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“Where do you think you’re going?”
Mona doesn’t look back where she once might’ve jumped at that voice. The sky above and surrounding them, such a thin, delicate firmament, is something she can only enjoy for this brief time after the Hexenzirkel’s work is done.
The hag calls again. “Honestly, child… how do you think this reflects on me, that my apprentice would slink away as soon as she’s able?”
Stay, is what she hears instead, and let me boast to my coven about how well I trained you, to be fit for such a cataclysmic occasion. Mona has only heard of these women through vague half-answers waved away by her master’s hand— how convenient is it that now she’s keen to present her student to them.
All this while, the other scions of this organization have been calling these women “Auntie.” She could barely bring herself to look Alice in the eye upon meeting her in person for the first time. It was all horribly frustrating to her.
“I am not slinking,” she asserts as firmly as she can, “I have fulfilled what you asked of me. I’m under no obligation to linger.”
Several weeks ago, not long after Durin and Albedo and someone else her heart strains at the thought of left for Nod-Krai, Mona received a letter from her master. It was less of a letter (to her relief, Archons know what horrible experience she’s had with those) than it was a set of instructions. Follow the coordinates very carefully and trace the shape of your constellation into the earth, and then she was at the edge of everything all at once.
A set of veiny hands braced her from tilting off of the world’s border. Mona hadn’t seen Barbeloth in person for a long time, but the fragmented, glass-like webbing of the sky was a greater source of shock. This was certainly urgent enough to warrant the presence of three esteemed mages, but for her, a mere apprentice to be called in attendance…
Whatever happened in Nod-Krai these last few days had her gnawing on her cheek, least of all with the sudden shifting of the moon, of all things. She had her own speculations on its verity, but the confirmation that the one she had gazed at since childhood was false was momentarily disheartening. She was named for it, after all.
Mona’s heart twinges at the notion that he might be hurting any more than she was.
“They require insight into the reflection of the stars while mending the fractures. I couldn’t be bothered to be in two places at once.” That’s all Barbeloth had to say before turning on heels too high for one of her age after Alice (she hopes they snap her ankles). This leaves her alone with Mage N, who smiles at her imploringly. The warmness she exudes dulls the surreal ache pounding in her skull, and her voice is a welcome departure from the one in her head.
”It’s a shame we’ve only officially met today,” she muses, “I recall that we only just missed each other in Fontaine, some time ago.”
Mona remembers. She had been trying to contact her master about the submergence prophecy, only to be ignored. To find out the next morning that another mage had fulfilled what she couldn't didn’t sting as much as it should have—it was the purpose of a guide to guide, after all.
“We must both abide the whims of a fateful meeting, I suppose,” Mona offers, “though I’ll agree the urgency of this is all rather unfortunate.”
She was worried the two of them would be locked into a sort of awkward silence, after this. Mona wasn’t often in the company of a senior mage she truly respected, but Nicole by no means made it difficult for her. She was certainly mouthy for one who never moved her mouth, and the conversation flowed well enough as they worked.
This goes on for what could have been minutes or hours before her insight whispers an urgent something to her. Him.
“Wait, that one—”
Nicole pauses, the magic at her fingertips dimming. “Hm?”
The shape of a constellation she’s scried for countless times is staring her in the face. She stares back, unblinking, if only to settle the treacherous palpitations in her heart.
“Does it truly not interest you at all?”
A life, inscribed and immortalized in starlight, yet he couldn’t be bothered to look at it. How dare he squander such a perfect, cloudless night— especially in front of an astrologer of such high esteem, though he held her in none.
“You interest me.”
The Wanderer is leaning against a tree, blending against the large shadow cast by its trunk. It’s nothing he hasn’t seen before, and from the edge of her sight, she can see the glow of his irises and that they’re trained entirely on her.
Where Mona would prefer this to be any other night between them, they both know it’ll be the last for a while. The winds have grown stronger for each day he’s been in Mond, as if insisting he carry on elsewhere. Further north, pursuing some evil that didn’t remember him. That he would be travelling with an old friend of hers was her only consolation.
And yet, how audacious to say such a thing. He was leaving an interesting thing behind to fret over him. Realizing this through her silence, as he had the abnormal sense to do, he pushes off the tree and joins her on the ground. Mona scowls. “Get your hands off of me.”
“No,” he says, “ I have something for you.” Something slides against her hand and everything goes still. All she can recall is a swell of something in synchronicity with the light of Peregrinus.
This is the same light she looks for now, amidst everything. When she sees it glowing, faint but undeniably him, the tension in her shoulders lessens. A burning sensation on a certain finger also relents, and Nicole smiles as if she’s gotten it all figured out.
“It seems like you have another fateful meeting to attend to, Miss Megistus.” Mona didn’t know what to expect from one of a race cursed for their love. She thought Nicole’s form was a testament to her avoidance of such matters of the heart, but the soft shine of it in her eyes made her choices clear.
She wasn’t afraid to live and love everything she did unabashedly. The lips that were sealed like a shackle could curve into a smile by her own whims, and so too could the light she used to guide those who needed it. Such radiance also seemed to serve its purpose for her junior mage.
“I do,” she can barely bring herself to murmur, “I… I need to go to him.”
Nicole’s thoughts buzz with excitement (she can’t catch everything, but hears her excitedly proclaim something of “young love”) before taking her hands in hers. Her pale gaze lingers on that certain finger, and her giddiness seems only more infectious.
“Ah! You’re just as driven and talented as Barbie said you were, but I’m glad I got to learn something about you she doesn’t know yet.” She winks, and Mona has to wonder if she’s heard any of what she just said correctly. “Hurry along, now! Your dear senior will cover your exit.”
And she did, to an extent—but the hag was nothing if not discerning. It took very little to confront her at the edge of it all just to accuse her of slinking.
“Of course you’re slinking,” the hag booms, “you’ve always been a slippery thing… running from your punishments, from me—”
“And you’ve never wondered why,” is all she has to say despite everything else warring against her tongue. It would have been easier to let it loose were it not for the conflict surging in her throat like bile.
What did it mean, to be praised by her master? Approval was dangled before her as if she were a bunny hopping for a carrot on a stick, but what purpose did it serve to voice it to everyone but her? Humility, maybe… but perhaps it was the credit she assumed for herself that stung the most. How many of her advancements were truly her own, if not to be subsumed by her shadow?
Either way, she has someone she was willing to run to, now. The starlight refracts off her hand and Barbeloth stares at it in what Mona can only assume is shock. It’s a rare expression for a prophetess to have, and she intends to savour it.
”You foolish girl.”
She won’t chase you this time.
Not like she ever did in a way that mattered. Mona closes her eyes and flashes away in a surge of hydro, taking her leave.
“…You know, I thought I saw something familiar on her,” Alice finally decides to weigh in, sighing wistfully, “Ah, well. I hope those two make a cute little playmate for Klee.”
“Oh, shut up, Alice!”
—
Mona emerges from her torrent in an unfamiliar parlour. It has a patched up sort of feel to it that she expected from a place like Nod-Krai, but it’s been tastefully adorned with Sumerian drapes and rugs and other such trinkets. There’s a cat watching her from atop a desk, curiously, and it offers a meow in greeting. Mona smiles, slightly. If he’s here, at least there’s some reminder of a place he holds dear.
If. How could she possibly frame this as a hypothetical? In the midst of every foreign thing within and around her, there was one pull of familiarity that her insight could never mistake. This tugging compels her forwards, strings constricting around her heel and her heart as she stumbles forward—
Danger. Misunderstanding. A blade from your homeland.
Mona stops just short of decapitating herself. Durin rears back, lips curled back into a snarl before he gets a look at her bewildered face and startles out of it.
“Mona? I’m so sorry, I had no idea you were— wait, Jahoda—!”
There’s a twang of a bowstring, and she can see the ridge of his hat from the doorway, so the astrologist decides she’s had just about enough of this nonsense. Her astrolabe twists and churns as she calls forth a reflection of the stars amidst the rippling of her hydro and ensnares both of her would-be assailants. Durin and his blonde conspirator both struggle against the projection, and Mona distastefully knocks away the arrow that was only an inch away from her neck. The girl gapes down at her.
”W-who the hell is this lady?!”
Durin opens his mouth, but Mona beats him to it. She raises her hand so sharply that she can hear it cut the wind, and the light from her elemental energy refracts from the cut of the stone into a nigh-infinite shattering of stars.
“I,” she says, admittedly a bit louder than needed, “am the Genius Astrologist Mona Megistus, and you are keeping me from exchanging words with the scumbag.”
“She’s Hat Guy’s fianc—”
Mona snaps her fingers and the bubble erupts. She was not Hat Guy’s anything (or, at least, no one needed to know if she was). The two young people fall to the ground with a thud, which was comical for all of their prior swiftness, and then she sees another familiar face emerge from the partition.
“Mona,” Albedo’s eyes dart to the floor before meeting hers, “my apologies. We didn’t know you were in Nod-Krai, I… thought you might’ve been an enemy that slipped through the cracks.”
He tilts his head at her in the way he usually does when he wants an explanation, but Mona couldn’t be bothered to oblige him this time. That he and Durin could retain their guard while the streets outside chattered with joy was smart, but that they felt the need to protect him meant another thing entirely.
Wordlessly, she pushes past Albedo, and when she tosses her head to the back of the room she finally sees him.
Her approach is slow and careful. She treads lighter than she had before, as if to step into his vicinity was to encroach upon some sacred wonder (which, given his tendencies, it was). The Wanderer was… asleep, she wanted to say. Eyes closed and mouth curved in neutrality, suspended in some state of meditation.
She can vaguely make out Albedo dismissing the two before approaching her again with an explanation at the ready. Something of formulas and computing and a deciding victory trickles into her ears as she stares into his closed eyes.
All she can think is that she’s never seen him like this before. The sight of it is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.
“He did it entirely of his own volition,” Albedo concludes. Mona is still staring. She doesn’t understand the caution in his tone. How did he expect her to react? Taking this sort of action… it was entirely in line for him.
“…I’d like to know where it is.”
It’s a part of him she’s never seen before today. It appears almost unto a dendro core, if she were to make a crude association—white branches, carefully carved and entwined with his colours. It pulses with the same faint half-glow as his stars did, and this is a small relief to her. He’s stable, from what she can infer.
“You do have one, you know.”
She’s pressed against him, her eyelids clinging to one another as she tries to blink away her sleepiness. His hand, carding through her hair, pauses at such a bold and assured claim.
“One of what, hm?”
Mona traces the spot with the point of her finger, tapping as if she could possibly feel what she knows to be underneath it. It takes Wanderer a moment to realize what, and he recognizes her meaning immediately. His gaze hardens.
“No.”
“Yes,” she insists, “because I heard it.” A rhythmic pulsing all the while his eyes were closed. She had reared back in bed just to grasp the full picture of it; the faint glow of power in his tattoos with each rise and fall of his chest, and the rare picture of serenity which he was. When she pressed a hand overtop it all, Mona swore the beating increased in pace.
He denied it, of course. His core was an organ completely separated from his definition of a heart, and could never hope to embody it. To Mona, however, it was further proof that he was wholly and unapologetically alive.
“We were just about to wake him up before you arrived,” Albedo clears his throat, “but since you’re here now… I think it would be best if you did it.”
The core, coming from wherever it’s been, is secured in a cushioned box. Just looking at it feels invasive, but for it to be here at all, someone else had to have handled it. This sparks something dark in her gut—some irrational seed of envy that someone else had their hands on this part of the man she…
“Hm. Yes, that would be best.”
Albedo turns, and the weight of his gaze lifted off of her lightens before Mona can register that it ever existed. Such decisive severity was to be expected from him. He was the pride of their masters in the Hexenzirkel; or the pride of her master, most notably, for these exact demonstrations of detachment. He had the tact to recognize intimacy and the parameters of its boundaries, abiding with it with the appropriate distance a scholar needed to succeed.
Mona wonders if he knows how often the hag compares her to him. She wonders if he thinks this makes her a weaker mind. Mona looks down at Wanderer’s core and finds that she cares about as much as she did when speaking to her master about it.
He leaves, and the two of them are alone. She suddenly doesn’t feel so sure of herself, but Mona was never one for hesitation. She slips off her gloves, but keeps the ring. The core she now gently cups between her hands wouldn’t want her to regret her choice, either.
Carved of wood as it was, she expected the touch of it to be cool, but it seems that even in sleep he defies expectation. Her Wanderer’s core is warm to the touch—a pleasant hum, perhaps, like the gentle whirring of unobtrusive machinery—and its light seems to glow like a lantern, gently guiding her hands to its resting spot.
She worries, with a spike of fear, that there’s some puppet-biology process to all of this that she wasn’t privy to, but his body seems to welcome its core into itself easily. There’s a moment where it sticks to her fingers as she eases the transition—as if it didn’t want to be parted from her—but it fits into him perfectly and seals itself up without ceremony. Mona breathes in, takes a step back and waits.
And waits.
And…
And nothing happens. She can feel her heart stutter in her chest, but his is as resounding and sure as it had been on the night he let his guard down. It was just like that scumbag to mock her in this way.
She’s moving before she realizes it, in small increments; a finger against his knee, her hand laid on his overtop it, and that’s when she sees that he never took his ring off either.
It’s a simple band, one she demanded he also wear if the one he gave her was to mean anything. To him, it resembled the physical form of some promise—that he would come back to her and make it mean something. It was his loyalty and devotion and an apology, of which his expression could never be clear if she were not so attuned to it.
Still, she insisted he wear his own before he set off. If she was to bear this part of him to herself and to Mondstadt and to her master, he must belong to her in equal measure. For the sake of reaching some agreement, he kept it plain—the same metal as the one he gave her, but not too dissimilar than the rings he wore around his middle finger. Anyone could easily miss the subtle engraving of their constellations entwined along it—another trait the rings shared, albeit subtler.
In that sense, perhaps it was smarter to keep a lower profile. He seemed to prefer that, and he was nothing if not a good judge of character. Mona’s felt quite ostentatious, in comparison—the band curving into the subtlest shape of the four-pointed star effigy she loved, and inlaid with a sapphire of undeniably high grade. The stone had to be enchanted in some way, for it seemed to darken in the shadows of her room, swirling with unfathomable depth before refracting the moonlight’s iridescence through her open window with the slightest shift of her hand.
Fate, too, can drastically shift with a single motion, yet the colouring of it remains consistent with something far more familiar. His eyes would shift with the light in a similar way, and there were moments where she could only stand transfixed by the ethereal beauty of it on his face. By then, his face would have twisted and the moment with it shattered, but there was nothing to disrupt something already so prolonged.
Mona rubs the ring between her fingers, considering it. When she went to Wagner for such a short-term commission, he recognized the one on her finger and congratulated her. Her insight, having whispered that it was forged here, had her thanking him—just for the blacksmith to turn around and mention that it wasn’t one of his, and that, in fact, a youth in eccentric garb had rented the space to forge months ago. The stone certainly must have left an impression on him, to encase it with such focus and precision.
Mona sighs. She wishes she could prod at him for hiding his sentiments. She feels so, so lonely right now.
Mona’s hand finds his knee again, while the other finds his shoulder. She tests herself on the tense muscle before doing something that would probably get her in trouble. If he wakes up, that is. She hoists herself up with a spring of energy, tucking herself against every vacancy of him she could find. It’s easier than she thought, though the dangling of her legs within the space where his are crossed does feel the slightest bit precarious. It gives her a closer look at his face, though.
She knew exactly who he was when they met for the first time. A different demeanor—a cat stretching its paws save of flexing to kill—yet the swathes of blue and white couldn’t distract from the gory red she remembered underneath it all. Though something as arbitrary as his dress wasn’t what gave him away—an astrologist must be disposed to more than material frivolity.
It was his eyes, again.
The first set of them were friendly. Upturned and opened in a perfectly practiced manner, trained into a pretense of relaxed approachability; but there was also a glint in them, a shadow of something when hit by just the right angle of light that had her insight screaming “Danger. Fatui Harbinger. A loathing beyond yourself.”
And that animosity was pouring out of every orifice when next she encountered him. A liar exposed was an ugly thing, and much of that anger he once felt for her companions was now directed solely on her (this she was used to, but the simultaneous intrigue was another matter). His was a gaze that followed her home from Musk Reef, lingering over her shoulder but disappearing into nothing as soon as she turned around.
Nothing eventually came of the threats he had brandished, so eventually she allowed herself to relax. That same year, the Traveler knocked on her door, keen to introduce her to a scholar friend of hers she met in Sumeru. When she saw those eyes again after so long, she could only wonder how she could ever forget them.
They weren’t bitter anymore. Guarded, sure, but not shrouded in malicious deceit as they once were. Now, he looked… honest. Free from something. Remorseful, perhaps. Anyone like that would be welcome to seek the truth with her.
And yet now, his eyes were closed.
“…Scumbag,” Mona mumbles, cupping his cheek, “you said you’d come back. You broke your promise to me.”
A part of her is grateful when her vision starts to blur. She doesn’t want to look at his face right now, so she buries herself into his neck, wrapping around it and trembling. The hag was right, and she was just a foolish girl, and that’s when the tears spill over.
“Wake up,” she muffles into his collar, “I don’t want to… do any of this without you. I refuse.”
Hands around her waist, stones and eyes catching the light and a thrumming within his chest. Something that could feel and was worthy of feeling. Both of them were worthy of feeling.
Her grip tightens as she presses herself into every space where she can fit. Mona moves against Wanderer as if to meld their bodies or their consciousness, as to join him in this slumber would be preferable to anywhere without him ever again.
She tries to control herself. Useless woman. These passionate outbursts were unseemly. She’ll never achieve the detachment required of a proper scholar. That she could be reduced to this is utterly inconceivable—
There’s a resounding pulse, rippling across him and into her. It’s the only thing that’s paused her cascade, and Mona goes entirely still.
There’s a sound that’s almost like creaking and a feeling almost like shifting fabric and something braces her from behind. A certain hand adorned with a certain ring. Wanderer groans and clicks his tongue.
“Get your hands off of me.”
Mona holds back another hiccup of a sob. “No.”
A shudder wracks her body and the hand begins rubbing her back. Round, circular motions, to calm and soothe. He sighs through his teeth and into her ear.
“First, I give up my core to a woman who was ranked beneath me, and now I wake up to a snivelling mage in my arms. Am I still asleep?”
“Don’t test me, scumbag. I-I’d make your life a living nightmare if you did.”
He snickers. His voice croaks from disuse. “Is that right? Big talk as usual, Mona.” He breathes in the scent of her hair, pausing. She wonders if he’s relishing this moment. “Gods, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”
You’re the best thing that’s happened to him since he’s arrived here.
Something swells in Mona, and she hugs back harder. When he brings them to the ground, they remain holding each other—if not in body, then in that moment, something entirely theirs as two pulses become one and the light filtering from a window refracts a myriad of futures within their eyes.