Work Text:
Marika finds her daughter in the coliseum.
It is far from the first place that anybody would bother to look. Even now, she can hear the distant clamor of the city bells, the chaotic fervor as the knights of Leyndell search every forgotten alleyway and domicile of ill-repute for their missing princess. For all that the girl carries Godfrey’s blood and stature, most still see her as a child. Far too young to climb the steep slopes to the gladiatorial arena.
A terrible assessment, ill-fitting and inane. One needs only to meet the girl’s gaze, to stare into her golden eyes and see something much more terrible and older than a child. Then again, most wouldn’t dare. Their eyes catch on the trappings of youth, soft palms and fair skin, and seek nothing more.
Marika knows better. Of all her children, beyond Godwyn or even Messmer, it is her sole daughter that carries the most years on her shoulders. Eight years of age, and yet…
And yet…
She watches from the shadows as the girl performs a queer dance along the edge of the coliseum. Blood still stains the sands, crimson-red-rusting bouts from the violent spectacle of the past days, lives spent and bled like gold. Her dress flows behind her like snow in the wind. The logic of her path is inscrutable, save that her steps hug the coliseum walls, never quite entering the radiance cast by the Erdtree.
The performance captivates her, fey and unnatural, entirely unlike the pageantry of the coliseum or the royal court over which she presides. For all intents and purposes, she should have no business with nonsensical rituals of little import, nor the patience to tolerate the capricious whims of a wayward child. And yet she cannot help but watch, reminiscing, studying, learning.
Pain shoots through her mouth, brisk and violent. Her teeth on her lip, scraping it bloody. A pulse of golden light heals her wounds, a fixing of grace, yet the ichor still wets her tongue.
She grimaces. It’s a foolish lapse in the decorum that she has long since mastered, a study in etiquette devised by herself for herself and the courtiers who trail in her wake like helpless babes. Not behavior fit for a queen, nor for a god.
“Gwyneth.” She steps forward, allowing the light of the Erdtree to illuminate her. “Thou’st caused much trouble for thy minders.”
Her daughter stills. In the shadow of the coliseum wall, the golden hue of her hair seems to fade away, revealing strands of ashen black. Her true coloring, hidden by mummery and dye. A sign of imperfection. Only the gold in her eyes runs true, a sign of her inheritance, potent and powerful.
Those same eyes seem to pierce her now, wide and searching. Always weary as well, and yet Marika cannot help but release a small breath as their gaze drifts back towards the bloody sands. A mockery of penitence. “Trouble travels wherever it may, mother. I cannot help whether it hath become my constant companion.”
Marika raises an eyebrow. “Thou wouldst absolve thyself of responsibility?”
A toothy grin answers her. It reminds her of Hoarah Loux before Serosh mounted his back, her ever loyal Elden Lord, wild and vivacious. The girl’s father worn upon her face like a mask. “I never said that.”
“Insolent child.”
Gwyneth laughs. It’s a quiet affair, dust-covered and old with how it seems to catch in her throat. “Only insolent, mother? Do not still thy tongue on my account. Speak true.”
And then it’s not just a laugh, but a thick cough. Gwyneth covers her mouth with her elbow and it comes away glistening red, wet with blood.
Marika finds herself moving before her thoughts order themselves, her arms moving to embrace her child. The silk black fabric of her dress falls over the girl like a cloak, casting them both in shadow. Pressed against the hollow of her ribcage, her daughter’s chest rattles with each breath, a febrility that neither physick nor incantation has proven capable of healing.
Her hands spin golden threads anyway, the warm light of an incantation mending unseen wounds. It’s a small comfort, fleeting, but it costs Marika little to ease her daughter’s plight. A hard knot of tension loosens inside her as her breathing settles.
“The thorns twist inside thee,” Marika murmurs fiercely. “Thou knowst the risk of fleeing thy chambers on such nights.”
Gwyneth settles onto her knees, almost curling into herself. “I did not wish to cause trouble.”
Marika knows that feeling well. An old sentiment, discarded like so many other parts of her amidst a garden of corpses. To see it blossom now in the words of her daughter touches something in the hollow left behind, an arrhythmic fluttering in her breast.
“Thou’rt no burden to be abandoned like chaff in a storm, child.”
A quick breath, frustrated with itself. “I cannot rely upon thee for an eternity, mother. I will have to walk my own path one day, alone.”
Marika frowns. “I have no intention of leaving thee.”
The grace of gold, kindness, deification. A new order under the light of a brilliant tree, deathless and unending. A better world for those who can no longer see it, and for her children that might yet enjoy its warm touch.
Gwyneth turns to look up at her, still shadowed by the dress. Twin pits of molten light scald her face. It is a gaze that wounds from a face that Marika cannot help but love, and confronted by that terrible visage, she can only recall the pronouncements of the Fingers upon the birth of the twins.
“Nothing lasts forever,” Gwyneth murmurs. She smiles, but it is a cruel look, only skin deep, and embraces Marika. Youthful arms hang from her neck like a millstone. “We must enjoy the time allotted to us all, each and every one.”
“No.” Marika denies it. This is law. None can deny her. Not the Fingers, and certainly not her errant daughter. “In ages past, perhaps, but no longer. Such is my will, until the workings of my designs shift. Eternal as the Elden Ring itself.”
“Death is not such a terrible ordeal.”
Marika knows this. There are worse fates laid upon the world, rotting within jars, lingering within the distant night. She would wage war upon them all, she would grind them to dust, she would destroy the world itself.
She would.
She already has.
“I would not have thee suffer it all the same,” Marika says.
Mercifully, her daughter does not refute her.
Leyndell builds itself up in moments. Every sunrise, the walls stretch a little higher, the rooftops gleam more brightly, the Erdtree shines more radiant. Out with the old, in with the new, and with each passing breath, Radagon can feel the remnants of past eras seep away with the tide of history, best forgotten.
The past holds little sway over him. He can only look forward, one foot after the other, never stopping or resting. The future holds possibility, the promise of purpose, and yet the current moment suffocates him like chains. In Leyndell, he has no purpose, rudderless; Marika has no need of a champion at the heart of her power, Godfrey leaping at her beck and call.
And so Radagon wanders, a purposeless mockery born of divinity, seeking a way out of this prison.
Naturally he fails, an outcome repeated with every passing day. The city buzzes with activity, whispered voices tittering with rumors and hearsay about the nighttime escapades of the daughter of god. All of it nonsense, of course. He remembers the moment as though witnessed in a dream, the long shadows of the fighting pits and whispered words shrouded in gold.
Were Marika to push herself to the fore, he knows that the gossips would still their tongues in a heartbeat. But with his cursed red hair and strong frame, he does not evoke any sort of feminine virtue. Walking along the streets without pomp or honor guard, he is just a champion, one of many. Lost amidst the crowd, the anonymity provides some small measure of comfort. Being unknown, being nobody and nothing, has been his state since his incarnation. He knows it better than anything else.
Marika’s scorn claws at his back, her amusement at his disgrace plain. At the very least, he has never stopped entertaining her with his wretched state.
Eventually, when he tires of Leyndell and its people, he retires to one of several hideaways situated throughout the city. Tall buildings with sealed windows hide a grove of trees, untouched as the settlement expanded and later forgotten with the rise of the new faith. An old power sits within the roots, the lingering traces of old gods once worshipped and now scattered among the mud. Like all of the other disparate faiths of the Lands Between, Marika slaughtered those divinities and took their followings into herself. Their places of worship now belong to her.
She graciously allows him to use the grove for his own ends. A kindness as much as a reminder. I can end you.
Radagon busies himself with swinging his sword, an instrument forged in the dark and tested upon the bones of his enemies. He has no foes upon which to practice, only the shadow cast by the Erdtree as he goes through the forms. A toothless sort of violence, an unsatisfying exertion that only serves to whet his appetite.
He sympathizes with Godfrey, strong and wild. Serosh upon Hoarah Loux’s back, Marika upon his. By association, they are one and the same. Chained beasts itching to act, left chained to the ennui of their own thoughts.
Another tight strike with his sword. Hold the elbows in. Pivot with his hips to strike the imaginary foe stabbing at his back.
“Lord Radagon.”
The voice lends credence to the impossibility of what he is seeing. Only the shock—his and Marika’s—prevents the blade from cleaving through fair skin and finely embroidered leathers.
He composes himself quickly, his expression inscrutable. “Princess.”
Gwyneth cocks her head in confusion, as though she has not intruded upon one of his most private places. She bears no sign of her recent weakness, no delicacy within her short frame. A blade hangs from her back, training steel, too tall for her. In time, perhaps, she will grow into it.
“I did not mean to surprise thee, milord,” she murmurs, bowing her head.
“I am not a lord,” Radagon protests gruffly, for he has no other retort beyond surliness. “Thou should not be here, princess.”
Gwyneth hums thoughtfully, ignoring the question. He has no idea what to do with her. With any of Marika’s children, his by the barest of technicalities. He does not consider them family, if a creature such as him can have family, if only because Marika clings to them so ferociously.
“In time,” Gwyneth says, unblinking. She has not moved from her position, scant inches from the lethal edge of his blade. “Thou will be a lord.”
He does not know why she has sought him out. She has no reason to know of him, save perhaps the soldier songs of glory and war. The ignorance discomfits him, an itch greater than any terror he might have felt during the war against the giants. “Thy queen mother must be seeking thee,” he compromises, desperate.
“She is not.” Words spoken with finality, tolerating no other interpretation. Marika haunts her like a second skin, the arrogance of a god, as sharp and cutting as the steel that flashes over her shoulder. “Shall we fight, Radagon?”
If the girl speaks with her mother’s pride, then she moves with Godfrey’s ferocity. She carries his hungry bloodlust in her intolerable eyes. Restless, unyielding, violent. He deflects every strike as she tests his defenses, any weakness imbued by the thorns discarded like a shed snakeskin. She wastes no words, so neither does he. Even Marika’s anger feels distant, the fury of the sun tempered only by the fact that he cannot feel the heat.
“I did not wish to cause trouble.”
Such hypocrisy. In this too, she resembles Marika. He delights in the contradiction as much as it disgusts him.
There is no challenge to this bout. The girl strikes to kill with a preternatural cunning, but he holds the advantage in weight, speed, and skill. Not a true battle, yet he finds challenge enough in restraining his strength. To cut down one of Marika’s children would be tantamount to committing suicide, and he does not know whether she would be the one to cast the final blow.
In another world, perhaps, this girl could be his child. The thought scalds him, the naïve hope that parenthood might stopper the emptiness within him. He can do nothing but hope, grasping blindly for the future like a witless babe. His own nature disgusts him.
And so he fights.
All too soon, the bout ends with Gwyneth panting and the edge of his blade flush against her neck. She stares at him defiantly, as though challenging him to follow through. He sees in her Hoarah Loux, beaten and bloodied underneath Marika’s hammer, accepting what may come.
“Thou’st much skill for thy age,” Radagon starts. The anger in her eyes burns bright, unsettling him, but he has not spoken false. “Thy form is commendable, if nothing else.”
Defiance characterizes Marika’s daughter, and he’s still fishing inside himself for more consolatory words when she presses her pale neck further against his still-raised sword. He quickly snatches it away, but the damage has been done, a crimson line pressed into the soft skin beneath her chin.
“Foolish girl!” Radagon hisses. He himself has abandoned rational thought, casting aside the expected propriety between a demigod and a lowly champion as he rushes to grab the girl by her shoulders. Blood and brambles stain his fingers, quickly illuminated by a faint golden glow. “Why wouldst thou do that?”
The cut heals swiftly, the incantation quick to find purchase. His own thoughts take much longer to settle.
Steel clatters against the ground as pale arms wrap around his shoulders. “I could not tell if thou hadst any love for us,” Gwyneth whispers into his ear. “I could not be certain. There was no other way to tell.”
Radagon stills, his artificial body like a stone. The castoff leavings of his god-flesh could be mistaken for a corpse. “I know not of what you speak.”
Small hands grab his wrists and pull them up until his fingers latch instinctively around a bare throat. She meets his gaze unflinchingly, her arms falling to her side.
“Should I call thee father, Radagon? Mother?”
He jerks his hands away and regrets the decision immediately. He would strangle her where she stood, if only to quell the words spilling from her lips. “You shall not.” His tongue is leaden, his spit acid. “I am not.”
Being known in such a manner scalds him like the wrath of the fire god. But unlike the giants, he cannot slay this enemy. Marika would not allow it, her attention sharp beneath his skin, knives ready to crucify him at the wrong word. His heart beats with an emotion that he cannot call fear, but equally loathsome and repugnant. Anathema to a creature like himself.
Gwyneth watches with hawk eyes. It is a small mercy that she does not smile. Those blistering eyes can clearly divine his torment. And yet the unmistakable pity burns his pride deeper than any mockery.
“Go,” Radagon spits, little more than a wounded animal. “Go, damn you.”
Gwyneth shifts. Quiet, untethered, piteous.
“I understand.” She does understand, he knows. She sees the whole of himself, a half-man, broken and incomplete.
And she leaves his grove, with unspoken truths and words that Radagon, despite himself, wants so desperately to hear.