After, when Taxian-jun has gorged his nightly fill, he cages his favoured consort into his arms and drifts off into a sated sleep.

Chu Wanning finds no such rest, for he knows no such peace. It is his fate and his penance to lie here, instead, aware if not awake. A carcass stripped of its morsels, willow-bones sucked of their marrow, suffering all the ravages of the fed-upon.

Face gathered to Mo Ran's throat, he can almost taste his pulse on his tongue, as copper-thick as the throb in Chu Wanning's split lip. The Emperor, for all his power, his seized Heaven's mandate, breathes as any other man must to live. And he bleeds, too, as any other man will to die.

The horrors Taxian-jun has wrought on the world are as unfathomable as they are uncountable. But there are still stretches of it that yet lay unburned. People who can be spared his torment, if Chu Wanning were to bare his teeth and bite out his throat.

It would take nothing from him at all. But it asks everything, in turn, the price so high that even the thought of unhinging his jaw makes Chu Wanning sick to his soul. Mo Ran is a testament to his every failure, the manifest of his heart's warp. He cannot spend his own disciple's life to balance his own debts' cost.

It does not make the bodies left in his wake heavier, for all it should. Chu Wanning has always known the animal he is, in the end. A comfort, however cold. He closes his eyes, and he presses his lips to Mo Ran's neck, feather-soft and honest, drinking of his swallow for himself. Another terrible gift, thieved to keep Chu Wanning warm until morning, where this will all begin anew again.