Work Text:
Between Remembrance and Ritual
Morgan was practicing his necromancy lessons when his new sister obnoxiously danced into his room, laughing about something.
“What is it, Morgan?” Morgan hissed, looking up from the bedraggled remains of a dead cat. His sister was nothing more than a shadow of himself, a clone created through black magic by his dear mother as a gift to him. Although she kept things fairly interesting in the lonely halls of Plegia Castle, he sometimes second-guessed Mother’s “gift.” She did not even have a name of her own – she was merely an anima-model of himself, his “feminine nature” made flesh. He had not realized that he had such brattiness within himself until he’d witnessed it made manifest.
They both were training hard to serve Mother. They’d both become rivals for her affections. Strangely enough, they hadn’t been sent forth to do any of the mother’s serious business yet. Mother was busy gathering her army, the soldiers being a new kind of creature – warriors that were already dead, the fallen of many lands and skills. The dark magic of Grima, being a god of death, flowed into chosen bodies, lifting bones from the earth and awakening the flesh of the newly fallen that had died in the last wars that had lead up to Mother’s indwelling.
The “Risen” were beings without souls, but with some vague remembrance of their skills in life – the “lizard-brain memories” or the “muscle memory” Morgan called it. They were animate without breath, yet breathed dark magic-smoke from their rotting innards. Their sinews and bones were puppets of Grima’s will, yet they had a small amount of their own agency, mainly in tactical terms. They were the bodies that were resurrected to continue warfare that their spirits had long slipped from. Some of the “commander-class” individuals were even patched-together multiple-body flesh-golems that existed solely via the workings of dark magic. The only way to control and communicate with them was via the use of such powers. Morgan was studying to become a sorcerer, but at this point still only had the skill-level of a standard dark mage. Some of the living Grimleal dark mages helped him to learn, just as his clone-sister was being taught how to tame and ride wyverns. They were each to serve as Mother needed them. They were each to bring their weary world ultimate peace through silence and the deep night.
This was Mother’s idea of peace and Morgan did not stop to question it anymore. She’d backhanded him and sent him writhing with a curse across the stone-tile floor of the altar room before the Dragon’s Table the last time he’d asked an impertinent question. As it was, he’d lost too much. He was willing to do anything to spend time with his mother even though the Mother that he knew seemed to grow more shadowed and distant by the day. Just a ghost of her was enough. He needed her.
He needed her much more than he needed his sister.
“Mother’s given us a present!” she sang, standing on her tip-toes and leaning uncomfortably over his shoulder. “Don’t you want to see? It’s more of a present for you than for me, but I’ll play with it if you won’t!”
“Morgan, don’t hover!” Morgan growled. He’d been working a revenant-spell on a scraggly gray cat all morning. He could not get its veins to knit properly to carry the false-life energies. The boy had found that dark sorcery wasn’t much different than skills he had learned in his life previous to now. He’d been studying to be a healer, a Ylissean Naga-priest, although he ultimately wanted to become a tactician. His father had taught him how to work healing-energies to knit bodies back together, but those energies were to work with the living and to keep viable systems alive. Now, Morgan was trying to figure out how to reform the broken systems of the already-dead to bring back pure physical function rather than to keep spirit and body together.
He’d spent his childhood searching the fields and farms around the orphanage his family ran for small animals that had been wounded by the brutality of nature to practice healing on. He’d always sought out the unlucky, or asked the local farmers if their cows and sheep had chafing to their udders or any small cuts to help heal in order to learn stave-craft enough to eventually try serious healing on people. He’d never harmed anything to heal it, despite Aunt Miriel dryly suggesting it once as a way to test the science of healing. Now, Morgan gathered any small live animal he could find to kill it for his sorcery-practice or to cage it alive to use in cursing-experiments. Ultimately, their pain would be temporary and would advance his work. He needed to get strong to please Mother.
Morgan was not helping Morgan’s frustration at all. “You can’t even raise a cat yet?” she whined. “Mother’s not going to like your lack of skill. She might even take back the present.”
“Oh, alright! Where is this thing you want to show me so badly?” Morgan groused. He was skeptical of this “present.” Why hadn’t Mother given whatever it was to him directly? His sister was much like he was in his tactical studies, prone to making traps and devising pranks to lure unwitting Grimleal-servants into - and especially him.
He left the opened cat-carcass on his alchemy-table to follow his sister as she grabbed his wrist and pulled him along down a corridor to one of the inner rooms.
“Isn’t this one of the private places that Mother keeps only for herself?” Morgan asked.
“Don’t be a baby!” his sister scolded.
Morgan halted as soon as he ran into a familiar figure in a chamber-doorway. “Mother!”
“My dear son…” she responded with a dark smile from beneath her hood. She seemed to like hooding herself more often these days than when she’d been simply human. “I see that your sister has been successful in fetching you. Please come inside.”
Morgan stepped within the confines of the chamber. It carried an overpowering, familiar smell. The aroma was sweet and smoky – the odor of incense. He could see smoke curls wafting in the pale sunlight that streamed in from the high windows. Mother stepped aside and directed Morgan to the shadows where a tall figure stood.
“Come on out, darling and see your son,” Mother ordered the figure.
Morgan was certain that his heart had stopped for a moment. The mysterious person in the chamber stepped into the light.
“F-father?” Morgan yelped.
He looked like the day the surviving Shepherds had buried him. The man was dressed in stately Ylissean monk’s robes and battle-armor – the war monk’s uniform. A bit of grave-dirt clung to the braids in his hair. The priest was pale and his eyes were milky and suffused with a red light. He definitely was not alive.
“Why would you make a Risen from Father?” Morgan asked.
“Having a sister has failed to satisfy you,” Mother observed. “I have listened to your piteous crying at night for this one. We can be a family again, Morgan. Aren’t you happy with that?”
Morgan shook his head. He looked between his mother and the remains of his father. It was true that he was desperate to have them both back. He did not bother praying for his father’s soul anymore since he did not think Naga would even hear him after that outburst he’d had at her shrine in Ylisstol-castle the night a fresh corpse had come home to him in a convoy-wagon.
“This isn’t Father…” Morgan ventured.
“Libra, here.” Mother ordered. The dead priest stepped slowly to stand at her side. She rested a hand upon his shoulder. “Do you recognize your child, Libra? You know you do.”
Morgan followed his father’s unnerving red-light gaze.
“Mor..gan?”
“Yes. Morgan,” Mother said.
He held the staff he was carrying forth. “H-heal? Mor-Mor-gan… Heal you?”
Morgan’s jaw hung.
“No, darling. The boy’s body is fine,” Mother told the Risen-of-Libra.
She turned to her son. “He is not the same,” she intoned, “but the brain was fresh enough to retain some memory. Your father is dead, Morgan, but in this form there is some semblance of what he once was.”
Mother twirled her finger upon the Risen’s shoulder and then ran her hand along its cheek. “And the best part of our relationship now is that this part of him is completely obedient. It matters not to him that I was not his god in life, I am now. Bow.”
Libra’s body immediately went to its knees. He looked up at Mother like an expectant puppy.
Morgan backed out of the room.
“You do not like your gift?” Mother asked.
Father stood up and looked on, gurgling. “Mor-gan?”
Morgan warned up to his father’s partial-presence slowly. It began when he saw his twin “playing with the new toy.” He’d stepped into the room in which the Risen-of-Father was being kept one afternoon when he’d heard a commotion that sounded like typical Risen death-moans, but more intense. He’d caught the other Morgan forcing Father to crawl around on the ground. She stomped on his hands and kicked him in the ribs, laughing as he fell over.
According to his studies, Risen did not feel pain in the intense way that people did, but one that had a sufficiently fresh brain at the time of their “resurrection” could register some sensations that could be called “pain” for them. It helped them to avoid “lethal” damage in battle so that they knew when to retreat so they could keep fighting later. Morgan had immediately hit his sister with a bone-twisting hex and pulled her away from the man who’d once taught him how to heal.
The brat screeched and ran from the room as Morgan leaned over the helpless zombie, offering a hand to lift him up. “Are you okay, Dad?”
Father grunted.
Despite the fact that Libra was merely a Risen now, Morgan noticed small things about him that lulled him into the notion that he’d had his father back. Father always approached him gently and calmly. He’d grunt and gurgle in a tone that Morgan took to be “sad.” He also was capable of saying simple words. Mostly, he uttered “Mor-gan.” Occasionally, Morgan caught him uttering “Na-ga” and bowing in a well-practiced ritual of prayer that the boy was sure was hollow when the body had no soul inside of it to complete the devotion.
“Dad, she’s not going to hear you,” Morgan said, trying to pull him up. “You’re a Risen. You’re just a zombie. You’re doing this by reflex, aren’t you?”
Father shambled back to the shadows to sit in the lone chair in the room silently.
Morgan took note of the odors in the room whenever he visited Father. There wasn’t much of a rotten-smell, which surprised him. Many Risen reeked. Father had been well-embalmed and so the odor of decay had been minimal. Also, the entire room was kept in incense. This was a “Dad-smell” to Morgan – the aroma of prayer-shrines. Father had a habit of burning incense to Naga at least once a week when he had been alive at an altar in the orphanage. These days, the zombie would shamble to one burner or another and take a fresh stick or nugget to set softly aflame and let burn. Mother supplied him with a crate of the stuff – this to mask whatever smell he had for Morgan’s sake. However, Father seemed to keep up his rituals as if he’d never died.
He only ever uttered “Gri-ma” when Mother was around and ordered him to bow to her.
He also asked Morgan frequently “Heal? Heal?” while taking up a staff whenever the boy came by. Morgan would dismiss him. He wondered if Father, even in this form, noticed a distinct distress in him, something known by instinct.
Morgan would sit with him for hours and talk about his sorcery lessons and Mother’s plans for him and the world. He’d complain about his twin. All in all, even though Father wasn’t the same, it was nice to have him listen to him again.
And in this “life,” Father had all the time in the world for him. Morgan refused to share him even with sister-Morgan – at least, not after the beating-incident. She did not seem interested in Father at all except as another Risen around the palace to torture for her own amusement. She hadn’t known the real Father, after all. She had been “born” after he’d died. Unlike the original Morgan, she had no memories of the man, nor any emotional attachment.
It was late into the night when Morgan had finally achieved a principal goal in his dark magic work. He was certain that he could be promoted to an official sorcerer. He’d mended the neck on a longhaired black cat he’d found and broken the neck of. He’d wired up all of the veins and nerves correctly and had brought it into un-life.
He held “Mr. Muffin the Fifteenth” as he ran through the halls. The small beast uttered a deep, guttural “murroowl” in protest of being carried. He came to his mother’s chamber and was so excited that he did not even bother knocking on the door. He pushed it open and beheld something that froze his blood.
There, in the light of the full moon streaming in from the windows and of the magic-imbued light crystals in the corners was Mother in her coat and nothing else leaning over Father dressed in nothing but the sheet gathered around his waist. His pale skin shone in the dim light. His chest bore an ugly line and stitch-marks as did his stomach. The wound in his chest was from the sword that had killed him. The wound in his middle was from what other priests and clerics of Ylisse and done to prepare him for formal burial, packing in some of the herbs that masked his scent.
Mother gripped his shoulders and leaned against him, pressing her body to his. Both her eyes and Father’s glowed red. For his part, Father appeared completely numb to what was going on. He was merely a body, unaware of the seduction – looking every bit like he was being abused – not possessed of a will enough to consent. Mother must have missed him greatly to violate him like this.
She shot Morgan a glare. “Care to watch, boy?” she growled.
Morgan dropped the cat and ran.
In his former life, Morgan had never caught his parents being intimate together. They’d kept their private chambers under lock and key and honestly didn’t have a lot of time to even try making more than one blood-child. Also, as he remembered in the life before, Mother had never been too much interested in “touchy things” and his Father was outright uncomfortable with being touched too much.
His mother was fused with a god of death and his father was a dead man – he never thought he’d see anything like what his eyes had beheld.
He quietly went to bed and tried to forget it. His Risen-cat ascended the bed and curled up at his feet.
He had failed in a small mission, the first of his command. The people he’d been commanded to kill had survived. The squad of Risen had been assigned to him had been wiped out. The only saving grace to the mission was that his enemies had not seen his face nor had they heard his voice.
Morgan as well as his mother were, according to the remaining Shepherds, still “among the missing” since Grima’s appearance. According to rumors on the wind that the Grimleal told, there was much suspicion of Mother among the Ylisseans, since she was known to have been bred to be a sacrifice. Some correctly surmised that she had become one with Grima. Others thought she had become merely a snack for him. Morgan’s fate remained a mystery to them. He was presumed -eaten. The dragon-spirit darkened the skies by day as it flew over the lands with Mother riding upon the nape of its neck, always to return quietly to the castle to rest at her whim. Towns burned, but at this point, Mother had specific targets that she was hunting down, namely, everyone that she had once fought with and broke bread with in life and their children. Morgan did not like the thought of fighting his friends, but his faith in his mother did not allow him to question her orders. He wondered if he could try to meet some of his former friends and convert them to the Grimleal. He doubted it, but he hoped.
Perhaps it was his sentimentality that had led to him making poor decisions that had gotten his Risen rested by the swords of Lucina and Owain. Sir Fredrick had been no slouch in that battle, either. They and the troops they commanded had forced Morgan into a retreat.
He had hesitated. For this, he received lashes to the back, magic-borne, by Mother. Morgan had accepted his punishment. Mother was unpleased with him. He missed the days when she had been kind, but reminded himself that those were her “weak days,” before she had become the god she’d been born to be. He had to be strong now, for her – and he had to get stronger.
Still, with his sorcerer’s robes in tatters and his back oozing fresh blood, he ran to his father’s keep. He did not cry, but still desired some measure of comfort.
Father took one look at him and grabbed his staff. “Heal?” He asked.
“Yes, Heal,” Morgan commanded.
His father approached him and Morgan felt the familiar sting and soothing of a basic Heal-stave. It did not seem that nearly enough power was brought into the healing and it took longer than any time that his father had ever healed him before. Then again, Father had been alive then and his heart had been close to Naga. Now he was just a shell operating on ritual and reflex and maybe some semblance of memory buried within a half-decayed brain.
Even knowing this, for the first time in forever, Morgan felt like he was at home.
Morgan tossed and turned in dreams the night of his battle-failure. As he balled up his thin blankets against the arid-cold Plegian night air his eyes fluttered open. He did not know if he was awake or still asleep when he saw Father in his room.
He noted that what he was seeing was transparent, a figure in outlines. It was not solid and did not look like the Risen. In fact, Father was suffused with a glow as if he were standing in a sunbeam.
“Morgan,” he said gently, his voice free of the Risen-rasp.
“Father?” Morgan said, sitting up in bed and grabbing at his blanket.
“Yes, Morgan, it is me. By Naga’s grace I came here to let you know that I am at peace. I am not at complete peace because I have been worried about you.”
“Mother will be angry that you are not in your chamber without her permission to leave.”
“You must find your friends, Morgan. You need to go to them.”
The vision faded as mysteriously as it had come. Morgan blinked, rolled over and fell back asleep.
He concluded that his mind must be playing tricks on him.
Mother slated that Father should be in a battle. The Risen-of-Libra retained his fiercesome skills with axes and his healing-stave skills were capable of patching up torn-up Risen despite the fact that the energies that animated them were dark-magic borne and not the life in warm flesh.
Morgan came to his chamber to prepare him for the coming fight. He chose also to practice some of his practical magic, bringing in a few magic tomes. Father watched in dull fascination as Morgan brought up the glowing words and symbols of spells from his fire-based and lighting-based spellbooks before putting the magic away in the pages. He played with them off his hand without discharging them, thus saving their use for warfare, not wasting their limits or breaking his books. The spines on the magical tomes had a tendency to bust once every spell written in them was used. There were some rare tomes, so Morgan had heard, that did not do this, but he had yet to find them.
Meanwhile, he explained to his Risen-father what his role in the battle was going to be. Morgan could have sworn that the corpse gave him a look of sorrow, even more so than was usual for his father. Even in life, perhaps especially in life, Dad always had a softly-sad way about him. It was taken by everyone around him to be a dignified, graceful demeanor. Getting him to smile or laugh usually took the actions of children or Mother’s well-timed sarcasm.
In hindsight, Morgan decided that his parents did actually have a rather dark sense of humor. Few people outside the family or the longtime residents of the home understood it. Theirs was comedy that was shared between people who’d had hard lives and had seen many painful things, the laughter of both warriors and victims.
Now that the family’s life had become significantly darker, somehow the humor was gone.
“Na-ga,” the Risen grunted.
“Naga has turned her back on us,” Morgan said. “Maybe your spirit is with her, but the you that is here… you’re already dead. There is nothing she can do for you.”
“Na-GA!” Morgan’s father insisted, spitting out grunts and gurgles. He turned from his son and went to his knees before the room’s incense-laden altar. “Na-ga…G-g..gra..”
Morgan shook his head. The Risen was back to doing one of its meaningless rituals.
Then the Risen spoke clearly for the first time – an entire, articulate sentence. Although it had a bit of Risen-rasp, it sounded more like the long-lost voice of Father. It was almost as clear as in as the dream he’d had some nights ago.
Father was on his knees, his hands clasped and his reddened eyes looking out at nothing. He said slowly and distinctly: “Naga, grant me death.”
Morgan was stricken. Father turned his head and looked at him.
“Ah! Ah!” Morgan stuttered.
“Rest now,” the Risen said before repeating rather plaintively “Naga, grant me death.”
Morgan immediately brought up his Thoron tome, called a spell and shot a bolt through his Father’s chest. He stared as the spell sparked and his father’s war monk robes caught fire.
The Risen of his father looked at him straight and true. His lips curled into a disturbing, yet contented smile. He fell, spark and flame billowing up to consume him. Morgan bit his tongue and ran from the room down the halls and toward a secret area of the castle leading out into the open desert.
A voice echoed in the back of his mind, sounding like the Father he’d met in his dream – old Father.
“My prayers have been answered.”
Morgan ran farther and harder, his boots skidding in the sand. The voice came to him again.
“Find your friends.”
Morgan squint his eyes against the sun and just kept running. He tried to forget the horror of what he’d just witnessed – of what he’d just done. It had been and act of mercy. It had been an instant, instinctual trigger.
No, he had not liked the “present” Mother had given him in the end.
He hoped that somewhere, Father forgave him. Something in him told him that Father was thanking him.
The Risen had sounded, for just a moment, like it retained just the tiniest fragment of a soul – something trapped. If so, it was free now, brain-residue or spirit, whatever it had been.
The sun blazed down and Morgan felt cold. He shivered as he came to rest beside a large wind-sculpted boulder. He was wearing Mother’s old coat. He was getting sand all over its inner lining.
He had forgotten his canteen – not a wise move.
The boy curled up and cried for he didn’t know how long. Despite the lack of water, he was as quick as he could force himself to be to get on the move. He did not want his sister discovering him. He did not want his Mother to find him flouting orders.
His nose tickled from the lingering odors of incense and burning flesh.
His throat was scratchy and his head hurt when he saw a dim blue light in the distance up on what was the Ylissean border. He walked toward it numbly.
He thought of Father’s Risen-eyes, red but somehow cold.
“Heal?” echoed in his mind.
The bolt came off the boy’s fingers again in his imagination.
Suddenly, he felt… blank.
Where was he again?
There was something he was supposed to find.
He collapsed in the dirt.
“Get up!”
Someone was lifting him by the arms.
“Oh, how Lady Fortune smiles that we should find you! By the fickle finger of Fate, we thought we had lost you forever, yet we find you as the noble desert wanderer! You must have felt forever-alone, sharing the terrible darksome destiny of Owain Dark!”
“Shut up and help me with him, will ya?”
Voices… there was a multitude of voices. They somehow sounded familiar but Morgan could not place any of them. He felt himself being sat upright and force-fed warm water from a metal-tasting canteen-lip. He grunted and moaned at first, then found the lip of the vessel and drank down greedily.
He opened his eyes. There were people in front of him – one was a male with short, messy hair, another was a girl with her hair in twin-tails. The young man’s face looked cheerful, the young woman’s stern and annoyed.
“You alright, buddy?” the male asked. “You’ve been missing for almost two years! We thought you were dead.”
“Who… who are you again?” Morgan asked.
“Pah-lease!” the girl retorted. “Don’t pretend you don’t remember me, Morgan! It’s me, Severa! I might not have everyone talking about me like my ‘totally perfect’ mother, but can’t be sooo unremarkable that you’d forget me completely!”
“Owain Dark has grown through many hardships! Hath the mighty hero’s countenance grown too weary with age and battle-scars for his dear old friend to recognize?”
“I do believe that our friend needs rest and water,” a boy with a tall, floppy-rimmed hat intoned. “We do not know how long he’s been out here. He shows the classic symptoms of heat-exhaustion and dehydration. We should not expect too much of him at this point. Also, we have no idea what has transpired in the lad’s life for the long time we have been missing him.”
Morgan stared at all of these people – and more – in confusion. They all were staring back at him. They seemed to be close to his own age – not that he knew how he knew that before looking down at his long limbs and brushing up the sleeves of his coat.
The coat! It was his mother’s! Mother! Yes! He remembered that he had a mother who was an absolute strategic genius! She was kind and warm and smart! She taught him everything he knew about magic and they played board games and mapped out battle-scenarios together!
He looked at his calloused hands. Those were staff-worker’s calluses. He realized in that moment that he knew how to heal, too, using holy clerical-staves. Was he religious? Was he involved in the church? He knew that stave-healers were connected to that, but he did not know the root of the knowledge. Who had taught him how to heal? He felt like it was someone who had been very important to him, but he could not remember anything but hollowness in his heart. He felt like he was being stabbed in the soul and did not know why.
“Laurent, we have to go,” said someone to the boy in the floppy hat. “If we wait any longer… unwanted company may follow us through the gateway.”
“Lucina, Morgan is obviously not well.”
“We can treat him on the other side! We have to go! Now!”
Morgan looked up as he was being grabbed by both of his arms. He could have sworn that he saw a black-smoke shape and enormous glowing red eyes on the horizon. He was being pulled toward a shimmering gateway of blue light by the strangers who seemed to know him.
There were two things that he knew. The first was that he had to find Mother. The second was that although he could not remember what he was running from, he felt a deep soul-shiver of nameless fear.
Morgan awakened to the chipper tweeting of birds in an open field of tall grass. He did not know how long he had been asleep. He was alone.
He stood up and assessed that he was in a temperate climate zone, nowhere near a desert or beach, yet when he reached into an inner pocket of his mother’s coat he pulled out sand.
Probing the pockets further, he found some gold. He figured that if he walked in one direction, perhaps he’d find a town and he could ask where he was…
…And maybe who he was.
If he described his mother, maybe he’d find someone who knew her and they could be reunited?
Yes, mother was a tactician. That narrowed the search, at least career-wise.
The boy did not know why, but he felt the unexplainable desire to try to buy a set of light-priest’s robes and a healing staff.
He felt like he was forgetting, among the many things he did not know right now, someone supremely important to him.
He also felt a sad sensation inside him that told him that he wanted to forget.
The boy wandered on, his scrambled brain protecting him – at least until he’d found himself trapped by angry walking corpses with nothing but a healing staff on his person.
A group of strangers soon stumbled upon the same area he’d gotten himself pinned down in and came to his rescue. Mother was among them!
Why did she look so much younger than when he last remembered seeing her?
An elegant person with long blond hair fought beside her. Morgan knew that although the person looked like a woman and cried out with a feminine voice that they were a man. They had subtle masculine features that Morgan was surprised that he’d immediately picked up on. His heart beat rapidly. He felt connected to this very pretty man who was cleaving the skulls of monsters with a giant battleaxe. The man’s hair was the exact same color as his own, only it was better hair, silk-shiny and longer.
The boy dredged his mind for why this person was almost as familiar to him as his mother and came up with nothing.
Mother took him aside and shepherded him toward the axe-wielder. The man set his axe down and withdrew a clerical stave from his back.
Morgan was bleeding from a small cut on one arm. He was so full of fear and adrenaline that he hadn’t even noticed it.
“Would you like me to heal you?” the man asked.
Morgan nodded. He took the healing, grateful.
A new world was ahead of him. He never knew what he’d left behind. If he could have known, he’d be grateful for the amnesia.
He was innocent and free.
END.
Shadsie, 2016