Su Lan
1301 years after The Long Night
Huichâng
There aren’t any words to describe how cold he is. Su Lan thinks that there might have been a second hell made, maybe just for him, and it’s full of ice.
He thinks he’s awake again, because everything hurts. If he focuses hard enough, there are sounds that fade in and out through the ringing in his ears. Sometimes, its water dripping. Sometimes he hears the ocean, and rustling leaves, and his mother’s voice, but he thinks that last one isn’t real.
Su Lan becomes aware of another sensation besides the pain after what feels like weeks, or months… and that is, he’s wrapped in something.
If it’s blankets, he can’t tell, and if they are, they’ve been drenched in water. The more conscious he becomes of it, the more Su Lan panics, feeling as if whatever it is cocoons his entire body up to his neck and won’t budge.
The first time Su Lan tries to move one of his fingers, he shrieks so hard his screams echo for minutes after. He thinks he’s in a cave. That idea is supported by the damp air, the hollow sounds that make it to him from where he lies on his back, sealed away from the world.
Once, he freezes in fear, sensing eyes on him in the darkness. He tries to call out, but nothing comes from his throat except pained hisses and groans.
If someone’s here, if they brought me here, why didn’t they just kill me? Put me out of my misery…
Su Lan slips in and out of dreams so frequently, sometimes he can’t tell if he’s awake or not for several hours. He keeps dreaming of the same thing too; yellow eyes watching him from some distance away… like they’re scared of him?
Su Lan tries to say-
“Help, help me!” But he’s probably just mumbling nonsense in his sleep.
After what feels like several different deaths, both from the pain and the cold, Su Lan opens his eyes and things are a little clearer. There’s a light coming from somewhere, the ocean sounds are louder… and those eyes, those yellow eyes-
They’re real.
He can’t beg for mercy, he can’t even move. Su Lan is entirely still and silent as he watches those eyes approach. For a moment, a brief moment, he entertains the possibility that someone actually did save him. All thoughts of that variety vanish the instant he sees the creature those eyes belong to.
It’s spent so long lurking just out of his vision, in the shadows. Su Lan barely breathes, watching as it drags a huge, scaly tail across the cave floor. Slowly, cautiously, it comes to lean over him, human-like face and hands questing over his body.
She’s not going to eat me, is she?!
Su Lan knows very little about magical creatures. What he knows about nagas is only that no one has seen one in about three hundred years. They were rarer than rare, a small evolutionary branch of humans that died off long ago. The last one it seems, is mending his wounds in a darkened cave.
He knows he’s right, because as the creature unwinds what he now assumes is bandages from him, she takes note and seems fascinated by every little twinge of pain in his eyes and his face. Her hands, though her nails are tipped with claws, are gentle, and Su Lan finds that once his panic has subsided, he too is fascinated by the creature’s appearance.
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Her eyes glow gold, like Yi-jun’s do sometimes when he practices magic, except this creature’s never stop. Her ears are pointed, webbed, he realizes. Aside from the iridescent scales on her cheekbones, she also has them on the backs of her hands. The hands that are now wrapping new bandages around Su Lan’s entire body.
“Agh!” His legs hurt so much that even the faintest of touches causes him to almost pass out.
The naga stops what she’s doing immediately and Su Lan sees the most frightened look come over her face. She was trying hard not to hurt him…
After a while, those yellow eyes flicker and she blinks. Su Lan watches in astonishment as she ducks away in a flash, gone. He beats his head against the ground a few times in distress, hoping to just knock himself out, when suddenly there is something wet and slimy being shoved under his head.
Su Lan stops. The face of the naga has transformed entirely from one of fear into one of fury. She huffs, making several strange sounds in her throat, slithering side to side as if deciding if she wants to attack him.
What is this, now?! Just let me sleep, beast-
With the look of a defeated parent disciplining her child, the naga narrows her glowing eyes and smacks Su Lan on the forehead lightly. He half expects to be paralyzed right then and there, but he can still tilt his head and move his eyes enough to see that after tucking what, judging by the smell, appeared to be seaweed under his head to stop him from hitting it, the creature has gone back to wrapping that cold material around his legs.
Su Lan resigns himself to being a magical creature’s plaything for the foreseeable future, and just enjoys the moments in which he’s asleep and out of pain. For the most part, he thinks he’s doing well, not panicking.
I’ve ended up in a cave, with a snake monster, after being crushed by boulders… Yi-jun likely has no clue where I am, and I don’t even know if Tan Zhi and Yuan Ning are still alive. The fact that I haven’t already hyperventilated or frozen to death is a small miracle-
That whole, not panicking thing, yeah. That goes up in flames the moment Su Lan is awake longer and finally realizes what the cold stuff surrounding him actually is.
… snake skin.
SNAKE SKIN?!
He sucks in a breath, staring down now at the very obvious blue scales, the shimmery skin that is flexible but weirdly strong. And cold! Su Lan thrashes, trying again as his terror rises, to try and get free, the claustrophobia that he’d been successfully pushing back until this moment striking suddenly with full force.
Moving is still evidently a bad idea. The second he so much as tries to bend one of his knees, the second he so much as thinks of doing so, pain so hot it feels like it’s burning holes in him causes him to immediately black out with a garbled shout. When he comes to, the naga is back again and she’s doing that thing of sliding her tail around on the ground, like an anxious dance. It makes Su Lan feel even more closed in and he fights back the pain-induced nausea just to wiggle a bit and choke out the words-
“Get me out of this! Let me go, I have to… please!”
The creature paces around a few times, casting Su Lan a few worried glances, before finally she approaches him again and her claws are roving over the snakeskin covering his upper body.
In a flash, her nails slice through it, just enough so that the layers wrapped there fall off and release his arms. Su Lan shakily raises his hands in front of his eyes, seeing that the naga had not only wrapped him up in big swathes of her skin, but also smaller ones, covering every wound he must have sustained, even the ones on his fingers.
Looking at the blue scales that covered his arms, his hands, Su Lan felt his mind go blank. For a moment, his heart froze in his chest, as he entertained the idea that somehow he’d managed to wake up less than human…
Despite her clear warning not to, Su Lan ignored the creature’s urgent noises of protest and bit down onto his lip so hard it bled, as he slowly unwrapped one of his hands.
His fingers were dark purple, looking as if they’d been submerged in water for months and had somehow wrinkled and shrunk to half their size. Su Lan’s stomach rolled, noticing his lack of fingernails, and it rolled some more upon the realization that the tips of his fingers were so small, because the skin on all of them had been ripped off.
Collapsing into a shivering, shaking mess, Su Lan could hear only ringing, only feel his heart racing as the naga hovered over him and hastily wrapped the snakeskin around his hand once more. Su Lan shook so hard that he started to feel his legs hurting again, and with a sharp inhale he wondered in horror what they might look like.
His panic only growing, Su Lan’s attention was caught suddenly by the look on the naga’s face. She was clearly anxious again, running a strand of her exceedingly long black hair over and over again through her hands as she stared down at him.
Su Lan met her eyes. He thought they looked like stars. As the edges of the world turned black again and started falling, he even found himself imagining that they were the stars, and that they were watching over him as he allowed himself to fade away.