Chapter Text
Lumine may be a “natural” when it comes to gliding, but navigating the rolling plains of Mondstadt is an entirely different experience from trying to throw attacks at a dragon in midair. In the middle of a storm no less! She can hardly tell up from down and left from right. Stormterror’s wind bullets are coming faster than she can counter, and far faster than she can move.
She feels something rip on her left. Fantastic. What a great time to get a tear in her brand-new glider. Lumine grits her teeth.
Yeah, even “the power of a thousand winds” won’t be able to help her with that.
For a moment, Lumine is suspended in midair, barely staying afloat on half a wing. Paimon’s panicking, and anemo boy seems to be trying to telepathically give her advice. She can’t hear any of it over the beating of her own heart and wind whipping at her face. While their efforts are appreciated, it’s a bit too late for them to be of any help. Dammit, she didn’t even spend an hour in Mondstadt! How did things go to hell this quickly? Her glider finally fails completely as she starts to fall.
Down…
Down…
Down…
But she doesn’t feel herself hit the ground.
She’s... frozen mid-freefall? For just a moment, everything is blissfully still, as if someone’s hit pause on the entire world.
Then the sky starts spinning.
At first, Lumine assumes she’s just resumed her descent, but then the weather changes too. Just as suddenly as the storm had come in, it dissipates before her very eyes. The hues of the clear afternoon sky shift to the orangey pinks of sunset, then to the starry void of night, and finally to the pale blue of midmorning again.
She suddenly feels solid ground at her back, but this revelation doesn’t come with the expected pain of bone hitting pavement. In fact, she doesn’t feel pavement at all. The hard stone of Mondstadt’s city streets has been substituted for wet grass and dirt, and the towering, red-tiled buildings replaced with dead air.
She’s back at Starfell Lake, right next to the Statue of the Seven.