Mirage
By JediShyala
This is the sequel to my first story "We Are Merely Shadows"
Please no flames.
I do not own Ilend, Sigrid, Menien, Savlian Matius, or any characters that appear in the game. They are the property of Bethesda and I thank them for allowing me to having them in my literary sandbox.
Saeana is as much mine as any player character belongs to their respective author.
The following characters are mine, please do no use without my permission
The woman Shadowmere
Ilura
The Butterfly
Maremma
The Lamb
Tavrel
I will add others as I see fit.
Thank you for waiting and please review!
Mirage
"I see the world, a last illusion's shimmer, it is crumbling all around us."
~Morian Zenas, The Doors of Oblivion
What the Wolf Saw
Sniffing the ground thoughtfully, a shaggy, skinny timber wolf plodded through the snow, barely noticing the towering portal that seemed so out of place in the frozen wilderness. The glowing amber door howled in an a-melodic tone that could most readily be described as the echo of a scream, and the wolf whimpered at the sound, but he was hungry enough to ignore the auditory annoyance. Beside the charred frame, the wolf came across a small dead creature, the color of man-flesh and its entire body curled, from the top of its pointed ears to the ends of its clawed fingers. It was the same type of animal that had been eating all the rabbits, rats and deer, leaving the wolf and his kin without much to eat. Despite its apparent hunger, the wolf didn't touch the now bloodless flesh; he knew this type of meat wasn't fit for eating. Many in his pack had succumbed to their hunger and torn into the strange corpses; they almost immediately began howling in pain, spewing froth and shaking violently, before dying. He had not eaten the meat, and he and his mate had survived. She had fallen to hunger and now he wandered the forests alone.
Instead of lingering over what would be his last meal, he continued his search for food, leaving the beast to be consumed by the indiscriminate elements. Suddenly, the gate's sound changed from a howl to a cough and made him lift his bushy head and his cautious ears perk up. The reflection of the setting sun on the unbroken snow became unnaturally intense and before he could even think to blink his lupine blue eyes, the portal exploded, spewing bitter cold fire and jagged rocks across the ground. The blast tossed the wolf into the air and sent him tumbling into a snow bank twenty feet away with a yelp. Unfazed, he bolted off into the woods, neither hungry, nor curious enough to warrant lingering around to investigate the scene.
In addition to the other debris, two figures, a female elf and a male human, came flying out, crashing to the ground with separate, heavy thuds. The Imperial man struck the snow like a sack of wet flour, not moving after he landed, while the Dunmer woman hit violently and kept rolling, crossing paths with rocks, downed branches and the occasional razor sharp piece of broken ice, until she came to rest on her belly. "Son…of a bitch." The stabbing pain in her side and head did not allow her thoughts to be more intact than simple cursing. The brilliance of the sunset seared her eyes and sent a pulse of sheer agony through her cranium, making the woman bury her face in the crook of her elbow while she tried to catch her breath, melting the snow under her lips with each pained breath. Each inhalation caused such intense discomfort, that she wasn't entirely certain that she hadn't been impaled on something after she had been thrown from the gate. It took her gingerly running her hands over her side and back to assuage her fears of being skewered. Her head was spinning like a cyclone, there was a storm atronach pounding its massive fists against the inside of her skull and she couldn't entirely remember where she was.
"But my…name is Shadowmere…" She could not truly forget her name again, but virtually all else at this point was a mystery. The low hum and slight pulsing of the sigil stone, which had somehow remained in her outstretched right hand throughout her vicious tumbling, reminded her where she had been most recently, which reminded her where she had been before that; an Oblivion gate on the southeast slope of the road to Bruma.
"With Ilend," Shadowmere remembered, the thought breaking through her delirium like the flickering light of a will o' the wisp. She rolled over onto her back, covering her eyes with her forearm and trying to ignore the throbbing in her head, the cold snow offering her only comfort, soothing the various wounds with which her foray into the gate had left her. Her heart sped up slightly as she realized she couldn't hear her comrade's groans or even so much as a tight, wounded exhale, like those still passing her own lips.
"Ilend?" Her voice was hoarse as she called out the name of her companion, the sounds catching in her sore throat. The silence that throbbed in her ears made her stomach twist uncomfortably, forcing her to recall what had happened just before they were hurled from the demonic plane. "He could just be unconscious," she consoled herself as she pushed herself to sitting, the movement making her body scream in discomfort, and kept her eyes covered for the time being. "Ilend?" she tried again, coughing some of the smoke out of her lungs. She lost her focus on finding her companion and continued coughing until she spat out phlegm streaked with soot and blood. "Ilend!" she called again, her voice clearer, but her eyes still hidden behind her arm. "You can't look for someone with your eyes closed moron," she chastised herself. Taking a stabilizing breath, she cautiously moved her arm down from her eyes, letting the burning light permeate her eyelids and her vision adjust gradually.
Though the storm atronach in her brain was as insistent as ever and the spinning hadn't slowed at all, Shadowmere managed to get to her hands and knees. From there she dragged herself toward a nearby tree, wrapped her arms around the trunk and staggered to her feet.
"Holy shit," she groaned her muscles quivering, the effort of standing nearly depleting her battered body. Once she had gained a reasonable amount of control over her limbs, she began to search for Ilend. "Ilend!" she called, hoping for any word from the voice that would unclench the icy fingers around her spine. "Ilend!" Through blurred vision, she scanned the ground, looking for the gleam of the man's city watch armor, trying not to think of the worst possible scenarios. "He's not dead, he's not dead, he's not dead…" she tried to use the thought to fight against her mounting despair and the unyielding atronach dashing her brains around her head. Her feet seemed to be magnetically drawn to the ground and it took all her physical strength to just keep them going in the search, but when compared to the psychological effort she was exerting to simply keep her eyes open, the task seemed miniscule.
Despite her earnest efforts, it was the worst possible scenario that glared back at her, reflected like a cruel mirror off of the blood-stained shield perhaps twenty feet from her. Her heart in her throat, Shadowmere hauled her barely functional limbs to Ilend's side, praying in desperation to the gods, in whom she didn't believe, that he was merely knocked out. As she made her burning eyes look at his bloodied face, her hopes were utterly dashed.
Ilend was dead; there was no question as to his state of existence as he rested on his back, his knees rolled to the side and his arm still clutching his sword. No breath moved his chest as his cornflower blue eyes, stained by crimson tears that no longer flowed, stared lifelessly at Shadowmere, who crumbled to her knees beside the empty husk. His tanned skin was cold as she put her fingers to his neck, but felt no pulse beating beneath. A crushing feeling on her chest, different from the pain she'd felt before, made it hard to take a deep breath, forcing her to take many shallow breaths. "Bastard." The words burned in her mind and the heat radiated through her eyelids, making it feel as though her sanguine eyes would burst. Resting her soot streaked forehead against her interlaced fingers, she made an effort to slow her breath and try to gain control over her heartbeat. It wasn't as though Ilend had been a dear friend; he had been an acquaintance, an assistant and, at times, an asshole. The Imperial had been someone with whom to share a fire, and whom she might petition for food or beer, and someone to keep watch while she slept.
Yet, here she was, close to tears for the first time in what seemed like eons, for this almost insignificant man. "I'm just tired," she consoled herself, doing her best to believe in the obvious lie. "I'm losing it because I'm tired." While it was true that she was tired, two days deprived of sleep, it had no bearing on what she felt at that moment, kneeling over the Imperial with his Kvatch shield clutched vainly over his chest. The deep indentations in the shield showed that it had protected his torso valiantly; but even the best shield will fail if it cannot protect the area where an impending blow is about to land, as Ilend's badly bloodied head had proven, his ash brown hair streaked a dark, cruel red. A mace had been the likely culprit, as the damaged helmet some distance away would indicate.
Letting out a sigh to focus her mind, Shadowmere got to her feet and seized the now useless helm, examining it with her eyes and the tips of her fingers, no longer feeling the pain of the reflected light. The perforations were massive and the broken metal, curled inside like terrible petals, likely would have caused a few cuts of their own, had the mace not taken center stage. Sparing an apologetic glance at the dead man, she knelt once again beside Ilend's body and let out a sigh as she hacked at the hardened ground with the edge of the helmet. She knew very little about the city guards or what sort of superstitions they held about their equipment, but she suspected that using a helmet to dig its owner's grave was most likely considered bad luck. "But what need do you have for luck when you're dead?" she wondered as she made an attempt to scrape away at the frozen ground.
"Buggeration," she swore under her breath as she came to the realization that this was going to be a difficult, unpleasant process; the soil was likely frozen down another foot at least, which would be almost impossible to penetrate even if she'd had a shovel. "The snow would probably keep him preserved until I was able to get to Bruma," she considered, eying the body of her friend. This idea was quickly dismissed as too distasteful even for her, not to mention the fresh wolf tracks nearby, and Shadowmere reticently scraped off another layer of the ground. She may not have felt a great deal of emotion toward Ilend, or so she claimed, but she had enough respect for the man to not leave him lying in front of an extinguished Oblivion gate for the wild beasts, bandits or remaining daedra to find. Not to mention if she refused to use her hands, which she had worked so hard to regain, to uphold the humanity that they represented then she might just as well be a horse again. "And I owe him that much," she reminded herself, thinking of the small acts of kindness he had shown her, as she chipped away at the ground.
So she dug. Inch by inch, minute by minute, foot by foot, hour by hour, she managed to make a sufficient amount of progress, though she was practically encased in sweat, itself a death sentence in this place. With the falling night temperature of the Midyear air, the Bruma cold and her endless effort making her shake, she dug nevertheless, tossing helmful after helmful of frozen dirt out of the increasing hole until it was almost level with the top of her head. There was no way she could make the grave six feet deep without trapping herself inside it, so she opted for making it a little more shallow and hollowing out a few footholds before attempting the climb. Feeling like a slug, covered with her own slimy perspiration and the mud made by the melted snow, she pulled herself out of the hole, slithering on her belly, clinging to the sprigs of harrada still growing by the remains of the gate while they lashed at her hands like whips. Through the blisters and cramps wracking her arms from the tips of her fingers to her shoulders, Shadowmere could hardly feel the sting of the abominable plants. She was too cold to have coherent thoughts, too tired and sore to consider anything other than the task at hand. Cresting the apex of the hole, she thought quickly enough to not roll on her left side, where she suspected her broken ribs were housed.
After taking a few breaths she didn't give herself the chance to come down from the adrenaline high that burned in her veins before she walked over to Ilend and crouched beside him, taking his shield in her hands, now finding herself unable to look at his face.
"I'll use this as a headstone," she said uselessly to the deaf corpse. "I'll try to find you something better, but for now this will have to do." She tugged at the shield, expecting it to come to her without much effort. As it turned out, she was mistaken to expect such a thing. For a few minutes, she tugged as hard as she dared, oddly afraid of breaking the body further, but Ilend refused to release this final hold on the mortal world. "Ilend, throw me a bone here!" she snapped. "I'm trying to help you!" Her pep talk and valiant efforts notwithstanding, Shadowmere found she couldn't free the armor from its owner. "Fine, you want it with you?" she snarled, her frustration and exhaustion limiting her patience. "Alright, take it. I don't have time for this crap." All she wanted to do was to get the man into the final bed he would ever have, and if that meant burying him with his shield, she didn't have a 'damn' left to give.
Not wanting to damage his head any further, as though it would have caused him pain, Shadowmere grabbed his ankles and meant to drag him to the grave as though she was pulling a wheelbarrow behind her. As she stood up and made a move to carry out her plan, she found herself suddenly dragged down to the ground, unable to lift his leaden legs. Pushing herself up, she looked over her shoulder and back at her former companion who, though she had moved him a few angstroms, was a granite statue, his shield still in the same position and his limbs stiff. "Son of a bitch," she muttered, now recognizing that Ilend was in the full grip of rigor mortis. His body wouldn't relax for some time now, and until that time, his full frame would be hard and unyielding as stone; she wouldn't be able to unbend his legs shy of cutting them off. Still, she was determined to bury the man before the blinding sunrise of the coming morning.
Wrapping her raw, worn hands around his cuirass, and with no small amount of physical exertion, she managed to haul the stiff, oddly positioned man over to the grave and meant to put him into it. Jerking his body left and right in a failing effort to force him into the hole, Shadowmere fought every urge she had to jump up and down on his chestplate in order to force his body to give way. "You bastard!" She wanted to scream the expletive, though it came out as barely a mutter, as if that would make his ears hear how used-up she felt at that very moment. "You chicken-shit bastard," she sighed, not caring how ill she spoke of the dead at that moment. Her newest vex in her days long crucible of physical and mental torments was due to the stiffness and unevenly distributed position of Ilend's body; the man simply wouldn't fit into the grave. If she turned him on his back, his shield would keep him suspended over the hole; if she turned him on his side, his knees wouldn't fit. Slumping to the frosty ground in defeat, Shadowmere decided this was Ilend's final way of proving just how much of an asshole he could be. Unless she wanted to leave him half-buried, something she had already decided against, she would be forced to stay here for however many hours it would take for the rigor mortis to wear off and allow him to drop into the hole so she could wrap the earth around him and give him the burial she had slaved to provide for him.
"I hate you so much," she sighed, forced to surrender to an unyielding power. Shivering, she knew she had to get out of her wet, cracked armor or she might as well join Ilend in the grave. Somehow she managed to get to her feet and unlace her supple black armor, pulling it off and almost totally ignorant of the frigid cold on her bare skin. Still, she dug through her simple pack as quickly as she could to find a thick quilted doublet and leather pants, jerking them on with all the coordination of a newborn foal. She then sat down on the armor, crossing her legs and resting her head on her hands, hoping she didn't freeze to the spot. With nothing left to do but wait, Shadowmere stared at Ilend, her emotions in fluctuation, and trying to remember how she had gotten roped into being with the Kvatch city guard. It wasn't difficult to recall the source of their meeting; it had started some months earlier, and began with a simple occurrence of an elaborate amulet falling out of a bedroll.