AN: In the process of trying to clean out my enormous documents folder, I've decided to upload the bits and pieces of fics I have lying about. This one in particular calls for a knowledge of Oblivion, the Shivering Isles, and probably a lot of flexibility in interpreting canon and suspension of disbelief. Enjoy!
The first time Lira hears the name Lucien Lachance, it registers as vaguely familiar but it isn't until she summons the Spectral Assassin and he launches into one of his long, drawn-out tales of the past that she nearly chokes on the blood she's trying to swallow.
"Have you heard the tale of Mathieu Bellamont and the treachery of Cheydinhal…?"
She wants to say, 'only a thousand times, thankyouverymuch' but she somehow manages to hold her tongue.
She really does not fancy the idea of having it cut out.
He says, "I am reminded of another Listener, a protégé I knew long ago" and she wishes desperately that something – anything, even a dragon! – would swoop down and dispel him back to the Void.
Part of her is amazed that he hasn't figured it out yet. They say she has her mother's face (at least when her mother is her mother and not, well – ) and even if her eyes glow like the center of a forge and her cheeks are a little sunken now, she doesn't think that much has changed.
But, she concedes graciously, perhaps being dead for two centuries clouded one's memory.
Thank Sithis for small miracles.
He finally, finally goes back to the Void and if Lira thinks the Night Mother is quietly laughing at her, she pretends she doesn't. She takes the wabbajack (why her mother still uses the blasted thing, she will never understand) and taps it incessantly against the stone outside her Falkreath manor.
"Mother," she shouts to nothing. A hawk squawks in response and quickly vacates her roof. She huffs and shakes the ugly two-headed stick like that will somehow incite her parents into answering.
To her surprise, it does. The wabbajack flies out of her hand of its own volition and stands upright in the middle of her walkway.
It is not her mother who answers, however, but her father. He appears in front of her, vaguely transparent in a way that is irritatingly similar to a certain spectral assassin. He raises a brow at her obvious moue.
"Where's mother?"
He leans on the staff as if it is a wall and not a narrow rod defying all sense of logic and physics. "Vacation," he drawls and she's reminded of how much she misses and hates her parents all at once.
"But where?"
"Somewhere in Solitude. I suspect she's been watching you."
Lira is offended simply for the sake of being offended. She nearly stomps away but her father throws something at her and she's forced to catch it or let it bounce off her head.
It's a pelvis. A familiar pelvis. "Didn't this used to be in the museum?"
He shrugs dismissively. "You mother does so enjoy toying with dear Una. That's why she's kept her around all these years."
Lira opens her mouth to speak and snaps it shut again. She wants no part of that.
She catches a carriage to Solitude and makes casual conversation with the guards when she arrives.
A terrible thing indeed, the Emperor's cousin being murdered. Very sad.
Lira is in the middle of consoling a weeping guard when a familiar face passing by distracts her. He may look like a beggar but she is neither fooled nor amused. She leaves the man to his blubbering and takes chase.
"Dervenin? Why aren't you in the Sacellum – argh!"
The dirty Bosmer accosts her with more force than she finds strictly necessary. "Oh, my lady! You must retrieve your mother for us! You'll help me won't you? She's left the whole realm under your father's command." He is nearly in tears.
Lira comes very, very close to rolling her glowing eyes. "I'll do what I can."
As soon as she enters the Pelagius Wing she yells, "Mother!" and glares at the wabbajack.
Fortunately, her mother is quick to pull her out of Tamriel. For once.
Sheogorath – and Lira will never call her that to her face, no matter how Haskill complains – lounges across from who she assumes to be Pelagius (it's disturbing that she has his hip bone in her pocket, but it's not the strangest thing that's ever happened to her). Her mother is in the guise of an old man with grey hair and a beard.
There's some history behind that – something about Jyggalag and daedric curses but honestly, she rarely pays attention when Una Armina speaks.
With a wave of a hand, her mother sends Pelagius away. Lira takes his seat.
"Is there a problem?" the Prince of Madness asks. She's suddenly Elnira again, a dunmer woman dressed in bone and velvet. She looks more like Lira's sister than her mother.
For once, Lira hesitates. She remembers the tales of retribution her mother had meted out upon Lucian's death and how close she'd come to breaking the Tenets. "I met an old friend of yours," she finally says.
Elnira tilts her head to the side and regards her only daughter with unblinking eyes the color of wet blood. There's no pupil in her irises – hasn't been for centuries.
"His name is Lucien Lachance."
There is a peculiar softening to her mother's face. "A descendent?"
"Not exactly. Rather, this seems to be quite the same Lucien Lachance you knew."
All traces of 'soft' vanish in an instant. "He is dead," and the way she hisses that last word makes the world shake around them.
"Quite so, mother," Lira assures quickly. "But he serves Sithis and I have been granted permission to summon him from the –"
"Ha!" her mother – Sheogorath – shouts in sudden mirth. "Free to kill again, is he? More than can be said for our dear Arquen!"
"Yes, well, fine as that is I believe he recognizes me. Sort of. I'd rather not be the one to explain all of this to a long dead assassin with a touchy temper and a thirsty blade."
"You may summon him now," her mother says with that blasted condescending tone that made Lira want to yank out her own hair.
Lira wants to say 'why can't the former ListenerGuildMasterArchmageGreyFox manage to summon him herself' but instead she stands and paces away three steps. She chants the spell Astrid taught her and tosses the ball of dark magic that forms in her palm.
The Spectral Assassin appears in the middle of Pelagius' mind with a whoosh. "My Listener," he greets politely.
Her mother is silent behind him, a statue of a woman. Finally, she unlocks her fingers from the stone of her chair and stands. "Lucien," she says and her voice is the hollow echo of two centuries of sorrow. It is one grief among many.
The ghost spins so fast, Lira gets whiplash. His dagger is in hand but it falls when he sees Elnira. He glares suspiciously over his shoulder at Lira, who looks very much as her mother – assuming her mother had been a vampire.
"What is this?" He demands and sounds awfully pushy for a man who's been dead two hundred years.
Part of her expects (and hopes) her mother will disintegrate him on the spot. Instead, Elnira comes around the table and takes his free hand gently between hers (and it's a little weird to see flesh meet ectoplasm). "I see you've met my daughter," she says, as if there had never been time, distance, or death between them.
"The Listener is your daughter," he says flatly; not a question. He pulls his hand free. Lira edges away. "You live, yet you have abandoned the Brotherhood?"
The ground shakes with her mother's temper but she whisks it away just as quickly. "Much happened while you slept in the Void," she answers.
For the first time, Lucien looks around and the solid ridge of his brow furrows. "Where have you brought us?" he asks Lira, who shakes her head mutely and makes a wonderful impression of a placating statue.
"You are in the mind of a madman," Elnira says. "My realm. I am not exactly as you remember me, Speaker."
Lira suspects they are about to see part of this man's infamous temper. "What manner of treachery is this?"
Her mother tsks and Lira wants to say something but standing between two very dangerous and angry murderers seems like an inopportune place to be snarky.
The silence stretches. Lira resist the urge to tap her foot because she has places to be and Gaius Maro will not wait around in Dragon Bridge forever.
Finally, Elnira breaks the staring contest. "You stand now in the presence of Sheogorath the Mad God." The force of her stare is unrelenting and she delivers the information without so much as a blink.
Lira thinks, briefly, that her Spectral Assassin might pop back to the Void right then and there. He grips the hilt of his dagger and she likes to think that if he was made of skin and bone, his knuckles would have been stark white and his face flushed with angry color.
It takes him a long time to formulate a response, long minutes in which his transparent jaw moves in a way that suggests a grinding of ethereal teeth. Is that even possible?
"I knew I saw potential in you," he finally says. "I just did not realize how much."
Her mother appears at her side and puts a hand on her shoulder before she can dodge away. Lira hates when she does that. "Lend me your assassin for a moment," she says. What might have been a request from anyone else fell as a command from her mother's lips. "We have much to discuss."
"Yes, mother, because I have all the time in the world to wait for you and no other prior obligations to fulfill," she snarks. She is perhaps the only person in any plane that would speak to a Daedric Lord in such a manner.
Elnira doesn't even seem to notice but the way the late Lucien Lachance fingers his blade and glares at her makes her wish she could leave him there in her mother's realm forever. How difficult could it be to forget his summoning spell completely?
In the end, she slinks off and torments poor Pelagius with the wabbajack while she waits. Though she may be Dragonborn (and she's still not certain what kind of deal her mother made with the Divines to arrange for that) she is, after all, the Child of Madness.