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Cecilias are Venti’s favorite flowers. They’re sturdy little things, able to bloom amidst the harsh gales at the sudden cliffs of the Mondstadt seaside. Wind collects at the deadly drops; there is hardly anything closer to the nothingness and sheer everything of space than the rushing air of the mortal earth.
His legs dangle over the ledge. A wind from the south blows in stories and secrets. He grasps them like grabbing seeds from the air and fashions them into notes on his lyre. The wind is another catalyst of erosion and it tears away at Venti and since there’s nothing inside in the first place, the wind leaves nothing behind. The flowers bend in its direction. Fingers pluck absentmindedly at strings. Venti’s face sloughs off into a pile of sludge.
--
Starconches wash ashore on warmer seasides. If you hold one to your ear, you hear the ocean, or the dead, or both. A scholar in the Angel’s Share had claimed that it’s actually the blood rushing in your ears, because it’s an empty shell, you see, it’s an echo, and Venti has no blood in his veins to claim as his own (nor veins) so he doesn’t bother. When Venti speaks, he hears a dead man. He dissolves into the gales that roar at the edges of the solid world and a hollow vessel looks back.
Venti can’t remember his name anymore. He remembers his face because it’s his reflection. It swings away from his head on hinges. Venti claws it off and air rushes out like a popped balloon and he stares numbly at the skin in his liar’s hands and thinks Ah, I can’t do this, if I’ll take responsibility for one thing it ought to be this, and he sticks the strips of it back on. They fall right into place.
The great statue in Mondstadt looks just like him. His people worship a stranger. In his thousands of years he’s never quite gotten used to the sensation of injuries, not because he’s a god but because he lived in this world for far longer as wind, and therefore without flesh that could tear. The unknowable, familiar wind! A sprout pushes through the hard ground on high cliffs. Survival is the trademark of the cecilias. Venti has survived and the face of the bard has survived like a shell slipping out of the tide. Put an ear to his chest; you’ll hear only echoes, disembodied, the howls of rushing air in a long-forgotten cave. He keeps the songs in his pockets.
--
He remembers his hands. They’d held Venti so gently. The winds know all there is because they tumble and soar over all of the world. His voice wasn’t special nor were his songs. There was nothing unique about the bard at the top of the tower, although in a thousand-year retrospect, he likely wasn’t supposed to be there. In the same manner, there was nothing special about a single wind spirit in a city locked by wind. His hands weren’t musician's hands yet because he was still practicing, but they had smelled like apples. He offered Venti a slice.
“You’re the closest thing to a bird I’ve ever seen,” he had told him.
In the hands of his statue, Venti turns to wind. A ball of tightly spinning wind, a collection of the purest anemo energy, a pitiable wind spirit who made a rash decision. But he’s lived with the consequences, which he would tell people as proof that he’s not that much of a fuck-up if not for the fact that it’s another awful secret. A petal clings onto its pistil. The hands are cold stone and his and not his at all, but they offer a lovely view, and a perching place for birds.
--
He got rid of the feather long ago. Tossed it away in a fit of - something - and donned his face and form and voice instead. At least he’s kept his character, although it has weathered down over the years into a drunken joke of a god. His voice still isn’t special, but Venti’s had a long time to practice. The first time, he threw up into the sea. People like his songs, though, and they like his voice, even if they don’t like his personality.
He doesn’t remember the look of the feather, but he remembers what it felt like. A wind spirit physically has no heart and Venti has no interest in biology but he will tell you firmly that lack of a proper heart doesn’t mean you can’t love. You may ask, from experience? And he’ll laugh and shake his head.
Something light hits his back, this high on the cliffs of Mondstadt. Venti reaches behind him to scrabble at the fabric and finds that he’s grasped a cecilia, torn away from the ground.
“Weren’t able to bear it, were you?” He runs a finger over the petals. “Sorry about that. The winds are quite strong here.” He releases it into the awaiting breeze and all that the little plant has witnessed tumbles away across the world.
He twirls an imaginary feather.
When Venti sings among the cliff-winds he sounds closer to himself, one member of a whirling choir. They die down for him tonight. A lonesome voice trails over the hills and ruins and sea, reaching far from where the little bard walks, singing of something nameless, a ballad for those who never got one. It feels like it ought to bring a tear to your eye, but you find that you’re just a little too empty for tears, left a little too empty of all.