The Prince of Death announced himself nameless. A new spirit within old flesh. He was to have been named by his mother, the one who had sparked his new unlife. Yet, she had been slain by a hunter of the Order.
He was meant to have been born into death. It was to have been a gentle darkess, a pale shade. Yet the Lord had betrayed his mother's dream, just as with the moon dragon's child and the Gloam-Eyed Queen. His flesh and the flesh of the Queen were siblings, but their true bond of kinship was through the fragments of Destined Death they bore.
He stressed they were not of one will, though. She sought only death, while he sought only Death. She wished to end; he wished for The End. Mortality had returned, and Death was harsh and frightening. The Prince wished for it to be gentle like his mother. When we should die, we should be given time to accept it before truly passing. He wished to give that to any who would take it – or so he claimed.
It was the most reasonable thing I had heard from a giant monster. Of course, the only other monsters I'd spoken with were the dragon who asked me to kill the Lord and the last giant to guard the Flame of Ruin, who mostly screamed.
What reason had the Prince of Death to lie? He wasn't asking for me to turn over those who died at the Academy. He could have killed us easily.
No, he said. We may become brothers in true death, if we should fail to stand against the Frenzied Flame. If that mad divinity truly wanted unity of all things, then let the living and the dead march together against it.
Yet, the Prince warned the Lord had become more. In the time of Farum Azula, the Great Will which had imposed Order and the Frenzied Flame of Chaos were a single deity. By consuming the Elden Ring, the Lord of Chaos had restored a fraction of that power. He could not say how that compared against Marika in her prime.
Such was the reason for the Queen of Death and her assassins. Just as I could not fight Marika when she came to the North, we could not fight the Lord. We would win by guile or not at all.
I asked at last about the matter of the Lord's power after death and my concern should anyone seize it. The Prince laughed, and it echoed hollowly in his clam's shell. The Elden Ring, he said, had not been utterly destroyed. Among its fragments was a new Rune of Death, a fragment of the Prince's own self and last heirloom of his mother. If his sister sought to take it from him, then he would hunt her to the ends of the earth.