Work Text:
In the wooded heartland of Evergolden Liyue, twinborn princes become joint kings under the chiming of the ancient amber tree. One, like earth warmed beneath the sun, lifts before them the sovereign's ley line sceptre, its pale length carved from a pulsing branch of Irminsul. To their left, she, of deep waters and the shimmer of the deceiving moon, crosses the conqueror's blade over shivering leaves.
It's quiet across the glade. The thousands of fae folk who have come to witness such a grand changing of the guard all press their palms together, ringed in flowering wreaths swaying to a soundless breeze.
For the first time in six millennia, Yanwang Dijun is no more.
Day turns to night. At the wink of the brightest stars, the three week vigil comes to an end, and the lives of countless fairies carry on.
She moves first, stretching to the sky, sweeping the long hems of her brocade robes over the dais, down the stone steps, past the rows upon rows of luminous mushrooms as bright as the clouds above. At the edge of the clearing, hidden by a thicket of red berried thorns, she finds him cradling a gem that beats to the metre of his heart.
"Mother," she starts, and the steel of her voice lifts one of his brows, "I have done what you have asked, to the letter. We are king now, so it is time you fulfilled your promise."
She makes it sound so serious. More serious than statecraft, warfare, matters of commerce. It's not that serious, but he supposes, it has been eight decades of carefully cultivating this curiosity.
"What is the real story between you and Father?"
From two paces back, her brother joins in, "Where is Father anyway?"
He sits them down within his copse of golden leaves and crystalflies, gathering geo into a glimmering blanket. Age has made him sentimental, he thinks, as he beholds the culmination of all his greatest achievements crowned by a pair of troublemakers.
"Your father is off hunting, you know this. Someone must protect the people as they return home."
In the distance, he can almost hear the howling of rifthounds and the thunderous parade of hooves. Like blossoms following the transit of the sun, his children wait with bright eyes, heads tilted to some unheard sound.
He brushes the creases from his coat—Yanwang Dijun's coat—folded over his knees. The gem in his hand quivers, like laughter, like joy.
"It begins as many stories of our kind do," the words spill from his being with dancing exuberance, as a great sail unfurls, catching the wind for the very first time, "with one desperate wish and another's answering wager."
After some twenty-seven wives, life in Jueyun Karst loses its colour. The birds overhead have learned not to sing when in the company of Liyue's greatest king, and when pressed for a reply on what mood riddles the palace walls, all within his court grimace and shake their heads, the sounds of their beads of station clacking around each corner.
How does a mountain feel about the wind. That's what they say, as if he cannot hear them behind their wings and painted fans. How does the sun feel about the ant.
Nothing, is the answer. Nothing, as he sends another beautiful face back to whichever family raised them, forgetting their name as easily as one forgets the time.
It was not always this way. When he first proclaimed his intention to wed all those many moons ago, he did so out of blameless hope that there exists someone worthy enough to conceive his heir. They must be beautiful, of course, as the fae can only bear to be around things of charm and symmetry. They must be wise, to share the duties of the crown and the raising of the nation's future. They must be cunning, or the whims of the court and their endless scheming would swallow them whole.
These qualities are important, yes, but more than anything else—they must be interesting, for Morax, Yanwang Dijun, King of the Summer Fae, has not lived for six thousand years to be bored in his retirement.
He is a tremendous number of things, but when he looks out amongst his crumpled stacks of letters strewn across his study in a fit of uncustomary rage, he resigns himself to this new existence, grey as the sky outside.
He is a fool. This whole farce is nonsensical. If it goes on for much longer, he doesn't know which will fall first: his will, ground to dust by tedium and utter vapidity, or his rule as dozens of clans and houses band together to dispose of he who slighted their honour.
He sighs, long and with great suffering, moulding himself to his chair. There is one more letter he dare not destroy, though its ink black oilskin and blood red seal has kept him from entertaining its contents. If his mood is enough to frighten his court into terrified avoidance, the vagaries of the most capricious Winter Queen are the subjects of legend.
So it is in desperation then that he peels back the tasteless dragonhide binding, unravelling an arm's length of human vellum. He's half surprised she has not sent him more painted pornography, though the declaration within inspires its own breed of indecency.
Morax, she starts, her flowing script punctuated with speckles of laughter, is it really so hard to sire children? Mine have plenty of experience, should you need the instruction.
Perhaps it is because she has always been like this to him that he reads as if tolerating an itch or granules of sand in his eyes.
I've heard of your situation blown across the world by the seven winds, and I have an offer for you. Quite magnanimous, wouldn't you agree? By the time you open this, I reckon you must be begging for a solution.
I won't give you my own flesh and blood—as no doubt you would rather vomit ceaselessly until the end of your days than join yourself to my kin. No, I have something far more fun. How about a little wager?
I'll send you my most exquisite blade, and if you don't like him, why not break him and use him to pay your tithe to the Primordial One?
You'll like him though, I am sure. And when you do fall in love, as that seems to be some baffling prerequisite for you to produce an heir, I will take immense pleasure from knowing that Summer bends to Winter.
Truly, what a detestable woman. And yet, she is nothing if not right, as much as it pains him to admit even this slightest concession. She is so much younger than the mountain of his years, but she fights him as if born under the same stars, nursed by the same fickle tides. With her pride on the line, she would not send him just any ordinary gift, and with such a wager she must have a particularly spectacular hand.
It is with this in mind that he peers out his window to wave in the golden eagle that has watched him since delivering this letter.
"Tell your master I accept." And the eagle, at last released from her duties in Liyue, takes the offered knot of Morax's hair into her talons, leaving without a sound.
Not two moons later, in the heart of winter under the darkest night, a bridal procession one hundred strong marches through winding paths and towering stone, their red lanterns bobbing softly like ships on the tranquil sea. At the head of the column, two armoured soldiers with their crystalline wings tucked close to their pauldrons hoist the Tsaritsa's twelve-pointed Pale Star. Behind them, seated upon a horse with the face and wings of an eagle, a member of the Eleventh Division solemnly waves the black standard of Snezhnaya's Vanguard Prince.
Citizens of Liyue, from the smallest forest creatures to the colossal custodian tree giants, shiver awake to the sight. For what amounts to merrymaking, a four-armed ghost veiled in silver plays a lighthearted, mirthful tune upon a two-stringed instrument and a flute of ebony stained bone.
Beneath the light of the moon, garlands of pale white blossoms gleam against vermilion silk. At the centre of the parade, the crown of ice and polished elk horns atop the bride's gilded palanquin shines like a beacon in the night.
Morax does not fidget. In the heavy red brocade of his ceremonial marital robes, he lets his attendants fuss over the small details of his clothes, his hair, the strings of glittering gemstones born from the earth of his dominion draped in rings across his shoulders like a spider's web. Undoubtedly there will be noble houses who take offence to the gulf in effort rallied for this one wedding versus the two dozen before it, but it's not like he has much of a choice.
He can't, after all, let his new bride humiliate him before they even take their vows.
At the gates of his palace, twenty maidens peel away from the procession to scatter a path of scarlet petals the shade of freshly spilled blood. He recognises the scent almost immediately as that of the ghastly death-walking dendrobium and wonders whether this is a show of intimidation or pride. To collect so many flowers, how many battlefields are needed? How many bodies? How many trapped souls perplexed by eternity, shackled to this plane only to become the heralds of a union most unholy?
The official presiding over the marriage curls his primly kept wings and bellows out the hour from his slender beak.
"Presenting His Royal Maleficence, Prince of the Undertide, Tartaglia the Sword of Torrents."
Out of the palanquin steps a wraith in red, his long gossamer veil catching the breeze like a fine mist of blood, drifting along in his wake. A thousand pearls stitched into his sleeves whisper under golden lantern light, and when he folds his black-tipped fingers together at his side, to curtsey as all the good court ladies do, the thirty-six silver crows of his draping scarf dance with mellow mockery.
Morax, for all that he is worth and all that he has endured, does not rise to the provocation. His bride laughs, crinkling in amusement.
The vows are short. The bows perfunctory. Of the people present, only one dares to say anything all, wishing them a prosperous matrimony through the delicate fan of her feathers.
Rituals complete, he leads his new consort to their bridal chamber, a room dressed in vermilion and scented with purifying incense, its bed swathed in fresh, luminous sheets. He sits Tartaglia down amongst silk and goose feather floss, then, with neither haste nor anticipation, he does as he must.
He lifts the veil.
Tartaglia stares back at him through long pretty lashes, his nose straight, his mouth curved into a smile. He wears a youth's face, pristine and supple, though what darkness swims in those depthless blue eyes intimates a life of hardship. Of ruination.
He clicks his tongue. Leave it to the Winter Queen to believe his proclivities leaned towards debasing beautiful broken things.
"I will not lay with you tonight," he says, as cold as the moon outside. He expects some show of tears, maybe a plead for his life, though short of some miracle there is nothing that will move him to breed with the enemy.
But far be it from his estimation, Tartaglia merely sharpens his smile, shrugging the fine bones of his shoulders. He slips out of his marital robes with an ease as if this had always been his home, gathering a mist about him that settles into sleeping clothes.
He leaves the ties undone, the pale expanse of his skin peeking through shifts in white fabric. Along his collar and across his chest, countless crisscrossing scars he carries like lavish silver chains twist with the shadows.
At a low table set aside for refreshments and entertainment, he folds his legs under him and plants his palms in his lap, the picture of practised elegance were it not for the sly grin that splits his face and gives him the airs of a self-satisfied fox.
"I've heard my husband is a fierce tactician," Tartaglia says, curling his words into the shape of poisonous flowers. He tilts his head, and the fringe of his fire hair only half hides his mirth. "My enemies call me one, too. Care to join me for a game?"
His long, soot-tipped fingers skip over boundaries of twinkling nacre. He drums his tidied, manicured nails upon the lacquered sandbearer board before him, and Morax, for reasons unknown—reasons he will not ponder—goes to him as a moth does to flame.
Tartaglia, wisely, says nothing, setting a bowl of white stones by Morax's hand. When the sun rises over their unfinished game, Yanwang Dijun is forced to admit two things.
One, his consort, for all his youth and feigned delicacy, is not someone to be underestimated. And two, worse than the first matter, is that somehow, unlike the twenty-seven odd wedding nights previous, he managed to have fun.
As the season turns and fresh buds dot the forest, the people of Liyue busy themselves with rituals to welcome in the new year. Houses are cleaned, linens are washed, and every fairy, young and old, contributes their skill and labour towards transforming each mountainside, every valley, from crags along the coast to rolling golden plains.
Every fairy, that is, except his queen consort.
It's not that Tartaglia is unwilling or lacking in the necessary enthusiasm, but Morax really should have known that any creature of the Tsaritsa's Winter Court would be wholly unsuitable to the intricate work of springtide. Never mind the nuance of crafting fragile blossoms or the complexity of conducting the migratory birds, his wife, lost in a crater of scattered paper and saltpetre, cannot even manage a single firecracker.
Truly, this is beyond embarrassing. What self-respecting Summer King would have a queen who could not make one measly lantern? He didn't even look ashamed as he presented his mangled corpses of crumpled silk, remarking on how no one will see them anyway amongst the thousands that will light the sky.
This, of course, is not the point. Morax would know, and that alone is unacceptable.
"Husband, are you mad?" Tartaglia asks, and his pout would be perfect if his eyes did not gleam with mischief. He smiles, some play at coyness, and the beads of his crown plink and jingle with every sway of his head. "Will you allow this lowly wife to make it up to you?"
Lowly wife, hah! He's never met someone so bold and unafraid of consequences, dancing on the knife's edge of propriety and malicious compliance. When his consort laughs, the whole room turns to him, caught between the jaws of his wild charm.
He should say no, that the damage Tartaglia has done is irreparable, impossible to repay. But a warm hand finds his, thumbs over knuckles, golden bands, and his fingers trace dragons into Morax's collar where they turn to plumes of rising heat.
His head says no, though what comes out is, "Tell me what you have in mind."
With the new year comes the thinning of the veil, and humans and monsters alike encroach upon their territory, stumbling through lands not their own looking for treasures to claim. It's for this reason they make so many firecrackers, deploying smoke and thunder to scare off meddlesome spirits. When this trick inevitably runs its course, as hunger drives beasts past the point of self-preservation, Morax leads a battalion from his Millelith Brigade to hunt down the scavengers.
It is not difficult work, not for him, but the tradition is nearly as old as his reign. For a consort to ask to take his place, he doesn't know what to say.
"As your legitimate wife, do I not have this right?" Tartaglia smiles into his sleeve, sweet as can be, as if he had not already half-dressed into his armour. "There are many things my lawful husband can deny me, but these are your rules, not mine. 'The burden of warding the kingdom lies with the family of the Crown.' Besides, hunting monsters of every shape and size is something of a speciality. Where do you think I got all those flowers for our wedding?"
So, it was pride after all.
Without a way to refute him and not be named arbitrary, Morax can do nothing except send him off with one of his generals in tow carrying an order to step in should the Wild Hunt be led astray. Xiao presses fist to palm, saluting with utmost gravity. A stomp of hooves, the cackle of savage dogs, and they vanish into the underbrush in a column of churning dust.
Twelve hours later at the first rays of daybreak, his consort rides in on a surf of ash, a cloak of the torn night sky billowing from his shoulders. His horse snorts, red in the eyes. Behind him, Xiao verily beams through his mask, his heaving breaths filling the morning with misty clouds.
"Dijun," his general starts, rolling off his mount in stumbling excitement, "Consort Li is tremendous! I've never seen someone bring down a drake so quickly or cleave a golden wolflord in twain so cleanly! Your Majesty please, you must allow Consort Li to hunt again. The soldiers—we have much to learn."
Anyone else and he might rebuke them for embellishing their report, but Xiao, the last of his yakshas, is not one to be moved to any great emotion.
"General Jinpeng exaggerates," comes the sly curve of his fox. "The only reason you have not seen a better performance is because His Majesty demonstrates restraint. In battle, there would no longer be a forest to return to if Yanwang Dijun shows his hand. As his wife, I can only hope to improve under his careful instruction."
Xiao looks to his king, then Consort Li, then back again. His mask dissolves in the wind. In his gaze shines a childlike excitement Morax has not seen for centuries.
This fox. How could he defeat his general in a single night?!
Tartaglia smiles into the jagged knuckles of his black metal gauntlet. With the sun at his back, his fire hair transforms into a halo of light, ethereal and wicked in one. There is dust settling between the chain links of his armour, soot smeared over fine silver engravings, and though his silks stick to his skin where he has sweated through exertion, he is still somehow more radiant than the moon, more untouchable, more beguiling.
"Tomorrow," Morax says, before his trepidation can catch up to his need to save face, "we will begin your lessons. If my consort wishes to lead Liyue's finest soldiers, he must learn how to maintain the dignity of the royal family."
So comes the following morning welcomed by crows and a small crowd of eager officers who won Xiao's midday lottery. These lessons between him and his consort are meant to be private affairs, but there's no suppressing the people's curiosity when Morax wields his golden Vortex Vanquisher with the intent to fight and his opponent is none other than his beautiful queen.
He is not fond of participating in such coarse commotion for entertainment. Although, upon seeing the way Consort Li curtsies towards the rabble, how he smiles as if winning or losing is no real matter, he thinks perhaps it's not such a bad thing that there are witnesses to watch him humble his wilful wife.
Still, he cannot help but ask, "Do you believe you can defeat me?"
Tartaglia laughs, like sun scattering on waves. He bows deeply, his back straight, and when he lifts his gaze, a whole shoal of glimmering, darting fish splash in the depths of his eyes.
"Hah! What nonsense. All I can do is try."
And try he does in the face of overwhelming odds, his chosen and favoured blade glinting white with his zeal. He is fast where the Millelith prefer strength, weaving and pressing the same way water seeks fissures, relentless and precise until a rift becomes a ravine. He does not talk, as Morax expected he might, and instead fills the space between them with strikes fierce as lightning, sharper than the storm's edge.
He does not smile either as the winter's frigid grasp steals his colour, his brightness. A thousand thoughts there could be behind his cutting violence, but one speaks louder in the voice of ringing steel.
Die!
It's over before he can acknowledge it, that whisper of savage spite. His heel digs into flesh, his spear poised between two fathomless eyes. The beating of his consort's heart quivers beneath his boot.
He blinks. He had not intended to use such force.
Whatever darkness he thought was there is gone in a breath. Tartaglia looks up at him, dazed, unreadable against the courtyard stones.
He considers apologising, as that is what gracious kings do, but a hand squeezes his bare calf under the shifting of his robes, and he forgets all that it means to be a gracious king.
What the—how could he—no being has ever touched him there!
He shakes himself free of his consort's laughing grasp, though not before a leg sweeps under him, toppling him to the ground.
Somewhere, a whole crowd gasps.
Tartaglia throws a leg over Morax's hip, settling comfortably atop his stomach. Beneath a knee he pins an arm, beneath a hand he pins a heart. He leans in, lips brushing light upon his cheek, tilting his head so the others cannot see.
He laughs with a silent tremor, bright and wicked in one, his soft breath raising gooseflesh down Morax's neck. Then, with unconcealed humour, he bites the tip of a pointed ear, whispers, "So it is true then—the indomitable Yanwang Dijun has one weakness named shame."
Off to the side, General Jinpeng clears his throat.
"Right, show's over! Don't you have duties to attend to? Everyone leave quickly now."
There's a flurry of movement, shoes tripping over hems. Utterly confounded, he cannot even speak a word before Xiao bows profusely, muttering half a dozen apologies.
"Please forgive the intrusion, Your Majesty. Thank you for the demonstration. I will make sure none of the soldiers ever bother you for such a thing again."
Eyes to the ground, the sky, to anywhere else but Consort Li's face or his precarious position, Xiao excuses himself with the typhoon speed he is famous for.
Alone at last, Tartaglia leans back, bathing in the morning sun. Perhaps it is a trick of the light, but from this angle, he doesn't seem quite so untouchable.
Before long, the Summer Solstice descends upon Liyue, setting the sky ablaze in peals of crimson gold. Hundreds of fairies from across the lands gather under canopies of rippling scarlet silk, and when a breeze blows through the wide courtyard of Yanwang Dijun's grand palace, the light scent of peonies drifts between sounds of gentle chatter.
As the oldest and most powerful of the fae monarchs, it is natural for Morax to receive tributes from near and far, from clans within his borders and nations without. In the ancient era of open warfare, such exchanges held far greater importance. Today, it is another tradition he doesn't quite care for, but customs are hard to change and the whims of the people harder still.
He grimaces, sighing behind a curtain of white jade beads. Beside him, perched upon cushions of golden thread, his consort barely contains his laughter, the blades of his temple ornaments shaking with his every breath. At the thirtieth kowtow and profusion of praise, he worries that the thousands of pearls and the hundred gemstones set into his wife's phoenix crown won't tremble loose, scattering across the hall.
How long has it been now? Surely the day is nearly over and they can proceed with the tenfold more enjoyable banquet complete with intoxicating, memory-stealing wine. He throws a meaningful glance towards his Minister of Rites, hoping to convey the depths of his displeasure.
Mountain Shaper clutches a wing, raising a placating feather to say just one more.
"On behalf of the Winter Queen, the emissary from Snezhnaya greets Your Royal Majesty."
For the first time since the proceedings started, Tartaglia holds still, silent.
Who walks in carries with him the stench of moth-eaten resentment, his shoulders covered in heavy furs despite the heat of the season. Down his neck three pairs of silver eyes wink with malignant secrets. He does not kowtow, and those of Morax's court present expect nothing less.
"Remarkable, truly remarkable," the emissary claps his gloved hands, ignoring all decorum. "I did not believe it possible, but the evidence before me is irrefutable—a wild dog can be tamed. Perhaps what they say is true, that the pet takes after the owner. Or is it that the owner takes after the pet?"
For so long has he bickered with the citizens of Winter that, short of the Tsaritsa appearing in the flesh, he is not moved by any of their attempts at aspersions. He waves a dismissive hand, like shooing an errant mosquito, and an attendant rushes to collect the small boxed offering from the hands of the emissary's servant.
That should have been the end of it, but to his disbelief, his consort has something to say.
"Your Majesty, please do not take his words to heart. Pantalone comes from poverty, a place as unworthy as that of your lowly wife, but the difference between us is that I have at least educated myself on the ways of the world. He, on the other hand, only leaves the motherland when his petty desires eclipse his fear."
The one called Pantalone reels as if struck, though he recovers fast with a snicker and click of his tongue.
"Ha! This dog has learned to bark. Why defend his honour when he cares not for yours? It has already been half a year since Her Majesty the Tsaritsa sent you off, and you still have not managed to produce a child. Do you know what they say about Consort Li back home?" He spits the name like some foul tasting poison, straightening to his full height. "He is barren. Infertile. All those years spent hunting monsters have made him noxious and unlovable."
At the curl of Morax's hand, the attendant opens the box. In it, on a bed of feathers nestled amongst dried flowers, a little glass bottle filled with perfectly round pills sparkles merrily in the late afternoon light.
"See? Yanwang Dijun doesn't even deny it! My Queen is magnanimous. Today I present Her Majesty's gift and heartfelt wish in a successful germination. This is a famous Snezhnayan recipe, guaranteed to bring about conception, even for someone as fruitless as our dear Tartaglia."
For the sake of his court who shift painfully from foot to foot, wringing their hands in their sleeves, and no other reason, he dismisses Pantalone in the fewest words possible, ending this year's procession of tributaries.
Tartaglia is first to rise, cornering the quivering attendant. He plucks the bottle from its nest, holding it up against the light. There are maybe three dozen pills, enough to last every night of a moon. With a click of his tongue, he snaps the box shut, pocketing the offending item.
"Let's not keep our guests waiting too long," his consort says towards no one in particular. Though Morax has come to know a great number of his faces, this sullen one is unfamiliar, full of dark clouds and bitter winds. He gathers and straightens the pleats of his ceremonial dress, and without another word he storms off to prepare for the evening, two handmaidens scurrying after him.
"Dijun," Mountain Shaper worries his beak with a wing, "shouldn't you go after Consort Li?" There seems to be something else stuck in his mouth, though he says nothing more and sighs to fill the air.
"Why?" Morax replies easily, neither concerned nor interested in chasing after his wife. He stands from his throne, and the rest take their cue to leave. "Consort Li is no lady of this court. He does not need me to coddle him."
Unable to argue, Mountain Shaper clasps his arm, shaking his head.
"Of course, Dijun knows best."
Truthfully, he does not understand why people pester him so. He provides all that is suitable for his consort's station—gold, gems, bolts of priceless fabric, a beautiful palace in an equally beautiful land of peace and prosperity—and confers upon him freedoms most can only dream of. Yes, it might be unusual that someone could last this long as his wife, surpassing the past record by several moons, but surely this just means he is doing something right and what fault there might be lies not with him.
He doesn't understand, but it's no matter. He has waited so many thousand years—what is one, two, a hundred more?
When the sun at last sets on the longest day of the year, he joins his agelong companions in sharing wine with their most important guests, members of families who have seen Liyue through its birth and harrowing adolescence. Like him, these are the people working tirelessly to secure the future, paving the road brick by solitary brick.
Tonight though, under the protection of the Summer King when his reach is greatest and his power suffuses even the darkness of night, they drink to forget their worries, dance to remember joy, and sing as if tomorrow won't arrive.
Three cups in and his consort appears dressed in the red of life. Gone are his jewels, his crown of five thousand pearls, and in their place he conjures a radiance with the curl of his wrists, the turn of his head, how his laugh brings the moon down from the sky. He dances amongst those who had once hated him, linking his arms with theirs, and when it is time for him to greet another, they do not let him leave without exchanging bowls, splitting jars of wine meant for kindred.
For a child of Winter, his consort is remarkably warm. He drinks with a certain ebullience, a raw kind of revelry tempered by polished elegance, holding his sleeve gently as he downs cup after cup. Glass orchids. Silver blade. He lingers just long enough to not offend and a moment no more, a world of mystery flickering in the curve of his smile.
Eventually, the only one left to address is himself, watching from afar under a cloak of blooming peonies. Tartaglia settles into the empty space beside him, resting his head upon Morax's shoulder.
"Not going to dance with the others?"
"The night is for them, not me."
It has always been this way.
His consort hums low, equivocal, pouring two cups from a bottle he picked up from elsewhere. He presses him to turn his way, twining their arms together. With his other hand he places wine overflowing into Morax's waiting fingers.
"Morax," he starts, the shape of his name like a colour never seen, "what do you think of me?"
What does he think of him? Not too much, not too little. An improvement upon his twenty-seven past wives, certainly, but this is neither appropriate nor something he wishes to say. There are no words to adequately describe him the way his actions describe themselves, so he picks the simplest truths out of a mountain of commentary.
"Proficient. Consort Li handles his station with competency and grace."
It's strange, how he expects the laugh, an echo to what's become his every day, listening for the response of rain after the scorching noon. But the laugh never comes, just a tilt of his head, a smile that somehow says his answer is wrong.
He drinks, so Morax drinks too, elbows bumping, breaths warm. When their cups are empty, he untangles their arms, sitting back to gaze at the moon.
One at a time, their honoured guests retire for the night, stumbling off into shadowed corridors bubbling with merry laughter. Mountain Shaper holds for as long as he can before fatigue forces him to relinquish his post. With a short and wobbling bow, he does what he can to corral whoever is left, shooing them as one shoos pigeons fat from fallen grain.
In this silence, Tartaglia rummages through his pockets, his sleeves. When he finds what he's looking for, he sighs some bitter thing, tossing his head back with a palm clapped to his mouth.
In his lap, an opened bottle filled with perfectly round pills rolls to a stop.
A pale hand clutches the red silk at his chest, fingers curling, back bowing. He folds in on top of himself, quaking, a moan slipping through the chatter of his teeth.
Morax is with him, beside him, trembling hands shaking trembling shoulders long before he understands just what it is he is doing. How stupid! How reckless! Doesn't Tartaglia know—everything the Tsaritsa sends is poison, rot made to destroy the soul.
Medicine is far from his field. No being in Liyue will be sober enough this night. Why couldn't his wife just be like everyone else—inoffensive, predictable, temperate, and amenable?!
His heart thumps in his chest, blood rushes through his ears. What is he to do now? What can he possibly do?
A sudden laugh strikes like thunder, savage and beautiful, a little bit mean. Tartaglia looks at him through eyes clear as daybreak, a pill propped on the tip of his tongue.
"Morax, my dear husband, it's only an aphrodisiac," another laugh, bright and blithesome, and Morax does not know whether to be angry or relieved to hear such a sound again. "If the Tsaritsa truly thought me barren, would I be here at all as your wife?"
He sees now. The stupid one is, in fact, him.
Yanwang Dijun does not pout, but he does know how to huff, fleeing from his consort's twinkling glee with a great snap of his sleeves.
Behind him, wrapped in sanguine thread, Tartaglia becomes something he is afraid to lose.
By the golden autumn, his consort is no less a facet of his court as the waters around Liyue belong to Summer's reign. His strength he lends to the subjugation of beasts, his strategies to the organisation of armies. In these times of peace, a general like he, who has seen more battlefields than years, would languish from neglect and disuse were it not for how he fills his time hunting the kingdom's oathbreakers, chasing those foolish enough to cheat the will of Yanwang Dijun.
From murderers to swindlers, liars to thieves, Tartaglia finds them in their homes, on the road, at the bridges between this world and another. Soon, a new legend attaches itself to the phoenix crown: an omen of rebalance, the harbinger of justice.
His consort thinks it pretty funny how word spreads along rivers, through pebble banks and silver bark trees, like a persistent song that won't ever leave. They say he is the one who will finally give Summer an heir, but when pressed, all he answers is riddles and rhymes, saying much and yet very little at once.
Tartaglia tips his head back, and Morax runs his fingers through fire hair and lather the scent of spice and wildflowers. Some days, like today, when Tartaglia returns from his travels carrying with him a week's worth of dirt and grime, he'll loop an easy arm through his, tugging them both to the baths.
Morax, still, refuses to partake, citing decency. Propriety. The right timing. His explanations—excuses—don't seem to bother him though, his wife both shameless and carefree as he strips down to his smallclothes then, with a happy little sigh, nothing at all.
Between the rustle of white leaves, blue-veined, paper-thin, he washes the road from his wife's skin. It comes off in oil-slicked streams, fouling the waters green-black-grey. Behind an ear, over his shoulders, down the ridge of his spine, some magic makes him flawless, some glamour meant to disguise.
He wants to ask but never does, too afraid of the answer. It's taken this long just to admit to himself he likes the Tartaglia he sees. To break the illusion now—there's no telling what horrors lie beneath the surface, what monstrosity the Winter Queen has to hide. A demon could be lurking in his pool, swimming amongst pale pink petals, drinking juice from a cup of cut crystal, not a worry in sight.
It frightens him, to not know. Though, strikingly so, it frightens him more to know. For someone so beautiful, so wild, so unburdened, what mammoth bribe must there be to bind such a soul to him?
Tartaglia turns in his bath, ripples of iridescent silt fanning from his centre. He cups a hand beneath his chin, drumming long fingers along mosaic tiles.
"Husband," he smiles, a dangerous, lethal thing, "I've been thinking. After so many moons, it's time to take our relationship to the next phase."
He's had this conversation before, one evening under the stars, eating fruits carved into swans. Tartaglia had fed him peeled grapes by hand, asking with a kiss if his king would come to his bed.
He said no then and thinks to say no now, but whether it's the heat from the steam or the dew clinging to his consort's nose, his lips, the fine blink of his lashes, some mystery compels him to discover where this time will go.
"What do you have in mind?"
He lifts the cloth from Morax's hand, pressing a kiss to his knuckles. Then, with a tenderness reserved for lovers, he guides his husband's palm to his cheek where his warmth bleeds sanguine red.
"I want a duel. A proper one, with stakes and a wager. You've taught me so much—there's a chance, now, that I can win."
Morax blinks. His heart skips, his stomach twists. Of all the things he could have asked, this one tastes the sweetest. He holds back the laugh, curving his thumb under one shining abyssal blue eye. His consort is still a thousand years too soon if he thinks he can defeat Yanwang Dijun in a contest of might.
"Wife," he replies with a forced solemnity, "this is unfair to you. I cannot ask a concession like this. It is tyranny. I won't be known as a king who bullies his queen."
Like a reed bending in a marsh, Tartaglia shrugs one elegant shoulder. "Then ask for something benign. We are not enemies, no matter what you think of Winter where I am from, so ask as if to a friend, and I will match your charitable wager with a considerate one of my own."
It sounds so simple, said like this. He thinks, but the answer doesn't take long at all.
"Very well. If I win, my consort will grow out his hair and wear it as those of the Summer Court do."
Easy enough. Neither too mean nor too insulting.
Tartaglia hums thoughtfully. His fingers skip upon ripples. He looks up and his smile is unreadable, cloaked by mist and shadow.
"Then, if I win, my king will let me wear his crown for one night."
How charming.
He doesn't know when it had become this way, that the words formed easier, that he learned this prickle along his skin is called delight. He lends his hand for his wife to step from his bath, pulling fresh silks across his chest.
"When?" he asks.
"How about now?" Tartaglia answers, knotting ties, slipping into shoes. His state of dress is far from appropriate for public eyes, but here in the privacy of Yanwang Dijun's inner sanctum, what did it matter if his collar slopes off a shoulder or that his thighs peek through panels of his skirt.
"Are you rested?"
"More than sufficient."
From the baths to the courtyard shaded by ancient trees, his consort collects his most favoured blade, a gleaming edge of lucent silver, its surface polished to a mirror shine.
"What are your terms?"
He flicks his sword tip left, right, a habit like cracking knuckles. "One term only: first to draw blood wins."
There's peril in such plain rules, plenty of pitfalls. Loopholes. If he is cruel, he could make the fight last forever, driving Tartaglia to exhaustion, to indignity, then, to death. If he is mean, he could play with him until the sun rises, until he begs, until he wants for nothing except the cut of his spear.
It is a terrible power he has given him, but his heart beats at the promise, his blood rushing at the scent of challenge. How long has it been since anyone trifled like this with him?
Vortex Vanquisher responds to his summons, settling in the palm of his hand. He is neither cruel nor mean, though Tartaglia's self-satisfied smirk almost makes him wish he were.
"Agreed?"
"Agreed."
His consort truly is a thing of beauty as he drops into his first stance, a snake, his eyes like pinpricks of the cutting void. This time when he draws his blade, it flickers with stolen moonlight, vanishing and reappearing at each split of shadow.
He is fast. Faster than before. A consequence of their weekly lessons. His movements are sharp, precise, lethal. Not a breath wasted, not a single hair out of place.
Morax catches steel with stone, and the crack of it whips through branches, shaking leaves.
There's chaos swimming in that gaze, tempered by zeal, bridled by discipline. He presses close, just a step, then another, and Morax meets him under the shade of shifting clouds.
"You will have to try much harder if you mean to defeat me."
His smile stretches ear to ear. He bears his teeth, his crow's feet crinkling, and in a blink he is gone.
The air smells of lightning. Of rain. Of summer storms. It sticks to his tongue, tickles his throat, prickling the backs of his eyes. He's heard of it before, from reports, from Xiao, but this is his first time tasting it himself, the thing even monsters are frightened of.
It comes suddenly, shattering the silence, tearing a seam through the fabric of night. An arc of swordlight brighter than day screams past the spot Morax once stood, ripping apart solid flagstones.
At the other end of the yard, cloaked in stars, his consort levels the edge of his sword, peering down its shining length.
"Won't my magnanimous king go easy on this lowly wife and let me strike him just once?"
Morax can't help the snort that bubbles out his mouth. "'Go easy'? Hah! My 'lowly wife' has no qualms about destroying my garden. He does not need anyone to 'go easy' on him."
A laugh, crystalline, absurd. "Save your garden by submitting to me. Just one strike. I promise, it won't hurt a bit."
Morax answers with a rumble of the earth, a slide of stone against stone. It has been centuries since he's done such a thing, but the land responds to their ancient lord all the same.
Spears of jagged jade pierce through loam, scattering roots and vegetation into the sky. Tartaglia though is light on his feet, skipping between, around, across lances of rock, the smile never leaving his face.
More. More. He wants to—needs to—see more. How he dances like the river's path carving through canyons, a streak of silver flashing through gloom. He parries, and a lance careens into the underbrush, exploding in a great plume of dust.
Morax throws another, and another, leaving openings just to crush them a moment after. But his consort is smart, too smart, darting through his traps like a shoal of fish in deep waters.
Perhaps the comparison is more apt than he realises as the inspiration hits him like a bolt of lightning.
To catch sardines, sharks drive them ashore.
So he pushes. He corrals. A ring of spikes closes the arena, shepherding them to the cliff's edge. In his home in the heart of Jueyun Karst, there's no shortage of perilous precipices, mountainsides as familiar as his own hands.
Pebbles tumble over a drop thousands feet tall. Tartaglia heaves a breath. Curses. Laughs.
"If ever you doubt whether I want this marriage to work out," he throws his arms to the side, proclaims, "remember how easy it would have been for me to cast myself into the chasm below, freeing me from the tyranny of my husband, the Summer King. Do you understand now?"
He whips his blade forward, drawing lightning to his feet. One last chance, he sees it, burning wild in his gaze.
"I would rather fight you every day than yield to expectations."
When did it become this way? That having a belligerent wife is better than having no wife at all. He dismisses his lances of jade with a clang of his great Vortex Vanquisher, curling a hand in invitation.
Nothing more needs to be said. Tartaglia vanishes in an eruption of sparks. He twists, and the threshold of a maelstrom rides the edge of his lightning sword.
It's over in an instant. This will be the twenty-seventh time he puts his consort on his back. With the tip of his golden spear, he nicks Tartaglia's bobbing throat, extracting a single bead of blood.
"It is my victory," he says, more for the chance to see his face fill with fury.
Except there is no fury in the curve of his smile, no anger, no resentment, no dissatisfaction. Only delight in the blink of abyssal blue eyes framed by fire. Pleasure. Joy.
He looks to his right, down his arm, down the length of his blade. Morax follows and with it catches the line of fresh blood smeared over lucent silver.
Impossible. There is no way. He would have felt the wound that left a trail like this.
Tartaglia laughs, a sound like sparkling waves. In his other hand, he peels back his fingers, one at a time, exposing the long gash across his palm.
"Actually, Morax, this is my win."
Inconceivable. Outrageous! He takes a step back, blinks once. Twice. Opens his mouth to retort yet his words fly away.
All this work, all this time, all the plots and schemes and nights of manoeuvring—all of it, for what? Just to lure him into agreeing to one innocuous bet with its single, nonsensical, easily exploitable term?!
Tartaglia sits up, shaking the dirt from his clothes. It's then that Morax remembers his consort is barely dressed.
Heat rises to his cheeks. He barks out an order to fix his attire, to which his consort howls with laughter.
"My dear husband! It's not as if you have never seen me naked. Why are you so shy now? Could it be—have I finally cracked my king's legendary stone heart?"
Morax doesn't answer, and that is answer enough.
In the ruined garden of Yanwang Dijun's home, not a single creature breathes a sound. Once the amusement passes, there is only a heavy silence dipped in the gum of uncertainty, the rustle of leaves a thousand years away.
With where they are now, there's no more reason not to ask.
"What is it that you truly want? What monstrous thing has the Tsaritsa promised you in exchange for bedding me?"
The shock of realisation strikes fast, sweeping across his consort's face. Tartaglia shifts between innumerable emotions, too many for Morax to count.
Eventually, when he settles on something wry, two steps from the pallor of grief, he sighs long and unburdened, at last speaking his mind.
"Oh Morax, that is where you are mistaken. It was I who petitioned Her Majesty the Winter's Might to grant this marriage. From the moment I saw Summer's radiance, I knew I had to make him mine."
Nonsense. It must be nonsense. The words tumble out in a torrent. "Why then? Why the glamour? Why have you hidden your self from me. Did you think I would never notice when you insist on sharing my bed, forcing me to bathe you?"
Tartaglia laughs, and this time it is clear he is laughing at himself.
"Has it not occurred to my brilliant, unmatched, peerless husband that his wife would be afraid of not being beautiful or strong enough to stand next to him?"
Morax staggers back another step, watching with wide eyes as his consort picks himself up from the forest floor. Since their wedding night seasons ago, he sees him for the very first time, a beautiful man who has never lied, not even once.
His hands move without any prompting, reaching for the golden horns he carries as his everyday crown. With his heart hammering in his chest, he sets his life's work upon a mop of fire hair, swallowing a hundred butterflies.
Tartaglia tilts his head against the moonlight, catching Morax's wrist before he can make his retreat. He sighs, soft, content, pressing a kiss to his palm.
"If you allow me," he whispers, like a secret no one else can share, "I would have you tonight."
With the last of his reservations, his doubts, his qualms, all resting in the glint of gold above his consort's brow, there is nothing left to hold back the thrum of his curiosity nor the voice that promises—this is the one.
He slides his fingers through knots in silk, pulls until he is left bare. Then, tender but absolute, he nods once.
"Yes, I allow it."
Truthfully, when he spoke with Tartaglia and agreed to withhold their story from their children until the time they ascended the throne, he anticipated and prepared for a great many reactions from disbelief to disappointment. Everyone in the Summer Court knows Yanwang Dijun's consort came from the land of their eternal rivals, but just how he won over their king's stone heart has been a matter of long speculation.
A dozen different myths persist, and so long as they all weighed equally in the fae folks' hearts, the Winter Queen would never find out just how truly, awfully, hideously embarrassing the real story is.
But to see his daughter turn to his son demanding a hefty concession for a bet made years ago, he remembers just who they take after.
"I knew it! Father pretends there is no one who can outsmart Mother, but Mother would never stay with someone who could not match and surprise him. Now I understand why you always caution us when agreeing to duels."
"I really thought it would have been something more romantic. Sister, are you not the least bit upset that we were conceived in a ruined garden blasted apart by Father's magic?"
Through the rustle of thorns, a certain consort interjects, "I should have you know, your mother's magic did far more damage than my own."
"Father!"
"Dad!"
No matter their age, the return of his consort never fails to turn them into little children again, whirling around him like kites catching a stream.
Under the moonlight, beneath the shade of ancient trees, he laughs at his family's riotous antics, their chatter loud enough to frighten all the sleeping birds. Tomorrow, he will have to apologise to them. Tonight, though, in the first breath of their new lives free from the demands of the crown, his heart only knows the colour of delight, a song he once thought impossible.
Tartaglia slips a hand in his. Their children, unwilling to see where this will lead, promptly excuse themselves with smiles both happy and horrified.
"Say," his consort sighs once they are alone, soft and coquettish as if he were not wearing his full armour painted in the blood of abyssal beasts, "now that you are no longer king, there are plenty more gardens we can make a mess of. This one is pretty nice. Are you willing?"
With a sly smile of his own, he hums thoughtfully, deliberating every option.
Then, as if there is any doubt, he nods.
"I'll allow it."