Marika
She drifted off as her strange guide led her out the door that seemed to ever glow with a calming light. As she passed through, she felt her stomach nearly burn out of her from the surge of panic. She was back in the village, surrounded by beautiful flowers and laughing women. She felt a surge of panic before a gentle hand rested on her shoulder.
"It wasn't your fault." She heard her strange guide whisper to her. She felt the tears begin to well up before she bit back the feeling as she nodded.
"It is hard... " She hugged herself gently as she watched what once were her sisters, aunts, nieces, dancing and laughing as music played. She felt the great mothers warmth here again and smiled tenderly as she watched them all. It had been a paradise she had tried to recreate her entire life but had so long lost her ways.
"Still... I am no better. I did... so much to others, for worse and pettier reasons." She sniffled quietly, thinking on even her own children she had thrown into the sewers under the guise of their protection when it had always been for her shame.
"Is that really how it happened?" Her odd aid waved a hand, and they were deep in the sewers beneath Leyndell. Thick walls of stone, dripping caverns, and chains that seemed to cover nearly every wall.
"What do you..." She gulped quietly as she watched the back of her younger self walking down the halls. Two little omen boys in her hands, fresh from the womb. Her heart began to burn as the shame started cracking at her heart.
"Look closer." She felt that hand gently touch her shoulder, and her memories began to stutter. She realized that she was no longer watching her own self, at least in any sense she could call it, but instead the thick back and red hair of Him.
"This... shouldn't be..."
"He and you are one, and yet also separate. Countless actions have been blurred by this strange duality. Many of your crimes may yet be yours to grip, whilst others..." as she watched Him throw her sons into a cage as they cried in pain. He sealed the cell shut with a heavy iron clang.
"Now you little bastards won't challenge my boy." She heard him mutter as tears she did not understand crept into the corner of her eyes.
"His... boy...? But... who could he have meant?" She covered her mouth, her mind a whirlpool now of questions as every memory became a question, every moment of her past a quiet mystery as to who or what or even which hand committed what acts.
"Shh." Her guide touched her arm and lightly tugged her to look away. "There is still much to see, too much to ponder on a single moment."
Marika begrudgingly turned to her guide and found her beloved Messmer knelt down in front of her with his hand tightly clenched around a writ. Her eyes widened as she remembered this moment. It was the day she had consigned Messmer to his prison. Her homeland had become his jail cell, and she had struggled ever since she awoke in that horrid cave with the memories of this moment. The longer she drifted, the more she found herself feeling such guilt over what days she could remember, and the cloudier the days she couldn't fully had become.
She heard her own mouth speak, and she wished that in that moment, she could cry and break free of these words. "My decision is final. You are to stay and guard our homeland in perpetuity. Until such a day I return, and only then will you be granted sanction to return to the Lands Between." The words burned like fire on her tongue and hot ashes in her lungs.
"Yes... as... you... wish... mother..." He choked through with barely contained fury, and she could see the serpent whispering into his mind as it seared his heart.
"Is this how it really happened?" Her guide asked.
"I remember writing... did... did I...?" She saw the world wobble as she was beside her guide in the side of her once beloved throne plateau. She watched her own face speak those words, her hand give him the note, and yet it did not sound like her. The tone was closer to that of an enraged father barking down at his son for being a failure.
"He..."
"Could walk around as you, for brief moments. The curse of the Giants made it rather hard, but he was as cruel and wicked as any of their flames."
Marika stared in horror as she watched her eldest son turn and march to where she could not follow and where he would be doomed to be trapped. "MESSMER!" She cried out, rushing to him only for her body to pass through him like a specter where she found herself once more in darkness.
It was not the empty abyss of the Doll's strange room but a hollow place devoid of light and creeking with empty lanterns. She heard the distant clang of a mighty hammer as steel crashed on hotter steel, and she would know the sound of that craftman anywhere.
"Hewg..." She smiled at the sound, approaching the slowly growing light of forge fire and splashing sparks. As she turned the corner, a frown slowly drifted back over her face as she found him shackled to a wall. "But... this... He was doing me... a favor..."
"He was, and is. Yet... you forgot so long ago. He was a slave." Her words rang like a crashing bell across her turmoiled mind as her face scrunched up in the agony of guilt. "To this day, he is here in this ghostly replication of your round table, ever hammering away to craft a weapon. A weapon to slay a God."
"Surely... someone must have offered him freedom."
"He refused it."
"What?!"
"He truly is dedicated to you. He loved you as his god, for better or worse. This, sadly, is no sin of his."
Marika watched this dutiful old man hammer away at steel with a quiet, tired determination. His stony skin and long loosened feathers gave him the appearance of a long bloated and weathered birdman, a misbegotten who had long been clipped of their wings.
"I.. I had been so desperate to die... to end all of this.." She choked through the words.
"There were more than just an old man harmed by your desire." Her guide spoke with a quiet eeriness. When Marika turned to face her, she saw a small woman sat by a fire as a stew cooked. A mark upon her one eye that once kept it shut and a head of pinkish hair told her who it was.
"Melina..."
"Is still determined, even now, to light the fire."
"No... No!" She screamed as the world spiraled, and she felt herself falling once more into that grim black abyss. Her hand extended upwards towards her eldest daughter, her first great tragedy.
Her precious candle. "No...!" She cried.
But there was no one left to hear her cries as she fell.