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He returns from the Chasm to his post at Wangshu Inn, guarding the all important pass within Dihua Marsh, and the days seem to fly - or crawl - by at their usual pace, and everything in his line of sight seems unchanged, from the reeds in the marsh to the statue of his Archon greeting various people into the land of Geo and trade. The strength of the demon gods festering underneath the earth and the monsters he banishes remain the same too; he continues his duties just like he has for the past two millennia, as if nothing significant has happened, ever, during his time at this post.
But that is not true, and he knows that in his heart.
There was the swearing in of the Seven, the Cataclysm, and most recently, his nearest brush with death yet.
Nothing has changed, Xiao thinks.
He is alone in his agony, while the people of Liyue are safe in the harbor, with the might of the Qixing behind them. Even with Rex Lapis’s passing, Xiao knows that he lives on in Zhongli-daren, most definitely presiding over Liyue, observing the humans lead their unchanging life cycles, those short years from childhood to adulthood to withering skin, basking under the sun in delight or sobbing from the hardships in a human life, something that he cannot personally relate to, since his hardships are all brushes with death and monsters, not the mundane life hassles of humans.
The pond is silent, and no ripples break its surface.
Nothing has changed, Xiao thinks.
But he knows it in his heart: Everything has changed.
Liyue is no longer under the sovereign reign of Rex Lapis, his Archon; his last hopes of seeing one of his yaksha family was shattered forever, leaving him shattered memories of Bosacius’s last moments, and the golden-haired Traveler was stirring up all types of things within their world.
But most importantly, when did his belief… turn into that… unspeakable, shameful thing?
*
If he was running away from it before, he knows he has to admit it to himself now: his belief in his Archon has changed. Even that… something that Xiao had sworn to himself would never change… even that had changed.
He curls his lip as he thinks about his “pitiful” state, lounging in one of the highest branches of the Wangshu Inn after a particularly grueling session of fighting with all of the monsters in the area, in exchange for the moment of rest.
And you dare call yourself a subject? Get a grip on yourself, Alatus.
The pull of karma in his bones signifies that more demons of the deep have popped up somewhere in his general vicinity, so he flips off the tree in pursuit of them, banishing those terrible thoughts to the back of his mind.
*
But now that he has realized these thoughts exist, they come back to plague him, more and more often. When he is eating almond tofu, when he is washing the blood off his hands after battles, when he leans against a tree out in the wild to catch a little bit of rest, they swirl back into his mind, and unlike the demons and curses, he is unable to banish them. They make up a little bit of his current existence, after all. He cannot banish them, no matter how hard he tries.
Slowly but surely, they chip away at his defenses.
Xiao knows that he is going to break, somehow, and just hopes that it comes at a time where his Archon cannot see the sins he has committed.
*
It’s been around two weeks since the incident at the Chasm, Xiao thinks, as he observes the floating disc of white light that bathes the marshes in a serene halo. When his Archon had appeared on the balcony of the Wangshu Inn, there had been no moon. Only the halo of the lanterns in the doorway and the slightly dimmer stars against the black carpet of the night sky illuminated Rex Lapis’s majestic figure.
A turn of the moon from new to full, and Xiao wonders if he can even last until the next new moon.
*
Another two weeks later, Xiao thinks that the raging fire in his heart has subsided a little, and maybe he can just live on. No one but him knows, and he is absolutely fine with that.
And then he nearly loses it.
Xiao stumbles along the cliffs of Jueyun Karst, slightly battered and bruised from a fight that had gone slightly wrong due to his recklessness, the monsters being prepared for his attack, losing him the element of surprise, all because he had stepped on a twig when he was thinking about Zhongli when he was stalking his targets. What a rookie mistake.
Still, for him, it is nothing much to worry about. Xiao clutches his spear as he stumbles along, finally finding the tree on the ledge that he knows will offer him respite.
Sinking down the trunk of the tree to the ground is relief at its finest, Xiao thinks, observing the yellow leaves and above him. It’s too comfortable, it might put him to sleep, a dangerous state to be in out in the wild. However, there’s a slight breeze catching on his bangs, the rock beside him faintly emits a sense of power that he has come to associate with security and comfort, an entity holding the power of the Geo Archon. Tipping his head back and peering through the soft yellow leaves rewards him with a sliver of bright blue sky.
Despite knowing better, Xiao lets the reins of his tiredness loose just a little, and slips into the darkness behind his eyelids.
*
He wakes up to the acrid smell of things burning before he realizes that he is the one burning. Pyro aligned monsters surround him as he jumps to his feet hurriedly and summoning all of his Anemo power, no matter how tainted with karma it is, to put out the fire on his body, all the while trying to fend off the monsters.
If his previous fight early in the day had only gone slightly wrong, this one was going spectacularly wrong in all ways imaginable. There were no ways for him to stop the pain and stinging signals from the burns on his body to stop crowding into his mind as he brings his spear to chest level and tries to sweep away the monsters so that he wasn’t in any immediate danger.
Despite the agonizing clash of both the karma in his bones and the scorching, stinging pain on his body, he finishes exorcizing the monsters before falling to his knees again.
He grits his teeth, eyebrows knitted together, two canines digging into his lip, hoping that the brief, sharp bit of pain could prevent him from going out cold again. He tries to think. What did he need to survive?
Mist… flowers… for the burns…
Xiao pants and tries to reel in his consciousness and pain. Without even thinking much about it, he barely manages to push himself to his feet and teleports, on instinct, to Qingyun Peak, where the statue of his Archon awaits him, along with a couple clumps of qingxin, good things to help him fight the pain.
He collapses at the foot of the statue, reaching out a shaky hand towards the direction of the qingxin, before abandoning that sequence of actions, and, in his slight delirium, reaches towards his Archon’s statue.
He caresses the base as if it were his most treasured thing in the world.
“My lord,” he whispers, gasping from the pain involved behind every single syllable, “I… still haven’t thanked you yet for the help you’ve extended to me at the Chasm. I’ve… been hiding, since I don’t want to admit that I had become a burden to you, my lord…”
Xiao feels the walls start to crack, and despite having a burn on his left cheek, he can’t stop the tears from falling, and tears roll over the burn, sending electrifying bolts of pain down Xiao’s spine, but he cannot stop the emotions from breaking through the defensive walls he had tried for a month to maintain, to shore up, but as reality had dictated, they were nothing but cardboard cutouts in front of his raging emotions.
“I’m sorry I’ve always been a burden to you,” he whispers. “I’m sorry that you’ve had to deal with me being a nuisance for so long. It would have been better if Bosacius survived. He was a hero. I am not. Despite what I’ve told the Traveler, I am not.”
Darkness rushes up to him, but in the sliver of clarity before it envelopes him, he whispers, “But I love you.”