Chapter Text
It was cold.
Kaeya wasn’t sure where he was.
He had been here for… hours, at least—that was as long as he’d been awake.
He’d cracked his eyes open, sending sharp pains through his skull, and clenched his teeth, attempting to sit up. The room he was in was dim; he could hardly see a thing, even now, hours later, when his eyes had long since adjusted to the low levels of light.
This room was empty to a degree which seemed nearly impossible; there was nothing here. It was just a grey, box shaped room, rounded at the corners. There wasn’t a door, or any sort of entrance, and the light seemed to both be coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And it was so, so cold.
After a bit of investigation, he had found that his vision had been taken from him, among a few of his other belongings, including his shoes and his cape. It still had to be nearby, though, because he could feel its presence. Still, with his vision gone, and no weapons in sight, he was defenseless. This thought brought about a deep, cold fear within him.
Panic would get him nowhere, he had realized after panicking for a great while, and it had only served to worsen his headache.
For the first time in his life, he truly had no idea where he was.
So now he was wracking his brain; what had he been doing, last he could remember? What assignment had he been on?
Yet every time he probed into that part of his memory, the most recent part alone, he could not seem to grasp at anything. There was nothing. Nothing. His life had been normal—work, drinking, reading—and now he was here.
It was so frigid here, and his head pounded, and he thought he probably had a concussion. And he knew: he could not survive here for longer than a few days.
No matter what, he needed to figure something out. Trembling, he leaned back against the wall, crossing his legs and arms and tilting his head back. Perhaps the next question could be: where was he?
This thought process, as well, yielded nothing.
He hugged himself tighter and rubbed his hands, trying to conserve heat and mostly failing. His one grace was that, as a cryo vision holder, he had the benefit of not normally experiencing such severe effects of cold as others would. Though his vision was not by his side, he could still feel some of its muted effects coursing through his veins.
This revelation would mean nothing if he could not find a door, though.
He huffed in frustration and his breath formed a cloud before his face. Now was not the time to let himself fall to the enemy’s tricks. Even if it appeared there was not an exit, there had to be.
Unless, he thought grimly, the enemy did not intend anything apart from his slow, painful death.
He would not put such a strategy past treasure hoarders, whose bad side he often found himself on, to wish to punish him in such a way. But they would never succeed in simply catching him off guard and tossing him into a sealed room such as this one. Something much more foul was at play here.
There was a sudden sharp pain in his head and he found himself gasping, clutching the sides of his head. It was a horrible pain, much stronger than his headache had been before, and much different.
Something felt wrong.
He slid down the wall until he was lying down, curled into himself, shivering violently, his head in his hands. His skull felt as if it was being pierced from the inside, sharp nails cutting through bone and skin.
Kaeya took one, two shuddering breaths as the pain only continued to worsen. He cried out. His fingernails dug into his scalp.
Before long, everything was dark.
Jean had not seen Kaeya in five days, and at this point, she was beginning to feel something was truly wrong.
It was not unusual for him to leave unannounced on a small excursion or two, usually unplanned yet somehow productive, and while she would get irritated at him, he was still catching criminals, and… she wasn’t sure how she felt about it, but she often found herself turning a blind eye to some of his darker dealings.
For three days, she had waited, not allowing herself to worry too much about Kaeya—he did sometimes forget to tell her. But on the fourth day, she had begun to tentatively investigate.
But five days was far too many for him to have left unannounced. Surely he would have noticed by now, had he simply forgotten to let her know. This past day she had spent walking around, asking after his whereabouts, only to receive a few ‘he’s probably in the tavern’s and not anything further.
She had finished several cups of coffee at this point, possibly even one or two more than she normally drank. It was just past midnight. The last time she had seen Kaeya, it had been just before she had locked up her office five days ago.
Where could he have been? She could not ask anyone to check on him in his house until morning—then, she could probably ask Amber to do it. Two days ago, she had knocked at his door, but had received no response. So she had decided to respect his privacy for the time being. Now, it had been too long.
Usually, even if he was sick, he would normally drag himself out of bed to at least let her know before sleeping it off. If he was sick or injured, somewhere in his house, it would have to be severe for him to simply not tell her.
She didn’t want to be proven an idiot, though, fretting about him possibly being abducted, when he was actually lying in his own bed not far from the Headquarters, ill rather than stolen. So, she decided, reaching into her pocket, she would not wait to get someone else to do it. She would have to do it herself.
Jean drained her last mug of coffee and left the empty mug on her desk. Then, she started her trip through the chilly night to her friend’s house.
She had received a key to his house practically as soon as he’d gotten his own. He had given it to her the day after he’d moved in, saying he didn’t know if she might need it some day, and that she was always welcome to come and visit. Before, she had always interpreted that as an offer, that if something happened she could stay at his place for a while as he had hers, but she hadn’t considered that he might need her in his house.
Jean stopped outside of his front door. There was a small plant next to it and a plain mat at her feet, and otherwise, it could have appeared empty. The curtains were drawn and she could not see any light coming through them.
Just as she was twisting the key in the lock, a cool voice came from behind her. “He’s not there.”
She flinched slightly and turned around to see who had interrupted her at this hour. “Sister Rosaria,” she greeted, relieved that she wasn’t being ambushed. Then, after a moment: “he’s not?”
“I checked, and he isn’t in his house. You may go in, if you please, and check for yourself. But I assure you, he’s not there.” Rosaria crossed her arms, her face carefully neutral.
“You have a key to his house?” Jean asked, opening his door. Inside, it looked much the same as the last time she had been here: there was a plain sofa to the left, a coffee table, a houseplant, a bookshelf, and across the room, a built in kitchenette. As she had suspected, the lights were all off.
“Something like that,” Rosaria muttered and stepped in behind Jean. “Why are you still here if you now know he isn’t?”
“Why are you?”
Rosaria didn’t respond.
They both walked throughout his house, examining everything. There was not a single disturbance; everything was perfectly in place, from the books on the shelves to the sheets on his bed. It did not look lived in.
“He wouldn’t have left,” Rosaria said. “His duty to this city and its citizens is far too great.”
“I dare not think he would have,” Jean said. “He is valued greatly here.”
She sighed, peeking into his office for the third time. It was, as before, empty. Rosaria leaned back against a wall, playing with her knife.
“I’m beginning to feel awkward, simply being in his house,” Jean said. “Especially if he were to come back tomorrow…”
“He will not,” Rosaria said. “As I said before, he would not have left without reason.”
“What sort of reason do you mean?” Jean asked. Rosaria followed her out the front door.
Rosaria said nothing.
Jean sighed, feeling a headache begin to stir behind her eyes and shutting Kaeya’s door with a click. “I need to go back to my office.”
The next morning, Jean had still found nothing. It was as if Kaeya had simply vanished without a trace, and now sunlight was coming in beams through the half-closed curtains of her office windows and Jean was so tired.
When Lisa came into her office that morning, bearing tea and breakfast, Jean was loath to say the respite was necessary.
“You look exhausted,” Lisa said, her voice soothing as she sat on the chair across from Jean. She handed Jean a steaming mug of dark tea and a sweet roll. “Did you sleep at all last night?”
Jean did not bother to lie and shook her head. “You’re up surprisingly early, too, Lisa. I don’t normally see you until noon.” In fact, Jean had yet to see anybody yet this morning except Lisa.
Lisa took a sip of her own tea. “I felt today was a good day to greet you with breakfast, nothing more,” she said. “But you look stressed. Is something the matter?”
“Have you seen Kaeya?” Jean said after a pause.
“Kaeya?” Lisa hummed. “No, not since he returned a book to me last week. Why do you ask? Has something happened?”
Jean set down her full mug on the table. “Nobody has seen him in nearly a week.”
Lisa frowned, thinking for a moment. “He’s not out doing… whatever it is he does?”
“If he is,” Jean said, “he’s in trouble.” If Kaeya had simply forgotten to tell her about him leaving for six days, she would stick him in solitary confinement along with Klee if she had to in order to get him to never do it again.
Lisa let out a nervous laugh. “Is there anything I could do to help you?” she asked.
If Lisa was asking to help, she must have been truly concerned. Jean downed the rest of her tea in a few gulps; it was pleasantly warm. “Could you call down Amber for me? She should be arriving around now.”
Lisa leaned forward, placing her warm hands atop Jean’s and looking her in the eyes. “He’ll be alright, don’t worry.”
Jean averted her eyes to the table. “I hope so,” she said. “I don’t know what I’ll do otherwise.”
Despite the Acting Grand Master’s attempts at confidentiality, the news of the missing Cavalry Captain spread like wildfire. One of the perks of this was that, now, alongside many of the knights, they had a few members of the Adventurer’s Guild keeping an eye out for him.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, this information happened to reach Dawn Winery sometime in the early afternoon.
Diluc had initially brushed it off; Kaeya was known to do questionable things and it would be presumptuous to assume he was simply missing. Kaeya never went missing.
Technically speaking, he had officially been declared missing around noon, since Jean had wanted to try out a few more sources before making an announcement. But Diluc knew they had already started looking before then.
Now, he was trying his very best to ignore the growing pit in his stomach and to tell himself he had no right to feel such worry for Kaeya of all people. So he was working, signing document after document and hardly looking at them, his mind reeling in the background.
That evening, Rosaria visited Angel’s Share. It was crowded today, the patrons buzzing with gossip—only about half of which had to do with Kaeya—and she was sitting upstairs at a table in the corner, a not-so-quiet but still relaxed place for her to think.
To say she was worried about Kaeya would not be entirely inaccurate, but she respected his ability to preserve himself and did not think anything particularly horrible would have happened to him just yet. No, he was stronger than that, at least in terms of battle.
Still, she had spent all day chasing down his sources—the ones that even Jean hadn’t caught wind of—and interrogating them. It wasn’t as if she’d had anything better to do with her time; the church was pointless and the only crime the town seemed to be able to speak of was their missing cavalry captain.
She almost smiled to herself around her drink when she imagined him walking back into the city, completely unaware of his status as ‘missing’ and about to be surrounded by hoards of worried strangers. If he had simply forgotten to alert them of his departure, he would deserve whatever he had coming for him.
If she were being honest, she had told a little white lie in her conversation with Jean the night before. She was not certain that Kaeya would not simply leave Mondstadt. But she also felt like something was off—this matter reeked of the abyss, in the same way that Kaeya or Albedo or the Traveler did. But it was not any of them, she knew— Albedo would not dare to do something so reckless as to abduct one of his own coworkers, and the traveler… was a good person. Still, she trusted her instincts.
Maybe, she thought, taking a sip of her wine, I could go see Albedo.
Rosaria was not the biggest fan of Albedo, in mild terms—even looking at him set of warning bells in her mind—but she needed whatever it was he knew about the abyss that seemingly nobody else did. Conveniently, she could also use this interaction as an inspection to rule him out as a suspect altogether.
The tavern was very full today, so she would prefer to leave before somebody came and sat at the table across from her. She stood and walked down the stairs, intent on bringing her glass to be cleaned, when she noticed a familiar head of bright red hair behind the bar.
Still, she weaved her way through the crowd of people and came to a stop in front of the bar, handing the glass to him.
“Sister Rosaria,” Diluc greeted, successfully keeping his tone professional despite his woes being written out clear on his face. “What can I get for you?”
Rosaria took another careful look at his face and decided he probably did not know any more about Kaeya than she did. Therefore, further interaction would only serve to hinder her progress.
“I’m already leaving,” she said, already turning to walk away. Diluc opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“Rosaria—“ he said, his voice low, but she could hear it across the crowded room all the same.
She decided to turn back around before she could reach the door. So she walked back, crossed her arms, and said quietly: “The abyss is behind this, I’m certain of it.”
Then she left.
Albedo had been at work for approximately eight hours when Sister Rosaria of the church walked in without so much as a knock.
Luckily, he was not in the middle of any sort of particularly important experiment. He simply peeled his gloves off, set his equipment off to the side, and gave her his momentary attention.
“Albedo,” she said, shutting the door behind her. “I trust you’ve heard the news?”
“What news?” Albedo asked, beginning to get a report gathered for his experiment. He had been alone in his office all day; most of his alchemy students were busy gathering supplies for a project of their own. Because of this he had not heard any workplace gossip.
Rosaria crossed her arms and Albedo noticed that, despite her cool exterior, she seemed mildly distressed. “Captain Kaeya is missing.”
Albedo let the pen he was holding fall to the table with a clatter. “Ah…” he said, hesitating for a moment. “That doesn’t sound ideal.”
Kaeya… he and Kaeya hadn’t spoken in almost a week, but he hadn’t thought anything of it. Often, when they were busy, they would simply stop visiting each other. Albedo had assumed Kaeya had been doing just that.
“Do you know anything of it?” Rosaria asked.
“No,” Albedo said. “But because you’re asking me, I can infer as to what information you may have.”
Rosaria sucked in a sharp breath, keeping her eyes in steady contact with his. “That’s right,” she said slowly.
Albedo stayed there sitting, for a few moments only, before Rosaria opened her mouth again.
“It reeks of abyss. Just like you do.”
“So that’s why you’re here, then? Am I a suspect?” he said, closing the file he was holding. He was not worried. Some level of suspicion was always inevitable, in his situation.
“No. For once, I do not believe it was you,” Rosaria said. “However, I do believe you could help.”
“And I plan to,” Albedo replied. “I’m sure the Acting Grand Master will have me investigate this ordeal as soon as I’m needed.”
Rosaria gave him a cold, calculating look, and he wasn’t sure whether he should have been afraid of her or not, but he wasn’t.
“You know that Jean will not always have the… legal opportunities to fully scope out the situation, right?” Rosaria said after a while.
“Of course,” Albedo said. “She is only permitted to do what the law states.”
“Will you help me, then?”
“I’ll consider your offer.”
On the edge of a crumbling rooftop, a boy dressed in traditional Mondstadtian attire sat, his fingers gliding over a lyre.
Beside him sat a beast, a dragon, its eyes closed, listening to his tune.
It was a beautiful tune, a sorrowful one, enough so that even the worn down stones of this abandoned lair could have wept.
But the boy stopped abruptly, letting his thin fingers slip from the strings of the instrument into his lap. Then, he sighed.
The beast opened one eye.
“I shall not put off this obligation any longer,” the boy said. “Lest the threat grow stronger.”
“I am pleased to see you still rhyme in such times,” the beast rumbled, its deep voice causing slight tremors in the floor.
The boy stood and laid a gentle hand on the dragon’s side, gently stroking it. “We must leave now.” Then, he leapt up, ever graceful as the wind seemingly lifted him up without second thoughts.
“That we must,” the beast rumbled, and it unfurled its great wings and jumped off the edge.
Kaeya awoke to find himself lying in the grass just outside of Dawn Winery. But immediately, he knew something was off. Before he even sat up, he could feel the way everything felt just a little fuzzy around the edges, just a little too abstract, a bit uncanny.
The ground beneath him, however, felt very much real. So did his hands, which he could tell were missing their gloves because of the slight breeze he could feel on them. And his head pounded, ever so slightly, the only remnant of what had happened before.
He pulled himself to his feet. Could he have been dreaming? The idea sounded both wrong and right at the same time.
His feet squelched in the mud and he realized, faintly, that he was not wearing any shoes.
So he looked down, and that was when he found his first piece of solid proof that this wasn’t reality: he was wearing robes, Khaenri’ahn ones, that only royalty were permitted to wear. They were dark blue with gold lining in some places and reached just below his knees. The wide sleeves came to rest about halfway down his forearms. His eyepatch was, by some celestial grace, still there.
This was not the outfit of a king, despite its royal associations. No, this had been his outfit when…
He shook his head, willing the thought away.
He felt so small, in the outfit of his childhood, and it didn’t help that it was just a little big on him, as it had been back then. He clenched his fists; he would need to find a change of clothes if he ever were to figure out where he was.
It was certainly not Dawn Winery. It wasn’t.
Kaeya took another step, doing his best to ignore the mud on his feet and the breeze on his arms and legs. Then another.
Toward Dawn Winery he went, and he walked for a good long while. But the building never seemed to grow any bigger, the land never seemed to change. Yet he could have sworn he was walking forward, he could see when he would walk past the small rock to his left, the bush to his right, but he never got any closer.
He walked until his legs grew tired and his throat begged for water. Then he sat on the ground, trying his very best not to think at all.
It was just a dream. It would be over soon.
Suddenly, a voice came to him, more clear than any of his surroundings and more clear than anything he had felt since he had found himself here.
“Kaeya,” the voice said, deep and ominous. He felt a shiver crawl up his spine.
“I am sorry I had to do this. It was a necessary sacrifice.”
Somehow the voice sounded both familiar and new at the same time, and it felt bittersweet, just like home, both how it was now and what it used to have been.
Kaeya found himself replying to nobody who he could see. “I forgive you,” he said quietly.
Somehow, after these words left his lips, he was left feeling as if he were missing something. Something he would never get back.
Around him, his surroundings changed, morphing into something he had never wished to see again, yet left his heart aching with longing.
“Kaeya!”