Join my Discord, it's kinda funny sometimes. And I also give pings n shi for the fic, among other things. Join at discord.gg/aWZ9qX9mAW
Glory to my bum ass proofreader: Solare.
Since the author's note is gonna be crowded already, ima say it here. I got med school finals next month, so as that implies the updates are gonna slow down a bit. I'll try to squeeze out chapters whenever i can tho
-------------------------
Long before the Erdtree towered like a gilded spear through the sky, before the Hornsent were broken, before the Eternal ever raised a hand against the Land of Shadow, the world was ruled by dragons.
Not the scattered, half-feral remnants that haunt the modern age, but a true draconic dominion.
In those days, the storm itself had a king.
The Dragonlord Placidusax sat upon a throne of thunder above the clouds, his wings spanning horizons, his four heads wreathed in crimson lightning older than the stars that watched him. Beneath his gaze, the Lands Between were not yet the patchwork corpse of kingdoms they would one day become. They were whole, raw. Still heaving with the first breath of creation.
Even the land that would later be called "shadow", the territory Queen Marika would someday tear away and cast aside, was then no exile, but a seamless part of the world. No boundary of shadow separated it. No curse of abandonment stained its soil. And even the grand, primordial tree that would later be split into the Erdtree and the Scadutree was whole still.
Shadow and light, lowland and peak, root and sky, all lay joined together under the single, crushing weight of draconic sovereignty.
The Dragons reigned supreme.
Their shadows fell like storm fronts across the continents and their roars were weather. Their breath decided which valleys flourished and which burned. Cities that dared to rise too high did so only with the Dragonlord's tacit permission, their tallest towers never reaching the heights of his coiled slumber.
For a time, that dominion was absolute.
But nothing born at the dawn of the world remains untouched by rot forever.
In the heart of the storm, a crack formed.
No one living can say with certainty how it began. Some tellings call it envy. Others call it hunger. Others, still, whisper that some subtle poison from beyond the stars' reach seeded doubt into draconic hearts. But all stories agree on this:
One day, a Drake of terrible ambition raised its head against the Dragonlord.
Bayle, they called him in the tongues that survived long enough to name him. Bayle the Dread. Bayle the Vile. Bayle the Faithless. Bayle the First Traitor. His lightning burned a fiery orange, tinged with some venomous hue, and his kin gathered to him in secret above cloud and chasm until they were many.
Whether he fought for some higher ideal, for a crown usurped, or simply to carve his own name into the bones of the world, the reason is dust now.
The result was not.
When Dragon turned on Dragon, the sky itself became their battlefield.
The civil war of the Dragons did not happen in one place. It did not confine itself to one nation's borders or one kingdom's concerns. Skirmishes broke out over every corner of the Lands Between: over forests yet unclaimed by men, over oceans not yet charted, over deserts unborn and cities undone.
Lightning storms that men would later name "acts of the gods" were, in truth, the claw and fang and fury of drakes locked in death-throes far above.
The Land of Shadow, the nascent kingdoms that would one day kneel before the Erdtree, the future site of Leyndell… all these places were scarred in ways the later ages would never fully understand.
And while the great scaled tyrants tore at one another in the heavens, something smaller and far more insidious began to stir below.
For under the Dragonlord's constant vigilance, many ambitions had been forced to remain dreams.
Now, with his gaze turned upward, with his strength poured into bleeding his own kin dry, the ground itself became fertile for older, crueler seeds.
The war of dragons became a curtain.
Behind that curtain, lesser powers began to move.
Some were simple opportunists: petty kings, would-be warlords, nameless cults. Others were older still, patient as fungus and just as delighted by decay. Among those rising forces, one in particular found itself uniquely suited to the age.
They called themselves the Hornsent.
They were not born of the Erdtree, for it did not yet reign.
They were not born of dragon's egg or celestial stone.
The Hornsent were a people of the Crucible.
They studied the beginning of all things, the first swirling mass of life where root and flesh and flame and storm had not yet decided what they wished to be. They worshipped that primordial soup with a zeal that bordered on madness, saw holiness in tangled, unrefined forms, in horn and hoof and scale and limb all coiled together.
To them, perfection was not purity, but totality.
In their temples that were grown more than built, walls slick with fossilized sap and fossilized flesh, they traced the patterns of life's first stirrings. They carved curling sigils that spoke not of one god, but of all possibilities intertwined. They branded themselves with symbols of antlers and tails, of wings and thorns, testing how far the body might stretch to hold more than one truth.
And in their fervent study of the Crucible's oldest truths, they reached too far.
Their prayers, their rituals, their dissected idols, their vivisection of the early forms of life; all of it began to pull at a curtain that should never have been lifted.
In their fervor, they brushed against a realm that lay beyond even the Dragons' comprehension. A realm not meant for mortal man. Not meant for any normal living thing at all.
A realm of Higher Beings, of Nightmares, of Outer Gods.
They did not reach it fully, not at first. They could not cross the threshold. They could not step into that crushing sea of thought where will and concept devoured each other like beasts. Their minds were too small, their souls too poorly insulated. Every attempt to press closer left cultists drooling, trembling, veins black with alien resonance.
They could not grasp it, and they could not comprehend it, and they could not understand it.
Nor, by any sane accounting, should they have.
But mankind has never been overly married to sanity.
Greed does not sleep. Hubris never tires. The dream of the impossible rots the edges of lesser dreams until only one thing remains:
More.
A man's ambition does not die merely because it should.
So they pressed on.
They studied. They watched the Crucible's first forms as they bloomed and rotted in slow, looping sigils. They worshipped. They crafted intricate engines of flesh and bone and horn to channel what little contact they could withstand. They hunted beasts and men both, carving them open to see how many truths the meat could store at once.
They violated their own laws. They desecrated the natural order they claimed to revere.
In their own twisted vision, theirs was a holy undertaking.
Were they not children of the primordial crucible themselves? Was not their horned flesh a testament to life's first wild impulse, the desire to be many things at once? If they had been born of stardust fallen through a rupture in heavens, why should they not seek the realms that rupture led from?
But their eyes had opened too far.
They had glimpsed the Beyond. They had heard whispers under the roars of dragons, seen shapes moving behind the firmament. And once a mind has touched such things, it will never be content again.
So the Hornsent dreamed a new dream.
Blasphemy, given form.
They would create a Higher Being of their own.
Not merely a vessel. Not merely a prophet. A true, self-sustaining locus of that alien power. Their own Saint.
At first they looked inward.
Could they not elevate one of their own? Peel back the layers of horn and hide, of root and vein, meld themselves further with the raw Crucible until something… more… emerged?
They tried. Oh, how they tried.
But familiarity stayed their hand. For all their cruelty, all their zeal, some instincts lingered. Their own bodies, so attuned to the spirits they worshiped and adored as they did, were too sacred in their doctrine. They were already holy works, even in their eyes. To unmake such a creation on the altar of some untested ritual felt… wrong.
Too profane, even for them.
They needed an Other.
Something close enough to be viable, but distant enough that their conscience could call it "necessary" and sleep at night.
Fate, ever eager to shove mortals down ruinous paths, presented them with an answer.
There were another people.
Ones not horned or twisted by the crucible in any way.
A gentler, softer, more pliable people.
They were called the Shamans.
They lived not in grand citadels of bone and brass, but on the outskirts and quiet corners of the lands, in tree-shadowed villages and cliffside sanctuaries. Their society was matriarchal, guided by the Grandmother, whose wisdom was measured not in blood spilled, but in lives kept whole.
They were simple, in the way a river is simple: easy to watch, hard to truly understand. Their rites were slow and cyclical. Their songs were old. They painted their skins with symbols, not of conquest, but of belonging.
And yet they possessed a gift that made them, in the Hornsent's eyes, a key.
Their flesh was malleable.
Not in the crude, splicing way the later Golden Lineage would one day perfect, but in something far older and gentler. The Shamans could meld their bodies with those of beasts, not through stitches and nails, but through mutual acceptance.
They could take into themselves the traits of creatures that offered willingly: the keen sight of hawks, the sure footing of goats, the webbed fingers of river-frogs. They could heal broken bodies by borrowing strength from nearby life and returning it after. They called it harmony.
To the Shamans, this ability was sacred. The highest orders of melding were reserved for dire need: to save a life that would otherwise be lost, to answer the plea of a dying spirit that wished for its strength to live on in another. The Grandmother commanded iron reverence on this point.
To abuse it was sacrilege.
And yet it was this gift, this bridge between forms, that drew the Hornsent's gaze.
The Hornsent watched. They saw how shamanic grafts did not warp the host into monstrosity, but wove them more tightly with the world. They saw flesh accept flesh without rejection, bone welcome bone, spirit embrace spirit.
Where the Shamans saw sacred unity, the Hornsent saw infrastructure.
A blueprint.
If these people could meld with beasts without losing themselves… then perhaps they could be made to meld with something higher. Something Other. Something that did not belong in the world at all.
A Saint could be built from their flesh.
So the Hornsent moved.
Their hunters slipped through night and storm, their priests whispering blessings of blasphemy as they crept toward shaman villages. What followed was not war, it was worse. War implies two sides striking one another.
This was a slaughter.
They fell upon unguarded settlements and sacred groves with nets woven from rune-thread and blades honed for delicate cuts. Those who resisted were put down. Those who surrendered were marked. Those whose bodies showed particular promise, resilient, adaptable, quick to harmonize were taken.
All in aid of their "holy purpose".
Under the cover of the Dragon civil war raging overhead, the Hornsent began their own private apocalypse below.
They built labs that called themselves temples. They carved circles of flesh and ash that they named altars. They stacked the bodies of beasts and Shamans alike in precise patterns, coaxing the Crucible's energies to mix in new, forbidden ways. And eventually merged the minced flesh into jars, as if the act would accelerate the horrific act.
Yet for all their zeal, all their cleverness, their attempts did not bear the fruit they'd envisioned.
The higher realm they sought to touch refused to be so easily pinned.
Summoned echoes rotted hosts from within. Partial successes ended in bleeding statues: frozen halfway between beast and man, mind and nightmare. The Hornsent's "proto-saints" screamed in voices not fully their own until mercifully silenced, or worse, left in their jars to suffer eternally.
The machinations of fate, however, care little for the intentions of mortals.
Sometimes it takes only a single, barely-noticed moment to wrench history onto a different track. A butterfly's wing. A dropped stone.
Or, in this case, a dragon's.
High above the Hornsent's grand city of Moorth, stormclouds churned with more than simple weather.
An Ancient Dragon of Placidusax's line, one who would eventually and miraculously give birth to two twin Dragons, Fortissax and Lansseax, tore through the air in pursuit of a fleeing Drake.
Bayle's kin.
Their battle had raged from horizon to horizon, burning chunks out of lesser storms as they went. Now, at last, it neared its crescendo above Moorth itself.
The sky cracked with blood-crimson lightning.
The traitor-drake's wing, already shredded from previous blows, finally failed. A bolt of ancient thunder caught it square in the chest, lightning crawling through bone and marrow. Its roar was less defiance than sheer, unwilling reflex as its massive form tumbled from the clouds.
It plummeted.
Down, through the muddy stormbanks. Down, past Moorth's highest towers, staining the air with sizzling, smoking blood. Down, right into the heart of the Hornsent's proud capital.
The dragon of Placidusax's brood did not let it fall alone.
She dove.
Her roar split the air, drowned out prayers, cut through the chants of Hornsent priests mid-ritual. She followed the tumbling drake like a comet wrapped in thunder. Crimson lightning coiled around her limbs, spiraled across her horns, gathered at her claws.
She hit like a meteor.
The impact shattered more than stone.
The plaza they struck, which was once a sacred square where Hornsent zealots had preached of the Crucible's unity, broke like brittle glass. The ground caved in, dropping entire tiers of the city into a yawning crater. Shockwaves split streets down their lengths, sending buildings listing drunkenly or toppling outright into the abyss.
Walls crumpled. Bridges snapped. Towers that had stood for generations leaned, cracked, and collapsed in great avalanches of dust and screaming stone.
The earth shook under the weight of draconic wrath.
What had been orderly oppression dissolved into raw, animal panic.
Mortals, for all their faith in their own importance, are very small beside dragons.
In the shadow of that impact, the Hornsent's supposed supremacy was laid bare as a fragile illusion. Their control over Moorth relied on fear, on the disciplined movement of soldiers and priests through well-known streets, on a city that stayed where it had always been.
With the foundations of the city itself torn open, with their temples cracked and their watchtowers falling, the Hornsent's authority fractured. Commands vanished into the roar of collapsing stone. Signals were lost in the dust. Zealous certainty drowned in very real, very immediate terror of being crushed.
What had been a stage for careful, cruel ritual became a riot.
Anarchy bloomed.
The Ancient Dragon did not know, as she slammed his claws into the traitor-drake's torn throat again and again, that her blows were rearranging more than one destiny. She cared only for the rebellion in front of her, for rending treacherous flesh from bone.
She had no way to see the ripple spreading out from her impact: Hornsent lines broken, slave-pens cracked open, guarded doors hanging from one hinge, watchful eyes turned skyward instead of down.
She did not see the cells beneath a certain bloodstained tower crack just enough for small hands to pry them wider.
She did not see two young Shamans slip through.
In the tumbling chaos of Moorth, in the screams and dust and the hiss of lightning still crawling through ruined stone, two figures ran.
They were slight, more bone than meat, clad in rough, ritual-woven cloth marked with the simple patterns of their village-circle. Horn-pendants bounced against their ribs as they moved. Ash and old paint stained their cheeks.
They were scarcely more than children.
Yet the way they moved – hands catching each other's wrists at every stagger, steps naturally falling into the same rhythm, breaths syncing without thought – spoke of a bond older and deeper than simple siblinghood.
Their bodies bore faint traces of the Shaman gift: a slight flicker of gold in the irises, a hard-to-name fluidity in the way their joints turned that hinted at other forms waiting just beneath the skin.
They stumbled through a fallen arch, ducked under a half-crushed statue of some crucible-beast, and pressed their backs to what remained of a wall as another tremor rattled the world.
Dust rained down over their hair.
For a heartbeat, hidden there on the broken edge of a city tearing itself apart, they squeezed each other's hands and dared to breathe.
They looked up.
Above them, dragon fire painted the clouds red. Below them, Hornsent agents screamed orders nobody could hear. Somewhere deeper in the city, shaman circles burned or broke or took their chances in the chaos, like these two had.
The world was ending, or was it beginning?
Sometimes the difference is hard to see from the ground.
Whatever else that day might be called, it would be remembered, as long as memory lasted, as the moment the Hornsent's absolute confidence cracked.
And that crack was all these two needed.
All it takes, sometimes, is that. A single fracture. A split second. A slightly misaligned stone in the foundation of a would-be empire.
Like a butterfly's wing or, more accurately, a dragon's strike.
Or two small figures slipping through a gap that should never have been left unguarded.
In time, they would wield hammers and runes and destinies. In time, one would take up a great beast of a man and call him Lord. In time, the other would become that beast in another form, a mirror and a wound all at once.
But for now, they were just frightened Shamans running for their lives through a city built on stolen flesh and stolen dreams.
Those two Shamans were called…
Radagon and Marika.
…
And so they ran.
Not like warriors, not yet.
Like children.
Their bare feet slapped against stone slick with dust and blood as they wove through the falling skeleton of their city. Great slabs of masonry crashed around them, chunks torn loose from towers that once seemed eternal. Splinters of crucible-grown bark rained from shattered organic buttresses. Smoke and powdered rock turned the air thick enough to chew.
Thunder rolled overhead, not from stormclouds, but from dragons colliding in the sky.
Marika did not look like a God-Queen.
She looked like a young shaman girl with hair the color of new-forged gold and eyes that still believed there was a better tomorrow somewhere just past the next hill. Her cheeks were streaked with ash, her lips split from earlier blows. But her mouth kept trying, stubbornly and desperately, to form a smile.
Not because there was anything to smile about.
Because she was trying to convince herself there still was.
If she let the smile go, if she let fear show, then she would have to admit that everything was truly, irrevocably broken. That the village festivals, the Grandmother's songs, the way the wind sounded at dusk over their old home… all of it had been ripped away forever.
So she smiled.
It was a wobbly, fragile thing.
Lying to herself with all the sincerity in her heart.
Radagon ran beside her, taller by a head despite being the same age, hair a wild thatch of red like coals that refused to die. His face was tight, eyes hard in a way no child's should be. Where Marika held an unsteady optimism in her expression, Radagon wore worry like armor.
He bled from three different cuts.
One high along the brow, where an Inquisitor's staff had caught him. One along the ribs, left by some guard's spear as they fled the pens. The worst was low in his side, just above the hip, where a dagger had gone in crooked. Each step darkened the cloth there further.
He did not complain.
His jaw was set, his breathing sharp, his left hand pressed into the wound to keep his life from dribbling out faster than he could afford, his right hand clutching a stolen knife like it was a lifeline.
They moved through carnage together.
Once, a Hornsent Inquisitor stepped from behind a collapsed arch in their path. Their robes marked with spiral sigils of the early cult, horned helm gleaming with sacrificial oils. His fingers crackled with crude golden light, the kind that would one day be refined into spiraling lances mimicking the "gate of divinity" the Hornsent dreamed of.
At this stage, it was little more than raw force.
"Found you," he hissed, light gathering at his palm.
Radagon threw himself sideways as Marika lunged forward. The girl uttered a shaman's word, half prayer, half plea, and her hand flashed with a simple seal. Not yet the polished glyphs of Golden Order incantations, but something older and rougher.
The incoming bolt sputtered against an invisible film of shimmering air, taking the brunt of the blow and leaving only numb fingers and prickling skin in its wake.
Radagon closed the rest of the distance in an instant.
His stolen dagger rammed up under the Inquisitor's ribs. The man's eyes widened, breath leaving him in a wet gasp. The second shaman twist of Radagon's wrist would have been textbook if anyone had ever taught him textbooks. As it was, he'd learned by watching butchery.
The Inquisitor crumpled.
Radagon staggered back, one hand clamping over his own worsening wound, his teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached. Marika grabbed his arm, dragged him along.
They kept going.
The city was not theirs. It never had been. Moorth belonged to the Hornsent, a monument to their Crucible worship. But in the short time they'd been held here, in cages and circles and cold stone rooms, they'd mapped enough corridors to know where not to run.
They avoided the main plazas, now choked with fallen dragonstone and Hornsent priests screaming at the sky. They cut through servant alleys, ducking under trailing vines of half-living masonry that bled sap when torn. They passed shrines where incomplete saints, twisted lumps of fused flesh and bone, lay snapped in half by fallen columns.
Every so often, another Inquisitor or guard caught sight of them.
Another flash of low, crude golden light. Another swarm of daggers and curses. Each time, the pair fought back with nothing but stolen blades, Marika's meager healing sigils, and an iron will to keep moving.
It was relentless.
But they were relentless, too.
They turned down a side street toward an outer terrace where Marika thought, hoped, there might be a way down to the cliffs. The world shook under another draconic impact. A chunk of wall tore free above them with a grinding roar.
They were not alone when it fell.
Two Hornsent Inquisitors had cornered Radagon in the narrow stretch of stone just before the terrace, while Marika was still fending off a pair of their fellows farther back.
One had tackled him, forcing him to the cobbles.
His knife clattered out of reach.
The other drove a blade into his shoulder, close to the neck. White pain shot through his body, his fingers spasming open. A rough forearm pressed against his throat, pinning him, cutting his breath to a thin whistle. Boots ground into his legs.
"Red hair," one of them sneered, breath hot and foul over his face. "The Grandmother favored you, did she not? Let us see what your 'gift' looks like when peeled apart, little shaman-"
Radagon could not answer.
His vision swam.
All sound felt distant, drowned beneath the roar in his ears.
Back down the street, Marika screamed his name.
She cut down one Inquisitor with a frantic, clumsy slash without grace, just desperation. The other lashed out with a jagged arc of golden force. It clipped her shoulder, spinning her into a wall, skin sizzling where it touched. She shook it off, teeth grinding, and pushed herself upright.
She took one step toward Radagon but then the world burst into white.
Crimson lightning arced down from the sky.
It wasn't meant for them. It never was. It was a stray limb of the storm, a single tendril of power flung wild as the Ancient Dragon above clashed with its traitorous kin.
The bolt struck a wall beside the cluster of struggling bodies.
Stone didn't shatter so much as liquefy in a scream of heat and force. The section of wall above them fractured, split, then came crashing down.
The two Inquisitors had just long enough to look up.
They disappeared under a rain of broken masonry.
So did Radagon's lower half.
Marika's shriek tore itself raw from her throat as the shockwave tossed her backward. She hit the ground, skidded, coughed dust, then scrambled up on bleeding palms.
The thunder rolled away. The sudden silence that followed was worse.
"Radagon!" she cried, voice breaking.
She staggered over the rubble, hands tearing at loose chunks of stone with no regard for her own skin. Fingers split, nails ripped. She didn't stop. Blood smeared the rock as she dug.
At last, she reached him.
The upper half of his body lay pinned awkwardly under two slabs of broken wall. His chest still heaved. His eyes, pale and wild, snapped up to meet hers. From the waist down…
She didn't look.
She didn't have to.
The Human mind can only take so much truth at once.
"R-Radagon…" she whispered again, falling to her knees beside him.
His breath came in wet, rattling pulls. Blood bubbled at the corner of his lips. The wound low in his side was now a river. One arm moved weakly, fingers trying and failing to grasp for purchase.
Marika slapped her hands over the worst of it, whispering the words of a healing incantation taught to her in better days. Sun-warm light flickered at her fingertips, feeble and stuttering. It flowed into him, knitting a few small veins, sealing surface cuts.
The deeper wounds did not care.
Her mana had long since bled dry, like the power of a candle whose wick had drowned in its own melted wax. All she had left were scraps, sputtering embers licked up by an invisible wind.
"Come on!" She murmured, voice shaking. "Come on, come on, please-"
But the light sputtered out and the blood kept coming.
Yet her smile remained.
It had to.
"It's okay-" she said, the words tumbling out too fast, each one clinging to the last like falling stones. "It's okay, it's okay, you'll be fine, Radagon, I'll- I'll think of something, I always do- Grandmother will come, she'll know what to do, she always knows what to do-"
He coughed.
It was a wet, ugly sound, thick with red. A spray of blood splattered across her cheek, hot and metallic, painting her forced smile in someone else's life.
Her mouth twitched.
The smile cracked further.
Radagon stared at her.
Even now, even pinned and torn and fading, his gaze softened when it found her face. His pupils were blown wide, but he still managed to focus enough to see the trembling corners of her lips, the way she refused to let the smile die.
He rasped, voice barely more than breath. "You… always smile…"
Marika flinched.
"I- what?" she whispered.
He swallowed, throat bobbing hard, more blood pooling at the edges of his mouth. "You… always… smile," he repeated, each word an effort. "No matter… what. It's… what made… everyone love you."
His hand twitched up, barely lifting from the rubble, fingers reaching for her cheek as if to brush away tears she pretended weren't there.
"It's… what made… me…" His chest hitched. "Love you."
The words landed like a blade in her heart.
She shook her head, too fast, too hard, tears finally blurring her vision even as she refused to admit they were there.
"Wh-what are you talking about?" She choked, the smile now a broken thing, shivering on her face. "You're not going to- This isn't- We're going to get out of here. We're going to go home. Together. You'll see. You'll-"
His next cough cut her off.
More red covered her young, beautiful face.
"M-Marika…" Radagon whispered.
His eyes, so steady even under pain, were suddenly very small. Very young.
"I don't… want to die."
Something inside her broke.
It was not a crack or a hairline fracture———it was a clean, brutal snap.
Something deep and golden and vital in Marika's soul, something that had believed, fiercely and stubbornly, that if she just smiled hard enough the world would eventually smile back… shattered.
What happened next, even she cannot recount clearly.
The ritual was forbidden.
Grandmother had told them so, once, in a voice like worn stone and warm earth. It had been around a low fire, in a village that no longer existed, while children drowsed against each other's shoulders.
A shaman could meld with beasts, she had said. With willing spirits. With branches and webbed paws and horns and talons, if all parties agreed and the need was great. That was the path of harmony, of honoring what wished to live on.
But two Shamans?
Two souls of equal weight, equal complexity, and equal potential?
That was different. That was not sharing. That was rewriting.
"Once done…" Grandmother had said, her eyes distant. "There is no going back. No knowing where one ends and the other begins. Two selves, unmade and made anew. One being where once there were two. It is… complete."
No one in their circle had ever attempted it. No one had been permitted.
Marika heard that warning again now, distantly, as if from underwater.
She looked down at Radagon.
At his pleading eyes, at the rubble pinning him, and at the blood on her hands.
"I don't want to die."
All she heard was thunder as her hands moved.
Whether she whispered the old words or screamed them or thought them so loudly that something listened, she could no longer say. She remembered only flashes.
Drawing symbols in blood and dust over his heart and hers.
Forcing their trembling palms together, fingers interlaced.
The sensation of her skin becoming not-skin where they touched, of boundaries beginning to blur.
Something in the air thickening, turning hot and sticky, like breathing through sap.
A pressure, immense and everywhere, pressing down on them both, pushing them together, folding them, flattening them, knotting their souls like ropes.
Radagon's voice – sobbing, laughing, terrified, relieved all at once – echoed through her mind and chest as if it were her own.
Her own voice was echoing in his.
For a heartbeat, two sets of memories flickered in the same skull.
Then there was silence.
And when the haze cleared, Radagon, the boy, no longer lay crushed beneath the rubble.
There was no second body. No broken, half-dead shaman gasping for air. No corpse.
There was only Marika kneeling alone in the middle of the ruined street, hands bloody, hair dust-choked, eyes wide and hollow.
She felt… wrong.
She felt too large and too small at once.
Her limbs responded when she commanded them, but the sense of where "she" ended and the world began had gone strange. There were echoes in her veins, half-formed thoughts that did not feel like hers and yet were. Snatches of memory of looking at her from outside, worrying, admiring, fearing, and protecting.
Radagon was not beside her. Radagon was not gone. Radagon was within.
Radagon was still alive.
The dragons above reached their brutal climax.
High in the clouds, the Ancient of Placidusax's line finally seized the traitor Drake's throat in between her jaw and tore. Crimson lightning poured from the wound as the drake's scream was snuffed out. Its body went slack, tumbling away into the distance, trailing smoke.
The victor's roar split the sky, a sound of rage and weary triumph both.
Below, the Hornsent, already broken by quake and panic, scattered like ants under boiling water. They abandoned their altars, their half-finished saints, their screaming captives. Priests fled with whatever relics they could claw from collapsing temples. Inquisitors dropped their golden spirals mid-cast and ran for any path that did not end in rubble.
Moorth bled, but the Hornsent would survive. They would always survive. Like mold in the dark, they would retreat, fester, and begin their blasphemies anew in whatever hole would still have them.
And the dragons would move on, the civil war would rage elsewhere.
History would, on its surface, continue.
But in the shattered bones of Moorth, one small figure remained where everything else moved.
Marika knelt.
Her wobbly smile, that stubborn talisman against despair, finally failed.
It did not slip so much as disintegrate, like brittle glass crushed under a boot.
Her shoulders curled in on themselves. Her arms wrapped around her own ribs, as if trying to hold herself together when something much deeper had already come apart. Her forehead pressed to her knees.
And she shook. Once, twice, then more, the tremors running up from somewhere beneath the sternum where grief lives.
The sobs started small with a hitch of breath, then a muffled whine bitten between her teeth.
Then the dam broke.
Sound tore itself free. Ugly, raw, animal sounds that had no place in temples or legends. Tears she had refused to acknowledge finally spilled over, cutting pale tracks through the dust and blood on her cheeks.
Her life had been stolen.
Whatever path she might have walked: a shaman elder, a village leader, a wanderer of quiet valleys. That road was gone. The melding had sealed it, the Hornsent had sealed it. She was not just herself anymore and she would never be just herself again.
Her people would not be the same. Those who survived would carry this city's scars in their dreams. The Hornsent's hands were on them forever.
The Lands Between would not be the same.
The dragons' war had cracked the sky, the Hornsent's blasphemies had cracked the earth. Something in the fabric of the world itself had been tugged out of true so far it would never quite settle back.
But Marika, in that moment, did not care about the shape of history.
She did not think of future kingdoms or godhood or the great machineries of fate.
All she could feel was the ache in her soul.
The absence where Radagon should have been, and the strange, echoing presence where Radagon now was.
And the weight of having chosen to break a taboo older than her village in order to save someone who now existed only as half of herself.
Her own voice sounded small to her ears when she finally spoke.
"Somebody…" She choked around the word, tasting blood and dust and tears. "Anybody…"
Her fingers dug into her arms until crescents of red blossomed under her nails.
"Please…"
The plea was not addressed to any named god. She did not yet know the wills that waited in the dark beyond the stars. She knew only Grandmother's stories, the quiet spirits in roots and rivers, the Dragons raging above. She didn't care who heard.
"I'm so tired…" She whispered, curls of golden hair falling over her face like a curtain. "I just… I just want to go home…"
Her voice cracked on the last word.
There was no answer.
There was no ray of holy light, there was no hand reaching down from haloed sky. Only the stench of smoke, the rumble of distant dragon wings leaving the battlefield, and the scurrying of Hornsent rats vanishing into whatever holes they could find.
Marika knelt in the ruins of Moorth, a girl who had just broken the laws of her people, woven another soul into her own, and watched her world fall.
The Lands Between shifted, infinitesimally, to make room for what she would become.
"Someone… Please save me…"
---------------------
Author's Note:
Heavy chapter, I know. I bet you didn't expect a flashback chapter to such ancient times, did ya?
I honestly didn't plan on this entire chapter being a flashback, but it kinda escaped my hands.
This is Marika's origins, her Beginning After The End.
And before some of you start misconstruing what I'm showing here as an excuse for EVERYTHING that you consider bad that Marika did, I'm showing here that, as with everything else in this world, it's complicated.
There is no truly good side, just lesser evils and people trying their best in a world that truly does not care for you.
Anyways, this has also been among my greatest PR campaign hits, short of creating a whole ass 280k word long fic to make a bum into a goat. But who would actually do that-
…Oh.
…
Next Chapter Title: "What Am I, To You?"
…
If you want access to all my stockpiled chapters, up to 16 chapters ahead (130k words ahead), as well as special privileges on Discord among other things, you can go do so on my Patreon!
Join at patreon.com/Helios539