Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The fire is alive above her, through her. She does not know for certain what it is about her that kindles it and feeds its flame, but she knows it will kill her. They will use her for kindling when the time comes, and she will not even be human enough to fear it. She might not even be dead when they cast her on the pyre. If she is the last, and there is no flame to follow, the fire will burn on until it dies, and it will consume what’s left of her with it. She will be senseless to it, she knows, but she fears that void more.

When they brought her here, carrying her down the crumbling path to the cell, through the ruins and the crumbling walls, she saw the pathetic little hearth. It was not lit then. It was simply smoldering, its ashes cut through with red embers and smoke. She had no tongue. There was only blood in her mouth, and she had no breath in her lungs; pain was all she remembered, but she knew she had nearly scoffed at the sight of the shrine’s pyre.

All this, she had thought. All this for some ash and smoke. I know what you are.

Anastacia did not fear death. Death watched her every day, if days were still possible as the flames died, and it followed her into the cave when they brought her there. Eventually death came in the form of a golden man and a terrible blade, and it drew her from the depths and slit her throat nigh kindly. She did not cry out, she did not flinch, and she did not weep. Her heart beat faster as he reached for her, yes, but time had rendered her fear so constant that she had, then, nothing left to fear.

The shrine would die with her, the undead faces that pass before her cage would be lost in the world far beyond, and none of them, no one, would ever know what she had seen, what she had known, what she could have told them.

Anastacia of Astora dies a human, with a story robbed of words on her bloody lips and darkness pressing in on her eyes.

She forgets most of this later.

She does not open her eyes.

The fire is alive above her, somehow. The dirt shifts under her as she wakes, and the scent of blood is fresh again like it had been when they placed her here. It’s blood, indeed— she can still feel it splattered on her throat, on her bodice, and on her mouth. She licks her lips and feels the congealed stuff move around, heavy.

She chokes and scratches a word out, a curse, then more, until all that flows past her lips is a sobbing litany of pain. She lifts herself to her knees in a parody of prayer, the curses pouring out now, begging for forgiveness in between each invective.

Anastacia finally forces herself silent, slapping a hand over her mouth. Maybe if she just didn’t say anything… Maybe if she did what the knife did... Maybe then… But the thought disappears as soon as it comes, slipping away.

There’s a voice at the bars, and movement, and for the first time since life returned to her, Anastacia looks away from the dirt and the insides of her own eyelids. The thought from before dies, extinguished, and it does not resurface.

An undead woman stands before the cell, her garb foreign and faded. Once-fine silk has held up against the ravages of time in all but hue, giving it the look of a fading dream. She has a sword with a terrible curve at her waist and another sword at her back. Her skin has sunken in undeath, revealing fine bones in an incomprehensibly expressive face. Her hair is strange, like the wing of a black raven, shifting in color with the light. 

“Well met, Fire Keeper.”

The undead voice echoes, hollow in that way undead tend to sound. Anastacia does not respond, but she does not move either. Anastacia watches the figure beyond the bars and breathes, like she had when the knight who killed her first sat before the cave, carelessly lounging with his blade catching the light and glinting phantom suns into the dark. Calmly. In and out.

“Th, thank you,” she says, her voice still weak from disuse, fumbling for words. “I am Anastacia of Astora. Now I can continue my duty as Keeper. But I only hope that my impure tongue does not offend.”

“Why would it offend?” the undead woman asks.

“Why did you restore it?” Anastacia returns, because she has no answer and no memory of how she knows what she knows. Thoughts are evaporating like dew in the sun as she speaks. “I am impure, my tongue never intended for restoration.”

The woman shrugs, the movement shifting her out of the shadows and into the light, blinding Anastacia and shrouding her in shadow.

“I killed the one who killed you and brought the soul back.”

“You might as well have consumed it,” Anastacia does not say. She looks back up at the dirt ceiling and feels herself tied still to the flames she does not remember ever having seen.

The woman watches her for a moment, and then she asks, “What would have happened if you had not been restored? Would you have died?” Her voice rings with something like curiosity, echoing in the hollowness of the words.

“I think I would have been truly dead,” Anastacia says, grief dulling her tone and making it meek. “I cannot fault you for restoring me, I regret only that this door to sin has been reopened. Please, if you have any heart, leave me be. I wish not to speak.”

The woman nods and then leaves her in the dark, with only intermittent rumblings in the depths of the soil and the sounds of life outside. Anastacia rests for a long while and wonders at the numbness that eventually builds within her legs. Shaking, numb, she stands. The feeling of tiny ants crawling all about her legs and feet begins as she moves, and every step… Every step is discomfort.

She stands with her hands on the bars and looks out over the sun-speckled hills and ruins beyond, and then her gaze lingers on the ruined steps just a few strides away. There’s a gap larger than usual in the bars. She remembers it, she remembers the knight in gold forcing the bars open and coming in, his sickle-like blade shining in the dark. That was how he killed her. He laughed when she did not cry out, he reached out for her and she didn’t mind, and he slit her throat, and she did not flinch.

She slips through the bars, struggling only a little, and finds herself standing beneath the sun. She can sense the flame, but she cannot feel the serpent below it all. She remembers the sounds of his slumber, but she cannot hear them now, her mind is preoccupied with the edge of the shrine, the sheer drop off the ruins and down into the darkness. The ledge calls to her, like the flame should have from the beginning.

She creeps towards the ledge and slips down to the steps below. They crumble under her bare feet. Yes, bare; they had left her feet bare when they broke— She shakes her head violently and rubs her eyes, trying to force the recollection away.

The stone is warm and damp under her and it gives away in places, but she takes the steps further down into darkness. It feels as though something beckons her down into the shadows. The fire pulls her back, but she resists it, like she has resisted it before, as though she is accustomed to the pull. The flames have not taken hold of her heart, though her fragmented memory cannot tell her if that’s because she won’t let them in, or if it's because she’s too impure for the flame to find a home inside her.

But somehow none of that matters. The flame, something she feels intrinsically inside her, feels like it is nothing to her. Her heart does not care for it, nor for its pull on her. With a firm glance into the dark, she leaves the surface behind.

She creeps down, down, seemingly forever, until she is unable to go any further. The stairs are almost endless, and sometimes they stop at a platform before continuing again into the endless dark. The silence is interrupted only by breathing she has not heard before. It’s a steady breathing that horrifies her, for in its place before there was the sound of nothing— and here, suddenly, the snores of the beast, deep within the stone and the earth. 

There’s sharp pain inside her, hooking into her gut and pulling her back up the steps to the light, but it’s an ache. It can be ignored, it can be disregarded. She can go on. So she goes further, and further, until she comes to a strange, dark room in the mountainside. There is a contraption by the entrance, and a circle of observant statuettes built into the walls seem to beckon her inside. She takes a step, and then her foot meets an uneven break in the floor. Her eyes catch the switch off to the side of the little room, and she knows with certain intensity that she cannot go further into the mountain. She is not prepared for what is down there, but she does not know why. She knows only that there is ruin there, that there is death, dark, and pain. 

Anastacia turns on her heels and scrambles up the steps, head swimming with the rush of blood in her body, and she returns to the cage again with a speed that leaves her legs burning and aching. Sunlight warms her shoulders and her bare toes, now dry, and the feeling of the dark’s cold embrace fades.

She cannot resist the flame’s call for long. The torture and bliss of distance is gone forever now, and the fire calls to her stronger than it has in a long time, and so she goes up the path and feels eyes upon her as she approaches. No one speaks to her, though from beneath lowered brows and lower, wide-brimmed hats, she can sense them all watching her.

The flame dances before her as she approaches, and when she reaches its warmth she passes a hand through it, delighted and disgusted by the thrill of peace that shoots through her soul at the feeling of the fire on her fingers. It dances about, blithe and happy, uncaring and unfeeling; joyous in the cruelest way. She hates it, she realizes. She is enchanted by it, she desires it, and she hates it. This brings her out of the daze, and she realizes that there are vibrations in the earth. Something comes together in the fog, and she follows the sound into the shrine.

The great serpent Frampt is awake, she can feel the rumble of his muttering from here, and so she approaches the steps that lead to where she knows he will be. The great bird that brings the undead to the shrine twitches in place, cocking its head so that its great eye is trained on her. It looks uncannily aware. Anastacia spares it a glance and a shiver before turning to the still waters and the great serpent that rises from them into the air and far above her head. 

“Kingseeker,” she says in greeting, lifting an arm to protect herself from the falling droplets.

“A Fire Keeper?” The serpent hums and makes noises of wonder before continuing, saying, “I have never seen the Keeper of this shrine’s flame. How might I know thy loyalty? Thou’rt tightly bound to the flame. I have never seen such bindings before.”

Unsure of how to tell the truth, nor how to explain that she does not know the truth, Anastacia clasps her hands before her and executes a bow that her body remembers easily.

For the truth must be that that she is not pure, that she was rightfully stripped of all speech for so long, and then restored by a trick of fate. The truth is that she was never meant to even stand beneath the sun. She cannot lie further, and risk polluting a pure tongue, so recently restored. She puts these fragmentary thoughts in their place and looks back up to the serpent.

“Thou’rt prettily behaved, however,” the serpent scoffs. “For what reason is thy binding so strong? What was the purpose of such a thing?”

“I know not, Kingseeker,” she says, and she does not exactly lie. She feels hurt by his outright contempt and his ancient insult. In the tones of old, he was condescending to her by referring to her in lowly address. 

“What? Sleeping, were thee? And to think the Lord of Sunlight himself entrusted this shrine to the Keepers. Greatly have they repaid him for that trust.” Frampt tosses his head in ire and his great eyes roll in a horrible way. “I have spoken with the Chosen One of this age, in any case, though I have not heard from her since. She has agreed to link the fire and rekindle the rightful age.”

Anastacia does not feel happy to hear this, but she does feel unburdened in a strange way. If the flame is rekindled, she might at least die. That selfish relief escapes her in a sigh.

“Good,” the serpent says. “I bethought thy disgusting robes, bloody and torn, w're evidence of a traitor punished. It’s good to know thou’rt loyal yet. Though something reeks about you. Being so near the stagnant, rotting waters of New Londo has polluted your scent. Something dreadful has its mark on you now. Not even the binding purifies you.”

She watches him sway and says nothing, feeling small and weak, dirty and confused. She doesn’t understand.

“Pray for forgiveness from thy Lords, Keeper,” he warns. “Take care, lest thy Darkness pollute this flame.”

Anastacia curtsies again and turns away, trying to move herself away from the slew of confusion and unhappiness that the serpent’s barrage of insults lays into her heart. She remembers something, maybe, bubbling forth instead of this nauseating fear. She remembers it on the tip of her tongue, in her first words. She does not turn back to look at the swaying serpent as she leaves the crumbling ruin of the shrine. She steps barefoot and gingerly forward through the grass and past the eyes watching her as she nears the fire again. It puts out a warmth that should be comfortable, but no human nears it. They seem to be crowding about it, but at great distance.

Anger feels like a convoluted, distant memory, like something she might have heard of once but had since forgotten. She knows she must have done something to anger the Dark Moon, the Dark Sun herself, but she does not remember why, exactly. Or how. Or when. She does not remember, at all, but she remembers the Blades, pain, and now she is here.

The story comes together naturally. 

There’s something calling her in the fire, but she does not want to go to it. It’s not the call she felt on the steps into the darkness. It is not the violent pull back to the flame that she felt then, but the call to the darkness deep down.

She goes back to her cell and slips between the bars, back into the darkness, and sits. As if her legs are still broken, she sits for hours, and nothing happens. The day does not change, the sun does not set, she even wonders if the birds singing are naught but a memory of birdsong. She cannot track their melody, to see if it varies or if it repeats endlessly like a ballad the morning after a wedding.

Because there were weddings before, and songs, and birds, and nights, and sunsets. She does not remember how long ago, but she fears the vague haze surrounding those words. She remains seated this way for a long time, but nothing happens; no one passes by and no one new takes up a place before the bars

The steps just beyond the sight of the cave’s opening still call to her, and though before it was a subtle pull, a gentle tug, like her hair on her neck standing up and prickling in anticipation, it is now like a yearning. She feels that she wants nothing more than to step down into the darkness and see what no one else has seen but the undead who travel the land. She fears death, but death will not come, not soon.

In the dark of the cave, behind the bars, with her legs growing steadily more and more numb, the truth comes to her. She will either die a human or she will fade like the flame and cease to be. The thought terrifies her, though in truth death does not. But sitting in the dark and awaiting a fate that lurks beyond the edges of her sight terrifies her more than either end ever did.

The steps pull her back after what might be days, but of course the sun does not move, and it is still warm when she steps into the bright warmth of its light. She goes to the steps, where they’re warm in the sunlight, and watches them descend into inky blackness.

What would happen if she pulled the bond when it pulled her? She takes a step into the darkness, then another. The pulling begins mildly as a feeling of fear and unease, then it becomes needles in her neck and a sharp jolt in her gut that fades into uneasy numbness. She descends again, further, and her feet grow cold and numb. She pulls harder and goes further into the dark.

It still feels like a hook, like something pulling, digging deep into her flesh and pulling, but she can feel what direction the hook bends in. She sits on the stones and looks into the darkness, and she listens to the sound of water dripping. She sits, listening, waiting for a sign that this won’t bring more pain, that it won’t bring the Blades to the steps and their blades into her legs—

Her head falls and she does not move. She can unhook the metal from her stomach and be free, she knows that she can, she can feel how it can be done. She can remember, here in the dark and the cold, with the feeling of metal in her gut, something of the past. She’s done it before.

A memory… It was something about a legend and a myth; a grotesque truth and a beautiful lie, and impressions of it were moving rapidly behind her eyelids. A queen in the dark? Like light pouring down through trees. Snakes, circles, swords, cycles, blades in her legs— and in her mouth.

She holds her breath against the memory, presses her knees into her eyes, and unhooks the thing from her gut. The lights behind her eyelids become painful the longer she presses her eyes shut, so she lifts her head and looks into the darkness she can’t yet see.

The numb feeling in her middle is mostly gone, so she knows that the fire above will slowly fade away and sputter out. She knows it like she has watched it happen before. The men watching it balefully, the men who’d been watching her, will realize something has happened as soon as it begins to truly fade. They will go to her cell, see her gone, and they will step down into the darkness and follow her. They’ll find her, and they’ll take her back to the surface, and they might not be merciful. Her body knows punishment, even if her memory does not.

Her memory like a broken jar, Anastacia rises, weak and shivering, and looks down into the darkness that calls her. She turns back.

She stands before the fire again. It is imperceptibly weaker now than it was; just an ordinary fire. She reaches out to reconnect her soul to it again, and sure enough it sputters and bursts with that feeling of life that ordinary fires do not have. It’s different than she remembers it to have been the last time she saw it, before she returned to the silence of the cave and before she tried to brave the darkness below. There are pathways embedded in the ash.

She leans down and puts her hand into the belly of the flame and pulls at one pathway. It feels like it goes on deep into the earth, deep into the darkness. There are several more, but this one is truly deep, in a way that freezes her heart. She knows what they are. They’re paths of travel, paths of use. They’re the existence of other fires, other flames like hers. The undead woman has traversed the world and lit many flames; she has done, consciously or not, the bidding of the Gods themselves.

Anastacia looks at the men huddled nearby, oddly dressed and sometimes muttering, and knows that it could not have been them. It had to have been the woman who avenged her, who slew the embraced knight, and who set a mighty vessel down—

The Lordvessel? So, the undead knightess had been to Anor Londo, and she had gained some favor of whatever deity resided there still.

When Anastacia goes to check on the shrine itself, the serpent Frampt is gone.

I bethought thy disgusting robes, bloody and torn, w're evidence of a traitor punished.

The hook is still in her belly, she can feel it, but her new memories have colored it another shade. It’s chaining her to the fires, but the Chosen One has unknowingly granted her a means of escape without detection. The fire will still burn, and she will kindle every flame she meets as she flees—

She goes back to the center of the flame and kneels in the ashes and the dim, impossibly vague heat. The path she had noticed before, the one that called to her with its depth and its strength, that called out to her, it dances in the flame. She reaches out and seizes it, knowing, with certainty, that it must be the same thing that called her to the belly of the valley and down those dark, stone steps.

She pulls and the world comes apart like fog.

The sound of water, distant this time, and breathing. She lifts her head and lets the path she’d seized before fall from her hand. Frampt is here—He watches her in the dark without making a sound, swaying in a familiar and unsettling way.

“Who are you? You’re no warrior,” Frampt says.

“I am the Fire Keeper; we have met before.”

“Nay, it must have been my cursed brother you encountered.”

Anastacia thinks about this for a moment, but she is confused by something smaller and more immediate. This serpent speaks respectfully, with no hint of ire or contempt. He addresses her formally, even.

“I am the Fire Keeper Anastacia of Astora. I tend the flame above.”

“Your garb… Forgive me for mentioning what may be a painful memory, but it reeks of blood and pain. What has happened in Firelink to set you down here, to cover you in blood, so?”

“Nothing. I have come myself.”

“I see that you have brought yourself, but you mean to tell me you are not the first wave of an army of Blades and snakes sent by the False ones?”

“I do not know what you mean.”

“Where does the blood come from?”

“I have been punished for heretical speech.”

“You seem unpunished to me.”

“It’s a long story, but the root of it is heresy.” It must be.

“Welcome, in that case. I am Darkstalker Kaathe. I feed the heretics, and I clothe the degenerate.”

The name stirs a memory in her, something indeed ancient. Darkstalker— “Was it not you who doomed Oolacile? Who drowned this place?”

“Doom? Drowned? No, nothing so harsh. I merely usher in, gently, the signs of the new age. The kings, one can safely say, drowned New Londo, and the doom of Oolacile was Manus, not I.”

Anastacia regards him doubtfully, but she can think of nothing, in her knowledge, to argue against what he’s said.

“What brings you here?” he asks.

“Something calls to me here.”

“I will need to know more before I tell you what has beckoned you down to these depths. We can consider it a trade. You tell me, a simple serpent, what has so coated you in blood and bound you to the flames, and I will tell you a beautiful tale. You’re missing part of yourself, this much even I can see.”

She is no fool. She has no memory, clear or whole, of her life before or her own knowledge. But she knows when she is being manipulated, twisted, and prodded into pliant obedience. She decides in the end that the promise of knowing is greater than the risk of being prodded. The flame dances behind her, too, ready.

“Your progenitor was likewise duplicitous, always plotting," he says, "I see it in your eyes. It is there, in part, but not enough. In the end, his descendants inherited his nature. In every sense,” the serpent says. “I could see the weakness in his heart, much like yours.”

Anastacia knows not to rise to the bait, but still she asks, “Who is the progenitor of which you speak?”

“Ah, ah,” the serpent chuckles, like she knew that he would. “Tell me Anastacia of Astora, Fire Keeper, what haunts you and clings to your robes? Why are you so bloody? Why does a curse rest on your brow? Tell me and I’ll tell you of the progenitor Pygmy and his flame, traitor to your own.”

Anastacia must visibly betray her shock, because the serpent laughs again, darkly, swaying horribly and showing teeth as he laughs. “Shocked, are you?” he asks. “I see that you are. Never fear, I can remove the curse, if you desire. It’s a simple curse. A curse on your mind.”

Anastacia’s hand flies to her forehead. She’s cursed? She knew she was cursed, on some level, for the ages she spent mute, motionless, and terrified, but she was cursed… truly? “Who cursed me?” she asks.

“I am curious to that end as well,” the serpent says. “Whoever it was has bound you, too. Tightly. I will not be able to tell until I can touch the mark, but tell me: Do you wish to be rid of it? You’ve been bound like a doomed criminal to a prison wall—Tell me, who do I doom in unleashing you?”

Maybe this was what called her into the dark. Maybe this was what beckoned her into the night—the only night she’d seen since before…

“I cannot remember in full, serpent.”

“Tell me what you can,” he says, kindly. He seems kinder than Frampt, and more understanding. She steps closer. “That’s it,” the serpent croons. “Just a little conversation, partake in it tit for tat… Just for a while.” And he laughs, dark and rolling like a large cloud obscuring the sun.

Anastacia looks up into the darkness, into his glowing eyes and gleaming teeth, and she watches him sway. Then she opens her mouth and her tongue feels like ash against the clammy cold of the air, but she speaks.

“I must have done something to the flame I guarded. I think I cut it off from its power. I found I could do it when I woke and sat on the steps…” She speaks and her words stumble over each other, events out of order and thoughts picking up where memories leave off, but the serpent does not seem to mind. Serpents, she thinks, are rather used to circles and running in them.

“I tried to do it to the flame at the shrine," she continues. "I did it, I did it to the flame at the shrine. I wanted to go into the dark below, you see. The dark called to me, and I thought perhaps it called to me because of my impure tongue. But I rekindled the flame, as soon as I put it out in my chest I went back and fixed it. I was so scared of being—Of it all happening again.” She can’t make herself follow one path of a memory; it all pours out of her like water. “I left it for a time, a long time,” she says. “And during that time the Chosen One of the age must have made it to Anor Londo; for when I next touched the flame the pathways were open like they would be only if—If something,” she trails off. “I don’t remember what.”

The serpent, who until now was silent and only betrayed a snort at the mention of Frampt, hums deeply and says, “I believe your confusion may indeed be a result of the curse. It may suit us both well to do away with our agreement and simply speak as equals, yes?”

He leans down, down, almost endlessly until suddenly something clammy and hard and rough is touching her forehead. Something in her head tingles, and then like a band about her skull from the back of her neck to the top of her forehead, it tightens. It tightens and tightens until it hurts so much she falls to her knees. She kneels, gasping for breath, and then it eases. The pain is gone, her mind clears, and the serpent above her laughs.

He has won. He’s won another pawn, he did what Frampt was too blind to attempt. For now that she can think a little more clearly, she wants nothing more than to help this serpent who she wishes she had found years, ages, centuries ago—

“So, you are a traitorous blasphemer? Delightful,” the serpent laughs. “Here I thought you were just caught in the crossfire.”

Anastacia gets to her feet, wondering at how she had ever lived so long with them curled and broken beneath her, with her own tongue thrown into the corner of the cave with her.

“You did doom Oolacile,” she says, with the calm of certainty, though something in her memory was still bound. She could feel it. “It was you who threw this place into ruin; you tempted the kings of this city until they were thrown into blasphemy. I was right. The memory was trying to tell me.”

“I made some suggestions. Your knowledge is deep, isn’t it? I wonder why and how. Do you know the reason for your binding now?”

“You cast the Nameless one, the firstborn— you cast his heart into doubt and—”

“I did not; freely would I confess to that had it been so.” The serpent grins, wider than ever. “What a prize that would have been.  Although he mourned the loss of his siblings, may they fall, forever, he was a worthy figure. It would have been a great victory against the flames. But do you remember?”

Snakes, her thoughts conjure snakes at that. She shakes her head, not yet ready to dive into the unearthed sea of memories the curse has hidden from her until now. “Tell me of the flame that is traitor to my own,” she says, ignoring him.

“The curse’s removal has made you bolder, it has given you something back,” the serpent says. “But bound you still are.”

Anastacia fidgets with the edge of her tattered shawl, wondering what to feel. She doesn’t feel anything much, nothing new. She just isn’t scared. Finally, she says, “I have nothing to fear.”

“That you don’t,” the serpent concedes. “I’ll tell you, however, something I tell many a lost soul. With the advent of fire,” he says, “there came disparity. The Lords divided the power of this between themselves. You know the story of the great Witch, of Nito, and of Gwyn.” She nods. “Then you need now to hear the story of the Pygmy, a small, furtive little thing, who found the last of the souls. The Dark Soul.”

“Dark?” she echoes his words, something about them calling to her, embracing her. The dark; she knew the dark. She knew how it called to her. 

“Ah,” the serpent says. “So, you know something of the Dark, now. True Dark, at that. Let us try and find out what, and perhaps show you more.”

“Why do you give allegiance to that which is… Dark and evil?”

“Dark? Evil?” the serpent laughs. “Ah, there is evil in the world. There is, but there is also Dark, and it is not evil. Or not always. It simply is.”

“This city and Oolacile speak to another truth.”

“Ah, another truth. Yes. Death is natural, yes? Like a cycle, we live and die. And yet you do not.”

Anastacia bites her lip. “The curse.”

“Is that not evil?”

“It’s cruel,” she says. “I tried to rid myself of it by ridding myself of the flame, I think. Maybe that was why I did it. To try and escape.”

“Yes, the Fire Keepers are the true kindling of this age.”

She watches him sway. “In what way?”

“What comes through your shrine? What passes by you every day?”

“Undead,” she says.

“From where?” he asks.

“They come in on the backs of a great bird from the Keep. Prisons, strongholds, they are corralled there and then brought here one by one.”

“Why?”

“In the hopes that one will link the flame.”

“A good student you must have been. Perfect answers. Let me tell you something else,” the serpent says, voice like silk. Anastacia leans in. The serpent says, “They are not sent one by one. They are sent in droves.”

“That’s impossible,” Anastacia argues. “I have only seen a handful pass.”

“The world here is thinning, the edges fraying, and times and ages collide. At any given moment, there is a broken Fire Keeper at the shrine, hidden away, and there is an undead warrior who kindles the flame above her.”

Anastacia quiets, her mind struggling to keep up. “Then… there is no Chosen One?”

“In any one of these ages, an undead will link the fire, will rekindle the first flame, and—”

“But—”

“And it will not matter, for us, here, until the ages converge again. You will suffer, or die, or not, and it will not matter.”

Anastacia shudders. She slips back to the damp stone beneath her.

“All life is fleeting, and all life is a pawn in the game the Lord of Sunlight plays, even beyond the grave.”

“What shall I do?”

“What shall you do, indeed? The Chosen One at the moment,” the serpent snorts, “she could damn or save you, but it would make no difference. You will live thousands more before the flame revives itself. There is no saving you.”

“Who did this to me?” she groans, her head swimming. Something black is pushing at her vision and she sinks from the weight of it, her forehead pressed to the cold stone. “Who—” She pushes herself up shakily, tired and longing for the comfort of the cage—of the cave. She turns to the flames at her back and grasps at a path she recognizes, her head swimming and her pulse pounding painfully in her neck.

“Think about it, Fire Keeper. You know who it is that damned you, damned you all, and damned the Dark,” the serpent says behind her. “You know why I do this, why I beckon the Dark, why I bring forth the Abyss. I can sense it in you.”

She hears his voice ringing in her head even as she turns and pulls the thread that calls to her from the belly of the flame.

I don’t, she lies to herself. I don’t.

The woman is standing in front of the flame. The same undead knightess in tattered, faded robes of silk and brocade, the Chosen One, one of many. The woman turns to look at her when Anastacia approaches through the crumbling stone, the tingle of the flame’s pathways still alight in her fist.

“Warrior,” she says. The woman shrugs.

“Something like that,” she hums. “Where did you go? I have not heard of a Fire Keeper who does not keep her fires. You were always here, before.”

“My legs were shattered, before.”

The undead woman’s broken, delicate husk of a face pinches in on itself as she rapidly begins to inspect the threadbare glove upon her bony hand. “I see,” she says. “My apologies.”

“I went to see someone,” Anastacia says, tentatively. She doesn’t want to reveal more than this, for it feels like a betrayal of the serpent, and of the knowledge sitting heavy and bright in her mind. The great bird above her head, perched on the ruins of the shrine, shifts audibly. She bites her lip, certain it is watching her again. 

The undead are— they’re flown in, constantly, in great numbers, throughout the many overlapping ages of this moment. Time is converging, her mind says, it’s a sign that the flame dies.

“Did that bird bring you here?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know… how?”

The undead woman shrugs, but watches her carefully. “It flew, but I know not how it knew the path or the place.”

Anastacia dares not turn back to the bird. “It does not leave that spot?”

“It leaves on occasion.”

“I would think,” Anastacia says, her heart in her chest, the bird’s sharp eye on her back, “that it would guard its precious soul more carefully.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” Anastacia says. “It carries souls innumerable.”

The undead woman watches the bird over Anastacia’s shoulder before looking back to her with a sly look. “I’m not tempted by such things,” she says.

“You’re not?” Anastacia bites her lip. She has to find another way to kill the bird.

“If I was, you wouldn’t be here.”

Anastacia’s blood freezes and her jaw tightens; she cannot look away from the woman’s eyes. “I see.”

She cannot approach the others, for fear still binds her tongue, even if nothing else does. The bird watches her, its head twitching side to side, one eye trained on her every time she dares to glance at it directly. There’s no real proof that it can understand what it sees, there’s no reason to fear it, but still she does. She does not dare approach the belly of the flame to reach for more threads, not with its eyes on her. She was foolish to try earlier. Perhaps it doesn’t understand what she had done. Perhaps it knows. But it matters not, for if the bird dies, perhaps the ages will cease. Perhaps this could be the final one—

“You’re oddly active now.”

Anastacia looks up to see the undead woman stepping from the flame and onto the ashes littering the grass around the flames. “What do you mean?”

“You never left that cave before, even after I brought you back. Now you’re everywhere. I hoped to speak to you about a matter, actually, now that I see you are returned.”

She straightens. “What do you mean?”

“I'll get to that in a moment. I have been away, preparing to place the vessel. I have now. Have you enjoyed the effects?”

The Lordvessel, of course. She’d nearly forgotten about it. “I heard from Frampt that you’d agree to link the flame. I cannot thank you enough—”

“Oh, please. You don’t believe that drivel any more than I do. We’re doomed no matter what we do.”

“If you link the flame, we can at least die human.”

“We’ll die like animals, like sheep,” the woman says. She wipes a knife, curved and clearly bloody, on her skirt. The brocade sucks it up hungrily, like it’s been enchanted to do so. It might have been, at that. Anastacia finds that her knowledge of magic is locked away, too. She notices that the brocade is embroidered with dark birds in flight, in thread that mimics the strange dark hair of the woman wearing it. The woman continues without pause, unaware of Anastacia's scrutiny. “And we’ll be conjured back up, somehow, in some form, at the end.”

“Human.”

“Shades,” the undead woman returns, a note of bitterness in her tone that resonates with Anastacia. “Maybe I should just take the throne,” the woman laughs. “The next age will be ruled by a queen. Dark and terrible.”

“Like dusk before night. But you’d be a puppet,” Anastacia says tentatively, finding that she was enjoying the banter and the fruitless speculation. “The Dark Sign would still cover the souls of humans, and the age of fire would continue. Nothing would change.”

“Maybe Kaathe has a point; embracing the Abyss and all. If we wipe everything out—”

A memory strikes Anastacia into frozen horror, a memory of legs shattering and cold steel at her lips. She shudders and shakes herself, looking away. “There’s no point in such speculation,” she says. “There’s no future for us.”

The woman looks at her strangely, and Anastacia is suddenly struck by the strange finery of her clothes, the strong way she carries herself, the fine delicacy of her strange face. She cuts a figure like royalty, like someone who isn’t speculating events but plotting them and watching her plans play out. “After us, there might be an age worth beckoning in,” the undead woman says.

Anastacia lifts her hands over the flame. “It matters not. I will not be there.” She stares into the flames for a time. “Have you any need of me now?”

“Yes, I remember now; I had one more thing to ask you. I found this; it may interest you.” The woman holds out a strange, pulsing white light. The sight of it pulls at Anastacia’s heart and brings tears to her eyes. “It’s a fire keeper’s soul.” The woman seems to freeze, hesitating. “Is it difficult for you to—?”

No, it isn’t. Anastacia wants to say that it isn’t, but she can’t. She takes it wordlessly, and it flutters slightly in her palm. She throws it onto the flame. “Let it strengthen you,” she says. “It has no other purpose now.” Let me spare one of them the pain of this, she thinks, and the woman watches her carefully over the flames rising between them. They sputter and dance as if happily feeding on the soul Anastacia has surrendered to their tongues.

“You have been to Anor Londo,” Anastacia says when the silence stretches on too long and the woman shows no sign of leaving. “What is it like now?”

“It is beautiful,” the woman says. “Though I would not suggest seeing it for yourself. It’s a dangerous place now; abandoned by civilization.”

“The Gods,” Anastacia starts, “they are no longer in Anor Londo?”

“I saw one, and she was but an illusion. They’ve abandoned their city.”

“So, Anor Londo is truly empty,” Anastacia says.

“I did not say that. Anor Londo is dangerous.”

“Will you take me?”

The woman looks at her in surprise. “Why would you want to go?”

“I was there when—” she pauses, staring at the fire, and gestures to her shawl and the front of her dress, covered in dried and flaking blood. “That was where this happened, I think.”

“My question remains, but I think I see now.”

“I wish to remember more,” Anastacia explains.

“More? You’ve remembered something? You… forgot something?”

Anastacia briefly considers explaining the curse on her brow, the one Kaathe removed, that had been blocking some of her faculties and memories, and how there were still gaps that remained even with its removal. She decides against it.

The crow had to be Anor Londo's. She has to know that much; she guesses that much. She does not know how the puzzle pieces in front of her fit together, but she finds that she does not care. The roads all lead to Anor Londo. The Blades were the Dark Sun's, the crow had to be acting on command of the Gods, and her own past lay there.  The crow might just be a giant, black bird. It might be a God's pet, summoning cannon fodder in the war against the Dark. It might be collecting pawns to use as kindling, to keep the flame alive. There was the prophecy, the one in Astora, that people often repeated. That there was a purpose, glorious, and holy in all this. 

That it was the destiny of those with the Dark Sign to be delivered from captivity and towards holy purpose.

But somehow, after everything, she has come to doubt that. There is something else in her mind, something in that bird--

In either case, Anastacia is certain of her place in every single scenario: dangerous and disposable. A risky combination—

“Lady Anastacia?”

Anastacia starts, looking away from the depths of the fire quickly. “My apologies,” she says. “I did not mean to drift off.”

“It’s of no concern, but I wonder what you’re thinking. Has it to do with Anor Londo?”

“Were there any Blades in Anor Londo?”

“Yes,” the woman says seriously. “There was a single Knightess. She kept a flame, actually.”

Anastacia bites her lip, making up her mind. “Very well. Take me to Anor Londo.”

“’Tis a risk,” the woman says. “You do not even know my name.”

“I trust you to protect me, and to resist the temptation my death may present. And you may tell me your name, if you remember it.”

“I am Kel,” the woman says with a secret smile. Something about her gaze is sharper than before, and she laughs like she can’t help herself.

“A strange name,” Anastacia concedes. “In a strange tongue.”

The woman gestures to her clothes, the heavy, rotting brocade and the strange finery about her sash. “I am from a strange land, but not so strange as this one.”

“What does your name mean?”

“Ah, that I cannot remember. When you are ready, we can depart. I do not know what you hope or expect to find or learn there, but I can protect you in Anor Londo.”

“Do you have the means to depart now?”

The woman lingers over the fire briefly, her hand in its depths, and when she looks up, she looks –

“I’m ready now. What do you think?”

Anastacia doesn’t have the words necessary to describe what she thinks, for the woman—Kel, is suddenly human. Gone is the hollowed, sagging skin, the scarred harshness of her bones poking through her skin. She looks just like Anastacia thought she might. Delicate, strange, and-- something about her face pulls at her memory.

“If you’re ready,” Anastacia manages, finally, “let us go.”

Anor Londo is impressive, as it always was and likely always will be, but she cannot feel for it anything but disgust. The obscenity of the spires, of the vastness of its halls, of its endless stairways and buttresses and connecting roofs, it all disgusts her. She knows beside her Kel is mostly unmoved, used to the sights now, but her eyes are on Anastacia with something unusual in their depths.

“Is it as you remember?”

“It is worse,” Anastacia says. “Take me to the knightess you spoke of.”

“Stay behind me,” Kel warns. “I will have to take another path, one of less resistance than I usually do. Perhaps it will take us to the knightess.”

Anastacia follows her silently and watches her leap to an arching buttress that soars away from the platform they’re on and into the air, towards another tower. She hesitates.

“Do you fear heights?”

“No,” Anastacia says. It’s not a lie. She doesn’t fear heights in particular, she merely fears everything.

“Then come, I will help you. We’ll have to move slowly, to start. You rest at that ledge, and I’ll go ahead and clear a path for us.” With that, Kel runs ahead, nimbly leaping like she’s clad in leathers and skins and not silk and brocade. Anastacia follows, slowly, and reaches the platform with some relief. She sighs and settles down on the chilly stone and watches the horizon. It’s strange. The shrine is so bright and welcoming, cursed as it is, but the sunlight reaches through the trees and the mountain cliffs and settles warm on the stones and the ruins. Here, the sun is strong, but it seems like a furnace in a painting. The stone…

The stone is cold. The sun is in her face, but she feels no brightness, her eyes can look directly into its face without trouble. She stands, horrified, and turns her head to look past the corner. Kel is long gone, carving a way, or ways, to the knightess.

Anastacia looks longer and presses her hands to the stone again. It’s ice cold. Is it possible that Kel has not noticed how wrong all of this is? The path ahead is clear, but narrow, so Anastacia takes a tentative step forward, back to the wall, and slides along the length of the ledge to the next platform. She continues this way until she finds the path broadening towards several archways.

There are many ledges. If she drops down, she’ll reach a strange balcony that glimmers… that calls to her in the false-sun’s rays. Anastacia, with her heart beating fast and loud, creeps to the edge and grips the stone with her fingers. She lets herself fall, then swing, and then the platform is under her feet. This is too far from the flame. The moment her feet hit the platform, she feels the beginnings of the discomfort, but then—

It’s gone. Like there’s another flame, a stronger one, nearer her than the one before. She looks around, wondering where it might be. She looks down the hallway, curiously. It’s almost like—

No, it is. She knows this path. It’s a place she’s seen, a place she’s… Not walked, but perhaps been taken to. She follows the path as it leads to an alcove—No, to a shrine. There’s even incense, and the scent rising from it is familiar. She can hardly breathe. Her heart is behind her teeth, her pulse is making her bones chatter, and the mist before her is clearly—

She steps forward, and a voice, cold and strange, rings out. She falls to her knees in terror, and the voice hums approvingly at her apparent devotion. She cannot speak. She can’t even understand what she’s hearing. She can’t understand a word, but she knows the rise and fall of the voice, the arrogance of it, and the terror she feels is a sign like any printed word.

Her mouth falls open, her pulse rocking her vision, and she can barely manage the breath to summon the name.

“Dark Sun.”

Chapter Text

The name falls from her lips like a breath, natural, sure-- It's the voice she remembers, deep in her broken mind it stirs something like a memory. She remembers fear, adoration, and hatred all at the same time. They burst in her like light.

The voice’s speech, prepared clearly, falls into a sudden silence when Anastacia speaks. The air of the hall changes, and the golden feeling in the air falls away starkly. The Dark Sun has turned all attention onto Anastacia’s prostrate form.

“Who art thou to speak my name so? Thine arrogance may be thine end.” Gwyndolin’s voice has changed, and the booming quality of it is gone. The artifice has fallen, and the threat of death is suddenly very real.

“I am but a Fire Keeper,” she says, shaking. She shouldn’t have come. What was she thinking? How could she plot revenge or seek the truth? She was no warrior, she was a fool and a heretical, worthless, impure—

“A Fire Keeper, so far from her fire?” The voice is closer now, but Anastacia cannot bring herself to lift her head. She can only kneel and shake. “You seem rightly pious, but why—” A finger under her chin, and she’s forced to look up. The hand is pale, and clad in luxurious silks and lace, and it’s larger than any human hand she’s ever seen.

Anastacia follows the hand where it directs her, even when it grips her chin and draws her forth into the mist. She follows, she crawls forward, shaking, into the cold breath of the barrier and shuts her eyes tight against the coming blow.

“Why,” the Dark Sun asks, “are you marked thus, in blood? Why are you bound so tightly to the flames? And here, there is a strange touch that rests on your brow. What beset you?”

Anastacia opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. Her eyes are shut, and her pulse pounds like a drum in her skull.

“I sense a story,” Gwyndolin murmurs. “I do love stories; they have so much power. Tell me yours.”

“You did this to me,” Anastacia gasps. “How could you have forgotten? Do you think so little of your actions?”

She is pulled all the way through the mists, towards the voice, but she has no choice but to follow, to allow herself to fall into the doorway and into a strange, golden light. The hand at her chin tilts her face up further, and further, until she has no choice but to stand before the last deity in Anor Londo. She looks upon Gwyndolin, but no snake does she see.

She sees a beautiful woman at first, tall, like a statue erected in a cathedral, and clothed all in white and gold. Then something shifts, and she's not quite sure that the figure is a woman. She's not sure the figure is recognizable in such a way, and she's overcome, looking away for a moment. But something like yearning brings her gaze back up. Or perhaps it is the insistent finger under her chin. She looks upon the face of the Dark Sun, the one who damned her.

The Dark Sun’s face is mostly hidden behind a great, golden cowl that reflects the dull light in the tomb and erupts in golden rays like the sun itself. There is no rush of memory; there is no sudden realization, no clarity, no fog that clears—there’s nothing but gold, and the hissing of snakes. Anastacia cannot look down, but the snakes are level with her neck, she knows they are. The cold hand around her chin does not relinquish its hold.

“You—you’re—” Anastacia does not wish to speak, but it is like the words are pulled from her and scrambled about on her tongue.

“I am,” Gwyndolin says, with a voice like crystal ringing out, hollow somehow in the empty tomb. “What are you?”

Anastacia swallows. “A Fire Keeper.”

“That’s impossible. You’re marked with the curse as dark as the Abyss itself. No Fire Keeper is thus tarnished. You must tell me your story, in truth and in full, or perish. And I do not like to let mysteries go unsolved, and I don’t like to be falsely accused.”

Never fear, I can remove the curse, if you desire. It’s a simple curse. A curse on your mind. I believe your confusion may indeed be a result of the curse. It may suit us both well to do away with our agreement and simply speak as equals, yes?

“No,” she whispers, mostly to herself. She can barely conjure horror at the realization. She knew, on some level, that the serpent had done something to her.

“Would you like me to remove the mark?”

Anastacia looks on helplessly, resigning herself to another mark from another faction she cannot even begin to understand, a sign of allegiance she does not have. The hand at her chin warms until it’s too hot to bear, but it does not let her go. There’s nothing but scorching heat and pain, and then it’s gone.

“Why does the Dark love you so dearly?” Gwyndolin asks. “The mark of it is buried deep in your soul, I won’t be able to remove it without killing you.”

“I do not know.”

“What fire do you tend?”

“Firelink shrine.”

Gwyndolin’s hands are flames on her again, this time around her wrist and the back of her neck. Those hands dwarf her, and she groans in pain as her vision goes black around the edges.

“A high honor for one so impure. Have we fallen so far, since the fire faded? If you’re the keeper of Firelink, how can you speak with the Abyss touching you so? Do you lie?”

“I don’t remember,” Anastacia lies, flinching from the barrage of questions. She remembers unhooking the link in her stomach once before she had done it on the ruined steps, she remembers that sensation. She had unlinked the flame from her soul, once. She remembered it then, she remembers it now. She lies. “I don’t remember anything. I only remember that they broke my legs and tore out my tongue.”

“You speak as if you don’t understand anything, interloper. Why would they break a Keeper’s legs if she were deemed fit for purification? Answer me or perish.”

“I was restored,” Anastacia cries, her head spinning from this reminder of her life in the Dark Sun’s hands. “I know nothing else.”

“Who do you credit with that?” Gwyndolin asks, the hands of flame gripping tighter than before and burning into Anastacia’s flesh. Anastacia squirms in the grip and rises to the tips of her toes as those hands lift her even higher off the ground. “Who would do such a thing?”

“A knight of Carim!” Anastacia gasps.

“Restored you? Unusual.”

“Killed me,” Anastacia chokes. Gwyndolin seems to realize that Anastacia is having trouble speaking and sets her down. But the grip on Anastacia’s wrist and neck do not ease. She chases air in the silence and the inscrutable golden cowl gleams in the dark, like it is set with eight glowing eyes. They bury themselves in Anastacia's face, and she cannot look away.

“A fire keeper touched by Dark is not unusual. All humans are polluted with it, to an extent.” Gwyndolin’s mouth twists in disgust. “You reek of it. But this tale of restoration explains your tongue and your confusion, at least.”

“I—” Anastacia begins, but she is cut off with a finger like a hot iron bar at her lips. It burns. Gwyndolin looks away from her and speaks coldly.

“You’ve brought a great many stories to my attention. But what priest would bless a soul with purity only to punish the same soul?” Gwyndolin freezes then, completely. The finger at Anastacia’s lips goes mildly cool.

Gwyndolin’s head turns to Anastacia again, and the inscrutable blankness of that half golden face terrifies her anew. She can feel eyes she can’t see watching her, intent on her own, and it’s more terrifying than the hands burning into her flesh and the snakes snapping at her neck. She feels bare, peeled apart, pinned in place with her ribcage open.

“I am not ungracious. You came all this way to bring me something like the truth, polluted and broken though you are. You were once deemed pure enough to preserve, though you have fallen now, perhaps permanently. I will reward the traces of that purity which remain. What would you desire?”

“I have questions,” Anastacia says, scarcely believing her bravery in asking. “Please, I want answers.”

“A coincidence.” Gwyndolin's grip tightens. “I want answers too. They will have to wait. There comes an undead knight, even as we speak.” Anastacia finds herself released, and she falls to the floor again, wondering at how often this sensation of falling has repeated itself as of late. Her hands break her fall and sting from the impact and the cold.

“That is the Chosen One,” Anastacia says, gasping and pushing herself back up to her knees. The snakes are above her head now, and they hiss and twist like the flames did at the shrine, back in her little cave. But this is not her little cave, and Gwyndolin’s mouth is in a firm line of displeasure.

“Fascinating.” Gwyndolin turns to the mist-covered doorway and speaks into the silence with their other voice, the one Anastacia first heard, the one that had stirred her memory and brought forth horror indescribable from deep within her. “Undead Knight, companion of the broken fire keeper, com’st thou now to reclaim her?”

There is an indistinct reply, and Gwyndolin turns to look at Anastacia with that same flat expression.

“Enter,” Gwyndolin says, still looking at Anastacia. Kel steps in and takes a moment to evaluate the new area, endless, and her gaze falls to the tomb at the far end of the great corridor. It’s the first time Anastacia has noticed it, and she looks to it too.

“Ah,” Gwyndolin sighs, and says, in a voice like the one Anastacia did not fear as much, “My father’s tomb. The great Lord Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight. You may pay your respects. I will gift thee time enough to do so.”

Anastacia, unsure of what to do, faces the tomb and clasps her hands reverently, but no words come to mind. Try as she might, no prayer surfaces. She has many memorized, she can even come up with some, like she has in the past. But she looks to the far end of the corridor and all she sees is a— She hears Kel cry out, a clang of metal on metal, and then there’s a flash of light so bright it blinds her momentarily. She covers her face and returns to her familiar position on her knees.

“Hide,” Kel’s voice says in her ear, and a strong hand shoves her down to the ground. “Crawl to the end of the corridor and hide behind the tomb. I’ll take care of the snake.”

Confused and paralyzed, Anastacia can only stare at the ground as the world around them darkens and the spots of light in her eyes clear. It’s like the cave—like her legs are broken again. She can’t move. The light bleeds from the marble and the stone around her. The floor is like a black abyss beneath her, but flashes of light crash around her, and her shadow is a pathetic, cowering thing burnt into the floor when the light strikes the stone. She crawls forwards, but suddenly the lights cease and there’s a cry—Kel, she realizes, is screaming in pain.

Anastacia turns her head in time to see something bright and blinding disappear, something she does not quite grasp before it is gone. Gwyndolin stands over the still, sprawling form of Kel and seems to meet her gaze over the carnage. Gwyndolin—

Gwyndolin looks different. Before, where there was a beautiful woman, there is now a terrible, snarling face, a rage that looks unrecognizable. It’s rage that transforms that face into something beyond man or woman, it’s—

The Dark Sun raises a hand and there’s a bright light that burns in Anastacia’s mind and body. She cries out; it burns more than anything she’s ever felt, and she presses her forehead to the floor and screams.

The pain goes away, slowly, bit by bit until she’s no longer screaming. She gasps and sobs and pleads, but after a moment there’s no pain, there’s not even the shadow of pain. The only strain she feels is from the unnatural twisting of her back and the ache in her thighs. She does not dare lift her head, even when the sound of hissing and snapping is just above her. Anastacia holds her breath, her hiccupping sobs fading as the hissing fades too.

“Your knightess has polluted the halls and the tomb of my father, she has insulted me in ways no rat has ever done, and while I expect the treachery of humans, I expected not the treachery of keepers. Is the Abyss’s hold on you so strong that you forget who you are?”

Anastacia can’t manage a response, but she groans weakly, pathetically, and wishes more than ever that she’d never come here.

“Your heretic warrior will be back to finish what she started,” Gwyndolin says. That soft, bell-like voice of peace is gone, and in its place is a sly, hissing thing, worse than the first and so much quieter than the second. “And while I would dearly love to be here to send her back to the grave, I’m afraid you’ve brought a mystery I cannot ignore to my attention. The pattern will be broken this time, and you will come with me. Rise.”

“I—”

“I don’t much care for the words of a traitor, much less the words of a failed traitor,” Gwyndolin interrupts.

A snake snaps at Anastacia’s ear and she flinches away, shutting her eyes tightly. “I did not know what she would do—Truly, I know only that she told Frampt she’d link the fire.”

“Her loyalties are elsewhere. And her blade is clearly occult; she turned it on me as soon as my back was turned. Do you know what that means? Of course not.”

Anastacia shakes her head, finally daring to look up and open her eyes. She’s horrified to see the Dark Sun’s white robes stained with blood.

“Your traitorous knightess has been sent to kill Gods, to wrest power from their essences, by an enemy I long thought caged,” Gwyndolin says, hatefully. “Now come, I must get to the bottom of this. Or you can stay.”

Anastacia wants to know. She stands, shakily, and wipes the tears from her eyes and her face. She feels more disgusting and pathetic than she has in a long time, but she wants to know.

“Good,” Gwyndolin says flatly. “If you had stayed, I would have killed you and taken your soul from this cycle entirely.”

Anastacia watches as Gwyndolin, gaunter and more frightening than before, approaches the tomb of the Lord Gwyn, waves a hand, and reveals a false wall. The corridor tapers into a sort of winding staircase that extends high into the tower above. The wall is intact when Anastacia turns around to look back, briefly, before continuing onwards. Gwyndolin glides up the steps effortlessly, but Anastacia lags behind, gasping for breath as the steps become too much. The burn in her thighs has become familiar, and she dares not take a moment to rest or breathe, so she suffers and forces herself forwards.

When they finally reach the top, Gwyndolin turns a key in a great, wooden door and swings it open to reveal a great platform that seems to reside above the clouds themselves. Anastacia steps out after Gwyndolin gestures for her to follow and looks out with awe over the peaks of the mountains and the furrows of the valleys surrounding Anor Londo.

It’s terrifying, being this far above the earth, but it’s also exhilarating. Her vision swims when a strange, winged being flies just beyond the next spire, but she remains upright. Her gasp has caught Gwyndolin’s attention, however, for the strange, eyeless gaze seems to be fixed on her when she looks away from the sky and back towards her captor.

“I suppose it is a breathtaking sight,” Gwyndolin murmurs, still in a voice that sounds more like a hiss than a bell. “But I have a riddle to unravel, and you seem to be at the center of it.”

Anastacia looks away from Gwyndolin’s face and looks back to the mountains. They’re so beautiful. She wants to be able to see them like this forever, from afar, where she can imagine that they’re soft to the touch, that they’ll unravel if she pulls on a corner. That they’re hers. Dangerous territory, of course, with a deity by her side.

“I was promised answers too,” she dares return.

“You have them, but for some reason you are blind to them.”

Anastacia thinks back to all she knows. It slips through her fingers like air, her memory flees from her and she is left with nothing.

“What answers do I have?”

“Is your memory yet broken?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she says.

“You seem to credit my Blades with tasks that are not theirs to carry out, and you are confused about rudimentary things that are a part of your past. This is to be expected. However, it’s impossible that a Blade did this to you. They kill, but they do not place keepers, and they certainly do not punish. They execute. And a betrayal by a keeper ranked high enough to be silenced? That is grounds for an execution.”

“Then who--?”

“A third party has entered my story, and I do not appreciate intrusions. I feel certain there is a strong connection between your heretic knightess and this third party; one I cannot ignore.”

“That’s impossible,” Anastacia says.

“Why do you say so?”

Anastacia pauses, wondering why as well. The memory comes to her as she watches the strange, false sun gleam on the gold of Gwyndolin’s cowl.

“I’m not tempted by such things,” the undead woman says.

“You’re not?”

“If I was, you wouldn’t be here.”

“You have remembered something,” Gwyndolin remarks with interest, in a voice more human sounding than it was before. “Your face is plain to read. Tell me at once.” Anastacia hesitates, only for a moment, before repeating the conversation to Gwyndolin.

“You wanted to kill the raven?”

“I wanted it dead, yes,” Anastacia admits.

“Why?”

“I thought—” she wonders if she should reveal that she had feared a deity’s notice, that she feared the Blades, or whoever it was who tortured her, returning to punish her anew for abandoning her flame. “I thought it was meant to be killed,” she says.

“The bird brings the undead into the shrine to carry out the will of the Lord Gwyn.”

“I saw it do no such thing,” she says truthfully, carefully shielding herself with ignorance, with her own weakness. “I was confined to a cave below the shrine until I was revived.”

“Hm,” is the only response. “And the knightess refused to kill it?”

“She also refused to make use of my soul for her own gain,” Anastacia says. “If she were heretical—”

“She attempted to assassinate me. She wields a profane, occult blade. She is without a doubt heretical, little fool.”

“She spared me. She spared the bird.”

“You are of no particular use,” Gwyndolin remarks in a cold, detached way. “The shrine would have ceased to function with your death, but it would be a small price to pay for the rarity of a Keeper’s soul. The bird, however, … The bird has its purpose.”

“She did not express interest in quelling the flow of the undead,” Anastacia says.

“That means nothing,” Gwyndolin says. “If her mission is heretical, she may entertain hopes of others following her and joining her in number. Then there is the question of the marks upon you. How did they come to be?”

“I… met the serpent below the shrine, he told me a mark was upon my brow and he said it could be removed. He removed it.”

“Nonsense,” Gwyndolin scoffs. “I see the mark as clear as your eyes. It is still there.”

“He did something; I felt it.”

“I know not what he did, then. It could not have been Frampt, for he is the greatest of those beings, loyal to my father and to this age. Who did you encounter?”

“I know not his name,” she lies.

“Where did you go?”

“I do not know,” she lies.

“You are a confused, sad little thing. It is quite pathetic.” Gwyndolin does not say this cruelly, but it is a cruel thing to say. Anastacia takes solace in remembering that she is lying, that she doesn’t truly remember nothing. She remembers, and she isn’t pathetic.

“What shall I do?”

“I shall send you back to the shrine, Anastacia of Astora,” Gwyndolin says. “You will speak to your knightess in whatever way brings you closer to her truth. You will return to me whenever you desire to, by way of your flame, but I will not be found here again. I find that I want to survive this particular cycle. If I do not, I fear—” Gwyndolin cuts off, staring at the peaks that so enchanted Anastacia a few scant moments before.

More confused than ever, Anastacia can do nothing but curtsy politely and wait to be sent back. She feels something warm about her, like flames a comfortable distance away, and when she lifts her head she is before the fire.

The undead warrior woman, Kel, is pacing in front of her. She stops when she sees Anastacia, frozen in horror.

“Lady Anastacia!” she cries out. “Goddess! What brings you back? I thought you for certain lost, I was consumed with such guilt!”

Anastacia believes her, but something gives her pause.

“I… awoke here. I remember pain, like being on fire, but I – I have returned to the fire. I have… been regenerated?” Gwyndolin sent her back alive, knowing that she was at least somewhat connected to a heretical killer. Gwyndolin trusted her. Or at least, Anastacia thought, Gwyndolin deemed her not enough of a threat to neutralize.

Perhaps Gwyndolin had set another pawn on the board, ready to use it however necessary.

“What a generous moon shone on you,” Kel snorts, and brings Anastacia back to the present. “She clearly wants you to go on being a good little girl, here in the dirt.”

Anastacia watches Kel’s face closely. She has hollowed once more, her fine bones poking through her delicate skin, now shriveled and sagging.

“Gwyndolin…” she pauses. “The Dark Sun has goals I do not understand,” she settles for, instead.

“Nor should you. Greed is all the deities of Anor Londo know.”

“How do you know that?”

“Look at what they did to you. Look at what they did to this entire world. This tragedy, all this pain, it is their doing.”

This is the most passion and emotion Kel has ever expressed, and she seems to notice that at the same moment that Anastacia does, for she falls silent.

“Do you know what they did to me?”

Kel watches her with some hesitation. “Yes. You were bound here for ages, with your legs broken.”

“Do you know of my tongue?”

“Yes, I remember that.”

“Do you know why they might remove it?”

Kel watches her carefully, and her next words are lies somehow. Anastacia knows not how, but she knows they’re not the truth. “I assumed it was as a punishment. You said as much when you first spoke to me. That it was never— Perhaps it was another way to tie you to the flame.”

That’s redundant, Anastacia does not say. If I am bound up in the flame like Frampt said, and my legs are broken to keep me in place, and I am marked a heretic like Kaathe said, then why did the Dark Sun think I was honored with silence? When did I unhook the flame the first time, why do I remember doing it? What of the first binding on my thoughts, and the memories that evaporated when I first awoke?

Pieces of a puzzle that did not fit together.

“I must go,” Kel says and interrupts her thoughts. “I would command you to stay here, to stay safe. But you will not listen to me, will you?” Kel says with a wry, bitter tone. “At least do not go back to Anor Londo.”

“Very well,” Anastacia concedes. “I will not go back.”

Kel reaches into the flame and begins to fade. “Good. I have work to do. I must hunt that snake down.” And then she’s gone.

Anastacia stands in the clearing, her feet feeling as though they’re sinking into the warm grass. She’s so exhausted. She’s so tired. The phantom feeling of pain is beginning to raise its head, and she can feel the eye of that bird on her neck. She hates this feeling, but she can see no escape from it.

The bird is watching her, just as she suspected, and it cocks its head this way and that, its eye trained on her as she makes her way to her cave. But when she reaches the cave, she realizes that she does not wish to go back inside. She sits in the grass outside the bars, leaning back against the earthen walls, and shuts her eyes. This way, the bird cannot watch her without revealing that it is watching her more obviously than it is. She senses that it does not want that.

With the sun on her face, she shuts her eyes and dozes off for a long time. She dreams strange, disjointed things. The bird’s eye is the sun, Kel labors at the fire doing something Anastacia cannot make out, and snakes are writhing in the grass. They part for her as she passes, barefoot, towards the flame. But when she approaches the fire, it disappears, and in its place, there is a great orb. It’s black, and haunting, and she loves it intensely, tenderly; she wants to keep it safe, to hold it, to make sure everyone sees it too.

She wants the Dark Sun to behold its beauty too, for some reason. A strange ring of fire covers it as she stands besotted with its perfection, and she feels a great and indescribable grief as the ring burns.

Her dream form falls to its knees weeping as she watches from above, all the while wondering how it could be so. She cocks her head to the side and awakes in a cold sweat, aware that she had been dreaming of herself… she had been watching herself from the gaze of the great bird perched atop the shrine’s ruins.

She stands, the yearning love in her heart still great, and knows what she has seen.

She cycles through her memories. The first she heard of a mark was from Frampt. What had he said? He’d said the pollution of the Abyss was on her, because of the ruins beneath the shrine. He’d dismissed it as a pollution, not a curse. Was it possible that she had not been cursed at all to begin with?

What had Frampt said? Bound. She was bound up in the flames, and it was a binding she knew to unhook. When had she unhooked it the first time? She remembered sensations more than events, that much was clear. She remembered her legs being broken, but not by whom, she remembered unhooking the flame from her soul, but not why she did it.

Standing in the sunlight, Anastacia picks up the pieces and realizes that they are not of a kind. Each piece belongs to another puzzle.

She paces before the cave, before the very spot that Lautrec had occupied not so long ago. He’d served another. A goddess, and he held no loyalties to any besides her, neither to the flame nor to the darkness. He wanted only his goddess’ gaze upon him. There was the strange, wicked blade that Kel wielded, intended for the killing of the gods. There was Kaathe, there was Gwyndolin, there was Frampt, and there was—

And then there was Anastacia of Astora. She stops in front of the cave and looks past the bars to the blood-stained spot where she sat for so long. The sun beats down warm on her back. She slips through the bars, goes to the spot, and sits. She can see the outside, but more importantly, she can see the spot Lautrec had sat, where he had watched her.

Where she had watched him.

She’d never told Gwyndolin her name. But Gwyndolin had used it, at the end.

She blinks as fire crackles before her, startled to see it. She had not realized that she had begun walking towards it, away from her cave and up those ruined steps. But she recovers quickly, reaching into the flame for that thread she had tugged to find her way to the bonfire in New Londo. She tugs it and immediately hears and feels the water and the vapors of that place, and the humming of the serpent behind her.

Anastacia turns, slowly, to see the serpent rising from the depths and watching her with that horrible grin and those rolling eyes.

“Oh my,” Kaathe says. “It seems you’ve got the scent of snake on you, little Keeper. And not the beautiful sort, either. I suppose you have questions,” the serpent says with a tone of exhaustion, like she is nothing but an overeager child asking for a story to while away the hours of the night. “What do you wish to ask of me?”

“What did you do to me?”

“Did you notice anything about yourself that is especially different?”

Anastacia ponders that for a moment. “No,” she answers honestly. “Some things are easier to think about, but that is all. My memories are still gone.”

“I do not blame you for distrusting a serpent, there is much in my line that may lead to distrust. You have encountered some twisted snakes, have you not? I have done all I can. Your body and your mind are your own wretched obstacles.”

Anastacia knows what the serpent is doing now. She will not allow it to happen. “Do you know who removed my tongue, or who broke my legs?”

“Why do you wish to know that? Is it revenge you seek?”

“I want to know who was tasked with punishing me, so that I can find out why.”

“Do you ever wonder what they did to you, to drive you to thinking you deserved the torture. That it was a punishment? Didn’t you hear? They silence the pure, up there.” The serpent slides away, with that. He is there, one moment, and then the next he is slithering back into the darkness, and she is left there. Questions unanswered. There’s a glow about the darkness, then, and she wonders if the flame is calling to her. It feels like it’s getting stronger.

When she turns to look at the flame, Gwyndolin is there, towering over her in the darkness like a massive, golden, blank-faced statue.

“Oh!” Anastacia gasps, stepping back and hitting something like a cliff with her bare heel. She stands there, quaking, and watching the golden glow of the Dark Sun engulf the flame. Gwyndolin steps out and approaches her, taking her hand and pulling her back from the edge. Anastacia cannot summon more than a few gasps, and fears that her quakes are very noticeable.

“I cannot tell if you are a traitor, deserving of destruction, or a woefully misled lamb. I mistakenly assumed you’d stay put if I released you,” Gwyndolin murmurs, looking down into Anastacia’s face. Those pale lips are drawn in displeasure, maybe even disgust, and the hand around Anastacia’s own is burning in a familiar way. Anastacia squirms in the grip, but she dares not move away. “Here the Darkstalker is seen speaking to you, familiarly no less, and all evidence points to the explanation that you have willingly come to him.”

“I—”

“It might be best,” Gwyndolin says, “if you do not speak, heretic.”

In a sudden burst of strength that she does not know how to claim, does not know if she can claim, Anastacia breaks away from Gwyndolin’s grip and dives for the flames. She seizes the first thread she sees and pulls on it, falling into it and away from the flaming hands behind her. She can hear those snakes hissing, and she can hear, echoing in her mind, something like:

Surrender your tongue, lest you speak of what you see.

She awakes before a flame, her head pounding and her hands burning. She looks around and sees nothing but a ruin and a great, dark path of forest and something familiar. She leans out the ruined walls of the structure and realizes that this place reminds her of the path, the steps, that called to her in those first hours after her restoration.

She does not even want to rise from her place near the fire, terrified that using the flame again will alert Gwyndolin to her hiding place. But she can’t stay here. Whatever brought Gwyndolin to New Londo will eventually reveal Anastacia’s new hiding place.

Shuddering and drawing her cloak tightly to her body, Anastacia rises and stumbles out of the ruin. She looks around, taking in the darkened forested landscape and the thick greenery erupting from the stones and the earth below her feet. There’s a ruin of a door, beautiful, with a glowing stone set into its heart. She finds it familiar, somehow, like a warning. She nearly steps out of the warm glow of the flame to touch it, before remembering herself. Quickly, she turns away from the flame and stumbles into the night, hands bundled up in her shawl.

Outside the circle of the flame, the sky is still dark, but she trudges on, following trails and steadily glowing plants until she reaches a fork in the path. There’s a steadily glowing light ahead, on a little mound, and beyond that, nothing. She approaches that path, ignoring the other, and continues on until she reaches a mossy ledge. From there she continues down and down into the basin of greenery and night, until she comes across a slumbering Black Knight. It does not move as she approaches, tentatively, and passes it.

She finds, here in the dark, that she does not fear death, nor dying. She puts her hands on the moss and feels her way past the knight, until she falls into a small cave entrance covered in vines. Within, just ahead, is another flame. She approaches it tentatively, looking behind her every few steps, and then finally reaches into the crackling fire to pull a string.

The world blurs around her, falling away before it comes back together, and she sees an enormous statue before her eyes. Her heart freezes, her neck goes cold, before she realizes it really is a statue.

It depicts a warm scene. A tall woman, crowned, holding a child close and tenderly. The statue feels alive in a way, like it is a human caught mid-movement and frozen for all time. The woman depicted is beautiful, and her expression is tender and doting, soft, as she presses the baby closer to herself and higher to her ear. The child gazes out with delight, and in its chubby, tiny hand there is a large sword.

There are three exits from this place: one leads to a massive, burnt bridge, one leads further into the depths of the structure, and one into a sunlit place. She takes the sunlit doorway to something like a balcony. It’s littered with wreckage, old statues, destroyed crates, and hollowed figures moaning and pressing themselves to the stone walls.

She ignores them, stepping up upon a stone podium that may have once held the statue of one of Gwyn’s children. She takes her place there and looks over the edge. She has to come up with a better plan than this, if she wants to survive.

But something gives her pause and stops her from pursuing that line of thought further.

They silence the pure.

The serpent had said that, and Gwyndolin had said something about silence and rank, and honor, and both Frampt and Gwyndolin had called her a heretic, a traitor. She steps down from her place on the podium and thinks back to her earliest thoughts. Her first thoughts upon her restoration are vague, but she remembers rage clearly. Rage and fear. She walks back to the statue of the woman and the child.

She’d been silenced long before anything else, her tongue removed when she became a Keeper. But something happened, something made her rebel and reject what Gwyndolin called a great rank, a great honor, an ultimate purity. She had rejected it; she had learned something.

She looks up at the stone woman and her child.

The child is one of the Children, that much is clear. Perhaps the firstborn, the one stricken from time itself, the one whose name no one can speak—the sword seems to recall those days. But for the first time she wonders: who is the mother?

She’s crowned, lovingly portrayed in stone, and completely intact. Anastacia looks around at the corpses that litter the ruined stronghold, at the hollow forms that press themselves to the walls and realizes suddenly that they are praying.

This had been a human town once, she realizes, fallen now to the undead and the hollow among them. She can see the remnants of a guard, ahead there might have once been something like a market, and though ruined now the structures are anointed with the touch of humans. Wood, stone, simple and sturdy structures, and this woman and her child.

Something in her memory stirs. It’s a small thing, barely a full thought, but it’s clear. Whatever stole her memories when she was regenerated never accounted for this, for a keeper of the shrine to be out here, gazing upon the remains of a human fortress, looking up into the face of defiant, stone memory.

Anastacia’s gaze lingers on the doorway that leads to the sunlit balcony, where statues lie in waste, before her gaze falls back to the ancient queen and the forgotten, warlike child. Time seems to stretch on forever before she works up the courage to move.

She turns away from the queen and her child and steps out onto the bridge, breaking into a run for maybe the first time in her memory. She bends to grab the first weapon she sees when she comes across the burnt corpses near the center, her pulse making her vision blur a little. There’s a heavy claymore she can’t possibly lift, several halberds, and—There! A regular sized sword with a broad, straight, flat edge.

She picks it up and runs back to the flame, flying over the torn up and burnt wood of the bridge, stumbling under the new weight and nearly losing her balance a few times. She plucks out the thread she knows best from the base, and the world blurs at the edges.

Anastacia shuts her eyes for a moment, and then there is sunshine, a breeze in her hair, and the familiar feeling of grass beneath her feet. When she opens her eyes, the bird is watching her, and it’s closer than it ever has been. No longer perched atop the ruined shrine, it has flown closer to the flame, and it watches her closely. It eyes the sword in her hand, its head turned so that one great eye watches her carefully. It looks like it has been waiting for her.

There was always one other faction, one Gwyndolin couldn’t predict. She doesn’t know why she took so long to realize what she had to do. The trouble was never the faction Gwyndolin couldn’t identify, it was never her, nor was it Lautrec, nor was it the Chosen One of this age, nor any other age.

It was the faction Gwyndolin never mentioned. The one too dangerous to even speak of, the one hissed in the words thrown against her, words she threw upon herself.

Traitor, heretic, blasphemer…

Gwyndolin, humans, and that. Flame, Dark, and... Her mind stretches itself thin, not even scraping the surface of the memory, and she wishes she could regenerate again and again until all of her is restored. It is time to test if she can. 

She falls upon the sword and into the flames. She doesn’t mind it when the blade pierces her heart. It hurts; it hurts less than Gwyndolin’s rage, and worse than Gwyndolin’s hands on her throat and chin.

Breath stops coming, but her mind is still clear at the end, even as her eyes slide shut. It’s not really death, after all. She’s as undead as the undead hollows littering the edges of the shrine. The sword has cut through her dress and the wound has stained her shawl, her dress, and her skin with fresh blood.

She should ask Kel for a new dress when she (if she) awakens. These robes have seen the absolute end of their days. They’ve been covered in ash, too, this entire time. How did the ash ever get to them, when she was down in the cave all this time?

And now they’re torn, on top of it all.

Goddess, she thinks before the flames consume her. It hurts.

Chapter Text

She awakes to the sunlight on her face and an ice-cold hand on her face.

“You are a fool. What were you thinking?”

She feels like a brook, or maybe like a clear stream tumbling between rocks and through a forest. She feels like she’s rolling over stones and laughing, running, throwing the sunlight back at the sky.

“My mind is like a stream now,” she says aloud. “Before it was like a puddle; stagnant. Or like a marsh. Maybe a swamp. But it moves about now.”

“I assume killing yourself served a purpose, then?”

Anastacia opens her eyes and meets the empty, sharp gaze of Kel’s dark eyes. “I knew you’d bring me back again.”

“You’re clearly a useless Keeper, I might as well have used your soul for something else.”

“You’re not tempted by such things,” Anastacia says, and rises from the ground to see the bird in its usual spot, above the shrine, watching her closely but from a distance. “We live in strange times.”

She feels like she’s passed some test. And in truth, she has.

“Do you wish to tell me what you are thinking?”

“Have you thought yourself very clever?” Anastacia asks in a soft voice, unwilling to answer any question now that she has the answers.

Kel blinks at her from her place in the grass, but then her eyes widen in understanding. “You remember?”

“The Darkstalker did remove a curse from me, but I needed to be restored once more before its effects could really be known. So that the memories could be restored.”

“What was that curse?”

“A curse on my mind,” Anastacia says. “It was placed so that I would not have it in me to betray the truth, even if I had the ability. My tongue was never intended for restoration, but they always did fear the worst.”

Kel pushes herself up from grass and stands beside Anastacia. She’s not tall, and her hair is a dark and strange color in the light, almost like the flesh of a fruit over-ripened in the sun. Anastacia had never noticed that before, but she’d somehow noticed her finery, the strange blade, and her fine, foreign face. She looks birdlike, distinctly so, like someone had mistranslated a raven and come out with a woman-shaped creature. There are even feathers, inky black and shining like her hair, in the knot of hair at the back of her neck.

“I never meant to deceive you,” Kel says to the fire, face hidden now in shadow. “I never said one thing or another.”

“No, but you must have immediately seen through my attempt to get you to kill the bird.”

“Yes, but your ploy would have worked on anyone else. It’s just that I—” Kel falls silent.

“You knew,” Anastacia sighs. “And I did not. That’s all right.”

“Do you remember why they broke your legs?”

“Yes.”

“And why—Your tongue, too?”

Anastacia laughs. “Yes.” Kel waits patiently before Anastacia continues. “It doesn’t matter now. It probably never did. The answer was in my name all along, now that I think of it. Do you still have need of this flame?”

Kel looks at it distractedly, clearly frustrated with Anastacia’s half-statements. “I can do without it. It’d be good to block the Dark Sun’s access to it.”

Anastacia considers this as she unhooks the flame from her body, like she has before. Something heavy falls from her gut again, a familiar feeling now that she has all her memories intact. She stretches her hands at her sides and looks around, fighting back a yawn. “What has become of the world in my absence?”

“I did not kill the Dark Sun, if that’s what you’re asking. But the opportunity has tempted me too greatly. You ought to be done with the snake fast, so I can be done with this too.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Dark Sun shows up here every so often, like a sentinel. Watching and waiting. I only managed to revive you when the shrine was utterly clear.”

Anastacia looks around, noting that indeed the shrine is nearly empty. No human is left, and the humming of the great serpent is silenced. She almost laughs when she thinks about the Dark Sun now, and how her mind had confused enough bits of enough puzzles to draw even Dark Sun Gwyndolin into a merry dance throughout the failing world.

“What did the Dark Sun want with me?”

“I don’t know. She’d come here and just stand in the clearing. Well, sometimes it was she. Sometimes her form was... not that of a woman, nor of a human shaped thing.”

“Did you not wish to kill Gwyndolin?”

Kel shrugs. “You have questions, yet. I will kill the Dark Sun when you have finished with her. There’s plenty of time to complete my mission, and my Goddess,” she looks at Anastacia meaningfully, “does not favor rashness.”

“No,” Anastacia says slowly, “she does not.”

“I will give you however long I can, but I will be back to chop the head off the serpent, so to speak.” Anastacia watches her reach into the flame to leave.

“Tell your mistress I send my greetings,” Anastacia almost says, but Kel is already gone. She leaves soon after, the bird’s eye comfortably on her all the while.

The truth is so clear it’s almost difficult to think about. She knows where she has to go next, but before she can, she has to make sure Gwyndolin doesn’t return here. She looks at the bird, above the shrine on its usual perch, and meets its eye.

Later, she thinks. There’s time for you later.

Anor Londo is all shadows now, and the cold stone is at least a truth, unshrouded in lies and tricks. She’s in a dark room lit by a flame. It is kept by another Keeper, that much is clear. Before she sees her, she senses her. She’s a sharp presence, impossible to miss.

“Who are you?”

Anastacia turns her head slowly to meet the gaze of this strange knightess. Clad in gold, in sharp, sweeping curves of metal, the Blade leans against the far wall and her shadow casts a terrifying shade upon it. Anastacia shudders, new memories clamoring at her mind, but she knows suddenly and intimately that if she does not speak, she will be safe.

She dips her head politely and gestures to her mouth. The knightess seems to understand, immediately, what has happened.

“Silenced, are you? Well, I suppose there is room for disparity, even in these torrential times. What brings you from your flame, pure one?” The voice is a little sarcastic, but still polite. Anastacia motions to her eyes and towards the door, and steps forwards towards it.

“Fine,” the knightess snorts. “I’m sure there’s something about you that isn’t gray, mousy, and ordinary. The Goddess must have seen it. Though where she has gone now, I know not. Something has moved her from her station.”

Anastacia hurries from that room, unused to anything resembling conflict that did not come with swords and breathes a sigh of relief when she leaves that door far enough behind. Yes, it is as the knightess so bluntly said. She is mousy, gray, and covered in ash. But the ash is the first clue; didn’t anyone notice that?

How else was she to be covered in ash if she had not spent, at least in part, some time on the surface tending the flame? What had she come across, what had she learned, that lead to the breaking of her legs and her imprisonment below the hill? What happened on the surface, when she became covered in ash, to bring her so low?

She’s mostly shocked that that she hadn’t thought of it before killing herself, that when her chest was pierced the thought had finally come to mind. Things might have gone more smoothly had she thought of it before. She might have avoided Gwyndolin entirely, she might have found the answers sooner.

Anastacia rounds the corner and comes across a net of interconnected buttresses and arches that will lead, surely, to the place she remembers so clearly. This, here, is the reason she unlinked the flame the first time, the reason she had been punished for that very sin. The reason, she only recently remembered, that she had abandoned the faith for an older, more ancient path.

She puts one foot before the other and begins to walk.

The Blades didn’t break her legs, as it turns out. But they did transport her to and from her trial. A nobody broke her legs, carrying out orders she didn’t hear over the roaring of blood in her ears. They broke her legs, submitted her to a priest who bound her to the flame body and soul, and then put her back where she started. The first flame she’d abandoned, the one she’d abandon again as soon as her memory failed.

And she used to want it. More than anything, she wanted to serve that flame. What else was a nobly born, faithful, pious girl from Astora to aspire to? She remembers desiring that single honor of true purity more than anything, but the knowledge and the sight that came with it had been bought with a heavy price.

They took her tongue, and then she looked upon the truth and saw only ugliness, hideous and pathetic. She looked on the truth and saw only an old man grasping for power and spoiled infants clinging to whatever love they could find. She looked on the world and saw only kindling, writhing and sobbing, pleading, purely human. She remembers the first time her vision cleared after the ritual, when she had seen the curse on herself and on the chest of every human around her. A disgusting, damning mark.

She’d tried to write it down, to preserve the truth, but so complete was the silencing that the results had been winding sentences like labyrinths that not even she could decipher. Nonsensical lines of poetry and obscure rhymes from her childhood, the scribbling of a madwoman, pouring from the hands of a woman long silenced. Pure of heresy, pure of blasphemy, incapable of disobedience.

Or so they thought.

In grief, in horror, in rage, she’d unhooked the flame from her belly—unlinked it, actually, but her description of it still fit the sensation of what it felt like— and she’d tried to leave. She’d tried to find her way to a painted world. She’d run flame to flame to the mysterious painting in the cathedral to cast a path inside it. She would have been able to enter, too, with her knowledge like a diadem on her brow and the name of the rogue Goddess herself all but bursting from her tongue, but they caught her. They—

She hadn’t been able to pronounce all the letters in time. Her tongue, gone, could not produce the name nor the prayer. The hope was gone, and they’d dragged her away screaming, wordlessly and hopelessly.

Have you thought yourself very clever?

If she had her mind about her, Anastacia would have immediately known Kel for what she was. It was too obvious. Her coloring, her strange clothes, the way her silk brocade tunic was embroidered with birds and her hair was a halo of feathers, shifting in the light, black to unnamable colors, blending together like the wing of a raven. Anastacia would have recognized the blade, the hexed dress that drank blood, and the unnamed Goddess she invoked. She would have known her mission, her occult blade, and she would have recognized her Goddess.

Kel never did intend to deceive her, no, but she did deceive her. For Kel followed Velka herself. And Anastacia was willing to bet that she wasn’t just an ordinary follower, not merely an upholder of an ancient covenant, no. Anastacia was willing to risk it all and plan every move under one truth, the first new truth she’d gathered since they broke her legs and left her under the Shrine, desperate to keep one Fire Keeper alive when they’d already used the rest in a desperate bid to keep the fire alive. And it was this:

Kel was one of the original Blades, the true Blades of the Darkmoon. The ones who served Velka, not Gwyndolin, the ones who were tasked with punishing the Gods themselves. The ones who punished primordial sins, sins unnamed. The ones who were slaughtered by the Dark Sun and whose order was usurped now into a tool of the Crown, of the Dark Sun.

It was these original blades that Anastacia had known of, who, even with the binding on her thoughts, pressed on her memory and demanded to be recognized, seen, and known.

The painting is before her now, towering over her, hardly attempting to hide or escape anyone’s notice. It is a grand, overwhelming depiction of what is only an icy bridge and a perilous drop. She reaches out to it and speaks the name, reverently, praying to be allowed inside. Her forehead falls onto the canvas, her feet carry her further, and nothing happens. There is a cold breeze about the frame, the canvas feels unusually icy, but nothing changes. She opens her eyes and the world is the same as it was. There are no answers to be had here.

“I know the path inside,” a voice says in the darkness. Then, a sarcastic laugh. “I knew you might come here.”

“Have you ever seen her?”

“Once,” Kel says, approaching slowly. “I saw her once, long ago.”

“What was she like?”

“Put from your mind the expectations of grandeur to which you’re accustomed. She was, like all mothers, angry and careworn. Kind, but strong. Harsh.”

“Whose mother is she?”

“You would laugh to know it, but I think you already do. It’s no secret.”

Anastacia returns to her memories of the old doctrines, the ones she’d inhaled like air, the scripture of Gwyn and the Way of White, the statue that had moved her to pick up the sword, to fight, to try. “No,” she says carefully. “I suppose it’s not a secret.”

“Rebellion is written into the fabric of this world,” Kel says, standing beside Anastacia before the painting. “The Mother, the Son, and now you and I.”

“The Nameless Child,” Anastacia says, hands still on the paint of the canvas, still marveling at the strength of it, the way it pulls and draws her in. “Is he hidden here too?”

“No, but another child is. She’s a half-breed, and she’s beautiful.”

“She’s trapped too?”

Kel is watching her, she feels it, but she can’t bring herself to look away from the canvas. “Yes and no. I dare to assume she fled to the painting and took it as a refuge, though yes, it makes her a prisoner.”

“If I enter, will I find—Will I find her?” She did not mean the half-breed, and she knew Kel understood that.

“No,” Kel says honestly. “Or at least, I don’t believe you will. I did not see her, though I entered hoping—” Kel’s face hardens and her lips tighten. “I don’t think she wishes to be found. She has left the matters for us to complete, and the resolution of her final plan for humanity to unravel.”

“Then the bird brings the undead to the shrine to do what? To make a choice? Between evil and death?”

Kel looks at her sharply. “Isn’t it the ultimate justice to leave it to the human sacrifice, the kindling on the flame, to decide? It was the human who was maligned, who deserves the right to sentence the Gods. Our Goddess has provided a path towards that justice. The way is there, where otherwise it would not be. Is that not enough?”

“Some will link the flame. They will burn themselves on the pyre.”

“And others will not. I will not.”

“The flame will carry on, nevertheless, until it can no longer maintain the world’s borders. Gwyndolin knows of this truth and has intervened with a story of their own, a story of eternal grandeur. A story that ignores the world as it is, that ignores what it knows as truth, as inevitable. The time that is most ideal will be the time allowed to continue on, and all this will only be a necessary sacrifice.”

Kel doesn’t speak for a long moment, clearly trying to untangle the web Anastacia has spread forth before her. “How do you know this?” she finally asks.

“Why do you think they cut out my tongue? Why do you think they bound me in so many curses? They did it because I know this. I know what will be. I am the thing the Dark Sun fears most.”

Kel stares in silent horror, and for a long time neither of them says a word. “I don’t care,” Kel finally spits out. “I’ll still do it. I’ll still leave them all to rot. I hate them, I hate them so much I don’t even care if it matters or not.”

Anastacia nods, watching the painting in all its massive, towering mystery in silence. “I wish to die a human,” she says. “I fear fading into nothing more than anything, even still, even now. But I will not change your mind.”

“It’s brave of you, but I would kill you if you said otherwise.”

“You sound like the Dark Sun,” Anastacia does not say. Instead, she says, “I rather like being feared. It feels wonderful.”

She knows the exact moment the Dark Sun enters the ring of ruined stone that makes up the shrine itself. She can feel it in the air, and she knows the Dark Sun will begin with a game. She’s ready, of course.

“Fire Keeper,” the Dark Sun says in greeting, which is a great difference from the burst of pain she had been expecting.

“Dark Sun Gwyndolin,” Anastacia says politely.

“I have learned,” Gwyndolin says in a cool, thoughtful tone, “that you tend to run when I push you towards the truth. You disappear when I try to pin you to any event, motivation, or cause. I will refrain from that, if you answer my questions.”

The Anastacia who did not have her memories would not have recognized this for what it was. She wouldn’t have realized how much Gwyndolin needed to know what she knew. She would have been suspicious and resentful; she would have ruined this opportunity. Gwyndolin likely counted on that. The Dark Sun was, after all, an intent observer, a masterful narrator, and a meticulous planner. The Dark Sun, in spite of all this mastery, never did seem to plan on being observed, on being told stories, or on being planned around.

Anastacia puts her hand to her head and winces, miming pain.

“I see that the binding about your mind has come apart,” Gwyndolin remarks. “A strange thing. It must be very painful. But the claim of the Abyss on you is weaker too. You can be restored to purity, should you wish it. I can forgive your indiscretions, and let you take up your post here once more.”

Anastacia makes a show of looking towards Gwyndolin’s golden figure and not quite seeing it, the part of a dazed lamb before a wolf. Fearing something, but not knowing what. She sees Gwyndolin approach, towering high above the flame, passing through it and nearing Anastacia’s spot on an overturned column of stone.

She shakes, not entirely for show, and tears flow down her cheeks, not entirely at her command. It’s tempting. A part of her is still Anastacia of Astora, and all she wants is this false victory. This hollow love Gwyndolin offers, this place of honor and trust, this role Gwyndolin wants her to play; part of her still wants it all.

She leans into that part of her heart, leaning forward into the warmth Gwyndolin radiates, into the false certainty the serpent wanted her to have faith in. “Dark Sun,” she says, not entirely pretending to be breathless. “This world is doomed,” she says.

“No such thing,” Gwyndolin says, coolly, reaching a hand like a habit to Anastacia’s cheek. It’s cool, the ire and rage of the Goddess wholly absent. It feels like a warning. “Play your role, do your part, and you will be rewarded.”

“What is my role?”

“To keep this flame intact, to obey me, to tell me what the occult traitor plans.”

“The occult?” Anastacia presses a wrist to her forehead. “I remember…”

“The undead one of this world; the blasphemous knightess,” Gwyndolin prompts, looking around, before that blocked out gaze falls on the dwindling flame. “Why is this flame unlinked,” the question comes quietly.

Anastacia curses internally, damning herself for unlinking it too soon. She should have resisted the urge, the desire to be free. She’d betrayed two sides now, at the same time.

She really is an awful fire keeper. They’d do better, she thinks, to trust someone else with the task the next time around. Or not trust them with so much. It is too late to do anything about it now. She stares, heart pounding and stomach going ice cold, as Gwyndolin realizes what she has done.

“A good liar would have been a better tool on my side than a dumb pawn; you’ve taught me that, at least,” Gwyndolin says. Anastacia shudders as that golden head turns to look at her.

“What polluted you? What could have possibly—Was it fear? Was it the inherent Darkness of your human soul? What ruined you?”

Gwyndolin doesn’t sound angry. No, the Dark Sun sounds curious. She’s safe as long as Gwyndolin remains curious— But perhaps she’s tired of being safe.

“It was the truth.”

“The truth is a difference in perspective.”

“Your own sins polluted me.”

“I am a Goddess, what sin could be assigned to me?”

“Velka judged you worthy of death.”

Gwyndolin looks more like stone than ever, but no strike comes. “You dare speak that name? You dare give it power here?”

“More should,” Anastacia says, voice quaking only a little. “If more had, then we’d be done with this. All of this.”

“She tried her best, yes. But she’s done now. All that remains of her is a story, a whisper.”

“No, all that remains of her is you. She’s been using your stories and your whispers all this time.”

“It was that occult knightess who did this to you, and she is naught but a freak accident of times converging. It won’t happen again.”

“No,” Anastacia laughs. “My own sins came long before I met her. Have you truly forgotten me?”

Now Gwyndolin is roused to rage, and the hand that was once cool becomes dangerously warm, there is no pain, but there is the threat of it. It grips her jaw and pulls her forward, towards the folds of white cloth and the hissing and snapping snakes. She’s used to this. She can handle this. Anastacia gasps out her breaths and prays to someone for deliverance. It had not helped her before, but she cannot help it. Her weak, human heart will always reach out for something, anything, in its terror.

They made her this way. Did they ever spare a thought for the kindling they’d forced to love them?

“What do you think you know? How?”

Anastacia bites her lip against another gasp, unwilling, or perhaps unable, to speak. Tears pour down her cheeks, and they well up where they meet Gwyndolin’s hands. Suddenly she is released and the surprise of it sends her forward onto her knees in the grass.

“You don’t matter,” Gwyndolin continues. “In this world you awoke, perhaps, but in every other world you remained mute, or stupid, or resigned. I don’t know what changed in this world, but it’ll never endure.”

“Kill me then,” she says, and she doesn’t bother to hide the goading in her voice, the taunt of the words.

“You want that, don’t you?” Gwyndolin puts an icy hand on the back of her neck, and something cold touches Anastacia’s throat. Anastacia remembers this. She’d desired it, longed for it, she’d let Lautrec do it. But now? Now she— There’s a quick movement, and in one moment Gwyndolin has a hand at her chin, lifting Anastacia’s head up.

“I could be done with you like this,” Gwyndolin mutters. “You’d be gone forever, and nothing about you would be found again. You’d be lost. This strange… Darkness in you; it’d be gone.”

Anastacia watches Gwyndolin, choking her breath through gritted teeth. “Do it,” she breathes, neck aching.

“No,” Gwyndolin says. “I cannot bring myself to do it. I tried, before. When your knightess attacked me I nearly did, but I—” Gwyndolin cuts off, and that golden cowl seems to have eight eyes, all boring into Anastacia. She feels small, but also something else. She feels, like she felt once before, dangerous. Like Gwyndolin has finally noticed.

“I wish I had been there for your trial. I wish I could have seen your face when they foiled your suicide. It was a suicide after all, wasn’t it? You’d unlinked the flame to die. Why else would you? But I see now that it wasn’t so. I do not understand what it was—But you came back to the place you were apprehended recently, did you not? I wish to understand why.”

There is an almost question at the edge of Gwyndolin’s words. Could it be that— No, it could not be possible. Gwyndolin was and remains the head of the Darkmoon Blades, the secret arm of Gwyn himself. But it had to be.

Gwyndolin, the Dark Sun Gwyndolin, does not understand entirely what secrets lie within the painting.

Anastacia doesn’t know what shows on her face, but it makes Gwyndolin shake her and ask: “Why are you laughing?”

“I’m not laughing,” she says. The hand in her hair must be a burning torch, but it doesn’t quite reach her scalp. Then it is gone from her hair. A cool hand grabs her wrist, and Gwyndolin pulls her up, forcing her to her feet. She is thrown forwards into the flame before she can breathe out a word, or even brace herself. It does not burn her, and the world around them shifts and fades, and then everything changes. Anor Londo towers over them, and Gwyndolin is looking down at her with a firm, tight expression.

“What do you know, that you will not tell me? Why did you laugh?”

Anastacia looks at Gwyndolin for a long time, but Gwyndolin makes no move to manhandle her, nor strike her, nor even demand anything—It is simply a question now. She rises to her feet, and Gwyndolin allows it, stepping back and watching her closely. For the first time, Anastacia feels like a human. She feels like Gwyndolin, not a Goddess, not a God, not even a Lord, is rather a lot like her.

They are both desperate. Desperately lonely, desperately seeking truth; but now one of them has found it. The other yearns and it is that yearning for the truth that makes Anastacia safe. For as long as Gwyndolin, Dark Sun, longs to understand the pieces in play around them, Anastacia’s life cannot be snuffed out like so much candlelight. She’s valuable now.

“It was you, who fed Astora the faith and the Way of White.”

“Not so, the Way of White was already born, long before I ever touched it. A form of it was alive even before my father saw the peaks of these mountains. You were bred for loyalty, for faith, but that changed after you learned something of the truth. That much is clear. But what do you know, that I do not?”

“Have you eyes?”

“That matters not.”

“It matters more than you think,” Anastacia says. “They took my tongue lest I speak of what I saw when the Abyss found a place in me.”

“This I do not understand.”

“It shocks me that you do not.”

“All humans have something of the Dark in them; something like the Abyss,” Gwyndolin muses. “This is clear. But how does it give you knowledge?”

“They should have taken my eyes if they wanted to spare me of what the Abyss showed me.” Anastacia shrugs, and then wonders if she has damned herself and the ones who follow her. “They could cast my tongue aside and curse my memory, but the knowledge would live on in me, for as long as my body had a soul.”

Gwyndolin turns away and gestures for her to follow, and Anastacia, unable to do much besides follow, leaves the safety of the fire (no longer pulsing in her gut) in the Dark Sun’s wake. They cross most of the city until they reach the Cathedral, past the darkened throne room, to where the painting towers over their heads. Even Gwyndolin, massive as they are, seems small beside it.

“This is where you were found. It was mentioned in the records, once I thought to check. I always thought of you as the suicidal fire keeper. It was a strange occurrence, and once I thought to remember…” Gwyndolin’s voice turns into something softer than it has ever been, quiet and low. “You were given such honor, and you were brought into the highest folds of the world. Here you stood, amongst Gods, amongst Lords stronger than any in the land… and you gave it all away. I did not think to wonder why. When the time of the trial came, I did not care what happened to you. I believe I actually petitioned to have you killed, since it was what you wanted. You would soon realize it was not to last, after all.”

Anastacia watches Gwyndolin stare up at the painting, but then Gwyndolin looks down at her, and Anastacia catches something like a crease in their cheek, like a smile.

“I did not care to hear your story, nor to understand. That is no longer true. After all the stories I stoked the humans with, I did not take care to listen to any of their own. Why did you come here when you knew your end neared? Why did you turn away from the light?”

“Is it enough to say that it is a beautiful painting? That I became mad with knowledge? With the pain of the rituals?”

“This painting, it has something of the Abyss in it— Something Dark, but deeper than Dark. I have mistaken human Darkness for the Abyss before. You have allowed me to do that. Not now.”

“It does contain something of significance.”

“What is that?”

“It contains a story, an old legend. And I’m not sure what else. I was drawn to it because I thought—” Gwyndolin waits, silent, as Anastacia looks for the words. “I knew,” she says, “that inside was something the Lord of Sunlight feared above all else.”

“I fear that I know what that might be.”

“What will you do, if you know?”

“I will leave her to her ends. She has been a worthy opponent, which is to be expected, as she is the light of the moon if I am the dark. Let the one who deserves victory win this round. I know that I will win this war.”

“How do you know?”

“I only ever needed one undead to rise and rekindle the flame, and countless have. Many failed, many succeeded, and some few let the world burn itself to ashes. But I only ever needed one." Gwyndolin smiles, teeth sharp and terrifying in the dark of the Cathedral. Anastacia tilts her head to consider Gwyndolin more carefully, craning her neck back to see them in full.

“This battle was lost for you.”

“Yes,” Gwyndolin admits. “Your knightess would have killed me. She is strong, and she knows too much of the world. She will go on to let this age die. She is doing so now. I can feel it. Once I discover how she entered this fight with her memories and her mind intact, I will rectify that error. The age of fire will continue, and this will be put behind me.”

Anastacia watches Gwyndolin and understands, like a light beaming through a cave off the armor of a man just outside, that the world is to end very soon.

“There is no queen in the dark to carry me home,” she says with a laugh. “I suppose that was why I ran to this painting. I had all the pieces to the truth, but no tongue to speak it with. I was trying to write it all down, and all that came out was a children's rhyme”

Gwyndolin looks down at her sharply. “What nonsense are you saying?”

“It was an old children’s rhyme, about a queen who’d carry you home if you stayed out too late,” Anastacia smiles wryly, unafraid of Gwyndolin and Gwyndolin’s distaste for the queen in question. “We didn’t understand it well, but kids sang it often. Astora was… it was a place of great piety and faith, but the truth has a way of sneaking in. Children often carry it. The innocence of children disguises it and it grows up with them. But all truth contains a lie.”

“Can you sing it? The rhyme.”

“I am out of practice,” Anastacia says, "on account of the withered tongue currently lying on the floor of the cave beneath Firelink.”

“Ah,” Gwyndolin says delicately.

“But I will try.” Anastacia shuts her eyes and tries to remember the little song. A queen in the dark carries you home, a voice in her head sings, and she repeats after it, singing about the queen chasing the dark and staying a step ahead of the light.

She’s not a particularly gifted singer, and her voice wobbles and it is too high-pitched to be soothing. But Gwyndolin tilts their head and considers her as she finishes, not a glimmer of emotion on their icy face. “Blasphemy,” Anastacia explains, inexplicably at ease in Gwyndolin’s presence now, “comes as easy as breathing to children.”

“Indeed, it does,” Gwyndolin says, and Anastacia detects a weak, exhausted tone in their voice.

“What shall you do?”

“It matters not what I do. I will live out this fading age, like so much smoke, or I shall go forth and find my sister and give her the happy news. That father’s choice was not in vain, that the fire will live on.”

“Will it continue to burn?”

“No,” Gwyndolin says. “It will fade if I do not change something. This plan worked, it bought this kingdom time, but it came too close to failure too many times. I did not account for the humans, not the way Father did. I have never feared them.”

“Will you fear them now?”

“I will not tell you. But I suspect that you, Anastacia of Astora, are my enemy.”

Anastacia shrugs. “I am. I have seen the truth of you and your age, and the truth of the Gods,” she says. “I did want to die. You are not wrong. I fear the hollowing in my future more than anything.”

“You are not cursed with the Dark Sign.”

“No,” she says. “No, I am not cursed.”

“The Dark Sign rises when the fire fades, and it will fade during this time.”

“I will be lost.”

“You will be, you have been. It was never a matter of any consequence, before.” Anastacia says nothing in response to this strange musing, but she watches Gwyndolin carefully. “Fire Keepers are nearly all gone now,” Gwyndolin says, with a heavy weight behind the words.

“I have no interest in serving your age of fire.”

“Do you yearn for the Dark, Fire Keeper?”

“I yearn for freedom from this, and I confess that I yearn to see your sins punished.”

“They may be, yet. Wouldn’t you want to see it come to be?”

“I could kill you.”

Gwyndolin laughs. A true laugh. “I know you mean you feel as though you could, given the rage plain on your face, but I struggle to imagine you wielding a sword.”

“Would I need a sword?”

“No,” Gwyndolin says. “I suppose not. Your contact with the Abyss showed you truth, and if the rumors are true, it showed you the fire fading. Filianore saw as much, when Father— She is like you, anointed with truth. Did you see—”

“I saw nothing concerning you, as I did not care, and the Abyss seemed not to care either,” Anastacia says, and Gwyndolin is silent. A thought comes to Anastacia in the quiet. She looks at them with a hard glare. “I have no desire to see anything more, nor to lose another sense. If you want to inject my eyes with the Abyss, you will get nothing out of me afterwards.”

The earth shakes before Gwyndolin can say anything in response to her outburst, and they steady her as the walls of Anor Londo begin to sway dangerously.

“What will happen?”

“You will not die,” they say. Anastacia rolls her eyes, yanking her arm out of their grip.

“You mentioned as much,” she snaps. But Gwyndolin grabs her again, more firmly this time.

“No, you will not,” they say, and then Anor Londo is gone. Wind howls in her hair and burns at her face. It is too cold, too strong, but then the winds stop. She looks out from behind her arms, which she had thrown over her face to protect herself and sees nothing but white. Are they in the painting? Is this—But no, it is cloth. It is Gwyndolin, shielding her from the wind.

Anastacia looks up, like a new habit, and sees Gwyndolin watching her.

“I find,” Gwyndolin says, and she can hear their voice over the wind somehow, “that I do not want you to leave just yet.”

“I am your enemy. I will never worship you, nor will I ever trust the flames.”

“Good,” Gwyndolin says. “You are mortal. Your enmity means little to me. Your insight and your knowledge mean considerably more”

Anastacia laughs, bitter and angry, but she wonders if the sound carries over the roaring of the storm. She looks around, and sees that they are atop a mountain, the same mountains she had admired the first time she and Gwyndolin had spoken to one another with some honesty. “You haven’t learned to fear the humans?” she asks, touching upon the danger with her finger, knowing she is safe.

“I have,” Gwyndolin says, and the roaring gets louder. Anastacia moves the arm around her away and looks to the valley below. Anor Londo is falling. It is crumbling, and there is a great black fog growing over the land. “Concern yourself not with that,” Gwyndolin says, “it is a brief age, and it will be gone when the sun rises. Your knightess knows this. She revels in causing me any pain.”

“This hurts you?” Anastacia asks.

Gwyndolin watches Anor Londo fall, and their face is grim and wan. Then they look away, and their face turns towards Anastacia. A tired smile is growing on their lips, but they look as though they are consumed with grief. “It hurts me deeply,” Gwyndolin says. “I know you have little reason to believe it, but I know love. And I loved my home.”

“Enough to torture, to kill, and to destroy worlds to keep it standing?”

“A family needs a home to return to,” Gwyndolin sighs. “I will keep the towers standing, and the walls strong, and one day---”

“One day your family will come home?”

“No,” Gwyndolin says darkly. “They may never come home. But they will have a home, should they wish it.”

“You see no evil in what you have done?”

“My father might have oppressed, or erred, but not I.”

“You have.” Anastacia is horrified to find herself near tears, broken in a way she hasn't been since... “I—You have," she says, and her voice breaks.

“Tell me about it now,” Gwyndolin says in a soft voice, “to while away the night. Tomorrow the sun will rise, and a new age will begin.”

Anastacia sees the road before her, as clearly as she had seen the mother, her children, and the clawing desperation of those weaker than they could ever let anyone see. It is paved and lined with Gwyndolin, with the will of Velka herself. She almost laughs, in a horrible, dark way, and something of it must show on her face because Gwyndolin looks like they want to peel her open and look inside.

She will have to grow accustomed to this face, to this look, because she will receive it often. Yes, something of the Abyss must still lie behind her eyes. She sees a great future, horrible, and then an inevitable fall. She sees her own face, looking at Gwyndolin with something like warmth and love. She sees something terrible, and at the end-- grief and freedom.

Freedom never came to her freely; she does not balk at the price when she sees it. She smiles, Anor Londo falls, and the undead knightess, Kel, fades in the far away reaches of this land.

Velka had placed two stories on the earth; one for the Gods, the sinners, for Gwyn, the greatest and worst of them all. The other was for her, for Anastacia, and all the ones without blades or shields, for the ones who might make some path towards her children…

Anastacia shuts her eyes. There’s a story she can tell Gwyndolin tonight, she just needs to think back far enough into her new-old memories and find it…

"I will," she says.