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Your encounter with the strange curator is entirely by chance.
It is late in the evening, and you decide to pay a visit to the nearby museum in the hopes of gaining some idea of what to do for your final project. Museums aren’t exactly your preferred source of inspiration, but none of the art galleries you went to had sparked anything and tomorrow is the deadline for your first draft, so at this point you’re getting a little desperate.
The Liyuean National Museum is a sprawling three-story building, and it is known for being both the largest museum and also the museum with the most comprehensive collection of historical artefacts in the country. Although the sky has not yet darkened completely, it is late enough that most people would be preparing to return home, so no queue obstructs you when you slip through the museum’s glass doors. Still, you can't help but feel a little like a thief when the doors close behind you quietly.
The museum is constructed in the style of traditional Liyuean architecture: careful symmetry, wooden columns and panelling painted in deep reds and yellows, and tall walls carefully constructed to give the impression of raised pavilions and compounds. Warm yellow lights cast a soft glow to the large display rooms, negating their intimidating opulence.
You neither expect nor want to get through all of it tonight, so you just take your time surveying the displays. Ancient weapons, old recipes scribbled in a crumbling notebook, traditional clothing and armour maintained in pristine condition…the more you look around, the more you find yourself drawn to the objects displayed in the museum’s glass cases. There’s one thing that catches your eye, though, tucked away in a corner, and you lean forward…
“You have a unique taste in artefacts.”
You can’t help the sharp flinch as you whirl away from the unique contraption you had just been looking at. A retort forms on your tongue, but it quickly dies when you face the man who had spoken so suddenly.
He looks back at you calmly, hands clasped behind his back. His features and long dark hair mark his Liyuean heritage, and he is quite classically handsome: broad-shouldered and tall, dressed in a sleek – and undoubtedly expensive – Liyuean-style suit and polished shoes, he would not look out of place on the covers of your sister’s glossy fashion magazines. The edges of his eyes are lined in a vivid red, a colour that should have clashed with his otherwise formal attire, but strangely seems to suit him.
He apologises for startling you, and introduces himself as the curator of the museum.
“I was just intrigued by your interest in this particular display,” he explains, gesturing to the contraption, “it is situated in a relatively less conspicuous area, and so most visitors tend to miss it in favour of more eye-catching artefacts. If I may ask, what drew you to it?”
Indeed, the display had been tucked away in a corner of the room, a distance away from the far more eye-catching centrepiece: a gleaming golden spear that glints under the light. Still, his question leaves you at a loss for words; partially because he’d asked it so directly, and partially because you yourself don’t know the answer. Somehow, it had been the first thing in the museum that caught your eye, the small humanoid amalgamation of cogs and machinery sparking the interest of your inner designer. You don’t know what its purpose was, back in ancient times, but it almost looks like some sort of toy young boys would play with.
When you tell the curator this, however, the corners of his lips quirk upwards slightly in a small smile.
“Ruin Guards were certainly not toys,” he explains, pointing to the display card pinned to the glass case, “far from it, in fact – this is but a small-scale replica of what they used to look like, as their original forms would tower above the both of us quite easily. But they do indeed look quite harmless when sized down to such a scale, do they not?”
You find yourself surprised by his manner of speech, which is far more formal than what you had expected from a man his age – although you are not entirely sure how old he is. There are no wrinkles or laugh lines at the corners of his mouth or eyes, but there is an agelessness in his features that makes that question difficult to answer: something about the quiet calmness in his gaze, perhaps, or the air of scholarly sophistication draped around his shoulders like a robe. He could be anywhere from twenty to forty years old.
He turns to you, then, head cocking slightly to the side in curiosity. “You are from Snezhnaya, yes? What brings you here, especially at this hour?”
You blush in embarrassment, unwilling to admit that you had dashed here from your student flat in a fit of desperation to meet your deadline. Still, you manage to cobble together some semblance of an explanation about wanting to know more about the history of Liyue, awkwardly fiddling at your earring dangling from your left ear.
The curator nods, but his gaze follows your movement, lingering for a moment longer than is natural. You ask him if anything is the matter, and he shifts his gaze back to your face, eyes as tranquil as ever. This close to him, you notice that his irises are a very pale shade of brown, so pale that they almost seem to gleam golden under the yellow light.
“I apologise,” he says smoothly, regaining his calm so quickly that it suddenly leaves you unsure if you had actually been mistaken, “you just look like someone I used to know.”
You can’t help your curiosity: “Are they a friend of yours?”
He offers another small smile in response. The slight expression transforms his demeanour, softening the aloof distance of his beauty into something a little more human.
“Yes.”
Saying no more on the matter, he transitions to another topic. “So you are a student on exchange here…that certainly explains it. And you said you were studying product design, were you not? Was that why you were looking at the Ruin Guard display?”
You nod, exclaiming that you didn’t know Ruin Guards looked like that, though you've only read about them in textbooks and old articles. From what you've read, they were definitely dangerous, but sometimes especially powerful people would seek them out intentionally – like Tartaglia of the Fatui, who had once decimated a whole factory of them.
The curator pauses. His expression does not change in the slightest, but somehow, something tells you that you’ve surprised him – you get the impression that that doesn’t exactly happen often.
“You know of Tartaglia? You are quite well-versed in Liyuean history.”
You laugh nervously, fiddling at your earring again. This time, you notice that the curator’s gaze does not flicker towards your earring, instead staying steadfastly on your face. You admit that you've just heard bits and pieces about Tartaglia from old myths and legends, like that fairytale that said he nearly unleashed an ancient god to destroy Liyue for fun.
The curator blinks once, seemingly bewildered. “‘For fun…?’”
He almost looks taken aback, but before you can analyse the emotion on his face, it disappears in lieu of a neutral expression. “No, not at all. Tartaglia unleashed the ancient god Osial purely to fulfil his mission to his archon, the ruler of Snezhnaya, which was where he hailed from. He may have revelled in chaos, but above all, he was a man who stuck to his ideals, and he found no pleasure in tormenting the weak…according to the records, at least.”
His unhurried manner of speaking remains unchanged, but as he finishes his last sentence, his placid tone hardens. It is almost as if he had wanted to specifically emphasise his point, which was that apparently…one of the foundational myths behind modern Liyue, and its following historical texts, was fundamentally wrong in its characterisation of the man said to be its greatest villain.
This time, it is your turn to blink, utterly gobsmacked. That…doesn’t sound like what you've read at all. Wasn’t Tartaglia cruel and inhumane, like all of the Snezhnayan archon’s Harbingers? How could he have cared about civilians?
“Cruel and inhumane…” There is a hint of irony in the gentle slant of the curator’s mouth, and he folds his arms behind his back as he turns towards the Ruin Guard display. When he continues, he still faces the display, as if speaking to the Ruin Guard itself.
“No,” he murmurs, staring at the small model of the automaton in the glass display case. There is a distance in his eyes that makes you think that he’s not truly looking at the Ruin Guard, but rather something else. “Certainly, some of the Tsaritsa’s Harbingers were so. The sixth Harbinger, for instance, was well-known for his brand of callous cruelty, and the Harbinger known as Il Dottore was notorious for his ventures in human experimentation. Yet, most of the eleven were surprisingly human in their conduct and desires – the tragic yet beautiful La Signora comes to mind. And Tartaglia, who had a human lifespan and desired everything that the vivaciousness of life could offer him…was the most human of them all.”
He stops abruptly then, cutting himself off. Still, you find himself hanging onto his words, the hushed silence left behind by them ringing deafeningly in the empty museum.
“My apologies,” the curator turns back to you. When you meet his eyes, they are as placid as when you first met him, still pools of liquid amber undisturbed by any ripples. “I have been told that I tend to be… overly absorbed when talking about a topic of interest.”
You hurry to shake your head and tell him the truth: that you enjoyed listening to him talk. He has a way of bringing the people he talks about to life — the genuine passion in his voice is contagious, and he makes historical figures sound like actual people who existed, and not just lines in a textbook. In fact…
You rub the back of your head, resisting the urge to look away from the curator’s steady gaze, and make a request: if he could you talk more about Tartaglia. It’s just…that he sounds so different from what you've read, so you'd like to know more.
And it’s not even a lie. In all the (admittedly few) accounts you’ve read of the infamous Tartaglia, he was always described as a cruel, vicious man who delighted in war and bloodshed. To hear someone else describe him as someone completely different…it intrigues you.
For a moment, the curator does not reply, and you wonder if you’ve been rude, and if you had committed some sort of Liyuean faux pas somehow.
But just as you open your mouth to apologise, the curator smiles. It strikes you that this expression is the most genuine of what you had seen on his face tonight – you hadn’t even known that his expressions had not been entirely genuine.
“Tomorrow,” he says gently, “should you come by at the same time again, I will be here. For now, however, it is late, and you should return home.”
So you do.
The next evening, when you arrive at the museum, the curator is already there. He greets you politely, a tinge of warmth in his features, and takes you up the stairs to the second floor, where the artefacts from the pre-Celestial War era are located. Not surprisingly, there are fewer artefacts on this floor than the first – the War destroyed both human lives and history alike, leaving behind little of the time before it.
“Not much is known about Tartaglia’s early life, but it is speculated that he came from humble origins.” He draws your attention to a yellowed map depicting the geography of ancient Snezhnaya framed on one of the walls, and points to an area on the west coast. “Since the discovery of the Morepsok Tomb, where the remains of a male likely belonging to Tartaglia were discovered, many have argued that he was born there in Morepsok, a small fishing village on the outskirts of Snezhnaya.”
Huh. The Bloody Vanguard of the Tsaritsa, growing up in a fishing village? That hadn’t been what you’d expected – you’d assumed that Tartaglia had been from a noble family, as was often the case for high-ranking military officials of that time. Il Dottore, for example, was rumoured to have literally signed his correspondences as ‘the high-born Il Dottore.’ But how did they know it was him?
"Tartaglia's unique mask, the mark of the Tsaritsa's eleventh Harbinger, was found in the same tomb," is your answer. The curator shows you to another glass case where a mask is displayed.
It is old, the crimson paint and delicate detailing dulled and worn away by time. You wonder what it must have looked like back then, all gleaming red paint and golden markings and sharp edges designed to frighten, but try as you might you cannot imagine it, like trying to reconstruct the subject of a faded photo. Perhaps it had been a symbol of intimidation back when its owner was alive, but in the cold display case under the spotlight, it is only another piece of history left behind in the footfalls of time.
Well, you suppose that’s as much of an identifier as anything else. But as one of Snezhnaya’s highest ranked officials, wouldn’t he have been buried by the palace grounds, as tradition of that time dictated?
“You’re well-informed,” the curator says, and you think he seems impressed. Nonetheless, he crosses his arms, as if pondering over his answer. “In some of his recorded correspondences, Tartaglia would make references to his parents and siblings, and he would often write to his family while he was abroad on missions. It would not be a large leap of logic to presume that he wished to be buried in his hometown, where they resided.”
Family? Tartaglia had a family?
At this, the curator shoots you a wry glance. “He was a human being just like you, you realise. Of course he had a family: he was the middle child in a family of five children.”
You think there’s something a little strange in what he said, but you put it aside as you try to reconcile the man your history textbooks described as bloodthirsty and cruel, with the almost…humanised version that you’re hearing. Tartaglia, the captain of Snezhnaya’s Imperial Vanguard, who loved his family and wrote letters to them frequently.
Though you suppose it makes sense – he was human, after all, just as the curator had said. And just like the rest of humanity, he wasn’t just a one-dimensional character. He had his own likes and dislikes, his own motivations and desires. And he’d had to be somewhat decent at socialising to be sent under the guise of a diplomat during his infamous Liyue mission; if you recall correctly, the people of Liyue actually had a decent opinion of him before he’d released Osial, and he’d actually gotten close to a few of them. He was rumoured to have visited a restaurant in the commercial district frequently, and some anecdotes you’d read mentioned often seeing him with someone… A consultant of some kind? You don’t remember…
“You certainly have a passion for this subject, to read so deep into it.” The curator raises an eyebrow. “What sparked this interest in such a niche period of history?
In response, you pull out your phone and open your photo gallery, showing your screen to him when you find your desired picture.
It’s a photo you had taken of one of the pictures at the forefront of your The Complete History of Liyue textbook. The photo is blurry and black-and-white, as the kamera had just recently been invented then, and it depicts a dinner gathering in some sort of large pavilion. However, the large group of people in the centre of the photo isn’t what had captured your attention then.
At the left corner of the photo slightly out of focus in the background, there is a table behind the one at the centre of the photo. Two men are seated at the table: a dark-haired man whose face is obscured by one of the people at the front of the picture, and another man who is wearing distinctly non-Liyuean clothing and a very familiar mask at the side of his head. An obvious conclusion can be drawn: that you had noticed the strangely-dressed man in your textbook and had gotten intrigued.
What you don’t say is that although the mask had initially intrigued you in the beginning, it was the glimpse of his portrait on the next page of your textbook that had grabbed your attention. It had just been a simple black-and-white sketch, a rough approximation – since there had been no known photos of him that were recovered – of Snezhnaya’s youngest Harbinger cobbled together from anecdotes and accounts of people alive at that time, but the similarity in that sketched face to your own had startled you.
You know that it isn’t exactly unheard of for people to share similarities in appearance to strangers, but Tartaglia’s face…
He looked so much like you (or was it that you looked so much like him?) that you could have been brothers.
“Ah, I see,” the curator murmurs, before he nods. “Well, you’re certainly correct. Tartaglia was rumoured to have met the acquaintance of a consultant when he sought his services to facilitate his integration into Liyue. They had gotten quite close before the completion of his mission and his return to Snezhnaya.”
He opens his mouth as if to continue, but then closes it again with a faint click. You look at him in askance, but he simply smiles at you and does not elaborate.
To your disappointment, no matter how much you hint at the subject, for the rest of your meeting he does not speak again of the mysterious consultant.
That night, you have a strange dream.
In it, you’re sitting in a restaurant. Judging by the food and decor, it is a Liyuean restaurant, but you are unfamiliar with the dishes and the furnishings seem antiquated in the way some establishments try and fail to emulate. The table before you holds a spread of food, but at this moment you only have eyes for the man eating with you.
You can’t make out his features, no matter how hard you try – despite sitting so close to him, whenever you try to focus on his face, it slips from you like a fleeting thought. Yet somehow, you know he’s smiling. He props his chin on his hand as he leans close, and he says something but you can’t hear it.
A stray curl of ginger hair falls in his eyes, and you want to reach out and brush it back. Maybe he’ll let you card your fingers through his hair, if you ask.
Who is this man?
The man throws his head back and laughs; you still cannot hear him, but you know, with a certainty that should surprise you but doesn’t, that his laughter is genuine. Something warm flutters in the centre of your ribcage, spreading through your chest like molten gold, and this time you don’t resist the urge to reach out and –
The next time you see the curator is two weeks later, after your exams.
You meet him at the entrance of the museum, and he is dressed exactly the same as when you last saw him, in his sleek suit and polished shoes. He smiles and asks how your exams went.
You rub the back of your neck, laughing nervously – you’d completely bombed them, and not in a good way. His smile widens, eyes shining in amusement, and you want to call him out for laughing at your misery but the expression passes as quickly as it comes.
“I presume you wish to resume our discussion?” He says more than asks, leading you up the familiar flight of stairs to the second floor.
He’s right. Last time, you’d only talked about Tartaglia’s biography – well, what little of it that had been recorded –, starting from when he joined the Fatui organisation at the age of fourteen. You had just started on his mission to Liyue, the beginning of what would later be named the Osial Incident, when it had gotten too late for you to stay any longer. As you reach the second floor, the curator continues from where he had left off.
“Tartaglia was sent to Liyue in order to procure the gnosis of Liyue’s archon, Rex Lapis. He was assigned a station at the head of a large bank in Liyue, under the guise of a foreign diplomat, and he made efforts to blend in, so to speak. To do so, he sought the assistance of a consultant – the one you mentioned during our last meeting – who was well-versed in both the Liyuean language and culture to learn more about Liyue.”
This you know somewhat. Apparently a few receipts of their extravagant meals together still exist today; were they close, then, to have eaten together more than once? Or were they all just business meetings?
The curator blinks slowly at your question, making a low, considering noise in his throat. You hadn’t noticed it before, but there is an orb of some sort hanging by his hip. It is perfectly spherical and polished to a gleam, but its surface is dull, with only the faintest tinge of blue – it might have glowed a brilliant sapphire, once. A Liyuean fashion trend? But he doesn’t strike you as the sort of person to conform to something as superficial as fast fashion...
“...No one knows for certain,” he replies, “some have said that they had grown to be friends, while others claim they maintained a strictly business relationship. Without a clear record of the events that transpired then, it is hard to say.”
Huh. in that case, you’re curious as to what he thinks of their relationship.
He doesn’t seem very surprised at that question, crossing his arms and seemingly pondering over his answer.
In the next moment, he strides over to the display case that holds Tartaglia's mask, and presses something on the wooden stand it rests on. A hidden drawer that you had never seen before pops out, and he retrieves something from it.
He turns back to you. In his hands are an envelope and a letter, both yellowed with age. He hands them out to you.
“This was found in the Morepesok Tomb, and was one of the reasons that historians and archaeologists alike agree on the identity of the body buried there.”
Gingerly, you take both items from his hands. Just before you start to read the letter, you notice that although a sender’s address is written in a neat script, the receiver’s address is conspicuously missing. Was the letter never sent?
You turn your attention to the letter. It crinkles in your hold no matter how light your touch is, as if it would crumble in your hands at the slightest movement.
The ink on the page has faded slightly with time, but that does not detract from the clean, elegant writing, the same as the one written on the front of the envelope, that fills the paper.
My Dearest Ajax,
How are you? It has been some time since we last met. The weather is growing colder in Liyue, and I often find myself thinking about the past. It is not something I should indulge in too frequently, but old habits are difficult to leave behind.
I once thought that I had grown used to living: much like a pebble by the sidewalk that spends lifetimes without moving from its place, I thought it had become natural for me to live apart from the world, untouched by all except for the inevitable erosion of time. You’d laugh at me, I think – ‘you might as well not have retired, then, ’ you would point out, like you told me once when I expressed those thoughts with you.
You were right, as always. For all my plans to become a
mortal
, I had forgotten how to learn to live like one. As a youth, it had always seemed so cumbersome to me, to learn all the rigid rules that humanity followed. Even now, I find myself struggling.
But with you, it is different. When I am with you, I feel none of the burden that had started to wear away at me in the later years of my reign. They say that one does not miss the shade until one sees the sun, and one does not know thirst until one sees the ocean. The same could be said for me, for if I had not met you, I would not have known how freeing it was to simply…be. To live day to day without the weight of responsibility on my shoulders.
Do you remember that afternoon at Yaoguang Shoal? You walked barefoot by the shore, sleeves rolled up to your elbows, trailing footprints in the sand. You found a starconch shining in the shallow ocean bed, marvelling at its beauty, and held it close to your ear when I told you of its legend. Behind you, the sun had sunk below the horizon, setting it aglow with orange tongues of flame, and yet the sheer joy on your face eclipsed its beauty entirely. You looked at me and laughed, your hair gleaming burnished red under the dying sun, and I wanted
I visited Yaoguang Shoal again this afternoon. Close to the waves, I found a lovely starconch that I think you would have liked. I brought it home and polished it until it shone with a beautiful lustre, but I am at a loss as to where to place it; nowhere that I have positioned it so far seems right. Perhaps you would know – you always had a far better sense for interior design than I.
Night is falling, so I'm afraid I must cut this letter short. Recently, I have taken up the habit of sleeping at the end of day, much like
Barbatos
does. It is something I rarely indulge in, but these days I find myself gravitating towards the
human
experience of dreaming. Perhaps it is because I miss you that I wish to see your face again, even if it is only in a dream.
Until we meet again.
Yours always,
Zhongli
There are a few words that have been smudged, rendering them unreadable, but it is the passage towards the end of the letter that has been completely blacked out that draws your attention. You squint at it, but try as you might you cannot parse a single word behind the black ink.
“Ajax was Tartaglia’s birth name,” the curator comments, taking the letter and envelope back from you. More swiftly than you had expected, he tucks them back into the drawer and locks it again. “It is the general consensus that the writer of this letter was the consultant he frequently associated with.”
You think they must have been close, for them to continue communicating even after Tartaglia had left Liyue, and you say so.
At this, the curator pauses. From his position by the display case, an overhead light shines directly behind him, draping his face in shadow. A moment later, however, he turns his head slightly in your direction, once again allowing the light to illuminate his expression.
It hasn’t changed much – not that you were expecting it to – but you think that something in his gaze softens.
“I believe so, as well,” he says.
But you wonder.
If the letter was never sent, how did it end up an ocean away in Tartaglia’s tomb?
You continue to meet the curator at the museum, though your meetings were always sporadic and followed no set schedule. Strangely, although you are always the one taking the initiative by going to the museum, you will always, without fail, find him there, in his impeccable suit and implacable smile.
You never see him in anything else, always finding him in that same suit, unchanging, like everything else about him. Most people will more or less experience a few changes over a short period of time: the length of their hair, perhaps, or a slight increase in weight. The curator, however, always remains exactly the same as when you had met him for the first time. It is as if he has been captured in a photograph still, his time forever frozen.
In a way, he is one of the few constants in your life, alongside the dreams.
They do not occur very frequently, though they are often set in a variety of locations: a plethora of restaurants, a grassy plain dotted with white and blue lilies; a bustling marketplace lined with stalls selling all kinds of goods. But it is always the same faceless man who appears in those dreams, the man with copper hair and a carefree smile.
Sometimes, he is happy, his laughter ringing in the air as he throws an arm around your shoulder. Other times, he is excited, mouth bared in a grin as he rushes at you with a strange blue sword in his hand. On rare occasions, he is quiet, a melancholy in him so deep it feels carved into his bones. And yet, the love in your chest that you feel – no, not you – for him remains ever constant, as unchanging as the bedrock beneath the earth, adoration stealing the air from your lungs and the words from your mouth. The magnitude of this emotion never fails to shock you, and you wonder what it is about this man that could inspire such devotion.
One night, you have yet another dream. You hear the waves first, the foaming tide crashing against the shore. The water does not reach your feet; you’re standing a distance away on the sand. Far enough so that your feet won’t be touched by the ocean, but close enough that you can see the man standing in the water.
He beckons you over, laughing, and says something. You cannot hear him, but somehow, you know he is saying: come here, xiansheng.
Xiansheng. Is that you? No, not you. Someone else – the other person whose dream you are experiencing, whose dreams you have experienced.
Ah. Here it is again, that love, swelling and crashing over you like a tidal wave. Your feet bring you closer, but you stop just at the edge of the shore, where the frothing waves meet sand. In your hands, you hold a grey jacket that you know is his.
The ocean water glints in the sun, clear and blue. You can see the silhouette of a man in it, and as you look closer, you realise that it is ‘you.’
‘You’ are tall and broad-shouldered, clad in a stately coat and suit in a fashion you have only seen in history textbooks. Somehow, it looks familiar, even though you’re sure you have never seen an outfit like that before in your life. Something similar, perhaps.
The waves settle, allowing you to take a closer look at ‘your’ face. You narrow your eyes, focusing on your shaky reflection…
A familiar pair of golden eyes, the edges lined with red.
The curator seems to be expecting you, for when you enter the front doors of the museum he is there, despite the late hour.
“I should have known it was you,” he says, apropos of nothing. A hint of nostalgia tints his words. “It has been so long that I have shared dreams with another, that I had forgotten the feeling.”
Your chest pounds. You had run all the way here as fast as you could, and now that you are here, you don’t know what to say.
Were those your dreams?
Who was that man? Why do you always dream about him?
Who are you?
In response, he tilts his head to the side, studying you. You resist the urge to shudder; his golden eyes are piercing, like he is looking right through you.
“You have questions,” he murmurs, “and I have the answers. Come with me.”
He turns and walks up and stairs, and you follow him. He passes the second floor where Tartaglia’s mask is displayed, the third floor, the fourth floor…you hadn’t even known the museum had more than two floors – looking from the outside, you can’t tell at all.
Finally, you arrive at the fifth floor, which given the lack of stairs leading to another floor, must be the topmost floor of the museum. The curator opens a plain wooden door leading to the floor, and you follow him in.
The fifth floor is less of a floor and more of an attic. It is the size of a tiny room, much smaller than the relatively sprawling lower floors of the museum, but what it lacks in space it makes up for in tidiness: it is quite sparsely decorated, with only a few objects lying around the room. A box full of some kind of blue seashells, a golden ring, a pair of ornate chopsticks…as far as decorations go, they would be considered eccentric at best.
However, it is the familiar painting at the centre of the room that catches your attention.
The large scroll depicts a portrait of a handsome young man standing by the ocean shore, rendered so realistically that you had almost mistaken it for a photo. It is old, old enough that the coloured ink has faded in uneven smudges, but enough of it remains that you can see the burnished red of the man's hair under the sunlight and the brilliant blue of his eyes.
He is dressed in some kind of elaborate uniform, the stiff and rigid style of the material reminding you of military regalia. Yet despite the stiffness of his attire, he has carelessly rolled his sleeves up to his elbows and his trouser pants to his ankles, and he looks behind his shoulder straight at the artist, some sort of shell clutched in his hand. A blue orb dangles by his hip, shining a brilliant sapphire in the sun.
But it is his expression that draws your focus: caught mid-laugh, the corners of his eyes crinkle in fond amusement, the object of his affections undoubtedly the person painting him onto their canvas. His feelings must have been returned, for it is this expression that the artist has painstakingly replicated, minute brush strokes capturing the curl of his lashes and the crinkles at the corners of his eyes in perfect detail.
To capture such a fleeting instant in their memory without a kamera...you can scarcely imagine the devotion behind every brush stroke, conveyed so clearly in the replication of the young man’s expression.
I love you, it says, I love you so much I recreated the image of you from my memory, because I cannot bear the thought of forgetting your face.
Instead of a signature, a single word is written on the bottom right corner of the portrait in elegant strokes:
Ajax .
You don’t understand. Tartaglia – Ajax – is clearly a stranger, someone who had lived and died thousands of years before your time. But something old and buried in your chest cries out in recognition, filled with a bone-deep longing so strong that it almost overwhelms you.
Big brother, it sobs, its voice pitched high like a young child’s.
You have three sisters. One is twice your age, and the other two are twins who are two years younger than you. You do not have a brother.
But you don’t even register the wetness on your cheeks until the curator hands you a handkerchief.
“Don’t cry, Mr. Teucer,” he says gently, closing your nerveless fingers around the handkerchief. He turns back towards the painting.
“Did you know? For all his zest for life, he disliked having his likeness captured, whether it be on film or on a canvas.” There is something almost painful in the way he looks at the painting, something in his gaze that reminds you of shattered glass. “Something about not being photogenic, he said, even though he could not be more wrong.”
He pauses. In that moment, despite his youthful face, he looks so, so, old.
“...Foolish boy.”
The bright lighting of the gallery deepens the shadows of his high cheekbones. Somehow, despite his straight posture and elegant suit, it makes him look empty, like someone has hollowed him out from the inside and left him only a shell of himself. You cannot see his expression through your blurred vision, but you think that perhaps it’s better that you can’t.
And yet.
The pieces gradually click into place in your head. Slowly at first, then faster, just like the first time you learnt to put together a jigsaw puzzle.
“Why?”
The question leaves your mouth before you can register it. Why. Why does he torment himself with his room? Why does he stay, with such loyalty and determination, in this museum? Why had he approached you in the first place, all those months ago?
Why is he telling you all of this?
He looks surprised at your question, and his expression softens. But for some reason, you know that tenderness in his eyes, that gentle affection, isn’t for you, not really. He isn’t even really looking at you at all.
“Why?” He repeats quietly. You do not know if he is speaking to you, or to the person he sees in your face.
“I deserve to know the truth.” You wipe your eyes with his handkerchief before meeting his eyes straight on. “I know nothing else about you.”
It’s strange. You’ve met so many times, so you naturally should know his name. He must have introduced himself when you first met him, and even if you had forgotten, it should have come up at least once during the rest of your encounters. But whenever you try to recall it, it slips away from you like you’re trying to grasp smoke between the gaps of your fingers. You don’t remember how you met in the first place, either. You know you met him when you visited the museum for the first time, but not what you were doing — what were you looking at? Why did he say to you? Yet, like his name, the memory escapes you.
Maybe when you part ways, you will even forget his face.
The curator doesn’t reply. His wordlessness rings in the air, like the hushed silence of an era long gone.
What must it be like, you wonder, spending day after day in a building filled with monuments to all the things you have lost, drifting from artefact to artefact, memory to memory. What must it be like to be a god, an old ghost surrounded by older memories, waiting to die alone?
The curator opens his mouth slightly, but makes no sound.
All of a sudden, he looks confused — like a young boy who embarks on a long adventure, but when the monster is killed and the journey is over, he turns back around and discovers that he can no longer find the way back home.
“I…”
Slowly, his gaze drifts to the red gemstone earring dangling on your ear, just like he had done the night you first met.
Somehow unwilling to look at him and the rawness in his eyes, you look down again at the blue orb by his hip. Upon closer inspection, you realise that it is not actually perfectly whole, but its exterior is instead marred with faint spiderweb cracks. The cracks themselves glow a gleaming gold, the shade of amber – the orb must have been shattered to pieces, and then painstakingly sealed back together.
Kintsugi, you think, or in Liyuean: 金缮。To repair with gold.
Judging by the fineness of the cracks in the orb, it must have been shattered into innumerable slivers of glass. You still don’t exactly know what it is, but how important must it be, for it to have been restored even after shattering beyond repair? And what does it say of the restorer, of the person who would have picked up every piece, every tiny sliver, and sealed them all together again one by one? Day after day, year after year, until slivers became fragments, and fragments became a whole again?
The curator looks back at you, an ocean of amber in his eyes, and you think you know the answer to your question.
“Perhaps it is just because…” he murmurs, five inches and an eternity between the two of you, “you look like someone I used to know.”
The next day, when you visit the museum again, the curator is nowhere to be found. When you question the staff and security guards, they stare at you uncomprehendingly.
You don’t know where he lives or the places he frequents; of all the times you have met him, it has always been at the museum. Now that you cannot find him there, you don’t know where else he could have gone – it is as if, without the museum, he is nothing else. A moon left adrift without a planet to orbit.
When you sneak up to the topmost floor, where Tartaglia’s portrait resides, you find that it is gone. Like the ocean tide that comes and goes without leaving any marks on the shore, both painting and artist have disappeared, leaving no footprints in the sand.
You imagine him in some other part of the city, starting another job: a book-keeper, perhaps, or a professor of some kind. Or maybe in another country; somewhere colder, somewhere a little further from home. Somehow, you cannot imagine him living anywhere but Liyue. Drifting from place to place, job to job; life to life. Surrounded by people, and yet always alone.
But then again… Your gaze drifts to the empty space where Tartaglia’s portrait once rested.
He wouldn’t exactly be alone, would he?
Somehow, you feel you should leave. Not because you feel uncomfortable, but simply because of the emptiness of the room. Like a stage that no longer holds any use after the music is over and all the actors are gone, this room too is meaningless without the curator and his lifetime of memories. You almost feel as if you’re intruding upon their absence, in a way, and so you get up, brush the nonexistent dust off your pants, and shut the door as you exit the room.
You leave the museum, and for the rest of your time in Liyue, never return.