Work Text:
There is a crossroads everyone must choose from when they break from the shell of naivete. No one person can single-handedly fix the world and all of its wrongs, and attempting to do so clumsily will only make things worse for people in the long run. So does one give up on things like kindness, charity, and empathy? Or are there concessions to be made in the efforts to make the world a little better?
Morgott does not agree with everything that the Golden Order and the Erdtree represents. If he could, he would have it so that the Omen, Albinaurics, Demi-humans, and other groups persecuted by his mother’s regime would be treated equally. In a perfect world, there is no need for such discrimination.
Perfect worlds do not exist.
He watched as rats devoured each other in the sewers. They had no laws, rules, or ethics; rats are creatures that follow their base desires, eating, sleeping, and procreating at will.
Those rats used to bite him as he tried to curl up and sleep on damp stone, they would steal food straight from his hands until he learned how to squish their tiny brains.
Society needs rules lest they become nothing more than rats.
So they have laws about punishing crime, their courts must prove a person guilty before being punished, and taxes are a necessary drain from the individual to keep the whole alive. Morgott can rationalize his own treatment. With the good comes the bad, as if human nature. He could hate Marika, choose to scorn her and her kingdom, but his scorn would only serve him. Marika, as godqueen, gives up everything to serve her people. When there is not enough to go around, she prioritizes the grace-given. Of course she does. Nothing is infinite, sure enough there is only so much food to fill so many mouths, or so many guards to surround the city walls. There must be limits. There is a number of acceptable casualties to keep the majority happy.
Morgott does not fall into the group of ‘the acceptable majority.’ That is his lot in life, the fate he’s been given. From the moment he was born, his horns condemned him. He used to wish they had cut them off anyway, damn whatever idea that his royal blood spared him. He would’ve preferred to rot and fester than to be reminded of his imperfection. Those times have passed, he’s no longer the moody young man that he was.
He’s not like his twin, whose similarities ended the moment they were born. They may share a date of birth, an affliction of horns, and the same parents, but it ended there. While Morgott overcame his turbulent emotions and realized why Marika made the choices she made- Mohg failed to see the bigger picture. Instead he sat in his own self-pity until he found another mother to coddle him. Mohg thinks that as long as he instills his own dynasty, one of blood and not gold, things will be better. Morgott knows things would simply be different, there would still be groups at the top of the hierarchy and groups at the bottom.
So Morgott is willing to join the very system of oppression that would’ve sought his head on a pike. He knows things are better now than they were before, than if they were deprived of the Erdtree. In a world of impossible choices to make between two evils, he’s not going to pretend there’s one right thing to do. He cannot change the entire world, he cannot even fix Leyndell. But he can look after the city as best he can.
He knows he cannot stop the corruption amongst the nobles, and passing tyrannical laws to control them will only lead to their revolt against him alongside their withdrawal of funds. Morgott knows it is a fine line of letting crime pass under the radar, working to punish the most egregious offenders so it is clear he does not condone it.
His identity as Margit the Fell Omen can be used, though not too often. If all of Morogott’s political enemies were killed by Margit, people would make the connection between his two names.
It is thankless work. It’s never-ending work. It is work he must do, nonetheless.
The people of Leyndell are innocent in the wars of gods and greater things. They feel the things humans do, stealing, lying, loving, wanting, laughing, and crying. Their crimes are not the kind that shatter worlds.
The demigods clash, his traitorous siblings who poison the land, leading battles that leave the fields covered in corpses. Morgott uncovers their secrets one by one and is unimpressed. Malenia leaves her blight along Caelid, but Miquella blights the mind; Praetor Rykard convenes with snakes while Princess Ranni masterminds her own siblings’ deaths. By the dozens, Marika’s offspring die or change in horrific ways, only the strongest and cleverest of them surviving.
If the people of Leyndell knew their Veiled Monarch and the Fell Omen were one and the same, they’d kill him; they’d chase him out of the golden capital from where he was born and try to shove him back into the sewers at best, more likely they’d cut off his horns, torture him until he wished he were dead. The citizens would not show him mercy, they were not taught to. Anything aberrant is to be culled. Morgott himself has allowed Omenkillers to enter and walk the streets of Leyndell, he has allowed this bigotry to flourish.
One person does not turn the world. Even Marika cannot.
If- if he could just enter the Erdtree, he’d assemble the Elden Ring and serve The Greater Will as his mother did before him. He’d be loyal, subservient, and willing to do anything, pay any price. Morgott knows it would not be some magical fix to change the world, but the people have lost their guiding light, the people need their faith returned to them to soften the harshness of their sad reality.
Still, the thorns do not yield.
Perhaps the Erdtree and its maker know better. The demigods are all rotten to their cores, failures all- even himself.
The Omen are cursed. It’s not for something as arbitrary as the horns that grow from their bodies, the simple crime of being different- Morgott has nightmares. They’re not the normal kind, no, it’s an affliction all Omen have. The thing is, he’s listened to the voices that cry, the faces that torment him, and they are people. Or, perhaps souls of the lingering dead, regardless, over time he has come to recognize certain people in his nightmares. They speak of a kingdom lost in shadow, a great and horrible crusade, and a sacrifice.
The Omen carry this curse of the dead from birth. Morgott could try to uncover the mystery of this affliction, and why it deprives the Omen from the Grace of the Erdtree, but the dead say Marika’s name with such disdain; they call her a slatternly moll, and her crown a crown of bones and blood. If it is a secret long buried, who is he to dig it up?
All he knows is that he should not be alive. He still breathes, so he’ll keep serving under his mother’s rule.
There was a short, infinitesimal and ephemeral time in history where the Erdtree was able to provide enough for all; its sap fell plentifully, and it was an age of flourish. It was a long, long time ago. It’ll never exist again, not under the rule of the Greater Will. Now the world rots. Marika is gone and the gods have abandoned them.
The era of the Erdtree is ending. If no one claims the throne, it’ll all wither away. Perhaps it’s all a lost cause from the start and there’s nothing he can do. Powerless, cursed Morogott, rightfully tossed away the moment he was born.
So be it then. That’ll be his role, the last king of kings, guarding a locked door and la ost dynasty.