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The Wanderer did not dream. Or perhaps he did but did not remember.
It was just that the rare times he slept were the only times he reminisced.
As the Balladeer, on his path to godhood, he looked back upon many things. As his divinity expanded in power, he remembered his time in Tatarasuna,
his time as the Fatuus Scaramouche,
his short, pitiful life as Kunikuzushi.
These memories lived in short spurts between lucid moments, squinting through the darkness of the physical manifestation of his consciousness— the vulnerable and hollow heart of the Shouki no Kami.
A lifetime later, he could only really remember that the Balladeer was just… thinking about those memories. A true remembrance meant embodying the moment in recalling it, something the Balladeer was wont to avoid. Inside the Shouki no Kami, the Balladeer’s nonexistent heart could only bleed a thousand times over in his own solitude, both in his waking and dreaming hours.
With his memories returned, the Wanderer couldn’t really feel how sharp the cuts felt anymore. The wounds still ached, but he was feeling it behind a glass window, a sort of phantom pain, a wince in sympathy.
One peaceful night in Sumeru City, the Wanderer put away his frustrated lecture notes and half-finished transcript. Perhaps it was because of the material being taught, or the memories he was keeping at arms length to write about. But that night, he… remembered.
He remembered, in the deepest recesses of his memory, waking for the first time.
He flickered into the scene:
A cavern. Outside was barely a thought, too bright to see through the haze. But he could hear the thunder and torrential rain from where he stood.
Before him was his mother, her back to the Wanderer as always.
At her feet was… him— it, he remedied.
From the looks of it, it hadn’t even been turned on yet. It laid down by the torii gate, lifeless, as she shut the entrance to her sister’s realm of consciousness.
The rain was loud in the background, almost static in its volume.
He took a step closer.
It was just newly formed judging from the faint glow to its skin, still naked. A rune crackled on its chest, right where the heart should have been. It just laid there blankly staring with lost, half-lidded eyes at the ceiling of the cavern. The puppet’s long hair— untied, not even braided— was half-drenched, plastered by its waist, where the rest of its limbs floated in the waters by the roots of the Sacred Sakura.
Flickering to a crouch next to the puppet, he leaned into its line of sight.
Dead eyes stared back.
“How tragic,” he muttered. “You were brought to this world dead to it, and you’ll spend every waking moment wishing you hadn’t been made to begin with. All because of this.” He drawled, reaching out, ghosting fingers over the puppet’s inscribed heart.
He reached up to cup its face instead, sighing.
He thought of the boy from the mountains touching him like this,
of Katsuragi,
of proud Niwa Hisahide.
He hoped his palm felt warm to the touch, hoped it could be felt deep into the puppet’s dreams. He— the Wanderer, the Balladeer, the Kabukimono— hoped that it’ll remember this touch in its waking hours more than it’d wish to remember a warm smile on its mother’s face.
Then, the puppet blinked.
Tears welled into its eyes, like a soul sliding perfectly into an empty vessel. The puppet stared directly at him, eyes slowly closing, tears streaming down its cheeks, but searching for… For…?
His mother, finished with her work, turned just at that moment.
The Wanderer, with dread in his stomach, realized what he’d just done.
He looked up, up, up at the length of her, like he could never meet her gaze no matter how long he tried to look up.
Then, the feeling of falling backwards took over.
His breath hitched.
His back did not hit water and stone. Instead, it arched, covered in cold sweat.
The ceiling of the hostel was bright with sunlight, blinding him into squeezing his eyes shut.
Outside his room, he can hear the ever-constant chirps of finches, the ones brooding on a nest right outside his window.
He couldn’t move his limbs.
A quick breeze at his side.
The jingle of a soft melody. The creaking of floorboards.
The Wanderer, between sleeping and waking, relaxed upon hearing this.
And as all feeling returned to his limbs, he finally, slowly, woke up.
…
Had he just been dreaming of something?
What he eventually learned while living in Sumeru was that there was no such thing as coincidences. Especially not where the Dendro Archon was concerned.
The Wanderer had awoken to finches outside his window, hounding him once more as he walked off to his god-mandated lectures. There was also the faint feeling of eyes following him, not related to the looks he’d sometimes get as an Inazuman walking into the Akademiya without proper uniform (he hasn’t seen hide nor hair of the general or any of his Matra lackeys, so maybe the school wasn’t all that strict about uniforms to begin with).
He figured perhaps he should ask Lesser Lord Kusanali to try a formal summons one of these days. It’ll get him out of his lectures faster than, “I think I might be sick,” for one. And it would get him into less trouble than just not showing up to these stupid things in the first place.
But, if he knew, then Lesser Lord Kusanali knew that he knew.
And so, his day continued. Lectures, breaks, self-study hours, more lectures.
And when the day was done, he packed his things up into his bag and trudged his way up, up, up to the palace perched like a nest in the Divine Tree.
The guards paid him no mind as he passed– no doubt they’ve received orders from the Lesser Lord herself about his continued visitation. Similarly, none of them said anything when he used a foot to open the door to the Sanctuary rather than his hands.
“Oh, classes convened early,” Nahida’s voice echoed. She floated next to the Akasha, looking over incomprehensible texts projected in small writing in front of her. “How was your day?”
“You know as well as I do how my day went,” he answered, ambling up next to her. He glanced over the text, then over at the mess of wires leading into the Akasha’s mobile form. “Sending a guard next time might be a lot less invasive, you know.”
“And let everyone in the Akademiya know that truant scholar Kasacchi (傘っち, literally Umbrella in Japanese. They translated this as Hat Guy in English localization) has regular correspondences with the Dendro Archon? Do you really want all that kind of attention on you?”
If she did, maybe all his teachers would stop giving him the most pointless reading assignments.
As if reading his mind or perhaps because she could, Nahida looked up from her work, “I’m not going to let you use me as an excuse to get out of your duties, Wanderer.”
“Duties,” he spat. His duties once went beyond mortal comprehension, he was sent to the Abyss once, was sent to witness things from beyond Teyvat. Now, duties were, what, readings on theories and essays on the self? “Well, what’d you call me in for, Lesser Lord Kusanali? I still have my duties, you know.”
Nahida squinted at him, as if trying to parse through a particularly difficult piece of text.
“You went out today,” he pointed out, when the silence stretched on for too long. He glared at the idle Akasha terminal, “with this abomination, no less. Anything of interest out there that needed field research that couldn’t wait until classes ended?”
She, finally, blinked. She aimed her sights back on the incomprehensible texts before her. “Oh, right. I was in Vanarana collecting data from the Tree of Dreams and another newer Ashvattha Tree in Old Vanarana. Apparently the Traveler helped plant this newer one just before my rescue. All the better so I can see in the desert.”
He shifted his weight. “And?”
“Results were as expected. Dreams and memories. As I am the tree that sprouted after my old self left, the Aranara are the roots through which I heard chatter over the years. The reason I didn’t wait for you is because in this realm, I’m much more familiar than you are,” she said, not as a brag but as a matter of fact. Wanderer nodded for her to continue.
“The other reason is that… I wanted to talk to you about your dreams.”
He raised a brow at that. “My dreams?”
Nahida summoned her swing and hopped on, gesturing for Wanderer to take a seat by the terminal.
He did, having nothing else to do.
“Do you remember your dream from this morning, Wanderer?”
“… No,” he said. And it was true. He rarely remembered any of his dreams, if he could help it.
He’s had a few people note how he talked in his sleep a few times in his lives. The boy from the mountains once said he always clutched at his chest when his nightmares were at their worst, like he wanted to tear out something that hadn’t been there to begin with.
“You were saying something about… um, a god’s heart (Gnoses in all the Eastern Asian translations of the game are called a god's heart. Visions are god's eyes.) ?”
“It’s always just memories. Bad ones. I wasn’t built with faculties for dreaming, perhaps.”
Nahida hummed. “Well, that’s fundamentally inaccurate. The mode of access we used for the transfer of your past incarnation’s memories were through dreams, remember? Evidently you were built with faculties for dreaming, to the point that, like any human, you forget most of them as you wake.”
He huffed. “Are you getting to your point yet? You really should stop using academic prose as a basis for communication. It’s logical, but it’s wasting my time.”
“Oh, shall I leave you to your duties then, Kasacchi? I see you’re already acquainted with my way of speaking.” Nahida teased, giggling.
He grumbled, crossing his arms and leaning back in his seat.
“Okay, I’ll stop teasing you,” she laughed. “I was asking because last night, I noticed something peculiar with the way you dreamt, Wanderer.”
He straightened in his seat at that.
Invasion of his privacy and a debate on her existence as a god of dreams aside, he’s heard this particular tone from her before. This was the same tone she used when she brought up Sachin’s inheritance during the Championship a few months before she was even going to have a meeting with the sages about it.
“I noticed something odd with the prizes around two decades ago…”
This tone meant, this is alarming but I want to ease you into it because it might freak you out, a concession he neither needed nor asked for.
“Just tell me,” he said, less impatient and more urgent-concerned-worried.
“You don’t usually do this so I just wanted to inform you. It might have been a one-time thing,” she said, ever-patient, ever-generous. “I don’t look into people’s dreams that much every night seeing as I don’t have to anymore. Araja and the others are more than capable of pointing out anomalies outside the city. Inside and in the desert though, that’s still my jurisdiction.
“When I sleep, I dream of Sumerans’ dreams. I see an ocean of stars beneath the Divine Tree and in every star is a dream from plants, animals, children, adults. Everyone and everything. That includes you. And last night, yours was a tidal pool in that ocean. Yours was a void.”
He stifled the shiver running down his spine, gripping the edge of his sleeves with some force. “What does that mean? A nightmare?”
“No, nightmares and dreams are indistinguishable until you enter them. Yours was funneling itself to a different point, like it was connecting to something else I wasn’t seeing. I was mindful already that this was a bit invasive, you love pointing that out,” she remarked, shaking her head when he gave a shrug in response. “So I figured, I’d ask you rather than explore it without warning. The next time that happens, shall I enter your dream?”
“Will you be able to?” Isn’t it dangerous?
“I can try,” she allowed, propping a hand up with her arm as she gestured. “I’d say we might even be able to manufacture the conditions and have you replicate it, right here in the Sanctuary. So that just in case anything happens, I can use the Jnana energy from the Akasha to pull us both out and store the information for when you wake. You might not even be able to notice I’ve done anything like that, if you so prefer it.”
He nodded numbly. It sounded like a stable plan, and what solution she gave sounded the most beneficial for them both— she’d get to the bottom of it, he’d figure out whether he was a danger to her nation again. Win-win.
“Well?”
His brows furrowed as he glared down at her. “Well, what?”
“Should we do it, then?” She asked, inclining her head, as if that was the obvious conclusion to come to.
“I thought that was assumed.”
She huffed. “I’m asking for your consent, here.”
He slouched and propped his chin up with a hand, balancing it on his lap in a brooding thinking pose. “You know, if there’s a sign of my dreams becoming a danger to Sumeru, I could just stop sleeping. I don’t technically need it.”
Nahida looked up at him as if he’d grown two heads, hands already hovering over the settings on the Akasha terminal. “And from what power source are you going to be getting your energy from, exactly?”
He shrugged. “Food?”
“With both food and sleep, you still require more. I’ve heard tell of Kasacchi turning up to his lectures late like he’d just rolled out of bed.”
“That’s because I don’t care to come in early, not because I need the sleep.”
“You need the sleep,” Nahida repeated, putting her metaphorical foot down. “You’re not running on whatever it was the Doctor gave you and you don’t have a Gnosis anymore either. If I need sleep, you need sleep. This isn’t an argument of views, Wanderer, I’m telling you because I’ve seen your records.”
More or less: you’re incorrect and wrong, now change the topic.
With one last sigh, Wanderer stood from his seat and fumbled with his bag as he walked past her.
“Where are you going?”
“Getting dinner and doing my homework. I’m assuming you’re gonna conjure up a bed or two somewhere so I’ll leave you to it.”
“Oh, tonight, okay. Well, get me some of that tahchin from last time!”
He pulled the door open, yelling, “You can’t always have tahchin, Lesser Lord Kusanali,” as he squinted past the setting sun. That huckster Jut from the bazaar sold it at exorbitant prices and it didn’t even taste good.
Better to make dinner while reading through his homework.
Again.
“Finish your food.”
Nahida made a sound that was probably the close approximation of, “But I’m already done,” as she chewed through the rice bun.
“Stop making excuses, you haven’t touched the wakatakeni (A vegetarian broth dish of seaweed and bamboo shoots. Recipe can be purchased from Kiminami Anna!) . There’s no fish in it,” he grabbed the bowl and leaned it a little in front of her. Nahida leaned back a little, whining a little. “There’s no fish in it. It’s just seaweed.”
Finally swallowing, Nahida smiled sheepishly. “Thank you for making me dinner, Wanderer.”
“I just gave you dishes to wash,” he grumbled, pushing the bowl towards her. “Finish eating so we can start.”
Nahida gingerly picked up the bowl. “We can just start without having to make me finish dinner.”
“Which one of us was saying we need both food and sleep?”
“So, now you believe me?”
That was a given. Wanderer had never questioned her wisdom.
“Do you want me to feed you myself?”
That got her eating, at least.
If only the people of Sumeru knew that their god had a bratty streak a mile wide…
She was careful not to make any faces while she ate the soup, which was enough for him to remember who he was dealing with.
At least she finished the sabzi.
… Good, it saved him the trouble of spending Mora on her.
He leaned back in his seat.
They were in one of the side rooms of the sanctuary, a side room Nahida had taken to redecorate into a personal living space. The rest of the other rooms were archives forbidden from the House of Daena and offices reserved for meetings with the general and the sages.
This measly room was still as grand as the rest of the sanctuary, but it had a home-y feel to it, with a specific corners reserved for the handmade toys the Lesser Lord made, a large bed full to the brim with pillows and blankets, with shelves of knick-knacks and curios that seemed to be from the Traveler, the Aranara, and the city children living several hundred meters below. Where there weren’t random ornaments on the shelves, there were storybooks.
It seemed odd to him that a god would require such… basic commodities. Then again, same god decided that the best action to take after arresting him was giving him an education.
But this revealing of her home was… revealing, sincere in a way he expected from Nahida.
Some part of him suspected this might lead to yet another favor he’d owe her in the future. The Lesser Lord did not act without thinking. Like making him join Vahumana for the Inter-Darshan Championship, this experiment surely had an ulterior motive that was beyond him.
He should remember to correct that.
“Do I really need the bed?”
Nahida hummed in askance. Then, “Oh. Why, do you think you wouldn’t fit? I had to ask for it to be commissioned a few months ago. I wanted a simple bed but—”
“I’m fine with the floor. If you dropped in on me, you’d have already known I sleep on a futon.” Really, even the Doctor didn’t give him this much leeway when it came to experiments.
He turned to see Nahida shaking her head. “This is an experiment I’m conducting, the least I could do after you’ve provided food and drink, as well as your consent, is to accommodate your comforts as my subject.”
He crossed his arms at that, feeling a wry smirk crawling onto his face. “Oh, am I just Kasacchi now? The Great and Wise Dendro Archon is offering me the honor of a bed?”
Nahida put her hands on her hips. “It’s common researcher etiquette. You’ll understand more in a few years. Now, get to bed, Mister, and I’ll go retrieve the Akasha.”
With a scoff, he stood from her tiny dinner table, taking the dishes with him to put somewhere else.
“Don’t clean up after me!”
“I’m not, I’m just clearing the table.”
Nahida walked him through the experiment as she made her best efforts to eat his cooking earlier. He was to lay down on her lush and uncomfortably comfortable bed, go to sleep, and hope he dreamt.
Or, rather, remembered.
…
..
.
He did not remember.
Nahida had to convince him multiple times to keep the experiment going because of it. Spending one night in the Sanctuary was one thing, but two consecutive nights?
Well…
Wanderer had to push through his embarrassment to remember that he had to. As prisoner, when the warden said jump, he had to ask how high.
…
Not that Nahida ever asked him to leap to such great feats.
She asked for little things:
food when he was leaving and returning to the Sanctuary,
for him to do well in his Vahumana studies,
to make friends even though it was pointless.
Just a few more useless points to his ledger. So, because they’d already started, they tried to get him to dream every night.
The longer this went on, the more things changed inside Nahida’s home.
A desk and an appropriately sized chair was added so he didn’t have to leave for Puspa to do his schoolwork.
Nahida also added a tiny stove next to the tiny kitchen table without asking for his input, complete with a highly decorative dallah (An ornate coffee pot. Commonly used for Arabic coffee.) for his coffee habit.
By this point, it had already been almost three weeks, and it showed.
The last time he spent a night alone was before this whole experiment even began.
He wondered if he was even going to have to take a few bounties from the Citadel to pay for those missed nights at his usual lodgings. He still wanted the space, but if he was going to be spending most of his time in the Sanctuary, it was probably going to be a little inconvenient to begin with.
But it was routine by now, so much so that it seemed Nahida had informed the guards of his ‘name.’
“Kasacchi,” greeted one of the guards.
“Good day in class?” asked the other.
He wondered what Nahida had told them about him apart from that stupid ‘name.’
“Sure,” he said. There wasn’t really much work to be done. Sometimes, when class convened early, she gave him a few assignments— usually relating to the leftover Fatui near the desert. It was better stress relief than her ongoing experiment. “You guys good?”
“Not much to do up here,” the other guard replied. “If you’re not too busy, you should drop by for a match of Genius Invokation. Hassan over there is barely an opponent.”
Hassan didn’t seem too open to that. “I’m too busy to keep up with some card game.”
Wanderer walked past them as they bickered.
His night went on.
Dinner, preparations, sleep.
And, as in an ironic twist of fate, perhaps because he was finally getting used to this, he remembered.
He remembered losing a heart.
His second heart.
Or perhaps his third.
…
How many times can one bear losing a heart before they stopped feeling?
There was once a puppet soldier whose greatest wish was to be with a ballerina doll forever and ever. But the soldier didn’t have a heart and didn’t know where his feelings came from.
He knew where this story was going.
He’d seen it in his dreams over and over, like a sickening punishment, an eternal loop of the worst moments of his life.
Maybe that’s what he truly deserved. More than anything, maybe instead of forgiveness or absolution, perhaps all he deserved was to think about all the mistakes he made and drown in the ocean of his sins and transgressions.
What if hearts can be born from ashes?
In the dream, everything was set ablaze.
He flickered into the cinders, knowing immediately what this was. When this was.
This was the other shoe dropping.
This was the birth of the Balladeer.
He stood over the Kabukimono, clutching a small doll in his hand, with eyes just as lifeless as the puppet he truly was.
The Wanderer could tell that the Kabukimono had been through a life of hardships just from one look. A life of highs and lows so bright and so dark simultaneously that he could see the tears streaking down those pale, lifeless cheeks even through the haze of the fire.
There was a shadow on the floor in the corner that his eye was drawn to but could never truly look at.
He dreaded to think what it was, to see what it was.
A thought came to his head, unbidden. Somehow, he knew immediately that it was not his.
If only I could have burned to death in the fire too… No, in fact, I wish I had never been born at all.
He couldn’t help but laugh. Even lived and wizened by loss, grief, joy, and love, the Kabukimono was still so, so helplessly naïve.
He stopped just before the Kabukimono.
He’d been like this, once.
Lifetimes ago.
“Never been born at all,” he scoffed. “Is that really all you wish for?”
The Kabukimono, as if hearing him, raised his head.
Their eyes met, and the Wanderer felt infinitely seen and see-through. Could the Kabukimono truly see him as he was? Did he understand who it was that stood before him?
It was likely that there was no way. The Kabukimono had hit his lowest point, and the Balladeer will rise from his ashes in the shape of a bleeding heart.
What, then, did the Kabukimono see in this oxygen-deprived skeleton of a burning house?
What did the Wanderer look like to him, seem like to him?
What was he, currently, to his former self?
An Akademiya student,
a ward of the Dendro Archon,
a wandering vagrant clinging desperately to the vestiges of life,
a discarded puppet trying its best at some approximation of a purpose.
His Vision felt impossibly heavier and lighter in that moment.
“You once dreamt of a god’s heart,” he told the Kabukimono, crouching before him. “But you barely even attained her gaze. It is all but lies, neither of them matter. Without a vessel, a heart will have no home, just like how this house will no longer be able to shelter another family after you leave. So again, is that really all you wish for?”
Could the Kabukimono hear him? Understand him?
With his free hand, the Kabukimono reached for him.
Without hesitating, the Wanderer reached back.
And the scene, impossibly, flickered.
The Wanderer bodily turned, and turned, and turned, around and around. Vertigo set in. Around him was nothing but dark, black void, cloying, empty, simultaneously vast and incredibly tight.
Where was he now?
“Don’t be afraid.” A soft melody followed by fluttering— of clothes or wings, he couldn’t parse.
He turned again.
He was pulled to seating as he awoke, then pushed back to recline against the mountain of pillows on Nahida’s bed.
“Here, have some water,” Nahida said, pulling up to a chair by his bedside. This was where she usually sat every night, or so he assumed. She was always awake before him.
He took the cup into his hands and just… cradled it for a moment.
His head pulsed with a migraine. His thoughts swam behind his eyes, evasive yet present.
“Do you remember anything?” she asked, voice soft as a whisper.
“No,” he whispered back. It seemed maybe the time of night and waking so abruptly had made him just as soft as the pillows beneath him. “I never do.”
“I could show you,” Nahida offered, already turning to the Akasha, resting by the foot of the bed.
He shook his head. “Did you find anything?”
She didn’t seem to like that answer. Or, perhaps the speed with which he did.
Did she think he was lying?
“Why not?” She was not asking about her findings.
He heaved a sigh. “What use is it to know? You just need to verify whether it’s a threat to Sumeru or not.”
“That is not what this experiment was for,” she replied, gravely serious. “When I saw your void in that ocean of stars, it did not cause me great panic or worry for the people of Sumeru. Are you not curious to know what it was you were doing? This was all for you.”
He snorted. He’s heard that line before. “That doesn’t change my answer.”
And there, if only just for a moment, he saw it. A look he never thought he’d see crossed Nahida’s face after everything that had been said.
She frowned, brows furrowing as the look passed. “… Didn’t you say that truth was something you were interested in knowing about?”
“If you’re so insistent, then tell me,” he sighed, tired. “Otherwise, we should just stop all this if it wasn’t even going to be dangerous to begin with.”
“Wanderer… Did you just go along with this because I asked you to?”
He deliberated his next few words. His past selves were roaring to keep his mouth shut, but it hurt. There was so much hurt he didn’t know where it was coming from or what it was, but whatever it was was louder than his past and larger than his nonexistent heart.
“In case you’ve forgotten, Lesser Lord Kusanali, I’m a prisoner.”
Nahida nodded numbly. “I see you still haven’t acclimated much to a good social life.”
“As opposed to you?”
They looked at each other as the words rung out in Nahida’s room, with all the knick-knacks on a shelf from the city children below, the story books and handmade toys, the small stove she’d had brought in just for their dinners for the past few weeks, the corner of her room she’d carved out just for him.
The Wanderer pushed the blanket off of him and stood.
Nahida did not try to stop him on his way out.
She never did.
This time, she just did not ask where he was going.
The Wanderer did not ignore summons.
Lesser Lord Kusanali being upset with him was what he expected out of this relationship to begin with, so bare minimum cooperation was what he owed her.
So, despite the awkward silence (something he’d gotten used to and even reveled in back in his Harbinger days), when finches hounded at him for the entirety of his day, he would take time out of his schedule to go to the Sanctuary.
Neither of them mentioned the incident.
The door to Nahida’s room stayed shut.
Since the experiment, the Wanderer was not aware whether or not he’d been dreaming oddly since. He never knew before, and he was not going to start now.
When he woke up groggy, in the rare times he slept, he’d pass it off as momentary vertigo. In the mornings ‘til past noon, he’d be in lecture halls or the House of Daena to finish his schoolwork.
To pay rent and for spending money, he’d do high-level bounties for the Citadel and the Corps of Thirty. Those jobs rarely lasted well into the night, so if he still had research he hadn’t done, he’d do that for the rest of the night.
If he’d been summoned for reconnaissance, he’d have to fly out to any given corner of Sumeru until early into the morning.
Nahida never sent him to missions that lasted more than a few hours. Though consequently (and perhaps coincidentally), he heard from some chatterbox Matra in Lambad’s that the General hadn’t been around lately.
He did not take it personally.
He should take a nap.
That was the loudest thought in his head.
Some professor whose name he forgot was giving a lecture about the liminal nature of history when it can be so easily overtaken by fiction. He was seated at the back of the class, a large window behind him casting shadows down on the students below.
(He remembered thinking once how funny it was that a mere shift in lighting was enough to make him seem the most imposing person in that room, a class half-full of children barely above ten years and another half of adults over twice their age.
And then there was him.)
He should take a nap.
The lecture slowed before freezing to a full stop.
The breeze outside stopped blowing, the trill of birds stopping.
Stop it, Wanderer hissed, turning to his right. What are you even doing?
Beside him, Nahida kicked her feet in the air where they couldn’t reach the floor. If everything unfroze, she’d look like any other child in his class.
“I didn’t even make this connection,” Nahida admitted, barely above a whisper. “Wanderer, I think I’m dreaming.”
Yeah, well, leave me out of it.
“I didn’t do this by choice. I was just in my room, at my table, drinking tea. I could see your desk from where I sat, your empty chair before me. And the next thing I know, I was here.”
Nahida turned to him in her seat, bringing her feet on the bench between them and sitting with her legs crossed.
Wanderer felt like he was having a nightmare.
“Wanderer, do you think dreams have meaning?”
He hesitated for a moment.
You would know more than me, wouldn’t you?
“Don’t answer questions with questions.”
Nahida was a lot more temperamental and open when she was dreaming, it seemed.
… I don’t. He lied. He put his attention back in his notes, nearly empty save for a few doodles on the side. I only have dreams of my own memories. So, it doesn’t really matter what say I have on the matter. It doesn’t apply to me. Now, go away and torment someone else, you’re making me miss my lecture.
Nahida hummed, then stood in her seat. Her steps played a simple, merry melody as she hopped in place. A familiar melody, one he couldn’t place and slipped his grasp every time he tried to remember where he’d heard it from.
“Okay. I hope I can talk to you later, then.”
And as he turned to look at her go, the world started moving again.
“Mister Kasacchi, is this class boring you?” asked the professor.
A few of the children down front giggled at the accusatory question.
He sighed. Just had to power trip today, huh. “No, ma’am.”
“I would hope not. Now, where was I…”
Whatever was the plan, it never really came to pass.
Not that it mattered.
When he blinked into existence, he felt simultaneously suspended in mid-air and constricted.
The palace (though if he were to be honest, he’d be more willing to compare it to a mausoleum) was red. Everywhere he looked, it was red.
The fallen maple leaves, the sheen of the otogi wood floors, even the purple banners were stained red. Artificial light filtered in through the scaffolding up above, giving the impression of being in a scarlet cage.
The Wanderer so loathed this place. Just the mere sight of it made him feel ill the first time he laid eyes on it.
… He was dreaming, the first time he laid eyes on it.
At times he imagined himself like one of Snezhnaya’s favorite toys, the one he inspired into existence himself. A couple of little nesting dolls of himself, the puppet inside the Kabukimono, inside the Balladeer, inside himself. All his selves looked through his eyes, thought with his conscience, spoke with his mouth.
The moment the Wanderer laid eyes on this place, he wanted to set it ablaze. The sudden violence of the thought surprised even him, as he had no recollection of it.
It was a beautiful pavilion, an almost perfect facsimile of the life outside it.
It was a desolate mausoleum, an immortal’s view of undying beauty.
Cloth brushed against wood.
Floorboards creaked with age.
He looked down to see a pool of pale silk.
Sitting in it, like a kimekomi doll he’d seen many fine craftsmen in Tatarasuna make from scratch, was a long-haired puppet.
The puppet.
Him.
It.
It laid on the floor, fittingly rag-dolled and lifeless, its hair in a neat braid running down his back.
He knew it was awake.
Lifetimes ago, it was him and he was it. They both were not made for prolonged bouts of rest nor life spent dreaming. They both were not made for much of anything but an eternity spent in this cage.
Unthinking, he took a step towards it, and another.
He stopped right before it on frozen feet, unsure whether to lean over and peer at its face or to wait for it to react.
Then, it tensed.
He resisted the urge to jump a foot in the air. He knew it wasn’t harmless. Worn though he was with the sands of time and altered by the hands of dozens, he and it were made with the same basic components. They both had the capacity to harm that would bring misery to a thousand insignificant lives.
The puppet blinked blearily up at him as it angled its head at an unnaturally disturbing angle, as if it were between sleeping and waking.
The Balladeer remembered waking up. The Wanderer could not recall if they had met anyone other than Katsuragi. But, he could at least verify it. Lesser Lord Kusanali’s tale corroborated this.
Before Katsuragi, the puppet had no one.
It yearned for… not really love or a family. No, that was after leaving this tomb, after meeting Katsuragi.
No, what it really yearned for was a purpose.
…
It… looked so much like his mother like this.
He moved to sit down in front of it, cross-legged and casual.
“You can hear me, right?”
It did not show any indicator of response. He waved a hand in front of its face. Its blank gaze followed his movements.
The Kabukimono remembered being coherent when he woke. Speaking full sentences was not difficult for him even at base functioning. So… why?
…
Perhaps—
“Are you able to hear me?” He tried again, this time in a form of Inazuman long dead. His first language, ravaged by the progression of time. His words were clumsy, the muscles in his mouth too unused to the way shapes were formed. But the words tasted sweet as they tumbled off his tongue, dipped his voice to a register like a worn glove.
This time, it recognized. It nodded.
“I am a wanderer, Nanashi (名無し, Literally one without a name, nameless, or no name in Japanese) ,” he said, bringing a hand to his hollowed chest. “You need to leave this place.”
It opened its mouth, then shook its head. Its sluggish blinking looked more and more fatigued.
It opened its mouth and breathed, wheezed for a moment, trying to force out its words through unused windpipes. What came out eventually was barely a whisper, two simple syllables held together by a misguided hope and grief. “Ha… ha… (母, Literally meaning mother, but in the context of speaking about your own mother with other people.) ”
His eyes flit to the feather hanging by its chest, then back up at its patient, waiting eyes.
He felt impossibly older at that moment.
He felt as if he were speaking to a child.
He was.
All his warnings would fall on disbelieving, forgetful ears.
He remembered the Balladeer’s life as this puppet and remembered life as his own. As the puppet he was forever distracted by the overwhelming awe that was life bustling every which way he looked. Teyvat was teeming with life and moments to be witnessed.
The Wanderer perhaps remembered this a lot better than the Balladeer and the Kabukimono combined.
With some hesitance, he reached out and grabbed its hand.
The puppet did not resist, trusting completely.
Perhaps knowing in that way wisdom was innate in all children that he was it and it was him.
Perhaps not knowing at all but trusting still.
The world will break this puppet over and over, a walking, talking heart in search of its own heart.
He could not imagine nor remember what life was like when he did not know the sting of betrayal and loss before every interaction. But he saw the way the puppet felt his touch and knew that the only way it would survive the hardship to come was if it forgot this moment.
He squeezed its hand gently. His palm was warm where its fingers were icy to the touch, calloused fingers wrapped around smooth ones.
“When you wake,” he started.
Its eyes searched his again.
His vision blurred.
This was pointless.
With a broken voice, he tried again. “When you wake, you shall learn to find purpose in the world around you. But you will have to grasp at the first hand that reaches out. Do you understand?”
It opened its mouth again. “Ha…?”
He shook his head, then reached up with a free hand to grasp loosely at his Vision and the feather linked to it. He held it up close to the puppet’s own feather.
“You see these? These belong to birds. Mother birds push their young off the tree to learn flight. So, when this cage breaks open, learn to fly. Understood?”
Dazedly, the puppet nodded.
Down the hall, a deep thunder-like rumble sounded.
The Wanderer stood.
“Sweet dreams, puppet.”
“Good… bye…” the puppet whispered.
The Wanderer turned…
And felt himself sink deep into a soft mattress, pillow, and cushion.
He cracked his eyes open.
Green.
Safe, all-encompassing, ever-green.
The Wanderer sank in the cushions of the plush bed and breathed in deep, relieved but… not remembering why.
He glanced down at his form.
Papers were strewn all over the blanket… all in his handwriting, it seemed. On closer inspection…
… this incident has since been left up for debate. Lack of conclusive evidence and the furnace’s recent malfunction due to the civil dispute has turned the area into an information black hole. All records found and conclusions made have been suspect (Aqaba & Sawada, xxxx)…
The brief chime of a melody— in his dreams. He’d heard this exact melody in his dreams— brought his attention away from the papers.
Porcelain and metal clattered against wood as the dallah and cup were put down with considerably clumsy force. “You’re awake!”
There was a scuffle of feet and it was all the warning he had to raise his arms to catch Nahida as she bound up too fast to stop herself from nearly toppling on top of him.
“Why is my draft on the bed,” he whispered, throat dry and parched. He tried to clear his throat but was met with more dry discomfort.
“Oh! Tea. Wait here.”
As if he had anything else to do.
Nahida zipped around her room in a rush, energy frantic like the finches she was fond of using to monitor him with. He’d never seen behavior like this before.
As she roamed, the melody looped, over and over, as if her every step was followed by it.
He pushed himself up to sit and saw that her feet barely touched the ground as she worked.
A sense of deja vu hit just as discomfort settled in.
The last time he’d been here… the last time they’d spoken to each other…
Nahida bound up carefully, feet solidly on the ground as she balanced a tray of a cup of Sumeran black tea and what smelled like Inazuman tea.
“I hope I got it right. I had the General ask his Genius Invokation friend if he had any sencha to spare, and he came back with a recipe and a can.”
He took the proffered cup gingerly, then drank under her expectant gaze.
Bitter, exactly how he used to like it.
He hummed, then nodded for her to take a seat. There had been a small chair by his bedside, like usual. It seemed she’d been reading before he awoke.
“What happened.” He asked, to get it out of the way.
Nahida frowned, concerned. “I thought you’d recall some parts of it at least. You passed out. No energy. You overworked yourself.”
She did not tack on an, I told you so.
He thought perhaps he deserved at least that much.
“How long was I out.”
“About a week now. I was trying to stabilize your condition but…” She trailed off, fiddling with her tea cup.
“But?”
With a huff, she looked up at him. “Are you sure you want to know? The last time I tried to tell you, you pushed me away.”
He exhaled, though there was no air in his lungs, it felt. Was this what it was like to be caught speechless? Breathless? Guilty?
Softly, guiltily, he mumbled, “… I want to know now.”
Neither of them looked at each other as he admitted this.
“... You weren’t dreaming. You were projecting yourself backwards, connecting your dreams to those of your past’s.”
“My dreams,” he echoed, confused.
She nodded. “When I observed your dream previously, it seemed externally similar to most dreams. I could watch and maneuver around its entry and exit points. But I couldn’t end it without needing a significant amount of Jnana energy from the Akasha. The only reason I was able to pull you out was because you were aware it was a dream.
“Wanderer… Do you remember your last dream?”
He shook his head. He never did.
“But you know what it was you were dreaming of. The past, your memories, you’d told me.”
“I don’t remember which ones, what happens in them, or how I know. I just do.”
So, Nahida told him.
She told him, in her soft and gentle voice about the burning hut in the mountains, the Balladeer crawling out of the ashes of the Kabukimono. The words he had said.
He felt like a child being told a bedtime story.
He knew, with certainty, that it was true. Nahida would never lie. But it seemed so… surreal.
Silence settled between them, both taking the moment to drink their tea as they mulled over his memories in silence.
What a strange dream to have, he concluded.
“Can I ask you a sensitive question?”
He looked at her, then nodded.
“Do you remember how you said your creator abandoned you?”
He was created to be her vessel. And because he cried in his…
He cried in his sleep.
He looked at Nahida, searching her gaze for deception or doubt.
Such was the wizened gaze of the God of Wisdom, infallibly solid against unreasonable doubt.
“How,” he asked.
“I only have a meager hypothesis born from one fact: both times I observed your sleep and dreaming, your Vision glowed the entire time.”
His hand reached up to his Vision, hovering over the etched rune where he had wrenched his heart out, the gnarly reminder of a past clumsily scribbled over in an attempt at—
At what, exactly?
Nahida continued, “The God of Anemo is said to have the power to send visions and memories through time. Perhaps as a creation of the God of Eternity, certain… functions triggered. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. It’s not the result of anything elemental because then it wouldn’t deplete your energy sources. Let’s say… if you recall finding me in your dreams back when I was imprisoned and you were still the Balladeer, it works similarly that way. You and your past selves have a connection. And you managed to find them right in those moments.”
“I wish I could remember…” he whispered.
“The words you told them? Or what words you wished to hear?”
“Aren’t they just the same?”
Nahida smiled.
“So… how do I stop it?”
Nahida’s smile dropped. Part of him wished to take his words back, but he found the lead slipping from his grasp.
“Who says we have to stop it? Dreams are meant to be had.”
“I’ve been out for a week, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Because you overworked yourself,” she pointed out, tone strict now. “You’re lucky you hadn’t fallen off the side of the Divine Tree. It would be difficult to explain how Kasacchi survived a fall from that height, don’t you agree?”
He huffed out a laugh. “Okay. Sure.”
“You need a balanced diet and sleep. And no more bounty hunting between jobs and school!”
“I have to pay rent, Lesser Lord Kusanali.”
Nahida shifted in her seat and, oh no, he knew that look.
“... Do you have to?”
“I’m not going to be some charity case. I’m already captive.”
“That’s an oxymoron. Besides, as my captive wouldn’t I have to trouble myself into housing you anyway?”
He rolled his eyes. Always a comeback but… he couldn’t deny the lightness in his chest. “You would have Kasacchi be the center of the gossip mill for living with the Dendro Archon?”
Nahida took a sip of her tea. “I had the medic bring you here instead of the Bimarstan. Every person who saw you be escorted here knows. And that was a week ago.
“Anyway, your thesis draft is going very well, by the way. It’s a compelling read despite how dry the topic sounds. You could have the makings of an author! Now, that’s an idea…”