Chapter Text
The Tarnished arrives at the courtyard eventually. Morgott, visibly fed up with one intruder after another, burns the Erdwood from his sword in an act of wanton blasphemy and leaps upon them. They die. Melina beats a retreat before her brother can turn his full attention to her.
This repeats. She doesn't worry over the Tarnished growing discouraged – they once spent a week hurling themselves from the balcony in the Roundtable Hold to challenge an invader spirit who killed them in a single blow – but Morgott shortens the pauses between his strikes by a little more on each attempt and spits his parting words at their corpse with more vitriol.
He also takes to speaking to himself after the body fades.
“The site in Marika's chambers,” he says after the sixth or so failure. On the next: “Queen Marika would scour them into a husk. I might well be doing them a favor.” The one after that: “Still here?”
Melina pauses on the threshold, waiting, but there's no one else he might be talking to even though he isn't looking at her. She materializes to say, “You could build a cage around the site they recover at.” Not that she means to give him the idea, but she can't fathom his not having already considered it.
Morgott replies, perpetual frown deepening into a scowl, “And resist the guidance of grace.”
Melina stares at him. “Does it point you to them?” And if it does, and if he's following it so scrupulously, is he a fundamentalist? Being what he is, and with that weapon for a catalyst? Morgott glances at her with his eye half-lidded, and she asks, “Is that why you ignore me after you slay them?”
“I would not count on any death taking for thee.”
She doesn't know the answer to that and has little interest in testing it, but, either way, the Tarnished's inability to perish certainly hasn't stopped Morgott from killing them repeatedly. “Do the Tarnished you hunt normally die?”
“Eventually.”
“Grace fades for them when they lose faith in their goal.” Death by despair, and Morgott's made something of an art out of it. It's... not far from what their mother might have done. Less effective, perhaps. But she is a god, so he never will measure up to her in any comparison. “That won't do for this Tarnished.”
“No?” asks Morgott.
Melina hesitates and looks back down the stairs. “They aren't....”
Morgott says, sounding tired for the first time, “Should they lose any further mental capacity, they will no longer retain the necessary brain function to breathe.”
Kinder than how Melina would have put it.
She doesn't intend it as disparagement. Godfrey and Radagon had considerably more going on up top than the Tarnished does, but they were named Elden Lord first and foremost for martial prowess. Conquerors, the both of them, just as the Tarnished is striving to become. Though Morgott isn't wrong, either, in saying that Marika would strip them down to the bones of what they were.
A person can't learn to live without Marika again once they've beheld her. The world itself has restructured around her absence.
Morgott raises his sword if Melina lingers too long in the courtyard after the Tarnished's death, but before that he allows her between ten seconds and one minute of dawdling depending on his level of irritation. She only avails herself of it a few times. Morgott wants nothing to do with her – though he seems, once or twice, on the verge of saying something anyway – and she in turn has little to ask of him.
He will not let her through without a more convincing argument than she has the ability to make. Information beyond that – their shared parentage and differing childhoods, Morgott's rise from the sewers to kingship, Godwyn's fall from grace, whatever crumbs of commonality they might find if they try – is extraneous. All of it.
Although maybe it wouldn't be if she dug into his disappearance a little harder when they were both younger.
Godwyn ventured into the shunning-grounds once and once only. He spent a day underground, making as thorough a round of the place as he could, knowing as he did that he wouldn't recognize the lost sibling if he found them. Melina doesn't remember why he chose to search; only that, upon his return, Marika sent for him to tell him that there was nothing for him beneath the ground. He had already chosen the sky, after all.
The Tarnished makes their breakthrough with very little warning. Between one loss and the next, something clicks for them.
The only blow Morgott lands that round is the one that kills them. They've begun to read him.
He stands over their fading corpse for a long while after, face twisted and eye staring at nothing. Melina doesn't speak. She retreats from the arena and waits out the hours until the Tarnished comes bounding up the stairs again.
The next battle proceeds much closer to a battle than the one-sided butchery it's been up until this point. The Tarnished scrambles aside from thrown blades, hurls themselves away from golden greatspears, and flails to safety when Morgott chains a pouncing strike into a diagonal slash into a leaping spin with a blade in each hand. He lands and stabs a conjured sword into the ground. Gold light fills the air above the courtyard.
A sprout of the same glow as Morgott's incantations grows from the cobbles, thickening, forming bark, unfurling branches. The Tarnished takes shelter beside it while swords fall in a shimmering rain, and Melina finishes her prayer and steps away from the tree.
Morgott's focus shifts to her. He hasn't seen her cast the healing miracle before; the Tarnished typically dies too quickly for her to find the time or opportunity. As an attacker, she's a distraction, but as a healer she has become a danger. Clerics and battlefield perfumers left unattended quickly compound problems.
Godwyn's fighting style hasn't translated well into this form – he stood eight feet tall and took more after Godfrey in musculature – so she's adopted a clunky copy of the one her mother demonstrated on a handful of occasions. Since she prefers not to test it against an opponent of Morgott's calibre, she concentrates on keeping her distance and channeling magic to throw at him.
Sensibly, Morgott isn't inclined to let her. He chases her down in seconds, hammer on his shoulder and poised to swing –
– he doesn't notice it. Melina sees his face, and there's not a single strand of awareness in it of what he does then.
He doesn't seem the type to remember often to analyze his own actions and the reasons behind them. There's too much in his mind that he doesn't want to find. Melina recognizes the signs: Godwyn shared the trait, though not to Morgott's apparent extreme. Or perhaps he did. Melina's recollections are far from objective.
She's in the air still, caught in the middle of a poorly timed leap. Her course is set. Morgott has free reign to land the strike that will dissipate her, but he doesn't because he hesitates.
He meant what he said about not wishing to commit fratricide.
The Tarnished comes at his back, and he spins to bring the hammer down on the spot they just vacated. Melina narrowly avoids the spikes on his tail as he turns, and as she beats a retreat she gathers and hurls another curse from her knife.
Once upon a time, Godwyn engaged Fortissax in battle for three days and three nights. When he emerged victorious they understood each other down to their souls. Godwyn held a blade to the dragon's throat and then sheathed it, because to slay Fortissax by that point would have been akin to murdering his own bonded sibling.
The choice took his mother so thoroughly off guard that she had no argument to muster against it, even after she had him spend several hours explaining his reasoning to her. She stared at him through the whole of it like he was some changeling child the spirits had finally traded back to her once grown, a foreign creature with a face she should have recognized.
Though this was before she sent Godfrey away, Godwyn feared she might disown him. He did not think he could survive her disdain. But he did not think he could live with himself if he struck down Fortissax, either.
Melina is not Godwyn, and Morgott is in her way. He crumples to his knees, choking on his own curse, and rises bloodied and burning and incandescently furious. The first burst of delayed fire from his sword sends the Tarnished tumbling, but beneath the boughs of Melina's prayer their burns fade and they roll back to their feet.
Their bull-headedness makes the difference that it always does. They kill Morgott in the end. Melina doesn't hear his last words; she's turned away already and started towards the passage into the Erdtree's interior.
A passage blocked by immortal thorns.