Quoted By:
"This is..." You find yourself lacking words when you behold what Dawn has lead you to.
<span class="mu-i">Indeed, it is,</span> Dawn confirms that your eyes are not lying to you.
Stepping back to a few moments before, you agreed to cleanse the Rot that festered beneath the garden. Even if Dawn carried those memories back to Yggdrasil whilst acting as your familiar, they will continue to resonate and shape a place of power so long as the flowers remain here. To allow a rot to disrupt the flow of memories would be a tragedy of the highest order. To allow the Blight to consume their resonant power and grow in size and strength would be an unforgivable sin.
Out of the obligation all Children hold to exterminate the Blight, and a desire to avoid any complications in the weaving of your new dress, you followed Dawn to the basement of the tower that once held the Throne of the Fire Dragon. You do not know what you expected to find in those old halls of mossy masonry, but it certainly was not what you found.
At first glance, once might mistake it for a sculpture of wood in the shape of a Child of Yggdrasil.
But the bark remains, showing that the likeness was not the work of chisel and knife. In the corner of an open room, where only a small thread of sunlight peaks in through a hole in the ceiling, you see the final rest of a weary Child. Her roots have spread into the cracks of the masonry, and where her bark has fallen away thrums the pulsing green of mana's flow that circulates through her body. Though the chain has been overgrown, a mythril medalion hangs from her wooden neck - one that you wear as well.
A fellow Daughter of Irminsul.
If your suspicions are correct, she would be Helen the Flame-Kissed, the Child whose memories you saw while you perused a certain corner of the garden up above. The woman who brought peace between the dust-born Humes and the Children of Yggdrasil after centuries of petty conflicts. Her eyes are closed, her expression is weary and meditative, but what draws your eye more than anything else is the shape of her hands and the way the roots of her fingers extend to become a webbed orb pulsing with green mana.
That, and what lies inside the orb. Swirling and black, suspended by the flowing mana and imprisoned in a cage from which it cannot move, a heart that has been consumed by the blight. <span class="mu-i">Her</span> heart, if your suspicions are correct.
<span class="mu-i">She removed her heart before the blight could spread through her body, and met the end all Children of Yggdrasil meet,</span> Dawn explains it as though it were a matter of course.
"Better by far to move on than to become a Blight Elf," you murmur. "For her to continue for this long without the sun... she must have been nourished by the flow of memories."
<span class="mu-i">No, this was not the flowers' doing,</span> Dawn's buzzing takes a chiding tone. <span class="mu-i">You Children gaze too much at the roots which connect the Nine Lands. It is not wrong to stand in awe of your Mother, but you should learn to look up above.</span>
