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On the mark of his return, Radagon could recall her. Golden as the rooftops that shimmered across the city. Gone was Godfrey, banished beyond the Lands Between. For what purpose, Radagon could not hope to ascertain.
Perhaps if he had dedicated more thought to the matter, or merely thought to ask, the truth of Godfrey’s fate may have been divulged unto him. Yet Radagon was far removed from the realm of deep cognition. What part of him that retained its clarity within the capital city was dulled by concern, a great dread for the remnants of his union with the Carian queen. Oh, loathe was his love for Rennala. Departed from her with a gift of fragile life, enwombed in amber. Now beyond her the very gifts that had came before. Radahn, Rykard, Ranni. Each a precious thing wrought from peace in refinement.
Radagon, as he were in his mind, thought of them often. Even then, as he climbed the many steps and fell enshrouded by the cool shade of the Erdtree’s sanctuary. Eyes cast upon its great breadth from the balcony. He thought of his eldest in Radahn. A reflection of a warrior most cruel to a father’s eyes. There in him was a great strength, an admiration for his betters that would soon be equals. A red-hewn tragedy of guaranteed fate, an omen that no peace could be eternal. So long as warriors continued to birth warriors, it would be so.
And of Rykard, the little tyke. Radagon saw all of his once-wife’s intellect, and none of her soft-hearted nature. The boy was a cunning figure, a sardonic mimic of his own means-to-ends. A reminder that Radagon could be clever, as he had been for so many years before now. If he only felt strength to will himself again.
Oh, what of strength. He thought, grim and morose, as his eyes reflected that golden light. Two of a kind, alone as only solitude were to deign tolerated.
And what of strength? For certainly Ranni held what little had bled from the remains of Rennala’s gravid nature with Radahn. Liurnian from her toes to her crown of black hair, Radagon feared for the nature of her care within the capital. For he saw none of Leyndell within his daughter, a gracious thing his clarity thought. Even as his faith mourned their disconnect. She was of the moon, with all the fascination- yet ne’er care- for the nature of the Fingers.
Oh, Ranni. What of his Ranni? Radagon fell before the Erdtree in prayer to ask of guidance from the Golden Order. Perhaps with the Fingers gone from sight, it might deign to grant him the consolation he sought. Succor and asylum for his children, respite from war, blessings for eternal peace. He willed for it all in a prayer as silent as the Golden Orders repose, hands wrung, heavy, as a hung martyr.
“O, loe Radagon, leal of mine Order.” Her hands, supple and warm as the earth, cupped his jaw, “Thou’rt a tender yearn. Pay thine tithe another time.”
“Marika,” Radagon’s gaze remained closed, words a breathe released at once as his prayer ended in knuckles kissed against the balcony stone, “Thou’rt a sun to all, yet a grace to me only in shadow. I plead to thee, a tithe paid by mineself be a tithe paid thine of my own kind.”
Silence, as the Golden Order’s tender repose, cradled him for a time. A yearning abreast and warmed ‘til thereupon the setting sun.
—-◖❂◗—-
Leyndell was not as it once was.
Not for the first time, Radagon sensed it as he climbed the high stairwell towards the queen’s bedchamber. A deep unrest, the heretics of death and other untoward faiths lay in wait. Their lies a whisper that shivered in the arcing leaves of the Erdtree. The noise creased in his palm as something like worry. A disquiet he would not show on that morn. For it was a most joyous day. For the people of the Lands Between, for Marika, and for something like himself.
Ranni was little yet, featherlight upon his shoulders as he climbed. Her fists delicate like glass as they held tight to his accursed red-hair. A sign of her father that fate had graced her to lack in all capacity. She was well enough grown to heed his warning that she remain steadfast, for in a jest he had warned her he were far too weary and worn to catch her. Perhaps his words had been unkind, Rykard doubtless believed it so. For he remained saturnine, malinger in his mergence with his father’s shadow as they climbed.
Radagon, in his insistence to avowal Marika’s lineage as justly incontrovertible, thought naught of his second born son nor his sullen demeanor. His attention thusly turned upon the far boundary of the curled steps. There Godwyn, the first of all Marika’s children, ascended alongside Radahn who had at last grown to reach the cherished lordling’s elbow. Fair-haired entwined in braids wrapped as a crown ‘round young Godwyn’s brow. His fathers banishment long sequestered from his mind as he spoke of the summer festival with his brother. A bond bound naught of blood, yet its strength dug as roots through their veins. They were two of a kind, wellborn and vigorous, destined to be great lords yet. Radagon believed it so, his worries of the greater world allayed as they graced the threshold of his wedded chambers.
Upon their arrival, Radagon knelt to loose Ranni upon her brothers. Her descent championed by cherished Godwyn, who neared to lift her up and upon the threshold by her underarms.
Broad hands curled against sheer, golden, drapes as Radagon lifted aside the partition. The fine fabric flowed through his fingers like water, caught upon the wind and raised to grant entrance unto the Elden Lord’s lineage. He strode forward, enveloped by cool shade, and beckoned forth those whom had been granted rare audience.
Dim candles granted sight to those hallowed guests as they entered. Parchment and tablets etched of ancient decrees lay strewn across the patterned, roundel, floor. Their scrawling words beyond that which could be fathomed in the withered candlelight. Radagon was well familiar with their contents, for Marika labored over little else beyond her edification through the Golden Order. His eyes were beyond her fine work as he tread over tablets and upon sere parchment that sought to drink upon the moisture of his skin.
Stone-built and hardy lay the bed of he and Marika’s union, encircled by a canopy of sheets- sheer as those that partitioned the open-air entrance they had come through. Though Radagon knew them thin, their layers upon each other hid all but the most stubborn of shadows from sight. An overlay of faded gold to enshroud what lay beyond.
The adjunct of his shadow was lost to him as Rykard wandered to cast his curiosity upon the discarded edicts cast in half-shadow. He ne’er made it far, for Ranni were the timorous sort in her young age and sought her brother’s sleeve in want of succor. Had he the thought to scorn her needful age it were not so beneath the eye of Godwyn. Whom remained ever watchful as Radagon turned his attentions from them with a command to remain at length from the golden veil.
As her guidance sanctioned, Radagon passed through the golden veil. Knelt upon stone at the feet of his goddess, unsighted to her golden grace from beneath his bloodied hair. He moved not for the ardent warmth that crept unto his skin, nor the gentle hand that pulled at his jaw.
“Loe consort, pious Lord of mine own throne. Truly born are thine inerrant children, e’er golden, e’er afflicted of thine own fates. Nurtured by mine own order.”
“As it hath been of Ranni. My blest Marika.”
“Thou’rt a hopeful sort, hidebound hound, does thou still regard the moon with golden light?”
“Ne’er, my lady.” Radagon bowed his head further, the hand on his knee clutching at his own flesh.
“Then acknowledge naught of cold Carian blood, lest there be furor in thine lands yet.” Her hand pressed hard against his jaw and left him with the cool of waning sunlight. “Let them be sated by this display, wield thine immured pride and make it known as thus; that the Lands Between have been blessed with Empyrean flesh once more. Gods of ages not yet to pass.”
“Ages graced by thine own light, surely.”
A silence lingered in her contemplation. A weighted nothing that sagged at his brow, reluctant to allow his desire to look upon his wife and discern the emotion behind her silence.
“Surely,” She repeated, at last discontent with the silence of her own making, “Now, enough of this talk. Make introductions for the little ones, thy children are all of a kind.”
“Impertinent?” Radagon guessed and tilted his head to lean further against her palm at the twinkling sound of her laughter.
“Impatient.”
—-◖❂◗—-
Thy children are all of a kind.
Thou’rt a fool to believe it any other way.
Radagon could not stem the weeping wound before him, try as he might. Bandage after bandage were bled through, the edges of the binding rotted, their white color a deep and sopping red. At his call, his incantations rose a warm and brilliant gold to mend broken skin. Yet as their light faded the skin would split again and his dear Malenia would weep anew.
It were a pointless wound, Radagon lamented unto his own mind. One all children were prone to receive in their early days of growth and play. Yet Malenia was not a child as the others were. For she was of his blood, and he were long accursed.
“It’s going to be okay, I promise.” A little hand locked tight with Malenia’s own to pull her grip from the edge of the chaise cushion.
E’er golden Miquella lay curled against his twin's side, his own eyes fraught with tears as she choked another sob. Desperate to silence her sorrow as their father mulled over her ankle, small and brittle in his grip, with reticent contemplation. Evening would soon be upon them, the day’s own golden light fading as Radagon’s incantations flared and faded with each attempt to heal her. It were a cyclical task. One that bore no change in the slightest to the affliction.
“Miquella,” At last he sought it fit to address his children, cold though his tone might be it lay burdened with concern and exhaustion, “Fetch thine sister from her chambers. Tell Ranni that I require her presence and will brook no disobedience.”
Ranni had become a rare sight in Lyendell, taken more to Liurnia as Radagon had always known she would be. Yet the fingers had granted her a shadow all her own, as Maliketh were to Markia, and thus she seemed bound to appear on the week’s farthest from the full moon. Her presence a requisite for the sake of appearances on the days of festivals or tourneys. The latter of which Radahn were unlikely to e’er allow her or Rykard to eschew.
With Miquella gone with his task, Radagon looked from the wound before him to level his gaze upon Malenia’s tear-burned eyes. She were young yet, his mind told him, it were too cruel an action to speak plainly now.
Yet he were more than a father, faith reminded coldly, he were a lord among his people. A hand of Markia’s Golden Order. And though Malenia were no omen, it were to be his task alone to divulge the truth of her condition.
“Heed me,” He pulled her attention with a gentle hand upon her shoulder, “Thy condition will ne’er mend fully. ‘Tis a reminder of all who come before you, the cursed nature of the powerful. Think not of what you are, think only of what you must be. Miquella shows naught yet, but thine fate will be shared by him. In what form, only our Golden Order is privy to know and has not yet revealed. Melania- look upon me rightly- you must take strength from this pain, remember it, mold it. For the solution I call upon now is but a weakness in the disguise of grace. Feel its bitter chill, and know that if you take no strength now- it shall claim thine grave in time.”
Oh, the cruelness of a lord. Radagon tightened and released his grip upon her rotten ankle. Eyes downcast and closed in a slow blink.
There were no peace in this regression.
—-◖❂◗—-
The worker of stone was disposed of in the silence of the new moon.
Radagon felt no peace in the act, as Marika’s most loyal numen servant came in the night to announce the sculptor’s fate, he felt only unease. Its clawing hand like nails upon his stoney heart. A grip which threatened to shatter him as he listened to the numen girl speak, his eyes drawn to the black knife upon her shrouded hip. She was sent away in meager thanks, and Radagon was left to the silence of his beloved’s bedchamber.
He’d seen naught of Marika in many months. She refused all tourneys, even at Godwyn’s pleading that she make a public appearance, and now she made no appearance even to the empty space beside Radagon as he lay there. Alone and contemplative with no company but the shadows of the night.
Where had she gone? He wondered, unable to take the night’s silence any longer as he stood and made for the chamber door. To the Erdtree? It seemed a likely place, one Radagon had shied from in recent times. His prayers, silent before, had begun to whisper back a mocking tune each time he knelt before the Erdtree’s golden warmth. The mocking voice sweet in its warnings of death and ruin. A thief as it sang its horrid prophecies with Marika’s own voice. A conjuring meant to belittle his own faith, no doubt, and thus he had decidedly halted all his prayers before the Erdtree.
Yet he believed himself safe from such wretched deceit that night, for the Erdtree’s light revealed no life before the Elden Throne as Radagon approached the platform. His hand wont to glide across the empty chairs at stood before it in a crescent shape. None had been occupied for a long time. Even gracious Godwyn sat as his council no longer, taken to the seclusion of his chambers and the company of none but the numen serfs who ferried all communications to and from his hall.
And why? Why had his own children, Marika’s children, forsaken their duties? Rykard and Ranni remained beyond him now, ne’er inclined to respond to his invitations to the capital. Radahn wrote, but hard won were the letters that were sent with couriers deft enough to survive the unrest in Caelid. Of which Radahn spoke little about, unwilling to bend his pride in the assurances that he and he alone could handle his fiefdom. Even young Miquella, accursed to e’er be thus, had disappeared. Gone with naught but a promise that he would have Malenia, and that she would be his safeguard.
Safeguard. What of safeguards now?
Radagon felt the unease in his heart weigh upon the clarity of his mind as he reached his throne and bent to rest a hand against its arm. Age, ne’er a concern to him before, felt to be a very real threat that night. For he was slow to push from his throne, stiff like a man hewn from stone as he climbed the final steps to the Erdtree’s knotted entrance.
"There is peace in regression." That mockery of Marika’s voice caressed his temple as he winced at the twinge of pain that burrowed there. "Rest now, loe counter, yield unto me.”
A lie, Radagon swore it to himself as he climbed. Numb to the sensation of a hand upon his jaw. He would intrude upon the Erdtree’s sanctity and find Marika as she alway were, hard at work in the name of the Order. Her skin aglow with light, her eyes…
Her eyes.
What of her eyes?
It felt a painful oversight, to neglect the memory of his beloved’s eyes. The shape of them, the color, the emotion behind them that could ne’er be discerned from voice alone. All was of great importance. Yet Radagon remembered naught.
Leyndell was not as it once was. How, he’d ne’er had the words to say before. Yet now he felt them pile upon his tongue. All the changes which marked the absence of a ruling lord. Upon his return, he had felt that impact upon every turn. Godwyn had told him of the effects of Godfrey’s absence.
Of Marika’s absence.
It twinged a great pain in his eye to consider the implication of the prince’s words now. Why would Marika retreat from her city after the banishment of her lord-husband? And why for such a short time as there had been between her call for Radagon and his return? For he had heard her that noon of his return, knelt in his prayer before the Erdtree. He had heard her. He had seen her-
Had he seen her?
The unsighted hand upon his jaw burned like a brand as a knee collapsed beneath him to shatter upon the steps. He reached up to wrench its grasp from him, only to feel his palm crack apart at the heat. Like a pot left too long in its kiln, the cracking scars ran across his hand to splinter skin at its seams. A great pain of unbinding.
A pain of regression.
”Loe counter, rest now, think naught of thine undoing. Think not of Godwyn’s tender fate. Think only of this, our sweet mergence evermore.”
Radagon pressed hard against the space where his jaw heated with golden flame, fingers pressed against cracking- fragile- skin that caved in upon itself. A reveal of naught but darkness and golden light. That of a hollow vessel, warded with a golden rune.
He collapsed there upon the final step to the Erdtree, red hair lightened to a fair yellow under the engulfing flames of gold. Back exposed to the night as it slimmed to that of supple, feminine, musculature.
Marika thought naught of Radagon as she cast her gaze upwards. Past those great branches and to what lay beyond. She thought only of the hammer she pulled from the shattered pottery around her as she stood. Golden eyes trained onto her destination. Even as the silent night shattered with the anguished death-cry of her eldest son. His soul carved into that of the half-wheel wound. A circle ne’er to be completed, for Ranni lay far away. A black knife to her throat as she cursed the Fingers in a final utterance.
No more would be her immortal lineage. Now cometh the end of all that were golden.
A great shattering of her own design.