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The vessel makes Yae smile. It cries at anything. It cries like a storm.
It cries when Ei deems it a failure. Stopgap, temporary setback en route to euthymia. She retreats to her mind. Yae claws at familiar pleas. Overhead, lightning singes, apathetic. The rain washes the puppet's face clean. It pours daily, and Yae doesn't have to raise a finger.
She will not abandon you , she tells it somewhere one hall turns into the other, somewhere disarray creeps at the edges. She can tell from the tightness of its fist that it believes her. It is cruel, maybe. Its eyes are like Makoto's, wide and butterfly-wing hopeful. Its tears are like Ei's. She smiles cherry-blossom sweet.
Birds sing. Foxes gossip beneath toriis. Time does not pass at all. She is not counting. She smiles like Saiguu taught her and does not scream.
She calls upon lightning. She uses her teeth. She burns flesh without grimacing.
She waits for her god.
The vessel is a miracle of biomechanics. To have a synthetic being grow in real time! To have it shed blood like its mother once did! She pages through another manuscript, picturing the child as the petulant teenage hero. Picturing the strands of raven hair in her whiteknuckled grip. Electricity prickles at her nailbeds.
Yae prays.
The vessel stares at its reflection behind a veil. It uses a paring knife (One, two, three throats slit. Its own windpipe fails to crumple) to slice through its long hair.
It grows still. It slaughters. Still. She waits for her god.
The rain washes away riverwater. The red on its face like an animal. At some point, it realizes most things are the same—not enough to matter. At some point it stops crying.
A star falls in Teyvat. A star talks to God. Yae keeps her eyes fixed on both. The only difference between traveler and wanderer is the time it takes to get to the heart.
Tatarasuna opens its mines, railways parallel and rusted like ribs. Ei had took her heart out, gave it to Yae in a satchel smelling of mangrove and ozone, and replaced it with a blade. No ribs harmed in the making. Yae so hates the gristle, but she always chews her way around the bone, refusing to waste good meat. She will not abandon you. She will not—
The traveler's knees give out. Yae's skirts brush against the poisoned floor. It's just the two of them (and her eternity, eternal presence, always maybe-watching. Waiting.)
Why, she says, you and I know the same things. Let us not waste time on trivial matters, shall we?
The vessel stares at her, every syllable of its new name trembling with unfettered rage.
(Yae preys.)
She presses the electro gnosis to its palm. The sting of static hasn't bothered her in five hundred years. She does it the favor of looking at the dried blood under its nails instead of the wetness in its eyes. Smiles.
God-killer, good luck.