Act 1, Part 1
Nelas Salvani and Vanranil of Firsthold
23 Last Seed, 4E 178
Nel leaned lightly on the railing, deck swaying beneath her feet, taking in her surroundings. Ocean met sky in all directions, an endless and infinite expanse of blue that only served to highlight the smallness of the single masted ship that carried her and her travelling companion to their destination. The young Dunmer woman shifted uneasily, trying to fight the anxiety that welled up in her at the sight. To punctuate the thought, the wood of the deck creaked noisily beneath her bare feet.
She turned to the refined, and, frankly, out of place looking Altmer sitting with his back against the mast. He held a tattered journal in one hand and a spherical stone with ornate, crystalline markings in the other.
"How, by Azura, did you talk me into this, Vanranil?"
He set the stone in his lap and scribbled in the journal with a stick of charcoal, not looking up from the pages.
"Give you a pitcher of alcohol, you'll do anything."
Nel gripped the railing tightly. "Drinking isn't even any fun at sea! I keep throwing it back up."
"Hasn't seemed to stop you from trying."
She shuffled over to where Vanranil sat and lowered herself down carefully beside him. She tried not to look out at the horizon. She scooped up the stone from Vanranil's lap and turned it over in her hands.
"Don't judge me. And I assume you'll be paying me in more than flin and nausea for helping you with this old rock?"
Vanranil snatched it back defensively, as if Nel were about to toss it overboard.
"For the last time, this 'old rock' is-"
"Yes, yes," Nel cut him off, waving his words away like a troublesome insect. "You ranted for hours about Topal the Pilot and other dead Aldmer too fancy to use a damn compass, I know. I may have been drunk but I'll never be able to purge those awful memories of you reading 'Father of the Niben' at me while I retched a pint of flin into the Abecean. What you still haven't told me is where we're going."
Vanranil snapped his book shut and stuffed it into a pocket of his fine, voluminous robes; precisely the kind one might expect an Altmer like Vanranil to wear. "A very old shipwreck. A Redguard friend of mine was in the area when an enchanted amulet of his started picking up on a strong source of magic. He threw anchor and sent his Argonian crewmen down into the depths. Apparently an Aldmeri wreck was forced up toward the surface some time ago by some quirk of the earth."
"Can't have been that impressive a ship, I was under the impression they were supposed to stay above the water."
"Hysterical," Vanranil replied, his tone flat. "The wreck was a valuable find, this little waystone only the tip of the iceberg, I hope. Given its age, we're unlikely to find much intact, but anything that might help us better divine the purpose of this device is worth the search."
Nel blinked.
"You're suggesting we dive down into a millennia old shipwreck?"
"Do you see any Argonians aboard?"
Without meaning to, Nel's eyes darted around the deck, seeing only bare chested Redguard men with swords on their hips busy hauling rope and fiddling with knots and doing all manner of other inscrutable nautical actions.
"Precisely," Vanranil continued, bringing out that lecturer's tone that always made Nel want to strangle him. "Luckily I've prepared a pair of enchanted rings for us to make the dive; a standard waterbreathing enchantment and a modified armor spell to protect us from the crushing forces of the depths. We should be able to stay under as long as we need."
"You're the one who needs to go down there," Nel replied, eying the gentle waves uneasily.
Vanranil switched up his tone again, now both pleading and mocking and further in need of strangling. "If not for the coin, do it for me? I could really use a second set of eyes."
"Eat a cock."
"I'll substitute," he replied, pulling a pipe out his sleeve and packing it with a crimson herb, lighting it with a spark that emerged from his fingertips.
"Though I'm surprised," he said after a few puffs, blowing a ring of pink smoke into the air.
"By what?"
"That bit about the compasses earlier. Almost a scholarly sentiment, for a heathen mongrel such as yourself. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it?"
"Maybe the Aldmer were idiots. Would explain your culture, in any case."
Vanranil took another deep puff, exhaling it slowly from his nostrils, not rising to the jibe. "They were supposedly looking for Aldmeris, you know. I suppose they would have to be idiots, in that case."
…
It was late afternoon by the time the ship arrived at its destination, though how Vanranil knew it to be so was a mystery she did not wish to give him the satisfaction of revealing.
After surveying the spot, that looked to Nel like any other choppy section of this endless ocean, Vanranil began to disrobe, stripping down to his undergarments.
"Shall we get started then?" he asked.
Nel rolled her eyes and began to follow suit, undoing the fastenings of her chitin breastplate and removing her tunic, trousers and her treasured sword and making a neat little pile of them beside a nearby crate.
"Never undress and ask me that again, Vanranil."
He looked her up and down, taking in her thin, scarred, wiry body as though it were the first time he'd done so.
"I prefer a more curvaceous creature. Though like that you do almost look a woman."
Nel's face warmed and she hated that it did. She stood just in her undergarments, her small chest bare.
"I assure you the feeling is mutual," she retorted, pointing to his slender body.
He laughed, always an odd sound to Nel's ears, and seemed younger suddenly, leaping up onto the railing and diving, twisting in the air to give Nel a smug smile as he fell with all the speed of a feather caught in the wind.
Him and his damned magic, she thought. Leaves me to plummet like a rock.
Nel fingered the gold band on her finger before climbing up onto the railing, legs shaky. She peered down into the waves, seeing the barest splash that Vanranil had left behind. The drop was much higher than she thought. The little cog ship seemed so small when they'd first chartered it on the docks of Hegathe, tiny against the great sailing ships that ringed it. But now, the scale of it sunk in. Just as she soon would.
She jumped, shoving the fear into the back of her mind. The air rushed up, growing more chill each fraction of a second as she approached the water, feet first, eyes clenched shut.
The water broke beneath her, slapping painfully against her soles and swallowing her up into the dark, cool embrace of the sea. She took a moment to adjust, opening her eyes slowly and enduring the initial sting that followed. Breathing water wasn't new to her, but wasn't something she'd done often or ever relished. She forced an even, steady breath, in and out to calm her nerves. It didn't help that liquid entered her mouth, yes, changing subtly to crisp, salty air, but entering as water nonetheless.
Down below, she saw a faint globe of light, hovering around the silhouette of a lanky, arrogant elf. Gathering her nerves, she weaved light into the water above her, faltering at first and nearly losing the structure of the thing. Vanranil made it look so easy.
Once she got the hang of the magelight, she swam after, the ghostly bluish-white glow only emphasizing the otherworldly nature of this undersea world. She was pleased to see Vanranil at the seafloor, not nearly as far down as Nel had feared. As he'd said, the earth seemed to jut upward, stones cracked and fractured, a great risen gorge spread out beneath them.
The centerpiece of this gorge was a collection of rotten wood that Vanranil eyed with curiosity. It didn't look like much, but Nel supposed it must be the shipwreck.
As she got closer, the wreck of the ship became clearer, more to the eye than a bundle of driftwood. She could just barely see into its shadowy interior, the whole ship disgorged from the earth lengthwise, as though it would sail at the two of them and resurface any moment.
Vanranil conjured another globe of light with a flick of his wrist, sending it down into the hull, before it landed upon a beam of some thin, hollow metal and illuminated the interior. He swam deeper in, waving for her to follow.
She did so, if warily. Tales of evil Dreugh kingdoms told by cruel Temple priestesses came rushing up from her childhood.
She shook the thoughts aside. She was going to help Vanranil, get back to dry land, get paid and get drunk in Hagathe. She dove down to follow.
They passed a structure of coral and colorful, darting fish on their way through the massive fracture in the hull of the ship, trailing after Vanranil. Down a long corridor and through a tear in the floor lined with moss and little shelled crustaceans that recoiled from their light. Deeper they went into the ship, Vanranil twisting his hand this way and that, a shimmering haze of dull violet light appearing and disappearing from his palm, his eyes constantly scanning their surroundings.
It took more time than Nel had hoped. The lower decks of the ship were labyrinthian, Vanranil having the occasional need to place his palm on barely intact doors to hasten their decay with a spell of his to allow them to proceed. The deeper they went, the more Nel felt as though her head were about to pop, enchanted ring or no.
Then came the very last door, more ornate than all the others and mysteriously more intact. It had gems inset along the frame, glimmering here and there under the grime of centuries as their magelights danced off their multifaceted surfaces. Nel wished she'd brought a knife to pry a few out.
Vanranil studied this door longer than the others and seemed almost hesitant to touch it, again letting that dull violet light pulse from his hand as he ran it just above the surface of the strange metal. Apparently satisfied after a moment's study, he brought his hand about in a new color of light and a new gesture, a deep emerald green, two fingers outstretched in a twisting motion. The door gave beneath the ministrations of the magical showoff, opening outward of its own accord, creaking oddly under the distorting effect of the depths.
The interior came as a shock to Nel, and even Vanranil seemed a little caught off guard. At the door frame the water just… stopped. Some force held the incredible weight and pressure of the sea at bay and the room below them looked completely dry, its contents pristine if tossed about. The two shared a glance before Vanranil conjured a spiderling, a small, nimble daedra from Mephala's Spiral Skein. With a nod, the little humanoid spider creature descended into the room, falling a good few paces to the opposite wall. No obvious trap was sprung.
Nel grabbed the frame of the door and lowered herself down into the room, feeling cool air suddenly upon her legs, then her torso. She dropped, falling in a crouch on the opposite wall of the cabin. The air was stale and dusty, like that of a crypt, not a hint of humidity.
Vanranil fell into the room shortly after, descending slowly to the wall Nel now sat upon.
"Well. This is quite a surprise."
Nel nodded. Her eyes took in the room. It appeared this was once maybe a captain's quarters, or a navigator's, though why it was so deep in the ship was beyond her. There were the decayed corners of parchment still pinned to the wall, once maps, perhaps. Empty shelves lined the wall, their contents spilled around their feet.
"So, what are we looking for?" she asked. It seemed there was little left intact.
"Anything that hasn't crumbled to dust," he replied, poking through a pile of books that were now little more than their leatherbound covers. "Though that may be very little."
He busied himself with the books all piled in the corner while Nel paced around. In the opposite corner, something caught her eye, a bundle of ragged fabric crumpled against both the wall they stood on and the flooring ahead of them. It looked to be a once ornate rug, threads of it caught against a splintered section of wood on the floor. On closer inspection, there seemed to be an indentation in the flooring. Close by was some old iron implement, maybe a compass or straightedge, Nel wasn't sure which, but it served her purposes well enough. With a bit of wiggling and prying, the floorboards came up in a creak of ancient splinters.
Vanranil rubbed his chin and watched her work.
"Promising," he finally remarked at the floor safe that was hidden underneath.
Its lock looked terribly primitive compared to the enchantment that held the sea at bay, and Nel fiddled it open with the iron tool she'd found after a cursory raking of the interior of the mechanism. It gave a satisfying click but opened with a loud and awful creak.
Inside was a scroll of delicate, frayed parchment. Vanranil seemed to think for a long moment before he reached for a small, fleshy bag affixed to the back of his smallclothes and flicked off the moisture that had settled onto its surface. His other hand gave off a faint orange glow, the scroll rising gently from the chest and into the air.
Nel scoffed. "That can't be necessary, you self important showoff."
Vanranil didn't reply immediately, still focused on floating the scroll into his vile looking bag.
"By using telekinesis I can apply pressures to the scroll distributed across its entire surface area and avoid as much damage to the thing as possible. Or would you rather carry this safe to the surface?"
"How do you keep it from getting damaged in the bag then, O Magister?"
"Well that's—" he began, then paused. "I'll account for that."
Nel grinned. "I'm certain that you will. Now if you've enough souvenirs, let's get out of this accursed place. I want to get back to breathing air that is neither water nor a thousand years stale."
"Yes yes." He seemed focused on a series of hand gestures made around the bag once it contained the scroll.
Nel clambered up the side of the wall and through the doorway, back into the cool embrace of the sea. It now seemed the lesser of two evils compared to the bewitched room. She considered giving him a hand climbing up the inverted cabin and to the door but was glad she didn't embarrass herself with the gesture. Vanranil kicked a bare foot off the wall and rose gracefully and unnaturally up into the hallway and back into the sea.
The trip back was much faster, Nel recalling the twists and turns they'd taken to make it to the tear in the hull that admitted them. She noticed her breathing came in less ragged now, her heart far stiller than on the trip down. It was almost over, thank the Three.
And then she saw it. She grabbed Vanranil by the ankle as he nearly swam past her, jerking against his grip and looking most annoyed. Until he saw it too.
There was the shadow of another ship beside their own.
The two rose, slowly and more cautiously now, up to the very side of the hull of the Redguard ship, opposite the new, much larger vessel. Nel couldn't fight the sudden instinct as they broke the surface of the water to gasp a deep lungful of air. Real air, air that had always been air.
She looked upward, scanning the edge of the deck visible from their vantage.
"Well, no doubt by the hull that that's a Dominion vessel. I could Recall us out of here. To our room in Hegathe," said Vanranil, studying Nel's face.
"I can't leave my sword," she said simply.
The Altmer sighed. "Yes, of course not. And I'd hate to lose that waystone after going through all this trouble. This scroll may be of no use without it."
"What's the plan?"
"The same we employed in Wayrest, I suppose. Can you conjure a sword?"
"You know damn well I can," Nel snapped. He'd taught her the spell in the first place. She thrust her hand out, forcing the fullness of her will into Oblivion as he had instructed her and felt the thrumming heat of the blade's handle materialize in her grip. The feeling of it was always wrong, unlike her sword up top. Like the material gnawed angrily into her skin, alive with the hatred of its subjugation.
"Ready, then?"
She nodded, eyes fixed on the railing above. "Just be ready to dispel me this time. I don't want to leap to dodge a blow like last time and drift off into the horizon."
"I'll do you one better," he replied, suddenly grinning.
Nel grinned back, the weight of the situation settling in, that mix of nerves and nausea boiling over into sudden giddy adrenaline. The "adventurer's high", she'd heard her mother often called it. She supposed that they were both a little mad for the reaction.
"Ready!" she shouted in a whisper, pushing against the hull with her free hand. In a moment, the weight of her form, the tension to her muscles, slipped away, the force of the push sending her out of the water and into the air, away from the hull. Again that fullness of will, that push to her body to advance and rise and not merely float there above the waves and she was gaining, slowly but surely up to the railing. Her hand found purchase on the lip of the deck, gripping tightly in anticipation of the sudden pull of the world around her. No sound emitted below her but she felt at first the rapid return to weightedness, the sense of it dropping into her with a crash. She gasped again, a new sensation overcoming her, a tightness and the tiniest humming vibration to the surface of her skin.
The next few moments were a blur, then, one fluid motion that gave way to another and another.
With a yank of her arm and a swing of her body she rose over the railing and into a roll on the deck, world spinning about her as shouts rose into the air.
"There!"
"Justiciars!"
"A Dunmer!"
"No flames!"
She was up and sprinting, head down and body low when the first bolt of lightning crashed against her side, crackling through her nervous system even as the bolt flashed away from her and back toward its caster, an Altmer man in a black leather cloak. Her leg wobbled, nearly buckling underneath her, stride near to caving in as a lance of ice bounced off her side. The impact was nevertheless immense on her ribs, knocking the wind from her in a pained cough, the spasm of which gave way to a slash on an assailant, the man in the next moment clutching his hip as blood gouted through his fingers.
Another slash, another leap, an arrow snapping against the shadow of her feet. Two more fell to the flash of the ghostly blade, shouts cut short in wet gasps by soldiers doubled over by the blows.
She let that tiny ounce of her will and focus drop, letting the blade give way in her hand, suddenly ash one second, vapor the next, then nothing. Her hand was empty only a moment, grasping the hilt of her trusty sword and bringing it up in a wild sweep behind her, finding purchase on the yield of flesh to the sound of screams. Still she kept her eyes forward, leaping forward and into another roll, a fork of blinding light cracking against the deck beside her, the explosive sound of it rendering her momentarily deaf, only a low ringing audible now.
Her free hand found a fine leather knapsack against the side of the cabin, and then the world tumbled again, the faces of shouting mer in dull golden armor blurring past her as roll turned to dive, over the railing and into the water below, just shy of the black hull of the Dominion vessel.
A heartbeat later and the water around her broke and chilled in an instant with a rain of frozen spikes. The next moment she felt a hand seize her wrist and they were tumbling through somewhere dark and blinding, blaring and silent, wet and dry, scorching and chilling but ever violent and fast.
Again, Nel gasped as though she feared drowning, reaching above her, praying to find purchase on something, anything to drag her back to solid ground.
Awareness only came slowly. Solid ground was indeed beneath her, cool, smooth tiled stones. The vague din of conversation that came to her ears broke into only scattered whispers. All around her were the eyes of Redguard laborers. They were in the inn, in Hegathe. In Hammerfell. No one looked happy to see them, but no one looked about to kill them. Nel found she preferred that.
"This isn't exactly our room, Vanranil."
"It wasn't exactly an unimpaired environment to cast in," he replied, words he seemed to hiss out through his gritted teeth. A thin needle of frost, dissipating into the warm air as they spoke, was pierced through the flesh of his upper arm.
"Gods," she stammered, "Gods, Vanranil. Will you be—"
"Yes," he hissed again, "yes. And the sooner I can do it in private the better." Already he was at work, faint golden light emanating from him like steam as the ice puffed to vapor and the wound began closing after a weak gout of blood.
Nel supported him on her shoulder and the two limped past the silent and staring onlookers and down a bright hallway.
"Could have been worse," Nel remarked, not sure at first if she meant the wound or the plan.
Vanranil nodded, the tight set of his fine features relaxing into a more gentle expression as Nel laid him out on the low bed of cushions in the corner of their room.
"Could have. And you, are you harmed?"
Nel instinctively caressed the not yet formed bruise that was sure to follow on her side. "Nothing I can't sleep off. Or drink off."
It occurred to her that she'd strode through the front of the inn topless but she decided she couldn't process that thought yet. She sat roughly down beside Vanranil, back against the windowsill, closing her eyes with a sigh.
…
"That stupid little scroll better have been worth it," said Nel, cleaning her sword by the window, the light of the sunset warm upon her skin.
"It looks to be," Vanranil replied. He was completely absorbed in the little collection of ancient parchment. "It reminds me of my mother."
"Ancient and dull?"
"Reminds me of her theories, I should say. She never bought into the idea that the Waystones only pointed in one of three locations."
"What did she think?"
"That the stones were designed to be attuned and willed toward somewhere in particular and had merely deviated from that point with time."
"Where were they meant to point?"
Vanranil looked over the scratchings of his quill in his now dry, if slightly warped journal, and then at the scroll upon the small desk, as if to be sure of what he was reading.
"Aldmeris, apparently."