He grips the sword so tightly his entire arm trembles with the effort. He stands coiled, every muscle in his body anticipating the coming revenge. There she sits, defiant, awaiting his judgment.
He has come so far. He has seen so much. He has been bathed in blood - drowned in it, choked on it. Behind him, a kingdom so impossible ancient it has been cleaved from its name sulks along the cliff. In front of him, the bloated, malformed corpse of a half-dead god stares sightlessly outward, snarled in the roots of the tree.
There is so much snarled in the roots of the Erdtree. It is embedded, deep in the wood - the grace, the deception, the mockery of what he so fervently believed in. There is so much blood on his hands, and so very little gold.
He has strayed from the path: first to dally with the witch, whose promise of freedom warped his belief, and then with the recusants, whose furious blasphemy stoked his own indignant doubt into all-too-certain rage. The roots have tangled, curled, twisted into knots of contradictions and fallacies - but all too clearly he remembers her, standing triumphantly over the corpse of a friend, daring him to break the rules of the Hold.
This is not the Hold. There are no rules. There are only the eyes of her corpse-god Prince, amid the rush and roar of the water beyond.
Do it, screams his heart. In all the things you have torn asunder, find your certainty here. Avenge him. Avenge yourself. Be done with it. Do something clear. Declare yourself. Assert yourself.
But Those Who Live In Death - they did not ask, did they? They did not hew themselves from the Tree. Nor did you, really. You didn't ask to have the grace torn from your eyes.
Assert. Declare. Avenge. Cut. Kill. Kill. Kill. Believe.
No.
The sword drops, and he collapses to his knees in front of her, hands reaching desperately for her own. He manages an anguished "I can't" before he buries his face in her robe - and after a moment of shock, she embraces him, as she always had, drawing him against her throat. The terror, the madness - it hums in his quivering shoulders, rocks him back and forth, but she holds him still, there in the roaring silence.
