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The photo album was old and the pictures inside had faded with age, but that only made Anastasiya more curious. It had been in her parents’ attic, probably for years, and she had only found it while playing a game of hide and seek with her siblings.
Her little brother, Viktor, thought there were monsters up there, but Anastasiya, being the brave twelve-year-old she was, decided that it would be the last place he would look for her. It was while she had been hiding that she found the ageing book inside of a box she had bumped into. Curious, the girl had opened it and had gasped at just how old it looked to be. Judging by the photos, they must have been from the time when the kamera had only just been popularized.
At the end of the round, Anastasiya had returned the book to its box and climbed out of the attic, but it had been on her mind. It had only been a week, but the album had piqued her curiosity enough that, armed with a flashlight, she had been sneaking up to look at it every single night. It was a very strange album since it didn’t look like the ones her mama liked to make and it looked like it could be just as old as her prababushka.
The book featured photos of many people, but most prominently it had two men: one person who looked very obviously Snezhnayan (and who kind of looked like pictures she had seen of her papa when he was young), and a man from Liyue. Almost every single picture had one of the two of them in it, but the few that didn’t have them in it instead pictured some of the other people she had seen throughout the rest of the book.
At first, she had thought that the book was some kind of friendship album, like the ones she would make with her friends, but the more pages she flipped through, she realized it was probably a personal one instead. The captions on the photos were written in a beautiful flowing script, and it was so pretty that Anastasiya vowed to one day have writing as pretty as that. They mentioned names, places, and dates, which allowed her to begin to understand the stories of the people whose pictures were saved lovingly within the pages of the book.
She read about a peppy chef named Xiangling, a rockstar named Xinyan, two teenage boys in blue who were labelled as Xingqiu and Chongyun, Hu Tao the precocious funeral director, and a young man named Xiao who seemed to have a fondness for almond tofu, if the picture of him enjoying a plate of it (according to the caption) was any indication. There was a page full of photographs taken from what seemed to be the inside of a bush, or from behind a wall, and they were all of the same couple but their faces weren’t shown in the photos. That page was labelled ‘Matchmaking successful: Nadia and Vlad out on a date’.
Other pages featured a woman with light blue hair and horns, and her favourite photo of her was the one where she seemed to be enjoying a cup of tea with two other women: one with long, white hair and the other with a cool-looking eyepatch. It reminded her of the pirates that Viktor always said he wanted to join when he got older. If all pirates looked like this lady, then maybe Anastasiya would have to go with him too when he joined. She had been confused when she flipped to the next page and saw two birds and a deer, especially since they looked nothing like the deer or birds they had in Snezhnaya. There was an old woman with them too, so perhaps she was their owner?
While seeing all these interesting people was cool, it was the main two people who drew her attention the most. The photos started off pretty formal, but the Snezhnayan man looked as if he was getting clingier and clingier the further Anastasiya flipped through the book. They were avid travellers too, apparently, as they had photos of themselves from all over the world. The first part of the book showed the scenery of Liyue but soon enough, she saw scenes of Mondstadt, Fontaine, and even Inazuma!
Anastasiya flipped to the next page and gasped when she recognized the snowy terrain of Snezhnaya. There were some landmarks she could easily identify, but they looked newer in the photos than they had when she had seen them. To her surprise, though, there was a photo of the two men standing in front of a familiar house in the town of Morepesok. Her family had lived there for generations, and there was no way she would ever mistake her hometown for anywhere else. She quickly turned the page to the next photo and she saw them standing with what looked like a large family. It reminded her eerily of her own, and she was starting to get an idea as to why that was.
She heard some rustling noises from the main floor and Anastasiya quickly closed the book. She had to go to bed for the night before her mama caught her, but she made sure to come back the next night, the one after that, and again two nights later. The photobook was like finding a time capsule and she knew she wouldn’t be able to let it go until she figured out every last secret that it held within its pages.
Night after night, page after page. She watched their lives through photos and she found herself enthralled with imagining what sort of people they were. As the years passed in photos, the kamera quality gradually improved and so too did the photos. Where at first she couldn’t see all the details, by about halfway through the book she could make out that the Snezhnayan man had faint freckles on his cheeks.
They were still together in those photos, but it was only when she flipped the page once more and saw a photo of them kissing that she truly realized what their relationship was. It made her smile, and Anastasiya was beyond enthusiastic that they seemed truly happy in those photos.
They aged slowly, for it seemed that they had taken photos quite often. There were photos of them attending a wedding that was clearly using the Snezhnayan traditions, and when she came across one of the photos, she absentmindedly brushed over it with her fingers. It seemed familiar for some reason - almost like she had seen this exact photo somewhere before.
Thinking she must be imagining it, Anastasiya waved aside the idea. That would be ridiculous. Instead of examining it closer, she simply turned the pages again and lost herself within this book of memories that didn’t belong to her.
By the end of the book, both men looked quite elderly, but still just as much in love as they had for a long time. Almost like there was some kind of joke she wasn’t getting, the Liyuen man seemed to be laughing at the Snezhnayan man as he failed at using those stick things that were used all the time in Liyue and Inazuma. Maybe he had said something funny?
The next day, Anastasiya walked over to her prababushka’s house with the book in hand. Her great-grandmother opened the door and drew her into a hug right there on the doorstep.
“Oh, my little Asya,” she cooed, “come to visit me, have you? Come inside before you catch a cold.”
Anastasiya was given a steaming mug of tea as she sat at the kitchen table and she gladly drank it, waiting for her great-grandmother to take a seat as well.
“So what’s the occasion, Asya? You didn’t bring Vitya with you this time,” the old woman remarked and Anastasiya slid the book across the tabletop.
“Prababushka, I found this in the attic. Who are these people?”
She watched as her great-grandmother opened the book and flipped through a few pages before chuckling.
“Oh, Asya… I have not seen this book for many years, I am surprised you found it.”
“So you know who they are?” Anastasiya asked eagerly. “There’s someone who kind of looks like papa, but not quite.”
She chuckled again. “Why yes, that would be because you are related.”
“This man-” she tapped a finger on a photo of the brightly smiling Snezhnayan man “-is my older brother, Ajax. You never would have met him, he died when your papa was young.”
“And the other person?” Anastasiya asked, pointing at the Liyuen man.
“Ah yes, that would be my brother-in-law, Mister Zhongli. He always did tell me that I didn’t need to call him that but, well, old habits die hard, as they say.”
The old woman laughed. “Mother and Father always used to wonder how someone like my older brother managed to convince someone as sophisticated as Mister Zhongli to marry him, but he said to me once: ‘Tonia, I don’t even know how it happened, he was the one who convinced me’.”
Anastasiya grinned and took a closer look at the photos in the book. “They really loved each other, didn’t they?”
“Oh yes, everyone used to complain because they were glued at the hip,” her great-grandmother told her. “I haven’t seen a love that strong since.”
She hummed and flipped to another page in the book, looking at the face of the great-grand-uncle she had never known. So much of his personality shone through in the happiness he exuded in these photos, but Anastasiya couldn’t help but wish she had gotten to meet him once.
“Prababushka?”
“Yes, Asya?”
Anastasiya looked down and nervously tapped her fingers on the table. “Do you think he would have liked me?”
The old woman sighed and shook her head with a smile. “Oh, Asya. He would have adored you. He always spoiled me and our other brothers when we were children, and he only got more doting as he got older.”
The young girl beamed and hopped off her chair to give her great-grandmother a tight hug.
“Now, let me tell you about the time he caught us a fish larger than our house…”
It had taken quite a while after coming back from her prababushka’s house to get the courage to read to the end of the book, but that night she flipped to the last page which didn’t have a photo at all. Instead, there was a pressed flower, its colour faded after so long, and a letter hastily, yet carefully written on the last page. It was a bit hard to read using the low light from the lantern she had brought up to the attic with her several days beforehand, but regardless, she managed to make it out to the best of her ability.
To my dearest Ajax,
We have always known that one day the mountains will be worn down by time and that the streams will slow to a trickle. All good things must come to an end, and yet I just cannot bring myself to want to accept that you, too, will go somewhere that I cannot follow. For decades you have brought joy and laughter to my life, and I would not change that for anything.
Ever since that day we met in Liyue Harbour, I knew that you would have an impact on my life unlike any other. I had not known true love until you, and I doubt I ever will again. There will never again be someone like you who could always sweep me off my feet even as your bones grew old and brittle, and there will never again be someone who knows me as well as you do.
You told me once that you never expected to make it this far, and that you did not plan for your future - believing instead that you would go out in a blaze of glory on the battlefield - but that meeting me made you want to live. You had the same effect on me as well, for I had never concerned myself with how quickly time passes until you came into my life. Even as I sit here by your bedside, I cannot imagine my life without you anymore, and I am scared of what the future will bring.
I know that if you see this, you will just laugh at me and tell me to stop worrying, but I cannot help it. However, despite that, I have made my decision. No matter what happens from here, my heart will always be with you until the very end and even beyond that.
I hope you can rest well when the time comes, my love. I will be right behind you, and I hope you will greet me on the other side of the boundary.
Eternally yours,
Zhongli