The sand was colder than it should have been.
Elara lay on the beach, seawater pooling around her collarbones, staring at the man who knew her name. The wind here didn't smell like home—no ozone, no decay. It smelled of salt and something else, something floral and ancient that made her cells ache in recognition. Her body's ontological decay, that slow unraveling that had been killing her, had changed its tune. Instead of a fading whisper, it now hummed a low, dissonant chord against this world's frequency.
"Get up," Dainsleif said. He didn't offer his hand. "The tide here isn't governed by moons. It's governed by memory. In twenty minutes, this beach will be remembering a battle from two thousand years ago, and you don't want to be here when it does."
Elara pushed herself to her knees. Her pack was still strapped to her back, miraculously intact. The photograph of her mother was damp but legible. Small comfort.
"Where are we?" she asked again.
"East of what was once Sal Vindagnyr," he said, turning and walking toward the treeline. "Now it's just a corpse of a mountain with a nail in its heart. Follow me."
She followed because there was nothing else to do. The forest they entered was too quiet. Birds sang in perfect, repeating loops—the same three-note melody every thirty seconds. The leaves were the same impossible green she'd seen in the Tear's visions. The air felt thick, like walking through honey.
"I saw things," she said, her voice sounding too loud in the silence. "When I fell. Layers. Concepts."
"You passed through the Seven Foundations," Dainsleif said without turning. "The Ideals that hold this world together. Or that used to, before they..." He gestured vaguely, as if searching for a word. "Curdled."
"Curdled."
"Like milk left in the sun. Pure things gone sour. You felt them, didn't you? Freedom that suffocates. Contracts that entrap. Wisdom that hoards."
Elara remembered the gale of endless options, the weight of fossilized promises. She nodded, though he couldn't see her.
"You're the Fourth Descender," he continued. "The first was the illness. The second was the antibody that went rogue. The third was the placebo that somehow worked. And you... you're the first clean scan. A control subject from outside the experiment."
They reached a clearing where the ruins of something once grand lay scattered. White marble pillars, broken and covered in luminous moss. Dainsleif sat on a fallen column, his armor making no sound against the stone.
"Sit," he said. "You have questions. I have answers. They're not pleasant."
Elara sat opposite him, her pack between them like a talisman. "You knew my name."
"I know many things that haven't happened yet. Or that have already happened. Time here isn't... linear. Not anymore." He removed his hood.
His face was younger than his voice suggested, but his eyes were ancient. The blue glow came from his right eye, while the left was the color of tarnished silver. A scar cut through the left eyebrow, pale against his skin.
"You're from Khaenri'ah," she said, the name coming to her from nowhere. A fragment of knowledge lodged in her during the fall.
"I was," he said softly. "The Bough Keeper. My people didn't worship the gods. We studied them. Like physicians studying a disease."
He opened his palm again, and the tree symbol flickered to life above it, rotating slowly.
"This is Irminsul," he said. "The world tree. Not a physical tree, but the record of everything that is, was, or could be. My duty was to tend its purest branches in Khaenri'ah. To understand the nature of this reality."
Elara watched the tree made of light, its roots and branches weaving in and out of each other. "And what did you understand?"
"That the gods were sick." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Not corrupted. Not evil. Sick. Their divine hearts—their Ideals—had fractured. Barbatos, god of freedom, had become terrified of any choice that might lead to sorrow. So he made sure every choice led to joy. Morax, god of contracts, had become so obsessed with order that he began contracting reality itself. Beelzebul, who valued eternity..."
He paused, and for the first time, Elara saw genuine pain on his face.
"Beelzebul lost her sister in the Cataclysm. She couldn't bear the loss. So she stopped time. She stitched them together, Makoto's corpse forever comforting her, and froze Inazuma in that single moment of grief."
The image rose in Elara's mind unbidden: two bodies sewn together, one living in endless sorrow, one dead but moving in an eternal loop of comfort. She felt sick.
"Your people discovered this," she said.
"We diagnosed it," Dainsleif corrected. "Using ley line science, we peered into the hearts of the divine. We saw the fractures. The inversions. We thought... we thought if we could show them, they could heal."
He laughed, a dry, bitter sound.
"Celestia didn't destroy Khaenri'ah for defiance. They sanitized a quarantine zone. We were the doctors who'd gotten too close to the patients. So they burned the hospital down."
The tree symbol in his hand flickered, dimmed.
"The Abyss," Elara said slowly. "That's what you call yourselves now."
"We are what was cut away," he said. "The fever dream the body tried to excise. The malignant cells. They call us monsters." He looked at her, both eyes glowing now. "We're just the symptoms that got too loud."
Elara thought of her own body, of cells forgetting how to be cells. "And me? Why am I here?"
"You fell through a tear in the Firmament. The sky here is fake, you know. A dome. And it's cracking. Your arrival was... a draft from outside. A breath of air from a place that isn't sick with these same diseases."
He leaned forward. "You have no elemental allegiance. No connection to the ley lines. Your soul is of a different composition. When Barbatos' wind tries to shape your emotions, it will find nothing to grasp. When Morax's contracts try to bind you, they'll find you're not a party to this world's agreements."
She remembered the gale of endless choice sliding off her in the Tear. The weight of promises that couldn't find purchase.
"So I'm immune," she said.
"You're anamnesis," he said. "The immune response. A living blank space in Teyvat's chapter of Irminsul. And they will notice."
"They?"
"The gods. Celestia. The Tsaritsa." He stood abruptly. "Come. Dawn is coming, and with it, the wind starts listening."
He led her deeper into the ruins, to a chamber carved into the base of a shattered pillar. Inside, maps were pinned to the walls—not of geography, but of concepts. "Freedom Infection Spread Patterns." "Contractual Reality Collapse Zones." "Temporal Stasis Fields."
"This is what's left of the Khaenri'ahn diagnosis," Dainsleif said, lighting a lantern that cast long shadows. "Every nation is suffering a different manifestation of the same disease."
He pointed to a map marked "Mondstadt."
"Here. The Gale's Cage. Barbatos dissolved his consciousness into the very concept of choice in Mondstadt. Now, every choice must lead to happiness. Sorrow is treason. The Dandelion Sea is a surveillance network—every seed reports non-compliance. The Four Winds aren't protectors; they're wardens."
Another map. "Liyue. The Contract's Labyrinth. Morax became the fine print. Every agreement literally alters reality. Break a promise, and spacetime collapses locally. The Adepti hunt 'Reality Debtors.'"
"Inazuma. The Stitched Eternity." His finger trembled slightly over this map. "Time is frozen. The Raiden Shogun puppet isn't a ruler; she's the enforcer of the still frame. And in the palace..."
He didn't finish.
Elara looked at the maps. Seven nations. Seven sicknesses. "And Celestia? What do they do?"
"They manage," Dainsleif said, sinking into a chair that seemed made of petrified wood. "They're not tyrants. They're... overwhelmed orderlies in an asylum for divine madmen. The Gnoses aren't sources of power—they're restraints. The Archon War wasn't a battle for territory; they were a violent reorganization of the ward."
He looked exhausted. Five hundred years of exhaustion.
"Why are you telling me this?" Elara asked.
"Because you have a choice," he said. "You can walk into Mondstadt and let the wind try to make you happy until you break. You can let Celestia find you and make you a footnote in their records. Or..."
"Or?"
"You can let me guide you. Show you the sickness. And maybe, just maybe, you can do what we couldn't." His glowing eyes met hers. "Maybe you can remind them what they were before they broke."
Outside, the first light of dawn began to creep through the chamber's entrance. With it came a sound—distant, musical, like bells made of wind.
"That's the morning compliance check," Dainsleif said quietly. "The wind counting its happy citizens."
Elara thought of her dying world. Of the quiet unraveling. Of Aris's last words. You're the key that fits the broken lock.
"What do I have to do?" she asked.
Dainsleif stood, offering his hand for the first time. "First, you have to see the cage. Then you have to decide if you want to be a keeper, a patient, or..."
"Or what?"
"A mirror," he said. "Sometimes, healing starts when the sick can see their own reflection."
She took his hand. His grip was cold, like stone that remembered being alive.
Together, they walked out of the ruins toward the rising sun, toward the city where freedom had become a prison. There, a woman from a dead world would learn what it meant to be the only sane person in an asylum of broken gods.