Author Note: This is an unofficial sequel to Brothers in Arms. That is to say, it follows BiA chronologically and in the same universe, but reading BiA should not be essential if you wish to read this one.
Chapter 1
"Right. Left. Left. Left. Right. Up. Right. Right. Down. Behind. Right. Right. Left. Right..."
"Bastard!" He chucked his wooden sword to the ground and stuffed his left fist in his mouth as an angry red welt was beginning to show across his knuckles. "Oo thed wight..."
"Now now Aden," his aunt scolded him, shaking her head. "There's no need to insult your kin, is there?" She rubbed his cheek with a thumb affectionately and laughed. "You see with your eyes, not your ears." Chucking her own wooden sword into a pile behind her, she observed her nephew closely. "You should go and see Oleta with that, you know."
Aden nodded, his hand still firmly lodged in his mouth. "Fankth," he muttered around his fist, walking past the woman with as much dignity as he could manage. She would be laughing at him as soon as he turned the corner; he knew that much.
Still, he couldn't think badly of her however hard he tried and however much his hand hurt. It wasn't the first lash she had given him, but it was certainly one of the worst – or at least it felt like it right now. She had taken him in some ten years past, the day that his mother, her sister, had been slaughtered like a lamb by the daedra as they sacked the city. His Aunt Tierra was still a guardswoman though, and would be until her dying breath, so even if it meant teaching her last surviving relative a harsh lesson she would do it without a second thought.
As hard as Aden thought, he couldn't remember what Kvatch had looked like before the daedra had come. He had seen only nine winters when the flames had come and taken away almost everything that he had ever known; the city still wore its scars proudly: the walls and the castle were still scorched and blackened from where the fires had touched them, and every here and there a house that had only been partially destroyed remained standing and had only been touched up during the great restoration.
Nobody forgot the daedra though.
When he lay down the sleep, the Redguard saw them in his dreams with their scarlet-and-ebony skin and their swords as long as he was tall, and the gnashing teeth and slashing claws, and fire. Everywhere was fire.
And Aden had got off lightly.
He had lost both his parents in the very first wave of daedra, but he himself had been tucked up in the chapel with his aunt and the man who would become Emperor and save them eventually. Some people lost everything. Their families, homes, possessions were all gone now, burnt to dust and blown away by the wind, leached by the rain. Some people had come away so traumatised that they had left at the first opportunity; a few had taken their own lives in anguish. The outward scars had faded long ago, but the internal wounds would never heal, no matter how long they waited. Some still didn't eat well; some still couldn't sleep without potions; some still didn't talk.
But the city was thriving. Aden couldn't remember what it had been like before, but his aunt had assured him that now it was better. The people of Kvatch had banded together and rebuilt their town brick by brick and plank by plank. The Mages and Fighters Guilds had returned about four years ago, re-establishing themselves quickly among the population and taking in all the people who had watched helplessly as their friends and relatives had been slaughtered. Kvatch Arena had not been rebuilt fully, but a training ground had been created in its place and it was frequented daily by a whole range of people.
Oleta lived next to it. The town's healer had been invaluable to them ever since the sacking of their city. She had patched them up, helped them sleep, and offered her advice. There was a reason that she was regarded at the best healer in the whole province.
Aden knocked on her door tentatively and slipped inside when she called an answer. Her home was a simple place with one bed and one desk and one cupboard. The boy had visited this single room more times than he would ever admit as he had grown up.
"Are you alright?" the woman asked him, looking up from the place where she was grinding some herbs in a mortar and pestle. Even after all this time she still dressed shabbily in a faded brown tunic and worn felt shoes that hung off her angular body like a tent until she tied them tightly with some simple string.
The would-be warrior wanted to nod and tell her that he had turned up only to have her counsel, but the fact that his knuckles were still lodged in his mouth rather gave him away. He extracted them and presented the wound to the ex-priestess. A raised red welt ran across three of his fingers and was surrounded by dark black bruises.
"Training with your aunt again?" Oleta chuckled, rising and looking in her cupboard for a remedy.
Aden flushed in embarrassment. "Umm... Yeah," he admitted, grimacing when she pressed a poultice against his swollen fingers.
"There's no shame in it," she told him, muttering a few Ayleid words of healing that rushed through his digits with a surreal cooling sensation. "Tierra has been a guard for almost two decades now, and she is one of the finest swords we have in this city. You can hardly expect her to go easy on you just because you are her nephew." Removing the bandage, she inspected the wound. "Ah, I see..." she muttered. "Looks like you've fractured one of your fingers." She tapped his swollen middle finger gently and he winced in pain. "It's fine. I can fix it," she promised, dousing it in the appropriate magicka. It took the swelling down, but the dark bruises remained prominent against his brown skin. "Now, its fine, but you're going to have to let it heal for a couple of weeks. So no more sword-fighting for you, I'm afraid."
The boy frowned. "What am I supposed to do then?" he asked. He had spent years doing little other than practicing his swordsmanship.
Oleta tapped him on the shoulder comfortingly. "You'll find something. When you were younger you were something of an artist, if I recall correctly."
"Yes, but that was before." He didn't need to say before what. Everybody knew what he was talking about.
"You'll find something," she reassured him.
He nodded mournfully and tracked back to the door. "Thanks for fixing up my finger," he muttered, pulling it open and stepping outside. He let it shut behind him under its own steam.
Sighing heavily, Aden walked away from the small house and gazed longingly at the training ground where two small boys were sparring. They had been born after the sacking and their innocence showed in the way that they played at being soldiers. Nobody who remembered treated it like a game; it was still life or death for them, even ten years on.
He grimaced and stared hatefully at his finger, spinning on his heels and trudging back through the streets towards the main square. Everywhere he looked there were memorials; the small council that led the city after its count had died had put a plaque to commemorate every single dead citizen into the ground around a statue of Martin Septim that they had erected after they had discovered what had become of the man who had once been their priest. There wasn't a single speck of earth visible now for the amount of brass and bronze and green copper that covered the area all the way across and most of the distance from the chapel to the main gate. It made his heart sink to look at them.
Finding his parents' plaques was easy. He visited them almost every day now, and had grown to know the area like the back of his hand. Sitting, he ran his hands other the engravings slowly, wiping off the mud from the boot prints of people who marched up and down all day: the guards, the guildsmen, the merchants...
Aden couldn't remember his parents. He was ashamed of that fact, but that didn't make it any less true. Nine years he had been with them, and ten years without them, and now they were little more than memories and dreams. Fractured memories and dreams.
"You alright?" a voice from behind him asked. It belonged to a Nord girl who had moved into the city with her father a little over a year after Kvatch had been sacked; he had moved on, but she had stayed behind on her own, staying in a small shack near the city walls and eventually moving into the Kvatch Mages Guild when it opened.
He looked up. "Fractured my finger," he murmured, showing her the blackened digit.
"Oh, that's nothing," she told him, strolling around into his line of sight and sitting cross-legged opposite him. "I managed to turn my hair pink today." She pulled back the green hood she was wearing to reveal brilliant cerise-coloured hair before hastily covering it back up again. "Alteration week at the Guild," she explained. "Spell went wrong, and no matter how many times I cast Dispel it never seems to fade." To prove her point, she cast the spell then and there.
Aden chuckled. "Only you, Finny," he admitted, almost forgetting about his injury. "I'm sure it will fade eventually. What were you aiming for?"
"Red," the Nord grinned. She was younger than he was, but only by about a year. It showed. She could be terribly childish sometimes, though Aden put that down to the fact that she had never lived through the Sack of Kvatch. "Now I just look stupid."
"It's not that bad," he lied. As if hot pink hair was normal. "But," he laughed. "I'd keep that hood up when you're out in public. Some of the people around here will think you're a lunatic if they see you like that."
"They wouldn't be totally wrong," she sniggered. "But look, perk up about your finger, yeah? I mean, it's only a fracture. Have you seen Oleta?"
He nodded. "I'm not allowed to train with my aunt for two weeks."
"Shame..."
"I'll live."
"You'd better! I'd get bored in this place without you!"
Aden snorted. "Kolfinna Ice-Heart, you flatter me," he smirked.
"I try." She mocked a bow and scrambled to her feet. "Now, there is no use moping about on these depressing old plaques... Come on," she said, offering him a hand. He took it gratefully and the Nord girl hauled him to his feet. "I know it's a cliché and all, but your parents wouldn't want you sitting around here all the time... And there are plenty of things to do besides whack people with swords! Look at me!"
He did look, but when one took into account the fact that she was wearing her Apprentice robes from head to toe there was not a great deal to see save blue eyes so pale that they were almost blank and a snowy white complexion as though she had never seen a day of sunlight in her life. She was shorter than he was too, but not so much that she had to look up to see him.
"I mean, I've never touched a sword in my life," she went on merrily despite his looks. "Well, I have, to like... move one around, but not to use it."
"Well, not everyone has magicka, Finny!" the Redguard chuckled. He didn't have one iota of magic in him, no matter how hard he looked for it. "Some of us have no choice but to hit each other with sticks!"
"Uncivilised savages," she muttered in jest, leading him away from his parents' only resting place. They had not had enough room on the plateau that the city rested on to bury all the bodies; most of them had been burnt. "What do you do all day other than train?"
He shrugged. "Not much. Nothing worth reporting anyway."
"I don't know what you think you're training to fight," Kolfinna sighed. "There hasn't been a war on in ten years, and the anarchy has nothing to do with you. You've never even been to the Imperial City!"
"I don't expect you to understand. You weren't there."
"Aden." She grabbed his shoulders and looked him straight in the eyes, causing him to shift uncomfortably. "They are never coming back. They never have, and they never can. They're gone. You're training to fight a banished enemy."
"You wouldn't understand..."
"Maybe not, but you know I'm right."
Aden raised an eyebrow. "Infuriatingly so," he growled. He had to try hard to stop himself grinding his teeth. "Though it doesn't do any harm to be prepared, does it?"
"And you're right too." The Nord shot him a grin. "Now let's go somewhere..."
"But where? There's nowhere in this city that we've not been before. It's not like we'll be making some intriguing discovery..." He paused and then chuckled. "You know what? I think I worked out why your hair went pink instead of red..."
Finny smirked. "Pray, tell."
"Well, your hair is white normally, isn't it?" It was, largely, though she would argue that it was blonde. Everything about the girl was white, so white she could have been the child of a man built of snow. Aden had seen her father, and he had been a dark man, pale of skin but with a shock of almost black hair and deep brown eyes. She was something of an anomaly, it seemed. Maybe that was why he had left her behind. His loss. "And what happens when you mix red and white together?"
She laughed, a strange sound somewhere between snorting and hyperventilating. "You get pink." Squinting up ahead and then down at her feet, she sighed. "I must look so strange right now. I'm virtually white, wearing dark green robes and having violent pink hair... Hopefully it'll wear off."
"I think you look equally weird with that hood up," he jested with her. "Well, no more weird than usual."
She punched him in the arm. "You're an arse, Aden, you know that?"
"And that's why you love me."
They both went into a fit of hysterics as they walked around the chapel. The streets had been repaved after the battle; there was a time a decade ago when just walking in the city was like wading through a knee-deep swamp of mud. Now the paving slabs were large and mostly flat, already pounded down by the endless comings and goings of hundreds of feet. To say that the city was thriving again would be wrong – though nowhere had really thrived during the ten year anarchy following the end of the Oblivion Crisis – but at least it was not limping along on the donations of Count Hassildor and Countess Umbranox. The ash had made the lands around Kvatch fertile, though not as fertile as the West Weald, and they had started trading in grain when they had managed to fill their own granaries once more. It wasn't much, but it tided them over.
The forge had been rebuilt, but had remained behind the chapel where it had sprung up after the Sack of Kvatch. Aden remembered gathering scrap metal from the ruins for Batul gra-Sharob to create new joints for buildings almost vividly. He had been shorter back then, and his hair had been almost constantly in a perfect afro as he ran up and down the streets with all the energy of a small boy. These days he braided his hair to keep it out of his eyes when he trained, and he had bulked up considerably through a semi-decent diet and working out daily.
"Do you remember when we were small?" Finny was saying as she looked down at the old shack that she had lived in on her own for years before somebody noticed.
Aden remembered almost everything, but there was quite a lot that he was trying to forget. He nodded. "People thought you were a ghost before they got to know you... Or I did... You were so pale... You still are."
"I know." Her eyes sparkled a little. "I remember you barging into a house with a wooden sword trying to rid the city of the ghost in order to save... Some fair maiden, or something..."
"We have ghosts enough in this town," he sighed. "We didn't need more." He smiled at the memory though. "It was a good thing I did hit your finger though."
The Nord agreed. She mocked his voice from when he had been so much smaller, a pitiful impression that was several octaves higher than he could recall himself ever being. "Ghosts don't bleed."
He would have teased her back if his voice hadn't broken and stopped him from speaking in such a high pitched tone. "I'm pretty sure I didn't sound like that, Finn."
She chuckled. "I was there. I know you did." They sat beneath the statue of Antus Pinder. "You know..." She started, but trailed off squinting into space. Her eyesight was notoriously poor.
"I know what?"
Finny almost jumped out of her skin. Eventually she regained her composure. "I was reading the other day... About the Oblivion Crisis in the Guild library. I thought it was strange, because they talk about the heroics of Martin Septim and High Chancellor Ocato and the Blades, but they never say..." She stopped and looked at her friend. "They never really say who saved Kvatch."
Aden frowned. "Well, that was the Hero of Kvatch, obviously. The clue is in the name."
"Yes," she replied, standing. "But they never say anything about the Hero... It's like they didn't even exist."
The Redguard was indignant. "Well I know the Hero existed because I spoke to h-" He paused and sprung to his feet. "I made a statue of her!" He grabbed Finny's hand and pulled her away from Antus Pinder down one of the small side-alleys.
They had been down here before, over the years, but right now the only thing Aden could remember was the once that he had dragged the Hero of Kvatch down here with her Argonian friend. It was just after the rebuilding effort had begun, after the rains had finished but before the war was over. There was rubble everywhere and houses were being built crudely with wooden crossbars and coarse mud walls covered in planks and boards. He could see it vividly, smell every smell again. He could feel the mud in his toes and spattered up his legs, hear the thumps of hammers and the scouring of ruins on the other side of the city. All at once he was nine years old again, scampering along on legs like sticks with a permanent grin on his small face.
The tree was still there after all these years. It was a burnt, sorry old thing that had never grown again and done little more than rot over the past ten years, but his statue was right where he had left it, tied to the trunk with string and a thin piece of wire. It was crude: a few sticks lashed together with a couple of metal pipes and some silvery brackets that had long since turned brown bolted up to hold it in place.
Kolfinna peered at the thing suspiciously. "What does it say there?" she asked, pointing at a tiny wooden plaque that he been beaten into the tree trunk so hard that the bark had split behind it.
Aden's brown eyes widened to see it again. The Heroe of Kvatch. Eydarreee. He could almost see her when he looked into his memories, almost touch her... But she wasn't quite there, his Hero... She was gone. A hooded figure in a dark street, garbed in black from head to toe. This statue was all he had of her now, and it was the crude representation of a nine year old boy created from broken bits of rubbish. "It says..." he started, but his throat was dry. "The Hero of Kvatch. Idari."
"That was her name?" Even semi-blind, the Nord's eyes were sparkling in the sunlight. She seemed to brighten at the prospect, as though she had never been down this way before and never seen the statue, never heard the tale. They had come here as children, but briefly and without due attention paid to the burnt out old tree. "Idari? What happened to her?"
"That's the question I can't answer."
Finny frowned deeply. "It doesn't say in the history books... She just seems to... disappear after saving Kvatch."
"But I know she didn't. I met her. I spoke to her!" Aden insisted. Even if she was just a shadow of his past, she had still been there in the flesh... She had told him her name.
"Then let's find out where she went."
It was a stupid plan, ridiculous even, but to the Redguard it made perfect sense. "We'd have to leave Kvatch," he pointed out.
"We can't stay here forever."
"But we don't know where it would take us... Maybe even beyond Cyrodiil."
The girl smirked. "I've always wanted to see the rest of the continent."
"Finny, you're not being logical."
"No, Aden," she replied, shaking her head. "Think about it. You've never been beyond this plateau, and I've been here ever since my father left me here in some falling down old shack with a bag of flatbread and a jar of salted beef. At least your parents only left you when they died, Aden. Now is our chance to do something, and to find something out that will help this town! We have to go, Aden..." She crossed her arms firmly. "And if you refuse to go then I'll go alone."
The Redguard observed his friend coolly. "You know it's not safe outside of Kvatch. The anarchy is spread right across the province, everywhere but this county. Kvatch has only stayed out of it because we're not ruled by one count, and that's only because Savlian Matius refused it all those years ago. You'd be dead before you reached Skingrad... And besides, where do you exactly propose to look? How do you find a Hero who disappeared? We only have her first name, and we don't even have a reliable picture of what she looked like..."
"Other people in town will remember her."
"And what if she's dead? What will we do then?"
Kolfinna smiled sweetly. "We will pay her tribute. She saved your town, Aden... This whole place owes her." She pushed her hood back off of her pink hair and stared at him until she had to look away from the light. "You'd be dead without her. This whole province would be dead without her... Judging by what became of Martin Septim."
"Yes, but..." His heart sank when he considered the more delicate logistics of his having to leave his city for the very first time and he heaved a heavy sigh.
She flung her arms around him and hugged him tightly. "Your aunt doesn't need you to protect her. She has seen almost fifty winters and yet she can still fracture your finger in training. She survived the Sack of Kvatch with blood on her blade; how many people can boast that? Only her and Savlian Matius and Merandil. All the others are dead or left. She is not weak, Aden. Do not worry about her."
"Yes, but I'd have to leave..." He sighed again, more heavily than before, wrapping his arms around the Nord girl and holding her close. "My parents."
"I feel awful saying this, Aden, but they're dead. They wouldn't want you to stay here forever. We won't be doing this for glory; we'll be doing this in memory of those who died here ten years ago... Isn't that a cause worth fighting for?"
"I should hope it doesn't come to fighting," he whispered, disentangling himself from his friend and looking around as though somebody was going to walk into their conversation and disturb them. It wouldn't happen though. Nobody came to this part of town anymore, save for the people who lived here, and all of the doors to their houses were facing away from the burnt old tree. It reminded people too strongly of the Sack, yet nobody had had the time to uproot it when they were rebuilding; it had still been living back then, and they couldn't stand the thought of another needless death. "Where would we go?"
She looked him in the eye this time, trying her hardest not to squint. "The Imperial City of course."
"The centre of the anarchy, huh?" They were between kings and without a leader. High Chancellor Ocato of the Elder Council had been killed during the final battle of the Oblivion Crisis – though the details of his death had never reached as far as the ears of small children in a sacked city – and the Council, in typical Council-style, had answered with only silence, never choosing themselves a new leader and never passing any decisions on who should succeed the Septims to the throne. A great chaos had reigned ever since.
Finny just grinned. "It'll be an adventure, won't it? Who knows where it'll take us?"
"Hopefully not to shallow graves..."
"Don't be so pessimistic!" She punched him in the arm. "We won't die. We will arrive back in Kvatch having found out what happened to their great Hero, and the people will thank us."
The Redguard glared at her until he burst out laughing. He couldn't stay angry with her for more than a few minutes, especially with that pink mop of hair she seemed to be sporting today; it was a funny sight. "OK, we'll go." Her beaming smile was worth it. "But I don't think we should go alone. Who else do you think we can rope in?"
Author Note 2: Yes, yes, the first line is a little reminiscent of a chapter in A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. That does not make it plagiarism. The idea behind the line fit, and this particular line is different; I checked. Yes, I know giving a character pink hair is a complete no-no, but she did it accidentally, and it was just the image of an albino Nord girl with candy pink hair that amused me too much to pass up. Aden is the same kid from one of the chapters of BiA... Did you expect a sequel about him?
This one shouldn't be quite as long as the last one, and it seemed a good way to start the new year. Yes, it is 2012 in England right now, so Happy New Year everybody :)
