You are now imagining Mohamara in a cat carrier. Have fun with that.
Chapter 12: Save us from the Queen!
Back at the Winking Skeever, Yagraz filled Mohamara in on certain… details that she'd left out earlier.
The tojay paused in getting changed out of the Jarl-meeting-clothes to something fit for adventure to glare in Yagraz's direction. "She's a vampire?"
Yagraz sighed and made an affirmative noise since Mohamara couldn't see her nod. "I know because I came to Solitude like three years or so back. She gave me and my Shield-Sister a job to destroy a rabid vampire coven that was north of the city, kidnapping people from the docks to feed."
Mohamara curled his lip in disgust while his fur stood on end. It made him look rather fluffy even though it was not friendly body language. "Ugh, I can't believe I let her touch me. If I could see, I would have been able to tell right away-..." Mohamara got a set of red and white robes on and turned to look at Yagraz again. "You've known about her being there for... years?"
The Orc woman put her hands over her face and groaned. "She's too strong to kill discreetly, and in too public of a position to be able to get a solid chance. I figured once I found you, we could plan something out to kill her, have some fun, you know?" Yagraz found herself being repeatedly bapped on the head by the tojay's small fists. "Hey, what gives?"
"I'm trying to knock some sense into you! You're Yagraz gro-Dushnikh, you Broke the Dragon to find me, made yourself a Companion again, and became one of the most badass people I know-and you complain that your enemy is too strong?!" Mohamara broke free of the Orc's grip when she tried to stop his attack by picking him up and promptly became a literal ankle biter. A rather ineffective one given the thickness of Yagraz's boots. "Malacath would kick your ass himself for that sort of talk! But he's not here so I'll do it for him!"
The Orc woman looked down, stunned by the Khajiit attacking her so ineffectively. As she processed what he'd said, it was like a knot in her head suddenly unraveled. She could breathe deeper, her limbs responded just a fraction of a second faster, and colors seemed more vibrant. While Mohamara continued to gnaw on her, Yagraz stood and stretched.
Bones that had been out of alignment for years that she hadn't noticed popped back into place, filling the air with a rapid series of pops and cracks. With her face set, she picked up the tojay again and held him at arm's length while he tried to wriggle free. "You're right. Malacath would be disgusted with me. So the first thing we're gonna do when we get back from Wolfskull cave is killing that bitch dead. Alright?"
"Alright. ...Are you okay, that was a lot of popping in your back and shoulders. Kinda sounded like it hurt."
Yagraz's expression was through grit teeth: "It's starting to hurt real bad, yep."
After Yagraz had an hour to rest, the two of them were off to Wolfskull. Fortunately, it was not terribly far from Solitude itself-the hill that led up to the city stopped in view of Mount Kilkreath, and from there they simply had to follow the ancient worn path up the mountain to Meridia's temple. Even though his Lady could not hear his prayers without the beacon, Mohamara prayed at her statue. There was always the chance that someone of the faith elsewhere in Skyrim was constructing a new beacon, which would allow the Daedra of Infinite Energies to hear him again.
Wolfskull cave was a peculiar thing-a fortress hidden under the ground. Towers, portcullises, gatehouses and all. The common theory back when Mohamara lived in the temple was that these structures were part of an ancient fortress that had since been buried. But whatever the fortifications, they proved hopelessly ill-equipped to handle an Orc Tongue with a spell-reflecting, atronach summoning, phat heals providing Khajiit riding on her shoulders.
Mohamara regretted only that he couldn't see any of the necromancers' faces when they shot off things like ice spears that bounced off him and impaled their casters on a cave wall. Or how a fruit salad atronach had managed to toss a Draugr Wight over forty feet as Yagraz claimed.
The fruit salad atronach fought like a demon according to Yagraz, tearing through the ranks of the undead and necromancers that disgracefully lurked in the cave. Occasionally, Mohamara could hear it mutter 'yummy yummy'. He almost missed it when it eventually faded away.
Yagraz described a dangerous scene when they went further in-a spectral woman floating above a tower in an underground fort. Surrounded by energies that drew from slain merchants, bandits, hunters, and soldiers littered around the cave-and being beseeched by necromancers.
They called this ghost-woman 'Potema', which Mohamara found weird to be a name. It was a word in his time, potemal-meaning to be relentlessly cruel and selfish. Perhaps whoever the name belonged to had been the impetus behind the word's creation.
The necromancers performing the ritual were attempting to call this 'Potema' back into the living world-already an oddity given the nature of resurrection magic. They made no reference to a realm of Oblivion or dominion of Aetherius from which they summoned Potema from-could she have survived as a loosed soul on Nirn?
"Do you know anything about this Potema woman?" Mohamara asked while summoning another atronach. Whatever it was, it made a hideous oozing sound and drew ghastly screams out of its first victim.
But she was a necromancer, so her suffering was a good thing.
"Former queen of Solitude, had a kid who became Emperor, started a civil war way back when." Yagraz's answers were slowed down by chopping the legs out from under a Draugr Deathlord. A necromancer tried to sneak up behind her but she ended his miserable life by bashing the boss of her shield into his skull without looking. "Oh, and she's Dragonborn so if that's important, there you go."
That explained how Potema had lingered on Nirn so long-dragons and Dragonborn could only be killed by each other. Their physical bodies could be slain, but their souls would remain bound to their bones until a dragon or other Dragonborn passed by to absorb their soul.
It also meant that without knowing Potema's Dovah-Zul name, the necromancers' attempt to bind her would fail no matter what they did. Which then gave Mohamara a wicked idea. "Alright, I need you to toss me at the tower where they're doing the ritual."
Yagraz stopped in the middle of decapitating another necromancer, who politely curled up onto the ground to cradle her stump of a left arm. "Want to run that by me again, short-stuff?"
"Toss me at the ritual site. I'm going to have fun with them since they can't do much in the middle of their binding attempt."
"And if they can do something while trying to bind her?"
"Then that makes things so much more interesting!" In a few seconds, Mohamara was sailing through the air until his flight path was intercepted by a woman. While Mohamara hit the ground after their collision, the woman was knocked backward and fell off the top of the tower into the cavern below. "Howdy, necromancer filth! How's your health plan?"
"What the-? An intruder! Stop hi-ckhhhh!"
Mohamara stopped whatever the necromancer had been intending by summoning another atronach. The atronach was large, a physical fighter, and ended the woman's life with a satisfying crunch.
"Yes! Yes, destroy the worms that would dare bind me!" Potema seemed to enjoy the show as well. The last necromancer, a man, foolishly tried to raise his fallen comrade as a thrall to fight back and was… well, whatever the atronach did to him resulted in a long, high pitched scream that resonated throughout the cavern.
Mohamara pouted. "Aw, that wasn't amusing at all. It just killed them. I was hoping it would put up only enough fight to let me make some funny lines about their mothers and how they dressed them."
"The wretched so rarely provide worthy amusement, little one." Potema's voice was close, entirely too close for Mohamara's liking. A faint aura of static sent his fur on end as a hand so cold it burned rested on his shoulder. "When I am at my full potential again, I will kill you raise you, and show you how to find proper fun with creatures such as them to thank you for freeing me like this."
"Um. You're not my type?"
"Await my arrival, worm. Until then, farewell!"
The static and cold-burning hand left Mohamara, and distantly he could hear Yagraz shout "Where the fuck is she going?!"
Mohamara tapped into the sympathetic bonds of the place, following the bonds between the necromancers to the altar, and from the altar to Potema to find her heading… toward Solitude. Uh oh.
"Um, atronach? Could you help me get to the shouting Orc lady quickly?" Mohamara hoped by the Yellow Room that the atronach he summoned wasn't acidic, and soon felt alarmingly human hands pick him up and thunderously walk down the stairs from the tower roof. Soon enough Mohamara and Yagraz were together again, pincering the last holdout of necromancers and Draugr between them. "Okay, so I might have accidentally let the object of that necromantic ritual loose and now she's on her way to Solitude. So we should hurry."
Yagraz made an exasperated noise and took the tojay from the atronach and put him on her shoulders again. "Next time you want me to toss you, I'm going to say no."
"That's fair."
Meanwhile, in Solitude's Blue Palace, Jarl Elisif the Fair found herself shaken to wakefulness in the dead of night. When she opened her eyes, it was to find her court wizard, Sybille Stentor standing over her with a retinue of guards behind her.
"What is the meaning of this?" The Jarl demanded as she stood from the bed.
"My Jarl, my divinations reveal that you are in grave danger. A powerful evil has been unleashed and is about to attack the Blue Palace." The Breton wizard snapped her fingers and the guards quickly retrieved a robe for Elisif to wear over her nightgown, as well as the Jarl's circlet. "I must ask you to come with me to a bunker in Castle Dour, through the Temple of the Divines while Falk plans the defense of the city."
The Jarl's mind whirled with possible outcomes, so much that she mechanically dressed in the items her guards had retrieved. "Al-alright, I will. But I want the townsfolk protected at all costs. Inform Falk that I want the city evacuated before this attack comes. And-and send word to General Tullius as well."
"It will be done, my Queen."
This gave Elisif pause, and she turned to look at the wizard with visible confusion. "Did you just call me 'Queen'."
"I'm sorry, my Jarl." The Breton hastily inclined her head. "I only attempted a divination before bed as a whim, once we are secure in the bunker I will need to rest and regain my full mental faculties."
"If we survive this attack, court wizard, I order you to take a vacation. I won't have my late husband's best friend work herself to death on my watch."
The dynamic duo rushed to Solitude, with Mohamara recharging the Spear of Bitter Mercy with soul gems that Yagraz had filled for him.
However, they were stopped at the outermost defenses to Solitude by three High Elves-a Thalmor officer and two golden-armored soldiers.
"Halt," the officer shouted, and held a hand up to stop Yagraz. "You are carrying a fugitive from the-... I said halt! Halt!" But the officer's shouts were not answered.
Yagraz kept on running, trampling over her and leaving the Thalmor officer pressed into the ground with deep footprints on her body. The two soldiers that had been with her wisely chose to flee the scene rather than chase after the Orc and her Khajiit friend.
"Where is she, short-stuff?"
Mohamara dove into the sympathetic bonds of Solitude again. Still, they were so fine he couldn't see most of them. But a tangle of bonds led up to Castle Dour, the temple, and somehow deep deep into the Solitude archway. "Start in the temple of the divines, I can get a better picture from there."
"When we get a big soul gem next, I would really like a Red Shoes enchantment for this sort of thing, by the way. My feet are killing me." Even still, Yagraz easily scaled the ramps that had previously been insurmountable by Mohamara and passed into the Castle Dour courtyard.
Where they found Elisif, in a nightgown and coat, along with four Solitude guards and Sybille. Yagraz rested her hand on her ax but otherwise carefully approached while the Jarl looked at them in confusion.
"What's going on, my Jarl? Had a late night crisis of faith?"
The Jarl didn't get a chance to speak before Sybille scoffed in disgust. "Those fools didn't even do any fatal damage to you two? Oh well, guards-kill them and bring their corpses to me."
"What? Guards you will do no such-" Elisif protested, shocked at the court wizard's orders but the Breton woman touched two fingers to the Jarl's head and she fainted right into Sybille's arms. The vampire then dashed into the temple with her, leaving the door ajar.
The guards spoke no words and drew their steel. As Yagraz drew her ax, Mohamara lept from her shoulders, over the guards, and pursued the vampire and kidnapped Jarl.
"So," Yagraz said through a vicious smile as the guards moved to surround her. "How's your health plan?"
It had been a stupid idea to follow a powerful vampire that had a hostage, Mohamara decided as he chased after the sympathetic bonds that were Elisif and Sybille.
"Not really stupid, so much as mad I'd say."
"Hey dad," Mohamara muttered to Sheogorath as he carefully navigated downstairs he couldn't see.
Sheogorath made a delighted noise, a squeal that made Mohamara's teeth itch. "Been promoted to bitter affection! Yes! Haskill will be so proud."
"I'm kinda busy, is this important?" Mohamara didn't position his foot correctly and ended up skipping a level of the staircase that he barely managed to keep from fully falling. It seemed to him that tojay were definitely visual hunters because his hearing hadn't adjusted enough to imply auditory.
"Of course it's important. I'm important, so anything I do is important. Also, things I tell you to do are important. Such as becoming a bard!" Mohamara was scooped off his feet by a Daedra he couldn't see, who might not have actually been physically present and shook around in the air. "And you did it! Missed the announcement, but they gave ya the metaphoric diploma with the fire festival thingy. Glad to see you put my orders above your duty to Meri-pants by the way, though I doubt she'll feel the same."
The Khajiit's blood was was ice as he processed what Sheogorath had said. "But… but you were gonna-"
"I wasn't going to do anything if you didn't make it a priority. All I said was it was an order. You had to do it at some point. But you were afraid of what I might do more than what Meri-pants would do to you in that situation." The Mad God hugged Mohamara so tight it was hard for the Khajiit to breathe. "Thank you for that by the way. It's always a father's dream to have their children absolutely terrified of their wrath."
For a moment, Mohamara forgot that there was a Dragonborn ghost at large, a vampire with a hostage, or that he was likely floating over a staircase that would spell his doom if he fell down on it and became a listless cat. He'd betrayed his Lady. It was a difficult thing to process. But, maybe if he killed the vampire she'd let it balance out and not smite him on the spot?
"Aw, don't you worry none, sonnie. I'll be a good parent and take the blame for you. It'll be our little secret, hmm?" Sheogorath released the tojay and set him back on his feet. "By the way-we've got it down to two candidates for your groom. I'm afraid this is the first marriage of this type I've put together, so Haskill thought it would be a good idea if We provide a dowry for you rather than ask one of someone else. Assuming you survive this little adventure, anyway."
That information restored to Mohamara his will to live, even for fearful reasons. "Um. Wait!" Mohamara tried to find where Sheogorath was in relation to him and eventually felt out the Daedra's hand. His mind raced for a way to keep that horrid fate far away for as long as possible. "D-did you talk to mom about it?"
"... Do you want me to talk to your mother about it?" Sheogorath's voice seemed genuinely puzzled but grew more excited as he spoke. "I mean, it would be nice to chat with her again. And bringing this up out of the blue will make things so amusingly awkward. You know, you're right! I should speak to her about this." Sheogorath moved away from the Khajiit and started up the stairs. "It'll delay things considerably, but the end result is sure to be so fun! I can't wait. Seeya, son!" There was a distinct pop to give Mohamara the impression the Mad God had left.
His doom forestalled by a little while, Mohamara started back down the stairs. Except he was already at the bottom, he realized. "I swear, if he keeps showing up like that I'll start to get gray fur before I'm thirty."
"I swear if you keep running off into danger when you're literally blind I will invent the cat carrier just for you!" Yagraz told him from the top of the stairs as she slid down them on a wooden plank of some kind before scooping up the Khajiit once more when she made it to the bottom. "Figured there would be some stairs to slow you down, let's go."
After killing their way through Draugr, lesser vampires, and an excessive number of skeletons, they got to a section of Solitude's catacombs that strongly resembled a Nordic tomb.
"Potema!" Sybille's voice echoed through the ruins as the duo made it deeper in. "This vessel, prepared for you, will let you fully return to this realm. Consume her soul, and let her body be your second life!"
"Potema!" Mohamara called back as Yagraz kicked in the door to a tiered room in which the spectral woman floated, sarcophagi lined the walls, and Sybille stood over Elisif's sleeping form with a knife. "Look at me!" When the ghost turned her head to behold Mohamara, Yagraz tugged on his leg to send the signal. "Bitch."
"How in the shores of Coldharbour are the two of you still alive?!" Sybille looked over her shoulder, stood and gathered fire in her free hand. "You're just two worthless peons too short-sighted to see that this has all been built up to for hundreds of ye-argh!"
With Sybille talking so much Mohamara had time to line up a bolt of holy sunlight and struck the vampire square in her previously perfect face. "I think the fuck not, you trick-ass bitch. Have at thee!"
Potema directed her swirling vortex of energy into the sarcophagi, unleashing the Draugr from within, which Yagraz met with gleeful abandon. The reflect spells effect of the Spear of Bitter Mercy proved invaluable when Potema herself would attack with great bolts of lightning, or Sybille launched superheated balls of fire at the Orc and Khajiit.
Though outnumbered, even with the watermelon atronach Mohamara summoned, it seemed that the tide of battle was going in their favor until Sybille managed to grab Mohamara and yank him off Yagraz's shoulders while the Orc was busy blocking two greatswords from two different Draugr Wights.
"If you want something done right," the vampire snarled, holding Mohamara up by his robe and letting the human facade of her face slip away, "do it yourself, I guess."
"Isn't it customary to grant the condemned one final request?" Mohamara tried to swing Bitter Mercy at Sybille, but she yanked it from his grip and cast it aside.
"Not for the likes of you." Sybille opened her mouth wide, baring her fangs, but instead found herself biting into a watermelon fired from the atronach.
Sensing an opening, Mohamara did what was becoming an alarmingly frequent thing-ditch his robes and go hunting for the spear in the direction he'd heard it clatter. "Either I'm getting too good at that, or people need to stop grabbing me by my clothes." As if to answer his request, Mohamara felt a mummified Draugr hand grab onto his tail while he felt around for the spear, and yank him backward. "Ow ow ow ow!"
"Archers! Aim! Fire!" A female's voice rang out through the air, and many twangs of bows filled the air. The Draugr that had been holding Mohamara fell to the ground, dead with many arrows protruding from its back and skull. From the doorway, a squad of five Legion soldiers stood in formation, three crouched in front, two standing behind. And behind them was a Nord woman in the metal armor of an Imperial Legate. "Draw steel, put every undead in here to the sword!" The Legate and her soldiers advanced into the room, shifting from bows to swords as they went and joined the fray.
Sybille had only just gotten the watermelon out of her mouth when the Legate grabbed her by her hair, and shoved Imperial steel entirely through the vampire's mouth and out her neck. It took a moment for her to die, her flesh drying out and becoming dust as the Legate watched.
"No! It will not end like this!" Potema released a shockwave that knocked the Imperials, and Yagraz to the ground as she fled behind a sealed door. The Orc was the first on her feet to bash down the door and pursue the specter.
"Get the Jarl and the boy out of here, Auxiliary. Everyone else, follow that ghost!"
"W-wait, I'm not-" Mohamara was cut off by an unfamiliar hand grabbing him by the wrist and yanking him to his feet.
"Don't worry, son," an Imperial-accented voice told him as he was forced out of the room. "Legion's here to save the day!"
The watermelon atronach, with no orders and no enemies left to kill, dissipated and left thirty perfectly good melons behind.
Those melons will go to waste because no one wants to eat watermelons with Draugr bits stuck in 'em. Right unsanitary, that.
