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They run alongside the golden leaves that flitter through ivory pillars and across shining rooftops. Their steps echo throughout the ash-laden steps, kicking up dust and gold, the rapid plip-plap-plap of bare feet running joyously through the streets. With the Queen Eternal and Her King Consort busy in preparation for receiving the demigods from the Carian Queen’s care, the twins had been ushered out of the Sanctuary to occupy themselves through play.
In this small moment, in the small nook carved out between time and responsibility, they are not Gods. Mere children who run through the streets of Leyndell, forever attempting to catch up to one another. Miquella lets out a noise of triumph, warbled through his childish voice. “Thou’rt fantastically slow, dear sister!” he cries, turning the corner. He stumbles, like a young foal attempting his first gallop, but he does not fall—he is too determined for it. “Thou wilt not catch I!”
Malenia lags behind him, somewhat clumsily, though her glee is no less pure than his own. She is a sickly child, but she makes up for it all in sheer enthusiasm. She grins white through laboured breaths, struggling to keep up with her twin. “Thou’rt lucky, Miquella,” she says in turn. Her fingers splay helplessly across the distance between them—barely, she grazes the fabric hanging off his back. Miquella stops in his tracks. “Yet thy luck is not enough—tag!”
The light of the Erdtree is blinding at all times of the day. It is one of the few constants in his life. (There are three; The Erdtree, his claim to Godhood, and Malenia.) Yet as Miquella turns to face the light, he is taken aback with how Malenia’s hair glows in the presence of the Erdtree’s guiding light. A halo of flame more impressive than any ring of light he could bother conjuring up with his childish hands.
It’s not a sight that is necessarily unfamiliar to him, for they play under the Erdtree all the time. Queen Marika sired few children that remain in Leyndell, and how rare it is for other children to wish to interact with the Gods on a personal level. Much less poor Malenia, whose flesh is forever being devoured by her own birthright.
It is far from pity, to be the reason why Miquella and Malenia so often play together. Necessity, he decides, and all the baggage that word implies.
“I’ve grown rather tired of this juvenile game,” he suddenly declares. Like a boy throwing a pile of sticks onto the grassy dirt, tempestuous. Malenia laughs, so clearly seeing through his boyish veneer.
“Oh, brother; thou’st tire simply because I’ve won.”
“Hardly,” he protests, chest puffed to the sky. “I merely think that we mayst pursue something… more stimulating .”
“More stimulating! A sore loser thou art, brother dearest. But alright, I shall play along.”
He turns with a start, a mirthful smile spreading across glossy lips. “Come hither,” he says. There is a tree in the courtyard, gnarled roots jutting perilously out over the marble-bricked road, threatening to codify both the golden haze of nature, and the white stoutness of architecture. The tree is no challenge to a spry infant, and the scent of bark and sweat fills the air like perfume. Carefully, Miquella shuffles his body weight so that he perches comfortably on one of the top branches of the golden tree, and he grins down at Malenia.
“Thou art most unkind, Miquella,” she complains. But she is not a quitter.
It’s a slow start. She grips one branch, attempts to claw her way up the bark, but her legs give. Miquella watches with an unmoving golden gaze. Shame tickles the back of his mind, a feeling that he soon waves off. They are Empyrean both, and Malenia is stronger than he regardless. A little tree should not present itself much of a challenge. She scrabbles to the very top, and firmly situates herself next to her twin. She attempts to hold in her wheezing, and smiles triumphantly. Miquella laughs.
“See? No tree shall fell Malenia the Blade.”
It’s a name created under the pretence of kingdom. Like little children, they pull each other under the covers and make up stories in the night, stories of Lord Miquella and his Divine Blade. It’s a farce of course—Miquella cannot see himself a public face of God (it felt too constricting, too perceptible), and Malenia will never swing a sword (pain gnaws at her arm like a feral wolf, violent and full of teeth), but it is so purely divine to wish like a child. Malenia huffs out a grin. It is laboured.
Then, with a sudden start, her head jerks downwards. She stares down at her legs, and Miquella, in his confusion, peers downwards as well. Her knee is skinned bloody. It trickles onto the roots below, an unnervingly bright scarlet.
The twins watch, time thickened with suspense, as Malenia’s rot-accursed blood slides down the bark, a grim sunset painted down the side of the wood. “Oh,” says Malenia, with an audible lurch in her stomach that causes Miquella’s to sink as well. They try to avoid the bloody bits on the way down—should they get someone? Something is horrifically wrong, and in the way children do, they hide.
When the blood dries, the bark turns red and white. The branches begin to sag demurely, as though it is simply tired. Underneath the bark’s rough exterior, something within the trunk burbles, like acid taken to flesh. It is this, Miquella suspects, that scares Malenia more than the idea of potential consequence. The idea that Malenia is always one bad day away from sharing the same fate.
(It frightens Miquella too, though he would never dare say it in front of his twin. She is strong, so he will be too. He squeezes Malenia’s hand, in hopes of conferring whatever little bit of confidence he may have to her.)
They are, as is to be expected, in a significant amount of trouble when they speak of the tree. The Royal Gardener (and what a gaudy title to bestow upon a glorified farmer!) has enough sense in him not to insult Malenia directly. The bad leg of the nobility though she may be, she is still nobility. But the feeling is conveyed enough—perhaps overmuch, as Queen Marika herself descends from the steps to make a show of disciplining her children. Her lip curves with boredom, though it could perhaps be disappointment if the sentiment was perverted enough.
Then again, Miquella, thinks, a look of disappointment on Marika’s face isn’t much different than how she normally gazes upon her children. He tries to search her gaze for something that might denote some sort of sentiment, and finds little indeed.
“Mother,” Malenia begins with a wobbly lip, a guilty frown. “I…” An expression so potent that Miquella immediately cuts her off.
“It was my fault,” he says simply. “‘Twas I who sought to climb the tree—Malenia merely did as I bade her. Pray, do not punish Malenia for mine own mistakes, Mother.”
Queen Marika’s expression shifts, but only into yet another unreadable expression. It frustrates Miquella more than it should, really—he could read the expression of even the most stoic-lipped soldier in all of Leyndell, yet how was it impossible for him to read his own mother? He tamps down on his annoyance like a boot on embers, and prays he looks apologetic enough for Marika to simply give up and let the two of them go.
“Surely, thy twin needs not be protected by thou so fiercely, little lightbug.”
Miquella bristles, despite himself. “It is not protection. It is the truth.” A philosophy used by thee to build all of Leyndell, mind, he wants to say, but bites back the words.
“Nay, Miquella. Even had I been following thee, I could have simply refused thee.” Malenia shrugs, like a dog lying down to take its punishment. “What punishment shall I bear, Mother?”
“What? That isn’t fair!” He frowns. Perhaps the only way he could look more petulant was if he were to stomp his foot along the marbled floor of the hallway, and he’s perhaps only a few more frustrating words away from doing just that.
Marika’s lips draw upwards. A smile, Miquella realises. “Enough. When the Gardener had sent word of my children’s misbehaviour, I had expected something more than mere accident.”
Then what was the point of all of that? Marika’s golden gaze is turned to Miquella, as though she can read his very mind. She gives a languid shrug.
“It heartens me to see the bond between brother and sister flourish so,” she says, like it's an ample explanation. “Cherish that feeling, for the bond between siblings crumbles at the best of times.”
Malenia’s face scrunches into something approaching confusion. “Is - Is that it, then? What of the tree?”
Another shrug. She looks out through the row of windows dotting the halls, onto the courtyard where several workers cut through the gnarled bark. “It shall be put to the flame.” Said so simply, said so easily.
The meaning is subtle, imperceptible. But judging from the way Malenia tenses, Miquella imagines that she understands it just as well as he does. The flame itself is sinful. A cruel, ruinous thing that had been locked away in order to protect not merely the Erdtree, but all the land it casts its light upon. If this rot is so calamitous as to be put to the most blasphemous flame, then Malenia’s existence too is blasphemy.
“It would do well for thee to keep thine play indoors for the time being,” Marika says gently, as though to soften the blow of her implications. “If only so as to keep the mortals out of our hair, no?”
A private joke. One that Miquella, in all his childish rage, cannot understand. And then Marika is gone, as though she’d never been there at all. He reaches out for Malenia’s hand, but it slips from his with ease. A shock delivered as easily as a cut between thin flesh.
He looks at her. Malenia’s face, flushed with the weight of her own inadequacies. Eyeless though she may be, she looks out through the halls, into the vast emptiness of the world beyond.
“I think I’m rather tired of playing,” she says, voice clipped, and bounds away.
“Mmn,” Radagon hums, like a low bell tolling in an abandoned church. It rings with apprehension, with disapproval. Slight, near imperceptible, but painfully there. “Thou hast yet to attain true manhood. Strange—Even thy twin swells into her age.”
What a stupid affair. He doesn’t need Radagon to confirm that which he has known all along. He’s been able to tell, ever since Malenia’s hands no longer fit into his. How her fingers had slimmed into dextrous, thin digits. How his remained plump and clumsy.
Like that of a child. His cheeks are round with innocence. A quality Miquella possesses not.
“No need to dance around the peculiarities of it, Father,” he says, with a half-hearted shrug. There’s a truth that weighs on the fraying edges of Miquella’s heart. He plucks it away, like a silver hair. “I am not the golden half of this accursed twinship. The two of us, we are beholden to something far greater than ourselves.”
Which is to say; he, too, is a child scorned by the gods.
“That is hardly ill,” Radagon says, voice gentle. His fingers tickle the back of Miquella’s neck and his hands gather Miquella’s hair like delicate straw. The action of a father braiding his son’s hair is nothing more than comfort derived from familiarity. Two half-somethings, trying to become whole. Miquella lets Radagon do as he pleases, because he imagines it brings them closer to one another. “Thy boyish qualities lend a certain charm to a one-day sure leader.”
Miquella breathes in. His chest is not tight because his curse spells his own doom; he has not the years of retrospection required to know such a thing. Instead, he lets his mind wander to the scarlet-headed whelp that lays in a room devoid of the Erdtree’s light, complaining that even though she’d been born sightless and stilted, the strange solarization of the world was still far too much to bear. She’d looked so utterly pathetic when he came to visit, grasping weakly for Miquella’s plump fingers. Her hand felt like gnarled wood, her face covered in silk.
This curse is one more thing that binds them together, he supposes.
Radagon combs out the knots in Miquella’s hair with his fingers, rough and gentle in equal measure. He fastens Miquella’s braid with a tie, and hovers his hands over Miquella’s shoulders. He’s hesitant to show more intimacy than that, because Radagon’s hands only ever work death, not children. Miquella leans into him, regardless.
Radagon hesitates. “Art thou worried?”
“No,” Miquella says. “One does not perish from being a child.”
“Childishness, perhaps.” Radagon’s smile is sad. “Thy devotion to Malenia is admirable.”
Miquella imagines that he must see himself in his daughter, red hair and thin skin stretched over jutting bones, and that is why Radagon cannot bear to treat Malenia an extension of himself. He is cordial, as are they all, but between the two of them, Miquella is the only one who is truly loved.
(Because Miquella is more Marika than he is Radagon. Because Radagon can hate Marika shamelessly, and love Miquella as though he is not a reflection of his mother. It’s a shameful perversion of love, whatever that might be, but Miquella allows it placidly. A concession, by way of allowing Radagon to braid his hair.)
“Sister dearest has shown me unrelenting kindness, even in my darkest hours. I wouldst see mineself a brother most detestable indeed, were I unable to return her devotion in kind.”
“Good lad. A proper King is devoted to his subjects.”
Then again, what would Radagon know? He is not a king, just a shawl draped over Marika’s shoulders pretending to act like one.
“Speak not in finalities, Father. Malenia is divine, too.”
Radagon need not speak for Miquella to know where his thoughts wander; Empyrean though she may be, Malenia has nothing to inherit. Trauma breeds aloofness, and thus Miquella is better-suited to rule. A mind doesn’t need to be pragmatic for the distinction to be made obvious.
Better a childish king over a dying queen.
She touches the pale stub where her arm once was and smiles ruefully. Only up to the forearm was her arm unusable, but they’d needed to cut the rot off at its source. (At the very least, as close to the source as they could get it, without ripping out her heart.)
“My legs will go next,” she says, not for any want of pity, but as a simple proclamation of defeat. “I can scarcely walk these days. And thou, who hast neglected thy swordsmanship, will be unable to carry me anywhere.”
The words are said with a hint of girlish pout. Childishness in the ashes, childishness at her fingertips. She laments his curse just as ardently as she laments her own, pounding her fist into a stub against the Erdtree’s golden bark. His heart aches with sympathy, and he is unsure whether he should be glad for it or not.
Miquella brings her head closer to his chest, his fingers (soft and decidedly useless) running through her hair (dry, like spindles of twine). He’s not supposed to be bringing Malenia this close to himself—Marika’s faux trepidations ring out in his mind, more annoyances than worries. Thou’rt at risk of receiving her infection, little lightbug.
Both the nickname and the warning are perfunctory performances. Marika is a woman built by happenstance, and caution as an afterthought.
He holds Malenia like she’ll fall apart if he doesn’t.
“There is a horse for thee yet,” Miquella says, the beginning of a joke. “Our stablehands take such pride in their work, able to find fine steeds for all manner of unfortunates. Like the young lady, the uh… ah, the albinauric.”
“Lady Loretta? She’s kind enough to me when she catches me in the plaza, but I truly detest horses.”
She slumps in his arms, visibly tired. A delicate petal on its way to ruin. His teeth pierce his own skin like silk.
“I pray those words will never find their way to Lord Radahn,” Miquella mutters around the blood that sticks to his tongue. Malenia giggles, as thin as dust in the air.
Hiding is what children do. Miquella is forced into the body of a child like a dog to its cage, so he imagines that hiding would be appropriate. He’s played the part of an infant for centuries now—he knows not how to act like anything else.
Malenia’s Two Fingers have grown disquietingly rigid, that even the hair poking through their leathery skin standing utterly still. It is annoying enough that Marika and Radagon treat Miquella like his rule will be divine—it seems that even the Greater Will urges it so.
“... Wilt thou stay in my room tonight? The pain makes it difficult to sleep.”
She is a child standing in the doorway. She is frightened of the monster that lurks in her closet. What is Miquella, then?
The Golden Order have no answers for the two of them. Gods do not simply die , so Malenia is kept on the precipice of two worlds, a continual state of undeath. Eaten alive by her own body, limbs plucked off like bitter roots that steal the life of its flowering buds. Perhaps Miquella should see the Hound, and beg him to relinquish Death. Just once. Just once, for Malenia’s sake.
Does she ever think about dying? Does she wish for it as much as he does?
What a lousy brother he is.
“If Mother shan’t find out, then I am happy to stay.” He tucks a lock of lightburnt hair out of her face, well out of the way of eyes Malenia does not possess. He stares into the divots where her gaze should be. Face sloughed off by the caterpillars. Does her face hurt? He traces the rotten scars with a gentle hand—she flinches.
He prays to himself that if he is to ascend to Divinity, that he will never be as obtuse as the Greater Will. Damnable things, smooth like seaglass and just as tough to break. Miquella is a mockery of himself. A trap set by shaky hands in frigid winter. Bound to snap with little more than a leaf on twine.
Malenia heaves, a laboured task. “I love you, Miquella.”
When the curtains drop, her words are only cold comforts.
He knows the rows of books like he knows the streets of Leyndell, each spine a house that looks in wonder at the boy Empyrean. It is useless for him to look for something which cannot possibly exist, but it’s one of the few things he can do in order to occupy his mind off of the here and the now.
There is no such thing as a magic tome that describes the secrets to undoing a God-wrought curse, no pages of a madman’s journal that will point him in the right direction. He’d tried the Greater Will, and his Two Fingers had merely rejected the notion of artificial purity altogether. And as Malenia writhes in her bedchambers, decrying her curse and begging the chambermaid to assuage her of her pain, so too Miquella stalks the rows of dust-coated books, much like an unwanted pest.
It’s rather quite pathetic in the grand scheme of things. It is infuriating in equal measure, how nobody else save Miquella cares enough to even try. Queen Marika is as flippant as she’s ever been, concerned with something higher than herself, and Radagon is more like a phantom that is worn by Leyndell like a setpiece—there when he is called upon, but shrouded by shadows during the curtain call.
Neither of them particularly love Malenia beyond what little flecks of divinity remain in her blood, and so they do nothing. Miquella feels like he only knows his parents through the stories woven inextricably around them, and though he tries desperately to get through to them through gifts and honeyed words, they are never fully present in the way he needs them to be. Inscrutable feelings made impenetrable by choice. His parents are simply the deliverers of divine ritual. Is it better or worse that they pretend?
Poor Malenia wails, and her cries seep through the walls. Flowers bloom everywhere, and butterflies chew the leaves. Spitting silk, spitting blood, spitting rot. He fails her with each passing day, in more and more ways. Poor, rot-accursed Malenia.
The skin on his lower lip is worried down to bloodiness. Miquella laps it up with remorse, and continues his search.
In the library stands a stranger.
“Oh,” comes a small, sudden voice, husked like the moon she studies, “‘Tis thee.”
Miquella blinks.
Ranni cuts an imposing figure, a mane of unkempt red hair cradling her face like a mother’s worn scarf. She wears a perpetual scowl on her face—invariably, Ranni is the least polite of Miquella’s half-siblings, but privately he is glad of it. If not for her feelings, then her bluntness. Miquella reads the emotions of others like he reads the whispers of the woods, careful and meticulous. He is glad that Ranni speaks her mind unequivocally, even as it is born of spite..
“Blessings unto ye,” he says, like an imitation of himself, “Would that I had been able to greet thee and thine at the gates, yet mine own work compels my stay elsewhere.”
The words feel flimsy out of his mouth. Today he fails at playing the Empyrean son, and quite spectacularly. Were Malenia well, she might poke fun at his awkward manners, stretched like leather over a tanner’s rack.
“Hm. And wouldst only that I could imagine what a mere child considers to be important work… Father dotes on thee far too much for any burdens of his own to be placed unto thyself.” She clips her bitterness with a half-hearted attempt at dressing, “Well, I imagine, anyway.”
He knows why Ranni acts the way she does. Yet he bristles at the accusation anyways. Not only because it is blatantly true, but because his frustration lies within the idea that other people have been able to see it as well.
Radagon loves Miquella more than perhaps any of his other children, and Ranni resents him for it. How could she not? Miquella had practically stolen her father away from her.
But he had watched as Malenia’s rotten arm was cast onto the perfumer's spark like the rest of the refuse from within Leyndell. He watched as her ashes were blown into the sky, like the little shards of life that fluttered down from the boughs of the Erdtree. Living, decaying, all treated the same.
It isn’t fair—Miquella hates when Radagon plays favourites too.
“Mine work is self-imposed, which I suppose calls for only a deeper apology.”
“Useless platitudes, then. I shall pay them no mind.” Ranni waves him off, and turns.
Miquella bites his cheek. He has rarely changed since the last he saw Ranni, and she is already a gangly young woman, sharp bones and sharper tongue. Like a shrewd reflection of Malenia—but the eyes are all wrong, the posture not quite there.
“Wait,” he calls, “Thou art in search of something. Mayhaps I am able to lend my aid.”
Ranni’s eyes are blue, like the moonlit sky Miquella sees only in sleep.
“… If only because thy library lacks a proper index,” she acquiesces. “A shame thou’rt never to step outside these confines. Were that I still in the Lakes…”
Her hands fold over herself, like a doll tacitly waiting for a child to commence play with it. Miquella begins to rifle through the spines with yet another purpose in mind. Ranni seeks historical records predating the Erdtree, and it soon becomes apparent that Miquella (of course) cannot aid her. Not through any fault of his own, he imagines. Upholding the good nature of the Erdtree is a truth held sacrosanct, and most accounts of ages predating the Golden Order’s influence have been burned, or buried, or otherwise safely out of the hands of curious Empyrean children. The most destined dead end.
At least Ranni and Miquella are in agreement over this one thing—Leyndell’s libraries are sorely lacking.
“How very unfortunate, yet not altogether unsurprising,” Ranni mutters, poking through the spines of dusty books like there’s something to find anyways. “How else wouldst thou create a cult of fanatics? Simply burn the embers of the past.”
“That is blasphemy, Lady Ranni.”
“Thou hast not a mind to stop me. Aye, not a damnable person in this fortress will.”
She makes a motion like a child moving to self-soothe with its thumb. Miquella’s lips press into a thin line. Part of him is annoyed—at Ranni’s callous disregard for the Golden Truth, at his own continued uselessness, but then Ranni winks down at him and he is amused again.
“Never say never. Marika hath yet to receive thee. She shall have thee strung across the roofs by nothing more than thy robes, for the amusement of all of Leyndell,” he jests.
Ranni quips in turn, “Not any more than she herself is being strung for our own amusement.”
It is not wholly a joke, Miquella suspects.
“Irregardless,” she continues, “There is one other thing I am interested in. More than the books, I mean. And perhaps thou might even prove useful in this regard.”
“Aye?”
Ranni grows close. Her eyes are scrutinising, wide. She smells vaguely of rimed weeds, wet and cold from the soil from which they spring forth. “… What do thy Fingers say to thee?”
So often Miquella forgets that Ranni too is Empyrean. So often everyone around him acts as though his eventual Lordship is definitive—his own Two Fingers as well. He does not expect this question from the Lunar Princess, who’d never shown any outward interest in ruling the Lands Between herself. “Why dost thou ask?”
“Curiosity, boredom. Radahn clings to Father’s robes like a babe, and Rykard attempts to womanise in the court. Godwyn is a rotten conversationalist, and given that which I seek is three sheets to the wind… That leaveth only thee.” She rolls her eyes. Ever-bitter Ranni. “What does it matter, mind? Willst thou begrudge a teenage girl her curiosities, then? Mine speaketh nonsense, and irritates me to no end.” She continues, louder, “And if they heareth mine words, I pray they receive my wishes, and perhaps don a more tolerable mask next we meet.”
“I see,” says Miquella. “It must be rather tiring for thee. I am lucky, by comparison. My Fingers speak to me only in dreams—the specifics are lost when I awake.”
A fine half-truth.
“A shame.” Ranni fishes around in her pocket for a wooden toy. Her fingernails scratch unpleasantly at the varnish. “Must it escape thy gaze, then? The thing that lingers in the sky.”
His confusion must show on Miquella’s face, because whatever brief look of scrutinization there had been in her eyes falls off completely. She’s bored again, disaffected by everything that Miquella has to offer.
“No clue then.” Ranni shrugs. “Of course it would elude thee—I am wholly unsure what other conclusion I wished to glean. Silly me.”
“And thou wilt not explain this strangeness?”
“Why should I? Thou wert woefully unable to aid me in any other manner of mine throughout this evening. What use is an explanation to thou?”
Very well, another tactic, then.
Miquella tries not to do this to those with a shard of divinity within them. He knows that if he pries enough, sooner or later his half-siblings will be able to tell that strange happenings are only strange around Miquella. Godwyn had implied he knew of Miquella’s tempering once, a long time ago. A test to scare him into admission. He can play stupid and does so often—it’s a necessary survival skill, after all.
She will feel a gentle push when he dissects her, like the beginnings of a headache. Nothing more.
He captures glimpses of it in flashes.
A white star, covered in a fleshy black substance. Little stars poking between nerve and wing. He feels insignificant, a speck of dust floating perilously over a great waterfall, and yet Ranni… Meticulous, defiant, self-assurances dressed in blue silk. She fights enemies he barely notices, and he wonders if her life has always been a series of fights. But it is not just the Thing that her ire is directed towards—a nebulous Thing that he can only barely see through the thick haze of fog. It is the Golden Order she hates, and Miquella’s blood most of all. He exits her mind just as swiftly as he had entered it, and blinks furtively.
It occurs to him that he has not been keeping up with his half-siblings as well as he should have been.
“… Thou speaketh in vague peculiarities, Ranni. I cannot aid with what I do not know.”
“Thou’rt rather unskeptical, for a child taught by Numen scholars,” Ranni observes. It’s a little unfair, Miquella thinks.
“I simply find myself concerned for my sister—”
“—Of which I am distinctly not .” Ranni scowls. Her accent comes through stronger when she’s angry. It’s Carian through and through. A mark of true love for a mother in name alone. “Blood though we may share, ideas we evidently do not . Very well; I shall seek out thy brother instead—I pray he is more grown than thee.”
Miquella doesn’t often hold onto spiteful feelings. He gets enough of those from his probing of others’ minds. He just shrugs, awkward. A terrible diplomat he will be, if he is unable to hold a conversation with even one unruly teenager. His Fingers would be ashamed. “Godwyn tends to the roots by the carcass these days—seek him there.” He will try something else. Stalk the library halls some more.
“Oh, and Miquella…”
Miquella turns. Ranni smiles.
“Stay out of my mind, little freak.”
He sees it again when he sleeps, a couple of nights afterwards.
The water is black and dotted with stars, his own reflection splashed around him. The water comes up just above his ankles and is almost unbearably cold, like the sky it reflects. But then he remembers, remembers that he has never seen a sky filled with stars, nor had he ever seen a sky so dark. The Erdtree casts its light on all of the Lands Between, and so it eclipses Leyndell in shrouds of lumination. This—whatever this is—is as black as a bitter pitch, and courses through the air with a certain divinity.
It moves like a puddle of dark ink slipped into a glass of water, or perhaps something approaching blood. A strange amalgamation of life and mystery, delivered to him in visions unseen. It rises from the sea of souls with a strange power behind it. It flies through the air like a great dragon, though it is far more graceful than even those which had once carried Godwyn on their backs.
Miquella gets the distinct feeling that it is looking at him, aimless as though its gaze seems.
The Fingers beside him twitch in anticipation, eager to glean Miquella’s thoughts. Like an excited dog, he thinks, but the observation is held on his tongue. Instead, he plays towards their expectations—the same as he does with all things, really.
“What was that?”
His Fingers bow in Miquella’s direction. They are almost hesitant in their delivery. Or perhaps it is reverence. Miquella understands many things (it is, after all, his method of survival), but he finds that they are utterly inscrutable now. Difficult to understand, like an impish girl that rejects her own blood.
It is Us, my Lord. Thy promised deification; Faith given form. That which all Lords must eventually convene with. Wanting, waiting, becoming, being. Waiting, wanting, being, becoming.
The Fingers shudder. Briefly, Miquella thinks of Malenia—do her Fingers whisper the same honeyed words? They must not. He wonders if it would make him feel better if they did.
“Is this convergence? Eventuality?”
Indeed, reply the Fingers, so painfully gentle.
“I see,” says Miquella, and watches the Beast descend into the waters below, illuminated only by the trees hovering above the lake’s surface, and the stars stare back at him.
His room feels empty without Malenia to fill it. Like a half missing its whole, he mourns the loss behind closed doors.
It’s been moons since Malenia left, but that doesn’t mean that Miquella has had enough time to get used to it. The first few weeks had been the worst of it, when Malenia’s sudden disappearance had caused an uproar throughout all of Leyndell—the rest of the Lands Between as well, if missives from Rykard and Radahn had anything to say of it. Miquella had often rode on the back of Fortissax at Godwyn’s behest, scouring the earth below as if every reddish leaf, every red stain of clay, every mottled patch of blood could’ve been her. It was only after Miquella had been slipped a dirt-covered letter that the royal search had ended, and Miquella felt only slightly reassured.
My Dearest Miquella…
A nameless swordsman and a rot-afflicted noble shoddily put back together like a porcelain doll, cutting a swath through the Caelid wilds. He teaches her to kill, and she… Well, Malenia herself doesn’t know what she brings to the table. A reprieve from boredom, is what she had assumed in her letter. Compensation for a life long past. It is a touching story, albeit one which Miquella has a hard time picturing Malenia being an actor in. He tries to imagine Malenia swinging a sword in one arm, cutting flesh into ribbons, and finds that he cannot.
Malenia, the young girl who cried out for Miquella when her legs had been carved off her body? Still, Malenia is not a liar—people change and grow, but fundamental truths remain.
Shame is something I will ascribe to no longer. When I return, my dear brother, it will be as a warrior befitting of the Golden Order, through prevalence and tarnish alike…
He regrets a lot of things in her absence. How Miquella should have talked to her more, helped her down the stairs more often. Fed her with his childish, useless hands. Loneliness turns to resentment, in order to sanctify the act of deliberation. How dare Malenia leave him. And yet, how dare he hate her, when the memories she left behind are all he has left.
One day, Marika presses a needle flat into his palms.
He’s all-too-aware of the deadly sharp edges that threaten his fingertips. He can’t help but to treat it like a ballista pointed to his body; a threat veiled in lavishness. Sardonically, he wonders if Marika intends for Miquella to gore himself on it.
“I casted it mineself,” Marika says, distant. “It is gold. I thought thou wouldst be brought closer to thy Father. I find him utterly graceless most days, but his enthusiasm for thine studies brings me some modicum of pleasure; as I hope this gift does unto thou.”
“I’ve little skill for clothwork,” Miquella states, unsure of how to hold the strange gift. His carelessness will bleed him, if he lets it. Radagon’s care for the craft is like a cathedral, sewing fabric together and tearing out the stitches, creating and destroying, cutting and killing. It must make him feel in control, Miquella imagines. Miquella would not defile the holiness of it by asking Radagon to imprint his passions onto his son.
“Saith thine Father? Or saith thee?” She raises a brow. “Thou will find purpose for this gift in one form or another, that of which I am sure. Thou’rt made from mine own flesh, after all.”
The idea is somewhat laughable. He is a failure of a son, and perhaps a failure of a brother as well. Of course, he is a saviour well on his way to ruin. He thumbs the needle mindlessly.
The needle breaks skin, and his blood coats the tip, like a pen dipped into an inkwell.
Marika’s golden gaze does not leave Miquella’s hands. The gold is exceptionally bright. Sun through stained glass. Glazed windows built out of shards. His blood is Malenia’s blood, and yet—
“Ah, afore my mind begets me; the Carian children shan’t be joining us for the winter, but little Ranni asked after thee.”
She is smiling, though if it is mere politeness or amusement, Miquella can’t be bothered to make the distinction. Marika is a bag of contradictions that he dare not attempt to decipher.
Instead, he simply watches how his blood slides down the golden needle. Surely, even a saviour on his way to ruin can make a castle out of flesh and bone. Gods are first flesh before they are divine. Blood nourishes the earth the same as water does, if one believes.
Write to me soon, would you? I do so miss your wit. The swordsman is as dry as a rock on an arid day, wouldn’t you know. Caelid is far different than how Radahn has described. I’ve a mind to call it even more wondrous than the plateau upon which we grew. Should I return a competent swordswoman, I would like to take you there. Like we spoke about in the past, years long gone… A Lord and his Blade. Fanciful imaginings for a girl like me, I fear.
But look at me now—sword in my hands and all.
I miss you most dearly.
Malenia.