Archive of Our Own

At night, Qingce Village transforms itself. It’s a magic all of its own: how the gentle slopes of the mountains become looming, monstrous. How the calm, bubbling river turns furiously loud. And the terraces—how they are dyed red in the dying light of the sun, and how the shade of it follows them into the dark, so close to the hue of blood.

Xiao knows better than most the history of this place. This transformation does not take him by surprise.

Still, his business in the area has been concluded promptly: a nest of corrupted geovishap hatchlings, usually not seen this far north. Not Xiao’s preferred enemy—their thick hide made his polearm almost obsolete, and they were often even faster than he was—but not proving to be much trouble either. He has had better fights. He has also had much, much worse.

It’s as he is sitting on top of the watermill, carefully inspecting his wounds for any sign of infection, that two of the villagers come strolling past the bridge. Xiao doesn’t bother hiding himself away. Humans don’t usually bother to look up.

“It’s such a relief,” one of them says.

“A gift from Rex Lapis himself,” the other agrees. Xiao doesn’t know their names, of course, but he has seen them around. Old, aging. They grew up in this village. If he tries, he could probably remember their faces as children. He doesn’t try.

“Wouldn’t you say Barbatos? He does seem to come from Mondstadt.”

The other scoffs. “From that lazy old god? Impossible. He abandoned humans a long time ago. No, no, this must be the Geo Archon himself.”

“I don’t know… I don’t think the Geo Archon concerns himself much with music.”

Xiao rolls his eyes. Mortals. So full of internal grandiose, and yet they would relegate gods to a few characteristics, as if all an Archon was is their domain and nothing else. To think of Rex Lapis and not to think of literature, music, art—narrow minds. Narrow lives.

“Tch, Ol’ Jiangcheng! The Geo Archon saw fit to send us a talented bard to provide old farts like us with some entertainment, all in exchange only for a bed and some food, and you’re ready to start worshipping the Anemo Archon?!”

“Never! You’re right, you’re right. What’s important is that the bard is here. Who cares where he came from?”

“Not like he knows!” his companion laughs. “Now, come. Chang the Ninth said he would lend us some books to give to the bard for inspiration.”

The two wander off. Xiao, who has by now determined that most of his cuts are shallow and superficial, stands up on the watermill’s ledge. A bard, in Qingce Village? For an idle moment, he wonders what songs he would sing about this place. Then, he banishes the thought from his mind. A wandering bard’s song has nothing to do with him.

As an immortal, keeping track of time is mercurial at best, tedious at worst. But the lives of humans are constrained by time above all else: day and night, holidays and memorials—all too often a focus for malevolent energy, a time where concentrated emotions can stir even the deepest buried beasts. And so Xiao too must count the days, must remember the dates and the years. When a month has passed, it is time for the first day of the yearly harvest at Qingce. Xiao finds himself at its periphery once more.

The first thing he hears when he scales the mountain is the sound of a lyre. It gives him pause—the lyre is hardly native to Liyue, and Qingce keeps to its old traditions better than most. Then, he remembers the bard, and shrugs it off. Qingce Village has been slowly stagnating for decades. If a little music can bring life to it back again, it would—well, it would mostly mean more work for him, but… he can’t bring himself to mind.

As always, disturbing the fields unearths several nests of dendro and geo slimes, and he spends the afternoon doing what is essentially pest control. It’s demeaning, and probably could be left for someone else, but he’s available, and might as well do it before it becomes an actual problem.

It’s as he is dispatching a particular nasty batch of large geo slimes on the northern banks of the river bisecting the village that he hears him.

“Ah, stranger! That was quite impressive. I believe it only took two strikes of your polearm to quall those creatures!”

When he turns around, a boy is standing there. No, perhaps—older than a boy. A young man, with youthful features. About Xiao’s height, perhaps a hair taller, dressed in the green and browns typical of farmers, although Xiao is having trouble imagining him working the fields. In his hands, he holds a beautiful lyre.

His eyes are—very green. And they are focused on Xiao, which is not the norm for humans.

“What?”

The man wanders closer, peering at the condescents cooling on the ground curiously. “I’ve never seen such things. Are they dangerous?”

He has never seen slimes before? “You’re speaking to me?”

“Yes?” he frowns at Xiao, puzzled. “Why, should I not be speaking to you?”

Humans don’t tend to notice Xiao. Their eyes slide right past him, as if the centuries have made him part of Liyue’s landscape, another stone in the earth. He prefers it, for it makes it easier for him to do his duty, and he doesn’t have to get involved in messy human business. But this bard’s gaze lands directly on him. Xiao takes stock of him again. The lyre feels… strange, but other than that absolutely nothing about this person seems out of the ordinary. Not a human, not a Vision—wait.

“You have a Vision.” And he does: an Anemo Vision, just like Xiao’s, is barely jutting out of the pocket of his trousers.

“Hmm?” He follows Xiao’s gaze. “Oh, this thing? A Vision?” He takes it out from his pocket and lifts it up against the sun, squinting it. “I don’t think I can quite see through it, though. It’s pretty opaque.”

Xiao gets the irrational urge to snatch it away from his hands. Seeing other Anemo Visions is always such a… disquieting experience. “You can’t see through a Vision.”

“Oh,” he says, and lowers it down. He looks back at Xiao, and says: “Oh! You also have one!” and then he tries to grab it.

Xiao’s hand moves even faster than his brain as he catches his wrist. “Don’t.”

The man has the audacity to pout at him. “I just wanted to see! I haven’t seen anyone who also has one. What is it, anyway?” He flexes his wrist, testing Xiao’s grip. Xiao can’t help but notice how fragile it feels in his grasp, how he can feel every bone through paper-thin skin. Humans, always so breakable. He lets go.

The man looks at him so expectantly, his green eyes wide and naive. This must be the new bard. He certainly doesn’t look like he’s from Liyue. Might be some rich and spoilt Monstadt brat, if he doesn’t even know what slimes are. No one Xiao needs to concern himself with, although—

It’s strange that he is so focused on Xiao. Even stranger that he doesn’t know what a Vision is.

Still, Xiao has seen stranger. He might keep an eye out, but he wouldn’t go out of his way to do so. He has better things to do. Having decided that, he turns, preparing himself to leap away, when against all odds, before he can even notice or do anything about it, the man is the one who grasps his wrist this time.

Xiao can’t help himself—he wrenches himself away violently, sending the other man stumbling backwards in surprise. How could Xiao have been taken off guard by such a clueless man? It was only for a second, but Xiao has felt the calluses on his fingers. They are the kind that comes from wielding musical instruments, not weapons. And yet, he managed to grab him so effortlessly—!

“Ah, my apologies!” the man raises his hands in surrender, doing his best to look unthreatening. “You’re the first person my age I’ve seen here. I just wanted to talk more.”

Xiao can’t help himself—he scoffs in derision. “We’re hardly the same age. You would do well to forget you’ve ever seen me, human. There’s nothing I can do for you.” Discreetly, he shakes his wrist behind his back. For some reason, it aches.

This time, when he turns away, the man doesn’t try to stop him. He just looks at him with those big, green eyes, as Xiao leaps further away from his grasp.

He isn’t proud of it, but for the next few days he can’t stop thinking about the strange new addition to Qingce Village. Mortals shouldn’t occupy his thoughts this way—he has learned a long time ago that to care about mortals is to care for a flower: fleeting and ultimately pointless. He has no idea how Ganyu bears it.

But there was something different about the bard. Something… strange. A sickness in the air almost, now that he is removed from the situation. He could see Xiao, and that should have been impossible, but more than that—it was like the air around him writhed in discomfort.

In pain, he thinks, and doesn’t know why.

Before the week is over, he finds himself back in the village. This time, he stays away from the terraces and houses, claiming a remote peak as his vantage point as he looks down at the sleepy village, only just waking up. He remembers it being bigger, at one point in time. He also remembers it being much, much, smaller. The golden sun takes a long time to climb over the mountains, and most of the valley remains in the shade in the mornings, a welcome reprieve from the later summer heat. Even now, so early in the morning, it’s so humid it almost feels like raindrops standing still against the skin. The earliest to rise are the youngest—children being herded off to what passes as school here, at the house of one of the older villagers. They’re loud and energetic despite the hour and the heat, blossoming in the summer as only kids can. One by one the other villagers leave their homes, often leaving the door open to circulate air, as if there’s no danger to be found in Qingce Village. For all they know, there isn’t.

It takes the bard hours to show up, so long that Xiao starts thinking he might have left the village all together. By the time he emerges from one of the houses at the edge of town, the sun is already high in the sky. Xiao watches as he makes his rounds in the village: as he stops to talk with an old lady, as he picks a few jueyun chilis from a plant at the edge of the river. He spends about an hour with the few children in the village, playing a game Xiao couldn’t figure out the rules to even if he tried. Which he doesn’t. But if he did, it would still have been incomprehensible.

His lyre only makes an appearance when dusk has started to paint the flowers of the terraces orange and red. The people of the village all gather near the watermill, as if it was a daily ritual by now. The bard takes his place on a small stool they prepared for him, and as he does his presences… grows, somehow. He is still a nameless bard wearing threadbare clothes, he is still playing for the tiny population of a tiny village that has been forgotten by time, but—he is also somehow more than that. As if he could have just as easily been playing in front of kings, and would have given the same effort as he did so.

The song he sings is unfamiliar to Xiao. From his height, he shouldn’t have been able to hear the lyrics, and yet he somehow still does—something about a forgotten prince, a kingdom betrayed, lost people. A depressing song, but it doesn’t seem to matter to the villagers, who smile and laugh and cheer at all the appropriate places.

It doesn’t fit him, he thinks, and once again—he doesn’t know why.

The bard finds him, afterwards. Xiao loses track of him for just a few moments, and the next thing he knows his head pops up over the ledge.

“Did you climb up here?” Xiao doesn’t mean to ask it, but the words leave his mouth anyway.

“Well, I didn’t see a staircase, so yes,” the bard shrugs, and heaves himself over, panting heavily. “Couldn’t you have found a more accessible spot to spy from?”

Xiao wants to bristle at the accusation, but he couldn’t exactly refute it. “It isn’t meant to be accessible.”

“Clearly,” he huffs, sprawling in what little grass there was on the stone ledge. They sit together in silence for a few moments. Xiao should leave. He has achieved what he has come here for. The bard might be strange, but he seems harmless. Xiao could continue to check in on him when he’s in the area, but he doesn’t need to spend any significant amount of time with him.

He doesn’t leave.

“Did you enjoy the song?”

Xiao, who has no opinion this way or the other about the song, stays quiet. This doesn’t seem to deter the bard.

“I only learned it the other day, so I’m sorry if the quality wasn’t up to par. I have to say I’m working with a very limited repertoire so far,” he laughs, although Xiao couldn’t say what for. He seems quick to smile and laugh, and those are usually not the type of people Xiao got along with. You should smile more, it puts people at ease, Rex Lapis had told him once, but Xiao had no need to put anyone at ease.

“You’re an Adepti, aren’t you?” the bard asks when the silence stretches perhaps a tad too long. “Granny Ruoxin told me that’s probably right. Chang the Ninth was very jealous of me, I think, although I’m not quite sure why. Oh! They also explained what this was,” he says, and fishes out his Vision from some side pockets. He is wearing more green than brown today, Xiao notices. “An Anemo Vision, right? I have no idea how to use it, but it sounds pretty cool. Maybe you could teach me?” he peers up at Xiao from where he’s still lying on the ground.

“No.”

“Aw, why not?” the bard pouts. “No one else here has a Vision.”

“How could you not know how to use it? How could you not know what it is?” The question has been nagging at Xiao, although he hasn’t quite meant to ask it.

The bard smiles sheepishly. “I don’t know quite a lot of things, actually. I know it’s strange, but I swear it’s true! I woke up about… two months ago, now, without a single memory to my name. No injury, no illness, nothing! Just the clothes on my back, this Vision, and this lyre. I was just wandering around until I stumbled on this place, and the people here were so nice I just decided to stay.”

It is strange, and unbelievable. Memory loss doesn’t just happen. But Xiao looks at him, with the somewhat empty look in his eyes, his vacant smile, and doesn’t call him a liar. Instead, he says: “It’s Adeptus. Adepti is the plural.”

“Oh!” the bard brightens up. “So it’s true? Granny Ruoxin said so, but it did seem a little bit fantastical to me. Qingce Village just seems too normal for someone like you to be around!”

Xiao, who knows very well the secrets that Qingce Village holds, can’t quite hold in the snort that escapes him at that. “Someone like me?”

The other nods vigorously. “Like—a proper hero, from a story or a ballad. All brave and strong and tragically silent.”

Abruptly, Xiao’s strangely good mood evaporates. “I’m no hero.”

“Hmm, you fit the bill quite well, you know!” the bard squints at him. “Well, maybe if you were a little bit taller.”

Xiao frowns. He hardly cares about such juvenile insults, but it rankles a little bit coming from someone who is only very barely taller than him.

The bard, who notices his scowl, laughs at him. “I’m joking, I’m joking! You’re absolutely the hero type. Almost every ballad has someone like you.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

The bard’s smile turns smaller, slyer. “I know! Shall we start with a name?”

Xiao leaves. He doesn’t give him a name.

“I’m Cecili!”

The bard accosts him the moment Xiao arrives… not even at Qingce Village, but the vicinity of it, in the south of Bishui Plains. He has no idea how the bard knew he would be there, and yet here he is, a beaming smile and sparkling eyes. He’s holding his lyre this time.

Xiao ignores him. He has felt resentful stirring in the area, and Ganyu sent a message about some reports of stray ruin guards. So far he has only seen lone hilichurls, which he mostly tends to avoid, leaving them for mortals to deal with.

The bard continues. “Last time I asked you for your name without even giving you mine, which I’ve been told is pretty rude. So, that’s my name. It’s the only thing I remember, you know.”

He has been told? “You speak of me to the villagers?” Humiliating, to think of himself as the subject of village gossip.

“Of course! They’ve been very helpful. They said that Adepti often accept offerings, so—” he extends his hand, where a shining red apple has somehow materialized in. “An apple?”

Xiao looks at him, unimpressed. “It’s been bitten into.”

Cecili—the bard, blushes. “I got hungry waiting, sorry.”

How did you know I would be here, Xiao wants to ask, but doesn’t. He’s sure he won’t get a satisfactory answer. “You should leave, it’s dangerous.”

The hand holding the apple folds back, almost forlornly. “More of those… slimes? You didn’t seem to have a problem, before.”

Honestly, what were the villagers doing, just letting this guy wander around? Does he even know how dangerous Liyue is? “No. There are worse things than slimes around here.”

The bard gasps, and Xiao is at least 90% sure it’s mostly theatrical. “Worse than those creatures? How terrifying! Then I simply must insist you accompany me back.” He makes as if to latch onto Xiao, but perhaps he remembers what happened in their first meeting and stops himself, only slightly lurching forward.

Xiao would have ignored him again but—it would be dangerous for him to walk back on his own. From the corner of his eye he can see several hilichurls make their way in their vague direction. Cecili might have a Vision, but unless he was lying about all of it he had no way how to use it. It would be gross negligence to leave him on his own. It would break his contract with Rex Lapis. It would break his own vow to himself.

Somehow, even though all of those things were true, they still sound like nothing but excuses in his mind.

“Fine. Follow me, bard.”

The bard cheers silently, and Xiao does him the courtesy of pretending he doesn’t see it. Of course, he doesn’t stay silent for long. “So, what are these things?” he asks. He’s pointing at the giant orange rocks jutting from the ground.

I’m not a tour guide, Xiao wants to snap, but answers instead. “Amber.”

“Amber? All the stories say there’s plenty of amber on Mount Hulao, but they never mention anything about Qingce…” The bard peers curiously at the rocks, although thankfully he doesn’t stray from Xiao’s side. “Those ruins… did this place also use to be Qingce Village?”

Xiao looks at him, a bit surprised. The bard catches his glance and laughs. “I’m not just a pretty face, you know! The architecture here is similar to the one of the shrine in the west of the village. Ah, now that I think of it, there’s some amber there as well. How curious!”

Xiao doesn’t find it curious at all, for obvious reasons. “Don’t come here again.” He points at the distant hilichurls. “They don’t come close to human settlements, but they wouldn’t hesitate to attack a lone traveler.”

“Hilichurls, right? The kids enjoy playing pretend and dressing up as these creatures.” He looks at Xiao. “Is that what you’re here to fight?”

“No.”

The bard sighs, morosely. “Aw, back to one word answers. I thought we were bonding.”

Xiao rolls his eyes. “And I thought I told you to stay away from me.”

“How can I do that? You’re soooo interesting!”

Xiao is sure most people would rather describe him as dour or blank rather than interesting. “Find something else to entertain yourself with, bard. I have better things to be doing.”

“Cecili.”

“What?”

“My name! Cecili. Just in case you’ve already forgotten. You don’t have to keep calling me by my profession. It’s very dehumanizing, you know.”

This human is incredibly annoying. “What should I care for your humanity?”

“Ah, getting philosophical are we? I’ve heard the Adepti were—haha, adept—at highbrow intellectual discussions, but you don’t seem quite the type.”

Just for that Xiao changes their trajectory, abandoning the more accessible route back to the village in favor of steeper inclines and rock climbing. Let the bard fall to his death, if he so wishes.

Mercifully, the harsher journey forces the bard to keep quiet for most of the way back, although Xiao does catch him humming a melody under his breath at times, so quiet it’s barely audible. Xiao has to admit that he does have a very nice voice: soft and lilting, so much so that even when he speaks there is an undertone of a singsong to it. He can understand why the people of the village are so taken with it, even if it comes attached to a rather unfortunate person.

It happens when they’re almost to the village. The bard leans on one of the last amber rocks on their path, to catch his breath, and the stone reacts to him. A normal human wouldn’t notice, even a human with a Vision might not, but Xiao certainly does. Something in the amber comes alive at his touch, a pulsing, floundering thing, as if the bard has reached towards it and something is reaching back. A moment later the bard straightens and disengages from the stone, and it disappears as if it never happened.

The bard notices him staring. “What?” he asks. “Not all of us can be heroic Adepti. I’m not in the best of shape!”

“That’s not—” Xiao starts, but lets it go. Whatever it was the bard just did, clearly he was unaware of it.

What else could he be unaware of?

“Ah, home sweet home,” the bard sighs as the village comes into view. “I don’t suppose you would let me thank you with a song, would you?”

Xiao, still preoccupied with trying to figure out exactly why the amber would react this way, is too slow to answer—and by the time he notices, the bard already has his lyre out, ready to play.

“I don’t need a song. Or your gratitude.”

The bard sighs, although the slight twist of his mouth gives his wry amusement away. “Yes, I figured you would say that. Still! I feel awfully rude, causing you all this trouble. I don’t even know your name.”

And Xiao, who can’t remember the last time he has given a mortal his name, doesn’t even have to think before he answers: “It’s Xiao.” Then, horrified at himself, he snaps: “Don’t use it.”

“Xiao!” the bard immediately disregards him. “It’s a beautiful name. Very fitting.” He eyes the flute tied to Xiao’s belt. “Hey, maybe we could duet at some point! I’m sure you would make such beautiful music, and I’m not half-bad if I do say so myself.”

“How can you even tell what beautiful music is?” Xiao can’t help but point out. “You don’t have any memories.”

The bard gasps, theatrically offended. “Good sir! A bard must never forget what beauty sounds like.” Then, the outrage fades from his face into a self-satisfied smile.

“What.”

“Nothing!” the bard chirps. “It’s just—first you gave me your name, and now you’re even bantering with me. My dear Xiao, I do believe you’re warming up to me.”

Xiao, much to his disgust, can feel himself start to flush. “This is not banter.”

“Ah!” the bard snaps his fingers at him, his smile growing even bigger. “But you don’t deny you’re warming up to me.” He looks so pleased with himself, so happy. Xiao can’t remember the last time he made anyone that happy—even when he saves a human’s life, they’re usually much too scared to feel pleased by his presence.

Xiao sighs. This was… not an unpleasant way to spend an afternoon, he supposes. But the sun is setting now, throwing harsh shadows over the valley, as Qingce begins its night time transformation. The mundanity of the village and its scenery becomes monstrous, as if the darkness can strip away centuries of accumulated sand and stone, exposing the village for what it truly is: the ruin of an old god. The ruin guards have yet to be dealt with, Xiao can’t ignore his duty. “I must go,” he says. He’s glad for it. He doesn’t know what he would have said, otherwise.

The bard’s—no, Cecili. Xiao has given him his name, even if he had done so mindlessly. He knows better than most the power names have. Cecili’s smile turns smaller, and Xiao feels the barest hints of bereftness. “Ah, I suppose the work of an Adepti is never done.” He looks… sad, and smaller than he had before. For the first time, Xiao thinks of what it must feel like, to have none of your memories, to know nothing of the world. Freeing, perhaps, in some ways. Terrifying in most others.

“I’ll be back,” he blurts out. He doesn’t know why. Qingce Village is only one corner of Liyue among many others, for all that it used to be something entirely different for him. He is an Adepti, the last of the Yakshas. He has his oath and his duty. For almost 2,000 years, he has not strayed away from this path.

But this bard, who was not scared of slimes or hilichurls, who looks at the world with naivete not even the youngest of children has—who looks at Xiao with those same eyes, as he calls him a hero, interesting, and then short, stupid—also transforms as Qingce does at night time, and… Xiao finds himself wanting to buffet it away, even if just for a moment.

And besides, he comforts himself as Cecili beams at him, there is always the possibility that he is evil and I will have to put him down.

That’s always something he could look forward to.

Possession was a complicated matter, and not as common as some people might believe. Humans are complex creatures, full of thoughts, beliefs, wants, dreams. For any being, even if it is as powerful as a god, to make space for itself inside one is difficult, and the results might vary. It could be as gentle as some bad dreams during the night, or feeling flu-like symptoms during the day. A sense of unease, a creeping dread. For more extreme cases, it might take over completely, but… humans, for all of their fragile bodies, have strong spirits.

Cecili was as good as a blank slate, without his memories. It is not inconceivable that something else might have wormed its way in.

Xiao turns over their interactions in his mind again and again. Despite its rarity, he has come across the odd possession case during the centuries. The humans involved always felt rotten, putrid. The stench of nightmares wafting from their bodies.

Cecili was loud, and annoying, and seemed to lack any shred of common sense, but there was nothing about him that stank. He smells life flowers, Xiao thinks, and immediately scowls. Flowers? What flowers? He doesn’t smell like qingxin, or violetgrass, or even silk flowers. He doesn’t smell like any kind of flower Xiao knows.

What does it matter what he smells like, he snaps at himself and leaps from the ledge of Wangshu Inn, ignoring the look Verr Goldet gives him as he descends. He pretends he doesn’t notice that his legs are carrying him in the direction of Bishui Plains.

“I’ll teach you how to use your Vision.”

Cecili, who was sitting in a tucked away corner next to the waterfall, immersed in a book, jumps in surprise. Xiao tries not to feel smug about it. “Xiao!” he places one hand on his chest. “You scared me! Maybe I should put a bell on you.”

“Give it a try, we can see how it goes,” Xiao bares his teeth at him. It isn’t a very nice look, but despite that, Cecili still laughs.

“Alright, alright, no bells! I think it would look very cute on you, though.”

Xiao flushes. He hates that he keeps doing that in front of this human. “Ridiculous.”

Cecili opens his mouth to reply, no doubt something else completely asinine, when Xiao’s earlier words finally get through to him. “Wait, really?” he asks, excited. “You would teach me?”

“Are you going to continue sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong and exploring ruins full of monsters?”

Cecili laughs sheepishly. “Uh, probably?”

“Then yes.” And it would be a good opportunity to test out exactly what’s wrong with the bard. “Not here, we’re too close to the village.”

“Wait, now?”

“Are you busy?” Xiao asks, with a pointed look at the book. Cecili clutches it to his chest.

“I’ll have you know this is important research!” he declares. “I know this must be shocking, but having no memories is quite a blow to my musical repertoire. I have to come up with so many new songs from scratch. Chang the Ninth lent this to me—it’s quite good, actually, even though I don’t have all the volumes. It’s about this fictional world called Axis Mundi—”

“Yes, I know what it’s about,” Xiao interrupts him. He happens to know for a fact that several characters are based on him, although he isn’t about to share that information with Cecili. The bard might get the idea to start writing songs about him, archons forbid. “Do you want to learn how to use your Vision or not?”

Cecili jumps to his feet, excited. “Yes! The book will wait for a different day, but I can’t pass the opportunity to spend time with my very own Adeptus instructor!”

Xiao looks at him and then, without a word, turns around and starts walking, trusting that Cecili will follow. They end up on a little ledge west from the village, where earlier Xiao made sure to scare away the local treasure hunters. Now, it is quiet and safe, perfect for some Anemo lessons.

“Have you managed to activate it at all?”

“Not at all!” Cecili replies cheerfully. He puts away his lyre and the book behind a rock for safekeeping. “Please give me instructions, Teacher Xiao.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Hmmm…. Xiao-er? Oh! Xiao-Xiao!”

Xiao scowls. “Call me by my name or don’t call me at all, bard.”

Cecili giggles, hiding his laugh behind a hand. “Sorry, sorry, I’ll behave. Please, go on.”

Truthfully, Xiao had very little idea how to instruct someone to operate a Vision. Fighting was one thing—exercises and forms were simple to memorize, and experience would do the rest. But for Xiao, using the power of Anemo has come as an instinct from the moment his Vision manifested in his hands, a rush of possibilities he never knew existed before. Rex Lapis would know how to teach him, he thinks. For some reason, it makes him agitated.

He begins from the basics. ”This,” and he points to his own Vision, and then Cecili’s, “is an Anemo Vision, gifted to us by the Anemo Archon Barbatos.” The name catches in the back of his throat, almost. He can’t remember the last time he has said it. Decades ago, maybe. But Cecili doesn’t notice.

“Barbatos? Oh, the god of Mondstadt! I heard he’s pretty flakey.”

“He prefers to leave humans to govern themselves. He prizes freedom above all else.” Xiao couldn’t presume to know why he does so, and he would never dare to pass judgement. He knows perfectly well what Rex Lapis’ opinion on the wayward archon is, but Xiao can’t help but think there is something very painful in the relationship between Barbatos and the city of wind and song.

“Hmm.” Cecili scrunches his face. He looks like one of the red-tailed weasels that run around Mt. Hulao. “I don’t remember any archons at all.”

“They usually don’t manifest themselves when they give it to you. When an archon recognizes a mortal, a Vision would manifest in front of that person, connected to the elemental affinity of that particular archon.”

“But you aren’t a mortal,” Cecili points out. “Why would Barbatos give a Vision to a Liyue Adeptus?”

Xiao, who has been asking himself this question for more centuries than this bard has been alive for, ignores him. “Once you manage to activate the Vision, it would glow with the energy of Anemo, giving you control over the wind. Watch.” He performs a cycle attack, purposefully slowing his movement to allow Cecili time to observe him. The wind attack tousles the bard’s hair.

“Wow!” Cecili exclaims, clapping his hands. “Very heroic!”

“It wasn’t meant to be—nevermind. Did you see me channeling Anemo power?”

“I think so!”

“Good. Now you try.”

Cecil gives him an alarmed look. “What, just like that? You didn’t explain how to do anything!”

Xiao gives him a slow blink. “I just showed you how to do it. What more do you need?”

Cecili gapes at him. “Ah, could it be that Teacher Xiao is a bad teacher?”

“I’ve never taught anyone before,” Xiao says, a bit defensively. On instinct, he crosses his arms in front of his chest. He hates how this person makes him feel perpetually unbalanced, as if he took a step only to find that the ground in front of him has vanished.

“I see, I see,” Cecili nods his head. He looks serious, but Xiao can tell he’s laughing at him. “Well, I’ll do my best to be a positive experience for first-time Teacher Xiao, then.” He then makes the most pathetic excuse of a lunge Xiao has ever seen. He looks like a kitten who is making his first leap to a taller surface and misses completely, like Cloud Retainer after she has drunk too much wine, like a fish flopping outside of water. “Like this?”

He looks ridiculous, and Xiao can’t help himself: he snorts out a laugh, bringing up one hand to cover his mouth to hide it, but it’s too late—Cecili’s face lights up at the sight.

“I’m going to ignore the fact that you’re laughing at me and just bask in the accomplishment of making you laugh at all!” he declares. “I was that good, huh?”

“It was… adequate,” Xiao tries, but another snort leaves his mouth before he can finish the sentence. Cecili still doesn’t take offense.

“I don’t think I’ve ever even held a weapon before,” he complains, looking at his hands. Xiao gets a flash of a memory of their first meeting, of Cecili’s hand grasping at his wrist, and how even then Xiao could tell his calluses were not caused by instruments of violence. His hand was warm then. He wonders if it would still be warm now, in the chill of the waning sun across the mountain ledge.

“Anemo isn’t necessarily used just for fighting,” Xiao says, although he can’t quite remember seeing it used for other things. It must exist, however. “Let’s just—alright. Have you ever done meditation?”

Over the next ten minutes Xiao discovers that Cecili is absolutely, incredibly, immeasurably archon-awful at meditation. If his body is still, his mouth isn’t. If his mouth is still, his hands aren’t. Xiao noticed before, how his entire body moves as he speaks, as he sings and plays and dances, but he wasn’t quite aware of how unnatural it is to see him try and suppress it, keeping quiet and still. Eventually, Xiao sighs. “Enough.”

“Aw, I’m sure I’m almost there—”

“You really aren’t,” Xiao says dryly. He considers. “Although Visions can be used outside of a battle, perhaps it might still come easier with a weapon. Here.” He materializes a spare polearm, handing it to Cecili. “I will teach you some forms.”

Cecili takes the polearm from him with great trepidation. “Are you sure this is… safe?”

“Of course not. It’s a weapon.”

“Haha, great!” he says, without any enthusiasm in his voice. “And I don’t suppose you know any healing magic…?”

“No. Now concentrate.” He steps behind Cecili, and then—stops. He could show Cecili the forms all he wants, but the bard doesn’t seem to do well with only visual instruction. So the only other option is…

Xiao takes a deep breath, and allows himself to be the closest he has been to another being in decades—he molds himself to Cecili’s back, positioning and repositioning his hands and legs until he can feel Cecili’s muscle strain against his own, struggling to hold this posture. “You aren’t well suited for a polearm,” he says quietly, almost a whisper, and then gets distracted for a moment by the way his breath ruffles the short hairs at the nape of his neck. The scent of the unknown flower is so strong. “Perhaps a sword, or—no, a bow.”

Cecili laughs, but even that seems subdued, as if he can also feel the weight of this moment over Xiao’s back. “I would prefer not to wield any weapon at all, actually.”

Hidden behind him, Xiao allows himself to smile. “Yes, I think that would be best.” He moves with careful care and precision, showing Cecili the way to lunge, the way to guard. He doesn’t expect any of this to be useful to him in a fight, but perhaps just enough for him to feel the way the polearm parts the wind in front of him, the way it moves through the air. For once, Cecili is completely quiet, although not still—Xiao can feel the way he’s breathing deeply, his back moving against Xiao’s chest.

“Now,” he steps away from him, immediately feeling the loss of warmth. “You can feel the wind all around us. The northern winds, coming from Mondstadt. The rising warm air from the valley, now that the night is almost here. And the way the polearm carves through all of it, guiding your way.” He’s barely breathing, he’s so focused on Cecili’s form. “Take all of this with you, and lunge.” He can see Cecili take a deep breath, sees him close his eyes—deadly in a fight, but alright here, where Xiao can keep an eye on him—and then jump forward, the polearm coming with him in a perfect arc. It’s a bit clumsy, but eons better than the previous attempt, and Xiao feels a flicker of satisfaction, of pride.

The Vision remains completely dark. Cecili notices as well.

“Ah, Teacher Xiao, I’m—” he huffs in frustration, perhaps the first time Xiao has seen anything but a positive expression on his face. “I’m sorry. Maybe this was a mistake. Perhaps this Vision never truly belonged to me. If only I could just remember—”

Xiao pushes him off the ledge. He watches as Cecili’s face changes: resignation to shock to anger to—something else. Xiao can’t quite see, in the approaching darkness, but he thinks it’s quite similar to what he has first felt, so very long ago.

Freedom.

That’s what he wished for Cecili to experience: the rush of wind around him, the way it buffets his face, his body, reaching past skin and flesh into bone. Of course, he has no intention of letting him plummet to his death. With a small smile, he jumps after him, accelerating his fall with Anemo to catch up, snatching Cecili’s waist with one hand and materializing his polearm with the other, teleporting both of them the short remaining distance to the ground. Of that brief second, he will later remember two things:

One, the way his own Vision reacted, as it touches Cecili’s skin—the way his entire body buzzed with energy, almost overloading his teleportation and sending them hurling over the edge once more.

Two, the way Cecili looked as he caught him: the entire galaxy above them reflected in his green eyes.

The next time he sees him, Cecili is standing in the village center near the mill, deep in conversation with one of the villagers. Before Xiao can make his escape, however, the bard notices him and waves to him excitedly, calling his name. Seeing the villager looking around in confusion, Xiao sighs and walks closer. “Xiao!” Cecili beams at him. “You came back! I was afraid I was such a terrible student that you had washed your hands entirely clean of my business.”

“I said I would,” Xiao says.

“You did, you did,” Cecili nods his head. Does he ever get tired of smiling? Xiao’s facial muscles ache at the thought.

The woman recovers fast. Xiao, who was prepared for hours of simpering and requests for wish granting (honestly, where did humans even get the idea that Adepti can fulfill wishes? Preposterous), is taken aback when she just smiles at him in greeting. “Ah, you must be xiao-Li’s friend. He speaks of you a lot.”

Xiao-Li? Before he can ask, Cecili intervenes, his face red. “Ah, Ms. Bai, let me introduce you. This is Adeptus Xiao. Xiao, this is Ms. Bai—the most incredible cook in all of Liyue!” He punctuates the declaration with a little thrum of his lyre.

Ms. Bai laughs. “You’re such a shameless flirt, xiao-Li. Honestly, as if you remember meeting any other cook in Liyue, or anywhere else for the matter.”

Cecili’s eyes twinkle at her mischievously. “I don’t have to remember to know that. The knowledge is ingrained right here.” He points at his chest.

“Your heart or your stomach?”

“Yes!”

Ms. Bai laughs again, ruffling his hair. It looks… very soft. “Like I said, such a flirt. No wonder you were even able to charm an Adeptus!”

Xiao stays silent. He wants to protest that he wasn’t charmed, but finds to his dismay that he doesn’t really have any convincing counterarguments. Better to stay quiet. He never really knows how to talk to humans, anyway.

“Ah, Xiao is just indulging me,” Cecili sighs, and slings an arm around Xiao’s shoulder. Xiao stiffens immediately. “Truly, he’s too nice.”

“Well, maybe he’s nice enough to keep you company while you go picking those herbs for me,” Ms. Bai says, and pushes a basket at Cecili’s direction.

Cecili pulls a face. “Aw, c’mon Ms. Bai. I can’t make a feared Adepti accompany me to gather herbs!”

“And yesterday you promised xiao-Liu to make flower crowns with her, and the day before that you were fixing your lyre, and the day before that it was raining and your constitution is weak—” Ms. Bai details Cecili’s laziness with an amused air around her. Xiao can’t imagine any of the Adepti being so lax—ah, no. She does remind him of Madam Ping, somewhat.

Cecili sighs, dropping his arm and taking the basket. “Alright, alright! Gathering herbs it is!” He throws Xiao a sidelong glance. “I don’t suppose you would like to accompany me, Teacher Xiao?”

Despite every instinct in his body to say no, Xiao finds himself nodding in agreement. He tells himself he must keep an eye on this strange bard. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with the rush he feels at seeing Cecili smile.

The banks of the river bisecting Qingce are bountiful with glazed lilies, mints, and juyun chilis. Cecili keeps a running commentary as they work: one would think that a bard with no memories would have little stories to tell, but Cecili seems to soak up tales like an Anemo slime, and even the most mundane of those transforms in his words, becoming important, fantastical. The gossip of a sleepy little village like Qingce has no right to sound so riveting, but as Xiao listens to Cecili tell of xiao-Liu’s father the Millielith, of Uncle Ghast’s ghost stories, of Hanfeng’s son and the business he has in Liyue Harbour—faces that Xiao has always deemed inconsequential grow solid and colorful, brought to life in Cecili’s melodious voice.

“You care for them,” Xiao says when Cecili finally stops to breathe.

“The herbs?” Cecili asks, looking at the glazed lilly he just pulled from the ground. “Not really. I guess it’s pretty?”

Xiao rolls his eyes. “Those people. The villagers.”

“Oh!” Cecili laughs, placing the flower in the basket and scratching at his cheek. “Yes, of course. They’ve been very kind to me. I truly don’t know where I would have ended up if they haven’t taken me in.”

Probably dead, Xiao thinks. Outloud, he takes the opportunity to ask: “Do you really not remember anything?”

Cecili hums in thought. “Not… anything,” he says slowly, as if testing the words in his mouth. “It’s very strange. I clearly remember language, and concepts like family, countries, cities, and so on, even as I don’t remember my own family, country, or city. I remember how to sing and play, but I don’t remember any songs. I know what an ocean or a lake is, but I don’t remember ever seeing them.”

“You remembered your name.”

“I… remembered two names, actually.” For the first time since he has known him, Cecili looks uncomfortable. He crouches down amongst the flowers, making as if he’s searching for herbs, but Xiao knows what avoiding looking at something looks like. “Cecili was one. Vennessa was the other.”

“Vennessa?” Another Mondstadt name… Cecili was definitely not from Liyue.

“Hmm,” Cecili nods, still not looking at Xiao. Above them, a passing cloud obscures the sun, casting everything around them in shadow. “I assumed it wasn’t mine, but frankly I don’t even know that either of those names belong to me. Surely those people, whoever they are, were important enough for me to remember their names, but… what does it say about them that I don’t remember anything else? What does it say about me?”

For Xiao, memory is a capricious thing. He remembers his name, his vows. He remembers his past, his fallen comrades. Above all else, he remembers Rex Lapis, and all that he is to him. But human names, human faces… they’re so fickle, so transient. If he tried to remember all their names, he would have broken a long time ago.

Rex Lapis once asked him if he loved the humans he protected. Xiao had answered that he loved them, but he didn’t know how to live with them. He still doesn’t.

“Isn’t it enough that you remember their names?” he asks. “As long as you remember their names, a trace of them remains in this world. They will forever be linked to you.”

Cecili looks up at him. The shade from the cloud colors his eyes darker, deeper. “Do you really think so?”

Xiao looks away. “Sometimes names are all a person has.”

“Is that all you have? Your name?”

Xiao doesn’t want to answer that. Xiao doesn’t know what the answer to that even is. He has his duty and his contract. He has his polearm. He has a room in Wangshu Inn, he has the memories of his dead comrades. He has a god. Compared to all of that, what importance does his name even have?

Cecili must read some of it on his face, because he retreats. “Ah, my apologies, I shouldn’t have pried. You’ve shared enough of yourself already.”

Has he? Suddenly, he’s desperate to know what Cecili thinks he has shared, what he saw when he looked at Xiao and talked to him and touched him, the way no human has dared in centuries. What secrets did Xiao unknowingly spill to this man, who shouldn't have meant anything to him?

“My name was given to me by the Geo Archon,” he says, a secret knowingly given. “When he saved me from my previous master. It was his way of protecting me.”

Cecili’s eyes go wide. “Previous master?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Xiao dismisses him, not rudely but blunt. He doesn’t have the words to speak of his previous life, not yet. Perhaps not ever. “Rex Lapis told me that in the fables of another world, the name Xiao is that of a spirit who encountered great suffering and hardship. By giving me this name, he was freeing me from my past.”

“Freedom, huh?” Cecili murmurs. The cloud above them drifts along, slowly revealing the sun again, but even in its light the bard looks older, weary. “Is this what this is? Not having my memories—is that freedom?” He’s worrying the grass between his fingers, tearing out some of it in absentmindedness. A stray lock of hair falls in his face, although he doesn’t seem to notice. Xiao’s hand twitches in desire to tuck it away.

“For some, it might be,” Xiao says, echoing his earlier thoughts. “Do you think that’s what freedom means for you, Cecili?”

The bard lets out a small, wry laugh. “What do I know of freedom,” he says, and watches as the grass blades drift away in the wind.

Xiao can’t remember when he started to leave apples at the abandoned shrine to the west of Qingce. It must have been—a very long time ago. Enough for several generations of villagers to have come and gone. Nowadays, they probably have no idea what the apples mean or where they come from, although they know better than to touch them.

Cecili knows no such thing, of course, which is why the next time Xiao swings by the village he sees him sitting on the altar, munching on one of the offerings.

“This isn’t for you.”

Disappointingly, he doesn’t manage to surprise him this time. “Xiao!” Cecili beams through a mouthful of apple. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

Xiao, who has never given him a schedule to expect him by, gives him a stern look. “The apple. Drop it.”

“This?” Cecili looks down at the apple he’s holding. Looking closely, Xiao can see that two have already been consumed by him. His eyebrow twitches.

“It’s not for you,” he repeats.

“It’s not for anyone, as far as I can tell,” Cecili retorts. “This shrine is totally abandoned except for those creepy statues and—what did you call them? Amber rocks?”

“Just because you don’t know something doesn’t mean it isn’t there, bard,” Xiao says. “Drop. The apple.”

Rolling his eyes impertinently, Cecili does as he asks, and drops the half-eaten apple directly on the altar. “There. Happy?”

“No.”

Cecili snorts, surprised. “You know, no one would believe me if I told them you have a sense of humor.”

“Good. They shouldn’t believe lies.”

“You’re so quick to deny all of my compliments!” Cecili complains, jumping down from the altar and wiping his hands on his pants. Disgusting. “Is it so hard to believe I find your company very pleasant?”

“I threw you off a cliff,” Xiao says, deadpanned.

“Eh, it was fun,” Cecili shrugs. “Please don’t do it again today, though. I’m wearing Auntie Yundan’s niece’s best set of clothes.” Looking closer, Xiao can tell his clothes are better quality than his usual farmer garb—still green, but with flashes of blue, a hint of embroidery on the sleeves. He looks like a proper Liyue boy.

Cecili notices him looking, and smiles mischievously. “Do you like it?” he asks, twirling to show it off.

“I don’t have any opinions about clothes.” He does like it. He never knew he could like clothes before, but Cecili looks softer in those clothes: just as approachable, maybe, but less wild, less in disarray. Like he has never suffered for a moment in his life. And even if that’s not true, it’s nice to believe in the fantasy, for even just a moment.

The bard pouts at him. The expression should look ridiculous on him, but it doesn’t. “Liar. I look really cute.”

Xiao is desperate for a subject change. “Why are you wearing them?”

“Oh! Auntie Yundan says that a bard should look nicer than a man rolling around in the fields all day. I told her that was what I do most of the time, but she wouldn’t listen. She’s so stubborn! But really nice, too. She makes this amazing Jueyun Guoba she learnt from Ms. Bai, says it’s her brother’s favorite. Her brother is one of the Liyue Qingxin, you know! And her niece works for them as well. She’s very proud, talks about her all the time. She said she wouldn’t mind if I wore her spare set of clothes.” He says all of this in one breath, somehow. Xiao struggles to follow. “Oh, actually! She mentions she works with an Adeptus? The Adeptus that works in the Harbour, I mean.”

Ah. “Ganyu.”

“Hmm, maybe! She didn’t mention a name.” Cecili peers at him. “A friend of yours?”

Xiao… doesn’t know if he would call them friends. “An old acquaintance. She’s very competent.”

Cecili’s eyebrows shot upwards. “High praise, coming from you. Definitely a friend, then.”

As is becoming a habit for him, Xiao ignores him. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Your question—oh, the clothes! I thought I answered?”

“You said you were told to wear them. You didn’t say why you chose to wear them,” he says, a bit awkward. He is still getting used to those mundane conversations, their push and pull.

Cecili looks at him, puzzled. “Is that not the same…? Ohhhhhhhh.” A dawning look of realization comes across his face. “Is this about the freedom thing? Xiao, are you trying to teach me what freedom is?” His voice turns is both incredulous and teasing.

Abruptly, Xiao feels absolutely done with this conversation. He huffs, turning away, only to be stopped once more by Cecili grabbing his wrist, a strange parallel to their first meeting. This time, he doesn’t shake him off. “Noooo, don’t go! I need your help.”

Xiao stills at that, and then turns back around, his eyes assessing and focused. “Are you hurt? What happened?”

“Wh—nothing happened. I need your help writing a song.” Cecili gives him a much more judgemental look than Xiao thinks he deserves from someone who used to not know what a slime or a hilichurl is. “Is your first thought always that of a crisis happening? That seems a bit paranoid to me.”

Now Xiao wrenches his wrist away to cross his arms, ignoring the tingling aftereffects on the skin of his wrist. “Is that how you’re trying to get me to help you.”

Cecili waves his hands in denial. “No, no, I’ll be nice! But I really would like your help.”

“I’m not a poet.”

“I don’t need you to be! I just—You know how I don’t have any memories, right?”

In the driest voice he can manage, Xiao says: “I’ve noticed.”

“Right! Writing songs without any memories is really hard. Like, really really hard. The villagers have been trying to help—Ms. Bai knows some raunchy sea ballads, if you can believe that!—but even their repertoire is lacking. And then I thought: Xiao lived for thousands of years, he must know some incredible songs and ballads and tales! And if he would be so kind as to share some with this lowly bard…” he says, fluttering his eyelashes at Xiao. “Please?”

Xiao sighs. He can already feel himself relenting, and although he should probably put up at least a little bit of a fight, he finds himself reluctant to do so. It’s only Cecili. Who would he fool? “I don’t know many songs.”

“But you know some?”

“Most of what I know is suitable for the flute, not a lyre,” he says, looking at Cecili’s instrument. He really should examine it closely at some point. If Cecili really is possessed…

The thought gives him pause. He hadn’t been investigating that at all, has he?

“Ah, I’m sure it will be easy enough to convert it,” Cecili waves him off, not noticing Xiao’s brief lapse of concentration. “Would you teach me one?” He leans closer to Xiao, and once more he can smell that strange floral scent, the one that doesn’t belong in Liyue, doesn’t belong to anything Xiao has ever known.

On impulse, he says: “Glaze lilies are almost extinct, these days.”

The bard blinks, nonplussed by the strange change in subject. “There are plenty in the terraces…?”

“They used to grow in the wild. The banks of Luhua Pool were covered in them.” If he closes his eyes, Xiao could almost see the fields of flowers, swaying gently in the breeze as he walked amongst them with Rex Lapis, listening to the archon talk of whatever caught his fancy that day. “We would sing to them, to help them grow. Now they only grow with careful cultivation, and only in tended gardens.”

Cecili’s voice is somber as he asks: “Will you teach me?”

Xiao’s voice is raspy, his fingers on the flute are clumsy. He has not played this song for almost 200 years now, and time has taken its toll as it always does. And yet Cecili’s eyes don’t waver from him as he plays for the flowers and the wind.

In gratitude, Cecili insists on taking him on a tour of the village. Xiao points out he has been there more times than a human could count, that he knows every peak and crevice, but Cecili isn’t convinced. “But you don’t know it as it comes alive,” he insists. “Let me show you.” He takes his hand in his, despite the heat and the sweat. Xiao flexes his fingers in his grasp, testing it, but Cecili holds on, and Xiao lets him.

He re-introduces him to Ms. Bai. He parades him in front of the grannies, the aunties. The bookseller almost faints when he meets him, and is so flustered when he asks him to sign several copies of Yakshas: The Guardian Adepti, which Xiao only does when Cecili pouts at him. He feels ridiculous as he does so, but it makes Cecili beam at him. He feels as light as a leaf.

The old blacksmith is fascinated by his polearm. He spends several minutes asking Xiao about its origin, its make. It was gifted to Xiao a very long time ago, and its long reach and unique shape favors attack over defense. Cecili seems entirely bored by the technical aspects, but he perks up attentively as Xiao explains: the Deathmatch was originally a gladiator’s weapon, perhaps from a bygone area in Mondstadt. “A tip stained red by the blood of his numerous enemies, huh…” Cecili muses, his fingers gliding over the weapon. Xiao has to bite his lips to keep himself from telling him to be careful. “Must have been quite a warrior that brought him to his death!”

The air in the valley stands still around them, but every once in a while there is a cooling breeze coming from the Stone Gate, from Mondstadt. The flowers of the terraces sway with it every so slightly, and their fragrance rises through the air, drowning the village in their scent. Xiao and Cecili make their way through hanging laundry, discarded furniture, the marks of living humans. They are stopped by almost every villager they see, Cecili’s popularity not waning. They ask him if he’s eaten, if he’s tried this or that dish. Whether he’s too warm in his clothes, maybe he would like to try this shirt that they have found in their closet and have no use for? Or perhaps this robe might feel more airy, cooler? A cold drink might help, too! Cecili thanks them all with a laugh, with a smile, a short tune on his lyre—but he always makes his way back to Xiao’s side, takes his hand in his again, leads him on.

Xiao remembers a time where Qingce Village wasn’t just a retirement spot for the elderly of Liyue, but the bustling textile of the world. In slow, measured words, he tells Cecili about it: how the watermill used to be the main warehouse, where they would weave the fabrics. How they used dye made from the crushed flowers of the terraces to create brilliant colors, unlike anything else in Teyvat. Merchants would travel for weeks for the chance to haggle for stock, and the valley was busy, prosperous.

“Nothing of that remains here,” Cecili says, awed. “No one else remembers it.”

“I do. I remember all of it.”

The village is quiet without the children around. Cecili tells him they were taken on a rare trip to the Harbour, that they haven’t stopped talking about it for weeks. Qingce is so small, so remote. Liyue Harbour must be dazzling to a child. “I would like to visit it someday too,” Cecili confides in him. “From everyone’s descriptions it sounds incredible.” Xiao hasn’t stepped foot in the city for years, never had a desire to before, but it blossoms inside of him now: to see the light of the lanterns reflected in Cecili’s eyes, to see him taste new food, hear new songs, re-learn what the world outside looks like.

Because throughout the day, Xiao understands: the world through Cecili’s eyes isn’t mundane, but spectacular, astounding. The views that Xiao has long since gotten used to are repainted, polished anew. Cecili keeps to his promise: he shows him what it means for a village to be alive.

Eventually, as night falls, they sit down on the bridge overlooking a small waterfall, their legs dangling above the water. The bridge is wide enough that they don’t restrict people’s passage, but they still sit close to each other under the pretense of accessibility. The sweat on Xiao’s body slowly cools down in the night’s breeze.

“This was fun, wasn’t it?” Cecili says. “Probably much better than having to deal with some slimes or hilichurls.”

“It’s my job,” Xiao says, although he doesn't refute it. Before today, he didn’t even know he could have fun. “You would know what it means if you had one.”

Cecili goes quiet. At first, Xiao thinks he’s merely tired of their day, but when he looks over he sees him staring out into the distance, a vacant look in his eyes. He looks deflated. “Cecili?”

“I don’t have any jobs. I don’t remember even having any jobs.”

“Yes…” Xiao nods, slowly. “You don’t have your memories.”

“No, I mean—” he huffs, looking down. “I’m worried you’ll get bored,” Cecili confesses. All around them, night has fallen, and the cicadas come alive, filling the darkness with their strange sounds. Again, what should be dull becomes alien, otherworldly.

“Bored?”

“All I can tell you are other people's stories. I don’t have any of my own.”

“I haven’t told you anything about myself either. You still haven’t left me alone.”

Cecili laughs. Sometime during the day, he has folded back his sleeves, surrendering to the sun’s heat. Now his skin pebbles against the cool breeze. “You have no idea how full you are, do you?” he asks, affection in his voice. “Of stories, thoughts, ideas. And you share them with me: little observations and remarks, careless things. I hoard them all inside the empty space in me.”

If Xiao could joke, he would say the ruins of Guili Plains are like a second home for him. But Xiao doesn't joke, and Xiao doesn't have a first home, much less a second one. Guili Plains are… comfortable, in a way few things in his life are. They are mostly always empty of humans, and he can kill whatever is in there and know he is fulfilling his duty. For so long, this was the closest he got to a feeling of contentment.

But as he’s evading the attacks of a lone ruin hunter, he finds himself distracted, his thoughts occupied. Instead of thinking of the next move, the next thrust, the next attack, he thinks of slender fingers thrumming on a lyre, wind-swept black-blue hair, wide green eyes, the smell of flowers. He thinks of the sound of laughter being carried on the wind.

First, Cecili was inconsequential. Then, he was an enigma, and then a potential threat. Now Xiao has spent an entire afternoon with him without even once testing his abilities or true intentions, and he’s none of those things. Xiao doesn’t know what else is there.

Rex Lapis would know, he thinks, but the thought of talking to his archon about his… feelings is utterly mortifying, impossible to conceive of. Likewise with any of the other Adepti. Madam Ping—maybe. But Xiao knows for a fact she’s a terrible gossip. He would rather die than have to face Moon Carver’s derision over his attachment to humans. He doesn’t know how Ganyu does it.

He should stop going to Qingce. If something goes wrong, surely he would feel it enough in advance to do something about it. He doesn’t need to monitor the bard constantly, couldn’t even if he wanted to. There is nothing for Xiao there, nothing—

Cecili’s eyes, as he watched Xiao fight. Cecili’s hands, masterfully playing an ancient song he has only heard once. His voice, as he asked Xiao what does it say about me? Back then, Xiao didn’t know the answer. He thinks he does now.

It says you’re a kind person, he imagines himself saying, but can’t quite picture it. Speaking beautiful words, offering comfort—none of it is familiar to Xiao. Maybe there’s nothing for Xiao in Qingce, but even if there was, what good was he for it? What did Xiao ever have that he hasn’t seen destroyed around him?

With one last thrust, the Ruin Hunter falls to the ground, unmoving. Xiao should feel accomplished. Should feel relieved.

He feels lonely.

He goes back to Qingce. He goes back to the shrine, thinking he might find Cecili there, but instead he’s accosted by a small child who looks at him with big brown eyes.

“You’re him!”

Xiao looks around, but there’s no one there but himself. “Me?”

“The pretty brother Adeptus!” She launches herself at Xiao. He could dodge her, but human children are so small and fragile—he’s afraid she will hurt herself. Resigned to his fate, he lets her grab his legs. “I finally found you again!”

From behind him, he hears the leaves crunch as Cecili comes around, looking amused. “Xiao-Luo, what are you doing?”

“Big brother, it’s him! The handsome Adeptus who saved my dolls from the hilichurls,” she says, looking up at Xiao with wonder. “You’re my hero.”

“Ah,” Cecili says. When Xiao looks back at him, he can tell the bard is barely smothering a laugh. “A dashing, handsome hero.”

“Yes!” she nods rapidly. “I’ve always wanted to thank you, Mr. Adeptus!”

“You’re welcome,” Xiao says, awkward. He does not require gratitude from humans, nor does he want it, but he also doesn’t want to make a little girl start crying on him. He can already tell Cecili will never stop laughing about it.

Cecili crouches next to the girl, putting a hand on her shoulders. “The nice, handsome Adeptus is my hero as well,” he tells her very seriously. “He saved me from some hilichurls once.”

You weren’t even close to those hilichurls, and I only saved you from your own stupidity, Xiao wants to insist, but keeps quiet in front of the girl. If possible, her eyes grow even wider.

“A real hero…” she mumbles. “Like in all of your stories, big brother!”

“Xiao is a huge inspiration to my works,” Cecili agrees. When Xiao gives him a sharp look at that—this is certainly the first time he has heard of this—Cecili has the nerve to smile at him innocently.

“I told you once already. I’m not a hero.”

“That’s what all the heroes say,” Cecili replies. “Well, all the proper ones, anyway.”

The girl takes some convincing, but eventually she leaves them alone, and Cecili leads the way back to the abandoned shrine. “I’ve grown to like this place,” he says. “The view is quite nice. And there is something about those statues...” he trails off.

“I hope you haven’t been eating the apples,” Xiao says, even as he sees five whole apples, entirely untouched. Cecili must have replaced the ones he took previously.

“Yes, yes,” Cecili waves him off. “Who are they offerings to, anyway?”

“Barbatos,” Xiao says, before biting his lip. But the damage is already done.

“The archon of Mondstadt again! He keeps popping up in our conversations, you know.”

“You’re from Mondstadt. Most likely that you used to worship him.”

Cecili pulls a face. “I hope not, I don’t think I like archons much.” He eyes Xiao. “Uh, no offense.”

Xiao snorts. It comes easier and easier to him, those involuntary noises and reactions. “You said you liked the view here, right?”

“Uh, yeah?”

On impulse, Xiao grabs him around the waist, and teleports them up, up, up. They go higher and higher, Cecili clutching at Xiao’s body first in surprise, then in fear, and then in something else, a line of warmth against him. Once they finally reach the top, Xiao lets go, but Cecili lingers for a moment, leaning in against his body. He sighs ever so slightly, his eyes still closed. Then, after a moment he steps away from Xiao, and opens his eyes.

The pool at the top is silent, undisturbed by their arrivals. The six statues stand guard as they always do, unmoving. Below them, the entire valley of Qingce Village stretches out. Beyond that, Liyue to the east, Mondstadt to the north, Dragonspine to the west. Everything feels muted, so high up, except for the wind, stronger than ever, carrying the smell of qingxin on its wings.

Xiao found this place eons ago, before he was a Yaksha, or an Adeptus. Before he was Xiao. He hadn’t been back in a very long time. But looking at Cecili’s awe-struck face as he takes the view, as he stretches his arms far and wide to feel the wind buffeting his entire body—he can’t regret it.

“Wow,” Cecili finally says, his voice breathless. “This place is incredible.” He points at the pool. “And look! More of those statues and amber things. I wonder what it means…”

Xiao wants to change the subject very quickly. “It’s the highest you can go in Liyue outside of Jueyun Karst. I… It’s easier for me, the higher I am.” Quieter, so far away from humans. So far away from those old, caged gods, writhing beneath the earth.

Cecili smiles at him. It’s different from his other smiles—Xiao hasn’t even noticed that he’s been cataloguing them, but he can tell. Less unrestrained, but no less sincere. Simply careful in its affection. “Thank you for sharing it with me.”

Suddenly feeling a bit warm, Xiao coughs, averting his gaze. He turns his attention to the landscape, pointing out Dragonspine, the city of Mondstadt, Starsnatch cliff. It’s Cecili who points at a spot further up north. “What’s that?”

“Stormterror Lair.” Xiao has never been outside of Liyue, but he has heard the stories. Has even heard the most recent rumors, courtesy of the gossip in Wangshu Inn. “It’s where Old Mondstadt used to be, under the rule of the tyrannical Anemo Archon Decarabian. During the Archon Wars Barbatos helped lead a revolt against his reign, which devastated the city. It then relocated to the west of Cider Lake.”

“Old Mondstadt…” Cecili’s voice is strange enough that Xiao turns to look at him. The bard, so often colored with warm tones of earth and green, looks distant, cold. His eyes are vacant, and for a moment Xiao can swear that he sees the light of Stormterror Lair reflected back at him. But then Cecili blinks, and the moment is gone. He smiles as if nothing happened. “That must have been quite the story! I would like to hear some of the ballads…” He goes to sit by the edge, his legs dangling over, and Xiao has the strangest urge to grab onto him, keep him from falling.

Xiao averts his eyes and shrugs. He doesn’t know any of them. Cecili looks up at him, curious. “Have you ever met him?”

“Who?”

He waves in the vague direction of Mondstadt. “The Anemo Archon. Barbatos.”

Instinctively, Xiao’s hand falls down to rest on his Vision. “No.”

Cecili’s eyes, sharp as always, don’t miss his movement. “Surely you must have. Uncle Ghast has some fantastic stories—and I’ve heard the Geo Archon and the Anemo Archon were allies, during the wars.”

Allies? “Barbatos was barely involved in the wars beyond his skirmish with Decarabian. The Geo Archon… Respects him, in his own way. But they aren’t allies.”

“Hmm…” Cecili taps his chin. “And you? What must the last Yaksha think of a god who abandoned his duty?”

It doesn’t surprise Xiao to hear Cecili refer to him as such. Despite his best efforts, his reputation precedes him. He’s more surprised he hasn’t brought it up until then. “It isn’t my place to question the archons.”

Predictably, that doesn’t quite satisfy the other. “Aw, come on! I promise I won’t tell him,” he says, pouting. “You can just tell me, I don’t matter.”

The notion that Cecili—Cecili, who hasn’t left his mind since he met him, who made Xiao think and laugh and talk as he hasn’t in decades—doesn’t matter, is so absurd that Xiao finds himself answering truthfully: “I admire him.”

“Admire him? Everyone calls him lazy and irresponsible.”

“He always comes back when Mondstadt needs him,” Xiao points out. “And… he’s dedicated.”

“To Mondstadt?”

“To freedom. To the freedom he gives himself, and the freedom he gives others.” To the people of Old Mondstast, first. To the people of Mondstadt from then on. To the four winds. To Xiao.

Cecili hums in thought. He leans forward, his hands crossed on his knees, his back bowed. He looks so small like this, and not for the first time, Xiao wonders at the person he used to be. Were they at all similar to the man who sits in front of him now? “Did he… give you yours?”

Xiao freezes. “What.” How could he have—

Cecili points to his Vision. “This, I mean.”

Ah. Right. Xiao swallows. “In a way, I suppose,” he allows. “He doesn’t even know who I am.”

“His loss!” Cecili declares. He stretches his neck—long, and graceful, how did Xiao never notice?—to look up at Xiao, face beaming. “I don’t have my memories, I know, so maybe this doesn’t mean much, but... I can still tell—meeting you was miraculous.”

Preposterous. Ridiculous. Utterly—Xiao flushes and looks away. “No one…” he starts, but then trails off, unsure how to finish the thought.

“Hmm?”

“No one has ever thought so, before.”

“No one?” His tone is so incredulous that Xiao almost feels defensive, crossing his arms over his chest.

“I usually show up when people are dying.”

“That’s still pretty miraculous,” Cecili mutters, and then backtracks when he sees Xiao’s glare. “Nevermind, nevermind. Augh, why are you still so far away? Come, come sit down with me. The wind feels so good.” Xiao can do nothing else but comply, sitting down next to Cecili, letting his legs dangle over the edge next to his.

“I don’t get it, though. You’ve lived for so long—don’t you have any friends?” he asks.

“The other Yakshas are all dead. The Adepti are secluded. Rex Lapis and Ganyu might be content to surround themselves with humans, but I’m better on my own.”

“I don’t think there is a single person out there who is better on their own,” Cecili murmurs. He sighs, and his head comes down to rest on Xiao’s shoulder. “Is this alright?”

Xiao swallows. “Yes.”

“There is an emptiness in me.” Xiao can’t see Cecili’s eyes like this, only the top of his head, the flyaway hairs there, but he can imagine them: deep, almost cavernous. “Sometimes I can almost hear it howling, like a violent wind tearing through an empty canyon. I can imagine the sound, even though I have no idea where I would have heard it, and it sounds like that. The other villagers… it’s nice to listen to them. They have so many stories to tell, and the chatter drowns it out, turns it into background noise.”

If Xiao was thinking straight, he would be cataloguing what Cecili was saying, calculating how likely it is that this was a sign of possession, that he was hearing the cries of an old god. But Cecili’s hair is so soft against his chin.

“It’s nice,” Cecili repeats, almost as if he’s trying to convince himself. “But I meant it when I said meeting you was miraculous, staggering. When I’m with you the sound isn’t just muted. It’s completely gone.” He sighs again. Xiao can feel his ribcage contracting. “It feels like I’m in a freefall.”

“Isn’t that scary?” Xiao can’t help but ask.

Cecili laughs. Xiao wants to see his face, but he doesn’t want him to move. Wants to stay like this, with Cecili leaning on him, just a little bit longer. He wants to touch his hair, to see if it’s as soft against his fingers as it is against his shoulder. He wants so much. “Freefalling isn’t scary. Isn’t that the first thing you taught me?”

He wants to kiss him.

Xiao thinks about kissing. He has never thought of kissing before, but now the thought won’t leave his mind, like a particularly stubborn xiao lantern clinging to a stray branch. He has seen humans kiss: at weddings and funerals, out on the street, in secluded spots. It comes to them as easily as breathing.

Xiao doesn’t know if Adepti… kiss. The thought of asking Cloud Retainer or, archon-forbid, Mountain Shaper is mortifying. But—Ganyu exists. Half-Qilin, half-human. Surely—

He shakes his head violently. He’s perched on the top of Wangshu Inn, as high as he can be. He wasn’t lying when he told Cecili the height helps him thinks, focus. He’s at his best with wind tousling his hair, with his feet as far away from the ground as possible. But it seems even here it’s impossible not to think of Cecili’s hair, eyes, lips. A flash of a long neck, smooth legs as they dangled above Qingce Village. If Xiao had kissed him then, with the entire world spread below them, would he have turned his gaze away?

Enough. Enough. This is ridiculous, embarrassing, insane. Xiao doesn’t do this. Xiao doesn’t spend time with mortals, care for them, think about kissing them. He carries an enormous karmic debt on his shoulders, one he can’t afford to ever share with another. Cecili is… kind, and interesting, and so beautiful Xiao can’t look away, but he’s only a human. Xiao has been too careless already, spending this time with him. Becoming attached. It can’t—It can’t be allowed to continue.

What does his loneliness matter, if it leads to more death, to destruction? Xiao once had a place he called his home, people he called his family. And he was forced to slaughter them, one by one. The thought of Cecili—lovely, carefree Cecili, who treats the mundanity of Qingce Village like the greatest of adventures, who looks at Xiao without censor or hate, who says he doesn’t know what freedom is but is the freest person Xiao knows—the thought of this person lying dead at his feet, makes him feel ill, as if he consumed an entire century worth of nightmares.

Time isn’t cyclical like humans love to think, but there are things that are constant. Xiao is meant to be alone. This is how it must be.

Decision made, he stands up, preparing to jump, but before he can a curious presence makes itself known on the balcony below him. Human, yes, but also not. Young, but feeling somewhat ancient. It carries a sigil of permission, of all things, and based on the snatches of conversation he can hear, looking for him.

He jumps down. There is a young woman, standing next to the edge of the balcony. Slight, shorter than Xiao but with a presence to her that almost knocks him back once he gets close enough. Big, gold eyes snap right to him as he makes himself known.

“To the blind, everything may not be as it appears... A Sigil of Permission? You came prepared.” Next to the woman is a weird… elf—imp—creature. Xiao stretches his senses, but he can’t sense any malevolence coming from it, and so dismisses it entirely from his mind. He focuses back on the woman. “Though this only prevents me from hurting you myself. Doesn't stop you from getting hurt in other ways.”

“Uhh… Paimon doesn’t get it…” the thing says.

“Too much contact with our world is breaking the rules. Mortal souls are not as robust as those of Adepti, nor can your blood carry this level of adeptal energy. It's for your own good. Leave. Now.” It’s as if saying the words out loud hardens his resolve. It is true for Cecili just as much as this stranger.

He doesn’t give the duo another glance as he vanishes from sight.

They prove to be persistent.

“It's your favorite, Almond Tofu! As well as this distant traveler's best dish — a Satisfying Salad.”

It’s been… a very long time, since he has last had Almond Tofu. The salad he ignores, but the dessert… he would take. And—distant traveler? Could this be the person involved in the whole affair with D’valin Xiao has only heard whispers of?

“Traveler! Quick! Tell him everything before he finishes eating!” He only half pays attention as she talks, too immersed in the taste of the dish on his tongue, right until the moment she says:

“Rex Lapis is dead.”

That is—impossible. Inconceivable. The sky is blue and the grass is green and the Geo Archon is everlasting. A dead Rex Lapis is—is—the death of the world Xiao has known. Unable to think, his mouth moves on its own: “Rex Lapis... How could this be? I... can't imagine it. Though times have changed, I've never imagined a Liyue without him.” And, because Xiao is Xiao, and he will never not think in terms of threats and dangers: “The ruling Qixing... Just what role have they played in this?”

The traveler looks at him intently. Xiao can’t read her at all. “Will the Adepti take over his role in Liyue?”

The thought that anyone could replace what Rex Lapis is—was to Liyue is laughable. “Adepti do not turn on their responsibilities. I have my reasons to not want to be tainted by the mortal realm, but... responsibilities are responsibilities.” If he had it in him, he would say the next sentence with a wry twist to his mouth, but he can’t, he can’t, he can’t. “Our god is the God of Contracts after all.”

They ask him about Dusky Ming. Xiao doesn’t want to be there, doesn’t want to be answering their questions, but he owes them courtesy for giving him the news. So he tells them of a lost spirit, and a favor asked of a kind human. The imp seems impressed, and the traveler’s expression changes as she looks at him. She smiles, something small and kind.

Rex Lapis is dead.

He desperately wants to see Cecili. Could it be that only hours before he had thought of kissing him? That only hours before that they’ve spent an afternoon on the peak of Qingce, with Cecili strumming on his lyre as he made up stories about far off lands? Already his conviction to stay away from the bard is crumbling, battered by this one sentence. Rex Lapis is dead.

What good was Xiao to a world that did not have the Geo Archon in it?

He does not go to see Cecili. Instead, as he told the traveler and her companion, he goes to confer with his fellow Adepti, the first time all of them have gathered in one place since the last rise of an old god. Maybe it should be comforting, to see them as lost as he is. It isn’t.

Morax—the Geo Archon was Xiao’s saviour, the ideal to which he has always strived. To lose him is to be a sailor under a suddenly starless sky, a complete disorientation of the world. Xiao had resented his first master, and had loved his second one. He doesn’t know how to exist without one at all.

Barbatos would be disappointed, the inane thought comes to him as he listens to the other Adepti bicker and argue. And then, as if a follow up: Cecili would be disappointed, too. Wasn’t it Xiao who was spouting all those pretty words about freedom? Teacher Xiao, he can almost hear him saying, you must lead by example!

He wants to hear him say it. He wants to see him as he does, see his face fold itself into that stupid frown he does, the one that makes him look like a weasel. He wants to see him wag his finger at Xiao, and then poke him with it, crossing an uncrossable boundary again and again. In a world that suddenly feels more alien to Xiao than it ever has, Cecili stands out like a beacon.

“The Qixing are not to be trusted!” Mountain Shaper snaps, shaking Xiao from his thoughts. The crane’s feathers are more ruffled than Xiao has ever seen them. “This one cannot abide by their word!”

Perhaps it’s for the best Ganyu isn’t here, Xiao thinks. She’s still so far away, in the city of brick and stone, mourning for their god. He hopes—he hopes she has someone to share her grief with.

“The traveler does not believe the Qixing are behind this,” Cloud Retainer says.

“And you would trust the words of a human child?!”

“She isn’t a child,” Xiao finally intervenes. “I am… not entirely sure she is human.”

Cloud Retainer turns her gaze on him. “You have met her as well, Conqueror of Demons. What shape does she take in your eyes?”

Xiao averts his gaze. “I don’t believe she is lying to us,” he finally says. He doesn’t have much to base it on. He’s lucky they don’t press him further—he could hardly tell them her eyes look like Cecili’s.

“Nonetheless, the Qixing are surely hiding something. Humans are not to be trusted. They are liars and thieves, and will let Rex Lapis’ memory rot if it suits them. One must do something,” Mountain Shaper insists, and Xiao has had enough of this conversation that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Humans cannot be trusted? Since when did the Adepti build such resentment to the ones they're sworn to protect? Ms. Bai and xiao-Luo drift into his thoughts. All the people Cecili has spoken to him about, the tales he has told him. Cecili himself. The traveler—Lumine, who even in the midst of such turmoil took time to make a strage Adeptus a dish, to play with the lost spirit of a child.

Liars? Thieves? As if any of the Adepti are free of sin. They all have their karmic debts to carry.

“I will do as I have always done,” Xiao snaps back. “Protect Liyue. But I can also trust the people of Liyue to protect themselves, if they need to. From all of us, included.” He turns his back on his fellow Adepti and teleports away. None of them stop him.

It’s too late to go back to Qingce—Cecili must be long asleep. But Xiao's steps don’t falter even once as he crosses the marsh, and then the plains, as he scales over the peak. Cecili isn’t at the pool, of course, but Xiao lets the memories of the afternoon they have spent here—has it really been only a few hours before?—bolster him, propel him to plunge over the edge.

He knows where Cecili resides only because he has seen him enter the place before. It’s a little shack at the edge of the village, long abandoned by a young couple who moved to the Harbour. It’s small and cramped, and has terrible acoustics according to Cecili. It’s a matter of moments for Xiao to slip in through the window—stupid, why would he keep it open? Xiao should scold him once he wakes up—and into the dark room.

The inside is bare. A small table and a chair are adjacent to the window, and Xiao tries to imagine Cecili sitting there, composing songs to the light of the sun or the moon, but it’s difficult to do so. Xiao isn’t used to imagining the bard outside of the open air. Then, on the other side of the room, is a bed, and on it Cecili, fast asleep. His face is lax, his breathing controlled. His hair is spread around his head like a halo, the tips dyed almost silver in the light of the moon. His lips are slightly parted.

Does he dream? What does it dream of? It’s been centuries since Xiao has consumed a dream not of his own, but there’s a gnawing at the pit of his stomach now, a hunger he has no name for.

This was—stupid. What had he come for? His words to the traveler flash in his mind again. Mortal souls are not as robust as those of Adepti. In a world that consumed even Rex Lapis, how could Xiao possibly protect one human?

The room shakes, blurs. The shack, already so small, feels like it’s growing smaller by the minute, closing in on him. Rex Lapis is dead. Rex Lapis is dead. He tries to imagine his body as the traveler has described it, falling still from the sky, shattering the terrace in front of Yuehai Pavilion with the force of his momentum, but he can’t. And the next thing he knows the image shifts, the body becoming Cecili’s falling from the sky, his eyes closed, blood on his lips, on his chest, falling, falling, falling—

He can’t breathe. If he could he would find it ironic, the wielder of an Anemo Vision not getting enough air, but nothing about this situation is funny or amusing. He hears himself gasping for it, but it’s as if the sound is coming from rooms away and not from his own mouth. He should leave before he wakes Cecili, he should go.

But before he can it’s too late: slender, calloused fingers grasp at his shoulders, and his view is suddenly full of white and blue and green and black, the hues of Cecili’s face washing over him. “Xiao? Xiao, can you hear me?” He looks worried, he looks scared. Xiao wants to tell him he should never look this scared while Xiao is there, because Xiao has entered a contract with Rex Lapis to protect Liyue, to protect humans. But Rex Lapis is dead. What happens to Xiao then?

“Okay, okay, don’t punch me for this, alright?” Xiao has no idea what he’s talking about, can’t look away from his eyes—until a hand suddenly makes contact with his cheek, throwing his entire body off-balance. Cecili’s other hand keeps him steady, but his head wrenches to his side, drawing a gasp from him—and he can breathe again, suddenly, the shock so sudden.

“Fuck,” he spits out, still gasping. He can at least feel the air entering his lungs now. “Fuck.”

“Are you out of it?” Cecili asks him. The hand that just slapped him comes back up, gently cupping his cheek. Xiao can’t even find it in himself to react to the contact at all. “I’m sorry I had to do that, I just didn’t know what—Xiao, are you hurt?”

Hurt? Is he—no, he’s fine. He’s healthy, as whole as someone tainted like him could ever be. It also feels like he’s broken beyond repair. “I’m fine.”

“No offense, that didn’t look fine. Come on, come here, seat down.” Cecili coaxes him down to the bed, treating him as gently as if he were made out of glass. If Xiao could, he would scoff at the treatment given to someone like him, an agent of violence and death, but he has nothing left in him to give. Suddenly, abruptly, he feels so tired, exhausted to his very bones. It’s as if he’s been holding it back since the moment the traveler said those terrible words, and the energy he had used to keep it at bay has sapped away completely.

If only he could take one of Barbatos’ hundred year long naps.

Cecili hands him a glass of water, and Xiao takes it automatically. “Sorry, I would offer you some tea but I don’t have any… I don’t quite have the taste for it myself, despite how many hours Granny Ruoxin has spent trying to teach me. That woman has about 500 different variants of leaves in her house, I swear it! And she insists that each one tastes completely differently, though I certainly wouldn’t be able to tell you the difference. And—”

“There aren’t 500 different variants of tea leaves in the world,” Xiao interrupts his ramblings with a raspy voice. His throat feels like he has been shouting, although he’s certain he hasn’t been.

Cecili giggles predictably, although it’s still tinged with concern. “According to Granny there might as well be.” His hand is holding Xiao’s own, he is just noticing, and is absentmindedly rubbing soothing circles on the back of it. “Feeling better?”

No. “Yes,” he says. “I… apologise, for my behaviour. It was unseemly.” He’s too exhausted to feel shame, although he’s sure that would come later. The air in the room is still and stagnant. Perhaps that is why Cecili had the window open, although it doesn’t seem to help much. When Xiao breathes in, slowly and deliberately, he can only smell rotten wood, rusted hinges. There is nothing of Qingce in the air. The room still feels feels very, very small.

Cecili’s hand tightens around his own. “Please don’t apologise. I’m glad you came to me.” A hesitant breath, and then another one. “Would you… like to tell me what happened? You don’t have to,” he stresses out. “But it might help.”

Letting those words slip out of his mouth is perhaps the hardest thing Xiao has ever done. “Rex Lapis is dead.” It’s only barely audible, but it’s out there now, vibrating in the quiet stillness of the room. “He’s gone.”

He hears Cecili’s shapely drawn breath. “Is that… possible? He’s an archon.”

“One of the only two remaining of the original seven,” Xiao points out. Do the other archons know? Does Barbatos know he is the last one? Xiao hasn’t felt anything when Rex Lapis’ body dropped from the sky, even though it feels like he should have. It’s possible none of them will know until the news arrives in their respective countries.

I should have asked the traveler to tell Barbatos, he thinks. It’s none of his business, but it feels kinder for Rex Lapis’ oldest ally to learn of his demise from… a friend? A companion? Xiao has no idea of their relationship. Really, Xiao doesn’t know anything about Barbatos at all.

“Oh, Xiao,” he hears, and then two thin, wiry arms come around him, gently pulling him to rest against another body. His head finds perch on Cecili’s shoulder, a strange parallel to their position on top of the mountain, the day before. Despite every instinct, he sags into it, lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding in. “I grieve with you.”

Rex Lapis is going to be grieved by many humans, both in Liyue and abroad. But Xiao knows that Cecili has no special connection or opinion on the archon, not even one worshipful bone in his body. When Cecili speaks of grief, he speaks of sharing Xiao’s own, not any of his.

Grief is a shackle, he remembers Guizhong saying, the last time he saw her. She was so threadbare and thin, a wisp of the woman she used to be, but her voice was strong and steady as she told him: don’t let it bind you, Alatus. I couldn’t bear it if I placed another noose around your neck.

The thought that he is placing a shackle around Cecili’s beautiful, long neck makes him feel vaguely ill. He can’t—he has to change the subject.

“I was thinking of kissing you. Before I heard of it.” He feels Cecili’s body freeze against his own, but the shaky aftermath of his panic makes him woozy, makes everything around him feels unreal. If he speaks of kissing right here, right now, it doesn’t matter. It will stay bound in this moment.

“Xiao…”

Bravery born from the ephemerality of this room makes him ask: “If I kissed you then, when we were high above the winds, what would you have done?”

Cecili takes in a breath, and leans his head on Xiao’s own. Their hair mixes together, black and teal and blue. “Oh, Xiao. Of course I would have kissed you back.”

If I turn my head now, our lips would meet, he thinks in a haze. But it seems like his bravery doesn’t give him quite enough momentum for that. Instead, he says: “You shouldn’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a mortal. I’m not. It would be dangerous.”

“You aren’t dangerous.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

Cecili huffs a laugh. He can’t hear it, but he can feel it fluttering the top of his hair. “I know you spent an entire afternoon teaching me how to use my Vision, and didn’t get short with me even once. I know you once saved xiao-Luo’s doll from monsters, and she thinks you are a hero for it, even though you would never accept it. Last week, you brought me a recipe to give Ms. Bai, and you still haven’t told me where you got it.” From Ganyu, he doesn’t say. Centuries and centuries ago. “I know you have the gentlest voice when you sing, but the second gentlest is when you talk to me of the people and places you remember, the ones that mattered to you. The third gentlest is when you say my name.” And then, in an ever softer voice: “I know you loved Rex Lapis.”

“You don’t know who I used to be. What I used to be.” It should rankle, that somehow this human sees to the very core of himself. It feels very warm.

“Xiao, I don’t even know who I used to be,” Cecili laughs, although there is something melancholic about it. “So maybe I’m not the best judge of character. Maybe I never was! I still don’t think I’m wrong about you.”

“You are,” Xiao says. “I’m afraid that someday I will do something to make you figure that out.”

“Won’t you let me worry about that?” Cecili asks. “I know I’m a bit silly, and useless, and good only for my songs, but won’t you trust me enough, just with this?” Cecili’s hand comes around him and lands in his hair, his fingers slowly petting through it. It feels… nice.

“What if you go? What if you leave?” People always leave. Xiao has learnt this lesson over and over again, felt it in his bones, his very core. His old village. The people he has been forced to kill. The other Yaksha. Guizhong. And now—Rex Lapis looms over them all.

“Then you can come with me!” Cecili declares, either naive as to Xiao’s true meaning or deliberately misunderstanding it. Either way, it makes Xiao smile, just a little. He’s so annoying. “Hey, I think we could really make a living just with our music! We could be traveling bards. Ohhhh, what would we name our act? The Anemo Duo is fine, but a bit lackluster. I love alliteration—maybe… the Anemo Array? Although maybe we will have to get more people for that one. The Anemo Acrobats! Augh, no, never mind actually, I could never do any of your stupid flips—”

Abruptly, feeling almost insane for it, Xiao bursts out laughing, the sound almost too big for his body. “You would break your legs.”

“I won’t! You’ll catch me, won’t you?”

“I thought you enjoyed falling.” The hand in his hair tugs a little at it, as if admonishing him for teasing.

“I do.” There is a smile in his voice—Xiao can almost taste it, even if he can’t see it. “Just sometimes, though.”

Xiao sighs. Nothing has really changed—Rex Lapis is still dead, the Liyue Qixing and the Adepti are at a stalemate, and the traveler is somehow in between all of this, playing at her own game. But for the moment, Xiao can breath, and feel the air enter his lungs. “Cecili.”

“Hmm?”

“If I—” he starts to ask, and then falters. It had seemed so easier to do before, when it was hypothetical. “If I—” In his hair, Cecili’s hand tugs again, and this time Xiao follows it, allowing his head to be lifted, to look at Cecili’s face again. He doesn’t know if he could have gone through this conversation if he was seeing it all this time: Cecili’s eyes are washed silver-green by the moon, and now Xiao is so close he can see how long his lashes are, framing them. He has freckles—did he ever notice them? Or maybe they never had to come out before the last few days, with the sun out in full force. Involuntarily, his gaze falls down. Cecili’s lips look soft, perhaps a little bit chapped. Did he sing for the villagers, after Xiao had left him? If he did, what song was it? Was it about him?

“Xiao.” Cecili’s voice snaps him from his thoughts. “I’m going to kiss you now. I think it’s a really good idea.” Xiao could move away, if he wanted to. Could be out the window and halfway though the village by the time Cecili closes the distance. He stays frozen in place.

They are as soft as they look, he thinks for a moment, and then he continues to think: what should he do with his hands, his lips, his tongue. Archons, does he need to do something with his tongue? His face feels stiff, his lips unyielding, and a second later Cecili disengages from him, laughing.

“You know, if I didn’t know better, I would think you didn’t want to kiss me at all!”

“I do,” Xiao blurts out, and then flushes in mortification. Cecili just giggles again.

“This isn’t a fight, Xiao,” he says gently. “You don’t have to figure it all out. Here, just… follow me?” He takes Xiao’s hands and places them against his waist, and Xiao can’t help but squeeze gently. He’s so slight—how can someone so unsubstantial be this remarkable? Cecili himself places on hand against his cheek, the other at his nape, causing him to shiver. It’s not a cold night, but he now notices he left the window just slightly open, and a cool breeze is coming from the west.

I still need to scold him about the window, he remembers, inanely, and then Cecili leans in and kisses him again, and then he doesn’t think anything at all, losing himself in it. His second-first kiss, and he still doesn’t know anything about it, so he consults his instincts and then does the exact opposite: relaxes into it instead of tensing, fluttering his eyes shut instead of keeping them open, looking for threats. He can feel Cecili doing the same, his breath mingling with his own, and once more he is surrounded by that strange flowery scent, cool and dewy against him.

Kissing Cecili isn’t like a freefall at all. Instead, it tastes like a dream: a sunny day’s breeze against warm cheeks, the rustle of glaze lilies in the meadow. Above him, the sky is blue and wide open, and he is surrounded by green. In the distance, a flute is playing, and the melody of it feels like a forgotten memory standing at the tip of his tongue. For a moment, he forgets about everything else but this.

He comes back to himself in pieces: first, the point where his lips are still connected with Cecili’s. Then Cecili’s thumb on his cheek, tracing circles as he did earlier. Cecili’s other hand tangled in the short hairs at the nape of his neck, the tug ever so slightly pleasant. He doesn’t know when he closed his eyes. He doesn’t know if Cecili’s closed his, but he hopes he didn’t. Hopes the memory of Xiao’s face as he fell into him is seared in his mind forever.

As if he can sense his thoughts, he can feel Cecili’s lips curve against his, and now he can really taste his smile. “Better. Ha, maybe you should call me Teacher Cecili.”

He doesn’t know where the urge comes from, but he nips his lips in retribution. Just the slightest bite, but it makes Cecili gasp. “Don’t push it.” He opens his eyes then, because he wants to see him. The bard’s face is flushed, and his lips are slightly swollen. His eyes look half-way to wild. He doesn’t look like he belongs here, on this rusty bed, in this abandoned house, in this half-forgotten village. He looks like he belongs to the skies.

“I still don’t think I’m wrong about you,” Cecili tells him. He lets go of Xiao’s neck, his hand making as if to tuck back his own hair, but Xiao beats him to the punch, the tips of his fingers only slightly grazing his ear. This time, it is Cecili who shivers.

“There is time yet to prove you wrong.”

Cecili’s eyes become alert. “Then you will give it to me? Time?”

Xiao thinks of his archon, dead and gone. Of a country thrown into turmoil. Of his own promises, debts, regrets. Only a short time ago he would have pushed away Cecili, claiming it was for his own good. Now he knows it would have been for Xiao’s. He doesn’t want to be like the other Adepti, so scornful of humans, so set in their ways. Maybe Ganyu always had the better idea of it.

“I will give you as much as I’m able to give,” he finally says. He refuses to make a promise he can’t keep, not ever again.

It’s enough for Cecili, who pecks him on his lips again, lightning fast. “I’ll take all of it and more.”

Over the next two weeks, Xiao keeps to his word. In between urgent meetings of the Adepti amongst rising tensions with the Qixing, he makes time to stop at Qingce Village whenever he can, even for just an hour or two. They go back to the pool on top of the mountain. They take strolls through the bamboo forest, Cecili whistling in appreciation as Xiao takes care of some stray hilichurls. On one memorable occasion, Cecili ropes him in to bake Ms. Bai a birthday cake, with… disastrous results.

It’s on his way to one of his excursions that Ganyu finds him.

“Xiao.”

“Ganyu.” She looks… tired. Xiao is sure the situation is hitting her harder than most, between her obligation to the Qixing and to the Adepti, to the memory of Rex Lapis. A pang of guilt hits him. It’s not that it’s not taking the toll on him, but Cecili’s presence makes everything… easier. He has not paid her much mind, the last few days.

As he has been scrutinizing her, she has been scrutinizing him. “I wanted to check in with you, Xiao. You’ve been… rather short-tempered with the other Adepti, lately. I wanted to make sure…” she trails off, but Xiao understands. He has seen more than one of his comrades succumb to their role.

Slightly irritated with the perceived insult, he snaps: “I’m fine. I’m not going to lose my mind and go on a rampage.”

She blinks at him, not taken-aback by his tone. “I didn’t think you would. The bard has been helping you—I’m glad.”

Of course Ganyu, the hands and ears and weapon of the Qixing, would know about Cecili. Something in him bristles. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Ganyu sighs. “Xiao, I’m not—this wasn’t a threat. I’m glad you have someone there for you, now that…” she has to swallow before she can finish. “Now that Rex Lapis is gone.”

Abruptly, all the anger and annoyance flees him, leaving behind a hollow feeling. “He…. does. Help,” he says, slightly awkward. The thought of talking about it, even with Ganyu who has spent most of her existence amongst humans, is daunting. “It’s… easier, this way.”

“I always thought so,” she agrees. The breeze tangles in her hair, and she has to tuck some of it behind her ear. “I know Moon Carver and Mountain Shaper haven’t always understood. I’m glad you might be starting to.”

Xiao shrugs. He doesn’t know that he understands anything, not just yet, but perhaps—he is on the path towards it. He looks at Ganyu, tired and worn as he has ever seen her, and feels the need to ask: “Do you have something like that for yourself?”

She startles at the question, her eyes widening. “Ah, not… Not quite like that. The situation right now is very complicated.”

He and Ganyu were never particularly close, Xiao prefering to avoid the company of most of the other Adepti, so he can’t quite read her. However, she now smells like the most desolate of dreams. “You don’t have to be involved. You can leave the Harbour.”

For some reason, this makes her break into a giggle. She sounds surprisingly young. “I couldn’t possibly leave Lady Ningguang and the other Qixing,” she says. “I… I wouldn’t want to.”

Xiao gives her an appraising look. “You really don’t think they’ve had anything to do with Rex Lapis’ death?”

“No.” Her voice is surprisingly steely as she says it, but it makes Xiao relax. “They are certainly capable of it, but I know at least Lady Ningguang would have never betrayed the Geo Archon, and the other Qixing would not have been able to move without her.”

Xiao sighs. He can feel the beginning of a headache. “The others would not agree so easily.”

“I know Lady Ningguang has spoken to the traveler about the situation. You’ve heard how the others respect Miss Lumine. This would surely go a long way.”

The traveler again. Xiao conjures her face in his mind: young and unassuming. Hard to believe this girl is meeting Archons and Qixings and Adepti, and taking them all by surprise. Perhaps Xiao should keep a closer eye on her.

He takes stock of the position of the sun in the sky. It’s not too late, although it is getting there, the sun is slowly starting its descent. Cecili has mentioned something about taking a swim in the river, taking advantage of one of the projected last summery days of the year. Xiao has no intention of doing the same, but he would like to be there.

Naturally, Ganyu notices. “I would not keep you longer from your bard,” she says.

Immediately, Xiao flushes. “He’s not my anything.”

She looks confused. “I thought you were friends…?”

Friends feels simultaneously too inconsequential and daunting of a word. “He might be dangerous to society,” Xiao says, using the excuse he has not thought about for weeks. “I’m keeping an eye on him.”

If anything, it makes her look even more confused. “That’s… good, I suppose. You can help each other.”

He huffs. “If that’s all…?”

She smiles at him, and takes a step back. “Fly with the wind, Adeptus Xiao. We will meet again.”

And they do. Xiao is already at the Harbour when Osial is resurrected, rising from the depth of the ocean like a particularly bad dream. He is surrounded by both the other Adepti and the might of the Qixing, and yet he feels naked in battle without Rex Lapis in front of him, commanding his strength. Despite their combined power, he doubts they can make it without him, although he is fully prepared to die trying. It is his duty, after all.

The thought of Cecili enters his mind, but he pushes it away. He doesn’t want even the memory of him to be here, amidst chaos and violence and rage. He doesn’t deserve it.

Then, the traveler is there. Suddenly, Xiao can feel the winds of change—first when that female Tianquan, Ningguang, commands the power of the Jade Palace, and then again when Cloud Retainer, Moon Carver and Mountain Shaper take control of the Guizhong Ballistas.

He sees the traveler fight. She is all grace in her motions, not a second wasted in her movements. When poets write of violence, they enjoy speaking in metaphors: a fight is like a dance, a duet, a whirl of combat. Xiao has always scoffed at such pretty words that try and mask the reality of what a fight is: a race for survival, clash of rage, grief, desperation. But there is beauty in the way the traveler wields her sword, the way she switches between Geo energy and Anemo. She has no Vision as far as Xiao can see, but she can fight with the best of them. He lends her strength when she needs it, and finds himself happy to share it.

Osial destroys the platform, and the Tianquan makes the sacrifice and directs the Jade Palace towards the body of Osial. Xiao is glad Ganyu’s words of support and dedication were not misplaced. The traveler falls, and he thinks strange, even as he doesn’t know why. It feels like she doesn’t belong in a freefall. He catches her effortlessly, and doesn’t dwell on the thought.

They stand the victors on the dock of Liyue Harbour. Rex Lapis is dead, and yet they have not yet suffered for it. It feels important, even though Xiao can’t quite say why. Now that the malevolence of Osial is contained once more, he allows himself to think of Cecili. He’s safe behind the mountain of Qingce, so far away from anything happening at the coast, but Xiao is itching to go make sure. He knows what is hiding in the valley, after all. There is always the possibility of a chain reaction.

But he can’t abandon his duties here. There are new contracts to be made between the Adepti and the Qixing. Little pockets of resentment and malevolence to be qualled all over the vicinity of the Harbour, stirred by Osial’s resurgence.

He doesn’t go to Rex Lapis’ funeral, although he watches it from afar, perched on top of Yujing Terrace. It’s a beautiful service. Quiet. Respectful. Following all the conventions, many of which he had thought long lost. Whoever it was that arranged it has done their research. He sees the traveler walking around, speaking to people. Even so far away, he can sense her enormous presence. She walks and it feels as though the ground itself should shake.

The smell of glaze lillies drifts on the wind in his direction. It reminds him of Guizhong, of Rex Lapis. Of so many people gone.

But now, it also reminds him of Qingce Village. Of Cecili. He smiles, small but unrestrained. Liyue Harbour is in good hands. He is needed somewhere else.

All in all, it takes him about a week before he can make his way to the remote village. By then the news has made its way all over the place, and Cecili is frantic when he sees him. He accosts him some ways outside the village, in the thick of the bamboo forest, and Xiao wants to scold him for wandering so far away. He can’t find it in himself though—he’s just too relieved to be here.

“Xiao!” Cecili is upon him like a hurricane, his hands hovering around him, unsure where to touch. “Are you alright? We heard that a sea monster attacked Liyue Harbour, that the whole city was almost destroyed!”

“Hardly.” Xiao rolls his eyes. “The city was barely even scratched.”

“So there wasn’t a sea monster?”

“It was an old god.”

Cecili’s voice is so dismayed when he says: “That’s worse!”

“I’m fine. The city is also fine. There were no casualties.” He says it in a calm, monotone tone, and it seems to help, because Cecili relaxes ever so slightly. He still gives him a worried look.

“You’re for sure not hurt, right?”

Impulsively, Xiao takes one of Cecili’s hands and places it over his chest, right where his heart still beats. “I won’t lie to you.”

Incredibly, this is what makes Cecili blush, and not all the countless shameless things he has said to Xiao across their time together. “R-right… Good! Everyone will be very relieved, they were all so worried. Xiao-Luo has been crying for a week.”

Xiao frowns. “They shouldn’t worry about me. This is only part of my duty.”

“This doesn’t stop us from worrying about you, Xiao,” Cecili shakes his head. There is a small smile on his face, and Xiao drinks it in. He hasn’t realized how he missed it. “I’m glad you came back to me.” He doesn’t say home, because he knows Xiao doesn’t have one, knows that Qingce Village isn’t really his own either. Maybe one day, they will have—

For now, it’s enough.

He can tell Cecili wants to ask him more. After all, the Adepti and Qixing coming together to defeat an awakened old god is an epic tale, and one to be sung about, but perhaps he can tell Xiao isn’t quite ready to speak of it, so he says nothing at all.

“And here? Has it been quiet?” Xiao asks, even though he can’t feel any trace of Osial’s influence—only whatever it is that attached itself to Cecili’s lyre.

“Yes, yes,” Cecili waves him off. “Unless you count Uncle Ghast scaring the kids so badly with one of his stories that they ran away all the way to the Stone Gate!”

“Tell me about it,” Xiao says. He isn’t particularly interested in the story itself—he is sure he has seen and lived much scarier—but he enjoys how every tale transforms in Cecili’s mouth, becomes something else, something more.

Before Cecili can begin, the sky that has been threateningly grey the entire day finally breaks, and it starts to rain, the last summer storm of the year. With a small giggle, Cecili leads him to a nearby alcove etched into the mountainside. In the sudden coldness of the rain, his hand in Xiao’s own is incredibly warm.

The story isn’t scary at all, as Xiao had predicted, although hearing Cecili explain how he had to chase xiao-You halfway to Mondstadt is amusing. Speaking of which…

“Would you ever want to go there?” he asks once Cecili wraps up his story.

“Hmm?”

“To Mondstadt. I’m pretty certain that’s where you’re from.” The names Cecili remembers, where he first woke up… Even his strange lyre. They all point to one place. “Someone there might know who you are.” He has wanted to ask Cecili this question for a long time, but always stopped himself, perhaps too afraid of his answer. If Cecili says yes, what could Xiao do? He is bound to Liyue and its stone forests, its marshes and open plains. He couldn’t follow.

But seeing Liyue Harbour come together without Rex Lapis and defend itself, seeing the change in the power struggle between the Adepti and the Qixing… Watching the traveler fight and talk and meddle, the way people of all walks of life would trust her, would follow her…

Maybe the change would reach Xiao himself, one day.

Cecili grimaces. The expression is so unlike him that Xiao almost apologizes for whatever crossed boundary he just violated, but before he can Cecili says: “I’m not sure if I want to know.”

The answer throws Xiao to a loop. “What? Why?”

The bard leans back against the mountain wall, staring unseeing at the sky. “I could have been… anyone. Anything. Someone completely different than who I am today. What happens to the current me if I get my memories back? Isn’t it a death sentence, in a way?”

Xiao finds it difficult to imagine anyone else but Cecili occupying his face, his body. “You don’t know that,” he objects. “A person isn’t just their memories.” None of Xiao’s memories have prepared him for Cecili, after all.

“But I don’t not know it,” Cecili retorts back, nonsensically. “I feel guilty for thinking that. Those names that I remember—Cecili, Vennessa. They could have been people important to me. What if they’re somewhere out there, searching for me? Could I just abandon them? But on the other hand, I… enjoy the person I am today. Who I am in the village. Who I am with you. If I find out I’m someone else entirely—if I become that someone else… What if I was a horrible person? And even if I wasn’t, how do I know it’s someone you would care for?”

Xiao takes a sharp breath. “You can’t make this decision just because of me. I can’t—Cecili, I can’t be responsible for—” the loss of part of you, he wants to say but can’t bring himself to. He had no idea Cecili had been carrying all of this. For how long? How had Xiao never noticed?

Cecili must notice Xiao’s panic because he takes his hands in his own, an anchoring gesture. “Not just because of you,” he reassures him. “But Xiao, you must know the space you take inside of me. I don’t know if there is room for much else.”

Xiao shakes his head in denial. That the brightest thing in Xiao’s memory thinks this way—it’s unbearable. “Then you expand. I—before you, I didn’t know that I could fit more inside of me. I thought what I had was all there was. You prove me wrong, over and over again. I am… more than I ever was.” There are names now, taking space inside of him. Names and faces and memories, people he has never bothered to speak to before, humans and Adepti both. And it all started with Cecili. “You were so… vacant, when we first met. But now you’re—” radiant, ablaze, incandescent—”you’re anything but.”

There is a pause as Ceciili takes time to think about Xiao’s words. Above them, the rain is still coming down, beating against the stone.

“Maybe,” Cecili finally says. He then smiles, and Xiao can tell it’s a real one, and not one of the wry, sad ones he hates. “You are Teacher Xiao, after all.”

Xiao squeezes his hands in admonishment. “I told you to stop with that nonsense.” Cecili still looks uncomfortably small. Xiao is desperate to change it. “Do you want to hear about what happened in Liyue Harbour?”

Cecili’s eyes snap to look at him. “What, really?” he asks. “I thought… I didn’t think you would want to talk about it.”

Xiao maybe isn’t ready to speak of the aftermath of it all—of what it could mean for the country, for himself and the other Adepti, for Rex Lapis’ memory. But he finds he doesn’t mind sharing the details of the battle now that it’s over. He pulls Cecili by his hands until they’re both sitting down on the wet grass, ignoring the mud which immediately cakes on their clothes.

Xiao has never been much of a storyteller, but for Cecili, he tries. He tells him of the figure of Osial, untamed as it rises above the roaring ocean. Tells him of how the Jade Palace sparkled in the light of the ballista attacks, painting the sky silver and blue. He speaks of Ganyu and her faith in the Qixing, and how that fate wasn’t misplaced—he had been impressed by the Tianquan after all, and he will respect that.

He tells him of the traveler.

“You know, I think I’ve heard of her,” Cecili muses. “I know Chang the Ninth had some dealing with her, and she bought some recipes from Ms. Bai… I always seem to miss her, though.”

“She’s… strange,” Xiao says. At Cecili’s look of censure, he huffs. “I can’t read people as easy as you do.”

“Surely you can do better than strange.”

“Nosey,” he says, just to hear Cecili giggle in amusement. “Apparently she pushed her way into this mess, no one made her. She reminds me of you in that sense, I suppose,” he adds as an afterthought.

Cecili sputters. “I’ll take that as a compliment, thank you very much!”

Xiao smiles. “You should. She fights spectacularly.”

“High praise, coming from you,” Cecili says, his eyebrow raised. “Aw, should I be jealous?” In response, Xiao pinches his side, and then avoids his attempted swipe.

“Supposedly she came from a different world. She’s searching for her brother.”

Cecili’s expression sobers. “That must be hard. I can’t imagine—” he cuts himself off.

Cecili. Vennessa. The two names that Cecili remembers, the only thing he does. Are they somewhere out there, searching for him?

If it comes to it, could Xiao let him go?

He spends less and less time in Wangshu Inn. Verr Goldet has made some pointed remarks about it, and Xiao knows who she’s working for, so he doesn’t quite answer, only gives noncommital hums. His time is spent in-between meeting the other Adepti at Juyeun Karst to discuss the affairs of Liyue Harbour, quelling monsters all across the country, and on some occasions, meeting Ganyu for some tea at the almost always abandoned inn just outside of Liyue Harbour. A weird place for an inn, but convenient for this weird… whatever it is that him and Ganyu are slowly cultivating. Friendship, he hears in Cecili’s voice. He doesn’t mind it as much as he thought he would.

The rest of it is spent with Cecili. They don’t speak of Mondstadt again—instead their days are full of more (failed) Anemo lessons, music lessons, swimming lessons once Xiao realized Cecili doesn’t actually remember how to swim. Kissing lessons too—the two of them sitting as close to each other as possible on top of houses, or mountain peaks, as high as they can go. It’s becoming colder now, autumn rolling in across the terraces, and Cecili takes him apple picking in the few trees he has found.

“For your altar to that useless Barbatos,” he tells him as he pushes the basket-full towards him, ignoring Xiao’s sputtering. Xiao can’t help but think those apples look especially red against Cecili’s skin as he bites into them. That they taste especially sweet on Cecili’s tongue.

When Cecili finds out Xiao won’t eat anything except Almond Tofu, he becomes determined to learn how to make it, pestering Ms. Bai for days until she agrees to let him in the kitchen. Xiao only finds out about it later, when Cecili sheepishly presents him with a semi-burnt dessert. “Ms. Bai managed to save it,” he says. “But I’m now definitely never going to be allowed in the kitchen ever again.”

A stray cat wanders into Qingce Village, and they find out that Cecili is allergic the hard way. He spends half the day sneezing miserably and whining to Xiao about it, until Xiao finally gives in and takes the cat away with him to Liyue Harbour, pushing it into Ganyu’s surprised hands with a curt request to find it a home. The children of the village are sad but it’s worth it to have Cecili finally stop annoying him about it, and Xiao pacifies them by joining Cecili on one of his weekly performances, the sound of Xiao’s flute harmonising perfectly with Cecili’s lyre.

Every day it feels like Cecili learns more about himself, and Xiao with him. Every day it feels like Xiao learns more about himself, and Cecili with him. An ebb and flow between them.

It feels like it could last forever.

And that’s when the traveler finds him again.

“I need your help.”

Xiao has not seen the traveler since the battle against Osial, but she seems unchanged. The creature—Paimon?—is conspicuously absent. The worried look on her face however, is new. Xiao has not seen her this agitated even when faced with a literal ancient god.

“What is it?”

The traveler shakes her head, looking at all the people still wandering around Wangshu Inn’s terrace even at this late hour. “Not here. Can you meet me at the Statue of the Seven in Dihua Marsh? It would be… quieter there.”

Xiao tenses up. He doesn’t get the sense that the traveler is prone to dramatics. Whatever it is seems serious. “I will see you there.”

The area around the statue is quiet—honestly, quieter than it should be. Xiao eyes the places where he knows for a fact Millelith officers should stand guard. It is unlike anyone working for the Millelith to abandon their duties.

“They’ve all been called back to the city,” the traveler says, coming up the path behind him. “We have a bit of a situation.”

Xiao would have known if that was the case, but he still feels compelled to ask: “Is it Osial?”

“No, no, everything has been quiet at Guyun Stone Forest. It’s…” she hesitates. “Do you know the Anemo Archon, Barbatos?”

The question is so strange, so out of context, that it takes Xiao a moment to respond. “I know of him, although we’ve never met. What is this about?”

“Yeah, he said…” she mumbles to herself, before addressing him again: “I don’t quite know how to say it, so I’ll just be blunt: he’s missing.”

Xiao raises an eyebrow. “An Archon doesn’t just go missing. He’s probably taking one of his long sleeps.”

“No, he couldn’t have. Have you heard of what happened in Mondstadt, a few months ago?”

“With the dragon? Vaguely.”

“I was there,” she says. He nods, having known that already. “Barbatos was with me.” This, he didn’t know.

“He has awoken again?”

“Yes, to help his friend. And we did. D’valin is free of his corruption. But afterwards…” she frowns. She seems much more expressive than she had before. Xiao wonders if anything changed for her. “One of the Fatui Harbingers stole his gnosis.”

This gets his attention. “What?!” He didn’t even know an Archon’s gnosis could be stolen. And the Fatui… why would the Tsarita order them to steal a gnosis?

His mouth is faster than his mind. “Could—Rex Lapis’ death—”

“Unrelated,” she says, although not very firmly. “Absolutely.”

“Traveler, if you’re hiding something from me about Rex Lapis’ death—”

“This case is unrelated to Rex Lapis’ death,” she repeats, her tone more steady this time. “I swear it. But Barbatos couldn’t have gone to sleep without his gnosis, and besides that, he wouldn’t have. He promised me to help me look for my brother. He wouldn’t break a promise.”

Xiao wants to ask her: what is he like? Is he kind? Is he gentle? Is his music as beautiful in person as it is carried by the wind miles away? But the sentence Barbatos is missing is reverberating in the same corners in his mind as Rex Lapis is dead once did, and he finds it hard to breathe all of a sudden.

“I’ve searched all of Mondstadt,” the traveler continues to say, not noticing his sudden panic. “Even Dragonspine, even though he hates the cold there. I don’t—I have no idea where he could be. I asked Ningguang to have the Millelith search for him in Liyue, but I know they can’t stretch themselves to cover the entire country and…” she bites her lips. “I’m searching, I swear it, but if I find an opening to enter Inazuma I’ll have to go. I need to know someone else is searching for me.”

“I… I don’t even know what he looks like,” Xiao says. He hates how stupid he sounds, how young.

“He… I don’t know, black hair, green eyes?” the traveler looks a little bit lost as well. “Paimon told me I’m not very good at descriptions.”

“Aren’t you asking people for help to look for your brother?” Xiao asks, incredulous.

The traveler gives him an incredulous look in turn. “We’re twins,” she says very slowly. “I usually just ask them if they’ve seen someone with my face.”

“... Ah.”

“Wouldn’t you be able to sense him? He is an Archon.”

“Possibly,” Xiao acquiesces. Without conscious thought, his hand falls to cover the Anemo Vision at his side. It’s not real, but he can swear it pulses gently, like a heartbeat. “I will keep an eye out.”

“Thank you,” the traveler says, looking relieved. “I was told I could rely on you.”

She was told? “By who?”

Curiously, she flushes a little, her eyes wide. “Oh, you know! There are a lot of stories about you, the last Yaksha.”

Humans and their stories. Xiao rolls his eyes. “Is that all you needed from me?”

“Oh, just a moment!” she squints her eyes a little and then an entire almond tofu manifests from thin air in her hands. “This is for you. Think of it as an advanced thank you.”

He considers asking how she did that, but then remembers the way she wielded Anemo and Geo energy effortlessly during the battle, without any use of Vision, and stops himself. Just another peculiarity. “I’ll accept it.”

They part ways, Xiao reassuring her that he will be able to find her if he needed to, and allowing her to call him if she needed him. He finds that he likes her, this strange woman with her strange powers. She cares, and she doesn’t bother to hide it away, wrap it up in pretty, hollow words. She is worlds apart from Cecili, but still—she reminds him of him.

Without noticing, his legs are taking him towards Qingce Village, and he has to physically stop himself. Barbatos is missing is still echoing in all the empty parts of him, the ones that were carved away by his past and his grief. He has already lost Rex Lapis. He refuses to lose the only other person who granted him freedom.

He begins his search in Jueyun Karst. The traveler has said the Millieth has been deployed to search as well, but they wouldn’t be able to enter those sacred grounds. He has no idea what Barbatos might be looking for in the land of the Adepti, but it’s as good a place to start as any. He spends as little time as possible asking the others if they’ve seen him, asking them to keep an eye out. Mountain Shaper still has not forgiven him for his earlier sharp words, and their relationship is strained. Xiao escapes as quickly as possible.

He spends longer in the plains. He meets Ganyu outside Liyue Harbour, and she confirms the traveler’s words. Apparently, the Acting Grand Master of the Knights of Favonius has personally requested the help of the Liyue Qixing in the matter, and of course the Tianquan would never miss out on an opportunity to hold a favor above the head of a powerful person.

“I’ve never met him before,” Ganyu admits. “Although I’ve heard many stories. Grand Master Jean was reluctant to provide much information about him—I believe she’s afraid other, less savoury people might be looking for him as well. So far we don’t have any leads.”

He has nothing to say to that. He was… hoping, even if it felt like it should be a blow to his pride, that the Qixing had uncovered something by now. Ganyu, perhaps sensing his disappointment, places a comforting hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t shake her off. “We will find him, Xiao,” she says, gently. “The world won’t be as cruel as to take two Archons away from us at once.” He has no idea if she knows what the Anemo Archon means to him, but the words comfort him nonetheless.

Guyun Stone Forest is as quiet as the traveler has said. No hint of either Osial or Barbatos, just a number of hilicurl camps and the odd slime here and there. Xiao avoids them with ease. The plains are likewise empty. Even the Ruin Guards seem to still be inactive. Xiao takes a moment to pray to Guizhong, something he has not done in centuries. He hopes that wherever it was that she went after death, she still listens.

Eventually, he turns his gaze to Qingce Village. Barbatos couldn’t be there, not with how often Xiao himself has been there and sense nothing, but he might as well check, and—

He thinks he misses it. Not just Cecili, but the place itself. Maybe he could offer a few more apples to his stupid altair. Just in case.

“Ah, Adeptus Xiao!” he’s greeted by Granny Ruoxin near the windmill. He has long since stopped hiding himself when he arrives at the valley, finding it easier to find Cecili as quickly as possible if he has someone to point his way.

“Granny,” he greets her back, only slightly flushing at the familiar address. She has scolded him somewhat fiercely when he had tried to refer to her as anything but. Cecili teased him about being scared of an old woman, but Xiao wasn’t scared. He was simply worried she might harm herself in her frenzy, that’s all. “Where’s Cecili?” It is strange. It’s the middle of the day, and usually Cecili would be somewhere in the vicinity, playing his weird lyre. Xiao strains his ears, but he can’t hear even the hint of music.

“Ah, xiao-Li? Let’s see,” she hums in thought, and Xiao waits as patiently as he can. “Oh, I do believe… He has grown very bored in your absence, you know,” she tells him. It’s not said as a reprimand, but Xiao winces nonetheless. He has been gone for longer than usual.

“I was busy. I’m here now.”

“Yes, you are,” she says approvingly. “But you know xiao-Li doesn’t do well in boredom. He started pestering me about all those fragments and statues he kept messing around with, so I told him the story of Chi—ah, I’m sure I don’t have to explain it to you,” she chuckles.

There is a pit in Xiao’s stomach. “He was looking for—did he find them? All of them?” he asks her, urgently, the patience of earlier completely gone. What the hell was Cecili thinking he’s doing?

“I believe so! He was very proud of it too. Said he was going to find a treasure. Silly boy, as if there’s any kind of treasure around here,” she laughs, but Xiao doesn’t stay around to hear it. He’s already gone.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Isn’t the place they met the second time one of the three? And the temple the second, and the pool the third—stupid. It was Xiao who brought him there, Xiao who told him what the ambers were. Hasn’t he been learning more about Cecili? Hasn’t he known that above all else, Cecili loves a good story, and that of the Geo Lord subduing a dragon is as good as it gets. Of course he would want to hear more. Of course he would put himself in danger to uncover it.

He doesn’t even know how to use his Vision, Xiao thinks, half-wild with it. He’s moving so fast the scenery is blurring all around him as he uses Anemo energy to boost himself forward, faster, faster, faster. Rex Lapis, Barbatos. He can’t lose Cecili too.

He passes by the Treasure Hoarders camp so fast they barely even notice him, instead complaining about the windy weather. He has no idea how Cecili snuck past them. The entrance to the vault is still where he remembers it, under the waterfall next to the crevice, and even from the entrance he can already tell something has shifted. Then the noise hits him and he curses, sprinting even faster.

The scene inside is straight out of a nightmare he once might have consumed. Cecili is standing at the center of the cave next to the mechanism, trying to use it as a shield against the two approaching Ruin Guards. He doesn’t have any idea that it is exactly the mechanism which they’re trying to destroy. The cave itself is destabilized, and huge rocks continuously plummet down from the ceiling.

“Get away from that thing!” Xiao yells as he launches his polearm forward, vanishing and reappearing where it hits one of the two machines.

“Xiao! What—”

“They’re after the mechanism, get away from it!” Without looking to see if he has done as he said, Xiao immediately whirls around to face the other one, putting them both in his field of view. If he distracts them enough, they won’t go after Cecili at all, mechanism or not.

The fight is short but brutal. Xiao doesn’t have the luxury of well-planned attacks, of any kind of strategy. If he lets up for even a second, there is a chance one of them will go after Cecili, and that’s unacceptable. So he’s relentless in his attacks, headless of the bruises and cuts he’s accumulating. He almost pulls out his mask, but decides against it—if he exhausts himself and falls, there is no one to protect Cecili.

It’s easier once the first one falls. Now he can see in his periphery, Cecili hovering against the cave’s whole. It looks like he’s contemplating getting involved.

“Stay back, it’s almost done,” Xiao snaps, and backflips away from an incoming attack that singes his trousers.

“You’re hurt—”

“I’ll be fine until this fight is over. Stay there!”

The Ruin Guard makes a rocket attack, and Xiao curses as he’s forced to dodge on his left leg. It’s possibly sprained, or maybe even broken. Hard to tell with the adrenaline rushing through his body. He stays low and uses the lull in the Ruin Guard’s attack pattern to rush forward, stabbing through his polearm into a weak spot. It jerks for a moment until finally, it falls quiet. Xiao leans over it, panting.

“Wow!” Cecili takes the opportunity to rush forward. “Xiao, that was incredible!” His eyes are so wide, so earnest. He doesn’t look even half as afraid as he should be.

“Are you hurt?” Xiao demands, even as he dismisses his polearm and starts to pet Cecili’s body for injuries. There is a shallow cut on his cheek that is sluggishly bleeding, and his clothes are absolutely filthy, but Xiao can’t see any prominent splotches of red against the green and brown fabric. He allows himself to slowly relax, his heart starting to slow down from the initial rush of adrenaline he got once Granny Ruoxin said the name of the dragon.

“Yes, it’s you who is—Look out!” Cecili’s eyes go wide the exact moment Xiao hears a whirring behind him. He spins around but it’s too late: a fucking Ruin Hunter has appeared out of fucking nowhere, it’s lazers pointed directly at them. There was nowhere to run, no time. Xiao could maybe judge it, but that would mean Cecili’s death sentence. There is no world in which that is the decision Xiao makes.

Instead, he braces himself, tries to make himself as tall and wide as possible, to cover every inch of Cecili’s body he can. He hopes Cecili runs after this. He hopes he leaves Xiao’s body behind.

He hopes he doesn’t cry.

Against his own instincts, Xiao closes his eyes, braces himself for impact. A moment passes, then two, and then a huge Anemo force surges around him, from behind him, and hits the Ruin Hunter with such a strong impact Xiao can hear it reverberate in his bones. His eyes slam open just in time to see the Ruin Hunter stagger, and he doesn’t waste time in warping forward, summoning his polearm as he does and striking in the thing’s weak spot. It goes down immediately.

“Cecili!” He whirls around to look at the bard, who is looking astonished down at his hands.

“I did this?”

“You did. You—saved my life.”

Cecili still looks puzzled even as he smiles. “Well, that’s certainly good! I just didn’t think—” he takes the Anemo Vision off from his belt, cupping it in his hands. “Wasn’t this supposed to do something?”

Xiao frowns at him. “This is what allows you to channel Anemo energy. It would have glowed during your attack.”

“Oh.” Cecili shakes his head. “It didn’t, though? I looked down almost immediately. It didn’t change at all!”

Xiao walks back towards him. His leg is screaming at him, but he ignores it for the moment, too focused on Cecili to care. “Would you allow me to look at it?” In all of their time training, Xiao has never touched Cecili’s Vision. Most Vision bearers were reluctant to let others touch their Visions, feeling it as violation of their connection with it. Xiao himself wasn’t fond of it, although for different reasons. He was sure Cecili wouldn’t mind, but it still felt… intimate. Presumptuous.

Clearly Cecili doesn’t have any such gumptions, because he immediately hands it over to Xiao. “Of course. Could it be broken?”

“Visions don’t break—” Xiao begins to say, but then his fingers make contact with the Vision, and he realizes three things in quick conjunction:

One: This Vision is completely fake. It has no capacity for any energy, Anemo or otherwise.

Two: Cecili himself was the source of the Anemo energy he hurled at the Ruin Hunter.

Three: Cecili wasn’t possessed, or influenced, or contaminated. He was something entirely else.

“I need to go,” he blurts. His heart is beating a cacophony in his ears. His vision is blurring. His hands are shaking. Beneath him, his legs are barely holding him upright. “I need to—I need to go.” He drops the Vision where he stands and warps out of sight, out of the cave, out of the village.

He never hears what Barbatos calls out after him.

He doesn’t—He doesn’t know where to go. He wants to see Rex Lapis, but Rex Lapis is dead. He wants to see Cecili, but Cecili is—Cecili was—

Once he regains enough of his senses, he realizes he has made it all the way over to Luhua Pool. The sky is completely black by now, and the only light that illuminates his way is the moon, and the light emanating from the hole in the middle of the pool.

The domain.

Xiao blinks, and for a moment he is shocked out of his panic. The Hidden Palace of Guizang Formula was locked a long time ago. He walks cautiously to the edge of what should have been a barrier and looks down, and here it is, completely open and visible. He stretches his senses but can’t seem to find any malevolent force lurking nearby—instead, he senses something similar to the power he felt during their fight against Osial.

What could the traveler want with Guizhong’s Realm Of Clouds?

Unconsciously, he leaps down into the hall, and up the stairs to the domain. It’s completely inert now, the challenges the traveler completed wiped away, but Xiao was there for its creation. He knows how to manipulate it. With a twist of his hand he forces it open, and walks in.

Guizhong’s mind was beautiful, and she always knew how to translate it with her hands. She created all of those dazzling inventions, phenomenal creations, and the Realm of Clouds was her masterpiece, the thing she spent years trying to perfect.

The floating islands are empty. Any traces of the dangerous weapons hidden away here so long ago are completely gone, and all that’s left is a strange sense of tranquility. It feels like her, and Xiao allows himself to sink down into his knees.

Cecili is Barbatos. Barbatos is Cecili. It made no sense, and yet it was the only thing that made sense. How the ambers reacted to him, how he felt so strange to Xiao’s senses. Xiao, who was so used to Rex Lapis’ overpowering presence, has felt traces of it in Cecili, but of course he couldn’t have looked at this clueless, annoying boy, and thought him an Archon.

No, no. He, of all people, should have known. Barbatos may have no idea who Xiao was, but Xiao has longed for his presence for countless eons, and has pretended to hear the faint sounds of a flute carried by the wind countless times. He should have known from the moment Cecili’s fingers touched the strings of his lyre.

From the start, it was strange. Xiao has never heard of someone who lost all of their memories, without any apparent trauma or injury. And his lyre—hadn’t he thought, again and again, how strange it was? How disconcerting? How had he not checked it at all? Why was he not more vigilant, more cautious around him? Could he have somehow known, all this time?

I kissed Barbatos, he thinks suddenly, and has to slam down his forehead against the ground, struggling to breathe. I tossed Barbatos off a cliff, he thinks, and almost chokes on hysterical laughter. The last few months spin around in his mind in vivid colours. Barbatos saw the altar I set for him. I told Barbatos his own tale. Barbatos called himself useless and lazy. Moment after moment that Xiao has spent with the Archon who saved him, and had no idea.

Were the moments of uncertainty, of doubt, all Cecili? Was it something Barbatos himself had also carried? All at once, Xiao realizes how little he knows, how stupid he is. Cecili was an open book, but Barbatos is unknowable. The person he kissed, the person he touched and was touched by in return, the person who took him swimming and climbing and exploring, played music with him and asked his help in inventing ballads and tales—that person isn’t real. He doesn’t exist. Has never existed.

Barbatos lost his gnosis. Cecili lost his memories. The two must be connected, even though Xiao has no idea how, barely knows what a gnosis even is. Rex Lapis never explained it to him, and Xiao never had to ask. And now Rex Lapis is gone, Guizhong is gone, Barbatos is all but gone.

He needs to take him to the traveler. He needs to—he needs to tell both of them the truth, and wash his hands off of this. Only days beforehand he had asked himself if he could ever let Cecili go, and now he finds out he was never his to have. Barbatos was the Archon of wind, of freedom. Xiao would never take that away from him.

He stays there, kneeling amongst the clouds, for a very long time.

He finds the traveler wandering around Mount Hulao, attacking the ambers for some strange reason. He doesn’t ask, but she still explains—something about treasures and chests. The strange imp is with her this time, and chirps her staunch support of this method of acquiring Mora.

He doesn’t reply to either of them, and instead says: “I found Barbatos.” Those are the first words that have left his mouth since he left Cecili—no, Barbatos, Cecili doesn’t exist—behind, and they’re painful as they cross his throat. He feels parched, even though he doesn’t need to drink water.

The traveler’s eyes go wide. “You did?”

“The Tone-Deaf Bard?!” the creature screeches.

That catches him by surprise. “You know he’s a bard?”

“You know he’s a bard?” the traveler asks him right back. “Ah, I suppose—it’s alright if we tell you. I was a bit worried that it would spread around, but you…” she trails off awkwardly, but he can understand what she’s getting at.

“You don’t have any friends to tell, anyway,” the creature apparently does not have the tact her companion does.

“Paimon!”

“Tell me what,” Xiao cuts them off before they can start squabbling.

“Ah, well. Barbatos’ human guise is a bard. He goes by the name of Venti,” the traveler explains. “Didn’t he introduce himself to you?”

Xiao ignores her. Venti. The name glides through his mind like a gentle summer breeze. It isn’t that Cecili didn’t fit him—Cecili was a boy tied to the earth, kneeling among the flowers. Venti was a boy who belonged in the sky.

The traveler is still looking at him expectantly. SInce meeting Cecili, Xiao’s lips have learnt the shapes of so many new words, so many new ways to express himself. Now, he finds himself unable to explain.

“Meet me in Qingce Village,” he finally says. “There’s someone you need to meet.”

He doesn’t think on his way back. He doesn’t allow himself to—if he thinks too long about everything, about the man he knew as Cecili, how could he possibly let him go? And so he sinks into himself, barricades himself as he has done centuries ago, when he was forced to commit unimaginable horrors. He doesn’t think this quite falls on the same level, but…

Qingce Village is quiet once he gets to the valley. It’s dawn now, but Xiao has no idea how much time has passed while he was in the Realm of Clouds. For all he knows, it could have been days. Somehow, the traveler is already there, even though Xiao should by all accounts have beaten her there. He doesn’t question it.

“This is where the Tone-Deaf Bard is?” the creature asks, her tone disbelieving. “No way, we would have heard!”

“Come,” Xiao says, not answering her. Cecili must still be asleep, but Xiao doesn’t want to delay until he wakes up. He has spent enough time living this delusion.

“Adeptus Xiao!” before they get far, they’re accosted by Ms. Bai. “And—Traveler! I didn’t know you knew each other.”

The traveler and the creature exchange glances. “You know Xiao?”

Ms. Bai’s smile turns warm. Xiao’s insides squirm to see it. “Of course! He’s our xiao-Li’s treasured friend.” Her gaze turns a bit knowing when she says it. Xiao doesn’t want to be here.

“Xiao-Li?” the traveler repeats.

“Ah, that’s right! He wasn’t around while you were visiting us, was he? He’s our newly acquired bard. So talented! A bit scatter-brained, but even that is such a welcome change in our little village,” she says. The traveler’s head whips around to stare at Xiao.

“A bard?”

Xiao is more than glad to leave the explanation to Ms. Bai, even if she doesn’t know exactly what she’s explaining. “Yes, yes. Quite a peculiar story, too—the poor dear has lost all of his memories, and he was just wandering around Stone Gate when Zhi found him! He almost walked straight into a hilichurl camp.”

“No memories,” the traveler repeats again. Clearly she has put it all together, even if it appears her companion has not.

“Eh, why do we care about some forgetful bard?! Is the Tone-Deaf Bard here or not?!”

The traveler sighs. “Paimon… Nevermind.” She turns to Ms. Bai. “We’re actually here to visit, uh, xiao-Li. Do you know where he is?”

Ms. Bai’s face turns troubled. “Usually I would say still sleeping, but I’ve noticed he’s been up awake at odd hours in the past two days… Ever since he returned from his latest exploration trip.” She eyes Xiao knowingly again. “A lover’s quarrel?”

Xiao’s face explodes with heat. “What?!”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, dear,” she continues, perhaps unaware she was the first human Xiao can ever remember scolding him. “All young couples go through it. Granted, I thought you might still be in the honeymoon stage, but I suppose immortals work at a different pace…”

Xiao remembers, very distantly, how in awe the villagers were of him when he first showed up to the village. He desperately misses it. “We—I—” he dimly realizes the traveler is outright laughing at his side, and just gives up on this entire conversation. “Is he home, then?” he asks instead.

“Probably,” Ms. Bai smiles. “Now, go on, I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of a sincere apology!”

Xiao spins on his feet and marches away from her, absolutely ignoring the traveler when she catches up to him, still sniggering. “Lovers?”

“Shut up,” he hisses at her.

She raises her hands in surrender, but he can tell her eyes are still laughing. The creature also follows, pouting. “Let Paimon in on the joke!”

“Ah, it wasn’t that funny, don’t worry about it,” the traveler waves her off. “Actually, Paimon—do you think you could go tell… our friend at Wangsheng Funeral Parlour about this? I’m sure he is very worried.”

The creature frowns at her. “Why would I—ohhhhhh.” She gives Xiao a look he doesn’t quite like. “But Paimon wants to see the Tone-Deaf Bard…”

“I promise I will bring you to see him as soon as possible,” the traveler swears. With one last whine, the creature is gone and the traveler then asks Xiao: “Did you know?”

Xiao is reluctant to admit his shameful shortcomings, but there is no getting around it. “No. Not until I realized his Anemo Vision was fake, and yet he could still use Anemo energy.”

She hums in thought. “Yes, Venti did tell me…” she trails off. “Wait, Ms. Bai called him… xiao-Li?”

Before Xiao can reply, they hear a shout from up ahead. “Xiao!” And then, almost faster than Xiao registers it, Cecili is there. He looks exactly as Xiao has last seen him, minus the now clean clothes. The cut on his cheek has scabbed over. He looks like the man Xiao has kissed, has held. He looks nothing like an Archon.

Xiao’s mouth snaps tight, his entire body locking. He has no idea what to say. But as always, Cecili is more than happy to feel up his silences. “Xiao, I’m so sorry. I was stupid, and put you in danger, and I know you have every right to be mad about me for that but I swear—”

He thinks Xiao is mad at him? Xiao nods his head in denial, his mouth still refusing to open, but just this once, Cecili fails to read his intentions. His eyes turn frantic. “Ah, please don’t be mad, please don’t be mad! I will… I will meditate every day for two hours! I will sing to every glaze lilly in the valley! I… I won’t make fun of you even a little the next time I catch you making flower crowns with xiao-Luo! I will—”

“He isn’t mad,” the traveler cuts in. Her gaze is strange as she looks at Ceci—Barbatos. Like the reality she sees before her doesn’t quite match her own perception of it. “Hello.”

Barbatos, losing his wind, blinks at her in surprise. “Um. Hello.”

“I’m Lumine,” she introduces herself. Probably for the second time.

His eyes widen in recognition. “Oh! The traveler! I’ve heard so much about you!”

“From Xiao?” her tone is dry, but her eyes are dancing.

“From Xiao,” Barbatos agrees. “Ah, let me introduce myself. I’m Cecili, a humble wandering bard.” He bows theatrically at his waist. “A pleasure to meet such a great hero.”

“Cecili?” she asks, her eyebrow raised, and suddenly Xiao can’t stand this charade any longer, can’t be a part of the conversation that is to come.

“She knows who you are,” he tells Barbatos. “She will explain.”

And then, he teleports away, like the coward he has always been.

“Cecili told me I will find you here,” the traveler greets him as she enters the area of the altar, a few hours later.

“Why do you call him that? It’s not his name.”

She shrugs. “It’s as much his name as any. I won’t disrespect him by calling him a name he doesn’t remember.” She skirts her way around the statues and comes to stand next to him near the altar, the two of them staring off into the distance. “You really didn’t know?”

Xiao flinches, stung. “Do you think I would have kept it away from him if I had?” From the periphery of his vision he can see her giving him an assessing gaze, but he doesn’t turn his head to meet it. He doesn’t know what he will see in her eyes.

“No,” she finally says. “I don’t think so.”

“I think I might have suspected,” Xiao says. He doesn’t know why he’s telling her this, but there’s something about her that compels him. She reminds him of all the best parts of Rex Lapis, of Guizhong. Her light is dim now, for whatever reason, but Xiao is certain she can shine like the brightest thing in the universe. “I convinced myself that I thought he was dangerous, but I never fully believed it.”

She laughs. “Venti couldn’t harm a cat. Like, literally, couldn’t. He’s—”

“Allergic,” Xiao finishes for her. A smile graces his lips. “I know.” He sighs, and then decides to get it over with. “How did he react?”

“Ah, the obvious. He didn’t believe me at first. I don’t think he fully does yet, either. But I managed to convince him well enough to agree to accompany me to a… friend who might be able to help.”

Now he looks at her, raises an eyebrow. “A friend who can help you recover the memories of an Archon?”

“You meet all sorts of people, traveling around,” she shrugs. She isn’t meeting his eyes. “Listen, he—Cecili wants you to join us.”

Immediately, Xiao shakes his head. “No.”

“No?”

He thinks if he sees the exact moment that Barbatos gets his memories back—if he sees awareness fade away from Cecili’s expressive eyes, and the consciousness of the Anemo Archon flooding in—he will surely finally break under the weight of his karmic debt. He will finally join his brothers in eternal oblivion. Rex Lapis might be dead, but Xiao isn’t ready to make the same commitment. “No.”

“Hmm…”

“Tell your friend I suspect the lyre is connected to whatever ails Barbatos.” From the beginning he has felt faint traces of something from it. He doesn’t know what kind of magic made him overlook it, time and time again, but whatever it is he doesn’t want it to impede those who wish to help him. “Traveler.” He now turns to face her fully. “You will take care of Cecili?” The name slips his lips before he can bite it back. It stings on its way out.

“I’ll take care of Venti,” she corrects him gently. “I think Cecili would much rather have your companionship.” She says it without censure or condemnation, as if even without the words she understands what Xiao cannot say. An unexpected surge of gratitude rises in Xiao. He finally can truly understand how this slip of a woman commands the loyalty of enormous powers.

“I can’t.”

“I know.” She makes as if to touch his shoulder, but then her hand hesitates and falls back. “Will you be alright, Xiao?”

No. “Yes.”

Lumine doesn’t look like she believes him.

Xiao doesn’t believe that he would sense the moment Barbatos would get his memories back, and yet he keeps imagining it. He missteps, and thinks that was it. He takes a mistimed breath, and thinks that was it. He gets slashed across his midsection by a hilichurl, and thinks that was it. Every breath he takes could be the last moment Cecili remains in existence, and he wouldn’t even know it. Would probably never know it, because he has no plans on ever seeing Barbatos again.

He hasn’t been to Qingce Village since then. He would not abandon it if one day it will be in peril, but the thought of seeing those worn-down houses, those beautiful terraces, those foreboding mountains, makes him feel ill. He thinks of going there, and meeting Ms. Bai, Hanfeng, any of the children—hear them talk to him and tease him, ask for his stories, for his music, acting as if nothing has changed… he wouldn’t be able to bear it. The regret and embarrassment would eat him whole.

He knows the traveler—Lumine—has been looking for him, but he will not answer her calls. Every time he gets close, just enough to determine she isn’t in actual danger, and then he leaves immediately. He doesn’t know what she will see in him if she sees him. He doesn’t want to expose her to all the ugliest parts of him.

Painstakingly, he builds up all the pieces of himself that he has discarded. First, the apathy. Then, the distrust. Rejection of comfort, of fun, of laughter. He spends several hours in the pool on Mount Hulao, scrubbing himself clean. He imagines he’s flaying his skin in every spot Cecili has ever touched. He imagines he’s remaking himself anew.

Cloud Retainer watches from her perch in silence. He doesn’t know what she’s thinking. He has no need to know. He has been too careless in the last few months. Too neglectful of his duties, he allowed himself to be distracted. No more.

Ganyu has different thoughts on the matter. When she comes to see him in Wangshu Inn (it’s a convenient location, that is all. He will no longer accept any Almond Tofu offerings) she takes one look at him and her face falls. He doesn’t know why. He’s fine.

“Oh, Xiao…”

“Do you have the reports?”

Wordlessly, she hands him reports of suspicious activity in Guyun Stone Forest. Xiao hates going there—sea journey, even the shortest one, does not agree with him—but he is grateful for the distraction.

“Are you leaving now?” Ganyu’s words stop him in his tracks.

“Is there a reason I should wait?”

“No,” she frowns, “But I would have thought… You would like to go to Qingce Village first?”

Xiao’s body has been remade anew. He does not flinch. “There is no need. I will depart immediately.” He doesn’t look back as he’s leaving, but he can feel Ganyu’s sad eyes following him until he’s out of sight.

He wishes he could tell her there is no need for her to mourn. That Xiao was not made to carry sadness within him. But Xiao’s words have been stolen from him, and the wind has carried them far, far away.

Months go by. If he was in Qingce Village, he knows the trees would all have shed their leaves by now, that the valley would appear barren and lifeless. Liyue during autumn is beautiful, but during the winter it sheds its beauty, becoming cold, foreboding. Nantianmen is especially restless during this time—the roots of its icy trees trying to spread out, encase the entire country in ice. Winter is relentless.

He spends an entire month incapacitated after a particularly bad fight with a geovishap. He was foolish, distracted like an amatuer fighter, and he pays for it with two broken legs, and a smattering of broken ribs. He’s confined to his room at Wangshu Inn, and he hates every second of it. Feeling trapped and closed in, he can do nothing except stare at the ceiling, try to clear his mind of thoughts, of the memories that plague him. Cecili is gone joins Barbatos is missing, Rex Lapis is dead. But it isn’t that Cecili is gone. He simply never existed in the first place.

When he finally leaves, he slaughters an entire camp of hilichurls. He doesn’t acquire any new injuries.

Barbatos has left Liyue. Xiao hears it from Ganyu, who has escorted him back to Mondstadt. She calls him by his human name—Venti. It rolls off her tongue easily, even with her Liyuen accent coloring it. He doesn’t dare voice it outloud.

Lumine catches up to him, at some point. She doesn’t try to convince him to meet the Anemo Archon. Instead, she spends a few days at his side, fighting when needed. She doesn’t even try to make him talk. He’s grateful for that.

When she leaves, she places a small, gentle hand on his shoulder, the way she didn’t dare to before. “I know what it’s like to miss someone who isn’t really gone,” she tells him. “It tears me apart, every day. But it doesn’t have to be the same for you.”

She leaves before he can think of a way to respond.

And then, he feels Chi moving in the north. He’s halfway to Qingce Village before he realizes. It would make no sense for him to be sensing that ancient dragon—unlike Osial and Azhdaha, Chi is dead, not merely subdued or sealed. But still, there is sickness in the air, and the stench of rot carried by the wind.

Could it be that when Cecili—no, the man that was Barbatos—activated that old vault, some piece of Chi still remained? That it had escaped? Xiao had not noticed anything, but between the fight and the subsequent revelations, he couldn't be certain he hadn’t missed anything. If something happened to Qingce Village, it would be his fault. His responsibility. His carelessness. The faces of the children, of Ms. Bai and Granny Ruoxin and old man Jiangcheng flash in his mind. Faces he never bothered learning before.

He quickens his pace, but when he arrives at the valley, there are no plumes of smoke, no destroyed terraces or buildings. Just a sleepy village, still seemingly abandoned in time. Still, the stench carries him upwards, beyond the watermill, beyond the terraces, up to the very peak of the mountain, and there stands—

He turns to leave immediately, sick now with more than the stench of decay, but Barbatos is too quick, and he catches his wrist lightning fast. “Xiao, wait!”

Xiao tries to shake him off, but unlike their first meeting, Barbatos’ grip is relentless, his fingers digging themselves into his wrist. He imagines they’re making a dent in his skin. He imagines that even if they let go, the evidence would remain: that Barbatos had touched him with such force to leave his mark.

“Please, Xiao,” Barbatos says. “Just—for a few moments. Stay.”

Xiao refuses to look at him. “There’s a disturbance in the area. I must investigate it,” he says stiffly.

“Uh, haha, about that…'' he giggles nervously. Xiao can almost see the way he absentmindedly scratches at his cheek but—no, that isn’t right. That was Cecili’s tell. Xiao has no idea what any of Barbatos’ are. “That was me. I remembered what it felt like in the vault cave and just… manipulated the winds to carry it to you. I’m sorry! But you kept avoiding me, and Lumi wouldn’t help me ambush you, so I really had no choice.”

Anger stirs in him. “You shouldn’t play with those forces, Lord Barbatos. You have no idea what you could have awoken.”

Barbatos’ hand tightens around his wrist. “Venti.”

“What?”

“You can be angry at me, you can be mad, but my name is Venti, it isn’t so bad.”

He—rhymes. Of course. Of course Barbatos could prove to be as outlandish as Cecili had. “I’m not angry.”

A short, wry laugh. “You could have fooled me.” Barbatos’ hand tugs at his wrist. “Come, can we go sit by the pool? For old time’s sake.”

Xiao sighs, and lets himself look at him, properly this time. He’s still wearing green, but in Mondstadt style, some ridiculous outfit with cape and breeches and frills all over the place. His hair, which Xiao remembers being so often unruly and tangled, is neatly tied into two braids, framing the same familiar face. The hat is… new. Xiao can’t remember Cecili ever wearing one, but it sits comfortably on Barbatos’ head. And attached to it is a flower.

Xiao’s unclaimed hand rises on its own accord, and without even noticing it his fingers graze the soft petals of the flower. Then, noticing what he has done, he withdraws his hand as if stung—but the damage is already done.

Cecili’s eyes stare at him from Barbatos’ face. “Please,” he asks again, and Xiao is defeated.

The water of the pool is ice cold as he accidentally splashes some on himself. It doesn’t seem to bother Barbatos, who happily sheds his shoes and socks, plunging his feet in. Through the water, the lines of his ankles become distorted, but Xiao can see how dainty they are, how seemingly fragile. Barbatos’ toes curl in the cold, and Xiao has to turn his gaze away.

“How have you been, Xiao?” Barbatos asks. His fingers are still around Xiao’s wrist, as if he’s afraid Xiao will disappear without a moment’s notice. He doesn’t know that Xiao couldn’t possibly, now that he has Barbatos’ touch branding his skin again.

“Busy,” he says. “Winter in Liyue is always busy.”

“Oh, it’s the opposite in Mondstadt,” Barbatos says. “In the cold season, the Winery is shut down, and with it the entire city, more or less. The taverns get a lot busier though!” He laughs. It’s the same laugh. It feels like it shouldn’t be, but it’s identical.

Xiao doesn’t have anything to say to that. He doesn’t know anything about Mondstadt. The silence between them is uncomfortable, barbed. He doesn’t know what there is to say. He doesn’t want to be there, and yet can’t imagine leaving.

As always, it is Barbatos who breaks the silence. “I’m sorry.”

The idea that there is anything Barbatos should apologize for to Xiao is ridiculous. Preposterous. “What is there to be sorry for?”

“I fear that you might feel as if I have… deceived you.” Barbatos’ voice is slow, measured, as if he is weighing every single word in his mouth. Xiao doesn’t need such consideration.

“You weren’t deceiving me. You didn’t have your memories.” A thought occurs to Xiao. “Unless—you lost them on purpose?”

Barbatos shakes his head. “No, no. Haha, you must know it just as well, but we immortals sure have a lot of memories, don’t we? By the time I noticed mine degrading, it was almost too late. I barely had enough time to push the rest of them into my lyre. Thank you, by the way,” he adds. “Lumi told me it was you who mentioned it to her.”

Xiao inclines his head. “Of course. I’m glad I could help.” He hesitates for a moment, and then asks: “Then, her friend was the one who helped you?”

A shadow passes over Barbatos’ face, there and gone so quickly that Xiao could have almost imagined it. It feels strange to see it on Cecili’s face, and yet not—Cecili had his own brand of melancholy, his own nature of intense emotions. “Yes, he did. He could have helped earlier, but—ah, never mind. I’ve yelled at him for long enough.”

Xiao is curious to know who it is that would refuse an Archon help, but he is more than aware he has no room to demand such information. He still doesn’t know what he’s doing here. Maybe he should ask.

“Barbatos. Why have you sought me out?”

Unprovoked, Barbatos’ fingers around his wrist pinch him, just the slightest bit. “I told you—it’s Venti. Please don’t blow my cover.”

There are no people around to reveal this secret in front, but Xiao acquiesces, as he always does. “Venti, then.” It’s the first time he has said the name. It doesn’t sound like when Lumine says it, familiar and comfortable in her mouth. It doesn’t sound like Ganyu says it either, a little bit hesitant on the consonants, deference in her tone. In his voice, it sounds desperate. It rings like a eulogy.

Perhaps Venti can hear it as well, because his breath catches, his eyes go a little bit wide. “Oh. Good.”

Xiao coughs, averts his gaze. “Why have you sought me out?” he asks again.

He hears Venti sigh besides him. “Why wouldn’t I have? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“That wasn’t you.”

“Hmm, maybe you should let me decide what was and wasn’t me.”

“You didn’t have your memories.”

“Memories aren’t all a person has. Wasn’t it you who taught me that?”

Xiao doesn’t have anything to say to that. But Cecili and Barbatos were different. They had to be. Otherwise Xiao has spent the last few months laughing with Barbatos, kissing Barbatos, falling in love with Barbatos. And he knew that Cecili loved him, and surely Barbatos can’t—can’t—

“Xiao, won’t you look at me?”

Xiao does, helpless to resist. Venti is dazzling in the dying light of the sun, brilliant beyond belief. The image of him is forever etched into Xiao’s very being. “Cecili wasn’t even real—”

“He was real,” Venti cuts him off. For all that Cecili was an open book, Barbatos is impossible for him to read. “He was real, and—this is his face I’m wearing, did you know?”

“What?”

Venti smiles, closes his eyes. In his hands, the lyre materializes; a familiar one, the one that housed his memories. It sports a flower now, matching the one in his hat. “You’ve taught me so many songs, Xiao. Would you let me tell you one in return?”

And he does—in a slow, haunting melody, which spirals all around them. The story of a tyrannical king, and a bard, and a wisp of wind, barely formed at all. The story of courage and revolution, of the desire for freedom towering over everything else. And finally, the story of sacrifice, of death, of a friendship forever defined by grief.

Xiao sits there, and lets the words wash over him. Lets himself imagine the place, those people that Venti speaks of with such love in his voice. Stormterror Lair is lit up in the sky behind them, but Xiao doesn’t want to look at its ruins. In Teyvat, one can’t help but be constantly surrounded by ruins and forgotten memories, and he doesn’t want this story to be one. Not in this moment

“His name was Cecili,” Venti’s voice is a whisper now, his tone changing from a rhythmic melody into that of a kept secret. The lyre’s strings fall silent beneath his long fingers. “I wanted to—honor him. I thought this way, he would never truly die. That if people could still see his face; his eyes, his smile, the freckles that sometimes come out in the sun… There would always be a part of him with me. I loved him before I even knew what love was.”

“You honor him,” Xiao says. He can’t look away from Venti’s face, the one that once belonged to a boy named Cecili—a boy Xiao has never met, and yet feels like he knows as well as he knows the stars in the sky. “You honor his memory.”

Venti smiles, a touch self-consciously. “Decades later, a flower started to pop up in Mondstadt, but only on Starsnatch Cliff. The city of Mondstadt—where it stands today, anyway—was still so new, and I was still known as Barbatos then. They came to me, to ask for a name.” His fingers pluck the flower attached to his hat, and he shows it to Xiao, cupped between his hands. “I named it Cecilia. He would have been embarrassed if it was just his name,” he giggles, but his fingers are gentle as they smooth out the petals.

Xiao leans forward, only slightly, but enough to smell it—the sweet, fresh scent he has memorized so long ago, the one he could never place. Without a thought, his lips quirk up in a small smile. “It’s a beautiful flower.” When Venti doesn’t say anything, he raises his eyes from the flower to look at him, and sees him gazing back at him in return, his lips slightly parted, his green eyes wide. He quirks his eyebrow at him in question, and has the joy to see Venti flush, the red climbing enticingly on his cheekbones.

“Ah, haha, sorry, it’s just… This is the first time you smiled at me. Um, I mean—me as Venti, not Cecili.” He ducks his head. Without the hat on, his hair is a little less orderly, a little more wild. Xiao feels the fondness blossom inside of him. “Oh, and then there is Vennessa, of course.”

Vennessa. The other name Cecili has mentioned. “Was she also a revolutionary?” Xiao asks dryly, intending it to be a joke, but Venti laughs at the question.

“Yes, actually! A different period, though. About… hmm. A thousand years ago, I believe? You know how it is, time.” He says the word the way only an immortal would, part condescending, part terrified. Xiao knew it just as well. “It’s a much happier story! You would have liked her, I think. She was very… devoted.”

And he tells him another story: of a girl born to slavery and shackles, who loved her people so fiercely she overthrow an entire city around her shoulders. He sings of family, and bravery, and an incredible strength of body and mind. He sings of a city reborn, of reconstruction and revitalization. And then, he sings of freedom: of how high she flew, on her newfound wings, so high that even Barbatos couldn’t follow her to where she went.

Venti might have said this was a happy story, but Xiao could still hear the sorrow in it, the loneliness.

“She was your friend.”

“The best!” Venti grins through the grief. “The current Grand Master, Jean—she reminds me of her a lot. Although I fear that if I tell her that, her heart will jump so high it might go splat!” At Xiao’s unimpressed look, he grimaces. “I know, I know, that was a bad one. Give me some slack, I only just got back!”

Xiao snorts, shaking his head. Venti pouts, and splashes him with some of the freezing water. “Rude. Lumi never makes fun of my rhymes.”

“Maybe she should.” Before Venti can retort, he asks him: “Why are you telling me all of this? Bar—Venti,” he corrects himself at Venti’s glare. “You don’t owe me your stories.”

“Oh, honestly, you Liyuens,” Venti huffs. “It’s not about owing, or debts, or equivalent exchange, or whatever term you wish to use. It’s just… Xiao. You…” it’s odd, seeing him so lost for words. For a second, Xiao thinks: maybe I make him as flustered as he makes me. It’s an odd idea.

“When I was going by Cecili… You kept giving me all those wonderful things, those beautiful pieces of your heart and soul. You let me get close, and stand next to you, and you quieted all the parts of me that were writhing, lost, confused. I could touch you and be touched in return. Even then, I wanted to expose myself to you, to show you everything I was, but I had nothing to show. Now that I do—of course I want to tell you. Of course I want to share myself with you.” Venti smiles at him. He raises the hand still holding the flower—the cecilia—toward Xiao, and with kind, careful motions, tucks it behind his ear. It should have immediately fallen off, but Xiao could feel the gentle Anemo energy swirling around it, tucking it close to Xiao’s body. Flowers can’t hold body heat, but Xiao can almost just feel Venti’s still radiating from its stem.

“I remember—I was so afraid there wouldn’t be room for anything else. I felt so empty, and you took up so much space. I was so afraid to remember anything else. I thought surely something would have to give. Surely something would have to be lost, forced out. But I was wrong! I don’t feel suffocated, I feel endless. You settle so nicely amongst everything else.”

“I haven’t told you everything,” Xiao whispers, his eyes falling to stare at the ground. The sun has long since set by now, and everything is washed by the light of the moon. The moment feels fragile, and reminds him of that night spent in Cecili’s hut, full of grief and despair. The air around them now vibrates in a different frequency. “The parts you have—you only think they’re beautiful. You can’t see the rot inside.”

Venti’s fingers retreat, lightly grazing the shell of his ear. Despite himself, Xiao shivers. “Did you know that decay is hastened by exposure to air? Harsh winds and the other elements will make a body decompose faster. That’s why the easiest method of conservation is through ice—it defends against the tenacity of the wind.”

At Xiao’s confused look, Venti chuckles. “What I mean, is that surely I’m more than qualified to recognize rot and decay, and all those ugly, disgusting things you claim are decomposing inside you. And I’m telling you, my dearest Xiao, there is no part of you that carries it within itself.”

Metaphors. He’s speaking to Xiao of metaphors, but he doesn’t understand—”I told you, of my old master.” He has told Cecili, but Venti doesn’t seem to differentiate between all of those aspects of himself: like Cecili is Venti is Barbatos. Maybe it’s alright if Xiao follows his lead.

“The one Morax saved you from? Yes.”

“I did—terrible things, under his command.” Xiao’s eyes close, but he forces them open. He doesn’t deserve to hide away from it. “A very, very long time ago… Qingce Village was my home.”

Venti’s eyebrows jump in surprise. “It was?”

“I wasn’t an Adepti then. I ate the village children’s nightmares, and protected them in their sleep. They called me Alatus—a name from Fontaine. It means winged. Perhaps that was how I appeared to them, in the depth of night. I was… happy. I didn’t know any other kind of life.” He knows that even if he closes his eyes, he couldn’t picture it anymore. That life is as far away from himself as the furthest point of Mare Jivari. “But when he took control over me, I slaughtered all of them. I devoured their dreams—do you know what it means, to steal away a human’s dream? To devour it whole? You aren’t just killing a person. You’re devastating a soul.” It tastes so good, he doesn’t say. In my darkest moments, I miss it like a severed limb.

“Xiao…” There is a certain kind of heartbreak painting itself across Venti’s face. Xiao thinks that if he lets it, it could rewrite him entirely.

“When Rex Lapis freed me, it was a rush. All of a sudden, I could think, I could feel, I could understand. It was like—”

“A freefall,” Venti finishes for him. “When suddenly the sky opens up above you, and everything is blue and open and bright. That’s when I gave you this, didn’t I?” His fingers trace Xiao’s Vision. It should have felt like a violation.

It feels like benediction.

Xiao stares at him, stupefied. “You knew?”

But Venti shakes his head. “Only just now. But I can remember it; a sense of freedom, of loss mixed with elation mixed with disbelief… It was so profound, so powerful, that I felt it from half a continent away. I was such a young god then… You were one of my firsts, you know.”

For some reason, that makes Xiao flush. Venti doesn’t seem to notice, for he continues: “And you think this makes you unloveable?”

Unloveable? Who said anything about love? “Barbatos—”

“It’s Venti. But—actually, no, never mind. We can come back to this in a moment. I have one other question.”

Xiao tenses. “What is it?”

“The altar—” he starts, and then pauses. He fidgets in place. “Ah, haha, I mean… You mentioned, before. That it was for Barbatos.”

A flash of crimson steals its way across Xiao’s face. He avoids Venti’s eyes entirely. “It is.”

“Is it… you, who puts the offerings there?”

Xiao could lie, but not to this face. Not to this man, not to this Archon. “Yes.”

“Was it because of the Vision?”

“No.”

Venti waits patiently. His hand is back on Xiao’s wrist now, his thumb tracing unknowable patterns across his skin. Finally, Xiao relents.

“You also play the flute.”

“Yes?” Venti asks, puzzled. “I used to play it more, but I’ve been feeling more partial to the lyre, in the last couple hundred years…”

“You played it once, a very long time ago. You must have been near the Stone Gate, perhaps even right on top of it. Or maybe the wind current was especially strong, that day, because I heard you all the way over in Guili Plains. I had fought for three days and three nights, without any break or respite. I was exhausted. Close to breaking. I thought that finally I would join the other Yakshas—that my karmic debts would overwhelm me, that I would fail Rex Lapis one final time. And then I heard it.” If he stretched his senses, he could almost pretend he hears it still, centuries away. “I was lying on the ground, and the flute played until dawn. It was… peaceful.” The glaze lilies were in bloom, he remembers. They swayed in the breeze all around them, and opened up to that sweet melody.

Venti looks frozen in place, staring at him. This time it’s Xiao who allows himself to lean forward, to be as brave as he was with Cecili. He traces Venti’s fingers with his own, re-familiarizes himself with the calluses, the small scars. When he reaches Venti’s wrist, he can feel his pulse running rabbit-fast. “I’ve searched for that same feeling of peace, for so, so long.”

“And then I found you,” Venti says, breathless with the weight of centuries above them.

Xiao allows himself to smile again. “I believe it was me who found you.”

“Semantics,” Venti waves him off, but he smiles back. It’s Cecili’s smile, which is Venti’s smile, which is Barbatos’ smile. Xiao thought him gone, thought him a fever-dream, a creature of his own creation. Like a mirage in the desert, there and gone just as quickly.

But now Xiao lets this smile be pressed against his in a kiss, lets Venti’s hand cup his face, careful to not dislodge the flower behind his ear. Lets his own hands bury themselves in his hair, tracing their way through wind-swept locks, messing those careful braids. He lets himself be pushed down into the grass, Venti above him, around him, all he can see. Lets his eyes close to the sight, lets himself sink into his taste, his scent, the wind that whips itself around them, cradling them in its embrace.

Kissing a god isn’t all the different from kissing a human. Or perhaps it’s that kissing Venti isn’t that different from kissing Cecili—they both sigh into the kiss just so, make the same noises, move the same way. Xiao could have spent centuries cataloguing the difference, but there are none to be catalogued. Venti bites his lips ever so gently, just like Cecili did, and Xiao arches under him, just as he did under Cecili. It’s all maddeningly, intoxicatingly, the same.

“Told you,” Venti says once he manages to rip himself away from Xiao’s lips. His are red, shining, as if coated by the juice of one of the apples Xiao would scold him for stealing away from his own altar. Xiao wants to bite them some more.

“Told me what,” he manages to reply, once he comprehends the words.

“That you aren’t unloveable,” Venti leans down, their noses almost touching. “Didn’t I once say so? I don’t think I’m wrong about you. I still don’t.”

Xiao looks up at him. “You are… Cecili,” he says, slowly, painfully. He sound so stupid, but Venti doesn’t seem to mind. He beams at him.

“I am! I am also Barbatos, Venti, Tone-Deaf Bard—we immortals do tend to have many names. I think Diluc calls me an incurable drunkard, which seems to me a bit rude. I’m not drunk quite a lot of hours of the day, you know!”

Xiao has no idea who Diluc is. He doesn’t care, either. “And it was all—real.”

“It was. And don’t worry, I’m definitely going to tease you forever for yelling at me for eating my own apples. And pushing me off a cliff. And telling me you admired me. And warning me you were dangerous for me. And—”

Exasperated, fond, absolutely and unbelievably ecstatic, Xiao slaps a hand over his mouth. Venti’s eyes crinkle at him as he smiles beneath his palm. “Forever?”

Venti kisses his palm, and it feels even more intimate than their previous kisses. He lets go. “You promised me time, before. It’s just that I have quite a lot more of it than we originally thought.”

Xiao smiles, closes his eyes. “I think I can be convinced to allow that.”

This time, when Venti kisses him, it doesn’t feel like a freefall, but like a gentle, cushioned landing in a sea of flowers.