Chapter Text
The woman speaks like the gods, all thees and thous at a loping cadence that brings forth a feeling of nostalgia from the spirits around Roderika. There is always the edge of a smile in her tone, but Roderika has never seen the woman smile from beneath the heavy folds of her hood. She tries not to look too hard at the woman; she may not be good at many things, but Roderika can read a displeased facial expression, and how it seems only to deepen the longer she stares at the mottled red scars on the woman’s cheek.
There is something of a disagreement coming from the other room. Normally, the robed woman would enter without a sound, and though the door remained open, nothing but the ring of Hewg’s smithing could be heard in the hallway. Sometimes, if Roderika strained her ears, she could hear the barest sound of what seemed to be voices from within the spacious room, but she could never make out words.
Today, she can make out the words.
“Consider thy words more carefully, Deathbed Companion,” the voice carries, measured and paced and chilled to the core. Footsteps approach the hallway, and Roderika jolts, suddenly staring down at her lap as though the hem of her skirt is the most interesting sight in all the Lands Between, hoping the woman did not see her. The footsteps pause, just before the threshold, and Roderika looks up only long enough to see a pair of feet - one of too-pale skin, and the other painted in the same mottled-red burn scarring that seems to afflict the right side of the woman’s face. “If I were to do that, mayhaps I’d steal thy warmth and use it for mine own resurrection.”
Hewg ignores the robed figure as she strides from the room, and ignores, too, the woman behind in her thinner clothing. A Tarnished of renown, but Fia says nothing, and stands at the doorway, crystal blue eyes following the diminishing figure of the other woman, narrowing with seemingly every footstep. Then, she turns just as abruptly as she appeared, and retreats back into the bedroom. When they are both out of earshot, only then does Roderika hear Hewg mumble, just loud enough over the crackle of his forge flames for her to hear.
“That woman’s no Tarnished,” he says, and punctuates it with the clang of hammer on metal. “She smells of ash. Of fire and darkness. Dusty and death-touched, but not like the other Tarnished. Not like the ones who spring back from Grace.”
Roderika watches him work, and catches the way his head moves, just barely, eyes brushing past hers as though on accident. She wants to ask the smith if they should do something about this, if they should cease helping the woman.
But Hewg offers no answers, and continues to pound away, forging and reforging an axe head until it is a particular shade of perfection that Roderika cannot fathom.
It was an accident which carried her to the Lands Between. She awoke in Ariandel, the chapel alight in blazing flames, and pried her corpse from where it had half-frozen to the ground in the melting ice.
The painter had bore witness to fire, then. There was naught left for her to do but draw back up her scythe (“a symbol of a long-lost home”), and leave. Through the snowfields, through the strange shifts of reality that signified the magic allowing her to leave the rotting painting. Father Ariandel was dead, or as dead as anything could ever be in a place where every cycle was broken beyond repair, or perhaps eating itself alive, and so her task was over. Ariandel would burn, and be replaced, and she was without a home once more.
So she wandered, bare feet trodding paths and pathless areas. From castles to desolate mountain peaks, her undying body bereft of the need for food or rest. She slayed beasts great and small, and men as well. Some days, she found herself wandering in the direction of her first home, but as soon as the jagged, black spires stabbed past the horizon into the sky, she turned and picked a different direction.
Londor would not have her back, and she would not go. It was beyond her purview any longer.
Her wandering brought her to a port, eventually. A port at the edge of a misty sea, and men and women of all shapes and sizes loaded barrels and crates aboard a ship.
“We have been called,” they said to each other, or called across the docks. “We return to the Lands Between!”
She did not know what the Lands Between were, or even the name of the land she currently stood upon, but what she did know was that her curiosity bore her too close to the group loading the ship, and a rucksack was thrust into her arms by a graying man in tattered brown rags, a wagon wheel affixed about his neck like a ridiculous hound’s collar.
He grinned, baring yellowed teeth from beneath his blindfold, and she gathered the musty burlap to her chest with the hand not burdened by her scythe. He disappeared into the crowd without a word. She never saw him again, even on the cramped quarters of the ship, as it swayed and rocked in breeze and tide.
Tarnished, they had called her. She had let them. She did not know what a Tarnished was, but she figured she would find out in due time. Maidenless, they had also called her, and that had sounded more like an insult, but one she did not know the extent of, and thus did not know the extent she should be offended.
The man who rubbed his hands together on the small cliff was as much a weasel, that she did know. He would have made a fine addition to the Sable Church, but she could see the glint of his eyes beneath his mask and knew he had his own ambitions to pursue. She thought following his advice would surely lead to a trap, but as a stranger with no companions in a strange land, it was her only guidance.
She did not know what to make of the Great Tree looming so large and glowing above the lands. It did, however, make for a convenient landmark, a way to orient herself in this unfamiliar place. That was more than enough for her.
There were other words that she would have to come to know in due time; Golden Order, Greater Will, Two Fingers, Grace. Other names that would begin to crop up more and more, Queen Marika, Lord Radagon, demigods. It was easy as it had always been, to go along, without correction or complaint. To gather knowledge, hoard it for her own and give nothing in turn. Let people stew in their assumptions, so she could get away with being what she was not.
The sorceress in the crystal cave beneath the overgrown ruins, too, had her own ambitions. She was the kind of woman that one did not turn their back on, lest they find a blade between their ribs. The stone mask hid her face and her intentions perfectly. Yet she, too, provided small nuggets of information here and there, and where she had no answers, nor patience to answer, could point at books to read.
The most helpful seemed to be the merchant, playing his lonesome song in a rotted-out church. He was not from beyond the fog and sea, and knew the world quite well. For a bit of runes, he could be coerced to speak about a great many things. His fellows would do the same, he explained, and she listened.
Most vexing was the spirit-woman, who appeared at her side as she sat beside some fruiting bushes outside a newly-emptied soldier’s camp. A memory arose of some sort of beast snuffling at her after washing ashore when the boat had overturned near the coast, and she swore there was a woman sitting atop it, or maybe was part of it, but she had lost consciousness or died or whatever it was once again before deciding. The woman handed her a ring, and pointed toward the ground, and for the first time since she had washed ashore, she saw a fluttering shade of golden light floating in midair. From it streaked rays, glimmering in the night, pointing to the north, and she stood, summoned the steed, and followed them.
Gideon drums his fingers against the table, as he stoops over his various books, eyes hungrily absorbing the words from the pages. He is an old man, even if he is also a living corpse, and his neck cricks something fierce for a moment. Perhaps it is time he take a break, and he takes his staff, and walks out to the roundtable proper. There are new faces, but there are always new faces. The Tarnished come in small waves or bits and pieces, and disappear the same way.
He is warming his old bones near the fire - though not so near as to startle the flighty Tarnished woman in the red hood who refuses to make eye contact with him - when the air stirs and shifts, then glimmers gold with a new arrival. Or rather, an arrival Gideon has been aware of before, but never properly greeted until now.
He’s never seen anyone like her, in truth. She is styled as that of a Confessor, but the symbols are all wrong. No Confessor wears a rosary for a belt, and there exists no emblems of Two Fingers or Greater Will or Golden Order on her person. Odd.
A nun with a scythe conjures not the image of a typical church zealot, but an assassin. A reaper, punishment more swift and decisive and divine than forcing sins and secrets from between bloody lips. Gideon inclines his head in greeting all the same, and introduces himself and the Roundtable Hold to her, but his eyes never leave her form until she is gone again completely.
She must be Tarnished, to be here. Grace only touches those from the Lands Between, unless... Gideon’s staff taps the worn wood floor as another hypothesis forms in his mind, and he hobbles back to his table. He needs more books.
One night, she returned to the old church, hoping the merchant man would be willing to part with a bit more information about some of the stranger goings-on she’d discovered in the place marked on a ragged map she found as the Mistwood, only for the whole area to be bizarrely muted and serene. A placid, sleeping silence that immediately set her on edge.
There was a figure, seated atop the crumbling wall. A four-armed doll, she discovered upon closer inspection. It spoke with a woman’s voice, and told her that its name was Renna the Witch, and that it had a gift for the one who was chosen by the spectral steed.
The doll handed her a bell, and bid her a final farewell before disappearing, and the heavy, slumbering weight in the area lifted.
The merchant had no recollection of the events, or the conversation, but that was just as well. He did, however, have knowledge of the howling beast in the Mistwood, and that it wasn’t coming from much of a beast at all. He told her how to beckon the being, and she set off into the night without any further ado.
There’s a ruckus outside, but Nepheli is trapped in a room by a monstrous knight in battered silver armor. He wields the winds, but she is faster still, and the figure crumples, gargling blood on the floor. The clatter of armor goes silent at nearly the same time the disturbance beyond the door does, but Nepheli pays it no mind for a long moment.
“Your only mistake was your choice of master,” she says to the unmoving corpse, as a shadow falls silently across the doorway. Brown eyes glance up, but she sees not the face of what she presumes to be another Tarnished. Hooded, carrying a scythe; a Confessor, then. One who would enforce the will of the Two Fingers in the myriad lands across the sea. She does not fear the dark and foreboding presence, and merely greets her fellow Tarnished. She and her father are chosen among the Fingers, and thus the Confessors pose no threat to either of them.
There is no formal exchange of names. Nepheli merely instructs her fellow to call upon her if they wish to challenge Godrick. The woman affirms, with an inclination of her head that only serves to slide her hood further down upon her face, obscuring yet more of her identity. They part ways, and Nepheli takes a brief moment to rest in the quiet little nook, before stepping through the door. The windstreaked quiet of the outside belies the carnage and death strewn about the passageway. Blood runs small rivulets between paving stones, the corpses are mangled and deformed.
She refuses to be rattled, and carries on, past the contorted lumps of troll and omen and many, many humans, past the broken weapons and bulwarks. Perhaps the woman never needed help against Godrick.
It is some surprise when Nepheli feels the pull of a furlcalling finger that evening, and she heeds its beckoning, finding herself before a large arched doorway, shrouded in cascading gold fog. The woman is there, scythe in hand, and says nothing as she steps through the fog gating the way.
Godrick’s bluster is not matched by his power. Intimidating as it is to stand before a true heir of the Golden Lineage, a demigod in name and stature, his grafting leaves him malformed and grotesque. His greasy head is barely supported by a gangly neck, and his voice is tight and nasal. Nepheli bears her arms, but the Confessor is lightning, leaping nearly the whole distance between arched gateway and hulking figure before the word kneel! has even finished echoing off the battlements. Nepheli scrambles to keep up, but finds she should have never even bothered to try.
The scythe arcs through the air, hewing limb from grafted limb, paring the writhing mass down as is a scythe’s wont. Godrick flails and rolls, slams the heavy axe into the ground head-first with power enough to rattle the very earth, but the Confessor freezes it in place, and while the demigod squalls in rage as he tries to pry it loose, she prunes three more limbs from his body.
By the time Nepheli catches up, her blade biting into demigod flesh for the very first time, a long, rattling scream escapes Godrick, and she just barely escapes a sweeping slash that chases both her and the confessor away a few paces. Just far, and long enough for Godrick to turn his axe upon himself, and sever his arm.
Exhausted, panting, he thrusts the stump beneath the jaw of the impaled dragon, and screams into the empty heavens for his forefathers to bear witness.
The dragon head, spurred back to life, spews red-hot flames across a wide arc before Godrick. Nepheli retreats, and as the dragon’s searing breath fades, realizes she cannot see the Confessor any longer. Her only clue as to the other woman’s whereabouts is when a trail of sparks appears from the misaligned stones on the ground, and Godrick’s dragon-arm is flung up into the air, nearly knocking him full sideways to the ground. One more shining arc of razor sharp steel, and the head is severed from his arm, falling limply to the ground. He barely has time to register that his showboating is for naught before his own head joins the dragon’s, decapitated neatly and sent flying to the ground.
Nepheli feels no remorse for the demigod’s fall, but she does feel a tinge of dread creep up her spine as she watches the Confessor approach the disembodied head.
“Curious,” the woman speaks, in a soft voice which matches little of the power and carnage she has proven to be capable of. “Thy gods are weak to flame.”
Then, the woman skewers Godrick’s head on her scythe like so much meat ready for a roast, and casts it off the blade and past the castle wall, into the tenebrous sea below.
Liurnia is a beautiful land, stretching a glimmering span from the back of Stormveil Castle into a mist-laden horizon that she cannot quite see. The air is thick not just with moisture, but a pulsating magic that she can feel constantly on the back of her tongue. Torrent is more than happy to splash quietly through the water, and she is more than happy to allow him to do it. The water is frigid, and though the temperature does not bother her a whit, it is still more convenient to let the spectral steed carry her.
It rains in the Lands Between. It rained once, too, in her home, an age or two ago, but the closer to the end of the Age of Fire it gets, the more things spiral and break, and the predictable cycle of monsoon is among those first to be discarded.
Still, the rain patters onto her hood, and if she tilts her head down, it spills in a small cascade onto Torrent’s back. The steed, soaked already, does little more than flick his tail anytime she does. Still, she tries to keep her head level for the trip.
She finds a great number of tomes about history and magic, and she happily consumes the contents, bridging gaps in her knowledge of these lands and some of their practices. The slant she finds in these books is different than the ones in the castle, but the words Golden Order and Caria are starting to make more sense in context now, and she can see their differences.
Entering the Academy, she happily steps past the crumpled corpses of half-mad scholars, scuffing magic staves away from death-stiffened hands in case they are as unkillable as she, and peruses the many, many shelves, looking for a selection to keep with her, to store in the packs on Torrent’s back. At the top of the academy, the former Raya Lucaria headmistress floats above a crowd of sluglike children. There is neither joy nor sorrow in ending their pathetic lives, until their singing hits a sour chord, and the barrier around the floating woman shatters, bringing her to the floor. Yet, before the final blow can be struck, the world begins to twist and turn, darkening to shadow, and the strange sense of being transported somewhere she was not a moment ago turns her stomach.
The moon behind the Carian queen is beautiful, awestriking, a show of true power.
There is no mercy, and there need not be, as the battle ends in the nighttime lake dissolving into the illusion from whence it sprang, and Rennala clutches her egg to her lap when the scene clears. It does not take a hardened swordsman to see that the broken woman is no threat, and she is left in the library to her grief and madness.
Returning to the Roundtable Hold is returning to an ambush, but the silent man that had been loitering outside Gideon’s room is hardly a threat, and his lifeless body clattering to the ground is the most sound she has ever heard him make.
She has two Great Runes now in her possession. Or perhaps, more accurately, in possession of her. Gideon seems thrumming with anticipation; the Two Fingers will obstruct her path to the Altus Plateau, realm of the Erdtree no longer. An eyeless old crone seems excited to relay word from the giant creature in the back room that she is primed now to be taken as Queen Marika’s consort.
Queen Marika, whom all signs point to having abandoned these lands some time ago, along with the Greater Will. Whatever the creature says, or whatever Enia interprets from it, seems wishful at best.
Still, it has a certain appeal to it. Her, an Elden Lord. Consort to a goddess. Lord of a realm when she failed to become aught at all before but Ash. Founder of a church which aimed to dethrone the very gods of their realm.
Surely, somewhere beyond the fog, Yuria is laughing.
She sets up across the table as Gideon relays his information to her, and how the long-abandoned lift to Altus may be coaxed into life again. She is curious about the other Great Runes, the other demigods, so she inquires about them. He does not hesitate to relay the information of the ones he knows: Praetor Rykard on Mount Gelmir, Morgott the Grace-Given in Leyndell, and General Radahn the Starscourge, likely out in the Caelid Wilds with his men.
Caelid. A place subsumed, he says, by rot. The terminology catches her attention, and she inquires further. That would have been caused by a demigod he has no knowledge of the whereabouts, and the line of inquiry follows further. The Lord of Blood, Miquella the Unalloyed, Princess Ranni of Caria, Malenia the Severed; demigods possessed of their own Great Runes, but whom even he cannot track. Runes she can seek out in the Lands Between if she so desires.
She leaves thereafter, riding at the head of a cool midday breeze across rolling hills and impressive stone bridges. Her thoughts whirl within her head. She could become the Consort of Queen Marika, the one who supposedly rules these lands, but she also sees many paths opening like a flower before her, stretching in all different directions. Gideon had mentioned empyreans; those especially chosen by the Two Fingers. Those who could become as gods.
If Queen Marika had abandoned her duty, then it makes the most sense to replace her with one who will do theirs. But first, more information. Scouting and intelligence, spying and subterfuge are hallmarks of the Sable Church, and she has long since learned what happens to those who dive into a situation without knowing.
The corner of her lips turns up into a little smile. She’s been tumbling the names of the demigods over in her head in a kaleidoscope of unspoken syllables, wry humor blossoming at the thought they seemed to be as in love with titles as any from her own homeland.
I am of Londor. Of the Sable Church. I am Ash. I am Hollow.
It would be meaningless to them, as their names are meaningless to her. Naught more than posturing and vying for meaningless glory, but still, she thinks it would at least be worth the momentary flit of amusement to say it, at least once.
The dirt beneath Torrent’s hooves turns from dusty gray-brown to muted red, and she sees a smoldering wall belting the top of a hill before her. They think burning will keep the rot at bay. Perhaps she’ll put an end to that here, too.
In the end, she always chooses rot over fire.
Caelid is the most beautiful place she’s ever seen. As she stands afore the hilltop shack overlooking the place, a thrill slithers up her spine and ends in a shudder.
The rot is flourishing, living and spreading and consuming, ravenous and alive. It devours so it may thrive. It turns water to roiling, geysering, caustic springs. It splays myconic petals towards the heavens, less in supplication, and more in threat - you’re next.
It is life. Life springing wild, untamed, voracious, and defiant from death. Life laughing in the face of the gods and any others that would try to control or stop it.
She pulls the reins to turn Torrent from the overlook, and presses her bare heels into his flanks. She has decided. Together, they step forward onto the scarlet path.
“Welcome to the Radahn Festival!” the castellan’s voice booms over the crowd, echoing into every corner of the great redstone castle.
There’s a crowd of disparate warriors, and, if Blaidd’s nose isn’t mistaken, a Finger Maiden of all things here for the celebration. There’s a feast laid out for the celebrants, meat and ale aplenty so none of them go into the melee on an empty stomach. The woman he’d invited isn’t here, but there is some time yet.
The participants mill about, some eating, some whetting their blades. A deep, booming laugh fills the courtyard long moments after the castellan’s voice fades, and Blaidd’s eyes rest upon a Tarnished in preposterously round armor serving a toast to a more sensibly dressed warrior.
The half-wolf’s tongue runs out from between his fangs, and over his snout. The air in Caelid is like nettles in his nose; he thought it was bad enough when the winds shifted and carried the scent to Mistwood, but at the core, so close to the Swamp of Aeonia is a far worse stench. It has been an age since he’s been here, and still every time he has to stop and think, what did you do, Malenia?
He is brought from his rumination by silence. The same kind of silence begot by fresh, frigid snowfall, when it seems to absorb the concept of sound itself, and hoard it jealously. He crosses his arms over his chest, and stays silent for a moment, as she strides through the crowd - precisely in the middle, each barefoot step seemingly measured and precise. Her dress is demure, but her presence is unmistakable. He is reminded of Ranni, in a strange way, after her tutelage under the Snow Witch was complete and she carried herself with a renewed sense of confidence.
However, where Ranni was well-bred royal grace, this woman’s grace is predatory and alarming. She is death, scythe and all, cold and lonesome and silent and inevitable. It’s a different kind of unsettlingly threatening than Ranni, or even Queen Marika for that matter, what little he ever remembered of her from before the Shattering.
Ranni likes to fashion herself as the most dangerous thing in the Lands Between aside from an explosive return from Marika or Miquella, and yet Blaidd isn’t quite so sure. His sister is aware of the fact the woman’s not Tarnished, but even still, it’s unclear what her game is.
At least she’s friendly. Mostly. More importantly, she’s amenable to Ranni’s plans. Blaidd falls into step behind her, raises a hand, and hails her.
Radahn is a beast, and the word is an apt descriptor of many of his traits, from his size to his temperament. He flails his massive swords from side to side, and the combatants are crushed and scattered, fewer and fewer rising from the dunes to rush him again after every swing. He cares not, it seems, for what it is that might get in his way. All are obstacles to be destroyed or consumed.
It is tempting for her to simply allow those who gathered to meet their fate; she is the only one who brought a mount, after all, yet she cannot help but be caught up in the fervor. She swings her scythe and it bites into stiff metal, and muscle like rock, and seems to do little more than irritate the behemoth of a man. Up close, she can smell the decay, can see the bloody froth at the corners of his lips and the cloudy, thoughtless madness in his eyes. His skin is stretched too-taught and tearing over bulging muscles, and his feet are gone entirely. The absurdity of his lanky, starving horse is pale in comparison to the sheer enormity of him.
She can see why he was once called mightiest among the demigods. It took nothing short of what must have been the most powerful weapon in Malenia’s arsenal, and untold scores of years on top of that to bring him even this low. He is still the better of half the army assembled, but the key players, the familiar faces to her - those are able to stay standing, even if barely.
A blow from the swords, even glancing, is like taking a meteorite to the gut, and she knows only the ruddy earth, and the taste of sand on her tongue for a long moment. Torrent, beyond her reach, whinnies, then fades from the world.
There’s a steadying hand at her back that is too big to be human, but it does help her rise to her feet in enough time to avoid massive accretions of rock smashing her into the dune. The same cannot be said for the demigod’s mangy horse, as the mindless brute crushes it to the earth, using the horse as a springboard to launch himself toward a crowd of combatants, and clears them all with an earth-shattering thud. Still, as any kicked, loyal animal, the horse shakily regains its feet, and hobbles after the man.
Her fingers hover over her belt, over the empty handle that she keeps tucked beneath the rosary. Perhaps the former mightiest of the demigods would be the first to test her. She pauses when a roar echoes to the very heavens as Blaidd’s greatsword shatters armor and probably bone, and the behemoth falters.
No. She’s seen enough to know what blackflame means to this world. She’s seen enough, also, to know that this world has no idea what blackflame is truly capable of. Not any longer. She needs not the rune of Death to make it a terrifying concept; the gods are vulnerable to flame in these lands.
He leaps into the air, gone, apparently, from the very earth itself like some winged creature, and the army can only stand, confused. Then, night turns to day, black to white, and a fiery streak screams down from the heavens. The impact is enough to white out her vision, and just about every other sense of hers. She wonders for a moment if she’ll feel the blazing ring scarred into her back activate to bind her spirit, but it does not. For the second time, she tastes sand and dust, sees nothing but a twilit sky, and when she shakes herself off, she realizes she wasn’t at the epicenter of the impact. She is not dead.
Nor is he, and he is baring down upon her with the skittering of his poor horse’s legs. She is mounted on Torrent and meeting his challenge with a lazy loop around back toward what few shaken soldiers remain on the battlefield before the spectral steed has even fully manifested.
She’s not sure who strikes the finishing blow, or if it can be accurately attributed to just one of the warriors, but when the dust settles, and the sun rises, another demigod’s corpse bakes in the arid sun among a cadre of other unmoving, armored figures. Alexander is knelt among them, scooping the remains into his unsealed lid. Blaidd is still standing, and while she cannot say she feels relief for his life specifically, she does feel relief to see the familiar faces are still here.
Altus Plateau is gold. It is shining, shimmering gold; the light, the trees, the bushes, the flowers. Everything is gold; even the air is tinged and the sky glows in pastel yellow contrast to the boldness of the Erdtree. Everything in the Lands Between is gold, but this is radiant.
It is almost too much light. The Erdtree shines too brightly, and she finds herself looking down toward Torrent’s back more often than to the distant road ahead. Dangerous, perhaps, but it feels like a light is cast upon her specifically. Once, she would have reveled in the attention, the glory. Now, she shrinks from it, pulling her hood further over her face. Too many stares at her scars, when the illumination is this strong. Too many eyes upon her disfigurement.
To the northwest is a dark and foreboding mountain. She pulls Torrent’s reins in its direction, and spurs him into faster motion. Mount Gelmir, it must be. She does not care for the cascading lava, and blasts of hot air that whistle through the fractured earth beneath her, pushing water into scalding geysers. She does not care for it, but the smoke and size of the looming volcano cast deep shadows that she can slip in and out of, and she feels less seen. It is enough.
A covenant devoted to the downfall of the gods. To the destruction of the ruling order. It is an almost laughable parallel to everything she and her sisters had worked for in Londor, right down to the serpents. When she thought her path was set before, she finds herself grasping at doubts now.
The woman in the silver mask tasks her to meet the others, and she finds an envelope, addressed in too-perfect handwriting to her. It is an order to kill her “fellow” Tarnished, and it is a task easily done. Whether or not she is Tarnished, whether or not the others are Hollow, she could easily dispatch them. She has easily dispatched them, in the past. The Sable Church are swordsmen, assassins, murderers. Dredges of society, carefully sculpting their order until only those who could stand a chance to bring down Gwyn and his ilk were left, until they could save themselves and Hollows all.
So she fights, and she kills, and when the final, red envelope is picked up from the table, she has to ask the knight armored in beastial symbols where the individual is. North, he says, that place is beyond Leyndell, and Leyndell is the only way to it.
She sighs. Of course. She has to travel through the obnoxious light of that glowing monolith.
For a moment, she thinks she has been given a clue. The castle is partially submerged in a noxious soup of liquid that rolls her stomach and sears her flesh when she touches it. Accessing the upper echelons is a task in leaping from collapsed rooftop to collapsed rooftop, until she can climb a ladder. A spirit mumbles a spiteful line about a severed harpy, and her breath catches in her throat.
She knows the knights in tattered red capes with winged helmets are those who served closely with Malenia, and seeing a small handful of them trying to bar her path to the top of the highest tower stirs a lightness in her breast. Yet, when she reaches the apex, there is only a man. Twisted thorns wrap about his armor, and he slings his sword in magical arcs far from his body, crushing and splintering the tables of the dining hall. When he is struck down, she steps toward the back. There are various prosthetic limbs of well-polished gold adorning the walls, and in the middle, a reverent painting of a redheaded woman in a winged gold helmet. It dwarfs all else in the room, a centerpiece and a shrine to obsession.
No, this is not what she is looking for, but she knows she has at least gained knowledge of what this Malenia demigod looks like.
She’s seen him before. This was the furry, tailed creature which had tried to prevent her from entering Stormveil Castle. He had not been much of a threat before, but he looks more resolved now. More than that, she’s fairly certain she’s treading his territory, and he’ll be all the more fierce because of it.
She has learned a lot from the people she has met in this place, and even more from the books she has picked up to read during long trips across empty fields. She knows what an Omen is, knows that the Omen are not creatures which typically can be accepted into the ruling Golden Order. This one seems a strange exception, but she also knows that if he is a demigod, then he is, cursed or not, a child of Marika. Normally that just meant they did not have their horns removed. This one seems to have been truly exceptional. She wonders if his King of Leyndell moniker would hold if Marika were to return, or if he would be cast back to the sewers once more.
He uses attacks of searing holy energies, and an unrestrained strength that he did not show her when they fought on the path to the castle. For the first time, she feels threatened. Ariandel’s ice is still brutally powerful, but Morgott is hard to hit. He seems to have learned from their first fight, and refuses to touch the frozen ground for more than a moment or two. She is crushed to the stone dias once, twice, and then a third time, and it becomes harder and harder to stand up each time. Whatever sword he wields is truly a rare weapon of earned renown.
Eventually, he cries out, and the whole of their makeshift arena is coated in an explosion of slimy, thick fluid that looks more like mucus than blood. The thrones are stained by his curse, now, he snarls. He will never forgive her part in this.
It is his curse, she wants to say. He is the one who stained them. He is the one who clings to their symbols long after all of those who once occupied them left, and left him, as well. He is the fool here.
Words will not get through to him, but her scythes will. She slips the second handle from its place at her hip, and when it ignites, she sees golden eyes narrow from beneath the mass of horns.
The flame consumes the wood for the demigods of this world are as sproutlings from the Erdtree; the darkness consumes the light for the demigods of this world are given life by the glowing grace of Gold. Morgott falls, face a snarl of terror and understanding.
“Thou’rt…” he says, reaching for a familiar word, a name. Something from the past that should have been buried and gone. Something she is not.
“No one,” she replies. She walks past him, up the stairs toward the great entryway hewn out of the bark of the Erdtree. He dies with his questions unanswered.
The Erdtree is sealed shut, thorns and symbols covering the one place of granted access. The spirit-woman appears again, and she has an idea.
Burn the Erdtree.
A grimace is the only response from someone too-aware of their own aversion to flame.
Deathroot is such a strange thing, she thinks, turning it over in her hands. It has eyes upon it. Eyes which look very much alive, very much give her the feeling that it can see her, and that whatever is looking is taking her measure.
The Beast Clergyman may be even stranger, for he devours the roots, and then begs for more, unsated. Rogier had some inclination about what was going on, but Fia knew more and never spoke it. No, perhaps more accurately, she was never allowed to speak it.
Death is its own, strange entity here. She has an unusual relationship with death to begin with, but in these Lands Between, death is a strange entity. It was once removed entirely from the place, but things still died, yet they did not call it death. It is restored, it is taken away, it is partially restored, it was never restored at all, the tales can never seem to agree. Except, now, it apparently spreads creeping fingers through roots, from what she can gather. She wishes she did not feel so affronted by Fia trying to partake of her unliving energies to fuel a resurrection of the dead, because she would very much like to speak to her again.
It is too late, now. The Hunter of the Dead - someone she made a point not to speak to much - lies slain on the floor of the Roundtable Hold, and Fia has disappeared to only the gods know where. To her lord, which was stated in more words than that. But whom that lord is…
Hm. She clasps her chin between her fingers, and her idle hand lifts her scythe briefly, tapping the shaft against the floor as a thought occurs to her. There is a demigod which is not dead, or is dead but still alive, in much the same way as Those Who Live In Death. In much the same way as she is.
Perhaps this is worth investigating. Her leads to get to Malenia, after all, have dried up.
Fia’s time at the Roundtable Hold had been punctuated by a number of Tarnished coming and going. Some would grant her request to hold them, kneeling between her knees and pressing a face against her bosom, and simply enjoying the physical contact. Some shunned her, derisive sneers turning their faces away; why would they touch something so despicable as a Deathbed Companion? A few of the more daring souls had even romped in bed with her, as Rogier had.
The most curious had been the woman in holy garb which Fia had never seen before, and could not place a finger upon the origin. She thought her a Confessor at first; It would have made sense if the woman had declined because of Golden Order principle, but that had not been her reason. It was not for risk of seeing her scars, which she seemed to purposefully hide from the eyes of those around, constantly retreated into the deep black hood, her hair falling over the little which light could touch. Was it, Fia had always wondered, because when their hands did brush at first, that it was not heat but biting cold that shocked between the two of them?
Fia thinks about that a lot, as she sits in the relative silence among the roots, her back resting gently, but purposefully against the fish-scaled tail of Godwyn’s corpse. The cold had not felt like ice, though she could feel the cold of ice radiating from the woman’s scythe. It felt like death. It felt like burning. But the sensation had been so fleeting, and every day her recollection of it fades until she can only speculate on something she had never really understood to begin with.
Then, the woman appears again, striding slowly across the shallow lake at Godwyn’s feet, and Fia watches her. Ghostly warriors rise to defend her, for she will not defend herself - it is not in a Deathbed Companion’s nature - but they are dispatched readily.
Death does not scare Fia, but the thought of being unable to finish her task does make her uneasy.
“Are you here to kill me?” she asks, tilting her head up. She will not die without looking the woman in the face, and though the shadows are deep, she gazes where the woman’s eyes should be.
“No,” is the reply. It is the only word the woman speaks for an uncomfortable length of time. The next words are a simple question, “What is thy task here?”
“I have embraced many Tarnished, and carry their essence with me. I will use this essence to aid in gestating a Rune with my lord Godwyn,” Fia responds, honestly. Lying will do nothing for her now. “Would you have embraced me as well, your vitality would be used alongside theirs. I am the Mother of the Dead. I would have my children accepted into the Elden Ring.”
Lips press a narrow line from beneath the shadows of the hood, and then, madly, the woman turns her scythe’s head to the ground, and leans the haft against Godwyn’s corpse. Fia glances once toward it, then up toward the woman, who steps forward. Baffled, she opens her own arms.
The woman begins to kneel before Fia, and then shifts forward. Arms slide as a lover’s around her hips, and then she is pressed back both against Godwyn and the roots by the other woman’s form. It is not an embrace; it is like she is being mounted to be taken, and Fia yields. The scarred cheek passes her vision, and lips whisper words, breath hot, sensual, horrifying into her ear.
“I am of the dead. Doth thou see it now?”
The woman is warm atop Fia, but trying to draw that warmth into her being is met with resistance at first. Resistance yields to heat, but it is too much, there is far too much, it is searing and awful and then she realizes it is not hot, but burning cold and dark and deadly and yawning before her, and it’s sucking the life from her, toward it, an all-consuming maw of darkness that will undo all of her progress. Then once more, it is hot again, burning, the sun shining bright around an eclipse and everything will burn, burn to ash and then the ash becomes cold and then it sparks flame and-
The woman parts from her, and Fia is left breathless and trembling. She closes her eyes, and presses shaking fingers to her eyelids. In the dark, she sees an unwilling soul bound to an unwilling body with a shackle of godflame, a burning ring about a writhing black middle that cannot escape.
When she steadies her breathing and opens her eyes, the woman is gone.
The whipping, frigid wind is refreshing. The swirling silver-sparkle of snow that frequently obstructs her vision is a welcome sight, when it is not obscuring enemies, but even then, she makes do. Torrent is placidly unbothered, per usual, and so pointing him in a direction and allowing him to simply make headway relaxes her ever further.
The land is all high plateaus connected by massive chains, as though the very earth itself is some kind of beast which needs to be shackled down. In these empty, frigid peaks, she discovers two things: The other half of the medallion she collected from the woman and her partner wolf in Liurnia, and the man in rose-and-silver armor that was named on her missive for execution. The first, she simply places in her traveling pack. The second is dispatched swiftly. There is something in the distance that she can see from time to time when the wind is still. A tree, it seems, far beyond another snowfield that she cannot figure out how to get to. Perhaps that is the Haligtree that she keeps hearing of, a rival for the Erdtree’s majesty and grip upon this world.
There is a cliff, and a stomach-clenching drop toward what would likely put her on the correct path, she discovers eventually. She does not feel like shattering her body on the frozen plains below, however, and so she turns away to see if she can seek out a different way.
Perhaps now that she’s ingratiated herself with the people of the Volcano Manor, she can ask them.
She delivers the final word; she is a fully fledged confederate of the Volcano Manor now. It was a simple task, all told, but any cause which purports to stand against the gods of a land is one that deserves some amount of her sympathy.
Yet, something still does not seem exactly right about the whole situation. She can speak to Praetor Rykard now, the masked consort tells her. Yet, she’s seen below the manor; it is a prison town, beings caged and fettered and constrained by the serpents and the strange machines that look like women with snakes within them. Perhaps that is what fuels her misgivings - is the whole thing simply a trap? A way to imprison her, as well?
It is not Praetor Rykard that greets her in the massive underground chamber. At least, not that she can discern. There is, however, an abominably huge snake within. Soon, its reptilian eyes focus on her, and it lunges.
Ah, and so the other shoe drops. He would have her consumed. Use her. Much the same way Godrick would have dissected her and fused parts of her body to him, Rykard seems keen to feed his giant pet with as many powerful warriors as possible, to grow it until it is large enough perhaps to strangle the life from the Erdtree itself.
Ariandel’s ice does little but steam and sputter as it meets the lava wreathing the serpent’s belly. Blackflame could work, she realizes, but the creature keeps lunging for her, mouth first, and its reach is impressive. She reaches for her second scythe, but is interrupted again and again. By poison, by spreading lava, by the serpent itself. She is forced to retreat nearly the whole distance to the door, and it is there, beyond the corpses piled into this room that she sees the weapon.
She is loathe to give up her scythe, but the blade still clenched tight in a corpse’s fist is there, and gleaming. Is this what that spirit in the hallway was speaking of? Serpent-hunter, or something of that ilk?
She has precious little time to decide what to do with it, as the serpent begins slithering closer to her. So she takes it up in her hands, and she feels it activate, feels its bloodthirsty pull toward the great snake. It will fulfill its destiny, its singular purpose.
The blade is huge, sweeping, magic, and it guts open the creature. She is a swordsman, not a pikeman or knight, so wielding it feels awkward, but it is enchanted, and it guides her motions. Arms reach out as though begging her to help from the wounds opened in the serpent’s hide, but she ignores them, until the snake falls, motionless.
She should know by now that it is not so easy, as the creature stirs, and a face appears on its belly. That is Praetor Rykard, then, and she sees now why what he did was called blasphemy.
Become a part of him. Together, they will devour the gods. A family. All as one in the belly of the beast.
She aims the next thrust of the serpent-hunting spear directly toward the scaly face. She’ll not be relegated to mere sustenance.
It is Gideon that provides the information she seeks, on a rare trip back to the Roundtable Hold. She has found the Haligtree Medallion. That should open the path to the Haligtree. The Haligtree should be the purview of Miquella. Miquella is Malenia’s twin. Gideon wants to know where Miquella is; she wants to know where Malenia is.
Anticipation wells in her gut as she activates the Dectus Lift. She steps out of the catacombs into a blizzard. The cold does nothing to or for her, and she pushes on. Archers with eagle-sight try to down her, but she slays them and their wolves. More Albinaurics, legs useless, but fierce fighters all the same. The clues start to come together. Past the liturgical town - but the only way to get past the town is to enter the Evergaol, to avoid the veiled Black Knife. Everything against her, and the enemies are mighty. The Black Knife pierces her heart, and she falls lifeless to the snow, but the burning ring carved into her back will not let her stay down, and she stands a moment later.
She climbs the rooftops, is shot off one, nearly falls off another trying to avoid more archers. Whatever is trying to keep her from that place seems to be getting desperate. Finally, the doors are all open and she ascends the stairs and touches the swirling portal to be taken to wherever it is, and she prays it is right.
She lands atop the barren branches of a dying greattree. A tree further gone than the half-dead Erdtree, she thinks. There are creatures dwelling in the branches, but there is a sign of promise, of hope: there, nestled between branches, clinging to the bark are the pale-and-red rot blossoms, mushrooming from the surface.
Anywhere they are, the demigod of rot must have once touched.
She descends, past heralds, past misbegotten, past crystalians and shambling corpses. There is a motley arrangement of creatures in this place, but in many ways it makes sense. Miquella had been said to accept those which the Golden Order shunned. Would that include the dead, she wonders. Would someone like her find respite, find safety among these golden halls?
She pauses at a statue on a rotunda. A one-armed woman kneels, holding a smaller being to her chest. There are candles about it, turning the statue from decoration to shrine. Yes. It is the same woman from the portrait in the blighted castle. Anticipation continues to well up within her. This is for what she has been searching, and it seems an eternity has passed since she started.
There is no end to the number of things that try to stop her descent. First, those shunned by the Golden Order. Then, an army. Then a collection of those skittering chitinous rot insects. There is a tree spirit, a tree avatar. It seems every single thing which had ever stood in her way thus far is again standing in her way, and she allows none of it. Every time she is struck down, she rises again, and pushes further with yet greater fervor.
Yet, she knows not where she is going, only that she needs to continue forward. Ever forward. Ever downward, toward the roots, it seems. The path takes her to an elevator, and she is about to walk down the long hallway when the glow of something in a side room catches her attention.
It is a large, singular flower. Is this… the Aeonia, she wonders? It seems so small for something that brought such widespread destruction, but then, perhaps that was not its fault. After all, the rot is ravenous, and it gleefully propagates and spreads as far as it is able. Butterflies flutter among the petals, but they are the only moving things about, and she circles the flower several times, leaning past the calyx to see if anything is further within. Nothing.
Hm. Back to the hallway, then. There’s an arched gateway at the end, and it leads to a wide open chamber, encircled almost gently by the Haligtree’s roots. She squints, and a vision of gold and red strikes her. Her hands tremble, she forgets how to breathe.
There.
There.
Malenia is the most beautiful being she has ever seen.
Malenia is shining gold armor and fiery red hair in a curly, untamed mane that cascades down her back. Malenia is scarred, and delimbed, and still she is transcendent. Malenia is muscular and powerful and moves with a terrible, intimidating grace.
Bare feet splash into the pool of water among the gently wafting lilies, and it is snowmelt cold, but the woman doesn’t care. She takes a knee, scythe resting head-down among the flowering grasses. Malenia’s voice makes her shudder; it is soft, and deep, and threatening.
“I am Malenia, Blade of Miquella. And I have never known defeat.”
In the frigid water, her head remains bowed, her scythe held in shaking hands. She hears the rush of a blade cutting through air, and it is too fast, too hard to be stopped in time, but Malenia surprises her as the unalloyed blade thumps into her neck, but does not sever it.
“Stand and fight,” the demigod commands. “Do not die on your knees.”
“I come to offer thee an accord,” she replies.
“I need one not, now stand,” Malenia’s voice is still tempered, uninterested. The blade presses harder against the sensitive, vulnerable neck flesh. The hood dulls the edge, but the pressure will be enough to bruise.
“Thy brother remains missing. The womb of the Haligtree lays barren,” she speaks, eyes tracing the runes on the length of the golden blade.
Silence.
“I come to offer thee an accord,” she offers again. “I would find thy brother.”
Silence, again, but for the whispering of wind among bare branches. Finally, Malenia speaks, “And what would you have in return?”
You, does not escape her lips, but the urge is there. No, such a thing would easily be turned down. She has spent much time thinking of something else to say, even if it is only a half-truth.
“I would raise the Haligtree to its proper position as savior of these lands. Thou’rt the Blade of Miquella, and so it follows that thou thinketh that he should be rightful god of these lands, no? I would find him, and I would be thine ally, and when all is done… I will have a proper home again,” she banks it on that. That the Blade of Miquella is more concerned with what he is doing than what she is, what her intentions are. If she never finds Miquella, it does not truly concern her. She has what she wants; towering, imposing, alluring in front of her. “I have traveled untold leagues to find this place. I have seen and done things that many could never even hope to dream of. All of it was for this singular moment. Take me as ally, and I will ensure the rightful place of the true victors of the Shattering.”
The blade moves, pressing up under the kneeling figure’s chin. The tip of the blade pierces flesh, and a single drop of blood drips down, staining the pale blue robes at their collar. Her chin is forced upward, and she sees the demigod’s face from only the difference of their respective heights. Her heart leaps, nearly escaping the cage of her ribs in a single, powerful jolt.
“Who are you?” Malenia asks, and her empty eye sockets narrow, a habit of muscle memory rather than trying to focus a gaze from eyes that no longer exist.
Victory. Sweet, beautiful victory. Pale lips curl up, just so.
“My name is Friede.”