He exists as a dichotomy between past and present, the culmination of his previous life manifested in imprisonment, adamantine shackles bereft him of his freedom, his world extending only as far as the darkness; those dreams and memories inextricably woven. Dan Heng’s banishment was extricating, to witness the vast cosmos both as infinite possibilities and a constricting, liminal space. The time between their paths crossing is unpredictable but he cannot forget the tactile memory of cloudpiercer’s shaft pressing firmly into his hand and the fetid scent of death searing at his senses. Whether transient or harrowingly drawn out they were invariably steeped in a macabre red. Alike the cascading stream of his past incarnation’s memories, those of ren begin nebulous and with each laboured breath they take on a terrible clarity. He cannot forget, even as he brandishes denial and calls it his truth, his mind is not a place he can escape from.
❝— there is nothing for us to talk about.❞ those terse words are something Dan Heng had recited before. Once, his belief in them had been unfaltering, all that was left for them was the collision, the haunting last breath before ren’s life ended. Now, there was a part of him that was ambivalent, that could no longer rely on that sequence to remain unchanged. It is with that hesitation that he becomes transparent, the limpid waters of his gaze tempestuous. Dan Heng observes him attentively, an ingrained response to his guttural voice; as quarry might it’s inescapable predator. His features might be compelled to remain reticent but the blanched skin drawn taut over his knuckles and his bated breath are traitorous things. There is so much to talk about, a life-times worth, yet he remains dithering at the cross-road between uncharted territory and the visceral flood of relief at eluding him. When did that feeling become so unfamiliar?
Then you’re clearly still running. His body no longer keens beneath the impact of ren's blows, his ire relentless but consistent — a variable he could predict. As the other turns on him, through the dark undulation of his hair Dan Heng is transfixed by his gaze, his pliant skin invites it to bury its rancour beside his fluttering heart-beat. He had devoted himself to emphatically separating himself from that past, to cast even a cursory glance back was to tempt the dragon’s jaws to close around him. Was there ever going to be a time where the ground beneath him felt solid enough for his stubbornly moored feet to turn back without the encroaching shadow of trepidation submerging him. He meets ren’s gaze, anchors himself in the intensity of that hue, in the lethal edge of his pupils. As his breath is expelled, soft, like the golden light dispersing between narrow branches and the visages of friends the past still harboured with such a painful fondness, he could almost envision it. The high elder and the craftsman, two who shared such a profound bond, the vestiges of which still lingered in the echoes of their present. His expression is complicated, as if that distant memory unfolded before his very eyes and he was but a bystander to his previous incarnation’s candour.
❝ It could also be that I’m wrong. ❞ he reciprocates the sincerity within Dan Feng’s memory with a precarious brush with his own subsiding reluctance. He witnessed himself immured in ren’s eyes, a countenance both wholly familiar and an anomaly where he could have sworn the ethereal features of the vidyadhara’s high elder stared back at him. ❝ I used to be certain.❞ Dan Heng’s disquiet is patent, unable to find his answer wading through the shallow waters of his own heart nor in the other’s gaze. ❝ … that has changed.❞
