Sabre of Dusk

by TheSelfMadeMan

During the early Fourth Era, the Third Aldmeri Dominion has reached the peak of its infancy, with its domain stretching across most of the Abecean Sea. Can a high elven pirate preserve his principles of truth and justice, or will they crumble into fatal contradictions under the Thalmor Party's totalitarian arm?

Chapter One

Martius Impius steeled himself as best he could, steering the Charity of Stendarr through the tumultuous tides of the Abecean Sea as if he were tentatively guiding a friend through a dark cave he himself was unsure how to navigate, his stubby olive-skinned hands wrapped around the wheel petulantly. The rays of the twilight sun bled through the soot-colored mist of clouds in a miasma of diluted crimsons and violets, intermingling with the motley cluster of stars to form an almost otherworldly wound from which poured forth the eerie aura of spirits and starlight that held his glazed eyes in an unnerving trance. From the focal point of this tear in the sky, a frightening gale shot through the ship's deck and crew like the haunting howls of mournful, condemned souls, the gravelly tone making the hair on his neck and arms stand on end. The inky water wracked the ship menacingly, throwing frothy mist into the air to obscure Martius's vision along the sides of the Charity of Stendarr and completely blotting out the distant silhouette of Anvil behind him.

Martius held his pudgy, slack-jawed face in a grimace as he looked at the goosebumps dotting his arms, the frizzy tonsure crowning his head now standing upright along with his arm and neck hairs. His glazed eyes swiveled cravenly as if he were in a state of paranoia, examining the hazy silhouettes of the Shield-Wall to the left and the Vanguard of Need to his right in an effort to reassure himself that he still had an escort. He could only pray to Stendarr that the other two escort ships still trailed closely behind.

He knew not why he should feel this sense of causeless dread coursing through the core of his very bones. No, he corrected himself, not dread; rather, it was a disembodied apprehension without a source, a nameless floating entity lurking within the deepest, darkest recesses of his mortal soul. Whatever it was, he tried his best to ignore it as it nagged at him, gnawing on the tendons connecting his bones like a savage beast on the desiccated remains of an unfortunate adventurer. After all, it was improper for an Imperial sailor to fear his duty, no matter the dangers that may await him.

And there were a great many dangers that lurked ahead. Being both a Vigilant of Stendarr and a veteran navigator of the sea's perilous waters, he knew all about the mysterious typhoons that seemed to hurl themselves at unwary ship captains and their crews with a purpose more befitting sentient beings than manifestations of inclement weather. He also knew of the occasional pirates infamous for congregating around the Gold Coast as well as the small isolated bands of no-man's-islands that dotted the sea, their galleys swerving and speeding through the water like wolves of the sea after their prey: merchant convoys. The worst of these perils, however, he had never seen for himself, but the rumors he had heard told of ghastly things beyond his most pessimistic nightmares—sea elves that rode bloodthirsty serpents as their trusty steeds and commanded mystical water magicks never seen anywhere in Tamriel. Such rumors, combined with the familiar risks, made him want to throw up his still-beating heart.

He felt even more ill at ease when he caught momentary glimpses of the eyes of his crew, ranging from similar states of barely dormant edginess to expressions of zombie-like single-mindedness. What most set his nerves alight like a flame, however, was the inauspicious stare of the stars twinkling intelligently above. Two blood red orbs, in particular, bore into his mortal soul with a keen, disdainful scrutiny that not only knew what he felt, but that he had good reason to feel it and more: the exact nature of what he felt.

He glowered defensively at the crimson pupils sneering at him, resenting the self-assured smile that accompanied them. He wanted desperately to lash out, to shout those judgmental eyes down beneath his boots, to wipe away the pitiless smile on her smooth, ivory face. You know nothing! he wanted to swear. How dare you look down on me! Shut up! Shut up! He had wanted to yell those exact words across the throne room of Castle Anvil itself to silence her a week and a half ago.

She had gazed at Countess Cecilia Maro with the hard defiance of a devout champion, her voice blasting through the room like a sermon designed to obliterate all trace of compassion. "Your Highness, you cannot seriously consider this relief initiative of yours. It veers well beyond gross inefficiency into the obscenely wasteful! There is no way you will ever see a return for your compassion." She had spat the last word like the dirtiest of expletives.

"You have a point, priestess," Countess Maro had replied, her thin mouth contorting uncertainly around her pallid, pasty face as her words rang atonally like an Akaviri gong. "My donation would indeed incur a net loss on my treasury, but whether or not I benefit from my endeavor is of no significance. Besides, with the amount of benefactors paying their fair share here, my treasury can surely take the hit. If those helpless paupers in Morrowind are truly in need, who am I to turn them away?"

"Here, Here," Martius had chanted loudly like a defensive battle cry, sneering at the Breton priestess with a fretful grin. "And I am willing to lend my ship to the cause." He had not known precisely what it had been about her at that instant that had threatened him—or why he should have felt threatened at all—but the nagging need to berate, belittle, and antagonize the Breton priestess in any way he could muster had occurred to him like a knee-jerk reflex.

But she had only ignored him. "You would do well to reconsider your choice, Your Highness, especially when the majority of the starving and helpless are within this province! I honestly think you should invest your money solely in the Anvil Guard and let the local businesses worry about your county's economic matters, but if you really wish to burden your budget with drug-induced philanthropic crusades, you should at least direct them toward your own people. Why, look at how our businessmen in Leyawiin—"

"Bah! Leyawiin!" Martius had scoffed with a prissy, glottal cough. The gesture consisted of two parts: the "Bah!" was like the hacking sound of a man trying to clear a sticky, congested throat; the "Leyawiin!" was the contemptuous act of spitting out the slimy insult directly onto the priestess's face. He smiled at the indignant scowl he received in return.

"And just what in Aetherius is that supposed to mean, pig?" She had narrowed her eyes menacingly toward him in a disgusted expression that had told him that she knew the nature of his outbursts. He had not liked that feeling of exposure one bit.

"That place is nothing more than a den of materialistic greed and unholy self-absorption. All anyone cares about there is slaving away at their anvils, slaking their anti-social thirst for the almighty septim; Not a single one of them has any heart, no compassion or humanitarian sentiment whatsoever—especially that robber baron Count Caro! Bah, when has Count Caro or any of these businessmen of yours ever come to our aid when we needed them most?"

The gossip he had heard from travelers regarding Leyawiin had been few, but they painted a clear enough picture in his mind: citizens—men, women, and children alike—working from sun up to sun down as fervently as a holy clergyman of the Nine preaches, with proud and purposeful smiles on their faces. He had scowled scornfully at the picture, boggled and deeply offended that there should be a place where people not only had to work for a living, but enjoyed the fact that they had to. It had made him sick just thinking about it.

But through his seething red vision, he had observed her stern face harden from obstinacy to vindictive antipathy, the kind of contempt a person would usually direct toward something they regarded as not only immoral and blasphemous but even evil. It was the ire of his enemy, and he derived a sense of satisfaction from that gaze, though he fought the tiny cold beads of sweat that came alongside his sordid victory.

"How dare you!" she had bombastically shouted with the righteous zeal of a Legion chaplain. "Because of Count Caro's enlightened rule, Leyawiin and its citizens have more than enough money to bail out your damned necks every time you engage in yet another of your pernicious and pretentious parables. You should be grateful Count Caro and the businessmen of Leyawiin have always spared you and everyone else from becoming yet another primitive tribal commune like Morrowind!"

"Have you no shame, bringing up the Dunmer! They can't help it that they are destitute, hungry, and stupid. They had their cultural traditions and their very identity stripped from them unfairly, and nobody ever gave them a chance—even their most cherished and beloved Daedric Princes have forsaken them! And when they were able to try to improve their living conditions, those spoiled, greedy lizards of Black Marsh launched the Accession Wars to stop them. How can you be so heartless and cruel as to write off these poor victims of fate as 'yet another primitive tribal commune'?"

"Enough boot-licking apologetics for those grey-skinned, entitled savages! Whether or not those outside of Cyrodiil are in need is irrelevant. The province of Cyrodiil cannot even afford handouts for its own needy and expect to stay afloat. To add to your burdens the woes of other populations is pure insanity!

"But you're right about one thing, pig: businessmen do care about making gold—and that's a good thing! It just goes to show why it is Count Caro and the county of Leyawiin that always rise up to salvage this province from staggering collapse. Maybe if, instead of dismissing and ridiculing these paragons of Zenithar—"

"Damn Zenithar!"

One of Martius's nerves had snapped like a fragile twig at the mention of the divine of production and commerce. It had burned his ears to hear his name like sunlight burning a vampire. He had growled defensively, like a cornered beast ready to martyr itself in order to bring its foe down into the depths of the void with it.

"Damn Zenithar! That's right, damn him! Damn him and his anti-social Sermon on the Anvil, his dark and blasphemous screed encouraging everyone to drag themselves and their fellow man down in sin for the sake of unbridled self-love! Bah! People keep labeling him the provider of our ease. What ease? What comfort is there in compelling a man to work for his keep under threat of starvation? How is that fair? Why, I'll tell you the truth: it's not fair! It's not fair at all!

"It's unfair for such an evil deity to be a part of the Church of the Nine! The Church is supposed to uphold what is good, what is fair, what makes all men, mer, and beast-folk equally worthy in the eyes of the gods. The Church is supposed to ensure that everyone gets their fair share of success, of prosperity, of happiness, of love, of life. Such a responsibility was handed down by the divines themselves—the true divines!—such that everyone may live equally under the merciful grace of Nirn.

"Don't believe me? Just ask Stendarr, who asks us to set aside our petty, banal urges to tend to the sick and the needy. But don't take his word for it, for the local priesthood in Anvil tell us that Dibella expects us to let one another into our hearts, indiscriminately and as intimately as we would ourselves, such that we may explore the mysteries of our collective love. And just as we should be thus unified physically, so we should stand together spiritually in the ever merciful name of Mara. . . ."

He had continued his own snarling screed for an indeterminate amount of time. He could not recall just how long it took him to list all of the fundaments of the other four divines—the fundaments as he liked to think of them, anyway—but it had felt like an eternity before he had had to allow himself a deep breath. He had inhaled the air with the obnoxious noise of a petulant toddler gasping in the middle of an explosive temper tantrum, unaware of the nature of his seething words or their implications.

And like such a child, he too had been far from finished with his tantrum. With his breath having returned to him, he had continued, heedless of the countess's shocked face and the Zenitharan priestess's homicidal umbrage. The last thing he had wanted was for her to continue her objection against the Countess's charity initiative.

". . . And yet, your putrid deviant of a god dares to throw all of that out into the abyss—in favor of what? He brainwashes youth to put themselves above their brothers, to turn them away in their time of need; indeed, he encourages them to spit on their inferiors! He indoctrinates the shepherds and keepers of mortals to abdicate themselves of their innate duties to their fellows, to let them starve, to let them wallow in poverty. His very being screams out to all mortal kind to throw away the other and totally embrace the self! Even in the face of the other eight, who preach in favor of a morally good life lived among others, this renegade deity praises the moral life lived within the self!

"And yet he still has a place among the Church! I resent that. I resent it very much, and I resent your whoring yourself to the master of selfishness and unfettered materialism. I firmly believe there are only eight divines! I don't think your precious Zenithar should be counted among them. You want to know what I really think of him. Why, I think he is no better than the most evil of the Daedric Princes! I think he is one of the most bloated, depraved entities out there. Why, I think he is nothing more than an over-rated, insolent little—"

"Stop right there, pig!" The Breton Priestess had boomed. "Only a worshipper of Mara, Stendarr, or even Dibella would stoop so low as to write off Zenithar's basic tenets as some seditious conspiracy to reduce mortals to a state of primitivism! If anything, that infernal trinity seeks such an end." She vomited the name of Anvil's patron divine with the intimate disdain of a wronged woman speaking an unjust ex-lover's name.

"Tell me, you petulant swine," she had continued, "why it is that people should be treated as the property of others? Why is it that people should be consumed by the affairs of their neighbors to the point of obsessive compulsion? Give me one—just one—good reason why the taxpayers of your city should be impressed against their will to—"

"Faith and Service." Countess Maro's lifeless voice had at that point possessed a dark passion in its tone, stiff and cold like a zombie hurling itself straight at her. The countess had scowled. "That is my family's motto, as it has been since the beginning of our lineage. As decreed by both the Empire and the divines that blessed it, we nobles of Cyrodiil are vested by divine right with the duty to uphold the Imperial Way. Whether we wish to exercise our individual talents to pursue our base desires like Count Caro or serve as vanguards of the Empire's people is irrelevant.

"All that matters is that we are obligated to set aside our selves for the good of the Empire, something much bigger and more meaningful than one's own petty ambitions. Now, priestess, I have summoned you here from your Resolution in Leyawiin to advise me on how best to achieve my duty to spend my treasury judiciously, and I am grateful for your mere presence." she spat the last phrase with caustic, barely contained sarcasm.

"But I do not appreciate your denigration of my family's beliefs or the Empire's sense of welfare, and I do not appreciate your bellicose snobbery toward those who are less fortunate than you. I had hoped that you would do as I asked of you; against the better judgement of my spiritual advisors in the House of Dibella, I sought to act on my beliefs and give you a fair chance despite your allegiance to Count Caro's guild-cartel of Leyawiin. It seems, however, that you're interested only in insulting the very foundations of my humanitarian rule and of society at large. I am truly disappointed.

"I am still glad you arrived, though, for it has cleared my conscience, given me focus. Therefore, I shall continue as planned: I will authorize a voyage to Morrowind to assist with the charitable efforts of the Dunmer people there. My decision is final."

Martius had taken immense pleasure in the look that had appeared on the Breton's face. She had borne the expression of a sane woman recoiling from the incoherent sermon of a Sheogorath cultist, her crimson eyes wide with shock and her jaw agape in blindsided surprise. Her ivory face had blanched, leaving her even paler than before. He licked his lips like a blood crazed orc gazing down upon a defeated foe. Though he had not been able to describe just what he was fighting for, he had nevertheless felt the moment to be a victory.

He had had little time to gloat to himself over this victory, however. The priestess of Zenithar's dumbfounded expression had faded, leaving only a tenacious defiance that completely ruined his self-righteous moment. Her voice had echoed rebelliously against the throne room's walls.

"Fine! Enjoy wasting your wealth away, Countess. I guess this kind of mindless debauchery is what I get for being charitable and thinking you had even a tenth of a brain more than those Dibellan whores! But remember this: when next you find yourself hurling into the pitch-black abyss of unbearable, deathly poverty and you cry out to Leyawiin to be saved once more, we will no longer redeem you."

He had thought she would leave the room at that, but he had jolted back in astonished fear when she had instead lurched aggressively toward him, a venomous sneer plastered on her thin lips. Her voice had come as a whisper, ice cold like the grave, slithering from her red tongue into the depths of his ear like a cold serpent whose hiss he could not help but hear.

"As for you, wretched little muckraker, I hope your adventure to 'save' those looting louts in Morrowind fails. And should the day come, whether immediately after you set sail or get ready to dock at your destination, when that ghastly stain that is your conscience catches up to you and presents you with your just deserts, do not bother to protest; your cries of 'what did I do to deserve this' will fall on deaf ears."

Her ghostly words echoed in his ears once more. Staring up at those crimson eyes petulantly, sneering self-righteously at the burning flame of their pupils gazing disdainfully back at him from the twilight sky, he likened the priestess's hissing words to a punishing curse inflicted upon him by a judgmental witch—though he knew neither why he should feel condemned nor the nature of his condemnation. The hex had two parts, the deathly chill of her incantation being the first. It had planted a flare of disquiet within his soul, not quite potent enough to count as mortification but bright enough to shine like a beacon. The second part of the affliction had yet to come, but he could feel it watching that beacon shining fearfully within him, tracking his every movement with the sardonic smile of a skeleton, the smirk of death itself. It loomed in the background like an assassin, poisoned dagger in hand, waiting for the perfect moment, the chance to inflict its icy bite of damnation. The mere thought of her words, combined with the chill of the Abecean Sea and the inky tides wracking the Charity of Stendarr, brought fresh goosebumps onto his arms.

But he could not afford to let his own fear consume him. As a journeyman member of Stendarr's relatively new order, he had taken a solemn oath to tend to the needs and wants of his fellow man faithfully. The fact that he was afraid of the inherent risks of the journey mattered not. He had to follow through with his god's divine decree, under the pain of moral condemnation.

Clutching his amulet of Stendarr stiffly, he took a series of deep breaths as if he were guiding himself through a meditation ritual, the direness of his nerves leaving him with each exhaled breath. Every inhale replaced the resulting void in his lungs with a renewed numbness in his mind and a lightness in his ribs that he best identified as hope, though it lacked the reassurance hope should have. The feeling of emotional salvation was shallower than usual, almost ephemeral, and he felt as though it could break at the first sign of trouble. Accompanying this fragile tranquility, the hungry embers of bitter hostility danced within his soul, and he glared back up at those twin red eyes judging him.

I'll show you! He raised his amulet high in resentful spite, the pupils of his eyes directly challenging the crimson fire of the stars. I'll show you and your heathen god what virtue really means! Just you wait!

oOo

The eerie blue-green light of Masser and Secunda diffused through the sea of green, violet, and yellow stars, the twinkling mist of starlight seeping through the gossamer layer of clouds like a sinister aura blanketing the Abecean Sea. The tide grasped at the ship possessively, tugging at the ship with frothy fingers of mist and wake groping along its sides seeking purchase. The biting gale wafted the salty scent of the sea throughout the deck of the ship, howling forlornly into the ears of Martius and his crew. The escort ships to his side bobbed and weaved precariously above the obsidian water, yet they still managed to keep from running into each other or the Charity of Stendarr.

Despite the unfavorable conditions, Martius could not help but feel his eyelids droop. Truthfully, he wanted to give one of his crew the responsibility to navigate the sea and get some sort of reprieve from the weariness of sailing throughout the night. But he could feel Stendarr's disapproving frown bearing down upon his shoulders like a weight as the thought crossed his mind, and he knew that he had intended for him to provide the dark elves with Countess Caro's deliverance. To abdicate this obligation was to forfeit the god of mercy's favor.

Keeping himself awake at the ship's helm did not require a monumental amount of effort on his part, though. In the distance, he could make out the dark silhouette of a ship, its hulking proportions implying the majesty and regal bearing of a leviathan, prowling the waters patiently as if patrolling its home territory for intruders or prey. The way it glided on the surface captivated him but also left him with mixed feelings. He could not consciously explain why, but he felt the urge to forget all of his duties to Stendarr and the rest of the Divines, to forget his responsibilities as the head of the relief voyage to Morrowind, to forsake all of his troubles just to stare at the wonder looming in the distance. He also felt the need to escape, to hide, to make himself invisible somehow, to do anything except continue to watch this new ship.

Stendarr damn it all, he censured himself like a parent insisting a child conform to a ubiquitous but arbitrary social custom. There is nothing to be afraid of. He avoided the question of why he should identify his mixed impressions as fear.

"I don't like the looks of things," a feminine voice complained with a squeaky tone. "Not at all."

Martius groaned and turned to meet the source of this voice with a grimace. To his right, an Imperial woman stood gawkily as she peeked through the eyepiece of her telescope, the large elongated instrument barely fitting in the grip of her slight fingers and dainty grip. Her body leaned into the gesture with a strain that made her already fragile-looking features appear anemic. Even her hair looked vulnerable to the slightest effort of the surrounding environment.

"Of course you don't, Atria," Martius snapped petulantly. "You never like anything. By Mara, all you ever do is complain."

"Because I always have good reason to," she responded defensively. "Just like I do now."

"Oh really, and what in Stendarr's good name could possess you to write off my noble endeavors as 'disasters waiting to happen'? Out with it!" Martius spat the question out with a snobbish, sanctimonious tone designed to intimidate rather than reason with Atria.

"Basic common sense!" she squawked meekly, visibly shaken by Martius's tone but still of a mind to defend herself, "not to mention the poor track record your charitable contributions to Tamriel have acquired. I mean, we're lucky to have escaped Bravil with our clothes still on our backs, or have you forgotten that food drive you led there months ago?"

"Shut up, you miserable rotten bitch!" Martius screamed at the top of his lungs. "You know nothing!" He hated how she brought up the great mishap of Bravil. He had intended to feed and spiritually educate those paupers in the edicts of Stendarr and to a lesser extent Mara, but they had spurned his softhearted act of charity at best and turned violent at worst. Instead, those he sought to save from want and fear turned to Count Caro's agents from Leyawiin for jobs in Cyrodiil's jewel of industry; they had preferred to work for their keep rather than live on the dole doing nothing.

Atria's reminder of the paupers' choice to accept what Martius saw as a cruelly inhuman offer from a gang of robber barons instead of his openhanded mercy offended him, but he seethed even more so at Atria's display of insubordination. After all, Mara told her faithful to maintain the hearth and home as well as to honor the bonds of family. In Martius's mind, this entitled him to his sister's unconditional support; he resented the criticism and disdain he received from her instead.

The sight of his sister flinching at his outburst did not stop the embers of his ire from fanning themselves into flames, though a mean-spirited smirk creeped upon his face with the eeriness of a long-legged spider. "See, that right there is your problem. You have no faith—not in the Empire, not in the Emperor, not even in the Divines! Whereas good people are thankful of the self-evident truths the world presents to them, you have to spit on Nirn's generosity and find fault with everything. Only a selfish, ungrateful brat could be capable of such a heinous act."

"Selfish?" Atria gasped, astonished at Martius's accusation. Her tone tried to sound as caustically indignant as the vocal cords in her tiny throat could manage, but only a timid, almost submissive squeak leapt from her tongue. "Faithless? But when have you ever not seen me pray for Mara's forgiveness or pay my tithes to the Empire—"

"But nothing! See, you're doing it again. Stendarr's mercy!"

"What?" Atria now developed a panic to her meek squeaking. "What i—"

"That!" Martius spat venomously. "That's it, right there! Why do you always have to keep doing that? Why must you always be such a pessimist? You never believe in any of my goals or dreams. You and Father, both! I hate it!"

"I don't—"

"I hate how Father would always criticize and debase my nobility like it had no value. 'Oh, what practical use is there giving food to the hungry?' 'Why should anyone with any business sense donate money to those in need?' 'What personal benefit is there joining the Vigilants?' Bah!" He half-gasped, half-vomited that last exclamation with a contemptuous umbrage that made his sister flinch, interrupting her before she could even formulate a response of her own.

"Why did everything have to be all about cold, ruthless profits and inhuman business—the almighty septim? Why couldn't Father just see the bigger picture, all the poor people that needed him and his fellow moguls, all of those times Mother wanted him to set the world of business aside and simply love her the way she needed to be loved—the way we needed to be loved? Gods above, why couldn't he have a heart and feel, just like people do? By Stendarr, he never once cared about anything outside his little plane of Oblivion he called business—especially not the selfless word of the Divines! The only person that mattered to him was himself! I guess I'm a fool for hoping he could repent and change.

"But look around now! Where is this wretched little mongrel of industry? Why, he still lies dead in a ditch somewhere in the Colovian Highlands, as cold and unfeeling as he was in life! He's certainly not around to bully Mother and me around anymore!"

He licked his fat, taffy-like lips into a grin that was a grotesque parody of triumph. His rotund face contorted into a morbid mask of purely mean-spirited malevolence. It resembled a hobgoblin's snarl as it mocked and assaulted its betters in a violent charge fueled by a bitter malice known only to the most primitive and twisted of creatures. Through the red haze engulfing his vision, he could see Atria's hand clench the rail of the ship's helm, a frail but gravely crucial lifeline, her eyes fixing themselves onto him with the dreadful wariness of prey caught in a predator's sight, frantically measuring the monster in front of her to find a means of escape. He licked his lips once more as he saw the sheen of cold sweat enveloping her olive skin, savoring the sight as a Colovian mountain lion would the thought of fresh meat, relishing the smell of blood and horror before it. He could even hear the shallow gasps of terror she breathed, faint but still audible.

The thick sheen of fear in her eyes appeared to have heard his words, but they had the aura of eyes that could not penetrate the surface of the words and integrate their full nature, of eyes that could see but not comprehend what they saw. Her anemic mouth, desiccated from fear, managed to cough out a response.

"B-but I don't understand. Father loved you for the potential you had, what you could have become!"

Martius screamed. His mind was blind to the specific nature of the wound; as far as he knew, it lacked any cause. The astonished look in his sister's blanched face told him that she also stood oblivious to the indictment her words implied. That indictment, however, sent him reeling in pain like a direct blow from a rudimentary but devastating cudgel, with all of the bluntness and ruthlessness of such a weapon. He stumbled back toward the ship's steering, struggling to recover from the vertigo of what he could only describe as shock and betrayal.

"How dare you! Never, ever insult my potential again! As a Vigilant of Stendarr, I am but a humble servant to the god of mercy and forbearance. He can make your life a living nightmare if you so much as mock any of his agents in Tamriel! I bet you never once considered that, did you? But then, I should never have expected you of all people to be capable of virtue, especially if you inherited Father's subhuman views of love!

"Bah! What a lowly view it is! To be loved for something! As if love—approval—is to be earned! Both Dibella and Mara say that love is its own cause, a free unconditional gift to be doled out to anyone who needs it. And they were right to say it, too! It just wouldn't be fair otherwise! Everyone needs approval—especially me! Why must we have to earn it? Why should I have to slave away for what I need? Damn it, I need it—need it more than Caro and his lackeys, more than that hussy bitch priestess, more than you and Father! So why am I deprived of my Stendarr-given rights while everyone else gets their self-indulging wants met?

"Yes, the Divines were right; and if that is what the Divines say, then that is what it has to be. And Stendarr strives to ensure that that gift is distributed fairly all across Tamriel, with not one hateful brigand like Caro and his exploiters of the poor getting more than their fair share! I resent everyone questioning their commandment—especially you! Mara says family is supposed to stick together and love one another without being judgmental and cruel, but you keep putting my nobility down with your judgmental pessimism! Stendarr says the better are supposed to practice patience and infinite forbearance and dedicate themselves faithfully to their fellow man, but you keep sneering at his very name by questioning me! Why must everyone question them? Gods above, why does everyone have to question everything?"

"How can you say that?" Atria's voice was low. "How can you think—"

What occurred next transpired so quickly it had seemed like a subliminal, fleeting memory to Martius. He strained to process how the joints of his knuckles turned from the tense form drained of a ghastly amount of color to the violently fretful fists of Stendarr himself, colored crimson with sanctimonious hate. He struggled to determine the source of the ache now writhing through his fingers, as if his fist directly collided with a solid wall of stone. The red fog that had dimmed his vision was now at its peak opacity, and he tried in vain to see through it, to piece together just how his sister's gawky form, which had been standing moments before, now lay sprawled out on the floor of the ship's helm, a pool of blood spilling from her now-broken nose.

Like a startled seagull scared from the beaches of the Gold Coast, the memory of what happened between the previous moment and the next flew past him before he could even catch it—and he did not care in the slightest. He could feel the acidic surge of righteous fury burning through his veins, and he was too drunk on the pure, unbridled feeling it gave him for the fresh tears streaming down his sister's bruised cheeks to bring any amount of guilt from his soul. If anything, the tears only fed the primal flames of ire he reveled in, urging him to sate it even more. He did not hesitate to heed its call.

"You greedy, gold-digging, self-entitled hussy! Who are you to question anything? Who are you to think? Why, only a selfish, egotistical imp like you could possibly consider committing such a vulgar sin as thinking! Why do you have to always ruin everyone else's dreams; why can't you just have faith and let us have them? Why can't you just feel like I do—no pesky thinking involved, just pure, human feeling? By Stendarr, I'll make you feel as I do! I'll make you approve of my goals and dreams! You won't be able to pummel my noble ideals into the ground anymore. My feelings are—"

A series of thunderous booms resounded from the left, and Martius rolled in an effort to distance himself from the mass of fire and splintered wood that flew toward the Charity of Stendarr. Once the inferno had receded, both he and Atria were aghast as they stood back up and looked toward the source of the fiery shrapnel. Through the charcoal-colored plumes of smoke, the darkened silhouettes of the few surviving crewmen hurled themselves into the sea from the fractured skeletal remains of the Shield-Wall, its fiery lifeblood bleeding profusely though its jagged, splintery ribs. The Abecean Sea seeped into the hollow spaces left behind, engulfing the wreck like a morbid meal. His sister's eyes met his for a moment as he turned away from the nightmarish image before him, the two of them sharing the same panicked conclusion.

Martius wheezed frantically as he scanned the sea for the threat and gasped in mortified shock at what he found. Bobbing and weaving like a bloodthirsty leviathan, the massive hulk of the ship he had previously been gawking at now closed in on the convoy, its myriad guns firing volleys of fiery cannonade periodically from its malachite-reinforced hull.

Wait. Malachite? Martius's pudgy fingers quickly wiped away the beads of fearful sweat pouring from his forehead before they feverishly snatched his sister's telescope from her hands. Nightmarish images of Maormeri corsairs slaughtering his entire convoy and raking their long, elven fingers through the resulting blood booty in the wake of their destruction flooded his mind, and he wished they were not what was currently targeting him. As he peered through the eyepiece, however, he temporarily lost the ability to breathe, for emblazoned proudly on the ship's black sails was an austere, gilt eagle—the imperialist Altmeri eagle.

No! Martius gasped in skin-blanching terror. Not them!

In the distance, from where the Vanguard of Need hovered next to the Charity of Stendarr, he heard a shrill voice cry out the warning that invalidated his greatest wishes of the moment and confirmed the very fact he did not want to acknowledge as true: "Pirates!"

The reality of the situation further dashed his hopes of the horror around him spontaneously dissipating when the sound of cannonade compelled him to glance behind his ship. Three sleek vessels circled the two escort ships like fish of prey around fresh food. Through the eyepiece of his sister's telescope, he could see triangular dorsal fins flared with predatory intent as the two friendly frigates struggled to hold them back. A ghastly horror locked his joints and muscles into place as he took in the harrowing sight of these fish's hulls flexing aggressively in the sea, encased in a set of scales made of primordial limestone-like planks supported by a bony skeletal frame. Splayed across the bows of these skeletal fish-ships was a primeval mass of corpses, pinned to their positions with arrows carved of bone and mutilated beyond recognition. The savagery he saw kept his eyes anchored to reality, preventing him from evading the identity of these bloodthirsty brigands: Bosmeri schooners.

But the most gruesome sight came when he finally peered toward the Vanguard of Need. Still shaken by the sight of the savage wood elven ships, he struggled to keep his knees from bowing forward as he took in the visage of two more vessels tearing through the sea like lightning through tumultuous skies. The speed with which these streaks of wooden planks soared sent a chilling fear through his spine, their exotic boxy hulls implying solidity, strength, fortitude—anything but speed. By all physical laws, their cumbersome, non-aerodynamic design should have rendered them immovable were it not for the long wooden oars spinning in and out of the water in a harmonic, cyclical rhythm more akin to a row of pendulums pushing the ships further toward the Vanguard of Need. Along their masts, he saw a motley collection of gossamer cloth and exquisite tapestries strewn together, the resulting angular pattern invoking the image of well-groomed, piercing claws, claws sharper than Imperial steel, claws capable of rending flesh and sinew with the ease of a knife cutting butter. Khajiiti claws.

Khajiiti boarding galleys! Martius could not help but name the sturdy vessels streaking toward the adjacent escort ship.

A paralyzing helplessness overcame him as he watched the closer of the two exotic wooden projectiles collide into the Vanguard of Need with all the blunt force and striking power of a Nordic battering ram, its head embedded into the now-splintered barrier of planks separating the furry feline warriors from the Imperial sailors and soldiers within the escort ship's hull. The impact itself had been but the prelude of a greater horror to come for those souls, a signal beckoning the carnivorous-looking pirates to leap into action. His jaw dropped when the furry tide of Khajiiti corsairs began to pile themselves onto the ship, their claws finding grim purchase as they pierced deep into the wood of the ship's hull, kilograms upon kilograms of fur-covered muscle flexing and tensing to propel the pirates along the Vanguard of Need's side.

The furry tide had just spilled over the lip of the ship's side and flooded the upper deck when an ear-splitting boom, accompanied by an earth-shattering shockwave surging through the Charity of Stendarr's upper deck, flung Martius, Atria, and the rest of the crew like rag-dolls. He struggled to ignore the flagellating pain and biting splinters digging into his flesh like the sharp tail of a toothy whip as he regained his footing.

It was a good thing he pulled himself up, too, for he would need to roll back onto his arms once more. Before he even hit the wooden deck of the ship's helm, he heard the gut-wrenching creak of the ship's sternward mast toppling onto the helm like a freshly chopped tree on a vengeful trajectory against its lumberjack assailants, the morbid crack and crunch of human bone and splintering wood signaling its success.

Urgency coursing through his very soul, he rolled onto his hands and feet, taking in the carnage the fallen mast had wrought. The ship's helm bore a giant tear from the steering to the sternward rail, shorn gossamer cloth and thick rope rigging trailing aimlessly away from the massive log, caressed by the colossal cradle of splintered wood, chunky crimson paste, and mangled flesh. Pain from both the wooden thorns still stabbing him and the fresh splinters littering the deck shot through his arms and legs as he crawled closer to the wreckage, beckoned by the sight of frail hair clinging to a torn barrette as if to save itself from death with the vitality of its bright yellow color. Dark, anemic blood seeped from underneath the strands of hair, staining the splintered wood and the barrette. Both the lifeless hair and lively cloth confirmed the identity of the corpse to which they belonged.

Ha! Martius spat mockingly, as if his heart-felt, irreverent curse were a wad of green puss hurled from the depths of his nostrils onto his dead sister's still-warm remains. Serves you right for being yet another faithless heathen!

Two more thunderclaps shook the deck of the Charity of Stendarr, disrupting his footing enough to have thrown him back onto his bloodied hands and knees were it not for the bits of railing still intact. A distant thud accompanied by the blood-curdling screams of crushed sailors resounded in the distance, signaling the fall of yet another tree-like mast. His pudgy fingers still gripping the rail like a desperate fist blanching itself from the strain of saving its owner from a horrific end, he turned and saw the malachite leviathan lurch violently toward the ship's bow, an ethereal blue aura wreathed around its massive form like a reactive armor coating flinging enemy cannon fire away with explosive force.

Wards! Martius gasped, the heart-pounding heaviness of dismay adding metric tons to his stomach and leaving a nauseous, desiccated dread in his mouth. Damned wizards!

Just before the impact, however, the giant Altmeri behemoth jerked away suddenly. The gesture was more akin to powerful hunters in the wild, and it generally played out in two phases. The first phase consisted of the predator toying with its prey with a series of taunting feints designed to instill a severe dread that kept the target on the run, panicked beyond all reason and constantly on the lookout for a means of escape, however irrational or impossible. In the midst of this confusion, the predator expected the prey's immediate panic to encourage it to act rashly, resulting in a gravely erroneous mistake that left the target vulnerable to a gruesome coup-de-grace.

Unlike such a natural predator, though, the leviathan ship loomed over the sea with a posture that implied an intent much worse than to kill. As the malachite-reinforced hull flew past the Charity of Stendarr's side, he saw several shadows vaulting over the armored lip of the hulk via specially rigged ropes and magic spells. The shadows had not even hit the deck when a few of the Charity of Stendarr's crew howled a frightful warning in the midnight air.

"We're being boarded!"

Martius's knees quivered fearfully as he raced to the safety of the lower decks. He glanced left and right through every dark corner and crevice of his path, the hairs on his neck standing on end when the sound of clashing swords, flying arrows, and arcane spells amplified from an ominous murmur to a chaotic cacophony. He watched a handful of his fellow Vigilants pour from the far side of the bow, weapons and spells readied as they charged a group of wood elves led by a trio of high elven sorcerers. Occasionally, he even had to shield himself from flying bodies, throwing them off himself with his arms whenever they tried to tackle him in a stiff, cold bear hug. Scanning through the fray, he found the doors to the lower decks.

His nerves in a blaze of dread-fueled energy, he weaved through the thick of the ensuing combat, ducking underneath errant fireballs and lightning bolts and rolling away from spark-emitting weapon duels. He had just thrust the wooden doors open when he heard the murderous cracking and popping of magic fire cackling toward him, the sardonic sneer of a fiery skull staring him in the eye when he saw it.

"Run, Brother!"

He heard a voice, distant and faint, call out to him like a mental premonition, an ill omen flashing through his mind by means of spoken word. It was a haunting call, and he desperately wanted to tell his legs to comply as fast as they can, but try as he might, his body ignored him, his joints locked and muscles tensed firmly into place. It was as if his soul-snuffing dread grew hands and held him there, paralyzed and helpless as he awaited his grizzly fate. The empty eyes of death peered into his very soul through the visage of the still-oncoming fireball. He closed his eyes, praying to Stendarr that he might get mercy and escape his inevitable doom.

He suddenly felt a sharp tugging on the back of his Vigilant's robes, a tight vise-like tether to an unknown but quite powerful force, yanking him in like a lightweight body. The doors exploded in a nightmarish blast of flaming, splintery shrapnel before him. Before he could even comprehend what miracle had just happened, the same force spun him around, and he stared into the luckless red eyes of a hooded-robed Dunmer.

"T-Tha . . . than—" Try as he might, Martius could not form any coherent words to express his appreciation for the miraculous salvation he had received.

"No time for idle pleasantries, Brother Vigilant," the dark elf curtly said, his thick hoarse accent compelling Martius into silence. "We need to move—now!"

Underscoring those words with a morbid and grotesque horror he could only describe as unholy, the discord beyond the scorched doorway presented a scene Martius wished he never saw. In middle of the fray, the most blood-freezing scream split the cold salty air like the ionizing shriek of wizard's lightning as another fellow Vigilant, a Redguard, fought in vain against his gory fate. Bits of blue and tan cloth—and pasty red strips of flayed skin, to Martius's terror—flew across the upper deck like shrapnel, a sinister crimson mist trailing behind the gore. He flashed Martius a haunting stare, a silent but desperate plea for mercy, the exact same plea Martius had given. But whereas the God of Mercy had granted Martius the salvation he so desperately wanted, the fickle Divine spared absolutely none for the Redguard as his eyes, nose, ears, and eventually his mutilated head leaped helplessly, drained of the vivacious warmth of life by the deathly talons of his assailant.

The giant brute of a beast towered over the mangled remains of the Redguard aggressively, its posture righteous and indignant. Encasing kilograms upon kilograms of orange black-striped fur and superhuman muscle, the telltale heaviness and gilt sheen of solid moonstone exaggerated its already imposing, unyielding size and strength. Nappy aboriginal dreadlocks crowned the stern, unforgiving feline glower of the beast's thick mask, the serpentine braids writhing with ruthless purpose. These features, combined with the still-dripping blood of the recently condemned and the whip-like tail lashing the air, emitted a gilded glow that shoved at Martius's soul with enough force to send him reeling from the punishing brilliance. Though blinded by the glare of the beast's essence, he knew what he saw: a Khajiit.

His heart pound against his chest with a rapid violence as he ran, as if it had stopped during that timeless limbo of demoralizing mortification moments earlier and had started again with a renewed, fear-driven vigor. Its drum-like echo rang in his ears, a series to deep thumps that in back-to-back succession produced a rhythm of terror and urgency that guided his legs, dictating the pace and gait with which he was to sprint toward the lower decks. Adrenaline swooshed through his temples along the tempo of his heartbeat, their lyrical sighs directing his path and blotting out the Dunmer Vigilant's own directions.

The number of other Vigilants flowing past him provided encouragement; that number served as a measurement of the strength of the buffer between him and the Khajiiti warrior pursuing him. He knew deep down those Vigilants would never stand a chance against the giant behemoth of a cat behind him, but he did hope it would slow it down enough to buy him some much-needed time.

At last, the beacon of salvation called to him in the form of a reinforced trap door. It flooded his vision like a mirage in the middle of a salty desert of desolation and gore, tempting him with promises of safety and succor. Given the violent bloodbath the corsairs waged around him, he vastly preferred the apparent security to another minute spent in the thick of the slaughter.

Thank Stendarr! he sighed, gripping the door handle with relief. He pulled, eager to escape the monsoon of death chasing him—and gulped an audible, panicked curse when the trap door refused to budge.

Before he could give in to his despair, he felt the wooden bulkhead smack the wind out of his lungs, leaving him breathless and wheezing to stay conscious. Try as he might, he felt an inhuman, arcane force pin his throat in place like a prison collar, negating any residual ability and even will to flee. The inevitability of his impending doom pushed against his neck with a pressure that extended its restrictive qualities down his arms and legs all the way to his fingers and toes, paralyzing him completely and forcing him to gaze into a pair of bitter black pools of hate.

Crowned by a thick head of silvery hair, those resentful eyes spat contemptuous curses upon his very being, from the cradle of black eyeliner and tint painted upon sun-kissed, wood elven flesh. A thin feminine mouth curled itself into a derisive snarl, a vicious grimace that projected its disgust through the lithe, sinewy arm and adroit fingers stretched toward him, fueling the tether around his neck. Lean muscles tensed with an angry vigor as she held him in that magic chokehold, her tiny feet planted on the deck with a solid foundation that belied an inhuman, wolfish strength and endurance. Her small, perky chest flared out and receded with every breath she took, her every exhale warm and humid with a dark, murderous passion.

The paralyzing pressure coursing through his nerves now gave way to a numbness that negated from existence any part of him below his neck, leaving only his eyes and ears as the two sole tethers he depended on to keep himself in this world, to stave off the oncoming blackness that threatened to take him. He tried to retain his alertness, to keep the wooden brown planks and beams of the ship's bulkhead from fading away, from setting beneath the horizon line that was the Bosmer's smooth contours and leading him in toward those dark portals enshrouding his vision. Alas, his weak willpower soon drained away completely, and he let his eyes drift toward those black holes, the void beyond engulfing his sight, leaving only his fleeting auditory lifeline to consciousness.

"Irwaen," a distant voice echoed, its accent posh and arrogant. "What should we do with this Imperial filth?"

The uncouth, animalistic growl that answered carried the contemptuous weight of a formal judicial verdict cast down upon a convicted criminal. "We'll take it with us."

oOo

A certain lull had reigned over Martius. It had not been the kind of peace seen among an individual after surmounting a difficult and trying obstacle, the victory producing a moment of revitalized, reinvigorated joy and wonder in one's life. Nor had it been the kind of spiritual paradise the Divines promised their faithful in Aetherius, a utopia of eternal virtue and tolerance devoid of conflict or strife. No, it had possessed the colder, stiffer, more sinister air of a static, morbid tranquility achieved not through triumph and progress but through complacency and stagnation. It had been the absolute zero, the static all-encompassing negation of the world and of existence itself.

That had set upon him during a long while ago, when the darkness had engulfed his eyes voraciously and the slight squeaking of feet upon wooden planks gave way to deafening silence. He could not determine precisely how long he had floated in that state of zero, but the fear that had wracked his brain and pounded in his chest slowly returned as the planking of feet upon wood echoed in his ears once more. The thick, accented scent of exotic tobacco quickly stuck to the hairs of his nostrils like tar, eliciting a hoarse series of coughs from the depths of his lungs. The darkness began to recede, liberating his eyes; the first sight that greeted them brought his fear to a gut retching terror.

The disembodied silhouette of a hand wafted the grey fog of tobacco smoke away with the disciplined precision and finesse of a natural confidence, revealing the towering figure of an elf perched in a chair with the calculated tension and coldness of a potent purpose. His gilded skin and orange-gold eyes proclaimed his race proudly, without a shred of nuance: Altmer.

Stendarr's mercy! Martius gasped. He recoiled from the sudden revelation, but the cold iron of chain bindings pulled him back sternly, bruising his wrists.

Though they had never been a huge part of his community-oriented environment or endeavors—indeed, virtually none of them ever associated with the Vigilants of Stendarr or left their upscale estates—Martius had had dealings with a few high elves in the past. Their prim, angular features had always sent his nerves alight like a blaze, their nasally accents sending waves of spasms and apprehension twitching through his average musculature. Their cultured diction and cadence had possessed an authoritarian that elicited thin layers of sweat and nervousness from his palms. He could still envision the vicious stares they had given him whenever he asked them to sponsor the Vigilants' myriad charity efforts, the stares of eagles sitting atop mounds of inherited wealth scorning a lesser being for even returning their gaze. They had been high-ranking aristocrats, and the thought of interfering with the Empire's feudal social structure had offended them like an expletive.

The Altmer sitting above him, however, differed radically from the nobles. Though he retained the sharp angles that made up the essentials of his race's typical visage, his were rectangular and more rugged instead of triangular, with a hard jawline that trailed down into a square chin. His face was like stone, his solid nose, eyebrows, and cheekbones chiseled into a mask of granite and thick tanned skin. His grim eyes pierced into Martius's soul coldly, an intelligent gleam clicking like a lockpick trying ruthlessly and relentlessly to fit the tumbler of a difficult lock into place. Short, blonde hair sloped back into a spiky oiled mane, extending from his sloped forehead to the base of his neck. Martius had likened the high elven aristocrats to pigeons, with all the pompousness and arrogance that implied; this Altmer invoked the imagery of a shark, with all the power and virility that implied.

"Well, well, well. Look who finally woke up." His salty accented voice projected a grim, gravelly tone that further reinforced the shark-like image in Martius's eyes, though the Imperial could not help but shiver at the dark air that accompanied it. "Took your precious time, though; I almost grew tired waiting."

"Waiting?" Martius stuttered, desiccating fear scratching his throat like tiny grains of sand rubbing against the exposed flesh of a fresh gash. His tone nevertheless sounded indignantly defensive. "What do I look like, some exotic Imperial City Arena exhibit? A Vigilant of Stendarr doesn't deserve this kind of treatment! Unhand me at once!"

When he saw the calculating sheen of intelligence in his eyes, his indignation turned to apprehension. Though the nature of that look had never crossed his mind in his entire life, the icy grip of intimidation always squeezed at his stomach when he saw hints of it flicker across others' faces. They would summon the hand of duress to clog his esophagus like a large portion of food that threatened to choke him. The light in the high elven pirate's eyes directed it to twist and wrench his stomach out from his gut and force its contents through his throat before thrusting it back in and returning the stomach acids to the organ as if they were sucked up into a vacuum.

By the Divines! Martius exclaimed. Stop examining me like that! Get that judgmental look away from me!

The pirate's smile fanned the flames of intimidating fear even more. A thick moonstone pipe jutted from between his thin lips as an extension of his body, the smoky embers dancing within its crucible the incarnation of the algorithm running through his mind, performing an intricate logical calculus completely alien and unnerving to Martius. When his smile erupted into laughter, the Imperial thought the algorithm had finished. Interrogation? Torture? Execution? Martius could not say, but the final integrated solution inspired sheer horror from him.

Then he heard the Altmer say something that swept him off his feet in shock, his astonishment causing him to hang painfully from his wrist bindings. "Alright. I think I can let you go. . . ."

Martius inhaled deeply. He felt off, like something was wrong, but he dismissed it as another shade of the surprise filling his lungs with the breath. "Really? You'll let me go?"

"Indeed, I will," the corsair replied, a gloved hand taking the pipe out from his lips, which curled into a smile that sent a shiver down Martius's spine. Martius could see a crazed gleam shine in the elf's eyes, though he could not say what specifically it was. "I distinctly recall you saying you deserved as much. . . ."

The pirate stared him directly in the eye, his face a stern mask of mocking contempt and knowing scrutiny. It did not convey the intimacy of close friends sharing an exclusive code derived of their brotherly bond, but the eerie ruthlessness of a spy utilizing a plan unknown to outsiders to retrieve the secrets he wanted. And the erudite smile on his face said that plan would work.

"Now prove it."

Those three words stabbed Martius like a dagger of disquiet, leaving him stunned. What? He asked himself, his tongue too stunned to sling a response at the pirate like arrows from a bow. The elf watched him as a shark would watch its bleeding prey.

"You want . . . proof?" Martius asked incredulously, half-question and half-scoff.

The pirate chuckled gaily. It sounded like a gesture of amusement and curiosity; Martius considered it cruel and inquisitorial. "You heard right," the elf said. "Let us play a little game. I will give you three chances to prove you deserve to walk away, to argue why I should grant you freedom. If you give me one valid, factual reason to do so, you walk."

Martius scoffed indignantly, "Why? How dare you ask why! And how dare you steal from a Vigilant of Stendarr! Have you no shame in robbing the needy?"

"I prefer the term 'repossessed.'" The Altmer wore an arresting smile, a smile that implied he knew more than Martius about the current situation. "Neither you nor the 'needy' rightfully owned the loot found on your ship."

"But we did!" Martius wailed, baffled and uneasy by the accusation. "You're the one who is a thief, here!"

The elven pirate's shark-like visage grew stern, and Martius swore it possessed a bloodthirsty tension. "Did you produce the loot?"

"Well no. Businessmen did that, but they had a debt to pay to society, as part of their agreement with the Countess and the Empire. What should that matter?"

"Did they choose to give you the loot?"

Martius laughed, the sound scathing and vulgar. "Hah! Wouldn't we all love it if they would just pay their dues, but they're too greedy and selfish to give back to their fellow man. Their debt had to be paid in other ways. . . ."

"What 'other ways?'" The pirate's stern face grew harder.

"As you may know, the Emperor and his House of Nobles are charged with ensuring everyone under their custody is well cared for, and—"

"Explain these other ways?" The elf repeated with the same tone as before, though it possessed a hint of impatience.

"Well, the Emperor and his vassals—the Nobility, I mean—they anticipated this kind of mean-spiritedness that would prevent their divinely-ordained mission, so they allowed for these businessmen to overcome their short-sighted self-interest and pay their duties by means of shared responsibility tithes. It would be easier for them to see to everyone's needs if everyone was voluntarily compelled to share some of the responsibility of caring for their neighbors—"

"So you forced them?"

"Well not me personally, but—"

"That sounds like theft to me," the pirate smiled his smile of knowing, the smile that continued to send shivers down Martius's spine. "You now have two chances left to justify why I should reward your thievery."

"Reward my—" Martius shook his head, quickly feeling the ache of disappointment throb in his forehead, draining his temper away. "Bah! There's no thievery going on among the agents of Stendarr. It's those antisocial businessmen who always try to shirk their duties to the Empire that want to exploit the poor and downtrodden!"

"How?"

"How? How? You dare to ask me how! Why, it should be self-evident that the unholy disciples of Zenithar shouldn't have more than anyone else! Its unfair to the point of thievery—"

"What valid standard condemns production as stealing, but glorifies your theft as moral?"

"Are you insane? The people of Morrowind are in need—"

"What need?"

The question slapped Martius in the face with its hand of bafflement. "What? Why, where to start. They have no treasury there, no food, no love! They have nothing—nothing!—and yet the robber barons of Leyawiin have vulgar mountains of gold, jewels, and produce to feed themselves and then some. Such inequality is intolerable, unfair, and—"

"What makes your pity a justification of your theft? What makes it unfair for one to keep what one makes but fair for you to take it by larceny?"

"You gods-damned, evil daedra in the flesh! How dare you accuse me of larceny! How dare you accuse me of anything with your thinking, with your questions! Can't you feel? Have you no heart at all? Have you no pity for the poor, needy Dunmer of Morrowind? Have—"

"No," the pirate said. His words possessed no explicitly hostile tone, but the simple and matter-of-fact way he said them gave his statement the air of a caustic interjection, an interruption that indicted Martius as the worst of criminals. "You now have one chance left; why should I forgive your theft and let you go?"

Martius lunged at the pirate, his face contorted in hate. "Shut up! You know nothing! How dare you use your petty logic against me! How dare you look down upon me with your 'values' and your precious 'principles'! Why, if I weren't restrained right now, I would make you set aside your antisocial brain. I would make you see what I see. I would break you and every one of your Zenithar-loving bretheren-in-the-spirit. By Stendarr, I would make every one of you scream. I want—"

But it was Martius who screamed. It was the sudden, ear-splitting scream of a banshee, as though he had seen the worst of horrors, though his eyes seemed empty and without sight, as if staring at a void. In an instant, all of the barriers of emotion, of evasion, of pretense, of non-thinking, of pseudo-logic that he had erected to protect himself from the reality he wished never to see imploded. The fallout left only a crystal clear vision into the inconvenient truth Martius did not want to see, the truth that knew the exact nature of the crime and was not averse to naming it aloud for him to hear. It was an indictment not just of Martius's actions but of his very being.

It was not words that assaulted his consciousness but a potent, all-encompassing emotion that he could not dispel: despair. Unable to re-summon that protective fog of emotional self-delusion he had relied on for his entire life, he was now forced to look past the unobscured doors into his deepest memories that swung wide open. Behind each door, he was seeing his true essence revealed. He saw the face of his father as he reveled in the pure joy of his business, and felt a metaphysical punch to his stomach when he saw the truth of his hatred toward it. He saw the defiant eyes of the priestess of Zenithar as she valiantly defended her god from his and Countess Maro's cannibalistic altar. The undiluted rage that marked his reaction toward her groped at his innards most violently, forcing them through his throat. And then he saw the epitome of his nature made manifest: the mangled mess of dead hair sucking the life out of the vivacious yellow barrette his sister loved to wear since she was a young child. That image ejected the bile from his throat, throwing away all of the evasive pretenses and pseudo-justifications for his resentment. In their place, he saw his true nature, something worse than death itself.

"No. . . ." he moaned hollowly, staring into that miasma of visual indictments, trying in vain to shake it away. "No. . . . No, it cannot be. . . ."

He finally saw it, the second part to the priestess's hex. He finally found himself staring directly into its hollow eye sockets, the deathly skull smiling sardonically back at him. Though only blackness remained in those sockets, he could feel low burning orbs burrowing into his soul, examining the beacon of disquiet that now shone brilliantly with terror with the morbid interest of a serious necromancer. In a flash, he felt the miserable stab of damnation throb through his chest, chilling his spine to the bone.

The pirate leaned in, the crystalline sheen of knowing in his orange-gold shark eyes even more frightening alongside the revelation. They watched Martius's self-destruction with indifferent objectivity. It was as if a physical property of nature demonstrated itself before him, an impersonal, matter-of-fact experiment playing out before him.

"Yes," the pirate whispered, his knowing eyes coloring his voice with a certain menace directed toward the Imperial's true nature. "You see it now. You want not to reap the benefits of life but to take them from others. You want not to build your own happiness and self-worth but to infect others with your misery and self-loathing. You want not to pull yourself up but to drag your betters down. You are a parasite, like the Julianos-forsaken Emperor you serve. You have sold out."

"No!" Martius wailed, tears shooting violently from his eyes as the wolfish Bosmer from the attack on the Charity of Stendarr entered the room, two Altmer in tow. "No! I cannot believe it. I refuse to believe it. I want out! Let me—"

"Too late." The elf said, a shark-like bloodthirstiness now pervading his smile.

The trio of corsairs began to grab at Martius, their hands trying valiantly to find purchase as he thrashed about. Try as he might, his bindings prevented any means of escape.

"No! You promised to let me go! I order you to let me go!"

"Order?" The elf replied, standing upright to his full height. Though a blood red longcoat hang over his rectangular build, Martius could see the potent masculinity radiating and twitching before him. Underneath a dark blue leather undershirt and black armored trousers, square muscles tensed and flowed into one another to form a powerful figure more befitting an orc than a high elf. The tension vibrated ferociously around him, as if he were in a state of constant, perpetual motion despite being at rest, as if the slightest stimulus could provoke an inhuman violence. And now, such a stimulus was introduced; Martius's words, his evasion, did provoke what he thought was an inhuman violence from the elf.

"I am Wynandil, captain of the Sabre of Dusk," he said with a low, dangerous growl, his eyes narrowed and lips turned in disgust, as if pronouncing the ultimate judgment upon a criminal. "And I never, ever take orders on my ship." He turned toward the trio of other pirates restraining the Imperial with all of their might, his verdict a hard-hitting conviction. "Take him away."