Lucian retraced his steps, following the same path back until he reached the Grace he had passed earlier.
According to the map, it was possible to reach Sellia, Town of Sorcery by continuing forward from where Commander O'Neil had lingered. But now, night had already fallen across the swamp, and in the darkness the marshes were treacherous and disorienting.
To avoid losing his way, Lucian chose the safer route back.
Exploring the Swamp of Aeonia had already cost him much time. Though the return journey was quicker, it was still long, and by the time he saw the Site of Grace again, the sky was black.
Yet Lucian did not plan to rest. He pressed on without pause. He needed to confirm Millicent's whereabouts as soon as possible—before anything happened to her.
The Pests themselves were weak, but to Millicent—already maimed, unable to wield her sword with a missing right arm—they posed real danger.
Millicent did not know that the Pests would never truly harm her. If, out of fear or shame, she were to end her life—that would be a disaster.
Just then, as Lucian neared the Grace, he noticed something strange.
A monstrous creature stood ahead. It looked somewhat like a bird, but its form was twisted and horrifying.
It bore a huge, shattered skull for a head. A short, hooked beak jutted from the broken bone, marking it as avian. The fractured cranium glowed faintly with a blue phantasmal light.
Its neck was grotesquely elongated—longer even than its body—crooked and serpentine. Its torso was almost the same width as the neck, making it appear all the more unnatural, as though the entire creature were one long, contorted strip of flesh.
Its body was naked, stripped of both feathers and skin, shriveled like a desiccated corpse, with gaping slits along its form. Yet no blood flowed from those wounds.
In truth, the creature's body resembled nothing so much as an impossibly long, grotesque duck's neck.
Closer inspection revealed that its wings bore not feathers but glowing azure spirits. These souls clutched forked spears as they dangled from the wings, chanting in eerie chorus—like a spectral choir singing unknown hymns.
This was a Deathbird—a herald of death.
The spirits that hung from its wings were ancient priests, permitted to join its retinue after undergoing a ritual of death. They served thereafter as the guardians of the Deathbird, bound by a covenant that promised a distant rebirth in some other age.
Lucian recognized it immediately and racked his memory for what he knew.
In the distance, the Deathbird scavenged corpses from the roadside. It had not noticed him. Lucian remained still, watching quietly.
In the age before the Erdtree was born, death was sanctified through the baptism of ghostflame—and the Deathbirds were keepers of that flame.
As for the "ghostflame" of the graveyards, the game revealed little. Lucian only knew it resembled the burning of bodies in the Funeral Pyres.
He did know this: the Deathbird's hooked staff, its signature weapon, was used to rake charred remains from the ghostflame's furnaces.
Was it now gathering corpses to return them to those sacred flames? Perhaps. If the ghostflame was truly a fire of the soul, burning the lingering essence in corpses might feed its power. Or perhaps the Deathbird's actions were mere instinct, an echo of rituals long past, repeated endlessly without purpose.
After the Shattering, the Erdtree's power had waned, and old faiths once banished were beginning to stir again.
But had the Twinbird, mother of all Deathbirds, also returned to the Lands Between?
The Twinbird was not only their progenitor, but also the emissary of an Outer God.
Lucian's gaze lingered on the twisted neck—it was too striking to ignore. And then he remembered. This deformity was not unique to the Deathbirds.
There was another who bore such a neck; the Usher of Death, Rosus.
The name was obscure, unfamiliar to most, yet his statues were everywhere. They were the very figures that pointed the way to the Catacombs, scattered throughout the Lands Between.
The statues, too, bore the same long, crooked neck. Both served death. Both shared that uncanny trait.
How could Lucian not draw the connection between Rosus and the Deathbirds?
And yet, a contradiction: if Rosus and the Deathbirds were linked, why were the Deathbirds driven out by the Erdtree, while Rosus's statues guided the way to the Erdtree's own catacombs?
The Erdtree's system of Erdtree Burial Grounds was its exclusive cycle of death. Thus, Rosus's statues must have been erected later, after the Erdtree's order was established.
In some catacombs, Rosus's light even manifested incorporeal shadows into tangible forms.
But then—why were Deathbirds weak to Holy damage, the mark of Erdtree-sanctioned punishment?
A bold thought struck Lucian. Could it be that, though Deathbirds and Those Who Live in Death were not the same, they nonetheless shared a similar state of existence?
The Deathroot-spawned beings born of Godwyn's corpse were accidents—souls that lingered without returning to the Erdtree. They were abominations, neither truly dead nor alive.
The Erdtree's order developed holy incantations precisely to purge such anomalies.
But Deathbirds were different. They were not corpses made anew. They were born in death. From the very start, they embodied the same "abnormal" conditions. Which was why they, too, were vulnerable to holy incantations.
Perhaps, Lucian mused, those forces who wished for Godwyn's true death had already reached out to the Deathbirds.
The signs were there: the black feathers of the Mausoleum Soldiers, their persistence as headless spirits after death, the purification of souls through ghostflame…
Suddenly, the Deathbird seemed to notice him.
It turned its grotesque skull toward Lucian. Then, unnervingly, it tilted its head sideways, bending its twisted neck at a perfect ninety degrees.
The eerie gesture sent a chill down Lucian's spine.
He braced himself, certain battle was about to erupt—
But instead, the Deathbird simply spread its wings and flew away, vanishing into the night.
Lucian exhaled slowly, puzzled. Still, it was better this way. There was no need to clash with such a creature now.
Behind the Deathbirds lay an entire faction of death. And Lucian, who sought to restore death to its rightful, equal place in the Lands Between, knew he could not ignore them.
To reintegrate death into the order of law, there were many possible paths: The sealed Rune of Death bound by Maliketh and the Black Blade. The Mending Rune of the Death-Prince, nurtured within Fia. Or even the Deathbirds themselves.
Since this one had not attacked, perhaps one day he could approach them.
For now, Lucian pressed forward under the cover of night, passing through the towering checkpoint.
Unlike Stormveil, this gatehouse was abandoned, unguarded. No surprise—Godrick the Grafted was ever a coward. He had crowded his soldiers along the road to Stormveil, but here in Caelid, nothing remained worth defending.
After the checkpoint and a short walk, Lucian spotted a dilapidated shack with a chained Monstrous Dog outside.
The beast wore a crude collar, proof it had been kept. But its fur was patchy, its frame emaciated, and its body bloomed with grotesque fungal growths of Scarlet Rot.
Compared to Hildegard's Monstrous Dog, this was a wretched, sickly sight—yet such diseased dogs were common in Caelid.
Snarling, the beast lunged the moment it saw Lucian. With a swift slash of his Swordspear, Lucian beheaded it.
He stepped into the shack. Inside, there was nothing but a chair.
The "sage" Gowry—who should have been here—was nowhere to be found.
Finding no clue, Lucian left, and pressed on toward the hazy silhouette of the town ahead.
Sellia, Town of Sorcery, was near.
—Not long after Lucian departed, the so-called Sage Gowry returned.
His mood was foul. Lately, everything had gone wrong.
First, his "daughters" had finally reached the age where they could receive the Scarlet Rot's gift. This was a momentous occasion.
He had labored to coax them into the scarlet blossoms—and at last, they obeyed.
They were older now, grown rebellious. Pitiful. But once they accepted the Rot's blessing, that disobedience would vanish.
As flowers, they would bloom gloriously, and when the Goddess of Rot descended, they would be reborn as Valkyries of the Scarlet Bloom. In time, they would spread her gospel across the Lands Between.
But the problem was Millicent.
She had fled.
She had resisted the Scarlet Rot, even cutting off her own arm to do so.
Strangely, Gowry did not hate her for it. In fact, it made her more like her "mother," Lady Malenia, who had also resisted. Surely Millicent was the finest of all the buds, destined to blossom most brilliantly.
But her disappearance was intolerable.
If she had merely resisted, it mattered little—there was time to reclaim her. But if she perished alone in the swamp… without that radiant bloom, Gowry's heart would shatter.
Even aside from her resistance, the Rot would gnaw her like any other mortal. And with her arm lost, untreated, she could well die.
Worse, the smell of blood would draw the swamp's beasts—many of them dreadful and near impossible to fight.
So he had dispatched her four sisters to scour the swamp and also to find Commander O'Neil.
He was certain O'Neil bore a Gold Needle, able to suppress the Rot. In Millicent's state, forcing her to accept the Rot further was unwise. Survival came first.
And letting her struggle, like LadyMalenia herself, against the Rot—that was no bad thing. With such will, when despair struck, she would bloom all the more brightly.
But then came the second calamity.
The sisters had failed.
Victory had been in hand—until a mysterious man interfered. His strength was terrifying. In mere moments, two of the sisters were gravely wounded. Were it not for his mercy in sparing them, none would have escaped.
No ordinary warrior could match such might. Even against a demigod's offspring, he would not falter.
He had called himself the Storm King. Gowry knew the name.
In their intelligence gathering across Limgrave, they had heard whispers. This Storm King had slain Godrick the Grafted, seizing his Great Rune.
Godrick, for all his weakness compared to the other demigod scions, was still a true Shardbearer, lord of his domain.
For one to defeat him—the Storm King was not to be underestimated.
And now, that very man had come silently into Caelid. Gowry did not know his purpose—but it had already disrupted his designs.
Without the Needle, if Millicent's strength gave out, her broken body might soon succumb to the Scarlet Rot.
How laughable, Gowry thought. That the faithful of the Rot, who cast Millicent into its embrace, must now pray it spares her.
With a bitter sigh, he trudged toward his shack. But before he reached it, the stench of blood stopped him.
His hound—his companion for so long—lay slain. Its great head had been hacked clean off, its blood soaking into the Rot-tainted soil. From that crimson feast, strange plants were already sprouting.
Gowry said nothing.
He entered the shack, sat heavily on the chair, his heart sinking under the weight of all that had gone wrong. It was as if he had swallowed a fly.
"A bad omen again…" he murmured.
—
Meanwhile, Lucian had reached the outskirts of Sellia, Town of Sorcery.
The town's architecture stood apart from the Lands Between's usual style, its spires sharp and foreign.
Without hesitation, Lucian stepped into its streets.
And immediately, from every direction, a barrage of sorcery bolts rained down upon him.