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of dreaming of dreams
Barbatos sits on the highest point of Old Mondstadt and watches the world in the morning.
People walk in cities - before dawn the knights that patrol the ground swap with those on the day shift, and walk the line back up to headquarters to sign off at the barracks.
The deliveries from out-of-town roll in, cart wheels crunching the pavement in the still morning air. Up ahead, Sara is pulling the boards off her shop windows and starting a fire in the stove to ready for the morning breakfast rush in a few hours.
If one was lucky enough, they might catch the acting grandmaster already up and about at headquarters. Most of the church still sleeps, but Sister Rosaria is slipping back through a window. Far from the city in Springvale the hunters check their boots for the morning trek, and closer to Liyue still, the master of the Dawn Winery apologizes to his head maid for tracking last night’s mud on their carpets.
Monsters walk in ruins - the ruin guards that roam the old temples are awake still, heavy footsteps grinding tile as they roam. Tucked at inconspicuous corners of ruins where a traveler might think of as plausible shortcuts are camps of hilichurls that lay await, battle-bitten shields and bone crushing weapons in their hands.
Abyssal mages stalk the ruins, hovering without the sound of a single footstep - it is already too late for the traveler who sees the flash of an elemental shield from behind a pillar. Slimes lie anywhere and everywhere just below the ground, stepping on a too-thin layer of soil near an elemental disturbance can trip people off their feet - it’s fortunate that these slimes are not quite sapient enough to pose a threat to anything that can run, and a traveler might end up with a burn on their clothes but a lively disposition.
Old Mondstadt greets the reflection of the sunrise at the edges of Qingce, and overlooks the early risers of its descendents in the city South. It is never quiet in Old Mondstadt, not when the winds once trapped there still blow. Those winds are now dead winds, forever twisting around the pillars of the tower, defending it for a reason they no longer remember.
Now still, Barbatos is hesitant to dispel them - thousand years past and a thousand more, and ghosts still haunt the ruins. He remembers being a part of them - a wisp forged from storm in a windless city, lured away from his siblings by the string of a lyre. He’d been far too gone from them by the time the city walls toppled - it’s the only reason he survived.
Decarabian dies, and the dying burst of his power rips apart all the wind spirits still tethered to his soul.
Barbatos remembers the expressions on the people’s faces, the fear as the final storm of Decarabian’s last breath grows larger and louder still, but only Barbatos hears it for what it is - all his siblings’ screams are not swallowed out by the wind, they are the wind, and Barbatos listens to all of them call for him.
(They called him a traitor. He deserves it, he thinks, a blasphemer. Decarabian forged him by hand, a wind spirit , a wisp of elemental energy, an extent of Decarabian’s will.
Barbatos cannot do anything on his own, against his siblings - wind against wind blows nothing - but the humans bore weapons of blood and stone and steel and bone, and it's a sort of power that Barbatos cannot imagine ever wielding.
He had fought with his Arrow and his Sword and his Song. Arrow - the girl who Decarabian had taken as a lover, who took a courageous and foolish weapon. A bow and arrow, a weapon that relied solely on what she needed to defeat - the wind itself. She had stolen it from Decarabian’s vault and now Barbatos powers it - he is a wind spirit, after all. He doesn’t channel the same ferocious storms that Decarabian possesses but he can still lend the power.
Barbatos gave his wind to the end of Arrow’s weapon. Twisted metal and wood wrought cut through his siblings’ futile elemental sweeps; straight into their eyes.
Each arrow that she notched and each target she hit felt like a period at the end of a sentence - an ending! And he felt it too.
An ending!
One of his siblings dies, a little piece of air ripped itself from Barbatos’ heart - because they are all a small part of the same storm, and the winds howl in an endless mourn, and the winds curse him.)
They are trapped here - in the wind barriers that still surround the Tower, at the base of the city where the heaviest screams fell. Barbatos likes to think of freedom, but there is still no freedom today for the ghosts that still live in Old Mondstadt.
(He builds his statue here in guilt. There is no blood to shed to tell a story, but they still call for him in a language that only he is left alive to understand.)
(He builds one in the mountains of snow too, as the heart of the dragon still beats. Barbatos is the god of Freedom and he fights for the freedom of the mortals that live so fleetingly, and he remembers - the thoughts of the old dragon still yearn for it as his bow and arrow sing.
Durin was born for a few hours before he fell, Barbatos listens to the calls of all on his land. The poor dragon called for his mother and a friend - Barbatos puts three arrows into his chest.)
(It is also three arrows he pulls out from Song’s chest, tip still dipped in red.
The first arrow he pulled - full of energy that he had newly possessed, the last wind elemental that meant the only one that could command them - split the earth into two. It drove a path through the cliff that surrounded the crumbling city (that crumbled a little bit more as the ground shook), and Barbatos followed it to where the Great Wolf of the Blizzard lay, an arrow snapped in two under his paw.
The second arrow he pulled dug another gorge into the snow, and Barbatos followed it to a great lake.
The third arrow embeds itself into the peak of a mountain that towers far above the rest of Mondstadt. The wind blows strong here, and Barbatos commands them to cut it down.)
Once-people walk in once-cities.
A pair of hilichurls trudge up a dirt road, fresh sunsettias tucked in the crook of their elbows, their clubs hung away at their belts. The fruits join the heap on flattened straw. They pick up the buckets (the rest of the encampment rests, but a friend stirs) and they head down to the lake.
Field tillers walk the ruins, and Barbatos thinks that they are like the old ghosts, patrolling in a routine that no longer bears purpose. (The early morning shift chatters as they circle the city walls, talking about their wives and their lunches. “Why do you think we walk the back of the city, anyways? No hilichurl is going to swim the way and no hydro slime is going to climb the walls!” (What is their purpose, indeed?)
The hilichurls are back, bucketfuls of water. Another is awake, coaxing their pyro slime to spit on a stick to start a fire. Water runs low in the tub for it, and they empty a bucket. The three split two sunsettias between them, and then they stand still as a Field Tiller (a hundred yards away) slowly passes. The handle of their pyro slime bucket is singed, and it will be a short while before there is a need to weave a new one.
A seelie wanders, a blue glow in the distance, far from court. Why can’t it find its way home?
(The bards of Mondstadt city - who once had to huddle within the four walls of the town hall, padding on the windows so that the storm outside did not drown out their sound - now sing and play, loud and unrestrained.
The people patch up their wounds, and they rebuild their houses and their fences and herd their cattle to softer pastures. The children run past where the edges of the wind barriers would have been, onto endless plains where plants could not have grown much higher if they wanted to keep their heads.
Bits of the city still crumble, and rubble still piles - the walls have kept out snow, now creeping slowly into the grounds. (It won’t be until Barbatos meets the Great Wolf of the Blizzard that the snow melts, so that the people can move past it.)
The sun shines bright on the burial grounds.
Barbatos places the feather that Song never got to see, on his chest.
“You should keep the lyre,” Sword tells him. “And the bow. I think they would have wanted you to have it.”
Both strings are unfamiliar to Barbatos.)
Barbatos had woken up when the land stirred - two travellers, foreign to his land.
(The last time this happened…)
It rains and rains and rains more, as they dig out of the abyss. An arrow and a bow, a father and a son.
Durin’s heart beats. Dvalin sleeps still, so Barbatos is the only one that still hears the language that no one else speaks - the ghost of the dragon, praying for Freedom. The rain feels remarkably like the tears Barbatos cries when his arrow and Dvalin’s fangs pierce the hide of Durin’s neck. It takes three seconds for Durin to fall, and those three seconds he hears the prayer - the clearest that Durin has ever been! Praying to him, to a time of freedom he would never see, to song and dance and rolling skies and green fields-
Mondstadt cheers for him, but their god is nowhere to be found (he is content to keep our freedom, they say, he will not stay to govern us!) But Barbatos had not left - he played the lyre and sang a song for a dying dragon. Farewell, o’ lovely bard! Durin called out to him. Had we met in a different time and place!
And it feels so different and yet so remarkably similar - a different time and place, at the edge of Old Mondstadt where ghosts still cry, five hundred years later! He notches the arrow, and he watched the boy trip over a tree root. “What is that?” He had asked, in old tongue.
Barbatos followed them to the edges of Dawn Winery.
Last hope - freedom! Is what the boy yearns for - Barbatos heard him! He did not pray (Barbatos knows the boy will never pray to him) but his soul still sings, and it sung for-
A last hope! Is that not what Barbatos was to the people of Old Mondstadt?
Barbatos knows what this man and this boy will bring - they had fled from a land long past. They will bring nothing but ghosts with them. Barbatos fights for his nation - his arrow could still fly against them - it had already, hadn’t it? Countless times, into the hearts of his siblings, into Durin’s eyes.
It was raining, and the boy looked up at the sky, hair clinging to his face. He ran his muddy hands on the grass and the tree stump and up the side of a lamp post that still shone bright, picked up a fallen sunsettia and took a bite (and spat it out, and took another bite, and spat it out some more), picked a Windwheel Aster off a ground and crushed it a little bit too hard, and then tried to take a bite from it, too.
A carriage thundered down the road. The boy, scared, dove behind some bushes.
Barbatos sent a gust of wind to pick him up and throw him out, and then sent another to blow the sides of the carriage door open.
“The storm today,” a man complained, sticking his head out, trying to grab for the door. “It is- oh! Stop the carriage!”
There is no such thing as time to ghosts, but it is midday, and the Field Tiller steps on the same tile at the same time on the same path that it has followed for the past five hundred years.
The group of five hilichurls that had set off a few hours before return with apples in their buckets and some game - four birds and a boar. The vegetables scavenged from broken carts a few trips prior are thrown into the pot over the fire.
A passing abyssal mage freezes a bucket - ice, for the day. They speak in a language that nobody remembers. It is funny, sometimes, when the boy with stars in his eyes speaks encouragingly to the girl who tries (she does poorly). Barbatos follows him sometimes, as wind over his shoulder as he heads out alone to Hilichurl encampments. He cries, because he thinks he’s lost his accent a little, and Barbatos wants to tell him he hasn’t (he has), but Barbatos is not a god that this boy prays to.
The boy with the star on his throat speaks to Durin. He hears the yearning for freedom that he will never get, feels the beat, beat, beat of a heart that still dreams.
The statue of Barbatos that watches over the dragon is silent, and it does not tell the story about Barbatos who sang to Durin for three hundred days and three hundred nights. There are fragments of dust and bone, that tells the story of Barbatos and his arrows of wind, that sliced through the people who dreamed.
And what did he dream of, but dreaming?
Morax does not stand unmovable like stone. Barbatos watches the God of Contracts break more than he forges - as he buries the people he promised to stand by, as he seals the friends he swore to love, as wind cuts through valleys of stone.
(“Death is a freedom.”
“Morax,” Barbatos sobbed.
“Would you rather they die as themselves, or remain as monsters who no longer remember what freedom even is?”
Morax says this, as he himself shakes (unmovable as stone), as he breaks contract after contract forged between the people (in sickness, and in health, death till us part?)
There are two meteorites in the crowd. There is a boy screaming and crying, there is his father dragging him off.
What is freedom, dictated by a god? What is a god of Freedom, if he kills all those whose freedoms he cannot grant?)
The biggest ghost is the one he wears, of a face he can no longer remember - why is he holding on to something he can no longer remember?
The hilichurls babble, and Barbatos watches the boy with the stars in his eyes walk up to them. The hilichurls and the boy gathers their fruit and their buckets, and they move out of the way of the path that Barbatos carved into the mountain - the same one, almost three thousand years later, that the people of Mondstadt walk to learn about their history. The boy returns, and cuts down the hilichurlian fences, then heads back down the path alone in silence.
(The other boy on the mountains grow evermore restless.)
Barbatos has an arrow and a bow. Three - one for each star. The eye, the throat, and the one that fell from the sky… all four of them tethered to a memory that has roamed the same path for five hundred years…
The first Field Tiller watches, dormant. Automation does not search for freedom, but Barbatos knows its eye will open again one day.
And the thing is, when wind dies, where does it go? Except back to itself.
He still hears them sometimes - Decarabian, his siblings. Screams, as they ask him why he betrayed them, and tell him how much it hurt.
Barbatos wants to go back to sleep. He wants to get so drunk, until he can’t hear them anymore.
“Venti,” the boy with stars in his eyes says. “Can I ask you a question? I hope you won’t find it blasphemous.”
The bar is almost empty, it is late at night - and in a few more hours it will be morning again.
Barbatos looks at him. He looks back, over the rim of his glass. The master of Dawn Winery, behind the counter today, looks up at the both of them, brows furrowed.
“I was not born a citizen of Mondstadt,” the boy says. “I don’t pray to Barbatos. Do you think - in your personal opinion, of course - you sing so many songs about him, you must have strong religious opinions. Do you think he would consider that heresy?”
“Not from Mondstadt? Are you daft?” The master of Dawn Winery says, words cutting, but eyes pleading as he looks at Barbatos. “You’ve been here your whole life.”
“I think,” Barbatos says, taking a sip of his drink, “that freedom means having the freedom to worship any god. Or not worship any at all.”
The bartender pauses between them, worrying at his lip.
“That’s nice to hear,” the cavalry captain finally says.
(Barbatos plucks the arrows out from Song’s chest - one, two, three. Their twisted metal tips glisten with drops of red.
He sets them aside - one, two, three.
He picks up the lyre, and places it over Song’s chest.
Just the way it should be.
“Do you see it?" Barbatos whispers to him. “Do you see the sky?”
How much of freedom is in death? How much of death is in freedom?
What is freedom, dictated by a god?
What does freedom mean for one person when it kills another?)
Barbatos is still tethered to a memory. But what does he remember? The face he wears, because he wears it - but he had never had a face of his own. This is him, as much as Song’s.
Song, whose name Barbatos can no longer remember. It is barely a wisp of a memory, now, and yet Barbatos is still chained to it-
Was there a time, he wasn’t tied to anything at all? From Decarabian, to Song, to being an Archon.
( "If you love the people so much!" His siblings cursed at him. "Join them! Be them!"
“You,” Decarabian agreed, “are no longer one of us.”)
And what had he done, once he was severed of one bond? Tied himself to another - promised himself to Song, as he lay dying, as Barbatos thought of him .
(“You…” Sword looked at Song, lying still, red on the floor. He looked at Barbatos, wrapped in Song’s cloak.
Barbatos looked down at his hands. They’re smooth, not calloused like Song’s, without years of plucking the strings of a lyre or the snap of a bow.
“Do you know what you look like?” Sword said, as he held up the sword - glistening, in the reflection, Song stared back at Barbatos.
Curls, uncurls his hand. “My siblings, and Decarabian told me to.”
“Decarabian?”
“He… told me if I loved you all so much, I should just become one of you.”
Sword lowered his weapon. “But you’re still a wind spirit, right?”
“I think so.”)
Somewhere in Liyue, there is an adeptus, who was cut free from one master, and then immediately bound himself to another.
What is a god of freedom, who has never quite been free themselves?
(“What’s freedom?”
“Well…” Song taps his chin. “It’s like… not being trapped. Being able to see the sky.”
“Oh.” Barbatos floats around him. “I can already see the sky. I can fly.” It's what he's supposed to do - the only thing he can do.
“Um…” Song thinks, tapping on his lyre. “It’s like… being able to leave this city, I guess.”
“I can do that too.” He can go to the edges of Mondstadt, through the mountains and the valleys, the snow-capped peaks.
There’s something in Song’s eyes, that Barbatos will later recognize as envy. “That’s nice. I guess you’re pretty free.”
Barbatos still didn’t understand what that meant. He floated by Song, and then sat down on the rock next to him.
“I’ll sing you a ballad about it,” Song says. “Maybe that will help you understand better.”)
The orange sun spills into the once-city of Old Mondstadt. The Field Tillers walk, the ghosts sing, the hilichurls head down to the lake.