When Huaisang cannot sleep for fear of something coming, his first and last rational thought is a simple one: he was wrong to assume his poor cultivation would spare him from qi deviation, and as Shen Yuan had predicted not days before, it is happening to the next of them now. There's no other explanation; he's never had trouble sleeping for any reason he couldn't identify, and even then: only from grief. It isn't grief that grips him now as soon as he lays down his head, and a day later, as soon as he so much as considers a good night's rest.
No; it's nebulous, darker. It dogs his footsteps and lingers in his periphery, something coming, something waiting. A glimpse of a shadow; a note of music.
When he hears his brother's voice the way it had sounded the day he died, Nie Huaisang resolves to go and do something, before he truly loses his mind. Another might wonder if Nie Mingjue has somehow come here, to Trench, but every agonizing syllable of his screams that day is etched on Huaisang's heart, and he knows a copy when he hears one.
So. He goes out. He needn't wander long before a suitable distraction presents itself, in the form of another man, a stranger, yelling in the streets for someone else with pain in his every word. Huaisang might have passed him by if not for that, left him to his own devices (he has a wolf with him? hello?), but—
"Who did you lose, xiansheng?" It will occur to him soon, that they're each suffering different shades of the same struggle. But not yet, so perhaps he can help this man (and his huge wolf, hello??) find who they're looking for. "If you call them a fool, they won't come!"
slides in for double insomnia time
No; it's nebulous, darker. It dogs his footsteps and lingers in his periphery, something coming, something waiting. A glimpse of a shadow; a note of music.
When he hears his brother's voice the way it had sounded the day he died, Nie Huaisang resolves to go and do something, before he truly loses his mind. Another might wonder if Nie Mingjue has somehow come here, to Trench, but every agonizing syllable of his screams that day is etched on Huaisang's heart, and he knows a copy when he hears one.
So. He goes out. He needn't wander long before a suitable distraction presents itself, in the form of another man, a stranger, yelling in the streets for someone else with pain in his every word. Huaisang might have passed him by if not for that, left him to his own devices (he has a wolf with him? hello?), but—
"Who did you lose, xiansheng?" It will occur to him soon, that they're each suffering different shades of the same struggle. But not yet, so perhaps he can help this man (and his huge wolf, hello??) find who they're looking for. "If you call them a fool, they won't come!"