#zena's disappearance is due to a plague = my brain liking plagues as story motifs | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fillianore-moved · 4 years

Text

oc nera: a study of fears

when it comes to my dark souls ocs the underlying motif of everything they do and are is fear, perhaps not in the most obvious ways, but it’s something i feel best defines and ties the three of them. i’ve already spoken about some other things they have in common, such as their memories and the past being both their best friend and worst enemy, but today i really wanted to take a deeper look at nera, my dark souls 1 oc, and try to map out the way her two primal fears that have shaped her journey! this is in a way a short(ish) overview of her past, her present and her as a person...

the past

during the time she was alive, nera was a court herbalist in zena. she was relatively well respected as a daughter of two lower nobles and at the time of her death she was around 24-25 years old. during her life, zena was a flourishing merchant kingdom and that boosted the prestige and aesthetic beauty of everything around her. arguably, one could say she didn’t even know true fear until her last moments.

before her death she was engaged to a young nobleman, her childhood friend and younger prince’s close confidante. it was supposed to be both a marriage of convenience but also soon turned out to be a union of love. nera was deeply in love with him and it seemed completely reciprocated by him, while also heartily supported by everyone around them. it was a real fairytale, court romance a girl could dream of, and nera found herself fulfilled both in her professional and private life.

her memory of the month or two before her death remain forever fuzzy, but it seemed to be a whirl of working on different cures for the sudden outbreak of a plague in zena and delayed wedding preparations. she remembers everyone being tense and stressed, working constantly with doctors, clerics and sorcerers from all over the country and the terrible stench of piled bodies in their research hall. she remembers her younger sister and father perishing soon after the outbreak came to their town, days before her wedding was first supposed to happen and she remembers being unable to scrub their blood from her fingernails - she distinctly remembers that fear that followed her until her own death a mere week later.

but it wasn’t the plague that finished her, ironically it was a dagger lodged into her ribs as she feel from the balcony and into the freezing waters. she sometimes likes to pretend she doesn’t know who did it, but she recognized the hand coming around her waist far too well, along with the engagment ring on it. hundreds of questions ran through her mind as she was falling, an eternity passed, but they became irrelevant as soon as she hit the surface and her senses scattered along with her consciousness.

who knows how much time has passed before she was dragged out, dagger in her chest and all, into the undead asylum. perhaps a day, perhaps a year or a hundred, it too was irrelevant. her white dress was just dirty tatters at that point, her skin and hair were no more and she was alone. the only thing that kept her sane was the question “why?” that kept coming back to her despite not having a target or an answer.

the memories and undeath

nera hoped her memories would fade as the undead curse progressed, but they never did. she found solace in the idea that one day her mind would be a blank slate untethered to anything or anyone. it was her fault, she was sure, the undeath doesn’t come for anyone, she must’ve done something terribly unforgivable to deserve such a fate. this was how she thought for the first few decades, and the lonely cell gave her far too much time to dwell on it all. and as even other undead she knew slowly hollowed out, it seemed as if it was just her and her own memories and questions stuck in time. that was the second primal fear that followed the first one - she would be stuck alone with her thoughts and questions until the end of time, no absolution and no answers ever to follow.

in a way, this fear made her feel more human than before, she would get up and pace the cell, she would yell like a madwoman and hit walls, she would sing ridiculous songs and name the rats in her cell all kinds of profanities. in a lot of ways, these all seem to be the doings of someone who doesn’t have their sanity, but they paradoxically made her more sane by the day. they also diverted her attention from her innermost fear and thoughts that haunted her. the biggest problem that started to plague her then was a surprisingly human one - she was bored.

the dagger lodged in her chest? she pulled it out after who knows how long and engraved all kinds of thoughts and recipes for elixirs on her cell walls and floors, they kept being erased by time and she overwrote them with new ones, heaps and heaps of knowledge and ideas. once the dagger finally broke, she saved the terribly rusted artifact into her tattered clothes. she isn’t even sure why, but the only artifact she had of her previous life suddenly felt too important to leave behind or throw out the small window. it was her past life materialized, the representation of her fears but in time it also became the anchor of her sanity.

the fate and the gods

now that death was a technicality for her and she had the opportunity to leave the undead asylum and find a new fate, it was something she wholeheartedly accepted. turns out that dying over and over wasn’t particularly terrifying for her, because she felt like her first death represented the worst possible way to go, everything else lordran threw at her wasn’t half as terrifying. also, she wasn’t a particular believer in the fate of two bells, the undead pilgrimage or the gods calling her, it was simply a way for her to have a goal that was obtainable (or at least more obtainable than getting the answers of centuries old corpses from a land that didn’t even seem to exist anymore) and that she can work towards.

she cried when she first came to anor londo, not because of her religious beliefs, but due to a certain level of familiarity, and also sudden warmth of the sun on her skin and although it was an empty marble city, it became a painful reminder of what probably became of her own home, if anything was even left of it. that nostalgia, melancholy and the sudden wash of memories and feelings she’s kept for so long under control threatened to swallow her whole. even after all that time she’s spent in the asylum and then traveling lordran, that fear that she will never be rid of her past was still alive and well in her chest.

even after all that time she remains the same as she was at the moment of her death - completely and utterly alone with no answers, only haunted by memories and questions that will never be answered in a way that was acceptable for her and that would appease her soul.

a cycle of fear

this is something she never pulls out of. fear is her constant companion and no amount of ignoring it will ever change that, the only thing she can do is get her mind to concentrate on something more immediate. but ignoring it and channeling her thoughts in another direction might work for someone who knows that they’re going to die, but for an undead who seems to be very persistently not hollowing (at least not in their mind), this was a haunting realization - there was no escaping this second fear she’s found in that cell ages ago, it was a fear that was as undead as she was. sooner or later that fear will come to the surface again and she will have to push it back down again and again and again.

that type of pointless cycle she was bound to follow made her realize how absurd everything she is and has done is. it also made her even more pessimistic about herself, the world around her and her journey.

what’s the point to relighting the fire? just so she can live the rest of her life burdened by the ages she’s lived through and remain still plagued by the ancient moment of her death until she perished truly forever? and yet not feeding the first flame felt as ultimately selfish and egoistic - who was she to decide that everything should perish just because her own life has left her fearful and wanting?

thankfully (or not) for her, she settles on relighting the first flame, unaware that the fire will take her own life as firewood.

the end?

nera’s second death when giving her life for the first flame doesn’t actually count as a happy end (at least not in my books). it’s just a terrible way of cutting the knot of her many issues as she still remains at her core an unhappy and fear-plagued person until her last moment. she doesn’t know that she will truly die when reviving the flame, so that in itself takes away from the heroic sacrifice scenario, but she is still ready to lift the undead curse and live what’s left of her life with the baggage that’s hundreds of years old. perhaps there was a hope in her head that if she knew she didn’t have forever and she could die as a mortal woman, her mind would more easily let go of those ancient fears and questions and let her finally live as she wanted to live - free from her past, unburdened by all the questions and maybe even happy one day.

nera was ultimately robbed of resolving her issues and because she died the second time with the same first primal fear she felt when the dagger was put into her ribcage it felt as if everything that had happened between the two true deaths was irrelevant and ultimately absurd. hundreds of years wasted, hundreds of possible lives wasted too was her final realization that answered none of her burning questions. it all felt like it happened one after the other, only this second time around it wasn’t freezing water that embraced her, but an endless fire.

#zena history and stuff is me just... thinking stuff up ahjksdgs #idk anything about zena and it's never mentioned after dks1 #so these are my creative liberties #zena's disappearance is due to a plague = my brain liking plagues as story motifs #ALSO this was done as a stream of consciousness so there are bound to be grammarerrors but atm i don't feel like rereading it rip #oc: nera #ocs: the tragedy triad #ocs: dark souls

8 notes · View notes