Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the new world of thy making, all things will flourish, whether graceful or malign.

- Miquella, cut dialogue

It starts with nothing and no one.

The little Omen has been no one since she was born. She is not of noble blood, but her horns have never been cut because the Veiled Monarch does not enforce that practice. (He does not outlaw it either.) She has no name, but she knows who she is. She is curious. She is brave. She is curseborn, and her curse helps her survive. When she is in danger, she takes a deep breath and exhales black and gold flames. She is a wraithcaller with pots full of ghosts to chase away the scary things.

She knows her underground world like her own body. She can stalk the imps on the pipes. She can find dry nooks in which to store food. She can climb almost anything. She can avoid the bad places. 

The chapel in the depths is one of them. There something came into the world from beyond, something other (M…other?). She can smell it still, metallic and sickly sweet, and beneath the iron sweetness lies pain. The very air in that place has been pierced, letting out red. 

The shadow Omen with the fiery claws keeps everyone away from the altar at the back of the chapel. That’s just as well. The child can hear something whispering from deep below that altar, worse than the echoes of red. It is a bad thing. Or rather, it is made of bad things, enough to become fire. It speaks to her not in words but in familiar feelings: pain, despair, hopelessness. Why shouldn’t she burn down the world? it asks. Is it not full of suffering? Does she not know that better than most?

Although she has indeed known suffering, she does not follow those whispers. Instead, she follows a current. It is not the grace the Tarnished see, although she does not know that. Her current is older. It is crimson gold.

One day it leads her to an underground roadside, where she meets the most beautiful person she has ever seen. This woman is a knight. Her armor is red-gold, like the current, and her helm is crowned with gnarled branches. She says her name is Cambria. When she takes off her helm a tangle of reddish curls spills down her back. She has no horns, but patches of shimmering scales ring her eyes.

Cambria hugs the child tight and asks her to do a very brave thing. Then a shape made of golden dust coalesces between them: a circle with twisting rays of sunlight, or roots. Or horns? A spiral cuts its center.

“This is a mending rune, dear girl,” Cambria says, kneeling down to look the child in the eye. “We made it, my comrades and I, of our faith, fealty, and courage, and our knowledge of the old world. ’Twill release the primordial Crucible if our work be true. Knowest thou what that will signify for thee and thy folk?”

The little Omen has no idea what any of this means. Mending rune, primordial Crucible - too many words. She shakes her head.

Cambria sighs. “No, of course not. ’Twill save thee, and all who are cursed for evils in which they had no part. ’Twill make thee as thou ought always to have been.”

“Like you?” She would like to be like Cambria with her beautiful scales.

“Greater than I, little one. I have but touched the edges of the Crucible’s current. Thou wert born of its heart. Touch thou the rune, and thou shalt see.”

So the child does. She closes her little furred fist on the edge of the rune, and her mind explodes with color. It is light, but no light she has ever seen. Red at its heart with a ring of gold, and beyond, iridescent and ever-changing, impossible to describe. It makes her want to run, jump, and fly all at once.

When she looks down, her horns and tail are shimmering with that same resplendent fire. The wraiths she carries within her go quiet. The buzzing heat in her blood subsides. 

This rune is a good thing.

Cambria smiles, but she looks sad. “We hoped to give this rune to Lord Godfrey, but we can wait no longer. We know not where our lord may be. Our order is scattered, the land is fading, and too many suffer. Wilt thou be our champion, and a champion for thy kind?”

The child nods, and the rune dissolves. Its warmth flutters against her palm like a second heartbeat.

“Go, then,” Cambria says. “Seek thou a Tarnished strong of arms and kind of heart and bid them come to me in Leyndell. By their dimmed eyes shalt thou know them. And…” She takes the girl’s hands in her gauntleted ones. “Remember always that thou art not a sin. If by chance thou shouldst meet the Grace-Given Lord, tell him the same.”

The little Omen does not understand this. She knows only that the rune made her feel whole. She does not want to let Cambria down. But how is she to find a Tarnished with a kind heart? She isn’t even sure what “kind” means. It isn’t something she can touch and know. Maybe she will sense it when she finds the right person. She will feel it in her blood, like she feels that some places are bad.

She must try. With the rune’s warmth lingering in her palm, she is sure she will find a way.

As it happens, she does not need to. A way finds her.

The little Omen is sitting on a pipe overlooking a muddy basin when a person walks in. A young woman, younger than Cambria, with shaggy brown hair that reminds the child of her own fur. Is she a Tarnished? The eyes of the perfumers who sneak their soothing physicks to the Omen-born shine soft gold, but this woman’s do not. Just as Cambria said.

The Tarnished makes her way towards the end of the chamber. Hers are the cautious steps of one who believes she is in a bad place. (She is not.) Then she stops, gaze caught by something on the ground. She stoops, picks a small object out of the mud, and wipes it off with her fist. The Omen child watches in the hope that it might be a scrap of food, but no. Spirits whisper within the object. The child can hear them from here. It is a bairn, a death-doll made for those who died when they were cut.

Don’t hate me or curse me. Please.

The Tarnished holds the bairn for a long time. The child wonders if she hears the ghosts too, or senses them at least. She must, because her face tightens up like she has a stomachache. She holds the doll close.

“I’ll take you with me if you want, little love,” she says, “so you won’t be alone.”

The Tarnished tucks the bairn into a pouch on her belt.

The child’s eyes widen. She has never seen anyone treat the doll of a curseborn bairn like that. They are sad and scary even to those who live here in the sewers. Is this the Tarnished she has been waiting for, then? 

Even if not, the Tarnished has just done a good thing. Good things are rare in the sewers. She deserves something good in return.

The Omen girl hisses through her teeth. The sound rings briefly through the dank chamber, cutting through the pulse of dripping water.

The Tarnished’s head snaps up. She whirls around, squinting at the pipe overhead. Her face tightens again. “There are children down here?”

The child puts a finger to her lips and tilts her head towards the walls just ahead of the Tarnished. First left, then right. There is a stone imp clinging to the bricks on either side. Too high in the gloom for the Tarnished to see. Not too high to pounce.

The Tarnished examines the walls. Her grin warms her whole face. “Ah. Should’ve known.”

Then she bursts into light. A crackling golden bolt explodes into her left hand, and she pulls back and hurls it at the imp on her left. The child does not see the little beast fall - she has squeezed her eyes shut against the glare. But she hears its stony body clatter to the ground. The imp on the other side soon follows.

When the child blinks the colorful spots from her vision, she does something she has never done before: she hops down from her pipe and approaches the visitor. Her fur stands on end in warning - the uncursed are cruel to her kind - but she does not heed it. Surely anyone who would cradle an Omen bairn in their hands is not cruel. And if the child is wrong, well, she can disappear in a blink and leave danger far behind. She is good at disappearing.

“Hello, love,” the Tarnished says, and kneels down. 

The sudden movement sends the child skittering back a few paces, but when the Tarnished extends a hand, the little Omen leans forward to sniff it. There are many scents on that hand. Some are familiar: iron, sweat, and warm metal - the smell of that spot on the pipes where light filters through a grate just above. There are sharp, sweet smells the child does not know. They are good. There is also the scent of a ghost, but this is not like the wraiths in the child’s body. This one smells dusty, which means it - she - is calm. A woman with a bow, her legs always folded.

The Tarnished has a long reddish-gold weapon on her back. It ends in curving branches, like the trees the child glimpses through sewer grates. It is the same color as the current that led to Cambria. That is good.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” the Tarnished says. “Are you hungry?”

Not as hungry as some, but yes. Much of the time.

The Tarnished seems to understand. She grimaces again. “So much hurt. You shouldn’t be in this place.” 

Then she says an unthinkable thing: “Do you want some food?”

The child stares at her. Does this Tarnished know what she has just offered? Food is precious and there is never enough to go around. To steal it is as good as murder, to share it an impossible gift. If this young woman gives up her food, she will be weakened. She may not be able to run and fight when next she needs to. She may be eaten herself. She may die. Those are the rules.

The little Omen shakes her head hard.

“It’s all right. I know where to get more. Boggart’s always got prawn and crab for me.”

Again the child is dumbstruck. What sort of world does the Tarnished live in where food can simply be gotten? Not found or hunted, but gotten? The little Omen does not know what a Boggart is, but it must be good if it supplies food. She wishes she had a Boggart too.

The Tarnished takes another pouch from her belt and opens it. There is pink meat inside. It smells a bit like the crayfish eggs that are so good to eat and so hard to acquire. The child’s mouth waters. Her stomach rumbles.

“Take it all,” the Tarnished says, looking very sad. “It’s not poison, I promise. Here, watch me. I’ll have one too.”

She takes a small piece of meat from the pouch, bites off its tail, and swallows the rest.

The child considers the pouch once more. Its contents are all but sacred. If she accepts it, she will incur a debt she must repay with something equally precious: that is the unspoken law of the Shunning Grounds. 

And she does have something to offer.

She moves very slowly, afraid to make this kind stranger - Yes, this must be what “kind” is - disappear. Her hand trembles with wonderment as she takes the pouch. After a careful sniff, she picks out a piece of meat and pulls off a small chunk with her teeth. It is mild and chewy. The taste reminds her of those rare feasts when a full-grown Omen brings down a giant crayfish. Then all of a sudden, heat spreads across her tongue.

The Tarnished smiles. “Prawns. Boggart put some spice in ‘em this time.”

The child licks her lips to cool them. Then she decides she likes the heat. Very much. It is good.

Still unsteady with awe, the Omen girl pulls the pouch closed. Much though she wants to eat all the prawn, she needs to save it for when times are lean. And they will be lean again.

The Tarnished reaches out, perhaps to ruffle the child’s hair. The little Omen withdraws a little: the Tarnished has already given her one impossible kindness today. Now it is her turn to offer the only gift she has.

She crouches down and sketches in the silt with her fingertip. It is a very rough drawing, just a few lines. A person with a horned helmet. 

The Tarnished squints. “An Omen? Misbegotten? Something down here I should let alone?”

The child shakes her head.

“A Crucible Knight?”

Vigorous nods. The child puts her finger to the dirt again, adds a circle with twisting lines all around the edge and a spiral through the middle.

“A Crucible Knight with a sun?”

No, that’s not quite it, though the rune was warm like sunlight.

“A golden rune? Or… No, it can’t be. It’s not a mending rune, is it?”

The child points from the sketch to the Tarnished.

“A Crucible Knight has a mending rune…for me? Here in the city?”

The child nods. Her heart is beating faster now.

“But why me?”

“Kind,” the little Omen says. 

The Tarnished has given meaning to that word. Yes, this is the one Cambria seeks: a Tarnished with a kind heart who shared food and thus shared life.

“Do you know what the rune does? Will it break your curse?” the Tarnished asks. “Latenna told me about an Empyrean named Miquella. He cares about people like you. I don’t know where he is, but if I find this rune and bring it to him, I wonder if we could…”

Her face changes, becoming more serious and less sad. She seems to be realizing something. “Lots of people have told me to go to the Erdtree and become Elden Lord, but no one’s ever told me what for,” she says, almost to herself. “I still don’t know. I never wanted to be a lord. But I’ll do what I can for you, love.”

Love. That is a new word.

“I might have to leave you for a while,” the Tarnished says. “I have…business with the Veiled Monarch and the Erdtree, and I don’t think it’s going to be easy. I’ll bring you some more food before I go. The city isn’t safe for you just now, but when all this is over I’ll find you a place. You’ve been in the sewers too long.”

Leave the sewers? That is a frightening thought. It’s true, the sewers are no safer than the city above, but at least here the child knows the dangers. She has lived with them all her life.

“What’s your name?” the Tarnished asks.

The child shakes her head. Nothing and no one.

The Tarnished considers. “Ragna. I’ll call you Ragna. Do you like that?”

The Omen girl tastes the name. It is foreign on her tongue, like food she has never tried. And yet, like the spicy prawn, she likes it. It slips right into an empty space she did not know was there. She stands a little straighter. Her lips curve up, almost a smile.

The Tarnished smiles too. “Hello, Ragna. My name is Eira.”

~~~

Morgott has always doubted the existence of Oracle Envoys. To him they are creatures of myth, sketches from folktales. 

Then they appear in Leyndell.

It’s said their horns herald new gods and new ages. Morgott tells himself they play for Godfrey, emerging from exile to reclaim the Elden Throne.

But then, why does that strange, shrill note chill him so?

~~~

His body marks the moment when the Tarnished pushes him too far. A sick pressure he hasn’t felt since he was a boy begins to build within him. He denies it, denies it, denies it with all the ferocity and resolve he has left until it explodes and his tainted blood floods the sacred court.

His consciousness fractures. Part of him detaches from this nightmarish reality. The other wails with the voice of the imprisoned child he was and always will be: But I was good! I tried so hard to be good!

After that, he unravels in a swift, ragged cascade. His voice frays as he damns the Tarnished for her part in this. His swordplay becomes frenzied, desperate, animal. He reaches up faster than conscience can restrain him, runs a hand along the edge of his sword and - heresy - flings an arc of burning blood across the court.

He is undone.

~~~

The world shrinks. Hand and foot and sword and spear and hammer and dagger and blood and rancor and his curse on the stones and her eyes full of life.

~~~

In the end, he miscalculates. He lingers close to the Tarnished in the reckless hope that one of his weapons will find an organ - and thus leaves himself vulnerable. In response to his last blow, his opponent rolls to his left. He bends low to swipe her with his offhand dagger. Faster than thought, she crouches. A shining horn manifests on her shoulder. 

Morgott knows that horn: an aspect of the Crucible.

Where did she learn -

This girl is no longer the callow Tarnished he tossed from the causeway at Stormveil.

He’s too close, already committed to his low stance. His dagger draws a spray of blood from the Tarnished’s chest as she dips beneath his arm, but it isn’t enough. Her incanted horn catches him full in the abdomen. The force is too brutal to come from her tiny body alone. Though she lacks the space to strike as hard as she might, the impact drives breath from Morgott’s body. Disoriented, gasping, he has no defense. 

The Tarnished hurls a final spiral from her tangled spear.

In the distance, the envoys’ horns scream.

~~~

The light

The light

drifts down through a grate

plunges down through him

as a single golden leaf

in one savage arc

and he fails

and he falls

to catch it.     

to his knees.

~~~

The murk on the ground dissolves like mist before the sun. For a moment it seems Eira has slain her opponent. But no - his chest still rises and falls ever so slightly.

Eira collapses in the center of the courtyard. Limp and leaden, she opens her arms to the sky. 

She is empty. Her face is wet, but not with sweat or blood.

The blackened gold flames on Morgott’s sword gutter out. The weapon slips from his nerveless fingers.

And that’s how it ends: with a sigh, with a flicker, with a scrape of blade on stone.

~~~

Later, a page plays a ballad of fallen leaves.

Though Eira does not remember much of her former life, she knows she was a dancer. She longs to dance to that ballad, her hips a cradle for the rhythm, her feet bare and her face to the stars. Not triumph, but soul-deep relief.

But she cannot. This is not a time for celebration.

She has work to do.

~~~

His blood spent, bled dry of strength, Morgott hovers on the edge of death.

While he falls, the Erdtree burns.

Chapter Text

It’s Millicent who finds him: on a balcony in the Erdtree Sanctuary, dusted in ash and gazing at the scorched branches overhead.

She’s come up here several times in the past few days. On those occasions Morgott was buried so far inside his own loss as to be unaware of Millicent’s presence. He’s more alert this time, though he scarcely glances at her as she sits down on the railing.

He is so still, more stone than flesh. It’s a wonder he survived his last battle to watch over the burning Erdtree. Omen-born are resilient indeed.

Nonetheless, summoning a healer is out of the question. From what little Millicent has heard of Morgott the Grace-Given, he will accept no such aid. He will either heal himself or he will die. Pretty words of encouragement will only insult him, now that the ground beneath his life is shattered.

So Millicent holds her silence.

The night stretches out around them. Eira has yet to enter the Erdtree, but already there are signs that the Lands Between is rallying to her potential. Ancient dragons slip in and out of the lingering smoke. Crucible Knights walk the streets, returning from their scattered exile. Their spectral horns and wings and tails shimmer in display. In the distance below, someone sings an old folk song of fallen leaves and flame.

Perhaps it is this heretical verse, sung with a clear ring of hope, that stirs the Omen King. When he speaks, however, it is not to condemn the singer.

“Get thee gone, Tarnished,” he mutters. His voice tries for hate and lands on weariness.

“I am no Tarnished,” Millicent says. She speaks softly, but not too much, lest Morgott mistake her gentleness for pity. “My name is Millicent.”

Morgott turns one dulled gold eye on her. “Thou’rt afflicted.”

An odd way to begin a conversation, if that is indeed what this is. Morgott must sense the rot within her, for in the dim torchlight he could not have seen the withered flesh on the right side of her face.

“I am,” Millicent says. “From birth.” 

“And thou livest still?”

“By the grace of a stranger, yes.”

Morgott looks at her more carefully. “Thy face is…familiar.”

“The face of the Severed, before the rot claimed her eyes.” 

A spark of comprehension. “Afflicted from birth, sayest thou?”

“Like my mother. I was born from her bloom in the Swamp of Aeonia.” 

Millicent did not expect to reach this point soon, but it’s just as well. She dislikes dancing around a point as much as Morgott does. This is the perfect opportunity to say what she came here for.

“Born of the scarlet rot,” Morgott says. His mouth twists with disgust or something else altogether.

Millicent selects each word. “Would you revile me for that?”

A soft huff of breath. Then Morgott looks away. “Dost thou not revile thyself?” 

His voice carries scorn, but not, Millicent thinks, for her. Not entirely.

“No,” she says. “That would be easier, wouldn’t it? But no. I had no part in the circumstances of my birth. Whatever shame or pride I feel lies in what I choose for myself.” 

She’s being obvious now, but that’s all right. She doesn’t think Morgott will appreciate subtlety tonight.

Morgott sits up straighter, large hands splayed on the ground as if he’s about to push himself up and have done with this game. 

“The Tarnished sent thee to say these things,” he sneers. “Thou speak’st her absurdities.”

“She sent me to ascertain your well-being, yes. Eira knew you would be…distressed, and she thought her company would make it worse.” That elicits a scoff, which she ignores. “My words, however, are my own, and sincerely meant.”

“I wish no sympathy from that desecrator, nor her curseborn lackeys.”

Millicent ignores the insult. It is false - the “lackey” part, at least. Morgott is looking back at the Erdtree again, but she keeps her gaze fixed on him. She can speak the language of stubbornness as fluently as he. 

“She saved me, you know,” she says. “She was the stranger I spoke of, the one to whom I owe my life. She fought the ghosts of Aeonia to find me an unalloyed needle. Later she brought me a new sword arm. She had no reason to do such things, for she did not know me. It was her kindness alone that -”

“Speak not to me of her kindness!” Morgott growls the last word. His visage is suddenly fierce, golden eye blazing and set off by thorny horns. “The first cardinal sin was not enough for her! Knowest thou the manner in which she removed me from her path? Knowest thou the ends to which she drove me, in the very court of the Erdtree, only to stay her hand at the last and condemn me to…”

His voice tightens. He seems to collapse inward. His unfinished sentence tells Millicent all she needs to know.

She murmurs, “Eira made you bloom.”

Millicent is certain this will see her dismissed. But Morgott does not turn her away. He doesn’t say anything either. He just looks at her in a way that tells her she has slipped past his guard, however briefly.

“I’ll bloom too someday,” Millicent says. She will press her luck for as long as it holds - isn’t that the tale of her life? “Like my mother, there will come a time when I find myself in such straits that my Aeonia must flower. It frightens me, because when that happens I think I’ll…lose something, become something other than myself. And if that bloom harms someone I love, or sullies a place I consider sacred…whatever is left of me will be heartbroken.”

Of course, Morgott has sullied nothing, but Millicent does not say so. Morgott will not listen to that tonight. She doesn’t know when or if he will.

Morgott is not looking at her anymore, but his breathing has unsteadied. It seems Millicent's words have touched him near. It occurs to her that he may not know what to make of compassion - that it may be rare and strange to him.

His silence gives her leave to go on.

“I do understand,” she concludes. “You seal your blood with a sword, I with a needle, and we both pray the day never comes when we can seal it no longer.”

Except it did come for you, while I await it still, and tremble.

In the ensuing pause, Millicent intuits the question Morgott will never ask aloud: How do you live with yourself?

“I live as well as I can, according to my own will,” she says. “The truest defiance of the ill fate to which I was born. If ever you are ready, I would advise you to do the same. The worst you could possibly imagine has come to pass, and you’re still here. Now you’ve nothing left to fear.”

Morgott doesn’t believe that for a moment. He gives her a sharp sidelong glance, but he doesn’t strike her down. An encouraging sign.

Millicent pushes one step further.

“Please hear me when I say that Eira - the Tarnished - did not realize you would bloom. Certainly she did not deny you death to cause you pain. She understands, however, why you hate her so.”

Millicent expects an acidic answer. Instead, Morgott slips further down the wall at his back. He lets out a long, weary breath.

“I confess to thee, Millicent, that on this night I lack the strength for hating.”

It’s odd to hear him say her name, but in a good way. He’s recognized her not as another accursed soul who should not have been born, or another traitorous pillager, but as a person.

She smiles a little. “Perhaps in the morning, then.”

Her wryness strikes a chord. Morgott's stony face relaxes a fraction.

“You must be cold. You’ve been out here a long time,” Millicent goes on, while she still has a touch of Morgott's goodwill. 

His eye slips shut and then opens again. A long, slow blink. “Hours. Days. I care not.”

“You should rest. You need food and water and sleep and healing. It may not help, but it will not hurt. I’ll walk with you, if you’ll allow me.”

Morgott is silent for a long while. Millicent is sure he has either fallen asleep or spurned her attempt at sympathy. While she waits, she listens to the distant ballad of fallen leaves. She thinks of how the first thing Eira intends to do when she becomes Elden Lord is to shatter the Omen shackles she bought from Patches. If only she could convince Morgott that he will be better in the end.

At last, Morgott pushes himself stiffly to his feet. Millicent is amazed he can stand with his body driven to the brink. She rises with him and follows as he descends the stairs from the balcony. Has she gotten through to him, if only for practical reasons? That’s more than Millicent expected to accomplish tonight. It gives her hope.

“I never thought you the sort to lie down and wait for death,” she says as they make their way down the stairs. Lamps light their path, burning brighter in the absence of the Erdtree’s light.

“I am not. To my great misfortune.” But he keeps putting one foot in front of the other.

“I would offer you my arm to lean on, but…” Millicent adds, gesturing at her small, slight figure.

Morgott pauses at the base of the stairs and lets the banister take his weight. Millicent can’t read his face beneath the shadows of his horns, but he seems to be appraising her.

She’ll accept that. Millicent didn’t come here expecting to make a friend or even an ally. She only came to hold out her hand. If Morgott has not yet taken it, he has at least touched her palm.

Chapter Text

After their battle, the Tarnished sat down beside him.

“Sorry about the horn. That was dirty, but I had to finish it.”

That was the first time Morgott heard her voice. Warm with a rural Altus accent and so much younger than he expected.

She saw the cut on his left hand, the one he slit open to coat his blade in bloodflame. She asked if he could still move his fingers. Morgott did not acknowledge her. All the same, she held her tiny palm over his. Golden light bloomed between them.

“It’s not a very good heal, but it’ll give you a start. I should learn a better one.”

He told her that the Erdtree’s thorns would never part for her, or for anyone. She replied that she would find a way in. Lord Godfrey’s exiled knights had given her something precious with which she intended to make - no, what was her word? restore - a better order.

“I want to give you a chance,” she said, “to walk in light, unveiled, unashamed, head high like a lord.”

She refused to kill him. She could have done it so easily. Between the battle wounds and releasing his cursed blood, it was all Morgott could do to breathe. Instead the Tarnished left him in the sacred court to live or die as he might.

He did not think of her for some time after that, because he couldn’t. He was dying. Delirious and exhausted, his body strained to breaking. When at last he regained lucidity, he mistook reality for nightmare. The golden boughs outside his chambers had begun to smolder.

Shock came first. It was as if he’d looked down to find a dagger in his chest but had not yet felt the pain. Only the breath-stealing impact. 

The Tarnished came to him once more. He had to get out of the city, she said, before the coming fall of ash buried it.

He hated himself with such ardor that he feared his next breath might bring fire. Twice he held Leyndell’s walls against impossible odds! How could he allow a mere Tarnished to break him so thoroughly that he could not defend the Erdtree at the crucial moment?

There was nothing he could do to stop her. The forge was lit, the bridge crossed. Killing the Tarnished would not reverse the burning. Even if it could, his body was wracked and feeble. The wound on his left hand had stiffened his fingers. Nonetheless, he did not leave Leyndell. He could not abandon the Erdtree, but neither had he any intention of dying. No, he meant to shoulder the consequences of his failure even if it broke him. Beyond that, he still held his Great Rune, the sacred anchor-ring. The Tarnished’s new order would collapse without that foundation. She’d have to kill him.

But she did not want to.

“The Erdtree isn’t going to die,” she insisted. So young and self-assured. “It’s just going to change. It’s broken, you told me that yourself. Why do you tear yourself apart defending something that’s broken?”

Yes, he used the word “forsaken” after his last battle. But the Erdtree was his foundation, and he did not - does not - know how to live in a world where it is absent or changed.

He watched it burn from an upstairs balcony. He was close enough to the boughs that he could hear the sap boiling. Something brittle inside him crumbled into dust. 

As fate or luck or curse would have it, the worst of the smoke passed him by.

And that was where he remained, far beyond tears, burning hollow. 

For some time, he was empty.

And then Millicent appeared, with her unlooked-for understanding and tales of the Tarnished who sent her to him.

The Tarnished who undid him in battle.

The Tarnished who dared the Swamp of Aeonia to save a stranger from the rot. 

The Tarnished who burned the Erdtree.

The Tarnished who offered him healing and seemed sorry she could not do more.

None of it makes sense.

Wrapped in blankets in the silent, private darkness of his chambers, Morgott thinks about all these things until sleep finally takes him.

The next morning, as every morning since the Erdtree burned, the sun rises reddish through the haze still drifting over Leyndell. The sun is flying primordial colors: gold shot with red.

~~~

Morgott finds Millicent watching the sunrise on his balcony.

She assesses him with her strange tawny eyes. Morgott wonders what he must look like to her. Like he could collapse at any moment, no doubt - because he could. He had no strength to work more than a few small healings this morning. Still, he doesn’t feel quite as pathetic as he did last night. His tail isn’t such an onerous weight, and the fog on his mind has lifted.

With this clarity comes his first true sight of Leyndell since the Erdtree burned.

There isn’t as much ash as there ought to be (something to do with dragons? Or was that a fever-dream?). The air is hazy-tangy with woodsmoke. Cinders drift on the breeze instead of leaves. Structures stand at odd, drunken angles, pushed over by ash-drifts or crushed by falling branches. Boughs lie in the streets like the severed limbs of an ancient sea monster.

The ember-red of burning leaves has largely faded - a mercy. Although this lifeless gray claws at his heart, the red was far worse. Morgott will see that color behind his eyes as long as he lives: the Erdtree a sunset that never ended. Red like his bloodflame, red like his failure.

Suddenly, the scent of sap sickens him. Morgott becomes keenly aware that he is still sprinkled with the ash of the thing he loved above all else. He can feel its smoke in his throat.

Steady. Thou’rt Lord of Leyndell still. Thy work is not yet done.

He unfolds the arms he does not remember clenching and grounds himself in Millicent’s voice.

“…kept watch,” she is saying. “I thought you might sleep for a good long while. I’m not certain you should be on your feet just yet.” 

He isn’t certain either, but his ravaged city makes it clear he has no choice.

“’Tis past time I awaken,” he mutters.

He does not know why he is allowing Millicent to stay. The girl has no business here, intruding on his private grief, keeping watch outside his chambers as if he were an invalid - no doubt spying for the Tarnished. But what she said last night, about her cursed blood and her fear of blooming as Malenia did…

“She hasn’t done it yet, if that’s what you fear,” Millicent tells him. “She hasn’t entered the Erdtree.” 

That kindles bitter anger. The Tarnished has already crossed the irrevocable threshold; why not see her ruinous quest to its end? 

“No?” Morgott says, venomous. “Doth she shrink from her own sin? Her ambition faileth in the final hour?”

“No. She waits in the hope that you will stand at her side.”

Morgott laughs. It is mirthless and ends in a cough. “Then she is more foolish than I imagined. What reason have I to commit such blasphemy?”

“She might offer you one, if you will only speak with her.”

“I have not fallen so far as that.”

Not quite - but the situation is dire. Leyndell is teetering on a precipice, the Tarnished is poised to unleash pandemonium, and Morgott’s magic barriers have fallen. The Frenzied Flame lies open to anyone stubborn and desperate enough to reach it.

He still can’t move his left hand properly. 

His sword is lying unsealed on his chamber floor. 

His blood has sunk into the sacred stones.

Millicent cocks her head at him. She must see his stoicism is naught but a mask.

He is slipping. That won’t do.

Morgott has never tolerated pity, neither from others nor from himself. This is no time to stand for shaking hands and anguish clawing up his throat. He must be practical. His childhood in the sewers taught him how to take each thing in its turn. Find food and clean water and fuel for fires; fend off crayfish; learn where the beams might break underfoot; craft rainbow stones to mark the way; ration candles so that no one is left in the dark with their nightmares. That’s how he’ll survive now.

But Morgott has never felt unmoored like this, as if he is crossing an abyss on invisible stones and can only guess where to place his feet. His dreams are full of fire and falling. Millicent was wrong to say that there is nothing left to fear now that the worst has come.

“’Tis hateful of the sun,” he says before he can stop himself, “to rise again when the world is ended.”

Millicent looks out at the city. “Not the end. The birthing pains of the beginning.”

~~~

Millicent offers to accompany him while he assesses Leyndell.

“If you won’t do the sensible thing and rest,” she says, “then walk with me. I can tell you how things stand. I know you would prefer to go alone, but I fear you will collapse in the street.”

Morgott finds her frankness galling, and all the more so because she’s right. He is nowhere near recovered and he does not trust his legs. Millicent will be of little physical aid if he does fall, but at least she can preserve his dignity by keeping curious passersby away. At any other time Morgott would turn the girl away, interloper that she is - but Millicent has not spent the past days in a fever. She knows far more of what has been happening in Leyndell than Morgott does.

Being practical means setting pride aside.

It means walking beside a curseborn who, unthinkably, bears no shame.

~~~

With his sword left unsealed in the Erdtree Sanctuary, Morgott has nothing to lean on as he and Millicent walk the streets. He expects his knees to buckle at least once.

When they do, it’s because of a dragon.

And not a shrunken dragon of the present era; no, a fully-grown ancient dragon. Four wings thrown wide, armored in gilded stone. It soars past them as they emerge onto an elevated arcade, so close that that the wind of its passing whips back their hair. Millicent lifts her face to greet it. It circles the Erdtree and disappears into the distance, carving paths through the haze. 

Morgott tries not to gag on the gust of sap-scented air. He glares at her, demanding an answer with his one good eye.

“Ah,” Millicent says. “Yes. There are dragons now. You…did not notice them before?” 

Nay, I did not. How deep in despair was I mired, to overlook such a thing?

“Whence came they?” Morgott rasps.

“From Farum Azula, Eira tells me. She fought the dragonlord to a stalemate. His kindred appeared in Leyndell not long afterward. They have been helping to clear away the ash and debris. Eira believes they are drawn to the precious thing she carries. They sense a new era about to begin.”

Her answer opens up ten more questions - Farum Azula and Destined Death, Placidusax, and the Tarnished’s new order. But Morgott dares not interrogate her yet. Too much dismay is already rising inside him. 

He is iron: strong, but brittle.

~~~

Morgott learns several things that morning.

The first is that Leyndell is infested with dragons. They do not seem hostile. Some of them are sweeping the ash from the streets with their powerful wings. Others are gathered around Gransax’s petrified body, heads bowed. Sometimes they vanish into the clouds following paths known only to them. They always return. 

Dragons have not been anathema to the Golden Order since Godwyn’s historic victory. Their presence is not alarming, but rather, what their presence signifies. Modern dragons are witless animals. Ancient dragons are quite the opposite: perceptive, close to the deep, slow currents of time. It cannot be mere whim that they followed the Tarnished back to Leyndell. They must sense that the precious thing she carries heralds a great shift.

Millicent won’t tell Morgott what treasure the Tarnished has found. He sees her game: she is deliberately withholding information to force him to speak with his enemy, no doubt in the foolish hope that they will form a truce. Ally with that girl, with her self-assurance and her cruelty disguised as mercy? The sun will sooner rise in the west!

Crucible Knights and ancient dragons... What did the Tarnished say after their battle? I want to give you a chance to walk in light, unveiled, unashamed. 

Morgott will not look too closely at those words. They are dangerous.

He will not give the Tarnished the satisfaction of coming to her for information. A few Crucible Knights remain in Leyndell: if Millicent will not tell him the truth, perhaps they will. 

The second thing Morgott learns is that despite enduring ruin matched only by Gransax, Leyndell is more alive than it has been in ages. The Tarnished must have given the people time to evacuate before she wrought her destruction. They are returning now, haunted but resilient, picking their way through crumbled bricks and powdery drifts to see what has become of their homes. Soldiers are helping the residents clear ash and begin what repairs they can. Others have set up healers’ tents, working alongside perfumers to treat the wounded. Still others have devised filters for the city’s wells so that no one need drink the Erdtree’s ashes. That thought makes Morgott shiver.

It’s much as it was during the great defenses of the walls: adaptable people overcoming grim circumstances. It seems this crisis has woken Leyndell from its dismal stupor.

“You see? Leyndell is not beaten,” Millicent says. “Her lord prepared her well to meet this struggle.”

Morgott cannot accept her praise.

It’s impossible to avoid being seen, but no one casts more than a curious glance at Morgott, consumed as they are with their own affairs. The soldiers who know him as Margit the Fell, who broke two sieges with little more than a wooden staff, nod to him from a cautious distance. Lord Godfrey would have offered them direction and encouragement. Morgott cannot. His failure disqualifies him as much as his Omen blood.

The Crucible Knights are not the only ones drawn to the Tarnished who would be lord. Nomadic merchants have also established themselves within the city. Their garb is bright against the gray world. Their somber, throaty fiddle music drifts on the air with the cinders. They have no hope of selling anything to Leyndell’s ragged populace, nor have they ever been so bold as to enter the gates before, so why are they here now? Perhaps they, like the dragons, can sense the balance shifting. The great have become shadows in their own lands and the exiles stand to inherit the earth. 

Who is she, this Tarnished of no renown? A witless child whom Morgott cast from the cliffs at Stormveil? A grace-given warrior who is drawing both meek and mighty to her side?

Millicent does not answer that. She does tell him where the Tarnished is now: she is fighting. That’s the third thing Morgott learns.

“We spotted a tree spirit prowling near the city’s southern edge several nights ago,” Millicent explains. “No sooner had we tracked it to its source than two more burst from the ash and forced us to retreat. Eira leads an attack against them this morning. She insisted that I stay behind with you, but I am certain of her victory.”

Morgott is glad the tree spirits will fall, even at his enemy’s hand. They are dangerous foes and sinister signs of the corruption at the Erdtree’s roots. Morgott does not want them in his city. He wonders idly if these monstrosities are the same ones who have been assaulting his camps on the plateau since the Shattering began.

Then he shudders. How high must the ash have drifted to conceal three tree spirits?

“It is best that you were too wounded and despairing to see,” Millicent says in answer.

The fourth thing Morgott learns is that the Tarnished’s name is Eira. Millicent must have said it before, but this is the first time he notices. Its most common meaning is “snow.” A fitting title for the woman who brought down the Erdtree in flurries of pale cinders. 

But in an older tongue, it means - oh, bitterest irony - “mercy.”

~~~

The fifth thing Morgott learns is that he really does need more rest. He has weathered storms before, but none like this, made to pierce him in all his most vulnerable places. He ends his walk with Millicent feeling dizzied. Although it heartens him to see Leyndell struggling back to her feet, the fact remains that the Erdtree is burned, the Tarnished is amassing allies, and he has completely, utterly failed. That gnaws at him like hunger.

Morgott sees no acceptable course out of this disaster. There’s no point in fighting the Tarnished again. That would be a waste of time and energy. Even if he managed to kill her, her grace would bring her back as many times as she needed. He could allow her to enter the Erdtree and pray that whatever remains of Queen Marika strikes her down. He could withhold his Great Rune from her so that her order collapses in the hour of its birth - but where would that leave the Lands Between? No better than they are now, and possibly worse.

The need to do something useful has become a pressure against his chest.

And...there are three tree spirits besieging his city.

He has to clear his mind and find his footing, and

Rest.

hard combat is the best way he knows of doing that. 

See sense.

Combat makes sense. Combat is familiar.

Thou’rt in no state -

He is Leyndell’s protector still.

It’s an irrational thing to do, especially after all his fine thoughts about practicality. But the world is upside down, and Morgott needs to fight something. 

At least his curse will not erupt this time. For that alone, he blesses his weakness.

Millicent tries to remain composed. “You have no weapon!” she protests, clasping Morgott’s arm. She cannot encircle his wrist even with both her hands. 

Golden light coalesces into an Erdsteel dagger. “Ah, but I do.”

~~~

Morgott and Millicent aren’t far from Leyndell’s southeastern wall. It isn’t long before flashes of red lightning mark out the site of the battle. Morgott initially assumes that the ancient dragons have involved themselves, but when he and Millicent reach the desert of ash that still consumes this part of the city, they find no dragons. Instead, the Tarnished is calling down the wrath of the storm.

Upon the pale dunes, three ulcerated tree spirits squirm like beached leviathans. Their stunted legs remind Morgott of the half-wheel centipede of Death. His hatred for them grows. 

The Tarnished has used the open terrain to draw one of them away from the others. One glance tells Morgott that she has changed her tactics dramatically since he fought her at the foot of the Erdtree. Where before she wielded the greatspear of a Crucible Tree Knight, now she wears nothing but traveler’s leathers, sacrificing protection for greater mobility. In her off hand she holds a glowing seal, while in the other wields a jagged spear. Lightning caught in metal.

She is also alone. Millicent implied that the Tarnished was leading Leyndell’s soldiers against these monstrosities. Although a few of Morgott’s men are indeed watching from the streets above the ash drifts, none of them seem keen to join in. Leyndell’s protectors are no cowards. Morgott assumes they refused to fight alongside the Tarnished who burned the Erdtree.

The battle is not going in her favor. She’s worn down the first tree spirit enough that golden fire now suffuses its body, a mark of its duress, but she is struggling. She can’t keep her footing on the powdery dunes. She rolls in close to the creature’s side, where its maw cannot reach her, and jabs it twice with the tip of her spear. The weapon draws red blood tinged with amber. Then her feet sink into the ash and rob her of her balance. The tree spirit wriggles away. By the time she has stumbled upright again, the creature has reared high for a lunging bite. 

For a splintered moment, Morgott is a child again. He is lying sick and weak on the paving stones as a lion guardian - unlike a tree spirit in all but its chaotic strength - drew back to tear him apart.

The crack of lightning slams him back into his body: the Tarnished’s jagged spear has transformed into a scarlet bolt. It lifts her above the dunes to meet the tree spirit. But she has misjudged the timing. Her magical attack is too slow in summoning. Before she can loose the bolt in her hand, the tree spirit dives for her. She to throws herself aside before the tree spirit can snatch her up. It crashes back to earth in a crazed flailing of limbs. The Tarnished tumbles across the ash and up to her knees, clutching her side. Her face is tight with pain.

Morgott feels a flash of delicious scorn. The Tarnished was foolish to engage three foes alone while unused to her new weapon. Then Morgott thinks of all the times he’s dealt with these monstrosities on the battlefield, and his spite fades. For this moment, he and his hated rival have a common enemy.

Then Millicent flies past him with a cry of rage. That’s all the encouragement he needs. His incanted dagger is hardly going to scratch the tree spirits. It doesn’t matter. He’s here, alive, not yet beaten.

Without further thought, Morgott drops down from the elevated street.

He slips behind the Tarnished and lifts her bodily to her feet while Millicent takes the tree spirit in hand. Before Morgott can so much as throw a dagger, Malenia’s offshoot has launched herself into the air. She hangs there for a second that weighs like eternity, one knee bent and sword arm tensed above her… Then she dives at the beast’s head. Her strikes unfurl so fast that Morgott can scarcely follow. Her shamshir, so small and unassuming hanging at her side, now becomes a bladed wind. She is a blur, a storm of wings and water and all flowing things. Time itself must stop to watch her. 

Millicent is every bit her mother’s daughter. Morgott has only seen such a technique once before, only in the training yard. He had no more defense against it then than the tree spirit has now. Utterly stunned by the relentless assault, the creature flops to the ground with an earth-shaking thud. Millicent plunges down and drives her sword into the woody hollow of its eye. Scarlet blood flecked with gold freckles her face.

Millicent straightens and flicks the blood off her sword.

“Fearsome indeed, mistress,” says Morgott, with none of the resentment he expected.

Millicent nods. “My pleasure.”

The Tarnished’s gaze settles on Morgott, and for the first time he notices that she is as youthful as her voice. She can scarcely have reached maturity before she entered Godfrey’s service and died in exile. No doubt she hoped to find glory alongside a mighty lord, like so many young soldiers Morgott has known. His disdain for her increases.

She looks up at him. “What are you doing here?” she pants.

He is about to rebuke her for her insolence when the ash shakes underfoot, announcing the arrival of the other two tree spirits. Before, they were idle away down the wall. Now they are both slithering towards the body of their fallen counterpart.

Three golden daggers manifest in Morgott’s right hand. He is used to wielding incanted weapons with his left, but his stubborn wound prevents him. 

“Gird thyself, Tarnished,” he says. “Or is thy warrior blood so thin as to be overcome…”

He steps out before one of the tree spirits. It draws itself up like a snake.

“…by three witless worms?”

Teeth bared in a defiant grin, the Tarnished calls red lightning to her spear. She lifts into the air once more. This time, with the tree spirit’s attention on Morgott, the bolt connects with its blunted head. The creature writhes away. Combat resumes with a shattering crackle.

~~~

The ashen plain descends into chaos of flailing bodies and gaping maws. Morgott glimpses Millicent intercepting the third tree spirit as it careens towards her, skating around it light as a sparrow and lethal as a heron, before the second one slams its head down. Morgott leaps away from the impact and spray of ash that follows. He sights the creature’s eye in midair and lets fly his three golden daggers. He knows he has struck true by the unholy screech that splits the air.

When he lands, tremors shoot through his legs. It startles him much more than it should. What did he expect? He could scarcely stand upright this morning. He knew he was ignoring his better judgment in his desperate need to be useful.

But he cannot ignore his exhaustion. His body’s message is clear: large movements are too much. He must keep his attacks small and close.

With a rush of impotent rage, Morgott realizes he will have to rely on the Tarnished to bring down the tree spirit while he acts as a distraction. He has been reduced to little more than a sorcerer’s phantom.

A bright flare of shame consumes his reason.

An ethereal tree spear shimmers to hand. Morgott hurls it into the mouth of the beast now thrashing towards him. The tree spirit’s head snaps back with a shriek of rage. The spear dissolves, its work done, and blackness subsumes Morgott’s vision. He scrabbles blindly backwards before dropping to one knee. He blinks dark spots from his eyes, panting for breath while the world reels around him. 

He is not yet done. As long as he doesn’t think too much about what lies underfoot.

When he looks up, the Tarnished has reared back to loose another red bolt from her spear.

“Morgott!” she calls out as the wind of the ancient storm lifts her off the ground. “Hold it down!”

“Presume not to issue me orders, Tarnished!”

Morgott’s voice disappears into the thunderous crack of the bolt hitting its mark. Angry heat spreads through his chest. How dare this Tarnished address him as if he is a novice? Has she not humiliated him enough?

Enough of this. Thou hast a duty.

As the tree spirit twists around to face the Tarnished again, Morgott reminds himself of that old saying: the enemy of my enemy, et cetera.

He grits his teeth and calls another dagger to hand.

~~~

Against all odds, they find their rhythm. He stays close to distract the tree spirit while she withdraws to cast bolts from her spear. Simple, but it works. The Tarnished is unpolished, but Morgott must admit she carries her weight. She grows more accustomed to her spear with each passing moment.

Morgott is not strong enough for his usual nimble maneuvers, but he can still harry the tree spirit with his dagger. He keeps his motions tight, skimming along the creature’s undulating body, slashing where he can. Anything more and his vision swims in warning. He will not give the Tarnished the satisfaction of seeing him collapse again.

The ash does not hinder him as long as he does not think about it.

He goads the Tarnished as they fight. It comforts him, as if nothing has changed since they met at Stormveil. Then she was a mouse and he a cat batting her about. She was not yet a force poised to change the shape of the world. 

“How is it that I found thee alone this morn, Tarnished?” he calls out as the tree spirit coils away from them, body smoldering with gold fire. “Did my men forsake thee for the traitor thou art?”

The Tarnished follows her prey’s sinuous movements as she speaks. “I wouldn’t let them fight with me. Wouldn’t be fair to ask it of them when they can die and I can’t.”

The tree spirit lunges for them, flames exploding. They both leap aside, but not before Morgott glimpses the Tarnished’s gentle smile. 

By the grace of gold, how he despises her! Her kindness is naught but a mask for unthinkable cruelty. Neither Millicent’s witness nor that of his own soldiers will convince him otherwise, when his feet are sliding over the -

Nay. Do not.

Morgott closes the gap between himself and the tree spirit in one swift rush. The rhythm of combat sweeps his mind clear. He is flagging, dizzy with exhaustion, but he takes no heed. The burn of his muscles, the flash of his dagger, the warm patter of his enemy’s blood - all so familiar and simple. The world may be ruined, but this at least has not changed. This he knows. This he can do.

The Tarnished stays close to the tree spirit this time, rather than leaping away to cast another bolt.

“Got something new to try!” she shouts over the creature’s writhing body.

She raises the seal in her left hand for the first time.

The heavens shatter. An unnatural wind roars. Red lighting spears sear downward as if all Placidusax’s kin have loosed their fury as one. Morgott is committed to a flurry of slashes and only just has time to scramble out of the way - curse this heedless child! - but the incantation does its work. Unleashed so close to the enemy, nearly all the crackling spears strike true. The tree spirit crashes to the ground with sparks dancing along its body.

With the last of his strength, Morgott throws himself at the creature’s head. He plunges his dagger into its eye, and his vision goes black.

~~~

If he loses consciousness, it’s only for a moment. He knows this because he hears the resounding thud when Millicent brings down her own tree spirit. He’d quite forgotten about her.

Then warmth spreads through his numbed limbs. Golden healing light pools around him.

“Thank you,” the Tarnished says.

“Necessity,” he mutters, more ragged breath than words. The Tarnished is sorely mistaken if she believes this battle changes anything between them.

“I brought a better heal this time.”

Spare me thy pity, Morgott thinks. Even in his mind he sounds feeble. The world is a blur and there are ashes under his knees and he is so tired. He does not resist the Tarnished’s healing incantation. 

Dimly, he notices that she is holding her side. Did she break a rib when she threw herself out of reach of the tree spirit’s jaws? She must be just as spent as Morgott.

“Thou’rt wounded.” Not his most incisive remark, but it’s all he can manage. His thoughts have lost their way somewhere between his mind and his tongue. He needs most of his effort just to breathe.

The Tarnished shrugs. “I’m used to it.”

Chapter Text

Miquella bled.

He turned a key inside himself and his flesh slid off him like a silk nightdress. His blood sprinkled the earth and red flowers burgeoned where it fell. From what he discarded there arose a golden cross to guide the way, for those who would follow after him.

It hurt, of course, that first divesting. It left him weak. A naked bloody wraith he was, leaving red-gold footprints behind him.

Miquella is not ashamed of how small and afraid he was. It is right that he should know pain and frailty on his way to ascension - that the shedding of his flesh should not only purify him, but humble him too. Bring him low, like so many of the people he seeks to save. When he becomes their god he can say to them that he too has known sacrifice. He has bled and hurt just as they.

Trina says that Miquella is being false with himself. His primary reason for abandoning everything, she says, is not to teach himself a lesson in humility. It is not even so he can slip into secret and sealed places as a bodiless spirit. It is to make himself unalloyed in every sense.

“You will forsake too much,” she warns him, over and over in a hundred different ways. “If you abandon everything that is you, who will you be?”

Trina cannot accept that to make the world a gentler place, Miquella must do terrible things, including to himself. In a perfect land he would not need to do these things. But this land is far from perfect.

Miquella tells himself that the first divestiture will be the worst. After that it will get easier. 

Well, no matter. This will be the last of the terrible things. Afterward there will be naught but love and he will never again hurt anyone but himself. These lands need a martyr for a god.

Miquella is resting now, bracing himself for further pain. He can see everything. By unshackling himself from his flesh, he unshackled his vision. While he waits for his followers to find him, he casts his discarnate sight across the Scadulands and into the Lands Between, to the Tarnished making their Erdtree pilgrimages. He wonders which of them might fulfill his designs. There aren’t many left now, and even fewer who can still see grace.

Miquella always returns to the same one: a young woman with unruly brown hair, warm eyes, and a spray of freckles across her nose. He has been watching her, through his butterflies and in dreams, since before he entered the Scadulands. At first it seemed Torrent had chosen poorly. The girl was too bold. Miquella’s very soul flinched when he saw her veer into dragon-fire on Agheel Lake. But she grew and she learned, and one day she and Torrent came thundering across Caelid’s scarlet dunes, leading a host of phantoms into battle with Radahn. Miquella watched the battle until the end, his spirit quivering in anticipation. At the last the Tarnished threw herself from Torrent’s back and met Radahn in midair with lightning in her hand. 

That was the first time Miquella heard her name, announced in Jerren’s ringing voice. 

“Glory to the champion of the festival! The Tarnished Eira of…”

The castellan’s voice faltered. 

The Tarnished chuckled and said, “Just Eira. Eira of Nowhere.”

Miquella liked her for that.

That answer, Miquella learned, encapsulates much of Eira’s character. She is playful and curious, ferocious when she must be. Despite everything she has overcome, she never loses her sense of wonder. Sometimes she rides Torrent to a high place and stands there gazing at the landscape, a girl on an adventure in a very big world. Sometimes Miquella lingers there with her. He wonders what the world looks like through her eyes.

Miquella thinks this Tarnished will go very far indeed. She has already burned the Erdtree’s impenetrable thorns. He also knows Eira is looking for him - and that troubles him a little, because he has never charmed this girl. She seeks Miquella the Kind of her own will, for her own reasons, and they may not align with his. He has already chosen his lord.

All the more reason to watch her, then. If this aspiring lord of the old order is to be trouble, Miquella will see her coming and be ready.

What he has seen of late has not eased his suspicions. Not long ago, Eira found her way to Farum Azula and dueled Placidusax at his seat beyond time. Placidusax did not yield easily. More than once he came sweeping out of the clouds, a storm in his own right, and raked Eira off her feet with red lightning claws. Eira picked herself up every time, claw marks scorched into her leather armor. 

Placidusax killed her that first time. He drove his great jagged bolt into the center of his courtyard and loosed a charge fit to shatter the air. Sound splintered into ringing silence. Eira’s body splintered with it.

When she returned to the storm beyond time, Eira was ready to dance. When Placidusax’s claws seared towards her, she tucked into a neat roll. When the dragonlord scoured the courtyard with golden fire, she twisted between it. When she was close enough, she slammed a red lightning spear into each of Placidusax’s remaining heads. When Placidusax became a thundercloud, she hurled a bolt of her own straight into it. When she ran along his sides, her feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.

The last time she ducked the dragonlord’s red claws, she smiled. Sparks in her hair, reflected in her eyes.

Placidusax made one final charge. Eira did not evade that time. She stood very still with her arms outspread, and a glowing something took shape in front of her. A circle ringed by roots with a spiral current down the center.

The dragonlord stopped dead. His skidding halt gouged chunks of stone from the courtyard. He drove his lightning spear into the pavers once more: not an assault, but a salute.

Thus a truce was made between a Tarnished and the ancient dragons of Farum Azula.

Miquella cannot ignore that.

What was the rune Eira presented to Placidusax? What role does she wish Miquella to play in her quest, whatever it may be? 

If it comes to open battle between them, that is a shame. Were he still himself, Miquella would have liked to know this young woman Torrent has chosen. Torrent was always a good judge of character.

(Is that why he is not here?)

But Miquella has made his choices. He will not choose otherwise now.

Chapter Text

Despite his obvious fatigue, Morgott refuses Millicent’s offer to escort him back to the Erdtree Sanctuary. Millicent lets him go. There’s no use arguing. 

“Follow him if you can,” Eira tells her friend. “Make sure he doesn’t come to harm.”

“Not until I’ve seen to you.”

Only once Morgott is out of sight does Eira sink to her knees. Beneath her hand, her side is throbbing fiercely. She must have broken a rib when she leapt out of the tree spirit’s path. Her vision swims, and she marvels that she managed to stay conscious until the end of the battle. Tarnished do not feel pain as keenly as most, but they still feel it. Every breath is a knife in Eira’s side. She’ll have to find a shard of grace to stitch her bones together. There’s no time for anything else.

She gives Millicent what she hopes is a brave smile. “I thought I’d try Gransax’s bolt before I go into the Erdtree. Cambria’s spear is too heavy for my liking.”

Millicent frowns, reproving and concerned. “You chose dangerous foes on which to practice.”

“I’m sorry you had to manage the last one on your own.”

“I admit I quite enjoyed myself.”

“You looked like you had wings! What do you call that?”

“The point is that you must be more careful if you are to be Elden Lord. And so must the Lord of Leyndell. He was in no state to be fighting.”

Eira looks up at the street behind her. Morgott is nowhere in sight. “It doesn’t seem like him, Millie, doing something so reckless.”

“It does not. He could not have held Leyndell through the Shattering if he were prone to recklessness.”

“When I fought him at Stormveil, he was so calm. He had perfect hold of himself, the battle, me - and he never once lost it.” Eira looks back at Millicent. “He’s in a bad way, isn’t he?”

Millicent nods. “He has lost his purpose. He is too stubborn for surrender, but I know not how or when he will find his feet again.”

This is no surprise. Eira dealt the Omen King two mortal blows in quick succession: the first when she made him bloom, the second when she burned his idol. Some things have to break before they can mend. Melina warned her about that more than once, and never more so than at the end. There is no gentle reforging, she said. It always requires a hammer.

Eira clutches a fistful of ashes. “Why did I have to burn the Erdtree? Why wasn’t there another way?”

She wasn’t ready for any of it. When she saw Leyndell drowning dry, she almost crumbled. She wandered, ash stinging her eyes, past Corhyn prophesying the end of days, until she came to a rampart she knew. Once, it had reared high above the ground. Now it hovered mere feet above the ashen sea. This more than anything impressed on her the scale of what she had wrought. She - a peasant from nowhere! - had brought down the incarnation of order.

Suddenly it was real.

You are two Eiras, Melina said once, the warrior and the dancer. I fear the latter will die. You must be stone to do what must be done. Eira refused. She needed both the warrior and the dancer. Together they kept her human. Fierce and battle-hungry, but never cruel. One eye on the world’s horrors, the other on its beauty.

There was only horror on the rampart that day. And Eira was not stone.

“I broke Leyndell,” she said when Millicent found her. By which she also meant, I broke Melina and Morgott and the Roundtable and the world, and I don’t know if I can fix it.

Millicent hears all those silent things. Presently she puts a hand on Eira’s shoulder. “Hush. ’Tis all for the best. You will make it right again, and I will help you where I can.”

Eira closes her eyes. She reminds herself that she doesn’t need to make a perfect world, just a better one. A fairer one. 

She lets out her breath. “Find Morgott for me, will you? I brought Ragna up from the sewers not long ago and I want to look in on her.”

“Of course.”

“I won’t be able to see her or Morgott for a while. I want to be sure they’re all right.”

“You mean to depart soon, then.”

“To the Haligtree, Millie. To find Miquella.”

~~~

Morgott wanders. He isn’t certain where. He isn’t even certain if he’s awake. A thick, numbing haze has fallen on his mind again. He feels the rough stone wall beneath his fingers as if from a great distance.

Eventually, there’s a stableyard, a tumbledown barracks, and a resting dragon.

The world is truly upside down, Morgott concludes. That this mighty creature should descend to Leyndell’s cramped streets on account of a Tarnished! Dragons belong in the sky, or on high cliffs where they can look down on the land in all its stark, broken beauty.

The dragon’s size only adds to the absurdity of the scene. Even with its wings folded, it barely fits into the courtyard. Its head is nigh as long as Morgott is tall. Slender, elegant horns spiral up from its brows. Stony scales armor its body, so sharply delineated they might have been chiseled by a master mason. Hints of gold wink from the edges of its wings. It’s a beautiful beast. Morgott allows himself to think that. His mind provides the supporting doctrine: The worship of ancient dragons and the Erdtree faith need not be opposed. After all, lightning is itself imbued with gold.

Privately, Morgott dislikes that. It feels less like divine truth and more like an addition, made at the behest of Queen Marika’s favorite son. And if that bit of dogma is arbitrary, then what else -

Caution. Yield not to heresy.

Morgott does not approach the dragon. He is drunk with exhaustion, but not enough for that. Instead he regards the creature from the gateway, and it regards him. Its slit pupils look like insects set in amber. Morgott can see the intelligence behind those eyes.

“The Tarnished wieldeth your lightning,” he says. The respectful you comes easily to his lips, though he has had no cause to use it in ages. “She is more ruinous still than the Dragonspear before her.”

For a moment Morgott hopes the dragon will tell him what to make of it all. It does not. It just rustles its great wings, and Morgott’s heart squeezes. He might have grown his own wings had he not cut them down to stumps in his youth. Aspects of the Crucible were - are - abhorrent to the Golden Order. I wish to be good, young Morgott thought, and so I shall not fly.

The dragon huffs through its nostrils. It’s a gentle sound, inviting.

Morgott ignores it. If this creature will not tell him what the Tarnished is planning, he will have to look elsewhere.

~~~

When Millicent arrives in the stableyard some time later, Morgott is gone. She can tell he was here, though: his large footprints have marked the dust.

The dragon is settled on all fours like a dozing cat. Millicent doesn’t recognize this individual, so she lingers at a distance. 

The beast opens one amber eye.

“Is he safe?” Millicent asks.

The dragon blinks slowly in answer.

~~~

Eira makes her painful way to a shard of grace on Leyndell’s main avenue. The golden light quickly puts her right, for which she is grateful. She has never gotten used to the prickling, tugging sensation of her bones knitting back together. And she has more important things to do.

It’s a short walk from the avenue to Cambria’s home. The house is in a cluster of residences set not far back from the street. They are simple but fine, with gilded roofs and stone planters by the doors. They are also identical, and so are the narrow paths between them. That gives them a sense of anonymity. Eira has to count each turning so she doesn’t get lost. When she reaches Cambria’s verdigrised door, she knocks in a prearranged sequence. The air shimmers as a ward breaks, and the door creaks open. 

The house’s interior is dim and sparse in the manner of a monastery. Its sole adornment is a tapestry on the far wall. Unlike so many of Leyndell’s wall hangings, it does not depict the Erdtree. Instead, it shows interlocking rings surrounded by twisting lines like roots. Eira did not recognize it the first time she came here. Now she does: the same image glowed above an altar in Farum Azula. Eira assumes it is an ancient incarnation of the Elden Ring, forged in the time of the Crucible. It’s clearly important to Cambria. Candles line the shelf beneath it, and a bowl of incense perfumes the air.

The sound of splashing leads Eira to a side chamber. Inside she finds a wooden tub lined with sheets to keep the water in. Cambria is attempting to place a squirming Ragna in the water. Five more little Omens are clustered around the tub, watching with wide, frightened eyes.

Eira blinks. “There are more of you! Ragna, have you brought your friends?”

“Bad?” Ragna asks, grave as a soldier.

Eira looks at the little furry faces before her, pinched with hunger, following her every move. “No. Good. It’s very good you’re here.”

This is why I burned the Erdtree. I’ll be Elden Lord for the little ‘uns in the sewers.

Cambria looks up through tangled red curls. Without her armor, only the scales around her eyes betray that she is more than human. “Yes,” she sighs, “but where shall we keep them? Mine home is too small for so many, and the city is not safe.”

“They can stay at the Erdtree Sanctuary.”

“Lord Morgott will not like it.”

“It’s hardly the worst I’ve done to him.”

“Then all the more reason they must be bathed. Perhaps Lord Morgott will be less inclined to spurn them if they are clean. I fear ’tis no simple task: they fear the water, as thou seest.”

Indeed, all the Omen children twitch every time the water ripples. The girl at the front looks ready to launch forward and pull Ragna out of danger. That one has spark. In her mind Eira names her Brigit, after a provincial hearth spirit in whose honor she used to dance.

“Well, they’ve never had baths before,” Eira says. “They must think you mean to torture them.”

Cambria flicks a strand of hair out of her eyes. It’s wet, a mark of Ragna’s protests. “I feared as much. I thought perhaps Ragna, who knoweth me as a friend, might set an example for the rest.”

“Can you trust us, love?” Eira asks the Omen girl in Cambria’s arms. “I promise you’ll feel better once you’re clean.”

Ragna looks at her for a long moment. Her eyes are too keen for her young face. You gave me food, they say. Do not now betray me.

“I’ll stay right here with you,” Eira says.

Ragna considers for one more moment, then nods. Cambria lowers her into the water without resistance. The other Omen children press together, twining tails for comfort.

“All will be well,” Cambria murmurs as she scoops handfuls of water over Ragna’s shaggy head. “’Tis sweet-scented and warm.”

Ragna says nothing. She sits as still as someone determined to face the gallows with dignity. Only her eyes move between her companions and Eira, conveying a message. This one is good.

The children keep silent watch until Cambria begins lathering Ragna’s silvery hair. Then they become convinced that their friend is having her skin scoured off. Their eyes dart about looking for weapons and escape routes. Brigit drops into a crouch, ready to pounce. Ragna just closes her eyes and leans into Cambria’s hands. She looks like a young monk practicing acceptance.

“Good,” she says.

Her companions are unconvinced. Their eyes are wide, pupils dilated. They need a distraction.

From her belt pouch Eira takes a toy she got from a nomadic merchant outside Leyndell: a perfect miniature replica of an oracle envoy's horn. The merchant tried to give it away. He said he had no hope of selling such frivolities, given the dire state of the world. When he would not accept her runes, Eira paid him with Boggart’s cooking. The toy brought her laughter at a dark time: that was priceless.

Eira is not sure if it will delight or frighten the Omen children. “This won’t hurt you. It’s just a bit of fun,” she tells the fearful faces around her. Then she realizes they may not know what fun is. “It’s a spell. It makes a silly noise and a bit of light, that’s all. Do you want to try it?”

Brigit is boldest. She takes the horn with dexterous fingers and peers at it from every angle. Cautiously, the other children gather around her.

Eira gestures for Brigit to hold the horn to her mouth. “Buzz your lips, like this. Pbbt.”

Brigit makes a few attempts before the horn emits a tiny squeak and a tinier stream of golden bubbles. They burst in the air and rain down shining mist. A few of the children jump, but giving Brigit control of the toy seems to have taken away most of its ability to frighten. Brigit’s eyes follow the bubbles; her tail swishes like a hunting cat’s. Then she blows a second stream. This time all the children watch. Their heads swivel between drifting bubbles, and some of them bend their knees as if to snatch them out of their air - but they don’t go that far. They’re too wary. Still, the toy serves its purpose. By Brigit’s third stream of bubbles, Ragna is smiling faintly, which seems to assure the other children that she isn’t suffering. Soon they’re more interested in the horn than in Ragna’s bath.

Eira’s heart aches for them. They’ve had no chance to be ordinary children. To them Eira must seem like a creature from another world, where toys and food sprout from pockets. She hopes they are still young enough to learn joy.

Cambria is rinsing Ragna’s hair now. When the soap has drained away, the Omen girl opens her eyes and looks at Eira. “Show. The magic.” She traces a circle in the air with her finger.

Eira glances at Cambria, who nods. “Ragna chose thee. ’Tis thine now. Do as thou wilt.”

“No - it’s theirs.” 

Eira wills the mending rune up from its resting place within her. It comes with warmth and a flutter, like it has its own heartbeat. It coalesces in front of her, a circle ringed with twisting lines like the roots on Cambria’s tapestry. It’s so small for such an important thing. Its light is beautiful but thin, exposed.

The Omen children are not frightened of this. They let go of each other and move towards it as one, drawn by instinct. They have never seen it before, and yet they seem to recognize it. Its colors scintillate in their eyes as they gather around.

“This is yours,” Eira repeats. “If I’m right, when I put this into the Elden Ring, you won’t be cursed anymore. No one will. It’ll make things the way they -”

A hard knock shatters the stillness, followed by a creak. Some of the Omen children scurry behind the tub; a few clutch at Eira’s legs. Cambria lifts Ragna out of the bath and holds her close in a towel. There’s nowhere to hide.

Morgott’s huge shadow fills the doorway. He has to stoop to look in. He still looks exhausted, one hand on the wall for support, but his good eye narrows at what he sees.

“Knight Cambria. Thou seest fit to bring curseborn strays into thine home without my knowledge? Perhaps the world is ended, but I am Lord of Leyndell still.”

Eira hears rawness in that last statement. You’re trying to convince yourself you haven’t lost your hold.

Cambria must hear it too. “You did not lock the Shunning Grounds gate, my lord,” she says steadily, “neither now nor in times past. I am certain this was no oversight. You do not wish children imprisoned there any more than I.”

Morgott does not yield an inch. “I came to thee for counsel, and I find thee conspiring with mine enemy.”

“I have good cause.”

Cambria carries Ragna out of the washroom and into the living area, where there is more room to talk. Eira shepherds the other children behind her. The mending rune drifts with them. 

Morgott tracks it, eye hardening all the while. “This is a work of heresy.”

“No heresy, my lord. ’Tis a mending rune. My companions and I made it ere we were scattered for good. ’Tis the work of long years and searching, both in this realm and the forsaken Scadulands. ’Twill set right what war put asunder and permit the great spiral to flow unbroken. ’Twill make you and your kind as ye should always have been.”

“My kind are accursed. Unnatural.”

Cambria’s eyes are shining. Eira cannot tell if it is the rune’s reflected glow or her own inner light. “Your curse was not born but made, from sins and hatreds in which ye had no part. The guilt upon your heart was never yours to bear. Did not my Captain Siluria tell you so?” 

Morgott folds his great arms. He isn’t hearing any of this. “How long hast thou conspired against me?”

“Not against you, but for your own -”

“How long?”

Cambria squares her shoulders. Even without her armor, she is solid as an oak. “Since the Erdtree assumed its present form. We knew the queen’s victory would twist the world, and we sought a way to put it right. We parted ways ere our searching was done, but we found each other once more to undertake our great making. I have kept it here in Leyndell ever since.”

“Beneath my very nose.” Morgott’s voice takes on a dangerous rumble.

“’Twas the safest place. You cannot see what lieth beneath your nose, my lord.”

You cannot see that you are not a sin - that’s what Cambria means, Eira is sure. But Morgott hasn’t taken it that way. He is flexing his arms, squaring up to fight Cambria right here in this small house. By grace, he really is coming undone. 

Eira inserts herself between them, gesturing at Ragna. “Cambria met this child in the Shunning Grounds and told her to find a Tarnished who would help her. She found me, and I found Cambria, and Cambria gave me this mending rune. The spear I used against you at the Elden Throne - she lent it to me. Wanted you to know what I’m fighting for.”

Something wavers behind Morgott’s eyes as he looks at Ragna. His voice remains hard. “Aye - for the curseborn, the lost, the errors of nature.” His tone turns mocking. “Thou wouldst be Elden Lord of the forsaken.”

“You of all people should understand why I need to be.”

“Pray enlighten me, Tarnished.”

Heat rises in Eira’s gut. “Omenkillers are slaughtering Albinaurics who can’t fight back. Omens are being tortured in their nightmares. The chaos flame is spreading; your soldiers on Mt. Gelmir are eating their fellows. Radahn’s folk are still burning the earth of Caelid even though it’s hopeless. Children are living in the sewers. I could go on. Did you think you’re the only one in the realm who’s ever suffered? The Lands Between are rotten. It’s past time someone raised a banner for the forsaken.”

Eira is breathing hard when she finishes. Morgott is still damnably calm - at least on the outside. He might as well be carved from wood.

“What concern are all of these to thee?” he asks.

Disappointment flares into rage. Aren’t they your concern too? Before Eira knows it, she is shouting.

“I know what it’s like to be a lost thing! I came from nothing and I died as nothing. No one asked me if I wanted to be reborn. When I came to the Lands Between, no one told me what to do or why. I can’t even stay dead - can’t even choose my own end! I shouldn’t have gotten this far. Gods know I’ve died more times than I can count. But I’m here, and I have a chance to do something good. Someone’s got to do it, Morgott. It might as well be me.”

Morgott looks at her for a long while. Eira is surprised he hasn’t thrown her through a wall yet. Maybe she’s struck a chord with him? He said himself that they are all forsaken.

Morgott’s gaze flits to the mending rune. It’s making him nervous; Eira sees that through his cold façade. “And with this thou think’st to…what? Unleash monstrosities upon the world?”

“I want to make things fair, so that no one is cursed because they’ve got horns and a tail. It won’t be a perfect world” - there are so many she couldn’t and will never be able to save - “but all life will have a fighting chance. Even you.”

“I?”

“Especially you! I don’t pretend to understand it all, but I can see when you fight that you could be more than you are. Something’s been stolen from you. Don’t you want to know what it is?”

To Eira’s increasing exasperation, Morgott does not answer. “And the outer gods of which thou speak’st? The scarlet rot, the yellow chaos flame?”

“I hope Miquella will help me fight them. I’ve heard he made needles that ward off the outer gods. And I don’t think he’d mind having an Elden Lord of the forsaken.”

“Thine ambition riseth further still.”

“What’s wrong with ambition?” At least I’m not sitting here watching things get worse.

“Right or wrong, thine shall fail. Miquella is dead.”

Eira’s breath catches. Behind her, Cambria stiffens. “You are certain of this, my lord?” the Crucible Knight asks.

Morgott smiles without mirth. He must think he has foiled his Tarnished enemy. “Malenia engaged many a battle in the Shattering, yet her brother was not in her retinue. The Twin Prodigies were ever loath to be separated. Miquella would not leave his sister for such a length of time had not some dire misfortune befallen him.”

Eira exhales slowly. She was afraid Morgott would have proof that everything she’s done has been for naught, but he doesn’t. She’s not lost yet.

“Doesn’t mean he’s dead,” she says. “His Haligtree is hidden; you can’t reach it without a secret medallion. Maybe he’s there, planning something. No one would know it if he were.”

“Hast thou a ‘secret medallion?’”

Now it’s Eira’s turn to grin. “I do. It’s coupled with the Grand Lift of Rold.”

Morgott’s brows knit together. “Rold? Is there no forbidden place thou hast not breached?”

“Probably not.”

“Well, small wonder that a heretic seeketh a heretic for her accomplice. Miquella renounced the Golden Order when he raised his Haligtree.”

Eira steps close enough to Morgott to drive a weapon into his chest. “The Golden Order’s time is done.”

The Omen King’s eye is smoldering. If he weren’t so tired, Eira knows he’d be spitting fire. His voice drops to a growl. “Thou’rt so very certain.”

“I’m not,” Eira says, and she means it. “But I’ve got to do something. I burned the Erdtree, the Roundtable, my maiden…” She looks at Ragna in Cambria’s arms, the other children all clinging to each other. A terrible weight settles on her chest. “I can’t stop now.”

Morgott is silent. 

You understand. You couldn’t stop either.

The mending rune shimmers like a slick of oil between them. It seems to exert its own pressure. Then Ragna slips from Cambria’s arms and pads over to the rune. Looking right at Morgott, she closes her hand upon it.

Light washes over - no, through - Ragna. Light in every color of life, flowing up her horns and tail, shining in rings around her irises. Forming into the silhouette of wings. Eira feels her lips part in awe. The girl from the sewers has become something divine.

Morgott takes a step backwards. For the first time, his face betrays fear. “What black magic is this?”

Ragna shakes her head hard. “Good.” 

She takes her hand away, and the light of life goes out.

“This is a deceit,” Morgott hisses.

“This is what you always should have been,” Eira says. “You aren’t meant to be cursed. Something is broken.” And I reckon your mother broke it. “Touch the rune and see.”

“Nay. I will not be party to this…sacrilege. ‘Tis contrary to the Golden Order.”

Ah, that’s the heart of it. 

“You’re afraid,” Eira says. “Afraid there’s no light in you, or that there is?”

Quick as a snake, Morgott closes his hand around her throat and lifts her off the floor. The Omen children scramble for shelter in the corners. Eira goes limp, breathing shallow through her nose. Her heart hammers, but her thoughts are calm. If Morgott kills her, she’ll just come back. Besides, if he wanted to crush her throat, he’d have done it. It would be effortless for him. Instead, he’s barely squeezing at all. His fingers are trembling.

“Go and seek thine Haligtree traitor,” he rasps at last. “May he be thy ruin.”

“Come with me if you want to set yourself free,” Eira manages.

Morgott drops her, whirls, and stoops out the door. 

Eira straightens up with Cambria’s help, panting and massaging her throat. The Omen children press close around her. “I’m all right,” she assures them. “He didn’t really hurt me.”

“Why?” Cambria muses. “He hath every reason. Knoweth he that grace will undo his work should he slay thee?”

“He does,” Eira says hoarsely, “but I don’t think that’s all of it.”

“Thou sayest he is in doubt.”

“Right. Ragna just cracked his armor.”

~~~

Morgott does not go to the Haligtree. When Eira asks him why, he says he will not waste his energies on a fruitless chase across the mountaintops. He says he has duties in Leyndell. Millicent suspects this is only one of his reasons for staying behind.

Eira leaves first. Millicent plans to follow a day later: she seeks the Haligtree for reasons of her own. Before that, she sees the Omen children settled into the Erdtree Sanctuary. The resident healer, a plain-spoken perfumer called Ursa, welcomes them into her infirmary. Once the fear of their new surroundings passes, they become curious. They’re a nimble lot, and strong, climbing everything in sight. Millicent expects Morgott to turn them away. He doesn’t. He won’t look at them either.

The night before she departs, she is saying goodbye to the children when she senses a presence outside the infirmary. She tucks the children in - they sleep in a pile in one cot - and steps into the corridor.

Morgott looks down at her. The torches cast his face into flickering darkness. He makes a fearsome sight, with his shadow stretching down the hall and the firelight playing red on his horns. Did Millicent not know him, her hand would be on her shamshir. Instead she returns his gaze without fear.

“Thou deceivest them,” Morgott rumbles. His voice is so soft that Millicent cannot make out his inflection. “Thy pity will be their ruin. There is nothing holy in them.”

Millicent does not correct Morgott’s use of the word “pity.” He may never learn.

“There is,” she says. “In them, and in you. And soon all the Lands Between will see it.”

With that Millicent departs for her own sleeping quarters. She ignores the scoff behind her.

~~~

In the days that follow, Morgott avoids the girl called Ragna. She now bears the mending rune Morgott saw in Cambria’s house, and he cannot think about that. It will unravel everything.

Ragna does things, however, that Morgott cannot help but notice. She has made several surreptitious ventures to the Shunning Grounds, for one. The damp smell on her fur betrayed her. Her goal, it seems, was to retrieve a substantial arsenal of pots. They remind Morgott unsettlingly of those Mohg once filled with his cursed blood. Ragna’s pots are filled with ghosts. Morgott hears them at night when the city is still, shifting and rustling like dry leaves. Morgott has ghosts too, inside him, and they sound just the same. Ragna’s seem placid enough, but Morgott knows they would spring to violence if the girl wished it.

It makes Morgott ill to see rancor magic amassed beneath this holy roof. He will have to take Ragna’s defenses from her. On the other hand, he remembers how long it took him to feel safe when he left the Shunning Grounds. He spent so many nights looking for claws in every darkened corner. Those instincts never truly faded. During his long wars, they resurfaced more times than he can recall.

Ragna and her companions have similar difficulties sleeping. They sometimes sleep in a bed but more often under it. Morgott knows this is because they are accustomed to claustrophobic cells and corridors. Too much open space makes them uneasy. Morgott felt much the same on his first few nights in the Erdtree Sanctuary: as though anyone might walk through his door and slit his throat. Thus, when he happens upon an Omen child asleep in a cupboard, he shuts the door and lets them be.

The children have no sense of time either. There is no such thing in the Shunning Grounds, suspended in perpetual greenish gloom. Acclimation will come but slowly. In the meanwhile, the little ones are prone to wandering at unseemly hours, when only Morgott is awake. That brings him into contact with Ragna.

The girl is all but silent. One would be forgiven for thinking she could melt into the dark. Morgott, however, grew up in the same tunnels as she, and he can detect the faintest rasp of bare feet on stone. The night she comes to him, Morgott is on his balcony, looking up at the Erdtree’s ashy boughs. He is grateful he cannot see them clearly in the dark. He could not bear to look at them otherwise, and that would leave him with no distraction from what he saw in Cambria’s house.

He does not need to turn his head to know the girl is near. “Ill dreams, child?” he says over his shoulder. “Look not to me for comfort. I am caught in a waking nightmare of mine own.”

Get thee gone, he prays. Bear away that light within thee. I dare not look upon it.

Ragna comes up beside him, slipping into his shadow. She does not look frightened. Come to think of it, she does not seem to suffer the nightmares that plague most Omen. Perhaps her command of spirits protects her, blasphemous though it is.

The girl gazes steadily up at him. “Why?”

Morgott bites down on a bitter laugh. “Why? Art thou blind as well as cursed? Cast thine eyes to the Erdtree and see my failure writ plain.”

Ragna is silent, though not, Morgott knows, for lack of wit. Anyone who looks at this child can tell she thinks much more than she says. Morgott feels her considering him, and the city, and the Erdtree above it. Pupils wide in the unnatural darkness, she tracks a dragon across the stars.

Then she says, “It will bloom.”

A chill finger runs up Morgott’s spine. Those words hold the weight of prophecy.

“How?”

“Eira.”

The Tarnished. Of course.

“’Twas she who set the flame, girl! She bringeth no salvation.”

Morgott’s left hand, still stiff, clenches with fury and shame. How has that desecrator convinced everyone that she can mend the world? Even the dragons have taken leave of their senses! No matter Millicent’s pretty words, this is the end of everything Morgott loves - everything worth preserving. The Tarnished’s age of the Crucible is a ruinous folly. It will be an age of curseborn.

But the light in the rune, in Ragna -

Morgott pins the girl with his gaze. “Tell me,” he says, ice in each word, “what thou knowest of this Tarnished. How did she earn thy regard?”

Ragna does not shrink an inch. “Crab.”

“What?”

“Crab,” she repeats, this time with a hum of pleasure. “And prawn.”

Morgott’s irritation wanes. No, this isn’t nonsense at all. “She shared her food with thee?”

Ragna nods solemnly.

“I see. And for that thou think’st her a worthy Elden Lord?”

Morgott tries and fails to summon disdain. Where Ragna came from, where he came from, food was all but sacred. Sharing it was like sharing blood.

His left hand relaxes. “Perhaps for thee, ’tis enough.”

Ragna nods again. Earnest as a saint, this one.

However great a service the Tarnished did thee, ’tis as naught when set against her sin, Morgott thinks. But then, unbidden, he recalls the Tarnished’s tiny palm in his bleeding one. Golden light blossomed between them where there might so easily have been death. And she spoke those words he cannot banish from his mind: Unveiled and unashamed.

He needs to stop thinking about this. He needs Ragna to go away.

“Go,” he says, directing Ragna with a tilt of his head. “Walk a while. Perhaps ’twill bring thee sleep.”

And I shall stay here and think of mine Erdtree, and not of the light in thine horns, child. For in that light thou didst not appear accursed.

And if that light be true…

(Cease.)

…then all I know…

(Go no further.)

…all I have served -

(CEASE)

…I shall not falter. The Erdtree is burned but firmly rooted. 

Always.

Chapter Text

“I’m glad we’re in here, Millie.”

Millicent looks around the catacomb. Slush on the ground, only just enough light to see by. A dead land octopus sits stinking in the middle of the room. “Why so?”

“Because…” Eira puts her foot on the octopus’s spongy body and wrests her dagger from its beak. “…it means we don’t have to go through the mountaintops to reach the Haligtree. Don’t think I could stand that. I haven’t been there since Melina…”

Her hand goes limp. The dagger drips slime onto the floor.

Millicent takes it from her gently, wipes it with a cloth. “She would be pleased to see you here. One day you will look upon the Forge of Giants as the place where a new age was born.”

“But not today.” For now the forge is just a pyre.

Eira takes the dagger back and turns it in her hands. It’s long and slender, made for sliding into soft places. When she brought it to Hewg for sharpening, he said battlefield healers used it to give swift death to those they could not help. Eira has used it that way too.

“It’s called a miséricorde. Master Hewg said it means ‘mercy.’” Like Eira’s name. “These lands are crying out for that. Gods, I hope Miquella can give it to us. I don’t think Ranni would.”

Millicent’s face grows cautious. “I do not doubt Miquella - but we have never met him. We know him by rumor alone. We cannot even be certain he is alive. Is it wise to place such faith in him?”

“What choice do I have?” Eira snaps her dagger into her belt sheath.

“I am only saying that this may not be as simple as you wish.”

The weight of responsibility settles on Eira again. Her breathing quickens. “Nothing is ever simple, but I’ve got to try. I’ve lost too many, killed too many. If I stop now, what was it all for?”

“If Miquella is all you hope he is, he will make those deeds worthwhile.”

Eira closes her eyes. “Yes.”

And if I’m wrong, I broke the world for nothing.

“Did grace not give you the right to reforge the Elden Ring?”

“Grace gave it to the Dung Eater too! Boggart’s right: the whole thing’s gone tits-up! I don’t know why grace keeps giving me life. I’m not a lord, Millie; I won’t be even when I sit the Elden Throne. But I’m here, and I can fight, and I won’t close my eyes now I’ve seen all the hurt in these lands!”

Eira stops herself, breathing hard. Millicent is as good as a sister; she doesn’t deserve to be shouted at.

“I’m sorry,” Eira mutters. “This is all so much bigger than it was before, and I just…hope I’m right. I’ve got to be.”

Millicent shuffles forward in the slush and grips Eira’s forearms. “I have never known you to doubt, dear friend.”

“I didn’t until I burned the Erdtree.”

“Then it all became real.”

Eira nods at the floor.

“The world is a heavy burden, but you do not bear it alone,” Millicent says. “Did you not tell me yourself that pain diminishes and joy increases when shared with others?”

“I’ll always believe that. But in the end I’m the one who’s got to make a choice for the whole world. I can’t share that.”

“Your allies will make the choice with you.” Millicent sits them both down on a broken chunk of masonry. “If I may ask, have you always desired so much to help others?”

“Morgott asked me something like that. I told him I care so much because I know what it’s like to be lost. Being Tarnished taught me that. That’s true, but…now I don’t think it’s all of it. I think it started long before I was Tarnished.”

“You speak of your former life? I would like to hear.”

Eira looks inward, unspooling memory from the fog. 

“You know I come from a village on the Altus Plateau. I don’t think it has a name. There weren’t many of us, and we had to work together to live. Everyone looked after each other, like we were all kin. It was natural as breathing. I tried to do that at the Roundtable, but...well.

“We didn’t have much, but we did have local spirits - at least, we thought so. We never saw them, but we saw what they did for us. They were part of the land. They made sure our firewood was dry, our harvests were good, and our water was clean. They didn’t ask for much, just attention. Everyone said that’s what kept them alive. If no one believed in them, they’d fade away.”

“And what was your role in all this?”

“I was their spirit dancer.”

Millicent smiles warmly. “You sustained them with your belief. I can well imagine.”

“I danced to thank them for their help. I kept them alive, and they kept us alive. I loved it. Made me feel like I had something special to give.”

Eira remembers more now. Impressions bloom across her mind. Bare feet on stone, on grass. Shrines decked with flowers and baskets of food. A pleasant burn in her muscles. Sweat beading and cooling her skin. Exhaustion, too. Numb legs dropping her into the grass. Making herself get up again. Her people needing her to get up.

Failing sometimes. Here and there a death of hunger or sickness.

“The spirits of the land and water were the most important, of course,” Eira goes on, “but Brigit the hearth spirit was my favorite. Her dances were fast and bold. She’d dance through me when she was pleased with me. Fill me up with heat.”

Brigit was Eira’s chosen patron. Eira still wears the hearth-spirit’s mark. A long-forgotten tattoo rings her right ankle: a chain of upward-pointing triangles to represent flames. Brigit’s devotional dances could be aggressive, and they made Eira feel invincible. They also wore her out, left her skin burning. She remembers steam rising off her in the night. Now she wonders if those rites might have shaped the way she fights.

“Do you remember any of your dances?” Millicent asks.

“I think I could if I ever had a moment’s peace.”

“I would like to see. How often did you perform this duty on your village’s behalf?”

“I don’t remember exactly. At festivals, I suppose, and any other time my people needed help. When the rains wouldn’t come or the snows were deep.”

A shadow falls across Millicent’s face. “And how long did your dances go on?”

Until the spirits showed approval by dancing through her. Sometimes that took a while.

“I remember falling down,” she says slowly. More impressions unspool from the fog: feet bleeding, sweat stinging her eyes. “I remember hurting and sleeping for days afterward. Sometimes the spirits wouldn’t answer me. But mostly I was proud, I think. I kept my village fed and well.”

“At no small cost to yourself. You carried your people’s lives with your very limbs.” Millicent looks at Eira hard. Something clicks into place behind her eyes. “You are carrying their lives still: the lives of all the Lands Between. You have never stopped.”

Eira shrugs. “I want to help. It makes me glad.”

“I do not doubt it, but take care you do not go too far.”

“I won’t. I know I can’t save everyone - I still see the Albinauric village in my dreams. I just want to mend what I can.”

“Then be not reckless. You are no use to anyone if you break yourself.”

“I’m not reckless. I just…”

“…attract runebears?” 

They both laugh. It sounds odd in the catacombs. Defiant.

Millicent takes Eira’s hands. “May I offer you a bit of hope? You said that St. Trina of the Cradlesong visits you in dreams, and that she is most kind. If she is Miquella’s other self, as the rumors say, that seems a good sign.”

“It does.” 

(Except those dreams have been getting shorter lately, as if Trina is distracted.)

“Perhaps you will see her tonight.” Millicent pats Eira’s hand. “Come, now. Let us find a more suitable place to rest.”

~~~

Morgott cannot stop thinking about that mending rune.

It’s aggravating. He has always prided himself on his mental fortitude; why is it failing him now? Avoiding Ragna no longer helps. The light of her horns now shines in Morgott’s dreams.

He keeps as busy as he can overseeing repairs. Anything will do as long as it takes him out of the Erdtree Sanctuary - but he isn’t safe outside either. People stare, which reminds him what he is. Dragons stare, which reminds him why they’re here. And that brings him back to the mending rune.

(Morgott won’t be able to ignore it forever. If dragons are interested, it’s a serious matter.)

At the sanctuary, he’s constantly extracting Omen children from whatever they’ve climbed this time. It’s a good distraction, but it too has its dangers. Holding the children is like holding his younger self. Morgott knows exactly what those little bodies have endured. It’s all he can do not to recoil.

“You don’t look well,” Ursa tells him one night, as he deposits Brigit back in the infirmary for the hundredth time. 

“I cannot imagine why,” Morgott mutters.

“You should have come to me long ago. Can’t have done you any good, sitting by the Erdtree breathing all that smoke.”

No one but Ursa could speak to Morgott like this. She is small and solid, and her stubbornness matches his. Morgott also owes her a debt. She makes a perfume to keep his Omen nightmares away, and she is the only person he trusts to trim his horns. She’s never once made him bleed.

“I did not require thy services,” he says without rancor.

“That’s not what Eira told me.”

Oh, what Morgott would say to that if the children weren’t here.

“Are your ghosts troubling you?” Ursa asks as Morgott turns to leave.

Morgott’s ghosts are the least of his concerns. “Nay, they are quieter of late.”

Ever since Ragna brought the mending rune into the sanctuary, in fact.

Damn it all, that cannot be!

Ragna is sitting on the cot, looking right at him. Yes it can, say her eyes.

~~~

Beyond the catacombs lies a swirling, biting veil. Tarnished are resilient, but they still feel the cold. Eira is numb to her waist before she knows it. 

She and Millicent hold hands so as not to lose each other. Shapes melt out of the blizzard without warning. Between miraculous guiding candles roam packs of direwolves as big as Torrent. Gardens rise from the snow, stony white trees that might be as old as the world. Red flowers dot their bases like a sprinkling of blood.

They pass a funeral caravan one night. The huge black wagon is a hole in the white. Two members of the Night’s Cavalry ride alongside it. The lanterns on the wagon burn purple: Trina’s color. Whatever treasure it carries must be associated with her. For that, Eira leaves it alone.

As always, she looks for beauty. She tries to dance on a frozen river, ends up falling and laughing instead. She explores a cave where holes in the rock have frozen over and formed windows onto lower caverns. They’re lit only by spirit jellyfish, an undersea scene brought to land. 

The magma wyrm is less beautiful - but it’s a chance to come alive. Eira’s cheeks blaze fever-hot in the lava’s wake. The wyrm’s footfalls drive a rhythm into her bones. She needs this. Later she will become the dancer again, and she will feel and think about all this and dance the day’s poisons away. For now she is the warrior, and she thinks only of the fight. Her spear is all the right she needs.

~~~

Ragna starts coming to Morgott’s balcony at night. Often she brings out the mending rune to look at. Morgott suspects she does this on purpose. He takes it as a challenge. He will not look at it, he will not think about it -

But he can feel the power rolling off it. It makes his heart race. The buzz of his cursed blood fades. 

And the way Ragna looks when she touches it! Like a creature woven from light. If Morgott cut her, her blood would make a prism.

He dares not think about any of this.

“Wert thou sent here to tempt me, child?” Morgott demands. “To turn me from the true Order?”

Ragna smiles as if Morgott has said something ridiculous.

~~~

Eira and Millicent make camp in an abandoned shack by the riverside. It’s only marginally better than nothing. Once the sun goes down, the only illumination comes from the candles scattered through the snow. Those little wells of light show that the world is still real and solid. All has not dissolved into shadow. Eira loves them fiercely. 

Are they a gift, Miquella? A test? I’ll follow you either way.

She dances between the candles until her legs give out.

Eira dreams herself into Trina’s haven. She’s been here before, and it’s the same as always: cloaked in mist, hazy with the smoke of many censers. Purple lanterns hang from the trees. Pavilions cover the forest floor, all thickly spread with blankets.

Eira enters the largest pavilion and lies down on the silky fabric. This is where Trina has always come to her. Eira has never seen her in detail. A young woman shrouded in gray; no more. The harder she tries to look, the more Trina seems to blend into the mist. It’s like trying to grasp remnants of a dream upon waking. Eira has felt her, though. Gentle hands on her shoulders, soothing her muscles, making her body too heavy for anything but rest. She never says a word and doesn’t need to. Her protection speaks for itself. She first came into Eira’s dreams near a watchtower in Liurnia, atop which the frenzied flame roared and groaned. The next morning Eira rode past it unharmed.

After that, Eira started seeing Trina’s lilies everywhere. Each time she found one growing in an unassuming corner, she felt less alone. Like someone unseen was smiling at her. “Keep me safe, now,” she’d say as she picked them. And they did keep her safe. Mixed into pots, they made a soporific potent enough to stop an angry runebear in its tracks. Trina continued to visit her in dreams, too, often in places where the frenzied flame had taken root. She stroked Eira’s hair so gently that Eira often wept. She so rarely experienced tenderness on her journeys. It was better than any armor.

Why Trina had taken an interest in Eira in particular, she never said. Eira did not ask. She was just glad to have a friend in this harsh world, a place where she could lay her body down and be refreshed. And if Trina really is part of Miquella, she could be Eira’s way to him too.

Tonight, Eira lies in the pavilion for a long time before Trina’s hand alights on her hair. Her touch is as tender as ever, but it doesn’t linger. There’s an urgency in those fingers.

“I’m going to the Haligtree,” Eira murmurs. She keeps her eyes closed, her back to Trina. By now she knows there’s no point trying to see. “I’m looking for Miquella. Do you know if he’s here?”

“I know you seek him because you are kind,” Trina says, “but be wary.”

Eira jumps. Trina has never spoken to her before. “Why?”

“Be wary,” Trina repeats. “Miquella is -”

Her hand stills. It’s as if she’s just heard some distant, unsettling noise. Eira can feel the tension in her.

“Trina?”

“Forgive me. I cannot stay.”

Trina kisses Eira’s brow, and the dream dissolves.

Eira wakes with her nose frozen and a single question in her mind: Miquella is what? Gone? In danger? Dead?

Don’t be dead. I need you. All the lost ones need you.

As they wade through the snow that day, they find an unwelcome answer: a ghost by a waygate splattered with blood. Eira doesn’t hear spirits as well as Roderika, but she hears enough: Mohg, you rotten Omen! Give Tender Miquella back!

Eira goes cold. She knows where Mohg is. She knocked out Varré and stole his secret medal when he tried to recruit her into the Bloody Fingers. Didn’t trust him from the moment he called her “lambkin.” Gods know what he would have injected into her finger if she’d let him. She was still curious about where he’d come from, though, so she used his medal. Took one look at the tumorous birds and bloody cascades and realized she was in over her head.

Would that place be too much for an Empyrean?

Grace, I hope not. I hope you’re not there at all, Miquella. Because if you are…

He’ll be at the Haligtree.

He must be.

~~~

“Thou’rt insubordinate, Knight Cambria.”

“Aye, my lord.”

“Thou hast undone me. ’Tis my right to strip thee of thy rank, if not thy life.”

“Do so, my lord, and I shall die knowing that I acted for love of you.”

“I cannot sleep for seeing the light of that rune in my dreams.” Morgott hopes he looks intimidating. It’s difficult: Cambria’s low ceiling keeps him hunched. “Canst thou offer me no counsel in return for thy trespass?”

“Naught that I have not already given. I could tell you a thousand times that you are no sin, but I fear you will not believe it until you speak it yourself.”

Morgott gestures at the tapestry on Cambria’s wall, the many rings and roots. He’s furious. It feels good - or at least familiar. “I indulged thee when I allowed thee this heretical display. Now I see where it led thee.”

Cambria folds her arms. “’Tis no heresy. ’Tis the primordial Elden Ring. What do you fear so?”

The rune giveth peace to my blood. ‘Twould suggest that I myself not am not unnatural, but rather -

Morgott snips that thought. “Is it not enough that I have seen the Erdtree burn? Wilt thou take my faith from me also?”

Cambria’s eyes glisten wet. “Oh, my lord. Yes, I must - but only so that you may find happiness such as you cannot now imagine.”

Morgott has no defense for that, so he says something petty. “Thou forget’st thyself. ’Tis beneath a knight’s station to bathe curseborn children.”

“’Twas no shame to me. The little ones were frightened of the water: that was the only difficulty.”

“’Tis no wonder,” Morgott snaps before he can stop himself. “The Shunning Grounds are wont to flood with the rains. The very water that giveth life may destroy it also.”

“I did not know…” Cambria relents, but only for a moment. “You could prevent it. You could ensure that no hornéd child need ever fear to drown in a dungeon, if you but accept -”

“Enough.”

Morgott steps out of the house and shuts the door. He’s breathing too hard. No, that mending rune will save no children. A curse unchained is not salvation.

But the light in Ragna did not look like a -

He needs a better distraction.

~~~

Trina’s warning gives Eira new urgency. She looks for shortcuts through the snowfields, and soon she finds one: a mine that seems to cut through a ridge. It would save some climbing. 

The mine is a frozen tomb. Ice lines the walls, encasing stone miners. Eira doesn’t dare think about whether they’re still alive. There’s only one shaft: a vertical plunge straight down. The place is full of sheer drops and slippery, rickety scaffolding. Every step is perilous. By the time they reach the sole branching tunnel, Eira aches from holding herself rigid.

In the cave beyond, a nightmare made of stars and bones snaps her in half.

And it keeps snapping her in half. After she kills it, leaves the ground smoking from her lightning, emerges on the other side of the mine with her arms numb and her ears ringing, it follows her into her dreams. It breaks her there, this unnameable horror. Eira’s mind scrabbles for comprehension. It isn’t an animal, a statue, a graft - it’s other. Bony hands seize her; her breath rushes away. Insect jaws snap shut. Everything in her cracks. Wet, splintering agony. Then she wakes, and Millicent holds her shoulders until she can breathe again.

Why does that creature frighten her so? Eira is not afraid of death. She has been killed in many ways - but never like this, by something she can’t understand. Never as if she were prey.

(And yet her body seems to remember it.)

She is glad she did not let Millicent fight with her on her second attempt. Millicent is not Tarnished: if the creature had grabbed her, that would have been her end.

“We could simply have gone over the ridge,” Millicent says the next morning.

“No. I needed that thing dead. For my own sake.”

Eira does not dance for a while.

Miquella - you’d best be waiting for me.

~~~

Morgott hates the Shunning Grounds. Every surface is drenched in memory. The grates were his windows on the Erdtree, where he caught falling leaves. That (relatively) dry corner was where he and Mohg kept their bedding. Those loose bricks concealed their food, and later, Mohg’s cursed-blood pots. And then there are the rooms they avoided because they contained bodies, and the screeching revenants spawned therefrom.

So many haunts. Morgott would not have come back here if he had any choice.

He wishes he could scamper past it all, but he is no longer a child, with a child’s compact body and good knees. He has to choose his paths carefully. He does not want to get stuck in some slimy tunnel - or attract the attention of his dead-eyed kin. Morgott has already broken rules for them. That he does not enforce horn-cutting is Leyndell’s worst-kept secret. That he leaves the sewer gate unguarded and unlocked, as Godwyn did long ago, is another.

Though he has not walked these downward paths in ages, Morgott remembers every one. When he dies, the undertaker will find them carved on his heart. For once he’s glad of that. It’s best if he doesn’t think too much.

Morgott reaches the forsaken chapel with his feet slick and his skin crawling. His mind is full of whispers. The ghosts inside him do not like this place. Most of the pews have long since rotted, but the air still smells of damp and iron, as it did on the day a much younger Morgott cut his own horns. He had to: they were pushing his eyes shut. He did not know where to stop, and he bit too deep with the horn-cutting wire. Suddenly his face was awash in blood. He lost consciousness, certain that he would not wake.

When he did, Mohg was looking down at him with terrified eyes. “I gave you my blood,” he said. But something else came with it. From that day on, a thread of lurid scarlet fire burned in Morgott’s veins. Bloodflame, he learned later. A bit of Mohg’s outer god, passed to his twin. Morgott feared it more than his ghosts, sealed it away with them - until the Tarnished woke it again.

It was in this chapel that Mohg met the thing that made him a beast. Though it’s long gone, Morgott senses its echoes. A thickness in the air, red mist at the edges of his mind. He pushes himself through it. What lies behind the overgrown altar is far more concerning.

Morgott pushes aside roots growing up the altar’s base. Then he stoops and runs his fingers along the groove between the altar and the floor. He exhales sharply when he finds an unbroken layer of mold and dust. Mohg’s illusion has fallen, as has Morgott’s golden seal, but the altar has not been moved. At least the Tarnished had enough sense to leave it alone.

Leaving it alone was one of the few things Morgott and Mohg agreed on by the end. It only took one journey behind the altar to convince them. They were young, far too young to see that mass tomb. It taught them Leyndell was built on layers of pain that ran deeper than the sewers. Some folk were more unfortunate even than Omens. 

They did not open the smoldering doors at the bottom. The thing behind it inspired dread so heavy they could scarcely breathe. They heard it. It did not speak so much as amplify all their direst thoughts. The world was rotten. Why should some live in palaces while others languished in filth? Why not burn it all down?

There was some truth in that. Mohg believed it more than Morgott, who already loved the Erdtree with desperate love. But they both suspected this would not be the sort of burning from which new life arose.

Morgott feels it again now. That insidious force in the depths is curling around his heart, trying to wield his despair. Morgott ignores it. He has a barrier to make.

As he always does when he works his magic, he thinks of Erdlight - or tries to. Instead of gold, his mind floods with the colors of failure: deep burning red, ashen gray. His incantation falters. The threads of light at his fingertips dissolve.

Morgott stares at his hand. He has never had this difficulty before. Perhaps the painful memories in this room are distracting him?

He calls up his magic again. Think only of the Erdtree. Radicata firmiter, firmly rooted - Leyndell’s words.

The spell fails. A few wisps of light, then ash.

Morgott shakes his head with a growl, tries again. Still nothing.

What is amiss with me? Have I grown so soft?

He knows what’s amiss: the Tarnished and her age of curseborn, the mending rune that unravels all. It’s no use fighting. The world will end whether Morgott seals the frenzied flame or not.

Morgott’s fur stands on end. He should not be thinking that way. His whole life has been defined by struggle; he has never once given up a fight. 

But this is not a fight anymore. The Erdtree is burned. The world might as well turn to ash.

Morgott knows what is drawing forth these thoughts he dares not speak even to himself. That doesn’t make it any easier to resist. 

I am not yet done, he thinks, teeth gritted. He tries once more to imagine Erdlight. 

When he lifts his casting hand, it lands on the altar instead.

No, this won’t do. He’s still too raw to be here, so close to the source of the frenzied flame. He’s just giving it fuel.

He’ll have to come back later.

Morgott is just about to tear himself away when a small hand lands on his leg. He looks down to find Ragna there. In the gloom her eyes are luminous and, as always, too knowing. She must be able to feel it too: the smoldering thing below trying to feed on her despair. But Ragna is not in despair. Suddenly fierce, she shakes her shaggy head at Morgott.

“No. Bad.”

Morgott exhales. “’Tis a ruinous thing indeed, yet I do not wonder that it reacheth into me now. The Erdtree was my source and path. Without it I know not where to place my feet.”

Ragna’s eyes burn. “Find it.”

Again she seems to be looking straight through Morgott, into the future. A tiny oracle.

“Is thy faith truly so firm, child?” Morgott asks.

Ragna nods.

“Then lend it to me now.”

Morgott puts his hand to the altar, pushing against it. This time he doesn’t think of Erdlight. Instead, he pictures the Erdtree’s burned silhouette against the stars, and Ragna beside him on his balcony, saying, “It will bloom.” He wills himself to believe that. He has to believe it.

Morgott summons his magic. This time it comes warm and steady. It flows around the altar stone, a wall of light solid as glass. Morgott etches an Erdtree sigil down the middle. Let its radiance burn away his despair.

His hand is trembling when he lifts it. By grace, he is more vulnerable than he thought. He will have to do something about that.

Ragna nods solemnly up at him and scampers away. Morgott follows her back to the surface, though he knows the way. For now she is the adult and he the child.

~~~

“We are close now.”

Eira looks to the top of Ordina’s highest staircase. There’s a golden barrier there, marked with a spiraling tree. It’s not the Erdtree. “I think we are.”

They are sitting in the plaza, just outside the evergaol seal. The town is a spirit menagerie. Spectral deer wander in and out of the trees. Spirit birds peck about at Eira’s feet. Overhead, an aurora blazes a shade of green she has never imagined.

Moments like these remind Eira that despite all her pain, she loves the world. It is so full of beauty. She could marvel at this scene for hours, let the crisp winter smell sink into her skin. If she had time she’d make a dance for the spirits of the snow.

“Strange to think this could be the end,” she says.

“Are you ready?” Millicent asks.

“I am, but I keep thinking it should be…I don’t know, Vyke sitting here. A proper legend.”

“No legend began as such.”

“They didn’t start out like me either. I don’t remember my first death, before grace brought me back to life, but I don’t think it was in a battle. An accident, maybe, on the march with Lord Godfrey’s army. I was bleeding on the ground and nobody stayed with me. Why would they? I was just a foot soldier, hardly old enough to be there.”

Millicent touches Eira’s hand. “How awful.”

“I remember thinking, ‘No one should die alone like this.’ That’s why I let Roderika…stay with Master Hewg.” Eira’s throat closes on the words.

She’s Tarnished and a spirit tuner; maybe she’ll find some clever way out once Hewg’s gone. It doesn’t have to be too late.

“Accident or not, you are no longer that Tarnished,” Millicent says. “You did not come so far only because you cannot die. You had every chance to throw down your arms, but you did not. In the short time I have known you, you have only grown stronger. I believe you will make a fine leader.”

Eira leans into her friend’s shoulder. “You’ve always got a kind word for me. I should have asked you sooner - what do you hope you’ll find at the Haligtree?”

“Who I am, of course. If Miquella is there, surely his beloved twin is also.”

“You know that no matter who you are - Malenia’s daughter or her bloom - it won’t change anything. You’ll still be my sister.”

Millicent smiles. “How I love your certainty.”

~~~

The worst is more endurable than not knowing at all. Morgott’s life has taught him that.

He wills himself not to stop as he descends the steps from his balcony. His visit to the depths showed him that his despair is feeding on uncertainty; he needs to know the truth. Then he can work out what to do about it. Knowing one’s enemy is the greater part of victory.

Of course, that knowledge may destroy him. Millicent was wrong to say he has nothing left to fear. There’s still one more pillar of his life to break.

He does not stop in the corridors. He does not stop in the sanctuary foyer, feet on ash on stones. Every step grows harder. The last moments of any uncertainty are always the most torturous. Morgott feels he’s walking to his execution. In some ways he is.

If he must tip over this edge, he’ll do it himself.

Morgott stops before the infirmary.

He pushes the door open as softly as he can. Ragna is sitting up amidst her slumbering fellows, waiting for him. She hops off the cot and pads over to Morgott.

“Show me,” he whispers.

It’s unnecessary. The girl is already calling forth the mending rune - and now Morgott wonders if the Tarnished left it with her for precisely this purpose. It hovers between them, a now-familiar ring with fiery roots. For now it is innocuously gold. It lies. Morgott has seen what happens when Ragna touches it. It ripples with all manner of wild colors, sacred and profane, but crimson gold most of all. Death and life entwined. 

Ragna touches the rune’s edge now. Her body floods with color.

As always, the sight makes Morgott’s heart stutter. The way Ragna smiles! She could be tasting the sweetest nectar in the world. Her face holds nothing but peace.

Morgott recalls the Tarnished’s question: Afraid there’s no light in you, or that there is?

He knows the answer.

Morgott reaches for the rune, flinches away as if from heat. He’s not ready. There is no “ready” for this.

He gives himself a count of five. Five heartbeats before the world ends.

Ragna watches beneath iridescent horns.

In those last seconds, recklessness bubbles up. Morgott felt this way before battle sometimes, when he thought he might die. This rune is here whether he ignores it or not. Everything else is tumbling down; why not finish it off?

That sounds like something the Tarnished would say. Easy for her. Breaking things does not trouble the young.

Forgive me, Morgott thinks. He doesn’t know who he’s addressing.

He closes his fingers on the rune.

~~~

Ordina is lethal and wonderfully normal. Invisible Black Knives and Albinauric archers are nothing after that thing in the mine. This Eira can do.

She and Millicent engage a deadly game of hide-and-seek. There’s plenty of cover. The clatter of arrows on stone becomes a constant drumbeat. Eira loves this sort of thing. She’s never more certain or alive than when she’s inches from death. She tries not to attack the archers as she darts from tower to tower: they seek the Haligtree too. She avoids the Black Knives also. Eira has always admired their floating movements. She wishes this were another world where they were sparring partners instead of assassins.

Eira’s left arm is limp and pierced in three places when she lights the evergaol’s last candle. Blood trails her up the steps to the Haligtree waygate. She hardly notices. 

Just a little more, and we can heal the world.

She emerges high in a tree canopy. The branch beneath her is thick and wide enough for Torrent to stand on. The air is cold, thin, and very still. It carries a sickly perfume.

Soon Eira sees why. Beneath her feet is a cluster of the same spongy pink growths infesting Caelid. The whole tree is riddled with them. Rotten mushrooms carpet the branches, some so badly decayed that sap has leaked out and frozen in midair. Miranda flowers exhale clouds of rot. 

Eira kneels, half detached from herself, and picks a red leaf. It crumbles in her hand.

Beside her, Millicent has frozen. “If Miquella were here -”

If Miquella were here, he would not have let the Haligtree rot. Eira doesn’t need to go any further to know that. She tastes the truth in the stillness. This place is hollowed out, barely breathing. Whatever hope once lived here has long since fled.

In the distance, oracle envoys’ horns are whining. Eira adds her own scream.

~~~

He is on his knees. 

His ears ring in the silence of his ghosts. They’ve stopped their buzzing, hissing unrest. 

Waves of color flow through his horns and tail. He is both the light and the stained glass refracting it.

There’s a wordless song in his blood where the ghosts should be. A current. It’s new to him, but not to the world. These verses have been sung since the beginning of time; new ones are still unspooling. He has merely walked in on them - and slipped right into place. He feels the inexorable pull of the deep forces that make life, destroy it, make it again. He sees, in one incomprehensible burst, the threads that bind every living thing. Spirals upon spirals, out to infinity. Beautiful chaos. He does not recognize his own thread, but he senses it is there. He has a place. He is not unnatural.

And he is so strong. His cursed blood has ceased its constant burning. He could wield life. He could fly with dragons.

Morgott drops his hands. The light goes out.

His palms are flat against the floor, but he is falling. No dogma can deny what his body knows.

For a moment, he was not cursed. 

He was full of light.

Chapter Text

Why did you stop me from speaking to Eira? Trina asks.

Miquella breathes wetly through exposed lungs. He is sitting beneath a tree, bearded with moss like a hoary elder, and watching a furnace lumber across the fields. A jar ritual magnified a thousandfold. Marika’s revenge was pointed indeed. Even at this distance, Miquella feels heat rolling off the golem. He tries not to think about it.

I stopped you because I must stop this, he says. This and all things that wander through the world causing pain. I will abide no…unforeseen complications. I did not choose this Tarnished, I did not charm her -

She is everything you prize in a consort, Trina insists. She is brave and kind, and she shares your concern for the lost.

Miquella has seen this himself. Lately he delighted in watching Eira tend to six Omen children, blowing magic bubbles from a tiny toy horn. Her arms have felled titans, yet they are capable of such gentleness. That is the same quality Miquella admires in Radahn.

She is, Miquella says. Yet I watch her as you do, Trina, and certain of her choices give me cause to doubt. 

Do they? Or do you seek cause to doubt her?

This young woman she dreams of - Roderika. Eira allowed her to remain in the burning Roundtable. I do not understand.

Roderika wished to remain with the blacksmith, who could or would not leave the hold.

Perhaps the blacksmith was beyond saving. Roderika was not, no matter how selfless her heart.

My love. The soft words resound within Miquella like a shout. Roderika chose her fate, for compassion’s sake. It was her sovereign will. She may yet live, you know - and if she does, that will be her will too.

Miquella still does not understand. He has revisited the last moments between Eira and Roderika over and over. Both women were bravely dry-eyed. Eira said everything she could to persuade her friend to leave. Roderika said, “Master Hewg made me who I am. It’s because of him that I did something worth doing. I’d like to return the kindness. I’ll stay with him until the end, so he’s not alone.” 

Eira echoed her: “No one should die alone.” The words were solemn as a mantra.

They held each other tight and parted ways, both of them straight-backed and dignified. Only later, in her sleep, did Eira weep. Miquella wanted to shout at her, Why did you not stop this?

Would you have done so? Trina asks. Would you have dragged Roderika from the hold, though it was not her will?

Yes, I would. I wish to save all. I believed you did as well. Now I see we are in discord. This pains me.

It pains me to see you so changed.

Changed? How so?

Oh, do you truly not see? ‘Tis no longer a gentler world you seek, but a perfect one, and for it you will countenance any destruction, including your own. You offer true healing no more, merely enchantment to veil the hurts and hatreds that plague all things. You would see your brothers slain so that you may have your chosen consort. I see no compassion in that.

Miquella looks at the ground around his little golden mound of flesh. He has discarded no more since then, for he is afraid, far more afraid than he lets on. He’s rested here long enough that buds are sprouting red with his blood. They remind him of Mohg. He thinks of Eira and the scream he felt in his soul. Eira blames Mohg for Miquella’s disappearance, and she will kill him; Miquella has no doubt. To her it will appear as though a monster abducted a beautiful Empyrean to use in unspeakable ways. Her desire to help the helpless will compel her to fight. In that way Eira is perfect for the task: a stroke of good fortune. A more callous Tarnished might walk away or even join Mohg’s ranks. This one won’t.

I did not wish for this, Miquella says, because Trina’s despair is weighing on his chest, and because he means it. It’s half the reason he hasn’t moved from beneath this tree. When he was a child, he used to sit on Radahn’s shoulders to pick fruit from high branches. He wanted his ascension to be like that - but it won’t. Marika tried to tell him that before the end. Ascension is not kind, she said. An Empyrean must birth herself and the world anew. With birth comes tearing, blood, and pain.

Thus also Miquella’s age of compassion.

For the thousandth time he tells himself that this Terrible Thing will be the last. Once his age is born he will sustain it himself, as he watered the Haligtree with his blood. No one else will have to hurt.

True healing is slow and fallible, he says. This world is too terribly broken for that. It requires more decisive change. Naught else will suffice.

Nothing Miquella has ever done has sufficed.

It will, Trina says. Take Eira for your consort. She seeks you willingly, and she would match you well. She has understanding you lack. Let Radahn rest. Leave Mohg be.

If I falter now, ’twill all be for naught. The Haligtree is rotting - surely you know what that means. My sister gave her very self so that Radahn and I might ascend. I will not waste her sacrifice. If she is to have any hope of salvation, I must go on.

Gods, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Had unalloyed gold not failed, had the Haligtree not failed…

But they did, and now Miquella is here, and he has already shed his flesh, and no Tarnished will stop him, even if she does have all Radahn’s best qualities. Besides, Miquella does not want a Tarnished he scarcely knows. He wants Radahn, hero of his youth, ruler of the battlefield, savior of stray cats. He wants to sit on those shoulders and embrace the world. Long ago, Radahn promised he could.

Do not speak to Eira again, Miquella says. Do not nurture her interest in me. She will play her part and that will be the end of it.

It must, because Trina is right about Eira: Miquella cannot dismiss her from his mind.

Complications. How Miquella loathes them.

Chapter Text

Eira descends no further than the Haligtree canopy. It hurts too much.

She wanders hanging bridges and treehouse platforms, past delicate woven woodwork. Her fingers skim scarlet dust from the railings. Everything is calculated to feel natural, like an outgrowth of the Haligtree itself. The candelabra are shaped like branches. The walls are open to the light and salty air. Even the sound of Eira’s boots on the boards is pleasing.

It was so perfect! she thinks, over and over. 

Each beautiful thing makes her want to scream again. What it would have been like to see this place full of life! Instead there are only rotting undead and Misbegotten kneeling in supplication. The oracles’ horns whine on. What are they heralding? No new age could rise from the Haligtree now.

Eira’s eyes fill with tears and she loses awareness of where she is. There’s a hollow ache in her stomach. Eventually she stops when her feet strike something hard. Looking up, she finds herself on a broad, round platform, standing before a statue. Two children, a boy and a girl, carved from pale marble. They are kneeling and holding each other. Clutching each other, even. The image is tender, but also desperate. It compels a question: Do these children have nothing but each other to hold onto?

Eira’s people made effigies like this for funerals, not of fine marble but wood and straw. They placed objects associated with the deceased around the effigy. Then Eira called upon Brigit to set it all aflame, releasing memory and grief to the stars. Eira does not do that now - because Miquella is not dead. She will not believe that until she sees it for herself. Instead she takes one of Trina’s lilies from her belt - she always wears one like a talisman - and lays it on the statue’s plinth. Let it rest amidst the candles: her promise to return.

Eira does not dance. She knows mourning dances, but she can’t bring herself to do them here. Later she’ll push her body until she falls down and the boiling energy inside her dissipates. 

And after that, there’s another dance waiting for her.

(She’s already seen and done so much, and it just keeps getting worse. There’s always more bloody work ahead of her. When will it get better? She’d like to rest.)

Eira slips her hand into her belt pouch and fingers the medal she took from Varré. She doesn’t let herself think what might be happening to Miquella in that nightmare land.

I’ll see you soon, Mohg.

~~~

Millicent descends further than Eira, down through the rotted branches to the city bracing the Haligtree. No one stops her, not even the mounted knight at the city gates. They must recognize Malenia in her. And Millicent recognizes this place, though she has never been here before or heard its name. She stands on a rampart and murmurs “Elphael” into the sea breeze, and knows it is right.

The spires and avenues are strewn with red leaves. Miquella’s leaves should not be red. The soldiers are slumped over wherever they’ve happened to fall, in alcoves and against railings. Only a few are scanning the horizon with spyglasses. They seem oblivious to the rot creeping along the branches. Millicent sits with them because she thinks Malenia would have done so. Certainly Eira would have.

“Your lord will return to you,” she tells them, “and return as a god. Wait just a bit longer.”

Let it not be an empty promise, Millicent thinks, then quells the thought. Eira needs her not to doubt.

(For that reason she did not tell Eira what she has been thinking about the needle in her arm. Unalloyed gold can only suppress the rot for so long. Sooner or late, Millicent will bloom. And if she must bloom, she wants to do it on her own terms. Not today - but perhaps in the end, before she’s too far gone.)

Further into the city, Millicent happens upon a courtyard with a single delicate gazebo. Beyond lies a candlelit alcove. She would not have noticed it if not for the Cleanrot Knight standing guard inside. She crosses her spear and rapier when Millicent approaches - then slowly lowers them again. Her helm hides her face; Millicent cannot see if it holds wonder, fear, or confusion. Perhaps she has no face left. The rot has sewn its mycelia through the slits in her helmet and the gaps in her armor. Her red cape is in tatters. She must have been here a long time, guarding this corner.

Millicent raises her hands. “It’s all right. I am…Malenia’s kin. Born of her bloom in Aeonia. Did you fight there as well? What is your name?”

The knight does not answer. Maybe she can’t, if the rot is in her throat. The hand on her spear trembles. Then her thrusting sword falls from her hand, and she falls with it, clattering to her knees. To her Millicent must look strange indeed. She is an impossibility - Malenia had no natural children - yet she is here, and the resemblance is undeniable.

Millicent puts her hand on the knight’s armored one. “Do not be afraid, and do not kneel to me. I am not your lady - though if I were, I would be proud of you.”

The knight squeezes Millicent’s hand.

“What are you guarding in this quiet corner?” Millicent asks. Then, when the knight’s posture tightens, she adds quickly, “I will not take it.”

Reluctantly, the knight moves aside so Millicent can see an ornate chest, the sort used across the Lands Between to keep ashes. 

“Who was this?” Millicent asks gently. This may be a fallen comrade’s remains.

The knight takes Millicent’s hand and writes on her palm with a finger: F-I-N-L-A-Y.

Millicent knows that name, but only secondhand, at a distance. It comes with warmth. Someone Malenia loved, then.

The knight spells out more words: B-R-O-U-G-H-T  M-Y  L-A-D-Y  H-E-R-E. It seems to cost her effort: the rot has stiffened her joints.

“Knight Finlay brought Malenia here? All the way from Caelid?” Millicent struggles to comprehend such a distance. Caelid is a world away from here, and enemies plague all the routes. For a lone knight to escort her badly weakened liege so far - such a deed should be immortalized in song.

“She should have a finer resting place,” Millicent says.

The knight shakes her head vehemently. There must be a story here, a reason Finlay’s ashes are in this plain little corner of Elphael. Maybe she was fond of this courtyard, with its gazebo secluded from the city’s bustle. Maybe she and Malenia kissed here, where no passerby would see that the knight had fallen in love with her lady.

“Very well,” Millicent says. “You know better than I where your sister-in-arms would like to rest. Keep her well - and rest yourself, if you can. A kinder day is soon to come.”

The knight clasps Millicent’s forearm and straightens up, all softness tucked away. They both know she won’t be able to rest. The scarlet rot does not bring clean death.

Millicent returns to the courtyard and lingers by the gazebo. Two forces pull her in opposite directions: one towards the place where she now knows Malenia rests, and the other back towards Eira. She could do what she came here for, or…

She glances back at the alcove with Finlay’s ashes.

…she could follow that example.

~~~

Millicent presses on all the way to the Haligtree’s roots. The rot is worst here: swamps of it pooling from drainage channels, infested with pests. In a hollow at the very bottom, Malenia sleeps amidst flowers and snow. She is still armored as she was in her last battle. Her head rests against the Haligtree’s trunk. Above her, the wood has taken the shape of a young person with flowing hair, head bent towards Malenia. It’s as if part of Miquella lives in the bark, watching over his sister.

Millicent does not venture far into the hollow. If she does, she may not turn back. She’ll want to pull the needle from her shoulder and give it to Malenia, return her pride and will. That will be the end of Millicent - and she isn’t ready for that. She won’t be ready until after her journey with Eira is done, and perhaps not even then. Now that she has lived as her own person, she wants more. She would like to see the new age, to spar with Eira not for necessity but for joy. If Miquella’s dreams succeed, she could even be freed from the rot.

More than all that, foreboding weighs on her. Wait, it urges. Keep that needle well. You will have need of it.

Millicent has no pretty words for Malenia. Nothing she can say will make the rot any easier to endure. Instead she makes a silent vow that when she returns, she will bring Miquella with her. He will help.

For now, she must be like Finlay. Millicent too has a comrade who needs her.

~~~

Millicent finds Eira kneeling before a statue of the young Malenia and Miquella. Her face is as hard as it is in battle. Snow has accumulated on her shoulders, but she does not seem to notice. Millicent dusts her off, then hugs her close. Eira speaks through touch; it anchors her like nothing else. This time, however, Eira does not relax. Her lean muscles are taut beneath Millicent’s arms. 

“I am so sorry, sister,” Millicent murmurs.

“Did you find what you were looking for, at least?”

“Yes,” Millicent says, and leaves it at that. “Malenia sleeps below. She is not well. Now more than ever she needs her brother to ascend.”

Eira exhales white breath. “And we need to see Mohg.”

~~~

Morgott swore he would never touch the mending rune again. Like so many of his recent endeavors, he failed. The damned thing lured him back again and again. Ragna was always eager to show it to him. Its wordless assurance never wavered: Morgott is no more or less than a curve in the current of life, and close to its magic, too. Not cursed, but blessed.

This is direst heresy to which Morgott cannot yield. It strikes at the root of the Golden Order. If the Omen curse is not inherent but somehow induced, what other fundamental truths might crumble apart? 

And yet he keeps coming back to the rune. The light in his veins never reveals itself as a trick. It is always as breathtaking as the first time, and it makes Morgott feel whole in a way he is increasingly unable to deny. Like he could grow wings. No doubt Cambria would exult if he did. By the grace of gold, he is surrounded by heretics!

He exhausts himself deliberately, hoping to drop into sleep at day’s end. His soldiers are getting used to the sight of him, but they still shrink away when he fights, which he does as often as possible because it’s the only thing that clears his mind. Nothing else feels real compared to the shattering light of that rune. Not long ago they engaged a tree spirit harassing a camp on the plateau. Morgott threw himself into the battle so completely that he did not realize until the end that he was fighting alone. His soldiers had formed a wary ring around him. He thought they were staring because his horns and tail had lit up - but no. They just did not want to get too close while he did his fearsome work. That’s all right. Morgott would rather be feared than pitied.

Fighting the tree spirit made him think of that day he fought beside the Tarnished. Her absurd red lightning. Whatever her sins, the girl has more nerve than all Leyndell’s soldiery. Morgott almost wishes she were here. Arguing with her would make a fine distraction. Perhaps it would even keep the light of life from his dreams.

Then one night she is there, sitting on a balcony railing with her head on her knees. She looks defeated. Good.

“Thine Haligtree traitor was not where he ought to be, I presume,” he says.

The girl does not look up.

“Do thy dreams trouble thee, Tarnished?” Morgott is spitefully pleased to know that his enemy’s sleep is as poor as his own.

“A thing made of stars keeps snapping me in half,” the Tarnished mutters. 

“Cease thy nonsense. I have no patience for it.”

“I wish it were nonsense. I found it in a cave in the snowfields. It had dragonfly wings and a body made of stars and jaws that… I killed it, but it won’t leave me alone. It keeps killing me in my dreams.”

Ordinarily, Morgott would take a practical interest in this “thing made of stars.” It might be related to the meteor-beast said to stalk a crater on Mt. Gelmir. Perhaps he should prepare the troops in that area to face something worse still - but the Morgott who would do that belongs to another world, where his faith is not undone and the Erdtree is not burned. Nothing seems to matter save those two things. Duty is all that keeps him functioning. It’s unfathomable to think that life is still going on beyond Leyndell.

Then the Tarnished says, “Miquella’s gone. I think Mohg took him.”

That matters.

Erdtree, please, I can bear no more.

“Remain here,” Morgott sighs, and goes to brew some tea.

~~~

The tea is good. Eira can’t deny that. Already her mind is clearer.

She can’t help but smile at the way Morgott drinks. His mug is much larger than Eira’s own cup, yet he handles it deftly. He may dress in rags, but he has a lord’s grace. A remarkable feat for a child of the Shunning Grounds. Eira can imagine it, though: Morgott clawing his way to education, as ruthless with himself as he is with her.

Morgott is sitting on another balcony across the room from Eira. He always positions himself in opposition to her. “What knowest thou of Mohg?” he demands, like an inquisitor.

“I know he’s underground, east of the Siofra river well. I think he lives in the ancient ruins there. One of his Bloody Fingers, Varré, kept going on about Luminary Mohg and his dynasty.”

“Hast thou seen this place?”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

“What is its nature?”

“A nightmare. Lakes of blood. It was running down the rocks and spraying up like fountains. There were dogs and dirty great crows covered in sores. I didn’t stay long. I wasn’t ready then.”

Morgott sets his mug on the stone railing. “’Tis the work of an outer god. Mohg is its vassal. He once named it a mother, but it is no such thing. The outer gods are not beings as we are; they do not think or feel. They are forces. Their singular purpose is to manifest themselves within the world.”

Morgott begins to speak faster, like the words have been festering within him for ages. 

“The Formless Mother claimed Mohg when he was yet young. It seized upon his hurts and echoed them back to him stronger still. Soon he was besotted with blood and wounds. He permitted his own horn to pierce his eye. All the better to see the mother’s bloody star, said he -”

“His horn? Mohg is an Omen? How do you know all this?”

Morgott’s face is shadowed, his voice flat. “He was my twin.”

“Was?”

“He ceased to be himself when his outer god took him. I doubt that aught remaineth of him now.”

Eira tries to imagine Morgott and Mohg as children like Ragna: climbing the walls, dodging crayfish, surviving together. It’s difficult. Morgott gives the impression that he was never young.

“What was he like before all this?” Eira asks.

“I will not unburden myself to a Tarnished. Know only that this thing twisted my brother. He conjured swarms of biting flies and sought the company of bloodthirsty warriors. He came to believe that wounds were holy. Ere long he spoke of nothing but his dynasty of blood. He wished me to rule beside him - as if he would ever be aught but an outer god’s puppet! His ‘mother’ loved him no more than our own. He merely deceived himself that he had found elsewhere what Queen Marika withheld.”

“That’s sad,” Eira says, sobered. All the more reason to find Miquella, so that he can banish the causes of all this pain - the Golden Order and the outer gods alike. “Maybe if he hadn’t been called a monster all his life, he wouldn’t have taken up with the Formless Mother. This is what comes of telling people they’re born cursed, Morgott.”

Morgott’s head snaps up. Eira expects a rebuke, but he just rumbles low in his throat.

“This is a change,” Eira says. “You haven’t called me a heretic tonight.”

“Have I not done so often enough? Dost thou crave further insult?”

“You seem different. Did something happen while I was away?”

“We are straying from the path.” Morgott’s voice is hard with anger, but not, Eira thinks, for her, or for Mohg. It’s aimed beyond. “If, as thou sayest, Mohg holdeth Miquella captive, we are all imperiled. A demigod is no fit vessel for an outer god, but an Empyrean is another matter. Should the mother of wounds claim Miquella upon his ascension -”

“ - there would be an age of blood. Miquella would be its god - and Mohg its lord.”

Eira imagines the world drenched red, a stinking wasteland of beasts and bleeding husks. A dynasty that welcomes the wounded sounds noble, but this outer god would only make everyone equal in their pain. Nothing would truly heal.

“Would you rather take your chances with me or Mohg?” Eira asks.

Morgott scoffs. “Ye would both enact an age of curseborn. I wish neither of you to rise. Thy sole redemption is that thou’rt not in thrall to an outer god.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“’Tis not.”

“The reason I asked how you know Mohg,” Eira goes on, “is that I may have to kill him if he won’t let Miquella go.”

“Not may, Tarnished. Will. Mohg is no longer master of his soul.”

Again that hardness in his voice. There’s old, old pain in it. Eira yearns to reunite these two brothers, but an outer god is beyond her ability to fell. How she hates to be powerless! Her limbs buzz with directionless energy. She crosses her legs and bounces the one on top.

“I won’t ask you to come with me,” she says. “Whatever you may think, I’m not cruel.”

Morgott is silent for a long time. He keeps glancing out his balcony window, as if asking the Erdtree for strength. Every so often his breathing loses its slow rhythm. 

“If I go, ’twill be for mine own sake,” he says at last.

“It’ll be to say goodbye. You said yourself that your twin is long gone and he won’t give up Miquella while he still breathes.”

“Then I will see him freed, if naught else. And that is not my sole purpose. Whilst thou wert away, there was a…”

He stops himself, but it’s too late. Eira sees the crack in his armor. She saw it a few moments ago, too, when she condemned the Golden Order’s treatment of Omens. Morgott should have challenged that. His silence betrayed his doubts.

“Go on. What happened while I was away?” Eira says.

“’Tis no affair of thine. I will say only that I require answers. If the world is indeed grown crooked, I would know how and why. If I must abet thine heresy to do so…I am resigned to it.”

Resigned to it. I hope you’ll rejoice in it one day.

“Ready thyself, Tarnished. We cannot delay.”

“You mean you don’t dare delay. You might lose your nerve.”

Morgott is halfway out the door when he whips a golden knife over his shoulder. He hardly turns to aim. The dagger strikes the wall beside Eira’s head and dissolves.

She smiles. “You seem more like yourself.”

Her smile does not fade when Morgott is gone. He touched the mending rune, or at least considered it: Eira is sure of that now. All is not yet lost.

~~~

The Tarnished was right: Morgott will lose his nerve if he delays. He hates her for being right.

He isn’t at all certain he should be chasing the truth. He has always favored defensive tactics: digging in his heels behind thick walls and outlasting his enemies. But this time the enemies are within him. He can either fight or wait to die.

Their accursed party assembles in the morning: a Tarnished, an Omen, and a child of rot. The Tarnished holds out the medal that will take them to Mohg’s hiding place. It’s an ostentatious thing, carved with swaths of fabric and a horned crown. It looks like it belongs in a play.

Morgott’s free hand clenches. The young Mohg was fond of sneaking into theaters.

~~~

Eira has always loved the river wells. She stared openmouthed all the way down that lift in the Mistwood. A new world opened before her, torchlit and dew-touched. There were stars on the rocks, stars underground! Later she learned these were glowworms, but that did not diminish their magic. Eira found it marvelous that they could make their own light. She tried not to disturb the other residents. She felt a kinship with those horn-decked folk, with their dances and reverence for spirits. Sometimes she’d sit behind them, out of their line of sight, and watch them feed the deer.

Mohgwyn is not like that. Instead of wet earth, the air reeks of iron. The rocks run red. No shamanic songs or animal cries echo in the trees. The silence is suffocating. Experience has taught Eira that when the wilds fall silent, bad things follow.

The medal brought them to a wooded glade, thick with dew and shadow. Eira can’t see very far ahead. Feeling exposed, she crouches down in the bushes. Millicent follows suit, but Morgott remains standing. Large as he is, his best chance at concealment is to stand as still as the trees.

“Do you see anything?” Millicent whispers.

Eira’s eyes adjust enough to pick out incongruities in the landscape: domed shapes in the bushes, smooth and red. Two at some distance ahead, one nearer on the right. Small chance of getting past all of them unseen.

“Albinaurics,” she says. “I saw them when last I was here. The red ones serve Mohg. They kidnap other Albinaurics from the surface and hold them prisoner. I count three around us.”

“Four,” Morgott rumbles. He tilts his head ever so subtly at the rocks behind them. Another red Albinauric stands there, thick club in hand.

“I’ll manage the two ahead of us,” Eira says. “Millicent, sneak up on the one to the right if you can. Morgott -”

Eira turns to find empty space behind her. Seconds later, the Albinauric on the rocks tumbles to the ground. A golden dagger is buried in its neck. Morgott stands in the sentry’s place. Eira never heard him move.

Go on and show off, then! 

Privately, she’s glad to see Morgott’s confidence returning. She’d feared her first and harshest teacher was gone for good.

The noise of the falling Albinauric has alerted the others in the wood. The one on the right begins moving closer, but Millicent is closer still. She slips behind it and flicks her shamshir across its throat. Blood sprays forth too red.

Eira stands up and electrifies Gransax’s bolt. Pulling back her arm, she hurls red lightning at one of the two Albinaurics at the glade’s far end. The jolt almost topples her - she’s still getting used to it - but the bolt strikes true. The Albinauric crumples, twitching. 

Eira is shaking out her numbed arm when the second Albinauric raises a knobbly staff. The ground splits, and a ghostly skeleton claws free of the rent. Its lower half stays buried, massive hands gouging up dirt. It’s bigger and bulkier than Morgott, the ghost of a giant. Its roar resounds off the rocks. Pale flame begins to gather in the hollow of its mouth.

Don’t like that at all!

Without thought, Eira pulls back her arm and heaves another bolt at the Albinauric summoner. It hits the creature in the head - along with another of Morgott’s daggers. The Albinauric falls, and the skeleton dissipates with a moan. The flame in its mouth goes with it.

Morgott hops nimbly off the rocks. “Rather unsettling.”

“You’re quick with those knives.” They’ve hit Eira in the gut often enough. “I could have managed on my own, though.”

“I do not doubt it. I only wished to guarantee it. In this place we cannot be too careful.”

That was not the insult Eira expected.

“I should warn you, I’m not here on good terms,” she adds. “I told you I attacked Varré and stole his medal. Even if I hadn’t, he said Mohg isn’t ready to see me yet. Now I reckon everything here wants my head.”

Morgott looks at her sidelong. “I would think thee well accustomed to that, Tarnished.”

He isn’t wrong.

The wood opens onto a bloody swamp. The iron stench is nauseating. Pale, stony trees rise from the murk like skeletal fingers. Albinaurics patrol around them in endless circles. If their paths have meaning, they alone know it.

“Many foes,” Millicent muses. “There may be more hiding beneath the surface. I believe we could manage them if we divide them amongst us, but perhaps we would do better to preserve our energies.”

Morgott nods. “A wise captain knoweth when a battle is better avoided.”

Eira has come to the same conclusion. She coughs, wishing she had a neckerchief to cover her mouth and nose. “I’m going to run. I’m fast enough; I’ve done it before. I don’t ask you to come with me. If it all goes wrong, grace won’t bring you back.”

“Spare us thine heroics,” says Morgott. “Let us go carefully. Should we keep to the fringes, where the foes are fewer, we shall not alert all of Mohgwyn.” 

“Remember what I have said about recklessness,” Millicent says gently. “You need neither fight alone nor court your own destruction.”

Eira has no patience for stealth - but her companions are right. Sighing, she makes for the cliffs at the swamp’s edge.

It’s a tense march. Eira is keenly aware of their sloshing footsteps: there’s no way to be quiet. She keeps her eye on the trees in the swamp’s center, where most of the Albinaurics patrol. They never deviate from their patterns. The caves in the cliffs are another matter. Some of them conceal Albinaurics waiting to tumble forth. Eira sends preemptive waves of lightning into the hollows. One of them drops six Albinaurics at once and gives Eira’s party a chance to escape.

They reach the lake’s far end without major incident. Up a hillside lies another swamp, little different from the first. By this time Eira’s boots are full of blood and she is vibrating with pent-up energy. She hates this sort of thing: watching, waiting for something to happen. 

When it does, she’s glad.

They’ve scarcely stepped into the swamp when a red phantom rises from the muck: a war surgeon in mask and bloodied apron. Not Varré, but one of his comrades. Eira backs away to force the White Mask to close with her. His miséricorde is long, but Gransax’s bolt is longer. Eira thrusts at him twice as soon as he enters the reach of her spear. He sidesteps the first, but the second comes too quick. It bites into phantom flesh. As he backs away to recover, Eira incants and swings a lightning glaive. The sizzling wave sends the White Mask sprawling. Eira leaps atop his twitching body and sinks her spear into his chest. The phantom dissolves beneath her.

Adrenaline roars in Eira’s ears. Through it, she hears dogs barking. She whirls around to see her companions fighting diseased dogs on a flat rock nearby. It must have been a pack to start with, but most of them lie dead. Millicent dispatches the last few with a flurry of her shamshir.

“They know I’m here!” Eira calls. “Time to go!”

Eira lets her mind go blank. Never mind the risks of recklessness. The warrior has taken the dancer’s place onstage.

She takes off through the swamp, aware of nothing but her pounding heart and burning muscles. The blood isn’t deep enough to slow her much. She flies past Albinauric patrols, hears their shrieks and thorns whizzing past her head. Soon the air is thick with darts. Another White Mask phantom rises to Eira’s left, and she skids in and plunges her miséricorde into his stomach. She yanks it out without waiting to see if she’s made a kill.

Then a gust of fetid wind sends her stumbling back. A monstrous crow splashes down in front of her. Eira aims a lightning bolt at its head before it can straighten. At this close range, it’s a heavy impact. The crow croaks piteously and wobbles on one leg. It crashes down - then flails, beak gnashing, blood flying. Caught off guard, Eira staggers away. She only just keeps her balance as she scrambles along the bird’s side, away from its beak. Thank all the spirits for her dancer’s agility!

The bird thrashes a final time. Blood splashes into Eira’s face and she has to blink her eyes clear. When she opens them, the bird is jabbing down at her. She ducks beneath its body and slams a red lightning spear into the swamp. The charge ripples up and out. The bird is briefly paralyzed. In that pause, Millicent leaps and strikes it in the head with her devastating flurry. The bird collapses - no tricks this time. Eira drives her miséricorde into its eye. Irony sears through her: she’s using the White Masks’ weapon against their dynasty.

Then they’re off again, Eira and Millicent hand in hand, Morgott behind them. He sends a dagger into a third phantom’s gut without breaking stride. Distantly, Eira realizes he has not yet used his sword. He’s carrying, it though, still unsealed and gleaming like an oil slick.

Together they pound up a cliffside path strewn with ruins. Hordes of shambling corpses crowd the way. They burst on contact with Eira’s lightning. Red mist clouds the air.

They duck into the ruins. Stooped figures robed in silk rise from pools of blood. Horns protrude from their hoods, but they are much smaller than Omens. Eira looks no closer than that. 

Torchlight blinds them when they burst out of the tunnels. Eira tugs Millicent onto what looks like a lift, Morgott close behind. Eira stomps on the pressure plate. The lift bears them up and away from the chaos. Only then does Eira bend double and gasp for breath. Her mind is empty and red. Her nerves are on fire. She does not love killing, but gods, danger brings her to life.

“That was unwise, Tarnished,” Morgott grumbles.

The lift stops. A crumbling, many-pillared temple rears up before them. It lies open on all sides to the air. Scarlet flame flickers on the paving stones. Inside, a grand hall lined by braziers leads to an altar. 

And a cocoon.

Eira has never seen it before, but she can guess.

Her spear growls in her hand.

I’m here, Miquella.

Chapter Text

In the quiet, Millicent wipes Eira’s face.

A strange gesture, Morgott thinks. Laughable, because the Tarnished is drenched in blood far beyond Millicent’s ability to cleanse. Tender, too. Millicent turns the Tarnished’s face with her fingertips, her strong hands gentle now. The Tarnished receives them with her eyes closed. 

Morgott does not think he would like to be touched that way. That sort of intimacy demands laying oneself bare. Morgott associates it with dying soldiers no longer too proud to accept comfort. Dying children in the sewers.

When Millicent is done, the Tarnished pushes back her shaggy brown hair. “Is there anything I should know?” she asks.

“I have only seen my brother’s illusion do battle,” Morgott says. “If ’twas thou who felled the conjuring in the forsaken depths, thou knowest as much as I. Be wary of bloodflame. I wager he will wield it to excess. Mohg is not subtle.”

The Tarnished grins briefly. “Neither am I.”

Morgott sees some of the young Mohg in her now. They have the same penchant for dramatics and rashness. Both ever so righteous in their disdain for true Order. A thorn pricks Morgott’s heart: sorrow and anger that no longer knows its object. He clenches his left hand against the heat rising inside him.

“He kept much secret from me,” Morgott says tightly. “He may possess other ‘blessings’ we have not yet seen.”

“Right.” The Tarnished flicks blood from her bronze spear. “I’ll expect surprises.”

Mohg was always fond of those. They turned nasty after he met his “mother”; before that they were only impish. He favored pots: bundles of them, full of wraiths, that he could toss into a crayfish’s path. They made a fine distraction while Morgott scurried in and scooped up some eggs.

The thorn in his heart twists, and the buzzing in his blood intensifies. How can he possibly be standing here poised to kill his twin? This moment has been coming for ages, yet it’s come too soon.

The Tarnished looks up at him with warm eyes. Spare me, Morgott thinks. Thy kindness concealeth ruin.

He locks the thorn behind thick walls and makes himself go cold.

“Are you sure you won’t wait out here?” the Tarnished asks.

“Not a chance.”

Morgott does not love who Mohg became, but as children they survived together. Nothing can diminish that shared struggle. For its sake, Morgott needs to hear Mohg’s last words. It is what his lord father would have done. Godfrey could fight like a beast, but when it came to the kill, he always acknowledged his foes’ humanity. “To do so keepeth us from cruelty,” he said. Morgott has not been quite so gracious to his own enemies. In many ways he is not what his father wished him to become. Is that why Godfrey has not returned to Leyndell?

He ignores the Tarnished’s pity. “What wilt thou do shouldst thou find Miquella dead or twisted? All thy designs will crumble.”

Fear flickers across the Tarnished’s face. It only lasts a moment, but it betrays deeper insecurities. Morgott savors a delicious flash of spite. Let the Tarnished taste a bit of what she has visited upon him: the rootlessness, the shattering of foundations. Let her know what it is to learn that all she fought and bled for is gone.

The Tarnished’s eyes harden. “Maybe you and I will rule.”

Morgott barks a laugh. “Hath an Albinauric struck thee upon thine head? Whence cometh this absurdity? I am not Empyrean. I am Omen-born. And were I not so, I would not choose for my lord the Tarnished who fired the Erdtree!”

“Am I really so silly, though?” the Tarnished says, unfazed. “The Crucible mending rune should rightly be yours.”

She turns towards the temple without another word.

Millicent grips the Tarnished’s forearms. “Take care. If Miquella is in peril, you will do him no good by rushing headlong to meet it.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Morgott rolls his eyes. That promise won’t last ten seconds.

The Tarnished steps into the temple hall, Morgott and Millicent behind her. Bright red flames nip at their heels. After the chaos of the swamps below, this place is all but silent. Undisturbed, unguarded. Far above, the glowworms shine on the cavern ceiling as they have for ages and will for ages more. The stillness makes Morgott’s fur stand on end.

Nothing stops them from approaching the cocoon on the altar. Morgott does not like the spongy look of it. It’s unwholesome, as if it’s incubating some monstrous, diseased insect. Someone has torn it down the middle to expose the fibrous lattice within. Then something slumps out of it: an arm. Though Morgott has no great love for Miquella, his jaw tightens at the sight. The bones are elongated beyond all natural proportions. The flesh is gray-brown and looks like it might slough off. Blood runs down the spindly fingers to redden a simple gold ring.

The Tarnished goes white. She looks like she might be sick. Millicent offers her a hand, but the Tarnished shrugs it off. Her horror is already giving way to fury. Her limbs begin to tremble. She inhales and shouts with all her breath: “Let him go!”

Her voice rings around the temple. In answer, more blood pours from the cocoon, pooling on the floor. A figure rises from it sheathed in red. The blood slides away to reveal deep blue robes and swathes of red silk. A stole trails almost to the floor, brocaded and clasped with gold. An ornamental pauldron covers the figure’s left shoulder. The effect is garish, a theatrical exaggeration of noble dress.

The figure bends towards the cocoon to clasp the withered hand. “Dearest Miquella. I must see to our visitors. I will soon return to you.”

Time has worn that voice to a rasp, but it hasn’t lost its sense of drama. Morgott knows that cadence. His blood begins to writhe and a growl builds in his throat. He incants a golden dagger in his left hand.

I will see thee returned to thyself, though ’twill surely cost thee thy life.

Mohg turns with a flourish. “Well, what strange guests we have.”

The Tarnished flies past Morgott with a scream.

~~~

It’s not Miquella. It’s just his empty shell. The Formless Mother tried to take him and he went somewhere else, left this body behind -

Gransax’s bolt electrifies in Eira’s hand. It has become an extension of her will. She hurls one bolt, two, three. All strike Mohg full in the chest. He makes no attempt to avoid them. The lightning ripples over him and he keeps walking towards Eira, leisurely as a cat who knows his prey is caught. 

Eira skids to a halt. Is the Formless Mother dampening Mohg’s sensitivity to pain, or does he enjoy it? He’s taller and bulkier than Morgott: maybe he has absorbed some of his outer god’s power. He’ll be faster than he looks too; Omens always are. And that trident in his hand is longer than Eira is tall. Long reach. Best to finish this quickly.

Miquella’s not here. He’s escaped, safe somewhere else -

“What has your god done to Miquella?” she calls across the temple. “Tell it to let him go. He’s not yours - ”

Mohg lifts a gnarled finger to his mouth. “Shh. Miquella yet slumbers. The time is not yet come.”

“Time for what?”

I didn’t do all this for nothing, I didn’t I didn’t -

But Mohg isn’t looking at her anymore. “It pains me to see you so reduced, brother.”

~~~

“You could be so much greater than you are.” Mohg is still striding casually forward. His horns have grown wild, encroaching on his face, but his one eye finds Morgott unerringly. “You still refuse to accept the curse?”

Dimly, Morgott notes that Mohg no longer uses the old, proper speech. Of course not.

“I will never. Mine allegiance is to the Golden Order,” Morgott states, as he did on the day they parted. His voice was higher and ardent with youth then, and his conviction was truer. Now he just sounds weary. He’s been falling through fog ever since he touched that mending rune and he does not know when or if he’ll reach the bottom.

He tries again. “Where hath thine allegiance led thee? Thou’rt an outer god’s plaything, pretending to lordship, building thy dynasty upon pain and wickedness.”

“Is the Golden Order so different? You and I know its wickedness better than most.”

“We were…”

Morgott’s voice falters. He cannot deny the children he held as they died, when he was a child himself. He cannot deny the rune that filled him with light.

Damn it all, why must I waver now?

Mohg steps into the opening Morgott has given him. “Is that doubt I hear? Come, you need not suffer so. I only ever wished you free of your chains, and you can still be free if you have the courage. The Mother of Truth will grant you the wings that are yours by right.”

Morgott’s stomach flutters. That last sentence had a zealot’s simmering fervor. Mohg was born with stumps of wings, but they never grew enough for flight. Shrouded in those absurd robes, Morgott can’t see what’s become of them.

“I will never,” Morgott growls again. It’s all he can say. He no longer has the surety of faith. A familiar pressure is building inside him; soon his sword will burst into flames. He clamps down on it with all his will. No, he will not spill his curse, his shame, again.

Mohg’s eye falls on Morgott’s sword, like he knows what his brother is thinking. He cocks his head at it. He used to do that as a child, his way of scolding Morgott for saying something he found ridiculous. Heat rushes up Morgott’s throat and he almost loses hold of himself.

“Still sealing your blood away, I see,” Mohg says. “Father would be disappointed.”

They snap into motion as one. 

Mohg swings his trident wide but not wide enough: teasing, baiting. Morgott lunges beneath it and aims a dagger at Mohg’s abdomen. Mohg knocks it away with the back of his free hand. Morgott retreats, forcing Mohg to take a second broad swing. He follows up with another from the opposite angle. Morgott catches the blow on his sword, palm flat against the blade. His limbs shake and his feet scrape along the floor. Dismay creeps in. Mohg was always strong, but this - !

“I have not forgotten how your curse drove back a lion guardian,” Mohg says. “Such power you had, and you were still a child. Father knew then that you would be great.”

Morgott’s grip slackens. That day is burned into his memory: the first time he spilled his cursed blood. He and Mohg had snuck up to the surface through a loose sewer grate. Mohg assured Morgott it would be all right. They’d only stay a moment. Just long enough for Morgott, who was ill, to be healed by the Erdtree’s light.

“That was folly. We should not have ventured above. ’Twas not our place,” Morgott hisses.

“It was no fault of ours that one of Father’s beasts slipped its bonds. That was not our punishment.”

But it felt that way. Certainly that was what young Morgott thought when he saw the lion charging down the cobbled street. He tried to run and collapsed, too ill to flee. He squeezed his eyes shut - and his curse erupted. Bruised-gold blood flooded the street and threw the lion off its feet, and Morgott’s mind wailed, I tried so hard to be good!

Morgott breaks the deadlock with a hard shove. He handsprings backwards on aching limbs and throws a dagger straight into Mohg’s gut. Morgott lands with a jolt through his knees. Grace, he’s still not recovered! 

Mohg touches his wound idly. He does not stagger. “Still so nimble,” he says through a fanged grin. “Think what you could be if you honored your promise to Father.”

“He knew not - ” Mohg drives his trident into the ground, and Morgott barely sidesteps a spray of earth and stone. “ - what he asked of me!”

The Crucible Knights put down the lion guardian and Siluria herself carried Morgott to their barracks. There he slept for days. When he woke, Godfrey came to see him. “Take it away,” young Morgott begged him. “Take it from me, please, I do not want it!”

Only with great reluctance did Godfrey offer a sword hilt upon which Morgott could make a blade of his blood. “Thou must promise me that thou wilt seal thy blood only until thou’rt grown enough to see, as I do, that thou’rt no sin.” 

Morgott promised.

Ages later, he has not kept that vow.

Mohg reaches through the air, through a wound in the underground night, and pulls out a fistful of blood. He tosses it across the stones. Fire ignites where the droplets fall, and Morgott has to shield his face from the heat.

“He knew full well,” Mohg says.

“Father would not wish me to bow to an outer god.”

“Had you done so, you would not now be retreating.”

“I need no curse to fell thee.”

With a confidence he does not feel, Morgott drops his blood-sword. It clangs to the stones like a smithing hammer. Morgott prays that was not the sound of his deathblow. He incants three daggers between his fingers. He needs no curse, and no beautiful spirals stretching into eternity, no matter how whole they made him feel. The Erdtree has armed him well enough.

“I shall free thee,” he says.

Mohg laughs. Morgott knows that sound: not Mohg’s mischievous chuckle, but a rough rasp he adopted when he met the Formless Mother. “I am already free.”

Morgott does not know why the Tarnished let him and Mohg toy with each other, but he is glad she did. He needed to hear that laugh. Now he can be sure.

He lifts his daggers above his head: a signal. The Tarnished’s lightning sears past him.

~~~

Gransax’s red meets Mohg’s. As Eira looses her bolt, Mohg reaches into that hole in the air and pulls out blood. He flings it at Eira. Though she has to back away, her lightning pierces the red haze and strikes Mohg’s left wrist. Pride swells Eira’s heart. Gransax’s red is the stronger.

Mohg shakes out his arm in exaggerated fashion. Morgott lands a dagger in it, just below the shoulder. That gives Eira a chance to close the distance. “Miquella doesn’t belong to the Formless Mother - and neither do you!” she shouts as she charges him.

“The Mother of Truth will grant us ascension.” 

Mohg claws open the air: three burning rents. Eira ducks the scarlet explosion and slips to Mohg’s left. Heat singes the ends of her loose ponytail as she goes. She thrusts at any part of Mohg she can reach. Her spear bites through fabric into something hard, maybe an ankle, but Mohg does not stumble. 

Morgott’s incanted tree spear arcs up behind Eira. Mohg twists just enough for it to bury itself in the ground - only to find Millicent on his other side with shamshir flashing. He brings his trident down hard from overhead. Millicent glides aside like she’s made of wind and slashes at Mohg’s arm while it’s low enough to access. 

Mohg retracts his arm with a nasty chuckle. “You have fierce comrades, brother! I am surprised at you. I thought you preferred clerics mumbling to the Erdtree for succor.”

He thrusts his trident up into another red void and growls a word Eira doesn’t understand. It sounds like trace. Part of an incantation? 

“Tarnished…” Morgott says somewhere behind her.

Eira doesn’t wait to hear. Mohg’s spell has left him briefly exposed - long enough for Eira to dash behind him. She lifts off the ground on a lightning spear. Give him back! she thinks as she drives the bolt down. She’s not sure if she’s addressing Mohg or his outer god; maybe they’re one and the same now. All she knows is that her nerves are raw, and this may be her only chance to save Miquella, and if she can’t save Mohg, she can at least deprive his god of its servant. 

Eira opens the channels of her anger. Her own fire floods her body. “Back!” she calls to her companions. “Let me wear him down a while!” 

Only then does the red runic ring around her torso catch her eye.

No chance to think about it. Mohg makes her an ironic bow. “Welcome, honored guest!”

Eira lifts her spear in salute to whatever’s left of the boy from the sewers. It saddens her that she and Mohg are meeting as enemies. She recognizes a fellow performer in him. If he’d grown up in a fairer world, he might have been an actor. The stage would have suited him. For that lost boy’s sake, Eira will give Mohg a clean end.

For Miquella’s sake and the world’s, I have to win.

The thought sears Eira’s mind clear.

Mohg swings low and wide. Eira leans back and lets the blow pass over her head, carrying the tang of hot metal. Mohg turns the trident downward and jabs it into the ground. A stone shard nicks Eira’s cheek as she rolls to his back. She hovers on Lansseax’s glaive and sends a wave of red lightning towards Mohg. The sparks bite up Mohg’s robes, but if he feels it he gives no sign, just a snarling laugh. He faces Eira and rakes his claws through the air. Three lines of fire brand heat into her cheeks. Afterimages fill her vision.

The spell comes slow enough for Eira to pace behind Mohg, away from the explosion. This time he gives her no chance to attack. Eira ducks as Mohg’s trident rushes over her head. She lands a quick thrust to what she hopes is Mohg’s abdomen, then he pulls more blood from that rip in the sky. Red showers down and ignites as it touches the stone. Fire surrounds Mohg, forcing Eira back.

“Tarnished!” Morgott calls again.

Eira can’t tell where he is. “This is no time to talk!”

Mohg gouges a three-pointed fireburst from the air. Eira backs away further still. Mohg lunges at her to close the distance, a brutal thrust. She slips past it and ends behind him again. Eira lands a hard thrust on Mohg’s leg before he whips around. He swings low, trying to sweep Eira off her feet. Eira jumps…and lands on the trident’s haft.

She is so taken aback that she almost loses her balance. Her eyes meet Mohg’s as she crouches and wobbles. For a flash they mirror each other’s surprise. Then Mohg bares his teeth in a grin and jerks the trident upwards. Eira hurtles into the air to the sound of Mohg’s laughter. “You would make a fine knight of the dynasty!”

Eira would laugh too if the circumstances were different. The chaos would be exhilarating. She thinks, I could have liked you if you hadn’t become this.

She drops hard into Morgott’s arms as Mohg chants another word. This one Eira knows: “Duo!” That means two of something.

“Tarnished,” Morgott says urgently, “look upon thyself.”

He sets Eira, still winded, on her feet. Eira looks down to find two red rings now glowing around her chest. Morgott has them too. Does Millicent? “What - ”

But Mohg is on her again, ripping blood from the air’s womb and forcing her and Morgott apart. Mohg swings twice; Eira ducks twice, mind racing. What happens when those two runic rings become three? Mohg seems to favor threes, and not for gentle purposes. Three bloodflame claws, three points on his trident. 

Mohg pauses long enough for Eira to land a thrust, but she hesitates to do it. Does attacking him fuel his spell? That would make sense, given his devotion to pain. 

Mohg takes another swipe at her head. Distracted, Eira barely ducks in time. She stumbles behind Mohg as he plunges his trident into the ground. Again she has an opportunity to attack him while he tugs his weapon free, and again she does not take it. She needs to think!

The fire on the ground has gone out but the heat remains, clouding her mind. None of the Bloody Fingers she has fought ever cast such a spell. Eira runs through them all: Nerijus, the assassin in Liurnia, the samurai in the mountains, and one other, who was the other…

Mohg flings more burning blood at her. Eira scrabbles away. Fresh heat sends sweat running down her face.

Eleonora. She killed Yura at an Altus church. As he died, Yura told Eira to take something from her. “You will need it if you would hunt the Bloody Fingers to their lair,” he said. “Against the rite of blood, it is the only hope.” Eira found it on Eleonora’s body after their fight: a plain flask of red liquid with a splintered golden heart. She’s kept it with her as a precaution ever since.

Mohg lunges at Eira again. She throws herself aside but this time the trident grazes her. The heat is worse than the pain. She staggers to one knee, her breath gone and her side running red. Mohg rears back with trident raised overhead. Gasping, Eira lifts her gravel stone seal and punches at the sky. Honed bolt after bolt rains upon her foe. Mohg slews sideways just as he is about to bring his trident down on Eira’s head. The blow splits the temple floor instead.

Eira scrambles upright and retreats. Her side is on fire and she can’t breathe without pain. She does not resist when Morgott’s hands catch her from behind. Meanwhile Millicent intercepts Mohg, dancing around his heavy swings and slashing rents in his robes.

Eira twists to look up at Morgott. “I’ve got something that might stop what he’s about to do,” she pants.

Millicent lifts off the ground, hanging in the air above Mohg’s flames. Two red rings glow around her torso.

“Is it sufficient for us all?” Morgott asks.

“No. Only for one.”

Millicent dives at Mohg. She lands a slash across his chest before Mohg blocks her with the haft of his trident and shoves her away. Millicent has done him enough harm, though: Mohg pierces the air and shouts a third foreign word. A third red ring appears around Eira and both her companions.

“One,” Morgott murmurs.

“Millie should have it. You’re hard to kill and it doesn’t matter if I die.”

Mohg slams his trident into the ground. Millicent darts up the haft and throws herself at his face. Mohg swats her out of the air.

Fury roars inside Eira. Her voice turns sharp. “Give me time to get to her!”

Morgott sighs. “More heroics, Tarnished? Well, thy life is no loss to me. On thine head be it.” He gives her a push. “Go.”

Eira takes off down the temple hall. Her wound drives barbs of pain between her ribs, but she does not slow. She knows pain, it is an old companion, she can run alongside it. As she runs she digs into her belt loops, fumbling Eleonora’s flask free. She carves a vow between her heartbeats: I will save Millie. I will save Miquella. Melina didn’t burn for nothing.

Behind her, Morgott conjures a rain of swords. If only for Millicent’s sake, he’s helping after all! The bladed star skewers the hem of Mohg’s robes but not the place where Millicent lies. Mohg sprays blood into the radiant downpour and sears a swath of swords into steam. Morgott leaps forth to meet his twin with a greathammer on his shoulder. Eira does not see his blow land, but the impact judders through the floor as she skids to Millicent’s side.

Eira pulls the cork from the flask with her teeth. “Drink this. No time to explain.”

Morgott and Mohg are whirling around each other now, gold on red. Even without his cursed-blood sword, Morgott is his brother’s match: smaller but far more agile. He never stays in one place for long. His spectral straight sword flashes like lightning through Mohg’s bloody mists. He tips Mohg off-balance with a wicked spinning attack with sword and hammer. Then he springs over Mohg’s shoulder and runs him through.

Eira closes her eyes. That’ll do it, I reckon.

“Drink now,” she urges.

“What about you?” Millicent asks.

“I’ll be fine. Just do it!”

Millicent gives her a last anxious look, then tips the flask’s contents down her throat.

And none too soon. Mohg lifts his trident in both hands and the heavens run red.

Scarlet light floods the temple, dyeing them all. Morgott wrenches free of Mohg and flings himself towards Eira, grasping her hands tight. Mohg shouts the same word three times, and though Eira does not know it, she understands well enough: 

Death. 

End. 

Oblivion. 

With each shout a line of fire scores Eira’s chest. Blinding red pain wipes her mind blank. There’s something other inside her, violating her will, demanding her agony. She pushes against it but its claws have sunk deep. Eira’s blood surges up to meet them.

Yet she does not die. With the first wave of pain comes a golden glow: Morgott’s. It surrounds them, easing the hurt, slowing the bleeding and coaxing their blood back inside. Eira clutches her seal and adds her own incantation. The glow grows stronger, a cool bubble amidst the red. Mohg’s light is pain; theirs is healing.

Mohg’s last exultant shout resounds through the temple and the red fades. Morgott releases Eira slowly; she cannot tell which of them is trembling. Dazed with hurt, she looks down to find three thin, burnt cuts oozing through the tears in her leathers -

- and black feathers drifting to the floor.

Mohg has grown wings.

~~~

“You could have flown, brother.”

Mohg’s voice has roughened to a growl; he is made of violence now. His trident is blazing scarlet. Raven wings extend from his shoulders, each tipped with a claw.

Morgott’s limbs quiver with fury. He puts a hand to the three cuts in his chest, which his healing mitigated by a hair’s breadth. He feels ransacked and dirtied. How dare this outer god steal his blood as well as his twin!

(And yet, if the mending rune be true, Mohg isn’t entirely wrong. The curse Morgott fears and loathes was never meant to - )

Morgott glances at Millicent. She is getting to her feet; the cuts on her chest are superficial. It seems the Tarnished’s flask did its work.

“I do not wish to fly this way,” he says.

Mohg grins. “You never did know what was best for you.”

He impales the ground, which smokes and steams and erupts in scarlet flame. Morgott leaps away and lets fly three daggers. All three bury themselves in Mohg’s chest, but he hardly seems to notice. In the same moment, a red lightning bolt comes hissing from Morgott’s left. It strikes Mohg’s unarmored shoulder; he shrugs it off and lifts into the air. He showers the ground with burning blood - then dives. He swoops with trident extended and hissing through the air. Morgott avoids it by inches. The heat is tremendous; it makes the cuts on his chest sting. 

Millicent pounces on Mohg as he lands, slashing quick at his dominant hand and wrist. Mohg aims a vicious uppercut at her. The Tarnished rushes to her from somewhere beyond Morgott’s sight and pushes her out of the way. Mohg’s trident crashes down just past the Tarnished’s left side. Now close to Mohg, the Tarnished conjures a horn on her shoulder and rams it into Mohg’s abdomen. Morgott notes bitterly that the Tarnished defeated him the same way. The irony gives him no pleasure.

Should it tear this beast from my brother, for that alone I will bless it.

Mohg’s wings lift him on a gust of scorching air. Morgott propels himself into the air to meet him. Suspended, he draws his arm back and heaves a golden tree spear. It strikes Mohg head-on and sends him tumbling, but Morgott does not hear the blow land. The temple is drowning in the crackle of fire.

Morgott drops to the ground and lands facing his twin. Serpent-quick, Mohg grabs his twin’s arm with a feral grin. For a moment they are children wrestling with each other. Then Mohg twists. Biting down on an outcry, Morgott flicks a dagger into Mohg’s gut and wrests himself free. His right arm throbs. Grief is a coiled spring inside him, tauter than he thought it could be after all these years. All his thoughts converge upon hatred for the outer god who is using his childhood memories as a weapon.

I will purge thee. Thou’rt my foe unto death - thou who wert never his mother!

Millicent and the Tarnished take his place while he shakes out his arm. Morgott must admit they are a capable pair, and clearly accustomed to fighting together. Each time Mohg throws bloodflame at one of them, the other attacks from behind. The Tarnished’s face is incandescent with hate, but it’s turned upward, towards Mohg’s bloody voids rather than Mohg himself. Again and again she raises her fist and hails lightning strikes upon him. Her gold gleams through Mohg’s scarlet assault.

Lend me thy fury, child, Morgott thinks, to his own surprise.

“Tarnished! Hold!” he calls.

Millicent and the Tarnished back away, weapons lowered but ready. Morgott glimpses the Tarnished’s face: resolution mingled with sorrow.

He conjures a spear and charges Mohg. Mohg makes a sweeping gesture and fire flares in Morgott’s path, loud enough to blot out thought. Morgott vaults over it. I need no accursed wings.

He turns his spear downward and plunges. Mohg lurches aside, his movements slowing for the first time. Morgott dissolves his spear as he falls and lands with golden sword and dagger ready. He lashes out with each in turn, no pause between attacks, backing Mohg into a crumbled pillar.

Mohg just laughs. He lifts himself with two great wingbeats, then lets himself fall. As he stomps down, Morgott sees that the soles of his feet are hardened and black. He backs away with a snarl. They used to play-fight like that as children, jumping off pipes and trying to land on each other. Now that memory has become the Formless Mother’s fuel.

Enough of this.

Morgott dismisses all thoughts. Four limbs and two weapons, that’s all he is - all he can bear to be for now. He and Mohg circle each other, Morgott aiming for his brother’s chest with sword and dagger while Mohg swings at Morgott’s head. Morgott sees the trident growing heavier in his twin’s hands. Each of Mohg’s attacks is clumsier than the last; one almost tips him off his feet. Morgott chains together three slashes between each of Mohg’s blows. Not all of them find their mark, but enough do. Mohg’s robes soon shine with blood.

Over and over Mohg reaches into his void, making a fiery labyrinth of the floor. It does not stop Morgott. Hast thou forgotten? We spent our youth on perilous terrain. He cartwheels amidst the flames - unnecessary, but he wants Mohg to know that he needs no outer god, no Crucible. The Erdtree alone is his strength. 

No matter how Mohg tries to drive him back, Morgott always closes the gap enough to swipe at Mohg’s dominant hand. He is peripherally aware of the Tarnished harassing Mohg with lightning from afar. The rest of the world is red. This is attrition. Morgott excels at that.

Fly, he thinks. Fly once more.

And at last, Mohg does. It’s a desperate attempt to get away. His right sleeve is shredded, his own blood running down his arm, and his wings labor to lift him as high as before. Morgott bends his knees and jumps to meet him, greathammer at the ready. Mohg extends his trident for a dive. Morgott is faster. The weight of his hammer carries him forward, and with all his strength he smashes Mohg out of the air.

Mohg plummets. His body goes limp and his trident falls from his hand. He hits the temple floor with a great thud and a cloud of dust. Morgott lands on shaking knees. He looks at the Tarnished, who is already kneeling on Mohg’s chest, and nods. He has no desire to make this kill.

The Tarnished draws a long, thin dagger. “Last words?” she asks, addressing both twins.

Mohg chuckles, coughs. “You are a fool, Morgott Grace-Spurned. Your strength is wasted on the Erdtree. Mohgwyn would have raised you high.”

“Thou didst but exchange thy former shackles for others,” Morgott says. “Be still now. Thy nightmares are past.”

Eira waits a few more seconds. When no one speaks, she draws her dagger across Mohg’s throat. It does not take long for the Lord of Blood to bleed his last.

Morgott lets his hammer dissipate. Spent and hollowed, he picks up the trident from where it has fallen and places it between Mohg’s hands.

Wherever thy soul goeth, let it be thine own soul once more.

~~~

Miquella does not watch Eira participate in his Terrible Thing. He cannot bear it and does not dare to try. If he watches he will falter. 

He feels it when it happens, though. Trina’s despair chills him like poison. So does his own. He did not wish for this. Mohg was one of the forsaken, those whom Miquella most wishes to save.

But now it’s done. His brothers have fallen, and there will be no more Terrible Things.

Time to begin.

He calls out in thought to Leda. As he rises from beneath the tree where he has been resting, he leaves bloody footprints behind. It seems fitting that he should bleed.

Chapter Text

“Eira.”

A dream. Eira hasn’t slept well enough to dream since she got back from Mohgwyn Palace, but tonight, here she is. Purple haze, dew on her skin, silky blankets beneath her. A sweet perfume she knows. And arms around her. A chest, too, pressed against her back.

Trina often strokes Eira’s hair, but she never holds her. This feels urgent.

“Trina? What’s wrong?”

Trina’s chest shudders with sobs. “He has gone wrong.”

Worry mingles with relief. If Trina is here, then Miquella must be alive too, or at least he escaped the body in the cocoon. 

“Gone wrong? Because of all the blood magic?”

“Find us in the Scadulands. I will give you something I fear you will need before the end. I will try.”

Eira reaches back and finds one of Trina’s hands. The dream-saint is shaking. “Can you tell me what’s happening?”

“He needs you more than he will see. Whatever he may say or do, remember that. Make him see it. Make him open his eyes.”

“What doesn’t he see - ”

“I cannot linger. Find us in the Scadulands. Please.”

Trina nuzzles her cheek against Eira’s neck. Her tears soak into Eira’s shoulder.

“Trina!” 

Eira bolts upright, grasping at purple mist. Trina is gone. Eira is back in her bed in the Erdtree Sanctuary, her fingers closed on nothing. A faint sweet scent lingers in her nostrils.

Eira falls back against her pillows with her hands over her face. Where on earth are the Scadulands? She’s never heard of them, and she’s traveled every corner of the Lands Between. If she had only found Miquella at Mohgwyn Palace, all this would be over. Now it seems yet another journey lies before her. She’s already come so far; gods, how much further is she supposed to go?

She sits up and sets her feet on the cool stones. She’s never gotten used to this room. Eira chose it at random when she realized she’d be staying in Leyndell for a while. Judging from the many candlelit Erdtree tapestries, it used to belong to a high-ranking cleric. Eira has left no mark on it beyond the clothes and weapons she’s scattered about. They make a stark contrast with the rest of the furnishings. The dressing screen, gilded and painted with flowering vines, would fetch a price Eira’s villagers could only dream of. So would the sheer, silky curtains on the balcony. Like every other place in the Lands Between, this one is meant for someone else. Eira is just a ghost passing through it.

She steps over to the balcony and runs the curtains through her fingers. The fabric feels nice, but she’d prefer beads that clicked in the breeze. Memory jolts through her: beads on her wrists, clicking as she danced. When she is lord, she’ll have to hang some colorful ones.

When she is lord.

Her chest tightens. After everything she’s been through, another journey is unimaginable. How many more battles and deaths will it entail? And now something is wrong with Miquella too?

Eira grips the balcony rail in both hands. She looks at Brigit’s flames tattooed around her ankle and thinks of the other Brigit, who grew up in the sewers because she was born with horns.

She makes herself take a deep breath of moonlit air.

One more adventure.

She dances for Brigit and all the Omen children, and imagines that the cool sweat on her skin is armor.

~~~

The little Omens are piled outside Morgott’s chamber. Millicent does not think he knows they are there. Morgott is still on his balcony, where he has been since returning from Mohgwyn Palace days ago. He does not appear to have moved an inch. The little ones must have come later. Now they are huddled so tight it’s hard to tell where each of them ends. The morning light glints on their horns. They are all linked: a hand on an arm, a tail on a back. Are they doing this for warmth and comfort? Or perhaps touch is sacred to these children, whom the rest of the world considers untouchable.

Millicent wonders what brought them to Morgott’s chamber. Perhaps they sense that he is hurting. They certainly look to be keeping vigil. Millicent leaves them to their watch.

Downstairs, she finds Eira at the sanctuary’s bathing pool, a dimly lit room tiled with Erdtree mosaics. Eira is sitting at the edge with her trousers rolled up and her feet in the water. Millicent is glad to see this: Eira has not been taking care of herself lately. Upon returning to Leyndell, she stripped off her blood-soaked clothes, gave them to Ursa to burn, and went straight to bed. Through her open nightshirt collar, Millicent sees that grace has mended the three gashes in her chest as if they never were. The memory will be slower to fade. No one could simply forget an outer god reaching into their body. Eira must carry many such invisible wounds, beyond the reach of grace. Damage accumulating like scarlet rot.

“The water will do you more good if you step into it,” Millicent says gently.

Eira looks up as if waking from a dream. “I will, I will. How are you feeling, Millie? How are your…” She taps her chest.

“Already healing,” Millicent says. “Ursa did her good work. The wounds are shallow. I owe that to you.”

“It was the only choice. If I’d done anything else, I couldn’t have lived with myself.” 

Eira says this as if it’s simple, and perhaps to her it is. Millicent recalls what she said about being a spirit dancer: how she sometimes had to dance for a long while before she received the spirits’ approval. Millicent imagines Eira’s bleeding feet crumpling beneath her. Giving of herself was this young woman’s vocation - and it still is.

“You give so much,” Millicent says, sitting down beside Eira. “That may win Miquella’s heart, if the tales are true. It’s said he watered the Haligtree with his blood. I can well imagine you doing such a thing. I hope that if you do meet Miquella, you will restrain each other’s penchant for self-sacrifice.”

Eira kicks at the water. She can never sit still when she is uneasy. “You think he’s still alive, then.”

“I think I would sense it if he were not.” Or the part of her that is Malenia would sense it.

“I think so too. Trina came to me last night. She didn’t stay for long - she never does anymore - but she told me something’s wrong. She said Miquella needs me, told me to make him see.”

“She did not say what?”

“She didn’t have time.”

Millicent tries not to let her foreboding reach her face. “Eira, have you considered that you may be stepping onto a stage where a performance has already begun - a performance greater than you realize?”

“I’m sure I am. Wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve been living that way since I came back to the Lands Between. I’ll find my rhythm; I always do.”

“Always so certain.”

“I have to be,” Eira says. She leans into Millicent, and that says quite the opposite.

For a moment, only the water speaks.

“Someday I will do something for you,” Millicent says. “I will save you as you saved me.”

As Finlay saved Malenia.

“You save me all the time, Millie.”

They sit in silence for a while, making a shelter of each other. Millicent thinks of the statues in the Haligtree, the young Miquella and Malenia clutching each other for comfort. 

Then Eira says, “Miquella’s in a place called the Scadulands. I don’t think it’s in the Lands Between. I want to go back to that cocoon. It’s the only thing left of Miquella - maybe it shows the way somehow.”

“Then you must wash and put on proper clothes. Should you find Miquella today, you would not want him to see you like this.”

Eira ruffles her hair, which only makes it scruffier. They both laugh. The sound echoes softly around the bathing pool. They have to keep laughing, Millicent thinks, no matter what happens. It keeps them human. It reminds them that there is more to the world than suffering.

~~~

They do not ask Morgott to come with them. Eira knows better than to approach him when he is locked inside himself as he is now. She does, however, beckon Ragna from the pile of Omen children outside Morgott’s door. As always, the girl knows what Eira needs without being told. She draws out the Crucible mending rune from within her, touches it one last time, bathes in its colors. Then she lets go, and the rune sinks into Eira’s chest. Its warmth nestles inside her.

“The next time you see it, it’ll be part of the Elden Ring,” she says.

All at once, Ragna clambers into Eira’s arms. Her little body is hard and solid and her grip is strong. 

“It’s all right,” Eira says. “I’ll come back, I promise.”

Ragna holds her tighter. It feels like a blessing.

~~~

The floor of Mohgwyn Palace is bizarrely clean. It’s as if the stones have drunk up the blood - or the Formless Mother has. As before, the temple is unguarded. Millicent and Eira linger outside the entryway, looking for changes. The first is the figure standing before the cocoon, cloaked in white embroidered with Miquella’s helical sigil. The second is that Mohg’s body is gone. Dissolved into blood, maybe, or dust. Omens don’t return to the Erdtree when they die, after all.

“That is not a knight of the dynasty,” Millicent says of the figure at the altar. “Shall we approach?”

Eira nods, but taps the twinblades at her hips as a signal to be ready for anything. They’re warhawk talons from Stormveil, light and deadly fast. Gransax’s bolt rests on Eira’s back as well. No harm in bringing additional armaments into unknown territory.

“You’re one of Miquella’s?” Eira calls out when she’s halfway across the hall.

“Do you too seek Kindly Miquella?” the knight replies. A woman’s voice, low and assured. “Approach and state your name.”

Up close, the knight’s armor is dark and set with gold. Her black-and-gold helm conceals her face and sets off her brilliant white cloak. Eira finds it an odd choice of colors. White is impractical in battle. Maybe it’s ceremonial garb?

Eira holds out her hand. “Eira. Just Eira.”

The knight does not take the offered hand. She lifts off her helmet, revealing wheat-colored hair and pale eyes, and looks Eira up and down. Many people have looked at Eira this way: sizing her up, deciding if she’s a threat. 

“Needle Knight Leda,” the woman says. “I’m afraid I can’t let you pass.”

“Pass where?”

“Kindly Miquella’s journey has already begun. His faithful have been called. You are not among those chosen to join him in the land of shadow.”

Eira digs her fingers into her palm. She’s been through too much to have any patience left for this nonsense. “That’s not what - ”

Instinct tells her not to say Trina’s name.

“ - that’s not what I heard.”

“What did you hear?”

“That Miquella needs me to find him.”

Leda’s eyes narrow. “His Grace said no such thing. Who told you this?”

“Oh, just a little butterfly.”

“Then I fear you have been misled by rumor, but do not grieve. Kindly Miquella’s light embraces all. If you seek his healing, present yourself before him when he is ascended. Then he will grant you what you need - but not sooner. The path of the Empyrean is not for us to walk.”

“You say that, but it sounds like you let other people into the Scadulands.”

“I did not allow them in. My lord chose them and called them by name.”

Trina called me by name.

“So if other people turned up at this cocoon, you’d send them away too.”

“I would.”

“Really?”

Leda’s obstruction is beginning to feel personal. Under any other circumstances, it wouldn’t - but Trina has come to Eira repeatedly, since the early days of her journey.

“Of course,” Leda says. Her face is too neutral. 

“Why doesn’t Miquella want me in the Scadulands? Or maybe it’s you who doesn’t want me there.”

“I assure you, you will not be forsaken upon my lord’s ascension. You are kind to be concerned for his safety, if that is indeed your concern. Know that although the Empyrean path is painful, Kindly Miquella is prepared to walk it to the end.”

Eira’s fingers itch towards her twinblades. Only Millicent’s grip on her arm stops her from drawing. Do not make an enemy of her yet, that grip says.

Eira exhales hard through her nose. “Tell him I’m praying for him. Tell him he’s my best chance.”

Leda nods as if to say, Kindly Miquella hears that sort of thing all the time. You’re not special. Eira has been dismissed.

She walks away with Gransax’s bolt rumbling on her back.

~~~

“She sent me away like I’m beneath her!”

Eira flings a lightning bolt across the Leyndell colosseum. Gransax’s bolt, planted in the sand, draws it down into the earth with a crack and a hiss. Millicent winces. She has seen her friend angry before, but this is different. Raw.

“Knights can be haughty,” she says from her arena-side bench. “Too many do not uphold their chivalric codes.”

“If it were just that - ” 

Eira hurls another lightning bolt at her spear. Another bang splits the air. 

“ - I could manage it, but it’s not just that. Trina held me and wept and begged me to come to the Scadulands!”

Another bolt, another crack.

“She’s part of Miquella. I trust her word much more than Leda’s!”

Eira looses a last bolt. It goes wide and sears a black mark into the sand. Eira lets out a frustrated growl and sits down on the arena floor.

Millicent goes to her side but does not touch her yet. Eira loves touch, but at times she is too tightly strung to bear it. At those times, physical contact only increases her pent-up energy.

Eira turns her dusty face to Millicent. “I need to get to that cocoon. Something is happening and I need to know what it is.”

Fear flutters wildly behind her eyes.

“Then we will find a way,” Millicent says. “Do you know a cloaking spell, perhaps?”

“No. That’s sorcery, and I’m rubbish at sorcery.”

“Something to quiet your footsteps?”

“…I might have something. Learned it from a prayerbook I found hidden in the Roundtable. I haven’t used it often, and it won’t last long.”

“Then I will simply have to create a distraction.”

Eira’s scowl becomes a grin. She must like the sound of that: Eira is fond of chaos. “You’re good to me, Millie. I’m lucky to have you.”

“I cannot cure my scarlet rot, so I devote myself to troubles I can solve. It does me good. How fortunate for me that you present me with many such troubles.”

Eira clasps Millicent’s hand and pulls herself up. “One day this’ll be over and we’ll travel for the joy of it and nothing else.”

“I imagine you will still find trouble.”

~~~

They return to Mohgwyn Palace with a plan. 

They crouch behind pillars on either side of the entryway, waiting for their chance. Right now, Leda is facing their hiding place. She only needs to turn away for a moment.

“If you can reach the cocoon, shall I follow behind you?” Millicent whispers.

“Not yet. I need you to make sure Morgott’s all right. His brother’s been dead to him for ages, but I reckon he’s hurting all the same. If he wants to follow me into the Scadulands when he’s ready, stay with him. We’ll find each other there somehow.”

There’s her optimism again, strong as steel. It bends but it never breaks. It’s mad. Millicent admires it, too.

Eira sets Varré’s medal in Millicent’s palm, along with a twist of golden light. “If this goes wrong, don’t fight your way out. Just disappear. Disappear if it goes well, too.”

“You would not take that counsel if I gave it to you.”

“Probably not, but that’s beside the point.”

Millicent clasps Eira’s hands. “I wish you such good luck, my friend. Promise me you will take care. May you find all that you seek.”

And if you do not, may you make it right.

“We’ll see each other soon,” Eira says. She lets Millicent go with a smile.

 Just then, Leda turns to her left, looking out at the ruins below.

Eira lifts her seal. Pale golden light wells from it and drips down to her feet. It wraps briefly around them, then dissipates into the ground. Eira lifts each foot experimentally, taps it against the stones: no sound.

“Go,” she says. 

Eira takes off around the right-hand edge of the temple, hands on her twinblades to keep them from rattling. She flattens herself behind pillars whenever possible. Meanwhile, Millicent unties the fire pot hanging from her belt and tosses it through the entryway. She flees onto the lift before she sees it explodes. The boom shakes the stones. Acrid pitch-smoke drifts down to her as the lift descends. Distantly, Leda shouts, “Who’s there?”

When the platform reaches the ground, Millicent ducks into a tunnel in the ruins, hoping none of Mohg’s nobles are lurking in the dark. Outside, a crowd of red Albinaurics converges on the lift. The noise has drawn them: good. The more trouble they give Leda, the less chance she’ll spot Eira. Millicent cannot risk returning to the temple to see if Eira succeeded, though. She’ll just have to trust.

She lets the memory of grace drift off her palm. Millicent cannot see grace, but Eira’s memory will deliver her back to Leyndell. 

Go swiftly, my friend. I know you have little patience for stealth.

Gold blooms around Millicent, and she is gone.

~~~

Eira never thought she would use this incantation. Miriel insisted on teaching it to her anyway. She indulged him only because he was as good as a grandfather to her. Eira forgot about the incantation soon afterwards, though she never let Miriel know it. It isn’t his fault that Eira will always prefer to fight fast and loud. 

Well, I wish you could see me now, you wise old thing. I’m not completely hopeless yet!

Shrieks and clanging echo behind Eira: red Albinaurics have come up the lift. Eira does not glance back to watch Leda engage them; her feet won’t stay silent for long. The fighting probably won’t last either. Every white and gold flash cuts short a scream. 

She is nearly to the cocoon. She can see the dried blood on those horrible fingers. Just a few more pillars to go. She darts through shadows, her back to ancient stone. Three more. Two more. The fighting echoes on. One more. 

There.

Bile rises in Eira’s throat. She has a strong stomach, but she hates the thought of touching those withered fingers. Everything about them is wrong. And they’re not Miquella’s anymore, she reminds herself. He’s in the Scadulands.

She looks over her shoulder. Leda is a bright blur amidst sprays of thorns and blood. There can’t be more than three Albinaurics left. Eira doesn’t even know if the arm is a gateway to the Scadulands. If it doesn’t work, if Leda finds her here, she’s going to have to fight - and she doesn’t like the look of those golden flashes. Eira has never seen light that pierces before.

The arm must be the way. Why else would Leda be guarding it?

Let me be right, Eira thinks for the thousandth time. 

She touches the ring on the arm’s ruined fourth finger.

Mohgwyn Palace dissolves behind her. Everything dissolves. There’s red, wet, and then nothing. Eira cannot feel her body. No - she has no body. She is suspended in a void, weightless and breathless. She has no sense of motion. She could be hurtling through space too quickly to discern, or she could be trapped. Her thoughts splinter. What if she is caught here forever, between being and unbeing? Is it possible to suffocate when she has no lungs? 

She drops back into herself all at once. She drags in a breath and loses it to coughing. Her knees hit damp grass. Earth and stone and evergreen fill her lungs. Familiar scents. Altus scents.

And another smell - hardly a proper one at all. Cold and dry. More like the absence of smell. 

Like spirit ash.

Eira’s vision returns in patches. First the dim glow of lanterns set along the path, then the worn edges of steps. Behind her, the tunnel narrows to a dead end. No way back. Just like in the beginning, when that first grafted thing pushed Eira into the sea.

She takes the low steps. Soon light spills into the tunnel. Ahead, a fissure splits the rock, and a new land unfurls.

Amber grass ripples out to the sky’s edge. Spectral headstones shine dimly amidst the stalks. Gnarled trees bend over them, draped with moss. There is something entirely too human about them, as if their branches might become grasping hands. Eira cannot dismiss the notion that they were people once. In her experience, it’s good to be a bit superstitious. 

The sky above is heavy. The clouds are bruised gold and ash, pregnant with a storm. Set against them, framed in the center of the fissure, is a mountainous tree. It’s every bit as tall as the Erdtree, but it’s blackened and crooked. Even at this distance, Eira sees golden liquid dripping from its boughs. A tower stands just below to catch it. 

An unsettled wind ruffles Eira’s hair. This is an eerie place. It’s full of death, yet it’s taut, too, holding its breath for something to happen. The tension seeps into Eira’s limbs. Soon her teeth are chattering with anticipation.

But even here, there is beauty. Veils trail from every side of the world-tree, sheer like the curtains in Eira’s borrowed bedroom. She imagines a curtain rising above a stage. Despite herself, her sense of adventure reawakens. She has a new land to explore. There will be pain, but wonder also. There is always wonder.

She steps out of the tunnel.

Grass tickles through her leggings as she walks. Pointed archways emerge from the waving fronds. They look like they might once have belonged to mausoleums, but now they’re orphaned and set adrift. Something thumps down from one of them as Eira passes. She glimpses wicked steel, an emaciated body…and horns like Morgott’s? That’s more than she wants to see. She whistles for Torrent and rides away without looking back.

She finds a dirt track and follows it towards a ravaged town. Blackened ghosts wander the road, dogs and people alike. Their whispers trail after Eira. Some curse Marika, others wonder what is happening. There was a fire, clearly - but what kind of fire leaves burnt ghosts?

The town does not look promising. It’s a small cluster of stone buildings, all of them burnt-out. The stone slabs are regular and finely laid. Maroon fabric still covers some of the tiled roofs. Dye like that does not come cheap. The folk who lived here might have been prosperous merchants or craftspeople before their land became a graveyard. Now their bodies dangle from a nearby tree.

I hope that’s not a greeting. Eira has seen many hanging trees, but never so early in a journey.

As she passes under the village’s central bridge, a terror looms on the horizon. It’s a golem, tall as a fire giant, twisted together from barbed metal. Instead of a head, its torso widens into a vast basket. It’s stuffed full of something. Soon Eira knows what. Heat rolls back to her on the breeze, and with it the unmistakable smell of charred flesh.

Eira’s stomach burns. Her hands spasm on the reins. She hates that thing on sight, as she hates Omenkillers’ swords. It’s an open, festering wound. A thing made for cruelty.

Eira guides Torrent to the edge of the giant’s patrol. It’s not hard to see its path: the grass has turned to ash in its wake. The heat and the smell intensify, clinging to the back of Eira’s throat. She resists the urge to gag and slings an experimental lightning bolt at the giant’s foot. The bolt dissipates without effect. At first the golem does not seem to have noticed. Then it turns with a creaking, scraping noise and kicks a spray of red-hot rubble at Eira. She wheels Torrent around and flees. Heat snaps at her back. The crash of rubble leaves her ears ringing. Through it, she hears the golem lumbering after her.

Oh, Miquella, what are you doing in a place like this?

Pressed to Torrent’s neck, Eira gallops towards a monumental gateway set into a cliff not far away. She passes more orphaned arches on the way. Birds perch atop them - little deathbirds, Eira thinks, but not skeletal. Instead their heads are made of armor gone green with age. Death-golems, then?

“Waiting for me to die?” Eira calls to them. “It probably won’t be long!”

The birds do not answer.

The road to the gateway widens. Another bent tree has grown on the path, and beneath it, something gold is gleaming. Eira discerns its shape as she draws nearer: a long stake piercing a crescent. It reminds her of a great rune, but it’s none she’s ever seen. A small pile of golden something sits beneath it.

A woman hails Eira as she dismounts. She looks as solid as the greatsword she’s leaning on. She’s armored in leather and sculpted gold, with sandals laced up her bare calves. Her plumed helm has its own face. A scar mars its brow. Eira wonders if the woman’s face bears the same mark.

The woman tilts her head at the place where Torrent disappeared. “Never seen that before.”

“Torrent is special,” Eira says.

“Torrent? Fitting name. You ride like you’re flying.” The woman extends her hand. She and Eira clasp forearms. Her grip is pleasantly rough. “Redmane Freyja. I once fought with General Radahn.”

Oh.

“I’m Eira. I should tell you I’m the one who…at the festival…”

“Gave him an honorable end? I heard about the festival. I’m sure old Jerren’s relieved it’s over. Was it a glorious battle, as Radahn would have wanted?”

“He fought hard, rot and all.”

“Can’t have been much left of him by the end. Well, that was his way: as long as you’ve still got something to fight with, you’re not done. Use your teeth if you have to.”

Eira likes this woman already. A fellow warrior, battle-hungry, open, and friendly. She likes Freyja’s accent too. It’s thicker than Eira’s, but it has the same unrefined warmth. It’s like hearing a bit of her long-forgotten home.

“Your speaking’s not so different from mine,” Eira says.

Freyja chuckles. “Do you come from nothing and nowhere too?”

“A little village on the Altus Plateau. It doesn’t have a name.”

“Nor mine. I lived in Caelid before it was rotted. I had no family, fought in the gladiator pits and lived on my winnings. Then Radahn saw me fight and everything changed. I was lucky. Lots of folk weren’t.”

Eira knows that feeling. That burden. “I’m sure you were strong too, not just lucky.”

“Not strong enough for that thing.” Freyja nods at the burning golem stumping through the fields. “Nasty, isn’t it? Not sure we could bring it down.”

“I think we could if we hit it hard enough.”

“But should we?”

Freyja is trying and failing to hide her eagerness. Eira senses she has found a kindred spirit.

“What, you don’t fancy our chances?” Eira asks.

“Not yet, eh? There’s got to be another way. I expect we’ll find something big enough to use against it if we look about a bit. Wouldn’t that be better than swinging at its legs?”

“Freyja, I want to kill it now.”

“And get yourself killed too!”

“Doesn’t matter. I can see grace.”

“You can come back, you mean?” Freyja rubs her helmet’s chin as if it is her real face. “Not sure Kindly Miquella would like you being careless with your life just because you can’t stay dead. He can’t abide suffering. You still feel pain, don’t you?”

Eira straightens up. “Miquella called you here?”

“Yes. Didn’t he call you too?”

Eira thinks of Trina and Leda and the silence from Miquella himself. She has to be careful what she says - but she could use an ally, too.

“Me too,” she says.

“‘Course he did. Kindly Miquella favors folk who come from nothing, you know. Well…” Freyja claps Eira hard on the back. “That makes us comrades-in-arms. Should we look for more crosses? They’re Kindly Miquella’s footprints.”

She gestures at the crescent rune.

Well, that’s a place to start.

“Do you know what’s underneath this cross, Freyja?” Eira asks.

The big warrior shuffles uneasily. “I’ve no head for this sort of thing, but I think it’s his body. A bit of his Empyrean self, like. The flowers coming up around it are full of blood.”

Gooseflesh prickles Eira’s arms.

He has gone wrong, Trina said.

“Why would he…cut off parts of himself?”

“I told you, I’ve no head for this sort thing. Just between the two of us, though, I’m glad I’m not Empyrean. Seems like more trouble than it’s worth.”

Chapter Text

He is moving faster now. Momentum, that’s what he needs. He always feels better when he has momentum. 

Veiled by magic, he left the spirit-grave plains behind. He passed the great gates and spiral pillars of Belurat. He passed the creatures within. He rested in a storeroom, while beyond the door the scorpions clicked and licked his blood from the floor. He passed the lion dancers hollowed of divinity. He climbed up towards the clouds.

He found the Tower dissolving into shadow.

Rubble flaking, falling, too slowly to see. Bit by imperceivable bit, returning to dust.

Miquella knew it might come to this. Still his mind flings itself against those impenetrable branches. I will not fail, not again, I will not leave my work half-done, I have had enough of almost!

He will have to take a longer route, wait for his followers to clear the path he cannot. That’s why he called them here. His life has taught him the importance of alternatives. There is always another plan.

(His plans are not what they once were. His current schemes bear no resemblance to the elegance of unalloyed gold.)

Elegance did not save Malenia, nor will it heal the Lands Between.

He journeyed back across the plains to Castle Ensis’ somber walls. There he wove a spell to fool the Black Knights’ eyes, so that to them he would appear as one crate among others. The scent of old blood clung to them. They passed him by in rust-reeking armor. They did not see him sink shaking to the ground. He’s still there now. He hurts so much.

Miquella left a cross at every place he stopped, and a bit of flesh with it. He grows lighter with each divestiture. Soon he’ll be able to travel like the wind.

(Torrent was supposed to be here to help. Well, no chance of that now.)

It’s easier to sink his hands into himself if he thinks of himself as a doll. He’s just disassembling. That does not dull the pain. His vision went white when he twisted off his left arm. He thought he might end right on the floor of that Belurat storeroom. He sat there for a long time, breathing wetly, just breathing. He felt pathetic, huddled amidst water jugs and sacks of grain. That was all right. He needs to know that feeling if he is to embrace his people properly. He thought about that instead of the pain shooting through his nerves. I pay my toll. I bring myself low and excise my golden lineage.

He understands Ranni’s need to sever her flesh. It’s his need too. When the roots are rotten, there’s no choice but to pull up the plant and start afresh. But Miquella always told himself that when he shed his own Empyrean body, he’d do it without assassinating his brother. 

(He failed there too.)

Gods, these doubts! They’re not just Trina’s, they’re his own - and he cannot abide them. During the Night of Black Knives, he hid in the Shunning Grounds with Morgott, and even through his grief he was horrified at what he saw. So many bodies, broken by hunger, cold, butchery, bad water. Children too. They need Miquella to bring change. What will happen to them if he succumbs to doubt?

He’ll have to do something about that.

Thinking of the little Omens makes Miquella think of Eira. For once, he does not resist. Eira is a welcome distraction from the mess Miquella has made of his body.

He casts his mind back to the beginning of Eira’s journey. Trina liked her first. Eira won her heart in Limgrave, when she bound up the demi-human tailor’s wounds. Miquella noticed that too, of course: such kindness was rare in the Lands Between. It caught his interest, but for him the true defining moment came later. It was when he saw Eira dance on the hill outside Castle Morne’s crumbling rampart. She was wearing a tree-and-beast surcoat far too large for her; the mail fell past her knees. She’d kicked off her boots, and she moved gracefully despite her armor. Light rain was falling. The clouds let through shafts of sun that sparkled on Eira’s damp skin. She tipped her head back as if the rain were a precious gift. Her smile was unfeigned.

Miquella had never seen anyone so in love with the world. It intrigued him that a Tarnished could celebrate simple beauty. Had this broken land not broken her time and again?

That was the first time Miquella thought, I would like to know her better.

Later, Eira emerged from Stormveil and rode to the cliff’s edge. She looked out on mist-laden Liurnia, shielding her eyes from the Academy’s gleam. Her face lit up with wonder. Miquella and Trina both smiled with her.

After that, Trina started visiting Eira in dreams, and Miquella watched her more often. He saw her visit the Roundtable Hold just to talk to Roderika. He saw her sit at campfires with nomadic merchants and dance to their music. He saw her learn incantations with Miriel, flinging lightning bolts at the walls of his church. The old pastor ducked into his shell and chuckled at her enthusiasm. She helped and encouraged anyone who needed it. She burned the earth of Caelid with Redmanes who were swinging for her head just days before. She held maddened soldiers on Gelmir and gave them clean deaths.

Miquella also saw her righteous fury. He has never forgotten how Eira impaled the Omenkiller who slaughtered an Albinauric village. She was beautiful in her rage. When she fought, her whole body became an expression of her will.

And she has quite a will. Miquella still worries about that. He does not want to meet Eira in battle. He instructed Leda to bar her from the Scadulands, but that may not be enough. Nothing has ever stopped this young woman before. Not even Radahn.

Where is she now? Miquella has been so consumed by his journey that he has not looked for Eira in days - not since she left for Mohgwyn Palace. 

In his mind, Miquella flicks between his butterflies, pausing on the most likely locations. Eira is not in Leyndell, not in Mohgwyn, not in the Haligtree. Where has she gone? Miquella’s vision has expanded since he began shedding his flesh; he should be able to see Eira even if she’s in a place where he has no butterflies.

Unless…

A shudder runs through Miquella’s mangled body: fear, anger, something else he dares not look at. The jolt makes him cough. He claps his remaining hand to his mouth to keep from making noise.

He looked for Eira in the Lands Between.

He looked in the wrong place.

Chapter Text

They do not, in fact, wait to engage the golem. Freyja’s warnings were earnest, but she has no more intention of heeding them than Eira. They’re both tense and spoiling for a fight.

They ride out together. The golem notices them at once, kicks burning chunks of rock and dirt in their direction. Eira lets go of the reins and gives Torrent the lead. He weaves through the flying debris as if he has wings. Looking up, Eira sees a mask mounted on the golem’s basket: a sun with a face, surrounded by horn-shaped rays. It’s the construct’s only smooth surface. The rest of its wicker body is barbed from top to bottom, its legs girded by splintery wood. Eira recalls something Ursa told her about Omenkillers: they drink physicks to ensure that when they butcher, they feel nothing. This thing is made of the same unthinking violence.

Torrent carries them between the golem’s legs. The construct raises one foot and pounds it down; a wave of fire sears outwards. The heat and smell cohere into a wall. It slams into them as Torrent jumps the fire. Eira chokes and sweat breaks out on her brow.

“Stay mounted,” she coughs as Torrent circles around. “I have all the chances I need, but you don’t.”

Freyja claps Eira on the back. “Stay alive for Kindly Miquella.”

“And for us!”

Brigit of the Hearth, protect us from fire.

Eira slides off Torrent and goes to work.

Fire, heat, stench, and smoke: for a while, that’s all Eira knows. She jumps wave after burning wave. Sweat runs into her eyes and makes them burn too. Her lungs ache from the thick air and constant exertion. Her feet heat up through her boots and her arms grow heavy. The golem becomes a heat-hazed blur. Eira tries not to stumble when it shakes the earth. Off, she thinks, stay off the ground. Lansseax’s glaive lifts her above the flames, and she answers them with her own crackling red waves. When she hits it hard enough, the construct topples over with an earth-shaking thud, and Eira jams her spear into the mask on its basket. Each stumble renews her resolve. If it can fall, it can die.

Freyja is a smear on the edge of Eira’s vision. The Redmane circles on Torrent, swinging two-handed at the golem’s feet. She’s a capable horsewoman. When the construct heaves its bulk into the air, Freyja gallops through its legs with hand extended and pulls Eira onto Torrent’s back. Torrent flies over the charred grass. Behind them, the golem crashes down and fire erupts across the plain. The heat roars like a beast.

Eira gets the finishing blow. Torrent swings back beneath the golem, and Eira slides to the ground. She lifts her seal. The ancient storm bellows; Eira screams into it. Red lightning spears rain down. The golem staggers and falls for the last time. Its fire goes out, leaving blackened metal and blackened bodies. Eira tries not to think about how many.

Freyja scoops her onto Torrent again. They ride back to Miquella’s cross and collapse in the grass. They look at each other, identically soot-smeared and scratched, and they nod and fall back and close their eyes. For a long while they lie there with chests heaving. The breeze cools the sweat on their skin. Eira’s feet sting fiercely. A small price to pay for putting trapped souls to rest.

After a while, Freyja nudges Eira. “Water?”

Eira takes the waterskin and drinks gratefully. The water is lovely on her raw throat. She’s tempted to tip the whole thing over her head. “You ride well. I think Torrent likes you.”

“General Radahn would be pleased to hear that. He expected his royal guard to be skilled in the saddle. He loved horses. Taught us to love them too.”

Groaning, Eira sits up and looks out at the golem’s empty hulk. Ashes are streaming from it like moths. “Who were all those people?”

“They’re called Hornsent,” Freyja says. “Folk who are close to the Crucible. I don’t pretend to understand what that means. They’ve all got horns.”

That gets Eira’s attention. “Like Omens?”

“What Omens would be if they weren’t cursed, maybe. One of the Hornsent is following Kindly Miquella like us. He’s a dour little man. He has a name, but I don’t know it. He says it doesn’t matter what it is because ‘names are of this world.’”

“So the people in the golem were his kin?”

“His kin or his ancestors. He said there was a war here long ago, between his people and the Erdtree’s. At the end of it, the Scadulands were cut off from the rest of the realm. The burnt ghosts you see are what’s left of the Hornsent. Not many still live.”

Eira frowns. She’s never heard of such a war. “Did he say why this happened?”

“No. Whatever the reason, he hates Queen Marika. I’d stay clear of him if I were you. He thinks all Tarnished serve the Golden Order.”

Eira turns this over in her mind. It spawns more questions than answers. Did this war cause the Omen curse? Who started it, and why? Marika has destroyed peoples before - the fire giants are gone, the ancient dragons diminished. Maybe the Hornsent posed a similar threat to Marika’s Erdtree empire. With their ties to the Crucible, they would have been her rivals. But Eira suspects it wasn’t so simple. That golem represented more than rivalry. Horrible things are often born of horror.

More answers to seek. As always.

“Did Miquella come to the Scadulands because they’re so broken?” Eira asks. “Is this where he wants to start healing the world?”

Freyja shrugs. “Lady Leda said he’s here to ‘walk the path of the Empyrean.’ Damned if I know what that means.”

She rolls onto her side, away from Eira. She removes her helmet, revealing close-cropped brown hair, and drinks from her waterskin. She keeps her face averted all the while.

~~~

While Freyja rests, Eira wrestles her boots off. Her feet are burned red, but not as badly as she feared. Grace does not take long to mend them enough for walking. Though Eira is exhausted, she wants to explore a bit more before the sun sets on this day. The golem brought her no closer to finding Miquella.

Death stalks the gravesite fields in many forms. A skeletal dragon sleeps in a pond, flesh hanging off it like ragged feathers. Elsewhere, a headless statue broods at the edge of a cliff. Its emaciated body reminds Eira of the something that dropped down from an arch on the plains. Freyja says it’s meant to be a guardian god. Apparently someone rejected its protection.

Then there is the village uphill from Miquella’s cross. The houses are stone-built, but not like those in the first ruin Eira passed through. These are rough-cut and unmortared. Others aren’t stone at all, just bare timber frames. The people must have had even less than Eira’s own. It’s hard to say at first what became of them. Then the wind brings her a sweet, rotten scent. Faint buzzing and whimpering sounds issue from the village entrance. Eira glimpses pale shapes wrapped in bandages. They look like…

Freyja catches Eira’s arm. “Don’t go in. They’ve got the fly sickness. It’s catching.”

“Is there nothing we can - ”

“Nothing. Hornsent says it’s not a normal sickness, it’s a curse, and if you go in there you’ll be cursed too. They’re long gone anyway. All you could do is give them death.”

Eira listens to the low whimpering. Her hands begin to tremble. Then she makes herself turn and walk away. 

It’s as Millicent said: Eira needs to save her strength for those she can help.

I hope you’re one of them, Miquella.

Near the village is a shack stacked with three of the horned suns Eira saw on the golem’s basket. Eira’s heart sinks at the sight. This means there are more golems wandering the land, carrying torment. How many people have they…

The thought staggers her. She tucks it away.

Judging from the masks, there are three fewer golems than there once were. Eira pictures the people who might have rested here. Maybe they were scavengers in rags, looting the fallen titans. Or maybe a lone warrior brought the golems down. Maybe that person came here, weary and burned, and fell asleep forever. The masks testify still: I was here. I fought.

Amidst the decay, there is life. It takes strange forms. As dusk falls, gardens of spirits emerge to wave in the breeze. They sprout up across the plains: pale blue worms with wispy hair and expressions of perpetual surprise. They look like they belong on the sea floor. Eira spends a long moment watching them and wondering why their rounded mouths never shut. Do they sift spiritual food from the winds? 

“What sound do you suppose they make?” she asks Freyja.

“Something like a wolf’s howl? Look how round their mouths are. Like this: Oooo…” 

The sound echoes inside Freyja’s helmet. Despite everything, Eira laughs. Yes, she and Freyja are going to be friends. It feels strange to laugh in a place like this, but what else can she do? She’ll take whatever joy she can get.

They make camp in a wood not far from Miquella’s cross. It’s piney like the woods of Altus, but the trees are thinner and wilder somehow. Everything here is wilder than Altus. The cliffs are steeper, the ravines deeper. It smells the same, though. Maybe this was part of the Lands Between before it became a limbo for the remnants of war.

They make a fire and settle down to rest. Freyja removes her helmet to eat the dried meat Eira offers her, but again, she turns away. The firelight catches on the crack in her helm.

“Was that a wound?” Eira asks.

Freyja’s back stiffens.

“I’m sorry,” Eira says. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“It’s all right. Yes, it was a wound. I got it in the Battle of Aeonia.”

“That should have killed you.”

“Nearly did. The blow was dire enough, and then the rot fouled it. I was fevered, lying in the swamp, too weak to move. That was when Kindly Miquella came to me. He drew out the poison with his own mouth. I don’t like to think how it must have hurt him.” Freyja’s voice goes soft with wonder. “Fancy that. I can scarcely read, but an Empyrean saved me.”

Eira relaxes a little. Freyja’s story supports all the rumors about Miquella’s compassion. But still Trina’s warning echoes in her mind: He has gone wrong.

“I’d have followed him anywhere after that. This scar is my guide,” Freyja says. “What about you? When did Kindly Miquella call you here?”

Eira clamps her mouth shut before she gives herself away. Think before you speak. To her annoyance, the thought comes in Morgott’s voice.

“It was in Liurnia,” she says. “I was passing through a village sick with the chaos flame. I was afraid I’d catch the madness, but Miquella laid a blessing on me to keep me safe.”

It’s not entirely a lie - except it was Trina who protected Eira that day. That was the first time they met in dreams.

“So he saved you too,” Freyja says. “He’s traveled everywhere, hasn’t he? Well, I suppose an Empyrean can go where he likes. They’re not like you and me, that’s for certain. So - tell me about the Radahn Festival. I want to feel every blow.”

Eira exhales in relief. This she can talk about.

She describes Radahn raging out of the sky, lighting up the Wailing Dunes. Freyja is an eager audience. She gasps at all the right moments. But even as Eira tells her story, half her mind lingers on the phrase “call you.” She wonders why Miquella did not call her to the Scadulands. Trina is so fond of her. If she is part of Miquella, shouldn’t they agree?

Trina holds Eira in her dreams that night. She does not shiver or weep this time, but she holds very tight. It’s as if she is bracing herself for something.

“The tower is sealed. He seeks to open the way,” she says.

She kisses Eira’s cheek and departs.

~~~

She is close now.

The armored one has gone. A noise in the woods drew her away. The other girl-child is alone and asleep. Easy.

Soon she will see what this little one carries.

She creeps closer on silent feet. She can be a shadow when she chooses, a darker shape against the dark. Weightless until she is not. She has perfect command of her body. Her skin is a map of scars she made herself, and each one marks a step on her journey. She is proud of them. She never reached the spiral’s summit, but she kept the old ways.

She watches the girl-child’s chest rise and fall. Her ears are old but still keen enough to hear this young one’s heart. Blood beating like distant battle-drums. She aligns her own breathing with it. How she loves this sacred visceral music - but she will not kill yet. Perhaps not at all. First she will see.

Tenderly, she sets her cirques to the girl-child’s throat.

The young one’s eyes snap open. She goes very still. Her pulse flutters wildly through the metal at her throat. 

“Why haven’t you killed me yet?” she whispers. 

She who is called a curseblade lets out a low sound: half growl, half longing. She cannot help herself. The magic within the girl-child calls to her like an oasis in a desert. One cirque slips from her hand. She brushes at the girl-child’s chest, trying to touch what lies beneath the skin. She needs it. It’s been so long since she touched the spiral.

“Is this what you sense?” the young one asks.

A glow wells up through her clothes: a ring of twisting horns or rays, rippling with all the colors of the life. Not the spiral, but grown from the same roots. An anchor, perhaps, or a missing link in the great current.

The curseblade’s breath shudders out of her. A knot comes loose, and her soul-deep thirst eases. For a moment she is whole.

“You can’t take it,” the girl-child says. “I’m going to put it in the Elden Ring and make a new order. I want to give all life a fighting chance.”

The curseblade strokes the rune with one long-nailed finger. It’s so beautiful. She cannot drink deeply enough. She wants to rip it from this young one’s chest and dissolve into it. But that would not be right. The great current is not hers to possess. It belongs to all and to none. Some of her people forgot that to their cost.

“We don’t have to be enemies,” the young one says, even as she reaches for the jagged spear beside her. “It’s all right.” 

The curseblade’s thoughts begin to buzz.

Nay, little one, nothing is right. The tower folk are divided. Too many grew proud and hasty. They wished to command that which is not to be commanded, and so they stooped to direst blasphemy. They said to me, "Seest thou not that the new ways are better? Never mind our sins, the sins we commit in this world are as naught; this world is as naught; reaching the spiral is all." How dare they say unto me that this world is naught? I, who gave my blood to preserve our sacred Shar, our Darishe! How could they forget that the spiral runneth through this land, from the firmament to the earth’s burning roots? The spiral and the land are one. Yet they fixed their eyes up, ever up, and forgot all else.

But many others did not forget. She did not forget. Her people sent her away for it. They called upon her to fight their wars, and then, secure in their power, they dismissed her. They said she had failed to ascend. This was true - and convenient. The tower’s new leaders feared her sect. They could not abide such stringent adherence to the old ways. They did not wish to hear that ascension comes only of tempering oneself. One’s own pain, and no other’s. 

Thou art no god of ours, they said.

She isn’t, and she no longer wishes to be. Her long life has taught her that struggle is more honorable than victory. The day she has nothing left to temper will be the day she dies.

She caresses the rune once more. A vision explodes across her mind: a helical current, ice and lightning at the summit, fire at the roots, unbroken once more. Her back tingles. For a moment she thinks she could sprout wings - but no, she was never a divine bird warrior. She cannot believe her good fortune. After ages of exile, the key to restoring the ancient Source has fallen into her lap! This will break the Erdtree’s artificial order. Life and death will reign entwined. Creation will be gloriously random, as it was in the beginning. The girl-child holds all this, and yet she went to sleep in the middle of the woods! Do all young creatures think themselves immortal?

The young one touches the curseblade’s mask. Her hand is shaking. “It’s all right,” she says again, with faith enough to carry her to the spiral’s heights.

A twig snaps. Heavy footsteps approach. The curseblade tears herself away from the rune, picks up her fallen cirque, and melts into the shadows. She is hollow and thirsting once more, but the great current still blazes in her mind. Now that she has seen it whole, she will not despair. The long night may be ending at last.

“What was that?” the girl-child’s companion asks. “Are you all right? I’m sorry I left you. I heard a whistle in the woods and some half-naked bastard came at me with claws…”

The curseblade puts a hand to her mask where the girl-child touched it. This young one is interesting. Too soft, perhaps, but brave. She has a heart. If she means to make the world right and avoid prior follies, there are things she ought to see.

The curseblade will watch for now. And when the time comes, she will guide.

~~~

Morgott does not grieve easily. He has never known what to do with sorrow. He could not afford it in the Shunning Grounds, and no more so as Veiled Monarch. He saw plenty of it, though, and he saw what it wrought: starvation, sickness, wounds. Morgott was still young when he decided that would never happen to him. He taught himself to lock his hurt away like his cursed blood. As long as he kept moving, surviving, he did not have to think about it. It could not break him.

And then the Tarnished came to Leyndell, and it all went wrong.

Morgott spilled more than his blood in the sacred court. It was everything he’d ever locked away, a lifetime of pain and shame, refusing to be denied any longer. The Tarnished must have known that. She must have heard it in his scream. That shames Morgott as much as the battle itself.

Since then, Morgott has been unable to put it all back inside. The Erdtree fire broke him and the mending rune broke him again, and now loss has paralyzed him for a third time. He’s been shut in his chamber for days. He keeps thinking of the only time he snuck out with Mohg to watch a play. They hid beneath the amphitheater’s stage. They could just make out the players through the gaps between the boards. Mohg’s little face was rapt. In the slatted light, Morgott saw him mouthing lines, memorizing the players’ best monologues.

Morgott resents himself for dwelling on these things. It’s useless. The childhood Mohg died long ago; Morgott never had any illusions about him renouncing his outer god. That’s a fairy story only the Tarnished would champion. Morgott has no time for it. The Lands Between are still unraveling, and he needs to get up and do something -

“Morgott. This time I won’t leave until you speak to me.”

It seems thinking of the Tarnished has summoned her fellow interloper. Millicent is standing at Morgott’s door. The Omen children are huddled around her legs, Ragna at the fore. She is looking right at Morgott and likely seeing too much.

Morgott lets out a long sigh. “Persuade me.” 

Push me from this precipice. I dare not leap myself.

“What did it feel like to touch the mending rune?” Millicent asks. 

Of course: straight to the heart.

“…light in my veins.”

The words come small and tight. Morgott has never said them aloud before. Now he’s made them real. He feels ill.

“If you do not chase that light, you might just as well have remained in the Shunning Grounds. You will condemn yourself to darkness. You will never know who you could truly be.”

“I knew my place beneath the Erdtree.”

“It was an unjust place.”

“It was Order.”

“That order is broken. It is past time for a new one. For your own sake, learn what it could be. You felt right when you touched the mending rune, yes? Let yourself be right.”

By grace, he thought he was right! Cursed, yes, but rightly so.

But the light in his horns! The spirals out to eternity!

Morgott puts a hand to his weary eyes. “Persuade me.”

“Eira is in the Scadulands. Will you let her roam about beyond your sight?”

Morgott almost laughs. Thou knowest me well, child of rot. The mending rune is too much to contemplate, but the Tarnished is not. He has a duty still.

He straightens up a little. 

“Nay, we cannot allow that.”

~~~

The next morning, Freyja notes a thin line of blood at Eira’s throat. It wasn’t a dream.

“Curseblade,” Freyja names the creature, and spits as if to ward off evil. “They’re quick and they’re fierce. Stay well clear of ‘em. That’s a dance you won’t finish.”

“I hope I have the chance to try.”

“What was that glow inside you?”

There’s no use denying it. “It’s a mending rune, and you’ve got to keep it secret. If I’m right, it’ll make it so that no living thing is ever born cursed.”

Freyja looks up from the ashes of the campfire. Even with her face hidden, her posture conveys wonder. “Is that why Kindly Miquella called you here? You’re going to be his lord?”

“I don’t know for certain. I hope so.”

“Funny - Lady Leda didn’t tell us about you. Well, she probably thinks she’s going to be Kindly Miquella’s lord. She can be a bit too certain about things.”

“I’ve noticed.” Before Freyja can think too hard, Eira adds, “Do you know of a place called the tower? I want to go there. I just…have a feeling.”

“You mean Belurat, most like. It’s not far from here, but the tower folk won’t let us through without a fight. You don’t do anything easy, do you?”

Eira hears a smile in Freyja’s voice.

~~~

Freyja is right: the road to Belurat lies through the great gate in the cliffs near Miquella’s cross. They traverse a dark passage hemmed in by stone, sloping uphill all the while. The sky above turns dull blue: the pall over the spirit-plains is thinner here. Then all at once the rocks release them, and a citadel looms above.

It’s every bit as solid as Leyndell. Its thick outer wall is carved with rows of figures too small to make out at this distance. Peaked roofs and slender towers rise beyond the wall, layer upon layer of verticality. Eira cannot tip her head back far enough to take it all in. She feels tiny. That may well be the point. Perhaps Belurat’s architects wanted visitors to be humbled. They wanted gazes drawn up to the sky.

And there is something up there: a curving structure lofted above the clouds. It blurs into shadow when Eira tries to look at it.

They climb several grand staircases. The steps are lined with charred ghosts and spiral pillars. Why spirals, Eira wonders. She’s rarely seen that shape in the Lands Between, least of all in Leyndell. 

Two people wait at the top of the hill. One is covered entirely in dark, blocky armor. The other wears deep blue-black robes and a cloak pinned with a scarlet badge. His mask is carved with four eye slits and wrinkled like an old man’s skin. A long, neatly kept beard extends beneath it. He lifts a hand as Freyja and Eira approach.

“Another new arrival?” he calls. His voice is clear and strong, though not young. “It seems a bit late for that, no?”

“Who are we to know Kindly Miquella’s ways?” Freyja says. “Sir Ansbach, Sir Moore, may I introduce Eira of Nowhere?”

Ansbach chuckles without mockery. Moore, seated on the ground, nods beneath his helm. “Together. We work together. For Miquella the Kind.”

Eira nods back, smiling. “I hope we can. Pleased to meet you both.”

She lets herself relax. She’s always loved meeting people, and these folk seem amiable enough. So far, Leda is the only unpleasant exception.

“How did you come to join our motley band, Eira of Nowhere?” Ansbach asks. Eira can feel him observing her. There’s a keen mind behind that mask, and no mistake.

“I’m a wanderer,” Eira says, then repeats the story she told Freyja. “Can’t say what about me caught Miquella’s notice.”

“Well, you’re not alone in that. I served as a knight of the Mohgwyn Dynasty when I was young and fearless like you, but my fighting days are done. Scholarship is my pursuit now. I’ve devoted myself to an investigation of Tender Miquella’s journey. I would rather not pledge myself to a new master until I am certain I can be of use.”

Eira tries to keep her face neutral. Why would Miquella summon a knight of Mohg? How far can Eira trust this man? Ansbach has an easy manner, but he holds himself straight and ready. Whatever he may say, he has not forgotten his fighting days. But if he has information, Eira cannot afford to shut him out. She needs to know what Trina is so afraid of.

“Do you know why Miquella is leaving bits of himself behind?” she asks. Another golden stake and crescent stands near Ansbach’s feet. Beneath it sits a little pile of luminous flesh. Buds have sprouted around it, red as blood.

“I regret I do not,” Ansbach says. “I suspect it is some manner of purification, or perhaps penance, though for what I cannot say. It does seem rather severe. We have discovered several such crosses, and no doubt there are more yet unknown to us.”

More? What will be left of Miquella by the end?

“I don’t like this,” Eira says.

“Nor do I. Empyrean flesh is not lightly shed.”

“Do you think he’s in danger? Could he be shedding his flesh to get away from something?”

Ansbach looks at her hard. “That sort of danger would be far beyond us to fight.”

“Is there another cross in this city?”

“Quite possibly. It is a place of great importance in these lands. Do you not sense the power gathered here?”

Eira goes still. Beneath her feet, the earth is thrumming. It’s a deep, slow sound, felt more than heard. The rune in Eira’s chest hums along with it.

“Do you want to come in and explore with us?” she asks.

Ansbach laughs, and the tension breaks. “Oh, no. I’ll leave that to you. The young are immune to peril, no?”

“We pretend we are, at least.”

“I shall wait here in safety, if you will be so kind as to share with me what you learn.”

Eira considers. Unless Ansbach snuck past Leda too, Miquella called him here for a reason. For now it may be more useful to work with him than against him. Eira will keep her secrets, though. She won’t tell him about the mending rune. She certainly won’t tell him about Mohg.

“I’ll see what I can find,” she says.

Ansbach cocks his head. No doubt he heard the caution in Eira’s voice. She senses he respects her for it.

Meanwhile, Freyja finishes up her business with Moore. She’s been perusing the various pots laid out in front of him, and she’s bought some sort of cured meat. It has the greenish tinge of pickled turtle neck. Freyja starts to gnaw on it without reservation.

“Things bring joy to many,” Moore says.

Freyja chuckles through her mouthful. “They do indeed. You’re helping me stay alive, Sir Moore.” She sees Eira looking at her askance. “What? I need my strength.”

~~~

As they enter Belurat’s recessed doors, Eira examines the carved rows of figures. They’re posed in various ways. Some are holding their fists to their chests. Others have lifted their hands in prayer or dance. A society of warrior dancers, then? Eira likes that idea. She also knows it will make for difficult foes.

A deep, dim room yawns beyond the doors. Smoke from the braziers on the floor clouds the air. At the back of the room stands an altar to a familiar emaciated figure. This one still has its head, and it looks much like the horned Curseblade who accosted Eira last night. Two curving staircases flank the altar. Bloody footprints lead up the one on the left. The steps are crawling with scorpions, as is the floor. They click and scuttle between pools of light. Some are investigating the footprints. A giant scorpion lurks behind the altar, near as big as a lion guardian. Its stinger glints in the torchlight.

Eira thinks of Ainsel River’s ant caves. The sounds, the smells.

Freyja looks at her. Eira nods.

They both charge.

Freyja rushes the giant scorpion behind the statue. She somersaults over her greatsword and deals it a blow that cracks its carapace. Meanwhile Eira incants Lansseax’s red glaive, sending sparks across the floor. The lightning flips the little scorpions onto their backs and leaves them twitching. It doesn’t take long to clear the room. Freyja brings her sword down with a last crack, and the chamber falls silent.

Freyja wipes greenish blood from her face. “I don’t much like crawling things,” she says cheerfully.

“They’re all right as long as they’re small.”

“And not in hordes.”

Eira makes for the bloodied staircase. She crouches at the base and squints through the gloom. The footprints have long dried, but the golden flecks within them still gleam.

Miquella, please be safe. I’m starting to think Trina has good reason to be scared.

Freyja puts her hand on Eira’s shoulder. “We’ll find him. We can follow his trail in here, with no grass or earth to hide it.”

“I’ve come too far, Freyja, I can’t - if something has happened to him, I don’t know what  I - ”

“It’ll be all right.” Freyja pulls Eira to her feet. “If he’s in danger, he’s got your spear and my sword to get him out.”

I hope this is the kind of danger I can fight with my spear.

Upstairs, another giant scorpion lashes out from an alcove. Further up, they emerge into relative brightness. Doors carved with more dancing figures stand closed ahead. To the left is a storeroom; to the right, a courtyard. Ash coats its stones. In the center, a fountain spews yellowish water. More of it runs down a wall on one side of the plaza. The place looks sick. 

Burnt ghosts crowd the courtyard - not a single living Hornsent to be found. Most are kneeling or slumped. A few raise heavy cleavers. They disperse into black smoke when they fall. Eira wonders if she’s setting them free or merely scattering them to the winds, their spirits as restless as ever. She tries to recall the steps of a cleansing dance. She thinks she only performed it once. Her memory is foggy - something to do with dead soldiers? She senses that the ritual nearly killed her.

Eira doesn’t know if her dances could put these blackened ghosts to rest. Something ancient and foul binds them to their home. Eira can practically taste it. It clots the air like rot.

The courtyard opens onto a main street lined with residences. The stone is finely cut and laid, with carved spirals climbing the joins between walls. Save for this, the buildings are largely unadorned. By contrast, the bridge above the street is hung with swathes of purple fabric. Eira recalls similar cloth covering the roofs of that burnt-out town on the plains. Here it reminds her of stage curtains.

She has little time to look. Ghosts posted along the bridge lift their hands and send pale gold spirals coiling down towards her. Eira grabs Freyja’s hand and breaks into a run. All the while she thinks, Where have I seen that shape before?

She and Freyja pound beneath the bridge and duck into a larder. It’s full of shelves, clay vessels, and sacks of grain no doubt long spoiled. Ghosts sift through the produce as if they’ve never died. They take no notice of their intruders. Eira wants to speak to them, but Freyja tugs her out of the room.

Beyond the larder, a staircase winds past gnarled trees thickly hung with moss. Pottery shards crunch underfoot. Eira thinks of the Haligtree, the candelabra burning by desks where no one will ever sit writing. Belurat has that same hollowness. This place is a mausoleum.

But it isn’t wholly dead. As Eira and Freyja crest the stairs, a figure strides into view. He is fully twice Eira’s height and sturdy as an oak. He is armored in metal-studded leather and draped in a gold toga. His exposed skin looks solid enough to be steel. A somber horned mask conceals his face. Two curved greatswords gleam in his hands, their cutting edges carved into tangled horns. They look heavy. Everything about him, in fact, conveys weight and power. He could kick Eira straight through a wall.

Freyja retreats down the stairs and presses herself to the nearest wall. Be careful, she mouths.

Eira ignores her. Her mind has fixed on a single thought: This is what Morgott should be! Solemn, dignified, unashamed to be seen.

She pulls her warhawk talons from her belt and steps into the warrior’s path.

He stops. Eira readies herself to dodge a kick, but none comes. Instead the horned warrior lifts one sword and points it at Eira, passing it down from her head to her chest. He stops there. The blade trembles almost imperceptibly. He has sensed the mending rune.

“You’re not cursed. Why not?” Eira asks.

The horned warrior clangs his blades together. A challenge.

“You know what I carry inside me, don’t you?” Eira says. Does he want to take it, or only test her worthiness to bear it?

The horned warrior advances one heavy step.

Eira plants her feet. “Pray with me, then.”

They clash with a bright ring of steel.

Chapter Text

Eira dancing, dancing with a horned warrior

How came she here?

he a bladed wall and she a wind

I did not call her. 

waking echoes from streets long-silent. Twinblades meet greatswords. Eira’s lean arms strain, her feet slide. Sweat glistens on her skin. Her opponent has already kicked her in the chest hard enough to rearrange her bones. He is stronger, but the light in Eira’s eyes says she is not beaten yet.

Leda did not call her.

The horned warrior breaks the deadlock, shoves Eira into a wall and swings for her head. She drops. The warrior’s momentum carries him into the wall and steel scrapes sparks from stone. In that moment, Eira rolls to his back and swipes her twinblades across the hollow behind his knee. The warrior falls like a boulder.

This one is dangerous, Trina. Who called her?

Miquella has been watching her. He watched her as he drove a golden stake into his heart on the sickly plains of Scadu Altus. He watched her as he shed his flesh at earth-sunken Moorth. Now he watches from this blue field, where he is the only red. Eira is not supposed to be here, but here she is, making allies, toppling foes, attracting interest. Offering a heal to the horned warrior who almost took off her head.

(A flutter in Miquella’s heartless chest)

The warrior lifts a hand in refusal. His fingers tremble as he reaches for the mending rune glowing through Eira’s clothes. Then he gives her the first words he has spoken in ages: 

“Alad. Below.”

She will not stop, will she?

Miquella does not want her. Eira is strong and kind, but she lets people go. She gave Alexander his last duel; Diallos, the defense of Jarburg; Thops, the key to Raya Lucaria. She did not give Hyetta eyes, but others did, and they melted her from the inside. However kindly she may have meant it, she sent them to their destruction when she could have saved them. And Trina thinks this woman a suitable consort? Miquella could not abide a lord who accepts suffering, no matter her concern for the forsaken.

I will have Radahn. He will return just as he was in life, and I will never be afraid again. I will never fail anyone.

Look away now.

He is too close to falter. He can travel so much faster now. He can feel himself separating from his ravaged flesh, losing feeling, the need for air. Gold gleams beneath blood. An ethereal new body is coalescing, the beginnings of the form he will take upon his ascension. Miquella is hatching at last from his bloody cocoon.

Bad luck to have attracted a Tarnished at once so compelling, determined, and impossible. He will consider it another test of his resolve. A last temptation to overcome.

Now. He must address this now.

Trina. You have been hiding your dreamwalking from me. Was it you who called her here?

~~~

“Are you feeling better?”

Eira winces and presses her glowing seal further into her side. Maybe that will increase her heal’s effectiveness. This hard stone bench certainly isn’t helping. “I can breathe without feeling a knife between my ribs. That’ll have to do until we find another shard of grace.”

“Rest here a while,” Freyja says.

“You too. You just fought that…whoever he was.”

Freyja looks across the courtyard, the rows and rows of stakes wrapped in horns. Some now lie splintered on the grass. They were broken during Freyja’s fight with the phantom. He had a strange weapon, a heavy thrusting sword as long as he was tall. The blade branched like fire hardened into metal.

“One of Messmer’s lot,” Freyja says. “Messmer led the war on the Hornsent.”

“And it seems he’s not fond of Tarnished either.”

“He’s sworn to destroy anyone the Golden Order holds graceless.”

Eira takes a cautious breath. (How many times has she broken her ribs in the past few days?) The pain has dulled, but it spikes if she inhales carelessly. The horned warrior kicked her hard enough to crack the wall behind her. Her vision was blackening by the time she ended the fight. Freyja half-carried her out of the street. Eira did not see the horned warrior limp off. She imagines him slumped somewhere, much like her, working his own heal.

Old anger smolders in her, too well-worn to explode. “I’m getting proper sick of that sort of thing. It’s the same everywhere I go. It always leads to this.” 

Eira sweeps the courtyard with her arm. The pool slick with yellowish slime. So many memorial markers.

She isn’t so naïve as to think the Hornsent were any different from the Golden Order. It’s no coincidence that Belurat reminds Eira of Leyndell. This is a citadel, the heart of an empire. Its leaders were clearly powerful. That always breeds arrogance and suffering. But the ghosts hunched on benches around the courtyard are not powerful. These are just people who lost loved ones.

“Kindly Miquella has seen it too,” Freyja says. “He’ll put a stop to all this.”

“I don’t think even he can stop people from fighting. People will always fight. But if he rules with kindness, he can keep this sort of war from happening again.”

“If he were here, do you think he could tell us who or what Alad is?”

Eira laughs, winces. From the lofty to the practical within seconds - that’s Freyja. “You like to keep your feet on the ground, don’t you?”

“I’m not much for grand affairs like yours. You’re a dreamer,” Freyja says with warmth. “If Alad is a person, it’s a bit strange they have a name. Hornsent said names mean little to his people because ‘this world is passing’ or some such nonsense.”

“Maybe the Hornsent didn’t always believe that, and Alad is older than that belief.”

“A god?”

Eira hadn’t thought of that. She knows little about Belurat’s gods. She’s seen only one statue in the city: the guardian on the altar downstairs, which resembled a curseblade. This stands in stark contrast to Leyndell. The royal capital positively overflows with statuary. 

Eira considers the tree on the plinth in the center of the fouled pool. It’s large, with two twining trunks and a sprawling canopy. Its leaves drape down towards the courtyard like streams of pale water. Its central placement suggests it’s important. Belurat honored this tree, either for its shape or its age. Perhaps this is how the Hornsent prefer to depict the sacred: through natural objects, not crafted ones.

“I don’t think there are any gods left in this city,” Eira says. “I think Alad is a person - someone who can help me.”

She touches her throbbing side once more.

Or test me, more like.

~~~

Morgott is nothing if not prepared. All his life he has held that readiness is next to godliness, and this time is no exception. Anyone who approaches the Erdtree in his absence will have to fight through layers of soldiers, and beyond that, his own projection. The defenders scarcely needed orders. Morgott’s captains know his tactics like their own hearts. They broke two sieges together, survived together. Morgott trusts them to do what must be done.

He almost wishes he didn’t. Were his soldiers less disciplined, he would have an excuse to stay in Leyndell. As it is, however, it isn’t long before he exhausts his list of preparations. By the time Millicent appears at his door with the Pureblood medal, nothing stands between Morgott and the Scadulands. 

Millicent says nothing, nor does she give Morgott the medal. She’s leaving the choice to him.

Choose for us both, girl; I would thank thee for it!

Against every screaming instinct, Morgott takes the medal. It’s like putting his hand into fire: it takes that kind of will. 

He runs his thumb over the absurd horned crown and sash. Mohg had a phrase for times like this: The crayfish is out of the pipe. The damage is wrought, he meant. One cannot coax an angry crayfish back into its hiding place. Fight or flee.

The fire is out of the forge, Morgott amends. He can think of no clever phrase for the mending rune and the chaos it has made of his life. Somehow that is harder to think about than the Erdtree fire. Perhaps it touches him nearer.

Morgott lowers the medal so Millicent can reach it. She puts her hand on it, her dull gold eyes never leaving his. She is ready: shamshir at her waist, satchel on her back. Oh, to be so young and certain! Until recently, Morgott was certain too. He vows he’ll be certain again when all this is over. Come what may, he’ll have answers.

He closes his hand over Millicent’s.

~~~

Below, the horned warrior said, but Belurat insists on above. The city leads upwards by design, over red-tiled roofs and rubble. Most of the buildings are crumbling, as if a vast arm swept their top halves away like a child knocking down blocks. Bricks litter the streets. Bricks and ghosts and towers. Belurat is a forest of stone. Eira tries to categorize all the different kinds of towers: squat, slender, connected by bridges, built atop roofs, pierced by arched windows. None of them have glass. Eira is grateful for that: she doesn’t need to see her reflection to know what a mess she is.

They pass what looks like a pulpit. Its carved railings are swathed in purple fabric and gold fringe. Around it Eira hears distant singing, like it’s echoing from a different time. She’s heard such things before. When night fell outside Leyndell, Eira sometimes felt drumbeats thumping amidst the craters and perfumer greatbolts. The spiritual residue of war, she guessed. Belurat’s song is even fainter, but Eira can feel its pulse. She taps her hip in time with it and wonders why she can’t hear it clearer. She’s no spirit tuner, but she was a spirit dancer. She’s never had trouble sensing the otherworldly.

Or maybe she’s just hallucinating. The pain in her poorly healed chest has reached a blinding pitch.

After an excruciating walk, she and Freyja reach a lift. It takes them down to the other side of the locked doors they saw when they entered Belurat. To Eira’s eye the carved figures on the doors are moving. Gods, she needs grace.

Freyja pushes the doors open. Then she slings Eira’s arm over her shoulders and helps her shuffle to the nearby shard of gold. Eira crumples beside it. Its warmth washes over her, and the pain recedes. A vise releases her lungs. She takes a great breath and closes her eyes.

When she opens them again, she is facing a footprint, brown-red against the pale stone. Too small to be a horned warrior’s. Flecked with gold.

I’m not the only one wounded just now, am I, Miquella? 

She finds no comfort in that thought.

“What was he like?” she asks. “Miquella, I mean.”

“He was very beautiful,” Freyja says softly.

“Of course. But what was he like?”

“Oh, I scarcely recall. I was in a wretched state, and he didn’t linger long. He spoke to me gently. His voice made me forget my pain and fear. I felt warm. Full of light. Well, you know how it is - you’ve met him too.”

“Right,” Eira says. The lie tastes sour. “I just hoped he said more to you than he did to me.” And she’s aching for something more solid than hope. Just a touch of golden fingers on her shoulder would put her fears to rest.

Freyja pats her hand. “I’m afraid not. I’m sure he’ll say more when we find him. Just hold to that.”

When, Eira thinks. It has to be when.

~~~

Mohgwyn Palace is quiet. Dead Albinaurics lie strewn across the floor. No one is guarding the cocoon on its pelvic throne. Mohg’s body is gone. Returned to his Mother’s womb, perhaps.

Once again, nothing stops Morgott from chasing his ruin.

~~~

Freyja rests her sword on the roof tiles. “And here we are again.”

Eira looks out over a field of red roofs, all alike. Cobbled avenues run between them like dry rivers. The scum in a fouled fountain glints dully in the sun. Eira has seen this view several times already. All the streets lead them back to the rooftops. Even when they start to descend, they never get far before an impassable pile of rubble forces them up again. It’s as if Belurat has a will, even in ruin, and that will is turned towards the heavens.

Shading her eyes, Eira looks at the shadowy structure suspended above. Now that she’s closer, she sees that it is in fact another city, all curving walkways and crumbling pillars. At times it looks solid; at others, Eira can see through the shadows to the yellowed sky behind. The structure seems caught between being and un-being. Is it a lost part of Belurat - the most important part? Is that why all the city is bent towards it?

Endings happen in high places: Eira’s journey taught her that. Maybe it isn’t yet time to unveil the mysterious floating structure.

Eira chews on a loose strand of hair. As usual, her hasty half-ponytail is less than effective. “The streets are no help. I think we’ll have to be sneakier, go some way this place has forgotten.”

“Back alleys and gutters, is it?”

“Afraid so.”

Freyja grins, not quite carefree. “No matter. I’ve survived gutters before.”

“Can’t be worse than the Aeonia.”

~~~

Morgott’s ghosts are screaming. Sound bleeds into sight; the rage of a hundred souls clouds his vision. He clamps a hand around his horns - he should have cut all the damned things off when he was young - and sets his will against the wraiths. Be silent.

As his vision clears, Morgott discerns the object of their fury: a metal hulk lying in the fields some distance away. Its charred frame is broadly human in form, two arms and two legs. The metalwork is open like a woven basket. A haze surrounds it: more wraiths, or rather, echoes thereof. The spirits are gone, but an imprint of their pain and despair remains. Morgott feels it like a stone in his stomach.

“Some manner of golem?” Millicent asks. Morgott envies her unawareness of the wraiths. “Perhaps Eira brought it down.”

Morgott grits his teeth against the spiritual clamor within him. “No other would be so foolish.”

“I see no sign of Torrent. He and Eira must be long gone. How will we find them in this unknown land?”

“Let us seek a forsaken place. There will the Tarnished be.”

~~~

They force their way down against Belurat’s will. A rope ladder hidden in a shadowed corner brings them to the sewers. A sluggish stream of foul water runs through the tunnel’s center. It’s the same color as the water in the fountains and pools. It reeks of rotting vegetation and something more dire. Belurat’s cisterns must be tainted. Ghosts wander the water’s edge - nothing but ghosts again. All commoners, dressed in loose tunics.

“Do you think any of them are Alad?” Eira asks, picking her way across cracked cobbles.

“The smell is the same,” Freyja mutters behind her.

“The same as what? The Aeonia?”

“No, it’s… Never mind. I don’t think we’ll find Alad in this tunnel. The warrior who gave you that name had fine weapons and armor: he must hold high rank. That sort of person doesn’t speak with the common folk.”

A ghost sinks to his knees by the water. The motion looks automatic, like he’s done it so many times he’s forgotten why. He seems unaware of Eira’s presence. Consciousness has eroded from his soul, leaving only habit.

Eira sighs. “And the common folk are too far gone to speak to us.”

How many puzzles has she had to solve with little or no help? Not for the first time, she thinks, Miquella, you could have made this easier.

The sewer tunnel soon opens onto a swamp. The sludge is thicker here, the smell of decay stronger. Towers lie broken like felled trunks. Red-roofed buildings list and sink. Trees stripped of foliage dot the shore. Dead branches straggle up from the murk, catching at Eira’s trousers. The only things not broken or breaking are the walls. They rear high and solid on all sides, unstained by the swamp. Their precisely spaced arches speak to a more prosperous time. They look solemn, and proud too. If they could speak they would no doubt tell many stories.

Feverish shivers seize Eira’s limbs. The slime is poison - why wouldn’t it be? She pushes through clumps of lily pads and tries to ignore her squelching boots. Thank grace she learned that cleansing fire spell in Liurnia. She’ll need it when she gets out of this, and Freyja too.

“It could be worse, eh?” Eira ventures. “It’s not scarlet rot.”

Freyja does not answer. Eira hears her breathing shallow beneath her helm.

“You’re quiet,” Eira says.

“I’ve nothing to say. I don't think we’re going to find Alad in a place like this -”

The sludge ripples beneath their feet. The ripples become tremors, quakes. Then a huge worm bursts through the surface. Green drips from its flailing, stunted limbs.

Eira almost throws down her seal. “Marika’s tits - this again!”

~~~

Morgott soon sees that all of the Scadulands could be called forsaken. Blackened ghosts litter the fields, roads, and crumbling villages. Their curses and lamentations follow him like a train. Morgott knows well the aftermath of war, but this is different. He’s never known a conflict to leave so many spirits unable to pass on. 

The fields are laden with spirit-graves. Spiral pillars stand between them, the same shape Morgott saw when he touched the mending rune. He avoids them. He does not know what he may envision if he goes too close.

Eventually he and Millicent choose a place that looks more forsaken than most: a maw in the cliffside, lined with metal teeth. From the cages strewn outside, this is a dungeon, and it’s meant to be hidden. This entrance lies apart from any settlement.

Morgott’s wraiths fall silent as he climbs past the broken portcullis, like they’ve all been snuffed at once. That unsettles him more than their shrieking.

Inside, the earth falls away. A pit yawns open, ringed by narrow paths wrapping ever downward. Morgott’s breath turns to mist in the air. Ghostflame torches shed blue, heatless light. Cages and chains hang from the cavern roof, along with large jars like those that bear soldiers’ remains to minor Erdtrees. They murmur to each other in ceaseless clinking voices.

The pillars sunk into the walls are smooth and rounded. Most of them stand in the dungeon’s deeper reaches. Their fine sculpting does not match the rest of the gaol, with its earth sheared crudely away into bridges and paths. Morgott wonders if they predate the dungeon itself. Echoes linger around them: deep-voiced chants entwining, and beneath, a song almost too low and slow to discern. The sound is faint, like the spiritual haze around the golem. These songs have not been sung for a long time. Far fresher are the phantom screams. They drown out the older echoes, the chants and the low, slow song of the earth. This place is soaked in pain.

By grace, only on Gelmir did I sense such a residuum of agony.

Morgott braces himself and begins to descend.

Ghosts are strewn along the downward path. Many are crouched in corners with their hands over their heads. They are small and horned. Morgott has never seen their kind before. In the Lands Between, horns grow wild, but these people’s growths are short, neat, and confined to their heads. The ghosts do not explain. They just whimper.

Yes, this is the sort of place the Tarnished would be. She is drawn to suffering like moths to light.

Behind Morgott, Millicent is moving carefully, no doubt reluctant to make noise. She wraps her arms around herself. “I do not like this place. It is haunted, like the Aeonia.”

“We are agreed.”

The stone in Morgott’s stomach grows heavier as he looks at the ghosts. He does not know these horned folk, Crucible folk, yet something tugs him towards them. A recognition deeper than thought.

Down and down they go, paths and bridges over air. Emptiness presses in from all sides. Burnt ghosts lunge from corners; others kneel and tremble. The clinking chains above grow maddening. Morgott’s wraiths reawaken; soon he is pushing through a rising swell of spectral voices. Thus far he sees no obvious cause for their agitation, nor for the intense anguish oozing from every surface. The gaol’s upper levels are spartan: cells and mess halls with bare wooden tables, nothing that would leave such deep spiritual scars. That means the source lies further below. Morgott’s wraiths confirm it, growing louder with every downward step. Most of them are afraid. A few are silent. That silence feels somehow spiteful.

The deeper they go, the more extravagant the architecture becomes. The pillars Morgott saw above bore straight and sheer into the earth. Some have crumbled away and now protrude from the cavern roof like broken teeth. Others surround an altar to a massive jar second only to Caelid’s titan. The echoes grow clearer: the solemn chanting and the screams. Morgott senses them as two distinct spiritual layers. The screams are newer. He becomes ever more convinced that whatever drenched this place in agony was not its original purpose. Long before the prisoners and gaolers, this was sacred earth.

Then they reach a corridor where icy spikes have grown amidst piles of jars. The horned ghost nearby is not too far gone for speech. Morgott discerns words amidst the wash of terror:

Not the jar, please, anything but that! I’ll be good, I swear it, I’ll never do wrong again!

Morgott stops cold, and Millicent knocks into his back. “What is it?”

What new heresy indeed? Jars honor the dead and nourish the Erdtree. They are not instruments of torture.

“Delirious ramblings, let us hope,” Morgott says.

In the passage ahead, one of the jars begins to move.

~~~

“Hold still. It bites a bit.”

From behind, Eira presses her burning fist to Freyja’s chest. The Redmane tenses but does not wince. After a few seconds, her shivers stop. She gives herself a shake, flicks sludge from her sandals. “That’s damned useful. I wish I’d known that spell in Caelid.”

Eira and Freyja felled the tree spirit in short order. Freyja struck the final blow: a hard somersault into the creature’s woody head. The battle brought her to life, but now that it’s over, she’s retreated back into herself. Now they are sitting on a bare patch of ground on one side of the swamp, scraping sludge from their feet. Freyja has hardly said a word since they sat down. There’s still no sign of anyone likely to be Alad, just man-flies buzzing around a half-sunken house in the middle of the mire.

Eira pounds her own chest with her ignited seal. Flame snaps over her, and she welcomes the bite. Her feverish trembling subsides.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Of course. I’ve fought worse battles than that.”

“That’s not what I mean. You seem upset. I’ve never seen you this way before.”

“This place troubles me.” 

“Is that really all?”

Freyja rises and walks beside the high wall, rubbing her arms to banish the last of her chills. “Wouldn’t it trouble anyone? This was the ugliest sort of war, no dignity, no glory - Eira. Come here.”

Eira follows Freyja to a bend in the wall. They lean around it together. Not far away, on another patch of dry ground, stands a horned warrior. He wears the same armor and solemn horn-crowned mask as his comrade upstairs. He is looking out at the mire with twin greatswords hanging loose in his hands. His posture conveys quiet despair.

Alad? Freyja mouths.

It’s worth asking, though if he wants to fight, they’ll have to do it in the swamp. Eira’s flesh crawls at the thought. After the tree spirit, she’s had quite enough of that.

Eira motions for Freyja to stay put and steps out from behind the wall. She grips her seal in her left hand and holds her right at the ready, poised to sling Gransax’s bolt off her back. As she approaches, she assesses the warrior’s substantial height and solidity. This one is even bigger than his fellow. Eira grimaces with remembered pain and braces for more.

For the Lands Between. For all the forsaken.

“Alad?”

The horned warrior twitches like he’s been burned and whirls on her. Metal and leather clink ominously. 

Eira steps back with hands raised. “It’s all right. Your comrade sent me. He said I’d find you below.”

Let me be right.

The horned warrior looks her up and down. Then, just as his fellow did, he points one of his horned greatswords at her and passes it down her body. He stops at her chest. Draws a sharp breath.

“Who?” he says. His voice is a hoarse rumble, as if he hasn’t used it in a long time.

Eira doesn’t dare breathe. “Who sent me? He didn’t tell me his name. He was…on duty, I suppose, not far from a courtyard full of memorial markers.”

Alad mutters something in a liquid tongue Eira has never heard before. She guesses he’s saying, My brother-in-arms sends me an outlander? He has gone mad.

“I won our duel,” Eira says carefully, one eye on the sword leveled at her chest. “And I have this.”

Alad takes her meaning. His swordpoint wavers. “It cannot be. The spiral is broken.”

“But not gone,” Eira says. She hopes Alad is referring to the Crucible. “This will mend it. I will go into the Erdtree and put this rune into the Elden Ring. I came here looking for an Empyrean to go with me, someone who will make sure that folk can live as they are. His name is Miquella. Have you seen him?”

“Nay.”

Then Alad goes very still. He tilts his head towards the shadowed city above. Slowly he lowers the sword pointed at Eira.

“It cannot be,” he murmurs again. 

“What’s up there?” Eira asks.

Alad shakes himself, looks across the swamp again. “The tower turned away. See the ruin it wrought. The spiral is broken, the greater and the less.”

“The tower turned away from what?”

“There is no salvation.”

“Not that I can give you,” Eira agrees, “but I can give you a chance to start again.”

Alad touches Eira’s chest, just below her collarbone. The rune within her flares to prismatic life. Alad’s breath leaves him slowly, and his shoulders sink. Eira realizes how difficult it must be for this proud creature to rely on a hornless stranger, to see her carrying something so precious to him and his people. How long has he been trapped in the Scadulands, staring at the mire, unable to stave off decay?

He regards Eira one moment more. Then his hand closes iron-hard around her arm. 

“Come. The lion shall judge thee.”

~~~

What crawls out of the jar is ungraspable. Morgott’s mind denies the truth of it. It is a flayed snail or turtle, or a cave creature with naked skin never meant to know the sun. Surely not a woman, reed-thin and staggering, legs buckling under the weight of the massed flesh on her back, a tumor expelling meaty projectiles. 

This cannot be what the horned folk make of their condemned.

~~~

Alad shows them to a long ladder out of the swamp. It’s so long that Eira thinks there must be an easier path. Maybe Alad is testing her by being as inconvenient as possible. 

He leads them back up the lift by the inner gates, down a rubble-choked street, and into a circular chamber whose rear wall has collapsed. A huge scorpion clings darkly to the tumbled brickwork. Alad strides past it as if it doesn’t exist. He climbs the curved staircase along one wall and jumps the gap in its broken center. It’s a wide break, but he lands with long-legged ease on the other side. He folds his arms expectantly.

Eira hesitates. Something gold is gleaming through a side door, and she wants to look but she doesn’t, doesn’t want to know what else Miquella has shed. 

She backs up and takes the stairs at a run. She only just clears the gap and stumbles to her knees. Her legs are burning. Alad does not help her up. He does not mock either.

Below, Freyja calls, “I’ll find another way up!”

“Be safe,” Eira says.

A curseblade melts from the shadows at the top of the stairs. She draws herself up, her cirques glinting. Eira cannot tell if this is the same individual who accosted her in the woods. She’s wearing the same golden mask, but then again, all her kind may do so.

Alad gives the curseblade a terse nod and speaks a single word in his language. After a moment, the curseblade steps aside. Eira hears her breath shudder and knows that she too senses the mending rune.

On the landing outside, another set of carved doors stands closed. Alad opens them with a touch of his broad palm. Beyond lies a large, open-air chamber. Arcaded galleries festooned with gold surround a floor with alternating stripes of grass and stone. The central stone strip is adorned with carved lotus flowers. Spirals proliferate: the galleries’ golden curtains are braided, and the pillars are coiled.

Eira knows a stage when she sees one.

Alad calls out, his voice ringing. His language sounds ancient. Eira hears the same word repeated several times. It sounds like “ilim.”

Another voice answers in the common tongue: a woman’s rasp, with the same lilting accent as Alad.

“O horn-decked beast from higher sphere delivered, take root inside the tower’s sculpted keepers. Dance in judgment of this outlander who beareth the spiral. If she be fit, make it known to we who keep the old ways still. Spirits of kin long fallen, we beg of you, rise! Rise and lend your voices to this most sacred dance!”

The figure slumped at the far end of the floor stirs. Its back is draped in dark red and armored in leather plates. Its head is a horned lion’s, its mane pale and lank. Two pairs of feet take position beneath it. Gray-skinned hands lock the beast’s jaw into place. Its eyes ignite in green.

A smile spreads over Eira’s face. The lion is a dancer. Two of them!

“One blow,” Alad says, and backs away.

She only has to land one hit? Then this will not be easy.

The lion roars. In the galleries, a hundred bodiless voices begin to sing.

~~~

Further down, more jars. A labyrinth of them, all sizes, piled like barricades. More jar-dwellers.

Some attack shrieking and stumbling. Others huddle in their pots like hermit crabs. Morgott closes off heart and mind and gives them quick deaths. He has rarely seen creatures in more obvious torment. He dares not think too much about it; his blood will boil to fire if he does. Morgott dislikes torture - clean kills always, Godfrey taught him - and this is beyond the pale. This is worse than the worst reports from Rykard’s dungeons, the experiments, the twisting of nature, for which Morgott tore Gelmir apart -

Millicent fights beside him, her face white and set. Morgott roots himself in her to keep from thinking.

Because a suspicion is creeping through him like a poisonous vine. A familiar inborn shame.

~~~

The lion dives and drives its jaw into the floor. Eira backs away just in time to avoid the beast’s next lunge. Wooden jaws snap closed inches from her body. She retreats further without counterattacking. If she only has to land one blow to win, she only has to take one blow to lose - and possibly die. She needs to be careful.

The spectral music swells. Guttural chanting punctuates a hard-edged melody and strings. The lion rears upright and turns in place, and wind pours from its mouth. Eira scrambles away from the first two revolutions. The wind tugs her hair from her ponytail. Then, on the third turn, Eira sees.

The lion’s movement has a rhythm. It’s turning in time with the music.

~~~

The song has a clear pulse. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. That must be the key. This is as much a performance as a battle, maybe more so.

The lion rears, holds…and slams its head into the ground. It struck on a strong beat, just as Eira guessed. She retreats without a scratch, timing her own backwards leap with the music. 

The lion lifts and twists through the air on a current of wind. It bites the ground at Eira’s feet, rises, and sprays the floor with a tempest. Gransax’s bolt carries Eira above it. Her red lightning slices luridly through the storm. It flies past the lion’s head. Eira is half a beat too late. That’s all right. She knows the game now.

The dancers click the lion’s jaw twice; then it lunges for her. She pivots aside in time to avoid a spray of dirt. She and the lion reset their positions in opposite directions, she to the right, the dancers to the left. For a moment their movements align.

Eira smiles. She was born for this.

~~~

She forgets Miquella, the Erdtree, the crushing weight on her heart. All that matters is her feet on stone and grass, her legs and the dancers’, vibrations in her chest each time the lion strikes. 

She starts to mirror the lion’s movements as if they are partners. When the lion drops into a predatory crouch, following a deep-voiced melody, Eira does too. They pace around each other, fellow hunters. Neither attempts to strike. Eira senses this is part of the ritual too. A performance ends at an appointed time, and that time has not yet come. To win, she must choose the proper moment.

The lion becomes more aggressive once Eira starts to mirror it. She cannot tell if it - the dancers? The horn-decked beast? - is pleased or angry.

~~~

They dance faster. Eira lingers closer and closer to the beast’s lunges. She spins away just as its jaws clack shut and sends lightning waves through its spilling wind. The creature has a fierce beauty. Despite its bulk, it flows like a current. Its dancers must be immensely skilled. 

The lion attacks three times in sequence: a spiral charge, a bite, then a slam into the ground. The dancers delay the last so that it lands off the beat. That catches Eira off-guard. She stumbles away and lifts her spear in salute. She is delighted. If this were peacetime, she’d sit and watch the lion dance for hours.

~~~

The music changes. Still the same three-count pulse, but more agitated now. The lion coils upwards and looses a shattering roar. Eira’s heart races as golden lightning sears down all across the stage. Her ears ring with the crackling. She welcomes it in. 

I can do that too.

She lifts her seal and splits the sky with her own magic. The ancient storm roars. Red lightning strikes gold: the colors of the Crucible. 

The singing grows. The unseen audience is excited.

The lion hovers and twists towards Eira once, twice. She springs away from the final slam, tucking her whole body into the air. If the dancers can show off, so can she. She thinks that’s part of the test.

The world dissolves into crashing bolts. Sparks nip at Eira’s skin as she slips between lightning pillars. Make me fierce, she thinks.

A deeper part of her adds, Gods, I love this.

~~~

The lion’s breath now pours forth electricity. Eira sends her own red waves into it, lofted above on Lansseax’s glaive. The lion answers with swift-thrown bolts. Red and gold clash in midair with a mighty crack and shower of sparks. The chants grow into shouts, almost drowning out the melody. 

Eira watches the dancers’ feet beneath the lion as they back away. They are not merely retreating; they are swaying to mimic a beast’s rocking hips.

Eira matches their footwork amidst a surge of song.

~~~

Just when her vision is filling with sparks, the lion changes patterns. This time, ice is in its roar. A chill descends on the stage. Now they dance amidst a blizzard.

The lion sinks its fangs into the ground. Where it bites, fangs of ice emerge. Eira poises just out of the way, then swipes them apart with her spear. The lion headbutts the floor, this time sprouting a wider field of sharp, frozen grass. Eira lifts above it with Gransax’s bolt electrified. Her red lightning flies over the lion’s head: a deliberate miss. She could have ended the duel right then, but she didn’t want to. The unseen audience is still singing. It’s not yet time for final bows.

She hardly feels the cold as she spins past the lion’s torrents of frosty breath. She can’t remember the last time she danced with someone, and it is exhilarating. The song is in her blood. This moment is all there is or ever will be.

~~~

From blizzard to windstorm the lion swings. Squalls accent its every lunge. Eira skitters away from them on her toes until the dancers change their timing, add a syncopated delay. She’s too close to that last gust to avoid it entirely. She skids backwards, digging her boots into the grass. When she’s regained her balance, she makes the lion a bow. The dancers click the lion’s jaw in response. They seem to relish this as much as Eira does.

~~~

The music crescendoes, and with it the battle. The waltz now resounds from strings and voices alike, a unified wall of sound. 

Once more Eira and the lion dance together. They crouch, pivot, bare their teeth, each other’s perfect mirror. Then the lion coils up into its lightning aspect. Eira senses this is it: the grand finale she’s been waiting for. She tenses up to run.

The lion spits a lightning bolt, then twists towards Eira on a storm. She rolls past both in time to see the lion headbutt the ground. An icy star erupts from the point of impact. Eira laughs aloud as she jumps the ice. The lion has sped through all three of its elements: a divine coda to this song.

Gransax’s bolt holds her for a few suspended seconds. Then she pulls back her arm and looses. This time she’s right on the beat. Her red lightning strikes the lion in its shaggy head. Its roar seems to shake the sky.

Eira drops back to the stage. The lion bends and bows.

With a scrape of cymbals, the music ends.

Eira returns her opponent’s bow. Silence crashes in on her. She is panting with her whole chest. Her very blood is vibrating. Only then does she realize that the Crucible rune inside her is blazing. 

I needed this. This day will live in me forever.

Silently she thanks Alad, the lion, and the unseen audience of the fallen. 

Miquella, I hope you’re watching.

~~~

Millicent is shaking when she unearths herself from the gaol. How good and clean the amber-lit air! She wants to fall on her knees and gulp down the evergreen scent. She wants to find Eira, warn her, maybe lean into her a while, let herself shake. Millicent is no stranger to suffering, but that dungeon was -

Gather yourself. There is still danger here.

A person is standing at the gaol’s mouth: neatly horned like the ghosts below, clad in tattered robes and a mask made of curled-up…caterpillars? Morgott’s eye is fixed on him. The Omen King is trembling too. Millicent can feel the repressed feeling rolling off him like heat. She is afraid he will take this stranger by the throat and shake him apart.

“What is thy business here?” Morgott demands, voice dangerously low.

The horned stranger looks up at him in wonder. “I heard a disturbance below, but…your face… So nigh unto the sacred beast’s visage it is, yet somehow wrong. You do not hail from these ruined lands?” His posture hardens and he folds his arms. “No, Erdtree-gold your eye shines. You are one of Marika’s get.” The stranger laughs roughly. “How fitting that she should bear a hornèd child. The instrument of our vengeance, our curse made manifest at last.”

Morgott’s fur stands visibly on end. “I am no instrument. Now give reason, if thou canst, for what thy kinfolk wrought below.”

“You are not Hornsent. You would not understand.” 

“Enlighten me.”

“My people sought to ascend the spiral and become divine, as is their birthright.”

“The spiral. Thou speak’st of the primordial Crucible?”

“Aye, that is your outlander name for it.”

Morgott’s hand shakes on his sword-hilt. Millicent sees with a sinking heart the false links he is drawing between the Crucible, his own nature, and the evil in the gaol. 

Remember the light of life in Ragna’s horns, and in yours, Millicent prays. Remember Lord Godfrey’s beautiful knights. What we saw below was not the Crucible.

“That dungeon,” Morgott says, “is a sin against nature, and thus also against thy spiral.” There is a tremor in his breathing. “Hast thou no fear of blasphemy?”

The Hornsent shrugs. “This world and its sins are passing, outlander. The spiral is eternal.”

“And how, pray, could such barbarity birth a god?”

“’Tis all that can.”

Chapter Text

Miquella does not know what brought him to this blue coast. There is nothing for him here. The place is a graveyard. Great stone arks protrude from the cliffs, as if they sank here eons ago and now the waters and the rock have receded from them. Miquella scents the ancient death seeping from them. It’s long since ceased to be a physical smell and become a spiritual one. Were Miquella not half a spirit himself, he might not be able to sense it. It lurks beneath the salty air and floral perfume. A cold, dank smell, redolent of places the world has forgotten.

Miquella is disturbed to find that he has strayed so far out of his way. That means he is wandering, avoiding. A god cannot do that. Marika always emphasized that divinity requires decisiveness. Her reign began to end when she began to doubt.

Miquella is not alone in his own doubts. That’s half the trouble.

I called Eira here because you are lost, Trina says within him. Her voice is unusually firm.

“I am not.” 

You are. You are not yourself and have not been for some time. You cannot see that you have cast aside all that made you good and beloved.

“My brother and I made a vow.”

A youthful vow made by children who knew nothing of the world! Such things are not binding; you cannot hold him to it!

Miquella runs half-spectral fingers through the flowers. “He promised me I would sit on his shoulders and embrace the world.”

(But in the end Miquella did not embrace Mohg, who was once his guest. Or Morgott, whose twin Miquella stole. And how can he embrace Radahn after all this?)

Stopitstopitstopit

Trina hears him anyway. When your brother returns, do you imagine he will be just as you remember him? Do you believe his self will endure what you have done to him?

Faster and faster go Miquella’s fingers. “Of course it will. His soul is strong.”

You deceive yourself, and you know it full well. To transgress the bounds of life carries a price. This one will be grave. 

“Cease this.”

Every time you look upon Radahn, you will remember your sin. You will never have peace. You will wake each day knowing that your age of compassion is hollow and false.

Miquella wraps his fist around a clump of blue flowers. “This harm will be the last. How many times must I say so?”

A thousand times, and still it will be untrue. Others will surely oppose your new order. What will you make of them? Will you bend their minds or send them to face Radahn’s swords?

He tears the flowers free with a soft snap. “Trina, I cannot abide such discord from my other self! You have been set against me since I laid my plans, and I cannot - I will not bear it! I must finish this work!”

I say nothing you have not thought yourself. That is why you fear Eira, no? In your heart you know you are a frightened child grasping for more than is yours to command, and she will know it too. She sees things clear.

The flowers glow through Miquella’s fingers like deep-creatures brought to the surface. His heartless chest heaves. No breath lifts it now, just instinct.

“What would you have me do? This Tarnished you love so dearly would birth a world of struggle.”

A free world, where none are cursed. Did you not once desire that also? You and Eira are not opposed. You would see so had you not sacrificed all in pursuit of a perfection that can never be. Your faithful never asked for that, only for your kindness!

Unbidden comes a memory of Crucible creatures clambering through the Haligtree’s upper boughs. The Golden Order called them misbegotten, but at the Haligtree they were nothing of the sort. With their strong limbs and tails, they traversed the treehouse platforms like they were born for it. They chittered to each other as they swung between branches. Nowhere else in the Lands Between had Miquella heard them make such a sound. It was the closest he’d ever heard them come to contentment.

But it wasn’t enough. Miquella knew it even then. What is a small group of contented misbegotten when weighed against all the world’s suffering?

This time he will not fall short.

“If I must ruin myself, so be it.”

Miquella reaches through himself, past his shredded flesh and into the spirit beneath. Having shed the greater part of his physical form, his soul is his to shape. He imagines his fingers closing on a small, quivering ball. He envisions himself withdrawing it - a knot of doubts wriggling like worms. At its core: the boy who watched his sister suffer and could not save her.

(When the Two Fingers declared Miquella an Empyrean, he thought, I cannot do it. He locked himself in his room and did not emerge until Radahn forced the door open and told him, You will touch the stars. I will hold you up.)

Miquella sets the little pile of self in the flowers. 

Farewell to the frightened child in that room.

He sinks a golden stake into the ground. 

Let Eira come. Let my brother return as something less than himself. I will not stop. I must make the world a gentler place.

In light he writes a crescent rune atop the stake.

I abandon here my doubt and vacillation.

And just like that, it’s gone. 

Miquella tests himself by looking for Eira. He finds her dancing with the tower’s divine lion, poised and fierce. He lets himself think, Should I have made her my consort? He waits for the flutter of uncertainty - and feels nothing. The thought remains, but without effect. Miquella has excised its nesting places.

He marvels at himself. He did not think it would be so easy! This proves that he was right to purge himself of his flesh. Now he can alter his naked soul however he needs to achieve his ends. He can make himself perfect. At last he can be enough.

The thought intoxicates him so thoroughly that it blots out Trina’s despair. For one giddy moment, Miquella loses awareness of his other self. Then her voice brings him back:

Oh, my love, what have you done?

Suddenly, Miquella knows why he came to this coast at the end of the earth.

He drops to one knee, dizzy and sick. The absolute clarity of his choice only makes it more terrible. His mind may be certain, but his heart is not numb. The sacrifice he is contemplating is not one he ever wished to make, and it will break him in more than one way. He wonders if it will kill him. He thinks, Perhaps ‘twould be right if it did, but feels no doubt. So he truly cannot hold himself back now. For the first time in his life, he has no limitations.

(That frightens him.)

“You care too much for me, and you protect me too well,” he says. His voice shakes a little. “If I am to embrace all things, my love must be selfless. I can keep none for myself.”

With terrifying ease, Miquella clears his mind and reaches inside himself.

~~~

It hurts.

Until now, Trina has only ever known pain through Miquella. This is her own. A great, deep tearing swallows all other awareness. She is splitting, dying, cannot possibly endure this. She is going to come apart and dissolve into the ether - and she does come apart, and then she is lying in the grass, bleeding from somewhere, everywhere, purple ichor pooling in the flowers, dew on her skin. She thinks of all the times she lay beside Eira in her dewy dream-pavilion. She wills herself to flee there, but she can’t. This is not a dream. Miquella is lying beside her, not Eira, a patchwork of blood and gold.

She would ask how this all went so wrong, but she knows exactly how. She was there for every second.

Miquella staggers upright. He isn’t bleeding; maybe there isn’t enough left in him to bleed. His eyes are shards of amber. He tugs Trina to her feet. There is no malice in his grip, but no softness either. Miquella is always most fearsome when is certain.

Without a word, he pulls Trina down the blue hillside. Her legs are heavy and clumsy. Her mind flies away. What a striking place this is, she thinks, death and beauty intertwined. That is the natural order, and not even a god can change it - should not try.

She wrenches herself back to the present. She needs to collect herself and do something, because she may not have another chance. Can she speak to Eira outside of dreams?

She has to try.

Trina imprints the blue fields and stone arks on her mind as clearly as she can. Then she bends all her being towards Eira, willing that image to become a message.

The coast. Come to the coast.

Distantly, she realizes she is sobbing.

~~~

Miquella walks. 

This is the last of the harm.

Trina can still hear him. “’Tis not! You will make a cage for yourself! To sustain your age, you will do harm after harm until nothing remains of you!”

Her words are ragged and broken by sobs. Trina is unaccustomed to speaking aloud. She sounds pained, yes, but not desperate. Her eyes are blazing like an oracle’s.

Miquella shivers and keeps walking.

(How can he feel so hollow and still hurt so much?)

~~~

The earth swallows them. Trina isn’t certain if Miquella knew the fissure was here or if he simply fell into it and pulled her with him. He is stumbling now, doubled over. He keeps his face forward so Trina cannot see it. She thinks he may be weeping. Her own face is wet with tears.

Ledge by ledge, the earth drops away. Bones crunch beneath their feet. Something dark oozes up from the ground. Then all at once, emptiness. A pit opens so wide that the space seems to exert its own gravity. Trina feels it tugging her and Miquella towards the edge. She digs in her bare feet. If she can stall Miquella for a few more seconds, she can think what to do next - if there is a “next.” Trina doesn’t know what awaits her in that abyss, but it smells like a grave.

And yet, she is strangely calm. Her bones say that this is not the end. It may be her end, but not the end of hope. She’ll set lights along Eira’s path however she can, for as long as she can.

Miquella sinks a stake into the reddish dirt. His breathing is as ragged as Trina’s. He leaves no pile of flesh this time. He doesn’t need to. Trina knows what he is about to abandon.

She does not move as Miquella turns on her. He has passed beyond her power to stop. Her task now is to survive and prepare some means of mitigating the disaster Miquella has wrought. There must be something. There always is.

Miquella often forgets that Trina has a will to match his own.

He averts his gaze. “I’m so sorry, my love.”

He shoves her hard. Trina staggers backwards, flails past the edge. She grabs for Miquella’s arm as the ground falls away from her. Miquella topples onto his stomach. They hang over the pit together, she clasping his arm with both her hands, he halfway out into empty air. Miquella shakes and strains but does not let go right away. Hope flickers amidst fear.

“I will wait for you,” Trina says. 

Mist breathes up from the chasm, obscuring the wreckage Miquella has made of his beautiful face. Trina is glad she cannot see him clearly. She would not want this to be her last sight of her other.

“Please understand,” Miquella says. Almost pleading. For a moment he sounds like himself again.

“I pray that you, too, understand before it is too late.”

Miquella peels his fingers off Trina’s arm, then hers. Their tenuous contact breaks. Then she is weightless, falling, air rushing up around her, Miquella a golden blur growing smaller and smaller above.

Below, only emptiness.

~~~

Forgive me forgive me forgive me forgive

~~~

Down and down she falls, an endless throat of stone and mist. She is gaining speed. How fast will she be falling when she reaches the bottom? Is there a bottom?

She thinks, I am going to die.

She thinks, I cannot yet die.

…

…

Eira. 

Chapter Text

Eira was still vibrating when Alad led her out of the theater. She wanted to speak with the lion dancers, but Alad would not allow it: apparently, the “sculpted keepers” take a vow of silence as part of their vocation. Now she and the horned warrior stand in a dim storeroom off of the theater. It seems an odd place to bring the victor of a battle. It’s a long room, but so cluttered as to be cramped. Shelves delineate a narrow path through the room, laden with all manner of objects: fabric, feathers, chalk, small brushes, dried plants, pots of sharp-smelling incense. Spiraled stands holding censers are placed at random intervals. A horned lion’s mask sits on a makeshift altar in one corner. 

Eira wonders if this used to be a backstage area. She imagines the bustle of dancers dressing, praying, painting faces, chalking hands and feet. She misses that sort of thing. Once upon a time, she performed at seasonal festivals not in her role as a spirit dancer, but for enjoyment. That feels like a different person’s life. When was the last time Eira did something just for the joy of it?

Alad stops where the shelves are densest, as if he’s trying not be seen or heard. A second horned warrior shuffles up behind Eira: from his limp, she judges this is the one she dueled in Belurat’s streets. Then lighter feet patter past outside - the curseblade Alad spoke to on the stairs leading to the theater? Eira decides she’s either about to be sacrificed or inducted into a secret order. 

She slips her seal into her left hand. “Two of you in here and one more outside? This is beginning to feel like a conspiracy.”

“The third standeth watch,” Alad says. Again his liquid accent surprises Eira. She expected harsher sounds from such a hardened creature. “‘Twas she who called the horn-decked beast to judge thee.”

“The Elder Lady cannot learn of this,” the other warrior says uneasily. “She would not wish -”

Alad barks a single low syllable. His companion falls silent.

“The tower is not safe,” he explains. “There are some, even now, who would not wish us to say what we must.”

“Why not?” Eira asks.

“We speak thy profane tongue,” says the other warrior.

“And we speak of the tower’s heresy,” says Alad.

I’ve wandered into a proper mess, haven’t I? Eira thinks. She recalls the way the horned warriors’ hands trembled when they sensed the mending rune within her. Warriors as disciplined as they do not lightly show such emotions.

“Go on,” Eira says, bracing herself.

“The sacred beast judged thee fit to bear this…shard of ilim,” Alad says. “'Tis for mending the great Ring, nay?”

“It is.”

“We are confined to this land and cannot reach the Ring. Thou wilt do so and become lord?”

“Yes.” Don’t doubt it now. “I’m here to find Miquella and take him as my god so we can restore the Cru - the spiral.”

The horned warriors regard each other over Eira’s head. Their steely masks glint in the dim, dust-filled light. Their armor creaks as they shift their weight. They seem to be having a silent exchange.

“Then learn well the tower’s folly,” Alad says, “so our ruin may not be thine.”

Eira waits for him to go on. He doesn’t.

“You won’t give me anything more than that?” she asks.

“We do not give. It is not our way. Thou must earn,” says the other warrior. 

“Seek our kin in exile,” says Alad. “They keep the old ways still.”

“What will they tell me?”

“Of ascension, true and false. Heed their words.”

The other warrior bows his head. “They will speak in vain. Atonement is not for us to claim.”

“I ask this not for us, but for those in the outlands who pay unjustly for the tower’s sin.”

This is the most candid sentence Alad has yet spoken. Eira wishes she could see his face. His voice is so low that she can’t make out any inflection.

“You had a part in these terrible things you say your people did?” she asks.

“Nay. We did not,” the second warrior rasps. The words hold ages of pain.

“Then why would you need to atone?”

“We could not stop them,” Alad says flatly. “We broke before the tower’s strength. To exile or silence we went.”

“I expect you’d have died fighting them.”

“Died, aye - and kept our honor,” says the other warrior.

He and Alad fold their arms, a gesture of old inadequacy.

“I’ll find what I can,” Eira says. She glances towards the doorway. Her limbs are starting to vibrate. Though she doesn’t think the horned warriors will harm her, she doesn’t like being hemmed in between them either. She wants to get out of this room. Then a last thought occurs to her:

“Could I ask you one more thing? Why do you have a name, Alad? I’ve heard your people don’t use them because names are ‘of this world,’ and nothing of this world matters.”

Alad growls low. “That is the new way. Heresy. Our names are earned. To be named is to be known - deep, here.” He puts his large hand to his armored chest. 

“Thou didst bring me low in battle,” says the other warrior, “thus I speak my name to thee: Sumur.”

Eira turns and clasps his forearm. It’s thick as oak. 

“Eira.”

~~~

The horned warriors return to their patrols. Freyja passes them unimpeded and meets Eira as she emerges blinking into the daylight. The Redmane clasps Eira’s wrists so hard she staggers back a pace, laughing. 

“They wouldn’t let me in, but I saw the end of your fight. What a sight that was! You were - you’re beautiful. I wish I could have been with you.” Beneath her helmet, Freyja’s voice is radiant. “Reminded me of my gladiator days. So - have they sworn you fealty?”

“Not so simple. They told me there are things I should know if I’m to be Elden Lord of the Crucible, wrongs I’ve got to put right. They wouldn’t tell me what. They said I’ve got to find out for myself.”

Freyja shakes her head. “They’re a hard-headed lot, the Hornsent. I thought they’d have been more generous to you, as you’re carrying the mending rune and all.”

“Or maybe this is how they show respect. They wouldn’t bother to test me if they thought I was worthless. And if they really disliked me, I reckon they’d just have my head.”

“You like to understand people, don’t you?”

“The world could do with a bit more understanding.”

“That will serve you well when you’re lord.”

“Thank you for saying ‘when.’” Sometimes when feels very faint.

Just then, a flicker at the doors of the theater: white and gold. Eira pulls Freyja back into the backstage storeroom. It’s like trying to move a tree; the Redmane is solid. Inside, Eira presses herself to the cool stone wall and peers around the doorframe just enough to watch a figure stride across the theater. 

“What’s the matter? It’s only Lady Leda,” Freyja says. Despite her confusion, she too has concealed herself against the wall. Eira loves her for that.

“That’s the trouble,” Eira says.

“But Lady Leda is one of ours.”

“Freyja, can I trust you?”

“Of course.”

“What I’m about to say - you’ve got to keep it secret.”

Freyja pulls off her helm, baring her scarred face. Perhaps this is her way of showing she is both honest and serious. “I will. Tell me. Is it about the…?” She taps her chest to indicate the mending rune.

“No - well, I don’t want Leda knowing about that either, but no, it’s something else.” 

Eira considers for a heartbeat longer. Freyja faced the golem with her, traversed Belurat with her. If she means Eira harm, she’s foregone lots of chances.

“Miquella didn’t call me here,” Eira says. “Trina did.”

Freyja blinks like she expected more. “What does that matter? Kindly Miquella and St. Trina are part of each other, aren’t they? Our own Thiollier is devoted to St. Trina. You should speak to him, if you happen upon him.”

“Leda doesn’t seem to think Trina’s call is enough. She told me I’m not one of Miquella’s chosen, tried to stop me coming here. I had to sneak past her. She doesn’t know I’m in the Scadulands.”

Again, Freyja’s broad, sturdy face registers a distinct lack of concern. “Don’t trouble yourself overmuch about Lady Leda. She holds herself and her authority in high regard, as she was Kindly Miquella’s knight. She may not know his thoughts as well as she lets on. If you wish to see him rise, you’re no foe of ours. Lady Leda won’t harm you, not while she’s charmed.”

Eira’s skin prickles. “Charmed?”

“Kindly Miquella’s charm. It sets his followers at peace with each other while we work to raise him to godhood.”

“What does it feel like?”

“To tell it true, I take little notice of it. When I do, I feel all will be well. It’s like warm light.”

“And you know about this - all of you?”

“I reckon so. Kindly Miquella told us when he laid the charm on us. He had to touch us, you see; that’s how the spell is done. It’s funny, really: he needn’t have charmed me at all. After he saved me from the rot, I’d have followed him anywhere. I’m sure many would agree.”

Eira’s heart speeds unevenly. She thinks of Latenna and Albus, who had nothing but rumors to guide them but trusted absolutely that the Haligtree would be their salvation. Malenia, who gave everything for her twin. All the unnamed souls who spread tales of Miquella’s kindness to the forsaken. So many placed their hope and love in him. As Freyja said, they would have followed him faithfully without this charm.

“Then why did he do this?” Eira asks.

Freyja shrugs, still too relaxed. “For his own protection, I suppose. Ascension is perilous. Kindly Miquella is being especially careful.”

“This is too careful for my liking.” 

Eira inhales sharply and tugs a hand through her hair. This doesn’t make sense. She has never associated Miquella with this kind of behavior. He dedicated his life to restraining the outer gods, the greatest violators of mortal will. Now he is bending wills himself. Gently, yes. Perhaps just as a temporary precaution. But still bending them. Again and again Eira’s mind slips off this revelation. She can’t grasp it. It’s as if this Miquella and the one she’s heard so much about are two different people. Irreconcilable.

Eira recalls Trina’s warning: He has gone wrong. Cold sweat breaks out on her brow.

Oh, Trina. I think he really has.

Where is Trina, now that she thinks of it? Eira hasn’t heard from her dream-guardian since before entering Belurat. Then again, she hasn’t slept since then either. Maybe she’ll find herself lying beside Trina tonight.

But if she doesn’t? The thought takes root and spreads like an invasive plant.

By now Leda has crossed the theater and disappeared into the shrine at the far end. Freyja puts a steadying hand on Eira’s shoulder. “Are you all right? Are you still unwell from that poisoned mire below?”

Eira tries and fails to even her breathing. Instead she sinks down along the wall. There’s a visceral pressure deep inside her. “This charm is wrong. I don’t like this sort of thing, Freyja. It’s like when grace dragged me out of my grave without my say -”

“The charm isn’t at all like that.”

“Not yet. I still don’t like it. Folk should do their own wills.” Eira puts her head on her knees. “I need Miquella to be all right, and I don’t think he’s all right.”

“I hear you, friend. I’d like nothing more than to see him rule and rule well.” Freyja sits with a creak of metal and leather. She’s just on the other side of the doorway, but she might as well be a world away. In her mind, all will be well because Miquella promised so. Just days ago, Eira believed that too. 

Freyja tucks her arms around her knees. “I told you I come from nothing. When I was young, my village saw plagues. It wasn’t scarlet rot, just a foulness in the water, a traveling perfumer told us. It left folk dry. Skin like dead leaves. And there was a smell: shut-up rooms and unwashed skin, something sweet. It was some time before I could name the shapes I saw beneath the sheets. I knew, but I didn’t wish to know. Belurat had that same sick smell. So did the man-fly village on the plains.”

Eira closes her eyes. So many need help. “Freyja, I’m so sorry. Is that why you seemed upset when we were looking for Alad in the swamp?”

Freyja nods, then shakes herself to cast off her vulnerability. “That’s why I need Kindly Miquella to rise. In his order, no one will die for want of clean water or simple physicks.”

“I want that too. My folk had very little, like yours. I did what I could to bring us good fortune as a spirit dancer. I don’t know what our village spirits were - ancestors, parts of nature…”

not there at all?

“Sometimes they heeded my prayers. Sometimes I wasn’t enough.”

(Is that why Eira left? Did she think she could better serve her people by enlisting with Lord Godfrey and returning as a warrior? That part of her memory is foggy.)

Again Freyja reaches across the doorway and touches Eira’s arm. “I don’t mean to grieve you. I mean to say I will fight beside you, charm or not, to make the world a fairer place. Never mind what Lady Leda says: I think you’d match Kindly Miquella well.”

Eira wants to wrap herself up in Freyja’s friendship, but she noticed that the Redmane never acknowledged that Miquella may not be himself. Maybe she knows it but can’t know it, like the plague bodies beneath the winding sheets.

If he’s not himself, I’ll bring him back, Eira thinks. Already she senses a shift inside her, her compass moving from “find Miquella” towards something else entirely. The rapidity of the change surprises her. It shouldn’t: this is hardly the first time Eira has had to change course quickly. She’s learned that in battle, such an ability can be the difference between life and death. “Margit” taught her that first. Thirteen times.

She’ll bring Miquella back. Trina believes she can. Melina did too. Just before she burned, she expressed regret that she would not see Eira win the most fearsome Empyrean.

Belief can be a blessing and a burden. Eira learned that on her journey too.

Metallic footfalls alert her that Leda has returned from wherever she went behind the shrine. Eira peeks around the doorframe to watch her cross the theater. Her quick stride bespeaks irritation. Her white cloak is as pristine as ever, which means she didn’t kill Alad and Sumur on her way through Belurat. Pettily, Eira hopes she had to hide in an alley to avoid a fight. She doubts it, though. Leda doesn’t seem like the sort to hide.

Eira waits to speak until Leda has passed through the great double doors. “I want to see where she went. Trina said -”

“St. Trina speaks to you still?”

“She did…until just now. She told me about a tower -”

“Belurat is little else but towers.”

“Trina said this particular tower is sealed. We haven’t found a sealed tower yet, unless…”

Drawn like metal to a lodestone, Eira’s gaze lifts to the shadowy structure above. It’s almost overhead now, so she can’t make out much of it. Curving paths and something dark sifting down. She thinks of the burning Erdtree and shivers. Does that suspended city hold the things Alad and Sumur want her to learn?

“I want to go up there. Miquella might have left another cross there, a direction.”

They venture back into the theater, across pavers and grass to the shrine Leda entered. A doorway now stands open beneath the pediment, flanked by spiral pillars. Beyond, a lift takes them up to a landing with two monolithic double doors. The rows of carved figures Eira has seen elsewhere in Belurat, lifting their hands in dance, are almost as tall as she is. It takes both her and Freyja’s full weight to push them open.

Past the doors lies an equally grand curving staircase. To the distant right, the blackened tree Eira saw upon entering the Scadulands bleeds golden sap and ash. Veils stretch from its boughs across the yellowed sky like bedcurtains. They remind Eira of the curtains cascading around Marika’s stony bed in Leyndell, only those were heavy and brocaded where these are gossamer. Does that mean Marika tucked away the Scadulands as she did her bed? Is this another of her private chambers, accessible only to those she granted leave?

They have not yet reached the top when they see the thorns, black as pitch, branching out like a monstrous spider’s web. They cover the doorway at the crest of the stairs in sharp, twisting shadow. Some of the barbs are as long as Eira’s arms. They cast her back to the Court of Thrones, where she stood before a different set of thorns, realizing that she had yet more work to do. Now her way stands barred once again.

Frustration flares. Eira knew she’d find the floating city blocked, but she needs to get in there, more so than ever now that she knows Miquella is going astray. 

“How many times…!”

She pulls back her left arm and hurls a fireball at the thorns. It hits them as if they were stone and gutters out. Eira sighs. She hoped. Part of her always hopes.

While she paces away, gnawing on a strand of hair, Freyja picks up a piece of parchment at the base of the thorns. She reads slowly, hesitating often. “It’s from Lady Leda. She says the… ‘Gate of Divinity’ is in this tower. She believes Kindly Miquella went east to… find a means of unsealing it.”

Gate of Divinity. The name lifts the hairs on Eira’s arms. Only once has she felt such a chill: when she returned to the Roundtable after kindling the Erdtree, and old Enia looked at her and said with eerie certainty, “You’ll be Elden Lord yet.” Eira agrees with Leda’s conclusion: there is something significant beyond the thorns. She can feel it. The deep thrum in the earth she sensed outside Belurat is much stronger here, vibrating in her chest, making her teeth chatter.

She unclenches herself with an effort. “Thorns can be burned.”

“You’ve just tried that.”

“That was ordinary flame magic. I’ve seen a seal like this before: we might need a special sort of flame to break it.” Then inspiration strikes. “That man you fought in the courtyard, what was it he said? ‘The embrace of Messmer’s flame’?”

Eira feels Freyja’s brows lift beneath her helmet. “You want to find Messmer?”

“If he led the war on the Hornsent, he may have sealed this tower too, or at least he had something to do with it. Maybe his fire can undo it.”

“He’s not likely to lend it to you.”

“No, I don’t expect he will.”

“Hornsent says Messmer’s keep is heavily guarded by soldiers and pyromancer-knights. It lies in Scadu Altus, no easy journey from here.”

“Then we’ll have to go to Scadu Altus.”

“You mean to storm the crusaders’ fortress?”

“I’ve done it before. I cut through most of Godrick’s garrison at Stormveil Castle, on my own.” 

Eira does not mention that she died several times on the way. She learned many harsh lessons from the hedge knights patrolling the castle. Her technique improved a little with each of their duels.  

I’ll die as many times as it takes to put this right before it’s too late. 

She thinks briefly of trying to break the charm, but no, that would only endanger her. And she has more than enough to do already. The horned warriors want her help, Trina wants her help, the Erdtree and its unknown guardians still await, and then there’s everything after -

Eira exhales through gritted teeth. One step, then the next. You’ve only got two hands.

Freyja shakes her helmed head. “You’re mad, you,” she says with warmth. “Let’s be off, then. You can tell me more about Stormveil on the way.”

~~~

Ansbach is sitting on a rock beside Moore’s makeshift shop when Eira and Freyja come down the hill from Belurat. He’s sketching with charcoal on a parchment spread across his lap. He looks up at his visitors’ approach. His beard twitches with what might be a smile.

“I am relieved to see you safe. The horned folk did not take your heads?”

“They tried,” Eira says. Ansbach looks her up and down with new interest.

“I am mapping Tender Miquella’s crosses,” he says, “so that perhaps we may unravel his purpose. Did you find any others within the citadel?”

“One,” Eira says, “and bloody footprints.”

“Then he truly is discarding his flesh in every sense.”

“Lady Leda believes he seeks the Gate of Divinity, above Belurat,” Freyja says, then repeats the rest of Leda’s letter. 

Eira winces inwardly. The charm seems to have loosened Freyja’s tongue. Eira would not have so readily shared such information with a former knight of Mohg. Then again, Ansbach is the only person she’s met who seems as disturbed by Miquella’s shedding of flesh as Eira is. “I don’t like it,” she told Ansbach when first they spoke. “Nor do I,” he said. That might be worth pursuing, especially in light of Trina’s warnings.

Ansbach traces a finger over his map. “The crosses we have thus far discovered do lead east and north, as Lady Leda suggests. The difficulty is that new crosses appear without warning. It seems we are treading Tender Miquella’s heels.”

As I’ve been doing all along. How can I be so close and so far away?

Eira decides to set suspicion aside. She can’t afford to go looking for enemies where there may be none. If Ansbach ever proves himself dangerous, Eira has youth and grace in her favor.

“Do you know anything about the Gate of Divinity?” she asks.

“It is the spiral’s apex, says our Hornsent companion,” Ansbach says. “To his people there is no more sacred place. There the veil between the earthly and the divine grows thin. A sensible place for an Empyrean to ascend, no?”

Eira frowns. Alad and Sumur never so much as alluded to this gate. Even though they want Eira to find answers for herself, it strikes her oddly that they omitted something so important to their people.

“It would be,” she says, and leaves it at that.

“Perhaps this particular means of ascension requires Tender Miquella to shed his physical form.”

“I hope you’re right, sir. I hope it’s only that.”

Ansbach regards her for a long moment. “As do I.”

~~~

Ansbach bids them an amiable goodbye. “I will remain here and assemble our knowledge for now,” he says. “I may join you once we have more clearly discerned Tender Miquella’s course. Before you go, might I advise you not to harm any creatures who appear to be pests of the rot? In these lands they are the forager brood, Sir Moore’s fellows. They may trade you useful things in return for your forbearance.”

“Together. We work together. For Miquella the Kind,” Moore adds from the depths of his heavy armor.

Eira envies him his simple faith.

She and Freyja journey back across the plains, heading for the crossroads where they first met. Eira hopes for a sign of Millicent but finds none. Besides that, it is a good journey, and far too brief. For a little while Eira feels like herself again. The sweet, dry smell of the grass rustling against her, tickling her hips at times, reminds her of the Altus Plateau. After sunset the spirit-graves glow a verdant blue-green. Eira saw a similar glow one night on a beach in Limgrave: rich blue beneath the waves, like undersea fire. In that light she strips down to the shirt and leggings beneath her leather armor. She wants to feel the dew on her skin. Barefoot, she weaves a dance of acknowledgment for all who fell here. Not mourning, just a nod in their direction. I see you were here once. She has done this in many places throughout the Lands Between. Often it is the only thing she can offer the dead.

This time she adds, Miquella. I see you too.

She and Freyja talk most of the way back towards Miquella’s first cross. Eira recounts her journey through Stormveil Castle, beginning with her thirteen duels with the Fell Omen. “I thought I’d be able to stay alive for a while after that, but I was wrong. Wasn’t long before I ran straight into a courtyard full of mercenaries manning ballistas. I thought I could manage. I couldn’t.”

Later, one of those mercenaries died clutching Eira’s arm. Her red hood and scale armor were riddled with deathblight thorns. Her death rattle was a sigh of relief.

That was also the first time Eira saw a horn-cut Omen.

She knew so little in those days. Her life counted for nothing. She hadn’t yet sacrificed anything but herself. In a way it was easier then.

Freyja tells her own stories of Caelid before the rot. In her memory it was full of lush forests and marshes and fields that rolled on forever like the sea. She could ride out towards the horizon for miles. The sky above was a depthless blue dome. Radahn held spectacular feasts at Redmane Castle. There were tournaments with endless bouts of melee, horseback showmanship, roaring fires and music, meat, and ale. “The morning after one such feast I woke on the floor amongst the general’s hunting dogs. I couldn’t recall how I’d gotten there, nor did I much care.”

Eira tries to imagine such uncomplicated joy.

“Would you renew those days when you become lord?” Freyja asks.

“I’d like that very much. Maybe I’ll make you Lord of Redmane Castle.”

“Oh no, I’m not meant for lordship. I’d fare better as a tournament marshal. Promise you’ll go riding with me one day. I could teach you to perform feats only you would be mad enough to attempt.”

Talking like this around the campfire, Eira can pretend that nothing has changed since her journey began.

But she can’t pretend for long. She keeps hearing movement in the arches drifting on the grassy sea. She knows that light tread, that glint of metal. And when she falls asleep, she does not find Trina in her dreams. Instead she grasps at purple mist slipping further and further out of reach.

In the morning they travel north to a gorge with a river hissing somewhere far below. The bridge that spans the gap is so wide and long that Eira expects to see a dragon crouched at the end. Instead it bristles with spiked wooden barricades shaved sharp as spears. Soldiers cluster around them, clad in drab browns and greens and coats of mail. They have a wild look about them: instead of swords, some carry axes and chipped roundshields.

“Straight through?” Freyja asks.

This is why we get on so well. “Straight through.”

Eira whistles for Torrent and pulls Freyja onto his back. Together they gallop between barricades, careening past soldiers, Freyja handling the reins while Eira slings lightning to deter anyone who gets too close. For a few precious seconds, Eira thinks of nothing but her racing heart.

At the other end of the bridge, they hurl themselves off Torrent. Freyja ducks into the bushes at the edge of a nearby encampment. Eira stops only to toss a lightning bolt at the soldier on the ballista platform ahead. Then she crouches down beside her companion. They’ve lost most of the troops far behind, but one is close enough to pursue them. He sweeps the bushes with the deep red glow of his torch. Then he takes one step too far. Freyja leaps up and twists his head too far around. The soldier drops, limp, torch rolling from away. 

Eira looks at her companion with new eyes. “You’re quicker than I thought.”

“In the gladiator pits, I needed every weapon I had.”

They creep around the edge of the camp. There’s no room to charge through here. Too many soldiers loiter between the tents, moving hazily and without purpose. The tents themselves are rich - purple fabric and gold trim - but they’re scattered without order amidst the spindly evergreens. Their canopies bear an unfamiliar sigil: a ring encircling a flame and a crown, bisected by a…snake? Around the tents stand dozens of stakes, each thrust through multiple charred bodies. Perfumers linger around them, nearly silent in their soft boots. Eira doubts they’re here to heal. A knight in black plate chased with gold paces the dirt track down the camp’s middle. He’s dragging a matching greathammer behind him, leaving a rut in the dirt. Eira keeps one eye on him as she moves through the trees. She’s sure he would overcome his weariness if he discovered her. Everything about him suggests he was trained and equipped to match the horned warriors’ strength.

“The Black Knights are the crusaders’ captains,” Freyja whispers. “They must have been Queen Marika’s finest before they came here. Their weapons are Erdtree-blessed. Doesn’t stop them smelling of blood.”

Eira and Freyja cut a wide half-circle around the camp. It’s slow going, but armed with the silencing incantation Miriel taught Eira, they reach the other side undetected. Ahead, across another gorge, a waterfall thunders down from sheer cliffs. It scents the air with wet earth. Eira takes deep, grateful breaths of it. The camp did indeed reek of blood.

A castle glowers down through the fog and spray. It’s built into the same cliffs as the waterfall, square and unlovely. Its walls are dark, unadorned brick. Leda’s white cloak stands out all the more against them. She waits at the far end of the bridge leading to the castle’s foot. She is looking up at the fortress as if she is expecting something.

Freyja rises from her hiding place behind a pine. “That castle must guard the way to Scadu Altus.”

Eira grits her teeth. She is so tired of obstacles. “I can’t go that way if Leda will be there.”

“Are you certain? I told you, Lady Leda won’t harm you if you’re a friend to Kindly Miquella, not while she’s charmed.”

Of course Eira considers herself Miquella’s friend, but does he feel the same? What if he told Leda to block the way to the Scadulands because he didn’t want Eira to know about…the charm? Something else?

Grace, don’t let it be something else.

“She doesn’t want me here,” Eira says. “Go with her. She’ll be suspicious if she thinks you’re avoiding her. I’ll look for a way around the castle and find you in Scadu Altus, if you can get away from Leda for a while.”

Freyja fidgets with her fur-lined cape. “I don’t like to leave you, but if you think it’s best… Good luck, then.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Be safe.”

“No chance of that.”

Eira clasps Freyja’s arm, holds it tight. Then she swings onto Torrent’s back and turns down the nearest hillside.

~~~

She watches.

She slips down from the theater where she woke the lion. She drifts through whispering grass past death that does not die. She smells the cages long before she sees them. They taint the earth with rust and pain. The horned one is still there, and the afflicted one with him. He is frozen by the gaol’s greedy mouth. He stands brittle-still. His companion often looks up at him but does not touch. She who is called a curseblade knows what they have seen. She knows what the horned one must now think of himself. For him she scratches in the dirt a mourning mark he will never see. She has failed him and all his kind, though she had no part in their curse. He should be full of light. Perhaps he still can be, if it is not too late.

As the day dies she turns her senses towards the girl-child who bested the lion. Her camp is easy to find. The curseblade does not approach this time, though she longs to touch the spiral once more, to hear the girl-child’s blood sing in her veins. She is stronger than she looks, this little gilim. How fitting that the word for “dancer” is so close to the word for “spiral.” Gilim bears ilim. 

Like all her folk, this curseblade is attuned to souls. In the dark she sees two of them tethered to the girl-child. So thin, these threads, on the very edge of being. One is nearly broken; the other will not break. One leads to a pit where deepest death gathers. The other…moves. Fast, faster than any creature that runs upon land. She wonders if the little gilim is aware of this. She does not know what it means. It frightens her.

Silent as the small hours, she follows the girl-child to the firebringers’ camp. The knight commander has allowed it to fall into disrepair. He no longer orders that the tents be pitched in neat rows. He no longer cares. The curseblade watches him enter his own tent. The brazier inside casts his shadow on the fabric walls. He drops helm and hammer and puts his head on his knees. There isn’t much left of him now. Blood spilled unchecked wears upon the soul. His people forgot that. Hers did too.

The little gilim does not enter the castle ahead. Instead she rides further northeast. That is the right way. It leads to the things the girl-child must see if she is to be a better bearer of the spiral than those who came before.

She who is called a curseblade will follow her there.