It’s another one of these. I’m sorry.
I went into Emilie’s story quest really trying not to make it about Pierro and I failed miserably. In the story quest, we learn that there is a type of flower called “Auguste” that is made by combining three other flowers (cecilias, glaze lilies, and rainbow roses) + adding in the power of a delusion. Perfume made using this Auguste flower was very popular during a “Perfume Mania” craze many years ago.
The creators of the perfume (one of whom was ex-Fatui) knew that longterm exposure to it was mostly okay, but potentially dangerous for people with particular sensitivities to the elements. As we saw in the quest, it could even be used as a poison to kill people under the right conditions. Knowing this, they continued to sell the perfume until some of them were eventually arrested and sent to the Fortress of Meropide & the original cultivator of the Auguste flower burned the garden — and herself with it.
Her younger brother saw this happen, and wanted to take revenge by killing her partners in the perfume business once they were released from prison. Long story short, he figured out how to grow the flowers because he stole her delusion when she died, and then he made his own secret garden full of Auguste flowers. He then used the delusion to age himself enough that he could pass for one of the other perfume-makers to enact his revenge.
At the end of the quest, Emilie is able to use more modern perfume-making techniques to recreate Auguste without the use of a delusion. This wouldn’t have been possible many years ago, but decades of knowledge have changed things. She doesn’t need an Auguste flower at all — she just needed to combine the scents of cecilias, glaze lilies, and rainbow roses.
Jillian
To explain a little more thoroughly: the original perfume needed an entirely new flower, which was essentially a cross-breed of those three existing flowers, to get the scent. For whatever reason, I guess this wasn’t possible to achieve without the “mutative and distorting power” of a delusion.
What Emilie was able to do later was recreate the perfume using the combined scents of the three separate flowers — no cross-breed needed, and therefore no delusion needed.
What does Pierro have to do with this?
First, the obvious: the Fatui are a central part of this story. Without Pierro and the creation of the Fatui (and mass-production of delusions), none of this would have happened.
Second, we have many of the classic hallmarks of a story that reminds me of Pierro:
- A character who is pretending to be someone they’re not
- A character who has stolen something or is smuggling something
- A character who wants revenge
Lastly, we’ve got this whole perfume metaphor that I think is really interesting & perhaps gives some insight into what Pierro is actually trying to achieve — especially if you compare it with the Sage of Stolen Flame’s goals.
Perfume = descender
Perfume is the end product, the essence of all the ingredients that were combined in the process of creating it. It’s a lot like alchemy, in that sense. It’s not hard to make the connection, especially because cecilias (one of the main Auguste ingredients) are closely associated with Albedo.
Let’s think of Auguste as a descender: someone whose will rivals the entire world’s because of their unique combination of ingredients. If someone wanted to create an artificial descender, for whatever reason, they would look at those ingredients and try to figure out how to put them together. But they would fail, because in this case the whole isn’t actually the sum of its parts — combining the scents of three flowers doesn’t give you the same result as taking the scent of a single flower that was specifically cultivated for this purpose.
For a while, this person might continue trying to create “counterfeit” descenders with this flawed method, never quite getting what they wanted. But if they add the power of the Abyss to the mix, they might start to get closer. This is one of the popular theories about what Rhinedottir was up to in Khaenri’ah — we know she was using khemia to create artificial beings like Albedo and Durin, and we know she was using some kind of Abyssal power in the process. But, similar to the Auguste perfume, that experimentation came at a cost.
I brought up the Sage of Stolen Flame because his goal was similar: he wanted to create a new race that combined the power of dragons and the wisdom of the gods with the tenacity of the humans. A combination of three races, just like Auguste is a combination of three flowers. But he never brings up that bonus fourth ingredient — the Abyss.
Pierro was in Khaenri’ah too, and he could have been learning the secrets of khemia by observing Rhinedottir. So maybe he’s trying to continue the work she started — but he has access to ingredients that she didn’t: the gnoses.
tl;dr:
- A real descender is like a naturally-growing variety of the Auguste flower, if it didn’t require a delusion to mutate
- The Sage of Stolen Flame tried to naturally “cultivate” a descender by mixing bloodlines
- Rhinedottir tried to make an artificial descender by combining the “ingredients” with the power of the Abyss (like the actual Auguste flower in the story)
- Pierro might have figured out how to create an artificial descender without the power of the Abyss (like Emilie’s recreated version of the Auguste perfume)
Some extra thoughts
It’s very difficult to cohesively and coherently put all of this together without feeling crazy, so there are naturally some more ideas floating around in my head that I don’t know what to do with:
- All of this made me remember the theory Ajax might be the third descender. If something like that is true, Childe could be the perfect vessel for Pierro’s plans — he’s inherited the will & name of a descender, and he’s strong enough to harness both the power of the Abyss and the power of the elements. The only ingredient missing is some dragon blood, but there’s plenty of that in Dragonspine.
- It’s not that hard to see how nearly every Harbinger might have been recruited specifically for Pierro to experiment with this plan. Ignoring the ones we don’t know much about yet: Arlecchino clearly has some weird Crimson Moon bloodline stuff going on, Signora seems to have replaced her blood with “liquid fire” to become the Crimson Witch of Flames, Scaramouche was literally created to be a vessel for a god, Dottore was injecting children with corrupted god remains, and I’ve already said all I need to about Childe.
- The actual lesson at the end of Emilie’s story quest is that you don’t even need to cultivate a whole flower anymore to make the Auguste perfume — you can just combine the scents of three separate flowers and get the same result. Which makes me think that the true goal shouldn’t be to create a descender, but to get all three realms of Teyvat to actually work together to survive.
- This also reminds me of the moments in the story where the Traveler has been able to use their true power, which usually happens when they combine forces with other people — I imagine we’ll also see this power at the end, when they’ve gathered up all the elements and unlock their full potential. (Interesting that this power usually presents itself as…gold…)