But time is an illusion, and the Tarnished does like their mimic veil.
Melina doesn't object to the increasingly far-ranging detours. On some level, the Tarnished might understand they're bringing forth the end of an era. It's natural that they would resolve any business left unfinished and any curiosities left unfulfilled before taking the final plunge.
She only wishes they would choose other locations for it.
The deathwoods on the surface, directly above her corpse far below, are discomfiting. While the Tarnished takes Torrent to go look for phantom crests, Melina, incorporeal, paces the woods near the site of grace.
They've come close enough to her body that she worries she might rejoin it in its eternal dreaming if she lets herself rest. She spent the however many thousands of years after Godwyn's death asleep, and she would have remained so had not something – she assumes the same call that rouses Tarnished from their graves – woken her. Fragile as she is, dormancy might be her natural state. If she returns to it, she doesn't know what will have the power to reverse her entropy again.
Godwyn's traces, entangled deeply as they are with the Erdtree's roots, have snaked their way across the Lands Between, contaminating sites they had no business reaching. They've crept into Erdtree avatars, obviously, unavoidably, twisting the spirits' forms and natures until their wounds drip blood like he did in place of sap; into catacombs, where they expel or reject the souls the Erdtree would have claimed for sustenance; into graveyards and forlorn remnants on the surface, where they leak saltwater and ghosts and senseless, thoughtless blight.
Death, broken and bloated, asserting itself in his mother's deathless world.
In this form, it's no more a natural part of the cycle than Malenia's untamed rot in Caelid is.
And, as with Malenia's affliction, the other members of their family have been working to suppress it. The scarlet rot has not escaped Caelid thanks to the Redmanes' efforts, but Godwyn's corpse is a kingdom-wide plague. Every living creature has a stake in its containment.
The deathwoods sit heavy with Miquella's interference, and in the areas overlooking it Melina spots Rykard's influence, too, and the enigmatic Lord of Blood's. Morgott had his own efforts in place as well, in Leyndell itself and in Stormveil Castle with presumably Godrick's cooperation. Her uncle Maliketh has been sending Tarnished to slow the spread of Godwyn's taint through the Erdtree's roots.
But they cannot extricate it anymore. Godwyn's corpse has had too long to fester, and the Erdtree has had too long to drink of its rotting bile, for the corpse to be safely extracted. Melina expects it could be removed, still, but doing so would require cutting out each root touched by the sickness. At least ninety percent of all of the Erdtree's roots, at a conservative estimate.
Autumn arrived in the Eternal Queen's kingdom the instant she chose to bury her eldest son's dreaming corpse in the foundations.
The Tarnished slays Rykard. The Tarnished slays Radahn. Ranni makes no more move to stop them than Melina did when the Tarnished arrived before Morgott or Miquella did when Malenia marched against Radahn or Marika did when the Black Knives found Godwyn.
In a desert country across the sea, the symbol of eternity is a snake devouring its own tail. Godwyn never gave it much thought, but Godwyn never lived long enough to remember his own death. The divinity of the Lands Between eat their own, and even as a former member of their number Melina cannot explain why.
Then again, she no longer believes Godwyn was made to comprehend eternity.
She thinks of Morgott, of Radahn, of Rykard, of Godrick, of long-lost Godfrey and of his calloused hands around Godwyn's own as he adjusted Godwyn's grip on the spear that would become his favored weapon. As they've come closer to the Erdtree's never-beating heart, more of Godwyn's memories have crept through the fog of her memory, thoughts and sensations scattered like stars in the sky for her to map into constellations. Marika's hands on her own, unyielding as stone but in that moment almost gentle, as she taught Melina how to wield the knife she does now –
– no. That never happened.
Melina's first memory of her own came after Godwyn's death. Melina met Marika only once, at her birth, and she wasn't nearly coherent enough at the time to grasp ahold of anything.
A displaced memory of Godwyn's? A hallucination? An entirely separate person's past that slipped out of the Erdtree and into Melina by a mistake?
But who else would Marika ever have…?
Malenia's memory, perhaps. Somehow. Despite Malenia not being dead and the Erdtree possessing no dominion yet upon her soul. Accidents occur.
Nevertheless, Melina rubs the recollection over with charcoal, filling in the shade of her mother and the shade of her. Her mother's touch was gentle, as much as Marika ever was. Stone that had chosen for a moment to forget how to crush. Would she have remembered again if the person she was guiding stopped following her teaching? Would she not have?
A hammer dents itself to some degree whenever it strikes hot metal. How much must a hammer love the ore beneath it to scar itself in the forging of a blade?
Boc's mother left him a legacy and little else, and yet he weeps for her. Melina cannot find it in herself to do the same, and, in this at least, she does not think herself different from Godwyn, who shed no tears either when his mother banished his father. Perhaps the difference between the divine lineage and mortality is that eternity is too long a time to waste on grief.
Perhaps the difference between them is that Boc can understand his mother's decisions without needing to isolate them from her first.
A hammer, a tree, a war, the sun blazing bright. A queen and a god and a mother, three roles braided so tightly into one that neither Godwyn nor Melina has found where each ended for the others to begin. Even as she encounters new memories washed up along the shore of her mind each time she chances to check, she cannot recall a single instance when Godwyn thought of his mother as a person.
Marika was his mother. She has done no wrong in all her reign because a force of nature cannot be judged by any creature below a god, of which the Golden Order admits to only one of.
In that moment, Melina is… not glad that she is not wholly Godwyn, but… it is for the best that he is not her.
Godwyn would be shattering along his fault lines if he was entertaining the thoughts she is. But Melina is a ghost, burned and bodiless. Unlike him, she is not solid enough to bleed.
The Tarnished encounters Shabriri in the forbidden lands, and they –
– they listen to him.
They listen.
To him.
To Shabriri.
To Shabriri.
Melina greets them across from the flickering grace the next time they rest. She tells them, "My purpose was given to me by my mother. But now, I act of my own volition." If her own volition happens to align with the course her mother may have intended, then that is not the Tarnished's to deny her. "I have set my heart upon the world that I would have. Regardless of my mother's designs. I won't allow anyone to speak ill of that."
Godwyn was once the crown prince of the realm, so, in the midst of anarchy, Melina does not consider herself entirely unqualified to attempt to decide the fate of her mother's kingdom. Godwyn's corpse requires a true death, the Lands Between cannot persist in abeyance, and her mother…
…Melina cannot say what a storm deserves, nor a hammer midway through a swing.
She might have been too subtle in her speech, however, because the Tarnished nods consideringly, not the slightest trace of comprehension in their eyes, and then follows Shabriri's instruction and warps to the site of grace before the Great Caravan's grave.
This would be an excellent moment for their habit of heeding the most recent person to speak to them to reassert itself, but apparently in a choice between that and a locked door they find the locked door the more irresistible. "Please, leave the Frenzied Flame alone," Melina says – pleads, in truth, and the meager amount of emotion she succeeds in lacing her words with makes enough of an impact upon the Tarnished that she believes it might take.
It does not.
What becomes the Lands Between's saving grace: the Tarnished never realizes the key to opening the door is to strip naked before the attempt.
Melina removes her hand from her dagger when the Tarnished, dejected, abandons their spirited efforts to strike through the seal. It's nearly a relief when they turn down the side passage leading to her grave instead.
