goldhunt

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I love when ppl meet D and think of me skdkddkfj my legacy is enjoying a niche elden ring npc

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how i operate this blog

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welcome to tumblr dot com slash goldhunt where we live in the rarest of rarepair hell

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d returns home only to find vyke already there. "finally."

their peace was never going to last forever. they both knew it. vyke, who made darian swear to let him go. darian, who quietly sharpened the blade and kept wood stocked. their bliss would end eventually and they thought to anticipate the recipe of its dissolution, as if it might prepare them for the inevitable.

never once did darian think the end would come this way.

dressed in flowy silks, thinly veiled vitriol in a tone of voice that calls his name as if a mother about to reprimand a child. oh, d... in the middle of the small lake, fia seemed akin to an apparition. a ghost of the past, of an age long gone. he had never seen her outside of the hold and so she seemed misplaced. the sunlight made her hair shine even under the hood, glistening gold more bright here than he remembered from the dimly lit room she commanded for herself. it seemed wrong, for her to be in the light. she had found him unarmed save for a small knife he used to cut through fishing nets and scrape the scale off his catch, or crack open the shells of sweet-water crabs. death came to him standing barefoot in the water, trousers rolled up, his face hot in the sun. (and death brought spirits. the whisling glintblades of an erstwhile lover turned against him.) the shallow water swallowed his scream when the thorns took root. above him, a bleary shimmer of the witch's face. she disappeared then just the same as she came.

the way home feels like an eternity. by the time darian reaches the garden gate, the sun has dropped low behind the horizon. the ascent is a blur, his focus wholly on keeping his insides on the inside, every branching thorn searing agony. they catch on his torn shirt, biting deeper into the flesh from which they sprout. light pours out of their small hut's windows. smoke rises from the chimney. when darian stumbles through the door, it smells of bread and rosemary.

relief falls over him like heavy drapery. vyke is there, unharmed, waiting for him. unharmed. waiting. finally ...

he's left bloody handprints on the door. "vyke..." he tries to take a step toward him, and falls.

@lrdvyke / A YELLOW SUNRISE

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whoever it was that said the twins' maiden couldn’t find them because they were in different places and so she fucking died in the process I hope you know I still think about that

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your bi-weekly darianpost. goodbye

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forever fascinated by the fact that the golden order accepted the d twins when no one else would, implying that even if there was no explicit doctrine re soul-sharing, it was at least tolerated. but the marika-radagon rebis was somehow so earth-shattering a revelation it drove the most learned scholars to despair.

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vyke has become, although still intimately familiar, akin to a stranger. once upon a time they understood each other—never perfectly aligned, with mismatches broadening a gap between them, but never one that felt too great to cross. now, though they have shared breaths in a closeness connected by the blade of his sword, vyke yet feels out of reach. darian speaks sharply, and it marks him changed, too. or perhaps this disdain had been always within him, subdued only by a greater loyalty that has since fallen, a love he still holds but feels a stranger to.

it is worth something. even as he looks at an unfamiliar silhouette, now this knight of miquella, hidden again behind a helm while darian's face is now bare. even quiet as it is, the apology is meaningful. and so darian lets up, though the wound remains. his silence is, perhaps, answer enough.

he picks himself up and follows. catacombs.

"you think i should fare better in the company of imps and living corpses?" he asks dryly, but lacking in malice. this whole land seems naught but a haven of misery. from the great dragon he'd spied laying dead far away, to the keep that seeps darkness, to the shadowy spiral and the darkened shadow-tree. darian had not yet come so far as to see the sprawling fields of cerulean flowers on the coast, or their crimson sisters below. yet even that beauty would be shortlived in his mind, nothing but pretty drapery over a land of rising dead. it will be some time ere he resigns himself to the fact that he has become one of them, and forever will be.

in his palm he finds the scale seal. as they walk, he looks down at it as if surprised to find it there, as if he had not been holding it ever since vyke gave it to him. after a moment's hesitation, darian puts it away, into the leather pouch on his belt he had picked off a dead soldier. every step hurts, though less so with time, and he picks up the pace to not fall behind.

"you know well that i would not seek peace with the undead..."

and yet, where else might he go? his mind drifts to rogier again. the one he had been looking for. he cannot bring himself to speak his name aloud. so he just follows the guidance of the man in gold. "where will you go? what does miquella ask of you?"

Vyke nods to the question of Miquella. Where the demigod is now, he cannot rightly say. There is more to do, more to find, for the little divinity, and Vyke was not meant to be a part of it. Not until the last, or so he has been told, just like the others who look towards the sky in hopes for another whisper from the golden son. The small group touched by the demigod's hands, healed in more ways than physical, given promises of a better tomorrow if only they gave him their loyalty. It is a price that is not hard to pay, that unlike the Frenzy, or so Vyke desires to hope, to silently plead ...

Yet it is in Darian's comment that has him stiffening some. He does not look at the other. He merely freezes before lowering just to grab his helmet from the ground. It is slight regardless, he hopes it does not show. Slowly, he flicks the dirt away from the shining surface, staring down at it as if it is far more interesting than the world itself. It shifts in his hands, reflecting the dull sun and the tarnished gold.

❛ I am aware, ❜ he starts, the words come out measured and deliberate, ❛ I have wronged you. ❜ But they still fall ashen upon his tongue. He does not go on. There is a small struggle to do so, as he opens his mouth to say more before closing it with a twist of his lips. What is there to say? It is hard to argue against a point you ultimately agree with; even if a part does not desire to reconcile it. To bring to mind and think thoughts he has already contended with for however long he sat suspended within the evergaol.

Thus, with a small, strangled grunt, Vyke puts his helmet back on.

❛ I'll show you to safer grounds so that you may get your bearings and figure out what to do, ❜ Vyke then says, voice now muffled behind shining metal as he looks back at Darian. ❛ It is better this way, for this place holds no mercy for the ills it has been done. Though you may very well find peace among a different crowd, one you are not all too stranger to, deep within the catacombs. ❜

A solemn tinge to his words, but he says them nonetheless even if regret trails close behind. Vyke struggles for a moment to simply turn back around and start leading the way, staring as he does through a thin slit at the man he would have given his all to had there been a different path. It is no surprise to Vyke that love remains in his heart, even when he knows he should not. That it may very well be an insult after leaving the way he did.

❛ ... For what it is worth, ❜ he says quietly, ❛ I am sorry. ❜

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spending my thursday night on the d's bell bearing wiki and

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ROUNDTABLE HOLD

The bustling hub area that exists outside of the Lands Between. A place to mingle with other adventurerers, craftsmen, resupply and discover a trove of blessings and rooms of secrets.

[goldhunt]

D, Hunter of the Dead, or Darian, is easy for a lot of people to hate. He’s rigid, allied with the Golden Order, and a hunter of the undead, who may be in need of mercies which the Order isn't interested in providing. I often see him written off as sort of bigoted, callous, an asshole, and given little in the way of nuance that is afforded to (almost all of) the rest of the cast of complicated characters we encounter. So I’d like to try to tease out those shades of grey, highlight the very human tragedy of his backstory, as well as make a few (hopefully interesting) observations about his parallels with both Fia and Morgott.

🚨🚨SPOILERS AHEAD🚨🚨

I. A quick recap

Players can first meet Darian near Summonwater, where he warns us about the Tibia Mariner and Those Who Live in Death. If we harvest the Mariner’s deathroot and return to him, he’ll offer to show us to the Bestial Sanctum and ask us to take his place as Gurranq’s servant. He will move to the Roundtable Hold and gives us a little info on who he is, who he serves, his bitterness towards Rogier, and will teach us incantations which are especially effective against the undead. We can summon him for help in two fights: one against a Mariner in eastern Liurnia, and another against a Black Knife Assassin in the Black Knife Catacombs. If you’ve kept up with Fia’s quest, she’ll ask you to bring the Weathered Dagger to its original owner. Interacting with Darian while having this item will result in him wondering where you got it, offering to take it off your hands, and thanking you for it. Next time you come to the Roundtable, he’ll be dead, presumably killed by the Fia’s Mist spell.

II. The allure of acceptance in an otherwise hostile world

As with most characters, we’re given very little info about who Darian and Devin were or where they’re coming from. Info from the Inseparable Sword tells us:

The inseparable twins found solace in the Golden Order, the only institution not to revile them as accursed beings.

The reason for the harsh treatment appears to be related to their strange nature. The twins share a single soul between them, living otherwise as distinct, autonomous persons. Per the Twinned Set:

The two known as D are inseparable twins. They are of two bodies and two minds, but one single soul.

Elden Ring is full of curses and shunned beings, so it’s not all that surprising that the world saw these kids with their weird spiritual situation and just weren’t having it. What is surprising at first glance is that the Golden Order, who are generally experts at reviling aberrant lifeforms, are the ones to accept them. But it makes some sense. Marika birthed not one, but two sets of cursed twins. And of course, Marika and Radagon have a very similar condition. In the fight within the Erdtree, we see them as one singular body, shifting between two aspects. It likely wasn’t always this way, and they were probably two distinct beings at some point, like Darian and Devin. Aside from how impractical it'd be to ask us to believe that no one noticed these two high profile rulers were never active at the same time, the wording of some of Marika’s echos indicates the two were not sharing a single body at some point:

O Radagon, leal hound of the Golden Order. Thou'rt yet to become me. Thou'rt yet to become a god. Let us be shattered, both. Mine other self.

All of this is to say, Marika and Radagon’s nature may have at one point been exactly like the D twins: a single soul shared between two bodies. This is further teased at by the fact that we receive the Inner Order gesture from Devin, and the Outer Order after listening to Marika’s words in a church. While the placement of these gestures was likely much more about illustrating the difference in blind faith versus an examined one, given Marika’s dialog there, it’s certainly interesting that we are given these paired gestures by these two characters. It’s not common knowledge to people of the Lands Between that Marika and Radagon are the same, but perhaps enough people in the upper echelons of the Order know this so as to recognize the similarity, and thus accept Darian and Devin.

It's clear why the Golden Order might make an exception for the D twins. It also conveniently sets the stage for some very fanatical devotion. It’s easy to write off fanatics. After all, they’re, well, fanatical. They’re rigid, unchanging, uninterested in adapting to new information which sheds any unflattering light on their new group. We’re all quite susceptible to this, our propensity towards tribalism once being a valuable trait which helped us to survive in our species’ infancy. The D twins get this kind of cranked up to 11 because they suffered a lifetime of being not just unwanted, but actively despised by everyone. They’re reviled for something they have no control over. We don’t know anything about their life as children, but it wouldn’t be surprising to learn they were abandoned by their parents if all institutions saw them as reviled. It could be that their parents were also adherents of the Golden Order, but given that they are Tarnished, and that the Inseparable Sword description specifies that they found solace rather than took solace or similar wording, it reads as though they may have only really had each other until the Order took them in.

What does something like that do to a person, especially if they lived with such cruelty as children? The need to belong is fundamental to our being, and shunning on a societal level like this would be pretty devastating. And it isn’t just one society that’s repulsed by you – it is every society except one. While the Golden Order has done horrible things, that becomes a lot harder to focus on when the hands that have committed those wrongs are the first to ever be extended to you in kindness. It’s hardly surprising then that Darian doesn’t just serve the Order, but has woven it into his identity. He doesn’t have any interests to share with us outside of his dedication to the Golden Order, like Rogier with his desire to be a scholar. He was given a purpose by the only people to show him acceptance, and he will pursue it doggedly.

III. Morgott and Darian – “Thy kind are all of a piece”

I mentioned before that the Order may have been accepting of the D twins due to Marika’s own 2 sets of twins. Malenia and Miquella have no significant similarities to Darian and Devin. And while Mohg shares a sense of instability with Devin, they don’t have much more in common beyond their cursed nature. Darian and Morgott, however, share a handful of interesting parallels.

They’re both reviled and rejected due to the circumstances of their birth. Cursed through no fault of their own, both were likely abandoned for it and kept from participating in society. Both serve the Golden Order fervently, with Morgott presiding over Leyndell as king while Darian hunts the dead on their behalf. In spite of being mistreated for what they are, they both perpetuate that mistreatment onto others like them. Morgott keeps the Merchants imprisoned, and leaves the Omens to wallow in the sewers. Darian hunts Those Who Live in Death while refusing to accept Rogier’s discovery that they are a result of a flaw in the very thing Darian has devoted himself to.

And both have a less than stable twin brother, one they never mention but for whom we might be able to reasonably assume they care about all the same as they were both likely each other’s only companion for much of their lives. When naming all of his siblings as traitors, Morgott notably leaves out Mohg from his condemnations. Darian, if killed by the player, begs his brother’s forgiveness, and keeps his very existence under wraps, with only Rogier appearing to know of Devin. Of further note, Morgott and Darian walk above ground, under the light of the Erdtree, while both Mohg and Devin live beneath the earth, in the endless night of the Eternal Cities.

IV. Rogier – “Such adaptability is more important now than ever...”

Besides Gurranq, the only other person we hear much about from Darian is Rogier. The dialog these two give about each other indicates that they meant a lot to each other before their fallout. I touched on it in my post about Rogier, but in essence, while Rogier appears composed and maybe even a bit wistful about their old days, Darian seems to stew and fume with resentment. He talks about Rogier as someone who used to be all of these positive things, but that he gave it up when he fell from the righteous path and took up with Those Who Live in Death, ultimately becoming a victim of them.

Yet in spite of their apparent split, we still catch Darian helping Rogier out with his research. He tells Rogier about the markings he found in Summonwater, and he fights a Black Knife Assassin in order to help us bring the knife print back to Rogier. There’s a strange little back and forth between them and I can’t help but read it as Darian navigating an internal conflict he’s not all that familiar with. After all, he’s unlikely to have had a friend like Rogier before, given how he was hated by everyone. So he’s even more unprepared to deal with losing that singular positive relationship he had with another person who wasn’t his own brother, or ordained to accept him. So he struggles, both resenting Rogier for his sacrilegious discoveries and maybe regretting parting ways to begin with. It has him fuming one moment then bringing back peace offerings the next.

They’re a classic case of opposites attracting, and the polarity between the refusal/acceptance of change was their downfall. Rogier encountered new information, was able to integrate that into his reality, made the challenging admission that he’d been doing wrong, and tried to fix it. Darian listened, but simply shut it down. It’s easy to write it off as bigotry, fanaticism, or whatever else – Fia indicates that the undead are unjustly persecuted by the Order, and Rogier tells us they aren’t malicious but rather unfortunate bystanders. Darian is too rigid in his beliefs to accept change, especially a change so radical as this. And he’d have to admit that he and Rogier may have been perpetuating an injustice in their brutal treatment of Those Who Live in Death.

I think there’s another pretty important factor in this which is often overlooked in discussions of Darian’s inability to adapt to the idea of a flawed Golden Order. And that’s in how much of his self-worth, his self-esteem, is going to inevitably be tied to the only people in the world to accept him and his brother as being fit for life. He wasn’t just exiled from his home after witnessing Grace like Fia or Roderika, he was reviled by everyone from day one. As I’ve said before, this leaves an indelible mark on a person, and such extreme shunning and forced isolation from society are a form of psychological torture. This is bound to leave a person with some trauma and maladaptive traits, and one that is relevant here is Darian’s inability to handle the Golden Order being mistaken about something so personal. This isn’t some mild administrative mistake, or even a major miscalculation in a war. It is a mistake about who is accursed and who isn’t, who is fit for society and who isn’t. And if they’re mistaken about the dead, who else are they mistaken about?

Normal people who have normal lives have a hard enough time accepting change. And those normal people have an even harder time taking in that change if it conflicts with some belief they already hold dear. So for someone like Darian, a change like this is not some trivial adjustment. It could be world-shattering for him, and would take loads of effort to accept, an effort he’d then have to make entirely on his own since his initial reaction was to flee from the conflict that brought it on altogether. He left Rogier, unable to handle this revelation, finding it easier to deny it altogether than accept it. And that in itself must tell us how painful this new truth would be for him – as someone viewed as accursed by all societies outside of the Order, Rogier very well could have been his only friend. Darian was willing to sever that link in an effort to preserve the reality where he has acceptance and a place in society. It is a very human reaction, and one that I feel deserves a little bit of reflecting on when we consider Darian and his motivations. This isn’t a standard case of someone being a stubborn ass because they can’t admit they made a mistake. This is something akin to cult indoctrination, when a traumatized person’s identity is far too wrapped up in people who told them that they are good, and that it’s everyone else who doesn’t love them.

V. Fia and Darian as caregivers

These two have more in common than you might think initially, since they’re positioned on opposite ends of the spectrum in the matter of death. While Fia seeks to uplift the dead, Darian would terminate them. One reviles the Order while the other reveres it. But both know very well what it is to be an outcast. Fia is exiled from her home after seeing Grace, and upon her arrival to the Lands Between is seen by some as “vulgar”. It’s her first taste of receiving the kind of scorn Darian would’ve known all his life.

But she still finds it in herself to care for others. And I would argue that Darian does too. Fia seeks to bear the hatred and disgust others have for the dead, to protect them from persecution. She has a gentle bearing that invites us to let our guard down around her, is soft spoken, steady, and calm. Darian shares a similarly placid disposition for the most part. Where Fia wants to protect the dead, Darian seeks to protect others from them. While he hunts the dead for the perfection of the Order, he clearly cares about the people the dead inflict themselves on. Upon first encountering him in Limgrave, we overhear him speaking to one such victim of Those Who Live in Death, saying:

I'm sorry, I cannot give you your proper rites... But at least you did not join Those Who Live in Death. Your soul will return to the Erdtree, in time.

He gives what comfort he can to this person, admitting that it isn’t much. And he does his best to warn us away from the village, trying to keep us from harm. When we return with the deathroot, he names us a comrade. Contrast this with Tanith or Varre, who ask us to kill for them to prove our allegiance. Darian does the opposite, telling us to leave the dead alone lest we fall victim, chastises us as foolish for taking such a risk to get the root anyway, and then invites us to serve Gurranq. He’s uninterested in pressuring or forcing us to join him, much less in having us bloody our hands for his own approval.

In his cut dialog for the Dreambrew quest, his thoughts go not to his own personal enjoyment of the drink we offer him, but to the victims of the dead. He says:

Alcohol, to make a libation? A fine idea. The Lands Between brim with the dead. If a drink can serve even as a small rite of remembrance, that is enough.

And then there’s probably the most blatant symbolism of this caring nature seen in the form of his armor and his posture with it. He literally holds his other half protectively in his idle stance, cradling the head of his twin as he is clutched by this smaller, frailer form. Even in death, repositioning the camera beneath him shows him shielding the bust as if to protect it from Fia’s fatal attack on him.

I often see Darian characterized as cold because of his distaste for the undead. But all of these little things about him add up to me as someone who is more concerned with being conscientious and caring of the living.

VI. Conclusion

I don't anticipate changing many minds about Darian. This is a pretty niche corner of an already niche fandom, after all, and it's super tempting to pick sides in search of which group in the game is right or wrong, which is going to pave the best way forward. Most characters in the game are doing something less than moral in an effort to advance an agenda, whether their own or that of who they serve. But at the same time, they usually have interesting and sympathetic motivations pushing them towards those goals. Fia murders Darian and never tells us her true goals until we find her with Godwyn, never letting us know that we were assisting her in killing someone, maybe even a friend, when she handed us that dagger. But she does all this in an effort to protect those she sees as persecuted. Darian is the one persecuting that group, but he does it as someone who has seen the violence the dead inflict on the living, as someone who has lived the very same persecution, as a servant to the only people to ever stay that persecution for him the way Fia would for the dead. This game is not interested in giving us neatly delineated good guys and bad guys for the most part, which is what makes their stories so compelling even when we're only given a few breadcrumbs. But it's also why it's strikes me as a bit short-sighted to write any one of them off as wholly irredeemable.

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been thinking about twlid a lot lately and why is that lore so convoluted. what the fuck even is the actual biological connection between death root, death blight, and twlid like—- dead people touched by death root become twlid but what the fuck is fia

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the scale feels foreign in his palm still. it isn't meant for him. he doesn't want it. vyke, meanwhile, seems almost as if he wished to never see it again. darian is uncertain if it is the congealed blood, or the seal itself. now it lingers in his hand, but it isn't his. his attention is soon drawn away from it, anyway.

a small, unreasonable part of darian had perhaps hoped that the tales had been false. had not at first he himself called them slander? in his heart the knowledge had sprouted already, and he could not deny it for long. he had not seen vyke much, in the days before his disappearance, and wished he could have said with absolute certainty that the man would never commit such a sin. but he had seen him swayed before. to hear him speak it now only finalises the betrayal. only, darian has exhausted his anger for the moment, and so he only listens, though his face twists when vyke regrets his own survival.

how far they have both strayed, from the path on which they met.

"miquella?" it is not a name he speaks often, though it feels as familiar as that of a brother. the young demigod who sought to purify gold, as if it were not already pristine. for a moment longer, darian looks up at vyke, before taking the hand offered and pulling himself up with a half-supressed groan. the wound is not yet gone, his insides still slowly repairing themselves. perhaps he should not forget so soon. but he is lonely, and there is still love, somewhere. his stunned expression overshadows it. "miquella is here?"

a demigod in this place seems as paradoxical as can be. here, amidst all this death, what would the gods find? d, who knows little of the demigods beyond those tales told by the church and rogier's speculations, looks at his old friend wearing yet another new kind of gold and no longer knows what to think. his foundations have sunken, like rotten old wood cracking and giving way, leaving him without guidance. but there is no flame in vyke's eye is that not all that matters?

stuck somewhere between hurt and relief, he lingers in place. uncertain, one hand still protectively cupped over the bloody tear in his clothes. the tender, pallid skin. "a new coat of arms then." oh he has not quite overcome hurt just yet. a new you. always a new you, reinventing yourself in the light that shines brightest. bending to pick up his sword makes him dizzy again.

"will it be enough this time?"

The incantation takes, the wound heals, and Vyke's shoulders no longer straight, his breath no longer held. The tension, once so taut like a bowstring ready to snap, has finally released. It is something, at least. He tells himself so. Even though Darian is well and truly part of the dead, there is still a residual soul. Now ... it is time to find out how stable that soul is. Has the Death Blight taken more? What of his time here? Vyke does not wish him to remain ( for nothing good comes of this place of shadow ), even if going beyond the shadowy veils will mark Darian as those which he has once hunted so ardently. Vyke swallows, thick around a rock.

He stares then at the stained scale. It was hers, once. Vyke tears his gaze away from it, he gives a small shake of his head. He does not want it back. He cannot take it back. For all he has done, there is no honor in keeping hold of that scale, like he yearns for the memories that cling so tight upon it, marring it like the blighted blood does.

Yet the questions come again. Of course they do. Darian is not to be put off so easily. He is not a man who gives to distractions. He is better than that. So, Vyke does not take the scale from him, and instead drags one of his gauntlets over from the ground to slip it on over his hand. ❛ You know the answer to the first. Surely, ❜ Vyke says quietly, picking up the other gauntlet and pointedly avoiding the other's gaze. ❛ But no, I am not dead. Shame, that. The Frenzy took—I took in the Frenzy, all for a lie. She died anyway. ❜

Her body is still there, at the church. Vyke stills, but he shakes himself out of it. Questions need their answers—he forgets that Darian may not wish his company. ❛ I was forced into an evergaol atop the Giant's graveyard. That's where they caught up to me. That is also where he found me. ❜ He took up his sword, eyeing the blackened blood upon its shining blade, before taking out a cloth to wipe it off with. No easy feat, as it clung. ❛ Kindly Miquella. ❜

Discarding the cloth, knowing there is no use for it now once the blood has marked it. Vyke stands, sheathing his sword, before holding out his gauntleted hand towards Darian. ❛ That is why I am here. If anyone can give me a second chance, it is with the god who gave me my mind back. Or so I hope ... desperately. ❜

[goldhunt]

rogier lets go of d's arm, allowing him to leave

he doesn't strain against the grip. in fact, he looks down at the hand wrapped around his arm in a flash of disbelief. rogier, ever fluid, has never before tried to keep him in place. there is no threat to it, at least not tangibly. d looks at the off-white glove, at the large glintstone set in it, shining oft as if in competition with its bearer's eyes of brilliant emerald. the glove that hides his nimble fingers, quick as his mind in weaving spells and strong in their mastery of the, albeit light, blade.

his gaze lifts. they are almost the same height, their eyes level. almost. d has never noticed until now. the wide brim of his hat often obscures rogier's face, after all. the question dies on his lips, plucked from his tongue by the spellblade's warm voice. he speaks a word of warning. be careful out there. to his own surprise, d finds himself regretting that, through the metal of his armour, the mail that lines his sleeve, he cannot feel the touch beyond it restraining him.

"i will," promises the hunter, and doesn't comment on the new dimension of familiarity that has crept into the tone of their interaction. they have been friends a long time, after all. there is nothing strange about growing closer, right?

when rogier releases him, d hovers as if suddenly unsure of himself. he looks at him a moment longer, half expecting the sorcerer to say something more. then, with a short inhale, he collects himself. "i'll be back soon." another promise; he is full of them today, distracted by how rogier looked at him. how close they stood, to where he could smell the crisp scent of magic that clings to the other man. and he walks away wondering if he has bewitched him.

TENSION STARTERS / @misaentropy

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this idea that darian is an aggressive dominant lover is so funny to me. where did that come from

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THE REALM OF SHADOW, with its heavy baldachin draped above, with the twisting tree—trees? darian isn't quite sure, having shuddered in horror at the sight and turned away. milky, grey eyes flicker back to vyke as he relays what he has learned of this place. a land of death, then. the thought seems to rattle the board upon which his observations rest, settling them into a pattern. a land of death, of shadow, outside of grace. but grace still exists, does it? has it only left him, though he prayed his lips bloody? he turns away, uncertain whether he feels shame in looking at vyke or only himself.

the other man's promise should have been comforting, perhaps. somehow darian isn't certain vyke holds this power. he has never felt this powerless.

he looks down. the seal fits perfectly into his palm as if it were made to be held by human hand. and it is warm, warmer than stone should ever be. in that moment, darian forgets all hesitancy to avail himself of draconic methods. it is but a tool to weave the incantation, and did not beasts once serve the dragons? none of it matters because its gold is not that of the erdtree, and thus it does not harm him.

darian has to close his eyes to muster the focus, to find in him the last echoes of faith and call forth the strength of beasts. it is untainted by his feelings of betrayal and uncertainty and, mercifully, it comes to him. when he murmurs the incantation and watches the sigil appear, the warmth that pools in his chest is so jarringly familiar. and it works, soothing the pain and slowly, slowly closing the wound. it will take a while to heal, but the relief is instantaneous and he releases a trembling breath he hadn't consciously held.

darkened blood now stains the scale, obscuring its gold. darian only notices when he means to hand it back and apologetically wipes it on his trousers. only then does the thought connect in his mind, bringing his gaze back up to vyke's eyes. "i died, i remember it. but you if death comes here, are you ..." all of his questions have gone unanswered, but he does not yet let up. "what happened, vyke? why are you here?" do you not at least owe me that answer?

Something in Vyke stills at the mention. Many have searched for him. Many of which held no good intentions in mind ( it was their right, a necessity he knows ). He had fought each and every one on his way to the Giant's Forge until he was finally overwhelmed. Brought low, face buried in the snow with a pierced shoulder. He remembers feeling the ice freeze his burnt flesh, pushed in through the slit in his visor, as the madness crept up on him. His body writhing while a scream ripped his throat raw—it is a surprise that some walked away from his evergaol without the Frenzy digging into them …

He blinks then, refocusing on Darian, on the questions asked in a desperate bid for clarity.

❛ I … ❜ Oh how he dislikes this. It is expected, to be sure, but Vyke is wholly unprepared for it. He looks back down at the wound. At least his hand no longer shakes. The only comfort given is that the blood has slowed to a stop, but it is unnatural. It should not be like this. It should not. Vyke's jaw tenses, his teeth gritting. Darian can protect himself … but if Vyke had not left, surely this would not be this man's fate. Right? Where was Rogier in this? What has become of him that Darian is all but alone?

Vyke swallows, his free hand lowering some. ❛ Perhaps. But your flesh … Darian it does not— ❜ He ignores the questions for aid, but cannot bring himself to finish either thought. He has no warming stone, but he knows someone who just might. They would have to walk, but it is far and Messmer's soldiers dot the land between them and the merchant. Would Darian even be able to walk that far? Or at all? He does not wish to give over to despair, so when Darian asks for a seal instead, Vyke clings to it assuredly.

❛ I do. Two, actually, ❜ Vyke says with a low, almost forced laugh under his breath, but he hesitates a little when his hand pulls back to retrieve the seals. He changes course, bringing out only the gravel stone seal, and swallows the memories down that rise up like bile. The scale is still warm. ❛ If it does not work, there is a merchant just north of here who may have a warming stone. It is … dangerous though. ❜ He watches Darian as he finally explains. ❛ This place has been hidden, obscured by the Erdtree for quite some time. The denizens show the decay readily. I am told this place held a name once. A proper name. But they call it the Realm of Shadow now. It is where death comes to be, Darian. I believe that is why you came as you did. ❜

He pauses, lips pressing into a thin line in thought. ❛ I do not know what it will mean for you in the long run ... but I will not allow this place to be your cage. I will not. ❜

[goldhunt]

Gavin Yuan Gao, from "Lullaby"