Chapter Text
“What is this?”
His companion passes a hand over the polished cedar wood. The gold leaf glints in the late afternoon sun.
“A loom,” the young god answers. He plucks tenderly at the silk of the warp above the half-formed mass of weft. This work has long remained unfinished. He feels a familiar pang of guilt. “I used to weave tapestries.”
“What is a tapestry?”
Even wearing the face of a man, Godwyn sometimes forgets what his companion is. “A story,” he answers, “woven in thread.”
The dragon looks at him. Slowly, he contorts his human face into something resembling curiosity. His yellow eyes never lose their pale hunger.
When he speaks, there is no lilt of request in his voice. Only the clear command of divinity.
“Weave then, for me. A tapestry of your holy life.”
He learns to weave at his mother’s side.
But she is a god, and he is not. Not fully - not in the hot, molten way she has been ordained by the cosmos. He is only a little spark, shot out from a kindled flame, not yet grown into his own divinity. So he watches, and with his small, clumsy hands he weaves with the crass tools of silk and wool. His mother draws long, liquid lines of silver from the earth, viscous and pliable, and she plucks hairs from her own head and uses them as gold thread. With her loom of starlight and deft hands she fashions playthings for him, creatures made of silver plated in gold that are watery reflections of himself. She gifts them to him, intends them to be companions and playthings, for he among gods and mortals is alone: the only son of the undying Queen.
Her creations are pale shadows without a voice, but who seem to understand the child-god. They splash alongside him in fountains of sunlight and run with him beneath the gilded branches and marble columns of the Erdtree palace. Eventually, when he grows tired of their strange silence and diluted faces, his mother unspools them, dissolves their forms into puddles of silver flesh which she eats delicately, with her weaver’s hands, as he watches. Later, he will wonder if this is her way of being close to him.
He is faultless, pristine as a newly formed lake from snow. His patience is unearthly, even for the child of a god; his deference elegant and humble. Even so, his mother teaches him not to wait. To offer only that which he does not covet himself. She teaches him to devour the richest and most beautiful things first, for they are his due.
His earliest memories are all of the palace - his palace - coloured in warm hues of cream and gold, pale altus blooms and white silk that murmurs as it sweeps across marble floors. He remembers the smell of lilies, of sweet erd resin, the warm spark of cinnamon and the heady waft of cedar wood turning grey with ash in bronze burners. He touches every hard facet of the gems inlaid in the palace walls, and runs his hands through every silvery tassel, letting the silk pour through his fingers like water. In his father’s chambers he inhales the overpowering scent of animal musk and old leather. At his mother’s feet, beneath the blaze of her glory, he tastes sweet crushed almonds. In her kiss, the velvet cruelty of an oleander.
He remembers white headdresses and gentle, worn hands, anointing his head with rose and golden sunflower oils. His Perfumers’ sharp smell of herbs and medicinal ointments, cold and soothing on his bare arms. A pair of young eyes on an old face that twinkle at him with amusement. Another pair, doleful, that look at him with the love he imagines a mother must bear her son.
Or maybe not. The Queen has never looked at him that way.
He is present for all the ceremonies and rites of the Golden Order, every passing season celebrating the unchanging nature of the Erdtree. He listens to every bell toll, and watches every libation poured into glazed bowls rimmed with gold. Not because it is required of him as the sole heir of the Queen and her Lord - he has learned already that very little is required of him, beyond the symbolic nature of his existence. His beauty is already blooming across smooth cheeks, a crown of hair as rich as the leaves of late autumn on sacred wood. He knows he could be a precious jewel in a locked box, a white lily encased in wax, if he so wished it. But he is thirsty for life, born into the age of abundance promised by his parents’ union, and he cannot help the need to witness every triumph, to bathe in every light. To know this world intimately, and all its rituals. He licks erdsap from his fingers, combs precious oils through his hair, kneels alongside the priests in the golden cathedrals to worship his mother. His early life is lived in interludes of spoken sermons and chanted incantations devoted to his family, and sometimes all he wants to do is sit and listen, let the voices wash over him and kindle an awe in his chest, a tightness that is both deeply joyful and immeasurably mournful. He has found only music, along with his mother’s words, can make him feel these two things at once.
For a while, he is pleased to tuck his golden mane beneath a plain wool hood and content himself with watching the worship from the balconies of the cathedral. When he is not listening to the soaring chants he listens to the idle gossip at the back of the great stone halls, hushed as all sounds are in such vast spaces. He hears intrigue and slander; quiet prayers in small voices and consoling words for shared disappointments. But never does he hear anything but gratitude and veneration for his holy mother and her Order. He hides his face and moves among the nobles like a secret, a game only he is playing. But eventually he remembers what he owes the people, and so returns adorned in jewels and silk, face arranged in beatific warmth, a painter’s idea of divinity. Perhaps, he thinks, he will be a lily encased in wax after all.
When he is old enough to leave his mother’s palatial embrace and roam the streets below the golden avenues, he sees for the first time the true faces of his people. Those who live outside of his mother’s promise of abundance, their grim gazes and dirtied hands. He sees the burnt, rippled flesh of a blacksmith’s bare arms, smells the perpetual stink of a cloth dyer and a fishmonger. And among them, monsters: Graceless creatures with no right to exist beneath his family’s golden bough, chained and marred by their mutations. At first he feels only revulsion for those who have neither his Grace nor his countenance. Mirrors have only ever shown him his own perfect, careless beauty.
“A god does not pity their people,” his Healer tells him later, in a stern voice better suited to a parent than a Perfumer. “A god loves their imperfections as much as their beauty, for the most imperfect are often the most devout, and beauty without humility is wont to worship itself. They deserve better than your pity.”
So he learns to turn his revulsion into love and, with more difficulty, respect. To see these creatures as whole in and of themselves, and not just mistakes, extensions of his mother’s careless whimsy.
Later, he will beg the dragon not to pity him in the same manner.
*
He is still a child when the twins are born, young enough that he does not remember his first glimpse of them. He only knows with certainty they are first kept in the palace, little horned babes cloaked and wrapped like daggers sheathed in the dark. They are given to his own Healer, he remembers, the most eminent Perfumer of Leyndell, to be kept out of sight until their place in the Shunning Grounds is prepared. His father had thought to take her tongue to guarantee her silence, but Godwyn begs and fights and sheds pitiful tears until his father relents. She is too clever to silence, and she is his mender. He will have what is owed to him, his father be damned.
In his innocence he does not understand the curse embedded in his brothers’ flesh, their disfiguration a symbolic punishment they will have to suffer. The shame is meant for his mother. A stain on the Golden Order, a check on her hubris. But when Marika had borne the twins there had been no screaming, no torturous agony. Only laughter, shrill and ironic and devastating. And then silence.
Give them to me, he demands at last. I can fix them.
He is young but his incantations are strong, pure: the bright golden light at high noon. The priests praise his faith while the Perfumers admire his keen eyes. I can do it, he insists with the kind of arrogance born of youthful entitlement. His father scowls at him, his mother says nothing. For the first time he feels the rage of a child who knows their elders are wrong, and can do nothing to change it. Feverish with resentment and fear for his kin, he takes to sneaking into their locked chamber at night. There, in secret, he bathes them in rays of gold until the sun lights the Erdtree from the east, and his Healer comes to fetch him. He crumples in her arms, exhausted, the magic drained from him, and she carries him back to his chambers to bed. In the glorious late morning light he bites back tears of frustration when he finds them still horned, little writhing shapes in slate blue and inky black grasping at his golden curls.
When they are barely old enough to be self-sufficient they are moved to the Shunning Grounds, and by now Godwyn is also old enough to understand. He has seen his father do the same to disobedient hunting dogs - release them into the wild rather than put them down himself. When they inevitably turn up dead, he is free to mourn them as if he had no part to play in their deaths but a merciful one.
For what is a god, he understands, if not a king who need never face the consequences of his actions?
*
When he is not hunting or hawking with his father, he weaves tapestries.
They say it is a symptom of idleness, or worse - of malaise in Godfrey’s absence; those long months when his father is far afield and has left his golden son to his attendants. They must get him outside, they say. Stewards with their rattling voices and weak chins, pleading with the lord’s towering knights like men praying between marble columns. Get a bow in his hand and a sword at his hip, they beg. Fix him, Godwyn understands. And then he will feel the noble bloodlust that runs so purely in his veins, the thick and insistent call of the hunt. Of the conqueror.
He weaves another tapestry.
His attendants will find him there, on occasion, seated at the great polished loom, trapped behind a thicket of wool or silk. He sits facing the back of the tapestry and peers through the threads to where a mirror reflects the face of his work back at him. The stewards are always the last to notice his golden eyes, fixed on them through the taught waterfall of string: the unblinking gaze of an animal. He finds some small satisfaction in the way they shudder when they notice him at last. The way he hears their breath quicken, the apology that tumbles from their quivering mouths for not noticing him sooner. Then he lets his face resolve into something warm and soft. As much as he would like to be left alone with his craft, he also wants their trembling gazes to drink of his work with the same awe and reverence as they do his own visage.
He weaves a scene of knights and priests come to lay tributes at the feet of his parents. A splendid yellow sky crowns their central perch, and their heads are framed by intricate looping halos in gold thread. He learned early enough how much his mother treasures depictions of her own likeness.
Remarkable, the attendants whisper; but he can hear the queer suspicion in their voices.
To this new composition he quietly adds his younger kin, a subtle likeness in the visages of a priest and a warrior who supplicate in his parents’ golden shadow. No one knows, of course; save perhaps the lone Healer aware of their existence, and this small trespass delights him. He is oblivious to consequence, but part of him knows with cruel certainty that, even if they choose to acknowledge his work, his mother and father will look right through the woven faces of their second sons. He noticed long ago how their eyes ghost over his own creations. They settle on his beauty, rather than the beauty of that which he creates. To them, he is their tapestry - their legacy - and whatever creation he conjures of his own volition is of little concern. It fades, obstructed by the long shadow they cast.
Still, he weaves. He meets his own liquid gaze in the mirror, behind a thousand brilliant intersections of colour.
Once finished, he hangs the tapestries himself in the halls outside his chambers, like signposts of his faith. Lords and nobles ask him which masters he commissioned, and how many weavers of the renowned guild worked to create such splendid depictions of their holy order.
None, he answers.
And by now he is used to their confusion, and the apprehension that follows close behind. A god, they whisper, the sole heir of Marika, making ornament. They wag their jewelled fingers, conflating decadence and immorality, blind to their hypocrisy. Idlework, they say tremulously - and worse, womenswork.
Still, he weaves. At night, he returns to his chambers stinking of dyes and covered in bright powdered colours. While his Perfumers draw his bath, he imagines his next work; as they scrub the indigo from his fingers and hair he begins to weave new shapes in his mind’s eye.
When it is finished, it is his grandest one yet: a complex, stylised depiction of the Erdtree, its roots in looping elegance and its bough thick and full, adorned with erdflowers stitched by hand in bright orange thread.
Idle hands, his father’s attendants say. They do not see how deft and strong his fingers have become.
Finally they strap him in leathers and buckle his jewelled scabbard, before sending him off into the Altus Wilds with the promise of a prize if he returns successful. The day is hot and bright on his face, the wind scented by erdleaves. He imagines them in delicate orange stitch, patterned with gold.
He returns in the evening with an enormous stag draped across his shoulders. He lays it at his father’s feet, and in the Elden Lord’s stoic features he sees pride resolve itself, softening the hardness of his brow. Satisfaction, the glimmer of expectations met. Godwyn bows, lets it wash over him. He would like to think himself clever, but still he bathes in his father’s adoration like a child; lets it curl the far edges of his mouth.
Then he washes the blood from his long fingers, and goes back to weaving.
*