Seven years is a long time to become someone.
Ethan had spent them the way he spent most things: methodically, with a plan that changed as the territory changed, and with the particular tenacity of someone who understood that the gap between knowing what needs to be done and being capable of doing it was not a failure of intention but a problem of preparation, and that preparation was, above all, a matter of patience.
At ten: Ser Aldous declared him competent with a blade, which in Aldous's vocabulary was a higher compliment than it sounded and which Ethan received with the appropriate gratitude. He began studying Knight of Favonius doctrine in earnest — not just combat doctrine, but procedural, political, the internal hierarchies and the gaps between official function and actual power. He did this by asking Aldous questions that Aldous answered with increasing frequency and decreasing surprise, and by using the Echo Sight on the older sections of the Voss estate's library, where Knights who had been guests over the decades had sat in the reading chairs and talked freely.
At eleven: his mother arranged, through the network she had been quietly building since the conversation about the Rennick contract, an introduction to a retired Qixing trade liaison who had settled in Mondstadt and who gave Ethan his first real education in how money moved between nations — not the version in the textbooks, but the version that actually happened. He spent six months absorbing this and came away with a map of financial leverage points that he added to the cipher-written notes he had been keeping since he was six. The notes had expanded substantially. He had started a second volume.
At twelve: he mapped, for the first time, the full extent of what he could read with the Echo Sight. Not just the Voss estate. The market district — two years of Milo's guidance, patient wall-by-wall reading in the gaps between their other work. The older sections of the city near the Cathedral, where the stone was oldest and the memories ran deepest. He began to understand the city's actual history, the version that had never been written down, the version that lived in the surfaces of things and waited for someone patient enough to ask. He filled a third notebook. He began to understand why the cipher had been a good idea.
At thirteen: Milo, who had been drifting between opportunistic employment and the kind of informal commerce that Mondstadt's lower city ran on, attached himself to Ethan's household with the easy permanence of a person who had found a place that suited him and had decided not to ask formal permission. Ethan's mother had known within a week and had said nothing. His father had taken slightly longer to notice and had said even less. It became, without any explicit decision being made, simply how things were.
At fourteen: Ethan presented himself to the Knights of Favonius as a candidate for the junior auxiliary programme — a route typically taken by noble-born children who lacked a Vision and wanted proximity to the organisation without formal rank. He passed the assessment in a way that produced a particular quality of silence from the evaluating officers, the silence of people recalibrating upward. Aldous, who had agreed to provide a reference, told him afterward with characteristic understatement: "You did well. They will watch you." Ethan had thanked him and thought: good. That's what I need.
At fifteen: the Echo Sight reached ten years' depth with reasonable consistency, which was the threshold he had been building toward. At ten years he could read everything that had happened in a location across the span of his own lifetime in Teyvat, which meant that the political history he had been mapping was no longer limited to what Mondstadt's inhabitants had let slip in front of him. He spent three months making very careful use of this in the older buildings of the city and came away with a clearer picture of the Fatui's presence in Mondstadt than the Knights had managed to assemble in a decade. He did not share this picture. Not yet. He didn't have the standing, and raw intelligence without trust behind it was more dangerous than ignorance.
At sixteen: he woke up one morning and understood, with the specific clarity of a person whose subconscious had finished processing something while they slept, that this was the year. The year the game had started. The year the Traveler's sibling was taken and the Traveler fell to earth and the clock that Ethan had been watching from behind the glass for three years and counting down in his head for ten more began, finally, to run.
He got up, dressed, went to the training yard, and ran the transition sequence — the one Aldous had spent three months correcting when he was nine — until his body executed it without any thought at all. Then he went inside and had breakfast and told Milo that they needed to be on the south wall by afternoon.
Milo, who had learned over seven years that when Ethan said they needed to be somewhere it was generally worth being there, asked no questions. He brought food.
✶ ✶ ✶
The south wall of Mondstadt was the oldest surviving section of the city's original fortifications, and the view from its walkway took in the full sweep of the plains that ran south toward the base of Dragonspine and the distant grey-blue smudge of the mountains beyond. Ethan had been up here many times over the years. The stone was good — deep memory, clean signal, the kind of surface that held everything without editorialising. But today he was not here to read the walls.
He was here to watch.
The afternoon was clear. The kind of Mondstadt afternoon that arrived in autumn like a well-considered gift — cool air carrying the last warmth of the season, the light going gold and sideways across the plains below. Milo sat on the parapet eating an apple and watching the distant treeline with the easy patience of someone who had learned not to ask why they were watching until watching produced something worth asking about.
Ethan stood at the wall's edge and thought about Aether.
He had known the Traveler the way he had known all of them — through the proxy of story, through hours of voiced dialogue and lore fragments and the accumulated weight of a fictional life rendered in extraordinary detail. He knew Aether's voice and his expressions and the particular quality of his curiosity, the way it drove him through every region's quests with the attentiveness of someone who was genuinely interested in everything he encountered. He knew what Aether had lost and what he was looking for and what it cost him to keep moving through a world that was never quite the right one because the right one had always been wherever his sister was.
He had grieved for that. In his apartment, at two in the morning, watching the Traveler stand alone at the edge of a story that kept giving him people to love and taking them away or putting them somewhere he could not reach. He had grieved it with the specific ache of someone watching someone else carry something heavy and being unable to help because the glass was in the way.
The glass was gone now. And Aether was about to arrive in this world without a sibling and without a guide and without anyone who understood what he was, into a city that would take his help and give him companionship and never quite grasp the scale of what it was asking him to carry. And Ethan was standing on the city wall with his hands in his pockets and the full weight of that knowledge sitting in his chest like a stone.
He had spent ten years thinking about this moment in strategic terms. The Traveler's arrival as a clock starting. The beginning of the sequence he had memorised. The signal to move from preparation to action. He had not, until this afternoon, thought much about what it would feel like to watch it happen.
It felt heavier than he had expected. That was the honest answer.
✶ ✶ ✶
It happened in the early evening, when the light had gone low and amber and the plains below were starting to disappear into the softening edge of dusk.
A light in the sky to the southwest. Not lightning — the wrong quality for that, too sustained, too directional, tracing a line from somewhere very high to somewhere on the plains below the treeline. The sound came a few seconds later: a low, resonant impact that Ethan felt more in his chest than heard with his ears, the kind of sound made by something large arriving from somewhere that wasn't quite the same world as the one it was arriving in.
Around him, the wall's other occupants — a pair of junior Knights doing their evening patrol, two merchants who had stopped to enjoy the view — made the small sounds of people noticing something unusual and not being sure how to classify it. One of the Knights put her hand on her sword hilt with the automatic gesture of someone whose training had decided the matter before her conscious mind caught up. The merchants looked at each other.
Milo had gone still beside him in the particular way he went still when something shifted from 'interesting' to 'significant.' He was not looking at the light. He was looking at Ethan.
"You knew that was going to happen," Milo said. It was not a question.
"I knew something was going to happen."
"That's not the same as what your face is doing."
Ethan looked away from the fading light on the horizon and at Milo, who was watching him with the sharp, patient attention that seven years of friendship had produced — the attention of someone who had learned to read him the same way he read everything else, which was by watching long enough for the pattern to reveal itself. He thought about what his face was doing. He thought it was probably doing something honest, which was the category of thing he had the least practice managing.
"Someone just arrived in this world," he said. "Someone who has lost something they are going to spend a very long time looking for. And the city they've arrived next to is going to ask them to save it before anyone thinks to ask whether they're alright."
Milo was quiet for a moment. "And you're going to —?"
"Not interfere directly. Not yet. He doesn't need me and he doesn't know me and introducing myself as 'someone who knows things' before I have standing is more dangerous than useful." He turned back to the plains. The light had gone entirely now, leaving only the ordinary dark of an autumn evening and the distant glow of farmhouse windows. "But I'm going to make sure the path he needs to walk stays clear. Remove the obstacles that aren't supposed to be there. Fill the gaps the story left open."
"And after that?"
Ethan considered the question for a moment. He had three goals, and he had been carrying them so long they had become something like structure rather than intention — the load-bearing walls of how he thought about his life in Teyvat. He had never said them out loud. He said them now, the way you say things you have known a long time when you finally have reason to stop keeping them to yourself.
"There are people in this world who are going to die in the next few years because the story requires it. Some of them I can't change. Some of them I might be able to. I intend to find out which is which and act accordingly." He paused. "There is also something that brought me here. A mechanism, or a plan, or something wearing the shape of both — I don't know what yet, only that it's real and that it's bigger than the story I played from the other side of a screen. I want to know what it is. I want to know what I am, in the context of it."
Milo waited. He had learned, over seven years, that Ethan's lists had a third item.
"And I want to matter here," Ethan said. Quieter than the other two. The kind of thing you said more carefully because it cost something to say it. "Not as a player running someone else's quest line. Not as a passenger in a story that was written before I arrived. I want to build something that lasts. I want to have been here in a way that means something when I'm gone."
The wall was quiet. Below them, Mondstadt went about its evening with the ordinary industry of a city that did not yet know its story had begun. Someone was cooking something that smelled of apple and cinnamon. Someone was arguing, distantly, about a delivery that had not arrived. The Cathedral bells rang the hour with the unhurried authority of something that had been ringing the same hour for a very long time and expected to go on doing so.
"Right," Milo said, eventually. He ate the last of his apple. He did not say anything consoling or grand or strategically useful. He said: "I'm in, then. Same as I've always been. Just wanted to know it was still the plan."
Ethan looked at him. There was something in his chest that he identified, after a moment, as gratitude of the specific kind that did not require expression because expressing it would diminish it. He filed it carefully in the part of him that kept track of things he did not want to lose.
"It's still the plan," he said.
✶ ✶ ✶
He wrote in his journal that night, in the cipher that had become second nature years ago, for long enough that the candle had burned down to a stub and the house had gone entirely quiet around him.
He wrote about what he had seen and what he had felt and the gap between them. He wrote about the Traveler — not by name, not yet, not until he knew which choices had already diverged — and what it meant that the story he had known from the outside was now a story he was inside. He wrote about Milo saying I'm in, then as if it were the most obvious thing, which it was, which was the part he was still adjusting to — the part where ordinary things were allowed to be simply good without requiring analysis.
He wrote about the decision he had made, which was not really a decision because he had made it long before tonight — the decision to stop surviving and start building. To stop watching the story from whatever vantage point was safe and to walk into it the way you walked into anything that mattered: with both hands open, knowing you were going to get things wrong, doing it anyway.
He had loved this world from behind glass. He had mourned its characters before he met them and grieved events before they happened and carried the weight of a story he could not affect for three years and ten more. He had done the preparation. He had built the position. He had learned the language, literally and otherwise, and trained the body and mapped the walls and made the one friend who would follow him without requiring explanations.
The prologue was over. The story was starting.
He closed the journal. He blew out the candle. The room went dark, and from outside through the cracked window came the sound of Mondstadt at night — the fountain in the square, the distant violin from somewhere near the tavern, the wind moving through the city the way it always had, the way it would long after he was gone, Barbatos's city breathing in its sleep and dreaming whatever it was that cities dreamed.
Ethan lay in the dark and did not sleep for a long time, and was not afraid, and listened to the city he had chosen, that had chosen him, that he intended to protect with every tool he had built and every year he had spent and every wall he had ever pressed his hand against and asked to tell him its truth.
Tomorrow, the Knights. Tomorrow, the work.
Tonight, just this.