#jingliu looks like she is melting from mara

[vagun1ka]

feixiao and jingliu thoughts

[deathbxnny]

hello!! im the anon that wrote the jingliu’s child idea, so i will request it now (paragraph below is a copy paste i aint writing allat again)

reader being jingliu’s child (like,biologically) and was born some months before jingliu became mara-struck, when jingliu became mara-struck she literally tried to kill her months old baby, so i like to think that jingliu would tell jingyuan to take care of her baby if anything happened to her, so after jingyuan “kills” jingliu, he takes the baby and tries to raise it as his own child, and as they grow up they take after their mother and almost look like their mothers carbon copy, which makes jingyuan remember his mentor

platonic and the character is jing yuan, feel free to mention other characters tho!!

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A/N: Hey there Anon! Thank you for resending the request! I really like the idea!<33

Content: Angst, spoilers to Jing Yuan's/Jingliu's backstory?, platonic relationships, hurt/comfort, Reader is described to look like Jingliu, fluff, sfw

Reader has no set pronouns!

((Not fully proofread))

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Killing his teacher was one of the hardest things Jing Yuan ever had to do. It was like a part of him was ripped apart in the process too. Like apart of him died with her that day. But the only thing that consoled him and that was left behind from his old mentor, was you, Jingliu's months old child. He was exhausted and absolutely shattered by what happened and yet, he held on just for you. He promised that he would.

It took him a while to learn how to take care of you. Thankfully he wasn't entirely alone in this and some of the female generals, surprisingly including Fu Xuan, helped him out immensely during his first year with you. He was so tired with life during the first few months, but you helped him get through it. Your existence felt like a last gift to him by his mentor and perhaps that's exactly what you were.

Years went by faster than Jing Yuan wanted them to. He never cared for them before, as he never really aged himself. But after you came into his life, he began appreciating every single year you were in it.

He documented everything about you and was proud of every little achievement you made. It didn't matter how mundane it was either. When you first babbled out a call of his name, he practically melted on the spot with pride and love.

As the years went by, he began noticing how similar you looked to your mother. It filled his heart with warmth and nostalgia to see you grow into a near carbon copy of his mentor. He made sure to give you a good and happy life, one that she deserved to have had with you too, if things had gone differently.

Once you were old enough, he began telling you simple stories about your mother, about her bravery and her days of mentoring him. You listened to his words, eagerly leaning to hear every word, as you looked so unbearably similar to her, that he couldn't help but hug you for longer every time he could. He saw you as a gift and he'd make sure to protect you with his life.

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A/N: Alright, I haven't been doing well today, so I hope this was coherent and okay! Thank you again for the request!<33

[shentm]

outsider still doesn't feel complete to me but i'm leaving it here for now. blade pov, no beta we die like baiheng, check tags for trigger warnings

dreamwidth mirror, which by the way is the more updated and also likely more permanent version of this piece, as this tumblr post always runs the risk of deletion anytime i'm awake past 11pm

The dream catches itself on those at the center of the tragedy, locking on to the minds already half-emptied by mara. It watches, as the nights repeat, as the hunt grows farther from its purpose.

He's covered in it, clothes slick with blood, the moonlight sliding off of it and watching him through the reflection. Every time he shows up, Jing Yuan has to stay awake for hours afterward, scrubbing at the floors to rid his home of the stains and the stench of mara-stricken beasts. It doesn't help that he likes to trail his sword behind, leaving gouges that the blood flows through, pooling in divots and seeping into the cracks between. But it's not like Jing Yuan expected him to be different.

An Outsider, who participated in a horrific ritual, and became tethered to the merging of paths, a creation of a collector who found the occurrence too interesting to resist. Who was given the abundance emanator's blessing, transforming him into something thought of as prey by most of the Xianzhou Alliance. It's strange that he's still sane sometimes, occasionally managing to break the contradictory resonance of intertwined paths where the hunt and the abundance intersect.

In the shared dream he sees the echoes of those he once knew, dead beings recreated in a perfect recollection of the waking world. It's just how he remembers, an everlasting reminder of what they did. He's drawn in when asleep and awake, unable to escape the repetition of memory.

In that intersection of paths he sometimes finds the shadow of the Imbibitor Lunae running away and away, too afraid to face his crimes. He finds the corpse of a dragon protected by its unborn kin, and tears it apart instead of looking back. He fights through the same landscapes again and again, always waking up in front of the same dim lamp. The only reason he can think of for this endless repetition is that someone out there likes these memories, wants to see the moment of the sin done right.

Skin melts against skin, fire burning through hair. The wet noise of a blade squelching as it rips through meat is the only sound that interrupts the guttural screaming of those beasts, displacing the cries with blood down their throats. Their pathetic existences mirror his own. Eyes press against his brain where they grow inside his skull, amplifying the beats of his heart. A constant high pitched whine carries through the sky, staying with him wherever he goes. Physical discomfort keeps him in the dream, afraid of what deeper pain awaits with the dawn of wakefulness.

He sees her too, sometimes, guarding the path before the corpse. She sees him in return, and they always meet in a clash of swords, the moon almost close enough to touch. It watches next to them, the blue light of her own weapon brilliant against the clouded orange sky. There was never any other choice; a recreation can only travel down the path of the original, like wheels in a rut on a dried dirt road. They tell each other that the dream will end. He continues the hunt again.

The dream is an awful thing to endure. He wonders about its purpose when cleaning his blade that Jingliu so kindly returned.

Dan Feng never acknowledges him, never admits to what he did, never even calls him by name. But it's clear that despite the physical differences, he's still the same arrogant coward that lives in the dream. How else would Dan Feng manage to kill him every time with the weapon he forged with his own once-deft hands, buying useless time before his inevitable judgement?

When he wakes up it is only a brief moment of respite from the dream as clear-cutting pain reminds him of his immortality. Sleep comes with the soothing promise of comfort, but also with the knowledge that it will not be restless.

Later he joins the Stellaron Hunters, gets taken in despite being on the brink of insanity. Feels the frenzy slipping away with Kafka's words, feels the understanding leave his mind. Turns him into a docile puppet, waiting for the next command. He names himself Blade. She gives him the first genuine rest he's had in seven hundred years.

His senses are diluted with her influence, not enough to render him completely useless, but enough to clear his mind. It's mostly just his sight that's a problem, and it's easy enough to counter with his other senses. The other one is touch, but he doesn't expect that to really be important. He does most of his hunting with a sword anyways, distanced enough from his prey.

He's never gone back to the Luofu personally. Once or twice through the years he hears news of its whereabouts, and soon has those reminders taken from his mind, rendering his sleep dreamless yet again.

He doesn't go back because he's not done hunting.

But at some point it was bound to happen, the meeting of three tragic sinners and that other guy who was also there.

A mission brings him back to the Luofu, and he doesn't complain because his mind is too empty to think. He tries to think of himself as just a simple vessel to help Elio carry out his plot. A stagehand for the endless show that they try to put on. It's quite nice, being like this, the desperately needed reprieve from the eyes that always try to crawl their way back into his brain. It's not easy to forget once your body has learned.

Kafka says the mission went well. Elio says he can break the tether now. He doesn't remember any of it, except from the brief moment of clarity when Jing Yuan asked him if he was done, and then the consciousness when he wakes up later.

Jing Yuan looks the same now as he did all those years ago, except for the young shadow he keeps at his side. He's still just as radiant as the sun, the center of everything he joins. Of course a comet like himself was never meant to stay long in Jing Yuan's orbit. The sun does not need to change when a dirty snowball cuts through its orbit after centuries of desolation in the universe; the sun burns bright on its own, without a need for a secondary light.

None of them are, were, like that, just a product that reflected their surroundings instead of the magnetic core that shaped their era. Maybe that's why they're all criminals wandering the stellar seas now, shot out from the gravity well and driven by their own definitions of the hunt.

But eventually he feels the searing pain start to fade when he chokes awake on drying blood, glances over at the dissolving bodies next to him. The eyes can no longer see. Kafka helps with her lightning, and soon the only physical links left are those burning wounds inside his brain.

Between puddles of blood and dripping black stone he wakes up, and the night grows deeper but the streetlights start burning. He collaborates, strangely, with Dan Heng (a new trailblazer) to force Jing Yuan back into his bed. He sees the artificial sunrise a few times, occasionally with Kafka, and sometimes just on his own. The sight of a celestial object rising behind the clouds has been one he's not seen for a while, even if it is still a false sun.

It's done, the dream has an end. The hunt is over, its conclusion long since found.

He meets the one who couldn't let go in the waking world, both of them more alive than they should be. Neither of them deserve to be here, yet they sully the Luofu with their presence anyways, carving and gouging out a place where they no longer belong.

She meets him with the same intensity she always carries, unable to be diminished by time or a dream's veil, and he feels alive as they dance the familiar battle once again, for what may be the last time. Unlike the cycles before them, this time it feels like a breaking of bonds, like something being set free.

On the last night of his stay on the Luofu he ends up at Jing Yuan's family home after he manages to separate from the dream, and he's lucky that Jing Yuan still stays here even after seven hundred years. Conveniently, Dan Heng mentions that Yanqing would be dragging the Luofu's heroic trailblazer on some sort of sword-hunting adventure on that day.

"Yingxing," Jing Yuan says when he enters civilly through the window, "please stop dripping blood on the floor."

It's that name that breaks him into the clearest state of mind he's had for centuries. That and the newfound control over his own mind, now that the moon no longer watches him. Jing Yuan still sounds the same, calls him with the same tone of voice. When's the last time anyone's referred to him as Yingxing? When's the last time he's been able to hear that name without his consciousness slipping through the cracks?

"Jing Yuan," he responds, and he's suddenly aware of the winds outside, carrying with them a fine mist of pollen that coats everything in a layer of grit, sticking to the drying blood on his clothes. He's aware of the artificial moonlight that gazes into the room, blue in tone and so much softer than the harsh orange red in his sleep. He can feel the silence of the home, where four others once gathered and where only one stays now.

"That's not my name."

The dream tries to call to him, but its voice is quiet here.

Jing Yuan reclines on the mass of pillows he calls a bed, and when he shifts he can hear the sound of feathers scratching at their confinements. He hears his pulse in his head, reviving nerves once thought to be dead, and he can feel the tingling sensation where it creeps through his limbs.

The air is cold where it hits his skin. It's been so long since he's been able to feel the temperature. He looks at Jing Yuan, and he can see the shine in his eyes, the strands of his hair where it was only a blurred image before. The world is clearer than it's ever been. It's like getting glasses. Do they still have those?

Jing Yuan grounds him in the present, the physicality distracting him from the broken link between his mind and that all-seeing eye disguised as the moon. The moon here on the Luofu is fake, as is the rest of the sky over most of the ship. The mara-stricken here do not scream as they claw at their faces, nor do they tear apart their prey with overwhelming strength.

He can touch and be touched now, acutely aware of the blood on his face, his body, his hands, the stains across the sheets and the fabric where he dares to rip them apart, but it doesn't matter in the moment. Cauterized wounds of foreign eyes that once grew inside his head start to make their presence known again, but they don't try to regrow. Flesh, not his own, knits itself together when he lets go, and the scent of iron permeates the air.

He's never been a particularly selfless lover. He bites down again.

"Ren," Jing Yuan says, quiet with an edge of something else. The false moon silently hangs behind the clouds, diffused into a hazy shower of light. The metallic taste of blood fills his mouth.

Jing Yuan is just as pliant for him now as he was centuries ago, body remembering and opening its vulnerabilities for him so readily. The heat in his head is easily ignored in favor of the heat beneath his hands. It's easy to get lost in the chase to consume and feed, but he reins himself in with the control he thought he'd lost a long time ago.

An Outsider, on equal ground with the Luofu's general, if only for one night. An Outsider, carving his own mark into the Xianzhou's history.

He finds Jing Yuan again after all these centuries, and he's still just as passionate as he's always been, fervent energy and primal fear driving him deeper into the desperate desire to stake a claim of his own.

[feathers-and-song]

Blood Rains and the Restless Nights

(cw: blood, body horror, nightmares, injury, death, trauma)

Backed against the wall, he could hear nothing but the ringing in his ears from the sounds of clashing metal. Rain fell fast and hard against Kai's face, his shoulder weeping from its opened wound as the claws of the ginkgo leaves tore their way out of his skin. They caressed his face and armor before reaching down for his discarded helmet.

Kai could have sworn he threw it away a long time ago, but when he looked at it now, it's shape was too pointed. The helmet of the Mara was placed into his hands. His fingers trembled around the cold steel. He wanted to throw it away so desperately, but the branches and twigs only pulled it closer.

Kai gritted his teeth and blazed like a wildfire, recreating the scene from eight hundred years ago and melting the steel to the point it mixed with his hands, binding them together.

When the fire cleared, the metal encasing his hands were turned into chains. Chains that connected to steel bars. Beyond the bars was a man with flowing dark hair and a hardened gaze. He stared at Kai with unfeeling eyes, not bothering to give a proper greeting.

The branches swirled around Kai's face now as the dark room filled with a thick red liquid that fell from the open stomachs of the hanging Cloud Knight soldiers on the ceiling. One by one, they dropped into the blood pool and softly floated to the surface.

Other bodies soon emerged as they all stood tall, branches of the mara protruding from their bodies, eyes dull and lifeless. Baiheng stood with a hunch, her back snapped in three places and her arms barely held together by the threads of her flesh.

His fellow soldiers became unrecognizable enemies. These men who he couldn't save because he was too busy moping over the death of someone who didn't even care about him. Jingliu stood in the corner, frostbite tainting her arms as mist poured from out of her mouth with a light rasp. Her eyes bled until they formed a tight mask over her eyes as she stalked off into the darkness, exiled and to never return.

Dan Feng mumbled some words, but they were drowned out by the incomprehensible moaning of his dead comrades. The mara wound tighter around Kai's body until he could see only out of one eye. He watched in horror as Dan Feng turned to stone, putting on the same pose as the statue outside of Scalegorge Waterscape.

The blood rose and rose until it was waste deep. A tall figure emerged later than the others. He had a kind, aged face and soft white hair. Standing behind Dan Feng was Yingxing who looked at Kai with the kindest eyes known on the Luofu. Those soft eyes rolled back into his head as his hair cascaded down, being painted a deep black.

Kai was forced to watch in horror as his best friend turned into a ruthless killing machine right before his eyes. Gentle hands took hold of his shoulders, bringing Kai close to the chest of this deranged world's version of Jing Yuan.

The twisted rendition of one of his closest friends took over the role of the Mara in stroking the side of Kai's head, creating a mirror of what people said on the streets. But Kai knew he did not give the General his body for his position.

They rarely talked at all anymore.

Kai could not struggle, the branches now turned to vines as he was forced to endure the suffocation through his armor, now taking form of the enemies he swore to kill, their decaying hands grabbing at his boots and pants, trying to drag him down into the murky depths.

Blade, once known as Yingxing, stalked out in front of the statue as it crumbled away, turning to dust. Jing Yuan wound his arms around Kai's shoulder, whispering to him that everything would be fine.

There were voices in the back of Kai's head, each one mingling with one another, telling him to embrace the mara, to embrace abundance and destruction in once. The General's arms held tight as Blade ran forward faster than Kai could keep up with, sword extended.

Kai screamed bloody murder as the weapon entered his chest, body bursting with hot pain until he found his eyes opening to see the ceiling of his room.

Jumping out of bed, Kai immediately fell to his knees against the floor sobbing. He gripped his shoulder tightly, feeling the throbbing pain. It was worse this night than any of the others.

And the nightmare was far more realistic.