"Why are you asking about Oblivion?"
Her voice is so beautiful, more delicate than I had anticipated. My hands twitch nervously in my lap, my paper and quill set aside out of respect. It's almost silly, how this young wisp of a woman could set my hands to trembling out of excitement and fear. I am an Argonian, scales impenetrable to arrow and blade, brave to the edge of death and beyond. It is in my blood to be courageous, yet this bedridden child before me--not the frozen chill of Cloudruler Temple--makes my reptilian body shake from my horns to my toes.
"The B—" I have to stop and swallow, containing my quivering voice. "The Black Horse Courier, greatest news carrier in all of Tamriel, it needs your story," I pause, wondering how to address her. "My lady," the term is too weak, too simple to fit the deeds she has done.
Her eyes sharpen. How intense she is! She can't be much more than seventeen winters, but she resonates with the aura of a much older, much more mature woman. I shrink, wondering if I've misspoken as her shoulders tense with distrust. She waits for a long time to speak, the large snowflakes that drift outside the window casting faint shadows on the sill. The fire cracks loudly, a log splitting on the grate, and she relaxes with a shiver.
"Tamriel has seen enough of this evil," she sighs, sinking back onto the pillows that prop up her body. I can see her chest rising and falling under the cream-colored nightgown, her breath deep and contemplative. A slight frown fills her pretty face, and I wonder if she is battling internally with some painful memory.
"Stoke the fire," she murmurs, and I leap to obey. I feel clumsy under her stare, prodding the flames and groping for another branch to feed them with. I hesitate, glancing back at her for approval, but she is staring at the bleak sky beyond the shutters. For a moment her hardened exterior falls away, and I can see the shards of a once innocent young girl peering through her steely blue eyes. She seems wilted, tired, and damaged beyond repair: a burdened girl with little strength left. The wood is forgotten in my hands as my curiosity resurrects itself. She is the reason I traveled all this way! I couldn't leave without knowing what she had to say, without understanding how she could have been reduced to this. I couldn't be dismissed until I knew more about the hero of Tamriel.
"My lady—" I begin, but her whisper interrupts me.
"Elija," she says. I blink, my words stuck to the roof of my mouth. She rubs the hem of her quilt between her thumb and forefinger, "My name is Elija. Just call me that."
"Elija," the word is foreign and difficult on my forked tongue. "Elija," it's easier the second time, and she nods without looking at me. "It's a pretty name, a strong name."
"He named me that," her lips twitch with a wistful, fond smile. "Before he departed, he gave me that one gift. I remembered my old name before the last gate closed, but it means nothing to me now."
"Who is 'he'? And what do you mean by 'remembered'?" I ask, hungry for answers. "Where did he depart to?"
She intensifies again, expression souring as an old fire inside her rekindles. She seems angry with herself for slipping, but I am too victorious to be daunted. I managed to wiggle my fingers into a chink in her shell, and I'm not about to pull them out again. We stare at each other, but I can sense that her will for me to back down is half-hearted. She needs to talk about it. She needs to release it in order to heal, both the external and internal wounds.
It seems like hours before she finally gives in, rubbing her eyes and jerking her elbow at the chair I had pulled up beside her bed.
"Sit," she commands. "Listen if you must. I'm not going to stop once I start, and it's a long tale," she drops her hands onto the blankets, eyeing me with a snide grin. "Put that in the fire. You can't hold it forever."
I stare at the log in my arms confusion. It had escaped me entirely that I had picked it up, but I pretend not to be disturbed by the fact as I shove it hurriedly into the fire. I situate myself as she traces lines down the pattern of the quilt, preparing her memory and her heart.
"It was cold in my cell on the day that the Emperor Uriel Septim died," she says. "The sky outside was gray and dark, just like this one. It wasn't raining, but it should have been. I think the gods were crying. I know that I was."
With those words, her shell shatters completely. I find myself staring into the expanse of her sorrow as the beginning unfolds before me, and the story envelops my attention and my imagination.
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Imperial prisons are like gray tombs. They're made of horrible stones that are all the same strange color, not quite white but not really black. You could turn round and round inside a room made of these stones and forget where exactly you started, because there's not really any way to tell the difference between them. They've been known to drive their prisoners to madness, but I found them comforting. The blankness of my cell was a mirror of my memories.
I say that the cell was blank, but that's not entirely true. The monotony of the walls was broken by a pitiful window that was high above my head even when I was standing on my toes, a low table with cracked dishes on it, and a bench set into the stone that was supposed to be my bed. And there was, of course, the bars that lined the door, giving the guard a clear view of me and giving me a clear view of the cell across from my own. It was occupied by a dark elf who had fallen victim to the madness of imprisonment. His unprovoked laughter disturbed me often in the dead of the night, when the only other sound was the lake lapping at the edges of the shore not fifteen feet from the prison walls. Sometimes he would call to me, giggling about how the lake would rise one day and fill the cells, and I would be the first to drown.
In fact, he was the first thing I saw when I woke in the damp cold, sore and shivering. My eyes fluttered open, vision blurred and tipping endlessly to the right. I blinked uncertainly, confused as to whether or not I was dreaming, and why my head and neck hurt so badly. As my gaze drifted slowly across the hallway, I gasped sharply. Crimson eyes gazed hungrily through the bars, peering at me as if he would devour me with a stare. He was crouched like an animal so that he would be at my level, grinning madly and clutching the iron till his knuckles turned white. I screamed and scrambled away as a guard slammed hilt of his sword against the elf's door.
"Stop that, you!" he hissed as the elf scampered back like a spider. "Get back. You stay back there, now, you hear me?" Red Eyes glowered at him from the darkness, out of the reach of the torchlight. The guard scowled and turned to me.
"You alright?" he asked pleasantly enough, pity in his gaze as I pressed my back to the wall. "He can't hurt you over there. Just keep away from the door when I'm not around and you'll be fine."
"W-where am I? What's going on?" I stammered, teeth chattering in the chill.
The guard made a clucking noise and shushed me softly, "You're in the Imperial prison, little girl."
"Why?" I dug my fingernails into the chinks in the stone as if I would scale the wall backwards. "What did I do wrong?"
"You would know that," he quirked his nearly bald head, rubbing the fuzz atop it curiously. "Don't you?"
I closed my eyes with a shudder and shook my head.
"Can't you remember?"
Another weary shake of my head answered his question and he frowned deeply with concern. He thought for a while as I struggled to reach into my mind, grasping at bits of nothing. My bare toes clung to the slick floor as I lowered myself to the ground with a moan.
"You were out cold when they brought you in," the guard offered. I shrugged weakly, unable to recall why. "What's your name?"
"I don't know," my voice squeaked tensely, my throat tight with distress.
"That's a pity," the guard nodded solemnly. I succumbed to the wailing sob that had stuck in my chest. The tears stopped only when I fell asleep, the guard hushing me from the other side of the cold iron bars.
I slept fitfully until dawn and watched the black sky turn to gray outside my window. Fog rose off the lake as the sun made its appearance somewhere on the invisible horizon, the moisture hanging in the air like a wayward ghost. Feeling a little better, I tried to climb the wall to see outside while the guard slept, but my limbs were too cold and the air was too wet for me to get very high. The sound of birds playing in the water that I couldn't see was infuriating.
I woke the guard, who snored in the chair beside my door, with a light poke to the shoulder and told him of my frustration. He broke into guffaws of laughter, reaching through the bars to ruffle my matted hair.
"You're an odd one," he chuckled. "Don't you realize that you're in prison? You're not supposed to see outside."
"I'm innocent," I huffed. I marveled inwardly at how readily the words came to me.
"You don't even know what you've been accused of, little one," he laughed. I folded my arms crossly and stuck out my lower lip.
"I didn't do it," I maintained. By now he was laughing so hard that his eyes spilled tears.
That guard came to be my friend while I was kept in that cell. I learned that his name was Arston, and that he had been a solider once before his leg had been injured.
"But I can still come after you if you try to run away," he warned me.
"Where would I run to?" I countered, which left him looking a little perplexed.
"Anywhere but here, little one," he patted my head. "Anywhere but here."
I told him that he was all that I knew, which made him smile at me sadly. He didn't speak for a long time.
"You remind me of a girl I knew once," he said one day. I stopped pushing bits of straw around my cell to listen.
"What was her name?" I asked.
"Meredith," he answered. "She had hair like yours, red like fire and blood."
I must have been smiling, because he smiled back. "She was pretty like you, too," he continued.
"I don't like the name Meredith," I told him, and he just grinned sheepishly. "Was she your wife?"
"No, my wife's youngest sister," he replied. "My wife had golden hair and lovely green eyes."
"What was her name?" I asked, scooting over towards the door.
"Elizabeth," he let out a sad breath. "She died from an illness after my son was born."
"You have a son?" I pressed, eyes wide with amazement. "Is he alive?"
"Somewhere," Arston shrugged. "He'd be a few years older than you, though."
"Don't you ever leave here to see him?" I tilted my head curiously.
"I'm just as much a prisoner here as you are, little one," he smiled sadly. "I can't leave my post, not to find my son or to visit my wife's grave. I haven't heard from him in nearly three years."
"I'm sorry," I patted his shoulder hesitantly.
"Don't be sorry for me, little one," he said, shaking his head. "You're the one that should be getting pity. You're barely a woman and you're stuck here."
"We're stuck together," I said. I think I was trying to comfort him as much as I was trying to comfort myself.