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The Wangshu Inn was full tonight.
From where he sat on the roof, Xiao could feel the thrumming energy of lively guests beneath him, enjoying their meals and their company in the late evening. Soon, weary from their travels and with full stomachs, the guests would head to their rooms and go to bed, marking the time when Xiao would have to leave. The silvery threads of the guests’ dreams filtered through the tiles of the roof, cool and silken to the touch, and Xiao hated the way they made his mouth water nauseatingly. He hated how even after thousands of years, his behavior was still conditioned to the whims of his old master.
A number of his fellow adepti enjoyed eating, ranging from those who accepted food offerings to Rex Lapis himself dining at all the finest establishments in Liyue. In his earlier days among the adepti, Xiao had watched as they chewed and swallowed in disturbed awe, unable to comprehend their reasoning for it. What use was there to adepti for eating in times of peace? He’d only ever known it from devouring the dreams of his victims, smooth and sweet upon his tongue in the midst of the bitter heat of battle.
Hundreds of years ago, Rex Lapis had invited Xiao to dine with him in the blossoming trade city of Liyue Harbor, a meeting to discuss their duties in service of the people and also to observe the progress the civilization had made. However, much to the dismay of the restaurant staff, Xiao had been unable to bring himself to take even a single bite. Each time he brought the chopsticks to his mouth, he caught glimpses of blood and ichor staining his hands, the familiar sweet, metallic tang blooming in his nose and upon his tongue. Worst of all, he felt hungry , not with the desire to eat, but with a wretched emptiness permeating deep into the core of his being. Looking at the plate before him, his head swam with mixed emotions, his mouth watering and bile rising in his throat, every fiber of his being imploring him to press his nails into the already dead meat and kill it once more.
“Aren’t you hungry?” he thought he heard one of the waitstaff ask him tentatively, bordering on scared. He’d been staring at his plate, hands steeled carefully on the table and his expression kept as even as possible, but clearly his eyes betrayed his ravenous desire to eat — not the food on his plate, but to eat nonetheless. The innocent question was lost among the swirling depths of Xiao’s turbulent mind.
“Aren’t you hungry, Alatus?” the voice of a god long passed whispered, making Xiao— Alatus bristle when he felt the memory of a breath ghosting over the shell of his ear. “If you kill them all, you may eat their dreams before they fall to your hand.” And with a bitter resentment towards his master, his weapon, and himself, Alatus allowed the taste of dreams to soothe his blackened heart as he thrust his polearm through the chests of his victims.
Across from him at the table, Rex Lapis watched Xiao tremble with a blank expression, his face still unable to portray emotions in the ways which mortals tended to expect. Distantly, Xiao could see that he was speaking, but he couldn’t tell if it was him who Morax had addressed, or perhaps one of the concerned-looking waitstaff. Soon, Xiao found that he was no longer staring at a plate of meat, his eyes trained upon the empty tablecloth instead. His food had been taken away from him, and he was still so impossibly, desperately hungry.
With each life that Alatus had claimed came an increased reliance upon his victims’ dreams as sustenance. His master had taken great care to ensure that for him, killing and nourishment were one and the same. When Alatus killed, he was fed. When Alatus was hungry, he would kill. He craved it in the same way mortals fell victim to alcohol and pain medications, fog-minded and desperate, doing anything within his power to ensure that he could find his next meal. For Alatus, that usually entailed being as obedient as he was possibly able to, for the master liked to toy with his addiction and mold his behavior like putty, leaving Alatus alone without any duties for long stretches of time before important battles so that his hunger would increase his bloodlust. Indeed, his master was so effective a puppeteer that Alatus had learned to pull his own strings.
On one of those desolate evenings, having fought no deadly battles for weeks in preparation for something that his master refused to disclose, Alatus found that he had dragged himself all the way out to Liyue’s distant borders where the wind began to bite and carried with it the promise of snow, the mountains of Dragonspine looming over the land like a dividing wall. Kneeling over a snowbank and letting the chill turn his aching joints numb, Alatus realized that he was starving— something which he hadn’t thought possible, for how could a being that required no food starve? But there he lay, weak and pained from the empty place within his soul, only worsened by the slow-acting poison of the karmic debt which blackened his veins. It hurt to simply exist. Closing his eyes, Alatus distantly hoped he was dying.
Death would have been too good a fate for him, a spirit so powerful yet weak, hungry enough that he let himself commit atrocities like the world had never seen. Would a greater being have been able to withstand the false starvation, or would they too have succumbed to their addiction? Alatus, for all he tried to compose himself, was unable to completely resist the insatiable need he felt to kill, to find a victim and plunge his weapon into their chest or through their skull and tear their flesh off the bone and the dreams from their soul, be they mortal, monster, or otherwise. Blood and ichor mixed on the point of his polearm, red and gold swirls crusting into bronze stains. He’d torn apart so many people that he could point out which organ went where, and he despised himself for it, hated how he’d come to know, hated not understanding the first thing about their functions and only which ones to strike for fatal blows, hated his master because just killing the victims had never been enough . The phantom sensation of warm blood seeping through his shoes as he stepped between the sea of bodies in his wake never truly left him for centuries to come.
Swaying in the Dragonspine wind, Alatus clutched his polearm to his chest, his muscles so tense he would have difficulty releasing them and his fingers twitching where he gripped the weapon as if he were trying to strangle it. He needed to eat, and for that, he needed to kill. He needed to kill so that he could eat. His entire being trembled, and he couldn’t tell if it was from the cold, the hunger, or something more sinister.
Dropping his weapon out of fear for what he might do with it, Alatus hunched over himself, pressing his palms into the ground. The snow was familiarly cool and silvery beneath him, and before he could think at all, Alatus found that he had raised a clump of it to his mouth and swallowed. Finding a momentary respite from his suffering, he began shoveling snow down his throat by the handful, desperate to abate the gnawing sensation in his soul which threatened to digest him from the inside out, even if the ice crystals brought him no more nutrition than the air he breathed. The snowbank was reduced to the dirt beneath it within minutes, melting water running red as it dribbled down his stained skin. The wet fabric of his sleeve froze in an uncomfortable jagged shape that flapped stiffly at his side as he walked, but Alatus hardly noticed. For the first time in the entire Archon War thus far, he’d convinced his body that he was no longer hungry— a short-lived victory, no doubt, but a victory nonetheless.
When Xiao next opened his eyes, he had returned to the home of the Adepti on Jueyun Karst. Rex Lapis did not invite him to a restaurant again. The thought of why made Xiao’s face prickle with shame.
For years, whenever he was able to, Alatus had gone to Dragonspine seeking what little relief he could garner by eating the snow. On occasion, he sometimes noticed humans doing the same, foraging for what little resources they could on the barren mountains and eating the snow to stave off starvation. The war of the Archons had ravaged their farmland and destroyed their homes, throwing the mortal realm into similar conflict as that of the gods. With his barely contained hunger, Alatus resolved not to torment them here as well, carefully avoiding them lest the urges to kill and eat become too powerful for him to suppress. Sometimes, however, too weak to dedicate energy to concealing himself, Alatus would find a mortal staring at him from behind a corner with stupefied horror, taking in the sight of the matted, bloodstained creature gorging itself on the snow. If he moved at all, tried to turn to meet their eyes, they would immediately flee, no doubt recognizing the signs of starvation even in a corrupted spirit such as himself. A folk tale spread in the area surrounding Dragonspine of a demon with golden eyes and a matted turquoise mane clinging to the remains of its soul, teetering on the edge of madness and eating snow to stop itself from slaughtering and feeding on the innocent souls of the mortals. The close accuracy to Alatus’s reality made him wince.
It was during one such period of bitter starvation that Alatus’s master met his end, sealed eternally under Morax’s impenetrable barriers of Geo. The battle had been short and almost anticlimactic, especially given how long the master had made Alatus starve, so desperate to utilize his weapon and win that he stopped regarding Alatus as alive at all. When his master finally fell, so too did the polearm from Alatus’s hands, and as Morax approached him, he opened his arms wide and fell upon his knees, imploring the victorious god to release him from his suffering.
Morax had not moved, his scrutinizing gaze passing over Alatus’s figure, his matted hair and blood-encrusted skin, his clothing muddy and unrecognizable from its former color, his skin so sickly and pale that it almost appeared transparent. Something changed in the god’s eyes as he looked upon that sorry sight, a tinge of sorrow or maybe compassion, and Alatus felt a wave of relief pass over himself. Morax would be kind. Morax would indulge him in his selfish wish to finally die.
But Morax did not raise his polearm, nor did he call upon the power of Geo to bring Alatus to his end. Instead, he stepped forward, tentatively reaching out towards the broken spirit before him, and asked:
“What is your name?”
“…Alatus,” he replied, mind weary from chaos and hunger,
“Alatus,” Morax repeated, “I would like to forge a contract with you.”
And what choice did he have?
“…What are the terms?”
“You are free from the burdens of your service to your previous master, no longer at his mercy to be used as a vessel for karmic debt,” Morax said. “You will be separate from your past, and as such, I will bestow upon you a new name. In the fables of another world, the name Xiao is that of a spirit who encountered great hardship. He endured much suffering, as you have. Use this name from now on."
Alatus— or rather, Xiao looked upon the god with exhaustion, a gaze aged by the duties he’d shouldered from the moment he came into existence.
“And what do you ask I do for you in return?”
The ghost of a smile passed over Morax’s face, melancholy and bearing the burden of a war lasting far too long. Xiao shuddered, their struggles resonating somewhere within his soul, and with those unreadable eyes of his gleaming with the light of distant fires, Morax replied:
“All I ask is that you live.”
What a cruel exchange, Xiao realized many years later, for liberation was not an immediate thing the way Morax had intended and Xiao had expected. The Archon War passed and Rex Lapis emerged victorious, as had been expected of him, and in the face of a new era of peace, Xiao threw himself into a new duty with more fervor than he had ever possessed while fighting starved under his old master. At its face, Xiao claimed he shouldered the duty of protecting Liyue from the shadows out of respect and debt to the Geo Archon, but there were more reasons beyond that. Xiao had found that despite his person no longer being under the control of a master, his soul was just as trapped as it had ever been. The veins under his skin remained blackened with bad karma, the hollow darkness under his eyes remained stark in contrast to his pale face, the memories of wretched screams and spilt blood remained at the forefront of his conscience, and the starvation did not abate. It never abated. With every moment he spent idle, the crushing, grating pain at his center grew in intensity, like a blade twisting within him, so Xiao did anything he could to avoid being unoccupied. He could not eat, and he would not kill for sustenance. Now, his polearm passed only through the shadows of evil that accumulated near the borders of the seals with which Rex Lapis had imprisoned his enemy gods, or the inhuman monsters that threatened the safety of the mortals which he and all the other adepti had sworn to protect. Battle and nourishment were no longer one and the same. Xiao killed because he was hungry. Xiao killed because he did not know how to do anything else. Xiao was hungry no matter how much he killed.
With his clothes and skin clean from blood and his hair no longer matted and trailing in the dirt behind him, Xiao found that he still made regular trips to Dragonspine to eat the snow, years after the end of the Archon War. The mortals maintained a regular presence on the outskirts of the mountains as well, much of their farmland still acrid and unrecovered from years of fire and battle, despite the efforts of the Geo Archon and the other adepti. The folktales speaking of the demon with a mane of teal had aged enough now to become legends, and on the rare occasions when the mortals saw him, they bowed deeply and gave him space, holding great respect for a creature which refused to succumb to its will to kill them. Occasionally, Xiao even found little offerings left for him next to altars of piled stones, often talismans carved from wood or little plates of food, whatever the impoverished people were able to spare for him. Xiao refused to let the offerings go to waste, especially when people who were themselves starving left out food that they so desperately needed for themselves. He tried desperately to eat the food they left, but each time lent the same results. He would hunch over from the pain of his karmic debt and years-old starvation, unable to keep the food down and vomiting it back up with a wave of clear, acrid bile almost immediately after swallowing, and his hunger worsened, for it was not food for which he was starving. Concealing the places where he vomited so that the mortals would not think him ungrateful, Xiao took to delivering the offerings to other villages plagued by starvation, where they would be properly appreciated.
Perhaps out of stubbornness, or maybe desperation to recover from the trauma that riddled his conscience, Xiao still sampled the offered dishes he hadn’t tried yet before passing them on to the next village. As the people started to regain their footing and the efforts of the Adepti to help them reached fruition, the offerings which were left for Xiao became more generous, the carved talismans demonstrating more craftsmanship and the dishes growing in size and decoration. Xiao became more selective with where he delivered the food, seeking out poor households instead of leaving the offerings in the town centers. The people who visited Dragonspine changed as well, now more often adventurers, researchers, and people specifically making trips to the small shrine that had been constructed to Xiao over the years. He didn’t quite understand what the people thought they would get from making offerings to him, as opposed to a greater power such as the Archon himself. He possessed no abilities to end famines or offer personal protections, and Xiao didn’t have the complete ability to tell when people were praying to him, though over time, he gained some form of subconscious connection to the shrine and could feel when someone had been there.
As the centuries passed, however, there came times when plague and poor harvest again riddled the land, and the frail people from the nearby villages once again made the trek to Dragonspine to visit his altar and eat the snow as they’d seen him do for so many years. The offerings became more simple, little morsels made the ingredients that they could spare. He continued to taste the food as it came, even though it pained him greatly from a starvation centuries old.
He one day encountered a dish with a small written note alongside it, a plate with a white cube sitting in a gentle syrup, the candles lit around it preventing it from freezing immediately in the harsh winter cold. The note was addressed to a name which Xiao did not recognize, no doubt something which the humans had conceived for him from the legends, and asked simply that he enjoy the offering such that he not starve so that he could protect the people while they weathered the harsh winter. The gentle sentiment of the note reminded him of the soft dreams he’d tasted long before being enslaved under his master, in the days when his role as a spirit was to snatch away the nightmares and fever dreams which plagued the people, ensuring a proper night’s rest. So when he tentatively lifted a bite of the offering to his mouth, anticipating the harsh wave of memories and phantom pain, he almost thought he was imagining the flavor of a dream blooming across his tongue, soothing his raw mental wounds and threatening the hunger that had made permanent residence in his core. It was the first thing that had soothed him in years, the snow having lost its effectiveness centuries ago, and now more than ever, an intense yearning grew in his soul, that teasing morsel offered to him not nearly enough to stave off the hunger. Awed, Xiao stared at the dish for a few seconds before devouring the rest with fervor and leaving the plate upon the altar in his hurry to go to Mingyun Village, the settlement nearest to the mountain base.
Standing in the center of the town, his teal hair and blackened fingertips immediately painting him as an inhuman outsider, Xiao realized that he had no idea where to go next. The weary people’s faces stretched in awe and recognition as they watched him wander the dirt paths. Before long, Xiao found himself before a building that had once been a restaurant before food shortage caused its closure.
He learned from the villagers that day that the dish he’d tasted was called almond tofu, a simple combination of agar, almonds, milk and sugar, easy to make even when ingredients were scarce, speaking to the times in which such a recipe had been developed. Upon hearing the name, Xiao immediately disappeared from sight, not wanting to be seen for any longer than absolutely necessary, and the villagers were left in shocked awe at the visit from the spirit whose skin was stained with karmic debt, the supposed teal “demon” from the legends they’d grown up hearing. From then on, taking note of his appearance, the offerings left for Xiao at the altar were almost always plates of almond tofu, which he ate gratefully, leaving the plates in a neat stack for the villagers to find when they returned. They continued to leave other offerings on occasion, such as a pair of thick black gloves and a palette of fine makeup, which he accepted gratefully to cover the black markings on his hands and around his eyes from his karmic debt. As time passed, Xiao finally stopped hurting with hunger in his every motion, and in exchange for the blessing which they’d granted him, he ensured that not a single malevolent spirit entered the confines of the village for as long as it stood until it fell into ruin when the inhabitants moved away, unable to sustain themselves there any longer.
Xiao’s shrine too fell into disuse, and the legends surrounding him became rare and obscure within the depths of Liyue’s rich history, but he didn’t mind. He had never sought to become a creature of legend and he easily slipped back into his role as a protector among the shadows, as he was across the rest of Liyue. Xiao never again wandered too close to the cities as he had that day in Mingyun Village no matter how much he yearned to sometimes, especially not at night when their dreams filtered freely across the night sky like ribbons of silk. Though he learned to make the almond tofu himself, the texture was never quite as close to that of dreams as was that prepared by an experienced human chef’s hands, no matter how many years he had to practice. His hands were trained too well for combat, unable to grasp the motions of more gentle arts like cooking.
As such, when he set up his base of operations at the Wangshu Inn, it had been one of his only requests in his brief meeting with the Qixing that the cook be able to make almond tofu, much to their surprise. It was done, however, and Xiao found that he was now able to spend time alone with his thoughts, enjoying his tofu on the roof of the Inn overlooking the gentle Liyue scenery. There were always moments in which pain and regret seized him entirely, making him wonder if his contract with Rex Lapis that he would live was something he should dissolve, but these days, he was able to pull himself out of the episodes more often than not, knowing that his existence was not in vain for the service that he was able to provide the people of Liyue, even if he was almost entirely unknown to them. When the Wangshu Inn guests brought plates of almond tofu to the rooftop, having heard stories of the adeptus who chose to reside there, Xiao always ate the offerings gratefully when he was out of sight, watching as the human’s faces lit up when they saw the empty plates he left behind.
Even in the crowded nights when Xiao could not make himself stay at the Inn, he watched from the distant mountainside as silver threads floated over Liyue, the inhabitants sleeping safely. And with his spear in gloved hands, red makeup smudged under his eyes, Xiao took to the skies, striking down the demons which threatened the sleeping country, such that their sweet almond-tofu dreams may be protected from afar.