Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Your absence has gone through me 
Like thread through a needle. 
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
Separation, W.S. Merwin 

When Zhao Yuanzhou wakes, he’s lying at the foot of the Baize Tree, a head full of hair spilling across its roots, the sky an open field of light, the air no longer drawn as tight as a bowstring. Zhao Yuanzhou levers himself upright, stunned. Around him, the old graveyard is unrecognizable. What happened to the rocks and muddy gullies he cut himself upon for so many years?

He’s dressed in robes embroidered with gold thread: the motif of a white ape swallowing the sun, two cranes above a sea. He rubs the pale fabric between two fingers. It’s heavy silk, the layers folded precisely one over the other. A jade token swings from the waistband. A golden crown holds his hair from his face. Someone had taken pains when laying his body to rest, dressing Zhao Yuanzhou’s corpse.

Getting to his feet stuns him, also. Even at the height of his power, pain had been his constant companion. He closes his eyes for a moment, circles his internal energy, and finds this second body of his also has an inner core. But—how strange.

It seems that Zhao Yuanzhou, the prophesized calamity of Heaven, Earth, and the Great Wilderness, has reincarnated as a godling.

Zhao Yuanzhou prepares himself for a hike through the Wilderness back to the mortal world. Though the road is smooth, and so easy, he knows better than most: appearances are most deceiving. He steels himself to find that it is his death, or perhaps even his rebirth, that has brought the world to ruin again.

When he passes the foot of Kunlun Mountain, he can’t help the way his eyes lift to drink in its immortal peaks. Down and down the stone steps he goes. Down and down the light follows. He needs to get back to the human world as quickly as he can, though he supposes none of his friends would have survived. Wen Xiao and Pei Sijing, most definitely gone. His zhiji may still cling to life, but he crushes the hope in his heart before it has time to bloom further. But he just needs to know. He—

There is a crowd gathered below the painted gates of Kunlun Mountain. The bridge at its base has expanded greatly. Flanked on either side of the road are stalls and between those stalls a crowd, all dressed in the fine garb that can only signify a year of rich harvest. Demons and mortals and gods mix among each other.

Zhao Yuanzhou's heart stops in his chest.

Then the gates burst open.

Footsteps thunder across the snow and stone.

“Zhao Yuanzhou!” Wen Xiao shouts.

Bai Jiu slams into him. “Zhao-ge!”

And— “Welcome back,” Pei Sijing says evenly.

Zhao Yuanzhou does not so much look up on his own volition than he is pulled to his feet. What he sees knocks the breath sideways from his lungs. 

“Wen Xiao,” he breathes. “Master Pei. And—”

Wen Xiao and Pei Sijing look the same as when he saw them last. But it is their little Bai Jiu, who had, at the end, spent more days in bed than he did upright, who is nearly a boy grown. He stands tall—taller than Zhao Yuanzhou—broader in the shoulders, without the pallor of sickness beneath his eyes. At an age he never reached, in their past life. To think, he might have outgrown the last bed they’d put his body in.

Zhao Yuanzhou cups Bai Jiu’s face in two shaking hands. “Xiaojiu,” he breathes.

When Bai Jiu looks back at him, Zhao Yuanzhou bares his teeth and lets out half a bark: the same kind he used to scare him with. This time, Bai Jiu doesn’t scream, nor do his eyes don’t roll back in his head. Instead, a line of tears runs from his eyes, wetting his cheeks. His lip trembles badly.

“How old are you now?” Zhao Yuanzhou says, wiping at his face. “To be crying in my arms like this?”

Bai Jiu twists his head aside, scrubbing at his own face. “Blame yourself for that one,” he says. “You took so long to get here, I thought you’d never wake up.”

“As if, my little rabbit,” Zhao Yuanzhou says.

Pei Sijing raises an eyebrow at him, over Bai Jiu's shoulder. Her arms crossed over her chest, but she’s smiling, however, in that faint way of hers.

“The mountains are high, and the sea boundless,” she says. “This lonesome traveler must be weary.”

Bai Jiu’s still crying. Zhao Yuanzhou’s still patting his back.

“Actually,” he says. “Life as a godling is much nicer than being a vessel for demonic energy.”

Bai Jiu extricates himself from Zhao Yuanzhou’s grasp, sniffling hard. He pats quite respectably at his hair and robes, smoothing each down. His nose is red, and his eyes are still wet, but he still rolls them so hard they nearly fall out of his head. 

“Your sense of humor didn't get any better,” he says, only slightly nasal. “What Pei-jie means, is that we need to get fucking wasted.”

They gather in the warm room of Ying Lei’s Kunlun estate. The little god fishes wine from his pantry, and cracks the lids open, one jar for each, and pours each of them a cup. Zhao Yuanzhou tosses back his mouthful, thinking of how much has changed since they were last together. Bai Jiu, even, joins them.

“Ten thousand years,” he repeats dumbly, once Wen Xiao tells him.

“Roughly,” she says, with a shrug. “Bai Jiu was the first to wake. So he’s had some time to grow.”

“And you were dressed as well as me?” Zhao Yuanzhou says, trying for another joke, and failing.

“Yeah,” Bai Jiu says. He looks down into his cup, expression complicated. “But I outgrew those robes pretty quick.” His voice gets even quieter. “As if I’d want to keep wearing funeral finery though.”

Zhao Yuanzhou bites his cheek. I know, he wants to say. But doesn’t.

“Pei-jie found me a couple months after that,” Bai Jiu says. “At my clinic.”

“Same ridiculous name,” is Pei Sijing’s assessment. But her hands are trembling when she brings her cup to her lips. “It wasn’t difficult to track you down.”

Zhao Yuanzhou looks at Ying Lei. “What about you?”

Ying Lei grins. “I don’t know,” he says. “How are gods born?”

Bai Jiu shoves at his face.

“There was divine lightning above Kunlun Mountain," he says. "So we made the climb. He was waiting for us there.”

Zhao Yuanzhou tips his head towards the door. “Then that outside was your doing?”

Ying Lei shakes his head. “The gates were already open when I got here,” he says. “I asked a few of us there: what happened to the Great Wilderness? Who was granting them passage into the human realm? They looked at me as if I was crazy.”

“They said it had been a thousand years,” Wen Xiao says. “Since the realms were united.”

Zhao Yuanzhou blinks. Realms? United? 

“I don’t know either,” Wen Xiao says, picking up on his confusion. “I only woke a year ago, when the Baize Goddess died. He laid me beside you, beneath my tree.”

Wen Xiao lifts her hand. There’s a gathering of light in her palm, and her flute materializes in it, its immortal body unchanged.

“We were taking turns watching over you," she says. "Kunlun has been a good place to stay. I knew it would be a matter of time before you would wake,” Wen Xiao says, tucking her flute away. “Though we really should have expected you to deceive us again, slipping by unnoticed while we weren’t looking.”

Zhao Yuanzhou doesn’t know what to say.

Ying Lei does. “A toast, then,” he says. “To this life, and our last one.”

They lift their cups, silently, to his. Zhao Yuanzhou knows they’re all thinking the same thing—of how they never had a chance to share a drink like this, together, in the end.

Another round comes and goes.

“Then what of fate, our old friend?” Zhao Yuanzhou says. He tips his head to the sky, where the constellations tip their heads back, unchanged. “Take a cup.”

“Take a cup,” Ying Lei agrees.

They each spill wine upon the hallowed ground of Kunlun Mountain.

The snow lightens, flurries, then goes blue with moonlight. Zhao Yuanzhou finally looks up from his cup, the question trembling in his throat. He’s been thinking about it since he woke beneath the Baize tree, all the way down the mountainside, and all the way up it to this warm room in the heart of Ying Lei’s home.

Zhao Yuanzhou looks to Wen Xiao. He doesn’t know what he wants to hear, so he doesn’t ask.

“But I gave him everything,” he says.

“I know,” Wen Xiao says.

“And Li Lun.”

“I know,” she says again.

“So, he—” His voice fails him. He can’t say it. He can barely think it. How ridiculous, isn’t it? Considering the lives he’s lived, the people he’s seen. 

Wen Xiao smiles. “No.”

“No?”

Wen Xiao takes his hand in hers. Bai Jiu and Pei Sijing look askance. In a show of surprising maturity, Ying Lei doesn’t. The hall falls quiet, only the howling of wind comes through the open window.

“If you want to know,” she says softly. “We’ll take you.”

Zhao Yuanzhou lets out a long breath. Lifts his eyes to meet Wen Xiao’s, to feel the ache of once again falling into the cradle of her sweet and knowing face. “Then I’ll trouble you, Great Goddess,” he says. “To show me the way.”

Wen Xiao smiles. She rises, and so do the others. Zhao Yuanzhou, too, though he stumbles, and has to brace himself heavily against the table. A moment later, one of Ying Lei’s arrays alight beneath them and the world dissolves into light.

The landing is soft.

“You’ve gotten stronger,” Zhao Yuanzhou remarks.

Ying Lei puffs a little. “I’ve been practicing,” he says. Then, quieter: “Things won’t happen the same way again.”

Zhao Yuanzhou acknowledges him with a sort of sideways nod. They’ve been talking in euphemisms all day. Last time, this life, and their fantasy of waking. Him.

It takes Zhao Yuanzhou a moment before he recognizes where they are. The streets are no longer paved with gray stone, he can feel where the roots of trees have come and gone, and frost touches everything in the air around him. The sign above the gate has been changed—Bingyi Temple, it reads—but those doors are the same doors. It’s flanked by an endless line of shrine offerings. Flowers, fruit, prayers. Up and down the line, people have come to worship with their candles and their incense.

It’s the sole and singular Zhuo estate. And what used to be the Demon Hunting Bureau.

Pei Sijing leads them towards the gate. The worshippers hurry aside, letting them through. Zhao Yuanzhou looks up. The characters Bingyi Temple gaze placidly back at him. His hands clench in the cover of his sleeve. Up ahead, Wen Xiao stands at the gate, flute in hand.

“Come,” she says, gesturing at the others. “Let’s try again, now that Zhao Yuanzhou’s here.”

“Me?” he says, surprised.

Pei Sijing tips her chin towards the gate. “He’s put up a barrier,” she says. “We can’t get through unless all of us are present.”

“We’ve tried already,” Bai Jiu interrupts. “So don’t bother arguing about it.”

Zhao Yuanzhou holds up his hands in defeat. “I wouldn’t dare,” he says.

Up ahead, Wen Xiao summons her flute and begins to play. A single note, and it’s powerful enough to blanket the entire estate in gold. True to word, the blue skin of Zhuo Yichen’s barriers lies beneath. Another note, and Zhao Yuanzhou looks up to find a thread of his energy racing towards the sky.

The barrier undoes itself with a sigh, blooming outwards like a flower. Wen Xiao, eyes still that familiar gold, steps up to the gate and rests her hand against the doors. A little of her magic races down her fingertips, and a gasp travels through the crowd as it swings open, raining down ice from above. Clearly, they haven’t been opened in some time.

When they enter, Zhao Yuanzhou looks around the Great Hall which, to his surprise, is the same as he saw it last. The roof has held. The little stones, the houses, the shrines stand intact. Everything is covered in a layer of frost, laid down as delicately as silk. As they walk, their footsteps echo in the massive hall. It’s as if they’re marching through a mausoleum with all its spinning doors, empty tables, and dark rooms.

Nobody dares to speak. Zhao Yuanzhou’s breath catches in his throat and stays there.

In the end, Zhuo Yichen had laid himself out in the bedroom, where very little has also changed: not the mountains steady outside the window, nor his family’s shrine against the wall. He sits in the water of a new fishpond—legs stretched out beside him, hair spilling unbound across his shoulders, two pale horns curving up from his temples. His head rests on his arms, which rest on the stone lip of the pool.

He doesn’t look like he’s in pain. He looks as if one day he laid down and had simply gone to sleep. 

From where they’re standing to where Zhuo Yichen lays in the water, only a handful of steps away. He’s across it in an instant, but when tries to kneel, Ying Lei has to help. Then he’s close enough to count Zhuo Yichen’s eyelashes. He’s gone as pale as bleached bone since he’d seen him last, and so has his hair. Still, there’s color in his lips, and along the rim of his ear. It’s just that—

“He’s not breathing,” Zhao Yuanzhou says, instead.

“But he’s alive,” Wen Xiao replies. 

“Are you sure?”

“You saw the estate.”

“The frost.” Of course. His inner core must still be intact.

Zhao Yuanzhou touches the back of his hand to Zhuo Yichen’s cheek, brushes his hair aside, revealing the demon marks on the side of his neck. Their color has deepened. The veins curl, now, down the swell of his throat, slipping into the collar of his robes. There’s a strange scar behind his ear, stretching about a handspan towards his spine.

Wen Xiao summons her flute again. Her song warms the room, but not its watery occupant.

Zhao Yuanzhou looks at the others over his shoulder. 

“Why won’t he wake up?”

Wen Xiao shrugs. “I don’t know.”

Zhao Yuanzhou turns back to the fishpond, and strokes his thumb across the turn of Zhuo Yichen’s cheek. The skin is soft. Wen Xiao did not lie.

But he’s so cold.

“Xiao Zhuo,” he says. “Where did you go?”

When Zhao Yaunzhou transfers a little energy into him, the fish begin to stir. A koi comes shimmering blue and white up to the edge of the fishpond, and rests the length of its tail against Zhuo Yichen’s knee, blinking its massive eyes at him. Zhao Yuanzhou blinks back.

There’s a poorly squelched laugh. Zhao Yuanzhou turns and finds Wen Xiao and Bai Jiu the culprits. Pei Sijing isn’t quite there, but she’s turned her head aside, fingers pressed to the corner of her mouth, which keeps lifting.

“Really,” Zhao Yuanzhou says.

Wen Xiao flaps a completely unfitting hand of the Baize goddess at him. “It’s your boy,” she says. Then: “Ladies first.”

Zhao Yuanzhou turns back around, ears burning. Perhaps his face isn’t so thick after all.

He reaches down, smoothing a hand over Zhuo Yichen’s jaw, before tipping his face upwards. Zhao Yuanzhou leans down until his spine creaks, to meet him. And finally, in a stroke of baseless confidence, presses their lips together.

A moment later, Zhuo Yichen sucks in a mouthful of trembling air, and opens his eyes.

Zhuo Yichen stares blankly at them from his bed. 

Wen Xiao sits beside him, keeping the blankets closed around his shoulders, and there are enough to bury him alive. Across the room, Pei Sijing and Ying Lei lean up against the wall, arms crossed. Zhao Yuanzhou isn’t sure if he should join them, or Bai Jiu, who flutters like a caged bird—checking Zhuo Yichen's pupils, his pulse, and prying his mouth open to force hot wine down his throat. 

Zhuo Yichen stops Bai Jiu, two elegant fingers curving around his wrist, the next time he returns with a bowl of medicine. He tips his head to one side, and then the other, studying him. When Zhuo Yichen reaches up, Bai Jiu leans down, so cheek meets fingers.

“What,” Zhuo Yichen says. Without inflection, as stiff as the rest of him. His voice is raw and thin. It sounds as if he hasn’t spoken in a long time. 

His gray eyes sweep from face to face in the room. He seems to find something there, because he then curls the fingers of his right hand together, in a spell Zhao Yuanzhou lost the second he woke up with a godly core, and says: “Wake.”

A pulse of magic ripples outwards, rattling everything in the room. Frost, newly broken, curtains towards the ground. The spell is small, hardly carrying effort, but in the hands of ten thousand years of cultivation, nearly blasts them off their feet.

The rippling stops. Seeing the world unchanged, Zhuo Yichen’s eyebrow ticks upwards. “What,” says, and again lifts his hand—

Shit. 

“Enough, enough.” Zhao Yuanzhou hurries to stop him. He clamps down on Zhuo Yichen’s fingers and slaps a hand over his cold mouth. “Darling, you’ll bring the roof down on us if you keep that up.”

Zhuo Yichen’s expression pinches. Nobody does confused anger as well as he does.

“I didn’t give this spell to you for you could kill us with it,” he continues. He can’t help but tease him. “Lord Bingyi.”

That does it.

“Zhao Yuanzhou!”

Zhuo Yichen lunges towards him. Zhao Yuanzhou laughs, ducking what was no doubt a smack to the face. But the hit doesn’t land. Zhuo Yichen’s knees buckle underneath him, and he goes sprawling across the floor. He barely catches Zhuo Yichen before he cracks his head open on the tea table.

When his shoulders start to shake, Zhao Yuanzhou looks up, alarmed. He tries to pull back, but Zhuo Yichen refuses, shoving his face deeper into his shoulder, fingers tightening against the back of his robes. He smells like frost.

So quietly, Zhao Yuanzhou strains to hear, he says: “Don’t go.”

While the others trace their way back to their old rooms and Wen Xiao back to the Archives like a woman with an addiction, Zhao Yuanzhou elects to sit on the floor beside Zhuo Yichen’s bed instead, busying himself with the study of his face, which has gone soft and slack under the moonlight.

At the yin hour halfway through the night, Zhuo Yichen stirs, but doesn’t wake. His markings start to glow, pulsing as his breath picks up, head tossing against the pillows. 

Zhao Yuanzhou grabs his hand. “Yichen?” he says, hurried.

Zhuo Yichen doesn’t respond, but his hand tightens around Zhao Yuanzhou’s, who grips him back. It doesn’t seem like he’s heard. But he goes still. His head lolls against the pillow towards Zhao Yuanzhou and stays there.

Zhuo Yichen crawls back to awareness with great effort, head splitting with pain, for the sole purpose of blocking the shaft of sunlight stabbing him in the eye. With an embarrassing amount of energy, considering the state of his cultivation, he levers himself upright. Then he has to sit for a minute with his head hanging. How long has it been since he went to sleep this time?

A peal of laughter splits the air, and Zhuo Yichen’s head jerks up.

What?

He notices, now—there’s fresh incense in the burner beside his bed, and a pile of cloaks by the window, the collection of half-drunken medicine on the tea table, and the women’s boots by the door.

He’s on his feet before the thought finishes. He doesn’t even look for his shoes, nor a tie for his hair as stumbles out of his room, forgoing everything but the robes on his back. They too are aberrative—the fabric too heavy, the embroidery too rich, to be his own careless ones. The air is sweet, tang with sugar, with sounds coming from the tearoom. Zhuo Yichen picks up the hems of his robes, and walks faster. 

He rounds the corner, heart in his throat, just as Ying Lei does, from the corner opposite. Neither of them, both moving at a speed, manage to stop in time. As Zhuo Yichen ducks sideways, Ying Lei tumbles towards him headfirst.

And the knife in his hand buries itself up to the hilt in his chest.

Ah. Slowly, Zhuo Yichen looks down; a little blood stains his hands. Slowly, he looks up; there are five pairs of eyes on him.

A boy who looks like Bai Jiu nearly upends the table when he jumps to his feet. “Ge!” he shrieks. “Don’t move!”

Then they’re really falling upon him like vultures. Zhao Yuanzhou against his back; Bai Jiu tearing at his medicine cabinet—

“Stop, stop,” Zhuo Yichen says, pushing them away. Dream or not, they’re noisy as ever, and the knife in his chest is not helping his temper.

None of them listen. So Zhuo Yichen grabs it by the hilt and yanks it out himself. There’s one last spurt of blood, then the wound closes on its own. To dead silence, he wipes the blood off the blade with his sleeve, then flips it around in his grip and hands it hilt-first to Ying Lei. He takes it numbly, then slides it back into the holster on his back.

Zhuo Yichen levers himself out of Zhao Yuanzhou’s embrace. He laces his hands behind his back and wanders over to where Pei Sijing sits at the dining table. She pours him a cup of tea and pushes it his way. Zhuo Yichen lifts it to his lips, holding his bloody sleeve aside with his other hand.

She must have traveled with it. He doesn’t think he has any actual food in the house. Or…

He takes in the scent. “Aged red leaf?” he asks, surprised.

“Aged red leaf,” she agrees.

He finishes the cup. So does Pei Sijing. He reaches for the teapot, and pours them both another.

“Are any of you going to sit down?” Pei Sijing says, in that mild way of hers. Her eyes flick up to the others, who are still frozen in place.

Zhuo Yichen studies each of their faces. There’s a bit of age in each, and Bai Jiu himself has shot up several years in age and in height. He wonders.

“Sit,” Pei Sijing says, firmer this time.

The others trickle back to the table, a little dazed in the face. Wen Xiao elects to sit beside him. Zhuo Yichen dips his eyes to meet hers, drinks in the soft planes of her face. He doesn’t know what to ask, or how to ask it.

“Are you here?” he says, eventually.

Her lips are a little chapped. A stroke of hair crosses her cheek. The earrings he’d buried her with glitter in her ears. Her skin is warm to the touch, and there’s a pulse beneath her wrist.

“Yes,” she says.

“How?” he asks.

She shrugs. “I’ve been looking in the Archives,” she says, by way of explanation. “And Ying Lei convened with the Mountain Gods.”

Zhuo Yichen sighs. Not again, he thinks.

“And they say it’s reincarnation,” he says, tired.

“It’s been ten thousand years,” Zhao Yuanzhou says. “Is it really so strange?”

Zhuo Yichen gives him a sort of sideways acknowledgement, but doesn’t agree.

“Bad form to doubt your Baize goddess, my dear,” Zhao Yuanzhou says.

Zhuo Yichen lifts his eyes from the whorl of wood he’s been studying. “So?” he says. He opens his hands in a helpless gesture. “I have these dreams, and they’re sweet.”

“This isn’t one,” Wen Xiao says, firmer this time.

“It has to be,” he says. He didn’t think he’d ever admit this part aloud. He didn’t dare. “Because I buried you.”

“Buried her, you mean,” Zhao Yuanzhou says.

He shakes his head.

Zhao Yuanzhou laughs. “There was no body.” Then, seeming to realize, the smile drops off his face— “What did you do.”

“Nothing,” Zhuo Yichen says.

It takes all Zhuo Yichen’s effort not to touch the scar on his neck, where one of his scales had been, but it’s too late; Zhao Yuanzhou is on him in a moment. Fingers in his hair, a hand in his collar. Zhuo Yichen’s whole body stiffens when the sun hits the back of his neck, which burns. His fingers crack the edge of the table. All the air goes out of the room. The temperature drops with a sudden frost.

They don’t fight in his dreams, just sit across from each other for a time. Then Zhao Yuanzhou will get to his feet, and he will get to his feet, and his sword will go through the other’s chest. “So it is you,” Zhuo Yichen says bitterly.

The sky darkens.

Zhao Yuanzhou ignores him. “You could’ve died,” he says. “Ripping them off like this.”

Zhuo Yichen pushes him away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. “I only found the last shred of your soul and the last shred of Ying Lei’s, and I carved your bodies out of the divine wood of the Baize tree. Nothing more.”

Bai Jiu gasps. “What? What’s happening?”

“Mathematics,” Pei Sijing says. “Your brother is missing scales.”

Zhao Yuanzhou: “But something has to bind us to the wood.”

Zhuo Yichen: “And something has to be strong enough to kill me.”

Bai Jiu’s mouth drops open.

This time, Zhuo Yichen’s successful, ducking Zhao Yuanzhou’s grasp. “Anyway, you wouldn’t understand,” he says, reaching for his teacup, for something to occupy his hands, if nothing else. He’s already said too much.

“Really?” Zhao Yuanzhou says. “I wouldn’t understand?”

Zhuo Yichen lifts his cup. “Ten thousand years,” he says. “Do you know how long that is?”

“I’ve lived three times that. You’d like to speak on solitude? Try me.”

Zhuo Yichen cracks the cup in his hand. The sound echoes around the hall. His breath is coming fast now, the markings on his neck pulsing hot beneath his skin. “Like you have a right to be upset,” he says. “That I spent my life seeking death the way you sought yours. At the very least I didn’t abandon my duties for it.”

Zhao Yuanzhou looks like he’s been slapped. A spike of vindication goes hot through Zhuo Yichen’s chest. Good, he thinks. Let him know.

“You left me behind, Zhao Yuanzhou. You all—” His voice cracks right down the middle. “You left me behind.”

“As if,” Zhao Yuanzhou says, though he looks uncertain now. “There weren’t others.”

“Are you hearing yourself?” he says. He can’t hold back a laugh. “Of course there were others. Like you, they came and they went. I say you wouldn’t understand because it’s like this: you were born with Li Lun. You had Wen Xiao’s master. But there’s only ever been us,” he gestures at everyone around the table. Then fists a hand in the front of his robes. “And there’s only ever been you. Was I supposed to find another zhiji? Do you think they fall from the sky?”

Zhao Yuanzhou’s whole face creases with pain. Zhuo Yichen can’t stand looking at him. What the fuck did he wake up for? He was happier without them here, stirring up old memories, making his heart feel old.

“I need to leave,” he says, and pushes away from the table, getting to his feet with the grace of a drunken dog. The ground spins beneath him. Pei Sijing’s tea, the water in Bai Jiu’s gourd, and the gully that cuts through the hall all turn to ice as Zhuo Yichen stumbles sideways.

“Yichen!” Zhao Yuanzhou says, rising to catch him.

Zhuo Yichen backs away.

“Stop,” he says, and is horrified to find his voice wet. His head spikes with pain. “Enough.”

Zhuo Yichen wants to say more. He wants to say nothing at all. In the end, the words don’t come to him, so he turns and makes his escape from the hall before anyone can stop him otherwise.

Bai Jiu finds him first. Zhuo Yichen’s closed the doors to his rooms—he must really be upset this time—but the wards open when he touches them. Maybe not that upset. 

Bai Jiu creeps in on soft feet—he’s outgrown the charms and beads of his childhood, so the only sound he makes is the rustling of his robes as he winds around walls and corners—and finds Zhuo Yichen brooding in the rock garden. He’s standing with his back to the door, both him and the world lit pink and red from the setting sun. When the wind stirs, so does a single strand of bells that hang off his robes.

Bai Jiu takes a breath, fists tightening nervously at his sides. Everyone’s voices keep echoing in his ear—Zhao Yuanzhou: You could have died; Pei Sijing: your brother’s missing scales; Zhuo Yichen: you all—left me behind.

Bai Jiu picks his way around the garden railing. “Ge,” he says, timid.

Zhuo Yichen doesn’t react. It seems he hasn’t heard.

Bai Jiu swallows, and very carefully, reaches a hand out to tug at his sleeve. “Ge,” he tries again.

Zhuo Yichen opens his eyes on a breath. Bai Jiu notices he’s gone more inhuman since their last lives. Minus the horns, and the markings on his neck, and his white-now-blue hair, there’s something about the way he moves, the look in his eyes. His head turns with uncanny ease.

But Zhuo Yichen’s mouth quirks with a smile, and all that goes away.

“Did Wen Xiao send you?” he asks.

Bai Jiu, who'd been afraid he’d be pushed away, or worse, lets out a quiet breath.

Bai Jiu pouts. “I sent myself.”

Zhuo Yichen nods absently. 

There’s a strange longing in his gaze. He takes Bai Jiu’s hands, which are now bigger than his own, in his.

“You’ve grown,” he says. It seems to startle him, how far he has to tip his chin up to look at him.

Bai Jiu sighs, maudlin. “Everyone’s been saying that to me.”

Zhuo Yichen doesn’t rise to the bait, or seem to notice it. He’s busy turning Bai Jiu’s hands in his own, holding onto his arms, running his fingers over and over the skin there, as if reassuring himself of something. He’s never been one for touch, and Bai Jiu’s never been still, but here they are. Time has changed them both.

“But your—” Zhuo Yichen lifts Bai Jiu’s arms to the light.

He’s incapable of finishing a thought, or saying what he means. It takes Bai Jiu a moment to figure out what’s happening, because he’s never seen it before. Zhuo Yichen is afraid.

“I don’t know,” Bai Jiu says. “I didn’t wake up sick. I wasn’t burnt. I thought that was you.”

Zhuo Yichen shakes his head. “If only,” he says. “Though Wen Xiao and I tried.” His touch is unseasonably cool, like a balm spread on Bai Jiu’s skin. “Did it hurt very much?”

At the end, he doesn’t add, but they hear it anyway. Bai Jiu thinks about lying for a moment. If only to spare him from more pain, but that’s all it would be—a lie.

“Ask me something else,” he says, instead.

Zhuo Yichen’s mouth parts with surprise. He blinks hard. Bai Jiu can see the wheels turning in his head. When he speaks, his voice is thin and uncertain. “How—how old are you now?”

Bai Jiu smiles. “Eighteen.”

“Eighteen,” he echoes. Another pause, as if he’s afraid to continue. There’s a crease between his brows. Bai Jiu can’t help but smooth away with his finger. “How do you know?”

“When I came back,” he says. Remembering nothing but rain, being buried in two fox-pelt cloaks, surrounded by funeral offerings that weighed more than he did. “I was the same. Then five years went by.”

Zhuo Yichen looks ill. “Five years,” he says. “I wasn’t there.”

“You didn’t know.”

“What does that absolve me of?” he says. He sounds ashamed of himself. “I’m always late, finding you.”

“No, no,” Bai Jiu says, pulling his hands out of Zhuo Yichen’s grasp, and wags a stern finger in his face. “Though you are ten thousand years my senior, Lord Bingyi, you won’t get away with this behavior while I’m around.”

Zhuo Yichen blinks gray eyes at his finger, then at him. “Lord Bingyi?”

“That’s what your sign says,” Bai Jiu says. “It’s your temple.”

“Oh,” Zhuo Yichen says. A pause, as the joke doesn’t land. “I didn’t do that. The mortals took down the signage for me about a thousand years in.”

As serious as ever. Bai Jiu redirects with a sigh. 

“We know,” he says, beleaguered. “You’re the talk of the town; nobody knows if you’re a being or a myth anymore. We’ve already heard a hundred guesses of what they think is in here.” He cracks a smile. “Zhuo-ge, you’re the oldest homebody I know.”

Zhuo Yichen shrugs. It’s a strange motion on his body. “Wandering the Great Wilderness was only ever a means to an end,” he says. “After a while, it’s all the same, anyway. Humans live short lives. They passed by in moments to me—so many faces, so many names. I found what I needed, and saw what I didn’t, so I left.”

“You mean Zhao Yuanzhou’s spirit?”

Zhuo Yichen nods. “Ying Lei’s too.” He presses a hand against Bai Jiu’s chest. “He left a little of himself here.”

It’s Bai Jiu’s turn to be struck speechless. Then Zhuo Yichen wavers on his feet, tired, his legs unsteady, and Bai Jiu starts back into motion.

“Woah,” he says, grabbing his arm. “You should sit down.” 

“I’m alright, Xiaojiu,” he says, and tries to wave him off.

Bai Jiu’s finger wags again. Ah, how he missed this. “Even all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful demons must rest!” he says. “Especially after being so rudely awoken.” He shakes his head, tutting. “That Zhao Yuanzhou has no clue what to do with godly energy.”

“Mn,” Zhuo Yichen says, strangely amicable. “Whatever my miracle doctor prescribes.”

He follows Bai Jiu into the bedroom politely. Zhuo Yichen doesn’t protest when Bai Jiu closes the bamboo curtains against the cold, nor when he dusts off a brazier and sets it alight.

Finished with his due diligence, Bai Jiu returns to his bedside to find the man listing heavily against the wooden posts, one leg drawn up beneath the covers. He has a little box in lap. It stops Bai Jiu mid-motion. “Uhn,” he says, the sound punched out of him.

“Here,” Zhuo Yichen says, and pulls something out of it. “This is yours.”

He opens his hand. Bai Jiu’s bell, fresh as the day he left it behind, glitters at him.

“Ge,” Bai Jiu says. His lip is trembling, but he rallies. “I gave it to you. You should keep it.”

“I’d rather keep you,” Zhuo Yichen says simply.

Something lodges in Bai Jiu’s throat and stays there. He’d thought himself so grown for his eighteen years, but here his big brother is, taking care of him without trying.

“I wouldn’t know what to do with it,” Bai Jiu says.

“Come,” Zhuo Yichen says, making room for him on the bed.

Bai Jiu inches his way over. At Zhuo Yichen’s raised brow, sits. He opens his mouth, about to ask, but Zhuo Yichen picks up the end of his braid, which hangs over one of his shoulders. His touch is so gentle.

“Ying Lei did that,” Bai Jiu says. “You can take it out if you don’t like it.”

“I won’t,” he says. “It’s just that.” He takes a breath. “Your hair’s gotten—very long.”

Oh. Bai Jiu didn’t have the chance for that either, the last time.

Zhuo Yichen undoes the ribbon Ying Lei had put in, and hooks the bell in its place, wrapping the leather tie around and around the tail. Then, he stops, and is still for so long Bai Jiu’s chest turns pins-and-needles with fear. 

They found him, and they found him alive, but Bai Jiu can tell—he’s not a miracle doctor by name, only—that his Zhuo-ge is sick, and really, very so. He’s attended to such patients before. There is no prescription he can write, no medicine he can brew, that can unwind time and undo the bruise.

“Ge?” he ventures. “If you want to keep it, just tell me,” he says, trying to make light of the atmosphere. “I’ll—I’ll get another one, and we can match.”

Zhuo Yichen sets Bai Jiu’s braid down, patting it gently where it lies against his chest.

“That’s quite kind of you, Xiaojiu,” he says, finally looking up. “But better you don’t think me so greedy.”

“I’ll have you know, Ying Lei and I are in a hair-growing competition,” Bai Jiu says, trying to shake Zhuo Yichen out of his daze. “I’ll overtake him soon. Bet on me.”

Zhuo Yichen laughs softly, shaking his head. “Don’t I always?”

There’s something desperately sad about him. Bai Jiu wants to protest again, to batter his words against the shield of his Zhuo Yichen’s guilt, which has so clearly solidified over the years, but it feels like there’s something he needs to say, that even he doesn’t want to.

Then, out of nowhere: “My little Bai Jiu,” Zhuo Yichen says weakly. “I’m sorry.”

Bai Jiu’s heart leaps out of his throat. “What?” he croaks.

“Every day I’d think—if only I’d been stronger, faster. If only I’d been with you then, so you wouldn’t have gone alone.”

Bai Jiu wants to shake him until his eyes fall out of his head. “But I wasn’t,” he says. “Pei-jie was there.” He loops a finger around the bells on Zhuo Yichen’s robes. “And so were you, remember?”

“No, listen, Xiaojiu—” Zhuo Yichen says, hopelessly. There go his hands again, cautious on Bai Jiu’s arms, as if he’s reaching back through the years, touching the charred skin there. “When I said you’d find someone to protect one day, I certainly didn’t mean then, and I certainly didn’t mean me—”

“Stop!” The words burst out before Bai Jiu can stop himself. He throws his arms around Zhuo Yichen and tightens them to the point of pain. “I took off my bell,” he says. “I cut the chime; I gave it to you; and you know why. I didn’t want you to search for me anymore. I made my choice, and you made yours.”

“What kind of choice was that?” Zhuo Yichen says. “You were supposed to live to an age. I never wanted the responsibility of burying you. I only wanted the responsibility of keeping you alive.”

Zhuo Yichen’s breath, which sweeps against Bai Jiu’s cheek, is as cold as a winter’s air.

“I imagined a hundred, a thousand times a day, what you might’ve looked like, if we had more time together,” he says. “Then I would erase it all again in my mind, saying I’d gotten it all wrong.”

Bai Jiu cups the base of Zhuo Yichen’s neck with a hand finally large enough to do so, and doesn’t let go. “But I’m right here.”

Zhuo Yichen pushes at Bai Jiu’s shoulder, but Bai Jiu doesn’t give. He brings their foreheads together instead. Bai Jiu needs him to hear this, if nothing else.

“Don’t leave,” Bai Jiu begs. “Whatever it is you’re searching for—if it really is us—we’re right here.”

Zhuo Yichen shudders, once, all the way from his head to his toes, and then falls silent.

The wind has come in twice through the windows, stirring the coals in the brazier, before he speaks again.

“Xiaojiu,” he says, very softly.

Bai Jiu nods, afraid to startle him.

“You said, earlier—eighteen?”

Bai Jiu nods again. He’s not sure where this is going.

“And you’re here? It is you?”

Bai Jiu nods a third time.

Zhuo Yichen pulls back enough to fix him with those gray eyes of his.

“Then, tell me honestly,” he says. “Are you well?”

And here they are—finally having arrived at the truth. With all the solemnity of his eighteen years and counting, Bai Jiu opens his mouth and says: “I am.”

When they first came down from Kunlun, Ying Lei had stuffed his bags with food—ever-shrinking pouches of rice and nuts and meats and an assortment of questionably colorful vegetables—but five mouths are hard to feed, even though none of them technically need food, considering the state of their cultivation. But after a week, even Pei Sijing was feeling the press of being cooped up in the estate with nothing to do.

“So I’m thinking,” Wen Xiao says, at the breakfast gathering. “We should go into town today.”

Zhao Yuanzhou quirks an eyebrow. “What for?”

“Because we’re out of tea, darling,” she says, then takes a pointed sip from her cup. “And wasn’t it you complaining about the state of Yichen’s wine pantry last night?”

Zhuo Yichen looks up from where he and Ying Lei are playing with Bai Jiu’s hair. His brows furrow, confused. “You were?” he says, looking at Zhao Yuanzhou. “I can get you the jars from outside, if you want.”

“The offerings your worshippers have troubled themselves to bring you?”

Zhuo Yichen’s eyes flick to one side, then the other. “...yes?” he says. “Isn’t that the point? It would be rude to leave it untouched.”

Zhao Yuanzhou opens his mouth. Wen Xiao pinches his thigh hard enough he winces, and closes it.

“I’m thinking as well,” she says, continuing with her poorly concealed plot to get Zhuo Yichen out of the house. “That perhaps we should replace some of the bedding.”

“Your fish are dying,” Pei Sijing adds. “They need feed.”

Zhuo Yichen’s confusion deepens further. “They’re sustained by my cultivation.”

Pei Sijing looks like she’s swallowed a marble. Oops. It seems her skills at deception haven’t improved, but neither have Zhuo Yichen’s skills at picking up on them. They blink at each other from across the table.

Wen Xiao shoots Bai Jiu a very pointed look instead. He picks it up in an instant and collapses dramatically against Zhuo Yichen’s shoulder. “We need more firewood as well,” he says, then fakes a shiver. “Ying Lei and I went to bed last night, but it was still so cold…”

“You were?” Zhuo Yichen says, horrified.

He’s on his feet in an instant, only for Ying Lei to grab his left arm, Bai Jiu his right, and have the two shove him back into his seat, then keep him there, arms locked around his.

Oops. Again. Zhao Yuanzhou lets out an indiscreet cough. Wen Xiao gives him a very discreet shove to the face.

“Anyway,” she says brightly, turning back to Zhuo Yichen. “How about it?”

Zhuo Yichen shifts uncomfortably. His eyes dart to the door at the end of the hall, then back to them. “I don’t know,” he says.

“You’re quite serious about this seclusion business, hm?” Zhao Yuanzhou says. He has his knee propped up beside him, then his arm on his knee, and his cheek in his hand. Zhu Yan, still. “What’s to be afraid of out there? If anyone tries making omelets out of you again, you know very well we’ll be making omelets out of them in return.”

“That’s not—” Zhuo Yichen says, flustered. “I can defend myself.” If he had his sword beside him, he’d be clutching it to his chest by now.

Wait.

“Come on, come on,” Bai Jiu’s saying, jiggling Zhuo Yichen’s arm up and down. “I’m hungry. I can smell the market from here, and someone’s gotta buy me snacks. It certainly won’t be Zhao Yuanzhou.”

Pei Sijing rises, having swallowed that marble, and offers Wen Xiao a hand. “We should go,” she says. “I’d like to avoid the afternoon rush.”

“I don’t—” 

Bai Jiu and Ying Lei, still clutching on to either of his arms, lifts Zhuo Yichen to his feet. He doesn’t protest as they skip him out to the front hall, but when Wen Xiao pushes open the door, he stops dead in the middle of the courtyard, squinting against the glare of the sun coming through the open doors. Bai Jiu and Ying Lei nearly go flying head-over-ass.

“Ge?” Bai Jiu says, tugging lightly at his sleeve. “Are you coming?”

Zhuo Yichen is one line of tense spine, unmoving. He opens his mouth on a breath. They wait for him to speak. Nothing comes out. He closes his mouth again.

“I,” he says, strained. “You go without me. I’ll just—”

He turns on his heel, pretty much sprinting out of the hall, hair and robes flying. So much for the venerated Lord Bingyi.

Ying Lei deflates hard and Bai Jiu, standing beside him, is left with his hands closing around empty air.

“We tried.” Pei Sijing pats them on the shoulder. “It’s not unusual. Another time, perhaps.”

“Actually,” Bai Jiu says, biting his lip. “I’ll go keep an eye on him.”

He darts out of the hall after Zhuo Yichen, all his bells chiming and ringing behind him. Wen Xiao watches him go, only to find that it’s Zhao Yuanzhou who's frozen in the hall now, head turned askance. His hands are tucked into the sleeves of his winter cloak, and his eyes are fixed on something in the middle distance, seeing nothing at all.

“What?” Wen Xiao says, a little sharp around the edges. “You want to stay behind and keep Yichen company too?”

Zhao Yuanzhou, a lifelong charlatan, has the gall to pretend he hasn’t been caught off guard. He folds his mouth into a smile which doesn’t touch his eyes and strolls over to them. It’s too late to put on that act of indifference, least of all to Wen Xiao, but she chooses to let sleeping dogs lie. This is a battle for another day, or never.

“I’m too tired to deal with your sulking, Zhao Yuanzhou,” she announces, turning away. “Stay, if you like. Leave, if you like. It’s not as if you’ll have a proper conversation with Yichen either way. We have responsibilities to our stomachs, and will be leaving now.”

Head held high, she marches out of the aptly named Bingyi Temple, flanked by Pei Sijing and Ying Lei on either side. After a moment, the scuff of Zhao Yuanzhou’s boots join theirs.

Halfway through town, Bai Jiu catches up to them, complaining about being kicked out of the house. He goes right to Ying Lei’s side, and the two of them bend their heads together like sunflowers. Wen Xiao shakes her head, but says nothing, and lets them wander.

Excepting Zhao Yuanzhou, they've been to this version of the town enough times, during all those years trying to get into the estate, that its winding streets and stringent dedication to a Bingyi theme has long lost its novelty. But the two eyes in Zhao Yuanzhou’s head aren’t enough to see it all.

“Who’s the kid now?” Bai Jiu grumbles, when Zhao Yuanzhou starts harassing him for more money. “You were supposed to be treating me.”

“Hush,” he says, throwing an arm around Bai Jiu’s shoulders. “Don’t tell me a pastry with his face on it doesn’t excite you.”

Bai Jiu doesn’t even put up a pretense of a fight. “Well, yeah, okay,” he says, and throws an arm around Zhao Yuanzhou too. They go skipping from stall to stall, scrutinizing every painting, scroll, and ornament in their line of sight. Ying Lei involves himself in a long-winded argument about the exact color of Zhuo Yichen’s eyes somewhere between the vegetable stand and the soup cart. Wen Xiao, whose grocery list grew out of its bogus origins and turned into something substantial, lets out a very long sigh.

“Zhao Yuanzhou!” she snaps.

Ying Lei and Bai Jiu freeze in their tracks, necks creaking over their shoulders to look at her. But Zhao Yuanzhou continues haggling over a jade ornament. Wen Xiao decides to cut her losses. She snaps her fingers, once, and a web of gold light comes and drags him away.

Even suspended midair, dangling upside down, Zhao Yuanzhou shoots her a wicked smile, eyes twinkling. “What has this lowly one done to offend the Baize Goddess?” he says, batting the hair from his eyes. “Could it be hidden enmity between you and Lord Bingyi?”

Wen Xiao drops him on his ass. “There will be enmity between the Baize Goddess and the Great Demon Zhu Yan, if he doesn’t come here and carry the firewood.”

The Great Demon Zhu Yan gets up, and carries the firewood.

Down the road, they pass a clothing store, which carries the heavy burden of being the sole maker of Lord Bingyi’s robes. There’s a set of pale cloaks lined up against one of the walls—thick for village weather and the oncoming snow.

“Good eye, young man,” the aged shopkeeper says, shuffling over to Zhao Yuanzhou’s side. “The design for that cloak comes to you from two hundred years past, made by my grandmother’s grandmother for Lord Bingyi.”

Zhao Yuanzhou rubs the collar of the cloak between two fingers. He raises an eyebrow. “This is ermine.”

“That it is.”

He looks at Wen Xiao over his shoulder. Thinking he’s caught the shopkeeper in a lie, says, “He never wore ermine.”

“His brother did,” Pei Sijing says.

Pained. “Ah.”

Zhao Yuanzhou acknowledges the defeat. But he doesn’t let go of the cloak.

“So what say you?” the shopkeeper asks. “The snow comes fast in this town. Whether you’re planning to winter here or not, you won’t find yourself anything warmer in all of Tiandu.”

“I think you should get it,” Bai Jiu pipes up. “I went through Zhuo-ge’s closet yesterday. Everything he owns has gotta be older than me and Ying Lei combined.”

“What? He’s that eager to turn himself into an ice sculpture?” Zhao Yuanzhou says.

Bai Jiu steps on his foot.

Zhao Yuanzhou turns to the shopkeeper, pasting a smile on his face.

“We’ll take it.”

The shopkeeper reaches up and pinches their cheeks. Both Bai Jiu and Zhao Yuanzhou have to bend themselves in half at the waist in order for her to reach. “Very good,” she says.

While her son handles the abacus with Wen Xiao, Bai Jiu and the shopkeeper natter away in the background. Zhao Yuanzhou leans up beside them to listen.

“Lord Bingyi has been the protecting spirit of our humble province for over ten millennia,” the shopkeeper’s saying. “Nobody has seen his face, but his power drives dark spirits away, waters our crops, and balances the earth and skies.”

“Sounds more like a god than a demon,” Zhao Yuanzhou says.

“Don’t be so old-fashioned,” she scolds. “If you want to use those archaic words, best do it on the street, with those storytellers. Nothing but heads full of drama and bad cabbage, I’m telling you.”

The cloak disappears into an oil-cloth bag.

“We’ll pay our respects to Lord Bingyi later,” she continues. “For sending you our way.”

Pei Sijing takes the bag. She fits it under her arm.

When they step back into the street, Wen Xiao checks the sun, which has hung itself high overhead, and says, “We should head back soon,” she says. “Best not to keep Yichen waiting.”

She turns them around on the road, to where the Zhuo estate rises above the rest of the city. They pass beneath the eaves of an inn on the way down, where one such cabbage-filled storyteller has set up his stage beneath the shade. Before a crowd composed mostly of children, he waves a crude miniature of Zhuo Yichen’s Cloud-Light Sword.

“—and with this sword, Lord Bingyi and the Baize Goddess opened the doors between the mortal world and that of the Great Wilderness, forever bringing peace to our realm and theirs.”

Wen Xiao doesn’t pay him much mind—the stories are for children, mostly, or those willing to sit through one and leave wildly misinformed—but Zhao Yuanzhou stops in his tracks. When Wen Xiao glances at him, she finds a complicated expression on his face; his hand closes into a fist where it rests against his back.

Zhao Yuanzhou says softly: “He’s done very well for himself.”

“He has,” Wen Xiao agrees.

The storyteller continues. “But!” he says, leaning in, voice low. “This was not the first time he went through a great sacrifice to save the world.”

The storyteller exchanges his sword for a black-waxed, red-tasseled, oil-paper umbrella. He raises it in one hand, and sun glances off its dark surface.

His voice drops low. “Because he once had to slaughter the mightiest demon of all.”

The children gasp. Zhao Yuanzhou looks as if he’s bracing for a blow.

“The only soulmate he recognized.”

And all the blood drains from Zhao Yuanzhou's face.

“The Great Demon Zhu Yan.”

They return to the estate, bearing their arms and bags. Zhuo Yichen stands in the empty hall, his back to the door, cutting a lonely figure in the lowering light. Wen Xiao can see him through the years, standing in this very same spot, in this very same house, the ground where he’s grown roots, the ancient and everlasting halls of his family’s home.

Bai Jiu goes running right to him, and nearly knocks him off his feet. 

“We’re home!” he shouts.

Zhuo Yichen holds him back. “Ah,” he says, something strange in his voice. “I know.”

“You need to give that to him,” Pei Sijing says.

Zhao Yuanzhou looks up from where he’s been staring at the cloak in his hands on his, quite comfortable, perch on a well-trimmed elm tree. He’s been running his fingers over and over the ermine edges, the silver clasp, thinking of the last time he’d seen Zhuo Yichen wearing cream and white. 

He affects innocence. “Huh?” he says.

Pei Sijing tips her head towards one of the many corridors in the hall. They’re in the south wing, where the rooms are smaller, and the space closed in. Homely, as much as that word can be attributed to the estate.

“I’ve seen him,” she says, which is a wonder, considering her borderline clinical relationship with Zhuo Yichen. “You should see him too.”

Zhao Yuanzhou’s mouth quirks with an insincere smile. “He’s had plenty of company, it seems,” he says. “If Miss Pei has been with him too.”

“Hm,” she says. Then, in that terribly discerning way of hers: “But I am not you.”

She’s stalking away before she can explain what that means.

Zhao Yuanzhou sits on his tree, eyes fixed on the corridor Pei Sijing had pointed him to, feeling the intrusion of it, the thought she’d planted in his mind. Damn her. She’s still an excellent strategist. She knocked his legs out in two sentences.

Zhuo Yichen emerges from one of the rooms, closing the door softly behind him. He holds a hand above the lock, and a moment later, one of his barriers flashes blue around it.

Zhao Yuanzhou slips off his tree and follows him.

Zhuo Yichen must be tired, or something worse, because he startles like a rabbit when Zhao Yuanzhou turns him around in the corridor. This close, he smells heavily of incense. He looks as if he’s recently been crying, his eyes sloping at the edges, and the tip of his nose gone pink. Zhao Yuanzhou looks at the closed doors of the room behind him, frowns.

“I thought your family’s shrine was in your rooms,” he says. It’s not really a comment, nor is it a question.

“It is,” Zhuo Yichen says. The barrier flashes blue again, as if reassuring him of its presence. “Leave me alone.”

But he doesn’t push him away.

Zhuo Yichen’s hands are tucked into his wide sleeves, his hair swept simply over one shoulder, over one of those too-thin robes of his. In that moment, Zhao Yuanzhou is abruptly grateful to have bought him this cloak, embarrassing as it was to withstand the knowing looks, the walk back from town, because their little demon seems insistent on freezing himself to death. 

“When we went out in town earlier,” Zhao Yuanzhou says, non-sequitur. “I discovered the humans turned the entire thing into a capital city of you.”

There, he’d quietly wondered why Zhuo Yichen never sired heirs, or if he had—where they were, and why he was not, then, gone, having passed his sword to a child and moved on. What was he waiting for? So it’d been like he said: just him, for all this time.

“You really should get out more,” he says. “See what they’ve done with the place.”

“So you’re here,” Zhuo Yichen says, and he’s getting angry now. “To make fun of me.” He pushes Zhao Yuanzhou away. “I’m leaving, if you have nothing better to say.”

Zhao Yuanzhou wants to kiss the look off his face, another reason why he hadn’t dared to stand this close since they returned. It pains Zhao Yuanzhou to look at him sometimes, to see past the boy they'd first met as—just as haunted, just as fragile, and so tense he looked like he might snap at a moment’s notice.

“If you’d been there,” he says, instead.

Zhuo Yichen freezes.

“Bai Jiu and I ate twenty flatbreads,” he says, nonsensically. “With your face on it.”

Zhuo Yichen’s gray eyes are fixed, unblinking, on his. Silence hooks the words between them for a long moment, the sunlight coursing through the open rooftop, their breaths frosting the air around them.

“I know what the humans do,” Zhuo Yichen says. “It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care.”

“It seemed to matter to Ying Lei,” he says. “I think he argued with every stall from here to the other end of town; he didn’t think they got your eyes right, or your nose, but Wen Xiao bought him a jade token anyway, and then she—”

“Why are you telling me all this?” Zhuo Yichen says.

Zhao Yuanzhou’s mouth clicks shut. For a long while, neither of them speak.

“We just had a good day,” he answers eventually, voice raw. His hands clench and loosen, clench and loosen, in the fabric of the cloak in his hands. “Is all.”

Zhuo Yichen doesn’t look like he believes him, so he screws his courage to the sticking place.

“And I—” Zhao Yuanzhou stops. “We found you something out there.”

He unfolds the cloak in his hands, catching it before it spills out entirely on the floor. He steps carefully close, afraid to spook him. When Zhuo Yichen doesn’t smack him in the face, he steps even closer, and swings the cloak around him, and clasps it carefully around his shoulders, then leaves his hands there, a hand on either side.

“For you,” Zhao Yuanzhou says. “Since you’ve decided to transform this place into a monastery while we were gone.”

Zhuo Yichen’s brows are furrowed, meaning he’s considering something. He touches the collar. “For me? This looks like something you’d wear,” he says. Then adds, “It’s very nice.”

Zhao Yuanzhou hesitates. Then pastes a smile on his face. It feels fake, even to him. “Wen Xiao was the one who picked it out. She loves you very much.”

He lets go of the collar. Steps back. But Zhuo Yichen’s hands curl around his wrists, touch so light Zhao Yuanzhou could’ve been dreaming it, and keep him there.

“Why are you always like this?” His voice cracks. “You—”

“Like what?”

“Lie.”

Ah. Zhao Yuanzhou closes his eyes. How he hates—hates himself for having the knife, for holding the knife, and for putting it in him, and then twisting, always.

“I know you blame me for what I did back then. I blame myself too,” Zhuo Yichen says. “I just wish you would be honest about it. You don’t have to lie to me. You don’t even have to be kind. That’s not what I need. If you hate me, can you say it to my face?”

They’re so close. A tear breaks free from Zhuo Yichen’s eye. Zhao Yuanzhou reaches a trembling hand up to brush it away. Zhuo Yichen’s lashes flutter against his fingers.

“I don’t hate you,” he admits. “And I can be honest with you. The question is whether or not you’d believe me.”

“I want to,” Zhuo Yichen says.

The cloak starts to slide sideways off of Zhuo Yichen. Zhao Yuanzhou catches it before it does, and settles it better on his shoulders.

“Then I’ll tell you this,” Zhao Yuanzhou says. The words come slowly at first, then faster and faster. “We went out in town today, and I saw the people who love you, like you should be loved. I saw this cloak, and I made Wen Xiao buy it for me, so I could give it to you, because I don’t want you to be cold, or to get sick. Because the first thing I thought about when I saw you here, for the first time, asleep in that pond, was that you might be dead. But you couldn’t be because I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if you were. I—”

Zhuo Yichen kisses him.

He tastes exactly as he did before—soft; sweet, like honey. And while the rest of Zhuo Yichen seems perpetually cool to the touch, his lips are warm. Zhao Yuanzhou’s mouth parts without his permission, and kisses him back.

When Zhuo Yichen pulls away, he nearly follows him.

“I love you,” Zhuo Yichen says, simply.

Zhao Yuanzhou’s heart goes tumbling out of his ribs and hits the ground beneath his feet, dragging a knife through every one of his bones on the way down.

It takes a moment for him to find the words. Zhao Yuanzhou prefaces them with a laugh. “I wonder what your score of followers would think,” he says. “Harboring such feelings for a Great Demon.”

“So I do,” Zhuo Yichen says. “Anyway, you’re not him anymore. Zhu Yan.”

It takes all of Zhao Yuanzhou’s strength not to flinch, hearing that name.

“Not this body maybe,” he says. “Though my point still stands. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’ve only had ten thousand years to think it through.” Zhuo Yichen says. “Why are you always running away from me?”

“I’m not,” Zhao Yuanzhou says, affecting ease. “Look at me. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“This is what I mean,” he says, making a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. “You can’t be honest about this either. You’re away, like before. Always away.”

No, I’m not, Zhao Yuanzhou wants to say. But Zhuo Yichen is right. In all the ways that matter, he is.

“I don’t need to know if you love me,” Zhuo Yichen says. “I know that’s too much to ask. But was it me? Did I do something wrong? Tell me, if I did, so that I can fix it.”

“What?”

“Look how close you are. Look how close I am,” Zhuo Yichen says. His tears are starting to fall like rain—one bright pearl after another. “Yet this is the farthest I’ve ever been from you. You were closer to me in my dreams than now.”

“Zhuo Yichen,” Zhao Yuanzhou says, horrified.

He doesn’t have a good answer at the ready. He doesn’t have an answer at all. Instead, he wants to gather Zhuo Yichen up in his arms, to shore him up away from the pain. Anything to stop him from making those horrible noises, that look in his eyes, on his close and most darling face.

Instead— “You could kiss me again,” he says faintly, “To see if that helps.”

It doesn’t have the effect he’s hoping for. Even anger would be better than this. All Zhuo Yichen looks is resigned.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” he says, after a long time.

When the sun comes through the window, it lights him from behind. For a moment, Zhao Yuanzhou can see him at sixteen, freshly orphaned, in the pale colors of his childhood robes Zhao Yuanzhou had so ruthlessly taken from him all those lifetimes ago.

“Because if you’ll be like this.” Zhuo Yichen’s voice breaks. Then he breaks. “And I’ll be like this.”

Even quieter, almost silent.

“I wish you never came back.”

Zhuo Yichen arrives at dawn in the training hall. He hasn’t been here in some time—there’s not much point in training when there’s only one opponent who remains a match for him, and even then, it’s not her martial prowess he’s fighting, but the circumstances of her power—but he’s been feeling, lately, like the world is closing in. Perhaps hacking away at some unsuspecting pillars will do the trick.

An unadorned sword in hand, he pushes into the hall, only to find Pei Sijing already there, restringing a bow. She looks up.

“Good morning,” she says stiffly.

“Good morning,” he replies, just as stiff.

They fall silent. Zhuo Yichen casts his mind out, searching desperately for something to break the ice.

“Would it be a bother?” he asks, eventually.

“No,” she says, in that straightforward way of hers.

Zhuo Yichen nods, but doesn't move any further into the hall. He’s not sure where the two of them stand, now or ever. They trusted each other in battle and with Bai Jiu, but even in the field, they stood at a distance: Zhuo Yichen fought in close-quarters, while Pei Sijing perched overhead with her bow and arrow. She was warm with Wen Xiao and Bai Jiu, mostly, and coolly indifferent to the rest.

“There must be something on your mind for you to have come here,” Pei Sijing says. “And so early in the day.”

“I’m not sure I can explain,” Zhuo Yichen admits.

Pei Sijing nods. She doesn’t ask if there’s anything he’d like to talk about. They wouldn’t know what to do with the words either. She says very little most days, but what she does, she means. It’s gotten them in trouble before, when working together, before the others learned not to pair the two of them off for interrogations. Even if the crying children couldn’t, Zhuo Yichen appreciates her simplicity, for he is simple also.

So—

Zhuo Yichen lifts his sword, which is not his sword, but has seen him through enough in the intervening years. And Pei Sijing raises her bow, which is not her bow, but seems to have seen her though enough in the intervening years too. Somewhere in the courtyard, silent with the early morning, a bird lands upon the branches of a begonia tree, beating its wings once, twice. In the space between the third, they leap at once into the air, and blur.

Zhuo Yichen doesn’t know how long they train. It turns out that it's as easy as drawing breath, because the both of them are racing for first blood or likely worse. Halfway through the spar, Pei Sijing loses the bow, tossing it aside as she twists through the air. She unsheathes the daggers on her back and rushes Zhuo Yichen from an impossible angle. He dodges the first, then uses it to block the second. Zhuo Yichen trades his sword for a staff, then a bladed fan, then down to his own bare hands.

“Your martial skills have improved,” Pei Sijing remarks, when they meet in a blow so heavy the ground cracks beneath their feet.

“My thanks to Master Pei,” he says. “I’ve had some time to train.”

Zhuo Yichen grabs her forearm and twists her into the air. Pei Sijing kicks out against nothing and twists with him, reversing the hold. She lands on one knee, then drives her fingers upwards; if Zhuo Yichen hadn’t slid aside in time, they would’ve gone through his lungs and likely punctured one from the force.

“Good,” she says. “That you didn’t waste your years.”

She catches Zhuo Yichen’s next blow in her open palm. His stomach drops. He’d expected her to dodge it, and hadn’t held back. He opens his mouth to apologize, but Pei Sijing sends Zhuo Yichen backwards, using that same palm.

What?

Zhuo Yichen had barely been her match when they were both human, but his cultivation had risen astronomically since then. So how could Pei Sijing, who died and whom he buried in a mortal body, still be his equal in a spar?

Pei Sijing doesn’t give him the time to overthink. She snaps up her abandoned daggers and charges at him, and Zhuo Yichen’s sword is in his hands before he can blink.

The stalemate lasts until the sun is high, and the estate is murmuring with noise. They stop only when the door to the training hall bangs open, with one of Bai Jiu’s long legs the culprit.

“I found them!” he shrieks, from the corridor outside. “And I was right, Wen-jie! They’re trying to kill each other!”

They both fall out of stance and retreat, sheathing their blades.

Zhuo Yichen cups his hands politely, bowing. “An honor, Master Pei,” he says. “Your martial prowess, as always, remains unparalleled.”

“Thank you for humoring me, my lord,” Pei Sijing says, also cupping her hands politely, and returning the bow. When they rise, the corner of her mouth lifts with a smile. “An interesting challenge,” she says, above the cacophony of Bai Jiu’s yelling.

Bai Jiu clatters over, waving two armfuls of medicine bottles and bandages. “What’s wrong with you two?” he shouts, racing circles around them. “You couldn’t have used training weapons? Why’d you have to go for the live ones?”

“We’re fine, Xiaojiu,” Pei Sijing says.

“Fine?” And there’s that little shriek of his. “I’ll say!”

Bai Jiu tears Zhuo Yichen’s collar in two to belabor the point. A little blood’s still leaking from the dagger wound beneath. His free hand yanks Pei Sijing’s sleeve aside. A little blood’s still leaking from her wound too. 

Both of them extract their robes from Bai Jiu’s grasp. Zhuo Yichen presses a hand to his neck, channeling a little energy, feeling the skin close, and the blood still. He smiles at Bai Jiu when he pulls his hand away.

“See?” Zhuo Yichen says. “Good as new.”

Bai Jiu harrumps, exceedingly displeased.

“And you!” he says, turning to Pei Sijing. The waving of the bottles and bandages starts up again. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

Pei Sijing pulls her sleeve down. “It’ll heal. I’ll be fine.”

“You two! Horrific! How’s a doctor meant to make a living like this?”

“A living? Like what?” calls a voice from across the training grounds.

The three look over to find Zhao Yuanzhou ambling in, arms crossed beneath one of those obnoxious cloaks he’s so fond of. Wen Xiao walks shoulder-to-shoulder beside him. She picks her way around the men and goes straight to Pei Sijing, who offers her a hand. Wen Xiao takes it.

“It’s their fault,” Bai Jiu says, jabbing two pointy fingers at Zhuo Yichen and Pei Sijing. “Sparring with live blades and no armor.”

Wen Xiao tips her head at Pei Sijing, confused. “Not your bow?”

“We trained with an assortment of weapons,” Pei Sijing says.

Wen Xiao’s eyes flick to Zhao Yuanzhou’s. “But he only wields the Cloud-Light sword.”

Pei Sijing nods at the sword on the ground. “Yes. He brought one with him.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Wen Xiao says. She glances at Zhuo Yichen's empty hands. “That isn’t the right one.”

Zhao Yuanzhou fixes his dark eyes on him. “Wen Xiao is right,” he says. “Where is it?”

“Safe,” Zhuo Yichen replies, straightening out his robes. “I put it away, is all.”

Wen Xiao frowns. “You literally can’t be separated from your sword, Yichen. It’s tied to your soul.”

Zhuo Yichen sighs. “It’s not like I turned it out onto the street,” he says.

“That sword is your lifeblood,” Zhao Yuanzhou says. “Your family’s heritage. It’s not a thing to be “put away”.”

“It’s unharmed,” he replies, brushing past him. This is not a conversation he was hoping to have—not now, and not ever. “Don’t concern yourself with my business.”

He means to make his escape from the hall, but Zhao Yuanzhou stops him with a hand on his arm.

“I taught you how to use that sword,” Zhao Yuanzhou says. “It has always been my business.”

“Ten thousand years ago, perhaps.”

Zhao Yuanzhou’s hand tightens.

“Look at me,” he snarls. “When I’m speaking to you.”

It’s so ridiculous that Zhuo Yichen turns around for the sole purpose of laughing straight in his face. 

“Who are you to tell me what I can or cannot do?" he says. "If I said I put my sword away, then I’ve put my sword away. If I don’t want to look at it anymore, then I won’t. Give anything long enough, and you’ll tire of seeing it.”

Zhuo Yichen tries to extricate himself, sympathizing more and more with his clan’s predilection for solitude, only for Zhao Yuanzhou to yank him closer.

But he’s not the only one who can fight. Zhuo Yichen grabs his wrist in return, and with a burst of energy, breaks the latter’s arm in two different places, the snap echoing around and around and up the ceiling of the hall. 

Pei Sijing’s eyes go wide. There are twin gasps from Wen Xiao and Bai Jiu. But Zhao Yuanzhou doesn’t care. He makes a grab for him. Zhuo Yichen lashes out to meet him, so fucking ready to be done with all this shame.

Zhao Yuanzhou grabs the back of his collar. Neither of them give in. The silk rips. Then Zhuo Yichen is halfway across the room. He presses one hand against the doors, but for some reason, can’t get himself to push them open.

Leave, he begs himself. Leave, leave, leave.

But he can't. “Is it really so strange, Zhao Yuanzhou?” he asks. “That I don’t want to hold the weapon that killed you, if I don’t have to?”

After a moment, Zhao Yuanzhou says, every word colored with Ying Long's voice. “That blade’s carried that burden countless times.”

Then, so quietly he can barely hear himself, says: “But I haven’t.”

His hands close into fists against the door, but still, he can’t push them open. He doesn’t have the strength.

Silence covers the hall with both hands.

“And then—I couldn’t,” he admits. “Because it got too heavy. You were too heavy.”

His body bows with the truth.

“I don’t ever—want to hold your life in my hands again,” he says, electing to lay the rest of himself at their feet, like a dog. “Take it back, Zhao Yuanzhou—”

He can’t remember: did he ever used to beg? 

There’s a thud in Zhuo Yichen’s heart. He presses a hand to it. He’d forgotten how it felt, having it broken.

“—take it back.”