Chapter Text
Your first meeting with him was not what you expected.
The glass shattered like fragile ice, and air filled your lungs again for the first time in centuries. The Akademiya’s lamplight stung your eyes. You staggered, wings tucked tight against your nude body.
“Fascinating,” murmured the young man who had woken you. His eyes glinted with a hunger you recognized—not for beauty, not for song, but for knowledge. For power.
You tried to speak, but only a soft hum escaped—melodic, unbidden, the curse still holding sway. Yet the hum quivered, reshaped, pressed against the boundaries of silence until it became words.
“Where… am I?”
The sound startled you more than it startled him. Centuries you had sung, only sung, unable to shape
your thoughts into speech. Now—here, in this place—you spoke.
The scholar tilted his head, raven hair spilling over his shoulder. “Alive,” he said, with a curl of his lips that was not a smile. “That is where you are. Alive, and under my care, for now. My name is Zandik.”
Care. That word sat uneasily in your chest.
But Zandik was already calculating. To the Akademiya, you would be his assistant—another set of hands and eyes for his research. But in truth, you were his subject. He did not hide the way his gaze lingered on your form, on the unnatural sheen of your feathers, on the timbre of your voice.
Yet he taught you.
In the weeks that followed, Zandik’s shadow stretched over your days. He thrust scrolls into your hands, covered your fingers in ink, pressed you to trace diagrams you did not understand.
“You can read, yes?” he asked once, impatience in every syllable.
“Only what I was made to,” you admitted. “Songs. Hymns. Words they wanted me to sing.”
His laughter was sharp. “Then you are as illiterate as a child. How fitting, for a pet.”
The insult stung, but still you bent over the texts he provided, mouthing syllables until the script of Teyvat began to unravel into meaning. He explained theories of alchemy and physics in clipped tones, as though daring you to fail him. You learned of Ley Lines, of elements, of the pursuit of knowledge without gods.
When you erred, he mocked you.
When you succeeded, he scowled.
And still, he taught you.
You learned of eras long passed, histories you had been blind to while locked in the Primordial One’s gilded cage. Names of nations rose and fell in your memory, though you knew none of their faces. To you, the world had always been the golden halls, the cruel throne.
Zandik seemed to delight in your ignorance. He questioned you endlessly.
“What did you see, in that place?”
“What did they tell you of the wars of old?”
“What of the usurper who took the seat of heaven?”
You had no answers. You could not tell him what he longed to know. For you had been nothing there. Only a songbird, wings clipped, voice bound. A pet.
And so he experimented. Quietly at first—blood samples, feathers stolen under the guise of study, questions about the strength of your bones and the strange way your voice still bent toward melody no matter what you spoke. His curiosity burned, and you endured it. Better this hunger, you thought, than the cold indifference of your former master.
*
But the Akademiya whispered.
Zandik’s ideas were too radical, his experiments too grotesque. He clashed with his peers, sneered at their cowardice, accused them of shackling themselves to tradition. Rumors spread of his work with “subjects” better left untouched. You felt the weight of eyes upon you when you walked at his side, the way others looked at your covered wings, at the strange tone of your voice.
In time, the council branded him a heretic.
The title did not wound him as they thought it might. No—Zandik laughed, the sound ringing down the marble halls as they stripped him of everything. “Heretic,” he hissed, almost lovingly. “Better that than a fool.”
And so you walked beside him, cast out.
Through the desert you went, sand biting at your skin, stars wheeling coldly overhead. The Akademiya was behind you, nothing but ruin ahead.
It was there, with no one to see, that the mask of pride he always wore finally slipped, revealing the doubt beneath.
“Tell me,” Zandik’s voice cut through the emptiness. His steps slowed, and for the first time, hesitation bled into his sharp tone. “Do you see me as they do? A monster?”
You only shook your head. Silent. Yet in your thoughts, the truth coiled: that word can only make me think of one being.
He searched your face. Whatever he saw seemed enough, for he walked on without another word.
*
It was not long after that both of you were found.
The man in white and blue stood like an eternal shadow against the desert sands, his presence heavier than any storm. His mask hid his expression, but the weight of his gaze did not need eyes to pierce.
He regarded Zandik first—measured, calculating, already certain of his choice. But when his attention shifted to you, it lingered. Long, uncomfortably long. You felt the way it cut through you, as though peeling away your disguise, stripping flesh from bone until your hidden wings threatened to tremble free. For one breathless moment you felt certain he knew.
Pierro’s momentary silence was suffocating. You drew the fabric tighter around yourself, willing your body to stillness. Then the two of them drowned into conversation and finally, he extended his hand—not to you, but to Zandik. A deal struck, a fate sealed.
You did not move. Not a breath, not a gesture. The handshake bound only them, even after Pierro had offered you one too.
Later, as you walked the barren path together—Pierro in the lead, Zandik at your side—you barely noticed the sound of their voices. You had grown used to shutting noise out, to existing only when called upon.
“See?” Zandik’s voice carried amusement, though his words were directed at Pierro, not you. “They never insert themselves into conversation. They only act if commanded. Almost like a puppet—one with no thought of its own.”
Pierro did not reply. But you felt his gaze again in the silence, dissecting, weighing.
You lowered your head and walked on, wings pressed tight against your back.
*
The Fatui did not take you all at once.
They unspooled you slowly, thread by thread.
At first, you were merely tolerated—an oddity brought in at Zandik’s side, a curiosity Pierro kept his sharp eye upon. But the Jester’s gaze was not idle. More than once, he summoned you to chambers where Zandik was not present.
There, in the stillness of dim firelight, he spoke to you. His voice was quiet, but every word carried the weight of centuries.
“You are not mortal,” Pierro said once, not a question but a declaration. “Nor are you quite what you were made to be. But you were close enough to it that I can see the chains still wound around you.”
You said nothing. What could you say?
He leaned forward, elbows resting upon the table between you, his masked face inscrutable. “I know what lies above the sky. I know who sits on that throne. The Primordial One slumbers. And the usurpers who call themselves the Heavenly Principles…” His voice dipped lower, darker. “They are not gods. They are tyrants. We will break them.”
The words struck you like thunder. All your life—no, your eternity—you had sung to the usurper’s throne. You had been a pet. A plaything. When the Shade of Time had whispered of rebellion, you had recoiled, knowing such defiance could only end in ruin.
But now…
Now the Jester laid before you something different. The Shade of Time had been reckless, doomed to fail. But Pierro was methodical, patient. He had seen the truth, and he had gathered those who would tear down the throne not in vain sacrifice, but in cold strategy.
And he was not alone in this.
Once, in one of those dim-lit meetings, he let slip the truth. “The Tsaritsa herself instructed me to speak with you. She saw you, and pitied you. A chained bird, wings clipped, voice turned against you. She does not waste sympathy easily. She believes you can become more than what they made you.”
The name lingered in your thoughts long after. The Cryo Archon—remote, untouchable, yet still choosing to extend a hand. She had not plucked you from the desert herself, but she had asked Pierro to give you something you had never been given before: choice.
And so you listened.
In meeting after meeting, Pierro told you what Zandik had never said. Histories older than the Akademiya’s archives. Accounts of Celestia’s tyranny, the gods who bent knee or fell beneath the Principles’ law. Where Zandik dissected you with questions and scorn, Pierro gave you answers.
For the first time, you understood why the world was the way it was. For the first time, you saw a chance—however slim—that the throne above the stars might actually fall.
And so you chose.
Not out of blind obedience. Not because Zandik demanded it. But because Pierro and the Tsaritsa together offered you something you had been denied for eternity: a purpose of your own.
You became one of them. Not merely Zandik’s silent assistant, not merely a puppet that moved at command, but a high-ranking agent of the Fatui—second only to the Harbingers themselves.
Dottore’s right hand.
It was not loyalty that tied you there. It was necessity. And perhaps, for the first time, something dangerously close to conviction.