Previous installments: (Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5).
**
You are Marika the Eternal, and your son is dead.
Godwyn the golden, beloved of all your demigods, is dead. Seven more of the Golden Lineage died with him. Your dynasty is ended. The assassin stood in silent defiance as you ordered her execution and chained her spirit to an evergaol. The wound remains.
The time you bought by plucking Death from the Rune is fully wasted; the Fingers and their guiding Will still pull at your strings. The gilded cage remains intact. The slaughter of your family is of no concern to them. Godwyn is dead and the Fingers sign that this is only a minor disruption. They only noticed because they lost their primary Empyrean, and even then it barely registers as a setback; if the twins are non-viable hosts, you are Marika mother of demigods - you can always go fuck yourself and make more. The Will demands an agent in the Lands Between.
Someone needs to bear the Ring.
Someone needs to maintain Order.
Their consent is optional.
Ranni chafed at the yoke that was prepared for her. You never blamed her for hating you: You were offering her up to the Fingers to secure your own emancipation, and if she inherited anything from you it was a refusal to kneel to anyone or anything.
Still, you tried to make the succession a painless affair, or as painless as it could be. Ranni would inherit the Ring, choose a Lord Consort as she saw fit according to love or convenience; then she would only need to lie back and think of Liurnia for a few uncomfortable nights, produce a demigod or two to appease the Will, and then she could retire to her rise to do as she wished for the rest of her life-without-death. The mundane realities of rule would be handed over to Godwyn, anyway. The people already called him the Young Lord, favoring his warmth and life over grim and reclusive Radagon.
Godwyn. A good man in a nest of vipers. A man for whom cruelty was alien, a man who could tease the good out from a blackened soul and broker peace between the most bitter enemies. Noble, idiot, innocent Godwyn. The best thing you ever made. Perhaps the only good thing, in the end. Godwyn, cut down by Destined Death as he rallied his sons and the knights of the guard against the black knives of the assassins.
Did he recognize the assailants? Did he know the danger he was in? No, he couldn’t have. The Eternal Cities were vanished into deep history, their people driven underground. Destined Death rested safely in Maliketh’s hands. He would have thought, perhaps to the very end, that he was facing ordinary steel and common sorcery from a band of Liurnian revanchists.
And now he’s dead. He and his seven sons and daughters. His body has poisoned the Erdtree and Deathroot spreads across the Lands Between like cancer.
Your surviving children - those fortunate enough to be away from the capital that night - play at cooperation but you know they are all a breath away from drawing swords and squabbling over your empire like tantruming infants. None of them are fit to inherit the Order that you built.
It doesn’t matter.
You pace the palace halls day and night, your mind gnawing at itself like a wolf with its foot caught in a trap. They’ve cleaned the blood from the floors. Your son’s blood, soaked up by a servant with a mop. The corridors reek of perfumers’ disinfectant. Memories and the dreams of memories seethe and foam, losing their time-blunted edges and boiling together until your thoughts cannot be discerned from your delusions and Now can no longer be separated from Then.
The snake lifts its head from where it naps in the roots and tells you the last secret of godhood.
You plant a golden tree in the field, near the old firepit where you would dance and sing and celebrate the spirits. It is the kindness of gold without a trace of Order - perhaps the last kindness you will ever offer to the world. You leave, and you will never return.
You hold a pale, flabby infant in your arms, swaddled in the soft and supple skin of your enemies.
A messenger arrives in the ash-choked city with news from the front: the Storm Lord is dead, and Castle Morne has fallen. The Weeping Peninsula is yours, the last resistance to your rule over the Lands Between is gone, and Lord Godfrey stands victorious at the head of a battle-hardened host with no more lands left to conquer and more loyalty to their Lord than to his Order. Something must be done.
You climb to the summit of the hill, to the spirit tree where the Grandmother’s mummified body rests. Drawing the knife from your belt, you cut off a braid and lay it there in the roots.
The midwife cowers as you command her to stop her whimpering and toss the wretched things into the sewers.
The stone-scaled dragon nods in approval at last, and strikes the clay tablet with lightning to leave his mark next to Godwyn’s seal. The treaty is made.
The flame-haired giant kneels, holds up his trembling hands in surrender. The war is over; the fields of dead are left for the crows. The enlisted men are already calling you Godslayer, crediting you with the fall of the giants’ Fell God.
Radagon is different now; his years of autonomy in Liurnia have given him experiences that you don’t share. His new formulations of the Golden Order spread like giantsflame; The court teems with Fundamentalists.
The village is silent. All the villages are silent now. There is no one left.
The blind drunkard Shabriri, caked in filth, is dragged out of his cell and thrown before the baying crowds. You wave your hand and the carnifex gouges out his eyes. All the while he screams “Lies, all lies, do you not see it? Order and chaos are one! She is not a god! She is not a god!”
Messmer and his penal legions march towards Belurat. You reach into the Ring and transform a thousand-thousand segments of ciphered light. The world is remade. The past is re-written. The path you took to your throne is wiped out of memory and out of time - you are eternal as the Erdtree is eternal, and always have been.
The highland barbarian bounces on the balls of his feet, bored with the Tower priest’s endless sermon. You feel neither love nor lust for Horah, but this is a marriage of alliance, not pleasure. Mutual respect for prowess on the field will suffice.
Melina stares back at you with her gloaming and Graceless eye. “Order alone cannot continue, Mother. The world strains under the weight, like a scale in need of balancing Isn’t that my purpose?” The ruinous flame takes her then, and she screams.
Horned riders crest the hill, their horses like thunder. Your mother begs you to run into the woods, to keep running and not look back.
The sun’s golden blood drips from the boughs of the grasping tree into the great bowl. You dole out your blessings of sap and grace to your loyal converts.
You pour over stone tablets by lamplight, deciphering the cuneiform of Rauh syllable-by-syllable.
The misbegotten blacksmith bows his head, and says “Yes, my lady. It’ll be done.”
The knife glimmers in the evening light before you drive it into your breast and carve out your dusk-eyed other self - There is no place for Death in your new Order.
The old woman - the one you call Grandmother because everyone calls her Grandmother - offers you a mushroom like a dead man’s finger, and as the cosmos unfolds in your vision she inducts you into the sisterhood of spirit-tuners.
In suffocating darkness, you feebly beat your fists against the jar’s inner wall as your organs melt and your bones dissolve into the raw mass of your new flesh. A dozen mouths gasp for air that isn’t there. A hornless slave stamps the wax seal with a serial number and an inquisitor’s mark.
You wrest your coiled sword from the old queen’s corpse. The inert Ring in her heart is small and dull, worthless without its divine vessel. The serpent whispers in your head "devour it...together..."
The burial shroud rustles softly as you withdraw a few fibers of gold. The red Gates of Divinity drip gore down their flanks. You are the last living being in Enir-Ilim.
The last of Godfrey’s ships passes into the encircling mist. A shrouded figure stands like a tower on the deck. He does not look back.
You walk through the ruined huts, the fields of flowers, the empty places where there used to be people. People you knew. People you loved. You remember the slaughter, again and again and again and again. Men in centipede masks drag you from your hut and chop your body apart with heavy blades. Hounds tear at your heels as you run into the night. An arrow buries itself in your back; a spear pierces your side; an axe cleaves open your skull. You remember your mother and your mothers and your mother; your sister and your sisters and your sister; your daughter and your daughters and your daughter. You remember the gaping mouth of the jar.
You lie with the serpent, and two are made one flesh.
You go to the base of the Erdtree. The place where Order was first imposed upon the crucible of primordial life. Maliketh waits for you there, his eyes betraying the agony of a dog torn between two masters. He begs you to turn around, to go back to the palace and grieve in the company of the living.
You brush off his desperate words and cross the plaza. The black blade forms in his hand.
He lands a single blow on you before he flees in horror and shame. But a single blow is all that was needed; a bloody red shard of Destined Death tears at your gut, and as it grows it will turn your body to lifeless stone.
Let it come. You have danced beyond death for so long that you no longer care if you live. You stagger onward in your waking dream, your hand clasped to your side.
You are Marika, and you are dying, and your Order is dying, and the Lands are dying, and you are still trapped here. Your body is not your own. You have backed yourself into a golden throne atop a mountain of corpses, and your son is dead.
May chaos take the world. May night reign. May the Order be broken forever. You no longer care; all this was for nothing.
Your son is dead.
You stand before the Ring and raise your hammer
**
A lot of the lore community likes portraying Marika as an unbeatable chessmaster who is always a billion steps ahead of everyone and planned the entire thing beginning to end - I think that's boring as sin. Lore is fun but it can strip all the humanity out of a story and leave it a lesser thing. (Noah Caldwell-Gervais says something like "lore doesn't stand next to you in the grocery store" in his DS video, I don't have the exact quote on hand).
Though if I am being honest I wrote this because I'm tired of Tarnished Archaeologist's current string of "it was all an incest singularity" theorizing. If Ranni had killed Godwyn specifically for that reason, she would, I don't know, fucking mention it? Even for a game as obtuse and vaguer as ER I would find total silence in those circumstances an impossible stretch - and it also just drains all the tragedy and pathos out of Night of Black Knives and turns it into "Ranni was totally justified, the end."
So I made it basically accidental. The assassins had their own agenda - no better time to kill Marika or the Fingers than while storming the palace - and Godwyn got blindsided because he's the resident himbo and went to play the hero because of course he did.
Several other theories went into this.
- The Golden Lineage are Godwyn’s offspring; Marika only had the children we see in game (thanks to kyana for this theory, it solves many problems).
- The Woman with the three wolves (as we see in Maliketh’s boss chamber) is Placidusax’s god; or more properly Placidusax was her Lord, because the god chooses.
- The Serpent, as serpents do, offered Marika a devil's bargain.
- Marika fucked the snake (prior to her ascension) and birthed the first generation of what would eventually become the Godskins. They were her personal kill squad back when she was hunting the Missing God, roughly analogous to Godfrey's Crucible Knights.
- Speaking of Godfrey, Marika married him prior to her ascension as an alliance between the Hornsent and the highlanders against the Giants. He and his tarnished were banished because with the Tree burnt and Radagon still in Liurnia there was basically nothing stopping him from marching on Leyndell and deposing Marika if he wanted. If he actually wanted to is another thing entirely.
- Shabriri understood that Marika had stolen godhood in some way (I do agree with TA on this point, and basically nothing else in that video) - though I don’t think he knew specifics (I think it was essentially a three-part plan: kill the Missing God to get the Ring, usurp the ritual at the Gate of Divinity to attain godhood, and then eat the sun to gain control over the Will / limit its influence in the Lands Between.)
- The Lands of Shadow are so disjointed from the base game and their own contents because it exists outside of the world of Order. It’s basically a dreamscape with no dreamer - everything in there existed in the normal Lands Between at some point, but it’s all been mashed together into illegibility.
- The Hornsent filled the power vacuum left after the collapse of the Eternal Empire, and they justified their pogroms against the shamans by the victims being numen (and thus, their old oppressors)
- The Grandmother Shaman was either a descendant of one of the four Eternal Queens (the giants in the thrones), or the queen herself. The other empty throne is a symbolic / traditional one, set aside in case the Missing God (herself also a numen) were to return.
- Marika is herself an amalgamation of dozens of shamans.
- The Gloam-Eyed Queen is like 4 different people, or one god in 4 persons.
- The Nameless God, a numen woman who became head of the empire of Farum Azula.
- Marika the hornsent jar-saint (after killing and eating the Nameless God)
- Fragments of the Nameless God that Marika cut out of herself a la Miquella when she ascended to godhood. This St. Trina-like other self later tries to topple Marika and is killed by by Maliketh.
- Melina, a clonal daughter who inherited some of the incorporated GEQ-ness.
- Melina burnt the Erdtree some time after Marika used it to eat the sun in an attempt to re-establish the balance of the world. I have no evidence to say that she was spurred to do this by a meeting with Shabriri, but it’s narratively satisfying to me.
Anyway, next post will hopefully be timeline and then I can close the book on this for a nice long while.
