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She senses him before she sees him.
Perhaps it is the affinity of the Gnoses she keeps so close to herself. The Anemo Gnosis, she is certain, reacts strongly and positively to the presence of its former bearer. Whether that is reciprocated, however, she does not know.
That is what has always unnerved her about Barbatos – the fact that she doesn’t know. He keeps himself under at least as many wraps as she does herself, or perhaps even more. Despite the many emotions he has always made an effort of showing, he has also never been more than a stranger, even in their closest days.
Their closest days. Hm.
He is a stranger, therefore, too, when the heavy curtain billows a little and the air shifts in the room – not from the added presence of someone new to occupy the space, but rather the absence of something. Anastasya turns around to face him, strangely unsurprised and yet perplexed at the same time.
He smiles at her. “Nastya.”
He leans against the windowsill, although it’s closed. He has always been flighty. She supposes it lies in his nature.
“Barbatos,” she says.
Barbatos laughs. “Now, now, what are the formalities for? You know we both care about no such thing. I prefer to be called Venti.”
By now, Anastasya believes herself to have mastered the art of a blank expression. On the inside, however, she curls her lip. Instead of stiffly asking what the purpose of his visit might be – she knows – or retorting in an indignified and childish way – as much as she wants to – she merely gestures towards her table.
“Sit down,” she says and glances towards the clock. It’s a minute before four. “Tea will be served soon. I will ask for a second cup.”
Venti clicks his tongue. “You know that I prefer wine to tea.”
He walks past the chessboard on her coffee table, completely ignoring it, and plops down onto the armchair instead, legs dangling. He does not need to look to know the way the pieces are arranged. He knows where the queen stands – or rather, where it doesn’t. Perhaps he knew long before she did herself, without ever doing anything against it.
To stare his own fate right into its eyes, unyielding, and refuse to fight it – Anastasya wonders whether to call him a coward or brave.
She bristles. “That would have been arrangeable had I been given further notice of your visit.”
He giggles. “I wasn’t given notice before there was a nail hanging over our heads, so I suppose that makes us even.”
Anastasya glances towards the door in hopes that the tea will arrive soon. Knowing Venti, Danica’s disturbance might cause him to vanish. He never liked confrontation. His entire philosophy of governing is built around avoiding as much conflict as possible.
A privilege to have, she thinks bitterly and, she is aware, unfairly, to have been granted a land that has the ability to be kind to its inhabitants.
Venti has followed her gaze to the door. He glances up at the painted ceiling, back at her and then fluidly rises from the armchair again as if he hadn’t just sat down.
“Speaking of something hanging our heads, I feel like this entire building is hanging over my head. Do you mind taking this conversation elsewhere?”
She could easily refuse. He would accept it, she knows, in his quiet, wistful way.
She looks up at him and those eyes, clear as glass and yet only showing her own reflection like the most polished of marble floors, and almost sighs.
It is the only approval he needs. With a grin, the room around them shifts. Anastasya hears the howling of the wind like wailing in the tundra, feels it bite against her skin, breathes the ice and snow– And then the white blur comes to a dizzying halt again, and they are at a lake.
As far as she can see, there is only the frozen surface and in the distance, the dark trees on the other shore. The sky is as pale as the ground. The wind whips up snow on the ice, sending it flying in scattered and whistling fragments. Distantly, Anastasya remembers a story about ghosts forming out of that snow-wind, dancing an eternal dance on the lake.
She glances sideways at Venti. He and his everlasting stories.
They settle on two rocks by the shore. In a way, she is glad not to face him. His voice is enough to drag up unwanted memories. She does not need to see his eyes; clear and sharp as they are now, full of torment and grief as they were the last time she saw him.
Even visible through the clouds, the nail looms in the sky. It is even worse a reminder of the past. It hovers and lingers in silence. It waits.
“We have another one in Mondstadt,” Venti murmurs next to her. “It’s right above Dragonspine.”
Anastasya nods. “Liyue does, too.”
“If they manage to drag it out of the depths.” The ghost a smile hushes over his face. “From what I’ve heard, the Chasm likes to hold onto things it has claimed once.”
“Have you ever been there?”
Venti laughs. “Celestia, no. I don’t do well with caverns.”
Anastasya knows. The caverns did not seem to bother him five hundred years ago. If anything, they only increased the damage of his power, causing his songs to echo from the walls and his storms to crash into one another in vast devastation.
She wonders whether he cried that day. He has always made an effort of bringing human emotion to a face that does not naturally bear it – to be more approachable, to be more expressive. Who would he need to approach? Who would he need to express the horror of his deeds towards? Gods do not need faces to read one another, and every human would be reduced to ashes and soot not before long either way.
Does it change anything if the gods cry while carrying out judgement?
Does it change anything if they regret it, and would do it again?
Venti exhales. Anastasya wonders how much he has caught of her thought process. When she glances over at him, he is staring up at the sky; not quite at the nail itself but at a point above it. She doesn’t know whether that is to avoid or because he sees something she doesn’t. In a way, that has always been him.
“Now towards the end of this Time,” Venti says, “I find myself strangely reminiscent of the past.” He laughs. “Perhaps I’m turning into Morax.”
Against her will, Anastasya thinks of days spent in the sun, with song and dance and wine in the sweet, sweet absence of war and guilt. Their voices fit quite well together for duets. She can’t remember the last time she sang.
Anastasya blinks until the memory evaporates like dew into the morning air. “Is that why you came?”
Venti hums. “Maybe, maybe not. I have nothing of importance to say to you, and you have nothing of importance to say to me. In the tundra, where snow and wind meet, there is only silence.”
“You could say that about almost anything. Ice and water creates silence, too.”
Venti laughs. “If you are already so keen on taking everything from me, please leave me at least my metaphors.”
“I didn’t take anything you weren’t willing to give.”
“No. You didn’t.” Venti’s gaze on her is sharp. “But what meaning does willingness even have, if the very frame it lives within is built on the bending of the free will?”
“Still, there are choices to be made within that frame,” Anastasya relents. “Everything you gave me has been given on your own accord. Down to your very fate, and the part you’ll play by succumbing to it.”
That earns a dry chuckle from Venti. “But I suppose even that won’t be enough to redeem my sins.”
“Nothing will ever redeem your sins.”
He sighs. “Of course not. But giving the gnosis away lightened their weight. You are right – I wanted to be rid of it.”
He grows quieter. “...I want to be rid of it.”
When Anastasya finally dares to look over at him, he does indeed not raise the effort of settling emotion onto his face. His eyes are old, very old. Despite his token form being that of a young boy, he appears almost bent under the weight of the centuries.
If she felt any pity for him, she would almost call it a shame – the cruelty of his fate. Always fighting for the freedom of others, never for his own.
But then again, who is she to talk. She is turning the very fabric of the world upside down in the name of a love that has been forced upon her.
Still, she has the strange urge to soothe him, knowing that there is no comfort for him. Call it the fragmental remains of a friendship long withered, or the tragedy of looking into the reflection of oneself.
“Do you?” she asks instead. “Given your actions after all this time, you seem to have melted into the love that once was so separate from your very nature.”
A ghost of a smile haunts Venti’s voice. “Just because one may paint the walls of a prison in all beautiful shades does not mean that it is not a prison still. And just because one might grow used to the walls does not mean that one does not yearn for the world outside regardless.”
His tone has taken on a strangely wistful note that Anastasya can’t place. It does not surprise her. Venti has always spoken with two tongues, one for the ones around him and one as a private joke to himself.
“I see no point in painting the walls only to tear them down to free oneself eventually,” Anastasya retorts.
“Then, dear Nastya, I dare say you have not understood life at all.”
“And you have?”
“Of course not. How could one understand life without death?”
There it is again, the joke.
Anastasya blinks. “You understand freedom well enough without ever having been free.”
“Do you understand love, then?”
“Do you?”
Venti laughs again, a third time, privately. “Love, if demanded of you by a god, is really no love at all.”
“Would you abandon them, then?”
“Of course not. The sacrifices I make, I make for them.”
“Not for yourself? Being free of your love for them is not your ultimate goal?”
Venti smiles at her, sadly. Anastasya gets the odd sense that perhaps she was a little too cruel.
Shifting his head to rest on his knees, Venti hums. “I don’t think I could ever be free of love, even if everything crumbled. At some point, we become our curses. That, perhaps, is the greatest curse of all.”
Anastasya personally thinks that the greatest curse is the sight in front of her: a god of freedom in chains, a god of love frozen. She regards the lake in front of her and sees only its deadly stillness, its thick ice and wailing ghost-winds and the darkness bubbling below, not a bit warmer than the surface.
“To be free to love, to be free of love…” she muses quietly, almost hushed enough for the gusts of wind to carry her voice away. She knows Venti would hear her anyway. “It is almost the same thing, yet so vastly different.”
Venti hums. “We are quite alike indeed.”
“I don’t believe so.”
“No?” His eyes bore into her. She feels like the surface of the lake, frozen and still, being chipped away by the sun. “What a pity. And here I almost started to regret the way things went.”
Anastasya says nothing.
She watches the ghosts dance over the ice and divine retribution gleam in the clouds.
She wonders whether she will ever see him again in his current form, somewhere between humanity and sky-hood.
She wonders whether there is a block of ice strong enough to protect a walled city from the fallout of a god’s demise.
Much to her surprise, the thought twists the seed of something in her chest. Indeed – ice slowly melting to the sun, never enough to fully vaporise, but enough to shimmer.
“I do regret it,” she says suddenly. “I do not forgive you. I do not wish for Time to give anything back. But I also regret it, as much as I am able to regret anything.”
Venti smiles. “That must be a lot, then,” he sighs. “I am glad. It makes it all the easier to say that I hope you will find love.”
“Did you come here only to tell me that?”
He winks. “Perhaps.”
Anastasya sighs. Regret is honey in her mouth; sweet, stinging her throat on its way down. “And I hope you will find freedom.”
“I believe I will,” he hums pensively. “In one way or another, thanks to you. You know what they say about life and love, and death and freedom.”
For a moment, silence: The wind weeps. The ice creaks.
Venti gets to his feet and dusts the snow off his clothes. He offers his hand to Anastasya and she takes it in a firm handshake, watching him smile even as the world whips back into the shape of a room around her. For a moment, she can still see the glow of his eyes imprinted on her inner eyelid.
The fireplace crackles. There is not a dent in the armchair. The air is still and the curtain unmoving.
For a moment, Anastasya stares at her chess set. She takes up the queen, rolls it around in her palm, and places it back on the board in the same position.
Regret, love, freedom – all honey sweetened in her throat, bittered by Time.
She desperately wants some tea.
With a sigh, Anastasya sits down by the empty table. Given the length of their conversation, it must already be much past four in the afternoon. In such cases of the Tsaritsa being unexpectedly absent, Danica is instructed to enjoy the tea for herself. Which means that–
A knock on the door pulls Anastasya out of her thoughts.
“Your Majesty,” Danica’s voice comes muffled through the door. “I have brought your tea.”
Anastasya glances at the clock above the fireplace. It is exactly four o’clock sharp.
Barely a single minute has passed.
Oh, well.