Chapter Text
"Once in a decade chance to speak to the late leaders of the past for advice, and you waste it again to speak to me."
Mogh says with a light sigh, his breath rustling the fur of his cape lightly as he looks past the infinite void to look at Llewellyn, her teeth now gold, glistening much like the gold and fine yellow silk she, along with the skeletal mothers before her, drape themselves with.
"You speak as if you aren't one."Llewellyn rebuts, the gold that was now the bones of her feet clinking lightly on the infinite void like the bangles and several fine jewelry she wore as she walked to stand before him.
"I've nothing to gain by telling you once again that I refuse to meddle with the matters of the living." Mogh answers, his head tilting down to look at the much shorter saintess, the gold of his crown sparkling much like her's was despite the lack of light.
"And yet you tell me still." Mogh had known her for long enough to know that if she had skin and muscle, she'd have been smirking as she said that.
Wiping the glint of amusement in his eyes with a sigh, he juts his elbow, his arm and hand raised to the sky to ask for her hand in dance.
She responds in kind -and thus begins their decade tradition of dancing in the void.
He dances to the left, his steps and movement a practiced, memorized dance of goodwill and luck that his village and culture long instilled in him since his youth.
She, to Mogh's dismay, dances to the right with the usual dance of grief, the gold in her person jingling to her movements, serving to fill the silence.
"A civil war is brewing in the Nether." Llewellyn speaks, continuing her dance as he does too.
"Is it?" Mogh asks, but his tone couldn't be more uninterested.
"Barely past a hundred years, and their governing system is already crumbling." She continues, but he stays silent at this, uncaring -the two still dancing to the missing beat of music.
"They miss you." Llewellyn starts once more.
"They speak of you so vividly, tell stories of you with such detail, sing and dance to your glory so often it has me thinking you're still with them." He huffs in both annoyance and amusement at this.
"Generations of your species have passed, your blood diluted to what is barely even yours, and yet the gold statue they've made of you remains unblemished." She continues, turning to catch a glimpse of the back of the dancing piglin -his cape dragging on the invisible floor of the void- to see if she's fished a reaction out of him.
"They miss you --they need you, your guidance, more than ever." She continues.
"Will you do more than try and guilt trip me into going against my morals?" He asks, the fur of his snout crinkling, yet his movements remaining true to the strength of his dance.
"Maybe." She answers back, her dance coming to an end as his does.
He replies with an angry huff from his snout, the space between his eyes crinkling with displeasure.
"I will not meddle with the living. They are products of their time, not mine. No advice I give you to relay to them will work." He starts.
"The people of the Nether will grow, will live, will thrive without me. They will not evolve if I meddle."
She responds to this with a series of disappointed clicks from the bone of her wrist, and he sighs once more at this.
"Have faith in my people. They are strong." He says, their dance finally having ended with the two face-to-face, back where they started.
"Let them miss me, before long, they'll have another to miss-to sing songs of, dance to their glory, and retail stories of."
A silence falls between the two, the much shorter saintess looking up at the late king who stood before her, his image unchanging from when he died.
"I miss you." She admits, as she always has.
"Everything was much easier with you around. You were a mind too brilliant to have gone so soon, so fast, so quickly."
"Every living thing dies far too quickly for you Espinukogs, more so for a saintess like you." Mogh rebuts with a playful shake of his ear.
"Yes, but you died far too young, even for your species." She reminds, and that has him huff in amusement.
"I miss you." She says once more after a string of silence, her head tilted for the lace atop her head to cover her face to convey great sadness.
"I know." He answers back, the Piglin bending down to nudge the side of his snout and face to the side of her lace-covered skull in sympathy.
"Sentimental as you are, please, carry on. You've purpose you haven't yet done." He continues as he stands upright once more, Llewellyn finally meeting his eyes once more and nodding.