A/N: This ties in with my other story, Shriller Than All the Music. You don't need to have read that to understand this, but a lot of it will make more sense if you have. There are minor spoilers for Shriller, but they're fairly subtle, so you should be fine if you haven't read it but are planning on doing so.

The Precipice of the Void

He stands on the porch, looking out over the snowy fields. It's springtime in County Bruma—which means more cold, more grey skies, and even an occasional snowfall. You have to know this land to farm it—really, really know it. It is a labor of love, not profit. The soil is rocky and requires constant maintenance to keep it fertile, but plant things correctly and they will grow. It's difficult to farm at this elevation and in this climate, but he's seen this land in its glory days. He knows it can be done. Of course, it's lain fallow for the past year—and it's been over three decades since it was at its height.

He doesn't know why he finally decided to return here, he muses as he fills his pipe. Also, he can't remember when he started smoking again. He scans the horizon, but there are no black figures appearing against it. Only the low piles of rubble left over from the peasants' huts are visible. Those huts were pulled down thirty years ago, not long after the peasants themselves left. They hadn't wanted to. They'd known the land, known what was going wrong, and they'd tried to explain, but no one had listened. No one who had the power to do anything about it, anyhow. So they'd left. They made their homes where there was work, and there'd been no work at Applewatch.

So now the debris stands, low monuments to another time, headstones to the past. He glances sourly in the other direction, where five recently erected headstones stand. They shouldn't be here. He stares at them intently, as though he can wipe them away by the mere force of his thoughts. The Draconis family razed Applewatch, ran it straight into the ground and ruined it. They don't deserve to be entombed in its soil. If he had the means, he would arrange to have them exhumed and their coffins piled in front of the Great Chapel of Talos—let them rot there in the undercroft instead. But he doesn't have the means—not currently, anyway. His primary objective is to stay alive. So he simply glares at the offending headstones, and silently promises them that he will return for them.

But he shifts his attention away, back out over the fields. He found the will. It's back where it should be now, but he'd found it beneath the mattress. It'd been a generally inaccessible hiding place, he thinks, but it'd been obvious. Too obvious. He found it within twenty minutes. He snorts. It's slightly bloodstained, but the blood belongs to Perennia Draconis, and he smiles in satisfaction at that knowledge. All is as it should be.

So what's taken him so long? He wonders as he takes another puff from the pipe. He's had nearly six months to make his way back here. So why hasn't he until now? He has been busy, he reasons. There was the mess in the Sanctuary to take care of. And then there were the times he had to travel to place the dead drops, and without Shadowmere, that took some significant amounts of time. And then of course, he'd been tracking the traitor. His face creases into a deep scowl at that thought. Stupid, stupid. He slams a fist into one of the supports, making it shudder and causing a section of snow to slide off the roof further down. Tracking the traitor. What a horrendous mistake on his part that turned out to be.

He's been Speaker for the past fifteen years—fifteen years spent, for the most part, in good standing. He took the role he was handed and made it his own. His Sanctuary doesn't—or didn't, rather—have the problems the others do. The highest rates of contract success—thanks to his decision to place Vicente Valtieri in charge of new recruits. Not a Tenet broken in thirteen years—thanks to a quickly thought-out personnel change on his part. And furthermore, his assassins genuinely seemed to like each other. They ate together, trained together, laughed together, lived together. They were friends. They were more than that—they were family.

He'd had to fight so hard to stifle his snickers when he was recruited, when the woman who would come to be his Speaker had shown up and started throwing words like "family" around. And he'd found it even more amusing when he got to the Sanctuary itself and met his fellow assassins. They were antagonistic and petty, and were just as likely to stick knives in each others' backs as to look at one another. Vicente had become a mentor of sorts to him, but other than that, he'd kept to himself and done his job. He was good at it. And over the next five years, his skills grew exponentially, and when the position of Silencer opened up, he'd been the obvious pick. And then four years after that, the Speaker was killed, he was named in her place, and he'd showed up to the Cheydinhal Sanctuary and cleaned house.

He'd recruited as though his life depended on it that spring—and in a sense, it had. The Shadowscale twins, the cutthroat Mages Guild dropout, the dishonored Orc: those had been the beginnings of it, Cheydinhal Sanctuary's hope for the future. That Bosmer client's slippery bastard daughter had come later, and that had been where the trouble started. But not with her—oh no, she had melded well with the others, and her subterfuge skills proved to be invaluable. The trouble, he thinks darkly, had been with him. And that was when he'd made his first mistake.

He had arrived at the Sanctuary three years after he had, but interestingly enough, he ended up being one of the primary reasons he's never felt at home there. Even in all these years since he's been gone, he hasn't spent more time than necessary in the Sanctuary. At sixteen years old, he'd already been a vicious killer, but that's always been what bothers him about him—he has no control. Everyone—even assassins he himself had clashed with—felt uncomfortable around the boy, and trouble seemed to follow him—and everyone he came into contact with. But that, he could handle. Assassins were supposed to be unlikeable; his recruits were the expectation. The real problem with him, though, had started when he began stalking Telaendril.

The woman had been wary of the attention she was receiving, but she handled it well. She knew how to take care of herself. But then, when he started showing up during her scouting missions and jeopardizing those, they'd all known there was a much greater issue at hand. Then there'd been the night he'd attacked her—right in the middle of the main hall, no less. She'd defended herself; he would have those scars for the rest of his miserable life. But still, he had nearly beaten her face in before the other Brothers and Sisters managed to drag him away. Luckily for them, he thinks slyly, the Anvil Speaker's Silencer had tangled with a nasty frost troll days before. The letter had been written that night, and he was gone within three days.

Even to this day, he still knows that was the best thing he's ever done for his Family. He's never regretted it—nor will he ever. But in the long run, he knows it was the worst thing he could have done for himself. Because the day he turned him loose, he set himself up to be hunted. And he has been hunted ever since. This didn't happen over weeks or even months, oh no. This has been in the workings for years. And he knows the traitor is him. He knows it in his very bones. Everything fits into place—just a little too neatly. He's slick, but overly so; that's always been what gives him away. Leave it to him to get his claws into everyone involved.

There's a letter inside lying on the kitchen table, a letter addressed to his Silencer. In it, he explains everything. Everything he should have told her in Bravil. He didn't want to say it, given his lack of proof, but once he got here, he realized that was all the proof he needed. He was not one to leave evidence behind. His teeth grit together at the thought of his Silencer. For all he knows she's walking into a trap—after all those months of manipulation, of playing the traitor's game right in the palm of his hand, there's reason to be concerned if she's not dead already. Whatever he has planned, it won't be good. And so that's why he's written the letter. When he allows himself to be silent, to be absolutely still, he knows what his fate will be. He can't stand the thought of her going on alone, being blindsided when the traitor springs the trap. And he won't be there to warn her—because he is going to die today.

And that, he realizes, is why he's returned here. To Applewatch, in these: his final days. He was born here, and it seems only fitting that he should die here as well. He'll have his one last bit of satisfaction, he thinks grimly, one thing the traitor won't be able to take from him. He tries not to think on it, taking in deep gulps from his pipe instead. Dead is dead, he reasons, and he was going to end up dead eventually, one day or another. But the hours leading up to it… He draws in a ragged breath. Those will be exceptionally unpleasant. But pain is pain, he reminds himself, and once it's over, he'll never experience it again. No more slices and punctures, no more crunching impacts. No more of the flesh-wasting power of destruction magic. No more hunger or thirst, no more stiff muscles. And no more of ache that's settled just over the left side of his chest. Because that's the real reason he's put off returning for so long. He didn't want to without her.

He explained some of it to his Silencer, and he'd meant to write more in the letter, but at the last minute, he'd lost his nerve. How could he explain what she'd meant to him? She was the reason the Draconis contracts existed in the first place. She reminded him of who he was, and of who he was meant to be. She made him want to reclaim, to retake, to become. And she'd done all this just by being—by being her. Fort Farragut was no place for someone like her. But she would have loved it here. And for a few moments, his thoughts are devoted to simply remembering.

He failed her. He knows that, and he's carried that guilt around for the past eight months. And a very small, selfish part of him is embracing his impending death, because the weight of that guilt will finally be gone. But another, larger part knows that it's not fair, because he deserves to suffer. Here he is at the end, finally defiant...only too late. Though suffer he will…

He finishes the last of his pipe, then takes one final sweeping gaze of the land before retreating back inside. He bolts the door into place behind him, although he knows that won't keep them out for very long. Folding the letter, he slips it into the pocket of his robes before shrugging out of them, neatly folding them and placing them there on the kitchen table. There's still a chance, some hopeful part of him suggests, that his Silencer could get here in time. But he knows that won't be the case. With any luck, she will be named to his position, and they'll simply hand her over his old robes rather than have her fitted for new ones. And then, he just prays she finds the letter before it's too late.

He sits down by the fireplace and props his boots up on the hearth. It's chilly in here with the loss of his woolen robes, and he wishes he had a fire. But he won't make it that easy for them. If they want him, they'll have to fight for him, figure it out for themselves. As the gravity of the coming events slowly descends over him, he closes his eyes, tilting his head back. He seems to always draw suffering. Maybe if he'd stayed away from her, she would have been safe. But he knows better than that. The malevolence behind this tragedy goes far beyond anything he or his Silencer could have prevented. They have only a false sense of security and their own gullibility to blame. But out of fools out there coming for him, he is the only true child of Sithis. And although it hardly matters now, he is his father's son.

There's a scuffling outside. He knows what Shadowmere's hooves sound like, and he knows that what he's hearing isn't them. His time is up. There are voices, now, sounding as though they're clustered outside the door. And as a lockpick clinks the door's bolt mechanism out of the way, he rises to his feet and opens his eyes.