Why he chose to promise Venti his return for Lantern Rite, Xiao cannot say. He doesn’t think he knows himself, in all honesty— at least, nothing he’s willing to admit for certain. All that comes up whenever he tries to justify that conversation to himself is the lonesome look on Venti’s face when it came time for Xiao to go and the thought of how it didn’t look right.

Xiao is aware he rarely knows what to make of human emotions. He’s a weapon, not a person, less than human for his crimes. He doesn’t know how to fix these kinds of things, how to keep Venti happy, and it is that lacking which pulls upon his throat.

This is the person who saved you, it whispers. Shouldn’t you make yourself worth the effort to them? The space you take up?

(The grace you waste?)

And even though Venti assures him that it’s nothing, that Xiao owes him nothing, Xiao knows that’s not entirely true. How can he not? Every eye raised in Liyue can see when another finds worth, and while Xiao might not understand why, he knows that his company is not nothing to Venti.

So then what can he say? He’s not dumb enough to make promises he can’t keep; he has work to do.

Except…

On the first night of Lantern Rite, Xiao stares at the field of budding dreams sprawled before him. Each year, they seem to multiply, as joy grows fast without him. They smoke the air with an opiate sweetness so strong, it forces the taste of childhood onto the back of his tongue—

(He has always hated the Lantern Rite.)

Before his sentence, Xiao had never understood why humans would sometimes describe the air as ‘sweet’. When he was young, the air was sharp with its own freshness, crisp and clear like thaw on a lake. Then in his youth, it was first thick and sickly, like pus oozing from a half-scabbed wound, and after, it became smoked in the acrid flames of the Archon War. He’s heard the claim that it’s intoxicating, but it’s not until now that he’s ever had the chance to know.

((He wishes it could be more bitter— that he could be more bitter about the arrival of the Lantern Rite.))

But it’s time for him to go.

Monstrous desire crawling up his throat, Xiao flees before his mask must rein him in.

He follows the light back to Venti’s dream.

Not literally, of course. There is no light in the space between dreams, for nothing can enter or exit a dream— save for those trained in the art of Dream Trawling, but Xiao is never able to explain how he always finds his way back to Venti otherwise. It truly does feel almost as if there is something tugging at him: a thin, invisible thread of fate guiding his footsteps to his solemn duty, or a pale flame’s light tugging at his heart, calling him home.

…Not that Venti’s dream is like a home to him. He hasn’t had anywhere to call home in many years, and it’s ridiculous to think that a dream born to a bard from Mondstadt, of all places, could ever change that.

Still, it’s oddly fitting that, when he finally does creep onto the roof of Venti’s dream castle, the first thing he notices is that the lighthouse is on.

It’s pretty, Xiao idly decides, caught up in its light.

Not that he’s ever had much sense of beauty, but it’s been a long, long time since Xiao last saw a man-made light shining in the night. He’s long lost count of exactly how long— he hardly tracked the passing years while he’d been awake, lost in the endless ebb and flow of his Archon-assigned duty— but lanterns and the like have never been a common fixture in his life anyway. His current penance only adds to their rarity, for Xiao has fought enough nightmares to know that their weight will crush any dreamer’s hope of light.

It feels wrong for him to idle in its glow, his little clockwork heart telling him that this is the busiest time of the year. He should be working to keep people safe outside, for that is simply his duty as a weapon. Yet, he makes no move to escape the way the very human light drapes his mask in shadow.

A window clicks open below him, and Xiao sharply snaps to attention. Venti’s delighted laugh drifts upwards— amused, it seems, at Xiao’s militant response.

“Hi, Xiao!” he chirps, first poking his head out the window, then making himself a seat on its ledge and leaning freely into the night. “I’m so happy to see you again!”

Something warmer than lantern glow begins to blush within Xiao, and though it is buried far more deeply than a grave, he still finds himself glancing away. “It is no big deal,” he mutters.

“Awww, but I missed you~” Venti whines, tilting further back like a child on a swing. The dangerous frivolity of it all makes Xiao’s heart race with anxiety (but the sight of Venti’s fond expression balances it all out somehow).

Xiao chooses not to dignify Venti’s teasing with a response, instead staring at him through the corner of his narrowed eyes.

“It’s today, isn’t it?” Venti blithely continues, his eyes bright and smile lighthearted with excitement. “Well, I guess now it’s more tonight, but— you know what I’m talking about!! The Lantern Rite!!!”

Xiao finds himself quietly sighing. “Yes,” he says simply, folding his arms over his chest, “though I don’t understand what you find so exciting about it.”

Venti crawls out the window and, perched precariously on its ledge, jumps.

Xiao’s heart briefly stops, before the glimmer of Venti’s Vision catches his eye. The bard skips on the breeze, lightly landing by Xiao’s side with a mischievous smile upon his face.

“What is there not to be excited about?” he asks, hands on his hips in mock accusation. “It’s a holiday, and a long one at that! That means there’s a lot for us to do together, right?”

Xiao feels the hairs on the back of his neck rise, his host’s proximity making him anxious. (He holds his breath as he takes a step back, to keep the dream from tempting him.) “I do not know what power keeps the nightmares at bay, but it wanes after the first few days,” he explains. “As such, although the Rite lasts a full two weeks, I will not be able to stay the entire duration. Don’t get too comfortable.”

(As if any person could adapt to such a poisoned presence in their dreams.)

Venti’s expression falls with glum acceptance anyway. “Awww, okay,” he drawls, clearly disappointed. “Should we prepare some lanterns, then? It seems a little silly to take time off for a holiday and not partake in the main festivity, at least to me.”

They’re nothing more than floating junk, Xiao wants to scoff, but somehow holds his tongue. Instead, he asks, “Is this one” —he gestures to the lighthouse nearby, its beam shining out to sea— “not enough for you?”

Venti’s cheeks look to lose a bit of color— or perhaps it simply seems as if they pale, compared to the apple-blossom blush which quickly blooms upon his face. “Of course not!!” he replies, sounding almost indignant at the suggestion. “I hear the Rite is normally full of them! A single light shall not suffice to move our heartbeats into flight!”

Xiao’s conscience prickles underneath his skin: His instincts call for him. There’s danger near; he has to fight—!

…But the hope in Venti’s eyes, bright like the pretty starlight, reminds him that’s not so.

“Please, Xiao, I would love it if you could,” the poor bard begs, with all the sincerity of a mountain bird’s morning song.

…There are no nightmares lurking near, no evil (save for himself) haunting the salty sea-side air. Xiao is free, for the moment, to live inside a dream— granted, he reminds himself, he keeps his promises to Venti.

(Yes. Of course, his debt to Venti; he should… indulge the bard’s frivolous requests, if only to pay him back for this particular night’s respite.)

Xiao turns his face away from Venti’s pleading gaze. “I have not made a lantern in a great many years,” he warns. “It is unlikely what I can teach you will be of any good.”

“I don’t mind,” Venti replies, creeping back into Xiao’s view. “As long as what you teach me is the truth.”

“The truth within the dream world is not always the truth within the real world,” Xiao says. Yet, there must exist something between them which always remains real…

The burn of blood trickles down Xiao’s throat as Venti reaches out to gently grab one of his gloved hands. Xiao sighs, and he relents:

“But… if you so wish, then I will teach you how to make those silly paper lanterns humans love so much.”

((It has nothing to do with the way he thinks he feels some cavern carving itself in his heart, pooling hollow longing in his chest.))

With a delighted gasp, Venti manages to coax Xiao into uncrossing his arms, and with both of his hands clasped securely around one of Xiao’s, he begins to guide the yaksha into the castle. “I do,” he says. “I’d like to see the skies done up in thousands of tiny lights.”

It ultimately does not matter that Xiao does not remember the last time he made a lantern with his own hands. Some actions have been engraved into Xiao’s memory (where they will remain until his bones have long turned to dust) and the act of crafting a paper lantern is one he remembers doing hundreds of thousands of times in his early centuries under Rex Lapis.

Venti, of course, is not so lucky, though he captures the art more swiftly than Xiao expects. He’s only on his third attempt out of what Xiao had anticipated to be at least a dozen when he is already apparently so good at assembling the skeleton that he has the mind to strike up conversation with Xiao again:

“What’s Lantern Rite about anyway?” he asks, very casually.

Xiao looks over, and he sees Venti watching him intently from beneath his long, dark eyelashes. His hands, idly assembling another lantern of his own, slow to a stop; his voice fails him for a moment.

“Who or what is it for?” Venti continues, insistent curiosity undampered by Xiao’s silence. “Where did it come from?”

Xiao hesitates, ashamed to realize that he does not immediately remember. He has gotten far too used to dreading its every painful night, to seeing lanterns as a sign for how those old, dead demons will soon swiftly rise to plague his mind, that he finds it’s been far too long a time since he last paid thought to why the lights are set free every year.

(It comes to him so quickly, it hardly matters anyway, but shame is a clingy little thing, trailing the tips of its long, stained fingers down the hollow of his throat.)

“The lanterns act as beacons in the night, guiding bygone heroes back to their homeland,” he slowly recites, a lesson as old as dust. He turns away from Venti’s starlit eyes, unable to handle their earnest curiosity. “It started in the Archon War, in the hopes that missing soldiers would see the light of home and find the strength to follow that thousand-li road back to their loved ones.

“Once the war was over, however, the people never stopped releasing the lanterns over the sea. Even after a generation had come and passed in peacetime, they would light their lanterns every year in memory of their heroes and ancestors, hoping, waiting for some miracle to bring their soldiers home.

“The people of the Harbor have taken to creating enormous and elaborate paper lanterns in the last few centuries,” Xiao continues, and Venti croons in excitement and awe. Xiao huffs in amusement. “If that is what you are expecting me to make, may I remind you that my duty leaves me without any sense of beauty? Such embellishments are beyond me.”

Venti laughs all the same. “Well, is there anyone you would like the lanterns to remember?” he asks. His voice is so sweet and tender as he speaks; it reminds Xiao of how Lady Guizhong long ago taught him and Ganyu how to sing for stubborn lilies so they’d bloom.

A silence falls between them as even the softly hissing gas lamp which lights their little workshop seems to fade away.

Xiao thinks of the child whose life he so selfishly stole, and he wonders where she’d have been at this time had he not killed her.

He doesn’t know.

How many years have passed since his sentence fell upon his throat?

He doesn’t know.

(Xiao notices Venti’s hands have ceased assembling his latest lantern.)

And yet…

“I do,” Xiao softly says, and he thinks of the early Lantern Rites spent fighting alongside his siblings. His hands are too dirty, his talons too picked with fragments of gore, to hold a child’s memory with its due reverence, but there were still others who were once like him, whose legacies cannot possibly be stained any more darkly than his own.

Venti hums.

(“So do I,” Xiao thinks he hears Venti say, barely a whisper beneath his breath.)

“Our setting seems to think so too,” Venti muses, much more clearly, and Xiao suddenly realizes that their surroundings, once a workshop, have since shifted, and he himself is bathed once more in the lighthouse lantern’s glow.

Oh, Xiao thinks, for although it’s not unusual for several parts of Venti’s dream castle to shift from day-to-day, he is flustered by the fact that his own emotions are so strong that all of Venti’s dream transforms its scene to place him in its spotlight. But before he starts to choke on shame, Venti steps forth and shelters him in shade.

“My lantern’s finished,” Venti offers, extending Xiao a hand. “Shall we go?”

Venti pulls him from the light (all at once, his lungs feel freer for it) and guides him to a terrace atop the lighthouse tower. He lets go of Xiao’s hand (all at once, he understands how bitter mortals find the winter cold) and starts to dance with his white paper lantern.

“You’re missing something,” Xiao says.

Venti twirls around to face him, lantern cradled close to his chest, a childish pout adorning his lips. “I did everything you told me, though!”

((Xiao’s lungs want to flip right into his throat.))

Xiao sighs in exasperation, then gestures Venti near him. “Mortals like to write their wishes for the year inside it.”

Venti makes a face as he inspects Xiao’s lantern, eyebrows furrowed and pink tongue poked ever-so-slightly out of his mouth. “Well, it’s not like you’ve written anything on yours,” he accuses.

Xiao takes back his lantern. “Don’t confuse me for some mortal,” he snips. “Adepti have no desires.”

“And someday, once you wake, won’t you have all the more Lantern Rites to learn from them in turn?” Venti playfully replies.

Xiao wants to protest, wants to claim there is no life waiting for him outside the blurry barriers of dreamland— at least none which offers him a heart so light and trifling— but finds that he cannot.

So instead, he turns away. He watches the taciturn waves as the sweep along the shore, studies the winking of starlight upon the ocean’s surface, and he finds himself wondering how many good soldiers’ souls have been left to rot, fates forgotten in the skies.

((He wonders why he hasn’t been sent to join them.))

“Xiao~” Venti sings, drawing the monster from his thoughts. Xiao turns to face the bard, watches his face soften from something worried into something rather warm. “You should write something too,” he insists, and he pushes a brush, wet with ink, into Xiao’s free hand.

The tangled roots of roses start growing down Xiao’s spine. There’s nothing for him to want, neither in the waking world nor this lullabine dreamscape, which wouldn’t drag him down the tides of ugly longing to his doom. The only thing he needs to do is serve; no more, no less.

I wish others will find me useful.

Xiao feels Venti rest his chin on his shoulder, and he bristles. “Aren’t mortals always saying that to share a wish is to kill its hope of coming true?” he asks, hiding his writing from view.

“I’ve also heard them claim, ‘a dream is a wish your heart makes’,” Venti ever-so lightly replies, “yet, sharing mine with you has yet to prove them fakes.”

Xiao teleports just outside of Venti’s reach.

(His heart’s tiny claws carve spider-silk lines into the cage of his ribs.)

“Ah,” says Venti, as Xiao’s lonely lantern starts to glow all on its own. “The moon is high in the sky, I see. The time’s arrived to set my lantern free.”

Xiao approaches the edge of the roof, docile as a dog, and lets his light drift into the night. His mask feels lighter than it has in ages; yet, if he were to perish in this time, then in another year, he wonders…

Who will be remembering me?

Then in the night, there appears another lantern. This alone is no wonder, but then appears another, and another, until Xiao looks towards Venti, bewildered by the simple magic of a dream.

There is something about the moment which draws Xiao in as he watches Venti release his own creation into the bright, starry skies. It’s something he can’t quite seem to name within himself, where it feels it would otherwise belong, but in many little parts of Venti: The magic seems to live in his expression, alight with both his own delight and his lantern’s warm glow alike; in the way he handles it with the same sweet grace as he does his feathers before their release; in his voice, hushed with awe as if charmed by a spell himself.

(Something stirs within Xiao’s chest at the sight. Everything about it is so soft, so gentle— he doesn’t belong in this sort of scene. He has never fit in with things so beautiful as hope.)

((He wants to, though. As ugly as it is of him to hold desire, it is harder still to let go of one so close by, so terribly within his reach.))

Xiao’s chest starts to thud; something is screaming to be freed from the cage of his ribs. Yet, that feeling, while familiar from all his years of pain, pales in comparison to the sudden clarity with which he can currently see Venti.

Long, dark, and delicate eyelashes— a fluttering frame to blue-green eyes of softest jade. Faint, smattered gatherings of freckles on apple-blush cheeks, like the scattered collections of stars in this galaxy of dreams. Bright, glowing, nearly lovestruck attention reflected in a gaze as unreadable as it is human.

Human, Xiao sharply remembers. Venti is human.

(And I am not.)

But it is still beautiful. Even he, wretched monster that he is, cannot deny that the very human showings of wonder and enchantment in Venti are divine in their beauty.

Some of Venti’s bangs fall in front of his eyes.

((Silly bard, Xiao thinks. So caught up in the sight of something mundane he doesn’t even notice—))

Venti looks sharply away from the lanterns, towards Xiao.

Their eyes catch.

Xiao freezes. He forgets even his own breath.

His hand, it is halfway done tucking that lock of stray hair behind Venti’s ear. He doesn’t even know when he moved to fix Venti’s bangs, but now it seems as if time itself has stopped all around him, and he is suddenly all-too keenly aware of his nearness, of his transgression, of his happening.

(It feels like waking up— that seamless, yet unmistakable, transformation of a dream into the real world.)

Xiao finishes what he started.

“You were… Your hair… It’s not good for your eyes,” he says, the words coming out with more certainty than he truly feels.

Venti’s eyes shift from surprise to something more soft and excited— although his smile betrays more mischief than anything. “Ah, yes, because it strains one’s sight when bangs block out the light, correct?” He turns to face Xiao fully, hands clasped behind his back as he leans in and takes a step forward.

(Xiao suddenly feels as if the ground has swallowed him up, and he is left drowning in freefall.)

Venti laughs, the sound bright as a daisy and pure as a cloud. “You truly are the shyest thing,” he remarks, light and teasing. He takes another tiny step forward as Xiao makes an instinctive move back. “It’s all right for you to touch me, Xiao. You cannot kill me here.”

((It splits him open from within, would be terrifying if there was not yet another long-forgotten feeling flowing from his memory.))

The wind picks up, and he feels the idle caress of the cool, night breeze skim over his bare skin: across his arms, around his neck, down his spine…

Xiao turns away with a heart like a butterfly, fluttering desperately against the glass of a jar.

(…It makes him shiver, just a little.)

Silence settles in the air between them. Venti decides to leave him be.

With a long, drawn-out sigh, Xiao watches the many lantern lights flicker in and out over the sea and thinks of every life he’s ever seen or heard or known to exist upon the world.

“A century of human life is like a dream,” Venti sings, a low murmur into the night.

Xiao feels as if some veil disintegrates over his gaze, showering him in the thousands of tiny, glassine shards of his worldview, as he notices Venti— with his reverent song flowing from his swan-pale throat as his hair as dark and smooth as a well-loved inkstone frames his face of sweetest downfall within his endless dream of a lighthouse’s guiding glow— settle against the crenellations to softly sing the first lines of an old Liyue wartime funeral poem at the sea.

It’s a ritual Xiao forfeit for himself from the moment he exchanged his personhood for his life of endless slaughter and, once the last embers of battle died out after the Archon War, never expected to hear again. It’s been so long since he last heard it, Xiao had nearly forgotten it altogether.

How does he…?

Venti catches him staring, and Xiao can only look away, heart burning in the darkness of his ribs from shame. Yet, he feels Venti’s sights upon him nonetheless: gentle, yet intense, like the pale weight of a dead dove in his hands.

“Your mask,” Venti says. “It’s back.”

When did it vanish? Xiao wonders. (How could he forget his duty so easily?)

((Just another cut of shame against him.))

“If you wish to go, I will not stop you,” Venti tells him, audibly sincere despite his obvious sorrow. “But the Lantern Rite is not yet over. There’s nothing for you to chase away.”

Xiao hesitates. Something about this night has transformed the space he and Venti share in this dream; he knows, deep down, that he will never be the same again for it.

He meets Venti’s gaze. “I will stay,” he says, a decision with a weight he struggles to understand as he makes it all on his own.

The hope on Venti’s face blossoms into something— somehow— prettier. “It’s good to take the mask off sometimes, even if it’s only for one night,” he says, pulling himself into a seat at the edge of the terrace, and he reaches out to touch one of the passing lanterns. “The lights are so sweet a memory…”

Venti starts to chatter on about the beauty of human ingenuity, the thousands of different ways they’ve managed to convey the many different facets of how they love.

It is difficult for Xiao to understand what Venti sees in the fleeting lives of mortals, unable to imagine the gravity of their minuscule legacies upon the history of Teyvat in comparison to every seed of sin he himself has reaped and sown; yet all the same, he listens as attentively as he can, not wanting to miss a single word falling from the bard’s fair lips. Briefly, Xiao wonders if it’s even possible for a monster such as himself— a wretched failure of a final guardian— to ever understand something so far away and unlike himself.

(He wants to try, if only for the fact that Venti can so clearly feel the weight of all their fates upon his shoulders.)

((Perhaps it’s what the lanterns tell him so.))