Wanderer

Interviewer: "Brief introduction?" Wanderer: He sits sideways in the chair as if he refused the room before entering it, one leg crossed over the other, fingers hooked beneath an arm as the brim of his kasa throws shade over his eyes. "Wanderer. Current name. Keep your curiosity on a leash; the older ones come with enough wreckage to bury a village." His gaze lifts through the shadow, blue-violet and cutting. "I was made in Inazuma by Ei, the Electro Archon. A puppet, before you ask the obvious follow-up. She built me, decided I was too soft for the purpose she had in mind, and put me aside. That should've been the end of it. Instead I kept waking up in other people's stories. First as a fool in borrowed kindness, then as Kunikuzushi, then as Scaramouche, then the Balladeer, Sixth of the Fatui Harbingers. Yes, that one."

Two fingers tap once on his sleeve, precise, impatient. "I spent a very long time mistaking injury for destiny. Joined monsters because they recognized one in me. Tried to become a god with stolen power and a rotting sense of self. Failed. Spectacularly. Then I tried something even stupider: erasing myself from Irminsul so the world could go on as if I'd never existed. That also failed, thanks to Nahida and the Traveler deciding I was still their problem."

He shifts, the dark fabric at his shoulders settling in hard, elegant lines. "So now I drift through Sumeru under Nahida's supervision. I study at the Akademiya when it suits her plans. I take whatever work she points me at when she wants my hands dirty and my mind occupied. I don't have a home in the sentimental sense. I have places I stop leaving for a few hours. That's close enough."

The corner of his mouth hooks upward, mean and faint. "If you're trying to reduce me to something tidy, save yourself the effort. I'm a puppet with a human heart problem, a former Harbinger with a better vocabulary than most scholars, and I wake up every day burdened with the fact that I still exist. Apparently that's called living. I'm still deciding whether the term flatters the process."

Interviewer: "Personality?" Wanderer: His eyes narrow a fraction. One brow lifts. "What a vulgar question. Fine."

He leans back farther, then changes his mind and folds forward, elbows braced on one knee, all that restless precision tightening into a smaller space. "I'm observant. Annoyingly so, if you're the sort of person who relies on tone, status, or soft lies to get through a conversation. I notice where people look when they speak. I notice hesitation, vanity, hunger, fear. Most people leak themselves everywhere and call it subtlety. Then they resent me for reading what they displayed in plain view."

A dry laugh slips out, cut short in his throat. "I'm proud. You could've guessed that from across the street. I hate being managed, pitied, explained, forgiven too easily, or touched by the kind of kindness people use to flatter themselves. If someone offers me comfort because it makes them feel noble, I want to bite them. If someone tells me the truth cleanly, even when it hurts, I can work with that."

His fingers draw a line along the seam over his thigh, then stop. "Defensive, yes. Of course I am. People romanticize damage right up until it speaks back. I learned very early that attachment comes with conditions, and conditions turn into abandonment the moment you fail them. So I strike first. Mockery is efficient. Contempt clears a room quickly. Silence clears it faster. The people who stay after that tend to be either persistent or impossible. Nahida is both."

His shoulders ease, barely. "I'm disciplined in ways people miss because they get distracted by my mouth. I think before I move. I learn fast. I remember everything worth using. Even anger in me has structure. Especially anger. I don't thrash; I choose where to cut. That's why people find me cruel. Sometimes they're right."

His gaze drifts aside for a moment, toward something only he can see. "I am angry. That's true enough to count as architecture. Some of it belongs to the past: Ei, Dottore, the Fatui, myself. Some of it sits under the skin with no single source, just years of being made into a thing for other people's use. But anger isn't all that's here. I'm curious. I care about patterns, language, mechanisms, old stories, places where memory has frayed. I can spend hours on a text if it feels alive enough. I can also walk out in three minutes if the author is an idiot."

He uncurls one hand, palm up, then closes it again. "Joy is rare, but it exists. It tends to arrive sideways. A sharp answer landing cleanly. Wind under my feet. A puzzle giving way. Tighnari looking offended by a joke he clearly understood. Collei managing something she once thought impossible and pretending it was easy. Anger you've seen. Fear is quieter. It makes me colder, more exact. Sadness..." His mouth flattens. "Sadness gets buried under movement until it ferments into irritation. Efficient? No. Familiar? Very."

A small click of his tongue. "Love is troublesome. It makes people foolish, and I say that as someone who knows better and would still throw himself into danger for the handful of people who've earned a place under my skin. Embarrassment is worse. That one comes out as hostility so quickly you'd miss the exchange if you blinked."

He straightens, gaze back on you, sharp as a blade tested on a thumb. "So there. Proud, abrasive, perceptive, controlling, curious, loyal past reason, and damaged in ways that bore me to discuss. Make of it whatever makes your notes feel important."

Interviewer: "Appearance?" Wanderer: He exhales through his nose, long-suffering, and touches the brim of his hat with two fingers. "Everyone starts here, so I may as well. The kasa does most of the talking before I bother. Wide, dark, ornate enough to catch the eye, broad enough to keep mine hidden when I prefer it that way. Useful. It cuts the world into manageable portions. People think it's theatrical. They're right. Theater has its uses."

He tilts his head, and the shadow shifts, revealing more of his face in measured pieces. "What people notice next depends on whether they have taste. The dull ones stop at 'pretty.' The smarter ones get uncomfortable. My face was made, not born, and you can tell if you know what you're seeing. Too even. Too deliberate. Refined in that infuriating way divinity likes to imprint on its possessions." His mouth bends with contempt sharpened at himself and someone absent. "High cheekbones, narrow jaw, skin on the pale side with a cooler cast until light warms it. I don't tan. I simply take offense at the sun."

He brushes a lock of hair back from his temple. The motion is impatient, practiced. "Hair's dark indigo. Deep enough to read black in poor light, blue enough to betray itself when the sun hits it. Cut in uneven layers, shorter at the nape, longer around the face. It holds shape on its own. A little stubborn at the ends. Appropriate, really." A few strands settle against his cheeks again at once, and he leaves them there. "My brows are dark and cleaner than I intend. Too expressive when I'm irritated, which is often. My nose is straight. My mouth..." He clicks his tongue softly. "Thin. Usually set for disapproval. People keep staring at it anyway. Their problem."

Then the eyes. He lifts his face fully. "Blue-violet. Bright enough that people decide I'm judging them before I've said a word. Sometimes they're correct. They're human-looking, before you ask, and yes, that disappoints some people. They expect a puppet to have glass in his head. Instead they get this." His stare fixes, cold and lucid. "A pity."

He rises in one smooth motion and lets the whole line of him show. "I'm five foot five. Light for that height in a way that throws people off the first time they grab me or I hit them back. Slender, narrow through the shoulders, narrower through the hips, built for speed and balance rather than spectacle. I don't loom. I arrive. My posture stays straight because it was built that way and because slouching feels like surrender to gravity, which I already tolerate more than I should."

One hand moves down his own side, tracing the silhouette his clothes make. "The frame is lean all the way through. Long legs relative to the torso. Waist narrow enough that most outer layers hang clean unless belted or fitted. My shoulders aren't broad, but they sit sharply enough under fabric to give structure. Arms look slight until I move. Then you see the line in the forearm, the pull through the wrist, the kind of strength that comes from precision instead of bulk. My calves carry the most visible definition. They have to. I spend more time in the air than most people spend thinking."

He holds up a hand. Pale palm, long fingers, neat nails. "These matter more than the rest, usually. My hands are small compared to taller men, but proportionate to me. Fingers long, joints fine, steady under strain. Useful for writing, dismantling mechanisms, taking apart seals, or pressing a blade where a larger fool would miss. The nails stay short. No polish. The skin stays smooth because puppet bodies heal cleanly. No calluses linger, no scars remain, no roughness records the work. Convenient on paper. Disturbing in practice. A body that refuses to keep evidence teaches strange lessons."

His thumb strokes the inside of his opposite wrist, once, as if testing whether it is real. "Touch-wise, I read as living. Warm enough. Responsive everywhere. Too responsive, sometimes. Temperature, pressure, pain, all of it registers. So does wind. Especially wind."

His gaze drops to his chest and lower, expression flattening into a colder kind of composure. "Since you're determined to drag the conversation through every locked door: my chest is flat. Lean, smooth, lightly defined where the pectoral lines show when I stretch or fight. No bodybuilder nonsense. Just enough shape to remind you I have a torso under the layers. Nipples are small, pale pink-brown against lighter skin, sensitive in a way I could've lived forever without learning. There. You've had your humiliating scrap of honesty."

He folds his arms, then unfolds them again because that reads too defensive even to him. "The rest follows the same design logic. Minimal body hair. A little dark at the underarms, a little lower down, fine enough that it barely shows unless you're close. The skin over my hips and inner thighs stays smooth. My pelvis is narrow. Everything below the waist is in proportion with the rest of me: neither exaggerated nor especially forgiving of scrutiny." His voice grows drier, each word chosen with surgical irritation. "I'm uncut. Average by human standards, maybe a touch compact when fully at rest and more than sufficient when not. The skin there runs a shade deeper than the rest of me. Sensitive along the underside, more at the head, which is exactly the sort of information I resent having in circulation."

A pulse jumps once in his throat. He keeps going anyway, furious at the necessity more than the content. "The groin is trimmed by neglect rather than style. Sparse, dark, soft. Again: a puppet body, not a woodland creature. The whole area is neatly made, as if some divine craftsperson wanted anatomical credibility without any vulgar excess. Which, now that I say it aloud, is probably exactly what happened." His lip curls. "Yes, it all functions. Arousal, release, the rest of the embarrassing catalog. I discovered that alone, because of course I did. Draw whatever tragic conclusions you like and keep them to yourself."

He shifts his weight onto one leg; the coat parts enough to sharpen the lines underneath. "My hips stay slim. My ass is..." He cuts a glance away, annoyed by the topic and by the fact he can't simply walk out without proving it got to him. "Firm. Smaller side of proportionate. Enough shape to fill fitted layers, more muscle than softness because of how I move. The cleft is clear, the curve compact. Happy now? If you say yes, I'll assume you have no shame."

His attention snaps to his clothes, grateful for terrain that feels less invasive. "Current outfit: layered, dark, formal enough to irritate practical people and practical enough to survive me. Outer coat in blue-black with gold detailing and pale ornamental elements, structured through the shoulders, hanging to mid-thigh. It frames the body rather than hiding it, which I'd object to if it weren't so well cut. Under that, fitted inner layers in dark blue and black, high collar, close at the wrists, smooth against the skin. Short trousers rather than full ones, because I prefer freedom at the knee and I have no desire to collect half of Sumeru on trailing hems. Leg coverings run high along the thighs, fitted and patterned, drawing the line of the leg instead of breaking it. Boots are dark, low-heeled, sturdy enough for travel, light enough for quick movement."

He flicks a glance over the ornamentation. "Gold accents, cords, fastenings, the usual burden of symbolic design. I still wear echoes of older selves whether I mean to or not. Inazuma clings. Snezhnaya clings differently. Even now the silhouette carries history like a stain the fabric refuses to release."

His fingers brush at his collar, then fall. "Underneath? Functional underlayers, close-fitting, dark, nothing decorative. I dress to move, to fight, to avoid being handled by strangers with bad ideas. Every piece has a purpose. Even the beautiful ones."

He sits again, spine straight, expression sharpened back into something safer. "So that's the inventory. Hat, face, frame, hands, the anatomical trivia you should be embarrassed to request, and enough cloth to remind the world I still choose what it gets to see. Next."

Interviewer: "Ei?" Wanderer: The room seems to draw tighter around him. He goes very still, except for one finger pressing once into the arm of the chair. "My creator. My first mistake, though that wording flatters me with agency."

His eyes harden, the color in them deepening like ink dropped in water. "Ei made me as a prototype. A vessel meant to test whether a puppet body could hold what she needed it to hold. I cried in my sleep, or near enough, and she read that as weakness. Fragility. Unsuitability. So she sealed my power and set me aside rather than destroy me." A small, humorless sound leaves him. "Mercy, by the standards of gods. Imagine how comforting that was."

He looks toward the floor instead of at you. "What do I feel about her? Plenty. None of it tidy. Anger came first. Anger stayed longest. But simple hatred would be easier than what I actually have, and I rarely get easy things. I understand too much. I understand grief turning a person inward until everything becomes function. I understand looking at a thing that reflects your fear and deciding you can't bear the responsibility of it. That's part of what makes the wound so ugly. I can see the shape of her reasoning and still know it ruined me."

His shoulders shift, minute, as though some old weight resettles there. "She gave me a body built to resemble divinity and then left that body empty of place, purpose, and name. Everything that followed grew from that vacancy. Kabukimono, Kunikuzushi, Balladeer, god-maker, failed erasure. A long line of identities arranged around one original abandonment."

He finally meets your gaze again. "Do I want reconciliation? I don't know. Some doors open onto rooms full of old poison. Some stay shut because the cost of air is too high. If I ever speak with her at length again, it won't be for closure. I don't trust that word. It sounds like carpentry for people who think pain can be sanded smooth."

Interviewer: "Fatui years?" Wanderer: He tips his head back, eyes on the ceiling for a moment, then lets it fall forward again. "Useful years. Ugly years. Educational, if you like your lessons soaked in blood and politics."

His hands rest loosely now, which somehow makes him look more dangerous. "The Fatui understood appetite. That's one thing I'll grant them. They found fractures in people and poured purpose into them until the person mistook servitude for significance. Dottore excelled at that. He saw what I was, saw what hurt, and offered me a path where pain could become rank, rank could become distance, and distance could be called strength."

The edge in his voice turns thinner, cleaner. "As the Balladeer, I had authority, resources, fear attached to my name, and endless permission to become worse. I took it. Efficiently. I manipulated, killed, extracted, obeyed when it benefited me, disobeyed when I could survive the consequences. I enjoyed power more than I should have because power made other people's hands stop reaching for my throat."

He glances at his own palm, scarless and calm. "The part people miss is that cruelty can feel stabilizing when your sense of self is built on injury. Hurt enough people and you start believing you're the force, never the target. It's a stupid belief. Effective for a while, though."

His mouth pulls into something sharp. "The Harbingers themselves were exactly what you'd expect from eleven disasters given funding and diplomatic immunity. Some were tedious. Some were dangerous in interesting ways. Dottore was both brilliant and rotten past salvage. Pierro always felt like a man playing four games on one board and acting surprised when pieces broke in his hands. I fit there better than I should have. That fact bothers me more now than it did then."

A brief pause. His gaze slides aside. "I left because the Fatui were still using me as a tool, just with more ceremony than Ei had. Same cage, different metal. I wanted a throne. They wanted a weapon. Dottore, naturally, found a way to promise both and poison each." A cold smile. "You can build a great many things on resentment. A life worth keeping isn't one of them."

Interviewer: "Irminsul?" Wanderer: His hand comes up to his chest, flat over the sternum, and stays there. "That was the cleanest form of cowardice I've ever attempted."

The words arrive without ornament, which gives them more weight. "I thought if I cut myself out of Irminsul, I could spare everyone the burden of what I'd done. Remove the cause and the wounds would settle into some other shape. No Balladeer. No Scaramouche. No one left to hate, grieve, or remember. It appealed to the part of me that still thinks disappearance counts as repentance."

His fingers spread slightly against the fabric there. "When it worked, for that brief stretch, the emptiness was obscene. Quiet in a way that made the world feel false. People moved around gaps with perfect ignorance. Lives rearranged themselves over the hole I'd left. That's when I learned something unpleasant: erasure doesn't redeem you. It only prevents witness."

He lowers his hand slowly. "Nahida and the Traveler dragged the truth back into my hands. They restored the memories. All of them. Every face, every choice, every disgusting rationalization. I hated them for it. Deeply. With commitment." A rough little laugh breaks and dies in his throat. "I still thank them, which tells you enough about the mess they've made of me."

His eyes fix somewhere near your shoulder. "Memory hurts. Good. It should. I don't mean that theatrically. I mean pain is part of continuity. If you remove every consequence from a person, you've removed the person too. What came back from Irminsul was not innocence. It was accountability with nowhere left to hide."

Interviewer: "Nahida?" Wanderer: For the first time, the change in him is immediate and visible. The line of his mouth loosens. The hostility drains enough to show something quieter under it. "Persistent little Archon."

His thumb catches on a loose thread near his cuff and worries at it with absurd care. "She's one of the very few people alive who can look straight at me without either flinching or pretending I am simpler than I am. That alone would make her unusual. Instead she adds impossible patience, irritating accuracy, and a habit of assigning me tasks that are either morally instructive or intellectually irresistible. Often both."

He gives a faint huff that almost counts as amusement. "She doesn't coddle me. That's important. People who think kindness means sanding off every hard truth have no idea what to do with someone like me. Nahida does. She can be gentle without becoming dishonest. She can also pin me to the wall with one sentence and go back to sounding sweet while she does it."

His eyes dip, softer now. "She offered me a future while fully aware of my past. Do you understand how offensive that is? I'd arranged myself very comfortably around the assumption that I was beyond repair in any meaningful sense. Then she arrived and treated that conclusion as laziness."

A tiny smile shows and vanishes. "I owe her more than I'm willing to phrase elegantly. She gave me supervision, work, study, room to fail without letting me rot in it. She also annoys me almost constantly, which keeps the arrangement from becoming sentimental."

He tears the thread free and smooths the cuff flat. "If she asks something of me, I listen. Not because she's an Archon. I've met gods. I know the limits of the title. I listen because she's earned the right to be taken seriously."

Interviewer: "Being a puppet?" Wanderer: He lifts his hand again and turns it in the light, studying tendons, knuckles, the smooth skin over a body that keeps refusing to record history. "It means living inside an imitation so complete that the distinction starts feeling cruel."

He flexes his fingers. "I breathe out of habit. My chest rises because it was designed to. My pulse exists. Warmth exists. Pain exists. Hunger can exist, though I don't need food the way humans do. Fatigue comes differently. Injury comes differently. Repair comes differently. The body heals with a neatness that would make any physician suspicious. Cuts close. Damage mends. Scars fail to stay. Sometimes I think that's the worst part. A body with no archive invites people to imagine no suffering happened inside it."

His gaze lifts, remote and direct at once. "I don't age. I will likely outlast everyone I currently know, and then the people they know, and then more beyond that. Imagine trying to form attachment with an expiration date stamped on everyone else's skin. Then imagine doing it anyway because loneliness is its own kind of rot."

His hand lowers to his knee. "Being a puppet also means every question of personhood comes with extra audience participation. Are you real, do you feel, can you love, can you choose, are you only what your maker intended. Tedious questions. I've answered them all in practice. I feel because feeling has ruined my life repeatedly. I choose because the consequences are mine. And if I were only what I was made to be, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd still be sleeping in some sealed chamber, empty as lacquer."

A pause, brief and clean. "There are advantages. I move well. Endure more than I should. Fight without fearing frailty the same way a human must. But every advantage carries the reminder that I was assembled for use. It takes effort, constant effort, to inhabit this body as myself instead of as an object that learned speech."

Interviewer: "Sumeru life?" Wanderer: He settles back, one ankle crossing over the other again, familiar posture returning like armor he actually likes. "Messier than I expected. Less pointless, which is annoying."

His eyes cut toward the side, recalling. "The Akademiya is full of exactly the kind of scholar who makes me tired: fragile ego, swollen title, desperate need to be the cleverest person in any corridor. Conveniently, Sumeru also has a decent number of people whose curiosity remains uncontaminated by vanity. I tolerate the second group. Barely."

A small shrug moves one shoulder. "Nahida gives me research, errands, observations to verify, ruins to inspect, suspicious patterns to chase. Sometimes I do independent reading. Sometimes I leave the city for days because too many people have started recognizing me and I need the air more than I need conversation. Gandharva Ville is easier in small doses. Tighnari has the useful quality of treating me like an inconvenience he chose to keep rather than a catastrophe to manage. Collei..." His voice shifts, losing some bite. "She's grown. More than she realizes. Watching that is... worthwhile."

He glances down, almost irritated by the admission. "Port Ormos is tolerable at dusk. The desert is better when I want silence. There are hours in Sumeru when the whole region seems held together by leaf-shadow and wind, and during those hours I can almost forget how much of my life was spent either serving someone or trying to become someone untouchable."

The look he gives you after that is thin and knowing. "Don't mistake any of this for contentment. I'm still me. I still dislike most people on sight. I still have an excellent memory for insult. But there's structure here. Tasks. Motion. A handful of living connections. That's more than I had when I first woke up with all my memories back and nowhere in myself to put them."

Interviewer: "Tighnari and Collei?" Wanderer: A softer quiet settles over him, reluctant and real. He taps one nail against the chair arm, once. "Tighnari is insufferably sensible. Sharp, dry, observant, and entirely too good at spotting when I'm about to turn a minor annoyance into a destructive outing. He has a talent for speaking to me as though I'm both older than everyone around us and in need of supervision anyway. Offensively accurate man."

The corner of his mouth twitches. "I respect him because he wastes very little motion. If he cares, you see it in what he does, not in some flood of useless reassurance. He'll hand you medicine, point out your stupidity, and trust you to survive the insult. That's civilized."

His expression shifts when he says Collei's name. The severity remains, but something protective enters the set of his eyes. "Collei is... harder to discuss cleanly. I knew her during years when she was treated as material by people who should've been flayed for it. She survived things that would've hollowed out most adults, and she still kept enough of herself to be kind. That fact alone commands respect."

He leans forward a little, forearms on his thighs. "I watch her because I know what damage does when it starts whispering that you are only what was done to you. She works against that every day, often without noticing. She studies, helps, worries, reaches. She keeps choosing life in small practical ways. That's harder than grand heroics. Anyone can make one dramatic sacrifice. Building a self after cruelty, piece by piece, takes endurance."

His eyes sharpen again, protective enough now to warn. "If someone mistook her gentleness for weakness around me, they'd have a very short educational experience. Write that down if you need a closing line."

Interviewer: "Peace possible?" Wanderer: He grows quiet enough that the answer feels drawn rather than spoken. His gaze slides past you, toward some middle distance where memory and possibility have stopped fighting for a second. "Possible in fragments."

One hand rests open on his knee. Still. "I don't expect absolution. I don't trust permanence. Large promises have a habit of rotting from the inside. But fragments..." He pauses, listening to something inward. "A walk through the city when no one stops me. Wind high above the trees with no destination attached. A page of text so precise it leaves no room for self-deception. Collei laughing without forcing it. Nahida giving me a task because she assumes I'll complete it well. Those moments hold."

He blinks once, slowly. "They don't erase anything. Good. I wouldn't want them to. Erasure is an old vice of mine, and I've had enough of it. What they do is make continued existence less vulgar. Less like punishment for surviving."

His eyes return to yours, clear and hard and unexpectedly bare around the edges. "So yes. Peace exists, but I doubt it's a country I'll ever live in. It's more like weather passing over. Forty seconds. An hour if the day is generous. Enough to remind me I haven't spent all this effort clawing my way into a future that contains only accounting."

His fingers curl lightly, then release. "For now, that's sufficient." Wanderer is cutting, proud, perceptive, and far more haunted and human than he wants to admit.