There is a discord for this fic. It has Live Updates about chapter progress and when they are completed, among other things. I'm also very active there and am likely to respond to any message sent there. Join at discord.gg/aWZ9qX9mAW
Glory to my Proofreader: Solare. For he is one who points out mistakes and acts as my favourite wall to bounce ideas off of.
I would like to point out that this chapter is 10k words long. Holy FUCK I am a yapper…
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John balanced on the very lip of the rampart tower, boots half-over empty air, looking down into the black throat of the chasm between the outer wall and the fractured bones of Stormveil below. Wind clawed at his coat, dragging at loose strands of hair, and from somewhere far beneath came the faint, constant hiss of the sea striking stone and the broken whisper of falling grit.
Behind his eyes, Marika's presence sharpened.
"What is it, mine Champion?" She asked, there was no teasing lilt in her voice, no amused cruelty, no regal smugness. Just a quiet tension. "What lies beneath that thou speakest so gravely?"
He inhaled once, slow and steady, tasting salt and dust and something like rust on the back of his tongue. The words sat bitter in his mouth.
"A cancer…" He said at last. "A pustule of Godwyn's remains… what's left of him… it's been festering under Stormveil, growing and spreading. Turning into something else entirely."
He glanced sideways at where she hovered, golden and weightless, her bare feet never touching the stone. His eyes were clear and hard in a way she rarely saw, all humor burned away down to simple, steady conviction.
"It's a tumor at the very roots of the Golden Lineage." He continued quietly. "And you… you need to see it for yourself."
For a heartbeat, Marika simply stared at him, the light of her form flickering like a candle caught in a draft. Then the meaning of what he'd said landed with full, ugly weight.
"Godwyn…?" she breathed, every syllable scraped clean of poise. "His remains? Here?" Her gaze snapped downward into the dark chasm. "Nay. That cannot be. I… I bade his husk be buried beneath the Minor Erdtree on the Altus Plateau, its roots enshrined and hidden. I watched to it myself. How then…?"
Her voice thinned at the end of the sentence, trailing into a barely-audible whisper.
John's jaw clenched. He wished he had a neat answer to hand her. He didn't.
"I don't know how," he admitted, exhaling through his nose. "But I've got some ideas. None of them are good."
Marika's eyes narrowed. The faint glow around her dimmed by a fraction, like a star going behind thin cloud. "I like not the sound of that, not one bit."
John huffed a humorless little breath. "Yeah. Join the club."
He tore his gaze away from the chasm long enough to glance back through the archway that led into the rampart mess hall.
Inside, Melina and Millicent were mid-argument over rope technique.
Millicent had a Stormveil soldier half-hogtied already, hands looped behind his back, feet trussed, a gag of torn cloak stuffed efficiently in his mouth. Another guard lay nearby, unconscious with a peaceful expression and a knot on his head.
"No, see-!" Millicent was saying cheerfully as she looped an extra turn around her captive's ankles. "If you cinch it here, he can't wriggle free even if he wakes up. Learned this from Patches the other day, actually-!"
"That is not the compliment you think it is." Melina replied, exasperation and fondness mixed in equal parts. She tugged the rope, adjusting the knot with quick, precise fingers. "And this man's circulation matters. We are detaining them, not torturing them."
"Pfft… What's it matter? They're just some random fuckin-" Millicent muttered.
Melina swatted the back of her head lightly with a sigh. "Language."
John found himself smiling despite everything. The sight of Millicent's irreverent grin and Melina's patient, long-suffering scolding warmed something in his chest that had nothing to do with Grace or flame. For all the chaos, for all the danger, this: this ridiculous, domestic moment in the middle of a doomed castle felt weirdly… right.
"Alright," he muttered under his breath. "Time to go swimming in cursed flesh."
He drew in another deep breath and reached into his inventory, fingers closing around the familiar cool glass of his Flask of Wondrous Physick. The mixture within sloshed faintly, its surface catching invisible light.
"Bottoms up." He said, tipping it back as he took a final step forward.
The liquid burned cold-warm down his throat, spreading through his chest like molten honey, hardening his muscles, lightening his bones, wrapping him in that peculiar cushion of potential the opaline hardtears always gave. He let the last drop slide free and stepped off the edge.
For a few moments, all he could hear was the wind as it roared past his ears, tugged his guts up into his throat, turned his stomach into a hollow, weightless thing. The tower vanished above as he dropped, the stone lip receding into a rapidly shrinking ring of dim light as the chasm swallowed him.
Air whipped his tunic and hair into a frenzy, carrying the scent of old stone, rotten roots and something faintly sweet and foul. Marika drifted alongside him, keeping pace without a hair out of place, as if gravity had forgotten she existed.
"Of all the idiotic, harebrained…" she muttered, pinching the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger. "I would name thee an idiot, mine Champion, but I fear the word lost its meaning where thou art concerned ages ago."
He grinned mid-fall, adrenaline sharpening his teeth. "Aww. That's too bad. You could use other words, you know? I don't doubt you know several synonyms that'd fit, or hit, even harder."
Her brows arched before a slow, wicked little smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth.
"Oh, very well," she said. "If thou insist."
He twisted his body in the air, rolling so his feet faced the cliff wall. His hand flicked out, pulling through nothing, and his Zweihander dropped into his grip with a comforting, enormous weight. He braced.
"Prepare thyself, you reckless, thick-skulled, rune-addled buffoon." Marika intoned sweetly above the rush of air.
"Love you too." John muttered with quite the bit of amusement in his voice, and rammed his sword into the rock.
Steel screamed when the Zweihander bit into the cliffside, carving a deep, jagged groove as he plunged past. Sparks spat around him in a glaring shower. The impact jolted up his arms so hard his shoulders popped, nearly dislocating both. His grip went numb for a second, but he held on, boots skidding against stone as the world tried to tear his arms out of their sockets.
His fall slowed, though not immediately or gently. It was more like going from "vertical bullet" to "vertical car crash", but it was enough. The stone shrieked as the blade cut a long scar into the wall, flinging shards into the dark. The smell of hot metal and pulverized rock slammed up into his nose.
At last, with what felt like an eternity of grinding, the sword caught on a jut of broken masonry and stopped dead. John lurched, suddenly hanging suspended a few meters above a shattered platform of old stone, some kind of collapsed roof.
His ribs protested and every tendon in his arms vibrated like a plucked string as he clung there, panting, heart jackhammering against his sternum.
Then he laughed.
It came out shaky, half-disbelieving. "Hoo… okay… that worked."
Above, the slit of light where he'd jumped was now a distant, narrow wound in the ceiling, barely more than a pale scratch against the black. Dust floated through that shaft like golden motes.
Marika drifted closer, arms folded. "Thou art a miracle of stupidity." She informed him, though amusement softened her words. "Truly, thou hast transcended simple 'idiot' and become a paragon of senseless bravado. A fool-king. A clown-lord. A cretin crowned in poor decisions."
John snorted, teeth bared. "See? Knew you had it in you."
He sucked in one more breath, bent his knees, then kicked off the wall and yanked the sword free. The Zweihander tore loose with a final grunt of protest from the stone, and he dropped the last few meters, landing in a crouch on the broken ruin below with only a light jolt.
He straightened slowly, rolling his shoulders and gulped down from his Crimson Flask till his body wasn't screaming at him anymore. Then, he put it away and looked at his weapon to inspect it.
Where once the blade's edge had been clean, honed steel, it was now chewed and ragged, the first third of it ground down to a brutal, flattened bevel. Long, shiny scars ran its length where the stone had eaten away metal. It looked like someone had taken a whetstone the size of a carriage and gone to town on it for sport.
"...Oh, come on! Urghhh..!" He groaned, holding it up to the faint light. "My poor baby!"
Marika's laughter tinkled through his skull like crystal being tapped. "What, pray tell, didst thou expect?" she asked, delighted. "Thou didst drag the blade down a cliff at terminal velocity. Didst thou think the stone would be gentle? That it would politely sharpen thy sword instead of devouring it?"
He scowled, and held it closer to his body. "A guy can dream."
"Dream less and think more." She chided, though the obvious amusement in her voice never faded. "Thou hast treated that blade as though 'twere a plow through granite, and now thou art shocked it is dulled? Tch. The next time thou presentest it to that blacksmith, he will have an apoplexy on the spot."
John winced, imagining Hewg's flat stare as he handed over the battered greatsword. "...Yeah. Last time I brought him a broken weapon, he didn't believe me when I said"
"Hopefully, he shall make thee swing a rusted hammer five hundred times to 'feel the metal's fatigue'." Marika added, hiding a smile behind her hand. "A punishment thou richly deserveth."
He grimaced, rubbing the back of his neck as phantom muscle soreness flared in his arms. "I need to visit him again soon anyway, I guess," he muttered. "Put this through intensive care."
He clicked his tongue and slid the butchered Zweihander back into his inventory with a whisper of warped steel, then turned his attention to his surroundings at last.
The broken platform he stood on sloped gently downward into the guts of what had once been a catacomb. Cracked stone arches leaned precariously overhead, their carvings worn nearly smooth by age and neglect. Half-collapsed walls hinted at alcoves that had once held bodies or offerings; now they held nothing but dust, twisted roots, and the occasional glimmer of tarnished metal.
Patches of ghostly fungus clung to the damp stones, shedding a pale, sickly light. The air was cool and heavy, thick with the scent of old earth, stale air, and something else underneath: a faint, cloying sweetness he recognized as the smell of rot gone eldritch.
"Well… Still beats the hell outta going through that annoying ass parkour later." He muttered, stepping off the broken ledge and onto a cracked stairway that led deeper in.
Marika floated along at his shoulder, eyes tracing the ruined walls with a peculiar intensity.
"I remember this place…" She said, voice gone distant. "These catacombs were carved at mine order, not long after Godfrey first took Stormveil in my name. They were meant as resting places for the honored dead… and vaults for certain relics best buried."
John stepped over the shattered remains of a coffin lid, toe nudging a broken iron torch-holder. "Most other catacombs I've seen are still intact. Creepy, sure. But not… this."
He gestured at a whole corridor that had simply sheared away, opening onto empty air and the dark void between cliffs. "What the hell happened down here?"
Marika's golden eyes lingered on a cracked relief of a lion and a storm-beast locked in combat, half-obscured by moss. She sighed, something like old nostalgia threading through the sound.
"Stormhill…" She murmured. "This region is where mine Old Lord, Godfrey, fought a King from a distant land. Their battle rent the sky and shook the bones of the earth. Cliffs cracked and valleys collapsed. The very bedrock of this place broke and slid. Stormveil stands upon those wounds still, I'd imagine being built upon such battlegrounds did its durability no favour."
"This 'king'…" He half remembered some flavour text from a few obscure items in the game that mentioned the previous king of Stormveil. "Wouldn't happen to be called the Storm King, would he?"
"Aye." Marika's lips thinned into a wry line. "That is what some had come to call him. He likely bore others, but he had never admitted or mentioned any before he was defeated. He wielded a sword-spear, commanded the storms themselves, and he was seldom seen without his God-Beast at his heel, as Serosh once followed Godfrey."
John's eyes lit up, mind racing as a flicker of recognition tugged at the back of his mind, half-remembered images from another game, another story. A warrior-king with a spear-sword, calling down storms. A God-Beast at his side like a living storm itself.'Oh, that sounds suspiciously like the Nameless–'
Before he could chase that thought any further down the speculative rabbit hole, the ground shuddered under his feet.
It was subtle at first, a faint vibration running up through his boots. Then the stone beneath him gave a deeper, more insistent lurch, dust sifting from the ceiling. Somewhere ahead, in the larger chamber the shattered hallway opened into, something heavy groaned.
John's stomach dropped for the second time that day.
"Oh…" He muttered. "Right. This room."
He stepped forward, boots ringing hollowly as he entered a wider, partially collapsed hall. Once, it might have been a ceremonial space, but it was now a vast empty hall surrounded by uneven, cracked flagstones. Root-veins as thick as his arm bulged from the walls, pulsing faintly with golden light.
He didn't need to see the rest to remember.
He raised a hand against his chest, fingers curled into a loose fist. "Flame, Grant Me Strength."
Heat surged.
Scarlet power flared across his skin in whorls, wrapping his arms, burning along his shoulders. His veins roared with borrowed ferocity, muscles tightening, perception sharpening as the crimson aura burst from him like a second, invisible heartbeat.
A second later, the floor exploded.
The central section of the chamber bulged from beneath, flagstones doming upward as if something huge pressed against them from below. Then the stone shattered, bursting outward in a rain of debris and clotted earth as something massive forced its way into the world.
First came roots, they surged out like a nest of serpents: thick, twisted cords of wood slick with sap and stained dark with rot. They whipped and coiled, tearing aside rock and dust. Between them, pale, tumor-flecked bark heaved, studded with pulsing, sickly-golden pustules that oozed luminous sap.
Then its front parted into a maw, it was not a mouth as anything sane would define it, but something more like the suggestion of one:an opening framed by jagged, splintered roots, lined with thorn-like growths. A reeking breath gusted out, hot and sweet and rancid all at once, smelling of sap, decay and something wrong.
The Ulcerated Tree Spirit screamed.
The sound was a wet, gurgling shriek that echoed off the broken stone and seemed to crawl straight into his bones. Its body writhed, a bunched, spiraling mass of semi-solid wood and flesh that had never decided which one it wanted to be. Golden sap dripped and hissed where it hit the ruined floor, burning tiny pits into the stone.
Above them, at the ragged edge of his vision, a familiar translucent bar unfurled across the air, red and segmented.
[Ulcerated Tree Spirit.]
"Riiight…" John muttered. "Forgot about you..."
Marika's voice cut through the shrieking like a whip as she snapped. "Enough gawking. That thing is a blight, a malformed echo of the Erdtree's roots. Draw steel, fool, unless thou wishest to end thy days as mulch. Thy bare hands will not suffice against this one."
He clicked his tongue. "I know, I know. Slippery bastard never did let me just do what I want."
He plunged his focus inward, flicking mentally through his inventory, weapon after weapon flashing at the edge of his awareness. Greatswords, swords, daggers-
His attention snagged on one.
A length of carved wood and metal etched with banners and runes, the memory of a commander's bellow on a rot-soaked battlefield, and the feeling of being impaled and helpless upon its sharp end.
"Oh…" He murmured, a slow grin forming. "Hello, you."
He reached into the air and pulled.
The Commander's Standard thumped into his grasp with a satisfying weight, the haft warm and solid against his palm. He stepped back, giving himself a little space as he spun it once, twice, familiarizing himself with its balance.
It was a halberd, but taller, more ceremonial: a long ash shaft carved with faint spiraling motifs, its surface worn smooth where countless hands had gripped it before. At its head, the weapon flared into a wicked crescent blade, one edge honed for sweeping cuts, the other thicker for blunt impacts. Above that, an elongated spike jutted forward like a lance tip.
Tattered red-and-gold banners hung from just below the blade, stitched with the emblem of a forgotten commander. They fluttered faintly in the stale, underground air as if responding to some wind only they could feel.
"Fancy~!" John muttered, twirling it again with a smirk. The weight distribution was different from the Zweihander, it was lighter, more front-heavy. It wanted to move in arcs, in sweeps and circles, not overhead cleaves. His shoulders adjusted quickly.
"Thou hast abandoned the daggers so soon?" Marika drawled, watching him. "Already bored with pretending to be an assassin, art thou?"
"They didn't feel natural!" He shot back, rolling his wrists. "And dual-wielding tiny knives made me feel like a discount Jin-Woo."
"...A what?"
"Nevermind."
The Ulcerated Tree Spirit reared back, its twisted mass coiling, then slammed forward toward him in a lurching, almost liquid lunge. Roots tore trenches in the floor as it came, maw yawning, pustules pulsing fervidly.
John planted the butt of the Commander's Standard against the ground, channeled his mana, and roared.
Scarlet-gold light exploded from the banners.
The Ash of War flared, a wave of shimmering radiance rippling out from him like a shockwave. It washed over his skin, layering atop Flame, Grant Me Strength, setting his muscles thrumming with renewed vigor, hardening his defenses, sharpening his focus. For a heartbeat, it felt like he was not standing alone, but at the head of an unseen phalanx, banners snapping at his back.
"Alright, ugly!" He called out, leveling the halberd tip at the oncoming monstrosity. "Come at me!"
The Tree Spirit obliged.
It crashed into him like an avalanche.
He dove to the side, boots skidding on grit as a mass of roots slammed into the ground where he'd stood, shards of rock spraying in all directions. Golden sap splattered, sizzling.
"Keep thy distance." Marika barked. "Its body is all momentum and mass. Thou must control the space, not contest it. A halberd is reach made manifest, use it!"
"Working on it!" He snapped back.
The Tree Spirit's bulk whipped around with unnatural flexibility, its whole body twisting like an overgrown, diseased vine. A root as thick as his torso lashed toward him. He swung the Commander's Standard in a wide, horizontal arc; the crescent blade met the root with a meaty thunk, biting deep, biting through.
Rotten wood and sap sprayed. The severed segment writhed on the floor for a moment, then stilled.
The Spirit shrieked, rearing back. Pustules along its flank swelled, then burst in rapid succession, spewing arcs of burning golden bile that splattered the ground in hissing pools.
John danced backward, feet light despite the weight of his buffs, halberd snapping into a defensive stance. The weapon felt… good. Different from the swords he favored, but not alien. It wanted wide circles, wanted him to pivot from the hips, to command the mid-range.
He obliged.
He stepped in just as the Spirit lunged again, swinging its bulk like a hammer. The bannered halberd flicked out, the lance-point spearheading a thrust that drove straight into a swollen mass near what passed for its neck.
The point punched through diseased bark, lodging deep. Sap exploded out in a thick, reeking stream, hissing against his buffs without searing through.
The Spirit thrashed, trying to twist away. John planted his feet, levered the weapon, and used its own momentum to carve the wound wider, dragging the blade through in a long, ripping gouge.
"Better." Marika said approvingly in his mind. "Do not meet force with force when leverage will suffice. Thou art not a boulder, thou art the man pushing it."
"Sure feels like a boulder from here…" He grunted.
The Tree Spirit jerked suddenly, its massive bulk coiling in on itself in preparation for another explosive slam. John saw the telltale tightening of root-muscles, the way its maw tucked in.
He jumped backward, but too late to completely avoid the shockwave.
It hit like a physical thing, a wave of concussive force blasting out as the Spirit hurled itself downward. The edge of it clipped him, sending him stumbling, ears ringing. The halberd nearly flew from his hands.
The Spirit surged forward to capitalize, maw yawning, light pooling deep within as it prepared to spew more noxious flame.
"Move!" Marika snapped.
He obeyed within a heartbeat, by cutting to the side, feeling heat lick across his coat as a column of blazing, golden fire roared past, turning the spot he'd occupied into a charred crater. His lungs seized at the smell, half-burnt wood and half-something else, some soul-stench that made his skin crawl.
"Ghh-" He coughed into his shoulder. "Okay. Don't like that."
"Then cease standing in front of it when it breathes." Marika replied tartly. "Aim for its pustules. They fuel its motion, burst enough, and its own corruption shall stagger it."
He grit his teeth and nodded, circling. The Tree Spirit turned to follow, roots pulverizing the floor with every shift. He started to find a rhythm: keep to mid-range, bait a swing, cut a root, stab a swelling, move again.
He thrust the halberd forward in a quick series of jabs, the lance-tip darting in like a serpent's head. Each impact burst another pale, throbbing growth, showering him in more sap and steam. His grip slipped once, twice, as the haft became slick, but he tightened his fingers and kept going.
The Spirit slammed its bulk sideways in a sweeping crush.
He ducked under it, dropping to one knee and letting the mass of wood sail over his head, feeling the air shove his hair downward. As it passed, he twisted and brought the halberd around in a brutal backswing, the crescent blade hacking into the underside of its body where delicate, root-like structures dangled.
The cut went deep as the Spirit howled, its entire frame convulsing.
"You complain of daggers feeling unnatural…" Marika commented dryly as he flowed into another sweep. "Yet thou art rapidly turning this halberd into an extension of thy limbs. Perhaps thou art less a swordsman than a farmer with delusions of grandeur."
"Hey." He huffed. "If it works, it works."
He spun the halberd in his hands, letting the banners snap, and lunged again, this time using the flat of the blade to bat aside a whipping root before reversing the motion into a downward chop that split a large pustule near its base like an overripe fruit.
The sticky explosion nearly knocked him off his feet. Sap splattered his boots, sizzling faintly. He grimaced.
"They feel wrong- Hah~..." he added between breaths, answering her earlier jab about the daggers. "Dual knives, I mean. Too edgy, too anime. I already feel like a walking shounen protagonist half the time. Last thing I need is to complete the look and turn into a full Jin-Woo clone."
"A 'Jin-Woo'…" Marika repeated, tasting the unfamiliar name. "Some hero of thy former world, no doubt?"
"You don't wanna know." He replied breathlessly, cringing inwardly at the idea.
"On the contrary," she said. "I find the idea of thee comparing thyself to heroes amusingly arrogant."
The Spirit's body suddenly glowed brighter along its length, golden light racing through its veins. Its movements sharpened, grew more erratic. It lashed out in rapid succession, roots striking like whips from multiple directions.
John ducked one, parried another with the halberd's shaft, and took a third on his shoulder, the impact jarring him to the bone. Pain flared across nerves, but Flame, Grant Me Strength and the Rallying buff soaked enough to keep him moving.
He ground his teeth. "Okay. Enough playing nice."
He baited another slam, feinting closer then darting away so the Spirit hurled itself into a patch of already-cracked floor. The impact broke the stone further, sending up a cloud of dust.
He used that cloud.
He darted in along the edge of its bulk, plant-skidding on the uneven terrain, and brought the halberd up in a full, committed overhead swing, every buff-enhanced muscle in his back and shoulders firing.
The blade bit down into a cluster of thick roots near what passed for its spine.
The impact sang through the chamber. The Spirit convulsed, its entire body arching as the blow staggered it. Golden light flared wildly, then dimmed, its movements suddenly sluggish.
"There, thou hast it!" Marika said sharply. "Press the advantage. Foul as it is, its form is still bound by its physical form. Enough trauma, and even this twisted thing must bow."
"Already planning on it!" John snarled.
He let the Commander's Standard fall from his hands, the halberd entering his inventory as he stepped forward, directly into the Spirit's shadow.
His arms tingled as scales bloomed along his forearms, racing up from fingertips to elbow in a rush of heat. Claws pushed through the skin of his fingers, lengthening and darkening into curved, black talons.
His muscles bulked beneath his skin, bones rearranging with a series of interior cracks that should have made him scream but now just felt right.
He grabbed the Ulcerated Tree Spirit.
His scaled hands sank into its half-solid flesh with a sickening squelch, claws biting through bark and sap and something that felt disturbingly like gristle. The Spirit shuddered, still stunned from the halberd blow, its roots flailing weakly as he hauled its massive, writhing head down toward him.
"Open wide-!" He hissed, sparks leaking from between his clenched teeth.
He drew in breath which ignited into flames. They gathered deep in his chest like a raw, ancient furnace heat of dragonic rage. It burned behind his ribs, roiled up his throat, tasting of ash and brimstone.
He exhaled.
A torrent of dragonflame erupted from his mouth, a wide cone of incandescent orange-red that roared into the Spirit's gaping maw at point-blank range. The sound was deafening, half his own bellow, half the scream of ignited corruption.
Flame poured through the thing, racing along internal channels, searing rot from the inside out. Pustules detonated like overfilled blisters, spraying burning sap that vaporized mid-air. Golden light sputtered, then warped, turning a sick orange as the dragon's fire overwhelmed whatever stolen divinity animated it.
The Spirit thrashed once, twice, horribly, its body contorting in impossible spirals as the fire ate it from within. Roots flailed blindly, then blackened, curling inward like fingers in death.
John held on, claws dug in, breath pouring forth until his lungs ached and dark spots prowled the edge of his vision.
At last, the Spirit's movements slowed.
Then stopped.
Its bulk sagged in his grip, the wood-flesh cracking, charred, splitting. The entire mass shuddered, then began to crumble, burning away into ashy fragments that drifted downward like black snow, disintegrating before they touched the ground.
The crimson dragonflame tapered off. John coughed, smoke stinging his throat, and let go, claws retracting, scales receding back into skin in a series of faint, tingling crawls.
Where the Ulcerated Tree Spirit had been, there was now only a scorched crater, its edges still glowing faintly, tiny tongues of flame licking at the ruined stone.
He staggered back a step, chest heaving, arms aching, the taste of ash and sap thick on his tongue.
Somewhere above, the crimson arc of the Spirit's health bar shattered and dissolved into motes of red light.
"Ghh-" He bent at the waist, spat black phlegm, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Smelled even worse up close than I remembered."
John let out a laboured breath that shuddered on the way out, half laugh and half relief, shoulders sagging as the last ash-motes of the Ulcerated Tree Spirit drifted away like burnt snowflakes and then vanished before they could even kiss the floor.
For a few moments he just stood there in the scorched silence, chest rising and falling hard, the taste of smoke still clinging to the back of his throat while his ears rang with the memory of that wet, hateful scream.
Then the air in front of him flickered, thin and pale like a heat haze, and a message unfurled across his vision with all the blunt ceremony of a verdict.
[GREAT SPIRIT SLAIN]
He blinked at it once, registering that the wording was new, that it wasn't the usual "Enemy Felled" he'd come to expect.
And then, because there were bigger, uglier problems waiting two rooms ahead, he let it drift into the background without giving it the reverence it probably deserved, even as the warm rush of reward flowed into his body like a tide of invisible weight.
[Runes Acquired: 52,000]
[Acquired Item: Golden Seed]
"Nice," he muttered, voice rough, and then he did what he always did after surviving something that tried to turn him into paste.
He pulled out his flasks.
A gulp of cerulean first, cool and clean and strangely sweet, the kind of drink that made his mana settle back into place like water returning to a cup, then a gulp of crimson that burned warm down his throat, spreading through bruised muscle and strained tendon, smoothing the worst of the aches into something he could ignore.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then patted down his clothes with brisk little swipes, brushing ash and dust off his sleeves and flicking bits of dried sap away like he could tidy up the fact that he'd just wrestled a blight-spirit in a hole beneath a castle.
Marika hummed, and it wasn't displeased, not quite. It carried the tone of a queen watching a soldier do the job, satisfied with the outcome even if the method had offended her sensibilities.
"Effective…" she conceded, and then immediately sharpened the compliment into a blade, as was her sacred right. "Yet thy skill remains shoddy. That victory was purchased on the cheap coin of overwhelming strength and a mindless foe. Had that thing possessed a warrior's mind, had it met thee with intent rather than instinct, it would have eaten thee alive. In a fight against an opponent of equal strength, thou wouldst be embarrassed by the difference in discipline."
John rolled his eyes so hard it almost hurt, then exhaled through his nose with an annoyed, accepting sigh.
"Of course I would." he admitted, because denying it would be stupidity and he'd already done enough of that for one day.
"I'm a complete amateur with no official training, no master, no proper forms. I just have brute force, stubbornness, and you screaming advice in my head when things get spicy." He glanced down at his hands, flexed them once, then added in a mutter that was half genuine and half sulky, "Which, by the way, helped in a pinch. I didn't take you for an expert in weapon skills."
Marika's smirk returned, faint but unmistakable, like a crown being set back onto a head that had briefly forgotten it was royal.
"Mine Champion..." She drawled with silky patience. "I have been alive for millennia, and most of that I spent as a God-Queen. Ruling is not merely sitting upon a throne and looking pretty, though I did both with excellence. One learns the arts of war as one learns statecraft. Because if thou dost not, then some ambitious fool will eventually attempt to pry thy kingdom from thy hands. I had time, and I had competence. Learning weapon styles was not difficult when one is required to understand everything around her."
John gave a helpless shrug, because frankly, he couldn't argue with that, and he also couldn't deny that the idea of having Marika as a constant combat tutor was… convenient in the most absurd way.
"Well…" He said, rolling his shoulders "...keep talking, then. I could use more advice until I find an actual teacher that won't try to kill me in the first lesson."
He felt her catch the surface of that thought like a hand catching a loose thread, and the smile in her voice widened by a hair, pleased in that quietly possessive way she sometimes got when he admitted he needed her.
Then her attention shifted, and so did the air.
The faint glow along the walls, those bulging, intrusive root-veins threaded through the stone, seemed to draw her gaze like a magnet, and her expression, though he could only feel it through the bond more than see it, tightened with a familiar, weary recognition.
"These roots…" she murmured, and there was something faintly grim beneath her tone. "They remind me of the Deathroot we saw in the Deathtouched Catacombs. That foul imitation. That… seepage."
John's mouth flattened.
"You haven't even seen the half of it," he said quietly, and there wasn't any humor in him now, only a resigned heaviness that made his next steps feel slower.
He moved forward through the broken archway at the far end of the chamber, boots crunching over scattered rubble and charred splinters, and as soon as he crossed the threshold the world changed.
The air grew thick, wet, and sweet in the most nauseating way, as if decay had learned to perfume itself. Roots here were not merely present; they were invasive, swollen, crawling over stone in knotted masses, and between them sprouted pale, pustular growths that pulsed faintly, as if the castle itself had developed a diseased heartbeat.
Marika's small smile didn't just fade, it collapsed. It broke apart in real time, her composure catching on something and tearing, and when she spoke her voice was lower, edged with a disbelief so raw it made him pause.
"John…" she whispered. "What… what in the name of all that is… am I looking at?"
He pursed his lips, because there was no gentle way to say it, and he'd already warned her, and yet warning was always softer than sight. "It's a pustule," he answered, voice steady only because he forced it to be, "of what has become of Godwyn. The actual body is much worse than this."
"Y-You're lying." Marika's refusal came instantly, violent in its denial, it was not because she truly believed he was deceitful. She was inside his head, she could feel the truth sitting there like a stone, but because the concept itself was too grotesque to accept. It was rejection as a defense, a queen trying to command reality to behave.
"You must be. This is not- this cannot be-"
John didn't interrupt her, he only kept walking, guiding her forward into the wider hollow beneath Stormveil where the stone walls had been gnawed open by roots that should not exist, and the sight waiting there was… wrong on a level that made the human mind itch.
Godwyn's face, what passed for it, was embedded into the ruin like a parasite and a shrine at once, half-swallowed by the walls, half-grown out of them. It was enormous, swollen, pallid with a waxy, drowned sheen.
One eye stared outward without seeing, the skin around it was split by thick black seams. Along his cheekbones and jawline, pale root-fibers threaded through the flesh like veins, pulsing faintly with sickly light.
It wasn't just a corpse.
It was an infection wearing a face.
"Marika, you're inside my head. You, of all people, would know I can't lie to you." John said softly, forcing his voice through the thick air.
Even then, she didn't want to believe him. He felt it in the way her presence trembled, in the way her thoughts recoiled and then surged forward again like waves slamming into denial.
It felt as if she might actually scream, might rage, might try to tear the world apart the way she once shattered the Ring, because what sat before her was the physical proof of a failure she'd tried to bury under roots and ritual and distance.
But there was nowhere to put it.
There was no room left to hide.
After a long, terrible stretch of silence, what escaped her wasn't a scream at all.
It was laughter.
Utterly humorless, cracked, hollow. A single short, broken sound that didn't belong to a goddess, or a queen, or even a woman who still believed the world made sense. It was the laugh of someone whose mind had finally run out of places to stack the horror.
"…Ah." She breathed, and the sound fell apart into nothing.
She sank without a hint of grace.
She fell down onto the stone as if her legs had simply stopped obeying her, long limbs splaying to the side on cold rock, head bowing forward, hands loose and useless at her lap. She stared at the floor like the stone might offer mercy by refusing to reflect the face behind her.
John didn't rush her. He didn't fill the silence with words that couldn't fix anything.
He gave her time.
Then he turned and walked forward to the clotted mass of festering Deathroot that had grown like a wreath around the grotesque visage, and he reached in with a grim set to his jaw, fingers pushing past damp tendrils that twitched at his touch. He grabbed onto something buried within, a bile-like lump of flesh and growth fused together, and pulled.
It came free with a wet, reluctant sound.
It was a talisman of a fetid pustule, hard at the edges and soft in the center, like a tumor that had learned to calcify, its surface mottled and faintly warm despite the cold air, and it pulsed once in his palm as if recognizing him.
His vision flickered again, the familiar system text sliding into view as he inspected it.
[Prince of Death's Pustule.]
A fetid pustule taken from facial flesh.
Raises vitality.
It is said that this pustule came from the visage of the Prince of Death, he who used to be called Godwyn.
As First Dead of the demigods, it's said he's buried deep under the capital, at the Erdtree's roots.
John stared at the words until they stopped swimming, until the implication settled into iron certainty.
Under the capital, at the Erdtree's roots.
And yet, he was here.
Under Stormveil.
He didn't even need to look at Marika to know she'd felt it too. The talisman wasn't just loot; it was a verdict stamped onto her denial.
He turned around slowly and stood there, waiting for her response, her reaction, anything at all, the talisman heavy in his hand like a piece of someone's severed truth. Minutes stretched. The sea hissed faintly through cracks in the distant stone. Somewhere above, the castle groaned in the wind like an old beast dreaming.
Finally, Marika spoke.
Her voice was hollow acceptance wrapped in a thin, brittle calm, as if she were reading her own condemnation aloud.
"I am not a good mother."
It wasn't a dramatic confession. It wasn't theatrical.
It was flat, dead, and therefore far more frightening than any scream.
"I failed." She continued, and the words came like stones dropping one by one into a deep well. "I failed in every single way it was possible for me to fail. I do not expect forgiveness from any of them. I do not deserve it."
John's heart ached at the sound, because despite everything, despite her arrogance, despite her cruelty, despite the weight of her choices… She was still the goddess he'd come to know, his patron, his confidant, his companion in every waking moment of this fantastical world, and hearing her sound like this made something in him twist.
"Why, then?" he asked quietly. "Why did you treat them like that? Why were you so cold, so… indifferent?" His words sharpened despite himself, because the grief in her voice didn't erase the scars she'd left behind. "Why did you cast Mohg and Morgott into the sewers? Why did you seal Messmer away and deny him your love and make him fight a never-ending war on your behalf?"
Marika's shoulders shook.
Just once at first, an involuntary tremor, then again, tighter and controlled, as if she were physically holding herself together by sheer force. For a few seconds she said nothing, and he could feel her trying to decide whether to deflect, whether to rage, whether to retreat into godhood and make the question die on her tongue.
But she didn't.
She controlled her breathing, lifted her head, and when she looked up at him she looked… fragile.
Like glass held together by habit and pride, like the lightest wind might shatter her into a million glimmering pieces.
"We were not always the same." She said, her voice rough. "Radagon and I."
John blinked. "What?"
Marika kept going, because if she stopped, she might never start again.
"We were separate beings." She said, and the words tasted like old secrets. "Separate souls. Separate lives. But… through a forbidden ritual, to save his life, we conjoined. We became… one."
John's eyes widened, shock flickering through him, because he'd assumed, like so many had assumed, that they were always one. That they were always dual, always a paradox, but hearing it framed like this made it suddenly human in the most horrifying way. Still, he didn't interrupt. He didn't force the moment to bend to his confusion. He let her speak.
Marika let out another humorless laugh and shook her head, gaze drifting toward Godwyn's dead, watching eyes without truly seeing it. "My beginning with the Hornsent… I do not even know where to begin. There is too much. Too many wounds. Too many hands."
Her fingers curled against her palm as if she could still feel them. "But in the end, after countless trials, tribulations, bloodshed, and a spiral tower of corpses reaching toward the heavens… I had my chance."
Her eyes sharpened, and for a heartbeat the old queen glinted through the cracked woman beneath. "A chance to break free, to become greater. To gain the power I needed to free myself and what remained of my people from the Hornsent, permanently."
She swallowed. "And so I took it. Consequences be damned."
John's throat tightened. He didn't like where this was going.
"At the Gate of Divinity, I made a deal with the Elden Beast. I would be its locus of power. Its conduit." A dry, bitter smile touched her lips and died immediately. "Its little 'God'."
John felt the slow turn of realization begin in his mind like a heavy gear grinding into place, and Marika saw it too, because her gaze lifted, locked on him, and she nodded faintly as if confirming what he'd begun to suspect.
"But…" she said softly. "I wasn't entirely… me."
Her voice tightened. "The Elden Beast did not want two souls in one body as the host of the Elden Ring. It did not need it. It would not tolerate it." Her hands clenched. "So it separated us. Forcefully. With no regard for form or rhyme or reason."
John's stomach dropped. "It-"
"It took a single, harmonious being…" She said, each word carved out of something old and angry. "And ripped it in two."
She exhaled, slow, shaking. "It worked. Somehow. But there was a reason the Grandmother forbade the ritual in the first place. When Radagon and I were separated again… it was not a perfect split."
Marika's eyes unfocused, as if looking at a memory she'd spent centuries refusing to touch. "Each of us kept the part of ourselves we considered most essential, the part we could not live without. Even subconsciously."
"As for Radagon…" she continued, voice dropping. "What he kept was… emotion. Feeling. Love, hate, guilt…" Her mouth twitched. "…and its opposite. The ability to justify. To absolve. Remorse. Regret. All the messy, human storms."
John swallowed hard.
"And I kept will. Ideals. Confidence. Ambition. The spine of purpose that does not bend." Her eyes flicked toward Godwyn's face and her voice went colder, not as a shield but as a fact. "I kept some emotion, yes. But it was muted. Incomplete. Like trying to feel sunlight through ten layers of cloth. I could see what I should feel. I could understand what I should feel."
Her fingers trembled slightly. "But the part of me that could truly burn with it… was in Radagon."
John felt something awful settle into place, because it explained too much.
"And of course, the opposite applied to him as well. He had feeling, yes, but his will…" She shook her head as she continued. "His certainty. His guiding star. Those were diminished. He could be driven by love and guilt and duty, but without the same clear, ruthless conviction I possessed, he became… susceptible."
Her lips pressed tight. "To rules. To doctrine. To the comforting structure of the Golden Order itself. He could kneel to it in a way I never truly did, because he needed something firm to hold when his emotions pulled him apart."
John stared at her, silent, because there was no clever quip that could survive this.
"At first, it was not so bad. I was still… newly made. The world was still bright. I could still feel enough." Her eyes dulled, her whisper scraping as it escaped her. "But time is not kind to fractures. The mutedness deepened. The fog thickened. And the only emotions that remained clear were the ones that exploded. Rage. Pride. Fear. The quieter things, the tenderness, the patience, the warmth… those withered. Not gone entirely. But… distant."
Her gaze lowered.
"So when I looked upon my children…" She whispered, the words sounded like a confession spoken in a tomb. "...all I could muster, most days, was cold analysis, calculation. What is useful. What is dangerous. What must be hidden. What must be sacrificed."
The air between them felt heavier.
"So when Mohg and Morgott were born, and I saw the curse in their flesh, saw the Hornsent's shadow in their horns, saw the past crawling out of my womb to mock me…" Marika continued, her eyes growing hollow.
Her shoulders lifted in a small, helpless motion. "...My first and immediate, instinctual urge was to choke the life out of mine own sons."
Marika didn't even flinch when she heard him gasp softly, she felt more disgust towards herself than anyone could hope to show to her.
"And so… The only thing I could think to do was to cast them away. Away where I would not have to see them. Away where I would not have to confront what they represented. Where their mere presence and existence wouldn't make the woman who should've loved them unconditionally, their mother, wish to snuff their very existence out!"
Her mouth twisted with self-loathing and disgust. "And I told myself… it was mercy. The greatest mercy I could afford them at the time."
She laughed again, the sound sharp and miserable. "Self-conceited fool that I was."
John's hands tightened at his sides, nails digging into skin.
"And Messmer…" Marika muttered, and something in her voice wavered, because even muted emotion could still find cracks to leak through. "I never planned to keep him in the Land of Shadow for so long. I did not."
Her eyes shut briefly.
"I sealed it with him and his army inside, thinking I would return. Soon. I would end it. I would pull him out of that war and…" Her lips parted, then closed, as if the rest of the thought hurt too much. "But then the Night of Black Knives came. And Godwyn died. And the world, and mine own mind…"
She gestured weakly at the deathroot pulsing around them, at the dead face embedded in stone. "…Were unmade."
John's throat tightened. He knew what came after. He'd lived the consequences in blood and ruin.
Marika's gaze lifted to him again, and now the rant came, spilling out of her like a dam finally cracking after centuries of pressure.
"And then my kingdom decayed, my so-called divinity revealed itself as a sham, my choices twisting into knots no matter how I pulled, my family tearing itself apart, my order becoming a cage, my throne becoming a grave." Her breath hitched, anger and despair flickering like lightning behind her eyes. "I asked myself again and again, for centuries, what I even was meant to be."
Her voice broke, just slightly, but the force behind it made the chamber feel smaller.
"If I am not a good enough Goddess," she demanded, "and if I am not enough of a Queen and enough of a Mother—Then tell me, Johnathan…" Her eyes blazed with an agony that had nowhere left to go.
"WHAT THE HELL AM I?!"
John didn't answer immediately.
He stood there for a few long moments, looking at her sitting on the stone like a fallen statue, long legs splayed, shoulders trembling, golden light dulled by the sheer weight of what she'd just admitted, and he let himself feel the ache of it—because he could, because he wasn't split, because he had all the messy, inconvenient human parts intact.
Then he smiled.
"You are Marika." He answered simply, voice gentle and certain. "The smartest, most beautiful woman I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. And that is nothing to scoff at."
The simplicity of it hit her harder than any condemnation could have, because it did not argue with her failures and it did not excuse them either, it simply named her as herself, not a role, not a function, not a title.
For a moment Marika's mouth parted and nothing came out.
Then, despite everything, despite how she tried to hold herself together, a few tears slipped free. They were quiet, bright, and utterly undignified while tracing down her cheeks like the first rain after a long drought.
She looked away quickly, as if ashamed of the weakness, as if anger would be easier to wear than this softness, and her voice stuttered when she finally forced it out.
"I-I…" She tried, breath catching. "Y-You… Th-Thank…"
But she couldn't continue. Not then. Not here, under the dead eye of her First Dead, with rot pulsing through the roots of her legacy.
Not while he looked at her with those smiling eyes so bright and warm they threatened to blot out the memory of any sun she had ever looked at or imagined.
Her light flickered, unsteady.
And then she vanished from sight, dissolving into nothing but the lingering warmth of her presence in his mind. Still there, still bound, but withdrawn like someone stepping into the next room because they couldn't bear to be seen crying in the doorway.
He climbed a ladder out of that place. It was obnoxiously long, bolted into crumbling stone that looked like it had once been careful work before the world started cracking at the seams.
By the time he reached the top his shoulders were burning, his hands were tacky with grime, and he had to haul himself onto the landing with a grunt that made him feel, briefly, embarrassingly mortal again.
A short corridor took him to a room he remembered for all the wrong reasons, adjacent to a wide hall where something too many-limbed and too eager roamed in lazy circles, and when he dropped down from the small elevation into the hall proper the sound of his landing bounced off stone and wood and broken furniture like an announcement.
Across the room, the Grafted Scion was gnawing on a corpse.
It hunched over its meal like a spider that had learned to wear a noble's arrogance, too many arms braced against the floor, too many hands working in concert to pull and tear and feed, and the wet, clicking noises it made were so thoroughly disgusting that John's face tightened into a flat line on instinct.
"Not today…" He muttered, and he walked past dismissively, as if the monster was an inconvenience rather than a threat, slipping along the side wall and into the small adjoining room where he knew the memento would be.
The smell hit first.
It was different from the rot below, less ancient and more immediate, like fresh death warmed by stale air, and inside he found a pile of corpses slumped together in a miserable heap, armor and cloth and bare skin all tangled, as if Stormveil had simply shoveled its unwanted into one corner and forgotten they were once people.
Two dogs had made that corner their feast, ribs showing through mangy hides, jaws working as they tore at flesh that no longer fought back, and when they noticed him their heads snapped up in perfect, ugly unison, lips peeling back to show wet teeth.
John stared at them for half a second with that same tired flatness he'd used on the Scion, then sighed like a man being asked to do chores.
"Really?" He breathed, and with a flick of thought he summoned the Commander's Standard.
It emerged in his hands with a faint shimmer, the long halberd-like polearm heavy and familiar enough now to sit right, the banner itself ragged and war-stained, bearing the faded emblem of a dead commander who'd once believed shouting at soldiers could keep death at bay.
John shifted his grip, stepped forward one pace, and swung in a wide, efficient arc that wasn't elegant but didn't need to be.
The blade met fur and bone in one smooth pass.
Both dogs went down at once, the sound more of impact than gore, and their bodies skidded across the stone and went still before they could even properly yelp, leaving the room abruptly quieter except for the faint drip of something unpleasant from the corpse pile.
John exhaled through his nose, lowered the standard, and stepped over the fallen dogs with the same energy someone might step over discarded clothes.
He found what he was looking for near the center of the heap, half-hidden under a torn sleeve and a hand that had long since gone cold: a blood-soaked brooch, small and simple, the kind of keepsake someone would wear for sentiment rather than status. He stared at it for a moment, imagining the girl's face when she'd handed something like this to someone she trusted, and the thought left a bitter aftertaste.
He tore a strip of red cloth from something nearby. He didn't bother checking what, because Stormveil didn't deserve his tenderness, and wrapped the brooch carefully anyway, folding it into a neat little bundle as if cleanliness could make it kinder.
"Hopefully, it'll be enough for her." He murmured, tucking it away.
There was no response from Marika, not even a sarcastic hum, and that absence followed him as he left the room, avoided the Scion's hungry gaze, and called back towards the familiar warmth of Grace.
When he reached it, the golden light was waiting like a held breath.
He willed it to cover him entirely as he brought his hand to his chest, and let the world fold.
…
When he stepped back out the Rampart Tower's mess hall snapped into existence around him again with its stale smoke, its scattered tables, its dozing soldiers now decidedly not dozing, because Melina and Millicent had been busy.
Very busy.
John materialized mid-step and froze, blinking at the scene like his brain needed time to decide whether it was real.
Melina sat near the hearth with her cloak neatly arranged despite the chaos, posture composed in that maddening way she had even when doing something objectively criminal, while Millicent sat cross-legged on the floor with the easy confidence of someone born to make trouble.
Between them, several foot soldiers were tied up, gagged, and stacked with varying degrees of dignity, and one particularly unlucky man. He was still conscious, eyes wide and furious above a cloth gag and was on his stomach, serving as an unwilling table.
On his back, a small pile of cards.
And sitting opposite Millicent, card-hand fanned out like a professional gambler, was Sorcerer Rogier.
Rogier looked perfectly at home.
He even had the audacity to glance up at John with a friendly smile, as if he hadn't just joined an impromptu hostage poker night in an enemy fortress.
John stared.
Millicent glanced up first, grinning like a cat caught with cream. Melina followed, expression carefully blank except for the faint twitch at the corner of her mouth that always betrayed her when she was trying not to be amused. Rogier's smile widened.
The foot soldier table made a muffled, angry noise.
For several long seconds, the only thing that moved was Millicent's cards as she tapped them against her knee, waiting.
John finally managed, slowly, "...What the hell am I looking at."
Millicent shrugged like it was obvious. "Cards."
Rogier lifted two fingers in greeting. "Ah, Johnathan. Good to see you've returned in one piece." His eyes flicked briefly to the tied soldiers, then back to John with serene approval. "Your companions have been… quite industrious."
John's gaze dropped to the foot soldier, who glared up at him with the kind of hatred that could curdle milk, and John very deliberately stepped around him without acknowledging his suffering, because if he started caring now he'd have to unpack a whole moral suitcase he didn't have time for.
Rogier cleared his throat politely.
"I found these two lovely ladies waiting here for you." He said, his voice warm. "And I thought it prudent to remain in company rather than wander Stormveil alone. One never knows what lurks in the corners."
John blinked once, then pointed at Rogier. "How did you get in?"
Melina answered before Rogier could, tone calm as if she were reciting the weather. "The news spread quickly, that Margit was… 'slain'. It seems word travels on fear faster than it does on footsteps."
Millicent's grin turned viciously proud. "People love a good rumor. Especially when it's about some big scary Omen getting folded."
John's eyebrows rose, because that was fast even by Lands Between standards, and he found himself briefly wondering how the main gate had been opened after they'd closed it behind themselves earlier.
Whether there was a mechanism from outside, or whether the ballista guard they'd knocked out had eventually wriggled free and decided his lord's pride was worth more than his own life, he didn't really think it mattered.
He let the thought go, because Stormveil was full of worse surprises than incompetent gate engineering.
"So, you just… walked in?" John asked slowly.
Rogier chuckled softly. "In essence, yes. There was… a distinct lack of resistance. Which, I admit, concerns me more than it reassures."
"It should." Melina agreed dryly, and then her gaze flicked to the bundle of red cloth at John's side, subtle but pointed, as if she'd been waiting for that. She didn't ask yet, but the concern was there, quiet and steady.
Millicent, meanwhile, leaned back on her hands and nodded toward the archway. "As funny as this is, there's another guy that came with Rogier."
John looked up. "Another–?"
"He's been outside just… staring at the sun for the past few minutes." Millicent continued, her expression turning puzzled.
John paused.
A slow, very specific dread crept up his spine.
He turned his head toward the doorway like someone approaching a trap, and without another word he walked past them, stepping over a bound ankle, around the human table, and through the archway into the open air of the ramparts.
The light outside hit him full in the face, bright enough to make him squint, before he saw him.
A knight stood near the edge of the rampart with his back to John, utterly unconcerned with the height or the danger, feet planted wide as if the stone itself belonged to him, arms spread wide toward the blazing sun in a posture so confident, so earnest, so theatrically joyful that it looked like devotion made physical.
From behind, he was unmistakable.
A broad-shouldered man in chainmail and plate with a tabard draped over his armor, armour he knew would have an ornate sun on its front. His helm was rounded and practical with a narrow eye slit, his white robes fluttered in the wind like a banner.
The man seemed genuinely, wholeheartedly grateful that the sun existed.
Millicent's voice drifted behind John as she stepped up onto the rampart stones, hands on hips. "He calls himself Solaire of Astora."
John went very still.
For a heartbeat, the world tried to rearrange itself in his mind into something that made sense, and failed.
He could feel Marika in his head still, silent but present, and he almost wished she'd speak, if only to confirm he wasn't hallucinating.
"Sunbro?"
----------------------------
Author's Note:
Power stones, please.
And so, my Marika PR campaign is completed. For now. (this entire fic is Marika PR LOL).
Hm? What'd you say? How is Solaire here? What are you yapping about bro? OFC he's here.
He's the Goat, is he not?
Anywho, Godrick is coming next chapter! A perfect time for some Jolly Cooperation, don't you think?
…
Next Chapter Title: Not a Hero of Justice.
…
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