A/N: Now, usually I would place this note on the bottom of the story, but I figured it would do to warn you guys that since this takes place in Skyrim, where love is hard to come by and war is raging on, I'm not going to be afraid to place a guy with a guy or a girl with a girl. In Skyrim, 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' love isn't all that different from each other, which by the way, if you don't think that way in real life, please don't read this story or any of my stories for the matter. Enjoy.
Prologue: The New Life
I held certain memories close to me, reliving them nearly every moment to ensure my mind wouldn't stray off and forget the only thoughts of happiness I had in my life. I was a criminal, but I was never a killer. I stole none from the poor, instead doing hard labor for the old and refusing payment. But, I had no qualms of stealing from the rich, sneaking into their houses, snatching anything of value, doing simple tasks and demanding a high fee.
A simple child could never be a thief, I always heard.
But, I stole and I bribed, I lied to the guards, I persuaded a fearsome leader into giving me one of his abandoned shacks. At a young age, I was given the name Silver-Tongue. I never talked with anyone if necessary, preferring to keep my mouth shut in front of the poor.
In front of the rich, however, was a different story. I cried the roll of a homeless child well, tears and snot coming to me at the blink of the eye, and the heartless couldn't resist such a lonely child in front of their peers, reputation and all.
I lived a quite cozy life.
But, my mother was a different story.
She coughed and she laid in bed for days on end, she hacked out blood and she cried herself to sleep on more than one occasion when she thought I was asleep on my bed roll on the floor. It hurt to watch the energy slowly drain from the proud Nord, yet despite the pain she smiled in the mornings, hiding her grimaces and flinches as I made her tea, fed her food and changed her clothes. She was an elderly woman, weak and wise, beautiful and scarred, and in the truth of the matter, not even my real mother.
But, back when Papa was alive, she didn't have as much whites in her hair, she had a sparkle in her eye that made her look years younger than she really was. She found me when I was a mere infant, cuddled into a blanket with gaping holes and itching fabric by the lake near her tiny cottage home. She took me in, and when Papa came home from his fishing trip every year, imagine his surprise when he found his lover cuddled into a bed holding an infant in her frail arms.
He wasn't unhappy, as Mama always said. He was a stern father with my best interests held in his heart. He was also quite goofy, making remarks at the guards when they weren't within hearing distance, doing a dance when he thought the cows weren't looking. Grumpy, one of the cows which I had proudly named at age 3, didn't like any sudden movements. It drove her crazy whenever Papa did that, made her make a noise so unnatural in the back of her throat, bumping her head erratically against the old fence. But, Papa died when we were at the wrong place at the wrong time. He witnessed a murder, the assassin digging into the dead's pockets and he saw the whole thing. I did too.
I have never seen Papa so enraged and scared to his wits in my entire life. We tried running, but Papa was old and frail and we saw a guard across the way. However, our voices were stolen by the wind and terror coursing through our veins, our legs were shaking and we didn't even make it thirty feet from the criminal before he caught up to us. That's when the assassin tackled Papa and that's when I heard the scream to run. And I did, my legs pumping and adrenaline screaming at me to go faster.
I ran to the guard, dragging him back to where I saw Papa last. I was too late, though. His throat was slashed and the murderer was long gone.
Mama cried that night, and I watched with a stony face as the guard took off his helmet and looked at me with such pity that I just thunked onto the bed and closed my eyes for a few hours.
That's when things went downhill. Papa was always managing the store and poor Mama had no clue what to do. So, the business went down, and before we knew what was happening, we were bankrupt within a month. We lived on the streets, unable to go anywhere else for protection and sometimes, we were thrown out of the city.
That's when I took matters into my own hands, I was eight then but Papa always told me you were never too young or too old. So, I made a living for me and Mama. I stole, I lied, and I persuaded countless people. Mama asked me several times where I got the money, the small shack, or the furniture, but I lied. I said I worked for an over credited store owner, a milk drinker whose money was given to him by his parents. In Mama's mind, the man didn't know he was paying me too much for cleaning up his store, so she had a very good laugh at that one.
Years of living in the streets however, had given Mama a rare disease. On good days, she coughed and could eat one meal a day. But bad days are responsible for the hard lines on my face at such a young age. She couldn't handle the smallest bits of food, hacking up the food she hadn't ate, her body shaking and it wasn't abnormal for me to wake up in the middle of the night to find her sweating blood.
I slowly fell in love with those good days, cherishing them with all my might. I stopped my thieving on those rare days, spending countless hours sitting on a chair by Mama's bed. We joked, we laughed, and I smiled as I brushed a strand of pure white hair out of her eyes.
She told me many stories, holding my hand as she told the endless shenanigans of Papa, when he was younger and faster and could trick the guards into thinking there was a crime committed on the opposite side of town. She told of the times when I was innocent and small, back when I was an infant. She told me of how afraid Papa was afraid of an infant, fretting whenever I cried, unknowing what to do. She told me it took him four months before he gathered the courage to hold me in his arms.
When I was nine, though, Mama was weak and she couldn't even speak. So, I stayed home until the day she passed, holding her cold hand and smiling into her expressionless eyes. She passed with a small smile on her face, looking into my eyes for the first time in ages, and the only signal I had that she left was the small exhale before an unbreakable silence.
No one knows I cried, that I sniffled and sobbed like the child I was at the time. That I shook and stayed by her cold body for hours on end. There was no guards outside of the abandoned shack. No one saw a child digging a hole in the middle of the forest, no one saw a child dragging a dead body in the forest at the darkest hours of the night.
When Mama died, I stopped smiling, stopped the pretence of a homeless child, instead hiding in plain sight and sneaking into mansions filled with goods that could be sold to a suspecting figure in black. I burned the shack that winter, shivering in the cold and wearing only rags that could barely pass as clothes that hung off my body.
The only thing I took as a memoir, was the cheap silver rings both Mama and Papa wore. I hung it off a string I found on the road, placing it around my neck and hiding them both under my dirty shirt.
Soon, being a thief was second nature to me. I wore a green tunic with the softest of fabric and carried a small, ebony dagger on my person at all times. My name was well known, Alec Silver-Tongue. I sneered at anyone and everyone, I used sarcasm on all the guards and I was well liked among the poor and hated amongst the rich. I was filthy stinking rich, gold bouncing in the tiny purse strapped to my belt. I never carried more than 100 Septims, though. Any extra gold was dropped on the porches of the elderly, dropped unceremoniously in front of the homeless. All guards were torn between throwing me to jail for all my crimes to ignoring all of the stolen goods given to the poor.
It wasn't long before I met two strangers on the road. I was travelling to city to city, unknowing of where to go but not really caring in the least. We met each other on a four way road, and we all mutually stopped and stared at each other for a countless amount of time. They were around my age, hard eyes and a stiff posture as we all sized each other up. We all saw our bulging knapsacks filled with unmistakeable stolen goods, all saw the point of a sheathed dagger hidden in our leather boots. In a mutual silent agreement, all three went on the one road where none of us knew led to.
We lived in the forest, bed rolls surrounding a small fire and by sunrise we were on the road. I learned only their names, none of us willing to share stories of our previous lives. Brock was the muscle of the group, ready to beat anyone to a pulp if any of us were caught. Samuel was the strategist, planning the break ins and the emergency exits. And me, I was the infiltrator. I was short and skinny and barely noticeable that the job was handed to me almost immediately.
By a month, we all knew each others strengths and we all weren't shy of confessing our weakness'. Brock was well muscled, sure, but he sure as hell can't handle a small, fast boy as I fought against him one day. He was tall, but not stocky in the least. We joined our coin to buy him two one-handed swords, both Samuel and I helping him train in fighting with two swords at the same time, even when we had no idea what the hell we were doing. By two months time, it wasn't unusual to find him swinging the two swords in a lazy, wind mill like motion as we walked to an unknown destination. And by those two months time, his tongue was lashing in curses and grumbles of needing mead, unlike when we first met, a quiet boy with the feeling that he didn't need to speak. How I missed those days.
Samuel, however, was not made to fight close-combat. That's when we found out about magicka, and we all made our way to a scholars home whom we all knew was on a trip on the latest scandal to make, and we all dug into the books of destruction spells. Both me and Brock held a different book in our hands as we read the tips and warnings aloud to him, even going as far into the books as to scold him that he was handling his hands in an incorrect manner. We even tried to have Samuel fall into the restoration magic, but he couldn't quite grasp the knowledge. So, we stuck to fire spells, ice spells, and his most favourite was the lightning and spark spells. We all formed together to teach all of us a few conjuration spells, for when we were disarmed in battle. Brock had no magicka whatsoever, we found out.
In replacement, however, we tied leather strips around his wrists to the swords, forming ways so that it wouldn't come back to slash Brock in the back if it was ever to be thrown out of his hands, and making it so that he could easily slip his hands into it when the time was needed, but making it so it was hard to slide off. It was genius, all Samuels idea when we came up with the solution. I slapped them both on the back that day when Brock mastered it, sneering a sarcastic, rude remark with no trace of a smile. I cursed them, however, when all they did was laugh while other people would be slowly backing away.
And, last, was me. Alec Silver-Tongue, a name that both Samuel and Brock agreed was too long. But, I kept it, proud of how quickly my name spread across the country, of how natural I was at being the thief of the story. I needed extra training, because Brock can only defend me so much while he was outside the house and I was on the inside. And, although Samuel could cast a lightning spell to make a person drop to the ground convulsing, I needed to have training far gruelling for the days when I get caught. I could say Samuel was the one who thought up the plan, that Brock was keeping an eye out for guards and any weird behaviour among folk, but I couldn't ever betray them like that. So, I took up archery, falling in love with the feel of the wooden arch in my hands. I took up the swords that Brock quickly became proud of, but I didn't go any farther than that. I was fast and had extreme amounts of stamina, and I could easily outrun a horse (something that both Samuel and Brock did to me one day when I was being particularly smart mouthed, and as revenge, they set an unbroken horse onto me when we were travelling), so it was all I needed, if not more.
We made agreements, making promises to not stick our heads into our previous lives. We didn't try to comfort or laugh whenever one of us woke up screaming into the starry night, only shooting up from our bedrolls and quickly pressing our hands against the screaming boys mouth, one hand on our weapons as we stayed up an hour more so the coast was clear. Whenever one of us fucked up, however, it was no food for a week, and all our goods and gold stolen was taken and spread amongst the other two. There came in the need for perfection. If Brock was to accidentally let in the resident of the house we were stealing from, he was punished and starved for a week. If Samuel didn't think any of plans through properly, he was punished and starved for a week. If I were to alert any guards or anyone that I was sneaking in or out of the house, I was punished and starved for a week. A year after that, we were starved for two weeks, and we could only have a gulp of water once every two days.
Soon, after numerous clumsy attempts of working together to earn a living, we were in and out in an hour. As we left the town, our hands were wandering into people's pockets without their knowledge. We hid in the shadows for years, we made our homes in the forests, and our refugees were a certain point in the middle of Cyrodiil, if one of us were to get caught. After we all met at the refugee point, we walked as one of us starved.
When we all turned 18, we all made another agreement. Life in Cyrodiil was as boring as ever, the countless people we had met now nothing to us and the heists and jobs we assigned another were becoming pointless. So, we left all our goods buried in the ground near a unnoticeable lake, agreeing if we were ever to come back, we would have some gold and goods to sell. We all smirked at another as we talked of the war in the neighbouring country, only gold in our minds and rare gems in our eyes as we became excited more and more. One by one, we would make our home in Skyrim.
I was the first to leave for the new life.