The weekend brings with it inches of snow, which is convenient for what I need to do next. I make sure my apartment is completely closed to the outside before settling on my couch and closing my eyes, willing myself to sleep.
I know something is wrong when I wake up with the cold sting of the living room still in my skin.
I open my eyes. I am lying in a snowbank, in the middle of snowy plains with no end in sight. I stand up, trusting my coat to keep out most of the cold.
This dream looks charted, but not the one I am used to. Will Xiao even be able to make it to the same place? If so, what benefit did this misdirection serve?
I stand still for five minutes, then ten. Then fifteen. The snow around my feet begins to soak into my shoes, adding to the unpleasant dampness. Truth be told, I dread doing this on my own. My influence over dreams only goes so far.
Then, behind me, salvation.
Xiao digs himself out of a snowdrift, flakes sticking to his short dark hair. He spits out a mouthful of snow and pulls off his blindfold, squinting in my general direction.
I hold up my hands. ‘It’s me.’
‘My lord—Mr. Zhongli! I thought I’d lost you.’
‘Do you know where this is?’
Xiao rubs his eyes. ‘I do not. I initially found the apartment, but he told me you weren’t there so I tried reentering from another side..’
‘Did you keep your blindfold on?’
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘I do not forget what you have told me.’
Nevertheless, he keeps his blindfold on his belt, looking at me expectantly. I take another look at our surroundings. Snow, with the promise of wind.
‘Let’s move,’ I say. ‘It’s better if we can find some landmarks.’
‘My lord,’ says Xiao, treading cat-like over the snow. ‘Is this dream yours?’
I look at him directly and shake my head.
‘Who,’ he breathes. ‘Who is capable of doing this?’
None of them are left, was the unspoken follow-up. I pick a direction and begin to walk.
The very wind resists us. I find myself needing to shield my eyes against the building blizzard, actively fighting against the snow that seems determined to drag us under. Xiao is faring better, though not by much. His laboured breathing turns sharper and sharper against the cold.
I turn to face him. ‘Would you be opposed to retreating for now?’
Xiao shakes his head. ‘I can hear… we’re close.’
It takes me a while to register what he is talking about. Underneath the sound of the wind, and the crush of snow beneath our feet, is a long, thin wail.
I grit my teeth and continue in the direction of the sound. The wind continues to resist, forcing me into a crouch. The wailing persists, though now I can hear the groans and creaks that accompany it. I shut my eyes against the blizzard, almost crawling forward now.
And then, everything stops.
I open my eyes once more. The blizzard is gone, and my surroundings are clear again, the snow glittering innocently in the light as if nothing had ever happened. I scramble against the snow, pulling myself up to my feet.
What I see in front of me freezes me in my tracks.
Breaking up the endless monotony of snow is an expanse of darkness. For a body of water it is unnervingly calm, the only ripples visible forming around chunks of ice that glide across the surface. I brace myself as two of the larger icebergs sail dangerously close to each other.
The groan emits on impact, and then comes the wailing as the icebergs grind against each other. It seems to echo in the distant emptiness, reverberating and folding in onto itself. The smaller iceberg crumbles into pieces, and the larger one does not escape unscathed either.
Silence falls as they sink into the sea in mutual destruction.
I turn around, a question on my lips, but behind me is nothing but snow. No footprints, no sign that another person was there at all. I lick my lips, dry from the wind.
‘Xiao?’
No one responds but the wind, picking up once more.
If he continued in the same direction as I did, he would eventually find the sea. The coastline stretches into the distance, an unnervingly straight line extending from right to left. Walking alongside it is the safest option for now, apart from retreating. He should have a relatively good chance of finding the direction I chose.
The host of this dream is here, and I will not go back without finding them.
I turn to my right, shake the snow from my coat, and begin to walk. The snow along the coast is thinner than the rest, which is kinder to my half-frozen feet.
I spend so much time looking into the distance, looking for a horizon, that I trip and almost fall over something solid half-buried in the snow.
Something heavy drops into my stomach when the thing sniffs, sitting up in his little nest of snow. I catch a shock of ginger hair, a small red scarf around his tiny body. His winter coat is slightly too large for him, and he stares up at me with large blue eyes.
I look down and freeze in my tracks.
Clutched in tiny gloved hands is a centipede, curled up and sleeping, half-tucked into a pocket.
~~~
The boy won’t tell me his name, won’t even speak. I ask him where the centipede came from, if he would let me hold it, and he refuses.
I let him trail behind me as I walk.
He looks achingly familiar. Childe did mention having younger siblings, and dreams are not constrained by location. Still, I find it hard to believe that this child is responsible for this dream. Poor thing, swept up in the midst of all this.
He doesn’t seem bothered, however. He keeps stroking the centipede on its back, breathing on it to keep it warm, muttering to himself in a language I do not recognise. Whenever I look at him he avoids my gaze, even though I can feel him staring holes into my back.
The icebergs continue their destructive journeys across the ink-dark sea. When the cacophony of wails started up again, I feel a hand tug on my coattails. The boy looks at me with his large, bright eyes, indicating the sea with a nod of his head.
We watch the icebergs sink, the last two chunks in the sheer vastness of the water. The boy pets the centipede on its head and tugs on my coattails again.
‘Have you seen my papa? He said he’d take me ice fishing.’
His speech is heavily accented, barely audible. I look him in the eye and shake my head.
‘Can you take care of Ilya for me?’ He hands me the centipede, placing it squarely in my hands. ‘I’m going to go ice fishing.’
I let the centipede come to its senses and crawl up my sleeve, where it finds warmth in the crook of my elbow. It isn’t until I realise the child is halfway to the sea, leaving tiny footprints behind him, that the true grievousness of the situation begins to set in.
‘Wait,’ I try to say, but the wind whisks my voice away. ‘There’s no ice left,’ I manage to say, placing a hand on his shoulder. He flinches but stares at me.
‘There is ice,’ he says. ‘There’s always ice.’
I look up, and everything in front of me is an endless blue. There is no sign of the ink darkness of the sea around me. Snow begins to fall again, and the boy pulls a hood up over his head, starting his resolute walk towards what had previously been the sea.
He tests the ice cautiously, tapping it with a toe before placing his full weight onto the frozen layer. I almost cry out when he stumbles, but he reorients himself and marches on, gaze cast downward as if looking for something on the ice.
The ice holds my weight surprisingly well. I feel the centipede curl tighter around my arm when I slip and almost fall, managing to catch myself at the last second. As I am brushing snowflakes out of my hair, the boy has found a good spot, producing a small saw from his pocket.
The foreignness of it forces me to watch. The boy drives the saw into the ice, teeth gritted as he carves out a perfectly round chunk. Carefully, he removes the chunk, producing a small hole in the ice.
What hits me at first is the unbearable heat. Through the gap in the ice, the same stars I had seen in the uncharted dream. I take a step back, the ice squeaking underneath my weight, ignoring the pulsing heat that emits from the hole, stars living and breathing and dying.
The boy is unbothered. He produces a small bucket, turns it over, and seats himself upon it. I watch numbly as he pulls out a fishing rod, fixes a mealworm to the hook, and feeds the bait into the hole.
Those large, owlish eyes find me once more.
‘How’s Ilya?’
He means the centipede. I nod in an attempt to be reassuring. ‘He’s warm.’
‘Oh, that’s good,’ says the boy, his hands surprisingly steady for how small they are. He looks about ten, but his manner of speaking suggests he is at least two years older than my estimate. ‘You’ll tell me a story, won’t you?’
I blink. ‘Pardon?’
‘Papa said he’d tell me about where my name came from if I could fish on my own. See, I’m doing it!’ He brandishes the fishing rod with no small amount of pride. ‘But he’s not here, and you look like you know a lot of things.’
Oh. ‘Alright, then.’ This boy knows this place better than I ever will. But first— ‘You have to tell me your name first.’
‘Oh! My name is Ajax.’
My memories of that story are vague, shifting sands in a storm. Half-formed images of a sea voyage, a life torn by violence. In the face of that expectant gaze, I choose a half-truth.
‘I must apologise. I do not know the origin of your name.’
The boy’s head droops. I am debating whether to comfort him when he recovers, smiling at me once more. ‘It’s okay! You can tell me another story. Something… something about a hero, and great adventures…’
I rack my brains. The centipede wraps itself tighter around my arm, its pointed legs digging into flesh. One story jumps to the front of my mind: a dark-haired young man, and his unwavering faith.
‘My home knows many guardians, but the Conqueror of Demons is the only one that has outlived his counterparts. Would you like to hear about him?’
‘I’ve never heard of him,’ says the boy. Am I seeing things, or is he taller now? ‘You’re not from Morepesok, are you?’
I shake my head. ‘The place I come from is much warmer, and home to many such legends.’ The boy’s earnest look spurs me into steadier speech. ‘Yet, not many know that most of them were just human at the very beginning of their stories.’
‘You see, before the endless hunt of evil, before his feats of heroism to protect his home from disaster, he was just a man. Unfortunate, really, that he was seized up by a god.
‘They called it a god to the best of their understanding, but it was far from holy. It seemed to wish for nothing but unending conquest, spreading carnage across the land with its captives as vessels. The people cried out over their slaughtered kin, their burned homes, and their god responded. Rex Lapis, lord of stone and contracts.’
‘Rex Lapis?’ The boy adjusts his gloves. The motion is hauntingly familiar. ‘Does he know the Tsaritsa?’
‘I… suppose not. Not yet.’
‘Not yet?’
‘Let me finish. Rex Lapis saw the vessels of the god now known as a devourer of dreams, chained in servitude by their mortal minds. Thus, he challenged the devourer of dreams, set with the simplest of terms: the victor had the right to force the loser to relinquish their hold over their people.
‘And so Rex Lapis fought. The devourer of dreams cowered behind its vessels, but it had forged those bonds out of fear and compulsion. At the first taste of potential freedom, those brave vessels broke the chains around their minds and killed their old master.’
I say killed, but what is more accurate is dispersed. Those things can never truly die. Still, that detail can be added later. ‘Only one survived this incredible feat. Rex Lapis gave him the name Alatus, wishing for him the sweet wind of freedom as indicated by his namesake.
‘Now freed, Alatus chose to follow his saviour. However, his captivity forced upon him a horrific fate: he would slowly poison anyone around him, dragging them into the depths of madness that he had barely survived. Instead of hiding or running away, he picked up his spear once more and declared to m—to the people he swore to protect:
“Unto you I swear this oath; to give to those who have none, to fight for those with not the strength. To serve the very land that has nourished me, given me life. To guard and to protect the land of Liyue, forevermore.”
‘He embraced the shadow,’ I say, lowering my voice against the wind, ‘fought from the darkness against the nightmares of the devourer’s kin, without recognition, without fail. Even as he found himself alone, traversing the cursed threads of nightmares, he did not doubt his cause one bit.
‘For he had sworn an oath, and that oath kept him warm like an ember in the snow.’
I let my voice fade into the wind. The boy’s eyes are so wide they take up almost half of his face.
‘Woah,’ he says. ‘I’ve never heard about any of that before. Rex Lapis… Liyue… they all sound so far away.’
‘It is only natural,’ I say. ‘I do not believe you have had much reason to leave your home.’
‘I want to,’ says the boy. ‘One day, I’m going to be an adventurer, just like my papa when he was young. I’m going to fight evil dragons, and I’ll save everyone from bad guys… just like your Alatus.’
I almost smile at that. The naïveté of childhood dreams, I think to myself.
But when I look up to address the boy, he is gone.
All that is left is the upturned bucket, and a fishing rod hanging onto the edge of the hole by its hook. I look all around me. The ice is completely empty of any other presence, almost mocking me with its endless blue.
The centipede uncoils itself from my arm, peeking out of my sleeve.
‘Hey!’
The sound almost makes me jump. There, in front of me—how did I not see her?—is a slight grey-haired woman. Smiling, she lifts one of her billowing sleeves and waves. A stringed instrument, almost as tall as she is, is slung across her back.
A guqin.
The ice cracks beneath me, and I scream as I fall through the void.
the fanfic server was absolutely delighted when i called this arc 'zhongli is now makima'