Chapter Text
Jiang Cheng stepped up onto the rain-slick pier, nodded to the ferryman, and watched the narrow barge that had carried him during the last stretch of his journey disappear into the night.
He was soaked through in a matter of minutes, his heavy wool cloak plastered to his damp clothes and water running down his wide-brimmed hat. He was still tempted to take out the note and check it a final time, although he had already done that so much that the papyrus was worn smooth as silk. Besides, the message so short that he had memorized it on the first reading:
Quarries found. Come to the White Stag Inn alone. Situation complicated.
Typical.
He was almost entirely sure that if Wei Wuxian and Wen Qing were dead, Lan Wangji would have worded it differently. But were they in one piece? Where had they been? Why had they left? What had happened in the temple of Poseidon? Why hadn’t they tried to contact him in the almost two years since the Fall of Nightless City? The questions had been running through his mind for two weeks, no less burning now that he would soon see them answered than they had been on the first reading.
Of course there was always a risk of a message being intercepted, hence the obliqueness of the wording and the lack of signature, replaced with the outline of a swan. In his time at the Cloud Recesses, Jiang Cheng had once said that these birds would fit the Lan sect much better than Athena’s owl, because they looked regal and ephemeral from afar but were actually petty assholes.
He still stood by that assessment.
Complicated, my ass.
The White Stag Inn, despite its rather grandiose name, was a discreet establishment, tucked away into a corner of the town made even more deserted by the current weather. Jiang Cheng sent a short prayer up to Zeus for helping him travel in relative anonymity, and pushed the door open. An old woman stood ready to receive him at the door, as if she had been waiting for him (and maybe she had). She helped him take off his hat and cloak, offered him a hot footbath (which he declined), and then led him through the deserted common room to one of the private rooms upstairs, before bowing and vanishing.
Not a single word had been exchanged.
As he set his hand on the door, Jiang Cheng saw that his fingers were shaking, and took a few minutes to calm his breathing and force his shoulders to relax before pushing it open.
His worry was focused first and foremost on his brother. Lan Wangji was the first thing his mind actually identified, as he stood out in his immaculate himation among the dimly-lit surroundings. But Jiang Cheng’s eyes immediately narrowed in on Wen Qing.
She looked tired and worn, and thinner still than the last time he had seen her, with the faintest of lines at the corners of her mouth. At the same time, there was something softer about her, as if an invisible muscle she had kept coiled within her since they were children had finally unwound. Her dark eyes were still just as deep, and yet lighter somehow, and the familiar way she held her chin looked less like defiance in the face of certain death than like determination to face a new day. She no longer looked hopeless.
As she was opening her mouth to say something, a strange gurgling sound came from the left, drawing Jiang Cheng’s attention away from her and to the figure sitting on the low couch.
Wei Wuxian looked terrible. Where Wen Qing was too thin, he was positively skeletal, as if the skin of his face had been strung directly over his skull. His neck was fragile like a baby bird’s. His curly hair, which he had generally kept shoulder-length, was cut very short.
All in all, he looked like a stiff breeze could knock him over. In his arms, he held a very small child who was currently sucking its thumb, staring unblinkingly at Jiang Cheng.
Jiang Cheng looked at Wen Qing, at Lan Wangji’s guarded expression, then back at Wei Wuxian and the child, thoughts and calculations and hypotheses flitting through his head. Before he could even start to feel any kind of way about the obvious conclusion, Wen Qing said:
“No.”
“No?” he repeated.
“I love A-Yuan very much. But I am not his mother.”
“I should hope not!” Wei Wuxian said, his usual indignation sounding strange in the raspy voice that went with his devastated appearance. “I bore him with my own body!”
“Wei Ying.”
“Lan Zhan!”
“No one denies that A-Yuan is yours. But you have to stop saying that.”
“Why? Dionysus was born from Zeus’s thigh! Athena, your own god ancestor, was born from his head!”
“Yes. Did you eat A-Yuan’s biological mother while he was still in the womb?”
“Wei Wuxian,” Wen Qing said. “I know you feel like the joke has to be made, but it’s really incredibly inappropriate. Do not.”
“Wen Qing! I wouldn’t!”
“Having lived with you for the last year and a half, I feel entitled to state that you certainly would.”
“Who is the child’s mother?” Jiang Cheng cut in, the sibling banter between Wei Wuxian and Wen Qing hitting him with painful fondness and envy.
Wei Wuxian pressed his mouth into a tight line. Lan Wangji just blinked as lightning flashed outside, briefly highlighting their faces with shadows.
Wen Qing sighed.
“The better question, A-Cheng, is: who is his father?”
“Alright then,” he said, feeling like he was wading into dangerous waters. “Who is his father?”
There was silence. And then Lan Wangji said:
“Wen Xu.”
A peal of thunder punctuated the statement with perfect dramatic timing.
“Ah,” Jiang Cheng said, reaching out a hand to steady himself against the nearest object.
This turned out to be a vase, so instead he went and sat down with his back to the fire.
“That…explains a lot,” he said, looking at his hands. “I suppose…he’s the reason you ran.”
“The main reason, yes,” Wen Qing said. “We knew that as the Wen heir, his chances of surviving the sack of the city were very thin.”
Jiang Cheng didn’t say “you could have come to me”, but Wei Wuxian seemed to hear it anyway.
“Wen Qing said I couldn’t guarantee everyone’s safety in the confusion if we left the temple, and there were…other things… which were harder to explain. It will be easier to show you, A-Cheng. Will you promise not to draw Sandu?”
“Of course.”
“You can come out,” Wen Qing said.
The fabric separating this room from the next one was pulled aside, and a group of people started to filter into the room, all looking worn-out, haggard and too-thin, although nowhere near as bad as Wei Wuxian. The first to walk in were a middle-aged man and a hunched old woman.
“Sect Leader Jiang,” Wen Qing said formally, “allow me to introduce to you the last survivors of the Dafan Wen, of the line of Asclepios by needle and hand. My people. Arsinoê had been hiding them in the temple of Poseidon for six months when Nightless City fell.
Jiang Cheng looked the group over. The majority were middle-aged or elderly. Some of them looked sick, others sported injuries. All of them looked mortal.
“I’m the only cultivator,” Wen Qing confirmed with the weight of old grief. “Once upon a time we were renowned for our cultivation healing and our wisdom, interacting only infrequently with Apollo’s main line. Sometimes there were marriages; my father was the youngest brother of Wen Ruohan’s mother, and my maternal grandmother was a cousin of Wen Ruohan’s wife. Over the last few decades, our cousin branch started to bind the most gifted practitioners in service to themselves. Many disappeared. Now there are only twenty of us left in total.”
“We keep the teachings of Asclepios and do what we can with our mortal limitations,” the old woman said. “Not all of us all healers; there are farmers and fishermen and wine-makers, like Uncle Four.”
The middle-aged man at her side gave an easy-going smile.
“We are not a threat to you or to the rest of the cultivation world, Sect Leader Jiang. All we want is to live peacefully and protect our lady, our talented Qingqing.”
Wen Qing smiled with real warmth, and Jiang Cheng didn’t even take the time to think before pledging, with his eyes fixed on the old woman:
“And I am not a threat to you and yours, Grandmother. I swear this by the storms and the tides. I am sorry that I couldn’t offer you the Jiang Sect’s protection during the Fall of Nightless City, but I can see that such a group could not safely have traversed the field of battle.”
“There’s someone else you have yet to meet,” Wen Qing said, her face unreadable.
The Wen remnants parted to allow a figure who had stayed in the adjoining room to step forward. They did so hesitantly, shuffling their feet.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. Dressed in a long faded dark chiton of rough linen. Shaved head, skin chalk-pale, grey lips stretched into a timid smile, large dark eyes. A neatly sewn-up scar running all the way around his throat.
Wen Ning, the boy that Jiang Cheng had killed, was standing in front of him and giving a small wave.
The absurdity of the gesture somehow overcame the blood-drenched, guilt-torn memories of the duel, and all Jiang Cheng could do was sit and stare, feeling as if somebody had ripped his soul from his body.
“How?” he heard himself rasp out from very far away. “Jin Zixun said… but no one thought…”
“We honestly don’t know,” Wei Wuxian hastened to explain, waving one hand as he clasped A-Yuan to him with the other. “I got to the temple with A-Ning still very, very dead. After a while, we heard the sound of fighting and shouting. Jin Zixun and his cronies broke down the door to the inner sanctum where we were going to ride out the sack of the city. I could have taken the lot of them with one hand tied behind my back, except…”
“… except I was holding A-Yuan, and Jin Zixun managed to get a sword at my throat,” Wen Qing said angrily. “That bastard came specifically to kill Wei Wuxian, and was positively delighted to find him ‘consorting with the enemy’. One of his low-life followers twisted Granny’s arm behind her back! I was so angry, and so desperate, and then…A-Ning suddenly jumped to his feet and launched himself at Jin Zixun, tearing him away from me and skewering him to the wall with his own spear. His eyes were blood-red, his mouth open in a silent scream. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
“I’m so sorry, Sister,” Wen Ning piped up, making Jiang Cheng jump.
His voice was just as timid as his demeanor, and extremely weird to hear coming out of the throat of a living corpse.
“Not your fault, kiddo,” Wei Wuxian said, picking up the storytelling thread. “The rest of the cultivators were no match for him. He didn’t seem to feel pain, and they were scared shitless anyway. In no time at all, we were standing around an altar to Poseidon, the ground covered in gore and dead bodies, with an unconscious Jin idiot pinned to the wall like a very gross butterfly and a moving corpse standing there with blood up to his armpits, and we could hear screams and the sound of fighting coming from the city. You can imagine the conundrum. I knew you would stand by me, A-Cheng, but…
“… but what if we couldn’t get to you?” Wen Qing cut in. “What if we encountered someone else before, like Nie Mingjue, or other Jins? They would have every reason to kill a Wen on sight, given what Wen Ruohan had been doing to Lan Xichen and Jin Zixuan. I kept trying to think of an escape route, and then A-Ning struck the altar with the butt of a spear, and it sank into the ground.”
“We found the old temple to Dionysus,” Jiang Cheng said, absorbing the information and still unsure of what he was feeling. “But we had to take apart the temple of Poseidon to access it. Why…?”
“I have a theory,” Wei Wuxian said, a spark of excitement appearing in his deeply sunken eyes. “So you know how Dionysus doesn’t have an organized religion now? Except the Court of Miracles, but we don’t really know what they do in the Mysteries. He’s a weird one, even for a god, and his origin story differs according to tradition. One says Zeus was tricked into killing his mortal mother by Hera’s lies, and then he tore the unborn babe from her womb and put it in his thigh until it was fully cooked. Like you, my little radish!”
“This is not an appropriate story for a baby,” Lan Wangji scolded as Wei Wuxian tickled A-Yuan under his little chin.
“He understands maybe one in every ten words right now, Lan Zhan, and he won’t remember any of it if you tell him the rabbit story later, relax. Where was I? Ah yes. So in another version, Dionysus was once a completely different god, son of the Lord or the Lady of the Underworld.”
Everyone made a sign against the evil eye, and Wei Wuxian rolled his eyes.
“I didn’t say his name, did I? Anyway, Dionysus’s original name was Zagreus, and in one version he is the son of the Lady and of Zeus, hidden by Apollo from Hera’s wrath. Then usual story, the Great Mother discovers the truth, tries to take revenge on the kid, Titans tear him limb from limb. Gross. Apollo manages to save his brother-nephew’s heart, also gross, and then Zeus swallows it, and he is reborn as Dionysus. Hence his name. I honestly don’t want to know which way he came out of Zeus. And then in another version he is actually cooked in a cauldron of…”
“Wei Wuxian.”
“My point being: what if there is no sect and no organized religion of Dionysus left because his priests need to die before entering his faith? His blessing is not passed on in blood, but in the water of the Styx. And there we were, right over one of his lost temples, with a woman and an orphan in danger, and a dead body lying right there. Perfect conditions for some divine intervention, right?”
“At any rate,” Wen Qing concluded. “Since we didn’t have a better plan, we followed A-Ning down the stairs, down the tunnel and into the cave. We got into a rowboat, and we cast off. A-Ning was steering, although he’s never trained as a sailor. He just… seemed to know where he was going. At midday he led us to another underground cave and a hidden river which carried us away from Qishan.”
“After that, we basically just tried to find the most isolated place possible to hide, and we did. A-Ning moved around for three nights and three days. Then, after helping to build a rudimentary shelter, he just lay down and became still again. Miracle over.”
“But…he’s alive now,” Jiang Cheng protested, then remembered his manners, turning toward the tall pale boy. “You’re alive, Young Master Wen. I don’t understand.”
“Ah… well I don’t remember anything after Wen Chao coming toward me with nails, Sect Leader Jiang, but when I opened my eyes… Sister told me I had died, and Wei Wuxian had brought me back.