The sun had not yet risen by the time that she peeled herself off her chair and set out down the hallways of the castle, a brisk rhythm of clomping boots following in her wake. Even after descending from the abandoned tower which housed her old room, the halls were sparsely populated- perhaps it was for the best.
A few unfamiliar and familiar faces that yet lingered set their beastly eyed gazes on her, hushed conversations falling silent as she strode by. Nobody dared address her directly. As it had always been.
Serana didn't mourn the lack of company now.
The dining hall was mercifully empty, tables wiped clean of blood- but even so, the feeble scent of grapes and lavender couldn't mask the lingering coppery tang in the musty air. The dry fire in the back of her throat throbbed against her senses, but she clamped her teeth together, grinding them against each other until in her mind she saw the vicious razor ends chip off and blunt out.
The archway that used to lead out into the courtyard garden laid in shambles, the broken slabs of stone that remained piling just as high as it used to stand.
A strange feeling of unease stabbed at the back of her mind, icily creeping up the base of her neck as she strode along to the side passage leading to her father's old tower- it too was collapsed. The walls there were lined with claw marks, carving jagged lines across stone and tearing sconces off of their hinges.
The more pragmatic revelation that she only needed to search a quarter of the space she'd been expecting to was enough to distract her, and she gladly welcomed that.
Eventually, she came across an isolated alcove. A silver chandelier hung just outside. The light that it cast splayed out the shadow of their family's crest onto the frayed carpet winding down the hall.
It blurred and swayed over her eyes when she marched up to the double doors. Grandiose, imposing slabs of oak.
Her fingers paused as they splayed out against the wood, supple skin prickling against the fissures in the surface. The nail of her left index finger traced the wavy line carved by one of many cracks, scraping away a clot of dust with it.
Oh, Marian. What happened?
She could've asked that earlier. Should've. Maybe it would've saved her from making the trip she was right now.
Her hands tightened against the doors, splinters brushing against her taut palms.
Or maybe the answers Marian had would've just spurred her to do come down here even more.
She pushed, and the doors parted with a bellowing groan.
Her arms fell back down to her side, the creases of exertion drawn over her face disappearing into the stoic porcelain mask settling in its place. A flickering flame in the distant corner of the room cast a somber haze over the worn walls and floor. A single table sat in the middle, barely illuminated by that dying fireplace. A map was sprawled over its length, the frayed parchment suffocating under towers of tomes and papers that had no shelves on the barren walls to house them.
An empty coffin stood lonely vigil to her right. The velvet sheets that lined the inside were scratched and torn, a few tatters openly hanging out like decaying flesh from a draugr's maw.
A chair creaked by the fireplace. The short screech that it released ground on her ears like the agonizing wail of a dying beast.
The rising silhouette of her father blotted out what little light remained from the flames.
The doors behind her squealed on rusted hinges and scraped across the floor as they sagged back into their positions. There was the faintest murmur of a thud as they locked into place.
Her father did not move, keeping his back towards her. His cape draped down his shoulder like a curtain, obscuring his towering form in a veil of shadow.
She stepped around to the side, brushing past her father's coffin and angling around the table. The firelight illuminated his bearded jaw and gaunt cheeks, tongues of orange glimmering blankly in his eyes as he stared into the fireplace.
Her tongue felt like a sack of bricks resting in her parched mouth. For a while, she waited for him to say something- anything, even if it would just be an excuse for her to snipe back with an accusation. It would have been so much easier.
It would have been easier, also, to pretend she didn't see that framed painting resting over the fireplace, hidden behind unused candles as it was. It, like everything else, was coated in a thin layer of dust, the colors faded by grains of grey. But it was still intact. And even at a distance, obscured by dimness, it was impossible not to see the brush strokes coalescing into her father and mother's faces.
Her boots clacked against the uncarpeted stone floor as she treaded her way over to her father's right side, his posture unmoving even by the time she stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him.
A long stretch of silence hung between them, punctuated by the crackle of flames dancing on desiccated wood.
It was hard not to think of days that were too far gone, standing like this. A part of her wished she could lose herself in those memories entirely, not just have them nipping mockingly at her thoughts in the stark reality of the present.
But she wished a lot of things were different.
She reached out with her left hand, gently easing aside the unlit candles resting on top of the fireplace, brushing her fingers over the painting behind them. She touched upon the dusted glass pressed over the portrait underneath, clearing away grainy grey splotches with gentle strokes.
Her father's jaw, strong in Nordic features and square-set, was unbearded. Her mother's cheeks were full, angling elegantly down to her painted lips. And the eyes- a mere grassy green in her mother's, the vividness of them in life impossible to capture with paint. Icy blue for her father's. Pale and cold, dulled by the ages.
She'd almost forgotten what they were like.
"You looked so happy back then," she stated, dead heart heavy as she noticed how she herself was not depicted in the portrait.
"Looks can be deceiving. And artists do not portray reality precisely."
She drew a finger over the brush strokes along their lips. They were broad, quickly painted, but bore a subtle upward curvature that made the smiles they coalesced into feel more real than anything she'd seen as of late.
"I suppose, though, you could call it happiness. Contentness, perhaps. We had that portrait commissioned to commemorate the acquisition of this property."
She drew her hand back, a soft drift of grey peeling off from the glass cover in the wake of her movement.
Her hair bristled. Her fingers grazed on the sides of candles, their surfaces coarse and smudged over with oily flakes.
"The castle's come a long way since then."
"The castle alone was never enough for us. Least of all yourself."
He wasn't wrong. But then again, she was born there- for nearly two decades, the castle was all she knew. Being locked in her tower for hours a day- books piling her desk, Mother standing stern vigil over her shoulder. Teaching her of the nature of the world, the practical and theoretical.
She learned of what a liver was before she knew how to make her own bed. She could list off the alchemical properties of cow liver extract, along with the precise steps to distill the most potent concentration from a fresh specimen by heart, but couldn't do up her own hair in the morning.
…
That had been one of Marian's responsibilities.
…
"Was that why you took me on your hunting trips?" The sound of her own words sent the smallest of quivers down her skin. She hated how the sting of warm salt uncontrollably swelled behind her eyes.
"Indeed. Valerica wasn't particularly keen on the idea. I had my own doubts as well, to be sure. But I knew it would be better than letting you run amok in the undercroft and aqueducts."
"You knew about that?" A tear slipped past the strained lid beneath her right eye, perhaps shaken loose from the bizarre chuckle rumbling in her throat.
"Marian expressed concern with smelling raw sewage in your hair when she bathed you."
"Ah."
The back-and-forth tapered off after that. Serana took the opportunity to draw in a steadying breath, laden with trembles as it was. She also lifted a hand to wipe away the thin stream of fluid running down her cheek and from her nose, angling her head away from her father and the fire when she realized the motion wasn't as subtle as she'd been hoping.
Mucus churned and bubbled in the back of her nose as her nostrils flared with an influx of air. Her left hand balled into a fist, nails digging into her palms.
Stop it!
She fought to keep her eyes straight, her posture firm, but she was only fooling herself if she thought her father didn't notice every second of it. He didn't say anything, didn't move, didn't shuffle. Just remained still as a statue, waiting for her to continue.
"So," she said, clearing her throat and biting back the whimper struggling to break out from her gritted teeth. "It… looks as though you haven't been out as often anymore."
"No."
"Why not?"
One second passed. Two. She swallowed, a lump of phlegm and saline fluid dragging down into her shriveled belly. She drew in another breath, a quiet gargle rumbling behind her tongue as she did so.
When her father still did not respond, she pressed onwards, burning tears swirling in her veins with blood.
"You said it yourself, didn't you? The castle's not enough."
But it's still home, she heard a voice echoing in the back of her mind. Constraining as it had been to spend every hour of her childhood within it, exciting- terrifying- satisfying- as it had been to finally set foot outside it- at the end of the day, in the cold of the night, there was no place she would've rather been.
And here she was again.
Squalid. Decrepit.
Lonely.
Uncaring of the sting beneath her eyelids now, she turned to face her father.
Still he stood, staring into the flames, a framed portrait of happier days hidden just out of his sight- was she just imagining things, or did she see a flash of hesitation, the slightest softening in his hard-edged brow?
His voice betrayed no such qualities.
"Do you remember our first hunt?"
The tundras. The sky, clear and crisp as glass touched by the wintry sea.
"Vaguely."
"You had trained with your bow, a few days prior to our arrival in the plains."
Instructed by the same voice that spoke to her now. Stony, flattened out with a cold sternness, easy to mistake for dispassion. The child that she was at the time had found it to be such a jarring difference from the one that came from a wide smile, often accompanied by basso laughter at the dinner table.
Though she supposed that as time went on, she only grew more used to it.
"You were no stranger to the weapon by the time we spotted our quarry."
Yes. The warm glow of orange bathing its spotted fur, miniscule ice crystals in the air around it glimmering like stars in broad daylight.
"Do you remember why you missed?"
Those wild doe eyes had shot up and fixed on her. Rooted her into the earth, took the chilled breath out of her lungs. When she made to loose the arrow, the beast had darted off before the bowstring had even snapped forward.
"I hesitated."
"You never had a clean shot to begin with. You should have waited. Hidden in the cold dirt, endured the biting winds and scratching blades of grass. Dragged yourself along, stalking it. For hours, days. Waiting for the perfect moment to strike."
He trailed off again, clasping his hands behind his back, cape sweeping a curtain of shadow across the walls.
"You didn't answer the question."
He sighed, the stone mask laid over his lips finally breaking.
"It is not an answer easily put into words."
"Well I'd rather you at least try, rather than just dredge up some pointless anecdote. I rememberthose days well enough as is."
She trailed off, a selective trickle of those memories dribbling into her thoughts.
"There were happy days. When we were more than just content."
The garden in particular came to mind. Dark green leaves entwining with velvety purple flowers, crowning the grey and brown mounds of mushrooms that sprouted from the moist dirt. A long way from the dyed red drapes and gleaming embroidery adorning the halls of the castle.
Her mother loved it. Serana had as well, but she wasn't the one who pondered over what strain of flower would best complement the juniper tree for three nights, who carefully crafted the ponds and seeded them with marshland reeds just well enough for the torchbugs to dance around them in the dark.
For her mother, it had been as much a work of art as a place to relax, or a bountiful source of alchemy reagents. Serana supposed the moondial was just another one of those touches- cast in a humble pewter hue, so as to not blot out the earthy richness of the garden.
"Even now, you think too much in mortal terms. I had thought you returned because you had finally come to see."
"See what? I was asleep for all this time!"
At long last, her father turned his attention to her, red irises regarding her sharply.
"You are still held down by the shackles you were bound by as a mere human. Your life is not so fleeting and meaningless that you can simply choose to latch onto any stray thing passing by you for a flash of satisfaction anymore."
She stared at him in silence, a chill slowly crawling up the base of her neck. He continued, stone voice only growing harsher with each word spoken.
"Family, companionship, love- all of these things must fade away in the eons that you will live for. There is no place for them in an immortal life. If you grow to rely on others, then you only set yourself up to be crippled when they either wither and die, or turn on you outright."
He spoke those last words with unmasked bitterness, his fingers splaying out and curling in strained, deliberate movements. They cast shadows of inky tendrils across the walls.
"I am where I am now, in this wasting ruin of a castle, because I failed to see that truth when I should have."
"That's bullshit," Serana snapped, the uneasy nip at her neck seeping through to her veins, unleashing a wave of tingling weightlessness over her whole body. The veil that she had purposely cast over select memories was washed away in the currents flooding her mind. "Mother left you because you were obsessed with this obscure prophecy, that damned scroll, more than your actual family!"
"I pursued it for the family. For you. For Valerica. For Marian. For a vision of us walking upon the earth and snow as the gods amongst mortals that we are. You think Valerica left, betrayed me for something so petty as feeling unloved? No, Serana. Your mother fled because she was a coward. She feared the mortals and all their fleeting armies, feared that their aimless warmongering would turn onto us – as though under the skies of darkness, they could ever hope to stand against us."
Serana could only stare at him, lips numb, throat dry. Her father continued, lines creasing across the immaculate skin of his face in a maddening focus- did he really believe what he was saying?
"She sabotaged me. Stole the scroll away and stole you away. Locked you into a dreamless sleep of eons because she feared you as well."
"Me? I never wanted any of this!"
"At the time, indeed. And I was a fool to have ever convinced myself to let your mother sink her treacherous claws into you. To let you have your precious family time, when she was in reality blinding you, leading you astray. But now that you have returned, you will learn, you will see, just as the entire court has. We are all the blessed children of Molag Bal, the Daedric Lord of domination, not fit to hide in the shadows."
That glimmer of fervor in his eyes flickered out just as quickly as it had surged forth, the snarl clawed over his mouth receding. The stone mask of impassiveness that stared back at her was somehow even more unsettling than it had been moments earlier.
"This castle is nothing. It has always been that way. A prison for us, sheltered from the world. Valerica would've had us waste away here for an eternity."
"Father-"
"I am not your father anymore, and you are no longer my daughter. I am Lord Harkon, and you are a Lady of my court. Your deeds in returning the Elder Scroll to us, and the purity of your divine blood, is what sets you apart from the rest. Not your mortal-given blood ties," he finished coldly.
It felt as though she'd splashed with a shock of icewater, numbing her limbs, washing the rose-tinted blur out of her eyes.
"I can't believe this," she whispered, more to herself than Harkon.
"Believe what you will. But you cannot deny the truth."
The truth stared at her in a pale guise of her father, a witch-image, hair hued with dust, eyes drained of the color that she remembered.
And then Harkon turned away, looking back into the dying fireplace before him. Watching, waiting, for those limping tongues of flame to die into embers, then fade in with the ash they danced upon.