A friend of mine was looting Fort Greymoor and stumbled upon Agnis, the non-aggressive old woman who lives there. She told him a story of how she'd gone to sleep with Orcs in the fort one day and woken up the next to find Vampires...and she told this story while in bed, fast asleep.
Then, I looked her up on the wiki and found that she's part of the Dark Brotherhood faction.
Dark Brotherhood? Curiously placid NPC in the midst of hostiles? Ability to hold a nagging conversation whilst napping? Let the wild mass guessing begin! (Oneshot)
Day and night, Agnis weaves.
Her loom is not so large as the one's she's used in the past, not nearly as grand. But then, nothing is. Not these days. Certainly not in Skyrim, where the stone halls are cold with a winter that never ends and all her children and children's children have forgotten her. Her hands are stiff with age and cold and she pauses each morning to warm them over a candle. It's the only light in her little room.
That had made one of the Orcs suspicious, once.
It was when they'd settled into Fort Greymoor and gotten used to her, more's the pity. There had been mishaps at first, yes – bafflement – attempted murder – as they tried to compass who she was, why she didn't flinch when they came at her in their ragtag armor with stolen swords and axes waving. But she'd sat them down and served them tea, and soon they had understood.
Or understood close enough, at least. Enough to leave her alone.
The tea she'd served had been from Morrowind. Or what was left of Morrowind. She'd lived there with her oldest children long ago, brought it with her when Red Mountain had broken open. She has only a little bit left. It's flavored with bittergreen leaves and nostalgia, and Agnis does not look forward to the day when it finally runs out.
She'd reached an…understanding with the Orcs, yes. It was pleasant enough. They were Beast Race, true, lumbering and crude, nothing like her own children, but their savagery had its own subtleties. And they were clever enough to be successful at their work. Agnis had rather liked them. They let her keep her little room, let cook for them (though her spices burnt their tongues, one said), let her pick up the mess they made whenever the Whiterun guard came calling – polish the fresh weapons and armor, scrub the fresher bloodstains from the floor. They never questioned how she handled the corpses, either (a Septim on each eye, an old forgotten funeral right, stripping them clean and dragging them down to the caverns underneath the fort where the Orcs rarely went).
One of the Orcs had even gone with her to those caverns, once. To help her gather fibers for her weaving. He'd had a horrible fear of spiders, he'd said, but he helped. She'd admired that.
Yes, they'd taken care of her. Kept her fed, fetched her candles to warm her fingers. Fetched fresh nightshade for her bedside table. And in return she'd cleaned for them, cooked, patched their cloaks, worked little charms against spell and blade into the lining when they weren't looking. She stayed small and silent and scuttled under their gaze, a little old woman who only told them old wives' tales when asked, complained to them in a grandmother's voice of her missing children.
And weaved. She always weaved.
It was her arachnophobic favorite who caught her weaving in the dark. The fort was black as death in the dead of night and he'd taken a wrong turning, stumbled into her room with his torch all ablaze. Agnis had been so intent on the pattern she'd been feeling out on her little loom that it took her a moment to notice – she tucked her legs up, hiding her spider-slim fingers behind the half-formed cloth in her lap, blinking at him with large round eyes. Overlarge eyes to see in the candleless dark. Her Orc friend had stared, and stumbled back away, and slammed the door.
She'd plucked and worried at the weave all night, then, and he'd woken hungover the next morning, head splitting, memory clouded. But he remembered enough.
Agnis had shut herself in her room after that, shaken her head and clucked her tongue at their accusations (their worried counting of candles and exclamations that she couldn't work in the dark like this). She'd patted them on their heads and told them stories of her children, of a family feud she'd heard of in Cyrodiil, of an old enchanted sword she'd once seen, of the best way to cook with bittergreen leaves. And she'd weaved.
Oh, she'd weaved.
She'd shut her eyes that night with fingers aching, and when she opened her eyes in the morning it was to find red ones staring back at her.
The Vampires had taken Fort Greymoor in silence, sudden as a Daedric summoning. Agnis had gotten along with them well enough, too.
There was one of them who reminded her of her second child – a girl, Babette, a pretty little thing in bows and ringlets and pink dresses. She and Babette celebrated Agnis's birthday together (a cold night in the middle of Frostfall, when the snow fell thick as old Red Mountain ash), drinking tea and taking of family.
Babette had asked Agnis's age, and she hadn't answered; but then, she'd asked the child the same, and the little girl had laughed a fang-sharp laugh and hadn't answered either.
She was sad to see the Vampires go. It was after a night that she'd stayed up weaving, plucking at patterns in the dark, building and breaking them because she could. Spider-quick fingers working under the warp and the weft and undoing, redoing. Feeling out new shapes. New threads.
She'd awoken in the morning to find piles of ash drifting on the floor like windswept snow.
Babette had gotten out safely. She knew. But the bandits had killed the rest of them, the new bandits that now held the fort, and Agnis had gone out to meet them with a cup of tea and loom in hand.
It's been a while since then, now, and her days are still the same.
She drinks her bittergreen tea in the dark before dawn and rises with the sun, goes down in the caverns under the fort to harvest the spider-silk alone. Cooks breakfast for her bandit friends, sweeps the floor under the feet as they plan: this raid, this caravan, this bounty. Some of them leave cloaks outside her bedroom door, a threadbare little offering, and she takes the time to patch them, carefully, with long-practiced patience.
She wanders the fort, cleaning and tinkering, straightening this shelf, brushing this cobweb. Little tasks for little old-woman hands. She is stooped, grey, slow-moving because of the cold. But she can do this, at least. There is a loom tucked under her arm and whenever she has a moment she rests in a shadowy corner. Settles herself down.
Weaves.
It is not the creation itself that she loves, not the completion. It's the weaving itself. It's finding new patterns, working them out with her fingers and plucking at weft so fine she can't properly see it, not with these eyes, only feel.
It's been a while now, Agnis thinks, and the bandits have grown used to her presence. Complacent. It will be the Imperial Legion in Fort Greymoor next – it's looking that way, what with the unrest in the Hold and the rumors from Helgen in the south, what with the things her fingers can feel in the cloth.
She can hear a disturbance at the main gate. Shouts. Clash of steel, thrum and scream of spell. An adventurer, perhaps?
She tugs at a thread.
Perhaps they will meet her as they tear through the fort. And she will tell them of bittergreen leaves and blades of ebony. Of her lost children (the honor-bound ones in Morrowind, the shadowy ones in Cyrodiil. They have forgotten her, all). Or perhaps she will just smile her old woman's smile and tell them off this fort, such an odd fort, Orcs one day and Vampires the next, here and gone like a Daedric summoning.
(Perhaps this is a clever adventurer, who will recognize her and give her a nightshade flower, call her name on the thirteenth of Frostfall and summon her for true).
Perhaps.
Agnis smiles and settles in the corner, settles the loom in her lap. Oh, perhaps.
There are such interesting things in the weave.
FIN.