Chapter Text
Raison D’etre
Thirteen
“Are you sure you’ll be warm enough in that?” you ask as Messmer trundles down the stairs toward you, one hand on the railing to favor his unsighted side.
“Hm? It should suffice.” He peers inquisitively down at his clothes once he reaches the bottom of the stairwell. He wasn’t dressed much different than usual, having added a dark woolen doublet with sleeves to his regular getup but, curiously, still leaving his legs mostly exposed. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing,” you say with a smile, “you look rather handsome.” You meant it, and no longer tell him so bashfully. Watching his face warmly react to your compliment as he joins you by the door, you sling a bag over your own thickly padded shoulder. “Shall we?”
“Let us.” He stoops to kiss the top of your head, covered with a knitted cap, then pats it sweetly under his great palm. Feeling its radiant warmth, you remember at once how he can stand to go out in the snowstorm so scantily clad.
Taking your arm in his, he could then activate the spell that transports you instantly with a brilliant flash of light. It always comes with a disorienting feeling, your stomach briefly turns from the floating sensation as air whooshes past. You squint your eyes shut at Shadow Keep, but when you open them again, fat snowflakes are falling before them. In fact, it is hard to see even a half mile ahead of you, and your breaths come in great plumes against the crisp winter air.
“The first part is a bit difficult, but worry not. I know the way.” He reassures, seeming grateful of your presence and eager to lead you wherever it is that you’re going. Glancing down at your legs, knee-deep in snow, he wonders aloud, “Wilt thou be able to walk in such conditions?”
You nod, and whistle for Torrent, who appears for you so that you may ride through the thick layer of snow over the ground alongside Messmer as he walks.
In the dead of each winter, he takes this trip in secret. Journeying far from his own realm to the frigid, ancient lands of the once powerful Fire Giants, he makes an offering to one of the few ceremonial pyres that still burns here. This year, you get to come along. You do not fully understand his connection to its flames, nor the near-extinct giants themselves, but quietly hope such things may become clearer to you on this expedition. And even more than this, you looked forward to a night of camp that your darling midnight star had begrudgingly agreed to.
***
By mid-day, you are already approaching the pyre. Perhaps demigods gave off some kind of aura that kept lesser enemies at bay, as you certainly recall having a harder time of it on your first trip through here almost two years ago. At first outset, there is much talk and laughter between you, but Messmer seems to tense, becoming quieter the closer you get to your destination. As you come upon it, reverence seems the more appropriate term. It feels somber somehow, the way he is looking at the historic building’s remains. The air prickles with it as you dismount Torrent to enter the sacred space with him, following just a few paces behind.
It is far more modest than the one you lit to burn the Erdtree, nestled within a sort of coliseum left to crumble with time. Even in the chill of this inhospitable land, something was evidently able to grow here once, for the enormous stone basin containing the ancient flame is lovingly wrapped with a thick tangle of gnarled, thorny vines. The flames themselves truly possess an otherworldly quality that enchants you fully as you both approach the pyre, feeling as if you are able to sense its primeval nature. Messmer places a hand on your shoulder as he begins to speak;
“This sacred fire has burned for so long, there is no record left that states who lit it. It shall burn as long as there is someone to look after it. Some of… my power… stems from this place.” He hesitates on the last part. Over your time together, you’d learned that he didn’t care to possess the gift of his flames, making you speculate on just when and how he had acquired them. You place your hand over top of his in a show of reassurance.
“It’s incredible,” you say, still looking around with awe at the unique stonework and dilapidated, overgrown statuary. “How come I never noticed this on my travels before?”
“Ah, that would be the illusory spell. I was surprised that thou could see through it without my assistance today. Good work.” You feel a little swell of pride at this, glad to see your hard labor at magic studies continuing to pay its dividends.
He then kneels in the snow to open one of the bags and rummage through it, perhaps searching for whatever offerings he’d brought and any tools he would need for this ritual. You watch him produce a bulb-shaped vial of what you hope is wine, a gold chalice, and a surprisingly plain looking dagger with a leather wrapped handle. You wonder briefly if someone who didn’t have so much trust in him might be nervous at seeing these items come out.
Placing the cup on the pyre’s edge, he pours wine from the small decanter, letting it flow over his right palm and then run into the chalice. The scorched part in the middle of his hand draws your eye as it is even deeper darkened by the wine’s color. He stops a little more than halfway through, and looks over his shoulder toward you, wordlessly beckoning you to his side. Your heart begins to race as you step forward.
“Wouldst thou like to feel… what it is like?” He holds out his hand to you, surely asking for the upturned palm that you are cautiously offering him. Taking your tiny right hand and guiding it over the cup, he again begins to pour. “I should warn thee, it is painful. But if the flame so chooses, its blessing shall remain.”
As he again begins to pour, it feels as if the well-chilled wine is searing your very flesh the instant it touches you. This heat seems to flow through your hand, up your arm and into your chest like water, gripping your insides and swirling within you as if you’d drunk from a boiling pot.
“I- It’s very warm…” you marvel as steam begins to bellow from your palm.
Messmer hums, impressed that you are withstanding the intense heat of this minor blasphemy. As he finishes off the flask, and the last lava-hot drops of wine drip from your palm into the ceremonial cup, you feel the ribbon of warm residual magic within your chest settle much like a serpent over your stomach. He whispers an ancient word over your shoulder, and tells you to repeat it.
A tiny flame emerges in your palm when you do, like a candle’s wick, and Messmer reaches out right away from either side to guard it from the wind. It has the same fantastical quality as the flames you remember from fighting the very man that kneels next to you, now sharing one of his deepest burdens with you in a very tangible way. Within its glow you see tiny tendrils of dark begin to take shape, like a sproutling tree’s branches swaying in a storm. You crouch silently there together and witness your little flame’s dance until you can no longer sustain it, suddenly feeling the sting of its heat on your skin, and release its form. It dawns on you then, that he may not be entirely immune to his own fire.
“Well done.” he says quietly beside you as you let out a long-held breath, his hands finding your shoulders and giving them a tender squeeze. “There is more I must do.”
Rising from his kneel in the snow, it is now time to take up the dagger, and with a sshik—, he cuts away a small lock of his hair from its innermost layer.
Messmer says a few words, asking for ancient divine spirits to make his furnace golems burn strong in the coming year, that they lend their power to his cause, and of course that the blessed Queen Marika watch over your souls. You’d normally feel a bit uneasy at her mention, but your mind and heart were so consumed with the intimacy of what had just occurred here. You had been prepared to simply stand by and watch this ritual, yet he had invited you to be part of it, to hold in your own hand the searing heat of his flames. It felt as if a part of him had now truly made its home within you. You lay a hand on his forearm at the pyre’s edge, and he looks surprised as you wordlessly offer to take the dagger.
As you cut away a chunk of your own hair, identical in size, and extend it out over the flame in unison with his, emotion overwhelms you. Tears sting your eyes.
Demigods tended to affect the people and things around them. You could tell the length of a Fire Knight's employ by how long their limbs had grown, how thin and how pale, and how closely the hue of their fine red hair matched their lord’s. The castle itself and each creature within it reacts to his emotional state, resonating with his evident joy, anger, sadness and all else. You too, are now attuned closely to his senses in this way. Finding that as your hands work together to drop each offering into the ominous fire, you feel the great swell of pride, hope, fear, and yearning that accompanies this action to him. It all washes over you as if you’d plunged to the bottom of a cool lake in summer.
Perhaps to show its acceptance of your offerings, the flames swell and spark several feet into the air with many dazzling colors. Like a massive desert opal it gleams and wavers, showing you hues reserved normally for celestial bodies in its spectrum. You and Messmer lean into one another, silently watching its brilliant show, feeling deeply accomplished and as if you were closer now than ever before.
***
Camping out once in a while is nice, isn’t it? Though you’d been reaping the many benefits of a warm bed each night, the charm of sleeping under the stars had its appeal in an almost nostalgic way. Well, not exactly under the stars tonight, you supposed, but close enough.
An offshoot of the road nearby the pyre’s clearing led to a cave rich with a mineral that made its crystals glow. You covered its opening with a heavy pelt, and set to work right away on starting a modest fire. The wind howled outside, accompanied by thick snowfall and the occasional distant wolf’s cry. Messmer is not in his element, but your experience makes things easy. He simply sits beside you, scrawling in a small notebook and keeping you company as you prepare a simple meal.
“Could I use the ceremony wine?” you ask, stirring a tiny iron kettle of seedy rowa fruits, herbs and lamb’s shoulder that had just begun to smoke. “I read that it’s good to cook with, it lends its imbued properties to the dish. Unless it offends the ritual somehow.”
“Of course, it is not against our creed to consume spent offerings.” He reaches into his bag to hand it to you, and you thank him as he goes back to his note taking.
“What is it you’re working on?” You ask, pushing the bottle’s cork free with both thumbs. It takes you a bit of effort before it releases with a satisfying pop.
“Sigils. To keep our hiding place… hidden.”
With a snicker, you pour the wine and it sizzles pleasantly against the hot iron. The smell of it fills the space, even after placing the lid over top to stew for a while. You set to work peeling a heartily sized red apple, and peer warmly over at him as he writes. He looks a little funny to you, with his serpents hiding away beneath his cloak all day to fend off the great chill. His right leg still bore the scar Radahn left him with several months ago, that you had healed to the best of your ability at the time. You’d offered to try again, but he liked to keep it as a memento.
“I still think we could have beaten him, you know. If he had stuck around.” You say, causing Messmer to look up at you inquisitively. You gesture to your own leg where the scar would be, and he understands who you mean.
He scoffs. “And incur Miquella’s ire? Well, at least he would be without the protection of his consort, then.”
This word had come to bring you great satisfaction; consort. You wear an expression that says as much. Turning the apple against your knife, you ask him wistfully, “Would you be mine?”
“Consort? But that would makest thou…” There is always a pang of shame in him for even thinking it. He gingerly puts down the notebook, his tone soft and cautious as he asks, “What dost thou seek to do… if lordship were within thy favor?”
“Hmm…” You think for a moment without pausing your work. “I’d like… to see the things that humans can create when we aren’t simply focused on surviving, I suppose. As things are, we are constantly at war. We die young from disease or from battle, or live in fear of the many monsters and great ills the Empyreans have wrought against the world. Yet, we have accomplished a great many things, I’ve seen them in both cities lost to time and villages that burned still as I rode through them.” You lean back against your bag, admiring the now skinless fruit in your hand before slicing it into fat wedges, its peel having fallen in one long strip onto your lap. You go on,
“Machines, buildings, breathtaking works of art throughout the land by nameless faces… They could create more if I let them. If I one day became… lord… I should like it to be an age of true enlightenment.” You think for a moment, cutting away the apple’s core. “But in reality, it is difficult to picture where to start. So for now, I fight.” You smile, extending the slice of apple toward him, held with care between your thumb and the knife’s blade. He slowly reaches out to take it.
It was so unlike what Miquella wanted. In his perfect world, individuals would no longer be allowed to remain themselves. Like sharing one vast consciousness without meaning, one that could not create or love or fight back. To be under his spell was to live on a potent drug, neglecting your own needs and wants for the throes of your undying devotion to him. When your body eventually wastes away, even your soul is indebted to him for eternity. You’d both seen it beginning to take root across the scorched earth of the Realm of Shadow, from his most loyal living soldiers to the shambling ghosts that moan his name and whisper still of his divine beauty.
He then thinks of his storehouse, filled to its highest shelves with artifacts left from his lifetime of cleansing this land of the Hornsent, and his blood runs cold. Your heartfelt desire seemed to embody forgiveness itself, while his very being represented a deep and utter lack of it. It tightens his throat, and he can’t think of a single thing to say to you. An ugly, panicked thought emerges from the pit of his stomach.
If there is one day no Order left to avenge… then what is my—?
“Ah, I think it’s ready.” You had lifted the wooden pot lid to release a plume of delicious-smelling steam. “I haven’t had the chance to cook for a long time, I hope you like it.”
You heap perfect, fluffy rice grains into wooden bowls, ladling tender hunks of meat and their tangy, deep red sauce over them. He looks a bit skeptical as you hand him the messy-looking dish, doubting that even someone of your talents could produce something edible in a cold and miserable cave such as this one.
To your relief, his face lights up when he tries it. “It’s even better than at home.” he tells you, with his mouth full.
“Well, don’t tell the cooks that.” You laugh, caught off-guard by the bluntness of his praise. “They’d be distraught to hear it. But, thank you all the same.” You proceed to dine and chat, as you always do, as though no great revelations had taken place here. When you’d eaten more than enough, having had eyes much bigger than your stomach, he swiftly offers to finish yours too.
While you feel a deep intimacy and closeness from today’s events, Messmer sets to the subconscious work of building a wall within himself, to guard his heart from the possible futures you could be catalyst to. Beneath his surface roils a sea, churning with the uncertainty now held in serving Marika’s order, as well as the crushing guilt that comes with wondering just how your order would serve to change the wretched world he had been left to suffer in. He dares not think it, for any waver in his devotion would surely bring defeat to his cause and to those in his service.
And to Queen Marika.
You roll out a thick mat, just barely too small for the both of you, and huddle closely to rest for the night. With his hand upon your ribs, he feels as you draw each delicate sleeping breath, and the weight of indecision settles in.
He cannot say how all of this frightens him.