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Sometimes – Aether thinks he’s similar to salmon.
Never rooted to one place, always on the move. To navigate the world with an invisible map and a path well worn with generations of use – but even then he has never swum upstream, never to know if he will return to the oceans he once swam.
Aether is a star bound to the surface of Teyvat – unable to swim the rivers between universes, unable to return to the deep, dark oceans of space. It’s impossible to not imagine he knows what dying feels like – every day that passes chained to Teyvat is another day yearning for the freedom he once took for granted.
---
The musty smell of the domain hits in a wave – old rotted wood and moth-eaten paper go hand in hand here. Shiki Taishou is silent in the spaces between the battles – breaks that lets them pause for a moment and lick new wounds.
Childe, every once in a while, sends a concerned look towards Aether. Xinyan, silent, strums her guitar. Aether watches the doors for rouge monsters that still stalk the halls of the dusty domain, Paimon sitting in his lap, quietly fidgeting.
“Shiki Taishou,” Aether begins suddenly, and the shikigami turns to him, tilted slightly, encouraging Aether to keep talking. “You have no memories of this domain, do you?”
“I don’t,” Shiki Taishou affirms, nodding.
Aether spares a glance at the floating paper charm and then returns his watch to the door. “This domain remembers you though, doesn’t it?”
Childe huffs and Xinyan tilts her head. The two of them stay silent. “This is old wood and paper and older magic that keeps this place together,” Aether continues. “But the memory of that which commanded the magic is still there. It still feeds on that magic, as all living things do.”
Aether pauses, and spares another glance at the shikigami, golden eyes searching. “This domain is filled with ghosts – this haunting is architectural,” he says, and when he looks at Childe, it’s already obvious the man knows what Aether is talking about. Xinyan doesn’t – but Aether will find the time to explain his suspicions later.
“Tell me, if we were to die here, would this domain know the taste of the outside world from which we came?”
---
Aether jars fireflies, captures butterflies and pulls apart crystalflies with trembling fingers.
How cruel, how mean. What is Aether, if not a boy in summer? If not a star in the universe with no way to return home?
Violence and survival are complementary here, hand in unlovable hand.
---
God of stove, of soil. Marchosius is an old name for an old god that does not remember his history of being a god of these things. Gouba is what remains – eroded by time and blessed by the fact he no longer remembers. He is not tied to duty, to honour. He is simply a young girl’s companion with a desire to eat and a desire to care.
Aether watches Gouba interact with old gods and Adepti and is silent in his observations.
There’s a sudden presence, a rush of wind. Aether does not need to turn his head to know who has arrived.
“So, Xiao,” Aether says, tiling his head. “Did you know?”
“I had a suspicion,” Xiao replies truthfully, stealing Aether’s spoon to steal his almond tofu. “This almond tofu is terrible – either way, I wasn’t going to comment on it until I was sure.”
“I didn’t make this almond tofu you know. I got it from one of the carts – and you never knew the Stove God well enough to be sure?”
Despite Xiao’s complaints, he steals another spoonful of Aether’s terrible almond tofu, too sweet and cloying to actually finish. “I spoke to him once or twice, but never a full conversation.”
“What stopped you?” Aether asks, finally taking his spoon back.
Xiao shrugs, resembling more of a teenager then a conqueror of demons. “There never was any time. Too much karmic debt.”
“Too much trauma?” Aether asks, taking a bite of his almond tofu. Still too sweet. Too much syrup and not enough of anything else. It’s terrible. Aether continues to eat it anyways.
“That too, I suppose.”
---
This mountain rests on old, sunken bones. Aether runs his fingers along side the ribcage of Durin’s long rotted skeleton, and watches the snow drift past. The world is silent like this, muffled and quiet by the flakes of frozen water that call this mountain home.
This mountain is haunted. This mountain is filled with the ghosts of adventurers and animals and a dragon that still warp this mountain into its hostile environment it is today.
This mountain is a graveyard. This mountain is a corpse. Aether wonders if that makes him the maggot.
---
The Fellflower lies there, dissipating into the cold air of Dragonspine – and whilst Albedo explains mimicry and a desire to assimilate, Aether carefully picks his way to the monster, Paimon floating by his side.
“Aether? What’s wrong?” Paimon asks, as Aether kneels down next to it’s corpse. The air nips at his exposed skin, but that doesn’t stop Aether pressing his fingers to it’s petals, and it croons quietly, as it slowly dissolves.
“You wanted to be human,” Aether says plainly. “But why?”
The monster croons more, and Aether understands. “You were lonely, once.”
The monster fades away, and leaves nothing behind.
“It’s almost sad,” Paimon whispers, as Aether stands up and re-joins everyone else. “It must have been lonely.”
Aether tilts his head. “Isn’t it always?”
---
“Once upon a time, there was an evil researcher,” Paimon begins her story before turning to Albedo.
“A great alchemist once created Subject One,.” Albedo confesses, and the two of them turn to Aether for his version of the events.
Aether ponders – he’s not good at telling stories. He’s not good at talking. But he can try.
“Once,” Aether begins, voice quiet and sad. “There were two children, and the stars that sung for them when they came into the world, fully realised from the earth they were born from.”
---
The rivers run quiet here. There are no salmon in Teyvat – they do not swim upstream.
But the birds still migrate, and there are other fish in these waters – it’s only a matter of searching.
Aether is not made to drown after all – but the rivers run quiet here. It would be so easy to falter, to fall.
---
“Hey, Traveller?” Gorou asks, waving a letter around. “I know I’m the one whose supposed to give advice, but I can’t make head or tails about this one…could you help?”
Aether carefully takes the letter from Gorou’s hand and reads it, Paimon hovering carefully over his shoulder.
“I’m afraid of drowning,” The letter reads, the script shaky and smudged. “I don’t want to drown. The rivers run quiet here. How much noise would I make if I fell? How do I not drown in the rivers here?”
Aether is silent for a moment, reading the words. “My advice,” he begins, staring. “Is to first learn how to swim.”
Aether then frowns, uncertain. “If I’m to be completely honest though, Gorou…I’m not sure what to say to this.”
Gorou sighs. “Don’t we all?”
---
Aether lies in the grass of his teapot and Kageroumaru presses his nose to his neck and face, before flopping down onto Aether’s chest, a single eye locked onto Aether’s own. Aether stares back, artificial moonlight making everything seem darker, the shadows longer.
Aether pulled off his gloves earlier to change the bandages beneath them, for the numerous new scars that now litter his hands – telling tales of climbing and falling and hours upon hours of swordsmanship until his hands bled and either Kazuha or Thoma had to drag him away. He raises a bandaged hand, shaking and trembling, and runs it through the dark fur of the canine bunshin that now watches with a silent vigil.
Here, at least, he is not the Traveller, the Outlander, the Star-Born saviour from many lightyears away.
Here, he is just a boy, and his dog, and the crystalflies that fill the pot with their gentle glow.
---
Salmon swim upstream, that is true. They search for colder waters to leave their young, and then swim back to the ocean from whence they came. How many of them truly return then? How many are caught and killed, how many fail to come back?
Is Aether like this then? Too caught up in his swim upstream he can no longer make it back? He thinks of the researcher sometimes, in that lone research station, before he and Lumine had left forever. He wonders – will he ever return there, to the place where he first crashed into soil.
In Teyvat, the rivers run quiet, and salmon do not live here, do not swim upstream. Aether is not made to drown, and there are other fish that lay their eggs here – navigation by magnetic field, by genetic memory that runs deeper than most.
Sometimes, a geo shield potion tastes like magnets. Sometimes, Aether can see supernovas explode on the back of his eyelids. Sometimes, Aether watches the rivers – and they always run quiet.
Rivers run into oceans, and Aether sits on the banks of them and watches the fish dart by.
The salmon swim upstream to seek calmer waters. Aether travels universes with his sister to seek a new place to call home. Did either of them know where they were going?
Did either of them know they weren’t going back?