With his amber eyes still caught on every dip and curve of Yuhui’s nonsense markings, Laike made a single innocent request:

“Take off your clothes.”

“Um… why?” Yu’s eyes were wide even as his fingers indicated he was not opposed to following the order. The boy’s hands moved to fuss with the sash looped around his narrow waist.

Lai tilted his head, glancing up to see the other boy doing as he was told. He lingered for a moment that stretched in untold length as he watched those lithe hands struggle to loose the belted cloth, his pale royal fingers digging at knots. Soon catching himself in his staring and feeling very self aware, the assassin’s apprentice looked demurely away, ears a little red. He didn’t want to be improper—especially not with a prince. Jiling would scold him severely if the Tian boy complained about his manners and Xueyu would surely mark the lesson indelibly into his hide. “I mean—you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I can find another way.”

“It’s okay. I don’t mind,” the boy replied, chin dipping so his assiduous eyes could observe his own work, lanky digits tugging at an impossibly self-tangling string. These types of exercises were always difficult, random probability unfurling exponentially and infuriatingly. “I just—ugh, you know, have issues.”

He shimmied instead, squirming his way out of a robe that was reluctant to leave his shoulders, one arm followed to freedom by the other. The soft cloth fell around his waist, draping itself over the belt that refused him, and revealed Yu’s skin: pristine except for a few bruises that were fading from old training sessions, so far unmarked by any presence of artifacts.

“Is this good enough?” Yuhui adjusted his skirts to lay better, palms smoothing over the silk draped over bent legs.

Leaning across the table, that boy brought up on Jiling’s riddles picked up his host’s inkstone and placed it in front of himself with care. Laike had a honed calligraphic hand cut on transcribing thousands of ancient rhymes, old tongued proverbs and verses, the scrolling script of mantras on infinite stacks of prayer sticks. This time, he had a much simpler task, though the stakes seemed so much higher.

“You should lay down on your back,” the shadowstalker advised, a bit nervous but hiding it well. He held his hand over the table and concentrated, head tilting slowly as he watched the energy around Yuhui warp the space around them. Gods, how the world screamed silent in both their lungs at the assassin’s flensing, consumptive yowls of the universe’s fabric stabbing needles to the quick of them, thousand cut sharp until suddenly, it all gave way: Laike held a chimera’s dagger in his hand, a shifting shudder of nonsense crystals and liquid gold. Outside, three roof tiles fell from a sudden spike of wind; a mature plum tree bowed, bent permanently to nature’s chaotic whim.

The young disciple observed these phenomena and tried his best not to look alarmed even when he jumped at the tiles hitting the ground. The room they were in, too, was wrong—different than the moment prior.

“I’m sorry,” he said mutely, holding tight to the chaos-bodied dagger that broke their immediate reality. “I should have warned you.”

“It’s okay.” Yuhui’s voice rang from nowhere, a foreign sound that didn’t feel like his own in any discernible manner except for that which made his throat feel dry from too much speech.

He laid back as the room eddied and twisted around the focal point of their bodies, sunlight a liquid splashing in from the window, flowing in a beam of fluid across the floor and over his body, his neck bisected by the purity of sky. Elsewhere, shadows bubbled in transeunt calamity, creeping through the rolodex of time in every angle of his crooked room in search for an iteration of reality that would welcome them with open arms. Edges were hard, were simultaneously soft—they swirled uncontrollably in a marbled manner, goldthread woven through the air, silkstring suspending thoughts in the incomprehensible sums of complicated formulae, signs scattered to the furthest reaches of their containment, confusion and curiosity palpable on the nonexistent wind.

That black-eyed prince intently watched his guest, his guest’s dagger, even as the floor shivered beneath his spine as his heart ticked off a melody like 123 123 123 12.

Dagger pressed into his palm, the younger boy cut his hand open, but the gravity didn’t feel right here. It wasn’t the opposite either, not completely wrong: it was simply lighter, simply twisted. Laike’s blood flowed parallel to the ground, from both sides of his clenched fist and he dropped the chaos shard to take up the inkstone instead, chimera blade blinking its red tinted mineral eyes in holographic wanting. Once he managed to collect enough, he rose, snatching the young prince’s brush on his way to his host’s trusting side.

“Can I… uh.” The disciple of the mountain was a polite thing, even when everything around him was all wrong. He knelt, placing the inkstone in the hollow space next to the older boy’s waist, looking down at his hand dribbling blood onto the floor. A knot of concern tied itself between his brows but it wasn’t for his wound. “…I’m going to touch you, is that okay?”

“Yes, you can touch me.” Yuhui hummed in soothing singsong, notes a palliative encouragement of la, la, la, la, la. His breath was gentle as a rainstorm sweeping over a neon cobalt countryside, lungsway back and forth like 喇, 喇, 喇, 喇, 喇. He ran a hand through the warmth drowning his neck and moved it back to his side, smearing sunlight into a drop of blood, patient amid the fitful gnashing of the world around them.

Nodding, Laike placed his hand on the shockwave ground, shivering goosebumps all along old steel beams, new tradition’s marbled wood and soft woven reeds. Concentration took him, then, and he dipped Yu’s brush in his inkblood ground from disarray, his bloodink let by chaos,

thirsty for control.

He painted on his puzzle’s skin, aching and slow—constructed a talisman writ of spoken word and sacred tracers, scrawled beautifully down the prince’s unadorned chest. As he wrote, he mouthed the words

開

天

避

海

and played his flourish careful from collarbone to sternum to waistband. When his strokes were complete, the impromptu scribe looked up at his substrate, marveling at the sudden quiet that felled the room.

Yuhui kept silent as the world around them reconfigured itself to the corrections of Laike’s redlining, watching the calligrapher’s face with an afterimage of adoration lurking at the corners of his lips. He smiled, crooked and sly even in his best attempt to convey himself otherwise, content to wear Laike’s blood like it was his favorite color, warm and slick on his paperskin.

The grand emptiness of normalcy never grew old, not when his every day was unexpected, not when logic always swung just out of his reach. The boy was mollified by the schism bloodslashed through time and space. He was euphoric in this barren foxhole dug just for him, this sanctuary between every screaking contortion of the absurd, this gorge cleft in abstrusity.

“How do you feel?” The Luanshi boy’s voice was calming in its stoicism but he didn’t dare move, brush still hovering over Yuhui’s waist. What if this was chaos’ trick? A ruse to lull them to misguided calm? “I can paint your hands—do you feel like I need to inscribe your hands?”

“I feel better, I suppose.” Yuhui lifted his hands anyway, offering up open palms. “I dunno, it’s like… I never really feel bad. I can’t anticipate the things that happen around me but now it’s quiet. I know the quiet of objects ceasing to conspire against me. I can feel the calm of everything again.” The prince turned his chin aside. “Thank you for this. I’d like it if you painted my hands. I don’t know how long this is going to last—I can’t keep your blood on me forever and I’m pretty sure overkill doesn’t exist in this situation.”

Taking the half undressed boy by the hand, Laike pulled him up to sitting. He shifted too, sitting cross legged on the bamboo floor. “It’ll last for a little bit,” he said, more sure than he felt. He was quite thankful Xueyu beat a definitive tone into his voice from a young age. He took the prince’s hand in his own as he began to draw the same characters onto the royal’s left palm. “I can feel it around you like a wave, the haunting. The chaos. Over time, maybe we can refine the talisman—take it to a tracer to have it set with conduits, make it look nice. Maybe then you can live peacefully.”

“Your writing is really beautiful. Augmenting it would only detract from its elegance.” Yuhui observed the process again with unfading interest, switching hands when Laike was finished with his left. “Does this mean you’re going to be performing my warding every week now? And you’re going to let me dress your wound, right?”

“It’s not necessary,” the black-clad boy insisted as he moved smoothly to the right palm and began the inscription for the third time. “As for your warding, I’m not sure. My Lady of the Swarm doesn’t often tell me directly what duties are expected of me. Regardless, don’t worry about my hand. I’ll dress it myself, young master. I wouldn’t wish to trouble you.”

Eyes still canted down following the reminder of the vast distance between their origins, Laike placed the brush on the table and began to turn away.

“It’s no trouble,” the prince insisted, sitting up straighter. “Please. You’ve done this great thing for me, bled yourself out for my benefit. At least let me express some small amount of gratitude to you. Let me help you.” The boy so often handicapped by his lofty status reached out to touch the disciple’s shoulder, breached their inequality because it was his birthright to be able to do so.

“Please,” Yuhui pressed again, voice depleted in the peak of his petitioning, “This would mean the world to me, Laike.”

Laike bowed his head, jaw tight. He didn’t turn into Yuhui’s insistent touch. Instead, he implored him gently:

“You should get dressed, my prince.”