#anaphai

MARCH

savior complex (Honkai: Star Rail, 3,925 words)

The war drums are beating louder and louder in his head in time with every movement. The smoke in his throat, the gold in his mouth, crumbling and decaying. Phainon doesn’t know what noises he’s making as he’s knocked forward against the altar, but none of it stops, and none of it matters—no one is here to hear him or the sound of the chains rattling. All there is is the blood and the weapon and the sheath. The artifact of violence. The burial and the body.

APRIL

sublimate (Honkai: Star Rail, 2,596 words)

The serenity Aglaea wears is unmoved by his commentary. There is an indolence to her in the embrace of this garden, captured in time and eternally sun-shaded, her idle figure framed in the light by the laden boughs of surrounding apple trees. But Anaxa’s heart does not quicken for her, much less wage wars in her honor. The real golden apple in this Hesperidean scene is clearly meant to be the boy at her feet. And Aglaea is both the dragon who guards him and the fair maiden who plucks him from the branch as an offering.

redshift (Honkai: Star Rail, 2,685 words)

Phainon sobs and presses his face into Cyrene’s shoulder, hiding. The card she had been holding has fallen from her slack fingers, its surface turned up to the heavens. It is stained with blood and crowned with corrosion, and it reads deliverance.

MAY

guilty party (Honkai: Star Rail, 4,625 words)

Professor Anaxa turns that strikingly red-aqua eye on him. It is singularly sharp and singularly intense and stabs through him more cleanly than any possible weapon. “Do not make any more cuts on your stomach,” he says, in the same tone as when he gives Phainon debate instruction. “Keep to the outside of your arms. Your thighs if absolutely necessary. Do not try to cut through any scar tissue. Do not even think about approaching any major arteries. Do you understand me?”

JUNE

motion sickness (Honkai: Star Rail, 4,410 words)

There are some things in existence that can’t be erased, only rewritten: the blood on his hands, a damning scarlet, his sister’s name on his lips. There are some things for which Anaxa knows there is no recovery. But Phainon won’t be one of them. He is yet young. He can yet be fixed.

JULY

nekyia (Honkai: Star Rail, 5,602 words)

His jaw is burning, a line of liquid fire that drips down his throat and through his ribs. Phainon brings both of his hands up to where it is loosely hanging, not giving himself the time to process what he is about to do before he shoves it up and back into place forcibly. Didn’t you hear what the doctors said, Snowy? Tribbie’s voice echoes out from the memory of a sickbed he has long left behind him. You made it worse by trying to fix it yourself. Next time just ask somebody.

aidōs (Honkai: Star Rail, 7,277 words)

Anaxa traces the shape of his image, every wound and every imperfection. If the soul is the seedling, then the body is the soil it grows in. Temporary, but in this life, no less important. Someone has to remember Phainon, if Phainon will continue to remember everyone but him.

AUGUST

era chrysea (Honkai: Star Rail, 15,612 words)

The distance melts like a mirage. The sweet scent turns to something acrid. The clear sky begins to weep over them in pink, then red rivulets. Anaxa doesn’t have to look ahead to know that the village is burning.

SEPTEMBER

blackbody (Honkai: Star Rail, 1,772 words)

He scoops up the first handful of dirt, then. It feels hollow without her touch guiding his. If there is a sea of flowers on the other side, a bed for her soul to rest in, he hopes that somewhere within it, her Elysian poppies are blooming.

OCTOBER

ecclesiastes (Honkai: Star Rail, 4,187 words)

Her breath brushes over your forehead. Her hand brushes over your cheek. You have grown taller over the years, you think, but in the dream you are small again. In the dream you are not crying. You lift your eyes again to the sky as she slides her palm down your chest, between your legs, where your own undoing is waiting. There is no pain as her fingers enter you. There is no feeling. You are just a boat, just a body.

every tomorrow is another yesterday (Honkai: Star Rail, 2,206 words)

That fragile life they had shared together—those fleeting, white-winged moments—Phainon had never dared to let himself want it. But even then, it was seeded for him, watered and tended to with every dawn-drenched banquet. Every bath, every stroll through the bustling markets, every history examination. Threaded with prophecy, embroidered with affection. Until it was lost, Phainon hadn’t known that he was allowed to have it. But it’s too late now. For him and for the child who had always been hiding underneath that shell, waiting for the second tragedy.

NOVEMBER

our hearts get torn up (Honkai: Star Rail, 2,075 words)

But what little remained of the laboratory’s security had found him, had pulled him out of the debris. The last he remembered of the scene was the garish plastic stretcher on which they had carried him away from it; the sky smeared scarlet over their heads, the medics crowding one fractured half of his vision, mouths moving as they shouted things he could no longer hear through the ringing. The ash kept falling. They never found his sister’s body.

closed my eyes and saw my father's sins (Honkai: Star Rail, 3,363 words)

Beneath the fever of their bodies, his student still smells slightly of the summer that he had been free in, Anaxa thinks dizzily.

DECEMBER

shepherds hear the angels sing (Honkai: Star Rail, 8,126 words)

In Aedes Elysiae, the Solstice was a different thing. After the customary Feast of Fortune, the village would gather around Oronyx’s altar and observe the skyveil as it finally spilled out from behind the cloud cover above them. As the fields lay empty and the waves lay quiet, they would all bow their heads and pray for the next year’s harvest. Phainon remembers kneeling by his sister in the dirt, peeking an eye open every so often to make sure he was mimicking the reverent press of her palms correctly. All around him, he could hear the whispers of his family’s voices melting into the sound of the distant sea. His father and mother would ask for sun, for rain, for trade, for propitious tidings. Cyrene would ask for peace, for the safety of him and the other children and all the Membrance Maze’s little fairies. As for Phainon, softly and under his breath, he would ask for things to stay exactly as they were. For all of them to be able to share another festival like this, year after year, and to never have to leave.