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Following the dark river, the girl who would be god walks ever-forward.
Her braid is coming undone, listless, only-shine-of-the-sun, dove soft, the pure organ, the glory of the morning. Detritus: clinging to her legs. The river black, like ichor, syrup, sticky butter sweet. The white silk of robes, stained to tar, to ash, to the color of the night that once pooled and collected itself so as-you-please on the crevices and cracks of her windows.
The river churns and never ceases. Her footsteps, weft wrapped like bandages with every lift, the black-night revels dripping from her feet, clinging to her skin, lover’s fingers around her ankles, curling head of a dead fern, murmuring stay a moment, a moment.
In lack of light her skin is painted with the river that looks red, which she steps over, as she does everything else, the warmth, and the fragments, sickly white jutting from abyss, and she ignores it, steadfast, as she does everything else, indomitable, her closed mouth, if she does not look, the scourge staining her wrought limbs will disappear, and she will be given everything that is left, radiant with purity.
If she is to look down she is to see the ichor is shot through with gold. Sweet night, sweet release. A veil over this land of dark, a tear in the sea like a drop of blood in the water. All that she is, the floral pattern, the chatter of branches, the mindless, the wise whispering of leaves, and she walks, she still walks, even if there is none to witness.
Birds once flew these storm swept skies keening with the weight of the undead river. Water dripping from their beaks, what was once pronounced sacred gone to waste, their flock of many, many as one, the river, its churning blue flame, its seething mass. All have been burned for sacrilege, but she cannot help but recall the whispers of it, from the mouth of the hidden grave to the bottom of the world.
If this was the river to god then let it be seen here: that nobody saw her, and nobody heralded her becoming. She was only the circle cyclical: laurel crown and weeping wreath. She walks, not for herself, but for all, one for all, one for many, her voice calling, a people answering.
Her hair drags behind her, an entity, a body, a corpse. What finer desecration of a corpse than to be dragged in the dirt, a funeral dirge pooling from a dripping throat, to pass on, to pass forth, without the wailing, and the weeping, and the singing, and with that, there was only silence. Her mother once braided her hair: perhaps she fancied herself her writ small. Frayed hilt, not at all saintly, not quite light and sharp like a knife, her hair comes undone, and sinks behind her in the silk river.
Still, she walks. Maybe she believes it her own kind of pilgrimage. The light in this place shines through the cracks in the walls. She knows she is not here. Nonetheless, in the back of her throat curls scent like the forges she tends to. What’s left of her is something horrific. Everything else has been already left behind. Her body abandoned in the same black canyon as her fate. Warm against her lips: she is used to rejecting the self. War and waste were never so fitting for one so fair.
She says to herself, that she will not die as a mother’s perfect son, and yet not a perfect daughter either. What is there to make sure of, if not the future her, that she will be no one’s son and no one’s brother. With this she takes her own fate into her hands and shatters it. Perhaps she already has. A recollection behind her eyes, that she does not know where she is, and if what will come to pass has passed, or if she can simply not remember what once she was.
All comes down to the incalculable. She is voyager, engineer, goldsmith, the child who would be god. Her apotheosis will make her not the void but the air that to breathe. A final redemption. A rebirth unlike any other. her own pilgrimage, to splinter her bones and led the marrow spill out. She whispers to herself, since no one is there. Sacrifice is defined by what one is willing to give up but nobody will ever be able to give up as much as she has.
The field of bones narrows, an archer finding their mark. Step to solid land and feel the earth itself cave to your feet, child who would be god, and child of god. The expanse is a tower that spires beyond the meat of her. After all, men are meat, and she has not yet broken past the veil, a curtain of glass and iron, a shroud of steel and silk. What once was half becomes whole. The steps are there for her to take. Her hair streams behind her, the intestines of a body shrived from throat to stomach. Her eyes and her heart, gold, and open. Inside of the Erdtree, Miquella ascends the steps.
—
In all her dreams, the stairway to ascension was a long and winding thing. The steps in the base are not. Miniscule and placid, Miquella is used to maintaining that distance: she dares not look up.
The winding river only flows from the base of the Erdtree for the sap it leaks. Heavy and deleterious, a luxurious mutation, tar shot through with an arrow of light, ichor to the center of the world, the amber runs underneath every footstep, underneath every living soul, the blood of the earth in its purest form. Follow the roots long enough and you will always find your way back home.
She raises her skirts, trailing wine & water, mother who makes meat, deliverance into her the mouths of her sylphic bird-like child. She ascends the stairs, as if she has been here before, though she knows she never has, and never will again.
Her presence alone bends the world around her out of shape. Miquella can only look around her, at the silhouette she carves out, shadows warped to her very being, sinuous winnowed thread, broken over a knee, stitched by the golden needle that tore her into being.
Energy hums like molten gold from that thing inside her chest, torn open, declaring that she can avert her gaze but still be cursed to see the brilliance of it, hazy and bloodred on her eyelids, her mother sitting the throne at the center of creation, the ***** **** itself shining from behind her ribcage.
She has always known she would be here, inside the Erdtree. The center of the known world, is that the way of it? Mother has always been impossible to approach. Even as a child she knew she had to maintain that distance. No woman and no mother could exist in the orbit of the planet of god. Nonetheless, she existed, and was the definition of all.
Glimmering sap soaks into the black earth floor. Her brother’s blighted eyes nestle in the cracks of every wall but it is little known that he only inherited that from her: every golden leaf shed from the Erdtree like the feathers of a careless, beautiful dove were as their mother’s eyes, her thousand-mouths, touch on the wind, the hunter hunted, the seeker, the searcher.
She does not reach the throne to stand tall. She once wondered if her mother looked down on her, the small thing, wringing her hands, with no clarity, no light. Stone burns against paper and bird-bone thin legs.
Miquella the dutiful child prayed to her. Miquella the rebellious child cursed her. Everything that is left of Miquella kneels at the shrine of her, tastes the words of sermon ricocheting in her mouth like burnished sparks.
Mother built a kingdom. She kneels because she has to lay laurels at her feet if nothing else.
In her dreams she rests in the shade cast by the shadow of her mother. Her hand rests on Miquella’s shoulder, and in the dream it is nothing, feather-light, a pure thing in an impure place, white worlds upon clouds, the only weight attributed to it the tangible grace just flowing, and radiant, and hot, a belly of blood. It’s heavy in the air and it bends her low with nausea, and fear, and want, and primarily the first, enough for her to retch and curl up like a child again, borne as laid in the womb, or an archetype of illness, the pale, recalcitrant, the vulnerable, the vitalized, the sickbed. Miquella has always bore the Vision.
Her head drops from the weight of it. The circlet forms with her godlike form but it constricts like thorns, digs into the contours of her skull, as if the weight of the crown could be made something impossible for her to bear. She blinks, light and release, brushing against the stone that is her mother, a statue, beautiful and immovable. Her eyelashes fan like translucent butterfly wings against her skin, and she despises it, vitriol like black sand on the beach.
For birthing her impure. For birthing her into a world of sacrilege. Her lips turn to the moment of her, the golden warmth of her, even when the thing behind her ribcage spurns her, burns its way onto her eyelids for even looking too close. For birthing her and leaving to commune with the Erdtree so the last thing she heard of her mother’s voice was the shattering, the awful sound of it, the obliteration and the annihilation.
Uselessly turned upwards, an open mouth, gleaming lips, it’s not an ideal of pure desire. Miquella thinks of her mother and wants to cut herself open from skin to bone, flayed purity, cleaved open and smashed against the walls of her chamber like a broken piece of prism glass.
Her hands, the dividends of her love close around her ankles. Mother’s eyes stay closed, her cracked visage to weep, in white worlds, to weep with the red spear slung through her like an arrow of divine love.
To ascend to a god is to kill her. Mother is a crystal tower. The anvil of creation is hers to tend. Mother is a body built on bodies. A climax derived from pure rote feeling and emotion. Golden light and red gore all over the walls.
Miquella is lost to her dreams on occasion. Her mother on the throne, the first goldsmith and but not the last. The tap of the tree roils down to them like oil & blood, sown wheat, stone, and roots, at the base of the tree, inside the tree. Miquella’s fragile hands, honey-sweet and fleshy, a child’s hands, touching against her ankle, inhuman with grace and gold, spilling from her veins in place of anything else.
The next step is her gleaming mouth, face drenched, vision blurring. She saw her mother scarce before she left to commune with the Erdtree. She can’t move but opens her mouth, to the cleaving of an opening, from the fear, and the anxiety, enough to drive a man to yellow madness, but she does not stop, and her mother does not move, is as still and hollow as the tree of her power. A full throne for an empty God.
Syrup and sticky sweet like the sap of the tree itself. This is an act of giving with no warmth to it. The gleam of her shines against her mouth, on her tongue when she dips back to take a breath, face still wet with tears and detritus. But she can’t waste one drop.
Mother tore out her chest as a child to make room to bear the weight of the ring. The absence hollows out more of her with every passing day.
Left to right to right to left to cyclical cycle to laurel crown and her grip tightens, like if she tries hard enough Mother will open her eyes and pour the molten gold from forges to fill the absence she left in her daughter with all of her might.
Out of the corner of her eyes she thinks she sees the sweep of gold, but of course it is only tears, because of course she had left her a long time ago.
There’s some kind of mountain peak that she cannot reach. Her body darts off the earth, wracked with inanimate pleasure, a blaze of glory, but she cannot move, and her hands on her mother’s heels are slippery with sweat. To kill her mother is what she has to do but her hands tremble from the beginning. Deep down Miquella thinks this is something her mother must know.
And what worse is a fate than the one they share? Her mother knows her plans. She does not move and Miquella mouths her name to herself like a prayer. Molten gold drips down her face, against blood, and sweat, and tears. Marika does not move against her. And what worse of a fate could there be? For a mother to know that she will always survive, and her daughter will not?