Flowers of the night

Prompt: “un rifugio alla fine del mondo”
Missione: M1 (week 1)
Parole: 622
Rating: teen up
Warnings: mentions of war, headcanon, minor spoilers

The Black Tower stands there, watching a world on fire like the last man on a battlefield of ruin and devastation. Dainsleif knows what a collapsing world looks like and the awful feeling of realisation first, then helplessness immediately after. The exact moment when one stares at flames engulfing everything, with not a single life to spare or to save, not even sacrificing themselves.

The Tower, though, is safe. For now. A shelter forgotten by everyone, made of silence; the faint scent of ashes from the east and the smell of burnt bodies from the south come together, shattering against stone and then going away with the wind. It’s like an oasis of grotesque peace, one that instead of making Dainsleif feel like it’s going to be fine makes him want to puke. 

There’s something almost heroic about the way the man in front of him can stare at such desolation without a flinch. A sort of familiar resignation in the way his shoulders slightly dropped once they stopped climbing the stairs, a lost gaze for a lost dream. Dainsleif stays there, two steps behind his prince as Kaeya embraces everything with his eye— the reddish sky, the smoke, the despair. And when the prince looks back at him, a peaceful expression is mixed with a pain so deep that a man’s soul can only be dumbed by it. He knows there’s no other way to survive this.

Dainsleif feels like he failed. He could have done better, he could have saved lives and yet this is all he managed to obtain; like a curse, time repeats and repeats and repeats— is the abyss so deep, so filthy that once you stare into it there’s no way out? That no matter what he tries, the odds will never be in his favour? In his people’s favour?

"Dainsleif," Kaeya's voice is soft like silk brushing against the skin as he calls his name, "do you think it will reach us?" he asks. Dainsleif looks outside the small window that the tower has to offer, a single gap in an iron defence. The sneaker sound of the Abyss Mages is filling the air, despite being a sound in the distance. He's not sure about what his prince wants to hear in response to his question. Yet, the lack of it doesn't seem to bother him— it's like slowly walking on ice while hoping it doesn't break under your feet.

"Oh," Dainsleif hears him say, a small nuance of fun in Kaeya's voice, "looks like he's not good at letting go, after all. We really haven't changed since we were kids, have we?" 

He has seen (fought) thousands of battles and yet the way Kaeya says it makes him shiver. The way his prince manages to convey the most nostalgic affection and, at the same time, his cruel desire to protect himself from the past. The same past that is now nothing but some kind of a long dream for him. And he wants to crush it.

So Dainsleif gets close to look outside as well: down there, on a bloody path, a red-haired man is stubbornly getting close to where they are. The Black Tower is not going to fall because of a single warrior— that's what it's meant to be: a refuge at the edge of the world, the starting point of a new era.

In a very distant past, Dainsleif once witnessed Khaenri'ah being destroyed.

His prince raises his right hand— now it's Mondstadt that it's going to be turned into ashes. With nothing but cursed eyes to watch as it happens.