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“Please, my lord,” Xiao says. He is kneeling at Morax’s feet, forehead pressed to the earth. He hasn’t kowtowed like this since near the beginning of the archon war, when an errant raise of voice or unintended snappishness of tone would prompt the bloodhound, face carefully blank of any emotion, to fold down to the floor.
“Please,” he repeats, and places down his spear. “If I should ever go the way of Indarius, slay me before I can cause such harm as she did.”
Morax suddenly finds that he cannot muster up anything except for a deep sigh.
“Rise,” he tells Xiao, who sits back on his heels obediently. “I have sealed my earliest of friends but a decade ago. You would have me under contract to ensure your death, as well, old friend? Indarius passed by her own hand, not mine.”
Xiao blinks up at him, hawkish. “I do not request a contract, my lord. But prior to her final action, Indarius burned the lands so deeply that the earth will remain a blackened scar for decades to come. Furthermore, I have heard of what Barbatos inflicted upon Mondstadt’s landscape in reshaping it for his people. If an adeptus of anemo were to be corrupted…
“I may not be able to stay among the mortals for very long,” Xiao says, looking to the ground, “but we have fought this war of attrition for their sake. To destroy them would render it all for nothing.”
And ever since Guizhong, you care about them, Morax hears, though Xiao does not say it. The hound has always been a loyal creature.
“Very well,” Morax says, because Xiao is right: certain things must be done. And better that it be him, who stayed his hand and blade all those years ago, than Bonanus or Menogias, who nearly failed to even when Alatus was first admitted to their ranks as an ally.
“But it will be a contract,” he continues, “and you will owe me something in return.”
“Anything you wish is yours, my lord.”
Morax smiles, though he feels no joy. “Be careful what you promise, young Yaksha. You are a godslayer now, and I ask of you to do what only a godslayer may: if I am to protect the world against your corruption, then you must protect it against mine.”
At the time, Xiao had looked as if Zhongli was asking him to commit the act at that very moment. It was, to Zhongli’s shame, direly amusing, if only for a moment—that the godslayer that had so vehemently attempted to murder him at the command of the God of Dreams could then so fervently threaten to swear off his spear forever, if only to preserve the same god that had slain his master.
Now, years later, it is less funny. Now, Zhongli is the one realizing that—of course—Xiao would acquiesce eventually. Of course he would stay loyal to Zhongli’s command, in the end. Of course someone like Xiao would resign himself to doing what needed to be done, no matter the personal cost.
Facing down a karmically-darkened Xiao, Zhongli realizes that it is his own ability to complete the deed that he should have been doubting.
At the very least, the combat is not long. Xiao’s limbs drag in battle, as if he is a puppet waiting for his strings to be cut. He is further slowed by his unwillingness to release his grip on some strange, small objects that impede his use of his weapon. When Zhongli finally places the edge of his spear to Xiao’s throat, the yaksha leans into the blade with a sigh that almost sounds like ‘finally.’
The word trails across Zhongli’s vision, a blackened stain of anemo tainting Liyue’s fresh air, and Zhongli finds himself echoing the sentiment.
After all, the previous losses were leading to this point, were they not? Guizhong’s parting, Azhdaha’s sealing, the destruction wrought on this very day by Bonanus and Menogias. The other yakshas are gone as well. With Xiao as the last, the one closest to Zhongli’s confidence, the one that would hurt the most to kill—
Well, isn’t it fitting? Zhongli is an archon: not afflicted by karmic debt with the same twisting, soul-cracking agony as the other adepti. Still, the universe must make its contractual balance—and so, he kills friend after friend, god after god, godslayer after godslayer. It is now simply time for the last.
It’s funny. He met with Xiao on this subject, not over-long ago.
In the end, it is Xiao’s slackness, the resignation in Xiao’s karmically-darkened limbs, that stays Zhongli’s hand for the second time. Zhongli draws the blade back to slam it into the earth instead, and ignores the miserable way Xiao sways forward on his knees when the cutting pressure no longer threatens his jugular.
There is a smear of blood on Zhongli’s spear now, and a matching rivulet trailing down to Xiao’s collar, where the dark cloth hides the stain.
“My lord,” Xiao murmurs, and bows his head.
“... Adeptus Xiao,” Zhongli replies, brows furrowing. That was an awfully coherent thing for a yaksha lost to karmic debt to utter. “I was worried you were lost.”
“I—“ Xiao stutters, stops. Swallows, and looks away, ashamed to lay eyes on so much as the earth his archon stands upon. “Yes. I was.”
“None of the other yakshas have ever recovered from such a fate.”
Xiao shivers visibly, an uncharacteristic expression of how rattled he is, and Zhongli realizes with a shock that the same anxiety that moves Xiao also buzzes under his own skin.
It is wintertime in Liyue. The tallest peaks of the Karst are capped with pale snow. If the world were more poetic, there would be stark streaks of crimson slashed across a white canvas. Instead, the evidence of Xiao’s corruption is simply ugly: dark cinders stains his fingertips and trails from the hems of his clothing like ash, even as wisps of smoke-dark anemo curl away from his skin, shedding malice into the atmosphere that will doubtlessly need to be cowed again in the future. The pale winter sun gilds the bruise-stains of corruption ever more acutely.
Zhongli frowns, and peers closer at Xiao’s gloves. He is still holding onto whatever was hindering him from fighting properly earlier.
“Is that soot?” he asks.
Xiao blinks, long and slow, and opens his hands.
“In a sense, my lord,” he says.
Something stone, almost bead-like, clacks together in his palms. The objects he holds are entirely black with ash, crumbling apart in his fingers as he proffers them, yet they glimmer with amber and pale cerulean like a cracked-open geode. When Zhongli looks more closely, he sees the remnants of a yaksha’s fingers intertwined with Xiao’s in a gross parody of a hand-hold.
“Bonanus.”
Xiao nods but does not look up again. He traces a thumb over Bonanus’s petrified, disembodied knuckles. “She and Menogias fought right here. There is not much in the way of… remains, given that she was crystallized, but I sought to return with enough for a Right of Parting. In the end, I found the task…temporarily overwhelming. This is why you found me like this.”
The soot of Bonanus’s stone remains is indistinguishable from the agonized karma that writhes off of Xiao’s shoulders. It makes no difference: if the discovery of the other yakshas’ deaths drove Xiao’s karma to madness, then they may as well be one and the same.
Zhongli holds the weight of that realization in his own hands and stays silent for too long. It is not something he can help: he is not sure that he can breathe, right now.
“I would not mind dying at your hands, my lord,” Xiao murmurs, “to avoid following in Bonanus’s footsteps.”
Zhongli stares down at his yaksha, blinking past the blinding white reflection of the snow.
“Would that not be equivalent,” he asks eventually, “if Menogias was the means to her end? There will be nobody to pick through the snow for grotesque chunks of your remains, Adeptus Xiao.”
Xiao flinches. More blood drips down his collarbone.
“Besides,” Zhongli drawls, feeling the faint stirrings of what very nearly may be anger, “you were nearly overcome by the karmic retribution of her death just now, no? Do you deny it?”
“I do not,” Xiao breathes, hunching as if to bare his neck to the blade of Zhongli’s spear again.
“Why?”
“...My lord?”
“Why?” Zhongli presses. “These karmic binds—I am not blind nor deaf to their insidious methodology. Indarius suffered the earliest and the longest. Bosacius disappeared when she passed. Menogias struggled to see his comrades go, and Bonanus trailed at his heels until they both went mad and fought here, leaving you holding their remains. Now you, kneeling with what remains of your comrade’s corpse, also falter under the burden of dead gods’ whispers.”
Xiao takes a slow breath, and it rattles on its way in.
“Yes, my lord,” he whispers. “I am sorry. I have learned today that the weight of suffering is more difficult to bear alone.”
“Is that what you would consign me to, then?”
Xiao’s head whips up, his slitted hawk’s eyes blown wide, and Zhongli lets the air rush out of his lungs. Sick of his friend’s kneeling, he sits, instead—a small stele of geo is sufficient to find seating on, and he finds himself reaching over to pry Xiao’s fingers away from Bonanus’s curled hand.
“I see now that you have little care for your own well-being,” Zhongli murmurs as he works. Xiao’s hands are clawed, clutching at Bonanus with surprising ferocity, but they yield immediately to Zhongli’s wishes. “Before, perhaps you would have stayed alive as a matter of duty. Guizhong spoke of this, once: the danger in bringing freedom and independent will to those that have been subjugated for too long. If they find freedom before they find peace, then the temptation to exercise their newfound freedom to find…relief from the pain, so to say, can be most empowering.”
Xiao’s jade skin pales further. “My duty is to you, my lord.”
“And so you wish for a way to fulfill both goals in one strike: to die, in my service, now that you think the absence of your blade would not be felt so acutely as it would have been if you had been slain during the archon war.”
Xiao has no words, and Zhongli turns Bonanus’s hand over in his. It’s only partly intact: the thumb and pointer finger have crumbled away, and the three remaining fingers curl forward even as the hand itself arches back. It looks like she was reaching for something in her final moments.
“You may not value your own life very highly,” Zhongli murmurs, “but have you considered that I tire of losing friends?”
A slow, ragged breath. The shudder and electric fizzle of dark karma skittering along Xiao’s skin before he collapses to a seat, subduing it. “My lord…” Xiao gasps in the corner of Zhongli’s vision.
“Guizhong was killed,” Zhongli says. “Azhdaha has been sealed by my hand. Your brothers and sisters have perished or vanished by each other’s hands or their own. This war has been long, and I am tired of pretending not to be selfish. Let me keep just one of my old friends alive, Xiao.”
He raises his eyes to where Xiao is staring at him, wide-eyed and half-sprawled in the snow.
“My lord—” Xiao stumbles over his words. It is as discomfitingly uncharacteristic of the soft-spoken adeptus now as it was the first time he’d done it. “I am sorry, my lord. I would never abandon my service deliberately, but—these memories, I… please forgive me. I’m not sure if I am strong enough to overcome them.”
The feeling comes, as it often does, that Zhongli wishes Guizhong were still here. He has taken to wearing her form, after her death. Even as he has slowly melded it to something more suited to himself, a female body that holds the echoes of Guizhong’s love in the delicacy of his fingers and curve of his hips, shifted around like a series of puzzle pieces until he could look himself in the mirror and see something worthy of her legacy—even then, he had never been granted her mind, nor her wisdom.
Instead, Zhongli is stuck doing things like this: pressing his subordinates into revealing how far they are willing to go without contesting his word (too far, in Xiao’s case) and believing that years of silence signal nothing worth hiding rather than a deep-seated toxicity that threads through their hearts and minds until they all crack apart as a unit.
Well.
Almost all of them.
Guizhong would have realized what was happening to the yakshas sooner than Zhongli has, he knows. But Guizhong is not here, and Zhongli still has the time and space to act. The war may have been long, and he may have ended it by force, but the steps taken towards peace have been few. Xiao and his fellow yakshas were not the only ones to have their minds overtaken by mourning. Bonanus was not the only one to be mangled by an endless vortex of violence that pulled at her until she saw no way forward.
“Perhaps you are not strong enough,” Zhongli agrees, standing. He reaches down, holding his hand out for Xiao to take, and his subordinate hesitates.
“As you said,” Zhongli tells him. “The weight of suffering is more difficult to bear alone. It follows that we should bear that weight together. Our contract, from before—it was remiss of me to allow it.”
“I asked—”
“And I should have known better,” Zhongli interrupts, passively and very mildly amused at the way Xiao’s teeth just…click shut, rather than daring to interrupt him. “A creature raised in violence and bound to the duties of war approached me requesting a solution to a problem. Of course the only one he could come up with was steeped in brutality and bloodshed.”
Xiao doesn’t wince, but his eyes drop. Zhongli bends and grasps his arm to pull him to his feet.
He pats the snow from Xiao’s shoulders, remembering when Guizhong had done the same for him many years ago. Did she feel the same fond exasperation, then? The same affectionate resignation that comes in the wake of realizing how much pointless suffering one has inflicted upon themselves?
Of course, it is both Xiao and Zhongli’s fault, in this case. But Zhongli is not so blinded by rose-tinted memories that he cannot acknowledge that Guizhong had never been perfect, either. It was enough for her to simply be good, and to try.
It is about time, Zhongli thinks, that he should try as well.
“Cloud Retainer is very well-versed in the herbs and plants that may be used to control negative energies,” Zhongli murmurs over Xiao’s bent head. “And Guizhong left many manuscripts of her own studies towards the advancement of technology and medicine. If there are mortal remedies for injuries of the spirit, then surely we can work to find immortal ones, as well.”
Xiao’s chin rises, and his eyes trace over where Zhongli still holds Menogias’s broken hand.
“Ah,” Zhongli hums. He finds that he understands, now, Xiao’s earlier disinclination to let go, and presses the relic back into Xiao’s palms regardless. “But first, the Rite of Parting. Let your lord help you for once, young adeptus. You need not carry the burden of her remains on your own.”
Xiao’s head dips, just once, into a short nod.
He stands there, perfectly still, as Zhongli picks up the pieces of their fallen sister.