Work Text:
I.
The second time Faruzan met the woman called Nicole, she had not been expecting anyone at all
This was, she had come to understand, simply the nature of her life now. She did not receive visitors who expected her. She received students who needed something from her; remedial lessons, a signature on a form, a recommendation from a name that still carried institutional weight despite belonging to a scholar a century out of date. She received administrators like Nadwah who required her to make decisions she found tedious and obvious in equal measure. She received, occasionally, the particular brand of pity that people tried to disguise as friendliness, where they would ask after her health and her research with eyes that held too much softness, as though she were something fragile rather than something stubborn. She had learned to recognize the look. She had learned not to mention that she recognized it.
She was in her office, which was a narrow room at the far end of Haravatat’s outer wing that she had claimed through sheer persistence rather than official assignment, when the knock came. Soft and unhurried, not the knock of someone who needed something urgently, which was already unusual.
“Come in,” she said, not looking up from her manuscript.
The door opened.
“Madam Faruzan.”
The voice, if one could call it that, was cheery yet warm, with the faintest edge of amusement in it, as though the speaker were gently entertained by the sight of Faruzan’s desk, which was, admittedly, an archaeological site unto itself. Towers of paper in three different organizational systems, none of them compatible with each other. Three inkwells in varying states of crisis. A brass mechanism she had been attempting to calibrate for six days and which had been winning the war. A half-eaten Ajilenakh cake that she kept forgetting to finish because she always remembered she was hungry only in the middle of theorizing something, and by the time she had finished theorizing she had forgotten that she brought in cake.
Faruzan looked up.
Nicole stood in the doorway in white, with the afternoon light from the corridor behind her doing something unreasonable to her hair, turning it close to gold. She was taller than Faruzan remembered from their brief meeting in the courtyard, or perhaps it was simply that she stood differently, with a particular quality of stillness that Faruzan associated with people who were not in a hurry. People who had, for reasons she had not yet worked out, a great deal of time.
She was also, Faruzan noticed with the involuntary precision of a researcher who catalogued things, very beautiful. She noted this with the same detached clarity she applied to interesting mechanisms, a feature of the thing. Data, simply. She filed it away.
“Miss Nicole.” Faruzan set down her brush. “This is unexpected.”
“I hope I’m not interrupting.” Nicole glanced at the papers. “Actually, I suspect I am. I'll be brief, then.” She held up something small, something carved. “I finished it.”
It took Faruzan a moment. Then she understood, and straightened in her chair.
“The squirrel!”
“The heroic squirrel, a mini version.” Nicole corrected, with a gravity that was entirely performed and entirely charming. She crossed the room and set a small carved figure on the only clear corner of Faruzan’s desk, which happened to be the corner directly in front of her. This meant Nicole had leaned over the organized chaos of papers to place it there, close enough that Faruzan caught the faint scent of cedar and something cleaner, like open air after rain.
Faruzan looked at the carving.
It was, without question, a squirrel. It was also, without question, pointing one tiny paw directly toward the sky, with the full conviction of a creature announcing something enormous. The posture was inherently ridiculous. The execution was extraordinary. The detail in the fur alone, each individual tuft rendered with a patience that Faruzan recognized as belonging to someone who had done this kind of work many, many times before, was frankly superior to half the sculpture currently occupying the Akademiya’s ceremonial hall, which Faruzan had always privately considered overrated anyway.
“The raised finger,” Faruzan said.
“Your suggestion,” Nicole smiled. “It was the right one.”
Faruzan picked up the figure and turned it carefully in her hands. The stone was jasper, pale green with darker veins, cool and slightly heavy for its size. She felt a weight to it beyond the material. The weight of effort, perhaps, of someone who had taken a passing comment from a stranger seriously enough to act on it and then returned to deliver the result. Faruzan could not, at this specific moment, recall the last time anyone had done something like that for her. Not in the years since her return, and possibly not for a very long time before.
She kept her face professionally composed.
“This is exceptional work,” she said, and she meant it with the full precision of a scholar who did not distribute praise loosely and knew exactly what she was saying when she offered it. “The classical influence is evident but not derivative. You’ve made something that looks like it belongs to a tradition without looking like it’s merely performing one. The weight distribution is correct, which most amateur sculptors miss entirely because they prioritize the visual plane over the structural. And the fur detail at the joints is particularly fine. Most people get lazy at the joints.”
She paused. She was aware she had said rather a lot.
Nicole’s expression did something complicated. Not surprise, exactly, but a softening, like the settling of something that had been held at a slight tension.
“Coming from you, that means more than you know,” her eyes lighting up.
Faruzan set the squirrel down carefully, upright, with its paw raised toward the ceiling. “And the partner piece? You mentioned you intended to place them face to face.”
“Still in progress. I wanted to bring this one to you first.” A pause that was brief and comfortable. “Also, I was in the area, and I thought, if you weren’t too occupied, you might want to get tea. There is a stall on the eastern side of the Akademiya grounds that does a rose hip blend I’ve been meaning to recommend.”
Faruzan looked at her.
Nicole looked back, perfectly composed, as though she invited scholars out of their narrow offices for afternoon tea with the same frequency that other people ate lunch.
The sensible response was to decline. She had the manuscript. The mechanism on her desk had been winning for six days and surrender was not in her vocabulary. There was the cake. There was the review she expected to fail, not because the work was wrong but because the reviewer had never once in their career engaged seriously with pre-Archon inscriptive methodology, which was frankly their loss, but Faruzan would still have to respond to the rejection.
“Yes, all right,” Faruzan said.
She did not think about why she agreed. She told herself it was because she was hungry and the cake’s “freshness” had passed beyond the point of return. She told herself it was professional courtesy extended to a talented artisan. She did not examine the part of her that had simply wanted, without reason, without justification, not to be alone in that narrow office for one more hour with only the mechanism and the failed manuscript and the Ajilenakh monument for company.
She had grown very good at not examining things.
They walked to the tea stall in the warm afternoon light, and almost immediately Faruzan found herself talking. This was not unusual in itself. Faruzan always talked, particularly when given a subject, and walking had always loosened her tongue in a way that sitting still in lecture halls never did. But Nicole asked about the ruin inscriptions, and Faruzan, instead of delivering the polished and defensive summary she had learned to give to people who asked skeptically, found herself actually explaining. The real explanation. The fascinating one.
“The thing people fundamentally misunderstand,” she said, and she had her hands going now, the way they always did when she was genuinely engaged, “is that the inscriptions are not decorative. They are functional in a way that we do not yet have adequate vocabulary for. They are neither purely linguistic nor purely mechanical. They operate at an intersection that current Haravatat methodology does not acknowledge exists, and current Kshahrewar methodology does not look for because they have decided, incorrectly, that understanding the mechanism is sufficient without understanding what the mechanism was made to say. It is like studying a letter by examining only the paper and ignoring that there are words on it. It is– forgive me, I am being uncharitable.”
“You’re not,” Nicole shook her head. She was listening with a quality of attention that Faruzan recognized as genuine, not polite. “Please, continue.”
So Faruzan continued. She talked about the specific ruin she had been analyzing before her disappearance, the one whose inscription system had used a base-seven numerical logic that nobody had cracked before she arrived and that nobody had built on since she returned, because the Kshahrewar researchers who had subsequently passed through had looked at the mechanisms and documented the mechanisms and not once read the walls. She talked about the relationship between symbol frequency and pressure-system activation, which she had worked out over approximately two decades of intermittent consciousness in the ruins where she had been trapped and which remained, as far as she could determine, entirely undiscovered by anyone else. She talked about a particular glyph that appeared at load-bearing junctions in three separate ruins across different geographic regions, which suggested a standardized engineering notation that implied, in turn, a level of cross-regional coordination that current historians were not prepared to acknowledge. She was, she realized partway through this, talking quite a lot.
“I apologize,” she said. “I tend to–”
“Please don’t apologize,” Nicole reiterated. There was something in her voice that was not performance. “I’ve been waiting to hear someone talk about the inscription systems like this for a very long time.”
Faruzan looked at her sideways.
Nicole met the look without deflecting.
They reached the tea stall and sat with their cups and Nicole asked three precise and genuinely intelligent follow-up questions, one of which Faruzan had not considered before in exactly that framing, and she had to stop and think about it seriously, turning it over, and the afternoon moved around them without asking anything of either of them.
When they parted at the edge of the Akademiya grounds, Faruzan walked back to her office with the small jasper squirrel in her pocket and the sensation of someone who had used a muscle they had forgotten they possessed.
She ate the Ajilenakh cake. Against all probability, it had survived.
She did not think about Nicole again until she was lying in the dark trying to sleep, at which point she thought about her steadily and without interruption for quite a long time before finally, firmly, deciding not to examine any of it and closing her eyes.
The squirrel sat on her desk.
Its paw pointed at the ceiling.
II.
Three weeks later, a note appeared under the door of her office.
Faruzan found it when she arrived in the morning, half-slid under the gap, folded once with the kind of creased precision that suggested the person folding it had done so deliberately rather than casually. She picked it up and unfolded it.
Madam Faruzan. There is something I would like to show you, if you have an afternoon free. Meet me at the east gate at second bell? I will bring snacks! — N
She read it twice. She set it on her desk. She looked at her manuscript. She looked at the mechanism, which had, in a development she was choosing to interpret as coincidental rather than symbolic, defeated her again this morning on what she had believed was the final calibration step. She looked at the note again.
She spent two hours not thinking about it during which she accomplished nothing useful and knocked over one of the inkwells.
She was at the east gate at second bell.
Nicole was already there, standing with a cloth bag over her shoulder and an expression of quiet satisfaction, the specific look of someone whose calculation has come out exactly as expected. She said nothing about Faruzan being precisely on time.
“Good afternoon,” She said, eyes brightening, and handed her a covered cup of Pop’s tea that was still warm and which she had apparently just known to bring, and turned toward the northeast path without further ceremony.
Faruzan walked beside her, holding the cup, and thought; she knew which gate. And she thought, the note was under my door, which means she knew not just that I was in my office but which office was mine, which is not information that appears in any current Akademiya directory because they are still working from the roster predating my room change last year. And she thought, how did I not notice that earlier? I should ask about that.
“How did you know where my office was?” she asked. “Specifically. The directory is incorrect.”
Nicole glanced at her with a faint amusement in her eyes. “I asked.”
“Asked whom?”
“A student who looked like they might have needed help with their mechanics revision. We had a brief and productive conversation, at the end of which I mentioned I was looking for Madam Faruzan’s office and they pointed me there. They seemed relieved to know you had a visitor who wasn’t delivering official paperwork.”
Faruzan processed this. “You tutored a student in exchange for my office location.”
“I tutored a student because they needed help. Your office location was incidental.” A pause. “Though I did ask.”
There was nothing to take issue with in this. Faruzan drank her tea and did not take issue with it. They walked through the city’s northeast districts, and the buildings thinned, and the rainforest edge came closer, and Nicole took a path that was not well-marked and walked it without consulting anything.
“You’ve been here before,” Faruzan observed.
“Many times,” Nicole said. “I find places and then I return to them.”
“Before the whole Irminsul situation, how many times have you visited Sumeru?”
The pause lasted one beat longer than casual. “Enough.”
Faruzan had spent a hundred years inside a trap-riddled ruin learning to notice when answers were being carefully shaped to fill the exact contours of a question without going beyond them. She filed this one away without comment and kept walking.
They came through a break in the tree line and Faruzan stopped.
The clearing was not large. What it had, in place of size, was a quality of light that was nothing like the city’s light, or the Akademiya’s, or the amber-and-lampwarm interior of her office. The canopy above broke at specific intervals, by design or by centuries of chance, and the afternoon sun fell through in long columns, steady and unhurried, striking the moss-covered rock formations below and the water pooled in their crevices, and the result was the kind of thing that does not have a proper academic category because it simply exists, silently, as evidence that the world does this sometimes: arranges itself beautifully, for no reason, without requiring an audience.
“Oh,” Faruzan said.
Just that. Just the one syllable. It was all she had.
Nicole sat down on the largest of the rocks and unpacked her bag with the unhurried movements of someone who had nowhere else to be. Cold rice wrapped in leaves. Small preserved plums whose tartness, Faruzan would discover, was exactly balanced against the sweetness. Two ceramic cups. A flask of something warm.
“Sit down,” Nicole tapped the area next to her with a gentleness that did not imply command so much as permission.
Faruzan sat.
She did not speak. For a while, Nicole did not either. The light moved the way light moves when she is genuinely watching it rather than seeing it incidentally, with patience, touching different surfaces in deliberate sequence. A column of it found a pool of water in the rocks below and the reflection it cast climbed the mossy stone beside them, and it was the specific kind of beauty that asks nothing of her, that does not require her to be useful or relevant or on time or making a contribution.
Faruzan could not remember the last time she had been somewhere that asked nothing of her.
The ache was always there. She was accustomed to it. It sat behind her sternum like a stone that had been there so long she had almost stopped noticing it, except in moments like this one, when something gentle pressed against her and she felt, with fresh and startling clarity, how much it still weighed. The people she had known, the people who had known her, the rooms and routines and small particular intimacies of a life she had built and walked away from. Not by choice, never by choice, but the distinction had never made the weight any lighter. She had returned to a Sumeru that remembered her name from textbooks rather than from rooms. She had been welcomed back with paperwork and curiosity and occasional pity but not with the specific warmth of someone who simply knew her. Who had always known her. That kind of knowing had gone with the people who had held it, and she had never, since returning, found anyone who held it again.
She had accepted this. She genuinely had. It was simply the shape of her life now, and she was not someone who fell apart over the shapes of things.
But the ache didn’t ask her permission to be there.
“My mother,” she said, and then stopped. She had not intended to say anything at all.
Nicole waited, with the quality of waiting that did not press.
“She used to take me to places like this,” Faruzan said, and she heard her own voice come out steadier than she had expected. “Not this exactly. But places she had found herself. Quiet places. She kept a small list of them, on a piece of paper she folded and put in her sleeve. She would take me when I had been studying too long without stopping, which was, according to her, always. She said that if you carried your thinking everywhere without ever setting it down, it got too heavy to carry at all.”
“She sounds wise.”
“She was practical,” Faruzan said, and the word was fond in a way she had not expected to sound. “She would have had no patience for most of what I’ve spent my life working on. She thought ruins were dangerous, which, again, she was entirely correct about, and she thought my inscriptive methodology was, and I am quoting directly, ‘all well and good but someone has to cook dinner.’ She was a brilliant woman who had absolutely no interest in ancient civilizations and thought that Kshahrewar and Haravatat were both equally peculiar for entirely different reasons.”
A small sound left her that was, she recognized with some surprise, the beginning of a laugh.
So Faruzan continued, “she would have liked you, I think. She liked people who did things with their hands.”
“I’m sorry she’s gone,” Nicole said. Simply and without addendum.
Faruzan looked down at the cup in her hands. “That was a hundred years ago.”
“Yes,” Nicole gave a soft smile. “It was.”
Which was not the same thing as saying it didn’t matter. Faruzan heard the difference very clearly. She heard it in the specific way she hears something she did not know she had been waiting to hear, which is not with surprise but with a sudden and involuntary sense of recognition, like solving the last step of a proof and finding it comes out right.
Nicole did not try to resolve the weight of it for her, did not offer consolation in the form of reduction, the way most people did, telling her it was long ago as though that erased it, or that she had done so well as though the hundred years had been a performance requiring evaluation. Nicole just acknowledged what was true and then let it be true and sat with her in the light.
Faruzan thought, when was the last time someone did that?
She did not finish the thought. She looked at the light and drank her tea and eventually the comfortable silence became conversation again, and Nicole mentioned a theory she had been developing regarding the relationship between star positions and ancient architectural orientation. She offered it as idle speculation, entirely without the defensive aggression that Faruzan had learned to expect from Kshahrewar scholars who treated every topic as territorial. It was simply intellectual curiosity, extended openly, which was, in Faruzan’s experience of the academic world as it currently existed, practically a revolutionary act.
Faruzan argued with three of the premises immediately, with genuine enthusiasm, because the premises were interesting enough to be worth arguing with. Nicole countered two of the arguments with sources Faruzan had not considered, which was both irritating and deeply satisfying, and conceded the third premise with such immediate good grace that it was almost disarming.
“You’ve done a great deal of reading,” Faruzan said, as the city walls came back into view on their return.
“I’ve had time,” Nicole smiled. The smile had something in it that Faruzan still could not fully read, a depth beneath the warmth, like a manuscript with commentary in the margins in a script she almost recognized.
A while, she had mentioned. Faruzan turned this over on the walk back. She thought about the way Nicole navigated paths. The quality of her face, which was young but did not feel young, which had something in it that Faruzan could not precisely date.
She thought: I have spent the years since my return watching scholars perform their age and their expertise and their certainties, and this woman does none of that, and I cannot work out what she is doing instead, and it is the most interesting problem I have encountered in some time.
“Thank you,” she said. “For this.”
“I know another place,” Nicole’s eyes perked up. “Different quality of light. More water. If you wanted to go, sometime.”
The afternoon light was behind Nicole, the same trick of illumination that the corridor light had played in the office doorway, and her hair was the specific gold of late afternoon and she was looking at Faruzan with that level, warm attention, and Faruzan thought: data. Simply data. I am noting what is here.
“Yes,” she said. “I think I would like that.”
III.
The third time, Nicole brought her somewhere Faruzan had not known existed, which was a thing that was not supposed to happen. Faruzan knew Haravatat’s building. She had known it before her disappearance and she had re-learned it after, in the particular thorough way of someone cataloguing new territory, walking every corridor with the methodical attention of a researcher who did not trust incomplete surveys.
And yet.
The archive was at the end of a corridor in Haravatat’s oldest wing, the wing that smelled of dry plaster and old binding glue and was generally avoided by current students on the grounds that nothing in it was on any current syllabus. It was not hidden ,nor was it not locked. It had simply been waiting at the end of a corridor nobody walked with any particular intention, and Faruzan had apparently walked past the end of that corridor every single time rather than down it.
Nicole had brought a lamp, though there were sconces on the wall. She lit both, and in the doubled warm light, the room became something from a different era entirely, which was a metaphor Faruzan was perhaps too personally acquainted with to find merely poetic.
“How did you find this?” Faruzan asked.
“I was looking for something else,” Nicole tapped her chin in thought. “I find that happens with archives. You look for one thing and find another thing entirely, and the other thing is usually more interesting.”
She moved to the shelves with the ease of someone who had already been here before, already had a sense of the organization. “Third shelf from the left, second row. I think you’ll want to start there.”
Faruzan took the indicated volume. The cover was plain and worn. The binding had cracked along the spine in the specific way that binding cracks when a book is opened often from a single angle. She opened it.
The handwriting was familiar. Not familiar in the way things are familiar when she has seen them before. Familiar in the way her own face in still water is familiar, the specific slant and pressure of letters drilled into her hand at age seven by a Haravatat tutor who had complained endlessly about her grip and been entirely correct to do so. Her grip was wrong and had always been wrong and remained wrong now and produced, despite this, handwriting that was immediately, undeniably, hers.
She checked the cover page. The author’s name in fading print.
Her name.
“This is from–” Her voice did something she did not give it permission to do. She stopped. Drew a breath.
“Before I left for the ruins. I wrote this in– I was in my third year. I remember the room I wrote it in. I remember the lamp I used because the one in the ceiling didn’t reach the desk properly. I didn’t know they had kept this.”
“Yes,” Nicole adjusted the lamp so that Faruzan would see better.
There were no chairs. Faruzan sat down on the floor, which she would have found undignified in any other context and which she did not think about now at all, and opened the manuscript and read her own handwriting.
She had been so certain when she wrote this. She could see it in the construction of every sentence, the forward lean of the argument, the absolute confidence that the work was building toward something and that the something it was building toward was real and worth building toward. She had been young in a way she could only see clearly from this distance, not naive but genuinely, completely committed to the idea that the work mattered and that she was going to matter to the work. The world had been, from where she had stood at twenty-three with her wrong grip and her lamp and her notebook, an enormous and deeply interesting problem.
The stone behind her sternum pressed harder.
She had been so full of momentum. She had not known that anything could stop it. She had not known the specific quality of waking up from decades of strange half-consciousness to find that the momentum had simply continued without her, in other people’s hands, using her notes as their foundation, and that no one had needed her to return because they had had her work all along.
She had been so certain when she wrote this, and she was still certain about the work, she had never stopped being certain about the work, but the certitude now had a quality it hadn’t had then. It was a certitude she maintained in spite of things rather than in ignorance of them, and sometimes the difference between those two felt like everything.
After a while, Nicole sat down beside her. Not close enough to press, but close enough that Faruzan was aware of the warmth of her in the cool of the archive. She had brought a different volume from the shelves and opened it and was simply reading it, calmly, as though sitting on archive floors was exactly where she had intended to be this afternoon, and no further justification was required.
The lamplight held them both in its circle.
“I was so certain of things,” Faruzan said, eventually. It was not directed at Nicole specifically. It was the thing that needed saying, finding its exit.
“You still are,” Nicole observed. Not a correction, nor an argument, but a simple observation.
“It is not the same kind of certain.”
“No.” The sound of Nicole’s voice was thoughtful. “I would imagine not. But certain in spite of difficulty is worth rather more than certain in the absence of it. Anyone can be confident when they haven’t been tested yet.”
Faruzan looked at her.
In the lamplight, Nicole had the quality she always had and that Faruzan kept almost identifying and then losing, like a problem that rearranges its variables each time she thinks she has solved for them. There was something behind her eyes that was older than it had any right to be. Something that had watched things from very far away, for very long, and had its own relationship with the specific kind of loss that comes from continuing when everything someone knew has changed around them.
Faruzan thought, she understands what I am saying. Not in the way people understand when they have been told about something, but in the way people understand when they have been inside it.
And then she thought, very clearly and without the usual evasion, who is she?
“Nicole,” she started.
She hummed in response.
“Who are you, precisely?”
The question landed between them with the directness Faruzan applied to everything she genuinely wanted to know. No apology for asking, nor was there any softening. Simply the question, offered with the same respect she would give any interesting problem.
Nicole looked at her for a long moment. The lamplight was warm on her face. She did not look away.
“Someone who has been in the world for a very long time,” her wistful smile on her face. “Longer than you, even.”
“That is a considerable claim.”
“It is.”
“And are you going to tell me more than that?”
Nicole turned back to her book. There was something in the motion that was not dismissal. It was more like the careful handling of something that required the right moment.
“Perhaps, eventually.”A pause, and then, softer. “I like that you asked directly.”
“I find that indirect questions waste everyone’s time.”
“Yes,” Nicole said. There was warmth in her voice, genuine and uncomplicated, and it was directed at Faruzan specifically, at this particular quality of Faruzan specifically, in a way that was different from tolerance and different from amusement. “You do.”
They sat in the archive for two more hours. Faruzan read her own handwriting and sometimes talked about it. The theories she would refine later, the ones she had been right about, the ones she had been wrong about, which she enumerated with the same evenness because a wrong theory earnestly held is still data, and Nicole listened, occasionally asked something precise that unlocked three more paragraphs of explanation from Faruzan, who talked with her hands even when sitting cross-legged on a floor, and the lamplight held them both and the archive was very quiet and very old and entirely content to wait.
When they finally left, stepping back into the corridor’s ordinary light, Faruzan felt something she had not felt in years. Not healed of anything, not fixed, but less alone in the specific way of having been genuinely seen, not managed, not accommodated, but seen, by someone who was also looking.
She thought, walking back to her office, I should have asked more directly, sooner. About everything.
She filed this conclusion under: “ongoing”.
IV.
The fourth time was Nicole’s most elaborate proposal, delivered with the same calm certainty Nicole brought to everything and which Faruzan was beginning to understand was not confidence in the conventional sense but something older than that, something that knew the ground before stepping on it."
“Mondstadt,” Nicole said. “There is a festival, it’s called Windblume. I’ve been there before several times, and it is worth seeing. I would like to see it with you.”
Faruzan looked at her steadily. “You are proposing travel.”
“It will take a few days. The festival is around two weeks, but we can return as soon as we’ve had our fill.”
“And you have simply decided I should come.”
“I decided to ask you,” Nicole tilted her head in amusement. “Whether you come is your decision.”
There was, Faruzan thought, genuinely nothing to object to in that. She went and told Nadwah she would be absent for research purposes, which was not entirely untrue, because everything was research if you were paying attention, and packed a bag with the methodical efficiency of someone who had learned not to bring more than necessary because the ruins never had room for it.
She had not been to Mondstadt before. She had meant to, in the years before the disappearance, and she had not gotten to it, and then a hundred years had passed and she had returned to a world where the travel was straightforward but the motivation to go anywhere new had felt, for a long time, effortful. Like every new place was a reminder that the old places were gone, which was irrational and she knew it was irrational and it was still true.
The city, when they arrived, was in full festival state. Flowers everywhere, not simply decorative but structural, threaded into the archways, banked against the fountain, twined up the lampposts and the market stalls. The wind, which everyone had told her was a constant presence in Mondstadt, made the flowers move, and the movement gave the whole city a quality of something gently breathing, something alive in the particular way that places are alive during their celebrations, when the people in them are for a few days more completely themselves than they usually have time to be.
Faruzan stopped walking at the edge of the main square and stood very still.
She had heard, in passing, from Collei, that the Windblume was something to see. Collei had described it with the enthusiastic imprecision of someone who is trying to communicate beauty without the vocabulary and who trusts that the feeling will transmit anyway, and Faruzan had listened with the fond skepticism she applied to most reports from people who were easily delighted. She had thought: flowers. Wind. Mondstadt. I have seen many nice things. I have adequate context.
She had not had adequate context.
The flowers were Cecilias, primarily, and some she couldn’t name, and the wind was warm and the sky above Mondstadt was the specific blue of high altitude and no clouds, and the people in the square were laughing and moving and the whole city smelled of something sweet and something green, and it was the specific kind of beautiful that Collei had meant.
“Well,” Faruzan said. Her voice came out slightly different than intended.
Nicole looked at her with the small satisfied expression of someone whose estimation has been confirmed. “I thought you would like it.”
“I am not–” Faruzan began.
“You are, slightly,” Nicole smiled pleasantly.
Faruzan chose not to argue, because she was, slightly. She drew herself up and folded her hands and said, with dignity, “It is aesthetically significant. I acknowledge that.”
“High praise,” Nicole had laughter in her tone, warm and private, a laugh that existed between the two of them and didn’t need to be louder.
They moved through the festival through the afternoon. Faruzan talked, because she always talked when she was engaged with something, and the Windblume engaged her fully. She knew things about Mondstadt’s historical relationship with its Archon that most Mondstadters had probably forgotten, and she deployed this knowledge at intervals as they walked, connecting the festival’s traditions back to their antecedents with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely found the connecting more interesting than the ends. She told Nicole about the symbolism of flowers in pre-Archon ceremonial contexts across three different civilizations, two of which had bearing on Mondstadt’s own early settlement patterns. She told her about a theory she had read, written by a Haravatat researcher two generations her junior, which was wrong in its methodology but had arrived at an interesting conclusion by accident, which was infuriating but not unprecedented. She observed a group of children weaving flower crowns and delivered, unprompted, a brief summation of how certain ancient pictographic systems had used woven patterns as syntactical markers rather than decorative ones.
Nicole walked beside her and listened to all of it with the full specific attention she brought to everything, which was different from polite listening and different from impressed listening and was simply the attention of someone who found you genuinely interesting and had no particular desire to hide it.
At some point, Nicole sat down at an open table in the square where festival-goers were making flower arrangements, simply sat down among strangers with the ease of someone who knew herself welcome wherever she chose to be, and picked up a Cecilia and began working its stem.
“Sit down,” she gestured to the other seat by the table
“I don’t do arrangements,” Faruzan said.
“You do now.”
Faruzan sat. Nicole slid a flower toward her. Faruzan looked at it. She thought about her mother, who had kept a garden and had tried to teach her the names of every plant in it, and who had given up when Faruzan was fourteen and simply told her to stop pulling things up to look at their roots. She thought about the specific way her mother’s hands had looked working in the garden, precise and unhurried.
She picked up the flower.
“I know how to weave theoretically,” she announced. “Structural patterning has the same underlying logic. This should be a transferable skill.”
“Let us find out,” Nicole smiled with the particular patience of someone making significant investments in charitable interpretation.
What Faruzan produced was terrible. It was structurally coherent, in the sense that it held together and did not immediately fall apart, but the proportions were wrong and she had included too many stems and not enough bloom and the overall effect was of something that had survived a minor disaster rather than been assembled with intention. She held it up and assessed it with the dispassionate honesty she applied to failed calibrations.
“This is not good,” she said.
“It has character,” Nicole laughed.
“It has the character of a research project that took an unexpected turn.”
“Some of the most interesting ones do.” Nicole looked at it seriously, head slightly tilted. “You were thinking about the weave pattern, not the visual result. I could see it. You were solving a different problem than the one in front of you.”
Faruzan lowered the arrangement. “Is that a problem?”
“Only if you wanted a pretty flower arrangement.” Nicole met her eyes. “If you wanted to understand how things hold together at their joints, then you did exactly what you needed to do”
Something about this hit Faruzan in a specific and undefended place. Not because it was flattering, which it wasn’t precisely, but because it was accurate. Because Nicole had seen what she was actually doing and named it without judgment, without the slight deflating quality that people applied to her when she got caught solving the wrong problem, the tolerant amusement that said: there she goes again. Nicole had simply described what she saw and told her it was fine.
The ache was there, as it always was. But sitting in the warm city’s square with flowers and wind and Nicole beside her, it was possible to feel the ache and also feel other things at the same time, which was different from how it usually went.
When evening came, the square filled with lanterns, and the Windblume lanterns were not like Sumeru’s or the neighboring Liyue’s, they were lighter, shaped to catch the wind rather than the updraft, and they spun a little as they rose, tumbling upward in slow spirals, and the festival light made them glow in amber and rose above the rooftops.
Faruzan watched them rise.
She had done this before. She had stood with people she loved and sent lights upward and had believed, in the uncomplicated way of someone who had not yet been tested, that there would always be more lights to send and more people to stand with. She had believed this and it had not been true and she had spent years working out how to continue believing in things anyway, which was harder and also more honest.
She thought, those people are gone and the festivals happen anyway and I have attended them and been politely present in them but I have not been inside them, in the way that people are inside things when they are not alone, and I have told myself this is fine and the shape of my life now and I should not want more from it than it is.
She thought, Nicole is standing next to me and she is real and she is here and she saw what I was doing with the flower arrangement and told me it was fine.
She did not complete the thought that followed that one. She recognized it, and she was going to have to look at it eventually. But for now she stood in the city’s square, by the Anemo Archon’s statue with the lanterns rising and the wind moving through the flowers and let it exist alongside all the other things she was feeling without forcing any of them to resolution.
“Thank you,” she said, a sense of deja vu briefly washing over. “For this.”
Nicole looked at her then with the expression Faruzan had been slowly learning to read. The one that went all the way down, that had centuries in it, that was the expression of someone who had spent a very long time watching things from a distance and was perhaps, recently, somewhat less far away.
“Thank you for coming,” Nicole said.
The lanterns rose. The wind took them. Faruzan thought, with absolute clarity and no further evasion at all, I am going to have to examine this.
She did not do it yet, but she knew it was there.
V.
The fifth time, Nicole arrived at her door with maps.
Not the Akademiya’s maps. Not the current city survey or the administrative district charts that Faruzan kept on her own wall and consulted when navigating bureaucratic geography. These were old, rolled carefully in a leather case, and when Nicole spread the first one on the clear space they made between the manuscript towers, Faruzan looked at the annotation style and felt the specific chill of recognition she associated with material that predated the current academic cataloguing system.
“Where did you get these?” she asked.
“I made them.”
“These are at least a hundred years old.”
“I know,” Nicole said, with the specific tranquility of someone who is not bothering to obscure what is already apparent.
Faruzan stood very still for a moment.
Then she said, “Nicole. I have been avoiding asking you something directly, which is unusual for me and I have found it increasingly inconvenient. So I am asking now.”
“All right.”
“What are you?”
The question, as always with Faruzan, was simply a question. It did not accuse, nor did it threaten. It was the honest application of curiosity to a problem that had been open for several months and that she had been, she could admit now, deliberately not solving because some part of her had not wanted to know yet, had wanted to keep the acquaintance uncomplicated for a little longer.
But she was not, in the end, someone who left problems open when she could close them.
Nicole looked at her across the map. The morning light was on her face. She did not look away.
“I was something that predates most of what you would recognize as history,” she explained. “I was one of the envoys of heaven. An angel, in the oldest meaning of that word. I tried, when I could, to help them.”
She paused, and the pause had in it the weight of things too large to compress easily. “What I am now is much less than that, and more human than that. I lost most of what I was a very long time ago. What remains is this. Me, as you see me. Alive in the world in the way humans are alive in the world.”
Faruzan was quiet for the span of several seconds. She was, internally, doing a very large number of things at once. Revising her understanding of several historical periods, recalibrating her theory about the inscriptive systems and their relationship to pre-Archon civilizational contact, and also sitting with the enormity of what Nicole had just described in terms of sheer duration, the amount of loss that was encoded in the words “a very long time ago”, and what it meant to carry that.
“The ruins I study,” she said slowly. “The ancient machines. The inscriptions from King Deshret’s civilization. You were alive then.”
“Not in Sumeru specifically,” Nicole gazed out the window. “I was elsewhere. But I knew of it. I knew some of what they built.”
“The glyph I found at load-bearing junctions across three geographically separate ruins,” Faruzan said. “The one I theorized indicated cross-regional engineering standardization. You know what it means.”
Something moved in Nicole’s eyes. Something that was fond and also very old.
“Yes.”
“Then you are going to tell me,” Faruzan said. “At some point. Because this is precisely the kind of thing I have been unable to get anyone to take seriously for three years.”
Nicole’s mouth curved. “Yes. At some point. We have time.”
Faruzan absorbed this. Then she said, in a different register, the scholar’s register setting aside for a moment, “And watching things. For that long. The things you have watched end.”
Her smile softened, then very quietly, “Yes.”
They stood across the map from each other and the morning was ordinary around them and Faruzan thought about what she knew of great duration, which was not nothing. She knew something about the specific way time felt from inside a hundred years of stasis. She knew the texture of returning to a world that had moved. She knew what it was to love people who were no longer there and to continue anyway, because what other option was there, what other option had ever existed.
She thought, she has known this for longer than I can conceptually grasp. She has watched everything I have ever grieved happen to more people than I can count, over and over, across the entire span of human history.
She thought, and she is here, in my office, having made maps a hundred years ago that she is now using to take me places.
“I understand,” Faruzan said.
Not ‘I'm sorry’, not ‘how terrible’, but simply, ‘I understand’. Because she did, in the way that someone who has been inside a similar architecture of loss understands the shape of it in another person, even if the scale is entirely different. The architecture was the same.
“I know you do.”
They went out with the maps and spent the afternoon walking the old districts, Nicole pointing to buildings whose foundations predated the facades, explaining what had stood on each site before what stood there now, and Faruzan asking questions, many questions, in rapid succession, which she did when she was genuinely excited and which she had stopped apologizing for because she had tried apologizing for it for years and it never actually reduced the number of questions. Nicole answered them all, with the patience and depth of someone who had been present for the things she was describing.
Faruzan told her about the inscriptions. The real version, not the defended version. The one that still filled her with genuine wonder even now, the one she told almost nobody because she had gotten tired of watching people’s eyes glaze over at the word inscriptive. She talked about the specific feeling of reading something that had not been read for three thousand years and understanding it, the vertigo of that, the profound responsibility. She talked about the ruin where she had been trapped, which she almost never talked about, and not the academic version of it either but the actual version. The floor covered in her own deductions, the way consciousness had begun to dissolve around the edges, the moment of solving it that she could not remember but whose aftermath she remembered perfectly, and the wind and the light and the terrible fact of her own hunger returned to her after years of nothing.
“The work kept me sane,” she said. “I want to be accurate about this. It was not noble, it was not even particularly courageous. It was that the alternative was to stop working and I did not know how to do that. So I kept working. And eventually I solved it. And that’s it, that’s the whole story.”
“That is the whole story,” Nicole agreed, with a warmth in it that said: and it is enough. And it is more than you are letting it be.
Faruzan thought, with the specific clarity that had been building across five meetings and was now very close to requiring an action.
I have been alone in a way I did not fully admit, not to myself, not to anyone, and she understands the shape of it the way nobody else in my current life does, and she is here and she has been coming back and she brought maps and she sat on the archive floor and she told me my terrible flower arrangement had character, and I am–
She stopped the thought there. Not because she was avoiding it, but because she wanted to say it properly, when she did.
“I would like to show you something,” she said instead. “When I ask. I would like for it to go both directions.”
Nicole stopped walking. She looked at Faruzan with full attention.
“Both directions,” she echoed.
“I am not making a declaration,” Faruzan said, with some precision. “I am making a statement of intention. There is a difference.”
“I know the difference,” Nicole responded. Something in her voice was very warm and also very careful in the way of someone holding something delicate. “I would like that. Very much.”
They walked back to the Akademiya in the evening light, the old maps rolled back in their case, and Faruzan thought: soon.
She thought, not yet.
She thought, I have been carrying the stone in my chest for so long and I did not know there was anyone who would understand exactly the weight of it, and I need a little more time to stop being surprised that there is.
This was honest. It was also a deadline she was setting for herself, which she immediately set at the top of her mental itinerary.
VI.
Sumeru’s early mornings, before the Akademiya wakes fully, have a specific quality of held breath. Faruzan knew this quality the way she knew the sound of her own footsteps. Not because she had studied it but because she had lived in it, all the early mornings of the years since returning, when she would wake before the light with the familiar weight already on her chest and lie still and let it be there until it was possible to get up and be productive and not think about it anymore.
She was good at this. She had become very, very good at this.
This particular morning she lay still in the gray-gold early light and thought, with the plainness of something finally said out loud even to no one, I am tired of being good at this.
She sat up.
She found paper. She found a pen.
She was aware, as she wrote, that she had not done this since before the ruins. Had not sat at a desk in the early morning and composed something intended purely to reach another person, with no academic purpose, no institutional necessity. The specific act of reaching toward another specific person for a specific reason that had no other name than– I want to. It had been a hundred and four years, by conservative estimate. She was aware this was significant. She wrote anyway.
Miss Nicole. There is a place I would like to show you. Meet me at the east gate tomorrow morning, early. I will explain early when you arrive, because I know you will be there on time. — Madam Faruzan
She looked at this. She added, beneath.
P.S. I have been thinking about what you said, in the old district. I would like to continue that conversation.
She looked at this too. She thought about the archive floor and the lamp and Nicole sitting beside her without any explanation for why this was exactly the right thing to do. She thought about Pop’s tea in covered cups. She thought about the quality of Nicole’s attention and how it felt different from every other kind of attention she had received since returning, which was either the attention of people who needed something from her or the attention of people who felt they owed her something for surviving. Nicole’s attention felt like neither of those. It felt like she was being told: “You are interesting and I am here and I have nowhere else I would rather be."
Then she wrote, beneath.
P.P.S I am told I do not always make my intentions clear. I will attempt clarity. You have been, over these months, the most genuinely interesting person I have spoken with in a very long time. You have brought a squirrel figure and lamps and maps and Pop’s tea and you sat on an archive floor as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I have found, perhaps later than I should have, that I would like to continue spending time with you for reasons that are not only intellectual. This is, I realize, an extremely formal way to say something that is not a professional proposition. I mention this only because accuracy is important to me, and I prefer to be accurate even when it is inconvenient.
She folded it before she could read it again.
She had it delivered.
She did not think about it for the rest of the day, by which she meant she thought about it without interruption for the entire day and accomplished nothing and knocked over the mechanism she had finally gotten calibrated correctly the day before, which she chose to interpret as the universe having opinions.
Nicole was at the east gate before the city was fully light.
This was, objectively, very early. Faruzan had arrived at what she considered early, which was earlier than most scholars of her acquaintance would voluntarily be awake, and Nicole was already there with two covered cups and an expression of tranquil attentiveness, as though she had been awake for a while and found the early morning pleasant rather than an imposition.
She held out a cup.
“Pop’s tea,” she smiled. “I guessed.”
“You guessed correctly,” Faruzan said.
They looked at each other in the gray morning light. The note hung in the air between them, not uncomfortable but present, a thing that had been said and did not need to be unsaid and had not yet been responded to fully, and the space around it was the specific space of things that are about to become true.
“Early,” Nicole nodded.
“I did say early.”
“You did.”
There was something around the edges of Nicole’s expression that Faruzan had not quite seen before. Not the tranquility she usually wore, not the warmth she usually offered. Something beneath both of those. Something that looked like it had been waiting for longer than the night, longer even than the months since the courtyard and the squirrel, something that had been held carefully for a very long time and was being held carefully still, but with a different quality than before. Like a door that is not yet open but is no longer locked.
Faruzan filed this. She turned toward the path and they began to climb.
The path she had chosen went up into the hills behind Sumeru’s northern edge, steep enough to require attention, narrow enough that they walked single file for the first stretch, Nicole slightly behind and slightly to her left, and Faruzan found that this was comfortable. She had not expected it to be comfortable, the specific configuration of leading somewhere for once. She thought about Nicole leading her to the clearing, and the archive, and the city of Mondstadt. She thought about the care embedded in each choice of destination. She thought, walking, about what it meant to her to bring Nicole here, to this particular place, and let her see a thing that Faruzan had carried quietly for two years without telling anyone about it.
The people who had known which things were the quiet ones were gone.
She was bringing Nicole here. This was a decision she had made and she did not want to un-make it.
The path leveled at the top into a flat shelf of rock above the treeline. Below them, the canopy spread in every direction, and east of them, nothing but open sky. They arrived in the last few minutes of darkness, and Faruzan sat on the rock and Nicole sat beside her, close, the warmth of her real and specific in the morning cold.
“Watch east,” Faruzan said.
Nicole watched.
The sun came up over the edge of the world.
It hit the canopy below them first, turning the forest green to a gold-green that had no other name, and then it found the valleys water, every pool and stream and still surface, and lit them simultaneously so that for a few minutes the entire valley beneath them appeared to be embedded with something precious, a landscape of deliberate, generous abundance. The sky went through its colors, the gray to pale gold to a blue that deepened as the light increased, and the whole of it was enormous and unhurried and not addressed to anyone in particular, which was part of what Faruzan loved about it: the complete indifference to whether anyone was watching, and the beauty being entirely unaffected by that.
Nicole was very still.
Faruzan watched her as much as she watched the valley. She did this now without pretense. She watched Nicole stand still in the light and something moved in Nicole’s face that Faruzan recognized because she had felt it herself, standing here at dawn years ago for the first time. The specific opening that happens when something is more beautiful than she had prepared herself for. The slight dissolution of composure, involuntary, that even people with very good composure cannot always prevent.
“Faruzan,” Nicole looked at her, after the colors had settled and the morning had become simply itself.
“Yes.”
“How did you find this?”
“I could not sleep,” Faruzan said. “This was two years ago. I walked until I was tired enough to try again, and I found it, and I came back and came back until eventually the not-sleeping stopped. Or mostly stopped.” She looked at the valley. “I have never brought anyone here. Not in two years. I have not wanted to, until now.”
The sentence sat between them, clear and specific.
“Why now,” Not a question, precisely. More like, tell me, if you want to. I am here.
Faruzan set her cup down on the rock. She had thought about how to say this, intermittently, for several weeks. She had written drafts of it in the margins of manuscripts that she had then defaced to protect the evidence. She had, she could admit, been frightened by it, which was an unusual and unwelcome experience for someone who made a point of not being frightened by things she could face directly.
The ache in her chest was there. It was always there. But she had noticed, over the months of knowing Nicole, that when Nicole was present the ache did not go away but it was accompanied by other things. Interest, warmth, the specific pleasure of being understood, and the even more specific pleasure of understanding in return. The stone did not lift, but she had not been carrying it entirely alone.
She had not known that was possible. She had stopped believing it was possible.
“I have been,” Faruzan said carefully, “very alone. For a long time. I don’t say this to ask for anything, I say it because it’s true and I have spent a great deal of energy not saying it directly, and I am tired of that.”
She kept her eyes on the valley, continuing, “I came back to a city that knew my name from textbooks and had no place in it that was shaped for me. The people who knew the shape of me were gone. I understood this. I accepted it. It is, as I have told myself repeatedly, simply the nature of my circumstances. And this is genuinely true and I have genuinely made my peace with it.” A beat. “And also, alongside all of that, I have been profoundly and persistently lonely in a way I have not admitted to anyone, including myself, until very recently.”
She turned to look at Nicole.
Nicole was looking at her with the expression that went all the way down. The one with centuries in it. The one that Faruzan had finally learned to read for what it was—the expression of someone who also knew what she was describing from the inside, who had carried a version of this weight for longer than Faruzan had any frame of reference for, and who was not, in this moment, at any distance from her.
“And,” Faruzan said, “I find that since knowing you, it has been less. Not gone. But less. You have seen things about me that I did not show you deliberately and you have not made anything of them except, it seems, reasons to come back. And you have shown me things and brought tea and you sat on a floor with me in a room where nobody ever goes, and I have found, with some surprise, that I would like to keep doing this. All of it. The tea and the walking and the arguments about star charts and the sitting in archives and whatever else there is. I would like very much to keep doing this with you.”
She stopped.
She had been, she noted, talking for rather a long time. This was not unusual. But she had also, she noted, said the true thing, the whole of the true thing, without redacting it for palatability or dressing it in academic language, and that was unusual. That was, in fact, the first time in a hundred and four years.
Nicole was quiet for a moment.
When she responded, her tone had the quality that Faruzan had heard only once before, briefly, in the archive when Faruzan had asked who she was directly. Something that had come a long way, something that had been waiting longer than this morning.
“I have watched people for so long,” Nicole had a wistful look. “I was an observer. That was what I was made for. I was outside of things, by design. I watched civilizations build themselves and fall and build again and I could help, sometimes, from the edge of things, but I was never—I was never inside it. I never had what the people I watched had, the specific warm interior of a life lived alongside other people who know you.”
She looked at Faruzan.
“And I have been in the world long enough, now, in this diminished form, to understand what I was missing. Long enough to learn what it feels like to want things for myself, not just to watch them happen to others. Long enough to recognize what it feels like to want someone in my life specifically, not in the general way of caring for all people but in the particular way of: you, this person, I would like you to stay.”
“Nicole,” Faruzan said.
“You asked,” Nicole smiled, with a ghost of the warmth she usually wore, but steadier beneath it, “in your note, if you were making your intentions clear. You were. Entirely.”
She reached across the space between them and placed her hand over Faruzan’s where it rested on the rock, light and deliberate, a question and a statement at the same time. “I have been coming back for months because of you. Because you say exactly what you mean and you cannot stop being curious even when it would be easier, and because you talked about load-bearing inscription systems for forty minutes on our first walk, and because you sat on an archive floor and cried a little over your own handwriting and let me see it. I have been coming back because I want to.”
Faruzan looked down at Nicole’s hand over hers.
She thought, my mother used to say that you know the people who matter because they make you feel less like you are carrying something and more like you are putting it down somewhere safe. She said this about my father. She said it with such certainty that even at fourteen Faruzan had understood it was something true, not advice exactly but a report from inside a life that had it.
She thought, I have been carrying the stone in my heart since I came back. I have been carrying it since before that. I have been carrying it for a very long time, carefully, with the discipline of someone who knows there is no option but to keep going.
She thought, she knows. She knows the weight of it not because I explained it but because she has her own, and she came back anyway, she keeps coming back and she brought the lamp.
She turned her hand over and held Nicole’s.
It was a very simple thing. It was also the most deliberate thing she had done in a hundred and four years.
“All right,” Faruzan said.
“All right,” Nicole agreed.
Below them, the valley was fully lit, ordinary morning light now, the spectacular part passed into the everyday. The city would be waking. The Akademiya would be opening. Nadwah would be somewhere composing a request that Faruzan would find inconvenient. The mechanism on her desk was still not correctly calibrated and that was still somehow her problem.
None of this required immediate attention.
They sat on the rock in the full morning with their hands held and their cups going cold and Faruzan thought about her mother’s extra portion of food, always set out, always waiting, and for the first time since she had read that note on Tamimi’s casing, the thought did not arrive as grief alone. It arrived as grief and something else, something that acknowledged both the loss and the fact that she was here, alive, on a hillside above a beautiful valley, holding someone’s hand who had been in the world long enough to understand everything she hadn’t said.
“There is another place,” Faruzan said, eventually. “It requires a longer walk. The ruins visible from the western face are significant, and I want to tell you my theory about the glyph system, and then you are going to tell me whether I am correct, because you know and I have been waiting years for someone who knows.”
“Maybe,” Nicole gave her a small smile. “Though, some of it you’ve already gotten right.”
“Of course I have,” Faruzan said.
Nicole laughed. The real kind, the one that reached all the way, and it was warm in the morning air and it was directed at Faruzan specifically and Faruzan thought: there it is. There it is.
The stone was still there. It would always be there to some degree. She did not expect otherwise and she did not want to.
But it was not all there was.
She thought, what is a century, but a spark swallowed by eternity?
The question had always carried a note of diminishment, as though centuries were small, as though sparks were insufficient. But a spark is warm. A spark is visible in the dark. A spark is the specific thing that begins fires.
Faruzan sat on a hillside with her hand in someone’s hand and thought: I am a spark that was swallowed and came back out the other side. I am still burning.
This seemed, this morning, like more than enough.