She could still feel the snow prickling at her bones within her arm. Could still feel her own blood running down her skin. Her lungs inflated, frost imbued air rushing down her throat. She tested her fingers, a muted signal rippling down nerves that felt as though they'd been burnt out. Her fingers twitched, the skin beneath her nails barely registering the coarse ice beneath them.
One of her hands brushed against the remnants of her cape, the once sumptuously tailored fabric now lying upon the ice like a discarded washcloth. Black thorns ran through the sundered flesh in the wound that it had been covering, tangled within the split fibres of muscle. They fed steady pulses of pain to the back of her muddled mind, running up and down the battered length of her spine.
A ceaseless sting assailed her eyes, their tear-stripped lenses searing under a crimson glare. Her eyelids ached, the congealed crusts of ice and salt in their corners crackling with an urge to be spared from the gaze of the creature before her. Its pillar-like boots stood sharply and starkly out from the canvas of swirling white around it.
Ponderously, her gaze crawled up their dull black length, eyes enduring the glare from above. She caught a glimpse of some fleshless, rubbery grey mass in the gap between its legs and the armor plates cresting over its waist. Bundles of ribbed tubes ran up over its breast, beyond the craggy fissure hewn by Sarpa's claws.
Serana's neck strained as her eyes trailed up to meet its own gaze.
Though its weapon rested by its side, the expression that it wore now was the same as when its blade sang for her blood. Unwavering, eerily blank and yet abstractly echoing a snarl at the same time. Forged into its head with the same uncanny precision that seemed to have molded the rest of its body, its blade, the ridged cylinder that had exploded in the cave- and that damned chain.
Her fingers inched towards the Elder Scroll at her side. The motions she put herself through felt murkily familiar, right up until her index finger grazed against the warm paper surface of the scroll. Warm, as though there were flowing blood and taut flesh beneath it.
Her palm slid over the entirety of the scroll. Her fingers wrung together over its curved surface, nails digging in.
Its metal rim scraped across the ice as she hefted its weight off the ground. A throbbing soreness blossomed over her arm's muscles, spiking into her shoulder as she slung the strap anchored to the scroll back over herself. She gave it barely a second for its weight to settle against her spine before her hand reached over her lap to the bloody remnants of her cape.
The sodden cloth pressed up against her wound once more, the sting of cold against split flesh numbed by the sheen of blood that trickled out. Her lithe fingers danced clumsily around it, wrapping tatters together into a limp tumor that bulged from her arm.
Her teeth ground together, breaths seething out through the razor slits between them as she pulled back her legs and set the soles of her boots against the bloodied ice. Her knees creaked like the rusted joints of a decayed door.
The hand of her wounded arm tensed at the side of her hip, mirroring the motion of her other. Flakes of blood and grime scraped against its palm as a faint tremble traveled over her blood slick skin. Her vision swam, this time swirling with a rush of nausea rather than tears. She squeezed her eyes shut, and then pushed her broken frame of a body upwards.
Darkness swam around her, the distant roar of the ocean drowning her ears in the howling wind. Blood seemed to ebb and weave in a pounding flow against her skull. An empty retch surged up her throat, making her knees tremble, her abdomen buckle. She took a step out into the swirling abyss, boot slamming down onto the ice with an impact that quivered up through her bones.
Her legs steadied themselves, propping up the limp mass of bone and skin that remained of her upper half. Coughs racked through her, the faintly fetid twang of her own blood stinging against her tongue. A voice in the back of her head mewled amongst the swirls of black noise, timidly wondering just how much blood had been ripped and drained out of her veins. Her fingers tightened their grip on her thighs. The frayed bundles of muscle in her arms tensed.
Her eyes peeled open, gazing down upon the speckles of red-tinted droplets splattered on the ice between her feet. The little bit she'd coughed up. She reckoned there was barely enough to coat the bottom of a wine chalice.
I'm still alive.
Her spine ached, the ridges groaning with a pain from a lingering weight that still pressed down on her, far heavier than the scroll which was drawn over there now. The titanic pillars of the creature's boots rested at the periphery of her vision, unmoving.
It is not my place to decide.
Even muffled by the murk of memory, warped and distorted by metal teeth, the creature's words from before seemed to boom with a bone trembling clarity in her mind. Too much so to be a mere figment of her imagination.
Her fingers, shaking with the exertion that tremored through her arm, dug into the grimy crust clinging to her eyelids. Dust, ice, and salt peeled away from tender flesh.
Splotches of black flashed in her vision as she straightened herself out. When she blinked them away, she found her gaze level to the creature's chest. Frayed ribbons of white and inky black continued to flutter around it. Its massive shoulders had not budged from when she'd last looked at it.
It is not my place to decide.
Its words echoed in her ears in an empty reprise.
"What will you do now?" Her words came out softer than she'd imagined they would, her lips stiff with a tension that mirrored the urge to clench her hands into fists.
Nothing but the wind answered her. She couldn't even say the silence surprised her.
"My father's court has the nose of a bloodhound. If you stay here, they'll find you."
She could almost hear the sheen of ice coating over its head cracking as it tilted its gaze down towards her ever so slightly.
"You may have slain one of his lesser lords, destroyed the retinue accompanying him- but you won't survive another encounter with his court."
The crimson glare was inscrutable as ever, a cold void of red- but she did not cow away from it. Even as its voice, echoing with an otherworldly reverb, rumbled out in response.
"Then I will die battling against them."
"You'd die fighting a futile battle."
Alone, unknown by anyone else- would it bleed when the hounds tore through its outer shell? Was there any flesh at all for the clan's beasts to sink their teeth into? Or would all that remained of it be nothing more than an empty husk of metal?
She trailed off before she could spew forth those thoughts, an uncomfortable tingle in the back of her mind commanding her to stop.
"Greater than I have died for less."
The limp corpse of Cedric laid a ways away behind the statue-still creature, almost blotted out by its bulk- but the sight of his rosy red blood, spreading across the ice in a grotesque blossom, burned bright in her memory. Burned bright within the lenses of the creature's eyes.
"You're right," she said, the serene murmur slipping off her tongue tempered by bitterness. "Cedric died to find you, after all."
Something in the back of her mind told her to back away then and there, turn and leave this pitiful thing to its miserable fate- but something else drove her to stay. Drove her cracked lips to speak. It sounded faintly of chiming metal in the wind.
"Died for some damnable trinket of a chain."
She could hear its grip tightening on its weapon, the muted grind of metal scraping against metal barely lasting a moment, but piercing through the deluge of wind. She waited – a second, then another. The wracking soreness and pain across her body did not cease. The weight of the scroll upon her back did not ease. The howl of the wind did not fade.
But the creature spoke. There was no anger to be heard in its voice, no more force than usual that could be discerned from the metallic bellow that rumbled forth from its barred teeth.
"He died for you as well."
And yet its words seemed to strike that much harder. Reverberate off the doubts that throbbed in the back of her mind.
She didn't think on it, couldn't, despite the ringing echoes of her thoughts.
"I'm not the one deciding to throw away the sacrifice he made."
Its metal maw raised up enough to reveal its neck, comprised of the same rubbery grey material she had glimpsed between its joints. Its teardrop shaped eyes turned skywards, as though searching the swirling clouds above. As though it were a child, lost in a forest, casting its gaze up from its own immeasurably small form to the towering trees surrounding it.
Her own eyes slipped downwards, towards the sword clasped in the creature's hand. The silvery metal of the blade mirrored that which comprised the chain tied over the crossguard, only blemished by streaks of blood. Neither it nor the creature that held it moved.
Her lips pursed, the agonizing wound in her arm palpable even as she fought to blot out the pain.
Her legs tensed, an instinct driving her to turn around and find the boats Sarpa's party had arrived on. To leave behind this thing, her sword, Cedric's body. To carry on by herself, into the wilderness of Skyrim- in spite of the odds, with how wounded and drained she was.
It was the same instinct that had driven her to leave the inn on that fateful night when she'd first met Cedric. The consequences of ignoring that instinct then were plain as day now.
So why did she ignore it yet again?
"Come with me."
Its gaze seemed to trail back down towards her with such a lethargy, as though the frost had sunk into the fibres of its neck. Perhaps it was merely an effect of the numb haze she felt flooding through herself, filtering through to how she saw the world moving around her.
The snow whipped by her as violently as ever.
The creature's metallic snarl responded, the warping echo coating its words barely able to conceal its vehemence this time.
"Why?"
Why?
The question reverberated in her ears with shades of her own voice, demanding an answer from the frayed lines of thought within her skull.
Why, indeed.
"I have to stop my father. And I can't do it alone. You… like it or not, you're part of this now. You became part of it the moment you spilled Volkihar blood."
The answers seemed to slip off her tongue before she could properly muse over them. Then again, she could've spent hours doing just that, while nursing her wounds with prodding fingers in a boat. That sounded like it would be strangely comforting at the moment.
"Before I left the castle, my handmaiden… she mentioned something about vampire hunters gathering in The Rift. She sounded worried enough that it's probably more than just an angry mob."
She stared into its unblinking teardrop-shaped lenses, unable to peer past the blazing red, but making sure that she held its gaze. Ropy strands of her hair fluttered in the wind before her eyes, but they were barely noticeable in hazy red canvas that they danced before.
"If you have such a hate for vampires, you'd do better to join up with them - make a difference - rather than just throw away your life up here."
She let her words hang. The creature glared back at her, letting the wind howl in her ears- but she waited.
Its eventual answer confirmed her suspicions.
"I know nothing of this land. Nothing of how to find these hunters."
Her neck muscles twitched into a nodding motion, practically of their own accord.
"I have a good idea of where to find them. And… I think, one way or another, they need to know what they're dealing with. So I'm going down there to talk to them."
"Those vampire hunters would be willing to talk with you?"
"Stranger things have happened. And I think even they would understand that something more's going on as soon as they see this," she said, gesturing at the scroll on her back with a limp shrug of her shoulder.
"You 'think'?" The creature's cold metal snarl seemed to bleed into the words that warped out from it.
"I have faith."
Just as she had had faith that Cedric would trust her. At least that much hadn't been misplaced faith.
She exhaled a heatless breath, ice crystals touching upon the raw flesh of her tongue. The sting from where she'd bitten herself was lost to her senses now. Air trickled out through her teeth, joining the snow which continued to blow around her. Her hand drew up to her face, bony fingers brushing aside loose locks of hair.
The creature turned around in what seemed like a flash, its crimson glare blinking out of her eyes. The trembling of the ice, the thunderous rhythm of its march, seemed so quiet now.
Its boots stepped over her discarded weapon without breaking stride.
Only when they came close enough to Cedric's body that they sent ripples through the pool of blood beneath it did she call out after the creature.
"What are you doing?"
Its march ceased.
Its voice boomed out over the distance that separated them, reverberating emptily in her ears.
"If I come with you, I will not leave this body here to be desecrated."
Its massive hand and plucked Cedric's limp corpse up from the ice, draping the body over its shoulder. Dregs of blood splashed onto the bone white carapace there, the body's head flopping limply against the black rim of the shoulder plating. The face was lost, hidden in clumps of dangling black hair that even the wind could not move.
The creature pivoted back around, its gaze meeting hers again.
"A simple burial would be ineffective."
Its words rang in her ears, the implications of its statement clear.
"I don't know if that's what he would've wanted."
"His soul has passed on already. Unless he imparted how he wished his funeral rites to be to you before, there is nobody else to decide."
"So now you think you're in 'the place to decide'? For a man you never even knew?"
It strode back towards her, barely stopping to pluck her weapon off the ice with its free hand.
It made no motion to return it, stopping its march when it was standing mere steps away from her once more.
"Yes."
Perhaps it was unreasonable to feel such a way, but she felt a heavy pang of regret- that she didn't know how Cedric would've preferred his own funeral to be carried out. After everything they'd been through, the few moments they'd shared- could she really say she'd come to know him that well?
The all too familiar answer of the empty wind howled in her ears.
The creature was right in one way though; burying the body in whatever frozen patch of earth they could find out here wouldn't stop the court from sniffing it out. Unearthing it. Reanimating it.
But to burn it? Leave behind nothing recognizable of Cedric at all?
She didn't know if she could make that call.
It made the short distance between her and Cedric's remains seem so much farther. A plain of sprawling ice. Open.
Free.
…
"Sarpa and his vampires followed us in on two boats," she spoke, tongue devoid of any feeling at all now. "You and I can take one to leave and load Cedric's body onto the other. Put in some other wood debris for tinder."
Let the ashes be scattered to the sea. Let them be free. Free of the curse to search the sea that had been placed upon Cedric in life, free of the chain that had bound him as a slave.
The thoughts echoed with little meaning in her mind, but no other voices rose to challenge them. Even the creature before her did not object, head nudging forwards in the faintest of nods.
"Lead on."
She nodded in return before turning on her heel. The muted thump of the creature's footsteps followed closely behind her.
I'm sorry, Cedric. I wish I could have done more.
Perhaps that whisper, that final apology, would carry out to the ocean with his ashes.