"You think to slay a man, mourning." But he speaks it like river water, judgement come and spumed and gone, leaving a world unstained, unchanged, unhastened. Reason compels him towards Five's orbit, in rushed alliance: they share an enemy, the man who enslaved Lily and Slick, who agonised Wrath and Wei Ying. Personal tragedy does not console the Beastmaster's victims.

And still, there's a trickling inkling of fear, of gutting understanding. A flicker of knowing that this a death lord stoked by the long wait, turned feral by awaiting the chance to glimpse a beloved gone. Can Lan Wangji cast the first stone upon him. His temples beat the start of roiling migraine, brewing.

"An adversary, reduced." They are better than this. Must be better than this. Were slept his principles, during the war, when they hounded Wen Ruohan at each turn, at any opportunity? Five is not Lan Wangji's to begrudge. "We do not meet him fairly."

How to torture simple, visceral objections into words? To explain what should be yet plain, that they set about not retaliation in heat of a bloodied moment, but execution? The Beastmaster has earned trial, before the sword. They want for judgement, for an elder.

Perhaps the Merchant — but then, there sleeps an old man resolutely divorced from the possibility of disclosure, content to weaponise them like shrapnel for his sling. He has battered, Lan Wangji suspects, the walls of three outposts, since their arrival. Whatever his purpose, senseless, eruptive conquest has not compromised his path.

Lan Wangji rises, slithers up from the rock, inhales with quiet, inexplicable frustration. This is not him, this is not his way. This is not —

"One day, we will not know our faces." Become strangers to themselves, to their choices. He breathes, and air burns another man, and he will be wicked for this, white of his collar noosing his neck, he will walk against the tide of the precepts. We are not assassins. With him, he lifts Bichen.

"We have a sword." Lan Wangji's instrument, silvered, pallid, a widow before she is ever a wife, her master's fate replicated. "For the deed that needs done."

Ahead. Alone. Wolves dart so, wandered and without purpose, absent of inhibitions. Lan Wangji watches him — thinks, he is not required. Not called. Not vanguard. Hardly a companion, and it is Five who downgrades him, who neglects him, who does not whisper his name.

Five who scatters his shadow like grains of wheat harvested in violence.

And Lan Wangji with certain, pained inevitability, who pursues at fast, if diminished step, who might have been a ghost once but finds his strength and his ability reduced by whatever curses bind this temple to its sins, like stars to constellations. They are subtle, he prays — compared to the gentle, aimless progression of statues of great heft, they may just as well not be.

When he catches pace with Five, easing to his right, so Lan Wangji may yet dispose and rouse his sword, should the hour require it, he murmurs:

"My..." And now for the inevitable eyeroll, because a man may be whipped, but still fight his marital lashing with dignity, "Soulmate suffered torturous temptations. Cravings stirred. You are... afflicted?"