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It all creeps back in only hours down the road — something sour that stays Collei’s tongue, something else, bitter and heavy that sinks down her throat into her stomach, and then finally, the daily miseries of her illness: the itching, exhaustion, stiffness, and numbness that locks her limbs into a stumble every couple of steps. The confident man who ripped the curse from out her neck reveals himself to be an awkward, sometimes discomfiting travel companion, and the westward path they follow puts the setting sun right in her eyes.
Cyno sets up camp for the night. Collei finds herself staring back towards the rolling green fields of Mondstadt, which sit sandwiched between the massive sheer cliffs of this “Stone Gate.” Somewhere back there lies her sun. She grows colder with every step taken away from it, and with the cold comes her ever-present bitterness.
“The fire is warm. You should sit,” Cyno says. His voice sends twinges of pain through the back of Collei’s neck as she wordlessly obeys. “Without the dark powers which held your Eleazer in remission, you must be exhausted.”
Well, duh, she almost snaps. It’s only because she’s tired that she tones it down to a half-hearted grunt, and then neither of them say much beyond that for a while.
Silence is her other awkward travel companion. She might prefer it. Silence doesn’t bustle about doing very competent camp-setting and paperwork things. It doesn’t make her feel the sting of injustice, that this man, who’s only a few years older than she is, didn’t have Eleazar, got to make “friends,” got to go to “school,” and wasn’t too hopelessly exhausted to learn how to do things beyond prolonging his own tiring existence. Silence doesn’t set the back of her neck throbbing with pain.
And she doesn’t have to fear that silence will grow frustrated with her behavior and leave. If she can trust in one thing, it’s that the silence of solitude will follow her always.
“You shouldn’t do that,” intrudes Cyno’s voice. When Collei blinks out of her haze, she notices she was scratching at the dry, scaling skin of her elbows. Logically, she knows he’s right. Out on her own, she follows a strict no-scratch policy, but she feels something in her smirk at the prospect of making Cyno’s night a little more difficult.
So she scratches — a little harder this time. She even lifts her hand to visibly scratch at a spot on her neck that’s bothered her especially bad all day. If he yells at her, she can yell back, and then he’ll chase her off, and she can get back to the sort of life she obviously deserves . . .
She stops scratching.
“. . . The itch must be unbearable,” he says. He doesn’t comment on the face she’s making, the face she assumes must be extremely pitiful based on the awkward regret gnawing at her heart. His consideration only makes her feel worse. “I have some salve that might ease the itch and help you sleep. Tomorrow, I’ll brew you an herbal tea from the Nilotpala Lotus, which will control the symptoms of Eleazar, including the exhaustion. For now, I suggest you apply the salve and rest.”
Bad things happen every time she opens her mouth, so she nods instead. After applying the oily paste the way Cyno suggests, she rolls out the bedroll Ms. Lisa gifted her and tries to sleep. She hears the man kill the fire just as she drifts off.
Many parts of her past are an indistinguishable blur, but this, she will always remember. She was not the only one who escaped the Fatui; she ran with a group of four, and the journey took them one by one until she was the sole survivor.
All of them were Eleazar patients at the Fatui’s phony clinic. The Archon Residue experiments had all but one of them in partial remission. In hindsight, it was obvious who would be the first to fall.
She still remembers waking in the middle of the night, her eyes crusty and stinging from the dust of travel. Through the bleary haze of sleep, she heard a muttering within the campsite: “. . . wa . . . ter . . . wa-ter . . .”
She didn’t think too hard about it before falling back asleep, and she curses it to this day.
When the group awoke next morning, they found the unlucky girl paralyzed in her sleep, arm outstretched toward her own bag. Her water flask lay tipped over on its side.
The three adults talked things out. Collei sat with the girl’s unblinking body, propped up against a tree trunk, and slowly fed her locked open mouth water from her flask. The lip of the flask tapped audibly against the hardened, scaly surface of her skin. She was immediately chastised for this. That day, collei learned that once she succumbs to Eleazar’s full-body paralysis, she will die of either dehydration or suffocation — from water sliding down her paralyzed airways.
They carried the girl with them for several days. She was young and scrawny, lighter than Collei even, so she wasn’t that inconvenient to sling over one of the adult’s backs as they walked. Collei often found herself murmuring to the unresponsive form when they camped down for nights, and sometimes she stared down the girl’s outstretched arm, fitting her hand into the gaps between splayed, scaly fingers.
Eventually the body began to reek. They found white things wriggling in the spaces between scales.
That was the day one of the adults carried the statuesque body out into the forest, and then came back without it.
In the morning, she feels her skin crawl from the dried, caked on salve, but at least she wasn’t woken by that stupid itching.
Then she remembers the conversation from last night, and her skin crawls for an entirely different reason.
“Um! Hey,” she says, a little too loudly. Cyno looks up from his reading. “You know, you can tell me if I’m being stupid. Or ungrateful. Or bratty. I know I’m really annoying to have around, but if I ever behave like I did last night or something, you can always just, I dunno, throw a stick at me or something. You’ve helped me out a lot and you’re still doing more than enough bringing me along so I won’t hold it against you or anything —”
“Wait,” Cyno says. Collei stops talking. The scholar takes a moment to scan the pages in front of him before glancing back upwards. “Ahem. Sumeru is rich in both Sumpter Beasts and trees, but why do you never see Sumpter Beasts hiding in trees?”
Collei blinks. “ . . . Er . . . because they’re big, and they don’t like small enclosed spaces?”
“No,” he answers, stone faced. “It’s because they’re very good at it.” Collei blinks again. “It’s a joke. You don’t get it? Here, let me explain: this joke utilizes the absurdity of large Sumpter Beasts hiding in small tree hollows to distract the listener from the connection that not being seen means one is very good at hiding. It also uses the double meaning of never seeing, as in the occurrence does not exist, to conceal the literal meaning of never seeing. See, it goes into great detail here in this book. I will share it with you once you learn how to read; I assure you it’s quite hysterical.”
“I . . . don’t understand,” Collei admits helplessly. Was that supposed to be funny?
“I think that explanation was quite comprehensive, but regardless,” he says, snapping the book closed, “now that you’ve stopped self deprecating, come sit by the fire and drink this Nilotpala tea.”
“Wait, I still don’t understand,” she insists. “Aren’t you pissed? I was trying to start a fight last night! I was a disrespectful brat, and you’re still gonna give me tea? Ms. Lisa’s not here anymore, so you don’t need to put up with me really —”
He holds up a hand. “Let us lay out what you did last night. One, you were taciturn and unsmiling.” Cyno shrugs here. “You’ve noticed I’m that way as well. Two, you scratched at Eleazar growths against my advice. Your standards for disrespect are much lower than mine.” He pours her a cup of steaming gold translucent liquid and holds it out. “Drink. Don’t waste your energy on unnecessary apologies. You’ll need that energy for the journey ahead.”
She takes the cup with a compliance driven by shock. She barely even feels the twinges of pain on the back of her neck through her utter lack of understanding. Is this what normal people think like? It’s so far from her long-enforced impressions that the caustic beast inside her is at a loss for what to attack.
The cup warms her hands and eases some of the numbness from her extremities. When she takes a long drink, she notices a dash of honey easing the heavy herbal flavor of the Nilop . . . Nilotna . . . the plant. It reminds her of the sweet snacks Amber bought her during Ludi Harpastum, and that alone is enough to bring a smile to her face.
As Collei tries to help Cyno break camp, she spies the slight spring to his step. He seems pleased with himself.
The grass begins to change color halfway through Liyue, turning more gold than green, and Collei is disgruntled once again. Green reminds her of Mondstadt, fun, and Amber. Why does the grass in Liyue have to be yellow?
“It’s because that’s how Liyue makes Mora,” Cyno says. “They grow it in the grass and on the trees.”
Collei stares up at him with wide eyes. “Really?”
“No,” he says, snapping his book shut. “It’s a joke. Don’t understand? Here, let me explain . . .”
After the longest hike of Collei’s life, Cyno treats her to a lavish lunch at Wangshu Inn. The colors and the flavors here are entirely different from what she had in Mondstadt, but delicious all the same. The sauce on the stir fried shrimp is smooth and savory, the simple chicken soup hides a hint of spice that warms her chest long after she finishes, and the vegetables are brilliantly green and crunchy. She finds herself wishing she had eaten like this her whole life. Then she thinks about how some people do eat like this their whole lives, and the food turns bitter on her tongue.
Is this how Amber thinks? No, of course not. She would be happy for other people having nice things. It’s just bitter trash rats like Collei who ruin things with jealousy.
“Eat like this often?” she asks, eager to feed the flames.
“No,” Cyno answers, and then does not elaborate.
Later, when they make tracks from Wangshu Inn, Cyno hands her a pack of wrapped crackers. Receiving no other instructions, Collei takes a nibble off the corner and promptly spits it out.
“Blech, what is this?” she asks. The sting on the back of her neck flares. “It tastes like sand.”
“Rations.” Cyno’s neutral expression takes on the slightest pitiful slant. If his ears were real, they might be drooping. “It’s what I eat eight out of ten days.”
Collei almost falls over from laughing.
They hunker down to camp halfway to Liyue harbor and, feeling more energetic tonight, Collei sets about systematically murdering every bug in the vicinity of her bedroll. Drawing a ring of ant corpses around her bed wards away the nightmares of bugs crawling up her body, breaking into her Eleazar growths, and laying eggs there. She remembers, that’s how the white wriggling things got between that girl’s scales.
Cyno takes one look at what she’s doing and asks, “Is that where you want to sleep?” She nods, and next thing she knows, there’s a tarp laid out on the ground for her.
She raises an eyebrow. He shrugs.
“It helps prevent bugs from getting into your bedding,” he explains. He sounds like he speaks from experience.
As Cyno reads another one of his terrible joke books by the fire, and Collei sits on her bedroll applying salve, she asks him, “Do you ever dream about bugs laying eggs in your body?”
Heck.
That’s a weird question. That’s the kind of question that gives away how much of a freak she is. Of course Cyno ignores it, or maybe he never heard it, but either way Collei holds her breath and suppresses the rising pressure in her throat that comes from regretting something with her whole body.
Eventually, she hears a page turn, and then Cyno replies, “No.”
Of course not, she thinks. That’s not how normal people think, idiot.
The man continues: “I do sometimes think about them crawling into my mouth.”
Collei blinks. Then she chuckles and rolls over to sleep.
Quietly, and perhaps too many minutes later to be proper, she says, “Thanks for the tarp.”
Nailed it. Queen of Conversation, this one.
After another awkwardly long pause, Cyno flips a page and says, “Of course.”
The other thing she thinks of, with morbid frequency, is what will happen to her body once the Eleazar takes her. She often considers which poses she wants to freeze in. That’s if she’s awake to realize what’s happening in the first place. Maybe she’ll just keep her hands to herself. Make it easier to carry her corpse.
She thinks that she will be alone when it happens, maybe out in the wild on her own; this way it’ll take ages for anybody to find her, if they even do, and then nature can take her. She pictures in graphic detail the way the crows will perch on her skin and peel the scales off one by one, cracking off the hardened flesh like how people husk Harra Fruits. Then the bugs will lay their eggs in what remains, and the wriggling white larvae will work together with the mushrooms to meld her body back into the forest dirt. If she has a choice, she’d like to go in a place where Rukkhashava Mushrooms grow. Rukkhashava Mushrooms are delicious.
But then she thinks of Amber finding her mushroom-ridden body. Would she recognize her? Do bugs eat hair? Do mushrooms? It’d probably ruin her day.
The Amber in her thoughts picks her up from the dirt and brushes the mushrooms and maggots off her arms. She scolds each and every crow into giving Collei her flesh back until her skin is once more smooth and unbroken.
“That’s not for years, silly,” imaginary Amber says, patting Collei’s head. “Remember, aren’t you gonna study in Sumeru until you can cure yourself? You’ll kick this Eleazar in the butt!”
And that’s usually when Collei stops thinking about it.
“We’ll meet with a close friend of mine in Gandharva Village,” Cyno says as they break camp at the border of Sumeru. “The forest’s energy is good for managing the symptoms of Eleazar, and Gandharva is much richer in natural energy than the City or the desert.”
“Oh,” Collei responds, happily warming her hands over the herbal tea. “Will you teach me how to read there?” Cyno coughs, lowering his book for just a moment.
“My friend will be the one teaching you, actually.”
Collei gives an ugly snort and jabs, “Then what use are you?”
“I’ll go back to my job.”
She stares.
He stares back.
“Wait, you’re leaving?” she squeaks.
“Was this not expected?”
She never really thought about it actually. Logically, it makes sense that he’d leave, and they’ve only known each other for a couple of days tops. It’s not even like she’s that attached to him anyways.
But she’s fallen into a routine at this point. She’ll probably miss him, and his stupid jokes, and the way he explains them afterwards. Maybe not as much as she misses Amber, but there’s a certain awkwardness to Cyno that Amber doesn’t have that makes Collei feel a little less terrible about how difficult she is, and that means something.
She claps a hand over the aching spot on the back of her neck and asks, “You’ll come to visit, right?”
Cyno doesn’t answer for the longest time, but she’s kinda used to that by now. He’s probably not trying to mince how eager he is to be rid of her. He’s probably just as bad as she is at finding the right thing to say.
He flips a page, but Collei bets he hasn’t been reading for quite a while now.
Eventually, he smiles. “Of course,” he says. “I have friends there after all.”