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The Tsaritsa’s wheezing breath echoes throughout the palace at all hours. It’s been this way for months, ever since the centuries-long toll of sustaining the Harbinger’s Delusions finally outweighed the strength of her hubris. Not even Dottore's best efforts could keep her from weakening, after a point, and the rattling whistle of each exhale bounces off the ice-covered walls until it's all that can be heard. It’s audible even in the small hours of the night, when everyone but the mice would rather be sleeping. It sounds like the palace itself is dying with her.
The sharp sound of Childe’s boot heels clacking against the frosted marble floors of the hallways doesn’t come anywhere close to drowning it out, and the sound only worsens the closer he gets to her rooms. It grates across his nerves, sets him on edge. More on edge.
Childe only lets himself pause for a single second outside the Tsaritsa’s room; any longer and the people inside will know that he’s weak, that he needs to catch his breath and steady himself for what he’s about to see, and that is unacceptable. He pushes the heavy wooden door open with a sweaty palm, hand slipping on ornate carvings that have been silvered and shaded by the thinnest layers of frost. Inside, he doesn't bother to look around before sinking into a salute: on one knee, head bowed, clasping a fist over his Hydro vision to cover it with the Delusion imbedded on the back of his gloved hand.
He stays there - waiting for an ‘at ease’ that will never come, he realizes after a too-long moment - until Pierro lays a hand on his shoulder. Childe looks up, startled, and Pierro gives him a tired look.
“You can stand,” is all he says.
Nodding sharply, Childe rises, adjusting his mask as he rises so that it sits on the side of his head rather than over his face. He chances a glance at the Tsaritsa, torn between hoping that she’s awake and that she'll stay asleep for just a while longer. She lays prone and eerily still in her giant canopied bed, and the gauzy, ice-crusted sheets that drape elegantly from the ceiling obscure her almost entirely from this angle. All Childe can see is the curve of her chin, and the way her chest struggles to rise on each inhale and collapses in on itself on each exhale. It's a small comfort to see the frozen vapor rise as she breathes, in and out.
Childe had dared to ask her, once, when he was just sixteen, why the Cryo Archon would bother to smoke. He hadn't understood then that the vapor coming from her mouth with each word, each breath, was living cold. In his naivete he'd simply assumed that she was a smoker, like Pulcinella and Pierro. In her generosity and grace she did not punish him for this infraction.
I have no need for such disgusting mortal habits, she'd murmured, in that way of hers that was speaking-and-not all at once. Then she'd taken his shoulder in a gentle hand, prompting him to turn towards her, and she'd blown her vapor into his face until his eyelashes froze together and the skin between his eyebrows was so cold it refused to move, even to frown. I am frost personified, my Tartaglia. You are young, so I will forgive this transgression, but do not forget a second time. I am no mere mortal.
Childe had loved her back then.
More than that, he had revered her, worshiping the ground she walked on. Childe still takes immense pride in catching his Queen’s eye when he was so young, and worth less than the filthy snow on the bottom of her shoe. The Tsaritsa had found him in the dredges of her army on his hands and knees scrubbing latrines, frostbite crawling up his bare, ragged fingers. She’d seen the potential in his Abyss-clouded eyes. She’d snatched him up to raise him herself, promising the Harbingers as another - better - family, and her training as the path to that light at the end of the tunnel. It was by her hand, her grace, that he was saved from the frozen barracks and the abuse of other, older recruits. In exchange for freedom from their cruelty he happily let himself be broken down into his most base parts and rebuilt into her most beloved weapon.
He was stupid back then, naïve - young, only fourteen - and he fell for her promises hook, line, and sinker. His devotion to Her comes first in his heart, but true love… he doesn't feel much of that any more. But it's his own fault he fell for her false promises of family and peace. He doesn’t blame her for saying what she had to in order to make sure he would fall in line.
And she can be kind, in her way, when she wants to be. Even when Childe admits that his time serving her has been more bad than good, the good memories tend to stick at the forefront of his mind like frost on the window of a warm house in the heart of winter. There were the times she allowed him to escort her, her hand on his elbow, as they walked through the palace; the long hours spent in the frozen library as she taught him to read from frosted pages; the praise she showered on him when he slaughtered the last Harbinger and was finally allowed to take up the mantle of Tartaglia, the Eleventh.
The Tsaritsa is, and always has been, a cold and dispassionate matriarch whose capacity for true love has long since frozen over. She can be kind, though, and she can be just, and she is loyal to the duty that she has to her people. Duty can be a form of love, if you let it. It’s why he’s here now, and not halfway to Liyue like he wants to be.
It’s unsettling to see the Tsaritsa laid out unmoving in her bed like this, but Childe lets himself feel the bone-aching relief that comes with knowing that if she’s sleeping, she’s not going to be delirious with fever and hurling abuse at anyone who comes within striking distance, as she has been on-and-off for the last two weeks.
Mothers, Childe thinks to himself, longsuffering, all of them the same. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.
Pierro gives Childe a solid pat on the back, bringing him back to the present and almost knocking the wind out of him, before retreating back to his place at the Tsaritsa’s bedside. Signora sits in the only chair in the room, bare legs crossed with nary a goosebump in sight, an intimidatingly sharp nail file in hand. Dottore is lingering beside some suspiciously pulsing medical equipment near the head of the bed, and the rest of the living Harbingers are scattered around the room, leaning up against whatever surface they’ve been able to lay claim to. They’re all more relaxed than they would normally dare to be in the Tsaritsa’s presence, but there’s an air of tense solemnity that even Childe can’t ignore.
Of course, Scaramouche and his big fucking mouth can’t let a good silence lie. “It’s as cold as fucking Dragonspine in here. Why won’t the old bat just die already?”
A hush falls over the room. All eyes flicker to the Tsaritsa; everyone holds their breath. Childe half expects her to rise from her bed like a vengeful ghost, striking Scaramouche down for even thinking the insult, as she would have done without hesitation only a month or two before.
She doesn’t, though. She just lies there and breathes. Even that looks like a labour.
“Scaramouche, please,” Columbina murmurs. Her voice is soft but her eyes are hard, holding Scaramouche’s gaze until he scoffs and tips his hat, breaking eye contact to hide his face.
“Yes, try having a heart, for once,” Sandrone snarks from the other side of the room, not bothering to look up from whatever she’s tinkering with in her lap. “Oh, or is that too sensitive a topic for you?”
“I will kill you -" Scaramouche hisses, electricity from his Delusion sparking void-purple at his fingertips.
“Let it loose and I kill you myself,” Dottore interjects, mildly. “I won’t have my data compromised by your temper tantrum.”
They’re idle threats, all of them, and each of the Harbingers know it. None of the Delusions have worked right since the Tsartitsa took to her chambers. It hasn’t exactly hobbled any of them - if they weren’t terrifyingly proficient with their Visions before being gifted a Delusion the Tsaritsa would never have wasted her time with any of them - but it’s a big change. It’s also, irritatingly, getting hard to hide it from the Fatui troops. If any of them get wind of what’s happening there’ll be an uprising on their hands, and none of the Harbingers have the patience for anything more subtle than slaughtering the dissidents and starting anew. Childe read somewhere that killing all the able-bodied fighters in a country is bad for the economy or something, but that's not his problem, so it hardly matters.
Scaramouche lets the sparks die as he rattles Inazuman obscenities at Dottore and Sandrone until he runs out of steam and perches himself back up on the windowsill with a huff. “Like you're not all just here to see which one of us becomes the next Archon,” he snaps, turning his Delusion over and over in his hand.
Scaramouche is charming as ever, Arleccino sneers, lingering over Scaramouche’s shoulder. She blows a cold breath onto the back of Scaramouche’s neck, making him shudder and roll his shoulders, scowl etching itself deeper into his face. I bet he poisoned the Tsaritsa.
Unlikely, seeing as Signora is the one who favours poison, Capitano muses, reading Dottore's notes over his shoulder.
Pulcinella nods, large hat bobbing like a cock’s comb. She’s the one that got me!
We know, Pulcinella. You never shut up about it, Arleccino snaps, phasing back and forth through Scaramouche. She catches Capitano’s unimpressed look and makes a face in his direction, pausing halfway through Scaramouche’s shoulder. What? We’re dead, it’s not like he can tell it’s me. The little shit deserves a lot worse than feeling a little cold, if he even can.
Pantalone ignores them all, as ever. He steps up alongside Childe, pressing a cold, transparent hand to the back of his neck, waiting until Childe shivers and brings a hand up to rest unknowingly, over Pantalone’s. That seems to be all Pantalone wanted; he steps away to stand beside Pierro, peering down at the Tsaritsa over the First Harbinger's shoulder.
Pierro, to his credit, notices. He looks sidelong at Pantalone out of the corner of his eye, though Pantalone knows they can’t be seen by the living, and moves half a step away.
Amongst her heavy sheets, settled in a bed filled with the softest down, the Tsaritsa stirs for the first time in hours.
Pantalone’s lips curve into a self-satisfied smile. Hush now, children, he murmurs, silencing the still-bickering Arleccino and Pulcinella. It’s finally time.
The Tsaritsa gasps and moans. Her head falls to one side then the other, and her lips come together in a sickly smack. Pierro stands to attention; Childe takes two striding steps to stand with him at her bedside, unsure what else to do. Pierro puts a heavy hand on his shoulder once again, and Chlide is selfishly grateful for the weight. To their credit, the rest of the Harbingers stand to attention as well, even cranky little Scaramouche.
“Your Majesty? My Queen, we are here. What would you have us do?” Pierro asks, voice low.
Tsk.
For such a little sound it's deafening in the Tsaritsa's large rooms, heavy with disapproval. Childe can't help but flinch. To disappoint their queen is to be at risk of death, and Childe has been fortunate - he has never been anything but in her favour.
"Help me sit up," she rasps, reaching with a frail, shaking hand. Her voice rattles around in Childe’s head but it is audible, entirely unlike the not-speak he’s used to hearing from his Queen. Sometimes her mouth wouldn’t even move and he would hear her, clear as day, even across battlefields. To hear her with his ears is shocking.
Pierro lurches forward, but she bats his hands away with surprising dexterity. "Not you," she hissed, "Tartaglia. Where is my Tartaglia?"
Mama's boy, someone mutters from across the room, and Childe smothers a cheeky, dimpled grin. He's not going to bother denying what's true. He may not particularly like his mothers - his biological mother or the Tsaritsa - but he certainly still loves them, enough that being called a mama's boy is more of a compliment than an insult.
It's a complicated feeling, one he never bothers examining. As far as he's concerned, it’s none of his business.
"I'm here, my queen." Childe ignores Pierro's twisted expression and slides a hand under the Tsaritsa's back, the other clasping her hand, slowly raising her into something closer to a sitting position. Dottore hisses Sumeran insults when Childe gets her close to forty-five degrees, so he stops there and fluffs some pillows to make sure she stays at that angle. The action is so familiar, so ingrained in his muscle memory, that he's reaching for the tall glass of water at her bedside without realizing it. He had a grandmother once, who he cared for until she died in her sleep when he was twelve. She was always thirsty when she woke up.
The Tsaritsa, it seems, is too. He watches her take a delicate sip through wide eyes; this is the first time Childe has ever seen the Tsaritsa consume. He chances a glance around the room to see that only a few of the harbingers look surprised - the rest aren't even bothering to watch. Silently, he takes the water back and leaves it gently on the table. When she reaches out he's still right there, and it's his hand she clutches first.
Childe has never touched her so much, ever. The Tsaritsa - his Queen, his mother, his Archon - will allow glancing touches as they bow and kiss her fingertips, or she will grasp you by your fur-covered shoulder or arm. Childe feels her hand under his, her skin paper thin and so cold it burns, and he shakes with sick anticipation.
If this isn't proof that change is coming, nothing is.
Oblivious to his turmoil, the Tsaritsa surveys the room. Her chin shakes as she does, a minute but uncontrollable tremor. "There are still seven of you left? How disappointing. I'm about to die and you still couldn't get this one thing right."
The Harbingers all stiffen and look at each other sidelong, the tension rising until Childe is all but choking on it. They had come together weeks ago to declare a truce while the Tsaritsa was at what they thought was the peak of her decline, out of respect for her illness. The war games can wait until she’s gone, they’d decided, but… obviously, that had been the wrong move.
Dottore tries to interject. “My Queen, we considered -”
“And who told any of you consider? To think for yourselves? Imbeciles, all of you, entirely incapable of independent thought. That you are my last generation of Harbingers is a disappointment.” Childe does not flinch. He doesn’t. “My second generation, now that was a beautiful clutch -” she devolves into muttering, clutching at Childe’s frozen fingers and staring off into the middle distance.
With wide eyes, Childe looks back at Pierro. While none of the Harbingers can be trusted, Pierro is the oldest of them, the only one left from the generation before, and it shows in the way that he guides them, even though he knows he’ll kill them all one day. Childe has relied on him through the years, as someone as close to a father as he'll ever get.
Pierro’s gaze is dark - sick jealousy is obvious in the way he stares at Childe’s hands stuck in the Tsaritsa’s sharp grasp. Childe knows then that, for all intents and purposes, the truce is over. Childe is on his own.
“My Queen, my Tsaritsa,” Childe murmurs, leaning in as far as he dares. She squeezes his hands with surprising power, hard enough to leave indentations from her too-long nails, then relaxes, finally pulling her hands away to rest them on her lap. Childe resists the urge to stick his hands in his armpits to warm them up.
“What is it?” She murmurs. Her eyes are focused somewhere in the middle distance. “Dear Tartaglia, what is the matter?”
Childe ignores Scaramouche’s scoff from across the room. He smiles in that way that makes his cheeks dimple, playing up the illusion of the indulgent child sitting at his mother’s knee. “My Queen, you called for us. Won’t you give us the gift of telling us why we’re here? We dedicate our lives to serving you, and only want to fulfill your wishes.”
A reluctant, murmured assent echoes throughout the room. The Tsaritsa herself sits up taller, long, tangled white hair tumbling over her shoulder as she reaches forward to grab Childe’s chin in her sharp fingers. She squeezes, ragged nails pricking through the skin of his cheeks, turning his face this way and that. “Of course, my dear Tartaglia’s only wish is to serve me. My Eleventh, the closest to this old woman’s heart in all matters. Would you serve me even after death, Tartaglia? Would you take the gifts I gave you and use them to uphold my laws, to tend to my ends even after I am gone?”
Childe can’t move his face, but he can lower his eyes, so he does. “Whatever my Queen wishes, it shall be done,” he murmurs.
The Tsaritsa releases his face - pushes it away - and laughs. The sound is thin and reedy, nothing like what Childe remembers it to be. “Of course you would, you stupid thing. Oh, how I love you, much more than all the rest. Still, I know what you’re all here for. Vultures and cannibals, the lot of you, ungrateful curs.”
With a great wheezing breath she cups her hands at the base of her throat, murmuring in the language of Celestia. The Harbingers all step forward like they can’t help themselves; even the strongest of them cannot resist the call of a Gnosis. Scaramouche is affected the most of all; he jumps off the windowsill, knees thudding and skidding as he lands on the plush carpet on the other side of the bed, directly across from Childe. They make brief eye contact and Scaramouche sneers, hands twisting in the bedspread as if to stop himself from reaching out and snatching it while he can. His face twists in a mockery of humanity as the light from the Gnosis breaching the Tsaritsa’s chest illuminates him from below.
Childe can’t even blame him. Scaramouche was created to house a Gnosis - a different Gnosis, but a Gnosis nonetheless - and he’s always been feral in his pursuit of the thing that he thinks will make him whole.
Childe, honestly, isn’t about to get in his way. Childe is a soldier, not a king, and certainly not a god.
A sickly, white pulse of light comes from the Tsaritsa’s breast, and she groans, long and low. It sounds like she’s ripping out her own heart. She wails and keens, tucking her chin close to her chest like that will stop whatever pain she’s putting herself through, rattling thick, mucousy breaths between every horrible wail. Out of the corner of his eye Childe can see Scaramouche grinning, Dottore taking furious notes, and Pierro standing still as stone.
Finally - finally - after what feels like an eternity, she slumps backwards, breathing hard. Her head falls back against the pillows and, in her hand is clutched the Gnosis. Childe feels like the thing - a chess piece? - should be covered in her blood, but it’s just… there. Glowing and clean.
The Tsaritsa’s pale black-and-blue-bitten fingers flush a bright and healthy pink before quickly turning white and purple, pale and sickly. As the frost rescinds Childe can see a flash of the young woman she was when she accepted the Gnosis - beautiful, radiant - before she ages decades in the span of seconds, skin wrinkling and puckering as the cold is sucked from her body and into the Gnosis. Her hair turns brittle and thin around her shoulders, her skin pulls tight around bone. Her velvets and silks fall around her, heavy on a ribcage that looks moments from breaking under the weight of even air.
Childe stares at this stranger on the bed, hoping to see even a shadow of the woman he dedicated his life to, but she’s… gone.
Is this a fair trade for divinity? Childe doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to.
The Gnosis pulses, full of life, spilling frost and frigid cold in waves over the side of the bed and down onto the floor, settling like fog around their feet.
“Look on me and… know,” the Tsaritsa rasps. Her voice is rough and weak, no louder than a breath. “This is… ah, this is what you want? This is what the… the power does… to you. I used to be beautiful. Signora… Signora, I used to be more beautiful than you could ever hope to be. You are a… a vile beast… compared to me… ah - haa -” The Tsaritsa chokes on her breath, coughs and coughs, while Signora seethes at the end of the bed. She catches Childe looking and bares her teeth at him. He looks away, chastened.
“But enough… my time is… ended. And you - you - my Harbingers, my arms and ears in the world… you have failed me one last time. There should only… be… one… left. My Tartaglia, my favourite boy, why… why have you not killed the rest? You lazy… lazy, ungrateful thing.”
Childe stays quiet. It hardly matters. The Tsaritsa’s eyes have gone foggy, clouding over with a milky film. Her hand around the Gnosis falters; she brings it up to her chest, to rest it again against the hollow of her throat. Childe thinks she would put it back inside herself, if she had the strength.
“So it is up to me,” she hisses, “to right your wrongs.”
In her shaking hand she raises the Gnosis, speaking the language of Celestia once more in her soft, ruined voice. It lays against her open palm, the metal and gemstones shuddering and shaking with unseen magics, even as the Tsaritsa’s hand seems to grow smaller, bones becoming more prominent as the skin tightens and shrinks. Her hands are skeletal, now, so sharp Childe thinks it might hurt to touch them.
He fists his hands in the long fall of his cloak and tries to pretend that he doesn’t already miss the near-frostbite chill of her. He doesn’t realize he’s crying until the tears freeze on his face.
All at once the Gnosis stops shaking. It rises by itself into the air and lets out a ringing, ear-piercing shriek that has all of them crying out and slapping their hands over their ears. It’s so shocking that Childe almost misses the way the chess piece streaks out the window, shattering the iced glass as it goes - the only reason he notices is Scaramouche’s scream.
“No! The Gnosis!”
The Tsaritsa laughs. All of the Harbingers, save Childe, rush over to the window. They watch as it streaks into the sky, up, up, up, until -
boom
The palace - no, the world - shakes, a rattling, reverberating feeling that seems to come from inside oneself as much as it comes from the world outside. It shakes through the sky and the earth together, and with a scream that they should not be able to hear, one that sounds too human to be truthful, a star tumbles out of the sky. They watch, together, as it careens through the night air, catching fire, flaming bright, searing their eyes and turning them momentarily blind. It seems to take a lifetime before it hits the ground miles and miles away - maybe even in another country - with a calamitous crash. The light flares one more time, making all of them hiss and shield their eyes, then snuffs itself out.
The Tsaritsa giggles and coughs. When Childe looks back at her, eyes wide from the spectacle he just witnessed, it’s to see a barely-living skeleton, a mummified farce of something shaped like a living thing When she smiles it’s no more than skin peeling back to show far too many teeth. There’s a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead, making her brittle hair stick to her temples and neck.
“The one to find it, to touch it first will… will rule after me. My Harbingers, my children… there have never been rules… the one to find it will be the most… deserving… ah, because they will be smart enough to make sure… they are the only one left to - ah-haah - find it,” she gasps.
Childe goes entirely still, suddenly glad that he’s alone at the Tsaritsa’s bedside while the rest of the Harbingers are clustered around the window.
Childe might have been born anew through a bloodlust that’s tainted by the madness of the Abyss, but he’s long since figured out that he can sate the monster inside him by hunting the natural beasts of Teyvat. He doesn’t need to hunt humans, and he has no desire to hunt his fellow Harbingers, all of whom are stronger than him, especially now that their numbers have dwindled. It sounds like they don’t need to kill each other to get the Gnosis, but what better way to make sure no one else will take it from you? He hopes for a moment that he’s the only one to have heard the Tsaritsa speak, and that he might be able to escape the palace and go into hiding before they figure out the rules of the game. He’s not that lucky, though - Scaramouche’s head snaps up, and with absolutely no hesitation, he shoves Sandrone bodily out the broken window.
She screams, cloak catching and ripping with a horrific noise on the broken glass, but it’s not enough to slow her fall. She screams the whole way down, voice cracking and breaking as she bounces off the high, slick walls of the palace. The sound only stops when she hits the ice-covered cliffs at the bottom with a wet, sickening crunch.
Scaramouche laughs, hard and long, bending over at the waist from the force of it. He laughs so hard tears fall from his eyes and hit the floor, his voice going manic and hoarse. He laughs and laughs, long enough that the Tsaritsa works up the strength to laugh with him.
“Good boy, good boy,” she giggles, wiggling her skeletal fingers against the bedspread. Her skin flakes away, glimpses of dry, white bone poking through. “Catch a falling star and put it… put it in… your pocket… never let it… fade away,” she sing-songs, laughing all the while.
Eventually, Scaramouche’s voice is the only one to be heard in the room. Childe looks up from her hands to her face, which is blessedly, disgustingly still. It’s such a perverse death mask of the woman he used to know - used to fear - that it takes Childe a moment to realize what’s happened.
“She’s dead,” he whispers. His hands come up to flutter over hers. He doesn’t touch her. He doesn’t want to disturb her bones, afraid they’ll turn into dust. The rest of the Harbingers are still looking out the window. Childe’s voice can’t be heard over Scaramouche’s terrible, hysterical laughter.
“She’s dead,” Childe says again, voice cracking. They still don’t hear him. “She’s dead, she’s dead -” he repeats and repeats and repeats until a big hand lands on his shoulder, silencing him.
Childe lets his head fall forward, dragging huge sobbing breaths into his lungs. Pierro’s other hand falls on his other shoulder, holding him steady as he folds in on himself, buries his face in his hands, and cries.