@necrrot, who enabled me || wei wuxian & jiang yanli.
the burial mounds are even worse up close.
the town of yilling is small but hospitable enough — but the burial mounds are barren and decrepit, and jiang yanli can feel the chill of them in a way that robes don’t keep out. she hates to think of how a-xian and those poor wens have survived in a place like this for months already; even from the edges, it’s clear that people aren’t meant to live here. people are, maybe, meant to die here, but not live.
and yet it’s where she’s come to stay.
she carries a pack over her shoulder, and faces down the wards before her with a wan sort of determination. it’s been a tiring journey, on foot and horseback, but every step had only solidified the determination in her heart that had been burning since that final day in lanling. too many days listening to her brother’s name be spit foully from the mouths of people who had had no problem using him up to win their wars. too many days sitting in silence, hating them for their hypocrisy, and hating herself for doing nothing. for pretending at happiness when injustice lurked so transparently under the surface of the waters of her life, like so many others do.
“a-xian,” she calls to the barren landscape, though the twisted trees seem to swallow her voice until it turns into a dead thing itself. the fierce corpses ringing the entrance to the mounds had frightened her, but they had also ignored her, and in the end she’d been able to walk past them with no resistance at all. so she dares to hope that raising her voice will not bring anything evil down on her, not while her brother controls this place. she’s been walking for so long already; surely she must reach them, reach something, soon. “a-xian?”
