Chapter Text
“My Lord, come quickly.”
Morgott could smell the ash clinging to the Perfumer’s clothes. Bitter and stale. He toppled his desk in his haste. Ink and loose manuscript coated the floor like a wound’s viscera.
“Where is he?” The growl crept into Morgott’s harrowed question despite his efforts.
The Perfumer, at least, was stalwart, “His chambers.”
“Have mercy.”
The prayer warbled for its aimlessness. The prayers of a God had no divine ear to make their dens in. The Perfumer threw themself against the wall as Morgott bolted past. The thrash of his tail chipped stone from a pillar. Suddenly the halls he’d walked for decades- the halls he’d helped build with his own hands- were labyrinthine. The Lands Between had gone without the Erdtree’s brilliance for a century, so torches lined the walls in sconces. They threw impregnable shadows into every doorway and corner.
But his feet stayed the course as his mind scrambled. They bore him to the polished wooden door he’d carved himself. He had once been proud of his handiwork- of the drooping, pearlescent bells of glovewort and the intricate bundles of violets’ umbels. The flowers of death he had etched into his son’s chambers. The tomb he had unwittingly transformed it into.
The door was already ajar- left cracked in the fleeing Perfumer’s wake. No sound eked from the room. Pale light painted Morgott’s feet a ghastly violet-white hue. He told himself that silence was a good sign. Whimpering, crying, and muttering often meant something else was worming its way into places it shouldn’t. Morgott entered.
The writhing glow of ghost flame washed color from Morgan’s face. His hair was leached of its warm brown tones and resembled instead the ashen locks of a spirit. The pallor of his skin was slick with the shine of sweat. His chest waxed and waned with tranquil breaths. It was no consolation that Morgan’s body remained alive. Godwyn’s had, too.
The filaments of shattered wards lay across his dark lashes. Clung to the door like strands of spider silk as Morgott slipped inside. He could not touch his son. The Omen blood of the Golden Lineage spurned Morgan’s soul. Even a fleeting caress would be too selfish to chance. So Morgott checked his broken wards with shaking hands.
Many were frayed- the gold of their webbing rent as if something had thrashed in anguish against it. A silver fish trapped in a gilded net. A typical symptom of Morgan’s curse. The Order’s holy magic yet marshaled Death even in the new God’s hands. It kept Morgan’s soul from straying far. It kept other spirits from investigating the still-living flesh.
But some wards had been snipped clean through. Golden dust evaporated beneath Morgott’s shuddering exhales. No spirit had ever managed that. The gold of holy incantation was agony to those that deviated from life. No ghost did this. No ghost that Morgott had ever encountered.
Morgott had attracted wraiths all his life, but it always took him a couple harrowing minutes to find Morgan’s restless spirit. The wards’ weave made fetters seen only by God. They bound a silver, larval thing into the room’s blackest corner. Morgott was plucking away the threads when another set of footsteps thundered up the hall to Morgan’s room.
The Lord was ready to snarl his admonition at the clumsy Perfumer’s tread until he recognized his wife in the entryway. It was typical for the Elden Lord to be abed as Morgott toiled through his sleeplessness. It was also typical for her to ride with a Night’s Cavalry patrol on short notice. He was selfishly gracious that she could be here with him- that she could take some of the load.
“Do you have him?” she whispered breathlessly.
“Aye.”
Morgott uttered an incantation that made the ghostflame torches lash with indignation. From Morgan’s chest gilt roots sprouted. Limbs of pure Grace the wayward spirit seemed keen to abandon. They grasped at the opaque soul and wrested it back within its vessel. Beneath Morgan’s skin, unseen by God and Lord, his soul was stretched to fill its shape again. It wasn’t quite resurrection, for Morgan had not truly died. But Morgott had created the technique by studying the rebirth of Tarnished in Marika’s Age and Mohg’s exceptional command over wraiths.
Morgan’s lips parted for a quiet, rasping gasp. Cyrielle sat down upon the bed, took up her child in her arms. Morgott pretended to ignore the way she subtly wiped the back of her hand over one eye.
The boy was born from the Death-touched Lord. ‘Twas bound to happen.
The murmured condemnations were as insidious as the shrieking of wraiths. A curse needed cause. In Morgott’s brief childhood in Grace, Lord Godfrey had been similarly slandered. Convert though he was, he had championed the Crucible the Golden Order had vanquished. Thus, his firstborn sons were made to bear his sin. Morgott had defied Death to resurrect his consort. Thus, Death must seek a soul in compensation.
The gold of Cyrielle’s scars was incandescent against Morgan’s pale skin. Those marks had been Morgott’s first miracle. Though the people remembered his False Sun first- the incantation he’d used to end the famine at the start of his Age- it was the consecration of Cyrielle that was his first grand achievement.
The rumors… that was all they were.
…And even if they were not, it was his burden to bear. Not Cyrielle’s. She had not asked to be remade.
Morgan jerked in Cyrielle’s hold and vomited acrid ash down her chest. The faintest violet hue bruised his cheeks. It somehow wounded worse that he no longer returned to his body sobbing in fear. So young and already resigned to the lethal wanderlust of his spirit. He clutched at Cyrielle’s arm. Anchored himself to her as he forced his breaths to slow and deepen. Morgott pressed his back into the wall. He would not taint the cold of ghostflame with the fire of his blood.
He was not a little boy anymore. In a decade, he would surpass Cyrielle in height. Then the softness of youth would cede to the growing man. But when his mismatched eyes caught on Morgott’s gaze, the Lord could only see a child.
“I wasn’t tuning, Da. I swear.”
Morgan’s voice was made thick by the dust cloying on his tongue. Morgott blinked. The physical distance he had to keep between himself and his son manifested an emotional one. Morgan sought foremost to assuage his father’s ire. Even if Morgott possessed not a mote of anger.
“Never mind that,” Morgott rumbled. “Art thou in pain?”
Morgan shook his head. Typical boyish bravery. Holy magic could pin in the wayward spirit and repel malfeasance, but it was not gentle. It was a shackle that did not scar the body but harmed its dignity all the same. And even then, it was not a hurt that Erdtree incantations could soothe. At least, the Elden Lord and her God were too wary to attempt them.
“I’m alright, Da, really.”
Morgott would send for herbalist remedies- if the Perfumers weren’t already fetching them. His fists balled up against his thighs. As close an embrace as he would dare. It had taken them years to understand what caused the expulsion of Morgan’s soul. The boy had always been mature beyond his years, and he had taken great care not to exacerbate his curse. He had been a gifted Spirit Tuner all his life. Now the spirits clamored at him, and he had been made to abandon his gift. A restriction he had abided by faithfully. Morgott would not insult his son by suggesting he had lied about his Tuning activities.
It was Cyrielle that spoke, “What happened? Do you remember?”
“I- no. I was sleeping.”
Morgott sighted a carafe of water and plodded over to it. The bowl of ice it sat in was half-melted. Leyndell’s youngest Demigod cost the Capital a fortune in imported ice. Slushy melt dripped over Morgott’s cupped palm like frigid tears. He leaned to hand it to Cyrielle. But it was Morgan that lurched forward to grasp at the needed drink. The God of Order almost dropped the carafe into Morgan’s lap as their fingers nearly brushed in his earnestness.
“Careful,” he cautioned hoarsely.
“S-sorry.” It was all Morgan managed to utter before gulping down the water. In that brief silence, Morgott was granted a chance to panic.
“In thy sleep?” he asked.
Morgan gasped like a man drowning. Cyrielle took the carafe from his trembling hands. But then she just held the freezing vessel against her side. Wards, swords, and discipline had protected their child. None of which could be used in the realm of sleep.
Morgan’s expression cinched with telltale confusion. A revelation dawned in his eyes- gone silver in the light of ghostflame.
“I was dreaming… I was in a cold place… Full of death.”
Each fragmented description Morgan recalled seemed to labor him. As if he had to dig through sands to fish out the fading memory of the dream. Morgott was furious at this inversion of fate. He was flayed by it. It was Omen that were meant to be terrorized by their dreams. It was an injustice Morgott had spent one hundred years reversing. Now it was his human son that was suffering. It was his human son that was cursed.
“It was as if… the Plateau was a graveyard,” Morgan continued hazily. “And if the graves themselves were also spirits.”
“And this land is what coaxed thy spirit?”
Morgan sat up straighter, disentangled himself from his mother. He shook his head.
“No. Someone tried to speak to me.”
“Who?”
“I-I didn’t see, Da. Or I don't remember.” Morgan blinked rapidly at Morgott’s urgent questions. And Morgott was hollowed out. He waited for Morgan to offer his words without prompting. Eventually, Morgan said, “I just heard their voice, and then I was torn apart.”
The nightmares imposed by wraiths had never been prophetic. They were the imposition of pain and fear imprinted upon the only souls that could bear their anguish with them. Morgott was inclined to believe that Morgan’s cursed mind had unwittingly split his soul from his body all on its own. Such was the life of the accursed, to be betrayed by their bodies again and again.
“T-they said-”
“-Morgan, ‘tis alright.”
Morgott suddenly dreaded hearing the curse’s invocation; he made to gently stop his son with a raised palm. Morgan wilted into Cyrielle’s side. Determination made violet his pallid cheeks. His boy, who used to stand on his shoulders to watch the splendor of the world through a spyglass. His boy, who used to make aunts and uncles out of the grizzled war-dead. His boy, whom he had condemned to break the Greater Will’s curse upon himself. His boy, who was meant to be an Empyrean.
“They said… Join me, Anchor, and be unmoored no more in my coming Age.”