Chapter Text
After the first time the winds convince Xiao to stand up again, he remains standing, but not for long. An insubstantial dream of his own – even one of clouds and the sky and flying – can hardly sustain him, especially when his head clears and he barely even believes in it.
Just a handful of decades later he is once again standing in a pool of his own blood, wondering if he is truly selfish enough to continue this mindless slaughter all for the faint hope that he will someday be able to fly. Then as he contemplates following Bosacius – if they meet on the other side he would be disappointed, but Xiao doubts anyone would hold it against him – the winds once again carry to him the sound of a flute.
(It is Lord Barbatos again. They have never met and he does not show himself, but the winds know so Xiao does, too.)
This melody is new to him, but even more familiar than the last.
It is a song of prayers, though not quite the same as the ones the winds usually carry to him. Threaded between the prayers for a saviour and those for a guiding light are the prayers he never lets himself hear – ones meant not for his ears, but made for him. The ones the winds have hoarded and kept hidden in seashells or wherever it is they hide their memory, only to bring them out when his guard is down and drown him in them.
Wake up. Stand. Fight. Don’t die.
Rest. Eat. Don’t fight.
Xiao opens his eyes. Don’t fight? Hah. Who would possibly ask that of Xiao?
(He gets up if only to spite them, and learns that spite keeps one going far longer than hope does. Or it does, if one happens to be Xiao.)
Lord Barbatos is insistent that Xiao lives. It does not concern him, but he would likely be upset if Xiao dies while he naps. Xiao has only one life, which he owes to far too many people. It would hardly be fair for him to allow it to end, when those he owes it to want him to live.
On days when there are no demons to quell, Xiao sits atop a mountain and listens to the stories the winds tell through the flute Lord Barbatos had left in his care. The story of an old lady who travels through the forest every day and every night, whom he sometimes has to guide home when her memory slips and she forgets the way; the story of a mother who still waits with a pot of steaming soup every evening, only to keep it all and share it with her neighbours the next day; the story of a man who sits by the shore all day waiting for a message that never comes.
Why do they wait? Xiao wonders. The dead do not come back. If the living allow themselves to rot away then there is no difference between them and those they wait for.
Why do you fight? the winds ask back.
It has been a while since he has been asked that question. He no longer remembers the answer he had prepared, so he begins to think one up again.
Then it is yet another lantern night and Xiao is lying on the sand after a week of nothing but slaughter, and he is bleeding out, and he thinks he can almost hear Lady Guizhong’s guzheng and smell the glaze lilies. Water licks at his bloodied clothes and threatens to take him away. The villagers will get a fright if he is washed onto their shore.
This time Lord Barbatos will not save him.
The winds fret and mourn but they cannot save him.
The winds can carry him through the skies and the spear can bring him to the bottom of the ocean, but Xiao has known for a while now that the only one who can keep him standing is himself. Some days he cannot remember why he bothers.
But he has lived and fought for so long, so surely there must exist a reason. He should at least try to remind himself.
The flute lies on the stone beside him.
What would you like to do? the winds ask him, in Rex Lapis’s voice.
Fly, he would have said, if he had not already learnt that that dream is no longer the reason he fights. Perhaps it never was.
Fight, he would have said, if he had life enough still to lie.
“Live,” he says, testing the answer on his tongue. It tastes like a dream left to rot for a lifetime, and just a little bit like fear. It does not taste like a lie, so he tries again, “I would like to live.”
It is not a lie, but it does not taste like the truth. This half-truth pokes curiously at the back of his mind and uncovers a memory he had thought lost.
“What would you like to do?” Rex Lapis asked, as Xiao looked down at the lights in the city. There was an answer that had come to mind that he had not voiced. An answer that felt like fear and shame and weakness, and so he had forgotten about it soon after.
(He thinks of the first city he had razed to the ground, because the forest was burning and the lights were lamps of fire. He thinks of a thousand lanterns floating above the sea, and the way their prayers drowned out all that he is. He thinks of a villager who had brought him fresh apples for the shrine every morning before dawn, for all her life, because, she claims, he had saved her life once.)
He does not want to fight. He does not want to be prayed to. He does not want to be thanked and remembered.
Xiao does not want to be necessary.
“I would like,” he says, to Rex Lapis, and to the dust on the ruins of Guili Plains, “to answer all their prayers.” Or, at the very least, the ones that are his to hear.
He cannot bring them good luck or a good harvest, but he can quell the grudges that shake the earth and poison the rain.
Then, to himself and to the winds, he says, “I would like to banish the reasons they pray.”
Then with the jade spear in hand he wills himself to stand up again.
There will come a day when Xiao is all but forgotten, because he is not a deity of times of peace who can grant their wishes or gift them wisdom, because he is a creature of war and bloodshed who slaughters their enemies and pulls them out of the demons’ grasp, and his time has passed.
He knows not what he will do when that day comes, but he knows that until it does, he will fight.