Author's Note: Since this chapter is shorter than most, I've uploaded the next one concurrently. Thanks to everyone who's stuck with the story thus far, and welcome to those of you who have recently followed and favourited the story. I hope you enjoy, and feel free to leave any reviews, knowing you guys are engaging with the story really makes it all worthwhile!

Chapter 36: Buried

Once again, Aelfwynn fell.

For a fraction of a moment, she almost expected Lake Honrich to swallow her again, to reclaim her for an eternity of madness and slow decay. Paralyzed by this terror, she failed to let go of Serana's hand before pulling the older vampire inexorably over the edge behind her. Aelfwynn barely caught sight of the wooden planks which rapidly appeared below her before she smacked into them, barely managing to shield her face with her arm and pull her knees up to her chest. Serana collapsed beside her, pulling herself to her feet far more rapidly than Aelfwynn could manage. Shaking her head clear, Aelfwynn realised that their fall had been swiftly broken by landing atop a rope bridge, suspended above the fog-obscured distance below.

Serana pulled her to her feet, the rickety bridge swaying and groaning apprehensively as she did so. Not far above them, the agonised roar returned – the blinded dragon reacting to the sound of its offensive prey.

Serana turned purposefully to Aelfwynn. "There's another bridge down there – come on!"

The two vampires threw themselves off the side of the bridge, merely moments before it was engulfed in flames, splintering as it burned and began to collapse into the void below.

The two vampires landed far better this time. Spurred on by the immediate threat, Aelfwynn quickly searched for any avenue of escape. On seeing the bridge ahead of them vanish into the cliffside past an odd, apparently carved pillar, she made a snap decision.

"This way!" Aelfwynn called out to Serana, as she sprinted past the strange pillar, vanishing into the tunnel.

Suddenly, the ground shook violently. Aelfwynn span around to see the Dragon had crushed the rope bridge, embedding its talons into the icy rock face. It's head moved in several darting motions, sniffing the air and pressing the side of its head to the rock. For a moment, Aelfwynn thought it had lost their trail, but as soon as the beast's maw found the crevice in the rock it let loose another torrent of flame. Aelfwynn and Serana threw themselves to the ground behind a turn in the cave path. The roar of the dragon was deafening, but to undead ears it was soul-tearing. For several seconds Aelfwynn could hear nothing but the dull ringing – but then she heard the crack.

It sounded as if a boulder were ripping in two, and then the cave went dark.

The walls were ice. Frozen fangs hung in frequent bunches on the ceiling, and a thin frost blanket delicately coated the cave floor. It took Aelfwynn's eyes a few moments to adapt to the darkness, but now her night-vision was clear – in shades of subtle colour she could never have conceived before her siring.

Serana walked toward the entry passage, wiping the dust from her regal armour as she did so.

"Great. Just great. I'm sealed underground… again!"

Aelfwynn followed her cautiously. From what she could make out, the strange pillar had collapsed under the intense heat of the dragon's flames, causing the tunnel entrance to fall in on itself.

"Well..." Aelfwynn began, gesturing towards the collapse, "at least the dragon is on the other side. Trust me – we had a lucky escape. I've seen what those creatures can do."

Serana turned to her then, fixing Aelfwynn with an oddly cold stare.

"Right." she uttered blandly, before beginning to wind her way deeper into the cave.

It was clear to Aelfwynn that Serana hadn't forgiven her mention of seeking a cure. Aelfwynn had hoped that if eventually she was forced to reveal her own intentions in that regard, Serana might at least respect her choice. Now she had profound doubts on the matter.

Serana wasn't like Harkon, Morcar or Frieda. She didn't seem to revel in her monstrous nature – yet that nature seemed desperately important to her at the same time. It was her 'gift'.

Maybe she's been undead so long she's frightened of being alive, Aelfwynn thought, recalling Serana's fear of the mortal threat to her and her kind.

As they descended deeper into the cave, it became more and more apparent they were not the first visitors. Various eclectic objects were liberally strewn about the tunnel, cluttering the floor and adorning the walls. Aelfwynn passed the old wooden barrels, scratched and beaten by age and misuse with rusted lanterns pointlessly adorning them, curiously observing the rotting wooden supports that were seemingly meant to block off some of the smaller passages.

All of a sudden Serana stopped ahead of her, holding up a hand to demand silence. As she did so, an echoed, seemingly desperate voice emerged from behind one of the ailing wooden boards leaning pointlessly against a half-collapsed side passage.

"Where is it? I know you are trying to keep it for yourself, J'zhar... You always try to keep it for yourself! No! There's got to be more Skooma... Shut up! Shut up! Don't lie to me, J'zhar! You hid it! You always try to hide it from me!"

The warmly accented voice seemed obviously Khajiit, Aelfwynn thought to herself, a male apparently suffering from withdrawl. She had far more experience with the dependencies of the destitute addicts of Daggerfall and later Skyrim than she would like, in some places they ended up on the temple slabs more often than soldiers.

It was like vampirism, in a way. The need for the substance was always with you, only muted by regular indulgence. The longer you went without it, the more your mind would warp, until nothing else mattered. The Problem was, even if you regularly consumed it, eventually you became blind to how it was burning your life down all around you. In time all that would be left to you was the drug.

In assisting addicts – there was no easy route. Herbs were no use – introducing new substances into the body to try and ease the suffering was merely shifting the dependency, drawing out the process. Magic was problematic for its own reasons – restoration healed the body, perhaps it could repair some of the damage skooma had wrought, but ultimately it couldn't cure the root of the problem no more than it could cure insanity.

After hearing his fevered footsteps fade, Aelfwynn turned back to Serana.

"Tread carefully," she began softly. "Addicts in that state tend to be a little hard to reason with."

"To be perfectly honest, I'm not feeling too reasonable myself. Being nearly turned to ash will do that to a girl. Come on." Serana retorted dryly, indicating to Aelfwynn to follow before striding deeper into the cave.

The omnipresence of clutter continued, and to Aelfwynn's surprise the passage began to widen further. She even saw upturned handcarts next to strangely carved stones stacked in piles, and now the ceiling was clearly being supported by large wooden beams at right angles.

When the passage opened out into a small chamber, Aelfwynn came sharply to a halt, feeling her foot kick something unusual in the layers of crystalline frost. Kneeling down to brush them aside, she found a lute. Pulling it out of the snow, it seemed to be in remarkably fine condition – considering the damp and cold conditions where she found it. Curiously, she brushed her finger tip across the strings, sending a discordant, detuned refrain bouncing off the nearby walls. Aelfwynn leaned the instrument gently against the nearest wall as she gazed around the rest of the chamber.

In the centre of the cave sat a fireplace, surrounded by round stones and still filled with charred logs burned cold. Rusty cooking pots lay strewn about, and amongst them – a skeleton. The bones appeared to have been skattered about, the ribcage in one place, the hands a few feet away. Most disturbing of all was the skull which seemed to be lying inside one of the upturned pots.

If this was some sort of excavation – something must have gone horribly wrong.

"Our Khajiit friend?" Serana inquired.

"Somehow I doubt it. Corpses like this don't just rot overnight…"

"You don't say?" Serana asked sarcastically.

Aelfwynn ignored it. "But there's something else strange here."

"hmm?"

"The floor's covered in frost – It should have preserved the body for even longer."

"So… what?" Serana asked.

After a few moments looking puzzled, Serana's eyes fell on the skull sitting neatly inside the lop-sided cooking pot.

"You're not saying what I think you're saying, right?"

Before Aelfwynn could do more than part her lips, the sound of heavy, clumsy footfalls crushing frost rapidly approached, alongside the sound of rasping whispers.

"What? Who is this, brother? Another of the smooth-skins looking for food? But these ones weren't trapped with us..."

Aelfwynn noticed the woodcutting axe twitching wildly in his left hand, the blade hanging mere inches from the ground. Small drops of blood fell from its edge, soaking into the ground like scarlet tears.

She held up her hands placatingly, trying to force herself to smile.

"It's alright," Aelfwynn said softly. "We just want to help you. Please, just put the axe away, okay?"

The cat's eyes were wide, but unseeing. They darted around the room frantically, barely focusing on Aelfwynn and Serana at all. Aelfwynn knew at once he was in a dangerous phase of withdrawal.

She approached him slowly, keeping her hands clearly in front of her.

"You won't take us! Not like the others J'zhar, I won't let them!"

The Kha'jiit took the axe in both hands and began to swing, but as Aelfwynn prepared to dodge – Serana was already there. She grabbed the handle of the weapon mid-arc, as though she were confiscating a toy from a misbehaving child. The Kha'jiit began to flail madly with his claws, but Serana merely grabbed his wrists, pulled him towards her and sank her fangs into his neck.

"Serana don't!" Aelfwynn called out, as the attacker's body first continued to flail, then spasm, before fading into utter stillness and silence. Serana let the body fall, meeting the frost with a dull thump. Aelfwynn knelt next to the body, but she knew he was already gone.

"Why would you… why did you have to do that? Couldn't you see he wasn't himself? You just ended his life like it was nothing!"

Serana wiped her bloodied mouth with her hand, her face contorted in exasperation.

"Why did I? He was going to kill you Aelfwynn! From the look of that axe you wouldn't have been the first either…."

Aelfwynn opened her mouth to interrupt, but Serana wasn't backing down.

"Look, I did you the courtesy of waiting until we were out of Windhelm before feeding, despite the thirst. Have you forgotten what that sick freak in Hjerim did to me? Drained my blood drop by drop, ever so slowly. A few more hours and I'd have ended up a desiccated corpse – and there's a hell of a lot I couldn't get back from his little alchemy set. So forgive me for thinking that some mad, drug-addled mortal in a cave might be more acceptable to your moralising!"

"Serana, as a vampire you should at least have a little compassion for what he was going through…"

"Exactly! I'm a vampire Aelfwynn. A vampire! Whether you like it or not, I drink blood. Mortal blood. I've been pretty understanding of your 'issues' when it comes to feeding, and your absurd, self-destructive guilt – but don't you dare think you can start projecting it onto me!"

It was like a door closed in Aelfwynn's mind. Serana was right – despite her manner, despite her occasional shows of compassion – she was still the enemy. She fed and killed without the slightest show of remorse, she was completely unapologetic about her nature. Aelfwynn knew in that moment that although she needed Serana to defeat Harkon, some day her time would have to come. Whatever her feelings toward her were.

Mara give me strength, Aelfwynn thought, swallowing the emotions threatening to consume her.

Aelfwynn had been mercifully silent since Serana had given her a piece of her mind. Still, it somehow made her uneasy. She would never let it show, but she felt a twinge of guilt gnawing away at the corner of her mind.

Serana hadn't wanted to upset her strange companion. For all Aelfwynn's flaws Serana had quite a bit of sympathy for what she'd been through – a lifetime of religious dogma before being forced into becoming a creature of the night, small wonder the poor girl hadn't gone completely insane as it was. Serana had taken months, even years to properly prepare herself for the change – from what Aelfwynn had said, she had just been seized in an alley.

But it had needed to be said. For them to have any chance of stopping her father, there needed to be mutual respect between them. Serana had tolerated a lot of Aelfwynn personal idiosyncrasies – it was time for her to realise it wasn't a one-way thing.

The cavern transformed back into a smaller passage of ice, which before long began to slope downwards. Taking a good deal of effort to prevent herself slipping headlong into wherever the tunnel was leading, Serana kept her eyes on the cave floor. Finally nearing the bottom, Serana looked up at what lay in front of her. The ice had clearly been carved away, and a grey stone doorway had been mostly revealed. On either sides of the opening, pillars of stone were ornately carved, much like the one Serana had briefly caught sight of as she and Aelfwynn had sprinted inside the cave.

"Never seen Dwemer architecture before?" Serana asked, seeing Aelfwynn approach one of the pillars and run a pale hand over the carved surface.

"Never had much time for sightseeing," Aelfwynn replied, moving through the doorway and into the corridor beyond. "Never had much time for anything really, the war saw to that. Speaking of which, I thought you said you rarely left the island?"

"I did. But my mother's research covered the dwemer a few times over the centuries. Trinkets, rods, odd pieces of metal, even lumps of rock. I think she wanted to know if dwemer metal had any inherently magical qualities, that helped explain some of the weird constructs that her books showed wandering around their cities."

"Your mother was a mage?" Aelfwynn asked curiously.

"Yeah. Though Necromancy was her real passion, she knew the dwemer used soul gems in their…"

Serana stopped mid-sentence, seeing the scathing disapproval in Aelfwynn's expression.

"Oh. Right. You priests probably don't look too kindly on necromancers huh?"

"Serana, do I need to remind you what happened back in Windhelm?!" Aelfwynn responded angrily. "Calixto violated you and several others. 'Don't look too kindly' is an understatement."

"Once again…" Serana began wearily. "You're young. That's like saying everyone who carries a sword is a murderer. It doesn't matter what tools you have Aelfwynn, its what you choose to do with them. You'd be surprised how many medical discoveries have come about through an understanding of the body only a necromancer could grasp. After all – don't you and a necromancer have the same goal, pushing back death?"

Serana could see Aelfwynn uncomfortably dealing with her logic. "I've heard stories. About what necromancers do with mortal souls. I'm not saying resurrecting a body from the dead is immediately evil, I'm not. But when you start messing with someone's soul? That's where I have to draw the line."

Serana hadn't really thought of it like that. She'd seen so many soul gems dotted around her mother's study they had just become commonplace. They were just a tool, an energy source. They weren't aware… were they?

Aelfwynn had never seen anything like it. The floor was polished stone, despite presumably thousands of years of being abandoned to time. Along the ceiling thick brass pipes twisted and turned, vanishing into the walls to who knows where. Behind the walls, she thought she could hear a myriad of alien sounds, clicking, humming and cranking all at once. The Dwemer may have been long dead, but this place still somehow lived. As Aelfwynn walked the length of the strange corridor, she was met by row after row of seemingly identical pillars, each carved with the image of what appeared to be a bearded face, appraising her ominously.

As they continued to traverse the corridor, it was as though the dwarven structure was gradually freeing itself from the ice, the translucent stalagtites hanging from above appeared in smaller and smaller groups and even the snow and slush piled against the walls appeared to dissipate.

At one point, they passed the body of another Kha'jiit, sprawled atop a worn, brown bedroll. Kneeling down to examine him, Aelfwynn found his throat had been slit viciously. Oddly, it was not a single clean cut, but jagged and uneven.

"The work of our friend back there?" Serana asked, gesturing behind her.

Aelfwynn tried to repress the revulsion she still felt over the murder, as well as the cloying, nauseous scent of long-dead blood. She ran a finger along the wound.

"It's pretty hard to slit someone's throat with an axe Serana…" Aelfwynn pointed out, exploring the corpse's pockets to try and find any clue to what happened.

"But, not impossible." Serana added

Aelfwynn's hand settled on a rectangular object inside the Kha'jiit's pocket. She pulled out what appeared to be a small, leather-bound journal. The book seemed frozen shut, but Aelfwynn managed to pull it open with a sticking snap. She flipped through to what seemed like the latest entry:

This one is at his wit's end. I signed J'darr and myself up for this expedition to try to get him clean of the Skooma. I brought a small supply to try and bring him down slowly, but the storm has had us trapped in the glacier for weeks.

The others have not yet caught on that one with fur should not shake so much from the cold, but I've run out of the little skooma I brought and J'darr is getting pretty bad. He's started hallucinating creatures coming out of the ice and the ruins, the others are starting to think he may be behind Valie's disappearance, but I know he would never do something like that.

"Care to fill me in?" Serana asked, looking towards Aelfwynn expectantly. Aelfwynn threw her the journal.

"By the Daedra…" Serana swore nauseously. "He killed his own brother? Sorry Aelfwynn, seems there was no reasoning with that one."

Aelfwynn looked back to the Kha'jiit's wound. It didn't add up. The neck appeared to have been sliced by a long, irregularly shaped blade, or if not by something Aelfwynn had never seen before.

"Keep your eyes open Serana. There's something wrong about all this…"

Serana crossed her arms. "You mean apart from the dragon, being sealed inside a cave which happens to also hold a Dwemer ruin and fighting homicidal drug addicts? You know Aelfwynn, you might just be onto something there…."

Aelfwynn dug her fangs into her bottom lip, trying not to say something she'd come to regret later. She dropped her satchel to the floor for a moment, tucking her amulet inside her robe before she pulled it over her head, revealing the sleek black vampire armour underneath. After neatly folding her robe and hastily stuffing it inside her battered satchel, she caught Serana's expression of baffled amusement on the corner of her eye.

"You ever tried to sneak around in temple robes?" Aelfwynn asked defensively.

"Hey, I wasn't going to say anything," Serana promised, a smug smile lighting up her face. "If you want my opinion? Suits you better anyway."

Aelfwynn tried to ignore that particular comment. Taking a moment to gather herself, she pulled on the matching clawed gauntlets, before becoming one with the shadows.