Chapter Text
This is not Snezhnaya.
This is one thing that Ajax is sure of.
Not only is it not bone-chillingly cold, it is also still, silent, dead. The sky is black. Or rather, there is no sky; the surrounding darkness feels like a living presence, a snake coiled across his face, blocking his vision.
The stone floor beneath him is flat and smooth when he presses his hands to it to get to his feet—but he cries out as his right leg buckles beneath him. It aches dully, but Ajax is still concerned with his predicament before his fall. He stares up in the direction from which he guesses he’d fallen, but there is no sound of howling wolves, no snarling bear chasing him down here. Wherever he’s fallen, it is deep, deep underground, and he is alone.
Feeling a little safer, he turns back to his leg. He’s unable to find the source of the pain, but he can’t get it to support his weight without buckling. He gives up and starts to blindly feel around, hoping to find a wall to lean against. On his hands and knees, he finds that the stone beneath him is not the jagged, dusty mess that he expects of a cave, but rather flat and grooved in places that seem more like large floor tiles than anything else.
Instead of finding a wall, he finds his shortsword and two loaves of bread, which miraculously fell with him. The sword he uses as a makeshift cane, and he pushes himself upright, then hobbles slowly forward.
When the sword touches the ground, it makes a sharp echoing sound, a noise that does not belong in a stuffy cave deep underground. Curious, he shouts, “Hello?” into the void, and his voice bounces about hopelessly, reverberating off of distant walls and coming back in a cacophony of voices, not all of which sound like his. Panic grips him suddenly, and his other knee threatens to give out.
This place is huge, and from the sound of it, empty. Ajax is no stranger to the forests and caves near Morepesok, but he’s never found something like this before. Snezhnaya’s caves are cold, icy, rough-hewn, and cramped—nothing like this, this massive cavern beneath the earth, black as pitch and quiet as death.
I guess I did ask for this, he thinks to himself, recalling how miserably bored he had been in the past few years, and how he had run off into the Snezhnayan wilderness in search of an adventure. Guess there’s no one to blame but me.
Before he can wallow in self-pity, though, there’s an answer.
“Hello? Ajax, is that you?”
He stiffens.
It’s his mother.
How is she here?
Has she followed him?
“...Mama?” he replies.
“Oh, Ajax, come to mama. I’m right over here.”
Ice slides through his veins. Whatever is speaking to him is not his mother. He knows this for two reasons: first, unless he’s in serious trouble, she never calls him Ajax—just her little Yasha—and second, she is terrified of the dark. This voice is too calm, lacking the emotion that his mother’s voice would carry, whether from anger or from fear. To a stranger, it might have worked, but as her son, he can sense the danger immediately.
“This way,” it repeats as he slowly moves further away. “Come to mama.”
Shaking, Ajax lets all of his weight shift to his left leg, and he holds the sword out in front of himself. “Who’s there?” he asks, his voice small in this cavernous space.
“Can’t you hear me, silly? It’s me,” it replies, now much closer than before. A faint glow, purple or maybe green against the darkness, reaches his eyes, and he adjusts his stance.
“Stay back!” he warns.
His mother’s voice, now alarmingly close, snaps, “How many times—”
Ajax allows his instincts to take over, and he swings the shortsword at the faint light in front of him. Steel meets something soft, possibly fleshy, and a hiss echoes from it in every direction, bouncing like his shout had earlier, returning in various pitches, a discordant choir of dying snakes. Breathing hard, Ajax wrestles his sword from the body and goes down on one knee.
A thousand thoughts rush to fill the silence that follows, and Ajax’s ears ring loudly. What was that? How did it copy his mother’s voice, and why did it know his name? And where in Teyvat is he?
It’s too warm down here for his thick winter coat, so he unbuttons it and tosses it aside, then lifts his blade. Unable to inspect it, he instead runs a finger along the flat edge and finds that it comes back slick. It smells... odd. Nothing like blood. Bitter and sharp, like the acrid smell that follows a freshly broken plant stem. He touches his tongue lightly and it tastes just like it smells. Ajax wrinkles his nose and reaches for a bite from one of his loaves of bread to rid his mouth of the taste, then cleans his blade with the leg of his pants.
The faint greenish glow is barely visible before him, but he’s able to make out a vaguely round shape, much larger than a human. He feels a rush of relief at the confirmation that his instincts were right and his mother hadn’t somehow found her way to this place, but that feeling is quickly replaced with cold dread. There’s no chance that this was the only creature like this down here.
He’s not alone. He can’t see a thing. Whatever lives down here can mimic what lives above. And this, this is not Snezhnaya.
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Ajax is thirsty.
It costs him a surprising amount of effort to limp forward with his injured leg, and he has long since emptied the small canteen he’d brought from home, when he’d been sure that he could survive off of melted snow.
But caves, he knows, typically hold some sort of water. If he can fall down here, then surely some rainwater has pooled somewhere deeper inside. He might sicken himself by drinking it, but it’s better than dying of dehydration.
It’s been many hours since his fall, possibly a whole day, though he can’t be certain. Without the pale winter sun to offer some sense of time, every minute drags, every step feeling slower than the last. But his eyes have begun to adjust, finding shadows within the shadows, great soaring walls and jagged shapes that might be stalactites reaching for the ground. The space is wide, and the floor slopes slightly downward as he rounds a bend.
A noise.
This time, it sounds nothing like his mother. It’s a low rumbling, a growl, a little further ahead. There are two points of purple light, and Ajax realizes with shock that they are eyes, turning to face him, narrowing when they spy him. A howl pierces the still air and the creature charges.
Adrenaline kicks in and Ajax rolls out of the way as a flying wolf rushes past him. He pushes himself up with his sword and again leans on his left leg. With his injury, he’ll have to await his enemy’s attacks, let it come to him. It’s dangerous, but the pounding of his heart is strangely exciting as he waits for it to charge again.
It seems to take a different approach, though, and a splash of tiny stars appears before it, which it dives into and vanishes. Ajax swallows, muscles tense. Where did it go?
The starry portal opens up directly overhead, and the wolf’s claws are the first thing through, giving him no time to react before they slash through the sleeve of his sweater. Pain rips through his left shoulder. Yelling, he swings his sword in a wild arc and manages to slice off the attacking paw before it can pull back, and it yelps in pain as it tumbles to the ground in front of him. Ajax takes the chance to drive his blade through one of its glowing eyes and into its skull. The light fades and it falls limp.
Panting, he sits down hard, clutching his left arm. Warm blood seeps through his fingers, and he knows he needs to do something about it, and quickly. Hands shaking, he peels away his sweater and the shirt underneath, then unwraps his scarf and ties it as tightly as he can manage around the wound. It’s not perfect, but it’ll have to do.
He puts his sweater back on carefully, then pauses a moment, head spinning. He’s already lost a lot of blood—more than he’d expected. And he’s so, so thirsty. The wolf’s corpse is dry, not a drop of blood to be found, and Ajax is a little relieved. He’s not sure he could stomach it if he had to satiate his thirst with animal blood. Then the memory of the bitter, plantlike substance that came from the mimicking creature comes to his mind, and he wonders what the chances are that he could retrace his steps back to it and drain it of whatever remains.
No, no sense in turning back now. He needs to keep moving.
Ajax takes a deep breath and forces himself upright, left arm tucked close, then begins to limp his way forward, down the ever-so-slightly sloping path, pausing after a few noisy steps to listen carefully for any more threats. In the echoing cavern, each step sounds like a dozen, as if he has a small army of teenage boys following close behind. He continues like this for hours, mind and body growing numb from the pain in his arm, until, when he pauses for a few bites of bread, something reaches his ears.
This time, it’s not his mother, or the growl of a monster. It’s something he actually wants to hear: the slow drip, drip of something wet. He falls still, listening intently, wide eyes staring into the darkness, searching for the source.
Drip, drip.
It’s further ahead, but he can’t determine how far. He’s not sure he’s strong enough to make it.
And then what? Is he just going to lay down and bleed out? He’s fallen all this way, defeated two strange monsters despite his injuries, just to give up when he’s so close to a water source?
He swallows the dry clump of bread, tongue clinging to the roof of his mouth, and begins moving once more, pausing every few steps to correct his course. Eventually, he finds himself circling a jagged pillar of rock, and realizes that the sound is coming from somewhere above. He can’t give up now. He just needs to climb, one step at a time....
Scaling the rock isn’t easy, but Ajax has had practice running around in the forest with his friends and siblings. There are enough outcroppings for him to drag himself upward slowly, and it turns out to not be as tall as he’d initially thought—a little over twice his height.
A strange sight awaits him at the top. There’s a faint light illuminating the area, and he’s able to make some sense of the formation: the rock he’s just climbed had once been a massive stalagmite, but hanging overhead is an even larger stalactite, reaching down almost to Ajax when he straightens as best he can. Liquid drips from the stalactite onto the rock below, not water, he thinks, but something that glows faintly blue and glitters like gemstones. Over time, it seems the steady drip has eroded the top of the stalagmite into something like a wide bowl. Ajax dips a finger into the pool to find that, though it shimmers and shifts incomprehensibly, it’s cool to the touch and, when he licks his finger, it tastes just like water.
Maybe the gods are somewhere far above, still looking out for him, after all.
Ajax cups his hands and greedily drinks several handfuls of the sparkling water. He splashes his face with it, rinses his hands. Sitting on the lip of the pool, he unties the scarf and cleans the three bloody scratches on his shoulder.
A wave of exhaustion washes over him. He’s been stumbling forward for hours, fighting unknown monsters, bleeding heavily, and now, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to hold his head up. He finishes off the first loaf of bread, acutely aware of the aching hunger that still lingers, but knowing he needs to save the other one. At least he’s found some water. And, he thinks, looking down at the area around the stone pillar, this place is a pretty good vantage point. It’s the safest spot he’s found so far, and he desperately, desperately needs to close his eyes.
With his sword held close to his chest, he lays down on a damp outcrop, too tired to fear that he could roll off the edge in his sleep.
And again Ajax falls into another realm.
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His body is being pulled by an unseen current. Ajax is underwater, tumbling through a riptide, being dragged deeper and deeper until it dumps him at the sandy ocean floor. Somehow, he knows that he is deeper under the sea than any human has ever been. Maybe, just as Teyvat hides a lightless cavern deep beneath the surface, the ocean too holds some dark, undiscovered secret.
A shrill noise explodes through his mind, and the sand before him shifts. At first, he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing: blue, white, purple—shards of light—stars rippling across a mirrored surface. But as it continues to move past him, he can distinguish a massive fin, and then a huge tail.
As the creature turns, the breath is sucked out of his lungs. The creature before him is larger than anything he’s seen in his life, and all he can do is watch in frozen silence as a colossal starry whale swims over him, its shadow blotting out the light from above.
The light, he realizes, comes from a star, a star at the center of a ring of planets, only one of billions that shine in the space around them. As the whale swims with ease through this sea of stars, it circles the nearest one, a shark eyeing its next meal. Suddenly sensing danger, Ajax tries to turn and swim away, but his body refuses to budge, and he’s forced to watch in horror as the whale opens its massive maw wide, wider than anything he’s ever seen, and it sucks in the star, the planets around it, and Ajax himself.
He jerks awake, clawing at his throat, certain he is drowning.
...No.
No, he isn’t.
There is no star-swallowing whale, no boundless sea of planets and stars. He’s still in this dark place, in the relative safety of his new perch, and still alone.
He lays there, gasping, willing his breaths to slow, willing his heart to stop racing. He’s not sure how long he was asleep, but he still feels rotten, exhausted. He listens to the steady drip of the shimmering water above him in the hopes that it might lull him back to sleep.
Drip, drip.
He’s not sure how long he lays there, but he can’t seem to keep his eyes shut for long. The fear that something else might be in the room with him holds his body tense, too tense to fall asleep, and he finds himself listening attentively to every sound around him.
Drip, drip.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap.
Footsteps.
He’s sure of it.
He sits up against the rock, peering into the darkness. There’s a purplish hue to the room around him now, and he’s able to spy a shadowy figure walking in his direction. When he moves his injured shoulder, his vision blurs as the pain almost knocks him out, and he curses silently to himself. Can he muster the strength to fend off another terrible creature?
The footsteps stop near the bottom of the rocky pillar.
“Who are you?”
A woman’s voice, flat and unfamiliar to him. Unlike the beast with his mother’s voice, which had spoken in Snezhnayan, she speaks in the common language of Teyvat. Ajax remains quiet, hoping she hasn’t seen him, hoping she’s instead addressing some other unseen person. But then, that thought unnerves him, too.
“Did you awaken it?”
“Who, me?” he asks, voice sounding painfully small in the large space.
“...Is there anyone else here?”
“No...? I don’t know.”
A spark catches his eye, and then a torch bursts to life, illuminating a white-haired woman with a stern face. She frowns. “Your eyes haven’t adapted?”
He feels a twinge of annoyance at her judgmental tone. “I mean, they’re starting to. I could see you walking towards me just now.”
“Come here, child.”
The words from that mimicking creature suddenly come back to him—come to mama. He grips the hilt of his sword tightly and says, “You’re trying to trick me. I don’t know what you are, but you’re gonna have to climb if you want to eat me.”
The woman is quiet. The torchlight flickers on the floor around her, confirming Ajax’s suspicion that it’s made mostly of cracked floor tiles, as though some ancient civilization had once built a road there. The thought is strangely disturbing to him, so he focuses instead on the woman.
The first thing he notices is the sword in her right hand, which is jagged and multifaceted, as though carved out of solid quartz. It’s impossible to guess her age but she’s definitely much older than him. Her eyes are unsettling, though it’s hard to determine exactly why from this distance. She’s wrapped in a tattered shawl that obscures everything but her arms, which even from a distance he can tell are lean and muscular, half covered by gloves or vambraces that glint and shimmer in the torchlight—uncomfortably reminiscent of the star-devouring whale he’d just seen in his dream. But she just stands there, watching him curiously, like he’s a small bird with an injured wing and it’s only a matter of time before he falls from the safety of his perch. Is she a cat, waiting to pounce, or is she a sympathetic human, ready to mend his wing until he can fly again?
Another point of light catches his eye, purple, and he immediately recognizes it as one of those wolf creatures. It floats in the direction of the swordswoman, followed by several others, and he looks back at her worriedly. “Behind you!” he warns.
She turns and approaches the monsters calmly, despite Ajax counting at least ten of them. Where did they all come from? And selfishly, he thinks, if they overpower her, then he’s as good as dead. He had hardly been a match for one, much less an entire pack.
The torch still in her left hand, she reaches out with her sword, and ice solidifies on the blade. Like a needle piercing through fabric, looping back and forth to make its stitches, the swordswoman and her blade move fluidly from beast to beast, the sword like an extension of her body, and Ajax can hardly comprehend what he’s seeing before the entire pack collapses as one.
He puts his own sword in its sheath and hastily begins climbing back down the eroded stalagmite. He makes it halfway down before his foot slips and he tumbles the rest of the way, but, undeterred, he limps towards the swordswoman, ignoring the pain that screams through his body. “Whoa! That was—how did you do that? That was amazing!”
She turns, and the ice dissipates.
“Can—can you teach me how to do that?”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll eat you?”
He shakes his head. “After seeing you do that? I don’t care who you are, I wanna fight like that, too!”
She moves quietly past him and he turns to stumble after her.
“What did you mean earlier, when you asked about me waking something up? Was it those wolves? I had no idea they were here... maybe they followed me after I killed that other one...?”
“You killed a rifthound?”
“Yeah!” Rifthound. So these things have a name... a name that this woman knows. “What even are they?”
She says nothing.
“Do you live down here?”
“Hm.”
“Where are we going?”
She huffs. “You ask a lot of questions.”
“Yeah,” he says, not feeling put off in the slightest. He finally has a shot at finding some answers to the things he’s had nothing but time to think about. “I mean, I don’t know anything about this place. One moment I’m running from wolves and bears outside Morepesok, the next I’m fighting rifthounds in some weird cave.”
She looks at him over her shoulder. “You’re from Teyvat?”
The question catches him off guard and he stops in his tracks. “Well... yeah? Where else would I be from?”
Instead of answering, the swordswoman veers off towards the sloping wall of the cavern, leaving Ajax to hobble after her, wondering if maybe this woman has been down here in the dark for so long that she’s started to go a little crazy. All he’d done was fall through a crack in the ground. He might be deep underground, but he’s still somewhere beneath the continent of Teyvat—he hadn’t fallen through the core of the planet, after all.
They reach a small nook in the wall, a shelter where a pile of split logs sits over a circle of ashes, and the swordswoman sets down the torch in the middle of it. The fire slowly crackles to life. She takes a seat on a flat rock, and Ajax does the same, grateful to rest his overworked legs. Then, she reaches into a box, spears a large dead fish on the tip of her blade, and holds it over the fire. As she does so, Ajax stares out at their bleak surroundings.
“If this isn’t Teyvat,” he says presently, “then where are we?”
Her eyes move from the fire to Ajax, though the rest of her body remains still as a statue. An uncomfortable feeling twists in his stomach when he realizes why he’s bothered by her eyes: despite the flames crackling before her, they reflect no light. They’re blank, like frosted glass, emotionless and distant.
She’s quiet for long enough that Ajax begins to suspect he won’t receive an answer, but then she turns the fish over and says, “We are in a place known as the Abyss.”
“The Abyss,” he repeats.
“Are you searching for a way out?”
“No,” he says quickly. “No, I want to learn how to fight like you.”
The shadow of a smile flickers across her face, but it vanishes just as quickly. “We’ll see about that.”
“You didn’t say ‘no’.”
She offers nothing in response. Instead, she slices the steaming fish in half and drops one piece onto a flat, thin rock. He offers her half of his remaining loaf of stale bread in exchange, and they eat in silence—though, if Ajax could ask her more questions through his mouthfuls of fish, he absolutely would. When they finish their meal, he stifles a sudden yawn and blinks hard, willing himself to stay alert.
“What do I need to do?” he asks. “I can prove myself. I’ll do anything.”
She turns over a log with her crystalline sword and says, “You are weak. Rest. I’ll keep watch.”
“I’m not weak!” Ajax protests, pushing himself to his feet—but his traitorous knee gives out and he sits down hard, squeezing his eyes shut as his face burns in embarrassment.
The swordswoman mercifully ignores him and instead continues to stoke the fire. Ajax wants to prove it to her, to show her that he can still get up and fight, that he would be a worthy student, but she’s right. He can’t even stand up straight. His time down here has severely weakened him, and he aches all over, down to his bones. However long he’d slept, it was nowhere near enough.
Ajax wonders again if she might be another cunning trick of this place, of the Abyss, and if she’s just waiting until he’s asleep to attack. But then, if that is the case, he stands no chance against her and her expert bladework. So he makes up his mind and decides to trust her; after all, he has nothing to lose, but so much to gain.
He lays down on the stone floor, near enough to the fire to feel its warmth. The crackling of the logs reminds him of home, and he closes his eyes, picturing for the first time since his fall what he might be missing right now. His father, coming home from a long day of commission work with his older siblings; his mother, setting bowls of borscht on the table for everyone. Little Tonia and Anthon stamping the snow out of their boots after playing outside all day. The vision begins to fade around the edges, and Ajax drifts off to sleep.
The whale does not appear this time. Instead, his sleep is empty and lifeless, just like the abyss he’s fallen into.
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