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The red of the ropes which bind her soul, like veins, is all the color Shenhe has to her.
The mountains are white and grey, the sun a pale insistence on the snow which falls perpetually. There is no color in the mountains; not even the sunsets, which others find so beautiful, can break through the pale of everlasting winter. Liyue Harbor is all lights and crowded spaces, harsh vibrance staking its claim into the world like a plunged polearm. Here, it is difficult to recall the simple pleasure of a breeze through the mountains. Sugar burns. Meat roasts. People walk by in pairs and crowds, chattering.
It is all quite overwhelming. She keeps to the edges. You cannot protect what you cannot endure, Cloud Retainer says. It is our duty to protect the people. You must learn to be among them. Being among people has never resulted in anything good. She endures it regardless.
“You are out of place.”
She does not startle; it is only her own thoughts spoken aloud. When she looks up, however, a measure of surprise flickers over her. “Lady Ningguang.”
They have met before in passing. Ningguang is, by purpose if not blood, an adeptus to Liyue now, protecting it in the age of mortals. Still, her eyes flicker with an amused sort of pleasure. “You know me?”
“I do.” She does not clarify, but Ningguang does not seem to need it.
“You seem displeased with the festivities,” Ningguang says. “I have a very fine vantage point, away from the crowd, if you want it.”
“I do not need it.” There is a very mild annoyance to staying with the crowd, but it is barely the prick of a thorn in her foot. She has endured too much to feel it strongly.
Ningguang is not moved. She tilts her head with a brief smile. “Then will you honor me with your company?”
That is an offer Shenhe cannot very well refuse. She stands with little ceremony. “If it is what you want.”
Ningguang looks pleased. “Come with me.” She navigates the crowd as a master of her craft. Her hair is warm-tinted, her hands clearly mortal with blood just beneath the surface. She belongs here, perhaps uniquely so, a human among humans, a leader with her people. Shenhe follows as winter to autumn.
The Jade Chamber is gone, but Ningguang has very well made do. Her new home— or, not a home, the way she looks at it; a replacement, a temporary substitute for something which may never quite return— is at the top of one of Liyue’s highest buildings, an entire floor decorated with what she could save and what must have been replaced. There are paintings on the walls; Shenhe spares them no time. She follows Ningguang where she walks.
When they reach a balcony, Ningguang stops. She turns around. Lights burn behind her, brilliant color against the night sky. Shenhe does not watch them. They reflect in Ningguang’s eyes the same as they do in the ocean. Her dress, a deep blue, blends into the midnight-rich color of the cosmos, and idly Shenhe wonders if there really is something more to her than simple, mortal wisdom, if perhaps she is born of something very long past.
Only the way she looks at Shenhe is quiet. “Do you care for the fireworks?”
Does she care for anything? Some things are pleasant, and some things are less so, but they are rarely anything more to her than brushes of wind against an unwavering mountain. Does she care for these? “I do not dislike them,” she settles on.
“My.” Ningguang smiles like a fox. “If that is the most you have to say, then this year’s lantern rite must be the worst among its kind.”
“It is not the fault of the fireworks. I do not like much, Lady Ningguang, and when I do, I barely know it.”
Ningguang leans back against the balustrade. She is very beautiful, Shenhe realizes belatedly, in the way of sharp and shining things, beautiful like the edge of a blade. “Do you feel happiness, then?”
Shenhe thinks of happiness: golden joy, leaping through a field of flowers. “No,” she responds, “but I do feel serene. Or— pleased, sometimes. But I am never what you would call happy .”
Ningguang makes no response. She looks at her with appraising eyes. Shenhe looks up to the lights in the sky, watching their ephemeral constellations, a mimicry of the stars humanity invented from powder and sulfur. It is impressive, if nothing else. They burn brighter than their natural counterparts, but they burn faster, too.
What do others see when they look at these heavens? “Sometimes I wish I could,” she adds abruptly. “If only to know what others feel, for a moment or two.”
“Happiness…” Ningguang looks up, pensive. “Happiness feels the way fireworks look,” she says, her throat a pale column in the distant light, “sparkling. Brilliant. As though it might tear you apart.”
Golden joy, shooting through the stars and dying in an instant. When Shenhe feels grief, it is quiet, a pebble dropped into a sea of indifference. She feels it now. How would it feel if the sea were drained, or the pebble turned to a boulder? Ice does not wish to be melted, but perhaps, sometimes, when it is hidden and alone, it might wonder at being a stream. “It sounds… painful.”
Ningguang laughs and it glitters like gold dust tossed into the air. “Painful, yes, but pleasantly so.”
Shenhe knows pain, but she knows no pleasure in it. “Is mine a terrible fate?” She asks the question without thinking of what it means. It is there, inside of her, and then it is gone, dissolved into the air. “To never feel it. Happiness, or grief, or anger.”
The last of the fireworks soars above Ningguang’s head and illuminates her. All this time, she has not stopped smiling, though now it melts into a fainter expression. She’s golden in this light, briefly, before the sparks turn to ash in the air and fall. “Let me show you something,” she says.
Shenhe follows as soot to fire. They do not go far. Ningguang stops before a gallery of paintings; some Liyuen, some from Mondstadt, some from the further reaches of the world. She points to one, a muted color landscape, trees in an ashy brown, leaves the palest of green. “Here,” she says. “It is from Fontaine. A technique called pastel.”
“It is very fine.”
“It is.” Ningguang tilts her head toward the painting by its side. More brilliant colors, in a similar scene, saturated reds and vibrant violet coalesced into a sunset. “Some artists prefer to work with gentler tones as opposed to strong pigments.”
Shenhe’s lips tug upward. “You are saying I am in pastel?”
“Look,” Ningguang commands with another gold-dust laugh. “It does not have the contrast, nor the color.”
There is a long pause. Shenhe says nothing.
“Is it any less beautiful because it is muted?” Ningguang traces the air in front of the canvas, lining the shapes of the trees. “Everything is in relation to itself.”
Shenhe folds her hands together and looks closer. “I see,” she says at last.
“Do you?” Ningguang’s gaze is as sharp as her smile. “You may be neither adeptus nor fully human, Shenhe; perhaps you will never feel anything greater than a ripple in a pond. You are not denied any experience. You are only yourself.”
Ningguang’s eyes are not quite red when Shenhe meets them. They are the color of mastered fire, a deep blood orange that glows like a Vision. “I see,” Shenhe repeats, a very faint smile on her mouth with the unpracticed hesitation of the first drop of rain. “With eyes that are my own.”