Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Tell me of the first time you saw Grace.”

“When the ship ran ashore on the northern beaches. The cliffs were a wall of alabaster colossi, the beach a carpet of sand like gold dust. Dead trees lined the path leading away from the tides, gnarled things, bone-white and dry from the salt. I thought the sun had disappeared. I was so very thirsty.”

“Could you see it, from the shoreline? The Erdtree?”

“Yes. It crowned the white cliffs, a halo, radiant like sunlight filtered through amber. I breathed the bitter pollen of altus blooms like the scent of a newborn. I thought nothing could wash the death from my eyes. I was as hollow as the bone trees, a husk; I don’t remember if I came here to escape death or to finally die. But I saw it, then, and I was saved.”  

⊱𖤓⊰

When she first learns of the Omen Twins, Tricia is disbudding a goat. 

A few hours before the goat, or the rising sun, she is slotting crisp, dried petals between heavy parchment, preparing to press them into workable shapes for sores and open wounds, when Perfumer Carmelina enters her workshop. To gather still-closed blooms at this hour, she thinks. Or to collect the dew from crystal buds, water as pure and clear as the air far above the city, in which she will soak the blooms for the draughts that Carmelina prepares for the Queen Mother herself. 

Come with me, is all her mentor says, the golden haze of dawn filtering through the doorway behind her. Obediently, Tricia follows.

They sit, now, facing each other on plush cushions as the royal caravan meanders through the sleepy outskirts of the city and into the fertile fields beyond. The caravan seems unnecessary; the roads are safe and Royal Perfumers are well-known and regarded by the commonfolk. Tricia has set more than one broken bone and treated countless imbalances of the humours before the High Perfumers - and Carmelina herself - had come to recruit her for the Capital. But Carmelina had insisted on the wheelhouse, and it could only mean that they were going far, or on royal business, or both. But what the Queen Mother could ask her most eminent Perfumers to fetch from the turned dirt of a sunflower field, she could not guess. 

A numbing balsam, Carmelina had replied, when Tricia asked what she ought to bring. Stanching boluses.

Carmelina puts a hand over their supply bag as the caravan gently jostles them along, her shawl slipping off one shoulder. Her robes, usually resplendent in their golden embroidery and rich hues, fit for an audience with the Golden Lineage, have been replaced with well-worn traveller’s robe, the modest embellishments long faded along frayed sleeves. Without thought for their journey, Tricia had donned her Royal Perfumer’s livery. Cramped in the caravan alongside her modestly dressed master, she feels vain and embarrassed, gold thread witnessed only by the empty landscape and dirt roads. Carmelina hums a tune while they ride, her voice dry and cheerful, like an invitation scrawled on old parchment. 

When the caravan rolls to a halt, she can barely see the farmhouse in the distance, a dark blotch against the field of wild blooms and occasional golden bough. She can hear chirping, muted in the trees, and what might be the sound of a stream, but the dawn’s silence tell her they are far from the city’s outskirts. 

Carmelina shuts the caravan door, bangs on the enclosed front where the driver is, though she cannot see their face. Wait, she signals. She hoists their shared rucksack over her shoulder, and Tricia feels even more foolish. Quite a sight, she thinks: her aged teacher in her old robes shuffling down the dirt road like a pack animal, and Tricia, younger and stronger, following obtusely in her stiff regalia. 

“Why not ride the entire way?”

Carmelina shakes her head. “Privacy,” she says, the sack bouncing with every step, a gentle clink of flasks and jars. Tricia knows her teacher better than to press the matter. At some point there will be a grand reveal of whatever lesson Carmelina has brought her out here to learn, whatever elaborated ruse to make an example of Tricia’s ignorance, and if Tricia plays the role of clever student well, her mentor will clap, delighted, a little glint of mischievous mockery in her pale eyes. But Tricia will bask in it anyway, because praise is sweet, no matter how much salt it is served with. 

The farmhouse is rundown but not abandoned. Signs of life are scattered in the raked piles of hay and wet spots on the otherwise dry ground. Nearby, she can see another shanty, but no evidence of farmers themselves. A herd of goats meanders close to the shack, spotted brown and white and black, some with curved horns that shine dully in the early morning light. 

Carmelina has unrolled their pack on the dirt floor and is carefully laying out their Perfumers’ tools, as if preparing for the most delicate operation. There is not another soul in sight. 

“Are you going to practice on me?” Tricia asks lightly. She hopes the quip masks her confusion. 

Carmelina takes the thin razor she uses to separate bulbs from their stems and waves it at Tricia in a parody of confrontation. “Aye, before you question me to death.”

Realising she will get nothing more from her obstinate teacher until they have begun whatever it is the High Perfumer has brought them here to accomplish, she gets to work. At some point, while she is preparing a mixture, she realises Carmelina has slipped out and gone into the patch of wild grass behind the rickety shack. She returns with a bundle in her arms. It bleats warily. 

“Ah.” Tricia sets down her mortar. “So you are to teach me how to cook, then.” 

Carmelina has no clever retort this time. She holds the goat, no doubt a babe of barely a full moon, and lowers herself to the floor gingerly. With one hand she pulls her robes above her knees, with other grips the animal in place. Behind her, an iron rod is laid out beside their pack. Sensing the tension in her grip, the goat begins to struggle. 

Tricia blanches. Are we going to kill the creature? Leyndell Perfumers are strictly forbidden from killing beasts for their skins or parts, even for a life-saving salve. Grace forbids them from weighing the worth of one life over another, the Order says. A fine idea in theory, though not always carried out in practice, she knows.  

The animal is squealing now, a high, panicked pitch that sounds disconcertingly human. 

Carmelina raises her voice above the ruckus. “I want you to say the words.” 

“Words?”

Leyndell’s most eminent Perfumer grinds her knees into the dirt, caging the the little animal with her legs, her weight bearing down on it. The air smells sour. “Recite the words.” 

Tricia shifts on her feet, frowning. “Forgive me, Sister. I still do not understand.” 

“Your oath.”

Tricia stares at her. 

The animal begins to struggle again. “Your Perfumer’s oath.”

She squeezes the creature between her thighs, locking it in place without crushing it. Strands of grey hair slip out from under her Perfumer’s hood as she shifts around on the packed earth, reaching for the iron rod behind her. The beast squeals, and she brings her hand above its head before falling still. She looks up at Tricia, her expression unreadable. 

Tricia feels the heat rise in her cheeks, embarrassed by the absurdity of it - a Perfumer to the royal family and its golden court, asked to recite her initiation oath in front of a shrieking animal on a mound of dirt. But that’s the magic of Carmelina, and suddenly she is a student once again, terrified of disappointing her mentor, desperate for knowledge still clumsily wielded without experience. 

Her memory strains for the rhythm of the oath, verses recited like a solemn prayer. Finally, she stutters, “I will offer those who suffer all my art and my knowledge. Never will I betray them or risk their well-being to satisfy my vanity.”

Carmelina nods. She takes the goat’s hooves and stretches them straight out in front of the animal, forcing its belly into the dirt. Her eyes return to Tricia, insistent.

“I will not hurt my fellow or put a knife to his flesh, or give him an herb to soothe his pain, even if he begs for it in anguish, if it might take away his breath.”

Carmelina extends the iron rod towards Tricia, who continues in a wavering voice. 

“I will never harm those who suffer, from ailments or from curses. As all is lit by the Erdtree’s light, so all who draw breath in its golden embrace are part of the covenant with Grace.” 

Carmelina’s mouth twitches, and her expression darkens momentarily. “All who draw breath.” 

Tricia, who is used to plumbing the depths of Carmelina’s aggravatingly brief and esoteric teachings, has no time to press her teacher. The older woman gestures with the rod, and then quietly whispers. “Fire.”

Flame catches in Tricia’s hand, and she smothers the tip of the rod until it glows like a beacon. She steels herself. Whatever Carmelina has brought her here to do, however unsettling her teacher’s methods, she is too devoted to her - to the Golden Order, to this second life afforded to her by the healing arts - to betray that trust in a crumbling farmhouse while a creature screams in the dirt. She does not wait for the prompt of the next verse.

“I pray that the attention I give to those who put themselves in my care be rewarded with the eternal guidance of Grace.”

Carmelina smooths back a section of fur from the goat’s head, revealing two silver-grey nubs - budding horns, barely emerged from the top of its skull, round and hard like crude ores. Only then does Tricia understand what is about to happen. She drops to her knees, rummaging hurriedly through their satchel and pulls out a balsam. With the tufts of fur held back by Carmelina’s free hand, she rubs the ointment around the base of the growths. It cries out again - Tricia knows the discomfort of the balsam before the numbing sensation sets it, like a needle’s prick before something sharper and crueler follows. 

“And in honour of the knowledge received from my teachers,” she whispers, wiping the stinging ointment from her fingers with a heavy cloth, “I swear to care for anyone who suffers, king or misbegotten, prince or slave.”

“Do you?”

Carmelina’s eyes meet hers. For a brief moment, she looks at Tricia with something akin to pity, and then, something Tricia has rarely seen in her teacher’s eyes: something like resignation. 

“Sister…”

“Do you?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “I do.”

Then Carmelina hands her the rod. 

Tricia presses the smouldering iron into the animal’s skull, and the cascade that follows is almost dizzying. She hears the brand’s hiss as it meets skin, the pained pitch of the creature’s desperate bleating. She sees the smoke unfurl to obscure Carmelina’s hands and face. She smells burnt fur, seared flesh; the metallic taste of blood where she bites her tongue. 

“Finish it.” 

Her eyes sting and her vision swims. She spares a moment of thought for the sweat, tears, cinders, and blood that stain her Royal robes. Anyone who suffers, prince or slave, she mouths silently. King or goat.

“I swear before the Greater Will, the Golden Order, my ancestors, my teachers -” She rekindles the flame along the steel rod once more, “my fellow healers and apprentices, and by all the arts and knowledge that are my privilege - I will stand by these words.”

She presses the rod into the animal’s second nub, cauterising the flesh around it, destroying its crown of horns before it can ever gain one. The animal’s scream drowns out her voice. 

“If I ever break this oath, let the gods take away my knowledge of this art and my own grace. Here speaks a citizen, a servant of people.” Through the billow of smoke and stench of burning flesh, she chokes out the last words of the oath.

“May I be destroyed if I betray these words.”

⊱𖤓⊰

Tricia sweeps away the last remnants of scorched earth before they depart. Carmelina is in a corner of the shack, applying unguents to the young animal. It croaks out a pathetic, exhausted bleat, and she cooes gently and smooths back its fur, brushing away the ash. Tricia watches from the corner of her eye, and though the silence between them is companionable, she feels an empty distance between herself and her teacher. As a Perfumer, it’s not the hardest thing asked of her, and far removed from the human suffering she has witnessed. But something about Carmelina’s behaviour - the gravity of the moment and the sombre way she asked Tricia to recite their oath - something about the Golden Order’s most eminent Perfumers maiming an infant goat in the middle of nowhere that heralds something worse. There is certainly a lesson, quixotic or otherwise. She knows Carmelina well enough to be sure of that. 

Finally, she bridges the gap of silence between them. 

“You wish for me to leave the Royal Perfumers.”

Carmelina looks over at her, her expression pulled into amused confusion. The face she makes when Tricia commits a mixing error, or proposes an absurd answer to a simple problem. She has been a Royal Perfumer for half her long life, but she has been made acutely aware today of how much she is still Carmelina’s student. 

“And what would that accomplish?”

Tricia shrugs. “This lesson. You had me leave the Capital. Practice our arts on an animal. Recite my oath. I know I should be spending more time in the Lower Roads.” She tosses the gathered ashes into the wild grass outside. “I know that before you became a High Perfumer, you worked as much with the Misbegotten and the Omens as you did the nobles at court. You think I should do the same.”

The other woman considers this for a moment. 

“Is it what I want, or what you want?” 

Tricia doesn’t answer. Instead she looks at the goat, its pathetic, trembling form, now in Carmelina’s arms. In its helpless domestication, it shelters in the embrace of the one who hurt it in the first place. Irony like the bitter grass at her feet. 

“Does it matter? It is my duty. My oath.”

“Aye,” Carmelina acknowledges. She begins to apply another balm to the animal’s cauterised wounds, masking the smell of burnt flesh. Her motions are steady and deft, despite her age. “Your duty, but not your penance.”

Tricia doesn’t bother to hide her confusion, even as embarrassment creeps into the edges of her features. 

Carmelina continues to speak without looking at her, attending the goat with all the care of a mother. “We are duty-bound to treat all, as equals, and ease their suffering. The king and the Misbegotten. And we are duty-bound to provide as much care and comfort to the Graceless as we do the servants of the Golden Order.” The razor from before emerges from the folds of her traveller’s garb, and she skillfully cuts away a patch of the goat’s singed fur.

“I know.”

“But you do not,” Carmelina counters mildly, still focused on the animal. Tricia knows this kind of teaching is particular to Carmelina - this offhand scolding, this casual disappointment - and it makes her fingers twist with contrition. 

“You treat the Graceless as a vehicle to fulfil your own grace. You attend them with a sort of devout pity, and because you are so desperate to cloak yourself in Grace, you cannot see them as full beings outside of it. Is there a quota that you have set for yourself, Sister, of the miserable and Misbegotten you must treat before you think the Erdtree’s blessing will accept you? Do you count them, like a list of ingredients?” She looks at Tricia. “The Graceless are not your sin, Sister. They are not a penance you must perform to feel worthy of attending the Golden Lineage. You are there to ease their suffering, not by need of self-flagellation.” She chuckles. “The Golden Order has plenty of other edicts for that.”

Tricia stares at her in silence. Outside, the air undulates with the sun’s rising glow. Inside, she feels like the thatched roof of the shack is descending on her. 

Finally, Carmelina releases the goat and stands up slowly, gripping a decrepit beam of wood to help herself up, back bent from the effort. “Since I brought you to the Capital you have done a great service to the court, and your dedication to the Greater Will has been exemplary. But there is something else I must ask of you.” 

The transition from scorn to praise is vertiginous, and Tricia holds her breath, skin still sunburned with shame.

Carmelina sighs, as though she has grown impatient with the whole ordeal. “Accompany me in the Lower Roads, as a Royal Perfumer. Return with me to care for the forsaken. Going forward, you will continue to serve the Graceless in the same capacity as the Golden Lineage.” 

Tricia looks down instinctively at her hands with disgust. “Serve both in the palace and the Lower Roads? Forgive me, Sister, but the Golden Order would never allow such -”

Carmelina holds up a tired hand, cutting her off. “They already have.” 

Tricia regards the older woman’s hand, thin and bony, skin pulled taught like parchment. She imagines her teacher returning from the gruesome disbudding of an Omen infant, covered in blood, reeking of death, and being allowed to touch the sanctified head of the young Godwyn. 

Inconceivable. How could the Golden Order - the Queen Mother, so besotted with her golden son - allow such a thing? Tricia herself has not returned to the Lower Roads or the Shunning Grounds since her appointment as Royal Perfumer to the Golden Lineage, as Carmelina’s aid - and, though left unsaid, her likely successor. All the while Carmelina has been performing duties for both the royal household and the lowest creatures in the city’s underbelly, staining one hand with curses and the other with ambrosia.   

“What about you?” Tricia asks, still digesting the surprise and revulsion. 

“I am old,” Carmelina laughs, brushing the soot from her tattered robes, careful not to startle the goat, “and I am running out of lessons to teach you. But this is something I cannot teach you through craft, or memory. This is something you will have to choose for yourself.”

“Ask it of me.”

“You will serve the Graceless as you serve the Golden, and you will learn they are not so different.”

“Revered Sister, I -”

“And then,” Carmelina cuts her off, her voice lowering, “you will come to learn that you can, in all your pious devotion, love and hate the blessings of the Erdtree all at once.”

Hate? Carmelina’s teachings are often cryptic and obtuse, but they are never heretical. The Erdlight is was brought Tricia here, she wants to remind the other woman. Across the great seas and onto the cold shores in the north, away from the home she could never return to, so steeped in death. 

“I am not asking you to doubt Grace,” Carmelina says, seeing the stricken expression on Tricia’s face. “I am simply asking you to embrace the full spectrum of our oath. The oppositions of nature. The full dissonance of the Order. ” She holds both hands up as though balancing them on a scale. “The perfect rule of the Greater Will and those who suffer despite it, and because of it. Death as a mercy. Faith and doubt. The barbarian Elden Lord and his immaculate son. The Queen Eternal of Grace and her Graceless sons.”

Her - what? 

Tricia sputters unintelligibly. 

“Aye. You did not think I brought you here to herd goats, did you?”

⊱𖤓⊰

"Tell me of your first Omen.”

“That is a macabre request, my lord.”

“Indulge me.”

“Very well. When I was first recruited as a Capital Perfumer, I was assigned to work the Lower Roads and the Homestead of the Forlorn. I was a follower of Carmelina even then, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. I thought the suffering we witnessed was a necessary punishment, a sign that we were all unworthy of Grace, but that as Healers, we might ingratiate ourselves with godliness. Might use the misery of the forsaken as stepping stones for our own holy accession. One day, a woman brought us a child. My daughter’s age, before…no more than six or seven summers. An Omen child. She had survived the birth and kept the child hidden - cloaked and secreted it behind closed doors for years. To keep it from the Shunning Grounds. But the child’s horns had begun to grow too obvious, the pallor of its skin too noticeable. So the mother tried to…cut them. Out of despair. Out of love and desperation for the child to survive, she mutilated it. There was not much left. The cries were the worst part. We did what we could to ease the pain. Milk of the Mistwood Lily, the Dreamer’s Jewel. But it was much too late. The child died a few days later. I still light a candle for her, sometimes. It’s hard to forget the first.”

⊱𖤓⊰

It is many more moons before Carmelina takes her far below the Shunning Grounds.

By now she knows well the upper levels, those half-lit corridors where still-horned Omens wander, sometimes chained and blind. She has served along the Lower Roads before, comforting the shamed, the impure, the Misbegotten and demi-humans - but that had stopped when Carmelina assigned her duties to the young Godwyn. Now her work takes her from horror to beauty in the span of an afternoon. She tries not to let Carmelina see how much it rankles her - the strange unease when she emerges from the dark, climbs the steps of the Erdtree Sanctuary and tends to the golden prince. A comparatively short pilgrimage from graceless death to eternal life, eyes still straining from the gloom.

But stranger still are Carmelina’s enigmatic descriptions of the Queen’s second sons. It still seems false, like a cruel lie, a tale spun into some misshapen horror. The Queen Eternal, Mother of Grace, had born monsters.

“Their treatment is…particular," Carmelina had said. Tricia knows Omens born of nobility are allowed to live intact so long as they do not wander aboveground. But banished to the Shunning Grounds, severed entirely from the outside world, it is no surprise they descend into an animalistic, brutish existence predicated on survival and little else. “They are different,” her mentor took to repeating after every tense encounter with one of the towering Omens in the grim, damp halls of the Shunning Grounds.  

How? Inevitably Tricia would pictured them as shadows of Lord Godfrey, monstrous and horned, in a frenzied bloodlust.

“They are educated. Trained.” Trained, like animals?

“Like Godwyn.” Ah, so like princes. Princes of the stinking city depths.

It made every Omen disbudding feel crueler than the last.

“It is necessary.” Carmelina had looked at her then, the usual spark of teasing mischief gone. “A time will come when I am no longer able to serve. The Elden Lord trusts you, and I have vouched for you as my only successor. You have cared for young Godwyn, as I have. This too you must inherit from me, Sister.”

When I am no longer able to serve. The Queen had bestowed the blessing of lifetimes on them, as Godwyn grows with the ponderous pace of an ancient tree, the unhurried coming of age of a god. Carmelina could live an eternity if she wanted to, mending his blessed brow. But lately, there has been a finality to her words, a bleeding edge of regret in every lesson, as if this were the last time she could remind Tricia of where this bloom grew, or how that brew would mix.

But now her lined face is set with a quiet purpose as they ride the lift down for what feels like an age, past the few remaining labourers stationed as makeshift guards and traps set to keep things in rather than out. Sometimes moans float out from the stagnant darkness, reproachful cries that ripple like the filthy water they plod through, skirts of their livery hiked up to the knees.

Tricia feels the frigid water still seeping through her boots when the lift shudders to a halt, the screech of metal announcing their arrival. It’s brighter down here, someone keeps the torches burning in the corridors, and glowstones are scattered along the edge of walls and in alcoves, illuminating dark corners or casting warning light over dangerously loose stones. The ground is slick with damp, but somehow the air here moves easier, and the smell is less oppressive.

“Incense?”

Carmelina nods. “And other oils, to keep the more aggressive creatures at bay.” She holds the torch higher, and Tricia can see how some dark corners are in fact paths winding away from this main junction. To their left, two heavy wooden doors are bolted shut. Pots burn oils next to the doors, a bitter mix of herbs unpleasant to smell and deadly to taste, makeshift wards for overly curious rats. This is where the very few souls who know the truth come and go, Carmelina had explained. The tutors. The personal knights of Lord Godfrey. Carmelina herself. And now Tricia, initiated into the Golden Order’s most shameful secret - not only that the Eternal Queen begot Omen sons, but that the Order allowed them to live, and gave them access to knowledge, to care. To humanity.

Carmelina fumbles with a set of brass keys on a wide loop. “They keep them locked in rooms?” Tricia had asked the first time Carmelina had described the arrangement. No, she learned; outside of lessons, as her master called them, they were free to roam, but as such responsible for their own safety. “If you are lucky,” Carmelina had said, smiling faintly, “they will regale you with stories as gruesome as they are improbable of what they get up to down here. And you will have to reconstruct the events for yourself, when one tells you the tale as though it’s a grand conquest, and the other dismisses it as a jaunt of no import.”

“They are together, when you see them?”

Carmelina had cast her gaze low. “Not any longer.”

Tricia’s reverie is interrupted by the grind of iron and brass as her mentor turns the key, and pushes the door open.

When they enter the room, the first thing that strikes her is silence. There is no fire crackling, no drip of water from the glistening stone ceilings, no rustle of something moving skittishly through the dark, rat or otherwise. Only quiet.

Carmelina slips the torch into steel hooks mounted clumsily against the curved stone walls, partially illuminating the space. The walls are smooth, and while there are no ornaments, it is clear this room has been hewn by a mason’s hand, and not by a millennia of rushing water. Carmelina closes the door behind her but does not lock it, setting down her satchel on the single wooden table in the centre of the room. There are two chairs, unadorned, and a low stool Tricia recognises as the kind they use for kneeling when treating immobile patients. On the table, two brass burners give off a dull glint in the firelight. At Carmelina’s signal, she finds the candles scattered across the floor of the room - some melted almost all the way down - and produces flame to light them. Most are plain and of no quality, but Tricia notices two that bear the Erdtree pattern wrought in brass along the holder. These are from Carmelina’s own workshop, she realises. They illuminate a single shelf against the wall to the left, covered in well-worn tomes - many on the history of the Golden Capital, some canonical Golden Order texts, and a few tomes on the properties of weather patterns at harvest, or something equally dry. There are no weapons in the room.

Carmelina pulls out a small glass container from her robes, and Tricia hears the clink of pebbles against glass. Resin incense, and the good kind, she remarks. The kind they burn in the Erdtree Sanctuary. Taking a pestle and mortar from their shared satchel, the High Perfumer pours out a handful of stones and begins to grind, the rhythmic crunching like clumsy steps through a forest floor. The canopy here is the glitter of stalactites beyond this room, filtering the light too weak to penetrate the depths of the Shunning Grounds, dim and dirty. Tricia thinks of the Erdtree’s pure light blotted out by the writhing shadows, and squirms.

Carmelina’s voice cuts through the steady grinding, affable and out of place.

“Come then, little lord. Step into the light.”

Tricia hears it before she sees it - a faint swoosh of fabric, a soft thump, and then something moving, deep in the impenetrable darkness at the other end of the small chamber. Quickly she catches a glimpse of it traversing the shadows to her left, coming closer, impossibly fast, she thinks apprehensively. Carmelina seems unperturbed as she lights the burners. The smoke curls, thick and heavy with scent, and she sets the brass bowls by an opening that Tricia had not glimpsed before, where the tendrils of fume escape through iron bars and into the abyssal mouth of the Shunning Grounds beyond.

Finally, carefully, the shadow emerges into the glow of firelight and takes form: a head taller than both of them, at least, and only the outline of a cloak, grey and rough spun, drawn close around a lithe figure. The shadow is shorter and smaller than any full-grown Omen she has seen in her time, but she swallows hard anyway. Then a face resolves in the half light.

Tricia feels her entire body go cold. It is Godwyn standing before her, but not Godwyn —  a misshapen shadow of Godwyn. Godwyn from a lifetime ago, not yet a man, when she had first come to serve the Golden family. The same broad nose, the same white-gold hair, but instead of a crown of lilies, a crown of horns, arching upward and outward from the right side of his face.

But Godwyn’s face was - still is - serene, unlined. This…Omen - for that is unmistakably what he is - has hurt etched into the few lines of his young face, and he wears it like a weight on his brow.

Tricia realizes that she is staring, and in the meantime Carmelina has been frozen in a deep bow, as though waiting for Tricia to join her. Heart pounding, Tricia scrambles onto one knee.

“My lord.”

It is only when Carmelina pulls her up that she dares to look at him again. He is looking at Carmelina now, eyes the telltale black and amber of Omen, but infinitely more watchful.

“Aye, don’t look at me like that,” Carmelina says, and Tricia has the wits about her to feel vaguely mortified at how her teacher is addressing an apparent member of the golden bloodline. “I’ve already told your lordship she is as trustworthy as I, if only half as pretty.”

The Omen prince’s face is a steely mask of indifference, but Carmelina chuckles to herself anyway. “Be seated, then, and let me have a look.”

Slowly, he moves over to the chair at the centre of the room and slides in. The sides of the chair have been partially cut away from the back, leaving it open, and only then does Tricia see the purpose: a tail, long and sinewy, peeking out from under his cloak. Its tip is covered in an uneven scattering of horns. One in particular arches over the rest with the deadly curve of a scimitar, like a scorpion’s stinger.

Even when he sits, Carmelina stands only a little bit taller, but she moves around him deftly, ever the fussing old healer. She motions for Tricia, who drifts cautiously alongside her, trying to suppress her agonising desire to stare, plainly, like a gaping idiot at an eclipse. 

“Most of these,” Carmelina is saying, pulling up the sleeves of his robe to reveal a pattern of crisscrossing scratches and scars, “are old, and have healed nicely. Boluses will do the trick, he reacts well to them, and the herba mix we formulated together is the most effective and the least discomforting. If the wound is particularly grim, I have been known to use an incantation, but rarely.” She moves to tilt his head and he acquiesces, revealing a long and jagged slash across the side of his neck, still raw, below cordlike muscles and veins. Tricia wonders if he knows how dangerously close he came to death. Carmelina sees her expression and nods.

“Aye, I needed the Erdtree’s help for this one, Grace keep me.” She turns to the prince. “How long ago?”

“The last waning crescent,” he answers evenly.

Tricia makes a mental note to ask where one can see the moon from down here. “How?” she manages to croak, gesturing to the wound.

“Sparring,” Carmelina says dismissively, and Tricia knows to drop it for now.

“And these,” the older woman continues, gently turning his face towards them, “are the ones I removed, many more moons ago. Too close to the eye.” She runs a hand over the left side of his brow, stubs where the horns once were, pointing to where a scur growth has healed poorly, or scarring faded unevenly. Tricia at once marvels and is taken aback by how easily the Omen lets himself be handled - like an animal, a colt examined before it is sold. Carmelina is gentle but firm, and not irreverent. Tricia wonders how long it has taken to build this trust. Many of the suffering Graceless she treated had to be restrained, or were too weak to protest. A few tried to kill her.

Carmelina reaches through the tangle of his horns to pull back his hair. “Here,” she says, and indicates for Tricia to hold the handful of locks while she points out the horns that she has trimmed in the past, and those she has capped. Tricia’s hands flutter nervously. The hair feels like Godwyn’s.

Carmelina goes on for a little while longer, listing bones that have been set and wounds that risk reopening, as well as the standard cures Tricia knows well from her time spent treating Godwyn. All the while the prince is silent, stoic, watching them with an awareness Tricia has never seen in an Omen before. She has never seen an Omen like this before, she reminds herself. The horns, the slate-coloured skin, even the tail can't mask the humanity that smoulders beneath his brow, the keen prescience that must make this entire ordeal all the more humiliating.

“In any case,” Carmelina finishes, turning away from her charge to address Tricia after her exhaustive monologue, “I will still be here, for now, as we work in tandem. Grace willing, your bones are not as tired as mine, Sister, and eventually this charge may be fully yours. You are more than capable, of that I am sure.”

Once, both twins had been Carmelina’s charges, or so she’d told Tricia -  but now, as the princes’ ponderously long adolescence came to an end, Lord Godfrey thought to separate them, at least in the presence of their attendants. Not as a function of their age, Tricia understood. But the older they become, the more imposing their size and strength. The more likely the two of them can overwhelm a single knight, perhaps - or a feeble tutor, an old healer - and make a break for the light. Climb through to the surface and spill the Golden Order’s monstrous secrets out onto the open streets.

So Carmelina would continue tending to this prince’s other half - for how long, Tricia did not know.

The prince, who has been watching and listening with a kind of austere patience, either knew this already or has caught Carmelina’s meaning.

“He will not be pleased.”

His tone is matter-of-fact, resonating in the claustrophobic space. There is a coarse undertone to his voice, like the rhythmic sound of the resin incense ground into fine sand, granular but not unpleasant. Tricia understands that he is referring to his brother, who is - somewhere? Are they forcefully separated at these times, a surreptitious attempt to weaken their bond, split their loyalty to each other? Or is the other one waiting just outside, hovering like a serrated shadow, listening, pinpricks of gold in the dark?

“No,” Carmelina tells the prince, “and that will be amusing for a short while before it becomes very tedious, as we both know.”

For the first time Tricia sees something move across the prince’s stony face - something that resolves in the corners of his eyes. Resignation, melancholy. A bleak instant of mirth, then acquiescence.

“I will speak with him.”

“Nothing sways your noble brother’s heart like diplomacy,” Carmelina replies, her amusement carving deep lines in her face.

She closes the latch on the satchel and gets up, as if to leave. She goes to bow again, and this time takes the prince’s hand in hers and presses it to her forehead. The gesture startles Tricia, so foreign to Carmelina, who has only ever expressed derision for overt, ingratiating displays of piety. But the motion is as unrehearsed as it is reverential, and Tricia feels something heavy tug at her.

“Grace keep you, my lord.”

Something about looking at the prince’s face feels like a violation in this moment, so Tricia bows deeply and awkwardly off to the side, feeling for all the world like an intruder.

The sound he makes could almost be quiet laughter, if it wasn’t so hollow. “If only it could.”

⊱𖤓⊰

When Carmelina closes the cage walls of the lift, Tricia’s mind is still swirling.

The Eternal Mother, bestower of Grace, has brought Omens into her perfect order. It is unfathomable. An Omen with Godwyn’s face. Godwyn, whom she has spent a lifetime mending in faithful service to the Golden Order, with his halo of placid equanimity, twisted into a snarl of horns with a moon-skinned, solemn face.

A betrayal of nature. Like a hive with bees who cultivate poison in place of honey.

Carmelina reaches over, snapping Tricia out of her reverie. She fixes her headdress, pinning it back under her ear where it has come loose.

“You are still grappling with it.”

An understatement. “There must be something, something other than…” She spread her hands wide. “This. Something more-”

“Dignified? Worthy of royalty?”

“Why not remove their horns? Allow them to live hidden but within the palace confines, not openly as Omens, but not as-”

“Abominations? No. You are a Perfumer, Tricia, think like one. What happens when we are forced to disbud older Omens?”

It’s a rhetorical question. “They die.”

“Aye.”

“But this existence is-”

“Not dissimilar to death,” Carmelina finishes for her. She looks at Tricia squarely. “When has the Golden Order been merciful to the Graceless? We did not ask permission to practice our craft on them. We insisted, and we are too useful to be refused. And so we are allowed our small indulgence of easing their pain and passing, but it is only that: an indulgence. Folly, to the Golden Order. Do not forget that.”

“They are sons of the Elden Lord. Of the Eternal Queen, for Grace’s sake, how could she -”

“Perhaps one day you will stop conflating godhood with empathy, dear Sister.”

They do not speak of it again.

⊱𖤓⊰

“Tell me about the hill where the golden altus blooms.”

“Oh? And who has been telling you about rare flowers?”

“Medicinal and Other Uses of Highland Blooms: The Origin, Variation, Immunity and Breeding of Altus Plateau Species.”

“Grace be good, that is a dry one. Well, you leave the city by the King’s highway, and before reaching the Grand Lift turn north; the road is a little rocky, there is the Wolf’s Ravine to the east, and not far to the west there is the Sage’s Lake, which we try to avoid now because of the pagans on Mount Gelmir - more’s the pity, but that’s another subject. But if you follow the path north, and there is a path, you can see the summit of the hill, the top cleared of trees. And the golden altus blooms there because it basks in the constant light of the Erdtree. The views of the city and the Tree are breathtaking. I spent more time there, before. There is a cairn, too, that I placed in memory of my kin, but by now it must be long swept away by the season’s rains. A proper lord would build a temple nearby, I would say, for all to bask in the light of the Erdtree.”

“I hope that one does, then.” 

⊱𖤓⊰

Only a few dozen visits later does she feel comfortable walking the path from the Lower Roads to the Shunning Grounds. 

Some residents begin to recognise her and greet her, though she has exchanged her Royal Perfumer’s robes for more modest robes so as not to attract too much attention. Some stop and ask her for unguents, or for her opinion on a blister or festering sore; some ask if she has read omens in the fire, an old Perfumer practice now considered heresy. She does what she can without lingering or drawing suspicion. 

She follows the winding canals until she reaches a gatehouse, where soldiers are stationed to protect the integrity of the city’s waterways, or so they are told. To be granted passage, she is given a seal by the knights of Lord Godfrey. Golden Order business, it indicates, without detail as far as she knows. The soldiers don’t ask questions. If the Perfumers are able to quell the stench of violence and savagery wafting up from the subterranean passages, then the guards are spared another day for languishing in place of butchering Omens, who often butcher them in return. This she knows from easing the passage of young soldiers too inexperienced to understand their brute strength. 

She carries a torch and sparkpowder as a precaution against rats, but there have been no incidents yet, so when she pulls the lever of the elevator and feels it groan into action, she relaxes. Sometimes she will cross paths with Lord Godfrey’s personal knights, or the tutor, a diminutive scholar with a brisk air and oversized robes who may have previously served young Godwyn, but whose face is not memorable enough for her to recall. When they do cross paths, they nod, respectfully, without words: secrecy is the most valuable thing in the Shunning Grounds, second only to a torch.  

Sometimes, she spends the long ride down into the gloom praying, but after a while the habit fades. The Erdtree cannot hear her down here, she muses. Would the Greater Will not act, according to the principles of Grace, if it knew such injustice was being carried out on its own…what? Disciples? Worshippers? Vessels? Where do they fit in the Queen’s perfect order? Where is there room to squeeze in an aberration or two?

She has yet to meet the prince’s brother. Carmelina forgets which one is the elder but makes assumptions anyway, and in any case it matters little. When Tricia had asked if they are alike, her master had frowned.

“No. Maybe, in some ways. Two sides of the same coin, and all that. You will see soon enough. We have a…rapport, so to speak. The younger one and I. He will have to get used to you; it may take some time.”

Tricia imagined something akin to the prince but more monstrous, a hulking figure wandering the depths, aggressive and unthinking. “He is…” She had searched for the right word, careful not to give offence - their blood is royal, after all. “Difficult?”

“No,” Carmelina had smiled faintly. “He hides nothing. He will spurn you one day and embrace you the next. He will recount lavish stories, histrionic half-truths about their conquests of the Shunning Grounds, only to mock you when you fail to figure out which parts are real and which are not. He will refuse treatment, and languish about it; he will delight at you when you ease the pain and curse and slander you when you do not.” A chuckle. “No, Sister, he is an open tome. He is not the difficult one.”

She thinks about asking the moon-skinned prince for one of these outlandish stories, and about his seemingly ungovernable brother. But she has not found the opening, both in his demeanour and in their brief exchanges.

So the sun vanishes and reappears visit after visit, and in the murky darkness he knows, by some mechanism, the passage of time, so that when she arrives he is already waiting. He sits, always in the chair at the centre of the room, and she adjacent, in another chair or kneeling by the stool. Aside from their placement, there is only a relaxed formality between them now. He allows her to pull his cloak and his robes back, to poke and prod where old injuries are healing, to mend where new ones have blossomed. Occasionally he will ask her questions about above - the word they have settled on for anything beyond the Shunning Grounds. Often he’ll reference things his tutors describe, or in books he has been given, and ask her if they are true, or that she describe them further. She tells him what she can, tries to fill the gaps in his knowledge, but his royal education already far exceeds hers. Sometimes, she thinks he is merely being polite, asking her about what blooms she has gathered that day, and what oils she anoints his head with. But he has no reason to be, and he owes her nothing, so on some days when he merely sits in sullen silence instead, she doesn’t reproach him. They refer to each other by title only - she is simply Healer, or Mender, never Tricia; and he is Lord or Prince, sometimes Little Lord if she is feeling the need to invoke Carmelina’s authority that day. She tries especially hard not to call him Your Grace. Once, she caught herself before slipping, and nearly called him Lord Godwyn, whom she has always addressed by name. He had looked at her strangely then, as if challenging her to correct herself and say his name. The finality of it scared her. She had named a son, once - a lifetime ago, before she found Grace. His name is scrawled on stone, a sea away.

⊱𖤓⊰

“Tell me of your ancestors’ lands.”

“The Golden Order calls them heretics.” 

“That is not what I asked.” 

“Very well. If you sail the Northern Sea far enough, just out of sight of the Erdtree’s glow, you will come upon a foggy bay, and if you follow the right stars you may come upon the mouth of the river that flows through the gates of great ice, where many ships have been broken and stranded in winter’s cruel mouth. But past that, when the tide is low, you can see the Raven Heads, shining black obelisks along the shoreline that have been there since my people’s memory began. There are countless fishing villages, and shipbuilders with trading vessels that can navigate the icy waters, and if you take them further inland you may see our modest cities of stone and ice; nothing so grand as your Leyndell, but enough for my people. We harvest when the trees turn gold, and for the long winters we burn fires that never die. Some have burned since before I was born, and perhaps they still do.”

“Do they not long to live in the light of the Erdtree?”

“Maybe. How could they know? I did not know I longed for it until death came for us all.” 

⊱𖤓⊰

There are several things she wishes to believe. 

She wishes to believe that Grace forgives her scattered prayers these past few moons, her waning voice without fervency. She dreams constantly of her children, from before, crowned in rimed crystal flowers. She grasps for the round innocence of their faces as they fade in and out. Surely they will wait for her, at the place where souls gather before the Erdtree. Surely they will remember her, and she them, and Grace will forgive them all their ignorance, their primitive ways. She will give as many more lifetimes as it takes, but already her bones are so tired, and her hands are so cold.

She wishes to believe that this is only temporary. That the Golden Order must only be assured of their devotion, their good intentions, and then it will understand. Reconsider. The Queen and Lord Godfrey will put an end to this farce and reveal that no, of course the Graceless were not born of the Queen, and yes, of course they may take their place on either side of their hallowed brother to receive the Erdtree’s blessing. This Order is perfect, or so she has been told. But if they are not of the Mother, how can they stand beside Godwyn? And if they are hers - she has glimpsed the Golden Mother only once, but she is not blind to her features - then the Greater Will must extend to them the blessing of Grace. She imagines how their malformed bodies will dissolve, ash shaken from the remains of a fire, so that only formless silhouettes of gold will remain. 

More pressingly, she wishes to believe that Carmelina wants to stay, will stay. That she still believes in the Greater Will’s influence, and that a perfect eternity awaits them, mending, anointing, perfuming the smell of decay. She wants to believe in the little fire in Carmelina’s pale eyes, not the exhaustion of so many lifetimes of service when all she wants is to rest her soul in the Erdtree’s embrace. 

The things she believes can’t all be true at once, though one of them must be. So she believes in all three versions, incongruous possibilities tangled together, because she is practiced at dissonance. If one accepts contradiction, then anything is believable.

⊱𖤓⊰

Carmelina says she is preparing for a voyage. She gives Tricia the keys to her workshop. “Leyndell is yours,” she says. “The Perfumers are yours. Some in the Order will want that power. Privilege the task at hand, but do not get distracted.”

Tricia takes the keys. “For safe keeping. Until you return.”

“I will return young and supple, and I will find you here old and wizened, bent over my recipes, still grinding amber like a clumsy child.” 

Tricia forces a laugh, harsh and bleak.

Carmelina shows her where the boats will leave from, indicating on the intricately-painted wall map of the palace council chambers, where they meet in the evening light. “An easy journey. “

Where will you go, Tricia should ask. But she doesn’t want to know. 

“There are lands far across the sea, where the light of the Erdtree does not reach those who seek it,” Carmelina says. Her voice is light, and she gestures expansively across the map. “You are proof of that.” She turns to her, puts a hand on Tricia’s face. “I will bring our arts and our knowledge to them, tell them of the golden Capital and the land of plenty.”

Tricia bites back the irrational sense of panic that has been growing in her for what seem like years. “It is far from the Erdtree’s influence.” Her voice falters. “Without the Queen’s blessing, you will die.”

“Yes, a true death.” Carmelina’s eyes are serene. “Forgive me for the burdens I leave to you, beloved Sister. But I am so very, very tired.”

⊱𖤓⊰

“Your Gra - my prince, may I speak freely?”

“I have, as of yet, been unable to stop you.” 

“Forgive me. But your lord brother. He is not - the moon has waned three times already. Still, he has not revealed himself to me. I must see that he is whole and hale, at least, if I should remain in your Lord Father’s service. Do you…would you speak with him on this? I know that you are not your brother’s keeper, but -”

“Who is, then? Not his tutor, terrified of his own shadow. Not the knights who leave us bruised and bloodied. Not Lord Godfrey, who would sooner break our bones than our bonds. Certainly not you. Who is my brother’s keeper, then, if not me?”

“Grace forgive me, I did not mean to give offence.”

“In this place we are long past that indignity, Healer.”

⊱𖤓⊰

On the fourth waning moon, she meets the prince’s twin.

Before departure, when Carmelina had deemed it appropriate to introduce them - not the right word, Tricia reflects - he had not come. Carmelina had berated him, speaking to the empty room like a mother scolding a child who should know better, voice full of exaggerated disappointment. Disappointment, but not surprise. She had left written instruction instead, and explained in detail the other prince’s ailments and injuries. But even as she tried to brush off his volatility as juvenile spite, Tricia had seen the disconcertion in her mentor’s features, the quiet intensity that belied her insouciant attitude toward him.

So Tricia had come time and again, palms slick with apprehension, at the hour Carmelina instructed her, to the same scented prison where she treats his fair-haired counterpart. The Chapel of Penance, she had called it once, full of loathing. A mockery of the Golden Order. The name had stuck. 

But as always, it is empty - no smouldering embers, no lingering scent of erdleaf, no skulking shadow. She waits what might be an hour, or two, trying to busy herself with mixtures and ointments, jars of dried herbs and hot water that boils over a small copper pot she has placed in a corner of the room. She adds ash to a remedy and watches it crystallise slowly, trying to clear her mind. But even fire-gazing won’t calm her, and so she waits in torturous silence, aching and exhausted. Perhaps today she will return early, she thinks. Godwyn and his father have departed on a hunt, and the court has mercifully emptied behind them, nobles of high and low birth alike trailing the hunting party into the Altus Wilds. To witness Godfrey’s legendary prowess when he runs down a great stag, or slays a Runebear in barehanded combat; or Godwyn’s renowned elegance when he draws a bow. He misses on purpose, they say, eyes glinting with devotion. The Golden son takes no life, no matter how meaningless. Some noble fools, heavy with drink, will think themselves knights, and so Tricia has taken care to dispatch healers among the revellers to set what she hopes will be no worse than broken noses and lacerated palms. They will hunt and drink and feast in exultation of their warrior-king, who will return stormier than before, she knows, his bloodlust still unslaked. 

She is packing her small satchel when he appears.

Eyes still watery from her meditation, she expects familiar features to materialise from the shadows, greys, whites, blues, two shadowed golden eyes under a heavy brow. Hasn’t he checked the moon? She has become so sleepy in her waiting. This is not the right time for - 

Then she sees that even in the light, these horns are black.

Before she can gather her wits, he pulls his cloak back with one hand and bows deeply at the waist, a dramatic, sweeping motion that makes the firelight flicker. She is so used to the stillness of the room that the gesture seems almost aggressive, and despite herself she steps back. When he rises again, straight-backed and a head taller than she, he flashes a smile, not unpleasant but still gruesomely out of place here. His canines are long in his wide mouth, horns like obsidian daggers that frame a face at once familiar and strangely alien. 

“Healer.” His voice is whispery, like ash.

Grace be good, Tricia thinks, gathering her robes. Lifetimes of tending to the miserable and monstrous and she can only stand before a scion of the Elden Lord like a dimwitted commoner. She bows deeply. “Prince.”

“Of prawns and imps,” he says, sliding easily into the chair, cloak slipping off one shoulder. He does not have a tail, she notices, but Carmelina has told her of the mounds on his back, great horny growths that may one day bloom into bony wings, if the stories are to be believed. It’s too early to tell, Carmelina had mused, and there have been no sightings of winged Omens for generations. Perhaps there would be, if they didn’t butcher half of them, she finished bitterly.

“I am Perfumer Carmelina’s -,”

“I know who you are,” he cuts her off. Everything about him is darker, harsher than either of his brothers: sharp and angular, cheeks smooth like a knife’s edge as though they have been hollowed out, his eyes set deep in their bony sockets, yellow pinpricks. Tufts of hair spill out around his horns, inky dark, and she wonders dimly if Godfrey’s snowy crown might once have been black. He studies her with practiced disinterest.

“May we…begin, my lord?”

He chews on a long fingernail, breaking off the tip with a snap, and spits it on the floor at her feet. 

“No. You wanted to see me, so here I am. Behold.” He makes another great sweeping gesture, revealing bony wrists from under his plain sleeves with a flourish. “Hale and hearty. Be sure to tell my esteemed Lord Father that I have dined well today - the cheeks of rat, a rare delicacy - and while I would have preferred a different colour, this cloak is suited to the coming cold, and only smells vaguely of mould. Though no doubt his most royal nose was blissfully unaware.”  

Erdtree grant me strength. “It has been many moons since you have been attended to, my prince. Is there truly nothing I can do?”

“You may spit at my Lord Father’s golden feet, if you are feeling up to it.”

She’s dealt with petulant children before. But none of them were demigods. Still, she thinks of what Carmelina has told her. It will take time, he will come around. Showing his hand a little too early, testing her to see how easily she will give up, how he can make her slip. He will want to know who you are loyal to, when it comes down to it, Carmelina had warned her. To them, or to the Golden Order. To their wellbeing, or their father’s wrath.

So much dissonance. What do I tell him? she had asked.

What do you think? 

“I will be pleased to tell Lord Godfrey that you are keeping well.” Then, carefully. “As is your brother.”

There it is. A ripple of tension, his eyes narrowing. 

“Tread carefully with your poisons around my brother, Perfumer.” Derision drips from the last word. 

“I administer only what blessings Grace allows me to bestow. I am sworn not to harm - you know this as well as you knew Carmelina, I am sure.”

He likes that, she sees. Getting testy with him. He wants to spar. 

“Your oath means nothing here, Perfumer. Your predecessor mixed a salve or two and kept our forsaken little heads combed and proper. No more. May you swallow your edicts on grace and blessings, and choke on the Order’s drivel you put into my brother’s head.” 

“Did you say such things to Sister Carmelina?”

He smiles, again the glint of canines in the firelight, a quiet intensity in his thin voice. “Your teacher was a healer, not a bishop. She hated the Golden Order’s hypocrisy more than you know. But you were her little lamb. How could she tell you such a thing?” He leans forward and this time lets his cloak slide off the other shoulder, and Tricia sees the scaly, bare skin of his upper back. Pale, jagged lines cover his bony flesh like a pattern, raised and inflamed, blood still dried and crusted over lacerations that must be only days old. She tries to keep her face steady.

“Come then, Healer, in your infinite wisdom and goodwill. See what your benevolent gods have wrought.”

⊱𖤓⊰

“Tell me about the Erdtree Sanctuary.”

“It is one of the most beautiful places in the Capital, high above even the noble quarters, dwarfed only by the Elden Throne room and the Queen’s chambers. It used to be an audience chamber for any of the faith to petition the king, but now -,”

“I know what purpose it serves. Describe it to me. As you have seen it.”

“The first thing you note is the breeze. The north and south facing walls have be hewn away into arched openings, from where you can gaze down onto the city or up to the Tree’s inner sanctum. There is always light - golden dawn, gloomy dusk, starlight, and the ever-burning candles for the faithful to study by night. Branches of the Erdtree have burrowed through the stone and marble, creating a canopy of golden fronds across the wide ceiling. I wove a little crown for your eldest brother, once, with these holy fronds. The chamber is braced along the bough of the Erdtree, and along its wide branches the Guardians observe the comings and goings of nobles and priests.”

“Tell me of these guardians.”

“They are ancestral keepers of the Tree, devotees of the cult of Miranda, the first maiden to join with the living bough. They carry great spears of sacred Erdwood, and practice the ritual grafting of blossoms to their bodies. Upon their backs they bear great branches, as your Lord Father bears the lion Serosh, so that they may be closer to the Tree’s unsullied nature. For many generations Perfumers have helped the guardians graft and tend their living blooms, and exchange they allow us to cultivate pollens and seeds for our mixtures.”

“Would you take a living bough upon your back to be closer in nature to the Erdtree?”

“I… ah. The flowers would not bloom down here, my lord.” 

⊱𖤓⊰

She visits the chapel in the Erdtree Sanctuary at night, when the city is dim and the palace is hushed. There are no knights patrolling, no watchmen in the inner sanctum. Why would there be, she thinks - this is the Golden Age of peace, of plenty, of perfection frozen in stasis like an insect in amber, unmoving, unchanging. Trapped. The only sounds are the quiet swish of her robe along the floor and the rustle of erdleaves that scatter before her. They are the same sound. 

Across the balconies on either side she can see the capital, rooftops tumbling away like sand dunes into the darkness, spires of gold glinting faintly, cold in the moon’s light and warm in the Erdtree’s. A perfect balance. What the Order has promised. Before her, the path that stretches to the Sheltered Chapels, and beyond that, the throne room, and the Inner sanctum of the Tree itself. 

Here she had bowed before the Lord Godfrey for the first time, half-hidden behind Carmelina, as her teacher promised their lord a successor worthy of perfuming his golden child. Carmelina had once laughed at it, their title of Royal Perfumers - gods need no perfume, she had scoffed, they are the light and the air and the sun itself. But demigods need healers, tutors and confidants. Tricia had wondered at the last one. What could a demigod have to confide in her, a conjuror born under a different moon in a land far beyond the Erdtree’s light?

She sparks a flame in her right hand and begins to light the ornate candles arranged before a vase of altus blooms. The night’s cool breeze, winding its way through the open passage of the Sanctuary, stirs the blooms in their jewelled container, shaking free their pollen. It falls like golden snow across the marble floors, glittering in the light of the fire. The room feels alive then; the sensation of being suffocated in amber recedes as the flickering light carves deep shadows into the walls and ceilings, across the ornate, coiling marble columns of sculpted plant matter, entwined in real blooms and errant Erdtree offshoots. Faces loom down at her from the high ceilings: a splendidly painted, low-relief engraving of Queen Marika, crowned by the many circlets of the Elden Ring, gazing down benevolently at the fertile earth. Her consort, his face chiseled in a stony glower, the beast Serosh gripping his shoulder, eyes inlaid with vermillion jewels. Between them, Godwyn the Golden, still childlike in his appearance - the relief must be thousands of moons old - hands spread in a universal gesture of offering, his golden head crowned by snow-white lilies. There are other icons in the room, processions of gilded knights and haloed saints painted stiffly as they circle the walls of the Sanctuary endlessly, each one with their heads turned to the depiction of the Queen Mother and her perfect order. An order without mistakes, without misfortune, Tricia observes. Of heroes made of polished gold and no ill-omens. 

She takes off her Royal Perfumer’s cloak of ruby velvet, embroidered with silk threads dyed in gold and silver, before folding the heavy fabric into a neat square that she places on the cold marble. Slipping out of her soft sandals, she lifts her skirts and kneels, lowering herself down slowly, doing her best to ignore the ache in her back and bruises on her knees. She pulls back her Perfumer’s headdress, a splendid silken cloth fastened by a band of gold, and shakes out her greying hair. Once she settles, she lays her palms open on her thighs, ankles stretched gently as her feet tuck under. Without blinking, she picks a single candle and fixes her gaze on it, opening her peripheral vision.

Quietly she begs the Erdtree for forgiveness; fire-gazing meditation is a heretical practice. But the Greater Will has yet to strike her down for it, and the familiarity brings her great comfort, so she reluctantly accepts the dissonance of her prayers - imploring Grace to accept the souls of her long-dead kin, may they be forgiven for their ignorance. Soon her eyes are watering, the flame coming in and out of focus. She steadies herself with a few counted breaths before continuing the prayer. 

“O Erdtree, love of the Greater Will,
pour out your grace,
and descend plentifully into my heart.
Enlighten the dark corners of this neglected dwelling,
and scatter there your jubilant beams.
Dwell in the soul that longs to be your temple.”

She catches herself. The sound of her own voice is strange in the hollowed room. She never supplicates out loud. But this night - perhaps she is missing Carmelina and their shared prayer. Perhaps she is trying to drown out the echo of strangled cries from hours spent in the depths of the Shunning Grounds. Or the prince’s hollow laughter, ashen, dusty on her fingertips, an afterthought of incense.

“Dwell in the soul that longs to be your temple,” she whispers again, more forcefully.

Whose soul? Her own, already accepted and given Grace, despite being born outside of it and into heresy? 

“Water that barren soil, overrun with weeds and briars,
and lost for lack of cultivating-”

Lack of cultivating? She has given all to the Golden Order. Her kin, slaughtered in their homes - their soil was not barren, their lives were righteous and full of wonder and devotion to the world around them. How could the Erdtree refuse their souls? How could they know? 

“…and make it fruitful with your dew from the heavens.”

But it has, she reminds herself. Grace has rained its blessing down upon her like the spring storms: opened her eyes to the guidance of gold. Granted her a new home. Given her a noble purpose, and an unnaturally long life to fulfil it. A holy teacher. The flames from the candles around her shudder in agreement.
 
“Come, golden sap, refreshment of those who languish and faint.
Come, heavenly crown of leaves, and guide of those who sail in the tempestuous sea of the world. You are the only haven of the tossed and shipwrecked.”

But they still languish and faint. Those whose suffering she has not eased. Those who stray from the Golden Order’s teaching into corruption - they have chosen the tempestuous sea for themselves, a voice reminds her, reflexively. But those who haven’t? She looks up at the image of the Golden Lineage. Benevolence. Godwyn and his crown of white lilies. Why a heavenly crown of leaves for some, then, and a crown of horns for others?

“Come, glory and light of the living, and only safeguard against death.”

Why, born blind to gold and destined to suffer without promise of repose or return? What hubris required such devastating punishment?

“Come, Holy Order, in your great mercy, and make me fit to receive you.”

Pollen from the blooms swirls around her makeshift shrine, like the flecks of Grace that led her from the shores of her wrecked ship to the steps of the Golden Capital.

Don’t let the smoke get in your eyes, Carmelina would say to her, when prayer made her weep.

𖤓

Chapter Text

“What happened?”

“Ah, this? An accident, with an…incurable.”

“Does it hurt?”

“I can still patch you up, can I not? No harm at all.”

“Tell me of it.”

“My Lord, I do not really think it that import-”

“Tell me.”

“…very well. A Misbegotten, in the Lower Roads, twos eves past. They were very far gone, and I tried to administer the Dreamer’s Jewel. To ease the pain of passing. I think they perhaps glimpsed my hand around their mouth and…ah, it was quick, only a little blood is all.  They are not the first to have struggled against death.”

“Struggled? You were performing a mercy.”

“Do you believe all my patrons lie down amicably without a sound and wait for death, little lord? No. Perhaps some in their unwavering urge to rejoin the Erdtree, but those without the promise of rebirth? They kick and scream and bite. They claw and struggle for their last breath, because all things, Graceless or not, endeavour to live, to push up through the mud and dirt to draw breath. Even fire itself must breathe. You may not have been blessed with Grace, but you have been bestowed the breath of life. I only wish that you fight every inch for it before it is taken from you, as it was taken from my kin.”

⊱𖤓⊰

She does not see the pale prince’s acerbic twin for many more moons.

On days when the Erdtree is dimmed she forces herself to work the Lower Roads, flasks in hand and self-reproach in her heart. Every slow death is a personal failure, every ill without ease is an insult to the memory of Carmelina, Grace keep her. Tricia thinks that if Carmelina could see her at her lowest, she’d cross the Sea of Fog to castigate her successor, and in a way Tricia wishes for it. Carmelina’s return, but the castigation too, she supposes, is deserved.

She knows her teacher is not coming back.

But despite her failure to entice both princes into her care, the eldest - she has come to think of him as the eldest, without evidence - appears without fail: subdued and sometimes melancholic, but as precise as the stars turning overhead. Shortly after their first meeting, she had asked about his brother, and he had simply given her the same advice as Carmelina.

Give him time.

So she does, and with all the inconspicuous neutrality she can muster she begins to show the fair-haired prince some mixing and binding techniques, easy remedies for shallow wounds. For emergency purposes, she intones. For your stubborn and long-suffering other half, she leaves unsaid. She has never seen them spar with the knights assigned to train them in arms, nor with Lord Godfrey himself - who always descends into the Shunning Grounds alone, with no escort, to avoid suspicion. She wonders if the twins watch each other fight, or are made to spar together. Whether they spare each other the most severe blows, or agree in advance who wins and loses that day; and whether Lord Godfrey would fly into a rage if he understood, which she already knows he would.

Sometimes she tries to get a closer look at the knights - Godfrey’s personal guards with their splendidly decorated greaves and epaulets. She tries to meet their gaze and read their expression, to understand what the twins could mean to them. Lords to serve and protect, or threats to manage and minimise?  How closely do they monitor their progress? When will these protectors of the realm decide the twins have learned too much, or become too resolute to restrain?

There is a contingency plan, Carmelina had once said, in a hushed tone, eyes dark. I pray for their sakes that you never need see it, Sister.

In these moments she feels like an intruder in the Shunning Grounds, plotting death and betrayal. It’s no wonder, then, how the fair-haired prince watches her with the intensity that he does, with a tired wariness. He is used to having every movement observed, questioned, sized up like a beast by a hunter - to be feared, and to be dominated. To be conquered. To be civilised by the very Order and logic that declared him savage, monstrous, unworthy. Tricia wonders if eventually all the secrecy will grow burdensome and tiring for the Order, and another two dead Omens is just that: dead Omens, and the Golden Lineage will carry on being golden. Is the prince wary of her because he expects that someday the draught she brews for him will bring on an endless sleep? Or that Godfrey, in his wanton brutality, will descend on his sons, tired of the gilded cages he has felt obliged to build them? Strength enough to bear the lion lord on his back, but not enough to bear the burden of responsibility for his own flesh and blood, twisted into inconvenience.

Does the Golden Order watch her, too, and measure how fervently she prays?

But as long as she performs her duties and reports every so often to the King Consort, she is left alone, at least for now, and that small mercy has allowed her time to grieve Carmelina. She thinks of Godwyn, a man grown now, and wonders if he mourns his old mender. Tricia’s responsibilities have pulled her further from the golden palace. Sometimes she regrets that distance - from holy ground and from her fellow Perfumers, though competent and well-respected, who have taken some of her duties to alleviate her burden. Royal Perfumer Tricia, devoting her life to the forsaken in the lowest places, they whisper. How noble. How sad. Their proximity to the Golden Lineage and the inner court breeds a strange, gnawing resentment in her.

Carmelina’s laughter bubbles up in her memory, a gentle sound of mockery. Do you truly long for a lifetime serving nobles in the golden court, sprinkling crystalline dew over their coiffed heads and rubbing scented oils into their plump flesh when they kneel before the Elden Lord, like fat prize pigs before a judge?

“You are smiling.”

She is snapped back into the present by the fair-haired prince’s hushed voice.

“Apologies. I was elsewhere."

“I should like to be elsewhere as well.”

She winces, embarrassed by the slip up. He is in a particularly bad state today, sullen and disheveled. She almost asks whether he prefers to dismiss her - but even through his simmering frustration he looks at her with expectance, roughspun robe already blotchy with blood. So gently she applies a poultice across a shallow cut on his sinewy forearm, only muscle and bone there, and a faint dusting of white-gold hair.

He tenses, and it’s clear he wants to pull away. Another time, he would have - not because it hurt, but from the shame of it. Something about some wounds deserving of treatment, and others not; bluntly he would tell her, that one is my own fault, if I had been more careful, leave it, and she would plead with him weakly until it bothered him enough to acquiesce. Each wound is a lesson, because everything with Lord Godfrey is a lesson, every outcome predetermined by its root cause; every action with its utility. Teach them what will be of use to them, he had instructed. Not out of any desire to make of them informed citizens, competent lords, or whole persons. They would learn as their elder brother had learned. But what use were lessons in governance and resource administration consigned to an eternity in the anarchy of the city’s underbelly? Whose resources would they administrate? What dignity in lording over roots and rats and semi-lucid Omens? If anything, at least the sparring is useful.

“How is the bruise from last time?”

He draws his cloak over his left shoulder, where a vibrant bruise extends from behind his clavicle to the base of his neck. “Fine,” he says, a little too forcefully, so Tricia knows it must still be exceedingly tender. There are sessions with Godfrey’s most trusted knights, the very few who have access to the princes and know the truth. Then there are lessons with Godfrey himself, always more demanding, more brutal, and Tricia wonders if he realises he is punishing his sons, shaping their sense of loathing as keenly as their sense of combat.

“Are you afraid of him?”

The question startles her even as she asks it, and the way her voice lilts leaves it hanging strangely in the air, foreign and intrusive.

He looks up. For the first time since she’s arrived this afternoon, he is truly paying attention. “Of whom?” But he can’t get the hook of the question mark, and she knows he understands.

Of your father makes her stomach twist like a knot, so instead, “Of Lord Godfrey.”

His long fingers wrap and unwrap around the cords that draw his cloak’s collar, tugging at them like the apprehension in her stomach. She sees his tail twitch at her feet; she knows his tells by now. He is too bothered to mask them, and regret seeps into the gentle motions of her hands treating his shoulder. I will never harm those who suffer. The words of the Perfumer’s Oath echo, accusingly. Her only purpose is to relieve the burdens and ease the ills of the royal family, but instead she exchanges one dis-ease for another with her insensitive prying. She can hear Carmelina’s quiet but devastating reproach already.

“Yes,” he says flatly. She is surprised by the simple finality of the answer. She feels his shoulders sag under her touch. 

What can she say? He loves you. She cannot, because she does not really know that, and even then, love and fear are often interchangeable in family relations. She wants to tell him that it is possible to love him and fear him at once, that these two things can coexist. That you can hold dissonance in your hands like she does with death and the promise of the Golden Order; like she does with the flaxen-haired prince she treats in the golden halls of the Erd palace and his blue-black shadows in the depths of the earth. 

I think he loves and fears you too, she wants to say. But instead she says nothing. 

⊱𖤓⊰

“Tell me of the gods of your ancestors.”

“I should not like to fill your head with such heresy, my lord.”

“You may speak freely, you know.”

“My intention is not to disobey you, but nor can I pretend the Golden Order would not strike me down as a blasphemer, were I to tell you of outsiders' gods and forbidden magics.”

“Why?”

“Because of who you are to the Golden Order.”

“What does it matter here? Pretend that I am not.”

“We both pretend to be something we are not, little lord. But my deceptions are far more malignant."

⊱𖤓⊰

The rain has been heavier since the equinox, and the winding corridors that plunge into the subterranean depths are wetter and slicker than usual. She steps carefully, the scent of damp and runoff assaulting her. For a panicked moment she wonders if the flooding has washed away the Chapel of Penance - the books, the armaments, her shelf of delicate glass bottles that fracture firelight on their surface. Cold ceramic pots with precious oils in their bellies, sealed shut with clay, smashed and scattered in the depths. She imagines the princes, her lord and his twin shadow drowned, claws filed down to bloody stumps and horns shattered against a stone ceiling in a desperate struggle to push outward, upwards, anywhere for air.

If only you could be as creative with your mixtures. Carmelina’s gentle reproach at the back of her head.

The stone passages are damp but not flooded, of course, because mercifully the sluice gates still function down here. Still, she muses. Such a clean and easy way for the Golden Order to rid themselves of this heretical little enclave and all those who know of it.

When she arrives, he is waiting.

“My lord,” she says, announcing herself with a bow, and then closing the door behind her. She sees him lingering in the far, shadowed edges of the room. It might be one of those times, she thinks, when he is sullen and reluctant, and every touch is a barely-tolerated affront, though tolerated nonetheless. On those days, they never speak. 

Belatedly she sees that his cloak is gone, and he has only the robes afforded to him on someone’s whim - Lord Godfrey’s, she imagines - and he is already growing out of these, the scratchy wool sleeves too short, the britches revealing ankles red and scabrous from bites. Patiently, she waits for him to come into the light and take his place, fussing over the candles in the meantime. She turns her back to him, something she has come to believe shows trust - like some kind of wild animal who needs proof she neither fears him nor intends to hurt him, and so she leaves herself vulnerable as much as possible, though whether or not he reads this in her body language is unclear. 

Pouring the packed incense into the brass receptacle, she catches flame in her palm to light the burners. The familiar scent of incense, round and arabesque, washes over the smell of fertile decay.  

When she shakes the spark from her hand, he holds up his own. 

“Leave it.” 

She turns back to look past his long fingers, flames still curling through her own like incense made flesh. 

“Please.”

Only then does she see the misery he’s come in: his robes are heavy with water, hair matted against his face, gleaming pearl-grey in the light. Wet strands hang limply from his tangle of horns, like a mockery of the garlands that hang from windows on festival days. In the stillness she can hear the steady drip of water now, pooling at his bare feet. 

“The flame.” 

Triage, Carmelina would say. The first ill you treat should always be the easiest comfort. 

She sparks the flame again, brighter this time, and holds it in front of him. He leans into the warmth, almost imperceptibly, blinking in the brightness. With her other hand she tries to wring the excess water from the heavier parts of his robe, but she can only do so much one-handed. 

“Here,” she says, and reaches into a hidden pouch under the tabard of her Perfumer’s livery. She pulls out a dusting of powder. “Give me your hand.”

Reluctantly, a hand emerges from his side. She sprinkles the pinch of powder over his open palm, then coats his long fingers. His nails have been filed down from their naturally fine points. Then she brings the flame, clutched in her other hand, and carefully manoeuvres it into his palm, as though giving him a precious jewel, or a small creature, hidden from the world. Her hands cup around the fire as it licks his fingertips, testing, before nestling into the creases of his palm. He recoils momentarily, fingers twitching with the expectation of pain, but when it doesn’t burn him he brings it closer, fixated, like someone holding a wild hawk for the first time, as if it might take flight and leave them in the cold dark.  

With both hands free she gathers the candles closer around them, vainly trying to create a pocket of warmth. She begins untangling the hair from his horns, like the fronds of a willow tangled in the crucible-knot of its branches. 

“What happened?”

He blinks, released from the spell of the flame. The stoic mask of indifference he usually wears is gone, now, his expression one of contrition and the kind of adolescent frustration with the world beyond one’s self that she recognises, having seen it in her own son, or in Godwyn. She cannot remember anymore.  

“The storm,” he says finally. He keeps his voice low. “I was in the wrong place.” 

In the wrong place. Anywhere above the Shunning Grounds. Anywhere outside of the Golden Order’s perfect order. 

“By the storm drains?”

“Yes.”

She makes a mental note of how easily he offers this admission. The storm drains are dangerously close to the surface, dangerously close to the bands of city guards that patrol the Lower Roads for errant Misbegotten and intrusive shadows. Or Omens, who wander too close to the sun. You do not have royalty written on your skin, she wants to scold him. In their ignorance they will butcher you and burn your body, and Lord Godfrey will never know. I will never know. 

She swallows the lump of frustration forming in her throat. If he has told her this, it means he trusts she will not turn and advise his sovereign father, who in a bout of rage and encumbered by unutterable fear and love, would certainly beat him within an inch of his life. 

She slips this token of trust away, like a precious bloom encased in soft cloth in a breast pocket, careful not to crush its brittle petals. 

“Did you not hear the warning of thunder?”

“No. I only wanted…” He shifts uncomfortably, and the flames quiver in anticipation. “To see the equinox moon. And the Erdtree.” He tears his gaze away from the little flame. “It is said only this moon’s light can rival that of the Erdtree at night. That it casts a silver halo over the city, and its leaves become white gold, and that the very stars rearrange themselves to crown the highest towers of the palace, and Mo-” He is almost whispering now. “-and the Queen Mother allows every citizen to take from the sap of the Tree, and purify themselves with its bounty, just as the land is purified with the new rains.” 

It is. She has seen it, spent a generation gathering the moon-bathed leaves every cycle, transcribing starlight onto parchment, worshipping the fractured Erdlight streaming through stained-glass windows as if it too could be bottled, captured and secreted away to be uncorked in this very room. But she has come empty-handed. 

She will owe him all this one day, she knows, but for now she hurriedly changes the subject. “And your lord brother? Was he also caught in the flood? Am I to find him shivering to death in some dark passage when I depart?”

“I went alone,” he whispers, like an obscenity.

“Oh?” 

He scowls, draws his lips thin in the same manner as Lord Godfrey. “My brother thinks me a fool.”

“For wandering above?”

“No. We both wander, it is…all we can do. But not for that.” The contrition in his face gives way to regret. “For seeking the light. Of the Erdtree. For believing there is anything of worth.” He gestures vaguely upward with his free hand. “Above.”

Tricia thinks on this. There is something fanatical about his very rejection of the Golden Order, Carmelina had remarked once of the prince’s dark twin. He is no fool. He knows there is no crown that awaits them here. He believes - knows - they are wrongfully denied, and rightfully owed. She had paused here. And he wants one. A crown. That is what I fear. 

“There is nothing foolish about wanting to witness beauty,” she says finally, unconvinced of her own shallow platitude. 

She works in silence for a while, noticing the slight spring of curl that returns to his mane of hair as it dries. The steady drip of water has ceased, though a damp haze still presses down, as if the storm can charge the air all the way down here. She leans a little closer into the fire, its tongues testing the air, forking around the prince’s index and thumb. 

“It is heretical, you know.” He raises the hand that cups the flame, bringing it closer to her. But his statement is without accusation, as though he is sharing an amusing fact he has plumbed from the depths of some obscure book. 

Despite herself, she smiles. “Old habits,” she says, collecting a handful of sparks from the flame. She moves her hand deftly, like a magician who makes a gold coin disappear, fingers curling and pressing into her palm. When she opens them, the sparks are arranged in a shape - a primitive crescent moon, red and hot, like a ruby smashed to pieces.

Her little parlour trick seems to amuse him, because his face softens noticeably. 

“Where I come from, the flame is a tool, like a blessing, or an incantation.” She closes her palm again, hiding the moon, intertwines two fingers, and then shows him the back of her hand. The image of a sunburst, the embers radiating outward like horns in a twisted corona. “It serves as an aid in meditation, or a well of possibilities to be deciphered. If you can look closely enough.”

He watches the sun dissolve from her hand, the embers blinking out of existed. “Fire beguiles those who gaze into it,” he recites. She knows this edict well, a warning to all those who practice incantations under the Golden Order. It used to drown out her prayers in meditation, before she came to accept the dissonance. 

“The fire of ruin is anathema to the Erdtree,” she replies, finishing the edict. “But is it anathema here, now, as you hold it, as I conjure it as a service to us both? Ask the farmers who set their fields alight to receive the Erdtree’s renewed blessing, burning away the old to make room for bountiful renewal, if they are beguiled by the flame. Or the widow who lights the votive fire to guide her beloved in the hereafter.” She makes a circular, pulling motion above the little flame still clutched in his palm and it dances upward to meet her, radiating but contained. 

The warmth prickles her pleasantly, and she watches the orange flame wash the pallor from his skin, dyeing it red, yellow, gold, and again for a moment, in this light, he has Godwyn’s face.   

“We can call it heresy,” she continues, “but such things erase the complexity of existence. Not all flames are the fires of ruinous fell gods.” She takes another fistful of flame, and - with a quick thought for Grace’s most merciful understanding - places her hand firmly on her chest. Flame spills out onto her like a wave and over her breast, enveloping her torso in a shower of embers. He recoils, startled; but the flame dissipates, and instead of immolation she is left with a faint light pulsating around her, as if she swallowed a glowstone. “If I use the flame to protect rather than burn those who champion the Erdtree, by what right can anyone call it heretical?”

There is a lesson there, about devotion, and the Graceless, and about one’s actions overriding the circumstances of one’s birth - but they are all too pedantic to speak aloud. Carmelina would have known how to teach it, she thinks. Something meaningful rather than facile. 

He is unmoved, but says nothing more about heresy. His confession to wandering outside of bounds has been returned in kind; he admits trespass, and she admits heresy. Tricia knows he could denounce her to the Golden Order - even prophets who glimpse the flame are banished, or worse. But he won’t, so they’ll keep their secrets, hushed, forbidden, a pact in the dark to keep them on even ground. 

She turns to fetch a jar from the little wooden shelf when she notices the books have been newly rearranged. The usual tomes, banal histories of Leyndell’s noble houses or dry theses on principles of governance are still there, but now there is a book of incantations as well, hastily shelved at the very base of the stack. It’s sumptuously encased in leather, gold leaf faded along the cracked spine, lovingly worn. It looks familiar. 

“Someone has taught you the Blessing of the Erdtree.” It’s a statement rather than a question. 

He looks at her sideways for a long moment, but then nods. Slowly he stands and hands her the flame, like a delicate container whose insides risk spilling over. Then he kneels, one hand to the earth, one hand clutching something slipped out from under his robe. Gold glints faintly between his fingertips. A seal. 

A warmth bubbles up in her when he casts the incantation, golden streams of light flowing on the stone floor, tracing the shape of the Erdtree seal. The air around them erupts - incandescent, euphoric, the smell of Erd flowers, the nectar of morning dew - and mingles with the flames’ protection nestled in her breast. Then the light dissipates and he rises, waiting for her to speak. 

“A Graceless Omen who can summon the Blessing of the Erdtree.” 

When he answers, his tone is sharp, and it surprises her. “I know what I am.” Then, a little softer. “It is heresy.” 

Heresy is not native to the world, Carmelina had told her once in that sly, cryptic fashion, without expounding. It is but a contrivance. No doubt something she picked up in a dusty old tome somewhere, but it feels fitting that Tricia repeats it now. 

“All things can be conjoined,” he answers. 

She wants to laugh. “Who told you that?”

He opens his fist to show her the Golden Order seal, wrought in exquisite detail, each branch of the Erdtree delineated in the most delicate yellow gold. “Godwyn, when he gave this to me.”

Ah, she thinks. So that is why the book looks familiar.

⊱𖤓⊰

“Tell me, Healer, does Lord Godfrey believe in Grace?”

“Would that I could tell you he does, my lord, but to say that I knew such a thing would be a lie. He believes it exists, as he witnesses it, and sees its bounty stretch across his realm, of that I am sure. That he rules solely by the Grace of your Eternal Mother, he must realise.”

“Acknowledgement and true belief are not the same thing.” 

“Forgive me. I think only that he is better suited to the battlefield than the blessed steps, and so concerns himself little with concepts of Grace.” 

“Why does he rule, then, if subjugation only brings the peace and quietude that bore him so?”

“A just king rules for more than his own desires. Your Lord Father puts the promise of his people’s prosperity before his own thirst for endless battle, and he is duty-bound to sacrifice that which fulfils him for the good of all. Perhaps one day he will relinquish the Elden Throne and return to the badlands, if he wishes it.” 

“And leave the throne to Godwyn.”

“Yes. If Grace has mercy on us all.”

⊱𖤓⊰

When the constellation of the great lion is west of the Erdtree, she is summoned by Lord Godfrey to give news of the twins.

Are they hale? he had asked on the first visit, when she knew not what to say. Are they unimpaired?

Yes, my lord, she had answered, gaze lowered, and left unsaid, except for the mark of your heavy hand.

He had said nothing of the younger prince’s behaviour, and so she had nervously skirted the issue. Perhaps he had not been injured enough for Godfrey to remark. Perhaps his elder brother had covered for her absence. She allowed herself a little swell of pride, imagining the prince tending to his scornful brother with the few remedies she has shown him.

As every other time, the Petition Chamber of Grace is cleared before her arrival at dusk, and she finds its cavernous emptiness disconcerting. Before serving as Perfumer to the twins, she had only known it in its liveliest moments, filled with the comings and goings of the Golden Order’s congregants - councillors to advise the Elden Lord and his son on matters of state, prophets to bring news of still more peoples from the farthest corners of the Lands Between brought under the yoke of the Golden Order - willing or otherwise. Knights and nobles of high and low birth, entreating their king’s approval for this public work, or that stretch of land; or the lord’s personal blessing on the heads of their unborn sons - may no shadow of ill-omen befall their birth, bathed in rays of gold. Lord Godfrey’s authority was by extension that of Queen Marika, but it never ceased to surprise Tricia how poor a conduit he was for the Greater Will’s sacrosanct message. Most of these blessing ceremonies he left to Godwyn, whose face was a mask of patient benevolence as he christened one supplicant after another with the words of the Two Fingers.

Godfrey is seated now on an ornate chair at the far end of the room, a tangle of golden branches rising up behind his throne, dressed in leathers too modest for a king, though he has kept his lord’s cloak. Beside him on the dais stands Godwyn, tall and graceful in his simple doublet of white, decorated with a stylised embroidery of the Erdtree in fine silver threads, his golden mane pulled back in a braid laced with silk and pearls. He needs no jewels, she muses. He could make stones glitter like precious gems simply by donning them. Vaguely she thinks about her own son, and the man he might have become, if he had been given the chance, but banishes the thought before it can dig into her heart.

Approaching the throne, Tricia kneels, taking them in before she lowers her gaze. Godfrey exudes power, even as he presents himself as an upright lord. Raw strength bristles below his skin, made flesh in the restless form of Serosh who looms over his shoulder like a living crown. But he is still physical, still bound to the earth and the dirt of his ancestors.

But Godwyn - Godwyn blazes like a jewel. Godwyn is the sun and the moon meeting on either horizon, the astral glow of the evening and the promise of coming brilliance at dawn. Tricia remembers him younger, an ever-burning ember of pleasant warmth; but now, as a man, his radiance envelops her, and she is grateful for his presence. She will need his clemency by the end of this. 

The audience goes as it always does. The Twins respond well to the apothecary arts. They are growing predictably into adulthood. They are able-bodied. They are physically unimpeded by their condition.

Lord Godfrey’s voice resonates across the empty chamber. 

“You do your teacher credit, Perfumer. You may go.”

But instead she stays fixed in place, like one of the mournful statues in the halls outside, gaze downcast. Surely she is as white as they are now. “My Lord. There is one other thing.”

Godfrey makes a sound as though he has heard her, but not explicit permission to speak. Very slightly she raises her head, searching for Godwyn’s gaze. He meets her eyes and inclines his head. She threads her fingers together to stop them from shaking. 

“Forgive me, it is not my place to intervene there where your most eminent scholars have tread, but I have noticed, my Lord, that the eldest prince has a talent for incantations.” She can hear the blood pounding in her ears. “Erdtree incantations.”

Godfrey grunts, an animal sound, forgetting himself. Then he clears his throat brusquely. From the corner of her eye she can see the subtlest curl at the corner of Godwyn’s mouth. This irreproachable golden child and his good intentions will be the death of us all, and she grits her teeth so as not to laugh at the absurdity of it.  

“The eldest? Morgott, then?”

She nods, uncomfortable at the intimacy with which Godfrey says his name. 

“Lord Father, if I may,” Godwyn’s smooth voice flows like honey between them, sticky and sweet to catch his father’s attention away from Tricia. “Given my brothers’ advanced knowledge of Golden Order principles, and the myriad uses these incantations have in service of the Greater Will, you must believe such an education would be both propitious and befitting.” Godwyn is being purposefully saccharine, Tricia knows - elucidating, mellifluous, his tone like an overripe fruit. Nothing makes Godfrey more impatient, or more willing to let the matter drop. 

“Do not assume to tell me what I must believe, boy,” Godfrey growls, without malice. “I have put swords in their hands and cloaks on their backs.” 

“And knowledge in their minds,” Godwyn answers mildly. “Why let it go to waste? At their age, I had already learned-”

“Be still,” Godfrey rumbles, cutting off his eldest. “At their age you marched with my army on the fringelands and slaughtered traitors and heretics, still bearing your blessed mother’s hairless face.”

Tricia had treated the adolescent Godwyn’s wounds upon their return, though they had been few in number and superficial in nature. The Elden Lord’s army had crashed upon the peninsula like a tidal wave, butchering what could not be converted. 

“If you would let me speak with them, Father-”

Godfrey rises then, looming over them both, a towering thundercloud. “I am sick unto death of talk.” His sapphire cape, wrought with golden lions arranged on either side of the Erdtree emblem, falls heavily behind him. The leather cords holding it in place around his shoulders groan in protest. “My needs lie with arms borne on the battlefield, not seals clutched in blessings and prayers. Warriors, not priests. Heed my words.” His voice booms, as though they were more than three in the chamber, and Tricia is suddenly afraid he will announce to the entire Golden City the shame of his Graceless sons. “War with the Giants is coming. Their flames of ruin will rain down upon my lands if we do not march first. Yet I cannot breach this frontier with knights unprepared for a cold death on the mountaintops, only to leave my city vulnerable to the upstart pagans in their thrice-damned volcano to the west.” His face is haggard. “There is no age of peace and plenty if I am to fight a war on two fronts, and I will not have my sons incapable of defending our hearth because priests have rotted their minds with litanies.” He rises, huffing, and Serosh’s rumbling growl echoes. The audience is over. 

As he steps away from the throne he looks at Tricia, who lowers her gaze. “Your role is to keep them alive, Perfumer. Do not make me regret the trust I placed in your predecessor and in your order of conjurors. That is your place. And you-” He looks pointedly at Godwyn, still standing at relaxed attention. “-will not fill the heads of your accursed kin with blithering chants about trees and peace. If they are of my lineage they will be worthy of my sword, and I will have no other law above mine.” 

He leaves like a storm, and Tricia’s forehead hits the cold marble floor, a hurried gesture of fear and reverence. His thunderous footsteps have faded completely before she peeks out at empty audience chamber. 

“After that, you might be brave enough to wield a sword on the battlefield alongside my father, dearest Mender.”

Not empty, then. Godwyn still lingers, and he comes over to Tricia, a lantern across dark water, as she struggles up from the floor.  

“Prince Godwyn.” Tricia bows deeply. “Forgive my impertinence. I meant no disrespect to your Lord Father.”

Godwyn waves a perfect hand. “There is nothing to forgive. Your inclination is right, of course. But perhaps it was simply not the right time to ask.”

“Or I was not the right person.” She looks sideways at him, like a parent suspicious of a child’s innocence. She has known him long enough that she permits herself these small familiarities. “You neglected to mention to your Lord Father that someone has already taken it upon themselves to begin instructing the little lords in Erdtree magic.”

He looks at her with the same golden eyes of his brothers, but softer, burnished. “They are not so little anymore, I should think."

“You would know.”

“And Father would not. He is almighty, but he is not all-seeing. He certainly does not see those who are beneath him, like a scholar of the blessed arts, scurrying around with tomes and seals under his nose.”

Her eyes widen. “A mimic veil,” she whispers.

“A conjuror’s trick,” he scoffs, endearingly. “And it is so very dark down there.” He lowers his voice. “I know you, Mender. I know the devotion you have for my family. I trust that you will act according to your heart.”

“I would have no harm come to them,” she replies soberly. “By Grace I love them as I loved you.” She is surprised by her own frankness. Love, she corrects herself, in the present. Her son and daughter are gone, but Godwyn and his brothers are still here. 

“It comes easier to some than others,” he answers solemnly, turning to the path where Godfrey exited the chamber. “He does not welcome my interference. He keeps his cruelty hard around his heart. It makes it easier to bear. Easier to think of them as abominations, rather than his own blood. He has long stopped listening to me in these matters, and Mother has been…” he trails off. “In communion with the Greater Will for a long time, now. Father grows restless, tired and impatient of ruling alone. He looks for war on the horizon, and conjures it where he wants to see it.”

“A war with the Giants?”

“Yes. He fears we grow fat on this age of peace and plenty. If he departs for war and Mother is not returned, I will rule in his stead.”

“But the twins-”

“Can fight. Harder and fiercer than you know.”

She feels the weight of the night settle on her shoulders. Eternal Mother, how many sons will I bury before you let me rest? 

“You believe the incantations will help them survive.”

“They are the blood of Queen Marika,” he says, and there is something akin to pride in his voice, but maybe she imagines it. “Erdtree magic is their birthright.” 

She tries to swallow the dread lodged in her throat. “Their tutors are not sorcerers, and my incantations are barely passable. If they are to learn, they need a proper teacher, though it seems to me your Lord Father did not quite answer our plea.” 

“Ah, but he did. He told us that as long as he can call upon them to do battle, what harm if they are also proficient in Erdtree magic? He has not called upon them to administer districts in the Capital, and yet they are certainly more capable than he is by now.” He shakes his golden head. “No, he will look away. It is all he has ever done for them, in any case.”

"Your Father is no fool."

"And I thank Grace for it, or he might have had them butchered at birth instead."

When Tricia responds, her voice is small. “Do you believe he would release them, truly? To wage war?”

He considers this, lines creasing his immaculate brow. “Yes, I do. But not as his scions. As tools of war, as our people have always used Omens in the past. For their brutality.”

“So, death on the battlefield, or life in a cage.”

“I cannot defend it. But you must trust me to do what I can to keep them alive.” 

She puts a hand on his arm then, with the desperation of a doomed soul grasping for a holy man’s touch. It is wildly inappropriate, for she is not healing or mending, and by what rights does she touch a god? But the plea is there, the message is sent, and she wants nothing more than to see the golden age he would usher in, a lord of the many, and of the meek. A Prince of Gold. 

O Mother of Grace, she prays, let him take the throne.

𖤓

Chapter Text

“Has the pain been keeping you awake, my lord?”

“No.” 

“The cavernous darkness around your eyes says otherwise. Here. Drink. Dusk mushrooms and milk of the Mistwood lily. It can dull the pain, ease agitation.”

“And the senses.”

“Sometimes sleep is the greatest healer.”

“I was told that would be you.”

“You sound like Carmelina.” 

“Does this draught bring on a dreamless sleep?"

“Is that what is disturbing you? Nightmares?” 

“Yes. Sometimes they are vivid, like visions. They are part of this…curse. All Omen dream of them, or so I have been told. My brother will not admit to it, though I know he does. I have seen his face when he sleeps, untroubled at first, and then twisted with fear. I dream of them chasing us through the tunnels, shrieking wraiths like black fire, clawing at our eyes. In these nightmares the Shunning Grounds are…rearranged, like a labyrinth, so that our familiar escapes are gone, and we find ourselves trapped, cornered. Sometimes we are separated from one another. Sometimes we are forced to jump from the mouth of the great well, into the endless abyss, and fall for eternity. Sometimes I dream we have both been blinded by our horns, and we fumble around in the dark, trying desperately to open our eyes, and they descend upon us.”

⊱𖤓⊰

On the third night of a waning moon, a soldier’s body washes up at the Greywater Outskirts.

Tricia doesn’t hear about it until a few days later, catching whispers in the warmly lit halls of the Erd palace. Her nights have been long, audiences with Godwyn and his irascible Lord Father draining. Godfrey has sent her back to work, demanding reports on the city’s stock of dry goods and grain supplies - I am a Perfumer, my Lord, not a steward, she has to remind him - but she takes care anyway to dispatch Perfumers to oversee their most important supplies. Already harvest time has stretched their ranks thin. Gathering parties come and go almost daily, traveling to the city’s outskirts for the season’s last blooms, training novices to cultivate and preserve the rarest among them. Perfumers in service to noble houses are traditionally asked to prepare festivities for the harvest celebration - fireworks and other artificer’s tricks to entertain wealthy households and their guests. Tricia finds it ignoble, reducing healers and apothecaries to cheap illusionists, even as she must use her novices to brace against the flood of demand for their arts. She is overwhelmed as it is, scurrying between the palace and the Shunning Grounds. Recalling her lessers only to have them inventory storehouses instead of setting off sparklers for highborn fools - the nobles will make sure someone hears about it, and the last thing she can afford now is Godfrey’s ire.

So when an apprentice Perfumer brings the news of a soldier's bloated corpse washed up from the outskirts spillway, she tries to hide her exasperation. 

“The Knight Captain asked that you…look at it, Eminent Sister.”

She looks at the apprentice’s round face with all the goodwill she can muster. So this is why Carmelina was tired all the time. “You have told the Knight Captain that a Perfumer’s role is strictly before death?”

The apprentice ignores her sarcasm, or otherwise misses it. “Yes, Eminent Sister. I mean, no, I did not tell him this. But he said you would understand, because…” She fidgets. “Because you work the Lower Roads.”

Tricia’s exasperation gives way to uneasiness. The work of a Misbegotten, they must think. Or an Omen. 

She sends the novice to give word of her arrival and closes the door of the workshop behind her. There is the matter of Godfrey’s request to attend to, and more generally the question of her Royal Perfumers, and whether she herself will take an apprentice soon. But the Perfumers seem far removed from her now, and such problems for a future self not weighed upon by the intrigues and contradictions of the Queen’s bloodline. Godfrey has not been a kind master-at-arms to the twins lately, and Godwyn has been evasively trying to help them as best he can - an incantation learnt quickly, or a healing talisman secretly tucked away - without inciting his father’s wrath. It is not what was promised of Tricia’s apprenticeship, in any case, and it is not a burden she wants to share with another for now. 

She leaves Carmelina’s old workshop by the palace upper gates and descends into the furor of the main halls. The harvest’s imminent approach is evident in the crisp air of the golden afternoon, and the palace bustles with nobles and commoners alike, the smallfolk allowed to supplicate on the blessed steps where a lesser Erd priest conveys the promise of long Erd-lit days to ripen a bountiful harvest. Landowning nobles admitted to the upper halls or the Sanctuary are, on occasion, lucky enough to be received by a Finger Reader. To Tricia, their prophetic mumblings are sometimes indecipherable, but the faithful still consider them the truest messengers of the Two Fingers. 

Garlands for the harvest festival span the maze of golden rooftops, and when she crosses the market square it is still brimming with activity, traders coming from as far as the wetlands to hawk precious stones and strange crystals. Fewer goods have made their way from the southern peninsula, where she imagines the people still harbour some resentment over the Elden Lord’s last conquest; and anyway most are too poor to make the journey by sea. Some great galleys have come all the way from Caelid’s jungle, carrying fragrant oils and strange spices, which she stops to examine at a well-dressed merchant’s stall. She has heard rumours of this fertile land and its nomadic peoples - Godfrey would be wise to set his sights there next, Godwyn had told her once. Caelid’s southern border is a perfect landing ground for foreign ships, and its northernmost tip could be made to funnel goods to the Capital’s south. But Leyndell’s vertiginous seaboard cliffs are its greatest defence, and Godfrey is loath to commission even a great lift to facilitate trade, lest an army disguised as merchants be graciously granted access to the heart of the city. And even then, rumours of dragons and great beasts in the uncharted corners of Caelid are rampant, and the nomads speak only in solemn whispers of those roads yet untrod by men. 

Still, Tricia observes, the nobles have begun to remark that audiences with the Elden Lord are less and less frequent. Even sightings of Godwyn have become few, and far between. Some speculate the King Consort and his son have joined the Eternal Queen in communion with the Greater Will; others that the Elden Lord has grown old and tired, and the Order is planning his succession. What good is a consort, they whisper, if he can only give the Queen Mother a single son? And even then, what champion could take his place? The lesser nobles especially love these intrigues and betrayals, she knows - anything to give their petty lives some colour and texture, even if outrageously vulgar. Only the hardest and most sullen of Godfrey’s knights are quiet, which makes her irrationally anxious. But the commonfolk seem unbothered by the city’s nervous undercurrent, and Queen Marika has promised them an age of peace and plenty, and surely they are owed that, for all their pious belief. 

She is reminded that it is a peace and plenty not afforded to the residents of the Lower Roads as she makes her way into the city’s shaded alleys, below the golden avenues and cathedrals of the main roads and into the narrow streets of bawdy-houses and grimy taverns. Many moons have turned since any incident with a Misbegotten, and more often than not it’s a soldier or guardsman who cuts down the unfortunate creature. Those who are freed from their bonds often leave the Lower City and go north, and despite calls from some minor noble houses to exterminate them, they are left alone. They are too useful to the city as hard labor, and so those who survive the House of the Forlorn become the city’s unaccounted-for slaves, a cruel blemish on the golden city’s underbelly. If an errant city guard strikes one down, a slaveowner may demand compensation for loss of property, but most look away, fearful of retribution in the shadowed streets. 

But the dead soldier that Tricia finds at the gatehouse has no feathers or scales on him, no signs of a struggle with a Misbegotten. Even with the windows flung open, the room stinks of decay. She pulls the fabric of her Perfumer’s headdress over her mouth and sprinkles some scented oils around the four corners of the table where the patrolmen have laid out their dead comrade. Carefully, she peels away sodden cloth and ruined leather from the body, looking for wounds. Even at this early stage of rot, Tricia can see exposed parts of the skin where flesh has puckered and blistered, as if held too close to fire - but the wounds are the festering kind, not cauterised by flame. And their shape - each one takes the form of a large handprint, fingers and claws splayed around the soldier’s arms, legs, throat. The skin is left branded, as though eaten away by acid.

“An Omen,” some of the dead fellow’s companions say. They are huddled nearby, a dark mass of suspicion. The worst kind of men - scared and prone to violence.  

She shakes her head. “These wounds are caused by poison, not brute force.” She looks at the multiple handprints and tries to suppress a shudder. “Some kind of wraith, most likely. A revenant.” 

There is only one place in the capital rumoured to house horrors like wraiths and revenants. She glances at them. “What was this man’s business in the old Shunning Ground cells?”

The men look at each other darkly. 

“And if I return with a seal from the Lord of Leyndell himself and ask again, will you still be a band of mutes?”

“Said he reckons he saw an Omen,” one mumbles finally, features hidden behind oily strands of hair and a helm too large for his head. He has the thick accent of a southern commoner. “Above, wanderin’ in the shadows. Said it’d come too close to the roads an’ he’d have to kill it, what with it being harvest time an’ all. Dangerous.” 

“Do you lot hunt Omens now?” she asks, half-serious, trying to keep the edge from her voice.

“No,” another one answers, “but maybe we ought to. Ain’t no more war. What use is there for ‘em?” He turns to spit over his shoulder, as if warding off bad luck.

Grace, I am so tired.  “Indeed. The same could be said for you.”

⊱𖤓⊰

The hardest thing she does is suppress the urge to go straight to the Chapel of Penance and warn the twins. She very nearly lets her feet guide her to the hidden entrance, Godfrey’s seal of permission flashing in one hand. It is her duty, she reasons - she is caretaker of his sons, and they are in danger.

But it is neither the day nor time she would visit either twin, and so what would she do? March into the gatehouse, descend into the Shunning Grounds and demand to see them? Were she to call out to them in the darkness, would they even hear her? Would they come?

No, she finally resolves. Bringing attention to them might only put them in greater danger, and they know not to come that close to the surface. There are checkpoints, in any case, where Godfrey’s personal knights keep watch. Besides, she believes - with some forced conviction - they are too smart to risk their safety at such a busy time in the Capital. 

When she does finally see them some days later, alive and intact, her relief is palpable. She has words prepared, something she wrote and mulled over in her mind for the few days between the incident and her visit - about staying away from the checkpoints and gatehouses, about tensions high around festival time, and some guards no doubt getting a little too aggressive, and the two of them should know where to seek shelter if ever - 

She see the black-horned prince first, and it takes him less than a minute to confess.

“Oh, that. Well, yes. We tried to hide, find a dark corner, do as we are always told. We did not mean to lead him into the Wraith’s Mire. We were only trying to save ourselves. Poor soul. We would have helped him, you know, if he had not wandered so deep into the blackwater, had not strayed so far from the sunlight - and not wanted to kill us. But it was a revenant, and we are just two Omens without magic, and as you can see I barely made it out alive-”

(A day later she will ask his brother, who will wear his best practiced indifference and dryest tone.  He knew the paths surprisingly well. He gave chase and we could not shake him. So we brought him there to die.)

But this eve the dark-haired prince has come for another reason: he shows her the blisters along one arm where he grappled briefly with the revenant in their frantic escape. 

She bites back the desire to scold him. He doesn’t know her or trust her enough, and if her tone is off he has only to disappear into shadow, and the wound will undoubtedly get worse. And Godfrey will hear of it, she thinks. A pang of guilt makes her refocus on the prince, instead of her standing in the golden court.

“Tell me.” 

“What does it look like, Healer? It poisoned me.”

“Yes, I see that. I need to know what it grabbed you with, and if it broke skin elsewhere.”

He sighs, as if greatly inconvenienced. “We were near-cornered. We could have either led the guardsman into the Wraith’s Mire, or killed him ourselves, but this seemed less risky. In the end, he stepped in the wrong place. As we’d hoped.” He gestures to the wound. “The revenant grabbed me in the scuffle with one of its many arms before it decided I was less appealing.”

She tries to hide her discomfort as a chill creeps up her neck. She has never encountered such a thing - few have and lived to tell of it. But enough to have left detailed descriptions and illustrations of their likeness in books and bestiaries that she pictures now. A writhing mass, amply provisioned in arms. A crowned, hollow head frozen in a gruesome, unnatural wail. 

She wants to ask what they were doing so close to the surface, but changes tact. “I thought your brother usually wanders by the surface alone.”

The prince narrows his eyes. “He does, but he does not usually run into both wraiths and soldiers.”

“He is lucky you were there.”

“Someone has to be.”

“Valiant of you to look out for him. I thought you were the younger of the two?”

“We are twins, and moreover born of a god. What a boorish thing to ask.”

She smiles faintly as she presses a hot, scented cloth over his wound. He grits his teeth and looks away.

“I was not aware you were allowed to pass the western sluice gates,” she says, taking his bony arm in her hand and peeling pack the compress gently. Dead, scaly skin sloughs away like old parchment.

“Of course we know how to pass the sluice gates.” He looks at her plainly as if she were an idiot. “Godfrey’s greatest mistake was giving us free rein down here and confining his knights and guards to their little gatehouses and checkpoints. Easy enough to find ways around those if one is nimble and can see in the dark. Less so, if you can only clank around in armour in the five square meters your sovereign has permitted.”

“Godwyn might have told you to be wary of the surface now. It is festival time.”

She watches his face closely at the mention of Godwyn. Even on his sharp features, something different is readable - more than disdain. Bitterness. Jealousy?

“Godwyn’s honeyed whispers mean nothing down here,” he says finally, his voice low. “News of this soldier’s death will make its way to Godfrey. Somehow. It always does. We did not kill the soldier, we made sure of it, but he will find a way to blame us anyway.” Then he laughs, a grim little sound that raises the hairs on Tricia’s neck. “Godfrey needs no pretext to punish us. But the coming war has made his lessons with us turgid. War makes the old man maudlin, I suppose.”

Tricia applies a cooling ointment to the wound, making sure to keep her gestures slow and gentle. She needs to tread carefully - he is taciturn, but she wants to keep him talking. 

“You know about that?”

Out of the corner of his eye he watches her work, occasionally biting the knuckle of his free hand as if to distract himself from the pain. “Godwyn implied as much,” he mumbles, his voice hitching when she passes over a particularly raw patch of skin. “What other reason to keep us alive, healthy, and combat ready? Nothing spreads the word of the Golden Order more effectively than a hoard of well-trained fanatics and a few trebuchets.”

“Your father means to raze the Giants and their god, not convert them.”

“Godfrey cannot even gain the Order’s favour long enough to make heirs worthy of the Erdtree,” the prince replies acidly. “How can he think to fell a rival god? If what your sordid histories say about Marika and our barbarian father is true, then this will be the bloodiest battle in a generation. I have read the texts. The flame of ruin cannot be snuffed out.”

“The Elden Lord would not march his armies to immolation if he thought it was certain death.”

“Perhaps. Who knows what he thinks, of late.” A dismissive gesture. “But these are not the savages in wood huts of the southern peninsula, or even the primitive sorcerers of the wetlands, an endless thorn in his side. No, this is Marika’s doing - she wants to kill a god, and she will not risk her only immaculate son in this arrogant bloodshed. Godwyn will remain, and we will go to die in his stead.”

“You will be armed, and able to fight.” Tricia winces at her own plaintive tone. Why am I defending this madness?

“Oh, we can fight,” the prince laughs then, a real laugh, teeth flashing. “We can rend and rip and break bones with our bare hands. I can skewer a rat with a halberd and my brother, astoundingly incompetent with a bow, can still throw a dagger with the precision of your sleeve’s satin-stitch embroidery. When the enemy is before us, we can hold our own.” Then he lowers his voice conspiratorially, and brings his face close to Tricia’s. In the firelight his black horns glisten like polished obsidian. “But in the chaos of battle - giantsflame is unpredictable, you know. A tent for the two of us, gone up in a blaze by an errant fireball. Or was it one of the Golden Army’s trebuchets? Who can say, in the chaos of battle? Or nervous steeds, panicked by an explosion, a swift kick with something sharp, a blind ride to a tragic end off a cliff’s edge? The slip of a dagger through one’s ribcage is quiet and clean, and everyone knows giants do not wield assassin’s daggers - but who will look that close, really? No one dares meet our eyes as it is.” 

“My prince, filicide could not be forgiven by the Greater Will.” 

But she envisions it anyway - Godfrey, covered in the cursed blood of his sons, standing over their misshapen corpses, hidden under robes streaked with shiny black gore. But there is only so much cruelty she can imagine in him, only so much savagery; and the loss of her own children is so unbearably present in her bones. So the image that remains fixed in her head becomes one of Godfrey kneeling, still covered in the lifeblood of his children, clutching at one of their lithe forms, a look of doomed horror in his eyes - a look she has seen only in the eyes of those condemned never to return to the Erdtree. 

The younger prince shrugs then, watching her closely. “Like all effective tyrants, the Greater Will is pragmatic. You would do well to remember that. Morgott does. Sometimes I wonder if he is truly a devoted fool, or clever enough to be practical about it.”

A devoted fool. The words are not meant for her, but they sting anyway. What Carmelina must have thought of me in the end. 

Tricia hands him a flask. “Drink,” she says. “It will cleanse any remaining poison too deep to draw from the wound.” 

She almost expects him to strike the flask from her hand, fling it across the room, shatter its contents against the wall. But he takes it, regarding its sludgy, viscous contents with mild apprehension. 

It’s moments like these she feels an overwhelming urge to curse Queen Marika, to spit fire at her name, because there is nothing in the world she wants more than her own children to return from the mounds of earth where she buried them. Instead she will be a willing accomplice when the Queen sends her own unwanted sons to die in a battle she cannot win. 

Merciful Mother, do not make me embalm the blood of your blood. Gods should not die. 

⊱𖤓⊰

“Where does the flame of your people come from?”

“I do not know, my lord. Perhaps it is distantly related to the giantsflame of ruin, or another otherworldly spark.”

“What tales do your people tell of it? …Come now, Healer. This is history, not heresy.” 

“As you wish. It is said the first great king of our people was a humble keeper of the Flame, a cosmic force bestowed on us by the forgotten gods who granted our forebears the knowledge to build great cities and thrive in the endless night of winter. One day a trickster, another god jealous of our warmth, came to steal the Flame and to enslave my people. The humble keeper was faced with a choice: allow the Flame to be stolen and our great kingdoms to survive, but under a yoke of a different, frightening god. Or destroy the Flame, plunge our people into the darkness of ignorance, but remain free of outside influence. He chose to destroy it, and thus our kingdoms crumbled and our knowledge was lost to time. But we survived, with the memory of the Flame and our freedom. So we burn great fires eternally to remind ourselves, despite the cold, of the sacrifices made by our forebears to keep us free from the yoke of tyranny.”

“A capricious god seems a small price to pay to keep a kingdom.”

“Our people have a saying: It is better to be cold than in chains.”

“Heedlessly spoken by those who have never been in chains.”

⊱𖤓⊰

When the Elden Lord next summons her for an audience, she is deep in prayer in a quiet corner of the Erdtree Sanctuary, trying and failing to hush her mind. She has been mumbling the same verses, distractedly, over and over again until the Page who has come to fetch her shakes her from her reverie. It is crassly inappropriate, and she would reprimand him if she didn’t feel like a bloom dried and left to bleach in the sun, like she will crack and break apart at the next strong wind. 

When she presents herself in the audience chamber she can tell from Godwyn’s face that something is wrong. He looks neither at her nor his father, and she has spent enough time fire-gazing these past days to recognise a sign when she sees one. She had turned to the flames for comfort and for answers and seen only warnings. A flock’s flight makes for an omen, a falling star a dire presage, her people would say. The fire had only spit flocks of embers and blood-red stars at her, as if in repudiation. Nothing but ill-omens from the old gods and the new. 

But the fire has never lied to her, and this time is no exception, because Godfrey has summoned her to tell her she will be joined in her duties by another Perfumer. She has anointed no successor and taken no apprentice yet, and so feeling the panic rise in her chest she asks how could that be, my lord, I do not understand, but there is no edict that says the Elden Lord must offer an explanation for his proclamations. And so she learns it has been decided she will split her responsibilities to the twins with a Perfumer called Carmaan, who will attend to the younger of the two.

She loses all sense of decorum when Godfrey tells her. Looks at him dead on, gaping, then at Godwyn as if for some mercy. But the golden prince’s face is shadowed, in regret or vexation, she can’t tell. She doesn’t remember the rest of the audience; she feels lightheaded and her vision swims. She must mumble through some obedient of course and yes my lord before bowing and leaving, but even that she cannot be sure. Did he ask her to guide Carmaan, as Carmelina had guided her? Or simply installed him, like a usurper, in her place - stealing the position she’d never asked for but has come so furiously to protect?

Erdtree, forgive this old fool’s blindness.

Carmaan. She hates his name. It twists on her tongue like gristle. Like someone has taken Carmelina’s name and blasphemed, turned it into a profanity. In her ancestor’s tongue the words profane and beastly have the same root, and she thinks of him as just that - a beast. She has never worked closely with him, but knows his early rise in the ranks had been swift and suspicious. The kind that comes when one charms nobility, fashions themself a pet. She has always thought about such colleagues - and Carmaan himself - more as artificers than healers, better at masking the stench of decay than treating the cause of putrefaction. Carmelina, in one of her particularly biting moods, had once remarked that he smelled like death. Not death’s sweet kiss, she’d clarified - not the fragrant merciful release after long suffering. He had the sickly smell of rot, of something improperly disposed of, lingering, impossible to cleanse. As if he spent all his time collecting dead things from the mossy underside of rocks rather than living blooms or herbs, and eventually it rubbed off on him. It had seemed uncalled for at the time, but Tricia finds herself wondering if her predecessor hadn’t been prescient in her observation. Then there was the matter of his unsavoury apprentice, a brute of man called Rollo, even more off-putting than his master. An ex-soldier with barely any talent for the apothecary arts. She has never understood why Carmaan accepted him as a novice. Probably one of those types who can’t stand being surpassed by his student. And Rollo always seemed like the type unaccustomed to being refused his requests.

With Carmelina gone, she muses, Carmaan must have sensed an opening in the ranks. The old healer had warned her, told her true that others would grasp for her position if she wasn’t vigilant. She has been a blind fool, and now Carmaan is calling her out on it. He has done what she neglected to do - ingratiate himself with the nobles, curry favour and earn their meaningless backing, while she thought herself above such things. But their support proved worthwhile when those words reached the Elden Lord; and scattered among the quiet statements that seeded doubt about her skill, her commitment, her rank in the order - he emerged, fully formed, as the answer. And perhaps the piteous glances she had begun to receive from her colleagues are his doing as well, but she knows she can only blame him so much for her own short-sightedness.

She finds herself choking on bitter frustration. She is still the highest ranking Perfumer in the Capital, but Godfrey’s word is law, and she can’t deny that some of her order have begun to whisper behind her back - that she has strayed ever since Carmelina’s departure, spent too much time away from the golden court, shifted her priorities too far below the city’s wealthiest paved roads, and her teacher ought to have chosen a better successor, there were others who were ready, look at her, Sister Carmelina must’ve taken pity on the poor lamb; and who can blame her, after what happened to her family? The whispers had always been there, but the enormity of the betrayal only becomes clear when Godfrey puts her fears into words. She wants to scream at the Elden Lord, beg and plead and convince him that this is not the way, that Carmaan cannot be trusted, not with the princes and not with this knowledge of the gravest of all betrayals of Grace; that he claims to love the Erdtree but he is a snake who will strangle its roots instead.

But Godfrey has made his decision and he imparts it distractedly, offhandedly, as though choosing who keeps his sons alive is the last thing he has time to care about. He leaves the audience chamber without another word. Godwyn follows his father silently this time, eyes averted and expression grim, and Tricia is left alone with the mournful marble statues.

⊱𖤓⊰

She crosses Carmaan much later, in the stairwell linking the Perfumer workshops and storehouses. 

“Sister Tricia.”

She is technically the Eminent Sister of their ranks, but she does not correct him. “Carmaan. I have heard the news.”

He smiles neutrally. The worst part is his face, she thinks - there is nothing sinister about it, finally. It’s rather plain, normal, even vaguely handsome. It makes it harder to hate him, even for those reasons she believes are entirely rational. 

"Indeed.” His fingers are adorned with splendid rings, bands of white gold and silver engraved with delicate, organic forms, or else inlaid with heavy stones of deep emerald green and milky opal, blood-ruby and a moonstone that shifts like the evening sky in winter. No doubt it takes a great long while to remove every ring each time a mixture must be kneaded or hands rubbed in oil. His palms do not look sufficiently rough, and she wonders when he last departed to gather in the outskirts of the Capital, trailing his rich robes through mud and dirt to unearth toxic mushrooms and hideously sticky chunks of resin. She can barely imagine it.  “A great honour to serve the Golden Lineage directly, though not in a way I could ever have imagined. Blessings are fickle, I suppose.”

“And some of us are less deserving than others,” she replies bluntly, because it seems like something Carmelina would have said. She doesn’t give him time to reply. “I thought your talents most suited to the noblest houses of the Merchant’s District and the Golden Rise. They are so frail, after all, easily taken by bouts of gout and hysterics. Do you not still concoct those wonderful fireworks for the Great Houses at festival time? By the Erdtree’s blessing, I hope they do not startle another dowager into an early tomb.” 

He readjusts the collar of his Perfumer’s livery, the luminous silk robe and patterns dyed ruby-red, overlaid with glittering embroidery. Tricia has long since traded in hers for the standard cotton robe and wool tabard in the cold months, save for her audiences with Godfrey, for which she still displays the skillfully woven Erdtree livery out of respect. She wonders if she will ever put them on again. 

He studies her with his aggravatingly symmetrical face. “Quite. But I have been busy pursuing my own research.”

“How splendid that you have such a luxury.”

“Not all of us spend our time trying to force themselves into Sister Carmelina’s shoes.” There is no malice in his tone, but the words are enough. “A queer choice, naming you her successor. But I suppose we only have so many resources to spare.”

She gives him a dark look, more offended by his mention of Carmelina than the slight to her competence. “Perhaps it is my extensive experience with death, which most of my eminent colleagues lack.”

“The afflicted need our skill, not our compassion,” he says with sanctimonious certainty, as though patiently explaining some fundamental truth to her. He fixes her with the same studied gaze, and she feels like a specimen stripped bare, or else some disdainful, tainted thing he has tasted. “I have been told the Omens are unrestrained and never sedated when you treat them, even in difficult procedures. Brave. No doubt a testament to your experience with the incurables of the Lower Roads.”

She wants to remind him that he has no power over her, and that indeed she outranks him and by vote could petition to have him stripped of his title. But the truth, of course, is that she can’t, because somehow he has wormed his way into the Elden Lord’s favour, and to push back against the inner court would be to insult Godfrey himself. The idea of working alongside or even in parallel with Carmaan is wretched, but it is infinitely better than trying Godfrey’s patience and losing. The princes can live without her, but this bloodline is her lifeline. She has already lost one family, and beyond losing a second one there is only darkness.

“Yes, the Lower Roads.” She is tired and distracted and no longer has the energy to be civil with this man, and she ought to sit vigil and ask Grace to forgive the myriad violent thoughts she has had during their brief exchange. “A work I must return to with haste.”

She moves to leave but he steps in front of her, a little too close. He smells thickly of myrrh and something sweet and cloying. “Will you not accompany me to the Shunning Grounds and introduce me? I have not yet been. It is a dark place, I am told, and foul. No Erdlight reaches it, nor the bright winter moon.”

“No,” she says. “I will not. There are other things to which I must attend, and two of those are the Lord’s eldest sons.” She manages to smile thinly. "I am sure you will do just fine. You know what they say: the youngest of the family is always the easiest.” 

⊱𖤓⊰

“Healer, why is it you no longer tend to Mohg?”

“Would that I could read the mind of your Lord Father and understand it myself.”

“And no one has told you?”

“Told me what?”

“That it seems, on the moon of their last meeting, my brother stole a sachet of Perfumer’s sparkpowder from this new Healer. He has since been flinging the volatile dust and causing small fires throughout the tunnels in the Shunning Grounds. He managed to kill a prawn with some difficulty, but I fear it attracts a great amount of unwanted attention. He also said he nearly set the Perfumer’s robes on fire when he made off with it, and the man was deeply upset. I can speak with my brother, but I do not think -”

“Upset, you say? No, that is quite alright, my prince. Let him keep the sparkpowder. I think your brother will make better use of it, anyway.”

⊱𖤓⊰

In the evening she finds Godwyn alone in the Sanctuary, meditating, robe of fine white silkspun cloth pooling around his knees. He is deathly still, and she thinks perhaps she has seen a sculpture of him in this pose somewhere in a Capital temple, but she can’t quite remember. She clears her throat gently when she comes up alongside him.

“Strange to see a demigod in prayer,” she admits, looking up at the frieze above them. The painted faces of his mother and father gaze down at them, and his own childlike visage, serene but hopeful, the promise of a golden age not yet come. 

He rises gracefully, smoothing the front of his robes. His feet are bare on the cold marble floor. “There are some things I would share with the Greater Will directly, without the influence of the Two Fingers, or my Mother.”

“And does the Will answer?”

His face is framed by gold rings woven into his braided hair, falling loosely past his shoulders. They clink gently when he moves. “No more than Mother does when I ask something impossible of her. She is not omnipotent, despite the Elden Ring. She is a vessel.”

“As we all are, for the presence of Grace,” she replies unthinkingly, before feeling a little chagrined by her presumptuousness. 

He spreads his hand. “I should like to be something less passive than a vessel.” He turns back to the frieze, examining the faces of his holy family. Then, quietly, “My brothers should be up there as well.” 

She won’t admit it, but she has imagined it before, briefly - Queen Marika and Godfrey pushed off to either side, distant, like old gods whose names are long forgotten. In their stead, Godwyn depicted in all his splendour as a king: crowned with the golden halo of the Erdtree intricately illustrated behind his head, a white jewelled lily in his hands. She pictures the elder twin on his right, sombre face crowned by altus blooms for his funereal dignity, and his brother to Godwyn’s left, scornful features softened by a halo of sacramental blooms inlaid with rubies. In her imagination their faces are not the conventionally symmetrical and soulless depictions she is so used to seeing, with their large, vapid eyes gazing at nothing - but instead real likenesses, infused with personhood beyond their status as demigods. But no likeness of them will ever be recorded, she knows, save perhaps the secretive bairn tokens sometimes carved for Omens at birth. She doubts there was ever one made for either of them. 

“Their position is no fault of your own, Your Grace,” she says at last. 

“No,” he shakes his head, braids chiming. “But nor am I doing anything to alter their fate.”

“You have petitioned your father and it has only made him more difficult, forgive me for saying so.”

“Then perhaps I ought to petition the Greater Will itself,” he answers, his gaze unmoving. “Demand it of Mother, rather than beg for it, like a child. Change the very tenets of the Golden Order itself, to erase this division between Grace-given and Graceless.” 

Tricia shifts uncomfortably. Godwyn has always been an idealist, his solutions elegant and harmonious and never disruptive. This is the first time she’s heard him speak recklessly of the Greater Will’s authority, and it scares her. 

You cannot upend the order of the world for the benefit of two souls, she wants to say, callously pragmatic. But she is in no position to speak to a god in that way, so instead she says, “Eternity is a long time. Perhaps something will change, someday. In the meantime I pray for their souls, and ask your Queen Mother for mercy.” 

“You pray for blessings, but you also take action, do you not? You pray for an end to suffering, but you continue to treat the ills of those who suffer. You do not wait on Grace.” He looks down at his hands, the image of a king in humble reflection. “Perhaps I have spent too much time waiting on Grace and not enough time putting it into action.”

If only Godfrey knew how his sons conspire against his rule, she thinks, and the prospect is at once frightening and strangely exhilarating. Grace forgive this intrigue, so far above my unworthy head.

“My brother’s wound is healing well,” Godwyn says suddenly, shifting tone. 

She gives him a rueful smile, grateful for the change in subject. “He must have taken the remedy I gave him, though with no great joy, I am sure.” Then her face darkens. “Does he know about Carmaan?”

Godwyn nods. “I told him as much. I am sorry you had to hear it from my Lord Father the way you did, Mender. It does not reflect on the quality of your work.”

She wants to believe the crown prince, but so much has been thrown into question that she barely manages a nod of gratitude for his words. “In truth, I had hoped to be gaining his trust.”

“Mohg’s?” Godwyn laughs quietly. “He will trust only a single solitary other soul in this lifetime, and that is his twin, and even then it will be grudgingly. He barely trusts me as it is.”

“Is he not good to you?” She remembers what the fair-haired Omen prince has said of his twin, once. He bears Godwyn no great love. But he understands our fate might be different, if Godwyn were to take the throne. He would not interfere.

Godwyn shrugs. “Everything denied to him, I have been given. What kindness does he owe me? But no, he has never been cruel. Not with me, a least. Or with Sister Carmelina, who never presumed to tell him who or what he is.”

“Carmaan does not have such a delicate touch.”

“Erdtree help him, then, because neither does my brother. Mohg will be careful, though. He can be reckless, but he knows the limits of disobeying our Lord Father - a lesson once learned the hard way, and not oft repeated. If there is one benefit the Shunning Grounds has bestowed upon my siblings, it is an acute sense of self-preservation.”

She moves over to where a handful of candles have been snuffed out by the breeze and catches flame between her fingers, lighting them again one at a time. It’s not the first time the young god has seen her conjure flame, and she makes no effort to hide it.

“Does your father find disfavour with anything I have told the twins?” Does he know his sons ask me about heresy and old gods, and that they are full of questions and doubts that I cannot allay? “Is that why he has chosen Carmaan?”

“You speak as though he asks them how they are getting on, and what new things they have learned in old tomes.” He studies the lit candles distractedly. “I wish I could say he chose Carmaan on his merits as a Perfumer, to work with you as Carmelina did. To serve as a precaution of sorts, and make sure they are both well looked-after in the coming months if he does choose to march north on the Mountaintops.”

“But you don’t believe that, and neither do I.” 

“No. I fear the stronger he makes them, the more desperately he will want to control them. I fear he will eventually cut them off entirely from one another. Strip them of the only thing that keeps them alive, and bury them down there. Do you know of the vow they made, to each other?”

She shakes her head. 

“They vowed that if ever only one of them escaped, he would not risk returning for the other, but claim his freedom and not look back.” Godwyn smiles without mirth. “A vow both have always intended to break, if it ever comes to pass.”

Better to die together than to live alone. Something Tricia knows well enough.

She looks pointedly at Godwyn. “Prince Mohg. He thinks your father will betray them both. On the battlefield.” It feels blasphemous to say out loud, so ghoulish and absurd. 

Godwyn presses his lips together in a thin line. Tricia sees conflict there for the first time, uncertainty and disbelief grappling with a willingness to entertain the possibility. He does not answer, and instead they stand in silence for a while. Tricia watches him think through the unthinkable while refusing to articulate it. To accept it would be to contradict how Godfrey has kept the twins alive and hidden until now; but to deny it would be turning a blind eye to the way his arbitrary violence has always dictated their existence. 

“Would you like to meditate?” Tricia asks finally, aware her presence had interrupted his prayers. 

He slips back into his white doeskin boots and straightens his tunic. “No. I have prayed more than enough, I think. Now I must act. There is something I would like to teach my brothers.” 

⊱𖤓⊰

Some cold moons later, she witnesses one of Godfrey’s lessons with the elder twin. 

She is to tend to him that evening, but when she sees Godfrey himself arrive deep in the gloomy depths by the Chapel of Penance, she wonders if she has made a mistake. Then she worries that perhaps there has been an accident, that one of them is gravely injured, or worse. Or the young twin has finally lashed out - finally acted on one of his more gruesome impulses, on the threat of violence that always seems to ripple around his sharp edges. She imagines the mess that will surely need cleaning, Carmaan’s innards slick on the stone floor. Tricia finds this possibility is less upsetting than the first, and then scolds herself half-heartedly for such impure thoughts. 

But when she arrives there are two knights present, whom she recognises as Godfrey’s personal guards from their elaborate bracers. The Elden Lord is still with his son, they say, though they do not specify which one, and through one of the great bolted doors Tricia can hear heavy footsteps. She has never been allowed past these doors, and though she is no longer worried that something is wrong, she is trembling with curiosity. Brusquely she flashes the royal seal she carries to gain access to the Shunning Grounds, hoping she looks somewhat self-assured. They glance at each other, but it seems to suffice. Stiffly, they step aside. 

On the other side of the door is a space much larger than she anticipated, vaulted ceiling above a circular area that might have been a massive drain once, the centre slanted to allow the flow of water. But the stone is dry now, and around the shallow pit there are crates and - she inhales - weapons hanging from wooden racks, clearly used, some bearing the Erdtree sigil inlaid in gold on the handles. 

Godfrey is there with the fair-haired Omen prince, and to her confusion Carmaan is as well, though he doesn’t see her enter. She slips in quietly and sticks to the shadows, hoping to go unnoticed. It’s unclear whether she is allowed to be there, but she will be seeing the prince later anyway, and the fact that Carmaan is present makes her irrationally jealous of his privilege, and all the more determined to stay. 

Godfrey is speaking to a soldier standing by one of the weapon racks, their tones hushed. He towers over his knight, and even the weapons at his disposal look small in comparison, like children's toys. She has seen the Elden Lord’s weapons, mounted on walls like trophies in the upper chambers of the Erd palace. She has never seen Godfrey’s greataxe in all its splendour, but the stories told of his battlefield prowess are legendary - they say the swing of his axe makes the wind change direction and conjures storms; the strike of his feet makes the earth shake beneath him and enemies break before him. But he reaches for a simple longsword now, and even though the blade is dulled, the iron shines cold and cruel in the dim light. 

The fair-haired prince is given a similar blade but shorter, and in this secluded space Tricia sees the Elden Lord still dwarfs his son, impossibly broad and tall. It is harder to tell in the soaring halls of the palace but frighteningly evident here - Godfrey is no longer fully a man, but partly a god. 

Very slowly, Godfrey unfastens and unlaces the heavy cords holding his lord’s brilliant blue cap around his shoulders, revealing plain armour of boiled leather, scuffed and discoloured. A knight steps into the circular space and takes the cloak from him hurriedly while his son waits, wearing nothing but his customary harsh wool tunic, tabard, and britches. He is still barefoot, Tricia notices. He stands perfectly still, like a breath held, except for the minute twitch of his horned tail. Godfrey’s knights have receded into the dimness, out of her awareness. Is the prince’s twin watching, she wonders, somewhere in the dark? And Godwyn? She sees Carmaan to her right, embroidered robes shimmering in the torchlight, face unreadable. The idea of his smooth, scented hands touching the prince’s wounds after the sparring makes her ill. 

Without warning, the bout begins.

Godfrey advances, and already it is all too fast for Tricia to follow. The Elden Lord moves in great heaving strokes, his entire weight in each swing, and when his sword hits the stone floor the sound is unbearable. The prince uses his smaller size to his advantage - Godfrey’s movements are forceful but lumbering, and the prince ducks in and around each stroke, quick and low to the ground, looking for an opening. When he finds one he takes a real swing, blade cleaving the air, but his sword only bounces off Godfrey’s leather padding, and his father pushes right through his strikes, flinging the sword aside and retaliating with great two-handed swoops. She has seen Godwyn train with ornate curved swords and beautiful long daggers, flowing like water, his movements showing no evidence of hesitation or reactivity, like a dance rehearsed unto death. His brother moves with a similar grace, but the gestures are sharper, more decisive. The prince is agile and his strikes carefully planned, but Godfrey’s hulking figure brushes them off, and when his sword connects with his son’s the reverberating clang is so tremendous that Tricia expects it could shatter bone. It is like watching a pebble trying to stop a river from flowing. In the dim light their shapes merge in and out, greys and whites. Some gold, but only faintly. 

They separate momentarily, the scrape of steel still ringing in Tricia’s ears, and the air is heavy with the smell of sweat and iron and blood. Godfrey’s boots drag lightly on the floor as he circles, sword arm angled out, and the prince follows, his chest rising with great heaving breaths. There is blood matted in his hair, and Tricia wonders briefly how long these sessions last. Is there something he must accomplish, some target he must hit or blood he must draw to be considered successful? Or does Godfrey press and press with his endless fury until he forces a yield? As if he has not made the twins yield everything already, she thinks bitterly - their birthright, their home. Their blood.

She doesn’t remember how long the fight lasts. Their forms dance in and out of the firelight, heavy footsteps and nimble turns, ponderous cleaves through the stale air and quick slashes on the spin of a heel. For a brief moment it feels like fire-gazing - the general movement is understandable, but the pattern remains random and unpredictable, and if she looks close enough maybe there’s a truth she can tease out, or a warning. 

Then the prince begins to falter. His sword arm no longer comes up as fast, and each time he gets low to ground he struggles noticeably to regain his footing. He steps back, on the defensive, and suddenly Godfrey has closed off all openings and advances on him. His father hammers him now, blow after blow pushing him back, forcing him almost to his knees and giving him barely enough time to raise his own weapon in defence. Godfrey’s strokes are methodical and even, matched to his footsteps like a metronome, ringing out in the hollow room like a bell’s call to prayer.

Finally the last strike knocks the sword from the prince’s hand, and the weapon goes flying across the room. It makes a hideous grinding sound as it hits the stone floor and clatters to a halt.

Godfrey raises his sword above his head. 

Then a sound like the breaking of glass fills the space. Tricia has heard it before - the chime of a crystal that shatters on a cold marble floor, the sound of ice fracturing like the surface of a mirror. But she can see this sound - a constellation of particles that coalesce into the golden likeness of a sword, raised high above the prince’s head, pulsing with light where he thrusts it to block Godfrey’s downward blow. The glow illuminates both their faces for a moment, pearlescent and haggard and defiant. 

Finally, Godfrey lowers his own sword. In response the beaming blade dissolves like starlight, breaking the silence once again and plunging the room into a dim afterglow. The prince’s empty hand falls to his side first, and then he is on hands and knees, body wracked by great heaves and gasps.

Godfrey looks at him, his face unreadable, dust still settling around him.  

“Good.”

Then he leaves his son, bloody and anguished and silent.

⊱𖤓⊰

"Tell me something, Healer."

"If it please you, prince."

“Why did you leave your people?”

“A complicated question.”

“You may give a simple answer, if you wish.” 

“I followed the light of the Erdtree by necessity, my lord, not because I chose to set out for it and abandon my homeland. I did not think to ever leave my kin, let alone our village, which was fair, on the outskirts of a great city, and though we lived modestly we wanted for nothing. We had food and music and fires that burned into eternity, and the city protected us. I thought I would grow old tending my herbs and blooms, watching the joys of my children and someday their children, as if good things can ever be infinite in this childish way.
But the last king of my people was a fool - a fool and a tyrant who could not protect the realm, and so made alliances with tyrants more clever and greedy than he. Thus our modest realm was razed to the ground, pillaged, and my village burned, just one among so many others, and our people put to the sword or taken as slaves.  I am alive because I left the village, that day. To gather supplies, like any other spring eve. I was an apothecary even then and it saved my life, and allowed me to make a new one here. But little good it did for my kin.” 

“Perhaps it was fate.”

“I do not know, my lord. Sometimes it is easier to believe in the random machinations of chaos, instead of the cruel specificity of fate.”

⊱𖤓⊰

She does not bother to return to the surface after the lesson, but goes straight to the Chapel of Penance and awaits the prince. Seeing the force with which Godfrey drove his son into the ground, she can better understand the persistence and severity of his wounds, and appreciate, even belatedly,  Carmelina’s tireless work preceding hers. For all the rancour of their father, the princes are in surprisingly good condition. She wonders if Godfrey will call upon the black-horned prince next, and she imagines him spitting curses with every blow, wearing each wound as a badge of rebellion.

She soaks dried dusk mushrooms in boiling infusions for the pain, lays out bandages dipped in purifying serums, and mixes rare herba sprouts from her most valuable batch. The work is calming and repetitive, the precision giving her something to focus on and quiet her mind. But as she measures flasks, her shaking hands betray her anxiety. What she witnessed was both cruel and sacred, painful and miraculous. Dressing the prince’s wounds worries her less than the delicate work of drawing him out of his saturnine shell to understand what he has done. 

When he finally comes, he drifts in through the curtain of incense smoke like an apparition, slowly, and Tricia can see he’s a little unsteady on his feet. She takes his arm and he winces as she lowers him down into the seat. His tunic is ripped in several places and she makes a note to ask for a new one, as the chill of the season has begun to descend on the Shunning Grounds, and the dank miasmas will get in his lungs and slow the healing. When finally he is seated he lets out a long breath, slowly, as if having held it the entirety of the fight; his shoulders drop around him and he looks suddenly very small and very young. In that moment Godwyn’s desire to reverse the order of the entire world for the benefit two singular souls makes perfect sense to her.  

"Deep breaths,” is all she can say.

He shakes his blood-matted head. "I have been through worse.”

“I would hate to have seen it.”

She can see from the way his fingers grip his tunic that his hands are still shaking. She hands him a draught. “For the nerves.”

He drinks it this time, without complaint, his nose wrinkling only slightly at the bitter taste. He hands the empty flask back to her and she takes it, observing new bruises revealed beneath his sleeve when he lifts his arm. She turns back to her preparation, but her heart is still in her throat. “I thought he would kill you then and there,” she says finally, if only to swallow her fear at last. 

“He would have done so already if he wanted,” the prince replies, but the twitch of his tail belies his uncertainty.

“What you did - was it an incantation?”

“I…cannot say. I had the seal tucked away, but I did not reach for it when it happened.” He pauses to catch his breath. When he continues, he sounds doubtful. “I simply wanted - needed - the sword, and then it was there, somehow. Godwyn says it is risky and requires immense amounts of vital energy and concentration, but he believes I could conjure other weapons, and perhaps even someday make projections of myself.” Even as he speaks, his voice is low with disbelief. 

“That sounds-"

“Absurd?”

“Incredible.”

“Just a conjuror’s cheap trick.” 

“That was no sorcery," she says firmly. "It was the same holy light as the blessing and protection of the Erdtree. I have seen it many times before. That blade was made from the light of Grace.”

He blinks at her, as if he misheard. She watches him struggle to keep his pale features composed, but the emotions are there. Confusion, uncertainty, disbelief. Realisation. 

“You are wrong.”

“What else would it be?” She wets a heavy cloth in clean water and wrings it out before using it to pull his hair back, combing the blood from it. 

“But I still cannot see Grace,” he insists, resentment creeping into his tone. He shies away from the cloth. “How could I manipulate something I cannot witness?”

“Godwyn showed you this, did he not?”

“He…” The prince hesitates. “He explained it to me, I suppose. When he first gave me the seal, and taught me the incantation. He tried to show me how to channel -” Then he waves a hand brusquely, cutting himself off and startling Tricia. “Enough. Whatever it is, I created it with the help of the seal. A trick. No more than your little flame.”

She chafes at the insult, though she knows it’s not his intention. “Little prince, you parried a blow with a sword made of holy light. Is this not what you longed for, all this while? A glimpse of Grace?” She almost wants to shake him. This is near miraculous, don’t you understand? “Godwyn gifted you the Erdtree seal for this very purpose. You are a son of Queen Marika, Erdtree magic is your birthright -"

“Birthright?” He nearly spits the word. “What right do I have, without Grace, to claim its magics? Of what service can I be to the Golden Order if I am still blind to its principle tenets?”

She knows he is right, of course. He has lived the truth of the Order: polished clean, gilded into some unknowable, immutable perfection; its uneven parts scraped and sandpapered away, like excess varnish, like dead skin. Omens are simply faults that must be sloughed off for the sake of purification. There is no allocation for traces of Grace. Monsters are not given crumbs of holy magic by accident of their birth. 

But she stops what she is doing anyway and turns to face him. His look is defiant, but he’s exhausted and agitated - and perhaps confused by what he’s been able to do - and behind his stubborn brow she recognises a deep well of resignation. The younger prince’s words echo in her mind. Sometimes I wonder if he is truly a devoted fool, or clever enough to be practical about it. He is trying to protect himself now, she realises. From the possibility. To hope beyond hope is a fool’s errand. An Omen cannot wield Grace, not matter how highborn. 

“Those who are Graceless still have a right to exist fully,” she says, trying her best not to let him slide too far back into the well of resignation. She tries to convey some of Carmelina’s stern insistence when she looks at him. “Are you not still the son of the Queen Eternal, even without Grace? You still live and breathe, struggle and relish, as Lord Godfrey did before ascending to the throne. You learn the same things as your golden brother and see the same night sky, even from a different vantage. Would you make the same disparaging condemnation of your twin, hollowed without Grace, though you would die for him?” He has never said as much, but she knows it by now. “Do you believe that I would be here, the most eminent Perfumer in Leyndell, if I treated my patrons according to the amount of Grace in their soul, like a cup only worth its contents? Is that really what you wish to be? An ambulatory chalice? You are the blood of the Golden Lineage, with or without Grace. Your magic proves it.” 

He looks away, face still a mask of resentment. Tricia’s voice was even, insistent, direct, but even so she resists the desire to apologise for speaking out of turn. She works in silence for a while, and her words weigh in the space. She replays them in her head like verses of a song, wondering what she should have said differently. 

When he finally breaks the silence, his voice is tremulous. "What use is there for an empty cup?”

The question is addressed to the quiet room as much as it is to her. But she must answer anyway, because she fears he’ll take the silence back into the dark of the Shunning Grounds’ solitude. 

"When your father marches north, you will be called upon to protect the realm. What greater role than that?”

It's comically hypocritical, of course - he will be asked to die alongside his brother defending a realm that took everything and gave them nothing in return. This is a practice in dissonance that not even prayer has prepared her for. He wants nothing more than to prove his worth, but all she can think to do is scream at him to get out from under the yoke of the Order, his father, this curse and the weight of shame that breaks his back. 

"The realm does not want my protection.”

“It might, someday. Mother have mercy, but what would you do if the fires of ruin fell upon your holy family, and there was no one else to carry on? I had that choice, once. I thought the best thing I could do without my kin was die. I was wrong. And I am no one, little lord. I am as replaceable as a single leaf from the living crown of the Erdtree, a Healer to those the world does not care to see healed. Your responsibility is so much greater than mine - to your people, Grace-given or Graceless, your city, your mother’s kingdom. What role would you play then, Prince Morgott?” She tries not to let her voice falter and fails. 

He becomes very still, and by then she has paused her ministrations to speak, so they remain unmoving in the silence. It is cold and dull, like the steel of the sword that has carved so many shapes into his body. 

“Leave,” he commands at last, though his voice carries a hint of pleading. “I wish to be alone.”

He does not look at her as she gathers her things, snuffing out the firelight and taking care to leave some bandages and ointment on a corner of the lonely wooden shelf. She wonders what Carmelina would have said to him now, what stern lesson or placid comfort she might have given. Then she thinks about the things she might have told her children, in the days and hours before they died, things she will forget to say to them before they are reunited in the place where souls gather at the Erdtree. If that day ever comes. She goes to slip out the door into obscurity, and stops. 

“You would make a noble king,” she says quietly, without turning to him. 

She hears him laugh without humour, the same harsh, hollow sound she remembers from the first time they met. “A king of nothing.” 

“Better a king of nothing than a tyrant of many.” 

She closes the door softly. 

𖤓

Chapter Text

𖤓

“Godwyn has told me a curious thing, Healer. He spoke to me of the Fell God of the Giants, and the power of the giantsflame of ruin.”

“Better you ask him about these heretical subjects than I, my lord.” 

 “It is written that the flame cannot be extinguished but will burn for eternity, and that we cannot defeat the fire itself, only destroy the Giants. He believes that upon eradicating them, the Queen will appoint a new order to guard what remains of the flame, to prevent its use against the faithful of the Greater Will.”

“Your Mother’s machinations are beyond me, but I suppose one cannot convert fire to a new religion.”

 “Would you do this?”

“Do what, my lord?”

“Become a caretaker of this fire. You have spoken of your people’s fires that burn eternal, and you can read them. The flames.”

“Fire is my people’s tool, prince, not their god. It is generous, and has many secrets to impart. But if you stare too long and too hard, you may lose yourself in it.”

“Fire truly does beguile, then.”

“Only if you do not blink.”

⊱𖤓⊰

For the first time in a long time, Tricia becomes acutely aware of the future.

Something about the long life promised to her by the Erdtree’s blessing had always diffused the passage of days. Instead of the stark downward march of years like sand in an hourglass, she felt the moons pass softly over her eyes like a veil. She lived in a circle rather than a straight line, tracking the changing weather by planting and gathering, the seasons by equinox festivals, and the moons by her visits to the Shunning Grounds. Or the other way around.

But the reality of the coming war has thrown all of that into chaos, and so instead of the warm reassurance of harvest’s end, a frantic hoarding takes place across the Capital and among the people. Merchants stream through the city gates in impossible numbers, and both the commonfolk and the royal treasury buy everything there is to be had, anticipating the march on the Mountaintops. Most of it will not stay in the Capital, she knows, but will follow as provisions for the Golden Army into the barren mountains. The harvest had been abundant, but if the war goes badly she expects a lean winter. And so every root is ground and stored, every bloom dried or preserved, every redundant beast slaughtered for its meat and fur and fat. Her Perfumers work tirelessly alongside the stewards and castellans of the palace, and the army’s provisioners are kind and pay well; but each day is still a race against the next setting sun, always lower on the horizon than yesterday’s. She feels everything around her in perpetual motion, save for the certainty of war which sits, looming on the horizon, like a raven bearing ill news.

There is a list she must draw up - names of Royal Perfumers who are next in line for her position, should she meet her end in the coming war. She finds the exercise absurd and disquieting, though she sits down purposefully to do it. Then her mind wanders, and she thinks of someone else taking her place in the Shunning Grounds, or of Carmaan taking charge of both princes, and the disgust makes her drop her quill and return to her duties, ill at ease.

Even the few guardsmen and knights who patrol the Shunning Ground depths seem to feel the agitation on the surface. They keep their weapons close, strain their eyes for monsters in the shadows where there are none. The weapons of Godfrey’s brutal lessons, once dulled and blunted, now bear edges that gleam in the torchlight. She finds boiled leather and thin coats of mail strewn by the narrow entryways, torn and battered, and she finds the fair-haired prince in much the same state, though he is always careful to dismiss everything but the worst of the injuries. She thinks of the sorry state his brother must be in. She begins to notice the empty jars and salves she leaves at the Chapel of Penance are disappearing, and gradually reappearing much later in the paths leading from the Shunning Grounds, shattered as though thrown and leaking vile, unknown substances. She brings it up with the eldest twin, and he gives her a look he no doubt learned from his father, and she has no choice but to accept when he simply tells her that his younger half grows ever more restless and bored and appropriates things for his own devices. Between her salve pots and the sparkpowder pilfered from Carmaan, she imagines the black-horned prince equipped with an arsenal of Perfumer’s tricks, roving and terrorising the Shunning Grounds. 

She does not see Carmaan and is grateful for it, though whether he is actively avoiding her - or she him - remains a mystery. The Elden Lord does not receive them in audience at the same time, and Tricia finds this unusual. She wonders if Carmaan has told Godfrey of his youngest son’s habitual insolence, and what kind of punishment it warrants. She makes a point to quietly continue teaching the fair-haired prince how to treat wounds in greater detail - a dagger’s bite, a burn from a torch held too close, even a wraith’s poison. Whatever aid the black-horned prince cannot get from his twin is at least administered by Godwyn, she hopes; though she doesn’t put it past his vindictiveness to refuse Godwyn’s help. She is sure Lord Godfrey must know by now that the common thread between his court and the twins is Godwyn, but Godfrey is not omnipotent, and perhaps he chooses not to acknowledge the loyalty his sons seem to have for one another. Or simply does not see it, his gazed so fixed on the white-capped mountains and their promise of war.

She wonders this as she bends the elder prince’s wrist back and forth, testing his mobility and feeling for stiffness along the forearm. He has begun sparring with a spear, he tells her, and is having trouble getting used to the range of motion.

“Why spears? I am not master-at-arms, but a sword seems quicker and easier, a dagger even more so.”

The prince shrugs in his noncommittal way, watching her work. “I do not disagree. But spears have greater range than swords, and when one's target is the size of a Giant, it is a welcome advantage. Godwyn said Lord Father has commanded the weaponsmiths to forge great spears of gold in the shape of the Erdtree, for all Leyndell soldiers to wield. I would sooner have one of the great living swordspears of the Tree Guardians - those that bloom into thick, thorny boughs.”

“A distinct disadvantage in fiery combat.” She releases his wrist. “Does Godwyn tell you everything that happens in your father’s court?”

“Mostly,” he replies. She makes it evident she wants to know more, so he relents. “Though not always like this. Before, when he would come to us, he would speak of everything else - of the shape of the world, and the histories of our people, and those of neighbouring lands. Even legends, like the cities of the Night and the great stone dragons - everything except life at court. It was Father who insisted we have some kind of…lordly education.” He winces at the words. “Perhaps Godwyn feels it is his duty to keep us apprised of Father's court. And so we know things only heirs to a great kingdom would know, and we will never use this knowledge. Or truly understand it, I suppose.”

“Do you want a crown?” The question tumbles out, without forethought; they have not spoken of such things for a while, and for good reason. But despite her abrupt query he doesn’t flinch, or seem stirred to anger.

“Truly?” He looks away for a long moment, brow knitted, and Tricia wonders whether he is deliberating his answer, or deciding whether she merits the truth.

When he does reply, he makes a point to look back at her, so she takes his word as truth. “No, I do not think so. It seems a lonely thing. Godwyn says Father becomes more isolated, and the Queen Mother is…” He shifts, considers his words. “She becomes something else, when she leaves to commune with the Greater Will. Some empty, isolated thing; a vessel without personhood. I do not presume to know what my brother fears, but the prospect of such an existence must frighten him. He is duty-bound to accept it, though, should the crown ever come to him.”

There is deference in his voice when he speaks, but also a little resentment. She thinks about Godwyn, the halcyon son so beloved by his people - real, tangible and within reach. Not some distant divinity but a lord who walks among men. She imagines how the Elden Ring would drink of his humanity until nothing was left but the brittle husk of a once-gentle man. 

“Godwyn is devout as any I have seen in my long life,” Tricia acknowledges, stepping carefully. “Perhaps he would be free to remake the Golden Order in the way he sees fit.” Bring true peace, she thinks. Raise you both up to your proper place, she doesn’t say.

The prince keeps his face as neutral as possible. “He will do what is best for his people.”

Sometimes she forgets that he has cultivated centuries’ worth of equanimity, despite the circumstances.

She works in silence for a while longer, examining the prince’s hands with interest. She had found them raw and tender before, palms calloused and blistered. One of his knuckles had been scraped to the bone, glistening white like pearl, and after each new bandage he would return with it bloodier and filthier than the last. But now she finds his long hands whole and unbroken, only faded scars where she knows there were deep cuts barely a few moons past. She turns them over - the right hand is smoother than the left.

“It heals you better than I.”

He looks away. He’s realised, of course, that the holy magic he endeavours to master has healing properties. Each sword he summons in stunning gold, each dagger he fashions with light mends the hand that wields it. He needs no seal, summons no incantation. She has never seen anything like it. He will not speak to her of it - and she won’t pry, not after the first time - but she knows Godwyn cultivates this gift he has given his brother. Each time she catches a glimpse, the light is brighter and the weapon stronger, more solid.

“It does not work on Mohg.”

She looks up sharply, surprised by this offering. “The magic?”

“The healing.” The prince's mouth is set, and she’s seen this demeanour before. He will speak despite himself, but brook no argument afterward. “I cannot manifest a sword that will heal him, by touch or otherwise. I cannot offer him the benefit of the light; it is mine and mine alone.”

“Has Godwyn tried to teach him, as he taught you?”

He frowns. “Even if Mohg had any inclination for Erdtree magics, he would never use them. On principle. Godwyn cannot convince him otherwise. But I know he has other abilities. He is working to master…” Here he gives a little incline of the head and a tired sigh, and Tricia is reminded of an overburdened parent. “Fire.”

She laughs, despite herself. “Does he pilfer more sparkpowder from my fellow Perfumer?”

“No, Mohg has refused his ministrations for several moons now.” His expression darkens suddenly, and his voice takes on an unusual edge. “I do not trust this new Perfumer, Healer. Say what you will of my brother - that he is wanton and belligerent, or simply ungrateful - but never was he cruel to Carmelina. Or to you. Even Godwyn he tolerates, despite his jealousy for the love our people bear him. On the subject of Father we disagree, but this-” He shakes his head. “I have not the gift of foresight, but these are more than misgivings. This man will only do my brother harm. I have dreamt of him, broken by fire and poisoned by blood.”

Tricia feels a quiet chill at the mention of his dream. “Have you spoken of this to your father?”

He gives her a look that borders on disdain. “So he can tell us to be still, and grateful for our breath? You know better than that, Healer.”

It feels strange to be reprimanded by him, but he is not a child, she reminds herself. Godwyn was even younger when he marched alongside his father for the first time. Her children younger still when death rode upon their village. Tricia hurriedly shuffles her grief elsewhere before it threatens to blossom.

The prince seems not to notice her momentary gloom. “There is something else I would ask of you, though.”

“I am at your service, your Majesty.”

“I implore you not to call me that,” he reproaches, and never does he sound so much like a petulant highborn as when he demands not to be addressed as one. She chuckles, and the grief fades again into the background.

But his expression turns serious once again, and she understands it will not be some mundane curiosity about the outside world. “My brother will not return to this Perfumer if he can help it, and Godwyn and I can only do so much. I need you to show me something.”

“Oh?”

“On his left side. There is a horn that has begun to spiral back slowly. Toward his face.” For a moment he looks a little uncertain; then he steels himself. “If it comes to this, I need you to show me how to remove it.”

Tricia stops what she is doing and considers. She hasn’t seen his twin in many moons, it is true, but the news does not surprise her. Rather than spiralling outward like his brother’s, the younger lord’s horns curl inward as they grow, giving him a remarkably symmetrical but dangerous crown. She knows beasts in the wild are sometimes killed by the slow puncture of their own horns, and she has treated a few other Omens in the Shunning Grounds whose horns have wrapped around themselves and punched through skin and bone. Most did not survive.

She wants desperately to examine it herself, to treat what ought to be a part of her duty, by Carmelina’s succession. But in truth she had not remarked on the growth pattern of his horns, and the prince is best placed to ascertain his brother’s condition. As much as she would rather do it herself, she cannot imagine letting Carmaan anywhere near the twins to cut their horns, nor does she think the young lord would be a remotely willing patient. It is too late to excise any of the large horns entirely, but they can be trimmed without much trouble.

“I can show you,” she says finally. “But it is not pleasant.” She knows because Carmelina had her practice on goats for what felt like an eternity, but she thinks to tell the prince such a thing might be insulting.

She watches his features smooth over with relief. “Better to endure the pain than to lose an eye.”

Instinctively she reaches out then, and touches the scurs on the left side of his face. Bits of scab-like growths have replaced horns that would have grown, had Carmelina not intervened. He stares, but does not pull away.

“You do not remember when Carmelina removed these?”

“No,” he admits. “I was too young.”

How many centuries ago was that, she wonders. She quietly hopes Carmelina is getting the rest she deserves.

Her hand moves over to the right side of his face, where his tangle of horns is thickest. The twins are on the cusp of adulthood, she guesses, based on her knowledge of Godwyn’s laboriously long coming-of-age. But there is a cluster of small bumps above the prince’s right eye that seem more like undeveloped horns than lingering scurs. She could disbud them now, but the procedure is risky, and immensely painful. Or she could wait and see, let them grow and then trim them once they break skin; there would be less pain, though she knows to wait means to risk complications around the eye.

But she doesn’t want to alarm him now, so instead she only nods. “I will have to keep watch on these, as well. They worry me. As for your brother-” She sighs. It can’t be helped. “I will do what I can to prepare you, if you think it necessary to save the eye. And if he allows it.”

“He will,” the prince answers, sounding sure. “He is vain like that.”

“I can bring the necessary implements the next-”

He holds up a hand. “I am grateful, Healer, but it can wait. Show me when we have returned from the war, and I will do it; but not before. Our horns will not keep growing if we are dead.”

⊱𖤓⊰

She sees the prince only a handful of times before they march north.

He leaves with Lord Godfrey and his personal guard at the head of a great host, the high lords resplendent in gold and bronze, flying great Erdtree banners that stream like rivers in the autumn wind. She watches from a balcony of the Erdtree Sanctuary, among Godfrey’s inner court, while Godwyn sits on the throne, a gold cloak of heavy brocade trimmed with white fur flung over one shoulder. The circlet around his head and the seal around his neck declare him regent, but the expression on his face is grim, even as he speaks lofty words to the nobles and commonfolk of the Golden Order’s coming victory. She wonders if he can see the twins from his vantage point: small and unremarkable in the midday light, not far behind their father’s procession, hooded and mounted on great steeds, trailed by an escort of riders in unadorned black cloaks. Godfrey’s personal knights wear gleaming bronze helms, decorated with gnarled shapes that twist and arch like the roots of the Erdtree, and so the spiralling horns hidden beneath the twins’ heavy hoods go unremarked, as far as she can tell.

Mother is close, Godwyn had said to her, on the eve before they marched. She had not known then what he meant.

Grace keep you, Tricia had answered simply, and pressed his hand to her forehead as she bowed.

She set off with the supply caravans a few days later.

⊱𖤓⊰

“Godwyn will be proclaimed regent in my father’s absence.”

“Yes, until the war is over, or until-”

“I know how succession works, Healer. But will the court obey him? I know he is loved by the people, but will they accept him in my father’s absence?”

“Godwyn is a placeholder for your father, my lord. Power resides where men believe it resides. Your people will obey a shadow on the wall if the Greater Will and the Elden Lord command them. Though it is always easier to rule if that shadow is well-loved. Or feared.”

“My brother says under his rule no wars shall be waged, and the Lands Between will know peace.”

“Your brother is an idealist.”

“Yet I would sooner bask in his well-loved shadow than be caught in the devouring eclipse of my father.”

⊱𖤓⊰

She walks as often as she can on the first part of the journey. The ground is even and the pace is manageable, and they have been told not to exhaust the beasts of burden. The hardiest ones are the goats, who will follow them all the way to the secondary camps to be slaughtered and sent onward as food for the forward camp. She watches the men-at-arms herd them in tight lines, their nervous braying cutting through the leaden sound of marching, their horns glinting in the golden afternoons. She keeps an eye out for roots and late blooms, anything she can gather that will be of use, careful not to stray too far from the procession.

Once they reach the snowfield, the blooms disappear.

Each day the trail becomes more punishing, and the supply train must stop periodically to equip the infantry with furs, and the caravans with spikes and chains on their wheels to bite into the ice. The field medics and men-at-arms huddle closer together, white faces embraced in haloes of pale fur, eyes vacant and staring; glints of ice and snow on dark eyelashes, intimacy on strange faces. Steel freezes to the touch and boots cleave through snow, but still they march. The golden light of the Erdtree becomes cold and white, but unlike the moon it is too close, too oppressive, as if the sky is a crystal about to smash down on them. In daylight the snow is unbearably bright, and it feels like someone is cutting the back of Tricia’s eyes. When the light dims, the cold is somehow wetter, and it burrows deeper into her bones, like the roots of a tree breaking through rock, drinking the warmth from her.

Messengers on horseback appear like ghosts through the snowfall, bringing word from the forward camp, urging them on, taking what they can ahead. Tricia can see the slow fear creep through her ranks of Perfumers, like the cloud that reveals their breath. The second camp is still a day’s march away, so she encourages them to begin preparing remedies, to soak and mix what they can before they reach the first skirmish territory. More than anything she wishes to distract them. On the eve of the last day a caravan fails to claw deeply enough into the ice, and with a great groan the snow beneath seems to move as if of its own accord, and the wheelhouse plunges back down the slopes, dragging men and horses to their death. It seems to her they all step lighter after that.

⊱𖤓⊰

The night sky is clear on the hour they crest the hill to the second camp. She can see the forward camp in the distance, half a day’s ride over the rocky terrain and dunes of ice and stone. Fires dot the horizon like stars, and in the moonlight, she thinks perhaps she can see the glow of the Erdtree banners, rippling defiantly.

Some nights she dreams of embers falling like snow, red starlight, and then blood.

For the first few days the barren landscape reminds her of home, but she discovers the air up here is harsher, thinner. Even the cookfires stoked day and night sputter and gasp for breath. Only conjured flame, imbued with fortification imparted by the Two Fingers, survives the howling wind. She adds her own fire to that, quietly feeding coals that have lost their spark when no one is looking. Some soldiers butcher animals for the cookfires, some walk sentry along the camp’s edge. Trenches are dug and filled with pikes large enough to skewer a Giant. Fire, it was found, did nothing to slow their progress. She begins to understand why the men fear the giantsflame - the roar of its approach, the searing heat in empty lungs - here, in this place where all other warmth is gone.

The supply train flags at times - caravans caught in snowdrifts, ballistae and other great siege engines that cannot make it over hills and through valleys. In the first weeks alone she has seen a hundred men die of exposure, and since then the supplies of furs has tripled, but still morale was devastated early on. The men have come to realise this is not the siege of the fringelands or the peninsula, where Godfrey marched his army along the coast and resupplied by ship; else hunted and foraged the fertile land. They expected an invasion - a quick and brutal show of force, like a landslide, and instead found themselves in a prolonged siege, like a squall breaking fruitlessly against alabaster cliffs. The whispers of fear and discontent grow louder by the firelight, though they don’t dare question their lord’s orders. By night it’s easier to wonder whether they might have been spared the bloodshed had they only been a little more pious or prayed a little more fervently.

But Godfrey is no stranger to the rhythm of war, and soon enough supplies from Leyndell are reinforced. More men pour across the northern border, and great lumbering engines are created to be hauled more efficiently through the snowfields and up the icy cliffs, bearing siege machines and beasts of burden.

Some nights she dreams of soaring golden ceilings, shattered to reveal the black of night. She dreams of chains around her son and daughter’s necks.

Some of the young healers and infantrymen break quickly - they are inexperienced, and all they have known is peace and the sickness of the idle. Some fall into despair or hysterics. Tricia has her Perfumers prepare remedies for them, to steel the nerves and blunt their new, acute awareness of mortality. She herself has never served on a battlefield, but she has fled war and ruin and death and lived, so she is spared the sensation that the world is ending around her. She comforts young and old, those who have accepted their end and those who fight tooth and nail against bodies that betray them. Still, every bloodstained cloth that reveals a new corpse makes her breath catch, but every poor dead soul that isn’t one of the twins is a small mercy. I would not know, she reminds herself. They’d not bring Omen bodies back to the camp. They would be left to the snows.

War surgeons come and go and in an endless stream from the advanced camps, escorted by bannermen and infantry, bringing the wounded over the treacherously icy slopes. Tricia’s Perfumers take them into the warming tents, treat what they can, and send those capable of returning to battle back up the slopes to their death. She does what she can for the untreatable, and quickly they deplete their stores of Mistwood lilies - Grace let there be enough in the Capital, she prays, it would take weeks for us to gather more from the southern peninsula. She sends back to Leyndell only those permanently unable to take up arms again. So they make do with what they have, and she adds rimed rowa where she can find it, which seems to be everywhere in this wasteland; but even the hardy little northern leaf is only good for cuts and scrapes, and it does a poor job of easing the soul’s passage to the Erdtree. After delivering their wounded fellows, the men-at-arms prepare to take furs and weapons back to the forward camp, and the Perfumers prepare salves and ointments, numbing balsams and cooling unguents to soothe the ravages of fire. Warming stones are hewn from great blocks of Erdtree resin, infused with firelight, and Tricia readies warming draughts for the men in small flasks, brewed from fire blossoms and ground cinnamon bark. They tint her hands red and yellow, until even plunging them in new-fallen snow can't remove the stain.

Some nights she dreams of how she gathers her children in her arms, and they are warm and real and tangible, soft, but when she looks down at them each one is missing an eye - one right, one left.

Those burnt by the giantsflame are the first to return to battle, their bodies covered in powerful numbing salves, skin sloughed off under the chafing of mail and plate, and sometimes she wonders if their minds have not been broken as well. Carmaan claims to have refined a fortification that erases their pain and fear, and Tricia wonders what new poison he has distilled from his wellspring of arrogance. But she cannot challenge him here and now, surrounded by the stench of burnt flesh and the horror of war.  Godfrey had promised those who fell in battle honorary Erdtree burials, but the sheer number of dead already overwhelm the few priests still bent over dying men. By the time Tricia’s caravan had arrived, they had already resorted to burning the bodies of the rest.

No proper burial. No wine poured over fresh dirt, or dew sprinkled over flowers hastily arranged in catacomb vaults. Only a prayer hoarsely whispered, barely heard over the roar of fire, heads bowed. The longer they remain here, the less hideous the smell of burnt flesh. She hears soldiers choking out prayers of forgiveness under their breath, the ashes of the dead blown into their lungs.

On the coldest nights she dreams of descending into the Shunning Ground depths, and when she enters the Chapel of Penance it is not either of the twins there but Carmelina instead, same as the day she left. Tricia embraces her, kisses her cheeks three times, and she smells like the hearthfire of her home across the sea. In her dream she takes her teacher by the hand and tries to lead her out of the darkness and back to the surface, but all those familiar passages have been rearranged, and she finds they are trapped.

From the front she hears news of Godfrey’s personal knights, men and women who fight like demons with their strange powers. The Crucible Knights, they are called - a myth she once read, before the text was declared apocrypha. Servants of some primordial life-force that existed before the Erdtree. She doesn’t quite understand it, but thinks it must be not unlike her little flame, a primal energy, giver and taker of life. But these knights have long since shed their unorthodox names and hidden their faces, granting them an unnaturally fearsome allure, distinguishable only by their armour. No doubt Godfrey keeps their identities discreet to avoid scorn or persecution by the masses, even if the Golden Order tolerates their presence.

No wonder the Eternal Mother hides in her tree with the Greater Will - the Elden Lord’s court is full of apostates. She allows herself a little smile at the irony of it.

The men say the ferocity of Godfrey’s knights is matched only by the grim Zamor warriors, and she becomes fascinated by their presence. The towering, unearthly beings seem to be made of ice and stone, like her homeland, and she feels a strange kinship with them. They have fought the flame of ruin since before time began, she learns, and she catches glimpses of them in the medic’s camp from time to time. Men shy away from them like a deadly scourge. They seem to float through the icy terrain, unfazed by the bedlam, fixated on their purpose. She wonders who their god is. Perhaps it has always been the Greater Will. Or perhaps the threat of Marika’s army razing the land is reason enough to throw in their lot with a new ally to destroy an ancient enemy.

A capricious god is a small price to pay to keep a kingdom. Perhaps it is true.

⊱𖤓⊰

News of the twins comes in snippets from infantrymen or field medics who have seen them in action.

She is careful not to ask anyone outright, or give the impression she knows the two oblique but sizeable warriors on the front lines with Godfrey, who are neither his personal knights nor Leyndell soldiers. She makes an effort to tend fires in the vicinity of soldiers who speak in hushed tones, to ask quietly what news they have of the battlefield as though testing whether a blow to the head has hampered their recollection. Sometimes she brings them flasks of warming remedies, medicinal or otherwise, to keep the men gratified and generous with their stories. She plays the comforting old healer well, fading in and out of the background as she listens for indications of the twins’ safety.

She perks up at the mention of a pair of hooded warriors - tall, cloaked, furtive; escorted by a handful of black riders. Of the black horsemen the soldiers know little, and so the men argue amongst themselves about whether they are knights of Godfrey, a company of freeriders or mercenaries, or even heretics sworn to Godfrey’s service and promised to the Greater Will. Some say they use massive halberds, black with silver blades; and others claim they wield great mauls or morningstars, riding dark steeds in armour coated in black oxide to dim the harsh reflection of the ice and sun. Tricia hopes they are a dispatch from Godwyn, there to keep the twins alive. A rational part of her knows they are there to ensure the twins don’t stray from the battlefield, and to serve as insurance if they do.

She turns embers in the fire pit while one suggests it is Godwyn in disguise, come to fight for his Lord Father.

“I’m telling you lot, I seen Godwyn the Golden fight on the hunt two winters past. It’s the same fighting manner.” He waves bandaged hands in flourishing patterns through the air. “Gets a little pretty sometimes.”

Another soldier, cloth wrapped around the side of his face where his eye should be, grunts at him. “That don’t mean anything. Give any squire in Leyndell one of them curved swords and they think they can fight like the Golden Prince.”

Only some suspect they are Omens, but others say it is impossible to tell with their cloaks; and in any case none have ever seen Omens use the weapons and techniques of a Leyndell knight. Others point out that those Omens forcibly conscripted are brutish and in chains, equipped with spiked clubs or cleavers, and they are savage but slow on the battlefield. The ones that get out of hand are slaughtered by their handlers or poisoned - but the benefits of a disposable force on the battlefield outweigh the messy consequences, and so the Golden Army fields them at the heart of intense combat. But these hooded figures are different, veteran knights say. The cloaked combatants tangle themselves in the feet of giants and trolls and bring them down with clever, well-placed strikes to heels and hamstrings.

“Saw it myself,” an archer says one evening, a look of pride on his otherwise motley features. “Took a proper giant down like a pack of urchins trippin’ and robbin’ a lordling.”

One swings a great halberd with savage abandon, impaling trolls and other monsters with what infantrymen  can only describe as relish. They say the other one uses magic-infused weapons, and that they cannot be Omens as the accursed have no magic. They say one can throw dust, like a holy man sprinkling Erdtree dew - dust that shimmers like snow but devours like fire; the other can summon the great stone hammer of the Elden Lord, the Giantsbane. It gleams like an illusion at first, but is solid enough to crush ice and bone.

 “I reckon they’re sorcerers in disguise, from the wetlands.”

“The magicfolk are allies of the Giants, why would they fight for Lord Godfrey?”

They huddle around the fire pit conspiratorially, nursing injuries or drinking to keep away the cold, or both. Heads shake, some murmur in disagreement.

“Who knows what motivates ‘em. Maybe some of ‘em are sick of breaking their necks looking at the stars.”

“That ain’t glintstone magic, it’s holy magic, like the priests use. Must be a priest.” A ripple of consent.

“Should’ve taken the cloth if I knew it’d help me fight like that.”

Laughter, bleak but knowing. And so on, into the night.

⊱𖤓⊰

 “Healer, why do men fear death?”

“Your question warrants a priest, my lord. I am only a Healer.”

“And yet you will die, like everyone else.”

“Only if your sacred Mother permits it.”

“The scholars say the Golden Order saves all worthy souls, to be reborn through the blessing of the Erdtree. In Godwyn’s tomes it is written that Grace guides the departed to reunion with those they loved under another sky, where they may be returned, together, to the living world. And yet it seems to me only fanatics walk willingly into the fires of war. Why is that, if the Greater Will has removed natural death from the world and made it only the briefest of sleep?”

“Perhaps there are other things they fear, my lord. The pain that accompanies an unnatural death. The threat of losing their bodies, their station, or their wealth gained in this life. Perhaps it is the fear born of doubt that somehow they are unworthy of the blessing, and will not return; or those they love will be forgotten or left behind at the time of rebirth. My kin were ignorant of the blessings of Grace when they were put to the sword. I am plagued with doubts that my prayers go unheard, and that no supplication will be enough to reunite our souls at the Tree. But what other choice do I have in this life? I can keep the faith, or despair. My people are called ignorant, uncivilised, heretics - but I must believe, for their sakes, that Grace’s mercy can extended to them, too. But I will tell you this - I have seen miracles, little lord. I have seen them born of faith and kindness. I have seen you, too, touched by it - do not think I cannot smell the scent of erdleaf, or see the glimmer of gold that hangs in the air long after you practice your incantations. You, who should never have been touched by it, receiving it like the earth soaks up rain after a long drought. You cannot tell me that isn’t proof of a miracle.”

“There is nothing that awaits my kind at the foot of the Erdtree. False hope is a cruel offering, Healer.”

“Hope is born out of love, little prince.”

⊱𖤓⊰

Days bleed into one another and she soon forgets how long they have been on the Mountaintops. Time is nebulous and should mean nothing to her long-lived sensibilities. By now she is used to the straw-filled sack and piles of fur she is lucky enough to have. But some nights feel unending: when the screams do not cease, the frozen earth digs into her back, and the whimpers of pain seem to be right up in her ear. On those nights she is spared the dreams, so perhaps there is some small mercy.

Some nights it is the wailing of the Giants that keeps her awake, a guttural, haunting sound that seems to vibrate through the ice below their feet and serves either as communication between themselves or their gods – no one seems to know. On those nights she cannot sleep, and anyway there is no use in trying; so she scours the tents looking for the source of whispers and whimpers of agony. Her flasks are strapped to her waist, fur-lined cloak tight around her body.

Tonight it is a foot soldier, barely a man, young features disfigured by pain. She has long since let the faces of the dead and suffering merge in her mind, eliminating the traits that make them individuals, sons and brothers and fathers who will be mourned and missed. Better to think of them as all the same. She kneels.

“Please. It’s so cold, please.”

She gathers embers in her palms and rubs them together before placing them over the man’s eyes, warm and soothing. She slips a piece of the Dreamer’s Jewel in his mouth, closes his jaw softly, bids him to chew and swallow. 

It’s only then that she notices another figure kneeling in the shadows. 

The golden band of the Royal Perfumers glints across his brow, and she realises it’s Carmaan. Has he followed me out here? He regards her with a strange expression, a sort of manic intensity that she has never seen on his normally subdued features. The war must be getting to him, she expects. His cloak is a thick mass of black feathers rather than fur, and kneeling now he looks like a crow come to feast at a corpse. She wonders how he keeps warm with such a thing. Briefly she wants to say something cutting, something grossly sardonic about how far removed this is from perfuming the fat, bejewelled fingers of nobles. But there is too much death in the room so she only nods at him, cautiously.

The wounded man’s voice is barely a whisper now. “Please. I’m cold.”

She unwinds the bandage around his waist, revealing a crusted, blackened hole where something punched clean through him. A spear, she guesses, as she tries to clear away some of the dried blood with a cloth soaked in fresh snow. He makes an unnatural wheezing sound every time she touches the wound. It is clean, at least; festering is slow out here in the cold, and easy to control. What will kill him instead is the placement.

She holds a hand out to Carmaan. “Arteria leaf,” she instructs. If he is here, he might as well make use of himself.

It seems at first he hasn’t heard her, so she repeats herself. But in her peripheral vision she sees he refuses to move, and finally when she opens her mouth to reproach his idleness, she notices his eerie, vacant expression.

When he speaks, his voice is hoarse. "We are all forsaken."

Erdtree’s mercy, the war is breaking him. She should have expected this, Carmelina had warned her as much. True, the last few skirmishes have gone badly, and morale is low - but she should have known not to trust fragile men who had never met with death, and whose only hardship in their lifetime had been the Capital’s shortage of honey. They all broke so easily.

She stares at him now, wondering how to pull him out of this stupor. His gaze is fixated on some point far past her, and his eyes glisten strangely in the firelight. She does a mental inventory of their supplies. Has he been taking something?

“The Greater Will has abandoned us. I have seen the signs.”

She looks at him coldly. “Remember your oath, Perfumer.”

The immediacy of her voice seems to pull him back, and she sees his moist eyes refocus on her, pupils black pinpricks against the wavering flames’ reflection. He wets his lips before speaking. “You must see it. The war is lost.”

“The war is barely begun,” she mumbles in answer, turning back to her charge. She does not have time for this.

She hears him shift close to her, and knows that if fear had a scent, she would smell it now. “You have seen them,” he insists. “Our crusaders take heathens and apostates into their fold. They swear allegiance to aberrations. They promise amnesty to servants of the Fell God if they cut his unholy face from their bodies.” He grinds his teeth before continuing. “We have already lost.”

She tears a bandage with her teeth and spits threads of silk at his feet. “Stay your tongue,” she says sharply. He always seemed too pragmatic for zealotry, but she has always been too far from the intricacies of the court to understand how they used their faith to cajole, manipulate, and sow fear. Perhaps he has been a fanatic all along. Perhaps she has been a blind old fool. Again.

His cloak rustles and she relaxes a little, expecting him to leave; but instead he reaches forward and grabs her wrist. She tries to wrench her hand away but his grip is like iron, hand warm and slippery, and he clutches her like a man in a fevered frenzy.

“The Order has betrayed us.” His features twist in the firelight. “The blood of Marika is poisoned. The Queen has sinned.”

For a bright blazing moment she feels an overwhelming urge to hurt him, to tear herself free and claw at him with the rage she feels for Godfrey, for the Golden Order, and for Marika herself, in her absence. But the moment passes and her rage burns itself out as quickly as it ignited, and all that’s left for this man is pity.

If she were back at the Capital she might have summoned guardsmen and fellow Perfumers, ordered them to take Carmaan somewhere quiet where he could sniff salts and get a hold of himself. But there is nothing she can do for him out here, and when he sees that she offers no response, his grip slackens.

She rises, red-eyed and sick from the smoke, and goes to fetch the arteria leaf herself.

⊱𖤓⊰

When the forward camp begins to lose ground, she knows the war is going badly.

Godfrey's battalion is cut off from the main host, the cavalrymen say. The Giants have managed to isolate him, his back to the soaring cliffs. The only retreat is a steep plunge into nothing. Their enemy has used the terrain to pull the force apart, bottlenecked the reinforcements and pushed Godfrey’s forces back where the siege engines cannot break rock or plow through enemy lines. They know that if Godfrey falls, the war is lost.

The Giants will butcher him and mount his head on the highest peak, they say, where even Queen Marika can see it from the Capital. The Giants will burn his body as an offering to their Fell God, and the fire will consume the Elden Lord himself, and the sparks from his body will set alight the Erdtree, and all will come to ruin.

It is the blackest night of her life since the suffocating months she spent crossing the sea to the Erdtree’s kingdom. She had fled death, and in her dreams it has found her again. It opens its mouth to swallow her, pushes up from below with gnarled, thorny brambles covered in unblinking eyes; coiling, twisting, erupting from fertile soil, skeletal remains half-merged in a deathly embrace. She awakens believing she has been swallowed by a tree, and all the roots around her have dead, unseeing eyes.

When the skies clear in the morning, they see then the signs of gold across the snowfields, like the season’s first altus blooms.

The army that crests the slopes must be hundreds of thousands strong, though Tricia only thinks to make sense of the numbers much later. All she can see in the moment are waves of gold, shimmering like the sea, emerging effortlessly from the great hills she climbed months before. Cresting the great wave she knows is Queen Marika the Eternal herself, mounted at the head of the great golden hoard, her flaxen hair billowing under a helm brighter than the sun, looking for all the world more a warlord than her own husband. By her side comes Godwyn, in a golden plate and a cloak whiter than the mountaintops, a figure as fierce as his holy Mother.

From the second camp, Tricia watches them pour over the killing field like honey, a swarm of liquid gold over and around the Giants’ forces, and drown them in steel.

Smoke chokes the landscape and blackens the sky as the Giants turn their entire force to greet the invading god, hurtling great fireballs and streams of ruinous flame from their vantage. But the Golden Army is protected by some kind of magic, and the fire washes over them like water, dissipating like cold breath as they push forward. The hammer Marika wields is by comparison much smaller than her husband’s, but when she swings it she seems to grow taller, towering above the battlefield. Where from a distance she looked human enough, now she walks across the ice field with the stature of a god, her blows shattering the earth and her enemies before her. A great spear of gold materialises in her outstretched hand and she throws it like the heavens hurtling lightning, the crack of its impact through the chest of a giant, like thunder.

Even hours later, when the last of the Giants are put to the sword by Queen Marika’s forces, Tricia can still here the clap of thunder thrumming in her ears.

The last thing she sees before evening falls is Godfrey’s battalion, freed from death’s yawning mouth where the Giants had trapped them along the cliff’s edge, descending the slopes to the snowfields to rejoin the main force. It is only then that she sees them finally from afar: the twins, still escorted by a handful of black riders, horses picking their way carefully over the carpet of corpses. They crest the rugged slope behind the riders, on foot, battered and bloody, their hoods torn and streaked with gore - others’, and their own - as hideous as the monsters they are claimed to be. But they are alive, and oh, Grace, how beautiful anyway.

⊱𖤓⊰

It takes her a full day to pick her way across the battlefield, Perfumers and field surgeons at her side. Despite their victory there are still soldiers dying in the snow, burned by fire or crushed under their own steeds, and the air is still heavy with smoke and death. She keeps her headdress wrapped tightly around her nose and mouth, stepping over those whose souls have already left for the Erdtree. Some still beg and gasp for breath, and the men haul the survivors on wooden stretchers or makeshift carts to the newly erected surgeons’ tents. She does what she can for those who will not make it, and each pain she eases takes her closer to the main pavilion erected by Marika’s men.

Even as she approaches, there is a queer sensation of falling, of the world spiralling away. Her footsteps become heavy. It is the same feeling the day she returned to her village and saw cinders on the horizon, smelled smoke and burning flesh on the wind. She remembers the pit of dread that swallowed her into the earth.

She pulls back the tent flaps and slips in, feeling the rush of warmth from the fire pit at the centre of the pavilion. Bodies bustle past her, knights and medics and some Perfumers she recognises, though Carmaan is not there. There are no cries of pain or wails for mercy, though she can smell blood and smoke. Godfrey’s personal knights are grouped in a far corner, still wearing their ornate armour. Some turn to her with their faceless helms, empty and unsettling. Further down she catches a glimpse of the black-cloaked riders, ragged and filthy. Some are barefaced, or have only chainmail around their head, and Tricia sees that they are hard men underneath all that black, faces craggy with scars and lined with suspicion.

She tries not to look beyond them, because beyond them she knows, without seeing, is the Queen Mother. Warmth radiates from her, and the air takes on an auric hue in her presence. She is too formidable to look upon, splendid and terrifying, and so Tricia keeps her eyes down. Her gaze finds the Queen’s golden greaves, splattered with blood and crusted with ice now pooling at her feet. She wonders if she can see the Eternal Mother’s face in the water’s reflection, but her heart is in her mouth, and she imagines the Queen’s immovable gaze piercing her: witnessing all her trespasses, her heresies, her doubts, and she trembles.

Finally, a hand comes to her shoulder, and she shudders as if released from a spell. She turns away from the corner where the glow of Queen Marika permeates the air and is greeted by Godwyn, his warmth a subdued sunset compared to the furnace of his Mother’s presence.

He is still in full armour: a sunburst in the likeness of the Erdtree is intricately embossed on his breast, inlaid with cut vermillion and topaz jewels. Wisps of gold hair tumble around his face like a halo. The edges of his cheeks and forehead are red from where his helm weighed down, and the bridge of his nose is bloodied, like a stain on a pristine white cloth.

She bows, brings his hand to her forehead and presses the cold steel of his gauntlets to her face. “Your Grace,” she says breathlessly. He says nothing, but the expression on his face opens the yawning mouth of dread in her chest.

“Where are they?”

He shakes his head.

⊱𖤓⊰

“You must swear something to me, Healer.”

“Ask it of me.”

“Swear to me you will do everything you can to keep my brother alive.”

“You know I am sworn to it, my lord. It is my oath as a Perfumer and my duty to your family.”

“I want you to swear it to me. Whether we win this war, or lose it. No matter what my father commands of you. No matter what happens to me. If you truly bear my family any love.”

“You know that I do-”

“Then swear it.”

“I swear it, my lord, on my oath. And on my life. You have asked this of Godwyn too, haven’t you? To protect your twin from you father. If it should come to that, Erdtree’s mercy.”

“Mohg is convinced we will not return, and it is a betrayal he cannot accept. I admit I do not know what to tell him. But he cannot go on for an eternity like this. Cannot accept that this is our life, else our death so close at hand. That we may be butchered at the sacrificial altar our lord Father has inadvertently created by waging war against an immortal enemy. He is not prepared to die like that.” 

"But you are?"

"I remain a scion of Leyndell, as you so oft remind me. If that is so - and I cannot govern - then I am compelled to carry out this duty instead."

“You are too young to have made peace with death, Prince Morgott.”

“You presume much, Healer. And you are too old to have not done so yourself.”

“But I have. Only the selfish kind. I would sooner die and leave nothing behind, than to be left behind in life once again.”

⊱𖤓⊰

Of the story that Tricia hears, there are two versions.

 She does not remember what order the details come in. Much later, she will have trouble remembering which of those details came from the mouths of strangers, which from Godwyn, and which from the deceptive memories of fever dreams.

One version is told by a squire, who tells it to a field medic, who overheard it from the knight he serves, whose fellow was a cavalryman riding a black horse.

A terrible thing, the squire keeps repeating throughout the tale; a dreadful thing. A murder, in the dead of night, in the chaos and aftermath, when the Queen Mother herself departed to punish the last of the Fire Giants and lay the stone foundations of her holy church. A Royal Perfumer, in service to the Golden Lineage, doing his duty, murdered in cold blood in the twilight of battle when he entered the wrong tent. The wrong tent! To bring solace to a knight, no doubt, or life-saving knowledge to a fallen cavalryman. War makes men delirious, afraid, strips them of their senses and they make mistakes - like this poor soul, to the wrong tent, because in that tent there were only monsters - Omens, great hulking beasts with no sentience; no wonder they make good war machines, he interjects here, but to allow them out of chains, to give them a tent and not a cage, outrageous, incompetent - here he clears his throat and is asked, if it would please him, continue the tale. And the ending is always rushed, to everyone’s disappointment, though each retelling warrants a death more gruesome than the last. The Omens set the Perfumer on fire. His eyeballs melt and run down his face like jelly. Or, the Omens gore him with their claws and horns, rip his throat out and drink his blood. Or, the Omens butcher him and devour him like beasts, robes and all, and then die from the poisons hidden in his cloak pockets. The last one is the newest, though Tricia thinks she has heard it retold a few times by now. Only, none can agree on how they die. Most say the Omens are struck down by loyal soldiers, by lightning, by Queen Marika herself. The tale curls into itself in a moralising death spiral.

Then there is the version she pieces together with Godwyn on a cold night returning to the Capital. He himself has pieced it together from the brief and broken whispers of his brother.

Too many things happened at once, Godwyn admits, and so the chain of events remains hazy. He knows they return to their tent after the last Giant flees the battlefield, but their cavalry escorts do not follow. He knows one of them sends for a Healer - this is where Tricia interjects, where she wrings her robe in her hands before pressing her palms over her eyes and makes a noise that encapsulates all her regret, like a dying animal. It is unclear who summons Carmaan to the tent, if anyone, or if he simply comes with purpose in mind, and whose purpose - Godwyn has not yet asked the questions he assuredly does not want the answers to. He prefers the version in which the fever of war drives Carmaan into the twins’ tent, his wits gone to smoke like vestiges on the killing field. He does not favour the version in which Carmaan acts on someone else’s orders.

He does not know, he concedes, again and again. It is impossible to know.

He does not know who breaks the stalemate first - if Carmaan makes a false move, or in the maddening grip of fear reaches into his robes to draw his sparkpowder. He does not know if the black-horned prince lashes out at some perceived threat, or acts in self-defence. What is clear, he says, is that Carmaan had sparkpowder on him, and poisons. But so do most Perfumers, Tricia knows, and he also had flasks of healing tinctures. But it doesn’t matter now.

It is not a sword, nor an assassin’s dagger, but the younger prince reacts. A spark goes off - and a small explosion, a flock of embers, a blood-red brightness, a dire presage - and in an instant the fair-haired prince is between them, a golden dagger from his hand to Carmaan’s throat, and it’s done.

What had the young prince been thinking, when he lashed out? Godwyn cannot know, but he can guess. About the immediacy of death, the charred air, the threat of madness. Their father and the wreckage of his war. The intoxicating taste of freedom and their imminent return to the depths. But that seems too simple an answer.

Maybe there is no rational reason, Tricia wants to say. Maybe rage is enough. Centuries of it, filled to the brim, overflowing. What a mistake, she wants to murmur. Teaching them not to fear death.

Then what? she had asked.

Then the sound - of fire or Carmaan’s dying wail, no one is sure - draws the black riders into the tent, and they bring fury down upon the princes. And when they bear down upon the younger prince he dissolves in a cloud of gold like so much snowfall, because he is only an illusion conjured in the aftermath of smoke and fire. And the magic has taken everything out of his elder brother, who remains sapped of all strength - but it’s enough. The gambit is played, the window has closed. Prince Mohg has disappeared into the night, and Prince Morgott is hauled before the Elden Lord and the holy Mother, one half of a whole.

⊱𖤓⊰

They cross the final stretch to the Capital on the third day, and when the last caravans have descended the slopes, the Eternal Queen takes her sacred hammer and splinters the mountain, carving great cliffs where none had stood before and leaving only a stark, vertiginous passage of thin ice back to the summit, where her newest church stands as a monument to righteous victory. The ground shakes beneath them and great sheets of ice and snow fall away into the abyss. She declares to her people the summit of the Fire Giants sacrosanct, and the lands around it forbidden, and bids them give thanks to the victory delivered by the Greater Will. Tricia spends a long time staring down into the blackness of the newly birthed crater leading back to the snowfields, until Godwyn comes for her gently in the dying light, and takes her back to the caravans.

Once returned, she moves quickly. There is only so much time she has to put things into place, to do what she can to preserve the Perfumers going forward. It’s what Carmelina would have wanted.

Godwyn finds her in the Erdtree Sanctuary before dawn, on the day of the great feast. She has not slept - it is her duty to sit vigil for those who have fallen. Her eyes burn and her knees ache, and the candles have surrounded her in a sea of melted wax. She doesn’t remember her last meal, and her tongue feels swollen and bruised from thirst. But she prays, and when she cannot pray any longer, she looks into the fire.

The Golden Prince appears in a hush, scattering ashes around his white boots.

“You have decided.”

He knows, of course; she doesn’t doubt it. He must have realised the moment the war ended. He regards her solemnly, and even the pearls wrought in his simple circlet seem to glimmer mournfully.

“Lord Godfrey will find fault with me,” she says, too worn to rise and greet the young god. And perhaps she is right. She has done everything asked of her and yet this failure is monumental. The princes have rebelled. She has kept them alive, whole, but there will always be more she could have done: tamed the fire that urged their disobedience, kept them under control. Sedated them like animals, as Carmaan would have no doubt done if he’d had his way. Perhaps that is why Godfrey had chosen him to replace her. She struggles against the current of self-pity, flowing fast and insistent.

“Where will you go?”

“I do not know.” Could she be said to abandon her duty, if she no longer has one? But she has not been stripped of her title, and holier men than she have gone into self-imposed exile for a time. “Away. I can be of use elsewhere, for a time. There are many who suffer beyond the city walls.” She knows the lands well enough; knows the calm grottos and the clean springs, the storehouses hidden away in golden groves where they tend and harvest rare blooms. And if it is Grace’s will then she will be of use, to the lonely and the abandoned and the ill-omened; and if not she will lay down in a shaded patch of grass and welcome the sleep that will return her to the roots of the Erdtree.

But she cannot stay. Carmelina would have stayed, she knows, through the shame and despair. But she is not strong enough. One day the princes will forgive her for not being Carmelina, she hopes. And then she can forgive herself.

“What shall I tell my father?”

That I have seen his ruin in the fire, she wants to answer, but she does not wish to hurt Godwyn, and in any case it isn’t entirely true - the Elden Lord’s fate ripples and shifts in the fire, too nebulous for her to read.

Her voice is steadier than she expects when she speaks. “That I have gone to fulfil my Perfumer’s oath, to find a cure for this affliction. And perhaps to find his son.” Another lie, and Godwyn will know. He as much as anyone must understand the youngest prince is better off free and in the wind than dragged before his father for punishment, or worse. Tricia only wishes she had been able to better equip him for whatever unwelcome things he finds along his way. “Tell the Elden Lord the Perfumers should convey a council to choose my successor. There is a list of names.” She barely knows them, but it’s better than leaving the order rudderless.

“The vacuum you leave in your wake may be dangerous.”

“You mistake me for Carmelina,” she says with more vitriol than intended. Abashed, she softens her tone. “Lord Godfrey should not find fault in the Order for this. Let him lay the blame at my feet, and at Carmaan’s, and let my future actions redeem whatever ill will he bears us now. But do not let him dissolve the Order of Perfumers. The Capital needs them.”

Godwyn looks at her seriously then, half of his face awash in torchlight, and she sees the solemnity of his younger brother.

“No one will chase you from the Capital, Healer. You are not some baseborn criminal or petty noble who has insulted my father. Exile is not the only way.”

“What way forward is there, then? You are long past any need for me. One of my charges is gone, and the other…” She trails off, not bothering to mask the anguish in her voice. “There are things that are beyond my power to mend, Prince Godwyn.”

“But you are guided by Grace. The Golden Order can be changed; made better by those who keep the faith.”

Would that we could be more than just vessels. She shakes her head. Since returning, she finds her hair looks more and more like the snowfield before battle. “I did not see Grace out there in the mountaintops, my prince. I saw only war. The same war I fled a lifetime ago, only this time I was on the other side. I did not see the mercy and salvation promised by the Greater Will.” Her voice breaks. “Only damnation.”

He bends down to help her up, and she allows herself to be pulled to her feet by his steady grip. She lets her hand linger in his for a moment, as if trying to impart some kind of blessing; though she doesn’t quite know if it’s to bestow or receive it.

“I would ask that you stay, but I am not my father, and I cannot command it of you.”

There is real regret in his eyes, and Tricia can’t help but be moved by it. “Then summon me again, once you are crowned.”

Until then, he is your responsibility. She drinks of his golden warmth one last time before lowering her voice.

“There is one last thing I would ask of you.”

⊱𖤓⊰

Her last descent into the Shunning Ground depths is furtive, and she knows the way well enough by now to slip through the checkpoints and into the sewers. She dons her Royal Perfumer’s garb one last time, hoping to outrank anyone who stops her to ask questions. But at this hour the streets are quiet and the gatehouses have emptied. Fewer patrols scour the roads, and somehow they look cleaner, less dangerous. The conquest of the Fire Giants must bring the people great reassurance, she realises. The Golden Order has never seemed so untouchable.

It feels to her like the caged lift takes a lifetime to reach the depths. She stares out into the blackness, listening to the grinding of long-rusted iron, her mind tricking her into smelling smoke and camphor as if she were back on the snowfields, back in a tent easing some dead man from his cot and onto a pile of limbs to be burned. 

When the cage rattles to a halt, she catches flame in her hand and holds it forward as she makes her way through the suffocating gloom. Many of the torches have been removed, she observes; the little signs of life that proved the comings and goings of a few souls with purpose down here have disappeared. It looks for all the world abandoned now, and she almost expects to see traces of decay - shiny, slick film growing over everything, like dusk mushrooms left too long in the open.

When she reaches the Chapel of Penance the door is shut and locked. The heavy bolt turns reluctantly, and there is no lingering smell of incense - instead there is the smell of something dry and hot, and brimstone. When she enters there is no light in the room, and no torch mounted on the wall, so she raises the little flame cupped in her hand, scattering shadows like frightened animals. In the flickering light she can see the table and chairs have been cleared, and even the lonely shelf has been knocked from the room, the tomes and her row of flasks and little jars of salve long gone.

It takes her eyes a moment to adjust, and when they do she sees her light is not the only one in the gloom. 

A very faint golden glow, a sigil carved into the floor, meets the light of her flame. Along the wet stones, gold runs through curling shapes and arabesques like rivulets of lava. Speckles of light hover around it, as though the air above the sigil is thicker. They drift like the altus bloom pollen she loves so much in the spring. Then she sees the prince.

He kneels at the heart of the sigil, one knee bent under him, like a mockery of the moment an incantation is cast. But there is no seal in his hands, and his back is bowed as if by some invisible force. He tries to look at her through the tangle of his hair and ivory horns, dyed in yellows and gold by the magic’s incandescence, but he can barely raise his head. A great iron shackle hangs around his neck, pulsing faintly with the same magic. She feels no Grace from the magic in this sigil, no familiar soothing balm in her chest or sweet smell of erdleaf in the air. Instead it is thick, burned wood with none of the warmth, and sulfur, the telltale sorcery of the Two Fingers. 

Godwyn had warned her, but it still feels as though her throat has been stuffed with ash.

“How long?” she finally manages to ask, her voice reverberating strangely in the charged air.

He shakes his head, but even that seems to take immeasurable effort.

She kneels, edging closer to the glowing frame of the sigil. “Did you confess?”

“Yes.” He coughs. “I killed him. The Perfumer.” 

She wants to grapple for answers, to wrench details from him that will somehow absolve him, but his answer is clear enough. Whether to defend or exonerate his brother, the prince had confessed to the Elden Lord - and to the Queen Mother. Tricia wonders if they bothered to hear his own account, whether they might have listened to him describe Carmaan’s hostility, the prince’s prescient dreams that harm would come to his twin, his crime as an act of self-defence. She knows the answer already. A small part of her wants him to name Carmaan the aggressor, to validate her suspicion that he struck first, in a frenzied madness. Godfrey would not wish his own sons dead, she has told herself a thousand times, but each time she is a little less sure. And then there is the terror, awoken in her by the presence of the Queen Mother that last day on the battlefield, that she has been unable to shake ever since.

“Is he safe?”

She can’t answer that, but she has already decided not to lie to him. “They have not found him, and he has not returned.”

She can see relief pass briefly over his illuminated features. His shoulders sag a little, and despite his disfiguration he looks impossibly young and defeated. Scars she has never seen line the side of his face and neck, reminders of the battlefield. She wants to touch him, lift his head and tend his wounds, free him from this betrayal. But the magic of the sigil pulses with hostility, and if she were to stay she might simply decide to lay down and die beside him. There would be worse ways to finally rest.

“Find him.” His voice is hoarse, a whisper. “In the fire. Tell him not to return.”

But she cannot promise him that. The fire will not show her where he is, will not help her deliver the warning that the same fate awaits him if he returns to break the vow they made to each other, because better to die together than to live alone, she knows.

And even if she could, she would not stop the young prince from returning. Would not stop him from tearing down every stone from this infernal place to free his brother.

She can promise him no other Perfumer will ever come near them. She has made Godwyn swear this, with the kind of insistence wholly unfitting of her in the face of a god. But he had understood, and agreed. You should have always been their keeper. This is your burden now. She thought she wanted nothing more than a life long enough to see Godwyn ascend to the throne. Now, she is not so sure the twins can wait that long. She has looked into the fire and seen them shackled and broken, flame the colour of blood, blood rising from the earth to soak the sky.

The prince watches her, his golden eyes in shadow, trapped in the auric halo that should be his birthright. She tells him none of this. She reminds herself that she cannot lie to him.

But it’s an empty, facile thing, to tell him instead that this will not be for eternity. She won’t offer him platitudes or empty comforts; she owes him far more, and telling him one day he will be free - one day he will be reunited with his twin - cannot lessen the weight that grinds him down in this choking solitude. Because she cannot explain why or how. She only knows what the fire has shown her. And the fire has never lied.

So she tells him one last true thing before she leaves.

“I looked into the fire, and I saw that you would be king.”

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