Courage
The great wolf reminds Ornstein of Artorias.
Of course it was the man's pet, but that is not all. Something in its eyes, he thinks, in the way it looks at him. Something in the way it moves. Artorias' crest was a wolf, after all. It throws itself through the air, a vaulting whirlwind with fangs in place of its master's sword, which is buried beneath rubble now.
He never fought Artorias in deadly combat, but he thinks this is what it would have been like.
When he dodges he can see his own blood whip past him in droplets. They caught into his tail of hair. With the wolf he dances to a music of panting, of growls, of tromping footfalls and blistering charges. When he flings his lightning spears the sound rebounds around the clearing of the Grave of Artorias, bouncing off the broken monolith and shaking dozens of tribute-swords in half.
His blood and Smough's mingle on the wolf's black lips. Ornstein will put him to rest when his duty permits. He has tarried too long here already.
Yes, the ring. Artorias's ring. The Astorian, the disgraced Sunlight Warrior has made off with it, back towards the forest and its burning hunters. If that man escapes with the ring then all of this is for nothing, then the Darkroot Garden will have burned for nothing. It had another name once.
Darkness creeps at the corners of his vision, and he is slower every time he dodges the wolf's lunge. He has never lost an arm before. But neither has he ever lost a fight, and the dragons are dead. Great Wolf Sif comes again, a snow storm with a bloody mouth. He can see the murder in its eyes, for no longer does it recognize him and fear him as it once did long ago. It has gone mad with sorrow and rage.
A misstep. His foot turns in the earth and he falls, twisting, grasping at midnight air. The wolf moves in for the kill. One minute it is across the clearing, crouched to leap. The next second it is upon him, mouthing itself between his helmet and his armor. Hot breath tickles his neck and he reaches up to pry at its jaws and finds himself uselessly clinging to its muzzle with one hand, muscles shaking in agony as he is punished for forgetting that he no longer has two arms. Sif bats him down to the ground with a massive paw before lunging in again, claws leaving great scuffs in his armor. But the wolf is not the only one with claws.
Ornstein's gauntlet snatches at the wolf's eye. It yowls, arching away with a black streak running from his face. Ornstein bunches his legs, the plates of his armor half constricting him before he kicks out into the chest of the wolf. He has done nothing but kick a mountain, the blow going entirely unnoticed for the agony of its ruined eye. Now the wolf rises onto its hind legs with its front extended out, intent on striking a crushing blow from a safer distance. In mere moments the beast falls like an avalanche bearing a blow that will crush his skull.
But too slow. Too cautious. Too afraid, after all. He rolls over his bad side, ignoring the pain from the amputated shoulder, cupping his left hand to his breast as he goes. The lightning splits from his fingers into a spear of sunlight and at the end of his roll he has driven it into the wolf's heart, a javelin thrown at point blank range. The bolt shirrs through the snowy scalp and up into the night, leaving a blanket of bright electric tendrils to wash across the fur from the point of impact, jittering down the powerful flanks and the shaking, earth tipped limbs. Sif howls long, piteous, staggering back and away.
Ornstein rises and comes after. He draws another arrow of light into existence, the familiar remnants of Lord Gwyn's power rising to the call of his faith. Then he swings it down like a tent stake into the beast's forehead until the crackling tip has dissipated within its brains. The stench of boiling meat fills his nostrils and the fur beneath his fist stands suddenly and permanently on end. Beneath his breath he continues the sunlight prayer, drawing still on its power, channeling it into his foe. With a wet popping sound a foul smoke belches from both eye sockets, then out the beast's seizing, snapping mouth, its twitching ears, from its hackles and the seams of its whole flesh, until and Great Wolf Sif is crumbling to its knees before him, burning beneath his hand and his arm as he now clings to the nape of the great white neck, a child wrestling his dog to the ground. Somehow it is still whining. He puts his hand between the animal's ears and rubs it until it is dead, until the skin and burnt hair comes off onto his fingers. The river that was the power of Gwyn has sunken back into him and taken with it all his strength. He slumps into the corpse and lets his eyes falls closed.
It is raining. What will the Princess think?
Once, he kicked Sif in the skull for doing something—he can not remember what. When Artorias found out he attacked. That was the first time they fought physically. Gough had stayed silent. Ciaran had refused to speak to Ornstein for weeks. But was it for the blows he had given the knight or the blows he had given the wolf?
Ornstein wipes his hand on the corpse-pelt and rises to his feet again. He goes to search for his arm, circling the clearing, listening to the hiss of the stream around him. Smough's blood flows like a black river from his corpse, the bulbous gold blob in the center of the graveyard, and it turns the stream muddy. Sif's body has begun to smoke into the sky and outward in a cloud to fill the yard. He chokes through the plumes to reach the broken base of the monument in his search, only to find that both his and Artorias's weapons are completely hidden by the rubble. It would take precious time to unearth them, and the strength of rest and two arms. These things he does not have.
There it is. Perhaps there is still time. He sees his arm glittering in a far corner of the world and dashes forwards just before a snow white paw slams down across it. He watches his own fingers twitch from no more than five feet away. Alvina's silver-yellow eyes loom out of the night and the smoke to leer at him; she is scuffed from where the wolf swatted her aside to keep her from interfering. Her limbs and muzzle are draped in the blood of his soldiers: even as he watches, the feline tongue flicks out to clean the fur from red to pink.
"Alvina." No one else is here. There is nothing to risk by admitting that he knows the cat, that he knows her true purpose here as she does his.
Her ears twitch. "I thought you had forgotten who we were. The Dragonslayer I knew would not turn on his companions so."
The words are like fine needles, but he cannot be swayed."Conniving little sith. Give me back my arm."
The cat's claws extend from her paws, full knives. "You will never have the use of it again. For what you have done tonight, what you have done to Sif, for what you have done to this place and to the memory of Artorias and Ciaran. Never again."
He looks back at the broken bodies, the broken graves, at his broken spear and the broken sword and the bones of the woman with the broken mask. "I did my duty. You cannot understand that?" He starts towards her, but she leaps away with maddening grace, her prize, his arm, clutched in her jaws.
"So slow," she hisses. "You are no lion. That is but the name they gave you, that is just how they hammered your arrrrmorrr." The cat drops and spins in a wild circle that comes near him but never close enough. "Look around you, Dragonslayer. Look at what the old lion has done. Does this make you prrroud?"
"You are foul little malkin. The fault for this lies on you, not me. You could have surrendered to me the Abysswalker's Ring, youknew the Lords had need of it, that Gwynevere had need of it, you knew I would come for it one day. But you chose to hoard this, all of this away, as if they were yours and yours alone." He feels the rage bubbling up his throat. "This place is my right, not yours, never yours."
The cat slides to a stop with quivering limbs, hunched just out of Ornstein's reach. His arm lies forgotten fifty feet away. "You had no right to ruin this place. Did it mean nothing to you, that you would destrrroy everything we loved just to steal some petty token?"
The Dragonslayer can feel his lips peel back from his teeth, as if he were a cat himself. "You know nothing of love, beast. If you did, you would have rushed to deliver Artorias' ring to me yourself. Instead, you hoarded these graves and their treasure like a jealous magpie and made yourself mistress to murderers. I am not the one who has destroyed the memory of Artorias."
She hisses back at him. "We do not abandon our friends."
He laughs. "Then this is loyalty? You may guard great corpses, but I guard Lord Gwyn's own living daughter even as she works to restore this world. Tell me then what you planned while you wasted away here. Tell me how you planned to rekindle Lordran, and relight the Far Fires, and push back the Dark once and for all."
In a long silence, the cat gapes at him with an expression almost human. "You are as blind and as deaf as ever, Dragonslayerrr." She backs away. "We are done with you now, we have had enough. You may leave, leave and suffer knowing what you have done, and take your madness and your blindness with you. But your arrrm will stay here."
"You will regret your treachery when I return. And soon." Ornstein looks towards Artorias's grave, where he last left the ring before the wolf killed Smough. "And the Executioner's body?"
Alvina's head cocks. "Your monster. His ample flesh will feed the forest."
"No. I want him buried here. Here, or I come for you now."
She plays at amusement. "You have no strength left, Dragonslayer."
He has steadied himself, and draws again on the sucking stream bed of sunlight within him. Just one more spark. "Lord Gwyn gives me strength. He is not dead yet. The sun is not so dim as you believe it to be; it still shines bright in Anor Londo."
The great cat blinks once, twice, unimpressed. "You have strange dreams, Dragonslayer."
"They are not merely dreams."
"Enough of you." She hisses at him, drawing back, slinking away into the darkness. "Enough. Go now, before yourrr madness burns us further. We will not give you a second chance."
So he goes. He turns and climbs over the wreckage of the gate, awkward with only three limbs, limping down the bridge and back towards the Darkroot Garden. He can feel the eyes of the cat on his back. There is a fuming wreck piled in the rain-mist beyond the bridge. The wreck is what remains of that Garden: it is a sprawling thing, black gorse and seared trunks, tree bodies curled like wilting beams of coal. The Darkroot Garden is a fire pit. It was his doing, his lighting that brought this destruction.
But there is no time to ponder. There are figures standing by the ruined bridge tower at the end of his path. They are screaming in the rain. He can make out the words, and from them the voices. He hears the confession of Solaire of Astora. It does not surprise him. Humans excel at destroying themselves.
Lightning flashes and he slumps, using the railing to pull himself to the end of the bridge. His armor weighs a thousand tons, and even his missing arm is made of lead. In the light he sees the Astorian fool helmetless, eyes hollow, straw colored clumps of hair dangling from a sallow scalp. The dead man has turned towards the bridge, and in that instant he is knocked down by the other figure.
Ornstein lurches to the end and steps from mossy stone to running mud. The Darkmoon Knightess stands over the Astorian, looks up to him, startled, and speaks. "He knows, my Lord. He has the ring. And he—"
Ornstein cuts her off. "I heard. And I have had enough of this place. I am ordering a retreat."
"What? He murdered—he has the ring."
Indeed, he heard. Solaire of Astora killed the Chosen Undead. But what difference does it make if the arrogant little cur was slain by foe or friend? Humans always fail. And the ring...they will not leave this place alive if they take it now. What good would the ring be if he cannot live to return it to Gwynevere?
Gwyndolin's Knightess is rambling, half dumb. "We can win. I can take it back. "
"Then do it," he says, mocking.
"I will."
Still she stands.
"We do not have time for a struggle," he urges, nodding at the half-corpse squirming at her feet. "Slay him and be done with it." And still no movement and no surprise to him. Alvina calls out in the night far behind, urging him away with a wordless shout.
The Knightess begs to search for survivors, and Ornstein walks past her towards the fires of the Garden and the lines of still corpses, scattered as in ant trails, smoking and burned, his soldiers or theirs. There will be another time. The Knightess says something hoarse behind, husking under her breath, some none-sense. But soon enough she joins his side on the way out of the incinerated garden, on the way to the cracked steps and the old archway.
He used to take walks here.
As soon as they are through the gate, the Darkmoon knightess collapses silently to the ground. At first he believes she has been struck down by an arrow to the back, but no, there is no wound that he can see. Her neat armor is beaten, bloodied, muddied, now shaking from some tremors beneath the covering. He stops for a moment, and once he is sure that no Hunter has followed them he takes a moment to circle her, wondering.
"What are you doing, lady."
No response comes. He reaches to feel at the blurry clot of pain where his right shoulder should be and is dismayed to discover that his arm and spear are still missing. And still the wretch shakes in the mud, that rain rattling on metal, fists pressed over the back of her head as if to drown herself. But she voices nothing. Around them, trees murmur, the underbrush stirs as if ready to spring to life. Their presence will not be tolerated here for much longer.
"Get up." He stoops to the knightess and grabs her by one arm, but she twists out of his grasp. Her helmet is mud smeared and tilted at a drunken angle. When she stands she does not look at him or address him. It suits.
"What a performance," says Ornstein. If he had both hands he would clap them. "Did you have a fit? Try to keep your emotions under control, lady."
Her fists clench, creaking metal, her voice is low and hard. "You should tend to your own wounds."
"I have a goddess to care for me, lady. Perhaps you should consult your own—if he will still take you back after this failure."
She has no response, of course. This one knows silence and obedience when it is called for; it served them well when she played the lookout while he slew those men in the Parish, all to justify and precipitate this battle. But it seems conspirators make for poor travelling companions; he is left to his thoughts.
On the path back they walk in the tracks that his dead war party made. The rain has not yet washed them away. He can see Smough's oversized footprints as well, balanced between the earth wall and the cliff. Any closer to the edge and the fat moron would have fallen off the side. He remembers then that he tied a handkerchief of Gwynevere's to the lugs of his spear—it was still there when they walked this way, he remembers. But since then he lost track of it.