at the feet of a godess

The crowd did not thin. It only changed its mind about how close a stranger was allowed to stand.

They kept the statue as a landmark because it was the only thing tall enough to survive the press: a pale suggestion at the far end of the human weather, kneeling, huge, waiting. Getting there meant accepting elbows, perfume, the bright chatter of people who had come to be near a name and would not step aside for anyone who had not bought a pin yet.

The stalls along that slow push finished the argument about innocence.

Dirt in little glass vials, labeled with dates and a tidy script that claimed the goddess had walked there. Water in stoppered bottles, sold as bathwater, priced like wine. Pillows printed with a silhouette so specific it was not devotion so much as a body someone wanted to sleep against. A woman argued with a vendor about whether a ribbon had actually touched a hem. A man held a scrap of cloth to his mouth and closed his eyes. These were not casual followers picking up a souvenir on the way home. This was the kind of fandom that kept calendars of footsteps and would drink a rumor if you bottled it.

Dehya’s lip curled.

“I have seen mercenary camps with better taste.”

“You have seen mercenary camps that still pretend they are not in love with a flag,”
Rosaria said. She still watched hands.
“This is worse. They brought the flag to bed.”

Citlali made a small sound of disgust and kept moving. Shenhe opened a lane when the lane refused to exist, not by shouting, by being a fact the crowd learned not to lean on.

It took longer than the distance deserved. When they finally spilled out of the last thick knot, there was another rope, another pleasant face, another little station keeping the statue from being climbed by the merely enthusiastic.

The statue itself was a kneeling woman, larger than honesty, carved with a care that made the pose look like offering and like waiting at the same time. Head bowed just enough. Hands set where a worshipper would want to imagine them. Moon-work in the lines of her hair. Aether’s gaze went up the stone and then, unhelpfully, sideways into a different square, a different life: Mondstadt’s church, the giant figure in front of it, Rosaria walking away from him that first time with her hips doing more theology than the building behind her.

Nostalgia made him stupid.

He put his hand on her ass, full and lewd, right there in the open approach to a sacred kneeling thing, and squeezed like the crowd was optional.

Rosaria jolted hard enough that Citlali looked over.

“Are you unwell,”
Rosaria hissed, not quite turning, because turning would have made the grab a performance.
“In front of a thousand people who sell dirt. Now?”

(https://im.ge/i/QQ1NHUh)

He kissed the rest of it off her mouth before she could climb into a full sentence. Short. Claiming. When he let her breathe he tipped his forehead to hers like that made it reasonable.

“The statue,”
he said.
“It reminded me of the first time. You walking off. I got nostalgic.”

Rosaria stared at him. The look promised a later conversation with volume. For the moment, surrounded, she let it stand. She also caught his wrist and moved it off her like she was filing evidence.

“You will hear about this,” she said, low. “When no one is selling bathwater.”

Dehya snorted once and pretended she had been watching the stone.

The woman at the pass-station had the same pleasant pin as the gate and a ledger already open.

“We need to see your head,” Aether said. “Lauma, if that is still the name that runs this.”

“Of course.”
Friendly. Immediate. She nodded to a helper, who peeled off into the inner walk with the briskness of someone fetching a favorite, not a commander.
“She will come. While you wait, would you like to touch the statue’s feet? Many find prayer more complete with contact. Direct prayer is also permitted if you kneel.”

The five of them had the same pause.

Touch the feet. As a menu item. As something you offered visitors the way other places offered tea.

“We will look at the face,” Citlali said, too dry. “From here.”

“As you like.”
The woman turned the ledger toward them anyway.
“Names for the register. Everyone who approaches this close is written. It keeps the grounds honest.”

Rosaria went first, clipped. Dehya second, like she was signing a contract she intended to break. Shenhe gave her name as if it were a tool. Citlali hesitated a fraction, then wrote because refusing would have made a scene she did not want yet.

Aether took the pen.

He wrote his name the way he had said it at every gate since Mondstadt.

The girl’s face emptied.

Not confusion. Horror, fast and total, as if the letters on the page had stood up and bitten her. The pen left her fingers and hit the wood. Her head snapped up. She pointed at him with a shaking hand, drew a breath that had no courtesy left in it, and screamed from the floor of her lungs.