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I.
When I was a child, my nerves ran wild
And I’d watch my friends ride to the tops of the trees
Nahida’s first memories are not of the Cataclysm, but of the aftermath.
She’s tried over and over again to expand her recollections, but her own knowledge of the disaster has never graced her. She’s sure that Barbatos is laughing at her, somewhere: Aren’t you the Lord of Wisdom? Why do you sound like me after a few drinks?
It is strange that she can still remember the light mirth of the wind god, complete with whimsical ballads and inexhaustible cheer, yet she can scarcely recall any of their many past meetings. It is stranger still that other memories seem blocked off altogether, just before they close into reach— as if a Dusk Bird has spread its wings and flown towards her, only to sail over her head and vanish beneath the other side of the horizon.
In any case, her story begins as a newborn god, and the Akademiya sages shroud her from the world before she has a chance to open her eyes.
She’s too small, they murmur to one another, too vulnerable. Can she really be our Archon? When they speak to her, they say something softer. “We have a sanctuary. Won’t you follow us?”
Nahida has much to learn, but she already understands what a sanctuary means. She understands what a group of scholars is meant to be, and the history and intelligence that they bear. They offer a place to hide away, a place to study and grow, and in her first moments, nothing she knows tells her that she should refuse.
Before she enters the Sanctuary of Surasthana, the sages hold a festival for her. After joyous dances and celebrations, she is spirited away on a flower carriage, left to wave goodbye as she nears the palace doors.
If she knew then what she knows now, she would’ve stayed outside for longer.
—
II.
The older I get, the more fears I collect
I gather them from all the people I meet
Nahida doesn’t remember making friends. Not exactly.
Friends know each other by name and speak to each other freely, like flowers sharing secrets across an Amurta researcher’s garden. Friends stay close to one another and hold each other tight, like how the tide is never pulled away from the shore for more than half a day. No one stays close to Nahida, and no one calls her by her name, not without attaching a Lesser Lord to Kusanali.
The sages don’t want Nahida to have friends— too distracting, they say, too unsafe. But they say that about everything she wants to do, no matter what it is: to visit the desert, to study the rainforest, even to read. How is she going to learn if she isn’t allowed to visit the library?
“You’ll see, in time,” the sages claim, “seclusion is better for you.” In their harsher moments, they scowl, looking at her with disdainful eyes. “You can’t go out into the city. What would the people say if they knew their god was so unassuming?”
So Nahida does not make friends, not in the way that she should. But dreams have been her home for as long as she has lived, and companionship persists even in people’s imagination. Children make good friends, although they can only hear her voice: young enough to be kind, and innocent enough to be moral, she speaks to them on quiet nights and livens their stagnant dreams until they come to know her name.
The Aranara make even better friends, because they live as she does. Creatures of nature, they share her wisdom and timelessness, and extend to her the bounties of music. Even so, she flinches whenever they claim to be her children: perhaps she did create them long ago, but even if that is true, she has surely since forgotten.
…Have they ever claimed to be her children? They must have, because Nahida remembers them claiming the Dendro Archon as their mother. But why does she still believe that they were referring to someone else?
Companions aside, Nahida continues to search for ways to impact the physical world. She borrows the bodies of others, when she has enough power; she sends anonymous letters to Sumeru’s civilians, when she can convince the sages to let her share her knowledge of vegetation. Children grow up happier, and blooming flowers dot the city streets, and still, the sages do not let her out of her sanctuary.
She returns to the world of slumber, and keeps her adventures as her own secrets, waiting to share her stories for when she is finally allowed out into the world. See? I was capable all along, she’ll say.
But that day never comes, and Nahida remains submerged in endless dreams.
—
III.
Time is not your friend
Time is not your remedy
Between her confinement and her sleep, Nahida has never done a very good job at remembering how many years have gone by. But when the Sabzeruz Festival fails to end, and Nahida’s memories begin to replay themselves, she realizes that she has been overthrown.
It has been five hundred years since the Cataclysm, now. In that time, the sages have seized control of Sumeru, even as a plague has seeped through Irminsul and into the nation’s roots. Nahida wants to cry out in protest, only for numb shock to reach her once she sees Snezhnayan sigils standing alongside Akademiya uniforms.
As Zubayr Theater opens and closes, and a girl with a Hydro vision has her performance interrupted day after day, Nahida searches for solutions. She learns that the Fatui tried a similar operation in Inazuma— and that once the plot was discovered, their Harbinger was reduced to ash by a single slash from Musou no Hitachi. But she is not the Raiden Shogun, not in ability nor in harshness. What is she to do?
Her answer comes to her when she sees a traveler with golden hair and golden eyes, and the presence of someone who comes from beyond Teyvat brings her a precious tailwind. Lumine is not all-powerful, nor is she nearly as wise as Nahida herself, but the traveler is righteous, kind, and just smart enough— not capable of solving the samsara on her own, but capable of being guided to the right answers. She is powerful, too: both in her speech and with a blade, she can bend a dreaming world into her desired reality.
In this case, she uplifts Nilou until the dancer does the bending for her. The Sabzeruz Festival goes on, and the endless day unravels as Zubayr Theater stays operational into the night. As the dream fades, Nahida holds still in Katheryne’s borrowed body, reckoning with Sumeru as she can see it through a puppet’s eyes.
The sages never offered her safety, she can see that clearly. They gave her a timeless prison laced with lies and false promises, seduced by the power to subvert a god. They lulled her into dreamscapes with delays and monotony, seizing all the authority they could find.
She can’t sleep anymore, not for a while. Even if they all blend together, she has to treasure every passing day.
—
IV.
No amount of waiting will make you brave
No amount of fear will keep you safe
Nahida remembers many things after the Sabzeruz Festival, but she wishes she could forget feeling so alone.
When Dottore catches her in-between bodyswaps, the Fatui leave no room for escape. Her consciousness is sealed in the sanctuary in earnest, now: no dreams, no jumping between minds, nothing but the sound of her own inner voice. She doesn’t know what’s happened to Lumine: at best, she’s escaped the rainforest to seek help from the desert, searching for miracles far, far away from Sumeru City.
The sages mean to supplant Nahida, she knows that now. They have a new archon in mind, a boy abandoned by Inazuma’s Shogun, willing to bear any agony to claim what he sees to be his birthright. Willing to become a pawn the same as her, just so he can become what he was molded to be.
She watches the sages move back and forth across the Surasthana floors, watching her like she’s a hawk ready to break loose. Why did you never want me to rule? Why did you always want me to be silent?
Archons are fallible, she knows that. The nation of Electro has proven that the folly of a god can lead men to clash on beaches cluttered with Sango Pearls and starfish. But she was never even given a chance to lead after the Cataclysm— and she wasn’t so bad before then, was she? If she’s Lesser Lord Kusanali now, then they must have revered her far more in the past, right?
Nahida’s logic tends not to be fallible— by simple reasoning, this must be true. But even so, something tells her that the title of Greater Lord has never belonged to her.
You know they don’t want you, her inner voice soothes, but don’t you know who does?
When Lumine finally reaches out to her once more, with allies gathered around her in droves, Nahida learns to accept the traveler’s call.
If the sages have never offered her a proper sanctuary, she must claim it for herself.
—
V.
Come what may
Come what may
Nahida remembers more of the fight against the Balladeer than he or Lumine ever will.
Scaramouche’s attacks are monstrous, overwhelming force etched into each artificial limb. Lumine darts across the battlefield like a Silkwhite Falcon, navigating around his titanic body like she is winding through the mountains of Dragonspine, and yet the Balladeer still seems to track her every movement, catlike reflexes waiting to strike when she slips too far into his reach.
If Scaramouche’s cunning is catlike, then so is his desperation. He is at once predator and prey, fearful of seeing his plans undone, eager to ascend above all mortal constraints. He was born a vessel, and his desire to become whole bleeds out of him like a wound— in his mind, he must become Sumeru’s Archon, no matter the cost.
And he would succeed, if Nahida only had one chance to stop him. But now, time is on her side, and she is the one to control its cycles.
Every fight ends in a different way. Sometimes, Lumine is too ambitious, and the Balladeer catches her in a blast of fire before she can dash aside. Other times, Scaramouche is too clever, and he leads the traveler into a trap laced with lightning. Lumine gets away from dozens of flurries, never stumbling or slowing down, but there is always another tactic, always another way for the Harbinger to control the battle as if he is playing with puppet strings.
Every time, he tries to take Nahida’s Gnosis, and every time, the samsara begins anew.
Clash after clash, Lumine proves that she can learn from her mistakes. Whenever luck and instincts save her where experience and knowledge cannot, she commits the peril to memory. There is no error that she will repeat, no trap that Scaramouche can spring twice. He cannot defeat the traveler through brute force, only through trickery— and trickery wears thin after a hundred duels.
Nahida continues the cycle until she is sure that she has seen every card the Balladeer has to play, that Lumine has found every answer to every situation. Then she continues yet further, until she can no longer stand to see the traveler crumple against arena walls, dress singed and scorched due to errors she’s already made in past lives. Memories flood into Lumine as the samsara ends, and the traveler re-engages the Harbinger with all of the knowledge she’s bled for.
If the Balladeer had been playing with puppet strings before, the marionettes have now begun to rebel against him. Lumine dances between his blows as if she is Nilou, slipping through wave after wave of fire and frost with the ease of a trained performer. Honed instincts and boundless knowledge combine to create a storm of bladework, and Lumine emerges untouched from every exchange, evading every trap the Harbinger lays before the Neo Akasha Terminal’s clovers destroy the core of the Fatui machine.
A cat can never catch a bird that doesn’t land, and Scaramouche was always the puppet, never the puppeteer.
Cats are also supposed to land light on their feet, but when his strings snap, Scaramouche plummets headfirst onto the floor.
Once she has two Gnoses, Dendro and Electro, Nahida has more than enough power to catalyze the restoration of Irminsul. The pollution and Withering is swept away, and the tree of Ley Lines is purged of corruption, ready to grow fresh and boundless after five hundred years of stain.
…Right?
“We’ve just saved the world, right?” Nahida asks.
That’s what her memories tell her. They defeated the Balladeer, reached the ancient consciousness of Irminsul, and dispelled the plague that had threatened to consume Sumeru from desert to forest. She couldn’t dream of a better ending.
But if that’s true, then why does Lumine look so anguished?
And more than that, she doesn’t understand—
“So why… why am I crying?”