Arriveth, Age of the Stars


The shattered Elden Ring lies cradled in dead Marika's cold and withered lap.

The Tarnished approaches. Slow, cumbersome. As if bewitched by the glorious dawn of an age of unbidden possibility. He abides this phantom trance a fleeting moment, for in his hands he measures cautiously the sleeked utensil of repair: the sacred Mending Rune.

What wouldst it cost to make thee whole?

Marika...wouldst thou taketh me?

Austere discernment gains a decisive upper hand as the Elden Lord appraises the priceless tool a final time, a collector at odds with an inutile trinket, before discarding it to the advancing wind.

The husk of the Erdtree heaves. A lance of starlight punctures the misty sky.

He halts at once, looking above. Clouds dispel along purpled horizons, cleaving the firmament to hail the imminent entrance of their nightly mother. His eyes tether the colossal sphere of the emergent Moon, which glides towards the earth through the aether as if astride some galactic, formless steed. Like a marionette the high-titled servant drops to one knee, practiced, his head gravely craning to a bow. The ground quivers as epitaphs written in violet fire begin to appear in all directions. His eyes attempt to record the manifold ghostveins scrawling across the ground in vehement stanzas, the runic scriptures unfolding in wild and incomprehensible pattern. But quicker than they appeared, they dissipate in great plumes of ash, stricken by imperceptible hand from this terrene scroll. Fevered anticipation boils his innards. He whispers her name, stretching forth an obeisant hand…

Time, h'rald thy nightly queen.

When one considers the sheer volume of desperate prayers offered heavenward each day, even the gods must question why the Queen's favor so often lends itself to the Tarnished's whim. But the exercise falls ultimately flat; the Goddess would answer his call across dimensions irrespective the cost. The cloak of space warps as his mistress wraith appears, bathed in spectral milklight. Pristine as a crystal bird. The Moon looses her infinite jaw. Hail, Ranni, Queen of Darkness.

She does not face her loyal lord but instead casts her head aslight to address him over her shoulder. A brittle aeolus whips about. Even the inmost wellspring of his heart freezes over — yon beckons the age of ice.

"The battle is over, I see."

The lord-consort offers dutiful silence in return, but it matters little; his lady's attention has already drawn to dead Marika. She stalks the fragile corpse. This interloper, the supplanter of her broken mother. The Moonwitch pauses upon reaching the hollow remains and leans forward, gradually, as if to breathe permanently of its purified scent, and then reaches to the ground to retrieve the ossified hunk that was once Marika's skull. Featherlight, it shifts easily in her hands. With the care of a midwife, she clutches it to her waist, allowing her many fingers to burrow into every available moss-grown orifice, before she lifts it with dreadful ceremony into the teeth of the everwinter's tempest.

And to that ignominious relic she delivers this inaugural decree, bestrewed over every ear of the land.

"I doth solemnly gage. To ev'ry living being and ev'ry living soul. Anon cometh the age of the stars. A thousand year voyage und'r the wisdom of the moon. H're beginneth the chill night yond encompass'th all, reaching the most wondrous beyond. Into fear, doubt, and loneliness…as the path stretcheth into darkness…"*

As if through a looking-glass, the Tarnished Elden Lord beholds the fruition of a long-coveted oracle. For upon a terrifying gesture of her arms, Ranni, the Goddess of the Dark Moon, did then summon the very wheel of time itself. Everywhere creation receded into vapor, history and future conjoined. Freeing herself and her loyal lord from its temporal shackles, the Queen assumed the helm at the lathe of heaven and marshaled the earth through a long age of suspension, which saw the Golden Order driven to pieces and the Edict of the Dark Moon rise to succeed them. General and widely-enjoyed progress accompanied this superfluous boon of an era, but the fruits of the world's labor would ultimately go wasted. For the season of abstemious preparation soon ended, and the imperative to rejoin the tides of time drew hot upon them — when the Goddess of the Moon would reject the earth for a stolid millennium of crusade through the stars, searching for divine wisdom. In this endeavor she would be assisted by her steadfast Elden Lord and their league of cherished followers, untouched by decay. A thousand years of constant marvel. Below, the Lands Between would languish in their absence, directionless, suffering out their Goddesses' distant pilgrimage under the triplicate yokes of war and pestilence and calamity. All this and more did the Elden Lord observe whilst stolen away from time, towing the Dark Moon Queen.

I longeth to behold the miracles mine own mistress p'rf'rms.

The process is not yet complete, but he cannot help himself. Capitulating to foolish impulse, the lord-consort seeks the labors of the Ascendant Queen with his eyes. But there are certain mysteries mankind was never meant to witness. Seized at once by a preternatural fear, his mortal soul succumbs to the sickness of apotheosis, accelerating as he gazes arrested into the yawning mill of time eternal. Lifetimes of suffering splinter his bones, flay his skin. There etches upon his brain of molten glass a million lives, a million tribulations. Pitched heedlessly to the lake of fire. Multiplying as doest the waters of the seas: fear, doubt, and loneliness...

In the blink of an eye she appears before him. Lief cometh the clairvoyant hour, tolling sweetly f'r thee. Whether or not she tasted his fear at this hour will remain forever uncertain. Afforded nary a moment to waste, she extends one set of her doubled arms towards him with all the licentious grace of an apostate goddess.

Moonlight gathers her periwinkle skin. "Well then…" she whispers. "Shall we?"

Through the unwarranted gift of some unknowable lucid calculus, his head clears of the horrific divination. The link forges. Her face glowing seraphic in its supernatural beauty, flush with pride, victory, longing. Eyes upon one another, the lord's hands begin to rise, like dutiful serpents against the frigid air, until the glacial hymn of her voice finds everlasting purchase deep within his breast.

"My fair consort, eternal…"

According upon the brush of their fingertips, one soul is exchanged for untold multitudes, and thereafter was it made possible for the Tarnished Elden Lord to spurn the stubborn mandate of Death and ascend to the stars, carried into the indescribable paradise beyond the void in the arms of the Goddess Ranni, the whole host of the Dark Moon rejoicing their union with ascetic liturgies, transforming, becoming attuned to all things.


Common English translation:

"I do solemnly swear. To every living being and every living soul. Now cometh the age of the stars. A thousand year voyage under the wisdom of the Moon. Here beginneth the chill night that encompasses all, reaching the great beyond. Into fear, doubt, and loneliness…as the path stretcheth into darkness…"