29.
The porch was quiet. There was no one else up here. Only the wind whispered its secrets and chased the clouds in the metal grey sky. They stood apart, silent. Watching over the plains. Neither of them knew what to say, how to start. Every word felt meager and meaningless. And they couldn't touch each other, they were family but in the current situation, they were way too far apart.
They were strangers.
Sura finally turned to look at him. He didn't answer her gaze. The look on his face was stern, serious and grave. He smiles so rarely, she thought. Would he look more familiar if he smiled at me?
She looked at his armor, his weapons, his strong arms and muscular body. He had changed from the day when he first appeared in Whiterun. Back then he had worn ragged leather armor, torn out shoes and a dull dagger. Now he wore a shiny steel armor that was partly covered in animal fur. She recognized wolf pelts and snow leopard skin. She didn't need to guess where he had got all of them. Her brother was a warrior. A hunter.
The armor had strange carvings that weren't familiar to her and his weapons - the two sharp and shiny axes and the curved bow - were made of the same material and had the same curious markings. She could have asked him about them but opening this conversation with such a meaningless topic seemed impossible. In fact, everything that she wanted to say seemed impossible.
So they stood there, silent but at the same time desperate to say something. Finally, Sura understood what she could do. The Eye was still on her neck and now she knew what to do with it. She closed the jewel in her fist, closed her eyes and like a whisper with the wind, came the words of the spell that she needed to recite. It only took a few moments and soon enough she felt how the jewel broke in two separate pieces. As she opened her hand, she saw the identical crescent moons. She reached around her neck, opened the lock and handed the other part to J'Ziir.
"This is yours," she said.
He took it. Again, silence fell between them. He looked at the necklace, thinking how long he had carried it with him. He hadn't known its meaning, it had only been a memory to him. Something that only he could understand. A mark of the anger that only he had the right possess. But now, here was his dead sister, who seemed to remember as much as he did, but in her face, he saw nothing of the same anger, of the same passionate will to revenge.
"You saved me," Sura continued. "Like you saved me back then."
"I didn't save you," J'Ziir replied.
"You did," Sura smiled. "Because without you the Eye wouldn't be here now. And if you hadn't told me to hide in the wagon, I would have died...back then… with ma and pa..."
"I didn't die," J'Ziir whispered. "I wish I had..."
"What happened to you?" she finally asked and moved a little closer.
"You don't want to know," he said grimly.
She giggled. "I remember you saying that to me. When we were little and I asked you something and you didn't know the answer. It was always "you don't want to know!"
"This time it's true, Raji," he didn't smile. "You don't want to know."
"Raji". How odd that sounded. How strange and at the same time so familiar, so dear. When he said the name, she could almost hear tenderness in his voice. Like a shadow of his old self, hiding somewhere beneath the hard and impenetrable surface.
"Or is it Sura now?" he mumbled.
"Just call me Raji," Sura smiled. "It makes me happy. Happy to remember that name. To remember who I used to be. Who we used to be. You were there with me, weren't you?"
"I didn't want to be," he shook his head. "I remember everything I need to."
"Where you a slave?" she dared to ask. He didn't need to say anything, she saw the answer in his face. "For how long?"
"Long enough," he replied.
"That doesn't really tell me much," Sura sighed.
"Seventeen years, two months, three weeks and five days, to be exact," he elaborated, looked at her with his piercing eyes and smiled sarcastically. "Does that tell you more?"
"What did they do to you?" she ignored his question and looked at him with sorrow in her eyes.
He hated to see it, the pity, the comfort, the understanding as if she could really understand anything. For a short, fleeting moment, he hated her. For living. For ruining his plans. For coming back into his life now, as a ghost, as a memory, as a reminder that he wasn't the kind of man his parents had always wanted him to be. For having lived such a secured and safe life within these sturdy walls. But as soon as the hate came, he also remembered what had happened to her. And the guilt quickly followed. To control his feelings, to escape from them, he turned away from her.
"You name it," he growled. "Poisoning, torture, fighting... whatever they wanted. We were their property, not living creatures. We weren't meant to feel pain, hunger, thirst. They saved the strongest of us, tested us, and made us fight each other."
Yes indeed, he thought. He had suppressed these memories, hoping he would never have to dig through them again. He had only scratched the surface because he didn't have to words to describe the worst of it to her.
How they kept them in chains for days under the hot and scorching sun, how the chains gnawed his skin, his ankles, his wrists, his neck into a bloody, painful and festering wounds filled with maggots and other parasites. How he was only a shadow of himself, at times too weak to move or even to talk or to sleep. And after a horrific day in the sun, the night came and they were left to fend for themselves against hungry predators and the biting cold of the dark.
How the master wizards tested their spells and poisons on them. How they could do nothing but try to scream, try to fight the enemies that weren't really there, to die a thousand times but still be alive, how the pain was so immense that they couldn't get a single sound out of their tortured bodies. How they could only twist and turn and hope that the suffering would end, hope for death, anything to make it stop.
He learned not to make friends, not to trust anyone, because day after day he was forced to kill others just to survive to the next day when the same thing happened again. There were times when he was so tired, so exhausted, that he had seen his opponent in two when he had barely been able to stay on his feet let alone defend himself. But somehow he always survived. He suffered massive wounds and deep gashes and often he was more than ready to die. The dark spots of death had danced in his eyes as he fell forward, tasted the dusty earth and felt the dirt underneath him soak his blood. Then he was ready, more than ready, to follow his parents. Hoping they would come to him. Hoping he would see them through the red haze that covered his eyes, when he could hear his heart beating, beating so slow, so tired, so ready to give it all up.
But death never came. It avoided him. And as he now looked at the other half of the Eye, he slowly began to understand why and how he survived.
"They?" Sura's voice broke into his thoughts.
"The elves," he mumbled.
"Were you in Skyrim all this time?" she wanted to know.
"I was at first," he reached deeper into his own pit of hell. "Before..."
"You escaped?"
"Yes," he replied. So many things contained in that one, small word. He didn't know how to explain. "I met an Argonian woman. In the Black Marsh. She taught me things. How to be quiet, how to kill quietly. How to use the shadows to my advantage. I spent years with her, learning to live like a person. Then she died and I...returned."
Those few memories of her brought her name to his lips. "Beelei," he whispered softly. How much had she taught him? How patient had she been? When he couldn't even eat without looking at her with a silent question in his eyes, asking for a permission to touch to food. When he wanted to live as a person but didn't know how.
And when she reached out for him in the middle of the night, when he felt his body answer to her soft touch but didn't know what to do. With her, he learned to be kind. Gentle. Loving. He learned where he needed to touch and how to touch. After she died, he forgot those things. He realized that there was no room for kindness in his life.
She saw it long before her untimely death. His hate. Repressed, but boiling beneath the surface. A great potential. With that in mind, she trained him. To be more precise. More accurate. To never miss or to underestimate his enemies. To count their weaknesses. And to use them to his advantage. Alongside her, he turned into an assassin. Without him knowing, she passed him her lifelong knowledge of poisons, archery, silent weapons and the art of stealth. And he mastered them all.
Sura sensed that there was so much more hidden behind his simple words, behind that one name, so many things that he couldn't or didn't want to tell. In a way, she could now understand him but she couldn't realize why he hated the Nords so much. After all, it was the elves that had kept him as their slave.
"Why hate the Nords?" she finally asked.
"Why?" he turned to look at her. "Who killed our parents?"
"Because of him you judge them all?" she asked and stepped closer. "Are you are going after him? What would that accomplish?"
"Revenge," he replied. "You might have forgotten, but I haven't. And I never will."
"I don't want to forget either," Sura touched his hand gently. "But let me help. We can do this together. The Dragons..."
"No!" he refused. "I don't want you to get involved."
"I'm already involved, whether you want it or not," she said sternly. "Skyrim needs you now, no one else can kill the dragons."
"Are you really asking me to ignore what happened?" he frowned. "Asking me to ignore that I lost everything, you, ma and pa...our home..!"
"But I'm here now!" she was now standing right in front of him. "Here and alive. You haven't lost everything. We have each other! And I'm not asking you to ignore. But there are other ways..."
"As long as he is alive, I have nothing," J'Ziir said but didn't pull away. "You need to let me go."
"I will if you let me follow," Sura said. "I just found you again. You go after him, you take me with you."
"Raji," he whispered, lifted his hand and caressed her cheek. Don't make this so hard on me. "Don't you realize that seeing you here now is like a dream. Something I never expected. You are the only good thing left. It doesn't matter what happens to me now. You are here."
"Don't talk like that," she shook her head and without a moment's hesitation, she wrapped her arms around him and held him close. His body stiffened and she was sure he would push her away. Couple minutes later she felt his arms, his strong, protective arms close around her.
"He is already wanted by the Imperials, can't you let them handle him?" Sura whispered.
Why couldn't he? Why couldn't he let them handle him? This addiction... he knew he couldn't be at peace before he would end the man himself. This path was his to walk, to its bitter end. He knew that there would a price to pay for choosing this. For not letting it go.
"So I will pay the price, whatever it may be when the time comes."
For the moment though, he was happy to hold his sister in his arms.
