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In modern-day Tiānhéng, there stands a lovers’ grave—
But never mind it. There is nothing there for mortals in evaluating the throes of death, in empathizing with the final permanence of departing… not until you are buried as well. What you must mind, instead, is the story that precedes it. The yuánfèn that walked parallel strides across Teyvat, taunting its flirting souls and pulling their aching heartstrings like dissonant harps.
Their tale begs a questionnaire for the gods: why create forbidden love? Why make playthings of fate’s spinning threads? Why torture the souls of the young?
In modern-day Tiānhéng, there stands a lovers’ grave, forever beckoning the unreachable azure’s care.
No answer comes.
And so the first hurdle of metamorphosis is feeling a tug from above, and realizing you’re the sky’s puppet after all.
夜半無人私語時。
在天願作比翼鳥，
At midnight when no one else was around, they vowed.
“Let’s be two birds in the sky flying side by side.”
Yíng sinks her canines into the silvery spool of linen, her sinewy, clothed nails whirling around her figure all tango-esque. This simple dance of fabric transfigures the mere threads into sarashi, and the metamorphosis is central to her larger goal of subterfuge.
Spin, drones her mind, spin, spin, and wrap .
Sighing, she gazes into the looking glass. It leaves much to be desired, the earthen-print hànfú top clinging to her flattened breasts; though what takes precedence is that she appears more man, albeit short, than woman now... even if her knuckles hurt and lips grow puffy as she binds her upteenth layer of smooth skin.
“O archons… could a better process not have existed for this?'' The blonde releases the reel of thread from her lips, tucking stray drops of honey behind her ears as her hands set themselves free. She’s indebted to Yoimiya for the foreign technique, yes, though Yíng has never been one for pain. And neither has she enjoyed the alchemy of mundane things— inclusive of turning cloth to sarashi… and sarashi back to cloth.
It has always been strange to her, how the same things can be called differently for new purposes. Why mortals bothered to bend linguistics for such trivial things. Like Snezhnayans and their baker’s dozen of words for snow, (snow that precedes rain, coats their mountain peaks, falls on farm soil)— but snow is still snow, no matter where it falls. Or Líyuèns and all their words for rice, (the unreaped, the uncooked, the bathed in what boils)— yet rice is still rice, no matter the state it is in.
Because Sunday is still a day of rest without a god, Yíng thinks. The fabric that constricts her bosom is still fabric, not “‘sarashi.’” Her bàba agrees with all of it. But what they cannot agree on is this: a daughter is still a daughter even if she leaves for school. Even if she leaves a life of housework for something more; when she swaps her place in the court from a pretty face’s seat (for gazing, for touching, not for listening to) to a throne.
But it matters not , the assurance echoes through her mind. It matters not what her bàba thinks because this carriage ride to Tiānhéng Shān is final. All she needs to ease herself is to place her body, snug and secure and safe from second thoughts, on the coach’s cushions and keep from sitting like a lady.
She smiles faintly, recalling all the times she was scolded before the manor’s guests for sitting with her chest too puffed and knees not pressed together in a chaste kiss… Perhaps , she believes, this little aspect of transformation may not be hard at all .
Though before she leaves home, before she leaves Yíng , what must first come are farewells.
The coach is here, stationed a ways away from their estate before daybreak; before the rooster’s first crows, before their bàba rises, just as they pleaded. It is dark but not without light, it is quiet but not without the crickets’ droning.
The loneliest symphony and the smallest group blesses Yíng’s departure on this timid morning, but it is all she will ever ask for. It is all she ever needs.
“Xīngān, I still can’t believe you’re leaving me,” Kōng, the real one, feigns melodrama.
“I can’t believe you’re still babying me,” Yíng retorts, with stolen snide and a stolen identity while fastening the braid she, too, stole from the man before her.
“Funny,” Kōng smirks, immediately swapping his theatrics to retrieve his snark. The dimple by his left lip is something she will surely miss— something she wishes she could also take (it’s strange, too, how mere imperfections on your other half’s face can spell something as profound as home ). “I am the older one, you know. So I think what’s actually unbelievable about this situation is you stealing me away.”
“You sure?” Yíng jests in return. “I’m sure there always have been two Kōngs.”
The brother laughs, and his precious sister mimics the gesture— a sequence of events as natural to the pair as the air they breathe. They join their two hands together, staring intensely into the other as intently as one inspects a soul; and again, they are as linked and inseparable as they were in the womb.
For the first time, however, they must part—
—and parting is a most sorrowful thing.
“Gēgē…” Yíng breaks away, retreating her shaky hands behind her back. She looks meekly at her feet, her sandaled toes barely poking out from her long garb. Her makeshift “male” hànfú is an ill-fit, rushed and wrinkled and constantly presaging to swallow her whole, but it is a fit nonetheless.
“Xīngān…” A genuine smile makes its way onto Kōng’s face, the one that meets his ears and digs his left dimple impossibly deep. “Make me proud, okay?”
“I will,” the younger sibling breaks through the threat of a running tear. “Of course I will.”
“Good,” the elder sibling smiles, coaxing his flesh and blood into the coach. She can do nothing but acquiesce as she is slyly locked into her fate. “Now get in that carriage, and don’t come back without your voice.”
Yíng finds herself in motion before she can settle in, before she can muster up a farewell. The blonde is forced to watch as all she’s ever known, all she’s ever lived for shrinks slowly and slowly into a speck of floating daffodil and lustrous amber.
When Kōng’s figure is gone for good, the rising sun takes his place in the horizon. She takes this as a sign to settle into the new day, melting into her seat as disquiet festers in her empty stomach.
The alchemy of mundane things is a sham , Yíng reminds herself. But what is true, what is flesh … she clutches the pudginess of her seated hips, feels her heart beating furiously through her bound breast. She is a woman, ‘til she feels the grip of bàba’s clutch around her throat, his palm flat on her nape. She is a woman, ‘til an apparition in Kōng’s shape ghosts her gaze out the window; the ghost holding the dullest, hollowest eyes her own have ever met.
But Yíng stands her ground, resolving not to give in to the chill creeping by her feet. To be nameless is such a cruel fate— she knows this, she has felt it, she has let the frustration of being nothing thrust her headfirst into Tiānhéng Shān— but for her to inflict it on Kōng … No, she would not have done this in another, kinder life.
What is not mundane is you. You are Yíng… you are Yíng even if you are Kōng. But you must remember… You are doing this for Yíng, you are doing this for you .
The carriage arrives soundlessly, not much louder than the steps Yíng has learned to conceal. When her feet reach the ground, accompanied only by her meager luggage, a stolen name, and the clothes on her back… the steps of Tiānhéng Dàxué, though straight, seem to wind forever and shoot impossibly into the sky. Breathing in, swallowing a lump, and breathing out, her sandals pitter-patter in celebration of her first steps.
“Xīngān, if you ever feel you’re not getting anywhere,” she remembers her brother’s voice, lazy as he skips stones into their manor pond. “Remember that the sound of every step is your body and the ground’s way of thanking you. For continuing to keep going. Like clap, clap, clap.”
With another step and another gulp, she reaches the second tread. “O Yánwáng Dìjūn, O Lady Guīzhōng… O Yánwáng Dìjūn, O Lady Guīzhōng…” The blonde maiden begins to murmur, chanting invocations of the mother and father gods she’d come to treat as her own. She reaches the next tread, and the next tread, and... “O Yánwáng Dìjūn, O Lady Guīzhōng… O Yánwáng Dì—”
“Ahhhh!” She loses her footing, tumbling like a sinner on the steps to heaven. I will die here , she accepts. I will die here, where the steps of Tiānhéng Dàxué will be my deathbed and my only legacy is a stain upon the family name . She apologizes to Kōng, to bàba, to everyone but herself because in her final moments… she cannot muster up repentance. I will die with this sin attached to my name, I will die with —
Warmth.
In the flitter of a single silken lash, everything in Tiānhéng Shān pales in comparison to that damned smile.
A-am I dreaming?
A tether. Fingers. A hand. An arm. Shoulders. A neck. A face. A smile.
When Yíng’s eyes flutter open once more, she finds that Tiānkōng-dǎo’s ceruleans are second only to this man’s eyes.
(Yíng decides that this is her divine punishment for stealing away Kōng. It has to be. )
在地願為連理枝。
“Let’s be two branches on the earth inseparably tied.”
Yíng as Kōng is a good student, because she cannot afford to be anything but. Yíng as Kōng is a good man, because she cannot afford to be anything but. But what belies every great man is a great weakness, the foreboding crack in one’s golden armor. And so for all of Yíng’s strengths, she as Kōng is not a good friend.
“Kōng…” Tartaglia mutters in a half-asleep daze, his face buried unflatteringly into the hóngmù table.
“Yes?” She asks, masking the way she hangs on his every word with a disinterested tone.
“Kōōōōōōng…”
“Sniffing mahogany isn’t good for you, Tartaglia.”
“Mhmmm... Alright, Kōng…”
“Honestly,” her eyebrow twitching, “what’s with this laziness? Why’d you invite me to the library, then?”
“To succeed in life, you need two things,” Tartaglia extends his pale hand, the appendage exuding enough warmth to melt through dense Snezhnayan snow. She recalls their meeting at the staircase, the first and only time thus far he’d offered her the bareness of his reach. She’s known his warmth ( briefly ), she’s craved it ( desperately ). Today, before her, his hand is warm… but so empty. Yíng sees no choice left for her but to take it.
What her body is met with isn’t just warmth, but a makeshift gust as she’s pulled in closer ( too close, too close ) into her friend’s chest.
“Ignorance and confidence.” He smiles, that half-smile that reaches his ocean eyes and frames his teeth like a white shore. She wants to seal the memory of it away, to swim in it endlessly on the darkest of nights like she’s a siren but is washed away too soon.
Tartaglia wags a parchment between their faces. It takes Yíng’s eyes a few seconds to register the rude interruption. It’s his report card, with yōu xiùs across the board. Something in her ribcage swells, then bursts alight.
“Really?” Her lip quivers, hand shakily shoving the paper into his face. Patience wearing thin, she summons a dispassionate smile and enough honey in her glazed eyes to make her irritation sickly-sweet. “That doesn’t answer my question. You’re also doing amazing in your classes. Are you just messing with—”
Tartaglia’s face falls, deep blue eyes sinking like an anchor of a thousand tons. She feels like the cruelest person in Teyvat for dousing the auburn boy’s flames.
“I just wanted to spend some time with you, comrade.” He pouts, crestfallen, and a ray of the golden hour falls on his brown-freckled face. Had guilt not filled her in this moment, she’d instead linger on the way he looks before her, frustratingly beautiful like he was one of Tiānkōng-dǎo’s favorites (it’s strange, how great perfections on a man’s face can spell something as profound as want ).
What was it like to be one of Tiānkōng-dǎo’s favorites? To be a man? To be a beautiful man? To be a beautiful man with a birthright between your legs to a beautiful throne? To have nectar ichor flowing through your gossamer veins? To have beads of sweat run down your face like rivulets of silver and pearl? To have your russets unkempt and bed-worn yet be worshipped like a brilliant fox-god?
Yíng will never know how that life tastes, but perhaps, yes, fox is the right word.
Because Tartaglia, with the greatest sleight of hand, calms the storm desolating his face but doesn’t remember to also whisk Yíng away.
Two invitations to Tiānhéng Dàxué’s annual cotillion are waved in front of her face, in a frighteningly similar position his grades had occupied moments prior.
“So I, personally, think this is a great way to unwind. Because you’re hard at work, comrade, and I’m proud of you for doing well.” His sharp incisors flash when he grins, making his mischief neither jester-esque nor childlike. The blonde thinks it’s infuriating how beautiful he is, even more so that she’s thought this so many times before. Want . “Won’t you come with me?”
She almost drowns.
Damn this man.
And so Yíng as Kōng is not a good friend, because something stirs more fiercely in her heart for a certain ginger each passing day.
Perhaps she can afford this much.
天長地久有時盡，
The sky and the earth will not be eternal, however.
“A tragic end met the butterfly lovers.” Tartaglia concludes his passionate telling of the folktale with a bow, and his friend meets the performance with a soft applause. She didn’t expect anything short of his well-meaning roguery when he’d pulled her, devilishly smiling and suit-clad, out of the haughty cotillion. The gaudy gala of debonair heirs parading the women accessorizing their arms.
Had I not made the journey here, I could have been one of those women.
The very truth of the thought haunts her.
Briefly shattering her somber, a distant bird’s chirping, unbecoming of the late hour, also acclaims the ginger. In his stream of fluid sapphire laughter, Yíng collects her senses.
What Yíng sees and feels, sans the ginger, is this: The little dronings of early spring, when hibernating animals and newborn insects occupy the empty cracks in the world left by then-vicious snow. The valleys of violetgrass blooming west of Tiānhéng Shān, swaying in the concerto of chilly breezes and gentle moonlight. The deafening quiet of a stone foyer by a translucent beach, lit up by a single, scintillating bonfire. The ringing emotions overdue an unpacking (the guilt, the fatigue, the desire, the want for flesh, the want for blood), left to collect dust in the crevices of her mind. The ache of her cherry-colored heels, sore from platform sandals the size of Qìngyún-dǐng.
“They’re Líyuè’s version of the star-crossed lovers,” he continues. “My баба would always tell me their story. Over and over again, and I’d never tire of it. I even wonder if I turned into Liáng because of it.”
When Tartaglia mentions his баба, Yíng doesn’t seize up like she used to. But her heart still aches at the faint, linguistic reminder of her own bàba; it always will. Because just as Tartaglia is not from here, neither should Yíng be here. Yet here they stand unpunished, cozied up by Líyuè’s womb.
Perhaps Tartaglia is right. And if they are their own Liáng and Zhù, the unraveling of their thread cocoons must be looming.
“I didn’t know you were such a romantic, Tartaglia.” She flashes her pretty porcelain smile (bàba’s pride) as ‘Liáng’ offers his hand; it’s just as pale, just as warm, just as outstretched, and just as lonely as she’s come to know it. The soft hand on her clothed waist was a new, but welcome addition. And so, two pairs of feet dance impromptu waltzes across the cold cobblestone, pittering and pattering in spontaneous crescendos like they have something to prove. ‘Zhù’ decides that Tiānkōng-dǎo celebrating them, two sinners, is a delusion she’s willing to lie in.
“You’d find that I’m a sucker for folk tales, comrade.” Her dance partner twirls her around, and in her flurry he looks like a raging, dancing, flickering flame. She’s reminded of something he said, after his invitation— an exchange she never knew to categorize as jest or belief.
“Never burn yourself out ,” he had advised her. “Fire leaves behind nothing but ashes. And you must survive at all costs.”
“Surviving, huh… I guess that’s the prerequisite for living,” she had told him then. “ But I don’t want to live just to survive.”
“If you know what you’re living for, even being stripped bare will keep you aflame.”
Oh, Tartaglia. Always with the answers. Never telling her where they’re from.
Their dance carries on in invaluable silence, the blonde and ginger imprinting the same footprints on the alabaster sand. A secret is the first thing that breaks it.
“Yíng. I— that’s my sister’s name.” The masquerading maiden almost chokes on her own name as it escapes her. It takes all her strength to hold her stare while braving his. “Would you like to visit my home one day and meet her?”
Whilst crossing of the no man’s land between two outlanders’ synchronizing souls and actual love, half-crescents form out of Tartaglia’s moonlit eyes. His gaze sweeps them into love.
“Nothing would make me happier.” Immediately, her eyelashes grow so, so dewy. Her platformed feet stand wobbly under the cover of her hulking hànfú. She wonders if he’s memorized all the times he’d washed her away. She wonders if he truly does feel what she feels when he says, “Would you two like to meet my family in Snezhnaya?”
“Tartaglia…” What she says next is neither a lie nor hyperbole. “I’d board the next boat if we could.”
“Yíng—” He’s caught off-guard by his own words, and it’s the most frightened she’s ever seen him. The most bare and the most straightforwardly sincere she’s ever seen him. His eyes grow wide like a lounging whale when he’s surprised, she finds. It’s a sight she believes is just as pleasant as the other sides of Tartaglia.
And it’s the first time in months she has heard it, the single syllable bearing the heavy weight of her identity (only men bear lofty titles, after all). It’s the first time in her life she has heard it, and felt right for being it. She comes back into herself, she comes back into Yíng. “I, sorry, can I call you by your name?”
It feels as though her name has come home.
“Only if you tell me yours.”
His lips ghost the effigy of her flushed ear. In response, she wants to reach out to them with a kiss but no . First, his name should suffice.
“Ajax…” If women are cursed to love what breaks their bodies, breaks their faith… will Ajax follow her to the grave? “Please, someday, take me away from here.”
“Yíng…” If she and Tartaglia, like butterflies, must selfishly oscillate and part the unrelenting clouds of a black sky, they will dance ‘til all left of them is sunset dust. If she and Tartaglia, like butterflies, must spend their days evading the cruel gods’ wrath, they will dance ‘til all left of them is destroyed in a thundering gust.
Show them what is beautiful is not so easily breakable. But show them how the gods, too, break the strongest of things. “Of course. I wouldn’t mind being an enemy of the world, not if I’m with you.”
此恨綿綿無絕期。
Only this regret remains and lasts for ever and ever.