Crimson and Clover

The Ghost Holds a Wedding - Part 8

For days now, Xie Lian has been carving a tablet.

The first one broke under his chisel, as the strength he applied to it was too great for the thin stone to withstand it. The second he cast aside, unable to look at the characters that came out from under his unskilled hand. Under San Lang's patient guidance and encouraging words, he tried and tried until he's found the right stone and the right pressure, and soon enough a memento was born.

He places it on the altar in his only temple and when it's done, he breaks down crying in front of it. San Lang holds him through it and RuoYe curls around them both, unaware they're mourning the lives it had taken before it was even born.

"Do you want to visit their graves with me one day?" Xie Lian asks eventually, once the tears have dried and his mind has cleared. He feels lighter, in a way he hasn't for a very long time. Grief surely is a heavy weight and he's carried it with him for centuries. "My mother, she... She would've loved you."

San Lang kisses Xie Lian's cheek and pulls him closer. With him, the temple's cold floor is no longer uncomfortable. "I would be honoured, gege."

He doesn't ask about Xie Lian's father. It's fine. Xie Lian's father didn't truly like his own son to begin with.

"Is He Xuan still coming to visit tomorrow?"

San Lang hums into his hair. He hasn't really let go of Xie Lian since he kicked Mu Qing and Feng Xin out of Paradise Manor. Xie Lian holds onto him just as tightly. Slowly, he rebuilds himself from earthly grime and ghostly love, from whispers meant for a betrothed and from the fire of the lanterns destined for a forgotten, absent, ancient god. He embraces the time passing and the world changing, and holds the dying past close to his heart. Those aren't a martial god's powers; he examines them with patience of an immortal and reads the ebb and flow of what he could have had using scraps borrowed from San Lang. He always gets more than he asks for and less than his hungry divinity demands—and never not nearly enough to satisfy decay that bleeds out of him in rivulets and chips away at the world in waves of entropy.

But San Lang is there to guide him all the steps of the way, and Xie Lian reciprocates by giving as much attention as he can to that cast-away godhood of old. Lost and rejected like everything Xie Lian has touched over the centuries, it flourishes in his hands and leaves San Lang glowing.

He would have made a terrifying god, had he embraced divinity all those long centuries ago. It's good that he didn't, though. The Devastation he's become suits him much, much better.

"I think this will be the last we'll see of him for a while," San Lang says. "It's about time he goes into hibernation again."

Xie Lian imagines He Xuan settling down on the ocean's floor, in a place as cold and dark as his heart has been for so long. He would cradle the urns to his chest and curl around them, and the dragons he crafted from lost bones and the excess of sorrow would guard his sleeping form until the time comes to wake up again and bend the water to his will.

"Be nice to him, then?"

San Lang scoffs. "I'm always nice to him, gege."

"Nicer, then. He deserves it."

For once, still waters became turbulent and rose all the way to the horizon, and with them He Xuan rose, too. He swallowed the bright star Shi Wu Du had been and spat back the bones of a headless corpse, and for the first time in centuries, the seas have gone quiet.

"If gege is asking so nicely..." San Lang nuzzles briefly into Xie Lian's neck. His kisses are fleeting this morning, chaste and gentle beyond belief. "Shall we get ready?"