"Papa?"
Aside from some wrestling leaves, the room was empty. It scared little Miquella, who was used to his siblings surrounding him and each encouraging him in their own unique ways.
Ranni would hold and assure him it were all written within the stars. If he could learn to listen and read them, he would see his destiny marked within. Radahn would encourage him to face things with a chin up and stand tall. That courage and strength could see the little boy through his sadness and pain. Godwyn would listen to him before making him laugh, even in dire situations, followed by words of kindness and hope. And Rykard? He was just Rykard. He tended to make outlandish suggestions that were overall unhelpful, but Miquella appreciated the effort.
Every moment, Miquella felt his twin's absence. He tried to take his mind and bury himself in his work. He invented a few spells that he had gifted his father, and Radagon had given him one in return. But the concentration soon waned, and Miquella could focus no more.
Without Malenia, he felt nothing was complete. The games to amuse himself were dull, and he needed more inspiration for his creations.
Miquella climbed on the Elden Lord's throne and rested his head against the arm. He closed his eyes and dreamed of a day when he and his sister reunited. It was a beautiful field with a great tree whose two mighty trunks twisted in a double helix. The ground below was fertile, so all life could spring and not be choked away. And the tree itself bore a great deal of fruit that rained down upon the starving masses.
The masses feasted and yet still were not filled.
"Miquella?"
Miquella woke from his dream.
"What are you doing here?" Radagon asked. He descended the staircase from the entrance of the Erdtree and, presumably, the Elden Ring itself.
Of course, no one could say what the Elden Ring was as an object. The philosophers considered it more symbolic. A force that both existed everywhere and nowhere at all and yet governed all natural laws in the Lands-Between. Others insisted it was genuine and physical. It could be seen, interacted with, and used like any other material thing.
Whatever it was, Radagon worshipped it and everything it represented.
"Rykard said he knows where Malenia is, but he wouldn't tell me," said Miquella.
"You needn't worry about Malenia. She's where she needs to be," said Radagon.
"But I want her here," said Miquella.
Radagon bit his lip.
"Please, papa. She's my best friend. At least tell me where she is," said Miquella. "Maybe I can go and visit her?"
"Son, your mother and I have high hopes for you and what you will become. Your sister was born in a way that she would help you become that," said Radagon. "I know it's been hard to watch, but she suffers because of what is a better purpose, and we ought not to tamper with that further."
"I don't understand what you mean. I want my sister back," said Miquella.
"For something to become perfect, it must merge with its opposite. And when it does, it creates a balance. You are the hope of this land. A gift to everyone who inhabits here. A god of eternal abundance..."
"I don't care!" shouted Miquella. "Where is Malenia? What's going to happen to her?"
Radagon's face said everything.
"No," said Miquella. Tears began to roll down his cheeks. "No, you can't. I promised her that nothing bad would happen anymore. No, you can't let this happen."
Radagon placed his hands on Miquella's shoulders, "Son, please listen to me. Your sister won't die. She'll become a part of you. And when she does, you will be a god stronger than any other being who ever walked this land."
"No! I'm not going to let that happen!"
"It's the wishes of the Greater Will."
"Then the Greater Will is cruel."
"Stop this now, Miquella. You are a god."
"I'm not a god like you! I won't be a god like you. I'm going to make my sister live. She's going to get better, and she'll be strong again," said Miquella.
Radagon could find no words to argue.
The day the twins were born, the two cried endlessly night after night. Each suffered from their curses in the greatest cruelty. Miquella was so tiny and frail, having not fully developed in Marika's womb, thanks to her interrupting the gastation. And Malenia was born all covered in sores and screaming at the slightest touch. She refused even to take a breast from her nurse.
It was after the third day that Marika laid the little ones together. They immediately snuggled up close to each other. Malenia stopped crying, and Miquella gave what seemed like the sweetest smile.
"Where is my sister?" he said.
When Miquella was gone, Radagon sat on the stairs of the Erdtree and stared at the throne... his throne. The one the Greater Will intended for him. The Greater Will crafted Radagon at its will, then molded and refined him until he could become something far more significant than he might even achieve.
The wind began to pick up, and yellow leaves started to fall from the branches of the Erdtree.
"Thou hast done this, Marika," said Radagon. "Our son has failed us. He has failed all that thou... that we built."
"He had failed thee and thine narrow view of the world and insistence that the only way is through the regression to the original designs of the Golden Order. It is thy cruelty that turns him away."
"I am thee, Marika!" shouted Radagon. "I have always been thee. If I am a cruel Lord, then so is thou also a cruel queen!"
When nothing was replied, Radagon began to pace the length of the throne room.
"Thou ruins all our designs through thy arrogance. Thou hast strutted around, circumventing the natural order of all things as though thou has created thyself!"
"Do not recite the Laws of the Golden Order to me, Radagon, when it was I who had observed their mechanisms throughout centuries and written them for man's understanding," said Marika. "I do not defy them but fulfill them. I would sooner let the fires of the Greater Will's craft run cold under the pale moonlight, and I would destroy the Elden Ring itself to see it so than to any longer be this being merged with thee. I had once listened to the Greater Will, removed death itself, and spun a world of decay and madness."
"Hast thou not gazed thine eyes at the world thou insists on destroying? No one stands above the Laws of Causality. Not even a goddess. "
"Let me speak to them all, Radagon. Say my own words..."
So, now free, Marika walked the lands again to see the secrets she had long hidden far below the earth. She hadn't shared her secrets with Radagon, for he had no empathy.
As she exited the gates and into the wilds of the Altus Plateau, the people looked up from their humble labors, seeing their goddess walking among the golden fields they planted with their hands. They were astonished and bowed down before her.
Soon came great multitudes as word that the goddess had come to walk among them spread quicker than fire in a dry field. Men, women, children. Some were aged beyond the years their bodies could maintain, so their flesh was barely sustained.
Their looks begged her for a miracle as the gold hue in their eyes showed dimly even upon the divine being who nurtured them. She heard their thoughts as doubt began to creep into their minds. Questions they left unspoken in fear of offending her. They feared the All-Mother who suckled and fed them from the soil of the Lands Between like a mother of her babe.
She opened her mouth to speak, "I declare mine intent, to search the depths of the Golden Order. Through understanding of the proper way, our faith, our grace is increased. Those blissful early days of blind belief are long past. My comrades; why must ye faulter?"
The women began to sing:
O, locus ille, beatus quondam, nunc deminuit.
Nos, destinatae matribus, nunc fiunt turpes.
Ploarvimus lacrimavimusque sed nemo nos consolatur.
Aureum, cui irascebaris?
Marika closed her eyes as their sorrow drifted to her ears.
But what choice did Marika have? They die, and their bodies are pulled back through the roots of the Erdtree to sprout again into life in the form of the dew that dripped down from the Erdtree's leaves. Each cycle of death and life, less and less of its grace, cycled through its branches, and the tree secreted less of its life-giving dew. What choice did Marika have but to remove the end and ration the life-bringing blessings?
But they did not weep for death; they did weep for the loss of children they could not have.
This world was in terrible need of healing.
Marika continued to search, and her short journey would take her down into the bowels of the Lands-Between. She had long sealed off the tunnel to prevent its tampering until the time was right.
It wasn't, but there was one there whom Marika once called "the Wisest."
It had been centuries, yet Marika remembered each turn as if it were yesterday. Each invisible wall that she placed to deter intruders, yet not be completely impenetrable either. She tapped them with her hammer to cause them to fade away until she was in the center of it all.
Sitting cross-legged upon the golden surface of the spark that once fell from the night sky was the one who called himself a Lord of the Stars. He smiled and said, "Thou art centuries earlier than I expected, Fair Lady. Or would thou prefer I call thee the Eternal?'"
"Call me what thou pleases, for I shall always call thee 'Lord,'" said Marika as she sat down with him.
The Onyx Lord reached out his hand but hesitated, unsure if he could still touch her. It had been so long, but soon, he took a strand of that golden hair. When he first saw it, it made him so curious that he couldn't resist touching it.
"Indeed," replied the Onyx Lord. His voice was deep and slow. A man who calculated the ages by the slow rotation of the galaxies just as Marika calculated hers by the tree's rings. As for names, there was no need for that. Among those called the Onyx and Alabaster Lords, they were merely called "Friends."
All life was consistent and sustained in the harmony of the rotation, from the grand stars to the small molecules.
"How be the student of my kind's art?"
"Stirring trouble, of course," said Marika.
The Lord laughed, "That is Radahn. Young is still at heart and is always looking to prove his might among others. Oh, how I miss the sky. To see the stars as they turn and slowly reveal themselves through their life-giving light. I sense he has reached his ambition to halt them to protect the Lands-Between from the beings above. I always feared that so. When young men are driven to ambition, they are driven to purpose. And when achieving that so young, they descend into nothing but stagnation."
"I have given him my daughter."
"A stagnant man betrothed to the goddess that feeds off stagnation. They sound like a fine match for each other when thy daughter is older, of course, but wo be these lands, Fair Lady."
"My other half believes that Ranni's ambitious Age of Stars is too dangerous to see it brought about," said Marika.
"And thee?"
"I fear him right."
"And yet thou named her thine heir."
"That is my sin. My tendency to betrayal. I intended her to be torn asunder by her own shadow in exchange for her to find the Finger-Slaying blade. An intended grand betrayal which I calculated in the dark dredges of my mind."
"But thou did not intend to come to love her like thine own."
Marika frowned. In a sense, Ranni was her "own," as were all Rennala's children. Marika never imagined she would feel for them the same way she did with her other children. She had tried to convince herself that another sired them, yet could never deny her other half, even as he was away from her for a season.
"Need not fear. I don't blame thee. I imagine she had reminded thee of thyself," said the Lord. His eyes saddened, and he wanted to add, "Just like our children," but that topic seemed forbidden to bring up.
There were memories long ago that they silently agreed never to speak of. When the Onyx Lord and Marika first met. When they became lovers. When she brought forth his children, only for them to die and Marika to drown in sorrow. Her vow to destroy all death fractured their tender love.
The Onyx Lord warned it was a mistake to think that possible, as even the galaxies had to cycle through life and decay. The stars soon run out of fuel, and their core begins to collapse, even as they cling to life, inflating and pulsating until they burn down to white embers and then to blackness.
So, shouldn't men and gods also relinquish their power in their own time?
When Marika returned, she found her dearest Miquella curled up in his bed. He had cried himself to sleep as he did many nights even before Malenia disappeared. He hugged his pillow to soothe himself in his sister's absence.
Marika laid a golden Erdtree branch down on Miquella's table, now fused with gold from the meteorite that crashed into the Lands-Between eons ago. It could grow into the miracle Marika had promised her people, but she wished Miquella to do so. With Ranni losing sight of her ambition and Godwyn holding on to his perverted secrets, Marika could trust no other of her offspring to bring about an age.
The drawings on Miquella's table caught Marika's attention after she set the branch down. The Golden Order had commissioned a personal artist while Marika was still married to Godfrey. Over the years, he painted most pictures and designed the various effigies that marked Marika's Golden Age. His current work, which he called his "masterpiece," was a statue of Radagon, which he intended to place in the capital.
Marika didn't care for the man, as she didn't like mortals looking at her. It was nothing personal or even hateful. Her particular species of Numan did not like attention. He was a grumpy man who even gave Marika a lip if she interrupted him. Yet, it looked like Miquella, with his persuasion powers, had pulled the man away to draw up some designs for prosthesis arms that were as beautiful as they were practical.
Marika wondered for a moment if Hewg might forge them. That was if there wasn't the risk that Malenia might cause the arm to decay as she did everything else in time.
It looked like Miquella had given that problem a thought as well. There were symbols that Marika had not seen for some time, all drawn out on a slate. There was no use for such things, as Marika had effectively banished other gods from her lands. While these symbols for consecration were close, they weren't the exact ones suited for such a purpose. Miquella drew his resources from a book, and the author drew his theory from the few consecrated artifacts that still remained. He rightly deduced that consecration spells required using a specific ancient alphabet but then used one that, although close, was far too modern. A few jots and tittles were missing, so Marika picked up the chalk and drew them in.
It wouldn't give Miquella the complete answer, but as clever as he was, Marika knew he would figure it out.
If I bring the sun to putrefaction and bury it in the earth, it will multiply like wheat and corn. My menstruum is nothing other than mercury viva, which decomposes the sun ex fundamento and brings it to putrefaction. For the more often I plant the seed, the more often I can reap the fruit. - Another One Told by a Silver Miner.