Snow White Dove, Blood Stained Wings.
(Or, the Traveler has a harrowing encounter which leaves her reeling.)
There is a shivering blob of white amongst the snow of Dragonspine, and as Lumine draws closer, jet black hair accented by hot pink stands out in sharp contrast.
Oh. That's a body.
“Hello?” the blonde called, kneeling down and ignoring how the cold bit into her legs. “Can you hear me?” No answer, so she shook the smaller person a little roughly, causing a pair of snow white wings to pop up and flitter rapidly as they jolted awake. Lumine screamed and leaned back, trying to avoid getting walloped in the face, and watched as the other person hissed and grabbed their right wing- now that the Traveler looked closer, it was moving oddly …was it broken? “Here, let me help you up. There's a church down in the city,” and strong hands lift the other person out of the snow - now that she can see the face, it seems to be another young lady, and her cheeks and nose are rosy from the chill.
“..thank you,” the girl manages, leaning all her weight on the Traveler. “You are too kind..”
It doesn't take too long to get to the church, taking the teleporters. The petite young lady is tucked into a bed and told to rest, and after ensuring she'll be alright, Lumine makes way to go.
“..it seems the rumors were true, you really will help just about anyone.. I wonder if one day, that will be your downfall..”
Lumine stopped in her tracks, looking to the inhabitant in the bed in her peripheral vision. She looked so small, the blankets covering her up about to her chin, but the room suddenly felt very, veryyyyy cold.
“..what do you mean by that,” she hears herself say, by some miracle.
“Oh…don't pay me any attention,” the raven haired girl placated, waving a hand weakly. “Simply thinking aloud..”.
“..who are you,” Lumine demanded, turning fully around to face the bed as her expression hardened.
“Does that matter..? Would you have left me alone on that mountain to die if you didn't like the answer?”
Silence.
“.. I don't mean you any harm, Traveler, or the people of Mondstadt, if that's what you're worried about," was the quiet reply after a long moment. "I swear it. But I'm aware you do not like the people I work with very much, and so I deemed it best to keep my mouth shut until you offered me assistance.”
“The folks you work with,” Lumine repeated almost dumbly, looking more and more rattled by the moment.
“You got one of my coworkers killed back in Inazuma. Does that ring any bells???”
Lumine can't breathe.
“You're a Harbinger?”
Rapidly, she goes down the list in her mind. Signora was dead, and she'd already met Arlecchino, so this had to be either Sandrone or Columbina.
“Which one?” she barely manages.
“The Damsel,” the girl replies easily, eyes finally opening - they're a beautiful magenta, almost mesmerizing. “Nice to meet you, Traveler. You don't have to be afraid. Like I said, I have no desire to harm you, or anyone here. It's a little disheartening to think you may have simply abandoned me if you knew who I was beforehand….. but at least that's not what happened, no? I don't know why you're so flustered, Master Childe speaks so highly of you -”
“He's NOT my friend!”
There go the wings again, slightly.
“.. we're not all horrible people, you know. Not all of us had a choice in this.”
Lumine thinks of the twins, and Freminet.
Columbina looks sad now, genuinely so.
“...Why can't you understand that?”
“Well, sorry for being a little on edge, considering some of your coworkers have tried to KILL me -”
“But I'm not them. I already said I have no interest in harming you. Do you think that I'm lying?”
Silence, painful.
“Perhaps if you stopped looking at us through your black and white lens, you'll see that we, and you, are much closer to grey than you'd like to admit -”
The door slams, the sound resounding. Lumine is gone.
Columbina closes her eyes, sighing.
“...well. You can't fault a girl for trying.”
She steeples her hands over her chest then, expression thoughtful. “The heart that forever bleeds will one day cease to beat. . I wonder if she will realize that before it's too late. I surely hope so.”
And the Harbinger slept.
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I doubt that many people will relate to this, but I had an extremely interesting experience the other day.
basically, I had a dream about a D&D campaign that does not exist, playing a character I’ve never even imagined before... this character’s name, and I remembered it very clearly because in the dream I had the character sheet right in front of me and I could remember exactly how I spelled it...
was Aurid.
A NAME THAT I’VE NEVER HEARD OR THOUGHT OF BEFORE.
I did some research, thinking “is Aurid even a real name? or did my subconscious make a new one?” turns out it is a real name and there is a singular person with the name Aurid. but there is no meaning recorded on the internet no matter how hard I looked to find one!
now, all of this would be like a regular strangely vivid dream, I’d forget about it after a while and I’d never think of this mysterious character named Aurid again...
that is not the case, however.
...
this man... bubbled up from the deepest depths of my subconscious and gripped my imagination by the throat! I was compelled to spend the entire day writing about him. recounting the backstory he had in the dream, and interpreting his personality into a solid character like it was some kind of possession...
Aurid’s backstory is one of, if not the darkest work of fiction I’ve ever written.
and most of it came from the dreams I had that had to do with him... in which I was in Aurid’s point of view.
how did I not wake up in a cold sweat from this sh*t.
from the way I interpreted how I played and characterized Aurid in my dream, he is a charismatic chaotic neutral rogue who lives life by the “here for a good time, not a long time” saying almost exclusively. he’s got a hidden blade that doesn’t have a backstory, a magical arson lantern his mother left him before she died of the plague, and he holds onto a teddy bear as a memento of his young friend who went missing while he was living in an orphanage. He could definitely kill you, but he could also give really cozy hugs. he’s really loyal to his party, but he also has rather questionable morals they don’t always approve of.
I’m not going to post Aurid’s backstory here because it is a body horror nightmare mystery that I basically just cranked out in a single day...
I will, however, post the picrew design I made of my boy Aurid because I have never had a character emerge from the dark recesses of my mind fully formed quite like this before, and the picrew really helped that along. prolly gonna draw him soonish.
here’s the Picrew by the way, if you’re wondering: https://picrew.me/image_maker/1801602
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