Chapter 49 49: The Omen King
"Have you ever heard of the Crucible Power?" Lansseax asked, her voice dropping into a register that felt ancient and hollow.
Lucia's mind immediately conjured the imagery of the elite Crucible Knights. He recalled the gold-and-red incantations they channeled—arts fundamentally distinct from the sterile, pure yellow light of modern prayers, matching the archaic, heavy bronze plate they wore into battle.
No one in the modern capital knew what manner of primordial entities were sealed beneath those massive suits of red-gold armor. Though the knights maintained human silhouettes, they could seamlessly manifest the localized atavisms of the ancient Melting Pot—sprouting feathered wings, massive reptilian tails, or horns to execute martial feats that shattered the physical boundaries of human biology.
Seeing that she had provoked a deep, analytical stillness in him, Lansseax did not keep him in suspense. She continued to methodically trace the restricted lineages of the past.
"That energy originates from the primal Forge of Life—the absolute, unrefined blessing of the Initial Erdtree," she explained, her eyes fixed on the rhythmic sway of the carriage curtain. "According to High Priest Gransax, before the Forbidden War fractured the old civilizations a millennium ago, the baseline grace coiling through our ancestors' veins carried that exact gold-and-red mixture. But when the Initial Ring was shattered in the fires of that war, the ancestral tree collapsed. During the subsequent War of the Gods, every living entity across the Lands Between endured centuries of absolute, lightless exile. They were an entire generation bereft of grace."
"It wasn't until Queen Marika emerged as the solitary victor of that slaughter that the Elden Ring—with Destined Death violently stripped from its matrix—ascended as the new, immutable Law of the world. A refined, calculated grace was lit once more within the pupils of all living things. That is the pure gold color you see today, the symbol of managed life. Even for our dragon kin and the Carian nobles who harbor other faiths, the systemic architecture of our residual grace is functionally identical to that of the Golden People."
Hearing her words, a profound question that had tormented Lucia since his transmigration was instantly resolved: This was why the Ancient Dragons, despite serving the primal tenets of Farum Azula, still possessed eyes that burned with pure, golden light.
He hadn't calculated that the era of the Tarnished wasn't a historical novelty. Centuries before his arrival, Eternal Queen Marika and War King Godfrey had already walked the exact, bloody path the future players would tread. That grand, harrowing labor—building a new civilization from the literal ashes of a collapsed cosmic order—was a tragic epic built upon ten thousand mountains of bones. To later generations, it was a holy myth; to those who survived it, it was merely a grim necessity to stabilize a broken world.
"But returning to the Crucible itself," Lansseax paused, her expression turning sharp and grim. "By every law of cosmic regression, now that the modern Law has been consolidated and golden grace saturates every boundary of the continent, the old energy should be extinct. Aside from those ancient Crucible Knights who drew breath before the golden calendar, and a few forgotten, degenerated races like the Misbegottens who exist outside the Erdtree's grace, no new entity should ever manifest the Crucible's traits. Not a single one. Do you grasp the weight of that architecture, Lucia?"
Lucia stared at her, his blood running cold as the systemic horror of the setting settled into his chest. "But they are being born anyway."
Aye. Even now, with Golden Order Fundamentalism sitting at the absolute zenith of its cultural monopoly, children are still born carrying the raw, untamed vitality of the Crucible. Their flesh erupts in chaotic tumors and hard, jagged horns, their muscles packing a primordial physical violence that makes a human babe look like glass.
"The Children of the Omen," Lucia whispered into the dim interior of the carriage.
Lansseax let out a slow, heavy sigh, her elegant brow knit in a tight line of distress. "In the century since the Erdtree's calendar was locked, the ratio of Omen births across the provinces has multiplied year by year. Within the walls of this capital alone, the probability of a normal human childbirth yielding an Omen infant is currently nearing a full one percent. The royal scholars have burned through three generations of research inside the archives, yet they cannot unearth a single mathematical theory sufficient to explain the regression."
"Imagine a common merchant couple," she murmured, her voice flat. "They were raised beneath the boughs of the Erdtree. They tithe to the churches, they chant the Fundamentalist hymns, and they devoutly worship the Golden Order. Then, without a single whisper of external interference or sin, the midwife hands them a twisted, bestial monster covered in horns. How could they see that babe as anything other than a demonic curse?"
Lucia understood the psychological mechanics perfectly. To the common populace, such a birth wasn't a biological misfire; it was a terrifying breakdown of their reality. When a society's absolute truth receives an answer it cannot explain, that confusion rapidly curdles into visceral fear—and unquenchable fear inevitably hardens into a bone-deep, generational hatred.
"This dynastic panic reached its absolute flashpoint when Queen Marika gave birth to the twin princes, Morgott and Mohg," Lansseax whispered, the memory clearly weighing on her dragon soul. "The War against the Giants had just concluded. The Queen and the War King returned to Leyndell at the head of their legions, carrying their newborn twins. The Golden People had constructed grand triumphal arches, preparing a massive festival to celebrate the absolute supremacy of their God and King. But when the royal veil was lifted—when they saw those two princes, and realized that even the Eternal Lineage could not escape the defilement—the collective mind of the capital fractured."
"They believed they were looking at an Omen of cosmic doom. They claimed the royal blood was a 'cursed lineage,' infected by a Frenzied Flame from the deep. The citizens went mad, Lucia. They formed howling mobs, marching through the Lower District with kitchen cleavers and smithing hammers, slaughtering the Omen infants they had personally birthed and cradled the night before. A massive, hysterical horde even breached the Upper District, storming the outer courtyards of the Golden Temple, demanding the Queen deliver the royal twins to the execution block to purify the realm."
"The citizens did that?" Lucia muttered, entirely stunned by the raw savagery of the capital's history. But then he thought back to the blood-soaked sand of the Serante Colosseum he had stood in hours prior, and the pieces fit the board perfectly. A society that feeds on the slaughter of non-humans for entertainment would naturally turn those same cleavers on its own blood when panicked.
"How did Godfrey contain the madness?" he asked.
Even though Lansseax was a sovereign priestess of Farum Azula who had witnessed the fall of empires, the moment she named the First Elden Lord, an involuntary, profound awe colored her eyes.
"The War King took the field alone," she replied. "Clutching that massive, double-bitted bronze axe, he planted his boots before the grand oak threshold of the Golden Temple. He stood as a solitary vanguard for three days and three nights. He allowed his own subjects to shift from pleading to screaming, to hysterical curses, to physically slamming their bodies against his armor. He never swung his blade. He simply used his physical bulk to absorb their fury, backed by an abyss-like, primordial gravity that formed an absolute barrier across the steps. When the sun rose on the fourth dawn, the crowd's voice was broken, and the Queen finally stepped through the veil to decree the Law of the underground."
"From that morning, common Omen infants had their horns brutally sheared away before being cast into the drainage gates. While the twin princes were exempted from the iron shears due to their royal blood, they could not evade the sentence of exile; they were chained in the deep dark. To keep the balance, the citizens began releasing common market lobsters, crabs, and parasitic frogs down into the wells. Under the volatile, radioactive stimulation of the discarded Omen blood, those common creatures mutated into massive, armored variants, providing a lethal ecosystem of hunter and prey for the exiled children to navigate for their scraps."
Lansseax leaned toward the window, her gaze lost in the gray stone avenues as their carriage approached the temple plaza. "Across sixteen winters, those sewers have evolved into an incredibly complex, hostile underworld. I once deployed a cohort of our knights to map the drainage arteries, but our numbers were lean, and we salvaged little—save for a singular whisper that even I cannot verify."
She looked at Lucia, her voice dropping to a bare whisper. "They say that Knight Ordovis of the Crucible Vanguard broke his vows of isolation. They claim he descended into the dark to become the secret tutor of the royal twins, and under his bronze hammer, the brothers have organized the subterranean exiles into a disciplined legion."
"The sewer-dwellers call the elder twin by a sovereign title, Lucia."
"The Omen King."
Author's note:
Crucible Power: The primordial energy of the Erdtree before it was refined into the Golden Order, characterized by chaotic, bestial manifestations.Morgott and Mohg: The twin demigod sons of Marika and Godfrey, born as Omens due to the residual influence of the Crucible.Ordovis: One of the two named Crucible Knight commanders (alongside Siluria), hinted here to have secretly preserved the old ways by training the exiled princes.
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