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On the morning of the day that Diluc’s father died ten years ago, a breeze finds him by the graveyard.
“Your father,” Venti says, “was a devout man.”
The sky is blue above them. Spring kisses the air. The flower crowns of May festivities already frame the streets, their mellow colours spilling onto the cobblestone with every gust of wind. The Cathedral is a beacon of light in the coming of summer. The sun glitters in its windows and rejoices off its walls.
This is no day to grieve. Not for Mondstadt, anyhow.
“Spring,” Venti continues as he strolls nearer, hands clasped behind his back like a curious gentleman on a walk, “is the season of new life, but also of rot. The soil moves. New life needs old energy. Why do you think it is that the last autumn’s leaves last until spring?”
Diluc grits his teeth and says nothing. Venti crouches, uncaring for the mud staining his tights, and plants a palm on the grave. The sight appears odd – a god bowing his head before the headstone of a dead man, all smile wiped from his face. Granted, he has never looked much like a god – choice, perhaps, or fate. Usually, they are the same hidden behind a reflection.
“Very pious. Very kind. The greatest of devotees. Many could compose songs of him,” Venti quietly says.
“But not you,” Diluc says.
“No. I suppose not me.”
Violence curls into Diluc’s fists. He senses that old anger rise once again, the feral hurt of a wolf bleeding out in the snow. He knows much about that – bleeding out, winter so thick, breathing becomes a hazard; the frost-gilded trees a mockery of beauty in a swimming vision. Venti can find the memories in his gaze. If he had not seen them for himself already, he would perhaps shy away from that human wrath he keeps forgetting is able to flatten mountains and kill gods.
“Why are you here?” Diluc asks, voice clipped.
Venti clicks his tongue and gets up. He leaves a single Cecilia in his wake. Its petals sway in the breeze. “You called.”
Diluc snorts. “In your dreams. I haven’t called on any gods in years.”
Venti smiles. Despite everything, he still finds amazement in the way fate slips in its little tricks on him, almost like a play with puns placed a tad too easily. “In my dreams indeed. Well, you did not call on me today, that’s true. It was a long while ago – for you, at least. And so I came.”
“I don’t need you anymore,” Diluc says. “I may have needed you, once. I needed you when the snow was the only thing to keep my fever down. I needed you when I was so starved, the flesh of the men I’d killed became appealing. I needed you when—” His voice cracks like it hasn’t since that dreadful night a decade ago. “I needed you when he died. But you weren’t there. You never were.”
Venti says nothing. There is not a word he can spin into comfort for a grief so splitting; no apology or tune he can sing into human language to lift his own guilt. It has been his to carry for many years and many souls. It will be for many more. It does not mean it is any easier.
Sometimes, it feels so heavy, he wonders whether he would still be able to fly if he wanted to.
What is the wind, shackled by its own iron chains of regret?
“I don’t know what I prayed for, all my childhood,” Diluc continues, clutching his anger like a Fontainian bayonette – the blade pointed at Venti, his own face covered in soot by the shot. “I wasted hours in that little room of ours. I hated every second of it. But he,” Diluc nods towards the grave with something almost called disgust, “he loved it. He loved you. And still, you abandoned him. Do you know what it feels like to watch the one person that taught you to be a person bleed out?”
Venti remains still. He watches Diluc’s face bleed from fury into despair into grief into nothing at all. The pebbles crunch beneath his heavy boots as he slowly turns around to leave. His back is broad to the world. He towers over Venti as many men have before – blocking the sun, unreachable in their maturity. They have always, always remained children at heart. They always do – even when it is their time. Life is a game of hopscotch they are not aware to be playing.
Venti likes to lift their steps so that they jump higher. He can’t catch them all, though. He can catch none of them. Humans have always been much too eleutheromanic to keep within the bounds of chalk on ground. It is why he loves them.
Diluc, for example, does not jump. He walks like he has walked for decades, shoulders bent and steps heavy. He walks home with a heart of long-festered betrayal and eyes full of regret. Venti supposes it is nothing but fair.
Venti regards the soil with a long glance. A pious man indeed. And yet, faith did not save him.
It merely made the inevitability of death easier to bear.
There is a child in the snow.
He lies on his back and stares up at the stars as if they still held his dreams. The air is cold. His skin is burning. His breath leaves him in feverish croaks. The fire is mere embers mocking winter. The fur coat he is wrapped in holds no warmth. The night is deep.
Barbatos dreams of many things. Lost in the winds, unformed, not quite slumbering but not quite there either, he shifts with time. He witnesses the end of times and the birth of olden days anew, and lets all their possibilities flow through his being with no shackle. He dreams of the children passing through his palms as they fade away, their laughter still ringing in the breeze. He knows each and every name. He forgets them as well as he remembers them.
When he sleeps, there is music and there is wind and there is time and there is death. There is never any rest. There is never any of the bliss humanity finds in oblivion.
He does not know when exactly he sees the child of Ragnvindr die in the cold, far away from the hills of his home. It could be a moment of the past. It could be yet to happen. It could be present and gone at the same time, in that beautifully twisted way of time and its not-stream of linearity.
It would not make a difference, anyhow. This, Barbatos has learned long since; despite time glancing at him with its eyebrows raised, revealing a flash of skin and doom, he cannot change it. Fate is a thing in the words with which this world was whispered into being. Fate is a thing in the stars. The stars are a thing in a mirror, not quite a lie, but a distortion. Time warps and splutters and shifts around him, and when there is no body for him to anchor his spirit to, he is pulled apart by it too freely.
Therefore, it does not matter when the boy is dying: only that he does, and Barbatos is not even a breath on the breeze around him, chilling him to the bone. The wound by his side leaks. Blood is dried on his cheek. Three men lie paces away, skin seared beyond recognition. A kinder man would have slit their throats. This is not a man, but a boy, with all the kindness stripped from his hands violently. They were gentle, once. They were pure. They held a quill and paper, and love.
Barbatos knows well about purity, and about not being it. He knows well about quills and paper and love, and how they are made to write words that will not last to edge a man’s suffering into the earth long enough to remember. He knows well about quills and paper and love, and how even a god such as himself crafts only lies from the poetry he is given with.
He knows well about the boy in the snow, too, even though he has not met him yet. He knows that in half an hour time, a love-drunken couple will stumble across him, interrupting their moonlit walk and his moonlit death. They will take one look at the fallen forms in the snow and drag him back to their village, where he will be nursed back to health under the assumption to be one of those he killed. He will be found, and he will be chased, and the village will burn down until all he can taste is ash on his tongue. It will feel like that night all over again. It will not feel like justice at all.
But not yet. Still, the boy is dying, and believes it to be his end. Perhaps it would be merciful. Barbatos knows about mercy, too, and about the snow that has none.
The snow is not the only one.
“Barbatos,” the child whispers, lips cracked, trembling hands pressed together like when he was younger; when the only thing between his palms was not a blade, not blood, but another palm to hold, and the darkened wooden chapel was warm and trusting, “Lord Barbatos. Help me. Please. I need-” and here the child chokes, merely a boy again, “I need help. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me keep faith in you.”
The night remains dark. The stars remain silent. The air remains frozen. Barbatos, a dream away, feels the prayer breathe through him. He can do nothing but watch.
He knows most, perhaps, about betrayal.
The boy will never utter his name again in the years to come.
“This time”, Venti says, “you actually called.”
Diluc does not move from where he is perched by the altar. “I didn’t.”
“Can’t fool these ears, I’m afraid.”
“Do you hear every prayer?”
“Every last one.”
“Then you must’ve heard the ones I sent to you all those nights.” Diluc turns around. His eyes are aglow in the candlelight. Outside of the warm glow of the Dawn Winery, night has long since fallen. The shadows are long and flickering, painting the wooden walls and pews black. “But you never answered.”
Venti gets up from his seat in the back row. His steps are soft on the carpet. It’s old – woven by hands long gone, with techniques much different from today. Beneath the stains of age and mud, it depicts scenes of the fairytale of a figure clad in white, bringing spring to the world. Venti traces it with his eyes. Diluc watches him silently. The anger from the morning has left him. He is empty now, devoid of anything but defeated quiet.
There is a reason Venti has never liked chapels.
“Why?” he asks, finding little satisfaction in the way Diluc bristles at the unfamiliar sobriety of his tone. “Why did you pray tonight?”
Diluc looks small in the light. Knees on the floor, hands folded in his lap, clad in the pale ghost of a linen shirt, he has donned not only his heavy coat, but also all of his titles. In this room, he is a boy again, with all his aches and bruises.
“I don’t know,” Diluc confesses. “I suppose I wanted to apologise to you.”
“To me?”
“I was...” Diluc grimaces, “unpleasant this morning. I said things I did not want to say.”
“Did you really?” Venti steps closer, casually dropping into a crouch before him. “Just because some words are unpleasant does not exclude you from meaning them.”
“...But I-”
“You didn’t answer my question, Master Diluc. Why did you pray tonight?”
Diluc does not meet his eyes. They are twin ponds of muted agony, bleeding out in the night. “I figured it wouldn’t matter,” he says, “for even if you heard it, you would not come anyway.”
“Like I’ve done before.”
“Like you’ve done before.”
Venti hums, satisfied, and leans back on his heels to settle into a more comfortable position. For a moment, he considers telling Diluc the truth, at least as much as the truth can be moulded into words: About the way time steals him away, about the way godhood has a price he never wanted to pay. About how he sees all, and has heard him all those nights, and yet could not come to aid. About how he cradles the soul of every child born within these lands, and it does not matter whether his father was a saint or a crook at all.
But then, glancing at Diluc’s face and finding all that hurt edged into it, not quite as fresh but still just as aching as years ago, he sighs to himself and decides against it. The musings of fate are not for mankind to hear. The woes of a god are not for a mortal to bear.
Instead, Venti folds his hands over his knees and looks up at the ceiling. Somewhere beyond it, their lie-crafted sky shines in all its fabricated glory. Aeons ago, another boy looked up and saw his future in them.
“I do not pretend to feel your pain,” Venti softly says, “nor am I in any place to lessen it. But there is one thing you were wrong about – I do know what it’s like to,” he chuckles to himself, “watch the one person who taught you to be a person bleed out.”
Diluc lifts his head, brow furrowed. “What?”
“How much does the Church still teach about Old Mondstadt?”
Diluc blinks. “Not much. Nothing important.”
“Not important to this era anymore, anyhow.” Venti sighs and shakes his head in disappointment. “I’m not surprised, I suppose. I did not expect anyone to remember him. After all, that is my duty, and not yours.” He tilts his head into the light almost as if for demonstration. “There is a reason I chose this form, and keep choosing it. There is a reason Mondstadt is built on the ideal of freedom.”
“Why?”
Venti laughs. “I had no father to teach me, Master Diluc. I had no flesh to limit my world to. I had a little boy who sang to me long before I became me, and fished the stars from the sky so he could bleed himself free on their liberty. It was cold when he died, just like when you last called for me in Snezhnaya.”
Diluc stares at him, pale. Something akin to fascinated horror trembles behind his eyes – perhaps at the revelation, perhaps at the story. Venti moves on with a flick of his wrist. Despite the warmth of spring settled in the room, the dusty air stale and the light small and golden, winter chills his skin. “And when he died, I felt myself calling out for help. There was no god left. There was no aid. Only when I became this,” he gestures to himself, batting away the millions of explanations and details left out for the sake of a tale – time has blurred them all, anyway – “did I realise that even the greatest of power could not bring him back. That is when I learned the heavy price a human pays for love is called grief.”
Diluc shakes his head. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
Venti smiles. “You know what I did then?”
“What?”
“I lost faith.” He waves his hand. “I’m sure the history books don’t mention it, but before I melted that bit of snow and tossed away those scraps of land you all call vacation islands now, I was hopeless. There was no reason to go on. Everything I’d learned – everything I was based on had turned out to be a lie. If he had died while fighting for his freedom, I thought, what is freedom still good for then? Death for something like me is a betrayal. He promised me freedom and love and life, and then he died.”
Venti pauses. He has not felt that old grief in a long time. It is changed, now, just as he is, not as piercing, but rather a fond, dull memory blurred at the edges like the glass of a wine bottle. He can taste the sweetness of it, now.
“I found myself despising the people who began praying to me,” he continues softly, “simply because their humanity was a constant reminder of how he had betrayed me with his mortality. Only when a very dear friend approached and asked me to carry her forgiveness as much as she would carry mine – not from a place of worship, or empty promise - did I grow beyond it.”
“...For all I know you not to be human, that sounds very human to me,” Diluc slowly deadpans.
Venti claps his hands together. “Mission accomplished!”
“The Church would probably collapse if they learned of this,” Diluc murmurs. “Lord Barbatos despising humanity. What are believers without a god?”
“What is a god without his believers?”
“Still powerful.”
Venti laughs. “Not at all. Belief is our base. Faith is our blood. Whatever the people of Mondstadt believe me to be, that I shall be. And the other way around are the people of Mondstadt what they set into their hearts long ago – free, flourishing, full of the joy and simplicity us gods often lack. Their sense of liberty does not come from me. It sparked long before me, from deep within. I am merely a... conduit to give their faith shape.” He pauses. “In a way, Mondstadt’s people are their own religion. Why do you think their belief flourished so brightly, even after I’ve been gone for centuries?”
Diluc says nothing. He stares into the flame of the candle as if it held his answers; as if the heat could burn a hole through his ribcage and sear away the bottomless grief clearly swirling in his gaze. A beat passes, then two. Venti leans forward.
“You’ve been asking questions tonight,” he says, softly. “Whether you wanted me to hear them or not, you returned to this room to pray and to look for closure. You used my name, but perhaps I am not the answer you are looking for. Perhaps I never was.” When Diluc glances up, Venti merely meets his eyes with a smile. “Tell me, Master Diluc, do you believe in the people of Mondstadt?”
Diluc’s voice is rough. “Yes.”
“Do you believe in freedom?”
“Of course.”
“Well, there you have it then. Your faith is not lost. You are not lost – merely redirected. You have the people to guide you and the city to hold your back. Like this, you don’t even need a deity.”
Diluc’s gaze flickers over his face. Venti does not know what it is that he finds there, but it seems to be surprising – because his eyes widen slightly. From so close up, Venti can see the creases of his skin. Human flaws, human beauty. Something so imperfectly perfect, even the divine could not copy it.
“This is what you do,” Diluc breathes. “This is your goal, isn’t it? The people worship and trust you, but you merely want to lead them to trusting themselves and each other.”
Venti lets his smile speak for itself.
Diluc leans back, exhaling heavily. “...You were never there,” he whispers. “You never helped me.” He looks down at his hands – not quite trembling, pale in the light, clean; but Venti knows what he sees. “I killed many people. People who deserved it, perhaps, but people regardless. I killed mere foot soldiers to get through to the generals. And you didn’t do anything against it. You never judged me, nor did you come to aid. Even now, you treat me with kindness.”
Venti shakes his head. “I could not judge you, not with my own past deeds in mind. And I can’t stop every tragedy,” he says, “even if I wanted to. Where would I have to stop? Think of me as you like – because that is your right, too – but any intervention on my part would only lead to a paradox of how far freedom should exceed safety.”
He briefly thinks of iron towers; of starving children; of a love so cold, so harsh, so afraid, it would rather smother its people behind a veil of storm than let them face the sky. “I cannot do that. I cannot become that.”
“That is why you let nothing but the people rule.”
“Exactly.”
“When my father died,” Diluc slowly says, “when I left for Snezhnaya, I did it all on my own. But I could’ve asked. I could’ve asked Jean. I could’ve asked Adeline. I could’ve asked Kaeya.”
“You were grieving,” Venti argues. “Religion was your steadiest pillar of support. When it fell away, you were without guidance. It is only natural that you turned away from it all.”
“But I didn’t have to. I didn’t even want to.” Diluc shakes his head as if arguing with himself, eyes wet. “I simply was too lost.”
“But you’re not anymore.” Venti nods towards the inside of the chapel. “You don’t need to cower anymore. This is not your life. You have people to believe in; a city to protect; a country that loves you back if you let it.”
When Diluc doesn’t react past a tightening of his jaw, Venti reaches out to briefly brush his cheek. “Diluc,” he says, “you are home.”
Diluc looks up at him. Venti feels his own chest swell with pride then, warmth spreading through his core. No matter the blood staining their hands, no matter their sins; he cannot help but love his children dearly. Some would call it a flaw. Some would call it a blessing. He would not have it any different; he would not lose faith in them ever again.
A moment passes. A heartbeat slows. Diluc, faintly, smiles back.
The snow is far, far away.
Pulling back, Venti breathes in the air of new hope. With a swirl of his hand, he summons the wine bottle he pocketed earlier, raising a brow at Dilucs disapproving face. The tension is broken. Venti settles back into his human skin.
“By the way,” he says cheerfully, “don’t think I forgot about your birthday. Here’s my gift to you.”
“You just stole this from the basement.”
“I did not! This is vintage. You wouldn’t get it anywhere else.”
“You know I don’t drink.”
Venti shrugs. “More for me, then. Appreciate the gesture, please. Memorising dates is a pain at my age.”
He cracks the bottle open. The wine tastes of a past spent golden and glorious and gone. He blinks away the memories.
Diluc takes the bottle from him with a huff. “You can’t drink in here.”
“Says who?”
“Says the rulebook.”
“And who wrote that?”
“The Church.”
“And for whom did the Church write it?”
Diluc pulls a face as if he’d bitten into a lemon. Venti giggles and takes the bottle back with a shrug.
“I don’t think Barbatos minds,” he says.
Diluc stares at him for a moment, expression unreadable. Then, something in his brow smoothens, and his eyes soften. “Yes,” he says, “I suppose he doesn’t.”
There is a child in the snow.
He is motionless. He is frozen. His blood runs in rivulets; sinking, drying, cold in a world that is colder. His fingers are still curved around the arrow, not around his lyre. A child martyr, playing war instead of a tune.
Barbatos will live in this moment for eternity. He will forever stare into unstaring eyes with eyes of his own, a body of his own, a world at his feet and at his fingertips. He will listen to the breaths of the people around him and sense every shift in the wind and still not feel the one presence he is looking for. He will look at their faces and see hope and fear and triumph and worst of all, worship, and find himself trapped for the first time beneath their expectations.
What is freedom, without him to witness it?
Why would freedom not die, when he did so easily?
What is faith, if not a lie woven to keep from shivering in the winter?
There is a child in the snow. With him, faith bleeds out soundlessly, red into white into an analogy.