Chapter Text
For as long as Wei Ying could remember, there had been screams. Ear piercing screeches of fear, echoing pleas for help, and thundering vengeful screams.
He thinks they were always there. Just quiet enough to escape the notice of everyone else. But for him they were loud, beckoning him ever closer.
Even when Uncle Jiang took him back to Lotus Pier they remained, if not a bit distant.
It was only ever on the verge of death that those screams would fall away for a plethora of chiming giggling, soothing whispers, and warm teasing.
For all that they followed him, it’d been years since he could truly listen to them.
A-Ying’s back! A-Ying’s back! The faintest of voices could be made out, its cheer would’ve been heartwarming if not for the way the air was suffocating him. He’s here! He’s here! He’s here!
“Wei Ying,” Wen Chao called out to where Wei Ying had been thrown to the ground at his feet. “Do you have any idea where we are?
He flinched at the discomforting use of his birth name, he didn’t need to look up to know.
The second the air turned to lava, thick as molasses and as hot as the sun despite its underlying cold nature, he knew.
He would’ve known the second he heard those warped caws of the crows, Yiling had long grown used to avian screeches mimicking the cries of the dead and the livings’ final words.
He didn’t need to look up to know, but he did anyways.
All around them, jagged mountains jabbed into the sky, their dark forms melting into the blackness of the clouds overhead. Not a trace of light escaped the pitch black valley at the bottom of the cliff, looking to be an endless abyss. A faint, red glow shown through in the ravenous darkness.
“That’s right,” Wen Chao grinned. “The Burial Mounds.”
The very cliff they came to a stop, it was familiar. As familiar as the screams, the voices, and the pressure.
It was his safe spot over his four-five years on the streets. Here he was safe from the sleazy bastards wanting to sell him to a brothel, from the starving rabid dogs, and their bigger meaner counterparts, wolves.
Never before had the pressure weighed down on him like this, though. Was it because it sensed his weakness? Or was it because of the company that brought him?
Completely unhindered by the ocean of pressure, Wen Chao continued, “It’s right in Yiling. I’m sure even you Yunmeng people have heard about it. It’s a mountain of corpses — an ancient battleground. You’ll be able to dig up a corpse anywhere on this mountain.”
Madam Yu would get a kick out hearing that the safest Wei Ying had ever felt was on the edge of a dumping ground for unwanted corpses. Where the largest, thickest concentration of resentful energy in the entire world gathered.
She’d screamed about it being an omen. A glimpse of the wanton destruction he’d bring about on YunmengJiang.
“Look at the darkness in the air. Tsk, tsk, tsk, the hostile energy is strong, isn’t it? And the resentful energy is thick, isn’t it? Even the Wen Sect couldn’t do anything about it. We could only block it off.” With a smirk, he brought down his foot grinding Wei Wuxian’s head into the ground. “Wei Ying, can you smell the resentment here?”
Wei Ying cringed once more at the jarring sound of his name on the bastard’s lecherous tongue, all the more so at his grating laughter, “Don’t forget, anyone who ventures inside remains trapped for all eternity.”
Wen Chao grabbed Wei Wuxian’s hair to pull him up, a grotesque grin on his face. Without wasting another second, Wen Chao took off into the air again, hovering high enough off the ground to not be pulled in by the pit of death around him as he searched for the densest trench of resentment.
Wen Chao smirked. “So you will never escape!”
Even had he not been paralyzed from his injuries, Wei Ying would not have fought back. The gapping maw of this valley of darkness calling to something deep inside him.
So Wei Wuxian fell.
He fell down….
Down….
Down….
Down.
Into that obscuring darkness that had called to him endlessly over the last decade.