Work Text:
You are the child of unalloyed gold, of lilies and dreams and all things bright and pure.
But the golden linage running through your veins is blackened and disgraced— you yourself are broken and sickly. You are everything, but you are also nothing at all.
You are adored by all— people make the pilgrimage to your secluded little kingdom just to bask in your radiance and godhood. You offer them kindness and peace, but your smile is strained, it is pointless and you feel guilty for feeling so spiteful .
The heart that beats in your chest is like an enraged beast restrained within your tiny rib cage, it is merciless and violent to everything it touches within you. It is tearing you apart from the inside, but yet you smile to the people, but yet you extend your hand to them in deliverance as if you are not praying for deliverance yourself.
Your parents left you with nothing, nothing but a curse that makes your body small and weak, and a religion that offers you no salvation.
On days where the fog surrounding your Haligtree’s little sanctuary is not so oppressive, light from the Erdtree penetrates the cloud, like golden rays of radiant sunshine.
It stands tall and proud, dwarfing your humble little tree of ivory. It is a martyr to some, a beacon of hope and order to many, but to you, it is a symbol of betrayal and broken promises.
The Golden Order provides you with nothing but emptiness and pathetic excuses, it cannot mend what it has already broken, it cannot alleviate the burden it has placed upon your shoulders.
You and your sister arrived into this world cursed, unfixable and cracked, and you have spent your whole life trying to mend what cannot be mended.
Your body is useless, it is tiny and powerless, what power you could command as an empyrean, a demigod of Queen Marika’s kin, is locked away behind later years that are unattainable for someone with your ageless curse.
The curse inhibits your every action, makes you stumble at every turn, and with each scrape you collect on your knees whenever it trips you up, only proves to make you angrier.
You are blistered with rage, a festering anger that cannot be sated. You live everyday wishing things were different, and that only adds to the flame in your chest.
But your rage isn’t concentrated on yourself— it is reserved for how it makes you unable to save your sister, whose curse is like a fast closing bear trap in comparison to yours.
Your sister is fair and strong, a warrior of delicate petals and unrelenting steel, and yet she is in unfathomable, all consuming agony no one could ever understand, not even you.
Most days she stands proud, a sentinel wreathed in auburn, but other days she writhes, stricken and helpless as rot boils her blood, her bones, her very soul. It peels her skin and splits her tendons, it is killing her, and it is killing you, too.
It is killing you because you are useless to alleviate her pain, you are worthless and small in a body unfit for your mind and heart, and her turmoil is unwavering and suffocating.
She bleeds fungus and decay that sinks into her flesh like mucus. You bleed rage and grief that waters the very roots of the tree you call home.
You remember when the rot first manifested in your sister, when the gravity of her condition became so horribly real to you, and how it forever tarnished the innocence of whatever youth you could have as a god.
Her hand was in yours, and you ran through the gardens joyously, laughing light and levity that you are unsure you can ever recreate.
You remember a wet snap; a bone chilling ripping sound, and how the weight behind your sister’s warm hand suddenly disappeared, leaving it limp and cold. You remember dropping the dismembered arm in your hand that should have been attached to your sister and watching blood, gore and fungus stain the flowers beneath your feet. You remember how she started screaming, but only just, because your screams were louder.
Since that day, the rot tore her apart, limb from limb. Each time she gained a new prosthetic, perfectly and intricately crafted for her out of immaculate, unalloyed gold that the rot could not tarnish, you were forced to swallow a lump in your throat, a wad of emotion that threatens to stop your breathing completely one day.
She has three golden limbs now— only a single arm of flesh remains, but its skin is already unrecognisable, it’s already dull and riveted by fungus and decay, and you are certain in time that it will crumble too, just like the other.
Each prosthetic has carvings done by you yourself— butterflies and flowers engrave every smooth surface along the edges of her artificial joints. You watch her run her remaining hand across the sketches in the gold sometimes, and it seems to calm her, bring her peace, but it only makes you grieve for her more than ever.
She is losing herself, piece by piece, and you remain powerless to stop it— all you can do is watch, and it ruins you, kills you.
She looks at you one day, sightless, calcified rot coating the plain of her face where her eyes used to be, and asks you what the blossoms high above that adorn the branches look like.
Your voice chokes in your throat, and your eyes sting with tears you will not shed. You tell her that they look beautiful this year.
But she knows you too well, she can hear the tremor in your voice even when you try so hard to conceal it. She frowns. Her worry for you is palpable, and you wish it wasn’t.
She holds you close, one arm solid and warm and the other cold steel of something lost, a testament to her entire life, and only then do you allow yourself to weep.
You weep because there is a desperation in the way she holds you that never used to be there— she embraces you like you will slip away through her fingers forever if she lets go.
She has been forgetting more and more— the rot wears at her brain and memories, severing what makes her her .
She holds you so tight because she wants to not forget what it is like to have you close, to hear your voice and hold your hand. It makes you want to scream.
You want to scream until there is no voice left in your pitifully small lungs, until the entire world knows of your grief for your sister whose life and soul is waning before your very eyes.
Her sickness is your own— with each part of her that is lost, something inside of you fractures, splinters. Your insides are broken glass, and you scoop them up with bloodied hands and use them as weapons to rage against the world that despised you from the moment you entered it.
She doesn't like to speak about it, she’d much rather talk of simple things and sparring with her beloved knights, she’d rather speak of sweetness and butterflies rather than the festering presence in her body, and that’s alright, because you have enough anger for the both of you.
You live like this for a long time. You spend every waking hour searching for some way to undo the suffering that was thrust upon you, but it all leads to nothing, and your anger and grief only continue to grow, forming something unsightly and hideous in your chest that your people are slowly starting to notice.
But then everything changed. The Elden Ring, the personification of the righteous Golden Order and the Erdtree, was destroyed, and it plunged the world beyond the confines of the Haligtree into madness and chaos.
The Shattering is ravenous— a war that knows no limit or bounds, it tears up the earth and fells the trees, it calls to everyone who call the Lands Between their home in derelict tones of unavoidable violence.
It drags together your half siblings you've never met before. You hear tales of their merciless campaigns and bloodstained domains over the shards of the Elden Ring that fell into their possessions, and how they use those Great Runes to further the destruction, and you can’t help but wonder what any of this, what merely existing in this wretched world, was ever for.
The Haligtree is safe from the carnage, but you wonder for how long— how long will it take before its peace is finally mutilated by war. You fear that moment.
The conflict pulls at your sister, with her Great Rune in her hands, like a rope around her leg, and she is called to battle.
Her troops are rallied, their weapons golden beacons in the sunlight as they march down the copper streets. Your sister holds your hands in her own, and you promise her that when she returns, things will be different.
You’ve made a breakthrough, after all this time, you finally know what to do to remedy your feeble body. You will weave yourself into the Haligtree itself, within a silken cocoon that would mould you into something greater, something that can finally break the curse upon your lives.
You promise her this, that when she returns from her battle you will have awakened to your true, all powerful self, and your lives will finally be without the strife and suffering your curses have inflicted upon you— you will finally be able to exist burdenless and free, a future you never would have thought you could achieve.
You promise her this, and she nods resolutely, like nothing in the entire world could ever make her doubt you. She trusts you completely, conviction without any limits at all, she has for her whole life. Though sometimes you wish she didn’t, because you have failed her too many times, but not this time— this time will be different.
Elphael is empty when the Haligtree bends to your will and you weave your cocoon. It’s a morose, empty and unfamiliar silence that makes your skin crawl, it fills you with premonitions of dread and anxiety, but you disregard this, pinning it on the distance between you and your sister, whom you’ve never been apart from for quite this long.
The cocoon is where you dream, where you dream a dream that will grant you the strength you were supposed to grow into, a dream that will give you the tools your parent’s worthless Golden Order never could.
Like the butterflies you spent hours carving into your beloved sister’s golden limbs, you hope to grow into something more, something that can end the cycle of decay and anger and grief the two curses have caused you both.
Your cocoon is a vessel— it will carry you to a new state of being, to something powerful worthy of your empyrean title, to something that can make things better.
It’s lonely here, but you don’t mind— your dream is filled with vibrant life and hope, and you’ve never felt so hopeful in your life.
Somewhere out there, your sister battles, your promise to her held deep within her heart. A promise that you intend to keep with every fiber of your being, should you ever break it would be the worst possible betrayal to everything you’ve ever worked for.
You pray that she will prevail, that her rot will stay dormant and uninhibiting, and that she will return to you with her soldiers in tow just as she always does. You pray that she will return and see the result of your dream, see that all your anger and grief finally accumulated into something worth something .
Your sister’s agony will be placated, her life will be preserved, even if it’s the last thing you ever do.
You pray that the Haligtree, your constant companion whose roots have been connected through your very veins your entire life, delivers your dream, and makes you whole.
You pray that when you awaken from your slumber, things will be different.