Work Text:
one would never think, looking at what barbatos would become, that he were ever capable of such things. that he were capable of war.
even his own children do not know. they do not understand.
to be an archon is to have split your fellow gods' throats. to be an archon is to have survived calamities beyond imagining. to be an archon is to have killed and withstood the test of time and survived. one cannot be alive and be an archon, as much as they live. being a god and having been awarded their gnoses was perhaps more akin to having been a king and then chained to their thrones.
barbatos never wanted that for himself, nor for his people.
three thousand years ago, there was war.
spirits rose — of nature and sand, storms and clouds, dust and salt and wind and earth — into gods. they spun what would become known as teyvat into place.
the area that would become mondstadt was overtaken by a spirit of storms: decarabian, who carved a fissure into the north and west of his land and lead storms of water and hail to fill it. he whipped the storms into a fury and bound mondstadt in lightning and thunder, the kind of storm that brought death to those who stepped out.
(they called it sylan in the tongue of the wind spirits, in the way the gods spoke before there were ever others that walked the earth.)
mondstadt was always meant to be the city of freedom.
decarabian falls to the will of the people. as much as barbatos fought and dealt the final blow to (his older brother his once-friend) decarabian, it was the people of his city that rebelled against his overprotective nature. the public and their will to fight for their freedoms, their strain against the wind-chains of their king, their heart raised barbatos from a simple wind sprite to their god.
(there is another dragon, somewhere in the middle of it all.
he is built of earth and is as steady as barbatos is wild.
barbatos does not know if they love him or not, but morax is as beautiful and sweet as he is stony.
he brings them qingxin and offers them a place to stay, and
perhaps if it were anyone else barbatos would have suspected a planned betrayal.
but this is the lord of geo, steady and unwavering, and he would likely not betray barbatos.)
two thousand years ago, there was war.
barbatos cut down gods by the tens. they came in droves and they came with bloody teeth, having fought like dogs for scraps of territory, and they came for the mondstadt that would become barbatos' home. dvalin grows and cuts his teeth on their bones, biting them apart and channeling the wind under his wings until he flies with all the grace of anemo.
their blood filled the lakes. one particularly stubborn god was born of stormclouds and tornadoes, once one of barbatos' siblings and another that he killed without remorse.
(perhaps there could have been some sadness there, once, but not after banyrs tried to come for barbatos' home.)
barbatos survived it all, and at the end of it came the crown of a queen. her (barbatos is a wind sprite, undefined by mortal terms in every sense) gnosis had become something held deeply and privately, something that she would not have given away easily.
she fought for it, after all.
(morax never tried to come for mondstadt, content to defend his territory.
barbatos knows that, if he had, they would have destroyed the stone gate to keep their territory safe.
they would have failed.
there is a reason that the lord of the earth and stone survived as long as he did, after all.
he is covered in the blood that seeps from his polearm. for a long, long time, barbatos lives in fear.)
barbatos sleeps for nearly five hundred years after the cataclysm, after going against everything that he is, after breaking himself down to the very fibres of his being and tearing apart the land that dared to be godless and unbelieving when he could have - should have - protected their freedom.
(all barbatos can do, after the fact, is offer comfort and asylum in secret. there is desperation in the way dainslef begs for his niece and nephew to be hidden, and barbatos draws the winds as if a cloak over the alberichs as they make their escape under the earth, hopes against celestia itself that no one watches their escape.)
and now, there is peace.
venti skips through the city with the taste of wine on her tongue. she hums to herself, anemo lightening each step, as she watches the wind blow through the mills, churning the city into life. over the walls, the sun begins to shine. she stops there, out of sight of the guards, and whisks herself to the top of the wall. she faces southeast and watches the sun rise, and thinks that perhaps she will leave for a bit.
perhaps, there is a friend waiting for her in liyue.