Molten Light
Synopsis:
After the discovery in the Chasm, Aether pays Dragonspine a visit for a tiny sense of normalcy. But nightmares latch onto him as he tries to make peace with what he suspects about his sister and himself. A Genshin Impact fanfiction.
POV:
First person point of view. Aether's point of view.
Genre:
Drama, Fantasy, Mystery, M/M Romance
Rating:
Mature
Content Warning:
Deals with loss and grief issues that might be triggering. Heavy on internal moral conflict monologue. Mostly a character study. No graphic depiction of violence, but it's implied.
About this fanfiction:
I posted this fanfiction on AO3 in 2022. It wasn't popular, but I really love it. Although I enjoy writing in third person point of view limited nowadays, this fanfiction reminds me why first person point of view still works best in some scenes.
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IN THE NIGHT, WEEKS AFTER my discovery in The Chasm, I had a dream that went like this: everything was dark, a black void in time. The air felt compressed, pressing into me like a dead weight, and I huffed my breath loudly into the stillness.
I had my eyes closed. I was exhausted. I felt exhausted. Sweat beaded, rolling down my temples and back. In my hand, I was gripping a sword. Not just any sword; my sword. The light sword I’d brought with me from my home world. And, when I looked down, its blade was covered in crimson.
Beneath my feet, all around me, I saw the wreckage of my own doing. Bodies, mangled open and dead, piling up around me like a graveyard. It was hard to breathe. Distantly, I asked myself if I was the one who did it, then told myself of course I was. In the void of that unending darkness there was nobody else.
This was an eerily familiar sight. Even though I couldn’t remember much of them, I got flashes of memories from the time before this. What kind of man was I, I wondered, to be able to see corpses and feel nothing but faint glimmer of guilt? I felt with an odd sense of certainty that I must have been glowing gold with my wings unfurled. A beam of light and these people were the moths. I had always been the enticement. I was the judge and jury. I was the law itself.
Then, she was standing before me. White dress, light-blonde hair floating gently in the non-existent flow of air. Her hands were free of weapons and I felt some kind of wonderment at that. Lumine, my twin sister, even as she was standing at the opposite end of our understanding, trusted me not to hurt her. And I felt shame in the knowledge that I was holding this sword, killing these monsters (who turned out not to be a monster at all, no, no, no), while she was as bare and trusting as the day I lost her.
“Aether,” she said my name softly, her face was free of any emotions, “who are you to decide that they don’t deserve redemption?”
My huffs sounded deafening in the quietness.
“At this point, after centuries of suffering,” she continued on, “isn’t 1% chance the barest form of kindness?”
Cold. I heard my teeth chattering.
“And, instead of me, are you not the one who’s being the hypocrite?”
✷
The Dragonspine camp was dark when I woke. Wind was blowing outside, bringing flecks of snow with it, and I felt the freezing cold completely unrelated to the temperature outside. The cave walls were closing in on me. I sat up in my bedroll, then buried my face in my hands.
Tendrils of nightmare still clung onto me as I slid my boot up my leg. In the bedroll beside mine, I noticed Albedo stirring. I smiled a little to myself, amusement felt subdued in my accumulated exhaustion; Albedo had always been a light-sleeper.
It might not be a really good idea coming back here in my current state of mind, but I was desperate for an escape. Albedo’s presence always reminded me that I was different from other people in Teyvat. His ever-present curiosity grounded me and, truthfully, as was his subtle affections.
I could, I suppose, crawl back into the bedroll. Listening to Albedo breathing evenly in his sleep could soothe me back to slumber. But more sleep would mean more nightmares of the same kind, and I had been dreaming of my sister far too often lately that waking without her beside me was a sharp ache that I couldn’t fend off.
I walked outside.
✷
I wasn’t aware of what I was doing. Or, at least, at first I wasn’t. I didn’t know if I was even thinking.
I walked through the steps that I could barely notice. The perpetual whiteness of Dragonspine reminded me of the utter blankness of being reborn, pure and untouched by ideas, not yet tainted by wants. The stars, before their birth, were once clouds of dust and gas that had collapsed into themselves at the weight of gravity, and it was strange to me that, out of all things I remembered, this knowledge was one that came to me right in that moment.
Perhaps because it was an apt description of my current self, whether I wanted it to be or not. Without Lumine, the longer this went on, I was at the brink of my collapse, but I was already a star and the next collapse I would face was only the one that would lead to my eventual obliteration.
So, maybe that was why I found myself standing right on the edge of the hilichurl’s camp, staring at them as they exclaimed in alarm, arms swinging, shield held up in ready, arrows nocked in place.
I held up my sword, then struck.
✷
Even here, in the aloneness of the mountains, with only myself as company, I still could not comprehend her words. They were repeated in my memory. Bent and twisted and distorted in my dreams.
Sometimes, in the dream, I would recognize the shape of her face. Familiar in the way your sibling was familiar to you even with your eyes closed and I got the vaguest image in my mind of a day spent under pale pink light, laughing breathlessly as we lay on a grassy land, and my fingers stained blue by the crushed leaves.
Or, on some other time in another world, as we painstakingly trudged through mountains of sands. The sun ray was harsh and painful on our bare skin, but, even with most of our faces covered in clothes, I could see that the glint in her eyes under her own goggles. Fierce with determination. She, after all, had always been the solid one of us two. I had always been more malleable. Gold tempered in heat; I was a molten light shaped like a dragonfly. I was brief in my current life cycle. I was ceaselessly changing my mind.
But, most of the time, I could not discern her features in the dream and I was shaking with the crippling fear that I could no longer remember her. That we were already so far away from each other we were not in the same page anymore, not even in the same book. The blurry face, the distorted way of her speaking, then the flashes of memory of that day in The Chasm, finding those flowers thoughtfully left near the end of another being’s life. Dainsleif’s stories, how he spoke about her like he’d known her for a long time, and how this Lumine was both foreign and familiar to the ones I could recall from my memories.
She would sometimes grow scales in the nightmares; her face was no longer one I remembered grinning widely at me but one that was covered in a demonic mask. Abyssal aura slithered around her like snakes and she was telling me I had to make a stand.
I have time, she would say. And as she waited for me to claim my stance, she would roam the realms and declare wars with the gods. Lots of people would call her insane. Heartless. Selfish.
Me, I would only call her my sister.
✷
The hilichurl curling at my feet was grunting, mumbling in words lost in translation. Perhaps if I could focus for just a single moment, I would understand what it was saying. An exclamation of pain, maybe, or a shout of anger, but I was a tangled mass of confusion. I was a ticking bomb waiting to explode, taking everything else along with me, and nobody knew it because no one else dragged this guilt like I did. Like the only way forward was to ascend, but ascension came at the cost of something else. Sometimes you would be lucky enough that it would only be yourself. Most of the time, you weren’t so lucky.
I stared down at the hilichurl and thought of Dainsleif’s words. They are not human anymore, he’d said. Remind yourself that. There was an or else dangling at the end of the sentence. Or else, and his eyes right at that moment were hard as he tried to convince me like he tried to convince himself. Did he not know that I was as well-acquainted with pain as he was? Did he think I couldn’t see the guilt flitting across his face as he spared a glance at the dying hilichurls? Who did he call a hypocrite: The Abyss or himself?
I raised my sword above my head. The man, I mused to myself, should really take his own advice.
I swung the blade down.
✷
If she were here, she would study me in that frustrated expression of hers. Lumine had always been so set in doing what was right, even before, back when we were younger than the five hundred years we must have been staying in Teyvat, while I’d never cared much either way; a fact I had successfully managed to cover up with my quietness. Which was why it was strange to me, at first, that she would associate herself with The Abyss Order at all.
My sister cared about people. I cared about her. Was that not enough?
“That’s not a way to live, Aether.” She had huffed a half-amused, half-baffled breath, watching an indigo sun setting at the far horizon in one of the only memories I could remember. “You’re supposed to care. You’re supposed to believe in something.”
“Then maybe there’s something wrong with me,” I had told her nonchalantly with my eyes closed, feeling the breeze caressing my cheeks.
I’d felt her fingers playing with the strands of my braid. She had said to me softly, “No, there’s not.” and it was during those moments that I was certain she loved me the way I loved her, that even though we bantered and we fought, we would always come back to each other. We were all we had left.
“Aether.”
“Yeah?”
When I had my eyes opened, she was staring at the darkened sky. Her face was pensive. “Sometimes, I wish you could see things through my eyes.”
When she looked down at me, the same amber eyes as mine shone like molten gold in the low light. “If you could,” she continued on, “then perhaps you would understand.”
✷
But, sister, I wanted to tell her now, understanding does not always lead to an agreement. Most of the time it only led to an impasse. Was that not why she and Dainsleif were dancing around the issue? Why she was in constant move and Dainsleif was at her heels, always?
The problem was I knew what she meant. What she saw. The revival of the homeland, she’d said and the Abyss creatures rejoiced at their princess’ words. The revival of the homeland, except the homeland was not Khaenri’ah; it was our home world.
Through her eyes I recalled the day we had to fly out of the planet to survive, watching suspended in space as the lines began to form in the atmosphere as though it was merely a glass cracking at the slightest pressure. I could feel the wetness of her unshed tears in her eyes only because I could feel it in my own. The destruction of our identity, I thought, looked a lot like a snowglobe shattering on the floor. There was not a sound in space. Not even a whimper.
And I could picture it in my head, what she must have seen when she’d witnessed the cataclysm. The utter devastation of it. Most people didn’t need to go through the loss of a home once in their lives, let alone twice.
‘Home’ is wherever we are together, she’d said to me, but we both had always been in perpetual search of a new home. Unable to forget. Unable to let go.
And I wanted so badly to grab her shoulders and shake her. Lumine, I would shout at her, Lumine, this is not our home world. These are not our people. Why do you care so much?
My sword missed the mark. Its point slid into the piling snow, clanging as it hit the ground, and I heaved a long shuddering breath like I’d just been carrying a boulder. My eyes stung, though perhaps it was the cold. Distantly, I noticed that I was wearing only my inner shirt and not a piece of armor.
I had to tamp down the urge to laugh. Of all the stupidest things I could have done, rushing into an enemy camp without any protection, in the freezing cold. Lumine would have scolded me.
I pulled up my sword and stepped back. The injured hilichurl was still squeaking on the ground. Shaking, I noted, and guilt laced into me, a sharp reminder that I was never as cold as I believed myself to be. “Leave,” I told the creature. It didn’t seem to understand, so I repeated the words in hilicurlian, which grabbed its attention, but not enough to get it moving. Irritated, I shouted, “Get out of here.”
The hilichurl scrambled out of sight and I let out a breath.
In the soft sound of snow falling, I felt inexplicably hollow.
✷
I didn’t know how long I was standing there, staring at nothing, but it must have not been long because I felt his presence before I saw him. The coat, when it covered my shoulders, was warm. Or maybe it was not the coat that was warm, but his arms around me, so uncharacteristic in their action that it took me a second to fall into them.
“Your current temperature reminds me of ice blocks,” Albedo said as he stepped away, giving me a searching look. He had, after all, questioned me regarding my nightmares a few times before tonight, all of which I’d politely evaded. Now, he was asking: “What are you doing in the snow?”
Clever eyes, clever mind, clever hands. I could never lie to him. I gave him an apologetic smile. “I had to clear my head.”
“By freezing yourself?”
“They say cold is the fastest way to keep yourself alert,” I replied to him magnanimously.
“You could have just asked for my assistance.” Albedo didn’t miss his pace. “I could have procured several snow balls and thrown them at your face. You wouldn’t even have had to move. At your request, of course.”
I laughed. “Of course, Albedo. How generous of you.”
“That’s me,” he said as he laced his fingers around mine. “Generous.”
Albedo must have seen what I’d done to the hilichurl camp. There was simply no possibility that he hadn’t. What must have he been thinking, watching me lose it like that? To the creatures that didn’t even deserve it. But now he was pulling me back to his camp with so much tenderness that it hurt, without any judgment in his eyes.
“Wait.” I stopped in my tracks.
“What is it?”
“Do you think you could conjure a Cecilia?”
Albedo hummed. “I suppose I could. I have some seeds in my coat pocket. What for?”
“Can’t a guy get flowers from his boyfriend once in awhile?”
He gave me an indulgent smile. “I would have given you some, but you would have told me you had no use for them.”
True, but: “Please.”
I took the flower back to the camp, cringing at the mess I had made of the place. Desolation tugged at me like an open wound, but I knelt at one of fallen mask and laid the Cecilia there, feeling an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. Was this what Lumine felt when she left the flowers in The Chasm? This crawling sense of helplessness?
I stood up, then walked back to where Albedo was standing, giving me a moment, and laced my fingers back to his. For someone who’d claimed to have difficulties discerning emotions, he was surprisingly attuned to other people’s moods. Or mine, at least.
Later, in the darkness of the camp, with his arm around my waist and his breath blowing softly across my neck, he whispered, “What are you thinking?”
I could always refuse to answer. I knew Albedo wouldn’t push, but I’d been thinking of my sister laughing under the sun and comparing it to the pale imitation of the one I’d met in front of that Defiled Statue. The company she kept. The Royal Guards of Khaenri’ah, forever cursed to watch the people they protected die out one by one. How did you tell someone else about this kind of thing?
Then, I thought of some hilichurls dancing in the grassy land of Mondstadt. If there was anyone I could tell about this, I pondered to myself, it would be Albedo, so I found myself answering, “You were right, you know, in the beginning.”
“I’m right most of the time, Aether, so you need to be more specific.”
I smiled in the dark. “The first time we met. You were drawing.”
“Oh?”
“They really were interesting,” I began, holding him tighter. “The hilichurls."
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