ophiuchus

[7.2 preload] ⚠️ Snezhnaya wind glider + Vera’s Melancholy author mention! Spoilers, it’s not Kleiner, it’s not Hroptatyr. Honestly, I’m leaning towards Alice now. If not, maybe someone we haven’t met yet, or another witch? The ending would particularly be an interesting twist if it’s Alice, and she went on to “get in touch with whoever was in charge of the planet’s borders” only to end up becoming the one in charge… maybe because Teyvat didn’t have someone in charge? Or it was Asmoday but her absence led to all these events + Alice becoming in charge. Here’s the story: One cannot have both stars and snow. Either the snow clouds smother the starry sky, or the stellar dome shines brightly and the night is clear. And of course, if all is well with the weather in a brightly lit corner of the mortal realm, one shall likely see neither stars nor snow. As for this sky-palace, it reposed above the clouds, closer to the false dome of stars. Naturally, there was no snowfall here. Of course, in this earthly paradise where time has frozen still, there is little point in discussing day and night, the changing seasons, temperature, precipitation probabilities... After breaking free of her confinement, she found that this floor was completely deserted, save for two creatures that looked rather like hands, watching her with curiosity. She could not even tell which was the left hand and which was the right. The temple's owner was nowhere to be found, and this floor was disconnected from the more populous levels below. For the time being, she had no way to leave the temple and escape without alerting the Watch. So, she had no choice but to chat with the two little hands to while away the time. "Oh, so your world has tales of a bottle-dwelling divinity too. Jinns, Archons, angels... Whatever. Anything that grants people's wishes is probably a little psychologically unsound. And actually, by the third day after I was sealed in that coffin, I'd already decided that I'd kill the first person I saw after getting out." And of course, she was only joking. She pressed all ten fingertips against those of one little hand, swaying their joined palms from side to side. "In a tale from some distant land, there was a divinity inside a bottle... Sakhr, or something like that. It even shared a name with your master, in a manner of speaking. Trapped in that bottle, its longing for freedom slowly turned into hatred for everything around it. Fortunately, it came to its senses before it was too late. As for how the story ends, you ask?" "I don't remember. It probably went off to explore a new world with the one who set them free. Who knows? That's just what I'd expect from the kind of popular fiction I usually read." "If you don't keep yourself conscious, then yeah, there's really no sense of time inside this coffin. But I had to crack it. It was probably like solving a twenty-nine-story Tower of Hanoi. Years of keeping your mind completely focused. Pretty exhausting, you know." Another day, she played Cat's Cradle with the two little hands. "Oh, you call that toy a Pagoda Stack in your world. Never mind. It's essentially a mathematical model. As long as you understand it, that's all that matters. I don't actually know much about the culture and history of your planet. I write for the money, and I read novels for entertainment. I'm not particularly interested in learning about other worlds, nor do I have the leisure for all that metaphorical nonsense." "You say there was once a civilization in this world that had both azure stars and white snow. Huh? Isn't the starry sky in this world fake?" On the final day, her hands were tucked inside her sleeves, while the two little hands sat quietly to one side. "But I suppose it doesn't matter anymore, does it? You say it 'once' existed, which means it doesn't anymore. You can't see it now anyway, so there's no need to dwell on it." (1/2)