Chapter Text
Oriane had been picking her way through the vast Shadow Keep for hours when her blade found the back of the last fire knight’s helm with a metallic crack that almost made her pity the man underneath. A strangled groan ebbed from beneath the dented armor as he slid to the ground. She tried to guide him gently, but he was heavier than he looked and landed with a somewhat harder thud than she would have preferred.
She almost sighed in relief. Part one of her mission was finally accomplished. However, instead of celebrating, once he lay on the blackened stones, she rested a careful hand on his chest, watching for any sudden moments. Their encounter had been quick but fierce. In the few seconds they tangled, he had managed to give her a wicked burn on the side of her face. She was impressed. It was far more than the others had managed and mercifully had happened toward the end of her journey, but she knew she needed a site of grace, and quickly. The fire had bit deep, so deep it surely would have her writhing in agony as soon as the adrenaline wore off.
But it was only a moment before she heard what she wanted.
There it was. A heartbeat. Strong and steady despite the knight’s unconscious state.
She huffed out a breath she didn’t know she was holding before straightening and wiping her hands against the green fabric accenting her leather armor. Good. He would almost certainly awaken concussed, but he would live. There wasn’t a god she wanted to thank, so she thanked the starry sky above for the fortune instead. She had made it this far without a single dead fire knight, and this man’s body on display right in front of his master’s tower would cause… complications.
She continued behind him, through the threshold of the dark tower he guarded and up a winding set of stairs lit by scattered candles. The staircase was not overly long, but the walk soon turned arduous as her cheek began to prickle and then sear. She grit her teeth past the pain. No, this was good. Even with the pain, this reprieve gave her a few precious moments to gather herself. Remind herself of the plan.
It was a very loose plan, to be fair, and one of exceeding idiocy. Oriane knew it, which is why she had asked Thiollier to remain back at their simple camp earlier that evening. He had looked up from his pack and tipped his head at the request. His gleaming mask betrayed nothing as always. He almost never took it off, and we had been working together long enough that she could read the small movements of his body instead. His shoulders had tensed, usually busy hands stopping their motion.
“I could help you get a little ways into the castle, at the very least,” he protested as he stood to face her, voice as soft and unsure as always. He had been concerned, which was unsurprising.
“You could be much more helpful here concocting poisons,” she countered, not unkindly. “If this works, we are going to need as many as possible.” The corner of her mouth lifted in a small, encouraging smile. “You could be outfitting more than just the two of us soon.”
Thiollier touched the lips of his mask, an amusing nervous habit, and hummed contemplatively. He knew his weaknesses, and a stealth mission through the enormous keep looming before them would expose the pair like wounds. His nod of agreement was quick. He would not put his friend in such danger simply because he was loath to be left behind.
“I suppose one way or another you’ll find your way back here.” He paused. “Three days still?”
She nodded. “If it’s been longer than that, consider me lost for the moment, and regroup,” she repeated for the nth time. “Find safety in the cave of the Saint. I will come find you in the Stone Coffin Fissure as soon as I’m able.”
He nodded again. “Be safe, and I will see you again soon, my friend.”
He had set to busying himself with his tinctures after that, and she had departed. But her worry for him had been near constant as she snuck and slammed my way through the keep’s defenses in equal measure. It was an irrational worry. He was Tarnished in his own right, one who, like her, could still see the guidance of grace. He would always be fine in body even if he was sliced open a thousand times.
But wellness of the soul in a state like this was something else entirely. She felt the weight of her countless deaths like an anchor in every breath, and she didn’t want that for him. He was such a young man, barely more than a child, and he didn’t deserve this torment. She would shield him from harm as best she could. It was an instinct that she simply couldn’t tamp down.
Melina had asked her a question long ago after she assisted Boc the first time in that Limgrave cave. She wondered aloud if what the little misbegotten felt was what one should feel for their mother. Her words had been so quiet, so tentative, so unlike her that they cracked something in Oriane’s heart.
“For a good one, yes,” she replied softly, poking at the embers of the fire with a stick and willing them to reignite. They sat at a grace on the beach, the wet, salty breeze in a desperate battle with their small flame. “You did not know yours?”
“She gave me my purpose inside the Erdtree.”
“Ah.”
That said everything Oriane needed to know.
Silence stretched between them before she finally looked back up at Melina. Her companion’s face was mostly a smooth mask, but Oriane did not miss the dip in the corners of her mouth, the particular gleaming at the corner of her golden eye.
Never before had Melina looked so small.
The sight tugged at that same instinct that Thoillier’s presence later would, too. One she had tried and failed tried to bury deep. It would be her ruin, already in that moment threatening to break the dam on an ocean of emotion.
“For what it’s worth,” Oriane began slowly, stretching a tentative hand out to her. Melina reached for it without hesitation, covering Tarnished’s hand gently with her own like she did when she turned runes to strength. “I am as proud of you as Boc’s mother has been of him. You are an impressive woman and a remarkable friend.”
Melina looked down, her eyes finding the small flames Oriane had coaxed back to life. After a moment, she smiled sadly. “Thank you, Oriane. It pleases me greatly to have the pride of someone’s mother, if not my own.”
And to think Melina, the woman who remained by her side through every moment of this forsaken quest, was to burn after to clear a path forward?
Untenable.
So for that reason and so many others, Oriane found myself on that staircase, pulling her battered body up the final few steps of a lost demigod’s tower.
She let out a cry as she finally crested the landing, nearly crumpling in relief when she saw the site of grace just outside a massive set of doors. She crawled towards the welcoming light, allowing it to wash over her body. Within seconds, the agonizing brand on my face and the insistent aching in her limbs lifted away. She sighed. Oriane had no love for the woman who created the little golden ember or her machinations, but she would not deny herself the blessing it provided. She was owed it, as far as she was concerned.
She allowed herself to lay in the light for a few fleeting moments to catch her breath, but all too soon she lifted herself to her feet and unsheathed Milady. The elegant blade was a comforting weight in her palm, though she had no intention of using it. No matter how many times it took.
This was the place. He had to be inside.
Oriane took a final steadying breath before pushing through the large black doors.
The chamber inside was dark and cavernous, lit sparsely with half-burned candles. The air was heavy and stagnant as though it had been a long while since the doors last opened. But the hinges had worked silently, so she doubted that was really the case. It took a moment for her to realize the floor she stood on was a circular platform wreathed in railing. The waist-high masonry was all that separated her from a drop into darkness of unknowable depth. Beyond that, far ahead of her lay a dias, upon which sat a throne.
She stumbled over herself for the briefest moment, something like but not quite relief settling into her bones. As she hoped, someone was seated in that throne, and the occupant rose languidly as she walked forward. She watched him carefully, fingers still curled around Milady, as he stepped down from the throne and spoke.
“Mongrel intruder.”
His voice was like an explosion, shattering the room’s stifling silence. Though she had watched him speak, the force of his words made her jump. She fought to anchor both her feet and racing heart.
His next words, still clear and booming, held a different tone. Complete authority threaded with a soft hint of surprise.
“Thou’rt Tarnished, it seemth.”
It was not a question. Still, she nodded slowly, fixing her eyes on his face as she lay her treasured sword on the stone before her.
He blinked, but his steps did not falter as continued to close the gap between them.
He was just as she remembered. Tall, like all the demigods were, her eyes were level with the dip between his clavicles. He was only a head and a half taller than she, but his presence seemed to fill the room to its edges, stretching him to the height of a mountain. His body was lean but power rippled through every moment of his muscles. His red hair, bright like fire, brushed past his shoulders and almost obscured his open golden eye. His nose was long and elegant, his pale lips pressed into an irritated line that somehow made his oval face even more lethally handsome. Two impossibly long red snakes with dark bat-like wings swam through the air around him, one of them extending forward to look at her with unblinking green eyes as he approached.
At least something about this accursed land was the same.
Tears of relief and unexpected grief prickled unbidden in his eyes, and she hoped he couldn’t see them. She didn’t want them to be interpreted as fear or something else all together. Emotion was so dangerous here, so easily weaponized in any form.
Mercifully, he didn’t seem to notice.
“Mother, wouldst thou truly Lordship sanction in one so bereft of light?”
The words were a mere murmur, like they were meant only for himself, but his voice couldn’t help but carry in this stone tomb.
Only twenty feet separated them now. At this pace, he would be on her in seconds. It had to be now.
“My lord,” she said, raising her empty hands to her ears.. She kept her stance wide and open, everything about her posture a study in surrender. “You assuredly will not remember it, but you showed me kindness an eon ago. I’ve come to appeal to that kindness once more.”
Kindness. Of all the words to use in a place like this, kindness seemed like the least appropriate. Anyone else would have thought she lost her mind entirely... But this was her plan after all -- to appeal to a man near-divine who long ago held kindness in his heart but most assuredly did no longer.
She knew this was a fool’s errand. She had seen evidence of the depravity of the Hornsent slaughter across the Land of Shadow, and it turned even her stomach. She had seen the still-smouldering bodies before Castle Ensis and the utter destruction wrought on collapsing Belurat. Blackened and keening spirits of the Hornsent were everywhere she looked, and the embers of Messmer’s fire still burned along the roads leading into the Shadow Keep.
Regardless of who he was before, these depths of violence would surely ruin a man a thousand times over. She doubted herself more deeply with each of his footfalls, but she had to try, and it was far too late to reconsider.
If her words stirred anything within him at all, good or bad, she couldn’t tell. The look on his face was unchanged, still the contemplative mask that had appeared as he had murmured to his mother. She hadn’t expected him to believe her, but she had hoped the declaration would give him some sort of pause.
It did not.
“Yet… my purpose standeth unchanged.”
With a smooth sweep of his arm, Messmer wreathed his spear in flames and pointed it in her direction.
She cursed internally but did not lower her hands. Instead she met his golden gaze with her own, the dare in her eyes the most she could muster.
“Those stripped of the Grace of Gold shall all meet death in the embrace of Messmer’s flame.”
Her heart skipped.
What was that in his voice? Was it… weariness? Sadness?
She didn’t have to consider further. It was that moment when he leapt at her with horrifying speed and embedded his spear firmly in her chest.
And then she saw nothing.