#hornsent beget marika who begets the empyreans who beget the tarnished

[workmitch]

God, just…finding the Shaman Village in SotE really recontexualizes Marika.

Like, she’s a god in her own right, a despot who exterminated races and forced The Lands Between to bend to her will, who discarded allies and friends and her own family when they no longer suited her, who loved maybe just one of her children and decided to destroy everything when he died. She’s a monster and a tyrant and a vessel for a greater power and she’s also just a scared shaman girl from an empty village.

The Fingers handed godhood to a traumatized girl who had watched her people die, and the ones not lucky enough to die mutated into grotesqueries and turned into living jars. How many years had she wished to inflict the pain tenfold onto the Hornsent? How many times had her people dreamed about having just enough power to stop them?

And then The Two Fingers gave her absolute power. Enough to not only stop her tormentors, but utterly wipe them out.

Could anyone have resisted that temptation? Was there any other choice to make?

And then when it’s over, when she’s gotten the vengeance she dreamed of, what does she do? She leaves a healing tree in her village to heal nobody, because there’s nobody left, and her victory and reign are as empty as that village. No matter what she does, no matter who she eliminates and subjugates, no matter how perfect she makes her Golden Order, the village will still be empty, and she’ll still just be the shaman girl given godhood.