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your aimless wanderings through liyue often bring you to the depths of huaguang-lin, where the perpetual fog shields you from the watchful eyes of old friends. quartzite pillars shrouded by clouds tower above the long-drained basin below, hewn from the earth by centuries of rivers carving ever-widening chasms through an ancient seabed.
a famous adventurer once remarked to you that if the vast reservoir beneath jueyun-jian were drained away, these bizarre crags of stone might find themselves back home at the bottom of the sea. and perhaps one day they might. after all, you have no power over liyue’s landscape, mortal as you profess yourself to be.
you are an observer now, and you bear witness as the forces of nature you used to believe you could overwhelm stitch over the vast scars of your war.
each year the wind and rain eat through the stone that is now solid under your feet; each winter crystals of frost widen the cracks that emerge. it serves as a reminder for what you would rather soon forget. for a heart of stone is a heart nonetheless, and there is a fault line running through yours that one day will split.
you stand the lone survivor of a war amongst gods, the last leaf clinging to the bare branch of the tree.
time is the one thing you cannot defeat.
_·’𒆙-‘,
the death of a god is enough to annihilate all that they worked to protect in life. their power bursts forth as their mortal guise fractures and all that they are returns to rest silently in the earth.
the killing of even the weakest of deities would tear a mortal soul to shreds; a supernova cannot attend to the well-being of its planets.
the death of a god means the death of their people. and she was no weaker than you were, with all your power and all your prowess. you were the earth and the mountains and the bedrock; she was everywhere and anywhere, the silt on the shore and the dust on the wind - and dust will set alight with the faintest spark.
you were always the protector. the levee sheltering your tranquil harbor as storms raged around you.
stone is built to weather, is it not? that is the covenant you swore to, solemn among the glaze lilies that now scatter in blooming flames amidst the ruins of your home. that is your contract. above anything, above the siren call of conquest and the beckoning of the heavens, you will protect what is yours.
the mortal lives she now entrusts to your clumsy, unpracticed care are fragile constructions of flesh and bone. they fragment under the touch of stone-carved hands accustomed to the rough grip of weapons.
you shift your hold to see the light. the cracks are showing. are you enough?
you are their protector forevermore, and so now, as the dust-choked skies blacken with ash and you kneel on the crumbling earth with what is left of her cradled in your arms,
you do what you do best.
your oath crystallizes into reality as the stuttering star supernovas. the impact is enough to shatter granite.
▿’·𒆙,`-
there is a crack spidering down the worn-out surfaces of your heart, stone though it may be. each freezing winter and thawing summer widens the gap, as the crevices and pores overflow with pouring rain.
is it time to go?
- ▿’_𒆙▪,` -
you once thought time was a gift. to protect what you must protect, to vanquish what must be vanquished. but eternity is a stone hanging heavy and lifeless, a coarse rope around your ankle.
it pulls you down unchanging, as around you the pale gold of sunlight splinters, fragments smothered by the midnight depths of ocean. of unending time. of day to night to day again, new to half to full and back, generations of leaves falling sunkissed to the earth as their spring wanes into autumn. a brief touch and they crumble, flow like dust through your hands.
the sun’s embrace is drowned by bottomless water. was it ever there? now even the distant memory of that warmth is fading.
you envy the leaves, you think. they get to feel the light before it is gone. they learn to treasure it, even as day by day it carves the life from their skin. their lives are a journey towards their final breath, the epilogue of their tale - but yours? your existence is an aching infinitude of powerless memories, the monument standing unmoved at the end of all things.
that was what you thought, wasn’t it?
but you who have no denouement now find yourself washed ashore in the wake of the receding tide.
time has no end, but the fissures tracing through your chest now spell out yours, and despite all your lifetimes and all your wisdom -
you are afraid.
- ▿·’_𒆙`▪,, -
the rain beats down. water soaks into the cracks and the crevices as a city battles the sea that sustains it.
lit by the distant glow of the qunyu-ge, the present wars with the past. three thousand years of history: it all culminates tonight. you will witness the end of your era standing rainsoaked on the balcony of the city you forged, the final act of your opera framed by a sea of clouds.
the approaching cold of the north seeps into you through drenched clothes. it has come to collect your debt.
is it selfish? the unsolvable puzzle sliced open with a single stroke. the endless knot given an end.
but you have always been selfish, have you not?
you are no longer enough for this city that has matured beyond what you can provide. an obsolete effigy only kept alive by the dramatized legends of their deeds. a leaf still anchored foolishly to its branch.
too afraid to change, so you stagnate. you who were once this land’s lifeline have now become the weight that drags it down towards its past.
so cast away your burden now. renounce your name and your role in a story no longer meant for you. the act is ending, and you have overstayed your ovation.
freeze and thaw.
an ocean stretches between the two halves.
- ▿’_·◟◟ _ 𒆙 _ ◞◞▪,`’ -
it widens then breaks. the divinity pulled, whole and glowing, from where it has rested for countless summers. its long-awaited prize attained, the biting ice does not linger.
half a heart. bartered away.
autumn leaves float by on the river’s surface.
. ` ◟ ___ ◞ -` .
the stone is cool and smooth like well-sanded wood. you remember bloodied edges rough under bloodied hands, but now the worn-down pieces slide cleanly into their slots. each segment intertwining with the rest, building the shape of the kongming suo she pressed into your grasp so many millennia before.
all but one.
no, you have never solved this final riddle. perhaps you were never meant to.
stone may erode, but it can never rot.
osial’s rise brought the monoliths that formed his undersea prison drifting to the shallows of guyun-ge. they are but crumbling slabs of stone now, barely recognizable. eaten away by time and the fury of the god they had kept imprisoned.
they have served their purpose. what are they now but curios, relics to be studied then discarded?
the crux’s salvage operations continue on the horizon. a new dawn unimpeded by the missing pieces lying abandoned on the seafloor, the chronicle of a bygone age.