ohhh nie huaisang would love fancy dinners...if this is a modern au and we're still assuming everyone from the cultivation clans is haute société then I can see him dressing up and going out to a fancy restaurant by himself and ordering a ton of tiny dishes and fancy wine....it's about the decadence... he'll have them put flowers and candles on the table if they're not there already and people think he's waiting for someone but no he just eats an entire meal himself then tips generously....the staff love him
otherwise if I may sprinkle in some sangcheng?? they go out for fancy dinners very occasionally, mostly for nhs (jc doesn't seem like the type who particularly likes fancy dinners? you have to be quiet and polite and there are a bunch of people around you who might be judging you and of course jc can do that but he probably secretly prefers dinners at home, maybe with family invited over maybe not...one time nhs cooked for him even though nhs doesn't like cooking and jc hasn't stopped thinking about it since....he didn't cry tho shhhh)
from this (feel free to send more!! no one has sent me any jc asks yet👀)
This, now, is your story. You know that epics are often told with a sense of belatedness—a wistful sense of what was, what could be, what could have been in worlds past. Repetitions of reminiscence—one, because it is all the same, and you know this—make up every history book and every novel you could ever find. You can reframe the same story 200 times, make the shadows on the wall slightly different with each retelling, play a different song in the background to change the mood and make it seem like the plot will go a little differently—when it won't. You know this intimately well, because this is the way your story flows.
Try as you may to change the rhyme—the rise and fall of the syllables of your life, the rhythm, the time, the tone of voice or sound—you cannot change the way your tale is written. So you stumble with your ink and pen, and the parchment you hold so dear, and you stutter your way through the pages, tripping over syllable and description. You hold your lute to your chest and run, as always, and you sing a little song to yourself to make the minutes pass faster. But you will not make it to your destination. You know this.
You are late.
~*~
The sea shifts tirelessly around the bustling port city of Taeseon. It sits nestled in the mouth of a great bay—one that leads out into the Eastern Sea and into the Unknown. One thousand strangers have passed through here, together and apart, to sell goods to each other or ferret away and start a new life. Some come and go, like the ephemeral clinks of gold and silver on leather palms, while others settle in and leave parts of their souls for the sea to take in its lonely hands.
The tides were high on the dawn you were born, lapping hungrily at the shores of the city and inching closer, as though to answer your keening cry.
You may blame your curse on your mother, because she met your sire at the wrong time and place. You are born screaming, covered by the crash of waves, to a nationless mother and a father who already has a family. She cradles the tiny bundle in her arms and sings hoarsely in the dim candle light. The nurse present stays two weeks, then absconds as soon as the clock allows her, paid off with gold and a necklace to keep her mouth shut tight. Your father lingers for a time at the edge of your mother's tired vision, watching solemnly, occasionally looking out into the darkened sea.
They see you squirming in your sleep, and share a moment of fondness. Your father asks your mother what he should call you, but she gives him a calculated look and tells him that he should choose the name.
"My people are not treated well in this country," she says sternly. Her voice is hard but there is a softness in the way she cradles you close. "You should choose the name."
He gives her a sad look. She passes you to him and he holds you quietly in his great arms. You curl a little closer and sigh, calm despite the coming storm.
He gives you a gentle name that could mean silver, or kindness, or nothing at all, and gives you back to your mother to settle.
Not a week later, your mother disappears, and your father takes you in like it's a gesture of charity.
~*~
You must realize that this was not your fault. You were born; this, you could not avoid. Some things simply fall outside of control, and this is one such event. Though unfortunate, you came into the world kicking and screaming just like the rest of us, and you will leave it in such a manner. But you will not be allowed to leave it until your story is done. For no great writer has ever let their creation go quietly into that vast, yawning dark.
You are painted in an outline, in the shadows that have not yet been fleshed out to become fore. Lines cross over your face and blur the places your eyes should be and you look messy and disjointed. Something is off about the way the light plays on your face, the way you smile, the way you hide. The way your world calls your name clashes with the way you think it in your head, and it all becomes a jumbled mess of color, light, and sound.
~*~
It becomes too obvious that you are not just some wayward refugee child your master found on the street after the war. Your hair is too black and has a distinct wave; your skin is too dark and your cheekbones too high. Your eyes are too familiar and wide and full of curiosity, and your master's wife is not stupid. She knows that deep brown and tender shine too well, and confronts your master about it one night.
And this is how you are late, truly.
You stay wide awake at moonrise, staring at the mild glow. You keep a chart of the twilight sun and watch it as it changes, observing the ways the ocean moves and dances with each passing night. The young master who shares your quarters finds this deeply annoying because it snatches him straight from his dreams and lays him out on his cot, staring up at the half-dark in the room and hating you with all his venomous, ten-year-old might.
But this time, it is convenient for you both.
You hear voices outside your room, arguing. Both are calm—exceedingly gentle. But the words themselves clap in staccato despite the soft-spoken tones. You peek out from around the corner and observe them. Master looks down at his feet, hand rubbing his neck, shaking his head. His wife's shoulders are pulled inward like a shield as her hand gesticulates in the air below her chin, her shoulders hiking up and up and up until her arms unravel and she talks more with her hands than her voice.
The most telling sign is the way he treats you.
But shouldn't he treat his servants with care?
No, this is different. He knows what this is about; his wife isn't an idiot. He knows. God, he knows.
There were things that happened in the war—
But that is not an excuse!
The words are finally harsh, punctuated by fury, hushed by a love for one who should be sleeping and fear for the other.
So what is the truth?
You had long since learned to breathe silently, but now you do not breathe at all; the air is caught up in the same net the master's is. You could swim through this tension, fish in it for tomorrow's breakfast if you wanted to.
"She's mine, but she isn't yours."
This is how he phrases it. It is true, but somehow, it makes you feel very far. Shadows flit across the wall as both figures freeze. The only sound you can hear is the sigh of the wind through the hallway. And now, you hear your brother behind you, breathing through his mouth and staring up at your father and his wife with wide brown eyes that are distinctly hers.
They stare at you. You can feel six eyes—three pairs—stick to you like the honey that stains the young master's—your brother's—clothes in the summer.
You are frozen in your spot, can hear every creak in the wooden floor as your father begins to turn to you. He calls your name before his wife sweeps before him like a crane on wing. She brushes past you and takes your brother away. She does not look at you any longer, but you can feel your brother's eyes on you still, burning into the back of your skull.
Your father drops to his knees before you. He gives you a tender kiss to the forehead, and you suddenly feel a sense of longing you had only felt when you saw the moon.
"I'll buy you a dress tomorrow," he says quietly, with a loving smile on his face. "You are my daughter, after all.”
He slips past you, after his wife and your brother. You hear the door sliding shut, and your father's sigh, but he does not come down. You wait and wait, watching the moonlight pass through the great sky. You find him sleeping in your brother's tiny cot and give his wide knuckles a gentle kiss. Belatedly, as you settle in, you thank him.
What a poor decision that was.
~*~
You are outlined on parchment, ink settled in line and contour. The shading is made of hair-like fragments crammed at various lengths and stops. There is a smudge where your mouth should be, and your eyes are a little worse for wear, but you exist, and that is what matters. As an artist, you know that finishing is more important than the quality of the work, as long as you know you are improving.
But you are told that you are a mistake; that you were never meant to exist, but the stain was already there, so why not make it into something nicer to look at? This is your family. See? Look at them smile. But here, you see, you aren’t supposed to be there. They are built with sharper lines and glorious color. You are a sketch by an artist who decided last second that they didn’t need the extra character. But it seems the artist died before he could erase you, poor thing.
The pen falls and flutters down, scatters ink droplets across the floor in an arc of black.
Now, what constitutes finishing?
~*~
You will weather years of distant, passing affection that leaves you craving more without a voice to beg for it. Because while your father loves you, he is not often here. His wife has not spoken to you since she found out who you were. Your brother calls you things you do not like or understand. Then, you learn what you are, and so does the rest of the town—half-breed bastard child of a misguided soldier—and you learn what those inherited names mean. You feel dirty, disgusting, unwanted. It would be better if you had not been born.
Some months, your brother ignores you. You come to think that you may or may not exist, but the way people look at you in the streets leads you to believe that you must, if only to be hated or marveled, or perhaps sold. You are learning to play the lute from a traveling bard who wears a silver crescent on her ear, and she says that selling yourself is sometimes the best way to get by. A quiet part of you hopes it never comes to that.
The bard says that your people were born of the moon. That they were painted in azure and grey when it first dipped down over the horizon and greeted the sun from afar. Your people were created curious and quick to race across the world and learn all its secrets.
But somewhere along the way, your people must have strayed, because the war began, and things fell to fire. It is easy to blame your people for the war because it is easier to blame a vulnerable people that put up a fight and call them war-like savages than it is to believe they were fighting for their lives. Now the men are called dogs and the women are called whores and anyone in between is either lost to time or killed.
You. You were born of dirt and wood, christened with sea water and grown under the green-gold light of another world and time. You know enough about this new world to know that they could not be blamed for the war either; that this was all a trick played by a third party that wanted both nations to fall. But this is not something anyone would believe, coming from a mongrel like you.
So you were born of moon and sea, earth and forest. You watch the night carefully and sit beneath still-growing trees and feel a connection to both.
You meet a knight in the marketplace. The emperor hired a chapter of knights from the desert lands in the West. They are a dutiful bunch, full of honor and bound to code, but one stands out to you. This one wears a helm in the shape of a snarling dog, stands tall in matching emblazoned armor. They are broad, handsome; missing a leg and living well just the same. Their smile is lopsided and blinds you like a direct look from the sun, because it feels as precious as gold and makes your heart skip twice as much. They are a little awkward, but so are you, and you stutter and stumble, learning the way their large, blunt hands move and navigate the wind on a sword’s edge.
You first share apples, then you share rice. Then follows meat and water, and then come the stories you tell in secret, under whispers. Words are the most precious gift of all. You meet in the bustling crowds in the market, because that is the only place a knight and a lady can meet here without straying too far from duty and into something else. But of course, this is what you both want. First, you show them the best tree to sit under, then you show them the best place to skip rocks. Then, one rainy evening after your brother has been shipped out for training and your father and his wife have gone out to the capitol, you show them your home, and they stay with you a few nights.
They tell you things they never told anyone, they say, though you aren’t sure you believe them. You tell them things you never told anyone, because no one has ever listened. They like your name and they like you, and you like them too. They are like you, except they are a child of the sun. You tell them this does not surprise you. You spend five good months with them, sleeping and living and meeting in the marketplace with apples and flowers. It becomes routine—the norm. It becomes like home for you, and you smile more than you have ever smiled before. You memorize the roadmap on their hands and sing them songs about the sea while you rock beneath the stars. You spend the summer and fall in their arms, and you learn to love being held this way.
And then, the frost creeps in beyond the shores, and they have to go.
The commission is over. Their entire chapter is leaving now—to go back home to the most powerful place in the world. Your knight fumbles with their helm in their hands, hair messy and black and beautiful against the cold winter sun. They look to you and to their ship, and they seem to hurt when they touch your cheek again. You cannot bring yourself to look into their eyes. You are trying not to cry.
By this time, your father knows who they are and offered to take them in, but they have a duty, and they are bound to it. As you are bound to yours.
They hold your face and give you a heartbreaking, heartfelt smile. They press a kiss to your forehead and you rush forward to hold them one more time.
You are also the first to pull away. You cannot speak. You have no words, no voice.
They hold your shoulders and squeeze. It makes you stand a little straighter.
They call you something beautiful—an allusion to the moon. They give you a roguish, lop-sided grin. "Look for me on the West wind."
***
It is night, and you are alone. You watch the moon rise and fall from the bed, and before you close your eyes an hour before dawn, you think loudly, to no one who can hear.
I love you.
~*~
You run along a path that builds itself as you scurry, but you misstep and trip into shadow. Now, this place is not safe, and you know that, but you like to think that you've always known where this path was going, so you keep running, and running, and running, into the ink that surrounds you. Bright eyes stare through the deep cloud as the seconds whisper by you like ants crawling in your ears. Rapid ticking chimes with your stuttering heart and you sprint just a little faster.
It becomes hard to breathe and your path is long behind you. Your fingers reach to feel the walls of cold dark but find purchase on nothing. You know you must continue even as the world crashes to pieces the further you go down this narrow street. Perhaps this is a forest, or perhaps this is a desert. You can taste iron and salt as you run, run, run, down and away, into the unknown.
You must run faster.
~*~
When you turned ten, you found a bird with a broken wing outside the sliding door. Your father had taught you how to set the bone, and you nursed it back to health. He taught you with steady, gentle hands and a quiet voice. The bird flew away into the sky, and you smiled after it, laughing as it soared. Your father grinned, patting your head affectionately. You swore you saw it every time your father took you out to sail with him.
When your brother’s ill-tempered blade shatters and cuts you across the face, your father pays out of pocket to save your life with a slightly illegal, very expensive procedure. He even pays to fix the sword. You are left with the biggest mass of scar tissue from the bottom of your chin to the top of your left brow, but you are not allowed to bleed out or lose an eye that day.
Your brother and your father’s wife think the expense was impractical because you only know how to sing pretty songs and tell pretty stories. You have no ‘real’ job, and you know you look nothing like your mother, so why keep you? But your father wants you around, and that is enough for you.
It happens that your father is one of the only people that seems to love you. There is something about the way others let you cry and hurt and bleed where your father rushes to heal and help you. Perhaps he is not the best—he is a fisherman, not a doctor—but he tries for you, and that is what you treasure most. He is the one that tells you that your stories are good—that your voice could carry him to places he’d forgotten or dreamt.
“You’re just like your mother,” he says one day while you practice on the beach. “She used to sing the most beautiful songs. She told the most wonderful stories.” You smile and hum a foreign tune—one that reminds you of a forgotten storm and a lost family.
You love your steadfast father more than you love anything else. But you do not tell him he is your lifeline, because you assume he knows. Perhaps you loved the wrong things about him. Perhaps you loved him too selfishly, because you do not notice him begin to fail and fall apart. You do not notice him leave.
You are singing songs and spinning the tales of places far and gone in a local tavern when someone quietly gives you a solid gold piece and tells you your father has collapsed. His ship came in, he stepped off the deck, and fell to the ground there, not five feet from the landing.
You are the fastest runner in the city that night, making excellent time from the tavern to the sea. You pick him up on your own, dump your earnings out on the floor, and hunt for the city’s doctor all night. You could hear your father’s wife yelling at you—the first words she has said to you in over ten years—but you cannot, for the life of you, know what in the deepest demon hell she is saying. Probably blaming you and calling you a bad name, as many do. You run through the city and find the doctor locking up his clinic for the night. You shove your entire savings into his hands and drag him back to the house, apologizing but not apologetic enough to send him home.
You have paid him twice the amount he needs to diagnose and treat your father, and he does his best. Your father is dying. You should settle his assets soon. Where is your brother?
Away. He is away. He hasn’t written back in almost a year now, because you were the only one writing after a time, and he has learned to memorize your handwriting. He never responds to your letters. You do not even know if he is alive.
It all comes out in a harsh rush and the doctor just shakes his head.
A woman cannot inherit the family fortune. You must find him, or get married, or risk losing everything.
Your brother hates you, but you feel it—he is alive somewhere. You say you will go find him. You tell your father to rest easy and you kiss his great knuckles with a small, sad smile. You give your father’s wife all the gold and silver you have ever earned without letting your hand touch hers. You tell her that you will bring her son home.
You hem your brother’s old travel clothes so they fit your tiny frame, and you pack your bags to leave. You pad out late in the night, on foot, without saying anything. There is a chill in the spring air and you do not want to linger here any longer.
You set up camp after a day of travel, just outside the neighboring city, and light a fire.
You sit in the flickering glow and cut your hair beneath the light of the stars and moon. You watch as the dark strands fall and burn, and know that your father will be dead long before you return. You can hear nothing but the sound of birds and strays in the forest that night.
You are alone.
~*~
A bird flies across the sky, sending ripples through a star-bright sea. Black-blue feathers play on the magpie as drops of blood grow solemn trees. You sit silent still on the stair, waiting for this page to pass; for you know now to take care when handling the shadows cast. But this you learn belatedly—long after you watch the fallen star burst into flame with silenced plea and leave the city scarred.
You were there when the golden city fell, weren't you?
~*~
It has been three years since you have seen them. Three long years, but something is wrong. You fell in love with the warmth in their smile and the way their grin seemed so sincere beneath the scars and the joking, but now you see blank pain in their eyes. Annoyance, distrust, shame, exhaustion. You want to reach out and help them, find out why they're here, so far away, so different, but then,
Then, they make the same disgusting comment everyone seems to give you, and you snap.
So that's what you think of me? You too? Is that all? Your thoughts race faster than you can keep up with and you find yourself kissing them roughly, painfully, fully.
Fine! Fine! If that’s all you want, I’ll give it to you…
They taste like alcohol, probably mead, and you hear them drop their tankard to pull you a little closer. There’s something needy yet guarded about their touch, but your heart hammers too hard in your ears for you to contemplate the words they’re saying. You can’t read them right anymore, and it hurts to know how distant they are from you now.
Well, this is better than nothing. You breathe them in and close your eyes.
***
You stand apart and feel years away from them as they sit back on their throne with a deep sigh. They look like they are in pain as they call the others in.
"We will talk later," you assert. They grunt, massage their brow, bleary eyes blinking stubbornly.
Broad Arikar saunters in, clapping the thinner Piers on the back good-naturedly. The sun priest smiles in turn. Quill and her dire cat pad in behind them, surveying the room carefully.
And you stand very still before the king, meeting their brown eyes with yours in deep defiance. You search them and their soul and construct their story in your head as their eyes flash in the bright temple lights. But then they smile that wicked jackal stretch again, and the insight you had is gone.
"What did you want, Piers?" Their voice is like a dull knife through wood.
The priest smooths his gold-trimmed robes, something in his face cracking. "Well, your Majesty—"
"Actually, I don't care," the king cuts him off. "I never really did." They give him a tired smile, leaning on their fist, slouching in their gilded throne. Piers blusters for a moment before falling silent. The king rolls their eyes and sighs.
"If there is nothing else, then here's your gold. 50 apiece." They wave their hand and you are paid the appropriate fee, feeling insulted despite the tempting gleam. "Now fuck off out of my city. I don't want to see you again."
Arikar mutters something about rudeness and Quill glares, but you stare at your hands and feel the creeping hollowness bleed into you again. Your party begins to turn, but you linger, staring at them before turning as well. Piers stops.
"Actually, sire, may you rise?"
The king sighs and stands, swaying slightly on their feet. You pivot on your heel. You sense something off in the air. Words trip through your mind in booming, far away syllables. It takes a flood to open the gate.
This room is familiar. You had seen it on the mural. The demon crystal, it’s sitting right behind the throne, behind the king, a point away from their slow, steady heart.
Piers crosses the room like a ghost, to the step before the king. He gives them a pleasant smile, a careful, sardonic grin.
Dexaris—the king among runaways—stands before you with tiredness in their eyes and sadness in their posture. They stand without their helm, without their sword, without their armor. They look naked, almost; bare of anything that made them great in years past. They are king, but they look as though they are made of nothing at all.
Piers smiles at them, the last knight in the land, and kicks them into the pit.
They sink in slow motion. Betrayal echoes through their eyes as they slip, drunken arms falling out to their sides. Piers jumps upon them, spear raised above his head.
You slip on the temple floors, tumbling, struggling, reaching out.
The priest roars and thunder cracks through the room.
Light erupts from his spear as the king falls, impaled on crystal and fire. You fly backward with a strangled cry, landing on your back a few feet away. The horrid stench of blood and burning flesh sears the air as the king writhes and dies on the crystal, staring through you and mouthing something that looks too much like your name.
Black shadows slide out of the crystal like ink, flooding the temple grounds with a sickening, rasping, metallic scream. Tendrils clasp around the party's ankles, catching them and drowning them in clinging, suffocating obsidian.
You claw at Piers and grapple his robes—cursing, sobbing as the world blurs around you, and disappears.
~*~
You are falling.
Falling straight through an inky cloud of thick pitch and living void that stretches far beyond you, around you, in you, through you. It tears away everything you knew—everything that made you feel like you—and leaves you naked in the bleak ash of eternal night.
They say that, before you die, your life flashes before your eyes, and you must be dying now, because nothing can describe this pain, the howling, grinding scream that fills the world, your ears, your head, the dark. It feels like a mad warrior dissected you with a scimitar's edge, bleeding the air out of your lungs and rending your heart clean from your chest—out into the falling shadows for you to ponder it before you lose it. You fumble in the tar-night, fingering tears and curses as you cry into the abyssal terror.
They could call you timeless, endless, out of time—one who has missed every single opportunity in her life because she was too slow, too much, too late. Too fast, too small, too early. You missed it. And even when you rush and plan and search, combing every space in the universe for a solution, for a sign, for a skeleton key, you never know enough to save.
