25

.~~~.

Mytho let out a shout as he vaulted over the edge of the building and sailed freely through the air. He tucked into a roll as he landed and pushed off the ground to his feet again. As he slid to a stop on the rocky rooftop, he glanced back. The fury-stricken face of one of several guards that had dogged him all the way from Castle Skingrad peeked over the side. The others hadn't shown themselves yet but he was sure they were only a moment behind.

Mytho bounced up and down to prepare his muscles for another leap. "Come on, lads!" he called out to them. "You aren't going to catch me at such a pitiful pace! I'll be on the road again before you can get yourself over this mansion here!"

Enough curses to make a priest sick to his stomach poured from the first guard's mouth.

Mytho lowered himself to the ground and inhaled. deeply to fill his lungs with ample breath and bravery. With a sharp exhale, he ran to the edge. With another jump, he was airborne once more and leaving them far behind. He wouldn't need to waste the effort of worrying any longer.

Rather, there were no reasons to worry about them catching up. There were still plenty of other reasons to worry.

It hadn't taken Mytho much time at all to realize something was terribly wrong with Halora's plan. If he had to guess, she probably had something else in mind that didn't involve half the guardsmen in the city hunting the Thieves Guild while the rest chased after him. That was all he had seen unfolding on his way, however. By his count, she had lost four of her guildmates and maybe more than that if they truly were spread thin across the whole city. He had tried his best to save a few of them as he ran but with so many men aiming to kill him, he hadn't had much time to dawdle. He definitely didn't enough time to save every last one of them.

It was the painfully drab streets of Skingrad that had proved to be his biggest challenge, though. From the castle window, he had been able to tell quite easily where the fireball in the sky was. Now that he was deep in the Hightown District and near where he believed it had been, he was beginning to hope he wasn't about to spend half the night circling the same two streets in a fruitless search for Halora. She had to be somewhere. If she were acting as she usually would, she was likely exactly where she shouldn't be.

A tickle of worry cropped up inside his chest, making it feel light and airy before he quieted the feeling. He gritted his teeth as he ran and they ached as they clacked harshly together.

Halora wouldn't do anything stupid. She wouldn't get herself hurt. She was too damned stubborn to die that easily. She always had been.

But Mytho had to be sure.

It was supposed to be simple. He was to come to town, find information, and leave. He wasn't supposed to involve himself in her matters again – it only amounted to tragedy every time he did – but a piece of him that wanted to be afraid. That damnable, abhorrent piece he buried many times over wouldn't let him stay away. It wouldn't allow him to turn his back on her without giving him an exhaustive fight.

Hadn't he learned from the last time he had tried to stay close to her? Were the scars it left on her not enough proof for him?

He supposed he hadn't and perhaps he truly was the World's Most Idiotic Man. He couldn't be bothered to stick by her side and he couldn't find it within himself to be so heartless as to leave her for good. Until he was a smarter and kinder man, though, Mytho could make his stupidity and cruelty work for their shared benefit.

He dropped from the next ledge he came upon and landed on the balcony below. An ear-splitting scream blasted from the window behind Mytho and forced him back into the air. That was no place to catch his breath. He clambered onto the railing and ran the length of it. At the end of the rail, he leaped out and caught a windowsill. Continuing the motion, he twirled around and released his grip to drop a down a floor, four from the base of the building. He landed on a hanging planter and pushed himself against the window, figuring it was a good thing it was closed.

A snapping sound pierced the air. Mytho instinctively leaped forward before he had time to figure out the cause, causing the planter to split in two pieces. He stretched out his hand to cling to whatever would take him. Two floors down, he caught the very edge above a closed window. Pain shot up his arm and crossed his shoulder as he swung forward and crashed through the window. Shards of glass busied themselves by being scattered across the impassive wooden floor/

Mytho let out a groan as he rolled onto his side, dazed as he tried to regain the breath that had been forced out of his chest. Years ago, he would've shrugged off impacts like those without flinching. Now? Well, his back wasn't sore now but gods knew he would be nearly immobilized come morning. Massaging the lower portion of his spine, he pulled himself up on the wall and staggered to the open door across the room. He didn't bother to sneak any longer. Had he come through the house earlier in the night, perhaps, but not now. There wasn't enough coin in the Empire to give him that kind of patience.

He left the room and crossed the hallway as he headed to the stairs at the end. There, he began his descent to the bottom floor. He kept a hand on one of his swords and the other on the railing while he scanned each shadowy corner with his eyes. Too many harsh lessons about how dangerous a horrified owner with a vase and a mean streak had bored the habit into him. He expected something, and yet it wasn't a surprise attack that disrupted the silence. It was a pungent odor that filled the air and caused him to stumble backward. He pinched his nostrils as his eyes burned and continued onward to the front door. Just as he set his hand on the knob, however, a peculiar sensation radiated goosebumps across his skin.

He was being watched. The inside of the house appeared to be quiet and, dare he say it,peaceful, though.

With all that was going on outside, that shouldn't have been the case. "Come out!" he said as he let go of the doorknob so he could grip his other sword. "I'm not one of the guards!"

The floorboards creaked behind him and he glanced over his shoulder at the cause of the noise.

"What in Nocturnal's name are you doing here, Phantom?" Luciros asked as he stepped out from behind an opened door and leaned on it for support. His face was coated with grime and his clothes were torn in slash-like patterns, stained with blood. "Madam Doyen told me you were supposed to be in Castle Skingrad creating a distraction."

"Trying to fix what's gone awry, that's what," Mytho said, shaking his head. "The plan has been ruined. You're wasting your time trying to keep it alive. Ilawe knew what was happening and he set a trap for me in the Castle."

Luciros' eyes, lacking any sort of spirit, traced over Mytho. "It appears his trap was a failure, then, seeing as you're standing here with me."

"That's just it," Mytho said. "He didn't fail because he didn't intend on having me killed, I don't think. Or maybe he did. I don't know. Either way, he wanted to keep me out of the way so he could deal with the Guild."

Luciros made a face. "What do you mean 'deal' with us?"

"I mean he's out there right now kicking your collective arses," Mytho said, pursing his lips to keep from sneering at his own failings. "Because the Vigilante isn't just Janus Hassildor. He's Ilawe, too. That's why the guards are turning the city over to find all of you. He figured out that we were making a move and alerted the guards before we could even begin."

"Gods damn it," Luciros spat. "And you're sure they're the same man?"

"I found his secret stash of blood bottles, so I'm rather sure of it," Mytho said, reaching out for the doorknob as he prepared to leave. "Now, I've got more important things to do than stand here and chat with you, lad. Hallie's out there somewhere and I intend to find her. You and the rest of the Guild should just go back home and hope for the best. Unless you're willing to fight to the death tonight, that is."

"Wait!" Luciros said before he could exit the house. He pushed off the door and limped towards Mytho, his face tight with visible pain as he detached a small bottle from his belt. "You may need this."

Mytho nearly took the bottle but retracted his hand when he felt something unexpected; heat enough to warm his hand through his gloves. "Eh, is this a trick? You aren't trying to off me, are you?"

Luciros shook his head. "It's something I made. Originally, I had intended to hand out several bottles of it to the rest of the Guild but the batch wasn't quite as I expected it to be."

"Meaning?"

"That's the only bottle of it left. Madam Doyen had the other and she's already used it, obviously."

Mytho gingerly took the bottle and held it at an arm's length as he wished he had something else to carry it in. Maybe a leather bag or a tiny crate on a long pole. "So that fireball that lit up the sky was her doing?"

"I'm afraid so," he said. "I begged her to only use it if the situation became too extreme to consider any other options. Since she did, I can only assume the worst has taken place and the Vigilante found her first. To be frank, I assumed he would."

Mytho tied the bottle to the belt around his waist. "Ah, that's my Hallie. Always getting herself buried waist-deep in –"

"One more thing. If you manage to find her before..." He trailed off and swallowed hard as he propped himself up on the wall. "If you find Madam Doyen and she is still safe and sound, I would be very appreciative if you could keep a close watch on her for me."

Mytho raised an eyebrow at him.

"Something has changed in her since her encounter with the Vigil – er, Janus Hassildor, the other night," he said. "I can say that with a fair degree of certainty."

"How so?"

"When I went to see her in the Chapel, I brought with me a bottle of wine as a treat. I wasn't there long, but by the time I left, she had already drank half of it." Luciros laid flat against the wall and lowered himself to the floor. "And, unless my eyes were fooling me, she didn't appear to be drunk in the slightest. She actually seemed rather energized and not relaxed like I hoped she would be."

"So what are you getting at?"

"Please, let me finish," he said, holding his hand up. "I didn't think much of it at the time until she mentioned to me the next morning as we walked back to the hideout that it must've been watered down."

"Was it?"

"That would be impossible. It had never been opened. That aside, she apparently finished the whole bottle and didn't even have a headache in the morning. At first, I wanted to agree with her deduction that it must have been ruined simply because I had no other reasonable explanation for the matter. However, I noticed something on our way back to the Guild that I haven't been able to stop thinking about."

Mytho cracked the door and peered out into the street to check for the guards that had been tailing him earlier. Unsurprising to him, the street was empty. "Go on."

"Every time we passed into the sunlight, she would express her distaste about how bright it was and how she was feeling as if she were burning up," Luciros said. "She then asked if it were the antidote working through her system, to which I answered yes despite that being a lie. It should have run its course before sunset the day before."

"Look, lad, this is a fine story, but if you want me to find her before –"

"And when I convinced her to let me check her pulse, I found that it was frighteningly weak," he said, his tone conveying a carefully restrained anxiety. "Later that night, I checked it again and felt it change anywhere from far faster and stronger than it ought to be, to impossible to discern in less than two minutes. But Madam Doyen didn't show any signs of distress, not even mild irritation over my continued pressing on her wrist."

"And?"

Luciros looked down and shifted to the side, his face pulled into a tight grimace as he moved. "Don't you see? There's something wrong with her," he said, letting out a groan as he settled again. "I'm afraid I don't know what it is but I'm sure that she isn't as she should be."

Mytho leaned against the door, his arms crossed over his chest. "So what is it you want me to do? If there truly is something wrong with Hallie, watching over her shoulder isn't going to do much good."

Luciros buried his head in his hands and exhaled between his palms. "Have you ever had someone you look up to, Phantom? And I don't mean someone you simply harbor respect for. I mean someone you would model yourself after, someone you would take pride in being compared to whether or not such a thing was meant as a compliment or an insult."

He raised his head, allowing Mytho to see he had paled to the point of grayness. "Madam Doyen is that person to me. She taught me everything I know, gave me a reason to live when I had none, and made me feel as if I had regained the family I had lost. Call it whatever you like; respect, reverence, worship, the term you use matters little to me because none of them can affect how I feel. And that feeling terrifies me, Phantom. Because I've already watched more than one of my friends die tonight and I'm afraid of what will become of me if I lose her, too."

Mytho clenched his jaw tight and his fists even tighter. "You do realize who you're asking for help, don't you? Last we spoke, you were telling me off."

Luciros, through the pain and paleness on his face, managed to force a smile. "I do know, in fact. That's precisely why I'm asking. Because if what she's told me about you, then not a damned thing on Nirn can get in your way when you want something. And you want to find her, don't you?"

Such a frustrating smile, filled with an ego too big for one person to carry. Mytho wondered how someone could possibly have such an inflated sense of self-importance. "You and her both," he said, exhaling the disconcerting tension in his chest as he released his balled fists, "are going to drive me absolutely mad one of these days. Fine. I'll keep an eye on her but I'm not making any promises. Understand?"

"Please, you can drop that act of yours," Luciros said. "I can see right through it. Why else would you be running across the city and not out of town if you truly were as apathetic as you pretend to be? Why would you have taken part in this ill-fated operation of ours? Forgive me but I don't buy into your front. Not one bit."

Mytho muttered a curse under his breath and turned to leave. "You aren't going to keel over on me, are you? She'll have my hide if she finds out I left you here to die."

Luciros' laugh was breathy and quiet. "Do you honestly believe I'd be done in by these half-wit guards so easily? They may have managed to fracture a rib or two mine, but I gave much worse. If you're curious," he gestured towards the open door at the end of the hall, "go and see for yourself how the human body looks when it's been reduced to a viscous puddle. You've probably smelled it already, haven't you?"

Gods above. Mytho gagged as he ripped the door open and hurried outside. "No wonder Hallie keeps you pent up in that hideout all day," he said over his shoulder, his stomach lurching as he tried to forget everything he had just heard and smelled. In fresh air again, he inhaled deeply and pushed the choking stench out of his system.

He scanned over the empty street in front of him, his hands cupped over his ears to listen for a sound to make a run for. Now, love, where are you hiding?

A howl of air came from a what sounded to be two streets over. There. Not that far at all.

Mytho dashed across the street to the buildings and began to climb, tearing at the stone wall hand-over-hand. It was like chasing her all over again, their little game of cat and mouse. She always did find a way to lure him back in just as he began to believe they were done.

The wind screeched once more, prodding him to quicken his pace with its sound.

Not that far but not that close, either.

He was going to be cutting it close, he figured. But that was when he did his best work.

.~~~.

A furious pillar of wind ripped through the alleyway crashed into Halora's back, throwing her face down into a puddle of murky water. She scrambled to her knees. Her lungs and heart ached in her chest as she tried to clear her throat of the putrid wash. Her eyes blurred and stung from the force of her coughing and a throbbing pressure strained the inside of her skull. The pebbles embedded deep in her palms – pointed like miniature daggers spouted from the ground – shifted underneath her bloodied skin and burrowed deeper still as she put her weight on them to struggle to her feet. With a frail breath scarcely able to be felt as it traveled through her gritted teeth, she pushed off into a sprint towards the gaping mouth of the alleyway.

She didn't make it far before her legs began to wobble too much to keep her upright. Halora slumped against the wall and wiped her arm across her drenched forehead. When she pulled her away, a red smear covered her sleeve from her wrist to her elbow. At that, her vision blurred again, the scent of blood – her blood – too thick in her nostrils to continue on without pause.

How had the tables turned so quickly? One moment she was the victor of an agonizingly long war. The next, she was helplessly fleeing from a ravenous beast that didn't understand the definition of mercy. She had become little more than a rabbit trying to escape a lion and she was failing. Badly.

The sound of heaving footsteps echoed down the windy corridor. A shout followed suit. Two guards rushed across the opening at the end opposite of her and missed her presence entirely.

That was how. That was the reason her plot had been unraveled in mere minutes. That and being beaten until she was barely able to walk and being pushed far beyond that.

There were guards everywhere. Every street, every corner. Somehow, they had known what was happening before it had even begun. Everything was falling apart and she couldn't do anything to stop it. She had found three of her guildmates' bodies already. Their heads were elsewhere, which had left her with no means of identifying them, but she hadn't let them go without properly avenging them. No, she had slit the throats of three guards as she fled from the Vigilante, her ethics and code be damned.

It wasn't enough. It wasn't even close. They were still horribly outnumbered and separated by what felt like entire worlds. The plan was still failing but she would take every consequence her actions brought to her and then some. If it meant saving just one of them, she would do it. On a night like this one, there weren't heroes nor villains. There was no right and no wrong. There were only survivors and victims claimed by a grisly fate.

She wrapped her arm around herself and pushed against her ribs. Electric pain radiated from her own touch, forcing her hands to shake uselessly as she felt she was coming undone from the inside out. She swore that by every Divine and every Daedra, every last worshiped god and those forgotten, she wouldn't be one of the victims tonight.

Halora clenched her fists and plodded forward, one unsteady footstep at a time, with one hand on the wall to keep her swaying movements steady. First, she would return to the hideout. She would take a moment to bind her wounds and clean the blood splattered all over her. Then, she would smash a lantern on the ground and burn everything – every ledger, every record of every day – all of it. If he truly could smell her blood from half a county away, he would find her again by dawn. He would find the hideout soon after if there was still one left to find. Anyone he hadn't slaughtered by then would be hunted by Skingrad's guards and executed anyway.

For their sake, she wouldn't let that happen. No one else would suffer because of her mistake. There were already too many deaths caused by her actions. The last she cared to let happen would be her own.

A gust blew again, tugging her forward like open arms. At the end of the alleyway ahead, the Vigilante dropped gracefully from above. In one hand, he held his sword. It was glossy and bright crimson even in the dark. In his other hand, he held the lifeless body of one of her guildmates, brutalized beyond all recognition, their skin shriveled and gray.

"Have you grown tired of running yet?" he asked as he tossed the corpse away. "You must have realized by now that you're trapped. There isn't any place left for you to hide. No place I cannot reach you." With a flourish of his sword, he began walking towards her. He crossed the puddles without disturbing their surface, ghost-like in his presence. "With each drop of blood I shed, I grow stronger. With each minute you spend running, you grow weaker. You grow closer to succumbing to your wounds. Do you not realize this?"

Halora tried to turn and run, yet her legs wouldn't budge. If she dared to move them again, she feared they would lose the strength to hold her up. "What..." she began as she tried to find enough air to inhale. "What would Rona say if she knew what you were doing?"

The Vigilante stopped. His silence returned in favor of his growing inclination to taunt her until it was broken by a mutter too quiet for her to hear. "Never speak her name," he said in a tone lower than the grave. "It doesn't belong on lips tainted with deceit and arrogance like yours."

Halora shuffled backward as he continued advanced towards her. She glanced around her for something to defend herself with. Nothing. "And what you're doing is better? All of this killing and for what? So you can feed?"

"As if I need your acceptance," he said. "Rona never understood what we had become. Neither did the rest of the Empire. She feared herself, for our lives, and refused to acknowledge herself for what she truly was. She spent entire days and nights pleading for the Divines to strike her down. And yet none listened to her cries." He reached to his hood and tugged at it from the top, revealing his pale complexion underneath. His appearance was carefully kept. His hair was smooth and slick against his head, his chin clean-shaven, and his demeanor as regal as she imagined he would have been centuries ago. "For a time, I, too neglected what I had become. I wanted to believe that despite the circumstances, I was still the same as I was. I refused to feed. I refused the powers it brought me and thought a lifetime of debilitation would be acceptable."

With a snap of his finger, a ripple traveled over his face much like a droplet of water landing in a pool. The masquerade he wore vanished in its wake, revealing the monster that lurked behind it. Scarlet vessels, pulsating and engorged with the blood he had stolen, snaked over his skin and darkened around his pitch-black eyes. His teeth, thick and elongated to the point of hardly fitting inside his mouth, were stained with a red so deep it seemed to make all colors around it fade. "And it cost me dearly," he continued, pointing towards his eyes. "For me, my vision. For Rona, it cost her more."

"And you killed her for it?"

Janus stopped again and his face hardened. "I set her free," he said. "With the Saint's help, I gave her what she desired and what the Divines wouldn't. She was cured, yes, but after so long without feeding, the return to normalcy was too much for her frail body to bear."

"Then why are you punishing us?" Halora shouted, backing away as he grew closer. "We've done nothing to you!"

"Because through losing her, I came to know the truth," he said, his footsteps heavy and filled with latent fury. "The Divines are cruel and uncaring. They would let us spill our blood in their names a million times over and enjoy the spectacle. Daedra, Aedra, they are the same breed; selfish, petulant children with infinite power. They are only interested in what we can do to puff up their pride. In saving her, they would gain nothing. And so they did nothing."

Halora stumbled and fell, landing on her tailbone. She winced as pain crept up her spine. Janus drew closer until he was standing over her.

"And in retaliation, I turned my back on them," he said, squatting down. "I realized that their justice is flawed. Their rule is poisoned. If they would allow my Rona to die in misery and fear, they mustn't be worthy of our devotion. The righteousness they claim to espouse must be shallow. Instead, it is up to us, as the mortals who claimed the world in their callous departure from creation, to see it kept clean. Beginning with the scurrying vermin that have taken up residence in my city."

Halora rolled onto her side when and planted her hand on the ground. "You've lost your damned mind," she said, digging her broken fingernails into the stony street. "This isn't justice. It's a genocide. And you're no more than an animal."

"Then you, too, should blame the gods for bringing about these circumstances," he said as he picked her up. "As in their haste to curse my existence, they mistakenly gave me the power to see true, impartial justice through to its fitting end."

Halora let her arms hang limply by her side as she raised high enough that her feet could no longer reach the ground. Nothing she had with her would do a thing to harm him. She had already been taught that twice over. Her fingers were ice-cold and tingling, her eyes barely able to focus on the Janus' face in front of her.

His face was that of failure. Bitter, stomach-turning failure with a touch as murky as the blackest abyss. So many lives lost because of her. Every one of them looked to her for guidance and now wandered listlessly in whatever world came after. For all her efforts to stop them from slipping away, she hadn't even come close to succeeding. They had warned her. They had told her she was wrong and still she pushed them away and trusted only herself and her pride. She had started the night with arrogance. It was only fitting it end this way.

Perhaps it truly was justice that he was bringing to her, poetic and savage justice for leading them to their deaths.

Ari. Only her name echoed in Halora's mind as the Vigilante drew her close. In the muddling darkness, she could see her face, so clear she could almost reach out and touch it. Please, be safe.

And then, his face joined the darkness with her. His smug, idiotic smile. His self-aggrandizing nature. But with those came the pieces of him she had nearly forgotten. The precious moments when he hadn't pushed her away and instead let her see what was tucked away behind that teasing smirk and buried beneath his grandeur. The moment when she learned of his only fear. His arms tight around her, his voice a gentle sea-breeze in her ear.

Halora squeezed her eyes shut as wet streaks ran down her cheeks. Whether it was blood or tears, she didn't know. She only knew that she was dying.

She went rigid as Janus' teeth sliced into the base of her neck and burrowed deep into her muscles. As he held her, however, she felt her muscles release their resistance and soften until they couldn't manage as little as a twitch. A cloud of numbness engulfed he arm, making her wonder if it were there anymore.

Until she landed on that very arm, the hardness of the ground beneath her.

"Absolutely foul!" Janus shouted, doubling over as he coughed up thick clumps of red onto the ground. "What have you done to yourself? Your blood! It's rotten!"

Halora could only imagine she had the energy to laugh. At least she would have that as her final defiant act.

Janus wiped his arm over his mouth before he spat up again. "Never mind that," he growled, lifting his sword high as he walked clumsily towards her again. "I can make do with the rest."

A shadow fell from the sky, its wings flapping in the wind. Janus locked his arms in a cross in front of his body. With a whirling motion, the shadow launched him away and landed in front of Halora. He raised to full height, pitch-black like the night in a solid form, and covered her like a shroud. A sword was on either side of him, drawn already and slick with blood. Dust and soot covered his back. At his hip, a flame trapped in a bottle raged against its little confinement. He brushed his hand over it and glanced over his shoulder, a smirk on his face.

"Damn you," Mytho said breathlessly, his voice hoarse in his throat. "You just had to go and make me care. Didn't you, Hallie?"