Maidenless No Longer (Elden Ring)

Chapter 17: Ranni the Witch

A/N: The chronology of Chapters 14-17 is pretty questionable. Honestly, just wanted to split up the Ranni chapters a little bit. Technically, the Tarnished could have stopped by Latenna's cave on his way back to the Grand Library to pick up the ring, I suppose. Either way, here's what I know a lot of people have been waiting for!

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The ground shakes, and a dragon's roar can be heard overhead. Ah, Ranni's most troublesome Knight, the Glintstone Dragon Adula. The only question was, was this treachery, or misplaced zealotry? Adula was ever a... jealous disciple of hers. But in the end, it seemed it mattered little.

The crashing about on the grasslands above lasts for barely a minute before one last boom, the sound of a dragon's body falling to the earth, can be heard. Then, it is over. In that time, Ranni does not move. Her doll body is in the worst state it's ever been in, but that is not why she does not struggle to rise. She stays where she is... because her part is done. All that is left, is to see what happens next.

Sitting perched there on the edge of the Two Fingers' palm, Ranni is victorious. The Two Fingers, HER Two Fingers, are at long last dead. When she had foregone her Empyrean flesh all that time ago, when she had cast aside her old body and done away with her destiny, Ranni had foolishly thought that would be the end of it.

Unfortunately, it did not take long for the Two Fingers to disabuse her of that notion. They would never stop hunting her. That much had been made abundantly clear. It did not matter to them that Lunar Princess Ranni was no more. It did not matter to them that Marika had cut away the part of her that cared, for the purposes of creating her formless, ever-burning kindling maiden.

All that mattered was her defiance. All that mattered was that she'd spat in the face of the Great Will. They could not abide by her decisions, and so they'd hunted her. And so Ranni... had had to flip the script, so to speak. To turn the tables. To make the hunter, the hunted.

It had taken time, quite a lot of it in fact... and the assistance of one who not even Ranni had thought to count upon. But she'd done it. The Fingerslayer Blade had done its grisly work. Her Two Fingers were dead. She was victorious.

She was also a broken, useless thing, trapped in the body of a doll. At the end of this hard, agonizing road, what did she truly have left to show for it? Ah, but she'd been ready for this end, hadn't she? She'd prepared for this to be where it all... stopped.

Only in more recent times, had she thought to plan for something more. Only in her last encounter with the Tarnished, had she allowed herself to hope. And now... now here he was. The Tarnished lands in the cave beneath the Cathedral of Manus Celes, where the Two Fingers sought to hide. It was a textbook case of refuge in audacity, she supposed, that they would try to lay low here, at the Moonlight Altar.

His knees bend to negate most of the impact of the fall, and then he straightens up, looking to her immediately with a smile on his lips. She remains unresponsive, even in the face of his approach. Her doll body has taken quite the beating. The damage would not be easily repaired, under most circumstances.

She knows, of course, what he had to do to get here. Returning to the Academy, to her mother's... chambers in order to utilize the key he gave her, that was one thing. But the Tarnished had gone even further beyond that, to reach this place. Traversing the Lake of Rot. Bringing low the Naturalborn of the Void, malformed star that he was.

The Death of the Eternal City had in turn been put to death himself by this Tarnished's own hands, in the same way Adula had just experienced up above. Generals and Stars and Dragons alike. Each of them, nothing more than another obstacle in the Tarnished's path. Each of them, calmly faced and destroyed, all for the sake of... of her.