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At first, Lumine does not think much of the resonance.
The first one is casual and quiet, barely noticed by the outside world of calla lilies and rippling waves. Lumine reaches out and touches the angelic statue, her fingers tracing the sun-dappled stone, light as the water’s kiss. Beneath the surface of rock, a trace of power trembles.
Ah, sings a spirited, gentle breeze in her soul, rustling like leaves and smelling like the sky. A sojourner from afar, a journeying star. What brings you to me, dear wandering god, with your scars?
A name whispers along with each word that stirs in her. Lumine presses her palm on the warmed stone, her lips parting.
“Barbatos,” she greets. “I call upon you.”
Light fingers of a spring breeze comb through her hair, twirling the ends playfully. They brush up her cheek, then are gone.
With such lovely soul, and spirit so lone, says the wind, each word falling in easy cadence, how can I say no, to one seeking home? Be free and go far, little star.
The sky swirls in her veins, buoyant and wild, laughing to the tips of her fingers. Lumine raises her hands and lets it fly. She watches it curdle, then rupture, the deadly gale slicing through flower petals and shorn grass like a crescent moon.
She hears the fading strains of a windsong lyre, washed away in the current among the dandelions.
ꕥ
Lumine expects the next resonance to be as simple and straightforward, but it is not.
She presses her hand on the statue set in the marshy grassland of Dihua, reaching for the vein of power within. She can sense it there, true as gold and firm as earth. But it does not come easily to her, bidden by her beckoning. It is not a breeze that sings in her fingers or sifts through her hair. Instead, it rejects her, warding off her summons like a pane of glass.
To resonate is to join as one, to see, to understand, breathes the hollow echo of stone and mountain in her ear, the last sigh of an eternal dragon. Do you realize what you are trifling with, little god?
Each word rumbles in her soul, a fragment of a fateful end. But Lumine does not shake. She raises her chin, letting the starlight bleed through her veins, letting her eyes shine in the darkness of night, bright as twin undying suns. She says nothing, only flourishes the trace of power singing in her blood. She twines with the soul in that mountainous presence, senses its name.
“Morax,” she says aloud. Her voice thrums. “I call upon you.”
The earth rattles beneath her feet in hushed warning. A master may only call upon that which they own. Do you come in conquest, little god?
“I do not,” she says moderately, truthfully. “Unless I am given reason to.”
The ground settles to a slow churn, biding, watching. Then let us establish a contract, binding unto the End. Equal terms and equal conditions. For may we be equals.
“May we be equals,” Lumine echoes, and the light dies from her eyes, solidifying into mortal honey-gold. “But what has a foreign spirit to offer an archon of Teyvat who commands the very earth?”
And there is little outside of Morax’s grasp. She can feel the length of life in his foliated memories, the strength in his fractures, the luster of discernment in his soul. He has seen much and known much: power, truth, wealth, allegiance.
Stripped of her wings and her true light, Lumine is nothing more than a wayfaring wisp.
The stone is unmoving, undaunted. As one mineral bears a thousand facets, so value is unique to every eye. To each their own wish.
“And your wish, God of Commerce?”
You wish to resonate with the memory of dust, little god, rasps the earth, and I wish to resonate with its children. We are similar in that regard.
Children of dust. Lumine frowns. “You speak of mortalkind,” she surmises. A drop of cold laces in her veins. “You are dying.”
Find my vessel at Liyue Harbor. There is a silence that dwells for a single moment, crumbling like sediment, breached with sorrow. Pay your respects, and lay it to rest. A historian will show you the way.
She reaches for him desperately. No. He cannot leave. He must guide her to her twin star, to Aether, brother of her blood. Show me! she begs, commands, the light blazing in her eyes as golden flame. Show me the one of Viator!
There is no answer, only resonance. It is blinding and terrible inside her, wreathing her bones in heavy laurels of stone. The world cracks beneath her feet, shaking with power, and she falls on her knees as the earth enters her blood.
Resonance with Barbatos was akin to a gift, a flighty whim. Through his trace woven into her soul, she sometimes heard the song of the wind as it whispered past her, speaking of change, warning of storms, soothing the pain. Morax’s contract is not so forgiving. His strength is shackles on her wrists, a yoke on her neck. When she communed with his spirit, it was placid and unyielding, smooth as the face of a yawning bluff, but this resonance—it is the heart of the bedrock, throbbing and ancient and vibrant, layered with eons of joy and sorrow, regret and devotion, memory eroded by Time. She feels the weight of history and choice, echoed by the flames of war and the golden glimmer of prosperity.
To join as one, to see, to understand. It is drowning her, filling her lungs with gravel. She gouges her fingers into the dirt below, gasping desperately.
Then, gradually, it fades.
The resonance of Morax remains, but quietly, a dull heartbeat beneath the earth that throbs with every step. She can feel it in her skin, steady and stable, shaped and weathered by millennia of history.
Lumine staggers to her feet and walks on. There is a contract to fulfill.
ꕥ
Zhongli of the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor is an odd man, but a necessary one.
He is the closest a mortal can come to something timeless, Lumine supposes; elegant and historic, serene and unflappable. His knowledge of Liyue is limitless, as is his patience. Though she wishes he were more practically-minded; she, a foreign spirit, is the one responsible for currency exchange in their little party of two, and that is cause for concern. Mortal burdens like room and board, food, and sleep seem below his notice.
How on earth this man has managed to survive until adulthood, Lumine has no idea.
Evenings are especially egregious; Zhongli seems to own no concept of rest. After thirteen hours of grueling travel to the Dadaupa Gorge, slivers of noctilucous jade carefully wrapped in silken cloth and ripe for testing, Lumine sets up camp beneath the star-speckled blackened sky—only to find that the funeral parlor consultant has wandered from camp.
She finds him taking interest in the elaborate scrimshaw on an abandoned Hilichurlian bone-staff, amber eyes cutting apart every stroke carved into the ivory surface.
“Mr. Zhongli,” she says, lightly clearing her throat. “It’s late, and we’ve been traveling for quite some time. You must sleep.”
Zhongli blinks, withdrawing his attentions from the bone-staff. “Ah, yes. I suppose that is something I must do.” He tilts his head slightly, his amber eyes unnervingly keen. “Do you sleep, Miss Lumine?”
She does. Sleep is not necessary for a child born of starlight—but rest is, for the sake of regenerating her power, and sleep offers the most concentrated amount of rest. And she dreams, but not in the way a mortal would expect. She is able to pass the veil between the waking world and dreaming realm without difficulty. She has tried to reach for her brother’s spirit in this way, searching for his keen presence of starshine and steel, but to no avail. Wherever he is, he does not seem to sleep.
There’s no point in rambling on useless matters, though, so Lumine merely smiles. “I do sleep,” she says. “Hurry to bed, Mr. Zhongli, or you’ll catch a cold.”
But instead of crawling in between the covers of his bedroll, Zhongli pauses. “Is that why I must sleep?” he muses. “To avoid sickness? Then that must be why you sleep, Miss Lumine. To stay in good health.”
“Er... yes.” She would rather the world not know of her true form, particularly with suspicious folk like the Fatui and their mysterious, god-hunting tsar as its denizens. “But I also sleep to dream,” she confesses. “It has been more pleasant than the waking world as of late.”
“I see,” Zhongli says softly. “And where do you go when you dream?”
Lumine stops at that. Where do you go. Not what do you dream of, what do you see. Where. A dreaming realm, a place, a road to walk. How would he know?
“Anywhere,” she says honestly. She weaves her fingers together. “Everywhere. I like to listen, to learn by watching. I—I liked to see the stars, too, when...” Her tongue ties up for a moment. “With my brother.”
Zhongli is quiet. He offers no condolences, which relieves her, nor presses any questions, which relieves her even more.
Lumine finds him in a dream that night, standing among the stars with his hands behind his back, watching their glimmering lifetimes as they wink in and out of space. She drifts to his side, following his gaze to a cluster of lights in the distance: Viatrix, the Voyager.
Zhongli’s eyes flit to her, then rest back on that swanlike shape of stars. “You gave no exaggeration,” he says. “It’s a beautiful sight indeed.”
And it is. Billions of distant lanterns, wafting like jellyfish in the deep sea, colored pinpricks in an endless abyss. Sometimes Lumine watches them bloom in rhythm, growing and fading like heartbeats. It’s all so vast. So boundless. It used to mean home.
Lumine summons a seat among the stars, a vague frame made of light and shadow, and settles in comfortably, tucking her ankles under her knees. “You’re a dreamwalker,” she says softly. “How?”
“Is it a remarkable trait?”
“I didn’t think”—mortals capable of it. “I’m just surprised.” Little wonder that he knew of the dreaming realm if he walked it.
“Admittedly, I do not traverse here often.” Zhongli’s gaze is distant, beyond the stars, beyond the infinite emptiness of space. “Dreams are a world of fantasy and illusion. It is easy to find ghosts from the past, and easier to get lost in them. There are those who eternally wander with mirages of their loved ones, unwilling to leave.”
A chill crawls slowly down Lumine’s spine. She has never witnessed shades of the past herself—perhaps she and Aether have not lingered in any single realm long enough to form such attachments. Not yet, at least.
“There used to be another constellation,” she blurts. She points to the yawning expanse next to Viatrix, a formless, lightless void. Once a mirror, a sibling. “It’s gone now, though,” she finishes weakly.
Pointless. She shouldn’t have said such nonsense.
Zhongli follows her gesture with his gaze. He watches that empty space with her.
“Do you encounter his illusion?” he finally asks.
Lumine swallows. He knows, then. He is dangerously keen.
“No,” she admits. She has not encountered Aether at all. Not his illusion, nor his thick and visceral presence as a dreamwalker, unmistakably different from the drifting aspect of a shade.
“Then there is still hope,” Zhongli says.
His voice sounds kinder somehow—a rounded richness to its usual matter-of-fact bluntness. And strangely enough, Lumine does feel comforted. He is correct. If Aether truly passed on, his shade would linger in her dreams for every night to come. There is hope, even if she cannot see his constellation from where she is.
She watches the stars dim with Zhongli until they wink out into nothing at all.
ꕥ
They fall into a comfortable rhythm, despite being an odd pair: a fallen god with a great curiosity for all the earthly things of Teyvat, and an absentminded consultant with more breadth of knowledge than a certified historian. Lumine finds herself asking Zhongli about any matter that piques her interest. More often than not, he has a thorough answer in store.
What do you know of the Gladiator’s Destiny? she would ask, her slender fingers tracing the muted golden ornament at the base of a scarlet feather.
Allow me to tell you of a young lioness, Zhongli would say. The beginnings of a hero in a time long past...
His voice would lull her into a rich and vibrant world of liberation, dandelions, and the four winds, prompting her to ask more and more—about Vanessa—about Mondstadt—about the Anemo archons of old.
And sometimes, her questions border on the mundane.
“Do you enjoy eating, Mr. Zhongli?” Lumine asks one day. “A favorite food, perhaps?”
“There is eating, the consumption of victuals for the sake of energy,” Zhongli says, “and there is dining, the experience of communing with others to wholly rejuvenate oneself. To which are you referring?”
“Ah.” She pauses. “Either, I suppose. Does that much change your decision?”
A rare smile pulls at his lips. “When time is of no issue, the taste of bamboo shoot soup is without compare.”
“Bamboo shoot soup?” Lumine says, surprised. She did not expect that from a man with such decadent tastes. “It’s a fairly common dish.”
The slightest glimmer enters his eye, a vein of gold. “Then I believe you have never sampled its true potential—gourmet ham cured with smoked salt and sprinkled with Jueyun chili paste, pork belly hunted fresh from Springvale, and crisp bamboo shoots from the coast of Qingce, all simmered to perfection in a creamy broth.”
Just the artful description makes Lumine’s mouth water. “And where can such a legendary dish be found?”
Zhongli’s smile warms. “Its make and method are not so rare. Good company is the most important ingredient.”
Lumine arches a brow with a playful grin. “And would my humble presence suffice?”
There’s a low, rumbling sound, and belatedly, Lumine realizes that she has just made Zhongli chuckle. “The size of a party has no bearing on its quality,” he agrees. “What say you to some hunting, Miss Lumine?”
ꕥ
It is evening when the fire roars to life, warming a sizable iron-black pot.
Lumine tasks herself with skinning and cleaning the freshly-hunted boar, setting aside the bones for the broth, while Zhongli peels and chops garlic and ginger and grinds a Jueyun chili into fire-red paste. Lumine fills the silence with an ancient battle hymn in her mother tongue, soothing with a hint of discord like a red dawn rising. Zhongli listens with keen interest.
You possess an enchanting voice, he compliments. It spirits one away to a distant world.
Flushed and nervous—surely her identity will not be discovered for a bit of humming—Lumine turns the attentions on him, pressing for a tune of his own. Zhongli accedes, singing in soothing, buttery bass an old Liyuen lullaby of a fisherman on the jasmine river. It is beautiful and nostalgic, and though their countries could not be any more different, it makes her ache of home.
Next comes the braising of the pork belly. It sizzles as Lumine slides it into the pot, filling the air with a thick, decadent smell along with the spices Zhongli has prepped. She watches as the surface puckers, glazed and crispy as it slides along the black iron. It looks good enough to eat there and then.
Zhongli removes the belly, replacing it with the cleaned pork bones and a full serving of water. He brings it to a roiling boil, using a ladle to skim any scum off the top. The ladle is, like most of his utensils, made of gold. At this point, Lumine is too afraid to ask.
From that point, there is little else to do other than sit and chat, watching the hypnotic bubbling of the pot as the pork bones steep, and so they do—at great length until the sun dips into darkness and the stars glimmer to life.
So rare for man to sit and be still between all the hustle and bustle, the coming and going, says Zhongli. The water bubbles; golden chopsticks swirl idly. It has been some time since I’ve found such leisure.
Piping qingxin blend, delicately steeped, meets Lumine’s lips. Are the duties of a funeral parlor consultant particularly taxing, Mr. Zhongli?
At times, he admits, and he delights her in a tale of a stately funeral held for a Qixing’s passing feline, in which he was coerced into wearing a headband of cat ears for the final ceremony. Lumine almost chokes on her qingxin tea in laughter, and silently thanks the parlor director for the gift of the mental image alone.
It turns into an exchange of stories that lingers long after the sun falls beneath the horizon. Lumine shares her own adventures with her brother—though she is careful to change the setting to Teyvat, renaming a world of ice and bone to Dragonspine and a world of iron steam to Fontaine. Zhongli, in return, regales her with tales of Rex Lapis, the archon of Liyue, told with a richness and depth that she’s never heard from the Liyuen storytellers.
You seem very fond of Rex Lapis, she mentions. Did his passing greatly sadden you?
Everything has its time and place, Zhongli says. And he hesitates. I would hope that Liyue remembers him not with tears and sorrow, but with fondness.
Still, you have lost something precious. She touches his gloved hand. None would fault you for mourning.
His eyes burn into her, simmering with unspoken thoughts. Would they not?
They would not, she promises.
And at some point, Lumine nods off. There’s something soporific about the slow-burning embers, mesmerizingly orange in the pressing darkness, flickering like ripples of rainwater, like pulses of a limber heart. She fades into sleep and does not walk any dreams.
When she wakes, it is to a vibrant, rose-gold dawn. She is surrounded by warmth and silken fabric, and—to her horror—finds herself curled against Zhongli, head tucked neatly under his chin. His arm is carefully bracing her waist, keeping her balanced and upright, a firm pressure along the small of her back.
Lumine quickly breaks away and shifts down until space yawns between them. She clears her throat delicately, attempting to seem unaffected. Because she is. Embarrassing as it is to lean on a mortal, she could certainly do worse than Zhongli, who is completely unperturbed as he resumes stirring the soup. He’s added the ham and bamboo shoots at some point, and they bobble around the broth like lily pads peeking up a pond.
Did you rest well? he asks—and there is no judgment to his voice, no ulterior motive.
Lumine breathes a sigh of relief. Good fortune that she is with the only mortal in Teyvat whose head is not stuffed full of romantic fancies. It must already be too full of history.
I did, she admits. It is the first time she’s felt complete and utter rest, at least since Aether vanished from her side. She never realized how antsy she has been with his disappearance—the lack of a sword defending her back, the absence of comfort and home. So she adds: Thank you for letting me sleep.
Zhongli only smiles and ladles her a full bowl of soup. The broth is a deep caramelized color, glossy with fat, topped with crispy braised pork belly. It smells heavenly.
Lumine tries a sip, and it’s every bit as good as he’s claimed: rich and hearty, heavy with lasting flavor, soaking her mouth with a beautiful savor. The bamboo shoots, softened with the boiling heat, offer a balancing freshness to the luscious broth, and eases the taste on her tongue. She lets out a small noise and curls her toes in pleasure. Zhongli hums in satisfaction as he scoops himself his own bowl. They eat in silence, yet together.
She is the warmest she’s been in a long, long time.
ꕥ
Lumine finds Aether, but he does not return to her.
This world was not meant to be a complicated one. She was supposed to search for her brother, and once she found him—and, perhaps, stole him from whatever prison dared to keep him from her—they would throw their arms about each other, shed a few tears, and she would scold him and he would tease her, and they would depart from this world without looking back, hand in hand.
But Aether shatters that plan and grinds the remnants beneath his heel.
His face is cold and distant, his voice layered with a grim weight that she has never heard. He looks at her not as a beloved sister, but a burden. Perhaps she is an obstacle to him, perhaps an enemy. Or perhaps, a forgotten memory, doomed to drift away like all the worlds they’ve left behind.
He disappears into the portal without affection or answers.
Lumine’s knees buckle the moment she breaks into fresh air. She collapses onto the grass, trembling with the bitter remnants of corruption and misery that those foul ruins have lodged into her bones. For a moment, she cannot think; she can only sit on the soft, verdant grass, watching the wisps of clouds trail idly by, sojourners on a lost journey.
There’s the padded sound of leather shoes on earth, and Zhongli sits next to her, an array of rich brown and silken gold spilling onto the earth. He offers nothing: no words, no sympathies, no touch. He is there and present, waiting in her pain.
Lumine hates it. She hates him.
She selfishly pushes her sorrow onto him, takes his frail mortal vessel and feeds it in like poison, lets the starlight in her blood curdle as it sears his heart like a dagger. Feel, you stupid man, be in agony, writhe in this crippling despair until it drives you mad—
Zhongli takes it quietly and without complaint, a stone unmoving beneath brutal punishment. Lumine twists his heart in his chest, knifing it with betrayal and loss and rejection, he left you, you’re not enough, your journey meant nothing, every day and every battle and every drop of sweat and blood—but he does not scream, does not strike her, though he has every right. She wrenches a gasp of pain from his lips and breaks a line of tears from his eyes as she squeezes tighter, drives into his core, relentless, feel, you bedamned pillar of stone, and—
—she hits metal.
It’s as if she struck a resonant gong. Something in Zhongli’s soul echoes against hers, and it pulses up her veins and into her bones, shaking her like a leaf. An aftershock rolls over her, flooding her senses with visceral images: dying sunlight, fading salt, the stench of blood and karmic shadow.
And then Lumine knows.
Zhongli has felt this before.
All her helplessness, all her regret, all her caustic fury and devastating anguish. Every last bit is familiar to him, an echo of a past time.
Lumine’s grip on Zhongli falls away, and with it, the onslaught of emotions. She chokes on the shame of it all: the abuse of her power on a helpless mortal, lashing out because he was convenient, here, not like Aether. Childish. Dangerous. Cruel. Like the very gods she hated, the very archons who smote Khaen’riah. Like Aether.
In the end, she isn’t so different.
Zhongli lifts a hand. Lumine flinches, ready for wrath, a blink away from summoning her sword—
—but his glove rests on her shoulder, thumb rubbing warm, rhythmic circles into her bare skin. Forgiveness proffered. Understanding. Not vengeance, as she deserved.
“I’m sorry,” is all Lumine can manage. The words are empty to her, laughable.
Zhongli rasps something—still recovering from her brutal intrusion, then. “There is a mortal saying,” he murmurs. “‘A burden shared is a burden halved.’”
Lumine releases a stuttering sob. “That’s foolish. A burden shared is a burden doubled. You are left with two in pain instead of one.”
“When borne alone, pain grows.” His hand tips her chin gently. “When borne together, it heals. Lumine. Give me your pain.”
She crumples.
Her head falls on his neck and she arches into him, clutching his intricate coat like a lifeline. She wails loud and raw into his chest. For once, she lets herself sink into the crushing loneliness that’s always lingered overhead. Aether left her. She has nowhere to go, nothing to do. There’s no new adventure to be had and no new world to explore. She’s beaten, she’s empty. She’s no honorary knight or savior of the citadel; she’s an abandoned little sister and a lost girl. She finally lets herself be one.
Zhongli presses her closer, his arm encircling her waist. He emits the warmth of a star. He smells of earthy stone and mountain snow, sturdy and comforting and always there. He breathes on her brow, whispers an old Liyuen proverb she doesn’t understand. He is here.
Lumine cries until there’s nothing left. She falls asleep curled against him, drifting away as her heart begins to mend.
ꕥ
Surrounded by a graveyard of salt and ash, Lumine sees Morax for the first time.
She is not surprised that Zhongli is inhuman; she grew to expect as much with his dreamwalking, his insight, his endless fount of knowledge. But she thought him a mere adeptus. No, she hoped him an adeptus, a fey but favorable guardian spirit, not one of those distant, warmongering archons who cursed mankind and rent apart the world for their own ambitions.
Morax, Rex Lapis, Zhongli watches her silently, haloed by the broken light of Havria’s shattered realm.
An archon of stone.
The destroyer of Khaen’riah.
Lumine’s fingers ache for her sword, but she forces them still. She meets his gaze unflinchingly.
“Why?” she demands–or, means to demand. It comes out as strangled and small, lacking all her intended authority. So she steps forward, drawing to a close, daring distance, nothing but a breath away from this man of stone. A paltry advance to cover for her cowardice.
Zhongli’s gaze flickers at her closeness, but he does not retreat.
“I cannot tell you,” he says. “My contract forbids it.”
She swallows. “If you could tell me, would you?”
He raises a hand. A finger brushes over her cheek, stirring a lazy heat in her chest. “There is no use pondering it,” he says gently. “I cannot tell you, Lumine.”
Lumine jerks away, gripping her scarf nervously with a hand. She can feel the rapid pulse that lies beneath, the vulnerability, the chink in the armor. And now, with the truth out in the open, with her blinders down and gone, she can feel him too—his muted presence in the resonance, a dangerous undertow that stirs the stone beneath her shoes.
“And is this a contract as well?” Her voice is shaking; she can hear it. “Our days together, our moments of companionship. Is it all part of some—some deal, some prior arrangement?”
Zhongli’s gaze burns orange, cor lapis. “I believe you know the answer.”
I don’t. She thought she knew Aether loved her, and that had crumbled before her eyes. She no longer trusts herself. She no longer trusts anything at all.
“You were on her side,” she says hoarsely. “The one who tore out my wings and stranded me here. The one who”—she swallowed—“killed the brother I knew. You stood with her while she cast the world into dust.”
He is grave and unmoving.
There is no use throwing accusations—not when he will not defend himself. But she is angry, betrayed. He is an archon, an enemy. He is a god of Contracts, calculating and merciless, a god who uses people as pawns and civilizations as pieces in a larger game and—
—he held her, he comforted her, he touched her heart and resonated with her.
She does not understand. She cannot reconcile these equal and opposite images of the Geo Archon thrust upon her. A warring king, a wise helper. A wrathful judge, a patient juror. A deadly traitor, a loyal defender.
Lumine stares into those eyes. They are sharp gemstones, fiery and still, built with age and ruin.
“Who are you?” she whispers, and the heartbeat of the earth pounds under her feet. “Who stands before me?”
He breathes. His gaze is gentle.
“I am Zhongli, a consultant employed at the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor.”
And he extends a hand, palm open and waiting.
“A friend, should you wish it.”
A faint, echoing breeze rustles between them, smelling of lush earth and minerals, a pool of stagnant water waiting to move.
Zhongli, the man who walked with her, stood by her, fought by her side. They felled great beasts together, watched the stars together. Rex Lapis she does not know, but Zhongli she does. He has been with her all this time, a quirky human, a warm advisor, a powerful warrior. He is steadfast, he is intelligent, and—
—he is someone dear to her.
Lumine reaches out and hesitates. She searches his gaze for answers, but it is stony, unyielding. There is no nervousness in those eyes, no bated breath behind his mouth.
But still, his hand is there, proffered and waiting.
Lumine settles her fingers in the crook of his palm. The warmth of his hand blooms over her skin.
Zhongli exhales, resting his thumb on hers. Stone hums in her bones, sated. Ah; perhaps he was uneasy, more than he showed. Perhaps he does care.
“I trust you,” Lumine says slowly. Her voice is tremulous, but she does not draw away. She will not draw away.
Zhongli’s fingers close, encasing her hand in jade warmth.
“I will not misplace it,” he says gently.
His eyes have softened, and they pull her in. She can hear the earth connecting them, a slow and languid pulse underfoot. It spells out something that cannot be put into words.
ꕥ
Nantianmen breathes of autumn, crisp and quiet, dying into a new winter. Azhdaha sleeps once more beneath the roots of the chrysalis tree.
Lumine watches Zhongli’s back as he stands before the gravestone, his hand tracing the eroded letters with gentle care. He is bidding farewell, she knows—as he has done countless times before, again and again, always the one to be left behind. She wonders how it must feel, stagnant on a path traversed by countless wanderers, each pressing their imprint on his heart before they disappear in the horizon, gone forevermore.
Zhongli steps back and exhales. She drifts to his side, waiting. Present, as he has been for her.
He turns to her, his gaze somber. “We will come again,” he murmurs. “Azhdaha will not slumber long.”
Lumine reaches up and lays her hand alongside his cheek, her thumb resting beneath his piercing amber eyes. She sees him now in a way she couldn’t before, in more dimensions, more depth. She sees the truth.
“Gentle Morax,” she murmurs softly. “How you have suffered.”
Zhongli grasps her fingers and lowers them. “Do not misunderstand,” he says quietly. “Little is gentle or kind with stone. That which Rex Lapis has done was to keep his contracts and balance his scales.”
Lumine’s eyes flicker to their entwined hands. He has not let go.
“And was Alatus’s freedom part of those scales?” she says. “What of the mercy on Azhdaha’s life? And what of the alliances with lesser gods who sought your protection?”
“Alatus paid a blood price for his own freedom, and it cost him dearly,” Zhongli says evenly. “As for Azhdaha, to rot in the throes of his own bitterness and misery is far from mercy; death would have been a kinder end, had I been able to manage it. Nor is there benevolence or sympathy in war, merely the odds of victory or defeat. I brokered no alliance that would hinder such odds.”
There is no break of emotion in his voice, no vulnerable thread. But Lumine knows. She is one with Geo. Though Zhongli shows nothing on his calm, angular features, she knows.
She winds her fingers around the back of his neck and tips his head down until it rests against hers. She closes her eyes and breathes, letting the trace of earth within her resonate.
You are not stone, dear Morax, but spirit.
It is not wrong to mourn, nor to desire days long past.
You may rest.
He exhales, his hands cradling her face like a blacksmith cradling prized ore. She can sense him reaching for the starlight within her, sifting through it, curiously feeling its nature. He has met many beings in his long life, she knows, but not a comet born to blaze between worlds. There are endless traces of outside realms woven into her blood.
“You are made to come and go,” he observes. His mortal voice rasps with the barest hint of emotion, a tiny fracture in an unyielding slab of stone. “The door shall open for you and your twin star. Viatrix and Viator shall pass on and know this world no more.”
“Do you fear my departure?” Lumine asks, surprised.
“We must all depart.” Zhongli’s thumb presses below her eye to feel the bone of her cheek, ethereal, foreign. “It is the one who must linger that remembers.”
Lumine would have thought that Zhongli would not fear loss—not a god who has seen death for six thousand years. But the thought is not alien to her. With Aether plucked from her side, she is empty, lonesome. She cannot imagine the devastation if her brother had been taken forever, how long it would fester in the hollow of her heart. Six thousand years would not be enough for her grief.
Then perhaps Zhongli does not fear loss—perhaps he fears to fear loss, loathe to form attachments if it could threaten to break him.
Lumine draws herself up, threading her fingers into the rich locks of his hair.
“You wished to resonate with mortals,” she says. “Then feel as they do.”
She leaves that tender command in their resonance, lets it pulse within them as she tiptoes and kisses his mouth. His skin is warm and fallible, forgiving and terrifyingly vulnerable, as is hers.
Zhongli’s breath stutters. He slides his arms around her and braces her neck, sealing his lips over hers. She can feel his walls crumbling, remnants of emotion bleeding into their link. And she takes it all, lets it encircle her like his embrace. She feels the loss, the anticipation, the weariness, chipping away at her like stones on a mountain. And beneath it all—the tender, burning pulse of affection, built slowly in layers. An interest in her glittering, golden hair and blazing eyes. A fascination with her boundless compassion and zeal. A yearning for the earnest starlight of her soul. Feelings so mortal, and so very, very defenseless.
Heal, she whispers, and she holds him close. For as long as he needs. She will join and see and understand, so long as the earth shall last.
ꕥ
問余何事棲碧山
You ask me what gleans from the mountains green—
笑而不答心自閒
I smile in silence, my heart serene.
桃花流水杳然去
So the peach-blossom flows, so it bears downstream—
別有天地非人間
This ethereal realm but a mortal dream.
— Li Bai, “Green Mountain”