grantors of dark disgrace

Then you see the mirror and there’s you, too! Your name is Furina, then there’s a mirror — the Mirror — talking to you, and of course there’s the lines of a prophecy carved into your very being. You know absolutely nothing besides that. How and why did you get on this stage, how old are you, what’s your favourite colour (you wear blue tailcoat so it must be blue), who named you Furina and where you’ve been before.

Everything is blurry and fogged and your head hurt thinking about it. So you stop thinking. You brush those questions off and try to never recall they exist somewhere in your mind — you have a more important thing to do.

That’s right, your name is Furina, and the Mirror talking to you says you were invited to avert the inevitable doom. She says it in Her soft and compassionate voice, like it’s truly an invitation — but you know you’re meant to take the task. This is why you’re here, on this stage, and how did you get there — it doesn’t matter anymore.

Not long after that, the Mirror turns empty, and now there’s only your puzzled face in the reflection, not the perfect, precious, darling She you just saw. Then you feel it. A weird thing in your chest, chilly and uncomfortable. You don’t know what it is but since then it doesn’t leave you.

You live, you play your part, you learn. You actually like the colour blue, and desserts, and you have a beautiful singing voice, and this it, an unsettling feeling behind your ribcage, is called emptiness.

You accept it as a part of yourself. Just like the way you like the colour blue and the way you can’t die and the way eyebags under your lower lids, already heavy when you wake up on the stage, turns heavier and heavier and darker.

Then there’s a trial — a trial of our god, ladies and gentlemen! — and it means you failed. You look at your people and at first you see their suspicious, hostile gazes, but then you see them as puddles of water on the luxurious opera floor, and it doesn’t matter anymore how much they hate you. They can hate you all they want, just please let them stay alive.

Now you know what the Mirror meant when She said about a magnificent and dramatic trial. You were diligent in your duty, you made sure every proceeding ran in this nation was dramatic enough, you dragged the Witness of Teyvat in court, and then, when it didn’t helped, you did the same with the 11th of the Fatui.

Now you know it wasn’t enough. Now you know why. Now you know…

this is why you’re here, on this stage.

It all makes sense now, and for once in your 500 long years you realize with crystalline certainty what you’re needed to do.

It all makes sense now, so you play your part.

You play your part and you fail. No matter how good you argue, how quick you are to find answers, Witness of Teyvat, the damned Traveler, just overpowers you with the force of their charisma and people’s already existing resentment towards you. You fight, and then you ask, and then you plead, and then you beg them to believe you, and they don’t.

They just don’t believe you.

It seems you spent all your parlour-trick smokemirrors pseudo-magic, and none is left.

It would’ve been such a fitting end for a deceiver such as yourself, if not for the fact that your exposure doomed all those who you loved and cherished. All their precious, darling lives will be lost to the Primordial sea. Your knees give up, and you fall back on your fancy — stupid — chair. The Oratrice stirs alive, ready to deliver the death sentence. You don’t have enough willpower to care, not anymore. You sit and cry on your throne, just as it was foretold . Is this why you’re here?

Gears and cogs and pistons of the intricate system that is the Oratrice work faster and faster, and your vision is suddenly clouded with black, so thick you feel blind, but maybe you just blinked because it doesn’t last more than a fleeting second, and right after that…

Something snaps deep inside your chest, like a string broken.

It hurts so bad you think you’re dying, and at the same time — it doesn’t hurt at all. You feel nothing, and yet, you also feel pain you never felt before, and this lingering emptiness, your loyal friend and closest confidante, it swallows you whole.

You stop breathing, because breathing hurts. You stop moving, and it still hurts. Your head, your throat, your chest, but what hurts the most is a fleeting concept of your useless heart, weeping for a precious thing you never knew, because She, the dearest, the loveliest person you ever saw, was never there with you, not really.

She’s dead, you realise with utmost confidence you always lacked.

She’s dead, and her death reverberates through your whole body like a march, like a tsunami, like an agonising crescendo of rainstorm droplets falling down and washing away all that you held dear.

She’s dead, and you’re not.

Why, you ask yourself, because now you have nobody else to ask.

Hours later, when waters give up on destroying the land and everyone is not dissolved, you meet Neuvillette. There’s no resentment in his eyes, no hatred. Only sadness and exhaustion, and something soft and tender, akin to a pity, so you scowl at him, because you can take his hostility, but he has no rights pitying you.

He tells you a story.

This story’s plot sucks, and the twist is the cheapest tears-squeezing crap you saw only in soap operas.

The precious darling goddess in the Mirror was You this whole time, and it’s hard to wrap your head around it, you’re not sure you understand.

It doesn’t matter anymore, does it?

Funny, you think.

I’m tired, you say. I need some rest, Monsieur Neuvillette.

You return to your suite to pack some of your belongings. You see the Mirror, the same one you ordered to drag all the way from the opera Epiclese to your personal rooms in the first day of your life, and there’s no You in the Mirror, only the same old you.

You’re suddenly reminded about the tiny snap deep in your chest, the mind-shattering non-existent pain. You cover the Mirror with your bedspread, and you leave the suite.