Maidenless No Longer (Elden Ring)

Chapter 32: Melina

A/N: This chapter and the next are pretty fucking heavy, or at least they're meant to be. You should hopefully get a gut-wrenching feeling by the end of this if I wrote it right.

-x-X-x-

She had been confused, at first. While their earlier journey had not exactly been rushed or particularly urgent, Melina had felt like, in the wake of their newest pact, there would be a sense of purpose attached to their need to reach the Mountaintop of Giants as fast as possible.

But instead of making his way ever onward, her Tarnished had descended into the depths beneath Leyndell. Instead of making for the forbidden lands, he had entered the Subterranean Shunning Grounds.

Upon reaching the Cathedral of the Forsaken, and facing Morgott's twin brother, Mohg the Omen, Melina had thought she understood her Tarnished's goal. He had slain the one brother... perhaps it made sense to slay the other. Omens were pitiable creatures, but also misbegotten and curseborn wretches all the same. In the wake of Morgott's death, who was to say that Mohg would not rise up to cause trouble?

She had been ready to praise her Tarnished for the act, and ready for them to finally move on... when he had instead rolled against the back wall of the Cathedral. In doing so, he had exposed a long forgotten cruel secret of the Golden Order that her mother had built. So long forgotten and so cruel was it, that Melina herself didn't know what was happening until the Tarnished was already making his way into the depths.

This was the Frenzied Flame Proscription. Half-buried catacombs, so deep in the earth below the Royal Capital that they lay even beneath the Subterranean Shunning-Grounds, which in turn lay beneath the sewers. When she saw the Nomadic Merchants, when she heard the music being played, Melina's heart had stopped in her chest, despite her incorporeal form.

The bodies were numerous. Merchants who had once thrived as members of the Great Caravan, only to be accused of heretical beliefs. Their entire clan had been rounded up by the Golden Order, and buried alive far beneath the earth, even further down still then the Royal Omen Twins had been buried. It would have been kinder to the world, in Melina's humble opinion, if they'd been buried dead, rather than alive.

For in leaving them alive down here to suffer eternally, the Golden Order had given these merchants the chance to chant a curse of despair... and summon the flame of frenzy that gave this area its name this day.

As her Tarnished reaches the bottom of the massive chasm, Melina wants nothing more than to stand in his way. Straightening up from his final fall, she watches him stare at the doors that lead to the Three Fingers. No... no, no, no...

Just as despair is welling up inside of her however, he stops, turns, and begins walking in another direction. Melina can only blink, as he makes his way to a seemingly nondescript section of the wall and rolls right through it, somehow knowing it to be an illusion as well. She can only watch on, stunned, as he goes from the Frenzied Flame Proscription into the Deeproot Depths.

So relieved is she, by his seeming rejection of those doors, that she barely pays much mind to what he does next. Oh, certainly, it's all a little bit alarming, what he and the Deathbed Companion Fia get up to together. Not that Melina minds her Tarnished having his way with the other woman. After all, she cannot be there for him in that way anymore, so it's for the best, isn't it?

And at the same time, it's not her place to remark or judge what he intends to do in reforming the Elden Ring. If it is his wish to take the Mending Rune that he and the Deathbed Companion made together in the throes of passion and add it to his form of the Elden Ring, who is Melina to comment on the matter? No, she'll be long dead by the time her champion sits upon the Elden Throne as Elden Lord. Better to leave her feelings on the matter to herself.