Flowers apart

7

Xiao stared down at the button that Lumine had given him long ago.

Maybe not that long ago, just about two weeks ago.

When everything was still fine. When Venti was still here.

"I believe you have the button to Lumine and Aether, right?" Jean had asked him when they were leaving. "Call them back if you want...I feel that they deserve to know," she smiled sadly. "Of course, it's your choice. You're the closest to Venti anyway."

Xiao doesn't want to call them back. He doesn't want to see two other additional faces pitying him or being disappointed in him for not being able to protect and keep Venti alive.

But like always, Jean was right.

Xiao pressed down on the button for a long, long time.

***

When Venti finally felt the light subsiding, he opened his eyes slowly, not knowing what to expect.

He half expected to still be in the backstage of Teyvat stadium, and find out that everything Aether and Lumine said was a joke. That it was all a weird magic trick. But obviously, Venti wouldn't be very convinced if that happened.

The other half of him was expecting his background to actually change, which was stupid, but he just can't help it. He keeps imagining that he'll end up in some magical, weird, out-of-the-world place that he can't recognise.

Well...none of those happened.

When he opened his eyes, he found himself a few feet away from the two twins, and he felt something pressing against his back. He turned around to see that he was leaning against a thick brown trunk of a tree, and somehow, he felt at peace, and it seems as if he could draw energy from the tree.

Something tingled at the edge of his mind, like there was a memory there, ready to be uncovered.

A fleeting conversation went past his brain, too fast to remember fully, too fast to catch.

All he heard was words, stringed together to form broken sentences.

"Windrise...your tree...it?"

"And...remember!"

"I'm your...I definitely...remember."

"This is..." he heard one of the twins say. He snapped back to reality.

"Windrise." The other twin confirmed. "It feels...different though."

"How so?" Aether asked his sister.

"Of course you don't know what it feels like to be here. You've never been," Lumine chuckled. "It used to feel much more...filled with energy? The winds here used to be much gentler, like a soft blanket getting laid out on you, but now...it just feels unnatural and rough. The Ameno energy is so weak I can barely feel it."

"Do you think it has anything to do with the reason they called us back?"

"I don't know..." As the twins conversed, Venti slowly crept behind the tree, tucking himself away from their vision, but not far enough to lose the twins from his line of sight either.

He watched the twins as they talked, and Aether was just casually leaning onto a statue that was right in front of the tree. It was a statue with a depiction of Barbatos, the long dead Ameno archon of Mondstadt.

Is this...a Statue of the Seven? He has never really seen one in real life before - it was all destroyed during the mess of battle during the Teyvat war - when people went crazy after losing all their archons.