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For yet another time, Diluc was out doing something the knights had been too incompetent to get done.
It didn’t help that the cavalry captain himself, Kaeya, had found this Ley Line anomaly. Diluc couldn’t get too angry at Kaeya right now, considering it hadn’t been long since he’d started working full-time after the whole curse incident, but... in Diluc’s opinion, it should’ve been well within the Knights’ power to organize an investigation. Ley Line anomalies did often pose threats to travelers and merchants, after all. So he’d begrudgingly taken it upon himself.
This one was well outside of the main city limits of Mondstadt, not far east of the Thousand Winds Temple. It was still within the reach of the reconnaissance company, though, which made the situation all the worse because he’d still ended up here.
He suspected something would happen once he approached it. The Ley Lines were fragile things; he’d not put much effort into studying them, but he did know they were deeply connected to the elements all throughout Teyvat. As a vision wielder, Ley Lines had always seemed to treat him differently.
What would come out of it was a gamble. Nobody really knew what caused a Ley Line to ‘record’ something, but it ended up being monsters more often than not. He hadn’t heard one story that had gone otherwise. This one hadn’t been here before, which was part of what had helped Kaeya distinguish it as an anomaly.
Diluc hoped silently to himself that this one would be something easy so he could finally get some well-needed rest. He stepped closer.
For a few moments, nothing happened.
Then there was a rustling in the bushes. Diluc reached for his weapon, ready to activate his vision. There was likely only one of whichever monster this was, and it seemed small enough to not be visible just yet.
The leaves rustled again. Diluc took a short look around to make sure there was nothing in the surrounding area. All clear.
Then a boy emerged from the bushes.
Diluc took a step backward then, his hand faltering on the hilt of his claymore. The boy couldn’t have been older than twelve, maybe thirteen, with a familiar shade of dark blue hair and tanned skin. ‘This is not Kaeya,’ he reminded himself, even if the boy looked the part. He needed to stay on his guard.
The child looked at him with no sign of aggression, but perhaps a sort of fear. Diluc noticed the clothes he was wearing—he was not from Mondstadt. His features felt all too familiar, all the same, down to the way his jaw led down to his chin and the shape of his hairline. Yet... both of his eyes were a pale blue. It wasn’t Kaeya.
“Who are you?” Diluc tried, hoping the boy would understand the common tongue as well as Kaeya first had, at least. Some more remote villages did still neglect to teach it to their children.
The boy looked down at his feet, then at his surroundings, his lips parting with something that looked awfully similar to awe. Then he looked back to Diluc, finally saying something, a question. “Where am I?”
This was a tough question. Just how much did this kid know? Would a simple ‘Teyvat’ suffice, or was he familiar with the region and just needed to orient himself a bit? Archons, Diluc wasn’t even sure if this kid was actually a manifestation of the Ley Lines or not. For all he knew, this could have been another Kaeya situation.
“You’re in Mondstadt,” he eventually settled on, taking one last glance around and letting his arms fall to his sides. Then he repeated, “Who are you?”
“Mondstadt,” the kid breathed, looking around with a sort of wistful look in his eyes. “I’ve always wanted to visit Teyvat.” His common was confident but heavily accented, as if he had learned it from someone who was fluent but still foreign.
“Who are you?” This was the third time he’d asked this. He needed to try a different approach. “I’m Diluc Ragnvindr. I run the Dawn Winery here in Mond.” And he really hoped his voice was as gentle as he had intended it to be, because he was trying his best.
The boy looked up to the sky, rubbing at his eyes and shielding them from the sun. He seemed distracted, but then he finally replied. “I’m Ruen Alberich. I’m from—”
“Wait you’re... who?” Diluc hoped he had heard wrong, because he was certainly not ready for this.
“Ruen... Alberich?” The kid looked at him, confusion written plain on his face. “I’m the prince of Khaenri’ah and... I’m dreaming, aren’t I?”
Diluc’s heart hammered in his chest. The implications of this were vast, but it was clearly work of the Ley Lines at this point. Could messing with Ley Lines mess with the past events it had recorded? This didn’t quite seem to be a recording, either. There was a living, breathing human boy standing right in front of him. One he knew about, too.
“I suppose so,” he said, unsure of another appropriate response.
This was Ruen. Ruen Alberich. The same Ruen who had been killed by his own father at the age of twelve, which couldn’t have been long from now, who had died in a pool of his own blood due to an injustice that wasn’t even related to anything he’d done in his life. Because he was twelve, and this was the boy Kaeya had known as his brother for the entire six years he’d spent in Khaenri’ah before being deposited in Mondstadt by the very same father who had killed Ruen.
Resentment coiled in Diluc’s gut. Kaeya’s grief about his brother’s death had been clear to him, but something felt so much more real about it now that he was seeing the object of it right before him. The king truly was a horrible man.
If Ruen was dreaming—or, at least, if he thought he was—then Diluc needed to play into what he already knew about Ruen. Or maybe it was just the curiosity clawing at the back of his mind. “You’re the brother of Kaeya Alberich, right?”
Ruen took a few steps away from the bush and closer to Diluc. “Yes, I am,” he said. “Do you know him?”
The Ley Lines were damn weird, Diluc could give them that. He wondered if it was the risk to go get Kaeya and have him talk to his brother himself, but... maybe not. Maybe Kaeya didn’t need that. Maybe Diluc really, really wanted to know more. “I do,” he said carefully, considering how much to reveal. If he said too much, Ruen would likely later end up perceiving this ‘dream’ as more of a prophecy than something only within his head. If he said too little... he wouldn’t learn what he wanted to know. “How old are you?”
“I’m eleven,” Ruen said. Then he asked, “What are you doing here?”
Diluc frowned. “What am I doing here?”
“You know—where and when you’re from. What you’re doing here. I’ve never met you before.”
Diluc had never actually bothered to ask the people in his dreams questions, but he’d never had a propensity toward lucid dreaming either. Ruen seemed to regard this as largely normal, so far. He’d have to go with it.
“Well...” He couldn’t just say he was from the future, could he? Or... perhaps it was the ‘when’ that was the issue. “I know your brother. We spent a lot of our childhood together.” Diluc winced. He hoped Ruen wouldn’t take that information and run with it.
Ruen frowned. “We’re growing up together.”
He was so bad with kids. “Time is a funny thing. Who you grow up with is only a matter of perspective.” It sounded philosophical, but he actually had no idea what he was explaining.
He scoured his mind for what little he knew about Ley Lines. Even the best scholars of Mondstadt had not found out much, and even those of Sumeru Akademiya who had would not share what they had learned for fear of something he couldn’t understand.
The elements were important. Ley Lines were a flow of pure elemental energy, were they not? And somehow, through that, they managed to sometimes record happenings of the past, or possibly the future. What was he missing?
It was Kaeya who had found this anomaly.
The royal powers. That was it.
The powers of the Khaenri’ahn royal family, the ability to control time and space... could influence the flow of elements itself. And Kaeya...
He’d thought Kaeya’s powers were completely gone by now, but perhaps not. Maybe there were some little residuals, and he’d somehow influenced...
Damn, he was thinking in circles. If he wasn’t going to be figuring it out, he’d have to go off of guesswork.
“I grew up with Kaeya too, but it was different from how you grew up with him,” Diluc finished, hoping he was making more sense than he thought he was.
“Alright,” Ruen said, accepting it more readily than Diluc would have expected. Then he sat down in the grass, looking again to the sky. “I wonder how long I’m going to be here.” Despite his words, he didn’t look the least bit impatient.
“You don’t want to wake up?”
“Nope,” Ruen said casually, pulling at a handful of grass with his hand. “I haven’t had a dream like this about Teyvat yet. I can still hope that...”
Diluc looked to him for a moment before sitting down next to him, hoping his presence wasn’t as imposing as it always seemed to be. “Hope that?” he echoed.
“Father did say dreams are often connected to one’s powers. Perhaps mine are finally starting to show, and this is...” Ruen averted his eyes, biting his lip. He reminded Diluc of how Kaeya had been when he was younger. “Well, I’ve always wanted to see the stars.”
This, Diluc remembered.
Ruen would never get to see the stars, unless he stayed right now. He knew this. Ruen did not.
“The stars will be out in a few hours,” Diluc told him. “You will see them then.” He earned a small smile in return.
“The plants in Khaenri’ah are different,” Ruen observed, holding up a single floret of a dandelion near to his eyes. “We do not have a sun.”
“Is that so?”
“Mhm.”
For several minutes, Ruen just sat there, observing the world around him with wide, perceiving eyes. Diluc knew this was likely the first and last time he would ever visit Teyvat.
Diluc didn’t normally allow himself to slow enough to appreciate nature, but he tried to think about it from Ruen’s perspective for a moment. Ruen had never felt the warmth of the sun, seen the sky, had never experienced the four seasons, nor felt rain on his skin. Yet a gentle breeze that he knew Ruen could feel brushed against his back, the sun was warm overhead, and in every direction, there was life.
This was something he had always taken for granted, that he knew for a fact Kaeya had not.
Kaeya. That was why he was still here.
He needed to know more about Ruen. He needed to understand. It was only fitting for him, as Kaeya’s brother, to understand the other of his kind. He needed to understand what Kaeya had felt when he’d looked at his brother, what their life had been like, how that compared to Diluc.
Kaeya having another brother had come as a huge shock to him at first, but the notion had slowly started to make more sense over time. That was why Kaeya had latched onto him so much when they had first met, that was why they had settled so easily into the dynamic of older and younger brother.
Jealousy was not something Diluc wanted to let himself feel. Ruen was dead. But some sense of inadequacy had always been inevitable. Because he hadn’t known. He'd thought it was only him, for so many years... only to now find out more about Kaeya’s past than he’d ever thought existed.
“Are you real?”
Diluc turned to look at Ruen, fiddling with his gloves. This was certainly... a question. “It is your dream,” he said. “Do you think I’m real?” Vague and ominous, as such dreams tended to be. Perhaps he wasn’t doing such a bad job at playing his part.
“Is Kaeya doing well?” Ruen asked suddenly, stretching his legs out in front of him. An abrupt subject change, something Diluc had become very used to in his years spent with Kaeya. It wasn’t always with bad intent, either. He just had to play along.
Diluc took a moment to consider. “Yes,” he said. “And he very much wishes he could see you right now.”
Ruen’s expression faltered. “Am I dead?”
Diluc didn’t answer.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have.” A bitter smile. “I’m not supposed to ask about the future.”
He could have asked Ruen if he was real in return, but something about that felt wrong. Influencing the past in any way felt wrong, and if he did well, he supposed he wouldn’t have to worry about that. Except... if the past influenced the future, and vice-versa, did that mean this had already happened before? And him having had this conversation with Ruen had led to it happening again, and again, and again? Perhaps he was destined to do it correctly. That would be simple.
He really didn’t understand how this whole ‘time powers’ thing worked.
“What’s your weapon there?” Ruen asked, gesturing vaguely in Diluc’s direction. So he had seen it. He seemed to have a few more questions, and Diluc was glad to answer them to the best reasonable extent.
“A claymore, wielded with two hands. I started learning when I was ten. Do you have these in Khaenri’ah?”
“I’m not sure,” Ruen admitted, rolling some grass between his fingers.
Diluc drew his claymore and set it gently in the grass between the two of them. He didn’t normally let people touch his weapons, but this felt like a special situation.
“Could we go somewhere else?” Ruen continued, starting to run his fingers over the blade. Diluc noted how he had said ‘we.’
But he wasn’t sure how the Ley Lines worked, still. “No,” he said, “I don’t believe we can.”
Ruen simply nodded, withdrawing his hand from Diluc’s weapon.
Half an hour later, the sun was beginning to set and Ruen had gone quiet again. He was laying in the grass, staring up at the sky. Diluc was still thinking.
“Sunset,” Diluc told Ruen. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
Something about this whole situation left Diluc feeling so insignificant. He meant nothing in the grand scheme of the universe compared to Kaeya, who had saved everyone across the seven lands of Teyvat, one of the sole survivors of a perished kingdom. And he was one of Kaeya's two brothers, only a replacement to patch the Ruen-shaped hole that the Cataclysm had left. Teyvat was huge, the abyss was infinite in both time and space, and he meant nothing.
He could accept this. Being a replacement didn’t mean as much when he saw Ruen right in front of him, tangible and very much a living, breathing person. Separate from Diluc, and so very different.
And meaning nothing was somewhat of a blessing, in a way. There was never anything expected of him by the universe. Kaeya had more of a destiny he did, and it was restrictive. Things had been planned for him without him even having been aware. Diluc was just another piece in the puzzle that was the chess board of life; Kaeya was one of the pawns.
The stars emerged slowly. Diluc sat, looking up at the sky at Ruen’s side. Maybe he could make peace with this. Maybe he and Ruen could coexist as ideas in Kaeya’s mind, at some point, if Diluc only helped him out. They had made progress, after all.
“Is it everything you ever dreamed of?” Diluc asked when the stars were bright and the moon was shining.
“It’s more,” Ruen said softly, crossing his arms over his chest. The faint glow of moonlight painted his face a wistful sort of color. “Is it true that each person has their own constellation?”
“Only those blessed by the divine,” Diluc told him, reaching for his vision. “Each star represents a part of someone’s archon-proven ambition.”
“The divine,” Ruen echoed. “Khaenri’ah does not have gods.”
“Gods are a funny thing. They exist whether you believe in them or not, yet who they are there for is a different question altogether.” And Khaenri’ah had not worshipped a god, so a god had not appeared to them.
“Is Kaeya welcome here by the gods?”
Diluc thought back to how Venti—Barbatos—spoke of his people. “I do believe so.”
Ruen peered up at the sky for several moments longer, seeming so young in that moment. “I think I need to wake up now.”
Diluc wanted to tell him to not wake up, because he knew it wasn’t safe. He wanted to rewind time so none of this had ever happened, but at the same time, he wanted Kaeya’s happiness to reside with him still.
Heaving a quick sigh, said, “Goodbye, then, Ruen.”
“Goodbye.”
Ruen disappeared into thin air, just like that.
Diluc sat up. That was a lot, and it had been very sudden. He...
Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes. He had actually met Kaeya’s brother, his five-hundred-years-dead older brother. Ruen had seen the stars, but... as a dream.
Kaeya had told him Ruen had never gotten to see the stars, but that wasn’t true.
He wondered if Ruen even knew.
“Nothing of importance,” he told Kaeya, who he knew could see right through his lies. “It would have been trivial for any knight.”
Thankfully, Kaeya tended to play along when it didn’t seem serious. “Thank you for your efforts, then, Master Diluc.”
Despite the teasing lilt to Kaeya’s voice, Diluc rolled his eyes. “Just Diluc, please.”
“Right.” Kaeya took a long sip of his drink. He was looking better now than he had in months. The effects of the curse and his kidnapping were finally out of his system, it seemed.
They had been doing well lately. Not as good as before, and not as good as they could have been, but better than they had been in years nevertheless.
Diluc wasn’t ready to share what he had seen. He wasn’t sure if Kaeya was ready, either.
Someday, though, maybe he would finally help Kaeya make peace. Ruen had been able to see the stars, after all.