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What Lyney could not achieve with raw strength, he would do with treachery. That is how she had raised him, and she was proud.
Arlecchino stood in the center of the dueling grounds while the sun beat down obnoxiously bright on the pale stone. She had positioned herself so Lyney had to bear the brunt of its fury when he tried to look at her. She could see his eyes narrowed to purple slits even at this distance.
Once a week, they would spar in the same place she had goaded them to challenge her once before. Lynette sparred with her on Mondays, Freminet on Wednesdays and Lyney on Fridays, and then all three of them would challenge her on Sunday. None of them had told the others that they sought out private training. She hoped so dearly that, one day soon, they would stop keeping things from each other. She would just keep having to defeat them until that day came.
Lyney flipped a deck of cards between his hands while he shifted from foot to foot, his endless energy bleeding into his grin and his stance. “I have something new for you, Father. I think you’re going to be impressed.”
“I will be impressed if you can strike me,” she replied.
Alrecchino examined her son in the harsh noon light. She did worry so. Lyney was… small, and while she knew plenty of people whose stature belied their strength, Lyney was not that adeptus of Liyue or even the Traveler. That’s not to suggest that he was weak by any means. He could carry a sibling to safety and likely win a fistfight with the average human, but the nature of their work would not pit him against the average. Tragically, he didn’t even have elemental might to supplement his physical shortcomings. His mastery of fire was intricate yet delicate. He could burn an enemy’s nerves from the inside out, but such things took time and focus and, most importantly, preparation. He could not simply obliterate an unexpected threat in an inferno. In a perfect world, Lyney would have time and a plan for every situation. The world was not perfect and Arlecchino would not kid herself into thinking her son could protect their family with intelligence alone.
She had faith he would grow into strength, but until that day came…
“Typical rules. First blood or surrender,” she said and drew her weapon.
She had enough control that ‘first blood’ was little more than a papercut, though in her frustrations she had taken to leaving a razor’s painless line across her child’s cheek. Lynette had commented on it once, to which Lyney replied he got cut by a bush out in the field, and Arlecchino internally wished to pull her own hair out.
“Understood. I’m ready when you are,” Lyney said and flicked his wrist, strewing cards across the battlefield. Each one simmered with elemental energy. He made a show of putting something in his ears afterwards – earplugs, most likely.
Arlecchino raised an eyebrow. “Mines?”
He grinned.
His smile faded when she simply triggered every trap with blade projections of her own. The explosions were loud, deafening even, and spewed out more light and smoke than should be possible. Arlecchino took a step backwards and waved her hand in front of her face to clear the choking smell.
“Aw. I worked so hard on those,” Lyney pouted.
“It shows,” she said honestly. She did not expect them to have such a lingering effect. She was forced to blink a few times, the smoke stinging her eyes while she retreated out of the area of effect. “Well done.”
And just like that, he beamed brighter than the sun. Still, she knew her son. He would not make such a fuss about ‘impressing’ her over something so simple. They had agreed that, with the looming threats on the horizon, he would focus less on shoring up his weaknesses and more on expanding his existing strengths. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but they didn’t have time for perfection.
This was a novel use of his power, but Arlecchino knew he was capable of more than a glorified party popper.
With that analysis over, she darted forward. She skirted the smoke cloud and dragged her scythe against the stone with a gods-awful shriek, sparks spewing in its wake. Lyney danced backwards just like he always did and brought his bow to bear. Distance gave an illusion of safety. He was very intelligent, but it was very, very hard to unlearn the body’s instinct to flee from a monster like her.
He ducked out of the way of a swipe intended for a centimeter above his head and panickedly released a prop arrow at her stomach. Arlecchino pivoted her torso out of the way and continued her advance in the same motion. He needed to stop getting overwhelmed just because an enemy was in his face.
To his credit, he did better than usual. Without the benefit of distance, he literally threw his bow at her and yanked out his emergency sword – Lynette’s sword.
He succeeded in surprising her. Arlecchino had to break her assault to catch his bow before it smacked her in the face and tossed it aside. “Does your sister know you borrowed that?”
The guilt on his face was answer enough. “Uh…”
Arlecchino loved her son, and that is why she had to punish him. She swung her scythe into his feeble block with all the force of her shoulders and hips. Metal met metal with a bone-shuddering thunk. Lyney stared at her scythe embedded a quarter inch into his sister’s sword with naked horror. There was no way he would be able to explain the chip in the blade without outing himself.
Well. He could purchase a new sword. Arlecchino sighed inwardly with the knowledge that he’d find a way to lie. His expression got more comical as Arlecchino yanked her weapon free – too comical. Exaggerated, even.
She heard the hiss of his prop arrow detonating and sending its homing payload towards her from behind. She ducked and backstepped so it passed over her head, bounced hard on the step and launched herself towards her son. He yelped as he floundered out of the way of his own projectile.
Again, exaggerated. Whatever he was doing, he was laying it on thick. Arlecchino debated whether to behave as normal and entertain whatever his little plan was, do the smart thing and give him some distance until she knew, or stress test the limits of his strategy with twice the expected ferocity.
She chose the last option. Lyney’s expression faded to neutral concentration as he barely blocked her incessant attacks, each strike driving him backwards and visibly hurting his shoulder and elbow. When they got too close to the edge of the arena, Arlecchino darted to his back and took a dirty swipe. He barely danced out of the way.
With that tiny break in the onslaught, Lyney took his chance to flee. He bolted for the center of the arena, picking up his bow on the way, and scattered cards in his wake. Arlecchino gave chase. Her feet fell in the shadow of his, expertly dodging his traps, gaining ground until she could reach out and hook her scythe over his shoulder and drag him back to her. She raised her weapon over her head to do so.
Lyney looked over his shoulder, giggled, and clapped his hands.
Arlecchino saw the spark between his hands with barely enough time to shut her eyes, though she had overcommitted to the attack to do anything but throw herself face-first into it. The resulting BANG left her ears ringing. The eruption of light seared itself into her vision through her eyelids. She hit the ground shoulder first and used her momentum to roll and put distance between them.
Temporarily blinded and deafened, Arlecchino shot out strands of silk across the arena to supplement her disabled senses with vibration. A few strands connected with Lyney’s cards and detonated, sending a brand new kind of overstimulation hell through her body. She grit her teeth and tried to parse out the small whispers of Lyney retreating from the explosive cacophony.
“Very well done,” she said, blinking rapidly. Lyney’s foot met silk off to her back and left. She tracked him with her scythe, keeping the weapon between them in case he tried to take advantage of her stunned state. She couldn’t help but smile.
He laughed and shouted back to her. “Thank you! I just need to find a way to not hit myself with it.”
It took both of them a few moments to regain their sight. When Arlecchino finally took a good look around, Lyney was not where she expected him to be. Her son stood ahead and to her right, smiling peacefully and waiting for her to recover. How kind.
And yet, she still felt his heartbeat thrumming through her silk from her left. She couldn’t turn to look at where he was supposed to be without tipping him off, so instead she looked at whatever was in front of her.
‘Lyney’ raised his bow and took aim at her. His stance was perfect, his shoulders straight, hips slightly twisted, his left foot in front of his right and his right… standing on top of one of his cards.
Arlecchino sent one of her balefire blades sliding along the ground towards him. The edge was dulled on the miniscule chance she was wrong, but the caution proved unnecessary. The blade cut straight through the illusion with a puff of smoke, immediately followed by the card detonation.
She looked farther to her right. Another Lyney, another execution, another puff of smoke. She smiled. “Fascinating. And how did you learn that trick?”
She still felt his pulse to her left, though he answered from everywhere. He’d been practicing voice projection. “Oh, just a little something I’ve been working on. Lord Childe isn’t as well connected as we are, but he was happy to introduce me to a few bored mirror maidens and pyro agents. I studied with them for a bit and now present to you: illusory clones!”
The two card mines closest to Arlecchino exploded into confetti and party favor noises. She tucked her scythe under her arm and gave him a polite three claps.
Lyney’s pride was palpable, but nothing compared to what she felt on the inside. Too much gushing would seem insincere. She spared a glance around the arena to see a dozen Lyneys, each one standing slightly differently, then returned to her own ready stance. “Let’s see how well you’ve mastered this trick, then.”
She could simply send a wash of fire across the arena and wipe out every clone at once, but that would be unsportsmanlike. She could surprise him with that next time. It was important for children to savor their victories, at least for a little bit.
So, Arlecchino pretended to not know where the real Lyney was and launched herself at the closest clone. It exploded into a puff of smoke with a yelp, as did the next. Two arrows came at her from opposite directions. Neither of them came from Lyney’s location, but she dodged them both the same. Another clone sprinted away from her and was cut down by a scythe in its back.
With all the motion, she could afford to look at the real Lyney without giving herself away. He squinted even though his back was now to the sun, chewing on his lip while she gunned down his clones with abandon. He shifted to put his weight on his other foot, felt that tacky resistance, and then his eyes widened.
So much for keeping her secrets.
Lyney pouted and stepped off of her web, glanced at one of his card mines, then smiled and detonated it. Arlecchino flinched at the assault on her senses. The concussive blast was overwhelming, shuddering through her entire body.
A clone took the opportunity to throw itself at her. She dismissively cut through its stomach, dissolving it, but it gave the break in line of sight necessary for Lyney to slip into the thinning crowd.
Only seven clones and one son remained. Lyney took great care not to step on her web, so much so that he neglected to actually attack her, but his foot still brushed it occasionally. The harsh sunlight was excellent for obscuring the faint shimmer of her silk.
Each time she regained sight of him, he detonated another card and sent a sacrificial clone in to distract her. She would simply take to the high ground if not for the fact that he was fast running out of clones. When they were down to three Lyneys total, Arlecchino’s head pounded with the repeated explosions and her eyes stung from smoke. She was ready to end the fight, go home and celebrate his progress.
So, when she felt Lyney brush against her web behind her, she knew it was safe to execute the clone in front of her. She surrounded it in a cage of blades that snapped shut on it like the jaws of a bear trap.
The clone did not dissolve.
In fact, Lyney jerked as the blade sank into his chest. He kicked his legs in a futile attempt to get away, looking for all the world like a rabbit caught in a snare, or perhaps a grasshopper skewered in a praying mantis’s grasp. He shrieked, his body too hopped up on adrenaline to acknowledge the damage, and he looked up at her with such wide, terrified eyes. “Father?!”
It would be so much better if it was indignation or betrayal in his voice, but alas even in grave injury he could not find it in himself to be angry at her. It was merely a panicked cry for help, much like when he woke screaming from a nightmare when he was young. He had never expected her to actually hurt him.
She never intended to actually hurt him.
For the first time in decades, Arlecchino was stunned into silence.
There was nothing to be done. If the blade had not met his heart (and she was almost certain it had), it had most definitely punctured a lung. Even if she could, somehow, carry him safely home without hurting him worse, he would die of blood loss the instant the blade was removed.
Arlecchino was never one to shy away from the truth, and so she forced herself to watch the front of his shirt darken with blood, committed the pain in his voice to memory – that horrible, choking, wet waver. He deserved that much. A different person would be eighteen again with the corpse of their best friend slipping off the blade she had walked herself onto. The reality was much less kind. Clervie had died with a smile of freedom, and Lyney was currently clawing at the thing in his chest while looking to her for help.
Her first thought was too painful to repeat.
Her second thought was that she was grateful Lynette and Freminet were not here.
The kindest thing would be to kill him quicker. He was already dead. His body just didn’t know it yet. She could not allow her child to suffer, and yet… the way he looked at her to do something, to save him, to pull him from the jaws of death instead of shoving him deeper into them…
Thankfully Arlecchino was saved from her momentary indecision by a weight striking her back and taking her to the ground. A garrote around her neck, Lyney’s boot on the back of her head, his knee pressed between her shoulderblades. She reacted a bit more instinctually than she was proud of. Arlecchino reached back, grabbed his leg and flung him to bounce hard against the pavement. Luckily she had the foresight to teach him how to fall without getting hurt. He yelped, alive, and she bolted to her feet.
He had fallen sprawled across several strands of her web and it shook with his joyous laughter and the powerful beat of his unharmed heart. Arlecchino stared down at him as if he was a spectre that had crawled out of hell wearing his face. The other Lyney was still tugging at the blade in its chest, though its movements had grown less coordinated – whether that was because it was a clone and Lyney wasn’t paying as much attention to it, or that her son was dying in front of her, she couldn’t quite tell.
The Lyney on the ground wiped a tear from its eye and grinned up at her, though the color drained from its face on seeing her expression. “I can’t believe that wo– Woah, wait, Father? Father, are you okay?!”
“Yes,” she replied, though it sounded flat even for her.
It scrambled to its feet and approached, their spar forgotten for the time being. It pulled on the strings of her web as it did and she clung to the sensation.
Arlecchino looked between it and the dying Lyney. All sensory input beyond visual suggested the one in front of her was the real one. The one in front of her had a greater vocal range and moved with a fluidity that was hard to replicate. Its eyebrows had furrowed with concern and its eyes still shined with the remains of its laughing tears. Also, logically, Lyney’s clones would all dispel if he were to die.
Arlecchino had not encountered enough good fortune in her life to believe that so easily.
The Lyney in front of her looked over at the dying version and grimaced, rubbing the back of its neck. “Guess I, uh, went a little overboard with the choking sounds, huh?”
“Not at all,” Arlecchino replied. She adjusted her sleeves and shook the soot from them, then smoothed down her coat. “In a real fight, you need whatever advantage you can get. The realism will serve you well. I’m impressed.”
The Lyney in front of her dismissively waved its hand and the dying one dissolved into a cloud of ash. She was tempted to touch its chest and assure herself that it was real, that it was him, that she hadn’t lived up to the title of Mad Knave, but it wasn’t as if she could tell if she had finally gone insane. She chose to accept what the Lyney in front of her said. If she had lost her mind, surely one of her children would put her out of her misery when she went home talking to a hallucination.
Though… that was a lot of responsibility to put on them. It would certainly traumatize them. Perhaps it was best she not go home until she convinced herself of her own sanity, and if unable to, she should dispose of herself.
“Father?”
Arlecchino blinked. “Hm? Yes?”
The remaining Lyney looked up at her with such concern written on its– his face. “Are you sure you’re alright?”
She could touch if it meant comforting him. Arlecchino reached out and patted his shoulder, noting the solidity, the warmth, the drum of his beating heart. “Yes, Lyney. I am quite alright.”
He didn’t look convinced. He cringed into her touch with a pained expression. “I’m so sorry, Father. I didn’t thi–”
“Don’t be. You did very well.”
“I didn’t think about how upsetting that might be,” he continued as if she hadn’t interrupted. How willful.
“I assure you, I’m fine,” she said. She was decidedly not upset. She felt nothing, nothing except a muted, distant pride and a nagging concern. Seeing that it was necessary for his conscience that he comfort her in some way, Arlecchino cleared her throat. “Er… you are still alive, yes?”
“Yes– yes, here,” he said and pulled out his sister’s sword.
Arlecchino mentally braced for the nightmare to continue and he, oh, cut his throat in front of her or something, but instead he did the much more reasonable thing of dragging the blade across the palm of his hand. He turned the cut to her.
“Look, first blood. You win.”
She stared rather stupidly at the red slowly making its way down his hand, coming to pool at his heel before dripping free to splat on the ground. For some reason, that red drop is what finally made the situation believable. Arlecchino crossed one arm across her chest and covered her relieved smile with the other hand, laughing softly into her muffling fingers. “Oh, my son, I love you.”
She raised her chin, exposing the thin line his garrotte had cut into her neck. “You already drew first blood. You win.”
He stared at her openly, his mouth slightly agape. She wanted to tap his chin to close it, but he had earned a moment of indecorum. His eyes lit up with life and joy and she set about overwriting the memories of the past few minutes with this image instead. Trauma was less likely to scar if treated quickly.
Once she sufficiently scrubbed her memory clean and stamped that over top of it, Arlecchino turned away from him to preserve the delicate image. She set off towards home. “Come. A celebration is in order.”
He hurried after her. She drank in the sounds of his footsteps and the slight, huffing pant between his words. “Wait, Father, they’ll want to know why.”
“We will say that the celebration is for the mere joy of being alive. That is sufficient, no?”
He jogged to her side. She noticed him looking up at her lovingly from her peripheral vision, his smile still strained by concern. He reached out to give her hand a quick squeeze before falling into step next to her, leaving a residue on her palm. Arlecchino rubbed her fingers against the smear, worried at it, and sighed realizing that it was his blood on her hand.
The irony was not lost on her. She was well-versed in omens and the mockeries of fate, and that is why she very pointedly wiped her hand on his shoulder under the guise of an affectionate pat. His blood was his to spill. She hoped the gesture would remind fate – and her future nightmares – of that fact.
And so they returned home in comfortable silence, Lyney walking a bit faster than natural to keep up with her longer stride. They did not talk further about what happened, not that day, nor next Friday, or the Friday after that. Lyney still used his illusions in their sparring matches, but Arlecchino did not strike them with lethal force and Lyney did not let them linger in hurt.
And things were good. Arlecchino did not have worse nightmares than usual. On the rare occasion she saw the blood draining from his body behind her eyelids, she would ruffle his hair or squeeze his shoulder to remind herself that he was alive, for now, and he accepted her unusual affections with graceful confusion. When he met her expressionless stare with a questioning eyebrow and a slight lean into her touch, she was content. He continued to seek out her guidance and she continued to teach him everything she knew. One day he would surpass her, and then she could rest.
…She hoped that day would come soon.