Work Text:
There is a distinction between “acceptance” and “inclusion,” just as there is between “loved” and “interwoven.”
Somewhere, there is a solitary branch—close but separate. Admired but from a distance. Is it worth it to wonder where “empathy” differs from “understanding”?
High in the emerald canopy, Nahida sits curled among the limbs of a meranti tree. Her legs dangle, bare toes brushing against a thick knot of vine. She had climbed with care—scratched hands, twigs tangled in her hair like wayward stems of wildflowers from a woven crown. The bark was rough, the texture prickling her skin. It is still new for her—experience in the real world.
Sensory perception is a marvel. Does everyone feel rough bark the same? The Haravatat lecture she passed as she’d wandered the Akademiya lingered in her mind: the doctrine of perception—samjñā, the aggregate of conceptualization. May one seer call the forest green, while another sees violet? Or another sees a thousand shifting hues that have no name but are ultimately reduced to “green”?
In Mawtiyima forest, the fungi glow cerulean. Bioluminescence. But if a child sees it and calls it starlight, is it any less real to them? What if the mushrooms glow because the stars asked them to?
A beetle crawls across Nahida's palm. Just an insect, perhaps, but also not just. It is part of the great cycle. Samsara. Birth, movement, stillness, death. It is part of an ecosystem. A shared world. Each footstep of the beetle inscribes a tiny mantra on her skin.
Nahida is the Avatar of Irminsul—linked to a collection of this world’s self-knowledge. But she’s hardly experienced even a tiny fraction of it herself. From her perch in this tree, Nahida can see everything. “Everything,” meaning as far as she has ever seen with her own eyes: from the cinnabar cliffs of Liyue’s Chasm, to the dewdrop waters of Fontaine. The golden dunes beyond the Wall of Samiel shimmer, stretching farther than memory. Below in the forest: canopy, root, river. Birds swoop low, and beasts rest in the shade.
This is her nation. Her home—a sacred forest, both literal and metaphysical. It holds what she knows, and everything she loves.
Although, Nahida cannot see any people from up here. They’re too small. But she knows where they are—like stars beneath a veil of daylight. Ports, forest towns, temples hidden behind waterfalls or even slumbering underground. Bustling city centers and markets where so many diverse minds gather and share the experience of being. Humanity in particular is so complex and fascinating. Nahida knows what they do. Kinda. In a sense. She’s learning why. She feels them, and through her, they feel heard.
She is Lesser Lord Kusanali. Dendro Archon. A god-child. To many, she is wisdom. To some, she is kindness and dream, or simply someone they whisper to when the wind stirs the canopy. To a few, she’s even just Nahida.
If she listens carefully, she hears it: the forest prays. The trees speak in murmurs through roots, fungal threads, and water. Cascading like dew upon the petals of flowers, flowing like wayward leaves in the wind. She is an answer and a question, their dream dreamed back.