Chapter Text
Time was split for Messmer as before and after the seal.
The before was a time without war. It was still one of pain and his mother’s urgings.
“Be careful. Keep it at bay.”
Firm hands cupped a vial trying to force it into limp ones. Whispers abounded. Messmer couldn’t focus on holding the glass nor making out the words said to him. There was only the twisting inside and hisses in the recess of his mind.
No longer could he resist his nature, what slithered within.
The hands kept trying to make him drink whatever was in the vial. Messmer hardly noticed. Every neuron alight in flames, a small part of his mind prayed this was it. That the darkness hugging the edges of his hazy vision would encompass him fully.
Already his skin had scaled over, already had the room been snuffed of its light.
Something cool trickled down his throat. He attempted to swallow the cool elixir only to end up choking until hands pull him up from the sickbed.
He coughed and managed to breathe. His head was tipped back. More cooling elixir. The fire beneath his skin seemed to abate. He wanted more, needed more.
The snake still burrowed inside.
There was another vial’s worth, and only then did Messmer feel like his skin his own, his mind under his own power, the snake buried away.
Buried away until he was weak enough to be overpowered.
He was exhausted by the end. It was not the serpent but sleep which took him.
Whispers. A warm glow. Glass shattered.
…
His room was awash in golden light when he woke up.
Gingerly, Messmer raised his hands up to his eye seeing his skin clear of scales. He flexed his fingers, and they moved at his command, then his arms, then his legs. It was a simple routine, but it was one he repeated every time the abyssal serpent emerged, wrestling for control.
It seemed he would live to fight another day.
The Minor Erdtree radiated light from the center of his room. It was shorter than what the spell usually manifested, and its branches were crooked where they should be straight, yet its pulsing energy still brought relief.
Only one person could fully conjure it. Another was merely learning.
The memories of the day before came crawling back. Melina had been the one to force him to drink his mother’s elixirs, hold him down, watch, and wait.
Her Minor Erdtree was the only thing she could do after exhaustion took him.
His snakes, constant companions for it all, urged him up, and Messmer peered over the bed to see his sister sleeping soundly on the ground. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, he bitterly thought. He was older. He was supposed to be looking out for her.
He was being eaten alive from the inside by a force his mother flinched at.
Most of his life he had spent in this house on a hill in the hinterlands. It was where his mother had grown up, where he had been born, where he and Melina had been raised, secluded from everything else.
They had no resolve to wander after their mother’s stories.
Mother would return soon, at least with her blessings. Those vials had saved him last night despite the serpent’s attacks growing more frequent, hungrier. Melina tended to him more and more.
His snakes lightly brushed her shoulder to which she stirred. Messmer pulled them back, but it was too late.
He was about to apologize once she opened her eyes only to be engulfed by as strong as a hug as she thought he could handle. For a moment, it was like there was never an abyssal serpent. Just his sister, the snakes who had draped themselves around her, and the light of the Minor Erdtree being still with them.
“It took five vials, brother,” she murmured, not having let go.
“Five?” he questioned because Messmer didn’t remember drinking five. He remembered three and then having the same dream repeat.
Her silence was confirmation enough. They were both thinking the same thing. It had never taken five. It had never happened twice within one cycle of the moon. Melina felt heavier in his arms.
“Mother will find a cure,” Messmer said, repeating the mantra that had been a lifelong companion. Melina only frowned and got up from the bed. The Minor Erdtree dissolved into dust.
“’Twas good!” he mumbled about the incantation to which she only replied that she would make one better.
…
“In my dreams I see fire,” she told him one day near dusk. He hasn’t been outside in days, but that evening he was the one who took a rather tired Melina to their lookout spot on the hill.
A snake tensed around his arm at her statement.
“Where does the fire spread?” He asked forcing his voice even. He saw the shadows of Belurat burned away every time the serpent emerged. To think Melina also saw something of that destruction…
She glanced at him before drawing her eye to the landscape once more. “I spread it. I burn mother’s tree,” she said, voice flat. In her palms sprouted her usual orange, yellow fire. Messmer too found himself looking into it, trying to see if it held answers.
Fire, a devastating power, danced. Messmer could almost envision it engulfing the grace embodying tree of their mother’s realm.
“I don’t only spread it, Messmer. I’m its kindling. I feel called by it,” she trailed off, bringing the fire ever closer to her face until Messmer, surprising even himself, swatted her hands away.
The fire dissipated.
“That’s not going to happen,” he countered holding her wrists. He let go before she could pull away. Messmer almost tried to allay her anxiety by telling her that mother would prevent it, but the empty vials upon empty vials that piled up at his bedside had nurtured Melina’s doubt. Mother hadn’t visited that year once. Messmer was alone in holding faith.
His sister only shrugged in response. Messmer wanted to challenge her on it, to insist that it wouldn’t come to pass, to have her agree, but such an exercise was more self-serving than he’d like to admit.
“…Could you show me the fire spirals once more?”
Melina nodded despite the forced subject change, and Messmer was relieved that she seemed like herself again after a few demonstrations. Messmer managed to imitate though where her spirals seemed to grow, his wobbled, slithering out of position.
“Now try this,” she said voice louder, small smile present. Her spirals coalesced until a distinct shape formed from the oranges, yellows, and reds. A butterfly with wings alit darted past them both before dissolving into smoke.
It was beautiful, Messmer thought. For a moment, the fire had been alive and free in form of soaring.
He realized Melina had been waiting for a reaction.
After he asked, she showed Messmer again and again how to capture freedom in fire until he too made a shape of dark fire that danced but couldn’t yet soar.
…
He woke up again and repeated his ritual.
His hands were his own. His fingers curled on command. Unmarred flesh replaced scaled.
It was dark. Usually, the gold of his sister’s Minor Erdtree accompanied him. Maybe she missed this episode. Messmer hoped so. He peered over to find the spot she usually occupied to be empty. Only the vials on the rickety nightstand told him that his sister had been there at his side yet again.
Still feeling weakness linger in his limbs, he forced himself to stand and venture out of his room. It was Messmer’s turn to check up on his sister: ensure she was sleeping or at least had taken in the evening time meal.
Finding her room empty and his calls unanswered, Messmer’s snakes hissed in agitation. He shushed them giving the nearest one a few pets only for them to grow more vocal.
The clouded windows of the foyer gave him the answer.
Outside was Melina hunched over clutching her face. Without further thought, he was at her side. The snakes’ hisses chorused.
“Melina, sister, what—art thou…” he asked, hand on her shoulder. She made no sound.
“Let me see! A potentate found thee? Thou ventured beyond the hinterland?” Messmer asked. He couldn’t see any blood seep out between her fingers, but her breathing was labored.
“I beg of thee let thy brother help!” She didn’t respond.
Panic overtook any prudence he had developed, and he forced her hands from her face. To his relief there was no visible wounds, but both her eyes were squeezed shut.
“Melina?”
The tension on her face lessened, and her eye forever sealed opened. A purple iris, dull like the lilac tinge of twilight faded, stared seemingly straight through him.
She didn’t seem like herself.
Melina pulled her hands away and spoke to him. “Thou’rt the brother?”
“Melina?” he questioned. A moment passed, and he answered her bizarre question. “Yes…It is I, Messmer, thy brother.”
His serpents hid behind his back on their own accord.
“Be gone!” she roared with a fierce, sudden intensity, and he scrambled backwards, flames in black, grey, and white nearly singeing him.
Messmer only strengthened his resolve. “I am thy brother! Melina, please!”
The inferno of unnatural fire before him died down as quickly as it had sprung. Melina was still knelt in the same spot. His snakes both curled around his spear arm beckoning him to brandish the weapon which Messmer ignored.
Melina was crying, but to his relief the eye was shut again. Only gold running red with tears looked at him as he embraced his little sister.
“I’m sorry, brother, I’m so sorry,” she repeated.
“Thou art unwell. Never could I harbor ill-will for thee,” he soothed. “Mother will help.”
At that, Melina pulled away, face in an expression of fear he had never seen before besides when the abyssal serpent wrestled for control.
“No, Messmer. Never can she know,” she said, voice hardening.
“Wherefore?”
“Swear, brother. Swear to never tell.”
Messmer promised against all instinct.
…
His hatred of fire was a learned thing.
It was born and enshrined within his mind on a day of lethargy where he was stuck in bed, skin still feeling too hot and rough from the serpent’s most recent attempt. His body was still his. That was the shred of relief he clung to.
The snakes opened their jaws, forked tongues out. They detected it moments before Messmer did.
When he first found his flame, he scorched his arm. It must have been bad because his mother had healed it herself. He doesn’t remember what it looked like. He doesn’t remember the pain.
The scent of flesh burning Messmer had never forgotten. And the acrid scent was faint throughout the house.
“Melina?” He yelled, malaise temporary shaken off.
No response.
Messmer tried again after forcing himself up and searching throughout their home until he exited to the outside where the scent was almost overwhelming.
In the boughs of the trees, there were hundreds of lights. Butterflies of smoldering bodies adorned the barren branches, watching him as he shouted his sister’s name to silence.
Melina was nowhere. Someone was burning. His sister was gone.
Her butterflies were just watching.
Messmer felt a lurch within. The abyssal serpent was awake.
The fire was at the bottom of the hill. His skin felt hot. The serpent twitched.
Butterflies danced around the fire in a twisted jubilee, so Messmer ran. Legs gave out quickly.
Now, desperate, dirt sank underneath his fingernails as he clawed at the earth to pull him closer; his cracked voice still repeating her name. More and more did the pain within rise.
In that great wall of fire there was a silhouette of grey, black, and white flame. Its head turned with arm outstretched. The fire, alive, moved closer to him…
…and at that point Messmer realized it was his sister who burned.
Tears pricked his eyes, his own skin burned, the Abyssal Serpent coiled tighter than it had ever before. Eye unaverred gazed upon a sister on fire. Body weakened inched forward still. He just had to get closer and get Melina out. Mother would fix the rest. She would. She has to.
His voice gave out, and the snakes went pale. Dark spots in his vision danced like his little sister’s butterflies.
The rest is only remembered in flashes.
His mother is there, and no more does any fire blaze.
He is burning alive and she speaks, but he does not understand.
She reaches for his eye, he squirms.
It is only dark after that.
After that his mother’s braids are uneven.
A Minor Erdtree pulses in the middle of an abandoned village his sister used to call home.
…
Decades later word spread of an apostate out South who declared war against gods and their wills. She swaddled her followers in skins of the divine and fanned heretical flame.
That was what the chroniclers say of the Gloam-Eyed Queen.
What Messmer remembered was different, suppressed for the annals of history, but clear in his mind for the ages to follow.
How fiery smoldering butterflies, on the empyrean’s pretender throne, perched.
How the heresiarch queen only had one eye, the color of purple dulled, the color of their childhood gloams.
How she reached for him right before Maliketh carried out the Eternal Queen Marika’s will.