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i. light
He stands under the sun as he looks over the pure white below, his hand filtering out its rays into slivers of light caressing his face.
Rosy red blooms where it touches flesh – the only sign of life in the desolation.
Some call his determination burning passion, but Chongyun knows fire all too well. The path he treads is lined with their inviting embraces, beckoning him to stay a while with unsteadiness flickering as the sun through falling snow.
He squeezes his eyes shut, numbing himself to their allure. Tempered by the chill of the mountains, he finds order - as the snowflakes on his palm turn into art.
When he opens his eyes, his pace slows as he hears voices. The mountain is alive, its heart steadily beating beneath the snow, and the exorcist feels all of its parts – the souls claimed by the oft merciless slopes, the heart of the dragon slumbering underneath, and an indescribable power surpassing all other – resonating with his chest.
He knows where the dissonance starts, and what he must do.
The hoarders have no time to react as he leaps, as soundless as a bird taking flight, and sends them all flying with the heft of a herd of boars. Immediately, a sword materializes in front of them, stabbing the ground with a force that sends them to their feet. He presses his fingers together, but a glance at the men shivering at his gaze tells him enough.
Wordless, he lets his swords crumble into frost and onto the men, eliciting a shrill shriek from them. He watches as the men gather themselves away from the thick layer of snow covering their backs and slowly walk away, not knowing if they shivered from shock or cold.
Only then did he realize the remains of a fireplace blasted to bits scattered by his feet.
Hurriedly, he grabs blankets from the abandoned tent and rushes to where the two adventurers huddled together. He feels heat rush to his face as the metal lock snaps under his Cryo. He walks a path alone, but he walks it for others. How can he forget the needs of the people his blood demands him to protect? How can he dive right in so thoughtlessly?
Doubt creeps in his heart with blazing speed. He can almost feel it crack under the weight of guilt when he looks at the pair of adventurers’ smiles.
The embers of the bandits’ fires had long been extinguished, but Chongyun saw no need for it at that very moment. Atop treacherous peaks, away from the bustling life of Liyue’s commerce, there is order, carved into ice and frozen unto eternity. Where its guiding hand went, certainty followed. Where it led him, the light of righteousness followed.
Only with that balance, could life, as he felt amidst the lifeless snow, burst forth.
ii. darkness
She looks at the harbor’s twin moons, and how the streetlamps below outshine them both.
It is time, and the Ferrylady lying in wait behind her knows this as well. Still, she chooses to bask in the glow of the night, like she can feel the warmth of the night sea through the window.
Alas, now is not the time. She thinks that there will never truly be a time for that.
She turns around, and the Ferrylady bows out. Alone in an office that still feels too big, she readies herself with pride, but she holds no illusions on what it meant to anyone else. What was pride to her was shame to the city of Liyue.
As it sets tempting aromas and sweet song into offerings to the moon, she and her people are ready to depart. One moment, and she feels the city’s offerings rein her in. The next, and she bows her head down in resolution.
She – their kind – knows paths others do not like the back of their hands. The cobbled streets fly past beneath their feet, taking them from side alley to side alley, building to building, and whisper to whisper.
This was their home. As long as death did not bow to the harbor’s wiles, all that served it had no choice. As long as the order she was born into stood, she would defend it.
Whatever anyone else may say about it would join the noise of the city in its upward climb. Like smoke and goodbyes, rising higher than the Jade Chamber, until they are gone from sight and mind.
She turns to her companions and utters, with a seriousness both characteristic and uncharacteristic. Do what you must do.
They blend into the house’s shadows and grief, leaving her alone at the doorstep. The glittering marketplace lights twinkle against the house’s closed windows, as if it, in its boundless acceptance, still found a house of loss worthy to be in its fold.
They do not quite reach her. To Hu Tao, dazzling light rarely brought comfort.
Instead, she brings out a bundle of thin sticks, and wills their ends to be set aflame with a prayer.
The scent of plum blossoms blends into the sea-bound breeze, consuming her senses with gentle sweetness. It envelops the garden, tucking the empty space into a small dream away from the world. Before her eyes, she sees a sproutling at her feet growing past her, past her grandfather, until it reaches the cold winter night where she sees the first bloom of red appear against black.
But she knows better than to get trapped in the past.
She has no time to register her black hood being ripped away, tearing away her hat and exposing her face to the artificial night. A flash, and she is dragged from dark winter nights into a harbor of life.
As the person clutching her hood glowers with the embers of anger, she feels like the moon’s city has withheld its light from her.
The director was not one to give up. However, in the spotlight of frigid scorn condensed, she simply smiles and lets the flame eating the incense die out.
As there is life, so there will be death. As light, so darkness. That is the truth that she knows, and that no one can make her deny.
She knows being trapped in fantasies serves no one, but she understands. As she takes off into the streets, so it drives her out. As she dreams of an everlasting past, so the people dream of an everlasting future.
She above all knows that the will to remain in an illusion is too sweet a temptation.
iii. ice
He looks at looping letters piled afoot, dark against the snow, and feels a faraway pinch in his heart.
A spark catches in between invisible fingers, but he stamps it out as he steps out into the snow.
The pile is left forgotten, as it has many times now, as Chongyun rises with the sun. Sunrise atop Dragonspine is glorious, when the sun’s punishing rays are cushioned by the all-encompassing chill.
It is only right that in its presence, the ripples in his gut finally quell. The mountain is no place for indecision, and indecision had no place in heroism. Now, more than ever, he heads unflinchingly down its path.
The hushed whispers usually kept underfoot by the frigidity consume the soundspace around him. Every path is a vein to the pulsing heart of Dragonspine, where thousands of years of power lay in wait.
Every step is one into danger, yet Chongyun does not slow in his approach. It is, after all, the conquest of insurmountable challenges that make heroes.
To defeat the strong that hold down the weak, one must be strong. To protect all threatened by their weapons, he must be strong.
When the barriers blocking the cavern fall with one swift swing of ice, he feels the goddess of contradictions’ blessing to take rules written in permafrost into his own hands.
When he hears the whispers of the mountain turn into screams, he feels the mountain’s guiding hand, leading him to where he should be, as it always has.
He wishes he could have thrown away all hesitation sooner. If it is to reach the heights, he says, unflinching as the air crushes his windpipe. If it is to be the light I should be.
The heart glows red, as blood, as danger and fire. It claws at his eyes, tearing out memories from the looped ink on white. The pinching in his heart is the only thing he feels even as he pushes past bone melting in the snow.
Fire in darkness. He stomps out the image that forms. Her ink is buried by the ice, and her smoke chokes out the words that follow.
He cannot ever be like her. He should not be like her.
But when he finally feels the crystalline heartbeat emanate from broken fingertips, it flows like fire into him. When its voice melds into his, it lacks the power he felt thrumming under the earth.
It sasys, so gently, wistfully, riding on incense’s scent to the sky:
If only we’d met under a kinder sky.
Heartbeats – his, the mountains’ – turn into tremors, and the fiery red at his fingers cracks, spreading to the rock above. Snow is falling, falling like he has never seen. The wind whistles through the fissures, but he remains calm as for the first time in his life, he stares directly at the sun.
His eyes burn, but he feels nothing, not accomplishment, not joy, not fear. In monochrome gray skies fading into blizzards and crumbling rocks, he stands by his sword anchored into the snow as he takes in the view.
He sees snow taking the world in its fold, humans and monsters living in harmony under its protection.
He sees emotions driving neverending conflicts be quelled by the numbing cold, easing it all into a sea of serenity.
He sees a world at peace, inviting him to rest with it.
But when he reaches out, the touch of ice is scalding.
iv. fire
She runs as fast as she can, past a city gone silent.
The clouds swallow the sunlight, stealing all the color from the landscape as she goes.
She lives within whispers and omens, shriveling at the light. Yet, as she collapses herself into fuel, she sets her staff ablaze with unwavering determination as she barrels through the gloom.
Frozen time meets her wherever she goes, but still she soldiers on. Her guide is a mere ephemeral spark in the face of a giant snowstorm, but still Hu Tao manages to see the light on the distant mountaintop, more majestic and terrifying than she remembers. In her hands is her staff, melting her a way through, but the barrage is incessant, matching every swing of fire with another layer of ice.
Is this how he felt when they kept coming?
The snow carries with it despair. Loss. Sifting through her hands as easily as ashes in an urn, but lying so heavily in her own heart..
Soon, she knows that the Adepti will descend, but it was a human who faced the world upended so many years ago.
As it was human souls that once brought Liyue to its knees.
It first comes as a sharp windfront blasting her away, stopped only by an instinctive swing of her arm. The mountain is no nearer, but the worst of the snowstorm has met her where she stood. She stabs her staff in the earth to steady herself, and at once, the storm clears.
Her staff’s light is the gold of the city. The eye of the storm is the calm of the mountains.
The world is white, like his clothes. Like his skin, sapped of all the warmth of blood vessels underneath. It is like he is the snowstorm, like the snowflakes are his limbs taking Liyue in its embrace.
Shaking, she drives heat to her throat, but the chill that grips does not melt away.
It’s you, she wants to say. A spot of light in darkness, as always.
She sets her staff alight, its fire licking hungrily at the swirling above. It illuminates the snow in a shimmering show, beautiful as it choked all life out of her home. Their home, she reminds herself as she glares at blue fading into white, born under the moon and golden light.
She drives in, desperate to see if the city lights he left behind still lingers.
When cold rushes up to meet her, she sees the void flash before her eyes.
Void is easy. It melds into her, protecting her from the demands of light’s scrutiny. It is the end prewritten for all, easy in assuredness.
She is not like him. She does not live in the light of approval, nor seek it.
But when she cuts through certain death with a trail of fire, she sees shadows mottled on his face, molding around it like they have always belonged there.
She knows that all of them do. For it is void that is natural, and light the intruder.
When she walks towards him, he does not stop her.
Her feet grow heavy as flames dance on his face, casting shadows where power hollowed out his. As she is a spot of warmth in the biting cold, slow in her approach in the blistering winds, he is a spot of calm in chaos, swallowing the light she shines above her.
They truly have never belonged anywhere – not in the city of borrowed light, not in the shadow of mountains past. Not in a world consumed by fire, nor completely silenced by ice.
When he finally moves, slow and purposeful towards her incoming blade, she thinks that he understands that, too.
v. eclipse
Their first splash of color in monochrome is red.
Scorched earth melts through the blanket of snow – the lone sign of where life once lay.
From ash comes new life. Long after the first of her name died, long after she will die – nothing has, and will change.
So she lets it all fall away as she collapses onto the melting snow.
She does not know how long she watches white retreat into blue. She does not know when her hands reach for his, nor whose chill she feels.
She does not know when the gods finally decide to look at them – two blemishes on the scarred, snow-laden land.
Sunlight streams through the clouds, chilling her enough to balk away. The numbness ebbs away into burning pain where her limbs melt ice. All around her is a world disoriented, spinning itself back into equilibrium with them at the center, unmoving, unmovable by anything beyond.
She will be a hero, but she knows she shines too dim for its honor, and too brightly for its solemnity.
There, in the in-betweens of swinging balances, life and death, fire and ice, light and darkness, and only there, did she truly belong.
Did they truly belong.