Dainsleif's POV
The woman followed me without asking where we were going.
That should have been my first warning. Not about her—about myself. Five hundred years of solitude had eroded something in me, some basic understanding of how people worked. Normal people, when they wash up on a strange shore, ask questions. Demand answers. Want to know the name of the place, the dangers, the distance to the nearest settlement.
She asked none of these things. She just walked.
I led her away from the beach, up a path worn into the cliffs by centuries of fishermen and smugglers. Behind us, the sea continued its restless work, shaping and reshaping the sand into patterns I no longer tried to read. The tree was gone. Whatever message the waves had meant to send, it had been delivered.
Or maybe it hadn't. Maybe I was fooling myself, seeing meaning in random shapes because I needed something to believe in. I had done that before. It had not ended well.
The woman stumbled. I caught her arm without thinking, steadied her, then let go. She didn't thank me. Didn't look at me. Just kept walking, her eyes fixed on the path ahead as if she could will herself to understand it by staring hard enough.
"You're not going to ask," I said.
"Ask what?"
"Anything. Where we're going. Who I am. What happened to you."
She was quiet for a moment. The path curved upward, away from the cliffs, and the sound of the sea faded behind us. Ahead, I could see the first trees of the Whispering Woods, their leaves already beginning their slow, synchronized sway.
"I'm not sure I'd understand the answers," she said finally.
Her voice was flat. Not emotionless—there was something underneath it, something pressed down hard enough to crack—but controlled. A woman who had learned to keep her questions to herself because the answers were never good.
"That's not the same as not wanting to know."
She stopped. Looked at me. Her eyes were grey, the color of the sea before a storm, and there was something in them I hadn't seen in a very long time.
Curiosity. Not the hungry, desperate curiosity of someone looking for a way out of their own skin. Just... curiosity. A mind that wanted to understand things for the sake of understanding.
"You said I'm not in the records," she said. "What records?"
So. She had been paying attention.
I resumed walking. After a moment, she followed.
"Teyvat keeps a history. Everything that happens, every person who lives and dies, is recorded in the Irminsul—the great tree that grows at the center of the world. It's not a tree in the way you're thinking. It's more like... an archive. A library that contains everything that has ever been."
"A library that contains everything that has ever been," she repeated. Her voice had shifted. Still flat, but with an edge now. The edge of a woman who had spent her life in libraries and knew exactly what it meant when something wasn't in them. "And I'm not in it."
"No."
We walked in silence for a while. The path leveled out, and the trees closed in around us. Their leaves were turning—not with the season, but with the presence of the city ahead. They knew what Mondstadt demanded of the world around it, and they were learning to comply.
"That should be impossible," she said.
"It should be."
"Which means either your records are incomplete, or I don't belong here."
I glanced at her. She was watching the trees now, her head tilted slightly, as if listening to something I couldn't hear.
"The Irminsul is not incomplete," I said. "It is... damaged. But not incomplete. It records everything that happens within the Firmament. Everything."
She absorbed that. I watched her process it, watched the implications unfold behind her eyes. She was quick. Quicker than I had expected. Five hundred years of watching people, and I had learned to read them. This one was different.
"So I came from somewhere else," she said. "Outside your Firmament."
"Yes."
"And you were waiting for me."
I did not answer. There was nothing to say. She had arrived at the conclusion herself, and any confirmation I gave would only raise more questions. Questions I was not ready to answer. Questions I was not sure I should answer at all.
We walked. The trees grew thicker, their branches intertwining overhead until the sky was only a memory, a pale light filtering down through layers of green. The air was warm, too warm for the season, and it carried the faint, sweet smell of dandelions.
Dandelions. Mondstadt's eyes. Watching everything, reporting everything, weaving their gentle, suffocating web.
"You're not from here either," she said.
It wasn't a question.
"What makes you say that?"
She gestured vaguely at the world around us. At the too-perfect trees, the too-sweet air, the silence that was not the silence of a living forest but the silence of something waiting to be told what to do.
"This place feels wrong. Like a photograph that's been edited. Too clean. Too arranged." She looked at me. "But you move through it like you're used to it. Like you know how to be in a place that's pretending to be something it's not."
I stopped walking. She stopped too, a few paces ahead, her back to me.
"You see things," I said.
"I'm a physicist. I'm trained to notice when the universe isn't behaving."
"Your world—" I began, then stopped. I had been about to ask what had happened to it. What had broken it so thoroughly that it had spat out this woman, this blank page, this impossible variable. But the question felt too large. Too close to something I didn't want to name.
She saved me from it.
"My world is dying," she said. Flat. Matter-of-fact. The voice of someone who had already done her grieving and was now just waiting for the paperwork to finalize. "The laws of reality are forgetting themselves. Light, sound, gravity—they stop working sometimes. People disappear. Not die. Disappear. One day they're there, and the next they're not, and no one remembers them enough to mourn."
She turned to face me. Her expression was calm. Too calm. The calm of a woman who had been holding herself together for so long she had forgotten how to fall apart.
"I stepped through a hole in the sky because there was nothing left for me on the other side. If I was going to disappear, I wanted it to mean something."
The trees swayed around us, their leaves rustling in a wind that had no source. The air was thick with the scent of dandelions, and beneath it, something else. Something older. The weight of centuries of waiting.
I thought of my own disappearance. The way Khaenri'ah had been erased from the world, not all at once, but gradually—its records expunged, its language forgotten, its people reduced to whispers and rumors. I thought of the children who had asked me to remember them, and how I had promised, and how that promise had become the only thing holding me together.
"You want it to mean something," I said. "What?"
She looked at me for a long moment. The grey of her eyes was the same grey as the sea after the storm, when the waves have exhausted themselves and the sky is just beginning to clear.
"I don't know yet. But I'll know it when I see it."
Something in my chest tightened. A feeling I had not allowed myself to feel in five hundred years, not since the last of my people had looked at me with eyes that still believed I could save them.
She could be the one. After everything. She could be the one.
I pushed the thought down. Hope was a weight I could not afford to carry. Not yet. Not until I was sure.
But I could not stop myself from taking the next step. From leading her where she needed to go. From telling her what she needed to hear, in the way she needed to hear it.
"You wanted to know where we're going," I said.
She nodded.
"There's a city ahead. Mondstadt. The City of Freedom." I paused, watching her face. "It's called that because its god decided, five hundred years ago, that freedom meant no one should ever be sad again."
Her expression didn't change. But something behind her eyes did. A flicker of understanding, of recognition.
"That's not freedom," she said.
"No. It's not."
"Then what is it?"
I started walking again. After a moment, she fell into step beside me.
"It's a cage," I said. "The most beautiful cage ever built. And the people inside it are so happy they don't even know they're trapped."
The trees opened up ahead, and I saw the first glimpse of the city walls—white stone, gleaming in the morning light, windmills turning in perfect synchronization. From here, it looked like a painting. A masterpiece. The work of an artist who had spent five hundred years perfecting every detail, smoothing every edge, coloring everything in shades of warmth and cheer.
She saw it too. I watched her take it in—the walls, the windmills, the clouds arranged just so. Her steps slowed. Her head tilted again, that gesture of listening, of paying attention to something most people wouldn't notice.
"It's too perfect," she said.
"Nothing here is perfect," I said. "But they've spent a very long time trying to make it look that way."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "You want me to go in there."
It wasn't a question.
"I want you to see it," I said. "What happens to a world when its god decides that the only way to protect people is to take away their choices. What happens to a city when sadness becomes a crime. I want you to see it, and then I want you to ask yourself why you were brought here."
She looked at me. Her eyes were still grey, still steady, still holding that quiet, unshakeable curiosity.
"I wasn't brought here," she said. "I fell."
"Did you?"
She didn't answer. I didn't expect her to. The question would sit with her, work its way into the cracks she didn't know she had. It would grow. It would become something she needed to answer, not for me, but for herself.
That was how it had to be. I could lead her to the edge of the truth, but I could not push her into it. She had to walk there on her own. She had to want to.
We stood at the edge of the wood, looking at the city. The windmills turned. The clouds held their positions. In the distance, faint and sweet, I could hear the sound of singing.
"You're not going to tell me what to do," she said.
"You wouldn't listen if I did."
"Probably not."
A ghost of a smile touched her lips. The first I had seen. It was small, tired, barely there—but it was real. Real in a way that nothing in Mondstadt had been real for five hundred years.
She could be the one.
"Then let's go see your beautiful cage," she said.
She stepped out of the trees and started walking toward the city. I watched her go for a moment—this strange woman from a dying world, walking toward a prison made of smiles, carrying nothing but her questions and her stubborn, impossible curiosity.
Then I followed.
---
Elara's POV
The road to Mondstadt was too clean.
I noticed it first in the trees—how they lined the path at exact intervals, how their branches arched overhead like the ceiling of a cathedral. Then in the grass, cropped to a uniform height, the color of new spring even though the air had the weight of late autumn. Then in the birds, singing the same three-note melody over and over, a loop that reset every thirty seconds.
A physicist notices patterns. It's what we do. And this place was nothing but patterns.
The man who had found me on the beach—Dainsleif, he'd called himself—walked ahead, his dark armor swallowing the light that filtered through the leaves. He moved like someone who knew exactly where he was going, which was more than I could say for myself.
I watched his back and tried to remember the last time I had followed anyone anywhere.
The beach. The lab. My apartment. The progression was simple, linear, the path of someone who had stopped choosing and started accepting. Accepting the diagnosis. Accepting the twenty-three days. Accepting the Rift and whatever waited on the other side.
I hadn't chosen any of it. Not really. I had just stopped saying no.
He stopped walking. I almost walked into him.
"You're not going to ask," he said.
"Ask what?"
"Anything. Where we're going. Who I am. What happened to you."
I considered the questions. They were good questions. The kind of questions a normal person would ask. But normal people had normal lives, normal expectations, normal reasons to care about the answers.
I had twenty-three days. Maybe fewer now. The decay had been quiet since I arrived, but I could feel it there, waiting, the same way you feel a storm in your bones before the sky goes dark.
"Where we're going," I said finally. "That's the only one that matters."
His eye—the glowing one, the one that looked like a galaxy compressed into a human socket—studied me. I wondered what he saw. A dying woman, probably. The kind of person who washed up on strange beaches because there was nowhere else left to go.
"A city," he said. "Mondstadt. It's not far."
He started walking again. I followed.
We walked in silence for a while. The trees grew thicker, the light dimmer, and the air took on a sweetness that made my teeth ache. Dandelions. Thousands of them, lining the path, their seeds floating past in clouds that moved against the wind.
That was wrong. I noticed it the way I noticed anything wrong—automatically, without effort, the way my lungs noticed air.
The seeds were moving against the wind.
I filed it away.
"The records," I said. "The ones I'm not in. What are they?"
He glanced at me, something flickering in his eye. Not surprise. Interest, maybe. Or caution.
"Teyvat keeps a history of everything," he said. "Every person, every event, every thought. It's all recorded in the Irminsul—the tree at the center of the world."
"A library that contains everything that has ever been," I said, translating it into terms I understood.
"Yes."
"And I'm not in it."
"No."
I thought about my father. The blank space in the photograph. The name I didn't know, the face I couldn't picture, the life that had been erased so completely I didn't even know what I was missing.
"That should be impossible," I said.
"It should be."
I walked. The trees watched. The dandelion seeds drifted against the wind.
"Which means either your records are incomplete," I said, "or I don't belong here."
He didn't answer. That was an answer in itself.
"You're not from here either," I said. It wasn't a guess. It was the way he moved through this place—too deliberately, too carefully. Like someone walking through a room full of things that might break.
"What makes you say that?"
I gestured at the world around us. The perfect trees. The perfect grass. The perfect, looping birdsong. "This place feels wrong. Like a photograph that's been edited. Too clean. Too arranged." I looked at him. "But you move through it like you're used to it. Like you know how to be in a place that's pretending to be something it's not."
He stopped walking. I stopped too, a few paces ahead, my back to him.
"You see things," he said.
"I'm a physicist. I'm trained to notice when the universe isn't behaving."
"Your world—" He stopped. I waited. When he spoke again, his voice was different. Softer. "Your world. What happened to it?"
The question landed in my chest like a stone. I had been waiting for it, I realized. Waiting for someone to ask. Waiting for the words to form in my mouth.
"My world is dying," I said. The words came out flat. Practiced. I had said them so many times, to so many people who didn't really want to know. "The laws of reality are forgetting themselves. Light, sound, gravity—they stop working sometimes. People disappear. Not die. Disappear. One day they're there, and the next they're not, and no one remembers them enough to mourn."
I turned to face him. His expression was unreadable, but his eye—that strange, starry eye—was fixed on me with an intensity that made my skin prickle.
"I stepped through a hole in the sky because there was nothing left for me on the other side. If I was going to disappear, I wanted it to mean something."
He was quiet for a long time. The trees swayed. The birds looped their three-note song. I watched him watch me, and I wondered what he was looking for.
"You want it to mean something," he said. "What?"
I thought about the question. I had been asking it for six months, ever since the diagnosis, ever since the first signs of decay, ever since I realized that the world was ending not with a bang but with a slow, quiet forgetting.
"I don't know yet," I said. "But I'll know it when I see it."
He started walking again. I followed.
...
We reached the edge of the forest as the sun was beginning its descent, the light turning gold and thick. The trees fell away, and I saw it.
Mondstadt.
The city was beautiful in the way that postcards are beautiful. Perfect. Static. A snapshot of a place that had never existed. White stone walls, red-tiled roofs, windmills turning in perfect synchronization. Clouds arranged in neat clusters above it, as if someone had decided that was where clouds should be and no one had bothered to argue.
"It's too perfect," I said.
"Nothing here is perfect," Dainsleif said. He had stopped beside me, his shadow long and dark against the gold-lit grass. "But they've spent a very long time trying to make it look that way."
I studied the city. The walls were too clean, the streets too straight, the windows too evenly spaced. It was a model. A diorama. A place designed by someone who had never lived in a place, only looked at them from a distance.
"You want me to go in there," I said.
It wasn't a question. I could feel it in the way he stood, the way he watched me watch the city. He had been leading me here from the beginning. The beach, the path, the forest—all of it had been a road to this moment.
"I want you to see it," he said. "What happens to a world when its god decides that the only way to protect people is to take away their choices. What happens to a city when sadness becomes a crime. I want you to see it, and then I want you to ask yourself why you were brought here."
I turned to look at him. His face was in shadow, his eye the only light.
"I wasn't brought here," I said. "I fell."
"Did you?"
The question hung in the air between us. I didn't answer. I couldn't. Because the truth was, I didn't know anymore. I had stepped through the Rift because there was nothing left for me. But maybe that wasn't the whole truth. Maybe there was something else. Something I hadn't let myself name.
We stood at the edge of the forest, looking at the city. The windmills turned. The clouds held. In the distance, I could hear singing—a melody without words, sweet and hollow and endless.
"You're not going to tell me what to do," I said.
"You wouldn't listen if I did."
"Probably not."
A smile tugged at my mouth. It was small, tired, barely there—but it was real. The first real thing I had felt since I stepped through the Rift.
Maybe that's what I'm looking for, I thought. Something real.
"Then let's go see your beautiful cage," I said.
I stepped out of the trees and started walking toward the city. The grass was soft under my boots, the air warm on my face, the singing growing louder with each step. Behind me, I heard Dainsleif follow.
I didn't look back. I didn't need to. I knew he would be there.
The question was, what would I find when I reached the walls?
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Author's Note
What are your opinons on Dainsleif and Elara currently. Do you like them? Also do you guys like this perspective styled writing?
Also I changed the cover, do you think it's cool? I personally really like it. I also have other options that also look good, please tell me which one you think looks good.