Chapter 1
The bard had been sitting on the highest balcony of Wangshu Inn for an hour before Xiao decided he was not a threat, and for another hour before Xiao decided he had been wrong.
It was the song that did it. At first the stranger only hummed, swinging his legs over the drop, a green cape bunched beneath him and a cecilia tucked into the band of his hat. Then he took out a lyre and began to play. Not loudly. Not for anyone. Something old and plain, a tune that climbed and fell like a path through hills, and the wind off Dihua Marsh, which had been blowing east all evening, turned around and came to listen.
Xiao felt it shift against the back of his neck. He stood up from the roof beam where he had been crouched since dusk, and the jade spear came into his hand without his asking.
"You," he said.
The bard did not stop playing. "Me," he agreed cheerfully. "Took you long enough, Alatus. I was starting to think I'd have to sing the second verse, and the second verse is terrible. I wrote it in a hurry. There was a dragon involved."
Almost no one living called him that. Xiao landed on the balcony rail without a sound, his spear-point resting a hand's breadth from the bard's throat. Below them the inn's lanterns swayed. Verr Goldet's laugh drifted up from the terrace, along with the smell of steamed fish and cheap wine.
"Barbatos," Xiao said.
"Venti, these days. Barbatos sounds like someone who'd scold you for skipping prayers." The Anemo Archon finally lifted his fingers from the strings. His eyes in the lantern light were a startling turquoise, the color of the sky over Starfell Lake. He did not look at the spear at all. "Put that down. You'll scare the innkeeper, and she's been very kind to me. She let me sleep in the hay last night for the price of one song."
"Why are you in Liyue?"
"I'm a bard. Wandering is in the job description." Venti tilted his head. "And I heard a rumor that the last of the Guardian Yakshas hasn't slept in a fortnight."
Xiao's grip tightened on the shaft. He had not told anyone. There was no one to tell. The Traveler and that floating companion had gone on to Inazuma. Zhongli, who had once been Rex Lapis and was now, inexplicably, a man who spent his afternoons at tea houses, did not ask. Or rather, he asked in the old way, sideways, with the weight of six thousand years in a glance across a table, and Xiao answered in the old way, by saying nothing and leaving.
"Rumors in Liyue," he said, "are cheap."
"Not this one. This one cost me a whole bottle of dandelion wine." Venti grinned. "There's an old tree spirit in Qingce Village who loves gossip and has terrible taste in drinks. She told me the mountain at the edge of the marsh has been screaming in the night. Not out loud. The other way. The way only someone like you or me would hear."
The wind died. Down on the terrace, someone dropped a cup and swore.
Xiao lowered the spear. He did it slowly, not because he had decided to trust this creature, but because his arms had begun, very faintly, to shake, and he would not let an Archon of all beings see that.
The karma had been bad this month. Worse than in decades. Osial's brief waking and the fall of the Jade Chamber had shaken loose things that had been sleeping under Liyue since the Archon War, fragments of dead gods' rage seeping up through the rock like groundwater after rain, and every one of them had to be met with the spear and the mask. Every one he killed left a residue. It sat in his blood. It whispered. In the long hours before dawn it took the voices of his brothers and sisters, Bosacius and Indarias and Menogias and Bonanus, and asked him why he was still alive when they were not.
He had stopped closing his eyes. It was easier.
"I don't need your help," he said.
"I didn't offer any." Venti reached into his cape and produced a small covered dish, the kind Verr Goldet's kitchen used for desserts. He set it on the balcony rail between them. "I brought you almond tofu. I'm told it's your favorite. I'm told you'll deny that if anyone asks, so I won't ask."
Xiao stared at the dish. Then at the bard.
"Who told you?"
"Your innkeeper. Also the cook, also the waiter, also a very small child who saw you eat three bowls once when you thought nobody was looking." Venti's grin went softer. "You're not as invisible as you think, Alatus. People here watch for you. They leave the light on in that top room. Did you know that?"
He had known. He had pretended not to.
Xiao did not touch the tofu. He sat down on the rail, at the far end, as far from the bard as the balcony allowed, with his spear across his knees. The mask hung at his hip. In the dark the demonic markings on his arm seemed to crawl.
"Why do you care," he said. It was not a question. It came out flat and tired.
Venti was quiet for long enough that Xiao thought he might not answer. When he spoke, his voice had lost its sing-song lilt.
"Because I had a friend once," he said, "who was the last of something too."
He began to play again, very softly, a few notes under the words.
"He was a boy in old Mondstadt, when it was still a city of walls and a tyrant's storms. He wanted to sing for birds who couldn't fly. He's the one whose face I wear. He died in the rebellion, and I got to keep going, which is the worst thing about being what we are. We keep going. We outlast everyone who'd have told us to rest." The lyre wavered on one note and steadied. "I spent a long time drinking about it. Sometimes I still do. But eventually I learned something useful, and I came all the way to Liyue to tell it to you, so you have to at least pretend to listen."
Xiao said nothing. The wind had come back. It moved through his hair, cool and patient, and something in it eased the pressure behind his eyes the way a hand eases a knot in a shoulder.
"The ones we've lost don't want us to keep the score," Venti said. "That voice in your head, asking why you're still here? That isn't them. That's the karma, wearing their faces because it knows it's the only thing you'll listen to. They would have kicked you off this balcony for even thinking it."
Xiao's throat closed.
He remembered Bosacius, tall and laughing, who had taught him to eat with chopsticks and mocked him for months when he got it wrong. He remembered Bonanus winning a sparring match by tripping him into a river. He remembered all of them by a campfire on a hill above the harbor, before the madness came, arguing about whether Rex Lapis ever slept. Indarias had said that the Geo Archon slept standing up like a horse, and the others had laughed until they wept, and Xiao, very young, had laughed too, not understanding the joke and not needing to.
He had not thought of that night in centuries. The karma never showed him that night.
"Play," he said roughly. "If you're going to stay. Play something."
Venti played.
It was the same tune from before, the one that climbed and fell, but slower now, and he did not sing the words. Xiao listened with his eyes open, then with them half-lidded, then, at some point he would never be able to name, with them closed. The whispering in his blood did not stop. But it went quiet, and further away, like a crowd heard through a closed door. In its place was the wind and the lyre and the marsh frogs and Verr Goldet calling last orders down below.
At some point, without looking, he reached for the dish and lifted the cover. The almond tofu was cool and soft and sweet, and it tasted, as it always had, of dreams he had once been made to devour and had long since stopped wanting. He ate it slowly. He did not say thank you. Venti did not stop playing to wait for it.
When Xiao woke, the sky over Dihua Marsh was pale gold and the balcony was empty.
He sat up too fast and reached for the spear, which was still across his knees. He had slept. He had slept through a whole night, which had not happened since before the Rite of Descension, and nothing had come for him. The mountain at the edge of the marsh was silent.
The dish was gone. In its place, on the rail where the bard had been sitting, there was a single cecilia, white and a little crushed from a night in a hat band. It shouldn't have survived the trip from Mondstadt. It had, somehow. A dandelion seed was caught in its petals, and as Xiao watched, the morning wind lifted the seed free and carried it east, toward the harbor, toward the sea.
He picked up the flower. He held it for a long time.
Then he went inside, to the top room where the light had been left on for him, and put the cecilia in a cup of water on the windowsill, where anyone passing on the road below would be able to see it.