A woman stood before a feebly lit altar, shrouded in an inky darkness. Enrobed in an embroidered cloak, she flung her arms from her sides.
"Morwen..." The woman wept to the sky, the tears streaming down her cheeks glistening in the sputtering light of the candles. The image wavered, rippling as a golden aura slowly swallowed her.
"Morwen!" The figure cried again as a deafening scream filled the Void. The screaming grew to a roar, the very bones of the earth shuddering at it's wake, the ground cracking and splitting open to reveal churning soil and the stripped malignance of death. As the very stars were ripped into alignment, sinister forces stirred from the deep, tearing their way from the Earth's core and into the world of man.
The woman from before reappeared, engulfed in flame, her cheeks streaked with crimson as she violently shouted to a sky thick with black smog and foreboding, the ground swallowing her with it's thunderous maw.
A girl bolted upright with a gasp, drinking in the dull roar of the river outside, the unfortunately familiar uncomfortability of the bed she was on, and the poor lighting dimly reflecting off of the cobblestone walls. The woman took a deep breath, trying to calm down.
Looking down at the callouses and grime on her otherwise dainty and pallid hands, she breathed a terse sigh and got up. Itching an ever worsening rash due to her feculent burlap clothes, she performed her daily scan of the sordid prison cell. From floor to ceiling, there featured cold cobblestone. Her bed of stiff matted furs was shoved into a corner near mildew subjected barrels, and at the far left from that was the door, creaky, barred, and made of rusted iron. Near it stood a table and next to that, the constant drip of a leak in the ceiling.
She ran her fingers through her hair and sighed again, a longer sigh filled with despondency. She had been trying for weeks to get out of her cell. She tried everything she could think of. The room was inattentive and possessed glaring omissions as far as windows were concerned, so escaping through one was impossible. Even if it were, with the turbulent waters of the White River just outside this decrepit building, the plan would quickly be out of the question.
The guard never came close enough to her cell, so the opportunity to pickpocket the keys never presented itself. In fact, every one of the guards liked placing the key on a table placed a few steps out of reach in front of her cage, to taunt her.
She had tried digging her way out a few weeks ago only for the shallow impression to collapse before it could get any farther. With bleeding nails, the girl cursed the dilapidation of the withering building that day, a curse she muttered to herself again.
She had tried carving the nails from the barrels into crude lockpicks only for them to break immediately, brittle with rust. She tried digging through the floor, hard as the stone it was made of, to no avail. She tried bending the bars to the door, breaking them, picking the lock with anything she could force into the keyhole. Nothing ever worked.
The girl winced, touching her back in remembrance of the lashings given for each and every one of these attempts at escape. She didn't know what to do anymore, her feet hanging over the edge of the pit of resignation. Dragging herself over to the door, she could hear the patrol snoring down the hall. A perfect time to escape, if escape was an option. 'Which it's not...' The woman reminded herself.
Slumping against the table, she cradled her head in her arms, closed her eyes, and groaned. A few seconds passed and she lifted her head just enough to study the grain of the wood, her brain looking for something, anything to think about other than the short woebegone future ahead of her.
Her mind wandered back to her dream. What did it mean? Who was that woman? Lady Mara? It certainly looked like her, the girl mused, comparing the figure of her dream to the memory of the Avatar in Riften's Temple. 'But why? Why would she appear in my dream? Why was she on fire? And those figures climbing out of the ground... I wish I could climb out, climb out of this cell, this prison...'
At first, she didn't even see it. She glazed over it twice before her mind recognized something was off. Retracing their steps, her eyes looked at it for a solid few seconds before realizing what it was. Right in front of her were three pristine lockpicks and a tension wrench.
"No way..." She breathed, slowly sitting up. "No way!" She repeated, snatching them up and examining them. "What in Talos' name..." The girl looked around wildly before shoving them down the front of her tunic.
She picked up the guard's snoring again and a delighted grin spread across her face. Regardless of supernatural possibilities or not, she was going to get out of there. Taking care to remain as silent as possible, she began fiddling with the lock on her door. It took her one try and the lock clicked. Her heart jumped with excitement but her face adopted a steely expression, the possible danger quickly mounting.
She crept up the few steps to the table. On it lay a dagger, an axe, a small coin purse, an unlit torch, a healing potion, and a key. Shoving the dagger and torch into her waist band and the potion and coin purse into her brasserie, she grabbed the axe and held the key in her fist.
She stood in a corridor flanked with cells on either side. Up ahead was a hallway with steps leading up to where the guard presumably slept, so that wasn't a good option. She swallowed. Was she trapped?
