"What better time?" Asked, the warmth of qi soaked as willingly as the water into his parched mouth, meridians buzzing with the boost, empty core passed through like any common crossroads, noteworthy only for its absence. He chooses to go, borrow on the lent energy that his husband parcels out now, pulling him forward as inexorably as the tides swallow the shores.

They, too, will be swallowed again. Swallowed like the heat kept underground, burrowed deep, and the craggy faces of etched stone they fight now.

"Almost nostalgic, isn't it?" He says with the kind of smile that says he knows it isn't, not for them, unless months back and the pillars of stone where the winds sighed as much as the ghosts did matters, if that structures tonight.

"Unlike some, at least these—" A grunt, and he lurches into Lan Zhan as elegantly as a sack of molded rice, spilling out of its burlap, "—speak."

In the way of stone, slow and ponderous where their movements are not, and there, feet come to stomp and kick and miss them in measured breadths of fingertips, coordinated more through chance than intent. His water, that stale, sad substance, falls, splatters, crushes under one stone sole.

A sad sound, wrenched from the depths of his chest. "Not the water-wine..."

There's some element of bittersweetness that laces through him, tender and fragile and stronger than it appears. Between the pull at his wrist, Lan Zhan's words offering a cup that needs no filling, and the slipping, sliding, battered way they progress, stones whispering in their wake. Stones shouting as they grind back to hold their contents safe, as they find the small spaces and fill them with each other.

He grunts at impacts, breathless at times with it, but moving, always moving, gaunt and alive in the way of a fever bright beginning. It's in the purposeful stumbling that he answers the pledge, a hard press of lips to cheek in what should have been flirtatious whimsy, if they were young men, if they'd ever had something close to a dancing courtship that wasn't dripping crimson and shadow.

"You would drown me," he says, and they're away again anyway, twisting behind a pillar rising firm and hard at their backs, unrelenting. "Some thirsts aren't to be quenched."

Revenge, a hollow echo that had been properly addressed, then had become nothing but its sad mockery of purpose, of justice delivered to the unjust, ribs deprived of marrow around lungs desiccated of damp. Alcohol, burning lips and dry mouth and drier eyes, and he laughs, he laughs when he's asked, do they claim you?

"They always tried," he says, and laughs where it's mirthless, where his eyes are shades that pierce the dark, "They never could. Here, they breathe without lungs, scream without air. They don't seek me."

Not him, stronger than others, even pressed back from what should be his meagre strengths played to their ends and then pushed beyond, not him they seek, they curl around, they covet. They're not so starved as Yiling stood. There is choice here, and distraction, and more feast than one broken man dropped into their midst, clinging to anything that was life, and remaining.

His turn then to tug, to pull, to let long fingers with their altered callouses press into Lan Zhan's hand like so many abortive gestures of kindness he'd wanted to make once, had stopped himself from claiming, a further selfishness the world didn't owe. Here, to pull down, into the lower corridor of stone natural and crude, as a last of the small statues whisper-shouts, "Small child, red child, here, here, here, gone and come, come and gone."

Rocks tumble from overhead, shaking maidens in their shrieking tumbles down unfamiliar walls, certain of their ending places, resigned yet unwilling. Pull at Lan Zhan, chest to chest, and it's backward Wei Wuxian falls, the air driven from his lungs as they land and slide and tumble, down a sloping face into the vegetation and broken columns below.