Chapter Text
------
The dark abyss that Ajax falls into leads to a world of wonder.
He wakes in an unfamiliar courtyard made of dark marble and gold, one that he’s never seen and would look out of place in the rural village of Morepesok. For a moment, he wonders if he has somehow found himself in Her Majesty’s palace, but the bitter cold of the Tsaritsa’s Everwinter is absent around him. He blinks, still bleary and aching from his fall despite the soft landing Caeli has provided, until he hears the snarl of a wolf above him.
Ajax makes a panicked, choked-off noise as he scrambles away from the unfamiliar daemon in the form of a white wolf, and he reaches for his own. Caeli shifts under his hold, from the great brown bear that caught him in the fall into a small lion cub. She whines under his touch, and he doesn’t know whether to ask her if she’s been hurt, not when he doesn’t know where they currently are, if they are even safe from harm.
“Who are you?”
Ajax turns his gaze from the still snarling daemon to the boy who must be the daemon’s partner. He looks to be the same age as him, but he wears such elegant garments that Ajax could never think to afford. He has stars in his eyes, Ajax thinks, and hair so blue that it reminds him of the wine-dark seas of his homeland.
“He seems like an outlander from the lands of the Seven,” the wolf says as she noses at Ajax’s hair, and he tenses at her touch. His mother has taught him that it is rude to touch another’s daemon without permission, and his own experiences have shown him that it feels repulsive to have that unwelcome touch on your soul. But the wolf’s touch doesn’t send the same horrid feeling in him as he expects, just one of strange familiarity and comfort. “He smells of ice and sea.”
“Astra, stop,” the blue-haired boy says, pulling at the great white wolf, and the daemon shifts under the boy’s hold until the wolf disappears and a sleek lark alights on the boy’s shoulder. The boy gives his daemon a pleased smile before turning back to look at Ajax. “I’m Kaeya. You are?”
“Ajax,” he finds himself answering despite his apprehension at this unfamiliar place and the beautiful boy in front of him. His father had told him stories of otherworldly creatures, fairies and spirits alike, that lured humans to their death with their desires and beauty, and for once, he wonders if he has gone too far in his pursuit of his father’s stories. Caeli jumps into his lap, trying to curl and hide away like Ajax wants to. Instead, he smiles at the boy and asks the question that burns in both their minds. “Where are we?”
Kaeya smiles, and his daemon, Astra, twitters as she pulls at the ribbon that ties Kaeya’s dark blue hair. “This is the Black Palace of Khaenri’ah. Are you lost, Ajax?”
Ajax laughs nervously, and he hugs his daemon close to his chest. She whines in his hold, and he bites his lip as he meets the stars in Kaeya’s eyes. He doesn’t recognize the name from any story. “Yeah,” he says as he stands with Caeli in his arms, feeling out of place in this wonderland. “That seems to be the case.”
------
The nation of Khaenri’ah is strange. For one thing, its people do not worship any Archon.
“What if we can’t go back?” Caeli asks him one night as they rest in the room provided for them in the Black Palace’s barracks. The mages and alchemists that Kaeya has taken him to had told him that he is far, far from home, and he has been told to wait and to learn. He doesn’t know how long he still has to wait.
“We will,” Ajax promises her in a whispered voice and a gentle touch, even though he knows that she can feel his doubt just as much as he can feel his fear. He misses their family with an ache that follows them both in their shared dreams. “Kaeya promised me.”
“And do you believe him?” Caeli wrinkles her nose, and she turns from the nimble cat on his bedside into a small dormice that can curl up on his pillows.
“I do,” he says before he closes his eyes. He doesn’t say what they both already know.
There is nothing else he can do in this foreign land, where he is nothing but an outlander and a lost child, but trust its prince who he has come to call friend.
------
“Ajax!”
Ajax stops his practice of the forms that Skirk has drilled into him to look over his shoulder. Caeli has already perked up from where she sits guarding beside him, and she rushes toward the other boy. The prince approaches with his two knights--Lumine and Dain, he remembers Kaeya introducing them before--a few steps behind him. Since Ajax has not been able to go home, he has also been placed under the care of another of Khaenri’ah’s knights to learn to fight.
In Khaenri’ah, he’s learned that everyone knows how to fight. They are the last bastion of humanity against the corruption that lays within, the corruption that eats at the ley lines and drains the Irminsul dry, and they are proud of the duties and prestige that they hold. In Khaenri’ah, the humans see themselves as no less than the gods of Teyvat.
And above such people stand the scions of the Eclipse Dynasty, with Kaeya as their only prince and heir.
Ajax’s friend.
Kaeya laughs as Caeli tackles him into the ground. Somehow, it does not feel repulsive or strange when it is Kaeya who touches Caeli like it did with other people. Somehow, it doesn’t feel wrong. He scans around Kaeya looking for the other’s daemon but finds Astra strangely absent.
At his searching look, Kaeya grins, still holding tightly to Caeli, and it almost feels as if he is holding Ajax himself. “Asta is feeling lazy today, so I left her in my rooms,” Kaeya answers the unasked question.
That is another peculiarity in Khaenri’ah, Ajax thinks. In Snezhnaya, in Teyvat where all the other lands are governed by Celestia’s archons, it is unthinkable to be separated from your daemon, to be separated from the physical manifestation of your soul.
With the use of Khemia, Khaenri’ah has achieved the impossible and terrifying idea of being separated from one’s daemon.
It still horrifies Ajax when he thinks of it. He cannot imagine being separated from Caeli.
He should be terrified of the people in Khaenri’ah too, of how easily they can live without the constant presence of their daemons beside them. It should not be easy to match Kaeya’s smile or to trust Caeli in his arms without the thought that he might get separated from her as well.
It should not be easy at all to be trapped in an unknown land with no way back home.
But Kaeya makes it easy.
When Kaeya returns Caeli in his arms and she curls as a snake around his shoulders, Ajax grins at the prince. “You promised to spar with me,” he points out.
Kaeya’s eyes glint like the stars that they are, and Ajax wonders if the reason why Khaenri’ah has no need for divinity is that their royalty might as well be born of the divine even as they are not shackled by Celestia’s might.
“I did,” Kaeya smirks as he picks up his own practice sword, and he looks every bit the beautiful and deadly creatures in Ajax’s familiar fairy tales. “Shall we play another game? Ready when you are.”
------
Kaeya laughs at the confused and stunned look on Ajax's face when Dainsleif’s daemon shifts from her usual panther form into a hawk just so she can bring Lumine her sword.
Even now that Ajax has been here for months, there are many things that still confuse the other about Khaenri’ah’s godless land. “How?” Ajax demands as he turns bright, curious blue eyes towards Kaeya. “Adults don’t have daemons that can shift,” the lost boy says with incredulity, and on his shoulder, Caeli nods in the form of a hamster.
“Not in Teyvat, no, but we are in Khaenri’ah” Kaeya laughs. “You’re under the fates of Celestia, but mother says we are free of such things.”
The two of them sit on the top of the Khaenri’ah’s walls, watching their legions fight the corrupted beasts below. Later on, he and Ajax will join the fight, as it is the duty of any citizen of their realm, but for now, it is a time for them to rest and for him to teach Ajax of the many wonders of his home.
“Will Caeli not settle into a form if I stay then?” Ajax muses out loud, kicking his feet as he bites into his sandwich, eyes trained to the battle below. He has changed from the lost, terrified trespasser that Kaeya has found in their courtyard. Now, he can stand just as proud and skilled as any warrior born and raised in Khaenri’ah.
If you stay, Kaeya thinks with a frown. He knows that Ajax still dreams of his frozen home, of the crackling fires and turbulent seas of Morepesok. He knows that Ajax will never stop dreaming.
“Maybe,” Kaeya says instead because he doesn’t want to think of being alone once again in the grandeur of Khaenri’ah’s Black Palace, because he is sure that even Astra would agree with him, that their lives have gotten more interesting and much better since Ajax and Caeli have joined them.
They were less lonely with them. Perhaps, it is such a selfish wish to keep Ajax far from his home.
“That should be fun,” Ajax says with a grin, and he wipes his palms on his trousers before jumping to his feet atop the wall. The corrupted shadowbeasts await them down below, but they aren’t so terrifying when Kaeya knows that he has Ajax on his side.
Astra purrs on his lap in the form of a kitten, and Kaeya strokes her fur, watching their carefree knight stretch. The battle rages on down below, the never ending duty of Khaenri’ah to protect humanity, Kaeya’s legacy that Ajax need not inherit.
Ajax looks over his shoulder, and Caeli chirps in the form of a sparrow as she alights on the prince’s head. “Shall we go back to fight, your highness?”
“Let’s go,” Kaeya says as he stands, and he lets Astra jump from his lap to follow close beside Ajax, rubbing her flank on his legs. “I’m sure Skirk will be looking for you by now.”
------
Rhinedottir has failed.
Kaeya watches the bleak skies from his room, growing ever darker as days and weeks pass. He watches the ruins left behind by the alchemist’s creation, broken field tillers and old homes left to rot with no people there to maintain them. The homunculi of Khaenri’ah have always been the creations of humans--alchemists--who seeked for the truth of the world, but before Rhinedottir, no one had thought to give the homunculi a daemon, a soul.
It was impossible. It wasn’t to be done for souls are the proof of their humanity.
And now, Rhinedottir’s experiment has gone dreadfully wrong. Her homunculus' daemon, Durin, has laid waste to their lands before heading south into Mondstadt. The homunculus in question himself, Gold, has grown corrupted and violent in the wake of the separation from his artificial soul, and even the Eclipse Dynasty’s royal guard has struggled to contain a monster made of Khemia and the Irminsul’s corrupted blessing, a perversion of humanity.
Kaeya remembers the horrified look on Ajax’s face that first time he had shown up without Astra by his side, and for the first time, he wonders if humans are truly meant to have the freedom to be separate from their souls, from their fates and dreams, the way the people of Khaenri’ah are. The way they have always been.
Perhaps, in the end, they were no different from Rhinedottir’s failed creations.
His thoughts are interrupted by the slam of the doors, and Ajax strides into the room as if he owns the place, as if he is the prince of this dark realm instead of Kaeya. Caeli follows her partner close behind, a lioness on the hunt, before she spots Astra curled up as a tigress by the fireplace, and she changes course to curl up beside her. Kaeya grimaces as the two track dirt and the blood of slain corrupted beasts into the room, victors of a war that should not be theirs to fight.
Ajax is drenched from the downpour outside and still carries his bloodstained swords in hand, but he grins at the sight of their daemons curled up together before he turns to look back at Kaeya. There is a minute change in his expression, growing softer and kinder, changing from the brutal soldier that Khaenri’ah has turned him into to the boy who first came into their lands that spoke of heroes and honor.
It has been years since then, and they’ve both changed too much.
“What? No welcome for me?” Ajax teases as he sheathes his blades and backs Kaeya onto the window sill.
“You’re dirty,” Kaeya points out, letting Ajax do as he wishes. Still, he matches the other’s savage grin with his own smirk and taps the other boy’s cheek with his fingers. “Welcome back. How was the fight?”
“Fun,” Ajax answers, but the lighthearted tone does not reach his dark, dark eyes, and Kaeya wishes that he had been able to bring Ajax home when he had first arrived, wishes that he still can now. “Kaeya?”
Kaeya draws Ajax’s collar aside to see the bandages and old scars beneath. “You got hurt,” he says with a sigh, his eyes narrowing at the red that stains the edges of the other’s bandages. He doesn’t want the protection that has been offered to him by their royal guard. He wants to be there with them, fighting alongside Ajax against the corruption that has ravaged his home.
He wants to do more. For his home. For his family. For his promises and his dearest friend.
“Just a scratch,” Ajax says with a laugh, dismissing his concern like he always does.
And Kaeya relents and indulges like he always would. “Of course,” he twists his lips in a grimace before pulling Ajax close in an embrace. “My stupid knight.”
“That’s so mean, your highness,” Ajax whines at him, teasing him even as he buries his face in the crook of Kaeya’s neck.
“Will you stay for the night?”
Ajax’s hold tightens around him, and over his shoulder, Kaeya can see how their daemons curl up closer to each other more than ever. “Of course,” Ajax says. “Whatever you wish, Kaeya.”
------
When Celestia’s judgment comes for Khaenri’ah, Kaeya finds himself in the battlefield.
Celestia’s divine judgment falls without mercy, and its gods do not go for the humans who have dared to challenge their might, not for the alchemists and mages of Khaenri’ah that dared to see themselves as equal to the divine thrones of Celestia.
Instead, they go after their daemons.
When daemons die, they turn into gold dusts and the seeds of irminsul trees. When daemons die, their humans are left cursed--soulless, inhuman, and corrupted.
Kaeya runs through the battlefield clutching at Astra in his hands. She has turned so small, a silver fox held in his hands. He can hear the pained screams of his people all around him, chokes on the dust and remains of Khaenri’ah’s souls--their hopes and dreams.
He cannot stop to think of his parents back in the black palace, in the last bastion of their land, and how they had bought him time to escape, to look for their only allies among the gods and archons of Teyvat. He cannot stop to think of Dain, who has protected him and Astra, who has been left behind to try and do what he can. He cannot stop to think of Lumine and her brother and if they’ve been able to leave.
He cannot think of stopping.
But he thinks of Ajax.
Ajax who must have been left in the battlefield on Khaenri’ah’s borders. Ajax who cannot be separated from Caeli, not without dying, because he is not of Khaenri’ah, because he is not like Kaeya who was born and raised on Khaenri’ah’s arrogance, on his people’s assurance that they can live without their souls always beside them.
He cannot let his realm, this gnawing abyss that it has become, swallow Ajax until he is nothing.
He stumbles at the burst of elemental energy that blooms at his feet, and he tries to shield Astra from the fall. His daemon leaps from his arms, snarling and growling at Celestia’s sentinel that has come for them.
“No,” Kaeya whispers at the sight of their pursuer, his eyes growing wide with horror.
When the divine blade pierces through Astra and his soul turns into golden dust and a blood red seed, Kaeya finds that he cannot bear to think of anything over the sound of his own anguished screams. The pain lances like a knife through his heart, through the very core of what makes him who he is, and it tears and it tears until Kaeya knows no more.
Blood drips from his right eye like tears that he cannot shed, the physical manifestation of the sudden separation. He no longer has to wonder why Gold had gone mad with grief when Durin had been corrupted and left. He no longer has to wonder why Ajax had thought it horrifying to be parted with one’s daemon.
Kaeya screams until his voice turns hoarse, and he wonders why no one can hear.
------
Ajax hears the familiar voice raised in a scream before he sees his prince.
Kaeya kneels in the bloodied mess of the battlefield, clutching at golden dust and blood red seeds of the Irminsul. His screams are deafening even over the sounds of the field tillers falling around them, over the sounds of the coming expedition from Mondstadt, over Celestia’s sentinels and gods and their unforgiving grace.
“Kaeya!” Ajax says as he reaches the other, shaking his shoulders and trying to get him to stop screaming. Caeli circles overhead as a hawk, ready to warn them of any coming danger. Kaeya is bleeding from one eye, and it stares back at him, dark and unseeing. Kaeya had stars in his eyes, but now, Ajax finds that one star has died and grown dim.
Ajax cannot see Astra around them, but he’s seen enough deaths in the endless battles of the last three months to know what the golden dust in Kaeya’s hands are. They fall like stars between Kaeya’s fingers, and Ajax thinks of Astra, clever and brilliant like his prince, gone now and forever.
“Ajax?” Kaeya clutches at his arm, and the first tears finally fall from his remaining eye.
Ajax swallows the cries that build in his chest. He doesn’t know if Kaeya will grow mad and corrupted like all the soulless beings all around them, the once citizens of this nation that was a testament to humanity’s pride.
But it doesn’t matter in the end. He will protect his prince all the same.
“We need to go,” he says as he helps Kaeya to his feet. Caeli swoops into the ground, and she places the blood red seeds in Ajax’s hand, the last remnants of Astra, of Kaeya’s soul and his dreams.
“Go where?” Kaeya laughs, manic and broken. “There is nowhere to go, Ajax.”
“With me,” Ajax says, with a resolute voice. He doesn’t know where to go either, but he will get them to safety even if it means defying the gods he once believed in. “Stay with me, Kaeya.”
“She’s gone,” the prince chokes out with that same unsettling laugh.
“I know,” Ajax replies as he wraps an arm around Kaeya’s waist to support him. “But you aren’t.”
The smile that Kaeya gives him is bitter and crooked and a reminder of the world that is falling all around them. “Not yet,” the prince says with something dark and cold in his eyes, but he goes with Ajax nonetheless.
Ajax can only be thankful for such small mercies.
------
There is a god waiting for them in the last domain of the Eclipse Dynasty--a familiar face, a family friend.
Still, Kaeya pushes away from Ajax out of uncertainty of where allegiances lie in this war they now face, this cataclysm. The god of time gives him a smile filled with pity, and Kaeya wants none of it.
“Let us pass,” Kaeya demands, still feeling faint, and his heart still aching for its missing piece.
“I cannot,” the god says. “They will only hunt you down wherever you might go.”
“Then--”
The god’s attention turns to Ajax, and Kaeya tries to step in front of him to shield him, but it is far too late. “You do not belong here, child,” the god says, and with a snap of their fingers, a portal appears behind Ajax pulling him into it. Kaeya calls for him, and he tries to reach out, but he finds that he cannot move.
“Caeli!” Ajax calls out and the daemon dives toward him. Ajax only shakes his head at this own daemon. “No, stay with Kaeya. Protect him for me.”
Caeli stops, a hummingbird fretting and hovering in the air. Kaeya tries to tell her to go, to follow Ajax back into his time, into his nation, but he cannot speak through the pain and exhaustion and the power that keeps him in place.
Before the portal closes, Ajax meets his eyes. “I’ll find you,” his knight swears. “I promise.”
When Kaeya falls to his knees, Caeli is there to catch him. She is in the form of a bear this time, and Kaeya is reminded of when he had first seen her and Ajax. She had been in the same form then, wasn’t she? “He’s gone back,” she tells him.
“He’s gone,” Kaeya agrees.
“Kaeya.”
“What?” He snarls, turning a rage-filled eye towards the god.
“We need to go,” the other replies calmly. “You must survive. I will bring you in a time and place that will be safe for you. This is your chance. You are our last hope.”
It doesn’t feel like it.
------
In a seaside village in Snezhnaya, a fourteen year old boy wakes in the Tsaritsa’s Everwinter with memories of battles that lasted for months and nothing else. In his hands is a rusted sword and a broken blood red jewel that he cannot remember.
“Ajax!”
He looks up at the familiar voice, wiping at the blood that has stuck to his skin like another layer of clothing. The chill of Snezhnaya doesn’t quite feel as familiar after his memories of the dark abyss and its battles. There is an emptiness inside, an ache that he cannot place for now.
He sees his parents approach him, their daemons following close behind, and he realizes where the ache comes from. He realizes that there is silence where Caeli would usually speak with him. Even as his mother embraces him, he is aware of his mother’s daemon looking for his own.
He knows even before he sees the horrified look on their faces that they would find nothing around.
He should feel more terrified, but there is only numbness and exhaustion as he allows himself to pass out in his mother’s arms.
Caeli is gone, but he isn’t. Not yet. He survived the abyss.
------
Outside a winery, in the borders of Mondstadt, an ancient god falls to their knees before the last hope of a nation that is barely remembered in this present time, five hundred years after the cataclysm that stole so much from them all.
Kaeya’s memories feel blurry and distant even as he clutches at Caeli in his arms, the only reminder of everything that’s happened to him. He is smaller, younger, and he feels every bit the useless child that he has become. He wonders if his memory will fade even further, and he holds Caeli even tighter in his arms, refusing to allow any other to take her and her other half away from him.
He wonders if Ajax has gotten home. All he knows is that the other should be alive because Caeli is, and daemons have never outlived their humans.
A glowing white chess piece dissolves in the god of time’s palms. “Remember, Kaeya,” the god insists, the closest thing Kaeya has left to a family, even as they fade into nonexistence. “You are our last hope.”
As the afternoon sun beats down on the worn path of the Nation of Freedom, Crepus Ragnvindr finds an abandoned child and his daemon, and he gives them another home to call their own.
“He’ll find us,” Caeli whispers to him as they follow the master of the winery into his home.
Kaeya smiles at her. He holds many secrets in his heart and a promise he knows his knight will keep.
And that is enough for now. It should be. They have nothing else.
-----