Playing Pirates - DiVExBaCK - 原神 (2024)

His father bears the solemn weight of fallen heavens on unassuming, quiet shoulders.

His fathers walks across ruptured earth, among discarded treasures, around collapsed pillars and broken towers, in the fissures of their home's foundations, one foot before the other; one stone over the other.

Arching bridges of the underground, deep beneath the snowy winterlands of Snezhnaya; a snuffed-out forge of once great intellectual might and technological advancement, blazing steel, burning blood.

The apex of humanity, prosperous and grand, godless, skyless, yet empyrean, above all others, built by the toiling hands of mortals.

Yet it's ruins and pieces of a legacy his father is left to hold together.

Barren pools of water to fill, crystallized stone to harvest, wilting faux gardens of created flora to bring like back into.

The Regency of the Alberich Clan had long since been in place since the One-Eyed King's stasis.

But Khaenri'ah's fractures had never healed, and though loyal, dedicated and just in all traditions and honor, the Alberich Clan had not been accepted as acting sovereign.

Thus the fine bladework of crown and clan had been taught to Kaeya at the age of seven.

A weapon placed in his hand, hilt light, blade balanced; ceremonial swordplay taught with swiftness and grace by his father himself, to uphold the dignified poise those who bore the name Alberich were expected to.

To pen with elegance.

To speak with sophistication.

To be as they were - as they are - the King's trusted and chosen.

But like the rest of Khaenri'ah's people, they cover their right eye, out of dutiful reverence for the King.

So long as the King lived, so too would their acknowledgement he had not yet fallen.

His father's father had taught instilled this knowledge within him, and so Kaeya's father had done the same.

Centuries later, and King Irmin could still not be woken, thus the duty of reign within the clan would continue.

His father had made the importance of this clear as Kaeya was raised in the palace absent of a royal family.

His father had made the distinction even clearer.

"We are not this nation's rightful ruling clan, but it is our responsibility to defend the throne from those who would seek to claim it for their own."

His blade had slid down the steel of Kaeya's own, disarming it at the speed of light and sending him staggering back in the training fields as mentors and clan members watched.

His father's voice, peaceful.

A ghost of a smile on his lips.

He had turned his larger, worn sword and held it in the outstretched palms of both his hands, offering it to Kaeya as this was the day Kaeya had turned eight.

"We are protectors of this home and land."

No.

His father was not the chosen ruler of their nation in the royal family's stead.

It was his father's brother, and his father's brother's eldest son, Heigan, who were to bear the brunt of duty and clan - and the One-Eyed King's last commands.

There is a picture of The Brave King, the one before King Irmin; stalwart, brusque, adorned in furs and cape fierce as Andrius, the North King of Mondstadt - a far away land.

But Andrius, ruler of glacier wrath and winds, in once human form had cutting blue eyes of judgment, a head of dark hair, coarse beard, and broad and mighty build.

And one was a god while the other was not, and people followed one, while people feared the second.

Yet, in the end, both had sacrificed pieces of themselves to save the people claimed as their own.

Kaeya's father shares this in the orange candlelight of a dim and quiet library, where scattered papers of clan writings, letters and Kaeya's own practiced-work is strewn across the table they sit at.

Magnanimous bookshelves, banners of blue and gold and white, floors laid in deep carpets, walls adorned with swords and shields.

And Kaeya, in his father's lap, gazes down at the heavy, illustrated book they share.

And he asks a question.

"Why?"

His father strokes an absent hand in his hair."For what reason did they sacrifice and give themselves away?"

"Yes."

The hand on his hair settles.

"…Because they felt love."

Kaeya doesn't understand the exact magnitude behind the words.

He only knows his father has gone quiet and that silence in the library somehow seems vital.

But Kaeya doesn't know what captures his father's wandering thoughts so.

So he turns the next page in the book and points down at the depictions of Khaenriah's revered craftsmen, sages and alchemists of legend.

Murmuring, Kaeya's father's finger traces the images Kaeya's does as he tells stories of old - and older still.

There's a problem a day before Kaeya turns ten.

Heigan has bested him in a spar for the fifteenth time.

Kaeya's right side is his weakest; his biggest blind-spot. He has reasonably deduced it's because of the patch that covers his eye with blatant, swallowing darkness.

"And... it... makes my eye itch," he finds himself telling his father's older brother.

The ruling regent had been ‘pouring over’ the lesser mundane affairs of Khaenri'ah's unstable court when Kaeya had found him.

As in - his uncle had been doing little work at all.

Rather, his uncle had been sitting in the vast study, spinning a pen between fingers, whilst gazing at the ceiling deep in thought before Kaeya had wandered in.

"Yes, the itching. I understand. It can be highly uncomfortable," his father’s brother says in response to Kaeya’s plight.

He strokes his chin, intrigued.

"What did Heigan do?"

"He got upset," Kaeya confesses, averting his gaze. "He lunged across the field. He said I shouldn't."

"And Brinjur pulled you apart?"

"He did. He made us do drills alone."

His uncle barks out a laugh.

“Seventy-five years, a respectable man of instruction, and he still suffers students who argue of the same dilemma.”

His uncle laughs heartily again.

It's… unexpected.

Two clan members shouldn't be fighting, much less the son of the ruling head and son of that head's brother.

Truthfully, Kaeya had been looking for his father to share his worries with. But his uncle had sent his father to lie down and had taken over his work instead.

"He's far too overworked, and he doesn't listen well."

"Come now, Kaeya, I'm not upset."

His father's older brother, jovial, sets down his pen and turns in his chair properly to give Kaeya his full attention.

"I'm quite ecstatic to see you, really. You hardly ever visit. I was afraid you'd transformed into some sort of sullen bookworm like my little brother."

"I am... told you are busy," Kaeya is careful to say.

But his uncle shakes his head, mirthfully, playing wounded, and beckons with a hand for him to move closer near.

"You need not treat me as a stranger. Our blood is the same."

Kaeya takes a few steps forward.

His uncle huffs in lighthearted exasperation.

Kaeya is thrown marginally by the juxtapose presented, of a lackadaisical sovereign - and he hesitates - for he thinks of his own father standing at the open-arched windows of the palace grounds and pavilion, profile shadowed, sharp and grim.

But here, the man who should be most grim, is the one who gazes at Kaeya with levels of understanding, mischief and mirth.

A mysterious levity.

And his length of hair is long, curled and dark at the waist of a decorated vest, layered, adorned in buckles and clasps and a one-shouldered cape.

It's further unlike Kaeya's father whose hair is kept neat and short, the smallest of tails at his neck indicating status of high-standing; wear modest, boots polished, coattails pressed.

His uncle and father.

Different as night and day.

"…You know," says Kaeya's uncle after a moment, solemnly.

The seriousness in his lilac blue eye is far too serious to actually be serious at all.

"I once fought with your father over the very same thing. The tradition of our eyepatches. The inheritance behind it. But your father wasn't half as nice as Heigan was to you. In the middle of our argument, I removed my eyepatch as if to make a point. You father, mid-swing, struck me in the eye. Brinjur nearly had a heart attack.”

Kaeya's gaze goes instinctively to the light scar cutting through the right side of his uncle's face, visible with the patch worn only able to cover part of it.

"The eye was fine," his uncle recalls, humorously, "but for weeks afterwards, I acted as if he had injured me blind. Of course at the time, your father's guilt was immense. He came to me apologetic, though he felt no apology was enough. Eventually, when brought before the doctor I had managed to evade until that point, I confessed to my tomfoolery."

The gaze of Kaeya's uncle wanders, the corner of his mouth threatening to rise.

"There were few in the Clan amused. I faced a severe scolding. But even after my confession, your father couldn't seem to let the matter go. So I took matters into my own hands. I confronted him one day in the hall. I pointed at him and proclaimed rights to treasure and piracy. He was alarmed and confused, but I had seen all the books he read behind our chosen ones of study, thinking it'd go unnoticed. Tales of wild adventures, heroes and exploration. Your father would read such stories for hours in our youth. So - 'A pirate-king I'll be, bound by no laws but my own'!"

The laughter of his uncle is boisterously loud.

"The look on his face! I convinced him to follow me around the ruins of our homeland for lucrative treasure. He pretended he wasn't enticed, but there was no denying the spark of excitement that lit up his eye before he forcibly squashed it away. I was pleased if my antics of false piracy could lighten the load we both carried, and deemed it more than worth it to see your father's hidden smiles."

His laughter settles, softly, trailing off.

The warmth Kaeya is looked at with is one of all-encompassing acceptance and love.

For Kaeya's father.

For Kaeya himself.

"My little brother has a tendency to worry. He thinks deeply. He plans for every eventuality, with the resolve of a general holding a last stand against an army alone. There are things he's forgotten in our many years."

Kaeya's uncle grows placated; wistful, smiling with remorse.

"We, the Alberichs, are proud upholders of tradition, who hold the line of defense for our slumbering King. With it, comes responsibility and burden. I fear at times its all too much to bear."

He rises from his chair.

His hand goes to the eyepatch he wears.

"The loss of sight is no weakness. In battle; in life, see it as the strength that makes you aware of what exists, what is gone and what will not return. And endeavor to press forward."

Close enough to Kaeya now, his uncle's smile grows and he ruffles Kaeya's hair.

"We are what's left to take flight in the ashes of our One-Eyed King. Wear your patch with knowledge and pride, that so long as you stand, your king will not die."

The next time Kaeya meets Heigan for a bout, he thinks of his father, of his uncle, of the Clan, of the world he was born into, of his role he doesn't yet understand.

He casts aside mundane discipline and normalcy, and surges towards his cousin, swinging unorthodox, a little bit wild, claiming friendly 'piracy'.

Heigan yelps and stumbles.

Kaeya wins.

The guffaws of the ruling regent of the Alberich Clan are undignified later that particular night; the expression on Heigan's face, sharper, mature, accusing - wholly surly.

“He cheated.”

“You tripped.”

Kaeya's father that same night will walk alongside Kaeya, casting him peculiar looks from the corner of his eye as Kaeya feigns innocence.

But when Kaeya requests that his father sit with him and read with him a story, his father doesn't refuse.

Instead his father looks at the book Kaeya has passed over - of youthful tales of adventure.

And his eyes will soften, and his forehead will crease, and his expression will be one of open ache, before it is washed with fortitude and steel.

The book is set aside.

Another one is selected by his father and read steadily in low murmurs.

A history of other underground civilizations that once spread beneath Teyvat, grand and sprawling as Khaenri'ah.

Almost a year passes.

Kaeya's father grows more somber by the day. His ruling uncle finds more grays in his hair than darks.

There is something turbulent stirring in the pits of Khaenri'ah's fissures.

Strange, chaotic spaces.

Pockets in in the roots of Irminsul's vast sprawl of trees.

An Order, from a place called the Abyss.

They bring with them trudges of a curse that the few loyal mages of Khaenri'ah's court, the warriors of Alberich Clan, the knights who have not yet lost their mind, have kept at bay for years.

Factions of dissent.

The dark underground of a resistance force against the regents ascended to royal bearing by the King, and not the lingering populace of Khaenri'ah themselves.

But the people are not the ones dissatisfied.

It's the lingering embers of past warring clans, ire stirred anew by a source beyond Khaenri'ah none can pinpoint.

There are whispers, and Kaeya hears them as he traverses the shadows of the halls.

"Snezhnaya?"

"They were once our allies. Now they pick and steal from our ruins. Seek our blueprints. Engage in treachery."

"We must protect what's left."

"And when there's nothing left to pilfer? When they come for us?"

"What would we have that they want?"

"A throne without a King."

"Our King lives."

"Our King is frozen to time. Our clan head lives for him. But for how much longer in these circ*mstances? Half the clan is unaware. The other maintains a ruse. We cannot operate like this."

"We will do it, regardless."

"Sias..."

"Don't tell me you've forgotten who we are."

"I haven't."

"So say it.”

"...We of the Alberich Clan should lead lives..."

As those who blaze like fire, rather than those who wallow in the embers, Kaeya will silently mouth along in the flickering shadows cast by braziers on the wall.

His boots will accidentally scuff the stone.

The hushed conversation between older clansman will stop.

When they come out to investigate, Kaeya will already be gone.

Heigan's spars with Kaeya continue, but the blade of his cousin is weighted, often distracted; accompanied by a frown.

Kaeya keeps his antics to a minimum until he ceases them entirely.

He focuses on his studies.

He follows drills with precision.

He copies the mantras of the Alberich with a steady hand, on his own, in gorgeous handwriting, thinking of his father; knowing his father fights a different battle elsewhere Kaeya is not privy to know, small as he is, not yet grown.

He is ten, not quite eleven, but if he grows faster, perhaps his father will let him in.

But there is a feeling deep down inside of him that tells him this will never happen.

Somehow in the time between Kaeya waddled at his father's knee, holding his father's hand, and in the time Kaeya rose tall enough to walk alone and wield his own sword against five of the clan by himself, he has lost the parent that used to tell him stories and sit with him in evenings until he slept in bed.

Deeper down, much much deeper, bleaker and grim, is a pit of uneasy unrest that tells Kaeya soon things will no longer be the same.

Soon there will be change.

"They're hunting us."

The words are enough.

So does come the change.

They are in Khaenri'ah, in the halls of the palace, surrounded by banner and stone.

They are traveling through the miasmic underground beneath the earth.

Kaeya's father pulls him by the hand, before the hand is replaced by a sword and they are made tofight.

There is blood in the earth, blood on their hands; flames at their backs as tunnels are collapsed, clothes are torn, and kin falls.

Masked.

Technologically-advanced.

It's a blur of a memory; there are gaps his mind blackens and refuses to let him recall.

But his heart races, his blood burns, he swallows sediment, smoke and stumbles through plumes of black over erupting geysers and scorching coals.

He can't remember what's become of his uncle, why his father's brother isn't there.

He is the most important, so why isn't he taking the lead?

Why is it Kaeya and his father and the others of their clan fleeing at the forefront?

He stumbles, a tiny figure, as the walls of the low tunnel around them shake.

A rock.

Heigan, guarding the rear of the retreat, sharply shoves Kaeya forward.

Then Heigan is gone.

Kaeya's father is there and Kaeya's father swiftly leads Kaeya further down the darkened passageways, further away.

There are twelve.

"Will they keep chasing us?"

There are eight.

"How much longer?"

There are five.

"Until we're all gone?"

Kaeya calls for his father. For an answer in the abyss terrifyingly folding them in.

He thinks he hears the answer.

"They will try, but they won't succeed. There is poison in their blood where there should be steel."

They huddle in the upper fissures of the earth before the surface will give them break.

They pass emblems and identifications, keepsakes and namesakes, and they are burned in a fire in the midst of a damp and dark and dismally dripping cave.

Kaeya has not yet processed the crimson splattered on clothes and cheek are that of his clan.

Kaeya has not yet processed that in the cave he imagined the voices of many; the gathering of his clan escaped from the insurrection of an insurrection, of an upheaval long-coming - he sits, hollow and cold, alone beside only his father.

He passes out with fever.

He wakes to the smell of thunderstorm and rain, dew wet on blades of grass that fold beneath the weight of forward-moving boots.

He wakes on his father's back, cheeks flushed, hair plastered by the rain, breathing weakly for the fear should he breath too hard his father will too leave him and disappear.

They were attacked.

This is all Kaeya remembers the second and third time he stirs.

Nothing else.

Nothing more.

They're in a place called Mondstadt.

Kaeya had remained in and out of unconsciousness without lucidity across three nations and the sea.

"Who took us?"Kaeya thinks he once asks.

"Pirates," says his father, the softest Kaeya has ever heard him.

Contingency.

A father that had planned for all eventualities.

Even this.

On a morning, where they rest in the early morning mists on the sturdy logs of fallen trees, in the thick of overgrown wilds, sprawling roots and flowered, thorny bushes Kaeya has never seen in person before, his father breaks a fruit he calls a sunsettia, and shares it.

Though Kaeya's thoughts stay absent, his skin warm, eye glassy and though tremors shake his hand, the fever in him has dulled, and his ghostly paleness and shakes come the process of illness-recovery.

Detailed memories elude him, but echoes of a clan persist.

Much of his time had been spent trying to pull them to the forefront, reclaim them within his own head; make sense of where they were and what had happened, why, and who had set the other dissatisfied clans of their homeland against them.

Usurpers, a voice whispers in him, quiet.

But they are pieces of a puzzle that refuses to fit in Kaeya's head.

It's a cold dampness in the woods.

Creatures skitter, undergrowth rustles, thickets sway in a slow, bending wind.

This is a lush woodland he has read about in books, free and wild with abandon, unlike the unmoving, resilient stone and steel of Khaenri'ah.

It should fill Kaeya with wonder.

It fills him with nausea.

There is nothing here he knows; the air is unlike the air beneath the ground; too much moves and too much changes.

Yet as Kaeya sits, sickened by the soft soil under ruined boots and smell of nature in the aftermath of storm, his father - for the first time in a long time - rests a hand on top his head.

The weight of it, the heaviness, the warmth, spill exhausted tears down his cheek, spoiling the broken sunsettia cradled in his palm.

'Home'.

He fears what's left of it.

What's left to depart from it.

Kaeya's father has been above-ground, on the surface before.

Kaeya notices this as the days go on.

His father has familiarity of the terrain, knowledge of the roads, the forests and hills, as he guides them to a certain point.

They meet with strangers who speak in tongues Kaeya can't understand.

They are given brief rides in wagons.

They are given different clothes and small meals.

They are escorted through denser, darker woods, left to pass through gorges and alongside the ridges of towering, jagged cliffs.

'A network of friends'.

Kaeya's father doesn't go into further details beyond it.

What he tells Kaeya, weeks later, however, is this.

Of a clan, not unlike their own, noble and forthright. One that selflessly helps others, serves and protects.

They have existed in Mondstadt for centuries, loyal to their nation; loyal as the Alberichs to their King.

Kaeya wonders how his father came to know of this clan so far away from their home.

Begins to wonder if the many trips his father had taken from Khaenri'ah's palace, if all the absences in the later years of Kaeya’s childhood had anything to do with this.

Begins to wonder who his 'father' really is.

The one who had taught him the sword, penmanship, how to walk and read.

Outside of that… what was he?

The feeling in Kaeya is sinking as the one before they were chased from Khaenri'ah, and he grabs his father's hand as to not stumble or be left behind as they venture on.

Oddly, he realizes how much more he 'knew' of his uncle, a ruler open, bright and gallant.

Oddly, he realizes, what little truth he knew of his father - who walked unknown paths and shadows beyond Khaenri’ah - despite being his son.

The Ragnvindr Clan.

They are an elaborate design of servants as informants, civilian-dressed aides and ears and eyes, who roam the outlying roads and property of a multitude of vineyards that encircle a manor, no different than barricades that enclose the fortress of a king.

It sits in a valley, encircled and protected by the natural ridge of mountains, curve of waterfall and river and forested trees.

Harvesters toil.

Maids run to-and-fro across the stretching patio.

When Kaeya and his father reach a hilltop, they overlook the unfamiliar sprawl of what Kaeya's father says is this nation's crowning wealth.

The darkened clouds broken overhead, pouring rain, falls harder - refusing to abate.

"Yet this is good fortune."

Kaeya's father ruminates, blue eye wandering the property, searching idly for something Kaeya doesn't know.

"The roads will flood. Those of the clan traveling will be forced to take a different route. Roundabout. Higher in the woods between the city and here."

After speaking, Kaeya's father gazes at the vineyards and the manor, sitting for a great length of time.

His hand, wrapped around Kaeya's own, will squeeze tight for a moment.

But only for a moment.

Before his father turns, taking Kaeya with him, into the bowels of the woods.

"They are good people," Kaeya's father says, "and you will be well-taken care of."

He kneels before Kaeya in the rain, searching Kaeya's face carefully, as if memorizing every detail.

"I know the man who leads them. He is a friend, and I trust him to do what's best."

"Where are you going?"

Kaeya's words will echo in the storm and echo in his head, above them, as rain breaks on mud, torrential, unforgiving, and cold.

Kaeya's father doesn't answer that.

"Mondstadt. Stay here. Let them take you in."

He sets a hand on Kaeya's small shoulder, and grips it, firm.

His gaze moves beyond Kaeya, briefly on the invisible, dark horizon hidden by the bowing branches of weeping trees, in the direction of the home they've fled from.

Bitterness.

Acceptance.

Coldness.

Hatred lights his eye, but it not for Kaeya.

For Kaeya, there is something that can't be read; distant, a flickering torch of warmth kept at length, refusing to come near.

And in looking at Kaeya, longer and longer, the two of them, together alone, his father's strange demeanor of aloofness abates.

Years it's taken.

An echo of a smile.

A slow murmur.

"Your uncle once joked. The last 'hope' of our clan."

His father bows his head and presses his forehead gently against own, holding it for a time, speaking weary, but light.

"...A prophetic fool. Still wiser than I. Live, Kaeya, not for sacrifices made and kin gone. Do you remember? We of the Alberich Clan-"

"Should lead lives," Kaeya finishes, muted, with him, "as those who blaze like fire."

Rather than those who wallow in the embers.

How much longer will Kaeya repeat this?

Rain drowns on the blank thought - and brings to him parting.

He's taken in, in the midst of a storm.

A man with a brilliant hair of red, grim mouth and pale, pale skin.

He grips Kaeya's shoulder, where Kaeya's father had gripped, hours and hours before.

He searches Kaeya for injury; searches him for weapons, for dangers to himself and others - before finding none.

He pulls him from beneath the trees he's sat under for useless shelter from the downpour, mud staining clothes and hands, and picks him up, and holds him close.

"What happened to him?"the man murmurs, quietly, with a heaviness, and grief.

He's not asking about Kaeya.

The ache in this stranger's voice is for Kaeya's father alone.

Maids fuss.

A bath is drawn.

A meal is prepared.

There is a boy not much older than Kaeya who tentatively peeks his head from around the legs of two households servants, watching the commotion around Kaeya with a frown and curious eyes.

Later, this same boy will offer Kaeya cutlery at dinner, sitting next to him in silence, but an openness in his demeanor, acceptance in his disposition nevertheless.

Ragnvindr.

Kaeya rolls the clan name in his mind, slowly.

Noble.

Fiery, kind.

They are not unlike the Alberich Clan.

The boy notices as Kaeya sits but doesn't eat; as Kaeya pushes around his food, straying from vegetables the most.

And the boy, without a word, will tilt his own plate, and slide his chicken onto Kaeya's with a generous amount of gravy and remove the vegetables from in front of Kaeya entirely, as if they're kin of the same kind, and always were.

Kaeya still won't eat.

He'll avoid eye-contact, self-conscious, his other eye - perfectly alright but hidden - damp and warm beneath its patch.

Weeks of traveling, sick, largely a burden, at the side of his father, sleeping in caverns, in the cradled boughs of trees and forest floors beneath the night stars, and because of it, his father had chosen to part ways and leave him behind.

Without reason.

For Kaeya's father had never spoken a reason, had he?

Rations split evenly in two; but his father would stow away the half for himself and save it for Kaeya later on.

A fire burning as dusk settled and twilight folded in; and his father would sit, back turned, unaware Kaeya was awake - and his father would burn pages from a journal one-by-one, memory of himself and Khaenri'ah one after the other.

Kaeya's father had risen, after sitting in the crackling quiet of the burning logs and leaves, and he had doused the fire before moving on to survey their surroundings.

Kaeya had stopped feigning sleep.

He had gone to the dying embers of the flame in his father's absence and gazed at the black, burning, curling pages left to crumble.

Too many couldn't be salvaged.

Still, he had managed to find one.

Teachings of the Clan, written by Kaeya himself when his words were uncertain and tentative, guided by his father's hand.

It'd been folded into the folds of his clothes.

He had slept with a hand over it, curled tightly, knees to his chest.

The way of their kin was no to cling to things of the past, but Kaeya had clung anyway, not wanting it be gone - and he had remembered that which he had forced himself not to acknowledge.

A warmth of a home and clan, buried in the earth, now certainly buried in tomb-less graves.

He doesn't know something's wrong until he hears the startled clatter of fork and knife the red-haired boy beside him at the dinner table.

Until he sees the face of the man who had brought him in, crease,

Until he finds the butlers and maids tittering around him, on the verge of approach, but not knowing it they're allowed to.

The back of Kaeya's small and scarred hands are wet.

His fork is held tightly.

Tears weep from his silent, curving down his cheeks with a chest tight in pain.

But Kaeya doesn't go anywhere.

He doesn't try to slip off the chair or hide or lower his fork. He sits and holds it because his father had told him to stay.

He sits and waits, anyway, wanting something to take him away.

Crepus.

He had introduced himself, softly, while toweling off Kaeya's hair in the aftermath of a second-drawn bath.

"You can call me that if you'd like. Sir Crepus. I was once a knight. I knew your father. We were friends."

The towel rests over Kaeya's head, hiding Kaeya's red and puffy eyes from sight.

The eyepatch had been removed in privacy; but Kaeya's shoulders hunch over, regardless, feeling traitorous, too far cut off from the roots of home.

Crepus sighs.

"We'll find a place for you, Kaeya. For now... it's alright to rest."

But the days come and go, and Crepus continues to care for him.

Carefully.

Weeks and more weeks pass, but another place for Kaeya is never found.

"I think he should stay," is what his son, Diluc, says to Crepus one night, softly.

Kaeya is walking down the hall, hand held by Adelinde, the manor's head maid, when the conversation from within the study slips out the crack in the door.

Adelinde guides him away kindly, but Kaeya doesn't forget the words or the sight, of the small, furrowed brows and frown on Crepus' face, and insistence on Diluc's own.

"Wouldn't it be alright?" Diluc presses. "He doesn't have anywhere else to go."

Further down the corridor, Kaeya is taken away.

Crepus' voice. Weary.

"Diluc... It's not so simple. It's... dangerous."

Regardless, in that home, in the vineyards of that manor, Kaeya stays.

He is given the crest of Ragnvindr, written into the clan.

His clothes become proper, once more, in a different way - but in a way too similar to the real father of Kaeya's that's gone.

He finds it uncomfortably suffocating, though he never voices it aloud.

A memory he doesn’t want.

He thinks of the loose-fitting wear the ruling regent of the Alberichs used to don, and thinks vaguely, distantly, as he grows older into adolescence, he would much rather be reminded of that uncle instead.

He opens his collar once.

The maids gasp like it's a travesty.

Diluc worries if he's sick with fever.

Crepus reminds him, kindly, the clan has an image to uphold.

Kaeya is reminded by himself and memory that the Alberichs too had an image and duty to uphold.

He's reminded too that the father who had abandoned him had told him not to linger on things of the past.

Kaeya decides not to dress outside of expectations again.

At least while anyone's around.

The years do pass.

For all Kaeya has been told, he still hears the voice of his father on the winds of the plains; wistful machinations of absent thinking in the valleys of a nation blessed and defended and cared for by the gods.

He is raised in a new family, in a new clan, with another man who fosters him with care that grows more and more sincere over time.

And in that time, for a time, Kaeya feels angry when the thought of his real father appears in his head.

He grows sullen, surly and upset.

He won't understand why he despises the man, but wants him to return.

He'll stuff those thoughts of missing father and home and clan down into the depths of nothingness in his heart, to be forgotten, where they belong.

It brings a dull ache, like a sore pain left in his body to acknowledge and ignore and acknowledge again.

"Kaeya. Your eye," Diluc asks one day with unprecedented caution and care. "Is it alright?"

Kaeya looks at him from where they sit on uneven rocks by the vineyard's riverside, hiding the incredulous humor blossoming and blooming within him.

Months and months together, and Diluc was asking him about it now?

"My eye is fine," Kaeya replies truthfully, a small, joking smile on his face. "I just like wearing it."

"Why?" Diluc wonders, eyebrows lowered, concerned.

Diluc.

So kind and good to Kaeya for no reason at all.

"Because I'm a pirate," Kaeya says.

He brings forth thought of King Irmin, centuries and centuries old, who led Khaenri'ah to its current state.

"Or - my grandfather was. So by default, that makes me one too."

Diluc doesn't ask why Kaeya doesn't include his father.

Kaeya picks up their practice swords on the grass in front of them in the silence that falls and pokes Diluc in the chest with a playfulness he vaguely recalls doing to someone else leagues beneath the ground.

"Duel with me?" he asks.

Diluc hesitates - then obliges.

Crepus makes it a routine to take them to the coasts often in the summer seasons.

Crepus himself will disappear, for 'meetings' with 'business people' stationed out of sight, nearby.

Diluc doesn't question it, so Kaeya doesn't either.

The bond between Diluc and his father is a close one; Kaeya trusts that Diluc knows and understands much more about Crepus than Kaeya ever will.

Under the eyes of the Ragnvindr employees who accompany them, they pick through the sand and stand in the ebbing and pushing cold waters of the ocean under a burning sun.

Diluc keeps collecting sea shells.

Kaeya doesn't particularly understand the fascination or habit behind it, and asks about it.

"You can hear the sound of the ocean," Diluc says.

He offers Kaeya a large and stripped blue conch.

"Sometimes, if you're far enough away, you can hear the sounds of home. I like the reminder."

Kaeya doesn't tell him that's ridiculous, although there is a part of him that badly wants to.

He raises the sandy conch to his ear - and hears the roaring fires of a blazing forge beneath the ground.

One evening, one trip out to the beach, while the sun burns orange and gold and crimson on the tumbling waves of the horizon, Kaeya who has wandered from the coast further than usual, catches sight of Crepus standing with masked figures in dark jackets.

In conversation, Crepus is frowning.

Kaeya steps back into the shadows of the boulders he's walked around, and returns to Diluc several miles away who's chosen to sit underneath a large umbrella, with a book.

Diluc has started, at Crepus' behest, to undergo testing for the Knights.

"You won't get a tan," Kaeya comments.

"I'm not trying to," Diluc answers, folding the book closed over a finger to hold his place. "My skin is sensitive."

He pats the spot beside him on the sand with his free hand.

"You're planning on joining too, aren't you? Read with me. It could help."

Yes.

Kaeya had been planning to.

The Master of the Knight Ordo, Varka had questioned his intentions, a light of mirth in his dark eyes.

Crepus had been surprised - and taken aback.

Diluc, figuring out Kaeya's intent to join long before anyone else, had simply accepted it.

He and Kaeya were inseparable.

Where one went, the other followed.

Two halves of the same whole; found family and kin.

But despite knowing Kaeya's intent, Diluc wasn't privy to knowing his intentions, and that was one of the most closely-guarded secrets Kaeya held for himself, aside from lineage, birthright and clan.

Because Knights of Favonius had access to much ordinary citizens did not.

They could travel far and wide without question; investigate others with little suspicion, and could sit for hours going through the archives locked and sealed away on 'forgotten' civilizations, practices and clans.

Higher in the ranks, they'd have further access to important matters of business, economy, the city's state of affairs, accords and trades.

Further up, much, more higher up, he'll know the details of Mondstadt's most intimate foes and true nature of Mondstadt's international ties.

He'll have answers on why his father had picked Mondstadt.

Where his father had gone.

Why his father had left him.

He'll have answers on 'Snezhnaya'.

The organization Crepus meets with though the Fatui were the 'enemies of the world'.

Kaeya was an Alberich, but the name would get him nothing in a place, in a nation like this.

Indeed, it will get him nothing anywhere.

Kaeya has recognized this, quickly, in the time spent in Mondstadt among its people and city and towns in Crepus' travels.

But the crest of a Knight - a sword and rank will.

Kaeya doesn't intend on finding his father.

Not at all.

He just wants to know what became of him.

If anything in him leaving Kaeya had been, for a greater reason - worth it.

Years later, still, when Crepus falls to the power of Delusion, Kaeya is only momentarily startled.

He had known of the darkness Diluc's father involved himself; he had mistakenly let himself believe nothing would come with it.

For surely there had to have been a purpose behind Crepus' actions and meetings and intentions. Something above him, Kaeya wouldn't be able to understand.

Otherwise Kaeya's father wouldn't have called him a 'good man' and Kaeya wouldn't have been looked after and treated with such kindness, acceptance and love.

Kaeya smirks, nothing behind it. Yet for everything he thought he could learn to understand...

His insides twist and his gut churns; a harrowing emptiness in his chest.

Here he thought his foster father wouldn't do anything to ever bring Diluc pain.

But even Crepus...

The world was fascinating, indeed.

Diluc is furious Kaeya had known about their father and the Fatui but hadn't told him.

He's confused when Kaeya tells him where he's from.

He's stunned when Kaeya shares a small thought that him being brought into the clan likely drew the eyes of the Fatui. Those who Kaeya - over the years - had come to believe himself had a hand in the hunting down and killing of his own clan.

Diluc's angry again.

For too many reasons, each more grievous than the one before in the jumbled mess of information and revelations being thrown his way one after the after.

They cross blades and fight, and it's a matter between two clans that burn with fires and awakened hearts.

Ice in Kaeya's veins surge to counter the flame in an explosive flurry of frost and wind so violent, Diluc mistakenly thinks it's yet another secret - a contained power of another Delusion - Kaeya has somehow gotten his hands on - kept from him too.

The 'benevolence of the gods' that have forsaken Kaeya's homeland and Clan, catches Kaeya off-guard.

As he stumbles forward, Diluc's sword, in its alarm, swings down.

An eye for an eye.

Diluc drops his weapon as soon as it cuts into Kaeya's face, as Kaeya staggers back, blood seeping through the hand and fingers that have gone belatedly to protect it.

In the moment, Kaeya doesn't think anything of it.

Rather, he thinks mildly, it's deserved.

For an eye that had been open to the happenings around them - and had pretended to stay shut, this was proper punishment.

This is what runs a steady line in his head as the pain burns fiery, swallowing fierce with Diluc's self-alarm and horror as he realizes what's happened in the heat of their clash.

Their blades have fumbled into the stormed earth, cast aside.

But as glacial frost spins around them, fracturing mud in the rain as Diluc's flames die out, Kaeya gazes at his brother from his good eye and thinks this is alright.

What's happened to him is fine.

For everything untrue, there is one truth.

And it is that Diluc is someone important who he loves.

It's alright to suffer for his sake.

Later on, much, much later on that night, Kaeya will contemplate, against everything, about his father.

And wonder if this too is what his father believed for him when he left him on his own.

And he'll remember something stranger.

A younger him, who sits in a library on the lap of that father, questioning why kings sacrificed themselves for their people to live on.

"What's a king without their people?"

Kaeya's uncle had once posed this question, musing over an import of wine given to him by Kaeya's father, that Kaeya's father had 'mysteriously' acquired.

But Kaeya now knows from where the wine had come.

And Kaeya has an inkling now of what his father and what his uncle had always known regarding the fate of Khaenri'ah and the fate of their clan.

When water tumbles from his eyes, injured and uninjured, without permission, he tells Jean it's not because the wound she's treating hurts, but because his body is only just now registering the pain from the drawn-out fight he and Diluc have just had.

She doesn't say she doesn't believe him.

She spends a long, long time holding hands to his head, murmuring songs of old and blessings of wind.

Kaeya doesn't place faith in the gods.

He places faith in no one and nothing but bonds of steel and blood, for that is the strength of a resilient, unyielding clan he had been born and raised into.

But even so, he feels that night the gaze of Celestia on his shoulders; of the gods on his back - as frost curls slow from his breath and and impenetrable cold sinks into his veins.

The fight; that fateful night reminds him.

For everything he had been determined to forget, there is still a piece of burnt and scorched paper, rescued from the doused embers of squashed out flames.

When Diluc takes his leave to find himself, and heal his wounds away from home, from Kaeya, the city and the Knights, Kaeya will re-evaluate his chosen reasons for joining the Order, even as he works to see Eroch kicked out for his treachery and lies against Crepus.

He'll sometimes linger on the coast of the beach after the drills of the Knights are run, find a shell in the sand, and lift it to his ear.

Listening, hearing a tremendous cacophony of thundering waves that carry a youth spent in a palace, in a Winery, in two clans, with fathers who kept secrets from their sons, despite all their love.

And in Diluc's prolonged absence, Kaeya finds himself in a different manner than his brother, confronts himself, and tells himself he will spend the resources of the Knights to find his dad.

It's not easy.

An echo of his uncle, someone looked-up-to, charming and benevolent and amicable; the memory, settles and sinks into his bone.

He loosens his clothes, loosens his smile, befriends citizens, bandits and unpleasant folk alike - and one night whilst sharing drinks with thieves in a bar - has a poignant moment of cognizance that in methodology his father and Crepus weren't so different after all.

That neither he or Diluc were either.

He writes to Diluc.

Diluc occasionally writes back.

Diluc also tells him to stop mentioning his eye in every other letter; he knows Kaeya's not blind.

What a shame.

Kaeya chuckles, not in the slightest bit put-out.

He folds the letter with care.

He'd been wondering how long Diluc had known, but he guessed it should have been obvious Diluc would write to Jean behind his back and question what had happened after they'd parted ways that night.

He was never one to leave behind loose ends.

But Kaeya's own personal loose ends are many.

No matter his side ventures, exploration, and close tabs kept on the Fatui, there is not a trace of his father anywhere.

Diluc returns to the city, years older, changed but unchanged, and he and Kaeya forget how to hold any sort of normal conversation.

Kaeya lifts his eyepatch and shows his brother the scar through a perfectly working eye, and Diluc's crossed arms in the tucked away street of Mondstadt, loses its stiffness.

Barely.

"It was only a joke. I thought you could use some lightening up."

"I didn't see the humor in it."

Kaeya stares at him.

Diluc stares back.

Kaeya's mouth opens and it curls on a pleased smile, slow, and insufferable and annoying, glee in his voice towards Diluc that comes naturally despite how many months and years they've spent apart.

Diluc's brows lower instantly. "Don't - "

"You couldn't see the humor, but eye certainly could," Kaeya interrupts. "My one eye, of course. Full of laughter and mirth, as my other was sadly incapacitated in a fierce battle of flame and frost on the high seas. A captain against a no-good pirate of his own crew. Truly dire affairs - where are you going, Master Diluc? I've only just started the story - "

Diluc doesn't call him brother anymore, but he treats Kaeya like Kaeya's a nuisance of one.

And he still does the things Kaeya asks him to, even if they're never done directly.

And he still comes, when Kaeya requests it of him; when Kaeya's in need.

And he'll still come even when Kaeya hasn't asked for him at all.

"You're drugged."

"Am I?"

Kaeya gazes brightly, absently, down at his sixth beverage of the night, tucked away in the corner of the Angel's Share.

He was supposed to have been keeping an eye out on two suspicious knights who were far friendlier with diplomats of the Fatui than they should have been.

"That's strange. I feel wonderful."

"I bet."

"What are we betting?"

"It's a figure of speech."

"Are you running for office? I can write you a speech."

"No."

"Can I have another drink?"

"What do you want?"

"Wine?"

He gets a seventh drink.

It's water.

Kaeya drinks it all.

He had taken his first 'drink' of the eve from one of those 'knights' in an act of goodwill; taken one whiff and a sip, and gone slightly silly.

It had taken him a while to process why Diluc kept bringing him water and to notice that the knights had, at one point, been escorted from the tavern by other actual knights under Diluc's curt orders, scathing tongue and furious observance.

For the fire that had been igniting Diluc's eyes before, he now stands before Kaeya and Kaeya's table with a great deal of calm.

Like it'd all been one fever dream Kaeya happened to witness from another realm of another world.

"They weren't knights," Kaeya says.

"They weren't," Diluc says back.

"Do you want to have a seat?"

Diluc pulls out the second chair at the table, wood scratching against wood, and sits.

Kaeya tells him.

"I've been looking for my father. I thought maybe I could get information from them before I exposed their treachery."

Diluc gazes at him. "What information?"

"If he's alive. If he's dead."

Diluc keeps gazing at him. "Why would they know?"

"Because," says Kaeya.

He plays with the glass in his hand, freezing the glass, unfreezing it, making it transparent; translucent; transparent again.

"Someone has to know."

He gives the glass to Diluc.

Diluc's palm melts the ice instantaneously.

Kaeya smiles, delighted, although he's not entirely right in his own head to properly discern the reason why.

But maybe it’s because it’s a reminder.

Fire, blazing forward, no matter the afflicted.

"Diluc," he says.

"...What is it?"

Kaeya doesn't know.

Because all the water he's consumed reverses with speed spectacularly out of his mouth.

The next few days are spent recovering in the Knight Headquarters that have become his home, with visits from Klee and Noelle and Jean, and for some reason Albedo, who checks on his well-being, though the alchemist is the furthest thing from a doctor and should be kept the furthest away.

"He's going to turn me into something!" Kaeya calls out to Jean from where he's lying in bed.

Jean leads Klee out his room by the hand. "Kaeya, you'll be fine."

"I'm going to become a plant!"

She leaves, door closing.

Albedo, handling vials at his bedside, lifts one full of bright pink liquid and slowly circles the glass tube under the ceiling light.

"You serve no purpose as a plant, thus I'd have no logical reason to transfigure you into one."

"That's great, Albedo. Thanks."

The smile on Albedo's face is poorly-hidden and bemused.

"Sarcasm. They say it's the lowest form of wit."

Kaeya eyes him, frowning, with heavy suspicion. "And what do you say about it?"

Albedo lowers the vial and turns towards Kaeya.

"I say it's the lowest form of wit."

The alchemist offers him the 'concoction' after the pleasant insult.

"Drink. What you consumed was potent; an undesirable amount left in your system. This will purge it out."

"It won't happen to purge me in the process as well, will it?" Kaeya utters, taking the two-ounce 'drink' in shaking hand.

Albedo settles his hand over Kaeya's, stilling the trembling of his weakened fingers; guiding vial to mouth.

"I can't say," he contemplates. "You're the first to have the real antidote."

By the time the words are done, Kaeya's already finished off the 'remedy' and stares at Albedo with nothing short of abject horror and betrayal.

Albedo chuckles and moves away.

"You'll be fine. I had a light conversation with the 'knights' in question during interrogation. The beta experimental counter was tested on them last night with suitable results."

Suitable meant a lot of things.

Especially when it came to Albedo.

Kaeya had to wonder, morbidly, as heavy slumber and nausea simultaneously took to him at once, if the 'knights' were still alive.

Kaeya's soundly convinced none of what had happened, had happened, because it's never brought up after he recovers.

As in, Diluc never indicates having heard Kaeya's confession about his father in the slightest.

So in between the Darknight stunts, the shenanigans and duties of the Favonius Ordo and protection of the city from Abyssal threats - as Kaeya recognizes the danger of the Abyss Order and why they had been such a threat to his homeland, broken as it was, in his younger youth - it's only logical Kaeya's completely thrown for a loop when he runs into Diluc standing right at the bottom of the stairs in front of the Knight Headquarters on a random afternoon.

Diluc's properly ignoring the looks from the knights posted on duty and passing civilians he gets.

"Walk with me," he says.

Kaeya points to himself, mystified.

Diluc withholds a sigh.

He turns and walks.

Kaeya instinctively follows.

The day is clear and bright.

The clouds low, robust and hanging.

On the wide terrace of cathedral grounds, on the further left side, where flowers of the garden and frondescence spills with carefully-looked after blossoms - they stand out of sight of the populace.

It gives a vantage point giving full view of Mondstadt's valleys and hills beyond, anyway, and Kaeya and Diluc gaze out over it together as Diluc speaks.

"...Your father left you on our road to be taken in. He had ties with a surprising number of networks in a multitude of nations. Snezhnaya and my own father's circle included. I didn't know."

"...That makes two of us. Snezhnaya?"

"He was using them for something undisclosed. There's no one around anymore who could say what it was. Same in what my father left behind. The people who connected them back then, have now simply disappeared."

No one 'simply disappeared'.

They both knew this.

Kaeya drags his eye from the forests and mountains of Mondstadt and faces Diluc without pretense, serious.

"Why are you telling me this?"

Diluc continues looking over the city's walls.

"Have you thought about the reason your father chose to leave you here?”

"When wouldn't I have?"

"You were being chased."

"I’m aware."

And Diluc faces him too.

"Why have you kept your family name?"

Kaeya frowns.

"Because I'm an Alberich. It's who I am."

"Kaeya."

There's an expression Diluc wears Kaeya can't understand.

It's intent.

Sharp and intense.

"There were orders to hunt your clan down. There's not a person in Mondstadt who doesn't know your name. You're Cavalry Captain, one of the ten Swords sworn to the city and its Grand Master. Kaeya Alberich. The streets are crawling with Fatui. After all these years, why has no one come for you?"

Kaeya blinks.

And blinks again, confused.

Diluc pulls out a letter from his jacket then.

"Interference," he shares. "They're under orders still. To wait. 'Until all pieces are in place'.”

He burns the intercepted missive of the Fatui to ashes where they stand and lets the passing wind cast it away.

"Wherever your father went, he's covered all steps to ensure his future whereabouts wouldn't be known. So did he leave you to protect you? Or did he leave you because he knows the game the one after you is trying to play?"

Because why else would Kaeya's father leave him in the care of another; a reputable clan in a free land, with bolstered military might, a legion of wind-blessed knights, the farthest away from Khaenri'ah and Sneznhaya - but in a place where his name as Alberich would still be known - where the eyes of that organization of Delusions and twisted dreams could see him everyday, walking about unshackled, with a Vision and sword?

Diluc says what dawns on Kaeya - and the weight of it is ground-shakingly tremendous.

"He wanted you to be known."

In a place none could attack without their true intentions and true orders coming to light.

"Who's behind this?"

The question Kaeya asks sounds it's an out-of-body question spoken by someone who sounds nothing like Kaeya's remembered sounding like before.

Like the coldest of steel, infuriated, poised to sink a blade in someone; in something; in anything.

Diluc's looking at him like he'll grab him and hold him in place.

He is holding him in place, the grip around his elbow warning and stern.

"We don't know."

But for all of Kaeya's acceptance of miserable events and unfortunate circ*mstances in his life - this is what he refuses to accept.

He removes his arm from his brother's hold, politely.

"Thanks for the information, Diluc," he says, deigning to take his leave, curtly, on the heel of his boot.

"Kaeya."

Kaeya stops - if only for a moment.

"Don't do anything reckless by yourself."

Kaeya looks over his shoulder with a great deal of effort, speaking careful; features manufactured like stone and ice.

"I won't. Thanks for your concern."

True enough, Kaeya doesn't do anything in the wake of the newfound revelation Diluc has given him.

He spends copious amounts of time thinking, with a slanted eye, brittle smile, and frost that cuts across the grasses and the fields as he goes about the clockwork duties of the knights.

His father's parting words won't stop echoing in his head.

Neither will the mysterious smile of his uncle, the Alberich Clan's ruling regent, in all the times he had laid his eye on Kaeya.

Everything they had known.

The secrets they had kept silent.

'Our last hope'.

He knows, then, before he had been born, there had already been a game of strategy in motion, played throughout the centuries since the demise of the royal family and Khaenri'ah's One-Eyed King.

Kaeya resents them.

Their fates had already been sealed.

Kaeya was a piece; a pawn like the rest on a chessboard where sacrifices were inevitable.

Where two opposing forces would have no choice but to come to a head.

But who was Kaeya to stand against to reclaim the board?

Why?

And when?

Would his father have been captured in Kaeya's place?

Culled?

Like the rest of their kin?

Diluc keeps eyes on Kaeya more often than usual.

More often than Kaeya wants.

When unusual rumors spread from Liyue to Mondstadt about the long-shutdown Chasm, bewitched hilichurls, and the presence of the Abyss Order, Kaeya takes the chance to get away from the city - as far as he can.

A commission is requested to hire Klee to help bombard and clear the debris.

It's good-timing.

He volunteers as her guardian.

Jean doesn't refute it.

She signs away on papers and he does as well.

A few weeks later before they're set to head out, Klee asks if Kaeya will join her and her 'big brother Albedo' for a dinner.

He accepts and he picks her up and settles her on his hip, absently departing from the Knight Headquarters to look for the alchemist by the spare workhouse shared by the apprentices near Timaeus' work bench.

Klee sits on his lap, telling him about her explorations of the day while they wait.

While Kaeya drowns in the thoughts of whether this care and affection he feels for Klee is what his father felt every time Kaeya, as a child, had sat on his lap.

Wondering if those feelings were ever ripped out and squashed as Kaeya's father was forced to acknowledge that they would never have a life where they could exist together, as a family, growing older.

But there is no need for wondering 'ifs'.

Kaeya can remember with clarity the looks on his father's face.

The silences.

The hidden griefs.

When Albedo comes out with Sucrose, leaving her with final notes on a study they're enacting together, Kaeya's no longer in the present.

He's retreated in the quiet corners of his mind where none but shadows of laughter, warmth and the smiles of his kin can reach him.

He doesn't hear the explosion.

He only feels the burn of licking flames before Albedo yanks him away.

He's sat down in the shade on a bench, out of the curious eyes of the public on the fiasco that's occurred, beneath an awning of the Good Hunter, next to a potted plant and curled-up cat.

Albedo is on one knee in front of him, treating the violent burns on Kaeya's left hand with zero physician's experience, as per usual, and in deep thought.

He hadn't said anything, really, in between the time Kaeya had grabbed a bomb from Klee's hand, mistaking it in his faraway thoughts for an onion, and dropping it into the pot on the open, outdoor stove.

Gauze is folded, one layer after the other, around Kaeya's knuckles, palm and thumb.

Kaeya looks at Albedo in a modicum of appreciation, since half the patrons of the restaurant and the restaurant itself would be horribly blown to smithereens had Albedo not swathed the radius in the gold of Geo, protecting them from harm.

He doesn't know why, but the ridiculously fast reaction time of the alchemist, coupled with the uncanny attentiveness Albedo bestows upon him, and dwindling adrenaline from near death, makes Kaeya crack a joke.

"A penny for your thoughts?"

Albedo doesn't slow on a response.

"A foreign expression," he acknowledges. "I surmise the Traveler taught you."

"He knows a lot of mysteriously fascinating things. Expressions like that are right up in my alley."

"I would agree."

"So what's the verdict? Irreversible damage, our Kreideprinz?"

"I believe you can tell with a simple look for yourself you'll be more than alright."

"Then why such a somber look on your face?" Kaeya muses. "The explosion was startling, yes, but thanks to your great skill, no one was harmed and no permanent destruction had. It’s fine.”

He pauses, and clears his throat, somewhat embarrassed in the afterthought that comes.

The afterthought that the Good Hunter would have to invest in a new stove and several tables and shelves and a decent amount of well-preserved ingredients that had been on display for sale... which would come out of the Knights' coffers.

Which meant Jean would have his head.

He furrows his eyebrows the deeper down that rabbit hole of his he delves.

…Whatwouldbe Jean's reaction on this?

Surely she wouldn't assume this meant neither Kaeya nor Klee could be trusted to handle a vault of explosives in the highly-unstable environment that was the Chasm, in their closely-allied neighboring nation.

Surely she wouldn't presume Kaeya wasn't up to task of facing whatever perils lied in the Chasm's depths without added Knight assistance.

His eye narrows next.

Surely.

"Kaeya."

Albedo speaks calmly, breaking into Kaeya's wandering, wandering thoughts that are well on their way to wandering without an end.

"...Yes?"

"You've been bothered lately."

"I'm bothered now by what this small event means for the grand adventure Klee and I were set to embark on," Kaeya responds.

His gaze focuses back on the present and goes to find the Spark Knight in question.

But Klee is perfectly alright, by the fountain in the center square, apologetically speaking with Sarah.

"That isn't what I was referring to," Albedo replies, nonplussed by Kaeya's deferring tactics. "I'm not often around. Still, the knights in my company talk."

"Gossipers." Kaeya pretends to be surprised. "How nefarious! You aren't keeping them busy enough."

Albedo ties off the bandages on Kaeya's hand.

"Perhaps not. It's easy to get distracted. My lab in Dragonspine is often milled around by Fatui."

“I thought you worked up there alone. You let your knights there now?”

“I was referring to my doppelgänger. He knows more than I. He’s also vastly more knowledgeable on subjects that should be left alone and likes to share his thoughts.”

It's such a left-curve admittance in the conversation Kaeya gets whiplash.

"I'm sorry?"

Albedo pushes to his feet and folds his arms lightly, gazing down at Kaeya.

With meaning.

"Where there are meetings, there are partings. But not every parting needs a reunion."

Kaeya stares at him, refusing to let his expression show more than it likely already has.

"Are you trying to become a poet?"

"No," says Albedo, looking at him still. "This is my own experience, and something I've learned. Our origins are rooted in difference, but I feel this is important for you to hear."

Kaeya breathes a breathy chuckle, full of air, amusem*nt bleeding into his tone and stirring in his eye though he's suffering what feels like a heavy, invisible blow of profound impact.

"Albedo. I haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about."

Albedo, years older, born at the hands of another, in the image of another; abandoned by his master, a fostered parent who showed him the art of creation, the Art of Khemia, and the magnitude of life from Khaenri'ah's own cursed lands -

"Poetry," Kaeya mentions a second time. "Your voice has such a nice cadence for it. Have I told you that before?"

"When inebriated, yes. You become severely adamant about those of us in the Knights pursuing our dreams and talents to our full potential."

Albedo's face has become one of mild, mild bemusem*nt, graced with indifference.

He doesn't push what Kaeya refuses to acknowledge between them.

They aren't kin or clan.

There's no obligation.

They're just distantly bound and born from the roots of the same tree away.

A quiet laugh escapes from the alchemist, as if he knows Kaeya's thoughts intimately.

"On those occasions, I've told you many times to become a bard. I find you have the words and temperament. The personality as well."

"I don't have a voice that sings, sorry to say."

"Unfortunately not," Albedo agrees. "But I hear unspoken stories in you the same. No doubt, others do too."

Kaeya opens his mouth to give a retort, a jest on what exactly those unspoken stories might be and why Albedo's even hearing them, when they're interrupted by a purposeful approach.

Footsteps around the corner of the Good Hunter.

Kaeya's entirely unsurprised to see the head of red hair that follows.

"What happened?" Diluc questions immediately, no nonsense. He's missing his jacket. "The explosion was heard from the tavern."

"A minor accident, Master Diluc."

Kaeya jovially waves his newly-bandaged hand, eyeing his brother more closely.

"No need for worry. Were you counting inventory in a back room when it occurred? How noble of you to come dashing over. Although you must've been handling expensive wine. It took you past ten minutes. Mondstadt’s elusive Darknight Hero would have faster.”

Diluc gives him a look like he's not sure whether to reach out and wring Kaeya's neck for the taunting or reach out and search him for further injury.

In the end, it doesn't matter.

Kaeya is ganged-up on, karma reserved by the past and present Captains of Mondstadt before him.

"What was the cause?"

"He was distracted. It's my astute analysis he's moderately unwell."

"Is that so?"

"Hey," Kaeya glares at Albedo who's all but thrown him under a metaphorical carriage to watch him get run over.

Albedo looks at him. "Hello."

Kaeya doesn't get to go to the Chasm.

Somehow, Jean hears of the exact nature of the debacle, and grounds him.

Like the mother-sister-superior to him she is.

Kaeya keeps his ears to the ground on the strange circ*mstances surrounding the Chasm anyway.

It's a hundred-percent not a shock to hear of the famed and renowned Traveler's involvement; of another crisis averted - although what that crisis was, no one aside from the Traveler and the team that'd been down with him seems to know.

He tries hard not to, but he ends up ruminating on Albedo's words to him, and they dig at him, for some reason, deeper than they should; in places they shouldn't.

Partings and reunions.

He doubts that there would have been any kind of reunion in the dredges of the Chasm; he doubts the Chasm is where his father would have hidden and tucked himself away.

Far more likely...

Kaeya stands on the precipice of a grassy hill overlooking the sea at Starsnatch Cliff.

His eye on the follow the movements of the water; the tumbling of the tides, the breaking of the waves.

Far more likely, his father would've sought somewhere like this under open sky, backed by whispering winds, with an ocean on an endless horizon, giving the illusion of freedom and peace.

Would he have removed the half mask that covered his eye - pretending he was unburdened - a youth with a future and dreams?

Or would his father have continued to stand, mask on, eye in darkness, gazing out, heart heavy, with dreams of what he could never have?

Kaeya lifts a hand and settles a thumb beneath his eyepatch, pulling it away from his face slightly - before stopping.

His mouth is thin, flat line.

He drops his hand.

He turns from the precipice, and walks back towards the home his father has 'given' him - even if that home was only a temporary means to an end.

He's on his way to Albedo's where Klee has taken residence for the day, a book of heroic knights and their twice-fold heroic adventures tucked under his arm, when two voices of familiar travelers reaches his ears from around the street corner.

"-fascinating! I'm not sure what can be done with them; it looks like they've already been fully-crafted to their potential. But there's something about them, for sure. Definitely a power."

"Ooohh,c'mon Timaeus! That just makes us want to do something with them even more!"

Kaeya stops, hidden out of sight, and peeks his head around the corner of the alleyway.

Aether.

And Paimon.

They're with Timaeus in front of the alchemists' and apprentices' workshop.

The bag Timaeus holds is closed and apologetically handed back into Aether's hands.

"Sorry. I'm telling it how it is. Er - but actually - where did you find them? I've never seen anyone from the Guild come back with those in all the Domains they've visited."

"Oh yeah," says Paimon. "He he... we never did tell you. We just handed you the bag, all excited."

"I was going to tell you," Aether says, looking at Timaeus. "But Paimon interrupted."

"Hey! Whose side are you on?"

The curve of Aether's fond smile is visible from where Kaeya stands.

"We were in the Chasm," he explains. "Knights rose from the miasma. These looked like tokens. I was going to offer them back where the knights had fallen after we beat them in arms."

"But they sort of kind of... went ‘poof’ and disappeared," Paimon finishes, looking greatly concerned, and understandably bamboozled.

It sounds like a mystery to Kaeya.

One he wouldn't be uninterested in investigating, had he been involved like them.

"Well. Thanks anyway," Aether dismisses, unbothered, waving a hand. "We'll keep them for now and figure out what to do with them later."

He's out of sight in record time, Paimon zipping after.

Timaeus shakes his head as he watches the notorious duo vanish before stepping back indoors the workshop.

Kaeya waits a good minute or two before shuffling out the shadows and wandering over.

His boot hits a stone on the step in front of the workshop.

No.

Not a stone.

Kaeya lifts a brow and looks down at what feels like a coal that's nearly burned through the toe of his boot.

He startles.

His foot jerks back.

It's a brown and gold statuette.

Carved in the likeness of a One-Eyed King.

Kaeya stares for an eternity down at it, and continues to stare.

His body moves on it own and bends down, dropping the book from under his arm as he picks up the idol with his hand.

It burns straight through his glove with its forged, undying heat before the pain of it jolts him into coating its underside with freezing ice.

The citizens of Khaenri'ah worshiped and once bowed before grander statues of its same make.

The knights who protected the crown once kept individual idols like this belted on their waists; the sages around their necks; the guards on their shields.

All clans instated the emblem in some way on their familial vestiges, banners and robes.

But the Alberich Clan had never been one in high bureaucratic standing; they had simply been the ones acknowledged by the King. So none in the clan had paraded around with the holy pieces; nor cherished them in the same way.

(Once Kaeya had wondered if this was in part why the gaze of King Irmin had fallen on the Alberichs centuries and centuries ago.)

How careless of Aether to leave this behind.

Its value could not be measured.

...Is what Kaeya wants to say.

But there is a warmth radiating from the one-eyed idol in his palm, familiarly calling of the fires and steel of home, and it aches, and it aches, and it pulls in his chest tightly, with shuttered memories of unending loss, duty, family, heart and clan.

He hears the drums of sacrifice and the welcoming sound of doors open, leading to a hall of warriors and the greats.

His mind tells him to let go of the piece of the past he has carelessly grabbed a hold of.

His hand slips the idol into the vest of his uniform, freezing it cold, beneath his heart.

He looks at the door of Albedo's workshop with a blanked mind afterwards, until sense returns to him and the present slots back into place from where they have been pushed, disturbed, in the nooks of his head.

He picks up the childish book he's dropped by the step.

He knocks on the door.

Sucrose's eyes brighten moderately when they see him as she steps back to let him indoors.

"Mr. Albedo and Klee are right upstairs. They were expecting you - "

"An interesting book of choice," Albedo notes as Kaeya takes a seat in a spacious but hideously cluttered space of spilled books, tacked-up diagrams, experimental devices, scrolls and extracted cores.

"You disapprove?" Kaeya jibes as Klee comes clambering up his leg to take a secure seat in his lap.

"No."

Albedo's gaze falls on him, thoughtfully, sideways.

"I'm only wondering which of us will take on the role of reading this in a wizened old man's voice."

It's the most unexpected answer.

Kaeya's mouth opens and talks on its own.

"That's easy. It'd be you. You areeons old."

Albedo looks at him - and looks at him - andlooksat him - as if contemplating the best way to lay him out on a table for the best way to conduct his autopsy on a still living body - before he takes the book out of Kaeya's hands and thwaps him on the back of the head.

"Ow! Not very princely, Albedo. Klee, you saw that, right?"

He falls asleep and wakes on a couch in the same study, Klee nestled into his side, a blanket tossed over them both - and his hand over his chest - where the idol of King Irmin rests, frozen, like the One-Eyed King himself in the pits of Khaenri'ah.

In the dark moonlight, by the window, in its sill, Albedo stops sketching and with turquoise eyes flitting with 'the known', meets his gaze.

Kaeya forcibly goes back to sleep.

He doesn't fancy anymore cryptic talk -especiallyones he can't escape from - with a child they're both partial to slumbering on his leg.

He feels Albedo's eyes stay on him anyway, no matter.

Understandably, the next day, Kaeya's in a mood.

He's attempting to do something about it, namely by ingesting less-than-healthy amounts of wine into his body, when Charles seems to vanish from behind the counter - and Charles is all of a sudden replaced by Diluc.

Who actually looks as if he's been standing at the bar across from him, watching him down one glass after the next, the entire time.

Kaeya chokes on the current drink, sputters over himself and his hand, unsightly, and stares at his brother before squinting with his eye hard.

"...Charles?"

"I'm obviously not."

Well it didn't hurt to try.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his fist - cautiously.

"Diluc. Long time no see."

He pauses, significantly.

"...Why am I seeing you?"

"Why are you drinking?"

"Because I paid."

Diluc's mouth presses together, displeased.

"I thought I said to drink responsibly on the property."

Kaeya makes a face at him.

"Am I not? I'm not swinging off the rafters naked."

"Ugh," Diluc barely refrains from rolling his eyes. "You do that, I'm giving you a ban."

"You do that and I'm going to the Winery to do it instead."

They glare at one another.

Diluc touches his forehead, moderately irritated, before questioning, "On a scale of one-to-ten, how coherent are you that you can hold an important conversation?"

He seems serious about it.

Unusual.

Kaeya tilts his head and answers. "Three. And a half. I was only pretending not to know you weren't Charles."

Diluc drums his fingers in the crook of his elbows from where he's folded them, running his eyes over Kaeya as if searching himself for the veracity of the words.

Then he says it.

Beneath the thrum of the rowdy, merry chatter in the background from regular noon-goers like Kaeya himself.

"My scouts have picked up a lead."

Kaeya hikes up a brow. "On what?"

"On your father."

"Hold on," Diluc snaps, seizing him by the shoulder and hauling him back.

Kaeya, halfway across the city, on his way to the Knight Headquarters to pack - moving too quickly to have considered what to pack, why he was packing, and what for - wheels around to look at Diluc in the middle of the busy street they've stopped in.

They get some interested looks; some curious gossip from passer-bys who haven't seen them together so openly, in broad daylight, in years, but Kaeya's heart is abnormally loud in his ears and his eye feels marginally wider, wilder, than usual, so he isn't paying them much attention.

He's just looking at the obstacle standing in his path, preventing him from taking off.

"What," he snaps back.

Diluc doesn't let go of his shoulder.

He holds it tighter.

It's unclear whether he's aware of where they are either, or if his urgency in bringing sense back to Kaeya has diminished all that he's otherwise careful about.

"I said they picked up a lead. Not that it was going anywhere. It could be nothing."

"It could be everything."

"And what's everything?"

Everything he's looking for.

The answers - the closure - that he needs.

The reunion after parting Albedo had warned against.

"What would you do, even if it was true?" Diluc asks.

"Go to him," Kaeya responds, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world.

"Then what?"

"Go to him," Kaeya repeats.

"Then what?" Diluc repeats back.

He lets go of Kaeya's shoulder.

The loss of contact is what shakes Kaeya from the irregular haste that's swept over him.

He blinks very rapidly, several times.

Rapidly, some more.

His gaze flits everywhere - to their surroundings - before falling back on Diluc, who seems like he's taken stock of where they are the same.

Diluc takes a step backwards, creating space between them.

Kaeya hesitates - but doesn't try to close it. "...I must know," is what comes out of him.

"...And I will tell you."

Diluc's eyes are careful as his words.

No different than Kaeya's had been what feels like decades ago standing by the cathedral, overlooking Mondstadt's land.

Diluc's face grows grim.

"But only if there's something to tell."

Kaeya spends the weeks up to his neck in administrative work, missions and errands, until he stops hearing Diluc's words in his dreams and starts seeing Huffman, the Knights and Jean in his brother's place, chastising him and looking at him with disapproval for taking on more than he should and doing things he shouldn't.

Because they're dreams, he ignores them.

Ignoring them in real life, however, doesn't go so well.

It takes nearly getting himself the knights on patrol with him obliterated by a Ruin Hunter before Jean puts him on indisputable leave for a weekend and tells him, sternly-

"Rest."

He rests - restless.

He paces in his room, thoughts filling, stacking, building and toppling over; foundations of a well-maintained base falling apart in his head.

His first words when he sees his father again.

The first thing his hands will do.

Will they reach to embrace the parent who deceived and loved him, or will they reach to draw his sword?

Either are feasible.

Both make perfect sense.

It's a sensible reaction; sensible as the suffocating, squeezing in his chest, the tightness in his throat; the upset feeling that comes from the knowledge Diluc has potentially offered that Kaeya's father was around but had never bothered to find and see Kaeya again.

They wouldn't have a home to return to, but that was fine.

Mondstadt would welcome his father the same as they had welcomed Kaeya himself.

They could live.

Then what?

It's Diluc's incessant, unwanted voice again.

Kaeya grabs the frozen idol he has kept on his person, beneath his vest, above his heart, in answer.

Then what?

They lived, answers given, schemes explained, and Kaeya could figure out what it meant in the grand game being played within Teyvat on crowns and kings and pieces on a chessboard laid between here and Snezhnaya.

His pacing takes him from the Knight Headquarters, to the city streets, to the scaffolds and battlements of the high walls - to its nooks.

He folds himself into the corner of a removed cannon, and sits, back against stone, half-canted in the moonlight that sweeps over from above and behind where he can't see.

He sinks into the shadows.

He sinks into the dark.

The fur of his cape cradles him; a mimicry, an echo of a mirthful uncle and chosen 'king'.

He tells himself, furiously, to rest.

It's ages before he's allowed it by the over-spilling thoughts in his head.

Every breath is an ebb into deeper breath.

He rides the receding waves into slumber, thoughts of his father, meetings and partings, a mighty force tethering him under.

"Why do you hide your eye?"

"Why?"

A boy with white and a lone hazel eye picks his wooden sword up off the speckled stone of Khaenri'ah's earth.

He turns to the one who asked the question.

A boy with blond hair and inquisitive green eyes.

He answers.

"Because one day I will learn to see without it."

Kaeya lurches awake, effigy of the statuette in his vest, burning.

He holds a hand over it.

He tempers its heat.

The night has darkened to the blackest hour between midnight and dawn, but the shade of vermilion in front of him is unmistakable.

Diluc stands outside the nook Kaeya has climbed into, is back turned, arms crossed, leaning against the stalwart pillar raised beside the tucked-away corner.

His hair, bound at the nape of his red, spills, unkempt regardless.

He's dressed in full formal wear.

From his days of chasing after the Fatui.

For a minute, Kaeya thinks he's witnessing a visage of the past - like whatever visage he's just suffered in his head between two strangers in a non-existent, prosperous Khaenri'ah.

It shakes him further.

Makes him doubt where he is; who he is; what's happened and who he has become.

But as he sits, cold and alarmed by his own fugue, Diluc looks over his shoulder and meets his eye.

The motion yanks Kaeya from the foggy vestiges of uncertainty.

Diluc has been out, gathering information.

Information from particular people - given his attire.

Putting a target on his back - on purpose - making himself known to the Fatui as the menace that once terrorized them, undercover, before?

Why the risk?

Kaeya's shifts from where he's slouched, bells ringing alarm.

"What's happened?"

Diluc's eyes rest on him.

They rest on him forever.

"We found him."

Kaeya remains sitting where he is, not comprehending the words at first.

When he does - he's stunned.

When he speaks - it's an infinity later.

With voice of someone lost and unthinking.

"Take me to him."

But Diluc looks back round front.

The quietest of sighs leaves him.

"Tomorrow. Go back to Headquarters. Sleep. I'll find you then."

"I'm awake."

"Sleep anyway."

"Diluc, is he alive?"

Diluc's answer is silence, and it's more than enough.

"Oh," says Kaeya.

Diluc doesn't look back around.

The line in his shoulders is tense.

"I thought as much," says Kaeya, as if he had never suffered, never felt turmoil in his dreams.

Diluc's arms fold into themselves tighter.

"That's strange," Kaeya goes on to say. "I thought that, but it didn't seem like it would be true. Maybe it's a mistake."

Diluc doesn't move.

Kaeya smiles small.

The clinging sleep has left him.

The idol beneath his vest, against his skin, scorches.

He leans forward, out of the shadows, partially into the white glow of the moon, and tugs the back of Diluc's jacket sleeve.

The silver decorations and chains on his attire jingle and shift.

They sound like windchimes.

Bells in a windless night.

"Are you sure you and your entourage of Fatui hunters didn't discover someone else? My father is hard man to find. Just as well. I wasn't able to track him for more than a decade. Didn't you say if he didn't want to be found, he wouldn't?"

"It's not a mistake," Diluc says softly, continuing not to look at him.

"I'm not convinced."

Kaeya tugs on the back of Diluc's sleeve once more, laughter quiet, smile crooked as it threatens to fall and break off.

"You've told me, so there's no getting me to go to sleep now. Let's go see this mysterious body you've found and let me confirm for it myself."

"Kaeya," says Diluc.

"Diluc," says Kaeya right back.

It's a bit blurry.

There's something wetting his face.

Diluc turns around, taking a hold of Kaeya's hand, holding it still.

He looks at Kaeya intently.

Upset bleeds into the dark red of Diluc's eyes, but it's not for Kaeya, not like a lot of things from others that weren't for him either, and it's a raw anger for someone who has been wronged.

If not for Kaeya - then who else?

There is no one else but Kaeya's father.

But Diluc closes his eyes, and Diluc takes a moment, and when Diluc opens them again, the anger is gone, and indiscernible blankness has settled on his features once more.

He bows forward.

He rests his forehead against Kaeya's, briefly, before drawing it back.

The gesture is reminiscent of Kaeya's father, but Diluc can't have known.

So Kaeya isn't sure why there's still water spilling from his eye.

He doesn't really cry.

"...Tomorrow," says his brother again. "I'll take you."

In the end, it's a gray-haired 'friend' of Kaeya's father from overseas, who had appeared from nowhere, apprehending Diluc's informants, who had passed on the news.

Without fanfare.

Without theatrics.

A wisp in the wind.

Kaeya can't believe where he's standing.

On the precipice of a hill.

On the edge of another cliff.

In Mondstadt.

Mondstadt.

His father had left but returned, just not by his own hands, for there wasn't any body, but only ashes another 'friend' had scattered to the wind.

Diluc hands Kaeya a note.

It had been in the urn unburied from an insignificant mound of dirt on the cliff above the sea by Diluc days before he had come to Kaeya.

A mound so small, so utterly alone, something in Kaeya wants to break the one who's done this.

Embers must be squashed so new flames can burn anew.

Kaeya drops the note to the earth and freezes it beneath his boot.

It breaks into pieces; as shattered glass.

It swells up inside of him, the desire to grieve; snaking hands around his heart and lungs, andcrushingthem.

His father was a good man.

He didn't have to be perfect.

He was a good man, and like this - he didn't deserve to die.

"They had him. They tortured him, not just for days. They kept him, waiting for him to tell what the plan of the Alberich's were - "

"Enough."Diluc had cut off the informant who had met them on the hill, abruptly.

He had stood in front of Kaeya, shielding him from sight, as if it would do anything; as if it would stop the truth from reaching Kaeya's ears.

An unmarked grave.

With Kaeya so far away.

He's furious.

But the fury in him in cold.

"Who did this?" he asks, now that he and Diluc are alone.

"Agents from Snezhnaya."

"Snezhnaya."

The stoked flame in Kaeya burns colder.

"The capture was years ago. He evaded them for a long time after leaving you here. He was protected by his contacts - until those contacts were hunted down too," Diluc goes on, as if knowing Kaeya's thoughts and feelings.

Because he always has.

"It's presumed they were acting under orders from a larger organization. A powerful head. To be more specific - "

Diluc steps up beside Kaeya from where he had lingered behind to give space, and looks Kaeya in his eye.

"A man who acted on his own. An exile. Pierro. The First of the Harbingers. He's the direct-in-command."

"Now why would someone like Pierro have an interest in my father? In the Clan? In the regents to a crown seemingly dead and gone?" Kaeya asks, features empty as he gazes out across the sea ahead, where the ashes of his father lay, sunken and forgotten, washed to nothing. Washed away.

It's a question he doesn't need an answer for.

There was only one kind so adamant about seeing those of his clan erased; any claims to the throne eradicated.

The One-Eyed King and his legacy had demanded reverence and respect.

Fealty of the people in exchange for prosperous, untold glory.

But their towers had reached too tall and they had drawn the ire of the heavens.

How dare mortals rise to meet them?

No.

It was more than that.

Deeper.

Complex.

So he knows.

Of the sages who had been denied.

Of the wars fought for rightful ascension as the bloodline of Khaenri'ah's true royalty suffered blight and affliction for their sins against humanity; for their hubris - and cursed calamity.

A sage.

Distantly, as distant as the seas and kingdoms, fallen and risen, that separated them, would such a sage share his blood.

On the precipice, facts laid bare, Kaeya then understands it, at long, long last.

Who the final two pieces on that sage's chessboard are supposed to be.

"...Kaeya?"

"This Harbinger. He doesn't happen to have one eye, does he?"

Diluc is silent for a time.

He knows the magnitude of the question.

"...I can't say. Why?"

"No reason," says Kaeya, softly. A laugh escapes him quietly, without humor, as his eye creases. "I'm only thinking of a game between pirates."

He knows Diluc won't understand it.

The one one who would had been burned to ashes, and respectfully, but un-respectfully packed into an urn, later thrown to the gales and sea.

But that's alright.

Kaeya can move on his own first.

There had been a blade buried further away from his father's urn, with a number of other personal affects Kaeya had been certain his father had gotten rid of.

Kaeya had been holding the sword; this remnant of his father, left to rust in silence.

But now he gazes at its steel.

At the reflection of his eye within it.

He no longer has to play the role of the hunted; the orphaned boy deposited into the protection of a city, risen to Knight.

He is the last of his clan, and though his Vision is that of frigid cold and brittle frost, the spirit of an Alberich burns within him; a mighty, swelling flame.

The first Harbinger - the cast-aside Fool- wanted to see the fires of the Alberich snuffed and quelled?

He wanted to, self-righteously, build a new world, on plundered and stolen lives?

Then this pawn, son of regents, progeny would take his turn - and strike Pierro down.

Not with the blood of a noble, but of a family, loyal, knowing sacrifice until the very end.

Then this Harbinger, wallowing in the dredges of a past, would come to know it, in the wake of a glacial star and singing sword.

Embers to ashes.

Fire born anew.

Pierro's ashes will be thrown over the frozen sea of Snezhnaya after.

Alberichs never wallowed.

They plotted as they grieved.

They paved the path for the next ahead.

Isn't that right?

Kaeya swings the sword down into the mound of 'grave'.

Father.

That's right.

Kaeya's uncle had once said it.

So long as there was a king, the game wouldn't end.

So long as he stands, their 'king' will not die.