Chapter Text
In the beginning there was blood. Everything begins in blood, even if it blooms into something golden.
Mohg has never seen his mother in person. Not the one who bore him.
The only time Mohg has seen Marika outside of the gilded frame of a portrait is in his nightmares, alongside the demons all omens dream of when they lay down at night to sleep. She is crucified, turning to dust in places. It is an image that is too good to be true. Her eyes are vacant pools of yellow and when she opens her mouth gold pours out, molten metal dripping down to the ground beneath her. It is covered in water— no.
No.
It is covered in blood. The gold sinks, disappearing under vivid red. There is not enough to dilute the crimson puddling all around them; there is not enough of Marika in Mohg to make him anything but angry. His father is no better, but he did not ask for the things he’s been given, Mohg and his brothers among them. Godfrey is a warrior first, a lord second, and a parent last of all.
Mohg does not wake up screaming any longer, because there is nothing to fear. No one to fear. Mohg is the one that wakes people screaming, and he is glad to be feared.
If terror is the only thing that people will give him, Mohg will take it.
-
There is blood, and then there are the Shunning Grounds. There are things in between, but Mohg cannot really recall them.
His memory begins with his arrival underground— Mohg remembers being afraid and wanting to go home, but not what that home looked like. They’d been taken through twisting sewer tunnels that made him dizzy; both the serpentine paths and the stench. There was no way he could find his way to the surface again. Mohg remembers a soldier leading him deeper, and deeper. The soldier’s shield was bigger than Mogh’s whole body, reflecting the mass of his horns in warped shades of gold.
Then the soldier left, and said he would return, but Mohg already knew better. This was where they buried the Great Caravan, a whole culture swallowed by the wrath of the Order. This was where they sent things to die when they weren’t a threat and no one could be bothered to stomach swinging the sword. Mohg remembers being terrified.
Mohg remembers being furious.
There was darkness, and his brother’s hand in his, both of them clinging so tightly it hurt. They were both so small. They were all alone.
They are not the only omens lurking in Shunning Grounds. They are not even the only omen children, but there is no community under the capital. There is no sense of belonging. They are not going through this together— they are going through this alongside each other.
Morgott stays at his side; they are going through this together. There are crawling ugly things around every corner and Mohg will not allow them to hurt his brother.
There are even uglier people, wearing masks from out of their worst dreams and hunting the omen through the tunnels like dogs. They only come at night, even if night and day mean nothing so far from the sun.
Godwyn comes, though Mohg thinks he has made more of it in his memories than there truly was in life. He brings his brothers clothes, food, and weapons. Mohg’s brothers are the only people who have ever touched him, and Morgott is so afraid.
It is nice to be touched by hands that are not shaking, or trying to hurt him. Mohg had almost forgotten what it was like.
Godwyn apologizes for leaving them behind, but he still leaves.
It feels like Mohg is being buried alive with every passing day.
Then, eventually, there was his Mother.
-
She is nothing, like Mohg is nothing. She is everywhere around him if he will only close his eyes and reach for her. He’s taken to wandering underground— through the eternal cities, and the ruins scattered around them. Through the wells and catacombs underneath lands he is not fit to tread upon.
So far underground, and it is a wonder it took so long for him to start hallucinating. Mohg thinks he is going mad, and she tells him to split her open, and she will show him the truth. She tells him that she is the truth. He doesn’t know what she means, but then he obeys.
Her blood on his hands for the first time is something he will never forget. Mohg reaches into the emptiness that has always wanted to swallow him and is bathed in a rain of blood, warm on his skin, all the way down to his bones. It’s the first time Mohg can remember anyone other than Morgott touching him without pulling away— he can still feel her presence, wrapped around him like a shroud.
Mother, he thinks. There is silence, shivering in the air around him, and then the noise of the Formless Mother in his ears.
Everything you need, she says, Mohg trembling at the feel of her.
Just bring me the blood.
This is something Mohg can do, even lost in hell.
-
It’s a mistake, trying to show his brother without already having the foundations of his dynasty laid. He’s spent too long fighting in the shadows to protect people who want him dead. They take the horns from infants and watch them die and hammer them onto cleavers and it is Mohg who is the monster. Mohg, who is the heretic.
There is no such thing as blasphemy; there is Mohg’s Mother, and then all the rest. Mohg has sworn no allegiances to the Order. Mohg has made no promises to the Fingers.
One person’s blasphemy is another’s worship, and Mohg is devout.
-
Twins, Godwyn says one day when he visits; a half-brother, and half-sister. They’re cursed in ways that make them weak instead of strong, and still they rest in their father’s arms, bathed in rays of gold. It is hard to say if things would be any different for Mohg and his brother had they been born of Radagon instead of Godfrey, but he doubts it. Names are powerful things. Queen Marika, the Eternal. Godfrey, the First Elden Lord.
Mohg doubts that Radagon of the Golden Order would have been kind enough to let him vanish quietly underground, a rotting vestige of the crucible undermining their every step.
He thinks of two infants in Marika’s arms, one with hair of shining gold, and wishes them both dead.
He reaches into the Mother when Godwyn is gone, and lets the gore of her pour over him until it burns all the way down into his bones. Mohg wonders how he will make a dynasty at the bottom of the Lands Between, all alone and bathed in blood.
You are not alone, the Mother says, and Mohg closes his eyes.
-
The mausoleums existed long before Mohg laid claim to them, but there is no shame in that; the soil has been soaked in blood for generations. Mohg can hear it singing it to him when he buries his fingers in it. Can feel the Formless Mother crooning her approval. There is nothing but old blood and old stones and that is fine.
Dry bones, and Mohg’s hunger to carve out a place in the world where there is no one to look down on him. He cannot do it by himself, but the Mother has said she will help him, and so she does— she shows him how to master the blood. How to slip into other places and take lives for her, and it is easy. For Mohg, it is easy.
It is not enough, though. Mohg can slip through the blood now, where it lays the thickest in the Lands Between. Often that is on battlefields, and so Mohg takes the people with the most blood on their hands and shows them the way. It takes someone who knows the blood to pour themselves into it.
Some of them live. Most of them die.
Blood is blood either way, but those who succeed feed the Mother, fingers covered in gore as they stand against the Golden Order. There aren’t many Bloody Fingers, but there are enough. Those who linger on the mausoleum grounds don their white masks and draw carnage back to the source. There’s much work to be done to make the grounds into a palace, and not many to do it.
There is Varre, wide eyed at his feet as the blood speaks to him for the first time— truly speaks to him. Not a distant echo as he spills blood for the Mother. Not the faraway sounds that slips through when he pierces her to baptize the war surgeons in her sacrament.
She speaks and Varre hears her, and it is like watching someone fall in love. With the Mother. With the blood. With Mohg. It does not truly matter.
Love is a vile thing but it binds, and Mohg will take all the loyalty he can get.
-
Mohg has not spent time in the Shunning Grounds for years and years, now. He is through begging his brother to join him, at least for the moment, but it doesn’t sit well with him to think of Morgott languishing underneath the capital in between shedding his blood to defend it. Morgott cuts down the enemies of the Order, then slinks away from the light of the Erdtree when there are none left to fight.
The Golden Order doesn’t deserve his brother. Neither does Mohg, or their mother, or father. Morgott wants the same thing Mohg wants; the thing he used to want.
Mohg is bitter. Time has done nothing but deepen his wounds, and love is not enough. Mohg needs blood. Mohg needs retribution.
Mohg needs a legacy, and he will build it with his own hands if he must.
Whenever Morgott asks him to meet their half-brother, Mohg almost refuses. Miquella is young by demigod standards but already the Lands Between is falling all over itself to adore him. Malenia is revered for her prowess in battle, but Miquella is simply revered, and Mohg cannot understand why.
People speak of him like he is a god already. He’s brilliant and bewitching and everyone who meets him wants to please him. He’s the golden child; Radagon’s most precious son, the spitting image of their mother.
He has been handed everything Mohg has ever wanted without struggling a day in his life. Eternal childhood sounds a blessing to Mohg when held up against the tangle of horns that are growing into his skull in places, one of them hovering just above his eye. He watches it get closer, every single day. The rot is eating Malenia alive, limbs falling away already.
Omen children are eviscerated and left to die, or buried under the capital. The albinaurics are vacant, or their bodies fail them.
To be forever a child in the golden shade of the Erdtree sounds hardly like a curse at all, but Mohg is curious. It is easy enough to slip through the blood from Mohgwyn to the sewers, in the Cathedral of the Forsaken in the Shunning Grounds. Mohg can hear the wailing of the caravan sometimes, and even further down the frenzy like the buzzing of flies in his ear, if only it were so easy to swat away. It’s grating, but he won’t have to listen for long.
When Morgott calls him down, their half-brother is already waiting. Mohg swirls up from the ground in shades of crimson, letting it pool at his feet before vanishing into the earth. He is just outside the cathedral; there is no reason to advertise that he isn’t living in the Shunning Grounds, isn’t confined beneath their feet. Mohg doesn’t think he’s enough of a threat just yet to warrant an execution squad from the Order or a fresh wave of omenkillers trying their luck once more.
Still, Mohg cannot trust anyone bathed in so much grace.
Then he walks into the church and lays eyes on Miquella, and it is like taking a knife in the stomach.
For a moment, Mohg thinks he’s been deceived. It is Marika before him, except that he cannot think of anything in all the heavens or the Lands Between that would bring her down here to see him. Morgott is looming on the other side of him but Mohg can’t tear his eyes away. He doesn’t know how old he is; Miquella looks like a child, but time passes strangely for the demigods. It’s been centuries since his birth, and Mohg can see every year of it in his eyes.
His hair catches the torchlight, burning in a dozen shades of gold. When he sees Mohg he smiles.
“It’s good to meet you finally, brother,” Miquella says, surging to his feet and crossing the cathedral to reach for Mohg’s hand. His skin is warm, soft against the calluses of Mohg’s fingers.
No one touches Mohg without recoiling. His breath is catching in his throat. Morgott has spent the last decades putting distance between them because he thinks him a heretic against the Order.
“What is Queen Marika’s golden child doing crawling around in the sewers with the likes of us?” Mohg finds himself asking breathlessly. It is not what is going through his mind.
There is nothing there but gold.
Miquella’s face hardens into something angry, grip tightening on Mohg’s hand, eyes lit wildly in the shivering of the torches.
“Omens are not meant to be a curse on the Lands Between. Omens are a blessing, something to be revered. There is so little true power left in the world, and the Golden Order cannot stand that it doesn’t all belong to them. The omens, the misbegotten, the albinaurics, the tarnished… the Order is weak, and so it must stamp out any strength that can oppose it. The Golden order is wrong.”
Miquella takes Mohg’s hand in both of his own, brows drawn together.
“I want to show you something, both of you. Come to the Haligtree with me. See what we have built there.”
No, Morgott says, as Mohg has known he would. He is still too tangled up in the shame of being born to do anything but fight the Order’s battles, but Mohg is even more curious now. It’s easier to understand why so many people adore their brother— Miquella came down into the Shunning Grounds, took Mohg’s hand, and told him everything he wanted to hear.
It’s too good to be all true, but there is some truth to it, at least within Miquella. He means what he is saying, even if he is a fool.
Mohg will go see this haven Miquella is trying to forge beneath the vicious shadow of the Erdtree and find out.