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Furina sat at the edge of the cliff, her legs dangling in the air. It was almost odd, knowing that should she push herself away from the ledge, she would certainly die.
She had always feared the grip of death. The prophesied destruction of Fontaine and its people had ruled her every action, had been the only reason she made it this far. The finality of death made an uneasy feeling settle in her gut, causing her stomach to cramp up and her palms to glisten with sweat. Even in operas, when the protagonist’s lover died in the second act to prompt their revenge on the villain in the third, she couldn’t shake the odd feeling.
She had never feared her own death, though. There were even times when she had longed for it. She knew that Foçalors had made it so that she could not die, but whenever she saw a pistol, she imagined testing the limits of the curse. Would the bullet even pierce her skin? Would she be able to blow her brains out and have it perfectly healed the next day? Or would the gore stay, and she would go to the Opera Epiclese the next day with blood still dripping down her ruined face, letting all of her people witness the spectacular failures of their ‘Archon’?
Alas, the curse had been lifted, which meant that her uneasy feeling had begun to spread to her own life. If she were take a gun to her forehead and press the trigger, there would be no experimentation. She would die.
If she did not commit suicide, and if no ailment or injury killed her, she would die of old age. She must be the oldest human alive, but she would still eventually go gray and she would wither away.
Furina wasn’t sure if she wanted to make it that far. At this point, she could still make it to 600 years of human living before her death, but… perhaps an earlier demise would be preferable.
Besides, there were very few people who would truly mourn her death. She was friends with Clorinde and Navia, she was acquainted with several Melusines… the main person that she imagined would mourn her was none other than Iudex Neuvillette.
After all, they had worked alongside one another for five centuries. She didn’t know what to call their relationship- friends felt embarrassingly shallow for the bond they had shared, but there was no other good term to explain it.
Furina could not describe how incredible it felt to be able to spend time with him again. They didn’t see each other nearly as often as they used to, but she would still waltz into his office and distract him from his work all the same. Sometimes she offered insight on cases, and as much as she was almost entirely sure it was unhelpful, he continued to insist that he appreciated it. He had even spoken about things she had mentioned in trials that he noticed she was watching. Perhaps he was taking it a tad bit far, but she appreciated the thought nonetheless.
And, on a less positive note, it was nice to have someone to talk to about everything. When she felt like she was drowning in her sorrow, all she had to do was ask him to show up and he would come to her home and offer her his comfort. She had never had someone hold her as she cried before, and it was a lot more pleasant than she had assumed it would be.
Before, she had loathed the idea of being vulnerable with people. She obviously couldn’t, or she would destroy of Fontaine, but even the idea itself felt uncomfortable. The idea of letting people see past her carefully crafted façade made her cringe. No one deserved to have to sit through her blubbering when everyone else had more important issues to deal with than her sadness.
Really, her story seemed inconsequential when compared to others. Other people had faced immense grief when the people they had loved passed away, other people had lost their homes during the flooding; Furina had just had a pathetic amount of willpower and thus had become overdramatic about the past five centuries. If she had been stronger, she wouldn’t have “suffered” so much.
When she voiced this to Neuvillette, he looked at her like she had ripped his heart (hearts?) out of his chest.
“Furina,” he whispered, his voice shaky. “How could you say that?”
She aggressively rubbed at the wetness on her cheeks, desperate for it to go away. “Say what, Neuvillette? It’s simply the truth.”
“Your suffering has been so immense that I cannot even begin to imagine what you have gone through, all for Fontaine. You were a human alive for five centuries- ignoring all the responsibilities you had, all the burdens you were shouldering, no human can live that long without suffering. Considering your unique position? It’s a miracle you didn’t go insane within fifty years,” he said, his gaze so intense that Furina almost wanted to back away. “You have every right to be miserable, Furina. You have every right to hate me, to hate the world, to hate your people. But you don’t hate anything, and that may be the most admirable thing I have ever witnessed.”
Frankly, Furina still wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t making a big deal over nothing. Saying it was “the most admirable thing he has ever witnessed” was certainly overdramatic, and that was coming from her.
But one thing those interactions had assured her of is that at least one person out there truly cared for her.
Of course, there were her loyal fans- the ones who were still sympathetic to her, for some odd reason- and she believed that they wouldn’t exactly be pleased with her death either. But they didn’t know the first thing about her, really, and so as much as she appreciated their kindness, she doubted they would truly grieve for her. If anything, they would revel in the drama her death would present, especially if it wasn’t due to natural causes.
Perhaps it was morbid to imagine one’s death in such a way. She expelled the train of thought from her mind, instead choosing to focus on the sunrise before her.
In her five hundred and some years of life, she had never quite grown used to the beauty of the world. It was nice to view a sky unmarked by rain clouds threatening Fontaine’s demise.
“Enjoying the view?” a voice asked from behind her. She startled, turning around to find a young Inazuman man with an Anemo Vision adorning his chest. Strange, he had an odd resemblance to the Electro Archon, but perhaps that was just Furina’s imagination.
“I am. May I ask who you might be?” Furina inquired, crossing her arms as she continued to strain her neck to look back at the man. Really, she was too old for this.
Thankfully, he moved to sit next to her, and her poor neck could rest. “You can call me the Wanderer.”
“Are you perhaps acquainted with the Traveler? You two have very similar names,” Furina replied, raising an eyebrow.
“I am, actually.”
Oh.
“You don’t need to introduce yourself to me. I’m well aware that you’re Furina de Fontaine, the Nation of Justice’s biggest celebrity,” the Wanderer said, staring at her pensively. “And you used to be a god.”
Furina was confused by the remark. It… was true, in a sense, but it was a weird way to word it and a weird thing to comment on in the first place. Suddenly her stomach began to cramp as she wondered if this man had been sent by the Knave to- no. Surely not. He didn’t seem like the type to be acquainted with a Fatui Harbinger, much less the type to do the Fatui’s bidding.
“I suppose so. Why do you bring that up?” It was a calm response, well fit for a cool protagonist in an opera. She mentally patted herself on the back for it. She sounded pretty awesome.
The man sighed. “Does it ever make you feel alone?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Your situation with the divine,” he clarified, staring at her as if she was a child who had asked an idiotic question. “Does it make you feel alone?”
Furina turned away from him to ponder her response, looking down at the ground far beneath her feet. “At times,” she finally said, her voice quiet. “Why do you ask?”
“I find myself in an oddly similar position to you, Furina,” he began. “Except I have nothing to do with the goddess Foçalors. Instead, my story began with the Raiden Shogun.”
Furina’s interest was suitably peaked, though she was sure her confusion was written all over her face.
The Wanderer snorted at her expression. “I was not created to avert a prophecy, mind you. No, my creator- my mother- she made me to rule over Inazuma for more selfish reasons. She planned to lock herself away, and she needed a puppet to rule in her stead,” he explained, looking into the distance. “However, when she discovered my… humanity, in a figurative sense, she abandoned me. She needed a puppet that could not feel nor gain sentiment for anything- I was not the one she was looking for.”
Furina exhaled. Their situations were similar in some ways, but there was a key difference- from what Neuvillette had told her, Foçalors believed that her humanity was what made her perfect. Apparently, the Electro Archon had felt the opposite, and had left the Wanderer to… wander.
“That’s awful,” she finally said, unsure of anything else to respond with. The unique nature of their situations meant it was hard to comfort anyone in them.
The Wanderer laughed at that. “Don’t I know it,” he responded, his voice dry and humorless. “And you know it, too.”
“Know what, exactly?”
“The pain of being left behind by a god. I imagine you don’t view Foçalors in precisely the same way as I view Ei, but… whether it be by death or indifference, we were both abandoned.”
Furina was silent for a moment before she responded. “What prompted you to come out and inform me of this? You preside in Sumeru, do you not?” she asked, gesturing to his Vision casing. Sumerian, despite his… place of creation.
“I befriended the Dendro Archon recently. She has told me many things about the other gods and their stories, using the knowledge she inherits from Irminsul,” he said. “You are one of the people recorded in it, as is your story. As is the prophecy.”
“The prophecy,” she murmured on instinct, as if it was a knee-jerk reaction to focus on it whenever it was brought up in conversation. She paused. “What does the Dendro Archon think of me?”
“She believes you are brilliant. I asked her about you, and the answer she gave was along the lines of- ‘some say that wisdom is knowing what you can change. The prophecy written in Irminsul has not changed, but it’s different now, isn’t it? I believe her to be smart enough to change the fate of the world itself.’”
Furina startled at that, her eyebrows shooting up. “She said what ?”
The Wanderer smiled in a weird, lazy way. “She’s impressed by you. She and the other Archons know of your actions in Fontaine and the significance of them, and she respects the audacity to go against Celestia.”
“I wouldn’t call it audacity as much as I would call it necessity, but I appreciate it nonetheless. If you would, could you… could you pass on my thanks for me?”
“I’m not a messenger boy. She wants to meet you at some point soon. Thank her then.”
“She wants to meet me?”
“That’s what I just said, yes.”
Furina returned to staring at the ground as though her gaze could burn through the grass. She was completely bewildered by this entire situation. The Goddess of Wisdom, the Dendro Archon herself, truly respected her that much?
As if reading her mind, the Wanderer spoke. “It’s odd, isn’t it? Being respected by a god, I mean.”
Furina nodded slowly.
“When she first showed me her kindness, I was confused. I have done a lot of awful things in the past in an attempt to gain some sort of vengeance against the people that have wronged me. Once I understood that again, her sympathy seemed out of place. Wrong. I had only ever been abandoned and mistreated by the gods before. For what reason was this particular god different?
But her kindness is genuine. She struggles with it, at times. Her selflessness overwhelms her. You can only put so many people before yourself before you go crazy,” he said, pointedly staring at Furina. She withered under his gaze. “Her praise and respect for you comes from a deep and true place in her heart.”
“…Why are you telling me all of this? When I asked you what she thought of me, I was expecting a shorter answer.”
“If I were in your position, it’s what I would want to hear. No- that came out wrong. It’s what I would need to hear.” He smirked. “Luckily for you, it’s the pure, unaltered truth.”
“And you were in my position,” she added after a moment of hesitation. “Maybe you still are. And that was what you needed to hear- that someone of an equivalent position to your creator truly respected you.”
“I used to think that isolating myself was the only way to heal from my wounds. After the betrayals I faced, I figured that connection with humans or the divine would just continue to hurt me,” he explained. “She was the one to make me understand the truth.”
“The truth being?”
“That solitude simply doesn’t heal anything. Think of companionship as a bandage for your injuries- sure, finding a bandage that has holes in it and thus won’t do much for the bleeding isn’t ideal, but refusing to put a bandage on because of it won’t help either. As a matter of fact, it will only make it worse.
“Interesting analogy,” she said, because as comprehensible as it was, bandages with holes simply weren’t provided anywhere.
The Wanderer sighed. “Nahida has always been more eloquent than I am. There’s a reason I didn’t go into Haravatat,” he muttered. If Furina’s small amount of knowledge pertaining to the nations was accurate, that was the language one.
“Oh? Are you a student at the Akademiya? Which Darshan?” she asked, an eyebrow raised.
“Vahumana,” he answered. “We’re the historians at the Akademiya.”
“Why history? Spantamad seems more up your alley.”
The Wanderer shrugged. “History is important to me,” he said, and she felt like there was definitely more to his answer, but she had no means to discern it nor any desire to. “And besides, I already have the Dendro Archon herself discussing Irminsul and the like with me. I don’t need to spend my days listening to those idiots either parroting her in vague ways or coming to blatantly incorrect conclusions.”
Furina raised an eyebrow. “The rivalry between the Darshans remains strong, then. I’ve never looked that far into the other nations, but I was particularly curious about the Akademiya. However, I found myself anxious to approach Sumerian scholars, worried that I would make an incorrect assumption about their Darshan and they’d be mad at me…”
The Wanderer snorted indelicately. “They believed you to be a god. Some scholars there are egotistical know-it-alls who care very little for manners or etiquette regarding their seniors, but they wouldn’t disrespect a god like that.”
“Then what do you call the past five hundred years for the Dendro Archon? A show of their great appreciation for her?”
“I suppose that’s true, but that’s above the pay grade of the scholars you’d most likely be interacting with. The Sages and the like have a lot of knowledge in their fields, but they are far too busy with Sumerian issues to handle anything Fontaine related. If you had put out an offer for financial compensation in exchange for their help investigating the rising water levels, they would have jumped at the opportunity like rabid Sumpter beasts.”
“I suppose so. Alas, I did not think of that at the time. I was too busy trying to convince everyone I was a nearly omnipotent goddess, who had no time to concern herself with the scholarly pursuits related to the rising water levels… though I did fund them.”
“How generous of you.”
“I just let the people believe I was being benevolent. The Iudex was somewhat irritated at me when he found out just how many scholars I was sponsoring, but if I limited it to the water levels then it would be incredibly obvious.”
“Whatever the case, you succeeded,” he said, his voice quiet. “And you were a better god than many others who have tried, all while being a regular human being.”
He sounded wistful, and his words carried a tinge of regret. What he regretted, Furina did not know, and she did not feel that it was her place to ask. But she made her assumptions, as was her right, and the conversation marched forward.
“What’s it like?” she asked, before realizing that her question was incomprehensible and backpedaling. “Being a puppet. If you don’t mind answering, that is.”
“If I knew what it was like to be anything else, I’d be able to give you a good answer, but for the most part? It just is. It’s the way I’ve always been, so any abnormality that I could have detected before has long since faded. I could ask you the same thing- what’s it like being human?”
“I don’t have memories of my time before Foçalors split her consciousness,” Furina began. “But what I do know is that my body felt wrong for years and years and years. She had already lived for a long while before me, and the absence of her- or rather, my- divinity left me feeling empty for a long time.”
“Empty?”
“Well, not necessarily empty. It just felt as though something was missing, and all of my human functions were a cheap replacement for it. My blood was pumping, my heart was beating, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something that just wasn’t there. Something I couldn’t remember, but something I couldn’t quite forget, either. I’ve long since adapted, and I don’t remember how divinity felt, other than the curse that had been placed on me.”
“Is being human enough for you now?”
Furina nodded. “I’m glad I’m just a mortal human now. I don’t want to live forever.”
“Were you concerned that you would?”
“Well, if Foçalors’ plan hadn’t gone as well as it did, then she wouldn’t be able to execute herself, thus eliminating her divinity. Should this be the case, then I would have lived forever, and ever, and ever, entirely unable to die due to the curse. The world could explode, and I would still be floating in space, in smithereens but still alive,” she said. “You mentioned how solitude is inevitably harmful- I would have been alone forever.”
“And still human,” he added.
“And still human,” she conceded.
“Damn,” he exhaled, leaning back. “I can see why you would fear immortality, then. I was the opposite.”
“You wanted immortality?”
“I wanted to be a god. I wanted to have the power to annihilate my enemies. I wanted to outlast, to outgun, to exceed any limit that had been previously placed on me. I wanted to be better than an Archon,” he said, a dry humor in his voice. “Immortality was part of that. I imagine that sounds idiotic to you.”
“It’s natural for people to fear or want to avoid death. I just never was that way. Especially not about myself,” she responded. “Now I… don’t exactly know what I am. Scared, or ready. Maybe even excited.”
“It’s hard to figure those things out when you’ve spent so long trying to be someone else,” the Wanderer said. “But these things take time. And you have that time, even if you don’t have as much as you used to.”
“Have you figured yourself out yet?”
He shook his head. “Far from it. I’m still confused as to what’s really me and what’s me just trying to deny what I really am. But I have no doubt in my ability to reach that understanding one day. From what I know about you, you will reach that understanding too.”
Furina smiled, looking back at the rising sun. “I hope you’re right.”
Suddenly, the Wanderer spoke again, this time with a mischievous tone. “I bet I can figure myself out first.”
“Wha- hey! That’s no fair, you had a head start!”
He stuck his tongue out at her, pulling at the skin under his eye, and she half-heartedly swatted at him.
Thus began the two’s unlikely friendship. It unfolded rather like an opera, with heartfelt conversations and playful interactions spread throughout. As the years went by, Furina began to have wrinkles, and eventually she couldn’t walk without a cane. The Wanderer stood by her for the rest of her life, and when she eventually perished, as all humans must do, he visited her grave regularly.
She had understood herself first. Nahida was right, she truly was wise. And at the end of it all, when she was on her last breath, she found the strength to answer her question from all those years ago.
“I’m ready to go,” she whispered, and he squeezed her hand.
“Then go now, and we will meet again one day.”
“I’ll hold you to it,” she said, and she died smiling.
He hated to keep her waiting, but he would not be joining her just yet. He had things he needed to get done.
He was a historian, after all,, and he had some recording to do related to her past. He published accounts of her life, and he was greatly aided by Neuvillette, who wanted her to be remembered fondly just as much as the Wanderer did.
The Wanderer was not sentimental by any means. Being a puppet, even with human emotions, meant his range was still painfully limited. He also had thought that he knew everything there was to know about himself. However, Furina once again proved him wrong on both counts, because there was one more thing that he had yet to understand.
The Wanderer was many things, but most of all? He was a sucker for a happy ending.