London in February 1992 was still bitterly cold. The cold alone wasn't so terrible; the real problem was how damp the air was. The chill seeped into your bones before you knew it. For anyone with a weaker constitution, a single step outside left hands and feet icy numb.
Skyl glanced at the young woman beside him, who kept breathing into her cupped hands. Her quiet bearing outshone late-blooming lilies; her eyes, sea-blue and dulled of Grace, were exquisitely beautiful.
He studied this "work" of his, weighing in his mind the intelligence and emotion it displayed.
"It's cold," the woman said. Noticing Skyl's gaze, she held out her reddened hands for him to see.
Skyl used Transfiguration to give her a pair of deerskin gloves. Once she slipped them on, warmth spread through them at once.
"Thank you."
"Have you remembered your name yet?"
She only shook her head.
"And your past? Have you remembered anything at all?"
Again, she just shook her head. Skyl still remembered the first time he had spoken to her: back then, she had been like a newborn infant, her eyes clear with a total ignorance of the world.
At that time, Skyl had just brought her back to life.
One week earlier.
The Lands Between, Chapel of Anticipation.
Skyl laid the body of the nameless Finger Maiden on the altar. The chapel of waiting kings, once filthy and in disarray, had been scrubbed clean. Every mold-ridden table and stool had been thrown over the cliff. Around the altar, the stone floor was covered with a single thick sheet of pure white cotton. The cloth was heaped with magical sigils. Ninety-nine soulstones were set into the complex nodes of the ritual array, and intricate, gorgeous runes were drawn in pure gold, quicksilver, and powdered amethyst, symbolizing the threefold protection of the Sun, the Dark Moon, and the Great One.
He intended to resurrect this witch—or, more precisely, to use the resurrection ritual to test his research results and communicate with the divine law of the Lands Between. Whether the person herself could be saved, he did not particularly care. If he truly wanted to revive someone, dragging the corpse into The Tower of Tomes and fixing it would take no more than the blink of an eye.
The Finger Maiden's corpse had been lying here for quite some time, yet it remained fresh, as though she had only just died. This wasn't due to some special property of her body, but rather the temporal confusion of the Lands Between.
Skyl speculated that ever since Queen Marika shattered the Elden Ring with her hammer, the history of the Lands Between had ceased to be recorded in the universe's memory-core and was instead written into the law of the gods.
To put it simply: only events inscribed in the law were "saved"; whatever took place within that save file would be fixed as history. Otherwise, events would fall into endless repetition.
This was also why histories of the Lands Between could never be strict annals, but only records of lives. The stretch of time between two events might be extremely short—or impossibly, unimaginably long.
For example: Zhang San kills Li Si. If the law acknowledges this event, then Li Si is dead. If it does not, time resets; Li Si was never killed, and Zhang San must repeat the process until one attempt is finally recorded as a node by the law.
The Finger Maiden's death had already been recorded by the law. It was a matter settled, nailed into the past.
What Skyl meant to do was erase that entry from the law, his entire purpose was to get the law to respond.
By committing this outrageous, law-defying crime, Skyl meant to force the law itself to manifest. Just as, later, in world I, he would use Eternal Transfiguration to force the soul of the universe to mend history, Skyl—top-tier among spellcasters—was not shy about using extreme measures to prove his theories. This, at root, was why spellcasters so often got branded as madmen—they just loved to mess with reality too much.
He held his notebook in hand, recording the design of the experimental procedure and the corpse's current state.
Once he was sure the preliminary preparations were complete, he checked the resurrection array again, then checked the condition of every soulstone.
Everything matched the standard he had designed.
Skyl cast a glance at the woman's body on the altar, then activated the soulstones.
Gorgeous, mistlike radiance welled up from every carved line, every sigil, every node of the array. The light was made from unimaginably fine thought-strings: chaotic yet free, frenzied yet utterly still.
"Gather, O light of the soul. Here and now, in my capacity as master of The Tower of Tomes, I will erase this person's mark of death. She shall rise again and set foot upon the bridge I hold aloft, walking step by step back from the void."
The hazy soul-mist heeded his words. The agitated cloud roiling along the ground rose up, twisting into a cyclone. Billions upon billions of thought-strings poured into the lifeless body, reconstructing the soul she had lost.
Skyl did not stop there. Mere resurrection could not change the fact that she had once died.
So he had to go a step further.
A surge of magic flooded out of the Tower's Eye, pouring into the corpse of the Finger Maiden.
Without Transfiguration, he could only split off a little of his own divinity to complete his wish.
The eye-shaped pendant trembled and blinked. The delicate sphere at its center floated free, its surface cracking open as thirteen leaflike blades unfurled around a concentrated core of light.
The condensed divinity was breathtakingly beautiful. It represented the totality of all possibilities, all colors of the world pooled into one.
Skyl flicked his fingers lightly. From the core of that divinity fell a single tear, which landed on the corpse's brow.
At once, the dried blood on the witch's robes flowed back into her wounds. Her torn garments stitched themselves whole again. Her failed organs resumed their labor. Color bloomed once more across her pale cheeks. Her fingers twitched, her eyelids fluttered. It seemed that in the very next instant she might open her eyes and sit up.
The rushing of the soul-mist was like the cold wind through distant valleys.
And then, all at once, the sound stopped.
Every sound stopped.
A vast, crushing silence blanketed the Chapel of Anticipation. The stillness was so complete that Skyl's ears began to generate a phantom buzzing.
When the buzzing finally faded—
Another voice arose.
"I am the god of the Lands Between." A mature, steady woman's voice spoke in a tongue Skyl did not know, and yet he understood every word.
"I am Marika."
Skyl watched as the soul-mist rose up and gathered beneath the chapel's vaulted ceiling, condensing into a golden figure. She stretched out her arms like Christ on the cross, head bowed.
A speechless solemnity fell upon that place.
Golden thought-strings flickered in the air, brightening and fading. Wherever they passed through Skyl, they left behind a faint trace of warmth.
Skyl gazed up at the crucified Marika, meeting her peacefully lowered eyes. There was no need for vocal chords; he simply voiced his question within his heart.
"Are you the vessel of the law—or the law itself?"
Marika's lips did not move, but her words rolled through the silence: calm, graceful, the only voice in this death-still world.
"I am the incarnation of the world's absolute spirit, the guardian goddess of the Lands Between. My heart is the Golden Order. My roots run through the earth. I have billions upon billions of fallen leaves. After I shattered the Ring with my hammer, I hid Grace within the leaves, to ride the wind into the hands of the Tarnished. I foresaw you, in the very first moment that you set foot upon this land. Outsider, you are no child of the Erdtree. Like that Beast, like the Outer Gods, you hail from foreign shores."
"What did you foresee of me?"
"That you and I will meet—not here, but upon the stone stage. Come, present yourself before the Elden Ring. Offer up the law of the Outsider, and save all the fates of the Lands Between."
Her voice grew ever more distant, weaker and weaker, faster and faster, thinner and more sorrowful.
Before Skyl could ask another question, the projection of Queen Marika dispersed.
The howling wind died away as well.
The Finger Maiden opened her eyes. There was no light of Grace in them; her pure sea-blue gaze was as guileless as a newborn's.
Here, Marika's dialogue is modeled after the speeches of Revachol's God in Disco Elysium.
As a character shrouded in mystery in the original game, Marika's own lines are only ever relayed through Melina. Aside from her usual riddling style, they are solemn and imperious. But the image of Marika in my mind, suffering on the cross, overlaps with Revachol's God: the same voice, hazy and languid, yet crystal-clear in its sincerity—like a mother of infinite forbearance, a soul full of pain and brimming with hope.
Also, Disco Elysium is art, truly. It's a classic masterpiece of the gaming medium, one that simply must be savored.
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