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Mondstadt City — otherwise known as the City of Freedom. Cobblestone streets wound between windmills and the red-roofed shops of the Market District, while at its heart, the Crown of the North remained as lively as ever. Merchants haggled over the price of goods, and the sweet aroma drifting from the flower shop carried past Knights of Favonius guards standing at their posts (far too lazily for Lohen’s liking).
Life, he thought, carried on the way it always did, even when circumstances changed. Reuniting with his homeland should have put him at ease; the expedition had been a treacherous journey, after all. He almost hadn’t made it back alive.
And yet, home wasn’t the same. No, it would never be.
Not without Adorno.
Lohen knelt down solemnly in front of the Benevolent Knight’s gravestone, placing a freshly plucked Cecilia beside it with care akin to reverence. He had picked it on the way, from Starsnach Cliff, where the flowers grew thickest. The wind caught at the flower’s pale petals, threatening to carry it off before it had even settled. He steadied it with two fingers until it stilled.
It had been approximately a month since Adorno had passed. Only a month, but it felt like a lifetime since he saw him last. Since he had said farewell to him. Some days it felt like he could still hear the old man’s voice rounding the corner. Others, it felt like he’d been gone for years — longer, even, than Lohen himself had been alive.
Time was a cruel force that wasn’t to be reckoned with. Even the Rächer of Solnari couldn’t win against such a foe. He knew that. Theodore knew that. Knowing didn’t make it hurt any less.
Nevertheless, a question gnawed at him, and it refused to leave his thoughts. Why, why, why?
Why did Adorno have to leave him?
It wasn’t even the right question, not really, and Lohen knew that much too. The real one remained underneath it, one far less forgivable: why hadn’t he stopped it sooner? Why had he let himself be talked into one more session, one more month, when he already knew where it was leading? He had told himself it was the old man’s choice to make. He still believed that, mostly, but it didn’t make the guilt dissipate by any stretch.
Lohen’s heart clenched, no, it was being squeezed — as if someone had reached into his chest and gripped it with all of their might, and they wouldn’t stop until it was pulverized. His hands curled into fists at his sides and a lump formed in his throat. He began to tremble.
Shaking his head, he took a quivering breath. You can’t. He pressed the palm of his hand to his sternum, like that would do anything at all. Lohen couldn’t recall the last time he shed a tear, and he certainly wasn’t going to do it in front of the old man’s grave. Especially when taking his epitaph into account:
Do not stand by my grave and cry. My life, I gave to wipe tears dry.
A faint smile graced his lips as he read it for the hundredth time, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. He ran a hand over the smooth stone, tracing the carved letters gingerly.
Lohen steadied himself, and began to speak.
“Hey there, old man. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you last, hasn’t it? The atmosphere has changed in Dornman Port with you not being around. The city too. It’s more melancholic, and… a tad less busy. And no, this isn’t just me projecting. Everyone misses you.”
I miss you, too.
The words didn’t make it past his lips.
Tears threatened to cloud his vision, so he shut down the waterworks again, this time by harshly biting the inside of his cheek. Good. The sharp sting of pain was welcome. Necessary, even.
He cleared his throat, the sound rough even to his own ears. “Don’t worry, though, I haven’t let the Fifth Company fall apart in your absence…”
Lohen’s thoughts were promptly scattered when he heard the rustling of grass from behind him. Spinning around, years of training overriding grief in an instant, he readied himself to pull out his knife—
But the sight that greeted him caused his hand to still before it ever reached the hilt. A stretch of silence passed, just long enough for the adrenaline to diminish, before Lohen opened his mouth.
“Ah, you two are part of that group of rascals who pester — I mean — pestered Adorno at every waking moment,” he muttered, the correction catching in his throat.
Two kids – Max and… Moricztill, was it? – stood in front of Lohen, gazing up at him. Windswept hair, grass stains on the knees… yup, that was them alright. He quickly deduced that they were, in fact, not here on a whim. Looking closer, Lohen saw that Max held a bouquet of Cecilias, bundled loosely with the stems cut unevenly, while Moricztill possessed a small bag made of cloth that was tied with a ribbon.
For some godforsaken reason, their eyes seemed to shine a little more at the sight of him.
It wasn’t as if Lohen hated kids — far from it — but he wouldn’t necessarily say they were his favorite thing in the world, either. He had never been sure how to indulge them without thoroughly wearing himself out. Engaging with children required participating in an abundance of repetitive, mundane tasks, such as answering the same question a million different ways. If he was too soft, they’d never leave him alone. Too blunt, and someone’s mother would complain to him or one of the other knights before sundown.
And besides, their presence tended to bring up not-so-pleasant memories. Memories of when he himself was young and weak and powerless. The world didn’t care what you had or hadn’t learned, even if you were just a kid.
(One thing to note, however: Klee was the exception to this rule, for reasons one didn’t need to spell out.)
Max shuffled his feet, looking up through his bangs. “Hi, Vice Captain Lohen,” he greeted, his voice lacking its usual boisterous volume.
Beside him, Moricztill held out the bag. “Do you want some candy?”
Huh. Normally, these two were little terrors. Lohen remembered them vividly, always running circles around the old man and talking his ear off. Not to mention they talked his ear off too when Adorno made him play with them. But now? They stood there unusually still, their shoulders slumped and their usual boundless energy noticeably absent. It was jarring, to say the least, seeing them like this.
Lohen blinked. He looked at the bag, then back at them. “...Sure. But first, riddle me this: why do you two look like you're about to cry?” he asked, crossing his arms. Perhaps not the most tactful observation, but alas, one he made known nonetheless.
Max and Moricztill traded a glance.
What, were they scared of him now because he had “terrorized” those other kids? They got what was coming to them. He stood by that decision wholeheartedly, regardless of how many times Jean had lectured him about it.
“...Grandpa Adorno taught us how to make candy,” Max admitted quietly, hugging his bouquet of Cecilias a little tighter to his chest.
“We were really excited,” Moricztill went on, fiddling with the bag in his hands. “So we kinda forgot how to… while we were eating it.”
This wasn’t an unexpected development — if the old man had taught Lohen how to make candy, it made sense that he would show others how to as well. Adorno probably had the patience to explain the process three, four, five times over, like how he’d never once lost patience with Lohen either.
“This is the last of it,” Max said. “We wanted to leave it here. For Grandpa Adorno.”
Ha — Lohen almost wished he could borrow a shred of their naïveté — take back what was once rightfully his before it was ripped away from him years ago.
He peered at them for a beat before a dry chuckle escaped him. “He’d say that was a waste, you know. Adorno never wanted people to be sad on his behalf.”
He tilted his head ever so slightly towards the gravestone. “The old man would want you to enjoy it. Not leave it out here.”
The two of them looked at the bag with narrowed eyes, and then him, perhaps questioning what the best course of action to take was now. Apparently, he had made a solid point.
In return, Lohen regarded the fading expanse above, his feet very nearly turning to leave. “Right, well…” He didn’t finish saying the rest: I’ll leave you to it.
He’d done what he came to do, hadn’t he? Well, mostly — he hadn’t finished talking to Adorno by any means — but he could come back tomorrow. These kids had their own things to say to the old man. Things that were none of his business. It would be better to just go and give them their space.
But… would Adorno be disappointed in him, if he did that?
He already knew the answer.
Sentimental old man.
Lohen exhaled slowly. Just this once wouldn’t hurt, right?
"…I can make it for you," he said. The words came out more awkward than intended. He wasn't quite looking at them. “The candy, I mean. But you’ll have to learn how to do it on your own from now on.”
He risked a glance downward. The two boys were staring up at him, wide-eyed, as if the intimidating Vice Captain had just offered to hand them the moon itself. The silence that followed lasted less than a second, if that.
“Really?!”
“Mhm,” nodded Lohen.
For a fleeting second, the melancholy that hung over them vanished. But just as Moricztill opened his mouth — likely to eagerly demand when and where this candy-making would take place — Max’s gaze drifted past Lohen’s legs.
He looked at the stone and the white Cecilia Lohen had placed beside it. The boy’s smile faltered, melting into something softer.
Lohen’s chest gave an unwelcome lurch.
Max tugged at Moricztill’s sleeve. “W-we should probably say hello to Grandpa Adorno first, before we do anything.”
Moricztill followed his friend’s gaze. He nodded, sobering impressively fast for a kid. The bag of candy was lowered back to his side, and without another word to Lohen, the two of them shuffled forward and turned to face the gravestone together.
Digging into his pocket, Lohen unwrapped a piece of his own bubblegum and tossed it into his mouth. Raising an eyebrow, he leaned his weight onto one leg and decided to watch this play out. See what the kids could come up with.
“Hi, Grandpa Adorno,” Max started, somewhat formally, the way children do when they’re trying very hard to be serious. “Sorry we haven’t come to see you until now. It’s been… kind of lonely. Around the port, I mean. It feels weird without you.”
“Someone's been taking care of your flowers, though,” Moricztill added, after a moment. “Keeping your house clean and stuff, too. We don't know who.”
Lohen said nothing.
Max rubbed his eyes with his spare hand. “But it’s nice. It means someone else is thinking about you too.” He paused. “We really wish you were here with us. Cause we miss playing with you. But… we’ll be okay.”
“We’ll be okay,” Moricztill echoed. As if saying it twice made it a little more true.
Lohen was quiet for a moment longer than he intended to be.
The cause? Well, he had heard a similar sentiment before. One that he would never forget for the rest of his days.
It’s alright. It’s over now.
Lohen had been small when he first heard those words. Even now, he recalled that fateful day with immense clarity.
The cart wheel had caught on a loose stone, and his father’s hand tightened on his shoulder just before the world went sideways. Bandits had been shadowing the wagon since the crossroads, and rather than fighting back, his supposed guardian’s response was to shove him behind the cart’s curtain and hiss at him to stay down, stay still, and don’t make a sound no matter what he heard.
It hadn’t mattered. His efforts were in vain.
When the curtain was finally drawn back, it wasn’t his father’s hands that reached for him. The faces beneath masks were strangers, and stranger still for how little they cared that he kicked, that he twisted, that he tried oh so uselessly, to fight back. Hands with an iron grip hauled him out of the only world he’d ever known.
Lohen could still feel the searing cold, smell the rotten stench of where they’d been kept. The cramped darkness of the cell, and through the wall, the muffled, ceaseless crying of Theodore and the others. He remembered the rope at his wrists, and the small arrowhead he’d smuggled in his sleeve, working it back and forth long after his fingers had gone numb. He hadn’t known whether it would be enough.
In the end, though, those weren’t the only memories that endured vividly.
Adorno was there too. An armored knight who bravely drew his bow, arrows singing through the dark.
Lohen had watched, transfixed, his bound hands forgetting their purpose entirely, until the door was opened and Adorno’s face waited for him instead of his captors. A tiny sliver of hope in the middle of all that chaos.
Decades had passed since then, yet that memory remained unchanged.
Then, not so long ago, he had heard those very same words again, in a different place, under different circumstances.
And even after so many years had passed, that voice, though frailer, still held the same compassion right up until the very end.
...Adorno always did know what to say.
Not that he had ever told him so.
Once the little one’s words had settled, the two of them knelt beside the gravestone, the rest of Max’s bouquet coming undone bloom by bloom as he laid each Cecilia down beside the one Lohen had placed earlier. Moricztill helped, smoothing the petals flat with careful hands until the base of the stone all but disappeared beneath a drift of white.
Lohen merely watched them work in silence.
As they rested there, the sky gradually changed from amber into a dustier blue, the warmth of the day beginning to fade behind the city walls. It was later than he’d realized. Later than it should be, for two kids this young to be out on their own. Lohen opened his mouth to question them. Did they have someone waiting for them, should he walk them back himself, was there—
“Max! Moricztill!”
A woman’s voice cut through the evening hush. Both boys startled upright as she came hurrying up the path, out of breath.
“There you two are! I told you not to wander off without telling me where…” She caught sight of Lohen mid-sentence and straightened at once, her tone abruptly changing to a much more sincere one. “Ah — Vice Captain. Good evening.”
Lohen inclined his head in acknowledgment, only humming in reply.
She crouched down to the boys’ level, brushing a hand over Max’s hair. “I see. You two came here to pay your respects. Did this knight help you?”
Both of them nodded eagerly, then turned, nearly in unison, to look at Lohen.
“Vice Captain Lohen’s gonna make us candy!” Moricztill blurted, before Max could get a word in.
The mother’s eyebrows rose, glancing between her son and Lohen. “Oh — that’s very generous, but you really don’t need to trouble yourself, they can just…”
“I’ll come by the port tomorrow,” Lohen interrupted, before she could finish turning it into an apology. “No need for them to make the walk all the way back out here.”
Her raised shoulders let loose of their tension. “Thank you. That’s very kind of you, truly.”
“Alright, alright,” the mother said, a hand finding each of their shoulders. “Say a proper goodbye. We need to get home before it’s fully dark.”
The two of them spun back to the gravestone one last time. "Bye, Grandpa Adorno! See you soon!” Max called, before they were tugged away, already chattering to each other about flavors and who’d get the first piece.
Lohen watched until they vanished past the cemetery gates, their voices disappearing into the evening. He worked his jaw once, before blowing a large bubble with the gum still tucked in his cheek. It popped with a soft snap, the sound apparent in the stillness settling back over the graves.
“Right.” He lowered himself back down to one knee. “Now, where was I? Right, Fifth Company.”
He started easy, the first topic being the new batch of recruits, half of them still flinching the moment he so much as mentioned “special training” (as if he hadn’t gone easier on them than what he’d once put himself through). Paperwork piling higher on his desk than it had any right to, multiplying like rabbits the second his back was turned also had to be mentioned, as well as Varka talking Jean down from yet another solitary confinement session meant for Lohen.
None of it was anything the old man hadn’t heard a hundred times over, in one form or another. Lohen relayed it all anyway, the words coming easier now that there were no small ears left nearby to catch the things he usually kept to himself. He left out the less savory details still, though. Old habits die hard.
Lohen talked, talked, and then talked some more.
By the time he had finished recounting his recent adventures, the sky overhead had dimmed to a deep indigo, the first stars blinking faintly through the dusk. Lohen stayed kneeling a while longer, in no particular hurry to leave. He thought about the kids, about the flowers carried across Mondstadt, and a promise made without much thought to it at all. Small kindnesses passed along. The kind Adorno had always been so effortlessly good at. The kind Lohen was still clumsily learning.
He wondered, not for the first time, whether the old man could see any of it from wherever he was now. Lohen scooted a little closer to the gravestone.
“If you’re watching over me, Adorno… I have one final thing I want to say before I go.”
He rested his hand atop the cool stone, his fingers lingering there as though he could still reach the man beneath it.
“Jean made it official,” Lohen murmured, his voice barely above a whisper. “The title of Benevolent Knight… it’s not mine to inherit anymore, nor anyone’s.”
He had confessed this to the Traveler already, right on this very patch of grass. But Lohen had wanted to tell the old man himself when they were alone together, and now he finally had the chance to do so.
“Theodore and I were deemed unworthy. After all, we gambled away far too much because we were too selfish to let you go. I… I know they’re right. I don’t deserve what was so valiantly yours.”
The wind picked up, rustling the laid Cecilias once more. Lohen watched the petals sway, a bitter, wistful smile tugging at his lips.
“But, the thing is… if they hadn’t found out... even if Jean and Varka had handed me the title on a silver platter... I can’t say for certain that I would have accepted it.”
His throat tightened, but he swallowed the lump down, willing his voice to remain steady — though the ache in his chest bled into the tone of his voice. “It wouldn’t have meant a thing without you there to grant it to me yourself. What’s the point of taking your title if you aren’t standing there next to me to pass it on? It would just be an empty name.”
He adjusted the collar of his coat, anything to give his hands something to do besides hang uselessly at his sides.
“I’m not the Benevolent Knight. And perhaps I never will be. In other words, I’m not worthy of your legacy right now,” he spoke softly to the chilly air.
“That doesn’t mean I’m not grateful, though.” Lohen faltered, searching for the right words, though he sensed all of his attempts would be lacking. Why did he always fumble when it counted most?
“You… never wished for me to stagger. My parents, as you know, wanted to clip the arrow’s fletching, so to speak. Keep it sitting in the quiver where nothing could damage it. Where it couldn’t damage anyone, either,” he whispered. “You were the only one who pointed me in a direction.”
The gum in Lohen’s mouth now was flavorless; void. “I think about that, sometimes. Where I would’ve ended up if you hadn’t been there to save me. I don’t like thinking about that ‘alternative me’ much.”
His eyes fixed somewhere past the gravestone, past the cemetery entirely.
“You knew what they wanted for me, and what I was never going to let myself be. I don’t think anyone else understood that you could hold both of those at once — that I could disappoint them and still love them, and that none of it canceled the other out.”
He took in a shuddery breath, his voice wobbling.
“They’re my family. I won’t pretend otherwise, and I won't stop being theirs.” His voice dropped, rough at the edges. “But if anyone gets to be called my father, old man — I think you already know it’s you.”
Lohen leaned forward, wrapping both arms around the gravestone like he might around the man himself, the cold of it pressing through his sleeves as his fingers dipped into the carved letters and held on.
“Thank you, Adorno. For everything.”
His forehead rested against the stone, and alongside him, a petal of the Cecilia he’d held earlier finally broke free, carried off into the lull.