Still Alive
[revised version]

Vivian was away from Whiterun the day it happened, on routine business, and I was left holding the fort in Breezehome, taking orders from occasional customers. She'd gone the previous day to Falkreath to tidy up something for the Jarl, who was, to be frank, a bumbling fool. Falkreath has had three or four incompetent Jarls in succession now, and if it weren't for the help of Vivian and a few other harried souls, it would be in a sorry state. Still, the people down there don't panic easily – you might even call them stolid – and so no matter what the emergency, there always seems to be time to set things right. I suppose that if your city is best known for its graveyard, you naturally incline towards moving slowly, staying calm, and taking the long view.

Back in Whiterun, it turned out to be a slow day, and most of the time I sat and read books about history. I thought I might have to write one of these some day, so I'd better get used to the conventions of the genre. Anyway, as I was trying to make sense of the muddled history of High Rock in early times, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it to fund a very small boy and his even smaller sister, who was hiding shyly behind her brother's back. They looked like Imperials, or perhaps Nords. The boy produced a wrapped package the size and shape of a large book, and presented it to me with more ceremony than you would expect such a young lad to be capable of.

"This is for you, ma'am, and your partner, because you did something good for my parents before I was born, ma'am. We hope you like it. My mother will visit you tonight, ma'am, if that's convenient. Is your partner in town, ma'am?"

I knelt down so that I was on his level, and replied, "No, she isn't. I'm afraid she was called to Falkreath. She probably won't be back for a few days. But if your mother has a message for us, I will be at home tonight, and I can pass it on to Vivian when she comes back."

"Vivian, is that the Dragonborn, ma'am?" And his eyes perceptibly widened.

I nodded. "Yes, but she doesn't kill dragons these days. She just tries to keep ordinary things running smoothly, as far as she can, in Whiterun and in all of Skyrim. It isn't exciting work, but it's very important all the same."

He gave a stiff bob of his head in reply, his face expressionless. I could see that he had been in two minds about whether the Dragonborn actually existed, or whether she was a character from a fairy story, and that confirmation of her existence – from a strange-looking Argonian, no less – was something he was going to have to think about for a while. I was going to say, "She doesn't bite, you know," but that would only have started him thinking of dragons again, and he was nervous enough already.

I said farewell to the two children, who disappeared around a corner, doubtless back to their mother. Then I put the parcel on the table, unopened until I found out more about it, resumed reading my history books, and waited for evening, which of course now seemed to be approaching at something less than the speed of a drugged horker.

Evening did finally arrive, and so did the promised knock on the door. I opened it to a woman in her late 20s, a Nord, the sort of person we deal with every day here. Her straight carriage spoke of a military background, as did the scar from a nasty gash she had had along the right cheekbone. I wondered immediately if I would be able to do anything for her. I know the general outlines of Vivian's career with the Imperial Legion, but I certainly don't have at my fingertips the details of every little incident she witnessed or participated in. If this woman had arrived here to say thanks to Vivian for saving her hide in some long-forgotten clash with the Stormcloaks, then her timing was unfortunate.

"Please come in," I said. "Are the children with you? I presume they were yours."

"I have a cousin in the Temple of Kynareth, and she's looking after them for the time being," the woman replied. "I came to thank the Dragonborn for something, but some of it isn't entirely appropriate for the ears of those so young."

Hmmmm... I thought. Some gruesome battlefield experience? A Dark Brotherhood or Thieves Guild contract? But people don't normally bother to send thank-you notes for things like that, and if she was willing to let me hear about it, it couldn't be tip-top secret.

"We'll be going back to Dawnstar early tomorrow morning, so I'll have to leave my gift and an explanation with you," the woman continued. I could hear a bit of tension in her voice, but not from fear, I think. She was friendly enough. It was more like embarrassment or shyness, as if she'd borrowed a cheap dish from us and had come to confess it had been broken by accident.

I led her into the house and settled her in your chair by the firepit, sitting down in my customary place at the other side. After inquiring her if she would like anything to eat or drink – she declined, again in a polite and friendly way – I finally asked her what she had come for, and why she had brought a present.

"You can open it, if you like," the Nord woman replied, and since it might be taken as a snub to hesitate further, I unwrapped it. It turned out to be not a book but a neatly boxed mirror – a very rare type of mirror, but one that I recognized at once, made of copper instead of glass, polished to a glittering flatness and then treated by some secret process so that it did not tarnish or fade thereafter. I have only seen two or three other examples in my whole life, and had never handled one before. They're the sort of thing that is hard to find even in the Imperial Palace; for one thing, it's said that even a small hand mirror of this type takes months to craft and decorate, and the one before me was a good deal larger. The polished copper reflects your face with absolute clarity, but also gives it an indescribable, subtle glow of health. The frame and handle of the mirror, also copper, were intricately worked in turquoises and lapis lazuli, with a number of small sapphires. I was immediately reminded of Vivian's beautiful blue eyes, and I wondered at the chance, if chance it was, that the mirror happened to be of that design.

"That's lovely," I said, with sincere admiration, but my inner merchant was whispering in my ear at the same time, And also damned expensive. That size, with such an elaborate jeweled frame, could sell for easily twice as much as this whole house is worth, for Zenithar's sake. Maybe three times. Or even ten times. It's the sort of thing that would have an imperial princess counting her septims and licking her lips. I hope Vivian at least saved this woman's life.

I put it down, very carefully, and continued, "I'm sure that Vivian will want to know who gave her this, and why. It's an incredible gift to receive without any notice."

She hesitated a bit before replying, and I thought she might be about to confess some Thieves' Guild caper, that she had stolen it to reward Vivian in the traditional manner for something now far in the past. But it wasn't that at all.

"It's about our children. You see, if it hadn't been for you and your partner, they might never have been born at all. You're almost as much their parents, in a way, as are I and my husband."

Now that was a puzzle. All I could do was say politely, "Please go on."

"You see," she began. "Both my good man and I were in the Imperial Legion, part of the same unit. We liked each other at once, but he's a very shy, quiet person, and I was no bolder at the time, despite the fact we were both out risking our skins day after day to rid Skyrim of the Stormcloaks. I was afraid that one of us would get killed before we got up the nerve to even have a talk with each other, and later on he told me he had felt the same way. We both made the same excuse to ourselves, that we would wait until the end of the war to speak of such things. It sounds a silly way to act, I know, but both of us come from very old-fashioned families where the parents arrange the marriages, not the children. I won't have that, and I'm making sure to raise my children to be frank about their feelings."

"Good idea," I said. "So did Vivian give you two a formal introduction or something?"

She looked into the fire, and I could swear that she was blushing.

"Not exactly, ma'am. But something like that."

I interjected, "My name is Shahvee, and you've no need to be so polite here. Or so nervous. Our house is always open to people like you. Vivian's a Legion veteran too, and neither of us will ever forget what we owe the ordinary soldiers who did all the real work in that war. We owe even more to those who never lived to see victory. You honor us by your presence, not the other way round."

"Thank you," she said quietly. "It means a lot to us that people like you feel that way. There are those who leave their memories behind when they rise higher, but she's not one of them, I knew that already."

"What's your name?"

"Bertholda, ma'am. Bertholda Hammer-Oak."

An old-fashioned name if ever there was one, I thought. No wonder her folk had preserved customs that the rest of Skyrim had discarded as hopelessly out of date, such as family control over marriages.

"And no more 'ma'am" please, or I will stiffen into insensibility," I replied. "My parents named me Shahvee, not 'ma'am.' Besides, 'ma'am' sounds like a Khajiit name." I gave her a reassuring glance, and awaited her response.

After a long moment of silence, Bertholda raised her head and returned my look with a smile. She dropped the honorific thereafter, although she obviously still felt awkward using my name. She avoided any name at all if she could, and where this was impractical, she hesitated noticeably before saying "Shahvee."

"I expect this gift has quite a story behind it," I continued. "I'm a merchant now, and although I've never dealt in goods this rare, I can guess how precious it is. Anything that you tell me, I will pass along to Vivian when she returns, and I'm sure she will be as moved and grateful as I am."

"To begin with...Shahvee...it was my husband who got the mirror, two years ago. It was a gift, or a payment for services, depending on how you want to see it. He and two of his friends were searching for any undiscovered veins of moonstone or copper or malachite up in some hills not far from our home – they'd been told there was some copper there, at least. While they were searching, they happened upon a bandit raid that was just taking place, on a small Orc smithy that none of them had known was there. It was pretty clear who were the criminals and who were the victims, so all three of the men attacked the bandits from the rear. My husband, who's always been good with a bow, put his first arrow right through the head of the bandit chief, and that was the end of the raid. The rest ran away as fast as their feet could carry them, and the three men shot and killed several more before they scrambled out of range.

"Of course, the Orc smith was extremely grateful for what they had done. He had been fighting well, and his brother had been at his side, but he couldn't have defended his smithy forever when they were outnumbered at least five to one. His pregnant wife and two children were there with him, too. I suppose the bandits would have killed them all if they had been victorious.

"It turned out that this particular smith was one of the very few who is able to make these special mirrors. He'd found the copper vein my husband and his friends had been searching for, and he was extracting the metal on site – there were all sorts of things he had to do to it, but my poor husband didn't understand a thing, even though the Orc was happy to explain the process to his three rescuers.

"That's how we came to have the mirror that is now yours. The Orc gave a regular-sized mirror and a smaller one to each of his rescuers, as well as quite a bit of gold. All three men thanked him at length for being so generous, but although the mirrors were very beautiful and obviously not cheap, they were thinking mostly of the two or three thousand septims in gold they had each received. But when they showed the mirrors to a jeweler in Windhelm, a couple of weeks later, the man nearly fainted.

"The jeweler told the men later that it would always stand as his most moral moment, the ethical high point of his life, that he told them the true worth of what they had, instead of buying the mirrors for a few hundred septims each and making a thousand to one profit on reselling them, as he might easily have done. My husband's two friends each sold both of their mirrors; one set himself up in business in Dawnstar on the proceeds, and the other more than doubled the size of his farm by buying out his happy neighbours for prices that were more than fair. We decided not to sell ours, though; we were making a good living anyway, and there would be expenses in the future, the marriages of the children and that sort of thing. Besides, suddenly getting your hands on a lot of money is tempting fate, even though we came by it honestly, and even though up to now it has done no harm that we can see to either of our friends. And the mirrors were so beautiful that we were reluctant to part with even one of them until we were told to."

That had ended oddly, I thought. Who in all of Tamriel would, or could, command them to do something like that, and why?

"I'm afraid I still don't understand," I said as soon as Bertholda finished her explanation. "Who could possibly order you to give such an expensive gift to us? I'm sure it wasn't your Jarl. And you still haven't explained what the gift was for, and how this all connects with your beautiful children."

For several moments, Bertholda sat staring into the fire, her hands clenched in front of her as if she were nervous to the point of paralysis. And yes, she was blushing again. Blushing as deep a red as a young girl caught reading her first love letter. I was just about ready to burst with curiosity at this point, but I somehow managed to remain outwardly impassive.

"It was the gods that told us, ma... Shahvee," she finally said in a very low voice. "They told us what we should do. In dreams. We both had the dreams, my husband and I. True dreams, I am certain, and the same for both of us. They weren't frightening or threatening or anything, but we knew that we couldn't ignore them."

"The gods? Which one of the gods do you mean?"

"The Queen of Heaven. Lady Dibella. The Lady of Love. She came to us both in dreams and told us that we owed a gift to you. She said that if it had not been for you and Vivian, I and my husband would never have managed to get married, and we would never have had the children that the gods have blessed us with. And she told us that our son, the first of our children, had been conceived under your inspiration, and that this had gifted him with talents that he would discover as he grew up, a special ability to attract love and loyalty from those around him."

"I don't want to argue with you when you're clearly acted at the command of one of the high gods," I said. "But I still don't understand. I don't recall inspiring any sort of conceptions for anyone. I don't even know how I would go about doing something like that, even if Lady Dibella herself ordered me to. Vivian and I paid the customary respects to the Queen of Heaven when we got married, but apart from that – we honor her, but we've had very little to do with her directly. I loved Vivian from the day we first met. I was content to wait for her. She finally came to me after another relationship had reached its fated end, and we made up for lost time, so to speak. And then the gods blessed us with the gift of a beautiful daughter, and there was nothing further we could ask for, other than to grow old together and die in each other's arms." I paused for a moment and then added, "The gods are like anyone else with power and authority. They hear a lot more from the discontented than the contented. We've never had anything from the Queen of Heaven that we felt we had to complain about."

Bertholda smiled and nodded as I told the story. She liked to hear it, I could see that, but she was still very tense. She went back to looking into the coals in the firepit, and then suddenly turned to me and blurted out a question.

"What was it like the first time you and Vivian had sex? Were you frightened?"

I stared at her with my mouth open for a moment, I'm afraid. This strange and very personal question, which obviously had a serious motivation behind it, hadn't offended me, so that wasn't the cause of my shock. It was the presence of the word "frightened," which seemed so utterly out of place in that context.

"Oh no, no, no. Bertholda...what a thing to think. We'd finally come home, to the place we both wanted to be, wanted for years in my case. Frightened? Of what? Carelessly putting an elbow in the other one's eye? Tripping over my tail? Farting? No... our bodies aren't built quite the same, we had to learn new things, talk it over, listen carefully to each other, get some practice, but that was all part of the joy of it. And it still is." At this point, I'm sure I was wearing one of the blissful, dreamy, "slightly idiotic" expressions that Vivian says I always have when I think about the physical side of our relationship. But Bertholda's next words wiped that look right off my face. Her tone was as bitter and angry as I've ever heard in a woman's voice, even though the anger was not directed at me.

"You're lucky. What that means is that you didn't have his parents. You didn't have my parents. When I was eight years old, my father gave me a terrific beating for watching two of our horses doing it in a field. I cried and asked him what was wrong, and he beat me again. He didn't tell me why. He just shouted that my watching the horses "with your mouth open" proved that I was a filthy little whore and I would come to a bad end. I didn't know what the horses had been doing. I didn't even know what the word whore meant, other than it was something terribly bad and I was one of those terribly bad people, even though I didn't know why and nobody would tell me. And after that, everyone seemed to treat me differently and I couldn't do anything right. That's why I ran away from home when I was sixteen, lied about my age, and joined the Legion. In the Legion, all I had to do was obey orders and try my best, and everyone praised me and encouraged me to do better. At least to them, in the daylight, in the real world, I was an honorable person who always did her duty, a proud soldier of the Emperor, not a filthy little whore.

"I found out later that my future husband's family was as sick as my own had been. One day when he was eight or nine, the same age I'd been when things changed for me, his parents suddenly announced to him that if they ever saw his thing sticking out, they would cut it off. He was confused, and terrified. He didn't know why they had said that. He didn't know why it stuck up sometimes. He hadn't even been paying attention to it. He was too young.

"Perhaps they wouldn't actually have done something that cruel, but saying it had been enough. Children pay attention. For years after, if something happened to make him hard, if he woke up that way for example, he would be sick with fear. I mean literally sick. I learned all of this later, and he cried and cried the first time he told me, it hurt him so much. He'd go to the outhouse and throw up, and then hide there, in the stink, until it got soft again, so that no one could see it sticking out and run to get the knife. He thought he knew which knife they would use to chop his thing off. It was a big black one, very sharp, the one they had to cut the throats of pigs when they were butchered. He had nightmares about that knife for years and years. Finally he stole the knife and threw it down the well when no one was looking. He felt a little bit better then, but he knew his father had a lot of other knives.

"Do you understand now what it was like when we first began to notice each other, to become a little special to each other, even though we didn't know why? We were terrified. Do you understand why we were convinced that one or both of us wasn't going to survive the war, and so we had to be careful to not even be friends? That if we got any closer, the gods would see to it that one of us died, to punish the other one? People see the gods through the lens of their parents. I know that now, but I didn't back then.

"I prayed every night that I would be the one that died. I felt awful about being so selfish, but I knew if the gods punished me by taking him away, I would go into the next battle trying to get myself killed as quickly as possible. I would charge the enemy, and everyone would say that I was a hero. But that would be a lie. I would have done it because I wanted to die, not because I wanted to please the emperor. Because I would have been miserable forever and all I would have thought was that everything had to stop, everything, forever, or I would go mad.

"Then it occurred to me that the gods might keep me from dying and let me play the hero for a while, just to make sure that I would be miserable longer, and then they would finally get rid of me by impaling me on a dirty wooden stake so that I would take three or four days to die, or burning me alive, or tearing off my arms and legs with me still living, or anything else horribly painful. I dreamed of being covered with flaming oil and running around and screaming as my armor turned red hot and roasted me like a pig in an oven, but for some reason, in the dream, I was never able to die and the flames never went out. I just burned and roasted and ran and screamed, screamed until blood came out of my mouth like a fountain, forever. And no one lifted a finger to help me, not even to put me out of my misery. Because in my dream, I was still a filthy little whore, and filthy little whores don't deserve any help from anyone.

"It was so stupid. I knew what the word whore meant, by that time. I was a virgin, not a whore. I liked men, most of them, but I'd never... It didn't matter. I was still a filthy little whore. I couldn't stop thinking it. My father had said so, everyone else in the family had agreed with him, and so it must be true. Every night, if I had momentarily forgotten myself and smiled at that man or he had waved to me from the battlements or I had caught myself thinking about him when I was on watch duty, I burned again. Because that was what I knew I deserved for wanting my own man when I was nothing but a filthy little whore. A filthy little whore..."

Bertholda ran out of breath at that point, and sat staring wide-eyed in a waking nightmare, gasping for air, with tears running down her face. I got up and drew her to her feet and held her as she began to sob again, until she cried herself out. I knew that if I held her tight enough, even though she might still be in the darkness, she would at least know that she wasn't alone, that someone else was there with her. When she finally stopped crying, she drew a bit apart from me and looked me in the eye, with a sad little smile. She held my gaze for a moment, and then said, "You can see why I didn't bring the children. They are not going to know anything about this. Not now, not ever. No one will call them names or threaten to cut them or burn them. I and my husband have agreed, no matter how much it hurts to keep it inside, what happened to us will never come out of the past to any place where they might learn of it. Never. It ends with us."

She sat down again, and I knelt beside her. She seemed to wander away for a few moments, a mental flight, and then she came slowly back into focus.

"I'd better tell you the rest. How you saved us and made it possible for us to get married and have children. It's not the sort of thing I'd normally talk about to anyone except perhaps my husband, but I think you should know after I've been hinting at it all evening."

"I don't have to know, but if you want to tell... I'm here to listen," I replied.

"Well," she began. "It happened at Windhelm, after the battle for the city. I and my friend, my future husband, were there, still in the same unit, and by the grace of the gods neither of us was seriously hurt in that last battle. And the war was over. I remember it was very late at night when we were finally told that it was all over, really over, so those of us not on guard duty could scatter to find some place to sleep. We were polite enough, for conquerors. We kicked a few doors down, but we didn't actually throw anyone out of their own home. Most of them had already fled in any case, so there were plenty of empty beds for us to sleep in; for most of us, to sleep in a real bed for the first time in weeks.

"Anyway, whether it was by chance or the contrivance of a god, I found myself in the same house as him. We had the ground floor to ourselves. We began to talk, very timidly at first, because if there wasn't a war to fight any longer, we might be able to be friends, at least, without getting punished for it. It felt good to talk. We discovered that we were comfortable with each other. Then we found some food and ate together, and after a while, we got very sleepy. But there was only one double bed in the solitary bedroom on the floor that we had to ourselves in that big old house. We crept upstairs to see if there were more beds, but we crept right back down again when we found all of them were full. That left us stuck with our one bed, and so we took off our helmets and iron boots and sword-belts and cautiously inserted ourselves into it from opposite sides.

"It seemed very strange to be in bed with a man, and I was frightened of him being close, even though we were nowhere near touching. I was afraid that as soon as I fell asleep, I would burn again, but worse this time, because we had been talking and laughing and now we were lying side by side in a bed. I wanted to tell him that I was frightened, and why I was frightened, but I couldn't say a word to him. And he told me later he was the same; every time he closed his eyes, he saw that knife.

"But it was a lovely soft bed, and we were both exhausted from battle, so I felt myself dropping off to sleep, even though I was still wearing bits and pieces of armor. It was nothing new to sleep in our armor, of course, and this was a far more comfortable place to do it than a stony bank or the wet grass.

"Then you got going. In the bedroom directly above us. You and Vivian. Servants of Dibella, whether you knew it or not, sent to take everything wrong and make it right."

She sat blissfully smiling to herself for a minute or two. I was nodding too, playing along, but inside me alarm bells were ringing loudly. I was going to have to be very careful indeed with what I said for the rest of the time my guest was here.

You see, I hadn't been there at all. Or to be more precise, I had been there, but not in that upstairs bedroom, in the Argonian Assemblage down by the docks, probably curled up in my bunk enjoying some tender and complicated fantasy about Vivian my future and sole life-mate, whom I hadn't so much as kissed on the cheek at that point. The other body in the bed upstairs had been that of Serana, Vivian's lover at the time, and later a true and loyal friend to both of us. But explaining this would complicate things further, and I didn't want to put any more strain on Bertholda. So, for the moment at least, I would have to pretend it had been me.

Bertholda was blushing again, I noticed. I leaned forward and touched her on the knee, trying to play my role to perfection, "Don't worry about it. We didn't mean to be overheard. It's just that... we forget sometimes. It's easy to forget everything else... well, you know. I apologize for us both, for embarrassing you. It shouldn't have happened."

She raised her eyes from the coals in the firepit, looked directly at me, and said in an excited voice,

"No, no. You don't understand at all. I wasn't embarrassed. He wasn't embarrassed. No. There's nothing to apologize for. The Queen of Heaven put you there, she saw to it, and she meant it all to be that way."

I was startled, and responded in a rush, "Well, it's the first time I ever considered that. But it's not the first time we've gotten into that sort of trouble. Things just... happen. It's very rude and inconsiderate to others to let them hear you making love."

Bertholda replied, in a confident voice, "You needed to be there. We needed you. That's why the Queen of Heaven sent me to you now. To thank you for helping us, not to complain. It doesn't matter that you didn't know you were doing it. That's the way the gods work."

She looked into the coals for another long moment, and then began speaking again.

"Remember. We couldn't even look at each other. We were that frightened. By what had happened to us in the past. If anyone had said boo, we would probably have jumped up and run away from each other, forever. And if we had just gone to sleep, we would have gotten up in the morning on different sides of the bed and gone in different directions. It was like a black cloud that surrounded us, the fear. The terror. I became so frightened when I was lying there, I almost started to cry. I felt that if I stretched out my arm in his direction, something would break it or cut it off. It sounds stupid now. But it hurt so much. And he felt the same way. The black cloud between us, and we would never be able to make it go away.

"But when you began to...I'm sorry, this part must embarrass you..."

"Not at all," I said firmly. And it didn't, even though I hadn't been quite what Bertholda thought I was at the time. I smiled to myself, and reflected that this was going to make quite the after-dinner story for Serana, the next time that Vivian and I met her.

"It was..." She hesitated again, searching for the right words. "It was as if that black cloud was made up of demons, from my family and his, and your lovemaking was an exorcism that drove the demons back, step by step, until they were beaten and ran away, and never came back. I don't care what others say, I think you were acolytes of Dibella that night, sent by the Queen of Heaven to banish the fear and the terror and the sick feeling inside that kept us apart. To free us to love one another, in body and soul. And when the last demon had run off in terror, chased off by your love cries, we could finally come together without fear. And the rest was nature."

Bertholda sat in silence for a long moment, with that silly-dreamy look on her face, and I knew what she was remembering. Then she began to speak again.

"After...a long time...we finally fell asleep in each others' arms. I had never slept like that before. It felt like a luxury, like taking a long, perfumed bath, and now we would have it forever. And I dreamed as well, a little dream where Dibella said only a few words to me, just before I woke up. The Queen of Heaven said to me, 'Took you long enough. But you made it home in the end.'

"When I finally opened my eyes again, the first thing I remember seeing was Vivian, the renowned Dragonborn, our famous war hero leader, standing in the door of our bedroom stark naked, wearing nothing but a smile. That was when I realized that she'd been the one upstairs the previous night. She's so beautiful, but it's sad too, she has so many scars from the wars, and her left arm was bandaged as well from some new injury. But she had a huge grin on her face.

"'Thought I heard someone down here,' the Dragonborn said. 'Although I wasn't paying that much attention last night. You can probably guess why. Welcome to the wonderful world of survival sex. It's one of war's oldest traditions. As soon as the battle's over, you find the nearest warm body and fuck each other till you both collapse. It's the best way to give the finger to the whole miserable situation, to say to the world, "You tried to kill me, you missed, screw you, I'm still alive." It's good to be alive.' She stretched, yawned, and added, 'Sometimes I wonder why people bother to do anything other than have sex, eat, and sleep. The last two with a warm and friendly body within reach. But duty calls, may it rot for eternity in the depths of the Pits. We'll be leaving in a little while, but there's plenty of food left in the kitchen, and I'm sure you can handle the other things without anyone else's help.' She grinned at us again, blew us both a kiss, gently closed our bedroom door, and that was the last we saw of her."

"She was being a bit of a cynic," Bertholda added. "For us, and for you two as well, it has been much more than the nearest warm body. You are still together, that was my husband lying there butt naked and snoring, and I was probably already pregnant. I pulled a blanket up over us and curled around him to get a bit more sleep. I knew we'd make love again when we both woke up, and I smiled to myself, as happy that day as I'd been sick with fright the day before. Looking forward to making love to the husband I had been too terrified to talk to the day before. I saw then that the power of the gods is truly without limits or measure, and they can turn anything to good.

"I was sure we wouldn't need to spend much time discussing our plans for the future. We'd retire from the army, get married, tell our respective families to go die in a fire, offer to light the fire for them if they still didn't get the message, and live together happily ever after. Raise healthy kids, and get rich, or at least comfortable. And that's more or less what we did, what we're doing. I guess one of the reasons Dibella visited our dreams and sent me here was to remind us how bad things had been before, and how much better they got when there was the right person to hold on to in stormy weather."

"I'm sorry that some of it hurts so much to remember," I said.

Bertholda smiled, a bit sadly this time.

"Yes, but...to quote your lovely partner, screw you, world, I'm still alive. I love my husband, I love my children, and they love me. We have our health, a roof over our heads, food for today's meals, and hope for tomorrow. That's about as close to winning as you'll ever get in this game. Give Vivian our love, when she comes back from Falkreath, and be sure to visit, either or both of you, if you're ever near Dawnstar."