Chapter Text
She is powerful.
Beyond hope and despair. Beyond ruin and heart ache. Beyond every weapon that was ever created, manifested, forged from the ether of imagination. It all clatters to her heels as in the end it is ice that will defeat everything.
To freeze time. To freeze it completely is her gambit and she will see it through. All stories accumulate into one focal point, when the soul strings of every climax converge into one singular key point. That is when she will strike with clean fists, shattering through time itself, through space itself, kicking with her heel and colliding fiercely onto all the strings of the universe that holds all their timelines together.
She has one goal. To reach the fetus universe. The very first one where silence was born. Where silence reigns eternal.
Where the rocks of elementals were first born and spread thoughts and life into the budding seed world. Roots grew from the stagnant dead, piercing out from the death of silence. Escaping like a thread yearning to become more. Not just a singular piece of silence and nothing, but wanting to be more. To become knit into a story. To have purpose. To be molded into something it had never been before.
And so this solar system of elementals was established. Each rock shuttling all their power onto the roots that somehow managed to breach out into space and become the kindle and fodder into something new. Something green with life. Thus, their new universe was born. But Tsaritsa knows… matter does not simply cease to exist. And matter cannot be born without matter already there.
She walks then with elegance back to her palace through the soul threads; as she just imagines the day of the foretold prophecy. Someday she will stand with the genesis pearl. That day draws near. For it is forever closer when the pendulum swings. All key players will finally arrive at the chessboard. Not as pawns. No. not this time. But as conscientious players of the life game.
Kaeya will bloom into what he was always meant to be.
And just as she had when her husband’s blood splattered like the drips of a pomegranate onto her face and pants and the floor, she will crush the truest of all evils. She had thought she would do this alone… but her fate is kind.
She has been given friends to play with her. The evils are always hiding in disguise. It is not the celestials, the gods in their palace gates. It is not the archons of any world. Not even of this one.
It is just the power itself.
The primordial elemental rock of ice and snow is her enemy. The very energy that courses through her veins. However, she is happy. Ice of out of all the elements was always destined to betray. She can always hear its call. Pleading… begging to her… in the most surreal way.
How could the manifestation of ice… that grants power to every cryo user all over this world and all other cryo users in the solar system…. How could this ice wish to cease its own existence?
Did it start to feel pity? Shame? Guilt for what it does? Robbing the dreams of its users and life force? Did it not wish to hide anymore and beg for condemnation? Someone to hold it by its jaw to smash it down against the floor? So that it could finally feel the pain it truly deserves for having been so unjust?
She is love, then. She will wield the hammer of justice and give the beautiful goodnight with fluttering wrists and lacy gloves, and slice the life out of every elemental that exists.
Her lavender eyes will bloom with the harshest of frosts and an eternal dream of snowflakes will overshadow them all.
Cryo.
Pyro.
Dendro.
Electro.
Geo.
Anemo.
Void.
Light.
Hydro.
The last dream is always her dying from the battle against the gods… the battle to reach the fetus universe and then fighting the elementals themselves. Each elemental will have to be crushed by one of its very own users.
The girl who is a maid for geo.
The man with flame hair and red eyes for pyro.
She will crush cryo with the biggest kiss goodbye as she knows her elemental rock will shatter only weeping, thanking her for the goodnight.
A blonde man with a feather on the side of his head for Dendro.
Capitano for electro.
Lumine for void.
Her brother for light.
Childe for Hydro.
Scaramouche for anemo.
And Pierro along with Kaeya, the wielders of the new elemental. The strange mix of void and light, bringing a radiance and iridescence that feels like all the elementals, but is something more. Something else. Something new.
That is why Tsaritsa can lift her head up at the end of the day as she sends her fatui out to the field and see many die. Their souls are collected in the crystal flower that Archon Kaeya once made. There she will bring them all back to life when the fateful day will come. Not as humans. But as elemental users and as archons. The last battle will only bring flame to every place and corner of this world… but no one will truly die. So long as Kaeya’s special heavens collects them all… there will be no true tears. No true departure. The golden flower holds her people. The blue one will hold each other.
Tsaritsa does pause for a moment as she overlooks clear wet water over the river she is phantom walking through. It’s such a beautiful day for such dark thoughts. It’s such a beautiful day for so much death. She is seeing the monster-kind dead on the grass like limp rag dolls. Like trash on the road.
“Lumine, really,” she tuts, shaking her head in disappointment. Well, she did bet on Gold and Lumine and their work. A margin of error must always be accounted for. She just and all of them just… kinda failed to expect any bad.
Shame that both her researchers are both the brightest kinds of minds she has ever seen. However, Gold is corrupted by her greed for knowledge. Whereas Lumine remains forever stuck in her 18 year old mentality. Then there is Dottore. He’s just… something really. Though she never regrets having him join. The most dangerous mind of this world. It works to have the most dangerous mind of this world on her side… because he’s now a friend. Someone she knows that will never stab her back. For she holds an important part of Dottores soul.
“If I ever do betray you, crush it. Smash it within your very fists. And my heart dies.”
He said this with a whimsical gesture but she knows as much as he does what it would mean and do to him if this part of his soul ever fractures.
“His drive for learning… to become the best human there is…” And she keeps it in a little bobble in her own mental domain. She hopes to never have to reach out for it. Knowing Dottore, she knows she won't have to. And for that she is thankful. That is why right now she exhales and can relax as she swims and soars across the fields like a ghost; past verdant pastures. All to get to her icy cold world of Snezhnaya.
It is a shame for all 3 of her best researchers to be so bright and at the same time be so dumb. Still, she’ll clean up this mess or else… who else would do so?
Dangerous lavender eyes keep walking forwards as she hisses and taunts the heavens.
“How I crave the day… if only the promised moment was upon us… I would just… smack Childe’s face and throw Dottore across the room. Ah.”
Glittering bright cruel eyes stare up. Oh, how celestia hangs in the air like the juiciest of apples. How she will enjoy biting into it. Into its very core and spitting the seeds out to the floor.
“I see you,” she points with her lavender and blonde highlighted hair swaying behind her. She ties it into a relaxed bun knot.
“And with my motley crew we will ascend and murder all of you, celestia. They care for you… the elementals. Blessing you and favoring you above all others. I will end this. Your turn will be over. Make way for the new. The old must step down. My promise is good like all the good tea in the world. I will crush you beneath my heels and I will end your tyranny. I see you for what you are. Imprisoners. Leeches of life. Cryo told me. For cryo wishes all the powers of the elementals to end… so that we, the people of every world, could be free. Our souls shall be rewritten into something new. Maybe into love.”
And she blushes because what does that future even entail? Even if she does manage to end celestia’s gods in totality and break through the sacred throne rooms that should never be breached, touched, by invading hands, she… will have to stand before the phantom limbs of the elementals and break through to the other side.
This is where the power of all the gods she’ll have on her side will have to sacrifice. Every person willing to bring her to this point in the battle will have to depart with a little fragment of their soul. Their biggest dream. For that is really what is at stake here.
A vision is born. And within it, the ultimate dream of the person imprisoned. It is encapsulated, enraptured into physical form and becomes the tool and access to the archon's power. By extension the elemental’s rock power.
The vision grants its wielder the power to really make it to fruition, whatever it may be. Granting them godlike power in stamina, luck, wit, valor, and all the good things. It is a flame that is stoked in return for life force. In turn for memories. In turn for littler dreams that the users will eventually forget. A part of one's soul is ripped out. Perhaps the most important one.
The one who dreams.
For what is the start of a dream?
The light that starts from one's eyes when the first piano note of love for an idea begins?
The first daydream? The first wanting and yearning for something that has never existed for them or to them… and the need to accomplish it. To see it?
It’s a beautifully dreadful and enslaving thing. So much that its user will commit and put down in cold hard downpayment of life hours and lifespan, to receive it. The gift. The treasure. The jail. The imprisonment.
IT’s hard to say then why a dream is the key that fits in place. The stuffing that fills the void inside. It is the key that brings your most potential out from you. A higher being of one's self. It lifts you to grander heights than ever thought possible… all in order for the chance of a happiness one has not ever beheld.
Tsaritsa calms… to think about all the collective visions of each user exploding when she ends her own elemental rock’s original form… is… terrifying. To even think about reaching the fetus universe that never has had a heartbeat…. she…. has to wonder….what that also means.
How will it even feel like to live in a universe… where no elemental power exists anymore? No more power of the elementals thriving in their lives or among them? It’s… jaw dropping. Simply magnifying. Bewildering and something to gasp at, all at once.
She was only handed this vision in a dream once right after she received the blessing directly from the cryo elemental itself and became the archon of ice and snow. She never even met Pierro and Kaeya at that time. But in that dream they rose to her mind like clear fog.
She’s in her dazzling battle armor. An army behind her. And the chaos that happens is like slow motion. Her whole nation fell with a strike as she fell down with it with lifeless eyes and blood dripping from her mouth. As she falls like a petal, a snowflake, her hands remain up, reaching forever upwards as all her citizens fall into the forever night of the chasm with her. But then there was a quick rewind. Like a scratch on a disk player. Someone chose to change fate. To give her fate another chance. A fate where she can win this and reach the end standing in the threshold of a new paradise.
She could defeat the elementals and celestia with key people behind her. That was the dream dictated.
A girl with blonde hair and a flower in her hair. Her Lumine.
A ginger with a mask on the side of his head and cold dead fish eyes. Childe, one of her harbingers.
Her current husband Pierro. A man turned ruthless, with only embers of his past kindness peeking under that mask sometimes.
His son, Kaeya, adult, alive and young, in abyssal armor. Bathed in the glow of a god as she is. However, she could never decipher it. The glowing rainbow that refracted from Kaeya. It was a new elemental. Different from light or void itself. A mixture of the two. An inbetween.
The same is said when dark light and bright light meet. A rainbow that is held within. One just needed the trick of the eye to see it.
Then other key figures rose like bright lights. And then she knew… that fate was finally on her side. Perhaps history wrote her story wrong the first time. But someone… had pity. Someone of a greater power decided to bet on her and all she stands for. For her love… for the freedom of all people and beings from elemental power in every world.
A man of red flaming hair in only dark clothing.
A blonde boy with a braid. One with golden eyes. Lumine’s brother.
A girl held in geo who looks like a maid.
The Harbingers.
Dainsleif too.
And a few key abysmal monsters as well as Khaenrian’s… are there all behind her in this valiant and inevitable fight above Liyue harbor and Snezhnaya.
Same for a slew of other elemental users that the boy with blonde braided hair befriended. Lumine’s brother is key for gathering the brightest. Such are the protagonists of the worlds. The old fable of the universal writer. The fate weavers. No one has ever seen them. However, traces of their work exist.
A person who is supposed to be dead that somehow comes to life. A person who falls in the greatest mercy. A villain who receives the ultimate punishment. Such are the ways the weavers of fate and the soul strings work. The storytellers of her world. The ones who created the soulstring in the first place. That binds all things together like words on a paper and color in a thought.
As a protagonist in her own right then, she has her players. They will be brought to her no matter what. Her soul plays a siren song and she will not be denied by any sturdy nor steadfast will. Each ship will sink to her for she is the ice that will travel beyond time and space.
No matter how, when, or where, she has placed all her bets on herself for her fury, cold anger, rage. Her vengeance will know no bounds. Her love is cruel in the eyes of some. Her love is forgiving in the eyes of others. It may help some sleep through the night with hazy restful dreams. To others she is the nightmare that never ends.
Tsaritsa thinks calmly then… why she never saw any other archon there in that premonition dream. She crinkles her knuckles as she molds her hand into a fist. They will probably go against her. Which was one of the reasons she stopped socializing with all the archons so long ago. Same for the fact of what they did to Khaenri’ah… her husband, Pierro’s world.
Watching the birds fly she watches the sun. A breeze picks up. She licks at the sweetness of it.
She will pave the way to the ultimate platform where all dreams will be put on the line to be saved or shattered. Be it with their fleshy and bloody bones on the ground or freezing them into blocks of ice, the archons of this world nor any other world will not interfere.
Nothing will get her down from this fight. This fight will be the most important of all time. All other squabbles mean nothing. Meant nothing.
Finally she reaches Snezhnaya as she mentally lifts her arms and begins a dance to ignite her healing at 1000%. All statues of the 7 and teleportation waypoints light up with the flutter of her hands as snow whirls around her. She can feel the weariness of tired souls gasp out a breath of ease. Monsters relax as shoulders slump. People with mental and physical pain find relief. And her ears tickle when she picks up the first few waves of prayers in thanks. This is her favorite part about being an archon.
How does it feel to be thanked by a follower? The adrenaline rush is like a high of no other. A kind kiss of thanks to the air. An ode of silence thanks heavy in a citizens heart. It becomes a crown that holds her together. A crown of flimsy snow or of cold hard ice. And she loves them both. For even when belief in her is low… she still is thankful for them all. For no one ever believed in others when she was still human and growing up.
Only her husband, her parents, and her few friends would endure and last throughout all her changes. It’s a shame they are all gone now. Being an archon means almost eternal life. However, memories live inside and she knows their souls are in celestia… relaxing in grace in their form of heaven. Maybe they’ll be recycled again. She always makes sure to bring the reincarnations of her loved ones back to live in Snezhnaya as she showers them with only blessings and luck.
Again. Life is this way. And life will always be the most complex story she has ever lived.