Chapter Text
In the countless years that come, they will watch civilisations begin from dust and handfuls of people grow into complex, corrupt societies far bigger than any one person. They will watch them fall again, dust to dust. Individual life, mortal and transient, holds little meaning to them now.
Xiao will know pain, he will never be able to forget, his karmic debt following him around Tevyat like a shadow. Yet he will sleep dreamless and undisturbed, wrapped in Aether’s arms and sometimes strangled by his golden hair, surrounded by dancing shadows. There is balance in this world too, and the pendulum swings low and harmoniously for Xiao and Aether.
Xiao will remain Liyue’s vigilant Yaksha, a masked martyr for the masses, until he fades away from the public eye, the fifth and forgotten of his brothers and sisters. Eventually, they will cease to speak of Adeptus Xiao at all.
Aether will become theatre mechanic and grandmaster of the shadows of Tevyat, crown himself the prince of the Abyss. They become his dancers, and his stage is ever-growing.
Xiao will not be able to name the exact moment when his own lines blurred enough to sit on the throne beside Aether, his mask nothing but an inmate piece of wood, its karmic debt long since rendered powerless in the ever-expanding realm of shadows that drowns Tevyat into an inky black that mirrors Aether’s eyes.
Someday, they too will fall, eventually, immortal but not, never invulnerable. Someday their armour will crack, and they too will return to dust.
Yet, as Xiao takes Aether’s hands, cold and frigid, his golden hair hidden away under layers of black, there is still a quirk to his red lips, a shine in his eyes that is reserved for Xiao, and he knows, as he always has, that he would follow Aether to the ends of the world.