today he feels neither calm nor soothed. “Uh, have a lovely morning.”

“Wei gongzi, go safely!” they call after him as he slip-slides back onto the path.

He gives them a wave, and starts heading back alone.

☄

“—ying. Wei Ying?”

 He blinks.  Then he comes to, piece by piece, chopsticks still aloft between his bowl and his mouth. A bite of married-couple spiced tripe drips its fiery oil into his food, a little red coin on the pebbled surface of his rice. Lan Zhan has leaned forward, mouth set in a taut line of concern. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” Wei Wuxian shovels his food into his mouth. “Nothing, Lan Zhan.”

His husband—will he ever tire of that title? Evidence points to no—is not convinced. Not that Wei Wuxian expected him to be, but he also doesn’t expect Lan Zhan to set his own bowl down, resting his chopsticks over the rim, and insist, again, “There’s something wrong.”

“Lan Zhan, it’s really…really, it’s…”

Of course, Hanguang-jun would never be so uncouth, I see that he doesn’t mind that Wei gongzi continues to wear his own robes.

“Well,” says Wei Wuxian, and Lan Zhan leans forward minutely to listen, “Lan Zhan, do you hate that I dress this way?”

This question apparently catches Lan Zhan off-guard. He blinks once, twice, then asks, “In what way, Wei Ying?”

“Like…myself.” Like my unmarried self. 

A faint ribbon of confusion slips between Lan Zhan’s eyebrows. “I love you regardless of what you wear.”

“You probably prefer me not wearing anything, right, Lan Zhan?” Wei Wuxian jokes weakly. 

“Yes. But,” says Lan Zhan, as Wei Wuxian wheezes at his frankness, “what is this about?”

“I just thought,” Wei Wuxian says, feeling wild and stupid, because they’re married, they’re married, why is he being silly about this, “that. I don’t know, I’d look different after I got married. To you? That I should look different.” I want to look different. I want to look like I belong to somewhere, to someplace, to someone.

“Different how?”

“Uhm,” he looks down into his rice, chili oil staining the grains a bright, yolky gold. Gods, this is ridiculous. “Never mind.”

Lan Zhan is a quiet rustle of fabric and footsteps when he stands and moves around the dining table. When he sits down beside Wei Wuxian he’s a warm waft of sandalwood and camellia oil. “Wei Ying,” he says, brings Wei Ying’s hand into his lap between his own. “Something troubles you.”

“It’s not—I’m not troubled, Lan Zhan, I promise. But I guess I. I want to look married to you.”

Lan Zhan searches his face. The concern softens around the edges. “How so?”

“I don’t think I can wear all white or a forehead ribbon, or more than three layers,” Wei Wuxian warns, “but. I felt at home, wearing your white underrobe. It’s not that I don’t like red, but I only wore it so much so you couldn’t see the bloo—”

Wei Wuxian snaps his mouth shut. Really, is this a topic he should be bringing up a day after their wedding, at dinner, no less? He feels like an uninvited, rain-soaked guest falling through the doorway of a place he’s not welcome. 

“Stains less,” he finishes in a tiny voice. 

“Wei Ying,” says Lan Zhan, and he reaches up to tuck one of Wei Wuxian’s feathery wisps of hair behind his ear. “If that is what you want to wear, then you should wear it.”

“I didn’t want to make you feel bad. You commissioned those for me in mind specially.”

Lan Zhan shakes his head. “Only because I mistook your preference for them. What you wear is your choice, Wei Ying. In this life, you do not have to look any way but the way you want to. All white. All black. A bit of both, or neither. The things we put on our bodies…they’re an extension of us. Whatever that looks like to you now is what I’ll love.”

“What if I want to wear a pink tunic and a green skirt and, and a gold belt, and no shoes?”

“You would look like Nezha,” Lan Zhan says very seriously, “and I would love you all the same.”

Wei Wuxian laughs, and then he kisses his husband right there at the dinner table, and he thinks that being married really doesn’t take too much out of you at all. Lan Zhan steadies him by the arms, and then pulls him into his lap, and Wei Wuxian’s ribs wedge into the side of the table and the bruise from even that will be sore and sweet the way a hickey is.

What a fortune it is to be married, Wei Wuxian thinks, when Lan Zhan has him on the bamboo mat floors and his hair in a dark fan across them, and have the privilege to be nothing but your messy, scattered, glimmering self. 

Hi Guys!

I’m sure a few people are running into this problem and not a lot of solutions have been found yet. I noticed a few things when comparing dashboards.

If you get this message:

I’m still not sure what this means. However, this is what I did notice:

In your dashboard settings, you now have two additional panels of metadata and an additional HTML section.

I haven’t played around with it much but I’m hoping that this new HTML slot isn’t the end all be all of theme editing. I’ve tried various codes on this new blog of mine and nothing works. Tumblr has gone through an update and, as far as I know, not provided details or info to the community about using custom themes has changed.

What I have seen: You can add a background, you can’t customize your links or posts setting. You MAYhave to cannibalize a code in order to get it to work properly. I’m still messing around and will make further posts if I can. If anyone else has insight into this, please let me know!