Chapter Text
Ephemerality was something every Mondstadter understood, for it was woven into the very idea of home. The wind could rise without warning, carrying with it songs, stories, feelings, and fleeting moments, only to vanish just as easily, dispersing into nothing. Perhaps that was why they had invented windmills: to catch those precious instants and turn them in an eternal circle, a reminder that no ending came without a beginning, and no beginning was free from an end.
Maybe that was also why Windwheel Asters were the flower most often associated with the Windblume. Yet it did raise a question: why did the Anemo Archon himself seem to favor the Cecilia instead?
A rare, white, almost intangible flower, the Cecilia could only bloom in the most windswept places. Naturally, something so delicate and so infuriatingly elusive had gathered its fair share of poetry and superstition. Its leaves were said to represent the waxing and waning of time, from birth to death. Its habit of growing high upon windy cliffsides placed it closer to the heavens and the celestial realms than most earthly things. And yet, for all its purity, the Cecilia had inspired its share of mournful, even dark, verse.
Varka would never claim to be much of a poet himself. Most of what he dealt with consisted of mundane, irritating reports and the endless paperwork required to keep Mondstadt running. But he had a drinking buddy, or rather, two very good drinking buddies. One was the god of wind and freedom himself. The other was a strange lantern fae. Both, however, had a habit of dressing their feelings in poetic language.
Through them, Varka had come to understand that something so beautiful, something that seemed almost fragile, could also represent moral blindness: a thing deprived of light, hidden from sight, or invisible in plain view. All of which, he thought, could be applied to a person.
Fragile as a flower, yet thriving in dangerous places.
Still, it begged the question: what would happen to a lily growing where no wind could reach?
And could a flower that only thrived in peril truly live in a place as peaceful as Mondstadt?
“Ah. There you are,” Lohen said. “I thought I’d find you here.”
Varka sighed.
So much for escaping the endless mountain of paperwork waiting for him back at headquarters. Then again, if anyone was going to discover his hiding place, at least it was Lohen. He was not like the other Knights of Favonius. He would not run off to Jean, would not mention the Grand Master’s secret retreat, and certainly would not tattle.
Not directly, anyway.
Then again that didn’t mean Varka was safe. After all that shit-eating grin tucked behind that perfectly polite smile suggested he might still find some other, more irritating way to enjoy the knowledge. Varka supposed that was only fair. Lohen himself was barely ever at headquarters. Half the time, the absence requests Varka signed were less requests and more advance notice that Lohen had already vanished into the wilderness, likely having a wonderful time turning monsters into minced meat.
Varka only grunted and shifted slightly in the grass.
Lohen took it as an invitation and sat beside him beneath the great tree of Windrise. The plains stretched lush and green around them, stirred by a breeze soft enough to feel almost lazy. Lohen leaned back against the trunk, closed his eyes, and let the dappled sunlight fall across his face. For once, he looked almost peaceful.
“I’m guessing you’re doing the ever-chivalrous thing and leaving all the paperwork to Jean again?”
A laugh escaped Varka before he could stop it. “What can I say? The winds of freedom were calling.”
Lohen’s eyes remained closed as he basked beneath the shifting light, but a knowing smile curved his mouth. “I’m sure they were,” he said softly.
The breeze threaded through his mint-green hair, stirring the loose strands like something touched by time itself. “At least they didn’t call you to the tavern this time.”
Varka huffed. Unfortunately, he had no defense. He had done it often enough for it to become less an accusation and more a documented pattern.
For a while, neither of them spoke. The grass whispered around them, bending beneath the lazy wind, and somewhere beyond the tree’s great roots, birdsong rose and vanished into the open air.
Then Lohen opened his eyes and looked up at the sky. “Mondstadt really is the place to be, huh?”
Varka glanced at him from the corner of his eye.
Lohen’s expression had hardly changed. His head rested lightly against the trunk, his posture loose and careless, one knee drawn up while an arm draped lazily over it. Anyone passing by might have mistaken him for an indolent knight shirking patrol beneath the shade.
But Varka saw something else.
There was a quiet expectation in the way Lohen watched the clouds, or perhaps a longing so old it had learned to disguise itself as indifference. As though some part of him was still waiting for the sky to split open. For the grass beneath his boots to turn to stone, or ash. For a voice he could not ignore to call him back.
And though his tone had been light enough to pass for idle conversation, soft enough that anyone else might have mistaken it for simple admiration, Varka knew better.
Lohen was a special kind of liar.
The kind who could weave falsehoods so intricate and beautiful that, for a moment, even the truth might hesitate before cutting through them. The kind who drew deception with all the elegance and ease of a blade sliding free from its sheath.
Nodkrai was about as far from Mondstadt as one could get. In Mondstadt, people worked together. They drank together, sang together, fought together when they had to. But Nodkrai was different. Its factions stood divided, many of them caring only for their own selfish gains. And yet, for all its harshness, it was still a moon-blessed land. One that, with great skepticism, welcomed travelers from afar.
It held everything from biting gales and desolate tundras, to snow-kissed lakes that fractured like mirrors beneath the cold. There were secluded ponds hidden behind silk-like fog, mist that came and waned as if deciding for itself when to be seen and when to vanish.
It was a borderland, so of course Favonius Keep was nothing like Mondstadt. But even here, in the far northern land of Nodkrai, the gentle warmth of the breeze somehow still carried the scent of dandelion wine. Rerir of Solnari had been defeated, but the Wild Hunt still roamed. Without their leader to guide them in any coordinated direction, they had fallen prey to the impulses of the Abyss. Infect. Destroy. Devour anything that belonged to Teyvat.
Then again, it wasn’t as if none of them knew why they had come here.
Many had left the safety and warmth of Mondstadt to join the expedition, all to protect the home they held so dear. There was a reason only the strongest and best-suited knights had been allowed to leave.
Still, the surprise attack from the Wild Hunt had been brutal.
It had come out of nowhere. They had been slowly making their way toward Amsvartnir when the Wild Hunt struck, using the fog to hide their decrepit bodies before surrounding them in an instant. It had been a mess, with visibility nearly swallowed whole by the same mist that protected the royal court of the Seelie.
In the end, they had won and as the camp recovered from the ambush, as wounds were tended and supplies were split between those who needed them most, Varka allowed them to take that victory for what it was.
His eyes moved over his men, counting faces out of habit more than anything else, until something made him pause.
The Fifth Company Vice Commander was missing. Which was odd. Lohen had been with Varka during the attack. More than that, Lohen never left his squad to fend for themselves. There was a reason Varka had knighted him the Sharpened Arrowhead. Like an arrow, he pierced through their enemies, drawing their attention and giving the ranged squad the opening they needed to move into position.
Varka sighed and rose to his feet.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’d had to go out and track the little rascal down.
After all, knowing Lohen, he was probably still out there gleefully stabbing whatever stragglers of the Wild Hunt he could find. Or whatever unfortunate monster happened to be unlucky enough to wander into his line of sight. Or his general vicinity.
Granted, Varka knew these creatures were dangerous. He knew better than most what sort of threat they posed, but given how Lohen treated the things he considered enemies, even Varka couldn’t help but pity them a little.
“Anselm?” Varka called, rolling his shoulders as he rose to his feet. “You’re in charge until I get back, all right?”
Anselm nodded at once. If he had already guessed exactly why Varka was leaving, he gave no sign of it. Then again, he hardly needed to. As commander of the Sixth Company, Anselm was no stranger to tracking down a certain mint-haired knight when he decided to vanish without warning.
“Yes, sir.”
Varka smirked, then turned and walked off into the fog. Finding Lohen wasn’t particularly tedious. Mika had already shown him the map, after all, with every likely point of trouble carefully marked. Small, ugly hilichurl camps. Patches of land still scarred by the Abyss. Reported sightings from the Ratniki they had crossed paths with along the way.
All Varka had to do was what any normal person knew not to do.
Namely, walk straight toward the place where he expected to find the most danger.
Case in point, he reached a clearing where the magenta smoke of long-dead monsters still coiled in the air, a faint whisper of the lives that had been taken. Judging from the perimeter, the marks carved into the ground, and the dying shimmer of a portal still trying to close after the Wild Hunt had torn it open into the living world, it must have been a significant attack.
And yet, there was Lohen.
Sitting in the middle of the mist-damp grass, petting a small white rabbit.
For a moment, Varka could only stare, because in his defence it was a strange sight. Lohen sat with monster blood streaked across his uniform and drying dark beneath his fingernails, his blade lying in the grass close enough to answer any threat before it finished becoming one. Around him, the last traces of violence still clung to the clearing. And there he was, gently stroking the rabbit between its ears. Strange, yes, but not unfamiliar.
Despite his brutality in battle, despite the merciless edge that came over him whenever he faced something he considered an enemy, Lohen had always had a soft spot for animals. Particularly small, fragile ones. Prey animals, the sort of creatures that startled at shadows and survived by knowing when to run.
The fondness seemed to go both ways. Whenever Varka found Lohen somewhere he was absolutely not supposed to be, there was usually an animal involved. A bird perched on his shoulder. A fox nosing curiously at his hand. Once, a half-starved cat had slept inside his coat through an entire strategy meeting, while Lohen sat there with the bland, innocent expression of a man not harboring contraband wildlife beneath military issue fabric.
Varka still had no idea how he had managed that. Especially when said feline seemed to deem the rest of humanity public enemy number one and would swipe at anyone who dared to come close to its vicinity with all the fury of disrespected god.
The rabbit, at least, made no attempt to hide. It sat in Lohen’s lap as if it had chosen him, its little nose twitching while his blood-stained fingers moved carefully over its fur.
Varka stopped at the edge of the clearing. For a moment, he said nothing as the fog slipped between them in thin silver ribbons. Around Lohen, the remains of the Wild Hunt slowly came apart, bodies dissolving into ash and strange-colored smoke. The grass had been ripped open. The earth was scored with claw marks. The air still carried the bitter, metallic taste of the Abyss. And in the center of it all, Lohen sat as peacefully as a child in a meadow.
“You know you were supposed to return after the ambush,” Varka said, folding his arms.
Lohen did not look up. “I was following the stragglers.”
“Yes, I gathered that.” Varka’s gaze drifted from the dissolving corpses to the rabbit curled in Lohen’s lap. “What I don’t understand is how that turned into you having a tea party with a rabbit.”
Lohen’s hand stilled. For a moment, he only looked down at the small creature nestled against him. The rabbit blinked up at him, trembling faintly, and something in Lohen’s face softened before he could hide it. “She was shaking,” he said quietly. “Hiding beneath one of the corpses. The Wild Hunt nearly crushed her.”
Varka’s expression did not change, but his voice lowered. “And that is why you ignored protocol and stayed behind?”
Lohen’s fingers resumed their slow, careful motion over the rabbit’s fur. “If I had waited,” he said, “they would have reached the burrows.”
Varka glanced around and only then did he see them. Small dips in the grass. Little openings tucked beneath roots and stones, half-hidden by mist and torn earth. Rabbit burrows, scattered all around the clearing.
Of course.
It was moments like this that made Varka remember how young Lohen still was. Because for all his skill, for all his titles, for all the blood on his hands, Lohen was still someone who would chase monsters through the fog because they had dared to threaten something small enough to fit in his palms.
And Varka could not help but wonder where that fierceness came from.
Was it instinct? Some innate, stubborn need to protect whatever could not protect itself? Or was it something older than that, something rooted so deeply in him that even Lohen himself might not know where it began? Perhaps he defended fragile things because no one had done the same for him when he was small. Perhaps every frightened creature, every trembling bird or starving cat or rabbit hiding beneath a corpse, reminded him of something he would never admit to remembering.
Varka watched him in silence. Lohen’s expression had gone calm again, almost unreadable, but his hand remained impossibly gentle. He scratched lightly beneath the rabbit’s chin, and the little thing leaned into his touch without fear.
That, more than anything, made Varka’s chest ache.
He had seen men twice Lohen’s age flinch from the boy after battle. He had seen enemies freeze at the sight of that smile, too bright and too empty to be kind. He had seen Lohen step through blood and smoke as if he belonged there. Yet here he sat treasuring a life with the same hands he used to take another.
Varka sighed. “Well, since you’ve apparently claimed responsibility for the local wildlife, do you at least plan on returning to camp before Anselm starts thinking I’ve been eaten?”
Lohen’s mouth curved faintly. “I doubt he would assume anything that dramatic.”
“He absolutely would. He’s been around you too long.”
That earned him a quiet huff, almost a laugh. The rabbit startled at the sound, ears twitching upright, but Lohen soothed it with a slow pass of his fingers over its back. “I’ll return soon,” he said.
Varka shot him a look, because that was an outright lie. “That word means something different to you than it does to the rest of us.”
“There might still be stragglers.”
“There might, and there might also be paperwork.”
Lohen finally looked up and his face carried an expression of such mild offense that Varka nearly laughed. “That’s just cruel.”
“Crueler than making your Grand Master trudge through Abyss-fog to retrieve you from a rabbit rescue operation?”
Lohen’s gaze dropped back to the small white creature curled in his lap. “She needed help,” he said quietly.
And there it was. Not an excuse. Not quite. Lohen was very good at excuses. He could lie with a straight face, deflect with a smile, or turn a question into something sharp enough to make the asker regret ever holding it. He could make himself look careless, amused, even bored, all while tucking the truth away somewhere no one else could reach.
But this was not that.
This was the simple, stubborn logic by which Lohen seemed to live most of his life. A frightened thing had needed help, and so he had helped it. The fact that helping it had required disobeying orders, vanishing into Abyss-fog, and starting a private war with the Wild Hunt was, apparently, a minor detail.
Varka studied him for another moment, then sighed. There were questions he could ask. Where that fierceness came from. Why Lohen looked at trembling creatures as if he recognized them. Why he could walk through carnage without blinking, yet could not leave a rabbit shaking beneath a corpse.
But asking Lohen for the truth was like trying to carve through stone with a feather. Worse, probably. At least the stone would have the decency not to smile back or give him attitude.
So Varka did not ask. Instead, he lowered himself onto a nearby stone with a weary grunt, propped one arm over his knee, and glanced toward the burrows half-hidden beneath the mist-damp roots. “All right. Finish helping her. Make sure the area is clear. Check the tunnels if you must. Then we go back together.”
Lohen blinked. For a second, his expression shifted faster than he could hide it. Surprise first. Then relief. Then, finally, that familiar cheeky smile slid back into place, bright enough to make him look almost innocent.
“As you command, Grand Master.”
Immedilay Varka winced. “Please, don’t sound so obedient. It’s unsettling.”
At that, Lohen laughed.
It was quiet at first, little more than a breath caught between his teeth, but it warmed as it escaped him. The rabbit startled, ears flicking upright, and Lohen immediately lowered his hand to soothe her, still smiling as his bloodstained fingers moved gently over her fur.
Varka looked away before the ache in his chest could turn into something more troublesome. “Come on, then,” he said gruffly. “Let’s make sure your new friend still has a home.”