Chapter Text
The night sky over Liyue was not so dissimilar from the one over Mondstat. There was some kind of song in that and if Venti had the time to stop and sit, look at the stars and think on it he would have had half a stanza by now with the tune soon to follow. But there was no time to stop and sit and think and look at the stars. He wasn’t usually the type to follow and stick with wandering in a direction for this long but he was the type to follow his heart.
He sighed as he hauled himself up over a rock in the path, hating the way its sharp edges pressed hard into the soft skin of his palms before quickly looking back up to the sky and its stars, lest he lose his quarry after all his hard work. He wasn’t much of a hunter either, but the shapes he was after were still there above his head, mere curves that dipped and rose again as they flew themselves further into the distance.
“Just hang on, little one.”
He could feel the feathers of their wing flutter against the side of his face as if to answer him before his temporary companion settled back on the perch they’d made of his shoulder. They cooed, their body humming with unused movement. Their wing shuddered across his cheek again.
“I know, I know. You’ll be up there soon enough.”
Patience felt like a bad way to punctuate a sentence for someone who usually had none themselves and so Venti refrained from saying it, even if he thought it needed to be said. Then again, his feathered friend had probably had enough of patience over the past little while, spending days grounded with gravity pulling unnaturally at their limbs. He’d sang them a sad little tune, trying to raise the wind beneath them so they could spend a few moments of freedom in the air but with their wing as broken as it was they’d been reluctant to try it. He’d understood that too.
They’d reached the borders of Liyue when Venti finally stopped. The cliffs and mountains that protected it from outsiders loomed large above them. The flock he’d been following began to crest just up above their peaks.
“Okay, showtime, my fine feathered friend. You can do it. I know you can. Trust yourself.”
The bird upon his shoulder gave a few experimental hops and then burrowed down deeper into itself, its neck sinking low into its body. “Come on now. No need for stage fright. I’ll turn around and close my eyes if it’ll make you happy.”
That didn’t seem to comfort the creature either. Its talons dug deeper into his shoulder, managing to pinch the skin underneath his clothes. “Ow, ow, ow, ow. Okay- alright. No need for that either. How about this? I can help you up. A little more than half way, at the least. You trust me, don’t you?”
The bird’s beady eyes slid in his direction, almost narrowing if bird eyes could really do that. “Just give it a go.”
It cooed in reply, a low hum now against Venti’s ear before it began to hop again, flutter its wings and then tip forward off his shoulder. When it began to fly it kept itself low to the ground, its wings flapping far more than they needed to, overcompensating.
Venti waved his hand, summoning his lyre in a cascade of bright green light. Then he began to pluck the strings.
The tune that emanated from it was a gentle one, but the notes were bouncy and light, rising higher and higher as Venti’s fingers climbed the scales. The breeze picked up behind him, brushing against his legs and unsettling the cap on his head. The bird still flew low, heading straight towards the center of a rock before the wind reached them. They would have crashed and maybe they would have liked to before the wind had grabbed a hold of their wings, firm but gentle. It was a touch no one could shake, and to a creature such as this one it was a touch as familiar as inhaling. Like a bolt of lightning, they changed course, heading straight upwards as they ascended the cliff’s edge, becoming smaller and smaller as they gained distance. Soon enough Venti couldn’t make them out from among the handful of dark crescents that made up their flock. He watched them fly for a while longer before they ascended another mountain peak and disappeared entirely.
“See, I told you so, little one.”
Venti smiled to himself, a satisfied curl of his lips before he banished his lyre and stretched, turning on his heel to face the wind he had summoned and head back the way he’d come. There was a bounce in his heel and a hum in his throat as he looked out towards the large, empty field of green and yellowing grass illuminated by the stars.
And then, one of the stars fell. So it seemed.
It was only one and so far away that Venti found himself quickening his step in order to catch up and get a better look at its descent, thinking of all the things a star might inspire. The briefest flashes of bright green marked it like a dot on a map and then it was gone. Venti was left standing in the moonlight and the light of the stars that still remained, having stopped at the edge of a clearing unsure of where the trail continued. He held onto a nearby tree trunk, the leaves of it Liyue’s signature golden yellow, even in the dark. He blinked a little.
In the center of this clearing, to Venti’s disappointment, there was no star. It was merely a lumpy mound of… something in the middle of a small crater where there was once grass and other flowers. The shadows around seemed to coalesce, hugging themselves close, obscuring the shape. Then the lump moved, rising, discarding the shadows like pieces of used clothing, revealing the form of something that was nearly human.
Nearly.
Perhaps it was something that had once been human and had forgotten what form that took, and was slowly remembering. The darkness still gripped the figure, cloying hands that refused to let go even as it was tossed aside. And the limbs were- they were all there, but to Venti’s eyes they seemed to be wrong, in the right place but just off enough if he stared for too long without blinking first. The shadows worked to drag them out, making them as long as the ones that belonged to monsters in songs that he’d used to scare children.
Venti blinked.
A torso emerged, then shoulders slumped low, topped off with a head of matted dark hair. It stayed seated on its knees, which Venti could only imagine were there underneath the black murk. A little ways away something glinted- the tip of a spear, covered in shadow. No, not shadow. Ink dark ichor.
Now that Venti’s eyes had adjusted, even the shadows that had surrounded whatever the stranger was had turned to liquid, dispersing in a puddle beneath it. All stemming from up above, like a crack in the earth, from its shoulder blades. Jagged twin rivers soaking through the rips in its white shirt, one adorning each of them. Venti winced and for a moment was suddenly reminded of the way cruel children would rip the wings from the backs of insects. When it tilted its head up towards the sky the moonlight highlighted cuts and purpling bruises scattered across its skin. The silhouette it now made looked odd like that. Venti had been right, at the least. Its limbs were in all the right places, but still off, still wrong. Its arm hung too low, the side of its shoulder out of place.
The thing that was almost human blinked golden eyes up at the stars, as bright as the leaves on Liyue’s trees. Its lips parted. Its eyes closed.
And then it screamed.
When it did it sounded nearly human too but the noise was too awful for Venti to consider it for too long, and the longer it went on the more it began to morph into something that was far more animal. Something that belonged to the wolves that called Wolvendom home that Venti could sometimes hear at night, their howls a warning. A threat. But this- under the threat, the aggressive snarl of it was a wounded whimper, as quiet and as quick as a gasp, as quiet and as quick as the wind that was snuffed out at the border of the Mare Javari. It made him jump, made his skin crawl, uncomfortable shivers crawling up the sides of his arms and he was glad that the birds had already flown away with their little one in tow before they had a chance to be scared off, scattering to the winds.
The note couldn’t decide if it wanted to be searing agony or hollow grief, a call to something lost for good or violent, burning rage and decided to be them all at once, too many voices that didn’t know how to harmonize with each other, every moment one overtaking the other in a discordant choir. But the note continued. The thing that was almost human kept screaming.
Venti backed away, though certain his footsteps hadn’t been noticed. He didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing else to do. So he did what he always did when he had no choice. In a flash of green he vanished, taking himself to somewhere where the note couldn’t reach him, though it echoed still. It echoed in the stones of the mountains that hugged Liyue close, for stone remembered and remembered well, and it echoed in the spaces where Venti kept things he’d much rather not think about and tried hard to bury.
It echoed, and it echoed, and it echoed.