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YO! There's a pretty important announcement along with art of Johnny Boy at the end of this chapter, please read it all.
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John melted into her embrace far more easily than he had any right to.
Maybe it was the way Rennala held him, gentle and trembling and yet so instinctively motherly that there was no room left in it for pride.
Maybe it was the warmth of her body after the cold, moon-drenched gloom of the library. Maybe it was simply that she sounded as if she had spent centuries with nobody to hold and far too much love left trapped in her chest.
Whatever the reason, John stopped resisting the moment she drew him in.
He let her cradle him there on the library floor amid drifting books, pale moonlight, and the eerie whispering of the juvenile scholars. He let her sob softly into his hair. He let her laugh in those breathy, disbelieving little bursts between tears.
He let himself sink into the softness of her embrace and, if he was being completely honest with himself, he enjoyed the particularly calming softness pressing against the side of his face far more than was remotely dignified.
Marika, standing a few paces away in a wash of spectral gold, sighed long and sufferingly.
"Thou art a shameless deviant." She said flatly. "Taking advantage of a broken woman at a time like this."
John smirked inwardly and kept his face very carefully neutral where it was buried against Rennala's chest.
'I have no idea what you're talking about.'
That only made the goddess narrow her eyes harder.
Rennala, mercifully or perhaps tragically, remained entirely focused on him and Wolfy. Her fingers moved through John's hair with absent, reverent wonder, long pale digits combing through the white-streaked dark strands and lingering every so often as though surprised by the texture.
"My…" She murmured softly, dream-like and melodic as moonlight on still water. "Such lovely hair… so silky… so very soft…"
Her hand drifted lower, brushing lightly over the side of his face, then up again into his hair as if she had decided that was the safest place to keep touching him before he disappeared on her.
"How old are you, dearest?" She asked after a moment. "And why do you feel so very much like a dragon… and yet not like a dragon at all? Nor even merely some juvenile wyrm…"
John chuckled quietly and tipped his head back enough to look up at her.
"I'm twenty-four, and… well. The dragon part happened because I ate one too many dragon hearts."
Rennala blinked slowly down at him.
John smiled sheepishly as he admitted. "Including Greyoll, among others."
That made her lips part just a little before a soft, airy laugh escaped her.
"Ara ara~… my…" She murmured, sounding more charmed than alarmed. "And here I thought my daughter had simply found herself an eccentric consort. Instead she found a sweet young man who devours dragons."
John lifted one shoulder slightly. "I'm not a full dragon. Yet, anyway. And I'm definitely not on track to become a wyrm. I'm doing my own thing, as usual."
"Fufufu~…" Rennala giggled, and there was something deeply fond in it already, as if she had decided within minutes that his particular brand of insanity was somehow endearing. "That does sound rather like my daughter's taste. Unique enough to match her."
Her hand slipped to his cheek, thumb brushing it once before returning to his hair.
"But you must be careful with those dragon hearts, young man." She ordered gently, with all the soft seriousness of a mother warning a child not to climb too high in a dangerous tree. "Do mind what you grow from them. Make certain you do not sprout anything my daughter would find disagreeable. You understand?"
John laughed, helplessly and warmly. "Yes, ma'am."
She made a tiny sound of satisfaction, then shifted with surprising ease, guiding him lower and more properly into her lap as though he had always belonged there. John, caught completely off guard by how natural the motion felt, let himself be arranged without protest.
A moment later he was lying with his head pillowed on her soft thighs, staring up at her from beneath a curtain of silver-black hair while she looked down at him with dreamy tenderness.
At the same time, Wolfy let out a pleased rumble, circled around the pair of them, and laid his enormous body down in a broad crescent. He curled close enough that his warm crimson flank pressed to Rennala's back like a furry living bolster, turning himself into a great plush backrest for his mother and his new playmate alike.
The whole arrangement was so absurdly comfortable that John nearly forgot where he was.
Rennala resumed playing with his hair at once, fingertips combing and separating strands with a care so old and practiced it made his chest ache a little.
"I shall trust that you will do your best, then."
John smiled up at her. "I will. Though I should point out that I'm not that young."
Rennala's eyes softened with immediate amusement.
"Ara ara~?" She hummed, before pinching his cheeks gently.
John made a weak, offended noise as her fingers caught him on both sides of the face and pressed just hard enough to be impossible to ignore.
"Compared to me and my daughter, you are a positively adorable little baby." She informed him with a teasing little smile. "We have a few thousand years on you, dear one."
John sighed with put-upon resignation as he was bullied by a lunar queen while using her lap as a pillow.
"Yes, ma'am…"
Rennala immediately pouted down at him.
"None of that!" She chastised softly, though no less firmly. "You are my lovely, adorable son-in-law. Call me Mommy, or at the very least call me Mother, or you shall break this poor old woman's heart."
That caught him far more off guard than the cheek pinching had.
A faint blush touched his face before he could stop it. He cleared his throat lightly and looked away for all of half a second, which was not nearly enough to hide anything from either queen present.
He looked back up and relented.
"All right… Mother… But stop calling yourself old. You don't look a day over thirty."
Rennala giggled at once, bright and pleased and openly delighted by the compliment even as she pinched his cheeks again.
"Ara~! You cheeky boy~!" She chided him gently. "Flirting with and teasing your mother-in-law like this…"
There was not the slightest trace of real annoyance in her voice. If anything, she sounded happier for it.
John reached up weakly, not nearly committed enough to actually stop her hands.
"Please stop doing that…"
Rennala tilted her head with false innocence and continued pinching his cheeks.
"Hmm? Whatever do you mean, dearest?"
John opened his mouth, thought better of it, and surrendered to his fate.
Marika appeared before them then, arms folded, one hip cocked slightly, wearing a look that sat in a precarious place between annoyance and immense amusement.
"This is all very touching…" She said dryly. "But thou didst, in fact, come here with a purpose."
She gestured toward the amber egg floating nearby in its warm, lunar glow.
John and Rennala both looked up at her and, almost in unison, their gazes followed the gesture to the egg, then back to Marika.
Rennala pursed her lips faintly, as if only now properly remembering that she had, in fact, seen far more than merely a strange handsome young man and her beloved Wolfy at the library doors.
Her fingers slowed in John's hair.
"What did she say?" Rennala asked softly as her gaze drifted fully back to John, there was something more searching in it now, something sharpened through the haze.
"And…" She added, voice quieter still. "Why do you carry so much of my dear Radagon's grace-signature?"
John blinked up at her. "You really can't hear her properly?"
Rennala shook her head just slightly. "I can see her as clear as day, or close enough to day, at least. But her voice…" She frowned delicately. "It reaches me as though through mist. Through static. I catch a word here, perhaps two there, and then it slips away."
John frowned thoughtfully. 'So she's got enough Insight to see you, but not enough to hear you properly?'
Marika immediately corrected him. "No, she should be able to hear me. Or near enough to it. Her senses are merely dulled. She hath lingered in this dream-state for so long that all of her finer faculties have softened with it."
Her gaze rested on Rennala with something sad and complicated beneath her usual poise. "'Tis like waking from too deep a sleep. The body feels weak, unsteady, slow to answer. If thou dost pull her from this mire for long enough, she should hear me properly in time."
John relayed that aloud as gently as he could.
Rennala listened in silence, then hummed and resumed stroking his hair. This time her fingers shifted into little scratching motions at his scalp, absent-minded and soothing.
John reacted instantly, his eyes fluttering half-shut. He leaned up into the touch without thinking, body loosening by another dangerous degree as a soft, pleased sound slipped out of him.
It was not quite a purr, but it was close enough.
"Art thou meant to be a dragon, or some manner of overgrown cat?" Marika asked bluntly as she stared at him.
John, already leaning unconsciously into the scratching, muttered without opening his eyes,
"Aren't dragons depicted as overgrown cats sometimes anyway…?"
Rennala chuckled softly above him, clearly having caught little more than the general shape of the exchange.
"I know not what she said, but I prefer wolves myself." She murmured. "Cats are adorable too, though."
Wolfy, curled protectively around them, let out a proud huff and flicked his tail once against the floor.
Rennala smiled faintly at the motion, then looked down at John again.
"But tell me, dearest…" She whispered, returning to the earlier question with quiet patience. "Why does your Grace feel so much like Radagon's?"
John hummed and thought.
Marika answered first.
"The Divine Tower." She reminded him. "When thou didst activate it. The Radagon's Soreseal integrated more deeply into thy soul and accepted thee under its Grace-signature."
John's eyes opened.
"Ah."
He looked back up at Rennala.
"When I activated the Divine Tower in Limgrave, it did more than just awaken Godrick's Great Rune. I had Radagon's Soreseal on me at the time, and when the tower's power hit me… it sort of integrated into my soul." He gestured vaguely with one hand from where he lay in her lap. "It helped me evolve. Strengthened me in a bunch of ways. I'm guessing that's why I carry some of his signature now."
Rennala listened with deep interest, her fingers never once leaving his hair.
When he finished, she nodded slowly, accepting the explanation with surprising ease.
"I see…" She whispered as she looked down at him with a soft, beautiful smile.
And so sad that for one awkward little moment, John did not know where to look.
There was no accusation in it, no anger or collapse. She just held the quiet ache of a woman who had once loved a man so deeply that even the echo of him resting in another soul could still touch something raw inside her.
John felt that sadness brush against him and swallowed his own discomfort down quickly before it could show on his face.
He kept his expression gentle.
Rennala's fingers slowed in John's hair, her silver-blue eyes turning thoughtful as she looked down at him through the last shimmer of old tears and maternal softness.
"You are no ordinary Tarnished, dearest…" She murmured, absently scratching at his scalp in a way that made his shoulders loosen again before he could stop himself.
"That much is plain to see. Your Grace is vast, your soul is saturated by a Great Rune, and yet…" Her gaze traced over his face, his hair, the shape of him in her lap. "You do not remind me of any of her blood that I know. Nor of any line that should be."
John let out a quiet chuckle, half from the question and half because Rennala's fingers had just hit that one spot behind his ear that made his brain temporarily stop working.
He was about to answer before all four of them felt it.
The air in the Royal Grand Library shifted.
It was not like a door opening, nor a spell being cast in any ordinary sense. It felt more like the room itself remembered a shape and made space for it.
Stars gathered first, tiny blue-white pinpricks forming in the dark between drifting books and lunar light. Then moonlight followed, winding through them in pale threads. The two coiled together in front of the gathered group, spinning slowly into the silhouette of a woman.
She appeared with her back half-turned to them at first, a figure of blue and moon-pale shadow, elegant and cold and unmistakably familiar in every line.
Her voice then drifted out, cool and measured and touched with suspicion.
"Yes… Why wouldst thou be here, Johnathan Pendragon? Why is the King of Wyrms in my dear mother's abode?"
Everyone turned toward her at once.
Rennala lit up with immediate, tender joy.
John's grin broke across his face like sunrise.
Marika's expression tightened into the smallest, most complicated grimace.
And Wolfy, who had been curled around John and Rennala in contentment, snapped alert so quickly that his ears nearly blurred.
Rennala's whole face softened with delighted wonder.
"My darling daughter…" She breathed warmly. "Why didst thou not tell thy poor old mother of thy lovely husband?"
The figure paused in the middle of turning around.
"…H-Husband?"
The word came out with a hitch the others did not often hear from her. She processed that for one long second, then turned fully to face them.
Ranni stood there in all her impossible, doll-like beauty.
Her puppet body was as elegant and eerie as John remembered, a small, blue-skinned figure wrought in the likeness of a pale, four-armed witch, dressed in layered garments of deep blue and silver, the broad witch's hat casting part of her form in cool shadow.
Everything about the doll-body was composed, precise, and controlled to the point of artifice.
But her spectral face hovering faintly over and around it was another matter entirely.
That face was far more expressive.
Her eyes widened first, not only with surprise but with genuine, unguarded confusion. Her mouth parted. Her brows rose. Every emotion the puppet body kept leashed rippled openly across the spectral overlay of her true self.
And what she saw, quite frankly, was absurd.
John was lying on the library floor with his head in Rennala's lap. Rennala still had one hand in his hair. Wolfy was curled around both of them like a delighted oversized housepet. The whole scene looked less like a demigod raid and more like a deeply intimate family reunion she had somehow not been invited to.
Her spectral face stared for a moment, before her eyes darted toward the wolf.
"What the Hell… Wolfy–?"
She got no farther.
Wolfy exploded upward like a released spring and launched himself at her with enough force and enthusiasm to flatten a knight. Ranni made a startled sound, tried to brace, and failed utterly as the giant crimson beast tackled her straight to the library floor.
Books scattered as juvenile scholars squealed and scrambled back.
John pushed himself up from Rennala's lap and sat upright, one knee raised, one arm resting loosely on it as Marika drifted a little to the side behind him.
The four of them simply watched.
Ranni, apparently caught in the worst possible ambush of her admittedly very strange life, was pinned beneath the ecstatic wolf while he barked, licked at her spectral face and puppet body alike, shoved his head into her shoulder, pawed at her robes, and generally behaved like an overgrown child greeting his favorite person after centuries apart.
"Wolfy–! W-Wolfy, please–!" She exclaimed, her spectral face going from stunned to openly flustered in a matter of seconds even as the doll body tried very hard to maintain some level of dignified composure. "Calm thyself–! Thou art crushing mine robes–! Stop licking me–!"
It took a while.
John had far too much fun watching that.
Rennala watched with tear-bright joy and openly maternal affection.
Marika watched with her arms folded and a look that shifted slowly from stiff surprise to quiet, helpless amusement.
Eventually Ranni managed it.
She got one hand beneath Wolfy's jaw, another to his neck, and with a slow stream of soothing words and practiced headpats, she finally calmed him down from ecstatic assault to merely trembling delight. He settled beside her with heavy, happy breathing and a thumping tail while she remained on one knee for a moment longer, clearly gathering herself.
When she rose, her spectral face was faintly flushed with embarrassment, though her puppet body stayed almost infuriatingly composed. She smoothed down her robes, straightened the line of her sleeves, and took one slow breath before turning back toward the others.
And she found all of them staring at her.
John with open, delighted amusement.
Rennala with soft endearment and lingering tears.
Marika with controlled surprise and the faintest edge of exasperated fascination.
The blush on Ranni's spectral face deepened for one brief, dangerous instant.
She coughed into one hand, the other still resting atop Wolfy's head to keep him satisfied, then finally gathered enough dignity to speak.
"Mother…" She said, inclining her head. "Forgive the intrusion."
She began walking toward them then, Wolfy stepping along beside her with immediate loyalty.
Rennala smiled warmly at once. "My sweeting, thou couldst never intrude in thine own home. I know thou must be busy with thine plans, but I would only ask that thou visit more often. It grows awfully boring in this academy at times."
Ranni's spectral mouth twitched faintly while the puppet body maintained its cooler, regal stillness.
After a second she sighed.
"I shall… endeavor to do so more often."
She continued forward until she reached John.
He looked up at her from where he sat on the floor, smiling far too widely to be innocent.
Ranni gave him an annoyed glare first, before she then lifted her gaze to Marika floating just beyond him.
One of Ranni's hands came to rest on her hip. Two more folded across her middle. The last remained at Wolfy's neck.
And then an entirely too smug smirk spread across her spectral face.
"And…" She said silkily. "Hello, Mother."
The word was drenched in sarcasm so sharp it could have cut glass. The room changed.
Tension rose at once, quiet and immediate and impossible to miss. Rennala tilted her head faintly. John's grin grew more interested. Even Wolfy seemed to sense it, ears flicking between the two women as they stared at one another.
Marika answered stiffly, clearly expecting nothing back beyond acknowledgement.
"And to thee as well, daughter."
But Ranni's smirk only widened as the small blue witch tilted her head.
"Tell me…" She asked sweetly. "...how fares life in that overgrown bush thou callest the Erdtree?"
John and Rennala both let out soft sounds of surprise.
Marika blinked, then flinched ever so slightly. Not because of the insult, but because it confirmed something far more important.
Ranni could see her, and hear her perfectly; she seemed to enjoy that realization for the briefest moment. Her smile turned sharper.
"Aye…" She said lightly, more to the room at large now. "I can hear you just fine."
"The last time we met, I was using only a projection. A poor substitute. Diminished in all parameters. A true puppet body is another matter entirely." Ranni then added, with casual smugness.
Rennala, quite unlike the others, seemed vastly less interested in that revelation than in the tone her daughter had chosen.
She floated over in a soft drift of lunar cloth and, before Ranni could prepare, reached out and pinched both of her cheeks.
Ranni made a startled, muffled sound.
"Mother–!"
"None of that!" Rennala chided with a maternal pout. "It is rude to speak so to thy stepmother. And in front of thy husband, no less! Thou ought to be more like John, dearest. He is so nice and polite in comparison!"
John's shoulders shook.
Marika closed her eyes for one slow second, and looked down, unjustly feeling shame in her champion's stead.
Ranni, spectral face flushing deeper while her puppet body struggled valiantly to retain dignity, turned her eyes toward John as best she could while still being held by the cheeks.
"What in the nine Hells does she mean by husband?!" She asked petulantly.
Rennala released her only to turn and point toward John, who was sitting there now with the most painfully polite smile imaginable.
It held back uproarious laughter by a thread. Marika and Ranni both recognized that instantly.
But Rennala, apparently, did not.
John lifted a hand and waved eagerly. "Hello, my lovely wife."
Ranni stared at him in blank, utter silence before she slowly turned her head toward Marika.
Marika, floating just behind Rennala now, gave the smallest little shrug in the world, plainly refusing to claim any share in Johnathan Pendragon's nonsense.
Ranni turned back to John.
He was still waving.
The little witch stared at him for a long moment, and John watched the thoughts move behind her eyes with almost visible speed.
She understood very quickly what had happened.
Her mother, lost in grief and dream for too long, had seen John. Had seen Marika. Had heard that he was "Ranni's husband". Then Wolfy had returned, ecstatic and devoted, and everything that sequence of miracles implied had struck Rennala right in the part of her heart that had not healed in centuries.
Denying it now would devastate her.
Ranni knew that.
John could see the exact instant she accepted it too.
A tiny, deeply annoyed tension entered her spectral jaw. Her puppet hands flexed once. She very nearly growled.
But she swallowed it.
Because for all her irritation, she had also very clearly seen what John had already done for her mother in the span of mere minutes. Rennala was more awake right now than Ranni had likely seen in an age.
So the little witch forced a polite smile onto her face.
It was a terrifying smile.
"Mother… wouldst thou kindly let me go have a brief word with my… hubby?" Ranni asked with exquisite false sweetness as she turned back to her mother.
The last word came out perilously close to a growl.
"I am simply dying to celebrate our reunion."
Rennala lit up again, moved completely by what she thought was adorable young marital enthusiasm.
"Of course, sweeting~!" She said warmly. "Go on then, the both of you. Get a little air outside this stuffy library."
She shooed them with happy little gestures.
John rose at once, grin already sharpening into dangerous delight as he followed Ranni toward the doors.
They had barely reached them when Ranni stopped just short of the threshold, turned her head slightly, and spoke in a low whisper edged in frost.
"Stay behind, would you, mother?" She told Marika without looking back. "I would like a private word with your pet."
John turned his head and gave Marika the faintest nod.
The goddess sighed, already knowing she could hardly object without making the scene worse. Her form dissolved back into his mindspace with regal reluctance.
Ranni, of course, did not know the specifics of how their bond worked.
Which meant she likely believed she had successfully removed Marika from the conversation.
John found that very, very funny.
As soon as the great library doors shut behind them, Ranni wheeled on him.
She crossed the small landing in three quick steps, her spectral face lit with incredulous annoyance while the puppet body beneath it held itself together only through obvious force of will. She planted a hand against the center of his chest and shoved once, more for emphasis than effect.
"What in the hell dost thou think thou art doing here?" She hissed, keeping her voice low only for her mother's sake. "Have thou truly gone mad?"
John, infuriating creature that he was, only chuckled.
"Easy, darling. It's not like I'm trying to do anything bad here."
Marika, listening from within him, let out a soft sound of disgust.
"Stop looking so pleased with thyself…" She muttered. "I can feel it. Thou art enjoying being scolded by my daughter far too much."
John's smirk widened by a fraction.
That made Marika sigh.
"Of course thou wouldst feel most content when being bullied by a beautiful older woman. I should have expected no better."
Ranni, unable to hear that private exchange, narrowed her eyes harder and jabbed a finger into his chest again.
"Like hell thou art not!" She whispered harshly. "What exactly art thou doing? This is naught like what thou didst in Stormveil. Was one Great Rune not enough for thee?"
John lifted both hands in lazy surrender.
"I already told you. Nothing nefarious." His tone softened, though the grin stayed. "I need the Great Rune in your mother's hands. That's all. I take it, then I'm on my way."
Ranni leveled him with an annoyed stare so flat it could have cut stone.
"That is all?"
John leaned down toward her, lowering his voice into a teasing murmur.
"Well…" He let his eyes flick across her face. "I wouldn't mind getting your heart too."
That got to her.
Though not much, not enough to make her lose herself like a certain blushing Academy maiden. But her spectral face did tighten for half a beat, the faintest flicker of heat touching her expression before she crushed it.
"No man hath ever benefited from being that forward with me." She said coolly.
John smiled. "Maybe you've just had a weak sample size~..."
Ranni scoffed, but the corner of her spectral mouth twitched with something that was not quite irritation and not quite amusement.
"Thou art impossibly arrogant."
"And yet you're still standing here talking to me."
"Because thou hast forced thyself into my family's business like some overgrown thick-headed calamity."
"That sounded almost affectionate."
"It was not."
"Mm. Could've fooled me."
Ranni's eyes narrowed.
He leaned just a little closer.
She did not step back.
That, more than anything, told him the argument had already drifted out of clean hostility and into something far more dangerous; that strange little place where Ranni answered every provoking smile with one of her own without seeming to realize she was doing it.
John knew exactly what he was doing. Ranni, meanwhile, appeared to believe she was engaging in precise, cold verbal correction.
She was not. Not with the way her gaze stayed on him. Not with how often she stood too close.
And definitely not with how her spectral expression betrayed every tiny flare of feeling even while the puppet body held itself in perfect composure.
Their bickering might have gone on longer had another presence not approached from below.
Bootsteps climbed the stairs.
Ranni looked over first, and John followed her gaze down toward the lower landing where Moongrum appeared, visibly disheveled but still every inch the Carian knight. His armor bore fresh dents and scratches, his shield arm moved with a touch more stiffness than before, and he gave John a look so deeply unimpressed it bordered on personal contempt.
Ranni straightened.
"Moongrum, my thanks for the heads-up. Give me a proper account. I would know what exactly this man hath been doing in the academy."
The knight climbed the remaining steps, stopped before her, then dropped into a kneel with measured dignity despite his obvious state.
"My lady."
His gaze cut sideways to John once more, then he began recounting everything that had happened over the course of the past two hours. And by the time he finished, even John had to admit it sounded a little unreasonable when laid out all at once.
…A little.
Moongrum's voice remained level to the end.
"The higher faculty and several noble houses presently call for his death." He concluded. "They gather what forces they can. Had he not already reached thy mother's wing, they would likely be descending upon him even now."
Ranni turned her head and looked back at John.
He gave her his most shameless grin.
She closed her eyes. Just briefly.
When she opened them again, she regarded him in silence. John could almost see the thoughts moving behind that steady gaze.
The report she had just heard, the chaos he'd left in his wake, the testimony Blaidd had already given her of Limgrave, of Darriwil, of the strangely infuriating demigod who had helped without demanding some immediate reward.
At last, she spoke.
"...What dost thou truly want?" She asked quietly.
John's smile softened.
Ranni continued, more serious now.
"And why dost thou keep helping me and mine?" Her spectral face showed far more of the real question than the puppet body allowed. "Great Rune aside, thou hadst no need to do all this for my mother. Nor any obligation to assist Blaidd a few days past."
John did not answer immediately with a joke, he leaned in slightly instead, his voice lowering into a teasing whisper.
"Have you ever heard of love at first sight?"
Ranni blinked questioningly, but John held her gaze.
"What higher reason do I need~?"
That actually flustered her.
It wasn't enough to make her stagger, or enough to ruin her composure outright, but enough that her spectral face gave her away with a small, involuntary shift of surprise and heat.
"T-There is no possible way thou actually meanest that."
John leaned closer until there was barely any space left between them.
Their noses nearly touched.
"Try me, darling~..."
Ranni squinted at him.
He stared back with lazy confidence and entirely too much warmth.
For several seconds neither of them moved. It became, somehow, a staring contest.
A ridiculous, silent duel of stubbornness on the landing outside Rennala's library while Moongrum remained kneeling and Marika listened from John's soul with mounting disbelief.
And against all odds, Ranni lost.
It was only the smallest thing; the first blink, the first tiny hitch, the first microscopic shift in posture that gave it away.
John smiled smugly.
Ranni exhaled sharply through her nose.
"…Fine!" She relented, as if conceding some vast and hateful point to the cosmos itself.
Her eyes flicked over him in one cool, assessing once-over. From his face to his shoulders, down the line of his coat and chest and back again, as if she were verifying for herself that the man being this insufferable was at least worth the trouble of being insufferable.
John caught it immediately.
"Oh?" He asked, delighted. "Checking if I'm hot?"
Her spectral face tightened with irritation.
Before he could say anything else, she stepped in.
Fast.
One cool hand caught his collar, and another pressed flat against his chest.
A third dragged down the front of his coat in a smooth, unhurried line before she grabbed his belt, fingers briefly straightening the fall of fabric there with such invasive calm precision that John's entire body forgot what it had been planning to do next.
Simultaneously, her fourth hand slid beneath the loosened waistband of his trousers, slipping past the barrier of cloth.
"H-Hey–" John gasped softly, but didn't push her away.
Her touch was an electric shock of investigation. It wasn't rough, but neither was it tentative. It was exploratory… proprietorial. Spectral fingertips mapped the contours of his length through thin undergarments first, tracing its hardening length with a tactile curiosity that bordered on clinical.
The cold hand decisively pushed the fabric down just enough to gain access. Icy knuckles brush heated skin as spectral fingers slid beneath the band of his underwear, curling around him directly with a firm, encompassing grip that stopped his breath entirely in a ragged, silent inhale.
Then, with a firm, yet shockingly gentle squeeze, she slipped her hand out and stepped back.
Her gaze moved over him one last time before she gave him one regal little nod.
"Adequate~..."
John grabbed the railing beside him.
His knees did not quite buckle, but the impulse had been there, and he deeply resented that fact.
Ranni, of course, noticed.
She lifted her chin with haughty satisfaction.
"Thy… equipment is acceptable enough. We shall discuss the rest later. For now, we return inside."
She then turned around and began walking back toward the doors as if she had not just casually reduced a demigod to holding onto architecture for emotional support.
Marika, behind the veil of John's thoughts, made a strangled sound that very rapidly collapsed into badly restrained laughter.
"Art thou well?" She asked, far too sweetly.
John turned his face just enough that she could see the flush there and the shaky grin he was trying and failing to control.
Marika stared at him blankly then sighed in severe disappointment.
"Oh, for pity's sake. Thou liked that?"
She sounded scandalized. She also sounded wholly unsurprised.
John let out a weak little chuckle and leaned more firmly on the railing, he looked down at himself and saw a wholly unsurprising tent in his pants.
"S-Shit… I did not expect that…"
A moment later, Moongrum rose from his knees. He looked at John for a long beat, then, to John's everlasting shock, gave him the slightest nod.
It was an expression that somehow combined respect, suffering, and a very old envy no loyal knight ought to have worn so plainly.
The Carian turned around and withdrew without another word.
John watched him go, then stayed right where he was for the next several minutes until his pulse stopped trying to embarrass him to death.
Marika had a great deal to say during that time.
None of it was helpful.
Eventually, after enough deep breaths and enough internal threats to his own body to start cooperating, John let out a slow breath through his nose, rolled his shoulders once, and walked back into the grand library with the brightest, straightest smile he could manage.
It was a good smile too. It was open, calm, and entirely innocent.
Which meant, naturally, that neither of the women waiting for him believed it for a single second.
Rennala looked up from where she sat with Wolfy pressed warmly against her side and brightened at once, all soft motherly warmth and dreamy delight.
Ranni stood nearby with one hand still resting on the great beast's neck, her puppet body held in perfect composure while her spectral face wore a tiny, knowing smile that held far too much amusement for John's peace of mind.
Marika, standing in pale gold just off to one side, took one look at his carefully composed expression and huffed.
"Art thou still pretending nothing humiliating hath occurred?"
John kept smiling and whispered quietly through his teeth. "I have no idea what you mean."
That earned him a deadpan stare from both goddess and witch.
He ignored them with the kind of fortitude only a deeply shameless man could summon and walked the rest of the way over.
"Sorry about that." He said pleasantly, stopping before them. "Had to, uh… clear my head a bit."
Ranni's spectral mouth twitched.
Marika looked one heartbeat away from laughter and one heartbeat away from striking him with divine force just on principle.
Rennala, mercifully, only smiled at him with sleepy affection and patted the place beside her.
"There thou art, dearest…" She murmured. "I was beginning to think my daughter had frightened thee away."
Ranni coughed into one hand.
John snorted and sat back down with easier care this time, close enough for Wolfy to immediately lean against him again in clear approval. The giant red wolf let out a pleased huff and laid his chin partly across John's thigh as though to make sure his two favorite people remained exactly where he wanted them.
For a little while, the conversation stayed light.
Rennala asked him whether the academy halls still felt as dreary as she remembered. John told her they had somehow become even worse, mostly because too many scholars still seemed tragically alive and willing to complain at him.
That got a soft, breathy laugh from her and a small, reluctant exhale from Ranni that might have been amusement if one were feeling generous.
He asked Rennala whether Wolfy had always been this dramatic.
"Oh, certainly." She said quickly, fingers returning to the great beast's mane. "Though he was smaller when he first perfected it."
Wolfy let out a sound of quiet dignity, as if objecting to the implication that his current size had in any way lessened the artistry of his behavior.
Ranni muttered that he had only grown more impossible with age.
John replied that the feeling was mutual between beast and mistress.
That got him a flat look from Ranni, a soft laugh from Rennala, and a faintly approving hum from Marika, who was clearly enjoying watching someone else deal with her daughter's temperament for once.
Eventually, however, the softness of the moment circled back toward what had brought them there in the first place.
John's expression eased, though it hadn't vanished entirely. He was still himself, still warm and easy. But some more serious lines settled into his posture as he glanced from Rennala, to Ranni, to the amber egg floating not far from them in its rich glow of gold and sorrow.
"Right…" He said quietly. "I should probably be honest about why I came."
Rennala looked at him with patient, moon-bright eyes.
John folded one arm over the raised knee he'd drawn up and exhaled through his nose.
"I did come here to visit. That part was real. But I also need your Great Rune for a while."
Rennala did not recoil, she only blinked slowly and waited.
Ranni's gaze sharpened at once.
John continued before either could interrupt.
He gave them the shape of it properly then; leaving out some impossible details, specifically the full absurdity of Helios, his old world, and all the pieces of himself that could not yet be cleanly explained.
He explained his bond to Marika. Explained that he was her champion. Explained the shattered state of the Elden Ring, the need to gather its fragments, and the truth that Marika's imprisonment and the world's stagnation could not continue forever.
He spoke plainly, not like a conqueror making threats, or like a courtier trying to negotiate around the truth.
He was just a man with too much weight on his shoulders and enough sincerity to make the burden visible.
"I'm gathering the shards of the Ring." He said, looking between them. "I'm going to free Marika. And after that…" His eyes hardened with quiet resolve. "I'm going to drag this world into a new age. One better than what came before. One that is fairer. Stronger. And kinder where it should be, harsher where it needs to be."
The rich lunar glow of the library seemed to still around him.
John turned then, not back to Rennala, but to Ranni. And the way he looked at her changed the whole room.
There was no teasing in it now. No baiting or shameless flirtation to hide behind. His gaze was filled with open honesty as a hand held out in trust.
"Please help me make sure it never ends up like this again." He said softly. "Help me change things for good. So none of it ever falls down the same road it did before."
Ranni stared at him.
She had expected many things from Johnathan Pendragon.
Nonsense. Flirtation. Catastrophic audacity. Unreasonable violence paired with unreasonable tenderness. Perhaps even a request.
She had not expected that kind of honesty. Not with Marika floating beside him. Not with his gaze so steady, and certainly not with no trick inside it.
Slowly, almost cautiously, Ranni turned her head toward the goddess to confirm what she had just heard.
Marika met her gaze.
And then, to both mother and daughters' surprise, the Eternal Queen nodded quietly and seriously.
"I believe in his path, entirely. I aid him because I wish to see it through." Her golden gaze dimmed with something older and uglier than pride. "There is much I regret. So very much, that there is scarcely enough time in the day to begin unraveling the full ruin of what my life's work became."
Marika did something none of them had expected.
She raised her hand and offered it to Ranni.
"I ask thy help, and I swear to do things differently this time."
Ranni looked at the offered hand like it was some impossible artifact from a world that no longer existed.
She did not take it.
She turned her face away instead, shoulders holding just a touch too stiff beneath all that composed puppet grace.
Marika kept her hand there for a few more seconds.
Then, slowly, she let it fall.
"I know…" She said softly. "...that it will be a long while before I deserve even the smallest chance at forgiveness. From thee, from thy siblings, from any of mine children."
She exhaled through her nose. "So I do not expect anything of thee but scorn. I ask only this; if thou wilt not listen for my sake, then hear Johnathan's offer for his, and this world's."
Ranni said nothing, she only stood there with the full weight of the room's silence pressing against her.
Rennala had not caught every word. John could tell that much.
But she had caught enough, and what she pieced together from tone, context, and old pain made her expression turn strangely soft; both melancholy and hopeful at once, as though the possibility of something better frightened her almost as much as it moved her.
John waited, he did not press.
He only sat there beside Rennala, one hand drifting idly beneath Wolfy's chin, scratching gently through the crimson fur while the great beast rumbled in approval and stared at Ranni with the calm, uncomplicated faith of something that believed family ought to solve itself if given enough time.
At last, Ranni sighed quietly and turned to look back at them, then at John, and then finally back at Marika.
"...Very well."
John's smile softened.
Ranni folded two arms over one another and looked away again, though her spectral face betrayed more feeling than the puppet ever allowed.
"I shall give thee a chance, just this once. For my mother's sake."
Rennala lit up.
"Oh!"
Before Ranni could brace herself, Rennala floated forward and pulled her into a hug with the happy urgency of a woman who had just watched one impossible thing after another fall into her lap and had decided to embrace all of them at once.
Ranni endured it with the vague resistance of someone fulfilling a moral obligation and losing badly.
Her spectral face tightened, and her puppet body stiffened. Her hand, however, still came up to rest lightly against her mother's back.
"I am not placing my path on hold any longer than I already have…" She muttered into the side of the embrace. "But… I shall not stop thee."
Rennala laughed softly, delighted beyond measure.
"That is wonderful! Absolutely wonderful!"
John, who could already feel where this was going and did nothing to prevent it, watched with the terrible serenity of a man willingly walking into his own execution.
Rennala pulled back from Ranni just enough to clap her hands together with bright, dreamy excitement.
"How lovely! The two of thee carrying on thy plots of conquest and dominion as a couple. Fufufu~... It suits thee so well."
Ranni's spectral face went blank.
John nodded along shamelessly. "Yes, mother."
Ranni looked at him like she was actively considering a murder.
Rennala gasped softly, as if struck by an even greater revelation.
"Oh! Tell me, have you had the wedding yet?"
Ranni stopped functioning for a second.
Marika looked mildly horrified.
John, meanwhile, moved with great smoothness. After all, once one digs himself a grave, he might as well try digging till he reaches the other side. Or something.
John Elden Ring doesn't think very far ahead.
"No, we haven't!" He announced, slipping in to answer before Ranni could make a sound. "We wouldn't dare have it without you there. That's partly why I came; I wanted to tell you myself."
He smiled, warm and easy. "I thought it would be a nice surprise for Ranni too. My lovely wife felt a little awkward about breaking the news of our blazingly quick love."
Ranni's spectral face twitched, once, then twice.
The amount of visible psychic damage in that tiny motion nearly made Marika laugh aloud.
Rennala, on the other hand, was overjoyed.
"Then there is no question at all~!" She declared. "It shall be at the Church of Vows. Just as mine own was, so very long ago."
Ranni and Marika both looked at least mildly stricken by that choice of venue.
John, naturally, made it worse.
"That sounds perfect!"
Rennala beamed at him with such motherly approval that Ranni's soul visibly left her body for half a second.
"Oh, dearest, I knew thou wouldst understand!" Rennala said happily. "Leave it all to me. I shall make the arrangements myself. You and my darling daughter need only continue with your clever little plots. I shall inform thee once it is ready."
John leaned forward and, with no second thought to consider abandoning his gimmick for the sake of living, took Ranni's hand.
She allowed it for exactly one second before realizing why.
Because when he turned to her, the smirk on his mouth was pure devilry.
"Isn't that wonderful, my love~?"
There was only the tiniest thread of teasing in his voice. That somehow made it much worse.
Ranni physically struggled to maintain her polite expression. John felt the tension in her fingers immediately.
Her smile held, just barely.
"Y-Yes…" She said, her voice strained enough to count as a siege instrument, clearly holding back the urge to murder something violently. "How… wonderful."
Rennala, glowing with happiness, noticed nothing wrong.
And so, with one happy maternal declaration too many, it became blindingly clear that Johnathan Pendragon had talked himself all the way into a wedding and would, at some point in the future, have to actually take Ranni the Witch's hand in matrimony.
Johnathan Pendragon would actually have to take responsibility for his actions for once.
Rennala floated closer again, seized both of his hands in hers, and drew them up between them as if she simply had too much gratitude to keep it contained within her own chest.
"Thank thee… Truly. For everything thou hast done. For my daughter. For me." Her eyes shone bright. "For dragging her from her tower."
Ranni made a noise of immediate protest. "Mother, I was not dragged anywhe—!"
But Rennala had already begun lamenting on her daughter's behalf with all the relentless force of a devoted mother who had spent far too many years worrying in private.
"Do you know how concerned I have been?" Rennala asked John as though Ranni were not even there. "From the time she was a little thing she scarcely socialized. Only family, servants, books, and the occasional creature clever enough not to bore her."
Ranni's eye twitched but Rennala could not be stopped after she had started.
"I feared she would grow far past her prime and end up miserable and alone with no lover, no children, no family of her own beyond what old ghosts remained to her."
Marika, hearing this, looked caught between exasperation and the urge to laugh at how thoroughly the lie had metastasized beyond any of their control.
John had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep himself composed in the meantime.
"Now, now~!" He said, still holding Rennala's hands. "Don't be so harsh! I'm sure Ranni would've had plenty of suitors. There's no way she could've ended up like that."
Rennala sighed dramatically, as if lamenting decades of hardship.
"She did have suitors, too many, perhaps. But all of them were far too small for her. Too dull. Too easily frightened. Too little for what she is." She smiled at him with deep and open approval. "That is why I am so happy she found thee~!"
Ranni stood there and accepted the slander because correcting any of it would require detonating her mother's joy with the truth, and she was not willing to do that.
Her spectral face had gone rigid with pain, and her puppet body remained composed.
Wolfy sat beside her looking immensely pleased like the traitorous beast that he was.
Rennala then pulled John into another hug.
This one had less warning.
His head vanished straight into the soft, warm abundance of her chest again as she held him close and laughed happily into his hair.
John, whose moral fortitude in the face of motherly affection was tragically nonexistent, gave up immediately and melted into it with all due gratitude.
'Bouncy heaven~...' He thought with reverent sincerity.
Ranni and Marika both stared at him blankly.
Each wore an expression balanced exactly between disgust and mirth.
And John, held warmly against Rennala's body while the Queen of the Full Moon thanked him all over again, decided that whatever else happened here today, he was handling it magnificently.
Rennala drew back from the hug after about a minute, though one hand lingered at his cheek for a moment longer as if she were reluctant to let the warmth of him go just yet. Her eyes were bright, soft, and shining with that old lunar tenderness that seemed forever half-submerged in dream and grief alike.
Her expression brightened quite suddenly with a new thought.
"Oh!" She gasped, the sound light and melodic. "Thou must receive a marital gift!"
John blinked, his curiosity was piqued almost immediately.
Marika, hovering nearby with her arms crossed and an increasingly familiar expression of tired disbelief, immediately cut in.
"Must thou look so eager?" She asked dryly. "At least attempt a token refusal out of politeness, mine champion."
John glanced toward her, entirely unrepentant. "That'd sound fake and we both know it."
Marika's stare flattened.
Rennala only giggled, apparently finding both of them charming rather than concerning. She shifted where she floated, the folds of her moon-dark robes spilling around her like quiet water, then reached back toward the amber egg drifting near her with an ease that was at once delicate and absolute.
When her fingers curled toward it, the room changed.
The juvenile scholars went still.
Wolfy lifted his head.
Ranni's expression sharpened in an instant.
And the amber egg answered.
It floated into Rennala's waiting hand like a heart returning to the body that had kept it safe for centuries. The pale amber shell glowed from within, first softly, then brighter, then with a depth that no longer resembled mere light at all.
It was power. Ancient, layered, divine power, old enough to feel like law and strange enough to feel like possibility unbound.
The air thickened.
Gold leaked into the moonlit dark of the library in long, luminous streams. Unreadable sigils bloomed in spirals around Rennala's body and the egg alike, intricate and fluid and older than scholarship, older than the Academy, older even than most memory.
Great spectral tomes appeared in the air around her, pages turning of their own accord as if consulting forgotten laws of existence itself. The very atmosphere of the library grew dense with primordial force until every breath tasted of fate, womb-dark potential, and the terrible sweetness of things not yet born.
Ranni straightened, for once, even she looked truly startled.
"Mother…" She said quietly, and there was real shock beneath the composure now. "Wouldst thou truly do this so simply? So easily?"
Rennala turned her face toward her daughter and smiled with all the soft certainty of the moon itself.
"Aye. You both deserve it. And he most of all." Her eyes drifted back to John, warm and terribly kind. "I can never repay all he hath done for our family. This is but a little thing."
A little thing.
John stared at the amber egg as the power pouring from it thickened, cohered, and began to take shape.
His entire soul pulsed.
His draconic heart hammered against his ribs with a greedy, hungry rhythm. Beneath his sternum, his newly forming Mana Core sang in answer.
The Immortal Heart within him beat harder too, savage and eager, and his soul—his strange, patched-together, rune-bloated, dragon-touched, God-shadowed soul—recognized exactly what was happening before his conscious mind fully caught up.
He knew this feeling. Or at least, he knew the family of it.
It was the same deep call he had felt with Godrick's shard. The same ancient ache. The same impossible pressure of divinity half-shattered and yet still complete enough to command the shape of the world around it.
He looked to Marika.
"Tell me this is what I think it is."
Marika gave him one of those helpless, fond, exasperated little sighs that only ever came when he had done something so outrageous that even she no longer knew whether to scold him or laugh.
With one hand on her hip, she nodded.
"...'Tis the Great Rune of the Unborn."
The amber egg shone brighter.
Then something within Rennala answered it.
A second core of light, deep inside her own soul, rose to meet the egg's glow; not equal to it, not separate from it, but entwined with it after so many years of proximity and study and grief. Her bond to the Rune had gone beyond simple possession.
She had lived with it so long, suffered with it so long, that part of its shape had impressed itself into her being.
Those two lights met.
And the Great Rune of the Unborn formed.
It emerged neither all at once nor in pieces, but in a slow, majestic coalescence, like the world itself remembering how to write one of its oldest characters.
Golden arcs folded inward from the air, long ribbons of sigil-light interlocking around a central void of amber radiance. Curved runic lines, elegant and alien, circled one another in impossibly precise symmetry, like a womb-diagram rendered by divinity rather than mortal hand.
Within its shape drifted faint, embryonic glows; suggestions of beginnings, of souls not yet named, of bodies not yet chosen, of futures not yet nailed down into one permanent road.
It was beautiful. It was not in the warm, triumphant way of grace beneath the Erdtree or in the brutal, kingly way of Godrick's stolen shard.
This Rune was softer and stranger than that. It felt mutable. Dangerous in a subtler fashion. A divine principle of rebirth, revision, reformation, and possibility; the right to begin again, and the terrible price of never being finished.
Amber light gleamed at its heart, while fine lines of gold and silver-white rotated around it like delicate rings around a captive moon. The unreadable tomes circling Rennala shifted in time with it, each page-turn echoing faintly through the library like some cosmic clerk recording that a law of being itself had been called into session.
John wanted it.
Gods, he wanted it.
His hands flexed once at his sides. Every hungry thing in him howled to simply take it. His draconic instincts wanted to lunge. His soul wanted to seize. His heart pounded like a beast smelling blood.
But somehow, somehow, he held still.
He looked at Rennala instead.
"A-Are you sure?" He asked, because for all his madness he could still be gentle when it mattered.
Rennala giggled.
The sound was so soft and pleased that it almost made him feel embarrassed for how hard it had been not to snatch the thing out of the air like a dragon hoarding gold.
"Fufufu~... What a polite, well-behaved boy thou art…" She said warmly and she nodded a few seconds later.
"I shall retain a portion of its power regardless." She explained, cradling the radiant formation with easy familiarity. "I have lived with it too long and learned too much from it for all its grace to wholly leave me. What I give thee is no true loss to me, dear one. A pittance only, compared to what thou hast done."
John's grin turned feral.
Behind Rennala, Ranni sighed with the exhausted air of a woman watching events leave all recognizable rails.
At John's side, Marika's expression softened into a helplessly excited smile.
There was still plenty in her face that disapproved of how he had gotten here, of the lies, the shamelessness, the catastrophic charm of it all…
But beneath all of that, she was happy for them both, unmistakably.
John saw it, and then he reached forward slowly.
Not because he wanted to savor the moment, but because every instinct he had was screaming at him to move faster, and he knew if he obeyed that impulse, he might tear the thing from Rennala's hands like a starving beast.
So he forced himself to be deliberate.
His fingers touched the Great Rune of the Unborn.
The world shattered as the Rune flashed with blinding, absolute light, then broke apart into a storm of golden motes and primordial amber radiance. It did not fall away. It surged.
Straight into him.
Into his flesh first, like molten law being poured through every channel of his body. Then deeper, through blood and bone, through the draconic lattice of his evolving form, through the glintstone brightening in his soul, through the Immortal Heart hammering in his chest.
Then it went deeper still.
Into his mind.
Into his soul.
Into the very pattern of Johnathan Pendragon as a thing that existed.
He felt himself rewritten and not rewritten. Expanded and hollowed and filled all at once. His soul convulsed around the incoming power, opening like a wound and a gate and a mouth.
Ancient golden script blazed through his nerves. Amber possibilities unfolded behind his eyes in infinite branching roads of unborn selves.
The juvenile scholars cried out.
Ranni stepped forward sharply.
Rennala's voice said something soft and distant.
Marika called out his name.
But Johnathan Pendragon's vision went blissfully blank for a few moments.
-----------------------------------
Author's Note: STONES PLEASE
They call him "The Greatest Larper In History".
I promise you all, John will have way more consequences for his fuckery. Very, very painful consequences…
Other than his blue balls, I mean.
Also, now begins the Lurinia arc in earnest! The following 16~ish chapters till chapter 91~ish are gonna be building up everyone's relationships together and expanding the world. After which, we'll finally move on from Luirnia and continue "conquering" the Lands Between with Larping.
It's gonna be a long, arduous road filled with TONS of Fluff and Slice of Life. I ask that you bear with me an enjoy
After all, let the record show! HELIOS NEVER WRITES QUICK ROMANCE! SLOW BURN ROMANCE TILL I DIE!!!
RAAAAGHHHH!!!
A-Ahem… So, yeah, I ask that you all let me cook. This shall be very good, I promise.
ANYWAYS!
I COMMISSIONED ART OF JOHNATHAN!
Truthfully, it's been completed for a long while and has been on my Patreon, but I've been waiting for the chance to show it off and this might as well be it.
Here it is.
Enjoy.
And if you can't access the link or wanna look at it again, it will be saved on a channel in my Discord Server.
I'll be saving any Fanart there as well, if you're curious.
…
Next Chapter Title: A Teacher's Audacity.
…
If you want access to all my stockpiled chapters, up to 17 chapters ahead (170k words ahead), as well as special privileges on Discord among other things, you can go do so on my Patreon!
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