Chapter 3

Morning came as it always did. It was a chilly sunrise, to say the least, but Arathor loved it no less than he always did to see the dark sky suddenly ablaze with the first tendrils of light as they spread outwards, shattering into a rainbow of colour and turning the cloud a brilliant red. He sat on the wooden steps of the stables outside Kvatch watching it, back pressed against a dark pillar, apple in hand, contemplating his future slowly.

He sniffed. "Rain's coming," he said to nobody, hauling himself to his feet before vaulting a fence into the paddock. There had never been many horses up here in all the years he had hung around, and today was no exception; they slept huddled under a tarpaulin he had slung up to keep them dry, the four white animals he had brought with him from Anvil after he had vowed to come up here. He dropped the apple into a feeding trough and walked off, satisfied.

It was a quiet life here in Kvatch to say the least. Very few traders ever went up the plateau and very few townsfolk ever went down; they kept themselves apart from the rest of Cyrodiil by not being involved in any of that politics business that frankly the mer did not wish to understand, and he couldn't say he blamed them. What little news that did make it up the steep winding road did not appear to be good, though he had to admit that business would be better somewhere else. It was hard to be an ostler in a town with only four horses.

Padding back into his house, Arathor threw himself back into a chair and kicked his feet up on the table, scowling at the offending appendages as he did so. It was not so much the feet themselves that annoyed him, but rather the skin that covered them, the thing that made so many people dislike him on sight. The product of an infidelity, Arathor was neither a Bosmer nor a Dunmer, but somewhere in between – his skin was neither Dunmeri green nor Bosmeri tan, and his hair was blond while his eyes had turned out crimson. He had lost track of the number of times he had been mistaken for a vampire as a result. Tall for a Wood Elf and short for a Dark Elf, he could not fit into either society, and had been spurned by both until he had run away to Cyrodiil when he had had enough. He kept his father's clan name – though technically it did not belong to him - but he did not find honour in it.

The only thing Arathor Samarys truly classed himself as was a mer; he was barely an ostler and he was barely a citizen of Kvatch. At least nobody could challenge him if he called himself a mer.

His father was dead though, along with all of the trueborn Samarys children, killed when the Ministry of Truth had crashed into Vivec and crushed them. Of that misfortune, Arathor merely said 'Truth hurts', though he was sure never to clarify whether he meant the truth of having a bastard half-breed for a son or having a hollowed out moon land on his head. His mother was somewhere in Valenwood, he suspected – though he couldn't say for certain. There was every possibility that she was dead – and she would likely stay there forever. The Bosmer, while outwardly a warmer race than their dark-skinned counterparts, had not accepted him any more than the Dunmer had, especially when he refused to honour their Green Pact and blithely developed a liking for apples. He had left the province soon afterwards.

So here he was, Arathor Samarys, twenty-six year old half-Bosmeri bastard, sitting in a wooden house beyond the walls of a city that he considered somewhat akin to a phoenix. It had risen from the ashes, stronger than before from what he had heard. He had not seen it before and he had seldom seen it afterwards; he only had the words of those few travellers who ventured up here to go on.

He rose again, dusting off his tan trousers with the palm of his mud-covered hand before crossing his tiny house to pick up the only book he had ever read: Notes on Racial Phylogeny. It was a subject close to his heart, if he had to put a reason on why exactly he felt the need to keep it close, and he had learnt to read by scouring its pages and asking letter sounds from clients. In short, it described what was created when races interbred, and the characteristics those offspring presented to the world. Arathor particularly liked the line which stated clearly that in most cases the offspring took the race of the mother, with a select few traits from the father's race. "Thank you father," he muttered as he flicked through the pages for the umpteenth time. They were smeared with grime from years of use and tattered all along one edge. "Your trait gets me mistaken for a vampire."

To say that he was not sore about that fact would have been a lie.

The knock to his door startled him and he dropped his book onto the straw pallet he called a bed. He rarely slept in the thing, and a plume of dust filled his lungs as the manuscript thumped it. He coughed violently. There are never customers this early, he complained bitterly to himself as he tried to expel the rest of the filth from his airways until his eyes started streaming. Apparently these customers were impatient, because they knocked again all the more firmly.

"We'd like to buy three horses," a female voice informed him before he'd even opened the door more than a crack. She sounded like a Nord, and when he looked he saw that his suspicions had been correct, though she was the strangest looking Nord he had ever laid eyes on. Her skin was whiter than milk and she was squinting at him from beneath a green mage's hood.

"Three?"

A Breton was with her too. A woman who looked almost of age with Arathor with red hair like fire and a sword strapped around her waist, a shield slung across her back and potions lodged in her sword belt. "Yes, three. Weren't you listening?"

"It's not like you can blame the man…" a Redguard responded. He was tall for his race, but not such much that it was especially noticeable, and his hair was pulled into fine braids that reached his shoulders before they were secured off his face. The sword he wore looked new and made of iron, but it seemed as though he was unused to the weight judging by the way he was leaning to one side and kept subconsciously touching the hilt. When he took a good look at Arathor, his eyes widened.

"I'm not a vampire," the half-Bosmer explained wearily, bearing his regular sized teeth in order to prove the point. These days he found it easier to pre-empt the question before they even asked it rather than wait for the panic to set in. It tended to scare the horses.

"But- But your eyes are…"

"My father was a Dunmer." Once upon a time he might have tried to deny that fact and claim that he was simply a Bosmer with naturally red eyes, but somewhere along the way he had grown up and learned to accept his heritage for what it was.

The Nord girl grinned beneath her hood; it was a nice smile, a far cry from the ones he usually got when he got around to clearing up their troubles. "You don't look like a Dunmer," she laughed, though she sounded more like she was hyperventilating. The other two did not seem to see the joke – the Redguard had hung back a little from the two women and the Breton appeared to disapprove of him already.

"That's because I'm not."

"A half Dunmer then?" she chuckled, pushing back her hood. "You're not the only one who's got a strange appearance. I turned my hair pink!" True to her words, her hair was indeed bright pink, a ridiculous colour for a girl with such a pale complexion. Arathor found himself tittering with her, and even the Redguard boy was smirking. The Breton, however, still was not impressed. "I did it by accident, mind you… A spell kind of… Backfired? Or… Or maybe just failed to Dispel. I'm hoping it'll fade or something." She pulled her hood back up. It was probably a wise action.

"What about these horses?" the Breton girl folded her arms. She was about the same height as Arathor and she met his gaze without flinching.

The ostler sighed. "See, I only have four horses…"

"And we only want three. Your problem being?"

His eyes narrowed at her by a fraction, but he decided that it was probably best not to let himself be rude to one of the few customers he actually got up here. "I only have four horses, and you only want three. The problem, you see, is that I would only have one left after you galloped off into the sunset, and what good is an ostler with only one horse? The poor things have got used to being together and-"

"You can come with us!" The Nord girl's suggestion apparently caught her counterparts as much off guard as it did Arathor. She, blissfully unaware, turned to the Redguard boy. "You always said you wanted a couple more people to come with us, Aden…" The mer had to admit, he was almost inclined to like this girl and her poisonous cheer.

The boy, who was named Aden by the sounds of it, opened his mouth and closed it again rather like a brain-dead fish before he finally blurted: "But we don't know anything about this guy!" and shot a warning glance towards the red-haired Breton. "Come on Finny… We don't even know if he wants to go."

"Of course he does," Finny replied after less than a second's worth of thought on the matter. "You can see it in his eyes… Look…" Arathor decided very quickly that it was quite disconcerting the way that she was staring at him, especially when she had to squint and lean in to do so. "And you didn't know anything about me before you broke into my house and hit me with a wooden sword! You thought I was a ghost!" An easy mistake to make. She definitely looked like a ghost, if nothing else. "Hi, I'm Kolfinna Ice-Heart," she said cheerily, extending a hand towards the mer that very nearly hit him. She had been bending in too close and forgot to compensate.

"Arathor," he responded uncertainly. "Samarys…" He included his clan name as an afterthought when he realised that her clan name didn't seem much more fitting than his did. "You don't seem like you have an icy heart," he admitted, taking her hand and shaking it.

Kolfinna giggled. "You never met my father. If I ever drop his name, I know what I'll be given in return… There aren't exactly many people like me around, are there?" She gestured to herself, her white skin seeming almost paler against the deep green of her robes. No, there most certainly aren't any people like you. She grinned as though she knew something hilarious. "I could probably ask you why you keep your father's name," she pointed out. "But since you're obviously so thrilled about your Dunmeri heritage, I figured it out already. My father abandoned me." For the first time since she had been speaking, she sounded almost sad. "And I was his legitimate pure-breed daughter… I can only imagine what they must have done to you."

The half-Bosmer shrugged. "It's not so bad, once you get used to it," he lied. Why am I telling these things to people I've only just met?

"Liar," she whispered, though she said nothing else. Arathor didn't even try to fight the accusation.

The red-haired Breton cleared her throat loudly. "What about these horses?" she demanded, placing her hands on her hips. Her eyes were a blue so dark that they reminded him of the night sky on a gloomy evening; he found no pleasure looking at them.

"I guess… He could come with us…" Aden muttered after a period of silence, though Arathor could not remember ever saying he wished to go. Finny hugged the boy excitedly. "I mean… Feu?" The Breton girl winced visibly, though the other two did not seem to notice.

"This is your ridiculous quest," she spat viciously. "But I swear on Mara's holy name that if you plan on picking up every single wastrel we encounter then I'm staying right here."

"Wastrel?" the mer was not easily offended after the years of abuse he had received for his obscure parentage, but never before had anyone called him a wastrel. "You don't know anything about me."

"All the more reason not to trust you." She was adamant in that, at least, and folded her arms again, fingers of her right hand brushing against the hilt of her blade. "You've lived outside of our city for Akatosh only knows how long, and yet we know nothing about you. That means you've obviously got something to hide."

Arathor opened his mouth to reply to her, but Kolfinna cut him off. "No, it's called being different," she stated. She sounded almost serious, even though all he'd seen of her so far had been jovial. "It's called people being ashamed of you…" Her eyes fell. Blue eyes, so pale they were almost as colourless as her skin. "My father kept me hidden for ten years, took me far away from Skyrim, lived with me in Kvatch for a month or so and then left me here alone in a locked house with a couple of bags of food and a blanket. All because of this." She pulled her sleeve up her arm to expose her snowy skin to the soft morning sunlight; even now it seemed to reflect the light and the ostler had to look away to stop himself hurting his eyes. "Having people be ashamed of you tends to make you ashamed of yourself. I loved my father and he treated me like an abomination." She rounded on the Breton abruptly. "The only thing different about you is your hair, and even then it's still a normal enough colour to go unnoticed… Imagine if you were only half Breton. Imagine if you had been born with no colour to speak of. Being different and being afraid of judgement is not a crime…"

The mer felt an uncanny desire to embrace her comfortingly for what she had said and the genuineness behind it. "Kolfinna…" he started.

"Finny." She smiled at him.

"Finny," he corrected himself. "I think you might be the most colourful person I know." She was as well. Not colourful in the sense of being brightly coloured – nobody could be less so, save for her bright pink hair that she had achieved by mistake – but more colourful in that she was unpredictable and amusing and strangely interesting to speak with. Arathor found himself liking her instantly.

The girl grinned. "That's just tacky."

"He's right though," Aden muttered in agreement. "You are, Finn, very much so."

"I really don't know about that," she chuckled. "So, Arathor, are you coming with us?"

The mer in question blinked. "You do know that you never told me where you were going, don't you? What am I agreeing to? A trek to Akavir? A whiz up and down the Gold Road? A journey into remote Orsinium? A romp down to Leyawiin?"

"We're going to the Imperial City!" Finny told him.

"To find the Hero of Kvatch," the Redguard finished for her.

The Hero of Kvatch. Yes, Arathor had heard about her. The woman who stopped this town from being razed to the ground not ten years past, a shadowy figure that almost nobody seemed to know or care about. Some people said she was a Dunmer, while others were not entirely sure, but they all said that she was dressed in black leather with a hood covering most of her face and two deadly swords. Some stories were more far-fetched than others, it had to be said, and all the ostler knew he had heard from strange merchants headed up to Kvatch to buy or sell, looking up at the walls and proclaiming all that they knew about this mysterious figure. He had heard other stories too… "Isn't she dead?"

"Probably," the redhead admitted, tapping her foot impatiently. "Come on." She threw a glance at the gates of Kvatch as though she were running from something, but the ostler made no attempt to even guess as to what.

"But there aren't any other ostlers around here…"

The Breton scowled. "How many years have you been here?"

"Three… Maybe four…"

"And how many horses have you sold in that time?"

"Ah." If anything, his lack of reply spoke more volumes than any words ever could, but eventually he gave her a reply. "None, actually. I turned up here with four horses, and four years later I still have four horses. It would be sad to see them go…" For the first time since they have turned up, he left his doorway and paced slowly across to his paddock, clambering over the fence in a less fluid manner than before. Beneath his feet the ground felt familiar, soft and peaty, springy and likewise firm. The animals that had been his life were still dozing beneath their makeshift shelter, but it was still only just dawn, so he could not fault them for it. He knew them all by sight and by name, and they all recognised him; there was no way he would let three of them go and be able to sleep soundly when eventually he lay his head down to sleep. If nothing else, he would go for the love of his horses, the family he never really had, the only things that accepted him regardless of his racial traits. His customers were waiting expectantly next to the fence. "I'll go," he spoke quietly, losing his words to the breeze, and yet somehow they still heard him.

"Finally…"

Arathor straightened up and took a long look at his little wooden house. He had built it himself with very little help once he had finally obtained permission from the council of Kvatch to set up a stables for them, made of timber to spite the Bosmer on a foundation of ashes for the Dunmer, the sort of thing that would go unnoticed unless somebody knew enough about him – the number of such people was abnormally small, and none of them lived in Cyrodiil. "Rain's coming," he told them, strolling back to meet them. They were an odd trio, the type you might see once in a lifetime, an ordinary Redguard, a red-haired Breton and an albino Nord. "You probably don't want to be out in this." The Redguard and Nord were both taller than him, but they were the two he settled his eyes upon. There was something about that Breton that made him feel horribly uncomfortable…

"It's only water. We're going now." Another glance towards the gate. This girl was either running or considering staying; the half-Bosmer suspected that it was both. What are you running from? He wanted to ask her. But he daren't. Not her. He had run too, once… Maybe she had the same reasons he did… "Are you going to bother selling us those animals or not?"

Considering this, Arathor shook his head. "Not much point if I'm coming with you. Let me get my stuff…" He hopped over the fence and walked back into his little home, but looking around there was scarcely a thing there that he felt a great deal of inclination to take with him; the others looked like they pretty well had what they were standing in, and they were sensible things like leather jerkins and warm robes and swords… Yes, even half-Bosmer-that-got-mistaken-for-vampires needed weapons, didn't they? He found the iron dagger that he'd had for many years in the same spot that he'd left it for many years, though its age was showing and it was flecked with rust, but without a whetstone that was about as good as it was going to get. Looking pointedly at his naked feet, he pulled on some doeskin shoes after brushing off some of the dirt with the palm of his hand; it was a strange sensation to be wearing shoes again after all this time and he felt an extreme urge to rip the things back off again and burn them in the fires of Oblivion, but he refrained. He peeled off the filthy shirt he was wearing and threw it onto the floor, venturing into his one small cupboard and garbing himself in an olive green shirt with a wine stain down the front that he made some feeble attempt to tuck into his breeches, pathetic things that were ripped off as soon as they reached his mid-calf – he couldn't do better than them, though; he had never been a practical enough person to repair his clothes and had never dared to ask somebody for help. Finally, he wrapped a brown woollen cloak around his shoulders and fastened it beneath his neck; it was too long for him and as a result the hem at the bottom was caked in mud, but it was warm and that was all that mattered. As an afterthought, he picked up five apples, a tiny loaf of bread, the remnants of a bottle of cheap wine, a small bag of coins and his copy of Notes on Racial Phylogeny, which he stuffed carelessly into a sack. There was really nothing else here that he had ever felt a great deal of connection to.

When he stepped back outside it was raining, as he had said it would, a light trickle that was more irritating than anything else. His new companions were waiting for him almost exactly where he had left them, which was a relief, given that they could easily have stolen his horses and been well away by now. Arathor saddled his animals. "Do you think that I ought to tell someone that I'm leaving?" he asked, voicing a question that only came into his mind when he chanced to glance at the city walls as he did so.

"I could go and tell my aunt…" Aden offered, clearly angling to run back through his city one last time before he departed. "She's on the council and-"

The Breton girl cut him off. "Do you think they really care that much? It's not like he does anything for our city."

"What is your problem?" the ostler hissed at her before he had a chance to keep his own tongue in check. He almost regretted speaking too, until he saw the look of surprise on her face that almost made it worth it.

She held her tongue.

Arathor sighed. "Well, I guess it's not essential that people know I'm gone. Very few people pass through here, and all I seem to do is watch horses for an hour or two at a time. All save these four…" He handed reins to Finny and Aden before turning back to the Breton girl. "You're not the first person to be biased against me," he admitted, forcing himself to smile as he handed her the reins of his third horse. "But it's their quest, not ours, and whether or not we're both running from something it doesn't really matter, because we're really both going for them and because of them. So whatever you may think of me… Well, it doesn't really matter. My name is Arathor - I don't answer to Bastard or Abomination or Vampire; pleased to meet you."

"Eleanor," she grumbled. "Eleanor Renault." She clambered onto her mount deftly enough, but once she was up there it was clear she was uncomfortable; the half-Bosmer could tell she had never ridden before.

"Everyone calls her Feu though," Finny stated in a rather over dramatic manner. She was whiter than the horse was, and it made for a strange image to see her up there, her green robes growing darker as they soaked with water to contrast even further. The only way the picture could have got odder was if she had taken her hood down.

"And what would you prefer to be called, Miss Renault?" Arathor swung himself up into the saddle with ease. He had kept his favourite horse for himself, a white-grey mare that he had named Cloud one day when he was at a loose end.

For a moment, Eleanor seemed shocked that he had ever asked the question. "Everyone calls me Feu," she begrudgingly admitted, though she was clearly not best pleased with this prospect. "But very few non-Bretons can pronounce it. I don't think anyone has called me Eleanor in ten years… Not to my face, anyway. Call me either one, I'll answer to both."

"But which would you prefer?" the half-Bosmer insisted. "I never asked you what other people call you or which you answer to. I asked you which one you would personally rather be called."

"Eleanor," she confessed, shooting a look at the other two. "Nobody can pronounce that nickname correctly…" The horse shifted beneath her and she whimpered, clinging to the saddle for dear life.

"How in Mara's name did you expect to get to the Imperial City if you don't even want the horse to move?" Arathor chuckled as she turned the colour of beetroots in embarrassment. "You've got to move with her, not against her, or else you'll fall off. She's a good one, is little Mist…" He patted Eleanor's horse affectionately. "She's not like to chuck you off, but she's not gonna be alright with you up there until you relax. Stressing about it will just stress her out; I've never known her bolt, but I'm the only one that's ever ridden her and she's known me pretty well since she was a foal."

"Can't you give me one of the others then?"

The ostler shook his head. "Mist's about the only one I would trust with you. She's a good horse. Drift used to bolt a lot when she was younger; she doesn't anymore, but I can't be certain how she'd react around new people… Chalk… She's good, but I've been thrown off her more times than I can count over the years – she's grown out of it, mind you, but I wouldn't give her to someone who wasn't confident… And Cloud here? This girl took longest to break in… Years and years. I wouldn't trust her with anybody else for at least another couple of years yet, when I know I can count on her to behave nicely. I hope you two are alright…" he said to Finny and Aden. They looked more secure, at least, whether they had ridden before or not.

"Your knowledge of your animals is pretty impressive," the Redguard conceded. He was riding Chalk; Arathor had decided that that would be a good choice, since he was taller and stronger than both of the women and more likely to be able to cope if the mare got funny with him.

"You spend long enough with 'em and you learn to understand 'em," the mer shrugged in reply. "They're easier to understand than people, anyway, and they're less likely to run away if they think you're a vampire. Horses don't care if you have green eyes or blue eyes or red eyes, or if your mother was a different race to your father. You feed 'em and care for 'em and then they'll accept you for who you are, not what you look like. You three had better take good care of my girls," he warned them, tying his sack to the front of his saddle and then placing its bulk in his lap; it was sodden by now, and he hoped that nothing inside would get ruined.

For somebody who had never ridden before, Eleanor picked it up quickly enough, though she was never brilliant and sometimes she faltered. Arathor had a feeling she was scared of falling from Mist's back, but when he tried to reassure her she snapped at him and denied having any fear whatsoever. Descending from the city's plateau was probably the most difficult thing he could have asked her to do; the track was narrow and wound its way down the cliff side like a serpent, zigzagging left and right and left again, over a flat ledge that the refugees from Kvatch had taken shelter on immediately after the event and down onto the Gold Road. The Breton had her eyes shut by the time they reached the bottom – though she denied that fervently as well – so the ostler had told the other two to dismount and lead their animals down, which would have been decidedly safer. He led Mist and Cloud himself, leaving Eleanor clinging to her saddle as though she would die if she let go.

"Well," Aden laughed as he pulled himself back into the saddle. "This is the furthest I've ever been from home…" It was strange, really, that nobody in Kvatch ever seemed to leave. Perhaps it was understandable that they would stick together after they went through some horrific event as a group, but Arathor did not know why they were all still stuck up there ten years on. They were like a little exclusive club up there, nobody joining, nobody leaving, no outsiders understanding.

"Welcome to the rest of the world."

Kvatch was probably the most unusual of the cities in Cyrodiil. It was perched high up on its own little mountain away from everything, nestled tightly in between the Gold Coast and the West Weald and yet reaping the benefits of neither. County Kvatch was located north of the city, though it could take almost half a day to reach it from the gates of the city unless one learned how to scale a sheer cliff edge or simply to fly, and that too seemed to be between the Gold Coast and the Colovian Highlands. The Gold Road ran east to west between Anvil and Skingrad, and somehow Kvatch had tacked itself right in between them, though it was missed by nearly all of the major traders.

There were nine major cities in Cyrodiil, which made sense if one were to consider their religion but no sense if one glanced at a map; the province might have been circular, if not for Valenwood and Elsweyr, and the Imperial City would have been at its centre, the heart of the Empire and the jewel in the crown, built on an island in the middle of Lake Rumare. The other eight cities might have fanned around it equally, if not for Valenwood and Elsweyr, but, as it happened, those two provinces did not seem likely to move with any particular urgency, and so Cyrodiil was oddly lop-sided in the distribution of its major cities.

There was Leyawiin in the south and Bruma in the north, yes, and Cheydinhal and Chorrol were dutifully in the north-east and north-west as great sentinels, but that was where the logic ended. Bravil had been built on the wrong shore of the Niben where the Larsius River fed into it and where its townspeople had proceeded to make it smell somewhat akin to a cesspit and have the appearance of a pig-sty; when the old count had died of a sudden fever that had almost wiped out the town his son the skooma-addict had taken over and destroyed the place further. These days, it was almost universally avoided. Skingrad and Kvatch ought to have been built further south in order to give the province some kind of symmetry, but alas it was not to be. Skingrad was a prosperous place even amid the turmoil, kept alive by its mysterious count who most people could not claim to have ever seen in anything other than a painting; people did not complain though, because it was obviously better to live in a town run by an enigma than to be poor elsewhere. Kvatch, for what it was, was doing better than most people had anticipated it would following the battle that had given it its scars; Arathor had headed there because he knew they were keeping out of the province's politics and because he supposed that people there were all too wrapped up in their own sorrows to pay him much notice. He had been right.

Still, he felt a twinge of loss to leave the place, and bade the city a silent farewell.

"Have you ever been to the Imperial City?" Finny asked him after they had been on the road for an hour and were beginning to see the beauty of the West Weald. It smelt clean and fresh, and everywhere he looked Arathor saw greenery and flowers and farmland; the area was fabled for its wine and cheese and tomatoes, he knew, and it was easy to see why.

He had to shake his head. "I've only been in Morrowind and Valenwood and Kvatch," he admitted carefully. "I don't remember much of Morrowind, because my mother left in disgrace pretty well as soon as I was born. Valenwood… Eh, I ticked off the Bosmer and then ran away. Kvatch isn't that far from the border at all." If he had keen enough eyesight, he might have seen it from the Gold Road; a hill lolled away southwards all the way into the province belonging to the Wood Elves. Unfortunately, however, borders were not quite as well defined as they were in maps and were not quite the unbroken black lines they appeared to be, a fact that had plagued him somewhat in his flight. He did not tell them that he had spent time in Anvil in the years following the Oblivion Crisis. It did not seem worth it.

"I saw it once," the Nord said dreamily, gazing at the sky that spotted her with rain. Her skin was brighter than the sky was today. "I was only about five, but I remember a bit. Father moved me around a lot when I was little, to places where he could pretend I didn't exist. After we ran out of places in Skyrim, he came here to Cyrodiil. Bruma… The Imperial City… Skingrad… Kvatch. He would have gone to Bravil after Skingrad if he had not heard that the city was practically alone in the scheme of things; it was the perfect place to put a daughter he was ashamed of and did not want: a place where nobody would think to look, a city on a hill in the middle of two prosperous regions, famed for nothing but its own destruction. He probably went back to Skyrim…"

What sort of monster would be ashamed of his own child? He almost asked, until he bit his tongue. He knew exactly what sort of monster; his father had been one of them. "What did he have to be ashamed of?" Arathor knew why his parents were ashamed – he was a half-breed and a bastard to boot – but he could not understand why a true-blood daughter would be scorned for the colour of her skin.

She tilted her head at him, squinting her pale eyes to get a better view. He found himself wondering how far she could actually see. "When you look at me, what do you see?"

"A Nord girl with white skin. That's all that's different about you, your skin… What is shameful about that?"

"That's the point." Though she sounded sad, she was grinning. "I'm a Nord, a child of the sky. The Nords live by their suspicions and their omens; they blame their misfortunes on the Falmer, the Snow Elves. What would be more like a Snow Elf than to turn a little girl white like snow? It was an omen, you see, and a dark one at that. Or that was what my father thought. My mother died birthing me – another ill-fortune associated with my birth, and ultimately the final straw. Children of the sky are not made of snow. He packed me up and ran away, though he probably should have killed me to appease the gods, or something. He was an Ice-Heart, so he should have done, but for some reason he didn't, and here I stand for the entire world to see, a snow-child become a snow-woman, a ghost and an omen. Hopefully not a bad omen for our quest though…"

"Finn," Aden reassured her. "You're not an omen. Personally, I wouldn't change you for the world."

"And that, my friend, is why you're awesome." She was a snow-woman, if there was no other way to describe her; she was tall and robust, by the looks of her – though it was hard to tell beneath the loose robes that she wore – and everything about her was white. Arathor had never seen real snow, but if she was anything to go by… He had to laugh when he realised that he had handed her the reins to Drift, the horse he had named after a snowdrift when he was bored and relaxing on his front porch in a soft dusky glow with an apple in one hand and a scroll that he could not read in the other. It had been from his father, and he had set it on fire before he had managed to grasp his first few letters. Good riddance, he said, though sometimes he would lie awake and wonder what had been on it; it was the only thing his father had ever really given him, save for the red colour of his eyes and a sickly discolouration of his skin.

"Finny, we can be social outcasts together," he chuckled, and she snickered too. The other two remained silent at that.

"You know… I always thought the Dunmer were relatively promiscuous."

That made Arathor cackle, if nothing else. "Yes… Apparently they are." He gestured to himself with a hand. "Living proof." Sniggering, he tried to regain a more serious demeanour. "They are, yeah, but they're also incredibly proud and distrusting of other races. I'm not exactly a legitimate child."

"So distrusting of other races that they fall into bed with them…" he heard Eleanor mutter, though when he looked at her she was far more intent on maintaining her balance. She was less fearful than she had been, but even the slightest excess rocking made her grasp for the saddle to steady herself.

"Well some people do trust others further than they can throw them." If nothing else, it was a subtle dig at her obvious dislike for him. "I never asked my parents how they ended up… Well, conceiving me. I'm never going to ask either. Some things are best left unknown."

"Yes," the Breton agreed. "Perhaps it would be best if we never find out what happened to our Hero… We might not like what we hear."

Aden shook his head, though he conceded the fact that she might well be dead and that their journey would therefore be for nothing. "I think it will be better to know than to wonder and wish that we did. Knowledge of this sort cannot be that damaging. I met her, and spoke to her, and she told me her name. She was not as bad as people said she was, and if nothing else then we owe her to prove that to the rest of Nirn, don't we? We need to find out why the history books all but omit her, and we need to right that terrible wrong. She deserved better, no matter what became of her."