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The citizens of Sumeru City knew that something had happened when exalted guests—people who clearly held great power, who some might even guess were not quite human—began arriving in the city. 

To be fair, they had known that something momentous had happened a week prior. Nahida was not the Hydro Dragon Sovereign, who flooded his nation with his tears, or Adeptus Xiao whose mournful cry was said to still echo among the sheer cliffs of Liyue, but her people still knew of her grief. 

It had already happened once before. 

That first time, it had been in the night, sometime past midnight and before dawn. Logically, she knew that she could count it down to the very hour, the very second, but even after nearly five years it still ached like an open wound to think about. Most hadn’t thought about why the plants had all remained closed, hadn’t wondered why the flowers hadn’t opened their blooms to greet the sun, why each stem was bowed as if they were also heavy with grief. 

(If Cyno had seen it, he might have made a joke about “boughs of grief” or something to that effect. “Boughs” like “branches”, rather than “bows” like a gesture of respect or, in this case, of her great grief. 

If Cyno had told that joke, which he probably wouldn’t have given the context, Nahida may have smiled. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled.)

This time, though, it happened during the day. Perhaps The Steambird commented on it, or the local gossip in the bazaar. Suddenly every flower had shuddered as if blown by a great gust of wind and then bowed its head. Even the trees had been affected. Buds about to bloom simply hadn’t, and florists had scrambled for fixes. Apparently even the Divine Tree had been affected, and the researchers at the Akademiya had been thrown into a frenzied panic. 

Or so Gooey had told her the first time. She hadn’t asked what he’d been doing out so late (or so early) and he hadn’t elaborated, but he had known to come and check on her after witnessing it. He’d woken his wife and oldest daughter, who had chosen not to marry and who lived with them, and they had whipped together a quick meal to bring over, and the too-sweet tea that she favored. 

It must have been a strange sight, to see a grown man like Gooey—who she still called “Gooey” and who never corrected her, even at his wedding which she and Alhaitham had jointly presided over in an honor that had made him blush almost as much as he had when he first saw his wife for the first time—greet her like an old friend. It must have been strange for Gooey’s wife to know that the child that he hugged on bended knee despite his bad joints had once been in daycare with him, but bless her she said nothing of the strangeness. She and her daughter had made themselves at home, cleaning out the kitchen and setting out plates and coaxing sweetened tea and flatbread still warm from the stove into her and Alhaitham. 

Celestia , she’d never seen Alhaitham like that. For nearly a week she’d been afraid that she’d lose him too, that he would waste away in his grief, but something made him stay. 

She hoped it wasn’t her. 

Zhongli had arrived not even a full day later, Xiao in his shadow. It had been Zhongli that had so lovingly prepared Kaveh’s body, albeit with Alhaitham hovering over his shoulder like a ghost. The only thing stopping her father from doing it himself was the tremor he’d picked up, the unsteadiness on his feet that required him to stand and walk with a cane. 

(It had been a gift from her and Zhongli and Kaveh, given to him on the birthday celebration after he’d been diagnosed with that tremor. They knew that he was too proud to accept a cane but too practical to throw away a gift so thoughtfully crafted and given. Kaveh had designed it and fussed over the details until Nahida thought that he’d have a nervous breakdown; she’d formed the wood herself, and Zhongli had helped her with the stones and gems so that they all blended seamlessly together. From then on, she never saw Alhaitham without it and sometimes even caught him running his fingers reverently over it, the slightest smile on his face.) 

They’d stayed for nearly a month after he passed. Venti had as well, though Nahida knew that it chafed at him to feel tied down to any one place. He and Xiao, nervous anemo creatures that they were, would sometimes leave to flirt with the wind among the branches of the Divine Tree. 

Zhongli had stayed and Xiao had stayed because of him, as if bound to be his shadow for eternity. He didn’t say why and she didn’t ask, nor did she ever tell him to leave because though she hated to admit it, she liked the company. 

He was steady, as steady as stone which was entirely unsurprising, but she needed that steadiness. 

A week after Kaveh’s funeral, Zhongli had approached her in the back garden. Padisarahs had taken over the entire area, vying for dominance against the mourning flowers that Kaveh had planted during a period of lucidity several years before his death. Beneath her bare feet, she could feel the battle between the roots of the flowers, moving far quicker than was natural in the presence of her grief until they felt like writing worms. 

None of them bloomed; all of them appeared wilted. 

Zhongli had found her there, her feet rooted in place by plants and the remains of what had once been an herb garden. “I don’t want to hurt them,” he said and she cleared a space of bare dirt for him to walk. He sat down against the wall, as ever ignorant of his fine clothes, and several of the padisarahs near him bent their tightly-closed buds toward him as if looking at him. When he held out a hand, she went to him. 

They weren’t… close . Not the way she was with Alhaitham and Kaveh. No longer in power they may be, but they were still archons, with the dignity that came with it. 

But he did sometimes hug her, and sometimes carried her, and sometimes stroked her hair the way that Alhaitham and Kaveh did…or had once done for her before time had rendered them too weak and unsteady. She had gone to him and had curled into his side and he had gently rearranged her so that she sat sidesaddle across his lap, her feet buried in the soft earth and her face tucked against his shoulder. 

“I thought that Alhaitham had taught you not to bottle everything up,” he had told her gently. 

“Have you met him?” she had asked and was horrified at the way that her voice wobbled. 

Zhongli had laughed, a warm and comforting sound and she’d cried against his chest, his arms secure around her. The silk flower in his clothes, no matter how old they were, had reacted to her grief as well. Venti had laughed, because Venti always laughed at everything, and had teased Zhongli for being so tangled that they’d needed pruning shears to even get close to prying Zhongli from the wall, much less out of his ruined clothes. 

They stayed and Alhaitham got better. 

Now, five years later almost to the day, all of Sumeru City—and perhaps even further—knew that something had happened. 

First they knew it by the shuddering of the Divine Tree, by the mourning of the flowers and every plant that could droop, and then they knew it by the sudden visitation of great dignitaries. 

Venti had arrived first, but only by his count—he’d arrived only a week or so after Zhongli had, and despite his flighty nature making him antsy at being “stuck” somewhere, had announced that he intended to linger for a while to help out and make sure that Alhaitham was comfortable in his last days. 

(Alhaitham had been annoyed. It wasn’t that he disliked Venti, but Nahida thought that he was grumpy for the sake of being grumpy. He couldn’t be mad at Xiao or Zhongli or Nahida, so he was grumpy at Venti. 

When Nahida had tried to apologize for her human father, Venti had said that clearly he took after Zhongli, who never knew how not to be serious. If Alhaitham had been younger, if his cane had been closer to the bed and not where he couldn’t reach it to keep him from wandering around the house and fussing, Nahida was sure that he’d have managed to hit Venti.) 

The first true “guest” arrived from Inazuma. Raiden Shogun, Ei, and Yae Miko all said that the winds were favorable for their ship and they had just about flown across the sea; Venti whistled and tried to pretend that he had nothing to do with it and Nahida allowed him to pretend that nobody knew what he had done. 

Next, surprisingly, was Neuvillette from Fontaine. He brought along two of his Melusines, Sigewinne and Sedene, and the people of Sumeru City tried not to gawk at the strange little creatures. Sedene had held Nahida’s hands in her mitten-shaped ones and in a high, sweet voice that was more childlike than Nahida’s ever was, she expressed her condolences; Sigewinne had outright hugged her and Nahida had struggled not to cry again. 

Neuvillette had brought along several young plants, crossbreeds of Sumeru roses and Fontaine’s famous rainbow roses, crossbreeds of padisarahs and romaritime roses, the result of one former Kshahrewar graduate’s homesickness and grief. They were all the rage in Fontaine, now that the strains had stabilized. 

(Nahida had once told her parents that though she loved all plants no matter their adherence or lack of to the human concept of aesthetics, and found them all beautiful in their own way, she personally thought that those strains were particularly ugly. It was a lovely sentiment, but there were some strains of flowers that shouldn’t be crossed and it seemed that Faranak had found four of them. Kaveh had laughed so hard that he’d sprained a rib.) 

Formal gift-giving done, Neuvillette had then knelt in front of everyone and let her throw her arms around his neck. He was far more awkward and socially stilted than Alhaitham had ever been, but he was kind despite his awkwardness and the gold-framed gray stone of his cravat pin spoke of his understanding of her grief. 

The Pyro Archon did not attend, but that was fine because Pyro and Dendro had never truly gotten along and Sumeru did not have as much to do with them as many would think—there was no reason for anyone from Natlan to send their condolences, except as an empty gesture to Nahida’s grief. There was still a package sent, a nice perfunctory gift to Sumeru for the sake of politics and another to “the surviving daughter of the former Grand Sage of Sumeru” that Nahida thought that she might one day appreciate, but there was only so much she could allow herself to feel before grief toppled her once more. It remained unopened in the foyer. 

Similarly, the Tsaritsa didn’t exactly attend either. Their relationship wasn’t… strained , or particularly bad, but a part of Nahida could never forgive her for what she ordered her Harbingers to do—what they’d done to her people, how they’d manipulated and tortured in her name. 

It had been Alhaitham that had gently held her and explained to her that sometimes being selfish was okay. Wasn’t he her Grand Sage? Let him worry about the politics—she could hold onto her resentment all she wanted. 

Fortunately, the Tsaritsa seemed to understand. Nahida sometimes wondered if Alhaitham had explained the situation to her, but she knew better than to really consider it. After facing down Raiden Shogun, not even properly armed, she knew that he’d protect her at any cost—and that included emotionally shielding her from another archon. Even if the Tsaritsa asked, she doubted he’d even admit to her existence. 

So the Tsaritsa didn’t technically attend. She sent an envoy as was proper—much like the Pyro Archon did—and delivered formal condolences from her nation, but the Tsaritsa “herself” didn’t arrive. 

But a young woman dressed simply in Snezhnayan clothing met a young Liyuen man with golden eyes and exchanged greetings and a small package. Zhongli, upon returning to the house in his borrowed shape, placed it in the foyer beside the parcel from Murata and none of them said anything about it.  

The Akademiya planned something grand and extravagant for their former Grand Sage and Nahida was obliged to attend as his daughter. Poor Xiao had been chased into the highest boughs of the Divine Tree, the noise and crowds too much for him, and she wished that she could join him. 

She was escorted personally by the General Mahamatra and though she knew it was wrong and unfair, she couldn’t help but compare this tall, blonde-haired woman against Cyno. On her other side, Zhongli accompanied her and neither of them cared about the strange stares they received. Zhongli had as much right to be there as she did, even if it was in a very different way. 

After the grand parties and festivities that the Akademiya threw came their own celebrations. 

If it could be called that. 

Alhaitham’s actual burial was a quiet thing, exactly what he would have wanted. He was buried beside Kaveh and Zhongli himself carved the headstone that marked their graves. Xiao, bird creature that he was, watched them from a nearby tree and Venti held Nahida’s hand. It rained from Neuvillette’s own sympathetic grief but his mastery over his element kept them dry, suspending the raindrops in midair so that the sunlight caught in them and threw reflected light all over the small plot. 

(It reminded Nahida of the chisel light mirrors that Alhaitham used when he was young enough to fight, before he developed that tremor and set aside his swords. Somehow, though it wasn’t intentional, it was fitting.) 

Raiden Shogun (or perhaps Ei, Nahida wasn’t certain) and Yae Miko both bowed and left an offering of flowers and prayer beads. Sigewinne left a shiny shell, Sedene a shimmering vial of ink that, when the light hit it, shone a deep and lovely green. Venti let go of Nahida’s hand to place the cecilia from his hair at Alhaitham’s grave—a match to the one that he’d left at Kaveh’s when it had been his time. 

Behind them, the tree groaned and Nahida didn’t need to turn to know that Xiao had taken his bird-shape. The small, secluded plot echoed with the songs that only one with a bird-shape could sing, of life and grief, open ended as if waiting for an answer. 

When they turned to leave, they found that people had joined them in silent vigil, each to pay their own quiet respects. Alhaitham had not been beloved the way that Kaveh had been, but he had not been unloved. 

Nor, Nahida realized, would he be unmourned. 

Gooey approached first, his wife letting go of his hand so they could have a moment alone. He paused to look up at Xiao’s bird-form, too large and peculiar to be mistaken for something mortal and mundane, especially from a child of Liyue, then turned back to Nahida. As he had at Kaveh’s death, he knelt and let her wrap her arms around him. “I’m sorry, jiejie ,” he said softly. “That’s the problem with us mortals.” 

“Please,” Gooey said softly as he hugged her small body. “Forgive us our weakness.” 

Despite there still being people in the house—Nahida of course, Zhongli, Xiao, Venti—it still felt empty. Like she stood in the cave and no matter how much she called, all she could hear were her own echoes. 

Alhaitham had always been quiet, more so in his last few years. He’d grown tired of his hearing aids, said that they hurt to wear, so he “gave up” hearing completely. Personally, Nahida thought that he’d done it because he didn’t want to hear a world without Kaveh’s voice in it. 

She could sympathize. 

But even deaf, even physically silent, Alhaitham’s presence had been…there. Even without seeing him she knew he was there, as if there was some undefinable sense attuned to him and him alone. 

It had been the same with Kaveh. Like they all held strings binding them together and with their loss, they hung limply from Nahida’s hands. 

Like she stood in that cave and called and called for them but instead of hearing Kaveh say, “ah, habibti , there you are” or Alhaitham’s quiet “mn” of acknowledgement, all she heard was her own voice mocking her for her hope. 

Though they were kind, Neuvillette and Ei could only sympathize so much. They were fortunate (in some ways) that they had duties to fall back upon. Grief could be kept at bay by work but Nahida didn’t have that luxury. 

After all, Sumeru was a nation that didn’t need its archon. 

And Nahida had the body of a child, so it wasn’t as if she could find something to do to occupy her time, to distract her from her grief.

And all of Sumeru knew that she was their archon, even though an archon was not needed. There was no hiding, no blessing of anonymity. Everyone knew that Alhaitham and Kaveh’s young daughter didn’t age, hadn’t aged in over half a century, that she was only their daughter in name (and questionable legal practices), that she was actually an immortal being and the vessel of Kusanali, the Dendro Archon. 

Knowing that, and knowing the unavoidable fact that Alhaitham had died, everyone spoke to her about it. Forgetting her grief was impossible. 

It was almost a relief to watch them leave. Neuvillette, Sigewinne, and Sedene were kind and Sigewinne told her that she was welcome to visit if she ever wanted to, but none of them understood. At least, Nahida didn’t think they did. 

Likewise for Ei, Raiden Shogun, and Yae Miko. Raiden Shogun had no need for grief and didn’t understand it, and Ei sympathized but even Nahida could understand that her approach to processing grief was…not the healthiest. And not something that Nahida could or would do. Yae Miko would be the closest that would understand, but she was a wily fox spirit, forever playful, and grief never seemed to affect her. It was probably the way that she wanted it—she never wanted to seem as if she was mourning—but Nahida knew that she also could never do that. 

It hurt too much to even contemplate. Her grief was thistle and bramble and for the first time, she feared the bite of their thorns should she try to swallow it. 

As he had with Kaveh’s death, Zhongli found her in the back garden, where everything had withered and died with Alhaitham. He stepped through the wreckage, his shoes clicking against the desiccated earth, and sat down beside Nahida, stretching his legs out in front of him. 

As she had with Kaveh’s death, Nahida climbed to sit sidesaddle in his lap and he wrapped his arms around her and held her close, the way that Alhaitham used to do before his bones grew brittle and his skin fragile enough that too hard of a grip would leave lurid bruises that would linger for days. 

When he died, he’d wanted to hold her like that again but she’d been too afraid of causing him more pain. She’d curled up next to him on the bed instead, and she had pressed her ear to his chest until his heart stopped beating and his breathing rattled and sighed and stopped too. 

He hadn’t let her go until his own relaxing muscles had forced him to.

Until his death made it inevitable. 

Venti had held her while Zhongli had begun preparations on Alhaitham’s body. It was strange, being held by someone so close to her in size, but Venti smelled like windswept cliffs and cecilias, like sweet apples and sweeter wine. A tree, even one as small as she was, knew the sweetest joy of the wind through its highest branches but how could she feel anything when what felt like the last of her tethers had been uprooted?

Now Zhongli held her like she wished that she wished Alhaitham and Kaveh were still able to. He smelled like rich earth, like the promise of life present even before the farmer sowed their fields. 

At some point, Venti joined them and tucked her feet into his lap as he leaned against Zhongli’s arm. She could sense Xiao somewhere nearby but he was as easy to pin down as Venti at his flightiest, as easy to track as a playful gust of wind. 

“I’m sorry,” Venti said, and seriousness sounded strange in his normally-playful voice. His hand squeezed her ankle and she curled tighter against Zhongli. “It never gets easier.” 

Zhongli’s arms were steady, his heartbeat sure and strong. The world may change, mountains may crumble, but he would live on—he had lived on. How many had he seen die? 

“How many have you buried?” Nahida asked softly. 

“An interesting question,” Zhongli said in a way that was very “him”.

And also very “Alhaitham” in a way that made her ache. 

He leaned his chin against the top of her head in a gesture of affection that she’d never felt from him. “Working with the funeral parlor, I have buried hundreds of bodies. Thousands; this wasn’t the only life that I worked with Director Hu.” 

A stroke of brilliance, if a depressing sort of brilliance. Calling the director of Wangsheng Funeral Parlor “Director Hu” would work for all seventy-nine directors since its creation all those years ago. 

“Before that, I’ve buried hundreds,” Zhongli continued. “Thousands; tens of thousands. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. Adepti, human, gods.” He adjusted his grip on her, awkward in the way that Alhaitham had once been and in a way that Kaveh had never been. 

(Archons, would that be the rest of her potentially eternal life? Bringing everything back to the short lives of two people that had somehow become everything to her?)

“Does it get any easier?” Nahida asked. 

“No,” Zhongli and Venti said in unison. 

Nahida curled tighter against Zhongli’s chest. His heart continued to beat, steady and sure. “I wish I never left the Sanctuary of Surasthana,” she said softly. 

“If you had never left,” Venti said softly, rubbing his thumb soothingly against the bump in her ankle, “then would you have ever been able to ride on someone’s shoulders?”

Vividly, Nahida could picture it. She didn’t have the cor lapis memory that Zhongli did, but the memory was recent enough that she could still imagine it in startling clarity. Alhaitham’s warm hands on her shins, her hands buried in his hair and folded over the strap of his headphones. The feeling of his steady gait beneath her, how tall she felt, the quiet joy that rose from Alhaitham like warm air beneath the wings of a bird. Kaveh looking up at her, somehow both terrified for her safety and delighted by her joy and always so, so loving as if she, along with Alhaitham, meant everything to him. 

“If you had never left,” Zhongli said quietly, “would you have seen the fireworks?” 

Just as vividly, Nahida could remember the feeling of being sandwiched between Alhaitham and Kaveh, pressed against the red railings of Liyue Harbor. The glow of Alhaitham’s headphones were off but he flinched just as often as they did at the booms of the fireworks high above. Gold and scarlet and violet and blue and green, sparkling like fireflies, like ripples in a pond, spreading across the sky like the mycelium of fungi, like the roots of a tree, like the branches of lightning. 

She remembered Tighnari, whose hearing was so sensitive that it caused him agony until they figured out a way to muffle the sounds enough for him to bear it. The solution ended up being stuffing his ears with cotton and then wrapping his head so thoroughly that only his face and the very tips of his long ears were visible. 

“What of Gooey?” Venti asked. “Or dance lessons with Nilou? Sword lessons with Alhaitham? Stealing candy with Xiao?”

“What?” Zhongli asked. 

“Nothing,” Venti said with a giggle. He squeezed her ankle again and smiled until his eyes crinkled. 

Zhongli sighed, but it was fond. “What about reading with us?” he asked. “Teaching me sign language?” 

“Going to Fontaine!” Venti suggested. “Learning how to swim! Going to a magic show!” 

Nahida remembered that, of course. Alhaitham had teased Kaveh for having roots in Fontaine and yet somehow not knowing how to swim. He hadn’t been impressed by the magic show because things like that didn’t impress him but his enjoyment had been entirely through the way that Kaveh and Nahida had enjoyed it. Whenever they had cheered at the stage, he had smiled at them. 

She sobered, swallowed, gripped the lapels of Zhongli’s coat. How could she smile when they’d only just entrusted Alhaitham to the earth? “But if I had never left,” she said in a cracked whisper, “then I’d…” 

“Without sorrow, there can be no joy,” Zhongli said gently. “Just as without joy, there can be no sorrow. The world is at balance.”

Venti rolled his eyes; she didn’t need to look at him to know. Something touched her and she peeked her eyes open and found a tiny white sprite that she instinctively knew from boughs to roots to deepest heartwood was Venti’s true form, or at least something that approached his original shape. 

It was a struggle to untangle her fingers from Zhongli’s lapels, as if her fingers had grown into that shape, but eventually she was able to open them and turn her palm in invitation. 

The shape that Venti wore was as light as a breeze, nearly weightless, soft as the gentlest silk as it settled in her palm. When he spoke, it was in a voice that was voiceless, shapeless, wordless but somehow permeated the entirety of the world around them. 

Think back to everything that has happened since you left , Venti said. Think of all the joys and the sorrows and that time that Alhaitham picked a fight with a tailor and bought you way too many clothes.

“Or that time that Kaveh picked a fight with a tailor and bought you way too many clothes,” Zhongli added dryly. 

Venti giggled, his voice as playful as a breeze tugging on a child’s kite. Think of every smile and every frown and every tear , he said. Think of everything you’ve seen and done. Is all of that worth giving up? Just to spare yourself this pain?

Her first response was yes; a thousand times, yes . It felt as if something had been carved from her, something that she had given up and would never get back. Missing them, the first two people that loved her for who she was—Nahida, not an archon, not a god—was like missing a limb. 

Missing them reminded her of how much she missed Tighnari and Cyno, who had died so many years before. Of their friend group, they’d all expected Cyno to go first but had been unpleasantly surprised when Collei brought word that it had, in fact, been Tighnari. He was buried deep in the forest, beneath the roots of a tree—Nahida herself had parted them to make space for him, had curled the roots around him like a protective nest. 

A few years later, it had been Cyno. None of them had expected him to outlive Tighnari for long, but as ever he stayed true to his course. He’d lived with them, unable to bear the emptiness of his house, until Alhaitham came home from the Akademiya one day to deliver the news that he’d received—General Mahamatra Cyno had been killed in the line of duty. 

So, Nahida had known grief. She thought she had known it when Dunyarzad had nearly died during that fateful samsara, but she tasted true grief for the first time as she laid her “uncles”, her “second mother” and “second father” to rest. They hadn’t been very old, either—or so many said when they offered their condolences. 

Such a tragedy, that they died so young. 

This grief now, that she felt in the dried-up remains of what had once been the family garden that Kaveh had insisted they all work on together—despite the fact that she was the Dendro Archon and could make plants grow on a whim—felt like an ocean compared to a puddle. 

They’d died so young, in the grand scheme of things. Nahida herself was…well, she only had 500 years of memories. How old she truly was, she couldn’t say—not even Irminsul seemed to know. 

500 years and yet she still had the body of a small child; how many more years until she resembled an adult? Would she continue to age after that? Or would she stop aging as Xiao, as Zhongli, as Neuvillette had stopped? 

Yet when Alhaitham had died, he hadn’t even been a fifth of that. 

How many years was it? Venti asked kindly. How many years with them did you have? Forty? Fifty? Sixty? All of those years of memories, good and bad. Can you weigh that against the grief you feel now?

Nahida shook and Zhongli’s arms tightened around her. “Barbatos,” he said, his voice deep like rockfall. 

It was just as well that Zhongli had stopped him, because Nahida didn’t know how to feel about realizing that Venti was correct. 

How could she bear to give up even a single memory of them, even if it meant that she was spared this awful agony of her grief?

Somehow, Nahida was unsurprised to find Xiao standing in the middle of that desiccated little garden, a bucket of water in his hands. Though he had to have heard her moving around, had to know that she was coming out to the garden, he still gave a little hop when he caught sight of her as if surprised. The water in his bucket sloshed out and formed a puddle at his feet. 

“What are you doing?” she asked. 

Xiao shifted his weight from foot to foot. They’d never talked, partially because he never knew how to react to her—another archon who was not his master, another archon from a country that was not his own, the “daughter” of someone that had once assumed that he was Venti’s brother or Zhongli’s child or both—and partially because that was just the way that Xiao was. He was a nervous, bird-like creature in any situation other than combat. 

So it wasn’t much of a surprise to her that he didn’t exactly answer her. He bobbed his head in a respectful bow, dipped his hand into the bucket of water, and returned to sprinkling it over the parched earth of the garden. 

Nurturing, as Kaveh had once done to her. 

Quiet acts of service, as Alhaitham had once done to show his love. 

“Does the pain ever go away?” she asked instead. 

Xiao twisted his head to look at her, his eyes glittering like an owl’s in the light of the moon. He set down his bucket and reached into a pocket. When he approached, it was in that wary, birdlike walk that had once made her laugh. Now, humor seemed locked behind a glass wall. She wondered if she’d ever laugh again. 

If she ever could . 

He held out a hand and she cupped both of hers under it and three small stones tumbled out. The largest was only as long as her pointer finger. 

“My lord says that there was once an eruption here, a long time ago,” Xiao said in a voice that was always surprisingly low and raspy for someone so tiny. “Long before even him. It covered the land and then was buried, but sometimes you can still find…pieces of it.” 

Nahida ran her fingers over the small stones. By some undefinable way, she could tell that it sang of home , of Sumeru, but little else—she was Dendro, not Geo, after all. They were jagged, as if they had been broken apart recently—perhaps whenever Xiao had found them, whenever that may have been—and Nahida could feel the edges against her soft skin. She looked back up at Xiao. 

“My lord says that there is a type that Natlan is known for,” Xiao added awkwardly. “Sharp as glass. Good for weapons. But…” he shifted, then bobbed his head as if gesturing toward the rocks in her hands. “I find rocks as I go. I took these because…” he shook his head, and Nahida knew that he was referring to Alhaitham, and his history with Alhaitham’s parents. “I keep them in my pocket. With enough rocks, with enough time, they wear down until they are smooth.” He cleared his throat. “They are still rocks. They will never not be rocks. But with time, they are easier to hold.” 

Grief, Nahida realized. He was talking about grief. 

“Grief will always be grief,” Xiao added in echo of her thoughts, clearing his throat and shifting from foot to foot like a nervous hawk. “But over time, the edges are…no longer sharp enough to cut.” 

She handed the rocks back to him and he tucked them back into his pocket. “Thank you,” she said. 

“It is not…reassuring,” Xiao said awkwardly. “I apologize.” 

Nahida shook her head. “I don’t know that anything would reassure me now, or comfort me.” 

“Where are you going?” Xiao asked when she turned toward the gate. 

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just…need some air. It’s early enough that I might not see anyone out.” 

Xiao made a low, birdlike noise in his throat. “May I…?” When she turned to look back at him, he shifted into his bird-shape. 

The plush toy she had gotten so many decades ago in her first trip to Liyue was almost insulting, now that she was able to see him up close. 

She climbed aboard his broad back and held on as he took to the air. Wind currents that shouldn’t be there lifted them through the boughs of the Divine Tree until they broke through the canopy and into the midnight air. Xiao spread his broad wings into a glide and the wind obliged. 

“Now what?” she asked no one in particular. 

Xiao tilted his head to look back at her with a single golden eye. He said nothing and continued to glide. In the distance, golden lights of campfires and braziers shone brightly against the deep emeralds and indigoes of the night. As high up as they were, circling high above the boughs of the Divine Tree in lazy spirals, spinocrocodiles and sumpterbeasts many times her size were smaller than ants. 

“What else is there?” she asked, not asking an answer. 

I’ve asked myself that question many times , Xiao said in that same wordless, voiceless, shapeless voice that Venti had used. 

“Did you ever find an answer?” Nahida wanted to know. 

Xiao didn’t answer. He tilted his great wings and extended their spiral. Perhaps that was its own answer. 

“How do you…” she didn’t know how to ask, didn’t even know what she wanted to ask. 

I had a purpose , Xiao said. Rex Lapis had a need for me . 

“I have no purpose,” Nahida said. “I never…” she tried not to grip Xiao’s feathers too hard as she bowed her head forward. So high up, so far from even the boughs of the Divine Tree, she felt disconnected from everything. It wasn’t…a bad feeling, just a strange one. 

She felt dizzy. 

“I’ve grieved before,” Nahida said into the wind. “But…this doesn’t feel like grief.” 

Xiao said nothing, but she knew that he was listening. 

“It feels like I’ll wake up at any point and it will all have been an awful dream,” Nahida said, tears welling up in her eyes. 

Below them, the glowing flowers of Vanarana glowed brighter and Xiao’s head turned toward it the same way that a wild animal might turn to look at sudden movement to determine if it was a threat or not. She felt rather than heard the singing of the Aranara, comfort and coaxing and an echo of a grief that they didn’t quite understand. 

She bowed her head forward and buried her face in the thick ruff of feathers at the base of Xiao’s neck. Like Venti, he smelled like windswept cliffs though instead of apples and cecilia, the bitter smell of sulfur clung to him from his karmic curse, interspersed like stars in the night sky with the smell of the cool, thin air found in the highest peaks he favored. The heavy smell of shallow water, of rich earth, of vegetation from his post at the inn found in the middle of a marsh where his presence had become an urban legend.

“I just…want them back,” Nahida said into Xiao’s feathers. “I would give anything to bring them back.” 

I…understand , Xiao said awkwardly. He tilted his wings and rolling hills gave way to winding rivers.

Of course he would. He was the last of Zhongli’s yaksha, one of the few remaining adepti of Liyue. He and Zhongli had seen much loss in the course of their long life. How could Nahida even begin to compare? She’d lost the two people that had meant more to her than anything—that she had loved more than she had ever thought she was capable of. 

But Xiao…he was the last of the great yaksha of Liyue, had himself laid to rest some of his brethren who were like kin to him. He’d witnessed the Archon War, the rise and fall of Rex Lapis, however false his “death” had been. How many funerals had he presided over? How many companions had he entrusted to the earth, lit incense for, prayed for? 

How many nights was he unable to sleep and so took to the loneliest cliffs of Liyue to sing his echoing songs of grief?

And Xiao was young , or so she was led to believe. “Only” 2,000 years old. 

Compared to him, she was barely a child and how could a child understand timeless grief? 

The glowing lights of Vanarana disappeared beneath a bank of clouds, silver and gray and the same dusty blue-green as the tops of Xiao’s wings when they were colored by the silver light of the moon. The clouds rolled and something emerged from them. 

My lord, Xiao said. 

Through her tears, the great form that Zhongli often called his “Exuvia” looked no different than the great roots of the Divine Tree, broken by the golden lights of the city built beneath and around it. Xiao , Zhongli said back in a voice like the great rumble of a millstone. He said nothing more, moving sinuously through the clouds like needle and thread through cloth. 

Nahida buried her face in Xiao’s feathers again. Below her and all around her, even though her aspect was dendro not anemo, she felt the call of her land, of Sumeru. Though she was not anemo, every breeze that ruffled every blade of grass and every branch of every tree was her. 

Though she was not geo, the earth itself sang to her; every cliff face and every pebble and every speck of dust and grain of sand from the forest to the desert knew her. 

Though she was not hydro, the waters knew her, from the rivers to the marshes to the swamps to the ponds and the rain.

She had once thought of it as “home”, as if Sumeru itself sang to her and welcomed her, but what did Sumeru need of an archon? A seedling that thought itself as great and powerful as the Divine Tree? 

No, “home” was a little house on the Divine Tree, up spiral walkways that the City was forever struggling to keep free of moss. “Home” was a hug from the Light of Kshahrewar, smeared in work dust and charcoal, from her mother Kaveh who kissed her cheeks until she laughed and tried to wiggle away. “Home” was sitting with the Grand Sage Alhaitham in his office, in his study, or with her father Alhaitham on the divan, learning the pronunciation of words in obscure languages, learning the various sign languages of Teyvat, debating points in literature or journals of linguistics, biology, whatever they mutually agreed to read together. 

“Home” was gone, the last of it entrusted to the earth in a quiet plot of land owned by Alhaitham’s paternal family. 

Nahida clung to Xiao’s feathers and cried. 

For the first time, seeing Aether and Lumine did not make Nahida smile. 

Their golden wings reminded her of golden hair, of watching her parents dance a waltz from Fontaine in their living room. The greenish light had made Alhaitham’s silver hair seem mossy but somehow had only made Kaveh’s hair shine even more golden. As he aged, as silver consumed what was once gold, he called it “electrum”. 

Eventually, Alhaitham told him that they matched, Alhaitham with his snow-white hair, Kaveh with his silver hair, and Nahida with white and silver and green. 

Aether and Lumine both had pale blonde hair, too light to be properly golden like Kaveh’s had been, too dark to be properly silver like Alhaitham’s had been. Still, it hurt to see them, as if someone had dug a knife into her chest and twisted. 

As soon as she saw them, she turned from them and Xiao met her in the back garden while Zhongli…well, Zhongli must have explained what had happened or had sent them away because she didn’t see them again. Comfort was not in Xiao’s nature, though kindness was, and he stood vigil over her as she cried, bearing silent witness to her grief. 

He didn’t want to be there. Not that he didn’t care, but she wasn’t “his”. She wasn’t of Liyue, someone who he had taken a sacred oath (in his mind) to protect. She was an archon, even if Sumeru didn’t want her, even if she had the body of a child, so who was he to try to protect someone like her? 

Xiao was only there for his lord, and only cared for her because his lord cared for her. It seemed heartless, but it was the way he was. Knowing that he stayed out of love and loyalty, not even to her, actually…was one of the few things that didn’t hurt. 

He stayed for Zhongli and yet he still chose to stand over her and guard her tears as she sobbed in the back garden whose earth still cried out, parched and desiccated, all life leached out of it the moment Alhaitham had breathed his last. 

It was fortunate that archons didn’t need to eat or sleep or she would have wasted away, as they had been afraid that Cyno and Kaveh would do when Tighnari had died, as they had been afraid that Alhaitham would do when Kaveh had died. 

Venti and Zhongli didn’t need to look at her with worry because there was nothing to worry about. Lack of food would not affect her, nor would sleepless nights, or mornings spent with Xiao in the highest boughs of the Divine Tree, staring as the stars abandoned the sky, unable to shine enough to rival the brilliance of the sun. 

She sat up and watched the light of the rising sun overcome the darkness of night, like the old night god of the desert was said to pull back the hems of her robe to give way to the sun. Around her, the leaves of the Divine Tree whispered songs that the wind brought to it and delighted in the warmth of the sun. 

Behind her, Xiao lifted his head from where he had been preening his wing. The Amurta researchers had noticed the presence of an enormous bird lately, and had been driving themselves mad trying to find evidence of him. It was the only sign that Nahida had ever seen of Xiao having a streak of mischief.

Perhaps finally, after so many thousands of years at Zhongli’s side, he had learned to become a menace to mortals. 

He chuffed, a wordless question in a forgotten language. 

“I need to go,” Nahida said. 

Xiao chuffed again. He fluttered his wings to resettle his feathers. 

“You don’t need to come with me,” Nahida told him. 

He chuffed at her a third time, more of a scoff. 

Turning, she stroked his wing and then climbed on his back. “Thank you,” she said and he fluffed his feathers irritably. She patted his shoulder until he turned in the direction she wanted. “That way.” 

In days of old, in a faraway land, the Golden-Winged King was one of the undisputed kings of the skies. It was said that only the wind could catch him. 

But those were tall tales, and passengers like Nahida would have fallen off in a moment. 

Xiao beat his wings and the wind followed his guide, smelling like sulfur and lonely cliffs and cecilias and sweet apples. Soon, nestled among cliffs and trees and frothing waterfalls, the Palace of Alcazarzaray appeared as if from a dream. In a series of heart-stopping swoops and dives that once upon a time would have delighted Nahida and terrified Kaveh, Xiao came to land in the central courtyard. 

Climbing down from Xiao’s back, Nahida looked up at her mother’s legacy, the thing that everyone said was Kaveh’s magnum opus. 

“This is what Kaveh was most famous for building,” Nahida told Xiao in a small voice. The birds and animals had been scared into silence by Xiao’s flight, so the area seemed unnaturally quiet, with only the sound of water filling the air. “When things didn’t turn out, he poured his own money into it to complete the building he had envisioned. He fell into debt millions of mora deep. He sold his house, nearly everything he owned. For a time, he was homeless and slept in the tavern where no one could see him.” 

Comfort was not in Xiao’s character but kindness was. He allowed her to put her hand on his wing as if to steady herself, and turned to look at her with a single wild, golden eye. It is…beautiful . 

“When he got older, he got sicker,” Nahida said softly. “He began to forget things. The doctors at Bimarstan said that he had a sickness of the brain that made it difficult for him to remember things. Over time, he would continue to lose his memory. He would become lost in the fog of his own mind.”

Xiao was silent but she could feel the way he shuddered beneath her hand. 

“Some days he’d forget us,” Nahida said softly. “Some days he’d remember, as if his memory was a switch to be turned on and off. Most of the time, he’d stare off into space. But one day he told me about how beautiful the Palace looked in the morning.” She swallowed hard, her grief digging thorns and bramble into her throat as if to choke her. “It was so vivid. How the stones changed color in the light, the sounds of the birds, the waterfall, the smell of the padisarahs he had planted at the end of the project, for which he had skipped five meals for.” 

Nahida felt Xiao crane his head to look around. There were no more padisarahs; Lord Sangemah Bay had not liked the way they made her sneeze. 

She felt sobs squeeze her lungs, felt her grief clench tighter in her throat. A tear fell and the plants around them rippled. Padisarahs exploded in the terraces, forcing out the flowers of foreign lands that had no place in the beautiful Palace that her mother had so lovingly created. 

Xiao gave a little hop of surprise, his feathers rustling. Anemo curled over the hand that touched him, a little breeze as playful as a kite. She thought that it was meant to be comforting. 

Another tear fell and the trees groaned. She tried not to dig her fingers into Xiao’s feathers as her grief threatened to swallow her whole. “And he looked at me . He actually saw me . And he smiled and he said, ‘but all of the beauty of the Palace is nothing compared to my husband and most precious daughter’.” 

She didn’t tell Xiao, but they were the last words he told her. After that, he was lost in his own mind again and one day, Alhaitham gently stroked her face until she opened her eyes. He had signed simply, died . 

Xiao made a low noise in his throat. What stone? He asked. 

“Not from the Palace,” Nahida said immediately, sure in a way that she could never explain. “I will not…defile it.” 

Making a sound that was more of a feline hiss than a sound she’d expect from a bird, even a peng , Xiao turned his crested head on his long neck toward the nearest terrace. The explosion of padisarahs had usurped the other flowers, had thrown about the dirt they had been planted in. He dipped his golden beak into the mess and when he turned back toward her, walking with steps she’d find adorable if her grief wasn’t slowly suffocating her, he was holding something. 

As soon as she touched it, as it thumped into her hand, she knew that it wasn’t something from Sumeru but something crafted by human hands—some kind of scraps from a construction project, though if it was the one that crafted the Palace into being or another renovation project, Nahida wouldn’t be able to tell. 

Still…

She closed her hand over its jagged edges and held it to her chest. Xiao offered her his wing and she tucked herself under it like a little chick. 

Then she tucked it away and climbed on his back once more. They crested the high wall of the dell in which the Palace sat in quiet repose just as the first light of dawn began to hit it and the many servants that lived there began to stir. Or perhaps they had been awake already and had simply stood aside and watched. 

Nahida found that she didn’t care. She tapped Xiao’s shoulder until he turned the way she wanted and watched as the world slipped beneath them. 

When they both returned, Zhongli said nothing of their absence. He brushed sand from Xiao’s hair and rubbed dust from Nahida’s cheek and set out food for them both, even though none of them really needed to eat. 

After lunch, Xiao and Zhongli exchanged looks. Bobbing his head in a nod not unlike the egrets that picked their way through the rivers and creeks around the city, Xiao took their plates into the kitchen. 

“Nahida?” Zhongli asked in an achingly gentle voice. “A word?” 

She swallowed and took the hand that he held out to her. Her hand was tiny in his, the way that it had once been tiny in Alhaitham’s and Kaveh’s as they swung her between them. 

Zhongli led her to the study, where she had tried to avoid going ever since Kaveh had passed. Everywhere in that room, more so than anywhere else in the house, there had been three seats, three spots for three people. “Fuck anyone else that visits, I guess,” Kaveh had said the day that they’d rearranged everything to officially make space for Nahida and her studies. 

Since Kaveh had passed, there were only two; now there was only one. 

Nahida simply had seen no point in entering the room at all. 

Now Zhongli gently led her through the doorway into a room where she and Alhaitham and Kaveh had once spent much of their time. She and Alhaitham would practice languages, or read quietly with each other while Kaveh would draw or work on models or his projects. Sometimes Nahida would help him, when an additional set of hands, or simply smaller hands, would be beneficial; mostly she did her own reading, leaning quietly against Alhaitham’s side. 

He squeezed her hand reassuringly and led her to a wooden chest that had been placed in the middle of the room. It looked like a steamer trunk, but no steamer trunk was fastened with bronze hinges shaped to look like the heart-shaped-leaf motifs that her power often formed. No steamer trunk was painstakingly stained or painted green, as green as the mossy trees of Apam Woods. The round handles on either side were formed to look like twisted vines; the clasps—two functional and one decorative—resembled the red and gold and green earrings that Kaveh had once worn, like the green glass structures of Alhaitham’s chisel light mirrors. 

Nahida looked up at Zhongli who squeezed her hand again and pushed her gently toward the chest. 

Swallowing the lump in her throat, the choking thistle of her grief, she thumbed open the clasps. The lid slid open smoothly, revealing a message carved and chased in gold on the inside of the lid:

May our daughter Nahida live a peaceful life . 

“When?” Nahida asked in a cracked whisper. 

Zhongli took a knee next to her. “After the doctors at Bimarstan warned Kaveh of his memory,” he said. “He locked himself in his room.” 

She remembered. She and Alhaitham had been so worried. 

She’d been so worried. Alhaitham had slept, without complaint for his aching bones, on the divan. Then Kaveh had returned as if nothing had happened and Nahida had been too scared to ask.

“They made as much of it as they could,” Zhongli said, reassuring and heartbreaking all at once. “But they were not artisans that had honed their craft for decades. It was only recently finished; your father would settle for nothing less than perfection.” 

With a shaking hand, she touched the golden letters, lingering over the “our”—the most important word there. Her hand shook and tears blurred her vision. She fiercely stomped it down, gripped her powers with an iron grip. She refused to accidentally ruin such a beautiful gift. 

“Look inside,” Zhongli urged gently. 

Nahida touched the golden letters again, swallowed, and looked down. It was mostly empty, save for a large wooden box that had seen better days and a leather satchel that looked intimidatingly formal. 

“The box,” Zhongli told her. “The other…it can wait.” 

Nahida eased the box out and placed it on the ground, kneeling beside it. It was a simple thing with hinges and edges that had seen better days. The wood beneath her hands told her of the high, quiet cliffs of Liyue, not Sumeru. A symbol that Nahida didn’t recognize was carved into the wood on the top but Zhongli quietly said, “Yanfei,” and she understood. 

An immortal lawyer, Alhaitham had once said of her. And an immortal pain in my ass . 

Heart in her throat, she opened the small chest. It was lined in soft silk flower silk in the Liyuen style and filled with folded pieces of paper. At the top was a small packet sealed in a green ribbon with a note that said in faded ink, read first . 

Nahida pulled it out and tugged the ribbon off. The parchment had formed thick creases as it was folded, but whoever had written the letter—and whoever had folded it—had been careful to not obscure the writing. Three of the edges were sharp but the last edge was jagged and feathery, as if it had been ripped out of a book. 

She pressed it open and saw Alhaitham’s familiar handwriting. 

Lord Kusanali , it said at the top. Then it was crossed out in two lines, as if Alhaitham had first opted to open the letter with simply “Kusanali” but changed his mind and crossed that out as well. 

Then it said Nahida , but that was crossed out. There was a thick drop of ink at the end of her name, as if Alhaitham had rested his pen there and the ink had soaked into the paper. 

He seemed to have decided on My Daughter , and Nahida’s throat closed. She traced the words, faded with time, and tried not to clench her hands too tightly in the aged paper. 

My Daughter , the letter read. 

Right now, you and Kaveh are on the luohan bed, taking a nap. Yanwang Dijun’s plush is draped over your shoulders and you’re both holding the irreverent plush of The Golden-Winged King. It is the last day of our first trip to Liyue. 

She felt a tear slide down her face and she yanked the precious letter away so that her grief wouldn’t ruin it. But that first tear spawned more and her eyes became clouded. 

Zhongli gathered her into his arms once more and she wiggled until she could sit against him but still read the letter. If only her eyes cleared so that she could see. 

Though she didn’t have the perfect cor lapis memory of Zhongli, the moment hadn’t been that long ago in her mind. She remembered it perfectly. 

She had woken up, tucked against Kaveh’s side just as Alhaitham had described. He had been sitting at the tea table, legs folded primly in the Liyuen style, as he read. His headphones had been off, placed on the table in front of him, and he had exuded the lazy contentment of a cat napping in a sunbeam. 

Though he couldn’t hear her, he seemed to somehow know that she was awake and tucked a finger into his book so that he could look up at her. Had he already written the letter she now held in her hands? Or was it yet to be written? 

He had slipped a bookmark into his book—cuihua wood carved in the shape of sandbearer leaves, she recalled, something that he and Zhongli had seemed perplexed by—and had stood. Though he couldn’t hear, his bare feet were quiet on the wooden floors as he walked over. 

Sleep , he had signed to her. Then he had cupped her cheek in one of his large hands and had pressed a soft kiss to her forehead. 

And she had slept again, tucked warm and safe against Kaveh’s side. 

I do not know what the future will bring, an Alhaitham of the past said in the letter, but I hope that we all had a long life together and that you know the truth now. Once you had said that you were not my family, but I told you that you were wrong. I do not believe you understood what I was telling you; do you know the answer now?

There was another dot of ink on the parchment, as if Alhaitham had rested his pen there, and she thumbed the mark with a shaking hand. She swallowed. Had he watched them, with that soft look that he had sometimes worn in the later years of his life? 

My archon, who is now somehow my daughter, do you now know the pain of your immoral life? Do you understand the grief that Zhongli- daren feels when he looks at me and instead sees my parents? 

I had never desired immortality; it had simply felt unnatural. Yet as I look at you and know the pain that you will face in only a few decades, I wonder if it is something that I should work for. Would I still be “me” if I did, though?

Another dot of ink that slid into a slight, thoughtful curl. 

I wish that I could spare you that pain, Nahida , Alhaitham said. Then, bizarrely, I will speak with Zhongli . 

At the very bottom of the sheet, Alhaitham wrote, I love you . 

She flipped the paper over, hoping for more but paused. Printed on the other side, in the crisp letters of a printed book, was another message, one that hadn’t been for her: This book is dedicated to my daughter: I believe in you, I cherish you, and I will love you every second of my life . 

Below it, in Alhaitham’s handwriting, it simply said, I thought it was fitting . 

Realization struck Nahida and her throat tightened again. When Alhaitham had written the letter, he had been reading; the paper he used to write it, was from the book in his hands . 

How many times had he and Kaveh bickered about it? Argued about the pros and cons of hardcopy books? Alhaitham liked his sensory things—the smell of the glue in the book, of the paper, of the cover. He liked the feel of it in his hand, the feel of the edges of the pages as he turned them. 

The book that Alhaitham had been reading was one of his favorites. Kaveh had bought it for him, knowing that he liked the book itself, but he’d bought it in a style popular in Mondstadt where he bought the bound pages separately and took it to a bookbinder to customize the cover. Nahida could see it in her mind’s eye—deep green, because Kaveh had mistakenly thought that it was Alhaitham’s favorite color, gold stamps, with the diamond-shaped motifs of his chisel light mirror at the corners and bands of braided vines on the spine.

He’d somehow lost some of the pages but had been vague about it. Kaveh had been loudly angry but not truly upset. 

Nahida knew where the pages went; she held them in her hands, ripped out of a book. 

( It’s only a thing , Kaveh , Alhaitham had said, incapable of love on its own , and Kaveh had replied, but its existence is its own form of love, is it not? Now Nahida knew why Alhaitham had then responded, and its destruction is its own form of love . Kaveh had thrown his hands helplessly into the air, but he hadn’t really been too upset. 

Perhaps at some point Alhaitham had told him what had happened to that mysterious missing page.)

“He and I corresponded after you left Liyue,” Zhongli said quietly. He didn’t rock her, the way Kaveh would have, or stroke her hair or back the way Alhaitham would have. 

In some ways, that was for the best. She thought that if he did, her heart really would have shattered. 

“Even that long ago, he wanted to prepare,” Zhongli said. “I’m sorry that it…does not bring you comfort to know.” 

Nahida tucked her head into his chest and cried. 

It took another day for her to go back to the study with Zhongli. After she had left, someone had closed that precious chest and tucked it aside where it wouldn’t be in the way. She pulled it out and ran her fingers over the clasps, then over the golden letters on the inside of the lid. 

May our daughter Nahida live a peaceful life . 

The satchel was stamped with Yanfei’s seal and contained, unsurprisingly, legal paperwork. These were all copies; the originals were in Yanfei’s possession. 

Nahida skimmed the information, unsure that she was able to look too much into it. After Kaveh’s death, his assets went to Alhaitham; after Alhaitham’s death, it all went to Nahida. Signed by Kaveh, signed by Alhaitham. Witnessed by Adeptus Xiao, The Conqueror of Demons, The Vigilant Yaksha, the…(his full name and titles, half written in the common script of Teyvat, half written in the ancient seal-script of the adepti, took up several lines). Witnessed by Zhongli, consultant at Wangsheng- tang . Notarized by Ganyu. 

Written by Zhongli and Yanfei. 

When Nahida pushed the papers away, Zhongli gathered them up and returned them to their satchel, then tucked the satchel back into the chest. “Only for now,” he assured her. “Until you are able to decide what you would like to do.” 

What would she like to do?

She would like to curl up with Alhaitham and read some obscure tome. She would like to sit beside Kaveh in the bed that he would die in, listening to the same stories he told over and over again of the Palace, of the many buildings he’d designed, of the life he lived and the love he had for Alhaitham (and, if he remembered her, his love for his beautiful, darling daughter). 

She would like to be in the garden, planting vegetables and flowers like a mortal and drawing water to water them, and watching them grow, and pulling weeds while Kaveh sat in a cushioned chair and watched, because his knees were too bad to kneel in the dirt with her. 

She would like to ride on Alhaitham’s shoulders again, would like to be swung between them again, would like to hold Kaveh’s hand while Alhaitham haggled with the merchants in the bazaar. 

She would like to feel warm and loved in Kaveh’s arms, she would like to feel safe and treasured in Alhaitham’s, and safer than she’d ever felt when they stood in front of her. 

She would trade her gnosis again a thousand, a million times over again, would trade everything she had, every second of her immortal life just to have them back again. 

Venti left. 

He was the wind; he couldn’t be pinned down, needed to be able to wander like he needed to breathe. 

Nahida was surprised at how much it didn’t hurt to say goodbye to him. She would miss him, as she always missed him when they parted ways, but she was surprised that she didn’t feel particularly abandoned by him. 

“I’ll write,” he offered. 

“Don’t bother,” Nahida said, thinking back to the way that Alhaitham used to roll his eyes the very few times Venti had actually written them a letter. One had been a dirty limerick on the back of a stained invoice from The Angel’s Share, located somewhere in Mondstadt. Another had been on the back of a printed picture taken, or so Venti later explained, from a fancier model of kamera. It was blurry, out of focus, and smudged as if the person taking the picture (perhaps Venti), had tripped while it was taken so not nothing of what it was supposed to depict was clear. The letter, if it could be called that, was written on the back: ehehe…oops. I’m a bard, not a kamera taker!  

(Alhaitham had scoffed and after reading it, Kaveh had muttered, “you’re an alcoholic, is what you are.” To which Alhaitham had replied, “pot, meet kettle.” He’d slept on the divan or in his office at the Akademiya for a week and insisted to Nahida with a hooked smile that it was the truth and Kaveh was just sensitive. 

She found out several years later that Alhaitiham had apologized after he let Kaveh cool down and he’d been invited back after spending the night in his office, but he’d insisted on completing his entire sentence.) 

(None of them could figure out why Venti had sent it either. They kept it, only because it was almost as funny as it was baffling, and learned several months later when they visited Liyue again that Zhongli had also received a picture and was also perplexed by it. It was just as bad, just as blurry and unclear, but a smudge of white and teal in one corner made them think that a part of Venti himself had been in the picture.)

“Good choice,” Zhongli said from where he stood, arms crossed over his chest as he leaned against the wall. “His letters are awful,” he added as if Nahida wasn’t already aware—as if he didn’t know that Nahida was already aware. 

Venti feigned insult, standing on his toes, puffing his chest out, and putting his hand over his heart. “Gasp! How dare you, yeye .” If Zhongli was one to roll his eyes, Nahida knew that he would. Once Venti had heard Nahida call him by that name, he’d refused to let it go, especially when he was strutting around pretending to be insulted. “My letters are wonderful . Right, Xiao?” 

Xiao, who had also appeared like Zhongli’s strangely small shadow, blinked and then walked away. 

“Betrayal!” Venti wailed, and several passers-by stopped to stare. He gathered Nahida’s hands in both of his. His smile faded. “I’m…”

“Don’t be sorry,” Nahida said, squeezing his hands gently. His hands bore calluses from archery and playing his lyre but hers were smooth and soft. 

“If you won’t let me write, I’ll visit,” Venti suggested. 

Nahida shrugged. “Go where the wind blows,” she told him. “Eventually the breeze returns to touch the boughs of even the smallest tree.” 

Venti laughed with delight and bent to hug her. In the nearly seventy years since they’d first met, Nahida hadn’t grown much taller so he still needed to stoop to wrap his arms around her, and kiss her cheek affectionately, the way that was traditional in Fontaine. 

“I’ll be back,” he promised. 

“That sounds like a threat,” Zhongli quipped. 

Venti laughed, kissed her cheek again and blew a kiss at Zhongli who, in a surprising act of playfulness, pretended to swat it out of the air like a fly. Laughing, Venti summoned his lyre from the folds of his mantle, and began walking away, humming under his breath. 

That night, Nahida found Xiao in the back garden, watering the garden once more. “You need to leave too, don’t you?” 

Xiao didn’t answer. 

“Geo is as steady as the earth,” Nahida said. “Dendro sets down roots as soon as they can. Anemo…” 

“Not all seeds set down roots,” Xiao said awkwardly. “Some blow with the wind until…” He made a low clicking sound of displeasure. “Dandelions.” 

Nahida hummed. “Some drift on the wind until they find somewhere favorable to land,” she suggested. “Some never find a place to call home. I don’t think that’s me.” 

“You don’t need to stay,” Xiao told her. “Not all the time.” 

“What else would I do?” Nahida asked and it seemed that Xiao didn’t have an answer for her because he fell silent again, sprinkling water on the dirt in the garden that wasn’t quite so desiccated after his tender care. 

“I have been away for too long,” Xiao muttered. 

He stiffened, as he always did, when she hugged him. But, like Alhaitham had before him, he slowly relaxed…just a little…and patted her head. “Thank you.”

The next morning, she and Zhongli saw him off. It was surprisingly anticlimactic. They climbed to the Sanctuary of Surasthana, then higher into the highest branches of the Divine Tree. The Tree groaned as Nahida directed one of its branches higher than the rest, flattened it at the top so that they could all sit and watch the sunrise. 

Then Xiao bowed to Zhongli and awkwardly bowed to Nahida. He knew would never demand that respect from him, yet he still chose to bow to her sometimes and Nahida never knew how to thank him for it or if she should at all. 

Then he was gone, disappearing in a burst of anemo-teal as soon as his mask was settled over his face. 

“I will stay as long as you need me to,” Zhongli told her, looking out over the burning line of the sun as it woke the land. 

“Did…” Nahida found that she couldn’t even say his name, as if her lips and tongue had forgotten the shape of it. “Did he ask you to?”

Zhongli hummed. “He did,” he agreed. “But I would have offered anyway.” 

She wondered if he felt disconnected from the earth, sitting so high above the nearest stone. Was it disorienting for him? Or was he so old that it didn’t seem strange to him anymore? 

“He…” Zhongli hesitated. “He was worried for you, after Kaveh.”

“He shouldn’t have worried,” Nahida said, her tongue heavy as she struggled to fight back her tears. 

“He loves you,” Zhongli said gently. “Of course he worried for you.” 

Nahida swallowed. “He’s dead,” she said, and felt her heart break when she said it out loud. 

“He is,” Zhongli agreed. “But that doesn’t mean that he’ll ever stop loving you.” 

“I don’t know if I believe in reincarnation,” Nahida said. Not anymore. Not when the thought of it not being true is so painful. She swallowed. “Or spirits, or ghosts.”

Zhongli shrugged and said nothing. She knew that he wasn’t insulted and honestly, wasn’t sure if he believed in such things either despite it being a common belief in Liyue. Spirits and demons existed—that was the purpose of his ancient contracts with his yaksha, after all, and the reason that Liyue was so well known for their exorcists, even if the concept of it baffled outsiders. In all his years, he’d fought gods and demons, tangible and not. 

In all his years, she’s sure he’d experienced doubt before. 

“I’m sorry,” she said. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Zhongli told her kindly. “Your beliefs are your own.” 

She kicked her legs and looked out over the land. 

A few members of the Corps of Thirty stood on the platform before the Sanctuary of Surasthana as they climbed down. In front of them was a woman in Akademiya robes. 

“You are trespassing,” the woman said. 

“Hardly,” Zhongli replied simply. Though his vessel appeared younger than the one he’d worn when she first met him, his low voice and golden eyes remained the same. It unnerved some people, and Nahida watched the woman blink at him for a moment. 

“You will be arrested and charged,” the woman insisted. 

“On whose authority?” Zhongli asked. 

The woman seemed surprised to be questioned so boldly. She blinked. Nahida wondered if she was new—she knew from Alhaitham’s stories that Akademiya scholars’ favorite questions always started with ‘why?’

Why can’t you give me an exception?

Why can’t I study forbidden topics? 

Why do you think you have any authority over me?

Why would you try to order me around?

Scholars are forever questioning things , Alhaitham had said more than once, disgust plain in his voice. Especially authority.

“On the authority of the Grand Sage,” the woman said. 

“Oh,” Zhongli said mildly, like the menace he was. 

The woman bristled. “What do you mean, ‘oh’?” 

Zhongli shrugged. “I was simply surprised that the Grand Sage would believe that she has any authority over the Divine Tree, or the area around the Sanctuary of Surasthana,” he said simply. “Which is the home of the Dendro Archon. Or has that changed?” 

Nahida reached into her pocket and found the mourning stones that she and Xiao had collected. Their edges dug into her palms and she suddenly knew who the woman was. 

“The Dendro Archon is dead,” Grand Sage Sudabeh said flatly. “It is not her property any longer, and the decision of the previous Grand Sage to have this…” her lips curled as she looked at the outer walls of the Sanctuary. “... eyesore remain unchanged has been overturned.” 

Nahida squeezed her hand around the rocks in her pocket. She hadn’t realized that Alhaitham had protected it. Her prison, her shelter, the area that Kaveh had redesigned to give her a space for herself if she ever wanted one. 

(She hadn’t. She’d always wanted to be with them. But they’d all stayed there several times, when Alhaitham and Kaveh’s house was being renovated or fixed and the thought of it being altered in any way filled her with a rage that she’d never felt before.) 

“I had not realized that Grand Sage Alhaitham had devised such protections for it,” Nahida said, fighting to keep her voice level. It hurt like a wind of razor blades cutting into her skin, like the burn of the coldest frost, to even say his name so soon after he left her, but it hurt even more to even consider what this woman was trying to do. She clenched her hand so tightly around the stones in her pocket that they dug into her skin but nothing physical could hurt her as much as her grief. “Nevertheless, they are superfluous—the Sanctuary of Surasthana has always belonged to Kusanali and it is hers to do with as she pleases.” 

Grand Sage Sudabeh frowned down at her. “Sumeru has no need for an archon,” she said. “Nor does the rest of the world. Symbols like the Sanctuary of Surasthana are antiquated and represent a world that no longer exists. As it is, it is a waste of space. There is no room in this world for useless things.” 

Something raw and aching in Nahida snapped. Like a wound that had only slowly begun to heal being torn open again. 

(Like the time that Alhaitham had fallen so badly that bone protruded from his leg. She’d been so terrified, even though it ultimately wasn’t a life-threatening injury. She and Kaveh had waited in the waiting area of Bimarstan as if he was fighting for his life. 

When he was released, he re-injured himself not even a full week later. Nahida couldn’t remember being so angry. They’d needed to buy a new divan after it burst into new growth. Alhaitham had held her close, murmuring apologies into her hair.

“Humans are too fragile,” she’d said into his neck. “One day you’ll wither away before me.” 

“Please forgive this foolish human,” Alhaitham had whispered back, his big hands warm and soothing as he carded his fingers through her hair. 

At that time, he had still been…young. By human standards, at least. In his late thirties. It would be another sixty years until he died.

Nahida missed him so much.) 

With the open wound of her grief came the flood of anger that burned. She clung to the stones in her pocket so hard that she wondered if their sharp edges would remain carved into her forever. 

“‘A waste of space’?” she asked, breathless in her rage. 

How could this woman think that it was a waste of space? Perhaps once upon a time it had been. Perhaps it had been a waste when it served little purpose other than to be a gilded cage for a bird that hadn’t known any other life, hadn’t known that she could fight back. 

You should learn to be selfish , Alhaitham had told her once, speaking with his hands because he had been awake far too early to want to be productive. Ask for things that you want; demand that your needs be met . 

In the later years of his life, before his memory had failed so badly that he forgot her most days, Kaveh had once held her and kissed her cheek. You never ask for anything , he had said. What is it, habibti? What can we give you that would bring you joy? There must be something. Sometimes joy can be found in something small, in something tangible.

I want your love, she had said and Kaveh had laughed and had spun her around in the air even though he sometimes ached because of it. That’s easy, he had said, laughter drawing deep grooves around his eyes and face as he beamed up at her. You already have it . 

She looked at Grand Sage Sudabeh, really looked at her, and something in her snapped like a dry twig. Suddenly, she saw the Sanctuary of Surasthana through a new lens—somewhere high, higher than any other building, the highest built point in the Divine Tree. 

A place with a view over all of Sumeru, even if human eyes could not see that far. 

A place that people revered, even if Sumeru had no need for an archon to rule them. 

A place of power. 

A place that showed one’s power. 

A place that former Grand Sage Alhaitham had been denying Grand Sage Sudabeh, the senile old man. A place that the former Grand Sage Alhaitham had been denying himself . 

But Grand Sage Sudabeh knew the value of that empty husk of an eyesore and who in the City, in all of Teyvat, could stop her? 

If Nahida had thought herself angry before, she was furious now. The stones in her pocket must have carved holes into her hands but she couldn’t force her hands to loosen. Above and below and all around her, the Divine Tree responded. The deep grooves in the trunk, the fissures, the cracks in the bark, all gleamed as if washed in silver; every leaf, every patch of moss, glowed green. 

It was as if Irminsul had shaken off a coating of mud and had revealed itself to be the Divine Tree all along. 

Grand Sage Sudabeh and the Corps of Thirty stumbled backwards and fell. Lights from the Tree shone in their eyes until they had to turn away. Below and around them, the citizens of the City all cried out in shock, alarm, awe. 

Though motion was not needed for her power, Nahida let go of the rocks in her pocket and clasped her hands in front of her anyway, threading her fingers together until her palms touched. The landing they stood on shook and groaned until Zhongli held his hands out, palms down, to steady it.

Behind them, the Tree groaned and branches sprouted, first as thin as her fingers and then growing larger and larger until they were as large around as her waist. They sealed over the entrance to the Sanctuary of Surasthana. 

As quickly as it had come, the rage faded and Nahida let go of the power that made the Divine Tree glow. Zhongli also let go of his power without comment and Nahida felt a brief sense of relief; if there was damage that would render the stones unsafe, she wouldn’t be able to feel his power recede back into him like waves of the tide.

“Kusanali,” Grand Sage Sudabeh whispered. The lack of an honorific was telling, but Nahida no longer cared. 

She turned and walked past them, ignoring the way that the Corps of Thirty guards with her scrambled out of her way as if afraid to get too close to her. Zhongli followed her. 

“I lost my temper,” she whispered when the door was closed safely behind them. She stared blankly at the two remaining packages in the foyer. 

“You’re grieving,” Zhongli said simply. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Nahida climbed on one of the divans and curled up. If she closed her eyes and focused really hard, she could probably pretend that she was taking a nap there while Kaveh cooked dinner for them all. She could pretend that Alhaitham was still at the Akademiya and Kaveh still remembered her, and still sang quietly to himself as he cooked. 

When his memories began to escape him like water through a sieve, they began to worry about his safety around dangerous objects so they kept him from the kitchen. Though Alhaitham had offered to do the cooking, or wondered if they should hire someone, or wondered if they should go back to purchasing meals from the bazaar, Nahida had insisted. After all, Kaveh had taught her over the years. She knew all of his recipes, all of his favorites, all of the little things he did to each of them to make it just right for the three of them. 

Now, the house was silent. 

It was just her and Zhongli. 

She didn’t think that she could bear to stay and listen to the echoes of a house that was once filled with the sounds of her parents’ love and life. 

She didn’t think that she could bear to leave, knowing that one day someone would come through and change the walls and move the furniture and turn this house into something else.

Zhongli’s footsteps faded and then grew louder; the divan creaked as he sat down beside her. “Zhongli- daren ,” he said. “I am nearing the end of my life, which we both know is inevitable. I humbly ask that you visit Nahida. She needs someone—she will need someone to help her with this loss.” 

Nahida looked up and found Zhongli holding a letter in his hands. He was looking at her—with his perfect memory, he didn’t need to read the letter to be able to recite it back to her. 

“This is not something that I can help her with. This is not something that I can love her or hold her through,” Zhongli continued, watching her with his steady, cor lapis-colored eyes. “So I ask you to guide her through this in a way that I will not be able to.” 

In his hands was another letter. 

It was addressed to her in Alhaitham’s handwriting. The handwriting that showed off the tremble that so frustrated him in the later years of his life. It made each letter, each stroke of his pen, wobble over the page like a kitten learning how to walk. 

Trembling, Nahida took the letter in a trembling hand and unfolded it. 

Nahida , the letter began. My love. 

She stopped and squeezed her eyes shut. Zhongli offered her a handkerchief and she used it to impatiently scrub her face until she could see again. 

I don’t know what to tell you. What words can I offer? 

Do you grieve me? Does it hurt you?

Do you regret inviting yourself to my home that day? Do you regret allowing Kaveh to call you my daughter?

It was so very “Alhaitham”. 

It hurt so much. 

I don’t think that any of us realized what would happen that first day you met Kaveh, Alhaitham mused in his letter. I don’t think that any of us expected to be here, to live a long life with you as our daughter . 

Long life? 

Nahida trembled. Ninety years was not a long life. Perhaps to humans, but not to her. 

He hadn’t even been a full century old when he’d died; she was approaching her sixth century of memory. Logically, she knew that she was even older, as old as Irminsul. 

Perhaps even older than Zhongli. 

I do not regret my life , Alhaitham told her in his letter. Only that I cannot be there to help you through your grief. But Nahida, habibti , we always knew that there would come a time where you would wake up to a world where we weren’t there.

And, as I imagine that any other parent hopes on their deathbed, I hope that you find joy. I hope that we brought you joy. I hope that you learn to find joy again, after grief. 

I hope that one day, when you wake up, you find that the grief does not hurt. That thoughts of me and Kaveh, that the memories of us all together, no longer hurt.

Nahida swallowed and squeezed her eyes shut again. When she opened her eyes again, she found that she had crumpled the edges of the letter in her grip. 

Clicking his tongue sympathetically, Zhongli grabbed her wrist and gently tugged until she let go of the paper. He gently uncurled her fingers and revealed the small scrapes that she had gotten from the stones in her pocket. 

Her blood, too red to be the same shade as cor lapis, too golden to be the same shade as human blood, stained the edges of the letter. Though it wasn’t enough to render it illegible, her heart still dropped at the thought of ruining it.

With another handkerchief that he pulled from somewhere, Zhongli gently dabbed at the scrapes. He stood and returned with bandages and a cup of water, which he used to gently wash her wounds. Zhongli gently stroked a thumb over her bandaged palm and lifted an arm so she could tuck herself against his side. 

She forced herself to look at the letter again but this time, Zhongli was there—just as Alhaitham had hoped—to hold her and guide her. 

It is every parent’s dream that their child lives a long and peaceful life, Alhaitham said through his last letter to her that he had written, she realized, with Zhongli at his side. That is all I hope for you, Nahida. Experience all of life’s joys and sorrows and know that we will always be with you.

He signed it with his full name, which he almost never used. 

Below it, it read, Former Grand Sage of Sumeru . 

Below that, it said simply, dad .

Nahida clutched the letter to her chest and cried into Zhongli’s chest. 

She woke up with no memory of falling asleep. 

Checking the angle of the sun to find that it was mid-afternoon, she got out of bed and walked into the kitchen. It was only halfway through preparing dinner that she remembered that it was only her and Zhongli left, two old gods that had no real need to eat.

That Kaveh was gone and so was Alhaitham. 

Zhongli walked up to the sink and peered at the dirty dishes. Wordlessly, he rolled up his sleeves and took off his gloves and began washing them. He was back in the shape that he had worn when she first met him in Liyue Harbor, at least in her current “living” memory. She thought that he preferred that form, though he had worn several other shapes while she’d known him. He often showed his divinity (when it suited him, or when, she assumed, he was particularly relaxed and among people he trusted) in the form of skin the color of shale so dark it was nearly black, cut through with veins of glimmering cor lapis. 

“I’d forgotten,” she said in a soft voice. 

“Even after all these years, sometimes I forget too,” Zhongli replied. “I will wake up and make breakfast and remember…”

Nahida swallowed. “There’s no sense in wasting it,” she said. 

“No,” Zhongli agreed. “You’re a very good cook,” he added, which was high praise from him. 

A lump formed in her throat. “Kaveh taught me well,” she said, her voice cracking. 

“He did,” Zhongli agreed and they lapsed back into silence. 

“What now?” Nahida asked as she covered the pot and set it to simmer. 

Zhongli made an inquisitive sound. “What do you mean?” he asked. 

“What now?” Nahida repeated. “What…do I do now?” 

Setting down the knife he had been cleaning, Zhongli turned to look at her. His eyes and expression were gentle but not condescending. He never was. “You grieve,” he told her. “And you live. There is no one way to do it.” 

Nahida stared down at her hands. The scrapes from the stone in her pocket had already healed—the blessing and curse of an archon’s power. Now they were shiny pink skin, not yet returned to the usual shade of her palms. 

“One day, grief won’t cut so deeply,” Zhongli told her gently. “But first you need to let yourself feel it.” 

“What else is in that chest?” Nahida asked. 

Zhongli was kind enough to allow the change in topic. “Why don’t you open it?” He smiled. “I’ll be right here.” 

It was an option. She knew that he’d go with her again if she asked. 

Swallowing, she nodded, climbed down the stool she used to see over the counters, and made her way into the study. 

It hurt less than she expected to walk inside. 

It hurt less than she expected to see the chest, then to open it again. 

It hurt less than she expected to see those golden words at the top of the lid and to trace them knowing that it was Alhaitham and Kaveh’s most sincere wish for her. 

May our daughter Nahida live a peaceful life. 

As it had been before, it was mostly empty. She found the first letter from Alhaitham, the one that had been written on the dedication page that he’d torn from a book, folded neatly on top of the small chest with Yanfei’s sigil. 

In the small chest were more letters, most written by Alhaitham and a few written by Kaveh. 

Mundane things, descriptions of where they were and what they were doing at the time. Of visiting Fontaine to find Kaveh’s mother, of the argument that had nearly split the three of them apart for good, of Alhaitham’s thoughts of growing old as the Grand Sage of Sumeru. 

A chest full of a lifetime of memories, told to her in (mostly) Alhaitham’s own voice. 

Every letter centered around her. The time that Alhaitham had taken a break and heard the daycare children—including her—laughing in Razan Garden. The first time that Alhaitham had held her while she cried and his fears that he would not be able to comfort her, because how could he offer comfort when he didn’t even understand what she was feeling? 

The Fight, the one that had nearly turned the Sanctuary of Surasthana into her prison once more. Alhaitham’s grief at what he thought was a permanent loss of Kaveh and Nahida all at once. (That letter had been marked with tears, something that shook Nahida more than she wanted to admit. For a long time, she held that letter to her chest and cried for all of the emotions that Alhaitham had never known how to express.)

It was late by the time she stopped, and she hadn’t even gotten through a quarter of the pile. Carefully, she packed everything away and walked back into the kitchen. 

Zhongli was at the stove, stirring the pot with an absentminded frown, and she went to him and hugged his leg. He moved the spoon to his other hand and gently patted her head. “How did it go?” he asked. 

“Ask me tomorrow,” Nahida told him, voice muffled by his pants. 

“You will feel differently tomorrow,” Zhongli said gently. 

“It hurts,” Nahida told him. “But tomorrow it won’t.” 

“Not as much,” Zhongli agreed. “And in time, the sharp edges will be worn down until all you have are pleasant memories.” 

He picked her up, something that he only very rarely did, and set her down gently on the counter. Once upon a time, Kaveh used to do that to her, before he taught her how to cook, back when he still thought that she was actually a child. The memory would never not be funny to her, even when grief was so raw and aching that it felt like laughing would make her fall apart. 

“I hope so,” Nahida said. 

Zhongli gently wiped her face and she wondered if his care for her was cathartic for his grief too. She hugged him. “Thank you,” she said. 

He said nothing, gently squeezing her, before going back to stirring the pot on the stove. “How much longer?” he asked, even though she knew that he knew. She had Kaveh had told him before, and his memory was impeccable. 

“When the meat falls apart,” she said. “And the stew is thick.” 

Zhongli portioned the stew for them both and they ate sitting across from each other in the living room, where she and Kaveh and Alhaitham all used to eat. After dinner, they washed the dishes together the way that she and Kaveh used to, and they read together on the divan that she and Alhaitham did when he didn’t need to work and she didn’t feel the need to join him in the study. 

That night, she dreamed and Alhaitham and Kaveh were sitting on the divan. Kaveh was young, about as young as he was when she first met him, that first day when she sat on the divan waiting for Alhaitham to come back from buying dinner. 

Alhaitham…well, he wasn’t young , but he didn’t match the Kaveh that was sitting on the divan in her dream, and though she wasn’t sure that she could place his exact age, she guessed that he was probably in his fifties, or sometime a few years before the diagnosis of his tremor, since she didn’t see his cane. 

Still, they were both there and with a sob she sprinted to them. 

Their arms were just as warm, just as safe as she remembered them and she cried as she clung to them, no longer caring about dignity. 

“Oh, habibti , ” Kaveh said and wrapped his arms around her. 

Alhaitham didn’t say anything, but his hands were as large and warm as she remembered, and he squeezed the back of her neck just the way he always did when he wanted her to feel his presence while Kaveh hugged her. Group hugs had never been his thing, but he put up with it like a tolerant cat only when Nahida hugged him first and Cyno, Kaveh, and Tighnari all ambushed him while he was distracted with her. 

She clung to Kaveh and felt his warm hand squeeze the back of her neck comfortingly, then felt him press a kiss to her temple. His skin was soft and smooth, like he’d just shaved. As he’d grown older and his tremor more pronounced, Kaveh had begun shaving him; when Kaveh’s memory began to go, Nahida had taken over. It was a sensory thing, Alhaitham’s hatred of facial hair. He didn’t mind it on Kaveh (even if he often proclaimed loudly that it looked like someone had glued handfuls of sumpterbeast fur to his face in a prank gone wrong), but he once told her that something about it on his own face made his skin crawl. 

Nahida used to tease him while she shaved his face but it meant that his face was always soft. She didn’t realize how much she missed it until she didn’t feel it against her cheek anymore, until she didn’t have to wake up and help him get ready for the day, even after he retired from the Akademiya. 

“ Habibti , ” Alhaitham said quietly against her hair. 

“I miss you both so much,” she cried. 

Kaveh murmured wordless noises of comfort against her cheek. “We miss you too,” he said. 

“We are just a dream,” Alhaitham said, because it absolutely would be a very “Alhaitham” thing to point out. But his voice was gentle, the way he had learned to be in the later years of his life. 

“Shh,” Kaveh said. “Let her have this.” 

Nahida wrapped her arms chokingly tight around Kaveh’s neck and Alhaitham’s broad hand rubbed her back. She didn’t know how long she sat there like that, wrapped up in Kaveh’s lap while Alhaitham gently stroked her hair, kissed her temple, stroked her back. 

“It’s almost morning, habibti,” Kaveh warned. 

“No!” Nahida cried, hugging him tighter. 

Alhaitham kissed her temple again. “We’re just a dream,” he said again. 

“But you’re here ,” Nahida sobbed. “If I wake up…”

“Oh, habibti,” Kaveh said, so achingly soft in a way that Alhaitham had never learned to be. “Just because we’re dead, that doesn’t mean that we’re not still with you.” 

Nahida clung to them tighter. “But I can’t hold you,” she cried. “And I can’t cook with you, and you can’t swing me between you.” 

Kaveh gently pushed Nahida away and she gripped him tighter until it had to hurt, until she realized that he was pushing her toward Alhaitham. Then she turned and clung to him, hard enough that it had to hurt. 

But he was a dream, a conjuring of her own memories. He didn’t feel pain unless she demanded it in the confines of her dream and she would never wish to cause him harm. 

“ Habibti,” he breathed into her hair. “We will always be here in the ways that matter.” 

“What good is it if you’re not here with me?” she demanded. 

“You lived before us,” Alhaitham told her as Kaveh scooted over and placed his hand over her back. “You will live again after us.”

“How can you say that?” she demanded, sobbing into his chest. 

Gently, he lifted her chin until she was looking at him. He smiled, and the motion highlighted the lines carved by age and stress around his eyes and mouth. “Because you will,” he said. “You will live and every day you wake up, you will find that the grief isn’t as sharp, until one day it won’t hurt at all.” 

Kaveh leaned against Alhaitiham’s arm. “One day, the memories won’t hurt,” he said. “But only if you let yourself grieve and you let that grief go when it’s time.” 

And Kaveh would know. For years, he mourned the loss of his parents. One could argue that Alhaitham didn’t feel grief (as ridiculous as that notion was) and that his parents had died when he was almost too young to remember them. But Kaveh had lost his father when he was old enough to feel guilt for something that wasn’t his fault, and lost his mother at the same time to a grief that wasn’t his to suffer for. It was only many years after their disappearance from his life, when he was in his thirties, that Kaveh got any closure. 

That he was, as he advised her to, able to let go of his grief. 

“I don’t want to lose you again,” Nahida whispered. 

“Oh, habibti,” Kaveh said and kissed her cheek. Alhaitham kissed her other cheek and they squished her between them the way they used to when they were both alive and remembered her. “You won’t.” 

“We’ll always be here,” Alhaitham said from her other side. 

Gently, Kaveh turned her head to look at him. “There is no timeline for grief,” he told her softly. “There is no guide about how you should feel and for how long. Just let yourself feel and remember that one day, the clouds will clear and it will be sunny again.” 

“And remember,” Alhaitham said, brusque but so achingly soft in a way that was unique to him. “That though we’re dead in the living world, we are always with you.” 

Kaveh smiled and cupped her cheek. “And we will always love you.” 

Squeezing her eyes shut, Nahida pressed her forehead to Kaveh’s. “I love you too,” she said, her voice breaking. 

When she opened her eyes again, it was morning and she was alone in her bed. 

“Now what?” she asked Zhongli as she walked into the kitchen for breakfast. 

Zhongli looked at her and smiled. He looked less like an ancient god and more like a normal young man in his thirties. Sometimes Nahida wondered what it was like to have a malleable form like his. But she was exactly as she was and could never change; though one might nurture a seed to adulthood, one could not change the rate at which it grew, nor could they change what it grew into. 

“What do you want to do next?” he asked. 

“I don’t know,” she said. 

Zhongli turned back to the stove, where he was heating up leftovers from the night before. “It’s entirely up to you,” he told her. “The house is legally yours, and as a former member of the Akademiya, Alhaitham—and his surviving family—was awarded certain benefits. You are within your rights to request a custodian of the house if you choose to leave.” 

Leave?

Nahida blinked. She’d never…considered leaving. Where would she go?

As if sensing her question, Zhongli portioned out a bowl and set it in front of her, along with a piece of bread. “You can travel,” he suggested. “You could visit Liyue again—I’m sure that Baizhu -daifu and Qiqi would appreciate seeing you again. You could visit Mondstadt as well; Barbatos would be pleased.” 

He sounded disgruntled at the thought, but he always sounded disgruntled when he talked about Venti. 

And, as he often professed, he was a dragon, an old dragon, and as such was incredibly possessive of those that he considered “his”. The thought that Zhongli saw her as “his”, just as he had with Alhaitham (and Kaveh by extension), made her feel warm and loved. It stung her grief, as disinfectant stung in an open wound, but she knew instinctively that it was a good kind of hurt. 

“I want to visit Liyue,” she said and watched him smile, just slightly, the way that Alhaitham had once done. “I want to walk it from north to south, then west to east, and hear every story of it. Do you think someone could guide me?” 

“I’m sure someone could be found,” Zhongli said. 

“After that,” Nahida mused, “I want to visit Mondstadt and hear the songs and stories of its past and present. Do you think someone could help me?”

Zhongli sat down across from her. “I’m sure a certain bard would be thrilled,” he said. 

“Thank you,” Nahida said. 

Reaching across the table, Zhongli gently squeezed her hand comfortingly. “Grief is hard,” he said simply. 

Though it still ached, Nahida felt her heart lighten slightly. She smiled weakly and squeezed his hand back and ate her breakfast.

Nahida stepped off the patch, dodging a jogger that shot her a dirty look, and ducked around one of the decorative trees lining the path. The grass and the leaves and the roots of trees that lay hidden from view all sang to her, welcoming her back. 

She touched a hand to the bark of a nearby tree and listened to the way it sighed as a cheerful breeze played with the highest leaves of its canopy. For a moment she stood there, listening to murmurs of the world. 

But if she stood there and listened for too long, she would be late and she’d promised to meet Zhongli and Venti for lunch at a tavern that had caught Venti’s eye. (Because of course it was a tavern, even if drinking laws would force Venti to sit on a table that was not connected to the one that she and Zhongli shared.)

Nahida pulled herself back from the tree and continued walking until the manicured grasses planted by the Akademiya gave way to wild grasses, which in turn gave way to a small clearing filled with wildflowers and padisarahs alike. It was a nightmare to someone like Venti, who turned out to be allergic to the thick pollen of the blooming padisarah blossoms.

(She and Zhongli had told him often that it wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t bring playful breezes with him whenever he visited. He insisted that what kind of anemo-creature would he be if he wasn’t surrounded by wind?)

At the center of the little clearing was a worn stone, weathered by time until the names that had once been carved into it had disappeared, yet still present by the will of the former Geo Archon himself. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the worn-smooth rocks that had lived in her pocket for the past few years and absently juggled them in the palm of her hand. 

With a sigh, Nahida sat down in front of the stone and gently knocked on it. “Hey,” she said. “It’s me. Sorry it took me so long to come back.” 

She didn’t think that they minded, if spirits did exist—if Alhaitham and Kaveh lingered in the quiet clearing where they were buried. 

“I thought that I would visit Grand Sage Azar,” she said, with a hooked smile. “Believe me, the irony isn't lost on me. She’s different, though.” 

Gently, she set down the worn stones in front of the worn gravestone. “Venti and Zhongli are here too,” she added. “I think they might visit tomorrow—they usually let me go first. It’s nice of them.” 

She sighed and rested her elbows on her bent knees. “Let’s see…I visited Fontaine recently. Mom, grandma’s ugly flowers are popular again. I thought we’d gotten some reprieve, but it seems that someone recently dug up records of the cross and began breeding them again. He denies it, but I think it’s Scaranara.” 

Thinking about the Wanderer made Nahida smile. Oh, how he hated being called Scaranara—precisely why she did it, of course. 

“I’m surprised that he’s still around,” she admitted. “But I’m not complaining. He’s calmed down a bit, which is nice.” 

Around her, the wind whispered against the trees. In the distance, she could hear the sounds of the City—a huge shift from what it had been when she first buried her parents. 

“They tried to tear down the house again,” Nahida said. “And destroy the park. I had to set them straight. You should have been proud, dad. They were terrified of me by the end of it, but nowhere near as much as scary as dad, though. Apparently they still tell stories about you.” 

She sighed and closed her eyes. In the distance, she could feel the little pond that Zhongli had helped her establish. Meaning well, Ei had sent over several of those glittering koi but they’d been stolen, either by humans or by animals tempted by those bright colors. She hadn’t yet figured out how to tell Ei yet. 

But the pond was mostly for the mourning flowers that Kaveh had so loved. She smiled when she found that they were still doing well, even so far from their natural habitat. Perhaps they’d crossed with something that had increased their survivability.

Carefully, she turned and lay down on the grass, staring up at the sky framed by the boughs of the trees around her. The many worn rocks she’d brought dug into her back, but somehow it wasn’t as uncomfortable as she would have expected. It never was. “I still miss you,” she said quietly. “So much. Every day. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been.”

She closed her eyes and listened to the whisper of the wind through the trees and felt the resonance of Sumeru beneath her and around her. She was no longer its archon—in some ways, had never been—yet the forests and the grass and the very ground always welcomed her back as if she was an old friend. 

“Oh,” she added, opening her eyes. “Yae Publishing House released a new book. I Adopted an Archon and I Didn’t Know It . It’s been in stores for a few months and already it’s becoming a huge hit. Yae Miko told me that they have another one in the works that’s based on Neuvillette. Something about otters. Honestly, in some ways I’m surprised that it took her this long to write about this. Or maybe she has and this is just the first time she’s actually mentioned it to me.” Nahida shrugged. “She sent me a special edition print of it. I haven’t read it yet. Maybe I’ll bring it here and we can read it together.” Closing her eyes, she smiled. “I’d like that.” 

Around her, the birds in the park chirped. She could hear the sound of children playing, of dogs barking, of the hustle and bustle of the City. Eventually, she sighed and sat up. 

“I’m sorry,” she said to that plain stone, pressing her hand to her lips and then her fingers against the stone. “I’ll visit again soon. Before I leave Sumeru. I’m meeting Zhongli and Venti for lunch and I just wanted to visit with you before I went.” 

It was the first thing she did whenever she returned to Sumeru, unless it was absolutely unavoidable. Kaveh and Alhaitham were always her priority. 

“Love you both,” she added as she stood and dusted herself off. 

She got a few looks when she emerged from the trees but was otherwise ignored. Reluctantly, she slipped her feet back into the light slippers she carried with her on her belt, and left the park. Not everyone understood her preference to feel the earth beneath her feet, and she’d found that it was simply easier to wear a pair of light slippers or sandals than to fight too hard. The sandals were comfortable at least and if made correctly, she could still sense the earth beneath her. 

The tavern in question was only a few blocks’ walk from the park and Nahida smiled to see it. A part of her was reminded of Lambad’s Tavern, though it had long since faded into obscurity. It was ridiculous to think so though—the only similarities between the modern tavern in front of her and the one that her parents used to frequent were that it had the word “tavern” in the name and that it had a green roof. 

Most modern buildings had gray or sand-colored roofs and colorful neon signs, making the tavern stick out. It seemed to be a fusion place, combining the aesthetics of an old Sumeru that only immortals bore witness to and the cuisine of modern Mondstadt. Venti had been unbearably smug about it when he’d heard about it and insisted that the next time they were all in Sumeru, they should meet up for lunch. 

When she walked in, she quickly found Venti and Zhongli, who were sitting on two separate tables as she had predicted. Smiling, Nahida sat down across from Zhongli who was cradling a glass of wine that Venti was staring at longingly. 

“Hello,” a waitress said in the common language of Teyvat, seemingly appearing out of thin air at Nahida’s elbow. “Can I get you anything to drink?” 

“Do you have that hard apple cider from Dawn?” Nahida asked.

“Coming right up,” the waitress said and returned to the bar. 

Venti squinted. “That’s mean,” he complained and Nahida smirked at him. 

“How does it feel to finally look old enough to not be asked to show ID?” Zhongli asked a little sourly. This iteration, she wore a female form and was known in Liyue by her stage name, Yuming. She had a lovely voice that won her several roles for traditional Chinese opera as well as contemporary musicals.

Most of the time, she was still known as Zhongli—she’d once told Nahida that she found that she quite enjoyed the name, even if she had to be careful of how often she used it lest someone figure out that she was a bit older than she seemed. 

(Nahida sometimes wondered if Zhongli was messing with her, or if she truly believed that most people wouldn’t immediately notice that there was something peculiar about her.)

When Nahida looked at her, Zhongli jutted her lower lip out in a pout that was as much for show as the personas she wore on stage. Nahida grinned. “Aww, Zhongli- nainai, did you get carded?” she teased. 

“I’m older than you,” Zhongli muttered and took a delicate sip of her wine, though Nahida could see the way that the corner of her lips curled upward in a slight smile. 

The waitress returned with a bottle of cider and placed it on a coaster in front of Nahida. “I’ll give you a few minutes to look over the menu.” She disappeared again. 

“How are you feeling?” Venti asked, though his eyes still lingered longingly on her cider. 

Nahida took a sip of it with a smug smile and set it down on her other side, further from Venti. “Fine,” she said. 

“Are you?” Zhongli asked. 

For a moment, Nahida considered the question. She thought about her memories of Alhaitham and Kaveh, colored by time and by the memories of a world that had since moved on. Despite the hundreds of years that had passed, grief was still close to her heart. 

The curse of immortality, she supposed. 

She sipped her cider. But though she still grieved, though she still missed Alhaitham and Kaveh every day, the edges of her grief had smoothed out. Just as Xiao had once said nearly a thousand years ago, her grief was still there and the rocks she kept in her pocket were still rocks but over time, the edges no longer cut. 

Oh, there were so many more people that she grieved as well. It had taken many, many years but eventually Nahida learned to love again. Her life was filled with the memories of the short and vibrant lives of hundreds of humans that had become her companions. Though she loved them too, each in their own way, none of them were ever as dear to her as Alhaitham and Kaveh. For her, that grief was something that would never fully fade. But…

She smiled and found that she really meant it. “Yes,” she said. “I think I am.”