Chapter 1: Searching
Moonlight tipped its pale beauty across the still, dark landscape. Somewhere in the fringe of distant trees an owl screeched, a sabre cat growled warning to its clumsy cubs, and a lone wolf sang out its melancholy. It was a gloriously haunting night, all things apart from her. Her loneliness so heavy it was almost a taste on the crisp, cool air.
There, atop a grey, lichen smothered boulder, she sat. The imortal woman with eyes of molten copper, skin like pearls, and stagnant blood, stilled by an unbeating heart. Wistfully, she lifted pale fingers, letting the night's gentle breeze weave it's delicate way between.
She thought, as much to her own mind's absence as to any dedicated effort of contemplation, of how some things, some truly precious things seemed blissfully timeless. That such things, like the nightly chill, the habitual, short lives of animals, and the feel of starlight on her skin remained, where all else familiar and solid seemed to have melted away in the face of countless passing years.
Melancholy lapped at her shins. A constant, damp presence, one that made her steps heavy. From time to time it swelled and rose like a listless tide, swallowing that little bit more of her spirit.
Endless. Was it truly a blessing to be endless?
With a heaving sigh that seemed to shift her ribs in her chest, Serana Volkihar lowered her fingers to rest once more on the stone. She shifted her sight to the glow of torchlight, warm and welcoming, the small shadows of activity murmuring echoes of life upon the clear plains. She was watching the city for a particular ripple.
Most would be sleeping at this hour. She could see guards, walking back and forth across battlements and the gates, watching for the unknown surprise threat that might come to beat at the gates of their home this night. Among the figures on the walls, and those at the sequential lower gates that she could see, illuminated by pulsing braziers, there was a Khajit. A single guard watching over a collective of colourful tents, a caravan no doubt, though Serana puzzled as to why they were not allowed to seek safety within the city. But that was all the trivial momentary wanderings of her distracted gaze.
No. Soon she would come. That great pacifier of a notion. Not yet, not in a undetermined time in the distant future, but soon, living in the moment just beyond the next.
Serana was aware of the gates opening. She watched, stretching her pale neck just a little, as a woman, cloaked in a raiment of deep green, a pale dress of washed out blue peeking out from underneath, stepped out from the deep shadows. She could see little detail from her boulder, the distance between it and the city too vast for her eyes. Only the shapes of colour and delicate gate of her walk. With a shivering eagerness, the silent ghost of her dead heart saw fit to set the echo of its beat just a little faster. Few had left the city since the beginning of her vigil, but maybe, maybe this was her.
The figure descended the sloping path from the main gates at a steady pace, stopping briefly to pass a handful of words with the Khajit guard, but in no great hurry to proceed quickly.
The urge to stand, to descend from her perch and move just that little bit nearer, came close to maddening her. It would have been foolish of course, to make her presence known without first confirmation that the figure was who she hoped it to be. She was too old to be that foolish. She should have been at least, if her parents' lectures were to be believed.
The shrouded woman passed by the last vestiges of man crafted structure that surrounded the palisade city, slipping into the silvery palette of the moon lit plains. She left the road once firmly out of the sights and memories of the watchmen at their posts, turning roughly to where Serana sat. Through hollow and over hill she walked, picking her way with noticeable familiarity across the rocky earth. At one moment she stopped, seeming to peer around the lunar lit landscape, searching.
At this moment Serana discarded her cautious neutrality, and stood waving a hand high above her head so she might be noticed, her pale skin shining like a beacon in the black and grey landscape around her. If this woman was not who she thought then she could dispatch her with little difficulty, should events turn to violence.
The woman saw her and returned the familiar gesture, though perhaps with stunted enthusiasm, adjusting her path to meet the foot of Serana's rock formation. At fifty yards, the features of her body and her face became clear, and Serana relaxed her tensions, recognition soothing her concerns.
She slid from her perch just as the woman reached the stone, slipping to the ground before her, a little dust picked up and clouding briefly in the darkness.
The cowl of forest green was pulled down by lightly tanned hands, crisscrossed with small scars, and dark curls tumbled forwards, framing a face of delicate feminine countenance and, at the same time, premature sobriety. Beneath dark angular brows, grey eyes looked upon Serana with curious, well settled surprise.
"I must be honest, I did not really expect it to be you waiting out here." The woman said, her voice quiet, not quite welcoming but neither carrying the bite of immediate disapproval. Purposefully it seemed balanced in preparation listen, and to then to mark approval on Serana's actions.
Serana held no such doubts. She was cheered at the site of the woman, more so than she had any sensible right to be, and gave a smile that she hoped conveyed her pleasure. "It is good to see you again." She confessed openly.
The woman refused her easy cheer. "You have put yourself in danger by straying so far from you kin Serana. Few in Whiterun would hesitate to attack a vampire if they knew one was so close to their city." Still, she spoke without defined emotion, though upon her carefully constructed features she let slip an almost imperceptible dip of her brows. A little frown, marred the constructed peace of her features.
"I needed to see you." Serana begged silently that she could make her voice convey the deep truth of her words. She wanted to infect the woman before her with her own joy, and drive away the mask that shadowed her face. Freeing her, she hoped, to return her sentiment.
"Home…" Serana hesitated, feeling the empty ache within her that longed for the ideal behind the word, one that she knew she'd likely never feel in her father's presence again. "…it was not what I'd hoped for. My father has not changed, and I needed to escape before he could set his hands upon the elder scroll. I needed to find you.".
The stoic front melted away. In a gesture of warmth Serana had not known for many waking decades, the woman stepped closer and wrapped her warm hands around Serana's, holding them firmly. "I'm so sorry Serana." She said, and Serana believed her.
Her hands were lightly calloused. Serana could feel the worn smoothness of them won from practiced and repeated actions, against her own unmarred, unnatural skin. The gentle heat of the contact spread soothingly up her arms to her chest, warming her against the chill she had not realised had settled into her bones in ages past. "Thank you."
The words fell between the two women, breaking the last hold of the mask.
A soft, gentle smile, as precious and beautiful as frost under starlight, spread across the woman's face, and she gave Serana's clasped hands a comforting squeeze. "I had an inkling I would see you again" She offered lightly, and with winning warmth. "That you found your way to me is impressive. How did you manage it? So much of Skyrim must have changed."
Dark truth lapped at the base of her tongue, bonded with her melancholy, threatening with eager delight to break the hard won happiness of this reunion she had longed for as soon as they had parted. She would do more harm if she did not tell her, and in all truth the woman may know of her watchers already. So, with reluctance, Serana explained her travels, but hid away the deaths. The woman need not know of the corpses in the fort.
If the guards thought it strange that a single, unarmed woman had left their city, then returned with a heavily shrouded stranger an hour later, they made no comment of it. Though, on closer passing inspection of their purposefully turned gazes, perfectly averted away from their approach, Serana surmised that perhaps they somehow knew it was best, in this case, not to ask.
What they knew, or how such knowledge had come to them, Serana could not be sure. Although she largely kept her head down and her molten copper eyes hidden below the edge of her heavy hood, on guarded occasion, in their ascension to the city gates, she risked a glance up to study the woman leading her.
A face with striking eyes, a sketch of a necklace, and an apparent fear at the sight of the costal fort. Those three separately innocuous things had allowed her to track her saviour down, all being mentioned in the dead elf's letter. But with that her knowledge of the woman withered.
No name had been given in their exchanges. Serana had offered her own, and it had been taken, and used pleasantly. However there had never seemed a moment to ask for the woman's. Not before her father's dominion had swept up before them, casting terminal shadow to their brief journey and companionship. When opportunity had become lost, vanishing with the woman's tumultuous exit from the castle, Serana had found herself longing in the space of the absence. The pit of her heart gaped open and she felt it's own absence more keenly than ever, when she realised that she'd had no means of finding the woman again.
Now, with the reaction of the guards, her father's reaction to the woman, and the letter, she knew, regardless of title or label, her saviour was someone of measurable power. At least within Whiterun, if not further beyond the hold.
The Imperial woman held herself with a grace that would earn, at least mild approval from Serana's mother. A feat few could hold claim to, and certainly no mortal had ever obtained since their collective 'ascension'. A certain air of softened nobility seemed to resonate in the woman's stride, a well-practiced, habitual command of softer, more gentle aspects of the unspoken language of the body.
The pair were admitted into the city without second glance, the pair of masked guards nodding at the woman, signalling that the heavy wood should be pulled back for them. Once they had stepped through, Serana making sure to keep her head down, the great slowly swinging gates were bolted and barred firmly behind them.
An invisible fist gripped Serana's neck, a swell of sudden tightness catching hold of her throat and squeezing, till her airways felt husky and parched. She stopped, and stood quite still for a long moment. Attempting to calm herself in the face of the press of the stone, pushing back the tide of her memories.
Stone, all around her. Nothing but an inch of air. Dark. So dark she couldn't see. Her nose brushing the limit of her world. The sounds of her own screams causing her ears to bleed, the sound itself incapable of escaping it. Unable to move, to sit, or lie. Forced to stand till her muscles stiffened and her bones calcified into that rigid stance. Eternity, pressed inside a box and forgotten about. Crying out to a deaf, distant, uncaring world. She'd cried for a lifetime.
A glance of concern with shimmering silver eyes. A touch, at first just a brush, then a presence as fingers were intertwined with her own. The tug on her stationary hand persuaded Serana's feet to once more take up their tarry. Her saviour led her onwards, walking this time close to her side.
"Are you alright?" She asked, her voice foggy and distant to her ears, leaning just close enough to Serana that her soft whisper could only be heard by the vampire.
With cobbled stone beneath her feet and the warmth of the woman at her side, Serana's mind clung onto its slipping sanity fervently. The darkness of the night provided little solace for her, the walls were still there, and she tried, she truly tried to bear it no mind.
She could see tightness in every corner. Suffocation in the stones. Closing air in the tapestry of wood and thatch. All too close, pressing against her. Her mind, her body…
Serana held great value in truth, and in this instance, she had no reason to lie. "I can't breathe." She replied, her skull swimming with heavy sound and movement as nausea took hold over panic and fought for supremacy. Pulse might be beyond her body now, but breath was still vital.
She swayed, though such things were beyond her own perception in her growing delirium. The woman at her arm encircled her waist, quickening their pace and making a lurching push to a door.
Then, in the next moment of Serana's clarity, there was no door, only a dark room, a lowly murmur of cinders in a fire pit, a single thrumming blossom of crimson amber, dying at it's centre.
She was alone. The warmth of the woman was gone. She felt the cold seep back through her limbs, coiling back to her bones. Traveling on a single, terrible breath, the icy absence of her cursed gift spread and scraped along her limbs, chilling her right down to her toes, a shiver ricocheting in its wake. Serana feared it would consume her, as it had done before, after the first lifetime of tears, and she would be lost to the endless depths of unwaking sleep again. The crush of immobile, looming walls pushing her tighter and tighter, till her bones splintered and her skull cracked. And her heart. Her dead, unbeating heart would give up its memory of life, its ghost pulse. And she would be forgotten in the well of her nightmares. Forgotten.
The shaft of pale moonlight that had followed their entry was shuttered, the last embers stuttering and dying in a final gust of air. The door swung shut upon the world and everything within fell into silence.
Seconds eked past where all was hauntingly still. Serana's knees began to shudder and shake as the waters of dread seeped into her joints. Coiling, thick, clear icy liquid, distilled from all the eons of utter absence, one year upon another, slipping into each other, becoming a great heaving mass that sucked her under its surface and pulled her down.
A body, smaller than her own, with fire in its flesh, caught her descent and held her up stubbornly. Strong arms looped under her own and dragged her through the darkness. She was heaved into a chair. Solid, the frame supported her shaking muscles. She melted into the simple comfort of sitting.
There was a spark in the darkness, beyond where the limit of the prison should be. Then a rustle and scratching of movement. Amber light flashed. Once, twice, each time illuminating a face, hard with concentration, eyes on the tinder heaped below the woman's shaking hands. On the third attempt the light caught and the spark became a flame, washing the room in flickering light.
With a sigh so heavy with relief the woman's shoulders lifted once free of its burden she coaxed the flame, breathing gently upon it, guiding up to take hold on the dry wood in the pit. The fire obeyed her commands, the light rose, alien warmth prickled the tips of Serana's toes.
Once seemingly satisfied that the fire would hold, the woman turned to her and was at her side in a moment. Concern made her face soft in the half glow, her lips slightly parted, her eyes shimmering reflectively. A feather light touch flitted across Serana's forehead as the woman assessed her attack.
"Look at my hand." She coaxed her as she had the flame, gently and with great care.
Serana found it a physical ache to follow the request, frightened that by drawing her gaze away from her face the wall might close back in. But she drew a long breath, closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them again turned them reluctantly from the woman's face to her hand.
It was curled slightly, the skin creasing, casting curving shadows across a smooth palm. Slowly, so very slowly it began to sway. Like the dance of a reed on the banks of a languid river, back and forth it tipped, easing into a breathing rhythm.
She soon found her mind steadying to meet this carefully measured pattern. It calmed her. Neatly, it crafted around her a deep, encompassing, cushion of achingly sweet drowsiness. She was sure that she had been awake for too long. Certain that her worries had pressed upon her, wearing her so thin. Now this swell and roll of beckoning motion was pulling her back together, and laying her down low to a new sleep, free of the nightmares, true rest, watched over by an ever-present guide and guardian.
Her saviour let her hand drift softly to Serana's lap, where it wove its fingers around the barely conscious older woman's own.
"Are you better now?" She asked on the breath of a whisper, hushed and gentle, like the texture of Yellow Mountain petals caught under the rays of the setting sun. Accompanied by a dainty fleeting smile, it would have surely put any on looker at the most agreeable of eases.
A great heaving sigh, that felt it lifted Serana's very ribs, bid itself free of her, and she sank back further into the comfort of the chair. "Yes".
The haze thinned a little, and then came the irresistible itch of her ever-hungry curiosity. "What was that?" She asked, her voice low and melodic in its induced tranquillity.
The woman kneeling beside her drew tingling circles on the back of Serana's hand with her calloused thumb. A flash of keen intelligence sharpened in the watery depths of her pale eyes, a studious wealth of knowledge lay beneath, the extents of which seemed beyond Serana's fading understanding.
"It is a little complex," she explained. Her concern, now becoming familiar and always it seemed readily given to her, wrapped Serana in a soft blanket. "And I do not wish to tire you any further."
Serana squeezed her hand weakly and hoped the movement urged the woman to answer.
"Sweeping, calm motion," her saviour twice over began, "is a calming well known reflex of the body. When a mother rocks her child, it is the slow, controlled motion, along with the warmth and safety of the mother's arms that induces in the child sleep. What I used is a similar principle. When a person panics their eyes dart to many fleeting points around them, adding to their manic, disorientated state. If this can be brought back to familiar rocking movement, then lucidity and eventually rest can be coaxed out of the mania."
Words washed around Serana like sweet song. She heard, and for the most part she understood, but true meaning would not sink into her at that time. Weariness had beaten the meaning to her bones, and in that moment, she found her eyes heavy with waiting sleep.
It was strange. She had not rested in so long, yet she felt she had spent half her life and more asleep, sequestered away in that stone prison. How strange it was to wish for sleeps familiar and transformed embrace her body was slipping into.
Tender mirth, half hidden though unashamedly fond, coloured the notes of the woman's lilting voice. "Sleep now Serana" she urged, placing a mesmerizingly touch on her forehead, brushing aside a few strands of her dark hair, and the last remnants of the older woman's resting worries.
Clinging to a final simper of energy the entirely vulnerable vampire pushed out one last question.
"What is your name?"
A pause. She hoped it was a pause that signalled the flicker of a smile upon her saviour's face, for her eyes had slid closed and she had not the strength to open them. After a breath, warm damp air coiling on Serana's pale cheek, the nameless saviour gave her name and unknowingly set her anchor in the ghost of Serana's silent heart.
"Maesa".
Rewrite!
All will become clear in the fullness of time.
I had begun noticed some glarring errors with my own plans for this story and needed to correct past mistakes in some important details before the story continued.
If you're a reader from before the rewrite, please bear with me, it'll be worth it.
If you're new, welcome to the story and I hope you enjoy yourself.