Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The thing is, the dead gods are dreaming.

()

It’s a lofty name for a small one such as me, but everyone is allowed some vanity.

So I name myself Nemesis.

()

Many gods were known by their title in the language of the gods - Lord Morax, Lord Havria, Lord Flauros, Lord Boreas.

Meng Po took care of me herself, with some sort of distant proprietary interest, as one must take care of a weapon. She told me that a damaged weapon always breaks at the worst time as she tended to my aches and wound after practice and battle.

. . . Meng Po had no companion gods. I didn’t think to question it, when she first brought me back to Yicui. I didn’t think to wonder why she was alone, to wonder how she defended her territory when it was clear that she hadn’t cultivated much martial prowess.

She brought me in to make me a weapon. She brought me in to eat the dreams and ambitions of her enemies.

()

“Do you eat dreams, as well as nightmares?” she had asked me early on.

“It is not allowed,” I had replied, trying to be polite. I was, after all, an illuminated beast who was in her territory and interacting with the mortals under her protection.

I had traveled far to see the Three Eternal Companion-Gods, and the gods and I spoke long about dreams, and their harvest. I knew that it did no harm to eat the dreams of the sleeping, the ephemeral and momentary wisps of energy and knowledge and desire that those bright dreams are.

Even so, I had decided that I did not want to take those small joys away. But the nightmares - the fear and anger and desperation of nightmares - those I could take, and rest easy, knowing that it would help others rest easy.

Meng Po had asked if I wouldn’t like to just try a dream.

She asked and I refused. She’d let the topic go, and treated me to sweets. And she asked again her next visit. And the next.

Three times was her limit it seemed.

She already had my name, because I was young, and because the Three Eternal Companion-Gods had treated me well in the short time I spent in their court.

I didn’t think -

I didn’t think.

()

Meng Po brought me to Yicui as her weapon. She had my name , and I hadn’t quite known what that meant. I was her weapon, her bloodbound, her torture device.

Under her other adepti’s guidance, I grew competent, then good at fighting in the little border skirmishes. No weapon I used could withstand my strength for long, wood splintering and metal bending, but that was a common problem for adepti, and Meng Po had the blacksmiths and ore to keep us supplied with weapons.

Meng Po’s relentless questioning on my abilities revealed that no person could hide their location when their words and movements were carried by the winds. I’d bargained for that privilege myself before I settled in Meng Po’s territory. After learning under the Three Eternal Companion-Gods in the Redlands, I traveled to the Temple of the Thousand Winds in Mondstadt and asked that I might always hear what I needed to, so that I might always hear when I was needed by those I protected. There had been other ways to ensure the same; I might have asked Lord Rukkhadevata for the same, given her connection to Irminsul, but I had thought of my own innate affinity for Anemo and I chose.

And for Meng Po’s prisoners . . . as for their dreams and ambitions, I am myself and there is no other like me. Meng Po did not let any remember what she ordered me to do, and it is so very difficult to fight something you have no defences against.

Meng Po used me as a weapon, as a torture device. Off the field of battle she brought being after being before me, and commanded me to eat their dreams and ambitions. At first she only asked me to eat the most inconsequential of desires, but that quickly changed.

The good dreams made me physically ill, all sticky overly sugar sweet. I could eat them. Dreams and nightmares come from the same root, and for the more subtle that linger on the border, the decision to eat them came down to my choice. But I shaped myself to eat nightmares, for the fear and hate and anger. As sweet as good dreams were, I found myself throwing up the energy later, leaving little spots of green to flourish scattered throughout Yicui.

Ambitions were worse than dreams. I could eat them, and I could keep them down. I could keep them down, and I hated myself all the more for it. Eating the dreams of the sleeping does no harm. Eating their ambitions does .

I made sure Meng Po didn’t know that I couldn’t keep good dreams down. I couldn’t keep much from her, but I could keep this. She wrote everything else down.

Meng Po brought me in as a weapon, as a curiosity. In the end, she told me that she found the most use for me in the purpose I had cultivated for myself. Butween torture, tracking, and battle, she bid me to roam amoung her people freely, confident in her control, and she bid me to eat the nightmares I found. She told me she had run the numbers, year by year, and the years I ate nightmares her people always seemed to do better.

The nightmares were a relief, between her experiments.

I had, in all honestly, initially found nightmares bitter and distasteful. Lord Rukkhadevata and Lord Nabu Malikata had laughed at me and plied me with what treats I could eat as they told me that I would have to either get used to it or change my mind. But now, with saccharine sweet dreams and bittersweet ambition to compare, with time and experience, the flavors deepened.

It would be a lie, I think, to say that the nightmares grew less bitter. I was the one changing, not the nightmares. And I grew less able to notice that bitterness as I grew into the purpose I still cultivated, even with Meng Po twisting me up. I was young when Meng Po found me. So nightmares no longer seemed bitter and unpleasant as I grew to notice a wide array of flavors.

()

Sometimes, when Meng Po grew bored of testing my ability to eat dreams, she would amuse herself by playing with my memories.

Mostly, it was small things. She was better at making me forget than at actually changing what I knew. The mind is a fickle thing, and memories more delicate than dreams.

The first time Meng Po had tried to insert new memories into my mind was the time we had both learned that my perception of the world was quite a bit off from how mortals perceived it, even though I had taken the form of a mortal. The crafted memory was missing familiar colors, the light was too bright, everything felt distant like memory-me was interacting with the world through layers of cotton, memory-me’s mouth had tasted weird like it had the last time I’d tried to eat human food, and even though the memory was set at night, I hadn’t been able to smell any dreams or nightmares.

Meng Po had been delighted. “Such a challenge!” she crooned, pinching my cheek as if she were the grandmother she presented herself as.

She would have me eat dreams. She would have me eat nightmares. She would have me eat ambitions.

She would take away my memories. She would try to give me new ones.

There were some memories she couldn’t take if she wanted to keep using me to eat dreams. If I forgot why I wanted to eat nightmares, if I forgot how I learned to eat them, if I forgot why I didn’t want to eat dreams and ambitions, I forgot that I could eat dreams at all.

She once had me live a year without any memories despite that, before she got bored. He hit his head , she told her other adepti. And she watched me in fascination as I tried to build a sense of identity. And I changed over that year, It hurt to remember because I wasn’t quite the same person I had been, and yet I suddenly had to be both and neither all at once as I ate the dreams of Meng Po’s prisoners and had to feel their hopes and dreams and fears as well.

It was difficult to piece myself back together again in the aftermath, and all the more so because that’s what I had thought I was doing without my memory, and all along Meng Po had lied and lied and lied when I asked her what I had been like.

And she did it again and again, though never as long after that first time. A month here. A week there.

Her other adepti were concerned about my habit of getting hit on the head. They made sure I had my helmet when I went out to fight, and when I trained they tried to help me find the gap in my fighting style.

Meng Po couldn’t take many of my important memories without ruining her fun, but she could take most of the smaller things.

I still don’t remember where, exactly within her territory I had lived before she lost her patience.

I knew I was young, but not how young.

I forgot Lord Nabu Malikata’s face, I forgot the sound of Lord Rukkhadevata’s voice, I forgot what it was that King Deshret ate when he made time to spend with his Companion-Gods and their fledgeling project, I forgot what colors his secretary Liloupar favored.

I forgot the exact wording of my agreement with the winds. The winds would whisper the words to me again and again, and she took the words again and again until the winds tried to throw her back, away from me -

There was a thread of the Thousand Winds trapped in her study when I returned to consciousness.

I released it without a thought, and when Meng Po returned to an empty cage, she raged .

I don’t remember what happened, but I’m fairly sure that that particular time was truly due to head trauma rather than Meng Po’s usual memory tampering. Can’t learn a lesson if you don’t remember the punishment after all.

I don’t think Meng Po ever managed to successfully give me a false memory. Perhaps, if she’d had longer to work on me. Perhaps if she had focused on that, rather than on my ability to eat dreams.

Or perhaps she did.

I got very good at identifying the signs of her tampering with my memory. Towards the end, she even showed me some of her techniques for the same, just so she could watch me pick apart the subtler signs, so she could work to make her techniques better.

Perhaps she did manage to insert false memories. I’ll never know.

()

I listened to Meng Po’s other adepti talk, when I could. I was set apart somewhat by Meng Po’s attention, and by our assumed relationship, but not too much.

When I had no memories, trying desperately to figure out who I was over and over again, some of them took pity on me and told me stories.

I listened to the gossip - who was flirting with who, whose relationship had gone cold, who was thinking of having a fling with a mortal.

()

. . . after one particularly bad month of experiments as Meng Po tore through the remains of an enemy army, good dreams no longer made me quite so sick.

(I learned to taint them with my own fear and anger and revulsion. they still didn’t taste good . They still didn’t settle well. But I stopped throwing up.)

Their nightmares were a relief. Nightmares are different under a god , I thought.

(There were so many nightmares of me.)

There was less fear of the world for me to arm myself with when I needed bravery, as they were protected.

(They saw me follow Meng Po into the interrogation room. they saw how little their comrades cared about anything when I followed them out.)

There was less fear of falling while climbing tall cliffs to lend wind beneath my wings, for they could trade or ask a flying adeptus to do the gathering.

(It was my golden winds that struck the most fear in them, with the rest of my form hidden by my hood and loose robes.)

And there was fear that the gods were going to go to war. There were rumors that Celestia was not content with the state of the world.

()

And then Meng Po brought me a god.

()

To eat a god’s dreams, I need their blood. Lord Zhong Kui’s blood came out an odd, pinkish brown as it dripped from the cut, but it still tasted metallic.

I could handle it, initially. His surface level dreams and nightmares were perhaps stronger than those of a mortal, but they weren’t truly different.

Meng Po noted that down.

Then shallow ambitions - some of those I watched grow in real time before Meng Po bid me to pull them out by the roots. There was this soup that his people made from the river weeds. It was common, vulgarly so. But the weeds that gave the soup its flavor only grew in Lord Zhong Kui’s territory, and so he never felt like he was truly home until he’d had a bowl.

(He was fixated on the soup by the time I consumed that desire, vividly picturing the taste and the smell. And he didn’t know why anymore, but I did. He’d concentrated on it, thinking early on that if he could only hold on to wanting that soup, then even if Meng Po kept all of his memories he might be able to find his way back to his people. I didn’t tell my master that.)

Meng Po noted that down.

Six months in I tried to refuse to eat anymore. Lord Zhong Kui’s mind was a whirlpool of terror and apathy and negativity and determination all chasing each other. I’d nearly been pulled into his last nightmare, and even the most positive of his ambitions were slipping more and more negative under the prolonged torture and mental strain.

Meng Po noted that down.

Lord Zhong Kui’s anger at his captivity went down easily enough, once I managed to grab hold of it.

I was unconscious for a day afterwards, and physically unable to take in more dreams and nightmares for a month, even with Meng Po’s orders. But in the end, it had been no little than eating a mortal ambition, only stronger.

Meng Po noted that down.

Lord Zhong Kui’s aimless desire to go home followed. I was out only eighteen hours after that, but I couldn’t eat for two months.

Meng Po noted that down.

Lord Zhong Kui’s mind destabilized entirely over that period of time. What remained was the terror and apathy and formless desires whose origins were in memories Meng Po herself had removed from his mind. I bit off as much as I could.

I was unconscious for eighteen hours again, but unable to eat for three months.

(I was young when Meng Po found me. I was still growing and shaping my abilities. My actions were shaping my abilities.

I was only glad that dreams still sat uncomfortable in my stomach.)

(Lord Zhong Kui had one nightmare over those three months.

Golden wings, golden eyes, teal and black hair on a god. On the not-yet god who came to him in the dark to eat and leave him hollow, on the not-yet god who might see no problem in doing the same to vulnerable mortals.

He’d imagined me completing every step of the process to become a god as he had, while Meng Po made him watch, helpless.

And then . . .)

Meng Po noted that down.

There was one ambition left, in the pit of nothingness.

Lord Zhong Kui’s strongest ambition almost shone amidst his whirling emotions. He wanted to protect his people, to help them grow.

He didn’t know who his people were, anymore. He didn’t remember them. He didn’t remember where they lived. He didn’t remember what they did. He didn’t even remember his riverweed soup.

His view of me looming over him echoed back to me without any dreams to cushion it, tears spilling silently down my cheeks, breathing through my mouth because my nose was clogged.

His view of Meng Po, watching, brush and notebook in hand. She’d had to order me again.

Even as I bit, something shifted .

()

Lord Zhong Kui knew two people at the time of his death. Me, obviously unwilling, And Meng Po, cold and watching .

Lord Zhong Kui’s last and greatest desire was to protect his people.

Meng Po had taken every memory Lord Zhong Kui had of his people.

Lord Zhong Kui knew two people at the time I ate his final dream.

()

When I came back to myself, that last and greatest of Lord Zhong Kui’s desires had ebbed to something I could manage. And there were two dead gods before me, at the center of the wreckage of Meng Po’s Yicui.

The jade tipped spear lying next to me (a ceremonial weapon, which would have snapped the moment I tried anything with it, Meng Po liked to see me pretty and helpless when I wasn’t on the battlefield) quivered with the blessings and deaths of two gods.

If any of Meng Po’s people still lived, then they fled long before I woke, for the wind brought me no sounds of breathing from within the town. I pushed myself to my feet, leaning on the spear to look around. It looked as if some massive bomb had gone off.

(There were corpses. There were - what is memory given solid form? Meng Po had told me once that stones had memories, and cor lapis the clearest memory of them all. I could see exquisitely carved statues littered across the village, wearing real cloth.)

My legs gave out from under me and I collapsed back onto the singed stone beneath me as the spear clattered to the ground and did not shatter.

I passed out.