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Chapter Text

The Floating World is what they call the pleasure quarters, where one must travel to reach heaven. One can only ascend if willing to rise.

“It smells like piss,” Ren says without turning to Kafka, who he knows possesses a too-well-known smoke on her lips. 

“Now, now, A-Ren—anywhere can smell like that, you know it. The alley I found you in smelled just as bad, but you…” she chuckles close to his ear, acquiring a softly low timbre. “You were quite good, if I may say.” 

For a deadman, perhaps. Ren bets he had the metallic sting of blood and the odour of a wet dog, if not for remnants of innards. 

As swift as she comes, Kafka returns to her demonstrative voice. “This district is highly sought after. The Charioteers and even the Ten Lords often request delicacies from here.”

“Do they, now.” Not a question nor a doubt. Honestly, he is just too apathetic even to decline.

“Yes, and I bet we can find a better way to soothe your hunger before Elio gives you what you want.”

Ren cannot say he is hopeless, for his mind requires him to be able to be disappointed with the outcome at least. 

Rain falls from the artificial night skies of the Luofu flagship, but the lanterns illuminate the streets sufficiently for one to walk by and recognise each of the offerings in front of their doors and panels. Warm red and amber, touches of lilac and pink lights, and the contrasts of people’s bodies and faces alongside establishments’ plaques glint regardless of the falling water. The rain is not enough to numb the music and invitations, either.

Under Kafka’s purple umbrella, they are safe from getting wet, but many people around the district seem not to mind the drenched state. Those not under the rain rest under the curved roofs of entrances, wandering mindlessly the podiums and even within the buildings, leaning over windowsills and panels. They have no fear of letting the water enter.

Even if out of spite, Ren did not lie regarding the smell, though the rain happens to conceal it as they walk. Other odours roam the air under and fumble the cobbled streets. The addictive floral scent of opium, the excessively sweet undertones of alcohol, and the pungent smells of the most diverse food and drinks from street sellers and open businesses. Soft notes of zithers and flutes, and Ren is pretty sure a few roads ahead, an entertainer sings ballads of illicit nightly liaisons.

As they pass, Ren lets Kafka chatter about whatever she feels like, from commentaries about dishes to the enticing figure of the courtesans they meet along the way. He wonders if she has already forgotten about the red-haired interest she so much pestered a few months ago in one of their missions.

She brings them to a stop in a quarter’s turn. “Here we are, A-Ren.”

The establishment has nothing that distinguishes it from the rest of the same-essence houses they have roamed through until now. 

It occupies a corner of the quarter, not even in the main street by which visitors probably stay and never leave (if the inviting whores posing and tantalising in front of them are good enough, which… he assumes they are. Apparently). An old and not well-kept sign hangs over the hooked roof tiles, and by the looks of it, it was painted and repainted many times over the decades—amateur brushes from what he sees. 

Heyu’s Tea House.

What a strange name for a whorehouse. It does not even have women wandering the balconies, as the other houses do—almost a close, private establishment, which is ironic, in his opinion. 

“You said it was a brothel.”

“It’s more than that,” says Kafka, fingers trailing up his shoulder and pushing him softly so he walks ahead. “Some badmouth this establishment for being… more than uncouth, even for whoring. Fitting, no? Go on. I’m certain you’ll enjoy its offerings.” 

The Stellaron Hunter still has doubts regarding it when he enters, and the first thing he meets is an amber-shaded, warm hall smelling of opium and lilies. 

A little foxian woman with a fairly painted face bows to them, motioning to put Kafka’s umbrella away and guide them forth into the ‘tea house’. “Welcome to Heyu’s Tea House, dear patrons. Are you seeking a particular flower…?”

While Ren cannot say she is not what most would consider unattractive, she feels no special. Her hair is a classical dark shade and pinned up with white flowers in a tight, ornamental ponytail, and her robes have lilac fabrics with silver embroidery, her small chest receiving attention with a slight opening. Her voice is a bit too sweet for his taste. 

Kafka chuckles, smiling at the (maybe attractive, possibly her next conquest) young woman, removing her coat with the elegance she praises herself for having. “Is Madam Yae here?” she asks in the tone red-heads usually fall for. 

The young woman is startled by it where she stands. “Madam Yae?”

“Yes, dove. I’m afraid she is the one that can help my friend’s situation.” 

“Madam Yae is outstandingly busy, Miss,” she replies, clearing her throat and adjusting to a proper stance—for now, that is, she has her back straight and a dulcet voice. Ren knows it lasts only until a man decides to her his way, or a woman, as some would. “Patrons that seek Madam Yae’s personal attendance request months prior to the desired meeting and have to wait on a list.” 

Men—and by their looks, Cloud Knights and noble merchants are among them—are entertained by courtesans at low tea tables, sharing smokes and lowly giggling as they caress one another; noble women are also amid the patrons, with flowers draped over their figure or embracing them in less than innocent ways. These scenes are every day, Ren notices, and are nothing he had never seen before now, but as soon as he is guided to sit, he can see the so-called peculiarities. 

Behind one of the translucent sheets on the lattice frames, a man comes crawling with a leash, only to be brought back by his mistress. In the corner, another noble was willingly stripped into nothing and kneels on his fours, with a male courtesan using him as support for his feet while tempting morphine. Some entertainers have masks, others have instruments of torture, and the patrons appear to relish in whatever pain they seem to offer.

“I’m willing to wait, darling,” Kafka stretches, grabbing her coat from the girl’s hand as the young paramour keeps staring at her. “Wouldn’t you be so kind as to call her? I know she will come.” 

The girl sighs. “Madam Yae has an iron fist regarding her time, Miss—”

“Call her for us,” and Ren knows that harmonious tone of the other Stellaron Hunter intimately so; what else, if not the Spirit Whisperer, to entice those without anyone noticing? “I shall wait.”

“Oh… I will,” the girl nods, bowing in all her grace. “Please, make yourselves comfortable. Anything you need, you may call for one of our courtesans.” Hardly an astounding figure, the young woman is lost to Ren when she disappears behind the paper frames.

“You think sex can solve my problem?” he asks, not holding back the slight scoff in his question. “It’s been too long since anything remotely normal worked on me. Opium? It’s best to try using lead sugar until I drown in it, or thallium, if I’m tired.” 

Morphine has not worked on him since he can remember—though he might welcome the pain, it is the sole thing that keeps him reviving the memory that he is still breathing and cannot put his body to rest. Most poisons do not even last because the Abundance cursed him forever into healing he cannot control, and when he is relishing in what could be a deadly effect, he is soon pulled back to health against his will. Ophidian venom mostly makes him tingle; it has no time to infect him when his body heals by itself fully. What could sex do unless it kills him? Soothe his insanity? Hilariously humourless. 

“Mortals with short lifespans aren’t the only ones who seek comfort in sex for their pain, A-Ren. It’s temporary, surely, but it can put your mind to rest—and your body, if they’re good enough for it,” she says as if explaining to a child what sex is. 

Ren imagines scenes that are too grotesque and visceral to be minimally acceptable during sexual intercourse, but he stays silent. Maybe, if he finds something instead of someone to fuck him to death. 

Kafka probably knows where his mind wanders to but ignores him with a smile. “Do you think the Xianzhou citizens were made for this long life? They need companions from time to time. Angels, demons, and anything that has to stay for a long time. There is a reason the Alliance has so many dens of vice in the flagships alongside drug heavens.”

“I don’t care about that when my problem is that I shouldn’t even be immortal,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest. A blind courtesan serves them cups of tea with what could be a charming beam. 

He waits for her to leave, but Kafka takes her cue before he can speak some more. “Sex can be more than just a painstaking exercise. Some do it under narcotics, others with blades and fire. It’s surprisingly effective to not only satisfy the material but calm the mind.”

“I don’t think slapping me can solve my mara.”

“Probably not slapping, no,” she concurs, drinking her tea. “But I need you to understand I can’t always be there to put a wave of peace to your madness, A-Ren—during missions, perhaps, and if I can go out of the script to assist you, no doubt. Your episodes between our scenes cannot be predicted, though, can they?” 

To that, Ren says nothing, drinking his tea to keep his mouth occupied. She speaks the truth, as much as he hates to admit it. Elio promises him a funeral and knows Destiny for being its faithful slave, transcribing all they need to know that needs to occur to make the chains of events happen—but Elio is a master of his craft, and even he knows that Destiny is not definitive; that is why they have scripts to follow and reassure it follows its course instead of another. 

Elio sees a righteous funeral that should have been his centuries ago, a final period to finally end his story and close his chapters for good. Now, Ren has to ensure he does not jeopardise their plans to guarantee his rest—unless he miraculously finds that death himself. That does not seem any close to seeing him, though.

Another two courtesans approach them, white and raven hairs with fans covering their mouths. Despite their… appealing appearance, or so it should be, Ren makes no motion to invite them into his arms or sit beside him. Kafka might have accepted it but refuses it with the gentleness he lacks. 

“Are none of them to your tastes?” Kafka asks, arching an eyebrow. “You must have at least a favourable aesthetic to consider beauty. Do you enjoy the exotic ones, with scars and uncommon features?”

“I don’t care for them at all, no matter what they look like.”

“Maybe you have a traditional appetite,” she muses. “Yet with a touch of peculiarity. Let me guess: hair dark as night, skin fair as snow, and eyes…” She hums, staring at him as if breaching the walls of his mind to find the picture of what could be his muse. Then, she sighs, feigning defeat. “You want eyes that defy you, but what colour could they be? Red as yours?”

Ren chooses silence. 

Apparently, Elio has yet to disclose his story entirely with her. 

“I hear I have been requested,” echoes a velvet-laced voice that stops before their tea table. 

Kafka widens a grin. “Madam Yae.”

Madam Yae is younger than what Ren expected from the lady of the establishment. 

Not young in Xianzhou standards, and her face has signs of different roots from the trace of her lilac and sly eyes. Her hair is the colour of cherry blossoms, long and half-braided, and foxian ears charmingly flutter beside her head, the same colour as her hair. She has a tempting body adorned in red and white fabrics, hugging her figure to make her curves the attention of sight: the side breasts, the tight red lace around her waist, and naked shoulders. 

And she looks at Ren with evident curiosity, sparing quick attention to Kafka as she answers. Her smile is a mask, “Miss Kafka, it’s been a while. The girls have missed you dearly.”

“I would’ve come back earlier if I could, but today I will have to decline,” Kafka says, only to finish her tea and point at Ren as an invitation—not for him, but for the strange woman that runs the tea house. “See, I think you could help my friend over here.” 

“Oh?” Madam Yar arches an eyebrow at him. “Men usually have a finer time even outside, especially…” She tilts her head without losing her imposing stance. “…handsome men such as you.” When Ren scoffs and rolls his eyes, she laughs. “Haven’t you heard? Upper-class maidens find in the outlaw the freedom they desire. Although… you have rejected the ones I sent you.”

“I’m not inclined,” he says, ignoring how she starts tapping on the table with two fingers. Her nails could turn into claws. 

“I understand not one of my girls caught the gentleman’s interest. Perhaps you have a preference for boys? We can offer them to you, as well. The gentleman only needs to ask.” Then, coyly, “Many famous Cloud Knights and revered Generals prefer the stamen to the pistil. Or both in one, should they fancy it.”

Ren couldn't care less. “It’s not a matter of gender or organs. I’m simply not interested. I was brought here out of courtesy.” He does not need to look up to know that both the woman and Kafka share opinions and have a silent conversation, yet he ignores them.

It could be worse. The mara is quiet despite the Luofu itself being a reason to make him meet his demons of insanity. 

“What I want, you cannot offer,” he spares a little of his time to explain. Maybe, like this, they will understand. “You might see what I want as perverse.”

“Nothing desired is perverse,” cuts Madam Yae. “Any flower can study woodcuts and master the twelve and twenty positions—I offer what the rare heart hungers.” Death. I want death. “Would you care to walk with me for a while, Mister? Allow me to show you.”

Ren wants to say it is a waste of time, but he has no energy even to reject it. What use would it be? He looks at Kafka, who nods and points in the woman’s direction, a silent ‘Go. Or else, Spirit Whisperer will accompany you, too.’ She gives him a sack of money. He picks it up, leaves his empty teacup behind and follows the woman. 

“Strong men come here to be weak, uncentered. They make themselves fools,” she says, guiding him upstairs. 

“So I’ve seen,” he retorts, not only remembering the men when he entered but seeing more as they walk. Was the humiliation worthy, satisfying in their senses? Ren cannot even have the sympathy of feeling shame in their stance. 

Madam Yae giggles, turning to face him. “I hope the gentleman isn’t one of those monkish Lan devotees who cares only about the sword.”

“How do you know I'm a swordsman?” He narrows his gaze, not hiding the hostility in his tone.

It does nothing if not amuse the foxian courtesan. “As I said, many of you come here. With years of invitation and entertainment, you learn how to recognise your clients.”

“I’m not your client.” And I’m no longer a Xianzhou servant. Furthermore, they have lesser weapons, from swords to spears and bows.

“‘To master the way of battle, one must become acquainted with every art’,” she quotes, returning to walk. They enter a long corridor with little light and wooden career doors that run through its length. “There is an appreciation in sex that can be seen as art and a language for itself, no? It becomes more than simply fucking, as the men would call it…” 

They pass by an open door where a woman is between two men, the latter kissing each other as their hands touch her bare breasts. 

“It can be done in private as it can be a theatre for many. It’s an art worthy of being observed, wouldn’t you agree?”

Ren stares at her with annoyance. 

“Call it a form of worship, for it can also be that. In many cultures, deals are sealed with a simple kiss, and contracts are sworn with one’s chastity. The heights of heaven and beyond are the possibilities for art.” 

In another room that chooses to let the door open, a man wholly wrapped in red rope is up in the ceiling, with a mistress working on wax candles. 

“Why do you think some emotional paramours call the act of intertwining ‘making love’?” she questions him, moving forward. “Let the bud honour the Heavens by blossoming, and let living beings sprout when they bend to their desires. The Aeons know of your thirst, so why should you refrain from seeking them?”

Because an Aeon is the reason for my torment—two gods, not only one. “You can entice others with your honeyed words,” he spats with no true venom. “What I want is beyond a messy affair, and hardly a pretty face may calm it—unless finality is your field of work.”

“Hm.” She slowly stops in front of a door at the end of the corridor, nails scraping the wood. “Sex isn’t the only thing we offer, as you saw it. Men need to keep up appearances for the world but only wish to fall with no fear. Or you mean to tell me the stone, cold-blooded Stellaron Hunter is your true self, who has no touch for humanity?” She turns to face him with eyes that shine more than they should.  “Are you even a man or a mere demon?”

“Is that what you call monsters now?” he dares to ask. 

“Monsters are born out of desperation, and humans are always in despair.” She opens the door. It is a room empty of people and courtesans, only decorated to wait for an affair. “Don’t mistake immortality in your kind to be a nature-turning spell. Or else, you might truly become the devil you see yourself as. Enter.” 

He looks inside the room but still has a defensive stance. 

When he doesn’t oblige at first, the Madam smirks. “You want death? Allow me to find a courtesan to give you a brief moment of delight.”

Ren does not know how long it has been since Madam Yae left him. She accommodated him, prepared a tea set for the courtesan that she claims will serve him properly, and closed the door behind her. He closed his eyes, and so he stayed. 

This is a waste of time. Kafka might be correct regarding the need to search for another antidote, even if temporary, to calm his mara if she cannot be around or call him, but thinking a brothel in one of the most dangerous districts of the Luofu of the Xianzhou will solve his problem seems too far-fetched. Did Elio see this? Did he allow it? If so, something must be worthy in this place aside from Kafka’s amusement with women.

Soft steps are heard on the other side, the running door opening again, and when he opens one eye to see which courtesan the woman found for him, ready to dismiss her, he freezes. 

He knows this one. 

The hair is black but has a shine of its own, similar to the depths of the darkest oceans in the most obscure planets; it falls as cascade, as a mantle of night itself with no need for stars—not with the wan-kissed skin of his, the moon of his face hiding irises of seafoam-tempered green. 

Eyes that stare at him after closing the door again, eyes that flicker to the swordsman’s semblance and see nothing. 

How dare you?

“Yinyue-jun.”

Ren utters the words before he recognises his own tone of wrath. 

The boy startles, eyes widening briefly before turning into a tempest. “How do you—” He tries to put distance between himself and Ren, and Aeons, even his voice is the same, hands searching for the entrance. 

“Found you.” 

If it is the mara talking, or his resentment, or himself, Ren does not know. 

What he knows is this: the tea table is thrown, the porcelain set breaking as it falls to the ground; his sword is invoked into his hand, and the steel meets the emerald of a spear that was not present before. 

Yinyue-jun’s robes are not troublesome for him to move. They dance like the course of a river, the water gleaming as it runs from its spring, deadly if one tries to venture into it—oh, Ren wants it. They are pristine as the High Elder should be, emerald and pearl-hued, and he has enough discipline that not a single cut is made upon the fabric. 

“You can’t run from me,” Ren snarls, sword falling into a latticed frame. 

“I don’t even know what you want from me—!” Yinyue-jun impedes the sword to cut him by using his spear’s body, and his eyes shine like a storm on unruled waters. “I’m not—”

The mara has an aura of its own that possesses Ren like a ghost, metamorphosing him into a revenant from the depths of fire. His vision turns cloudy with golden leaves and roots that sparkle too bright not to be venomous. He has phantom strings to guide his limbs, the closest thing to a walking corpse that he can ever aspire to be, if not a putrefied one. He can smell the rot, the sickness that cures him, the dread and arousal of becoming death.

Let me fall for nine days and nights, I will meet my end, let me attempt to stop the wings from burning. 

The steel-kissing sound of a sword and a spear clash is glass-like, a symphony of their own and ignoring the breaking furniture, they cantillate alone and intertwined, a sheer metal tempered into their owners’ will and who refuse to turn into ash under each other’s pressure.

They fall to the ground, Ren above him, forbidding him from getting up because of the weight of his thighs. He manages to get a single cut on Yinyue-jun’s neck—

At this point, he must look like a true monster. “You owe me—!”

—and the spear breaks into his jacket, his chest, breaks his ribs and steaks him where his heart beats. 

Ren only remembers blinking away the haze of the mara, the iron flavour in his tongue and lips, and Yinyue-jun’s pearlescent haunted features under him after taking the hunter’s life.

Chapter Text

Servants wake him up when the Luofu’s artificial sun starts to shine with its mimicry sun rays from a distant galaxy, before the realm is met with proper clear skies and fake clouds. Stars—accurate masses of gas in the void that surrounds the ship, that is—still shine upon them. 

Dan Heng knows of darkness more from his quarters in the depths of Scalegorge Waterscape than from the vast universe that engulfs them all. 

It is said that the universe is silent, a void of quietness where no sound can echo, but Dan Heng knows of a darkness that sings in a siren’s voice and crescendo waves, running water that can never, will never stop its course. It echoes in his ears before the servants enter his room and wake him up. 

“Your Grace, it’s time to rise,” they say. 

Please, let me drown in my shell. I don’t want to wake up.

He nods in acknowledgement, but no more. He enjoys the quiet of the ocean, his only comfort, and tries his best to focus solely on it as he is dressed—handpicked clothes by the Preceptors, meticulously embroidered by their finest tailors—and his hair is embellished with a jade and pearl hairpiece, collected from their ponds’ shells, falling like a thread of stars over his hair—but not without hiding it all with a white veil with its inlaid crystals, carefully put over his horns and protecting his face, since the Preceptors find it dangerous that lesser names should know of Yinyue-jun’s features in this reincarnation, and why his clothes are also restrictive and concealing him from others, not even letting his fingers breathe. 

Yinyue-jun is to be seen, not perceived. 

“Thus is the price of being a sinner,” Lady Xuepu, his tutor, once said when he asked why he is to be hidden from the public eye. “You will need to repent. Your name is worth more than their gemstones and plundered golds, and has a stain that they will use against us. Will you let them?” At the time, he was still a child, with more memories of the Shackling Prison than of his reign; therefore, he refused, shaking his head. “Then you will abide by what we teach you. All you have to do is what we tell you to.” 

You can never be your own person. You belong to us. 

The High Elder watches over the Plaguemark, they say, and that he does. Yinyue-jun protects the Ambrosial Arbour, but not without the guidance of the Preceptors, his inner circle, that shield him from the wrath of the Ten Lords’ Commission, who, too, claims to own the chance of making the Scion of Long repent for his sins. 

Dan Heng has never been told which sins are those. He fears as much as he wishes to know. 

“Your Grace,” greets Lady Xuepu, offering a slight bow. “I hope you have rested well.”

As well as I could. “Same to you, my lady.” Dan Heng has been dreaming nightmares lately, though he calls them nightmares for anything but familiarity. He feels dread and curiosity, one he cannot fathom indulging. He sees a flower in the form of a spider with scarlet limbs stretching all the way towards his figure, still in the egg and its vast oceans. 

“Spokespeople from the Realm request a meeting in your presence,” not with you. To speak properly with you, “I shall ask of you your best behaviour.” 

“You shall have it,” because if he denies them a single thing, he will be confined in shackles that will impede his appendages’ movement, and his mouth will be sealed with embroidered jade since he cannot act as one. 

Even behind the veil, knowing the people cannot see his face in its genuineness. Dan Heng is no fool—they stare at him with heated wrath nurtured for centuries, even before Dan Heng came to the world. More dangerous than persevering affection, remaining hatred turns even the most docile of creatures into capable of carrying vileness. 

The people of the Xianzhou Luofu look at Dan Heng and will call him Yinyue-jun, the traitor, for this epithet was responsible for so many deaths and tragedies still upholding consequences on the flagship. It does not matter that Dan Heng is not him, the one before, who many do not even dare vocalise his name; Dan Heng shall pay the price. 

Thus said—

He wants to throw up.

“You‘ve abused your privileges over the High Elder for far too long,” says the spokesman for the Divination Commission, looking through Dan Heng directly towards Lady Xuepu. “Have you forgotten what Yinyue-jun did? He has offended more than just your race.”

“It’s been written in stone and the law since Yubie’s time, my lord,” argues Preceptor Taoran. “The trial of a Vidyadhara belongs, most importantly and foremost, to their people. Our justice differs from that of the Xianzhou, and we know what you would have done should he be put under your care.”

“He was under their care,” Preceptor Sutuan points out, “Our High Elder was born inside of one of the deepest cells in the Shackling Prison, paying for his crimes that cannot be paid solely with a molten rebirth.”

“Which is why we made a case for soul eradication, my Lord…”

“And who, pray tell, would watch over the Plaguemark that your people caused to exist?”

I could drown all of you. I could drag your bodies into the depths, never to be found again, rotting slowly under my veins.

“The Abundance—”

“Your people messed with what they could not understand and found an ally in the Vidyadharas in exchange for a home. You have no more right to exterminate a soul of Permanence than we have to bestow punishment on the marastruck.”

“You had plans of creating another High Elder. Easier to control, you promised us, and you failed.” 

I could end this discussion, once and for all. I could—

If Dan Heng were him, he could order them to shut up. His word was final, the most crucial adornment of a contract, changing the course of deals and even lives. 

When the meeting is done with more punishments established as repentance for his sins, Dan Heng swiftly runs from the Pearlkeepers towards the lotus pond and lifts his veil, incapable of holding his insides. 

He throws up with no elegance. An unbecoming sight, unfitting for the image he needs to uphold. 

“Your Grace, are you ill?” one of the Pearlkeepers asks, though her voice shows no care. It sounds more like annoyance or boredom. “We shall summon the healers if so.” 

“No need,” he chokes, cleaning his mouth with a tender cloudhymn trick. His knees tremble, flirting with an abrupt fall. 

Yinyue-jun doesn’t get sick, they say, but Dan Heng feels like puking every day, drained to the point of physical weakness, as if his body did not come from the lunarescent depths of a dead Aeon’s lineage, as if the bloodline is not a course of royal emerald and ichor—how pathetic is Dan Heng, sovereign over the tempest, to become so feeble and waterless? 

I should let myself fall into the pond and become one with the crystals, lose the body to nature, where he dissolves into the only comfort he has known since the darkness of his egg and memories. They are cloudy and unintelligible, yet Dan Heng can recognise the familiarity of cold waves embracing his creature and responding to his commands. Maybe, like this, I can get rid of my shackles. 

It is tempting. All he needs to do is fall. How hard can that be?

What about your crimes? 

…Dan Feng ran away. He wanted to get away. 

Do it do it do it—

Dan Heng should not entertain such dangerous thoughts. 

He is taken under more rigid surveillance, his keepers more attentive but not to his welfare. 

I shouldn’t entertain such dangerous thoughts. 

He cannot speak during dinner. They discuss punishment for sins he cannot atone for. No matter how many times he is shackled, he is deprived; he is put on his knees and led to pray for repentance. It does not matter if he should be the closest thing to a god for them—god is as jealous and vile as anyone when he should be pure and dutiful. 

He cannot ask for his innocence when he is guilty by his title, his reincarnation. Dan Heng is a vessel, no more, and vessels serve a purpose like the much-loathed High Elder, once beloved and now chastised. 

He cannot run away, but Dan Heng feels the bile running up his throat when they mention using his powers to guide and strengthen the new High Elder, the little Vidyadhara girl they plan on tutoring with even a more brutal fist of control, and keep him shackled alongside the marastruck and remnants of the Abundance Emanator. 

He shouldn’t. 

Dan Heng wonders if this is how the storms feel when they are unchained, not enshrined in a puppet of a vessel—because he forgets any possible punishment for misbehaviour, crimes of betrayals he never committed, consequences for acts he never lived through, and picks up the first dark-grey robe and veils from his coral chest, a couple of jewels that his heart has an unexplained affection for, valuable relics—especially his rightful heirloom, an astounding spear, piercer of clouds—from the treasury and disappears among the dark waters of the Azure Palace. 

If the river cannot continue its course, it will carve one for itself.

Dan Heng thinks for less than five minutes after a manic episode. The Preceptors will most likely search for him in the Exalted Sanctum and the upper regions of the Luofu.

His best escape will be in the underground of the flagship. 

Down here, the Realm-Keepers make it rain. It is the only familiarity for him. He extends a hand, daring to denude it for the first time, and his heart flutters at a cold droplet wetting his palm.

I like it here. 

The drug heavens are not safe in the slightest, reeking from chemicals and herbs with madness-inducing crystals. Rumours in the upper regions claim many Abundance followers find in this place a safe home to explore their flourishing powers, healing and manipulation at their finest. Dan Heng avoids them by overlooking them as they share needles, inhale substances and exchange pills between disgusting physical actions. 

It is not possible to say if the pleasure quarters are any better when they smell just as bad. Maybe if I were to work as a whore, the Preceptors would finally let me be. 

The thought amuses him as much as it frightens him. How scandalous—Yinyue-jun, all spread for those with enough money to pay. Degrading, to say the least, though he is confident it would send Lady Xuepu to the cycle of reincarnation in no time. It is tempting if he is honest. 

He knows from the gossiping Pearlkeepers that not a tiny number of Vidyadharas visit this place (one of the rare moments Dan Heng is thankful for being seen as a relic, more than as the true High Elder), even recommending establishments for their vulgar encounters or needs; because of that, he is aware there are illegal sellers with foreign deals and ill-reputed inns. 

Indeed, there must be one around here. The pleasure houses have rooms, but… oh, well. Nothing can be worse than the deepest cells of the Shackling Prison. Dan Heng is in no place to choose. 

Avoiding ladies of the night and men with more smoke than teeth in their mouths, Dan Heng finds himself in a lonely corner of the district, where a welcome sign of a tea house hangs from the roof. 

Heyu’s Tea House. 

Dan Heng would be a liar if he said it was not inviting. There are no women and men to sell their company in the balconies or even at the door, and no unholy sounds come out of the windows. Despite being closed, he heard too much as he walked through the district. Some people were… loud. 

Anything is better than the Shackling Prison. A tea house amid dens of vice must not serve the best teas, but it cannot possibly be so terrible as to be refused. If luck is on his side, he might ask for a room for a few nights, and his rings can pay for it. 

“Welcome to Heyu’s Tea House, dear patron,” he is welcomed by a prettied foxian woman in fine robes and red lipstick. “Are you looking for a particular flower?” 

Flower? Perhaps the tea house has access to exotic herbs he knows not of. Dan Heng lifts his veil and hopes that the small disguise spell works to, at least, hide a few features. No one but the Azure Court knows what he looks like, truthfully, but Dan Heng cannot risk it. His horns, pointy ears and tail are hidden, even if they ache to be freed. “I’m sorry—I delve for orientation. A place to sleep, as well…” He will need an income until he decides what to do long-term. The jewels he brought can only sustain him so much. “And maybe a job, if available.”

The girl blinks and changes her expression from a welcoming semblance to a surprised one. “Are you with your employer?”

“Employer?” Dan Heng frowns. 

“By your manners and appearance, you must come from the upper regions,” she says, and Dan Heng’s breath startles for a second. “You must cost more than most. How come you know of this establishment?”

“I’m… simply seeking shelter, for the most part, though I must insist on the work if you allow me.” 

After a few seconds of the girl looking him up and down, Dan Heng’s heart choking with nervousness and irrational fear of recognition, she nods. “Come with me, then. Madam Yae must approve of you before you start working here.” 

Dan Heng almost stumbles when he finally sees the main hall of the establishment. Oh, Long, is the first thought that passes through his mind, followed by the pathetic realisation that it is not a proper tea house. 

Women and men display and drape themselves over patrons in countless ways. Dan Heng cannot pay attention to all of them—nor does he find it in himself to do it. Curiosity and shame make him raise his gaze to see and look away, but he is only met with another peculiarity that burns his cheeks. He never knew there could be so much uncouthness with clothes still on, wordlessly sending shivers down his spine. Privacy is also just a detail, it appears, for a few women have one or both breasts showing, clients of more than one gender paying attention to them, and men shamelessly reduce themselves to less than slaves. 

He sees instruments that he knows from prison. There are whips and collars, and he smells the opium in a way that he almost coughs at how strong it takes over the place. 

The young woman guides him without paying a single mind to the people… occupied in the hall, corridors and open rooms and stops before one. She knocks three times, hearing a bored, “Come in”.

“Madam Yae,” she opens the door and greets the woman on the other side, bowing. “I bring you… a new flower, I believe.” 

Oh. Flowers are…

“Oh?”

Dan Heng imagines how men feel in Madam Yae’s presence. She is undoubtedly a beauty that imposes without trying. Dan Heng sees she is a foxian, though not so similar to the ones in the Xianzhou—she dresses with elegance, covering most of her body, but entices with small parts of skin to, what he assumes, enchant the patrons who ask after her. 

However, what freezes him in place is how sly her eyes are to him. 

“I don’t remember employing another bud to sprout in my care.” She dismisses the other girl who was previously present. Her voice is certainly dangerous. It compels, almost as a spell. She approaches him with steady steps. “What’s your name, darling?” 

He swallows. They don’t know me, how could they? The Preceptors never regaled the traitor’s new name out of fear people would chant cults in their name and offer odes to someone who besmirched their impeccable history as they did with the last one. Perhaps, for once, he wants to revel in it. “Dan Heng,” he says, lower than a whisper, hoping no one but the woman hears it. 

“Dan Heng…” she stretches his name as if tasting a new substance from the drug heavens and hums, in the same tone, the same chord of murmur. Then, louder, “Leave us,” she demands. Soon, Dan Heng is alone with the foxian woman. 

He realises he is in deep trouble when her lips’ corners lift in a knowing semblance, eyes piercing him. 

“And why is a Vidyadhara noble aspiring to work in my establishment?” 

Dan Heng gulps down any nervousness, taking a deep breath. “I’m afraid I don't know what you are talking about, my lady. I’m a courtesan wishing to change his employer since I…”

“Spare us precious minutes of our lives with that poor explanation,” she cuts him with a venom disguised for teasing. “More than half of my girls don’t even know how to read and cannot entertain the men, if not with a smile and by letting their robes fall. They have postures for lovers during the night and not of born royalty.” She pins him with her gaze alone, and with him frozen in place, she observes him thoroughly, not only up and down. “You breathe courtesy.”

At that, Dan Heng does not know what to reply. 

She does not want a reply, though, for she continues, “You have jewellery that would pay for their freedom from this place, boy. Some of them haven’t ever seen what emerald looks like, and you carry two of them in your eyes. Your skin is fairer than most. Your speech is more than natural—it’s yours because, of course, you never met another to compare literacy. Uptight and well-kept, you know nothing of how a whore should act, do you?” With a pointy nail, she lifts his chin. “Did you choose the word courtesan for chance?” 

Dan Heng licks his lips, avoiding her stare. Are foxians this witching? “I know they— I am an entertainer, more than…” If I stutter, it will be more obvious. “…than a paramour. I was taught in the seven arts for their sake and enjoyment.” Painting, literature, music, singing, prayer, cloudhymn magic and metamorphosis.

“This is not a geisha house, darling,” she purrs, freeing his chin. “While I can offer more than simple sex, this is a whorehouse. You will be demanded to serve with your body more than your intellect. Let me ask you again: why is a noble Vidyadhara seeking employment in this establishment, forgotten by the good citizens and sought to appease the vile from the upper class?”

There is no turning back. The river carves its course. “As I said, my lady, I am searching for work.”

Admitting to himself and maybe to the lady before him, Dan Heng had not thought of this thoroughly. He wanted to leave from under the high-ranking eyes, infuriate the Preceptors, and, for a change, make them feel the burning anger he feels at being powerless. He admits he can be petty and remorseful—a two-way dagger where all sides are maddening each other, outraged, umbraging their interests, and interdicting their goals. 

Nonetheless, he reached places he never thought he could. He survived hours without the alarms going off, without a scandal of disappearance. He cannot give up after so much, after so long. If their relic is tarnished, they will have no use for me. At least, it will be for something I chose. 

Madam Yae tilts her head, knuckles supporting her chin as she continues to observe him with the dangerously sly eyes of a fox. “Do you take our profession for a joke, boy?” This time, she finds no amusement in tormenting a noble. “Despite what many assume about us, we are professionals. I receive requests from the most important names of the flagship and the rest of the Alliance, sometimes even sending some of my girls when they ache for what we can offer. I don’t tolerate mediocrity, no matter how little some think of what my flowers can provide.” 

“I’m no fool to think of you, or any of you, as a mockery if that is what you imply,” he defends himself. “I didn’t lie when I said I am after a job and a place to stay. If working under you can give me that, I shall abide.” 

She scoffs. “You can’t even act as an experienced courtesan, much less a whore. Have you ever seen a man’s cock in your life?” She sighs when she sees him press his lips and blink away from their stare contest. “Just as I thought.” 

Dan Heng feels his cheeks burning as she reads him whole. He is sure that books’ pictured appendages do not count as what she asked of him. “I can learn,” he whispers, breathing frantically each second. “I’m a fast learner. If needed, I can gain time in other ways.”

Her features border on pity. “Don’t trust your talent in other arts to save your skin in this place, darling. In the end, more often than not, they don’t want anything but to stuff themselves in you.” Dan Heng would be a liar if he said her words didn’t send goosebumps down his spine. Her exhale is exhausted. “A runaway noble from a finite race, inexperienced, however ambitious. Lovely.” 

He is sure she would have continued to taunt him to no end, but a knock at her door makes both change their attention to the newcomer. The same young woman who welcomed him opens the door, delicately bowing. “Madam Yae, forgive me for disturbing you. A foreign Miss has requested for you by name.” 

“Then she knows my time is as valuable as the stolen golds of the Xianzhou,” the foxian remarks, crossing her arms. “Who was it, Tingyun?”

“A purple lady in strange foreign attires, followed by a man with a gloomy aura,” the girl explains, fidgeting with her fingers. “She… compelled me, I believe. I remember explaining to her that your company is to be requested with months of wait, and I didn’t want to bother you… but…” 

Madam Yae arches her eyebrow and lets out a recognition sound in her confusion. “Oh, I see. Fear not; I shall see her.” Then, she flickers her attention to Dan Heng, once more looking him up and down. Still directed to the girl, she says, “And find him better garments.”

The girl blinks. “For our guest?”

“Yes…” drawls Madam Yae, holding Dan Heng’s chin in her palm. “I think the colours of the sea shall suit him. A pure jade, through and through, don’t you think?” He lets her move his face to her whims, ignoring the embarrassment. Sea, jade, she might even know who he is. “Malachite with pearls. Try to use his jewellery—letting them rot with a face like this would be a waste.” 

As soon as the interrogation ends, Madam Yae leaves through the door, and the young woman approaches him. “Do you have a preference for the cut?” 

No, I don’t. Since he was still in prison, others have always chosen what he wears. “May I wear something similar to yours?” 

He is dressed in a thin, not-so-diaphanous, smaragd-hued fabric with pearl undertones. It is not as restrictive as his usual robes, and the light sleeves let him move freely while also showing his wrist if he desires. His clavicles get to breathe for the first time—if Lady Xuepu saw him wearing this, she would curse his reincarnations to come. 

From the jewellery he brought with him, a hairsitck carved from coral and inlaid in pearls holds a small amount of his hair in a bun; a fine pearlwork for earrings, and a simple necklace that he much adored from the treasury, with a single pearl for charm, resting where his clavicles meet.

Looking at himself in the mirror, Dan Heng cannot help but smile even a little. He likes this dress, his face, and his appearance. 

“Well, once again, I am correct,” Madam Yae echoes behind him. Dan Heng turns to see her approaching, mindful steps with intent, but her eyes sparkle with something he cannot point out; it is only that he feels in trouble. “Tingyun, give me that corset.” And the girl abides. 

The foxian’s hands roam his body with her palms. Lifting his chin, fitting the necklace, checking his robes with the attentiveness of a tailor. 

“You said you’ll learn if I accept you in my care, correct?” He nods, and she grins. Then, they fall to his waist. To him, she speaks in a velvet tone. “I’ll offer you a chance. A challenging client that, to your luck, desires no intimacy yet. If you can satisfy him without removing your dress, I’ll accept your work as a courtesan.” 

Dan Heng almost loses his breath when her waist is grabbed not by hands but by an intricate silver latticework with viridescent jewels inlaid on its skeleton. 

She taps on his sides. “Trust me, it’s not that tight—and you’re lucky you don’t need it tighter. Men would commit seppuku to simply stare at your bare waist, and they would kill to hold it. I’ve seen it with lesser bodies.” 

“You’ll make me work immediately?” he asks, heart beating incessantly inside his chest. 

“How else will you learn how to please a man?” She turns him towards the door as she finishes some touches on his appearance. “Didn’t you know?” She leans down on his ear. “Jade is also a name for valuable harlots.” 

Her cue is his speechlessness, for she pushes him out of the room and guides him down the corridor while brushing her fingers against the small of his back. 

“What, are you thinking of turning back on your word?” 

“No,” he gulps. 

“Good.” 

Dan Heng feels her—or lack of her presence—when she walks away.

Breathing deep once, twice, five times and gulping one last time, he opens the door.

Blood. 

There is blood in his mouth, down his throat; blood on his neck, on his clothes, on Cloud Piercer—

Oh, Aeons. 

There is a corpse lying above him. Plastered on his body like a blanket. 

What do I do what do I do what I do—

Dan Heng pushes the body off of him and summons Cloud Piercer back. The stranger’s sword disappeared alongside his vitality before he even fell upon him. The body falls with a thud, meaty and heavy, and Dan Heng wants to puke. 

Those eyes… he knows them from nightmares. The nightmares he has been dreaming with as of late, which he can never comprehend when conscience returns to him in the morning. He remembers the vicious scarlet, the flowers sprouting from the phantom haunting him, the golden leaves. 

Taking a deep breath, he turns his face to see the man. Blood stains his mouth, and an ugly wound displays his innards as a grotesquely beautiful artistry. He was smiling like a devil when I pierced him. This man is beyond ordinary. 

And then, the man inhales as sharp as his sword, reviving beside him. 

Dan Heng crawls back away from him, bile rising in his throat twice that night. Long, please. I don’t know what to do. 

The man’s wound is closing by itself, gnawing-like sounds as the skin closes and heals itself—the organs, the tendons, too, and Dan Heng can hear them all. Long, Permanence of mine, please, tell me what to do. He is ready to summon Cloud Piercer once more if the man attacks him, outrages him, this is not what I planned—

“You still wield that spear as an extension of your body,” is what the man says. 

The realisation that the man has a husky voice, appealing to his ears, is terrifying and gratifying. Dan Heng gulps, blinks, and observes as the man sits, grunting as if it is arduous to rise from the ground. When the man turns his face towards Dan Heng, the latter has Cloud Piercer summoned and pointing at the stranger’s calm expression. 

But the man stares at him, scoffs, and lowers the spear’s edge with his hand, getting up without further explanation. 

On the other hand, Dan Heng transforms dread into anger. He follows the stranger, trembling legs and frantic breath. “You—How did you know that I—”

“That you’re Yinyue-jun?” The stranger finishes for him. “Spare me. Hardly anyone else would have seafoam for eyes.” 

‘Some of them haven’t ever seen what emerald looks like, and you carry two of them in your eyes’. Dan Heng’s plan is going all wrong. “Please,” he begs, licking his lips. “Please, don’t tell anyone.”

“Don’t disclose that their High Elder is whoring himself? Is that what the Preceptors are imposing as punishment for your crimes?” If Dan Heng did not know better, he would guess there was a scratch of wrath in the man’s voice. “They’re as useless as the Ten Lords.” 

I don’t even know all the crimes he committed. I didn’t commit anything, but none of it escapes Dan Heng’s mouth, who just holds back his tears and keeps Cloud Piercer in his hand, hurting by how strong he grips it. 

“Please,” he tries once again. “I don’t want them to find me.” Not now, maybe never. 

Even if possessing eyes in the colour of molten blood, the man looks at him with an unreadable yet knowing gaze. Dan Heng almost calls it comforting. “Under one condition,” he concurs. 

What can Dan Heng do, if not harden his semblance and nod? “Say it. I’ll do my best to meet it.”

The stranger picks up something from his—ruined—coat. “Give me your hand.” 

Dan Heng abides. 

The stranger gives him a black pound with golden tingling inside. 

Dan Heng frowns. What? “What do you—?”

“I’ll tell the Madam that she met my request, and I’ll keep the service.” Without further explanation, the man leaves.

…he leaves Dan Heng in a pool of blood, destroyed furniture, and more doubts than satisfaction. 

When the Vidyadhara finally processes what happened, he notices it is too late to even ask for a name. What is the name of the man I murdered? And the man that paid me for his murder?

When Madam Yae returns, shock is a euphemism for her expression. At least Dan Heng didn’t need to remove his dress. 

Chapter Text

“Haven’t you heard? Yinyue-jun disappeared!”

“That viper of a traitor?!”

“Vanished as fog during the night, right from the Preceptors’ care. The Azure Palace was supposed to have proper security, but see, apparently, it is worse than in the underground!” 

“Scalegorge Waterscape closed its gates—no one is leaving, and no one is coming in. Some say it’s a quarantine and that it’s all a masquerade for some mysterious illness that the High Elder got infected with. ‘To not cause panic’, they say, as if it’s any better!” 

“Those fuckers of the Ten Lords’ Commission have ‘im, no doubt. That snake didn’t pay enough for all the lives he took in that rebellion of his!”

“Do you think he’s dead?”

“He should be.”

“We shouldn’t have messed with the Vidyadhara in the first place! Immortality is what got us here, and look at them—flaunting it around, never to know what fearing mara is. If the High Elder is dead, I say, good.”

“Death is too merciful a fate for him. The Ten Lords didn’t make him pay enough.”

“Wherever he is, I hope he rots.” 

If the Starskiff Haven’s word has it silver, then the tongues spit acids from their stomachs underground. 

No wonder Kafka brought him so quickly the first time: blending in is effortless, to the point that his drenched-in-blood appearance is the least concerning or threatening element among the rest. 

No one pays a mind to his soaked hair, darker than usual but no darker than the cacodemonic lightning of the district; the gore splattered on one side of his face (at least it is not his) is overlooked, people more concerned if he has money, trying to steal from him and edging on losing their hands if they try; his sword is ignored, especially for being the least of their problems. The upper class may crunch their noses at what happens in the underground, but it is a truth consensually concealed that Cloud Knights, higher-ups and foreign diplomats frequent these places. 

A sword is nothing. 

When Ren reaches the tea house, he doesn’t knock. He opens the entrance doors and encounters the little courtesan who welcomed him and Kafka the first time—the night before, truthfully. Upon seeing his state, she startles with a small jump. 

“Is Madam Yae available?” he asks with no emotion whatsoever. He is not excited, annoyed, or has a fluttering stomach. Curious is probably the correct word to use. 

“Uh—I-I have to…” she gulps, walking back. “She might be busy…” 

“Call her for me, please.”

She nods while gulping another time and runs away into the halls of the establishment. 

For a courtesan who works in one of the most dangerous quarters of the flagship, where the crimes and vileness of the citizens are explored at its extreme, she gets scared like a little mouse when seeing a killer. Ren knows he is not the first murderer to visit the place and doubts he will be the last; the girl must be new, then. She should get used to it. 

Life under the divine is not a forgiving experience. 

“A gentleman shouldn’t scare the poor damsels away, no matter their social station,” says Madam Yae, arms crossed over her chest. Today, she has the robes of a priestess, shining in white and soft red. After narrowing her gaze at him, she smirks, sly as a fox. “I see you’ve returned. Am I correct to assume you were satisfied?”

As if you didn’t know already. “I came to see him.” He does not want to waste the time he could spend with Yinyue-jun. He owes me. 

“That direct, huh?” She nods. “Usually, men spend days, weeks—even months—courting their object of interest before requesting them in their beds.” She leans forward as if speaking to a naughty child, reprehension flaming her acts. “ Even whores.” 

“I’m paying for his time.” He lifts another generous pound of money from his jacket, where the foxian eyes flicker their attention. “And I’m paying for his exclusivity.” 

Her eyebrow arches. “His exclusivity?”

“My affairs with that man are mine alone. My reasons are my own.” 

Then, she scoffs, “You destroyed the room I offered and stained the floor with your blood, and now you demand his unique company to be solely yours. You have a nerve, Stellaron Hunter.”

“You send prostitutes to other Xianzhou ships without a second thought if not for the income, and is beginning to spread among other planets,” he comments, not accusing, especially for he does not care. “As long as you make a profit and your client is satisfied, you shouldn’t be so concerned. Am I wrong?”

“…not at all.” She accepts the pound of money, then indicates with a finger that he follows her. “I hope you have more in your pockets, for I believe he will be quite expensive to keep. It is hard to find a similar jade outside the coral brothels, no matter how much he tries to conceal his features—I believe it’s the eyes if you understand me.” Over her shoulder, she stares at him like a mischievous devil from folktales. “I should warn you, however: the moment a patron offers a higher price for him…”

“I’ll deal with it when the time comes.” 

Men, women, and all in between unblushingly expose their affairs with one another, sounds that would make even some Masked Fool feel mortified from listening to it, let alone seeing it. There are not only moans and grunts but commands of the dominant kind, abused flesh and instruments not meant for a haphazard as the ones that occur under this roof.

“I should also warn you—you came without prior notice, nor do you have consistent… visiting hours,” she begins, guiding him through the maze of currier doors and corridors, ignoring the exhibitionist patrons. “Your rosebud is not ready in the slightest to receive you. If you wish to have him ready for when you come, send a letter beforehand. He will take his sweet time getting ready to see you.”

“I don’t mind.” After centuries, he finally has Yinyue-jun in the palm of his hand. Retribution took more than seven centuries. He can wait a few hours. 

Madam Yae giggles. “Men like you don’t blossom in every dynasty.”

She leads him to a new room—no wonder she chastised him for the last one—a warmer room with a better bed, too. The paper panels have delicate ink drawings of waves and golden sun rays on a cream-white canvas. Candles softly light the place and cause the paintings to live through faux movements. The bed is settled on the floor and fits two bodies, though it has abundant cushions. A small table with a nice new teapot set is in the middle of the room. 

“Try not to destroy this one,” she says when he enters, and with the smile of a woman who knows too much, she closes the running doors. 

Ren sits at the tea table, hugs his sword, and closes his eyes. 

So the Preceptors are not aware. By Yinyue-jun’s reaction the night before, he assumed his whereabouts were a secret but still lingered on the possibility of the Preceptors subjecting him to this to run from the Ten Lords. Ren would know—there is a reason they are the most infamous Commission on the Luofu, and the Shackling Prison is seen as a tool to scare even the Abundance denizens. 

They don’t tolerate treason, much less from Him, who was supposed to be on their side and, while alive, expresses a challenge to their influence by mere breathing. 

Although Ren’s memories are confusing and overtaken by the mara, he remembers a few things: the tension between him and someone close to him, someone powerful. They had to be careful, for what they planned could cause a crisis for the whole flagship. He remembers… 

… what do I remember?

Before he could get a headache endeavouring in remembrance, the door opens with Yinyue-jun’s crystal form. 

“You returned,” he says, hiding the surprise to the best of his abilities. 

That is to say, he is a terrible liar.

“I told you I’ll keep your service,” Ren hastily replies, not moving towards him. The mara is tingling to scream, to possess his limbs and control his body. He wants to devour. “I’ll keep returning until you deliver me what I want.”

Tonight, Yinyue-jun wears deep blue fabrics with sleeves embroidered with lotus in rose and silver. They do not have the transparency aspect of the last ones but leave the moon-imbibed skin to the imagination. A pallid-looking silk hugs his waist, laced behind his back, and contrasts with the long braid woven with his hair, ornamented with tiny hairpieces along its length. A few threads did his fringe contour his confused face—surprisingly met with paint. Long lines of charcoal for his eyes and peach-coloured flushed lips. 

Even as he wants to pass as a common harlot, he can never grasp it, even if he hides his horns, tail, scales, and crowns. He can never equate to others.

Yinyue-jun returns with a lour. “You said you were… satisfied yesterday. Wasn’t that what you wanted?” His steps are slow, not even proper steps, given how small and mindful they are. “You simply left.”

“I’ve been killed more than a thousand times with a sword familiar to me, and yet I can’t comprehend how much of its familiarity is mine and lost to time or shared with someone I can’t remember.” 

He recalls how his chest and stomach were stabbed until he was nothing but a living piece of flesh, no skin, if not livid red muscles. 

“Your execution gave me a peace I have long missed and became strangers with.” Ren pins Yinyue-jun with a gaze. “That is why you have a debt to pay with me. You owe me death, Yinyue-jun.”

It takes seconds before Yinyue-jun kneels before him on the other side of the tea table. “The one you speak of—I’m not him.” He stops as if waiting for Ren to argue against him; the Stellaron Hunter would be a liar if he said he doesn’t wish to, but Ren only scoffs. Bullshit. “You’re not the first to pin me as Dan Feng. I understand where it comes from, but I don’t even remember his crimes altogether to atone with sincerity, only what I get told. Whatever way he wronged you—I can’t be the one you look for.”

“You’re the blessed lunar pearl. It’s Yinyue-jun who is tangled with me.”

“I can’t be him!” The Vidyadhara’s eyes sparkle not in excitement. It is anything but. “Everyone is making me pay for sins I didn’t even know of, I still don’t grasp them fully, and no one even has the decency to explain them to me! I wear the epithet and skin of a sinner. I am aware. But I wasn’t even alive when those crimes were committed. I am no traitor.” 

The mara wants to embrace Yinyue-jun until the scionettes sprout and pierce him, make roots of new fruits in his corpse, and turn him into a new blossom. Ren has to control his breath, or else— “You don’t remember a single thing, then.” Or else, you would know. Your treason cost us everything. 

“I just know those crimes were paid—not in full—with the lives of many,” yes, including mine. “I have been told I neglected my duties, which is a sin for itself, and that I went against all we preached about. I have been told I was in cahoots with… them, and that is why the Ten Lords and everyone else want their right to punish me.” Eventually, quieter, “Even my incarnation was not meant to happen. They wanted soul annihilation but chose molten rebirth instead.” 

Ren acknowledges that he is not a man of utmost self-control. He can be patient, yes, but self-control is volatile, the rotten ice upon which he walks with a hefty broken sword, bordering on breaking the surface when a single trigger transforms him completely. 

There is something extremely sick in him that is triggered when imagining Yinyue-jun shackled and under the Ten Lords’ stern control. It borders on sadism, itching within to see for himself how the mighty fall, at the same time, the mara begs to come out and lay waste to the whole flagship. Ren has made friends with this monster that speaks to him, gold and festering inside. 

If anyone has the right to punish Yinyue-jun and take satisfaction in it, it’s him. 

“You turned me into this,” he hisses, swallowing the rotting-sweet taste of mara rising in his throat. Maybe it is just bile.

“…truly?”

“The mara corrupted most of my memories, but I know this body was never to meet the curse of the Abundance.” And, somehow, Yinyue-jun turned him into the delight of a curse. A perfected experiment, if you will, he remembers a bastard denizen say. “Just being here in the Luofu causes the mara to flare up. A headache, in the beginning, that turns into a blank space in your brain taken over by wrath and despair.”

“Then why do you come?”

“Our prices will be paid, Yinyue-jun. Until our debts are fulfilled, you can’t run from me.” 

“Speaking in riddles and prophecies will not help our case.” Yinyue-jun diverges his stare, fidgeting with his fingers on his lap. “You paid me for that.” At that, Ren hums. “You paid me for killing you.” 

“I did.”

“That’s not—I mean, this place, this establishment—” His cheeks become redder and redder as he attempts at one complete phrase. He sighs, narrowing his gaze. “You are aware you shouldn’t be paying me for murder.” 

“You gave me what I wanted. Isn’t that the job of a whore?” 

Under his breath, the Vidyadhara murmurs, ‘Courtesan is a better name’ before shaking his head and propping his hands on the tea table. “Yes, you are correct. But if you seek death, the battlefield is the place meant for it, and not a pleasure house.”

Ren scoffs. “Would you rather I bent you over this table and fucked you until your bones shattered?”

Yinyue-jun looks away once more, wholly scarlet, shutting his eyes and, by the appearance of it, holding back a curse. “That’s not—!” 

“What I want is peace,” Ren decides to pity him, just this once. “There’s only so much peace an ICP fucker can give me if he tries to kill me with a bullet or another mediocre sword trespasses my stomach. You’ll keep trying until you give me the definitive rest I’m owed. Let the punishment fit the crime—and the author.”

There is no proper way to describe to Yinyue-jun the sensation of upcoming death, the rapture of a sting, burn, or fracture compelling your organs to stop. Every explanation will sound vulgar, to say the least. It is the closest thing to the pleasure of sex he will get, he assumes. 

“I would rather be the corpse I was than the man I am,” is what Ren ends up saying. “I want you to kill me.” 

In return for tense seconds, he receives a long silence. The little recollections the Stellaron Hunter has of the previous Yinyue-jun are similar to how the current High Elder acts and hides. Concealing features, forbidding from exposing more than they should, though the one before him seems less experienced in the arts of manipulation. 

The previous High Elder was a better liar. 

Yinyue-jun appears to collect himself, taking a deep breath and motioning towards the teapot set. 

“We shall not fight,” he says, the epitome of a royal. He carefully moves the kettle and starts a ministration for two. “It is unbecoming of me and of a patron to destroy Madam Yae’s rooms. If you desire any conflict…”

“I’m not against conflict, but I demand the murder and not the means,” interrupts Ren, noticing how Yinyue-jun’s lithe wrists have unfitting rose marks. They do not seem new, but were they old, they would not be there anymore. “Surprise me with your killing, and deliver me a moment of delight. That is all.” 

“Oh. Of course.” Yinyue-jun blinks at him as if studying him. Ren finds it amusing how, once, the High Elder knew him enough to curse him, and now, he is a spectre. 

Ren lets Yinyue-jun prepare the tea according to his whims. Part of him itches to say, ‘This is unnecessary; just kill me,’ but he suspects it is the mara more than his rationality. He cannot say it is his human part; the Madam suggested him being a demon, and maybe she was correct. More than that, he is a tool. He has Yinyue-jun in his sphere. It is only a matter of time now. 

“I don’t think you mind that much, but…” Yinyue-jun holds the kettle in the delicate manner a true courtesan would, though Ren suspects he does not know it yet. He serves them both and then rests the kettle to hold one cup, “Black tea.”

“Hm.” While Ren accepts it and admits it is enjoyable, he is no fool to notice that Yinyue-jun is controlling his own breath to the point that he is more of a jade statue than a favourable courtesan. “If you’re worried about me attacking you, fear not. You will know when I’m tempted to cut your head off and drink from it.” 

“I’m not concerned for my safety,” rebukes Yinyue-jun. 

From under a few pieces of fabric, he searches for—a dagger. It is exquisite in appearance and forging: a double-edged blade with an ivory handle, steel sharp even to the eye alone, providing ghostly cuts as the surface reflects the candlelight. 

He holds it gingerly as if it is a precious relic, and Ren frowns at how familiar the object is. A golden tingle starts scratching in his head. “I… this was in the treasury of the palace. His treasury. I got it when the Pearlkeepers were not looking.”

At least I won’t be killed by a simple dagger, Ren thinks. It gives him more satisfaction, almost analogous to the author of his ephemeral passing. Furthermore, he knows Yinyue-jun will follow through. 

Ren leaves his cup on the table. Yinyue-jun pleads with his eyes, though he does not know a plausible reason. Is it not the Stellaron Hunter who is pleading and using money to get what he wants and cannot have with someone else?

“What are you waiting for?” I paid you, he wants to say, satisfy me. It is just at that moment that he feels any flicker of excitement. 

“Are you sure we… I can…” 

The mara has a voice of its own. “What? Cure me?” It is a mockery of themselves, a twisted joke on their punishments and tribulations. 

Is that forbearance in the eyes of jade? Quivering, reluctance, perhaps dread? “I just meant…”

“You owe me, Yinyue-jun,” and now he recognises the taste of venom on his tongue—it tastes like medicine, leaves of amber and sick sweetness. “It’s the least you can—”

SWISH. 

When a befitting blade cuts, they say it sings as it deadly kisses the air. 

When it kisses skin, cutting the muscles and tasting ichor in its pure form, it is a grotesque declaration of affection—or so it is said. 

Hear how I bleed.

The last things Ren remembers before losing consciousness are his own throat burning, Yinyue-jun’s euphoria, pupils dilating and overwhelming the emerald of his irises, and the residues of blood splattered across his cheeks. 

Once again, when the void befalls him, Ren swears he welcomed it with a smile—or, the bare minimum, he could finally let the mara go and rest. 

Blackness transforms into waves of hair, into jade, into current water that is washing him upon the shores of a lost paradise. 

Trusting the coldness of the shore, he awakes to the warmth of amber.

The first inhale of oxygen is always formidably painful. 

Born in sheer, terrifying agony. His lungs have not gotten used to breathing again, no matter how many times he is killed, and they rot with the rest of him. The air is fire; his first breath as he revives is poisonous, and for seconds, he desires to taste the honeyed medicine of the Abundance. The thought disappears as soon as it comes, for he hisses in more pain, filling his chest with air that will keep him moving. 

His heart pumps again, and this time, it does not need time to regenerate itself. When it does, it hurts more than flames consuming flesh and water burning within his veins, more than stabbing or other cut more profound, enough to be irreversible in any other living creature. This time, however, he grunts at pumping the cardiac muscles against his ribs, blood returning to his limbs in tingling courses and washing him with waves of heat instead of ice. His fingers start to move, and the stone gives up control, no more deadened. His chest breathes, he breathes, and his body starts forgetting the stone-cold state of a corpse. 

Opening his eyes is challenging.

When he dies, it is a mist of red and gold that takes over his vision, fading to black as his consciousness vanishes. 

Ren is not the golden triumph of immortality, the lyrical beloved many arias sing. This is an abomination. 

Waking up, on the other hand, is a cloudy affair. With his sight fogged, he blinks once, twice and shuts his eyes when a little headache forms against his skull. It never lasts long; it just lasts until he can see suitably. 

“Do you need anything?” The voice has an incomprehensible character, almost as if it does not belong in that reality. Ren takes one, two seconds before he pins the naming and chastises himself for wanting to drown in the velvet tone of Yinyue-jun’s speech. 

Trying to get up, he does not feel the hard pavement, wooden soil, or even the discomfort of a table. As memories return, he wonders why he did not fall against the igneous surface when he was killed—then feels softness. A pillow supports his head, he reasons.  

He had been laid on the bed. 

Hmpf. 

What a courtesy. 

Ren grunts when getting up, vision unclouding second by second. His shirt is filthy with dry blood, but they are not so appearing against the black of his clothes. He can feel the smudge on his chest, collar, and neck, filth contouring in a crescent moon where a cut healed without his genuine willingness. 

Still in a misery that he is, unfortunately, more than acquainted with, Ren turns to watch Yinyue-jun, the almighty High Elder, kept under lock and key by more than one party, the one meant to be a living god in the flesh on the flagship—cleaning the table and the porcelain like a servant, and with eyes full of caution when directed at the hunter he laid on the bed. The blue and wan of his dress are tarnished with ugly black and red dried vitality, smudging his bare neck, as well. The remnants of blood across his cheeks were cleaned, but Ren could notice the vestiges. 

Especially on his lips, as if he licked them instead.

The dagger is nowhere in sight. 

“I have to make another tea,” the Vidyadhara starts saying, his throat telling the hunter that he is swallowing hard whatever he is concealing from vocalising. “When I killed you, the blood splattered on the tea… it is not ideal.” Strangely, there is a tone of lies on that. Ren does not expect more from a snake than silver on their forked tongue. 

“Don’t bother, Yinyue-jun.” Ren groans when getting up, searching for his sword that he finds lying beside where his corpse was. “That was sufficient for tonight.” Not for the long-term, not to satisfy him for months, but enough to calm the mara. He needs to find out how the maraphilia reacts when in the High Elder’s presence—why does it wish to blossom yet is gentled with less than courtesy? 

“Dan Heng,” whispered with a timbre of timidity.

Ren arches an eyebrow, facing the Vidyadhara again. “Hm?”

“If we continue this arrangement, then I ask you to call me by my name. It is not Yinyue-jun— I am Dan Heng.” In the emerald eyes, Ren finds that plea he notices just before falling into the hands of death. Don’t call me by that title, it begs. 

“…you know it does not hide your guilt, yes?” 

Dan Heng gulps, resting the tea kettle on the table. “I’m not trying to hide it. But as you said—I’m a whore, remember? I’m not the High Elder when I serve you.”

Yinyue-jun claiming to perform duties so ill-spoken of, be obedient like that. Ren should find it anything but bewitching. Some would say it’s gratifying to see a god fall for his arrogance. Ren suspects his interest comes from a deeper root. 

The Stellaron Hunter does what he does best: remains silent. He searches for the sack of money in his jacket when Dan Heng asks, “And you?” Ren hums in acknowledgement. “Your name. I do not even know who you are.” 

When he hears it, it sets a pyre of passive anger and disappointment, bordering on melancholy. You should remember me. I remember you even when the mara devours the little I have. “Ren,” he replies instead, depositing the payment on the table beside the kettle and leaving without demanding to be recalled in this lifetime.

Chapter Text

Dan Heng is confident he is getting better at being a courtesan. 

"I see the Madam's found a new little lamb for her tea house." Hearing a voice calling from behind him, Dan Heng inhales sharply and stops mid-track. "What's your name, sweetheart?"

I cannot tell you that. Lifting the gown of his robes and smiling to conceal his trembling limbs, appeasing his heart, which was wreaking a tantrum within his chest, Dan Heng turns. "Good evening, dear benefactor."

"Fuck—cursed be Lan. You're stunning." Not only is the man a knight, a Cloud Knight, his breath stinks of absinthe and bitter drugs sold around the districts. Dan Heng cannot name them, nor is he familiar with them, to point out by the smell alone, but not even diseases stink so badly. "How much to take you to the balcony and have your pretty mouth wrapped around my cock?"

Dan Heng falters, hoping the scarlet shame does not expose his nervousness. "I'm afraid I am taken for the night," he replies, clearing his throat. At least, that is what the Madam told him, but it was not just for a night. As far as he knows, he is Ren's and Ren's alone. "I beg your forgiveness, dear benefactor, but I must—”

"I'm sure we can have a quickie without your patron knowing, darling." Why does his voice... drop? Dan Heng narrows his gaze, holding back a curse. "I won't even stain the front. The back is easier to hide."

"My patron is not one to share, and I must leave for now." Swallowing the bile, Dan Heng bows with just the head and turns again. "I have a presentation for all the visitors, and perhaps it might be to your liking. Have a good evening."

Well, at least he abides to the duty bestowed upon him.

They say Yinyue-jun could imbibe the moon and turn the sky into his blessed watery heavens, metamorphosing stars into jades and dressing water as a second skin; in his fingertips, the eternal course of crystal as rain. His fingers pluck the twisted silk strings of the guzheng and invoke waterfalls in the form of harmony, using his authority over the lunarescent brine to wordlessly chant the tones of a flowing stream; tongues are waves of foam, language turned deep. 

A warmth of an unknown kind flares up in his belly when, for once, the attention he receives is not heated with hatred but awe. Be it for his appearance, his face, or his instrumental skills, Dan Heng finds that he does not care about the reason for their regard—when all of them praise his offerings, how could he not be glad? So these are the devoirs of men lusting for eyes and women longing for sighs? Scriptures retell adorations towards deities and how the scions of Permanence were revered as true divines, objects of all human emotions when gazed upon; were they this desired, too?

The main hall is silent, but for his guzheng playing, Dan Heng relishes it as he never could before. 

Only this time, he is thankful for the rigid teachings his tutor has made him go through. 

To be connected with his roots without needing to mock a drowning for himself must be the utmost skill of a so-described scion of a god, and, for the first time, Dan Heng believes he understands it without the agony of loneliness.

When the last pentatonic is played, he is greeted with applause and adoration. Is this how Yinyue-jun should be seen? No hatred and resentment, but affection and respect? 

Perhaps Dan Heng was made to be a jade.

“I ask myself if I could sell you for your artistic demeanour for the higher lords of the flagship since your shape is, until further notice, out of the question,” comments Madam Yae when he retreats from the little podium of the hall. 

“My shape?” he asks, brows knitting in confusion. Before she answers, he realises what she means, cheeks burning. “Oh.”

She amuses herself, of course, giggling a bit. “Wouldn’t you like it to, let’s say, be flaunted in the golden lotus’ rings of the Zhuming, a seafoam jade for the whole Burning Court to ask if they can have you turned to ashes? Or, perhaps closer to home, be cherished by the Emanator of the Hunt himself?” Her nails nip at his exposed collarbone, almost to get rid of the upper part of his garment. “Don’t make that face—to warm a lord’s bed is a privilege for many of the flowerbuds, although you don’t need to discover how a soft mattress feels under you. If you’re lucky, some would not even need you for lewd favours,” she laughs. “You’d make a fine geisha. Were you from my homeland, I’d teach you.”

Although she teases more often than not, Dan Heng has yet to get used to her suggestions. How unbecoming of him. After all, he has said and done to stay, he still blushes at the mere mention of rendezvouses. He offered himself for said duties, did he not? 

Maybe Madam Yae sees through the mirror of his eyes and feels pity, for she sighs. “Don’t worry. One thing you still don’t understand is that you have a spark none of the others have, and that might interest the patrons for more than sex.” At his questioning semblance, she envelops his shoulders with her sleeve and brings him along, away from the main hall. “Common whores don’t have the chance to disregard what is asked of them,” she says, a kinder yet serious tone than her usual slyness. “They are bought, they are used, and they will not get a better offer unless fully paid for—that is, their freedom. The thing is, they never are paid their freedom. Rather, patrons choose to pay for them for themselves, so they answer to another master. But you?” 

They stop just at the turn for the upper stairs, where the din of the main hall and the haphazard of pleasure are opaque to their ears. Before him, Madam Yae even appears taller. It could be for her shoes or her slight disposition on a step higher than his, but he is more bewitched by her eyes to wonder the hows and whens of anything. 

“You didn’t even know when you offered yourself as a courtesan for me, did you? You were too attentive to the wrong details to notice the slip.” She clicks her tongue. “Your faithful client’s deal permits you to reject offers from any lesser patron, even if they are willing to pay all of their strales for your mouth on their pricks. Of course, you will get no payment for the favours we sell, but the profit would come from them wishing to be rejected by you.”

“I can… reject them?” 

“The others? Sure. You answer to your contract, dear. But you should be fine with being passed around, which many are…” she trails, rolling her eyes. “Well, for now. Take the gentleman who paid for your company full time, for example—it will last until…”

Dan Heng shivers just thinking of his client. “Until…?”

“A higher bidder offers for your company, and your contract is over with him. You could even end the deal yourself, if I allow it.”

If I allow it. Chances are, she would not—but wishful thinking gets the best of him.

Could another man come and trade for me? He does not know how to feel about it. Can I decide I’m over with that man? Ren is anything but ordinary. He tried to murder Dan Heng, only to say he is satisfied with the treatment—getting killed, even if for a second only. 

Ending the contract with him would be wise. Dan Heng would be free to see others and find people who would not cause him to calm himself after his heart started beating incessantly because he had just taken a life. Ren also claims they are in a liaison dating back from the previous Yinyue-jun’s time and are to pay the price together. You owe me, he kept saying, and Dan Heng… 

…but Ren gave him more explanations than the Judges ever did and the Preceptors ever will. It is not enough to understand his past self yet, but he now knows more than simply treason, repentance, and duty. 

Lady Xuepu kept saying that the less he knew, the less chance he had to condemn them all. 

Will I feel guilty for more than a phantom pain if he tells me more of what happened?

“I’m fine with my current patron, Madam Yae,” he says, taking a deep breath. Her eyes sparkle with curiosity, and he beams for the first time since knowing her. “I find him enjoyable, and I’m just as satisfied as he is after our nights.”

She briefly regards him and lifts his chin with her nail as if searching for a single vestige of what roams his mind. She is no mind reader, thank the Aeons. 

Seeming content even with the lack of mystery, she hums. “Very well.” When they return to their walking, she also returns with her teasing. “Your client is coming tonight, by the way.”

Dan Heng blinks. “Is he?” 

It’s been no more than a week since Ren visited him, and Dan Heng cut the man’s throat, spilling blood on his tea. It also means it has been a week since he tasted the man’s blood on the tip of his tongue and lips, which he cannot come to terms with that he thought of anything but disgusting. 

“I received a lonely cycrane from what I suspect is the Divination Commission, though Lan knows how he hid his message from the diviners,” she says, guiding him to his room. It is nothing close to what he had in the Azure Palace, but he has more privacy than he could ask for. She lets him inside first, following soon after and closing the door for their privacy. “He doesn’t particularly care for your preparation, which is… concerning, though curious, but I still have a reputation to maintain. I won’t have you sleazy when attending to your clients, no matter how strange they may be.”

In contrast to Dan Heng’s old clothes, Madam Yae has him dressed in shades and fabrics he could never wear at Scalegorge Waterscape without causing more scandals than his existence alone is responsible for. Where Dan Heng had to cover in the tightest sleeves and protect every inch of skin from breathing, the new garments allow him to move and expose whatever piece of skin he wants. According to her, the robes befit him.

“Coral and pearl will suit you,” she says, picking the vestures. When Dan Heng touches them, they feel smooth and lustrous under his fingers. “This is the moment I tell you your clients might bequeath you regalias if they feel inspired to do so. Especially men.”

“Do they?”

“Darling, there is still much for you to understand and learn about what goes in here.” 

Soon after, she gives him the space to change his garments. Where he wore cerulean and willow hues for his presentation, now, he has reddish and chalk-white with needlework in lilies along the edges. 

His chest and neck are covered this time, though not oppressively so, and his shoulders are bare. The sleeves come separately, just enough to leave the upper arm free of the salmon-coloured silk. 

“You’ll need a name,” she comments later, doing his hair. She suggests a perfect bun with dahlias for ornaments and offers her hand to help him. 

He always had servants to help him, though he knew it was never meant to be proper aid; whatever Dan Feng did centuries ago, now the Preceptors refuse to trust him with himself. He is learning, however. Slow, small steps are still steps. 

She continues, retrieving him from hsi reveries. “Everyone here has a performative name for their proposed work, which… you will still need to learn a few more things.”

Dan Heng tries to hide the blush. “Learn how to please a man, you mean,” he says.

“You did sell yourself to a brothel, darling,” she chuckles, again with that taunting aura only a fox could possess. “And men are easier to please. The girls will enjoy teaching you if you fancy the idea.” She knows exactly what she is doing, and he is not that used to her antics. “Have you even touched yourself, ever, in this reincarnation?”

It is not something he never thought of, though Dan Heng hardly knew what to make of it. 

He had sporadic dreams that could have come close to what arousal feels like, itching and uncomfortable and unbearably warm, but waking up turned into an erasure of anything that could stimulate him. He remembers calloused hands, a ghost remembrance of them on his skin… 

…and nothing else.

When he gives silence as a reply, she smirks.

“A new name?” He clears his throat, thinking of anything but how she would intend for him to… amuse himself.

“You were too panicky when we met and gave me your real name. Therefore, only I would know your real identity, but when you attend clients from now on, you should be mindful of a…” She momentarily stops her ministrations to narrow her gaze at him through the mirror. “You gave your name to your pious client, didn’t you?”

His silence is answer enough. 

She sighs, resuming the decorations on his hair. “Well, by the looks of him, I doubt he intends to share that information. Never met a man so devoured to silence, they usually enjoy the sound of their own voice. You should choose a new name for your own safety, nonetheless.”

Madam Yae has a point. He could not adequately think when he met her, too in shock that he managed to get this far, and Ren… Ren— he did not only know he was a Vidyadhara, he knew Dan Heng by his reincarnation. 

The man, most likely, would know him better than Dan Heng himself in ways many in this life cannot. Lying about his identity would serve nothing when his client recognised him as more than just a name. 

He cannot risk it anymore. If the wrong mouth breathes his name in the streets or even the tea house, Long’s dead presence knows when the Pearlkeepers will find out his whereabouts and take him back under worse shackles. 

“Lotus fits you well,” her voice brings him back to the present. She soon finishes her task, bringing two delicate threads of hair to adorn the sides of his face. “Isn’t it true that Vidyadharas are fated for rebirth?”

Lotus. Dan Heng endeavours to mouth the name and observe his reflection in the mirror—maybe.

Yes, he thinks, nodding to himself, I can do this. 

Tonight, Ren does not show up with a blood-tainted face and his sword, and Dan Heng is thankful for that. The new robes are charming, and it would be a shame to smudge them in any way. He cannot promise that they will continue pristine by the end of the night, though he will try. 

His client asked his paramour to surprise him. Dan Heng hopes his idea works. 

“Welcome back,” he greets, licking his lips as an alternative for not sweating, trembling and invoking Cloud Piercer out of fear.

Expectedly, Ren stares at him with the eeriness of an immortal locked in limbo. He closes the door behind him and steadily paces until he reaches the small table. Like the last time, they sit facing one another. “Hm.”

He clears his throat. “Tea?” 

Of course. Dan Heng learns that Ren can be a man of few words unless he recalls their crimes. The courtesan takes a deep breath. 

He cannot offer a genuine smile, for he hasn’t learned how to smile for this; he never learned how to sustain a smile for the masses, and the Commissions would not enjoy seeing him smile in any case. He then offers a thin press of lips, resisting any urge he does not want to act on. 

“How will you kill me today?” Ren asks instead. His voice has no hostility or haste, not even annoyance or boredom. 

Dan Heng admits in shame he expected Ren to be rougher with him, and more aggressive, especially for how their first encounter went. While Ren claims the fault on the mara, Dan Heng suspects they both know there is a resentment that has deeper roots than an Aeon’s curse of immortality. When Ren jumped on him on their first night, his eyes were more a cascade of blood molten in fire than the corrupted, ever-rotting amber of the mara. 

“I thought of a less messy way of doing it. If you’d like.” 

It is useless to think so much about the mara-corruption—anything could trigger it, inflame it; it has no actual, perfect trail aside from eventual madness and a cursed, long lifespan. And according to Ren, he was not even a true bearer of mara until centuries ago. Dan Heng can only try and soothe it. 

When Ren nods and hums, acknowledging him, Dan Heng continues, “Have you ever been poisoned?”

“I have,” Ren sighs, clicking his tongue and closing his eyes. “It doesn’t do much in my organism. If the poison takes a while to kill me, I don’t even feel the side effects because I healed my body before it affected me for good. If it acts fast, I might suffer for a few minutes, but no more. ‘Tried to drink a whole barrel of the Long Farewell once.” At that, Dan Heng’s breath startles, a knot forming in his stomach. “I didn’t revive properly, just had trouble with my lungs for a few seconds after I immediately recovered. I wasn’t dead for a whole minute, and I came back filthy in my own sickness.”

“Oh.” 

How intelligent of me. 

The Long Farewell is an extreme choice of poison that even the Alchemy Commission still has no way to cure as it should, and if that does not work, Dan Heng will have to think of a stronger one. If there is one, the Alliance has yet to discover it—the universe is vast, and they have explored only a little of it. Is that not what their diviners say? 

Maybe one day, they can find a solution. “Then, can I try it either way?” 

Ren even seems amused with his question, though he is hardly easy to read. “You and I both know nothing else won’t work.”

“I’m versed in the art of cloudhymn magic,” argues Dan Heng, deciding to occupy his fidgeting hands with the teapot on the table. “I could manipulate it, and then manipulate it in your body to ensure it works for longer, and maybe, try to stop the healing.” 

“Isn’t cloudhymn meant for healing?”

“To heal someone, you first must know how to inflict pain,” recites Dan Heng. He would know—his tutor made sure he experienced it for his classes and kept a stringent watch over his lessons, so he knew how cruel the treatment and abuse of cloudhymn magic is when in the wrong hands. Never again, boy, she said. “And water isn’t the only thing I can control.” 

“Doesn’t that go against your Vidyadhara morals?” 

Dan Heng rolls his eyes. “I’m not exactly following any Vidyadhara moral since I ran away.” 

“It’s not like sex is so beyond your reality or morality,” says Ren, crossing his arms. “Half of you chose celibacy, while the other abuses infertility and self-healing abilities to experience it without true consequences.”

The courtesan has to admit that Ren is not lying, distraughtly. It is just not something he had any chance to see since he has been shackled his whole life and watched over by those who loathe him. Who would even be interested in the High Elder if not to delight themselves while hurting him until his healing could not be upheld? 

“Regardless,” Dan Heng dismisses, refusing to look at his client. “I’m not the first option for many. I’m only meant to be their relic, which they punish to their whims, where the only moral thing to do is accept my place as a traitor and answer for it.” 

A relic cannot reject anything. 

“Maybe they yearn to torture you.” 

Are you hearing my thoughts? Are you reading my mind? Ren scares him more and more. “Maybe,” Dan Heng admits with a whisper, swallowing dry. 

Taking Ren’s silence and lack of refusal as a positive sign for his offer, Dan Heng focuses on heating the teaware. He flickers a small fire with the candles, joining it with the incense stick for the rose and jasmine scent, and forces his brain to distract him while he prepares the tea for his patron. 

It is unsettling how Ren stares at him as he prepares the tea, but the man’s regard is also bizarrely addictive. Ren observes him, and Dan Heng can only imagine the molten blood in his eyes when the courtesan resists the need to observe him back. Is he scared of what he will see? Will Ren look at him with that resentment of their first encounter, dormant and passive despite its wrathful nature, or will it be yearning, as he mentioned? Could Ren look at him like the other patrons?

Dan Heng curses under his breath, hoping Ren does not notice it. At the same time, he should not think of the man in such a way. He definitely should. How could it be uncouth of him when it is now his work? 

“Do you…” He swallows, picking the purple, helmet-shaped leaves from the bowl. “Can you remember something else from when you and Yinyue-jun were involved?”

“Not much.” Short and direct. Okay, fine. “The mara ate most of my memories, and it’s easily triggered if I recognise anything.” 

“What do you remember?”

Ren closes his eyes briefly as if recalling sweet times—how ironic. “I remember we were close.” He holds his arm to his chest, hand caressing over the fabric. It seems something is lying underneath it aside from skin. “I remember my hands were not broken. I could hold a pen without quivering, write without looking like an illiterate child.”

His hands are always bandaged, Dan Heng notices. “Doesn’t the mara…”

“Cure it? No.” At his answer, Dan Heng frowns. “There are many things the mara doesn’t cure. I don’t know if it chooses to heal me or not or simply keeps my body young and healthy. Many scars I have were inflicted after being turned into this monstrosity, and some wounds are never truly healed.” He stops caressing his arm to show his hand. The gauze is poorly used, but it has some dark stains. He would need to change it. “I guess, as long as I’m breathing, Yaoshi doesn’t care much for what I do with this longing corpse.”

Dan Heng stares at Ren’s hand and ignores the intrusiveness of ‘Could I heal them for you?’ that his brain is entertaining. Why does he care about healing this monster of a man when the latter pays him to find a way to end his torment? 

“You hold your sword with much skill and precision,” Dan Heng says, smelling the bitterness of the herb, strong and fairly unpleasant. Unfortunately, the incense cannot fully conceal it with the slight jasmine odour. “You are a talented swordsman.”

“Hm. I assure you, the talent cost me scars after the horror I became. An efficient way to share your blade teachings is by quartering it in your muscles and bones, right?”

You’re hiding something between these words. “I suppose.”

There is an underlying tone of crucifixion in how Ren speaks of his skills and adjoining martyrdom. No, it’s not correct. Ren does not view himself as a martyr. Dan Heng is frightened by how intense his curiosity is, wanting to know more while rooting to stay away.

He finishes brewing the tea in silence, the courtesan not wishing to press further to the point of an argument and belligerence, and Ren for his steady demeanour that the Vidyadhara cannot read in its fullness.

“It will be painless,” Dan Heng reassures, pouring the tea into a single cup. “It will be like falling asleep.”

Ren disdains with a huff. “I enjoy pain if you need to know.” Nonetheless, he accepts the cup. He sniffs it, then, “What poison?”

“Wolfsbane.” If this works, he must thank Madam Yae for helping him deliver his request. Unsurprisingly, the illegal markets in the underground of the Luofu have a richer stache with dangerous vendibles, and foreign merchants can work on their rejected deals under the nose of the Realm-Keeping Commission. “I mixed it with some sweeter herbs to make the taste bearable since I hear it is as unpleasant as its smell.” Then, he asks, “Why do you claim to enjoy pain when you want it to stop?”

“It’s not the same,” Ren says, drinking the tea in one go. Dan Heng has to contain the sigh, itching to leave when he sees the movement of Ren’s throat imbibing the poison. “The pain reminds me I’m alive, that I’m still breathing and not lying in a ditch. It’s aggravating.”

“Why would you wish to remember it when you want to… people ache for the pain when they feel deadened and wish to get rid of this sentiment. You…”

“If I remember I shouldn’t be here, kicking and killing, I remember the little I have from the remaining worthy memories of me. The reason my wrath is justified.” Ren huffs with a tiny, tired motion. His head falls forward, and his arms fall to his sides. “It’s the only thing I have left.”

Do you fuel your goals with revenge and resentment? 

Before Dan Heng can ask, however, Ren becomes a corpse. 

Dan Heng does not know what stimulates him to do it, but before Ren falls on the table, the courtesan catches him by the shoulders and pulls him back against his chest.

Ren is heavier than Dan Heng previously thought. Not only is he rather taller than Dan Heng, but he is also muscular. He is fully clothed, and yet, at the touch, anyone could feel the rugged figure underneath. Maybe part of the weight comes from the clothes. His sword is nowhere in sight, and it looked cumbersome…

Focus. Exhaling any nervousness in a deep breath, Dan Heng moves them to a better position. He manages to lean against the table, mindful of the teaware and the undrinkable content he will need to get rid of later, and kneels with care so Ren does not fall from his lap. It is far from ideal. He tries to support his upper weight with his arm on the table surface, almost draping on his side. 

Next time he suggests a similar demise, he will ask Ren if they can do it on the bed. 

Far from ideal, but I’ve had worse, he thinks, chuckling to himself. Anything after the Shackling Prison and dracocatena nails piercing his nerves is better. 

Looking down at Ren’s peaceful semblance, he wonders why part of his brain and chest flutters with a sense of value, chanting worth it, worth it, it is worth it. Ren has half of his face buried amid the courtesan’s gowns, towards his stomach and navel. In any other situation, Dan Heng could have thought Ren fell asleep peacefully, searching for some comfort in the whore he paid for the company. 

Strangely, the thought is not horrendous.

Dan Heng reaches to remove some of the hair from the man’s eyes. Can you look like this when breathing? 

Refusing to entertain dangerous thoughts he feels too guilty in nurturing, Dan Heng closes his eyes and carries out a diligent cloudhymn theurgy, overseeing a deadman’s rest.

Somewhere between caring for Ren and controlling his magic, Dan Heng closes his eyes and does not open them again for the night.

In the dim abyss devoid of light, he seems to have returned to the insides of a Vidyadhara egg, being ceaselessly churned in tumultuous waves and elusive dreams.

He dreams he is standing before a sacrificial altar, dancing and chanting. However, the songs and gestures are mere facades. The light emanating from his eyes and the storm roiling in his blood are the true forces at play. Casually, he waves the misty and foggy tide in Scalegorge Waterscape, sealing the maddened and frenzied dragon into the propagating giant tree. As the echoing roar streams up into the heavens and dissipates, Scalegorge Waterscape will continue its peace for centuries more, and his duty is over.

The ceremony ends, and he turns to look behind him. In the blink of an eye, the stairs he had stepped down from became full of standing dignitaries with draconic horns and dressed like royalty. As if they are mirages in a mirror, each of them turns and their sleeves swirls with the motion, ready to leave one after another in a meticulously calculated arrangement. Innumerable, they form a staircase to the sky, stretching into the never-ending spatial void. The faces of all these people would greet him every morning in his dressing mirror—that is his face.

No, it is the face of the primordial, the original, the very first High Elder. He smiles bitterly and covers his face with his palm, as if ascertaining whether he can tear off this mask and return it to its true owner…

…only to be cradled by warm, trusting palms.

Although cloudy and confusing, he feels some familiarity in the calloused hands cradling his face and tilting his head up. 

He does not recognise whoever holds him. Their face is a hue of pearl with a strange aura shining behind them; it is not so strong as to blind a man but makes recognising them impossible.

He touches them, touching their arms and shoulders, caressing their necks and descending his palms on their chest. He says something about the moon, wine, and unintelligible visions of a comfortable cold night under the starry night. Whoever holds him laughs.

A knot forms deep in his belly with a nostalgia he cannot name, a longing that he does not know where it comes from or what it entails aside from the sense of safety, refuge, and… and what?

I don’t want to wake up, a voice whispers against his ear, under his jaw. 

Where are you? 

Star of mine, please, come back…

—xing, where are you? 

When the hands vanish, and Dan Heng finds himself inside the lunarescent waves, he wakes up. 

He is comfortable, and it feels strange. Staring up at the ceiling and curling on the bed, Dan Heng recalls—

Bed?

Dan Heng blinks. The bed is, indeed, comfortable, but he did not fall asleep on it. Did he? And there is no weight of a head resting on his lap, warm and—

Getting up, Dan Heng finds himself alone in the room, and a sack of money rests on the table beside the porcelain with poisoned tea. 

Chapter Text

It has been a month, Dan Heng thinks as his fingers brush and pull the twisted silk strings of the guzheng. 

It has been a month, and he smiles like a lotus to the moon, blossoming to his wan-kissed deity, honouring them with his liberty. 

It has been a month, and he has to contain a shudder when word gets to his ears about the gossip of late, Yinyue-jun vanished into thin air! 

“I’ve never seen you ‘round here before, love,” a patron echoes from beside Dan Heng. “You must be new—the Madam needed to change some faces, not gonna lie…”

“I am graciously called Lotus, dear patron,” he answers, swallowing the anxiety building up in his throat. 

By the man’s attire, he serves in the upper regions. Realm-Keeping Commission. Dan Heng joins his hands and bows in respect, hoping to Long that the visitor is too drunk or too perceiving of his body instead of his face. The number of people who know Yinyue-jun by face is fewer each year, but he cannot risk it.

“Yours is pretty,” the man says, pointing at the courtesan’s face… or it should have been because it ends up being his chest. “Foreigner?”

Dan Heng imbues the coyness he never had. “It would be telling if I answered you truthfully.” The Madam oriented him not to share much about himself. Leave them wanting more. 

If they wanted a wife to know and marry, they would not come here.

“How much?”

The courtesan arches an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”

“What else would I ask you for the price? I’ve been stressed to the core since that scaly bitch’s disappearance, sweetheart—have some mercy on a poor, neglected man, and just tell me the numbers to satisfy me.”

Oh. Dan Heng should have expected it, but hearing it to his face is… something else. And not enjoyable. “I’m afraid I cannot, kind patron. My keeper has me for his exclusivity. Even if I wished…” Which I do not. “...I would not be able to keep you company.”

He must have said something wrong, for the man narrows the regard for him. “‘The fuck did you come from? You’re not from here. And how much is he paying you, exactly? The Realm has treasures beyond your imagination, sweetheart, I’m sure I—”

“Then see it with my employer, kind patron,” he interrupts. “Forgive me, but I must serve the others.” Not in the way you want to be served. 

If there is one noise aside from patrons and their paid-companions twisted in a torrid affair, it is the noise of the upper class’ rumours. 

The Luofu closed its doors to the foreigners until the High Elder is found. No one is getting in without a rigid and complex verification, and no one is getting out without a complete attestation; the streets are being heavily patrolled by the Cloud Knights and Pearlkeepers’ legionnaires, and word has it the Ten Lords’ Commission will implement a curfew should they find no vestige of the traitor. 

The Divination Commission does not seem to find him anywhere, regardless of their celestial readings—though rumour says that they are purposefully omitting for an obscure reason, and the Commissions are hiding something while using his disappearance as a curtain. Worse, Dan Heng knows there are spies in the underground, and he can only count on his poorly thought-out disguise and the fact that the Preceptor kept his face a mystery to the rest of the world. 

Tension has risen more than ever with the increasing number of Cloud Knights in the neglected regions of the flagship, but Dan Heng cannot comment much as he does his best to remain inside the tea house.

“A particular prominent lord in the district asked for your presence in his residence for entertainment purposes,” said Madam Yae once, “Found your guzheng playing a sight to behold, and would pay you a stunningly large amount. Unfortunately, not enough to outsmart your dearest client.” 

While rejoicing the discovery he is, indeed, perceived and longed for, Dan Heng had just heard about some wild Pearlkeepers infesting the district and interrogating the foreign merchants. If Madam Yae noticed his nervousness, she did not comment on it.

It would not be a calm course to carve my path, he thinks as he pulls the last pentatonic sounds from the instrument, I just need to make them see I deserve better. 

On the nights when Dan Heng found himself judging and accusing his selfishness for his actions and the uprising crisis on the flagship, he forces his brain to recall the tortures under both his tutors and his Judges. 

Spite is not, by far, the best motivation for someone to nurture a scandal—but what else would he do when the other options revolved around more lives being taken under his fury and despair? Lady Xuepu often mentioned how his previous incarnation could be volatile if pushed too far, and with the immense power, he had… no wonder they warned me of the wrong hands. Dan Feng was one.

For another night, Dan Heng receives looks of awe and praise.

For another night, he wonders where Ren is. 

“He left no warning, no, darling,” said Madam Yae when he asked for Ren’s whereabouts—or better, if Ren left anything as a notice for him. “Some whores don’t see a few of their loyal patrons for decades, centuries even, when their clients are in the military. No need to worry about yours.”

Yes, if he was in the military. Dan Heng might not know which faction or organisation Ren works for, but he knows it is as obscure as some contracts done underground. He asked the Madam if his contract was still in effect, if Ren had not cancelled without a prior warning. 

After all, Dan Heng does not need to know any of his reasoning, correct? He is just a whore. The patron changes interests when bored. Was suggesting the tranquil execution a mistake? Was Ren not satisfied with him after the wolfsbane? 

Why am I thinking of this? 

All he received, however, was her sly-as-a-fox eye, “Until you say otherwise or a higher bidder shows up, yes, it’s still in vigour.” 

So, not only is Ren his hope to discover any information on what happened seven hundred years ago, but he also has no explanation for his presence whatsoever. 

What do you do for a living, Ren?

Maybe Dan Heng should not pry that much into the man’s life. Ren should not mind him at all. Their conversations happen solely because the courtesan is being paid to amuse him, listen, and do whatever the man wants him to do. I should not be paying that much attention.

He definitely should not—especially when tonight the lovemaking noises in the tea house are louder than ever, and Dan Heng has yet to…

The door to one of the upper rooms is not closed, and he suspects it is on purpose (what did Madam Yae say once when he furiously blushed at a humiliation display? ‘There is an exhilaration in being perceived that I suspect you’d understand when you get on the stage’, and he simply nodded but looked away from the insolent nakedness). Inevitably, the noises were incessant; the closer Dan Heng got to the room, the clearer he could hear them. Focus, Dan Heng, you just need to reach the end of the corridor. A constant thud against the wall, rhythmic groans and moans, flesh hitting flesh and—

Oh, Long. 

Dan Heng can hear every single cell in his body begging to leave, to look away and move forward, caring for his life alone instead of other flowers and patrons’ private affairs, but his feet became frozen to the ground, and he curses every reaction his body has at seeing such a shameless disposition. 

Is that not uncomfortable? The way the woman’s back is held makes her bend her spine to what appears to be an incredibly painful curve, one that Dan Heng feels tingles in the small of his back by simply seeing the display. 

It cannot possibly be relaxing, not with the bodice she is wearing and that is being mercilessly pulled by her companion, or how her knees tremble and seem to give up at the vicious pace the—assumingly—buyer thrusts into her, or the fact that her whole body is laced in ropes that Dan Heng can notice that are too tight, arms firmly tied on the wall, legs and feet forcibly separated by the knots and she cannot seek support.

His wrists itch at the mere sight of the red ropes gnawing at the skin as if he is the one tied to the bed at the mercy of another, and his breath is stolen when the woman is bent even more, the patron’s hand grasping her neck to pull her head further back, her bodice is pulled twofold, and the sound she lets out is that of an airless, gasping and begging throat. 

He sees tears running down her cheeks with the charcoal eyeliner, and he sees hand and rope prints in vivid red across her skin. He also sees her satisfied smile. Dan Heng does not want to quiver or pathetically fall in the middle of the corridor.

‘I enjoy the pain,’ Ren said.

Ren’s words start itching his brain, and Dan Heng suspects they are itching other body regions. 

Dan Heng had never walked so fast to his room in his life.

‘I enjoy the pain,’ Ren said. He enjoys pain and suffering so he can remember his roots. 

It is not the first explicit scene Dan Heng has seen since he started working at the tea house—how could it be when patrons ask for their favourite harlots throughout the day and night? 

He saw a mother beg for one of the flowers to take her son’s chastity before he joined the army, and Aeons knew what happened in that room since the girl did not accept the payment afterwards but left with a smile. 

He saw a noble lady searching for her female lover and begging for them to have a last passionate night before the noble’s marriage the following day. 

He saw lonely Cloud Knights stripped from their titles and left naked, begging for their mistresses to use them as they please. 

Aeons, more than once he passed by the rawest scenes where more than two people were intertwined. He heard and witnessed one too many sexual meetings, and he should not be so bashful of them. 

But now Ren’s words keep messing with his thoughts, and Dan Heng cannot forget how painful it looked to have his body reduced into a crying mess at someone else’s mercy and enjoy it. If Ren were to be held down and inflicted with torture, would he want it? Would I—

Dan Heng closes the door behind him and lets his body rest against its surface, swallowing any unholy sound at the image his brain keeps creating as his questions pile up. He feels bothered, he feels hot, and the more he brushes his thighs, the more he wants to sigh. The question ‘Have you even touched yourself, ever, in this reincarnation?’ mocks him relentlessly. 

His mind conjures calloused hands belonging to a faceless man and imagines if, without the bandages, Ren’s hands would feel the same. They are scarred, forever wounded, and would feel husky against his skin. A killer, a skilled swordsman that, if treated the courtesan as he should, no doubt would manhandle him like a weapon. 

Licking his lips and taking a deep breath, Dan Heng walks towards the bed. Over three weeks ago, Ren put him to sleep here and left without a single word. 

Stop that. He doesn’t owe you anything. Ren feels pleasure from being killed by Dan Heng, and that is all. But would he—

It is getting deeply uncomfortable the more he thinks about it. Something is sticking to the interior of his thighs; every movement feels messy and wet and filthy, and his belly is curling in itself. 

With a frustrated sigh that he will not call despair, Dan Heng unties the silk fabric around his waist, mimicking a corset. Lotus silk, nonetheless, is the colour of a kuroyuri and slightly translucent, transparent enough to reveal a silhouette instead of the entire canvas. He thought breathing would be easier when he got rid of it; his stomach still burns, and his chest aches. 

He is not naive. He recognises all the signs. 

Often, back at the Azure Palace, he woke up with faint recollections of a man whose palms are shrivelled, whose lips brush too gentle on what should be Dan Heng’s skin, whose teeth bite enough to draw blood when piercing his neck or nipping at the smaragd scales of his navel. 

Roughened fingers would pry between his legs, and Dan Heng always woke up when he was close to seeing whose face kept worshipping him—with his body unattended, his scales ghostly-abused, a soaking heat where he should be pristine, feigning well-being when the Pearlkeepers came to service him, and not in the way he might’ve wanted. 

There are no Pearlkeepers here, though, he thinks for a second. Truthfully, no one would enter without knocking, and whoever could enter is occupied. Ren is not coming anytime soon. Why does it feel like a terribly tempting idea that he would need to kneel on the gravels of Scalegorge Waterscape asking for amnesty?

Dan Heng huffs, tying the silk around his arm and palm and lifting his gown. His room is not cold, but it does not help. 

Were I in the ocean depths, it would be better, but he gets a simple room with a mattress, blankets and pillows, a few candles, and meddlesome thoughts that insist on turning the faceless man of his dreams into a familiar regard with molten blood for eyes, an unsettled semblance, and bandages that fall from ever-scarred hands. 

The man is bloody, with stains all over his scars and fervid wounds. 

He sighs at every tiny motion, not caring that his garments turn shambolic. His thighs seek friction. He finds support by burying the heel of his feet on the mattress. Sweat gathers in his back, neck, chest and forehead, but he does not mind cleansing it—not when he accidentally brushes the silk against his heat and keens at the sudden smooth, gentle caress. 

A man stands above him, parting his legs and descending a trail of bites where Yinyue-jun’s scales shine and glisten in emerald and bruised skin. 

He’s far from gentle. 

Undoing the silk seems like a terrible chore because he knows he is glistening between his legs, throbbing and imploring for attention. 

Is he this pitiful when asleep, dishevelled and prayerful? 

The position is not comfortable, but Dan Heng can hardly worry about it when his fingers hold the silken hems and blooming. He shatters in a whimper when the silk finally slithers strokes over his cunt, the smooth fabric length grazing over his erogenous bud and leaving him a shuddering mess, the tissue nudging back and forth, in and out along his sex. 

That man wouldn’t care if he is filthy or tarnishing a relic. 

Most likely, he would enjoy doing it, using pain as fuel. 

Dan Heng comes voiceless and with his hips lifting in ecstasy. 

His hand hurts, and his knuckles are numb, his silk is ruined, goosebumps run up his spine, and he is still shivering from pleasure. 

He feels lonelier than ever. 

“How many credits a high-ranking ICP needs to pay to have you wrapped around my cock, little dove?”

It could be worse. 

“I’m afraid my price is being upheld by others, kind patron.”

The Madam could hate me, the other flowers could not stand me, I could have been sent to a Pearlkeeper or a Judge. 

What if it was one of the Preceptors? 

Dan Heng shudders in disgust at the mere thought of seeing any names of the Azure Court in a brothel, especially one where Yinyue-jun is working. More than shame, he would panic and be overtaken by anger before disappointment hit him. Lucky for him, most of the Vidyadharas prefer not to seek pleasure from others and become wanderers of the coral brothels instead of the standard Xianzhou ones.

He finishes cleansing himself and chooses the first light robe he finds from the options given to him. It is light enough for the sleeves to hide his fingers and the gown’s hem to graze on the floor in a blue shade that appears silver. It is soft against his skin, still wet and cold from the washing. 

There is no reason to worry about it, Dan Heng repeats to himself, sitting at the edge of the bed and brushing his hair, he cannot die. Why am I concerned about a killer’s well-being? 

As if playing a joke on his life and his worries, a loud THUD! echoes from the other side of the door. Dan Heng quiets his ministrations and frowns, getting up from bed and not daring to make a further step. Is someone taking their affairs out of the room? How loutish—

The door opens to a dripping mess of blood, a curved body on the gushing wound and grunts of pain. 

Before Dan Heng could even vocalise a question, Ren closes the door with haste or lack of care, most likely searching for the courtesan’s eyes with bloody regard. 

“I’m dying,” he says, voice but a husk of his usual bored tone. 

Dan Heng rushes to his side with his brain full of panic, horror and curiosity. 

“What happened?” The wound is horrendous, slicing not only Ren’s clothes and skin but cutting through the muscles, innards gleaming red and black and threatening to fall to the floor alongside the scarlet droplets. Dan Heng stains his fingers by simply holding onto Ren’s wrist so he touches the man’s shoulders. “Ren?”

“I want to lay down,” the man murmurs, blood coming out of his mouth. It’s getting worse. He looks worse. Not even when Dan Heng killed him on their first night Ren looked so… so undead. 

They both end up on the bed—the courtesan wishes they were doing it in any other context than him holding Ren as intestines and blood are pushed out of his stomach. 

“Ren…” Dan Heng swallows, trying to accommodate them without getting innards on the bed, on him— “Ren, talk to me,” he pleads.

Ren cannot sit straight, body leaning forward towards Dan Heng and grunting every time he is moved. “Fuckin’ spectral envoy. I killed it.”

“Ren, you need help.” The Alchemy Commission can help. There are clandestine doctors underground, too, and he knows from sporadic conversations that the alchemists are in cahoots with the illegal merchants. “I can heal you—”

“No,” comes as a groan, Ren panting against his shoulder. “No healing. Let me die.”

“Why did you come here…?” Dan Heng licks his lips, helping Ren to contain the insides within the body. “You-you’re walking around wounded and—and—”

“I want it.” Their hands press on the open wound, causing the man to groan again. “I want that… painless thing… you did.”

Dan Heng wants to wail at hearing it. “I-I thought you wanted it to hurt…” he says, weaker than ever. “Why did you come here when—when you could—” But Ren does not answer him, instead falling onto the courtesan’s lap. Last time, we did it peacefully, yet Dan Heng hears his own heartbeat explode in his chest, his hands tremble, and he does not know what to do. Do you— “—want me to kill you?” 

“Please.”

“I don’t even…” Dan Heng swallows dry, attempting to compose himself. It’s okay, it’s alright, it’s just another night. “I don’t have wolfsbane anymore, I threw everything away,” thinking you hated it, “and morphine won’t work, it’ll be slow—”

Ren does not even move anymore. “Just let me stay… it doesn’t hurt…”

You mocked me for choosing a painless method of execution, only to show up improperly and impromptu and beg for an innocuous demise. “Why the sudden change of heart?” he cannot help but ask, leading a hand to brush Ren’s sweaty and greasy hair out of the way. “You said—you said you enjoyed the pain.” And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“You made it good. I felt like dying for good. Even when you make it hurt, it’s good.” The way he talks, with blood dripping from his lips and onto the courtesan’s nightgown and so, so low it sounds like a whispered confession meant to be murmured against the ear instead, Dan Heng even wonders if he could fool both of them into something further than death. “Please, kill me.”

In Dan Heng’s dreams, the faceless man has a hauntingly similar voice. He is begging and pleading Yinyue-jun for a chance at redemption because, in those utopic scenes conjured from the depths of his mind, he has never been a traitor or unlawful wrongdoer but cherished by someone instead of receiving the ill-gazes wishing for his irritation, rapturing from his painful screams alone. The faceless man slowly obtains the face of another man, one who names himself after a weapon and views his existence as doomed.

“You’ll be okay…” It’s not what I wanted. It’s all wrong. Dan Heng invokes cloudhymn theurgy from the tips of his fingers, tingles floating as waves under his digits where intestines are falling with blood. “Close your eyes for me?” he asks, though when he looks down, Ren has his eyelids shut in an aching semblance. “You won’t feel a thing.”

The cloudhymn spell beguiles, intrudes Ren’s body and runs through his veins as an icy course, suspending its movements. It won’t last, it won’t last, it’ll stop, don’t worry, and Dan Heng does not know if he is chanting it mentally or in hushed susurration. He feels the man’s blood answering his control as strings of a puppet. In seconds, it reaches Ren’s still-beating heart. 

The painful expression turns into what could be seen as a deep slumber if turning a blind eye to the nauseating red across his face and body; the occasional tremors cease, and the breathing halts.

Dan Heng closes his eyes and ignores the oppressive stench of iron, caressing the corpse’s hair and cradling it with simple swaying. He does not notice when he falls asleep. 

When morning comes, the courtesan awakes alone, begrimed in the dry blood of a man long gone and a sack of money on top of the tea table.

Chapter Text

Kafka [2234]

A-Ren~ 

How did the assassination go?

If the Xianzhou Alliance was insufferable before, now it has become unbearable for whoever roams around it. 

Kafka [2249]

Ah, Elio just told me it went great 

I’m so proud of you

Just don’t forget your late assignment, sweetie…

The Stellaron Hunter swordsman blocks his phone and puts it back in his pocket. It takes longer than a month to return, but he only takes a short time to enter the flagship when he does. No one is getting in, he thinks as he hits the lone Cloud Knight at the Cargo Lane in the head with the back of his sword, and no one is getting out. 

When will the Luofu realise that Yinyue-jun has been taunting their cleverness by remaining on the flagship and disguising himself as a commoner? 

The last thing he heard, when he left more than a month ago, was that they were striving for the other flagships’ aid, searching for clues about Yinyue-jun’s whereabouts, should he have flown to another ship of the Hexafleet and sheltering with one of his kin—to say the least, the Zhuming had to placate Yanting-jun’s rain of fire at hearing the Luofu lost his bloodline, and that was enough information regarding whether the High Elders were in a distorted liaison or not. 

But the word around the Exalted Sanctum is, Yinyue-jun became one with the waves. 

Ren passes through the gossipers around the plaza and finds Aurum’s Alley’s cobblestone avenues, a ghost town in the making, according to some citizens—and also, if you regale with the right people, the central passageway to the underground. 

It is not a surprising conclusion: the Exalted Sanctum already has ties with the Alchemy Commission to trade a few non-recommended elixirs for those who have enough strales, even some Vidyadhara-manipulated potions and herbs if they have the right connections. Foreigners make an excellent trade not only in the healer’s market but under the Divine Foresight’s nose. From remedies and neglected merchandise, the abandoned lower grounds have an easy path for an entrance.

The secret is ignoring all the dealers, from Aurum’s darkest alleys to the black market, and knowing where you’re headed without flirting with an off-track out of distraction. 

“The General is conducting a rigorous revision of the Luofu’s perimeter, but I heard he suspects the Sanctum to be the last place Yinyue-jun was seen,” reveals a lowly merchant with a penny for his stolen weapons.

A trader of exotic creatures scoffs at him. “If the bitch was seen around so close to the Alley, we’d know. The runners would’ve made good money out of it.”

“Yes, by selling exquisite Vidyadhara’s scales and emerald horns to the butchers,” laughs another, a retailer of amnesties to avoid condemnation in the afterlife. Some truly buy those. “Do you think Yinyue-jun’s horns are more robust than others? Seem easy to break. Some stories say the keratin is close to chalcedonies by how shiny they are.”

“How would we know? The freak’s most likely dead.”

“Then one of his kin on the Yoaqing, or maybe the fiery one.”

Ren resists the urge to draw his sword and cut their tongues on the spot. 

Next time, perhaps.

Just like last time, the tea house stands alone but is not abandoned. Ren is thankful for the slight isolation. Whatever gossip must be roaming around inside the patrons’ mouths will probably be omitted by sex and filthiness.

“So you did return,” muses Madam Yae, ever in her imposing charm of a cherry blossom. “When I received your cycrane, I wondered if I was dreaming. Usually, men take a long while to come back to their lovers.”

Ren will not comment on the last bit. Lovers. How cruel a word to use for their arrangement. “Where is he?”

The Madam grins, licking her fangs. She is something more dangerous than a simple foxian. “Won’t you give a flower its time to bloom before the divine?”

“I don’t really bother with the divine,” he says, walking away from her and the vulgar main hall. Tonight, there are couples actively engaging in raw sex behind the translucent paper dividers. He would rather listen to Yinyue-jun’s painful noises when cornered with a sword. 

Was their first encounter the only one in which they battered their weapons? He should change that.

“He’s in his room,” she offers, but her voice is far gone when he listens. He was going to search for Yinyue-jun regardless. He is a hunter, after all. 

When Ren opens the running door, he freezes in place.

“Oh. You’re here.”

Dan Heng still needs to be ready. 

His hair is loose and devoid of any tie or decoration, possibly even not appropriately brushed despite its tamed appearance, length kissing the back of his thighs and lower. A remaining thick thread of black falls over his shoulder, contrasting with the courtesan’s pale neck and marrying with the viridescent and ashen hues of his robes, regardless of the diaphanous emerald green linen—viridian and silver little lotuses thread in fine needlework along the sleeves and covering any revealing region. It shows the silhouette, tempting the skin, but no more. 

But Dan Heng holds the edges of a deep jade bodice’s laces just in front of his stomach. 

“I thought you would come later…” Dan Heng comments, red rising to his cheeks. 

“I told you I don’t care about your appearance,” he grunts, closing the door behind him without removing the object of his attention from sight. “It’s not relevant.” 

Yinyue-jun could murder him in any garments, be it for religious prayers and public ceremonies or the common regalia. Or simply nothing but bare flesh, blood and gore. 

Dan Heng’s straightened lips indicate a lack of satisfaction. Ren cannot possibly fathom why. “Right,” the Vidyadhara grits out, rolling his eyes and turning his back, focusing on preparing himself. 

Although Ren should not care, he keeps staring. Dan Heng might claim to be another person, ‘I’m not Dan Feng!’, but there are elegant and regal behaviours he can never hide despite how much he tries to pretend. It could be a Vidyadhara thing if Ren had not witnessed how gross many of them are, including a few Preceptors in the Azure Court when they are anywhere but in Scalegorge Waterscape; he  assumes, then, it is a Yinyue-jun thing, no more, no less. 

The movements of his shoulder blades as he tries to reach and lace the bodice, his uptight stature, and his high regard for the spine are unmistakable. 

“Could you help me?” 

Ren blinks and looks up, specifically from where the translucent pearl grazed the floor to where Dan Heng looks over his shoulder, though avoiding his gaze. “Hm?”

“I can’t lace it,” says Dan Heng, giving up on adjusting it by himself. “I know you don’t care about this, but I still… I want to.” He does not turn, and his face slowly stares forward at his feet. “Please.”

Yinyue-jun would have commanded it, ordered it with the imposition of his presence alone instead of begging like a commoner. Why does he not demand it as he should? 

But Ren does not elaborate on any thought regarding what the most noble and sacred of the Vidyadhara should or should not do. 

Instead, he approaches Dan Heng and positions himself behind him, picking the bodice’s laces up. 

He hears a sigh, sees the courtesan’s body standing still, and waits for Dan Heng, who adjusts the place of the corset at the front and pulls more of his hair forward, resting above one shoulder. He never fully turns to see Ren but nods briefly before staring at his feet again, sustaining the corset at its front. 

Lacing the first section is not that hard a task, pulling back the silver-green line until it holds in place just above the curvature of the spine, but Ren has to keep his hands in check. My hands don’t work as they once used to. It is not as if he remembers clearly of a time when they did, only knowing because they did not hurt in the episodes of recollection. Instead of making it fast, he chooses to slow the pace so his fingers do not tremble when stringing the fibre. 

Dan Heng lets out tiny sighs at every section laced, at every pull Ren gives on the fillis that tautens the coutil on his body. As Ren goes on, reaching the sacral, the smaller it gets. However, the bodice hugs the courtesan’s body as a second skin, with a considerable, impossibly tight size for a waist. Ren pulls the last section, stringing the whole bodice at once, gaining a huff from the Vidyadhara, who breathes deep while in the corset. 

“You can make it tighter,” says Dan Heng, touching the shapewear—though he hardly needs it. Not that Ren would comment anything on it. 

“Seems tight enough for me,” rebukes Ren, and proves his point by touching the corset as well, not caring that his palms cover Dan Heng’s. The latter startles with a wordless whimper, though Ren does not see it, gripping the waist in its entirety with both his hands. 

“It can be tighter,” chokes the courtesan, slightly attempting to look over his shoulder, but the little he does, Ren only sees his cheeks red and dark flyaways of hair. “It feels loose.” 

Ren stares at him, the bare part of a half-covered back, and at him again. He grips the loose ends of the laces, wraps them around his bandaged fingers, and, for once, does not keep his actions in check, tugging both ends with a final, stricter pull.

Dan Heng almost loses the balance, falling forward with a sharp inhale, lowering his head and supporting himself with his hands on the wall. He asked for tighter. 

The corset does not appear any tighter if the Stellaron Hunter is honest, yet cannot see the breathing motions as clearly as before. It must’ve worked. “Better?” he asks, with no genuine curiosity. 

“Y-yes,” in less than a whisper’s tone.

“Hm.” Ren ignores the detail that his hands fit a bit too well around Yinyue-jun’s waist and the sense of belonging there, starting to walk away and sit at the tea table. 

He does not know why Dan Heng is fidgeting so much tonight. The Vidyadhara seems to hesitate, avoiding any state contest he might have with Ren, and the hunter spots signs of nervousness that he finds unfitting for Yinyue-jun, regardless of the latter acting-pretending to be-working as a whore. 

On their first night, Dan Heng had more bite; on their second night, he was slightly vicious and remorseful. Why don’t you snap at me? 

Soon after, nonetheless, the weird behaviour, Dan Heng sits with him with impeccable decorum, one that only Yinyue-jun could possess, which could be understood in their silence. No matter how hard you try, something will always tell. 

“You came earlier,” repeats Dan Heng, not wasting time to prepare the tea. “After so long, your forewarned note was a surprise. I even thought it was to end our contract instead of spending another night with me.” 

“You owe me your life and torment,” Ren says nonchalantly. “If I remain, so will you.”

“That doesn’t explain why you decided to keep me at all.” Dan Heng rolls his eyes. There, the spite. “If you want to have me under your thumb in such a foul, obsessive way for a revenge I know not of, why not fully pay for me rather than returning to this loathed place that you cannot stand?” Then, he looks at Ren—eyes on eyes, smaragd depths on molten blood. 

“It wouldn’t work,” the hunter explains, as impassive as any answer if not for the cries of repayment and vice. “I don’t stay in one place most of the time, and you’d still be held captive if I did.”

Dan Heng’s ears flicker. “You would hold me captive?”

“You would feel as if I were.” Ren would not even be present to ensure Yinyue-jun stayed in place if he happened to chain him somewhere. “Why, do you want another client?” 

“It’s not that,” says Dan Heng. If he had not hidden his Vidyadhara’s features, Ren thinks he would have seen a tail twirling behind him. “Whether I want or not, it does not matter,” he huffs, shaking his head. “But you want me for more than just… death, right?” 

Is this a trick? Ren scowls. “I told you—”

“Yes, if you remain in purgatory, so will I, but…” Dan Heng’s hands linger on the teaware, fingers quivering. The jasmine scent of incense slowly becomes faint, even though the odour is weak, giving rise to white tea. As if thinking more than he should, he shakes his head, exhaling in apparent defeat. Even his stance becomes sleazy, tired. “Forget it. I shouldn’t pry more than I should, I suppose.” 

The courtesan resumes the tea-making in utter silence and without sharing a single look with his patron. Porcelain and hot liquid, dry spring flower leaves, silk moving according to one’s motions. 

If Ren were something more than a mere weapon, he would have bothered for the tension between them in such a calm silence, but all he can do is close his eyes and cross his arms over his chest, breathe the essence of the tea, and think about how Yinyue’s hands and magic feel the closer to godchild than he will ever feel under the Abundance’s domain. 

Anything within the Plagues’ Author’s domain is dangerous and fickle despite the curse of immortality: what good does the perpetual body do when, in the end, their minds are still quantum perceived to exist for no more than a few decades, centuries at best? He doubts the General… that man can remember all of them. He claims to remember Ren, or at least the person before this despicable shell. It is more than what Ren can recollect of himself, that is true—but not for too long. 

Dying under the maraphilia is the slow possession of rotten gold with the promise of unwanted resurrection, hardly relieving. Yinyue-jun enshrouds the putrescent amber and metamorphoses it into the vastness of the ancient seas; the darkness is welcoming, the silence is a chant for his soul, and there are bones to pick his corpse from the undying. 

Yinyue-jun is He who imbibes the moon, savouring it as liquor—his theurgy imbibes the stars and their decay as the caress of Mercy itself. 

If only his affection were as merciful instead of horrifying.

“What do you work with?” 

Ren blinks once, twice, and processes the image before him: Yinyue— Dan Heng, once High Elder and now courtesan at a shady whorehouse, holding the small porcelain cup in his hands, offering it to him, and gazing in his direction. 

“You might have seen my face on wanted posters,” he comments, accepting the cup. As always, the tea is excellent, but he will not say a word. 

Dan Heng gulps, picking a cup for himself. “You’re a criminal?”

That sounds belittling. “Stellaron Hunter.” 

“Oh. I never heard of them.” Of you. “And why are you with them?”

“Kafka found me dead under the rain not so long ago.” Focused on reminiscing about when he was sworn a deal that gave him hope after centuries, Ren ignores Dan Heng’s curious gaze at the mention of the woman’s name. “We work for a man, Elio, who calls himself Destiny’s Slave, and promised me a funeral if I help him enact the script that is about to happen.” 

“A funeral…” echoes Dan Heng, putting his cup back on the table. “So you seek death with them, as well. Has this man seen your demise to be so sure you can work with him?” 

“As long as I stick to the script and ensure the events need to happen, yes.” 

For several seconds, Dan Heng utters nothing, only watches him with a regard one would find in statues of jade. Unbending, unrelenting, and impossible to discern. “Then am I part of this script of yours? Am I even useful if you seek me for this demise, and yet you know there are… events to happen before that?” 

I don’t know. I hope it will be you. 

And Ren is anything but a liar; he may be too honest for his own good, which is why silence is the best answer when in doubt. Or a few words, like with Dan Heng. “I cannot kill you because Destiny has plans for you. That is all I know.” I hope it will be y—

He has yet to learn if this pacifies Yinyue-jun or not. It should be in this case if the Vidyadhara feared death. For a race that depends on reincarnation to perpetuate its lives, a definitive death has no open doors for a new beginning; they cannot reproduce, and they cannot last, if not by themselves and preserve the little they have. 

What Yinyue-jun should fear, and perhaps that is the case, is Ren ensuring he stays behind until the debt is paid in its entirety. The mara wants to rip his scales apart, one by one, with fangs he does not have, with claws that he cannot grow, shred him until Yinyue-jun and his abomination become one in decomposition; the mara wants to make them drink each other’s blood until they share the pain, longing and finality. 

Ren did not choose this to begin with, but Yinyue-jun should know. It is one of the few things he remembers, at least. 

“Pour me another,” he says, pretending he is not demanding as he lifts his cup. 

The courtesan obliges, carefully manoeuvring the teapot, but he lours as soon as his eyes focus on— what? What is he—

Dan Heng lowers the teapot and does not mind asking for permission before bringing Ren’s arm to him, lifting the rugged sleeve of the hunter’s jacket. 

There, underneath the fabric and faithfully attached to the bedevilled skin, rests a leather bracer worn by time but not less exquisite in its crafting. 

Before Ren can voice his doubts and confusion, Dan Heng speaks, “Where did you get this?”

It’s been with me since I woke up alone and with no memories of who I am, who I was, and what happened to me. “I’ve always had it. It’s the only thing I have and remember belonging to me before he cursed me everlastingly.” 

That is half-true. While it is not a proper lie, Ren does not share that he stares at the bracer with a bittersweet feeling of longing and self-loathe, that he wants to cut his arm off at the sight of it—and once he tried, only to have it hanging by tendons because, for one time only, he regretted a wound—and that he believes in keeping it safe away from his weaponised walking corpse. 

He does not share that he might remove it forcibly and cannot tell if it is out of despair or care, nor does he say, Dan Feng has something to do with it, and I don’t know what he meant by it. 

“What’s so special about it?” he wonders out loud, starting to get mildly annoyed. Do you recognise it, Yinyue-jun? Do you remember something for once that you did to me? What do you remember? “If you’re not going to answer—”

“It’s a beautiful bracer. That is all.” Dan Heng motions to let go of the hunter’s arm but hesitates at every move: his fingers last abandon the bracer, the bandaged palm. 

Ren thinks of withdrawing his limb with the viciousness of a man seeing his revenant before him, but… he doesn’t. He wants to. The mara is screaming at him to draw his sword, cut his arm off, extricate his arm and bring Yinyue-jun forward so they can slice each other’s gore, make him remember, make him remember, make him remember— but he breaks his unburdened hand instead, out of the courtesan’s vision right under the table. The cracking sounds are minimal, and it does not hurt as it should. 

They finish drinking their tea in another suffocating silence, although Dan Heng visibly fidgets in place, restless. 

This is bullshit. Ren sighs, placing the now-empty cup on the wooden surface. “So, how will you satisfy me?”

Dan Heng dithers for a long minute. “I was thinking of strangling you… or using cloudhymn to bend your blood, like last time.” Pressing his lips together, he collects the teaware back to its tray. “Maybe I could strangle you with spells. You should feel it worse since it comes from within instead of an outer force.”

“Hm. Seems good to me.”

“But before we do it…” At Dan Heng’s interruption, he hums with the murmur of a question. “Is it not fair I know what pleases you? Death is incalculable, and you have preferences in how to be executed. Would you tell me how else you have been killed in the past so I can…”

“...kill me better?” Ren is not humorous and is hardly amused if not under the mara and seeing the Moon— but having Yinyue-jun struggle to please him makes his still-beating heart pump painfully in his chest. 

“...I suppose, yes.”

Ren crosses his arms and opens his mouth, ready to speak, but Dan Heng leans forward and touches his arm—the same he strangely observed just moments before. 

“The bed is more comfortable,” he rasps, a tiny uncertainty in his timbre. Ren can see how his throat gulps, mirror-like eyes turning into pure jade as they don’t blink. 

Yinyue-jun used to never appear human despite the human mimicry of his tangible shell. Cold-blooded, motionless when not commanding his rage with tempest over his enemies, eerie as a horror beyond a mortal’s theory. 

When the god becomes more of a monster than a divine, can they still be revered? 

Without saying a word, the Stellaron Hunter stands up and turns to the bed. Somehow, he feels as if he disappointed his companion with this action, though he cannot understand how when he was asked to. It’s not the first time Yinyue-jun is disillusioned by his own selfish requests. 

Opalescent and jade silks approach him with no haste, the elegance that befits something more treasured than a simple noble even as they sit beside him. Yinyue-jun and he had never shared heights from the little Ren can recollect, but the current incarnation seems even less almighty. Not less splendid, though, naturally distinguished. 

Their knees bump into one another, an uncommonly comforting distance. 

“I tried to set myself on fire once,” Ren conveys, numb and indifferent. “Not long after, I understood what my condition was. I tried to throw myself into a lake of liquid fire and molten hematite to see if it could keep my corpse carbonised, but all I got was consciousness after a couple of hours as my bones tried to decarbonise, the fire still gnawing at the remnants of my skeleton. And it didn’t melt my heart. It kept pumping.” He always suspected the Plagues’ Author was watching over him, a festering divine finger pressing on his decomposed body being eaten by fire and teaching him a lesson. “I tried to decapitate myself with the sword. When a Cloud Knight tried once, my head kept hanging by a few muscles and skin; it didn’t work. But again, mine didn’t, either.”

The horror in Dan Heng’s voice could be regaling if Ren did not feel goosebumps as the eyes of jade widened at his words. “You cut off your own head?” 

“It was worth trying,” is the only explanation he has. Yinyue-jun cannot stop staring at him but closes his legs a bit more. “I don’t know how my body keeps on living. Usually, beheading is a good tactic to kill anything, even the marastruck.” Yaoshi must have a cryptic enjoyment in my torment, is the most likely justification. “Having my limbs severed doesn’t do much. A monster tried to cut me in half, but I thrashed myself back when I noticed I was breathing again. Drowned in pitch once.” 

Dan Heng says nothing, not in words, but he should know better if he is trying to appease him by searching for their hands to hold. The Vidyadhara’s hands have never been forced to callousness, not a single wound, and feel as cotton under his bandaged palms. 

There are more ways Ren met his demise, but some become hazy, and others… he cannot fully remember. “I’ve been stabbed one too many times,” he murmurs, recalling a glacial white ghost with a sword of ice piercing his heart until he became something else, more than a simple corpse with consciousness. “Poisoned. Some crazy alchemist tried to contaminate me with some plague to see what would happen, but the Abundance didn’t let it nurture in any way.” 

“…I see.” 

BZZ. 

“The pain can be good,” Ren goes on, attention flickering to the top of the courtesan’s head, conjuring horns of sparkling emerald. “When you finally meet the peace after torture, you can almost consider it worthy. Sinners are meant to walk in the crook of torment’s elbow, so why not embrace it?” 

BZZ. 

“But you like it when I soothe it, too.” Dan Heng lets his fingers trail up to the hunter’s shoulder, bordering on the neck’s curvature. Then, he contours the man’s jaw, cradling in his palm. “How do you want it?”

Elegies beyond the Luofu sing of eeriness in the eyes of the godly and those under their domain, of annihilatory devotions and insanity in their cults for a baneful holiness that can present piety as it can destroy those under them. 

Reflected on the glass-like irises of viridescent depths, Ren could be a man willing to be dragged to the nethers of an endless abyss of water, pressured to never feel the burning light once more on his face, inflaming his skin, instead shackled to the nethers with this higher form of genius, the one that does not explanation beside existing.

“Make it sting,” he pleads, a whisper away from ripping Yinyue-jun’s crystal glasses from the sockets.

When the all-powerful deity with full reign over watery pits sees praise in you, is it a grievous sin or a blessing?

BZZ.

BZZ.

…Ren exhales in dissatisfaction and picks up his phone, unblocking the screen. 

Kafka [0027]

A-Ren~

It’s time for the next scene

Kafka [0031]

I’m sure you miss your lover boy, you’ll have time for him later~

Don’t forget what Elio said, it’s a promise~

…So much for a brief moment to rest.

“Where are you going?” Dan Heng asks on edge, his fingers on Ren’s as the latter stands up. 

“Mission,” he says without fuss, searching for the money inside his pockets. As he finds it, he turns, handing it to the courtesan. “I’ll send a notice.” 

Ren does not look back when he leaves, so he does not see the shuddersome look the courtesan sends on his way, the disquieting disappointment overtaking his countenance and hissed bloodcurdling curses under his chilling breath before falling on the bed with an exasperated, tired lamentation.

Chapter Text

Emerging as one in the ancient seas of his shell, the devourer of moonlight recalls the leather of an unknown creature attached to his arm, charcoal and coral hues lacing on his skin in something beyond a simple armour, a protection for a single limb, but a jointure. 

Waking from his slumber, he finds himself shackled under the subjection of dracocatenas, surrendering him whole for those who ache to punish him with no repentance, who so-vehemently vouch for his execution while knowing his race depend on rebirth cycles, but, oh, they will not risk with something so dangerous as him. 

Ancient depths of a serpent become the dark and moist corners of a cell, and from the penalties upon him bestowed, he sees as they rip the leather from his arm before condemning him to a molten cycle—incomplete, erroneous, and give that back, it’s mine, please, please pleasepleaseplea—

They took it, he thinks, brushing his naked arm where once rested a similar bracer. They took it, and it meant something. 

Familiarity hit Dan Heng when his eyes fell on the mysterious leather on Ren’s arm. 

It took him another full tea made to pacify himself, a thorough bath, and forcing his brain to remember through the use of cloudhymn. It takes him more than one try, but he is Yinyue-jun—lord of the tempests, He who once petrified mortals when reaching the battle and still petrifies them behind a veil. 

He finally remembers, even if it is only some details. 

The cost of running away to aggravate the Preceptors and the Ten Lords is to lose access to the treasury and the vaults of the Azure Palace, and be farther away than ever from the Shackling Prison’s under-chambers. 

It is a known fact that the Xianzhou Alliance is infamous among its people for the spoils of war and damaged goods of the prisoners who never see the light when caught by the spectral envoys. Rumours say, it is a sea of ill-gotten gains that shine as an ocean of gold and riches—but if you look closely, it is the haunting of spending so much time in the darkness that convinces you they are valuable and brighter than the sun.

Dan Heng would not know, spending his whole time kneeling in his cell, so deep underneath the prison, he almost saw no light if not by the reflection of his eyes on the water pools gathering on the cobblestones. Some spectral guards talked too much, but even they had no idea where the spoils went; they only stole them, never kept them. 

As if it was any better.

Anything that once belonged to Dan Feng would be somewhere in their strongrooms, no doubt—including the strange bracer. 

Cursed them be. 

Thinking about the Preceptors who denied him of memories of himself, all the Pearlkeepers who were amused at not allowing him a moment of privacy, the nobles of Scalegorge Waterscape who think of themselves as superiors to Yinyue-jun, the Judges who could not resist smirking when he knelt before them… 

…Dan Heng only wishes he could release the wrath he had contained for so long. 

Curse them all, let the waves drag their bodies to the vastness, and the current vanish their bodies. 

He needs to find a way to get anything on Dan Feng back. Anything, especially the bracer.

A white night goes by, then two, five, and Ren does not even return to soothe Dan Heng’s ache for answers. 

That is the issue, though, is it not? Ren never needs to appease his whore. It is the opposite. It is now Dan Heng’s job to be needed, never need.

“Such a forlorn look, darling. It doesn’t suit you,” coos the Madam one late evening. “Perhaps you’re missing your dear swordsman…?”

Yes. No. I need answers. “I found myself in a predicament, Madam. While I much enjoy what I do now, the freedom I’m given, and the regard I receive every night, I also aspire to know what the world outside looks like. I’ve never been out of the Luofu, much less the Alliance, and when foreigners come to the tea house, they have stories to tell. It makes me wonder how it would be to… trailblaze.” 

It is not a whole lie. Dan Heng knows he could never leave the Luofu when the Preceptors keep such a tight leash on him with the help of the Ten Lords and other Commissions. The only way any faction could have an armistice, through Yinyue-jun’s penalties, of course.

And now, there is a manhunt for him around the flagship. 

If he plans to leave, he needs a better plan. If I go, will Ren find me? 

“Those are dangerous thoughts for you,” she says. When an enthusiastic couple giggles their way to a nearby corner, she leads him to a quiet table in the main hall. “Unless you can pay for your freedom or a gentleman does it for you, I’m afraid you’re stuck here with me.”

Dan Heng has to swallow a gag. “I’m aware, Madam. As I said, I simply wonder.” 

He is no fool. Inexperienced as he may still be, or might have been, people are… people. Books spoke of whorehouses and brothels with the aspects of prisons with pretty faces to hide their depravity and horrors, even ghosts lurking around. 

Remnants, nothing more. “But with less ambitious desires of mine, I was thinking of searching for a stringmaker since I felt the ruan was—”

“Absolutely not.”

He blinks. “I beg your pardon?”

“Haven’t you heard?” There is a disconcerting grin, a shine that means more trouble for what is worth. “The sinner Yinyue-jun disappeared not so long ago, and the Commissions are turning themselves inside out to discover where he’s gone.” Dan Heng inhales a sharp breath. He swears his lungs are cut by it. “That means more problems for us, of course. If Yinyue-jun is nowhere in sight, they have to search for the devil. Sterner patrols, longer vigils, hardened verifications and, expectedly, we get more trouble, too. More Cloud Knights are roaming the underground as of late, and even Pearlkeepers are showing up, though I guess you already knew that bit.”

Yes, he did. Especially since some Pearlkeepers visited the tea house once or twice, and Dan Heng had to hide his face behind veils for as long as they remained inside. ‘I wanted to try a new look’, he said when asked about them. 

“And so the streets seem more dangerous now,” he concurs, pretending his stomach is not curling in itself and that his fingers are hurt by how hard he is tightening his fist. Even now, they make my life harder. Maybe I did this to myself. Stupid, impulsive, reckless child. No time for mourning, now, though. It’s their fault, not mine. It’s His fault. “I only wished…”

“Unless you want to go back in shackles, you stay, darling.”

As if Dan Heng could not be more still with a heart choking his throat from the inside. Not a single swallow, a blink, or a heartbeat. 

Madam Yae leans closer to him, elbows elegantly crooked on the table. “There are many Vidyadhara-selling brothels just under Dragonprayer Terrace, and it is said that only a descendant of Long will know how to please another.” If a toothy grin could bury a man, the Madam’s fangs would rip their flesh. “I find it bullshit, obviously. Just because you can’t reproduce doesn’t mean you can’t feel pleasure or pain. If they can harm one of you, why not satisfy them?”

“I thought I had the option of choice, even if only to end a contract or choose my garments,” whispers Dan Heng. She does not argue against his point. It is almost amusing, horridly so. “Will you sell me to them?” he asks with the finest jade for countenance. “For a higher price than my client, perhaps.” 

“Then I would lose a real pearl to a synthetic ivory passing as white gold.” Her nails tap rhythmically on the table’s surface. “Don’t you know how much the higher-ups would pay for a virgin flower like you? Unless that swordsman of yours ruined you for that, as well. It would cause a scandal in Scalegorge Waterscape, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe it’s a good idea,” he utters, shuddering at the image. Get used, get tarnished once and for all, and return to Dragonvista Rain Hall in a dishevelled, revealing nightdress so everyone would see his shame. “If I solve this, you get to sell me for whatever price you want like a common whore. One less problem for you to worry about.”

“I’m not your enemy,” softens the Madam, corners of lips becoming less malicious and more… he doesn’t want to think of them as kind. “Trust me on this, yes? Whatever you need to solve outside of the tea house…” 

She completely ignores him. Dan Heng thinks it is a good thing after all they have spoken. He could lose the little liberty he has, never see Ren again, and lose the trail of Dan Feng’s crimes. He cannot have that, not now. 

“Know that you don’t need to leave,” continues the Madam, as if suggesting a moral, legal partnership. As if she is not his boss and would not ruin his little, pathetic peace with a word if she so wishes. “You should remain here and, preferably, use a veil for your safety. If I get a crazy Pearlkeeper claiming to recognise your face, I will throttle them. Or, maybe you’d enjoy doing it instead.”

“...so you will not sell me,” he breathes out. “Even if I am inestimable.”

Is that pity with which she regards him? “It wouldn’t be me. When I tell you of the coral brothels, I mean it as a warning. If they catch you and find you ruined enough, trust that they will see that you experience the endeavours you claim to want.” Then, she leans closer and whispers, “They didn’t think twice about condemning the previous Yinyue-jun to death, save his past merits for a molten rebirth—what makes you think they would spare you?”

I’m Yinyue-jun, the closest thing to a god this flagship will ever have. If they kill me, who will protect the Ambrosial Arbour, watch over the Plaguemark, invoke the ancient waters? Will they truly succeed in creating yet another High Elder to replace him, after failing one? Do they want him solely to punish and parade him as an example of what happens to sinners instead of seeing him as the perilous Scion of Permanence? 

It makes more sense than forgiveness from them. 

“People would pay too much money for your tail alone,” she says, retrieving him from the depths of his mind. “And it would still not be enough for your true price.” 

Dan Heng frowns. “Is what he pays for me enough, then?” 

“As long as he keeps you here for my profit and forbids the patrols to seize my establishment, then yes, his payment is enough.”

As long as I want him if I’m daring enough. If I say I want to be sold to a coral brothel, will she do it? He is tempted to try, but something refrains him from even voicing the hypothesis. 

They soon enjoy a warm cup of tea—courtesy of Tingyun—and Dan Heng attempts his best to ignore how loud one of the flowers. A young man this time, though Dan Heng cannot recall his epithet, is moaning not so many latticed frames away. It reminds me of the woman with the corset not long ago, which consequently turns his thoughts towards one direction.

Is Ren alive? Sometimes, Dan Heng would feel occasional goosebumps rising up his spine, regardless of the hour or situation; he could be sleeping and waking up, curving his spine out of the glacial feeling, or taking a bath, and suddenly, the water turned colder. ‘I tried to set myself on fire,’ Ren said. Maybe I should, too. 

He does not mind when the Madam stands up and leaves and is left alone in a neglected corner of the main hall; he tries not to mind when the moans and flesh-meeting-flesh noises become considerably more prominent, which does not help with his little problem. 

Maybe if Dan Heng had accepted the Madam and the other flowers’ offer of a thorough lesson on the art of blooming, he would not be in this self-deprecating predicament that he voluntarily sought. 

The thought keeps haunting him as he searches for a silken veil in the shade of his robes—tonight, he wears soft hues of violet that remind him of a warm pair of mirrors from his fantasies, and he did not even realise the choice until it was too late for a change—and he does not stop thinking of it as he plays the guzheng—the ruan is, indeed, not to his taste until new strings are bought and the instrument repaired.

Would Ren like it if I played for him? More than one medical study from the Alchemy Commission speaks of calm ways to soothe the mara and the mind, in general, using peaceful harmonies and delicate melodies. Alongside cloudhymn magic and the zither of ocean waves, would that not be a marvellous experience? I could drown him, too. 

Drag him until his lungs are filled with water of mine, his body gives up fighting the pressure, and his heart replaces blood for cloudhymn. 

When Dan Heng returns to his room later that night, his brain summons the image of a man-consuming tempest desiring to submerge a sword trimmed to the bone, a hunger he could have felt when shackled to the pits’ walls and ceilings and hanged by excruciating nails. 

The bathtub’s water simmers as the knot in his belly tightens, and he steams like a true flame instead of a creature of lunarescent depths, and it grows restless as he guides his hand between his legs, where the heat turns into a pool just threatening to overflow against his will.

He imagines warm hands gripping him by the waist like shapewear, snugger than any bodice or lace, forging him to their will, dreams of fingers pulling him by the hips to meet something stiff and aching, conjures the sight of breathlessness while being selfishly taken to his whims as he should be. 

But Dan Heng genuinely gives in when picturing the vision of himself above a much familiar body that he has yet to see undressed, imagining how the scars would look like and how they would feel against his thighs and tender middle, how they would feel under his palms, and imagines his fingers curling around a known neck to choke him as he rides to his will. As he should be. 

Would he be pliant with me in anything other than death? 

Dan Heng exhales in exhaustion and allows his head to fully submerge, welcoming the familiar embrace of now-cold water that he, at least, can live with without fear of making a mistake.

In the dim abyss devoid of light, he seems to have returned to the insides of a Vidyadhara egg, being ceaselessly churned in tumultuous waves and elusive dreams.

A pair of amethysts look at him with a glint that transforms Dan Heng’s belly into a pyre. For a creature whose control over water is absolute and burns are unheard of, this man, somehow, sets him ablaze with the hottest fires. Perhaps because they are in a forge, by the appearances of it.

They feel familiar, though he cannot remember where he ever met this pair of eyes. He does not know anyone with such a mystique, not with the hues of the cold evenings and blessed mornings. 

“I want to give you something,” the man says and, oh, his voice… 

Dan Heng turns into a puddle, shuddering enough to curve his spine as he leans towards the amethyst stranger. When he speaks, though, his voice sounds… not his own. “One more present from the Furnace Master? My, you will spoil me if you keep this up.” 

“As if you’re not spoiled already, Your Highness. Knows of destruction and beauty, but not of manufacture.” What in that voice lures him as a sea temptress and their odes to sailors? Dan Heng may fall; what a dangerous thing when you are the one that flies higher than most—the collapse will cause irreversible damage. Not that it stops the man from taunting him with what he wants but cannot have. “Regardless… I offer you this.”

He knows this object is the first thought that comes to him, and oh, how beautiful, is the second, forgetting any vestige of doubt when receiving the opalescent spear in his hands. Coruscant ember jade forms waves along its shape and meets lucent viridescent steel, rutilant contoured with flickering scarlet and spherical amber just under the emerald steel’s edge.

Where does this familiarity come from? Dan Heng cannot tell but accepts the gift, ignoring the constant feeling of cryptomnesia. It must be nothing, indeed. This man before him would never trick him. How do I know that? Did he not try to kill me the other day? Who—

“This spear is sharp enough to pierce dragon scales. Be careful, High Elder, lest you hurt yourself with it.” Is that a threat? Spoken so reverently, it should be a gift and a timbre of teasing, especially with how affectionate the pair of amethysts look at him. There are crow’s feet in the corner of his eyes, dark circles under them… why is Dan Heng getting this sense of longing for something he never had to begin with?

“So you planned my demise before yours?” he asks in a taunt, still observing the beautiful weapon now under his care. “You have some nerve.” 

“When it comes to you, I have more than just nerves.” 

Be it for the sense of isolation when in the presence of this man, the sensation that the rest of the world disappears, Dan Heng could not give single importance to it, or be it the dreamscape emerging him again in the depths, moulding to an unconscious interest. All Dan Heng knows is that the steaming fire of a forge becomes opaque blue, metal noises become silent waves around them, and someone holds him closer to their chest, where scars paint a once-white skin. 

His tail curls around this person, scars and scales in what he wishes was an everlasting attachment but faded to disappear. Are we truly not meant to last? Why would the Aeons punish me so cruelly? What have I done to deserve this? 

Nothing in this place makes sense. How can he simultaneously know and estrange this man when their intimacy is imprinted everywhere on their bodies or trust him fully without seeing his face? There are eyes, pupils, and lips that worship him, and yet the face acquires the countenance of another that, somehow, fits like a glove on the missing pieces. 

Before long, their arms touch and their bracers—bracers?— share their warmth, their tongues marry each other’s skins, and lilac becomes molten blood he does know.

Dan Heng awakes with moist eyelashes, burning eyes, and an aching heart. His wrist feels too naked, and nothing seems to appease the cold. 

Somehow, he wonders if Ren could make it better. 

Give me a brief moment of delight, too. 

“Did you know—the Charioteers want to send a dragnet to find Yinyue-jun.” 

Everyone knows that the word flies through the underground before it reaches the average Xianzhou citizen’s ears.

“Tsc, they wanted to send the order for that on the same day he disappeared—but no, he’s a, what do they call him? ‘Important Scion of Permanence!’” The lowly stolen goods dealer spits on the stoned ground of the alley, face twisting in disgust. “Those fuckin’ lizards with their fuckin’ cults. Even the ones loathing the bastard want to preserve whatever shitty relic they have. Pff, a bunch of lunatics.”

“Heard the Preceptors are goin’ forward on their word for a Council in power instead of the High Elder,” says the runner, flaunting a smoke with an exoworlder herb. “You think they got rid of him, maybe?”

The issue of the Vidyadhara situation has been in shambles and slandered upon since Sedition, that is known. Image has been tarnished, value reduced, and loyalty doubted, although it is not a novelty that many of Permanence’s children resented their nobility reduced to nothing just to share a flagship in the middle of the galaxy. 

“Most likely.” From under the crooked roof of the Red Pavilion, a most-sought den of vice, the poor smuggler coughs, leaning against the dirty alley’s masonry wall. “They wanted to do it right after his imprisonment, didn’t they? Perhaps they got fed up with waiting.”

“Because they’re fuckin’ liars on the Xianzhou ladder, that’s why…” The plunderer of spoils scoffs. “But killin’ the High Elder is not enough. Wanna hear what I think? They sold the bitch to some high-ranking buyer. Maybe the Charioteers themselves, or the belvedere’s owners.”

“Are you implying he became a whore?” 

The suggestion is humorous, to say the least. 

“Tell me you wouldn’t fuck him.”

“Why would I go after a cold-blooded snake when I can have the comfort and warmth of a true Xianzhou blood?” The laugh is interrupted by a dry cough that draws blood. “Keep your scaly cunt, I know what’s good.”

“They say he’s a beauty, an unimaginable one, at that.” Who has not heard of the tales of Yinyue-jun’s allurement? Some legends told by the common folk sing that the first incarnation of the High Elder acquired his charming name by collecting the moon from the brine of the ocean depths and devouring its opalescence. How else would he and his reincarnations stay magnificent for thousands of years? “But… nah, I wouldn’t. He’s a monster. Who knows, he might even kill me with his freaky water magic. I’d rather fuck a marastruck.”

“That’s why you need to break it. I bet he’s tight.”

“You’d truly fuck him?” Another scoff. “He must be cold. Maybe you could break his horns,” said with a snicker. 

“Just chain him like the Ten Lords did—you think they had a turn?”

“They’ll have your tongue for that…”

“Just throw him on the floor and have your fill. What will he do? Scream? It’s less than what he—”

SWISH.

With a precise cut, the smuggler’s head flies to the floor with a fountain of blood. 

“He can keep his tongue.”

Chapter Text

“Do I want to know what’s in that bag?” 

“It’s none of your concern.”

The Madam arches an eyebrow at him as she crosses her arms over the chest, regarding him with more than only caution and untrustworthiness. 

Ren supposes his stained face does not help his case. 

Butchering a few lowly merchants with dull tongues is the least horrendous thing he ever did, and he might even hear Kafka’s voice saying, ‘You did a good thing, no? Some people don’t deserve the right to speak or breathe’, giving them a sense of god-playing mentality he does not particularly cares about—but fuck, it feels great to kill some people. 

The Stellaron Hunter is not a sanguinary murderer, a man whose bloodlust rivals that of Aeons, but he would be a liar in saying some killings are not another relief. 

Brief satisfaction, despite being gruesome, almost heals the soul. Almost. 

“At least clean your face,” she suggests, apparent exhaustion in her sigh. “Blood is not always a nice flavour to taste on the lips of your lover.” 

Lover. He didn’t seem to mind it when he slashed my throat. “His room, right?” As always. 

Any possibility that he might have caused mayhem by showing up with a gore-painted face and clothes, or a heavy sack that is starting to drip liquid, is overlooked by how occupied the rest of the patrons and pleasure workers are. He would not have cared if they had paid attention, but disregard is better for absolutely everyone. 

Ren stops before Dan Heng’s door, trying to recall if there were any objections before his arrival. If the courtesan were to get ready still, the Madam would have warned him as soon as he entered the establishment. Would it matter if he were indisposed? As far as Ren knew, it is not about what they want, either way. 

As long as he can still kill me, he is useful. 

With these thoughts in mind, he opens the door.

“What happened to you?” is the first thing that comes out of Dan Heng’s mouth. 

Tonight, the courtesan seemed to have prepared himself beforehand with rosette silks and coral hues veiling half of his face, leaving only the eyes painted with charcoal lines for appreciation. No need to taste blood on the lips of those that are concealed, even if the thought savours bittersweet on his tongue. 

As an answer, Ren lifts the sack, having half a mind to throw it at Yinyue-jun. 

Dan Heng narrows his gaze at the sack, gulping with the grace only a noble would possess. “Do I want to know?” Were Ren anyone else, he might have missed the soft motion of Vidyadhara’s throat.

“If you want. They’re for you.” Ren huffs, approaching the courtesan with the slow steps of a predator. “It’s not like you should be surprised by what I do so late in our bond. Or do you care for details rather than the execution?”

“If I am honest, I see no relevance to this,” says Dan Heng, taking a deep breath and sitting on the edge of the bed. A willowy hand rests beside him, a silent invitation. “Should you desire to share your… endeavours, then I will listen.”

Ren obliges, not caring for the indecency of leaving a sack full of heads so close to where they will engage in brief delightfulness. He pretends not to notice how Dan Heng tautens his jawline, gripping his silks and focusing solely on his client. Soon enough, the heads will start to stain the floor with the remnants of dripping blood, and they will rot. 

Perhaps Yinyue-jun can satisfy him before that.

“I have no problem sharing anything if I can remember it,” says the Stellaron Hunter, sitting beside the courtesan. 

“Why did you bring these for me, Ren?”

Because once, you used to have spoils of war when you deemed worthy and vengeful. Because once, you would have stopped their blood from pouring and running in their veins instead of letting them badmouth you. Because I wanted to. 

There is no plausible justification that could sound acceptable, sane or merely gentle despite how careful he thought of Yinyue-jun while leaving the dirty passageway under Aurum Alley, and before he had proper consciousness, he was in front of the tea house. 

So Ren says nothing. He should, but he does not. 

Dan Heng must sense he will not give him the benefit of an answer, for he cradles the hunter’s scarred hand in his satin palms, more akin to a pearl than a murderer with intent. “I wonder about you more than I should. I find myself more often than not fantasising about how to satisfy you next and if you will seek it in another’s capabilities to delight you when I fail.”

“Useless worry. They don’t owe me anything and could never cease me as you are fated to.”

“What has that Destiny’s Slave of yours told you of this? Can he predict the future, or does he shape reality to meet the future he plans? Has he shaped yours at your request?”

“I don’t need a scriptwriter or a seer to tell me that you, wanting or not, are destined to suffer the consequences with me.” That was their fate all along, was it not? To create catastrophe together and cease as they become one. “Your questions seem to go round and round only to end in the same conclusions I always offer you. Why do you keep asking?”

“Because I also wonder if you know the answer to them, too.” Dan Heng is stiffer than before. “I cannot help myself. And it is only fair, is it not? If I had better recollection, perhaps my questions would cease, as you say, but you’re the only one allowing me the benefit of the doubt and not keeping me in the dark—you just need to realise I’m not capable of seeing it with clarity yet. If I’m given time, I shall see to it—see that what is owed to you is not death alone.”

“Your words flow as those of a Vidyadhara chantress, Yinyue-jun.” Ren scoffs. “Once, maybe, it could have worked on me. Whoever I was before I turned into this monstrosity, whoever that man was, he would have fallen easy. The proof that here I stand is sufficient to tell me that. But I don’t trust you.”

“You do,” Dan Heng says, low on the tone but no less imposing, too much like him. One of his palms abandons the scarred hand to brush away blood crusts on the hunter’s cheek. It has not been so long since he left from slaughter, and the blood has yet to fully dry, but the courtesan appears not to care about the verges of his silken sleeve getting stained by gruesome red. His thumb never leaves Ren’s upper cheek. “You do. Just as I trust the ocean depths and its mirrors to reflect the clouds I command.”

“I mistrust you in ways that make me wish to drag you along with me every time I meet my demise,” he confesses. Yinyue-jun is turning into the golden image of a saint, even if rotten, and Ren blinks twice to get rid of the amber. He cannot stand looking at the perpetrator of his damnation. “I wish I could tear myself apart until I found that piece of mine that insists on pestering me to come back to you, but it will not leave until I see you subjected to the fairness you owe me and not anyone else.”

“Careful, now.” Yinyue-jun has the terrible habit of sounding alluring as the apple of a cursed garden. “I might misunderstand you completely despite your maledictions. You are not like them—the white of mourning, for you, will be of joy. When you wish the worst upon me, do you mean it with a blackened heart? Should I feel praised instead of threatened?”

“How would I know?” His heart never felt like his own. It is darker than red, lighter than blood. “Maybe you should rip it off to see.” 

“Is that how you want to part today?” Their whispers are loud, or perhaps it is due to how close they are, but Yinyue-jun’s eyes shine as the tiny sparks of lunarescent glint after one dives further into the depths. In a dark blue sea, they reflect like the surface of the ocean. “Raw?”

“The knife makes it too easy, and the cut doesn’t give me a spark of emotion,” Ren confesses. Their foreheads are almost touching. “I remember your claws being made of something sharper than a blade.” 

There is a reason Dan Heng always had the advantage should they come down to a fight. How else could Destiny clarify that Ren is fated to die by his hands without the gift of the literati?

When the courtesan descends the fingers to the line of his jawline and throat, grazing just under the collar line, shivers run down the hunter’s spine. Claws slowly appear as the fingers feel his skin. A tiny cut stings already, with a fillet of warm blood tainting a thin line down his neck. 

The trail continues until the claws meet the buttons of his shirt. One by one, they part ways. 

“Have you ever had your heart ripped by someone else?” There is a tone of disturbance in the manner in which Dan Heng asks him. 

“If I did, I hardly recall,” admits Ren, edging on, letting his eyes close and allowing his forehead to touch the courtesan’s. It feels terrifyingly right to be exposed. 

“How heartless you.” 

“You wouldn’t be the first to call me that.”

“I don’t mean it as…” Their eyelashes could be grazing on one another by how near their faces are, noses an inhale away from each other. “…as to call you a monster. You’re not a monster.” 

When did they start using less than a husk for their voices? Maybe when Dan Heng sprawled his palm over Ren’s partially exposed chest. The Vidyadhara feels cold. “And compared to Yinyue-jun, who could ever be a monster to you?” 

“Monsters are born out of desperation. If one of us is a grotesque creature forged in despair, then it is me.” 

It is addictive to follow Yinyue-jun’s pupils dilating, a sea of smaragd becoming nothing but endless mirrors, but more so how they flicker from molten blood gems to a pair of lips above his own. 

“You’re not grotesque,” grunts Ren, wondering when the claws will finally pierce into his skin instead of lingering above where his heart beats faster and faster. “You’re something worse and much more dangerous to look at. If the gods were fair, they would turn you into stone when gazed upon—what else would be fitting for you than being enchained by your own flesh?” 

As Yinyue-jun still cradles his hand with one of his, now the hold turns into a shackle, taunting his bones. “I would rather your fantasy was made manifest than returning to Dragonvista Rain Hall, if you wish to know,” in a shuddering exhale. 

“Will you or will you not ruin me, Yinyue-jun?” Ren grits his teeth.

“Close your eyes for me.” The request does not need to be uttered out loud. The mere movements of the lips and puff of breath on Ren’s lips. “Close them and think of me in the jade conjuring you view me in.”

Perhaps the Stellaron Hunter is giving into the tiredness, or Yinyue-jun is using the hexing imbued in his being, but Ren obliges with no resistance. 

Claws start breaking into the skin, lips graze upon his own. 

“Just focus on me,” though the voice is akin to the rotten gold shimmering before him. “They cannot deliver you to a better death than I can.”

Ren relies on their shared proximity and traces the line in his imagination. They are anywhere but the tea house, anywhere but the Luofu, never to be found by the Xianzhou Alliance. He wonders if the lunarescent depths from whence Yinyue-jun came could be this spherical moon of gloom he sees, where he falls deeper and deeper as Yinyue-jun punctures the hunter’s chest. 

His muscles sing with stinging pain, his heart is begging to implode, his stomach tautens, and his lips tingle with the velvet touch of thin skin on his. 

The tingle does not stop. He conjures Yinyue-jun suffocating him with hierophany-touched lotuses from the inside, withholding the blood from its course. 

Velvet sucks and nips on his lips with reluctance until it completely vanishes, and Ren sees the conjuring breaking into a million pieces before him. 

When he tries to run after it, he groans with the aching on his chest—the wounds are being teased incessantly, the claws crawl deeper and deeper into his muscles, five gruesome and thick threads of blood run down his skin and through his clothes. 

What held his hand before now flew to his neck, messing with his nape with a tight grip. 

Expecting the rotten gold for a vision, Ren frowns when he opens his eyes and sees nothing but Yinyue-jun, lips parted, glistening with something more than ointment—a stronger shine and remnants of still-aqueous blood. 

It suits him better than paint, but Ren is too far gone in the sensation of being torn apart to distinguish the line of his thoughts. 

“I’m—I apologise,” utters Yinyue-jun with the feebleness of a commoner instead of a water sovereign. There is a familiar panic, however, even if Ren cannot remember where he knows that dread from. 

Have I seen you in such a state? 

Death is not so close as to embrace him, but the Vidyadhara fulfils that empty space. “For what?” It makes him wrathful, somehow—is Yinyue-jun apologising for finally giving Ren what he wanted since waking up without memories in a vastness of fields? “Why did you stop?” 

Can’t you just do what I ask, like you’ve been doing since I first walked in? He does not want excuses. Yinyue-jun stood him up for too long to retreat now when he felt something. 

Ren leans forward before Yinyue-jun can hex more than he already has.

The courtesan’s lips are as bittersweet as pomegranates. 

Very few things the Stellaron Hunter tasted could come close to Dan Heng, and they would still be outmatched. There is the sweetness of thin-skinned lips, plump and willing, and there is the sting of iron, much familiar to him after savouring more than once. His tongue breaches a passageway to taste a warmth as wet as blood but saccharine instead of bitter. 

Claws continue to pierce him; thus, he cannot detain the gasps and grunts that compel him to push forward and further into the bed—if to rest from the gnawing pain or to seek that pair of lips once more, he does not know. Ren takes both for granted until his eyes close for good. 

The hand on his nape becomes an arm enclasping his neck; the claws rupture his bones, and they lie on the bed with a careless fall.

Ren cannot tell if the blood he tastes now comes from his throat or Dan Heng’s besmirched lips, but he bites them nonetheless—if the blood were not Vidyadhara, he would make it bleed so they twinge together. With a sharp inhale, Dan Heng bites him back, growing fangs viciously bursting the hunter’s lower lip and searching to curse his tongue. 

If he means to hurt in a way that matters, he should know better than to give Ren something so shiver-inducing. 

Amid their feverish actions, Ren breaks their kiss to shudder in a breathy gasp as claws fracture his ribs. That’s more like it. “Did you poison yourself, Dan Heng?” He fathoms if his grin looks as terrifying as some say he is. 

But under him, Dan Heng has gore and sortilege on his face, half-lidded and agape-mouth, staring at him as if he were a cursed being from the voids of nihility; incomprehensible, unfathomable. “I never needed any poison.” The Vidyadhara’s voice does not need to whisper to be breathless. 

Claws are now fully sheathed within the hunter’s ribcage. Ren coughs, feeling the dripping blood from his mouth, but he has never felt better. Is that fear with which Yinyue-jun looks at him? Not that spineless dread commoners have—it’s worse, hence why, being so addictive, Ren knows he will want more of it. “You have witchcraft on your lips, Yinyue-jun.”

What other reason would there be for him to seek those lips if not the untrue temptation of death they send him? 

And the courtesan kisses him back with the willingness of a snake in the grass waiting for its following victim. By how enthusiastic he seems, leaning back against the pillow and giving Ren a voluntary opening within, the miscellany of blood and saliva coming out of the hunter’s mouth is not discouraging. 

Ren’s whole body quivers in what could be weakness or fever. How could he care when, beneath him, Yinyue-jun parts his legs to let him fall on top of his form? One could call him gentle and attentive for giving a killer the mercy of comfort before tearing an organ off in the rawest of ways. 

Yinyue’s serpentine tongue curls around his with intent—maybe it could suffocate him there; instead, it ventures deeper, forked and caressing all it can with its sour texture. 

Parting like this sounds perfect. 

The first untwist of their tongues he feels in his mouth, Ren knocks his fist on the pillow just beside the courtesan’s head. “What are you… waiting for…?” He can’t continue kissing him despite the sweet taste of finality he finds in that mouth. His insides are a funeral pyre lit by a demonic creature of water. Insanity, madness in its pure form, just as the gift from the Abundance and the mara-induced hysteria.

Only, this time, it is not Yaoshi and their cursed red eyes, their lengthy phalanges penetrating his mouth and picking his organs inside out in a festering delirium painted in gold—Yinyue-jun, as always, is the worst thing to ever happen to him. 

His limbs are a neverending shudder Ren no longer can contain. He lets his head fall against the courtesan’s neck—oh, it’s as red as the rest of him; that certainly is a sight—and tries to support a bit of his own weight, just enough so the beating organ can be ripped off him. It will not take long before he falls and never gets up again, though.

“Please.”

The Vidyadhara’s entire hand ruptures in his ribcage with a cacophony of bones shattering and abused flesh. 

Gore descends as water, thick and luminescent, on the willowy arm ready to burst through his chest and back. Not a bad idea, but all Ren can see before darkness embraces him is the black running down on garments of silk, and the sensation of velvet fingers caressing his hair. 

Then, his innard is pulled out, and he falls unceremoniously.

He is sure he can hear the pumping against his ears, but in one moment, he listens to Yinyue-jun’s voice, “It’s red as rubies,” in tremulous words, and the next, nothing.

Chapter Text

Ren’s heart is lighter than most, but darker hues of red shine like the black seas even under the amber candlelight and emerald of the Vidyadhara’s eyes.

Of course, it also persists in beating.

Pump, pump, pump.

Blood runs down his hands and arms, and claws and fingers sink into the organ as he holds it just above the corpse he cradles between his legs. In the hunter’s chest rests a gaping wound that commoners would die by, ribs torn and broken by the forced rupture and blood gushing in a cascade on top of Dan Heng, wetting their bodies in scarlet-black. 

This hanfu could not be saved even if Dan Heng washed it in the clear and pure waters of Scalegorge Waterscape and left it for a century to get rid of the stains. Peach becomes cardinal red, and the lightness of silk becomes heavy, attaching to his skin.

Dan Heng should feel bothered by how heavy Ren is and how often they end up entangled in this position—the Stellaron Hunter on top of him, a literal dead weight. 

Strangely, the pool of gore he finds himself sinking in is familiar; in a bizarre, eerie behaviour, that is, but familiar nonetheless. 

Pump, pump, pump.

It continues to pump until it slows down . Pump.

Pump. 

There is peace in knowing Ren’s heart is not rotten. 

Pump. 

The dead organ is as hefty as its owner. 

Dan Heng does not feel the hot breath against his neck or the shivering limbs that resisted as he pushed deeper into the heart cavity, much less gasps groaning into his mouth. His tongue still tastes liquid iron, simultaneously sweet and sour, and he can still savour remains from one’s throat insides. 

He also does not know if the wetness lingering amid his thighs is the blood sticking to his skin or himself. 

Deciding he can do nothing but wait until his so-loyal client returns to the world of the living, Dan Heng brings the vascular organ closer to his chest, where Ren’s peaceful face closed its eyes for a hopeful ending. With his other hand, free of gore-holding, he fondles the hunter’s hair. It is soft, as always, and the courtesan has slowly come to terms with the fact that he much enjoys it.

They could stay like this for so long if the Abundance blessing gave them the chance.

Only for the heart to start pumping again. 

Will we ever have enough time to breathe? 

Ren does not stir, though, and Dan Heng stiffens under him. Is he…? Truly? At this point, the mara should have regenerated the organ, uncracked the ribs, closed the skin, and joined the muscles and all the nerves into a perfect bundle of flesh. 

Instead, the rapture closes itself, the heart pumps as if it were a living being, and Ren continues to stay dead. 

No, no, no no, no no no no nononono—

Turning the man on the bed is arduous, falling with a thud on the filthy mattress. The gap is closing, but the eyes carrying molten blood for hues are still closed, lifeless and unperturbed. 

“Ren?” 

Dan Heng cannot recognise his own voice. What the elegies used to say about Yinyue-jun and the imposing tides? They were to never be weak. They could never be weak when answering solely to the moon, bending for no one, never to run afoul with that which vexes all mortal, ordinary men—yet here Yinyue-jun’s latest reincarnation is, bent over a corpse he has taken the life from, any power disintegrated in his bones, timbre reduced to nothing but a fragile thing that never faced death in its rawness. 

How pathetic. 

“Ren, do s omething,” he grits his teeth. He rests the heart on the stiff chest, shaking the unresponsive shoulders. “I can’t have done it. Not now.”

Pump, pump, pump.

Dan Heng stares at the heart, then at Ren’s halcyon aspect.

Pump, pump, pump.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs to a ghost, the mortal remains of a wraith, and picks up the pumping organ into his hands. 

The same claws that ruptured into the chest cavity, healed and cured, now reopen the skin with need, carving a path between muscles and ribs.

Monsters are born out of desperation.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he keeps chanting, as if Ren is listening to him. “Forgive me.”

With the heart in its rightful place, even with the sense of wrongness and antipathy to its belonging, Dan Heng attempts to close the gruesome, deadly wound with cloudhymn theurgy. No, no, no, this is not right; it shouldn’t have worked. What were the spells to repair flesh and savour blood? Stay, stay, stay, stay. He contains the new blood gushing out with trembling fingers and unintelligible prayers to a long-gone, ever-dead god that abandoned him in this world.

It is a ghastly sight.

Ren is a corpse with living blood and a new scar on his chest that may or may not cure—how could they know when the Abundance seems too adamant in picking favourites?—with red painting him as a horrid, grim picture. Dan Heng must appear as a dire thing, an abhorrent statue that came out from a rain of blood that he lashed upon the two bodies in the room, including himself. It’s all my fault, it’s my fault, my fault, my fault.

His palm quivers as it carefully lays on the bare, stained chest, where he wants to imagine the scar is closing. Pump. Pump. Pump. His sigh of relief is met with a shattered, miserable laugh; shoulders fall, and he wonders why tears are not falling along his entire countenance and frame. 

The price for his selfish limerence is too high. Is that what Dan Feng cursed me with? The remains of unfathomable selfishness and greed that dragons are sung to have are only in tails of old and full of mystique, even for the Scion of Permanence. The Preceptors were right in keeping me locked, is the first thing that curses in his mind, only for him to gag at the thought. No, no, never that. After he has come so far, Dan Heng cannot turn away. 

Sniffling dry, he takes a deep breath and lies his cheek above a pumping heart, refusing to acknowledge his trembling lip or the hexing judgements clouding his brain. He should remove his own organs. It is only fair.

Dan Heng closes his eyes and thinks of the ocean engulfing him and his corpse, jade rather than blood and ivory rather than skeletons, listening to the heartbeat of a deadman.

The differences between dreams, nightmares and reality are beginning to blur. 

Midnight hair and cardinal red possess him in the likeness of devouring him inside and out, skinning him alive layer by layer until he is nothing but a polished piece of jade ready to be cut down, trimmed into the perfect, desired shape in the eyes for this entity above him. He quivers and inflames despite being in the purest state of water, despite being the flawless crystal sent by the Aeons.

So, he also devours and consumes the entity, refusing to be left behind for one’s appreciation alone. He feels a void that cannot be fulfilled, but blood and flesh seem fitting for him to savour. What else would appease a dragon’s appetite?

He fancies retribution; he loves it. 

Then midnight becomes the whitest night of bright snow; red is a miscellany for violaceous, and he feels anguish. 

The red he sees is not a beautiful, vicious red that sets him aflame but a thick one with an even thicker smell that, for the first time, makes him want to gag. No, no, not like this, —xing, please, no, no, —xing, —xing— The bracer is mocking him—it was supposed to keep him safe, to keep them together—

Could nihility be better than this? He does not wish to know. 

Wrath and misery change into hope, loss, pain, devotion, and then…

…nothing.

Nothing but warmth envelops his nape and starts caressing him in the void, feeling too real to be a simple fantasy or trick of the mind. 

From the obscure depths of water, he resurges.

Dan Heng first sees maroon and smells a bitter, metallic odour overtaking his nostrils and lungs. The hazed sight turns into detailed, grotesque scenery—ruined sheets, soggy covers, a crusted and breathing chest under him— oh. 

“It took you a while to wake up.” 

If the courtesan has ever felt more embarrassed, he cannot remember a moment when it happened—or perhaps it is panic in its purest form, mixed with an insufferable tenderness across his countenance; his body and face are red not only because of gore. 

Getting up with haste, Dan Heng feels it all: his robes are crusty, smudged and sticking to his skin, the knots in his hair, the absolute state of filth of his being. Pump, pump, pump just under his palm, under an inhaling, exhaling chest, the rising of a stomach that was immovable just moments before—

“…I apologise,” he says, meek and feeble, not the behaviour one should find in the sovereign of water and clouds, not Yinyue-jun, staring down at Ren. Oh, so that’s where the caress came from, he realises as he finds the Stellaron Hunter’s hand lingering close to his body. It could almost be seen as sweet. “I didn’t even—”

“Why did you do it?”

Dan Heng gulps. Because I wasn’t ready to let go, not so soon, not now, and it has no logic behind it. 

The man dreams of killing him, tried to murder him on the first night they shared, and yet here Dan Heng is, without answers to incognito dreams-turned-nightmares and a hope that shines red. His options are as miserable as him. 

“You didn’t need to…” But Ren narrows his gaze, continuing to speak with the humour of a still stone, incapable of metamorphosing. Dan Heng swallows. “Were you trying to suffocate me with your tongue before I died due to the lack of a heart?”

“I wasn’t,” replies Dan Heng, blinking once, twice. “That was intuitive. I thought you would enjoy it while I did the rest.” 

He cannot possibly admit he wanted to taste Ren’s innards in ways no one else ever tasted. He savoured salt, iron, and a sourness that slowly turned into honey, but Dan Heng suspects his ulterior monsters found it sweet. Mostly, he tasted blood, and he delighted in it. 

More than he should. “Why, did you like it?” Hopefully, Ren will say yes.

However, what comes is, “For how long was I dead this time?”

“I would say… the whole night,” says Dan Heng, frowning. By the looks of the dried blood, no more than a few hours have passed since he fell asleep on the still-sparkling fluid. 

Ren hums. “That’s longer than all I’ve tried before,” he muses. “And more peaceful, too.”

That’s because you genuinely died and were going to remain dead, but Dan Heng cannot speak it with these words. If he contains it, it will devour him from the inside; he cannot omit what happened. 

“Your heart stopped after you gave in,” he regales, kneeling on the bed as if he could please his appearance despite their messy affair. “Not right after, for it kept beating for a few minutes—as if seeking its proper place and blood to pump. As if sentient, somehow. It slowly stopped and eventually rested.” He can still feel the constant beating and blood leaking in his hand, his palm embracing it. “I don’t know how long it took before it started again, all by itself and not inside you.” As if searching for you. It wanted to go back to you. 

If it is the correct thing to say, Dan Heng can only hope it is.

But with how Ren straightens his look and sits on the bed, not even daring to blink, the Vidyadhara wonders if he has ruined them for good. The hunter tilts his head to the side. “It didn’t grow back?”

Dan Heng shakes in negation. “No.”

“The thing inside me… is it the one you ripped off me?”

A nod. “Yes.”

I’m sorry, resting on top of his tongue, ready to burst. That was the deal, was it not? 

“I would’ve stayed dead,” says Ren without a hint of emotion. No wrathful gaze, heated snarl, loathed curses, not even invoking his sword to try and cut Dan Heng down. Nothing. “You… you did it.”

He has nothing to offer, not even after denying Ren, which is the only thing he has begged for since they first began their encounters. What could Dan Heng give him—immortality, which Ren abhors with reason? His corruption, his virtue? As if Ren was one of those men, Aeons, the hunter does not even look for him with sexual intent! He only wished for death, and Dan Heng denied him that.

Amid the courtesan’s frantic thoughts and crescendo heartbeat, Ren says nothing, but motions to leave after a deep exhale and deviating from the kingfisher-green locked on him. The buttons of his shirt were ripped unceremoniously, but he cares not. Just as Ren entered with his ichor-kissed face, he will leave with the vestiges of a gaping wound that, surprisingly, was not mistreated. Of course, it was not mistreated, not when the client wanted to be hurt. 

Before Ren turns towards the door, he searches for the sack of money in the voids of his pockets. Not in his jacket, though. If anything could be found there, the courtesan would have seen it. 

The weight of the payment never felt so heavy and disturbing. “Are you satisfied?” Dan Heng prizes himself for the lack of stutter and faint voice, keeping it emotionless as the Yinyue-jun’s heir should. It just feels… wrong. 

Ren’s gaze directed at him speaks more than a thousand words. It is not the first time someone has looked down upon Yinyue-jun with disappointment and a loathsome desire for revenge. One too many men have done it. I cost you your pearls, jewels, and immeasurable treasures, Dan Heng was taught to avoid a worse punishment, followed by a, so I accept whichever punishment you find fitting for me. Until the debt is paid. 

“Whatever answer I give you would be a lie, and we both would leave unhappy,” Ren says without sparing him a last regard.

The hunter leaves with a penumbral appearance, suffocating and cryptic.

Cryptic. 

How could a man find pleasure and torment in the same space, moment and feeling? Was Dan Heng not up to his tastes? 

It’s because you fucked up. 

Dan Heng shakes his head, looking away from the closed door of his room. I did not. He might have liked it, only to be shut down by his own allurement of failure—Ren solely asked for one thing, and the courtesan denied him something so simple, so trivial and utterly gut-wrenching.

The sack does feel heavier, though. Frowning, Dan Heng undoes the poor lacing of its opening, just to be met with more than average credits and strales: there are a few mother-of-pearl jewels and prismatic gemstones of different trimmings and cuts. Jewels Dan Heng recognises because they have all been around the Azure Palace’s treasury, inlaid in the columns and mosaics of Dragonvista Hall and in some of Yinyue-jun’s ceremonial garments. 

That is not their— Dan Heng’s —cost. 

It is coarsely more than what they have established.

Not only did Ren leave unsatisfied, but he also tipped the courtesan. 

Payment never felt sourer.

Dan Heng also needs to get rid of the decapitated heads. 

When Madam Yae finds him days later, it is while bringing the words of foreign gratification. “There are more renters for your presence willing to offer your entire request’s cost in retribution for you to parade bare in their residence.” 

This is not the first, nor will it be the last time, that the Madam comments about what other patrons have offered in exchange for his skills. Dan Heng considers it each time, though it always feels utterly wrong of him. 

“There’s a Baron with contacts all over the Alliance that would much appreciate you to be his alone, too. Flowers bought to be kept do have the privilege of not risking being shared, although… it can never be a promise. Anything comes with risks, as you may know.”

“I’m not that green about society’s unfairness, Madam.” Dan Heng does not speak with venom but cannot hide his tiredness. “More than once, I’ve heard Vidyadharas familiar with these barons and dukes, even some Arbitrator-Generals. They find it particularly rude not to partake in their spoils.”

Is that not what the Judges and the spectral wardens did to him? Instead of pleasure and sex, though, they partook in humiliating and punishing him. Maybe they had pleasure in doing it for him. Dan Heng now wonders if he was just unaware of how much of a harlot the Ten Lords viewed him. He should one day thank the Preceptors for their little iron fist in his penitence. 

They would never let his honour be tainted, would they? 

Would they not?

“Regardless, dear. His offer did not surpass your client’s, though, and it left me with the most crestfallen look I’ve ever seen on a powerful man. He didn’t see it worthy after a few more digits to the count… I find it surprising, if not haunting and terrifying, how he always seems to raise his payment days before the new offers come along. One could even say he is aware of what the future holds for you.” 

She serves them without Dan Heng’s permission. They are in his room, kneeling comfortably on his plum cushions, and she is using his teaware. 

Not that he will argue against it. 

“I just… you could obtain more. You are not allowed to be laid on another’s bed until I sell you to a higher bidder, but…”

Dan Heng huffs. “I know.”

“You’re fortunate. Some of my flowerbuds have loyal patrons paying for their stipend but still offer blowjobs to lesser visitors if in need of extra money or serving a high-ranking delegate. As long as no one tells on them, who is to say the contract is being betrayed?”

“I know.”

“Then be careful with your actions and propositions.” The Madam exhales with the heaviness of a lady who controls her establishment to the best of her ability and maximises profits. “If you lose this current client of yours, unless you wish to be thrown on the streets—which we both do not want—your last resource is to be given to other clients. You can entice them with haiku poems all you want, some do enjoy the literary arts and get more excited at the prospect of a challenge… but many will not want solely your pretty face.”

“You will keep me for both of our sakes.”

“For as long as you provide income, darling,” she interrupts mercilessly. “People like the unattainable, vestal beauty with braincells to speak with them. They find you interesting and exotic, second only to real foreigners with unlucky chances when they end up on the Luofu. You entice them to become lesser men. I make a profit out of it. When you become reachable, however, the charm will lie in what your open legs and mouth have to offer them. If you wish to continue working here, your choices will begin to appear unbearable for you.”

Is she threatening him with the voice of a priestess? No, stupid—this is what you offered yourself for.

“If I leave, it is a bad deal for you and me,” he muses again.

“Very much. Your fealty patron… I suppose advising you not to become attached is useless by now, so I tell you this—our job is to give them what they want. If we need to shape ourselves differently for it, we will. If we have to pretend we have minimal affection for them, we shall. Your body is not your own when they ask that of you, as much as they become yours. But he wants your cruelty? Give it to him. Act like a god for a night, and keep him in your palm. Weak men are the safest option we have.”

Is he weak, though? Maybe not physically, Ren is not. His fragility is evident like the crystalline waters of Scalegorge Waterscape’s seas. “How do I do that?” With him?

“Let him climb inside your body and pretend he’s the best as he fills you. Make him feel powerful, become his strength.” Each word sounds like a hex. Maybe she is right, he thinks, especially when she leans forward and, “Pretend to worship him, and he will worship you in return.”

Her words haunt him for the rest of the evening. When Dan Heng is left alone in his room and overlooking the lewd sounds of flesh and whimpers in the adjacent beds, separated by thin walls more akin to paper panels, and when he is submerging in the shallow waters of his bathtub, all while thinking of a bracer object lost to time. 

That was lost. He imagines it here, cradled against his body as a living being.

A teal-coloured tail and horns with oceanic shades free themselves without their owner’s reluctance. It has been months since he last welcomed his authentic appearance or at least his beloved Vidyadhara features. If following through with his impulsive, intrusive ideas, he had no choice but to make sacrifices, but as the brilliant scales meet the water and coil around his legs as a long-gone lover, feathery tip brushing against the phantom bracer against his chest, Dan Heng almost thinks, perfect. 

If the rumours are as truthful as they claim to be, he managed to install a crisis on the flagship, on the Alliance; the Preceptors can no longer keep him chained and hidden. Is it not terrible how they need him? Could a council made of them sustain itself without the aeon-assigned Scion of their nurturer? And the Ten Lords may forget him, for all he wants to know. 

Even if he delivers in the quiet request, it does not forbid nor stop him from falling asleep, cradling the ghostly warmth of a far-gone bracer and giving in a soundless curl of his tail, breathing and free from his nethers. 

In the dim abyss devoid of light, he seems to have returned to the insides of a Vidyadhara egg, being ceaselessly churned in tumultuous waves and elusive dreams.

The sea of white turns into red in the blink of an eye. 

“It shouldn’t have gone like this, it shouldn’t, it shouldn’t….” Dan Heng can feel blood running down his legs from between his thighs, can feel blood in his hands and sticking to his palms like a second skin, can feel… he feels cold. He feels nothing but cold. 

The bracer on his arm runs colder than that woman’s ice, and he just wants to rip it off his skin. I didn’t make it for this…

“No, no, no, no, not like this,” but Dan Heng wonders if the pleas come from his mouth or the puppet he acts as.

Dan Feng, are these yours?

It was a gift to you, my beloved, why are you hurting me with it?

Of course, he receives no answer, but he forgets the doubt as soon as a ghastly cry comes out of their throat. 

There is a name being muttered so many times in the vastness of his despair—is it a star? Why would Dan Feng wish for a star?—and he has no time to inquire to himself about it when the bracer is changed for a corpse lying on his lap.

The sea of white turns into red in the blink of an eye, and Dan Feng—Dan Heng—can only chant under his breath for something too far away, unattainable even for a god. If Aeons can fall, he is only a mere leaf sweeping away by the wind and crushed under one’s shoes. 

Their blood has different shades. Their blood? At one moment, he sees a heartache drowning in red, a vivid scarlet, and then a gruesome black from scales joins it in an ugly miscellany. 

I know this blood. I’ve seen it.

A familiar pump, pump, pump in his palm, a strange gaping wound on his chest that Dan Heng has never felt but has seen before, and… what is going on? 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to…”

It is difficult to discern between memories and nightmares, Dan Heng realises. He cannot leave the comfort of his bath, but the minuscule waves of the surface play a script of their own, taunting him with a life he never lived, memories that do not belong to him, and a man who was never his.

His heart can never be appeased. Something is wrong with it, and something is wrong with Ren’s heart, too.

Destiny mocks him. Of course, Ren was meant to be unattainable.

Days go by with the ever-lingering question of investigating the bracer and the always-stopping reluctance with a candid voice, so don’t do this. Dan Heng could wrap himself in his tail and relish in the comfort of his scales, he could embellish his horns for a few hours with spoiled, prismatic gemstones, and he could sleep alongside the memory of the coral-gold bracer while forcing his remembrance to return in a haze. 

Something wrong, however, cannot be repaired by wishful thinking alone.

“Confide in me, Lotus dear…” 

Dan Heng is lucky he remembered to wear his silken veils today; otherwise, he would have been acknowledged immediately by the Cloud-Knight, who was draping himself over the podium’s edge. 

The man could be drunk, but Dan Heng recognises him from all the Preceptors and the Divine Foresight visits regarding the shifting tides of the Luofu’s Ambrosial Arbour. A foul-mouthed, less-than-honoured knight who never lost a chance to comment about the frigid Yinyue-jun. 

And here Yinyue-jun is, entertaining him for the evening. 

“I want to take you to bed, my sacred lotus.” 

Dan Heng feigns a smile and restrains the urge to drown the man in his own blood, fanning himself with a blue sapphire paper fan. 

If he appears coy and vestal, perhaps the bastard will go away. By the vexing comments Dan Heng remembers… he is not an adorer of coy and shy lovers. 

Go away, but the man only creeps his hand further to where the courtesan rests his feet, coiled under his robes’ hem. “Did you hear me? I want to fuck you, my—”

“You know the rules,” interrupts Dan Heng, no, Lotus, before the man could dive into the fantasies the Vidyadhara most certainly does not want to partake in. To be desired is a beautiful feeling, but— he closes the fan and snaps it at the knight’s hand, creeping closer and closer to his feet. “If you’re unsatisfied, there are others to comfort you.”

“But I want you. It’s all that… bastard’s fault. Keeping you all to himself…”

“He pays for the privilege.”

“How much is he paying?” Can he never stop? “I could pay you so much more…”

Dan Heng cannot hit him in the head with his fan, nor can he choke him with his now-hidden tail, but he can just make the knight feel more miserable, which is somehow much more entertaining. Serves him right. “More than your Divine Foresight will ever square for you, dear.”

Ultimately, the Madam was correct on one thing: some men enjoy being reduced to less-than-respectable humans, especially high-ranking officials.

“Can he even fuck you properly?” And he goes on and on and on. Is this knight even aware that the courtesan he fancies belongs to a criminal and not some high lord of the flagship? Maybe he should one day find out so his commentaries would halt in a beat. “A pretty thin’ like you shouldn’ even… be here…”

On that, Dan Heng partially agrees. One day, he will leave, he has no doubt. “And according to you, your bed is appropriate.” If only he knew the ‘damned, frigid bitch of a traitor’ was the one luring him—against their will, nonetheless.

“I’d show you a good time that’d make you forget him…” I highly disbelieve you. Dan Heng and Ren seem to have been intertwined even before they came to be. He would most likely forget me first because of the mara. “If you want, I’d let the General, too. His lovers claim he’s good enough.” Promises to treat me better and already offers me to someone else? As if the knight was not pitiful enough. “Then, he’d promote me…”

It only gets worse. 

Of how drunk he is, he faints in less than an hour after sharing unwanted thoughts with his unwanted partner.

Dan Heng leaves for his room before any other despicable patron can come and demand his companionship for the little they can charge, for the little to no benefits they can get of him until his ownership is finally passed onto another’s hands. If anyone requests his presence, unfortunately, his buyer will be with him.

It starts as a lie, but soon becomes the truth.

“He’s coming tonight,” warns Madam Yae. She gives him a set of red ropes, calloused to the touch, which hums awkwardly in his palm.

“Is he?” I thought he would discard me in no time after my failure, but he cannot admit it to Madam. 

“That one was a man of few to no words. I forewarned him that you had no knowledge of what he asked for, but did he listen to me? Of course not. Can I trust you to know how to tie a knot so firm not even the Permanence could escape from, darling?”

Dan Heng’s wrists, ankles and waist are more familiar with metal-made shackles than ropes, truth be told. His neck often remembers phantom tenderness from when they used it to constrict his throat, as well. “I believe I can arrange myself. If not…”

“Yes, yes, I don’t need much detail on how you two solve your problems. I only need them to be solved in whatever way you manage.” Her smile is of a sly changeling. “You may find his request cruel, even for his standards, but nothing you cannot have the will to do.”

The ropes are ruthless to the skin, that he knows.

His heart threatens to puke itself out of his mouth when Ren enters his room with the same apathetic contour. Is he still disappointed in me? Did I ruin things? 

Why is he so nervous at the prospect of atrophy between them? Even if he answers it a thousand times, with a million reasons to justify the permanence of their contract, he cannot help but ask either way. I could find someone else. 

Ren pays for the privilege of the courtesan not being available for others to do as they please. Why do I think it is finite?

“Kafka said it could help,” says Ren. There is something significantly wrong, though not unfitting, in how he speaks to Dan Heng tonight. For a change, he does not even dare approach the courtesan.

Rigid limbs, as if he is containing, restraining from lashing out, and eyes cast away to the floor with flickering golden… oh. Dan Heng’s heart falls into his chest. 

“I see.” He swallows any impertinent inquiry, wishing to leave his mouth. “Is it… Is it that bad for now?”

“Elio foresaw it.” Kafka, Elio, all names I know nothing of, and Dan Heng hates hearing them. “Kafka would be on a mission, so… I had to come.”

Dan Heng extends his palm. An invitation, a welcoming, because why would he ever reject Ren and his wishes? You denied him once. 

Ren does not take his offered hand but kneels at the courtesan’s feet as a loyal servant instead of his owner, the buyer keeping him from other lustful men and women who seek to possess him. Then again, how many have you entangled with, my dear hunter? If one is to see death as the rapture of sex… Dan Heng is no exception in Ren’s incessant scavenger hunt for pleasure. 

The green that settles in the Vidyadhara’s stomach is not the sparkling emerald of viridescent seas or the tides under shining stars, transparent simultaneously with the hues of smaragd. It is a puking sentiment in the ugliest shades of green. Rueful and possessive, and perhaps he should restrain himself instead of someone else. Jealousy is not a face for your countenance, Yinyue-jun. 

With a steady pace despite the lingering hysteria to rapture between them—within Ren, his bestowed curse of mara—the Stellaron Hunter removes each piece of clothing. The jacket had been fixed, and Dan Heng can feel the embroidery under his digits as he helps Ren to remove every part of him; the coat is draped over the bed as a treasured gift rather than a simple garment. 

That Ren is not a bad-looking man, Dan Heng is more than aware. His semblance might carry the gloomy shades of a doomed-by-destiny being, a mere pawn in the grand schemes of Aeons and lesser deities, but to say he is unpleasant to look at is a far-fetched lie, through and through. 

The contours are of fairness with finality written with a finite ink, the beauty of a flower that will wither when plucked from its nurturing ground—but that is only because he is gracious, is he not? There are no unappealing flowers on the vases and garlands of prayer. 

The almond-shaped eyes with long eyelashes, the sharp cheekbones that get their sharpness from his demeanour, less than from his nature; they invite a hand to cup them, to feel them under the softness of a palm—which Dan follows without thinking correctly. Ren’s face is soft. It unconsciously brings a slight lift to his lips. 

Ren’s body is nothing to be left behind, either. It is not devoid of scars and besmirching—hells, Dan Heng can see droplets of dry blood on the bandages and on his neck, but nothing too alarming. Some scars appear as old as Dan Heng’s existence, not Yinyue-jun’s, and others look too new for an Abundance-blessed child. They, however, only make his body look more appealing for some fucking reason that Dan Heng cannot understand. Broad shoulders and a fine-toned chest wrapped in bandages, though it is visible how his stomach is just as well-kept. Killing is undoubtedly an arduous affair for the physique.

It also feels familiar under Dan Heng’s palm, as if the skin of his hands and the digits in his control have once ventured into this same scarred skin. Maybe when it was not so scarred. When his hair was yet as fair as snow.

“Are you sure the ropes can hold the mara back?” Ignoring any charm and enchantment he finds in observing Ren kneeling and so pliantly bare to him, Dan Heng can feel with the soft touch of cloudhymn under his fingers that Ren’s body is being held with less than a thread of reason. The Abundance’s power tingles, shattering pieces of leaves crumbling and resounding as a flowing river of gems. Beautiful in theory and woeful in practice. 

“I’m sure,” whispers Ren, and Long, even his timbre is being taken by another. It is hoarse, a choir of rotten chords. “If you do it, it will last.” 

“How can you trust me?” After my merciless robbing of your peace. 

“I don’t…” The fact that Ren leans into his palm is not enough to soothe their worries, but may the Permanence allow him this bit to cherish just for a second too long, longer than they deserve. “I must trust you more than I trust myself to keep one’s watch. I don’t want to…” 

“…I’ll keep you,” says Dan Heng with the tone of a chantress. It always works. “Close your eyes for me.” 

The binds Dan Heng is familiar with are metal and pain, needles, and dracocatenas, which forbid even his tail from moving. For Ren, however, he wants to make it more than just restraint for a possible escape and punishment for a criminal. The body has innumerable ways to trick and influence one’s senses—he would know; he was taught by a healer. 

“Strangle me if you wish,” says the Stellaron Hunter, throwing his head back and shutting his eyes in the looks of pain. His body has sporadic tremors, probably from containing the mara until Dan Heng is finished. “It will be better if I decide to use my mouth.” 

The rope shines as blood against Ren’s pome, the movements of his throat and swallowing in bewitching motions. Dan Heng gets up, keeping the rope on the hunter’s skin, circling the kneeling form and allowing the hem of his viridescent robes to graze on the man’s thighs. 

“Would you bite me if given the chance?” He lifts Ren’s chin from behind, pulling the rope just enough to make the murderer gasp and open his mouth. 

“Yes,” Ren says while gritting teeth and in small intakes of oxygen. 

There is an art in binding prisoners of war. 

Dan Heng then goes to the hunter’s hands: he brings the wrists behind the strong back and joins them in a mockery of prayer, tying the fibre rope with calmness despite intrinsically planning the arduous knots. The rope does not kiss the skin with tenderness but is rough and scraping the already-existing scars around the wounded wrists. Dan Heng notices the bandages on the palms, the accumulated pools of blood… he chooses to leave them be. The wrists and forearms will do. He makes sure to encircle the leather bracer, too. He tugs once to secure them. It should hurt, especially if Ren attempts to move. 

Be it his neck or hands, the lack of air will keep him stranded long enough for them to solve the mara. 

“If you pull your hands, you will choke,” says Dan Heng, permitting his fingers to roam Ren’s throbbing throat, gritting jawline. “And you cannot move forward unless you wish to break your arm’s bones. Is this what you wanted?”

Of course, Ren nods weakly and grunts in pain.

His torso is easier to bind, even if it takes much more time to secure it—Dan Heng does not wish Ren to get up and run away or run up to him, and he ties a complex series of knots from the torso to the ankles. If he lets his fingers graze a second, two seconds more than necessary when contouring the stomach… he cannot think of it right now. 

Ah, but the reason is thrown out of the window when every rope pulls, making Ren groan, gasp and curse in unintelligible words.

“Can you hear my voice and think of it more than the crushing leaves?” Essentially, Ren is an immovable object. Dan Heng inhales deeply, allowing his hands to rest on the hunter’s shoulders and feeling each scar under his palms. They are so prominent he can envision their forms with his eyes closed. “Just listen to me. No need to see, just feel me.” 

On an impulse, he tugs on the red silk adorning his waist and sacrifices the form-fitting silhouette to twirl the silk in his hands before pouring the softness over Ren’s eyes, forcing him to face darkness instead of golden leaves and detached realities. The silk is not as tight as the rest of the bindings, but it will hardly fall when Ren cannot move in the ways he intends.

“Yinyue-jun…”

“That’s not my name, dear,” whispers Dan Heng, trying to sound as enticing and hexing as possible, soothing as his cloudhymn spells. “Don’t conjure his image. Conjure mine. Think of me and nothing else.”

As foreseen, Ren does not let go immediately of the Long-forsaken title. It’s okay, the courtesan thinks, sighing and moving to sit before his client.

“I could have laid these scars on you,” he murmurs, tracing one of many with a single finger. He wants to know about them, their stories, their inciters, and why they can remain when Dan Heng’s inflictions cannot. “We will never remember completely, will we? Molten rebirth and a thousand swords piercing our bodies were all made so we could forget and be forged into someone else’s whims instead of ours.”

Before he knows any better, he lets his body descend by the edge of the bed, knees meeting the ligneous floor. With Ren all tied up, Dan Heng decides what happens to him. The hunter is attempting to free himself, and the courtesan can see it, but he can never—not unless Dan Heng cuts the ropes, undoes the knots, and sets him in liberty. 

“I can cool your blood with the soothing of a falling snow if you want.” Lifting the hem of his robes, Dan Heng frees his horns and tail, slowly supporting his back against the bed’s edge and his legs over Ren’s thighs, hands piercing the hunter’s shoulders once more—this time with claws. “Like that one night, you fell asleep so peacefully on me, remember? That one you surely do recall. Leaves fall on water and float, but never leave its embrace—golden, fan-like flowers are no different to it.”

“Yinyue…”

“That’s not my name,” he repeats, savouring the way Ren hisses at the piercing claws. “Say it. Say my name, and I’ll give you what you want.”

Between more grunts and hisses, amid a Vidyadhara’s pleas, it resounds, “Dan Heng…”

Ah… it is better than anything others have ever called him.

“Do you seek pain or the lack of it?” he asks, containing a lewd sound to escape his mouth as he pushes forward. It is just slightly, but he inhales a shattered breath when he feels a hard pressure against him. It is better than any silk he brushes against himself. “You come and ask for both. I cannot understand you…”

“You make them both feel good,” rasps Ren, closer to a snarl than to a smile. “Just do whatever you wish to do to me.”

“Anything?”

“That’s what you did before. I’m just letting you with… with my per… permission…” Aeons, even his words are being corrupted so viciously by the mara. “I don’t care if you do it with me, unwilling, now…”

But I want you to be willing, however, Dan Heng is no fool to say it out loud when Ren is no longer coherent. He will effortlessly forget anything they say.

When the curses and grunts of distress begin, Dan Heng leans forward, transmuting the cloudhymn magic in any spell that will soothe the mara in the fastest manner he remembers possible. Ren still trembles and grunts, but every movement is a pain, and Dan Heng is nothing but merciful—he arches so his neck meets Ren’s mouth range, cooling the running lukewarm blood in the immortal’s body as a flow he commands with sovereignty. 

He quivers and hisses in pain, as well, when teeth gnaw at his throat but refuses to leave.

“Rest now, my dear,” he weeps, controlling his breath as the hunter’s calms to a stop. “My dear, my darling, my… my…” My dead one. 

When the vestiges of remaining consciousness are the only lingering sign of life, Dan Heng pulls back and ignores the fresh blood on Ren’s lips—when he kisses the man, he flourishes and thinks of a flower blooming.

Chapter Text

The only thing he can sense is a splotch of crimson in his sight and the taste of iron in his mouth. His limbs are unresponsive—he must have died.

"Do you remember?"

He opens his mouth, lost, his voice as coarse as a savage beast's. The sound from his throat stops abruptly as the cold, hard object penetrates his torso.

Again and again, this repeated for thousands of times.

Before the sword pierced his body once more, he grabbed it with his bare hands and slowly stood up.

"Do you remember now?"

He meets the woman's blood-red eyes, his mind still empty—he was run through by the sword once again.

"Remember the feeling of death, and bring it to them."

Crimson resurfaces in his vision. He stares at the sword that killed him. The blade is broken in half and lying on the ground.

"Rise, and let me kill you once more."

Whilst some claim that sleeping is the rehearsal for death, Ren disagrees. There is no dreaming when dying. In finality, there is a faint recollection of your life, ending then and there, and it passes in less than a blink. 

Waking up is never without painful gasps and inhales of cold air for just-awaken lungs, revived-pumping muscles close to them, and blood once more running as rivers in his veins. His body jolts, quivers in shock, and makes him want to cut his limbs off his bones since they are always so feeble when they return to the world of the living.

The headache is just as insufferable, ghostly suffocating him with pain instead of a rope or decisive hands around his throat. His mouth tastes metallic.

“Easy, now,” a much-adored velvet voice echoes above him. There is a velvet-like phantom surrounding him that is not unique to the tone, overflowing his senses with calmness, rest, and a serene sentiment he rarely got to feel ever since… ever since returning, that is. The only way he met this zenith was by visiting him. “It’s never without a price to wake up from an arduous submission. There is no rush.”

He starts by forcing his eyes to shut closer than before until prismatic lights shine behind his eyelids in the darkness, and opening them to… more darkness. A soft fabric veils his sight.

It is not the darkness of the void of an endless well that you could see an illusionary starry night the deeper you fall. He faintly remembers it, but death’s is less enchanted, less welcoming; the one he sees now is a dark red-hued blur that borders on black, just enough to make him notice feeble light in the room. 

The mara’s obsession has a similar spell when it possesses him: nothing is straightforward to be distinguished, nothing is what it seems, but fan-shaped leaves in the colour of rotten gold and amber shades take hold of everything in a haze, brushing his senses aside. 

His head is pillowed on a soft surface that does not feel like a cushion. It is styrax-fragrant with an orchid flavour of odour climbing up his senses, but also moving, motions of a pacified breathing that Ren steadily matches as he returns to himself. He lies between a pair of plush thighs, and both rest on the mattress’s comfort instead of the floor, where he last remembers being. His limbs are sore, though.

Feeling more of his limbs each minute that passes, he begins his attempts: his hand is made of stone, but with a little effort, he meets fingers that are not his own. 

Their fingers entangle, and a thumb brushes just above his knuckles, soothing enough to make him take a deep breath without stinging his chest and turn his head into the mellowness of the stomach he rests on. He immensely enjoys the orchid smell.

More fingers come to him, caressing the back of his hair this time. 

“You slept soundly,” says Yinyue-jun—Dan Heng, Dan Heng, he needs to remember—as if the euphemism for his demise is nothing but the truth instead of a white lie. “Your marks healed too fast, though… I undid the ropes and hoped they would remain. I wish I could have made them last longer.”

“The Abundance would never let you keep them,” mumbles Ren, still getting used to the vocal cords. They were beautifully choked before he passed and can only conjure the remembrance of his neck tender. “Not unless you keep inflicting them. You’d have to hurt me every single day if you want them to last.”

“If that’s what you want, I don’t see why not.”

Ren, for a change, does not want to leave. 

The payment is somewhere in his jacket Aeons-know-where, and with the constant raise of the courtesan’s price, he had to get creative to keep him—invading the Azure Palace was not the most complicated task he has ever received, and call it some miraculous muscle-memory, he knew where to go. He only needed the most perfected piece of ruby and onyx tassel to guarantee his interests.

Exhaling deeply and putting his mind to reason, Ren slowly lifts himself from where he laid on the Vidyadhara, stiff knees returning at their own sweet time to respond and do as he orders and supporting his weight on both arms.

“Let me help you,” murmurs Dan Heng— Dan Heng —before willowy fingers undo the knot behind his head and remove the silken veil from his eyes. 

There is no blurry, festering gold brushing his vision, but the shimmering pair of jade-green gems that keep pestering him in his free time, intruding his thoughts when he thinks of death and meets it by anyone’s hands. 

And malachite horns. “Much better, isn’t it?”

Oh, you have finally shown yourself now.

The courtesan’s clothes are mushed and dishevelled, with only a thin white fabric enshrining the countenance from being brushed by the air. It’s been partly lifted to lay the thighs bare, almost exposing more skin above them. Dangerously almost, and teal-coloured tail curls swiftly close to them. 

That, and his chest is uncovering more than the courtesan ever did. Ren can see the faint marks of ribs under the jade-white skin, the design of his clavicles, the hollow of the collarbone… and a red stain ruining the clear canvas with blood on the neck. 

Noticing where his attention went, Dan Heng sighs. “I let you use your mouth when I was taking care of you,” he explains, shaking his head. “It healed faster than your marks, and the blood is nothing new. At least I can save this robe.”

So this is where Ren feels the metallic taste in his mouth. He roams his tongue on his teeth, under the small fangs, and tastes more of the ichor remnants. “You let me.”

“Yes. I thought it would calm you and let your mara rest more easily than just containing you.” 

Ren scoffs. “I warned you to strangle me if I give in the hands delirium.”

“Do not mistake me—I wanted it,” corrects Dan Heng, fingers grasping the hunter’s bare arm. “If I didn’t want you to hurt me, I wouldn’t have used cloudhymn to contain you. Those ropes, I suspect they wouldn’t have fully restrained you. But I handled you more than once. You could never hurt me unless I wished you to do it.”

“Are you appeasing me?” It is comical in a humourless manner. As if he ever needed a reminder of who the natural hunter was and who was meant to be the prey between them. “I come back to you for a reason. What made you unravel your true form this time?”

Dan Heng blinks, positioning his body so they are eye-to-eye, or as much as they can be since the courtesan has to tail his head a little to watch him properly. “I believe it is fair that I don't conceal myself from you anymore. You have always known who I was. I don’t have to hide behind a name for you. If I am to take care of you and, as you say, be in penitence in your company, then let me lay myself bare alongside you.” 

“Fair, you say.” Ren straightens his gaze.

“Yes. You claim I’ve been unfair to you and cursed you. I cannot speak for myself and can’t even… remember. Not as I should, at least.” Then, he blinks and looks away. “I just remember a man that was very close to Dan Feng, and…”

This cannot be real. It can’t. “You remember?” Ren does not want to hiss, but it naturally leaves his tongue before he controls it.

“Barely. Just barely,” explains Dan Heng, accommodating them on the bed and pulling Ren closer between his legs. One of his hands finds the bracer on Ren’s arm, caressing the leather. “You can help me remember. If it’s to finally free me from another’s sins or make me understand why I am paying for them in his stead. None of us deserves to be in the dark. We can solve it.”

“I can offer you nothing but terror and melancholy with the memories I still hold onto.” 

The mara hardly allows him to recollect who his vessel was before being cursed. 

He knows he was someone whose name bore a meaning beyond a weapon, who had a future and who knew Yinyue-jun in ways no one ever had a chance to. 

He knows good memories exist, but now they are all buried and never to be returned unless he wants to be under the mara’s influence again. “What do you remember now?”

“I know this bracer meant something more than just an armour.” Dan Heng may speak, but Ren can hardly leave the sight of the Vidyadhara’s neck where there should be teeth marks, fangs piercing it, but only has dry blood besmirching a once-flawless countenance. “I can see it in your arm before everything happened, more akin to a gift than a legionnaire’s preparation.”

“A gift.” Ren wishes he could remember it. “I just know I used to feel something else with it. Pain and misery that was not mine, excruciating and controlling my entire body. I cannot know which one was worse—the thousand piercing swords in my chest or the phantom woes it made me experience.” He lost track of time and how long it had been since it last sparkled throbs in his arms and body. A few centuries, not much longer after he woke up alone. He huffs. “Why am I surprised Yinyue-jun would curse me even after he condemned me to this…”

“If so, I’m sure he did not mean it for torture.” Palms rise to his shoulders, neck and jawline, close to cradling his cheeks, and he has no option but to stare back at the sea-hued jades. “I see you gifting me—er, him the spear, too. You warned him to be careful since it could pierce through Vidyadhara scales. Can you not remember any of this?” 

Despite the hope in Dan Heng’s eyes, Ren cannot force a single thought regarding such an episode. “I can’t craft anything anymore,” he says, and even if he speaks with no venom tainting his words, part of him spits for it. “My hands are forever wounded, and since they never heal, I wound them even more. My fingers quiver for nothing when they are not wrapped around a sword’s handle, guiding it straight into someone’s chest or cutting their head off. How can I be the same man if what makes him a true human being is no longer with me?”

A long-forgotten name lost to time and erased by those who still had a vestige of his presence, a lost skill he will never recover and dedicate himself to. Aeons, not even the same appearance. His body has been killed, burnt, and wounded so many times the flesh does not even feel like his own anymore, much less that man’s flesh. 

He is a vessel for punishment, nothing else. 

An instrument to be wielded, commanded and held as the wielder desires him to be.

“If you pay for his sins, then there must be something connecting you,” insists Dan Heng, fingers brushing under Ren’s ear. Has his voice lowered? “Which is the same for me in your argument, correct?” Ren hums in response, still looking at the blood on Dan Heng’s neck and collarbones. He bit him deeply by how bloody it was left. “We are intertwined—you said it yourself.”

“You were meant to become someone else from the moment you shattered your egg and came to the world, and so it has been since the dawn of your time and existence, Yinyue-jun,” he retorts, allowing his face to fall closer to the bare neck. “I wasn’t even meant to live past my fifties. We are intertwined, for we sinned together, cursing one another.” 

“And what sin was that?” Is that a plea that shines in Dan Heng’s eyes? “You’ve been the only one giving me answers that have been denied instead of simply spatting curses in my name and at my title. Can you not remember anything? Why does everyone hate me so?”

What could Ren answer—or better yet, how could he answer it when he vaguely has distorted and broken memories with no real attachment, confusing orders and faces turning into blurs? He can only recall the same shades of eyes that held the ancient sea for irises; could the mara or Spirit Whisperer make him forget them? 

“We sought immortality,” he says because that is the only thing he knows. 

Why else would he suffer what he went through, with the ice demon killing him a thousand times over? 

“I know you—Yinyue-jun wanted to use the secret of immortality to end the conflict we were facing and save someone.” When pain starts throbbing against his forehead, he closes his eyes and grunts. “I know I died protecting him. I remember falling to my knees and giving into the arms of death in what would be once and for all, but the last thing I saw before being taken away was blood and a tempest. I think it was raining. It wasn’t… meant to be me, the one with immortality. Why did you seek it?” 

Why did you do this to me when I was meant to become ashes and leave my name for a legacy instead of persevering breathing?

He does not mean for his voice to sound so broken, so defeated and fractured, feeble as he was never allowed to be but reduced to, but he can do nothing when the words are uttered before he can clear his throat and settle his thoughts.

“I don’t know.” Dan Heng heaves a breath, touching his forehead against Ren’s. This action, strangely, soothes the headache. “Have you considered he had good intent? Why else would he risk it for you?”

“Maybe he never had a good intent to begin with,” Ren groans. “Arrogant, proud and could never accept he committed a mistake. He thought he could defy the Aeons if he were to reach his goals. I don’t know how that man could ever get along with him.” I don’t know how I could get along with him enough to protect him with my life. 

“His way of caring could have been different.” Is it mercy or punishment that Dan Heng lets him rest on his shoulder, breathing in the orchid-scented skin of his collarbones and the remnants of iron of blood? “For you, the true meaning of caring would be to let go. For him, it could have been to defy all the odds to save you.”

“At the cost of cursing me and leaving me alone to suffer the consequences? They say gods are cruel—he was one, through and through.” You are one, too. “The first human experience I lived when I was born again was abandonment. From him, my perpetuator. Dare I say, creator?” You wear his face, and it pains me. “Has it ever been a creature so alone, so utterly helpless? Was ever a newborn creature abandoned the moment they were born?”

“I don’t know if he abandoned you. Not willingly.” Dan Heng guides their bodies to rest on the bed again, Ren giving up the fight against gravity to fall on him again and circling the sylphlike waist. “He was punished, too. I am certain he would have stayed with you if he could.”

How can you say that? Can you even remember him that well to speak for him? And Yinyue-jun still claims to be someone else when he reeks of certainty. 

“I loathe him,” whispers Ren, cutting his tongue with the words. “I loathe that he still haunts me and that I can’t forget him. He makes me want to spear myself in that fucking emerald spear so profoundly my body will never recover, never lift itself again, and I’m forced to be restrained in one place instead of… searching for him…” I wish I had never met him, that our paths had never crossed. 

Fingers fondle his hair, pushing threads of ebony behind his ear. “I know,” as a whispered apology more than a confession.

Dan Heng’s neck should have the vexing mark of teeth rupturing the skin, the dark bruises of tiny holes from which blood should never stop gushing. Should he dare give Yinyue-jun another ornament to flaunt alongside his silken robes and statuesque body? 

So Ren sinks his teeth into the healed mess of Dan Heng’s throat.

“Ah! Ren—!”

He never fancied too-honeyed flavours and suspects his past self never did either, but the moonbloom sweetness that is Yinyue-jun’s blood is an elixir by itself. 

Ren sinks his teeth deeper until he imagines himself ripping apart the tendons and muscles to find the scarlet spring underneath the jade-white countenance, but all he will do is bruise in purple and red blushes as his tongue licks and sucks the ambrosial vitality. 

Under him, Dan Heng starts squirming, though not to push the hunter away; even his tail curls around the hunter’s middle instead of throwing him out of bed. 

“Slow down, slow down…” Fingers grip Ren’s hair and pull him closer against the sweet curve of the neck, legs tighten on his hips, and the most vulgar sounds echo from who should be the most sanctified of the Vidyadhara. “No need to rush…” 

A roughened palm tautens its hold on the courtesan’s waist, the perfect fit for the hollow of his stomach. It makes Dan Heng tremble. 

The Stellaron Hunter detaches his teeth with a mellow, fluid-serene sound, drenched lips with ichor that runs down his chin, only to look at the man who continues to be reverent in his sleepless nights. 

“Are the rumours true?” Ren asks, lingering teeth on the open wound; he knows it is a simple mark instead of a disaster, one that the mara could lead him to cause, and yet he likes the image of simple piercings a little too much. 

Judging how Dan Heng pants with oscillating lips and a heaving chest, perhaps he does, too. “What rumours?”

“Word is that you bloomed like a moonflower by drinking from its brine. Drank its shine and become its most loyal follower, if not the celestial. The Exalting Sanctum’s cultists and singers often exaggerate their sonnets, composing ballads and sharing elegies of Yinyue-jun, He who imbibed the moon to obtain its sanctity.” He grazes his teeth over the stinging tenderness.

Maybe Dan Heng is manipulating him with cloudhymn magic. What else could explain his sudden conclusion and belief in cinquains and villanelles? If not a celestial…

“Ah…” And what else could explain why Yinyue-jun’s sounds are more akin to a hymn than natural, human, and mortal reactions? “I’ve never heard those… I never… It’s not true.”

“Then you’re a devil.” It’s the only explanation acceptable.

Their bodies begin to entangle more and more, but not to separate one from the other. “I…”

Ren wonders if the wish to drown himself in the moonbloom scent and flavour is genuinely his desire and not cloudhymn’s silent spells chanting liturgies to vex him. “Wearing the face of the lunarescent pearl to lure anyone into believing in you, running afoul with you, only to be cursed.”

“T-Then you are no better…” Dan Heng pulls Ren by the hair—not forcefully, not painfully, how strange— and looks at him half-lidded, fingers brushing on the hunter’s lips where more blood keeps accumulating. “He must’ve spellbound you to be as foul and enthralling, insomuch as I want to…”

“Want to what?” Ren leans forward, touching their foreheads and making them share puffs of breath. “That never stopped you before.”

“...I want to bite you, too.”

And that he does.

Dan Heng’s fangs do much more damage than Ren’s human-shaped ones. They sting as needles with the strength of abyssal creatures, an unbearable pressure that Ren savours with a grin, not caring that Dan Heng is punishing them with the bloody shape of his mouth. A serpentine tongue carves its way between human lips and curls around a mortal’s, venturing further as it pleases.

Their limbs entangle as if they wish not to depart from each other. The courtesan embraces his client with both arms caging the man’s neck and legs crossing at his calves, tail roaming to brush and gather around the hunter’s thigh, all while their bodies unlearn the meaning of personal space and appears to merge their chests into one. 

With a push against the body beneath him, Ren gains a chance at breathing, for Dan Heng uncoils his tongue and throws his head against the pillow, a new and lewd whisper of breath, and tightens his legs’ embrace around his… lover’s hips. 

Are we lovers?

It could be the mara thinking for him since he cannot. His thoughts wonder if he can break Yinyue-jun’s collarbones with his teeth alone.

Since Dan Heng is ephemerally distracted, Ren rejoices under his jawline, biting all the skin he can find. He gnaws at the flesh and every prominent muscle or vein, descending to the hollow of the Vidyadhara’s clavicle, and mercilessly bites at the bones.

“AH!” 

Oh, Yinyue-jun can be shattered. 

Ren knows he is on the right path when a tail hardens its embrace, pure muscle and scales that could hardly be pierced by common weapons and have all the ways to break his skeleton if they fancy so.

“Ren… Ren, wait…” The Stellaron Hunter nips one last time at the bone—no, he will have to try harder in the future to see if it fractures—and regards Dan Heng from under his eyelashes, not even lifting his body until he is forced to do so. 

He scoffs at seeing the courtesan flushed and blinking nonstop. “If you don’t want any of this, you should just kill—” me. 

But Dan Heng does not answer him, probably not even listening to him, because he undoes the remaining laces of his robes and let them unveil more of his skin—uncovers the shoulders, the bewitching trail of his chest to his stomach, the lightest and softest silks pooling around his hips, where he also lifts them, baring his thighs entirely and just peeking the region where they meet, where they kept pushing against one another. 

If Ren doubted whether the odes spoke truths or lies about Yinyue-jun, he now thinks they are poor attempts at reaching the divine. 

Slender fingers reach his cheek, brushing hair off his face, and Yinyue-jun— Dan Heng, the moon’s name—regards him with eyes taken by ancient depths, the embracing sea turned dark for a mortal. “It is only fair we partake in this regale as one.” 

They share one sole look before Ren buries his face and teeth on the jade-born skin and hears the moon sing a chant worthy of praise. 

Maybe this is why he fell, the mara suggests in the corners of Ren’s mind. 

Maybe the moonbloom is a boat-sinking, man-devouring hex, and a simple mortal had no chance to look away. 

He feasts on the moon as if he could imbibe it instead of the Holy of Holies of the Vidyadhara, nipping and sucking to his whims. As his mouth finds pecking nipples that he will absolutely bite until they bruise, his thumbs venture to touch and press on the courtesan’s ribs, feeling each bone until he has the flaccid flesh under them. He presses until he hopes it is uncomfortable for Dan Heng. It could be fastidious by how the lotus’ spine arches. 

Letting go of the abused nipple, Ren attempts to bite every rib his fingers can feel through the skin, gnawing and chewing the jade until whimpers echo above him. 

His hair is pulled until it hurts, but his head is pushed further against the stomach he worships for a ghastly hunger. So Ren does what he does best: he obeys, and continues to lick and suck until he reaches Dan Heng’s navel, where teal minor scales begin to appear alongside jade. 

Ren bites them with the intent of ripping them off Dan Heng’s skin, devouring them until they melt on his tongue, but all he can do is bruise them with his teeth and make the Vidyadhara quiver incessantly under him, pushing his hips forward as if Ren was not already attached to him. Ren grunts, forcing the hips down by gripping the thighs and keeping them in place against the mattress, earning a lament from the courtesan.

The tail tightens even more and snakes its path to hold the hunter on the bed, not even an inch of air passing between their skins. Ren can feel his chest constricting, aching and wanting to breathe, but all he wants to do is descend further, where the scales present a fluttering slit, glistening and beginning to wet the silks and covers.

Styrax and orchid intrude on his senses, and he much obliges. Perhaps he is compelled by cloudhymn or enthralled by the seafoam; most likely, the need to drown beguiles him. The last thing he knows before closing his eyes and wrenching the moon to its brine is that Dan Heng tugs on his fingers and heaves breaths, agape-mouthed. 

As soon as he mouths the drenched cunt, he feels it tremulous on his tongue, lukewarm and wet and throbbing, all while Dan Heng is shattering once more in whimpers, trembling thighs and tail stiff. Ren savours the tight pooling heat with a lung slurp of the tongue, the clenching wet muscles serving more as a motivation for him to push further rather than retreat, and when legs circle his head, and calves hit his back, he finds no other choice but to dive deeper. 

Claws dig into his knuckles, and the tail starts to hurt with its ruthless grasp. “Ah— Ren—ah…” 

Ren circles that much-erogenous bud with his tongue, steadily changing the wet and warm caress with the grazing of teeth. He licks and presses it with his tongue until it pops into his mouth, and his fangs sink just enough to make Dan Heng lament a teary and hushed sigh. Evidently, Ren should just keep nibbling until he faintly fantasises about chewing it, tearing it, forcing Yinyue-jun to strain his legs, and never letting Ren leave the foreshore. 

If Yinyue-jun dragged him to the depths of his death like this, even if the Stellaron Hunter knew he would not stay dead, he would welcome the ocean for the attempt.

Until the bud is bruised and engorged, red and tender for his breath upon it is sufficient to make Dan Heng snivel, Ren bites and softly sucks it, mirroring a vicious hale. 

His chin gets wetter and wetter with the amount of overwhelming heat slipping from the throbbing sex, so with one last lure of teeth, Ren abandons the puffy red button and glories in damp lower lips, quivering under his cherishing famine. 

When he tries to pull back, he finds that the thighs are firmer than they look, for he is incapable of getting another fresh inhale—trust Yinyue-jun to demand, order and subject a mortal to his whims, selfish, narcissistic and arrogant to see him as the only one. He is lucky Ren is amused by it.

“Ren, Ren—ah, it’s too much…” And yet, he forbids Ren from giving him a moment of rest, immensely selfish and gourmand of his own wants. “Please—ah, there, there—”

His lungs ache, sting and sting; his chest feels as if it will implode, liquifying him from the inside; and Dan Heng keeps filling his mouth with brine, making Ren dig further until he drowns. His tongue is sweetly warm, his throat savours every bit of heat gushed into him, and his head hurts from how tight the legs shackle him; he seeks to breathe when engulfed by the seafoam that does not stop overflowing—

“A-Ah-ah—!”

The last things Ren is aware of before the ocean takes hold of his life are a broken symphony of moans, a more potent gush of styrax into his mouth, and the throbbing cunt around his tongue. 

There is a weight on his chest that impedes him from properly inhaling that painful oxygen as soon as he returns to the world of the living. The weight moves, shakes him, takes him by the shoulders and—

“Ren?” 

Who? 

He forces his eyes shut until they sting before opening them in a haze, seeing a sea of black above him—or it starts as black, for it turns into a body, moon-kissed skin blushed in red and violet, the most intense pair of smaragd stones he has ever seen as far as he can remember—

Ah. 

Ren knows this celestial creature upon him.

Yinyue-jun is dishevelled, through and through. He cannot remember if the Vidyadhara’s hair looked this messy when they started this affair of theirs, with waves of shimmering black falling over his shoulder and cooling on top of Ren. The reddish blues are bruises—bite marks, fingers forging themselves into the skin. Pale legs strand his chest, and the robes hang for dear life on his shoulders, but they hardly cover the statuesque, ruined flesh. And he can see shining, transparent trails of tears from puffy-red eyes and moist, long eyelashes, wounded lips vocalising his name, though it sounds so… so ghostly. 

“Ren, are you…?”

Ah. He coughs, clearing his throat. “I’m alive,” he forces out with a hoarse voice. 

“You weren’t,” hisses Yinyue… Dan Heng, his mind helps. “You just—you can’t just—!”

Ren massages his throat, taking a deep breath as best as possible. “You killed me.” 

He can still taste their gluttony in their tryst. His mouth was conquered and pulled to the seafoam by his willingness to drown, laden with the sweetened brine he drank, as if dying of thirst was not appropriate despite his relentless hunt for a definitive rest. His tongue presses behind and under his teeth, where he can still taste how Dan Heng delighted in his mouth. 

Such an intense delight made him trap Ren between his legs without the mercy of breath.

Dan Heng opens his mouth, but no sound comes out, and his eyes flicker toward any direction but the man beneath him. 

It could have been comical if the courtesan were not trembling on top of him. Rather than speaking, Ren chooses to sigh and wait.

His senses are not fully back, but he is glad there are no signs of mara anywhere—not to whisper spells and maledictions in his ear or overthrow his control to speak in his place. His palm wanders until it meets a plush thigh tensing on top of him. 

They are soft, as he had previously touched them, and he can notice fingerprints in rosette shades matching his own digits. He must have gripped them harder than he thought when going down on him. It almost makes him snicker, though he chooses to brush his thumb and caress the skin instead. 

“I’ll cut your throat if you think of apologising,” he mutters without an accurate threatening timbre, eyes focused on the curves of Dan Heng’s legs and the way they close, the way they jaunt towards the navel… I should— 

Above him, a scoff. “As if you could. I would impale you before you reached for me.” Dan Heng speaks the truth, and they know it, but any signs of confidence or imposing behaviour he should possess are anywhere to be found. No, he sounds tired, breathless, defeated, even. “I didn’t mean to… not like that…”

And Ren may be a criminal—murderer, more precisely—but he is not a liar. “Then have no qualms in doing it again.”

The courtesan stiffs.

The hunter looks up at him.

“Don’t be absurd,” grits Dan Heng, nails starting to pinch Ren’s pectoral.

“If I’m absurd, the fault lies with you,” he retorts. “Call me insane, and you are no better than I am. You didn’t have a problem before when you choked me to d—”

Apparently, Dan Heng simply does not want to hear of their affair but is not refusing it.

Their kiss has none of the heat and nastiness of the ones they shared until now. Dan Heng frowns and leans down to kiss Ren, touching each other’s lips, tasting the bruises left behind and licking them in soothing movements, and Ren… obliges. Yinyue-jun is the closest thing to a god, and he is mortal (or, well, used to be).

It is only fair the courtesan presents his nakedness as Ren has been for hours. Their kiss might not be malicious or malevolent, but their hands rush to remove the remaining silks from his willowy frame, exposing the moon-kissed countenance that should prove he had an affair with the moon, how could a mortal creature be similar to that?

Dan Heng brings him closer, lifting their torsos and sitting on the bed, and while one arm embraces Ren’s shoulder, the other seeks the hunter’s belt. Ah, yes. They are not wholly bare to each other, not yet.

“Do you perhaps wish to devour me, Yinyue-jun?” he murmurs against the courtesan’s lips.

Only to be smacked in the arm by a tail. “That’s not my name.”

Of course, it’s not. What was that the courtesan said on their second night together? ‘I’m not Yinyue-jun when I serve you’. And yet, here Ren is, obeying like a loyal follower. He sighs, palms changing from the thigh to the lithe waist. It fits so well; a comforting, flawlessly matching curvature of his silhouette, and he can still thumb at the prominent ribs. 

They groan in unison when their hips grind. Even with the tightness of his trousers, he feels the heat between Dan Heng’s legs, staining and wetting the last pieces of clothes separating them. 

“My name, Ren,” pants the Vidyadhara, yet trying to undo the insufferable belt. “Call me by my name. I’m not the untouchable holiness with you, I’m just yours.” 

I can almost believe you. 

“…Dan Heng.” If Ren shuts his eyes, he can imagine the moon of his life is not entertaining him for an ever-increasing price and due to a punishment they both should endure. “Dan Heng, Dan Heng.” 

“Yes, yes, yes.” 

After hardships and hazed kisses, amid chanting for each other, Ren’s cock is freed, rigid and leaking from the tip. Dan Heng brushes his fingers on it, earning a delicious moan from Ren as kiss-breaking. 

“You can take me as you will.” Dan Heng kisses the corners of Ren’s lips at the same time he pushes his hips forward, revelling a suspire when his soaked cunt meets Ren’s hardened cock. “Whatever you need me to be, anything you want me to do… take me as you please.”

Obviously, I’m paying you. 

But Ren can pretend for a night that Yinyue-jun— Dan Heng, Dan Heng, Dan Heng —holds any affection for him that transcends their sins and penitence, that they can forget their past selves have no influence on them. He also wishes it was the mara talking instead of reason. 

Feeling Dan Heng getting wetter and wetter on top of his cock is beyond words, and this soaking sex was in his mouth moments before. Ren tugs the courtesan by the waist with both arms, hand venturing the spine towards the longer scales, and Dan Heng whimpers when his sacral is cupped by a warm palm, fingers pressuring the base of his tail.

“Ren…”

“Dan Heng…”

BZZ.

Dan Heng arches his back and throws his head back, sitting with more fervour on Ren’s lap. The Stellaron Hunter wonders how he would look when he finally gets the cock inside of him, just like he did with his tongue and teeth. 

BZZ .

“Ah— ah—! Ren, Ren, wait…”

Ren feels his guts wrenching as his cock is pressed down and ridden. It will feel better when he’s inside—

BZZ.

BZZ.

“…Shit.”

…And he forces Dan Heng to stay still, gaining him a lament of protest, a confused and pitiful semblance. Shit. 

“What—?”

BZZ. 

He holds back the urge to just change their positions, to pin Dan Heng to the mattress, and lifts him with as much care as he can afford—or offer—before picking up the buzzing, fucking awful device phone, which he, unfortunately, knows who is sending messages.

Kafka [0425]

A-Ren…

You knew you couldn’t spend so much time on the Luofu, dear

Elio promised you more time if this deal is completed

A-Ren, be a good boy and don’t be sad, yes?

You will come back, no need to be disappointed

Dan Heng beats him. “You’re leaving.”

At this point, they cannot even lie properly to each other. Any enchanting spell their words could possess and chant their lover into engaging in a heated affair returns to the usual lost, secretive tones between two people who cannot move past their mistakes. 

“Kafka needs me.” He gets up without courtesy, no rush or calmness. He lost track of time. Shit. His cock is still hard, but Ren disregards it as fast as his mood sours, or else he will fuck Elio’s plans up by falling for Yinyue-jun’s velvet mouth once more. Bewitching men to drown, indeed. 

His jacket was still on the floor, with all the mess of ropes and a few silken robes mixed so ungraciously. One could even think they started fucking right there, as soon as Ren entered the room. 

“You will come back, right?” From the bed, Dan Heng hides the little modesty left with the muddled covers, not even trying to hide the untidy appearance or shambolic marks on his neck and shoulders. No one needs to know they didn’t follow through, nor do they need to know if they did.

“Hm. I will. Or do you think this can veil our wrongdoings?” asks Ren without any sign of venom. They can engage in this enthralling dance all they want, but their fate is written. Good times never last, as Kafka claims.

Dan Heng scoffs. “I’m not that naïve,” he says, more to a whisper than a proper answer. “Are you satisfied, at least…?” Ah, he almost sounds unsure.

As Ren is done buttoning his coat, neglecting the disappointment at seeing none of the marks Yinyue-jun inflicted on him last, he goes for the sack of money. Soon, he will need to change it for a larger bag since patrons never stop offering countless credits to get hold of a whore they cannot even fathom its true worth. If only they knew. 

Before giving Dan Heng the pouch, though, Ren opens it and searches for the valuable ruby-and-onyx piece that would secure the courtesan for a good lunar system-months.

“What…?” The courtesan motions to grip Ren’s wrist, but the hunter does not even spare a single look if not towards the precious ornament, making sure it punctures the Vidyadhara’s keen ears where no other jewel has pierced. Dan Heng stiffens, blinking and flinching only when Ren successfully perforates his tender skin.

It suits him. Ren ignores that he shares a familiar jewel for his own ear, simply picking Dan Heng’s lingering hand to lay the small bag with his payment. It suits him, it was his, to begin with. The red tassel earring was meant for the Holiest of Holies, after all. 

“I’ll send a cycrane next time,” Ren says at last for a farewell, turning and leaving the room before Dan Heng can react, with the tiny relief that his mara has quieted and almost forgiven Elio for his promises.

Almost.

Chapter Text

Ren abhors Kafka for the same reasons he respects and is thankful for her. 

The truth is, he never knew if Elio had foreseen Yinyue-jun in the swordsman’s future when he promised him a funeral. More than retribution and justice, Ren had no hopes of thoroughly fulfilling it and accepted the singular hope of reposing as he deserves, as his nature called for. Death meant he could rest and that his debt was paid.

He does not know if meeting Dan Heng was a curse or a blessing. Should it be the first option, it is worse than the thousand-eyed Aeon. 

Standing before the familiar tea house, Ren wonders about one too many things that are beyond his ability to correct at this point. 

Soon, he will have to return to the Xianzhou Luofu to impersonate his part of the script—all for a decent burial, all to have his sword buried among many others he laid before while waiting for his turn—and he inquires, in the silent moments where seafoam eyes and ebony hair intrude his thoughts of loneliness, if the mara could ever accept Yinyue-jun without turning this vessel into a living weapon. 

Last time, Ren’s remaining reasonable part prevented him from jumping on Yinyue-jun when he entered the room. The ropes were not the most robust fibres that had ever restrained him, but they were sufficient to keep him quiet, pliant, and from striking Dan Heng. 

It is raining in the underground tonight. 

It is halcyon in a similar azure, moonlit touch, and Ren takes a deep breath before entering the establishment.

“You took your sweet time returning, dear,” purrs the Madam with a smile that knows too much and eyes of a creature beyond a simple foxian. She beats him before he can cut her witching sentences, and requests Dan Heng. “He’s still getting ready. You’d do well in waiting for him to be presentable before seeing him.”

He’s always presentable. “I don’t care about that. I told you already. And I told him, too.”

She sighs in faux tiredness. “Can’t you simply appreciate the effort being put into pleasing you? You’re a difficult man to sweeten and surprise…”

“I don’t expect surprise from fancy garments and lipstick,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest. “Just tell me when he’s done.”

In the presence of people like the Madam, the best course of action is to turn your back and leave them talking by themselves before their words can influence you any further. For everyone’s luck, the mara stopped tormenting him in the last few days, almost as if it dwells, pacified at the prospect of something Ren cannot grasp. The mara may have more access to his memories and desires than the swordsman himself; Yaoshi probably knows why he’s been given such a lulling.

The paramours stripping themselves, engaging in sexual intercourse and dishonouring their partners in front and behind the paper panels are not even prominent in Ren’s sight and thoughts. The sounds of flesh and breathless moans are mere wanderers in his senses as he sits in one corner, closes his eyes and waits.

“Are you lonely?” echoes near him, almost draped over his ear. “I could fix that, handsome.” 

Hands start roaming his shoulders, and without giving genuine regard to the woman, he grabs her wrist without genuine strength and removes it from himself. “No need.” He will be fixed; she is just not knowledgeable of his situation, and it cannot be anyone who could solve his predicaments. 

She huffs. tone sipped in amusement. “As long as the gentleman leaves this humble establishment satisfied, we are all content.” She leaves as the wind, silks brushing against the swordsman’s arm and leaving behind the strange fragrance of frankincense. 

“Lesser men would have easily given into her charms, while you don’t even spare a single look.” 

When Ren opens his eyes, the Madam stands before him, all-knowing when she should not. He snorts and gets up. “These are distractions for men who are fated to be mara-stricken and try to live the remaining decades of lucidity in their brains.”

“As if you are so different,” she muses, rolling her eyes. “If only all the patrons were like you.”

“You should be thankful they’re not. His rooms, yes?”

Waiting not for a nod or a verbal confirmation, Ren ignores the crude scenery and indecorous cacophony through the establishment, walking the known path towards an upper room he knows as intimately as his sword’s blade.

There are no elegies sung and sonnets recited throughout the entire crystalline waters of Dragonprayer Terrace, the eeriness of Scalegorge Waterscape at night, where the void reflects itself on the calm waters, that could be sufficient to describe Dan Heng. Ren fathoms the statue in Dragonvista Rain Hall is somewhat verisimilar, but it is a poor and irredeemable stone if compared. 

Some cultists that still revere the last incarnation believe in the euphemisms in their odes, but Ren wonders if they would find it belittling their lyrics the moment their eyes fell on the real muse. 

“Ren?” 

The Stellaron Hunter is no fool. He knows that part of his loathsome pursuit and sorrow comes with the disappointment of still carrying an affectionate regard for the moon-born scion. Killing them both in a murder-suicide would solve all of their problems, all of everyone’s problems. They would do a favour to the world and the cosmos if they were sent to the depths with stones attached to their feet, never to return. 

Instead, Ren closes the door behind him and beholds until his eyes sting, unblinking. 

“Ren…” Dan Heng, in all the glory only an authentic mother-of-pearl could possess while wearing the shades of the seas and abyssal nacres, extends the sylphlike fingers in a welcoming motion, clean palm, inviting the newcomer to approach. “Come here.” 

What is Ren to do if not obey? 

Margarite-bred palms pull the hunter nearer, soon touching his ice-cold, humid cheek. Ren can notice the soft charcoal line under the waxing crescent moon for eyes, the slight peach hues on velvet lips, and how a thin coral-and-pearl lacework falls as a shawl over the cascade of black hair. 

“You’re soaked. Are you not cold?” asks Dan Heng, balsam for voice, seraphic enough to bedevil cosmic horrors. Ren does not answer correctly; he grunts in refusal. When was the last time he truly felt cold, freezing on the spot? It is not a demise he particularly enjoys. Guiding Ren to sit on the bed, Dan Heng takes a deep breath. “Let me sear you.” 

“There’s no need,” but Ren lets him either way, trying his best not to react when he the flowery touch nestles him, lissom and aqueous beneficent lotuses itching on his dampness.

Ren also benefits from this small, quiet moment between them to let his attention change from the comforting theurgy, caressing him at its sweet transcendence, to observing Dan Heng, who can never stop haunting his thoughts. Every time Ren meets him, the fantasies acquire more dreadful details to torment him into question his sanity. 

With the unveiled collarbone, it is expected for Ren’s regard to fall on the jade-white skin, the hollow of the clavicles, the movements of the neck, the enticing descent… that is concealed by the light collar of the robe, tied at the lithe waist with more strands of transparent, cerise silk. He can find, however, more wan in the pale wrists, easily seen by the soft waving of the oversized sleeves. His mind wages one too many thoughts on whether the pale wrists would taste on his tongue.

While the coral-and-pearl filigree could be considered a charming and beautiful embellishment, when draped on the shimmering black and near the emerald-trimmed eyes, it becomes a simple ornament that sparkles under the luminaires. Or the red tassel earring shining in its ruby-and-onyx preciosity. It was always meant to be yours.  

“There, there,” coos Dan Heng, hands roaming the hunter’s coat from the chest and up the shoulders, trailing the collar. “Is it not better?” 

Ren blinks away before noticing the soft contour of the courtesan’s legs under the robes or how close they sit, bumping on his. “It doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t bother with that when you should be endeavouring to take my life. My body will cool in one way or another. How will you kill me tonight?”

It takes Dan Heng one, two, five seconds before speaking, unsure of his words, “I was planning on surprising you.” A timid confession given with a sheepish press of the lips, quiet, thus far empyrean. Nervousness. 

“I could order you to rip my heart again and not put it back.”

“…you could, yes,” concurs Dan Heng, avoiding to stare back. His fingers have yet to let go of the coat’s collar. “After all, you’re paying me to indulge you. I do what I must, what my patron asks of me.” 

Unambiguously, he sees that Yinyue-jun refuses. Behind the white lie of acceptance, the words of reassurance, and the well-behaved demeanour. Yinyue-jun has never been one to accept, and this reincarnation is no less stubborn; less aggressive, that is seen, but not less defiant. That is why Ren is still kicking and breathing, after all. 

“With that mouth of yours, I see why so many fall for your lies.” Why else would his past self have fallen so low if not by a deception? “The moment you had my heart in your hand, pulsing it with the rawest blood, you would put it back out of spite. You’re lucky I know I’d be living for longer, for I cannot fathom falling for your untruths and becoming a penitent once again, Your Highness.” 

“I have not lied to you,” rebukes Dan Heng, frowning. “I overreacted. I admit it. I should… I should have left you the way you were, but I didn’t. You still owe me answers, though, just as everyone else.”

The tempest in his eyes is more akin to the Scion of Permanence than the passive-aggressive little liar in the flagship’s worst districts. The firmness and the imposition in his tone almost make Ren enjoy being alive and see the fall of the viridescent mask.

“I will kill you how many times necessary until you are satisfied and meet your coveted burial, but not before I am satisfied with the justifications you give me. You say we will answer to punishment together? Then you’re not allowed to simply vanish when I am still in the dark.” 

No sufficient poetry lyrics could match the softness with which the moon itself threatens the ones it cherishes. How can Dan Heng speak of vicious retribution with the tone of a lullaby, not even triggering the mara to expose its rotten gold roots and terminal Nirvana?

“You are claiming not to be a liar and yet are hiding behind a mortal appearance.” Ren blisters but grins, overtaken by a deplorable gift—miserable, even. He would have spoken with poison in each word, but he can only reminisce about how well the keen Vidyadhara’s ear looked with the rightful heirloom on his flesh.

Was it not you who claimed we should rejoice in a last supper as one, stark naked as we came?

Ren much prefers Dan Heng with the horned crown, emerald and pearl, than this lesser—and rather poor—disguise for an ordinary Xianzhou citizen with a human bloodline.

From under the emerald-hued white of the dress, the tail emerges, serpentine and coiling around their feet with its lunarescent scales; Ren cannot yet see it in its almighty form, but the flowy teal tip brushes softly at their ankles. Between the coral lacework of the filigree, a pair of horns akin to smaragd-hued chalcedonies carry a few pearlescent ornaments sublimely suited with decor. 

Although the tips of the ears shape themselves keener, the red tassel earring never loses its grace. No, they even obtain more attention, lingering against the pale face and alluring cheeks, matching the rosette blush.

Dan Heng softly tilts his head with a gentle smile, reddening more in the face. “You may touch them if you want.”

“I thought you’d have realised by now that the things I want from you are not so similar to those of other patrons,” he murmurs, nails piercing his palm until he feels the warm blood gushing. The invitation is tempting, but he fears he will wish to break the keratin as a forgemaster would cut a gemstone. “Are you not even a bit fearful, scared of what I might do to you in the name of retribution?”

“Would you like to kill me?” 

More than once. “Why, do you fear I would cut you down like others have done to me?”

“Do not mistake my interest for fear. I’m not a simple victim and have never been a commoner for anyone. Much less you,” retorts Dan Heng with no malice, cradling the bandaged, shrivelled hands. “You may hold the title of a hunter, Ren, but I’m the one closer to monsters than gods. We both know that I would kill you regardless of whether you let me take your life or not.”

Ren’s thumb brushes against the base of the horn, feeling the calloused texture of the keratin and somewhere inside of him—be it the mara or his own non-metamorphic desires—he ponders if he could break it. Is it as fragile as it looks? Turning into ashes in his hold, shattering in the same way Yinyue-jun and his jade could…

“Every time we meet, you steal a breath of mine. I don’t need proof that you would defeat me, I ask if you would be defeated by your own volition. Is that not why you ask?”

…shattering, perhaps, not yet, but Dan Heng lets out a wavering, husky sigh. “I want to know what roams your mind when you see me, for I cannot help but wonder if you find death’s embrace to be a marvellous affection not only to you.” 

“You don’t feel rage and disgust at being subjected to kill me?” 

“How could I, when you look peaceful giving in the arms of such a permanence?” His fingers feel soft as velvet when caressing Ren’s rough and never-to-heal ones. “Do you want me to feel disgusted? To enrage myself and, in a fit, cease you once and for all?” 

I want you to know discomfort and to know when your willingness is taken away. “Maybe I simply wish to see how you would look when you are met with the same fate as me. How you would look when I took you the same way my death was robbed. You have not known horror until I show it to you.”

“Tell me how you would take me, then.” Dan Heng’s whispers begin to sound more endearing than zephyr’s bliss.

“Do you not fear that I might follow you until the end of the universe should you disappear from my sight or run away from me?”

The more he caresses the horn and its chalcedony aspect— could Yinyue-jun be, in his entirety, made of jewels? —the more he sees the tail curling and twirling in itself under the silks, pantomiming a river, the sea waves at their zenith, and the Vidyadhara closes his eyes with stirring lids, lashes shadowing over his cheeks, scantily tilting his head upwards and curving his spine.

“Maybe I want you to come, to present these horrors to me,” says Dan Heng, dainty and gentle, unbothered—or, better, anything but terrified— by the menacing creature before him, who sheds more horror in melancholy than genuine ire. “Maybe I want you to run after me the moment I am no longer in your sphere, follow me should I happen to flee, chase me through chains of stars all over the cosmos, and hunt me down as your rightful claim. The same way I would shadow you to madness if you fall into delirium, you would come to me.”

Ren swallows the festering venom that delights at the prospect. His hold tightens around the keratin, conjuring the corneal cracking in his ears. “Why do you view yourself as prey when we both know you’re the natural hunter, luring victims to a deathless death as the snake you were born as?” Crack!

“See me as a viper, then.” Dan Heng, half-lidded and unsealed lips, leaning forward, speaking in pure satin, enticing fish to drown and birds to fall. Ren is nothing but a follower, weak and induced. “See me the way you want. Whatever you need me to be, I’m yours to do as you please. Treat me as you crave.” Five fingers creep up Ren’s throat and jawline, following a humming chant. “I only wish you would come for me. You didn’t answer me—how would you take me?”

Their lips’ encounter is chaste at first. 

Using his hold on the keratinous appendage for guidance, Ren hoists Dan Heng nearer, keeping his face angled and agape for him, just as he slants down at the courtesan’s mercy to feel his ever-bitten, always-wounded lips. When Dan Heng seeks more of his flesh and opens his mouth to suck at Ren’s thin skin, the latter feels the faint graze of fangs keeping him under a witching grasp. Good. 

Ren prefers the moonlit heir in his ravenous, vindictive state to faux innocence.

Two palms cup his neck, bringing him nearer and bumping their legs until bumping is not enough, and Ren huffs mid-kiss before picking Dan Heng’s thighs and lifting them over his own.

They both groan, Dan Heng’s tail following its owner in a shivering reflex and curling further in disruptive twists, while Ren ends up palming the courtesan’s thigh over the silks, wishing to tear it apart—would Dan Heng be mad at him for that?—and search for the scales beneath.

“You still haven’t answered me,” mumbles Ren, letting Dan Heng bite his lips to the dragon’s whims. At the confused humming in response, he presses, fingers firming on the thighs even through the light fabric. “How will you kill me? Do you plan on choking me to death with your mouth instead, strangling me from the inside with your tongue?” 

He mimics a bending with the horn, ripping a voiceless choke out of the moon-born scion. It is for the best, he thinks, given Yinyue-jun would look astounding while squirming for a broken horn. Oh, the things he wants to tear apart with it.

“I told you, it could be a surprise.” The way Dan Heng blinks, eyelashes fluttering and observing Ren from under them, irises shining like water under the moonlit—it would be so, so easy to pretend they might have something beyond remorse to move them forward, something that would persuade him into stay in the land of the living. “Will you not trust me?” 

“You know I can’t,” even though I wish I could. 

“Only for tonight, that is all,” begs Dan Heng, thumbs fondling Ren’s cheeks with the affection many patrons pay for. Has someone asked this of you, regardless of the jewels I give for your uniqueness? He knows better than to ask when the courtesan lures him deeper and deeper. “Let us both be rewarded in the secrecy of this room, no one to punish us for sins we can’t remember. I deliver you death. You deliver mine.” 

One too many times, Ren thought of his corpse and Yinyue-jun sharing a grave, decomposing in the same piece of land under the sea and forever stored away in the abyss, entangled limbs and forgotten by the living, chastised by the dead, epitaphs marking their sins instead of their names. Let the cosmos never forget why they should be buried as one, never to depart from one another. 

“Let yourself be mine, and I, yours.” 

For tonight, they will share a bed instead of a grave.

Their second kiss starts chaste and corrupts into yearning the moment the courtesan bites the hunter’s lower lip with enough force to draw blood.

Ren thinks that it is fair, to a certain extent, that he’s to be used as an instrument more than an actual human being. He should not be considered a human being anymore, not after the Emanator’s flesh got imbued into his, nature changed into that of a monster designed for Yoashi’s amusement and sick pride. 

So he pretends—feigns that Yinyue-jun could deliver him a worse fate or quell the current state of misery. If only for a night to pacify the thirst.

His grip on the horn dissolves into a crawling hand touching the collarbones, pressing them until he senses lamentations against his mouth. Despite the soft silk covering the skin, Ren cups as much flesh as he can feel in his palm, besetting on willowy hips, aiming higher, sighing in harmony and almost falling on the mattress.

“Wait, wait, Ren…” They groan together again, the Stellaron Hunter out of friction and dissatisfaction and the courtesan out of ache. 

“What now?” Is Dan Heng not getting what he wants already? What more could he possibly offer to this fallen god if not obedience? What else do I need— 

Letting Dan Heng do as he pleases— ha, how ironic —means having the Vidyadhara kneel on both sides of him, supporting his weight on the shoulders, and adjusting himself on Ren’s knees. And Ren… cannot do anything but tighten his grip on the velvety hips.

“You can remove my hanfu if you want,” mutters Dan Heng, slowly swaying on Ren’s lap, hardly fearing he might fall. If Ren looks at the eyes with tempests for crystals, he might be sent to delirium faster than any maraphilia could ever attempt with him. So he hums, hands stiff, ever in place. 

Instead of being unsatisfied with the answer, however, Dan Heng carefully picks Ren’s grasping fingers and guides them to his back, where delicate ribbons tighten the garments at the waist. One knot after the other, the ribbons fall without grace, leaving the silks light and undone. 

Like this, Ren can see more of Dan Heng’s collarbones, the curvature of his shoulders, the middle of his chest, the revealing thighs with a flowery ribboned jewel in silver… and something else under the mantua, just under his chest. Removing the last remaining fabrics and forgetting about them falling on the floor, Ren descries an elegant bodice fastened around the lithe waist, just above the teal-coloured scales on the bare navel.

“You can touch it, you know.”

Obviously, Ren thinks, tongue suddenly sour, I’m paying for it. Would you let anyone touch it if it were someone else’s strales?

In ivory boning and diaphanous silk, the bodice appears as a natural second skin, too form-fitting, appearing smaller than it must be, and it would be a lie to say it does not fit the statue it adorns. Throughout the sheer silk, coral and ashen lotus were meticulously embroidered, fine needlework painting them flowing within the fabric and the skin underneath, as if enrooted on the courtesan. Coral filigrees wave to the back, becoming its knotted lacework to keep it in place. 

The mere act of grazing his thumbs against the corset evokes shivers, but he is never told to stop his endeavours; not even when his hands slowly slide the palms on the serpentine curve of his body, when they cup the faux tattooed skin or when he envelops the waist with so much ease his finger meets without hardships, on his front and grazing on his sacral, behind, above the curve of his spine.

“Ah!”

Ren does not think about much when he brings Dan Heng down on his lap, and buries his face on the wan collarbones.

“Ah, easy now…” The courtesan balms him, fingers caress his hair, but all Ren can pay attention to is how good Dan Heng smells, luscious in a garland of orchids’ sweet and a little after-rain. No one could get bored of it. “Let me lay you down.”

Grunting, Ren allows him to do as he pleases. Always, apparently.

Dan Heng pulls only enough to set both hands on his shoulders. “Trust me, yes?” he asks, orders, suggests while pushing Ren to lower his body on the bed. This a more fitting position for a mortal to their god, Ren thinks, as if Yinyue-jun ever needed more depictions and insufficient poems to describe his eerie appearance and divinity.

He cannot breathe his scent or hold onto the slender waist clearly made to be had, especially if by him, but Dan Heng merely adjusts onto his thighs, where the thigh-chain shines in its subtle allurement. Ren can see the jewel, a mindfully trimmed lotus in white and silver gemstones, as the courtesan straddles his chest slowly and supports himself on the mattress.

“Were you satisfied last time?” asks Dan Heng, looking down at him.

But all Ren can do is tug at the thighs, teasing the jewel and flickering his attention to the scales so close to his face. “I thought the payment gave you my answer.”

Dan Heng huffs, diverting the stare. “I suppose it did. In this case, if I asked you to do it again, before…”

Ren pulls him forward until Dan Heng slides his hips with a surprised yelp, curving for support, and Ren wastes no time in breathing the styrax-scented navel and licking at the scales.

“A-Ahh… ah, Ren—!”

It had not been so long, or maybe it has, far too long, since they met, and Ren met one of the sweetest demises between the thighs of the moon. His teeth nip and suck at every firm-fleshed emerald scale, as if he could never go without it in the near future. Knowing how much the skin of an exuviated snake tastes like, how could he live in his loathed permanence without aspiring to flay it with his teeth? He gnaws at the scales’ borders until he phantom-feels them lacerated.

“Ngh— m-more gentle, please—”

Wetness starts to drench his chin, cheeks and throat. With as much mercy as he can possess, Ren abandons the scales with rosette, abused skin surrounding them and slides Dan Heng further onto his face until a soft and quivering humid pair of lips meets his mouth and tongue. Teeth nibble at the enlarged bud, begging to be bitten. If the way Dan Heng spasms and tugs at Ren’s hair, bringing him closer to his sex, is anything significant, Ren takes it as if he has not used his tongue enough. 

“Ah-ahh… right there…”

He tastes the puffy button until he can simply graze his teeth over it to make Dan Heng weep, his tongue venturing into the fleshy folds until it is engulfed by the moon’s brine. The cunt tightens around his tongue as it could. It is painful, and he is starting to lack air, but the more he grips Dan Heng’s thighs and hears him moan at getting pleasured, tail twisting and curling around the hunter’s leg, the more he savours the overflow, submerging his tongue.

Ren knows Dan Heng is close by how shattered his cries become, how tense his limbs grow, and how his cunt flutters and contracts around his tongue, pulsing more and more, so he submits to the unkind and vicious impulse of biting where his muse is most sensitive, tender, and still shuddering—letting his mouth engulf most of the cunt while roaming his tongue with fervour, only to grace it under the button, biting it as soon as Dan Heng gasps at the motion.

“Ah—Ren, Ren, Ren….”

Instead of pleas or coherent words, all he hears is his name being chanted in favour of tearful sighs, a cunt filling his mouth, which he imbibes without second thoughts.

Delectable as it may be, Ren grunts and delivers himself a brief moment of death by reminding the saccharine fall from the last time he breached the divine, or the closest thing to the divine he will ever meet, because if he knows anything of his script, is that he will not live to see all the Aeons fall. But he can see Dan Heng, his moon, staggering to a spasming mess. 

He wonders if Dan Heng will be merciful enough to let him meet another restful end between his plush thighs.

…and he soon finds that no, he will not; rather than dying peacefully, Dan Heng pets him and alleviates from his face, dishevelled hair and aching-breathing mess slowly straddling back as the tail uncoils from the Ren’s leg, but never leaving the serpentine crawling and twisting. 

 “You could finish your job if you just came back here,” Ren mutters, licking the salty remnants from his lips and their contours. If he is lucky, he will taste the brine and petrichor under his teeth for days. 

Fingers find the buttons of his coat and undo them one by one. “My job is to make men happy,” says Dan Heng between inhales. “You, especially.”

A scoff. “You know exactly how to make me happy.” What a strange word to use. Has Ren ever been happy in their moonlight meetings within this filthy district, this forsaken quarter that the flagship cannot wait to burn down?

“Wouldn’t it make you happy if I took care of you before I put your corpse to sleep?” Another euphemism. His coat is removed without effort, along with nails trailing the scars on his chest in the company of a teal-made regard. They almost rip his bandages. “You want my cruelty for being godly, but then, so can my affections be well-received, no?”

“Your affections are unhinged, beyond what anyone can endure,” that’s why I became a monster, he made me into this abomination, “Your mercy is heartless enough.” He is still hard in his clothes, and Dan Heng swaying on top of it with his soaked sex is not quenching the goosebumps running through his body. 

Instead of being teased, however, Dan Heng unbuttons his trousers and slides to the floor.

How many can howl about gazing upon the moon, kneeling before them, between their legs and stroking their cocks? For once, this is not something the Stellaron had envisioned. Not this vividly, enthusiastically, and much less clean. Most of his conjurings involve him being cut before Yinyue-jun has any leniency on him—and yet, here he is, Dan Heng eyeing his stiffness with reluctance and famine, sylphlike fingers fondling to their whims, and tail snaking up his limbs.

Ren does not groan when the tip of his cock is licked and wrapped in a velvety warmth, but shivers trail his spine, and his hand flies to get hold of the now-familiar horned crown, keratin amid coral and pearlescent veil. Under him, Dan Heng shrieks, claws dangerously close to piercing the trousers and skin, but still keeps the cock in his mouth.

“Is this your plan to pacify me?” he asks, gritting his teeth, gaining a defiant stare below him—and more of his cock involved by the lips he fancies more than he should.

Amid sporadic gasps and quivers, Dan Heng swallows him whole, mouth uncomfortably stretched and bulging throat. If Ren were any crueller, he would force the courtesan to keep this position until he gets tired of the warm enclosure or until his knees hurt and he begs for air—but Ren is not cruel. His thumb returns to caress the base of the horn and teases a bending, making Dan Heng tilt his head back, but no more. “I could break it,” he says, receiving a surprised yelp. “Maybe you’d like that for punishment, too. In that way, you’ll be no High Elder, just as you wanted.”

Or maybe, he could still be—the High Elder should have enough power and influence to be fucked in Dragonvista Rain Hall and not hear a single word from anyone who sees it, shamelessly used and still be revered, pure and sanctified. Now, that would be a stain on their image. 

Perhaps, if his mouth and tongue were not occupied with licking him, Dan Heng would have answered with a curse or even a pretentious taunt, but he still has fangs, and they are enough of an answer. Ren tenses around the horn and snickers between the satisfied hums as Dan Heng uses him as he pleases, savouring him without genuine care for his horn. Go on, break it, it almost says, even more, when the Vidyadhara looks up at him with that tempestuous pair of eyes, break it and make me weep. 

He reaches his high when the tail tugs at his wrist, his hips pushing forward until his cock is swallowed to the base and spends himself in Dan Heng’s throat. Claws finally pierce through his clothes and sink to his skin, which only satisfies him better.

No wonder your price is constantly rising, he thinks. He could come by the image alone: the weeping moon transforming tears into crystals, feebly gasping and soothed by the rare, gentle caress on his horn. 

I should break it. 

He doesn’t.

Dan Heng pulls away, abandoning the cock with a pop and inhaling deeply before removing the man’s shoes and tugging the trousers lower. He gets up, knees oscillating and forcing him to lean on the mattress, yet he chooses Ren as his help, heaving breaths as he straddles him again, picking his fingers and bringing them down to his bitten and tender navel.

“Trust me this once.” Again.

As if Ren, bare as he came to the world of the living, would deny him. Again. 

Ren hums, grunts, and tugs him closer with his arm as he adds another finger inside. 

“Stretch me as you want,” mumbles Dan Heng, embracing his neck. The salty sweat is mixing with the scent of orchids and sex, sickly bitter. “You can… ah, you can finish me like this, too.”

Curling his fingers inside, Dan Heng whimpers and mimics a torsion with his tail. Ren caresses the tender base of the appendage, making it spiral around his arm; by now, the serpent’s cauda is more of a comforting touch than anything else. A fluttering and wetness sousing his digits induces him to add another. Dan Heng can be moaning and shivering out of pleasure, pain or discomfort, but Ren delights in them all the same, pushing deeper to his knuckles. He will have to suck them clean afterwards. 

Against his ear, he hears, “Do your whole hand…” and inserts a fourth finger out of reflex, hearing a hissing and fangs nipping his earlobe. In a few thrusts, until his knuckles are thoroughly soaked, he conceals his thumb within Dan Heng’s cunt, at last, the jade-like body trembling nonstop with faint whimpers and broken breaths. Would you do this with anyone paying you more than a million credits? 

Dan Heng’s tail curls until Ren grunts in pain, and gushes another wave of pleasure. 

“Lie down for me?” 

How can he say no when his hair is gently fondled, and the moon whispers so daintily to him? He also cannot resist tasting his soaked fingers when he removes them from that soft warmth, earning another keen.

All you have to do is take what is given to you, Ren tells himself. As he observes Dan Heng searching for a vial of oil beside the bed and straddling his lap in his bare glory, stroking Ren’s half-hardened cock, all I have to do is let him be.

“See, you only need to trust me,” huffs Dan Heng, steadying his frame on the bandaged chest and lingering above the stiffened cock. His eyes flutter, tail roams over the bed, and hair falls over one shoulder, a veil of pearls and coral cascading with him. And the Stellaron Hunter can focus on how reachable his waist is for him to take. “I’ll make you feel good, I promise.”

If Yinyue-jun wanted to have him so acquiescent and dutiful, all he had to do was stand above him as he does now, hissing and quivering, lowering his weight onto the cock.

They groan in a lewd harmony, Ren gnashing teeth and tugging sheets while the Vidyadhara shatters every breath as he forces inch by inch inside, a moan of relief when taking it all. It is a tense fit despite the stretch, but not an unpleasant one. He wants to curse every time the cunt throbs and clenches around him. Ren feels his hand caressed and removed from where it strangles the eiderdown, being brought to— oh. 

“You only need to hold me,” says Dan Heng, still clenching and trembling on the cock, taking deep breaths, but invites Ren to clutch onto his bodice. Could my hands get forged on your skin like the silken lotuses pretend to be? “You can keep me here if you want. Pull my laces, or move me… just never letting go.”

It starts slow. Ren does as he is told, pulling the coral lacework until Dan Heng is short of air, until his cunt clutches around the cock impossibly tight. Yinyue-jun doesn’t need proof to be divine, but Ren would easily depict the image of the High Elder throwing his head back and swaying his hips on his cock as a testament to it. 

Every sound coming out of Dan Heng’s agape mouth will forever haunt him during lonely nights: the image of his chest heaving and frantic for breathing, the quivering thighs each time he lifts himself to descend back on the cock, all the times his moans are interrupted because the hardness found another spot to distend and press, the swift brush of his fingers over Ren’s when they move to his front, touching his belly and grazing the navel. 

“Ah—right there, there…” As if I was doing anything but oblige, Ren only wishes he could tear the bodice off and change its embrace for his hands alone. A knot curls in his stomach, building heat, and he doesn’t want to leave the soft warmth he found in this celestial body using him to their satisfaction. “Ren, Ren, Ren, please—”  

What can he do if not just stay there as Dan Heng hastens his pace, seeking to force his cock deeper— until something breaks, he tells himself, and oh, it’s enticing—and flirting with a graceless fall as he calls for Ren one last time, clutching tauter than ever and coming with a third gush of pleasure. 

Tears moist his eyelashes, his mouth rests open, searching for air, and his body trembles nonstop. 

Then, he looks down at Ren, caressing the hands on his corset as if they were not moulding his body to withstand deafening lungs. “You can finish in me,” he says, a husk of a whisper, and lowers himself until he pecks Ren on the lips. Chaste, if compared to anything they have done so far. “Don’t you want to use me, too?”

“What I want is not just that,” he admits, his voice in no better condition and grip tensing around the corset. 

With all the force Dan Heng can still muster, he lifts his body until only the tip remains and slams himself back down, both groaning at the notion. “A-At least find your brief delight inside me.”

Ren sneers, cock is starting to hurt. Changing his hands for arms and bringing the courtesan to him with an embrace, Dan Heng shrieks. They do not leave an inch between them, and his hips to thrust inside of the tender cunt. “You’re the worst thing I’ve ever had.” 

“Ah, there—!”

I hate you, I want to worship you, I want you to kill me, there are too many thoughts going through Ren’s mind, but all become blank and malleable when spilling inside Dan Heng, who writhes in his hold and sighs with difficulty against his ear. Ren could almost die right here, with the moon leaning on his shoulder and not minding for the mess between his legs, not removing the cock inside him, fingers trailing to the hunter’s cheek and fondling his lips. 

“Are you satisfied?”

Ah, I could sleep with this voice. He says nothing, simply tightening the hold around him. 

Dan Heng huffs, pecking at the corner of his lips. “Rest well, my dear.” 

For the first time in a long time, Ren falls asleep without being in the arms of death—and he doesn’t care if he wakes up. 

Chapter Text

Chiyan has never been a troublesome knight in the army, though his lewd habits are not unheard of. 

This is why, as he reaches the Seat of Divine Foresight with a bottle of licorice-flavoured spirit and muttering unintelligibly under his breath, walking without a proper stance and without his helmet, there are no doubts that he just spent a ravenous night in more-than-just-vulgar establishments that the upper citizens pretend not to know of their existence. 

If only he wore a better face instead of the let-down, brooding semblance with a bit of anger.

“What’s that face for?” taunts another knight, obviously entertaining himself with his companion’s misery. “Don’t tell me you lost your so-called irresistible charm and didn’t get your cock sucked last night,” followed by snickers from the rest of the squadron.

He receives a grunt in response. “Shut up, for Lan’s sake.”

Expectedly, the cloud knight gets an amused laugh from his peers. “Not even paying for the whore?” The man whistles. “My friend, if the bitch can’t want you with money, I’m afraid you’re a lost cause.”

“It’s the money,” Chiyan complains, drinking from his bottle. “It wasn’t enough for him to even look at me.”

That makes his companion straighten his attention. “The harlot didn’t think the Divine Foresight’s payment was enough?” Surprise is insufficient to describe it, but it has yet to spark a flame of interest. “What’s the problem, then? Look for another. Unless you’re too embarrassed to admit you stumbled upon a money-eating, deceitful brothel.”

“No, no, you don’t understand.” It is the only moment where a single sign of lucidity is exposed in Chiyan’s demeanour; he is not drunk, not sleepless but awake to the best of his abilities. “Forget about the whorehouses the Charioteers like to visit or the fair-game dens for the addicted. Lan, I don’t think the Arbiter-General knows about this. You won’t find faces like his everywhere, even if you have travelled the whole Alliance.” Another sip of the absinthe, just to not allow the misery to eat him. “He has the voice of a celestial as if… as if the moon created a face. Plays like a muse.” And with a grunt and a huff, he whispers, “And a fucker has been monopolising him for Lan-knows-how-long.”

“Oh, it’s worse than I thought,” murmurs his colleague, with only a hint of compassion. 

That soon disappears to laugh out loud. 

“You fell for a whore.”

In the end, Chiyan’s lewd habits only acquired a terrible reputation despite being harmless to the higher-ups.

It does not impede the rumours, ‘Haven’t you heard? There’s a charming prostitute in the underground who chants like the moon the flagship never had, making knights fall with a single look!’, to fly through the garrison and reach the ears of those in charge—and the Arbiter-General’s.

The only thing he can sense is a splotch of crimson in his sight and the taste of iron in his mouth. His limbs are unresponsive—he must have died.

The black-haired young man shivers violently all over, but still clutches onto the spear in his hands. He has no dragon horns, and his reaction is slightly less mature than Ren remembered… 

But he will never forget this spear, these eyes, and how cruelty burst out from beneath the mirror-like emerald calmness. His wounds begin to heal. His irises flicker and fix their gaze at the boy once more. Without hesitation, the boy makes another flourish with the spear… 

"That's it."

The one who shows no mercy to enemies—is you.

The one who single-handedly buries the beloved—is you.

The one who almost led the place called home to its destruction—was also you.

He falls down again.

The teen presses his hand against his own wounds and retreats, until he is no longer in the man's sight.

"Before I witness your death in person, we will meet again, ███."

Waking up from a dream—or was it a memory? He can no longer discern—is different from death. His lungs do not claim the pain of the first—many—breaths, they do not sting with the first inhale, his chest does not ache from the strange air filling his body; his head does not hurt. His eyes are simply tired and unambitious to open, even if his senses desire him to do it. 

Something is caressing his hair, and the pillow smells like orchids and petrichor.

“Did you sleep well?”

Ren hums, burying his face in the warm pillow that oddly moves under him, matching his breathing… but as long as it’s comfortable and I can rest, all is fine, no?

How long has it been since he last slept so soundly, since he last dreamt? Ren cannot remember. If hazy memories do not return to torment him and lead him to hysteria, all he remembers are his name, his role, and all that Kafka tells him to do; he remembers Spirit Whisperer softly receiving him with open arms, leading him where he needs to be, where he needs to be used and meet his temporary end, reborn into an empty husk.

His dreams are not reachable, not even during his deepest slumbers, and yet. As the waves hug the shores in their unnatural supine, Ren lets consciousness lead him into the world of the living.

The first thing he sees is skin. A kissed-by-the-moon skin, one that has known endurance and yet can roam freely without any reminder of it, portraying itself pristine and pure because who would, in their right mind, tarnish it with punishments? Then, he sees legs, plush thighs in which he lies between, and messy, tousled covers that should have been concealing him, them, but are just comfortably thrown around on the bed.

Ah, yes— he is on a bed. When he finally dares to look up and first notices the candle burning beside the table, he remembers.

“I can give you something stronger to keep you longer,” says the moonbeam above him. “That way, you may sleep undisturbed until I say otherwise or ask me to wake up.”

“You shouldn’t say something you don’t truly mean to follow through,” he rasps, voice hoarse not because his vocal cords were ripped, shredded, dead, but because he fucking slept. “We both know you wouldn’t want to let me sleep before your guilt, regardless of how displaced it is, makes you fetch me from my rest.”

“I can’t say I wouldn’t feel the need to,” says Dan Heng, pushing Ren’s hair out of his face and placing it behind his ear. “But I find myself wondering—I fathom the idea you cursed me so I feel your torment, even if only to experience a quarter, no doubt less, of your pain. I should relish in your death, and I do when I ask if I could follow you. I wish I could, I think.”

“You would be the cruellest god if silver touched these words of yours,” he says, but he cannot express any venom. The mara should be there, picking at his senses and nipping his ears, whispering tragedies and the elegies he is part of. No, not anymore, and he does not know for how long… he can’t even bring himself to hope it lasts. It feels good not to feel anger. “I would kill you as you buried me if you asked.”

Dan Heng falters, holding Ren’s hands. “I’ll let you take me as you please to whatever demise and finality you find fitting for us.”

“I just wish I could curse you again,” admits Ren, letting Dan Heng pull him until he breathes in the scent of the moon, that of the tides and petrichor, the same in his dreams. “I think of ending you in your vast domain as if the water wouldn’t engulf me before I bit your flesh off. I think of you laying me on the sand and allowing the tides to take me anywhere but near you because I know you’ll torture me again. I don’t know if I want you to bury me or have you devour my corpse. I don’t know how to…” make you pay the price. “It’d be easier for both of us if you just killed me, Dan Heng.”

The dead cannot deal with the living. No more pain, no more mara to contour his senses, no more aching and longing for things he will never have.

Biting Dan Heng’s neck feels more natural than ever as he offers the two of them a customary deliverance, perhaps in their moments of secrecy and… companionship. How strange a word to use when it comes to them, howbeit so familiar. 

Ren sucks the jade as if it is a delicacy that he’s been tasting since the dawn of time, or the dawn of their times, as typical as inhaling oxygen. Maybe, in their past lives, they were biting each other’s skins with less anger than they do now. He detaches his teeth only at the moment he feels the first drops of blood on his tongue, sucked clean and licking the tiny wounds. Ren huffs, offering the last resource in his possession: “You should bite me.”

“Hm?”

Dan Heng blinks and focuses on Ren, heaving his breath, and the hunter can’t help but scoff, nipping at the courtesan’s jawline. “I know you want to bite me.” His hands graze at the waist’s sides, an irreproachable fit. “Why did you take it off?”

At that, he receives a chuckle and a caress on his neck. “I took it off so you could sleep on me. The pearly beads would hurt you when you laid your cheek. Do you…?”

Ren grunts. Yes. The bodice rests at the edge of the bed, open and undone, alongside the coral-and-pearl hairpiece, a cascade of filigrees poorly scattered, and the silvery thigh-chain. 

“Put it on me,” demands Dan Heng, red blemishing his cheeks as he looks away. Harlots shouldn’t be this shy, should they? Is he this sweetly, sickly shy with others? Ren refrains from asking or doubting. He doesn’t mind for other harlots in any way. 

Before him, Dan Heng turns his back to him and pulls his hair over his shoulder. The delicate arch of his spine, the soft curves of his sides, the smaller teal-coloured scales on his sacral and the metamorphosis into the grand tail, which curls around Ren’s middle in what he suspects is a cuddle. He could stare for days.

“Ren?” Dan Heng looks over his shoulder, tail tensing around the man.

Ren clears his throat and focuses on his task.

Chances are that the courtesan never once tightened the corset before inviting Ren to pull the ribbons hours prior, for the hunter encloses the waist with the bodice and finds his palms perfectly cupping it if he so dares to. His fingers still tremble, but he tries his best not to ruin the lacework. The coral lace intertwines, crosses and is pulled at every section, Dan Heng sighing and waiting, tail slightly brushing against the hunter’s hips.

There is no point in resisting the urge to devour the one he longs for, especially when the bane of his existence is better delivered than death for him, bare and willing and at his mercy. As he bites on Dan Heng’s shoulder, the tail stiffens around his middle.

He tugs the last row, and Dan Heng beautifully arches in his hold, placing his hand on his stomach and catching his breath.

“You can have me for as long as you want me,” whispers the courtesan, supporting his weight against the bedpost—and Ren takes the opportunity to breathe under his keen ears and the dangling red tassel earring, made for one Vidyadhara only. “Until you’re utterly satisfied, I’m yours, through and through. Deliver me demise.” 

Isn’t demise simply heaven for a deadman?

It feels more like a threatening promise than a considerate invitation, but Ren does not overthink when his cock is getting hard again and it’s brushing against Dan Heng’s scales just above the tail, earning him a low, wavering moan.

Having Yinyue-jun on his fours is another feeling Ren cannot name. Dan Heng never once strikes him with his tail or blood-bends him into stopping, ‘Faster, please’, yet his legs quiver nonstop, and he has to clench his claws on the bed frame when his client takes hold of his hips and pulls back, cunt wet and tensing in that brilliant, almost unbearable fit. 

Ren leans down, kissing him under the ear and biting the earring, slightly pulling it until Dan Heng keens. “Take deep breaths for me.”

“Ha…” The object of his desires swallows. “I can’t…”

Hauling the coral ribbons even tighter, Dan Heng shrieks. “You said I could deliver you death, no?” As soon as Dan Heng nods, a little smile curling on his lips and the tail coiling around Ren’s thigh, the bed thumps and cracks in oneness with their bodies.

They create a mellifluous composition of fragmented moans and thrumming flesh, unrelenting, and each thrust becomes more of a cacophony. Ren finds it melodious—Dan Heng’s voice reduced to staccato, breathless whimpers, claws scratching the bedpost until the wood is ruined, cunt quarrelsome tight around his cock that only heeds him to push further and further until the squelching sounds become another savouring aria for him. 

He wants to shatter Yinyue-jun and be shattered between the ancient teeth of a long-gone, antediluvian carnivorous creature whose sinuous spine arches the more Ren pulls the ribbons, whose breath catches and whimpers become nothing but gasps, and is close to falling onto the mattress by how the creature trembles under him despite his earnest hold around the waist.

His hand flies to the creature’s horn, pulling the alluring head back with a voiceless yelp. “I should break it,” he sighs heavily, leaning until he bites and tugs at the earring. He chuckles when he hears despair for a moan. “Break you down to your spine and shatter your bones.” 

“Ren… ah—!” A particular sharp and deeper thrust makes him tremble down to the mattress, face buried in the pillow. Ren never abandons the grip on the horn, pulling just enough so Dan Heng may gasp properly, claws ruining the sheets instead. “Too deep, too deep—!”

You smell good, but all Ren thinks and bites to say is how good it feels to have Dan Heng’s throbbing cunt fluttering and reaching its ecstasy the moment he pushes until he touches the deepest core, burying himself as far as he can. Under him, Dan Heng tightens and weeps on the cushions, but Ren still hasn’t reached his own pleasure. So he leans forward and bites the moon on the tender skin of its flesh, and thinks of finishing inside its squirming body. 

Ren comes with a deep thrust, not even resisting the way his body falls forward on top of Dan Heng’s, pressing him between the hunter and the ruined sheets.

Maybe, he thinks, just maybe I’d let him lie to me again.

Dan Heng finds it more pressing that Ren bathes first, even though the courtesan has more than just vestiges of their rendezvous in his body. Whitish lines are still coursing down his legs, though he tried to keep it seconds before. Any argument they might have had is shut when Ren brings him along without saying a word, ripping the bodice without mercy along the way. Truthfully, he doesn’t trust any of his thoughts for the time being, much less what his tongue may slip.

It is not a big enough tub to contain two people, beyond uncomfortable, yet they still remain, minding sudden knees and elbow movements just in case, and Dan Heng ensures his tail drapes out of the basin. With careful ministrations and care, they cleanse one another—and resist the will to test the tub’s endurance at the minimal sign of ecstasy.

“See?” says Dan Heng, tying a clean, less embroidered robe. “You may come to me anytime you wish, for any reason.”

“Why are you here?”

The Vidyadhara stops, blinking at him. “Why?”

“On our first night, you said, ‘They can’t know I’m here.’” Ren lost any exhausted sigh in his lungs a long time ago, primarily reviving them when the vessel of flesh in which he lives is also brought back. “They didn’t sell you here like a common whore, and no one knows Yinyue-jun has run away from the palace to become a harlot.” He finishes confining his belt and turns, searching for his coat. “You could just run away again instead of staying.”

When Dan Heng says nothing, Ren finds him sitting perfectly upright on the edge of the bed, their mess still visible on top of it. “You never asked me about this before.”

“Your best deal would be to leave the Luofu at once,” he continues. “Your damned Pearlkeepers are beginning to flood the streets in every corner of the ship, and I don’t need to be a Vidyadhara to know what they’ll do the moment they find your whereabouts. Some Charioteers are envisaging putting a bounty on your head for disrupting the peace, you know? The Judges don’t even hide behind their crusade to imprison you again. The Realm-keeping Commission is being backed up by the Divine Foresight to pressure your Preceptors to share any valuable information on Yinyue-jun.”

“They never needed to keep me locked in the Shackling Prison to make me a prisoner,” says Dan Heng, fidgeting hands tucked between his legs. “The Preceptors did it themselves, believing I’d betray their trust and the Xianzhou like Dan Feng did. They might need Yinyue-jun, but not me. They needed Yinyue-jun to watch over the Plaguemark and protect the Ambrosial Arbour, but they treated me like less than forsaken bastards.”

“And now you did betray them,” points out Ren.

“All I needed was time,” argued Dan Heng, inhaling deeply. “They were planning to execute me even if I obeyed, and that I did, but they still talked about establishing the Preceptor Council and getting rid of the tainted, maculate ichor line that is me.”

You can never not be Yinyue-jun, Ren refrains from speaking.

“I could’ve just gotten rid of them as they wanted to do with me, right? Become this… phantom monster they paint Dan Feng as, make everyone fear me when all I wanted was not to be punished every day for things I didn’t even know were my fault. They never told me, out of fear that I would do them again. It would be easy, right? Use the ancient invocations to drown them in the depths and make them pay for countless lifetimes, become something I never wished to be.”

“You’d be safe,” hisses Ren.

“And I’d be guilty of all they accuse me of,” rebukes Dan Heng, getting up and walking towards Ren. “I wasn’t planning on running away forever. They took care of the Arbour without me for centuries until the Judges freed me from the prison, and they still do. Maybe they’re right. I’m not really needed. And maybe you are right, I should leave. But I just…” Dan Heng’s fingers start buttoning the hunter’s coat, an irascible jade for semblance.

You wanted them to fear you, miss you, even. “And being here is what you found to make them panic?”

Dan Heng huffs, straightening his gaze up at him. “You say that, but we only met because you were here first.”

Ren glares with molten blood. “I wasn’t here to fuck. It was Kafka’s idea that sex might calm me down, but I hardly believed I was going to do it.” 

Did she know Dan Heng would be here? He cannot deny the theory, the most likely justification. He never asked her, nor Elio—has he gone so forgetful, so insane that he lost rationality even when out of the mara’s grasp? It had to be Yinyue-jun for something like this to happen. 

“Would you?” asks Dan Heng, At a confused stare, he sighs. “Have fucked someone else or asked them to kill you, just as you asked me? Maybe this friend of yours, this—this Kafka? What is she to you?”

Kafka? He scoffs; there is no proper way to describe what that woman is. “She keeps me on my toes when the mara flares again. If she doesn’t, I might screw the script up. And no, I wouldn’t have fucked anyone. I don’t know about… about killing me, though.”

Now it is Dan Heng’s time to scoff, tugging harshly at his coat when the last button is finely put. “You never needed me to soothe your condition, did you?” His voice is laced with a tired disappointment. “It was always that wretched retribution you wanted with Dan Feng. Is there not any way I could do to convince you to stay?”

“How could it be anything else between us?” His words come harsher than his intentions. “I don’t know how I could ever be made to stay. My sword will be buried alongside my body, as it should be—how can I aspire to anything else, knowing I shouldn’t be here at all?”

“I can,” stresses Dan Heng, a tempest forging in his eyes. That’s more like it. Never a wallflower, always an immemorial demon. “I can, just as I’m not Dan Feng, and I’m not answering for him! I should start anew. This was supposed to be a start, far away from all that he could have meant and been! I could make you…”

“I never hid that I wanted retribution from you, Yinyue-jun,” and he ignores the whispering, ‘Don’t call me that’. “Wanting or not, you are his reincarnation, and he wasn’t Dan Feng when cursing me.” No, because Yinyue-jun is a horrifying, cosmical deity beyond comprehension when under their hex. He would know.

“Did she ever kill you?” interrupts the courtesan, straining his jaw. “You once told me all the ways you tried to end your existence, and more than once, the tales came with someone else’s hand in it,” he hisses. “You once bled on me with another’s wound.” 

“You think you were the first I begged for death?” 

Dan Heng jerks away from him. “You never needed me if not for this tortuous revenge you want me to pay for. I thought, ‘Maybe he will want to live to see this debt paid’, because why else would you come to me for, if anyone can offer you death? Ask them to rip your heart—ask her, your keeper, to whom you go back every time, and spare your hunter’s money.” 

“How come you are not scared of me now?” Ren tilts his head to the side, scowling. “Your first reaction when we met was to invoke your spear, and we began this with death. We never departed from it, and we never will, Your Highness.”

“I wanted to bind you here on my spear so you wouldn’t seek another. ” 

“This would’ve been less painful than this neverending death and suffering you put me through with false hope,” he continues, disregarding the plea, but pleading himself. “It was about me, living! I shouldn’t be here! All you needed to do was to murder me, and even on that, you betrayed me. Like he did.”

“And others have done it, despite you coming here and imploring me to harm you and help you! You never needed me!” 

“When I needed you, you weren’t there!” He didn’t have a name and woke up from the deepest slumber. His past was shattered into razor-edged shards, and he forgot even his own name. You weren’t there. At that, the courtesan catches a breath, staring at him in horror. “But you come here, entertaining others even when I make sure you stay, make sure I can find you, for once I can find you and see you, and not feel alone.” 

Dan Heng startles with a miserable laugh. “I didn’t know you! The others, they… I don’t… you never…”

“You want them?” He jeers at it. He never wanted you, from the beginning. Do you think he would?  

Fantasies were never meant to last, and Ren is older than he should be. He should also know how fragile these conjurings are.

Ren, even in death, continues to trust in those he should never gaze up to. He can’t even argue anymore, tired in tone. This was stupid. “Maybe I should just let you go, then.”

The silence befalling them is beyond tense and uncomfortable. Ren can see a raging storm in Dan Heng’s eyes, the one that nurtures cyclones and devastating tempests, sweeping all in its range. You could have swapped me. You could have drowned me, and you never did. 

Dan Heng nods, eyes crueller and sharper than any knife. “Perhaps you have a point.” Even if he grins, Ren can see his fangs and how the corners of his lips quiver downwards. “I should also just let them all know Yinyue-jun is daintily begging in this shithole of a district under the Commissions’ noses. Would that be sufficient for you? I should walk up naked in the Shackling Prison and let them all have me, if that’s what it took to pay this damned price.”

Ren swallows the mara’s whispering words, ‘Fine, then I’ll kill you and them, too’, gritting his teeth and steeling his hand until his knuckles claim mercy. “I only asked you one thing,” he says, hoping he can break his own hand before it flies towards a jade-white neck. “But I should’ve known better from you.”

“Don’t you care that I might leave this room and let the first dozen men I find to fuck me, ruin me for you?”

“Would you care if I claimed so?” If he speaks the truth, he is no better than his first, unnamed life that guided them into damnation. He wants to steal the moon from the brine of the ocean, but the celestial never hid that it would abandon him the moment they arise, disappearing to a plane he can never reach. I can run after it. Incessantly. Neverending. “You always lie.”

“You!” Dan Heng cannot even finish a proper sentence, the white of his turning red and glistening more and more. He closes his mouth and takes a deep breath, pinning Ren with a gaze as piercing as his spear. “You do what you will. Finish the contract, tell everyone who I am, I don’t care. I’m a whore, remember?” 

Yinyue-jun lied. He lied again. He never wanted to follow you, only to drag you.

Without taking his eyes off the courtesan, Ren picks up the last bag full of credits in his jacket, approaches the other and pulls his hand forward to place the (last) payment. 

Ren knows he should have been killed the moment he sees Dan Heng gritting his teeth and horns flaring in emerald green when he mutters, emotionless: 

“The moment you leave this ship, I will raven your corpse, Yinyue-jun.”

Chapter Text

He is abandoning me.

He’s abandoning me he’s leaving me he’s forsaking me—

It takes Dan Heng a hysteric breakdown, a bloody ear, and a spiteful—though mournful—heart to leave the room after he last sees R—the Stellaron Hunter’s statuesque frame abandoning him. His chest is enraged and wrathful as the waves are controlled by wind and clouds under the eye of Yinyue-jun. Maybe this is the ravenous thing everyone was afraid of, should he let his feelings control his reason; it might be, it feels like, the path to a downfall, one that his ancestor gladly took and is haunting him to this moment.

How can he deny his ichor line when he has to suppress the tempestuous revenge?

I should have pierced you to the ground and kept you in the thin veil of life and death, begging me, he thinks, ripping his earring and picking the first set of lustrous robes he finds. I should have just cut your heart and devoured it myself before burying you, he curses, ignoring the loud thud when he opens the door and is seething. 

The abundant gathering in the entrance hall of the tea house mocks him endlessly. Of course, they will not care that he has been left behind in this hellish, nightmarish ship; they will not ever care that a paid harlot has been broken in more ways than one, not when it is expected to break them, piece by piece until they are nothing but wandering ghosts in the underworld of the Xianzhou. This is what Dan Heng offered himself for, is it not? It is not as if no one warned him of it. 

It is a poor Cloud Knight too drunk to remember all that will happen to him, and the victim of his woeful heart.

“I hope the night sees you well, dear benefactor,” he sings, adorning his face with the prettiest, most welcoming smile he can afford. If men sought him when he never attempted to bring them, then his efforts should lure them even easier. “You seem lonely…”

They always are. Men want what they cannot have, the faux sentiment of having arms to fall into. What is the poor knight to do, if not stare up at him with shining, amazed eyes? 

Dan Heng takes him by the hand, ignoring the raging storm blistering inside, guiding him to the tea house’s balcony. It is the sweetest and most isolated place he can think of, aside from his room. How could he, when his room and eiderdowns still smelled of leather, spiceflowers, and iron? He fears entering his rooms so soon after being forgottenforsakenabandoned that he might let the Azure Dragon dictate the following ruins to create, all because of him, him, him—

“Tell me what you most desire,” murmurs Dan Heng in the same intonation of hexing that he was taught to chant, swallowing the bile and the delicious remains of him in his mouth, strong and ruining his inside. “It’s been me, right?” Why else would this Cloud Knight return and sulk while giving him heart eyes, drink until he fainted and complain when Dan Heng returned to his rooms to meet— stop! Not here, not now. He is not unfair and naïve enough to overlook the men who flatter him; some, he even recognises. He loathes them the most, but perhaps anything is better than to linger on copper and the delicious scent of blood and leather he can still smell on his own body.

He lifts his gown, feeling the cold air hit against his skin that makes him tremble in any way but pleasurable, and lets the pitiful knight ogle as if he has never once seen a pair of naked thighs before in his life, gulping and stuttering, pupils dilated and quivering hands. Do you want me to lift it until I’m bare to you? It is Dan Heng who gulps then, pressing his lips together, leaning against the balustrade and parting his legs, thinking, this is what I offered myself for, this is what I— The Madam had once said that pretending to be someone else helps to get through difficult patrons. 

But hands begin to trail up between his thighs until fingers reach his dry lowermost, and a wave of fulgurant leap—hardly strong to kill—knocks the knight out, gauchely fainting to the ground. Water pools around the poor man; it is not water of rain, of common grounds for common people. He knows it comes from his veins to be this violent.

Dan Heng cannot contain the disgrace rising up his throat any more. 

He turns on the balcony and pukes, hoping to Long no one was underneath the railings.

“If he wonders from whence you came, you answer…?”

“A stars-away planet that no longer carries home for me,” he dutifully says, the epitome of elegance and nobility. “The Hexafleet has given me a home to nourish as my own, and the flower prospers under the gods’ attention.”

The Madam nods. “Very good. I almost believed you.” Her approval often feels better than the Preceptors’, he thinks. 

The offers did not take long to pile up on the Madam’s desk. 

Commoners were bordering on giving all of their savings for a simple glimpse of the jade lotus and its moon-kissed countenance. Cloud-Knights sent letters from the battlefronts asking for a single night of mercy, and the ones roaming the flagship were ready to fall on their swords after one evening in his presence. High lords and barons wrote with unspeakable digits just to have him for a day and play the guzheng, with the promises of a flourishing lifestyle and comfort as long as he accepted to be theirs and theirs alone. And they still don’t know they’re courting Yinyue-jun.

“Remember to be graceful regardless of what he demands of you,” she says, veiling him in sheer red. “If he wanted a foul-mouthed harlot, he wouldn’t have asked for you.”

Dan Heng refuses to let sorrow ruin his face this evening. It is the first client since… since then, and he was lucky that the Madam pretends nothing happened after that dreadful night at the balcony. He remembers coiling pathetically in the corner, hugging his knees like when he was a child and the Ten Lords visited him in the Shackling Prison, soon to be found by not one of the Commissions’ lords but the Madam, who sighed and said nothing, bringing him to her baths instead of his own. Dan Heng does not think the word merciful or kind are fitting to describe his employer, but it is the closest he’s had since coming to be into this reincarnation. He takes what he can.

His robes are bright red as living, flowing ruby, and the golden filigrees treat him for royal fairness. With a concealed face, he almost believes this is truly his wedding day, an unblemished bride prepared to lie with their influential husband. 

Reality is less disheartening and terrifying, though no less nerve-wracking. A highly sought-after lord above the district and with influential names on the Realm-Keeping Commission sent a letter with an astounding stipend for a simple night with the courtesan and requested that he come in the colours of a bride-to-be. An unsettling patron, according to the Madam, who grew tired of the older flowers and could hardly be satisfied if not by bending over and moaning as loud as possible, feigning pleasure to make him happy.

I failed at that with my first and only client. He swallows the bile and breathes deeply. Dan Heng refuses to remember his knees failing with him the moment the door closed nights prior, how he ripped the red tassel earring off his ear so brusquely and vicious he fantasised it was him, if only to console his grieving heart that he was not abandoned. “I will do my best to satisfy him, Madam.”

How bad can it be?

Lucky for Dan Heng, whose affliction and woes threatened to make him vomit, the lord is no one who had a minimal chance of recognising his face or pinning him as eerily familiar alongside Yinyue-jun. No, the man seems…

“Ah, you’re more mouthwatering than they claimed you to be.”

…measly, if Dan Heng is honest.

“My lord, this flower is much glad to hear words as flattering as yours,” he greets, resisting the urge to turn and leave the room. He joins his hands and bows as graciously as possible without hashing a hair out of place. “How may I assist you this evening?”

For a lord, he sure does not look much. Dan Heng chastises himself for the thought—he does not look like the Holy of Holies, either, instead dressing as a harlot and reduced to a paid little thing. The man has no decor, however: the simplest robe Dan Heng has ever seen despite the fine bronze embroidery on the amber-shaded fabric, poorly laced, which allows a less-than-desired view of his body. No doubt, if he moves too much, the robe will likely fall.

The man groans, sitting in a way he does not even shy himself from exposing his half-hardened cock, but in his hand, he carries a cup of tea and lifts it towards the courtesan. “You may start by serving us tea and calling me your dearest.” Judging by how he speaks, husked and lingering, almost lost in his words, Dan Heng suspects he drank something other than tea before descending to the brothel. 

This time, the courtesan swallows in pure dryness but nods with a small smile and sits on the comfortable pillow at the tea table. 

He cannot even do his job since, the moment he unjoins his hands to make them tea, the man grazes at his wrist, grasping it as a jewel. 

“Moon-turned-flesh, they called you,” the man rasps, bringing Dan Heng’s wrist close to his nose and sniffling. His hold is weak, if the Vidyadhara is honest, but he has to pass as a delicate flower instead of the ocean’s sovereign—for a common lotus, the palm rasps against his wrist, uncomfortable and itching. “Blossoming on his skin as a hexing fragrance of spring-born lotuses.” Then, he lets Dan Heng go with the lingering motion of still holding his limb in his palm.

I should kill you where you stand, but Dan Heng offers a faux sigh, ministering the teaware with the slowest motions one could attend to the task. “My dear is very kind with his praises.” It feels wrong to utter such a word for a man who cannot even tell he is disturbed and on the edge of throwing up. Ren could tell things about me I never grasped by myself. Ren would let me—

He shakes his head and inhales deeply, listening to the man’s rant as the tea is prepared. The moment he is ready to pour it for them, “Lift your veil,” says the man. 

Dan Heng freezes. He imagines the man desires him with the covered face so he can picture a better bride or a specific someone to envision as he is with the courtesan. He would not be the first to think of someone else while in another’s bed. “My lord?”

“It’s fair I see my spouse’s face before we share a cup of tea and consummate.” 

All he can do is close his eyes, using cloudhymn to sweep away the tears burning on them. “Is it not fair that the husband removes their bride’s veil instead, dear of mine?” Behind the translucent curtain of red silk, he tries to see another silhouette of the man in front of him—taller, broader shoulders, scarred and—

The man snickers. “I suppose,” and leans over the table. 

My husband’s hands would never be like these, Dan Heng thinks, forcing a smile to stay on his lips as his face is unveiled, my husband wouldn’t need to order me to dress as such; I would do it for my willingness; please him needlessly. Resisting the urge to swallow, Dan Heng lets the man touch his features as he wishes. Fingers press on his lips, then his cheeks, turning his face to the sides and checking the earrings, which is a small pair of golden lotuses. I removed the beautiful ruby-and-onyx after he left me, matching his garments for the night. If only his (not) husband came back to him, to the mirage of his true spouse.

The man hums, returning to his pillow. “Your previous client must’ve gone bankrupt keeping you for so long. No wonder why.” 

My previous client kept me for revenge. “Is my dear satisfied with this flower?” He kept me to murder him in this same room and desired to kill me with distress in our affair. 

“I’ll be more pleased when you undress for me,” he says. 

How ironic and disappointing, Dan Heng thinks, that days before, he undressed at his own volition for a man who wanted nothing but his killing, and now that another truly wants him for sex, he cannot move. Stop thinking of him. Your job was never to belong to anyone. Clearing his throat, Dan Heng serves them both, ignoring the bike running up his throat. “Ah, dear, this pleases this flower’s heart with great joy. May this lotus ask, however, for us to partake in a served-tea companionship before we lie together in bed?”

“I don’t care if it’s on the bed, and the tea is just to sober me up.” The man sends the entire cup down his throat with a single act. “Now, remove your robes.” Even if his tone flirts with sweetness and excitement, all Dan Heng can think of is to free his tail and slam him against the wall until he passes out. 

The courtesan softly sighs, removing his hairpiece and veil and placing them on the table with care. From this movement alone, the man grains, leading his hand between his legs, and Dan Heng stops undoing his laces midway, gulping down any nervousness. 

“Is my husband perhaps versed in the art of poetry?” he asks, swaying the robe from his shoulders. Any marks his previous client once bit in there are no longer visible, pristine skin as the moonlit on the still water ponds. 

The man frowns, his voice full of disbelief. “And what would you know of poetry?” 

“So happens that your spouse delights in the beauty of spoken arts and the intangible sentiment of songs.” And he was taught with an iron fist by his Vidyadhara tutors, who put him into writing them down by heart and reciting them with perfect punctuation and morae. 

“A literate prostitute?” The man finds it amusing if the way he leans back with a drunk smirk is enough. “Green, green the reed, dew and frost gleam,” he recites, stretching the words more than he should. “Where’s she I need, beyond the stream? Upstream I go, the way is long; downstream I go, she’s there among.”

“White, white the reed, dew not yet dried.” Dan Heng lifts his chin, more uptight and regal. “Where’s she I need, on the other side? Upstream I go, hard is the way; downstream I go, she’s far away.”

Dark and mirroring pupils overtake his eyes, and his lips curve in a genuine smile. “Bright, bright the reed, dew and frost blend.” The lord closes his eyes and strokes his cock. “Where’s she I need, at the river's end? Upstream I go, the way downwind; downstream I go, she’s far behind.”

He’s enjoying this, Dan Heng notices. How knowledgeable can you be? “Sitting bored on my bed one dusk, half the beaded curtain peeled back. In no mood to awaken yet no mood to sleep, clothes half-worn and eyes half-slack.”

Apparently, it takes the man a sluggish pause to remember—probably taken over with desire from his own hand than anything else. “A sudden gust of wind pushes forth the boat, in dreams a war with the borisin we wage.” He almost pouts, looking up at the courtesan. “How are you—”

“Knife in hand, black and red horses leap on, alongside my husband’s warship, in fight, I engage.” But Dan Heng knows the verses as the shadow of his incarnations behind him better than he knows Cloud Piercer when in his palm. “Two twittering orioles land on their branch, with karma past doth this life’s grief cast. Ten times reborn, with all its love and hate, how hard can one take of a husband lost?”

“Ah… Gazing up, I now see daylight through that verdigris, those… those…”

“Those past loves and past lives seen only in reveries,” Dan Heng finishes for him before he knows this aria better than anyone else. He gets up with the grace he mustered over the centuries. “This flower is almost impressed with their husband’s knowledge. I should finally see why I gave you my hand, dear.”

The lord is becoming sweaty from the effort put into reaching his climax. “Just—ah, just remove your dress and spread—”

Dan Heng allows his robes to fall enough to expose his chest, the serpentine curve of his waist, and the ophidian arch of his spine if he dares lean forward, but he stands high and proud over this man. “When the dragon turns red, then the green pines shall shed. Cast by the wind of a cold morning, feeling the weight of your suffering.”

“Ah… ah…”

“When the dragon turns red, then the green pines shall shed, spinning our glory through time and space. When will I next come to see your face?”

“Ngh… when… when the dragon turns red, the green… pines… ah… shall shed…”

“...wantonly drinking the silver moon, how many times must we be entombed?” The lord hardly needs any help—be it with pumping his rigid member for him or putting his mouth on it. “When the dragon turns red, then the green pines shall shed, pass like a dream out of sight and mind, six hundred years in this mortal bind.”

Despite Dan Heng feeling victorious and superior when watching a mortal coming untouched by his reciting alone, he cannot help but grimace at the sprout of white over the table and on the tea he so carefully prepared.

“Are you not satisfied with your future wife, dear?”

His lord moans, cock spent and sweating, heaving breaths. “This husband is… very satisfied.”

“Good.” Walking around the table and invoking slumber spells in cloudhymn against the man’s forehead, who falls into a deep sleep against Dan Heng’s legs. The courtesan sighs, dropping his smile as soon as he pulls his gown and lets the man hit the floor, unconscious. “At least one of us is glad.”

Even if the lord had been the highest bidder for his company for the night, he seems to have no intentions of keeping Dan Heng, who doesn't know if it is terrific news or a devastating one.

His client leaves with a heart for eyes and a promise of devotion, even claiming that one day he will be worthy of seeing his sun-blessed lotus undressed and delighting him as a real lover would. The man kisses the back of his hand, grazes his cheeks and sniffles at his neck—which made the courtesan almost vomit on his back—while offering an undeniably grand payment for his company.

Dan Heng waits until the door is closed, and he is alone in his room before puking his guts in the basin.

With the beneficent lotus on the tip of his fingers, he has no quarrel with cleaning his sickness and filling the bath right after, filling it to the brim on the verge of overflowing. Would it be so bad if I flooded this place? This flagship? He shakes his head, undresses himself, and enters the bath, unleashing his tail and horns in the comfort of the water. I’m no monster. He cannot let his anger dictate his actions, regardless of how capable he may be or how possible it would be for him to let go of self-control and let the tempest command all and everyone. Hugging his legs and shutting his eyes, he tries.

In the dim abyss devoid of light, he seems to have returned to the insides of a Vidyadhara egg, being ceaselessly churned in tumultuous waves and elusive dreams.

The starlight has him wrapped in strong arms that steam his skin, always meant for loneliness and freezing depths, a cold-blooded antediluvian creature. They pull him closer against a familiar chest in which he leans and breathes in the heated and salty scent of iron, but not blood, pungent and deliciously addicting. Dan Heng raises his head and kisses his lover, his lover, we are meant to be one in the grave, and he giggles when feeling the hanging long earring in a red tassel aspect, just like his own, because I gave it to him, I wanted him to be seen as mine. 

Where are these thoughts coming from?

“Starlight of mine,” he echoes, though it is not him. His voice, his timbre, his vocal cords, and yet. “When will you pause in your infuriating forging and come attend to me?” 

His lover laughs, pressing a kiss against his cheek. “Ah, I never meant to neglect my dear spouse. What a terrible husband I am.” Stop teasing!

“Stop teasing!” 

But they giggle, hug, and kiss and forget the forge is scalding hot, the warmest place this cold-blooded creature could rest, that his lover is sweating, and that the table is full of instruments and blueprints… 

…and Dan Heng opens his eyes to a terrifying familiarity of dry darkness.

From birth, all that ever lay before him was but a lightless dungeon.

Dracocatena nails are staked into his body, and chains of corallium winding around him to hang him in midair in the Shackling Prison.

“What is the secret of the Arcanum?”

His mouth is sealed shut.

“Through molten rebirth, you shall repay for your sins.”

His mouth is sealed shut.

“Where have you hidden the dragon heart?”

His mouth is sealed shut.

He does not speak, but his mind keeps wandering beyond the crimes he committed, recollecting how monstrous of him, how ruthless, inhumane and unmerciful it was to subject someone he cherished to such a terrible fate out of despair. The name that lingers on his tongue but never once uttered feels more like an answer than a simple prayer.

“You’re truly a heartless being, Yinyue-jun.”

Of course, the dreamscape, or him—the thing he was centuries before—thinks, biting his tongue shut until he tastes blood, I gave it to him. 

Dan Heng awakes with a startle, choking on his tongue and, for a second, genuinely believing in drowning in the imbued horror of his bones.

He never returns to the balcony in the next few days. Instead, he carries his fan and tight-laced robes to the brothel’s entrance hall, and if he searches for the red tassel earring for a sense of comfort—no, he doesn’t. Yes, but it was charming enough to fit his attire. He will not think of the earring as a mockery of what he has lost, he cannot afford it. Patrons will gift you. That was what the Madam said once.

The Cloud Knight tonight is not drunk, though he acts like being impossibly inebriated.

“Are you sure I can’t make you at least sit on my lap, jewel?” His words are sloppy, his speech is slowly beginning to stretch, and his eyes are begging to shut in a deep slumber. He can’t even remember I put him to sleep, can he? “I can just use my fingers, I swear…”

Dan Heng hits him with his fan and returns to treating himself, praying that Long, in whatever post-life They may be, gives him the strength not to unleash an accidental strike against the man’s face with his hidden tail. “I was bought for the night, and you know this.”

The knight groans, pitifully. “Why are you always unavailable?” he complains, falling back against the wall. “I can’t even convince you to use that pretty mouth of yours?”

More pitiful yet, Dan Heng did notice the bulge in the man’s trousers as soon as he laid eyes on him. “Fully reserved, beloved.” He has discovered that one too many patrons become excited at the mere sight of him instead of actual teasing, and the courtesan has yet to come to terms with this. “But you should try your luck next time or tomorrow night.”

His body tenses at the same time he hears the tea house’s door open.

The only times his nerves blossomed in desperation was at the sight of—

“Ah, shit,” complains the knight, treating himself to a full cup of rum. “Pearlkeepers.”

On the day I choose not to wear my veil, Dan Heng curses himself. Are Pearlkeepers now entering the establishments to search for him? Did Ren actually tell them? No, he dismisses the thought as soon as it reaches his mind. Deciding to take a peek, Dan Heng covers his face with the fan and looks over his shoulder from the side eye.

Oh, Long.

The Pearlkeeper is—or was, now—one of those in charge of overwatching Dan Heng at all times, whether in his bedroom or in meetings. He has a semblance of a miserable man that Dan Heng cannot pity, especially after hearing depravity behind his back from the same character who now enters the tea house and accommodates himself at the extreme corner of the hall. He can hear the tormented voice whispering foul words towards his statue, following the always-veiled Yinyue-jun to the terrace, the snickers as Dan Heng was put to shame every night for repentance on naked shells of the shores, ever-disgraceful.

“What if you just opened your legs and let me see—”

The Pearlkeeper receives another courtesan in his arms, but his eyes lock with Dan Heng’s for a second.

A spark shines in the serpentine gaze, straight and unblinking.

Did he recognise me?

“—and then you just finger yourself while I—”

The Pearlkeeper becomes too busy with the harlot in his arms, and Dan Heng wants to vomit.

“—I could just watch as your buyer fucks you; I’m fine with—”

Dan Heng takes a deep breath with the sharpness of a singing blade and looks at the bumbling, insufferable Cloud Knight, disguising his ire with coyness. “I’m afraid my buyer is not one for sharing.” Truthfully, he does not know who his buyer is. 

The Madam came to him with the stern gaze of a businesswoman, ‘I received a letter from the Exalted Sanctum this morning asking for you, outdoing all the other renters for the night’, and she froze him in place with a warning alone, ‘If I were you, I’d remember all the sonnets I learned, dear. You might need to touch this one’. While she found it amusing how his last client went home with an infatuation for his mind and unreachable beauty, she sighed soon after he finished retelling the reason for such a curious payment—higher than established for his company. “Don’t get used to it, boy. Men will always follow their little cocks before reason speaks for them.” If only this mysterious patron actually showed up… 

But in no time, Dan Heng is hailed by some other courtesans, claiming that his patron will arrive shortly. 

In a better tale, he would not have run upstairs. 

In this reality, he puts himself in a moment of hysteria, and he does not even mind if he mistakenly pushes someone, as weak as they may be, just to get away from the Pearlkeeper’s range. 

He will recognise my face. He almost stumbles on his dress. He will take me back. They will shackle me again. “I apologise, pardon me,” he mumbles as he swiftly pushes against another flower. They will never let me see daylight again. I need to leave, leave, leave—

He’s met with a wall and startles, falling back.

Or he should have fallen back, but he is caught by a strong arm supporting his waist, armour picking at his robes, and he blinks to see a chest plate of silver just where he unintentionally slammed. The Pearlkeeper may not recognise him if Long has mercy on Their Scion, but no one can hide from the Hunt and their Emanators. 

“They were telling the truth, then,” says Arbiter-General Jing Yuan, surprise-edged-written, bordering acrimonious, in the golden reflection of his eyes. 

Dan Heng does his best not to throw up.

Chapter Text

The silence is beyond uncomfortable. If Dan Heng were not controlling his own breath, it could have been the loudest sound in the room. 

Touching the teaware would make a sound, and Dan Heng can still not stand his own breathing to ruin the tension between them. The slight movement of his arm would flow the silks. The water would run loud and not wash away the worries. It is all useless. He keeps his hands on his lap and focuses on the kettle’s misplaced porcelain. Looking up means facing a face he swore he would never see again, eyes shining like the sun’s strongest rays and a familiar, kind semblance that gave him the news of his new custody. 

The General did not visit him in those dungeons to tell him of the final verdict, to say goodbye to a no-longer-living friend before his definitive execution, or even to share the news of a possible exile, never to return to the Luofu. Dan Heng often catches himself thinking of exile. Would it have been a better option for me, instead of confinement in my home? Scalegorge Waterscape turns into a bittersweet thought of home. He does not know if he wishes to return, not now. What else, however, would the Arbiter-General’s presence mean if not that his little tantrum has come to an end?

“When I got word that there was a… supernatural being roaming the underground districts, I first thought of a heliobus gone rogue,” starts the General, sighing deeply. The courtesan cringes. His voice is still the same. “It took me a few inebriated knights with a… fascination, so to speak, and… too vivid descriptions I’ve heard only in ballads.” Embarrassing. Even the General grimaced as he went on, avoiding to stare at his companion. “It was a wild guess. Too wild to even be real.”

Dan Heng chooses silence, but his breath inhales too sharply to be quiet.

“Especially when I saw how much it costs to… keep you for a night, ” the man continues, placing his hands on his crossed legs. “For the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to think before seeing you running away from the Pearlkeeper. It felt like my own madness was making it up, and it would be the first sign of delirium of age. They don’t know you’re here at all, do they?”

“No,” whispers Dan Heng, exhaling in exhaustion. His belly inflames to the point of pain, and his fingers quiver nonstop. All he wants is for Jing Yuan to leave. “Ideally, they would never know.”

It is tempting, the idea of shaming the Preceptors by announcing the High Elder is spreading his legs for whoever has enough money to glance at him. How pathetic, he thinks; all he got was wavering fear at the prospect of undressing when faced with other men, and he cannot simply harm them to get away. His spiteful nature is what got him into this mess. The escape should be enough to keep the Vidyadhara Council forever nervous about his situation. 

He swallows and sniffles, not yet on the verge of crying. “Are you not going to question me about this mess?” 

Now is the moment Jing Yuan, a supposed friend of his last incarnation and not-perverse acquaintance, a man who saw him shackled in the deepest dungeons of the prison and sprout from his egg, to get disgusted at him, regard him as less than a noble for his betrayal. 

Instead, however, the General frowns. “Confirming you are indeed in this establishment and working, many things began to make sense and piece themselves together in this plan.” Then, he clears his throat. “Is this white tea?” 

Dan Heng blinks and nods, ignoring his reluctance to touch the porcelain or the goosebumps running up and down his spine— one last time before I’m locked up once more. 

The tea is a delicacy on their tongues. Not too sweet, he imagines tasting a cherry blossom plum in his mouth—though not sufficiently light and pure to calm down his nerves, on edge and pushing his brain to think of an escape as soon as he leaves. I cannot stay here any longer. They will know. The General offers his kind smile after finishing his cup, delightfully closing his eyes. His shoulders drop a single inch. 

Why is he tense? I will be the one apprehended, but Jing Yuan simply says, “The Preceptors began to train the little healer lady to watch over the Plaguemark. It’s been calm regarding stability, but they have been arguing with the Ten Lords ever since you disappeared.”

“Let me guess,” mumbles Dan Heng, lips lingering on the porcelain. “They are arguing whether they should proceed with soul annihilation or incarcerate me for the rest of this incarnation’s life if they do not get rid of me first. The Preceptors wish to establish a definitive Council instead of the High Elder and keep the heir as a tool rather than the symbol of their faith. The Judges put a bounty on my head, and I trust they would enjoy my body laid naked and lifeless at their feet.” 

Jing Yuan sighs. “So you’ve heard. Word spreads fast.” Especially in the underground, where they live off getting the upper hand with intel to keep themselves functional to the flagship. “The Realm-Keepers believe you’ve left the Luofu entirely, and if it wasn’t for the Master Diviner, I think I would’ve believed that, too.”

“All you had to do was look into the Matrix of Prescience, no?” Dan Heng narrows his gaze. “You could’ve found me not even a week after I vanished, yet you still doubted my location. You are the Divine Foresight, outsmarting your foes before they turn against you, even.” Or so the stories say. “I should not have made it this far.” Not so far as to miss a murderer and my touch on his scars. “How come you never looked for me here?”

The General does not answer, not right away. He licks his lips, presses them, and returns to the serene demeanour that infuriates any of his assistants and colleagues. “The caged bird should serve a single purpose, which is that of an ill-gotten spoil. It will whistle once, perhaps twice, but no more, and he cannot fly beyond the iron bars,” he speaks, tipping the cup. “It is beautiful, until it sings and never stops, or attempts to flee. The high lord versed in the art of war sees the winning strategy, and will cut its tongue should it keep whistling and tear its wings off should it escape.” 

Dan Heng sniffles again, swallowing loud and dry. 

“But if the lord chooses to set the bird free, even if out of sight and devoured of its beauty, he knows the little bird will sing and fly as high as it can.” With such words spoken softly and in a warm tone that only Jing Yuan could possess, Dan Heng almost believes him. “You’re hardly unprotected. I figured you’d be fine wherever you were.” 

“Even if it’s in a brothel in one of the most distrusting districts of the Luofu?” teases the courtesan without a true vestige of humour. 

“Well, it was not the first option that came to mind when I thought of your whereabouts,” confesses the General, sparing Dan Heng the need to pour more tea for him. Secretly, the Vidyadhara thanks him, for he cannot trust his hands and their skill to stay still. “But then, the garrison began to spread rumours of a ‘ moon-kissed courtesan’ that could never be bought by them, even with the stipend of the Divine Foresight.” At that, Jing Yuan fixes on him. “Are you… content to be here? I would never guess how you could find yourself satisfied in this place.” 

“It wasn’t my first option, either.” Truthfully, he had no option but luck. “I couldn’t leave the flagship without attracting ill looks, and the Sanctum would be an easy search if I remained. I planned to search for an inn and hoped the owners would keep it quiet since everyone hates the Ten Lords down here. I caught the first opportunity since I knew I’d not get a better offer so soon. No sooner than they would find me if I kept wandering, aimlessly waiting. But it worked fine until now.”

Anything but the Preceptors and the Ten Lords, or you, he does not say. Did he convince himself so well that he was content in this place? Compared to the Commissions’ iron fist wrapped around his neck, anything seemed a good option. And Ren was here. 

“They considered the possibility of your kidnapping around these parts, which is why the Pearlkeepers roam too much as of late,” explains Jing Yuan. “But your kidnapping would mean invoking the wrath of both Yanting-jun and the Zhuming, so the hunt had to happen under the rug. I’m pretty sure the flaming letter we received was enough a warning. Not that it helped with the tension of their presence, clearly.”

“I should have gone to the Burning Court.” There was an offer, early in this new journey of his, where he was invited to entertain the Master Artisans of the Zhuming. Now that he thinks of it, it could have been an opportunity to escape, but what about Ren? “I believe I would not be put on my knees, on seashells, naked, every evening to repent.”

“Is that what the Preceptors bestowed on you?”

Dan Heng looks at the General, frowning, treading carefully on both his tone and words. “...you never knew?”

“The Azure Court barely trusts the rest of the Luofu after Sedition, just as they no longer trust in Yinyue-jun.” At that, the courtesan sighs, and the General continues, “As long as you were kept under surveillance, never to leave Scalegorge Waterscape, the Ten Lords never bothered with details, and the Preceptors never gave them none. They tried to bargain you, last time.” They both remember it, for Dan Heng, still young in this new life and namesake, is still a criminal’s legacy. The General held him for as long as he could; as long as the Ten Lords allowed him. “If only I had more time, I swear…”

“It doesn’t matter now.” Dan Heng places his cup on the table, fearing he will vomit if he takes one more sip. “I ran. I was impulsive. I ran away and dug my own grave… I just couldn’t stay there anymore.” He shuts his eyes, resisting the terrifying will to fall. “This place makes me sick.” They both know that the Vidyadhara does not mean the tea house.

“It was not a coincidence that he was here while you were unavailable, was it?” 

Yes, because he was as selfish as I am. “I abided by the laws of my new work, no more. Until a higher bidder came outplaying my previous keeper, I was his alone.” And I would’ve continued to be, had I not betrayed him, too. All he has of Ren now is the red tassel earring he wears in a sorrowful state, a few jewels from his last payments and the phantom sensation of his hands on him. “Could you give me some time before I return?” he asks, less than a whisper for a voice. This allows him to search for his grey mantle, gather his things, and protect them first, for he knows the Preceptors and the Ten Lords will confiscate them in no time. I don’t want them to have my earring or my spear. He gave it to me; I have nothing left.

Jing Yuan knits his brows. “Hm? Return where?”

It is Dan Heng’s turn to make a face. “Why else would you be here for?” If not, take me back quietly and unalarmingly.

“I would by no means take you back.” Huh? “As far as the Seat knows, I’m relieving my stress in a terrifically spoken of brothel, alleviating my burdens in the company of a bewitching woman. They know better than to pursue or bother me.”

“You paid for a company you weren’t even certain it was the one you suspected of?” This man is beyond mad. “Willingly, without a threat of apprehension?”

“As I told you—not always the victorious stratagem is the right arrangement.”

Dan Heng feels like crying. There is a sob stuck in his throat; his limbs cannot stop trembling, and he just wishes Ren would return to him so they could leave this Aeon-forsaken ship, but Ren left me before that. “You won’t tell on me?” he chokes.

Maybe it is pity what he finds in the General’s semblance. He does not know, but much less wants to discover. “He would loathe me for the rest of his life if I brought you back to them, and you would forever resent me, just like he does. It is the least I can do for the remaining people I care for.”

“I’m not him, General,” Dan Heng reminds him. “I’m not Dan Feng. I don’t know you beyond the Lieutenant who announced my confinement, even if in mourning. I… I’m sorry.”

Jing Yuan sours but smiles nonetheless. “Ah… I know. Fear not, though—my choice is still the same.” He clears his throat, straightening his posture. “And I was not talking about Dan Feng.”

Before Dan Heng has the chance to voice his doubts, however, Jing Yuan motions to pick something up from under his mantle. The Vidyadhara frowns at the bundle, which is nothing worth looking at and something many would disregard as a rag. Unveiling the cloth, Dan Heng inhales sharply. Made of flowing coral gold and the dark leather of an unknown beast, the bracer shone beautifully, enticing Dan Heng to lean over the table to look at it. His hands twitch, fingers itching to pick it up, which he does when Jing Yuan lays the bracer out for him.

“If there’s one thing you—Dan Feng attempted to do until the end, it was to keep it safe. It was the only thing he had left after Yingxing’s death,” reveals Jing Yuan. The name rings a bell in Dan Heng’s mind, and he stops his caress on the bracer for a second, but the man continues, “I planned on giving it to you the moment you were released from the Shackling Prison, as I did with Cloud Piercer, but the Ten Lords hid it with other spoils. By the moment I found it, the Preceptors were not allowing anyone’s entrance nor strange gifts to tarnish their reach.”

“That was his name, then?” he murmurs, remembering how Ren laid his head on his lap and refused to move, even to open his eyes. “Yingxing.” He tastes the name, a fitting composition of morae on his tongue that, for once, feels fair and rightful to be uttered. Yingxing, he repeats, soundless, letting his lips contour the name. Yingxing, who cannot remember his own name.

“It’s not hard to point out what happens when both of you are in the same place,” says Jing Yuan, exhaling one more time before getting up. “It was an unbelievable chance, but if it turned out to be true—which it did, fortunately—I opted to put this matter to rest.”

“You’re leaving?” Dan Heng widens his gaze. “You risked bringing this here with a little chance of not finding me, and now you…”

A rich, deep laugh resounds from the General like an older man would to a young child and their neverending questions. “I’m afraid I have some paperwork to look at… or I’ll let the Master Diviner deal with it. You see, the Realm-Keeping Commission is putting up posters of a wanted criminal—a swordsman who acts more as a hunter and has some unfinished business around the ship. He has left some corpses behind.”

“I’m sure you’ll imprison him.”It does not sound confident or even reassuring, more like hopes for a young man to finally know where to find someone he longs for. He threatened to kill me, thinks Dan Heng. “I wish you good luck on your endeavours, and… thank you, General,” even if he says the last part, feeling his cheeks burning and restraining the slight lift of his lips.

The last time Dan Heng saw this smile, the gentle smile Jing Yuan offers him now, in their farewell, was when he was still in a lightless dungeon without a chance of leaving.

“I have… one last thing, though.” The General takes a deep breath and stares down at him, some amusement gone. “I have enough strales and credits to buy you instead of renting you.” Dan Heng gulps. “Not for… that. If you want to, I can buy your freedom. There’s a starskiff pilot I know that would keep their mouth shut and take you away from the Luofu in secrecy.” 

“No.” Not from you, not you. Too risky.

“…I understand. I will not speak more about it.” His smile is strained. He can do it without my consent; he just needs to— “If you find yourself in need, however, do not hesitate to contact me.” And the last thing he gives the courtesan is a jade abacus with a fine sigil at the top. “Be it for you or him.”

Dan Heng nods and watches as the Arbiter-General, one of the Six Charioteers, one of the heads in the hunt of Yinyue-jun, leaves in the same way he arrived—swiftly, with his own agenda, unbothered by all who know of his name. Who could ever foresee what the Lightning Lord’s possessor would plan?

But he knows I’m here. 

If needed, he might reveal it.

He can buy me once and for all. 

Again, who could ever trust a man who serves the Hunt and lives by the art of war?

Embracing the bracer against his chest, Dan Heng closes his eyes and wishes Ren would just be with him.

Dreaming of Yingxing occupies his mind most of the time, almost making him brush aside the news that he has been bought for a week as soon as the Arbiter-General left. Dan Heng lours, sighs in exhaustion and finds no energy to feel sorry for himself.

He cannot be this impulsive, not anymore. Letting his hysteria rule over him feels hauntingly close to what led Dan Feng to fall from grace, the highest of the celestials with an even harder decline, ruining the ichor line and all its names to come. He suspects Dan Feng once wished to end the entire ichor line out of spite, which is humourlessly ironic. The dragon may be meant to be disciplined and forged to flawlessness. Spite is a human, mortal thing. It is not meant for a higher being to feel and act on these sentiments. They cannot control themselves and the consequences of their actions. 

As Dan Heng unveils the bracer and carefully places it on his arm, he only thinks he needs to leave.

His fit of pique lasted long enough. He sold himself for less than what is worth; he’s been the aim of those who never lost a chance of badmouthing him, had to entertain them when he acted as Yinyue-jun, the fucking relic, and as a simple courtesan. He can never run from them. He’s been bought, ogled at, courted shamelessly, and no one will know that he blemished the sacred vessel that is He who imbibes the moon, imbibed by another. They will never know, and he ignores his temper, chiming to act recklessly again—

The first thing he feels is warmth.

A river of warm blood running underneath his skin, a mellow vitality carving its course when all he should have—an antediluvian, ancient creature from depths lost to time—is a cold-hearted ichor masquerading in red. Dan Heng’s heart skips a beat. He never felt so hot before, perspiring, swearing he would roast in his own vessel.

It is restful, he finds, alleviating him in a ghostly embrace, almost letting him sleep in a reverie.

“Argh—!”

The second thing is a slash across his stomach.

His voice vanishes, hand clutching at his belly, and it’s agonising, excruciating, but looking down, he finds his body well, untarnished and unplucked. Yet his lungs scream for relief, his body drains itself, and he falls on the floor with little to no support. His fingers ruin the covers while searching for relief, but all he can do is writhe and curl in himself, coiling his tail—when did it get out?

His lungs cry for mercy, his stomach aches and floods, and he can feel himself despairing. With any last energy without influential, painful madness he has, he holds onto his arm and sends a wave of cloudhymn magic to soothe his nerves, flowing deeply until he whimpers, anguishes and…

…nothing.

Eyes wet with tears and unable to leave his stomach unprotected, he catches his breath.

The third thing is cold.

Not the familiar, comfortable cold of the ocean depths that never failed to welcome his body, the phantom cold seas within the egg, or even the blood running in his veins, keeping him alive.

It is a deadening, lifeless cold without a single heartbeat to follow.

It hits him, the familiarity of the lukewarm bracer—he knew what had such an erratic beating, melting blood in his hands so close to him.

Yingxing, who killed you now?

Dan Heng removes the bracer like a plague but collects it against his chest as soon as the corals hit the ground, cradling it against his chest and his body, tucked in the leisure of his tail. 

Ren, where are you?

He is not surprised to receive silence as an answer, but he mourns for the withered lily all the same, weeping at a revenant grave. 

This time, the faceless man has not only a visage, but a beautiful name to be called by. 

And this face is blemished with blood. Lukewarm gore that stains his clothes, neck, and his chest has a horrifying hole where once it should have held a heart. Dan Heng weeps, kissing his lover’s face once before departure. “Forgive me,” he whispers amid tears and a contained anger. 

He can hear armours clanging and coming closer. He knows it is to arrest him; they shouldn’t have tried to bring her back, but all he can do is mourn, making it an art, and he, the tortured one, paints it. My starlight was the artist; now he’s gone, and weeps more.

His words are not his own, but Dan Heng cannot help but mutter them as a second entity alongside this terrible, horrifying Yinyue-jun whose claws are carving his own chest, “Carry my heart with you in the valley of death, my dear,” and Dan Heng gasps at feeling the organ stretching from its tendons, muscles carved and turning him into a heartless monster. “And I will carry yours into the egg to find you again.” 

Yinyue-jun will not die from the loss of his heart, but neither will his lover in its possession. The Scion of Permanence was never meant to feel like a mortal. What better thing could he do, as his last offering, than to give it away? 

Forgive me forgive me forgive me forgive me forgive me forgive—

Yinyue-jun never gets to see Yingxing waking up, but the heart beats alongside the waves of the ancient depths, a rhythm he much adores and will cherish until he is not allowed anymore. 

Dan Heng’s buyer for the week never shows up. Not a letter, a jade-abacus alert, a cycrane. Nothing.

When patrons ask for him, he fans himself and hides his veiled visage, chuckling as a fox would. “I’m taken for the next seven days, dear benefactor,” but he knows best when it comes to his buyers. Chances are that the General is allowing him a week before this tiny, pathetic new life of his ends, merciful as he is—which Dan Heng dreads.

Or, his brain tells him as he rejects another foul-mouthed patron, he is leaving you alone because he cares for you. He scoffs, ignoring the goosebumps at seeing yet another Pearlkeeper making way. He cares for Dan Feng, and maybe, just maybe, he is trying to see me as Dan Heng. He wishes he could blame the General for his longing, but he desires to be selfish, arrogant for once. 

He walks by the Pearlkeeper and thanks Long for entertaining them with a different courtesan and ensuring their eyes never meet. Ah, he knows that one: he never lost a chance at pushing him down on his knees when it was time to repent, even pressuring his shoulders so Dan Heng would sink further into the seashells. 

But patrons still seek for him, or a mere glimpse of his presence.

“At least let me weep for my loss on your thighs, beloved. I accept a single hair caress if that is all you will ever offer me.” You once told me your wife expects you to be at home every time after you leave work but come here instead. He does not bother answering and nods, walking away.

“Just tell me how much they’re buying you for!” This envoy from the Zhuming is beyond exasperated. “The lords at the Burning Court would buy this whole ship if you asked.” The Xianzhou was supposed to be an Alliance, but Dan Heng has better reason than to let an inebriated man speak reasonably. 

His heart stops when he sees the familiar face of a prison warden who drinks a whole bottle of artemisia in one go. “I can let you in about what we did to Yinyue-jun while he was imprisoned. Some folk get off on that, beautiful.”

“I’m taken, dear benefactor,” he says, refusing to sniffle and to acknowledge the want to choke this bastard to death. A clean cut with his fan, bend his blood to a stop, free his tail and strangle him against the wall now that his limbs are free of nails. All of them sound tempting. Curse you, Dan Heng thinks, leaving the warden behind and ignoring his calls. The courtesan was bought; at the end of the day, he can ignore lesser offers. Curse you, and everyone who had anything to do with it.

Closing the door of his room behind him, Dan Heng slithers to the floor and groans.

If Ren were here, they could pretend that only their complicated lives and remorse toward each other mattered, that only their cyclic arguments on the little memories they have are worthy of attention, and that they are not traitors outside these four walls. 

The bracer lies on top of his pillow. He could not get rid of it, didn’t have the heart to leave it be when he now understands how much of a cursed object it is, and yet it is proof of the reason why Dan Feng trusted that man once—who else would it be loyal to conspire alongside the poisonous apple of the Abundance if not the one transcending with you? Hence why it ended so catastrophically. 

Whoever they tried to bring back remained a wanderer in the land of the dead, and if their soul found solace despite a gruesome demise, he hopes they are not condemning him as everyone else. At least one person, he thinks, because Ren, the tangible wanderer stuck between planes, will not forgive him.

The earring feels heavy now, but Dan Heng wears it nonetheless. With the ornament, he can even remove his robes and lie on the bed, feeling shrouded, buried, and protected from the rest of the maledictions. Cradling the bracer against his chest as a living thing rather than just a piece of armour, Dan Heng curls in himself and wonders of a man who aches for him as a moth to a flame, loathing him with the same intensity.

He gives in the arms of slumber, and for the phantom he shares the bed with, he conjures himself as the winged insect and the dead-man-walking as the funeral pyre he can never run from.

Chapter Text

Dan Heng stirs from his sleep with a loud THUD! outside his door.

No, it can’t be the preceptors, or else his cloudhymn magic would have woken up before him and told him to flee. If it were the Cloud Knights, they would cling and scream in their armours, for the art of subtlety has never been their strongest skill. The spectral envoys? Dan Heng uncurls his tail and sits on the bed, hiding the bracer and keeping dracore libre on his fingertips should he…

What meets him is considerably worse than a spectral guard from the Ten Lords or anything on the Xianzhou by their own standards. 

The wraith finds him dressed in a red shawl, and Dan Heng knows the revenant better than most. Ren tilts his neck until a cracking resounds through the room and closes the door with more strength than needed. Dan Heng slips one foot to the floor, lips ready to call for him, before the heavy sword is lifted towards him, approaching the slow and mindful steps of a predator.

“You had no right,” spits Ren, eyes overthrown by molten blood that shines for rotten gold. In a few wounds, the courtesan can see golden fan-like leaves and scarlet silken spider legs sprout from the festering slashings. They even smell sickly sweet, the deadened blossom for graveyards. “You didn’t want this, and you keep lying, and then then you fucking dispel my misery.”

“You were in too much pain.” Dan Heng swallows, lifting his fingers to touch the sword’s edge until thin trails of blood run down his skin, soaking his knuckles and between his digits, always attentive to the vengeful ghost above him. “I accept seeing and knowing of your death, but don’t make me stand aside as you suffer through it.”

Ren snickers, pushing the sword until Dan Heng has to tilt his chin. “You left me once, left me again, and tempt me with something I cannot have anymore!”  

“I left you?” How dare you? “You walked out of that door and never returned. Was it some twisted vengeance of yours for when he abandoned you after stealing your heart? I wouldn’t have left you if you gave me the chance to remain at all!” He can still feel the way his knees fell after Ren left him with a promise of hunting him down, how weak they quivered, and he gave in to the feebleness, conjuring all his willpower not to invoke Cloud Pierce and stake Ren down so he may never leave, drown him in benediction lotus and transform him into a relic of his azure reign. Dan Heng dares to lift his hand, stained with fresh red and finds Ren’s rotting vermillion, drenched in what could be his own blood or many others’. He sees the hunter’s knuckles tense and on the edge of cracking. He conjures the most seraphic tone he can, “I’ll follow you to the end, if you let me.” Please, do.

If Ren does not believe him, Dan Heng will not blame him. He will resent, carry the heavy heart to the valley of death, but will not bestow blame when he understands his incarnation’s selfishness. Yinyue-jun was not meant for mortals.

The only warning he gets is a growl. 

Ren lifts his sword and descends as the ardour that can never be nullified, a swift and precise swish! that almost cuts one of his horns. Dan Heng impels it with an aggressive gush of dracore invocation, but he forgets to push the sword’s wielder away alongside it. “Ren, wait—!” 

“Get out of my fucking head!” But the hunter is kneeling on the bed and hustling his hands around the Vidyadhara’s neck, pressing with as much force as possible. A touch that should be warm and welcoming, and Dan Heng might have welcomed before, yet now is drenched in wrath and misery; he is just as miserable. Ren’s voice is overtaken by something wretched, breaking each word, syllable and plea. “Just kill me and be done with it!”

Dan Heng can barely push the calloused hands away from strangling him, but can claw Ren’s throat in return while chanting cloudhymn spells with the consciousness left in him. “Ren, Ren—” he gasps, barrelling under Ren. Their limbs hurt, and they shove each other away. “I-I—” I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he wants to say, but since he is never allowed to, he hexes Ren there and then. 

He can feel how cloudhymn challenges the festering wounds and Yaoshi’s candlelight guiding Ren to utter madness, how they fight in his veins for control. The hold around his neck ceases steadily, the body above him stumbles, groaning and supporting himself in trembling limbs. There is hissing against his sore throat, teeth threatening to sink into him with a vengeance, and dried blood blemishing both their skins. Ah, does it not bring memories to blossom?

Only this time, Ren is not dead, nor is he viscerally pierced in self-dense—Dan Heng removes his claws in slow motion, embracing the strong back a breath from falling upon him. “I have you,” mutters Ren, ignoring how his… lover’s fingers grasp his arm with might, intending to hurt and nurture all similar feelings to turn the Vidyadhara into the corpse that should have followed him on his first death. It is hard to die unmourned. 

When they kiss, it is not chaste nor calming, but ravenous in all the wrong ways.

Lips are not meant to be kissed but to be viciously bitten and abused until their red becomes living tenderness, swollen and sore, painful to even breathe above them. Ren murmurs curses and damnations that Dan Heng nods along and accepts in their interwoven hunger, lightheaded, soon not even becoming intelligible if not for how malevolently they entangle. Fingers press with too much force, nails and claws pierce skin without regrets, they cannot decide on a position to dominate one another.

A teal-coloured tail crawls up Ren’s chest and neck, curling around them until the hunter changes his nastiness to the scales, biting them until Dan Heng shudders and jerks back, tightening the curl and aching to hear the gasping mortal under his hold. They gracelessly lie on the mattress, grousing in unison from the pain and the pressing hips. Ah, Dan Heng wants to close his legs around Ren, push him until the prominent bulge makes him pour from pressure alone and ruin him from the bottom so that the man has no option but to stay and let him stay in return.

“Borrow me for as long as you want,” he whispers, releasing Ren from his spiteful, scaly grip. He can see his tail stained with red. It could be his blood from teeth devouring them or the filth scathing them. “Is it yours?” he asks, breathless, as Ren dives into his shoulders, nipping his clavicle.

“Mmhh.” Dan Heng will understand it as both yes and no. He can never be sure about Ren, but he will fantasise about being solely his. It is better, bearable, or else this affair of theirs will be sourer than it already is. If it is to be poisonous, so be it. Ren will be wearing their blood for a shawl.

Dan Heng lets the rueful selfishness decide all of his actions—ripping Ren’s buttons and tossing the filthy coat, claws carving the belt and trousers open to free the hard cock, sending shivers down his spine the moment he sees it, leaning back and bringing Ren down with him, letting his forked tongue roam that mouth that he dreamt with more times than he should.

It hurts more this time. Dan Heng counts on his arousal and eagerness to be sufficient, but he feels like he is being ripped to shreds from within, Ren pushing and pushing and pushing, and it’s a never-ending burn that persists and gets worse when Ren buries himself to the hilt. His hands fly to the bedpost, but Ren is heaving above him, holding his wrists with the intent of breaking them. He will not break Dan Heng, but will attempt to turn them into the worst of themselves. 

“Ngh—wait—!” Ren doesn’t wait for Dan Heng to get used to the stretch or the itch where the cock’s tip presses, that deepest point that never fails to make the Vidyadhara weep. He uses Yinyue-jun as he wants, in the way he wants. It should have been like this since the beginning.

Every thrust rips a voiceless whimper from Dan Heng, shutting his eyes and feeling the tears slipping, but reaching his high and coming overwhelmingly, clenching around the cock and trying to keep it deep inside him. Of course, his lover is not that merciful. Ren continues to thrust, hastening his pace and trembling as he pushes harder, finally spilling inside and hissing above Dan Heng, weaning his hold around the pale wrists. 

Their breathing is haphazardly messed up, their bodies uncomfortably, blood-painted joined, but the courtesan puts his legs around the waist, and his client lets his weight down, not caring if he is too heavy. 

“You did great, my dear,” sighs Dan Heng, embracing Ren’s neck and caressing his hair. I’ve missed you lingers on his tongue, but he knows better than to tempt the man when the mara has just left his mind. “Sleep. I’m not going anywhere.” 

The Stellaron Hunter there remains, breathing against his favourite courtesan’s throat and forgetting to remove himself. If the courtesan is honest, he does not mind, either, closing his eyes and drifting to sleep along the Lethe. 

Ren is sitting at the edge of the bed when Dan Heng later awakes. 

Scratch marks and mean claws’ vestiges should be on the broad shoulders and back, but only dried trails of blood and larger stains in rose and red can be found. The bandages were ripped somewhere along their wrathful affair, and… ah, he cannot remember if he did it or not. Was I truly that frenzied? He cannot think properly when it comes to Ren, be it for their grievances or passionate encounters. 

He can feel his thighs sore, cunt aching and wet. It must not have been long since Ren abandoned him. Guiding his hand towards the jaded back, he is content to see the slight shudder at his touch. Good. “Come back to bed,” he says, low and dulcet, how else can I make you stay? 

“I am in bed,” retorts Ren, but without any humour or venom. Simple, emotionless… 

Dan Heng sighs, hissing as he tries to sit. Even with cloudhymn magic, his lowermost will still take a while to heal. “I mean,” he stresses, leaning until he embraces Ren from behind, laying his head on Ren’s robust shoulders. “Come and lie down with me.” Are you done with me already? Have you finally gotten the one you most desired?

“I have to go.”

Don’t you always? There is no use in weeping or sobbing, though the throat feels constricted. “…I see.” 

But neither Dan Heng nor Ren moves. 

“How did you get it?” The coral-gold and leather bracer lay on Stellaron Hunter’s hands as it has always belonged in his hands. Perhaps it did once and is crossing his path again after so long. Calloused fingers brush against the leather as if it were a fragile relic instead of a piece of armour—a highly regarded one at that.

Dan Heng adjusts his position to lean against Ren’s side, still embracing his waist. “...the General gave it to me.”

“Jing Yuan?” Ren’s tone is that of vice, incredulity, and it is impossible not to shiver under the raging remorse as he spits the name. “He knows you’re here?”

“Knights talk when they’re unsatisfied,” is the only explanation he can offer. Maybe they would talk if they were happy, too, but Dan Heng would rather never know what they would sputter if he had given them any opportunity to please them. “And he’s known of your presence for far longer than my whereabouts. Were you aware of it?”

He receives a scoff. “He’s aware of too many things and doesn’t share a quarter of them if he doesn’t find it useful for strategy. I’m supposed to come back here in a few months to fulfil the script, and he’s necessary for me to continue. I better hope he knows no more than what Kafka let him on.”

“Is that why you came back? For this ominous script of yours?”

But rather than answering him, Ren turns in his direction—not yet sharing looks—and pulls Dan Heng’s arm with no roughness. “When you dressed this bracer, I could feel the leviathan blood immobilising me from above, like a cascade flowing into my whole body.” His hands quiver still, awfully bandaged and cluttered, but the tenderness with which he laces the bracer on Dan Heng’s arm reminds the Vidyadhara of a long-gone passerby in wandering clouds. “For a moment, I thought the mara was marking me physically, using that remembrance against me. Only when you sent that cool effluence into my body did I realise you were tormenting me from afar.”

“I didn’t want to torment you; I wanted to soothe you.” Dan Heng grimaces. Soon, his arm feels prickling warm, a husk of a familiar beating thrumming under his skin. “It tormented me to feel as you drifted away in that malediction.”

“So you once again did it all for your selfishness.” How can Ren accuse him with such a candid voice? There is no venom, not one that hurts and stings and makes you bleed from the inside-out. It is awfully gentle. “I’m still the idiot that comes back running under the title of a hunter. Maybe it’s my fault you manipulated me and still use me.”

“Have you not thought, even once, that I wanted you to run after me because I would hunt you, too?” Ren looks up at him at his words, and Dan Heng wishes he could drink from the blood melting in this man’s eyes. He swallows instead. “You said that you woke up alone after that, a miserable mockery of rebirth. You said that you were abandoned and that I never repaid you from then on. I couldn’t.” He licks his lips, feeling the wounds left behind from sharp teeth and vicious biting. “But I’m not Dan Feng. You… you can’t see me as Dan Feng if you want me to stay.”

Ren says nothing, does not move an inch, and his semblance hardly exposes any of his sentiments and thoughts regarding Dan Heng’s words.

“I will follow you until the end if you let me,” he repeats the words before Ren gave into the festering hysteria. Even his wounds are gone, and any flower sprouting is scattered on the covers and floor. “And I can make things right for both of us. I’ll see it through until you are finally entombed in the valley of death that you court, and I’ll plunge your sword on your grave amid the lilies, mourning you as a beloved departed.” How else can I make you see it? “Dan Feng loved very much, dearly so, enough to curse you.” When the lunar pearl cups the spider-lily’s stained cheek, he feels it bejewelled. “But I am not like him. I love dearly enough to kill you.”

A huffed, “You sound like a ghost chanting these things,” followed by Ren leaning until their heads meet and they share the same fillets of breath. “I want to drown in them as I want to drown in your veins, and now I can feel them for the first time in a long time.”

“Take me with you,” says Dan Heng, softly tugging at his lover’s arm. “I will be there for anything you need as we follow this path, and I’ll be there to see you give your last inhale, to carve your heart when the time is right.”

“I wonder what would’ve happened if you let me die on that night,” muses Ren, voice tipped with regret and disillusion but so, so enamoured. “It was never meant to die on that day, yet I think of it, and I can’t help but long to live, if only for the moments I live and breathe in you before you do it again.”

Dan Heng sighs, heart fluttering and tail curling around Ren’s other arm. “When the time is right. Until then, lead me to mourn you as you deserve,” he concurs.

For he still wonders if Ren might wish to remain with him instead of aching for death in this visceral way he courts it. Can he ever be more than death for this man, this beautiful, terrible and tempting soul that brings out of him the worst feelings he has ever experienced, collecting them as mother-of-pearls from the depths of the ocean with his human, ruined and bare hands?

He does not disclose that he imagines it centuries from now—that Ren will return to the land of the dead in utter peacefulness, and Dan Heng will carve his beating heart to bring it with him to his next reincarnation. So I find you wherever I venture, just as the moon once wanted. Until he finds a way to compel Ren to stay on this plane, he kisses him in their secret affair, where no one can see them, and tempers them with damnations, convincing a flower to bloom for him instead of other gods. 

The beloved, dying now a second time, utters no complaint against his lunar pearl. What is there to complain of, but that he is being loved?

When two veiled shadows flee in the dead of night hours later, hands clasped, a sword and a jade spear in hand, no one pays attention or notices.

After all, how could they, when Yinyue-jun is still missing?

“Well, well—my, General, you came back so soon?”

It is no wonder that the underground districts are one of the most famous yet reliable information springs for the Intelligence within the Divine Foresight. The Master Diviner may help predict and oversee the welfare of the Luofu and its contributions to the Alliance, but not even chiromancers and prognostics can ensure the people’s safety.

Jing Yuan should have expected those in the shadows to discover the troubles before they came to light in the Matrix of Prescience.

He chuckles, hiding his lack of humour. “Madam, how do you fare?” He should not be here at all, and he can still hear Fu Xuan’s exasperated reprehension in his ear from the hologram. Slacking off, ignoring paperwork, and not giving a single regard towards the manhunt they are supposed to be conducting. Ah, if only she knew.

She hums, leaning her chin on her palm. “Better now that you’re here, dear. But you are not searching to ascend today, are you?”

His smile must be a telltale for his tiredness, for her eyes sparkle. “Where is he?”

“Unless you give me a name, I can hardly help you.”

“You know who I mean, Madam.” With the increasing search sent to the underground and the red light districts, it will take no time before they discover Dan Heng has been hiding in a brothel-faced-as-tea house. Honestly, the General is surprised they had not found it earlier. He is more clever than he gives himself credit. “I’m just here with an offer for him, nothing more.” He only needs to convince Dan Heng to accept it; if so, a starskiff at Stargazer Navalia will be ready to depart with a paid pilot.

“Hm… then I’m afraid I have sad news for you. He’s no longer here.”

Jing Yuan tries, but cannot hide how his face narrows immediately. “Since when?”

“Ah, you ask the wrong questions, dear.” The Madam crosses her arms over her chest. “You know how it works down here with the brothels. I’m certain the Charioteers bought whores as camp followers not many decades ago. The highest bidder takes the jewel. You should have raised your remittance, I’m afraid. A week is hardly guaranteed to be preserved if there is a better buyer.” The last part is not subtle in the slightest. Of course the Madam would know he paid for a week of peace for him.

There was no way Dan Heng would have accepted the offer a week ago—Jing Yuan could tell from how the Vidyadhara’s eyes shone when thinking of Ren at his mere mention and the red earring hanging and brushing against his face. It made sense the number of times the Stellaron Hunter came to the flagship and disregarded their deal. But did you two have to make it such a lewd transaction? Dan Feng would have made it public if someone had caught him on a bad day. 

“And who bought him?”

“I know not of this information,” smiles the Madam. “But I was left with this flawlessly crafted jade abacus and a very charitable pound of strales, so… well. I wonder how much you would give for him.” From her dress’ open sleeves, she retrieves a much-familiar green stalae with a lion’s seal crafted on top of it. “I believe it’s your seal, no?”

“Do you have any idea who you sold, Madam?” Jing Yuan asks, without the energy to keep a smile on his face. Dan Heng would leave the jade abacus behind for one reason only. “He was priceless if we had to lay cards on the table.”

She has fangs when she smirks this time. “You speak as if he was divine-born.” 

What else does he have to do here when he lost the last friend he had? “He might be.” I hope you didn’t kill any knight on your way, though. He does not know to whom he sends this soundless wish, but be it on a spear of a sword, something tells him he is about to meet more blood than he wants to. 

“Ah, fear not.” Her taunting is a threat in itself. Feigning an exhausted sigh, she gets up, the utmost class for a woman who sneaked her tricks under the Luofu’s nose. “I would know if I had a royal in my establishment, General.”