In the early days, the people of Mondstadt had a tradition of building theaters on top of windy cliffs to please the gods. Rituals took the form of performances, for they believed the gods enjoyed stories and ballads. This script is a millennia old, and is no longer legible.

Long ago, a war waged between the Lord of Storm and the Great Wolf King of the North. Mondstadt was engulfed in blizzards, and the snow stung like sand. A group who could no longer bear the cold built a shrine high on a clifftop in the east. There, they prayed for divine mercy and protection.

A hand appears over the edge of the column, fingers sinking into the stone; the Traveler hauls himself to the top and perches on the balls of his feet. "Isn't there," he glances down at the ruins below them, "an island off of Starsnatch Cliff with a sundial like that one?"

"Hm, probably!" Venti chirps, leaning back on his palms. His legs swing back and forth over the ledge like a pendulum. "I didn't check what happened to the mountaintops I sliced."

"You just," the Traveler gestures out to the side, "carelessly tossed mountains into the sea?"

Venti tilts his head back, giving him a lopsided smile. "I thought the ocean felt a bit empty. My landscaping filled it with islands aplenty!"

The Traveler sighs, shaking his head; the corners of his lips quirk up slightly. "I've heard that story. I thought it was just another…" he waves his hand, "glorification. A creation myth. With how devoted the Church is, and knowing of your…" he smiles into his words, "weakness as a god, I thought the history books were exaggerating."

"Hey!" Venti protests, eyebrows furrowing, but then he tilts his head back up and hums. "Traveler, do you, by any change, have a berry?"

Venti barely finishes his sentence before the Traveler procures a handful of berries. "I have three-hundred."

Venti blinks then laughs brightly into the air, as loud as the wind whirling past his ears. He plucks a berry from the Traveler's palm and pops it into his mouth, then he takes another between his fingers. "The Seven derive their power from their nation. An Archon," he encircles the berry with his hand and slowly squeezes, the juice spilling between his fingers, "clutches their nation tightly. The harder they squeeze, the more power comes out."

He opens his palm and eats the berry, making a face of disgust as he shakes out his hand. "Ugh. There aren't enough words in our language to thoroughly describe how much I despise sticky things."

Venti blows the juice off his hand. "When I first received my Gnosis," he continues, "I hadn't left Mond yet, so I had the full power of an Archon."

The Traveler blinks, staring at the bard's back, the cape sleeves that flutter lightly. "You gave up your power?"

"It was the whirlwinds that swirled in Decarabian's chest that changed his ideals from protection to devotion. It has always been the winds that erode away even the darkest ink, that rattle unshakeable ideals." He glances over his shoulder, a smile tugging at his lips. "What security did I have, being a spirit of wind, that I wouldn't wear away too? What right did I have to install myself after being named the God of Freedom?"

The Traveler tilts his head, braid rippling behind him in the breeze. "Wind and Time… it's just another way of saying erosion?"

Venti huffs a laugh. "In a way. I wouldn't say it is erosion, but it certainly causes it. Seeds brought on by the wind bloom into legends in due time, and over time, the ink of those legends is worn away once again by the wind. That," when he smiles, his sky-eyes crinkle, "is the cycle of time. Erosion is a simpler name for it."

"I think we have something like that," the Traveler murmurs, a puff of air in the draft. "We call it entropy: the chaos created when universes collide, when pieces shove themselves into places they don't belong."

"Hm." Venti leans back, tilting his head to the sky; above them, Celestia floats between the clouds. "Perhaps there's a reason the concepts are so similar."

The Traveler tilts his head, a question behind his lips, but he glances at the palace in the sky and doesn't say more. Instead, he drops his gaze to the ruins below them, the light pouring through the cracked cobblestone seats, the toppled columns. The gale streams from the fractures, and when it curls past his ears, he can hear faint musical notes immortalized in the stone.

"I brought Kairos here once," Venti says, laying a hand on the stone column, tracing the cracks with a finger, "to watch one of Mondstadt's first plays after Decarabian's fall. They dedicated their performance to Time and her Thousand Winds. Even though…" he twists to face the Traveler, brushing a hand against his ear, "the stone has eroded away, the songs contained within this temple still ring."

He leans back with a grin. "That's the role played by Time and Wind. When erosion consumes the continent, when entropy tears this world apart… all that will remain is the faint whispers of the breeze whistling through the debris. Teyvat will exist solely in songs and memories."

"The Thousand Winds…" the Traveler echoes. "Can you tell me that story?"

"All Anemo energy is wind," Venti begins, "but not all wind is a part of Time. Kairos' Thousand Winds were like… Ei's Shogun. Or perhaps a more accurate comparison is the Primordial One's Shades. The Thousand Winds were pieces of herself, extensions of her will. Cogs in the cycle of time." His voice softens to a whisper, and the corners of his lips turn up. "I was merely one in a thousand."

The Traveler shifts forwards, moving to dangle his legs off the edge of the pillar. "Then how did you end up," he waves a hand over the temple ruins, the sloping hills, "here?"

"The wind always searches for a tale of the ages," Venti says, a light smile on his face. "Where the seeds of legends are planted, the wind arrives to cultivate them. Who else is going to spin their stories into a ballad?"

"I'm not sure I understand." The Traveler tilts his head. "Did you branch off from the God of Time?"

Venti reaches for the Traveler's arm; his fingers are feather-light as they encircle his wrist. "Imagine if one of your cells suddenly sprouted its own consciousness, grew out of your arm, and stood before you in a visage of its own."

"But how," his eyebrows furrow, "did you become your own self?"

Venti laughs at that, bright and blithe and tinged with something that makes the Traveler think he doesn't find it funny at all; he glances back at him with a shine in his eyes, crinkling at the edges. "Oh, Traveler," he says, and the two braids running down the sides of his face ripple in the breeze, "I didn't."

And the raggedness of the column they are sitting on feels a bit more like the ridges of a statue's palms. "Oh."

Venti looks out to the horizon, where Liyue's mountains lie in smudged jagged lines, where the Narukami Shrine is a dim, violet blur. "Morax walked with Liyue for thousands of years, Baal and Beelzebul fought for Inazuma, but I…" he glances back down at the ruins below them. "The embers of rebellion were already sizzling under the city. I inherited seeds already sown."

"I don't think that Mondstadt's rebellion," the Traveler says quietly, "would've come to fruition without you."

Venti grins. "Maybe. Maybe not. But the ideas that fueled that fire, the same concepts woven into Mondstadt today, aren't mine."

"How so?"

His fingers are as cool as the breeze when they drag down his veins. "It was that bard who wrote the lyrics of freedom, who composed a tale of revolt. When he d… when I was given Mondstadt's fate to spin, I pilfered the words he wrote and recreated his song."

Quietly: "Inspiration."

Venti shakes his head; his hands tremble around the Traveler's wrist. "Thievery."

The Traveler bites his tongue, chewing his words. Hesitantly, he whispers, "Even the 'freedom' that Mondstadt enjoys is weighed down by the chains of the past."

Venti hums. "I don't think Mondstadt is chained to that history. They don't… remember most of it. The visage, the concepts… in their eyes, it's all become mine now. I wonder…" he traces patterns into the Traveler's skin, "if I have anything to my name that isn't stolen or eroded away."

"This temple," the Traveler says, "is to you, is it not?"

Venti shakes his head. "It was built for Time and Wind."

The Traveler blinks. "They omitted her name?"

"No." He sounds too much like a bard sitting in the hands of a statue with a bottle of cider. "They forgot it."

The Traveler shifts closer, brushing a shoulder against the bard's. "Both of their names… became yours?"

"Ironic, isn't it?" Venti flashes a smile. "I was supposed to function under Kairos' title. I was never supposed to act under a name of my own. Yet now… both of them fall under my anonym."

"When the words wear away… when people no longer remember… is this the erosion," he taps a finger against Venti's knuckles, "faced by the wind?"

"Perhaps it is," Venti says. "Mondstadt's memories of their origins have already faded into the wind. Perhaps one day, I will go to sing that bard's song and find even I've forgotten the words. Perhaps it has been so long… perhaps Mondstadt has changed so much that his idea of 'freedom' no longer applies."

The Traveler moves to lace their fingers together. "And what then?"

He takes in a breath then says honestly, "I'm not sure. I have always enacted the wishes of other people. I'm a god parading in the body of a bard, holding onto the last book in a burning athenaeum. I'm a cog in the cycle of time. Even if they sprout their own legs and walk away, your cells are still your cells. Even if they detach from your head, your ears are still your ears. What does the freedom of choice mean to me," he presses his fingertips into the Traveler's skin, "when I was formed to enact the whims of others?"

The Traveler falls silent, dragging his thumb in a circle over Venti's hand. Below them, the wind sweeps up dust into the vestiges of dancers. "Why did you fight so hard to save Dvalin? To ensure nobody killed him, despite that being the easier solution?"

"He's my friend," Venti responds immediately, then after a beat, "and I had no right to ask him to fight for me back then. I had no right to throw him to the void and leave him to corrode."

"That's not what I meant." The Traveler brings their joint hands to rest on his thigh. "When we fell in Stormterror's Lair, he begged you to call for him, and you kept your mouth shut."

"I wasn't going to repeat my mistakes," Venti says. "I wasn't going to ask anything of him again."

"You fought to preserve his freedom, even at the potential cost of your life," the Traveler says. "You remember what Mondstadt doesn't so that they can be free from the chains of history."

"I have learned," he thinks of shackles around a friend's ankle, leaving the city with freedom and returning to slavery, "that someone has to give up their freedom for others to be free. I'll always fight for Mondstadt's happiness and freedom, no matter how they define it. No matter how much the nation changes from what I once knew."

"And those ideals haven't wavered?"

"My ideals for Mondstadt," Venti murmurs, glancing down at their hands, "have always been an emanation of his. I was meant to witness this world on his behalf."

The Traveler leans back. In the distance, the sunset slips below the horizon, leaving the echo of gold over the ruins. "Why do you allow freedom for everyone but yourself?"

Venti blinks, drawing in a long breath, and maybe another time, he would laugh and wave a hand, dissolve into the wind or sleep for a hundred years. But the Traveler squeezes his hand, and all Venti mutters is, "Oh."

"I think," the Traveler says gently, as light as the breeze, "that you have always sought freedom for yourself."

"I think," Venti continues, squeezing his hand, "that I don't know what it feels like to not have chains around my throat."

"Maybe that's why when you were given the chance to form your own identity outside of Kairos," he traces a circle with his nail, "you immediately chained yourself to another person."

Venti glances from their hands to the temple below them, to the curve of Mondstadt's hills and swaying grass. "Someday," he says, the moonlight dripping off the stone, "I will have to write my own story instead of retelling the tales of others."

"Maybe." The Traveler turns to face him. "The winds will always blow towards a brighter future. If you lose the bard, the God of Time, and ask yourself what's left," he lifts his other hand, gesturing to the landscape below them, "Mondstadt will come find you."

Maybe another time, Venti would've said without the bard, without Time, there is nothing to find. But the words die on his tongue, and instead: "I'll have to find what freedom means for myself."

"Well," the Traveler smiles, bright like the stars glittering above them, "Mondstadt will wait for you, then. Even if the wind drifts to the edges of the world, it can never forget where it began to blow."

"When erosion consumes this world, all that will remain is the wind whistling through oblivion." Venti takes the Traveler's hand between both of his palms. "Let me lose this ballad in the void so that you can preserve it. Let me witness your story unfold."

Aether smiles at him, as lucent as the stars, as all-consuming as the void. "Only if you let me remember yours."

The wind blows for a moment, but the ravages of time are constant, unrelenting, and irreversible. A god of the winds may move between the pages of a book, but in the end, the merciless god of time will eat away at them until not a single legible word remains. Yet, time's assault and that of the wind often take their toll the same upon the heart.

Perhaps that is why later generations presumed the shrine to have always been to the wind, and the wind alone.

-Sacrificial Fragments