hellenhighwater: Fic that I will not be writing (…but maybe someone else will?) SPOILER
hellenhighwater:Fic that I will not be writing (…but maybe someone else will?) SPOILERS for the untamed below. Wings are attached to golden cores; it’s a cultivation thing. Mundane people don’t have them at all; juniors are basically fledglings. Most of the time they’re metaphysically stored in the golden core, and it takes effort to manifest them physically. You can usually tell how strong a cultivator is by how long they can keep their wings out (post-timeskip Lan Wangji and Lan Zichen could keep theirs out basically 24/7, for example) but it’s not uncommon to keep them stashed most of the time–they can be unwieldy. What they look like depends mostly on personality. The twin jades, for example, both have swan wings. Jiang Chenghad cormorant wings. They’re fishing birds, the deepest divers, and their wings are a matte black. Not very flashy, not very pretty. He doesn’t keep them out much. Jiang Yanli has killdeer wings, tan and black and white. (They’re almost like her mother’s loon wings, but more drab.)Wei Wuxian has raven wings, of course. Jiang Chengloses his core and he doesn’t even realize his wings are lost until later. All three of the siblings were keeping their wings hidden anyway to stay under Wen radar, but… it’s as bad a blow as losing his core, knowing he’ll never fly again. He comes down from Baoshan Sanren’s mountain with his wings, black and graceless as ever, ruffled every which way like someone had grabbed them all over, like they’d been thrashing against the grip. It takes him a while to get used to them again, even though they weren’t gone long. It feels like they’re shorter? Wider, maybe? they need grooming, they’re too oily, but they’re his wings back again, so it doesn’t matter.(Wei Wuxianplummets into the Burial Mounds with nothing to break his fall. It wouldn’t have mattered–the resentful energy drags down airbourne cultivators like spiderwebs, but it’s the first time in his life he’s felt fear in the sky. It’s not the last.)During the sunshot campaign most cultivators keep their wings away unless they’re in battle–it’s spent energy no one can afford to waste in the middle of a war. Jin Zixuan, kept mostly out of combat, flaunts his stupid copper and cobalt peacock wings at Yanli, and Wei Wuxian threatens to tear them right off him during the Soup Incident. And when Jin Zixuan gets angry back Wei Wuxiandoesn’t even do him the dignity of flaring his wings back, which is as much of an insult as not carrying a sword. But Wei Wuxianis different after the burial mounds, and it’s just one in a long list of things his siblings (and Lan Zhan) are worried about.The Wen remnants, of course, don’t have any wings. Wen Quing does–she’s an African Grey–and Wen Ning’s got the biggest wings anyone’s ever seen, the vast stretch of a California Condor, which drag uselessly behind his corpse. But the rest of them can’t fly, so their escape to the burial mounds is on foot.At the Nightless City, after everything falls apart, Jiang Cheng is standing on a cliff beside Lan Wangji, looking down at his brother over Lan Wangji’s bloodied white wing, feeling off balance the way his wings have ever since he got them back. He’s looking down at this fool who just got his sister killed, dangling from the edge of a cliff and still refusing to bring out his raven wings. But there’s this look on Wei Wuxian’s face like he wants this, like he’s waiting for it, and— Jiang Cheng doesn’t let himself think about what it means, that Wei Wuxian kept his wings folded away until the end._____Mo Xuanyu’s got grackle wings. Common, and a little under-feathered, but as colorful as an oilslick in the right light. He flaunts them just the way Wei Wuxian used to, tiny under the wide white shadow of Hanguang-Jun. -- source link