Archive of Our Own

Everywhere Miquella looks, he sees blue: the waves upon the swaying sea; the flowers blanketing all, soaking up the light of the dimming red-purple evening and casting it back in a pale radiance.

He breathes in deep, tasting salt at the back of his throat. Beneath the salt, a certain sweetness wafts, like honey, like the nectar of brilliant blooms. His chest grows tight, then tighter, as though some power he cannot name has put bonds on him and is cinching them slowly but surely. There is a prickle at the corner of his eye, his one usable one. The other has been sealed from his infancy by his mother to keep him inviolate from the meddling of Outer Gods; a protection he is more than willing to keep.

He had to die, to get here. His flesh failed, then withered, and he took scraps of it with him, leaving behind a disfigured corpse grafted with illusion and incantation so it might be a signpost and a portal to any who wish to follow him: the first of the citizens in his new world. And those flesh-scraps, those relics of himself, he has been burying them, deep in the soil of this land of graves he has been laying them, raising crosses high above like a trail of footsteps, or chapters in a story. Look, he wants someone to say in the near future, a scholar maybe, or a priest, here is what Miquella the Kind did for us, to become our God. Here is proof of his sacrifice, his suffering.

He is dead, and he is buried, and he thought (hoped) that might mean that all of him would be dead and buried, all feelings, all sensations, all reminders of what he’s had to leave behind. But that is not so. He is in a body that is not a body but the projection of his spirit, his essence, him, and he feels as he has never felt before, or maybe as he used to feel in a childhood he can now only recall faintly, factually, like a history learned by rote.

In his arms, she sleeps, and sighs from amid her dreams.

He does not cry, because that is not what Gods do. The breeze rolling in off the coast is crisp against his cheeks. Cooling him; soothing him. Beneath them both, Torrent walks, hooves near-silent as they brush past the flowers, pace unhurried. He knows where he is going, clever beast that he is, most loyal of friends; and he is in no rush to get there.

That suits Miquella just fine.

He wishes that she were awake. He wishes that she understood. That they could talk about this path that they are on without hard words or faces hidden behind hands or silences, absences, his dearest one stealing away from his presence and taking half his heart with her. He wishes—

No. Gods do not wish. They reach out and with their power they take the world and order it as they deem necessary.

He holds her that little bit tighter. She is small against him, petal-soft.

The world he can order, but not her. She is him. He is her. Facets of a whole, like a mirror spidered with cracks that fit perfectly together, like sea and shore ever-mingled, meaningless without the other.

Ah—not meaningless. Other. He must become other, for that is what Godhood is. Apart. Pre-eminent. Divine.

He cannot be of the world if he wants to change it, gentle it. Cannot be bound to it. That is what they don’t understand, the rest of them, his demigod siblings squabbling for power for their own sake, without greater purpose. Noble Morgott, lonely Morgott protecting the Order that decreed him an abomination, praying to the Erdtree that shuns him still. Mohg whiling away his days in a blood-drunk haze, debasing himself before a new Mother who does not ask him to hide but asks him to hurt, himself, others, all so she can for a moment satiate her boundless thirst for wounds. Radahn, proud and valiant, who has eschewed his stables and his libraries for the battlefield where he can earn his renown, more of it, again and again; who used to sneak away from his duties to show young Miquella his horses, and put him on their broad backs, and teach him how to ride, but now remembers him not at all.

Their thoughts, their hopes, their dreams—and those of most of his mother’s children besides—are small; small and stuck, like an endlessly spinning wheel, going nowhere. They do not see like he sees.

Of all of them, he thought she might understand. His tenderest half. She who takes refuge in dreams from a world that grieves her. She who offers that same balm to others, to anyone chafing under the yoke of sickness, sorrow, strife, deceit.

Surely she would share his purpose, and not hinder him from what must be done. He will bring—is bringing—suffering upon his own self to make a world where no one else need suffer ever again. There is always loss in a becoming: the past must be cast aside to carve out room for the future.

Their mother, cold and proud and golden as she was, at least understood as much.

But she does not.

You mean to mutilate yourself, she whispered, horrified, when he told her of his plan, his new plan, hatched once the Haligtree had stagnated and could not be coaxed to further growth and he had to step out of its barren womb, and stop, and think; this plan, he knew (hoped), would at long last work and in working it would change everything and everyone, rooting out this world’s cruelty and replacing it with compassion.

Yet she disagreed. She shook her head, and took his hands within her own, and she said to him, slowly and sadly and earnestly: This is not the path to Godhood. All you will find at its end is a cage barring you from your purpose. It is compassion that you seek to inspire, yet think, Miquella, please: how can you feel compassion if you forget what it is to love another, to care for them, to fear for their wellbeing, to look at your past conduct towards them and call it into question and decide whether there is room for more kindness in you? And how can you inspire something in others if you cut it off in your own self? What you describe to me is a hard, heartless God. And that is not you.

He had never struck anything or anyone in his life. It is a bad thing to do, a hateful thing, needless. But he wanted to strike her in that moment.

Or perhaps he wanted to strike himself.

He didn’t, in any case. But he still remembers how he felt: the helplessness that opened like a charnel pit in his gut, the despair that dizzied him, the anger that came hot on its heels. What else would she have him do?

The world is broken, rotten through and through to the core, and by the world he means its Gods and its lords and its citizens, gleeful instigators of pain, blind and deaf to plight, seeking only the fulfilment of their own ends.

No one should ever be enslaved. No one should ever be shunned. No one should ever be hurt, maimed, saddled with the burden of relentless disease, bound still to the earth after death as a restless not-quite-corpse.

It is not fair.

None of it is fair, and nothing he’s tried has fixed it.

But this will. Godhood will grant him the power to make everyone see what he sees: that kindness breeds kindness; breeds peace; breeds contentment.

All will have a place in his order, all will be welcomed, all will be honoured. He will do away with hate and hurt, with selfishness, with malice.

It will be perfect.

He will take away the world from those who have not treated it kindly and he will make it perfect.

It is not me now, he said to his sweetest half, once he had composed himself enough for measured speech. But it will be. It has to be. You know this, dearest heart, you must. I am flawed. I am cursed. Nothing I touch bears fruit. None of my dreams reach their end. I can inspire compassion in one person, ten, a hundred, a thousand; but a new day will come, and new people, and new cruelties. I need to be more if I am to better this world that has caused so much hurt to so many that I love—not least to you, dearest heart. I need to grow up. I need to become a God. And a God—a God that is good, and steadfast in their purpose, and true to the interests of their citizens—does not love. Does not doubt. Does not fear. A God simply is. And so will I simply be, too.

He remembers her listening to him, her face darkening like night come early and all at once. Remembers her turning her back to him once he was done speaking. Remembers her folding at the knees and sinking to the ground, and staying there as one made stone. Remembers the sounds of her sobs, when they came, soft as wind through leaves, sharp enough to enter his ears and travel down into his chest and impale his heart as though with a dozen pointed spears.

Now, in the cradle of his arms, she stirs, nuzzling close. She will not wake unless he wills it. She did not wish to accompany him into this grave-land. She had closed her mind to him, her ears, her heart; she did not understand, and was not willing to try. But he has always been the stronger of the two. Sleep is her domain, dreams, rest, forgetfulness. Yet when they stand close enough to touch, close enough that they could blur into each other and become one, then their powers mingle, flowing together, sea and shore. He put her to sleep; secreted her inside himself, brought her here, and kept her asleep.

Oh, how he would love to hear her voice, look into her eye, speak to her as they used to when they were friends and allies and halves of the same heart.

He almost wakes her. Almost. Almost. As Torrent plods on and the sea gleams under the deepening evening and the flowers nod their fair blue heads, he strokes her hair and murmurs, “Look. There is so much blue. Like we’ve been swallowed up by the sky. Like we’re flying in an endless dream. It is peaceful here. I made sure it would be, for you. You deserve peace.”

But she cannot hear. Or if she can, if his voice trickles down into her slumber, she cannot reply.

He knows what she would say, were she awake.

Stop. Please. I do not ask this for my own sake, but for yours.

You are making a mistake. You doom yourself, my first and best love, and if a God is doomed then the world in their care is doomed too. You mean to throw away your flesh, your doubts, your love, your fears. Your choices, dearest heart. For a husk cannot make choices. Cannot feel or think enough to make choices, or show others the path to making their own good choices. A husk can only march on, insensate and uncaring, and force others to march with it. And compassion should not, cannot be forced. It should be a choice. It means very little if it is not a choice.

We have spoken of our mother often, you and I. We have spoken of the tragedies she has wrought. Her flaws. Her heartless, golden dreams. You follow in her footsteps, my love, my half. Salvation cannot begin with destruction. It cannot.

Destruction, no, that is not what he is doing. He is—saying goodbye. Burying what he cannot take into Godhood with him.

It’s not that he wouldn’t, if he could. He is not Marika. He holds no hate in his heart. Just too much pain. Too much fear. Too many fractured hopes.

He has tried, again, again: prayer, and when that didn’t work magic that he tinkered with and made his own, and then gold made so pure and so perfect that it would repel all unclean outer wills, and then a tree he dreamed up so big and so strong that it would hold up the whole world except that it failed because he failed—too young, never quite good enough, always just outside the reach of his own powers, his own potential—and he dreamed up an eclipse too so that houseless souls might be reunited with not-dead-enough bodies, so that his lord brother Godwyn might find his long-lost peace, but no, no, his rituals were not enough, nothing ever is enough, and then finally one last stratagem, one last try, Mohg come to whisk him away from his cocoon of bark to a cocoon of blood and bone and more blood potent and thick and corrosive, blood of the Formless Mother that soaked through his skin and poured down his throat in torrents and torrents till the Greater Will’s grip loosened then slipped free entirely and his flesh could wither and it could die truly and his soul could be freed to come here, where it had all begun for his mother, where it would all begin for him.

It cannot be a mistake; it is the only path still open to him.

And if it is a mistake—

No. No mistakes. He has come too far for mistakes.

A mistake it could have been when he left his sweet, strong, suffering sister behind, when he bid her bring war to his lord brother Radahn so he would die and be free to join him in this grave-land as his consort, when he bid her wait for him at the Haligtree, and defend it, not for the sake of the futile edifice of branches and leaves it had become but for the sake of its inhabitants, the many hunted souls that had found refuge there.

She said yes, of course, because she never refused him anything just as he never refused her anything. If she was half his heart, then Malenia was half his mind: his twin, his companion from birth, attuned to him as he is to her, protective of him as he is of her, their purpose one, which is: liberation from affliction, for themselves, for everyone.

A mistake it could have been when he claimed death for his flesh and buried himself to lie with the other buried things beneath the soil of these shadowed lands, for all things in this world yearn to meld and what is melding if not a force, all those wills and dreams and wishes and fears and cravings and sins and loves and hates made one and throbbing like a heartbeat, and if the melding is great enough then great things can be achieved. Power. Ascension. Godhood.

To earn something, something else must be sacrificed.

To earn something as vast as Godhood, the sacrifice must be monumental.

A self for another self.

He holds her closer, the figure in his arms, his truest heart now that his own still one was interred deep into the dirt.

He cannot keep her. He has come too far to stop, go back, sweep this all away and try—what? What is there left to try? Nothing to ease the agony of his sister’s rotting organs, nothing to regrow her mangled limbs. Nothing to lull Godwyn into true slumber, death everlasting and peaceful. Nothing to soothe the throats that cry out in the Lands Between, the eyes that weep, the hearts that mourn.

He must do this. Will. Will do this.

“Whoa, boy,” he says to Torrent quietly, as if he might wake her, although, of course, he will not; his enchantments are not so easily broken. “Whoa now.”

Torrent dutifully stops. He shakes his great horned head, then stills, and stands, and looks about as Miquella dismounts.

They have veered away from the coast, past shades who shamble between tombstones and trees and pay them little mind, past enormous ships of stone—vessels of mass funerary rites too old to be remembered or too strange to be catalogued—jutting up from the ground and embedded in the cliffs. This is the path proper, the one they should have been following all along, but he wanted to take her down to the shore; hoped that the whisper of the waves might carry into her dreams, and soothe her, as water always has.

Still, there are flowers here too, and down upon them he lays her, and they stir about her in the brisk sea-breeze, and to Miquella it seems that they are welcoming her home, a soft purple bloom amid the blue.

He gets to his knees. The soil is slightly damp, perhaps from past rain or the sea stirred up to fury from beyond the edge of the cliff. His robes where they cling to his knees and press down into that dampness grow cold, the white fabric turning see-through. From the pouch at his waist he withdraws scroll and quill and a tiny sealed inkpot.

He writes, right there on his lap, and the letters are a child’s letters, big and untidy.

I am making a mistake.

I should not have abandoned my sister.

I should not have abandoned my body.

I should not abandon my love, my heart’s half, my tenderest self.

I should not become a God.

I should stop while I still can.

Again. He reads it all again. Silently in his head and then out loud.

He does not look at her as he re-seals the inkpot and slips both it and the quill back into his pouch. Not even as he puts both hands on the soil, in the soil, and he digs, dirtying himself, his pale spirit-flesh growing steadily blacker until he’s made a hole big enough to put the parchment in.

It is calm that he feels, after. He wipes his hands on his robes then dabs at his eye, reflexively, expecting there to be wetness as there has been before. There is nothing. How could there be? Gods do not cry.

“Oh, my heart, my love, you are cold,” he whispers as beside him amid the flowers she shivers. Night has come down fast. There are stars up there, far away, peeking out behind grey veils of cloud.

He has tarried too long. Tarried because he did not want to do this, not truly, for she is him and he is her and what would life be without her if not a mirror shattered senseless and useless on the ground, the seas swelling up and eating the shore whole until there is nothing but water, deathly cold?

Other, that will be his life. But he will not be senseless, not useless, not alone. He will be a God, and Gods are legion, their life beating in time with the lives of those who look up at them in hope and in adulation.

And he will be kind to her. Yes, he will be kind. He will not strangle the life from her and lay her in a deep, eternal bower of soil to rot and be forgotten. He will give her safety. Rest. Peace. All the things she longed for in life he will give her here in this land peppered with the gravestones of millennia where the dead go walking and those ambitious enough and adamant enough can be reborn.

“Come,” he murmurs to her, though she cannot hear. With a deft gesture he sends out a little of his essence, a tiny flicker of golden power, and it settles atop the new grave and then rises tall and assumes the shape of a cross. I abandon here my doubt and vacillation. He nods at the cross, or maybe at himself. And without backward glance he scoops her up into his arms and out of the cold, and returns to Torrent’s back.

“Walk on, friend. Not much farther to go.”

Placidly, Torrent resumes his plodding.

The land begins to rise, cleaving up and away from the sea into a mighty promontory.

The lap of the waves dims as they ascend. In the quiet, between the clip of Torrent’s hooves, he hears her breathing, soft and long and deep, sometimes with the littlest content sigh, as though her dreams were as sweet as dreams have ever been.  He is glad. Glad he did not wake her. Up here, the flowers are sparser, the wind keener, the night darker. She would be frightened. Would want to go back home.

And there, he cannot take her.

She is him and he is her; but when he becomes a God, he will not be himself anymore, so what does that make her?

A relic.

An artifact.

A treasure, lost.

It was not without intent that he chose this as her resting place, poring over maps and dusty texts until he found it, somewhere perfect, somewhere that would bring her comfort and serenity. Where they are headed there is a fissure, and it splits the earth deeper than deep, deeper than memory, than history. It is a home, a haven, for all things dead or purposeless or weary of the world.

He is doing her a kindness. This is what she wanted. What she wants. To rest in complete quietude, forever.

She is the first beneficiary of his new order. Of his compassion.

He will make eternity good for her. He will make it good for everyone.

Torrent’s hoofbeats have become louder. The flowers have given way to bare rock, and a few metres ahead the bare rock is rock no more: it opens, yawns, an immense maw of darkness. The fissure.

“Down,” he instructs Torrent. “See, there to the right: stone ledges will take us all the way down.”

Torrent pricks his ears—and does not budge.

Miquella sucks in a breath. This body, spirit that it is, has no need of air; still, it is habit, and it is a good backbone to hold on to as he rearranges everything inside and around himself. Torrent has never refused him before, but then, many things happening tonight have never happened before.

He releases one hand from around her back—she is so light, like a reverie given form, easy for him to support with one arm only—and burrows his fingers into Torrent’s thick fur, giving him a scratch, a pat.

“I ask this of you as a friend,” he tells him, because it is true: Torrent was a gift from his mother given long ago, when she still remembered that she had other children besides poor half-slain Godwyn; and they grew close, and delighted in each other’s company, in gallops across wide, open lands and long dozing in the sun and the warmth.

In truth, the giving of Torrent was one of the rare times his mother gave him anything at all. Motherhood never suited Marika, and Miquella has come to understand why: it takes sacrifices to be a God. He never minded much, in any case; he had his other half, he had his twin sister, his siblings some of whom he saw not at all and others like Radahn who were a frequent and welcome sight; and he had his father who taught him and smiled at him, though that grew sparser the less sense the Golden Order made to him. Marika, on the other hand… most of his memories of her are as a statue rather than a being, a mother, in the flesh. Still, she cared enough to gift him Torrent, whom she had brought with her out of these very lands as she came crowned in gold and with blood on her hands. And she chose him for Torrent’s new master.

That meant something.

Little though he learned from his mother, he has held on to one lesson: Gods never do anything without purpose.

But Torrent, spirit, steed, friend, knows little of his purpose.

“Please,” Miquella whispers, and he makes his voice soft, and his hand in his fur is busy scratching at his withers where Torrent likes it best. “The way is long on foot, and slippery, and treacherous, and I carry a precious burden.” And then, when Torrent tosses his head and stamps his hooves uncertainly, he adds, “I will not hurt her. Not her. I could never.”

Beneath him, Torrent snorts and, though he does not do it quickly, he starts to pick his way over the descending ledges.

Miquella’s breath floods out of him. His second half spoke of choices; she named him husk, saying that a husked God cannot make choices and cannot offer choices to others; can only yoke their citizens to their will whether they wish it or not. But that is an untruth. An unfairness. He cannot force love in another, cannot force compassion. He cannot manufacture compliance where there is none. This—the path that he is on, the sacrifices, the Godhood awaiting him at the end—would be needless if he could. He can see people, that is his gift; down to their core he can see them, root through their secrets, their shames, their most desperate wishes, and he can become anything they need him to become, friend, confidant, healer, teacher, leader, weapon, hope.

It is easy to be kind.

It is easier still to be loved when you are kind.

So it is that Torrent bears him down into the fissure’s depths uncomplainingly.

So it is that as they descend Miquella says, “Nor would I hurt you. We do not have much more time together, you and I. But the time that we do have I would like us to spend in easy companionship as we have done all these long years.”

Torrent expertly negotiates a drop that would have otherwise jarred bones.

“You will like her, the person I shall entrust with your keeping. She is a sister of mine, though not one you have met before. She reminds me of Mother, a little. There is a fire in her. A will to move pieces on this board on which we play out our lives. She will take good care of you until such a time that you choose a new rider and friend.”

This, too, is part of his plan. Everything he does, he does with a purpose. And he needs trust, heaps of it, rolling hills, entire mountains, trust that those who are part of his plan will carry out their appointed role. It is easy enough to trust when you are loved. After all, one who is in love will do anything in service of their beloved.

And this—this is why she cannot stay. Cannot be part of his plan. Part of him.

A God that loves is fallible. A God that loves would have a hierarchy of priorities, and it would go like this: first, their beloved; then, the rest of the world.

And that is not good enough. The world deserves better. It deserves to be put first as no one has ever bothered to do for it before.

He will be a good God. He will be kind to everyone; will be loved by everyone. And will love no one in return.

That is the way it must be. The way to make this foolproof, this, at last, after a litany of failures.

Torrent has reached the bottom of the fissure. There is stone all around, glistening with damp, dark and smooth like walls of night. And there is a hole in that night, a tall, round cave mouth leading into the unknown. For here the maps and histories all end. Here is the realm of those dead or seeking an eternal tranquillity not unlike death; none who might return to the living and draw maps or tell tales.

“Carefully now,” he murmurs to Torrent, and as they plunge into the cave mouth he pulls her close, head lolling upon his shoulder, hair spilling moss-soft about them both.

It is a short stretch of up-down darkness that they traverse before the cave opens up, opens huge, less cave than mausoleum if a mausoleum could hold a thousand thousand souls. They have lost the light of the night outside, meagre as it was, so Miquella summons a little ball of brightness to hang suspended above them; it glows gold-purple, reaching far. Above, hard, rugged stone is revealed, studded with stalactites long as giants’ swords. Below, a dizzying drop into mist, and here and there sprouting from the walls funerary ships much like the ones up above just that they are uncountable in number: graves, graves, graves, all the way down into eternity. The bottom, if indeed there is one, cannot be glimpsed or guessed. There is a path forward, but it is makeshift, crossing crumbling shelves of stone, leading over gaps that must be jumped, spanning the wide and empty decks of coffin-ships.

But Torrent makes masterly work of it, and for that Miquella is grateful. Soon enough they drop down to a large rocky outcrop suspended above the void below. There is a stream here, shallow and silent. Bulging boulders loom out of the shadows. Near-invisible tracks lead away into secret places.

Miquella feels them, the eyes watching them out of the darkness. But he is not afraid. None shall assail them. He is here with holy purpose and her—no one could ever raise an unkind hand to her. She has too much love in her and it spills and spills till all around her are covered in it, drenched from skin to bone to soul; and they love her, because they cannot help it, and she loves them, because she cannot help it.

There are some things he cannot help either.

“Here, Torrent,” he says, once they reach the furthest edge of the stony outcrop, overlooking a tumbling procession of funerary ships from so long ago that their civilisations no longer have names. “Here is good.”

Torrent clops to a stop, and stands still so Miquella can dismount with his dear burden.

“Thank you, friend.” He leans in, pressing a kiss to Torrent’s forehead and stroking one hand down his neck. “I will call upon you soon. Go rest, and wait for me.”

With a practiced motion, he one-handedly frees one of the packs strapped to Torrent’s saddle, then touches his lips to the delicate golden ring on his forefinger and blows. Air travels through it, through clever cavities within the goldwork—his own invention—and produces a short, sharp whistle. Torrent blinks at him placidly, and then he is gone, flickered away into nothing.

Miquella is alone with the treasure bundled against his chest.

“There we go,” he murmurs as he kneels with her still clasped in her arms. “We are here, love.”

But she cannot hear, for she is still asleep; and he keeps her still sleeping and still held to his breast while he gestures and makes a cross, another one, and in its magic he scribbles words for any who might be inclined to read them: I abandon here my love.

He wakes her gently, very gently, easing her out of his spell of sleep in the tiniest increments.

Within his not-quite-real chest, inside the not-quite-alive muscle of his heart, he feels—a stirring. What might have been grief in his old life.

“Miq…”

The sound of her voice makes him close his eye. Makes him breathe, focusing on the familiarity of the sensation as the world around him looms up too big and too new and, for a moment, he can’t quite make sense of who he is. Not her Miquella, surely. Not a God yet either.

“Hi, love,” he murmurs, opening his eye again to her blinking hers open, and he reaches out to her because he can’t stop himself, because his dead-alive heart demands it, because letting go cannot be easy otherwise everyone would be a God.

He strokes her lovely hair back from her lovely face. His fingers linger. Her skin is soft; it is cold.

“Miq… uella…”

“I am here.”

She takes her lissom arms and places them underneath herself. Inch by inch, with slow determination, she pushes up into a sitting position, curling her legs. Her robes are much like Miquella’s, save that their whiteness is tinged with faintest purple, like a sleepy sunrise. They catch on the stone; they tear, very slightly.

“Where…” She turns her head upon her slender neck, this way then that, taking in the enormity of the cave. Her eye is wide; it blinks, uncomprehending. “Where… is… here?”

She is always like this after a long sleep. Slow to come back to herself. Slow to remember things that people do, like speech. Her instincts tend more towards laying down roots: settling somewhere safe and soft and pretty, and dreaming, and smiling while she dreams.

“Here is home, dearest heart,” Miquella answers. He takes her hands, both her hands, and plants kisses upon her knuckles to warm them. “A new home, just for you.”

“It is… grey.” A shudder goes through her, like a hurricane battering a flower. “It… is cold.”

“It is,” he agrees, forgoing her hands to root about in the saddle pack. “Here.”

A velvet cloak he withdraws from the pack, in a purple so deep that it seems almost black. Dozens of exquisite little flowers and butterflies are threaded into it in glittering silver. He drapes it over her shoulders, clasping it gingerly at her neck, and she seems to shrink into it, away from the cave, away from him.

“And the greyness need not be grey if you do not wish it,” he adds. Her hands are tucking the cloak close about herself, and do not need his warmth anymore. He finds himself not quite knowing what to do; tightening his fingers in his own robes and holding on, just to hold on to something. “Make flowers. Grow yourself a field of them. A garden. A jungle. Do with this place whatever will please you, my heart. I want you to be pleased.”

“You will leave…” she says, and she is not looking at him but at the chasm next to her, over the lip of the outcrop, “won’t you.”

“I must.”

“You choose to.”

“It is not a choice when I have no alternatives.”

Her eye flicks over to him. It is very clear, and very sad.

“Oh, Miquella.” She touches him, takes his cheek in her small hand and strokes him, thumbing over his cheekbone from nose to ear, slowly, as if she might commit his shape to memory. “You have lost… so much.”

“Not quite enough to become a God,” he counters. “Yet.”

He means it as reassurance. He means to say, I have lost nothing more than what I had to lose. What I set out to lose, for a greater purpose. And that is good. I am doing good for the world.

But she is not reassured. She sighs, and it is not her sweet, familiar sigh but something so heavy that he is surprised not to see it take physical form and thud down between them.

“But enough so you cannot go back.”

At that he laughs, and it comes out too brittle—or is it too hard?—to be amusement. “I do not wish to go back.”

Her hand stills. Deep down in the earth, in this place without light or life, her eye is bright as an amethyst glistening under the sun; its tears remain unshed.

“You… did,” she tells him. “You do not any longer.”

Her gentleness is a decoy, has always been a decoy, showing others only what they care to see of her. Dreams are her domain, but dreams can turn vengeful and grow teeth. She knows nightmares; she knows terror; she knows blackest despair.

She knows hearts, the truth of them, whether pretty or no.

“Go,” she says, before he can think of a reply; but—silly him: they have never needed words to know each other’s hearts. “There is nothing to keep you here.”

Inside Miquella’s head there is an earthquake. The things he thought certain—the things he thought he could rely on—are crumbling, slipping through his fingers.

“I expected you to try to dissuade me,” he points out, not because he wants to be dissuaded but because he wants (hopes) to have this one last moment with her—with another thinking, speaking being—to voice his purpose and list his reasons and gird himself in the surety of his nascent Godhood, his backbone, his handhold, his sense, bright and beckoning, deep and strong even as the golden roots of his mother’s Erdtree. “You have done so before, after all, and persistently.”

A smile tilts her lips, and it is beautiful like a death is beautiful after long suffering. “I would, if there were any chance of success. But… I failed, when I had that power; and now it must pass on to another.”

Perplexed, Miquella asks, “Who?”

“I know not.” She shakes her head, not so much at him as at—everything. “Time will tell.” And then: “You are afraid.”

Gods have no need of fear. They are Gods, and Godly power transcends all. “I am not, dearest heart.”

“You are, dearest heart. You…” She studies him, and her gaze upon him makes him want to cower and cover up as though it were blades paring back clothing, spirit-flesh, ambitions, convictions; but Gods do not cower; Gods do not cover up. “… you fear that a day will come when you will look back upon this moment, upon the journey you have taken to get here, and you will regret it. You will wish you had not done it. You will see yourself ascended, and you will find it not quite what you hoped it would be, like nothing you have done has ever been quite what you hoped it would be, and you will think the price too dear.”

Her words are blades too, and they touch deep, in a place he has tried to keep secret even from himself. It—

Does not matter. It is too late. His path is set. His feet are upon it. He will go forward, and if doom will come from looking back, then he will not look back. Ever forward. Ever ascending.

“It is not so,” he whispers to her, gently, as he used to when they were young and she would wake shaking from a nightmare of her own. “Do not let such worries trouble your rest; for I have brought you here to rest, and dream your dreams, and find your happiness.”

“Oh, no. Please.” She puts her fingers to his lips to forestall any further words. “Do not make my choices for me. You are taking them away from yourself, and you will take them away from the world. But I am not you, and you do not want me to be part of your world. I will keep my choices. I will rest if I wish it, and dream, and be happy, perhaps, in time. Or… I will not.”

“I—”

“Go,” she whispers, with so much love that Miquella has one moment, one single fleeting moment, when he trembles with it and feels bowed under its titanic weight and wonders if maybe, just maybe, she should be a God instead of him. “Seek your Godhood, if you must. I will be here. I will be… alone.”

“Beloved, oh—”

“Hush. I do not hate you, you who used to be Miquella, my golden half, my brilliant second self. Oh, I could never. I love you most and best. Remember that, if you can, when you become a God. Remember that you were loved before you divested yourself of your flaws, your failures, your unworthiness. Or what amounts to such to your own mind.”

She was not born a saint. No one ever is. Nor was she made a saint through ritual, like their mother’s kin. She became a saint because the people decided that she must be, holy in her perfect love, inspiring hope, acceptance, a sense of one’s own intrinsic value like a fire-warm glow deep inside.

It is easy to love one who makes you look kindly upon your own self.

But Miquella will not allow himself to love. He has no need of it where he is going. A God is so much more than a demigod, a saint, a mortal; their love must also be so much more. Bright. Burning. Blinding.

His mother’s love for her kin led to slaughter, a land charred by flame and stained red with blood. Her love for poor restless Godwyn led to a shattered order, a warring world, pandemonium: suffering for thousands.

Love tarnishes what it touches. And he—he will be a God of purest gold.

“Before I go,” he begins, but—

“There is no before. For me, there will only be after.”

She arises then, and her body shakes as the torpor of long slumber fades from her muscles, but she does not reach to him for support, and eventually she is on her feet standing alone and unaided. He joins her.

They are the same height. Their eyes are level. Pale gold to radiant amethyst.

“This is goodbye,” he says, a statement, and his voice sounds empty to his own ears, and there is still enough of him left to realise that that is not right but not enough to—care.

He breathes in. Makes himself breathe in. He doesn’t think he’s been doing it in… too long. Too many minutes. He would be dead, asphyxiated, were he still alive.

“It is,” she smiles, she who used to be the half of him but now is less. “I would hold you, if you are willing.”

Her arms open and when Miquella goes to her they close tight about him and they are so soft and so tender and so perfect and his head is cradled upon her shoulder as though she were mother to him as his own had never been and her tears are silent and soak into his hair.

“I love you, Trina,” he murmurs, still too empty, still—

“I do not think you know what that means anymore,” she says, and he hears the smile still there in her voice, and it is pure enough to snag up something from the very depths of his memory, I love you meaning I will be here for you always meaning I do not want a life without you in it meaning I see your tears and they break me and I vow to you that we will remake this world together, gentler, safer, good; a home for us and for all.

“But,” she adds, “I love you.”

She lets him go. The memory fades. He tries to keep hold of it—no; he does not. He watches it go, like sand washed away by rushing waves.

“Farewell,” he says, and it sounds cold, and lordly, and the sound of it pleases him.

Her smile has faded, like sand in water, like memory, like so many things.

“I wish you…” She stops, tilting her head, looking at him long, or rather not at him but through him, beyond him. “You know, I am not quite sure what to wish you, so I shall wish you nothing. Farewell, my erstwhile heart.”

He nods, picks up the saddle pack, and turns his back to her. Torrent comes when called, most loyal of beasts. He cranes his horned, shaggy head often as they ascend, glancing behind; but Miquella does not.

His path leads upwards. Forwards.

He stops for one thing and one thing only. At the entrance of the cave mouth, before climbing back up into the night, he halts Torrent; and he weaves a spell about the cave mouth, sealing it shut so that none may enter and disturb the inhabitants.

This, he has not planned to do. But it feels important. All graves must be sealed for protection and preservation. And what he left behind—who he left behind—is a tender thing, too easily hurt, too easily bruised.

He’ll keep her safe. And where is safest than under the earth, behind walls of stone and thaumaturgy?

His seal forms, settles. Shines a perfect, blinding gold.

Satisfied, he turns his face away and to the many stone ledges stacked high, high, high under a sliver of night sky. Upwards. Onwards.

A few more sacrifices await him, just a handful more before he is fully grown. Nothing much: some flesh, some old fears, Torrent. Nothing too painful to part with. And then, at long last: Godhood. And a kinder world.