Beneath Sadness - Lette

My bones ache. Feet sore. Perhaps a few new wrinkles have found my ancient face. Yet I endure. It would not be much longer, I promised as much. A sea of fresh blood followed me. A dotted line from our town. To the north, whatever lie there. The documents my guide, only but a handful of invoices and the reminder that he had made it through the long years. It would be enough for me to press on. Across many a sad field, muck and scum abound. Fiends of every variety, some personal, others only doing what they do to survive. But they would not.

These were wild lands. The entire country was wild by some measure, but these lands were those of Nords in many ages passed. Ruins littered the treeline, overgrown and forgotten. Settlements were few and far between. Crossing through an abandoned town, I came upon a graveyard. Two graves in particular caught my eye. Symbols to me. I knelt before them and wept. Oh how I wept. Cheeks still damp from tears, I stumbled into a town just down the road. Quiet. I passed through without speaking. I found the inn, a light thwap as my coinpurse fell before the innkeep. A silent exchange, only a finger pointing to a room across from the desk. There was some unease in his movements. As though he were hiding something. I latched the door behind me. Alone, I sat numb on the floor for some time. A thousand thoughts. I drank and ate, thought and wept. Then the numbness again. There was little sleep to be had.

Across mushroom covered cliffs the next week. I brought out my papers and questioned the most common looking of folk that I met in my travels. Few had answers, others seemed hesitant to even speak to me. I suspected that the news had yet again spread ahead of me. At one point, my attention fell to a dark shape on the horizon. The path lead up toward it but it seemed many days ahead. And that it was. On the fourth day since noticing it, I was close enough to make it out. A castle or fort, near ruined. By the fifth day, the gates were within walking distance. My maps and papers were vague. I went inside.

The foyer, black as the darkest night. Silent, dead apart from the clink of my glass boots. I thought it a place to rest away from prying eyes. Each night was to be the last night before I found him. My mind raced on, the things I would say, the things I would do. Those thoughts came to me now in the dark of that place. One comfort in a world with none. Then came an arrow. The twang of a bowstring broke my thoughts, the sound of air rushing behind it, the curling of my palm. The shaft shattering against the wall behind me, the darkness now fleeing from my light. I could see them. At all sides, they hustled and crept. Their masks and daggers caught glints of my sickening light. Morag Tong or meager assassins in their garb. It didn’t matter. The one nearest me spoke to the others, thick and ashy. Coastal. To low for my failing hearing to catch, but in that instant they approached in unison. One reach for my hand, as if to apprehend me. As his hand drew near, I held my own toward it. At contact, his went limp. My glow permeating the meat of his arm, he gasped then fell. Breath labored, it was over in a handful of seconds. The others looked on horrified but held fast. Why do they never flee? If they knew of me, they had to have known what I would do. Magicka surging, my palms rose. Panic in their ranks. Their daggers drove out for me, some finding a mark, others trailing past me in the poor lighting. I held, enduring, letting it swell in me. An arrow struck my right thigh. I endured. Another my right arm, nothing. The last in my back, grazing but lodging itself in the fabric. And then the release. A flash from my hands brought about a fog by our feet. By the time the clouds truly formed, it was too late. Pale jade vapor swirled and pulsated through the corridor, a life of it’s own, it sought out lungs and stung at their skin. Their masks and leathers did little to stop me. Once grey skin blazed red and green, irritation, rot. As they fell like flies, they prayed. Oh how they prayed. Crumpled to the ground, clawing at the floor. A number took mother Azura’s name to their fowl tongues. I would have none of it, a clenching of my fist and their suffering would be tenfold that of their brethren. Some took off their masks, only quickening their fate. Their words tangled amidst coughs and gagging. Their innards churning and boiling, last vestiges of hope failing with each passing second. Some took it better than others, having a peaceful seat in some lonely corner of the room, content to pass. Others fought on until the last breath, grasping for each others fallen daggers, fumbling arrows past my head. Some cursed me in whatever tongues they could muster. It mattered not. In a room littered with the dead and dying that could not stop me, my green became gold, slowly but surely tending to my wounds. They would harm me no further. It was done and I felt an odd chill. A new sadness beneath the old sadness.

The next day was quiet. Mostly wilderness as I had grown accustomed to. I traveled at night, fearing another ambush. Though fear was not the right word. I had time to think under the moonlight. Collect my thoughts. This ever growing crimson river had gotten high and it now weighed on me. A weight I rarely felt these two hundred and some odd years. Most certainly not in the last 35 years. These thoughts could never penetrate that. But things had changed, and in me something as well. I thought it a result of my journey. That missing part of me soon to be made whole again, that I would be a different person when it was over. That my one regret would be replaced by the many that I had accumulated in the search of it. I arrived upon a grassy hill by sunrise. The closer I got to the top, the more welcoming it all seemed. Birds woke from their slumber to serenade me. A variety of insects went about their days in the tall grass, zooming past, above and below. A soft wind, a kiss on my tired cheeks. From the top, I could see the shoreline. The northern coast possibly? I had hoped so. The slaver documents placed him there. A town, sparse and far spread dotted the coast. I made my way to the inn and paid for a week’s room.

Across from the cookpot, I knelt. As I did every night, I told myself the bottle of Sujamma would be my companion tonight, for I would have no need of it come tomorrow. His face, clear as ever sat in the back of my mind.