Chapter Text
Some Time Later
Sieglinde waited outside the Giant Blacksmith’s door, turning this way and that on the off chance Solaire might appear. She’d gotten horribly sidetracked, but in Lordran, time had a way of stretching and shrinking and folding in on itself, in these empty, liminal places. Undead were very likely to run into one another while passing by an area, even if each party remembers the event happening on a different date and time. It had a name, something she should remember from her school days. Oh what was it?
The Theory of Narrative Causality?
Something like that.
She was tired. A strange little man had tried to trick her by laying iridescent stones all about the halls, so that he could push her down a well and steal her armour. She ended up chasing the little pervert away after becoming wise to his tricks - as soon as she twisted his arm behind his back, he went off crying with his tail between his legs. She wrote warnings all along where the stones were found - “liar ahead”, “cowardly sort ahead”, and a new one she was really enjoying: “you don’t have the right!”.
When she’d finally reached the Sagrada Madre, it had been after a series of other misadventures, but these are stories for another night.
Out of the corner of her visor, she saw a familiar shape approaching, a shape that broke into a jog when she waved over at it.
“Miss Sieglinde!” Solaire called out “A sight for sore eyes!”
Sieglinde noticed her companion’s armour looking decidedly less shabby, and he had something interesting strapped to his back - a greatsword, glimmering blue. And the emblem on his chest had been updated too, to include a crescent moon inside the sun. It looked to be finished by someone with more experience with a brush, to be honest - or at least someone with brushes of differing sizes.
“I’m glad to see you well,” she laughed at his enthusiastic waving. She pointed at his tabard “This is nice - did you run into a painter?”
“Oh Linde,” he said jovially “There is an
entire painted world
not one mile from here! Scoff if you like, but that just means we won’t bring you to visit.”
“A painted world,” good grief, some of the things he came out with. She would worry he was going hollow, except this wasn’t the usual flavour of madness that went along with that “And you found your sun there, I suppose?”
She’d learned about this from, of all people, that weaselly man that liked to push women into holes.
Here, you know he wants to claim his very own sun, right?
Sun in the sky, mind.
Believe me on this one, luv. He's a complete idiot.
But he happens to be an awfully strong idiot. Just nod your head and keep him on your side!
Solaire became uncharacteristically shy for a moment, bashful even.
“Well, actually,” he began “not in the painted world, but -”
“WHAT.”
“Ah, when you are older and fall in love yourself, you will understand,” he said moonily.
Love?? Oh, well this made a lot more sense than whatever nonsense that petty thief was rabbiting on about.
“Hang on,” she raised a pair of gauntleted hands “Start from the beginning please.”
And so the newly-minted Knight of the Sun and Moon regaled her, and by extension the Giant Blacksmith with his story. In gushing at length about his beau’s grace, selflessness and so many other qualities, he forgot to mention his True Love, leader of the Darkmoon Blades, was an immortal eight foot tall being composed at least partially of many large snakes.
Needless to say, next time she took up Solaire’s offer of ‘popping around for tea’, the onion knight got the surprise of her life.