Chapter Text
Melina stared into the gentle curve of golden Grace which arced towards the distant walls of Leyndell. Nearby, her Tarnished tended to a meager flame beside a low stone rise that sheltered her against an unusually chill wind.
Her Tarnished.
The word, simple but unpliant, like steel in her burnt and bodiless spirit. Belonging. Such a thing, she thought, I’d never known without –
“Nervous?” Came the ever-cheery voice of her constant companion. Her Tarnished, a powerful woman in both strength and deed, looked at her with all the reverence and warmth of a candle, ever-burning. Melina stared at her, unsure how to respond, and the warrior before her, who’d felled countless men and beasts across the Lands Between, grew red in the face and looked away with a coy smile, on at the city walls which seemed so minuscule beneath the bows of the Erdtree. “We’re getting closer every day, I wonder what the capitol is like. You must remember something of it?”
“Precious little, I’m afraid.” Melina settled down across from her, between the flame and the grace now at her back. She shivered, suddenly, against a brisk wind which rattled the pale amber grasses and scattered pockets of ghostly pollen along the hillside.
“Cold?” asked her Tarnished.
Melina shrugged and folded herself into her cloak. “It seems on nights such as these, the winds can chill even spirits. Or perhaps it is but a memory of cold, and the closeness of the capitol has me feeling nostalgic for a time which I have never borne witness.”
The gentle flame flickered at her feet, but its heat may as well have been a star for its distance to her appreciation to feel it. Her Tarnished lounged against the close stones that offered them gentle shelter. Her face, illuminated in fire and highlighted by the scintillating gold, could well have been the most beautiful image Melina had ever seen. She hoped, perhaps selfishly, that she would remember her exactly as she was in this moment.
“You are welcome to lay with me. For warmth.”
A sudden heat. But not the likes of flame or sunlight. Melina held an airless breath against the tightness in her chest which bloomed into a heat of devastating force. It terrified her, for no feeling felt so tactile in her long life of spiritdom, and the weight of such a gossamer embrace threatened to swallow her whole.
“I know not, dear Tarnished, what warmth a mere spirit might enjoy.”
Even as she spoke the words, she trembled for her cowardice. How long had they traveled together in that timeless age? How many days did she watch her triumph over every trial, conquer every challenger, champion every cause of the downtrodden of this accursed world? How many nights did she watch her Tarnished sleep beneath the stars and fallen golden leaves and wish to be…more.
“A spirit may not know unless she tries,” said her Tarnished with a soft smile and eyes filled with kindness. “If that is her wish, of course.”
My wish?
Melina’s thoughts wandered briefly to the future - to their imminent arrival at the Erdtree capital. She thought of rejecting her companion the familiarity that would breed only pain in each other’s absence once she realized her fate. But her wish? She had seldom considered a life, if that was what her existence could be called, lived in pursuit of such a simple thing as desire. Surely, this once, she could indulge what instincts of mortal want yet mustered in her soul.
She pulled herself over the short distance to her Grace-given warrior and lay herself at her side. The Tarnished rolled her cloak and placed it behind them as a cushion and rested herself on it, her face turned to the cloudless sky where moon and stars battled the ever-golden glow of the great tree. Melina shifted to her side and watched her companion’s eyes trace constellations in the bleary night.
“If I become Elden Lord,” started her Tarnished, breaking Melina from a daze, “do you think I will be worthy of the name?”
She broke her observation of the stars and looked at Melina, yet even turned away from the night sky a small universe danced in her eyes, surrounding Melina’s reflection in those deep and glistening pools of hope.
“My dear Tarnished, I have never known you to turn away from kindness when by rights your blood would proffer you the path of war. Your heart and desires are just. You shall be a Lord yet, and if my measure is of any worth, you shall hold the love of all the world.”
“Do I hold yours?”
“My…?” Melina blinked her solitary eye and bit her tongue. Such closeness, such a gaze, and surely such words would set her soul ablaze for all the warmth it spurred within her. She wondered, for a moment, what such a flame would spark in a kindling spirit as she. Quickly she found her wonder knotted into a frightful and sudden need.
Melina was not without a sense of touch. Like many spirits, she held partial sway in the world which existed in a deathless liminal age between stagnant eternity and rotten abundance. Countless times had she held the hand of her Tarnished, at first simply for the ritual purpose of imparting strength through runes. More often of late, she found herself lingering on the touch, the way her warrior companion’s strong fingers curled into her palm, remaining long after the need had passed for connection to the power within her. More often she watched the dance of her battles and felt worry fill her with each blow and injury she met. More, now, she tended to her Tarnished's wounds and took any and every opportunity to relish their closeness.
Now, however, her eye lingered on her Tarnished’s lips with a single impulse that gnawed at her usually stoic mien. For all her talk of duty and destiny, it amazed her how easily the world and all its troubles fell away when she looked at her. In place of the smell of ash which followed her every step, she imagined the scent of her hair. Where once was the bitter taste of coals which scoured the war-scarred battlefields, there was now her - an imagined taste of something altogether sweeter and softer.
“I know not what love a spirit might offer, that would be equal to yours.”
Her Tarnished smiled. A radiant expression that scoured even the Erdtree’s golden gloam from her mind.
“A spirit may not know, unless she tries. If that is indeed her wish.”
My wish.
In Melina’s soul there was a pleading request she could not impart through words. So through simple gaze did she give her champion an answer, through parted lips between which empty breath escaped did she finally ask.
Her Tarnished, ever graceful and ever kind, placed a gentle hand on her maiden’s face and brushed away such stray auburn hairs that would divide them. Melina reached up to touch her hand, pressing it against her cheek. As the distance between them dwindled into ceaseless abyss, she felt the kindling in her soul grow warm and desperate - for fear of forsaken duty or anticipation of a bond never meant to be, she could not discern. And now, she did not care.
Their lips met with the softness of velvet and deep within her soul something ignited. An inferno burned unlike any in the world, wielding an impudent fury. She felt herself alight, in comfort and in safety, in happiness. So unlike her dreams of fire which plagued her since her sodden birth and summary exile, she reveled in its warmth and let the flames catch her bodiless frame, so long as she may be consumed by this embrace.
Please. Please, let it not end here.
She kissed her in turn. A ravenous thing took her over, hungry and feverish. Melina’s fingers entangled themselves in her companion’s clothes, pulling at her, desperate to be smothered by her form, to have her fire tended, to be stoked by her breath and her light.
Let me have this. I beg thee. I have never asked for anything in this accursed life. This alone, I am owed.
The difference in their bodies seemed to melt away. Melina swore, to all the stars that bore witness to their union, that a heart began to beat within her breast. A bellow fueling a raging inferno in her meager spirit which denied all but the most primal of senses. A mortal’s blessing, if so fleeting. Each kiss shaped her into something more solid, more tangible than the ghost she had lived her life as. The heat was almost impossible to bear.
Please. Let me spend eternity with her.
When all was naught but bliss and sinful glee, she pulled away to see the eyes of her beloved Tarnished. There, staring back at her, was a swirling mass of madness and chaos. It pinned her down into the coarse earth, searing her wrists. The face of her companion was replaced by an all-consuming miasma of frenzied fire; her voice only a discordant echo of all which would eradicate the very stars from the sky and all that looks upon them. It looked - if such a thing could look - down at her.
“LET CHAOS TAKE THE WORLD!”
Melina awoke from a violet slumber surrounded by a grove of wilting lilies. Her hands were wrapped around her body in a tight hold, shadows of tears caked her eyes and a taste lingered on her lips, though every moment of wakefulness found it drifting away as quickly as a whisper.
She rose from the nascent garden of violet half-blooms with a heaviness unfamiliar to her spirit self, excited by the melodic thrum of emotions which burred within her against the lull of magical sleep. She looked above the lilting flora and saw, beyond the high walls of Elphael, where a churning sky of frenzied flame crawled across the world like a shroud of pestilence.
“A cruel gift, sibling,” she cursed towards the lilies. And yet, she smiled in spite of the pain in her chest. She cupped the pedals in her palm and whispered a prayer of peaceful death for her dear departed sister. Their stems sunk further in despair, dried and parched of sustenance and expended of nectar. Even they were succumbing to the slow, assured erasure of the frenzy.
She looked back at the bruised sky once more before descending from the grove, into the charred ruins of her brother’s failed first attempt at a new order.
The Haligtree’s pale-red blooms fell onto the marble streets of the city in a funerary cascade. Melina stepped over rotten corpses and discarded branches which littered the streets in a dour procession following her fitful slumber. Where once was the metallic melodies of bugles which sounded through the pale-gold sanctuary, now remained a groaning cacophony of half-life and misery.
A fowl wind carried cinders from a faraway apocalypse, and each step pressed ash into the splintering stone of Elphael, rendering the weight of countless eons of lost hope upon her weary shoulders. Melina glided over countless white-stone steps until under shaded bower she found the object of her search. A dry-rot basin of white flowers, wherein lay a massive scarlet bloom yet untouched by the frenzied flame, held fast within the warm and fetid air.
“Oh sister, never to bloom thrice. How many destinies shall never reach fruition because of the yelough-death, I wonder. Too many.”
Her voice rang like dull chimes across the stagnant pool beneath the small canopy of drying pedals. Flakes of ash spilt through the burning peak of the great tree and would soon smother the basin. She would need to work quickly.
Melina knelt down beside the scarlet aeonia and placed her burnt hands within its recesses. Something long beyond death stirred within, a hallowed remnant of a once great warrior reaching for absolution and purpose. An all too familiar feeling for the kindling maiden.
“Hush, sweet Malenia. This fate is cruel, I know, but both our lots are spoken for us, it seems. Whence our lives were ours to live, mayhaps we could have stood side by side in a kinder world. But twas not to be. The Lord of Frenzied Flame has risen, and I must end her life afore the last of life she will consume thus. For this task, your ashes I require.”
The blossom shuddered. Uneasy. Frightened.
“Yes, my sister. Life will prosper. Hope will reign. Take my word, as blood. Upon our Mother’s sinful soul do I so solemnly swear: I will right the wrong and give all upon the world the chance of possibility once more, if it be the last I shall do with my meager existence.”
With her words, the scarlet flower relaxed, ready to accept a heinous end. Melina closed her eyes and flattened her palm against her yet-reborn elder sister, coaxing the cinders from within her tender spirit.
As kindling set to flame, Malenia burned. The scarlet rot fought within, but in spite of the will of her goddess-embodied, it caught and smothered all else but resignation and acceptance. When finally Melina pulled her hands free of the gentle blaze, she cradled a handful of dark ash and carefully drained them into the crimson flask on her belt.
“Ashes join the tears, but I fear more will be needed lest I risk untimely demise. A spirit’s body is vulnerable to the flame of frenzy. With thee, my sister, and perhaps one more, I might craft a body worthy to wield Death, indiscriminate. I pray only that the Crucible accepts my prayers and grants me what my birth denied.”
As she rose to leave, a glint of pale gold caught her attention in the ashen remains. As the stagnant waters muddied, a small needle revealed itself in the shallow depth, glinting from the faintest light. Melina, curious, reached for the needle and held it in her palm.
It was an unalloyed gold spiral. The work of Miquela. In its metallic cold she could feel the repulsion of the divine elements, the subtle magnetism it had to the earth and its lower spheres. It was more than enough to force her to her knees with tears.
“You damned fool,” Melina cursed through choked breaths. A dam broke within her, a sturdy force which held fast her determination since the moment of betrayal now simply washed away with grief and heartache. Shattered like the Ring. Spectral tears fell and joined the still pool below as she clutched the fine metalwork. Her body convulsed in agony as the realization became all the more sure in her mind. “You miserable fiend. You left her. She tried to fix it and you left! Had you been there, had you stayed by her side like you promised, she could have…she might have had the strength to resist. She might have come back to you.”
Melina looked at the crumbling remains of her sister’s flowery cocoon and let free all her sorrow and despair. She howled into the nothingness and the would-be-nothing. She let all her immortal mirage of a heart scream into the flimsy needle and its utter completeness.
When finally her soul could stand to weep no longer, Melina rose from the pool and placed the needle as a pin within her cloak, over her unbeating heart.
Even the Land of Shadow was not to be spared the uncompromising wrath of the Flame of Frenzy. The Black Keep’s numerous occupants, soldiers from Messmer’s army, writhed in pain as the yelough flame twisted through the cracks and crevices of the stonework and dark lattice of charred steel. Their cries were met with wallowing howls of madness as they fought each other to bitter undeath, only to be consumed in pustulant cremation as their bodies writhed against one-another in abhorrent misery. When they were silenced, it was at the hands of a complete oblivion. Not even the bitter memories of that place could fill the hollowness of their passing once gone.
Melina snaked between the vexing displays of depraved murder without notice, as was her wont. Her unfortunate nature afforded her the subtlety of her passing, a condition she began to wonder if she would miss should her efforts come to fruition. Perhaps, by chance, she would maintain some semblance of her current self. The thought of transformation, undergone by so many of her family before, was a heavy thought on her mind given the intensity of their change.
High in the western tower, across a narrow bridge whose failed frame threatened to bring down the marred scar of Marika’s sinful artifice, she found him. Or rather, what remained.
Beneath the sodden statue of their Mother, in a dimly lit hall whereupon once sat the arbiter of a goddess's unbridled vengeance, lay the ashes of Messmer the Impaler.
“Firstborn and twice burned of Marika’s bastard brood. Bearer of the original sin. Tyrant. Brother. What peace is this that you should find but a curse upon our sorry blood?”
Melina knelt down beside the pile. From her belt she drew the flask of crimson tears and poured a handful of ash into the tonic. A gentle, forlorn warmth spread within the ceramic confines, and around her she could feel the lingering guilt and resentment of another soul yet trapped within that place.
“Tactless intruder…” echoed a familiar timbre.
From whence the undying resilience of the Shadowlands did claim such a wretched soul, now appeared before her the shade of her eldest brother. Communed to the touch of a fellow apparition, Messmer stared with a singular burning eye at Melina.
“Thou’rt yet another divested remnant of mine gaoler, it seemeth.”
“Eldest brother,” spoke the unshaken maiden, “I am Melina. Like you I was born with visions of fire and an unkind fate thrust upon by Marika the Eternal.”
Messmer’s spectral form smirked with bemusement. “And such a tempestual fate wouldst serve to cause our Mother frightful airs, but this…” He gazed at the gently smoldering ruins of his once-seat of power.
Melina nodded, stowing her flask and folding her hands reservedly in her lap as she noted the mirrored fate floating before her. “A flame she did not altogether anticipate, I fear. This is the doing of a Tarnished who would be Lord. The one who brought you low, in fact.”
“Ah yes, the graceless mongrel. Lest I forget even in this shadowy death the humbling demise she so gracelessly bestowed me. It doth appear, however, that my final wish was granted. Mother received Her dues, after all. A most befitting end to Her tale.”
Melina felt a conflict of ancient loyalties rage deep in her heart but could not find fault within his words. She recalled the scene which broke her very being, standing in the ashes of the Erdtree, upon the ruin of her Mother and the Golden Order. The site and moment of her baleful oath.
“She met Her end, yes. But none deserve this cruel nothingness of which the Three Fingers promise. There is no rest, no hope in this meaningless void. Life, at least, should persist.”
“If thou feel’st so strongly of this fact, wherefore did thou not prevent it?”
“I–” she stopped, shame filling her every thought. Rather than send it away, she embraced the whole of it and faced her brother in earnest. “I left her. My Tarnished. She chose a path I could not follow and its fruition became the end of everything. Twas her decision to accept the temptations of the Three Fingers. And mine to abandon her. I share the blame.”
“And wherefore,” Messmer began mockingly, “didst your unruly Tarnished seek the company of the foul fingers?”
Melina glared at her elder brother with a paired cindering ferocity. Yet, in spite of herself, she felt the divine element they shared at work and her stark firmness cool at his indelicate prodding.
“She loved me.”
The spirit of Messmer laughed. A rasping, callous sound. Even in his spectral visage the empty socket of his right eye was a horrendous sight and in his baleful laughter the barest hint of an ancient spark surged within the hollow.
“A rueful sin, indeed. And didst thou, dear sister, hold your charge’s heart in fondness, too?”
“I did,” Melina said. Inwardly she felt relief to let another soul know the truth she had buried within her for so long, and by the emptiness of his silence she found, perhaps for the first time since leaving her intrepid champion in the cursed depths beneath Leyndel, kinship.
Messmer continued to hold his silence, compelled by his sister’s sincerity. Finally, Melina spoke with fervent disregard, to the only family she had in unfavorable chance to speak with in all her life.
“I loved her with everything I held precious in my being and I failed to make it known to her. We both knew I would be the kindling to end Marika’s imprisonment at the hands of the Golden Order. No less would be required to right the world. To mend the Elden Ring or forge an order anew, any of such outcomes would have been acceptable. Anything but this. But she saw through my desperate mask. She saw me, like no other has or will. She touched my heart and I in my despicable selfishness touched hers and she saw no world worth saving where I was burned to ash. It was too great a price for her to pay.”
Messmer’s piteous demeanor had softened to that of a dutiful older sibling. A role entirely unfamiliar to the cursed child of fell flame and feller serpenthood, yet one, in his afterlife, he shouldered nobly.
“She took the threads of destiny from thee, sister.”
Melina nodded. “Yes. And I will never forgive her for it. She took from me the fate I had not simply resigned myself to but proudly accepted. And yet, a part of me aches for the dream of what could have been. Another course in life where both she and I could…”
Her brother turned his head, a bewildered sympathy in his eye.
“A fool’s dream, you see. But a dream I fear we both shared. And that dream gave birth to a dangerous passion in her. One the Three Fingers exploited.”
“Aha,” said Messmer after a short pause. “What crueler temptress than the heart. I’m saddened to say I sympathize with your plight, young Melina.”
The kindling maiden’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Rellana, as you might recall if by the Tarnished’s side you stood whilst she scavenged these shadowed lands. I knew mine own fate, and made it well known to her the damned destiny I would meet within this dreadful place. Yet, by my side she stood. Adamant in resolve. Proud. An unkind and uncommon love.”
He looked at her with the broken honesty of the long-consigned dead. A man who, for all his faults, was victim in his tragedy to the whims and grudges of the past.
“Did you love her?”
“I…do not rightly know.” He seemed lost in remembrance, as if grasping for rays of daylight deep beneath the shaded bows of a dense forest. A weaker countenance befell him, entirely foreign to the station of one who claimed birthright to a goddess. “Love, I think, is too grand a word for such lowly things as we. Demigods, all. Except for you, I imagine.”
“Why not me?”
“Did you know our Mother well?”
Melina shook her head. “I was Her last born. Burned and bodiless and left at the foot of the Erdtree with nothing but silence and fear to embrace me.”
“And that is why you are nothing like the rest of our besotted line. You did not know our Mother’s love, Her wrath. You had your Tarnished. You learned love as mortals do. Lived in their shadow and not as sundry playthings in Her attempts to thwart the Greater Will. All the grace of gold, without the expectations of Her order.”
His words echoed in her like the countless spoken fragments of her Mother’s history which haunted her during her travels. To herself she admitted there was bitter truth in his voice.
“Messmer. Brother. I am grateful for this chance to speak. I regret only that we could not have known each other in another time.”
“I am ready for oblivion, sister. Such is deserved for my transgressions. Lest in my ashes you seek to redeem the irredeemable.”
Melina looked down at the scars on her hands. “I cannot promise what will become of you. A faded void of flame awaits us all if I do not act, and with your ashes, and those of our sister Malenia’s, I shall forge the instrument of our hopeful absolution.”
Messmer smiled. “Let not your siblings' demise weigh heavy on your heart. You are hope incarnate, Melina. Take death with you where you roam, and may it meet your Tarnished with surety. For now, let me pass in peace, as I have always wanted. Go.”
Melina rose from the site of one of her beloved’s greatest victories and wished her brother the fondest farewell she could grant him. In that coming emptiness, where the flames sought in sluggish consumption the whole of that place, she stepped down the grand stairs and met her gaze towards the great baldachin hanging from Scadutree. The yelough frenzy was hours from ending its haunting visage, and soon the hidden lands would rejoin the Lands Between in time for its ultimate decimation.
With courage in her heart, Melina returned to the once-golden world, and the beginning of the end.