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Shenhe isn’t sure where the others are. They were poking around in the Chasm together, and then they were poking around the Chasm separately. Or, at least, Shenhe was separated.
Maybe she should quell her little habit of wandering off. She doesn’t mind being alone, not usually. But a part of her worries that she’ll stray too far to hear them call for help. She’s still getting used to being needed, but it’s something she tries to take very seriously.
She does take it seriously. It’s just that her way of being needed is very different from how the others seem to think of it.
The blunt end of her spear drags across the rough ground beside her. Shenhe’s vision is good, but she still has to strain her eyes to see in the dark.
The traveler had some sort of lampstone that worked well down here. When she first got separated (she refuses to say lost ), she’d had a torch with her, but the glow it cast off was muted and was doing more to alert others of her presence than to alert her of theirs. So. She snuffed it.
This is her first time in the Chasm, but she’s been underground before. She knows how to use a combination of sight and sound to detect her way through the gloom. She should know how, anyway.
It’s difficult. Maybe she’s losing her touch. She ought to train harder.
She doesn’t like the Chasm, she decides. It’s ominous . . . It has presence, almost personality. Looming. Spiteful. She can hear the ceiling groaning over her head as she walks, the damp patter of her footsteps on the ground beneath her.
Her own presence echoes. Her aura is prominent, penetrating. She can feel it, and she has a feeling that other things can feel it too.
The Abyss , she realizes, This place feels like the Abyss.
A glimmer of fear seeps past her bindings. She wonders what kind of cavernous emotion yawns behind it.
Should she tell the others?
The Traveler probably already knows. He’s very in touch with that sort of thing, sometimes.
And besides. The others aren’t here. She lost track of them.
Right.
Shenhe feels a shift in the air. A twitch behind her.
She turns.
The air glimmers, sparks, and an Pyro abyss mage appears before her. Runes glow faintly on the walls of the tunnel. Abyss, Abyss . . .
She readies her spear and summons her talisman. The Chasm is dangerous, but this is a much more familiar kind of danger. She’ll take what she can get, maybe release some of the tension that’s been building up inside her.
The stone ground ignites around Shenhe, but she’s more than ready for it and leaps up to avoid them, heading straight for the creature in the center.
Shenhe has no patience for monsters. Herself included.
The Pyro abyss mage’s shield begins to fizzle out as Shenhe launches herself at it and unleashes a burst of Cryo. She’s heard that Hydro visions work faster against Pyro, but if there really is any difference, she hasn’t noticed. She swings her spear once and jabs forward experimentally, seeing if it’s knocked off guard enough to push around.
For now, the cracked Pyro shield is still doing its job protecting the mage, but it should only need a few more elemental hits before—
Behind the abyss mage, the figment of her talisman wails silently.
Shenhe frowns at it while still lunging around her opponent, even as the air changes, hot and fast.
And then.
And then, Shenhe doesn’t quite know what happens. The air changes, and her whole body is thrown backward, and she can’t brace herself against it because now the ground is too loose to take her footing.
Shenhe hits the wall behind her hard and fast, and she lets herself fall like a doll to the ground, hoping that will absorb the impact. She fully intends to tuck and roll herself back into a standing position, but a stone, a little larger than she, dislodges itself and hails down from the low ceiling.
She bats it aside with her spear, and it strikes against the wall, and the whole tunnel shakes again. More rocks tumble at her, and she dodges and hits two or three aside before she realizes that it’s not just three or four coming down at her, not even ten or twenty.
She should have started running immediately.
It’s too late for that now, though, she can tell already, so she kneels down and covers her head, holding her spear lengthwise above her.
The air fills with dust, and she can’t see as much as feel the cracks in the ceiling. The abyss mage’s shrieks cut off suddenly, and the fact that she can’t see it glowing means that its shield has probably failed.
At least I outlasted it, she thinks.
The tunnel collapses. Her spear snaps in half.
It takes longer than she’d like to admit to get her bearings back.
She doesn’t cough, but she wants to. She just keeps her head tucked inward against her chest, saving her breath.
She doesn’t know where she is.
She’s in the Chasm. She’s been down here for a while. She came here with friends who had a map. She does not have the map. Even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to look at it right now.
Her body hurts.
Shenhe zeroes in on that.
There is rock on all sides. She barely has space to turn her shoulders, but that’s still more than she had hoped for. Something else feels very wrong, but she can’t quite figure out what. Everything aches a little, but something hurts a lot. Her hair is caught in the stone rubble.
Well. First things first.
One hand is tucked tight against her chest, but she has a little more freedom of movement with the other. She reaches for the point of her spear in the dark. It takes her a moment to find the shattered remains of the spearhead. A pity. She grabs one of the shard and begins hacking at her hair. It doesn’t take long, but the sharp edge slices her fingers a few times before she manages to get it free.
She still can’t move much, but it’s a relief to be able to move her neck a little bit more. She does, and the joints crunch.
Huh. That’s new. She thinks she’s seen Yelan do that before, though.
She can feel drips of blood mixing with the dust, but for some reason, the smell in the cramped air doesn’t change.
Her elbows scrape against the walls.
Okay. Next up.
She leans against one side of her little Chasm-enforced nook, gasping in pain as her hip and shoulder meet the ground. That does set her off coughing, and it takes a moment before she’s able to get her breath back. It’s a sharp, bright pain. Maybe something broken, then? Or just badly bruised. That’s fine.
Pressed up against one wall, though, she’s able to unpin her other arm and press experimentally against some of the stones. Some are large and solid, others move easily or even fall to bits under her touch. With one hand, she finds purchase on a ragged edge of one of the rocks and tugs it towards her.
Shenhe knows that she’s strong. She doesn’t know how to quantify it. But even without the gaping stares the citizens of Liyue or even the Traveler give her when she punches through a ruin wall or picks up a table with one hand to find a chopstick she dropped, even without the stunned, muted surprise of her master each time she pushes herself to another physical feat, she has an intuitive knowledge that her abilities are a bit . . . disproportionate. Unnatural, even.
It’s not hard to push the stone away. She has a bad angle, but she just puts more force into the fingertips. It shifts and scrapes away from her, which is good.
The cavern rumbles, and she hears the stone ceiling split above her again.
That is. Less good.
Ah.
As concerning as that is, she can’t stay here. It might be better to shove her way through the broken stone and make a break for it. Her body aches, but as long as she has an arm and a leg working, she can find ways to compensate for anything that isn’t. She doesn’t have any kind of metric to tell which rocks are holding weight and which ones can be moved, but honestly, if the rest of the tunnel collapses, well, what’s it to her?
But.
There’s something.
Something else.
It takes a moment to remember. She didn’t come down here alone. She doesn’t know where the others are. They might come nearby. They might already be nearby.
Shenhe is strong enough to force her way out. Her body is sturdy enough to survive this. The Traveler has limits, though. He is young and soft. Yun Jin, too, and so is that cook girl whose name she can’t remember. And she doesn’t know how far away they are, or if they’re beneath her, because this damned Chasm is enormous and unnatural and twists wildly like a fox in a trap, a snake cut in two.
And she can’t hurt them. She can’t .
She falls back against the ground and, for the first time since she was a child, allows herself to cry out in pain.
Shenhe is used to feeling trapped. It’s still not pleasant.
She isn’t sure what she expected from her first trip into the Chasm, but if she’s honest, this feels par for the course. Enter a notoriously dangerous underground mine: get trapped in the stone. It makes sense.
She dislikes it.
Maybe she hates it.
She can’t tell.
Alone for a while, she’s able to roughly piece together how this happened. Someone had definitely told the cook girl that fire could be dangerous in the cavern and to check for gas leaks before using her Pyro Vision. It takes her a while to remember that little piece of advice. It hadn’t applied to her, so she’d forgotten it. Not that it would have made much of a difference if she remembered.
So. Pyro abyss mage, gas leak, explosion, collapse. Simple enough.
She wants to kick something. She wants to kill something.
She waits under a mountain of rubble.
Not for the first time, she feels stupid . That’s bound to happen, isn’t it? For someone accustomed to using brute force at every turn?
The talisman nestles within her. It tries to comfort her. Its touch is cold.
Shenhe thinks a lot, even as her consciousness flutters. Her ideas shudder beneath her mind, which is always looking for the next thing to fight, next danger, next person who will hurt her, leave her—
Shenhe goes very still. Unbidden, memories wash over her. She fought a monster in a cave before. She was left in a cave by someone who needed her.
So. Shenhe is used to feeling trapped.
She thought this already.
She knows this already.
Back then, she was a tiny thing, a feral thing. That little girl feels like an entirely different person now. Sometimes, Shenhe misses her. Usually she does not.
Shenhe doesn’t know how much time passes. She doesn’t get chilled easily, but she’s cold . There isn’t enough space for her down here, let alone her long limbs and bonded feelings.
The feeling is still familiar.
Shenhe knows what it’s like to be contained.
She curls in tighter, breathing as shallowly as she can manage. There must be some gap in the rocks, and she must be near the edge of the collapse, because she hasn’t quite run out of air yet. The air still moves around her, but that might just be her talisman stirring.
It takes her a long time to realize that she’s not doing well.
Her blood dries on her skin and her body throbs. She’s caked with mud and her head spins, even though she’s been stuck on her side this whole time.
Shenhe is not afraid of being contained, not as far as she can tell. If she was, she would be frightened of her Master and the other adepti for binding her the way they did. (If she held fear against them, would she even be able to notice? Would she feel it?)
She would be afraid of the state of her own existence for the past two decades. The ropes are not comfortable, but they are comforting. They are equal parts trap and security, one that she gladly accepts. Well, perhaps not gladly. Willingly.
Shenhe coughs in the dark. She doesn’t know what she’s afraid of here, but she is afraid.
On impulse, she kicks out against the looser wall with the leg that works properly. (She has since determined that one of them is not working.) Some rocks shift.
This situation is . . . Sort of new. She hasn’t had something like this in a long time, anyway, and she’s a very different person than the little child who bit when she was angry and cared so, so deeply.
Knowing that she’s wasting her air, she whispers, “I miss her.”
She doesn’t know what she means by that.
The uncertainty bothers her. She chooses to think about something else.
Right. The feelings are familiar, but the situation is new. She hasn’t been pinned down by a tunnel collapse before. So, she should draw from what she was taught. Experience.
She has no experience with this. She just established that.
Shenhe tries to imagine what someone else might do in her position. She doesn’t know how to do that. Seeing other perspectives has never been a strength of hers.
What would her Master do? Easy. Cloud Retainer isn’t stupid enough to get herself into this situation in the first place. And if she was, she’d find a way to build some sort of device to restabilize the cavern. Shenhe is not able to do that.
The Traveler, then. Aether . . . is a mystery and a force of nature. He would be fortunate enough to crawl his way out without hurting anyone else. Shenhe does not have that kind of luck.
Yun Jin. No idea. The girl is sociable and kind, two things Shenhe has never been and can’t begin to understand. Maybe she would sing? But. That doesn’t make sense. It wouldn’t help.
Cook girl, whose name she tries to remember but never can. Fire is what got her into this situation in the first place, maybe fire can get her out?
Shenhe does not have access to fire right now.
She wants to scream. She doesn’t. She keeps it bottled like everything about her should be.
Shenhe can feel herself fading in and out. She’s exhausted, like she’s about to collapse. Which is frustrating, because she hasn’t done anything but twist and shuffle in the little space she’s in.
She hasn’t felt like this in a very long while. She never wanted to feel like this again and doesn’t want to feel it now.
Time moves strangely. At first she thought it was just the tired ache in her limbs grappling against her restlessness, or the irregular lull and swell of her consciousness, but the longer she spends here, the more she believes there’s some sort of time distortion happening.
Maybe that should frighten her. Mostly, though, she just wants to get out.
She dreams. She’s not sure if she’s awake or asleep when it happens. That does frighten her.
She dreams of the creature tearing into her, back when she was small and tender and vicious. She dreams of fighting back, tooth and claw and nail, using her little elbows to shove her way out of one close call after the next.
She dreams of a woman coughing up blood. The woman looks a lot like her. She knows this is her mother but can’t bring herself to think of her as any sort of parent. She had never been well enough to care for her daughter. Shenhe wants to pity her. Instead, she loves her. Their blood mixes as she tries to hold the woman, but that’s the only part of her she can make contact with. Her blood.
She dreams of a man kissing her forehead and sending her away, a twisted, awful expression on his face. She wants to hate him. Instead, she feels nothing.
After each distorted fragment, she jolts awake and knocks her knees or her head against the jagged stone walls.
She wants to get out.
She wants to go home.
She . . . didn’t realize she had a home until now. She doesn’t even know where that would be, just that she desperately needs to be there .
Hours pass, at least. She’s fairly certain of that. Voices marble through the stone around her, blending in with the surroundings. An instinct tells her to listen in and gather more information, whether they would hurt her or just pass by, but she’s too tired for that.
Sometimes she sleeps. Sometimes she falls unconscious. Yelan has told her that there’s a difference, but she has yet to figure out what that would be.
Something changes.
The Chasm cracks and shifts around her, even when she doesn’t move. The rock crumbles and presses inward.
Shenhe is a survivor.
So. She takes her time to find a stone that is easy to dislodge and nudges it out of the way with her knee. It clatters outside of the hole she’s trapped in, the sound muffled by layers of dust and rock.
It takes a long time. Her nails break on jagged edges as she feels around in the dark for a place to dig out. Shenhe has several false starts where she thinks she’s found a good passage but realizes there’s a major supporting stone right in the middle. She loses progress frequently. She passes out at least twice, which is irritating. Even as a child, back during her first brushes with death at the claws and teeth of the Beast, she hadn’t been this feeble.
Her hand breaks through to the open air first. She almost laughs, it must look so silly from the other side.
She bludgeons her way out, punching and breaking against the dirt and debris. She feels pathetic. She’s used to breaking columns wider than she is tall with just her hands. She’s used to holding the world on her shoulders.
Somehow, it takes all of her strength to drag herself out.
Her body screams at her. She welcomes its protest.
And despite her best efforts, she collapses again.
“. . . d you hear that?”
Shenhe isn’t sure when the scene around her changes, but it does. There is twisting and shuffling, like before, and her eyes are blurry, which is new because there hadn’t been enough light to notice any blurriness before. Just the trembling glow of her Vision.
“Oh, archons, it . . .”
“ . . . no, be m . . .”
“. . . over here, if . . .”
She feels pain, hot and fresh and raw and new, despite knowing that she’s been in pain for hours. She twists and thrashes, trying to wrangle her way out of the hands holding her down, pinning her to the cold ground that is crusted with her blood.
Screams and shouts ring out in response, which is good, but also bad. She smacks the hands away and feels the dregs of her strength trickle through her limbs, but somehow it’s still enough to make people yell, and she hears something crack when her still-working leg strikes it.
She feels weight, and it’s nothing like the crushing from before, but it presses down on her and something in her own head keeps her from moving, which is wrong bad wrong get out—
She wants to get out.
“You’re going to be okay,” the weight on her whispers.
She collapses under it, tears streaking down her face from the exertion. It’s been a while since she’s pushed herself this hard.
Shenhe isn’t sure when she blacked out again, but when she wakes, the light is soft and the air moves freely. She breathes in deep and immediately starts coughing. It hurts. She curls her knees up to her chest, which also hurts.
Well. One knee comes up to her chest. The other one is partially restricted. She panics and begins twisting against it.
“You will be alright. Stop, please, you’re going to pull your stitches,” someone says above her, a young woman’s voice.
Shenhe feels a finger touch either side of her wrist, as if to squeeze, but they pull back almost immediately, seeming to think better of it. Someone’s body settles beside her own, close enough to feel the heat and gravity pull each other, but not close enough to touch.
“You are safe,” Yun Jin says.
Because it is Yun Jin who’s with her, she realizes. And feels a bit silly for not recognizing her earlier. The opera singer has become a good friend of hers, and out of all people she should be able to recognize at least her voice.
A minute or two pass before Shenhe is able to calm her limbs down. She’s never safe, not really, but she usually knows the difference between immediate danger and lurking, imminent danger. Yun Jin mistakes the second for safety sometimes, but she doesn’t lie to Shenhe about these things.
She wants to listen to Yun Jin immediately, because she sounds so sad, but her heart races and she keeps moving. Eventually, though, she comes to a stop and lets her limbs fall onto the mattress.
She’s on a mattress. That. That’s new.
Yun Jin gently strokes her hair, sitting on the edge of her bed. She’s not as dressed up as usual, missing her shawl and headpiece. Shenhe assesses her for a moment. She allows Yun Jin to continue.
“Where am I?” she tries to ask quietly, but her already soft voice comes out thin and wavering. She tries to clear her throat and almost sets off another coughing fit.
“Lumberpick Valley. A small medicine practice. We wanted to take you to Bubu Pharmacy, but were advised to wait until you woke until we moved you that far,” says Yun Jin. She giggles behind one hand, eyes still soft, “You’re a lot bigger than the rest of us. We weren’t sure how to carry you.”
“Oh. Sorry,” whispers Shenhe. Her voice still isn’t working. Annoying.
“No need to apologize, dear,” Yun Jin responds immediately. Which is exactly what Yun Jin would say. “I’m just filling the air with words. I can stop if you’d like.”
Shenhe shakes her head, which hurts so bad she screws her face shut and has to breathe through it. Yun Jin notices, because of course she does, and hums sympathetically. Her hands return to Shenhe’s hair.
“Stay still, if you can, you’re badly— well, not that still. You’re allowed to breathe, Miss Shenhe.”
She has had to play dead before. She has good muscle control.
Shenhe doesn’t know how motionless she needs to be. She lies confused for a moment before Yun Jin laughs again. Usually her laughter is light and delighted but now . . . Something is weighing on her.
Yun Jin must know her very well by now, much better than she thought, because without prompting she says, “You can relax your body. You can turn over. No large gestures with your limbs, though, and try not to move your neck too much.”
Shenhe appreciates that. A lot.
“How long . . . ?” Shenhe asks.
“Hm?”
Shenhe searches for the right question. Time is difficult, but Yun Jin is patient. “How long was I asleep?”
It wasn’t sleep . She knows that.
Yun Jin’s eyebrows pinch. “About an hour, I’d say? Not terribly long.”
“And the others?”
“They’re just outside, collecting some plants. Would you like me to call them for you?”
“No.”
“I should call the doctor back in, though, and let him know you’ve woken up.”
“Okay.”
Yun Jin lingers.
“Miss Shenhe, we couldn’t find you for a long time. For several hours.”
Shenhe doesn’t know how to respond to that. So she doesn’t.
After a pause, Yun Jin continues, “You didn’t call for help, did you?”
That question makes Shenhe uncomfortable. Her skin crawls. She doesn’t know why.
“No. I did not.”
“Why?”
Shenhe looks up at Yun Jin’s round face, pinched in a little frown that looks practiced but genuine. As she notices that, she realizes that she’s been getting better at figuring out facial expressions. Or this one, at least. It gets directed at her a bit too often.
“Did you not want to attract other creatures?”
“No. That’s not it. I just . . . . I didn’t realize that was an option.”
Yun Jin studies her. Her eyes fall up and down Shenhe’s battered body.
She hasn’t felt this helpless in a very long time.
“I didn’t know you were looking. For me. I’m sorry,” says Shenhe.
Yun Jin shakes her head and runs her hand through Shenhe’s bangs one more time. The tassels on her blouse flutter when she moves.
“No need for that. But I want you to think, if it had been any of us in your place, would you look for us?”
“Yes.”
Yun Jin stares at her like she’s waiting for something. Shenhe stares back for a moment, but the singer’s gaze has too many emotions behind it for Shenhe, so she turns her eyes to the coarse blanket she’s lying on top of. It’s stained with drops of her blood.
“Why wouldn’t we come rescue you?” Yun Jin asks under her breath.
Because she shouldn’t need to be rescued. Because her only worth is her strength, and that is why she rescues others, but Yun Jin and Aether and that spitfire young girl are good and kind and have other things that make them important.
“That’s different,” she whispers instead.
“It’s not.”
Yun Jin wipes away the tear streaks at the corners of Shenhe’s eyes, which is strange because Shenhe doesn’t know when she started crying. Then, she leans down and presses her lips to Shenhe’s hairline, before standing saying that she’s going to get the doctor.