"Good job, men," the Legate declares, walking toward the main gate of Fort Dunstad, "Let's bring back some mead and celebrate."
"Serves the rabble right!" another Legionare agrees, to general cheers from the crowd. If everyone hadn't been wearing red armor before, it would be red now anyway. The ground is red. The walls are red.
The Dragonborn's hands are red.
"'Ey, Quaestor, you comin'?" one of the low-ranking soldiers asks, watching his subordinates carry off the bodies wearing armor identical to his. "We ain't got much to clean up here. Stormcloaks never knew what hit 'em!" He laughs and motions for the gate.
"Yeah, I'm… I'm coming," the Dragonborn answers, shooing him along. "Don't wait for me, I have some stuff I have to do."
The soldier laughs, but keeps walking. "You gonna dig for some gold? I guess times are tough, even for the fighters! You take what you can. I'll buy you a round later." He waves over his shoulder and leaves.
The Quaestor stands in the middle of a battlefield, surrounded by bodies, and so very, very alone.
She starts for the one nearest her, stepping over discarded weapons and shields along the way. Standing over the body, she knows nothing about it but the blue fabric it wears, and even that's been tarnished by the sticky red coating its back. Behind her, the subordinates take a break from collecting bodies to try and calm down an errant horse. The animal runs back and forth along the walls of the fort, whinnying its dismay at the sight of its old owners now reduced to nondescript corpses.
The Dragonborn uses one toe, covered in steel, to roll over the body in front of her. Once it's on its back, she can tell that it belonged to a man. Looking around, but not really caring if she's being watched, she kneels down and pulls the helmet from his head.
It slides off easily, allowing blonde hair to spill out. Green eyes stare up at her, through her, lost in a battle that ended only minutes ago. He's a Nord. He was a Nord. Of course he was a Nord; he's wearing Stormcloak colors. He's also wearing Imperial colors, but those can be blamed on the short wounds peppering his torso.
She remembers seeing an Imperial with a dagger. She wonders if the same boy was responsible, and shivers.
Those green eyes were at one time full of life, she tells herself once before closing them. She tosses the helmet aside, but it only hits another body some ten feet away. Picking herself up, the Quaestor follows the helmet to another corpse and kneels beside it. Before she even removes the helmet, she knows it's a woman.
Another fair-haired, battle-hardened face is turned toward the sky, this time with her eyes closed and mouth open. The Dragonborn closes the body's lips and brushes the hair from its blood-encrusted face. She could almost be the sister of the first body, but of course all Nords look the same. The helmet clatters to the dirt.
As the woman walks to the next body, the same agitated horse canters by, nearly clipping her side but turning at the last second. Low-ranking soldiers chase after it, trying to get it under rein.
This next body is a young boy with no hair at all, but she can tell he's a Nord by the half-lidded blue eyes turned toward the sky. His hand is still closed around a sword, and she pries it from his grasp to toss it, along with the helmet, far away from his body.
Every body tells the same story, with only minor differences. She holds onto these differences tightly, remembering each one in comforting, yet horrific detail. This girl has a kerchief tied around her neck; this boy has paint across his face; this woman is wearing a gold locket. This man has his hand wedged behind the breastplate of his armor… when the Dragonborn finally manages to extract it, she finds it clutching, even in death, a woman's handbag. She doesn't disturb it.
Every detail is a clue of who these people once were.
She doesn't rest until none of them are holding a weapon.
She doesn't rest until she's seen the face of every person they've killed.
By the time she's removed every Stormcloak helmet in the fort, the other Imperials are long gone, along with the sun. She treks back to their camp in the dark, following the sounds of hooting and shouting. When she gets there, the celebration's already in full-swing, and most of the mead is gone.
A drunken Sergeant stumbles up and offers her a cut of beef, sloshing the freshly-opened bottle of alcohol in his hand. She declines, and ends up having to push her way past him and through the crowd to make it to the hitching posts on the outskirts of the celebration. Here, the bonfire light has to be assisted by lanterns.
She steps into place next to a pair of guards chatting with each other, each nursing a bottle. They both turn to her, subtly hiding the mead behind their backs. Trying to be conversational, one of them asks, "Why aren't you at the party?" but winces at the accusatory tone he takes on.
"Did you capture that horse that created such a problem after the raid?" she asks, keeping her voice even with all the authority a Quaestor should have.
"Yes ma'am, it's only just calmed down some. We had to tie it away from our horses because it made such a ruckus."
"May I take it off your hands?"
The guards look at each other, before shrugging and deciding they have neither the authority nor the motivation to question the request. "Sure, it's been nothing but trouble so far. Be careful though, it took three of us to get it tied down."
She nods and follows his directions to the farthest hitching post, well away from the other horses. There she sees the Stormcloak steed tied tightly to the post, face cast into an eerie shadow by the lantern. Its eyes flick over her as she approaches, and its ears bolt upright like small towers on its head.
She steps over a puddle—it's kicked a hole in the bottom of its watering trough—and stops just outside an arm's reach from it. The horse, exhausted from a day of running from the soldiers, perceives her as no threat and only knickers at her.
Keeping the animal calm, she undoes the lead rope—done much too closely—from the post, and begins leading the horse away from the camp. She'll have to take the long way around, but she doesn't mind. Neither does the horse.
The Dragonborn steps, along with the steed, back into Fort Dunstad. The scene is still as gory as before, but it's no longer lit by the edgy tones of dusk. Instead, the pale glow of the night turns the blood into dark pools, and pale Nordic skin into the shade of gray the Stormcloaks have always despised.
The horse stops tugging on the rope, once they enter the gate. It knows it's home.
The Dragonborn unhooks the lead rope, allowing the horse to pick its own way through the gore. Ignoring it for a moment, she finds a pile of helmets she made earlier. She selects one that's not too covered in blood, and attempts to polish its surface with one of her hands. She only smudges the dirt.
Taking her own steel helmet from her head, she slides the Stormcloak helmet into is place.
The edges of her vision are blocked by the metal, but other than that the night hasn't changed. This is the world through Stormcloak eyes, she tells herself, this is the last thing my enemies ever saw.
It looks no different than what she sees through an Imperial helmet.
When she turns, the horse is staring at her again, its ears twin lightning rods and its nostrils flared. They stare each other down for a few moments.
She crosses to the horse, slowly, watching it twitch in recognition. "I look the same as they do, don't I?" she asks. It snorts at her. "This helmet makes them all look the same, right?"
She slides it off her head again and turns it over in her hands, gazing into the empty eye holes. "Even you don't see them as people. We all just see helmets," she comments. The horse doesn't move.
"You wouldn't know the difference, whether I supported the rebellion or the empire. You wouldn't care if I praised the High King or Ulfric Stormcloak. All you see is this." She holds out the helmet to the horse, who nervously sniffs it.
They look at each other for a long pause.
"Too many people do."
Placing the helmet on the ground, the Quaestor walks back over to a body; this one is the girl with the kerchief. She glances back at the helmet, which the horse is now sniffing, and then back to the corpse. She can imagine those closed eyes through the eye holes again, but she can't turn the face back into a helmet in her mind. The girl with the kerchief is a person.
The Dragonborn strides suddenly back to the place where she dropped the helmet. She yanks it away from under the horse's nose, and hurls it with all her strength at the nearest wall. The sound of it crashing reverberates through the fort, causing the horse to start and rear. It takes off, but only runs to the opposite wall. Where else would it go? This place, with the steeple-crowned helmets, is its home.
The only other living thing at the fort points madly at the now-dented helmet, which bounced back to only a few feet away. "I will not let that be the last thing seen of these people!" She pivots, now facing the horse and shouting at it. "They can't be known, after all, as Stormcloaks!"
As a final act of proof, she finds where she dropped her steel helmet, and kicks it back through the doors of the fort. As the expensive metal rolls and bounces away, she feels lighter.
The horse is right behind her suddenly, sniffing her hair. She reattaches the lead rope to it without any protest. "When I die," she tells it with finality, "people will see my face."
The horse sniffs at her face as though it's never seen one before.