Take him, and cut him out in little stars...
There are no witnesses beyond the other dead, and they’re not talking. His mind and soul are too broken even to take it in himself, and so the tree falls in the forest with no one around, and whether it makes a sound or not doesn’t matter.
Word of his death travels loud and fast, and thousands of voices cry out in joy and relief.
One voice has no words to express its grief.
Thousands of hearts rise in jubilation, lighter than they have been in years.
One sinks heavier than a stone into the bottomless sea.
Impossibly far away, in the deep empty nothingness of space, something very strange happens.
Perhaps the ball of rock and ice was already there, left over from the startled creation of everything. Perhaps it coalesced out of the void at the last beat of Wei Wuxian’s weary heart. No one was there to witness it, so it doesn’t matter.
What happens is this: Wei Wuxian wakes up.
He is alone. Blind, for he has no eyes, and even if he did he is in darkness. Deaf, for he has no ears, and even if he did, sound does not exist out here.
He is aware of himself and his surroundings in ways that are as old as time but entirely new to him. He feels without nerves the gravity of distant enormities and the vastness of the space between them. He perceives his own utter solitude.
He thinks without neurons: Good.
It is correct, he knows, for him to be here, like this. There is justice to it.
He still, somehow, feels the grief and the shame, although he no longer has the glands to release the hormones to shake his frail human body with those feelings.
That is good too, he thinks, that he doesn’t get a break from those things. He wants one, of course. It’s upsetting to still have consciousness, after death. But he’s aware that he deserves it.
He sits with that for a while. Or floats, or whatever it is he does now. There are no days here, or any other measure of time, so there’s no way to know how long he sits with it.
There’s something else as well, he comes to realize, built into the very core of him in this new self, this clod of dust and grieving stone.
There is a question: where to now?
He doesn’t know where the question comes from. From himself, perhaps, or from something else. Some god, perhaps, although what kind of god would inhabit this emptiness?
He is perfectly balanced here: barely, impossibly still. All it will take is the tiniest impulse in any direction and he will go, and go forever. There is nothing to stop him, and only his own will to start him.
He can tell, he realizes, where his old home is. Not by the subtle pull of gravity, but by something deeper and stranger. He knows, though, beyond doubt. It’s all there, everything he’s ever known: all the joys and sorrows, all the rage and failure of his short, violent life. Jiang Cheng is there. Lan Zhan. All that’s left of his Shijie, and A-Yuan, Wen Ning and Wen Qing. Dust, like his old body. Like his new body too.
It’s so far away. He has no idea where ‘here’ is; there are no directions here except one: home. And home is so very, very far away it seems diminished to almost nothing. The smallest pinprick imaginable, in a black cloak that goes on forever in all directions.
Less than a speck, all that he’s ever wanted and had and lost.
For a moment he wonders what would happen if he chose the direction opposite that connection. He could put himself even farther away. Farther and farther and farther.
There might be wonderous things.
He discovers himself, strangely, even after everything, to be curious.
But he is who he is in more than just his curiosity, even when he’s a frozen dustball in the infinite depths of fathomless darkness.
So he tips himself towards home, and Wei Wuxian becomes a comet.