[PALACE GAME - LAN WANGJI RUN]

[laughitoff]

Everything is red. You are dying, somewhere far beyond pain, the very essence of yourself going to pieces. You’re shattering so badly you don’t know if you’ll ever find all of yourself again, if you’ll ever put yourself back together. There are teeth on you, ripping, tearing, devouring. There are teeth inside you, carving their way out, and those are worse.

This is a memory, happening at a remove. It is not yours. This is not happening now.

Everything is grey. You wake up in a prison cell, eyes wide, the ceiling flat and blank and unfamiliar above you. For a moment you simply think, no. You think, Please, wasn’t it over? Wasn’t it enough? You consider closing your eyes again and refusing to get up, until oblivion reclaims you. Even if you’re no longer dying, everything hurts.

This is a memory, happening at a remove. It is not yours. This is not happening now.

What is happening, then?

You–

–sit up.

Comments

[laughitoff]

The Wen Sect were fools, to have taken over another sect's home. It makes it very easy to move around unseen, to send in spirits at points where they'll wreak the most havoc and create the most paranoia among the occupiers of their home. You can taste it as well as any of your attendant ghouls, even from where you hide in the forest beyond the town walls. The fear is rich, thick and heady -- the promise of a meal.

You find every ward talisman on the outer walls during the day, and slip in through doors they don't know about to get to the ones inside. It's the work of a moment to change each ward, a few strokes of your own blood making it into a tool to attract the malice of the dead rather than repelling it.

When you prowl closer and the spirits touch their nightmares that night, you can hear them screaming within the walls. You smile. That's your signal to beckon the gathering dead, and tell them to get to work.

You also tell them to get creative, in the way only vengeful ghosts can be.

It's over within the hour. There's no one to stop you as you stride through the halls of your childhood: all the people in the compound are dying, or already twisted in death, in a hundred different gruesome ways. You follow a particular set of screams that's still going strong, though: you saved this one for last.

Wang Lingjiao and Wen Chao are struggling on the ground. It's the latter who's squealing like a stuck pig, hands clasped to a spreading bloody spot between his legs. The former's gnawing on what she's bitten off him, even as tears stream down her face.

They're the only ones you take care of personally, that night. Wang Lingjiao finishes it dead. Wen Chao's bodyguard rescues him, but not before you've handed him a knife and made him cut into his own flesh, made him cram it into his own mouth and choke it down around his braying sobs. Not before you mocked him for needing it to be cooked, and made him use a heated lamp accordingly on his face. Not before you've grabbed his wrists and made him offer his hands up to one of your favorite ghosts, a furious little child who died of hunger.

Ah, revenge. You did warn them you'd come back.

[strikingchords]

[closes his eyes and schools his gorge down; it's not hard. he has practice.

opens them to look at whatever ghost this represents...]

[laughitoff]

[Three ghosts appear after that very special memory experience finishes. Wen Zhuliu, the bodyguard, has clearly been strangled, his eyes bulging and his face blue, and his head lolls on a broken neck. Wang Lingjiao's entire head is bruised and deformed, and some kind of wooden stake protrudes out of her mouth -- it's been forced down her throat. The third ghost is just fully unrecognizable as Wen Chao at this point, but his continued torture past the memory is pretty evident -- his legs have been fully flayed to the bone, the fingers of both hands are missing, and his face is raw, exposed flesh.]

[strikingchords]

[okay

if he just turns them all three to ash with Heresy, he'll have three Orthodoxies going into the next place. perfect.]

[laughitoff]

[They disperse into the breeze, and are gone.]

[strikingchords]

[it's honestly more respectful treatment than all three of them gave a lot of people Lan Wangji personally knew, so. there's that.

he'll head back through the corridor and central area and head left, now.]

[laughitoff]

[Left hall.]