4th of Rain's Hand, 3e434
For the weeks I spent healing Lucrezia and for the further weeks that followed, I entered civilized areas only at the dark of night to steal. The eastern wilderness was full of places to hide out quite comfortably and since I could eat wild food my trips of burglary were only for luxuries such as books, clothing and candles. I wonder of the look on my victims come the morning and their candlesticks and shoes are all missing, but all the silver and jewels? Rummaged through, untouched.
I will complete this account of my past, finally, with the events that led me to my present home.
In a pile of books I had haphazardly stolen one night there was slipped a copy of the latest courier-brought news. I settled in to read it one soggy afternoon with my lunch, but soon lost interest in eating. The page described a sickly ritual in which one was apparently able to summon an assassin that would kill anyone you could give a name or adequate description of.
A scene flashed in my mind. I saw myself handing over money to a cloaked figure, a smile on my face, and the words 'Raminus Polus' slowly leaving my lips. I glimpsed the hated Imperial pig lying bloodied and dead on the street. I nearly made up my mind right then and there. The man that had killed Svetlana with his own hand was dead, and I had never known even his name. But I hadn't forgotten the man who put her in tears over her own people's customs, made her ashamed to be a true Vizzafir Psijic. I hadn't forgotten his suspicion, his prying, all spawned from that same Imperial self-righteousness. I knew she had been doing something he didn't 'approve of'. I couldn't forget that the mages' robes on the killer were the same worn by all of his trusted associates. And therefore I couldn't separate Raminus Polus from the death of Svetlana.
To think that all it would take would be a bag of gold, a ritual, and that vision where he lay dead or, preferably, dying quite slowly, on the cold street would become a reality!
But was that what I wanted? Of course, but not this way. It seemed more like something a crooked merchant would do, or perhaps, someone who wasn't strong enough to perform the act themselves. Why should I accept the services of another for something I was perfectly able to do myself? It seemed contradictory. I also had no gold, when I paused to think about it. I could just as well obtain it but the entire idea of employing this Dark Brotherhood seemed like the coward's way to me now.
I headed downhill and west, taking my time and sometimes not travelling at all for a day or two, making for the White Gold Tower that had never left my sight, no matter how far into the wilderness I had wandered. Lucrezia was on my heel the entire journey, quite able these days to find her own food when she got hungry and drag it back to where I was camped. On many occasions I would hunt with her, for the exercise and sheer thrill mainly, and with our combined efforts the tackling and killing of a deer was much faster and more efficient.
Now, the people of my island were no hunters, the primary staples of our diet being fruit and mushrooms with the occasional inclusion of turtle eggs, if we by chance happened upon some. We scavenged kills of predatory animals for bones to use in ritual or decoration, but never ate the meat. It took some time before I could be quite able to enjoy my dinner at the same time Lucrezia enjoyed hers, and she seemed puzzled that I would not take offerings of raw limbs or such she would drop in my lap until she gave up on that entirely.
We reached the hyacinth-dotted banks of Lake Rumare by sunset one evening and made camp in a cluster of trees a small distance from the water. Lucrezia occupied herself while I made a fire by making sport of the mudcrabs that scuttled along the riverbank. She ended up bringing back four that weren't fortunate enough to make it into the deeper water in time, but was quite confounded by their hard shells, so I dashed them against rocks for her until the flesh was accessible enough that she could eat.
The next day we scouted out the closest entry point into the Imperial Sewers and began to explore. Lucrezia tore many a rat and mudcrab to shreds, and I found myself face-to-face with at least a dozen goblins before all was said and done that first day. With each kill I pretended it was my vengeance I was carrying out, and my thirst for it only grew in my mind. I went on like this for several days, navigating my way through the sewer by day and sleeping outdoors by night. My thoughts became more and more focused on what I now believed I had no choice but to do. Four days into my explorations, after taking many wrong turns, I found a way through that took me right onto the grounds of the Arcane University, and set up a camp of sorts just below this grate.
The Imperial Watch had at least thought of one thing—the Market District. I found my way beneath it all the access points were cleverly cut off or inoperable. I was forced to use an access point in the Elven Gardens District in order to find places to steal the things I needed such as candles. I slept mostly in the daytime, staying vigilant at night and occasionally entering the University grounds in order to scout out where my target went to sleep. I entered the room once or twice. It would be risky; the room was very crowded, and the other floors only contained more sleepers in the same barrack-style setup.
I consumed a fair amount of wine during these extremely long nights. As alcohol was something foreign to my people I was fairly new to it myself, and had not quite the refined treatment that these Heartlanders had developed for it. My fatal flaw? Once I opened a bottle of good wine I would not stop drinking until the bottle was spent. If there were other bottles nearby I would even start on a second one, and the ordeal was usually not over until I had fallen asleep, usually on a bare floor, and I always woke in misery. During her life, Svetlana had fallen prey to this unstoppable process many times along with myself, the both of us laughing and drinking until we could no longer move. Such bittersweet memory usually led to only a swifter refilling of my glass on many a night.
One night, when I was a good three-quarters of the way through a bottle of twenty-year-old Skingrad vintage, I abandoned my stolen silver goblet and sipped the bottle as I wandered north through the passages. Lucrezia had disappeared early that evening, I presumed it meant she had gone outdoors to hunt as per usual. I thought to myself that I could also use some fresh air, and started to head for the access point to the surface. I was lost within twenty minutes, stumbling through unfamiliar after unfamiliar passage and fending off the occasional rat. In a particularly darkened room, my footing gave way, and I fell to the cold, damp stone, dashing my head quite excellently against the wall.
The world spun around me, and in all my attempts to get to my feet I felt I simply had the wrong idea of which way was up. I managed to get to my hands and knees, though I frequently wound up falling to my elbows. Voices began to echo down the corridors and I tried to move myself in the opposite direction, until I heard something that made my heart skip and subsequently sink with realization.
Svetlana. There was no second guess about it in my intoxicated, concussion-delirious brain. That musical voice, words too echoed and my head too fuzzy to differentiate could belong to no other. Her accent and flux of speech that only she and I shared in this strange land were impossible to mistake. I turned back, dragging myself through the filth and wearing my sackcloth dress thin against the abrasive stones, but fighting to keep my wine, which had not spilled during my fall, upright. It was the only relief I had for the painful throbbing on the back of my head. Other voices mixed and blurred in and out with the sound of Svetlana's own, but the direction was clear and I was able to follow, crawling along dizzily on the dirty stones.
The source got ever closer and my heart began to pound. The walls of the corridor became dark, closed-in and narrow, so I brought myself to an unsteady stand, leaning against them, and inched my way on. My whole world continued to tilt and spin in nausea-inducing patterns, and the wall to which I clung frequently switched. Pitch blackness broke and gave way to a faint firelight, and the voices all began to softly speak in unison, strange, unearthly words that were not Fionncine, Altmer, or Tamrielic. Svetlana's voice sounded out above these others, not chanting, but singing, a single, breathy, ethereal note, and the light and fire grew so bright that I, just around the corner, was blinded and fell to my knees.
I opened my eyes, blinking in blackness whilst my eyes re-adjusted to the once more dim firelight coming my way. The voices were gone, and when I crawled lightly to peek around, an empty room greeted me.
Yet only empty of life. Sensing no one I brought myself fully round the corner and sat in the room's torchlight, dazed. My drunken state tugged at my emotional strings. Perhaps that had been what toyed with me all along. It was just some thieves' den; they weren't that uncommon in the sewers. I felt silly, but began to cry nonetheless, which only made me feel more ashamed of myself. In the center of that room, equipped with bare wood furnishings, lumpy beds and bleak tables, I put the rest of my bottle of wine away and discarded the emptied vessel in a fitful throw against the nearest wall.
I stood up, largely recovered from my hit to the skull, and began to take real notice of my surroundings. Strange crimson banners hung from the walls. A fire, sweet-smelling from the burning of incense and spices, burned low in a brass holder with cushions set around it. Books of the extremely thick variety were all about. These things were far too peculiar for a set of bandits.
But these books were familiar. I picked up a copy from a table that was left a colorful mess of alchemy experiments and squinted at the first page in the dark. The weight, title, the elaborate and otherworldly speech—these were one and the same with Svetlana's books, although the covers were far less worn than the copies I remembered. This was merely the first volume. Lying just underneath it was the third volume, and stacking the heavy things on a stool, I began to search around for the second and fourth.
The fourth, to my dismay, escaped me in the end; I could find no copies of it in the entire area. The second I found on an old crate next to a bed, beneath a bowl of sweet blackberries—I trembled as I noted a fresh Alkanet flower sticking out from between the pages rather like a bookmark.
