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Teyvat had changed so much, in the centuries since they’d left.
It had been a joke, at first. See what had made it into the history books, when all the dust had settled. Would either of them be remembered, or lost to memory? The traveler was almost certainly not forgotten, but the wanderer? He’d played only a minor role in the saga, leaving the heroics and derring-do to better, nicer people.
However, on learning that Buer had released his story in full after their disappearance, Kazeharu was dismayed to find that the humans had turned it into a romance. The fated lovers, an abandoned demigod and a lost star’s heart, destined to be together despite initially being from opposite sides of the battlefield. The traveler had nearly died laughing seeing how it was described in some of the summaries they’d found, while the puppet by his side had wished instead to sink into the earth and disappear entirely out of embarrassment.
There were books about it. Puppet theatres (of course) and full length historical plays and ballads composed in their honor. If they weren’t trying to be inconspicuous he might have screamed at something already, it was so horrifying. Yes, he loved the man, but that was his business, nobody else needed to care. He hated thinking about it, hated knowing that so many of the cursed mortals were imagining them sleeping together - because of course they were, he knew how filthy most of their minds were - and that thought was only confirmed when he flipped open one of the books to an extremely raunchy passage that portrayed both of them as disgustingly affectionate in ways they certainly weren’t.
The traveler insisted on seeing one of the plays. The complete, full length, several days long production by one of the most famous theatre companies in Liyue. Aether explained that he’d known one of the members, back when they only did traditional opera and hadn’t branched out yet, so he wanted to support them. Fine, he could appreciate the sentiment, but what he didn’t understand was why he needed to be there. Kazeharu was not interested in seeing how the mortals had interpreted his mostly selfish and destructive actions, and he most certainly did not want to be there while the traveler was drinking in every word and song in delight.
“Because I want to see a play with you,” Aether had said, with that smile he could never refuse. “It doesn’t have to be that one, I just think it would be really interesting. It’s not often I come back to a world to see how it’s grown.”
And that was how they found themselves seated in the audience, watching a theatrical production loosely (very loosely) based on his own ‘tragically puppeteered backstory’ (as it was described in the handbook) with an excessive amount of drama added for good measure. For instance, his father had not been capable of getting up after being stabbed to sing a duet with his own killer about how he hoped his son would one day learn and grow from this experience, becoming wise enough to see through the twisting schemes others would try to use him for.
He got more than a few offended glances every time he made an involuntary noise of disgust or disappointment at the portrayals on stage, to the point where Aether had to lean over and gently apologize for his partner, who ‘just wasn’t very fond of love stories or theatre in general’.
Their first meeting on stage went far, far better than it had in real life, the Balladeer’s actor swooping in to stop ‘Aether’ from touching the cursed meteorite shard, subsequently receiving a grateful promise of forever remembering his debt. (Archons and stars preserve him, it was so goddamn cheesy.) Their second and third meetings were similarly dramatized, with ‘Scaramouche’ displaying an enormous amount of internal conflict over realizing he would have to kill this beautiful heavenly being and not being able to go through with it, followed by a sorrowful parting upon realizing that with the meteorite problem solved, they both had to go their own separate ways. (The real Aether had to hit his arm to stop him from gagging over their sappy call and response song of ‘we may yet meet again, some day’)
When it got to their fourth meeting, at the delusion factory, the entire outcome was completely reversed. The woeful and conflicted traveler defeated the blustering Balladeer and took the electro gnosis, but left him alive because he ‘remembered his debt’. Even Aether was hard pressed not to burst out laughing at the ridiculous setup, and the man was holding back incredulous tears by the end of the scene.
Two days in and Kazeharu had resigned himself to whatever unapologetic shitshow the humans had come up with for the retelling of that fateful dream-fueled battle.
There was probably going to be more singing.
(There was absolutely singing.)
But the song was no light-hearted lover’s spat, no gentle melodic ballad. This was… plaintive. Mournful, and sinister, and longing, all at once. A chanting chorus in the style of Mondstatian church hymns, threatening rhetoric uttered in the long-dead language of ancient Teyvat’s Seelies that only scholars knew, now, with the anguished voice of his actor soaring over the background drone of their deep and sonorous words, in both Seelean and Inazuman.
Who would create a false god?
A false god, a real god… empty words really, in the end. It could have been either of them, had the other lost.
Woe to those who dare create a god.
Woe, woe, for the hubris of mankind - but no, it was his own hubris for thinking he needed outside recognition to be real, as if his existence was only determined by his observers. By acknowledgment.
Worship.
It is all to no avail.
Both his struggle and theirs. Flies caught in honey, weakly fluttering wings that would never fly again despite all hope otherwise.
A rhapsody to them, deceit to you.
Believe me and live. Deny me and die. It was only the natural course of the world, was it not?
Do not abandon me. (Do not.)
The music’s tempo changed, faster, more unhinged, accompanied now by the resonant nigh-religious chords of the organ dominating the background. Feelings he’d left behind centuries ago flooded back in vivid, heart-wrenching agony.
May Celestia be denied you.
If he could not be divine, then let no one be.
May disaster weigh heavy upon you.
If he had suffered three betrayals, so must the world.
(Why did you throw me away before you even named me?)
If he had no name, then let no name remain unsullied.
Arrogant sages, seduced by sin. (Their sins condemn them.)
Condemned him, condemned them, condemned Teyvat and Irminsul and every flowering root and branch.
Tyranny, Tyranny, Tyranny. (Why did you throw me away before you even named me?)
His breathing slowed again, as the memories began to ease their grip. The question still haunted him. But not all names were worth keeping, he’d found.
Not all names… were meaningful.
The sages place their false idol on an empty, barren throne. (Woe to the sages, woe to the idol.)
Woe and wretchedness, terror and trauma. Each of them inflicting their own hurts upon those who followed, that none might have the peace they were denied. Generation upon generation of pain cascading down through time.
I wish I had never been born at all.
The final nail in the coffin. The utmost truth of his despair, before Aether had caught him and gave him kindness instead of retribution. Compassion, instead of vengeance.
Love, instead of pain.
It hadn’t stopped him from trying to enact that wish, later, when he learned the true depth of his betrayal.
He was silent, afterward, as they watched his actor fall through the air in the sudden absence of instruments and sound. Was this what it was like to be worshipped? To have followers that would sing his praises, to have devotees echo his sentiments in the lonely hours of the night? To have bonds of kinship with the mortals whose image he had been fashioned in?
He’d only had to leave to get what he’d really wanted from this world.
Understanding.
Later, when the opera finally concluded on the third day, Aether wisely elected to say nothing when Kazeharu gave in and grudgingly bought the spincrystal collection on their way out, with a particularly vicious scowl on his face.