We walked and talked. My girls were all there, and I held them with tears. Yet something was wrong. I tried believe it was my negativity again, the grimness of a man who had once thought only of tending the Flame and destroying his enemy. But I kept seeing shadows.
The architecture of these ruins was familiar for the wrong reasons. I saw a handful of white-robed individuals like the woman who had guided me here, those survivors or descendants of the Nox. But these were not Nox structures. The shapes almost seemed not fit for human hands.
Some of the white-robed women rode on giant ants, but I kept hearing a skittering I could not account for. There were too few torches. The ever-present lava provided illumination, but it would have been dim without.
Stealth was not our way, but subtlety was sometimes required. There was a right way to ask a question. As we sat down for our last family meal, I paused and looked at the food.
"Were you planning on telling me you had joined them after I had no choice?"
The meal was a mix of mushrooms and crushed insects. It was not a strange thing to eat when you were living in a cult camp and could find little else. But these were of the Rot.
If the Nox woman could climb or swim to the riverbed, then so surely could at least one of my daughters. Unless they were already willing creatures of the Rot and so repulsed by water which purified it.
Some of my girls looked betrayed. They had not been part of this, whatever they had become. My wife smiled the same as she always had.
She admitted her crime but insisted it was necessary. Under what circumstances would one willingly give themself over to the Scarlet Rot? This was the only way mankind would survive, she insisted. We must hide underground like the insects and build our hives. Only then would we be safe from conquering Lords and strange gods from beyond the vault of heaven. If such creatures would feed on we mortals, then we should be so full of blight as to kill them from within.
I saw her logic but not the sense in it. The Scarlet Rot had laid Radahn low, and it had taken the immaculate healing of the genius Miquella to slow the death of Malenia. Perhaps the insects would survive, but we would not.
She told me again that fire expelled the Rot. A fire within could produce and equilibrium. The Rot would turn from a parasite to a beneficial symbiote.
Again, I said no. We were not giants, and even they had suffered from bearing the giantsflame. It would destroy us.
She agreed, the Flame of Ruin would. She lifted back her hood, and the Frenzied Flame stared right through me.