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It all begins with a desperate shriek.
“NO!” Scaramouche howled, eyes wild, hand outstretched. The gnosis glanced against his fingertips and fell away, down, down, guided into small hands that he couldn’t help but focus on.
The tubes and string and wires and all else snapped away from his body with a sudden, startling noise. A grotesque rip echoes in his ears as the main tube tears away from his spine, the liquid within warm on his skin as if it was blood. All that he can focus on is the loss of godhood, of a heart, glancing against his fingertips before he fails once again to mean something.
He, too, fell away. The fall was like this: sudden, shocking. The clarity hit him when the air surrounding his deadened body became soft, when the empty maw of his chest became full for just a moment with that freedom. For a moment, hollowed out with wind, he was flying.
(A bird made of metal will expect to fly, but without feathers, without blood and bone and a heart, it could never truly fly. It will leap from objects that grow gradually taller, chasing that brief moment of flight.
Eventually, it will choose a height too far.)
It begins with a heart and a fall and Scaramouche has always had a history of falling. He falls first when he is made; a bird settles on a tree’s branch just a few feet away and he is filled with so much awe it makes tears well in his eyes. His mother—creator—looks down at him with disappointed eyes, and he never knows why until he is left alone, no beating heart of thunder within him.
He is made to contain a great, big heart. Even without one he was able to cry, able to smile and rage and shriek injustice in a dead room. He is able to fall in love with things so incredibly easily, then, because he has no heart to tell him that there is too much love. That there will be grief if he loves this too much, if he holds it too dear and close, if he watches the birds unknowing that they will die in barely even a hundredth of his lifetime.
He is created to hold the heart of the gentle Electro Archon Makoto. Created to hold that and cradle it and protect it and love it. The very worst thing that had never happened was the gifting of that heart. You create a life with a mind and feelings and love and you deny it the heart you wished for it. You create a life and leave it forever yearning for something it can never have.
Scaramouche… falls. It begins and ends with Niwa, with supposed betrayal, with Dottore. It begins and ends with false godhood with a stolen Gnosis, with shrieking wind, with a hollow chest.
It begins and ends with Kunikuzushi, Kabukimono, The Balladeer, Scaramouche, the Wanderer, and—
Nobody ever notices. They leave his body in the rubble when it crashes down harshly enough to go straight through two layers of concrete. He was able to cry. The Doctor had never removed his tear ducts.
He was able to cry. He shed a tear for the first time in what must have been eternity. It’s covered by the rubble and dust and nobody will ever notice the dried tear but it was there. It happened. If he could scream he would, would scream until his throat gave out, until his godbuilt lungs collapsed, would laugh and howl and shriek until everything inside of his chest imploded.
He would. He would.
He witnesses only the faintest tinge of green before he finally succumbs to what must be death.
_
Scaramouche—a name he finds he doesn’t like much anymore—opens his eyes. He expects Dottore’s lab, his chest torn open, condensed-electro-metal ribs gaping open as the man shoved his hands into whatever resembled a stomach within Scaramouche’s body. He doesn’t expect to see anything warm, or soft.
Green is the first thing that he is able to see, color soft and warm and indescribably gentle. Entirely unexpected.
The first he is able to feel is the baffling softness of the sheets. Sometimes it catches in the exposed innards of his left arm when he shifts, something that hasn’t happened in decades. He lifts his eyes again only to be faced with the visage of a little girl, hunched over a desk. Drooling, more like.
He looks closer and the realization hits him like lightning, however ironic the comparison. His throat works for a moment, words normally strong and steady coming out as a croak, “Kusanali.”
She’s still dead asleep. He almost wishes that Archons or other such immortal beings could just drop dead just like that. As if from a heart attack. It would be wonderful, truly.
She’s clearly not going to move any time soon, so he has time to think. To wonder why he is still alive. They did not have to bring him and nurse him back to health, as they’ve apparently done. He couldn’t give less of a shit about most humans and he’s already tried to essentially decimate several nations. It wouldn’t be worth it to just… release him again on the populace.
Scaramouche comes to a conclusion. Usually, his conclusions are twisted and generally strange, but this time he’s gotten it right. Kusanali either wants to make a deal with him or something along those lines. If not that, then at least assure herself that he won’t be a threat.
_
It takes an hour before the Dendro Archon awakens. He’d almost resorted to recounting the ceiling tiles in his boredom, unable to recall why he chose not to simply force her awake. She seems to immediately focus on him with an odd intensity, emotion he can’t name lest he becomes unimaginably angry bright in her little green eyes.
The two stare at each other. Scaramouche only blinks first because his eyes aren’t eternally fueled by the power of Dendro. Or something. (His eyes are crafted from a substance none other than the gods could recognize—glass blown, colored with dyes indescribably expensive. He doesn’t even need to imitate blinking. Nor do his eyes need to be open in order to see.)
Kusanali smiles, expression oddly stiff on her face, though he thinks it’s more because she’s been in a divine sensory deprivation chamber unable to develop beyond dream-hopping and observing through the Akasha rather than some mixture of anger or displeasure.
He opens his mouth, thinking of all the questions to ask before his throat reminds him that it likely has a crack in the side—or something got stuck in there. At least he remembers why he’d chosen not to wake Kusanali up, considering he’d only be able to throw objects at her in order to do so or make pathetic wheezing noises until the rattle of the metal against his esophagus woke her.
He’s having a great day.
It gets even better when, bulldozing by his blatant attempt to speak, Kusanali says; “Do you want to make a deal, Kunikuzushi?”
She even used a name that would at the very least make it obvious that she would go along with whatever name he chose for himself once he got his shit together, though how she knew that he would choose another name in the first place was odd. Looking at her big eyes and uncomfortably childlike exterior, something inside of him crumples like wet paper. He really hopes that it was another placebo organ that Dottore shoved in there.
It’s not like he had a choice, really. He asks for the terms of the deal by staring at her very hard, bullies Kusanali into a few changes, and agrees. Unwillingly.
Looking at the little smile on her face, small and childlike and strangling some invisible snake in his chest, almost makes the fact that he now has to spend at least thirty minutes each night talking to a child-Archon as a misplaced attempt at therapy worthwhile. Almost.
(A bird made of metal is still a bird. A puppet lacking a heart is not human, explicitly. But humanity always becomes a rather thin line when you recall that there are hundreds of different creatures in the world that resemble humans. Hundreds of creatures with societies and stories and languages and hearts.
The bird made of metal falls from a great height. Its metal wings are mangled in the fall, and it thinks that it will die in an odd, abstract way. It thinks, perhaps I will be reborn as a real bird next time. It thinks, perhaps I will have feathers, wings, talons and a heart.
Gentle claws pick its crumpled form from off of the ground. It gazes upward at a real bird, feathered and magnificent and with a true beating heart. It says, My name is Niwa, Kabukimono.
The metal bird creates something resembling a heart out of the scrap, as the years pass.)
_
He realizes he is in a dream once he hears screaming. It is his own voice, still capable of softness, without that death-rattle that’s accompanied him beyond his hundredth year after an unfortunate encounter with Dottore that ended with several rocks shoved inside of his body and left in there. It is a scream of rage, of injustice, of something resembling betrayal. He knows it is a dream because he had once walked, quietly, into the furnace. Had once stepped into the core of it all, the first true threat to his life, without fear.
The man who was Dottore who was stealing the face of a dead man smiles, hungrily. Scaramouche can abruptly recall the pressure of the man’s focus, like bugs beneath his skin.
His own voice, his own face, howls with the injustice of it all. Cradling a heart he had not yet known about until after he came from the furnace’s innards. Niwa’s heart is red and pulses still in those soft hands. In the screaming, in the middle of it all, Scaramouche is able to see what he could have done. If he was human, he would never have taken the possibility of death as simply as that.
It’s a tired, honest truth. He’s known it for an eternity. Humans are endlessly grasping towards something greater, holding the moments of their lives close to their chest, filling all of the emptiness with love and adrenaline and life—the kind of life that is like baring your teeth to the world, a challenge, a long dream. If he were human with a heart and mortality and the surety that he would die, he would have screamed, too.
The Dottore within the dream grins a sickly grin, the face he stole wrinkling in odd ways. It looks unnatural on his face. Kabukimono, hands clutching the red heart with tenderness in spite of his rage, grows louder. He echoes in the corridors of this long dream, fierce and alive. Like he has a heart in the vast emptiness.
Kabukimono snarls it into the sudden dark of the dream, a facsimile of the Balladeer he grows to be. “Who gave you this right?” Scaramouche can hear the well beneath the words, deep and hollow. Dottore becomes shadow, the dark creeping at the edges of the dream like an Abyss.
His own words boom in the dead silence, echoing long when he wakes. Kabukimono, his reflection, watches him with a terrible challenge in his gaze, hand squeezing Niwa’s beating heart with dainty fingers.
“Who gave you the right to decide that I had no heart?”
In abstract moments of time, fleeting and frail, Scaramouche finds himself within the pieces.
Our dear Kabukimono… is that not your ‘heart’?
_
He is still very young as he cries. “Please,” he gasped to nobody in particular, blind with the grief of it all. “Please.”
He could never have known that that deep, aching thing was an emotion. With no heart, it was logical to assume that he would not feel emotion. With no heart, it was logical that… in time, he would descend into the hollow inhumanity that he’d always vaguely feared. Just like Ei, distant from the people she should walk amongst. A great fear that had nothing but abstract concepts.
His nails dig into the flesh of his palm. He muffles a whine, high and pathetic, into the fabric of his sleeve. The tears won’t stop no matter what he tries. Please.
Maybe Ei should have known. You make a puppet with this big hole in its chest where a heart should be and deprive it of that heart. You leave it alone, hollow, and it must continue to exist knowing that it is lacking. Believing that, without a heart, it meant nothing. Wandering the world searching for something it will never have.
Maybe she should have known. Maybe she did. Maybe the Wanderer is a corpse pieced together with the shards of Scaramouche, who was once Kunikuzushi, who was once Kabukimono.
Maybe Scaramouche is the name closest to what he is, now. Blood-stained, without regret. All of that death for a task that ultimately meant nothing. Maybe it’s also Kabukimono, wondering at the world, still soft in the maw of tragedy. Even Kunikuzushi, soul-forged, with tears welling up at his eye’s corner at the moment of his birth, like any child’s should. That was what he was for such a heartbreakingly short moment in time— a child, with love indescribable, gazing up at the shadow of his mother’s divinity with shining eyes.
_
Irminsul is a tree that grew as Teyvat grew. It dreamed up all of the dreams, carefully collected all legends and stories and little moments kept gentle in the dawn. It remembered what many could not bear to, kept the echo of those dead until they could finally pass, remembered people who wanted to be forgotten in honor of their place in things. They would be forgotten, but only as they were. Only as their time passed within the world.
And so Scaramouche tumbled into the branches of memory. Scaramouche, result of five-hundred years of something resembling tragedy. I want to be erased, he had shrieked at the enormous rings of the tree’s core. I don’t want to exist.
Irminsul has no mind nor a voice. It has memories. Oh, child. Little one. Dear heart. A thousand other words that could mean something tumbled out of its leaves.
Nobody can ever be forgotten for as long as the tree lives. And it will live for a very, very long time. Each ring of its core represents a century of memory, each little scratch and leaf and branch a mark made on history, on Irminsul itself. The people that went screaming into death. The great beasts of legends long past, primordial vishaps with visions of lands green and full. A child that stood before a warlord, quivering, a stick in hand with defiance. The nation that had a name once that stood before the gods with nothing but manmade creations and nearly won.
Even the very smallest person had a place within Irminsul. Sometimes they’re just buried a bit deeper.
The thing named Scaramouche understands this within very small moments, eyes glassy with denial. Scaramouche still tears at the parts that contain who he is. Who he was. What mark he’d left. The bark chips beneath his fingertips and the leaves are soft and the branches bend easily. Five-hundred years is still a long time, despite it all.
Irminsul still does not forget. But things can slip beyond notice. Scaramouche is a name that fades into obscurity, and a Wanderer spends five-hundred years utterly hollow without any of the heartache or experience or emotion that Scaramouche once had. The Wanderer is eternally lacking a name and nothing more.
Please. Something small shrieks its last dying breath, very quietly. Please.
_
Nahida looks up at him when he throws the self-help books down onto the table. Her big green eyes make the great raging thing in his chest dull into a low roar, but that doesn’t stop the words from forcing their way out. “These can’t help me.”
They’re written by mortal humans for mortal humans. Not for five-hundred year old puppets that tried for godhood and failed. No matter what he tries to see in the words, they don’t mean anything. Even reading them upside down inspired nothing but boredom.
She hops down from the Grand Scribe’s stolen chair. Her hand feels warm against his wrist when she silently leads him out of the room. He doesn’t remember how it became this easy to comply with these little things. How something began calming in him when that familiar warmth grazed against his cold skin.
There’s plenty of researchers loitering around, few giving them more than passing glances after the sheer amount of times she has trotted past with him on her heel, seething. He can even see Al-Haitham, head pressed into his hands utterly miserably at the sight of another secretary with a stack of paperwork large enough for Al-Haitham to use as a pillow. He almost snickers under his breath.
A warm little jab to his arm stops that just as he starts forming the Anemo line required to trip the secretary. Big green eyes stare up, sternly, and as always he ends up folding.
(As always. When did that happen?)
_
“The self-help books are not helping you. How odd. I assumed that you were mostly human, at least in idea and mentality, so it would at the very least have an effect. But it has not. How peculiar.”
Self-help books written by mortal men are generally not recommended for heartless mechanical puppets with centuries of trauma. His head is utterly blown by the intelligence of this thought process.
Kusanali ends up dragging the Traveler into helping with his alleged recovery. They take one look at him, sulking, beyond bored, and tug him out into the wilderness to meet peculiar little things generally called Aranara. He is able to teach one how to say several curses before the Traveler catches on, their little flying companion shrill as she tries to convince the little Aranara that the words he used were very, very bad.
She fails. He laughs at her, straight from the chest as the Aranara scuttles off, loudly and carefully pronouncing a curse so vulgar it was hard to think. Something he hadn’t even known was lost clicks into place somewhere within his ribs.
Oh, there you are. I’d forgotten about you.
The Traveler looks at him with wide and wondering eyes.
_
Aether mutters to Paimon, quiet as he can feasibly be, “I didn’t know that Scaramouche could laugh like that.“
Real laughter. That visceral and beautiful kind that you assume belongs to wildhearted young men running off in the night. Scaramouche laughed like he was—
Aether doesn’t even have the words for it. Something utterly magnificent, for sure.
_
Kusanali’s voice becomes steadily quieter as she speaks, each word carefully pronounced. Irminsul—this memory from the tree itself—lulls him into a daydream.
“Once upon a time, there was a puppet.”
The words stay the same throughout thousands of iterations. He’s never felt the need to sleep, but here, here in this timeless expanse of shapeless dreams, he can feel the weight of memory fall into oblivion. In an iteration so old it makes his godforged bones ache, he is given the name Skydancer by a traveler.
“Because of the way you use your Anemo,” they said. He must have had a look on his face or said something, because they clarify; “I’ve seen the way that you fight, using it. It’s like a dance only you know the rhythm to.”
Then, quieter, echoing in the fragmented pieces of the memory, “I had forgotten that things like you could exist.”
They never clarified what those words meant. Skydancer can see it, though. Inexplicable wonder, staring up at something beautiful and unknown and wild. Like watching a natural disaster—all shock and heart-stopping breathlessness. They didn’t expect him to be like this, and it showed.
So did the admiration. The awe. Once, he overhears them as they whisper, “You are magnificent,” and his eyes catch on the shine of their eyes. On the verge of tears, unable to cry, as if they’d found something utterly relieving.
Kusanali’s voice is soft, incredibly so, as she continues. “This puppet was without a heart. He was born with a mother that could not bear to love him. Her grief was still far too raw, and he was left alone.”
Not abandoned. Just… alone.
Alone. Alone some where, some time, some way. Alone in the aching depths of a heart. Nobody ever tells you that it’s not a heart that makes you alive. Nobody ever says that it’s okay to lack something. Skydancer—a Wanderer—stares up into the eyes of false stars and wonders what it means to be alive.
Please. There was once a dragon, carefree. Its heart now beats beneath a mountain, not quite dead but never alive. It was filled with so much love that the love burnt its blood in its veins, ate at the once gentle behemoth’s heart. Now its blood fractures into warm crystals on a mountain of ice, readily protecting what it could even after death.
They name you after your beauty within the skies. Skydancer. Twist and turn and laugh and they name you after viciousness and freedom and something resembling hope.
Please.
There is a deity that rises from the ash of a child’s nightmare two thousand years ago. You expect it to become a nightmare itself and now… Protector of dreams, the dearest Yaksha, Guardian of Liyue. He is a time-bomb, weighted by the debt of those he kills. One day he will implode in on himself, and his dear master will have to put him down. Just like a dog. For a heartbreakingly short moment of time, this same Yaksha was happy.
For a time, his life was beautiful. That was all that he had desired, even if it was brief.
Skydancer, who is also named Kabukimono, who is also named Scaramouche, who is also named Kunikuzushi, laughs until gold blood drips onto the branches below.
Time is always different within a place so wound into the heart of everything. Scaramouche rips at the flayed parts of Kunikuzushi and gags on the dreams of a Wanderer named Skydancer, laughing as the ash of Kabukimono stains his pale hands. It seems to last an eternity.
It does.
_
Kusanali smiles at him when he tries to convince her to let him out of the metaphorical (though seeming less and less metaphorical at this point) dog cage for at least an hour, a week and a half into his supposed rehabilitation. The kind of smile you reserve for people you think are out of their minds. It shouldn’t have hurt. It did.
The walls are pretty but they’re all the same. He can recite the amount of plants within the Sanctuary off of the top of his head. He’s resorted to simple ‘system’ shutdowns to at the very least sort out the mess inside of his head. He’s as stable as can be for someone with some incredibly lacking coping techniques, especially regarding the five-hundred years or so spent feeling agonizingly hollow. You could even call that a type of psychological torture.
He can still dream, he finds, during another random shutdown after an entire day spent utterly bored. Scaring the odd Sage or two just doesn’t lighten his day like it used to. For some reason he’d not expected to be able to dream after he’d fallen.
His first dream of this new reality is about a searing sun. So bright that his components melt in its radiance. That, for a moment, that empty thing where his heart should be is filled to the brim with light. Just a moment.
It occurs to him quickly that the dream is based off of how he felt when the Gnosis was attached to his body. Each pump of that synthetic purple fluid was melting his body from the inside out, but even then, he’d still torn himself off of the wires to try and grasp the Gnosis itself. The source of that agony.
Nobody else knows that the Gnosis would have melted his core self into nothing if he was truly housing it. He, as he existed, would have simply burnt out in the glory of godhood. ‘Scaramouche’, all that he was, all of that history and emotion—it would have become so small compared to the power. For a moment and only a moment he lets himself believe it would be worth it.
He went screaming into the dark in another time. He had experienced such injustice, such rage, that his lightning struck the sky itself. One little twinkling fake star burnt out. Celestia itself remade that version of him, wiped the slate clean, carved the idea of a wanderer out of the hollow puppet that they left behind. He only gets echoes of that terrible feeling, pulsing at his core like a heartbeat with its consistency.
But—Kusanali, eyes big and green and still so incredibly young in spite of the time used watching her people, she skips up to him during another day of mind melting boredom and hands him a few books. Self-help guides for the mentally troubled, one title said. It sounded like something you’d give to someone as an insult.
She looked at him with those terrible earnest eyes and he’d only just begun hating how simple it was to make him fold. At that moment, it was…
Please.
It was a perfect moment in time. Something he didn’t have the words for, yet. The book was probably useless and he would definitely hate the whole thing. Her eyes…
The Wanderer takes the books with nothing beyond a grumble. He trudges off to a random room to angrily read the words that meant nothing. In his chest, there was something screaming and terrified and small, and it dies quickly.
_
Al-Haitham stares down at him with a raised brow. Without the exhaustion lining his every edge, he looks less like a reedy-tall scholar and more like someone who means something. The Wanderer steps as hard as possible on the man’s foot as he walks past and listens to the pained hiss with a deep sense of pleasure. The man doesn’t say anything about it, even after several other meetings like this.
It comes to a figurative head as the Wanderer skulks through the halls yet again, his second and a half week into being a glorified prisoner. Al-Haitham endures the usual foot-stomp without any noise, now, but finally says something. “What are you afraid of?”
The Wanderer freezes. Mid-step, he has to shuffle back a little just to stare the man down. Blunt little mortal. Kusanali’s mind brushes his own with soft reprimand.
They call this rehabilitation. He calls it prison with a few extra steps. Her presence shrinks away with something resembling regret.
The Wanderer (when did he begin calling himself that? That thing died when he began remembering) pastes a sneer on his face. “Nothing. What are you afraid of?”
It’s meant to sound scathing. It sounds more drawn than anything else. At least he still had it in him to make the words acerbic. Al-Haitham raises a single sharp brow, doubt in every single shred of body language he possessed. He huffs and continues walking, gait just slow enough that the words he throws back are heard. “You should consider thinking about Niwa. Working past old regrets usually helps with the more recent ones, I find.”
How did he know? How did he remember? Those words have no place in this time, no place in this new reality. The name Niwa should have faded into obscurity without the worst events of Tatarasuna occurring the way they had. Al-Haitham’s silhouette looks dark against the backlight of the windows lighting the halls.
He wants to send a spike of condensed Anemo through the man’s skull. He wants to manifest a small air bubble beneath the man’s skin and watch as he succumbs. He wants to steal the air from his lungs and watch him fade. He does none of these things, seething as he power-walks to the nearest room that could be decimated safely.
Questions will be asked later. Now, he has to shred a few pieces of furniture.
Niwa. Please.
Oh, shut it.
_
He can remember Niwa and the others as if it all happened yesterday. One of the most terrible things that Dottore had ever done to him was the supposed perfection of both short term and long term memory. Originally, his memory was meant to fade away into soft oblivion like any other human, to prevent the main consequences of immortality. All of that grief, able to fade in time… The people he inevitably gets attached to, finally dying after a hundred and one years kept alive after death within his memory. Now he is made to live for however long his vessel lasts knowing that he will recall his own eternity easily, like the back of his hand.
The worst thing is that, inevitably, taking Al-Haitham’s advice was helping. There’s less of a weight on his chest. Less of an ever-present ache. Kusanali watches the improvement with awed eyes and grills Al-Haitham within an inch of his life trying to figure out how the man had known the right words to use.
That somehow became the first time he smiled in several months. A smile that wasn’t split and bloodied. More… small. Honest. Teeth still bared to the world but it was more a wild expression of real happiness. For a long time, he isn’t sure how to feel about that.
But it’s a smile. One that vanishes the moment that Al-Haitham’s eyes widen in uncharacteristic shock when he spies it. One that turns into a deep frown.
It’s a smile. He didn’t think he could do that anymore.
_
What makes something precious? Losing it and finding it again. The small and wretched thing within his chest screams each time he thinks about godhood. About a future without mortality. He doesn’t realize why, at first, but then it occurs to him; I will miss this living. This in the moment existence. As a god I will be eternal and always, and I will lose what humanity I have.
It was never about the humanity, though. Mostly about a heart. Sometimes about emotion. He’s even caught himself staring off after little street animals, wondering how long they will live once he has ascended, wondering if they will witness it or die within what feels like a day. He is already long-lived, showing no signs of crumbling. No signs of erosion. His mind is clear and he recalls the dead’s faces easily.
It’s less of a blessing and more of a curse. For a time, he had no name, and there was a little nameless boy living in an empty home at the edges of Tatarasuna. The boy was sick with Tatarigami, though he had not known. He watched as the child withered and frayed and eventually could not muster the energy to explore and laugh as he once had.
He mourned for what was dead and gone though he’d never understood even when Niwa had explained it with a careful, gentle voice. At the time, Kabukimono had frowned, still not quite understanding.
But he understood, eventually. He’d understood it all too well by the time Tatarasuna became a disaster that became a piece of quiet history. By the time a nameless boy that was a friend and brother and son thrice died quietly and alone because of the aftermath.
It was with the rusty blood of a blackened heart that he understood. Within betrayal that was heartbreakingly false, Kabukimono grew to understand, grew to hate it and love it equally, choking on the vitriol of it all.
_
Scaramouche rips himself out of Irminsul’s memory with desperation and enough self-hate to fuel a city.
Irminsul never forgets. Denial is a beautiful thing all up until it’s what kills you.
He trips. He falls. He falls, and falls, and falls. He falls for long enough that his name fades away from him, slipping from his hands like sand within an hourglass, cracked with time. He falls for long enough that the ache of five hundred years of betrayal and loss becomes dull.
The hollowed feeling never disappears. He doesn’t miraculously gain a heart.
When he finally hits the ground, he climbs from the debris, hollow and nameless and who is Niwa, again?
Five hundred more years of this.
Still wandering the world even after all of this time. A traveler by the name of Aether follows him out on a trip to get fresh Sunsettias for a kind shopkeeper. There is a deep familiarity in their eyes, a wariness and caution strikingly strange to the Wanderer.
He is told that he once had a name, was once someone, and once did terrible things.
The one thing he has ever wanted was a heart. This iteration of him doesn’t quite have much meaning, simply wandering and taking all of the world in as quietly as he knows how. Maybe…
He ends up following that same traveler up into the Sanctuary of Surasthana, where the Dendro Archon awaits with patient eyes as the traveler begins explaining.
Remembering is torture. The addition of those memories with the parts of what he already is, though not much, is still enough to shift something fundamental. Before the Wanderer blurs the lines between Scaramouche and all of those other names, he is able to think; Ah. A heart.
(There will always be those who dare brave the Lightning’s glow. History is made when another wanderer, one all-too familiar, blocks his mother’s blade. The blade famously known for its sheer power. All with a common sword and the reignited vision of a dead friend.
It made Scaramouche want to scream when he’d seen the memory. Before this, before his fall, there were rumors. Little stories about the person that used two elements in tandem to block the Musou no Hitachi.
Kaedehara. That name. He choked on it for a fleeting moment, lost in the memories the next.)
Please. Scaramouche gasps for air beneath the weight of Kabukimono. Kabukimono claws at Scaramouche’s wrists as Scaramouche keeps him below the water. Kunikuzushi howls with agony as his blood soaks into their clothes. The Wanderer watches it all, blood on his hands, holding a darkened heart gently. It was once a man named Niwa. Please, Scaramouche stares up wildly at the false stars, recalls the great and terrible memory of the aeon of tragedy, the era wherein Teyvat itself flipped upside down.
Irminsul remembers. That was what struck him as he fell. Nothing about Teyvat itself was ever forgotten. The gods and people and creatures and incomprehensible small tales that faded over time had still existed as brightly as anything else within the branches of Irminsul if you knew where to look.
A doctor steals a man’s face and identity and engineers the death of all that resembles a wanderer’s heart. The wanderer spends five hundred years believing that a man named Niwa was a traitor.
A child drags him into a brief moment of brightness, hazy with fond memory. The Tatarigami was so new, then, and neither of them had known that it was the thing that would kill the boy. It was never a betrayal. That nameless child had just wanted to braid his hair one last time before he’d gone.
A mother once could not love her child, and so she cast him away with the aching thought that, perhaps, he would find his own way. It’s not right. But it’s what happened. Scaramouche, the Wanderer, clings onto those scraps of truth within the turmoil of it all.
The world’s changing. It’s been changing ever since an outlander fished a fairy out of the ocean. It’s been changing ever since Scaramouche tumbled through memory and found a truth and a tragedy. It’s been changing since the gods of the island above thought mankind unworthy.
A Wanderer is once named Scaramouche, once named Kunikuzushi, once named Kabukimono. It is in those names, those old identities and softer selves and decayed dreams that he finds himself. He is small and worn by time and grief.
Small and worn but not yet dead.
_
The Wanderer, named Skydancer by a traveler named Aether, looks at his hands. These days it’s less of a maniacal rage that fuels him and more of a subtle, quiet thing. It’s an emotion, that’s for sure. He just doesn’t know which.
Once upon a time there was a puppet that had no name. Once upon a time there was an Archon named Makoto, who’s sister went to war on her behalf. Once there was an Archon named Ei, who took the mantle after her sister fell. Once there was a puppet and a heartbroken mother and a heart that nobody could keep.
Once there was a puppet named Scaramouche. Look at where he’s gotten you.
Skydancer is the product of five hundred years of tragedies. Tragedy made by others, by himself, by the earth beneath his feet. Murder that never happened in this echo of a world that had happened in another. Blood dark beneath his nails. There is a traveler named Aether that says that he is magnificent, and that he should smile more often.
A small, gentle part of him begs to live again. Yet another part that died a very long time ago with a boy and a doll. It pleads and Skydancer can feel the unending exhaustion of it all. Please, it says, I want to exist. I want to remember and dream and live again. A heart doesn’t mean a damn thing anymore. I want…
Five hundred years and Skydancer can still trace the lines that signify his lack of humanity. The creases where the ball-joints link. The etches in obscure places that nobody else sees that are left like carvings against wood. This old and gentle piece of him is what kept him alive for such a long time. He’s not kind, but this part of him—it resembles softness. That part of him that used to play with a dying nameless child. The part of him that spent months unable to understand death, kneeling near the boy’s corpse long after he had gone, cradling the doll with a tender touch. That part that would let birds perch on its shoulders, gazing at the stars with such awe and fascination it spent ten years wandering the lands to witness all of them that it could, regardless of their false flares.
It feels like such a gooey piece of him. Scaramouche would have shoved it back down, murdered anybody nearby who bore witness, and decimated a small town. But his name is Skydancer. A name offered by a traveler named Aether, who…
His name is Skydancer. It is a beautiful name.
Please, it says again. Weak and soft. He scoffs at the fragility of it. Maybe this is the last time he’ll ever hear it.
_
Aether forces Skydancer out of the confines of the Sanctuary for one blissful day. Skydancer can’t recall when he’d began anticipating the traveler’s visits, nor can he remember when it became so unnervingly easy to just… follow along. Kusanali squints at him with narrowed eyes and the message comes across clearly. No funny business. Even though he’s not even done anything beyond stealing a few books and tripping the occasional scholar or two.
He’s really beginning to wonder if learning how to live from humans specifically is such a good thing for her. She should probably try to visit the Adepti of Liyue. At least they’d be able to keep a leash on her mind-reading hobbies, even if they’ve reduced in frequency.
Aether tugs at Skydancer’s wrist and glances back with gleaming eyes. Grasp loose and entirely aware of his distaste for touch in spite of it all. They sprint off of the edge of the Sanctuary’s entrance platform and for a blinding moment in time the wind howls like a great beast. The gales bellow in his ears and in that wild sound he can hear faint laughter. He can’t tell if it’s Aether or himself.
Aether’s windglider flares in the light of the sun, brown-gold wings highlighted by the solar flare into something incredible. Skydancer stops midair to gaze at that wondrous sight, his Vision bright enough at his side to light a small room. He’d forgotten what it was like to witness casual beauty. Forgot those moments of pure unfettered awe, caught on the unbearably warm orb stuck in his chest. For something with supposedly perfect memory, he’s ended up forgetting quite a few things.
The traveler drifts lower as the wind currents die out, but Skydancer unconsciously offers up another with the crook of his pinky. Aether watches him with crinkled eyes and a smile as blinding as anything else when they’re both face to face.
Skydancer huffs. “Well? Are we going somewhere?”
Aether doesn’t respond. Though what he does do is raise a hand carefully from where it’s spread along the ‘wings’ of the glider to tap Skydancer on the nose. He could have avoided it, easily, but there was something about this entire situation that made relaxation so easy. Maybe it was Aether himself, or that purifying aura. Maybe that’s just an excuse.
Aether closes the wings and drops like a stone to avoid Skydancer’s belated outrage. Where it would have once felt like a flare of molten lava within his chest, the anger is muted and lighthearted. Something else shudders into place as the wind shrieks with his speed, grin wild and toothy.
In that blind moment of mindless fun, chasing each other through the sky, that gentle and weak part of him breathes its last breath. It’s not dead. Just… not separate, anymore.
Oh. There you are. I’d almost forgotten about you.