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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and all rights for characters, plots and settings belong to G.R.R. Martin and FromSoftware. I have no ownership.
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"Smarag was a devourer of sorcerers, and over time, his body became corrupted by their glintstones."
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Liurnia,
973 year AS (After Shattering of the Elden Ring)
Aerion
The mist over Liurnia did not rise; it hung heavy and cold, smelling of stagnant water, crushed lilies, and the faint, copper tang of burnt blood.
Aerion stood near the edge of a sunken stone pavilion, his boots sinking slightly into the soft, wet moss covering the ancient masonry. The Grace burned behind his left eye. It wasn't a blinding light that obscured his vision, but rather a low, pulsing hearth fire.
His gaze fell on her.
Malenia stood beside the massive, armored form of a black horse. Her golden prosthetic gleamed dully in the gray Liurnian light. There was no grandeur in her posture now, only the deep exhaustion of a demigod who had walked too long through a dying world.
The faint scent of rotting trailed after her, a constant reminder of the scarlet curse she carried within her flesh.
The battle against Vyke and his master had left its mark on all of them. And they left a bad taste in his mouth and a thought ingrained in the back of his mind: What if the same fate awaited him?
"It was an honor to meet you and fight by your side. Your arm is strong, your mind sharp, and your heart in the right place. I want to see what you can build," Malenia said, looking at him, or at least facing him with a small smile.
"Likewise. You're different than I expected. Good luck. It was an honor to meet you," he said sincerely, extending his right hand to her.
Malenia tilted her head, her blind, hidden eyes fixed on his face as if she could read the lines of his soul. "A noble sentiment. But the Greater Will does not reward nobility. It rewards survival. It rewards the last one left standing in the blood," she replied, grabbing his forearm in a firm grip with her prosthetic.
"I've died more than once before, Malenia," Aerion said, a faint, humorless smile touching his lips as memories of the cold daggers in the dark flashed through his mind. "It's an overrated experience. I prefer survival. And I prefer building something that lasts."
A ghost of a smile seemed to pass over Malenia's pale lips, a brief moment of humanity in a body wracked by rot. For a night, sharing a quiet camp beside a flickering Site of Grace, they had exchanged fragments of their pasts.
Aerion had spoken about his experiences and struggles. Malenia had spoken of a twin brother who promised to change everything, a brilliant mind trapped in the body of a child, a brother she would tear the world apart to find. They were both exiles looking for a purpose in a land that had forgotten the meaning of home.
Malenia paused, looking back over her golden shoulder. "Be careful, Aerion. The sorcerers are proud, but they are cowards behind their seals and spells.
"Vigilance has brought me this far, and I have no intention of abandoning it," Aerion replied. "Safe travels, Malenia. May you find your brother."
"Until our paths cross again, Brave Tarnished," she said softly.
With a soft, rhythmic splash of hooves through the shallow water, Malenia and Loretta vanished into the thick white fog.
Aerion watched the mist swallow them up until even the sound of their departure was gone. He breathed out, a long puff of white air, and felt the sudden, crushing weight of loneliness return.
It was the same loneliness he felt on the Wall, the isolation of command. But there was no time to linger on old ghosts. Limgrave was his; the Weeping Peninsula was secured under the banner of his unified Roundtable forces, but Liurnia was an open wound. To secure his flank, to truly govern this flooded realm, the Academy of Raya Lucaria had to fall under his control.
The march through the heart of Liurnia was a grueling lesson in decay. In Limgrave, the land felt like a wild, untamed wilderness waiting for someone to tame it. Here, everything felt drowned and stagnant but dangerously mysterious.
Sunken rooftops poked out of the murky water like the rotted teeth of a dead leviathan. Giant Crayfish clicked their heavy claws in the tall reeds, and the pathetic, gurgling cries of maddened Albinaurics echoed through the endless fog.
Aerion moved through this wasteland on the back of Torrent, whose hooves left barely a ripple on the water's surface as he drifted between the half-submerged columns of ancient Carian estates.
He thought about his people back at Limgrave and Stormveil. Nepheli Loux was holding the line, ensuring the soldiers didn't revert to Godrick's cruel ways. Roderika was guiding the spirits, giving comfort to those who had been broken by grafting. He had built a fragile peace, but peace in the Lands Between was a rare commodity, always paid for in blood.
As he bypassed a ruined church, a pack of maddened glintstone sorcerers ambushed him from the high arches of a broken highway. They wore heavy stone crowns shaped like the faces of ancient scholars, their eyes glowing with a faint, unnatural blue. They shouted slurred words, raising their glintstone staffs to rain magical missiles down upon them.
Aerion didn't even draw his sword. He didn't need to.
With a slight, practiced twitch of his palm holding the Seal. A ball of fire appeared in his hand and began to move towards the ruins, slowly at first, then growing faster and faster all the time, until it hit the wall of the ruined building, flooding the entire ruins and the sorcerers there with fire.
The Academy of Raya Lucaria rose like a dark mountain of stone, iron, and stained glass, completely dominating the skyline of the lake. It was a monument to human ambition, a place that had turned its back on the world to study the cold, uncaring stars. These were Loretta's exact words.
As Aerion drew closer to the northern gates, he saw the barriers. A brilliant, translucent sheet of magical blue energy enveloped the entire structure, humming with a frequency that vibrated in his teeth. It was a perfect seal. He reached out with a hand, stopping just inches from the barrier. The air grew intensely hot, and the smell of ozone was thick. To touch it without a key would mean instant vaporization.
He turned away from the main gate and headed toward the western crystalline formations, where the scouts said the dragon kept its roost. The water grew shallower here, pooling around massive shards of blue glintstone that grew out of the lakebed like jagged, glowing teeth. The ambient magic in the air was heavy enough to taste bitter, sharp, and metallic.
And then, the mountain moved.
A deep, rumbling growl vibrated through the water, shaking the soles of Aerion's boots and sending small ripples across the surface of the lake for hundreds of meters. From behind a massive rock formation covered in glowing blue crystals, a colossal shape uncoiled itself.
Glintstone Dragon Smarag.
The beast was both magnificent and horrifying, a testament to what happened when nature absorbed too much of unnatural magic. Smarag had been deeply corrupted by the very land he hunted. He gorged himself on sorcerers, and their magic transformed him.
His scales were a pale, crystalline blue, shimmering with an icy light. Jagged shards of raw glintstone erupted from his hide like monstrous tumors, tearing through his flesh. His eyes didn't hold the wild fury of an animal; they glowed with a cold, calculating, sorcerous light.
Smarag rose to his full, towering height, his massive wings beating the damp air. The force of his wings sent waves of murky water crashing over the sunken ruins, wiping away the silence of the swamp. He lowered his massive, elongated head, his nostrils flaring as he sniffed the air, locking his glowing eyes onto the tiny, lone man standing in the shallows.
Aerion did not flinch. He stood his ground, his hand resting lightly on the pommel of his sword. He had faced monsters before. He had faced the undead, he had faced demigods, and he had faced dragon before. This one here was indeed much bigger, but Aerion was also incomparably weaker back then.
"You better run into the air, beast," Aerion said softly, his voice carrying clearly over the quiet water. "And you have something I need. And I don't just mean your heart."
The dragon replied with a roar that shattered the nearby stone arches, sending a shower of ancient debris into the water. Smarag opened his massive jaws, and instead of the expected red fire, a torrent of pure, brilliant blue glintstone magic erupted from his throat. The magical beam tore through the water, instantly vaporizing the lakebed and rushing directly toward Aerion like a river.
Aerion didn't dodge like a normal warrior. He didn't roll through the mud or hide behind a broken pillar. The Grace exploded in his muscles like a physical force. In a fraction of a second, he launched himself twenty meters to the left, his movement so fast it left a violent wake of exploded water behind him.
The dragon's magical breath blasted the exact spot he had been standing on a moment prior, turning the lake water into a boiling, blinding cloud of white steam that hissed furiously against the cold air.
"Well, I wouldn't want to get hit with that," he muttered to himself, looking at the effects of the attack.
Before the steam could even begin to clear, Aerion was already moving again. He closed the distance with terrifying velocity, his boots barely touching the mud. Smarag, surprised by his speed, slammed his massive, crystal-encrusted tail down, intending to crush him into a paste.
Aerion leaped high into the air, over the massive tail with a good two meters to spare. While suspended in mid-air, time seemed to slow down for him. He could see every individual blue crystal on the dragon's back. Vyke's War Spear appeared in his hand, with gold and red lightning dancing around it.
He wanted to cut the dragon's exposed side with the tip of his spear, but with one flap of his powerful wings combined with a leap from his legs, Smarag created a distance of over forty meters between them.
A miniature sun blazed in his hand.
With a fierce grunt, Aerion hurled the massive fireball down at the beast. It drifted through the air deceptively slowly at first, expanding and roaring with a terrifying, primal hunger that seemed to consume the very oxygen in the air.
Smarag, sensing the immense danger, tried to throw his massive body backward, but the sphere detonated right against his thick chest.
The explosion was deafening, a sound that echoed across the entire region. A wave of intense heat washed over the lake, instantly drying the water for fifty meters around them and turning the mud into cracked, baked clay.
Smarag shrieked in absolute agony. The primordial fire ate through his crystalline scales, blackening his chest and forcing the massive beast to stagger backward, its legs buckling under the weight of the blast.
But a dragon, fed on the ambient magic of the Academy for centuries, did not fall so easily. Snapping out of his daze through sheer instinct, Smarag leaped into the air. His massive, torn wings caught the heavy wind, lifting his scorched body above the rising steam and mist.
Now high above the lake, the dragon circled like a bird of prey, his eyes locked onto Aerion with a hatred that burned hotter than his magic. He opened his jaws again, his throat glowing with a blinding blue light as he prepared to rain down a barrage of glintstone comets that would destroy everything around Aerion.
Aerion stood, his eyes fixed on his opponent. The mud beneath his boots was dry and smoking from his own fire. He looked up at the circling beast, his face completely calm, his breathing steady and rhythmic.
He raised his right arm toward the stormy, gray sky. He called upon something far more ancient, far more lethal than Smarag himself. The power of the Ancient Dragons.
Golden electricity began to crackle violently around his fist, snapping and hissing. The air grew immensely heavy with the sharp scent of ozone. The crackle grew into a deafening, metallic roar as a massive, ornate spear of pure, solid gold lightning formed in his hand, followed immediately by six more spears floating right behind his shoulders, crackling with autonomous fury. Knight's Lightning Spear.
But his meeting with Malenia was not in vain, for although she possessed no Seal, as the daughter of Marika and Radagon, she knew quite a few Incantations, possessing knowledge beyond most living beings.
She showed him how, through higher Focus concentration, Incantations could be increased in power and even modified.
That was why more small golden clusters of electricity began to appear in the air around him. First two, then three, then a dozen or more.
He threw his arm forward with everything he had. The main lightning spear streaked through the sky, tearing the heavy clouds apart and leaving a trail of golden light in its wake. Smarag saw the incoming projectile and tried to dive to the right, but the speed of the incantation was absolute. The spear struck the dragon squarely where his left wing met his massive shoulder.
But that wasn't the end, as the first was followed by dozens of smaller ones, more than half of which struck the dragon's massive body, hitting practically every limb, from tail to maw.
The explosion of gold light literally split the sky. The dragon's wing hit by the main spear was completely severed from its body, turning into a horrific shower of burning blue crystals, shredded leather, and black blood.
But the rest of the body didn't look any better, as even the beast's head wasn't spared. The entire right side of the upper jaw was gone.
Smarag let out a final, tragic scream that sounded almost human in its agony as his massive body lost all lift and stability.
Before his heavy body could even hit the shallow water below, Aerion summoned Vyke's War Spear once more and, waiting for the dragon's body to descend, finally hurled it with all his physical strength.
Leaving a trail of gold and red lightning bolts in its wake, the spear flew a good half mile, striking the falling dragon in the head, completely destroying it.
The colossal dragon crashed into the lake with the force of an earthquake. A massive wall of water, mud, and shattered stone shot thirty meters into the air, raining down over the ruins like a heavy storm. Then, a profound, heavy silence returned to Liurnia. The dragon was dead.
ENEMY FELLED
Glintstone Dragon Smarag
You received 84 000 runes.
He waited for information about his captured heart, but it never arrived. He was therefore somewhat disoriented by this situation, Aerion moved slowly through the settling mud toward the massive, smoking corpse of the dragon.
His chest heaved slightly, the only physical sign of the incredible amount of power he had just wielded. His boots splashed in the returning water as the lake began to fill the empty space left by evaporated water.
Much of the dragon's torso was devastated, so getting to the heart, despite the beast's size, was easier than in the case of Agheel.
Having won the heart, however, he knew that something much more difficult to find now awaited him. Somewhere in this vicinity lay the key, but it was a vast area to search. Before he could do so, however, he summoned his new mount.
He had nothing against Torrent, as he was still his loyal companion, but flying had a certain magic about it. So, using a fragment of the Elden Ring, he restored the body to life.
The golden particles of Grace flowing from his eye began to form, first into a golden vortex, and then into Smarag's massive body, fully healthy and fit, even in better condition than before their fight.
A moment later, the mighty dragon stood before him in all its glory, raising its jaws to the sky and letting out a terrifying roar.
Then Smarag lowered his body and bowed his head deeply before him, acknowledging his superiority and authority.
"A spectacular display," a voice murmured from the shifting mist behind him. "Though I fear you won't find what you're looking for anywhere nearby, Tarnished."
Aerion's warrior instincts flared instantly. In a blur of motion that a normal human eye could barely follow, he aimed his spear straight at thick white fog. The Grace within him screamed, but it wasn't a warning of immediate physical danger; it was something else. Anger and irritation.
He could feel it, just as he could feel the wrongness of Frenzied Flame. It was the presence of something old, cold, and deeply unnatural, like the dark space between the stars.
The mist parted slowly, rolling away as if obeying a silent command. Sitting atop a broken stone pillar was a figure that did not seem entirely real, a specter of the night.
It was a woman, or rather, the spirit of one animating a false body. She wore a massive, wide-brimmed witch's hat that cast a deep shadow over her face and heavy, snow-white robes that trailed into the water.
Her skin was a pale, ghostly blue, and as Aerion looked closer with his enhanced sight, he realized her body was made of intricately carved wood, porcelain, and a puppet's frame. Beside her porcelain face, a second, ethereal face floated like a faint spirit, mirroring her features with a melancholic expression.
He knew this woman; she was the one who had given him the Spirit Calling Bell at the Church of Elleh. What was her name, Renna?
"What do you mean?" Aerion asked. He had met many strange and terrifying things in this world, but this creature carried an aura that felt as vast, cold, and very familiar. She felt like Others.
"I misled you when we last met. My real name is Ranni," she said, her voice smooth, calm, and entirely devoid of the fear that most mortals showed in the presence of his power. She looked at the massive dragon with an air of mild amusement, then turned her gaze to him.
"Ranni the Witch?" Aerion narrowed his eyes, now regarding her with suspicion. He didn't like being lied to. "You're one of the demigods and the main cause of the Shattering. You ordered the assassination of your brother Godwyn."
"Half-brother," she clarified, a slightly harsher note creeping into her tone. This topic clearly irritated her, as did his tone and her entire demeanor. "Besides, I don't see what Tarnished has to do with you. What happened in the past should stay there."
Aerion arched a brow. When he compared her to Malenia, there wasn't even a comparison. While the former was a powerful warrior, contrary to his expectations, she proved humble and kind. This witch here seemed to have a bit of an ego problem and a past to work through.
With a heavy, clearly audible sigh, he asked, "So what do you want from me? Speak up, or go your own way. I have neither the inclination nor the time for riddles."
Although he saw that his tone only irritated her further, she regained control and replied in a surprisingly calm tone.
"You possess great strength, Tarnished. More than any who have come before you. I watched you fight your enemies and even your fight with the avatar of Frenzied Flame, alongside the Blade of Miquella. And now you killed, Smarag, with the power of the ancient dragons. You are no ordinary man sent to die for the Golden Order."
"Well, you're certainly creepy. If I were you, I wouldn't admit to secretly spying on someone. Did you also watch me while I was taking a shit?"
Ranni let out a soft, melodic laugh that sounded like silver wind chimes moving in a graveyard, but Aerion saw not only her crimson cheeks but also the flash of anger in her eyes. Well, it must have been hard to find someone who would address a demigod that way.
"Do you want to know where the key is or not?" she asked again, her tone colder.
He just shrugged, "Then tell me. Or disappear. I'm not into these kinds of games."
Ranni leaned forward, her four puppet arms resting on her knees in a posture that was surprisingly casual for a being of her stature. Her single open eye gleamed with a calculating, cosmic light that seemed to see right through his armor.
"I took it, Tarnished," she said plainly. "It rests with me, far above these flooded plains, where the stars speak clearly without the suffocating screaming of the Erdtree. I have no desire to see common savages enter my mother's domain to steal her remaining sanity."
She stood up on the narrow stone pillar, her ghostly form flickering like a dying candle in a dark room. The white mist began to close in around her again, swallowing her silhouette bit by bit.
"If you truly wish to challenge the Academy, if you wish to change the fate of this broken world rather than simply mending a broken ring for a fickle god, then seek me out," Ranni's voice echoed, seemingly coming from all directions at once, vibrating through the stones and the water.
"Come to the Cathedral of Manus Celes, high upon the plateau. Look for me there, Aerion. Let us see if your ambition matches the terrifying strength you displayed today."
With a final, freezing gust of wind that sent a shiver through the reeds, the phantom vanished entirely, leaving no trace that she had ever been there.
Aerion stood alone in the quiet, ruined swamp, the last remnants of the fake key slipping through his fingers. He looked up toward the high, jagged cliffs in the far, far distance, where the ancient Cathedral of Manus Celes sat far above the clouds, shrouded in mystery. A cold, hard smile appeared on his face.
Fuck. If you wanted a crown, if you wanted to protect the people you had claimed as your own, you had to climb for it. You had to take it from the hands of gods and witches alike.
He glanced at Smarag, standing quietly to the side, who was watching him intently.
"So, what are we going to do?" he asked lightly, to which the dragon, he could have sworn, shrugged. Aerion smiled faintly and then, in a few quick strides, climbed onto the dragon's back.
"Fly," he commanded, and Smarag took to the air. However, a moment later, instead of the peaceful sky of Liurnia, a storm of snow and ice struck his face, and a frosty wind raged around them.