The voices that woke Cedric were muffled, murky. The same formless distortion greeted his eyes as he opened them with the sluggishness of an otherworldly creature rising from water.
The dim glow of warm, orange light blended with harsh bronze and cold rock.
"Cedric!"
He gasped, inhaling a mouthful of stifling air as that one word pierced the veil of slurring noise around him. His sight sharpened, the blurs at the edge of his vision receding somewhat.
"Bastard Reachmen! Kill them all!"
He saw the glint of blood on the flange of the mace. The specks of eviscerated flesh which clung to the metal.
Time seemed to grind to a halt as his gaze drew downwards, the pandemonium around him whizzing by at a hellish pace, screams and shouts screeching at his ears beyond a muffling veil. He blinked, trying to make sense of the defiled and limp body slumped across his vision.
Make sense of its warm, calloused skin through the scratches which lacerated it. Piece together the smudgy, comely face it once held from the jellied globs of red which poured from its neck and scattered over the stone.
I am sad.
He made the observation with such a bizarre detachment, his heartbeat thumping limply in the back of his mind when it should have been roaring like tonnes of star-wrought metal being crushed under the merciless weight of the ocean.
His weightless body launched from its helpless perch on the ground as the guardsman's mace flailed harmlessly past his head, his arms effortlessly lashing out and punching clean through the armored figure's chest. There was no scream, no reverberating feedback from the savage impact rushing up his arms. It was like tearing through soiled parchment.
A queer chill nipping at the back of his mind tempered his aimless anger with a sliver of fear.
Something danced at the periphery of his senses, an… alien? thing threading itself through the cushioned murk of his memories, beckoning him towards it.
"Cedric! Over here!"
His eyes snapped up, his sudden motions sending ripples through the slowly trudging world around him. He opened his mouth to cry out, call out, to the faint voice which carried his name with such urgency. No words came as he bellowed silently into the void.
The ragged flesh of the guard he'd killed slipped through his fingers like dirty, sludgy water. It filtered into his fading surroundings, melding grotesquely with the broken corpse of his beloved Thera in the distance.
Thera!
The name died on his tongue as soon as it came to mind, the bloody ruby glint of her memory slurring away into the fiery deluge.
Focus.
The voice boomed into his consciousness, sending quakes running through his already quivering form. It prodded at him with a callous arrogance, grasping him by his limply hanging neck and forcing his gaze away from the mesmerizing pain of his past. His hands, still slick with blood, tightened even further into fists, craggy nails digging into his palms.
His world blurred and blacked out, the faint, lingering impact of some formless mass ringing in his ears as he tumbled into the ground.
Listen to me.
He listened, for a moment, if only because he could no longer see.
He listened, and heard only the screams of people he had come to see as his friends. He heard the choking cries of one which he some day might have called his loved one. He heard the hateful screams of those who'd stood over him all his life, and the frenzied bellows of madmen and warlocks clashing with them over the din of clanging metal and shearing flesh-
A firm grasp yanked him away from his memories, roughly shoving him towards a dark alleyway hidden from the raging fires.
It was not your fate to die with the rest of them.
He tumbled into the shadows with a forceful splash, darkness enveloping him. He flailed in the abyss, blackness swimming by his vision like loosely floating ashes.
The voice continued to ring in his ears, soothing azure hands tugging at his limbs in directions he could not comprehend. He thrashed about in its grip, the frenzied motions coursing through his body with a physical heaviness that felt all too real.
A single arm broke free from the confounding forces enveloping him, the serene voice reverberating ever more urgently throughout his trembling bones. He reached out towards the one thing which looked familiar to him in this tumultuous ocean, the moonlit glint of a broken chain floating in the tumbling abyss.
The broken chain of a free man.
Freedom! Had he, Cedric, not earned his freedom!?
The tightening grips desperately fighting to pry his feeble mind away from his petty mortal musings weighed upon him more heavily than any chains could.
No.
He could feel the beginnings of a scream welling in the drowning pits of his lungs as the image of that chain slipped away. His body propelled helplessly through the blackness towards a horrible white cold he could not bear to face.
Baleful red eyes bled into his sight, hard ruby lenses burning through his blindness with an otherworldly glare even as they cast their gaze downwards with a quiet melancholy that seemed unbefitting of such terrifyingly incomprehensible... things.
An icy chill ran down his spine, a windy whisper from the Sea of Ghosts grazing by his ears.
"Without the dark, there can be no light."
It was the last thing he could discern before his very figure, ephemeral as it was, buckled and folded in on itself.
0-0-0
Cedric awoke with a scream, his hoarse voice, finally given form once more, bellowing out into the faint coldness of his room even as he bolted upright.
Sweat dribbled down his pallid skin, every trickle seeming to send shivers coursing through his sinewy, but intact body. The air nipped savagely at his drenched figure, but he shakily drank it in with a ravenous thirst regardless.
His blue eyes darted about every empty corner of the room, his room, however transient the ownership was, watching the knotted wooden boards with a wide open, unblinking gaze.
The candle at his bedside table had long since gone out, but the faint rays of firelight trickled in outside from underneath the door. The dusty wooden shelf across from him bore no signs of mind-twisting distortions, and the only thing which tugged at his skin were the cold, soaked bedfurs matted to the lower half of his body.
His ears heard only the urgent pounding of fists upon his door when he stopped screaming. The clambering tumble of an opening lock.
The noises of such intrusion bothered him not, and if anything, he greeted the influx of light into his room with a welcome wide-eyed gaze as Thoring lumbered in.
The innkeeper did not say anything, and did not move any closer towards Cedric from his perch on the door frame. The dark circles hanging under his eyes, the ever-present slump in his shoulders- somehow, Cedric felt that they too came from many sleepless nights.
"A dream," Cedric rasped out when his breath stilled enough for him to form words again. "The Sea of Ghosts."
And more, of course. So much, painfully more. But musings on the past alone, no matter how much they stung, were not enough to wake him, screaming, in the night.
No. He looked into the empty eyes of Thoring, the barren gaze of someone who could only watch those suffering from the same ailment they were with a solemn pity, and knew now that they had both seen the same thing.
"All the other townsfolk I'd spoken to were sure it was over," drawled Thoring. "That the nightmares were gone. Ever since that Priest of Mara left for the tower on the hill. Sure enough, they've all slept soundly since then."
"But not you," said Cedric, his voice still barely carrying enough strength to speak above a whisper.
Neither of them spoke for some time, and only the shivering, ragged breaths of Cedric filled the dank room. Some sliver of feeling began to worm its way back into his nostrils as his body began to steady itself, the rank odor of his own sweat palpable.
"I lost my daughter to the dragons," said Thoring quite suddenly.
Cedric's gaze softened, his waking mind, having momentarily shaken the queerness of his dreams, immediately realizing that though it was the nightmares which woke men like them in the pitch darkness, it was something far more sinister which slowly drove them into the shuffling depths of quiet despair.
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"I know. You seem like a man who's well acquainted with loss."
The remark would have had him scrambling to leave just a day ago, Cedric mused. Being a Markarth fugitive in a Nord town, he couldn't be too careful. Something told him that was the last thing Thoring was concerned about though- so he sat in his bed, and nodded solemnly.
"Ordinary travellers have never shared the same night terrors I have. I can only suppose this curse is for those who've already their fair share of burdens."
They sat and stood respectively like that for moments longer, with only the quiet crackle of the hearth outside as company for the reigning silence.
Cedric's eyes eventually dropped down to the drenched furs he laid in, the filthy wetness of them clinging to his skin with a foul chill. He made no effort to free himself of them, though it was certainly not in the mind of being decent in front of the innkeeper.
Freedom.
What a laughable concept he fooled himself with.
Two days ago, he'd resolved to leave Dawnstar in the early morning, strike out on his own and seek fortune elsewhere. The day after that, he'd resolved to do the same after another night's sleep and a warm meal.
Had he not been woken by this dream, he likely would've put off his departure again in the morning. Curl up in these rank furs and hide for scant moments more from the world.
He glanced up as Thoring retreated from his room, dragging his booted feet across the ground back to his familiar old countertop, no doubt.
He closed his eyes as the door shut again, peering into the darkness of his memories in search of some distant discussion with the one light that had been in his old life.
"Without the dark, there can be no light."
0-0-0
He wasn't sure if it was the queer dream-whispers he'd caught only a fleeting glimpse of, or if it really was the bittersweet images of Thera he had reluctantly dug out of his mind which had him brought him out to the shore.
The water churned up against the gravel, quiet roars roiling all along the coast from the abyssal expanse beyond. The waves shifted before his eyes like moonlit shadows.
After what he had been through moments ago, he would be lying to himself to say he was not afraid to be standing out there, his clothes doing nothing to shield his still sweaty body from the wailing winds swirling around him. To be standing underneath the two moons and the star-speckled sky, their uncaring gaze reflecting murkily off the deep sea.
He knelt down at the water's edge, legs quivering as he wondered if it would reach out and swallow him whole, just as it had in his dream.
His breathing echoed ever more loudly in his ears as he peered intently into the darkness, his chest tightening with an overwhelming sense of wrongness the longer he did so.
He reached out with a naked hand, pallid white skin stretched thinly over bony appendages standing out staunchly against the backdrop of the black water. His fingers, numb as they were, bristled in the chilling breeze.
"I'm not afraid of anything, Thera."
That could not have been farther from the truth back then. He'd been afraid of losing her. So fearful had he been to see her die that he could not bear to stay by her side when the fighting had broken out in the streets.
He was weak, too. She'd been his strength in the mines, pushing him to use his twiny arms, heft the pickaxe, fight through the rock and pain so they could have time together. At her side, he would have been nothing more than a liability.
And now…
Now, his fingertips hovered above the water.
A shaky gasp escaped his lips as he plunged his hand in. The freezing current rushed up his arm, tearing through flesh down to his bones with a horrible white cold.
His fingers danced about without feeling in the water, the shock of the cold blotting out all other sense.
It was insanity, foolishness.
He ground his teeth together, squeezed his eyes shut, beckoned the dark to come to him again, as it had in the dream. He reached in deeper. A wintry grasp seized him by the sleeves of his coat, waves tugging at his arm.
He didn't even know what had happened to her. And somehow, that hurt even more than the thought of seeing her die.
His eyes snapped open, that familiar chill, the overwhelming fear rushing up his spine when he felt his fingers brush against something solid in the water. Something small, rounded, the invisible edges of it intertwining with more of the same.
He was afraid now, but he wrapped his fingers around the object all the same. He was weak now, but he heaved through the cold, pulled his twiny arm out of the water and brought his shivering hand up to his eyes.
His ice-slicked fingers clasped a broken chain, its silvery, frosted metal shining faintly in the moonlight.
It only left him with more questions, more fear. That his dreams could blur into reality like this shook him to his core. Wondering why this would happen left him with tears welling in his eyes, and a stifled sob clawing in his lungs.
It was all he could do to clench his cursed prize tightly to his chest, the cold heaviness of the metal seeping through to his heart as the ocean breeze brushed against his ears.
"We have purpose."