#stygian tiger

Present-Day, 1947

They told you the war was over.

You used to know someone who might laugh at moments like this one, and now that he’s gone you wonder if maybe it was how he kept himself from crying in the dark.

Your brother told you, once, that everyone has a different way of coping.

Every splatter of blood is unique. You don’t ever really get used to it. And you certainly won’t forget it now. This is death, you think, almost tonelessly. Somehow you aren’t as surprised as Jiang Cheng is, staring at Xiao Xichen’s sword sticking out of Song Lan’s chest. You know it well. You spent years on the road, in the trenches, first getting rid of the Japanese and then purging Wen Ruohan’s corruption from the face of what you were promised would be a free China. Somehow it never goes the way you expect.

You knew someone once with better intuition. And also worse.

From the thick of the battle, Jiang Cheng shouts with single-minded focus, and in his hands Zidian lights up like a firework. “Get him!” He shouts at you, surging into a new wave of bodies, people who had names and faces and who were loved and lost like …

No. Nobody was like him. He had been unique.

For you, Song Lan dies out of focus, like a blurry object in the distance. You will mourn him later, maybe, if there is any part of you that still has the capacity for it. Jiang Cheng is redirecting your attention to the objective, the real assassin, the puppeteer who has eluded you for months and who now controls Xiao Xichen’s enhanced corpse at a distance you haven’t been able to cut through the bodies to reach.

The rumors have given this man, and his mask, a name: the Stygian Tiger. You have been following breadcrumbs, piecing together a string of deaths dotted from province to province, trying to find the bigger picture behind yet another wave of senseless violence. This is the first time you’ve caught him in the act, so to speak; in the villages they whisper the name and they say he never leaves witnesses.

He plays the flute.

You’ve had no taste for the instrument since 1945. Yet now, listening to the melody that propels Xiao Xichen’s corpse into further and further malevolence, you are struck by the sound. The notes lodge themselves into you like living splinters, working their way someplace deeper, to hidden parts of you that are kept secret and which are still raw, even two years after the fact.

Something shatters when the realization arrives: this is the precise inverse of a melody you are certain only two people on earth know. “Wei Wuxian,” you whisper, and just the three syllables falling out of your mouth are the explosion of a grenade you swore to swallow when he died.

You move with new purpose, flying towards him, but as Zidian wrangles Xiao Xichen into submission, the assassin must realize his work is done. You watch as he puts the flute away — yes, there it is, the deft twirl that you know so well, the fingers that still haunt your dreams — takes the pistol out of a holster, fires.

You are left with a hole in your chest, bleeding out on the ground.

It’s surgical work, this shot, the work of a master. But you can already tell you’re going to live.

You don’t think he missed.

Your name is Lan Wangji. “W-Wei … Wuxian,” you say, again, and you tell yourself you’re not going to pass out when Jiang Cheng’s face appears above yours in alarmed triplicate. You are Lan Wangji, Hanguang-Jun, they call you, the soldiers who served with you in the army, who watched you and Wei Wuxian accomplish improbable things at impossible odds. You don’t entirely understand it: the way people look at you as though you could make them feel brave.

Wei Wuxian used to look at you like that, too, as though he never knew he was brave already.

There’s a sour, coppery taste on your tongue. You tell yourself you’re going to stay awake. You say that, but the bullet’s been tipped in something, and already the edges of the world are going dark.

You know exactly where he learned to shoot so well. After all, you were there.