Mohg turned around, raised his trident high, and spread his arms in an enthusiastic gesture of welcome. In fairness, he carried himself with considerable elegance. He was preparing to murder someone, yet somehow managed to make it sound perfectly courteous.
Then he saw his "honored guests."
Godfrey had received word the very day the Erdtree began to wither and immediately set out for the Lands Between.
Long ago, he and his warriors had been stripped of their Grace and banished from the Lands Between by his wife, Marika. It had not been some heartless attempt by Marika to discard her husband after he had outlived his usefulness. Her true purpose had been to escape the Golden Order.
Revolutions imposed from the top rarely succeeded. To rebel against the Golden Order, Marika had personally driven away her husband. The eldest son she treasured most died in a conspiracy. She shattered the Elden Ring with her own hands, and for her defiance she was imprisoned upon a stone platform and impaled through the body.
The sacrifices had been brutal and absolute.
Yet even that had failed to destroy the Erdtree. Instead, the Lands Between had simply descended into an age of endless warfare.
The remaining hope lay with those who had been driven away, stripped of everything, and reduced to the lowest rungs of society, the Tarnished.
Only someone who stood outside the existing system and rose from nothing had any real chance of creating a new world.
And in the end, the Golden Order really had been destroyed by an outsider.
Originally, a Tarnished should have ascended the throne. Skyl had simply come up with a better and far more permanent solution.
Godfrey had always assumed that he himself would serve as the final safeguard against the Golden Order, carrying that heavy responsibility on his shoulders.
Things had developed in a way no one could have predicted.
When he returned and saw the chaos consuming the Lands Between, he decided to help restore order. The Golden Order might be gone, but people still had to live.
The greatest remaining threats in the Lands Between were now the shardbearers who possessed Great Runes.
They had power.
They had ambition.
And sooner or later, every one of them would dream of conquering the realm and claiming Leyndell.
The ancient political structure of the Lands Between had always revolved around one god and one lord.
The two existed as different halves of the same system. The god served as the vessel of the ruling Law, while the lord acted as the sword that enforced it. Without a lord, the Law weakened. Without a god, the realm descended into chaos.
Within the society of the Lands Between, Law functioned almost like an all-encompassing ideology, penetrating every aspect of people's lives until those born beneath it could scarcely imagine existing outside it.
And the institution that enforced that Law through violence was the Elden Lord.
Mohg wanted to become a lord.
First, however, he needed a god of his own.
Although the Outer God known as the Formless Mother favored him, there was no telling how long it might take to actually bring her into the Lands Between.
So Mohg had chosen a more convenient option.
Find a local Empyrean, force the Law of Blood into them, and use them as a substitute vessel.
"Mohg, I'm disappointed in you."
Godfrey gripped his enormous axe and rested it against the ground like a walking stick.
He might technically have been mortal, but his muscular physique was every bit as imposing as that of the shardbearers empowered by Great Runes. The heroes of ancient times had apparently all been absurdly huge.
Even Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon, who looked like an elegant and delicate woman, could have stared straight over Shaquille O'Neal's head.
Skyl, an ordinary guy by Earth standards, had learned very quickly that living in the Lands Between involved a lot of looking upward.
From the side, Skyl casually joined in.
"Mohg, give it up. Outer Gods are all bad news. They'll carve out your kidneys without even giving you anesthesia. Of course, you're hardly a saint yourself, so normally I'd be happy to let you monsters tear each other apart. But you've also been wrecking the Lands Between, turning Albinaurics into red-skinned freaks, convincing battlefield surgeons to curse wounded soldiers, and kidnapping a disabled woman's brother. That's where I have to draw the line."
Malenia silently moved several steps farther away from Skyl.
Her rotted eyes, hidden beneath her winged helm, remained fixed on the Cocoon of the Empyrean high above the altar.
Miquella lay inside.
The aura of Unalloyed Gold that once surrounded him had been contaminated by blood until it now felt almost unfamiliar.
Mohg looked at the terrifying collection of people standing before him and, perhaps instinctively sensing how badly this was about to go, uttered what sounded very much like his eventual defeat line.
"Miquella is mine and mine alone..."
"Silence!"
Godfrey suddenly leaped into the air.
With a violent twist of his body, he hurled his axe.
The enormous weapon ripped through the air with a terrifying shriek and smashed into his beloved son with enough force to send Mohg staggering sideways, nearly knocking the trident from his hands.
"Tres!"
Mohg immediately activated his blood curse.
It was a horrifying ritual of accursed blood that invoked the power of an Outer God and planted a curse within his enemies.
Each stage of the countdown added another ring to the curse. Once all three rings had accumulated and the ritual reached its climax, the victims would suffer catastrophic blood loss, their bodies rapidly withering toward desiccated husks.
Mohg thrust his trident into empty space.
The air above him seemed to transform into rich living flesh.
Blood poured from the wound.
The trident had pierced the body of the Formless Mother herself, drawing her curse-laden blood out of the unseen realm beyond.
As the ritual began, a ring of brilliant crimson symbols appeared around every person present.
The malignant runes slowly revolved around their waists.
Their blood began to boil.
Skyl lowered his head and studied the symbols.
Words possessing genuine power could produce supernatural effects simply by being read. The spiritual essence within these runes all pointed toward a specific divine existence.
Skyl silently repeated them twice.
His consciousness followed that connection outward, drifting beyond the world.
"Duo!"
Faced with Mohg's desperate resistance, Godfrey wasn't angry.
If anything, he looked delighted.
"Good! Very good, Mohg! It's been many years since father and son last met. Come, let us spend some quality time together!"
The spectral lion that had been resting across his shoulders, Serosh, manifested physically.
Godfrey and the Beast Regent immediately began tag-teaming his son.
Serosh himself was among the mightiest beings in the Lands Between. If Godrick the Grafted had shown up, the lion could probably have beaten him so badly he'd be crawling around trying to find all his stolen arms afterward.
Together, Godfrey and Serosh were even more terrifying.
Godfrey's presence surged wildly.
Father and lion happily beat the living hell out of his son.
Mohg, the mighty Lord of Blood, found himself completely unable to fight back against his white-haired old man.
Caught up in the excitement, Godfrey suddenly tore off his upper garments.
A mountain of muscle emerged beneath them, enough to make Arnold Schwarzenegger stare in jealous disbelief.
Godfrey roared.
He seized one of the curved horns growing from Mohg's head and slammed him into the ground.
Left.
Right.
Left.
Three times on each side.
Even Mohg's iron-hard horn finally snapped in Godfrey's hand.
Then Godfrey hurled his son high into the air and kicked him straight back into the ground.
BOOM!
Dust billowed everywhere.
Mohg lay at the bottom of an enormous crater like a puddle of mud.
The two senior Crucible Knights watched silently.
Both shook their heads.
Brutal.
Malenia paid no attention to the father-son beatdown.
She rushed to Miquella's side and gently took his hand.
The Empyrean who had once possessed such a small, delicate body had become monstrously enlarged and deformed.
The sight inevitably reminded her of the bloated corpse of Godwyn the Golden after his death.
"Miquella... is mine..."
Mohg's bones had been broken in more places than anyone cared to count, yet he stubbornly dragged himself upright again.
He raised one hand.
His trident flew back into his grasp.
Then he continued the ritual.
"Unus!"
Millicent could already feel the blood inside her body stabbing against the walls of her veins like countless needles.
It was as though some malicious will had been injected into her bloodstream, urging every drop to tear its way out of her body.
"Skyl... Something's wrong. Are you okay? I have to stop him."
The swordswoman had never understood the meaning of retreat.
She drew her blade and charged straight toward Mohg.
Godfrey, Malenia, and the two foremost Crucible Knights all sensed the danger at once.
They rushed him simultaneously, intending to stop Mohg before the ritual could be completed.
Mohg threw his head back and laughed fanatically.
He gripped his trident with both hands.
The ritual activated.
The cavernous sky of the underground world turned crimson.
The ominous sight alone was enough to fill the heart with dread.
I've won.
Triumph blazed in Mohg's eyes.
He raised his trident toward the heavens.
Toward the flesh of the Formless Mother.
"NIHIL!"
"NIHIL!"
"NIHIL!"
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