Author's Notes: Okay, so you're all aware of the fact that I'm an airhead, right? And that I have my reviews set to email alert so that when I check my email the whole "UPDATE NOW" thing is like a slap in the face? It's kinda necessary. Otherwise I forget when I last posted. So if it's been like a week and I haven't updated, just prod me. XD
Stonebriar
Chapter Four
*
Eloe locked the barn doors behind her, her assassin's agonized screams still slipping through the cracks. It wasn't safe here. It certainly wasn't safe in the house. If they realized it was occupied, if they worried they had been observed, Eloe would be a quick and easy kill.
She wanted to go to Cloud Ruler. Or Bruma at the very least. They'd never seen her to look for her, after all. But then she couldn't leave the horses and neither could she take them. Her assassin's horse was far too distinctive. If they saw the hell spawned beast, they'd know. They'd wait for her to return if nothing else and she wasn't sure dissuading them with a cast iron skillet would work. Besides, the noise of two horses passing—hell, just getting them out of the barn—could attract attention and she was not ready to die again. Once had been more than enough.
Jeanne glared at her, pacing from one side of the stall to the other, unearthly noises no horse should have been able to produce echoing from her foaming jaws. Eloe only watched her, feeling a sort of distant sympathy as she watched. She'd seen more dead bodies than she could easily count, had sat by dozens as they died, but to hear such pain…
Millie came to meet her at the stall door, jittery and unnerved by the faint, tortured screaming and Jeanne's cries, butting her muzzle into Eloe's neck. Feeling close to tears and shaking besides, the woman pressed her cheek to Millie's, eyes closed as she traced tiny pictures in magicka through her fur.
And then the screaming stopped.
For a long while she held her breath, waiting for the next cry but nothing came. A horrible, sickening silence sprawled out in front of her and it was far, far worse. It felt like the world had stopped, her heart suspended, the air around her still and lifeless, just listening.
He was dead.
Eloe turned and crossed the barn, climbing the ladder to the hay loft with a growing sense of dread. She pulled it up behind her as quickly as she could, masking her life force when she'd finished with a twist of the hands.
"Let them see the shape of the horses and move on," she whispered to Arkay, shoving bales of hay into a semi-circle reminiscent of her childhood forts. "Let them see no human shape. Let them continue on without knowing there was someone close enough to hear."
She slipped inside the fort of hay and peered through a crack in the wall. She could only see a little of the road from here, but cast chameleon just in case. Should someone look her way and even suspect they saw an eye between the slats of wood, she was a dead woman.
An hour passed before she heard Perennia's door crash open and peeked out of the wood to see a woman careen out in bloodstained black. Her hem was dripping, Eloe noticed, the world seeming very far away even as the thought occurred to her. The woman's mouth and hands were stained with blood, her hem raining dark droplets down onto the earth as she spun, laughing. The Dunmer joined her and together they waltzed around Perennia's house and into the apple grove before the old Imperial emerged to herd them back inside.
No one so much as glanced at her darkened house, and for that she was intensely grateful.
*
It was almost midnight when Eloe jerked out of an uneasy sleep at the sound of someone galloping down the road off in the distance. Recasting her spells as quickly as she could mange and hoping against hope it wasn't a Blade on his way home, she rose up on her haunches to stare through the splintered crack and out into the night.
A lone Dunmer woman was making her way down the road, perched atop a dappled half-breed that looked as though it had died the year before but was too damn mean to let that stop it. The woman herself was cloaked from head to boot in dark leather, her only distinguishing feature the lock of fire-red hair peeking out from her hood. She was Dark Brotherhood as well, it would seem, but far too late for the party.
Eloe sank down against the wall, turning her back on the slim assassin. Suddenly she was very sure this night would never end. In a few hours she'd find herself picking her way down the path from Rielle again, listening to her assassin's last animal cries of pain over and over, the night repeating into infinity. She felt with a strange, absolute certainty that the sun would never rise again and just then no amount of whispered prayer could bring her comfort.
Closing her eyes, Eloe pulled her knees to her chest and pressed her face into the soft fabric of her skirt. Never in her life had she felt more like she had as a small child, struggling against the cascade of new magic and a birth blessing from the gods. Forces were at work here tonight far larger than herself and just at the moment, Eloe felt rather like a pebble caught in the tide.
For a long while she sat unmoving with her back against the splintering wood, just listening to the quiet passage of time. An indeterminable amount slipped by her before she heard horses on the road again and turned to look, watching as her assassin's four attackers rode off on night black horses, the latecomer close behind and struggling with her own.
Eloe counted them twice to be sure they'd left no one behind and waited to see if they'd return. But the road remained perfectly silent and she heaved a breath of relief, letting her spells fade as she picked her way towards the ladder on shaky legs. She thought of the crow Arkay had sent her weeks ago and wondered if she hadn't misconstrued his message.
"Arkay, I intend to help this man," she said aloud, pleased to note her voice didn't shake near as badly as her hands. "If this gift of yours is only meant as a test of restraint, you'd best make that clear now. I may be mortal, but I can see this isn't right."
She waited a moment, lowering the ladder back down into the niche that had kept it in place since the barn had been built, but no message came. Holding her skirts in one hand as she climbed down, Eloe spared a pat for the horses before slipping out into the night.
No crow. No sign. Not even a patch of moonlight in the shape of a tomb.
Nothing.
Eloe smiled, though it wavered slightly, and made her way into the house to change.
"Akatosh answers prayers by turning his priests into giant golden dragons," she told the air, struggling out of her skirts and into the soft cotton pants she wore for heavy lifting. "Julianos leaves meaningful books lying about with important passages underlined. But you—you just sit up there and watch, you voyeur. You could at least give me a meaningful look in the right direction, couldn't you?"
Outside, the wind rattled against the shutters and it almost sounded as though someone were laughing.
*
Perennia's painstakingly tidy house was a horrible mess.
Strangely, it was the only thing Eloe could think of, even as she rushed out of Applewatch to empty her stomach in the nearby shrubs. The house would never be the same again. The stains would never come out. Perennia would have been furious.
Eloe wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and steeled herself, opening her eyes against the image of blood and death that had seared itself to her eyelids. She had work to do. There was a slim chance those… creatures would be back again, and she needed to get her assassin pieced together enough to move him without worrying about losing bits on the way.
"I have seen worse," she told herself, pulling her hair back into a tight bun as she turned to face the house. "I am a priestess of Arkay and I have seen and managed far worse than this."
She returned to the house in long, determined strides and paused to take in what needed to be done. First, she needed a knife or something to cut him down, and once she found that, she needed something sturdy enough to stand on. They'd broken all of Perennia's nice chairs, but she couldn't reach the rope that held him on his head without something to stand on.
I heard him dying… I heard his pain. He was alive through all of this—alive and conscious.
The table was sturdy enough. A bit of one leg looked as though it might give way sometime soon, but it would hold her long enough to cut the rope at least. Eloe crossed the room to take a knife from one of Perennia's kitchen drawers and pushed the table into place. She tried to ease her assassin down gently, but even with her telekinesis pressing up on his shoulders, he hit the ground like a rock.
Sweet Arkay, are those bite marks? Did they…? Oh gods…
Eloe pushed the table back into the corner where it belonged before crouching down beside him, one hand easing away the lines of pain on what was left of his poor, once handsome face. It took her a moment to remember the name his attackers had called him by, but when she had it, she knelt down to speak in the one ear he had left.
"Lachance," she called softly, casting her voice into the drift. "Don't slip too far from me—I intend on dragging you back out, gods willing."
"Gods," she heard him snort, his voice whispering back to her from death. "I serve Sithis."
*
They'd cut off nearly every bit of him that could be easily removed. She found his robes a blood soaked pile in the corner, hiding within them two fingers, a missing chunk of his cheek and… Eloe closed her eyes against the sudden rush of nausea, gripping hard at a clean portion of the wall.
I hope you were dead for that, my friend. I truly hope they spared you that.
Working as quickly and efficiently as she could, Eloe swept through the house, gathering the missing bits of him together. Before, she'd thought she could work here. Not for long—just enough to get him somewhat put together. But the copper stench of blood and death and fear in the air would haunt her dreams for weeks to come, and Eloe had to duck outside twice before she could even finish collecting his missing pieces.
They enjoyed this. Your suffering, your pain—they enjoyed it. And you worked with these people.
Eloe escaped the house again to take heaving breaths of fresh air before making her way around the building to retrieve the wheelbarrow from the orchard and a bag for the pieces of him easily lost.
Were you like them, I wonder? Am I risking everything for a man who will kill me in my sleep and enjoy it? Who would… devour parts of me?
Her stomach jumped and threatened to turn itself inside out again at the memory of the Altmer woman, her face stained with blood. Time flowed around her as she stood there with the grove's high grass licking at her ankles like rivulets of water.
For a moment, she was jealous of Errandil's certainty in life. He knew without a doubt that his place in life was to maintain the balance by showing no favor and uttering no curse. He truly believed that by teaching others to do the same, the world would remain in perfect harmony. But the world was not harmonious. Eloe could hear the discordant notes in her sleep. Each misplaced death, each unwanted child called out to her, begging her to set them right again.
But this man was not calling her—he was wrenching her, demanding her undivided attention with that silver graveled voice of his, one hand clenched around her soul. And even as Eloe approached the house with the wheelbarrow in tow, her hands were shaking. She had not done this in quite some time—almost two years since she'd soothed Steffan back into his body and that had not been a proper resurrection. He'd been haunting her, whispering her name in the dark hours of the night as he passed through the moonlight. Slipping him back into his body had been as easy as dressing herself.
Not like her assassin, his fate twined around her neck like a garrote. He would need to be fished from the abyss. His return would likely be as painful as his passing—for both of them. But Eloe was sure… no, she wasn't sure—she was never really sure when it came to the gods—but she thought she could feel Arkay smiling down at her, a sliver of something like resolve trickling into her heart as she opened the door to Applewatch again.
She was doing the right thing.
*
The sun never rose for Eloe. She had taken her assassin down into the secret level that separated her house from the root cellar where the sun could not reach her. A constant light spell flickered and danced along the low ceiling as she pieced the man back together, her every thought bent with singular intensity on the task at hand.
Hours slipped past in rapid succession without her noticing. She worked as much magicka into him as she could bear to lose and a little more besides. Severed appendages were connected as though they'd never been lost, bits of missing organs re-grown
around what Eloe refused to think of as bite marks, his gaping wounds stitched up again. In the end, she hadn't been able to patch as many of his broken bones as she would have liked, but those she could not, she set on the way to mending.
It was only when even the fizzle of light spell above her took all her concentration to maintain that Eloe finally pulled back to check her work, lightheaded with hunger and exhaustion. Her assassin was beautiful, she noted to herself in a rare moment of distracted honesty. The knife-twist of his lips, the breadth of his jaw, the curve of his muscles—every arch and bow of his body… Even with his heart only just set back to beating and what little rot there'd been freshly chased away, it was obvious the deadly grace this man was capable of.
Eloe closed her eyes a moment, shaking away the old butterflies that had settled in her stomach and settled herself on the bed next to him, a golden glow beginning to work its way up her arms.
"Are you ready?" she asked, her voice just barely reaching the other side.
But she heard his silken laughter nonetheless, her mind half with the dead already, and shivered when he spoke.
"Always."
And suddenly she could feel the consuming heat of his soul pressed flush against her own, and without warning—without pausing to collect what little magicka she'd saved—Eloe reached into the drift.