Work Text:
Citlali thinks often of death.
She tries not to, of course — she spends her days buried in novels, escaping to worlds built for cheap entertainment; when that doesn’t work, she finds comfort in the sloshing of a bottle and the burning in her throat, in the promise of a dreamless sleep uninterrupted until the early hours of afternoon, when it begins all over again.
But death has a way of catching up to her. It’s in the small things, sometimes. Take the empty pot on the floor: once home to a budding flower brought inside to freshen the atmosphere, only to be forgotten in days-long stupors and left to wilt, neglected, alone, discovered weeks later in a rare moment of clarity as nothing more than a hollowed-out shell of its former self.
See the paint on her walls, chipped and faded. See the books on her shelf, their pages yellowed and wrinkled with age. One day they are new, the next they are buckling under the weight of time. Even inanimate objects are not immune to rot.
(Will her body do the same, one day so far in the future it seems impossible? Will her flesh be eaten by crawling things, will her bones be ground to dust beneath the dirt? Or will she remain perfectly preserved, cursed to forever look youthful and fresh until the stars fall from the sky?)
Consider the very instruments of her life’s work. The bones belong to long-dead animals, creatures she has never met — or has she, in the flap of a wing, the scrape of a claw, the world around her alive in a way she is not — resurrected by her expert weaving of stars and smoke. Over ashen remains she speaks to spirits, with threads dyed by crushed insects she weaves the stories of her people.
She enters civilization only when she has no other choice. Each time, it feels as though something is different. That building was not there when she was here last, though she does not recall what it’s replaced. She has never seen that vendor before, though he sits as comfortably beneath his tent as though he’s lived his whole life there. Old dwellings are razed to make room for the new, and she finds herself unable to recall which is which. The chiefdom is passed down from one to the next, their reigns blurring together in her mind, their names lost in glasses of wine.
One thing never changes — invariably, her people fear her.
Good, she tells herself, for it is easier to accept change when one bears no personal attachments.
(And yet, she mourns in her own silent way when the wizened barkeep is replaced by his son, when the children who once threw rocks at her feet are buried by children of their own.)
Good, she yells after the disciples who run away in fear and defeat, for despite the name she carries she can only stand to watch their imitations of her once-friend’s techniques for so long.
(And yet, she lets them leave their marks in vibrant hues upon her home, drinking toasts to ghosts on nights too lonely to spend inside.)
Good, she spits at the few brave souls who try to break down her walls and inevitably give up, her scorn too much for even the most persistent.
(And yet, their names linger in her mind long after they leave, long after they’ve faded from the stones above their graves.)
She cannot avoid them forever, though. It is, after all, a shaman’s duty to convene with the other, to bridge the gap between life and death for the sake of those on either side. So she performs the ceremonies too complex for the priesthood, she takes the jobs the Archon doesn’t trust anyone else with.
She weaves scrolls with every color of the rainbow and then some, imbuing them with her power and protection, ensuring the memories last through the generations. She keeps her involvement a secret, her reputation never to taint her first and only friend’s legacy.
(Her own legacy one of inaction, of rumors told to keep naughty children in line. Smashed bottles and delusions of grandeur relegated to pages no one will read.)
Sometimes she wonders why she bothers. The other is dead and gone, soul buried deeper in the Ley Lines than even she can reach. What is a broken promise to someone who can no longer complain?
(As long as I remember them, says the only person she’s ever met who can hope to outlive her, they will never truly die.
Memories are the history of a people, says the latest chief, reverence in his voice as he gazes upon her work, her eulogy for a friend.)
And so year after year, decade after decade, she sits at the loom, weaving a history that she has only ever been a side character in. She measures time in stories preserved.
How many years has it been, Huitzilin?
(Two hundred, exactly. It is the only number she has bothered to count.)
For a long time, that is all her life is. Smoke and scrolls and strong liquor. She tells herself this is how it should be. That she is better off this way.
And then comes the boy with the broken soul.
When the chief asks for her blessing in the child’s sacrifice, she thinks little of it. Yet another ceremony she is included in as a mere afterthought. She gives the same answer she gives to most requests — she wants no part in it. But she does not refuse out of righteous indignation. She does not much care if the child lives or dies, and she knows as well as the elders do — if not better — the dire straits the nation is in. She knows the likelihood of the ceremony’s success is nigh impossible, but humans need hope to survive, even if only a few moments longer before they realize the futility of their actions.
So she does not tell them to stop, to spare the life of an innocent child. She simply tells them she will not participate, and she does so because she is arrogant. Because she is prideful and lazy, a deadly combination. Because she has tried her whole life to master the art of apathy, and now is the time she chooses to act upon it.
She still is not quite sure what she expected. Did she think the tribe valued her opinion so greatly, they’d give up all hope to bend to her whims? Or, she wonders in the darkest part of the night at the bottom of the bottle, has she separated herself from her humanity so completely that she would rather sentence an infant to death than inconvenience herself?
In the end, it doesn’t matter. The ceremony fails, and the child lives, and for the first time in her overlong life, she knows the crushing weight of guilt.
So she takes him under her wing, her first and only disciple. She lets him see more sides of her than the public (though not every side — never every side). She gives him guidance, and scolds him when he makes mistakes, and almost finds a sort of camaraderie with him as a fellow outcast — even if she is one by choice, and he by fate.
She keeps him at an arm’s length, of course. Two centuries and enough alcohol to drown Teyvat are not sufficient to stifle her grief — she will not make the same mistake twice, no matter how many light novels he buys her, or how many homegrown vegetables he gifts her. This fragile boy with a soul stitched together with less finesse than her earliest attempts at star-binding can only ever be a liability.
But he does not seem to mind. He calls her “Granny,” like the rest, but with a fondness unique to him. He listens to her drunken rambles and carries her home when she loses herself in her vices. He tells everyone that he loves her like blood, even though she would’ve let him die without raising a finger.
She thinks, maybe, it is enough to make up for her greatest sin.
It is not.
—
Ororon was born to die.
At least, that’s what he’s come to believe — and it’s hard to think otherwise, when he was abandoned by his first family and nearly sacrificed by his next.
He isn’t upset about this, really. Sooner or later, death comes to everyone — this core fact of life is learned early by all children of Natlan, and those of the Night-Wind especially — and if his will help even one person, he doesn’t mind if it falls into the “sooner” category. As far as he’s concerned, his whole life has been borrowed time. He is grateful for every extra day spent tending to his aphids and watering his garden, certainly, but if it all ended tomorrow he would be perfectly content. Two decades on this side of the veil are plenty for someone who should have died before he uttered his first words.
He wishes the others in his tribe would see it this way, but alas, on his rare trips to the market to give away cabbages he’s met with the same pitying glances, the same softly-spoken words. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate their kindness, of course. But he knows their innermost feelings at a glance; has known all along that their treatment of him is born of guilt. Beneath her superficially harsh words, even his Granny treats him like a delicate thing, mere moments away from shattering to pieces.
He doesn’t understand why they’re all so ashamed. It’s as though they expect him to bear a grudge, when really, it should be the other way around. After all, it’s his own failure as a sacrifice that forces them to live in fear for themselves and their loved ones. It’s his fault Natlan’s future hangs undecided, its arteries polluted.
When he tries to tell the others this, though, they look at him oddly and wave him off. He’s a strange one, they mutter. It really is a pity.
(His Granny doesn’t whisper behind his back, but she does throw light novels at him with all her might when he so much as brings up the topic. He’s not sure the person who decided to call them “light novels” knew what they were talking about — there’s nothing light about a brick of bound Inazuman paper flying straight at one’s head, launched by a hot-tempered centuries-old shaman.)
Eventually, he learns to stop talking about it. To people, at least. His vegetables hear plenty.
That’s the nice thing about living in the wilderness, far from the tribe’s main settlement. There’s no one to cast guilty glances his way. He can chatter to his aphids and his carrots all he likes, and never will they respond with unhelpful platitudes like that’s very dark, dear, please don’t think that way or we all care about you, really, we wouldn’t trade you for the world.
(Because they would, and they did, and they would not feel so ashamed if he had died like he was supposed to.)
And so he spends his borrowed time — borrowed, or selfishly stolen from Natlan’s lifeblood? — playing the simple agrarian. He’s happy, he’s content. Mostly. He cannot shake the feeling that he owes the world a debt too weighty to be paid in mora, that he was given a second, a third chance at life so that he could fulfill some greater purpose. A purpose that probably has nothing to do with cabbages, though the Wayob do work in mysterious ways.
So when the masked outlander with the strange soul invites him to play an indispensable role in his plan to save Natlan, how could he refuse?
And when the heavens turn their gaze upon the man who offered him both a reason to die and a reason to live, he learns firsthand why he was spared — to guide the true sacrifice to the altar.
—
Death does not know the Captain, but he knows it.
He knows the death of the mind, as his people lose all reason and sense of self and become nothing more than monsters to be slaughtered wholesale.
He knows the death of the body, as his flesh begins to stink and slough off his bones, as the maggots worm their way into his lungs.
He knows the death of a nation, a culture, a people, as his once-home is tortured and punished, its achievements buried beneath the hubris and sins of a few.
He knows enough to recognize that it will happen again.
He knows also that the only fate worse than being granted no death is achieving only an incomplete one. He has seen corpses strewn across the battlefield, whole villages razed, generations of people with no one to bury them, no one to tell their stories or remember their names. He has heard the screams of the eternally dying — he still hears them, for every waking moment (and every moment is waking, for their torment never ceases and neither does his) they beg him to take them home. But he cannot, for the gates are closed to him, too.
He knows that this is the fate that awaits his adopted home.
He knows that he will not sit idly by and let it happen.
He receives the blessing of the only one who hates those that watch more than he does. He returns to the nation he once defended, now with half a millennium’s rot weighing down his bones and his heart both. He makes deal after deal with others who refuse to bend to celestial whims any longer.
He stares at Death, and Death stares back.
He forces his fingers stiff with decay and ice both to close around the sword that he points at She whom all but his own people, barred from release, will one day meet. He accuses this watcher of inevitabilities, challenges Her to break the ironclad laws of the heavens.
He carves his place, the place of his people, the place of those who accepted him as one of their own when he had nowhere else to go, in the very fabric of the land. He forces the tyrants above to cede to his will. He makes the world embrace him and the countless he carries.
He sits upon the throne.
And finally,
all
is
still.