NAIL’EM TO THE MAST

A.

( He watches the stirred corpses, shivered in the yawning stretch of grey-eyed skies, like thick smoke on winter mornings — dead men rising and falling in their fetters of dark leathers. Nearly charcoal sketches, eclipsed by a hasty, passing thumb.

Their lives mean nothing here: an easy decapitation, or the long crackling burn, or the push of their lean, wet, decaying muscle into wall or stone or the high pillar of the deck’s mast. They forget themselves, how to heed and to listen, how to prowl and fear when they are hunted. Death makes creatures arrogant, steals their caution.

Men with nothing to lose surrender everything.

The dulled meowl of Lan Wangji's white silks in between corners of the deck’s cargoes, nooks of the Pariah’s quarters down under, crannies among columns of ill-stored rowboats. He scavenges for the dead, draws out each duel until his opponent is neatly disarmed, and Wangji may give a hard thrust of his blade through their pulsing, breathing rib cages, locking their thrashing, convulsive bodies between hilt and pillar, or lean wood.

He does not excuse himself, red thick and dripping down his cheek, under the lazy beam of his spectator’s gaze; only drags his hand over the wall to relieve it of — slick and breathes out, rasping: )

Death would be as nothing to them.

( This, then, is why he impairs and arrests the dead in place, but does not exterminate them. )


B.

( The smell of damp plaster, groan of weighed wood yielding under weight, metal’s aftertaste when his mouth scratches chains in a long cleaving, or the screeched, wet tear of linens, savaged when he’s plunged down through sails.

It emerges that being corseted by an unwieldy tentacle, then catapulted each way across a ship, is a gallery of experiences.

When the tentacle unravels, finally to drop him down on a ship’s deck — and which vessel? is there gain in the name? a difference? — Lan Wangji hardly remembers to shout from a raw mouth brimming with blood and only rolls at the last moment, searching but failing not to fall.

Landing.

Right.

On.

You. )



THE RED ROOSTER | UNDEAD SHIPPING

A.

( She’s beauty, she’s grace, she’s more holes than a termite can embrace — a merchant’s ship basking in her leaking, creaking and red-lacquered splendour. Among the first risen, the Red Rooster holds two dozen sailors so hard at their work they’ve persisted in it past their natural expiry — half these men consumed by less bellicose, than domestic purpose. Unbidden, they pass long, heavy ladles below deck and occupy themselves with the business of pushing out fresh flows of accruing water, its stench damp and rotting, stale and saline.

Upon invading the Red Rooster, Lan Wangji had anticipated, in order:

&mdasj; a sword to his neck

— the strange, tinkering loud metallic contraption that bursts flame when activated, like a fire-dipped arrow

— a greeting of excessively enthusiastic, creative and biologically unsound imprecations

— chaos, carnage and thematic alliterations thereof

Instead, he scuttles below deck, his back to the broad, wailing rattle of the decaying wooden wall, and receives, from a hand all hard bone...

...

A ladle.

Chipped, pathetically. Mutinously brimming with holes, like the swollen spread of a prolific lotus pod. Uncaring, five dead men sprawled on a bench and the floor carry on with the task of spooning out water and delivering half their catch in nearby buckets. The rest rains down in a dusty slush.

A dead thing stares back at Lan Wangji, growl like nails, pulling. A hard taskmaster. Helplessly, Lan Wangji stares between the silvered edge of his raised sword and the... ladle... in his hand, then his inevitable companion: )

They... anticipate success with this instrument.

( Save... him. )


B.

( Another day, another lifetime, absent the hard, callous yelps and yowls of teething, angered spirits that screech out their wrath and their fear, Lan Wangji — silks dappled by fat beads of red and rain — might try to enjoy exorcism at sea.

Instead, he is here, silver of his sword blinding a dead man who seeks to scratch out his eyes with a contorted hook, turning to belt his leg around the Red Rooster’s wobbly rail, and slap a slip of powered talisman on the nearest phantasm —

...when an undead rat plunges, catching the parchment piece between its teeth, and scuttles away. Forgive Lan Wangji if, Bichen’s blade deflecting the hook that’s cutting a path to his eyes again, he forgets his manners to scream: )

Seize the paper.

( All the bloodthirsting ghosts nearby could benefit from that talisman. )



THE STRANDING

( Slow to wake, mouth dry and tongue slackened, and his fingers, thin as silvered wire contorted against the hard slick jut of crumbled stone. Brittle, it scratches his fingertips in rolled rumble, and he clutches, first purchase of the beach’s spread, then the reins of his bone-deep, metallic inertia. It weighs him down at the joints, the rise of him off sand loose-limbed and animalic, as if — puppet righted on thin strings — he has neglected to remember the proper forms of a body in motion.

As if this flesh is not his own but stretched taut and thin, like watered ink. He hardly knows it, meagre and delicate, but absent the natural calluses that should line and shield the crest of his wrist bone, his knuckles.

A sword worked to forge him strong. Time has stripped him of Bichen’s gains. ( And what were they? He thinks, only heartbeats ago, he knew — )

He walks the island's sands dazed, fumbling. Failing to master the balance of a body that shifts and shifts and shifts, grows and lessens, and taunts him, with the need to loosen the bindings of his robes, to tighten them after. Water whispers dark, at the beach’s edge. He knows, he might not glimpse each detail, but to see his shape alone now would paralyse him. He does not look.

He haunts. Salted palms slide his forehead ribbon down, crudely braid in his hair to avoid slippage during his — transitions. When he stumbles on a face he thinks known through guesswork and approximation, they are not alone — but watched, hollowly, by shapes dark and long-staring.

The tar creatures do not need to round them to hunt them. Efficient predators never do. He watches them back.

And he shifts again, and now his voice comes too young, too reedy, with a watery edge: )

Are they to be fled?


( ooc: Lan Wangji will be cycling in between the ages of 16-35 on the island, but he has mostly sharpened rather than drastically changed his appearance since the days of his youth. He’ll also be recognisable for his white robes and headband! )