Morgott, son of a god and her golden consort, shared his childhood with sewer rats.
The dark and the damp and the filth encompassed his early years, the skittering of pests and the snuffling of rodents, the clink of the chain around his neck and the familiar worn grooves his fingers traced in the stonework. The world turned by laws he did not comprehend. When a brick he could once spread both splayed hands upon became too small for him to do so without careful angling, he understood not that he had grown, but that his surroundings had shrunk.
He didn't yet know what he would do if the room became too small to hold him. There seemed few options. He might leave, he supposed.
His father, after all, must have come from somewhere.
At some point following the Shattering, he will reason that Godfrey must have met him before, or else Morgott would not have understood language. But for much of his life, the first he remembers of Godfrey is his voice, deep and slow, and his fingers against Morgott's neck. The steel collar had begun to cling too snugly, and Godfrey on one of his regular visits took measurements for a replacement.
Morgott suffered the contact with minimal hissing since Godfrey had brought an apple and the threat of a shorter stay should Morgott bite him. Although Morgott could survive without his company, he made for a more interesting climbing exercise than the walls.
Godfrey talked all the while, primarily of court gossip and administrative business. On these visits he never spoke of subjects he actually enjoyed, and the names Godwyn and Mohg avoided all mention. Morgott knew that Marika was Godfrey's wife and he her consort, but not that this meant she was Morgott's mother as well. His father strove to give him no reason to care about the world outside.
So Godfrey was caught rather off guard when Morgott, currently scaling the vast expanse of his back, interrupted his story to say, “That's a different name.”
“Which name?”
“The countess's husband. He was someone else before.”
“Who was he before?” Once Morgott answered, Godfrey rumbled, “She remarried three weeks ago. So you remember it that far back.”
Obviously. “I'm not as stupid as you.”
“If you say that again, I won't bring anything next time.”
“Why not?” Morgott demanded. “It's true.”
He tightened his grip on the coat as his handholds rose and fell with Godfrey's sigh. “It is not, I don't appreciate it, and you are considerably smaller than I am. Do as you're told.”
Morgott snarled, but the annoyance didn't linger. He clambered onto Godfrey's shoulder, draped himself over it, and set to playing with his father's pale beard. Years of accumulated grime smeared across the strands. Once he'd done appropriate damage to the braid, he tugged it up and shoved into his mouth what little would fit.
Godfrey made a disgusted noise and started to lift an arm, but he paused midway through the motion and in the end didn't stop Morgott.
Through a mouthful of hair, Morgott asked, “What are the names like?”
“Which names?”
Morgott listed them, each member of the court and each of Godfrey's aides and each of their scandalous partners –
“Do you need to breathe at all?” said Godfrey. Morgott paused, inhaled, and made to continue, but Godfrey spoke first. “What do you want to know about them?”
Morgott bit the hairs harder. Then he spat them out, pushing the stray strands along with his tongue, and snapped, “What are they like?”
“I can't tell what you're asking about.”
“Are they like the rats? Are they like you? Are they like – ”
“That's how it's been for you. I didn't realize.” Godfrey ran a hand down his newly freed beard, gave it up for a lost cause, and set to undoing the plait. “The names belong to people, not rats.”
“People? Like we're people?”
“Well,” said Godfrey, “not so much like you, Morgott.”
Morgott speaks to his younger kindred for the first time on the battlefield.
His brother's get Godrick, that spineless boy clawing for the golden leaves far above his station. Radahn, who imagines that halting the course of the stars and the fate of his mother Rennala means he has strength enough too to claim the Elden Ring. Rykard, who loses sight of what he fights for until any amount of sacrifice becomes a paltry stepping stone. Malenia and Miquella offer no war but rather the promise of one, a vow that Malenia will return to depose him once she has assurance the Erdtree will admit Miquella. And Ranni, that sinister creature with no army at her back, watches from on high and works in the shadows and offers no word where he might hear.
Undeserving down to the last.
He bars the gates to them all, as the Erdtree has. His siblings' forces break on Leyndell's walls, their commanders fall to the Fell Omen's stave, and, inside the city that they cannot breach, sickness ravages the populace Morgott protects. Ash and rubble pile high enough to drown the lower streets, dust in such quantities as to scour the lungs of those who breathe it.
Some nights, Mohg arrives to drift between the dead and dying like an ill wind. Morgott can prevent his entries into the city as well, but Mohg is the most inoffensive of his family. He's heretical, yes. Overwrought, of course. Graceless, bombastic, loud, contact-starved, murderous, sneaked into the rafters of an opera once and fashioned his entire personality around it... but inoffensive. The worst Morgott can say of him is that his timing has ever been impossibly inconvenient.
The surgeon scrambles back when the blood pooled around Morgott's feet parts to admit a horned head, a black iron trident, a hulking figure outfitted in robes that would look pretentious on a king. Morgott spares him a glance, scowling. “Come back later.”
“How terribly cold, brother!” He makes to drape his arm over Morgott's shoulders, but Morgott has already formed a fence between them with his tail. Mohg puts on an offended expression. He leans in to peer at the appendage instead, patting it idly. “Did you come by these injuries from Radahn? I heard his army has called a full retreat to Caelid. Congratulations. Although next time you might consider not facing a demigod unarmored.”
“I won't hear that from you.”
Mohg smiles. It's a meaningless gripe; Mohg, after all, is not the king of a city besieged. He doesn't need armor when his enemies don't know where to find him.
“What do you want?” says Morgott.
Mohg waves the surgeon away. She doesn't move, and Morgott doesn't tell her to. “I can take care of this.”
“With heresy.”
“Of course,” Mohg agrees, “and meanwhile your surgeon can attend to the others in need. You've acquired a number of those.”
Morgott sighs and gestures for her to go. Mohg waits until the tent flap settles, then turns to Morgott, raises the trident, and slams the dull end once upon the ground. The blood soaked into the floor and the over-sized cot and Morgott's rags rises into the air, gathering into a perfect liquid sphere before Mohg.
Morgott braces. Mohg laughs and waits for his nod before bringing the trident down a second time.
The sphere scatters outwards. Morgott's breath catches as each droplet of blood lands unerringly in an open wound, and he grits his teeth and hunches, forcing himself still as his injuries both inside and out seal shut.
“Was that so terrible?” says Mohg, nudging Morgott's tail aside and taking a seat on the cot beside him.
A phantom ache lingers in every place touched by Mohg's curse. It won't clear for hours. “Thank you.”
“I'll have you know that you are the one who never visits me unless you need a favor. We should both agree that I am the better sibling.”
“You live in a lake of bloody shit,” Morgott replies.
“It lends a nostalgic fragrance.”
That's the problem.
“Would you visit me if I moved, then?”
“Would you?”
Mohg says, predictably, “Hypothetically.”
One day Mohg will get himself killed doing something incredibly idiotic, and Morgott can't say anything about it because he's in the same boat.
“You would come if grace led you.”
He doesn't bother replying to that. “Should I get you something since you traveled all this way? Food? Drink?”
“Your company is more than enough, dear brother.” Mohg pauses. “Since you've mentioned it, however, there is a matter we should work through. I stumbled across an artifact earlier that will undoubtedly be of interest to you. You might prefer to get off of the bed before I reveal it.”
Morgott frowns. “Why?”
“A simple precaution.”
“What did you find?”
“Off of the cot, please.”
Slowly, gaze locked on Mohg, Morgott rises and steps away. “That looks far enough,” Mohg says quietly. He looks almost apologetic as he retrieves from the folds of his robes something small enough to conceal in his hand. Without further preamble, he leans forwards and presses it against the ground.
Leaden weight drags Morgott to his hands and knees. The shock of it pulls a cry from him, and he forgets how to move, how to breathe, how to think, his world condensed to the golden anchor seal illuminating the floor.
Memory returns before reason does. He raises an arm, as he watched Radagon do not so long ago, and brings his fist down. The tent shakes; the seal shatters.
He lunges at Mohg, who's already gotten to his feet, pushed Morgott's staff out of reach behind him, and raised the trident to block. “That's hardly ideal,” Mohg says. He grimaces as Morgott's tail slams into his side, then snarls from the back of his throat and forces Morgott to the ground by dint of the superior weight the trident affords him, pressing the weapon crosswise against Morgott's chest to keep him there. “I'm sorry, brother, you would not have let me test it if I told you.”
“Did you consider why?” Morgott hisses, nails catching on Mohg's sleeves.
“Yes, I'm sorry. Calm yourself and I will hand over the shackle.”
Mohg holds him down for the ten minutes it takes for him to stop attempting fratricide. More than a few guards and passers-by attempt to check on the commotion; Morgott orders them each away in turn.
“Are you finished?” Mohg says.
Morgott bares his teeth. “Get off.”
Mohg rises and steps back. When Morgott sits up, seething but quiescent, Mohg settles onto the bed again and tosses him the rune-etched stone. Morgott doesn't realize until after he's already caught it that he can't bear to hold it. He drops it as if scalded.
“Can you not touch it?” Mohg asks.
“I can,” says Morgott and makes no move to do so. “Where did you retrieve it from?”
“Where else.”
The sewers. “You went there?”
Mohg smiles with a touch of wariness that didn't exist before Morgott's outburst. “I had a pet crayfish for a time. I thought I might check on its family.” He flaps a hand. “Of course, my crayfish is dead. It grew large enough that I began to look appetizing, so Father tore its head off. And then left it there.”
“I kept rats.” Morgott's aware that Mohg's derailed them, but he can always return them to the original subject later, after they finish complaining about their father. “For meals, not as pets. But Father stepped on Gilda when she came near to biting him.”
“He had no right.”
Morgott considers Mohg. “Is that the only reason you went into the sewers?”
“I also left a gift.” Mohg sets his elbows on his legs, leaning the trident against his shoulder. “A further layer of protection against Chaos.”
Morgott snorts and pushes himself to his feet. He doesn't lose awareness of the shackle's location; it hovers at the edge of the sight, the rune seeming brighter than he knows it to shine. Worse because, thanks to Mohg, he knows it still functions. “I survived the day after all. Your effort was needless.”
“You shouldn't speak like that. You've little idea how much I welcomed the surprise of your victory.” Mohg lifts his chin. “What's done is done. Should you ever fall, and your seals with you, a precaution exists.”
One singular precaution. Excellent.
Mohg nods at the shackle. “Have you any thought on how to dispose of that?”
Morgott's lip curls as he looks at it. “A weighted chest in the moat.”
“Are you certain that would service? I would drop it off of the edge of Nokron, or over Mount Gelmir.”
Not Nokron, not when nobody has any idea what might live at the bottom of the abyss. The volcano, however, might prove more secure than the moat approach. Even if something fishes it from the lava, the rune's glow can pass for simple heat at a glance.
There's only the small matter of Rykard's army occupying the roads from Leyndell to Gelmir.
“You wouldn't have business at Mount Gelmir,” says Morgott.
“No, but for you I can make some.” Mohg stands and heads over to pick up the shackle. Morgott swallows his reaction, turns his back with an effort, and goes to retrieve his staff where Mohg left it. As he reaches for it, Mohg says, “Brother?”
“Yes?”
“I would never expect you to go looking. But if you should come across any of my old keepsakes....”
“Keepsakes,” Morgott says, derisive. “I will contact you if I do.”
“Don't contact, visit! You never give me a chance to act the host. Will you come if I clean the lake?”
“Do that anyway.”
Mohg makes a show of mulling it over. “No.”
On occasion, the water level rose in the cell. For the most part Morgott paid it little mind – liquid always coated the floor in some capacity, and when the level changed it still rarely reached even halfway up his toes – but once in a blue moon the incoming tide would lap at his ankles, and he would shimmy up a wall until his horns rubbed the ceiling and cling with a death grip to the brickwork as the flood climbed higher.
He had nearly no light to see by at the brightest of times, and those never were the brightest of times. The water was black as tar and the distance and depth of it impossible to judge. The coursing rush of it thundered through the sewers, echoes overlapping to build upon each other into a storm, but what crept into his cell only ever gurgled quietly.
He couldn't know the quantity until after the floods had subsided, when he could climb back down the wall and find the border beneath which the stones grew damp. Any trinkets he had accumulated had gotten swept out and replaced anew with bones and shells and pebbles and splintered wood.
If he sometimes dreamed of slipping, of falling, of a pitch-dark abyss swallowing him as easily as a snake devouring a mouse... the difference between sleep and waking in an environment that didn't respond to his attempts to change it and which he couldn't leave from was an academic one.
The first time a flood coincided with Godfrey's schedule, the flood won out. Morgott had more immediate concerns and barely noticed the usual appointment passing by. When the waters drained, he dropped to the floor and curled up to sleep. The hours spent holding himself above the waterline had exhausted him.
He opened an eye to torchlight outside the door – Godfrey had stopped bringing light sources inside after he'd learned it reduced Morgott to a volatile, snarling wreck in the farthest corner of the room – and to Godfrey nudging him awake. Then he closed his eye and turned his back.
Godfrey sighed. “Morgott.”
If Morgott fell asleep, he wouldn't see Godfrey until the next visit. He didn't much care about the company, but it would be a long wait. He shoved himself to a sitting position. “What?”
Grime stained Godfrey's shirtfront and clumped together strands of his hair. Morgott's attention caught on the shapes in it – hand prints and footprints, startlingly familiar. They looked like his own. He reached out, and Godfrey's grip closed around his wrist and steered it away. Luckily, he had two hands; unluckily, so did his father. “Morgott, did you spend last night on the ceiling?”
“What left those?”
Godfrey paused. “You did, last time.”
Morgott frowned. Had he?
Godfrey stood, stooped to keep from hitting his head, and headed to the back wall. He ghosted his hand down the bricks until he met the highest point the water had reached. “And you don't know how to swim,” he murmured.
“How to what?”
“Like a... fish....” A what? “A method of moving through water. It's not important.”
“You don't say that unless it is,” said Morgott. Pointing out so consistent a tell didn't help him, but sometimes he was clever and wanted it acknowledged. It needn't be by Godfrey, but Godfrey was the only person he had.
Godfrey grunted, still examining the wall. He hadn't been listening.
He arrived irregularly for the next visit as well, far earlier than Morgott had anticipated, and he brought with him a bundle of clutter and an entire bunch of grapes. The latter kept Morgott distracted from digging through the former, though he still climbed onto Godfrey to watch him work.
Godfrey explained as he went – he was knocking holes into the bricks to embed nails in, attaching a metal board against the wall to give the end result more stability, sticking a wooden board perpendicularly into that one for Morgott to sit on in the future if he needed to. Morgott listened, expression still, his grip on Godfrey's shoulder digging deeper and deeper.
Godfrey had told him of the cursed blood he bore. He was a relic of a bygone age, unwanted and unbelonging. It was not his fault. But it was better if he was forgotten in this cell. Safer for him and for others. Besides, the world outside held little to interest him.
To which Morgott has asked why Godfrey didn't stay in the cell.
However, he had never asked why Godfrey came on a schedule that the man occasionally missed but never supplemented, and he'd never asked why the cell remained largely barren. He'd taken them for granted. But now Godfrey had challenged both laws of the world, and it raised the understanding that he could have at any point. That he had not done so came down to his own choice.
Morgott had never deluded himself into imagining that love existed in this relationship, but that realization stung, still. He knew the world outside didn't want him. He hadn't believed that Godfrey didn't, either.
He asked, “Why do this now?”
“Would you prefer I stop?”
“You could have done it before, at any time. But you didn't think about it until you tried to come and the water didn't allow you.”
“No,” Godfrey agreed. “I didn't realize what happens down here when it storms. Neither did you tell me.”
“I thought you knew,” Morgott hissed. “Don't you know everything?”
“Compared to you, yes.”
The last time Morgott had clubbed him with his tail, Godfrey had told him he'd cut it off if it happened again. The intensity of the urge this time shocked the breath from him, but he forced the violence down and settled for lashing it instead. “You don't tell me what happens where you go. I won't tell you what happens to me. That's fairness, is it not?”
“That's pettiness,” said Godfrey, unmoved. “It's beneath you. If you had come to me about the problem earlier – ”
“Would you have helped? How? How was I meant to know you can make a new floor? What else can you do? What else haven't you done? You don't think about me unless I'm in front of you or inconveniencing you. Why would I ask anything of you? I'm an obligation.”
Godfrey said nothing for a long moment. “Would you like it if I stopped coming?”
Morgott recoiled. “That's – I didn't say that.”
Another pause. “I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but you're right. You are an obligation. You're my son, as much as... well. I have a responsibility to you.” He knocked on the completed shelf. “Here I am, meeting it.”
“The Lord of Leyndell sends the Fell Omen to parley with me.”
Morgott snorts. “He sends himself. As you requested.”
Behind the golden helm, the weight of Malenia's attention shifts. “He sends...”
“A son born frail, so that a hidden, quiet life away from the capital was arranged.” Morgott can't tell what expression he's wearing, and frankly he doesn't care. “Where he might have remained, content in obscurity, had the line of succession not arrived at him. Feel free to replace the details with more palatable ones. It's what our mother did. Now, what do you want, and why could we not negotiate it through an envoy?”
He still would have met Malenia as Margit, her demands be damned, if she didn't have an army arrayed behind his city. There's a time and a place for showing his contempt, and it is not while an Empyrean on the war path threatens Leyndell before the city has recovered from the rest of his family.
If she tries to take Leyndell in this moment, she'll succeed. But, by the Erdtree, he'll make her bleed for it.
She keeps her silence, still working through the bomb he dropped. “Well?” he presses, rapping his fingers on the table between them.
They're in a meeting room. The windows have been covered, the torches have been blessed – most of the light sources in the Erdtree's cradle have been, now – and the chairs have been lined against the wall or pushed snug against the table. Morgott can't sit in them, and Malenia doesn't appear uncomfortable standing. She's agreed to leave her two Cleanrot Knights outside, and he didn't bring anyone in the first place.
One of his advisors threw a fit at that, but Morgott can tease quite a bit of mileage out of selectively pretending to be a sewer rat who doesn't understand words longer than two syllables. They start talking down to him, he calls them out once they've dug themselves into a hole, and then, while they sputter, he reminds them that whether or not their king heeds their advice is his choice.
His advisors were chosen by Radagon. They understand their roles, perform them well enough, and don't make trouble as often as they can. Morgott has bare-bones knowledge of statecraft from the bits and pieces Godfrey fed him over the years, but he doesn't have enough to run a city, let alone the lands under its jurisdiction as well. He relies on the handful of officials trustworthy enough to know what he is.
That doesn't mean he likes it.
Besides, if she's come with a trick, he'll survive more easily without a human between them.
She asks, “Do you have proof?”
He sneers and gathers grace into a blade. Malenia rests a hand on the sword's hilt at her waist, but he flips the knife and carves a shallow line horizontally down the outside of his own right arm. “Marika's blood,” he says, letting the knife fade. “The same that runs through yours and Miquella's veins.”
Malenia cocks her head. Morgott's blood drips onto the floor and runs in rivulets down his hand to his stave. “...That suffices for now.” She hesitates, then adds, “You've inherited her sense of drama.”
“If you say so.”
“Are you going to stop that?” she asks, gesturing at the cut.
Morgott doesn't look at it. “Are you going to keep changing the subject?”
What he can see of her face hardens. “No. We can speak of business, then. Morgott.” He relaxes marginally. Since she deescalated, she likely didn't come to start a fight. “I've come to request safe passage through Leyndell.”
“For what purpose?”
“To spread the word of Miquella's Haligtree.”
There's no messenger quite like an army. His grip tightens on the staff. “I'm not inclined to support that.”
“I didn't know you were in a position to refuse.”
He considers saying no anyway, knowing it would decimate Leyndell's forces, would weaken Malenia's, thousands displaced and injured and dead, a level of damage to the city's infrastructure that would require decades to rebuild from, the Erdtree's secret – that it has not sealed itself until the next worthy claimant to the title of Elden Lord arrives, but that it has sealed itself to everyone, indefinitely – blown open.
That would all happen, unavoidably, if he refuses. But it would also spite Malenia, which might nearly make it worth it.
...That's Chaos speaking.
“I'll open the gates,” he says. “You can send your forces through in groups of fifteen, with intervals of half an hour between. Escorts will see them without detour to the western gate.”
She pauses to do the math. “I will not waste a week on moving my soldiers.”
Morgott's been learning numbers through osmosis and necessity. If he had six or seven minutes and significantly less pride, he could conjure a counting frame to estimate the size of her army with.
Malenia continues, “Intervals of ten minutes,” and Morgott settles in for the long haul.
It takes them an hour and a half to sort through conditions. Groups of fifteen, intervals of fifteen, and Morgott will guarantee them passage in the same manner on their return. Malenia calls for insurance, something for her to hold onto and then to return to him when she makes it home from her campaign; he agrees through gritted teeth. She'll need to work out how to handle her supply line herself, though he won't stop her from purchasing from Leyndell if she has the funds, and she'll not pillage from the lands under his protection nor harm the people there nor proselytize.
He spends the discussion wondering why she'll wage war against everyone south of Leyndell but not Leyndell itself. He doesn't work it out until they've nearly finished: it's because she's using the city as a buffer.
Leyndell sits upon the choke point that hides the only path to the Haligtree. Any enemy who attempts to reach Malenia's home needs to get through Morgott first, and he can't attack it either because he's protecting the Erdtree, so she doesn't even need to defend the place herself.
He hopes she knows he can invite Godrick or Rykard or Radahn or Ranni through at any point. He won't, but he can.
“What are you looking for as insurance?” he asks.
“I will take something from Leyndell,” she replies, “and something from you. You can choose what to part with for yourself, but from Leyndell I would like the original manuscript of the Blessing of the Erdtree incantation.”
That... sounds important. Morgott should argue her down.
To what?
He drums his fingers on the staff's handle. Each day finds a hundred new ways to remind him that he's a spare piece playing the part of a monarch. He doesn't know what treasures his city has. He was never intended to take Godwyn's place.
He calls for a break to consult with people who know more than him, then, upon his return, convinces her to agree to Barrier of Gold instead. She gives no indication of surprise, which confirms she set the original price too high.
He really can't stand his family.
For his own half of her demand, he's not so petty that he'll pluck a pebble from the ground and offer it to her as his beloved pet rock. But he doesn't own much to give away. He supposes he's fond enough of the kitchen, which never serves water flavored with his own waste. Maybe she can have a chef's hat from there.
No, there is something he can let her take.
“Are you coming?” he says, not making it a question.
“Where to?”
“To your brother's room,” says Morgott. He smiles faintly, humorlessly. “The other brother. Godwyn. And then you will leave, and may I never have to think of you again.”
She brings her knights, which is sensible. He brings no one, which is less so. If he guessed correctly and she prefers him alive to hold the city, then she won't try anything. If he was wrong, or if she acts against him anyway, or if she discovered what he did to her parents, then he'll have an excuse. He doesn't appreciate her holding a knife to his throat.
Mohg has told him before that he uses Morgott as a baseline. The Lord of Blood's recruits should be at least half as truculent and angry after a bad day as Morgott already is before breakfast. But the formless, seething mass of pent-up violence constricted inside of his chest isn't anger.
He haunts a world not made for him, not meant for him, furniture constructed too small to seat him and legislation written in script he cannot read and family members who spark as much emotion in him as strangers and history a black box that culminated in the present day through decisions he hasn't the cultural context to understand. Protect the Erdtree, protect Leyndell, protect the people who will call for his slaughter if they learn of him. Lovelorn son, reign ye well in Our shadow. Grace-Given Morgott, veiled in gold, who defends his land against all comers, and so well has he accomplished his duty that no one questions any longer his decision to employ Omen and night riders. Leyndell loves the king it believes it hosts, and the Erdtree will never love him at all. If his name survives beyond his death, he will still only be remembered for the ripples he left in his wake.
He's spent most of his life in a single room. In the later years he could hardly stand up in the cell without scraping the ceiling – how convenient that the new shackles kept him locked to the floor. But here? Now?
The sky traps him in vertigo if he looks up for too long. When he stands on Leyndell's walls with a view of the plateau stretching to the misty horizon, the wind carrying the scents of fields blooming gold and green, smoke rising in lazy trails from the chimneys of people he will never meet, the Erdtree's light dappling the earth below and the ever-present whisper of its leaves rustling far, far above, Morgott sees a world he cannot fill by simply existing.
Do you understand, Mohg? That's not anger.
Dust blankets Godwyn's room. Malenia pauses on the threshold, mouth twisting.
“You knew him,” Morgott says.
“I remember him,” says Malenia, “which is not the same. You must not have met him at all.”
Morgott glances at her, then steps into the room, heading for the writing desk beneath a narrow windows.
Godwyn preferred his living space cohesive in theme and tidy enough not to trip over. The only populated piece of furniture he had was the vanity, which holds neat rows of cosmetics arrayed before the mirror. He kept a handful of keepsakes scattered out of sight in drawers and on low shelves, a diary inside of the desk with dates years apart and most entries blacked out by his own hand, and a dragon's stone scale in an unlocked chest near the bed.
Morgott doesn't bother with those this time and reaches for the desk. One of the upper drawers held a false bottom before he broke it open months ago. He takes from the hole a bronze charm a quarter the size of his palm.
Godwyn took after Marika in at least one hobby – he had a personal forge that shows more personality by far than his bedroom. He smithed weapons on occasion, but mostly trinkets and jewelry and sculptures cover the walls there. A wind chime shaped like a soaring hawk with each primary feather a bell. A model of a sleeping four-winged dragon, the scars on the body rendered in such detail that Morgott can guess what forms of injury left them. An unfinished portrait of Godfrey where placing it under sunlight will resolve the lines of his hair into Serosh.
The doll in Morgott's hand is one of Godwyn's worse creations, a child's flawed memory. The proportions are laughable compared to his other works, the colors show too dark and too light in turns, and Morgott has never had so much of his body covered in horns.
He tosses it at Malenia, who catches it easily and turns it over in her flesh hand. “Ah, I see. That's why....”
He eyes her, but she doesn't finish the sentence.
“He would have wanted to give it to you. I will make sure to return it,” she says. She lowers her arm and turns her face to him. “The offer Miquella made to Margit stands.”
“As does Margit's answer.”
She hums shortly. “You asked me to come because the people who passed us on the way over would have thought more of it they saw you alone. What would happen if they knew your true identity?”
Seriously? What a sharp pivot from offering him sanctuary at the Haligtree. “Are you threatening me with that?” No one will believe her. Morgott is too well liked, and, more than that, he's made himself necessary. Leyndell only has the one demigod defending it.
“No, I've no intention of telling anyone other than Miquella. If I should wage war against you, brother, it will be by the sword. But if you're... content with your place, then what of the Omen in the shunning-grounds?”
“You'll leave them alone.”
“They don't understand language, do they.”
“Because no one taught them,” Morgott snaps. “Of course they don't. You can't explain to them what you want, so don't bother.”
She nods. To her extraordinarily minor credit, she doesn't call him heartless. He had the accusation leveled at him earlier in his rule – Morgott is horrific for abandoning the other Omen underground, but if he brings them out then he would be monstrous. The people who left them there always escape mention.
“I still don't understand what appeal the Golden Order holds for you.”
“Great,” says Morgott. “You don't need to.” If she wants to have a conversation, maybe she should have left the army at the Haligtree.
When Morgott offhandedly mentions the shackles, Mohg derails the conversation with a gasp, a raised finger, and an expression of exaggerated, dawning revelation. “Oh. Do you know why Father switched from the chain?”
Morgott narrows his working eye. “He... never explained.” Mohg props a hand beneath his chin behind his horns, studying Morgott with unabashed intensity. “You did something.”
“I certainly did!” Mohg is still watching. Morgott's mouth twists, and he glances aside. Far past the walls of the Elden Throne's court lie the giants' mountains, glowing faintly silver with snow even nearing midnight and from this distance. Easier to look at than his brother settled upon the ground with him. “I will not apologize. Though I wish it hadn't reflected onto you.”
Eventually Morgott says, “If you hadn't acted, I would have.”
“You had a plan too?”
“Something like it.”
“An impulse, then,” Mohg guesses.
“You're staring. Again.”
“Am I? It's only because I enjoy watching you.”
“My face is not that interesting.”
“Oh, no, I wouldn't say that,” Mohg murmurs. “I used to wonder how you would look. I'm very thankful you don't appear anything like I imagined. I was picturing a smaller Father.”
Morgott tips his head back. He can't see the stars. The leaves miles above blot them out. “I didn't know you existed until Radagon mentioned it. I had suspicions, but nothing... concrete.”
“It would seem we owe him,” Mohg says, tone blank.
“We owe him nothing.” Morgott flicks his gaze to meet Mohg's. “I've repaid him in full.”
Mohg laughs, high and rasping, until he doubles over breathless with a hand pressed to his forehead. It's contagious enough that Morgott cracks a smile. He doesn't consider the memory entertaining, but if even one of them does that might be enough.
Perhaps speaking this way before the Erdtree isn't entirely appropriate, but one day it would find out regardless no matter where the conversation took place. The souls that return to it carry their memories with them. Mohg found Morgott behind the Elden Throne brooding at the seal he set across the passage into the tree, and they had little reason to relocate to anywhere farther than a different side of the courtyard.
Morgott's seal past the throne is redundant when the tree's own thorns already bar the path, but he means for the barrier to stop anyone from seeing the thorns, not reaching them. The sight of them will give the game away. The Erdtree wouldn't have grown them so thickly if it intended them as a temporary measure.
The shattering of the Elden Ring was an act of terrible violence, but any attempt to set it aright would require – at the very least – access to the Ring. The Erdtree denies them that. Marika committed the deed, Marika has suffered the punishment, and the rest of them will either survive the consequences or not. Morgott isn't unused to locked passages and gods who don't answer, but....
“I've brought something, by the by,” Mohg announces, dragging him back into the present. Mohg draws a small earthenware bottle from inside of his sleeve and dangles it by the neck between two fingers. The scent of alcohol follows it.
“You drink now?”
Mohg shrugs. It's like watching a theatre curtain roll over a hill. “Not so much, but this one comes recommended. I met a truly lovely man the other day. Beautiful sword work, I could have admired it without tiring if only he wasn't demonstrating it on me.”
“He – ”
“He reminded me of you.” Mohg places the bottle on the ground with a clink.
“He cut you?”
“I've recovered.” He spreads his arms wide to demonstrate his range of movement, sleeves billowing with the motion. “As has Okina. We're family now. He explained it as such, and I... I mean, I didn't entirely follow, but he was very assured on that point, that drinking rice wine with our blood intermingled in it made us family. Who am I to argue?”
What does he mean for Morgott to do with that? “Where do you find these people.”
“The majority of them? At the end of a trail of someone else's blood.”
Right.
Obviously.
“Where, specifically, did you come across this one?”
“Not in East Altus. Any crimes he may – or may not! – have committed should not fall beneath Leyndell's jurisdiction.”
Morgott works his jaw. “Of course.”
“Never mind that. He gifted me another sample besides the one we shared. I meant to ask if you would like any.” He taps a fingernail against the bottle. “I'll be drinking it either way. I have to build more of a tolerance, I almost started coughing in front of him.”
“That's the only link in that chain of events you still find concerning,” says Morgott. “I'll pass.”
“As you prefer.” For a bare instant, disappointment shows through the crease around Mohg's eye. Anyone would have missed it without watching closely.
Most of his expressions come across as manufactured. Which is not to say that they are fake, but that he practiced them before a mirror, smoothing the edges and honing the subtleties until they conveyed what he meant them to and no less. He might consider it a necessity: more of his face than his brother's is distorted by horns and fangs.
But that flicker came from a true reaction.
Morgott sighs. “I'll have a little.”
Mohg brightens. “I was so sure you would say no! ...I forgot to bring cups.”
“You meant to drink it from the bottle once I said no.”
“Nobody has explained to me yet why that's a problem.”
“It means you don't have friends, or it means you do and you don't think of them.” People tend to dislike sharing saliva, even through a method so indirect as drinking from the same container, and there's something too about spreading illness that he hasn't grasped the mechanics of. Sickness stemming from poor air, and the methods of passing that air along.
It might also be a tradition justified retroactively. More customs than not seem to stem from that origin. Memorizing common practices when so many don't seem to have a reason for existing in the manner that they do has been trying.
“Does it?” says Mohg. “I see. Even if that's true, you wouldn't like to give the impression.”
Morgott shapes a thimble-sized cup into being. (It's thimble-sized for him, so it's still too large.) “Only enough to cover the bottom.”
Mohg unstoppers the bottle and pours with overdone care, withdrawing with a flourish as soon as he's met the specification. Morgott eyes it. It smells like poison.
Tastes like it, too.
“Are you going to keep gathering miscreants who've made attempts on your life?” he asks, lowering the gold cup with most of the contents still remaining.
“How do others make friends?” Mohg says thoughtfully. “I could try speaking with them first, instead... but this seems more effective by far.”
“This,” says Morgott, “and the abductions.”
Mohg blinks. “When did I mention those to you?”
“You didn't.” Morgott considers taking another sip and decides against it. He'll down it in one go once he's ready to force himself through that. “You need to be more careful.”
“Ah.” After a moment Mohg says, “I appreciate the warning.”
“Do more than appreciate it.”
“I will be more careful,” he says indulgently.
If Morgott dies and anyone by then still cares one jot for proper succession, then the man sitting across from him will become the king of Leyndell. Morgott can choose a different heir before then, but the state of the world is somehow such that any other candidate would do equally awful or worse.
Maybe he can name Okina heir.
Or Morgott can try to never die.
Whatever ruler comes after him will move to kill the Erdtree, and Leyndell and the Lands Between with it. No monarch would accept the tree's decision because every person who lusts after a crown is the same level of arrogant. The way the Tarnished from the Roundtable Hold talk sets him on edge every time he has to hear them. Most of them can't even see grace.
He's been weighing the merits of officially ending succession, severing the line at himself. It would be symbolic only, since Leyndell's unlikely to outlast him, but he's about to decide he can live with that.
Though he doesn't need to settle his mind on it in this moment. He files it aside and begins, “When you said you did something for Father to switch to the other shackle.”
Mohg smiles. He proffers the bottle but, when Morgott shakes his head, takes a swallow from it himself. He makes a considering sound. “A very acquired taste.” Then he replies, “I broke out. It made him realize steel wouldn't cut it anymore.”
“You used magic?” Morgott guesses. Mohg doesn't deny it. “How did you acquire a catalyst?”
“I will tell you, but let's make it a trade. I'm just as curious about your side, brother. If Father didn't tell you anything, then did he – what, come in, set the shackle, and leave?” He raises an eyebrow. “Just like that?”
It was somewhat more involved. “Essentially. Who would you rather go first?”
“You,” says Mohg immediately. “I can try to end us on a marginally more upbeat note.”
Morgott's stories do trend towards the joyless, and this one doesn't break the pattern.
The years had not passed by Godfrey unnoticed. Morgott knew distantly of the campaigns he had led and of the hard-won peace that weighed on him. Liurnia and Caelid remained unconquered, but Radagon's marriage to Queen Rennala had bought Liurnia's alliance if not their allegiance. Caelid lay too far from Leyndell, and Marika's subjects had grown too fond of the story of Liurnia being won with love in place of war, to bother with them yet.
A sense of anticipation, of pacing on the brink, dogged Godfrey's steps. His restlessness had instilled a growing apathy that rendered him harder to predict and harder to read, even if it also left him more easily baited into discussing topics he once avoided. In the instant he activated the binding, Morgott could not interpret the expression he wore, and these days distance has tattered the memory. Each time he recalls it, he takes from it a different emotion.
He had not seen it on Godfrey before and would not see it on him since. In moments he least expects to, he'll catch a flash of it in a mirror, and it will wrench him to a stop as thoroughly as a chain around his neck.
A pointless, primordial part of him will not believe in Godfrey's death unless he witnesses the body burned.
To start from the beginning: Morgott's father came in. He affixed the shackles to three evenly-spaced points around the cell; Morgott let him. The floor blazed gold.
He took a seat.
He watched.
Morgott floundered. The light stung his eye, and standing suddenly took more strength than he had, and Godfrey looked on with no sign of alarm. The connection cost him seconds to reach: he'd never had magic used against him. He scrabbled at the ground, clawed at the edges of the light, tried to heave himself upright and could not.
“What? What did you – ” He couldn't name where the words to blame Godfrey had sprung from, but once he spoke them the thought followed and built it into truth. “Why? What'd I do?”
“Nothing,” said Godfrey. “It's always been nothing, Morgott.”
He sounded as tired as Morgott had ever heard him, as if he had a right after he'd acted first. Morgott lunged, and the seal flared and dragged him prone when he reached the border. He drew back and shoved himself to his knees, shaking with the effort. The fear hadn't quite crept in – he hadn't yet realized this was a permanent arrangement – so his focus was occupied with determining the rules of engagement.
“Give me a reason,” he bit out.
Godfrey remained silent. Morgott sprang for him – if he only moved fast enough, maybe the magic wouldn't notice – and again hit the damp ground as soon as he neared the light's edge.
Godfrey would let him out. Godfrey had to let him out. This wasn't – he couldn't live like this.
His father eventually said, “It wasn't anything you did.”
Morgott, who didn't know any curses, snarled wordlessly.
“It's not always about you.”
“Who else is here?” Morgott demanded.
Godfrey had become Elden Lord for his skill at pummeling foes into submission, not for his diplomatic ability. Sometimes that shone through particularly clearly despite his having never raised a fist to Morgott.
“Only us.”
Then again, he didn't need to use his words with any degree of competence when he held all of the power in the negotiation.
“I would seem to be making this worse,” he rumbled. “I am not sure what to say to you.”
“You might consider an answer.”
Godfrey ignored him, and Morgott rolled his eye and pushed himself onto his forearms for a better vantage to examine the seal from. “How well can you move?” Godfrey asked.
Morgott whipped his head up to stare. “Did you not know what this does?”
“Its maker explained it to me, but I'm asking you.”
If someone other than him had crafted it, then that made for the most direct human interaction outside of Godfrey Morgott had ever encountered. This was absurd. “The very next time it floods, I'll drown.”
“The water level inside the boundary won't rise past where it is now.”
“How does that work?”
“Magic.”
Morgott took a long breath. Since that argument had hit a dead end, he tried for another card to play and came up blank. He had nothing Godfrey wanted.
(Except for his own safety. The thought didn't come to his conscious mind, but some deeper part of him must have noticed it and weighed its value. It's the best explanation he can imagine, in retrospect, for what he did next.)
“You can't leave this here,” he snapped, volume rising. “You can't – Father. What is wrong with you?”
Godfrey's mouth twisted. “You're well enough to be yourself, looks like.” He uncrossed his legs and got to his feet. “That's all I needed to see.”
Morgott tried to reach him for a third time and succeeded as well as he had before. “No, wait, no, no – come back! Father!” The barred door latched shut, and the light outside flickered wildly as Godfrey took the torch off of the wall.
Even if he intended to take the seal down the next time he came, that was a very long time to remain pinned to the ground. And Morgott didn't know if Godfrey would remove it at all. This wasn't sustainable. Morgott wouldn't allow it to be.
He couldn't reach the shackles Godfrey had set around the room. He scooped up a loose pebble to throw at one, and it bounced off without effect. That left him with the seal itself. It seemed attached to the floor, so maybe if he could pull up the floor... he slotted his nails into a crack in the mortar and tugged. The stonework didn't budge, but he tore off half of a fingernail.
He howled loudly enough to hurt his own ears. Though the pain was real, the volume was a choice.
Godfrey didn't answer.
Regardless of Godfrey's idiotic and newfound inability to explain his motives, Morgott could guess why he'd placed the seal. He didn't know why Godfrey had specifically chosen this time to do it, but the base reason he knew. It always came back to the curse in his blood.
He had never considered nullifying the curse, since his father had seemed certain that it couldn't be done. But what did Godfrey understand, really?
He braced one hand around the base of a horn on his head, and with the other he took it by the tip. He didn't give himself time to think it through. He inhaled, and then he wrenched.
The snap of bone breaking echoed off of the walls. The horn remained connected at the bottom half, but he'd managed to shear a long fissure through the top and into the center. It bled freely.
He'd meant to finish the job, but the memory of the agony when it cracked paralyzed him, leaving him with only a fair bit of regret, a half-severed horn, and enough pain that he almost wished Godfrey would return to kill him and be done with it. And his blood gathering beneath him, where the seal's golden light lent it strange colors.
He has to stop talking at this point to lean back.
Mohg has been slowly but steadily sprawling out, ending up with one elbow on the ground, both legs extended, and knuckles propping up the horns on his cheek, but a moment ago he shifted to sit up properly, and now he's raising a hand towards Morgott's face. Morgott catches it palm-to-palm before it reaches him, and Mohg locks their fingers together.
Quietly, Mohg asks, “Which horn?”
Morgott taps a nub before his left ear, brushing the hair covering it aside. “This one.”
“All of those can't be – ”
“They're not. Most are only scales. You don't have to look at me like that.”
Mohg continues to be remarkably expressive for someone with half of his face calcified. “That... that looks treated. He came back?”
“I was screaming. He might have thought I was dying.” He would have preferred it if Godfrey didn't, though. A few more minutes and Morgott would have broken free. Acquiring a sword, a catalyst, and the ability to see grace should have broadened his options, after all, if only he didn't have the former confiscated immediately.
“I did that,” Mohg says.
Morgott shakes his head. “Don't flatter yourself. My choices were my own.” He extricates his hand, and Mohg lets his own fall and laughs a little helplessly.
“He always sounds like he was worse to you.”
“You're easier to get along with.”
“That does seem to be the consensus.”
“And,” says Morgott, “I did it to myself. He had nothing to do with that decision.”
“Certainly,” says Mohg. Morgott narrows his eye: he's being pandered to. His brother half-raises both arms in surrender. “I agree! You're correct.” Mohg is looking at him the way one might at something dear and fragile.
Morgott never has any real idea what to do about him.
“But you must know,” Mohg adds, reaching out again. This time he stops of his own volition, which, while better, leaves Morgott acutely aware of the foreign object existing too near to his face. “Your pain is beautiful, you are beautiful, and this was never a curse.”
...Sometimes Morgott forgets Mohg is with a cult.
Well, so is he when things things come down to it.
He files Mohg's words under religious disagreement to never address. (Nepotism? Of course not, he hates his family equally.) “Right.” He bats the hand away. “I've done my part. It's your turn.”
“After that? Still?”
“Yes, after that.” Morgott sighs. “I'm asking you to.”
Silence answers him.
“It wasn't that bad, and you didn't cause it.” He grimaces and continues, “I agreed to a trade. This has been one-sided.”
Slowly, Mohg straightens. “So it has.”
“Don't – modify what you'll say, either. There's no need.”
“Then I won't do that any more than I already planned to.” Mohg pauses. “Perhaps slightly more. I feel....”
“If you didn't act,” Morgott repeats, “I would have.” For something to do, he downs the remainder of his drink in one swallow and briefly appreciates the distraction of the burn. “You can put it out of your mind.”
“I will try,” says Mohg, “and I expect I will fail. Well, since you insist, allow me to uphold my end.”
Mohg didn't have friends, but he did keep sheep. Wandering spirits, souls denied their rebirth in the cycle. Hearing their feet splash in the water or smelling the source-less dust and death they brought had never unsettled him. They weren't so different from him, these apparitions trapped and forgotten in the gloom, and he couldn't be scared of himself. I understand you, he told the sense of being watched, so sing for me.
He existed at a lower depth of the shunning-grounds than Morgott. Debris accumulates there. Memories wash in, break senselessly upon the Erdtree's roots, and, in their shattering, fester. Mohg gathered the shells of what had once been and lifted them to his ear to listen, and he heard the same stories told again and again: of their lives, those ghosts remember only the moments of their own undoings.
Most got lost on their journeys to the roots and would find their way again, but nearly as many reached the Erdtree and were scorned by its light. Others, the oldest whispers, had the gall to reject the Erdtree themselves; they'd recoiled from it, expecting something else in its place. [1]
Those are the hardest to coax into speaking. If they haven't forgotten most of their words, then they've lost interest in living souls. He needed a more tangible lure to draw them in.
Though ghosts will flock to any of a number of offerings, blood and comfort are the easiest to lose. The air from his lungs is the only other thing similarly easy to replace, but it hurts a fair bit more.
He invited them to scratch his arms and face bloody. (The wounds inevitably got infected, but illness burns out quickly in Omen. At most they swelled for a few days before scarring into a new layer of stony skin.) He hid his winces, made sympathetic noises, and wheedled them into sharing their stories. He only had trouble getting them to stop taking from him once they'd started, until he worked out that he could redirect them to other targets. [2]
(He still needed a pot for that then, but later he would learn how to keep spirits away from himself as a matter of course unless he antagonized them first.)
Eventually, when he'd heard enough from them and understood how much they could enact on the world, he upended a pot of sweetly scented blood over his chain, waited for the wraiths to erode the links, and walked out the door.
“I'll skim over what happened after that,” Mohg says, flicking his fingers, “only because I can't skip it entirely. I went down, to the cathedral I'd heard fragments about over the years.” Morgott drags a hand across his face; he can guess where this might go. “It was impressive in a different way back then. Did you ever see it before they buried the Caravan? No? It was only a tomb for lost things. No maintenance.
“I imagine most of your constituents wouldn't have recognized it for what it was, even with the roots crossing the walls. It was all ghosts and bones and slugs and what possessions had been tossed down over generations, and much older things at the bottom before the Flame burned them to dust. It was... more honest that way. A cathedral for creatures like us. But they did remodel it to hide the Caravan. An altar is more likely to go undisturbed than a pile of miscellany.
“Of course I would have seen more of the world if I went up instead, but I had no interest in venturing immediately from one place I was not wanted to another. I've not changed much, have I?”
Morgott doesn't say, More than I have. It's not a competition. “And you knew how to operate the elevator?”
“No, no. Not even slightly. Triggered the pressure plate fully by accident and fled as soon as it began its descent. I ended up climbing down the wall. You may surmise that I did not slip and die.”
One needs to be in a certain state of mind to listen to Mohg describe events. When he's not exaggerating for effect, he's downplaying all of the wrong things. Sometimes Morgott wants to turn a character from his stories into a slab of meat, but it's difficult when the characters in question are either Mohg's newest favorite recruits or a force of nature (frequently gravity) or Mohg himself.
Nothing to be done about the past, in any case. Morgott holds his strained peace and listens.
“Anyway, I – ah, I made it to the bottom, found some... found the Formless Mother – ” Mohg, without seeming to notice, digs his thumbnail into his index finger with force enough to break the hardened skin, and the trace of blood that shows through burns with rose-red sparks “ – grew a pair of wings, flew to the surface – ”
“Who did you get the wings from?” As far as Morgott knows, Mohg needs a blood sacrifice to develop them from their usual malformed state.
“You wouldn't like the explanation.”
“Indulge me.” His lips peel back into what could pass for a grin in worse lighting. “How many people had died by the time you were arrested?”
“Ah, well – keeping count wasn't the first thing on my mind.”
“I'd just like to prepare. I'm not judging,” Morgott says. It was Mohg's first time out; any damage he caused would have been incidental. Besides, he has never owed responsibility to Leyndell, and Morgott would be looking down his nose at Mohg from atop a literal stack of corpses. The Fell Omen's reputation didn't sprout from the ether.
Out of this entire generation of the family, the only member with ostensibly cleaner hands than Mohg is Ranni, who has never done anything wrong in her life. Whatever skeletons she has, she's buried them well. Meanwhile, Morgott, Radahn, Rykard, and Godrick's branch have each caused the deaths of thousands, and Malenia is on track to join them bearing either Miquella's allowance or endorsement. Godwyn, likewise, was a war hero.
In contrast, Mohg has harmed, what, a few dozen? Which is a few dozen too many (Morgott grew up with neither statistics nor large numbers of people and so never learned how to dilute the latter into the former), but Morgott has killed more than that.
Mohg abducts and tortures and exsanguinates and he alone knows what else. It... isn't ideal.
But he has no intention yet of moving against the Erdtree, and, in terms of scale, his negative impact is so negligible that Morgott always has larger problems to curb. Although Morgott sometimes needs to actively discover the larger problems first.
Even if Mohg takes it upon himself to paint the Lands Between dripping red, Morgott will still not loathe his twin as much as he does the rest of the family. He holds no expectations of Mohg, but the other demigods should be better. They have every cause to be better. They had no right to shirk their responsibilities to such an extent that an Omen snatched Leyndell from them.
Mohg closes his eye with a hum, then, after counting on his fingers, looks at Morgott again and says, “At least one. Certainly no more than three. Again, I wasn't paying attention. But! If you'd really like to know, the wings were... essentially free.
“It was a first time gift. I asked for her help in making it to the surface, and she granted it without recompense just that once. It was a clumsy argument, but – she was of the opinion that the unseen veins beneath the skin of the world are the loveliest part of it, and everything that lives inside of them that others have discarded – so I told her I wished to agree with her, but I could not until I saw the outside to compare.”
He pauses, eye fixed on a distant memory. Quietly he continues, “I would have done much for her, after all that she said, even if she didn't humor me on that. But I wished to know if her words were empty.”
So that's why he tried to avoid explaining.
The attempt did little besides draw attention to it. Morgott doesn't care overmuch that only one of them follows a god who answers, but Mohg occasionally shies away from it in a manner that edges too near to pity. As if he doesn't spend his nights tottering about the country making a nuisance of himself while Morgott sleeps in a clean room with access to servants and food and running water. (Or broods over the Elden Throne, as the case may be.)
Mohg's gaze drifts to the side of Morgott's face, then flicks back to the center more quickly. Morgott, eye half-lidded, says, “Keep going. If you would.”
Mohg taps a horn protruding from his cheek. The silence waxes, heavy with possibility and the words he holds caged in his throat. Do not, Morgott thinks. There will be a time and a place for them; the time will never be now, and the place will never be here. The polite omission upon which they've built a relationship is too fragile to suffer speaking aloud.
Eventually Mohg says, “I can tell you what she told me. But I expect you'd prefer if I didn't.”
The truth is this: when Mohg comes to Leyndell, finding Morgott is not his only or primary motive. If Morgott didn't exist, he would come all the same to gauge the states of the Elden Ring and the Flame of Frenzy. The capital is the hub about which the Shattering revolves.
Morgott has no such reason to frequent Siofra. He doesn't need to judge the progress of Mohg's cult: Mohg volunteers the information himself, even if convincing him to explain exactly how he acquired his latest inductees is like pulling teeth. Although he conceals segments of his operation, visiting wouldn't expose them. He knows where Morgott would enter from, having designed the teleportation charm, and keeps nothing truly problematic in sight of that point.
His invitations to visit his home aren't frivolous. He's tailored the circumstances such that, if Morgott goes again, it will be for him alone.
And Mohg is not worth leaving Leyndell for.
Morgott replies, “I expect we'd both prefer if you didn't.”
The sentiment that snared Mohg's loyalty will not do the same for him. Nothing either of them can voice will make the other an ally. He can guess, in any case, what the outer god said.
The first person Morgott met besides Godfrey told him, You are not what anyone would have chosen, but you are necessary.
And the Formless Mother said to Mohg, You are just as you should be, and you are loved.
What else should Mohg have done but believe her? A promise, and wings and blood, and fire and filth.... Morgott understands, sympathy aching as an unhealed wound, and wishes he did not.
Mohg laughs, low and dry. “Probably. In that case, I'll continue.
"I... actually, I'll skip most of this as well, it's nothing interesting. Made it to the surface, one or some people died, I got caught when the sun rose. Then I spent a few days in a prison while our parents came up with something that would hold me – hold us. And you would... know the aftermath already.”
“Some people died,” Morgott repeats.
“I was hungry.”
Morgott chokes.
Mohg doubles over cackling. “I'm joking! I didn't – that is not why I did it. Though that's not not why I did it either.”
“Was that supposed to mean something?”
“Actually,” Mohg says, ignoring him, “one of them screamed when they saw me, and they kept screaming when I asked them to stop. Something only does that if it's expecting help, and I was not meant to be up here, and I thought, what if Father heard? It was largely an accident – I didn't expect people to be so delicate.
“I did eat them, though, after.”
Morgott says, “I hear Rykard's doing that these days.” As if it's not an open secret that Rykard and his officers have taken to eating their enemies' stewed heads.
“I can't guess at why he prefers the brain when the heart exists. I haven't done it since, anyway. Haven't had cause to.” He scratches his cheek, considering. “I believe that's all unless I forgot an event... oh! And I started a fire.” He stands to peer at the city through the courtyard's fence. “You can't see where it was from here.” Then he spins back to face Morgott, spreading his arms. “That would be all.”
Morgott watches him blandly. “We're not mentioning the blood rituals – ”
“You wouldn't like to hear about those.”
“ – or how you were captured – ”
“Lost the wings at a poor time.”
“ – or what Father said to you afterwards.”
“I promised to end us on a lighter note.”
Morgott shrugs. “Then that's all. Thank you for telling me.”
“You need only ever ask.” Too top-heavy to offer a grandiose bow, he conveys the sentiment through tone alone. If he'd only stop coming out with lines like keeping count wasn't the first thing on my mind, he'd fit the image of a king better than Morgott does. Not that that's saying much of anything.