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The thoroughfare between Morepesok and Olnegorosk was wide, flat, and snow-dusted even after fresh plowing. Surrounded on all sides by empty snowfields and set in just enough of a basin to obscure any view of the sea, there was little along its path to interest a traveler––not that there were many of those around here. Most of the traffic along the road was shipment sledges in and out of Morepesok, and most of those carried uninteresting cargo of basic staples. Diluc, after more than a week walking the three miles to Morepesok and back every morning, had even begun to memorize some merchants’ faces. One, who brought a sledge every other morning, he could recognize at a distance by his lumpy, lopsided hat.
“Good morning!” called said man from atop his cart, as he did every time he saw Diluc on the road. Diluc nodded in reply, as he also did every time. He lit a nearby brazier with an absent flick of his hand, which the man on the cart mistook for a wave and enthusiastically returned.
The braziers along the road were spaced at careful intervals to ensure the safety of foot travelers against Snezhnaya’s pervasive Sheer Cold. This was a wonderful arrangement when the fires were all lit––however, when the torches went out, as they did every morning and evening like clockwork, it was an uncomfortable journey for whoever was in charge of re-lighting them. Diluc’s travel time was almost doubled by the necessity of stopping by each brazier he lit to ease the chattering of his teeth.
He reached Morepesok by midmorning, as usual, and tramped his sorry, snow-dusted self into a nearby tea shop, where the morning waitress greeted him cheerily as ‘lantern boy.’ He averted his eyes. Incredible, how closely small towns like this kept track of their newcomers. Mondstadt was no great capital, but even there one person could easily pass unnoticed. Not so here. The entire shop staff knew him by name, and he would bet that most of the town knew him by description. It made his skin crawl.
After a cup of tea and two more uncomfortable greetings, he left the restaurant to begin the (thankfully warmer) trek back to Olnegorosk. On his way out the door, the waitress called after him,
“Careful out there, lantern boy! The Rostov Estate are in town this morning!”
He opened his mouth to ask what that meant, but her attention was caught by a coworker, and instead he left the building with mild wariness. The Rostov Estate––he hadn’t heard the term before. Some group, perhaps? Were they dangerous? Well, she hadn’t seemed too concerned. It probably wasn’t serious, and even if it was, it was hardly his business.
Outside, the midmorning bustle of Morepesok was in full swing. It was lively for a small town, and its day began early. Diluc wove his way around the market’s edge, trading stiff nods with stall keepers who recognized him and studiously avoiding any attempts to draw him into conversation. There was one week left on his commission as lantern lighter––the usual morning routesman was expected to recover by then––and once that was finished, he would move along, just as he had done for the last year.
He wouldn’t take any more jobs like this one, he thought; a week in one place and he already felt too stationary, too still. Too much time to think. He had to keep moving, or he’d sink.
And no more small towns after this. Altogether too many people knew his name.
“Hey mister, is that a Vision?” piped a little voice to his left. Some village kid, getting curious. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence; he cut an unusual figure here, and that meant he collected curious children like lint.
“Yes,” he said without looking at the child or slowing his stride. “It’s Pyro, and no, you cannot touch it.”
There was a flurry of light, crunching steps as the kid scrambled to keep up with him. Diluc picked up his pace. “Aw, okay,” the child said. “That’s pretty boring. Can you fight with it?”
“Yes.”
“Are you an adventurer?”
“No.” He technically was, actually, since he took commissions from the Adventurer’s Guild, but he didn’t really consider himself one. Not enough exploratory spirit.
“Oooh. Are you a toy salesman, then?”
“Why would I be a toy salesman?” Diluc turned to actually look at the kid, and was startled to find a significantly smaller child than he’d expected. He stopped walking, and the boy almost careened into a snowbank.
“My brother is a toy salesman,” the kid said proudly once he’d steadied himself, propping his little fists on his hips and puffing out his chest. “He has a Vision too!”
“Good for him. Where are your adults, kid?” The child was tiny; he couldn’t possibly be old enough to wander unsupervised.
“Big Brother’s over there,” he chirped, gesturing vaguely towards a stall down the street, where Diluc indeed saw an older boy with the same unruly orange hair exchanging coins at a produce stand. “Hey, do you have a sword?”
“Yes,” said Diluc, then when the kid sucked in a breath added, “but I’m not taking it out in town.” The boy visibly deflated. “You should go back to your brother.”
“Okay,” said the boy, then didn’t move an inch. “Have you ever seen a hilichurl?”
“Yes. Now go.”
“A big one or a small one? Did you fight it? Was there treasure?”
Four big ones, last time, and a common chest at the end of it. At least the commission fee had been decent. “Not nearly enough to make it worth it.”
The kid puffed up indignantly, apparently ready to defend the financial viability of monster hunting, but was interrupted by a call of “Teucer!” His eyes went wide, and he was gone with a call of, “Bye Mister!” scurrying back to his brother’s side almost before Diluc knew what was happening. The older brother tilted him a quick, apologetic salute, though he was too far off for Diluc to read his expression, and Diluc watched as together the two of them melted away into the marketplace. Within moments, it was as if the entire encounter had never happened.
“That’s a face, alright,” said a nearby stall keeper, jolting Diluc out of his reverie. “You ever met the Rostov Estate before?”
“That’s the Rostov Estate?” Diluc hardly thought some kid and his brother deserved a special warning. Chatty and persistent though the child may be, that was hardly unusual for kids his age. Though he had said his brother had a Vision…
“Mm, half of it at any rate. The oldest and the youngest––there are two more.” She chuckled, a dry, wheezing laugh like old wood creaking. “They’re a bit more… hm, rambunctious, in other combinations. Lady forbid you meet all the youngest three without the oldest––or the oldest without any of the others.”
“...Right.” Diluc wasn’t certain what to make of any of that. Or whether he should make anything of it at all, for that matter. “I’ll stay clear, then. Thank you.” It probably wouldn’t matter anyway. He wasn’t likely to see either of them again.
“Heh, good luck with that, lantern lighter,” she said, still snickering as he walked away. “Better than you have tried.”
The journey back to Olnegorosk, while warmer than his morning task, was just as flat and uneventful as the last dozen times he’d walked it. His afternoon was similarly rote: he checked in with the Guild for payment for his morning route, then ran a couple quick commissions in the area. They got a lot of monsters around here where the Sheer Cold attracted the stronger ones who could tap into Cryo defenses, and his Pyro vision was in high demand. Then he returned to the inn, ate a slow, silent dinner, cleaned his equipment, and went to bed.
He woke, shaking, in the darkest hours of the morning. The entire inn around him was silent and still; the night outside the window seemed to seep in like cold through the seams, settling thick and heavy as snow over the building. In the dark, his shaking, gasping breaths seemed too loud, too thin, brittle as rice paper.
“Shit,” he whispered, curling up tight and pressing his knuckles into his eyes. It didn’t help; he could still see it on the backs of his eyelids. His mouth pressed into a pathetic, wobbling line. “Shit.”
Always the same. He knew what it looked like; he had been there. He had watched it. He didn’t need a fucking reminder.
“God damn it , ” he choked into his hands. He was so fucking tired. He breathed in slowly, counting. It rattled going in. Breathe out, count. In, out. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it.
It was a long night.
By the time the sky showed its first hint of morning, he was dressed and storming out the door, headed for the Guild outpost. He stumbled a little on the inn’s front step, mind still bleary with interrupted sleep. Shaking his head to clear it, he continued on. The few locals milling about at this hour took one glance at him as he passed and paled, hurrying along their way.
Upon reaching the Guild, he found he was in luck; there was a new commission for a small monster encampment not far off the Morepesok road, a simple enough detour. He’d take care of it on his way back, and then maybe he’d stop feeling like one wrong thought would collapse him like a pile of brittle sticks.
The lantern route was freezing and unpleasant, as usual, but completed in record time. Charged with the manic energy of the exhausted, Diluc made a mission of running from brazier to brazier, trying to accumulate as little Cold as possible between fires by cutting down exposure time. He reached Morepesok just as the sun broke properly across the sky, streaking it in pinks and golds. Everything on Snezhnayan soil was muddy gray or white, but its sky on clear days was as much a work of Celestia as it was in Mondstadt.
As children, he and Kaeya had sat side by side in Barbatos’s cupped hands to watch the sun rise. They were squashed together by the central slope of the fingers, jostling at the elbows until the light broke over the horizon and they both went quiet, just watching. Their two pairs of knobby knees poked out over the edge, lined up together like knuckles, they were practically the same age but Diluc had always thought of Kaeya as the little brother–
Stop fucking thinking.
He wouldn’t stop for tea today. He couldn’t. He’d made it almost a week without the nightmare, he’d thought it was a good sign, he’d thought– He couldn’t think, he couldn’t– Breathe, fucking breathe, you’re not going to break down here––
“Oh, Mister Lantern Lighter!”
Diluc flinched and turned. A young man was jogging up the lane, waving to him. He was tall and wiry, perhaps a year or two younger than Diluc himself, with the vestigial gangliness of someone who had only recently managed to fill out their own frame and unruly orange hair that curled defiantly outward from beneath his knitted hat.
The hat had a puffball on the top.
Ah, Diluc realized distantly, staring at the puffball, this was the little boy’s brother from yesterday. One of the Rostov Estate.
“Good morning,” the brother said cheerfully as he slowed to a stop several paces off. “Word on the street has it you come in around here midmorning every day, so I figured I’d just wait. Good thing I came early, or I’d have missed you!” He laughed, light and careless. His cheeks were pink with wind and cold.
Diluc’s hands flexed inside his gloves, numbed through. “What do you want?” he rasped.
“Ah, so direct,” said the brother. He was still beaming. The resemblance to the little boy was uncanny. “Teucer said you’re an adventurer with a Pyro vision, right?”
More questions. Apparently that was genetic too. Diluc turned away, mouth flattening. He didn’t have time for this. The brother’s eyes widened, and he lunged forward into Diluc’s path.
“Fight me!”
The demand was so unexpected, and delivered with such bravado––hands on hips, chin tilted in challenge––that Diluc drew up short. The brother’s eyes had gone hard with familiar stubbornness, and his smile had sharpened, darkened. He was serious, or thought he was.
His hat still had a puffball on top.
“No,” said Diluc, and he kept on walking.
“Come on,” the brother protested, dropping his pose to keep pace. He walked backwards a few paces ahead of Diluc to face him while speaking. Diluc willed him to trip on something. “I bet you’re strong, right? There’s no one in Morepesok worth fighting, we hardly get any Vision users here.” A Hydro Vision dangled from his hip––that much had been true, it seemed. It lent at least some reason to the young man’s thoughtless confidence.
“Then go somewhere else.”
“Ah, so cruel, Mister Ponytail!” Diluc’s shoulders stiffened. “You wouldn’t deprive me of the only entertainment I’ve found in weeks, would you?”
“Yes, I would,” Diluc said. “In a heartbeat.
The brother let loose a string of discontented grumblings, which needled lightly but seemed mostly meant for himself as they made their way down the thoroughfare towards the detour point to reach the monster encampment. Diluc had no intention of still having company by the time he had to leave the road.
“You should go back,” he said.
“No,” said the brother simply. “Not until we fight.”
“I don’t fight people. Only monsters.”
The brother blinked. “No people?”
Hair fanning out–– Chains of fire–– The screaming––
“No,” Diluc forced out. Something of his feeling must have shown in his expression, and the brother went quiet for a moment, looking almost thoughtful.
“Not even for sparring?”
“No.”
“But that’s useless! How are you ever going to get stronger if your only opposition is hilichurls?”
He was right about that much. Hilichurl encampments hadn’t been a challenge since Diluc was fifteen, when he was still unused to his Vision and defaulted to non-elemental sword strikes by habit. He wouldn’t improve, taking commissions like this––but it didn’t matter. Strength hadn’t mattered one whit that day; being strong hadn’t helped anyone, hadn’t saved anyone. And then, afterward, when everything that mattered was already gone, Diluc’s own strength had destroyed what little remained.
“I don’t care about getting stronger,” he said.
The brother stared at him. There were faint freckles on the bridge of his nose, fading in and out of view as the clouds of his breath passed in front of his face.
“Are you serious?” he asked. When Diluc’s level gaze said that he was, the brother turned around to walk beside him instead of trotting backwards. “You’d waste a Vision like that?”
Diluc had considered leaving his Vision behind along with the rest of his life when he left Mondstadt. Had tried, in fact, to leave it behind with Jean. She’d refused to take it, and he had found, much to his own reluctance, that he couldn’t bear leaving it with anyone else. So he had taken it with him, despite his private conviction that should the god who bestowed it see him now, they would revoke it in a heartbeat.
Of course, it had proven fortunate that he had his Vision once it became clear that the money he took away with him, though not insignificant, was also not inexhaustible. While there was technically nothing preventing him from making a trip back to the Winery to replenish his funds, he balked at the idea, and instead began taking commissions with the Adventurer’s Guild. Better to make a clean break of it; he would not return to Mondstadt, now or ever. Too much memory there.
“It’s not wasted,” he said at last. The brother hummed in disagreement.
“You really don’t think it’s important? Don’t you have anything you want to protect?”
Diluc’s breath stuttered in his chest.
Shit. Shit, shit.
“Ah, Mister Ponytail?”
Diluc picked up his pace. Not again, god damn it. Why was he so fucking fragile today? Don’t think about it, don’t think about it.
It was no use. It was there in front of his eyes, just like the dream, just like every spare moment today and for the last year. The fire, the blood. The ten feet he sprinted toward the epicenter.
And then he’d seen…
“Are you alright?” The brother’s footsteps had quickened to keep pace. Diluc couldn’t see his face anymore, having moved ahead of him.
Diluc said nothing.
“I apologize. I didn’t mean to upset you.” Was his contrition genuine? Everything sounded teasing, coming out of his mouth, and now Diluc couldn’t even see his ridiculous face. “I’m sorry for bringing up bad memories.”
“Just leave,” Diluc finally hissed. The brother’s footsteps faltered for a moment beside him, then resumed.
“I understand,” he said carefully. “But–”
“But nothing. Go.”
“Mister Ponytail–”
“Stop calling me that.”
“I would if I knew your name.”
Diluc said nothing.
“Mister Pyro Guy–”
“No.”
“Tall, Red, and Handsome?”
Diluc made a strangled noise.
“Firefly!”
“What.” Diluc turned to glare at him and immediately regretted it. The young man’s face was lit up with mischief, eyes almost sparkling.
“I think I’ll call you Firefly now. Unless you’d care to give me your name?”
Diluc’s jaw flexed.
“I’ll start it off. Hello stranger, my name is Ajax. What’s yours?”
Ajax. He didn’t look like an Ajax––and yet, at the same time, it fit him. Strangely, like a coat he’d nearly grown out of, but it fit nonetheless.
There was no logical reason for Diluc not to give his name in return. He was well known around Morepesok by now, Ajax (Ajax) could find out his name easily enough just by asking around the marketplace. There was no reason not to tell him.
And yet, somehow, Diluc would rather walk out into the torchless tundra until Sheer Cold froze him solid.
“Come on,” Ajax wheedled, “it’s only fair!”
“And you care so much about fairness?”
“Oh yes,” said Ajax, nodding sincerely. “As an older brother, fairness is tantamount. Can you imagine if one sibling got half a syrniki more than the others? Anarchy, Firefly, it’s anarchy.”
Diluc drew a breath to protest the nickname, then stopped, gritting his teeth when he realized he would have no excuse to withhold his real name if he did. They had finally reached the turning off point, where a faint track led from the main thoroughfare off into the slopes of the tundra. The encampment he was tasked with eliminating was somewhere around here. “I’m leaving. Go back.”
“Oh!” said Ajax, blatantly ignoring the demand. “Are you on a commission?” Diluc stepped off the road and onto the trail. “Can I watch?”
“Watch?” The question slipped out incredulously before Diluc could catch it. “What?”
“I want to see you fight,” Ajax said.
“I told you, I’m not going to fight you.”
“Did I say fight me? I just want to see the way you swing a sword, is all.
The last words were said with a strange, teasing tilt. Diluc felt his face slowly grow warm. Ajax’s expression was all innocence, but from the gleam in his eyes Diluc just knew he’d done it on purpose.
“Anyway, I could use a demonstration. I’ve been focusing on my polearm recently, I haven’t touched a sword in–– Hey, wait up, Firefly!”
All the way down the path to the commission site, Diluc tried to discourage his hanger-on, with little success. Finally, he conceded that he was unlikely to rid himself of the irritation by speaking, since any response seemed to encourage him, and simply stopped replying. This didn’t work either, as Ajax definitively managed to turn his hanging questions into getting the last word, and then sat in decidedly smug silence for the rest of the journey.
They rounded a small, snow-covered hill and were rewarded with a near fall into a narrow chasm hidden by the snow-covered local topography. Crouching at the chasm’s edge and peering inward, Diluc saw the monster encampment twenty feet down. It was a group of typical size for the region, ten enemies in total, mostly small rangers and samachurls as well as two heavier hitters. Almost all of them bore some mark of the region’s Cold, in the form of an ice shield or a glint of Cryo on their weapons, with the exception of two Electro rangers. In other words, an excellent task for a Pyro vision.
Well, no time like the present.
“Stay here,” Diluc muttered. Then, ignoring Ajax’s quiet Aye aye, captain, he leapt off the edge and into the chasm.
The initial plunge attack took out one ranger, and sent another ranger and a samachurl flying backwards. Their startled hisses roused the rest of the camp, and then the fight was on. With two short swings, Diluc finished off the two he’d injured in the plunge. There came the clang and roar of a shield behind him, and he threw himself to the right as one of the large mitachurls charged past him, shield raised and ready to bash. Presented with the creature’s back, he seized the opening, and it went down without him even needing to break the shield.
That was four out of ten, and he hadn’t even bothered to use his Vision yet. As he dodged a Cryo arrow and darted toward the ranger who had fired it, the thought came to him unbidden of Ajax’s point about hilichurl camps posing no challenge. With a sudden prickling on his neck, he remembered that Ajax was, in fact, watching.
Without thinking too deeply about it, he infused his next swing with Pyro to finish the Cryo ranger. Its body collapsed inward, dissolving into dark mist as all monster bodies did. Diluc gave his sword an experimental heft as he waited for the second wave to reach him, trailing sparks that sizzled against the snow.
Snarls over his shoulder warned him that the camp’s second half was closing in. As he turned to face them, he spared a glance to the lip of the chasm, where Ajax’s legs dangled over the edge. Ajax himself seemed perfectly content to spectate and even tossed Diluc a jaunty little wave. Diluc snapped his head away, igniting his sword.
Swift, fiery slashes made short work of two small ice shields, and one last wave of fire eliminated their owners. Three enemies remained: a ranger, a samachurl, and a mitachurl hefting an axe, which charged forward over the disintegrating bodies. Diluc ducked its heavy swing and lunged forward past it instead, crashing through a stack of barrels to eliminate the samachurl before it could cast––and accidentally lighting the barrels’ scraps on fire in the process.
Just the ranger and the mitachurl left, now. The ranger was atop a small platform without obvious footholds to climb, and Diluc didn’t exactly have long-range options here. Usually, his strategy would be to finish the mitachurl, then climb the chasm wall nearby, either out of range of the hilichurl’s bow or scaling quickly enough to avoid the bolts, to drop down on the platform and finish the job. Straightforward enough. No frills.
Now, though… Someone was watching.
Electro ranger, short platform. Burning barrels.
The mitachurl was regathering itself for a charge; this would have to be quick, and it would have to happen correctly the first time. Diluc stood still, staring up at the Electro ranger. As he watched, it loosed a bolt, which he ducked beneath, turning as he did to put his back to the platform. Then he bent his knees, dismissed his sword, and watched the still-sparking arrow meet the burning wood.
The breath punched out of his lungs as the Overloaded explosion flung him backwards through the air with a deafening roar. The world around him tilted wildly, and for a moment he hardly knew which way was up. But he had chosen his angle well. With one grasping hand, he reached out and seized the wood of the platform. The stopping force jolted his shoulder painfully in his socket––but he was up, hanging from the ranger’s post. It had worked.
Diluc couldn’t resist baring his teeth in satisfaction. It had been a long time since he’d pulled that particular gambit, and the first time he’d tried it in an actual fight, not just a spar or a game. It was good to know he still had the trick of it.
He dangled for a moment to realign himself with gravity, then hauled himself up onto the platform, face to face with the Electro ranger. It snarled and raised its crossbow. Diluc replied with a heave of his greatsword. A short conversation, all told.
Just the mitachurl with the axe left. Not much to do there. Diluc peered over the edge of the platform, waited for the lumbering beast to wander close, then took a running leap blade-first. He lit his sword on the way down, just for the show of it, but it wasn’t necessary; with no shield to hack through, the creature went down in three hits.
For a blissful moment the entire camp was quiet, save for Diluc’s breathing and the faint crackle of monster bodies flaking apart. He dismissed his sword and rolled his shoulders. Easy enough; camps like this were never hard. But this was the first time in a very long time that one had been even a little exciting. He turned his face up to his audience.
Ajax sat curled forward over the cliff’s edge, gloved fingers braced against its lip. His eyes were wide, and his face…
“Well,” he said.
His voice was quiet, but resounded clearly off the icy cliff walls. Diluc couldn’t move beneath the weight of his stare and the sudden, stifling stillness. His mouth was dry. Ajax sighed, and his head tilted dreamily to the side. The movement tipped that stupid fucking puffball on his hat.
“I’m afraid this may have been counterproductive. Sorry, Firefly, but––I just want to fight you more now.”
All at once, the moment was broken. Diluc’s hackles rose, and his briefly improved mood plunged back into irritation as though it had never risen. Wordlessly, he turned to stalk down the length of the ravine in search of sloping ground. He could just climb up the cliffside, it would probably be the faster route back to the road, but something in him balked at the idea. The same something, probably, that had kept him from telling Ajax his name. Some stupid, instinctive stubbornness, willing at any provocation to dig in its heels, with a strange and specific grudge against a random village brat.
Well. In any case, he wouldn’t be making that climb where Ajax could see. And he’d walk away quickly, without looking back, to shake him. And then they’d go their separate ways, he’d finish his week with the torches, and they’d never see each other again, if he could help it. Simple. Easy.
“Thank you for showing me,” Ajax said.
Diluc’s step faltered. Without conscious thought, he came to a halt, boots scuffling the soft, thin snow. Ajax huffed out a laugh. There was the faint crackle of shifting snow as he stood.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. His lowered voice carried through the chasm, distorted by its own echo but loud as if he stood two feet away. Diluc did not turn. He did not walk on. Instead he stood and listened as Ajax’s feet tracked away from the chasm and out of his hearing. Even after he was long gone, Diluc could see it clearly in his mind: the smile, the stupid hat. The promise. See you tomorrow.
Somehow, Ajax seemed the type to keep his promises.
He gathered himself and began the walk back to the city.