Celestia floats. It has always floated. The mechanisms by which gods once ascended to it — through great deeds, through the accumulation of divine authority, through what the records call "recognition" — have not functioned since the Cataclysm. The Archons who currently hold their thrones did not climb to Celestia. They were already there, or they were placed. The distinction matters.

The historical record of Celestia's door is one of consistent absence. The Liyue Qixing's oldest archived correspondence mentions "the gate above the clouds" in the context of something their predecessors feared. The Akademiya has three separate entries for "the Celestian threshold," all of which reference earlier documents that no longer exist. The Mondstadt church records describe it once, in a margin note dated to the first century of Barbatos's silence, as "the door that answers only from within."

What the records agree on is this: the door has opened once in recorded history. Not to admit someone. Not to send someone down. It opened, and something came through, and what came through is described in two surviving accounts using the same word — a word that does not appear anywhere else in either document. Scholars have translated it as "announcement." The Sumeru linguists prefer "consequence."

The night the door opened is the same night as the Cataclysm. The two events are documented in sources that have never been collated — they exist in different archives, in different nations, written by people who could not have compared notes. The correlation was identified once, by a researcher at the Akademiya whose subsequent work was entirely in unrelated fields. He never published the finding.