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1. Ajax
Your parents named you after Ajax the Great. They probably had hoped that you would grow into the name, that one day they would wake up and you would be stronger and faster and more headstrong than they ever could. (The name Ajax, after all, is not one suited to six-year-old boys with hands that still tremble during fishing trips with their fathers.) But regardless of how well it suited you—or didn’t—they would tuck you into bed every night without fail, reciting to you the stories of his strength and grandeur and tendency to never yield and reminded you that “you too [could] become a hero, just like him.”
You didn’t want anyone to be mistaken, though; you didn’t want anyone to assume that your parents placed unto you a pressure you couldn’t bear. You loved your family. After all, Snezhnaya was a cold and unforgiving place, and regardless of their advanced technology, there was nothing their military could create that would fend away the months-long blizzards that swept through your town of Morepesok and ravaged homes like clockwork—the region was defined by their harsh snowstorms in the summer and even harsher snowfalls during the most gruelling months of winter. The people of Snezhnaya loved their god, the Tsaritsa, as much as they loved their family. The former supplied them with security from other nations while the latter filled their bellies when there was barely any food to be found. You always made sure to pay reverence to your god before mealtimes before thanking your mother for the food. Neither you nor your family were an exception: it was your mother who would set aside extra bowls of borscht for each of your siblings every day, reminding you all to “drink up and ward off the cold.” It was your father who would wrap your fur coat extra tightly around your shoulders before leaving your home. In turn, you, then twelve-years-old, loved your family as much as your feeble heart would allow: you walked your younger siblings to school when your older ones could not and made sure to be extra patient when your father was preparing the bait for the fish.
You loved fishing with your father. You felt that it taught you a great deal about patience and about appreciating the small things in life. You did: you spent your formative years counting the pleats of your mother’s skirt while listening to her bedtime stories in the evening and memorizing the exact sound your father’s ice pick made as it hit the frozen layer covering the lake the next day. You often found yourself mesmerized, observing the way the ice would break away into a jagged yet reasonably-sized hole uncovering the water underneath, the bright blue eyes that your mother loved so much shining in childlike wonder at the sight. (“They shine right through the dark nights of winter, Ajax,” your mother would say, admiringly, before pulling you into a warm embrace one night.)
You and your father would sit there, fishing rods plunged into the water in wait for the fish to take the pieces of bait you eagerly positioned onto the hook yourself. Instead of your father’s usual silence at home, he often turned to you during these fishing trips to tell you various tales: anecdotes about the adventurers of the Snezhnayan Adventurer’s Guild. “My friend ran into a harbinger last week,” he told you, once, over the dead, unseeing fish the two of you had just caught, “barely got away with his life, that man. Don’t mess with the military, alright Ajax?”
These fishing trips would range from a few hours to half a day—no fish after a day of work meant nothing to sell at the market for mora the next day, and no mora meant no food for your family to eat that night. Therefore, it was important that you and your father set off shortly after you came home from school every other weekday, lest you come home empty-handed.
Unlike your father whose main worry was the amount of fish caught each day, you possessed another layer of concern: the process of actually reeling in the fish. Quite often, you worried that the pull of the fish would be too strong and that the fish’s powerful stride would take you along with it. Yet, every single time without fail, when you felt the resistance between the fish and your gloved hands grow too large, your father would cup his hands around yours and yank the fish out with the same ease used to pick up a piece of bait from his fishing box.
As a result, you wondered how your parents expected you to live up to your name; how could you, Ajax, live up to a warrior birthed of grandeur when you could barely wield a rod? How could you, Ajax, surpass your parents in the way that they wanted you to when your father was still helping you yank the fish out of the water, the pull of the fish too strong for your scrawny arms?
To live up to your name, you needed to be strong, you needed to be fast, and you needed to be smart. If Ajax was a warrior, you should be too. So, at the ripe age of 14, you left your home in the early hours of a Monday morning with a sack full of breakfast and pocket candy, lost your footing, and felt the ground give under you as you fell to your fate below.
--
2. Childe
Your slender face and supple, sinewy fingers remind your mother of your father; your bright, orange hair and broad shoulders remind your father of your mother; and your dull, blue eyes remind both your parents of the stumble you took into the forest not-too-many nights ago. You’ve been back at home for about a week now, you think. But one’s perception of time is fickle, and you wonder if their not-too-many-nights ago passed by at a quicker pace than yours, which seemed to drag on for ages with each cautious glance your family is giving you. Your brain is addled with sleep terrors, with monsters and blood; your hands shake now, not out of fear, but for something else. You ignore both of these things, but your parents do not.
“That is not our child,” you hear your mother exclaim to your father one night. “Those eyes don’t belong to Ajax—not to my son.”
As of late, you’ve started to notice the way your parents seem to look right through you—you’ll walk into the kitchen and see the way your mother stares forlornly at your old photos, then peer at your father by the door, mumbling under his breath when he stares at your old fur coat for too long. You’re not sure what’s worse: the nightmares you’ve been plagued with at night, or the way your parents don’t slow down and smile anymore when walking past your room during the day.
There’s a game you’re trying out, now. It’s simple, only three steps, and easy to master.
Step one: when your mother calls for dinner, make sure to wear a pair of socks that mask the sound of your footsteps walking down the linoleum tiles.
Step two: sit still. When your younger siblings ask for extra helpings, let your mother pass them the bowl. When your older siblings look at you like a ghost, don’t get up and slam your chair against the edge of the table.
Step three: seal your mouth. When your mother asks about school, count the divots on the wooden table, courtesy of your younger brother, Teucer, and the fork and knife sitting to the left of his plate. When your father asks you what happened between your fall into the forest and resurgence “three days later,” clamp your teeth down on your tongue and be careful not to shout back.
When you follow the steps, it works. A month after your return, your family starts acting as if you never came back.
At first, you wanted them to notice you, to realize that you were the same little boy who went into the forest and the one who came back alive, but when you tried to tell them the truth, they would ignore you.
You tried, once, when your mother first found you hunched over in the snow, torn threads on your gloves giving away to red and blistered fingers tearing through the frozen dirt atop the snowfall. It was the first of you that your mother had seen in days. (“I looked for you for ages! How far could you have possibly gotten?” your mother would soon shout after dragging you home by the shoulders.)
She reached down for you, and you gripped her shoulders tightly. (“Days?” you would soon ask her, “it’s been three months already though, right?” You will see the way your mother’s eyes widen as your roll back your sleeve, revealing a hundred and two chaotically spaced lines on your arm, traced with various materials. The first five are drawn with a pen, and the rest vary from texture to shade, the utensils used far less recognizable. “See? I counted.”)
(Your mother will soon sit you down on the armchair in the living room, making sure to patch up every blister and cut covering your body. Yet, she will not talk to you for the rest of the day; you will not get a chance to tell her what happened.)
Then, one day, your mother calls you into the kitchen. It is rather abrupt, the way she yanks you out of your room in the middle of the night while the rest of your family is asleep. Maybe she knew you were tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep in the face of another possible nightmare. Outside your room, the world blankets the two of you in enrapturing silence—you stare at each other before your mother turns her head to the left, rests her chin in her palm, and sighs.
“What happened to you, Ajax?”
You clasp your hands together and take a deep breath in, akin to a toddler telling their mother about their day at school. You don’t need clarification; the two of you already know what she is asking.
"I fell into a hole,” you tell her. “I tripped on a tree root, lost my footing, and started falling. I thought I was going to die.”
Your mother stares at you with wary eyes.
“Right… and what was at the bottom of the hole?”
“I’m not sure. It was dark and really, really blue and I couldn’t see the sky. There was a rifthound pack there, and they took turns swiping at me with their claws until I passed out.”
“But…?”
“I woke up in a tent next to a lady in a black hood. She helped me survive for the next three months-”
“Three days.”
“-for the three months I was down there. She taught me how to fight because there were monsters everywhere and wolves with teeth so big they could tear three people to shreds at once. I thanked her before I left because I knew that was what you would tell me to do, right?”
“…Tell me the truth, Ajax.”
Your hands shake, trying to remember the sensation of their blood coating your hands.
“I am! If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t have been able to make it out—she taught me how to fight my way back home.”
“Ajax.”
“I’m not lying! I fought nonstop and finally crawled my way back up because I knew you and everyone else would be waiting for me back home!”
“Ajax, you were only gone for three days. If I had to guess, you got attacked by rifthounds and laid there until I found you out in the cold. Your body was probably so cold that your brain started making things up.”
“But-”
“No buts, Ajax. Lying isn’t good for you.”
“…”
Recently, the shake in your hands has started to get to you again. You try to suppress it, but it all comes to a head when you’re walking your younger siblings, Tonia and Anthon, back home after the school day ends. A little boy their age blows your sister a raspberry, and you feel something inside you snap. This is what you’ve been waiting for, your mind supplies, as you land your first punch across the boy’s face. You keep punching, and punching, and punching.
--
“You’re in the abyss,” you remember the cloaked woman telling you. “Here, it’s kill or be killed, and you don’t want to die. Right, Childe?”
“…I just want to see my mother and father again. Can you help me, ma’am?”
“I can’t help you return to your family, but I can help you fight so that you can live to see another day, alright?”
You nod.
“…And you can call me Skirk, kid.”
--
“You broke his nose,” your mother screams at you. “They had to take him to the hospital!”
You pretend to take an avid interest in the door, ignoring the way your mother’s face contorts in rage and confusion.
“Look at me, Ajax! We’ll have to pay for the poor boy’s hospital bills! His parents are furious!”
You realize that the game you’ve created for yourself at the dinner table has other, more practical applications; you seal your lips tightly and plant your feet into the ground. You try not to think about the look of abject horror that painted your siblings’ faces after your act of violence.
You’re not allowed to walk your siblings home from school anymore.
--
“There’s something about the abyss that will change you, Childe,” you remember Skirk telling you. You are standing on top of your first kill: a rifthound that you had the unfortunate luck to make eye contact with. “Once you’ve spent enough of your life fighting, it’s hard to get the feeling of adrenaline out of your system.”
“It’s alright,” you tell her, wiping the creature’s blood off and onto your pants, “as long as I get home, I don’t mind.”
--
You’ve been coming home with blood on the soles of your shoes recently. It’s not entirely your fault—street fights and chaos seem to follow you wherever you go, and if you’re the one initiating them all, then… it’s everyone else’s fault for reacting. For the most part, however, your family seems to be trying to ignore it. In the small town of Morepesok, though, gossip spreads quickly, regardless of the distance between each house. Your father comes home several nights of the week and simply stares at you in disappointment, before sighing and sitting down in his designated living room chair, and on other nights, he simply doesn’t look at you at all.
One night, one of your street squabbles gets too big, too bloody, and then your father comes home through the front door, looking downright petrified. He has a note in his hand from the military officer sent to the scene to break apart the fight, and you turn your head away from it.
The day after your father receives the paper, he takes you out to ice-fish again. You cannot sit still, shifting your weight dangerously across the thin ice.
You come to realize that your father probably won’t want you ice-fishing with him anymore after you try to stab the fish through the water when it takes too long to swim towards the bait. You have a pocket knife inside your shoe, you had figured, so you might as well make the most of it.
“Maybe it’s puberty,” your father tries to reason to your mother that night, as if your siblings’ growth spurts came with blood in their hands and concerned looks from the adults. But at the end of the day, your parents do what they think good parents should: they’ve reacted to your sister’s cramps with a heating pad and tackled your brother’s growing pains with mint salve, and now they meet your newfound behaviour with a signed letter of recommendation to the military.
Your parents slide the note across to you at the dinner table the next day after your solitary walk home from school. You don’t react well, breaking the second rule of your self-imposed game: you slam your fists on the table, creating a cacophony of noise as the cutlery rattles, Teucer cries, and your older siblings squeak.
And now you’re off to military training at fourteen years old—not even a year has passed since your brush with a hole and bad luck. The ride to the base is silent; your mother is out running errands and your siblings are at school. Neither you nor your father speaks the whole way there.
The two of you are greeted by an armed officer at the entrance. You jerk your head around, startled, in an attempt to make eye contact with your father. How long are you going to be away from home in a place like this? you desperately want to ask. But by the time you open your mouth, your father is already walking away from you. You shout, but he doesn’t look back.
The officer nudges you with the tip of his gun, pushing you toward the dormitory area, and you find that you have no choice but to relent.
“Him?” one of the trainees sputters out as you enter the building. “Are we a nation that needs to resort to child soldiers now?”
“Doesn’t matter,” the man to his left smirks and rolls his shoulder backwards, “let me have a go at him.”
…And it turns out your punches have just a little too much force behind them, because… well…
One: both the men are out cold. (You don’t really know how that happened, actually. You were only targeting one, although you suppose that the other was just unfortunate enough to occupy the space between your fist and the man trying to attack you, unfortunate collateral damage as a result of your violence.)
Two: You’re sitting in an office, now. Your hands are tied behind your back with a zip tie, thanks to the man sitting across from you. A container sits at the top of the desk separating the two of you, bright red and dark black bands spilling out of the sides.
Three: a man is introducing himself to you. Pulcinella, he calls himself. You know that is not his real name; you’ve heard about this man before, down to his alias and short stature and pointed ears. The Harbingers, you recall your father telling you.
Said Harbinger is sitting on the other side of the desk, drumming his fingers on the table. He looks at you, face made out of stone at the sight of the ruckus you had just caused.
“Come with me, Ajax.”
He stands up from his chair and pulls out a pair of scissors. His feet make a clack-clacking sound as he walks behind you to cut the band tying your hands together.
--
“Come on, Skirk! I see an opening in the sky—we can finally escape! Aren’t you coming?”
“No, Childe. If fate chose to lead me here, then here I will stay.”
“But… you can finally see the stars again!”
“...”
“...Can I at least tell you my real name before I leave?”
“You’re Childe to me. You’ve been down here for long enough; you’re no longer the same boy you were before. I can see it..”
“...”
“Take the name I’ve given you and hold it close to you, Childe. It’s who you are now; you have not yet won your first honour.”
--
“Childe. You can call me Childe.”
Pulcinella nods and leads you into a room. The walls are high and wide and the room is empty, save for a single, white throne sitting in the middle of the space.
You come to an understanding immediately upon seeing Her—the Tsaritsa—with Her cold, grey eyes and hair the colour of the frost at your fingertips. She commands you to kneel, and you do, because you know immediately that you want to serve Her country, Her people until your last hollow breath.
(You will never quite figure out what “honour” Skirk was referring to, but you’d be damned if it wasn’t one to serve the God in front of you.)
--
3. Tartaglia
Sooner down the line than you might think, you will find yourself in the position of a high-ranking military officer, fighting alongside the man who brought you to the Tsaritsa on your first day there.
“Tartaglia,” She will tell you, a year into your recruitment, “is your new title now.”
And what kind of person would you be if you did not take the name placed upon you by Her, by your own god?
She will send you to Liyue, the region defined by its commerce and tight contracts. You will find that it is nothing like Snezhnaya—you won’t need to bundle yourself up in multiple layers of clothing before braving the cold outside your front doorstep, regardless of the time of year. The region is far out for you: Liyue sits to the south of Mondstadt, and even farther to the south of your hometown.
You will settle in there, basking in the sunlight still present during the latter half of the year. Time will pass quickly, long periods of rest interrupted by short, manageable tasks assigned to you by your God: leave that woman this letter on her front door, shake down the man’s pockets in front of his family. But, your life will not stay the way. Months after your arrival, you will be approached by a boy younger than you, with hair as orange as yours.
“Teucer,” you will call out, “I’ve missed you! What are you doing here?” (“How did you get here,” you will want to ask. After all, your younger brother coming all by himself should gain disapproval from your mother.)
“Ajax! You haven’t been home lately… I wanted to say hi! This nice lady on a boat offered me a trip here.”
You will bite your tongue. It will be in your better interests not to ask.
“You should show me what you’ve been up to for work,” your brother will supply. Bless his poor heart.
You’ll have been writing letters back to your family as of late. You will tell them about exploring the world. You will ask about sending money back home to your mother for the harsh winters; you will ask your father about the conditions in Morepesok. Is it snowing? Who goes ice fishing with you now? You will give your siblings gifts wrapped in paper from shops around the region, and you will weave tales to your brother Teucer about your job: the best toymaker in the world, travelling from region to region to sell your prized miniature robots and stuffed animals. You will want to leave a good impression on the only sibling unaware of your whole self, and will not want him to ever look at you the way Tonia and Anthon did.
You will take your brother by the hand and take him on a walk through the mountains of Liyue. He will cheer excitedly, before dashing off into an abandoned building.
You will neither cheer, nor rejoice at the speed your brother will run away from you, likely too excited to explore nature without the threat of freezing to death.
You will be even less thrilled when you come face-to-face with a group of burglars using the space to rest, angered by your brother’s presence. But you will be nothing but a skilled warrior, and your hands shake again as you ask your brother to close his eyes and count to ten before slitting all their throats in one fell swoop.
You will leave Teucer in the comfort of your rented apartment for the time being, in wait for your mother to come and pick him up.
“Bye, Ajax,” your brother will say three days later, smiling as he slips you a handful of candy from his bag.
“Bye, Teucer. Stay safe, alright?” You will ruffle his hair and slip the candy into your back pocket.
Teucer will wave at you from the boat heading back to the small town of Morepesok, young joints being pushed to the limit with how harsh and jerky his arm movements are. Your mother will place your old fur coat around his shoulders—an acknowledgement of your existence—but she will not wave back, and you will decide that that’s okay; you will figure that your mother sees the stars you once had in your eyes reflected in Teucer’s. You will hope that your mother tucks your brother into bed after telling him stories and that your father takes him ice fishing with the same amount of care he gave to you.
You will stand there, watching as the boat your family is in creeps out of sight. Your hands will still tremble, and you’ll walk away, pockets filled with mora and your brother’s candy, to wherever fate plans to take you.
It will be nine years since you last fished with your father, soon. At that point, you will be stronger, you will be faster and you will be more headstrong than your parents will have ever dreamed of. You will never yield in the face of the Tsaritsa and Her will, and you will take the same She gave you along with it. You will be Great, but you won’t be Ajax—you will be Tartaglia, one of the harbingers of Snezhnaya and a valiant foe.