Chapter Text
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*
It comes to Kaveh in fleeting flashes, as he lays there.
He’s running, heels pounding against the floor, Mehrak gripped tightly in his sweaty palms. Gasping with the effort in every breath, but he doesn’t stop, can’t stop-
His head spins. Where…is he?
Monsters everywhere. He’s never been a fighter, never wanted to be. Somehow he finds himself desperately wishing he had paid more attention when that ‘feeble scholar’ demonstrated his so called feebleness.
Kaveh’s surroundings are bright, he notes distantly. That’s not new. Sumeru is sunny nearly all year round- but its sun casts a warm yellow glow on viridescent greenery. The light here is… cold.
He needs to go. It wasn’t safe anymore, really- it hadn’t ever been from the start. He’d been blind, to think he could wait this out. As always.
His vision is blurred- half of it almost completely dark- like whenever he fell asleep at his desk with the side of his head pressed into his arm. But if he focuses, he notices that,
Red stained the pure white.
Beautiful, he thinks, a shaky sort of smile curling his lips as his head is suddenly flooded with visions of smooth marble and curling, vivid mourning flowers. He’s interrupted, however, by a sharp cough that tears at his throat and a spike of pure pain in his right eye, mouth filling with the tang of iron, and it clicks that oh.
The red is his. He’s bleeding, bleeding and only now does he realise his cheek is cold because he’s pressed against snow (snow! he’s never seen it himself before-) and he can’t get up. His body feels heavy and warm, even with all of the ice that surrounds him.
Not good, is the next thought that comes, then I’m tired before he lets his heavy eyes close.
- * -
There was something in the snow.
This isn’t new. He and Dvalin had steadily been trying to purge the area of hillichurls- the monsters keep coming and they just didn’t stop, for some reason- so seeing motionless bodies isn’t the sort of thing he’d write down.
What really captures Albedo’s attention, however, is the colour of the blood specifically.
Not a dark viscous purple, abyssal tinged and biting to the touch. Red and vivid. Human.
His feet are moving before he knows it, boots crunching. Was it a treasure hoarder, maybe, caught in a storm and inexperienced enough to have ploughed on anyway? Or was it an adventurer, unfortunate enough to have found themself on Dragonspine and killed by monsters?
…this man looks like neither of those things.
He has olive skin and a Sumeran complexion, the first thing that leaps out at the alchemist. Next is the blond hair, styled in a way that curls around his face and covered with clips that do nothing to keep it from falling in his face, then framed by a single cyan feather. After that, the light clothes, completely unsuited to the cold weather of Dragonspine. A red capelet sits around his shoulders. The elegant fabric is tattered and torn, and bloodstained, clear despite the carmine colour of it.
Right. The injuries. A nasty looking claw mark sits over his right eye, seemingly freshly gouged (abyssal in origin, it looked like, positively dripping in corrosion) and nicks and bruises litter his body.
Most importantly though, his chest rose and fell- in an unsteady rhythm, but a rhythm nonetheless.
His first instinct is ‘spy’. Someone from Sumeru had no business being so near to Mondstadt- the nation had already begun to close off on Ven- hm, Barbatos’ orders with the sudden influx of monsters recently, and Sumeru was protected by that God of Wisdom, experienced in defending her people from abyssal forces. Why would he leave, if not to gather intel on behalf of his Archon, expanding her wealth of knowledge?
But then he takes a closer look and sees the nimble but admittedly un-calloused hands of an artist and the frail (mortal) figure of someone who doesn’t fight and he thinks ‘oh, an ordinary citizen.’
Admittedly, Albedo isn’t doing much good speculating on this man’s identity while said man is currently bleeding out and freezing to death.
He debates leaving him here. Dragonspine isn’t exactly the most hospitable of places, he and Dvalin are already struggling to get resources up the mountain when most of everything is focused on the people in Mondstadt City, and the less people present the better. It’s the most logical, efficient path. It’s the best path.
Another part of him thinks back to the bards and minstrels and innocent citizens of Mondstadt, and imagines those familiar faces in place of this mysterious man’s own. People with jobs and families and lives, all disrupted with… it, on the horizon. People, probably just like him.
Albedo curses what Mondstadt has done to him and crouches down, unclasping his cloak and draping it over the man, then hauls him into his arms.