Hello there, and welcome to the new and improved version of The Gods Must Be Crazy! Long story short, I ended up looking through this and realizing it could be a lot better than its original version, and I wanted to make that happen. Also, this is my way of beating myself into writing in first person POV, because I need to get into that habit for my original stuff. For those of you who read the first version of this, welcome back! The major plot points here will be staying the same, but a lot of parts are going to be heavily revised and, in some cases, expanded, because I ended up skipping over a few things I'd initially wanted to include in this fic's first draft, so if you're interested, I hope reading this again shouldn't be too boring. Also, thank you to everyone who reviewed/favorited/put this thing on your alert list in its first incarnation; this thing never would have gotten finished without you! And happy third birthday to this fanfic itself. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this chapter, and I would love to hear any and all feedback you may have for me, whether it be questions, praise, criticism, or anything one could feasibly fit into the review box. Or a PM, if that's what floats your boat. It's always nice to hear from people! If nothing else, it makes it feel like my writing isn't just me talking to myself.
Disclaimer: All I own here is my own personal version of the Hero of Kvatch. If that changes, I promise you'll be the first to know.
After a few weeks in a cell with no one for company but another Dunmer across the hall, who'd lost interest in me after realizing I wasn't a woman, my stay in the Imperial City Prison started to get to me. It wasn't that I'd never been arrested before – what I did for a living at the time wasn't exactly legal – but it was the first time I'd been arrested for anything serious. It was also the first time I was in prison for something I hadn't actually done. Or at least, I hadn't done what I'd been officially charged with. I'd done plenty of things I wasn't proud of, but as far as I knew, murder and necrophilia were definitely not on that list. And I like to think that if I'd murdered nine people and had my way with each of their corpses in a single night, I'd have remembered it. Still, the thought of spending the rest of my life in prison for it without so much as a trial almost made me wish I had. Almost.
I sighed, and flopped down on the slightly damp, straw-covered stone shelf that was my bed. A trial wouldn't have made a difference, really. Whether I got a chance to explain myself or not, even I wasn't sure exactly what happened. One moment I was wandering the Waterfront, looking for work, and the next thing I knew I was naked in a bed full of corpses with a splitting headache and a guard yelling at me. My best guess was that whoever killed everyone else had wanted me dead, too, but didn't finish the job for some reason. Not that I thought anyone would believe me. I just wanted a chance to say it before someone important remembered where I was and got around to having me executed. If that's actually what they had planned for me. All I had to go on was one conversation with my fellow prisoner, and he probably wasn't a reliable source of news.
That thought wasn't much of a comfort, and I ended up lying awake longer than I probably should have thinking of all the possible messy ends that might have been planned for me. I must have fallen asleep at some point, though, because I woke up to someone making noise in the hallway outside my cell. I tried to ignore it at first, but it kept getting closer, which made it hard to keep hoping they weren't there for me. Soon I could make out bits and pieces of what they were saying, something about someone being killed and a cell that shouldn't have had a prisoner in it. I realized that that last bit probably applied to me when a fluffy-robed man surrounded by guards unlocked my door and entered my cell.
I didn't have the first idea what someone like that would want from me, but if this was going to be my execution, I hoped they'd at least make it quick and clean. I stood as the man in the fancy robes approached me, and tried to finger-comb my hair into something more presentable than the rat's nest it had knotted itself into in my weeks without a mirror. I figured the least I could do for myself was make sure I didn't look like a mess when they dragged my body away.
But instead of ordering his guards to kill me, or doing it himself, he just said, "I've seen you... Let me see your face," and put his hand on my cheek. After staring into my eyes like he was looking for something important for what felt like an eternity, he nodded to himself. "Yes... You are the one from my dreams..."
"Who are you? And what's going on here?" I asked, backing myself into a corner. I didn't particularly like the way he was looking at me, and I liked the fact that I'd apparently been in his dreams even less. No one whose dreams involved a Dunmer of my description could be entirely sane, and being trapped in a cell with a madman and his armed guards was never a good thing.
"I am your emperor, Uriel Septim. My sons have been assassinated, and I am next. I am being escorted out of the city via a secret escape route that leads through your cell," he explained, like it was the most normal thing in the world.
It took a while to get my tongue working again, but I managed it somehow. "I'm Remy... And I am, or at least I was, working as a prostitute in this lovely city of yours until I got locked in here." In retrospect, it was not the best way to introduce myself, and I'd gone and said it to the emperor, of all people. Still, at least it was better than saying what I was actually imprisoned for. That really would have been awkward. And at least spending the rest of my life in prison meant no one had to know how far I'd stuffed my foot into my mouth. Maybe my luck was finally taking a turn for the better.
"Perhaps the gods have placed you here so that we may meet. As for what you have done... it does not matter. That is not what you will be remembered for."
"If you say so..." I replied, wishing I had half as much faith in myself as the emperor did. "What do I do now?"
"You will find your own path. Take care... there will be blood and death before he end."
Before I could ask what any of that meant, the emperor's guards opened a passageway hidden behind one of my cell's walls and guided him down the dark hallway it led to. I just stared at the new hole in my wall for a while after that, trying to decide whether I wanted to follow him or not. If I was even supposed to follow him. I didn't think that whatever was on the other side of that hole could be any worse than staying in my cell, though, so I headed down the passage before someone decided to check on me and move me to a cell without a hole in it.
I caught up with the emperor and his guards at around the same time as a group of assassins did. I was fairly handy with a dagger, but it didn't look like I'd be a match for any of them, and I didn't have anything to use as a weapon if I did join the fight, so I stayed out of the room until it was over. One of the emperor's guards ended up dying, and the rest of the group left me with her corpse after locking the only way out behind them. I assumed that was the end of my escape attempt until a pair of rats decided to smash a hole in a wall just as I'd made up my mind to go back to my cell. I managed to fight them off with the dead guard's shortsword without getting bitten too many times, then decided to at least take a look at the hole they'd come out of before resigning myself to spending the rest of my life in prison.
Somehow, after fighting my way through a small army of rats and goblins, I ended up in the same chamber as the emperor and his guards again. They'd just finished fighting off another group of assassins, and the moment one caught sight of me he had me shoved up against a wall with a sword at my neck before I could so much as say 'hello'. Clearly, he didn't care nearly as much for me as his master did.
"How did he manage to find us again?" the other guard asked, looking like he was just as surprised at my luck as I was. "Kill him, he might be working with the assassins."
"W-wait a moment, there!" I stammered, "Can't we talk this over? I mean look at me, I couldn't possibly be with them! I don't have the shiny weapons and armor, I'm half-starved, and I practically glow in the dark. What use would they have for me?"
The guard holding me just snorted, but before he could carry out his friend's order the emperor took a step forward.
"You are not to kill him," he said. "He can help us. He must help us."
"As you wish, sire," the guard replied, glaring at me as he lowered his blade.
As soon as he let go of me, I was at the emperor's side. I didn't want to be any closer to his guards than I had to. Granted, I had no idea what sort of 'help' I could offer, or how safe providing that help would be, but I didn't have any better plans.
"They cannot understand why I trust you. They've not seen what I've seen. How can I explain? Listen. You know the Nine? How they guide our fates with an invisible hand?" the emperor asked.
"I'm not on good terms with the gods..." I replied. Or at least, I didn't think I was. If the Nine liked me, I doubted I would have ended up in that prison cell in the first place. Though I didn't see what my thoughts on religion had to do with anything. I wondered if the emperor was always so strange, or if his mind had just cracked due to all the assassination attempts. I'd have believed either one, really.
"I've served the Nine all my days, and I chart my course by the cycles of the heavens. The skies are marked with numberless sparks, each a fire, and every one a sign. The signs I read show the end of my path. My death, a necessary end, will come when it will come."
"Aren't you afraid to die?" I asked. The emperor seemed strangely calm about everything he'd gone through that night, and to be honest, it was a bit unsettling. Not fearing death was one thing, but accepting it so easily was something else entirely. I almost wished he'd cry, or scream, or do something to show he didn't want to accept his destiny without a fight. It would've made him seem more... human.
"I have lived well, and my ghost shall rest easy. In your face, I behold the sun's companion. The dawn of Akatosh's bright glory may banish the coming darkness. With such hope, and with the promise of your aid, my heart must be satisfied." The emperor smiled, patted my shoulder, and followed his guards down another dark tunnel. Much as I wanted him to give me a real explanation of what was going on, and what part I was supposed to play in it, I realized that I wasn't likely to get anything else out of him.
"Where are we going?" I asked, following as closely behind the emperor as I could without stepping on his robes. I wasn't about to get left behind again if I could avoid it.
"I go to my grave. A tongue shriller than all the music calls me. You shall follow me yet for a while, then we must part."
I just sighed and followed the emperor and his guards through their escape route. We fought off so many assassins I lost count along the way, until we found an excessively large group of them blocking the exit. I got shoved into a side room with the emperor, with orders to guard him with my life, while the guards tried to fight through them. How I was supposed to guard him against people far better trained and equipped than I was was beyond me, but I didn't have much choice in the matter. At least the room we were in looked relatively assassin-proof.
"I can go no further," the emperor said, startling me out of my thoughts. "You alone must stand against the Prince of Destruction and his mortal servants. He must not have the Amulet of Kings! Take the Amulet. Give it to Jauffre. He alone knows where to find my last son. Find him, and close shut the jaws of Oblivion."
"Your amulet? This is... the part where you die, then?"
He smiled and nodded. "This is where my journey ends. For you though, the road is long and dangerous. Now, give me your hand."
I did as he asked, and as soon as soon as he'd pressed his amulet into my hand, one of the room's walls slid out of place and an assassin stabbed a knife into his back. I gave him a matching wound in his throat while he was distracted by the emperor's death, just to make things fair. If the feeling of his blood bubbling out over my hand and the little gurgling sound he made as he fell to the floor felt more satisfying than they should have, I didn't think anything of it at the time.
When the fighting died down in the other room, only one guard was left. However he felt about me not saving the emperor, he told me where I could find the Jauffre person I was supposed to deliver the Amulet of Kings to, then gave me his torch to light my way out while he stayed behind to guard the emperor's corpse.
Once I'd seen what the rest of my way out looked like, I wished he'd kept the torch. It didn't do much to light my way, but it did give me a wonderful view of the exact contents of the Imperial City's sewer system. I was almost happy when it went out after I slipped and fell into a pile of goop I was probably better off not identifying. There are some things mortals were never meant to know, and making the rest of that journey in darkness saved me from learning them.
The sewer tunnels eventually brought me to the shore of Lake Rumare, and I didn't waste any time before getting into the water and washing the sewer filth off myself. After a bit of scrubbing, I got myself to look as normal as I ever did, grinning to myself as my hair returned to its usual shade of pink from the greenish-black mess it turned into after my fall in the sewers. From there, it wasn't hard to find my way to my cozy little shack on the Waterfront. I didn't stay long; just long enough to find myself a clean set of clothing, a belt to strap my shortsword to, and a scrap of cloth to tie my hair back with. Strange as he was, the emperor was the reason I was free and alive, and I wasn't about to dishonor his memory by refusing to grant his dying wish. After all, he'd just wanted me to walk to Chorrol and deliver an amulet. How hard could that possibly be?
