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Chapter Text

Roses bloomed where blood was spilled. Their black-thorned vines sprawled across ancient battlegrounds. Memorials eroded. Gravestones could be desecrated. But the land didn’t forget where it had been made host to a tumultuous tomb.

Or so Moiragh had been told. Her uncle and father had lived through a war that had seen entire horizons choked with crimson florescence. While Deathblight sowed its greedy brambles in graveyards, roses marked those buried without headstones by the thousands.

Young Moiragh had never seen bloodroses propagate to such numbers. Just before her birth, the Erdtree had been razed and a God slain. The resulting ashfall had sepulchered a country. The land had gone to sleep and awoken almost virginal. The flowery remembrances to the Shattering War were gone. At least from the Altus.

In modernity, there was a single place in all the golden Plateau where one might behold a proper garden of deep red roses.

Between Leyndell’s inner and outer walls- beyond the crumbled, cluttered centuries-old graveyard- a Minor Erdtree was slowly being coaxed from its dormancy. Gold shone dimly in the webbed cracks of its bark. Papery leaves adorned its branches. As did amber fetishes bound to them on fine chains- each depicting the likeness of a horned bairn. In the spindly Tree’s shadow, a house of healing had been constructed.

It was not a Perfumers’ apothecary nor a chapel for Erdtree Pastors. Not that Order magicians and herbalists didn’t ply their craft within. It was a place for the bloody work of life and death. Some wounds still necessitated sutures. Some limbs still needed amputating. Bones demanded splinting. Blood diseases required treating. Here, those that wished could place their bodies into caring hands that would allow them to pass peacefully with dignity. Here, midwives could tend to complicated births and safeguard the tender lives of infants and mothers.

Here, timber walls and arches of stone were embraced by clawing thorns. Heavy rose blossoms hung their blushing heads in sympathy. They heard the cries of the pained and assured them: No one shall breach our fangs to harm you while you are most vulnerable.

Roses bloomed where blood was spilled.

Moiragh did not take offense that her temple was branded with the heralds of bloodshed. To live was to be injured, eventually. Better to suffer life’s agony in sympathetic company.

The Heiress of Blood trod over fallen petals as she crossed the threshold. Surgeons dressed in white weaved around temple nurses clad in black. Industrious but not panicked. In the corner, a Perfumer uncrated vials of numbing aromatics made from Trina lilies. An exhausted looking woman paced before one of the tall windows. An impossibly small infant slept in her arms as she cooed to it.

Moiragh did not come here every day. But it was one of her favorite places to be all the same. It was hers. Silver wrought wreaths enshrined the sparse seals of Lord Morgott’s Order. The black and gold heraldry of Leyndell was trimmed with Truth’s vermillion rather than Order’s blue. The crests above the east and west wing doors boasted corvids with roses clutched in their talons rather than the ram-horned lion of the Capital. It had always amused Magpie that her pet name had incorporated itself into her iconography somewhere in time.

She breathed in a great lungful of air. Blood she scented beneath the stronger aromas of disinfecting flame and antiseptics. That tacky, sanguine sweetness. She stood in the midst of dozens of little hurts and was rejuvenated. The God within her had once gorged on suffering. In that regard, the past century had been fairly lean. But Truth was sated in this place. Proud.

“Lord Moiragh!”

A surgeon lumbered over. His tunic was already stained with blood so early in the morning. He unwound the scarf that masked his mouth. A delightful flush darkened his cheeks a rosy shade. His work excited him.

He bowed to his God. Those that committed themselves to Truth’s healing house weren’t as formal with the Goddess as her common adherents. To the laboring parent and the exsanguinating hunter, she was the rescuing reach of the divine. To her practitioners, she was demystified. They’d seen her tears and held her hand and shared in her pranks. The gray-haired ones had known her in her childhood.

The surgeon continued, “There’s a man out in the garden. Insists he’s ill but won’t let anyone near enough to mind him.”

“Is his condition dire?”

This was not an uncommon occurrence in the Rose Temple. Though her clergy were skilled, there were those that sought solely the blessings of the Goddess of Truth. They would stubbornly bleed a mire upon the floor rather than do the sensible thing and acquiesce to a surgeon’s attention.

“No,” the surgeon shook his head. “He looks like he’s come a long way alone. Blind, too, determined fool. But he isn’t about to bleed out atop the stoop.”

Moiragh was equally disquieted and relieved. Her malformed winglets beat once. The surgeon winced.

“There is another thing, Princess. He is asking for Lord Mohg.”

She didn’t waste her breath asking why. She already knew her beleaguered surgeon wouldn’t have an answer. She pursed her thin lips thoughtfully. They pinched around her protruding tusks.

“I can send him away,” the surgeon offered.

“No, I’ll see what he wants.”

Moiragh marched through the temple’s main hall, swept through the kitchen, and emerged into a dim Altus morning in the shade of Leyndell’s immense outer wall. Roses twined about the wooden fence that enclosed the garden. It was dominated by edible herbs and vegetables, though the volunteering Perfumers had commandeered a portion for easily-growing medicinal plants. This time of day the chickens were typically out plucking bugs off of the leaves. Instead, they purred and clucked by their coop. Where a robed figure held out his palm laden with feed.

He was a diminutive thing. Not even two meters tall. Moiragh was the next shortest member of the royal family. But that was only because her youngest cousin was yet a child. He’d hit his growth spurt soon enough and leave Magpie the smallest again. She was still nearly twice this man’s height.

His traveler’s cloak was crusted with the grime of travel. He smelled strongly of sweat and mildewy boots. She could discern from the back steps that he was not bleeding. But there was a wrongness to his scent. Something akin to illness that made her insides twist. Something that caused him incredible pain.

It is not illness, but invitation.

“Hey, Kid.”

The man cast the rest of the chicken feed into the grass before straightening. He faced her; his eyes were covered by dingy bandages. And Moiragh realized the damp reek was that of the sodden land of the Lakes. She strode towards him, the motherly warmth she’d carried with her to the Temple was reforged into matronly sternness. Her narrow shoulder’s set, her spine became a steel rod. Let the sharpness of her horns speak for her.

“Have they no healing sorceries in your Academy, Carian?”

“Good grief, keep your voice down.” The man’s hissed admonition was more aggrieved than disdainful. But as chickens pecked at his rancid shoes, he amended acerbically. “Also, yes. Leyndell didn’t invent the concept of medicine.”

Moiragh came as close as she dared. His name she barred herself from speaking like the invocation of a curse. As if any acknowledgement of him might bring the wrath of Liurnia upon her shoulders in an instant.

Not too long ago, the Goddess of Truth and her loyal twin had breached a treaty older than themselves to meet a decrepit, shut-in Lord. The consort of the absent Moon God. Scant records in an ancient subterranean palace had betrayed him as a brief compatriot of the Lord of Blood. Thus, brazen Moiragh had sought him out to better understand herself. Moiragh and Marie had put two kingdoms in peril to question Aster the Carian. Now he stood before her in her home, in violation of the same tenuous treaty. She reminded herself she had no right to be cross. Yet. She knew desperation when she saw it.

“Why are you here?”

“Look, Kid, I need Mohg, and you aren’t Mohg.”

His despair- the secrets withheld- made for tempting fruit. Round and fat, fragile skin stretched to cracking from the ripeness of its flesh. Aster’s face was a ravage of scars. And even beneath the bandage occluding his eyes, she could make out the pinkened scar of the trident. A symbol that meant much to the God within her.

“A letter wouldn’t have sufficed?”

Aster scoffed derisively. “I can’t afford to be ignored.”

“Then show me what ails you. Let me make an earnest effort. Then we can bother my father with this nonsense.”

“Nonsense.” Aster chuckled. The delectable fruit went to saccharine rot. “Gracious, you don’t know the half of it, Princess.”

A thin arm emerged from the cloak. Its complexion so white it bore the blue tinge of snowfall. The veins threaded up the delicate flesh like glintstone ore in milky alabaster. That perfect stone limb was marred, however, by a festering mark. Angry, raw flesh radiated heat to Moiragh’s hovering hands. The malodor wafting from it was acrid.

It is not illness, but invitation.

“What caused this?” She could not see the wound the sickness had been borne from. Infections took root in the blood when the flesh was compromised by injury.

He knew, but he was reticent to say. The cinch of his dark brows betrayed him. With his free hand, he lowered the blue-violet hood of his cloak and unwrapped the bandages over his eyes. There were the polished glintstone spheres she remembered. Azure and veined with turquoise. But the sockets themselves smelled like the strange infection in his arm. The skin blistered and scabbed. Viscous puss gathered like a tear in one corner. Too thick to properly fall.

The God in her was suddenly abrasive. The Carian’s torment was no longer enticing, but tainted.

Thickly, Aster asked, “Can you fix it?”

The man’s secret was too wretched for even Truth to desire. Moiragh passed a thumb over the black stain. Aster hissed, but did not jerk away. She felt beneath his skin- within his meager muscle- a foreign body. Slender and sturdy. A claw she pressed into fetid flesh. Sweat glistened at his brow as blood beaded from the prick she’d made. The pad of her thumb communed with his ichor. She sifted its substance to find the origin of his agonies. There was no fever, no poison, no filth. But fire.

Fire singed her and she gasped.

“That… is a first,” she muttered. It was humiliating how she panted- spooked. A tiny blister bubbled where she’d touched his blood.

“Gods,” Aster spat. Cursed. “Just… just get it out of me.”

Moiragh took a knife from her belt. She gripped it by the blade and squeezed until her blood was drawn forth to sanctify it. A mere pinch in the torrent of Aster’s diffusing agonies. When the last brilliant embers faded from the blade, she took the hot metal to his arm.

The flesh yielded like an overripe plum. Only his juices were soured and scorched. Pain poured from the incision, but he barely grunted. There, nestled in a charred cocoon of meat was a slim object. Practically flanked by the bones of his forearm. Mercy, she should have worn gloves. His blood was searing.

A surgeon would have used forceps to pluck the needle-like thing from his flesh. But Moiragh did not have tools with her. So with a snap of her fingers, flame cleansed her claws. The old man whimpered as she rooted the gold splinter out in two pieces, for it was split in twine. Aster paled as he stared at the halves in the dirt.

With sutures conjured from his very capillaries, Moiragh set to staunching the wound. The flesh within was still burnt and putrid. But its cause was a maladious curse rather than an affliction of the body. It was beyond her ability to fix, and Truth bid her close the lesion and be done with it.

Aster did not begrudge her giving up. His sorcerous stone eyes glared at the thing she had removed from him. As if he could shame it with a look.

“What is it?”

Curiosity stepped over her compassion for a moment. This, too, Aster did not resent her for. His arm sealed up with a pink seam of a scar.

“It’s the only thing keeping me alive,” he rasped. A dry, bitter laugh rattled in his throat. “Or it was before it went and broke itself in half.”

Truth was too prickly to be useful, so Moiragh had to take charge despite the dread coiled around her spine. “How… how can I-”

“I have to see Mohg.” the man’s white throat clenched as he swallowed. “Either he fixes this, or he kills me. Or Morgott kills me. All preferable outcomes to waiting this out to see crawls out of the ash, hmm?”

Moiragh did not want to be responsible for his life. For this man that had once, very briefly, existed in her mind as a potential father. He had denied the relation years ago, and yet the child in her held a seed of affection and she could not crush it in her fist. Sacs of memory were laden behind her eyes. The God knew the reality of Aster and Lord Mohg’s past. She only needed to ask to learn the whole of it.

As though he could sense her thoughts, he asked, frigid and soft, “Have your self-righteous parents ever told you who I really am?”

With sudden, inexplicable agitation, Moiragh growled back, “Your name has never once eked from their lips.”

“Then you don’t understand how much shit we’re all in. I feel it, the draw of blood. Your father made me his convert and now a thousand agonies drag me to his God. Get me in front of Mohg, now. This is his problem. He… he has to answer for this.”

Moiragh’s tail lashed. She could grab that rotten fruit and glean sense from the reeking pulp. It was always a tiresome thing to commune with her God. Always painful. But she did not require divine introspection to ponder the severity of Aster’s illness. It had escaped her notice at first, on account of the burning, but there was kinship in his ichor. The faintest filament of mycelia. A tiny part of her indeed clotted within him.

It is not illness, but invitation.

She recognized at last the mantra was not a warning of Truth. It was the voice she never remembered in her waking hours. But here were their words scrawled into the delicate skin of a rival Lord. Of her almost-father.

I invite thee, Truth, to the place of thy birth.