The Chivalric Records: Lingering Dust

A curious book recording many knight-errants from Liyue street legend. Some tales are old, yet still much loved by common readers.

Liyue's land was not from the first ruled by Rex Lapis. In distant ages many Archons walked the earth.

The land called Guili Plains once bloomed with Glaze Lilies. War's poison scarred Guili; the old inhabitants all scattered; the flourishing of Liyue Harbor later drew most new settlers away. Yet in modern times this plain still holds many knight-errant legends.

In the idle talk and gossip of merchants and porters, a mysterious figure sometimes appeared by night in Guili Plains—a woman in indigo long robes walking the Bishui River's shoals; moonlight edged her profile in silver, night wind carried her words toward the sleepless glittering stars.

Guests of Wangshu Inn say only passersby lost among summer-night insect song can see her; only those who, under fireflies and drifting Seelie, catch a thread of Glaze Lily fragrance can follow her tracks. Some guess she may be an adeptal beast that lost its past, a lonely remnant of a dead Archon, gently mourning her old master only at night; others think she is simply a knight-errant who, like many who leave mountain and market behind, has hidden her true name.

The woman's story has no known beginning, yet ends in a hunter's telling. Unlike the merchants' accounts, the hunter once on a merciless moonlit night saw her dance with a sword against several dangerous black shapes. When the elegant, fierce, murder-bright dance ended, the woman was gone—leaving only a cloud of blood-dust.

Next day the curious found by the river the corpses of Millelith soldiers and land surveyors.

Thereafter, though the Ministry of Civil Affairs launched many searches, no one again saw the riverside woman.

Perhaps that night's sword-dance was only a blood feud, or the woman was herself a fierce bandit. Perhaps the matter needs no reason or excuse: knight-errants are knight-errants because they are sword-bearers beyond common rules.

But as Liyue Harbor's lights day by day swallow the wild villages of the outskirts, such legends too gradually die.

Legend says that the riverbank where the woman once wandered now blooms thick with Glaze Lilies.