Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

And it goes like this:

History is written by the winners, always written by the ones who struck down those that came before them and burned their books. The losers are buried, forgotten, sealed away and reviled. But there are always those who remember, even in the worst of times and the most violent of wars, and it goes like this:

The Guizhong ballista is slick with rain, steady and unwavering despite years of disuse. Its handles fit Ganyu’s hands like they were made to. She feels the power of the Qilin flow from her into it and loads it with a bolt of ice. The overlord of the vortex roars as she takes aim and she is half-divine, fighting the remnant of a god with the legacy of another, and it goes like this:

Fatui pour from doors torn through space and leap at the ballistae. She sees the traveler and Keqing draw their swords and her eyes are keen enough from centuries of looking down a bowstring to see the hesitation in their own. Keen enough to see past the masks of the Fatui, Sergei and Katya and Yuri, their shock at the timid blue-haired secretary from Yuehai, and it goes like this:

Ganyu knows better than to waste the might of the Guizhong ballista against foot soldiers. She’s seen it in use, seen what weapons made to kill gods were meant to do. She focuses on the many headed hydra as she prepares to take a shot, thinks maybe in a kinder world, Osial, and it goes like this:

The ballista is supposed to be immovable. Guizhong had made sure of that, and her handiwork never fades even though she is gone, but it shakes and trembles in time with Ganyu’s own pounding heart until she looks up and sees a pyro agent lunging at her, trying to take out what he thinks is the weakest link in their arsenal, and it goes like this:

History is written by the winners, and the winners leave out what is inconvenient for them. No one wants to believe the qilin are anything but the most peaceful of beasts, treading on clouds to avoid harming the grass. But despite her horns and her manner, Ganyu is not a qilin. She is not a human, despite her appearance and her vision. Instead, it goes like this:

History has forgotten the nature of Rex Lapis’ finest soldiers, and even before adepti had visions they were a force to be reckoned with. History has forgotten the half-breed beast that stood by his side and rained arrows across Liyue’s blood-soaked fields. A qilin would abhor the harming of innocents and a human would detest the siege on a loved one’s memory, and Ganyu leaps off the ballista with a cry she has not uttered in millenia.

The world spins and shrinks into a pinhole of light. Distantly she hears the sounds of battle and they sound familiar, a song and dance she slips into like a fish to water. Perhaps I’ve been washed up on shore for far too long, she thinks as she turns on her heel. It’s a good thing the tide comes back for everyone.

Her pinhole view goes hazy and strange, flickers in and out before she blinks to clear it. A figure that seems familiar is standing close, far too close for it to be anyone she knows. Guizhong? Rex Lapis? ...Xiao? Those horns look familiar.

Ganyu feels rain coming down on her shoulders and a ghost of a hand on her arm. Blood she didn’t know was there flows off her clothes and she dimly thinks oh, they’ll be unwearable until the twelfth, when the cleaners stop by—when she remembers the cleaners will be stopping by, and they’ll want to know what happened, and though the harbour believes that her horns are a headdress now they’ll be skeptical enough when she goes back to work with blood all over her, and—

The horned figure resolves into a purple blur with two buns in their hair and Ganyu finds Keqing’s name on the tip of her tongue, thank the Archons she’s here, can she help talk to the cleaners? Until she realises that Keqing is standing still.

Keqing never stands still. It’s the first thing the Qixing’s staff notice. Grass is green, Mora comes from the Golden House, and the Yuheng never stops for anything. The undersecretaries joke that she’ll climb out of her own casket at her funeral and demand they stop slacking, but she’s as still as can be and it’s so very wrong for someone who moves fast as lightning and shines twice as bright. Does she need tea? Is there something bothering her? Ganyu is always there to listen to—

There is nothing to listen to, she realises. Keqing is standing very, very still and staring at her. For a moment Ganyu considers looking behind her. The expression on the Yuheng’s face is strange, and it’s easy to assume it means anger before remembering that she doesn’t get angry like that, not really, so that look means fear.

...Keqing is scared of her. Oh Archons, Keqing is scared of her.

A hysterical laugh strangles itself in Ganyu’s throat. No one is scared of her anymore, much less a member of the Qixing. Blood is still in her clothes and she pats them down before bringing her hands up to run them through her hair, around her horns, and almost laughs again because her fingers are coated in frost in a way that hasn’t happened since she first got her vision. They’re longer and each is tipped in a claw dripping with meltwater stained crimson. She doesn’t need to check to know her horns are longer as well, slender and branching like a true qilin’s would.

It’s quiet, the sounds around her muffled as if she’s underwater. Someone is talking and it’s not Keqing. That’s fine, Ganyu thinks. It’s not like Keqing would have anything to say. The voices are familiar, tumbling over each other in words that she doesn’t bother trying to parse. Instead, she moves with the grace of a sleepwalker towards the edge of the platform.

The overlord of the vortex is still there, still struggling in the sea as it (not he, filled with too much rage to remember having been a he) charges up for a devastating attack. Ganyu blinks at it slowly, idly wondering if she still has the strength to snap a few of its necks like she used to back when she fought. Fear is long forgotten. She’s weathered this power and worse, and she’s still here.

A wind at her back. She lets her eyes slide lazily towards its source, unsurprised when they land on Xiao. He’s been through all of it too, right? Of course he has. It’s no wonder he’s not bothering to join the people talking when he’s seen everything a dead god has to offer. But something’s off about him that Ganyu can’t quite place, prickling at her skin. His jaw, usually set so hard his teeth might shatter if he was mortal, is relaxed. The slant of his shoulders is easy and natural where it’s usually perpetually tensed for combat.

Maybe he’s feeling it too, whatever it is. The wave of his hand as he summons his yaksha’s mask is slow and almost peaceful, and for a moment Ganyu thinks he spares her a glance before it covers his face. It’s a silly thought. He never does that.

Xiao doesn’t dash into combat like she’s seen him do. Instead, the vision on his bracer glows and wind surrounds him before he sails off the platform in a smooth arc towards a waiting Osial. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t make a sound, and the quiet is so strange Ganyu forgets that she’s watching him approach a risen god in the nexus of its power.

She forgets to be shocked, forgets to have a reaction, forgets to cry out as she sees the distant spread of golden wings and Xiao sheds his human form. A part of her mind that is filled with regret and memories of immortals with their lives cut short screams for him, but it is ignored because Osial is going down in a shower of blues and greens and golds and it’s terrible, it’s hideous, it’s the stuff of nightmares and it’s the most beautiful show of light she’s ever seen. It sears itself into her memory like a brand on her eyes and she stares like she’s seeing the sun for the first time, because everything has ground to a halt and the world fits neatly into a single spark of divine power sinking to the bottom of the sea.

The voices are still rising and falling over each other. It’s all of little consequence, what mortals have to say. Their problems have been solved, haven’t they? That’s how it always goes. The adepti fix it, the humans go home, Ganyu goes back to work. It doesn’t matter what happened. Life goes on, except when it doesn’t. Work goes on, even when life doesn’t.

Ganyu floats, punch-drunk, through the Jade Chamber. She descends the elevator and winds her way between the stalls and streets of Liyue Harbour with legs of brittle stone and a head filled with cotton. She doesn’t know if there are people staring because she isn’t looking for anything but her next task.

She finds herself working on a registration form for someone’s stall at the lantern festival. It’s long past sundown, and there’s no telling how much time has passed since…

Since everything. Ganyu looks down at her clothes, drying into rust brown and smearing her seat with the scent of iron. At her clawed hands, leaving gouges in her pen as she writes. Ganyu remembers, and she bursts into tears.

The attendants are off shift, she reminds herself. Either that or they’ve been scared off by the sight of her covered in blood with antlers and claws. Even still, it’s a habit to clamp her hands over her mouth and let the tears fall in silence. No one wants to see the divine as anything but perfect, and she has it on her own authority that she’s an ugly crier.

Her chair is stained now and she curls up in it, taking shuddering breaths and trying to calm her racing heart. It’s alright. Life goes on. The adepti will still protect Liyue. Its citizens are safe, like Rex Lapis always wanted. A pyrrhic victory is nothing new to her, so if she could just calm down, there’s still paperwork she’s behind on.

A knock sounds at her door, crisp and echoing in the empty office. She scrubs at her face with the heel of her hand and turns her back towards the door, pretends to rearrange something on her bookshelf in an attempt to save face. “Come in”, she says in a voice she hopes doesn’t shake too much.

The door swings in and oh, it’s Keqing. Ganyu doesn’t need to turn around to know, not when her footsteps are marked by the click of stiletto heels and the faint smell of ozone. There’s a moment of silence, and the space between them that had grown slim over years of working by each others’ sides seems a yawning gash in the carpet of Ganyu’s office. The image of Keqing’s face, its planes and curves lit by adeptal energy as she stood ever so still, comes to mind. She had looked afraid then. Ganyu wonders if she is afraid now.

It’s always Keqing that breaks the silence when they talk to each other, and now is no different. When she speaks, her voice is soft. It could almost be mistaken for tenderness if one ignored the barbs in her words.

“Adeptus Ganyu.” Ganyu’s breath stills for a moment. “You kept your nature hidden from Liyue. From its citizens and the Qixing.” She pauses, uncharacteristically. “From me. Why?”

There is a treacherous little creature in Ganyu’s chest that whispers to her to turn around and throw her arms around the Yuheng’s shoulders, or maybe to scream and rage at this human who has come to question her reasons when she has lived so long and seen so many things in the service of Liyue. She wonders if Keqing’s blouse is soft. Wonders if she would flinch if shown the fury of a qilin wronged.

Instead she shakes her head. “I don’t know what would happen if I didn’t. I… It’s always been this way.” A deep breath that steadies her less than she would like. “Just like the Conqueror of Demons did not approach humans, I stay as a guardian of Liyue’s people. Have, for thousands of years.” I hope you understand, she leaves unsaid. This is not a time to ask for understanding.

Turned away as she is, she cannot see Keqing’s face. Even after millenia spent among people, their expressions are all but incomprehensible to her. Still, she wishes she could see what Keqing looks like at this moment.

“Fine. Answer me this, then: If you served Rex Lapis, why did you let a nonbeliever get into Yuehai?” It’s almost easy to believe her voice is shaking, but believing never gets one anywhere around Keqing. “Why did you let me become the Yuheng? Why not just—” A frustrated pause. “Why not kill me?”

Bile rises in Ganyu’s throat. Keqing hasn’t done anything to deserve an execution, much less one of her arrows through the eye. Her fingers, still clawed, twitch at her sides. Disrespect of the dead cannot be tolerated, and neither can disrespect of Rex Lapis. And yet…

She clenches her hands into fists hard enough to feel pricks in her palms. “I don’t know,” she says, and it feels like an admission of failure.

The tilt of Keqing’s head is almost audible when she says, “Why not? I thought you were meant to know things.” Another pause, this time the kind she uses to press the advantage on an uncooperative merchant. “You seemed certain when two gods died in a matter of days. Rex Lapis and—”

“Two gods and one adeptus.” The words come out unbidden. “Osial can’t be killed, not really. And the Conqueror of Demons did the closest thing to truly killing him. You saw what happened, right? You should know.”

Her words hang in the air for a moment before the finality of them strikes. Of course. Of course that’s what happened, because gods don’t go down easy and Xiao may have been immortal but he was never a god, not like Morax or Guizhong or Osial were. But that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? No one goes through the Archon War without seeing gods die. Adepti all meet their ends, one way or another. Xiao was lucky to have lived as long as he had.

“I...” Keqing sighs, and Ganyu hears the voice of a young woman in a conflict millenia too old, before Keqing clears her throat and she is the Yuheng, ruthless and unyielding. “I don’t know why I expected better.” And with that, she leaves.

Ganyu drops back into her chair like a marionette with its strings cut, and everything goes dark.

Sunrise finds her waking up in her office chair, which is not unusual—Even less so, considering the events of the night before. When she lifts her head from her desk, something heavy slides off her back. She picks it up without paying it any mind and hangs it over the back of her chair before rushing to her powder room.

She finds a mirror among the scattered accessories and directs her best ‘keeping it together’ expression at it. The figure staring back at her looks… tired. There’s no better way to put it, not with the way she can see bone-deep exhaustion in the slope of her shoulders. A cursory tilt of the mirror tells her that at least her horns are back to normal. The top of her halter-neck collar seems unblemished, as does the bell on her chest.

Returning to her seat, she finds Keqing’s coat. It’s the one she wears in high winds or heavy rain. It’s long enough to cover most of her body, so she wraps it around herself and walks out of her office with a false confidence in her step. If she can cover up for long enough to get an extra change of clothes, she would—

She sighs. Who does she think she’s kidding? Going back to work like nothing has changed is clearly not an option. Looking Keqing in the face and offering her coat back seems just as outlandish as Osial rising again. It’s time to move on. It’s time to get out.

The moment she steps foot outside Yuehai Pavilion, her throat closes up.

Liyue is untouched. From her place at the top of the city, she can see merchants hawking their wares, dockworkers loading and unloading cargo, stray cats sunning themselves. The harbour is immaculate, as if nothing had happened at all.

Of course it is, she reminds herself. Osial never made it to the harbour. Xiao made sure of that. A part of her expected it to be in shambles, flooded or collapsed or simply wiped off the map.

She wonders if Xiao would be offended if he knew. Do not dismiss the dead. The fact that they leave behind a different world is worth respecting, he’d say. Or maybe he wouldn’t. She was never too familiar with him, but the people of Liyue never seem to find his name on their lips despite all he did.

The wind is calm as she approaches the sea, laden with salt and memory. A few labourers nod to her in greeting, but Ganyu ignores them in favour of looking for a secluded spot by the water. She ducks behind an outcrop of rock and removes her shoes. Holding them in one hand, she takes a breath. It’s been a while since she’s done this. Cryo comes to her as easily as it ever has, a delicate layer of ice spreading under her feet. Guyun Stone Forest is a short journey by boat, but it is always shorter at a qilin’s pace.

Fish swirl beneath her as she moves, sensing her heritage and seeking what little divinity she has. She doesn’t have enough energy to feel sorry for their fruitless journey, the way they nearly throw themselves out of the water after her when she reaches Guyun. The stone forest is a place of old history, and none of it has been good. It’s only natural that whatever is left living between the spires would seek to be purified.

But Ganyu has never been pure. She sifts through the sand under Guyun’s shadow, praying to find something. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, only that she’ll know when she sees it.

Gods are not in the habit of leaving corpses behind, and neither are the adepti she has seen fall in battle. It’s unlikely she’ll find Xiao’s remains, but it’s not beyond hoping that there will be something here. An amulet, maybe. It might be too much to hope for more. She scans the sand for the shape of something, anything she recognises—she’ll need a token to remember him by.

It had become something of a custom during the Archon War to take from the remains of fallen allies. Not out of resourcefulness, nor a desire to have their power—gods were strangers to death as they were to permanence. No, at first it was just holding onto something for a friend until they pulled themself up again and everyone could laugh at how they had worried.

The tradition was much more somber by Ganyu’s time. Gods die and gods stay dead, and a half-illuminated beast who has seen far mightier beings than her fall has no delusions. She has never sought to hold something for a friend, if she had even been friends with the deceased. She seeks something else entirely. Something to keep her memory fresh in the millenia without him. Something to place on her mantlepiece, or to lay down at the second Rite of Parting she’ll see in a week.

Maybe he would object to it. Xiao was no stranger to moving on, she reminds herself. Should she not do the same, in his memory? In part, Ganyu had expected Xiao to never die. He was a constant, reticent and straight faced, always standing guard over Dihua Marsh, as immovable as the mountainous land he protected.

It’s a silly thought. She’s seen plenty of mountains crumble.

He would hate the idea of his Rite being attended by so many people, she thinks, and allows herself a small smile in the face of absurdity. Xiao had always hated crowds.

“Ganyu-mei.”

The voice that calls out to her is familiar; much too familiar. She almost dismisses it as a hallucination caused by stress or sleep deprivation. But a hallucination is better than nothing, and Ganyu has always given into temptation a bit too much for her own good. She turns towards where she had heard Xiao’s voice, ready for disappointment.

“I’m older than you.” She’s always wanted to say that.

Her violet eyes meet gold ones and Ganyu almost does a double-take. The Xiao in front of her seems all too real, whole and healthy and rather annoyed. The sun slides off him in a way that comes worryingly close to making him look human.

But Xiao is gone, whatever scraps of identity and power he had scattered along the seafloor with the gods he used to battle. Xiao is dead. Xiao was a blur of movement that spat venom and cleaved wind and he was stopped, somehow. Is stopped, right in front of her on the beach. He catches her staring and tsks.

“I heard you calling for me.”

Of course he had. He always does. Always did. Ganyu shakes her head, the bell on her chest tolling gently. The sound does nothing to dispel Xiao’s image, even for all she wishes it would.

“It’s nothing.” She’s told her smiles are comforting. “Be careful out there, Conqueror of Demons.”

Calling Xiao by his title is an old habit, but she regrets reminding him of the things it carries. His eyes narrow. “When am I not? You, on the other hand, could afford to be more careful.” A pause. Xiao tugs at his single sleeve in a manner he used to back when they fought gods side by side. He’s nervous. “I don’t like whatever’s brewing in Liyue. It makes me… uneasy.”

Ganyu almost laughs at that. It took the death of their god for Xiao to admit he ever felt nervous. It took his own death for him to admit it to her. Her mind is scattered like a jigsaw someone’s child swiped a hand through, so she nods as half the words spoken to her slide past without a single bit of meaning.

“Ganyu. Are you listening?” Xiao’s voice is curt, the way it is when his mask fades from his face. Pained. “You are familiar with the world of mortals in a manner I am not. It would be best to keep an eye out for any… suspicious actors.”

“Of course.” Such loyalty to a dead god, Ganyu thinks. It was just like Xiao to still be following his orders to the letter. Even so, she is hardly one to speak on the matter.

The look Xiao gives her before vanishing in a burst of black and teal is strange. She waves goodbye to an empty stretch of sand.

...That’s enough. That’s far more than enough. Ganyu starts back towards the mainland, ice forming beneath her feet. There’s no telling what thoughts she’s trying to block from her mind. She’s not sure she wants to know.

“You missed a meeting this morning.”

A hand finds her shoulder while she’s watering the plants in Yuehai Pavilion. She welcomes the distraction, turning around with her usual smile.

“Oh, my apologies. I must have forgotten. Though my planner didn’t have anything slated for this...” Her voice falters, fails. Keqing’s hand is on her shoulder. Keqing is staring at her like there is nothing wrong with the world except the expression she wears.

A smile makes its way across the Yuheng’s face. “Of course. No one works harder than you, Ganyu. I was just wondering where you were, that’s all.” With a wave and a reminder, the lavender ends of Keqing’s hair disappear around a corner.

Ganyu stares after her long enough that the watering pot slips from her fingers and shatters against the stone. She doesn’t even pay it mind as she sweeps up the shards with a gust of adeptal energy. Your coat, she wants to say. Did you mean it when you gave it to me?

And it goes like this:

History is written by the winners, always seeking to paint a better picture of themselves before they are inevitably struck down by someone with a different history to write. Each thinking that they are the zenith of capability, immortal until proven mortal, and it goes like this:

All of it goes around in a sickening cycle, the serpent devouring its own tail until there is nothing left of it. Those who have seen the serpent often claim to know better. The immortal do not need to prove anything to know they can be killed. And it goes like this:

A rumble from the sea. A call to arms. The Guizhong ballista is slick with rain beneath Ganyu’s palms as she looks downwards on Osial, risen again. The power of the qilin sits heavy in her throat. She feels like she might be sick, and it goes like this:

Fatui pour from doors torn through space and she leaps down to meet them without a second thought. Her face is streaked with rain, meltwater, blood, tears—there’s no telling anymore, Sergei and Katya and Yuri reduced to just flesh, viscera beneath her feet, and it goes like this:

The beast tearing through the crowd has claws and horns and bared teeth and Ganyu is laughing, genuine, raucous laughter. How long has it been since she last laughed? It doesn’t matter. None of it matters, none of it did, because Liyue is a winner in a long line of winners and someone else will write her story so she’d better make it a good one, and it goes like this:

There’s the traveler, shocked, and there’s Keqing, afraid, and isn’t it funny how she looks so scared when she isn’t the one scared here? Doesn’t she know? Her expression fits perfectly into a jigsaw that is slowly forming a terrifying, terrifying conclusion, and it goes like this:

Xiao leaps off the platform just as he had exactly twenty four hours earlier.

His mask splits, the last traces of the yaskhas that protected Liyue lost to the sea.

Five people see his true form before it is submerged. Ganyu is turned away.

He dies exactly two seconds after impacting the Overlord of the Vortex, but not before unleashing a fatal blow.

The body of the golden winged king disintegrates shortly after his death, scattering traces of tainted divinity across Guyun.

Ganyu goes back to work like she always has. She sleeps early that night. She sleeps dreamlessly.

When she wakes up, there is no sign of the past forty eight hours having taken place.

She pulls Keqing’s coat around her shoulders and laughs. It’s an ugly sound.

“Ah, fuck.”

Chapter Text

It’s a simple task to file for absence. Ganyu tends to take impromptu trips to places of spiritual importance when they call to her, so Baiwen doesn’t bat an eye when she leaves Yuehai and heads north. She knows where she’s going. She doesn’t know what she’ll do when she gets there.

In the tree overlooking Dihua Marsh, there is an inn. Running the inn is a Qixing agent who calls herself Verr Goldet. It’s not her real name, of course. Those who have experience with divinity are hard to come by, hard to hire, and rarely want to keep an identity for too long.

Ganyu has known Verr Goldet since far before she was Verr Goldet, before the inn was constructed and carefully staffed with people who would defend themselves well and ask few questions. She had been clear on the reason for the inn; an adeptus weighed down by guilt and grief could not always be relied on to protect themself. An adeptus whose duty is to protect Liyue will not always view themself as part of their country.

As she climbs the stairs towards the inn’s top, Ganyu wonders how much of the inn was built for Xiao and how much was for her. Xiao had always been the strong one. She was the one with the human parent and bleeding heart, for better or for worse.

Past the gap in the stairs (it would need to be patched later. Maybe Yaoyao could be convinced to grow some of the tree over it) the balcony is empty. She doesn’t know what she expected, really, or what she would say if it wasn’t. Thinking about it results in a dull ache below her ribs. Instead, she turns to investigate what the traces left on the balcony say.

Someone has already been there. The thin sheen of dust along the railing has been disturbed by a trademark gust of anemo power. If Xiao left, surely…

“Ah, Miss Ganyu! Always perceptive.” Verr Goldet’s voice is never short of warm, and she stops at the doorway to curtsy towards her superior. “I haven’t seen you here in months—not just visiting for our tax records, I hope?”

Ganyu forces a smile before dropping it. There’s no need for formalities with trusted company, after all. “Not at all, but the real reason I’m here is hardly better. Have you seen Xiao today?”

This gets the inn’s boss to suck in a sharp breath through her teeth. “You’re not the first person to ask after him today—there was someone from Mond that he talked to. He left after that.” She fumbles with her bracelets. A nervous tic, rare enough to cause concern. “The visitor’s still here, but he won’t talk. None of my usual methods worked, so I’m starting to think there’s something… off.”

“Bring me to him.” It comes out quite a bit harsher than intended, and Ganyu feels the blood drain from her face. Inferiors should never be snapped at, no matter one’s status. Rex Lapis would be ashamed. “Please,” she bites out. Verr casts her a strange look that she pretends to ignore before leading her through the inn to an alcove by the kitchen.

The first thing she notices about Xiao’s visitor is that he’s alarmingly small. Of course, size is no sign of power, but the way he curls in his chair reminds her of something ugly and dying, something not meant to be seen. Her fingers twitch at her side when she notices a cape on the floor and a bottle in his hand.

When she was younger and Liyue nothing but a whisper of hope against the ashy sky, Ganyu had thought of Xiao as a role model. It was unthinkable that he would run from anything, let alone something as small as the humans he shunned. But Liyue is a nation now, and she is old enough to know courage from desperation. She looks at the Mondstadtian crumpled in a battered dining chair and she wants to run.

It’s not courage that pushes her to sit down next to him. His grip is loose on the bottle as she takes it from him, and he turns to look at her from the corner of a teal eye rimmed with red. There’s a rattling intake of breath that lingers in the air. She doesn’t know whose it is.

Vaguely, she notices Verr Goldet leaving. Always the cautious one around matters of the divine, that one. A hand reaches out to bat at the bottle she holds. She moves it behind her back and turns her full attention to the Mondstadtian.

“You visited Xiao?” It comes out sounding like a question, and she winces to hear it. It’s never Ganyu who starts the conversation. It’s always someone else asking for something from her, looking for a reply she automatically gives.

A shuffling from the other side of the table. Her conversational partner drags himself upright, swaying loose-limbed from side to side before his head lolls just enough to meet her eye. “Ah… uh… Yep! Though I worry I came on a bit strong...” He lifts one limp-wristed hand to run his fingers through unkempt hair. The other inches towards the bottle behind Ganyu’s back. “You see, he didn’t stick around too long.”

Ganyu is so taken aback—did he just rhyme?—that he manages to seize the bottle’s neck before she yanks it away from him. “You shouldn’t drink more in your state.” She chews over the next sentence in her mind before deciding that, forget it, she might as well go ahead and question this drunkard. “Why did you visit him?”

“Oh, you know—he’s always had that sort of charm. Come now, one more glass won’t do any harm!” There is a conspicuous lack of glasses around him as he pulls a lyre from seemingly nowhere and plucks a few notes. He hums along, a melancholy tune Ganyu can’t quite place, before blinking a few times and lifting his hands from the strings. “Well, the million-Mora question now is this: what business do you have that crosses with his?”

Over the years, Ganyu has met many strange characters. Mortal, divine, every shade in between—even so, she can’t quite say she knows where this bard lies on that scale. His inebriation seems natural enough, even if his skill with words under the influence far surpasses expectations. The teal gaze he had cast at her has slowly drifted away, staring yet unseeing into a ceiling corner. She searches his eyes and comes up empty-handed of anything except grief.

Fine. If he wants to make things complicated, she’ll keep up. “I was going to check on him, is all. How do you know where he stays?”

The bard hiccups, hides his face behind one sleeve. “Have you ever heard the story of Old Mondstadt’s fall? It’s faded away, and most don’t remember it at all. The tale of Huntress Amos comes to mind...” He trails off. “But I peddle no stories here. None that my listeners want to hear. What would you do if you found him?”

“You never told me how you know where he stays, or the reason you came here. We can...” She rifles through what little she can remember of Mondstadt’s traditions. A creature like her has never had reason to step outside Liyue’s borders, not when there is still work to be done. “We’ll trade stories.”

“Of course, of course. Xiao talked about you, you know?”

Ganyu blinks. “He did?”

“Yep! I know allllll about you. He talks about you a lot! But think if I told you what he said, he’d be quite distraught. You too, really. But there’s no story here I haven’t already heard, whether it be from the adeptus himself or just a little...” He draws his fingers in circles across the gilt of his lyre. “Just a little bird.” A self-satisfied nod, and then the bard tilts his head to look up at Ganyu. She’s not sure if she’s imagining it, but his face seems expectant.

She clears her throat, suddenly self-conscious. “If you already know my stories, could you share yours?” No response. “How do you know Xiao, and why did you visit him.”

There’s an edge to her voice that she didn’t mean to let slip in, but the bard takes no notice. If he does, the way he stretches in his seat says he doesn’t care.

Then he snorts. Half a laugh makes its way out into the ringing silence between them, cut off by a drunken hiccup. He gestures, one arm sweeping out to show the inn’s wooden floors and worn stairs. Oddly enough, he looks like a king in that moment—no, a god. A ruler of the space between breaths and alcoves just small enough to hide in.

“Why, of course! I am—” Here he winks, entirely too coherent— “Madly in love with him.”

The hardest of Ganyu’s habits to shake are the ones she never really bothers to get rid of. It took centuries, nearly millenia, to whittle her bloody edges and feral eyes down into a human guise. Other less pressing habits can wait. And they have, because Ganyu’s first instinct upon waking up is still to feign sleep until she is certain it is safe to wake up.

The sound of a lyre, soft. Sad. She remembers the bard from Mondstadt, how he had spoken in words that tumbled over each other and whirled around her in a way that she didn’t understand. How he had told her he loved Xiao, in a voice that fitted perfectly in the tune of a dirge. How she had felt the same. She remembers the bard from Mondstadt, and she does not notice that she is crying until salt stains her sleeve and a hand touches her shoulder.

“Hey, you alright? You just fell asleep on the table...”

She coughs, her throat sticking with tears and words unsaid. “I think I love him too. I think we could have been brother and sister, if I let him be.” The bard does not speak when she lifts her head to look at him, maybe sensing the levity of the situation. “I think I miss him. It’s silly. I should be used to missing people by now.”

“I don’t think he needs you to ‘let’ him do anything. He’s like that.” An absent-minded strum on the lyre. The resulting notes are dissonant, strings too close to form a chord. “Sorry you miss him.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

There is a bow lying on the table. It hadn’t been there when Ganyu fell asleep. The bard notices her looking and picks it up to stow it away, but she puts out a hand to stop him. Surprisingly, he does.

“Noticed my bow, have you? It’s not for sale, but I can appreciate someone with a good eye for detail.” His voice shakes almost imperceptibly as he resumes his rhyming. “If you show me your weapon, I’ll show you mine—though I’m sure I could be swayed with a bottle of wine.”

Ganyu almost misses his words entirely, transfixed on the weapon in his hands. It seems otherworldly, and if she were not half-qilin herself she would call the blazing violet light it sheds divine. The curve of its limbs speaks to something larger than she understands—she flatters herself by thinking she understands anything of it, bowyer though she may be—and it seems untouchable, almost. The bard holds it in his hand like it means nothing to him. Maybe it does.

“I… Never mind. It’s beautiful, is all. I should be going.” Her mind is clamouring, screaming. She has things to do, somewhere. She can’t afford to let trivialities distract her. A shake of her head causes the bell around her neck to ring. An end to the conversation. “Have a nice day.”

The bard’s eyes widen. “Wait!”

But he is too late. His voice is already fading, drowned out by the frantic click of Ganyu’s heels as she runs. She has never been brave.

Jueyun Karst is empty, as it always is. Ganyu feels out of place, as she always does. The wind at her back is cold in a way she used to find comforting before her soul was branded with unmelting frost. As she climbs, the clattering of dislodged stone that follows marks her an intruder.

When she pulls herself up and onto Qingyun Peak, the scene before her is one of solitude. Moon Carver lounges, insofar as adepti can lounge, by the entrance to his abode. His eyes are closed as if in meditation. From a distance, one could almost mistake him for a large deer.

But he is not a deer. He never has been. The being that calls himself Moon Carver is a well into which the mortal world falls, a burning note played from some cosmic flute. Trees bend towards him and the wind stills in his wake. A magnificent antlered head balances perfectly on a body of fur that does not move, cascading frozen over a static space where lungs would be. There are many words that could be used to describe this. Deer is not one of them.

“One is pleased by your company, unexpected though it may be.” Moon Carver has never seen the need to move his mouth while speaking, never had the lodging of cartilage in flesh that rules speech and song. “Pray, my moon-eyed kin—you come bearing the weight of secrets. What news is there hidden under your tongue?”

They are not kin in the strictest of the word, family being as hard to measure between the divine as it is. But the divine do not make a habit of understanding such concepts. The kindest thing they can do is not to pretend they care at all, and Moon Carver has always been kind. He sees the full moon’s lustre in Ganyu’s eyes, sees the bases of antlers she keeps small and harmless for the humans that would believe her one of them, and he calls her his kin because no one else will. For that, she is thankful.

She settles down in the sparse mountain grass next to him and lets out a breath she hadn’t noticed she’d been holding. “Liyue is in danger. I think I will have to fight again.”

It is not hard to believe that the adeptus by her side could pare the moon to pieces like she would an apple in her hand, shape for the sky a second sun as naturally as she draws breath. Even so, she finds herself hesitating to mention having lived this day before.

“Rex Lapis may have fallen, but the adepti will stand in his absence. One remembers your skill. There is no reason to fear.” Moon Carver rises, unearthly. His legs mesh in a way no bone could manage. “And what of Liyue itself? It hardly needs protecting the way one used to.”

“Maybe. Are the adepti having a meeting?” The tassel on Ganyu’s vision is finely made, hand-spun and woven in a method that predates the Archon War. It is fraying now, years of wear and tear made worse as she scrapes her nails over its knots. She’ll have to make another one soon.

“One assumed you were aware of Rex Lapis’ passing long before other adepti, stationed in Liyue Harbour as you are. We convened at the earliest possible time, yet have not reached a conclusion.”

“Right. I’m sorry for assuming.”

“There is no need. You were always the quickest to resolve matters such as these. The adeptus before you expects nothing less.” A clicking of hooves as Moon Carver paces, the sound echoing off unseen barriers. “Humans will need more guidance than the likes of the illuminated. Should it come to blows, one trusts your skill with bow and arrow has not waned over the years.”

Ganyu nods, grits her teeth. It was a bad idea to search for the adepti. She shouldn’t have expected them to offer guidance, not when they can hardly make up their minds on whether she is one of them.

“Raise your head, moon-eyed one. It does not speak to your virtue.”

Her horns weigh heavy on her head as she complies, meeting eyes of molten gold with her own fading violet. Moon Carver remains impassive.

“One must always maintain dignity, little Plenilune. Has one offered what you want to hear?”

It is an old folktale that adepti can taste falsehood. It’s said to linger bitter on their tongues. Ganyu cannot say if it is true, cannot scent the air for deception, but she thinks that if she could, they would taste like qingxin in bloom. She thinks she would savor being lied to.

“No,” she says, because folktale or not, it’s rude to lie to one’s closest kin. “I’m sorry.”

“Do not apologise. If one cannot say what you want to hear, seek others who can.” None of those words have the ability to be a lie, but they leave a bitter taste in her mouth as she takes her leave for Mount Hulao.

Mountain Shaper has never been kind, not in a way that could be understood. Mountain Shaper is snarling vines and brittle temper where Moon Carver is soft words and implicit trust, but Moon Carver goes through the motions of comfort without understanding them. Mountain Shaper can be trusted not to. When she airs her worries, all she gets in return is an incline of the crane’s head.

“Moon Carver is astute as always. One will not mislead you in saying so.” A pause, not so much for thought as for ornamentation. “Have you visited Cloud Retainer? One was under the impression you two were far closer than the two of us may ever be.”

Ganyu picks at her tassel and says nothing. Cloud Retainer is closer to her, yes, but the thought of facing her now looms large with words thought of but unsaid.

“No matter. One is paralyzed as always with the weight of choices unmade. How are the humans as of late? Healthy in number?” It’s almost funny, the way Mountain Shaper describes Liyue’s people like livestock. Maybe that’s what they are to the adepti. They live on a scale that humans could hardly see, let alone comprehend. The crane form Mountain Shaper takes is far smaller than Moon Carver’s stag, but Ganyu cannot say they feel different; radiant, all-consuming beings that her eyes cramp into the shapes of animals.

“Liyue has been growing. Its people are diverse, and some are moving in and out of other regions. They’re creative, they’re headstrong. They’re alive, I think, in a way I’m not. There’s a vibrancy to them, and they’re so scared of looking weak but they’re kinder than anything...” She feels hollow crane’s eyes on her, and she takes a step back for reasons she can’t explain. “They’re planning a monument to Skybracer next Lantern Rite. I think Rex Lapis would be proud.”

“One lacks understanding of your fondness towards humans on an individual scale. Nonetheless, you have stewarded Liyue through thirty seven centuries worth of human lives. They need you more than they need us, for Jueyun’s adepti, mighty and illuminated though they be, cannot understand their needs in the way one of your parentage can.”

Ganyu bites down on her tongue, chews the inside of her cheek until she tastes blood. It doesn’t taste like victory. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll head back to the harbour.”

Millenia ago, she was younger. It feels like a useless statement to make, especially when time means so little to the immortal. Even so, Ganyu remembers the millenia past, and she remembers when she was different. When her youth was genuine, her eyes uncomprehending, her face open in curiosity instead of a mask of a human that never existed.

(She had once tried imitating the faces of her parents. No one had told her not to. They never cautioned her against it afterwards, either. They hadn’t needed to.)

There had been a maiden with sleeves billowing in the wind. Mirth had carved its way into the light of her eyes and the line of her mouth. In that time, even the gentlest of laughs was cruel—she bore it with grace as her own cut into her features, wore it with pride in a world where joy was so scarce as to be mythical. After all, she would one day be a myth with the rest of them.

A bright-eyed youth had asked her once about humans, soft and sad in the way that children who have seen too much grow up to be. She had sat down next to the youth in the marsh, ignoring the battle-churned mud as it stained her garments, and brushed her fingers through an unruly mane not yet long enough to style.

“I think I quite love humans. Sometimes I wonder if I’m only loving them because it’s my job, or maybe because no one else will.”

The youth by her side leaned into her, breathing softly like any stray movement might dissolve the scene. “But you don’t?”

“I don’t know. There are a lot of things I don’t know. But if I love them because I think they’re interesting test subjects or because they’re new and strange… I don’t think it’s so different from loving them genuinely. The reason might be different, but the result is the same. Maybe in a kinder world there would be a difference, we don’t live in it.”

“It doesn’t bother you?”

“It always does.”

And then she had run one hand gently across the youth’s spreading antlers, sang a tune remembered only in the candle-shadow before waking.

“Come, sit up. I found something that the humans do that I think you’ll enjoy. They always want to make something that will outlast them, and this new method is one I really like. No one else has the patience or fingers for it. So you wind together a tassel...”

They sat together in the marsh for a long while after that, a pocket of peace while the world raged in fire and flood. Her fingers flew lightly over thread, weaving them together with unpracticed motions and unmoving certainty. They lacked the youth’s callouses. It wasn’t for lack of experience, nor lack of labour—she had simply never bothered to learn what they were.

“I think one day I’d like to walk with the humans. I’m not very good at pretending to be one, but I’ll get better.”

“Why? Are you unhappy here?”

“Of course not. I would never be unhappy with you, you know that?”

She had tied off the ends of her string, twisted it into a four-petaled flower that she hung from the youth’s antler. She smiled, and everything was alright for a time.

(When she left, she took their hearts with her. They never blamed her. They had always trusted her to take better care of their hearts than they could themselves.)

Ganyu looks back towards the harbour, distant lights and imagined voices. There are people waiting there for her. In her mouth, her blood pangs of iron and fear. She tastes it, tastes the violence that taints it, spits it out.

It’s time to go home.

She steps off the Jade Chamber’s elevator and into a sea of people. They’re shouting, running, panicking, and it’s such a contrast from the Chamber’s usual atmosphere that she finds herself hesitating.

“Secretary Ganyu, is that you? I thought you’d be on leave—you have to turn around, Ms. Ganyu, it’s not safe! We’re evacuating!” Baishi gapes, open-mouthed, arms full of papers and hair askew, from across the balcony. Baixiao nearly trips on her own feet on her way onto the elevator. Ganyu pays them no notice.

“Ms. Ganyu, now’s not the time for work! Come on!”

I’m not here for work, she wants to say. Don’t wait for me, she wants to say. She says nothing. Her younger self would have transported them to the ground herself. Her slightly less young, slightly more jaded self would have shouted at them to run. She doesn’t think the likes of Moon Carver or Mountain Shaper would notice them at all. She runs across the balcony, heart in her throat, and she wonders if that makes her better than them.

“Ganyu, wait!” A hand seizes hers and holds on like a soul half-drowned. She stops. She waits.

“As the Lady Yuheng, I— no, as Keqing. I can’t order you to do anything. I can’t tell you to evacuate, can I?” Keqing’s hand is warm, sparking with vitality through her glove. She’s breathing heavily. There’s something in her eyes, crystalline and sharp enough to cut, and it sings of a desperation that hurts to look at. “I’ve no right to tell you to leave, it’s just—”

Her hairpin is loose. Ganyu wants to reach out and fix it. She’s done it before, pushed it back into position when she found the Yuheng sleeping in her office, buns askew. It can’t be comfortable to wear her hair like that, but she wraps her buns close to her head, fastens them so tight her scalp must be sore. Like she can pull everything together if she just ties her hair well enough.

“I want you to stay safe, alright? You’re an archer, they get hurt easily, and I know I haven’t been the kindest to you… I can’t make you believe me. Just stay safe.”

Ganyu’s eyes glaze over with tears unshed. She’s not looking at Keqing, doesn’t know if she wants to see whatever expression is on her face. She wrenches her hand away.

“I have to go.”

The Guizhong ballista is slick with rain.

She doesn’t reach out to touch it. It feels warm, comforting even, feels like a voice saying it’s alright, you don’t have to, it’ll be okay, feels like it’s pretending the world does not punish compromise. It feels like the grips were made to fit her hands, but she is a coward and she’s come this far through bending backwards for everyone who didn’t ask her to.

Fatui pour from doors torn through space and it would be too easy to leap down to meet them, to tear through their number with claws out and teeth bared, but it’s not what she should do because she’s come this far riding coattails and slipping through cracks and taking the easy way out, and that’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? She’s always been the weak link because no one replaced her.

This time, she aims for Osial.

She crouches, sets her sights, leaps off the platform. The ocean is wild with energy from a god gone haywire, but her ancestry has got to count for something. Ice forms beneath her feet and she wills it to hold steady. Qilin are said to have walked upon clouds to avoid harming the grass. Ganyu is not a qilin. Every nerve in her body sings for blood as her ice slowly cracks, and she takes off running.

She feels her antlers lengthen, her fingertips curve into points. Her heels are lost to the sea spray as cloven hooves take their place on the ice. Osial doesn’t notice her. She can’t take her eyes off him.

Out of the corner of her eye, a flash of teal. She’s watched Xiao do this too many times now. It’s about time he followed her. The wind is singing and the ocean dancing and she is running towards certain death but Ganyu feels alive, alive, alive.

If the Fatui are overpowering the ballistae this time, if the traveller is struggling, if the other adepti look on in shock, she doesn’t see it. If Keqing’s sword comes dangerously close to slipping from her hand as she stares after her in wonder and fear, it doesn’t register over the crashing of saltwater and roaring of blood in Ganyu’s ears.

Osial is smaller at close range. Of course he is. Every god is smaller at close range, holding shreds of divinity to their chests, shaking with effort and pride. His heads thrash and snap at each other as she draws close. She allows herself a smile.

His first neck snaps like a twig in her hands.

She tears through flesh and water with the ease of a well-honed knife finding its target. Thoughts of Liyue are no more, thoughts of people that wait for her and voices she recognised lost to the ebb and flow of combat. Xiao is right behind her, and she doesn’t need to look around to know that he’s pulling his punches.

He’s afraid. Isn’t it funny? There’s no need for him to be afraid. She’s here now. It’ll be just like before. Everything was simpler before. Their enemy is suppressed, see? There’s nothing to worry about. Just keep going. Keep fighting. Everything will work out. She tilts her head back towards him and smiles. She can’t tell if he smiles back.

It’s in that moment that her guard comes down. A watery limb catches her midsection, blindsides her with bruising force, and she stumbles. She was always the one who stumbled, always the one who blinked first. Xiao leaps forward into the space she left behind. Of course he does. It’s his job. She never liked how well he took to his job.

Out come his wings and he’s in his true form now, talons and beak and eyes that burn with jade light. He dives in and Osial surges to meet him, and Ganyu watches in horror because there’s nothing she can do now, is there? He’s being fought and battered and now he’s being dragged down beneath and she shouldn’t be surprised, she really shouldn’t, but they can’t do that to him, he’s tried so hard, don’t they know Xiao hates the dark?

She dives after him. She fights through water and tooth until she can see his face and one look at him tells her that it’s over.

She looks at him and he looks back. The expression on his face is one very familiar to her, though she would never have expected to see it.

Xiao does not smile at her and tell her to live. He does not cry out for help. He is not happy to go. There is only grim determination there, and she mirrors it without realising.

Osial goes down in a shower of blues and greens and when a god dies, the energy that flows forth burns. It shreds at the edges of Ganyu’s being like a sandstorm, merciless and raw, and she tries to close her eyes but she can’t, not when a god is dying. Not when Xiao is dying.

It’s neither punishment nor mercy when her eyes finally slip shut. There is no god watching over her to grant either.

It’s hours later when she opens her eyes again. Her lashes are crusted with salt, fishlike scales creeping up her arms. She coughs. When she sits up, her vision swims and her hair falls damp around her face. I should really make a new tassel, she thinks. this one’s ruined. But her hands are claws, still. She cannot bring herself to blunt them for the sake of being gentle.

Guyun Stone Forest is nearly unrecognisable with its trademark stone spears laid flat. Once, a long time ago now, she had wanted nothing more than to wipe it off the map. She had thought of it as a monument to pain, a constant reminder of bygone wars no one wished to relive. The stone forest is a place of old history, and none of it has been good. It’s only natural that she would avoid it. The effort she put in seems to amount to nothing, now. The spires cast their shadow over her no matter which way she turns.

But now they’re gone. Xiao died and he took Osial with him and Osial died and took half the seafloor with him, so what is there left to cast a shadow? Ganyu calls it Guyun Stone Forest still, but there’s nothing left that deserves being called that name. She wonders if Rex Lapis would be disappointed that the land he formed was desecrated, or maybe he’d be content to let the memory of his battles fade. Rex Lapis is dead and gone, so maybe it’s best that he be forgotten with the rest of the gods he vanquished.

Oh.

Oh, but of course. It’s never that simple, is it? Rex Lapis is dead but that’s the crux, that’s the rub of it, isn’t it? She’s lived long enough to know that clean breaks don’t happen when there’s blood on your hands, stains on your soul. She should know that better than anyone, but she got ahead of herself because the years have made her soft. Ganyu the qilin made way for Ganyu the soldier made way for a Ganyu that feigned ignorance to everything she was before, and look where it got her. Battered and washed up and unable to see what was right before her eyes.

In the end, she doesn’t bother spitting out the brine in her lungs. It’s better to remember that she doesn’t need to breathe, not really. Better to stop pretending while she still can.

Her sleep is dreamless, the way it used to be.

Chapter Text

And it goes like this:

History is written by the winners. Everyone knows this. The winners always have plenty to say about themselves, one way or another. But even so, there are stories the winners do not tell. Perhaps it is because they are unflattering, or maybe because storytellers in later times find them lacking.

A youth and a spirit crouch body-heat close, more for comfort than anything. Neither of them run warm enough to share. The youth traces circles with one finger on the cave wall; the spirit remains silent. In that time, they had not yet needed words to bridge the distance between them.

Huddled as they are in an alcove, dusty and small, they still maintain their dignity—or whatever dignity is inherent to soldiers that stare down death with child’s eyes. Were an observer to pass by, the two would seem to occupy a space far larger than their single pocket away from the all too familiar violence that consumes them. The spirit dozes, head not quite resting on the youth’s shoulder. Not quite trusting, not yet.

“Guizhong taught me how to tie some ornamental knots. Do you want to see?”

A nod. Out comes the four-petaled knot, tassel hanging matted from the centre. Red, for fortune, stained rust with blood. The youth frowns, runs frustrated fingers through the threads in an attempt to untangle them.

“She said no one else had the patience or fingers for it, but I want to teach you too. I don’t have the string for it, but I can untie this one and use it for practice.”

“...No. She said she wanted to teach me.”

Silence. The wheels in the youth’s head turn, churning the space between them into something sour.

“You turned her down, didn’t you?”

“I can turn things down if I wish now.” Not quite used to a physical form, the spirit shrinks a bit before mirroring the youth’s posture; crossed arms, judgemental stare. “And I turn this down.”

“Tsk.” Mercifully enough, the youth doesn’t push it. One cloven hoof scuffs at the cave floor. The spirit picks up a shard of dislodged stone and eats it.

“What— Hey! You can’t eat that.”

“It won’t kill me. I saw Morax doing it.”

“Morax is made of stone. You’re not.”

“I’m not made of anything.”, the spirit says sourly. “You just like trying to talk to a bag of air and nightmares.”

The youth frowns. “But you don’t eat dreams anymore, right? You know that’s—”

“I mean it metaphorically. Humans are scared of me.” A pause. Somewhere beneath them, stone shifts. “I think I give them nightmares.”

The youth’s lip curls, revealing teeth far blunter than one might expect. Best suited to herbivory, rather than tearing out throats and crushing bone.

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t need to. They’re scared of me because I’m an evil spirit. You’re a qilin.”

Clawed fingers bunch in the hem of the youth’s tunic. There’s a moment where neither moves, staring expectantly at each other like lions with hackles raised. Then:

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

What stillness there was in the cave before is gone now, replaced with crackling energy from a source neither can name. The spirit begins to retort, but is cut off.

“No, shut up. We were getting along so well, and then you pull this ‘I’m evil and nobody loves me’ act? I’m immortal. You’re immortal. We go around killing things. There’s no difference. If you’re evil, I’m evil.” A pause to draw breath, more for dramatics than necessity. “And I’m not a qilin. My mom was, but I’m not. Qilin don’t kill people.”

The spirit hisses through razor-sharp teeth, fangs bared in an open display of hostility. “You’re a person. I’m a weapon. Learn the difference.” A scuff of feet against the stone and then it is gone, not even a shadow in its place.

“Xiao!”, the youth shouts. “Wait, come back—”

Ganyu stares at the wall across from her desk, her vision swimming with unwelcome memories. She thinks of the tassels hanging from Xiao’s necklace. Wonders if he made them himself.

The sun beats down through her window; It’s almost noon. She never sleeps in for this long. She pulls Keqing’s overcoat—still draped over her shoulders—tighter around her and startles as it dislodges a lavender scarf she very much recognises.

...So Keqing came by while she was sleeping and added her scarf, for reasons unknown. She supposes that it’s to be expected, with how many times she’s done the same. The Yuheng isn’t one to leave debts unpaid or actions unsettled.

But she can’t wallow in thoughts of the past forever. It’s never gotten her anywhere, and she’s seen immortals far mightier than her fall to their own memory. As if moving on command, she stands up slowly.

North, to Wangshu.

The bard is, as expected, busy drinking himself into a stupor. His bow is lying on the table. It might be just a trick of the light, but the glow of it seems brighter. Burning, somehow. It hurts to look at. Ganyu stares.

“Hey there! Didn’t think there’d be visitors for this little bard, ha-” He flicks his cap with one finger, setting it even further askew. “But if I wasn’t wiser, I’d say you’re visiting for Amos here. Even so, no Mora could part me from my old friend. Sentimentality aside, this bow’s simply without peer!”

His rhymes are looser than she remembers, but Ganyu paces a small circle around him anyways. “I am well versed in bow-crafting, and your bow is priceless. Asking to buy it would be an insult.” She hesitates, before adding “Ganyu, of Yuehai Pavilion. May I ask about the origins of your weapon?”

“Ehehe. Venti the bard, pleased to meet you. And this bow isn’t mine! I inherited it from a dear friend struck down by the divine.” Melancholy ghosts featherlight over his face before being replaced by the hazy smile she’s coming to know well. “Don’t suppose you’d like to sing me a song? It’s been a long time since I’ve heard one where nothing goes wrong.”

“...No, I don’t suppose I know any songs like that.” Maybe she does. She’s lived a long time and heard many things, but she doesn’t favour dwelling on them. Better to question the drunkard and get over it.

“Such a shame, such a shame. I guess some things never change.”

“Try ‘some things always stay the same.’”

Venti snaps his fingers vaguely in her direction. “Yep, got it. You’d make a good versemonger, I say. I’ll repay your rhyme with a song, if you care to stay.”

There’s no reason to sit in a dusty sideroom with a drunk foreigner. There’s no reason to listen to his meandering words as he tells a story she’s sure is only half true. There’s no reason to spend time doing anything that won’t bring Xiao back from the gaping void he was always going to throw himself into.

She pulls out a chair and sits down.

“Tell me everything.”

So there was this lady, you see? She was tall, with long hair. Horribly thin. Back then, everyone was. But she was thinner than most. Made it her duty to hunt game and feed the people, even though she went hungry more often.

She was a good person. Truly. But good people make mistakes too, and she made maybe the worst mistake that someone can make: She fell in love with a god.

Back then, gods were smaller. Not weaker, no—their power simply never went to giving them form beyond vague thoughts of the ideals they held. The god back then was a protector. He shielded his people with all his might, and he saw something of himself in the huntress.

She loved him, and he loved her back. This was no question. Even as the wind stripped the colour from her hair and her hands started to shake from the chill, they loved each other.

Things changed, as they always do. To love a god is to sign your will, as it always is. The huntress was kind. She lent her ears to everyone with something to say. She let a bard with his hair in braids into her heart, he with his winding song of endless skies and winds that did not cut. More followed: the red-haired knight, the chieftain and her clan, the wisp who seemed without trouble. That was her second mistake.

When she spoke to her lover the god about blue vastness and trees unbent by the wind, he did not hear her. Even so, she still loved him. She knew all along, knew that he did not love her the way she did him, and she still loved him.

But it was not until the moment when her arrow flew toward him, and when the piercing wind was about to rip her asunder, that she finally realized their distance apart.

She was a huntress. It struck him true. There was still love in her heart, blinding and all consuming, and it tore her apart exactly like the winds did. And the bard she had lent her ear to…?

He had followed a wisp to the end of his world, and what did he get to show for it? Blood on his hands not his own. Arrows to the chest meant for someone else. He had never understood the wisp, even with how he laid down his life, but he loved it still.

(The bard may not have been a god. There was little difference, not with the depth of his eyes; blue-black like understanding, like the afterimages of a dying star. There was a human kind of divinity to him.)

The wisp had loved him back. That was certain. But change makes no space for love. And when it came time for another god to take the Lord of Storms’ place, when the wisp sloughed off its old form like a snakeskin, it thought that it had fallen in love with a god.

The Anemo Archon Barbatos took up the huntress’ bow in her memory. He had followed a mortal through blood and revolution, and what did he get to show for it? He’d never understood the bard, not even when his storm-dark eyes faded and slipped shut. He had thought the two of them to be unreachable, and yet—

They’d never reached each other at all.

Amos’ bow carries with it a blessing and a curse. The huntress’ story was forged in love and loss, and so too is her bow; The further you are from your heart’s desire, the stronger you become.

Venti turns the weapon over in his hands. “I think,” he says, slow and careful, as if he’s testing out an idea: “I think it’s all my fault.”

Ganyu blinks. The voice that comes crawling from her throat is not hers, husky with disuse and too many held breaths. “I apologise, Lord Barbatos. If I’d known you were an archon—”

One of the most powerful beings in the world tilts back his splinter-ridden chair and laughs, the sound hollow. “Not anymore, no—you're sorely mistaken. See, my god-heart…” He raps his knuckles against his chest. “It’s been unfairly taken.”

They sit, almost silent but for the squeak of the table as Barbatos rests his feet on it. Then a thought seems to occur to him, and he adds “Oh, and not in the romantic way, though you could say that my metaphorical heart belongs to someone. I mean like—” Here he pauses, makes the gesture of a clawed hand, mimes tearing something out of his chest. “My gnosis? Gone. I’m just as killable as the rest of you, now.”

“I— I see. I apologise.”

“Nothing to be sorry for... Hey, want to hear a secret?” He flails for a moment before pulling himself across the table towards her. The Anemo Archon is gangly, long-limbed like he’s been starved, but the power crushed into that small frame makes Ganyu’s head spin as he beckons her to tilt her ear in his direction.

When his words reach her, they carry no sting of alcohol despite the copious amounts she’s seen him consume. Instead, there’s a melancholy in them. He sighs and it’s cold. She thinks suddenly of a sheer cliff, the wind around it brisk and musical even as it carves ruts into stone. She thinks of flowers in the white shades of mourning, petals clinging to each other even as the grass around them is torn apart. She has never been anywhere like it.

“Even if I still had my gnosis”, Venti breathes, soft as budding leaves in inhospitable places, “I think I’d give it up just to be free.”

The Golden House is empty, unusually so. Rex Lapis’ domain has not housed his form for millenia. It does so now. Ganyu brushes past the Millelith guarding the entrance with a muttered apology, barely noticed. She is a small figure under the silhouette of her post as a secretary.

In the dead centre of the atrium’s wall is a glass vessel; In the dead centre of the vessel floats the exuvia. It’s probably insensitive to use “dead centre” in reference to the deceased, but no one can hear her thoughts now. (When Ganyu was young, she’d thought Rex Lapis could hear her thoughts. Now she knows that gods are not nearly infallible.) She crouches at the edge of a walkway to reach down and run her hand through the piles of Mora. It hums softly with latent energy, making her fingertips buzz with geo. Even if Rex Lapis is dead, he leaves behind a legacy none could erase.

Mora minted through adeptal means doesn’t hold shape well in her grasp, tainted with human blood though she may be. When the coins start molding themselves at her touch, she withdraws her hand. She’s stalled enough.

Her heels click too loudly in the empty space, every bounce of sound off of the mint’s walls distorting it into something that almost reminds Ganyu of hoofbeats. Absently, she lifts one foot to rub at her ankle; Walking on the soles of her false-feet has never been comfortable in the way of her natural digitigrade gait. She sheds her high heels in favour of approaching the exuvia on stockinged toes.

A few metres from the exuvia, she bows. Shows her respect, palm over fist, waits a moment for an acknowledgement she knows will not come. Breathes deeply. In, out.

“Dijun, I don’t know what I’m trying to do by talking to a corpse. I don’t even talk to myself most of the time.” The exuvia, predictably, does not respond. “Did you know you were going to die? You were acting off before you did. I thought it was because of something the Qixing did, or Keqing stepping up again and saying we didn’t need a god. I think I should be mad at her. You died and everything’s falling apart and I can’t do anything about it but I’m not mad at Keqing, for some reason.”

She scans the draconic form of Rex Lapis up and down, eyes lingering on his qilin traits. Once, she had asked him if he was secretly her father. He’d laughed and told her that he’d never lie to her, that he had never hidden her ancestry from her. In retrospect, she had just wanted to be a real adeptus.

Well. She’s standing here now, adeptal energy in her form as much as any coin of Mora that lies in the Golden House’s vaults. Plus, she thinks hysterically, I’m outliving the Prime of the Adepti. That’s got to count for something.

Ganyu the qilin lowers herself into a crouch. There’s no more human left in her, not now. “I worry about Liyue. When I signed that contract with you almost four millennia ago, I thought I would die before you did. Protecting the harbour or fighting a monster or maybe of old age. I don’t know what my lifespan is, but it’s got to be shorter than yours.” One finger, unclawed still, traces spirals on the floor. “Osial is going to rise again soon. I worry about Liyue, even if it’s been through worse. I worry about the Qixing, even though I've been their secretary for so long. I worry about Xiao.” A pause. She mulls over her next words carefully. “Were you still sending him medicine? I don’t talk to him much. I think he won’t take it from me, even if it calms the things that pain him. I… there’s a bard at Wangshu Inn. He calls himself Barbatos. I think I believe him. You knew him. Did you still know him when you died?”

She sighs when she stands, a punched-out exhale that does nothing to relieve the tension in her chest. It was a naive thought, that unburdening herself to her god’s dead body would solve anything. There’s no room for naivety in war.

It seems like a sin to approach the exuvia, an Archon in the most vulnerable state of death. Even so, sin weighs nothing if no god judges it. She places her palms on the glass, rests her forehead on it.

And she feels life.

Ganyu tears herself from Rex Lapis’ temporary coffin so fast her head swims, and suddenly she doesn’t feel very divine at all. The Ganyu that stumbles backwards and nearly trips down the stairs is painfully human. For some reason, she grabs her heels and puts them back on.

Just to make sure, she slowly makes her way towards the exuvia for a second time. Beneath the glassy, half-shut eyes and still lungs is an echo of energy, a distant but vital soul. The exuvia may be inert, but it is far from dead.

Rex Lapis… Isn’t dead.

Just as the thought crosses her mind, someone taps her on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Ganyu-xiaojie. Were you here on behalf of the Qixing?” The voice is soft-spoken, timbre just shy of rough. She turns to see a man in a dragon-scale patterned coat. A worshipper, and a traditionalist at that.

“N—not at all, sir. Are you in need of assistance?”

He shakes his head gently. “Nothing urgent. Zhongli, of Wangsheng Funeral Parlour. I am the consultant for Rex Lapis’ Rite of Parting. I do have some questions for you, though—questions best asked outside of a high-security area such as this one.”

She follows him in a daze. Something about Zhongli seems familiar, though she can’t put her finger on it.

When they exit the Golden House’s courtyard, they pass a fatuus on his way in. Zhongli says nothing, seemingly not even noticing. Ganyu turns her head towards him, because isn’t that the Harbinger who’s a main suspect in Rex Lapis’ murder? when she feels something divine on him. It scrambles her mind, makes the world tilt in ways that shouldn’t be possible. She only realises she’s falling when Zhongli stiffens beside her and reaches out a steadying hand.

“You seem stressed, xiaojie. The questions can wait.” She tries to object around a tongue sitting heavy in her mouth, but he’s having none of it. “Come,” he says. “Let’s take tea.”

She feels a sudden pain in the back of her head, and everything goes dark.

Her head feels fuzzy with half-formed memories, her eyes waxy with tears she has no time for. Ganyu wakes up to the morning sun and a searing feeling of guilt in her stomach. She’d fainted, hadn’t she? Had the fatuus done something to incapacitate her?

In a panic, she reaches for her shoulders. She’s reassured to find Keqing’s coat resting there, a mark that the day hasn’t passed yet. If someone asked her why she pulls it close to her and hunches her shoulders, she wouldn’t be able to answer. For the moment, it grounds her in a cocoon of lilac fabric.

...She hadn’t been there when Osial reared his heads, hadn’t been there when Xiao flew off to give his life. Archons, he’d probably thought that he deserved that death. She worries for him and she chips away at herself out of guilt and that’s always how it’s been. It’s been like that for millennia and she knows that he’s alive at the moment, probably talking to Venti, but her heart weighs heavy still for not preventing a death that had no consequence. She slumps forwards onto her desk.

How could she have prevented his death, anyways? In all their years, Ganyu has never known Xiao to hold off on self-sacrifice. There’s a sour taste in her mouth when she thinks that he might not have wanted to be saved.

The door creaks open. She feigns sleep.

It’s a dangerous thing to sleep in the presence of someone one doesn’t know. Ganyu has had this drilled into her head since she was old enough to understand danger. But Liyue is not the same place it was in her youth; no monstrous gods or divine beasts tear across its mountains and seas. Every inch of its land is familiar to her. There is nothing short of divine that can land even a scratch on her skin. She sleeps when her body demands it, a qilin no longer necessary in times of peace.

Lately, she hasn’t been sleeping much at all. It’s a far cry from her millenia spent dozing, frantic slivers of wakefulness tinged with fear until she laid eyes on the paperwork she’d been assigned and remembered that it was no threat worth waking a qilin. Liyue is a land full of petty squabbles and jurisdiction and her human side delights in making it make sense, so she wrenches herself from carefully rationed sleep to push ahead with whatever financial decisions she has to make.

Stiletto heels pause at the doorway before clicking over to the desk, and there’s that scent of ozone that never seems to leave the Yuheng’s dress. A memory rises, unbidden: Keqing wrenching her hairpin, still electrified, from the chassis of a felled Ruin Guard and shoving it back into her hair without a second glance. She’d gotten a tasteful hat and a haircut afterwards, but Ganyu couldn’t look at her for a long time without remembering the storm in her eyes and the smell of burnt hair (hair-flesh-blood, battlefields razed with power she’d rather forget) lingering in her mind’s recesses.

She wonders why she can’t seem to sleep in Keqing’s presence. Maybe she doesn’t know the other woman as well as she thought, or maybe she thinks the Yuheng is a dangerous nonbeliever set on toppling the gods. Neither of those are unlikely, per se—and yet, Ganyu thinks she would trust Keqing with the Jade Chamber, Liyue, and the world besides.

She doesn’t know why. Keqing is a level-headed and just leader, but all mortals have flaws in a way that the divine don’t. Though, if Rex Lapis never takes Liyue’s throne again... she thinks Keqing would be a good fit.

Something soft descends over her shoulders. Lavender fabric and static electricity. Keqing doesn’t stay long after arranging her scarf over her.

She sits through her meetings this time, throws herself into an endless sea of people and propriety. She stays in Yuehai like a good little secretary and she does what she’s told and it doesn’t calm her down one bit like she hoped it would. Her head is full of something dark and swirling; she imagines it dripping viscous from her eyes, her mouth, leaking out of one ear like blood.

She thinks that this must be how Xiao feels. It doesn’t hurt, not really, but she can easily imagine it hurting. Ganyu leaves work on time for the first time in centuries, headed straight for the Golden House.

The Millelith stationed at the entrance are slumped, boneless. Limp. She can’t say she didn’t expect it to come to this, and yet she whispers a prayer as steps over their bodies. Rex Lapis had better hear this one.

Once, she had been proud of the Golden House’s security. It seems almost comical now, doors haphazardly slammed shut in the wake of a sudden entrance. She tries them, only to find them closed in a futile effort to keep the intruders from escaping. A thin seal of residual pyro from the minting process, all the weaker now that there is no god powering the mint.

Ganyu laughs. Then she rips the doors off their hinges.

The metal buckles under her grip, the work of mortals nothing to the ancient rage she feels when the familiar haze of battle awaits her.

In all her long, long life, Ganyu has never been a strategist. Even so, the scene that unfolds before her seems painfully predictable. The Eleventh Harbinger, as she expected, stalks towards Rex Lapis’ exuvia. The body of the last person to oppose him lies broken on the atrium floor, their floating companion tugging frantically at the edge of their scarf in an attempt to rouse the dead.

She doesn’t move to protect the exuvia. Rex Lapis might be weakened, but there’s no way he would have left the most powerful part of himself vulnerable. But then, she thinks as the Harbinger’s hand comes up empty, where did he leave it?

If Rex Lapis isn’t dead, she thinks as the Harbinger spins on his heel with a snarl, where the fuck did he go?

As absorbed in thought as she is, she doesn’t notice when the fae creature drags the Traveller upright, doesn’t notice them wipe a thin streak of blood from their mouth with one glove and adjust their grip on their sword in the other. What she does notice is when the Harbinger summons a lance of energy from somewhere time forgot and plunges it through the atrium floor.

The Traveller lands feet-first. The Harbinger crushes the floor where he falls. He’s taller now, all violet plating and red traces, bright like a poisonous animal, don’t-fucking-touch-me, and he braces his lance across his shoulder like a warrior but something in the way he shies from his own star-filled cape says fear.

Nothing about this situation should calm Ganyu, and yet she finds her hands hanging loose at her sides as she peers downwards through the hole in the Golden House’s floor. It’ll be awfully expensive to replace, to be sure, but she imagines that quite a few Liyuen citizens will be in need of jobs now that Rex Lapis’ preternatural instinct for the market will no longer support Liyue. Or maybe it will, after all. He’s not dead. Even if he was, death is seldom the end for gods.

Something prickles at her senses then. Gods… dead gods often rise again. She should be ready to receive them. To receive Osial.

When the Traveller goes on the offensive, they hold nothing back. The gold trim on their clothes flashes, darts towards their opponent, and for a moment the look on their face seems all too familiar. She can’t remember whose face she last saw it on, a long time ago. But it doesn't matter. They lunge and their sword shreds armour like paper and for a scant second she can see the Harbinger’s eyes as his mask slips, a rictus of pain, and yet his eyes shine with the thrill of the hunt.

He crumples to the floor. The shining carapace that had surrounded him dissolves, but the manic spirit doesn’t, and here’s something odd: When the Harbinger talks, he’s all smiles. Every word falling from his mouth is torn from under his laughing tongue. His mirth is genuine, clearly, but the set of his jaw and the bare of his teeth speak for him. Over his words of plans and power, the light in his eyes flashes wide like cornered prey.

It’s when he brandishes the Sigils of Permission that everything starts to come together. They fill the Golden House with thin shining strands of power, swirling around the mint, and the walls seem to close in around Ganyu. The scene warps around the Harbinger, rippling the veil between mortal and divine like fire to air. He spreads his arms and Ganyu reaches for her bow.

But she has always been woven into the cloth of that veil. Her arms shake and her eyes burn as she sets her sights on the Harbinger. The Sigils’ fine strands are reaching, now, towards Guyun Stone Forest, lashing at the spears that hold Osial in place, slinking into hairline cracks in immovable stone, and she feels them tighten around her hands as she nocks an arrow. She is flattened against the truth of herself with the force of a false god.

It takes far too long for the arrowhead to infuse with cryo. The Sigils still whisper-scream hallow into the tremble of her hands, obeyobeyobey, but she is not an adeptus that answers to them. No, she thinks that she isn’t much of an adeptus at all.

After all, qilin don’t kill people.

When Ganyu looses the arrow and it sings towards its target, when she gives up her peaceful nature to come to her country’s defense, she remembers that her qilin nature has always been secondary to the bloodlust in her irreverent soul. She laughs, then, and she thinks it sounds a bit like sobbing.

Until, that is, the arrow stops.

Its flight is blocked unceremoniously by a stone stele that rises from the Golden House’s scaffolding, its cryo spent futile against unmoving earth. She scrambles to nock another for the interloper, scans her surroundings for who could have stopped her, but just then someone taps her on the shoulder.

“Ganyu-xiaojie.” It’s the funeral parlour worker. She looks up, fury writ large across her features, but she meets his eyes for the first time and freezes because lined by red and careworn though they may be, she would never forget their colour.

Zhongli of Wangsheng Funeral Parlour, the man in the dragon-scale coat with eyes an impossible shade of amber, smiles at her. His voice is brittle when he next speaks.

“Come,” he says. “Let’s take tea.”

Chapter Text

“So.”

Ganyu folds her hands over each other on the table. Zhongli’s apartment is small, nestled close above the parlour he works at. It’s filled with knickknacks and souvenirs, mismatched cushions on chairs that pretend at comfort. She feels a disgusting sense of familiarity. He had always had fine taste.

“You’re Rex Lapis.”

“I am Zhongli, for the moment.”

“Right.” The chair scrapes against the floor as she stands up. Zhongli makes no move to stop her, though she can remember a time when he would scold her for leaving the table in the middle of a conversation. She rises to her full height, rolls her shoulders, stretches.

And then she punches him in the face.

It hurts. Her knuckles crush themselves against each other with enough force to break bones, if she had been mortal. Her skin tears itself slightly. To add insult to injury, he doesn’t even flinch. It’s a textbook example of unsatisfying, bruising her pride in a way she should’ve entirely expected but doesn’t stop her from glaring at Zhongli as she returns her fist to her side. She doesn’t unclench it, or even inspect it for signs of damage. To do so would be to admit defeat.

Zhongli nods, like seeing violence from a qilin was just about as interesting as a squalling child. “I’m sorry. You have every right to hit me, after what I have put you through. I would welcome it, if it meant your forgiveness.” He looks at her like she’s a teenager throwing a fit, and that makes the anger smouldering behind Ganyu’s ribs flare bright.

“My forgiveness cannot be bought with violence. You of all people should know that.” She shakes out her hand, skin already flushing in blotches of red. “And I don’t remember you being so eager to sacrifice yourself to the whims of someone you always looked down on.”

“I never looked down on you, Ganyu. I am truly sorry if anything I did led you to believe—”

“Stop that. Stop apologising. You never do that.” A small part of her says that he apologises plenty, but she doesn’t think she’s ever heard him say it out loud. Seeing him penitent makes her feel sick. “And it’s not you. It’s not your problem. Archons, not everything’s about you. Xiao dies today, you know that? And you’re just going to let it happen.”

She wrenches herself away from the table, refuses to meet Zhongli’s eyes as his face falls into some sort of expression she doesn’t want to see. The door beckons to her, calls to the parts of her soul that don’t want the image of her god that she’s spent so much time maintaining to fall apart. Ganyu chooses a different kind of cowardice; the kind that hopes beyond hope that there is something worth saving. She turns back towards Zhongli and hopes that she can magically place all her problems on him and have them vanish.

He picks up his teapot, pours water into it until it drips out the spout and into slats in the tea tray, rinses out two cups. “Elaborate on that, if you would.”

And she does.

For reasons she can’t explain, she finds everything from the past few days spilling out through her mouth like a body drowned, seawater seeming to flow endless from blue lips and unblinking eyes as their allies weep and try to resuscitate something long dead. She tells him about Osial rising again, waves the size of cities and sea salt flooding the air bitter with resentment. About Venti, who talks about overthrowing the divine like it’s nothing but avoids her eyes when admitting love like it’s an admission of guilt instead. About waking up again and again on the same day. Her voice doesn’t shake when she recounts Xiao giving his life to end another. When she reaches up to wipe away tears, she finds none.

“I see.”

Oh, so he sees now, does he? Aren’t gods all-seeing? Ganyu is angry and tired and the strain of fighting a god every day is catching up to her, and she’s seen half of everything but she had enough long before that.

“You should have let me kill that fatuus.”

“Hm.” He has the audacity to tilt his head like he’s considering it. “I have made many mistakes, but I will not concede to that being one of them.”

“Why.” It’s not a question. She demands answers she knows he is eager to give.

“Xiao’s death is not a loss I am willing to accept, yes—I am truly regretful that it took that much to prove that Liyue still needs the adepti. With all things considered, though, it is far too late for me to stop it now. If what you say is true, we must treat every day like it is your last in this cycle. There is no saying how stable it is.”

Ganyu settles back into her seat and stares into the teacup in front of her. It’s gone cold in the time it took her to explain. Zhongli pours its contents back into the teapot and refills it with hot tea. She wraps her hands around it, leeching warmth from the ceramic. Her mouth is dry. Everything moves so fast, she thinks.

...Shockwaves from a faraway source she can’t bring herself to put a name to send her tea rippling against the edges of the cup, and she holds herself back from crushing it in her hands.

“Why didn’t you tell me—tell us you were still alive?”

“It was necessary. I could not have told you, for it would violate the contract.” He lifts his own cup to his lips and sighs. “I have guided Liyue for a long time now, as have you. Long enough to wonder if it truly needs the adepti by its side.”

“But it does.” The words are out of her mouth before she can think, a kneejerk response to the threat of redundancy. How could Liyue persist without its god, without the watchful eyes at its darkest corners? Rex Lapis has been gone for mere days and everything is falling apart spectacularly. Xiao is dead. The image of paperwork piling up at the Qixing’s doors in her absence flashes across Ganyu’s mind before she shakes it off.

“I can see it now. Years ago, I signed a contract stating that I would forfeit my gnosis if Liyue proves it no longer needs me. Faking my death without notice came part and parcel with my departure. And it is as you say; Liyue does need the adepti. I only regret that it became clear to me now.”

Ganyu grits her teeth. “So what are you going to do now? Sit at a tea table and take things kneeling? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, yanwang dijun, but you can’t turn back time and suppress Osial again. You can’t bring Xiao back.”

A deep sigh. “No, but you can.”

“I—” I thought we were treating this like each day was my last. I thought you were the one who kills gods. I thought, foolishly, that I could tell you my problems and you would fix everything.

“Liyue needs a god, it is true. But it cannot have me.” Before she can ask what he means, he plows onwards. “I have viewed too many things as bargaining chips, weighed lives in my hands like Mora. In this, I have failed you. I have failed Xiao. I’ve failed Guizhong, who had the most faith in humans out of all of us.”

A light breeze picks up, despite the windows being closed. In the shuttered lamps’ pale glow, ancient history seems only a blink away. There’s a tired cast to the shadows on Zhongli’s face as he places one hand on his chest.

“I am no longer fit to rule.”

He plunges his hand into his core, sinking up to the wrist in a flare of golden light someone like Ganyu was never meant to see. Then, slowly but with a ringing tone that resonates in her very bones, he tears the god-heart from his body.

The gnosis is, undeniably, divine; she can feel its weight just from a glance. But her eyes are not on the piece in Zhongli’s hands. She frantically scans his form for a change, any indication that the removal of what makes him an Archon has side-effects.

Of course it does. He still sits—proper as ever—in his chair, but there’s something hollow behind his eyes. The power that filled every gap in his being seems to have been leached from him; He is no longer the god she knew, his presence no longer radiant and stone-steady the way it used to be. The amber tips of his hair are dimmer. When he shifts in his seat, she can tell he takes up less space than he used to. For a fraction of a second, the light the gnosis sheds plays on his features and she sees neither god nor adeptus, but a warrior worn and tired from fighting a war with no end.

And then, in an act that perverts the very natural order of things, he offers it to her.

“You have always had a better understanding of such things than I. As I cannot guide Liyue through this crisis, its godhood falls to you.”

“No, I can’t. I—”

But can she? Ganyu looks at the god-heart shining in his hand and she thinks of the possibilities. She has power, she has control. She has the most agency out of anyone in this damn loop. She imagines taking it, slotting it between her ribs like it belongs there, imagines making it her own. She imagines rising in a blaze of divinity and fighting back Osial with arrows of stone.

She turns it down.

“I won’t.”

“Ganyu, you know that I respect your decisions. Even so, taking the gnosis would give you— give us the best chance of fighting back against fate.”

“I know. I know that. But I can’t take it.” Her hands find her tassel out of habit, clawing almost compulsively at its fraying strands. “It’s… Hm. It’s nothing against you, I swear.”

“It is no longer my role to issue orders. Even so, I must ask you not as a god, but as one who has seen you grow and change. War takes a heavy toll on you. I am truly sorry that it has come to this, but Ganyu—please set aside any thoughts of me as a higher being. I have already failed you. This is the last I can offer for your war against destiny. My god-heart is yours.”

And just like that, a familiar rage bubbles up within her. “Stop. Stop fucking apologising. This isn’t about you, remember? I just—” She runs her hands through her hair, tugs on the ends of her horns in an attempt to self-soothe. “I should be the one saying sorry, but I’m not. I can’t take your gnosis. I won’t.”

The tea on the table is going cold. She fights back the urge to reheat it.

“You owe me no explanation. If you approach me with the same news in a later cycle—that is, assuming there are later cycles—I will undoubtedly offer you the same support.”

Zhongli is no longer Rex Lapis. In all likelihood, he never will be again. It pains Ganyu (loyal, pious Ganyu, always ready to serve, eyes and ears and blade of the unreachable) to think that her god is dead. It might pain her more to know that he lives on in a different form. (Finicky, wavering Ganyu. Adepti don’t know what family means. She asks for something she doesn’t know how to have). She doesn’t know how to separate the two anymore.

“Rex Lapis never lived in a time where might didn’t make right. I don’t think I have either... I don’t think this is about power. I don’t think I could fix anything if I were a god.” The words drop from her mouth like stones, and her first instinct is to decry them. Of course she could fix things if she became a god. That’s how it always has been.

But then she thinks of looking in the mirror to see something so divine as to be alien. She thinks of looking at Xiao through amber eyes as he swears fealty to a new god. She thinks of Venti, whispering winds through her hair and millenia-old regret. She thinks of Keqing, both a port and the storm that surrounds it, adrift in a world of gods and monsters not her own and raising her sword to the stars that have her in their grip.

She thinks of a maiden with billowing sleeves. She thinks of the antlered youth, mane unruly and teeth blunt, aiming a shaky arrow with eyes the colour of a Guili sunrise.

Zhongli seems to sense her moment of weakness and presses the god-heart into her palm. His hands remain folded over hers. “I cannot force you into apotheosis.”

Can’t, or won’t? “Liyue… I can’t imagine it without a god. But I’m going to try.” Her voice takes on a desperation that she wishes it wouldn’t. “You don’t have to understand, but you do. Right?”

All the response she gets is a shake of the head. “I don’t think I can understand. I will always acknowledge your choices, even if I do not understand them.”

The two of them sit in silence for a while. Ganyu shifts in her seat. By now, the fight should be over. Osial should be gone and Guyun flattened, Keqing going home with no knowledge of the true nature of Yuehai’s first secretary. Liyue should be settling into a worried kind of safety, tucked into sideways glances in early hours and startling at flickering lamps. By now, Xiao should be dead.

It’s not a new realisation; Xiao has died for every day she has spent in this cycle. There’s a difference this time, though. Zhongli is wise where Ganyu is foolish, and his grasp on mortality, of the clock branded into one’s heart, of hurtling down a tunnel towards an uncertain end while scrabbling at the walls with bloodied hands for any semblance of purchase—

Suffice to say that she has never thought about running out of time the same way he does.

We must treat every day like it is your last in this cycle. There is no saying how stable it is. Those words echo in her head like the sickening crunch of bone. It was so very long ago when she last thought she couldn’t get hurt, thought her heritage would cause blades to slide off her skin like water from her hair. Even so, there is still so much that she takes for granted.

Silly Ganyu, she doesn’t even know how much better she’s got it.

I do, she wants to say. I’ve always been killable. Humans know how long they last. I know how long they last. I would’ve never raised a hand against them if I had a choice, I’m so sorry, I know it’s not enough. Don’t you know I think every day about my loved ones finding an empty bed and another silent layer in the sea of clouds? I keep fighting because I’m scared that if there’s peace I’ll fall asleep and never wake up again. I shouldn’t complain. I kill people. I’m sorry.

Funny how she thinks about herself dying so often that she neglects the deaths of others. What if this really is the last cycle and Xiao is gone, gone forever? Verr Goldet will never know what happened unless Ganyu tells her to her face that she failed. Xiao’s censer will sink to the bottom of the sea and cleansing rites will never be performed just so ever again. There’ll be a cold vacancy on the balcony of Wangshu Inn. (An empty bed, maybe, but Ganyu isn’t delusional enough to believe that Xiao would let himself sleep). One day the last human to see a yaksha will die. Venti will drink, she’s sure, and sing himself hoarse. Zhongli will say nothing, but he will be quiet for longer when he sits in Jueyun among the qingxin. And her…

It will all be her fault. She wants to say something about it, maybe. The gnosis weighs heavy in her hand. Ganyu the half-human, the half-beast, the secretary, the soldier—she has never been a leader. Her hands were never meant to hold the weight of the world, as a fragile thing wrought of cloud and frost and the shake of human nerves. She opens her mouth. Zhongli looks at her with a strange expression she’s never seen before, just shy of pity. It reminds her of afternoons spent among the glaze lilies. It reminds her more of sunrises before battle.

What comes out of her mouth instead of all the things she thinks will help fix things is “Can I stay over tonight?”

“Of course.” There’s no hesitation.

“I don’t mean to impose—if the cycle resumes, I’ll never have been here and all...”

“Ganyu. You may stay. If you have anything else that burdens you, I will offer every means of help at my disposal.”

He’s kind in a way she doesn’t deserve. He lays out a sleeping mat and a thin blanket, all the while glancing sideways at her in moments she pretends not to notice. How strange. After all these years, the man who used to be Rex Lapis is scared of her. She tries to give him back his god-heart, seeking only to rebalance the situation, but she sees his expression and thinks better of it.

What must Ganyu look like to him at this moment? Curled around a pearl of ugly truths, wrapped in could-have-beens and should-bes. A quiet, frenzied little thing that carries in its throat something far larger than any of them. Does he see the flash of her eyes with a light duller than his, an understanding that is never enough for times of need? She is running on a razor’s edge with no end in sight. Ganyu is a human, scared and obstinate. She is a qilin, silent and meek. What does Zhongli see, in the clench of her hands and the tuck of her shoulders?

“Ganyu-ah.” She knows better than to ask this of him, even as he will certainly ask something of her. He has never answered her once.

“Yes, Dijun. Ah, Zhongli. Zhongli-daren.”

“There is no need to refer to me with such titles. Come, now.” He scoots closer to sit on the floor by her chair. Not close enough to touch, like he’s scared. She understands, now, why people would be scared of her. She’s scared of herself.

Her chair scrapes against the floor as Ganyu slides out of it to sit by his side on the sleeping mat. “I couldn’t possibly do that. It’s, again, nothing against you. I think… No, never mind.”

“Of course. I won’t force you.” He busies himself with a loose thread hanging from the blanket’s corner. It twists in his hands, then snaps cleanly from the rest of the seam. He tucks the now-detached thread into his pocket. “Do you know what you’ll do, once the day loops?”

“Can we not talk about that?” She doesn’t know. Her horns feel a thousand pounds heavier than usual, bidding her to sleep. She pushes on, not ready for whatever happens after. “I’m sorry. I know you’re just trying to help.” A gentle tolling of the bell around her neck when she shakes herself back to wakefulness.

“Is there something you would like to talk about, then?” Of course there is. There are thousands of questions she could ask of an ex-archon, the nature of divinity and the land’s memory and the blood in her veins. But Zhongli has been nothing but kind, even when she turned him down. She bites her lip.

“No, nothing. Whatever you want to talk about.”

“I see.” He is quiet in contemplation. The light from his hair flickers ever so slightly. Then:

“Ganyu, will being human hurt?”

It’s such a strange yet utterly expected question that she laughs. Really laughs, doubling over and burying her face in her arms. Her voice is hoarse from talking, tired from screaming, a touch hysterical. Zhongli peers at her with concern. She waves him off.

When she’s recovered enough to talk, she scans him from top to bottom. Not an insincere bone in his body, it seems. Ganyu takes a deep, steadying breath.

“I think it will, kind of. But I’m not the one you should be asking.”

“My apologies. I thought you might have some insight on the matter, considering you have lived among them.”

She fights back another bout of laughter. “I’m not human, though. I’ve never been human. They think I’m human but they’re wrong. I just didn’t expect you to think I’m human as well, you know?”

“I never did. My apologies if I made your heritage feel insignificant.”

“Oh, it’s not a problem. I mean, I’m used to it by now. But you’re not human either, so it balances out, I guess. Taking out your god-heart won’t make you human.” A pause to heave a sigh and run one hand through her hair. The other holds up the gnosis, shining in the room’s low light. “If it was that easy, I would’ve been human a long time ago. When I said I’d protect Liyue by serving them, I thought I’d have to be a human for that. And I tried to be. Really hard.”

“Oh, Ganyu. It’s never been necessary to—”

“I know! I know that now. Didn’t always, though. Yanfei walks around these days with her scales out. I like her a lot, you know? But I keep feeling jealous of her because she never wanted to hide. Did you know that when I was just starting out, I tried to hide my horns by piling my hair on top of my head? I looked horrible. I hadn’t even managed to hide my mane yet, so it just looked like I had hair growing out the back of my neck and halfway down my spine. Zhongli, Zhongli-daren, I tried so hard to be human and it never worked.” Tears are prickling at the corners of her eyes now. For some reason, she keeps talking. “I still can’t walk without high heels because my ankles don’t work that way and I don’t want people asking why my knees bend backwards. I think a lot about just dropping the ruse, but I’ve been keeping it up for so long that I think people would be scared.”

“I’m sorry. If I had known—”

“It’s not about that. It’s not about you, either. You think you could’ve known when I didn’t even know?” A beat. “I keep cutting you off. Sorry.”

“It’s alright.” Zhongli blinks, a slow shuttering of his eyes like a cat. “Neither of us can change the past.” But you can change the present, he leaves unsaid. The gnosis in her hand calls to her still.

Ganyu swallows hard around the lump in her throat, something viscous and heavy that scrapes at her vocal chords. “It won’t hurt to be human. It hurts to pretend.” It’s awfully trite. She feels like a character in a romance novel, explaining the intricacies of the self to a battle-hardened general with no grasp on emotion. The thought is so absurd that she can’t hold back a small smile. No matter the resemblance, she does not and will never live in a romance novel.

The man sitting across from her has, undoubtedly, felt love. Love for his allies, love for his people, love for his closest companions. It paints the undersides of his newly fragile eyelids bruise-dark. In a romance novel, she’d describe him as dashing. Elegant, maybe, or mysterious. He folds his hands over each other and she thinks that he deserves more. He deserves to be happy with people who let him mourn and they cannot make him forget about the things he has seen—nothing can—but he deserves to remember them in a fonder light with those he loves.

Maybe she could have been one of those people. She does not know anything about the love in romance novels, swooning and sighing and dramatic declarations, but maybe in another world she could have stood by his side more. Maybe in another world she made time between shifts at Yuehai to sit with him, learned how to brew tea and slow-cook soup just so, and maybe he would recognise the quiet stuttering way she loves for what it is. It may not be what he deserves, far from it, but she could have given him something. She is nothing like a qilin and nothing like a human, not anymore, but she will shape the molten metal of her form with bloodstained hands and maybe one day she will be able to give him something like a daughter.

It’s a while before she notices how Zhongli has shifted away from her. He stands, carefully, as if he’s treading on eggshells and she’s made of glass. She doesn’t miss how his eyes linger on his gnosis when he gives her a once-over. She can’t bring herself to care.

“I will be in the other room if you need me.” He backs away a few paces before turning and leaving in earnest. “Don’t hesitate to—”

“Wait.”

He stops, glances at her over his shoulder. “Yes?”

“I… never mind. It’s nothing important.”

“星火燎原. A spark sets the prairie alight.”

“I know. It’s nothing, really. I forgot what I was going to say.”

“Alright. I will let you think on your own. But if you like...”

He crouches down to where Ganyu sits on the floor and holds out his arms in a bracing gesture. She grabs them to try and lever herself up from her resting position, yet he doesn’t move and—

Oh.

The hug is awkward and a little uncomfortable. Her leg is trapped at a weird angle and Zhongli can’t seem to figure out where to put his arms but she leans her head against the impossibly soft fabric of his vest and hears the beat of his heart, the un-divine one that is his and his only, and one of his hands comes up to pat her on the back in a stiff but genuine attempt at comfort. It’s nice, in a way that she hasn’t felt for a long time. Archons, how long has it been since she touched someone outside of handshakes and shoulder-taps?

She doesn’t know how long it takes her to withdraw her arms from their loop around her god’s waist, but with the loss of his body heat comes a deep feeling of disquiet. She tells herself that she couldn’t possibly live with the burden if she got tears on the attire of someone who, while no longer an archon, used to be. It doesn’t make the feeling go away. Zhongli dusts off his sleeves and leaves without a word.

Does she wish he had said something? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know how he felt about the hug, either—was it a momentary lapse in judgement, an indulgence of a childish plea? Did he feel comfort when he had pulled her close (untouchable, wild, qilin seldom ever approach their own kind and even more rarely do they show themselves to strangers) and felt the frost in her veins?

The Ganyu that curls on her side in the dark is neither qilin nor human, not really. Her eyes scan the inside of Zhongli’s apartment. Sleeping mat, table, armchair, tea set, wall. Painted wall hanging, wicker box, unlit lamp. She scrubs at her face and wishes she could watch her way to answers by the ever-present light of the god-heart in her hand.

Distantly, she hears a voice so soft she’s not sure if she imagined it or not.

Dream something simple, it says. It will merely have been a lovely dream.

She wakes up to the sun slanting through the window and a crick in her neck from where her face is pressed against her desk. Her first action is to tug Keqing’s jacket around her shoulders, as is slowly becoming habit; for reasons unknown, her second is to scrabble at her chest as if expecting to tear out a god-heart. To her relief (disappointment?), she finds none.

A watery laugh forces itself from her throat. What had she been expecting? She pushes herself upright, casting about for any clue as to where she should go, what she should do. At this point, any help at all would be considered divine intervention—or maybe not, seeing as what Zhongli had been able to do.

The sun’s angle tells her that she still has a few hours until midday. Hours that she doesn’t know what to do with. She’s tried everything; intervening in the fight with Osial, talking to Xiao, talking to Rex Lapis and the man who used to be Rex Lapis. The paperwork piled on her desk taunts her. In a rare moment of anger, she sweeps it all off with her arm. Her inkwell clatters to the floor and spills and suddenly she’s just tired, look what she’s done, won’t that take so long to clean up?

Black ink drips from the toe of an equally black loafer. The wearer of the shoe adjusts his position, cross-legged on the edge of her work space.

“You know”, says Venti, “I really missed you yesterday. Where’d you go, huh?”

Chapter Text

“See, I used to be a revolutionary. Gathering allies is an important part of the process. Whether or not I’ve driven you off, though, is anyone’s guess.” Venti half-walks, half-dances backwards through the harbour’s street markets, all the while addressing Ganyu in seemingly indefatigable rhyme. “Your absence from the inn was sorely mourned, you know... as soon as I escaped the drunken undertow.” He plucks an apple underhand from a fruit stand. She gives the owner the requisite Mora and an apologetic look.

She follows the bard down Liyue’s streets until they reach the docks; He actually steps off a pier backwards and keeps going mid-air for a few paces until he realises his error.

“Eep, sorry. You’re all about blending in, right? I didn’t mean for anything to have been a slight. Here, let me just—” He waves his arms vaguely until a gust of wind carries him back onto the pier. “There. Now we can talk in private! No one around here seems like the type that’ll notice.”

Something about his behaviour leaves a rotten taste in her mouth. Of course she’s seen people like him, chatting and laughing their way through stress. It doesn’t make the picture he paints seem any more pleasant.

The first words out of her mouth are, “Xiao dies today.”

This seems to get a reaction. Venti sighs and takes a bite out of his apple. “Of course he does. Just like him, to give his life for that sort of cause.”

“And you’d rather he let—” She gestures to the ocean with a wide, violent sweep of her arm that the Ganyu of four (five?) days before would never have let herself perform. “You’d rather that thing sink Liyue? I know you love him. I do too. But if you think one life is worth a city, you’re a fool.”

This gets a laugh from him. A light, breathy thing, a different beast entirely from the mangled sounds she makes, like a creature in pain. He throws his head back, twin braids floating in an intangible wind, and something about his artful slouch and jewel eyes seems just a little off. A force of nature lurks under his skin that was never meant to be. The way his breathing comes shallow, not still, the faint scar on his ear that he tucks his hair over… Where, exactly, does Mondstadt’s revolutionary end and its god begin?

Countless humans over the years have attempted to become divine. The only reversal of this rule looks at her, hat perpetually on the verge of falling off, and Ganyu thinks carnivore.

“Sure. You can run the numbers all you like, Miss Ganyu! I know all the people in the harbour have lives and souls and whatnot just as much as you do. God of music, remember? Every time that deckhand over there sings a drinking song I hear it. Every time the lady at the grocer’s plays a lullaby to her daughter I hear it. Doesn’t change the fact that I’ve thought about things the other way round.”

When she stiffens in response, he laughs again. This time, it’s quieter. More mean.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t considered it. People like us feel bad thinking about doing this kind of thing, but sometimes you want to be selfish. Do I want to trade a city for the one I love, if it means they do not die for its sake? I can’t say I don’t. Will I? The jury’s still out on that one.”

“It’s not.” Ganyu doesn’t consider herself an impulsive person; she makes her fair share of mistakes, but rarely if ever is she ruled by the kneejerk of fear-anger-love. When she says this, it’s clear in her mind that it is the truth.

“Isn’t it? I thought you would be angrier at me for what I’ve done. If what they say about Liyue’s hospitality is true, mark me down as stunned!”

“If you wanted to sacrifice Liyue for Xiao, he’d fight you all the way down. I don’t think either of us want to do that to him. I don’t think either of us could, no matter how much we love him.”

Strangely enough, Venti tsks. A percussive sound of tongue on teeth. He settles himself on his stomach, basking in the sun on splinter-ridden planks. “Quite the observer you are! But have you only thought that far?”

“You started rhyming again. Why?”

“Rhyme is a bard’s bread and butter, you know. From one side of the mind the other borrows; Only in the absence of reason is the gift of rhyme bestowed.” A kick of his feet, heedless of the drying ink on one shoe. “I suppose I do it to keep my mind busy. A rhyming bard is a bard without reason, you see?”

“Do you not like thinking?” It’s a fair question to ask. Venti sings and he rhymes and he drinks and it seems he does very little thinking at all. Half the things he says are tales, carried by the wind and parroted without thought. “Sorry. I don’t know you. I don’t know what you do, what you’ve done, I just—ugh.”

“No, no! That’s entirely fair. I led you to that thought, after all—It’d be of little honour to make you take the fall.”

“Was I right?”

“Mm. A question most rhetorical.”

“Are you going to start thinking now?”

“I don’t know, my dew-wrought friend. There’s plenty of thoughts to run from, I must contend.”

The water beneath the pier grows sluggish, still. A thin layer of frost creeps its way up the wooden supports.

“I stopped running a long time ago, Barbatos.”

They make an odd pair, the two of them; Venti is as clearly from Mondstadt as Ganyu is a native Liyuen, outspoken where she is quiet. He hums a constantly changing tune as if it’s the only reason he draws breath. It might as well be.

She trails after him through the harbour’s streets as he pesters the townsfolk, an Anything interesting at sea lately, sir? here and a Fine day for it, hm? Notice anything unusual? there. After each query, he crosses his arms behind his back and tilts his head. He watches the questioned party with something in his eyes that she thinks is interest but is not unlike hunger.

“I’ll be the first to admit my failures,” He says after they’ve canvassed the city twice. They stop under one of Yuehai’s many awnings; She crouches to rub at her ankles in feigned fatigue and genuine discomfort. “And this is either no way at all to go about looking for others like us, or there are simply none out there.”

“Why do you think there are others like us? I think we’re aware of this—” And here she skirts around the topic- “This thing—because we’re both outliers.” If he notices her reluctance to speak of the loop directly, he shows no sign of it.

“Maybe. I’m not the secretary between the two of us, but having two people aware at all seems significant to me. You will never be alone in the world on anything; Even if this is the first time something like this has happened, it’s not your burden to shoulder alone. I’d even argue that it’s mine more than yours, you know?” Venti shows no sign of weariness, his face set in a pleasant expression. One corner of his mouth is ticked upwards, as if he knows something funny no one else does.

“You act like you’re the only one who’s thought about this.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dare.” She is angry at him, she realises. There is something gnarled in her heart and it is reaching into her throat and twisting and she doesn't like it at all.

It feels different from when she shouted at Zhongli, when she punched him and hurled words like stones from her lofty perch atop a mountain of chances untaken. Maybe it will feel different every time. She regrets snapping at Zhongli, remembers perfectly the sorrow in his features, but she cannot imagine how Venti will look if she tears the smile from his face. Would he sulk, nursing his wounds both physical and emotional, and avoid her? Would he shrug it off with a quip, no worse for wear? Or would he snap right back, venomed tongue and barbed wit, eyes glowing teal as he calls forth the winds? Ganyu does not know this bard-god very well at all, and certainly not well enough to know the answer.

(There is a part of her that wants him to be angry in return. A part of her that wants to claw and slash and rend flesh from bone, to feel blood on her knuckles from a fistfight and cuts on her fingers from her arrows leaving the bow. She wants to tear through everything until something tears back. Nothing can harm her save her own fury. She’s tired of having to do everything herself.)

“Hello?” The greeting is soft, almost a whisper in the throat of a child. She is aware, suddenly, of just how cold the air around her is. “Hello? Can you hear me?”

Slowly, she lowers her gaze. Tugging at the tassel on her vision is a small hand, nails blue-black and fingertips blotched with white.

“I am Qiqi. Qiqi is a zombie. And you are not supposed to be here.”

Venti, unsurprisingly, regains his voice first. “Why hello yourself, young miss! Surely there’s no reason to interrupt this—ah, my dew-drinking companion, do you know her?”

“I do.” The words crawl from her mouth unbidden, twisting the shape of her face into something she does not know. “Hello, Qiqi.” The jiangshi is not a stranger by any means; they’ve spoken, surely. She cannot remember the reason she is afraid of this child.

“Hello, Ganyu-jiejie. Hello, jiejie’s friend. I’ve known Ganyu-jiejie since before I died. She does not remember, maybe. But she is not supposed to be here.” Qiqi sits, slowly. The joints of her small frame take a while to bend to the will of her mind. “The ground here is warm. I have been touching warm things because no one will remember. Not even Qiqi.”

Venti seems all too eager to join her. “Not even Qiqi, you say? Not even you?”

“No. I am Qiqi but Qiqi is not me. I don’t know you. You are scary.”

The bard responds to this by unclasping his cape and laying it between them on the ground, a mockery of a picnic blanket for a child who has not been able to taste for centuries. He looks smaller without it. Once, she’d read that birds spread their wings wide in dangerous situations. Something about making them seem larger. Seeing Venti do the reverse strikes a chord in her that she didn’t know it could. There’s no explanation for why she sees so much of a bird in Venti; he may be a creature of the wind, but there is no sign of wings, not a single feather in sight for all the resemblance.

His smile is consoling, wide enough for a single dimple. There are callouses on his fingertips when he beckons her to sit in the shape of lyre strings, yet not a single scar from the fletching of an arrow. Every feature in the god’s body is carefully crafted to a certain image. She does not know why it reminds her of a bird in flight when he tilts his head questioningly.

“Come now, there’s no shame in resting. Surely a conversation with this child could prove to be refreshing!”

She sits. Qiqi produces a small digging knife and turns it over in her hands before driving it into the soil by her side.

“Ganyu-jiejie. How are you here?”

Courtesy has always come more fluidly to her than honesty. “I… I’m showing this traveller around. It’s not safe for you to be warm for too long, Qiqi. Do you want me to help cool you down?”

A shake of Qiqi’s head. She reaches into Yuehai’s carefully manicured flowerbed and picks at a weed with her nails. “No. Qiqi will rot if it is warm. But tomorrow everything will be the same again. Ganyu-jiejie is kind but she does not have to worry.”

Ganyu’s heart stops in her chest.

“Excuse me?”

Slowly, the pieces come together. Qiqi can’t possibly remember knowing anything before her death. She knows that Ganyu isn’t meant to be at Yuehai this time of day. And with a sinking feeling, Ganyu realises what her insistence on being warm means.

“Hey, is anyone home?” Venti waves one hand in front of her face. “If you need to sleep again, that’s fine, but I think this conversation is leaving me a bit behind.”

She ignores him. “Qiqi. Of the past few days, how much do you remember? Does the day—” she gestures with her hands, painting a picture in clumsy strokes. It doesn’t feel nearly enough for everything that’s happened.

Slowly(she does everything slowly, but time must be strange again because everything around her is moving like a spoon through honey), Qiqi nods. “Everything happens. A monster comes to flood the city. I ran to the mountains.” She raises one hand to her mouth, worries her thumbnail between her teeth. Ganyu has half a mind to wash those hands, but jiangshi are above problems like disease. “It was raining.”

“It was-” Of course it was raining. A sea god’s rise will bring storms. Even so, there’s something faint at the back of her mind. “I’m sorry. What about the rain?”

“I slipped. Hurt my leg.” The gaze she levels at Ganyu is expectant, even through the glazed eyes of a life departed. She pulls up the digging knife and taps the side against her bandaged ankle. “Here, on a rock. I wanted to fix it. I hid from the monster in a cave.”

“And then I killed you.”

Ganyu doesn’t recognise the words as her own for a moment, whispered as they are. It’s midday, the sun at its zenith above them. There is a bloom of frost in her soul that keeps her lucid in even the coldest climes. Even so, she shivers as she recounts the rest of the tale.

“I—there was a nest of demons. The ley lines were going berserk. I chased them away from the Harbour. The other adepti—we cornered them. Against a mountain in the North of Jueyun Karst. They retreated into a cave. Mountain Shaper wanted to bring the whole thing down on them, but I wanted a clean kill.” It’s crystal clear, now that she remembers; she had been granted her vision a scant few centuries prior, and had yet to use it in combat. The rain had slicked the mountainside, but she had scaled it with ease on cloven hooves and drawn her bow.

She’d wanted to show off, was that it? She saw the rain, saw the demons all huddled together as they fled into their cave, and she had wanted to use her brand new toy so badly, wanted to see just what she could freeze, and she’d followed them in. ‘Clean kill’ was a pale excuse in the face of what she’d done.

“Xiao was with us. We didn’t know there was a human in there. I’m sorry. He was the one who called for a stop first, said he’d sworn an oath never to harm a human again. We froze you in amber but it was too late. I’m, I’m so sorry.”

Mountain Shaper had given his resolve, amber sealed shut around the child’s corpse. Xiao had given his strength, a talisman scrawled in his handwriting. (He’d barely learned to write, then. Too many years of hardly existing at all and too many millennia of nothing but battle.) And Ganyu…

“I gave you my blood. I didn’t know if it would work. The blood of a qilin given freely is supposed to be powerful beyond everything. I wanted to take away the pain, but I’m not really a qilin. It was our best shot. I’m sorry. We thought you might still be alive, because your vision hadn’t dimmed. I—”

“It worked. I think.” Her hands are shaking when Qiqi places her vision in them. The clasp on her hat swings back and forth from where it was detached. “I was dead but you took away the pain. You took away the memory of it hurting.”

That’s worse, she wants to say. I made you a corpse dead twice. I took everything you were away from you. How can you look at me like that? The vision in her hands glows softly. I let you walk again, talk again. I let you use this gem that you keep on your hat. It cost you everything. I can’t let you forgive me.

“I remember things now, Ganyu-jiejie. I’m not really Qiqi now. I was Qiqi for a long time, almost longer than I was alive. I think it’s okay. I like picking herbs.”

She’d almost forgotten about Venti’s presence. He leans forward, then, and takes Qiqi by the shoulder. His eyes are wide, wider than she’s ever seen them. There’s something fierce in them that she doesn’t want to understand. “Miss Qiqi, when did you start remembering? What is it?”

To her credit, Qiqi doesn’t react. Her face has always been stiff in death. “I remember not being Qiqi. I remember being Qiqi and forgetting everything. It was like this when the wheel of life stopped.”

“The wheel of life?” He glances towards Ganyu with a worried expression. “Is this a Liyuen belief?”

She winces. Despite her ancestry, she knows very little of Liyuen beliefs. “I don’t know. The adepti are believed in, not the believers. I’ve never thought about it.”

“We didn't always believe the same things. People change. Guixue could not change because she is dead, and now I remember what people believed in before. The wheel of life is...” She lifts one finger, draws a circle in the air. “I feel it go past me because I am dead. It keeps spinning one way and then it stops. Like a jammed water wheel. And then it does it again.”

Venti has no nervous tics, she’s noticed; maybe nothing she’s seen has made him nervous so far, or maybe he has the luxury of crafting himself an unflinching form. When he furrows his brow and puts a hand to his chin, it could not be more of an act.

“So it’s the loop, then.”

“I can remember things now. Everything was repeating for me before but now everything except me is repeating. I want to go to a hot spring. I never went to a hot spring before I died. When I was Qiqi I would rot. But now I can rot and then I can blink and then I will not be rotting.”

“I don’t think it’s quite the same, Miss Qiqi. Should I call you something different?”

“Hmm.” Qiqi takes her vision from Ganyu’s hands and clasps it back onto her hat. “My name used to be Yun Guixue. I liked to write stories. I picked herbs when I wasn’t supposed to. I was good at my family’s sword technique. Once I found a finch with a broken wing and I named it a-yuan. She was cute.”

“Miss Yun, then?”

“I don’t know. I was always Guixue until I forgot about being Guixue and then I was Qiqi. Qiqi still likes to write in her notebook and pick herbs and she wants a pet finch. Sometimes Qiqi will see something Guixue knew and Qiqi will not remember. But I think about it.” She rocks from side to side where she sits. “Guixue did not learn calisthenics or how to use a vision before she died. Qiqi remembers Yunlai swordsmanship.”

Something about that rings a bell. “Yunlai swordsmanship? You don’t mean-”

“Like Keqing. Qiqi called her Lady Keqing but she is from Guixue's family, so I can call her Keqing-jiejie. Even though Yun Guixue is dead and I am maybe more Qiqi than Guixue. It’s strange. I have been dead for a long time. I don’t know if I’m younger than her. I like her sword. I think I saw it when I was Guixue. I like her as well. She is nice to Qiqi.”

Venti’s face doesn’t move a single muscle. “A little of both. I see. How do you decide who you are?”

She blinks at him slowly. It seems to take a lot of effort, a conscious motion of stiff muscles for the sole purpose of conveying confusion. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Are you Qiqi or Guixue?”

“I am Qiqi. I am Guixue too. You can call me whatever you want.”

“Would you rather be Qiqi or Guixue?”

“Qiqi is a zombie. Guixue is dead. I like picking herbs and writing in my journal. Who I am doesn’t matter.”

As if scripted, Venti melts backwards into an easygoing slouch. He smiles at the jiangshi and it almost reaches his eyes, once again half-lidded and lazy. “Never mind, then. Thanks, Miss.”

“Ganyu-jiejie.” It takes her by surprise. “I don’t remember who killed me.”

“I might as well have,” she finds herself saying. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does. You let me live again. I was Qiqi after that, but I still know my family’s sword technique. I think I will go back to being Qiqi. Once the wheel of life starts turning again, I think I will forget.”

“You’ll… forget? Being Guixue, I mean. You’ll forget dying.”

“Qiqi is scared of being sealed. Qiqi is scared of falling. Qiqi is scared of gods. I will remember that part.”

It feels like a betrayal, suddenly. To have given her life in undeath, but without meaning. To have let her regain her memories, but to let the world wrench it away as surely as the wheel of life turns.

The half-shadow of a girl who died centuries ago pulls a notebook from her pocket. “Qiqi does not remember being scared of you. Look.”

Spread across two pages is a drawing in a child’s shaky hand. The shapes are simple and the lines uneven, but the likeness is remarkable. It depicts a stag with one hoof raised, covered in swirls of ink reminiscent of fire. The familiar sleeve hanging from Xiao’s arm, his face out of view and one hand clutching what must be his mask. And front and center…

The Ganyu in the drawing is younger. Her hair is wild from combat and her eyes wild with fear, fingers free of claws in an attempt to appear human in Yun Guixue’s final moments. There’s a bleeding slash across one of her palms, dripping blood rubbed out and redrawn with red ink. Despite the darkness of the scene and the artist’s lack of skill, it’s clear that she’s smiling. A strange smile, borne of panic and pain and the need to seem strong for the dying child collapsed against the cave wall.

The Ganyu in the drawing looks determined. The Ganyu in the drawing looks kind. The Ganyu in the drawing looks like a hero, and Ganyu doesn’t know why a wave of nausea overtakes her at that thought.

“Thank you, Qiqi. Guixue-meimei. I should... get going.” Her head spins when she stands. Every fibre of her being is wound tight, nerves screaming at her that she needs to leave, now, to get as far away from that notebook as she can.

“Okay. I don’t mind things going back to normal.” The notebook is tucked away carefully between folds of fabric. “Oh… One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t sleep near monsters, jiejie. It’s dangerous.”

“So… Miss Ganyu.” Venti leads them back down to the docks, down busy market streets and the narrow back-alleys between.

Ganyu exhales through clenched teeth. “What is it?”

“What should we do about Qiqi?” The question is posed lightly, almost flippant; It would be easily brushed off if not for the roiling mass of something in her gut that hasn’t subsided since they left Yuehai.

“We let her live her life. She’s the only one who doesn’t have a hand in all this.” For lack of a better term, she gestures towards the ocean.

“But we aren’t the only ones who remember it. Does that count for something in your book, Miss Ganyu?” He’s produced his lyre again, though his hands lie still. “I suppose you’re right about us being outliers, in any case. The girl had a strange relationship with time to start with.”

She gets no joy from being right. “And? She’s a bystander just as much as all these people on the street.”

“Ah, ah. You would’ve been a bystander too, if you didn’t do what you did. I must admit, I’m rather curious as to what you’ve done so far.”

“So you’d have her put herself in danger by joining us? She’s a child, Barbatos. She’s already been collateral damage once.”

A sigh. “I never said that.”

“What if she rots away and it’s our last cycle? I can’t let that happen. She keeps putting herself in danger because she doesn’t think it’s permanent.”

For a moment, there’s genuine irritation on Venti’s face before he schools it into a more pleasant expression. “That won’t happen. I’ll make sure of it personally, if that’s what you want.”

There’s a strange tingling in her hands, almost indistinguishable from sweat, and then there is golden dust and the wood of her bow is pressing into the fists she’s formed. I’ll make sure of it personally, he says. How trite. How utterly stupid. Doesn’t he know that promises mean nothing here? When a merchant offers to inspect all the goods in their caravan, you send an escort to make sure they get it done. When the God of Salt promised her people safety from the war, Rex Lapis’ oldest soldier crossed the ocean to Sal Terrae because she never believed for a moment that such promises could be kept. Havria, the God of Salt, was far too gentle to live in such times. Ganyu had seen the remains. Havria was gentle and she made promises she wanted to keep and couldn’t and when a god dies, the energy that flows forth burns.

Oh, she had wanted to kill. She had wanted to rip and tear and scream her grievances to Celestia, because what kind of bastard kills their own god? What kind of kindness is that? (She knows what kind of kindness it is. She’s afforded that kindness to plenty of people.)

But Havria wouldn’t have wanted harm to come to her people. The devotees saw a beast emerge from her temple, tears down her face, and they assumed their god had been assassinated. The beast took them from their homeland and to a strange place down south called Liyue Harbour and they missed their protector dearly and Ganyu never had the heart to tell them that the deicide was the fault of those among their own. Her bow had bent, splintered in her hands. She had regretted it at that moment. Maybe it was a sign that she wasn’t to fight, after all.

That was when she decided to stay in Liyue Harbour. What good are gods, if their people despair? What good are demon slayers, when the collateral cannot be ignored? She had seen a child crumpled against a cave wall and an effigy of divinity in salt. Yuehai had been kind to her. She had learned to be a human. The remains of her bow stayed in a locked safe for thousands of years.

Five hundred years ago, she’d had it repaired at the hands of a master blacksmith. The Cataclysm had not been kind to anyone. It would not be kind to Liyue. Prototype Crescent, he had called it. She took up arms and her arrows shone like the moonlight in her eyes.

Power? ...Now there's a key performance indicator I haven't needed in a long time.

The Prototype Crescent hasn’t failed her, even after centuries of disuse. Its weight is familiar in her hands.

“I’m going to kill the Fatui Harbinger,” she says to Venti. “You can follow me, if you want.” For god and country, as always. If you want to protect the people, if you want things done right… The only real option is to do things yourself. The Harbinger can be collateral, for all she cares.

“What?” For the first time, Venti’s face shows disbelief. “Are you serious?”

“Deadly.”

“Very funny. Not the ‘haha’ kind of funny, though. What’s going on?”

She sighs. Playing catch-up has never been fun. Having someone else try catching up to her is exhausting. “I need you to stop Rex Lapis from stopping me from killing the Harbinger. If this is our last cycle, I’ll make it count.”

“It’s not our last cycle. Call it a bard’s intuition, if you will.”

“Intuition tells us nothing, Barbatos. Listen, if you don’t have anything to give me that’s not some kind of- some kind of riddle, you can just fly away. Leave.” Ganyu waits for a response. When she receives none, she turns away.

“Wait!” A single note plucked from a lyre.

“What? Don’t waste my time, Lord Barbatos.”

The Anemo Archon purses his lips. “It’s not our last cycle because I’m the one responsible. I set this whole thing up.” His eyes curve in a small, wan smile. “I told you it was all my fault. Did you think I was joking, perchance?”

Chapter Text

Let me tell you a story. It’s an old one, see. No one’s heard it in a while. In fact, I do believe you’re the first one ever to hear it.

Don’t blink, now. Don’t look away. Time is strange where we are going.

There was a god, once. They were tall, with a voice like a song and eyes like the end of the world. They had an easy smile and a laugh like a death knell and they are gone, now. The God of Time lived in the turn of a phrase and the curve of letters carved into a sundial’s base and now that is all that remains of them.

They had a companion. A wind wisp with the face of a dead boy. The two of them lived together. Time flows forwards as the wind blows; the wind carries stories of the past to the future. It was a comfortable thing, the space between them. A space filled with song and devotion, something not unlike love but entirely alien to the un-divine. Their people offered prayer to them in tandem, the stars in their eyes lined in syzygy.

The God of Time had a gravity to them. Not gravitas, no; The crinkle of their eyes and flit of their hands was far from solemn. They were movement, they were light. It was hard to look away and harder to resist their pull. But that’s the catch.

(There’s always a catch, don’t you know? This world is not a kind one.)

Light has no substance. There is no weight in an afterimage. Once, the wisp with the dead boy’s face had reached for the God of Time’s heart and he had felt nothing. They’d smiled, then, a curious thing with no understanding of the matter. No gnosis.

And so it was. The God of Time had no gnosis, no people to call their own. The wisp tried to give them their own temples, their own church, to share his heart with them. They hadn’t understood. They laughed, clear and sweet, and in it he heard their death knell. When the sands of their own domain erased them, they did nothing to stop it.

(The Anemo Archon Barbatos loses another loved one.)

God are cannibals, all of them. Let not the peace of their rule deceive you. At their cores, they are beasts that do nothing but devour. He took for Himself the face of a bard, the bow of a huntress, the eternal life of a storm. He takes and takes and He cannot stop himself from subsuming another. There is nothing in His chest except a heart that means nothing and the hollow of a roaring gale.

(Much later, Venti the bard has his god-heart torn from him. He doesn’t fight it. Why would he? It’s about time someone else takes what’s his.)

The Golden House’s doors yield easily for Ganyu’s strength. She turns and seals them shut behind her with a blast of cryo. Venti paces slowly around the interior like a tourist, eyes flicking this way and that. He steps carefully around the floor before the exuvia.

“So, no changing the plan? For a moment there I thought you were going to try and kill me instead.”

Foolish. “What would killing you even do?”

“I dunno. I guess I wouldn’t be around to see. You’re not as angry as you might have been after I gave you the story, you know. I’m as good a scapegoat as any.”

“Don’t rhyme.”

He raises his hands, palms up, in a gesture of surrender. “Alright. It’s a habit, that's all.”

Slow and careful, she moves to the centre of the mint. Scans the interior for any sign of the Harbinger.

“It’s empty. At least, I think it is.” She seldom visits the mint, much less when it’s an echoing husk. “I thought he would be here.” It’s a strange feeling; relief and disappointment and anger in the space between her ribs. The golden tinge of currency surrounds her on all sides, soft light falling from her god’s domain to settle on her chest, her shoulders, her weary eyes. Her country’s still heart presses in on her like amnion in her most desperate state. And then:

“Thought who would be here, exactly?” The Harbinger, dishevelled.

He climbs over a railing with fluid ease and saunters to her, shoves his thumbs through his belt loops. His eyes (flat-blue eyes, like a rip current at shore. Irises swallowed whole in fear) sweep her up and down before curving into a smile.

“Miss Ganyu the secretary, is it? I’ve heard plenty of you from an associate of mine. What are you doing here?”

Ganyu smiles back. It’s only polite, after all. The corners of her mouth pull back until they reveal teeth. “I could ask you the same thing, sir.” With this, she produces her bow. “Consider me here on official business.” She nocks an arrow.

Surely Zhongli cannot stop her from shooting the Harbinger point-blank, she thinks, and lets it fly.

Oh, but someone else can.

The Harbinger stares, deprived of the chance to flinch. Hovering just in front of the skin between his eyes is her arrowhead, cryo still flashing for a clean kill. Wrapped around the shaft is Venti’s hand.

He lowers it so slowly it borders on reverent. As he turns to face her, his eyes flash teal. Her arrow is offered back to her fletching-first. The feathers streak with crimson, as do his hands, but there is not a single scratch across his palms. Another god’s blood on her conscience, then. With her luck, it won’t be the last.

(Letting her more bestial features rise to the surface has grown to become an unfamiliar feeling over the millenia. It’s best that she reacquaints herself.)

Horns, claws, mane, scales. She rolls her shoulders forwards, then back. The Anemo Archon has seen war, perhaps, but he has never been a soldier. He has never felt kinship with a fox gnawing off its own leg to escape a trap. If he had, he would understand the mantra that thunders through her veins.

Any means necessary.

The Harbinger dodges her first swipe, catches his scarf on horns still sharpening from her transformation. No matter, she thinks as she snatches at it. He will not dodge her second.

Any means necessary.

She reels him in with the stone forests’ strength, rakes lion’s claws down his side. He does not so much as gasp as his eyes alight. He lashes back, first with hydro, then with electro. She is older than such pointless denominations. Her blood is stronger still, even as it leaks from her temple.

Any means necessary. Any means necessary.

He fights dirty. They both do. His canines leave a trail of red down her shoulder. She tears his vision and false eye both from his belt as retribution with a hand seizing with electricity. He does the same to her, though it’s an empty gesture. Barehanded and locked in close range, she is his clear superior.

Any means necessary anymea ns necessary anymeansnecessary

The Harbinger doesn’t make it easy, despite his shrinking odds. She flings his elemental foci aside and hears them skitter to a stop against the wall as he lunges towards them. When she moves to stop him, he produces a dagger and drives it into the flesh of her thigh. He has not flinched since they met. She does not give him the pleasure of seeing her do so now. Distantly, voices.

Any-

“Stop!!”

Strangely, she does. It must make for an odd tableau, the Harbinger’s collar clenched in her hand as she hoists him from the ground, both their chests heaving. All eyes drift towards the mint’s entrance. Enter the Traveller.

“W-what’s going on?” The Traveller’s floating guide darts towards where Ganyu stands and tugs at her clothes before recoiling at the sickly-warm wetness of blood. “Ganyu, please tell us you’re not...”

The Harbinger has to spit out a mouthful of blood before responding. “Oh, of course not. Miss Ganyu and I were just having a friendly tussle, promise.”

She gives him a shake, watches with grim satisfaction as his breath stutters and one hand comes up to clutch at her wrist. “I make no such promises.”

“Hey, c’mon. You’re a skilled warrior, Miss. Set me down and let’s have a talk, hm?” He pats her arm in what could have been a reassuring gesture.

She can see clearly the moment the Traveller decides not to interfere with this scenario, instead turning on their heel to approach- Huh. She’d forgotten Venti was there. Afraid of bloodying his hands as always, then.

They gesture, make small circles with the movement of their hands. “Venti. What’s going on?”

The bard visibly grimaces before answering. “I’m not even sure I know anymore, my friend. It seems your Fatui fellow there’s a means to a gruesome end.”

Ganyu cuts in. “Yes, he is. And he must be eliminated, for Liyue’s safety. Surely Mondstadt’s archon would know the value of a nation? Or would he not, having abandoned his?” Insults fly from her mouth like a venomed snake; Things the meek secretary of Yuehai would never say, but she is not that secretary anymore.

“Traveller.” Venti’s face creases with worry. “Surely you’re here to solve this dispute? I don’t mean to impose, but-”

The Traveller stills. Frowns. Their hands hover in the air, stuttering without sound. “I don’t know. I’m not from here.” They sketch ‘here’ with a circling of one wrist, something Ganyu doesn’t know but understands innately. Here is the Harbour, Liyue, Teyvat. “It’s not my duty.”

A snarl crawls its way out of Ganyu’s throat. “Stay out of it, then.”

And then: the Traveller takes a step back. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I know I’m not the best person for the job.” They list to one side, and for a moment she sees something of herself, something of Xiao in the slope of their shoulders. A child who had never asked for the weight of the world, the weight of expectant eyes on their every move. “I care, of course I do, but…”

“I understand,” says Venti, his smile drawn. “You care about your sibling more.”

The Traveller nods, miserable. They have not yet been powerless and snarled in the web of loyalty that forces every soldier’s hand to sacrifice themselves, sacrifice their brethren for the greater good. “I don’t know what led to this happening. I barely know who any of you are.” Their floating companion jolts, lunges for their shoulder; it’s too late, though, as they summon their sword.

With a clatter, they toss the sword aside. It skids across the mint’s floor with the eerie scrape of metal on metal. When they move their hands back up to speak, they shake with something unnameable.

“I just wanted,” the Traveller says, “to put up wanted posters.”

“Haven’t you done enough?” As if choreographed, Venti whirls on Ganyu. “Nobody ought to die on my behalf.”

“This isn’t about you.” She feels the Harbinger’s pulse against her fingers. She feels the Golden House’s resonance beneath her feet. She tosses the Harbinger to one side, watches his unconscious form crumple.

Venti stands his ground as she approaches. “Of course it is.” There is a certain cold fury in his expression, ageless and unlined. He crosses his arms over his chest. “I have no intentions of running from what I’ve done.”

“It’s about Xiao. Haven’t you forgotten? Or are you too absorbed in playing the hero?” To Venti’s credit, he doesn’t so much as flinch even as she looms over him. She thinks of striking him, of what good it would do.

“Of course I haven’t.” His lip curls. “Do you think he would want someone to die on his behalf, either?”

Foolish. Asinine. Reprehensible. What does he know of war?

She laughs, matchstick-coarse. “So you think he and I have gone soft, in our millennia? I will protect Liyue by any means necessary, just as I have in the past. He would have done the same thing.” The Harbinger’s body lies only a few paces away. It takes less than a second to reach it. “I will protect the person who could have been my brother by any means necessary.”

Human flesh feels the same in her hands as it always has. She’s seen everything she wants to see. With a twist of her arm, she tears the Harbinger’s heart from his chest as easily as if she was coring an apple.

From behind her, she hears the Traveller yelp. Their companion’s cape jangles, dissonant, as she tries to shield her eyes. And Venti -

Venti screams. A shrill sound with no music in it. It rips out of him, something not meant to ever pass human lips. The sheer noise of it rings wide under the Golden House’s domed roof, drills into her skull until it feels like it’s about to crack in two. She closes her eyes reflexively -

And opens them to the surface of her desk in Yuehai, the sun stretching lazily across her shoulders.

This morning finds the two of them, worn thin and un-divine, staring at each other across the now-familiar table in Wangshu’s kitchen. Venti shuffles a deck of cards from one hand to the other. His eyes flit from side to side.

“I borrowed this from a merchant down on the deck. She was really quite taken with my musical skills, you know. Care to play a hand?”

Ganyu shakes her head. A coil of string lies heavy at her foot. She runs it through her hands in a slow, meditative motion.

“I’m restringing my bow. It’s best to be prepared for combat.” The Crescent’s knots are familiar to her as the curve of her own horns. They come apart easily, gracefully under her watch. “I’d advise you to do the same.”

Out comes Amos’ memory, violet and gleaming on the table. “It’s never needed restringing.” Venti shrugs. “I’ve never really wondered why, but I’d risk a guess that it has something to do with the heartstrings of the bearer. Amos would’ve liked that idea.” He plucks at its spectral bowstring like a lyre. The bow seems to shiver, arms fluttering in a motion that belies its power.

The string flows through her grip like water. She picks at one end with her nails, tests its weight between her fingers. She won’t let a single fibre go to waste.

“I spoke to Rex Lapis.”

“Did you, now? It’s been...” An uncharacteristic silence. “A while since I saw him last. I regret not visiting Liyue more.”

“He’s alive.” The words are spoken softly, almost silently, but there’s a conviction behind them. They leave in their wake a ringing void. “The Rite of Descension, the exuvia… it was a fake. All of it.”

She watches Venti’s face move from solemn to fearful to enraged in the span of seconds. It doesn’t affect her as much as it should. This is a country’s god, merciful to his people and fond of his friends. This is someone’s watcher, someone’s friend, someone’s salvation. This is her only ally in a world that seems set on forcing her to relive despair indefinitely. She looks at his twisting expression and she doesn’t feel much at all.

“Did he tell you why,” the ex-archon grinds out through clenched teeth, “he decided to lead us all on? I know Morax doesn’t do things with no purpose. He doesn’t even operate solo. Every last thought in that brick of a brain is about his people. His contracts. Am I not part of the equation just because I never signed my soul to him? Is that it? Who does he-”

Just as abruptly as he started, he stops. Twists the end of one braid between his fingers. “Sorry. That was uncalled for.” Distantly Ganyu notes that he would be gasping for breath if he was human.

“It’s okay,” she says. Maybe she even means it. “I was angry when I found out, too.” There is a shadow of a stain on the table; a smudged ring, like someone was scolded out of putting down a cup without a saucer. It is beautiful in a quiet way. Ganyu still loves the world, despite everything, but she thinks that the world is slowly falling out of love with her.

There is still a tar-pit of rage bubbling behind her sternum; she bites it down. Any combatant wishing to live through their first battle must know when they are outclassed. Venti holds in his lyrist’s hands the wheel of time itself. Nothing she can do to him would have an effect.

Shuffle. Bridge. Cut. Venti palms a card with a flick of his wrist, retrieves it from his opposite sleeve. “What was that back there? I’ve never seen an adeptus transform like you did.”

“They all can. They have their true forms, as I have mine. It’s how I’m supposed to look.” She ties the final knot of her bowstring with an unusual vehemence. “Were you expecting an illuminated beast, maybe?” She is a qilin on the smallest technicality, a human only under pretence.

He ignores the bait. “I was just trying to take stock of what assets we have.”

She scoffs. “This isn’t an investment portfolio. I am not your asset.”

“We have a common goal, though.” He spreads the cards out in a fan before picking one up seemingly at random. “Shouldn’t we be working together?”

“You were determined to stop me from killing the Harbinger.”

“A life lost is a life lost, xiaojie.” The honourific sounds strange in his accent, foreign in a way she doesn’t understand. “I don’t suppose you’d understand if I told you how this cycle came to be?”

“Try me.” He throws the card at her. She catches it between two fingers and turns it around; the three of spades. Venti takes a deep breath inwards, eyes fluttering shut. The world stills around him.

And then he begins to talk.

This story isn’t too long. Even if it was, we have all the time in the world.

Here’s the simplest version: I went to Liyue and I felt Xiao die.

Here’s a more complicated version: As the Anemo Archon, no matter how lax my approach to ruling is, I still watch over those who bear my eyes. When an anemo vision holder dies, I know exactly where and how it happened.

(if it makes you feel better, I don’t think it was painful. It doesn’t for me, but… you know.)

I did it out of instinct. The God of Time died and I ate her. We were worshipped together; I took her worshippers. I took her temples, I took her memory, I took every scrap of what makes a god a god from her. I’ve never used it until now.

It felt awful, of course. I had to take a few days to figure out what was going on. The air tastes like her burnt offerings, did you know? You probably can’t notice it, but it’s there. I’m not even supposed to talk about her. She’s supposed to be gone gone, the God of Time that might have maybe existed at some point, and now she’s everywhere. It feels bad. I’ve said that already. Some poet I am, huh?

So she’s part of me now, or maybe I am her. Gods never really die, after all… but you probably know that better than I do.

And here’s the cincher: I don’t want to be the God of Time. There’s no space for a God of Time in Mondstadt or Liyue or anywhere under the sky. This whole loop, the day repeating over and over again? I want it to end as much as you do. I want her to go back to the ether, or the Dao, or whichever place gods go when they’re gone for good. I just can’t bring myself to do it.

I want to be the Anemo Archon. I want to guide my people with a gentle hand and a whisper on the breeze. I’m not some purveyor of an almighty principle. I watch Mondstadt change, for better or for worse, because I’ve never wanted to be the kind of ruler who forces their people to do things a specific way or see things in a specific light. I’m certainly not the kind of ruler who decides who should live or die.

Xiao died, and then she-or-maybe-I turned back time to save him. Heroic, maybe, but it’s not what I wanted. I don’t live in terms of heroes and saviours. It’s all relative in the eyes of a god. If someone wants to die, I won’t stop them from tipping that scale.

Of course I want him to live. You know that. Who am I, however, to decide that the Conqueror of Demons is more worthy of life than any living thing? I am the God of Freedom, and freedom is the last thing I have. Who am I to take that away from him?

Is keeping him alive nepotism or punishment? I lean towards the latter. Loving a god is a mistake, but the love of a god is a curse.

Still, I won’t deny that I wanted to keep him alive in that moment. I wanted him to live so badly that I turned back time for him, and isn’t that romantic? If I wanted to, I could keep him forever. Approach him every day with cecilias from Starsnatch cliff and ask him to spare a moment to dine with me, whisk him away from his duties to watch the city come alive from the rooftops.

Ha! The thought makes me sick, Miss Ganyu. Stolen time bought with stolen divinity. A stolen face and a stolen love I never had. The God of Time has left me with nothing. She was always good at forcing my hand when she was alive, that girl.

What can I do to stop her? At my strongest, I was still her junior. My gnosis was the only thing keeping me afloat for a long time. Might makes right, you know. You don’t get stories written about you if you’re a peacemaker.

The God of Time, my closest friend, has given me everything she is. In doing so, she's taken away everything I hold dear. I loved her and she loved me. What a pair we make nowadays.

Venti gathers the cards from their fan, only to spread them again; this time, face-up. A showing of hands. “The deck is stacked, so to speak. I couldn’t end this even if I wanted to.” It’s a damning confession. He returns Ganyu’s scrutiny with equal intensity, shoulders squared under the phantom weight of the target he painted on his own back. A flourish, and the cards are in his hand once again. He offers them to her. “Do what you will.”

The bard sitting across from her is the origin of everything that has happened over the past few days. If he’d had his way, Xiao would have gone to his death willingly. The being that calls himself Venti is further from human than she ever will be.

Ganyu slides the three of spades back into the proffered deck without taking it. “In that case, I have something to tell you.”

In all his strangeness, Venti smiles. “I’d be honoured to trade stories, Miss Ganyu.”

Once upon a time, Ganyu had been told that she talked with her hands. A remnant of her youth in the plains of Guili, standing on any elevated rock she could find in the streets and exalting the principles of the Lords of Dust and Stone. Her voice was quiet, so she made it carry. A gesture could catch the attention of passerby just as well as a shout could. She walked with gods and laughed with humans, she’d say, and brush one hand along the horns she didn’t yet have reason to hide. Look, I am one of the adepti. Look, I am one of you. My qilin blood commends our Lords for their wisdom in rule, and my human heart loves them for the care they have shown us. The faith their people have is worth more to them than any tianming.

She speaks barely above a whisper now, but her hands still move as she describes her meeting with Zhongli. They fall into their old patterns, circling and sweeping as she describes her Lord’s honour, his generosity. The way he had offered her his god-heart.

Venti listens, rapt, until she mimics the motion Zhongli had used to tear his heart from his body. He crosses his arms tightly over his chest then, and she sees him bare his teeth in a grimace.

“Well,” she says, letting her hands fall, “You know how it was.”

“Hm. You didn’t take it, after all he’d gone through for you?” A tilt of the head; he narrows his eyes at her, as if trying to peer into her core. She narrows hers right back.

“I have no desire to become an archon.” She knows what happens to gods deemed too weak to rule, what happens to gods deemed obsolete. The Archon War made it abundantly clear that only one god was allotted per region. Boreas killed himself to make room for Barbatos, she’d heard. She wonders if Venti remembers why.

Venti shrugs, arms still wrapped around himself. “It’s worth a shot. Anything is, in our situation.” What a hypocrite.

“Why, then, didn’t you let me kill the Harbinger? You could have turned back time at the first hint that it wouldn’t work.”

“Some risks aren’t worth taking. Morax, that old stone, doesn’t die easy. You underestimate him… that Childe fellow is a different story, though.” He fishes the three of spades from the deck without looking. “I’d like to avoid losses, even the impermanent ones. That’s got to count for something.”

It doesn’t, by definition, but Ganyu lets it slide. She has no input in how this story ends.

“Either way,” Venti continues, “It was god-eating that got us into this situation. It wasn’t you, it wasn’t Xiao, and it certainly wasn’t Childe. I propose we fight fire with fire, so to speak.”

You do it then, she wants to say. You watch a god older than the mountains themselves place his heart in your hands. Do you think you could stand looking in the mirror and seeing amber looking back? She says none of this. Instead, she folds her hands in her lap and shakes her head. The bell around her neck tolls, funereal. “I’d like to avoid this, as well.”

There’s a scraping sound as the Anemo Archon stands up from his seat, Amos’ bow clutched in one hand. He sighs, defeat writ in the slope of his shoulders.

“I understand,” he says, smiling gossamer-thin. “It’s not your fault.” He sets off towards the balcony; she retrieves her own bow, string still untrimmed, and follows as she has before. She has only ever trailed after someone else. His shoes tap a war-drum rhythm on the inn’s floorboards. When she catches up to him, he leans his elbows on the balcony railing. She stands beside him and they stare out over Dihua Marsh. They do not look at each other.

Her throat is dry. “What are you doing?”

A laugh like bells swaying. “I don’t want to take that freedom away from you, Miss Ganyu. It was risky of me to suggest taking the gnosis, let alone ask you to risk killing your god. If it’s something you don’t want to do, I can always do something else.” Amos’ bow vanishes into golden sparks, leaving Venti free to clench his hands around the railing. “Did you know that Mondstadt is wonderful this time of year?”

“I do.” Of course it is. The wine industry is booming and tourism is at a high. However, she gets the sense that this isn’t what he means. She waits for him to gather his words.

“They’re well loved. By me, of course, but mostly by each other. I’ve come to wonder over the years if they even need me at all.” His braids brush over his shoulders as he tilts his head this way and that. “Of course, I don’t expect you to understand. Adepti are such pillars of their society that Liyue could hardly stand without them.”

Liyue needs someone to seal each living thing in amber and ensure their eternal remembrance, it needs someone to dream of the elaborate gadgetry that keeps the harbour running, someone to fend off the demons at its doorstep and someone to watch over the last living glaze lilies. It needs these roles to be filled the same way it needs the stone beneath its foundations, the water threading through its cities like blood, the dragonscale lustre of its currency. It’s impossible to imagine a Liyue without adepti, just as it’s impossible to imagine an adeptus without a land to protect.

“Istaroth was big on exchange,” Venti says. “Always going on about how today’s toil is tomorrow’s harvest, today’s sloth is tomorrow’s suffering. Seeds and time and whatnot. I think I understand the exchange I need to make.”

He spins around to face her, the ever-present smile he wears falling lopsided. There’s a strange light in his eyes. “It’s not your fault. It’s not Xiao’s fault. Promise me you’ll tell him that.” A pause to think. “That Osial will be rising soon, right? Let’s see if this wind spirit’s still got some might in him.”

The pieces fall into place and Ganyu snarls, really snarls, in a way that reminds her why qilin were said to have the manes of lions. Of course he would. Of course he would try something so careless and inane.

"I'm not going to let you sacrifice yourself."

"Sorry, Miss Ganyu, but it's not an issue of whether you'll let me. It's an issue of what has to be done." He doffs his hat in a mockery of formality. "It's not right for me to ask everyone else to sacrifice things in my name. I've never been that kind of god. I started this, and-"

Venti braces one hand on the railing and vaults off the balcony. The winds swirl and gather around him, holding him aloft like a puppet on its strings. Behind him, the sunset glows a furious red. His smile is all teeth.

"-I can end it. I'm the only one who can."

It makes sense, in a twisted way. Mondstadt will live on without him. He wishes to throw himself into Osial's jaws, to trade Xiao's life for his own. In doing so, the loop will be broken. A plan made with thought behind it. She pulls the trailing string of her bow through her fingers. There have always been things one must do.

"It's a coward's plan."

Venti laughs. "It's a revolutionary's duty to prioritise the end over the means." How disgusting. She ties a knot in the rope, pulling it tight around the shaft of an arrow, and chooses her next words to cut.

"You think that having people die for you makes you safe from criticism, do you?" Her hands shake. "You want an easy way out that doesn't require you to think about anything you've done. You'd rather die than respect them. As if your death would make anything better."

For the first time, a flicker of anger crosses the bard's face. It's gone as swiftly as it appeared. "It is not," he says, "a matter of whether you'll let me."

In a fraction of a blink, Ganyu has her bow drawn and an arrow aimed at his chest. If he can stop her from killing the Harbinger, she can stop him from running to his death.

Again, Venti laughs. "You're going to prevent me from killing myself by killing me first? That would only make things worse." He begins to drift away, facing her all the while. "You're not going to kill me. You can't."

"Sure I can't." She keeps her arrow trained on him.

"That's right." Venti grins like a cat with the cream. "You know I'm nice and weak and killable, but you're not going to do it. After all, don't you care about Xiao?"

What a reprehensible beast. Does he genuinely think Xiao would want this?

"You're right," says Ganyu. She does care about Xiao. She does not want to kill Venti. Still, there are things she must do.

"You're right," she repeats, and lets the arrow fly.

Millenia of sinew and string against her fingers and the arc of wood or metal or ley-branch straining against the pull of her arms have not served her wrong. Her shot flies true and shining. Venti's eyes widen in shock, then fury. She does not grant him the dignity of seeing satisfaction on her face. Just another task. Just a tick on her schedule, on a list of errands to run.

The sound of tearing veins has always been quiet, but a wind sprit has no such thing.

The arrow, string flying behind it, catches Venti in the upper chest and traces a path as if threading a needle-

Up, up, up. There is no cryo on the arrowhead, and yet she can feel its position as clearly as if she had pushed it there with her own hands.

It rips into the flesh below his collarbone and protrudes, neat and tidy, above it.

A moment of silence.

Venti sneers. "You missed," he says. "I'd tell you to aim for the heart, but you won't get another chance."

Ganyu stares back. This is far from the first time she's done this.

"I never miss," she replies. As he turns to leave, she closes her hand around the arrow's trailing string-

And wrenches the Anemo Archon from his own sky.

Chapter Text

Venti hardly makes a sound when he hits the balcony floor. He bounces once, rolls over from the force of the impact. Comes to a rest on his side.

One of his hands comes up to clutch at his collarbone, red just a shade too bright leeching over silk and linen.

“What the fuck,” he hisses. Ganyu shrugs — it’s just business — and turns to hammer out a rhythm with her knuckles on the balcony entranceway. Three, two, five, two. Verr Goldet and anyone who hears will know to keep the area empty.

When she returns, Venti spits blood at her feet. His face twists in disdain.

She leans down to inspect him. "Did I nick something?" By all means, a clean shot through the collarbone should not introduce any blood to the respiratory system.

"I don't know! I don't know." His teeth are stained pink. "They always die this way in the stories, at least. And he coughed blood when he was shot."

Ganyu has a hunch she knows who that 'he' was, but doesn't comment on it. They stare at each other, sizing up the threat, until Venti waves one hand dismissively.

“Go get the gnosis then,” he says, “since you want to do everything yourself.” He makes no move to stand, doesn’t even try to pull the arrow out. He props himself up against the balcony railing like he expects someone to rescue him, pull him into their arms and hold him close. She does no such thing. “What are you waiting for? I wanted to let you choose not to take that power, but it seems you can’t let me do anything. You just wanted to take that choice away from yourself.”

It’s just business, Ganyu tells herself. It wouldn’t do to pull the string just to watch him wince.

Venti continues. "You know what? I’m sorry my love for him couldn’t fix him. I’m sorry my love for him couldn’t fix me. Is that what you wanted to hear?” He coughs, spits. “I’m only going to die for you once. Go.” I’m going to die alone and I’m going to die afraid and I don’t want you to try to save me.

That’s the problem with these types, see. They always think the story’s about them.

“I’ve mourned enough people,” she says.

“Does it make you feel better when you think there’s no other way?” Another one of those laughs. She feels sick. “Are you exempt from mourning when the harm done was justified?”

"Of course not." Her hand closes, vise-tight, around the string. "I'm not going to take the gnosis. I don't want to add another name to my regrets."

"It's that or watch Xiao die, Miss Ganyu. Neither of us are stupid. A life for a life. If you don't want to take the gnosis, that's your choice. But if you don't want me to trade my life for his, either?" Venti shrugs. The arrowhead snags in his hair. "We sit in this loop and do nothing. You can pretend I've saved him. Though I'm not very fond of inaction, I must warn you."

"I don't want to mourn him at all," snaps Ganyu. "And as much as I've wanted to kill you, I won't do it. I've heard enough sad stories. Don't you ever get bored of martyrs? Haven't you had enough of people throwing themselves on swords?" Her shoulders heave with exertion. Leave it to her to clean up the messes, to find a way when none seem to exist. Always the dirty work. Always the thankless work. She's thrown herself onto swords before, both metaphorically and literally. They hurt like a bitch, and every time she did so it was with the intent to stop other people from needing to in the future.

Ha. Well, the war's over. Liyue has been a nation for three thousand seven hundred years. It's been two thousand one hundred fifty seven years since she last gripped a sword by the blade and tore it from her chest, still streaming blood, and roared a battle cry. She would gladly never do it again. Still, Liyue needs her. She has put aside what she would rather do for the good of the nation time and time again.

"I've heard enough sad stories from you," she says simply. "I've lived enough sad stories. This is the one situation we have infinite time in, Barbatos. Aren't you going to try?"

The reply comes as swift as ever. "All the time in the world can't bend the rules of the heavens. You ought to know that. You can't have your cake and eat it too, no matter which way you slice it." He lays this out like it's simple, like a sum of basic parts. He knows nothing of mortal tenacity in the face of the impossible.

Ganyu stomps one thankfully still human foot. It's a childish motion, definitely, but her heel thumps solid on Wangshu's finished wood and Venti blinks at the noise.

"I'm going to have my cake and eat it too. I don't care how many times I have to try. I'm not going to — to give up before even giving it a shot. If you can bring the God of Time back for even a second, you can take the gift she gave you. There has to be a way." She says it with such conviction that she actually believes it. That's right, there has to be a way. There has to be a way. There has to be a way.

"And what," Venti scowls. "Go convince Xiao not to be the way he is? Shoot the Harbinger between the eyes? Nothing's going to be normal again, at least not the way you want it. You can't pull Morax away from the grave he's dug himself. You can't bring that Qiqi girl back to life. You can't turn back the clock, Ganyu. Sure, maybe in a kinder world Celestia would let you have just this one exception and you'd get a happily ever after, but those? They're usually tacked on later by storytellers. This world isn't a kind one. Take what you get before chasing something better destroys you."

"Shut up."

The syllables leave her mouth crisp and clear. As odd and certainly disrespectful it may be to address an archon in this manner, it brings a cruel sense of freedom with it. She's heard enough. Venti, for his part, doesn't seem surprised.

"Maybe this isn't a kind world. Maybe I can't do all of that. But I’m going to keep fighting." Her breath hitches with the ghost of a sob and she is four thousand years younger, fingers sore from fletching arrows, standing tiptoe on an old stump in the scant dawn-glow before battle. She swallows and widens her stance. A speech delivered as much for the orator as it is for the audience. "I've backed out as soon as a solution presented itself too many times to count. Sometimes it was to preserve resources and troops, sometimes it was to avoid conflict. Sometimes it was out of cowardice. I regret those choices almost as much as I regret the people who died for the causes I championed. I've taken too many easy routes and so have you."

He raises his eyebrows and moves as if to speak, but she cuts him off. "Millenia. Millenia living in a world that is not kind to its people, and I've had enough. And if you don't want to lift a finger to try and make it kinder, to try and find even the smallest chance to improve things, I don't think a single revolutionary would want you in their ranks." She pauses. "You can do whatever you want. I can and will shoot you down every day if I have to."

Silence, save for the thundering of her blood in her ears.

Venti’s eyes fold at the edges; whether from mirth or exhaustion, it’s unclear. He lifts the arm on the side she shot with a degree of ease impossible for any human — his hand covers his mouth, muffles something that could be a laugh or a sob.

What are you laughing about, she wants to say. What are you crying about. I thought you didn't care. I thought you would rather go to your death than imagine a brighter future for yourself. She's no god. Despite what the legends say about qilin, she's no arbiter of merit. Still, there’s something pulsing bright and furious in her chest that sears her from the inside out, something with eyes sun-sharp and teeth of porcelain fragments.

She’s not herself, she thinks belatedly. She would never, should never treat a god this way. The archon war is over. There’s no need for qilin in a land of peace. There’s no need for bloodshed and cutting words.

But her ‘self’ has never been needed, either. She has not been a secretary since she stepped up and turned Guizhong’s war machines on a seaborne threat. She has not been a soldier since she watched Xiao die without lifting a finger. Of course she isn’t herself. There is simply nothing left of her to be.

Once, a few scant centuries after she’d signed her contract with Rex Lapis, Ganyu had been asked about her nature. It was an innocent question; a coworker had noticed the way her teeth sat in her mouth and wondered if she needed them fixed. She’d laughed it off, said it was a hereditary thing.

Later that night, she had lain beside a mountain stream and examined herself. Her front teeth were those of a predator, lionlike and wickedly curved. Her molars were those of any herbivore. They had never caused her trouble before — she could speak and eat around both kinds just fine. Nonetheless, something bothered her about her front teeth.

Humans didn’t need such things, she decided. She ate human food, slept in a human bed, and performed human tasks. It had been a long time since she’d last bared her fangs or seized a throat in her jaws. As if such conclusions were her daily fare, she drew a notched blade from her pockets and set to work.

Now, she runs her tongue over the false shapes of human teeth that sit in her mouth. Venti’s head is bent down, obscuring his face. He insists on his ruse to the point of commanding his body to bleed. Does he hate this charade as much as she does? She feels, suddenly, a perverse sense of pity.

“Sorry,” she says, noncommittal. He rolls his eyes, exaggerated to the point that the movement of his head conveys the expression even as his hair falls over his features.

“No, you’re not.”

Ganyu considers this for a moment. “No, I’m not.”

Venti makes that sound again, cry-laugh-coughs into his sleeve. “You’re quite the personality, Miss Ganyu. I missed having someone like you around. But it’s too late for that.”

As if on cue, the sky is set alight.

For a single terrifying second, the world is cast in black and white relief like lightning had struck at their feet. Every detail of the scene brands itself with ruthless clarity into the very backs of Ganyu’s eyes. The scratches on the balcony railing magnified into gouge marks. The tiny frayed fibres of her bowstring standing eerily upright like an accusation. Venti in the process of lifting his head. Each of his eyelashes casts an individual, ink-dark shadow. His expression, backlit by the sterile, ashen light, is unreadable.

Then the noise. A tremendous, bone-deep sound that rings in her ears and shakes her eyes in their sockets. With it comes a flash from the south, blues and greens and golds. Colours she never wants to see again, she thinks with childish viciousness. The silence left in its wake presses on her. Layers upon layers of mountain strata fold in upon every inch of her unwilling skin.

“It’s over,” Venti looks at her with something approximating pity in his eyes. One of his hands reaches out, palm up, as if to offer her succour. She draws a shuddering breath. A droplet of something lands in his waiting hand. It is tempting to take a knee at his side, she admits.

“Hm,” he says. “It must be raining.”

A slow rolling of the clouds above, driven apart and scattered by the explosion. They shift slowly to pinks and oranges in the light of the setting sun. “It’s not.” She hates lying.

And just like that, a gentle rain begins falling.

It patters on them both, plucks resonant notes from the wood flooring. The corner of Venti’s mouth jumps, twitches, stills like the last of an animal’s death throes. Seeming to have made a decision, he brings his hand to his mouth and licks it.

“It’s sweet.”

Ganyu doesn’t question it, merely tilts her head up and stares skyward. Her hair drips slowly onto her face. She parts her lips. Is it?

It is.

In her dreams, she is sitting cross legged in a marsh and the sky is so blue it hurts to look at. She does not begrudge the mud as it stains her legs, nor the rushes that prod at her shoulders. When she rocks side to side, the world sways with her in delicate, whispering song. All is tranquil. In her dreams there is something precious she cradles to her chest and it tells her it loves her.

She adjusts to hold the Memory of Dust in her lap, running her fingers over the edges. Each one is carefully bevelled, points filed down with unerring precision into something unyielding but without capacity to harm. The light in its core pulses a gentle gold. A puzzle lock. How silly. A children’s toy containing untold divine secrets. Ganyu loves it fiercely, just as she had loved its maker. Just as she had taken up honed steel when her horns were only sprouting, as she had shed blood and riven bone and bent herself into shapes unrecognisable in service of an ideal not everyone would live to see realised. It is an ugly kind of love, she thinks.

She thumbs at the lock’s seams. To her surprise, it comes apart; each piece falls away from the centre like a flower in bloom. The inside is pristine, carved with the same patience and attention to detail as the outside had been. It flickers, sparks, and—

A voice. One she, nor anyone else, has heard in millenia. Guizhong’s smile is infectious, seeping into her every word, and suddenly the marsh is smaller and the trees thinner, the mud scarred with the tracks of war machines. Suddenly, the Lord of Dust has made her a child again, rapt with admiration and a devotion that could raze cities to the ground. She listens. It is simply the only thing to do.

Zhongli is there, then, as a human. There is something very much Rex Lapis in his posture, very much Morax in the cut of his jaw. Despite this, he marks himself Zhongli by the slant of his eyes and the breath he draws. It is not an observable thing. A name chosen and an identity worn over hundreds of others. He kneels across from her in the mud. The rushes bend around him, reaching out as if seeking benediction.

There is a slight breeze about; it threads through their hair and buoys Guizhong’s voice upon its back, lifted in song both blithe and mournful. In the glistening marsh, pockmarked with wellings-up of silt water and shrapnel scars, something stirs.

Ganyu watches the sprout as it pushes its way up through the mud. It is a tender shade of green, a jade sliver shaved thin enough to see through. It unfurls leaves with the sugar-glass fragility and whetstone conviction that all new things have. Drawn by the sound of a god’s self-sung dirge and fed by bloodied earth, it grows. She cannot bring herself to hate it. She does not know why she would. And atop the stem, a pristine bloom.

The sudden rush of selfishness that fills her has no known cause. She wants to share this song, this flower, this moment with the world—yet she feels as if each listening ear would be a knife driven into her heart. Her hands twitch in her lap and she fumbles with the lock, moving to cram the pieces back together in a clumsy mockery of their previous state. She wants to close it back up. For what reason, she doesn’t know. To keep the song inside like something precious, to hoard it for herself, to ration it out in the interminable years ahead.

Across from her, Zhongli reaches out one hand. No matter his form or the name he takes, he will always command her attention; not by the divine power he wields or the status he holds, but merely by the bonds of loyalty. When he holds out his hand in a gesture to stop, she does. They watch together as the Memory of Dust fulfils its final purpose. They watch together as it trembles in the cradle of her hands before crumbling into the same dust its maker did. Piece by piece it dissipates, the once-unyielding stone it was carved from becoming immaterial motes on the wind as if it had never been solid at all.

If she were younger, if she were the youth the Lord of Dust had first told her stories to, Ganyu would have scrubbed one arm across her eyes to wipe her tears. But now her arms lie leaden at her sides, unmoving for fear of disturbing the spectre of a puzzle already solved. The song has long petered out.

A rustling in the reeds, and suddenly her god is before her; her country’s steward, her commander in battle, the man who could have been her father had either of them been just a bit more human. He shucks his gloves in favour of holding her face in bare, scarred hands, and wipes her tears for her with a tenderness she hadn’t known she could miss.

He’s crying too, she realises as she looks up at him. By the looks of it, he had been crying for a while before she started—perhaps since he first arrived in the marsh. His eyes are shut against the flow of tears, but they curve upwards in what is unmistakably a smile. They have lines at the corners. She doesn’t know why she’s noticing this now but they’re there, faint creases under the lines of his red-ochre makeup. She buries her face in his shoulder and cries like the world is ending. Maybe it is; it wouldn’t surprise her if the very earth beneath them began to crumble, if every stalk of grass and gnarled tree-root was pulled apart at the seams and cast into some yawning void far beneath them. She clings to Zhongli’s sun-warm form and heaves in great, gasping breaths until her chest hurts, until her eyes run dry and her throat scrapes on every sob.

I’m making a mess of his clothing, she thinks belatedly, and moves to withdraw. She is held gently in her place by an arm firm as bedrock as she feels tears not her own slide down her hair. The faintest hint of resistance to her pulling away has her slumping back into her father’s arms. She sniffs, trembling.

Rex Lapis’ voice never wavers, but this is not Rex Lapis. Zhongli speaks softly, haltingly, as if to cushion something fragile. “Do you still remember the melody?”

Of course, of course. She understands. All things can be kept alive through memory. She nods into Zhongli’s shoulder; she can’t see his face and neither can he see hers. A thought comes to her, and voicing it takes clearing her throat several times.

“Where’s, I’m— Xiao, where is he? He always loved music.” He would have wanted to hear Guizhong sing one last time goes unsaid. Despite his strict outlook on artistic pursuits, Xiao had carried bits and pieces with him since time immemorial. Whether they were gifts shoved into his hands by the people he protected, embroidery and filigree made tough as tempered steel by adeptal craftsmanship, or a tune played, silvery and ardent, across the marshes centuries ago—he had held them close and kept them in his memories with the same diligence he used to guard Liyue’s landscape. She finds she misses him. Isn’t it odd? They’d barely talked, and here she is feeling like she’s had a chunk of flesh carved from her chest. It hurts. It hurts, and she doesn’t know why or how or what she should do to stop it or if she even could, if she even should. She wants to find him on the roof of some poor unsuspecting farmer scanning the fields for elemental energy and sit beside him like they used to before they were Xiao and Ganyu, before they were Ganyu-and-Xiao, before they were anyone, a spirit shifting about in its new name like it was trying to break in a new pair of shoes and a youth with antlers and callouses and exalted blood in his veins that he didn’t know what to do with. They’re past that, she knows, because then Xiao was Xiao and Ganyu was Ganyu and they were Ganyu-and-Xiao, inseparable, children growing up in the midst of war, comrades-in-arms to the bloody and ignoble end, two scared creatures feeling their way hand in hand towards something like identity, but after that Xiao was General Jinpeng and Ganyu was the Cloud-Strider and they had not very much to do with each other for almost four thousand years.

Zhongli, for his part, stays silent. He unwinds his arms from around her slowly. She stands. As if being pulled by the waist from her own grave, she finds her limbs strangely limp—they sway her this way and that as she gains her bearings, as her spine seems to straighten of its own accord, illusory soil sloughing from her shoulders. Her feet carry her away from her god, her father, her dead-and-gone. The field of flowers fades to nothing behind her just as Guizhong had scattered in the wind.

And then it is nothing at all; and then she is dry-eyed and made-up, dressed for a night on the town in a skirt that flares about her knees and gloves that hug her wrists just right. The harbour is a riot of light and sound about her, merchants hawking their goods and children running about and lanterns swaying just above her head. Her chest swells to know that this is the land she has guarded, these are the people she has given her blood and tears to. The festival, she thinks, is going wonderfully.

An arm threads itself through hers. The Yuheng of the Qixing, steward to the city, hands her a skewer of grilled potatoes. She’s smiling ever so slightly, a wry twist to one side of her mouth even as her eyes shine with joy, all those sleepless nights paid off, hm?

“I spent at least five minutes trying to pay full price for these.” The hand that isn’t currently fixing itself in a warm if slightly sweaty grip on Ganyu’s forearm waves a lamb skewer in frustration. “You’d think they’d at least let the recipient of their tax money give it back to them.”

Ganyu snorts. “Let the people thank you just once, Keqing-daren. Don’t think they can’t see the circles under your eyes.”

They pause their conversation to skirt sideways around a couple of bickering youths carrying a pallet of fruit. Keqing tears a chunk of meat from her skewer with her teeth like it has personally wronged her somehow, or maybe planning food stall placements has just awoken her appetite. “The economy benefits when Mora flows through it. The hawkers trying to get me to keep my money don’t know that. Also, don’t call me daren. We’ve been over this.”

“I’m sure they do.” The people of Liyue are savvy with their money; after all, their country’s lifeblood is the clinking of coins as they pass from one hand to another. “They're just trying to be nice.”

Keqing rolls her eyes and says something else, her voice lost in the chatter of the crowd and the hissing of sparklers. A lone firework streaks into the sky, shrill and smelling of ashes, and someone shouts from the docks to stop that this instant, the display has to go to plan or er-jie will have our heads.

And in a moment, it does. The sky comes alight in blues and greens and golds, stars carving paths through the darkness and searing themselves into her eyes, whip-crack bursts of shape and colour and the ringing in her ears after they pass. The world’s spinning slows just for her, just for her and the firmament above and Keqing’s hand growing clammy on her arm and the beginnings of the night’s wind nipping at her cheeks, and when she blinks she realises she has been staring for far too long.

“Hey,” Keqing says, nudging an elbow into her side, “are you alright? Is there something about that…” She squints, trying to track Ganyu’s gaze. “Toy vendor?”

Her kneejerk reaction is to say no, of course, but as she blinks herself back to reality from the traces of light still crisscrossing her vision, she does see something that catches her eye. A carved wooden burr, parts slotted together at right angles.

Her companion scoffs. “Psh, I could make one better than that.” She leans in to mutter in Ganyu’s ear, gossipy as always. “Look at that seam on the left side. It’s not cut smoothly, and the way the wood grain aligns is just begging to split. I bet I wouldn’t even need a template or a machine to correct all those mistakes.”

Ganyu giggles. How very absurd and yet very Keqing-like, to bring a critic’s eye to everything she sees on the street. “No, I don’t need a puzzle lock anyways. I was just getting sentimental, I guess.”

“Really? Yunlai swordsmanship’s claim to fame is its precision, you know. Maybe I’ll make one anyway. My hands are getting idle, and wouldn’t it be nice to give my favourite secretary a gift?”

She bumps their shoulders together. “Only if you let me pay you for it. Mark up the price a little, even, since the quality’s so much better. It’s good for the economy.”

When Keqing groans, it’s the same groan she hears after a long week at the office. A guttural, long-suffering, get-a-load-of-this-guy groan. She flicks a strand of hair away from her face, irritable. “Sevens, just let me do something nice for you. It’s a kids’ toy you can keep on your desk. It’s not a big deal. You can put something silly in it.”

“Oh, then you can make one if you want!” Ganyu takes a step backwards, hands out and placating. The Yuheng, usually so immovable, lets herself get dragged closer by their still-linked arms. “I won’t stop you. Sorry if I ruined the moment. I was just—”

“Aiya, why do you only use your words when you’re apologising?” Keqing’s free hand comes up to ruffle through periwinkle hair, bumping lightly against Ganyu’s horns. “I’ll still like you if you ruin every moment we have and don’t let me do anything for you.”

“Really?” asks Ganyu, and she hates the way it comes out thin and wheedling, like her world hinges on the answer. Perhaps it’s for the best; she hates lying and is terrible at it besides.

To her credit, Kewing isn’t immediately repelled. She just shrugs. “I think I’d like you no matter what.” A pause as she looks Ganyu up and down. “Are you going to finish your skewer? It’s getting cold.”

Ganyu wakes up in a cold sweat, heart pounding in her ears and hands closing around nothing. Her eyes feel like they’ve been crusted over with sand and her mouth is dry as sun-baked earth. She wants, for some reason, to go to a night market.