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The Harbinger is a curious one. She has thought this upon meeting. What else can you think when your villain rescues you from your allies? The moment he landed in front of her, slashing away at the Millelith, she thought: he looks young. His face was unlined, smooth, pale, like the surface of a snowdrift iced over under the sun, though his hands were rough from war. His hair was a shock of red against the mountains of Liyue, vibrant as his voice and volatile as fire. But his eyes were depthless and blue, holding no light as if all of it had drowned in their event horizon. Even when they’re smiling, there is something missing.
She thinks this now, watching him polish his weapon in front of the fire, the orange flames licking his face into shadow. His blade glows faintly blue in the dark as he polishes it with a rag, humming to himself with a smile. It’s a little off-tune. It’s a little too human.
Another thing about the Harbinger is that he is not quite her villain. Oh, she will never forget La Signora and the way she so easily ripped the heart out of a god’s chest. But this Harbinger isn’t quite so cold like that. He would befriend a god before betraying him. He would befriend the hero before fighting her. And after, when all was said and done, he would tell the hero how he wrote about her in a letter to his family—tell her that she should come home with him, meet his younger siblings.
Most of all: he is young. There’s a boyish glint to his smile that begets a sense of ease, so long as you don’t look at his eyes. So long as you forget what a Harbinger is. Tartaglia is a blade wrapped in silk, so carefully careless one could forget just who they were speaking to.
He’s still polishing his weapon, singing to himself, and he looks like both Harbinger and boy with the off-key A note and the cut in his Delusion smiling wickedly in the dark.
“I am the least adept with a bow,” he’d said once. “And that is precisely why I must master it.”
She had rolled her eyes. She pretended not to see the way his face fell. “You say you’re trying to master your bow, and yet I see you fighting with blades have the time.”
“It’s the principle of it.” He’d smiled at her. “Besides, I can wield a bow well enough to fight you.”
Now, she watches him swipe a dark gray rag across the blade that can be a bow, swiping and swiping and swiping.
“Watch me any longer and you’ll make me blush,” he says, grin white as bone in the pale fire.
She rolls her eyes now.
Outside the cave, the rain beats endlessly against Teyvat, drumming against the ground until it almost sounds like a voice murmuring. Like a mother speaking in low tones to her child. The thunder breaks, the rain is ceaseless, and the lullaby collects in the gaping maw of earth until it is frothing at the mouth.
“Kidding.” He smiles that bone white smile again. “Ahh, I was supposed to be back home by now. What a shame it decided to rain now.”
What a shame indeed. Lumine had been wandering through Liyue on a commission for Xingqiu when she met the Harbinger walking amongst the ruined grave of the temple of some dead god. She hadn’t meant to talk to him at first, but then he’d spotted her the way a hunter twitches toward movement, and then he was leaping through the air in front of her before landing solidly on his feet to say, “Wanna fight?”
Paimon had crossed her arms. “Why would we waste any time on you?”
But perhaps enough encounters with the Harbinger had corrupted her, because she had also felt a fire ignite under her skin. She drew her blade and the Harbinger looked glowed like he’d been proposed to. She remembers him licking his lips, those lightless eyes winking under the sunlight, and then they’d charged at each other.
They clashed over and over and over until they were both soaked with sweat, but still pumping with adrenaline and the thrill of battle. And they were both ready to keep going until the sky cracked open and wept a flood through the valley, soaking them both through with rainwater instead.
So they’d found a cave and hunkered down in it. The Harbinger had flint on him while she had the sword to strike it. They huddled near the fire for warmth and stayed for hours.
“Is there a certain time you need to be back?” She asks him.
“No,” says the boy. “I just miss my siblings. I told Teucer I’d be back before his birthday. Now I’m cutting it close.”
She hums. “I’m sure he’ll understand.”
“But I’ll be sad.” He drops the rag onto the cave floor and slams the blades back together until they form a bow once more. “Work can be so demanding. I haven’t seen my family in weeks!”
“Hopefully the rain lets up soon, then,” she says noncommittally. Outside, the rain is not letting up and seems it will not let up soon. The sky continues to grieve, and so there they are. Stuck.
“You understand, right?” The Harbinger slings his bow back onto his back and leans toward her, forearms resting on his thighs, his chest bent forward. So casual and still as if they hadn’t been slashing at each other’s throats just an hour earlier. “You have a brother, don’t you?”
She swallows, throat tight. “I do.”
“Mmm.” He leans back, running a hand through his rain-damp wildfire hair to slick it back from his face. “But he’s older than you, right?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a little different then,” he says. “Mostly the same, but a little different. I mean, I’ve got two older brothers and a bunch of older sisters, but going home, I always think about Teucer and Tonia looking up to me and I worry about how much I’ve missed them growing when I’m gone. Each time I come home, they get a little taller and there’s grief in the time I’ve lost with them. With my older siblings, they’re close enough to me in age that I don’t feel like I’ve missed everything.”
“We don’t age,” she says.
“But you change.” The Harbinger and the boy lean back. “But enough about me. What about you?”
She blinked. “What about me?”
“Traveler,” says Tartaglia. “What do you miss most about home?”
-
Lumine is left-handed.
Her brother is right-handed. Together, the two of them were an impenetrable unit, fighting together to fill in their gaps. Where Aether slashed, Lumine sliced. Where Lumine jumped, Aether stayed solidly two-footed on the ground.
Aether is older by a few seconds, but it could’ve been millennia for everywhere they traveled. They walked side by side, and still it was always Aether pointing first, looking first, while Lumine looked after. It’s how they entered Teyvat together. Aether finding the Abyss first, promising something first, and Lumine following after.
In her nightmares, she still sees the void swallowing him. Like a mouth with teeth, devouring her brother and promising nothing, but him walking towards it like salvation. There was the corrupted statue of a god hanging upside down, there was the tragic song of the monsters she was supposed to fight, there was her brother with his sad eyes and his sad smile and his sad promise that, “You will understand one day. At the end of your journey, you will understand.”
She thinks she could understand sooner if he would just talk to her, but the stories don’t work so simply. She is a Descender come to witness the decay of Teyvat, a thankless historian. It would be all too simple to simply drop her right at the end.
So there she is with her sword in her left-hand and Paimon at her right. Slashing upwards and sideways and flat over the ground and jumping last minute to avoid a jab to her left, ducking to avoid a punch over head, pinwheeling sideways to avoid that arrow zipping toward the back of her head because the pair of eyes she once had there are now gone.
She has lost her mirror. She has lost part of her armor. And even if they miss each other, the worst part is that he is not searching for her. Not the way she is searching for him.
-
If I could remember, she tells him. If I could remember…
The Harbinger is young but Lumine is not. She looks to be his age, her eyes bright and her skin smooth and her stature small and unimposing. But she has crossed hundreds of worlds before Tartaglia let out his first cry into the universe, and she knew flight before he knew feet.
If I could remember…
Home is a word that didn’t used to hurt. The definition of home is quite subjective for most people, but this isn’t news. Home is the room in your house. Home is the house in your country. Home is your country in Teyvat. Home is Teyvat in the universe. Home is your mother singing you to sleep and home is your father’s stir-fry and home is your younger brother that loves you and believes you to be a toy maker and home is your older brother that is not looking for you, that is not gathering the shatter pieces of a mirror, that is not alone and not in want of a new partner to cover his back and his side and his head. Home is running away from you and home is not looking to be found.
“I miss…” She starts and then she stops, because there is no single concept to describe the stab wound in her chest. There is no word out there to say once to describe the endless bleeding and the bone deep ache that no splint can fix. There is just my brother and his name is Aether and no one calls me by my name except him.
It’s Traveler this, Traveler that. Traveler, your clothes are so odd. Traveler, your accent is so strange. Traveler, you are so different you do all the impossible things that our residents cannot. Remember our dead gods. Remember our false ones, too. Never forget, recordkeeper, your burden is an ancient one and still you are the only one alive who can do it.
“I miss…” she starts again. “I miss my name.”
Remember everything but we will not know your name.
This startles the Harbinger. Tartaglia tilts his head, curious like a cat, and furrows his eyebrows at her with a question in his lightless eyes.
“Your…name?” He spins a dagger that had been hidden up his sleeve. She’d watched it slide down through the fabric before the hilt landed gracefully in his palm, perfect for the fidgeting. “Look, I know your name isn’t just Traveler, but I thought you were comfortable with your title.”
“I am,” she says. “I just miss being called something other than…that.”
Tartaglia is silent for a moment. He’s staring at the fire and twisting the dagger back and forth, back and forth across both hands like a coin magician disappearing act.
“I understand,” he says.
She lifts her head. “You do?”
“Only my family calls me Ajax now. And I only get to see them so often, so I’m more known by my other titles.”
Ajax. A secret so casually offered. A name isn’t a blade but it still feels similar to being handed one. A blade and a bared chest and a godless faith that you will not be stabbed.
“Ajax,” says Paimon.
“Ajax,” she repeats, feeling the name on her tongue. “Ajax.” The curl of her tongue around the first syllable, the brief clench of her teeth at the second, the thicket at the back of her throat to close out the sound.
“Ajax,” he repeats, smiling. “But, you can still call me Childe or Tartaglia or whatever you like.”
“Ajax,” she repeats.
“Traveler,” he smiles.
A lump rises in her throat so thick it feels suffocating. The blood in her head rises like a tidal wave and for a moment, all she can hear is her heartbeat.
“Lumine,” she decides. “You can call me that. Or Traveler. Or whatever you prefer.”
“Lumine,” he repeats. “I’ll call you it often enough that you won’t forget what it sounds like spoken aloud.”
The shell in her chest cracks open, the first milk-tooth tap into the fracture. It hurts hearing it. It hurts hearing her name from anyone but her brother, like something sacred has been unmasked and tossed to the ground.
But the worst part is the relief she feels. How wonderful it is to break promises.
“Ajax,” she says.
“Lumine,” he says.
“Paimon!” Paimon leaps into the space between them and throws her arms out. “Paimon has always been Paimon, so you can keep calling her Paimon.”
“Of course,” the Harbinger nods solemnly.
“Don’t worry,” says Lumine. “I never thought you had a different name.”
Paimon huffs. “Paimon can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not.”
“I’ve never been sarcastic with you before.”
Paimon crosses her arms. “That was definitely sarcasm.”
“Lumine.”
Her name startles her like a thunderclap. The rain is still whispering outside the cave but the fire is low, crackling to its embers, and the Harbinger said her name, which hasn’t been said since she last saw her brother.
“Yes?”
“I’ll take first watch.” He nods toward the mouth of the cave. “It doesn’t look like it’ll let up until morning.”
“How do we know we can trust you?” Paimon asks, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.
“You know I wouldn’t hurt you without your permission.” He smiles that bone white smile and in the dark, it’s a startling bright line like a streak of stardust.
“Do we?” Paimon raises an eyebrow.
“We do.” Lumine lays back. “Come on, Paimon. If he kills us in our sleep, he won’t have a sparring partner anymore.”
“And if you know anything about me,” says Tartaglia. “Then you know that is one of my greatest nightmares. Second only to losing my family.”
I’ve lost my family, she thinks. Not permanently, but very close. She’s sure that’s not what he’s talking about.
“Well,” she says. “So long as you let us sleep through the night, your second nightmare won’t come to fruition.”
“Of course.” His grin is lopsided and young, boyish. He looks one eye twitch away from winking, but the Harbinger isn’t that frivolous.
“Wake me up when you want to switch,” she says, laying her head against the cold stone.
“Might be a while,” he says. “I don’t get tired so easily.”
“Don’t pass out the next time we spar then, and I’ll believe you.”
“You have so little faith in me, Traveler.”
She pillows her head on her arms. “Good night, Ajax.”
“Good night, Lumine.”
“Good night, Paimon! Thanks, Paimon.” Paimon floats down to the ground and lays next to her.
“Good night, Paimon,” she says, half laughing.
“Good night, Traveler,” says Paimon with a yawn. Then, she closes her eyes and falls asleep in a second.
Lumine lays there a little longer, listening to Paimon breathe, listening to the rain humming outside. The cave is quite shallow, barely three strides and you’re out the mouth. But Tartaglia feels far enough away that if she spoke right now, she’d be afraid her voice wouldn’t carry.
She looks at the boy who is sitting at the mouth of the cave. One leg is stretched out straight in front of him, the other is bent so he can rest his hand on his knee. In this light, his black silhouette looks black like a puppet, which must be fitting as a Harbinger. But the lightning flashes once, right when the thunder comes, and illuminates the whole cave: the boy/Harbinder, a sleeping Paimon, the dying fire, and brotherless sister.
She sits up. She can’t sleep. She envies Paimon for how quickly she has fallen asleep but she is not Paimon.
Tartaglia tosses her a curious glance, but does not say anything as she slides across the floor of the cave right until she’s at the opening. At the edge, the rain is trickling through the damp earth and over the threshold of the cave. Tartaglia is sitting right at the edge, flirting with the danger of getting his pants wet. She wonders if that is a thrill for him, too.
“Can’t sleep?” He murmurs.
“No.”
Tartaglia smiles. “You barely tried.”
“I tried long enough.”
He laughs at that. It sounds young and carefree, befitting of the age he is and not the child soldier he grew from.
“What’s on your mind, Lumine?”
There’s her name again, startling as a thunderclap. Each time he says it, she does not expect it, but with how freely she gave it away, surely it must have read like an invitation.
“What I always think about,” she says, staring out at the rain. It’s raining so hard that the mists are curling around each other, wisping through their makers and drifting skyward back to Celestia or Heaven or wherever divine things go. The deep slate-gray of the sky reminds her much of her sword laying next to the fire. She’d used it to poke at the embers when she told Tartaglia he could not stick his Hydro-wrapped hand to do it. “My brother. And home.”
“Ah, you’re like me then.” He smiles that mirthful smile and she’s not sure how she feels about being likened to the Harbinger.
“In a sense,” she says.
She can feel him watching her. His eyes land on the side of her face like a fly, buzzing in her ear at his presence. She’s watching the rain destroy itself and he’s watching her watch the rain.
She can feel the moment he lifts his eyes off her, turning to watch the rain with her.
“I get lonely, too,” he says.
A cold wind breathes through the cave. Lumine shivers. “I never said I was lonely.”
“Some things don’t need to be said.” He stretches out his other leg until it’s nearly tapping her thigh. She moves away because his boot is muddy and she’d rather keep her skin dry where she can.
Lumine says nothing to that. She’s not sure what she can say. The rain isn’t letting up and the sky isn’t any closer to stoppering its grief and neither is she. Once, in another world, she and Aether had gotten caught up in a sandstorm with a wind so fierce it turned all the sand flying sideways into little knives. There had been red slices all over her skin and a cut on her cheek and Aether had slipped off his cape and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“What about you?” She’d asked.
“I’m fine,” he’d said right as a gust of sand slashed a line over his bicep. “I’d rather you be unharmed.”
“A little late for that,” she’d smiled, still wrapping the cape tighter around her shoulders.
“Well,” said Aether. “I’m wearing pants and you’re not. So.”
She’d kicked him and then sand flew in her eyes so he caught her before she fell and then they both went searching for shelter before the sand tore them to ribbons.
“I think about my siblings a lot,” Tartaglia says now. “I thoroughly enjoy being a Harbinger, but leaving them behind is my greatest regret.”
“I’m sure.” She inches toward the edge, tilting her head up to the sky. The rain mist is much softer than sand, and more grounding than nothing.
“Why don’t you come back with me?” Out of the corner of her eye, she can see him turning towards her. “You could meet my family.”
“Why would I do that?” she asks, though a string in her heart snags.
“It’s nice being around family,” says the boy. “Even if it’s not yours.”
She’s hesitant. He can tell.
“You could meet my mother,” he says, softer. “And you can see Teucer again. And you’ll meet Tonia. You might even catch a glimpse of my older siblings.”
Paimon is snoring at an impressive volume from behind them considering her size, but it’s metronomic over the rain. Like a heartbeat. Thump. Thump. Thump.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” It feels like looking a cliff in its face—saying yes. Like, she’s not allowed these detours, not when she has a brother to find and a journey to finish. But all heroes get weary, and Lumine is exhausted beyond belief.
The boy and the Harbinger smile at her. “Wonderful. We’ll set off in the morning?”
“If the rain stops by then, yes.”
His smile stretches wider. There’s a genuine joy in his depthless eyes which she doesn’t quite understand, so she doesn’t linger long and instead watches the rain, searching for figures through the mist.
“Are you staying up, then?” he asks her.
“Yeah.” She stretches and then adjusts her skirt. “I’m not tired. You can sleep, though, if you want.”
“Me? Tired? My dear comrade, I wouldn’t let you best me in this.”
She snorts. “I wouldn’t say staying awake is a sparring of any sorts.”
“Still, this is a challenge I’d like to face.”
She laughs and it’s loud, echoing out into the weeping world before being swallowed by the rain. It’s a good thing she laughed toward the sky than in the cave or else it would have echoed there and woken Paimon. She risks a glance at Tartaglia and sees him watching her, the smile still faint on his face like an ink stain—smeared and persistent.
“If you insist,” she says.
“I do,” he says, and it sounds like a challenge.
But she doesn’t take the bait. She lays her head against the cold stone wall and watches the dark grays in the sky shift like murky pond water. Tartaglia is leaning against the other wall, watching the world with her.
She doesn’t mean to fall asleep. She meant it when she said she wasn’t tired, but with the rain whispering its lullaby and the sturdiness of Tartaglia the Harbinger watching the other wall, she sort of. Just. Slips.
And suddenly it’s morning. The rain has stopped overnight, though its smell still lingers in the air. The sun is still shy over the horizon, barely peeking over the rim of the world, but there’s enough light to scatter across the morning dew. Paimon is still asleep. The Harbinger is, too.
There should be panic. There should be fear. The thought of falling asleep around a Harbinger, her guard so steadily lowered beneath her gaze without her consent. First the name, then watching the cave overnight. She should be jerking to her feet and double checking her items and shaking Paimon awake to leave, but there’s a jacket around her shoulders that was not there before. It’s gray and white and smells faintly of old blood. She finally realizes she’s seeing his undershirt.
Lumine pulls the jacket off and then shivers at the sudden lack of warmth. The rustling must have disturbed him, because a moment later, he peels open his eyes, blue as the azure sky.
“Oh, sorry about that.” He sits up. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
“I didn’t either.”
He grins at her and it’s all sweet and lopsided. The pale sunlight crawling through the mouth of the cave is sliding across his face in sheets, softening all the lines of his face. He looks like a boy.
“You seemed more tired than you let on,” he says. “So I let you sleep.”
“And this?” She holds up the jacket.
“You seemed cold.”
She holds it out to him. “I’m not.”
“Well, not now.”
The birds are starting to chirp their morning song, so different from the murmur of the rain. They are sharp and they are loud and they are heralding in a new day.
He’s smiling at her, dead-eyed and kind. Her heart snags against her ribs at the sight.
“How tired are you?” he asks, though he’s really saying, Do you have the energy to travel?
Which is a ridiculous question. She’s the Traveler, of course she can go anywhere. The matter of if she is willing or not is the real question.
She looks at Paimon, still sleeping, too far back in the cave for the dawn to touch her. Lumine is almost envious.
“Not at all,” she decides. Her adventures have taken her more than halfway through Teyvat—what was a small detour?
The boy grins at her then. The boy and the Harbinger. There’s teeth to the smile like a wolf, but his eyes are crinkling like the foils of the candy wrappers. A paradoxical boy. Boy and weapon and kind and cruel—villain and ally and friend and fool.
“Then let’s wake that thing up.” He gestures to Paimon. “We have a long walk ahead of us.”
“I’ll do it,” she sighs. She’s been on Paimon-wake-up-duty for months.
It takes a long moment to fully wake her up, but when Paimon finally floats into the air, rubbing a small hand to her dizzy head, Lumine looks back at Tartaglia waiting at the mouth of the cave. He’s watching the sun unfurling its hands over the fields of Liyue, but when she stands, he turns back to her, eyes glinting.
“What are you smiling for?” she asks.
“No reason,” he says, though it broadens. “I’m just—I’m really excited to go home.”
-
Shortly after meeting Mona Megistus, Lumine asked her what she could see.
“You want me to read the stars?” Mona Megistus clarified.
“Yes.” Lumine nodded once, then jerked out another nod. “Please.”
It’d already been dark by the time she asked. It made sense, anyway, for astrology. Lumine had been making the journey from Liyue back to Mondstat all that morning and ran into the astrologer once the sun winked away. She didn’t mean to ask at first, had only meant to catch up with an old friend, but then she’d tilted her head too far up at the sky and saw the north star blinking at her, a little freckle on the blanket of the world. Another star winked just beside it, a little smaller and a little fainter, but there was no doubting the two were a pair. Lumine had looked at that faint star just trailing behind the tail of polaris and felt an ocean swelling in her throat.
“Well, I can try.” Mona stepped back. She held out a hand and drew her scryglass in the air, hovering azure and bold in the space in front of her. The symbols floated slowly in a circle, waiting for input. “What do you want to know?”
Her mouth went dry. Her tongue flopped lifelessly in her throat like a fish. She was frightened, she realized—frightened to ask, frightened of the answer, frightened there was none.
A vague question. Very non-specific. Probably couldn’t even get a definitive answer, but all encompassing. A wide net for the greatest catch and an excuse if the holes were big enough to slip through.
“Where is my brother?”
Mona nodded as if she had been expecting that. She turned to her scryglass and closed her eyes, and the glowing blue symbols began to spin wildly in a circle. The circle glowed brighter, spinning wilder and wilder until it stopped, coming to an abrupt halt.
Mona opened her eyes.
“Oh,” she said, and Lumine could feel her heart capsizing in a river.
“Yes?” She asked anyway because courage was the act of doing even in spite of fear.
Mona lowered her hand and the circle disappeared. “I can’t see him.”
Lumine let out a breath. She’d expected as much. Of course, nothing could be simple on her journey to the end.
“I mean—” Mona stepped forward, her voice a little softer. “It’s dark where he is. It’s hard for the stars to get through.”
“I see.” She should have known. She did know and she still asked. Was it courage in the face of fear? Or delusion in the face of hope?
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.” Mona pressed a hand to her shoulder. “Let me try answering another question for you.”
Lumine sucked in a breath, heart trembling in her throat. Her next question was asked because she knew it couldn’t be answered. She could face the disappointment beforehand.
“When can I go home again?”
Mona looked at her like she knew the impossibility. Still, she held out her hand and her scryglass reappeared.
“Tell me more about your home,” she said gently.
“It’s far.” Lumine licked her lips. “Really far and it keeps shifting.” The sky was so dark over them this far from the city. Out here in the wild, sometimes she would close her eyes and pretend she was back hovering among the stars. “I couldn’t even go home right now if I wanted to.”
Mona closed her eyes and flicked her hand so the symbols on the scryglass spun around in a circle. Slower this time, not a chaotic search. When it slowed to a stop, Mona opened her eyes.
She was silent for a long moment. Long enough that she started to foolishly hope.
“What?” She pressed.
Mona looked up at the sky, at the space in front of her, and finally at Lumine. She opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again, her deep blue eyes turning luminous under the moonlight.
“Would you like to know how stars form?”
Lumine blinked, uncertain where this had come from. But she wasn’t an adventurer for saying no to new paths, so she opened her mouth and said, “Sure.”
Overhead, the moon was silvering across the wild fields of Mondstat, turning the late dew into liquid metal on the earth. There were birds cawing in the distance, and all around them the cicadas were singing.
“Stars form because enough gas collects together in space to create enough self gravitating force to collapse, and that collapse ignites the gas which creates a star.” She tilted her head up to the sky, the shadowed brim of her hat revealing her eyes. “That exact same force kills the star in the end.”
“Oh.”
Mona turned to look at her. “But both their birth and death have created everything in the universe. Take, for example, the iron in your blood. Iron is the last element a massive star fuses before it dies, but iron also requires more energy to fuse than the process of fusion gives off so the star collapses under its own weight. It’s a little like the strength people get before they die, and a little like giving their loved ones strength to keep going before dying. And that iron that one star made billions of years ago is in all of us, it’s all the same iron in our blood.”
“I didn’t realize astrologists knew these kinds of things.”
“Most don’t,” said Mona. “But I do. I like to know what makes up the things I’m looking at.”
Lumine was silent for a moment. “Why did you tell me this?”
Mona smiled, the first one she gave all night. “I wanted you to know that we came from the stars and we will return to them, the way stars are born and die for the same reason they exist. It means you’re made of the same stuff as the place you came from, which means you’re always carrying a little bit of home with you everywhere you go.”
-
Without the rain, weeping feels wrong. Last night’s storm blew away all the clouds and mourning until there was nothing but an undiluted blue sky. The sun has unfurled overhead and bears its face down over the blended fields of Mondstat and Liyue where they are now. Transitory travelers straddling a demarcation line.
They’d crawled out the cave earlier after waking Paimon up and set out north. Lumine has a compass but the Harbinger does not, though he claimed otherwise.
“My heart will guide me home,” he’d said.
“Your heart led us twenty minutes west.”
He at least had the grace to look embarrassed. “It needs recalibrating.”
Slowly, the mountains of Liyue begin to bow away into the soft fields of Mondstat where the smell of old and dead gods fades to the cool, omnipresent wind. The dandelions fluff up into the air like snowfall, if the world were upside down. The cliffs give way to grass and rolling hills and a simple sun burning through nothing but sky.
There are no other ancient forces here other than the Anemo Archon and his dragon. The wars have long gone, the mountains sleep, there is little trace left of Barbatos’ solitary friend. Just the ruins of old Mondstat and the faded blur of memory etched into history etched into paper which is just as transient as the dandelions, which break and form and break and form before spreading toward the corners of Teyvat.
It must be lonely, Lumine thinks, to be a god of ephemerality. Or, perhaps, it must be a relief to have less things to grieve.
-
The Harbinger carries candy in his pockets.
For my siblings, he tells her. Apparently, wherever the Tsaritsa sends him, the second place he will stop after his first assignment is the sweet shops to buy local candy for Teucer and Tonia and all the others to try.
He offers her one of those candies now as they stop for the night. It’s evening and quickening to cold when they stop, the setting sun bleeding into the canvas of the sky. The sunsets in Liyue were lovely when they cut through the mountains, but there’s something about watching the full body of dusk stretch over the horizon. Looking at all of its bleeding points. Looking at its full face tucking itself into sleep.
He turns to her while she’s trying to spark the fire, a hand appearing in her vision with a purple sphere wrapped in waxy paper resting on his outstretched palm. The battle scars on his hand flower out from the center, white veiny lines crawling over the perimeter.
“Want one?” asks the boy.
“What is that?” She eyes it for a moment before going back to the fire, striking the flint with her sword.
The collision launches a spark onto the dry leaves. A fire cries to life and she quickly gathers logs around the meager flame to shelter it before it can protect itself from the wind.
“Lavender melon candy.” Tartaglia is still wiggling the candy in her peripheral. “From Inazuma.”
She eyes it. “Did you poison it?”
“Comrade, if I poisoned it, you would not be at your peak when we spar. And I’ve no greater nightmare than an unfair battle.”
She looks at him flatly.
“Besides, it’s from my stash for my siblings. I wouldn’t want to mix up the candy and give Teucer or Tonia something poisoned.”
Lumine takes the candy. His palms are warm as her fingertips skim over the surface of his hand.
He looks pleased when she pops it in her mouth. He produces a second, identical candy from his pocket and eats it as well. Paimon floats over, complaining about being left out, and Tartaglia gives her one as well.
“But no more,” he says. “I need to save enough for my siblings.”
He’s a curious one, she thinks again. The Harbinger with a taste for blood and a courtship with danger is also the boy who concerns himself to keep enough foreign candy for his younger siblings. He’s two halves of a coin with opposing faces, all made from the same alloy.
Aether would like the candy, she thinks. Part of her a long time ago would have asked for a second one to save for him, but the instinct to ask for things in pairs has long faded. She’s been without a brother long enough to break that habit, and the thought makes a lump rise in her throat.
“Whoa, I can give you another one if it really upsets you.” Tartaglia shifts forward, prepared to give her another one.
“No.” Lumine doesn’t know what face she’s making, but she’s sure it’s nothing pleasant. She catalogs all the sensations on her body—the wind cutting through her neck, the evening sun burning the backs of her eyes, the tight furrow between her eyebrows and the way her clenched fist digs into her skin.
“No?”
“No.” She takes a deep breath. Lets it go. Imagines it carrying a dandelion seed all the way to the Abyss. “No, I don’t need another candy. I was just thinking about something.”
“Oh.” Tartaglia leans forward. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” she says. Her fingers are twitching.
“No? What do you want to do then?”
She looks up at him, at his flat blue eyes. They’re the same color as ice over a lake in the depths of winter, cold as one, too, but swimming with things unseen beneath the hard surface.
“Do you want to fight?” she asks.
A grin cuts across his face like quicksilver. He’s breaking his bow into two blades before he fully stands. “I thought you’d never ask.”
-
Lumine doesn’t know bloodlust the way the Harbinger does. She is an experienced fighter, knows her way around a sword with all the traveling she’s done—both in and out of Teyvat. But that experience came with a partner, her brother mirroring her movements and filling in all her weak spots. When she first fell to Teyvat with just a dull sword in hand and her wings torn out of her back, she knew she needed to become fiercer. There was no more Aether blocking her right side, just herself, Lumine, and Lumine alone. Each swing is for survival.
The Harbinger launches himself at her before she’s even got her sword out, but her reflexes are flint-quick and her body knows survival so she jumps to the wayside and slides on her feet until she can stand again.
Tartaglia rises and spins around until he’s facing her. Their gazes slam together like magnets for one frantic second before he’s launching himself at her again.
She’s ready this time. She raises her blade as he slams into her and the reverberations knocking through her brain make her feel so pleasantly numb that she swings again before she breathes. Their swords spark when they collide, the glowing blue of the Harbinger’s blade looking much like a streak of starfall. He’s grinning at her, bright and alive, as the yolk of the sun behind him ruptures and spills down the horizon.
“There it is,” he says, a high flush on his face. “Moya Tsaritsa, it’s always a thrill with you.”
She will never admit this out loud, but she does enjoy sparring with the Harbinger. Paimon is bewildered every single time they break away from their journey just for Lumine to smash swords with him again and again, but there’s just a thrill in battle that can’t be replicated anywhere else—the heart kicking up, the sweat on her face, all the desperation of claws and teeth and spittle from screaming in a raw, ugly push to stay alive. When she fought Tartaglia, it felt less like survival and quick breaths and more like a practiced dance.
There’s an anger in her that claws its way out in every battle, whether by choice or by forceful wrenching—anger at the unfairness of the world, anger at the gods who won’t leave her alone, anger at her brother who has. And still, she misses him with an ache so fierce it could bring her to her knees if she thought too hard about it.
But in a fight, in the thrill of the battle, when her sword sings through the air in a lone cleave through the sky, there is one heartstopping moment where she forgets about her anger. The thunderclap right before the lightning, the storm weaving around its eye. In the moment before she strikes, she braces her core, tenses her muscles, and screams into the collision. That is the moment she searches for. That is the oblivion she seeks.
Perhaps they weren’t so different—the Traveler and the Harbinger, the sister and the boy. After all, they were made from the same stars.
They spar until they’re both drenched in sweat and it hurts to breathe through their ribs. They spar until Tartaglia quite literally collapses onto the ground and can’t get up again. She goes over to help him, but he’s thrown a hand over his eyes as he grins sightlessly at the stars.
“That was fun,” he says, laugh puffing out.
“I feel disgusting.” She swipes a hand across her forehead.
“Paimon’s whole body hurts just watching you two.” She shivers.
Lumine’s body hurts, too, but in a good way. In the sweetly-numbed oblivion way where all the anger she felt has slipped into adrenaline, and then peace. She hesitates for one second and then lies back onto the cool, damp grass a few feet away from the Harbinger. She looks up at the stars and wonders which one died billions of years ago to make the iron in her blood.
“Not that I’m complaining,” Tartaglia suddenly says. “But what brought this on? I normally have to beg you for a fight.”
The anger has subsided and the fog in her head has cleared enough that she feels less regret when she admits, “I was thinking about my brother.”
“Oh?” Tartaglia sits up. She can see him in her peripheral. “And that made you want to fight?”
“Yes.”
He’s silent for a moment. Around them, the wind whispers through the trees in hushed tones. He looks up at the sky, at the stars freckled over the dark, and then back at her.
“What’s your brother like?”
What is Aether like? She knew the answer once, back when they fought side by side and had their wings and traveled the worlds together. But now he is the Prince of the Abyss and she doesn’t understand him anymore, not the brother that keeps turning away. Perhaps that’s the worst part, and the part she hates about him most—that he has turned himself into a stranger and doesn’t care to change it back.
Salt touches her tongue. It takes a moment to realize it’s coming from her eyes, leaking down the hills of her cheeks until they slip through her half open mouth. She’s crying and she didn’t mean to.
“Oh, oh gods, why are you crying?” Tartaglia kneels down next to her. “Was it something I said?”
“Traveler…” Paimon hovers over, worriedly.
“Can you tell me something?” she says, her voice wobbling at the breaking point.
“What do you want to know?”
Tell me about the stars, she thinks. Tell me how we’re all made of the same stuff. Tell me how I carry home somewhere in the rotted pit of my heart. Tell me we’ll all make it home one day.
“Can you tell me about your family?”
-
The boy speaks in soft tones about them. His voice is a murmur like the nearby river and the wind whistling through the trees. He tells her about how when Teucer was born, he wanted to hold his little brother but his parents thought he was too small to carry him. He tells her about when Tonia was born and he also wanted to hold her, except his father had looked at him with a strange fear in his eyes and made the same excuse, even though he’d grown much taller since last time.
He tells her about his mother’s borscht and the way it would color his entire mouth pink. How it warmed him up after fishing on a frozen lake for hours with his father, who brought him there in the first place because it was the only way to get him to stay still.
He tells her about Ajax, the boy before the Harbinger, when his older brothers and sisters would come home. This was before Teucer and Tonia and Anthon, when he was the youngest child and would menace them and their spouses. How he’d hide their suitcases so they couldn’t leave and snuck the smallest of the Matryoshka dolls painted in his likeness into their socks so they had to carry him everywhere.
He tells her about the first time he’d seen Anthon walk after he’d fallen into the Abyss. He’d been caught by two low-ranking Fatui for fighting a boy twice his size for stealing his pirozhki and punching him until his fists were painted red. The boy was fine, but Ajax got in trouble nonetheless, and the two Fatui dragged him home all the way to the door where they threw it open and tossed him in at the feet of his parents right as Anthon rose to his feet and took his first wobbling step.
He’d scrambled to his feet bright with joy and looked frantically back and forth between his parents and Anthon and it’d taken a long minute for him to realize his parents were looking at him, arms crossed. He then remembered that the Fatui were there and he’d punched a boy and his knuckles were purpling over like splattered ink splotches over wet linen.
“And then I got thrown into the Fatui,” he says brightly. “But it all turned out fine for me in the end. My family still loves me and I can provide for them and thank them for all they’ve given me.”
The memories he gave were so sweet and happy. She tries to wrap herself up in the feeling of a cramped Snezhnayan home smelling of borscht and damp wood, pictures a solid root planted in one place and a seed that blows far but remembers home. Lumine wonders what it must be like to have roots. She wonders if she’d feel steadier.
She licks the salt off her lips and scrubs at her face. The tear tracks have dried into nothing and her head feels a little clearer.
The boy notices, but he doesn’t comment. He tilts his head and says openly, “Your turn, Lumine. Will you tell me about your brother now?”
What can she tell him? What’s left of Aether that is true?
-
She tells him of the time Aether tripped down a hill. He’d been gesturing wildly to her, telling her about fighting stance and how she’d stepped too far forward when his foot had snagged on a rock right at the top of the hill and he rolled all the way down. She’d laughed until her stomach hurt and Aether had simply grumbled about her hurrying down. She tells him of the time Aether had tried showing her a new sword technique he’d mastered and ended up throwing his sword over a cliff. She’d laughed again as he flew down to retrieve it and came back up covered in wild burrs and tangled in vines of the world they were visiting. She tells him of the time Aether took an arrow to the shoulder because they were fighting monsters in another world and she hadn’t moved fast enough.
She tells him that Aether is the Prince of the Abyss, how each time they meet, he says, “It’s not time.” How he says, “You will understand at the end of your journey.” How he says all this bullshit and how he keeps turning away from her right when they’re about to meet. “I wish we could reunite soon.” Then stay! She thinks. Stay!
She tells Tartaglia that she is tired of searching, tired of traveling, tired of floating from place to place like a dandelion seed without ever planting anything. She’s so tired she could die from it, but she can’t because she’s the Traveler, the recordkeeper, the sister without a brother. There’s so much left to do. The land of freedom was the first place to shackle her to duty.
The Harbinger watches her for a long moment. For once, he is silent. He tilts his head thoughtfully toward the water and she wishes for rain.
There are no clocks out in the wild. All she has to tell time is the angle of the moon and the vibrancy of the stars. They could have been talking for hours. They could have been talking for three minutes. They could have done anything in the time from their fight until now and still they would have ended right at this moment where the Traveler admits she is tired of traveling.
The stars are winking overhead. Lumine sees the north star and its companion, trailing faintly behind it, barely there in the dark, and begins to ache.
“I see,” the Harbinger finally says, and she thinks it’s strange that she has told no one this except one of her villains. Because she is a sister without a home and he is a brother who aches for it. She imagines what it must be like to have a brother that seeks to return. For a moment, she is envious of his younger siblings.
“I’m tired,” she says, meaning it in both ways and none. “We should sleep.”
The Harbinger looks at her, an eyebrow raised as if to say, Should we?
But she rolls onto her side and turns away from the stars, curling into her fists and her body, tucking into herself like a star on the verge of collapse.
“We’re alike, you and I,” he finally says, voice soft as the river. “I miss my siblings, too.”
It’s complicated with Aether, beneath the anger and the hate and the fatigue, there is the bone deep yearning for home.
“Thank you for telling me, Lumine.”
She rolls over. “Thank you for telling me about your family. I look forward to meeting them.”
“I look forward to you meeting them, too.”
-
In one version of the world, there’s a story about a boy who flew too close to the sun. On artificial wings, the boy jumped off the cliff and dove towards the sea where he gave into his joy and let it carry him so high that he felt sick with it. On artificial wings, the boy flew higher and higher beyond what humans should know and flew until the gods struck him down for the hubris of daring to experience such joy. They don’t have this story in Teyvat, but Lumine and her brother found it somewhere across the universe.
The story has always disturbed her. Though she and Aether did not have artificial wings, who was to say there weren’t greater powers wishing to smite them for their arrogance?
Aether never understood her caution or her fear. He simply said, “It won’t happen because there’s two of us to help each other.” And it was true until it wasn’t.
How long can your joy carry you until you fall? How long until the universe strikes you down for daring to smile?
When she woke up in Teyvat, wingless and weak, she’d felt a despair so deep it felt like losing Aether a second time. Walking on your own two legs gets tiring, even with a companion.
Lumine—sister, found twin, fallen god—stands now at the base of a cliff they must climb and suddenly feels very weary.
“Come on, comrade, it’s not too steep of a climb, is it?” The boy is trying to goad her, but she doesn’t have it in her to give in.
What is the point? She thinks. What is all this wandering for if each time she reaches her destination it moves away from her? The spirit of detours is a strong one in adventurers but all adventurers grow weary. All adventurers lay down to die.
“It’s fine,” she tells Tartaglia, even though the evening is caving in again and they’ve been walking all day. Each time the sun sinks back toward the horizon, her fatigue comes back in leagues.
He looks at her oddly and Paimon looks at her oddly and she knows that something has gone terrible wrong. Perhaps admitting her fatigue has only exacerbated it, like acknowledging the hill has made the boulder heavier.
“Let’s stop for the night,” says Paimon gently.
“We still have light,” says Lumine.
The boy frowns at her. “It’s close enough to dark,” he says. “Perhaps we should.”
So they do, even despite her meager protests. When they set up camp that night and start the fire, they sit around it in a circle and stare into the light.
She’s itching for something. She’s itching for a story. The falling night and the burning fire are stoking an ember inside her that longs for a home, even a surrogate of one.
“Ajax,” she says.
The boy startles. It’s the first time she’s called him Ajax since that night in the cave. He straightens, suddenly alert, as if preparing to jump into battle.
“What are you most excited for when we get to Snezhnaya?”
“Interesting question.” He straightens. “Well, other than seeing my family, I’m excited to celebrate Teucer’s birthday.”
She tilts her head. “Really?”
He nods. When he smiles, it glints star-bright against the fire. “I missed his last few ones, and he was young enough that I was afraid he’d forget me.” His eyes soften in the firelight, not quite glowing, but close to it. “Thankfully, he didn’t and I’m still the best older brother. But the way my assignments have lined up, I’m finally able to make it back in time for his birthday. Or at least, I hope so.”
“We’ll make it,” she says, because she believes they will and she realizes she wants it to be true.
Tartaglia shoots her a grin. “Is that a promise?”
“That depends on you, too.” She kicks a heel out.
He laughs at her, warm under the crackling fire. A swift silence falls over them, replaced only by the grasshoppers singing.
Then, “What about you?” asks the boy. “What are you most looking forward to in Snezhnaya?”
That gives her pause, though only because she’s embarrassed to admit her answer. It’s simple, it’s nothing grand, but her heart aches with the deep-seated need of tasting someone’s home.
“I’d like to try your mother’s borscht,” she says.
Tartaglia laughs again, sounding delighted. “You do?”
She nods.
“Well, I’ll let her know then.” He sits up. “Who knows, maybe she’ll already have a pot before we even step through the door.”
“I look forward to it.” She stretches out her arms and tilts her head skyward, up at the lonely stars and the distant moon. It feels like all of Teyvat is sleeping except for them, speaking in hushed tones, hiding under the crackle of the fire. She looks at the Harbinger, who is looking at her and smiling. She asks, “What are your siblings like?”
She volleys the questioning back to him and all he does is take it with a grin. It must be the greatest question she could possibly ask because he’s leaning forward and there’s a spark in his eye. He opens his mouth and begins to tell his stories, all the way until it is her turn, and they speak back and forth all the way until her weariness bleeds away into the sunrise.
-
“I asked an astrologer to read the stars for me once,” she tells him the next night they set up camp.
They’re sitting in the ruins of Stormterror’s Lair. Well, Stormterror is once again Dvalin, but he’s left the lair for the monsters and adventurers to pick at. This is where they sit now near the carcass of a tower, near the water under the open sky. The night spins around them, all fractured light and diluted clouds. The moon cuts a figure against the surface of the pond, luminous and yawning like a mouth. All around them, the stars are burning.
“What for?” Tartaglia tilts his head, the sharp edge of a smile cutting through his face. It’s cunning, for sure, but there’s also the boyish glint of curiosity and she once again thinks about how young he really is.
“What else? I asked about my brother.”
“Of course.” Tartaglia leans back on his hands, palms crunch the grass underfoot but softly enough that it does not disturb a sleeping Paimon. “And what did the astrologer say?”
A lump climbs in her throat.
“She said she couldn’t see him. It was too dark for the stars to see, wherever he was.”
“What a waste,” says the boy. He turns his nose up as if offended on her behalf, then tilts his head down to look at her.
“It wasn’t entirely.” She taps the blade of her sword, listening to the light clink of a nail against the metal and feeling the reverberations up her finger. We came from stars and we will return to them.
Tartaglia looks at her, his eyes hard and blue under the night sky. Hard and azure like a frozen lake, pooling into the depths. “What do you think she’d say about my stars?”
She presses her palms into the grass. “Probably that they’re cold.”
He snorts. “Because I’m from Snezhnaya?”
“Maybe.” She smiles into the dark.
He looks out at the water lapping at the shore. The moon is low in the sky tonight, a yellow mouth hanging open near the trees.
“What do you want to know about your future?” she asks.
“Hmm. I’d want to know if my family is safe. If my siblings grow up well. If I get to see it. If I will ever get to meet another god and best them in battle. If I’ll be stronger than I am now.”
Very straightforward wants. Then again, the Harbinger has a very straightforward heart.
“That’s sweet,” she says, meaning it.
He smiles at her compliment.
Aether would have said something like that once. In another version of the world where they’d met Mona Megistus together, he would have asked if Lumine would be safe and if she’d grow up well. He doesn’t have the same lust for battle though—that latter wish is all Tartaglia.
“I mean it,” he says. “I think about home all the time and sometimes I wonder if I’ll be part of it in the future, or if I’m doomed to miss out on all of their milestones while we both change away from each other.”
She thinks about her and Aether’s paths diverging the moment she fell from the sky. How he’d willingly follow the darkness of the Abyss while still promising there was an answer. Lumine has learned to fight alone, how to cover her own weak spots, and even though she’s aching, her wounds have scabbed over.
“I worry that the older I get, the more of home I’ll lose. And if I don’t have a home, what do I have?”
They really are alike, she and him. The way home is a wisp so easily blown away by a mouth, and still they are seeds clinging to the gale.
“Ajax,” she says, and there’s his name on her tongue again.
He tilts his head to her, eyes bright. “Yes?”
“Would you like to know how stars form?”
-
When they reach Snezhnaya, it’s nightfall, which is fitting. There’s something about the harsh snow and the icy winds that make the starlight burn colder.
The first order of business is getting Lumine something warmer to wear, but she hesitates for the same reason she did in Inazuma when Ayaka tried to offer her clothes.
“You’ll look more like a local,” says Tartaglia.
For all her strangeness, it serves as a reminder of where she came from—that being; not here. If she loses her strangeness, she loses sight of home. And then what would she have?
“At least get a cloak,” says Tartaglia. “Just to keep you warm.”
She agrees because it is cold in Snezhnaya and she’d rather not freeze before she meets Aether at the end of her journey. Who would have thought? The nation of Cryo is cold. Shocking.
Morepesok is a sleepy village like the outskirts of Mondstat. The cold winter sea blows harshly from the east and crawls up its icy beaches to claw against the land. The snowdrifts glow under the pale moon, lighting the whole village even without the lamplight lighting the paths. There are a few lower ranking Fatui patrolling around as the villagers haul in their catches for the night and retire to their warm huts. Tartaglia nods at a few of them as they pass.
They stop in front of a hut that is glowing orange, voices and song spilling through the cracks. The boy emerges from the Harbinger the closer they get, and when they’re at the door, he throws it open and announces with a booming voice, “I’m home!”
“Ajax!” Several small children come racing up to cling at his legs. He laughs and hunches over to rub their heads when a man with Tartaglia’s shock of red hair also wearing a beard on his face comes over the clap him on the shoulder. Another man, slightly older makes his way over and ruffles his hair. Behind him, two women are holding small infants and smiling at his return.
“You made it!” Teucer cries.
“I told you I would,” says Tartaglia with a wink. “I don’t break my promises.”
It takes a moment for anyone to notice her, but it’s Teucer who sees her first. His blue eyes widen—so much like the Harbinger’s, but so bright it makes her wonder if this is what he looked like when he was younger—and he jumps in the air. “It’s you!”
Lumine smiles weakly. “It’s me.”
“Who is she?” A woman stands up from the table behind them. Her face is wrinkle-lined and soft.
“She played with me when I was in Liyue!” Teucer cries. “She’s super nice and she’s a lot of fun.”
“Mom,” says Tartaglia. “This is my friend…the Traveler.”
“The Traveler...” Tartaglia’s mother steps forward and looks her up and down, as if assessing how dangerous she could be.
Lumine considers knives. She considers weapons. She considers the cracked open feeling of offering a name. It belonged to Aether at first, then she gave it to Tartaglia, sacrificing pieces of her secrecy for the ache of an open wound. She considers what it would feel like to have more people know and then she decides it.
She holds out a hand. “You can call me Lumine.”
The woman’s face softens. “Lumine. That’s a lovely name.”
In her peripheral, she can see Tartaglia jerking his head to the side in shock. She doesn’t say anything though because Tartaglia’s mother is already pulling her toward the kitchen with a firm but gentle hand.
“Ajax,” she calls. “Help me get some bowls. I think the both of you could use some warming up after the trek you made here.”
The Harbinger, the boy, her friend Tartaglia jerks forward and hurries to grab two bowls from the cabinets. His Delusion is dangling at his waist but it doesn’t look particularly dangerous when it’s just a boy reaching for earthen wooden bowls to help his mother serve the guest.
He’s taller than her by a whole head when he stands near the stove, holding the two bowls out in waiting. Tartaglia’s mother is small, but she is firm and warm when she drags him closer affectionately saying, “Closer. I won’t bite.”
She ladles steaming borscht into two bowls and hands one to Lumine. When she drinks it, it warms her like a hearth from the inside out.
“Now that Ajax is here,” says a man who must be his father. “Let’s continue with the rest of the birthday.”
Lumine stands to the side, borscht in warming her frigid hands, watching as Tartaglia sticks a birthday candle into a lopsided cake. Teucer is beaming up at him.
“Make a wish, bud,” says the boy, the Harbinger, the older brother.
Teucer squeezes his eyes shut for a long second before he opens them and blows out the candle. Tartaglia returns to her side as the family cheers.
“Thank you for bringing me to your home,” she murmurs.
He looks at her, eyes soft in the firelight. “You’re welcome anytime.”
She looks at the boy, the Harbinger, the brother, Ajax and considers herself: sister, found twin, fallen god. She considers the star dust in both of their veins and the lengths they travel to find a definition that works for home. How hers is so nebulous, how his is so definitive yet fleeting. They are both missing things the more they travel in the world but there’s a tether bringing them back to somewhere. For Ajax, it is Snezhnaya. For Lumine, it is her brother, somewhere out there. She is angry and she is tired but she is sitting in the warmth of a small Snezhnayan hut watching a year pass for another brother.
Outside, the stars are burning.