most of this chapter was written before the DLC's release
A thick sheen of rot colors the air about the Erdtree's roots.
Melina doesn't follow the Tarnished to her own grave. Visiting it herself is one thing, but she would rather not be present for a third party to witness the divide between her soul and her body, regardless of whether they understand it or not.
There's little danger to their going alone, besides. The most that might happen to them is contracting deathblight, which might even encourage them to stay away from it in the future. (She would be more concerned were they any other Tarnished, but Torrent's chosen has suffered deathblight on multiple occasions and sprung back each time none the worse for wear. The Greater Will favors them to an unlikely degree.)
Still, she watches their journey from afar, as she has since the beginning.
Silver-blooded pagans live in the moonless night below the Lands Between, driven there long before Godwyn's birth. The race sought to challenge the Golden Order and, as with others before and after, was smited by the heavens for their hubris. Less figuratively than usual, in their case: the Order hardly needed to lift a finger before the nightfolk's own gods fell from the skies and decimated their cities.
The remnants established a relationship with Liurnia. A notable portion of Liurnia's population throughout Godwyn's life consisted of nightfolk mongrels, though it was never appropriate to mention as much in polite company after Radagon married into House Caria.
The Black Knives, too, come of that race.
And the magic of the spirit beasts, though originating from the ancestral worshipers' rituals, was claimed by their nightfolk neighbors as well.
Melina knows, of course, what Torrent is. She knows what spirit beasts are. But there is something strange, still, in seeing Torrent navigate the lands of a people Marika buried with as much ease as he does the empire she built atop their graves.
He springs from root to outcropping to thin air as naturally he bounds across solid ground, following his own sense more than the Tarnished's attempts at pathing.
Godwyn knew little of his mother's history beyond what was written into scripture. He had only what contextless fragments she chose to gift him, strange shells unearthed from stretches of earth the sea has never touched, bones without form. After the exile of Godfrey and his warriors, Marika became the entirety of Godwyn's heritage: Godwyn possessed no ancestors, no distant relations, no cultural background beyond the one his mother, once a foreigner to the shores of the Lands Between, shaped from the aether by her own will.
Marika might never have existed at all before her apotheosis and the birth of the Order. Her lineage began from nothing and will end in nothing, her descendants petering out like sparks from a carefully tended flame.
If not for Torrent.
Before cremation was a sacrilege and a horror, Marika burned her steed's body and forged the ashes into a ring. Torrent predates the Golden Order, and one day he might outlast the eternal faith. His existence is the only proof that Marika did not coalesce, fully-formed, at the instant the Order's golden star struck the earth.
What a strange choice it was, for Marika to leave him with Melina.
Limited in her physicality as she is, Melina would always have required a Tarnished to enter Morgott's sealed Leyndell. Because her sole companion upon waking was Torrent, the Tarnished she bound herself to could only ever have been of Torrent's choosing, and the warhorse would never have settled for a master who might accept defeat upon discovering the path into the Erdtree barred. No more than Melina would have settled for accepting Marika's silence as an answer.
Their journey could only have ever ended in the Erdtree's burning.
What kind of world does Melina want?
The only world she has ever known is the one her mother built. The only people she has ever been are the ones her mother made of her. Her mother is a god of war. The only peaces Godwyn has ever won were at swordpoint, and Melina's first memory is of her hand gripping the knife that killed her. A living person might have been able to learn, and to grow, and to become more than they were meant to be, but Melina is a ghost tethered to her corpse, and her corpse is a cancer and its growth a horror.
Perhaps these things were true from the start. Perhaps Godwyn was always a stagnation. If Marika had done the unthinkable and died, his kingdom would have looked very much like hers, and very much like Morgott's, because Godwyn could not imagine any other set of rules by which to allow reality to exist.
Melina will burn the Erdtree. She will burn herself with it, breathing ghost and dreaming body, as kindling for the new age. Then the Tarnished will find Marika the Eternal, and they will wrest from her the answer that her children could not.
The choice for what comes afterwards Melina lays fully at their feet, because whatever decision they make will be one Godwyn could not have. It does not matter what she wants. She did not come this far, watering the Erdtree with the blood of her own kin, out of concern for what comes after.
The Tarnished rides past the ruined townships of the Zamor, the people who Godwyn promised an alliance with and who Marika discarded in the snow once the war against the fire giants came to an end. Up the mountainside, through the soldiers' graveyard that Godwyn's death has unsettled, between the frozen corpses that remain of the fire giants, and to the last living member of that race, who yet guards his people's greatest work even as the pain of old war wounds leaves him screaming upon each movement. The Tarnished kills him, and one might almost call it a mercy.
The Age of the Erdtree began upon this peak. Melina will end it here, too.
The Tarnished has already come farther than she imagined they ever could when Torrent first led her to them. Just one final request.
"Are you prepared," she asks quietly, "to commit a cardinal sin?"
The Tarnished is. Of course they are. They did not traverse the entirety of her mother's realm to fail here, at the pivotal choice, and, perhaps even more than that, they have always viewed locked doors as a challenge to overcome. The seal upon the Erdtree has turned the Erdtree into the most locked door in the land. Cardinal sin means little to them in the face of an unsatisfied curiosity.
She rests her hand upon them. With the same power she uses to strengthen them, she robs them of all she has given them, leaving them again that unconscious body Torrent found at the base of the cliff.
Their power will return to them once she burns, but until that comes to pass they will not see what she does. They will not stop her.
She cannot know what kind of age their ascension to Elden Lord will bring. But if that strange, raw honesty of theirs survives their meeting with Marika, then whatever era they shape will be different from the one that is all Melina and Godwyn have known. Melina can hope for no more than that.
Even so –
"I will not ask for this. The world that you create will be wholly your own, for good or for ill," she says to the Tarnished.
She speaks her next words to herself, and to the golden prince she once was: "But I... would like a world where mothers do not harm their children."
The Tarnished cannot hear her, which is as it should be. Only Torrent can, so for a moment, there at the end, she finds herself back at the beginning: waking up beside her corpse with the spirit steed as her sole companion, understanding nothing of herself but the questions she will kill a brother and a descendant to ask and the path she must take forwards to reach an answer.
Here, over the giants' forge at the end of her mother's lands, Melina takes the final step upon that path.