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Only through the incomprehensible loom of Kairos’ itself, woven by her thousand hands without end, can divine tales uncloak —
so it is that this raconteur entreats her for the boon of transcendent wisdom, that one should write a humble paradox both worthy of Song and Stone.
The lonesome god sits on the precipice of the northeast mounts, settled into the form of a young bard in teal braids. There is no wind to feel as a spirit, he feels—no path for the air to course through him, and so he makes himself vessels. Air sacs. Nostrils to breathe through and nerves to have his skin pricked by the harsh breeze. Little will question his presence—less yet, the fierce children of Freedom—and even if they dare, the bard Venti is not one who beckons to be ingrained in memory, an honor that is better attributed to his songs.
Who he comes to face that day is not one from his land. The soldier wields his spear with pride, and falters not in the face of the brewing gale. The layers of rock they stand on have changed, worn by the wind and time that blows further East, yet the soldier stands firmer still, firmer than any rock the land can bear.
I see your lie, proudly thinks the younger one, who reaches not even half the soldier’s height.
A gust of air pricks at Morax’s eyes; under it, a darkness blooms that he conceals under human illusion. A lethargy he can hide to all, even those divine. Not to the God of Wind. Never to the God of Wind. A miscalculation on Morax’s part it could be—the assimilation of Barbatos’ inexplicable constancy; yet Barbatos himself has learned every freckle and tic Morax’s ever shown in his presence. Would it not be sound to claim that this could, too, be a weaving of all their little truths?
Morax does not comment on the jab, lips sealed as clay hardens. The smaller god watches, watches, watches. Amber eyes don’t come to meet his gaze, not even for a brief second—even when a second is nothing to either of them. Bare feet trail the path of stone, the weight of two feet balanced in their steps. Barbatos watches still, with the older god’s back turned on him.
No words are exchanged between them. No need for such a mortal thing, when Morax can make even space bear the weight of a boulder, tearing through the seams of elusive air with so little effort.
It feels like an eternity later when Morax finally turns around, and Barbatos gets to see the golden gleam of his eyes. A minute, a minute splintered into seconds, seconds that find their way in memory and dreams, sunsettias, cor lapis, a setting sun.
The breeze that follows is soft and sweet as the bard’s tunes are. The soldier’s pointed eyes do not get any less cold, nor his spear any less sharp.
Morax takes his leave not in flight, not in a blink. He maintains his mortal, vulnerable form, drenched with blood and sweat, and walks the excruciating path south. Not that he isn’t always within Barbatos’ sight, anyway—the golden standard, the venerable archon, the one he is bound to in Eternity.
Missing is a sentiment foreign to either of them, the bard has to remind himself when he questions if the older god was ever stained with tears. They have lived on, after everything. They will live still.
Still, though he himself is never still;
and yet, still, still.
“Come, catch me if you can!” The echoes scream in the air that mutes, followed by laughter and the swaying of blooms.
“Fool is he who heeds your taunts any longer. Your intention is most surely to drag us out to the savage ends of our home and doom us into damnation.”
“If this foolishness is the cost of freedom, I find no better expedient than to pay it in full.”
“What freedom can be found in the darkest corners of the land, its many traps between rocks? Surely, to be able to walk among the light without a worry of what possible dangers lie is the greatest sense of freedom you can hope to capture.”
“Is it not right below the Sun itself, where the fearsome dragons swim?” The lyre does not cease its singing; the child, not his skipping. “Is it not that we, bestowed with the power of Light, are utterly forbidden from using it for ourselves? As we are confined to the elders, the nature, the dark, so will we always be chained to the walls of this never-ending sea."
There is something about the children that binds them in perfect harmony, a single unending trajectory of fates. One lies at the other end of the orbit, never for them to meet. Like death takes those who no longer live, and life breathes its way in and banishes death out. Like cold leaves those by a fire, and fire dies in the air of cold. Yet like, indeed, does light live afar from shadow, and shadow, where light is no more—so are they always bound, through the end which marks the beginning.
“Come, now—we are children, though they wish to forget; let us go further west, and see how opaline the waters gleam.”
They are children indeed; it is only so long before the two break into giggles they cannot hush.
“Leave,” grumbled the fiery bartender. The lethargy drawn in his furrowed face doesn’t make him any less handsome, Venti thinks, which makes these sparse encounters all the more lovely. Master Diluc has little reason to leave the comforts of his mansion, after all, though Venti knows he often ventures to do more than one might seek to do in a day’s work.
Oh, to be loaded with money, Venti thinks wistfully, emptying another bottle of sweetflower wine. This one’s of a new method of fermentation Diluc’s been playing with; it’s probably the only reason he hasn’t already kicked Venti out of the tavern with his own sturdy hands. What better connoisseur to wine is there, aside from the god of wine himself?
“Y’know, Mr. Darknight Hero,” drawls Venti, “on the nights when you’re not out there kicking ass, fighting crime—” A small burp breaks out of Venti, to which he simply grins cheekily. “What do you do?”
“I don’t suppose that’s any of your business, now, is it?”
Venti deflates with a huff. “Such a businessman, you young tycoon. You can’t tell me you don’t indulge in any late night activity to destress, though, can you? I know it isn’t drinking, so you must do something else. No one is without their guilty pleasures.”
“Regardless—and I’ll repeat this, because it seems you’ve already forgotten what I just said—” Diluc whisks the bottle away from Venti’s grasp. “That is none of your business. Go home now, you’re drunk enough.”
So very laughable, Diluc is. “You know I don’t have a home. All the more reason for this tragic bard to find a way to cope with his lonely nights. Help a man out, will you?”
“If you want a home, get a job. And if you’re so curious, I work to cope with certain stressors. Like bards loitering around my premises, stealing my stocks.”
“I don’t steal your stocks, okay? I beg for them,” Venti mutters, pouting. “If only you were as immune to my adorable face as… literally everyone else in this city is.”
“You’ve sorely gotten me mistaken if you think I would so easily succumb to a pretty face,” Diluc scoffs.
Venti likes that. A lot more than he thought he would. “Oh? Is this a declaration, then?”
“What of?”
“That you’ll be able to keep resisting me,” challenges Venti with a smirk. “I don’t doubt your hard-headedness, Master Diluc—you are, if anything, best known for your seriousness in every action you take, so I believe that if you say it as it is, then you would, indeed, not succumb to this pretty face so easily. But you forget your breath carries your heart with it. I have heard your heart as you tend to me in my drunken state; I have seen your breath hitch as those warm eyes of yours glaze over me. Even now, your hand tightens around that bottle with overflowing resistance—I hear, I hear. You forget part of a bard’s job is to listen for new muses to write poetry of, and I will prove you wrong in so many more ways than you can imagine.”
The lump on Diluc’s throat bobs up and down, but he keeps his glare hard on Venti.
“Say, then, Master—will you come with me?”
They whisk away out of the tavern faster than eyes could follow, clandestine touches and howls under the blotted out sky. Diluc’s warmth is familiar, yet not quite the same; he is never as harsh, never as demanding, never as painful. Never as much, but it’s there—and for a god over varieties, Venti will never complain about an experience, so long as it thrills and pleases him enough to forget the evening’s sentiments.
“I’ve missed you,” whispers Venti against Diluc’s bare clavicles.
Whatever Diluc thinks about it is made irrelevant as he makes no further comment. All that matters then is the ardor drives their mouths and hands in continuous tandem; an unending symphony that sings praises and hides a different melody in its rests.
Is it so strange that they are to meet in the border that divides their lands? They have always been neighbors, and forever is in their hands.
The bard has found himself company to a certain traveler, who he wishes to show the beauties of the snow mountain to; with a blessing by wind, they ascend to the cliffs atop the Stone Gate. Yet it must be the workings of Fate herself that a certain consultant stands, looking over the wetlands of Dihua and the plains of tragedy, twisted and shaped by the days of yore.
The world falls to a pause. The air stretches thin, the clouds disperse to mist and an empty gray blankets them. Amber against teal is all it takes to strike the thunder wild; a heart shaken and torn like the tumbles of stone down an avalanche, a heart restless as the billowing tempest sweeping all that was built into nothingness. Mouths fail the gods with every word ever invented at their disposal.
Lumine watches the two with sage apprehension; Paimon, who proves quite the curious companion, pays no heed to this divine discordance. “Look, it’s Zhongli! He’s a good friend of yours, isn’t he?” gushes she, not knowing of Venti’s unmoving feet, or caring of how bizarre it is for the winged god to be rooted. What a joyous occasion, after all—that two of the oldest, two of the original Seven should meet again after these loaded centuries, as mortals content with the state of things in their nations—in Zhongli’s case, what was once his nation.
Sharp-eyed Zhongli had seen them before they noticed him, so he is first to break himself out of the trance. A greeting; a smile. He makes no mention of Venti; not a snide remark, not a cry of nostalgia, not an offering of wine.
Nor does Venti give him the honor of being acknowledged. Paimon’s gaze alters between them, the confusion apparent in her face. It isn’t until Lumine tugs on her cape that understanding dawns on her, and she lets out a sheepish smile, her face a book with a font too large.
A knowing smile graces Lumine’s countenance, even as she brings herself to conclude the conversation with Zhongli for the sake of continuing her prior journey with Venti. They take their leave toward harsh Dragonspine, and when the wind returns, Zhongli walks to where it leads: the village north, where Rhodeia can be most certainly found still in her endless frenzy. It is as all things are, for the likes of them elemental beings—endless, endless going, save for Celestia’s own intervention.
No, there is nothing to be found strange in finding their stars crossed once more; that they should meet with the enigmatic traveler as witness can perhaps be attributed to mere coincidence.
But know this: nothing falls as coincidence among the strings of sibylline Kairos’ loom.
Inferno consumes the sky, though it would be inaccurate to say it so literally. In fact, Murata’s flames itself has long since extinguished, leaving only clouds of smoke in its wake—it is the life force itself that bleeds through the sky, the primordial element before Heaven, tearing apart what was seen as an anathema, when really it is no other than the Sustainer herself who believes so, blinded by pride and sadism.
It is through this substance, Morax assumes—though there are things that even he is forbidden from knowing, lest he be struck down into nihility as the others before him have—that the gods themselves are created. Being in that cataclysm is almost like drowning in one’s own blood—that’s how he feels anyway, breathless, suffocated in so much fear and regret that he can’t make vocal the one question he needs to ask. He figures not many will know the truth, either way; so much is lost to the fracture of the world, the reckless brutality of a nonsensical wrath. Every god he sees is left to mourn over their own losses; every man, gone with the wind.
A grainy cough tears its way out of Morax’s throat. He blames it on the floating soot.
A tear slips through his lower lash. He blames it on the acrid sting of space.
Morax’s hand hardens before it even forms a fist. He is the Lord of Geo, and his element envelops him always.
What explanation is left to make for the scorching of his lungs, and the shredding of his heart?
In this void where no one listens, Morax screams, crying to the solace of the victims who linger in mirages. The air is nowhere to be found—he gasps, and gasps, pulling on whatever thread of the wind there is left, desperate, so desperate to hold on to life. The intricate system of his mind that he’s refined with hard work and cunning over all the years skids to a halt, crumbling down like a block of sand in the face of his remorse.
Air—he needs it. Air. Morax is not in his mortal body, no—he is the pinnacle of godhood, the one archon above every other, the one who has lived the longest and suffered the most—he would not have weakness on his armor when he comes to fight a war. He is still here, searching for air when blood has consumed all else. He is still here, bellowing with whatever breath he has left, in futile hope to seek that which has gone.
Doom has dawned, it seems to Morax, as the air never comes.
“This is pointless, as it always is with you. You make it impossible to level with.”
“While I’d very much like to nitpick on your choice of words—because of course it is impossible to get on my level—” A hiccup cuts the smooth bard’s mischief, as he lets out a drowsy grin, “au contraire, love. The wind leaves always room for something new; that you can’t seem to get around it is merely a display of your short-sightedness, or even close-mindedness.”
The gentleman’s disappointment is as immeasurable as his fondness grows tall. “Always so proficient with your words, my dear, and always so fallacious. How do you expect me to argue against your self-proclaimed ‘sound’ logic when, eventually, they boil down to all but one: ‘I do as I please’?”
“It’s on you to assume logic on the nature of our arguments. Which, I suppose, only speaks volumes of how differently you and I see the world, really. Makes one wonder why we do this all over again, doesn’t it?”
Amber against teal—a sight that should be so familiar, with them having gone through it for eternity. How fascinating is it, then, that every encounter shall be new still; that they never run out of the force that drives them towards each other, time and again, without fail?
“Makes one wonder, indeed,” sighs the brooding gentleman—or so one would think if the slight quirk of his lips slip their notice.
People look to the heavens in hopes for divine favor to fall like sunlight graces all land. Hidden in the obsidian corners are the two deities, meshed in an entanglement of carnal mortality, a mess so ungodly, a hunger that even Celestia herself fails to feed. Tongues, breasts, hips collide at once, as fingers dig into a flesh they do not need, and they exhale breaths they do not have.
Morax’s hair, golden hued and as long as his own life has been, is left undone, so have Barbatos’ braids been unraveled in a gradient of cyan against the navy of his crown. The earth asserts his fingers between the sky’s curls, tugging on its strands as he gnaws on Barbatos’ lips with bottomless desire, his own bangs brushing between their foreheads. The wind does nothing but make the marks on Morax’s skin prick sharper, which Barbatos then would soothe with a brief, lingering kiss, before he moves on to make his damage in some other land. They have no need to rush, no; how they breathe in each other’s skin and mouths without rest is then left unexplained, unspoken, as only the sounds of pleasure echo throughout the darkened bedroom.
In all this, they keep their eyes closed. It is not Barbatos’ gratification, nor one of Morax’s rules for intercourse. No, it is that they cannot bear to open their eyes. They are sinners before each other, and not to uncover the blinds that reveal too much of them, during this dance of longing and loneliness.
They are deities, still. Barbatos knows that Morax kisses him, holds him close to bedrock, with the love for one who has passed, one he can no longer reclaim and do as he once wished to do. Morax knows that Barbatos cares not who he makes love to so long as his body is made a temple, carved well with teeth and claw. They do not need to speak of this, for their confessions come out in their whimpers and moans enough.
No, there is nothing strange about the gods to be twisted; that they make each other, above all others, a means to their own selfishness may perhaps be attributed to mere coincidence.
But know this: nothing falls as coincidence among the strings of sibylline Kairos’ loom.
Perhaps, too, it is so that their hearts gain a fraction of respite from the cruelty of Celestia, that she decides to keep their eyes closed, even if there is no need for so in the night.
The lyre is out to play, yet the bard strums it not.
He sits by the tower, the lyre ahead of him, hoisted into the air through the constant flow of Anemo. It is not hard to draw on such a power here, not when so much is left to void and ruin, and one of the Winds themselves rest here when all is done. The dragon notices that the indolent god does not sing, nor does he touch his wine; his darkened pensive gaze is cast far south against the wind, sending his hair in chaos.
“Sing of your sorrow, as you do in olden days,” says the dragon, “and blow on to live another day.”
But Barbatos cannot find his voice; he finds that he is consumed by it. By song, melody, harmony, instrument—all in a haphazard concoction of a tragic rhapsode that deafens. His mouth yields not a single word, and he attempts with his hands to make an expression of himself. They latch onto the ground instead, onto the stone wall on which he leans, unwilling to let go. He is seconds into disintegrating—he knows—and he loathes it so. Let him be human for a moment. Let him feel, his heart is screaming. It comes out in no other way than through his tears, flowing incessantly all over his face, all his senses frozen in time.
Alas, the wind consumes him, and he dissolves into a spirit, whisked off the ground so fast, spiraling up into the open sky. Barbatos reaches for the ground, but finds he cannot touch it; his hands, his feet, all are gone as his grief consumes him from the inside out. What’s left of him whirls into a windstorm, trashing against the ruins of the home he once abandoned long ago, yearning, yearning that he might return to the home he’s since chosen, his one and only shelter left.
He is dead, they say, and Barbatos can no longer feel him through his fingertips—but how is it that he sees him everywhere? Even in the mountains where he dwells in freedom, even in the city where he saunters about inebriated, the ghost of him remains in every little corner, every little craft, every little conversation—all calling out to him, haunting his daylights with the regret he thought he would never have to feel.
The storm persists. Thunder roars and rain descends violently; not a melodious tune to be heard in twilight.
Where does Barbatos go, now that he has lost his anchor and ground, his home, once more?
Purple petals settle gently on Zhongli’s crown, only to be as quickly blown away. “That tree,” he points to the peak of the tallest mountain, surrounded by gates of red in a spiral, “hasn’t always been there, has it?”
Raiden Ei, once the kagemusha, casts her gaze upon the tree in question. The smile she lets out is one Zhongli has seen so often, in those around him, in his own reflection. One that screams of an agony unutterable, of a love that cannot be made known in any way other than to let it leak out of the soul however it pleases. “Indeed, it hasn’t. I’ve only planted it recently.”
“With the end of the decree?” prompts Zhongli. “A change of setting for a change of mind?”
“I’d like to put it as… a promise to the people. To our people.” Ei’s voice has fallen to a whisper, as though it will be too sorrowful for anyone else to handle, and perhaps it is, indeed, true of all the gods. “Perhaps, though, it is more accurate to call it a tombstone.”
Zhongli’s contemplative gaze shifts to the sister beside him, a face so achingly familiar, an entity so foreign. Ei is nothing like her sister, benevolent and understanding, wise beyond the limits of her godhood, so graceful in her transience. Yet still the two gods left standing have more in common than Zhongli does with the late archon—both warriors, both witnesses of bloodshed and endless death, both having lost their everything that night.
“The tree—it’s a parting gift from Makoto. One that is to define the true Eternity to come,” says Ei, with a smile that holds centuries of memory.
Even so long after her death, the goddess lives on, it has seemed. As so has divinity, unending—not in the human notion of a preserved memory, an ideal timelessness. Each of their souls are to be recycled, the faulty remnants scattered throughout this current world, as have all the ones before them: those who perished in the war, those who they have worked with, those who they have loved violently—they reemerge as life through the leylines, their power spread as boons in domains not many dare venture into. And then, when all this is over, they are to live this cycle again. This is the cursed boulder they haul. This is the august destiny they bear.
Ei’s smile is reflected in Zhongli’s own lips. “It has grown well.”
“Only with Time’s blessing, it has.”
Time, you say? Zhongli gazes once more into the towering tree in the distance, blooming violet against the bright blue sky. Even with so much that has been and so much that has gone, she always has a way of evading even the attentive god’s notice, so subtle in her dexterity and loud in her silence. So has the Ruler made her move again, it seems, slow and steady as prudence flows.
“And what of Barbatos?” asks Ei, now turning to look at the older god with new curiosity. “I hear he calls himself Venti?”
“For the wind,” Zhongli nods. “As for his whereabouts…”
The wind blows around them, swaying their long hairs in waves as they continue to walk, bubble milk tea in their hands as way of experiencing this new mortal world. The sun-kissed horizon glitters the shore, and still the waters know no rest; it comes, and comes, and comes to meet the sand.
“Who can ever speak of his whereabouts with such certainty?”
Ei lets out a laugh, and for a moment it’s easy to believe she’s related to the late Makoto. “I know scant about the two of you, since it is my sister you have oft had the chance of meeting. But in what little time we have spent together, only one constant have I ever noticed—no matter how wide space strives to push you apart, he is your gravity, and you, his.”
There were once children, in a city submerged in sorrow, who were granted the power to light the world.
There were once children, who knew naught but to play, to roam, to listen to the world who speaks in glowing sprouts and wayward fish. They had names—they had many names—but no one remembers them. Not even the children themselves, who have now gone on to live another damned eternity.
They were once children, and they were once doomed to a life of malicious order and helplessness. They did not know any better, and they condemned those who mean no fault, those the world decided to prosecute for their own selfish intentions. They think themselves wisest, for they think themselves highest; they think themselves highest, for everyone else puts them up there; they think nothing of the throne they sit on, and fall into their own coffins. They did not know any better. They did not know any better.
What they wanted was not power.
One wished only to sing to the world beyond, and one, to bring life out of molded clay.
The lonesome god walks by the rocks that tower, just by the river flowing from up north. Falcons cry from high up, rejoicing for the sun that has come out of its hiding; the trees of spring shrug off the last of the week’s worth of raindrops. The morning is quiet spare for nature’s morning business, and the refined gentleman that stands out in the midst of all life stands content with where he is, the cup of tea in his hand a complement to his serenity.
Even the wind makes his entrance in silence. The dew dampens the sound of his footsteps, but the puddles betray his presence. He carries the scent of a prelude with him, an ode to the beginnings of an epic, one which leaves the listener with an eagered spirit, impatiently awaiting for the next. Unfortunate it is for them, then, that this bard in particular has no regard for human time; he sings that which he wishes to on each day and rarely has he ever sung something truthful, and he scatters his truths in time that seemingly cannot collide.
Only they know the truth—that all times are perpetually in a state of collision, and all moments are entwined with one another.
Zhongli does not turn to look at the bard, but he slows his pace enough to keep track of his presence. There is a song even in the air that bears no melody, only a brilliant synchronization of footsteps and heartbeats. In the distance, dawncatchers flock and jump out of the water in glee, and cranes circle the fragrant Lotus Flowers. So rarely do the gods appreciate the sentient world, Zhongli thinks to himself, admiring the workings of wildlife around each other, like little gears in what makes a clock.
He slows to a halt. Venti passes him still like the unimpeded wind, and their hands brush for the briefest moment, a moment splintered into seconds, seconds that find their way in memories and dreams, in cecilia, clear wine, the first breath at sunrise.
Zhongli can let it be so—for what are seconds to they, who are bound to live the end of all things, and relive the beginning of all things?
Instead he reaches out and slips his hand into Venti’s, interlocking their fingers like the wind currents complement stony cliffs. Teal eyes meet his amber ones as they gaze into each other, a million questions hung high in the air, a million more feelings coursing from the contact out through their nerves.
Have we not borne the weight of history alone for long enough?
The sun falls right on Venti, illuminating the god’s philosophical solemnity. You know Eternity separates us. Will you then still risk these moments, when there is no happy ending to be gained for us?
But there is no ending for us; every of our seconds is a middle. Zhongli takes the step forward, narrowing the space between them. And Eternity binds as much as it separates—that is enough of a reason, and more, to risk all else.
The road ahead will not prove easy.
Nothing has. We would know that best.
Amber and teal blend like sunrise paints the blue of dawn, every morn past and every morn to come, without fail. They have lived on, after everything. They will live still.
Doom is the price they carry for love—of the lands, of the people, of each other. It doesn’t sound half as bad a cacophony, when they have their hands joined and heartbeats aligned.