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This world is so, so different from how he remembers it. The land above the cliffs is rolling, green hills, dotted with trees and bushes, and some unkempt roads winding between hills. There’s no trace of the catastrophe he remembers seeing.
Then, Teyvat was in total disarray. He and Lumine were no strangers to bad situations. With as many worlds as they’d been through, they’d seen their fair share of disaster.
But Teyvat was on a whole different level. The winds howled, the sky wept acid tears, the mountains cracked and crumbled, and the seas boiled. There were times when they couldn’t even fly close to the ground, because of the holes in earth belching liquid rock. Lumine stayed close to him, constantly pulling him up above the cloud cover, her fingers always tight around the hilt of her sword.
It was a hellish place. The stars and the sun were blotted out by the acrid smoke, and the whole world was constantly in an artificial night.
Normally, they would land in a world and explore. Aether’s talent has always lied in language, with the words and phrases of different worlds coming naturally to him. Lumine was better at haggling prices of supplies, striking bargains, and inserting herself into the business of the locals.
But not then. In Teyvat, they’d stayed for less than a day, soaring above the earth in search of a safe place before they’d realized the whole earth was engulfed in some unnatural fury.
But they found no escape in the space between worlds, where white pillars and bridges interlocked gates that separated worlds.
There’s no sign, though, of that disaster. The sky above is still darkened by night, but the stars are out in full force. He can’t crane his neck up far, without irritating his wounds, but the stars here are just….beautiful.
Lumine would love them.
Aether finds that walking is hard. He keeps leaning forward, expecting the weight of his wings to balance him out, but instead he sends himself stumbling, with only the cold stinging on his back to accompany him.
The path he walks on isn’t very well kept. The weeds pull at his feet, slowing him down. And even though he’s just woken up, Aether’s exhausted. His eyelids droop and he’s finding it harder and harder to keep them open.
He dodges under a particularly aggressive tree branch, wincing as it scrapes his shoulders, just above his first wound. The pressure of his shirt is almost unbearable as it is, with the added tightness of the bandages. He has no idea if the accelerated healing he and Lumine share has been sealed as well. He can only hope so. He’s never healed as slowly as the people of any world they’ve been to, but he can only estimate that wounds like his would take months to heal for a normal person.
When he almost trips over his own feet, Aether finally decides that he needs to stop for the night before he hurts himself. His vision is blurry, but he does see a crumbling stone wall bordering the path.
He settles against it, sliding onto the ground. The cool rock is almost soothing to the aggravated wounds.
And with the cool ocean breeze coming up from under the nearby cliffs, the summer night warmth, and his own exhaustion, it’s not long until he falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.
He wakes up to the morning light filtering through his eyelids, and an insistent shaking—the unmistakable feeling of hands on his shoulder, shaking him awake.
He jumps, scraping his back against the stone wall and hissing when his spine lights up in pain. It takes a moment for his eyes to focus, but when they do, he finds himself face to face with a child.
Aether stills.
A kid with brown hair and brown eyes, who looks no older than ten, has his hands on his shoulder, waking him up. He’s jabbering something—something Aether can’t understand, he doesn’t know Teyvat’s language.
The kid stands up from his crouching position, looks over the stone wall, and calls out for someone. A female voice answers—a mother?
He cranes his neck over the short wall. He must not have seen it last night, in the dark, but the wall he’s sitting next to is bordering the yard of a small house.
And on the porch of that house, there’s a stout woman in an apron making dead eye contact with him.
And she looks very startled by his presence.
He painstakingly pushes himself up, more out of instinct and habit than any desire to stand. His limbs are stiff, from sleeping in a sitting position.
The little boy suddenly gasps, a noise that Aether can recognize well enough in any language, and he realizes that the kid’s eyes are fixed on the bloodied bandages on his back.
The child yells to his mother, pointing and jumping at Aether, and though he has no idea what’s being said, he suddenly finds a worried woman gently pulling him into her home, with the young boy hovering around the both of them.
He’s too tired—and taken aback—to protest. What are they doing? Do they think he was trying to rob them or something? He wishes he knew the language, so he could communicate even a little. It’s unimaginably frustrating to be talked to, but not knowing how to respond.
He finds himself being plopped down on a wooden chair, the woman pushing his braid away from his back, and pulling the back of his shirt up. Her fingers brush the bandages, making him flinch.
She’s trying to treat his wounds.
The realization is surprising, somehow. Why? Why would she be helping him? She doesn’t know him, he’s just a random person who showed up bleeding outside her home.
He doesn’t quite get it. But there’s a warm, grateful feeling that ignites in his chest as the woman begins to untie the knots in his bandages.
The little boy, likely her son, is shooed out of the kitchen by the woman. Aether doesn’t protest. He wouldn’t know how to speak to her anyway, without sounding insane.
She says something. Then she glances at him, meeting his eyes, and repeats it, a concerned look still on her face.
He takes a moment to consider her tone—language is what he’s good at, after all, and something he’d often tell Lumine to be considerate of—and he realizes with a start that she’s asking his name.
He swallows, throat still dry. “Aehh—“ he croaks. Just the sound makes him cringe, from the soreness of his throat. Is it from disuse? “Ae….ther...Aether.”
She nods. “Aether,” she repeats. It sounds too kind, too much for him to handle.
Lumine would normally treat his wounds.
The woman continues to talk, but he doesn’t understand anything she says. She keeps looking at him, as if expecting him to respond, but whenever she looks at his face, her expression softens.
She makes a cry of horror when she unwraps the bandages from his back, and he can barely catch the way her face changes from mild concern to absolute terror. Her deft hands use a wetted cloth to wash the wounds, and it’s less than a minute before fresh bandages are wrapped over his back.
For a minute, it’s silent. The woman is breathing hard, hands on her knees. Are his eyes unfocusing?
No, he realizes. He’s just shaking slightly.
The woman lets out a breath that sounds relieved, and says something with an ironic tone.
He breathes out a small laugh in response. It’s a tactic he’s used in almost every world while he’s learning the language. Pay close attention to the tones used, memorize greetings, please and thank you, and apologies. When someone says something ironic or sarcastic, try to imitate the way they act.
The woman stands back up, and says something to him that sounds….kindly. He hears his name in there, and she gestures to a stairway in the back of the room.
If Aether’s experience serves him even in this state, she’s offering him a room to stay.
“Okay?” The woman ends her sentence with that phrase.
Aether nods, stretching a small, tight smile over his face. He has a feeling that it looks painfully awkward. “Okay,” he says.
It’s the right word, apparently, because the woman helps him off the chair and to the stairs. He catches sight of the boy, at the top of the stairs. The woman says something to him in a stern manner, as she helps him up the stairs.
She settles him on a straw mattress, saying something in the same stern tone. Aether’s pretty sure it’s something about not irritating his wounds any further.
A word he keeps hearing is “blood”, or “hurt.” He files those away to the back of his mind for later reference.
After all, he won’t be able to find Lumine if he can’t describe her. Language is more important than even some resources, the way he sees it. To be able to communicate, to learn from the people of a world—
It’s even more important now that he has something to look for.
Aether stayed in that house for two more days. The woman wouldn’t let him leave, always sitting him back down in the house, even when he tried to leave.
He picked up more words in his stay. Hello, thank you, sorry, I’m okay, please, good night, good evening, good morning, sleep well, and no and yes.
His vocabulary is coming along well.
But, he still doesn’t know the word for sister. Or missing, or taken.
The little boy hangs around him more often than not. He doesn’t say much, but he has felt the kid touching his hair, and repeating things his mother has said. Mostly to lay down, eat, or rest.
He hasn’t seen a father, or any siblings, though. Aether can’t imagine not having a sibling. Though, he doesn’t have to imagine anymore.
He learns how to ask for certain things, like water or food. From the boy, he learns smaller words, like flowers or bowl or clothes.
On the third day he’s there, the boy takes him outside. He pulls him past the broken-down stone wall, to a little pond nearby.
“Fish!” The boy says, tugging on his hand. “Want—fishing—me?”
What he probably said was “want to go fishing with me?” But there are only so many words he’s memorized. Aether nods.
“Sure,” he says. The boy hands him a fishing rod, an instrument he at least recognizes, and for one quiet afternoon, he fishes with the young boy.
They barely catch anything.
But even as he sits fishing, there’s always an ugly thought in the back of his mind. A guilt, for just….sitting there. For having fun, while Lumine is out there. Is she looking for him? Is she in pain? Danger?
And Aether is here fishing. It’s a guilt that makes his hands shake, makes his stomach turn and puts a sour taste in his mouth.
That same night, he finally says goodbye to the woman and her son. The boy pushes a fishing rod into his hands, and refuses to take it back.
It’s unceremonious, but Aether goes past the stone wall, and back on his way. It’s odd to him though, still. That these people who he doesn’t even know the names of took him in without a second thought.
His feet don’t drag the ground now. The holes where his wings used to be don’t hurt as badly now. Even though he still balances badly, and he swears he can feel the six folded wings laying against his bare back sometimes.
He smiles, looking back once as the house disappears from view. It’s evening now, with the sky turning purple as a bruise and the stars, like needle pinpricks, begin to show through the sky’s veil.
He never even learned the names of the woman or her son.
But at least Teyvat has one thing—one thing that he lost along with his sister, in between the worlds.
Kindness.
Or maybe it’s the feeling in his chest. It’s warm and light, like a cloud, sitting right in the hollow hole where Lumine used to be. It doesn’t fill it all the way, but it’s there.
Aether doesn’t quite know what to call it, but the closest word he knows?
He thinks it’s hope.