Chapter Text
Prologue
Stars glimmered coldly in the distant sky.
They watched silently as headlights hurtled towards her.
They laughed cruelly as the light extinguished from her eyes.
Darkness.
A suffocating, eternal night swallows her, whispering promises of a long and painless death. Yet, a corner of her subconscious told her she had already died. This must be death. An empty void.
As she floats, all sensations cut off and all emotion muted, one voice grows louder than the rest.
“This one,” the voice whispers.
She feels a cold hand reach inside her chest, gripping her still, lifeless heart.
“You shall serve us,” the voice says. “Our persecutors shall suffer as we have. Become our harbinger. Serve…
…the…
…”
Chapter 1
The gentle lapping of waves filled Ash’s ears. Silken sand rubbed against her palms and slowly worked itself into the folds of her clothes. The air smelled like a seaside town. Salt and fish. She opened her eyes, squinting against the blazing sun.
Ash sat there for a moment, contemplating what had just happened.
Did I… die?
She stood up, looking around her. The open ocean lay before her, and a sheer cliff reared up behind. It was a narrow beach. Foreign, yet strangely familiar. A cliff curved around the beach’s border, cutting off all exits but one to the south. Confused, Ash walked along the waterside.
Sand made way for grass and Ash sat down to tip the small grains out of her shoes, leaning against a strange stone structure.
Again, it felt familiar but she couldn’t quite place it.
Ash sighed and rubbed her forehead, trying to settle her thoughts. She had been walking back home from uni, feeling tired and brain-dead. She had crossed a dark road. One that cars rarely drove along.
Headlights, then darkness.
Ash shuddered, feeling sick to her stomach. Had she been run over? How was she here, her breaths coming rapid and ragged? Her heart was pounding, so she couldn’t be dead. But the recollection was so vivid. So fresh.
Like a bell, a memory chimed in the back of her mind.
Ash slowly turned around, looking again at the structure she had been leaning against. It floated in place, bands of glowing light wrapped around the light grey stone.
This is impossible. It has to be a prank.
But the stone felt real and the beach’s familiarity had finally clicked with the name dwelling in her mind.
“Starfell Valley,” she muttered, running her hand down the structure that she now recognised as a teleport waypoint. This place looked exactly like the beach where the Traveller described their separation from their sibling to Paimon.
The salty seaside wind didn’t smell like a set and the waypoint didn’t feel like a prop, but… it just wasn’t possible. Not only that she had… died, but somehow reincarnated into Teyvat - a fictional world that should, by all rights, be bound by its code. Had she somehow survived the collision? Was this all generated by her coma-bound imagination?
Ash’s stomach growled.
“If this is an illusion,” she sighed, “it sure is immersive.”
Maybe coma rules were different, but she was pretty sure dreams didn’t usually come with smells, wind and sand rashes.
Either way, she couldn’t stay here if her hunger had anything to say about it. Unlike the Traveller, Ash didn’t have any emergency food.
The novelty and nostalgia of walking through Starfell Valley never got old for Ash, although scrambling over logs and clawing her way up small cliffs wasn’t quite as peaceful as pressing keys on her computer.
Finally, she reached the top, her lungs working rapidly to keep up with the physical exertion.
Before her was the rolling landscape of Mondstadt, the walled city sitting safely in the midst of Cidar Lake and in the distance, the dense forests of Wolvendom.
Starfell Lake glittered in the midday sun, casting ripples of sunlight on the Statue of the Seven in the middle.
A thought crossed Ash’s mind and curiosity overrode her common sense.
Would swimming to the Statue make her clothes wet and uncomfortable? Yes. Would it give her cool powers? Possibly, and that possibility was enough to send her running down to the lake. After all, she wasn’t from this world either.
Leaving her shoes behind on the bank, Ash swam across.
The Statue looked peaceful, hand cupped benevolently and wings curved around as if Barbatos had just descended from flying freely through the skies.
She wet her lips and approached. A strange sensation started in her chest as if her heart and the Statue were repelling each other. Like magnets refusing to touch. Ash tried to push through the feeling, hoping that if she could just touch the Statue, she’d have its blessings, but the sensation began to grow painful and she doubled over, clutching her chest. Her knees hit the ground painfully, skinning them.
Ash crawled feebly away from the Statue, its smile now seeming derisive. It's benevolence, a mockery.
Now a few metres away, the feeling began to fade and Ash stopped to catch her breath.
“I am not trying that again,” she panted, splashing water onto her bleeding knees.
Tiredly, she leant over the water to splash her face too. Her reflection looked exactly as it had last time she had checked in her bedroom mirror, if sandier.
Brown eyes in a freckled face.
At least that hasn’t changed.
Yet she couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Whether or not this was all real, she could’ve at least gotten some powers and a cool scar or something.
But no, she was just hungry and allergic to statues.
Even her clothes were the same ones she’d been wearing when she’d ‘died’, which could pose a problem if she planned to go to Mondstadt.
Ash doubted polyester was very common in Teyvat.
A scream interrupted Ash’s musings, drawing her attention across the lake, where a man crouching down, covering his head in protection against three Hillichurls.
He screamed again.
Pallad? Ash recognised the scene. He looks like he’s in trouble.
Her adrenaline spiked, and she swam across the lake, racing across the grass from the moment her feet touched ground. Simply covering his head could only do so much, but the Hillichurls were only toying with him for now.
The… Hillichurls…
Ash’s mad dash slowed until she was a few metres away from the group. She’d never noticed in the game, but they were big. Taller than her, and with lean, muscular arms.
And also aggressive.
Her brain also chose this time to remind her she didn't have a weapon.
Oh, shoot.
~~~
Amber was excited.
There was a sale for sticky honey roast today, and she only had a few more square metres on her route.
Yet, she was disciplined enough to contain her eagerness, and carefully follow the Hillichurl tracks that she was tracing. There was a set of human prints as well, so she was trying to go as fast as she could.
Suddenly, a pulse of sickening nausea ran through her, before disappearing as quickly as it had come. A sense of danger ran up Amber’s spine, and she realised the forest had gone completely silent.
That’s not a good sign, she thought stressfully, that’s never a good sign.
Forgetting the tracks, she ran in the direction the pulse had come from, crashing through the undergrowth and smacking into branches. She burst into a clearing and surveyed the scene with an expert eye.
“Pallad!” she cried, “are you okay?” she knelt by the man, who was doubled over on the ground.
“I’m alright,” he coughed, “just feeling a bit sick… this girl, though…”
“What’s wrong with her?” Amber asked, moving over to where the stranger had collapsed on the ground. The grass surrounding her body was dead, and three Hilichurls were lying nearby. Amber watched for breath.
None. The Hillichurls were also dead.
“She just came out of nowhere,” Pallad was saying, scrambling to a sitting position, “the Hillichurls attacked her and she just- uh…”
“What?” Amber prompted while checking the girl for a pulse. Good, there was one.
“I-I don’t know, to be honest,” Pallad said, “I looked away, you know? I didn’t want to see her get hurt for my sake, but the next thing I know, I’m feeling sick and the hilichurls are dead.”
“Strange…” Amber couldn’t see a Vision anywhere on the stranger, nor a weapon. There wasn’t any blood or injuries either, aside from scraped knees and cut hands.
“How are you feeling now, Pallad?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine now.”
“Could you help me? We need to carry her back to Mondstadt.”