Atop the high tower, the solitary king sat upon his throne.
Even as he sensed the presence of his old adversary gathering outside the city walls, he showed no surprise.
That expending divine power to rebuild the royal city had left him weakened was something that could not be hidden from the Wolf King of the North Wind. These two gods had spent an age reading each other across the frozen land of the north, attacking and defending in a contest that had no real end. When one side showed a significant opening, the other would not let it pass.
This was not about hatred. It was not about justice or its absence.
It was simply the logic of the game they had been playing since the day the divinely appointed thrones descended and left neither of them any room to retreat.
Decarabian had known, before he made his decision to return to the city and spend what remained of his power, that this moment was coming.
It was his choice. A move made was a move accepted.
---
The gale howled. The north wind cut to the bone.
Below the high tower, the two most powerful gods of the northern lands met without preamble and clashed.
Decarabian excelled at defense. With his dreams of prosperity woven into every wall and brick, he had forged the hardest shield.
Andrius excelled at offense. With frost breath hardening claws that could rend anything, he wielded the sharpest spear.
Before, these two had always reached a stalemate. The spear would push, and push, and eventually withdraw without having broken through.
But this time was different.
The hardest shield now had a crack running through it. The spear pressed that crack relentlessly, giving it no time to close.
Having spent too much of his divine power before the battle, Decarabian could not match what he had been before. The disadvantage grew with every exchange.
Under a heavy, unrestrained blow from the Wolf King, Decarabian staggered backward. His armor fractured.
Andrius did not immediately press his advantage.
His massive dark blue eyes settled on the wounded solitary king, and he spoke with a gravity unusual for a battle:
"Decarabian. You knew this would happen. You chose to do it anyway. Was it worth it?"
The solitary king said nothing.
Even facing his oldest enemy, even in defeat, the pride of the king of the tower would not bend to the point of offering an explanation.
The two gods faced each other in silence, the wind screaming around them.
Then a voice cut through the storm.
"Heh heh heh."
"Your Majesty. Even the great you can look this pathetic?"
Amos pushed against the warring wind fields of two demon gods with her bare feet pressing into the snow, forcing herself forward step by step until she stood before Decarabian.
"Look at you now. You thought nothing of anyone, you and your power. Now that the power is gone, what exactly is the difference between you and me?"
Her face was bright with something between triumph and desperation.
"Now we stand on equal ground. Now, finally, you can look at me, can't you?"
In her mind she had rehearsed this reversal many times. The former master reduced to nothing. The former subject standing before him as the one who remained. Just imagining it made her hands tremble.
But Decarabian did not give her the reaction she had imagined.
He did not give her any reaction at all.
He did not even turn his head.
The complete indifference was worse than anger would have been. Worse than contempt. It was as though she had not spoken. As though she was not there.
Her face flushed red. Then went white.
"Why?" Her voice cracked. "Even now, you still won't look at me?"
"Do you despise me that much?"
"Fine. If that is how it is, then don't blame me for what comes next."
Her expression broke apart entirely. She raised the magnificent bow in her hand, notched an arrow, drew the string to her cheek, and aimed at Decarabian.
In that same moment, Decarabian rose to his feet.
His divine power gathered. The winds surged back to life around him, fiercer than they had been since the battle began.
Amos's breath caught. He's responding. He's finally responding to me.
The excitement pushed her forward. She channeled more elemental power into the arrow until the tip blazed.
Andrius, who had been watching, grew cautious. His dark blue eyes fixed on Decarabian. Frost gathered around his paws.
Then the two gods collided again.
On the battlefield between them, gale and north wind tore against each other in a storm that shook the ground.
And in the same moment, Amos loosed her arrow at the solitary king.
"Your Majesty! Surely this will finally make you look at me!"
What answered her was not his gaze.
It was the wind.
"Ugh... ah..."
Amos's voice came out broken and strained.
Only as her body was torn apart by the passing winds of two demon gods did she understand the scale of the distance between herself and the God of Storms.
But for Decarabian and Andrius, locked in their final confrontation, neither noticed that an insignificant figure had been crushed by the collision of forces in the space between them.
---
Decarabian's counterattack, even weakened as he was, proved far more ferocious than Andrius had anticipated.
He was, even diminished, one of the most powerful gods in the north.
The battle that followed left the Wolf King grievously wounded before it was over.
But the outcome was decided.
Andrius, half his paw cut open by the gale, stood before the defeated Decarabian and slowly raised his claws for the final blow.
In Mondstadt, only a handful of gods held any real power. Beyond the elusive God of Time, who kept herself apart from such contests, there had only ever been these two.
With the solitary king gone, no one would remain to contest Andrius for the throne of Mondstadt.
Then, drifting in on the wind, came sounds.
Human voices. Chaotic and faint, but unmistakable.
"Wolf King from the north. Get away from our king!"
"Andrius! Don't you dare touch him!"
"Everyone, together! Drive that wolf back! We cannot let him hurt His Majesty!"
Andrius turned his massive head slowly.
He looked at the humans struggling against the wind field, trying to push through it toward Decarabian.
He had the ability to see into human hearts. It was that ability which had led him, when the Mondstadters first came seeking shelter, to look at them and find them wanting. He had seen the flaws in them clearly enough to refuse all but their infants, those whose minds had not yet been shaped by the things he despised.
He had believed, for a very long time, that humans were creatures who brought nothing but disappointment.
But what he was seeing now did not fit that understanding.
These people were visibly frightened. Their fear of him was real. And yet they were still pushing against his wind field, still shouting, still trying to put themselves between him and a fallen god-king.
Andrius had some sense of why Decarabian had left the royal city and then returned to spend what little power remained to him rebuilding its walls. That was precisely what made this moment so confusing.
Were these truly the same people who had driven him out in the first place?
Was human nature genuinely this layered and contradictory? Capable of ingratitude and capable of this, sometimes in the same breath?
The sight of it unsettled something deep in Andrius. He was also a being shaped by that original intent of loving humanity, the intent that had been embedded in the broken throne. But his nature, his form, had always made that concept harder to hold onto than it was for the gods who wore human shapes. He had loved his wolf subjects. He had been willing to protect human infants. But his first sustained encounter with adult humans had left him with impressions too poor to overcome.
Until now.
Of course, none of this meant he would spare Decarabian.
That would reduce the entire struggle for the northern throne to a farce.
The Wolf King summoned a gust of the north wind and swept the shouting humans back from the battlefield. He set them down carefully, none of them harmed.
Then he delivered the final blow to the solitary king.
Decarabian's body dissolved slowly into a tornado, rising and dispersing back into the winds that moved through heaven and earth.
Before he was entirely gone, he smiled.
Whether Andrius, his oldest rival, had expected to be the only witness to that smile was impossible to say.
---
After the solitary king of the tower was dead, the great wolf stood in place for a long time.
With the gale stilled, the north wind should now move freely across this land, answering to a new master.
But the divine throne did not descend upon Andrius.
Perhaps only he knew why he had not claimed it.
He was lost.
To accept the throne meant accepting what Decarabian had said in his final moments, that the duty of protecting humanity now falls to you. It meant becoming the guiding god for the people of Mondstadt.
But could he truly do that?
Could he do it better than Decarabian had?
He did not know the answer.
Andrius turned and walked silently out of the royal city into the wind and snow, to look for one.
If he could find it, he would take the divinely appointed throne and become Mondstadt's god.
---
Days later, the Gunnhildr clan returned to the royal city.
Having understood their mistake, they came to confess and reflect, to beg the king's forgiveness, and to tell those who had been blinded by the idea of freedom what they had learned out in the frozen wilderness. They wanted to show people what the king had truly done for them.
What they found when they arrived was not the king.
From inside the houses, quiet and broken weeping drifted through the air.
Gunnhildr stood at the gate and could not make sense of it, until words from inside reached him clearly.
"His Majesty is gone. He gave everything to protect us, and the Wolf King killed him for it."
"He will never come back."
"We failed him. After everything he did for us, we could not protect him."
Gunnhildr's body went rigid. He staggered where he stood.
"His Majesty... is gone?"
A mournful melody moved through the streets.
The young poet sat somewhere inside the city and played, but the subject of his songs had changed. He no longer sang about freedom and open skies.
He sang now about the king. A quiet, great figure who had asked for nothing, who had given everything, and who had never once been truly seen by the people he spent his power protecting.
The spirit of the thousand winds, who had returned to the city alongside the Gunnhildr clan, was drawn to the sound of the harp. She found herself lingering near the poet, keeping him company while he played. In return, she sent gentle, warm currents of air to circle around him.
They became the closest of companions.
Time moved.
The young poet's hair turned gray. Lines appeared on his face where there had been none. His energy was not what it had been.
But two things remained unchanged: the spirit of the thousand winds, always nearby, and the songs he still played about the king, giving the young people of Mondstadt a picture of a silent, great protector they had never known.
---
And the Wolf King, who had walked out into the snow to find his answer, had found it. And had not.
What he had not found was a way to coexist with the people of Mondstadt. A way to guide them that would not break them.
What he had found was that he could not do what the throne required of him.
His claws were too sharp. His nature too fierce. The bitter north wind that surrounded him could sustain nothing. It could only extinguish.
So Andrius chose a different way to fulfill the duty he had inherited alongside the concept of loving humanity.
At the end of his life, he let his power go. He released it into the land itself, to protect this place and its people for as long as the wind continued to blow.
---
The old poet died peacefully.
The people of the city held a funeral for the aged bard.
The spirit of the thousand winds lingered beside her dearest friend, making small, grieving sounds that had no words.
But those who closed their eyes did not open them again.
Before he died, the poet had told her that human death came in three stages.
The first was the moment the body stopped, when the breath ceased and the heart went quiet.
The second was at the burial, when those who gathered to mourn said their final words. The death of a person's place in the world.
The third came when the last person who remembered them let that memory go. Only then did a person truly, finally disappear.
He had smiled when he said it, and told her: "So if you want to keep me from dying completely, all you have to do is remember me."
After she had sat with the meaning of those words long enough to understand them, the spirit of the thousand winds made her decision.
She drew on her memory of the poet as he had first appeared to her and took a human form built from that image.
She gave herself his name.
Venti.
She took up the harp he had set down for the last time, and became, as he had been, a bard who carried old stories from place to place.
She became Mondstadt's god.
---
[Ding. Timeline alteration for Mondstadt: 10%.]
That was the final alteration value when the simulation closed.
---
The system spoke.
[This was a special simulation mode. There is no overall rating and no life summary.]
[The host has received epic-grade simulation rewards: Fragment II of "Lament from a Distant Ancient Kingdom" (2/3): "▆▆▆". Fragment of the Throne (Incomplete). One attribute point and talent skill draw opportunity, based on the simulated character Decarabian.]
[Epic Achievement "Mondstadt's Millennial Flowing Wind" current completion: 25%.]
[Sub-achievements unlocked: "Light and Shadow of the West Wind," "The Solitary King of the Tower." Sub-achievements still locked: 2/?]
[When the completion rate of "Mondstadt's Millennial Flowing Wind" reaches over 60%, a special system function will be unlocked. Host, please continue to work toward this goal.]
---
Collecting the second piece of the ancient kingdom simulation fragment put Ji An in a good mood.
He moved on to the second reward.
"Fragment of the Throne?"
He thought about it carefully.
Within the simulation, the only throne fragments he had encountered were those scattered by the white-clad human across the frozen land. He had watched what those fragments did when they were taken up: the being that merged with one received the authority contained within it, inherited the name engraved inside, and was transformed into a god.
"But this one is marked as incomplete. What does that mean exactly?"
He turned the question over without arriving at a satisfying answer, and eventually set it aside. He was not too disappointed. At least for the moment, he had no particular interest in possessing a god's authority.
The white-clad human had been clear about it: the fragments brought power, but they also brought the shackle of loving humanity, an ideal embedded into whoever took one.
Ji An had no objection to that ideal in principle. Not objecting to something in the abstract, however, was a very different thing from having it pressed directly into his mind as a binding obligation. Those were not the same situation at all.
-------
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