Kaleidoscopes
She's running with her friends in the streets of the Imperial City, all clad in rags; scabby-kneed and barefoot and bruised from playing, as unashamed of their poverty as only children could be. One of the boys shoves another into the muddy gutter, and she runs over to return the favour. Soon everyone is pushing everyone; hardly able to walk straight from laughter—until the orphanage door opens and all the mother superior sees are dirty, filthy, smiling faces.
Katya knows she won't be able to squirm out of getting a bath tonight.
It's far past lights-out, but most of the children are still awake, clustered in a tight circle between the beds. Tonight, they're sharing stories of the ruins a mile or two outside the city walls—made all the scarier by the pitch-black room, the voices sliding in and out of the darkness. One says it's a necromancer lair; another says awful, ghostly things dwell in the shadows of the cold stone halls; a third scoffs at both of these, then tells his own tale of the mad wizard who kidnaps travellers for experimentation. She stays quiet the whole time, so quiet her friends don't even know she's there, and the stories run rampant through her head.
The red-haired apothecary, now twenty and even handsomer, tells the young Nord her body is changing as he hands her a mug of warm milk, but she already knows that; things jiggle unpleasantly when she runs now, and she can't seem to sleep comfortably on her stomach, and strangest of all she's been thinking about him, about the redhead, a lot more. For her twelfth name-day he gave her a silver bracelet, a broad band with her name inscribed on the inside. The silver tarnishes easily, but she knows it's the best thing he could afford and it's beautiful anyway, so she's worn it every day since she got it... but as she slowly makes her way out of memory and into reality again, she sees he's clearly embarrassed with what he's talking about, and he's noticed she's hardly listening. She sits in awkward silence for a few moments before something—the changes he was talking about, perhaps—spurs her to lean across the table and press her lips to his cheek.
The snow sprinkles down outside, turning the muddy streets to slush, but inside, the blaze roaring in the fireplace warms the two of them nicely. He's supposed to be teaching her how to mix salves, but every time he reaches across the table to fetch the recipe their hands brush together and he gives her that wonderfully shy smile that makes her tremble inside. Her eyes meet his, just briefly, before her left and his right hands meet, and stay that way.
Alchemy, indeed.
It's almost Saturalia. She's saved every penny she could find, doing odd jobs for any poor soul she clapped eyes upon, and she desperately hopes that he has done the same. She slips out of the gates in the dead of night with a moth-eaten cloak and a rusty dagger, and passes by a man in rags stumbling from the stables—she gives him a wide berth. The night is cold but clear, and the thrill of being out late, mixed with something she can't quite place, makes her heart pound.
She finds him waiting a mile or two outside the city walls, by the old ivory ruin, red hair made redder by the blood oozing up from the pike in his skull. It's a broken chase, north through the forest, and despite the tears and the sobs and the wind whipping by her ears she can hear the cackles of a necromancer far behind.
Katya trudges through snow for several eternities laid end-to-end as the winds fan her fever to impossible heights. She can no longer tell if she is burning or freezing, knows only that it is easier to breathe here and she wants so very badly to sleep…
There's shouting, swearing, foreign accents and the biting clash of steel, but she can't see.
She's thinking again. It's all she ever does.
A tenday she's been in the village, squatting in the tavern, drinking and thinking. Says she's remembering tales from her childhood, the storytellers weaving worlds, crafting utopias where a wood elf might slay fifty giants, or a beggar might find a city built from gold. Where heroes are heroes. Where nobody dies.
Sven sighs and plucks another shrill cord.
Katya frowns and knocks back another shot.
Last night, she dreamt of a voyage on a sea of glass, beneath a sky of fire. She was travelling to an island, a prison on a hill, but she does not remember why. She awoke in the Sleeping Giant, as she does every morning, and went downstairs to begin drinking, as she does every day. She tells herself that today she will journey to Whiterun, that she will warn the Jarl, that she will save those still living and avenge those who are not.
But this is a lie. An empty promise, made to calm the knot of rage in her stomach until the alcohol dissolves it completely.
She has heard it said that death lives inside everyone, appearing the moment they are born and waiting for the moment they die. In the past she scorned this as a simple folk tale, until she watched him under the trees, the pale moon, the ivory, ivory ruin, and saw death lurking beneath his skin. Perhaps death is handsome.
It breaks her heart to think of him, and every day his face is fading.
Lydia gets it. She knows that people die and more often than not there is nothing that can be done about it. It's a fact of life. She understands that. She understands that feeling of helplessness, that empty grasping of phantom fingers at everything and anything, but gripping, holding onto nothing, and falling.
But then, of course, Lydia is dead, too.
She told Arngeir she had preparations to make, other things to do, that she would return to the monastery in a few days. A hundred bottles, a few rolls of moon sugar, and two weeks have passed, but if the disappointment in his eyes when she first arrived was any indication, she doubts he's surprised at her absence.
All night the lighthouse has kept her anchored, lucid. She sat, when she was at the very edge of despair, when the screams echoed in her ears and she saw their faces in every shadow, locked in death, blood pooling patterns on the cold brown dirt. She sat at the edge and watched the lighthouse flicker through the darkness. It is mute and it is slow and it has no thought in its metal head but to blink each wave and ship and minute aside until the morning comes and renders it blind as well as deaf-mute.
In many ways, they have much in common.
The city's name eludes her, but Delphine knows, as she knows everything. The Blade turns and speaks, her voice level as her words cry out the need for revenge, for retaliation. But her drunken protégé denies her even this. Katya leaves Delphine and her orders by the carriage, in the dust, because the Breton's presence alone speaks her flaws aloud, and she finds herself cringing in her sight.
Of course, Katya tries to rearrange the memory, to somehow justify her behaviour—but no matter how skilled she has become in the arts of deceit, she cannot lie to herself.
Normally, the Blade hides her feelings well. But caught in her own troubles, Katya speaks daggers where she means none, and Delphine's façade crumbles. She rages at the Nord's attitude, her indifference—and then she is shouting, but Katya cannot hear the words. Finally hot anger cools to bitter disappointment, as it always does, and Delphine disappears beyond the city walls.
Katya doesn't see her again.
Few people wander along the streets at this late hour. A drunk stumbles on the cobblestones in front of her, vomiting into an alleyway, and mere seconds pass before she's following his lead. Inebriation is not her traitor this time, however.
She needed the coin—desperately, in fact—and maybe the old hag deserved it, but she can't help thinking through the retches and the sobs that this is not how it's supposed to be.
The living are relatively easy to discard or evade, but the dead cling to mortals for far longer a time.
She's heard of theories that claim every decision made creates a kaleidoscope of tiny universes, countless pathways closed forever and seen only in the rarest of dreams. Perhaps it is true. She can certainly pinpoint the exact moment when she chose her current path. The memory haunts her waking hours, though her dreams these days no longer have as large a cast.
They escaped the underground maze after a solid day of wandering. Magic dissipates, shadows brighten, blood oozes from her wrist—and she is standing in the centre of it all. Her ragtag band lies scattered; the elven ranger, the old Blade, the jester; the four of them blinking wildly as the sun creeps over the shattered walls of a forgotten temple to a forgotten Order. A dwindling hope, and she is the key. A faulty key, if truth be told; she seems like the others, was created like the others, could certainly pass as another of her kind if she tried, but blink, look closer, and there are scratches and etches and dents, rusted and brittle like the old bracelet crumbling around her wrist and her heart. Enough to fluke, but too different in the long haul.
Too broken.