Elara
The bridge into Mondstadt was too clean.
I noticed it halfway across. Five hundred years of feet, Dainsleif had said. The stone was smooth as glass. Below, the water was clear enough to count individual pebbles on the bottom. No fish. No algae. Nothing that grew or died or fed something else.
The singing was louder here. Not music—just sound. A continuous thread of melody that wrapped around itself and kept going, like a record with the needle stuck.
"You feel it," Dainsleif said.
He had stopped a few paces ahead, waiting. His hood was up, but I could see his jaw, the line of it tight.
"I feel something."
"It will try to shape you. The wind here doesn't like uncertainty. It will offer you certainty in exchange for compliance."
I looked at him. "Compliance with what?"
He didn't answer. Just turned and kept walking.
...
The gates were open. No guards. No checkpoint. Just an archway carved with celebration scenes—dancers, musicians, lovers embracing—and beyond it, a city that looked like it had been arranged for a painting.
I stopped at the threshold.
"Shouldn't there be guards?"
"There are no arrivals," Dainsleif said. "No one leaves Mondstadt. No one enters. The gates are open because there's no reason to close them."
"Then how do we—"
"We are not arriving. We are appearing. The city doesn't know what to do with us yet. It will figure it out."
He said this the way someone might say "the wound will scar." Not a prediction. An observation of something inevitable.
I stepped through.
...
The plaza beyond was wide and circular, paved with the same unnaturally smooth stone. In the center, a fountain shaped like a lyre sent water arcing into the air in perfect, repeating patterns. The same droplets. The same arcs. The same shadows on the ground.
Around it, people moved.
A woman arranging flowers at a stall. Her hands moved in a sequence—select, turn, place—and never hesitated. A man stacking crates outside a bakery. Three high, two wide, one on top. Two children chasing each other between the fountain and the fountain and the fountain. Their laughter was the same pitch, the same duration, every time.
I stood at the edge of the plaza and watched.
"Who are they?" I asked.
"People. Once."
"And now?"
Dainsleif was quiet for a moment. "Now they are what Mondstadt needs them to be. The god of this place decided five hundred years ago that his people would never suffer again. He did not ask if they wanted that. He simply made it so."
I watched the children run their loop again. The same path. The same laugh. The same splash of water.
"How?"
"The wind carries their sorrow away. Every morning, it sweeps through the city and collects whatever sadness accumulated overnight. By the time the sun rises—by the time the sun would rise, if it moved—everyone is happy. Refreshed. Ready to perform their roles."
I thought about that. About waking up every morning with yesterday's grief erased. About never carrying anything heavier than the moment you were in.
"Does it hurt?"
He looked at me. His one visible eye—the normal one, not the starry thing—was tired. Older than anything I'd ever seen.
"I don't know. The people here don't remember what it felt like to hurt. They only know that every morning, they wake up lighter. They think it's a gift."
"Isn't it?"
He didn't answer. He didn't need to. We were both watching the children run their loop.
...
We walked deeper into the city. The streets were laid out in clean geometry. Every building faced the same direction. Every window was the same size. Every door was painted in patterns—I counted thirty-seven green, twelve blue, four red. The numbers didn't change from block to block.
"Everything is designed," Dainsleif said. "The god believed that if he controlled the environment, he could control the experience. If the city was orderly enough, predictable enough, no one would ever need to feel anything but joy."
"And if they feel something else anyway?"
"The wind takes it. That's what the wind is for."
...
A man came out of a tavern ahead of us.
Tall, broad-shouldered, with red hair shot through with grey. He moved like someone who had spent a lot of time learning to move quietly, but there was a stiffness in his movements now. The kind that comes from years of holding yourself together.
He stopped when he saw us.
His eyes went to Dainsleif first—the armor, the hood, the way he stood like someone who had forgotten how to be casual. Then they went to me. My coat. My pack. My face, which probably looked exactly like what it was: a woman who had no idea where she was and was trying very hard not to show it.
Something flickered in his expression. Fast. Gone before I could name it.
"You're new," he said. His voice was flat. Not hostile, not friendly. Just flat. The voice of a man who had learned not to put too much feeling into his words.
"I'm new."
He looked at Dainsleif again. Longer this time. "You brought her here."
"She came here. I only showed her the way."
The man's jaw tightened. He looked at me, and for a moment—just a moment—I saw something behind the flatness. Something that looked like a warning.
"Go back," he said. "Whatever you're looking for, it's not here. Go back before the wind notices you."
"The wind already noticed her."
Something passed between them. Recognition, maybe. History. Two people who had done this dance before.
"She's still herself," the man said. It wasn't a question.
"She's still herself."
He looked at me again. Really looked. At my hands, which were bare. At my clothes, which carried no emblem, no crest, no mark of any nation. At my eyes, which I knew from mirrors were the color of the sea before a storm and probably looked as tired as I felt.
"You're dying," he said.
It wasn't a question. I didn't bother pretending otherwise.
"Yes."
He considered this. His eyes moved from my face to my hands to my coat and back again. Cataloging. Deciding something.
"How long do you have?"
I thought about the answer. Eighteen days when I stepped through the Rift. Then seventeen. Then sixteen. I hadn't checked since I arrived. There hadn't been time. There hadn't been quiet.
"I don't know," I said. "Long enough. Or not. Depends on what happens next."
His jaw tightened. "That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I have."
He held my gaze for a moment longer. Then he stepped aside, gesturing toward the door behind him. "You should come inside. The wind is less attentive in the tavern. The man who built it made sure of that, once."
...
The inside of the tavern was dark.
After the brightness of the plaza, the dim light was almost disorienting. Wooden floors, wooden walls, a long bar worn smooth by decades of elbows. It smelled like old beer and older wood and something else. Something that might have been dust, except dust doesn't usually smell like patience.
I took a stool at the far end of the bar, away from the door. Dainsleif sat at a table near the window, his back to the wall, his face toward the door. Old habit. The kind of habit you develop when you've spent five hundred years waiting for something to come through it.
The man stood behind the bar. He had a glass in his hand, a rag in the other, and he was wiping it in slow, circular motions. His hands were steady, but there was a tremor at the edge of them—the kind that comes from years of gripping things too tightly.
He put the glass down. Didn't pour anything. Just stood there, looking at me.
"Your world," he said. "What happened to it?"
"I don't know. One day, the laws of physics started forgetting themselves. Light forgot to travel. Sound forgot to echo. Gravity took breaks. People started forgetting too. Not dying. Forgetting. One morning you'd wake up and there would be an empty room where someone used to be, and you couldn't remember their name."
I pulled the photograph from my pocket. Held it up so he could see.
"That's my mother. That's me. That's where my father used to be, before the universe decided he was inconvenient."
The man looked at the blank space. His expression didn't change, but his posture stiffened. The kind of thing you notice when you've spent your life watching people try not to react.
"You carry that with you."
"I carry a lot of things."
He nodded slowly. Then he reached under the bar and brought out a bottle—dark glass, no label, filled with something the color of old honey. He poured a measure into a clean glass and pushed it toward me.
"Drink."
I looked at the glass. At the liquid inside, which was too still, too clear, too perfect. Like everything else in this city.
"Is this real?"
"It's real enough."
I picked it up. The glass was cold. Not chilled—cold the way things are cold when they haven't been touched by anything warm for a very long time.
I didn't drink. I just held it, feeling the cold seep into my fingers.
...
A woman came in while we sat there.
She was in her forties, maybe, though it was hard to tell. Her face was smooth in the way that faces are when they haven't been allowed to frown or weep or do anything except smile. She sat in the corner without ordering anything. Her hands were under the table.
Shaking.
I watched her for a long moment. She didn't look at anyone. Didn't move. Just sat there, pressing her hands flat against her thighs, trying to still them.
They kept shaking.
The man watched her too. Then he filled a glass with water and walked it over. He didn't say anything. Just set it down and stood there, not looking at her, not looking away.
Her hands stopped shaking.
She looked up at him. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. Something passed between them—not words, something else. Something that looked like understanding.
Then she smiled.
It was the same smile as everyone else's. Wide. Bright. Empty.
"Thank you," she said. "I'm feeling much better now."
The man nodded. He picked up the empty glass and walked back to the bar. His hands were steady. His face was blank. His eyes were the eyes of a man who had watched the same thing happen more times than he could count and would watch it happen again.
The woman left.
I watched her go through the window, watched her step into the plaza and disappear into the patterns. The fountain. The flowers. The crates. The children running their loop.
"Does she come here often?" I asked.
"Yes."
"And you give her water. You stand with her until the shaking stops. You watch her put the smile back on."
"Yes."
"Why not let her go to the Cathedral?"
The man's hands paused on the glass he was cleaning. "Because the Cathedral doesn't give her water. The Cathedral takes her to a room with white walls and white lights and white sheets, and they put a mask over her face, and they pump Dandelion Essence into her lungs until she can't remember what her hands were shaking for. Then she comes back. And she's lighter. Emptier. And she doesn't come here anymore. Because there's nothing left to shake."
He set the glass down.
"She used to be a painter. Landscapes. The cliffs outside the city. The lake at dawn. The forest when the leaves were turning. She sold them in the plaza. She was happy. Real happy. Not the city's kind of happy."
He picked up another glass.
"That was twenty years ago. Her mother was a painter too, before her. And her grandmother. Three generations of women who mixed colors and sold paintings and were happy. Now she's the last one. Her mother is in the Cathedral—has been for ten years. Doesn't paint anymore. Doesn't shake anymore. Doesn't do anything except sit in a white room and smile."
He set the glass down.
"The wind took her mother's colors faster. Her grandmother's faster still. Each generation loses more, faster, because there's no one left to tell them what the colors looked like. No one to say that blue matters, that sky matters, the way you mixed them matters."
He looked at me.
"She still paints, sometimes. In the mornings, before the wind gets too strong. She mixes colors she can't remember the names of, paints landscapes she's never seen, because somewhere underneath all the forgetting, there's still something that knows what a cliff looks like at dawn. And then she comes here, and her hands shake, and I give her water, and she puts the smile back on. And one day, she won't come back. Not because she's dead. Because there's nothing left to shake."
He picked up the cloth. Folded it. Set it beside the glasses.
"That's what the wind takes. Not just the sadness. The things that made the sadness worth having."
I looked at the door where she had disappeared.
"What's her name?"
He looked at me for a long moment. "What does it matter?"
"Because if I'm going to remember her, I need to know her name."
He was quiet. Then: "Elara."
I blinked.
"There are five Elaras in Mondstadt. The wind doesn't care. They're just sounds. Just labels. The city doesn't need names. It needs roles. The flower seller. The baker. The children by the fountain. The woman in the corner."
He picked up another glass. Began wiping it with the same cloth, the same circular motions.
"She used to be a painter. Now she shakes. That's the shape of her forgetting."
...
We stayed in the tavern until the light began to fade.
The sun didn't move—it never moved—but the light shifted in increments, gold to orange to red to a deep, unchanging blue. The singing softened too, became something slower, something that might have been a lullaby if lullabies were designed to make you forget instead of sleep.
The man was still cleaning the bar. The wood was already clean. It had been clean when we arrived. It would be clean when we left.
"You need somewhere to stay," he said. It wasn't a question.
"There's an inn near the gates—"
"The inn will ask questions. Not because they want to know the answers—because the city expects them to ask. They'll record your name, your purpose, your intended length of stay. The wind will know everything you tell them."
He pulled a key from under the bar. Old iron. Heavy.
"There's a room above the stables. Behind the tavern. No one uses it. No one asks who stays there. It's not in the city's records."
"Why?"
He looked at me. His face was still flat, still controlled, but there was something in his eyes. Tiredness, maybe. Or something else.
"Because sometimes people need a place to be without being recorded. Without being filed. Without being anything except what they are."
He set the key on the bar.
---
Diluc
I watched them leave.
The woman moved like someone carrying something heavy. Not a pack or a weapon. Something she'd been holding for a long time. Something she didn't know how to set down.
Dainsleif followed a step behind. Same as always. Watching. Waiting. I'd known him for fifteen years, since the night he first walked into my tavern looking for a place to sit where the wind wouldn't find him. He was already ancient then. He'll be ancient when I'm gone.
I locked the door behind them. The tavern settled into its usual silence. No one else would come tonight. The city was winding down, the last of the day's performers heading home to sleep and wake and perform again.
I poured myself a glass of the colored water. Didn't drink it. Just held it, the same way she had held hers, feeling the cold seep into my fingers.
She hadn't drunk. She'd held the glass for hours, watching, listening, asking questions that no one in this city had asked in decades. Not because she was smart—though she was—but because she didn't know she wasn't supposed to.
That was the thing about outsiders. They didn't know the rules. They didn't know which questions were dangerous, which observations were supposed to go unremarked, which patterns were supposed to stay invisible.
She'd counted the doors. She'd noticed the children's laughter looped. She'd noticed the woman in the corner.
She'd asked her name.
No one asked names here. Names were anchors. They tied you to a self that wasn't the one the city needed you to be. The flower seller wasn't a woman who had once danced at festivals and sung off-key and argued with her mother about marriage. She was the flower seller. That was enough. That was everything.
But this Elara had asked. And she'd tucked the answer somewhere behind her eyes, in that place where she was keeping all the other things she'd noticed.
I set the glass down. The colored water rippled once, then stilled.
Dainsleif thought she was the one. I didn't know if I believed in "the one." I'd been running this tavern for thirty years, watching people come and go, watching them forget themselves one piece at a time. My father ran it before me. His father before him. Three generations of men pouring colored water and pretending it was wine, watching the city hollow itself out.
My father stopped shaking when I was twenty. Stopped coming to the tavern. Stopped being anything except the role the city gave him. He's in the Cathedral now. Has been for twenty years. Doesn't remember me. Doesn't remember my mother. Doesn't remember he ever had a name.
I poured the colored water down the sink. Set the glass on the bar. Clean and empty.
The painter used to be my mother's friend. I remember her when I was young—bright, loud, always covered in paint. She taught me the names of colors once. Ultramarine. Vermilion. Cadmium yellow. Words no one in this city uses anymore.
She stopped teaching when I was fifteen. Stopped remembering the names. Started mixing colors she couldn't name, painting landscapes she'd never seen. And then she stopped painting altogether, and now she comes to my tavern and her hands shake and I give her water and she smiles the same smile as everyone else.
I walked to the window. Looked up at the room above the stables. A faint light glowed behind the glass. She was still awake.
The wind stirred. I felt it shift, turning, noticing the new presence in the city. It would press against her window tonight. Try to get in. Try to find the cracks, the weights, the things she was carrying that it could take.
She'd held the glass for hours. She hadn't drunk. She'd asked for a name.
Maybe that was enough to hold the wind back. For one night.
I turned from the window. The tavern was dark, the bottles lined up behind the bar, the glasses clean and waiting for tomorrow's performances. I didn't bother lighting a lamp. I knew the shape of this room better than I knew the shape of my own face.
I sat in the corner where the painter used to sit. Where she still sat, sometimes, on the nights when the shaking got bad enough to bring her back.
My hands were steady. They'd been steady for thirty years. The wind had taken whatever made them shake a long time ago.
I closed my eyes.
Tomorrow, the flower seller would arrange her flowers. The baker would stack his crates. The children would run their loop around the fountain. The painter would come to the tavern, or she wouldn't. And the woman with the tired eyes and the photograph of a man who didn't exist would wake up in a room above the stables and decide what to do with the time she didn't know she'd been given.
I'd be here. I was always here. That was the role the city had given me, and I played it well enough that the wind left me alone.
But I'd given her the key. And I'd told her the painter's name.
That was something. I didn't know what. But something.
---
Elara
The room above the stables was small.
A bed. A chair. A window that looked out over the city walls. The floorboards creaked—the first real sound I'd heard since entering Mondstadt. Creaking meant wear. Wear meant use. Use meant something had happened here.
I sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress was thin, the springs old. It gave under my weight. Nothing else in this city gave. Everything was supposed to hold its shape forever.
I sat there for a moment, letting the silence settle. The singing was fainter here. Diluc had said the room was old. Older than the city, maybe. Protections. I didn't know if I believed in protections. But the quiet was real enough.
I looked at my hands.
They weren't shaking. They were steady, pale, the same hands I'd had for twenty-four years. The hands that had gripped the railing of the observation deck. That had tucked my mother's photograph into my pocket. That had reached toward a tear in reality because there was nothing left to reach for.
I pressed my palm flat against my chest. Over my heart. The way I'd done a hundred times in my world, tracking the decay, measuring the spaces where the forgetting crept in.
The first sign had been numbness. A spot on my left hand where touch didn't quite land. I'd pressed my thumb to my palm and felt nothing. The sensation just stopped. Like a road that ended without warning.
Then the gaps in memory. Not forgetting—I could still recall facts, equations, the names of everyone I'd ever worked with. But the texture was gone. The feeling of being there. I could tell you what happened, but I couldn't remember what it felt like.
Then the moments of blankness. Standing in the lab, looking at the Rift, and for one second—one long, endless second—I wasn't anywhere. Not thinking. Not feeling. Just absent. A space where a person should have been.
I had been tracking it. Every day. Every symptom. Marking the progression in a notebook that I'd left on my desk, because what was the point of bringing it? I knew how it ended.
Eighteen days when I stepped through the Rift. Then seventeen. Then sixteen.
I hadn't checked since.
I pressed harder against my chest. Closed my eyes. Waited for the numbness. The gaps. The blankness.
Nothing.
I moved my hand. Pressed my thumb to my palm. Felt the pressure. The warmth. The solid, unremarkable sensation of skin against skin.
I opened my eyes.
My hand was fine. My chest was fine. The decay that had been eating me for six months—the cellular forgetting, the slow erasure—it wasn't there.
No. That wasn't right. It was there. I could feel it, somewhere. Not in my body. In the space around it. Like a weight suspended above me. A clock that had stopped ticking but hadn't been wound down.
I stood up. Walked to the window. Pressed my palm against the glass.
Cold. Real cold. The cold of something that had been sitting in night air for hours, not the staged cold of the tavern's colored water.
I thought about the Rift. The seven layers. The way each had pressed against me, trying to make me something I wasn't. The way I had refused.
I had thought I was refusing because I was stubborn. Because I was dying and didn't see the point in becoming something else before the end.
But maybe it was something else. Maybe the Rift didn't just deposit me here. Maybe it changed something. Protected something. Suspended something.
My hand was fine. My chest was fine. The forgetting had stopped.
I pressed my forehead against the glass. The cold was good. Grounding. It reminded me that I was still here. Still myself. Still in a body that knew how to feel cold and warmth and pressure and the faint, distant hum of a city that was trying to forget.
I had been carrying the decay for six months. Tracking it. Measuring it. Waiting for it to finish. And now it was paused. Suspended. Held somewhere outside me, waiting for something I didn't understand.
I should have felt relief.
Instead, I felt the cold glass against my forehead. And something else. Something I hadn't let myself feel in a very long time.
I had stepped through the Rift because I wanted my disappearance to mean something. I had walked into this city because I wanted to see what freedom looked like when it forgot how to be free. I had watched a woman with my name lose her colors one shade at a time, and I had felt the anger settle into my bones.
But I hadn't stopped to ask what it meant that I was still here. That I had time I didn't expect to have.
Time to do what?
I pulled back from the window. Looked at my hands again. Still steady. Still mine.
I thought about the painter. About the colors she had lost. About her mother in the Cathedral, smiling at nothing. About her grandmother, who lost her colors faster because no one was left to tell her their names. About the generations of women who painted the cliffs at dawn, each one more hollow than the last, because the wind took more from them and no one remembered what was taken.
I thought about my father. The blank space in the photograph. The name I didn't know, the face I couldn't picture, the life that had been erased so completely I didn't even know what I was missing.
I thought about the days that were waiting for me. Not pressing. Not counting down. Just waiting.
I sat back on the bed. The mattress creaked—that honest, worn sound.
For six months, I had been living with an expiration date. Every morning, I woke up and knew exactly how many days I had left. It was terrible. It was also simple. I didn't have to decide what to do with my time. I just had to get through it.
Now I didn't know. I didn't know how much time I had. I didn't know what would happen when it started again. I didn't know if I was supposed to keep walking, keep asking questions, keep watching women lose their colors one shade at a time. Or if I was supposed to find a quiet corner and wait for the clock to resume.
I lay back on the bed. Stared at the ceiling. The wood was old, cracked in places, stained in others. Real. The first real ceiling I'd seen since entering this city.
I thought about Dainsleif. The way he had been waiting on the beach. The way he had led me here, step by step, without ever telling me what he wanted. The way he had said, "She is not in the records," as if that meant something.
It did mean something. It meant I wasn't supposed to be here. I wasn't in the pattern. I was a blank page in a city that had been writing the same story for five hundred years.
And blank pages are dangerous to places that have stopped asking questions.
I thought about the painter again. About what Diluc had said. That's what the wind takes. Not just the sadness. The things that made the sadness worth having.
The wind hadn't taken anything from me yet. I was still angry. Still tired. Still carrying the weight of six months of counting down days that weren't passing.
Maybe that was why I was here. Not to save anyone. Not to fix anything. Just to be a person who still had weight. Who still shook. Who still remembered that there were things worth being sad about.
I closed my eyes.
The wind pressed against the window. Soft. Almost gentle.
It wanted to come in. It wanted to take the shaking from my hands, the tiredness from my bones, the weight from my chest. It wanted to make me lighter. Emptier. Less.
I didn't open the window.
I thought about the painter's name. Elara. She used to paint the cliffs at dawn. Her mother painted them before her. Her grandmother before that. Three generations of women who mixed colors and sold paintings and were happy. Real happy.
I didn't know if remembering that would do anything. I didn't know if a name, held in someone else's memory, could anchor anything against the wind.
But I was going to remember. I was going to carry it. The same way I carried the photograph. The same way I carried the anger and the tiredness and the weight of days that weren't passing.
The wind pressed again. Softer. Almost patient.
It could wait. It had waited five hundred years. It could wait until morning.
I opened my eyes one last time. Looked at the ceiling. At the cracks and the stains and the honest, worn wood.
I didn't know what I was going to do tomorrow. I didn't know if I would walk deeper into this city or turn back or stand still and wait for something to happen.
But I knew I wasn't going to let the wind take anything from me. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not until I understood what I was carrying, and why.
I closed my eyes again. The singing faded. The wind settled. The city slept its dreamless sleep.
And somewhere in the dark, a woman with my name sat alone with her hands, trying to remember something she had already forgotten.
But I remembered. I would keep remembering.
That would have to be enough for now.