Perhaps it was her eyes still snatching every detail they could, but the roiling red glow high overhead tipped Malenia off to what was coming before anything else. She dashed forwards, evading the ear-ringing spear of lightning that cracked to the floor in a cloud of dust; a second leaping stride had her bearing down like an arrow upon the great dragon. Placidusax did not get the chance to send forth another bolt before Malenia's outstretched prosthesis brought the full length of her blade against the stump of his neck. With a single winged bound she careened past the whole of the dragon's flank, sword held out and drawing along his hide the entire way down. It felt as if she were pulling her sword against a stony cliff; it skidded along the dragon's skin with tinnish bounces that she could dimly hear over his incensed roar. Pulling her arm back, she jumped away on instinct, but saw through the slits in her obstructive visor that the Dragonlord had his head pointed down in front of himself, seemingly oblivious to her; the sound of a boulder's worth of sharpened steel plunging into the stone floor somewhere by his chest told her why. Flicking her eyes back down to where she had struck, she saw only the thinnest dotted trickle of golden blood welling up from Placidusax's skin.
Better than nothing, she thought. She raised her sword and poised herself to strike again. As if sensing her aggression, the same red glow flickered around the corners of her eyes—this time, from below. Malenia looked down to see a jagged, pulsating ring encircling her feet, illuminating the air with a menacing hue that intensified even as she watched. She jolted, and was quick to sidestep the column of crimson light that struck down where the ring had formed, but felt a surge of voltage along the length of her golden leg. A gasp was squeezed from her lungs, and she fell onto her other knee as metal and dragonhide alike seized with the power of ancient lightning.
Another halo of light sparked to life at her feet. Gritting her teeth, Malenia willed her good foot up, dragging the paralyzed leg behind her like irons. She could feel the upcoming bolt sending thousands of tiny shocks up both her prosthetics, leaving her good foot unsteady. As the ring of lightning coalesced to a burgeoning white, Malenia finally planted her sole on the earth and, with a great heave, made a one-legged leap away from the area of impact. The lightning exploded downwards just after she dove away, leaving her in the clear as she tumbled to the ground with a clumsy somersault and fell onto her back, panting softly. When the next thunderclap threatened to obliterate her, she simply rolled on her side out of the way, winding up on her stomach.
The lightning faded, and Malenia finally had a moment to let her legs return to normal. Slowly, the twitching and humming died down, and when she willed the plates to engage, they clicked into place. It was not gracefully she stood, but stand she did. Placidusax's eyes did not once meet hers, focused entirely on the man who had skirted his lightning and retaliated with a sword twice his size. Under the stealth of Ash's misdirection, Malenia had the purchase to re-ready her sword and scan her target, assessing her vantage while she worked the seizure out of her legs. She took half a moment to train her eyes on the gold-speckled line she'd left in the Dragonlord's flank; shallow as a dinner plate, thick as a coin, the wound was there nonetheless. His stony hide had been separated; what lay underneath was vulnerable. She'd carved herself a mere handhold, barely even a fingerhold, but her grip was nothing if not dextrous and fierce.
Malenia's flesh hand reached for her helm, pulling it back until it lay perched atop her head. Light flooded her vision, giving her clear sight of the slice she had inflicted. Keeping her eyes narrow and firmly fixated on the subtle glimmer of golden ooze, she bent her knees and gave a testy hop. Her plates and gears acquiesced with obedience and animated with ease. Coming to a soft landing, she dug her feet into the earth, winding her body for but a blink before leaping forwards with the straightness of an arrow. Her sword pointed outwards, breaking her headwind, carving a path through the air and directly into her target: The same cut she had just inflicted. With surgical precision and the strength of a bear, Malenia drove the point of her blade into one of the tiny bleeding holes.
It was her liberated eyes that honed her practiced instincts and guided her hand. With a screech like a waraxe against plate, the sword parted Placidusax's gravelly hide and sank a good inch and a half into the tender flesh beneath. At the dragon-god's size, the damage was not much—but it was enough to get his attention. With her sword still lodged in him, Malenia felt the beast shift before she saw the great wall of grey before her lurch. She looked up to finally lock eyes with the Dragonlord, only for the sight to be cut short when a geyser of yellow fire erupted from his jaws. It fell to the floor like a burlap sack and burst like a rotten one, with the flames rushing to meet his aggressor. Malenia yanked her sword free from its stony scabbard and leapt straight into the air, allowing the sword to trail at her side. The heat of the fire singed her skin and filled the thin metal joints of her legs, burning the places where they connected to her body. Malenia grimaced, but clenched her teeth and twirled midair until her sword arm was poised to come bearing down on her landing. As soon as she began to fall, she threw her whole body into slamming her sword down on Placidusax's back. The blade did little against his rock-hard hide, but the sound of a sickly, almost bony crack could be dimly heard between the draconic howling and roiling lightning. Inadvertently, Malenia had crashed her knuckles straight into his skin, punching him with such force that it broke the outer layer.
Placidsax snarled at her, turning one head around to snap at the thing between his shoulders. Malenia barely moved her own head out of the way of the oncoming bite, the residual heat of the fire wafting from his dried maw. With her feet infirmly planted on the Dragonlord's shifting back, she found a gasp entering her lungs when one leg slipped, only barely putting a hand out to break her fall. The fresh skin of her palm was sliced by the many crags and edges that lined Placidusax's hide, making her suck her teeth in pain before raising her sword arm, poised to strike with the blade pointed straight down. With a wrathful war cry, she plunged the katana straight into the fractured pockmark her knuckles had left behind. The point slipped straight through the cracks and sunk a third of its length into the dragon's flesh; amidst the din of battle, Malenia felt the blade pierce flesh rather than heard it.
That was sufficient to pull a deep, earth-shaking howl from Placidusax's lungs. The huge, lumbering Dragonlord shuddered with pain and fury, trying to throw Malenia off his back, but with her sword firmly lodged between his scales on one end and latched to her prosthesis on the other, all he succeeded in doing was sending her loose helmet flipping off her scalp and flying to the side. Full bangs of scarlet hair descended upon Malenia's vision, obscuring her periphery for a moment as she dug in and held fast. With her own locks in the way and her focus directed on enduring Placidusax's frenzy, she failed to notice a certain thorn-clad knight roll underneath a flailing swipe of galvanized claws and sprint up to the dragon's flank, shouting something.
"Malenia!"
It wasn't until Ash called her name that her ears perked up. Clutching her sword with her prosthesis and her prosthesis with her hand, she snapped her head down to see him signaling to her.
"Keep his head down here!" he commanded. She blinked, bewildered for a moment, but when the Tarnished heaved his hulking blade onto his shoulder and cocked his knees, chambering a great strike with the colossal sword, she realized what he was aiming for, nodded, replied with a breathless "Yes!" and gave her sword a firm squeeze, angling her body behind it as Placidusax's left head continued to bite at her. Crouching behind the cutting face of the katana for some form of defense, she tensed every muscle in her body before pulling herself up by the base of the blade. With her weight pressing down on it, it sank further into Placidusax's flesh, inciting a rageful hiss from both heads as he snapped at her once more. His face rammed straight into her sword, shaking Malenia's entire world and sending a foot slipping out from beneath her, but the golden armament stayed affixed within his flesh as he recoiled from its vicious edge, giving Malenia a chance to reorient herself and bring herself onto one knee.
And then, in a move she would've never expected, Placidusax rolled, almost fell, onto one side—the side on which Ash stood right beneath the massive dragon.
Alarm bolted through Malenia's chest. Eyes wide, she called the Tarnished's name, and when she received no response, she dared to poke her head out from behind her blade and peer over Placidusax's shoulders in search of her companion. She found him, braced as deeply as possible into his greatsword, the tip of which stabbed Placidusax's shoulder, holding him in place like a wedge. But she could see that the sheer weight of the Dragonlord was already proving too much for Ash; he shuddered with the effort of holding fast and his feet were sliding ever backwards as the full brunt of the great king bore down upon him.
Malenia's heart leapt. She had to act fast. Using her sword as a brace, she clambered up the side of Placidusax's lopsided back until her feet crouched squarely on one shoulder—the most solid ground she could find. Her eyes darted up and down the great lord's form, looking for some kind of weakness to pierce and pull his attention back towards her. She found it in his wings: the underside gleamed a rich yet blackened yellow, the same metallic hue that seeped angrily from the wounds she'd made. A soft spot, ripe to burst under the swordswoman's golden fang—if she could make it to the wing from where she crouched upon Placidusax's shoulders.
Malenia squeezed the base of the blade. Her muscles grew hard, resisting the flopping of her stomach and willing her legs to find purchase upon their thrashing, uneven ground. She stood just enough to get her back straight and then, facing her target, bunched her legs up and took off in a capricious pounce. With a screech of metal on rock, her katana was wrenched free from its burial and joined Malenia in her wild leap, coming around just in time to plunge upside-down into a golden tarp of flesh.
A wet, fibrous sound reached Malenia's ears. The great dragon's swollen tendons snapped with such force that Malenia could hear them as her blade pierced him. Her full weight slammed gracelessly into the wing soon after; thankfully the muscular underside was just pliant enough to offer something resembling padding, muffling the thud she made on contact.
Her head was filled with an agonized roar.
The sky above Malenia tilted as Placidusax righted himself at once. Gravity seized her dangling feet and swung them to the side, taking the rest of her body with it. Thanks to her iron grip on the sword, she found herself spinning the blade to match her reorientation, corkscrewing it into the Dragonlord's wing. The hole it carved allowed the point to keep spinning until it pointed, almost dropped, down towards the ground; at once, there was a lurch in Malenia's precarious position. With gravity and her full weight working together to tug on the blade, it began to slice through Placidusax's muscles, descending down the length of his wing and leaving the great limb bisected in its wake. Placidusax's inflamed howl drowned out the sound of ripping flesh, as well as the sound of Malenia cutting herself free of her perch and dropping squarely to the floor. What it didn't drown out was the earsplitting crack of thunder igniting the air right over Malenia's head as soon as she landed; looking up, her vision was filled with a blinding red light that took the form of three jagged claws all bearing down on her.
She didn't have time to dodge. Placidusax struck her squarely and viciously. She was flung back into the air, this time without any anchor, careening like a glintstone missile launched from a sorcerer's staff. She landed on her back with a gravelly thud, bounced once, flipping clean over before she skidded several meters more and then finally came to a grinding halt. It took quite some time spent groaning in pain before she could get her hands underneath her and sit up; her back, throbbing like a swollen cyst from the impact, felt cold and bare. Her golden dress had been shredded, leaving only the latticed maille intact—maille that had shielded her from the brunt of the attack, but failed to insulate any of the lightning that had touched her skin; the jitters it sent up and down her body prevented her from getting up right away. Her abdomen stung, and when she parted the trailing armor, she observed three angry red gashes welling up along her belly that stretched from one edge to the other. The wounds were shallow, but ugly, and she grimaced when she noticed some of the chain links that protected her were missing, having been snapped by the sheer force of the blow.
Struggling to stand with the electricity coursing through her veins, she looked up and scanned the area around Placidusax for Ash. She spotted him for all of a second before a geyser of yellow flame spewed from Placidusax's twin maws and towards the Tarnished down below. He took off running, sprinting straight for the Dragonlord's tail; Malenia held her breath at the sight, uncertain of Ash's safety. For as searing as the fire was, Placidusax himself seemed impervious to it, so she doubted luring it towards his tail would be a sufficient deterrent—and indeed, the tip of the appendage was promptly engulfed in flames, making Malenia's stomach clench. At the fringe of the blaze, however, she spied a trace of movement somewhere within. Then, like a mole emerging from its burrow, Ash rose above the scorching barrage.
Evidently, he'd been perfectly aware of Placidusax's immunity to his own fire and had sought to exploit such a weakness, for in an astonishingly resourceful maneuver, he vaulted over the beast's tail and disappeared behind it where the flames were naught. The surge died soon after and Placidusax's heads swivelled to find Ash, sweeping over his flank before one of the four eyes caught the woman knocked onto her knickers in front of him.
Two heads snapped to face her.
In a flash, Malenia was broken free of her observatory trance and scrabbled to get her feet under her, but her legs could barely move, still totally paralyzed by the lightning coursing through veins and plates alike, trembling violently and yet unimaginably stiff. Her muscles simply refused to obey her while the joints of her prosthetics could not lock in place as they shuddered with the current.
Placidusax reared both heads back and let loose a bellowing chant, shaking the earth and filling it with a skin-tingling hum. Malenia watched with dismay as wisps of wrathful lightning coalesced around her.
There was a sound of steel on stone, one which Malenia had come all too well to recognize. Suddenly, the voltage in the air dissipated, leaving her free of any new cracks of lightning with which to be smitten—yet, she would still find herself thoroughly shocked as she saw Placidusax, enormous lumbering dragon that he was, stumble to the side.
With a great heave of his sword, Ash had knocked the massive beast off-kilter. Placidusax's front claws slid out from under him, sending his hulking front end down towards the earth along with both heads. They collapsed to the floor, splayed out in front of himself like a pair of dead snakes.
Amidst the great fall, Malenia finally found her feet, unsteady though they were. Her sword clicked into place and at once she commenced forth in a gait caught halfway between a sprint and a limp. From behind the dragon's great flank came Ash, beelining straight towards the same place Malenia was: Placidusax's grounded heads.
"Take the one on the right!" he shouted. Malenia poised her sword so that the point jutted forth from her side. She veered to the right just as Ash reached the frey; with her arm cocked to attack, Malenia dove onto Placidusax's face and let herself fall straight onto him, throwing her whole weight into this decisive strike. In perfect unison, the two warriors planted their blades into Placidusax's eyes. Malenia's long, slender katana plunged deep into the socket. Like a clap of thunder came a thick, gooey POP, and like a valve bursting open came a thick, oily mixture of runny golden blood and a sickly dark ooze. It splattered all along her front where it promptly seeped into the fabric of her dress and drained through the gaps in her maille. She paid it no mind; she had lived through far more revolting contamination every day. Ash, meanwhile, spared himself the mess entirely by striking the haphazard edge of his great blade along the length of Placidusax's brow. Neither head, stunned so gravely as they were, reacted with sufficient force in time, giving Ash ample opportunity to land a second blow across the wound he'd just opened up while Malenia grabbed her prosthesis by the wrist and yanked her sword free of its gruesome sheath.
The punitive mutilation of the wounds was enough to rouse the disoriented Placidusax. Both heads jolted awake and lifted straight into the air to flail haphazardly while Malenia backed up. What remained of Placidusax's popped eye gushed buckets of blood and ooze that poured down his face and thumped to the floor like a stream of visceral tears. Malenia sidestepped a stray glob as it flung towards her, only for her heel to slide into a puddle of it that sent her stumbling further backwards. Briefly, she wondered if the sickly blood of an Elden Lord would be enough to tarnish her unalloyed limbs.
Placidusax's twin heads issued a unified duet of stomach-churning bellows that blasted his rage into the heavens—and in response, the heavens sent down yet more lightning. Malenia's teeth loosely clenched, and she sighed under her breath. She'd become quite ill of the constant rain of electricity… then again, if all the Dragonlord had beyond that was his oafish rolling, then perhaps it was to be expected.
By now, the paralysis had just about faded from her legs; not a moment too soon, for the instant that a smattering of sparks began their telltale churn around her, she leapt forwards out of the way. Apprehensive of subsequent volleys, she did not stop when that first spire of light smote the ground where she once was; she kept running, outpacing the dragon's vengeance with ease. She sprinted down the length of his starboard flank, then bound over his tail and came back round the other side, scanning his craggy skin for any weak points while the storm raged futilely in her wake. Along the whole of his sides, nothing brazen or obvious met her eyes, for though his hide was cracked and withered, it showed near none of the soft flesh hiding beneath. Coming up to his left, however, Malenia spotted just what she was looking for: A thick serpentine figure coiled itself around his chest, terminating in a jagged stump that peered out meekly over his shoulder. It seemed Placidusax had once boasted even more than two heads, for what she saw could be nothing other than another neck, its head having been severed who knows how long ago and its form partially fused to his body. The stump that remained bore a dull golden face, scarred over and yet certainly more tender and vulnerable than anything protected by the armor that coated the rest of his form—and thus, she had her target.
Malenia stopped dead in her tracks, giving herself only a moment to dig her soles into the ground before pouncing for the exposed flesh. Gold met gold, and for a split-second moment, Malenia tensed, wondering only briefly if her intuitions had served her well. Just as soon as the thought passed her mind, however, she had her answer when her sword did not stop upon contact with the severed remains. The point of it slid so easily into Placidusax's neck that Malenia herself, travelling with her leaping thrust, had to hold her other hand out to break her fall as she careened straight into the wall of sinew and stone. It was her own body that stopped her from stabbing any deeper into the thick of the neck, coming to a halt with a meaty thud against the dried, frail tissue into which her blade was now buried up to the hilt—the hilt being the hand permanently affixed to its base.
Placidusax was sent lurching at once. Malenia's whole world rocked and at once she shot a hand up to the edge of the neck stump and wrapped her fingers around a single rocky scale. Already scraped and bloody, it burned to clench the rugged stone as she did, but she grit her teeth and held tight as the great dragon thrashed. Hooked into and dangling from his neck as she was, she moved with him, swinging back and forth like some malignant ornament and perhaps half as secure. Fighting the fire in her battered hand and the growing ache in her wrought muscles, she panted through clenched teeth and held firm while Placidusax flailed wildly. Though her prosthesis buried itself surely within the swollen golden meat of his neck, her hand wept tears of crimson as she held on, its tenuous grasp only persisting because the spines of the Dragonlord's scales dug into her fingers just as deeply and perhaps deeper than she dug into them. Her own blood trickled in rivulets down Placidusax's skin and was swallowed when it mingled with the black-and-gold fluid leaking from the wound from which she currently hung suspended.
Down below, Ash threw another great swing into the beast's chest. The force of the impact was apparently enough to jolt Placidusax out of his incensed hysteria, for his heads whipped down to face him—for but a moment. Then, they raised themselves to the sky… as did the rest of his hulking frame.
The ancient dragon had fought with such inept and heavy-handed lumbering that Malenia had almost forgotten the notion of flight. As she started to ascend even further from the ground than she already was, however, her stomach dropped to the pits of Nokron. Placidusax flew up and up, closer to the sky and the raging storm high overhead—and indeed, it seemed indistinguishable from him. Red lightning crackled in the air and dark gray gales coalesced all around Malenia. All of a sudden, she was surrounded on all sides by a whipping wind. Her sight was fettered when her own hair was thrown into her eyes and her ears were filled with the half-hiss, half-roar of a brewing storm.
Instinct overcame her. Her bloody hand released its hold on Placidusax, leaving her dangling by just her great blade. In the mounting tempest, she strained to keep herself level with the embedded prosthesis, but was able to press her open palm against the wall of flesh and push while her golden arm pulled, and just as easily as it had buried itself into the body of her foe did it slip back out, completely relinquishing her hold on the old lord. As soon as her sword was free of its sheath, Malenia realized with a skip of her heartbeat that she should have thought this action through: without her weapon fixing her in place, there was nowhere to go but down, and down she went. She plunged straight to the ground below, her last glimpse of Placidusax being his disappearance into a black stormcloud before she reflexively, almost autonomously, spun herself around midair until her feet and gaze were pointed towards the earth, which rushed like a speeding comet to meet her.
She had not nearly enough time to land properly, only to brace for impact. The stone struck her with all the force of Placiudusax's wrath, sending her knees into her chest nearly fast enough to drive them into her heart. Faster still than the wind was pushed from her lungs by her legs was her vision plunged into total blackness as her head careened into the earth. She tumbled with the motion, turning over enough times to completely scatter what remained of her bearings in a desperate attempt to disperse the impact to any degree. She wasn't sure how far she skidded along the concrete, nor was she quite sure when exactly she stopped. All she could tell was at some point, she was no longer spinning, but the world was.
Amidst the darkness, stars pulsated and flared. Malenia's eyes clenched shut, but the dizzying kaleidoscope persisted behind her lids. It was incoherent, bordering on nauseating. Her hand flopped onto her sweat-lined forehead and pressed deep against her brow as if the pressure would bring some kind of stabilization. It didn't. Everything spun in her brain, making it impossible to tell up from down, left from right, anything from everything.
She didn't notice Ash come sprinting up to her, only felt a pair of barbed hands on her shoulders that heaved her into a hunched sitting position. They held her firm while she gasped and groaned, keeping her upright as she waited for her senses to return to her.
And slowly—or perhaps not, she couldn't tell—they did. As the spots in her vision calmed, however, her discombobulated body finally registered what had happened the moment she crashed to the floor, and like a riptide the empty space in her head was flooded with a pulsing, throbbing pain. It screeched in discordant tandem with her scatterbrained daze, washing her over with a new wave of dizziness. Though she sat squarely on the ground, held firm and still by Ash, everything swirled and tumbled as if she had been pulled with Placidusax straight into his storm.
Amidst the din of pain and confusion, her ally's voice was distant, but she heard it nonetheless.
"Malenia! Are you alright?"
The Empyrean groaned.
"No," she professed. The one word took what little breath she could afford from her lungs, and she found herself panting as she went on. "That… that fall, my bearings are… in pieces."
"Breathe," Ash implored. "Your wounds, they are not healing."
"What?"
"The cuts and abrasions that adorn you—they persist as fresh and angry as ever. Were you not sapping the lifeblood of Placidusax as you did me?"
Malenia's stomach sank. As soon as Ash uttered such a venture did the lurking notion dawn on her. No, she realized, she was not. Her lifehunt powers, they…
The Scarlet Rot. The baleful demon that bubbled within her veins, all these years. She, its progenitor, who had inherited its inferno. Its poison, its contagion, its decay… its parasitism. The parasitism that allowed her to extract the life force from her enemies and draw it into her own body. With the Scarlet Rot and all its inheritance gone, so too was that otherworldly vampire bite with which her sword so fiercely glinted.
The one good thing that wretched Outer God had ever bestowed upon her. Gone when she needed it most.
Her hand fell away from her head.
"Dammit…" she muttered. "Just my luck."
"What is it?"
"My lifehunt powers are gone. They… they vanished with the rot."
Ash fell silent. As Malenia sat there awaiting his response, the psychedelic array of stars and spots that filled her vision continued to fade, letting her tilt her head to look over her shoulder at him, just in time to see him finish fiddling with the faded leather belt slung around his waist. A strap fell to the floor behind him, and then he offered Malenia a small, shimmering crimson flask.
"Drink," he ordered. Malenia shook her head.
"I told you then, and I tell you now," she growled. "If the dew of the Erdtree slips into me—"
"Then the rabid hounds the shattered Order sends your way will pale in power to what awaits us in the clouds," Ash interrupted, tersely. "Your vampirism is gone, and so is the bloom that would pull you from death. The Erdtree burns as we speak, Malenia. I'll take my chances with whatever comes tumbling from its failing boughs. Will you?"
Thunder cracked overhead. A drop of rain fell onto her skin, then another, and then another, until a steady downpour was falling from the sky. She knew right away that it heralded a new storm, one that she had already angered quite severely.
With lips as thin as a penstroke, Malenia snatched the flask from Ash's hands and threw her head back. The holy water that spilled down her throat lit up with gold even as she watched it pour from the mouth of the chalice. With the first swig, the spinning in her head ground to a halt in the blink of an eye, and when she blinked her eyes, the vignette that darkened her vision had dissipated. With the second swig, every last cut and bruise covering her vanished, from the pricks left by Ash's briar to the oversized, crackling clawmarks left in her stomach. With the third, she thrust the flask back into Ash's hands and stood up with an incensed haste and a furrowed brow. Neither of them said a word and she spared him only a glance before turning her gaze to the darkening sky.
An explosion of thunder sounded behind them. They spun around in unison to see a black cloud falling from the sky and straight towards them; as they watched, the shape of the Dragonlord materialized from the storm, blazing claws spread out and poised to smite his prey.
He fell towards them as fast as Malenia fell towards the earth. The swordswoman jolted to life and dove straight to the right just as Placidusax soared by at astounding speeds, barely missing Malenia's tattered, trailing dress. The air around him swelled with heat, but that sensation came and went just as fast as his talons did.
Malenia landed ungracefully on her hands. By the time she staggered to her feet and spun to face the dragon, his form was already dissolving into the clouds. Not a few moments later, she saw that same black nimbus encircling high overhead, watching as it banked towards the center of the colosseum and then came barrelling towards her. This time, she was ready, and kept her balance as she leapt out of the way. Placidusax dissolved into the clouds again; when he dove into the ground for a third time, it was pointed at Ash, who barely managed to roll free of the swathe that Placidusax's galvanized slash carved through the air. This time, he did not take to the skies, instead spinning to face the two intruders.
Another great flash of lightning split the sky, followed by an ear-ringing thunderclap. The rain coalesced into a torrent that soaked Malenia to the bone, washing the golden blood from her katana as it sparked into place. A ways away, Ash climbed to his feet and hastily fixed his flask back to his belt. Placidusax stared the both of them down, eyes shining with wrath that glowed even through the curtains of rain that separated him from them. Malenia took in a deep breath and held it for a long, heavy moment. Her head was no longer pounding, but her heart was. She would have to make those three crimson doses count. The storm through which her blade would be slicing had only grown darker and angrier. The nimbus had become a tornado, and here she was, smaller than ever before.
Her hand reached up to graze the nub that protruded from her solar plexus. Her brother's needle had done its job, yet it remained interred in her skin. It felt warm to the touch, as if his gentle light emanated from it, unalloyed and unflinching.
Miquella awaited her. Her and all the things she had to show him. She would not be ripped from his embrace by this tired old beast.
Her golden fingers squeezed her blade. Ash hoisted his greatsword back onto his shoulder.
Another thunderclap shook the whole sky. Placidusax answered its call with a roar that rumbled the ground in kind. Little red sparks flitted through the air around his prey.
This is not my grave.
Malenia leapt forth.