Archive of Our Own

Ningguang’s path begins at the northern entrance to Liyue Harbor, near the great gate there. Tourists congregate around the Geo archon statue to pay their respects. Ningguang mills about patiently amongst the contemplative humming and careful footsteps. When their hands are no longer clasped, it is the best time to sidle up beside them with her wares.

“Shells?” She says, and shows them the contents of her woven basket. Conches pink on the inside, dove shells, king helmets, and the stranger and less identifiable types. Pointed and twisted. The tourists are eager to sort through her selection - perhaps pressured to with the stone god watching over their shoulders - and give her a few mora in exchange.

Next is the wharf. When the sailors aren’t around - burly and gruff - to scare away the crowds of shoppers, business is good. Great, even, for no other vendor is willing to sift through hot sand in pursuit of these small treasures. She has a monopoly on cowries - her humble trade - and once the local shoppers are exhausted from surveying the stalls, Ningguang is conveniently there before them with a diminutive smile and a bevy of offerings.

The locals seem to haggle less, and even as a child she knows it’s because they see her here twice a week, peddling what the ocean has cast off.

The pity is inescapable, so what other choice is there but to integrate it into her marketing strategy?

Ningguang rarely finds success along the promenade in Feiyun slope. The merchants there have no sympathy for orphans and demand to see her permit, knowing she has none, whenever she dares to peek onto the plaza. She has been chased away before, the stiff grass of a broom swatting at her heels, leaving needly stripes of pain where its strikes land.

Chihu Rock, then, is where she does her best bartering. Mora is good, but for a girl who lives in a beachside hut - constructed of materials thrown from passing ships and reeds scavenged from burn piles - it is simply a means to live another day. The vendors here know this, and so currency is cut out - deemed an unnecessary step.

She exchanges the largest starfish she has for a new porcelain cup. Drinking water from concave hands is not always comfortable when the skin has been cut by sharp rock and shell. Sand dollars for a portion of tea leaves, sunrise tellins for a few days of rice.

Sometimes, if the young man and his cantankerous father who run Wanmin restaurant aren’t too busy over roaring flame and cast iron, they’re willing to part with some chicken skewers - but only if she has dog head tritons, not the angular ones. Ningguang sees his newborn daughter on odd days, and her eyes are so astonishingly amber and fresh to the world that Ningguang can’t forget them, no matter how hard she might try.

There are times her hunger aches so deep in her belly that she prematurely makes the long trek back to the shoal. She pursues more tritons, and roots through shining, wet sand. Nothing but amber. It feels as if she is standing on the surface of the baby’s eyes. The color surrounds her in all directions. Glossy and golden under the purview of the setting sun.

The people of Chihu Rock care for her. They are not parents, nor are they friends, but they are her community, and she takes great joy in feeling a part of something. She knows each person by name, and addresses them such, and even those who first ask her to call them by titles grow accustomed to her stilted attempt at intimacy. There is joy in recognition, but when the perfumist-in-training calls out her name to give her a blooming glaze lily, or when the nearby fisherman says it while tousling her bright hair, there is an unbearable pain in hearing it pronounced. No woman has the rich music of her mother, and no man the deep timbre of her father.

Ningguang is young - young enough that she does not have the vocabulary to describe how death compounds in those who go on living. However, she is wise - not from her suffering but from her survival - and she keeps that ineffable intelligence with her. It is her guiding principle.

Regardless, there are shells to be sold, and hunger grows in her stomach. There is little time for mourning the past - not when the world is forever staggering forward, and the body demands to be fed.

-

The man who lives by Yaoguang shoal does not often come into the city. Ningguang is accustomed to seeing him at low tide when she goes there to gather shells, so when they cross paths in the harbor market, it is a surprise.

“Little Ningguang,” he says, eyes soft and warm as always. There are many wares on his back, and despite his good health, he bends over at the waist to support it all. “I was told I might find you here.”

“Jiangcheng,” she says, and turns from the scrap of linen cloth upon which she’d been drying out her new batch of cowries. “You are far from home.”

“Yes, I cannot stay long." he says, wistful. “My child should arrive any day now.”

Ningguang had seen his wife last time she’d traveled up to Mingyun village. She’d traded her a starconch for incense with which to pay respects. His wife is quiet and kind, sometimes stumbling over her words, but always eager to offer what little they have. With news of the child, Ningguang had been unable to look away from the absurd swell of her belly - afraid that it would burst forth from the distended skin.

“Is that so?” She chooses to say. “I look forward to meeting them."

Jiangcheng laughs, and runs his hands along his hairline to wipe the sweat there. “Still talking like a diplomat, I see. By the time you’re an adult, you could be one of the Qixing.”

“It is thanks to the books we traded last year,” she says, and does a short half-bow. The shells shine in the afternoon sun, and their light invades her periphery in white bursts.

“I will be a lucky father if my child grows up to be as well-mannered as you,” he says, hands waving in protest of her politeness. “I’ve come because I have a gift for you - if you will accept it.” He takes a woven roll from where it’d been tied to his back, and unfurls it like a scroll - its language the asemic pattern of dried grass.

“A cot,” she says, flat. “For me?”

“It’s not much, but now that there will be another of us, we’ve gotten a new bed.” He gives it a quick swat and particles of dust depart from its weft, caught in the sunlight. “It seemed a shame to throw this one out.”

Although it’d been years since she’d relocated to the beach east of the city, she’d yet to procure a proper bed. She’d attempted to make a cot not unlike the one Jiancheng offers to her, but the art of drying and weaving grass was not of her skill set. Ningguang wants this, yes, but not for free. She looks to her cowries. The air is humid, and so they are still wet. Furthermore, they'll require another wash to rid them of their peculiar scent before they’ll be ready to be sold, and she doesn’t want to make an offer with unprepared goods.

Jiangcheng’s smile grows more pained the longer it takes for Ningguang to respond, and when he senses that trepidation has stunned her, he speaks.

“Please, don’t think much of it,” he says.

Ningguang stifles the frustration she can feel heavy at the base of her lungs with a perfunctory cough into her fist. “I have nothing with which to buy or trade for it.”

Jiangcheng sighs, and his eyes go to the horizon - gauging the time. “I will leave it here then.”

They say their goodbyes; Ningguang performs the correct movements and Jiangcheng gives her a pitiable expression. It is one too sentimental in its wilting shape for her to bear.

She sits for a long while between the grass roll and her drying shells. Long enough that the sun begins its descent before she first touches the cot. It is softer than she expects, and her small, calloused fingers catch easily on its material. It would be comfortable. Certainly more comfortable than the eroded rock she’d deemed her bed in the long-lasting meantime.

Ningguang’s chest splits like struck ore, and her hands pulls away – sudden. Then it returns and she snatches it up into her arms, ties it around her shoulders, and goes into the benighted streets of Chihu rock, where fat flies buzzing around paper lamps and the percussion of metal tools on blackened iron are enough to drown out the whimpers caught in her throat.

-

They first meet beyond the bridge that connects Chihu Rock to the mainland, where the sand gives way to stone and the earthy erupts in sharp, vertical cliffs. There are a few homes here - mostly elderly who had grown tired of the bustling thoroughfares of the city and chosen to move somewhere with less noise. Ningguang often comes here to trade shells for fruit; many of the houses there have inherited small orchards.

The upward ascent to the first house is enough to leave Ningguang panting. She hasn’t eaten since the previous morning, and her mouth is dry from thirst. She’ll find some method of drinking water before she attempts to barter; the last thing she wants is to come across as desperate. She has her dignity to uphold.

As she reaches the apex of the hill, Ningguang sees first the ripe sunsettia fruits bowing the narrow branches of the cuihua tree, and second the little hand that plucks them, one by one. She approaches warily, her basket of shells rustling against each other’s edges - a sort of truncated chime - with each step closer.

The girl, no, the thief moves from branch to branch with an agility Ningguang has seen only in sailors. She’d once watched one swing from the crow’s nest to the deck by a string of a rope – tethered to nothing she could discern - like flight. Or falling.

Ningguang’s wares announce her presence before she can speak.

The girl’s face emerges from the leaves, high in the tree. Then disappears. Ningguang moves forward by a few paces and the girl’s face reappears - lower this time. Wry smile, freckled brow.

“Somebody planted this tree with the hopes of eating its fruit one day,” Ningguang says, and her voice burns her throat despite her cold expression. “And you’re taking it from them."

The thief girl - eyes wild and red, hair dark and tangled - situates herself on the lowest limb of the tree where the leaves are sparse, and kicks her legs back and forth in the air. She stares back at Ningguang with astonished curiosity for a few moments before responding.

“This tree is so old that the person who planted it is probably dead!” She says, and the words are punctuated with a few heaved breaths as if she’s holding back laughter.

Ningguang situates her hands at the crests of her hips. A pose of dissatisfaction - arms akimbo to ensure she appears larger. “So it’s alright to disrespect the dead?”

“No!” The girl says, and her gaze shifts elsewhere. Her mouth is turned up in a sly crescent shape. “But people who are alive get hungry. Is that a sin?"

Ningguang balls up her tiny hands into hard fists. “Hunger is not a sin, but stealing is!”

After the eruption of words, Ningguang takes the girl by her dangling ankle and attempts to wrench her from the tree branch. The nearby boughs shake a great deal, and a mass of cuihua leaves descends onto them in little green shapes. The dark-haired girl cries out with squealing laughter, her amusement entirely eclipsing Ningguang’s frustration.

She slips out of Ningguang’s grasp easily; the branch she’s perched on is far too steady to be moved by the likes of a child. Ningguang thinks she’s going to ascend further to secure her spot in the tree, but instead the girl hops down onto the dirt with a dull thud. Then she’s before Ningguang, teeth crooked and bright like quartz and eyes crinkled at the corners.

“You talk like a grown-up,” the girl says, and makes an impressed sound in the back of her throat. “I like you. My name is Beidou.”

“Ningguang,” she says, voice light with the pronunciation of her own name.

-

The girl, no, Beidou explains she is from across the water – a small island inhabited by her parents and two brothers. They are a family of fishermen, each with their own boat and tasks. She gestures to hers when she says this, and Ningguang lets out an unimpressed sound from deep in her chest. A dingy dinghy.

Beidou is the youngest of them all, and therefore the least liable to get in trouble for stealing, so she’s been sent to Liyue Harbor with the purpose of procuring fruit that they can then jar and preserve for winter. She is to do this by any means.

When Beidou explains this, she seems entirely unperturbed by the family dynamic – a band of seafaring thieves – and though Ningguang finds the whole matter suspect, she’s too young to explain why she finds it unethical. She knows it in her body - by instinct.

“How else will we eat?” Beidou says whenever the subject is broached and Ningguang’s face goes cold. “You try feeding a whole damn family.” There’s the flash of a grin, teeth caught in the moonlight. She relishes in cursing; it must have some allure in it that Ningguang does not see. “I eat the most.”

There are books, too, that teach Ningguang of how things ought to be: thick volumes she’d picked up by the dozen for cheap. Though their pages never last long in the angular ocean breeze, though their covers split under salt and sand, Ningguang reads them. They’re filled with narrow, small text - words too large for her developing mind. Filial piety, human virtue, impartial care. Each author has a different take on how to conduct oneself, and Ningguang cherry-picks the parts she can understand, creating her own philosophy. It will be years until Ningguang gains fluency in these topics – and few more even before she is able to implement them properly into her own life.

But for now, she and Beidou engage in their spars of half-baked philosophy when they cross paths in the market.

-

Ningguang carries her sack of rice to the beach through the back streets of Chihu Rock, taking care to not catch the rough fabric on any edges of the paved stone, for even a small tear will leave a trail of rice in her wake. Each grain is precious; she is the type to leave a clean bowl, both out of gratitude and obligation.

Beidou is at the back of a stall, a few dozen paces away, but the two of them catch each other’s eyes. She holds a statuette of Rex Lapis’ exuvia, carved in maroon clay, like a prize – grinning that lopsided grin.

Ningguang steels herself, twists up her face in anticipation of a scolding, but it does not come. When Beidou senses it, she reaches into her ragged pocket and produces two coins of mora, sets them where the statuette had been, and scampers off into some unknown alley way.

That night, when Ningguang is settling into her makeshift home on the shoreline, a pot of rice on the fire, she sees the silhouette of Beidou and her boat out on the water. Her oars leave entropic ellipses on the water, and then there is nothing. Nothing but that great blue expanse, so rich and and navy and wide that she cannot discern where the night ends and where the abyssal waters begin.

-

A great storm – purple and bloated with stripes of lightning - careens through all of coastal Liyue, only narrowly missing the harbor when it veers off course and falters in the dead of the ocean.

Ningguang goes back to Yaoguang shoal some time after – once she’s sure there no residual tempests lingering in its path – and finds that Jiangcheng’s family is gone, their house empty.

She goes inside – the threshold had been stripped of its door - and surveys the collapsed shelves, the waterlogged mattress, the contents of the kitchen strewn about on the mud-caked floor. It is unrecognizable to her – so different then the hollow house that had been left after her parent’s passing, the one she’d had to bid goodbye to when it had been repossessed.

So this is the fate of families, she thinks. Little Xiangling’s amber eyes – the picture of futile innocence - shine too large in her mind, and she blinks the thought away.

Ningguang exits the house with the intention of never returning, and when she steps out onto the shoal, she sees that the tidal waves caused by the storm have left mounds of shells in their wake. Cowries with stripes like tigers, spindly sea stars, tritons of every variety, scotch bonnets. There is nobody there but her to gather them – nobody else who can see their value.

-

Things change, as they are wont to do. Learning how to make her own way at such a young age without adult oversight becomes Ningguang’s chief fault, for as she grows older and her oddities remain a part of her – no longer a symptom of her prepubescent naiveté – the people of Liyue Harbor retain less sympathy.

She learns that hateful looks are more barbed than pitiable ones.

“Ma’am, do you like shells?” Ningguang asks, her voice light and rounded by the onset of puberty.

“Oh my,” the woman says when Ningguang approaches her. “I don’t have any mora.” She recoils in fear of being touched, and continues walking - leaving Ningguang with her mouth slightly agape and the iridescent shell forgotten in her hand.

And so rather than speak in that strange and adult manner, she simply does not speak at all. Not to strangers, at least. The seashell selling turns into a quiet affair, accomplished solely through nods and shakes of the head.

But there are moments of tenderness too – the perfumist doing her hair up in the sort of style reserved only for festivals, the family of Wanmin restaurant bringing her bamboo shoot stew on her birthday, the bookstore owner teaching her to read the characters she’d never learned.

There is no currency she could obtain that might pay off these debts of kindness – no number of shells that could be their equivalent.

-

There are days on the beach, too, that Ningguang does not speak, does not project a single word. Just gathers shells in anticipation of the larger markets. And though these are times of contemplation - ripe with fantasies of the future - they are also excruciatingly lonely. Nothing but curls of salty air and the gulls riding them inland.

So when Beidou’s narrow boat launches itself onto shore one day - intercepting Ningguang’s shell-foraging path - it is a welcome deviation from her usual schedule of silence and rumination. They settle into conversation as if she’d never left, but it’s unmissable how they’ve changed. Ningguang, infinitely more quiet and introspective – a foil to Beidou, whose mouth seem to have grown wider as if to account for her booming voice.

“I always wondered. Are you from the city or somewhere else?” Beidou asks, her pace in time with Ningguang’s only by way of conscious effort. It’s been years since they’ve seen each other last, and Ningguang is taller of the two now - thanks to her gangly, elongated legs. Beidou has developed too, but it’s horizontal - shoulders broadening in both muscle and bone. Ningguang wonders if it’s the constant rowing back and forth across the bay that has shaped Beidou in such a way.

“I used to live in Mingyun village,” Ningguang says, her observations filing themselves away in some distant part of her mind.

Beidou pauses, collecting her words. “But you don’t anymore.”

“The mine shaft collapsed.” It is easier to speak than Ningguang anticipates. The fact of death is burnished and worn; it glances off her, falls somewhere behind them in the turning tide. “And then it was just me.”

“Oh,” Beidou says. The vowel doesn’t ring out. Words don't reverberate here; they’re too far from the rocky cliff faces and vertical valleys. Any echoes are swallowed up by the sea and the sandbar.

“This was years ago,” Ningguang says. “Before I ever saw you.”

Beidou looks only forward. “Where do you live?”

“Close to where we first met.” She gestures with her chin in the vague direction of Liyue Harbor. “Near the eastern docks."

“On the beach?” Beidou tilts her head and her hair, shaggy and long, dislodges itself from where it’d been accidentally tucked into her shirt. She seems unaccustomed to dealing with its length. Ningguang thinks she should teach her how to put it up so that it stays out of the face.

“Yes.” Ningguang’s scalp tingles with the sense memory of her mother combing her hair and securing it in a bun at the crown of her head as a child. Then the thought falls away - like a wisp of cloud dispersed in the summer air.

“That’s dangerous during the rainy season,” Beidou says, her brow furrowed.

Ningguang knows Beidou isn’t scolding her. It’s concern she speaks with, but the part of Ningguang that’s grown more comfortable in her independence can’t help but to take a modicum of offense from it.

“To live in the city proper - on land - it costs mora,” she says, cool and plain.

“Then why not stay in Mingyun?"

“For the same reason you go to the harbor to find goods. People like the shells from Yaoguang shoal, but the locals there won’t buy what they can easily find.” Ningguang looks down at her stock in the tightly woven basket hanging by her knees. “I’ve always gone to the wharf to make my living."

“I didn’t realize that back when we first met,” Beidou says. “That’s a long walk for somebody without shoes.”

Ningguang just scans her eyes along Beidou’s form, her gaze stopping at the worn and bleeding callouses of Beidou’s own bare feet, trickling the occasional trail of red into the ocean. “Shoes don’t last long in the sand.”

“Yeah,” Beidou says, and twists up her mouth as if holding back the rest of her thought.

They walk for a bit, Ningguang picking up sand dollars and spine stars and moonshells. The shoals are rich with spiraled treasure, and recounting the many classifications of the shells is a nice distraction from sore memories. Beidou helps where she can – though her eyes are less trained to pick out the best from the piles that have drifted up along the sandbar.

Beidou scoffs, a mucous-y and rough sound, breaking the silence.

“You know, my mom died.” Beidou kicks at nothing. Just stubborn sand and oceanic air. “She got really sick and my dad had to go to Bubu pharmacy to get the medicine, but there was that big storm and he couldn’t make it in time."

“I’m sorry,” Ningguang says, unsure of what other words to use. She places a tortoiseshell scallop into her grass-woven basket. They continue walking along the ridge of the beach. In the distance, a flock of white cranes gather, stiff and narrow like reeds.

Beidou shrugs, and her torn shirt shifts on her shoulders, exposing sun-kissed skin and scratches from errant tree branches. “I don’t know what it was like for you when your parents died, but it was pretty hard for me and my family. My brothers don’t talk a lot, but I can tell when they’re sad.”

Ningguang can’t locate a response for that. She’d been around adults her entire life; there hadn’t even been other children in the village when she’d lived there, and so the idea of siblings is entirely foreign to her.

There are a few beats of silence as the two girls sink into the sand.

“I kind of notice when you’re sad too,” Beidou adds, quiet. Like she doesn’t know if she should say it. “Even when we were younger.” A tender pause, and she wipes absent-mindedly at the bottom of her foot. It's pink, rubbed raw by the sand. “I wish I could take it away or something.”

Ningguang surveys Beidou. Who is this girl? Who is this girl who sails from beach to beach, stealing fruit and speaking strange sentiments? So unexpected in their intimacy that they stun.

“Thank you,” Ningguang says, her voice more polite than she anticipates.

Beidou doesn’t say anything, and she turns away before Ningguang can observe what happens to her somber expression. She goes over to the edge of the wet sand and kneels beside a lump of color. A hermit crab.

“Dare me to pick him up?” She asks, but she’s already got him by the shell, lifting him up by what must seem to him a great measurement of distance. His shell is colored in needly stripes of white and blue - a starconch. It would fetch quite a few mora, Ningguang thinks, but then she sees the nervous twitching of the hermit crab’s limbs from the small opening, and thinks otherwise - that maybe it’s priceless.

“He probably thinks you’re going to eat him,” she says, and Beidou nods, the motion small and tucked close to her chest.

“It’s okay, little guy,” Beidou says, putting the hermit crab down onto the wet ground. “I’m not trying to hurt you. Just admiring the home on your back.” As soon as he makes contact with the earth, he scuttles away and wedges himself beneath a porous rock. Beidou watches him disappear entirely with no discernible expression. Then a smile - bright like a break in the cloud cover.

“I want a house that can move with me,” she says. “One day I’ll get a big boat and then my brothers and dad won’t have to wait for me back home.”

The words come out of Ningguang in a breathless procession, as if the fantasy demands it be whispered as recompense for its impossibility. “I want a house in the sky. Above everything.”

Beidou laughs - grand and boisterous - and it sends joyous shockwaves through her person. “That’s kind of weird!” She says, and then pauses. Smiles. “But also cool. I like it.”

Ningguang’s social skills have fallen into disuse over the years, and so confession comes at a great price to her - florid embarrassment and a strained voice. But aside from the fire in her face, there is a pleasure. Friendship, she wants to say, but does not have the word yet. She has not spoken openly like this for a long while - not since she last saw her parents.

“Hey, you okay?” Beidou’s face invades her vision. It is degree of closeness Ningguang has not yet experienced, and so she steps back a few paces into a shallow tide pool. There’s the sound of skin breaking water - and the cool sensation of it on her scarred ankle.

Beidou is still smiling – a nervous thing, perhaps even excited. Ningguang can’t look away from her teeth. They’re impeccably straight now – no longer the jagged shapes she remembers from childhood. She wonders if they’re lost in the ocean.

“Sorry,” Ningguang says. “I was just thinking.”

“Yeah, well, you better keep doing that,” Beidou throws her hands behind her head in the way that sailors by the wharf do. “Because how else will you figure out how to make a floating house?”

Ningguang allows a little laugh to leave her, and it feels peculiar - airy and light. Like flying.

-

Ningguang does not know where Beidou goes at night when she stays in the harbor – only that they find each other in the mornings. It is natural as gravity - not like descent, but in the way the moon tugs the ocean back over the shore as it pleases. So, too, do Ningguang and Beidou meet. It is always serendipitous, always in an unexpected alley way or stray food stall. Never a grand thing – not in the middle of a great promenade, not at the sidelines of a festival.

And so, like every other time, Ningguang is surprised to find Beidou suddenly beside her while she’s bartering with the newest merchant. She has a hot expression, like there’s anger simmering beneath those red eyes, and though Ningguang wants to calm her, it’s not her priority.

“1,000 is more than adequate,” Ningguang says. Her voice comes out more quiet than she’d like, and she internally blames it on Beidou’s presence.

The merchant looks no more pleased with that offer than he had with the previous one, and sensing his discontent, Beidou’s throat thrums with a tense growl.

“I sell these for 1,500 mora each in Mondstadt,” he says in a huff. “Do you know how much it costs to transport even one case?” His eyes, light and narrow, pass over Ningguang’s disheveled figure. “I doubt you’ve even left the harbor. No clue what goes on in the outside world.”

Ningguang is opening her mouth to make a counteroffer when Beidou takes him by the collar and lifts him onto his toes. There a whimper of fear caught in his mouth, and an irritated growl springing forth out from between Beidou’s bared teeth.

“Ningguang is infinitely smarter than you, asshole,” she spits.

Ningguang is quick to place her long, pale hand on Beidou’s flexed shoulder, and when she touches the skin there, she can sense the muscle quivering with adrenaline.

“Beidou,” she says, low and quiet, and the man falls to his knees, petrified.

He’s sputtering the moment he regains his posture, and begins gathering the bottles of wolfhook juice close to his person.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Is his resounding cry before he launches his body into the throngs of passing people.

Beidou just laughs, and Ningguang can’t help the frustration that wells up in her face, setting her capillaries alight.

“He would have accepted my offer if you hadn’t upset him,” she says, and starts walking away.

“Yeah, well,” Beidou calls out, catching up with a few elongated paces. “I didn’t like the way he was talking to you.”

“I’m used to it,” is her biting response.

Beidou doesn’t seem to detect the sharpness there – either because Ningguang hasn’t adequately filed her edge, or simply because she doesn’t care. “Adults talk that way to me all the time. Like I’m stupid, but I’m not.” She is quiet for a few paces, and the consistent padding of their foosteps fill in the strained silence. “And neither are you. You’re probably the most intelligent person I know.”

Ningguang ducks into a nearby side street; Beidou follows. They do that – winding through the labyrinthine paths of Chihu Rock, crowded by towering buildings - for some time. Ningguang thinks maybe Beidou will give up and go off, but she never does. She just follows – always a few steps behind.

“Are you mad at me?” Beidou finally asks after they’ve made their way around the back of Wanmin restaurant.

Ningguang stops to lean her shoulder against a wall, and her eyes fall to the ground where castoff bits of tobacco and food wrappings have accumulated from being swept off the main road.

“No,” she says. It’s only half true.

“Okay, well,” Beidou starts, disbelief coloring her voice. “I actually found you because I wanted to ask you a question.”

“What is it?” Ningguang asks, curt and quiet.

“Can I stay on the beach with you? It’s just that I need to get some more stuff before I go back home, and I’m kind of tired of sleeping outside.”

Ningguang takes a long time to answer – not because she’s thinking any discrete or solid thoughts, but because she’s battling herself over how quickly she’s come to the decision despite her mood.

“Yes,” she finally says. “Yes, it’s alright.”

“Oh,” Beidou exhales, and the breath wafts in Ningguang’s direction, warming the skin it crosses. “Thanks.”

Ningguang is less prepared for the hug than she was for the altercation with the merchant. Beidou’s arms wrap around her shoulders with great force, and the two of them hobble backward into the wall. Ningguang is unbearably warm – likely because the Wanmin kitchen is on the other side. No other reason.

She relents, lets her hands go to Beidou’s back and feels the muscle there. She has not been held – has not held another – since she was a child. The shape of it is un-practiced and awkward. Ningguang’s nose is somewhere at the side of her head, near an ear and nestled amongst hair. She can smell nothing but Beidou: musk and ocean and skin chemistry.

Ningguang’s hands seek some purchase just as Beidou pulls away. She goes to remove her hand from where it’d been laid, but then Beidou takes her by the wrist and shoves her fingers deep in her pocket.

“What are you—”

“Feel that?” Beidou asks, grinning that new smile. Still foreign to Ningguang in its orderliness. Her fingers brush against something metallic in Beidou’s pocket. Shaped like a disc, ridged at the edges.

“Mora?”

“Yeah,” Beidou says. “Lunch.” She releases Ningguang’s hand, and her wrist feels like it’s glowing where it’d been held. “You’re hungry, right?”

-

Beidou stays longer each time she docks. There is no spoken explanation for this. When they wedge the boat half in the sand further up the beach to prevent it sailing off during high tide, Ningguang notices there are things inside. Extra changes of clothes. A toy, sometimes, sentimental in a way she cannot detect. Gifts – which she only recognizes because in the wake of Beidou’s departures, they are left beside Ningguang’s grass roll – set just out of her line of sight in case she wakes up during their placement.

The first few tokens are pieces of cookware – heavy enough that they must come on separate trips. A new pot for rice, and a pan with a long handle and heavy bottom so that it might sit more comfortably on the fire. A grate, too, and they use it to cook skewers of foraged mountain mushrooms. New chopsticks to replace the splintered ones Ningguang has been using for years.

Then there are books. Beidou does not read much, though Ningguang knows she has in her great intelligence of the tactical kind, and so her selections are sporadic. She must overhear that Ningguang likes poetry – maybe from little Xiangling, for she is still so young that she has not learned of secrets yet. So there are volumes of poetry – not only from Liyue, but from across the ocean. Inazuma. Upward on the continent. Snezchnaya and Mondstadt. Ningguang does not always understand the cryptic verse, but she welcomes the intellectual challenge. There is a joy to be found in not knowing things, she learns – even after all those years of self-imposed rules and order. She does not regret any of it; it was how she survived.

The other books are nonfiction, and those are what Ningguang enjoys the most. Both Sumeru and Fontaine have their fair share of theory on law and order, and she reads those volumes before the damp beach air can leave its rippled imprint on the pages. She finds herself revisiting the books she’d cherished as a child, and there is new meaning in them.

Ningguang knows these gifts are stolen, but they come from people out of her sight – somewhere over the horizon – and so while it doesn’t completely eradicate the sin, it is the concession she makes so that she can keep Beidou’s friendship. There are times she doubts herself, times she reads over her salt-worn principles with anxiety thrumming in her chest – seeking out the answer, seeking some sort of cosmic rule that might guide her into virtue.

There is no code of ethics that is entirely unyielding – even the ones written out in assured black ink.

When Beidou catches Ningguang cradling a new cup or thumbing through the most recent addition to her makeshift bookshelf, she smiles so immense and bright - starlike, even - that Ningguang suspects it is something she could not quell if she tried.

Each time Beidou’s boat pulls up onto the shore, Ningguang is always there to greet her with a gourd of cold oolong tea. When Beidou takes draws a long, golden drink from it, Ningguang sees the way the tea travels down her neck, disappears. There is no answer to this either, but there is comfort in company, and so that is what she thinks of as the days go by in blue and pink, as the glaze lilies close tight, as the trips accumulate, as Beidou’s hands grow scarred from lashes for law-breaking, as Ningguang’s hair comes to reach the swell of her thigh, as the tide continues its eternal dance for the shore.

-

The sensibilities of her clientele change as time passes, and Ningguang adjusts her wares to suit the new market.

People are enchanted by the abalone shells, Ningguang comes to notice. Whether old or young, local or foreign, they are always astonished by the layer of mother-of-pearl that constitutes the interior of the shell, and when she gives them a small shell to look over and consider, they turn it over in the hands as if sunlight might pool there.

Among all the myriad shells, Ningguang primarily sells bivalves. She learned early on in her career that though people appreciate the singularity of one shell, they often want many. Little tokens of the seaside. And so the scallop shells - ridged and ivory white - remain one of her most popular wares. It is convenient to her, as they are quite abundant. The ocean produces them at an astonishing rate - spitting them up from its crests of froth into shallow tide pools.

When she finds scallop shells that have baked too long in the sun and turned brassy, she tosses them up into the air and pretends they are mora coins. It is a childish thought, she knows this. When the shells descend, they almost always break upon landing - for their color is also a compromise of its integrity.

Ningguang knows she should do away with such fantasies. Nobody will buy a broken shell - not even the women in Chihu Rock who leave their leftovers for her out on the boardwalk.

The nautilus shell is also well-liked. It has that famous spiral shape, and on days Beidou comes to assist her in gathering, Ningguang laughs at the way she dips her finger into the shell in pursuit of its end - little digit wriggling in the darkness of its twisting. Beidou’s finger is, of course, not long enough, nor does it have enough knuckles to complete the shape, but she tries.

It is something Ningguang appreciates about Beidou - the persistence, the stubbornness. But on bad days, it is the quality she hates most in her - that she will stop at nothing, that she will break rules to get what she wants. It’s a sick feeling; Ningguang detests it. She does not like to look on others in such a way, but part of her - the part that is a child and will always be - envies Beidou.

Beidou stands in the ebb and flow of the tide without much care over whether it is going in or out, for it is the sea that is her home - not the shore – and she knows how to traverse a material that bucks up in violent waves.

Ningguang walks along the sand and feels it creep up her skin in its microscopic parts. It is neither water nor soil beneath her. The substrate of her home is too yielding to the pressure of bare feet; how could it hold the golden weight of the future?

She wonders what it would feel like to sleep on solid ground - to not feel the world slipping away beneath her even in dreams.

-

“Do you think you’ll ever leave here?” Beidou asks one night. It’s oppressively cloudy – one of the first signs of the incoming rainy season, and the stars are blotted out. Even with the gaps in the hut’s roof, no moonlight can reach them. They are blanketed in darkness with only enough residual light from the city to illuminate the barest of features.

They’ve been sleeping beside each other for long enough now that Ningguang is accustomed to the sound of a voice near to her ear. The cot is narrow, but they do not lie close enough to touch.

“I can’t imagine myself anywhere else,” Ningguang says.

It’s quiet, save the ambience of the ocean. That is always there; it might as well be silence to Ningguang by now.

Beidou shifts uncomfortably on the grass roll, some errant thought sitting poorly behind her half-lidded eyes. She looks at the ground. Anywhere but Ningguang.

“So you’re just going to sleep on the beach for the rest of your life?” Beidou asks. She’s as quiet as the time she’d asked about her parents. That memory seems distant now – an artifact of their friendship.

“I have plans.” She thinks of the merchants she’s met over the years, of the side work she’s been doing in Chihu Rock, though it’s incomparable to the degree of familiarity she has with selling shells. “If you don’t believe me—”

“I do,” Beidou says, her voice hurried. Like she really does. “I do believe you.”

“Where will you go?” Ningguang asks – because they both know Beidou cannot stay in one place.

“I don’t know.” A pause in the darkness. “Wherever you think would be interesting, I guess.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Ningguang asks. She wishes she could see Beidou’s features, but that’s why she brought it up in the dead of night, right? So she could have some cover, some plausible deniability.

Ningguang brings herself in closer to Beidou, and the new closeness excavates an answer from her.

“There’s so much out there.” Her voice is quavering, as is her body. Ningguang can feel it traveling along the weft of the grass roll. It’s in Ningguang too – like sympathetic vibration. “I want to go places that you want to hear about. So if you end up staying here, then I can go and come back. Tell you about it or something.” Ningguang is charmed by the way Beidou speaks too fast, repeats the same words.

“That sounds nice,” is all she says – because it does.

They lay like that for a while, the two of them basking in the shared silence. Even with the thick cloud cover, Ningguang can sense the moon up there. She wonders if it knows what it’s doing by pulling the ocean to the shore - if it’s bringing the water there even though it’s always going slip away, leaving only shells and froth with its departure.

“Maybe when you build your floating house I can visit you up there?” Beidou says after a few moments.

Ningguang can’t help the laugh that floats out of her.

“It’s going to be heavily guarded.” She dares to reach forward and run her hand along the waves of Beidou’s loose hair. She can locate her even in the darkness. “A thief like you will have no chance of entering.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Beidou says, and she gives Ningguang a few emphatic pushes until she is facing the opposite direction. “Go to sleep.”

Ningguang doesn’t need the moonlight to know that Beidou is smiling. She can feel it in her hair, against the curve of her jaw. She can feel her heart too - soaring in her chest like a seabird, beating its wings at Ningguang's back.

-

Ningguang wakes early one morning to Beidou jostling her. Through the gaps in the walls of her home, she can see the eerie pink of the sun overtaking the horizon. She sits up slowly, and sand falls from her gossamer hair. The dried grass cot had sunken deeper into the sand than times before - a sign that the tide is moving along the shorelines with more force now. Stealing the earth away from underneath them.

She looks up. Beidou is already standing and pulling her thick, dark hair back in a loose bun near the base of her neck. Just as Ningguang had taught her.

“Come with me,” she says.

There’s still pieces of sleep in Ningguang’s airways, so when she starts to question the order, her voice cracks. Some small degree of embarrassment hitches in her chest.

They go out onto the beach and Ningguang sees that it extends far beyond what her human eye can understand - the curvature of the earth elongating it like a salty mirage. The tide is low. Low enough that she can sense the waves out on the ocean sucking the shoreline up in their undertow.

She follows Beidou to a rocky outcropping among the shimmering, shifting sand, and they wait. Beidou is silent. The air is interrupted only by the far-off cries of gulls and the restless tide. Ningguang listens - listens with such attentiveness that her head begins to ache.

Beidou’s shoulders tense, and when Ningguang follows her line of sight, she sees something emerging from the sheet of water. It’s translucent and damp and pale - ghostly pale. Enough that Ningguang wonders for a moment if it’s a spirit. But then there’s the whip of a tendril as it extends forward a length, and the arduous pulling of the mass of flesh behind it. The procession of movement continues, and the many limbs move about in a pattern that Ningguang’s body cannot replicate.

It draws closer, and it makes eye contact with Ningguang despite the distance. Intelligence scintillates within its pupils.

But Beidou is fast, faster than the adolescent octopus, and when she leaps from her place at the apex of the rock, the hunt is effectively over. She moves in great leaps, and though there is the loud slap of her bare feet against the wet sand, there is not enough time for the octopus - smart as it may be - to escape her pursuit.

Ningguang does not even have time to fill her lungs with the gasp before Beidou sweeps the octopus up in her hands and bites it quick between the eyes. Its shining, multiplicative limbs writhe in a one pronounced jolt before it falls limp. Ningguang does not see any sort of light leave its rectangular pupils, no sign of life escaping. It is still there in its body, hidden beneath death.

Beidou pulls her small mouth from its nacreous, spotted skin. “Breakfast,” she says.

Neither Beidou nor Ningguang are adept at cooking, and so the tentacles bubble, char, stiffen over the fire. The flesh turns strange and rubbery. By all measurements, it should be a poor breakfast. But there are other things - dark and leafy vegetables, cloves of garlic, flavorful spices that Ningguang does not taste except in scavenged leftovers. The stalks of the bok choy are clean enough that she knows they were not picked fresh this morning. No, they are too pretty, too neat to have been plucked from dirt. When she makes questioning eye contact with Beidou over the steam shooting out from the rice pot, she knows from the guilty flicker of red that they are goods stolen from yesterday’s market.

Ningguang thinks perhaps she should scold Beidou as she has before, but there’s a dark pit in her stomach that growls and insists otherwise.

She eats. The sun glows from its diagonal placement. For a few brief moments, as they bite through tough, pale flesh and gather waterlogged grains of rice at the rims of their bowls, the sky lights up in an impossible vermilion. It passes through the world in great pillars and as this happens, there is the grand illusion that they are among the elegant, monochromatic architecture of Feiyun slope. Ningguang's hand stills at the base of her bowl. The sleeping flame they’d used to cook breakfast attempts to imitate the sky - and fails. Those flickering embers might as well be sand at the foot of a red mountain.

As Beidou is cast wholly in the color, Ningguang knows in her child-shaped heart that she will never forget this morning. For as long as she goes on living, she will see the eternal coming and going of that bright heavenly body and know it can paint everything - if it wishes.

-

A storm dithers on the break of the horizon for a few days – just at the precipice of the vanishing point, and Ningguang prays it will do just that, but it does not. It hurdles forward with great force, and she watches it sweep up gargantuan waves in the distance. Small to her human eyes – smaller if she could forget the laws of perspective.

Beidou arrives before the rain, and when she hauls her boat up along the beach to where sand becomes soil, she says nothing – just looks to Ningguang with a disquieted expression.

“Why did you come?” Ningguang says. She’s standing in the portico of her makeshift house – a shack cobbled together from years of scavenging. It is nothing. It is her home. It is everything. It is trash. She will not leave it. “Why are you here?”

There are shells laid out on scraps of cloth along the larger stones. Her livelihood, pre-fragmented. The air is so humid they have no chance of drying before the storm comes.

“You have to leave,” Beidou says, voice hoarse from air so salty it stings to breathe. “If you go inland, you’ll be safe.”

Ningguang can feel the electricity along every inch of her exposed skin. Rain begins in its little shapes. She knows it’s coming, and she’s helpless to the tragedy of it. She can do nothing but collapse into the sand, and when Beidou takes her by the crooks of her arms and begins pulling her up the beach – as if she too is a boat – only then does she flail in upset shapes, crying out in protest and cursing. She kicks helplessly, and Beidou continues on, grim and doleful.

The sky turns entirely violet.

Beidou deposits Ningguang past the bridge, at the foot of the mountain, and sits behind her so she can use her broad arms to hold her in place. Ningguang couldn’t move if she wanted. The storm has taken all the oxygen from the air.

The wind takes the roof first. It’s one solid piece, and the air sweeps it up in a singular motion. It twirls about in the sky, leaving splinters of itself in its path when the serrated clouds turns violent. There's the wall she'd found only a week ago, halved on the corner of an anvil-shaped mass of vapor. And the great boulders that had held everything in place, rendered useless midair. Every nail, every beam. Shelves, dismantled - their contents nothing but dots on the horizon. The storm cuts into everything, and soon all of Ningguang’s home is suspended over the harbor, being continually remade and deconstructed as the wind carries its parts upward, upward.

She can almost hear the shells, too. The soft chimes of scotch bonnets knocking into moonshells.

Beidou’s boat finally goes into the air, and it sails along the thick drafts of humidity that swirl about. The sky is so gray it could be an arctic ocean, but it’s not. It is a storm, taking everything with it. Nothing but sharp, stray currents of air - thin as razors - that cut at Ningguang’s cheeks as if to ward off her watching.

The eye of the storm passes over them and Ningguang looks up from where she lays on the ground. There is a pinhole of possibility – and beyond it a dreamlike expanse of placid blue. She could be there, she realizes. She could build her home on the blue shore of the heavens – out of the reach of the planet's shifting sands, above the tempests.

Then there is only Beidou above her, blotting out the mirage, and their noses brush against each other.

“Ningguang,” she says, her voice distant and remote despite their proximity. Fading under the great roar of the storm as it overtakes them once more. Ningguang feels something at her shoulders. Hands, maybe. Nails digging into her skin. There are only Beidou’s eyes before her.

“I’m going to take you—”

Red like Feiyun slope.

“—to be okay—”

Red like the sun.

“—just don’t fucking— “

Then there is not much of anything.

-

Ningguang snaps back into waking life to the sight of wide amber. She tries to move backward and slams the base of her skull in the wall behind her. Instinctively, her hand goes to cradle the skin there.

“Dad!” The amber says, and then removes itself enough that she can see the person to which it belongs. “Dad!” Little Xiangling waddles through the threshold of the door – into another room.

Chef Mao enters not long after the wailing ceases.

“Ningguang,” he says, solemn in every limb as he nears her. “You’re awake.”

“Did I,” She pauses to take the mug of warm tea he hands off to her. “Did I pass out?”

“At first, but then I think you just fell asleep.” He sighs, and it comes out of him heavy as iron. “You were exhausted. When was the last time you ate?”

It had been a few days. Ningguang had yet to learn how to balance the bevy of new responsibilities with which she’d tasked herself. Anxiety jolts in her chest, and the muscles there seize momentarily. Will she still be able to work after the storm?

“You know, it’s okay to ask for help sometimes,” Chef Mao says, perhaps sensing her worry. He has a look of exasperation on his face – heavy brow and drooping mouth - and only in seeing that does Ningguang start to understand how grave the situation could have been had she not relocated from the beach.

She sits up and woven grass shifts beneath her. For a moment she think she’s dreaming – that she’s been asleep this whole time, but there’s no sand caught in the weft. Only stable hardwood floors.

“Sorry,” Chef Mao says, and he covers his forehead out of what Ningguang can only assume is embarrassment. “This was all I was able to get from the restaurant when we evacuated.”

It’s not much different than the grass rolls Ningguang has slept on for over a decade, and so she can’t bring herself to be dissatisfied – there is not much else to which she can compare its comfort.

“Thank you,” she says. “I am indebted to you.”

Chef Mao is about to protest when Xiangling cries out something incomprehensible from the other room, either in joy or pain, and then there is the familiar footfall of leather boots. Beidou enters slowly, her footsteps punctuated by increasing measurements of silence until she’s come to a full stop beside the makeshift cot.

“My house,” Ningguang starts, and then trails off into shallow breaths.

“I’m sorry,” is all Beidou can seem to say.

Chef Mao takes his leave, and Beidou sits beside Ningguang, resting her head against the wall. The silence between them hangs heavy but sweet with shared tenderness - not unlike cuihua boughs ripe with sunsettia fruit.

“Your father and brothers. Are they okay?” Ningguang asks, and her hands go to her ratted pants to play with the fabric there.

“We all left when we felt the wind change,” she says. “They probably made it to the mainland before I did since they didn’t have to sail all the way to the south side.”

Ningguang thinks of Jiangcheng, then, and the sadness is doubled when she realizes how their house must be good and truly gone now – not even the ruins of it could be left after such a storm. The crying is a natural consequence of such deep sadness, for such thoughts tumble into each other, knocking into grief like a person lost in the night. There is a child inside of her, no, she is still yet a child, and there is a storm inside of her that has yet to properly pass.

“Oh,” Beidou says, and sits back a little, hands suspended upward and useless. “Ningguang, are you okay?”

“I’m sorry,” Ningguang says, then again. “I’m sorry.” She can feel the snot bubbling up in her nose like froth, the tears salty and stinging in the corners of her eyes, and it only makes the sobs wretch more fiercely in her chest. The ocean is still ebbing and flowing inside of her – threatening to burst forth. “I miss my mom and dad,” she says, and a violent sob climbs up her torso once more. The force with which she’s crying is disorienting - nauseating, even - and she has to bend over and grasp her knees to stop the world from its accelerated spinning.

“Hey!” Beidou places her hand on her back in the same way a large bird might to rest on a narrow branch. Entirely out of her comfort zone and scared of her own might. “There, there,” she says, delivering a few awkward pats. They make a dull, hollow sound against Ningguang’s quivering ribcage.

“You’re bad at comforting me,” Ningguang says, and cries a little harder, but there’s laughter in there too – like her shells in the storm.

“Stop, I’m—” Beidou laughs – not at Ningguang, but at herself – and then performs a loud cough as if to cover it up. “I am bad at it, but I’m trying. Give me some credit, okay?”

“Okay,” Ningguang says, and sucks up a great deal of snot back into her sinuses. “You’re going to get better at it for me, okay?”

“I promise,” Beidou says, low and true.

There’s a tumult of memories inside of Ningguang, and each time she’s able to take a lucid breath, she plummets back into their undertow, and so things go on like that for some time – Beidou making poorly timed jokes and rubbing methodical circles into Ningguang’s back while she cries – loud and childlike.

“I don’t know what to do,” Ningguang says, her voice so caught in her wet, raspy throat she can barely form words. “Beidou, what am I going to do?”

“Um, fuck. I don’t know,” she says, shrugging with her whole upper body. She pulls Ningguang’s head against her shoulder and runs her hand along her long, ivory hair. Her fingers are clammy, and they get stuck the first few times in the thick tangles there, but with some effort she’s able to dislodge the knot. Ningguang makes a truncated noise of pain into Beidou’s now-damp sleeve at the final tug.

“Wait, no I do,” Beidou starts, and her hand picks up pace in Ningguang’s hair as if the excitement is the guiding force for all her movement. “We’re going to make some mora by helping rebuild some stuff. I mean, you built your house – you can fix a roof, right?”

“Right,” Ningguang says. A prolonged sniffle makes it way through her nose.

“Right,” Beidou says with an unsure finality, her plan clearly ending there.

Xiangling enters - chef Mao shouting out in disapproval not far behind her - and when she catches sight of Ningguang’s wrecked face, she too bursts into tears.

“No!” Beidou says, scrambling half of her body across the stone floor to bring Xiangling into her arms, the other half still stuck under Ningguang’s wilted figure. “You don’t even have a reason to be sad!”

Ningguang laughs again, and for a brief fluttering second, it doesn’t feel like flying or plummeting. Just an even thing - like cresting the surface of the water and staying there, like treading it.

-

In the case of certain senders, the parcel is delivered directly to the Tianquan by one of her trusted staff, and so when her assistant – garbed in nostalgic vermilion – knocks on her door, she must quell the familiar excitement that ignites in her chest.

Her assistant, eyes cast to the ground, hands off the parcel and twirls off into the corridor. Efficient. Ningguang can appreciate that.

There is a letter and a poorly wrapped package. She first takes the envelope, as is polite, and slips one of her finger guards between the seal to open it. The letter is damp, perhaps due to improper storage out on sea – the fault of the sender, not the messenger.

Saw this shell and thought of you. Think a hermit crab could live in here?

Beidou

Ningguang sets the letter down, already crafting her sharp-witted reply in her head.

Deep in the pouch is a clouded amulet set into finely worked metal. Ningguang can sense its materials by touch before the lamplight even illuminates it.

She produces it from the bag and turns it over in her long, lily-white hands. It fits neatly in the bed of her palm. Such exact geometry is not of mortal craft, certainly, and aside from that, Ningguang knows well what sort of trinket this is. A gift from the archons – and abandoned, by the looks of it. Whoever its owner is, Ningguang is no longer concerned. Such is the tentative compromise between her and Beidou. Things find their way to her, and she asks not of their origin.

Ningguang sets the vision down on her desk and picks up her pipe from where she’d left it. There’s enough tobacco leaf nestled in there for a few more uses – if she’s making a conservative estimate. She settles into her chair and surveys the procession of documents and antiques she’s accumulated over only the last few days. There is much to do, she thinks, and so few people capable of doing it.

There’s a flicker of golden light, and even the great Tianquan is at first foolish enough to think it’s a match being lit for her pipe.