Chapter Text
Sizhui wakes up to daylight and the sweet scent of woodsmoke. And warmth. He is very, very cozy. Any night without nightmares is a blessed one. Daylight strokes the cherry wood floor boards beside his face…
Ah, he lays on the ground before the hearth. In Gui’s moving castle, amongst the mountains of the Wilds. Because he’s cursed.
Someone (Xuanyu?) must have set his body down on this pallet of layered blankets. He hopes he was a toddler at the time, for their sake. The glazed blue tiles on his other side radiate heat.
Hanguang’s hearth, he remembers, sitting up fast. Looking right, he finds himself face-to-face with the fire in its wide, grand hearth. But it looks ordinary, now.
Could he have been a dream, Sizhui wonders, staring hard at the faceless fire, or does his magic allow him to transform and leave?
Ah, those are mature enough thoughts. He hums, assessing his voice—yes, he’s his age. More or less, anyway.
“Rice cake?” someone says with a full mouth.
Sizhui looks left, out over the room: Xuanyu is hunched over a dining table and eating while they paint… directly onto the table.
“Humbly, thank you,” Sizhui responds with perfect monastic manners, slowly making his way across the most wondrous, chaotic room he’s ever seen. The walls are entirely made of shelves like a library. But instead of neatly stacked scrolls, everywhere he looks is an entirely unrelated assortment of occult and magical items, and also maybe random junk:
Herbs, notebooks, stacks of golden coins, shards of pottery, fanged animal skulls, bolts of silks in every color, flutes crafted in every wood, thread-bound books, paint sets, brush sets, ancient scrolls with script that moves, more notebooks, sparkling jewels and crystals, crow feathers, living plants growing from chipped cups, dead plants emitting gray motes of light, stringed instruments, chisels made from bone, evilly glowing talismans in glass jars with iron lids, too many children’s rattle drums to count, strings and strings and strings of scarlet chilis and garlic—
He’s a bit dizzy when he sits down, but also, undeniably curious. He knows the monks would say this is a very, very bad place to be. Still, Sizhui’s chosen to cultivate an open mind since a young age.
Laid on the smooth stone tabletop—which is covered all over in esoteric scripts and characters, not to mention some bizarre doodles—is a slightly dirty platter bearing slightly misshapen rice cakes, steamed in leaves. There are also mis-matched ceramic cups contrasting a handsome brass pitcher. “Xuanyu, did you make these cakes?”
“Yep. I live off these.” They stuff another one in their cheek, not looking up from their ink brush. Today, their eyes are lined in red paint that comes to dramatic points, and they’ve chaotically layered varying shades of gray for clothes. Adding to asymmetry, they sport several brass earrings in only one lobe. Sizhui’s plain white uniform must look a stark contrast.
Selecting a cake, he takes a chewy, hungry bite. It’s not good, but he’s famished. He pours lots of water too, downing two cups straight away. Surreptitiously checking the look of his hands, he thinks his curse must still be in remission. “Xuanyu, last night, you said ‘me too.’ Are you also cursed?”
“Um, not exactly…” they reply, looking anywhere but him.
Just then—there’s a knock at the door, from down that recessed stairway where Sizhui tumbled in last night.
Gui? Sizhui thinks, nervous—
“Coast,” Hanguang announces, suddenly present in the flames. Sizhui’s heart races, seeing a fire demon again. Hanguang has vertical slit pupils, he realizes, like a snake or cat.
“The chores begin, then.” Xuanyu stands, then freezes, looking at Sizhui with an expression he can’t read. “Well.”
And in the next breath—they turn into a woman.
Their features settle even prettier, into an arrangement that is very similar but slightly different, like twins might be, and they’ve aged themself to their twenties. Their dark brown hair is out of its messy bun—now hanging in cascades of long, thin, shiny braids, partially curtaining their face.
“Oh.” Sizhui blinks, eyebrows very high (hopefully, he’s not blushing). “You’re a shapeshifter. Hey, wait—you were that little toad kid who greeted me last night!”
Across the room, there’s a crackling in the logs.
“Hanguang!” Xuanyu cries, as if betrayed.
Sizhui feels slightly abashed, but he can’t tell if Xuanyu is actually upset or not. Sizhui suspects that that crackling was a subtle expression of humor… He may have just amused a demon. What a thought.
“‘Toad kid’… Pah.” Woman Xuanyu scrunches their lips at Sizhui. “I’m working on it! Shifting younger or older is hardest of all.” Huffy, they hurry over to the door, throwing on a rich scarlet cloak and pulling its hood up. It flows around them like blood made into silk.
As they reach up over the door's threshold with their skinny arm, Sizhui sees a glazed ceramic dial at the top of the door divided into four colors like a perfectly cut pie: green, gold, blue, and black. There’s a compass arrow fixed to the center, currently pointing to green.
Xuanyu swivels it to blue—
And the light outside the windows changes. In a mere second, it’s overcast. Did Xuanyu just enact the most sophisticated weather magic Sizhui’s ever seen, in a blink? Gui’s castle is far, far beyond what the monk mages can do!
They open the door, and Sizhui expects the Wilds outside. But it is very much not the Wilds.
Hopping down from his chair (for he has shrunk to seven or so), he races over to the top of the stairwell, gaping down as Xuanyu (in a lower, slower-paced, very womanly voice) greets a weather-grizzled man with red, chapped hands and a wide hat, breath clouding around him.
He says, “Hello again, little sister. Has Mystic Ying finished my spell?”
That man stands on brick streets, not alpine meadows of snow… and there’s a cacophony of urban sound behind him, in briny, humid air…
Sizhui races to the window next, bare feet drumming the wood floor—and for the first time in his life, he sees the sea! Just beyond the hilly, tilting city of clay tile rooftops frosted with snow, there is an unending wall of glittering blue.
“One moment,” Xuanyu says in that affected voice, and walks up the stairs in an attempt at elegance. But their awkwardness shines through, and Sizhui finds himself grinning under his hand.
Selecting a sachet of herbs from a cluttered shelf, Xuanyu returns to the man below. “Fare thee well, sailor.” They pass the sachet and raise their other hand in the good luck sigil. “May you avoid the warships at sea.”
Once the door closes, Sizhui leaps onto the stairwell’s brass railing, practically hanging over it in eagerness to talk to Xuanyu. “I recognize that sigil!” he cries, voice very high. They eye him as they climb the stairs, amused. He’s full of energy in his seven-year-old body. “It's Buddhist! The monks use it too!” He gasps. “Are you pretending to be a cultivation mage?”
“We’re helping people,” they sniff, settling back as a teen but staying feminine. They're still much taller than child Sizhui, but the red cloak now looks oversized on their slight frame. “And we aren’t lying. We never say we aren’t sorcerers.”
“Xuanyu, you’re still a girl,” Sizhui points out, youthfully curious and blunt.
“Oh I’m always a girl, and I’m always a boy, so I’m always both, which I guess also makes me neither, so whatever,” they sigh, rolling their eyes and shrugging so big that their many small braids slip over their shoulders. “So? Do you hate me now?”
He’s fully sixteen again, after that, now with a few inches on them. “I don’t see why I should,” he replies fairly. “I’m not so different, with this curse.”
“But I choose to change. I can look however I want.” And with that—they transform into Sizhui, eye to eye and glaring with challenge.
Sizhui blinks in surprise a few times, then smiles. “Wow. Is it fun?”
They pop right back into themselves in surprise. For the first time, they smile back. It’s surprisingly sweet, if not a little stiff. “Sometimes.”
Hanguang’s deep, resonant voice fills the room again. “Shapeshifters face mistrust and persecution.”
Now Sizhui understands. “Oh… I’m sorry, Xuanyu. You don’t seem like a bad person.”
Xuanyu’s cheeks are like ripe autumn apples in their blush—belying the following bravado. “You don’t know me yet, Sizhui! You don’t know what I’m capable of!”
And he swallows, suddenly remembering—he’s in a sorcerer’s castle, having this conversation with that sorcerer’s apprentice… He really doesn’t know what Xuanyu is capable of.
Just then, the threshold compass slides to black.
The windows darken in turn. As if thrust into the dead of night, the common room is lit only by Hanguang. The door flies open on its own, revealing a… void. A rippling, formless blackness, with a sound like a distant snowstorm’s roar. Sizhui shivers.
And appearing out of that void is a man in a long, flowing black cloak, its hood shielding his eyes. All Sizhui can see of his face is a pointed chin and a smile.
Sizhui is shot through with electricity. Gui! The infamous Ghost has come home. He knows it in his bones.
“Master Gui!” Xuanyu cries, expression lighting at the sight of him. They sprint to the top of the stairs, overlong scarlet cloak trailing. “Our client just paid! We can finally go grocery shopping!”
The moment Gui is through the door, it closes, and the windows beam seaside sunlight as quickly as the color compass flicks back to blue.
Stony, Hanguang intones, “Xuanyu. Caution.”
Coming up the stairs, Gui chuckles. “Go ahead, Xuanyu,” he says in a rich, musical voice, surprising Sizhui with its friendly timbre. “I was someplace nice, this time. My cloak is safe to touch.”
They gracelessly gather the billowing black cloak from him. “Ooh, where?”
“The Khmer Empire!” he cries, and Xuanyu squeals delightedly as Gui passes them some foreign treat from his pocket. Now Sizhui can see Gui fully: handsome in his mid-thirties, he’s a striking figure, lithe and tall in humble robes of black and red. He hasn’t stopped smiling, and certainly doesn’t look evil.
But… this is the most powerful sorcerer in the entire kingdom. A man who resorts to twisted, dark magics. No one can practice proper cultivation magic without a heart. And they say he’s been raising the dead to terrorize the kingdom. There are 'wanted' posters for him everywhere, even in a remote place like Alpine Town.
Sizhui finds himself staring at Gui’s chest, trying to comprehend how it could really be empty.
Gui’s battling with his boots, as if his fingers don’t work very well. “The jungles over the southern mountains have turned Hindu! They’ve got temples you wouldn’t believe. The art is incredible! And their naga weather magic? Unparalleled.” Free of his boots, he’s hurrying over to the hearth—where he actually hops up onto the stone to sit with the cinders, leaning his back against the decorative lapis tiles.
Holding his hands out toward Hanguang and scooting his socked feet as close as he can, Gui sighs so deeply, it’s as if Sizhui sees each of his muscles relax. Hanguang flares, bigger and fuller than Sizhui’s seen, and Gui “Mmmm”s in response. With the fire this size, Sizhui notices a dark, pulsing, fist-sized mass at the blue base of Hanguang. The demon seems tethered to it. Perhaps it is his source, and the wood is only fuel…
“Oh what a good fire you are…” Gui’s eyes are closed in relief, head tilted back. He has a very expressive face. Suddenly, he straightens—looking right at Sizhui, fully alert. “So where did you come from?”
Finished with hanging their cloaks (and ferally devouring their treat), Xuanyu races back up the stairs. “Hanguang let him in from the Wilds!”
“Did he, now?” Gui’s gaze slides over to the living fire. Hanguang looks back inscrutably.
Sizhui needs to speak for himself. "I—I’m here to ask for your help, Sorcerer Gui.” He stands tall, not looking away.
Brows furrowing, Gui peers at him for a moment. “Do we know each other?”
“N-no, Sorcerer Gui…”
“My my, just ‘Gui’ is fine, come now! Hmmmm…” He’s tapping a finger on his chin. “That’s a powerful curse you’re dealing with. That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it?” Sizhui nods, gulping. “Poor boy. The curse must be bad, to come all the way out here looking for me. Hah! Aging backward, wow… How did you get it? Do you perceive a pattern yet?”
Sizhui’s heart lights with hope, that Gui can read magic so well. “It doesn’t make sense… Often it happens when I’m frightened, but then, not always.” Like right now, he thinks—still sixteen, but in the presence of an infamous sorcerer.
Gui stands, and Sizhui thinks his color looks better than when he arrived. There’s more sparkle in his eyes, too, and fluid movement to him. “It’s been a while since someone had the moxie to seek me out.”
Sizhui balls his fists, then bows. “Sorcerer Gui. I may not be worthy, but please, break my curse. Whatever price, I shall pay.”
“Watch it.” For the first time, Gui sounds very serious. Sizhui rises to see he’s gone still. “You shouldn’t make such offers so freely. You don’t fully understand what you may get into.” What felt like sparkling in his eyes now feels more like lightning in ominous clouds. “You don’t know what you might be giving up.”
The willies race up Sizhui’s spine. “The thing is, all I can offer is my labor. I have no money, no land, no social standing. I’m nobody.”
I can’t even do cultivation magic anymore, with this curse. He’s worked very hard all his life, living under caretakers who were also his teachers. And overnight—it’s all gone.
“Hmmmm…” Gui peers at him curiously again, smile returning. “We’ll see about that last bit. What labor?” Sizhui explains all chores and cooking he does at the orphanage, supervised by strict monks and mages, and Gui’s brows raise. “Sounds good to me! Look around! My my, we clean all the time, yet messes seem to spawn on their own!”
“You clean once a moon cycle,” Hanguang corrects, and Xuanyu snickers behind their hand. Unruffled, their master throws his head back and laughs, hands on his hips.
Xuanyu wears an abruptly casual look. “Master Gui,” they say sweetly, “I can help Sizhui—”
“NOPE! You need to train, slovenly apprentice.” Grinning wickedly, he leans down closer to their level—they’re scrunching their lips again, looking at the floor. “You’ve been slacking.”
“Yes, Master Gui,” they grumble, softening in acknowledgement.
“Good.” He ruffles their hair and pushes them toward the stairway to the rest of the castle, laughing. It’s a bright sound. “If you slack off again, I’ll add more arm exercises to sword practice.”
Zapped with urgency, Xuanyu’s a blur up the staircase. “Master Gui, I’ll focus, I promise!”
“I know!” he calls back. Sighing, now he turns toward the fire.
And something in his gaze shifts. His expression doesn’t change, but rather… becomes richer.
“Hanguang.” A purr. “You’ve let a stranger into our house. You haven’t done that in nine years.”
“Mmn.” Those eyes, set on Gui, have not yet burned this beautifully.
Just another few heartbeats go by, as they lock eyes in a meaningful silence. Then Gui hums a laugh, setting a shrewd smile on Sizhui.
Something is suddenly piercing, in those gray, cat-like eyes. Sizhui gets the sense he’s never met someone anywhere near this brilliant and cunning in his life. “Hmm. Something is definitely up with you, Sizhui. More than just this curse.”
“How did you know my name?”
“Hanguang told me. We’re very close.” He beams down at the face in the fire—who can only withstand this a moment before looking away, sparks and cinder flying everywhere.
“Gui…” Hanguang growls.
“Hahaha! Sizhui, my first offering is this: in a curse or bargain, there are always rules. These manifest not just in obvious magic—like your transformations—but as things you can’t talk about, can’t think about, or can’t remember.”
“I can’t remember before I was three!” Sizhui says, hopeful at these dots connecting. “I never turn younger than that. I’m trying to remember something when I'm three, but can’t. Any older than that, and I can’t remember what I can’t remember.”
Gui’s eyes widen over his smile. “Fascinating!”
This is the first time Sizhui’s curse has had any positive kind of light on it. It feels nice. Sizhui realizes that he likes Gui. He liked him right away. “That’s when the curse came, actually… I was supposed to take my vows as a cultivation mage. However, on the morning of my initiation, I had a nightmare about my past and woke up cursed. I knew I had to leave before the monks found me. So, I set out to find you. I didn’t know where else to go.”
“This next piece may not make you happy, Sizhui. But for a curse this strong, there is no quick way to fix it. The key to breaking curses is figuring out what their rules are. Those rules usually lead you to the root. Then—you can figure out how to break those rules.”
From the spark in his smile at that last bit, Sizhui suspects he very much enjoys breaking rules.
Gui flits over to his many shelves, selecting an assortment of odd and colorful items as he explains the rest. He drops each one into a tiny, red velvet pouch, despite their impossible size in relation to it. “You’d have to commit to staying here while I figure it out—if I can. And even if I do, you may have your work cut out for you. Usually, these things are up to the cursed person to break, regardless of whether they’re teaming up with a legendary demonic practitioner—Look at this!”
Excited, Gui whirls around to brandish what looks like a rabbit skull carved out of ruby, but flickering with something inside. Awed, Sizhui accepts it—it’s cool and smooth, and surprisingly heavy, and surely the most valuable thing he’s ever handled. “Will… will this help me break my curse?”
“Oh, hah, no, I just wanted to show it to you.” Pocketing his impossible velvet pouch, he arches one feathery brow. “Anyway—Sizhui, are you up to this task?”
Clutching the red rabbit skull, Sizhui takes a deep breath. There is a possibility that the way this place feels, the way it looks… the obvious happiness and ethics and care in these strange people, already as clear as Alpine Town’s snowmelt river… There is a dreadful possibility that all of it is an extremely complicated illusion. A glamor. They say demons and sorcerer’s can cast them, after all.
But Sizhui’s heart doesn’t believe that. And he must break his curse. “I am up to it.” He bows again. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet! Who knows? I may not figure out your curse for fifty years. Or ever!”
“Still, it’s generous of you to try, and house me. I’ll do my best, too.”
Gui is almost at the wooden stairway where Xuanyu disappeared, when he looks back to Sizhui one more time. “Well. Show me what you can do, kid.” He winks. “Welcome to our castle.”
Then he sweeps away up the stairs, fast and light on his feet. Hanguang is watching him go.
As Sizhui sets the jewel skull back on the shelf, shrinking to a younger age, he realizes… the entire time Gui was here, he didn’t transform once.
⋆⁺ ₊⋆₊⁺₊⋆⋆ ⁺₊⋆ ☾ ⁺₊⋆ ⋆⁺₊ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ⁺
For the rest of the day, Sizhui works hard. Judging by the state of the castle, he suspects that neither Gui nor Xuanyu actually know how to clean. Each task contains its own skills, after all.
But cleaning is a form of meditation, one Sizhui has always taken to. He stays teenaged almost the entire time, only shrinking to about ten once when he encounters a horrendously large, colorful spider in the kitchen cupboard. Xuanyu suddenly appears at his elbow, begging him not to kill the creature: shapeshifter traps spider in a jar, then scurries away up the stairs, holding it close and murmuring things to it.
Sizhui smiles, endeared. Most people would condemn this place as evil… and then turn around and kill the spider simply for existing.
By lunch time, he’s swept and mopped the common room, the stairwell and landing, and the first flight of stairs leading into the castle. Encroaching deeper made him nervous… but curious. All he could see of the second story was rows of dark doors in red walls; a long, lush green rug; dim, buttery lanterns; and a painted ceiling. Like the common room hearth’s tiles, the artist chose a spectrum of blues. It swirls with stars, moons, and a sinuous, luminous dragon.
Tired but satisfied, Sizhui tries to make lunch. Cooking on a fire demon seems wrong for a number of reasons, and he shrinks to age six in uncertainty. But Hanguang reassures him with a few words, transforming into low, blue-hot flames under the wok. Sizhui sets his shoulders, growing tall enough to work. Xuanyu’s excitement over a fresh, nutritious meal flares Sizhui’s heart.
Then he tackles the rest of the stairway, which branches and climbs in seemingly impossible directions. Each of the many floors contain yet more doors and painted ceilings, in new aesthetics. Xuanyu explains that the rooms are all for experiments or training. The fifth story's hall has wild-eyed demons painted floor-to-ceiling, very ominous qi, and just one door at the very end, painted black. Turning smaller by the heartbeat, Sizhui hurried past this floor.
By the end of the day, it’s all he can do to plop down in a chair by the common room fire, resting his aching muscles. Outside, the seaside town’s sunset bleeds blood orange over sloping hills. A great spiked serpent breaches not far from shore. Despite that front room view, Sizhui had quite a shock earlier dumping mop water out a window, to discover the freezing, roaring wind of another steep mountainscape. Portal door and front window aside, the castle still roams the Wilds with them inside.
Xuanyu finally emerges, dragging their feet down the stairs—they’ve been going between floors all day with talismans, weaponry, scrolls, and musical instruments. Gui came home to be a training master for a while, and Xuanyu is still looking bedraggled from that.
They pull up a chair next to Sizhui to collapse, flopping their feet onto Hanguang’s hearth. “I did it all.”
“Me too.”
“You got the whole stairway? Nice.”
Feet also chilly, Sizhui surreptitiously presses them against the warm tiles below—
“Hearth is acceptable,” Hanguang says, flat. He does not sound inviting.
Slightly nervous—but not wanting to turn down someone’s hospitality—Sizhui puts up his feet. And then sighs.
“Isn’t that the best?” Xuanyu murmurs, eyes closed and sagging in their chair. “Hanguang is too good to us.”
Sizhui puzzles, consistently surprised. Hanguang really doesn’t seem evil either. There’s a strict, monk-like voice inside reminding him to stay vigilant. But even after just one night and one day inside Gui’s castle, the voice sounds ever less like his own.
Just then, Gui reappears to drop off Seaside City street food for supper, with much cheering from Xuanyu—but he does not eat. He soars off into blackness again. For the entire dinner, Hanguang stares wordlessly at the door.
As Sizhui finishes cleaning up, he says, “Good night, Hanguang. Thank you for keeping us warm today. Is… something the matter with Gui? Is it about his missing heart?”
Hanguang’s golden eyes finally swivel away from the door—to glare powerfully at him. It feels like a zap of electricity. The demon doesn’t say a word.
Xuanyu is pulling on Sizhui’s elbow. “Ummm... Come upstairs a second?”
They stop in the dim hallway, Xuanyu nervous. “Any room with a fireplace, he can potentially hear you—I've always wondered about the lanterns, too—anyway—Sizhui, Hanguang can’t speak about ‘matters of the heart,’” they whisper, big eyes flitting from the glowing stairwell to Sizhui again. “It’s a condition of the curse. Master Gui’s is that he forgets we exist.”
“What??”
“He always remembers later! It’s not that he doesn’t care! It just… happens sometimes. Anyway, neither of them can speak about the nature of their curse, and Gui can’t even hear you if you try to ask, so don’t bother.”
“How terrible…” He also looks down at Hanguang’s flickering orange-gold light on the stairs. Hanguang… the source of this curse. “Are some fire demons good and others bad?”
Xuanyu shrugs. “Hanguang is a person. So, what do you think?” And they walk away, slipping into their room down the hall. Sizhui glimpses a sliver of purplish, ghostly glow through their doorway before it clicks shut.
As Sizhui lies down to sleep on his servant’s pallet, tucked under the castle stairway… he realizes the answer to his seemingly simple question is not so simple at all.
⋆⁺ ₊⋆₊⁺₊⋆⋆ ⁺₊⋆ ☾ ⁺₊⋆ ⋆⁺₊ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ⁺
It’s almost dawn when Wei Wuxian finally returns to his wandering castle of bricked chimneys and stacked temple towers.
He’s not returning from a place of horror—not tonight—so no intensive purification needed. Just rinsing and warming up, after using sorcery to portal himself to the most distant place he’s searched yet. It was a clean, hilly river city several oceans away, a diverse metropolis with over 150,000 people, teeming with animist magics so different and yet so similar. Cahokia, they called it.
It was incredible, and the people were wonderful, and their magics were amazing… but the trip was a failure. Yet again. For he returns alone. His empty chest feels like ice.
He knows he can only do this for so much longer.
The common room fireplace is currently just a fire, with no golden eyes in its flames. Of course, that fire is always connected to the powerful demon who resides here. Every fire in the house, even lit wicks and lanterns, are made of him. Wielded by him.
Wei Wuxian always loved fire, ever since he was a child. It was the first natural magic that came to him, in fact.
He never knew he would be unrequitedly in love with it, though.
Still—much like playing too close and getting burned—it’s such a wondrous, magnetic thing, he can’t seem to stop, despite the sting. Using dark magic, being heartless? Well, that makes it impossible to stay away for long, anyway. His fingertips have been numb for an hour.
Wei Wuxian traipses upstairs, tired and aching. He gazes up at the starfire dragon he lovingly painted across the ceiling ten years ago, his sore, freezing feet padding gratefully on the soft rug. It’s thick and green enough to remind him of moss. He wonders if there are divine moss demons too, and what their titles are like. Are they as grand as ‘Hanguang?’
Pondering things like cursed bargains and the titles and true names of spirits has been his pastime for over a decade, now.
Here in his own lands, there are divine Shenjing, earthly Yaojing, and many more—and across the world, he’s found the Djinn, the Sidhe, the Nunnehi, the Nymph, the Abatwa. There are countless more he’ll never know, for they are everywhere. Each being is as distinct as their lands and peoples. But, as with all magic, there are certain similarities.
All of these fey folk contain great, mysterious power. They can take a life as easily as save it. Only they are required to reveal their names in bargains, for it’s only with their name that you can control them. Likewise, if one of them knows a human’s name, they can easily compel that human.
Wei Wuxian steps into his cluttered, cozy, beautiful bedroom, walls covered in his murals and spells and crystals and floating jars of witch fire. It’s the one place in this castle that’s his and his demon’s alone.
He looks toward his bedroom’s hearth. “Lan Zhan.”
Lan Zhan appears right away, with a flare of indigo blue. “Wei Ying.”
⋆⁺ ₊⋆₊⁺₊⋆⋆ ⁺₊⋆ ☾ ⁺₊⋆ ⋆⁺₊ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ⁺