[NEW STORY] ELDEN LORD! SUMMER ROSE (AN ELDEN RING/RWBY CROSSOVER STORY)

All of her adventuring, all of her trials and tribulations, had led to this. Fighting gods and demigods, trying to nab pieces of their Greater Runes to yank them into some coherent whole; all to access the capital of The Lands Between, the place where she, as a Tarnished, had been banished from so many years ago. Cast out, thrown out, unable to return until the very last possible second, where fate itself hinged upon the Tarnished.

She’d been led by Grace and by her Maiden to the myriad of demigods who were all meant to fight for control and ascendancy in the age after The Breaking of the great Elden Ring, the shattering that had ended an empire. Maybe no one had seen it at first, but after traveling the lands and seeing how decrepit and borderline unlivable it had become, the Tarnished had only resigned herself to her cause.

She could have done many things, being the being that she was.

The All-Knowing Gideon would have surely been happy to ape off her success, had she let him. She could have, instead, succumbed to the wench Fia and her plans. She could have gone along with Ranni or submitted to the other crazed Empyreans. She’d been tempted to, once her Maiden died to burn the great Elden Tree down. An unthinkable, insane act, but necessary to gain entry inside. She’d fought for that, too, going against the First Elden Lord Godfrey, to claim her place as the one to enter the Tree. She’d done so with great determination, with all the training and runes at her disposal, entering with her head held high; to fight against Radagon, the one who uselessly tried to reforge a Ring in the absence of its constituent parts.

Radagon, the last ‘husband’ of Marika, He Who Was Marika, was beaten by her scythe. But the creature that emerged was something beyond her reckoning, however. The Elden Beast itself was massive and gelatinous, a creature of the stars unlike any of the others she had fought and beaten. It was majestic, it was powerful, and she’d fought it to her last breath, as she had all the other monsters of the land: dying and living and dying through undeath for eternity, or so it seemed, just to get there. Just to bury her scythe in the Beast’s head and kill it. 

The tree was still burning around her at this very moment, and she was breathing in the divine ash. She would live in a world with no Elden Tree, and she was not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. How would the cycle of divinity exist? What would happen after? She did not know, not one bit. She kept thinking about the good and the bad of her situation, trying to understand if this was the right choice to make.

And it was, as far as she could ascertain. 

This was what she was here for, and it was not just because of the guiding Grace. She’d tried to find the best possible course for the land. It was why she’d had to listen to the stupid ‘Goldmask’ dude and his babbling companion. She’d learned damning secrets about the Golden Order, all to forge and obtain a perfect Rune of Mending for Marika the Eternal.

Marika, the Queen; Marika, the Golden; Marika, the one she was meant to save, the woman whose body she had to collect from around the burning tree because it had been reduced to stone during its captivity; pieces collected from the shattered Radagon, whom the Tarnished had slain. It was not the strangest thing she’d ever done in her journey so far, but it did feel particularly taboo to rebuild her goddess piece by piece, until she set a golden head of stone upon brilliant shoulders.

She placed her Mending Rune of Perfect Order within Marika’s hollowed chest, between the shell of a cracked breast and the swell of another, and set it down against the broken Elden Ring itself, filaments of oddly pulsating gold, like quivering flesh. The Tarnished had no clue what would come next from this. She didn’t know what would happen when she reached the end of her journey: Marika was long dead, it seemed, and any potential was just potential.

She was tired. She was spent. She’d fought too much, too hard, been put to sleep to outlast the burning of the tree, and was exhausted from no less than three successive battles. She was a Tarnished, yes, and a powerful mage-warrior, soaked and imbued with runes… but she was also exhausted. She’d died so many times, so now, she just wanted to rest. To sit down or lie down, and sleep.

She fell to her knees, panting hard, stained with both blood and sweat alike. She looked nothing like the warriors she had seen; she was small, barely up to the shoulders of the average one. Any definition to her figure was modest, more suited to a scholar’s robe than a battlefield. And due to being starved from her journeys, if she stretched even lightly to a side, one could see the definition of her ribcage across her skin.

Her legs were her only defined feature, reflecting a past lifestyle focused around clever, quick footwork. They were decently muscular for her body size, and yet scarred with effort. And as she fell to her knees, they folded before her, tucked tight. Her rapier clanged to the floor, reflecting the fires around her. She kept her stave loose in her hand, useless as it was: she was drained of any possible magic, and her flask was empty.

She hung her head, and her long, black-red hair hung down around her face like a matted curtain. Normally, she had it more tamed than this, but she could hardly control it now. She barely paid attention to it. Instead, she spent a moment just breathing. She was so, so tired. So very tired.

I can't believe I made it here, she marveled as she knelt before Marika’s corpse-statue. And now… now…

What happened now?

She didn’t know. She had no Maiden to ask, no Two Fingers for guidance.

What was next?…What was left?

She did not know how long she knelt. It could have been five minutes, it could have been five hours, it could have been five days. All she did as she knelt was listen to the rhythm of her barely beating heart, the rise and fall of her small chest, and the expansion of her lungs. Up, down. Up, down. Up, down. In, and out.

It was only dimly that she became aware of the golden itch. A light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, making her vision almost foggy. It was slow to pull itself together, but once it did, the golden glow was centered upon the Mending Rune before her: the Elden Ring repairing itself bit by fractured bit, entwining with itself.

Marika’s statue creaked. Then, it expanded into golden light, and the Tarnished’s eyesight left her. No, she simply went blind. No other words described it, and nothing else could be said. The Tarnished had nothing to do as light blazed across the inner slopes of the Tree, as the Elden Ring was finally mended for good, pulled back together through her efforts and the dictation of Goldmask. Light flowed over the Tarnished, making her feel warm, safe, and reassured. It was almost like being in the embrace of her mother, but that had been so long ago she couldn’t even remember her face.

She hung there listlessly on her knees as the golden light radiated over her, her head lolled forward, eyes drooping into sleep. She was limp all the way through, barely conscious, but she felt magic in the air, however. Her own talents allowed her to discern the ebbs of a magic so strong, so pure, that it seemed divine. And it was running around her like a current, all being pulled into the corpse-statue before her.

Not that she could see anything, even then.

"Arise, Tarnished. Thou need not kneel in my presence. Not after thine great deed."

The rich, flowing syllables of that voice made her hair stand on end. And she opened her eyes, confused and uncertain as to when they had actually closed. She found herself staring at a pair of feet at first, bare, with golden rings upon the toes. Up her eyes went, across smooth ankles—one of which bore a chain of golden thread—and then across calves so unblemished it was like looking at marble.

"I apologize, Queen Marika, but my kneeling is not from reverence," she rasped, "I… cannot stand."

Blood still seeped from her wounds, and she doubted she would be conscious for much longer.

"A god is not so easily slain," Marika noted, her voice still reverberating inside her head. "I will bid thee rest, for the moment. Thou hast earned it. But know this: there lieth more work to do in these still-dark days ahead. I no longer hear its calling. The Greater Will no longer reaches this land. Thou hast severed its grasp.

Her eyes fluttered, but she willed herself to stay awake. She wanted to—no, needed to—hear it. All of it.

Marika held her hand out, the cracks in her skin still evident.

"I proclaim thee as Elden Lord. I would know thine name, for my third and final consort."

She took a deep breath. She could not remember the last time she had been asked that. Her name seemed like such a distant thing now. But remember it she did, and she would do well to never forget, like a cherished memory.

"My name… is Summer," she finally gasped out. "Summer Rose of Patch."

Summer finally looked up to stare Marika in the eye. They were golden and unending, and looking upon her face was akin to staring at the sun. Though her face still held the cracks the rest of her body shared, there was beauty through it, still unbroken by time.

"Then rest now, my Lord Summer. Rest, and recover thine strength. This world is freed of true gods, but there is much to do."

And, like a struggling lantern in the wind, Summer's light finally went out.