Author's note: Oh, wow! I made it to Chapter 3! YAY! So if your survived my last chapter and are back for more, well, I am still going. Once again, ONLY MY CHARACTER(s), Amaranthe Kera, BELONG TO ME! EVERYTHING ELSE BELONGS TO BETHESDA STUDIOS!
Part I:
Chapter 3: Through Oblivion (I)
Amaranthe grasped the steel claymore strongly, slicing it through the air with ease and grace. "Yes, it is easy enough to use." She said to Jauffre.
"Good. You need to get to Kvatch, quickly. You must find Martin before the enemy does. I have arranged with the Mages Guild here to get you to Kvatch, but you will haft to return by foot." Jauffre said, walking out of the door of the priory house alongside the abnormally short high elf.
"It should be easy enough. I will not fail." She said.
"Then good luck, Amaranthe. Return here swiftly once you find him." Jauffre said in farewell, and Amaranthe ran to the road and up to the town.
She was no longer garbed in the dirty clothes of a prisoner, which was much to a relief to her. Instead, she wore plain, deep brown leather armor. The steel claymore and a new bow and set of arrows had replaced her short sword and crumbling bow arrows she had found. Amaranthe looked ready for a fight, and in her blood, she knew she was.
She quickly located the Mages Guild in Chorrol, entering the building swiftly. Amaranthe approached the normal appearing high elf man sitting near the entrance, and he looked up as if expecting her. "Amaranthe Kera?" He asked. She nodded as she caught her breath again.
"Come with me." The high elf said, and she followed behind him into a side room.
"We have been prepared for some time to send somebody to Kvatch, or at least ever since Jauffre showed up here. It was like he was expecting you to come along one day." The man said. Amaranthe wanted to say, or maybe it was to retrieve the illegitimate son of the Emperor when the time came, but she kept her mouth shut. It would not be wise to say things right now.
Amaranthe stepped into the center of the room without a word. The high elf understood she would not say anything, and began the incantation to send her to Kvatch. She closed her eyes, thinking that this would be a simple find and convince thing.
Everything went bright, and then extremely dark.
The sounds of yelling and footsteps coming at her made her eyes fly open. Amaranthe looked directly up the sloping road and zigzagging road, spotting a camp full of people from the town, and a man running at her.
"Run, run! We must flee! Kvatch has fallen!" The man said, running past her.
"Wait! What is going on?" She asked, running after the man. He stopped, and looked at her with shock on his face.
"By the Nine Divines, you do not know?" He cried. Amaranthe shook her head, not understanding a thing.
"Kvatch has fallen. It is destroyed. The daedra came from the gate and destroyed it all! That thing... it climbed over the walls... fire everywhere! Captain Savlian Matius might hold ground for now, but it will not be for long." Amaranthe's stomach dropped as he said it.
"Is the priest Martin with the others?" Amaranthe asked. The man shook his head, and something loud cracked causing him to jump and run once again. Immediately, she rushed past the camp of groaning people, and up the cliff-like path to Kvatch.
The cloudy sky began to change as Amaranthe ran. The clouds were soon gone, but the skies pitch black, with stars and a strange sun lighting it with the color of fire. Cracks in the sky, glowing in the same color as the sun and stars webbed about. Something was unnaturally wrong here, and Amaranthe could feel it.
"Damn it! That stupid Bosmer! I can not believe he just did that!" She heard someone yell as she reached the top. Amaranthe's eyes caught on many of the Kvatch guard standing on the same side as she of wooden spiked barricades. Her blue eyes widened at the large glowing, fire-colored portal directly in front of the gates of Kvatch. She continued forward, slowing to a walk. She went past the first guards, ignoring any stares, and went towards the end of the barricades, preparing to go in.
"Stop right there, civilian. No one is going past here and into that place, especially with all of the daedra swarming around in there." She heard somebody say behind her.
She turned and could tell by the high authority of the man over the rest of the guard that this was the captain of the Kvatch guard. "Savlian Matius, sir," Amaranthe said, saluting the man, "I need to get in there and find Martin. He is needed urgently elsewhere."
"The priest? Last I saw him, he was taking a large group of survivors into the chapel. I hope they are all still there alive and safe." The man seemed exhausted from working and trying to exterminate the daedra creatures that had come from the gate.
"If I must, I will help you. I know how to use a blade and some magic. I must get in there and retrieve him. I can probably find a way to close that gate, too." Amaranthe replied calmly.
"Help? You must be out of your mind. I sent in a group of soldiers and they have not come back, and some idiot wood elf ranger ran in there several minutes ago and I highly doubt I am ever going to see him again." Savlian Matius looked at her hard, but Amaranthe's dark blue eyes showed she was going to be absolutely stubborn about it.
The man sighed. "Alright. If you are going in there though, try to find my men and that Bosmer."
Amaranthe nodded. She drew the claymore from her back, charging past the barricades and towards the gate. She ran through the gate, the air whipped through her ears as she ran through.
It was miserably hot on the other side of the gate. Amaranthe looked about the wasteland. The sky was the same as it had been on the other side standing near the gate, but seeming fiercer and far more real, and had no sun. The ground was black and rocky, with little growing out of it but strange plants. Pools of liquid fire were everywhere, hissing and spitting flame and as they devoured the land. In the distance, Amaranthe could see a dark tower rising out of the ground. Something about it was drawing her towards it.
'I do not imagine anyone but certain people could survive here.' Amaranthe thought, continuing forward. She looked around, no signs of life stirring anywhere. And then from the corner of her eye she caught sight of a spark turning into a small orb of fire and flying straight for her head.
Amaranthe threw herself forward, like she had in her first dream, rolling forward, the flare missing her easily. She spotted the creature firing it at her, and apparently, it had two other friends with it.
They were ugly creatures, short with naked heads and orange skin. Spiky teeth came from their mouths and their little hands were like claws. 'Scamps.' Amaranthe thought. The creatures were then stupid enough to try to charge her.
She brandished the claymore at the creatures as they reached her, their greedy, clawed little hands trying to tear at her. The most they did was scrape the leather armor, leaving little scratches in it, before she swung the blade down into the three of them. One fell with a squeal, and anther fell dully beside it. The last had been smarter then it looked though, jumping back just as it saw her move. Amaranthe grinned at the thing, the sickness that normally filled her stomach when she killed not coming as she fell these creatures.
She ran at the creature, instead of swinging the sword, grabbing it by the head and whispering a word under her breath. The scamp screamed and became solidly frozen over. 'This, is easy.' She thought, and carried on around the lava and onwards to the tower.
A groan rose up then. Amaranthe turned, looking back to where she had taken her blade and magic to the scamps. And then she caught sight of a man dressed in the garb of the Kvatch guard. She remembered Savlian Matius asking her to keep and eye out for his men and the wood elf that had gone through the gate. She ran to him.
"Are you alright?" Amaranthe asked the man, crouching down to him.
"Oh, thank the Divines. I though I'd never see anther friendly face. I think my leg is broken." He groaned to her. Amaranthe nodded, looking back to where she had first come from. A gate similar to the one sitting just outside the Kvatch gates was there, and Amaranthe nodded to herself.
"Alright. I will get you out of here. Where is the rest of your group?" She asked, and pulled the soldier up, supporting him as much as she could.
"Dead. All dead... I was next until you showed up and killed the rest of those little bastards." The soldier groaned, obviously in pain. Amaranthe almost wanted to laugh at the fact that a group of men could not kill three scamps, but a sole woman could without getting a scratch. She kept it to herself though.
She knew it would be rough trying to get him back to the gate, and his leg would be put through a large amount of pain as she tried to get him to the gate. "I am sorry. This is going to hurt badly." Amaranthe said, and she helped the soldier limp to the gate. She could see in the man's eyes that he was in pain throughout the entire way back as his broken leg would touch the ground every few moments, but he did not cry out once.
They reached the gate at an extremely slow rate. "Alright. Do you think you can get through there alone?" Amaranthe asked the soldier as they finally got close to it for her to feel the lick of the portal and the air on the other side, which was not very different from over here, but it was cooler. The soldier nodded, and Amaranthe let him go. The man let out a cry as he began to fall through the portal, but he stopped as he went through.
She made sure he was all the way through, and then Amaranthe carried on in the direction she had been formerly going.
Her way to the tower had been simple, not coming across any more then the unsightly scamps which were easy enough to slay. The last one that had been in front of the tower went down with a deep stab to the heart, and Amaranthe felt it odd that the sickness of slaying these creatures was not coming over her, but she appreciated it for the time being. If she had, she would have probably been sick everywhere.
The tower loomed over her, high into the eternal sky that was like fire. 'Why do I get the feeling I am going to haft to go to the very top of that thing?' Amaranthe asked herself. She sighed, finding the handle to the large black door guarding the entrance to the tower, and pulling them open.
The door swung shut behind her as Amaranthe entered the tower. It was not loud, but Amaranthe's eyes flicked about nervously, knowing that something had probably heard it. Her eyes adjusted to the lighting of the tower, and focused on the nearly bare main room. It was dark, and probably would have been pitch black if not for the pool at the center, where a large beam of light rose. As Amaranthe stared at it, the draw she had felt to the tower now focused on the beam and up to the higher levels of the tower. She moved forward into the main room, her hands grasping the claymore more tightly.
Nothing.
Not a thing was even there on the bottom floor, except a few more dead scamps lying about and one humanoid-like thing that Amaranthe had never quite seen, but somehow, she felt she knew it. 'Dremora. Daedra soldiers of Mehrunes Dagon.' She had no idea how she knew it, but she had a feeling she had heard it somewhere before. The scamps had been killed by very good arrow shots, one with an arrow to the head while the other to with one to the chest. The daedra had been killed with a blade, and rather sloppily as if the person had very little experience with a sword. She looked about, looking for anything else, her eyes catching on a black door sunken into the dark walls of the tower. Once again, she felt drawn to the top of the tower and knew through that door, there was a way.
She pulled it open, going into a narrow corridor passage the sloped upwards immediately. Amaranthe followed it, not finding anything once again but dead scamps in a room that the corridor opened up into. Her eyes searched, something feeling wrong with the fact that she had to fight her way here, and now that she was here, everything she had come across but herself and the beam going up to the top of the tower was dead, mainly to the same arrows that had killed the creatures bellow.
Exiting the room, Amaranthe proceeded up the spiral ramps. Once again, anything that had been on them was dead, shot down by arrows or killed by extremely sloppy blade work. She continued into the next set of corridors at the top of the ramp, and into the room at the top of the sloping way. Amaranthe was starting to feel familiar with the destruction of creatures and daedra in the tower as she entered.
Amaranthe's eyes seemed to avoid the mess, which was extremely fresh as some of the creatures were still oozing blood, and touched the two doors in the room. One, on the wall to the left of her, was part way cracked, as if it had been recently opened, the air outside of it whistling through the crack loudly. The other, which was directly in front of her, was fully sealed. The tug that she had been feeling from the tower and then the beam then came from there though. She went to that door, and tried to pull it open.
The door refused to budge, and she could tell it was not stuck, but locked. Amaranthe sighed, and looked at the other door, part way cracked open. 'At least I can possibly know who is killing everything. There is no other way but back from here, unless someone somehow got the door open or left before I got here, but those have not been dead long.'
She went to the cracked door, pushing the heavy sliding things open. It went outside, a narrow bridge that only one person alone or a single file line could fit across, going to a smaller tower across the way. At the height Amaranthe was at, a fall would be fatal. Amaranthe stepped out onto the bridge, the narrow pathway and being as high up as she was making her partly frightened, but she kept her head on firmly.
Amaranthe reached the other side happily, pulling open the door and entering. The smaller tower was much lighter on the inside, but still very dark. Blood was dried onto the walls, and dead bodies hung from the roof, some a light with fire. A spiraling ramp, nearly as small and narrow as the bridge that had just gotten her here, spiraled down to she guessed a quarter of a way up the tower.
She could hear sounds of movement below her, and it was getting closer. Something in her twitched as she grasped the blade more tightly between her hands, the feeling of sickness that normally came when she thought about killing a human or humanoid, but had not shown up here. Amaranthe ran up the ramp, going for the top floor. The shouts and cries of a man above her were now heavily audible as she rushed up the stairs loudly, and when she reached the top, something smashed into the wall beside her. A mace.
Amaranthe looked to the source directly in front of her, one of the Dremora standing in front of her seething. "You should not be here mortal!" He yelled, and pulled his mace back, trying to strike her again.
Amaranthe ducked as he swung the thing, trying to freeze it with her spell but missing by quite a bit. She threw herself into a forward roll, taking careful care not to stab herself with her own sword, returning to her feet. She turned on the daedra, blocking the next swing from his mace, taking a chance to make an upwards cut. It scraped off of the daedra's armor until it found a crack in the armor, stopping there. Amaranthe reacted fast, stabbing inwards.
The claymore had located itself in the stomach, a wound that would have been fatal to a normal human being. But instead, the daedra kept going, shoving her back and sending her into the ground beside a large cage with a man inside, that she had not noticed when she first got to the top of the small tower. Amaranthe grasped for the claymore, knowing the blade had flown back with her. It was several inches away from her, and the Dremora was advancing fast on her with the mace even though it was bleeding horribly.
Desperation took over, and she began to push herself over to her blade, grabbing for it, feeling the thing coming closer by the moment. She threw herself to the left and the mace smashed just where she had been. Amaranthe's fingers brushed the hilt of the blade, and it moved more into her hand.
She grasped it tightly, and swung it around at the daedra.
Amaranthe found she had not need to as the creature crashed forward to the ground, an arrow matching the ones that had killed the creatures below sticking out at the exact center of it's head…