📜 Chapter 18: Threads of Smoke & Red Silk
Morning brought noise back to the Pavilion: footsteps, laughter forced too loud, smell of rice porridge and cheap wine.
Yujin slipped out before the lanterns were snuffed.
Yet at the door, he paused.
Behind him, Xiao half-slept, red ribbon slipped loose onto the floor.
"If you fall again," Xiao murmured drowsily, not even opening his eyes,
"Come back anyway."
Yujin stepped into dawn's chill — cloak around shoulders, head bowed.
But inside, a thread held him fast: Xiao's words, quiet as prayer:
"Come back anyway."
At Cloud Recesses, whispers had reached elder ears: A small sect boy drinking himself into tears in a brothel. A mission failed, a child lost.
Lan Qiren frowned, brows knitted deep.
"If grief is all that guides him," he told a junior,
"then grief will break him."
But Lan Wangji, passing silent as wind, paused.
"Yet grief," he said, voice low,
"is how the living remain living."
In Yinshi, black ash still marked burned beams; the scent of char lingered.
Yujin knelt at the ruin's edge, fingertips brushing soot.
"I will not forget you," he whispered to the boy whose name he never knew.
"Even broken wings can still hold vows."
That night, back at the Pavilion, Xiao found the purple ribbon Yujin once wore — slipped from his hair when drunk.
He picked it up gently, pressing it to his lips.
"You fool perple bird.." Xiao whispered, throat tight.
"Fly, even if you fall again.."