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The Abyss tonight is blue, deep, and immeasurably vast.
Lumine… It whispers her name, a disembodied voice, slithering through the milky mist that dances languidly around her calves, lapping at her bare skin like rivulets of phantom rain. Cool like the icy glow of stars in the inkiest of nights. The power it exudes creeping through this surreal dimension like ivy, one that hungrily tastes every dissenting mortal breath it pervades and smothering it without mercy. Yet to her, its presence is a comfort in her lonely mind.
She threads through the undercurrents, her lone form caressed by the Abyss’ all-encompassing, all-devouring aura.
Lumine, the Abyss’ growl resonates through the air, a warning.
An intruder.
She spins around, searching through the fog. Steps lightly as if on the brittle carcasses of enemies, lying dead at her feet. She hears him speak before she sees him through the opalescent murkiness. And when she does, she freezes.
“Lumine…?”
Her name on those lips is a spell, an accursed, cruel enchantment sinking blunt teeth into her heart. Those sea-blue star-adorned eyes, ghosts chasing her relentlessly even in dreams that shouldn’t be nightmares, narrow upon her. Almost as stunned as her to see him, here, before her once again.
“Am I dreaming?” she murmurs, taking in his appearance, growing more threateningly solid with each tentative step he takes to her. The face flaring with recognition at the sight of her. The utter betrayal she remembers. The eyes harrowed and red-rimmed with sleepless nights and hints of mania.
That voice that lets out a weak chuckle. “I think I am the one dreaming here,” he says. The hoarseness of that sound, strained with tortured longing, makes Lumine stiffen.
This is no mere dream.
Her sword is out in a flash, slashing through her mortal enemy like a blade rippling through the surface of a calm lake.
The illusion flickers, disappears. And she breathes a sigh of empty relief when she wakes.
Yet again the phantom from her past returns to haunt her, in this otherworldly dimension of opalescent mist and starry tears.
Lumine blinks, narrows her eyes at the apparition taking his form, approaching her as though in a daze. No, no, no—
“Wait!” her ghost gasps, reaching out to her. Frantic fingers grasping at white petals flurrying in a blizzard.
Her sword is a lightning arc, cleaving through him like wet clay. He crumbles to dust.
Again.
Again.
Again.
“How many times shall we go through this same endless cycle, this unceasing samsara of dreams, Lumine?” The ghost questions sincerely, something reminiscent of leisure in his slow strides forward, but learnedly keeps a safe distance away from her blade.
“Stop calling me that,” she hisses.
“Ah, yes. You have a new title now,” he frowns, bitterness creeping into the crinkle of his furrowed brows. “ Princess of the Abyss Order.” He steps closer, not heeding the threatening glint of her blade. It doesn’t harm him, only temporarily severs whatever strange connection stretches between the two, even as one roams the wilderness of Teyvat in perpetual loneliness, while the other dwells in the darkest depths of the fathomless Abyss.
Yet this place is neither Teyvat nor the Abyss.
Lumine frowns at the clear displeasure darkening his tone, but pays it no care. “Leave me, Dainsleif,” she orders coldly. Her sword swings for him once more, and he sighs, eyes fluttering close in resigned acceptance.
But the dreams return, incessantly, and so does he.
“Cease this, Lumine,” her phantom says as he approaches her, the white mist shivering and parting around him in his wake.
Those ghostly words echo through the dream dimension, that heart-wrenchingly familiar gravel of his voice prickling her skin.
Lumine glares at him, the creases of her finger joints surely indented by the sword hilt she grips with something murderous. But rage and irritation hold no power here in this world of dreams, when her anger clearly does little more than amuse him.
She can’t kill a ghost, after all.
And she’s getting tired. Tired of being forced to hear his voice, feel his presence, smell his scent, when he isn’t even, can’t possibly be here with her.
“Why are you doing this?” she whispers.
The smirk that curves his lips mocks her foolishness, her naivety. Yet it is anything but cruel. “I’m not doing anything, Princess.” His answer stuns her, though not so much as the amusement underlying his soft tone. “All of this is your doing.”
Those black gloved fingers stroke along the opal mist swirling around his form. The aura of her powers ripples, quivers at the contact of his hand, sighing as if greeting an old, familiar friend, and she can almost imagine those fingers caressing naked skin. It elicits a shiver she cannot let him notice.
“You’re lying,” she says decisively. “You’re the one entering my dreams, invading my mind.”
Yet he’s right. The abyssal power that orbits the sphere of this dream dimension enclosing them hums with its own unique signature, in which lies the aura of dying stars and white flowers, scarcely beginning to wither, of the celestial entity from another world. Pure and untainted and wholly hers.
Her phantom closes the distance between them, and, against her better good, she lets him. Allows them to speak a pace apart from each other, an invisible yet tangible cord stretching taut between them with each inexorable step he takes. Claws at her mercilessly, till Lumine fears she might surrender what little control she hoards in her not to drive her sword through his chest once more.
“Believe me, Lumine, if I could somehow crawl under your skin and into your mind, we wouldn’t be on opposite halves of the same war a second longer.”
His closeness makes her wonder if he was a ghost at all. Because the warmth of his breath, so different from the chill of this dimension where reality and reason cease to exist, is slipping down the length of her bare neck, tracing the line of her clavicle and dipping past her breastbone. A mere touch that evokes a wave of sensation in which she fights to stay afloat.
So real and so close to her it pulls her under the dark seas riddling those haunted eyes.
“And why do you presume I would be doing all this, summoning you to me in my dreams, when I left you?” She scoffs, raising a sceptical eyebrow.
“The mind works in mysterious ways, Princess. Yours most of all.” He gives a light chuckle. “And I was a fool to have ever hoped I would one day come to understand it.”
“You were a fool for many things, Dainsleif, and a fool still,” Lumine says, leaning in closer. She blames that single compulsive act on that invisible rope to him that just p u l l s her over, till their hearts beat in tandem a mere breath apart. The barest hitch in his breathing makes her pulse quicken.
“But your folly for me just might be your undoing.”
A well-practised motion smoothly sinks her sword into his thoracic cavity, where they both know his heart beats eternally, undyingly, for hers. His figure melts away like snow in her hand, clenched tight around nothing but ghosts.
The next time she dreams, her ghost stands a surprisingly far distance away. She would’ve mistaken him uncharacteristically apprehensive of her, if it weren’t for the mischief glinting in those blue eyes. “Do not touch me,” he says.
“Why’s that?” Lumine quips, not wanting to know the reason why that order made something sink cold and heavy into her gut. The desire to disobey his command, to be defiant, to touch him or whatever this illusion taking the form of her enemy is, flashes hot through her head.
The expression that flits unbidden across her face must’ve amused him, because Dainsleif smiles, faintly, at her. It irks, no, aghasts her to think that even after all this time, he can still read all her masterfully masked emotions like a damn book.
“Because the moment you touch me, the dream ends.”
Her heart flutters at his words, and she hates it, hates him. “I’ve figured that out, too.” Lumine lunges for him, but he nimbly steps out of her reach. That subtle, infuriating smirk playing on his lips.
She growls under her breath, unsheathes her blade, thrusts it at his face.
Yet again and again he dodges her every attempt to touch him, and soon the two are weaving back and forth amidst the grass like inelegant, drunken dancers in some sort of childish play. Rain descends like strings of glittering stars, flooding the world. Their staggering, graceless footsteps somehow in sync with each other, anticipating the other’s next move with uncanny accuracy, as though with a well-rehearsed familiarity two enemies definitely shouldn’t have.
Yet it flows between them both, a gossamer string that connects her soul to the depths of his like the rain tethers heaven to earth. Tangles, stretches, frays amidst the dew-spangled mist and opaque fog, but never yielding to tear. Pricks cruelly at her heart like the barbs of a wire fence separating him from her.
Dainsleif lets out a laugh, and she grits her teeth. Another gazing upon the two might’ve mistakenly thought them dancing in the rain. Doused in something carefree and romantic and something that can never be.
Indeed; End this foolishness already, Princess, the Abyss purrs in her ear.
Lumine’s arm lifts like a gilded puppet on silk strings, hurls her blade.
When her sword finds his chest once again, Lumine prays that the string between them will be shattered along with him to permanent disrepair.
Lumine doesn’t dream of him for a while. But when she does, she feels relief, and it annoys her.
His strides defeat the gap between them, and her eyes narrow. He’s becoming bolder. No longer quite so afraid of the edge of her sword when he could simply return to haunt her in her next dream and the next.
He chuckles at the sight of her. “I missed you,” he says. That smile widens a little, becomes something genuine, familiar. Tilts the world she already stands so unsteadily in.
“Don’t say that,” she snaps, already unsheathing her sword.
Dainsleif’s smile falters; the painfully lighthearted mood shifting into something weightier as he sombers.
“Would you rather I tell a lie, then?”
Lumine’s heart catches. Eyes unblinking, unyielding as she glares up at him. “Yes. Lie to me, Dainsleif,” she breathes, every syllable a poison dripping with unadulterated scorn.
His breath slips between her lips, a deluge of heat rushing into her core at the sudden realisation of his proximity. Lumine braces herself. But never does his mouth meet hers.
“You haven’t changed a bit since the day you left,” he murmurs. She stills, held rapt in his eyes that ensnare her so gently, sending shivers down her arms that have nothing to do with the cold.
He reaches out a single tentative hand. He wants to touch her. And Lumine forgets to breathe.
“May I…?” He asks quietly.
Despite herself, despite everything, she nods.
Dainsleif touches a single fingertip to her bare shoulder, watches with hollow eyes as she withers to pure-white petals, strewn with mournful listlessness over his hand and out of reach in the wind.
He’s standing next to her, softly speaking to her. “You truly believe that what you covet most is the revival of the homeland, the return of Khaenri’ah’s glory and the toppling of the divine thrones, Princess?”
Her fingers itch for her blade, but controls it. The fact that their arms are a mere breath apart is infinitely more distracting than the words she’d readied herself to hear, more harrowing.
“I’ve chosen this path long ago when I’d forfeited my fate to be by your side,” she tells him stoically.
His gaze hardens. “So you have.” He reaches out, almost as if to touch her, and holds himself back at the last moment. Suppresses the yearning for her hand against his, more than just the touch of her hand, that flickers faintly in his gaze and tautens his tone, lest the hand of reality rips the dream apart yet again.
“But tell me, Lumine. Do you regret it?”
The whispered words summon a lie to her tongue, swift as an arrow. “No.” The cold passivity of her tone betrays none of the anger rearing its venomous head inside her. How dare he? How dare he make her question her purpose, when she has already reached a point of no return, when doubts and regrets have no use beyond tormenting her of the things she had sacrificed, of what she had lost?
He falls silent, and his expression softens, imperceptibly. “I know you don’t. You’ve always been selfless, putting the needs of others before your own, even when they’ve never asked for it of you. You are chained to your duty by your guilt, and not because they wish for it.”
She knows who the “they” he refers to is; it sears bitterness into her tongue.
“But believe me, when I say this.” He’s in front of her, a fevered vow brewing on his lips. “I will stop at nothing to stop the Abyss Order, to stop you from falling to your inevitable doom.”
Rage, a creature coiled dormant in her core, consumes her before she even feels it. Courses like a drug through her bones, clambering eagerly from the Abyss and rushing upon her enemy, devouring him in flames of radiant violet.
The blaze envelopes him, sends him falling to his knees, gasping, while Lumine staggers back, satisfaction and guilt warring within her. “Watch your tongue, Bough-Keeper,” she brings herself to whisper harshly. “You speak ill of nightmares while still asleep.”
Dainsleif clenches his jaw, pushes himself up. His lips curl, a hint of sadism that heats her abdomen. “I do, indeed.” He gazes down at himself, appraising the aura of her power simmering and smoking around his skin—unharmed. Her powers have no effect in this world of dreams, unlike in the real world, where he would have smothered to ash if not for his immortality.
“And perhaps nightmares, reflections of that which we dread, which we fear most, are what tortures us.”
He steps closer, his own Abyssal powers awakening, stifling the air with an azure icy glow. It slithers through the mist towards her, flowing undulatingly like miniature serpents up her legs her waist her chest, knotting around her throat and baring the delicate white of her neck to him. Lumine is frozen, paralysed not with fear, but with something that makes her heart clench, utter a shallow gasp of his name. Whether in protest or in longing, even she is uncertain.
“But what a beautiful nightmare it is,” he whispers softly into her ear, thumb ghosting over her lower lip. His face is tilting down to hers, an imminent collision of stars that’ll surely hurl the cosmos into upheaval.
You are not his to have , the Abyss snarls, rushing upon her to engulf her at once, and wrench her apart from his grasp.
At his touch, her body scatters in an implosion of phantom dandelion seeds, drifting away. And she faintly recalls the memory of her and a travel companion, a dandelion held out in her hand, telling him to make a wish.
Rain plummets from the heavens like a night of falling stars, dripping honey amidst the inky cold. She can’t help recalling another night hundreds of years ago, just like this one, watching the sky’s inexorable descent with another’s warm fingers laced through hers, a promise to witness a lifetime more of nights like this one by her side.
“...Outlanders…they don’t belong in this world,” Lumine finds herself saying, tone brittle with the biting bitterness of years of anguish and remorse and regret. She can hardly recall what she was saying or doing in the dream just moments before, but her entire body aches with each syllable souring her tongue, possibly the truest words she’d spoken to him since their falling apart.
Standing apart from her, her phantom hesitates.
Then he takes a single silent step forward. Every nerve in her body wants to step away, to move out of the focus of that scrutinising gaze, stripping all the guards she’s been so careful to mount all this time.
“Perhaps not,” he says quietly. “But you, Lumine, where do you think you belong?”
Her answer is a ready dagger she hopes slices through his hidden defences. “Here, in the Abyss. As the Princess of the Abyss Order, against the Heavenly Principles to fulfil my mission for the revival of the Homeland. And I most definitely do not belong to you.”
The look he gives her is infinitely, unashamedly mournful. And she realises that her answer has failed to tear down any of his defences, because he is utterly, painfully defenceless for her, as always.
A step towards her. “So that is what you tell me…or tell yourself. But even you should know that the Abyss is nowhere a star like you should have her light stifled, choked and smothered. You belong on the surface, basking in the sun.”
Another step closer. “With your brother.”
The final step he takes leaves them only inches apart. Her hardened amber eyes gaze into the depths of his sea-blue, glinting with an ice-sheathed vow, that should she be careless and sink into their beguiling, deadly abyss, she will surely drown to the sweetest, most tender death.
“And I belong nowhere else but with you, Lumine.”
Lumine's heart is splintering from the pain of it all, the illusion of his proximity, the warmth of his breath ghosting her lips, achingly close. The barbed wire between them wrenching at her chest, knotting and fraying and bleeding red, even as she takes her sword with a trembling hand and tears apart the dream into painless, welcome oblivion.
“ Lumine…” Dainsleif was saying, voice low and pleading. Rain slides from the tips of his lashes like tears.
“Just leave me alone,” she screams at him, even though there’s no need to, seeing as he is standing right in front of her and the false promise of his presence is a dagger twisting in her gut. The break of her voice reverberates through the drizzling gloom, through the vast dream dimension, her own shame echoing soundlessly in her ears.
Because her heart is growing too weak and he’s probing in too deep through the cracks in her mask, and she fears if he sees her, all of her, in this moment where he renders her so utterly vulnerable, he will know everything,
And then he will never leave.
He smiles sadly, takes her hand to touch her at last.
“You know I’d sooner die than let you go.”
She feels her dream-self disintegrate at the first contact of him, and she feels nothing. There is no warmth, no coldness, nothing.
Only a dull longing for his familiar touch, from a lifetime ago.
Her body dissipates into opal mist slipping through desperately cupped fingers, and the look in his eyes breaks her heart all over again as she fades away.
Dreaming again, Lumine crashes into white, flower petals flurrying into the storm of clashing cerulean and turquoise—the colour of his eyes.
And she waits for those eyes to fall upon her once again, searching against volition the place where he’s always appeared, waiting for her without warning, without conscious summons, without words.
But he is nowhere to be found.
She searches, something in her whispering his name like a fervent prayer, twirling barefooted steps in a shifting world. It suddenly occurs to her that he was never once there, but a figment of her imagination. Long gone, preserved and alive only in her memory.
She expects his absence to bring her comfort.
Yet all she can hear is the Abyss’ seductive susurrations swirling at her feet, mocking the futility of her foolish act, its amusement at all her silly little contradictions.
Because as much as Lumine hates it, hates him, she’d rather die than leave him a second time.
What do you want? The Abyss whispers, stroking her cheek.
My mission, Lumine thinks. The Homeland. Revival. Vengeance. Justice. Power. Obliteration. Destroy, Him, Obsession, Hate, Kill, Rescue Hope Vain Foolish—
The world is spinning, the dream threading apart and fraying at the seams.
Memories Past Present Gone nation crown gods mortals time cease catastrophe overwhelm suffocate devour duty break death rebirth relinquish resurrection renewal
Malevolent laughter roars in her ears, drowning it all out to abysmal oblivion, till the incessant thoughts spiralling out like hideous writhing tentacles contort and twist into a single glaring word:
return.
The final time she dreams of him, Lumine approaches him instead.
“Dainsleif,” her voice tethers dangerously on the edge of something desperate. It sickens her. “Please. I can’t…we can’t keep seeing each other like this. How do I stop this? How do I make you leave me? ”
He smiles at her, a mirthless curl of the lip.
“Isn’t it obvious, Lumine? You have to kill me.”
“But I’ve tried!” she cries, frustrated and furious with herself. “Nothing works! Not my sword, not my powers, nothing!”
Dainsleif sighs. An infinitesimal gesture that reminds her of all the dead-of-nights where he’d awoken to her sobbing, her heart aching so keenly for her brother’s presence she’d failed to think of the one that had stayed by her side all night long, consoling and comforting her quiet anguish, wiped away her tears with a tender hand. A memory from long ago.
“Do you mean to kill me?” he whispers.
She hesitates, and curses herself for it.
His eyes narrow. “Do you want to kill me, Lumine?” That voice, so dangerously soft, practically taunts her. Like the threat of a thorned crown hanging over her head, promising power and pain in equal measure.
Yes, her mind screams for her to answer. Yes, I want nothing more than to kill you, my dearest mortal enemy. I want to kill you, to spear my blade through your heart and make you feel even a sliver of the pain all these dreams of your ghost torment me with. I want to kill you, to watch you die in my arms, because I despise you, loathe you, hate you almost as painfully and as deeply as I still love you.
“No,” she chokes out instead. “I could never hurt you, Dain.”
Dainsleif watches her carefully. Pain flickers in his eyes, mirroring hers. “I know you won’t,” he eventually says, softly. “But you aren’t just Lumine, are you?”
Her breath snags on brambles in her lungs. “Wh-what?”
“You wouldn’t kill me.” The end of his lips tilt upward in a wicked half-smile, a hint of fangs. “But the Princess of the Abyss Order…she would’ve killed me without mercy, without hesitation, without regret.” His words are a curse weaving that barbed wire round and round her chest, hooking into her heart and squeezing, relentlessly.
“And that is who you are, aren’t you, Princess?”
He’s right. She is.
“That’s why you left me, an enemy of the Abyss Order,” he reminds her, the softness of his voice a deception of his utter cruelty, “to become its Princess. Simply being Lumine, my travel companion, wasn’t enough for you. And you would not have left me only to become someone you’re not, would you?”
He’s accusing her, mocking her. Caressing cracks into her heart that is already so fragile and wounded. Yet she stands there, letting him.
She should kill him. She should’ve killed him all along.
“Kill me, then, Princess.” His words are half a taunt, half a plea. “Kill me, release me from this cruel dream that wreaks havoc on my waking slumber, that haunts me with memories I try and fail each day to forget. That tortures me with your presence, even when I know I can never be yours again.”
Lumine is trembling, a weak sob clawing up from her throat. She pushes it down, locks in a vault where all emotion has been chained down like wild beasts, tamed only by shackle and bolt. Except now they are bursting free from their manacles, rushing out in a hot flood of something that reminds her terrifyingly of tears.
But it isn’t tears, she reminds herself. Simply the rain, as it’s always been.
“Once I’ve killed you, in this dream and the realm of reality,” she says shakily, “will you find peace?”
His gaze softens. “Not until I’ve set you free, Lumine.”
She laughs hollowly, lips curved in a sweet, bitter smile. “You can’t.”
Dainsleif lowers his eyes, sighs. Nothing left for him to say, to protest, to plead. All he chases after are soulless memories, dreams of the past, intoxicating in their ambrosiac embrace and drugged dance. Awakening will only be a cruel knife stabbing his conscious mind, one which she is ready to deliver to him, for his own good. For hers. For the purpose she steels her life to follow: the revival of the Homeland.
He is, after all, her enemy.
So she reaches forward, fingers meeting and touching his chest, feels how hard and warm and real it is.
Their eyes meet once more, hers wide with shock and perplexity, Dainsleif’s glimmering blue with mirth. As if he’d known this to be true, all along.
So all this time…she was never unable to touch him. It was only her own morose loathing borne from regrets of the past, her fear of getting too close and falling in too irreversibly deep, that forbade her from touching him.
No longer.
Her hand pushes forward, delving through this ghostly, illusionary yet very much real skin, feels warm wet flesh that groans helplessly in protest to this surreal penetration. It’s so easy, Lumine wonders why she’d never tried before.
Then she plucks between the ridges of his rib cage the pulsating appendage that beats inside her grasp.
Wrenches her hand back out, her insides curdling at the damp squelch of ripped veins and torn tendons dripping something horridly satisfying. It sounds too loud, too real. Splashes hot on her cheek and slides down her face; it takes everything in her not to cringe away.
His heart beats wildly in her palm, ligaments hanging limp and quivering, bleeding black and ash. Inky juices run down her quivering fingers, blue blue blue, like the blue of the coldest night, the blue of his eyes when all light flees from his grasp, blue when he’s saddest and on the verge of tears because sorrows, not fears, are greater than what the most beautiful nightmares can ever reflect.
She’s done it, done what her real self could never bring herself to do. Ripped the heart of her enemy out.
While Dainsleif gazes gently at her in contentment. A thin line of blue, glistening wet, tracks down his chin.
“It was only ever yours, anyway,” he exhales.
He leans in, the warmth expelled from his lungs caressing her parted dry lips, a final kiss farewell.
Lumine raises her head, desperate to meet him—
She tastes nothing but blood. A cold, coppery-scented opiate that chills her gut and freezes her soul. Overwhelming, a relentless downpour, gushing over her nose and mouth and chin. It both titillates and nauseates her.
She cups his cheek, hungrily searching for the same warmth she’d felt, the same heat that has been teasing her, taunting her, tendering her all this time. Grips onto his wrist as if to stop him from slipping away, realises he already has.
He’s already gone, crumbling like cadaver cremated to burning ash, like the inteyvat flower laid home to rest. Disintegrating flesh, time-weary bones fracturing like powder and collapsing in on themselves…
Till her ghost, his blue blue blood, his still-beating heart are no more than dust slipping through the cracks of her fingers like sand in a broken hourglass. Perhaps to mock her eternal, vain immortality, because time has never once been on her side.
And then she wakes.
Somewhere else, Dainsleif, killed, breaks free,
that enchanted realm of dreams and flowers and lies and nightmares woven into something throbbing agonisingly hard against his ribcage, already fading away into memory.
His fingers fly to his chest; he sags in relief when his heart still beats within him. Alive. Though the pain that riddles him, that curls gnarled claws around his neck and grips, chokes, cannot be something conjured by a mind bewitched by the past.
It’s real. Too real.
Phantom pain, he tells himself, taking in shuddering breaths, hunched over; feeling that slowing pulse, flooding his ears and filling the spaces between his every slow inhale, exhale, inhale. A phantom, a ghost from the past, who will haunt him in his nightmares no longer. A lethal reverie where he was too blind to see the depth of his indulgence, too selfish to resist, because all he desires, all he ever needs, is but the touch of her hand. Even if it tears his flesh, rips his heart out.
Yet the moon soaks with dewy luminescence the tangled sheets by his side, still warm; the faintest fragrance of wilting inteyvats still lingering like bloodstains.
And it’s almost as though she’d never left.