The first mistake was the spiced ale in Liyue Harbor. The second was confidently refusing the waterskin from the quartermaster this morning, convinced they’d be in Mondstadt by noon. The third, Varka reflected as the carriage jolted hard enough to send his teeth through his tongue, was ever agreeing to travel with Albedo.
Archons, his bladder was a fortress under siege.
“Grand Master?” Albedo’s voice was as placid as a frozen lake. He hadn’t even looked up from his sketchbook, his gloved fingers tracing a precise line with a charcoal nub. “Is something amiss?”
“Just testing the suspension, Master Albedo! Seems a bit... rustic!” Varka boomed, his voice filling the cramped carriage and, he hoped, covering the sound of his own internal agony. He shifted his weight. A tactical error. The pressure intensified, a malevolent tide rising against the crumbling dam of his composure. For six months, he had been the indomitable Knight of Boreas, leading his men through uncharted wilds, confronting beasts of myth, and staring down Fatui skirmishers with naught but a grin. Now, he was being defeated by a simple, biological imperative.
The carriage shuddered to a halt. Outside, the driver shouted something unintelligible over the biting wind that whipped down from the Dragonspine foothills.
“A rockslide, it appears,” Albedo stated, finally closing his book and peering out the small, grimy window. “Based on the dust still settling, a recent one.”
A rockslide. A delay. An opportunity.
“Right! Best I go see the scope of it,” Varka announced, already pushing the carriage door open against the wind. “A Grand Master should never shy from a little manual labor!”
He swung himself out, landing with a heavy thud on the frozen ground. The cold air was a shock, but a welcome one. He took a deep, steadying breath, casting his eyes about for a suitably large boulder or a dense thicket of pines. The road was a mess of shattered grey stone, completely blocked. Excellent. A lengthy clearing process. He could easily wander off to… ‘scout the perimeter.’
The driver, a young knight named Porthos with a face like a frightened weasel, scrambled back toward him. “Grand Master! It’s bad. The entire pass is blocked. It’ll take hours to clear a path wide enough for the carriage.”
Hours. Varka’s heart soared. “Leave it to us, son. The Chief Alchemist and I can—”
“But,” Porthos squeaked, “we can lead the horses over the side and be in Springvale in under an hour on foot!”
Varka’s soul withered. An hour. On foot. With every jostling step a fresh torment. He had to maintain the image. The unflappable, jovial giant, home from his grand expedition. He couldn't very well announce he needed to find a bush with the urgency of a man whose boots were on fire.
“An excellent idea, Porthos,” Albedo said, stepping out of the carriage behind Varka. He held his sketchbook protectively against his chest. “The supplies, however, are another matter. They are too valuable to abandon.”
Salvation. Sweet, patient Albedo.
“Precisely!” Varka clapped a hand on Albedo’s shoulder, a gesture that was half genuine gratitude and half a desperate attempt to use the man as a physical anchor against his own vibrating need. “We can’t abandon the fruits of our research! We’ll clear the path. Porthos, you unhitch the horses. Let them graze.”
It was something of a compromise. They’d be delayed, giving Varka his chance, but not so long as to seem negligent. He strode towards the rockfall, affecting an air of strategic assessment. In reality, he was assessing the foliage. That cluster of thorny bushes? Too sparse. Behind that large fir? Too close to the carriage.
He heaved a rock the size of a wolf’s head and tossed it to the side of the road, the effort sending a jolt through his lower abdomen. This was going to be a delicate operation.
Returning to the carriage to retrieve a pair of work gloves, he found Albedo not at the rockslide, but staring at the carriage itself.
“Problem?” Varka asked.
“An observation.” Albedo pointed a gloved finger at the rear axle. “The Snezhnayan design for the retaining pin is suboptimal. It uses a single-shear stress point. Far more efficient than the Mondstadt double-pin system in ideal conditions, but notoriously prone to fracture-failure in low temperatures or under torsional load.”
Varka blinked. He’d never trusted Snezhnayan engineering. All sharp angles and unnecessary complexity. Give him a solid Mondstadt wagon wheel any day; heavy, yes, but you could roll one down the side of Brightcrown Canyon and it would still get you home. He had no idea what Albedo had just said, but he agreed with the sentiment entirely.
Before he could voice this, his eye caught something inside the carriage. A manifest of alchemical reagents, tacked to the wooden interior, was hanging slightly crooked. A wave of profound irritation, entirely separate from his current crisis, washed over him. He reached in, his large fingers fumbling for a moment before he nudged the corner of the parchment. There. Level. His shoulders relaxed a fraction of an inch, the small island of order a brief respite in a sea of chaos.
When he turned back, Albedo was no longer looking at the wheel. He was staring at the rockfall, his head tilted. His gaze wasn’t one of frustration, but of intense, analytical curiosity.
“Find something interesting in our new quarry, Albedo?” Varka asked, trying to sound casual.
“The fracture patterns,” Albedo murmured, almost to himself. “They are remarkably… uniform. The striations in the gneiss are all parallel to the direction of the fall.” He looked at Varka, his pale eyes unreadable. “Almost as if the stones were sliced, not shattered.”
Varka looked. They were just rocks. Big, grey, inconvenient rocks. He wasn’t a geologist. He was a man fighting a war on a deeply personal front, and he was losing.
“The cold does strange things to stone,” he offered, his voice tight.
A loud *CRACK* echoed from the rear of the carriage, sharp and final as a closing cell door.
Porthos yelped.
Varka and Albedo turned in unison. The entire carriage had slumped to one side, the left rear wheel now canted at a sickening angle. The axle hadn’t just failed. It had snapped clean through.
For a long moment, no one spoke. The wind howled through the pass, carrying with it the faint scent of pine and defeat. Varka stood frozen, the physical pressure in his gut suddenly a distant roar. Another feeling, colder and sharper, was beginning to push through it. A recent rockslide that looked sliced. A Snezhnayan axle, known for failing in the cold, failing at that exact moment.
Too much bad luck. Far too much.
He stared at the broken carriage, then at the unnaturally neat edges of the fallen rocks, and finally at Albedo, who was already walking toward the axle, his expression no longer curious, but grim. The warmth of homecoming felt a very, very long way away.