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These were the early days, before the Shattering and the war of all against all; when the streets of Leyndell were populous and clean, and its doorways not yet clotted with corpse-wax. The Carian schism had not yet occurred and the ancient dragons kept their distance, and the demigods still walked the palace halls – not often, but enough for a glimpse of one to be considered merely exceptional, rather than miraculous. Yet there came a time when fair Miquella was seen no more, and long enough for Marika’s closest attendants to murmur in concern. Miquella was the most beloved of her progeny even then, rivaled only by noble Godwyn, and far more amenable to mingling with the lower peoples of the Order. His chambers remained shut, and all felt his absence like a wound.
He stood there now, in his eternal childhood. His hair was undone and lay upon him like a second garment, and through his windows the Erdtree’s honeyed light glimmered on his frame and the shambles that his room had become. The tapestries were piled in a corner and replaced with diagrams that to the untrained eye resembled mad spirographs; thin stone tablets were precariously stacked in their own geometry, as though the floor had become a haphazard model of the city itself. Amidst those stacks glinted countless needles, strewn such that it seemed unlikely Miquella could take a step without injuring his bare feet. He held another tablet in one dangling hand, forgotten, his face raised to the ceiling as though he wished for the palace to collapse on him.
The door creaked open and a shadow fell over the room. Miquella turned to the silhouette there, mute and questioning. Despite the state this intruder found him in, his voice and countenance were gentle as ever.
“I’m sorry, Father,” he said. “It isn’t enough.”
* * *
The Lands Between burned.
The once-solemn fields of Limgrave had become a sheet of twisting flame whose tongues rose higher than the scattered war-pennants, their emblems now rendered unanimous by fire. Bodies burnt to bones and bones to charcoal, rivers and lakes reduced to eczemic earth. So complete was the devastation that the landscape itself wavered and ran like tallow, as though the earth itself had forgotten what it once was. But it had been scoured clean of life, save for the laughing colossus that strode its horizon.
It was a thing that defied reason even in this shattered age. A mad meld of draconic flesh spewing flame and mirth in equal measure, its scaled hide kaleidoscopic as grease, its individual parts strangely indecisive. Feet became hands became teeth which were swords, through which protruded tongues that were flame and then flesh and then riddled with grasping fingers, and its innumerable eyes rolled blindly, and its half-hundred horns were haloed with gold, and here and again, like an errant blemish, could be glimpsed a withered frame protruding from that mirth – straw-haired, chest caved in around its ribs, howling at the sky.
Godrick the Golden’s self-image was always malleable at best. This was especially true in his dreams.
Here he was the war incarnate, the revelatory beast; there were none left to question his supremacy. His siblings and their sycophants had been burned and stomped together into the same anonymous mud. Somewhere, blinking in and out like the sun glimpsed behind clouds, was the Erdtree and its throne waiting to embrace him, and it would wait patiently, lovingly, until he was sated.
But then his procession stopped. In the red inferno underfoot, a single gold spark shone bright. The amalgamation’s rolling eyes focused on it, then widened.
“You?” it gurgled.
Miquella was untouched by the flames; not a speck of soot marred his robe. His presence seemed to shame them, for they dampened to cinders when Godrick recognized his face. Those golden eyes, their corneas ringed with a gold paler and brighter still.
“Brother Godrick,” he said. “How long has it been?”
Godrick stepped forward – and did so easily, for his body was now fine-formed, the spitting image of his father Godfrey. Only two arms and two legs, but immaculately set, and with the wretched pallor gone from his cheeks. But there was nevertheless something sunken and unpleasant in the way he grinned.
“Little Miquella,” he said. “Is it you in truth?”
“It is. I know this was unexpected.”
“Ha! The prodigal son returns, at the peak of my triumph!” He swept a hand over the scorched battlefield. “See here? Victory claimed by my mettle alone. Not even Radahn could boast such a feat! And what have you been up to, hm? The family took you for dead!”
“You could say that I am on pilgrimage.” Miquella’s voice was soft, but each word chimed as if he spoke directly into Godrick’s ear. “I thought to pay a visit to my kin. The ones who still wished to receive me, at least.”
“Ever the presumptuous one. No wonder, with those charms. Alas, none remain but myself. The Shattering at last put paid by these hands.” He flexed his fingers and grinned. “These perfect hands!”
“It’s all right. You were the first I wished to visit.”
“Quite reasonable! My hospitality is unparalleled!”
And then they were no longer on the burnt fields but in the depths of Stormveil – the murky and splintered dining halls whose shadows almost, but not quite, concealed a menagerie of hanging limbs. Godrick sat at the head of the table, those massive hands pawing at the dishware. Miquella seemed to take this sudden change of scenery in stride.
“You’ve found me in a fine mood. My lordship is imminent, you know. Any boon you might ask could be within my power.” He squinted, smile fading. “In fact… what has become of your arm, brother?”
Miquella’s left arm was there, but not as present as the rest of him. Hazy and transparent, it was wreathed in the same glow as the rest of him but appeared lost in it, like it was little more than a trick of the light.
“These are troubling times,” he said. “All of us have to make sacrifices.”
“Bah! Anything lost can be recovered.”
“We agree on that.”
“Shall we fetch you a new one? I doubt any of my, eheh, donors could supply limbs as finely-formed as yours, but all the Lands Between are open to me now. All for the grafting!”
“You’re very generous,” said Miquella. “But I must decline. There are transformations that all of us must accept, to face what is coming.”
“Yes. Yes! At last, someone understands!” He pounded the table and rose, his seat squealing across the floor. “They all mocked my art. Every one of those so-called demigods, as though their own bodies were sacred as temples. You have been gone too long, brother. The profanities these hypocrites inflict upon themselves would turn your hair white. But I suffer no such contradiction! Bear witness, for I am complete in every moment! The true inheritor of gold!”
Again his cackles resounded, snaking through dismembered arms which spasmed as though feigning applause. Miquella stayed there, stoically, even as Godrick’s laughter fractured to sobbing and he collapsed to his knees.
They were alone now. The dining hall gone to featureless rock, the ceiling ripped away. Overheard was the Erdtree’s canopy, itself now aflame, staining the sky red. Godrick was so withered and thin that it seemed a wonder his frame could bear his own weight as he sobbed and clutched at Miquella’s robe.
“Why does no one understand?” he asked. “The throne means nothing without legacy. Our father’s heritage was everything. Proof of the mundane, elevated to the divine. But they’ve all left me. Godwyn slain, that wretched Omen Morgott sequestered. Radahn a mere pretender to the line, lost to blithering madness. All the gold has departed, even you… even you!” His gnarled fingers tore at himself. “What else was I to do? Only through grafting can one’s shoulders bear this crisis. Don’t tell me you don’t see it!” He craned his head up to the blazing tree, the firelight painting his tear-streaked face. “Look up at the sky. It burns…!”
But Miquella stepped in front of him, eclipsing the sight. He laid his corporeal hand on Godrick’s cheek, and dream or not, he felt suffused with warmth.
“I share your anguish, brother,” said Miquella. “The world is wracked with torments. It must undergo its own transformation. So please, continue as you are, and wait just a little longer. Better days will come for all. Including you.”
Godrick’s grin returned, shakily. “Always such the orator.”
“We all have our talents.”
“Listen here.” He seized Miquella’s wrist. “That Haligtree of yours remains standing, hm? Surely its forces can yet be bolstered. I shall send a retinue to your sister, if you ensure their safe passage.”
“Thank you,” said Miquella. “You can be assured of it.”
“I’m not so feeble. Not so foolish.” He released him, collapsed back. “They will all see.”
“Of course they will. But you may remember little of this encounter.” The world around them grew indistinct. “Regardless, please hold onto this truth. An age of compassion is nigh.”
When Godrick awoke, details of the dream had already broken apart. All he could recall was a corona of gold and a vague comfort. But there was warmth on his cheek, and when he touched it with a six-fingered hand, it came away wet with tears.
* * *
In the Shadowlands, Miquella’s mortal spirit shed itself like leaves, each divestment staked to the earth. But space was fluid here, and his footfalls marked the land of dreams as well.
He was seldom seen and always forgotten, but his shade passed through many in the Lands Between, raising their hopes and soothing their nightmares. Sometimes he would whisper to those who’d pledged themselves to his service, and they woke with renewed vigor, determined to either work in his service or patiently await his return.
From this vantage, he could sense a change coming over the land. New dreams tinging the malaise that had come with the Shattering. He entered a wretched cell, near-lightless mossy, that had been made resplendent by intricate diagrams across every surface; in the middle of the floor an emaciated and gold-masked figure fingerpainted yet more patterns with mute fervor. The dreamer did not respond to his presence or his words and so he studied their work more closely. Painted circles of runes, their brilliance flowering in front of him. He thought of his own abortive studies in Leyndell, and realized that this dreamer’s command of Order was possibly greater even than his own.
“Marvelous,” he said. “But a different paradigm is still needed. Do you see?”
The dreamer gave no indication it had heard. Miquella watched them work for a while longer, then moved on. And across the Lands Between, the Tarnished arrived, and brought their fragile wonders.
* * *
Morgott walked the halls of the empty palace. The rasp of his rags and tail underscored the tempo of his walking stick; under his craze of horns, his eyes were heavy-lidded and grim. He was searching for something.
Dreams were often fluid things, without transition. The unwitting dreamer fell through landscapes that would shift with a completedness that was neither expected nor questioned, buffeted by their unconscious moods like fallen leaves in a gale. A bedside in a home that became a swamp that hung on a stormy precipice, where a window overlooked stitched and uncanny vistas. But King Morgott was among the most self-possessed of Marika’s children, and his dreams typically maintained a joyless mundanity. Whether he dwelled in the lifeless palace or the diseased streets, or the filth-ridden sewers that had been his true birthplace, he was ever hounded by a faint anxiety, in pursuit of something always out of reach. A spy from one of his treacherous siblings. An attendant who’d glimpsed his face. His father.
But this time, his reverie was interrupted. Soft footfalls behind his own. He turned and showed no clear surprise at what he saw.
Morgott’s heritage meant he’d seldom seen his fellow demigods in person, but Miquella left an impression that didn’t easily fade. There he was, radiant in his simple gold-trimmed robe, his smile warm and inscrutable. The very air seemed to shimmer around him. The only detail out of place was his right eye, now shut; the lashes lay on his cheek like a thin streak of soot.
“Hello, brother Morgott,” he said.
“Brother Miquella.” He turned around fully, tail lashing. “Who sanctioned thee to intrude upon my dreams?”
That smile didn’t flicker. “You grasped the situation at once. Impressive.”
“A trivial deduction. Thou cannot be here in true, so this is a dream. And yet the warmth and light thou bring’st is part of no dream, for I never knew it in waking.” He sat down, for they were no longer in Lenydell’s halls. Now this was the grand plaza before the Erdtree, where the demigods’ abandoned thrones stood. His fist tightened on his staff.
“I heard it said thou commanded dominion over sleep,” Morgott went on. “In another guise, another name. So, thou walk’st through the sleeping realms as well?”
“On occasion. At a distance. But I wanted to see you. It’s been a long time.”
“Long and long. Thy presence is unwelcome.”
“Won’t you speak more familiarly, at least? We are kin.”
“By dint of parentage only.” Morgott leaned forward. “Thou divested thyself of all relation with the creation of that wretched Haligtree. A separate divinity, no less heretical.”
“You were always the most dutiful of us,” said Miquella. “I admired that about you. I do still.”
“Spare me thy honeyed tongue. Or intend’st thou to bewitch me in this state?”
“That was unkind.” Miquella sat in his own chair, across from Morgott, and now theirs were the only seats in the plaza, which was not the plaza but the king’s own chambers, dusty and spartan. “I have no ill intent. This meeting will likely be forgotten upon waking. As most dreams are.”
“A fleeting connection, then. Have there been earlier visitations?”
“No. Nor will there be another.” A trace of sadness in Miquella’s open eye. “I suppose you could call this a pilgrimage.”
For the first time, Morgott’s own features softened; the room wavered like heat-haze. He leaned heavy on his staff.
“There was no affection between us,” he said.
“You allowed my sister free passage through your territory.”
“Yes, when she marched against that mad beast Radahn. Another who forsook duty to pursue his appetites. Mistake not my lapse for benevolence; my forces were occupied with Rykard.” The staff creaked in his grip. “Pillagers and heretics all. And thou wert nowhere to be seen.”
“You knew.”
“I suspected. Leyndell’s forces were scant even in those days, but I had eyes upon thy blasphemous settlement. I knew of Malenia’s return. Her sequestration. And no word of Miquella the Unalloyed. I thought someone must have spirited thee away. Either during thy sister’s campaign, or as the cause of it.” He glared up at Miquella. “Thine empyreal eye…”
Miquella gestured to it, and as he did, his garment shifted. Patches of the flesh underneath were transparent as mist.
“I pondered long,” Morgott said, quieter. “Who wouldst possess the gall to abduct an Empyrean and the will to succeed. For what aim. A possibility occurred to me as to the culprit, vile in implication. Blood of my blood.”
“You mustn’t hate him.”
“I have too long renounced him for hate,” Morgott said, but the way he snarled the words suggested otherwise. “What profanities has my twin inflicted upon thee?”
“Nothing that cannot be healed,” said Miquella. “That was what I came to tell you, brother. All can yet be reclaimed. I ask not for your aid, or your sanction. This is merely one last act of selfishness before I carry on my chosen task.”
“Thou wouldst seek the throne?” Morgott shook the head. “A fool with foolish ambitions.”
“You were the Order’s most faithful servant. I believe you are, still. Haven’t you ever wished for a world more deserving of your loyalty?”
“I have not. Life is toil. All else is seduction.” Outside this chamber was a plain of curling mist, and now it glowed red, as if obscuring firelight. “Our shores are encroached upon. Those bereft of gold, the forsaken Tarnished, have returned.”
“And you fend them off.”
“With ease. There is only one capable of striking me down. And before he crushes this malformed skull, I shall once again feel his hand upon my brow.” He spoke levelly, without emotion. “That is my hope. The only one I am permitted.”
Miquella appeared genuinely troubled by this; for the first time, his fingers knotted, his porcelain brow creased. “A better world is possible, brother. But we must open ourselves to it before it can be made known. I only wish I could show you how.”
For a time, Morgott was silent. Then he spoke slowly, with great deliberation.
“Little use, to grant me a conviction that would fade with the dawn,” he said.
Miquella said nothing.
“Mohg was always weak,” said Morgott. “Open to temptation. When he was besotted by false idols, I was little surprised. But this dynasty of his, this ‘Moghwyn’… he was there, with me, to seal away an abominable secret. One yet fouler than ourselves. Then his obsession deepened until even his blighted image was unrecognizable. I thought it truly unforgivable, had he spirited away our mother’s favored son. Yet here you are. Unbothered. Ascendant.” His gaze ran Miquella through. “Perhaps a deeper seduction was at work.”
The windows now showed only darkness. The walls slick with sewage, gnarled hands grasping feebly through the grates, bearing severed horns like keratinized boils. A chorus of pleading moans. Miquella was no longer smiling.
“I asked thee the purpose of thy visitation,” Morgott continued. “Didst thou cometh to shrive thyself? A balm of the conscience, to carry away from this fading dream?” He gestured at the wretched assemblage in the outer shadow. “Observest my true kin. Perhaps thou couldst instead offer these phantasms succor. Kiss their plagued flesh and whisper thy beatific promises. Truly they must have found purchase in my twin brother’s ears.”
Even now, Miquella’s frame cut through the gloom. A corona of gold spilled from his feet, shining wetly on the streaks of unnamable slime. Morgott rose and hobbled away from that glow, into the dark.
“To think Marika counted thee among her best,” he said. “Thy kind are all of a piece.”
* * *
It was well-known that the Scarlet Rot’s corruption went well beyond the flesh. In its terminal stages, victims tended towards either catatonia or rapturous mania, the latter sort rabid to spread the sickness wherever and however they could. When Miquella walked in Caelid, the minds he brushed were feverish with a red fog often so thick it obscured minds and dreams entirely, all surrendered to the seething corruption. He offered what help he could. But Morgott’s accusation, unkind or not, wasn’t inaccurate – Miquella could indeed exert his holy charisma in this state, and the Rot saw him as an invasive presence, blowing against him in a corrosive gale.
He exercised his power judiciously. Most souls who’d survived the Shattering were wracked with pain and desperate for belief, and would have given themselves to him whole-heartedly with little persuasion, but he was content to be a comforting presence, a break in their fevers and a pause to their aches; no need to enthrall each forlorn soul he encountered. There were those who possessed far more strength but lacked for a cause, and he cast his eye on them, offered his guidance. As he tended to these souls and further refined his own, he also gathered a retinue that, in time, he might beckon to Moghwyn Palace.
The commonfolk were one thing, but his kin were almost entirely unpersuadable. Their agendas and appetites rang like a bell in their minds, drowning out his voice. Godrick had been one exception, with feet of clay under all those he’d grafted to himself, but he was an unsubtle sort and bound tightly to his territory. And then there was Mohg, the reclusive Lord of Blood, who lacked his twin’s grim resignation and ironclad sense of duty. He was ambitious, and thirsted for love so fiercely that Miquella’s very shade had felt parched. He had sufficed.
In his waking dream, he drifted through Caelid. Passed through minds chittering and alien, drowning in fever, consumed with flame. Redmane Castle was a pestilential beacon; concepts such as distance didn’t quite apply on this place, but Miquella still felt that he could scarcely approach it for the ravenous, agonized din that emitted from that cloud.
It was all so regrettable.
In the swamps where the Scarlet Aeonia had bloomed, he peered into the mind of O’Neil and amidst his gibbering saw a faint golden glow, purging the worst of the rot. The memory of his needle. Those slivers of unalloyed gold had been a preventative measure, and a shoddy one at that, but even broken and mired in sludge, they were potent enough to have some effect on these more mundane infections.
But it hadn’t been enough – not in the Haligtree, the span of the continent away, where he could still sense the Rot’s pulse. It was the one place he hadn’t visited in this state.
As a child, an actual child, he’d wept over the deprecation of his sister’s flesh. The oozing, crusted corruption that gradually stole her away. Her fingernails had fallen off, then her sword hand, then her foot; by then he’d delved fully into the studies of fundamentalism and designed the prosthetics that would replace what she’d lost and sterilize the rot, but it was insatiable. She was sent away to blight distant lands as he forgot what it felt like to sleep and dreamed only of his studies. When he’d at last developed the needle and slid it into her flesh, the eyes which had looked on him so kindly had been consumed.
Not long after that had been the vow, and all that transpired in its wake. She would await his return, and Miquella told himself that he would honor her patience by returning in full. Not some half-remembered specter.
Radahn had made his own arrangements; Miquella hadn’t anticipated the Festival and it had come as a pleasant surprise. The Tarnished would flock there, and with all his mother had done for her own preparations, he was sure there’d be a contender who could overcome him eventually. And for tender, furtive Mohg, if one of those would-be lords didn’t find him themselves, he would whisper in the ears of his chosen and ask they seek out Kind Miquella. And all the while, he continued his pilgrimage, feeling emptier and more expansive with each divestment. He would grow enough to encompass the hopes of an epoch, and descend, resplendent, to sweep away this pestilence like vapor.
* * *
Little remained of him now. His body stripped almost to hallucination itself, all translucent save for his remaining eye. He walked across shallow water and his feet left no ripple – but then, this was no typical water, and no typical dream.
The sky overhead boiled with writhing stars. Constellations crawled over one another like ants across whorls of amethyst dust; amidst that frenzy were points of light which held their place and pulsed with inscrutable vitality. The cosmos’ procession was mirrored in the water underneath and all between was dark and featureless, save for the structure he approached now – a stone cradle like a sacrificial bowl, large enough to contain a grown man. He peered over the lip of it.
Inside was a young girl, fast asleep. Ivory-skinned and russet-haired, she seemed to glow inside this strange bed. She wore a simple robe of deep indigo that seemed more like a nightshirt and was clutching a thick wolf-skin cloak like a blanket, its hairs wavering with her breath.
Then her eye opened the merest crack, and everything changed.
He was in a library now, its cyclopean shelves stretching towards enshadowed ceilings – or maybe not ceilings at all, for Miquella thought he saw stars twinkling in that darkness. He was accustomed to these shifts in dreams but they had always come passively, in response to the dreamer’s moods and histories. This was willful, and rushed upon him suddenly enough to bring vertigo.
“Well now. This is unexpected.”
He turned on his heel and the library was gone. Looming before him now was a cold stone hearth bearing only a handful of embers. Over the hearth was a painting whose oils had faded to meaningless abstraction but changed every time he refocused it, and in front was an armchair in which the red-haired girl sat, fingers tented. Her eyes were the color of ice.
“I seldom entertain visitors in these strange days. So perhaps a strange visitor is only appropriate. Brother Miquella, thy light seem’st rather out of place.”
The hearth was gone. The library returned. Before the shelf was a girl different and the same, her hair now black and pin-straight, coursing past her waist. She bore an armful of books and scrolls and examined the shelves, paying him little mind.
The shelves were gone. The room far more constrained. Some manner of tower crazed with bric-a-brac, astrological instruments of unknown purpose. The room was unlit and outside the window was a howling blizzard that painted everything in chiaroscuro hues. The girl sat in a high-backed chair now, facing him directly. She wore a fur cloak and a broad-brimmed hat and her skin was blue as a corpse taken in from the cold. Two of her hands rested on her lap. The other two resumed that tent-fingered pose.
“Art thou unsettled?” said Ranni. “Permit me these amusements. Thou didst enter uninvited, after all.”
“I thought you might enjoy the company,” said Miquella.
She smiled faintly. “Ever the thoughtful one.”
Three Empyreans were born to the Erdtree line. Three demigods deemed capable of succeeding Marika in full godhood, and as Melania deferred to him in all things, Ranni was his only true rival. And even before their family’s deterioration had begun in earnest, he knew she would be a fearsome one. From childhood, her mind had traveled along vectors foreign to the Order’s most brilliant scholars, and she had little love for her father’s heritage; Rykard favored his personal ambitions, Radahn pursued Godfrey’s legacy, but Ranni had cared for her mother above all, and after the Carian schism she drifted away from their family, distant as the profane moon she now favored. There had been a long and uneasy silence before her own plans were set into motion.
Miquella had been off establishing the Haligtree when news had reached him about the Night of Black Knives. He understood then that he’d run out of time.
Now here she was, her own body wavering between those three states – the child of Radagon, child of Rennala, and at last this aspect of the frost witch, the one she had chosen for herself. There wasn’t any of the frightful instability Godrick had shown. All were encompassed within her.
“Will I recall this gracious encounter come the morn?” she asked. “Or will it fade, like any dream?”
“It fades. But you were always exceptional.”
“Not in this respect, I fear. My slumbers are long, but on waking I think them dreamless. So let us not waste this chance on pleasantries.” She tilted her head, hat-brim obscuring her face, so that her blinded eye mirrored his open one. “Thou hast divested much of thine own flesh, it would seem. So, thine apotheosis is at hand?”
“It won’t be long now,” he said.
This was to be the final visit, and he’d expected a challenge but still struggled to keep himself dispassionate, even after so many of his passions had been taken away. Ranni was his equal in wits, and while he had no intention of trying to use his charms here, he knew they wouldn’t find purchase on her regardless; there was no part of her to which he could appeal in such a way. She was seamless like an egg.
“In truth, thou wert often close in my thoughts.” The tower wavered and again they were before the hearth, its weak flame now burning blue. “Pledged to my service is the greatest tracker in all the Lands Between. When opportunity availed, I bade him search for any trace of you. He found none. Which could only mean thou wert sequestered in a place that could not be found. Precious few of our kin could accomplish such a thing.” She regarded the flame. “Morgott’s reviled twin, hm?”
“Yes. As tribute to his own deity.”
“And with his gambit were another brother and sister undone. Plots within plots. Preludes to the Shattering. Yet we endure. I thought thy ascendancy had been stymied with Radahn’s war against the stars, as was mine.”
“Our kind aren’t easily halted,” he said. “The curse of the Empyreans. An insatiable will, bound to be subordinate to another.”
“And thy sister is likewise leashed.” Ranni paused. “Forgive me. That was unkind.”
“It’s all right.”
“I envied thy closeness, in a sense. My own comrades are few, and my chosen path lonesome. I gleaned that she yet lives. Hast thou visited her in this way?”
“She knows I’m always with her,” said Miquella. “I promised that when my own path is complete, she will be the first one I see. To purge her illness and all others.”
“Someone in thy position would place much value on promises. Vows which must be kept.” She tapped her fingertips together, her arms wavering like mirage. “Out with it, then. Thou wouldst try and dissuade me from mine own ambitions.”
“I’ve found another way,” he said, and midway through speaking the hearth had vanished to be replaced with a heap of tomes upon which Ranni perched like a throne. “Ranni. I sympathize with your intent. The roots of the world are rotten. But what you have planned, this severance…”
“Thou know’st mine intent, hm.”
“I know enough. To push away all gods. All faith. Leaving the forlorn to contend with their sins.” He placed a hand to his chest. “I have traveled much and traveled far, and touched as many of their hearts as I could. Emptied myself, so that I can take on their anguish. When I return, it would be with an age of unalloyed compassion. A thousand years of benevolence, where the war of all against all would find never again take light. No rancor, no schisms. Succor would be granted to even the lowliest, so that they would longer be low at all, but raised into the light by my will.” His eye met hers. “I ask not for your surrender or your aid– neither would do us much good, in this realm of dreams. My only hope is some fleeting sympathy may accompany you into waking. And when we meet again, all would be remembered.”
Ranni let the silence stretch on several seconds longer than was comfortable.
“An impassioned plea, to be sure,” she said. “But why make it at all, knowing Radahn holds me at bay? Unless there is an obstacle thou hast not yet overcome.”
“There are further steps to be taken. But once they are, the rest will happen very quickly. This will be my only chance.”
Again they were before the hearth, but the fire was livelier now, red as the hair with which she’d been birthed. She watched it contemplatively.
“I have been too long apart from all kin,” she said quietly. “Hast thou spoken to Rykard?”
“I could not. He is lost in his appetites. The same as Uncle Maliketh, though the Black Blade bears it with more dignity.”
“That may be the first and only time anyone calls him Uncle,” she said dryly, and Miquella almost smiled despite himself. “I imagine a similar affliction befell Radahn.”
“I’m sorry, Ranni. The Scarlet Rot is a vile thing. There must be a spark of him buried deep in its mire, but it’s beyond my reach.” Miquella stepped closer to her. “But it will be purged, with every other malady.”
“It is a pity nonetheless. He was fond of thee.”
“He was?”
“Oh yes. He oft said that we two were the only demigods who could see eye to eye.” She sighed. “An amusing joke, I gathered, to do with our stature.”
That actually coaxed a reaction from him. Less a laugh than an exasperated sigh, but still the closest thing to mirth he’d felt in a long time.
“He was gifted, to be certain," said Ranni. "The sort who only finds their true measure in times of turbulence. Tenderness to match his strength, and caution to temper his will. I knew I could never truly count him among my allies, reverent as he was of Godfrey, but there was much to admire. Though he was an impediment, I loved him. I do still.” Then she turned to Miquella. “Though not, I would think, as thou did.”
The fire went out, and all was darkness.
Miquella was left adrift. He felt poleaxed; Ranni’s last words were like an icicle slipped into his heart. He was about to whisper her name when she whispered instead, as if she stood just beside his ear.
“Didst thou not wonder why Radahn arrested the stars? I have my suspicions, and shall share them with thee now. That my brother, who so venerated mortal Godfrey divested of gold, saw a terrible design in the empyreal fate. That he sought to belay our ascension for what it might entail, though the very land may wither as a consequence. Well-intentioned, in the end. But he misjudged us both.”
The dark bled away, and he was against standing in that shallow pool beset by maniac stars. Its true location was clearer now – this was the grand reflecting pool of the Carian manor, though the Erdtree was absent. No gold shone here. And before him, Ranni’s cradle had resumed its true shape as the grand astrolabe, before which she stood, all her selves, three sisters in herself, gazing down at him like prosecutors.
“In my seclusion, I ruminated much,” she said. “On the ruination of the Erdtree line, and the splinters of a dying age. There was one puzzle that eluded me. Why Malenia the Severed, who would raise her blade only at thy behest, traveled the land for such a great and scarring battle, only for thee to vanish so soon thereafter. Was the Haligtree’s aegis so frail, or was there a greater string-puller at work? Such a rare opportunity we have been afforded, to shed light on this matter. What say’st thou?”
He answered in a voice he did not fully recognize as his own. “As you said. A vow must be kept.”
Ranni smiled, in all her aspects. In the distance could be heard the baying of wolves.
“Was Morgott one of thy recipients as well? Did he also discern thy complicity?”
“Not entirely.”
“A vast puzzle it was. And your arrival was the final piece. You must have known that in this meeting it would be revealed. So dost thou come as pilgrim, or as penitent? No matter. Let us start anew, without further dissembling.”
And now the moon was there, without ceremony, silent and colossal – its upper curvature stretched beyond his line of sight, its surface so vast that Ranni seemed little more than a pore in its silvery skin. Its craters were dark as open mouths and something deep within sometimes writhed and sometimes it stared, and the sound of wolves grew louder.
“For my Carian heritage and allegiance to the dark moon, I was dubbed the Lunar Princess,” said Ranni. “Less welcoming, I admit, than thine epithets. I have heard them all. Tender Miquella, Kindly Miquella, Miquella the Unalloyed. Such a pretty sheen, over such an ugly truth.” Unseen jaws snapped at his back. “Where is thy truth, o gilded aspirant? Where is thy sister, who loves thee so dearly? A love genuine and uncompelled, I am sure, and perhaps the only of its kind thou hast ever known – taken by thee and reforged to kinslaying blade. Believest thyself worthy of it?”
“Were you worthy of your mother’s?” he asked.
Ranni showed no outward reaction, though the howls stopped suddenly as a blade dropping and the water at his feet crackled and froze. But Miquella was undaunted.
“Would you deny it?” he went on. “Your severance with the Order began with the betrayal of Queen Rennala. Mine because it was unfit to restore my sister. We took the first step on this path whispering the names of those we loved, to spur ourselves on. But I wish to create a world worthy of them. You only punish the one that was.”
“And yet Scarlet Rot blights the world from thy plotting.”
“It will be purged.”
“And yet thy kin scatter maddened and slain by thy hand.”
“You have no right to say that to me!” Miquella shouted. “Even in the Shadowlands I’ve seen what became of Godwyn. His corrupted putrescence blights everything. Every corner of the Lands Between is stained by your betrayal!”
“Indeed,” said Ranni. “By foul betrayal and fearsome rite did I purloin Destined Death, and with it condemned Godwyn the Golden to rot eternal. I set in motion the calamity which would scatter the Age of Gold asunder. For I am Ranni, apostle of the chill and faithless night, and with mine ascension shall all bonds be likewise severed. What of thee, who preach’st compassion? What of thy thousand years of benevolence, teetering upon a rotted base? It seem’st to me thy compassion is naught but a fetter. Another link in the morbid chain which hath encircled thy lineage.” The moonlight was relentless, blinding. “Thou’rt beset by contradictions. Thou know’st thyself not. Godhood shall devour thee.”
Before he could retort came the final shift. Gone was the moon, the dais, the sound of slavering jaws. It was only himself and Ranni, standing an arm’s-length away. Her hands were folded, her voice gentle.
“Brother Miquella,” she said. “I would offer thee an accord.”
“I underestimated you after all,” he said. “You found weakness, though I’ve come so far. But I’m not so deluded as to believe you would ever honor an alliance.”
“Thou art correct on both counts. We are not allies. And weakness persists in thee still. Thy fears, thy doubts, these are not yet divested – and that means there is still time to preserve what remains of thyself.” Three visages flickered, all sincere. “So I say to thee: yield the path forward, Miquella. Turn away from the ruin. And in exchange, before this dismal age completes its own turning, I shall flense the Scarlet Rot from Malenia and cast it to the outer dark.”
His oratory failed him. All he could say was, “You won’t remember—”
“Doubt not mine ability,” she said. “To retain this vow, or to see it through. We are Empyrean, and there is nothing we cannot do, given will and cause. For that is our curse.”
Another age might have passed while they stood there. Ranni’s expression was imperious as ever, but her gaze was unwavering and the dream unbroken, earnestly awaiting Miquella’s answer. In the end, he was the one to hang his head.
“It isn’t enough,” he said. “The world suffers as she does. What good does saving one soul do, when we have the potential to alleviate it all?” He couldn’t bring himself to meet her eye again. “But take heart. When the work is complete, I know that you too will understand.”
No reply. Instead Ranni receded, still unmoving, the gulf between them growing wider. He felt himself pushed to the periphery of the dream. Before the outer shadows engulfed her entirely, he heard her voice one last time, so faint it might not have been there at all.
“Understand this, ere thy departure,” she said. “With each divestment, thou becomest not more of a god. Only less of a brother.”
* * *
All transpired as he’d foreseen. After the encounter with Ranni, he shed St. Trina and the world of dreams around him dimmed. Some part of that old potency yet clung to his Great Rune, the core of who he was, but when that too was cast away all that would remain was unhindered divinity. He felt within him a coldness as vast as the space between stars, where a god’s beneficence could surely grow, and his mind spread out across the Shadowlands. Without St. Trina he could no longer touch the sleep of all the world, but this corner of it was yet under his dominion, though his visions were murky and brief, glimpses through spoiled glass.
Here was a dream so inchoate that he wasn’t certain if it came from man or beast. A featureless and empty world of grey mists that passed through the golden fog of his own form. He lingered there a moment, and believed that the last of his other self’s influence had left him. It was for the best, he thought. The divine tower awaited.
Then there came the sound.
A hammerblow of such force that it was beyond comprehension, audible only in its echo; the strike crazed the mists with cracks of gold and reverberated through his phantasmal body. He searched for its origin and then cried out soundlessly as the hammer struck again, and again, the gold splinters running around him and through him; he would have clapped his hands to his ears had he hands or ears remaining. This din was unendurable.
Mother? he tried to say, and was answered only with another hammerfall. No – this was not Marika, but an echo in itself, though he still felt her presence with every strike. Who in the Shadowlands could have borne this in their heart?
The mists parted and he saw it. A slight and huddled figure, a tarnished stain on the fog. It crouched with its hands over its ears, featureless, motionless, even as the world around it fractured apart. Miquella stood before it, and it raised its head. It saw him.
He had cast aside his fears, placed himself beyond anything that could touch him, and awaiting him was a new aegis that could not be overcome by anything in the Lands Between. But when he felt this meager shade’s regard, Miquella was struck by a deep and abiding terror that rooted in him, clung to him, even after the final dream thundered him awake.
* * *
At the base of the Haligtree, the great scarlet flower slumbered. Its tendrils had already begun to corrupt the surrounding land, creeping to the abandoned tree’s base; given enough time, it would devour the roots, and the abandoned Elphael would finally collapse. Malenia slumbered within its petals. The Scarlet Rot gnawed at her dreams.
It was much the same as it had been in all the years before. Dreams clotted with red, as she awaited Miquella’s return. Her blood felt invaded by a horde of biting insects, a dull heat that hounded her through deepest sleep, and the itching fractured her consciousness so that any dream held for only a moment before crumbling like sand. She welcomed the incoherence. It distracted from her failure.
It should have been worse than this, Malenia thought when she was able to think. The Haligtree had been invaded, Miquella’s haven and homecoming endangered, and in her desperation to grasp victory she’d allowed the rot to run rampant. It should have consumed whatever was left of her, inside this aeonian bloom. But after her loss she had felt a familiar sting, an arm reaching through the petals to push through a gold needle. It kept the rot from invading the core of her, even now. She didn’t know if it was mercy or cruelty.
Then the red mist surged again, and sense left her. She drifted through the hungering dream with closed and eaten eyes.
Time passed. In her dream she felt the rot recede ever so slightly, pushed back by a familiar presence. Pale gold leaking through her blinded eyelids. No more than an errant hallucination, but she spoke to it regardless.
“I’m sorry, brother,” she said. “I was outmatched.”
No answer.
“There was an outsider. A Tarnished of no renown, lowly and utterly without peer. Their strikes were tempered with such desperation, and yet in them I felt… You must be wary of them, brother. This age is nearing its end, for if they seek the throne, then I tell you the throne is forfeit.”
“I know.”
The words were toneless, but she sensed their implication. The rot rushed in eagerly at her despair.
“Then our hopes are ended, and all is lost,” she said. “Miquella, I am weary. I will keep my vigil as long as I am bidden. But hasn’t this been enough?”
“It was always enough,” said the voice. “The fault was never with you. Miquella was tormented by his failure to break your curse. He believed himself irredeemable. And so he sought to redeem the world instead.”
“What is this? Are you not Miquella?”
“I am what is left of him,” it answered. “Or maybe I am what was left behind. It makes little difference now. But I carry his thoughts of you still, for no matter what lengths he took, how deeply he tried to scour himself, he still could not rid himself of them. The faith he had in you, and the love that compelled his undoing. This remnant’s time is short. But there is yet one task before me.”
The pale glow brightened and warmth enveloped her. It found the needle’s sting and seized upon it, so it pulsed within her like a second heart. Paralyzed and adrift, Malenia tried to speak, but her voice had left her, and before long she realized that something else had left as well. The glow ebbed, and with it the endless gnawing.
She found that she could open her eyes.
“Sister,” said Miquella. “Wake up.”