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Wuwang Hill lay thick with dusk, its spine cragged and layered in bruised gold, glazed faintly by the lowering sun. From this vantage, the world below rippled in endless gradations; terraced rice paddies, lacquered with water and cloud, and the distant spires of Liyue Harbor, their lights kindling one by one like ground-level stars. Xiao moved up the ridgeline with steps that left no mark. Wind combed over his arms and rattled through the withered pines, each gust carrying whispers that only the adepti could hear. Tonight, they sounded like the voices of memory, old grievances, restless and faint.
The mountain’s silence tasted of burnt sandalwood and weathered granite. Each intake of air prickled his palate with the ghost of qinxing blossoms, though few grew at this altitude; he wondered if he was simply imagining it, the scent haunting him from memories as far back as the Archon War. Or perhaps the wind simply remembered better than he did.
He sensed the presence in the wind, a familiar resonance threading through the currents like a half-remembered melody. Old, free, unmistakably divine. Tangled in the scent of cecilias.
Barbatos was perched atop the highest tooth of rock like a heron awaiting the tide. His legs dangled, his back to the void, posture loose as though the next breeze might simply take him. If he noticed Xiao’s approach, he gave no sign; his gaze fixed on the north horizon, teal hair braided and half-unraveling in the wind.
The adeptus stood some distance below, letting the greenish swirl of his adeptal aura pool at his ankles, the motion slow and deliberate as waves against stone. He knew Barbatos could feel his presence, but it was not in his nature to speak first, nor to intrude on a god in reverie.
He flexed his hand and looked past Barbatos to the horizon. There was nothing there but haze, a wedge of twilight, perhaps the merest outline of a storm. He tasted the air with his other senses, letting his adeptal vision uncoil along the wind. He felt no trace of malice, no hint of demonic corruption, nor did he sense the telltale pressure of an interloping god or celestial beast. But a thickness lingered, as though the world had forgotten how to breathe in this place. In that emptiness, a current ran beneath the surface, vast and cold. Guilt, he recognized after a moment. Not the sharp tang of a fresh wound, but the ashen, exhausted vastness of remorse aged beyond repair. It filled the air like sea fog.
A dead sea of ash.
“I thought you’d take the summit,” Barbatos called, voice floating down with the dry ease of someone who’d been waiting hours to deploy it. “Surely the Conqueror of Demons does not fear heights.”
Xiao did not answer at first. There was a kind of test here; how much silence could one let pass before a god’s patience wore thin enough to become sincere.
Barbatos’s laughter came, light and brief, snagging the wind. “Or perhaps you feared I’d sing.”
“Your voice is not the hazard,” Xiao said. He closed the distance, bracing on the scant ledge beside the Archon, the pines now a hundred paces below and the world falling away in all directions. “It is the words.”
Barbatos leaned back, twisting to look at him sidelong. The god’s eyes, cool and bright emerald, caught the last daylight, showing tired lines and the faintest glimmer of mischief. “Come now, I only torment the ones I like.”
“You torment everyone.”
A soft, uneven exhale from Barbatos, not quite laughter this time. “True, but most can’t tell the difference. You do. That’s why I treasure our conversations.”
Xiao regarded him sidelong, the god’s face half illuminated, half shadowed, as if he sat on the fault line between day and night. “It is not conversation,” Xiao said. “You talk. I listen.”
Barbatos smirked. “A duet need not be equal parts.” The god’s hands were busy, as always. He fingered his small, battered lyre, tracing the veins in its wood, though his fingers didn’t actually play.
They sat a while, the wind rising, flattening the grass and whistling between the stones. Xiao tried to let himself drift, but his mind would not still. The world pulled at him in a thousand soft currents; migrating birds, a fox somewhere down in the brush, a laborer’s cough echoing up from the valley. Barbatos, too: his presence sharp and strange, like sunlight filtered through wine. Xiao felt his own darkness curl inward, recoiling at the proximity, and he worried that Barbatos must sense it, too.
He did not know what the Anemo Archon wanted of him. Some nights, the god would cajole him into games, riddles, or sparring matches that always ended in laughter, never true contest. In rare occasions, Barbatos would sit in silence, unmoving for hours, and Xiao would settle nearby without speaking. He did not ask what weighed on the Archon's mind. It was not his place to probe the grief of gods, nor did he wish to. Some darknesses were meant to be borne alone. Yet he stayed. He stayed because Barbatos had once saved his life, had offered him reprieve when he had been twisted out of himself with the weight of his karmic debt, and that gratitude ran deeper than pride or propriety.
Xiao knew darkness. He had swallowed centuries of it; had let it colonize his bones until he could taste ash in every breath. He understood the shape of it, how it could hollow a being from within while the surface remained intact. And the god of freedom, of all beings, should not be imprisoned in it. It felt wrong, like watching a bird beat itself against glass, like hearing a song strangled mid-note. So, he kept vigil instead, wordless and steady, offering the only comfort he knew: his presence, undemanding, unwavering.
Barbatos kicked his foot, setting a pebble skittering into the void. “You’re brooding again. If you keep at it, the mountain will cave from the weight.”
“Brooding is a mortal occupation,” Xiao said.
“You are not immune.” Barbatos’s gaze lingered on the horizon; the green in his eyes looked brittle, seeped through with winter. “Even Archons… Sometimes I think we are the most gifted mourners of all.”
He watched the god in profile. The delicate jaw, the mouth set in a line that might have been mirthless if one did not know how many thousands of smiles it had flexed through the centuries. Barbatos wore masks so well they felt less like disguises than natural outgrowths; bard, archon, child, and vagabond, each slipping over his true face with practiced ease. He had mastered the art of moving through the world unbruised, of letting nothing touch him longer than a single note in a song. Yet Xiao had seen the aftermath of gods with less skill. The way remorse clung, how it calcified and smothered. He had been forged in the aftermath of such grief.
The adepti knew grief in its mortal increments; a comrade devoured by madness, another driven to self-obliteration, centuries of quiet attrition.
What did a god’s sorrow weigh? How many more lives did it tally, how much longer lay its shadow upon the world?
Wind made a soft vortex around Barbatos’s feet, swirling the dust and old pine needles. Xiao watched the currents, the unpatterned dance, and wondered if the god let his powers roam for company, or if he was too tired to restrain them.
The wind shifted, and Xiao caught the scent again: cecilia, but twisted with something else. Smoke, maybe. Or the sweetness of decay. He let his thoughts scatter, hoping the god would lose interest and move on to some other pastime, but the silence stretched until it became a question.
“Xiao.” Barbatos’s voice was stripped of its usual playfulness; it was a low thing, unobstructed, unfamiliar. “How do you bear it?”
Xiao turned his head, uncertain if he was meant to answer. “Bear what.”
There was a long moment where Xiao thought Barbatos might dismiss the question, make play of it, but then: “The voices of the dead.” The lyre in his hands was still, the god’s fingers frozen against its battered frame.
He did not answer at once. The wind pressed at his back, threatening to lever him off his perch and into the spun-glass expanse of dusk. He watched the color shift, searching for words that would hold against the silence.
Barbatos drew up his knees, clasped his lyre with both hands, and stared off into the horizon as if he might parse from the clouds the answer himself. “I have met mortals and immortals alike who cannot quiet the smallest regrets,” Barbatos said, almost gently. “Your burden, I hear it from leagues away, smoldering against the sky. And still, you keep moving.”
Xiao let the words ferment. He wanted to say: it is the cost of my contract. Duty, Rex Lapis had called it once, as if the word alone explained the sum of his existence. He had never known whether it was a curse for his lack of ambition or a cruel gift for surviving when the others had not. He wanted to say it was penance, that suffering was the cost of all he had done, all he had failed to protect. The voices were all that was left. There was no single soul in the cacophony, no face among the countless. There was only the collective pressure. Weightless, ceaseless, patient as water on stone. The faces blurred: fallen friends, the ones he had killed, the unlucky, the collateral. The world always found more for him. If he let his control slip for all but a second, he could hear them in the hollows of his bones, shape the shrieks and keening into names.
He thought of Rex Lapis, the old contract, the commandment to defend Liyue at any cost. That was supposed to be the root, but it felt brittle. The world had changed so many times in the centuries since, and Xiao had not.
He thought of Lumine, her eyes intent as she told him that he mattered. To the world, to her, to himself; however little he believed it. He thought of the way her voice never wavered, how she did not look away from the ruin that clung to him like a second skin.
He thought of Barbatos, the god so practiced in joy that his sorrow became invisible to those who did not know the shadow of it. Beneath every jest and song, a care for the world that never expired. Xiao wondered if it was the same for him, in some diminished way.
He forced himself to answer: “It is… my debt. If no one else can hear them, then I must listen.”
Barbatos turned to him, face reshaped by a smile so soft it could have been a trick of the fading light. He did not speak at first, only studied Xiao with a closeness that felt both weightless and insistent, as if the god were tuning an instrument by ear. Then Barbatos reached out, slow and unhurried, and cupped Xiao’s cheek in his palm. The touch was careful, almost reverent, the hand cold from wind but steady as stone.
“You are a gentle one,” Barbatos said, not in jest this time. “Gentle and wounded. The world echoes loudest in those who try least to change it.”
Xiao flinched, not from the hand but from the words. He did not know what to make of them; gentleness was not a trait he recognized in himself, nor one he could claim as virtue. There had been nothing gentle in his creation, nor the centuries of culling and cleansing that had shaped him. If anything, he thought, the world had made him into the sharpest tool it could fashion, and it was only his persistence to function as such that defined him now.
Barbatos traced the line of Xiao’s jaw with a thumb, the gesture oddly precise, as if memorizing its topography.
“You mourn injuries that were never yours to answer for,” he said. “You cradle the world’s broken edge, and think it mercy to bleed for it.”
The god drew his fingers along the line of Xiao’s jaw, then let his hand trail downwards, tracing the adeptal markings that coiled over Xiao’s arm. The lines glowed faint, their seal thrumming where the god’s touch followed them. Barbatos paused at the wrist, then, with a deftness that surprised Xiao, slid his hand over to the vision set in his left glove. Barbatos’s thumb ran the rim of the anemo vision, its glassy surface chilled from the night and streaked with miniature fractures. Xiao braced for a sting or a surge of energy, but the vision only pulsed, low and steady, as if recognizing the presence of its progenitor.
He held it as if weighing something unseen. “Why is it,” Barbatos mused, his voice so soft that Xiao nearly mistook it for the hush of wind, “that the heavens mark their most captive children with the element of freedom?” His fingers tightened, not possessive but searching. “The ones with the least latitude, the smallest chance to escape what binds them… They alone are burdened with the wind.”
Xiao stared at his hand, the vision burning an unnatural sea-glass green against the dying light, Barbatos’s fingers resting atop as if in benediction or apology. He did not know if the words were accusation, lament, or simple curiosity. He could not dislodge his hand from beneath the god’s touch. All the scripts of duty and repentance fled him in the moment, leaving only a blank ache behind the ribs. The wind pressed hard at his back, chilling the sweat at his nape.
He wondered what prison the Anemo Archon had fashioned for himself. What was it like, to govern freedom, to be renowned for boundlessness, and yet never leave the chains of one’s own regret? To be a god of the wind, but find no air left to speak or sing. To gaze into an infinite horizon and find nothing but a sea of ash. Xiao remembered the first time he heard the bards of Mondstadt praise Barbatos, the way their hymns soared in the cathedral vaults, their songs laced with devotion and childish hope. He had thought the god must be proud, or at least content, to be immortalized so. But the real Barbatos, the one before him now, wore his own permanence like a wound.
He found himself unable to look away from the god’s hand, the way it seemed at once weightless and inescapable. Barbatos’s grip was not strong, but it made the air around Xiao’s wrist feel as if it were swelling with pressure, a storm held in abeyance. He did not know if it was his own pulse or some current between them, but the feeling built until he could not breathe around it.
“There are places in this world the wind does not blow,” Barbatos murmured. “Places where it will never blow again.”
Xiao followed the line of Barbatos’s gaze, the emptiness at the world’s edge. The black seam of the horizon, the distant peaks that clutched at the clouds but found nothing, the slatted hollow where even the birds did not fly. There was a taste on his tongue like old incense, burned through, and in that smoke, he sensed the afterimage of a world that had ended long ago.
The god’s hand lingered cold against his own, then receded, leaving a phantom pressure. The wind built and collapsed, carving low moans from the throat of the mountain. Xiao tasted ash on the back of his tongue, the brace of it. He wondered if Barbatos tasted it, too.
“All I ever wanted was to sing,” Barbatos said, almost childlike, voice barely above the breath of wind. The words caught in the air, fragile as frost. Xiao looked at him. The twilight limned profile against swirling clouds, the boundless gaze fixed towards the horizon. He looked past the mask and the posture, past the unfixed smile always waiting in the wings, but at the shadow cut by the god’s form against the sky. The planes of his face held twin contradictions: the youth of someone not old enough for regret, and the ancient, furnace-hot sorrow of a being who had known and mourned every note in the world’s dying song.
There were, Xiao realized, two beings inside of him. The one the people clung to, the subject of drunken hymns and noisy devotion, the archon of revels, wine and wind, a spirit of unruled delight. And the other, something smaller, almost starved. A whorl of air, a whisper of music, a soul so bright and pure for its size that the world had buried it under godhood for its own protection. Xiao saw both, one overlapping the other, like a poorly aligned double exposure.
He found his hand moving before he could halt it. He placed his gloved palm over Barbatos’s. In the hush that followed, the wind seemed to slow, as if pausing to watch.
“I am the Conqueror of Demons,” Xiao said, the formal cadence arising from a place ancient and reflexive. “The last Yaksha of Liyue. A warrior. An executioner.” He let the weight of that settle, each word a rung down a deeper well. “A remnant of war and duty.” He pressed his fingers against Barbatos’s hand. “I am also an adeptus. I remember flight.” He looked up, letting his gaze sweep the vast sky, the blue deepening by the minute, dusk spilling into night. “I remember the feel of the wind tangled in my wings.”
He met Barbatos’s gaze, steady and unwavering. “You are a bard,” he said. “Sing.”
Something in the god’s posture changed, shoulders shifting, a ripple of amusement passing through him. The smile that answered was stripped of all its usual acrobatics, a bright, unhedged thing. “And here I thought you’d only ever ask for silence.” Barbatos tapped the lyre lightly against his knee, then spun it upright and cradled it in his arms. “But as you wish. This one’s for you, little bird.”
He tuned the strings absently, the notes falling soft as rain through wind. Then, with no ceremony, Barbatos sang.
There was no audience here but stone and cloud and the lingering dead. The voice that spilled out was not the shining, theatrical thing he wore in Mondstadt’s squares and taverns, nor the sly, taunting drone he used to tease. It was a single line, thin and bright as thread, holding the world together in its tautness. No prelude, no warning. Just song… raw, unbraided, unshaken by any need to please.
To carry the sunrise, one must open their palm
Even as the night clings to each knuckle and line.
To remember the names is to shoulder the dawn,
Though the world forgets, the wind will remind.
A thousand dead flowers, a million more stars,
Yet the first and the last all dissolve into sky.
If you wish to hold on, then you must let go;
Let the chorus of memory teach you to fly.
So sing for the lost ones, for those who remain,
For the silence that comes when the mourning is done.
If tomorrow is empty, then fill it with song:
The promise of freedom, the pulse of the sun.
Xiao let his head fall forward in surrender. The wind caught the music and spun it out across the valley, tangling it in the upper branches of the pine trees, into the gold-washed shadows below. Xiao let it bind him, the melody so fine it sliced clean through the bramble of his thoughts. There was no fear in it; no trembling, no apology. The bard sang as if nothing in the world would ever be frightened again.
For a moment, the noise in Xiao’s skull quieted, the darkness at the edge of his vision drew back, and the vice that had been coiled around his heart for eons loosened, just slightly. The raw ache of carrying the dead, the futility of his contract, the inescapable guilt… all of it receded, as if the wind itself had made space for him to be.
He recognized the voice beneath the song: small, bright, unsullied by the world’s rot. A little spirit, flung whole into the care of a god so much larger, so much older than time itself. That voice was not just a tool or a weapon. It was cherished, even now. He wondered whether the previous Anemo archon had loved that spirit so fiercely that he had wrapped him in wind and song to keep him safe. To keep that innocence whole, unbroken; a single flame cupped against the dark. And after millennia, after war and loss and the slow erosion of everything mortal… he still was.
The wind still carried him.
The bard sang, and Xiao listened.