Archive of Our Own

The hustle and bustle of Penacony’s Golden Hour is nowhere near unfamiliar to Caelus. He’s spent days on end locked within the Dream, willingly or not, and he could likely find the way to Dr. Edward’s Dreamscapes Sales Store in his sleep. Or, rather, he does find the way to the store in his sleep, every single time, because it only exists in dreams. 

Maybe “he could find his way to the store with his eyes closed” would be a better metaphor. He’s not sure. He’s still figuring metaphors out.

Dr. Edward occupies a corner of one of the main plazas in the Golden Hour. His massive eye tracks Caelus as he approaches, just like it always does. Seriously, does he have to do that every time Caelus so much as steps foot into the area? 

“Hello there, trailblazer,” says the massive eye. Just like every other time, Caelus wonders how a single eyeball manages to speak. 

“I got your messages,” Caelus starts.

“Good, good,” says the eye. How does that guy function without blinking? Caelus has never seen an eyelid. “I’ve kept it set aside for you, as I said. Even I only have the vaguest idea of its contents, just enough to message you yourself about it.”

Caelus, of course, takes this to mean I am going to double the price when I make you buy it. Seriously, the guy’s an eyeball, what’s he going to buy with all that money? “What’s the idea, then?”

That is, of course, when Dr. Edward tells him. 

The Dreamscape makes Dan Heng’s skin crawl for a reason he can’t quite place.

Scratch that. He can absolutely place it. It’s just a question of which reason: the thought of being locked into an endless nightmare or the time when he had been. 

He’s spent minimal time in the Golden Hour before, having spent most of the Astral Express’ time on Penacony on the train itself as a guard, but it’s simple enough to navigate to the coordinates Caelus had sent. Dr. Edward had come up in his fellow Trailblazers’ summary of the Penacony events, after all.

Despite already being aware, the feeling of Dr. Edward’s gaze sweeping over him is just as skin crawling as Caelus had said, even from a distance. 

“Your friend is here,” the eyeball calls. Dan Heng is sure Caelus would have said something ridiculous asking about how he could speak in the first place. 

The Trailblazer in question turns to look as Dan Heng walks over. Something seems off about the look on his face, and it instantly raises the concern from Caelus’s texts back to the surface, bubbling in his chest almost painfully. 

In his hands, Caelus holds what looks like a dream bubble. This, of course, makes sense, because he is standing at a shop that sells dream bubbles, but the way he treats it doesn’t. He holds it gingerly, a visible space of air in between the outer edges of the bubble and his fingers where usually he’d squeeze things so tightly even March would sometimes get concerned for their safety. It’s enough to immediately set Dan Heng on edge: was this the danger he wouldn’t elaborate on?

His fingers itch to hold Cloud-Piercer.

“Dan Heng,” starts Caelus, “you may want to see this one.” That is, of course, when Dan Heng manages to identify the look on his face. It’s not common to see Caelus sad.

“This is not a dream bubble,” says Dr. Edward, and Dan Heng whips around to look at the eye. “I believe it to be a memory from the Xianzhou Luofu, approximately seven hundred years ago.” 

Seven hundred years… The hitch in his breath might be audible. Instantly, he knows. “This is why you reached out to me specifically.” He doesn’t wait for an answer, or an elaboration. None could ever give him more information than he already knows. Instead, he reaches a hand out to Caelus, and it says more than enough that his fellow Nameless understands instantly.

The memory is cold against his fingers.

Your body is not your own. While it may seem similar, it bears the most minute of differences. You find tiny scars on your hands that you can’t remember having, despite being long healed. Scars, in a race like yours, are a sign of rebellion.

Scars are something many of the people you see will not live long enough to have. By the end of the day, the majority will be dead.

The dragon- your dragon, yours, you must take responsibility for your actions- towers far too high. This isn’t what they told you it should do, this isn’t what should be happening, this isn’t-

A woman with a stare like ice points her blade at your throat. You know who she is. She’s a friend. 

“I should kill you,” she says. “But you will have your own torment to bear for all of eternity.” 

“Impossible,” you say. It is only when the words leave your lips that you realize you are gasping for air. “The Preceptors said… the blood of my race and the soul of my ancestor should have created another High Elder.”

It shouldn’t be like this. None of it should be like this. A ritual to create another to take his place, that was what it should have been. Not this. Never this.

It’s slowly dawning on you that the freedom you’ve been striving towards for the past decades will never come to fruition, as the screams of dying innocents echo in the distance. You are about to lose the little freedom you’ve had. Everything… you’re losing everything.

Why had you ever trusted the Preceptors? You can imagine them laughing at your back once you left the meeting. Then you can imagine them getting serious again: “A traitor to the Permanence,” they would call you, hissed between sharp teeth at your retreating form. 

They’re right. You’re a traitor to your Aeon, to your people, to yourself. To Yingxing, laying in the mud after helping you. To Jingliu, with her soon-to-be-shattered blade at your throat. To the freedom you so desired after reincarnation after reincarnation of Imbibitor Lunae.

All you can do is hope they kill you quickly and include you in the casualties. And yet, they never will. Why blame themselves when they can pin it all on you? 

He might be crying, Dan Heng realizes. That may be the only explanation for the wetness crawling down his cheek, the salt he can taste on the corner of his lips. 

“Oh,” he breathes. That’s the only reaction he can muster. Oh.

He’s suddenly excruciatingly aware of the fact that he’s standing in public. On the bustling streets of Penacony, nobody pays a single traveler a second glance, which works in his favor, but it doesn’t stop the crawling feeling of eyes on his back. Dr. Edward doesn’t help either, as a literal eye on him.

As isolating as a bustling city can be, he’s still in public, and Dan Heng hates the feeling of tear tracks on his face. Those get scrubbed off with the side of his hand.

“That was Dan Feng,” he says, and despises the way it trembles leaving his lips. “That was- how did you get this?”

“It came from a very secretive seller,” says Dr. Edward. “Despite my dealing primarily in the dream side of memoria, their description piqued my interest just enough to snatch it up. Then, of course, analysis proved their descriptions accurate, and I sent a message straight away.”

The bubble in Dan Heng’s hands has no weight, but it feels heavy regardless. It hovers less than an inch above his palms, swirling innocently in shades of blue and green. It’s nearly identical to the ones that used to nestle in corners around Herta’s Station, close but not enough to be the same. 

It’s far too innocuous for a bubble with the power to change the political environment of the Xianzhou Luofu, if anyone paused for long enough to believe it was real. 

“And you’re sure this is genuine?” Dan Heng asks. One of the smaller bubbles drifts around his fingertips, as if begging him to touch it again.

“I wouldn’t be giving it to you if it wasn’t, by all verifiable standards.”

He’d nearly forgotten Caelus was there, somehow. “How much would I owe you?”

The massive eyeball pauses, as if contemplating. There’s an itch in Dan Heng’s bones begging him to just find somewhere away from people to process all of this. He craves the isolation of a quiet room.

Credits change hands, far fewer than Dan Heng (and apparently Caelus) was expecting. The swirl of the bubble is mesmerizing. It’s far enough from water to not be mistaken, but close enough that it feels nearly the same. It has no presence in the vague corners of his mind connected to his powers, and yet has immense repercussions for them regardless. A shoulder bumps into his own, light enough to be purposeful, enough to tear his attention away from the swirling memoria.

“C'mon, Dan Heng,” says Caelus. “Let’s go back to the Express.”

Caelus's voice will guide his feet back to the Archives. He'll need to find a place to hide this bubble for good: it's too dangerous to be let out into the universe, too dangerous to be attached to his name. If the Luofu found out, it might clear his name. It might also get him sent straight back to the Shackling Prison, because not a single person will believe a memory of Dan Feng if it comes from his hands.

He'll spend sleepless nights wondering if things could have been different, but nothing can change the past.

For now, though, he's on his way back home for the night, with a lot on his mind.