Author's Note: What can I say? In strange aeons, even deadfic may die. Especially aeons around the 30th of October, apparently.

To Weather the Storm

"There's one favor I must ask first," said Maelona.

"Only one?" Lathenil could think of quite a few more, before the agreement to live with Maelona and her family was sealed. "I swear I will help rebuild the wall of your home, and let no one pass it save by your word. I will help gain you food and water, never taking more than is the share accorded me. I will fight to defend this house as your brother in blood. I will owe no allegiance which you do not, save to the Law and the High Queen of Summerset – and that never to your cost, or Anvil's. Should you or your husband fall while I stand, I will keep your daughter from harm."

"No need," said Maelona, looking at him strangely. "That is to say... no need to give your life to mine like a Northern housecarl, and if I'd thought you would take my food and shelter and give nothing in return, or throw my daughter to the wilderness, I never would have offered you a place in my household. But I had something a bit less apparent in mind."

"'Housecarl' goes far beyond what I've sworn here," protested Lathenil. "Besides, the tradition of the housecarl began in a time such as this, a time of chaos, and such vows were not then limited to the service of thanes and kings. Yours is a household worthy of loyalty, I do not take back my vows, and I will adhere to whatever oath you now ask of me."

"Lathenil... don't let me be Vienne."

He was willing to keep any oath Maelona would bind him to, and more than capable in this case, but... "Only Auri-El is in danger of allowing that to happen, I should think. And if He does, there's nothing to be done but to welcome it."

"No, no, I don't mean that," said Maelona, shaking her head, her eyes squeezed tight. "I mean, because I lost her, and I could have saved her. Because Vienne let the hope of the Empire slip through her fingers at Lake Arrius, and she never forgot it. Never. Nothing she did, from the day Dagon fell, was anything but a work of atonement – and there was no atonement. There couldn't be. Lathenil – if I am not satisfied simply to do my duty to my city, my husband and my child, if I yearn to mend with my own hands what is shattered beyond repair, swear to me that you will remind me I can gain nothing from it but despair."

"I swear it," said Lathenil. But he vowed one more thing, to himself before Phynaster and Auri-El: he would be ever watchful for the things of the Empire, on this side of the Strait or the other, that were not shattered beyond repair. Maelona's heart drank from the soil of Colovia, and in all her natural years, she might not live to see the first dread sail crest the horizon from Alinor: Lathenil was not so fortunate.

Lathenil had made his own stipulation: no food or drink would pass his lips whose preparation he had not overseen. It could have been his wine glass at council. It could have been Ocato's brandy, in the crystal tumbler that night. Better to return to old cautions.

As such, his daily task was to draw water from the well, gather whatever foodstuffs would fit into a perpetual stew, and collect dried dung to fuel the fire (for the horizon was shrunken to the west end of Anvil County, and the forests held a thousand perils to anyone who dared swing an ax, and wood was too dear to burn). Bit by bit, the house rose.

The nearest the arrangement with Maelona's family came to ruin was the day little Lessa dug through his satchel while he was out and, to her horror, found the audience robes, hard with dried blood. Maelona quickly discerned and expostulated (to an adoring Lessa) that the blood was that of a dead person whom Lathenil had not harmed but grieved, but nonetheless, Lathenil re-entered the house to find her making arrangements to dispose of it.

"I need to know the epitaph," he had said after the row, breath shallow and head ringing with all that had nearly happened. "There can be no burial until I know the epitaph."

It had nothing to do with any knowledge of the fate of Lillandril and Alinor, of Fiorana and the others; it was the product of mere circumstance; but his life in Anvil at times gave him a sense that the epitaph would be a good one.

Anvil, Kvatch, Bruma: they were the three counties that neither bowed nor fell to any Emperor in the year after Ocato's murder. But even Kvatch on the eastern border would not ally. The pass beyond Belletor's Folly and the village of Cookfire – shortly Fort Cookfire – was shut fast, and Count Matius would open it for no one. Of the three sovereign counties, Anvil was far the most vulnerable, and every week was a week the blow might fall.

But in spite of Shasten's reasoned pessimism, the Gray Fox remained in the seat of Anvil the next week, and many weeks after that. He knew as little of farming and fishing as any common thief on the Waterfront, but he soon gave an ear to those who did know, and let them do as they saw fit. He had never seen a military campaign, but he learned, best as he could, from those in the Guard who had- and this extension of trust was no doubt what made the attempted revolt by the dispossessed landowners, and then the attempted revolt of the under-served refugees, attempts only.

Under the auspices of the Anvil Society, founded and led by Maelona and Gogan, the tents in the plaza became sturdy shanties with tar in their roofs, and the ruin of the docks rose again in stone piled on stone from the reef to the high-tide mark, with stone barriers erected at the breakwater.

All went hungry that first year, and many succumbed to disease in their weakness (it was three days of agony for the mother of Analucia and Galen). But no one starved outright, and the city stood against what rabble tried to take it, from without or from within.

The second year saw the coming of Dinaen Camoran's navy from Leyawiin ("at least," said Gogan, "one of these gangsters let Bravil alone on their way up north.") He might or might not have been a real Camoran, but if he was a pretender, he ought to have known it was a poor name to conjure with. The new-made siege engines of Anvil tore his undermanned fleet to rags.

The longer the first months of the Fox's reign wore on, the more Lathenil had imagined the city becoming a bandit camp of unwilling thousands; but one day after nigh a year without such a thing coming to pass, he simply opened his eyes, and found, with dumbstruck relief, that many a Hold-King had done worse than this prince of thieves.

It was not, of course, to last.

The first grave wound Anvil took came in the third year from a force that could not be made to retreat: an army of the dead, led by a self-proclaimed Ayleid king and his lieutenants, necromancers all, who were drawn, it was said, from the remnant of Mannimarco's men. By main force, they breached the city wall from the northeast before there was stoked fire enough for the tar to consume them- them, and those who fell in the fight. The necromancers themselves, bereft of dead men to hide behind, finding the men of the unassailable Fort Siren upon their rear, fled to find easier prey for their arts.

But there the gap stood, leaving Anvil naked to any army that would brave it, and such a one – brigands and hirelings and swordsmen with nowhere else to go, without even a decent smattering of pretended belief in their chosen pretender – arrived within the fortnight. What wet-mortared bricks were affixed, were cast down, and the pikemen crushed, by a single stone from the single catapult they had.

Shortly, the city was at the enemy's mercy. Shasten and Analucia were among the shanty-dwellers marched to the castle gates and the barracks with daggers to their throats (for bargain, not daedra's sport; Lathenil shook with relief afterward to find Shasten without a scratch on him.) Within the hour, the castle gates were opened. Trast her First Captain, who distinguished himself among her lieutenants by looting no one, was rewarded when she cheerfully appointed him Imperial Ambassador on the spot and sent him blind into the enemy castle with a cohort of five. It was as fortunate for First Captain Trast as it was for the hostages that the surrender was quite real.

There was one curious detail in the taking of Anvil Castle. Lathenil understood it not at all, but he was quite scrupulous in the recording, for there seemed to be much lying behind or beneath it: Before beginning negotiations of surrender to the "Ambassador", the Gray Fox had set an hourglass. There were, apparently, no negotiations at all thereafter. Next Captain Trast knew, the sands were more than half out, he seemed to have thrown the Fox's hood into the fire, one of his men was staring down his sword at the body of a man no one had ever seen before, and all present felt that they had wept. The Gray Fox was never seen or heard from again.

For Anvil, the time of sovereign Counts and making do on the land they had was done. They now answered to the pretender and bandit queen known as Catulla the Wild – but she would not be called that in Anvil any longer. To her followers, she was always Tulla Septim, on pain of death.

Tulla was a young woman of twenty-six summers, chestnut-haired, baleful-eyed, with the magnetic beauty of a wounded Dibella. She wore wine-red silk that flowed from her as from a queen, yet draped her like a dancing girl.

"I had always known that the blood of the Dragon flowed in me," she declaimed over the plaza, now cleared of the unseemly-looking shanties. Those who protested the destruction of their home were not present. Dissuaded, imprisoned, dead – Shasten said he did not know what had become of Analucia Corrinus and her family, and Maelona and Gogan stood in the Empress's guard unspeaking. "Never had I thought I would be called to rule Tamriel. Yet from the time I was a small girl, my mother told me, again and again in the quiet of night: Martin Septim was my father."

Lies. Lies that anyone in Cyrodiil could know to be lies. But they issued from the mouth of their conqueror.

"Do not let it dim his clear sun, that he was not my father in deed as well as blood." But her face was the face of one aggrieved. "He did only what his father had done before him, and did it for the same reason: to vouchsafe the blood of kings. The future of the Empire, which now stands before you once more.

"My path is not a clear one, but it never has been. I was but a girl of fourteen, when I came before the Council of the First Year – only then, for never would I have thought to supersede my noble father. I could see, then, in their eyes that the Council knew me for the true heir, and that they would not have truth in their court. The next night, the Captain of the City Watch took me from my lodgings in chains. The infraction was invented. Any little thing I did in the Imperial Prison was added to my sentence. In the end, it was nine long years before I felt the light of the sun again.

"Captain Hayn is now the right-hand man of Eurian Vorius, his true colors revealed at last. Be assured, his treachery will be answered."

Before her, Maelona and Gogan exchanged the most minute of glances. Gogan looked queasy.

"Nor was it the law that set me free. I escaped, with the aid of an Argonian who told me that all Nirn rested in me, who pulled me through the prison bars as though they were less than water. Disguised as a pilgrim to the tunnel where Uriel Septim my grandfather died, dressed in the finery I was born to, I found freedom at long last.

"Three days later, the first of the great storms struck the Imperial Prison. Had I remained there, be sure I would have died, and the Dragon Blood with me. I learned later that the day of my escape was the very day of the Potentate's death. He had a hand in my captivity, do not doubt, and do not doubt that he is well-served for it."

The Argonian had come on the very day of the Potentate's death? A lie. Surely a lie. But how did she know to tell it, what could she gain in speaking it?

No. Not, perhaps, a lie. Or a lie after all, with another intent, or none – did Tulla Septim need a purpose, before a lie left her lips? But whatever it may be, she did not speak of the same Argonian Lathenil had met on that day. To imagine Nu-Hatta of Artaeum would appoint this spiteful, deceitful girl as the rightful Empress...

Ocato was well-served, she had said. Let law fall broken to the ground, let kingdom rip apart into bloody ribbons: should Tulla Septim get the faintest suspicion that you oppose her, it is no more than your deserts.

An observation of no small practical import, and so he shut his eyes and his ears to her at once, applauding when the others did, but turning his mind far from her words. Only later did he learn he (as an able-bodied young male of a certain height) had been conscripted into her "Legion", or that her youth and dress belied the fact that she had two small sons (curiously still and fearful babes, whom she presented more as valuable possessions than as her children and heirs), or that the greatest stir around him had come about when (after disclosing how shamefully she had been wronged and betrayed by the three consorts she had had) she found the face of a comely Nord in the crowd and decreed him her newest consort, at the point of her guard

Of course the Loremaster won't let you browse the Lower Archives. You did join in the Red Year, and your ignorance can be understood on that count, but any reference you may have heard to our last Loremaster granting such access was not meant as an encouragement. Had he kept to the ancient law, which, may I add, was entirely in force throughout his tenure, you would never have had cause to write this petition, and I would never be sitting in the Grandmaster's chair to receive it- for only an extreme circumstance such as resulted could propel a member of the Emperor's public guard to such a lofty station.

Fortunately, there is no need to consult the Lower Archives in this matter to begin with. Why single out one target for operations, when we would do far better to strike them all?

The stated aim of your petition is a matter not for the Blades, but for Akatosh. We can feel safe in trusting Him not to fall down on the job. We must also scratch out the outright power plays. We are servants of the Empire even in her ruin; our task now is not to burn yet another hole in the map of Tamriel, but to beat down the flames. But it is a good proposal on several other counts: it would solidify our reputation, bolster our numbers, and above all, ensure that whatever we can salvage of the Empire won't be endangered all over again with the next generation. We're taking it under serious consideration, and not with regard to the Septim pretenders only.

Your original concern, however, is not forgotten. We feel that prevention is the best medicine at this time, and accordingly, a covert retinue is being dispatched to Winterhold to defend the life of High King Ingolf at all costs. In our considerations of this retinue, your ability to travel to Bruma from the Reach under wartime conditions has not gone unnoted: you'll find your formal transfer in the second envelope.

"The Anvil Society?" said Lathenil wonderingly, shutting the door behind Shasten. "The Anvil Society still exists?"

The first of his Legion drills (such as they were, with such veterans as this Legion could boast) had tired him far less than he let on. But, lacking half a hand, Shasten (as he had just revealed) had been conscripted instead into the Anvil Society. Tulla Septim neither knew nor cared how he would be of use there, but no matter- he was to be of use, and it was at least understood that a mer with half a hand gone would make a poor soldier. He was here to discuss options with the chairmen.

Gogan smiled grimly. "It has occurred to Tulla that she may want manpower for purposes other than attending her person and extending her little empire. Rebuilding that hole in the wall she came through, to begin with. Putting up something seemly for the refugees still sleeping outside the castle dungeons, because their dirty blankets surely aren't it. And then, needless to say, she needs monuments. Her intent for that purpose is to mine the stone of Garlas Alatar, and that's also our purview – one craft is the same as another, so far as she's concerned."

"Good idea," muttered Maelona. "Mine Garlas Alatar for all its worth, then throw the rubble into the sea."

"Wish we could leave the wall down," said Shasten wistfully.

Lathenil shook his head firmly. "We must never say it can't go worse than what we have already. Surely not now; Umbacano's still prowling our doorstep, for all we know, ready to change us to Worm Thralls if we prefer. Remember, too – remember as you breathe: it truly couldn't have gone worse than the daedra, and yet..."

Shasten bowed his head.

"No matter what we do, Tulla will fall, and soon. It is her nature. But the next up-jumped Emperor down the pike..." Lathenil sighed, frustrated. "If there were some way to- I don't know- undermine the wall, for an invader of our choice-"

"But keep the rest out," added Shasten. "That... I think it might actually... if we splay the substructure... Leave a hidden door, to reach in and take an axe to the root- no, two, if we're not counting on another shot to that part of the wall..."

"It'll need integration," Maelona put in urgently, scanning the stair to be sure Lessa wasn't awake and watching. "Reinforce the whole wall at once, keep everyone too busy with their own corner to realize what's up."

"These are the walls that were penetrated by zombies wielding a battering ram," Gogan said. "A broader reinforcement is all in all called for."

"Kingmaker Wall," mused Shasten, and broke into a bluff grin. "Right. Know what to do with myself now. I'm your architect. Someone will still need to get word to an enemy siege camp, of course."

That summer saw Tulla's Legion establish what she called bases in the Reserve. In reality they were camps, and camps of the same kind that had plagued the Reserve for centuries. The duties were to accost any who came wittingly or not within the perimeter, to relieve them of their goods and also their lives if resistance was met, and to dispatch the spoils to their chief – the only real distinction was that their chief, unlike most, paid them in salary. Lathenil's horror of poison was the only stroke of good fortune, for, his hard-won skill at rough cooking once exposed, he was set to cook for the camp rather than to wrest, himself, the spoils that went into the pot.

It was not in his constitution to forget what they were about there, or to blot the sounds of ambush from his ears. But a bitter silence, he managed, and hid it best when he sang a melancholy song of Sunhold as he worked. He knew how little he could do about any of it. To desert the camp would be to forsake his vows to Maelona, and worse still, to abandon Shasten – and yet sometimes he so longed to fly in spite of knowing these things that he had to remind himself how soon the camp's cook might be missed. With no way of knowing what might be in the wine and ale that their victims carried, he always gave first share to Captain Bloodspear (a marauder to the bone; to look on his hard-weather features, that might have been his true name from birth). It was a generosity that helped to keep him in good standing with the new order, but alas, not one bottle had yet actually contained poison.

Toward the end of Sun's Height, there arrived at the base a night-grey Khajiit whom Lathenil had never met, but his name was Kazarr, and he had been found on the citizen-rolls of Anvil from before the war began. He was to be a scout and a messenger.

"The name is familiar," he said as he doled Kazarr his ladle of stew (the most prominent features tonight were corn and dried meat.) He had meant for the words to come out without any edge or weight, but he knew as soon as they left his lips that he had failed in both respects. Still he added, with still more palpable urgency: "When you lived in Anvil last, would you have been with the Fighter's Guild?"

Kazarr only stared up at him, a flat and wary look. But when the Khajiit was well settled in his bench, Lathenil heard him loudly telling his fellows that he had, indeed, been in the Fighters' Guild before the war – they were only lucky it hadn't been the Thieves' Guild – and, as an incidental part of his experience there, he knew every face to pass through the Waterfront and always liked the crowd best at the Foc's'le.

The moment the last Empress' bandit had had his last ladling, Lathenil cast his ladle away and strode up to where Kazarr sat.

"I am Lathenil. A son of Summerset, but late of Maelona's household. She desperately sought your aid, in the days before Ocato's death, and I bid you speak with her when next you bear a message to Anvil."

"This one will see what can be done," said Kazarr, in noncommittal tones Lathenil was all too familiar with.

But that night, the moment he left his tent for the latrines, he found Kazarr taking a single and deliberate stride toward him. It was that step alone that distinguished him from the darkness of the wood around.

"Forgive this one if it does not seek the old contract that might have been; this one is not too willing to bury one task with another. It is a time of rats that make nests of duties. But this one would surely hear from a frank mouth what has come in Anvil since it was away."

The same as has come over all the Empire, he did not say. The sword that fell on Ocato was not mentioned. His vow held, as vows must: it was Maelona's now to speak or be silent, to be truthful yet to keep the whirlwind and devastation on this side of the strait only.

He licked his lips.

"What came first to Anvil, after the war began – the Countess was murdered in her bed: they say at the will of the Captain of the Guard. Then the Gray Fox, or a man claiming to be such, took the castle from within. He was an able Count for a year and more, but he vanished when the Empress – Catulla the Wild is her right name – took us in siege. That is how we came to have a post in the Reserve, keeping a weather eye for hapless travelers and detached mercenaries. The city has become of a piece with this 'base', I assure you; all its captains, of a piece with Captain Bloodspear; its Empress, of a piece with the very storms upon Rumare."

"Does it say none serve Tulla Septim for honest cause?" The Khajiit seemed honestly perplexed.

"Well... perhaps I speak too hastily. I cannot imagine what honest cause there may be, but Captain Trast – chief of the castle guard – he's not like the others. His is more to serve than to gain. But as suited as you are to scouting, don't count on the fortune of serving in the castle. No – if you're one who can steal off to the center of the camp on your first night guarding, you're one who can steal away to the wilderness also. Better that than to be blooded at such a perimeter as this, dar'Khajiit."

Kazarr shook his head gently. "This counsel is meant only for the best, but it is as has already been said: this one does not bury one duty with another."

There must have been a moment the Khajiit was gone and night was left in his place, but Lathenil did not see it with his eyes.

He was, in any case, a messenger. He did not stay long enough to shed innocent blood, but was soon dispatched to Anvil bearing a chest of ill-gotten gold.

Captain Trast held up a hand the moment he gave Kazarr entry to his private quarters. "Let's have one thing clear before we go any further: I will not betray the Empress."

"A strange thing to request of a humble messenger."

Trast snorted as he put the officer's desk between them. "Half the servants that see me in this chamber have tried."

"The Empress has many faults," Kazarr said, "to which servants are not blind. Nor guard captains, this one should think."

The answer was a slam of the fist on Trast's desk. "And there's the inevitable next step in the conversation, when treachery is the subject. Yes, Oblivion take you. I am not blind. The Empress Tulla is a liar, a reveler amid want, a cruel mistress to her consorts, a tyrant in Anvil and a robber in the Reserve. She is (as the last one said) capricious enough to turn on me any moment – but if you were the sort to hold that over my head, you would have turned to Bloodspear or Cregan or someone else every bit as unfit as she is.

"But you turned to me, Khajiit. And I, Captain Trast of Castle Anvil, Ambassador of the Empire, will accept death unflinching at my Queen's command. I will, if you force my hand, die defending her today. The Empress Tulla is many things – but foremost among them is this." Trast looked him in the eye, imploringly. "She is the true heir to the Red Dragon Crown."

Though the conversation was going his way, it was proper that Kazarr feign discomfit. "How can it be so sure?"

"Honor forbids me to speak of it."

"It has declaimed its Queen in nearly every fashion a sovereign may be declaimed, yet honor forbids it to speak of its sovereign's noble birth?"

"I speak now of honor to the dead," said Captain Trast quietly.

Kazarr nodded. "It has had rumor of the Chorrol Mages' Guild, or some other place of ill repute not a long journey away."

It was as though Kazarr had doused Trast awake with a bucket of icy water. The question How did you know did not form on his lips, but the rest of his face told the same tale.

"This one has been long away from Anvil," Kazarr explained. "Caught in the Jeralls when the first warcamp's fire burned. This one answers now to the command of Cloud Ruler Temple, a brother of the Blades and a servant always of the Dragon blood. We will do no harm to this Empress – and the little sons, the Dragonborns that come after, they too must suffer no harm... not even at the hand of their queenly mother."

Captain Trast swallowed, looking a bit sick, and it was a long while before he answered.

"You'll forgive me if I don't take you at your word," he said at last. "Were I to leave some door ajar and happen to turn my face away, I might be the blackest of traitors and never know it. No, I must partake, I must ensure their safety myself- and should any harm befall the princes, however it seems to come, I will repay you and yours in blood."

He was a good ally, then.

The gatekeepers were under arrest and no doubt due for execution. The Empress had taken direct command of the castle guard, who had formed an iron perimeter about her. Her consort, it was rumored, was shut up in the barest guest-chamber again without food or water; perhaps this time to die of thirst. The whole force of Fort Siren and the Reserve base were dispatched in pursuit of Princes Pelagius and Tiberian, last seen leaving the gate atop the horse of Servus Trast: First Captain, Imperial Ambassador, and traitor to the realm.

The breach in the wall was left to the Anvil Society.

"I don't believe this," Maelona snapped at Analucia, guiding her through the shrunken gap in the outer wall. "I tasked you to watch the breach last night, not go through it and have a night at your farmstead. As you're sentenced to hard labor I shouldn't have done even that, and see how you repay-"

"I know, I know!" she said, pleadingly, the infant Tiberian in her arms, weeping and chafing for the coarseness of his infant-gown but still not actually making a sound. "Only it's been six months since last I laid eyes on them, I couldn't take it anymore- please, Mistress Maelona-"

(Laborers exchanged smirks and raised eyebrows: it was well-known that Shasten the architect had eyes for this stick-thin farmer's wife, and she had never thought to mention her prior obligations to him.)

"Didn't you say he had a horse?" said Maelona. (She pointed at Captain Trast, shaven, bleached and in peasant dress, but she addressed Analucia, having already established with Kazarr that Captain Trast would make a painfully bad actor.) "You might have been here before morning if you'd thought to use his horse!"

"Stolen," said Analucia. "A lone Khajiit, only last week, Erik says. I don't believe he had the best control of the thing, but if it's thrown him off, it still hasn't come back to the homestead. No matter." She looked down tenderly into Tiberian's eyes. "Enough of us have lost worse than that."

Maelona paused, eyes narrow, as though to weigh out the situation. "Fine. Your blunders are done. But the timing is bad as it could have been, because we have a crisis on our hands. Your husband looks like a good hand with a hammer, so I'll thank you for bringing him. Erik, stand watch, second rank. Analucia, you can watch the brats. Maybe they'll even be happy to see you at some point."

Trast reluctantly let Pelagius down to join the others, and Maelona strode to the next inner scaffolding muttering about the uselessness of conscripts.

Maelona found an excuse to drive Analucia's "family" offsite two hours later (Trast giving a genuinely tearful goodbye to Analucia, whose attentions had actually gotten a smile out of sad, silent little Prince Pelagius), there to link up with Kazarr at whatever spot he had designated – the abandoned Reserve camp, probably; it was a golden opportunity if Maelona ever saw one.

Maelona looked out after them – Tiberian slung over Trast's belly, Pelagius over his back, his hammer held very steady as he went. But her thoughts were of Kazarr.

Kazarr, one of the last people to see Maenlorn the innkeep alive. An agent of the Blades now, one of many tasked to ensure the war would not swallow another Era. He had come to her because the camp's cook, Lathenil, had indicated she might be trusted. As they spoke it became apparent that Kazarr was like a Sigil Stone in her palm; with a mere gesture she could place him, just so, and throw open the gates of Oblivion.

Throw them open – in the very heart of Cloud Ruler Temple, among men who really did think there was a chance of an Empire remade and were working to see it done.

All for Vienne's sake, of course.

Instead, she had left the Sigil Stone where it was, but a note beside it. "He wished me to say," she had told him, "that there's reason to suspect this war was devised in the Summerset Isles. That the Flowing Bowl had something to do with it.

"Look for me if this war does ever come to an end, and I can get you hard evidence. In the meantime, Kazarr – the war business. Let me help you with that."

It was no vaunting attempt at atonement. Certainly, it was not what Vienne would have done; if Vienne were alive, she would probably be charging through Alinor Palace at this moment, breaking all the appropriate heads. Yet Maelona felt, as Trast faded into the grasses, a peace she had not known since the night she had gone to sleep with a head filled with war-rumors from Kvatch and Bruma and Solstheim, and woke knowing Vienne to be dead. Without explanation, without fanfare, the cold weight was gone from her heart.

8 Last Seed, 4E13

It was a futile pursuit, in a hundred futile directions. Having at last no other tenable way to pursue Captain Trast and the princes, we were made to assail Fort Cookfire. Happily, Kvatch drove us back without harm, but our casualties are heavy. Hundreds are dead, and most of them are of Anvil. Gogan, who was at Fort Siren when the alarm went out, has lost his left leg above the knee, and a good-sized chunk of his face, to the burning pitch.

Maelona, as I write, is weeping in thanks for this: Tulla is in need of a new consort, and Gogan is now not to her taste. I wonder, myself, whether she would not prefer a consort without the legs to flee, but certainly his face is marred for the best.

For we begin to see there was, after all, a better nature in Catulla the Wild. It is now gone. She has lost her oldest and most faithful ally. The others are, I doubt not, sharpening their knives for her, and her trust, which was capricious, has disappeared entirely. She now trusts no one – and whom she does not trust, she will torment to the grave, if they do not drive her there first.

And still the only cause I have to falter in keeping my record is that I left it in the strongbox when called to the Reserve. I would sooner starve than have this chronicle in my hand and not fill it. Perhaps I really am mad as they say.

No word of Summerset. For three years and more, there has been no word, and I wonder that I even trouble myself to pen it down. Yet memory has its demands that must be sated, if we are to be whole. Whatever Anvil's griefs, there shall be votive candles for Uriel Septim on the twenty-seventh. And if Lathenil has forgotten his homeland, let him forget his breath, for he is already dead.

Tulla Septim was overthrown within the week – quite literally. She had been flung to her death from a parapet of Anvil Castle, and there were many competing claims as to who had done it. Her remaining lieutenants fell upon one another; the native guards of Anvil stood as far back from the fray as they could; and the last man standing found his victory short-lived in the face of a determined sea assault by Jean Renard, late of the Elder Council, having lost his pet pretender but not his zeal for conquest. Rebuilding the docks was small trial,

He was a tyrant, and an obtuse one, and he had smashed up Bravil, immediately on being forced from the Imperial City. But he was not wanton, nor haphazard, nor a madman or a bandit. It was something to go on.

In the Strait, he had shied from Summerset's ships of the line without troubling himself to fight. That was the next best thing to word from Summerset, and it was significant, in that they had neither attacked Renard's fleet in their superior strength, nor turned on one another. But try as Lathenil might, he could not divine from this short anecdote whether it was High Queen Faltana or Lord Arrinaro who commanded the ships.

"Both, maybe," suggested Shasten glumly, the twentieth time Lathenil picked over it. "The Queen hasn't got to like the Thalmor, to like the Rumare whirlwind less."

"They are not alternatives," said Lathenil. "Not even by a technicality. Those magical diagrams in your file would require a trained eye to read, but there are the waves of the Anguish. There is Red Mountain. I maintain the whirlwind is one of the things the Imperial City Liaisons were instructed to remain in order to perpetrate. Along, no doubt, with other sabotage of the current ruler of the Imperial City should his success be too great."

Shasten grunted, plainly wishing he'd said nothing at all.

"Who is in charge of the Imperial City?" piped in Lessa. Since Gogan's lost leg left him less able to stop her, she had begun inveigling herself into the political conversations.

"Still Eurian Vorius," said Shasten. "Messenger said so last Fredas."

While Anvil County was having its dalliance with banditry, the rest of Cyrodiil had evidently adopted a formal network of messengers. Under a banner of truce indicated by a parley flag or a white feather in their caps, they would stay to public squares, where spies and assassins were not liable to thrive, shout what news they had of the rest of Tamriel, and in return, take bread and hear the news of the city. Theoretically they were mendicants, but whenever a messenger entered Anvil's plaza, it was the whole city that surrounded him, crying for sustenance.

Kvatch was still closed to all comers, but then Savlian Matius was still, by all reports, the Count, so the total closure of the County was generally agreed to be good governance.

Bravil was claimed by no one, reduced to an ugly muddle of chaos within and without the castle.

The Countess Valga and her daughter, the Countess Caro, had reunited in Chorrol. The Countess Valga did not survive that reunion, and False Reuel no doubt gloated on her grave.

Cheydinhal, to no great surprise, had allied with Blacklight and declared itself a part of Morrowind. Along the way, they had apparently had to overthrow a contingent of Firstholders. Alas, that tantalizing detail was all the messenger had.

Antus the Ashdragon had disappeared, as everyone thought he would in the end, but hearteningly, it seemed his Solstheim advisors had not in any way anticipated it. The people of Anvil, no doubt remembering Pelagius and Tiberian, wished him well.

In northern Valenwood, meanwhile, a disastrous campaign showing that Gaius Septim was totally incapable of living the jungle was compounded by the sudden disappearance of his small daughter. Here, there was no particular reason to hope in her safety: the area was a known den of giant spiders.

There was something in the south of Hammerfell that resembled peace. Not under either Kratos – indeed, the Kratos of Stros M'kai had been vanquished by an Imperial with Crown family ties who had, somehow, gotten the southern Amirs to an agreement. The much-mistrusted Dunmer refugees of a place called "Mournhold-in-the-West" had played a key part in the fight, and were gladly received in southern Hammerfell at large.

In Windhelm, by contrast, the Dunmer refugees wanted no part of Stone-Fist's fight, and it was beginning to foster ill will.

In Winterhold, High King Ingolf was leading a charmed life, seemingly impervious to any attack an enemy Jarl could muster. As a result, he was growing exceedingly popular and looked liable to quench the Windhelm rebellion once and for all.

In the meantime, Erek Free-Winter, Count-Consort of Bruma, had been murdered as he walked beside his wife in procession down the Dragonpath. The assassin answered to Stone-Fist, but the Countess Carvain would not retaliate: she (and presumably, by extension, the Blades) now answered to Eurian Vorius, and Skyrim was beyond the bounds of the territory Eurian Vorius could hold. Someone had written a lay about it:

Then will you not avenge this deed
 With all your heart, and with all speed?
 And will you not o'erthrow that creed
 Stole all you loved away?

That creed that left my true-love dead,
 Millona in her Western bed,
 An Empire all in ruin red,
 Is overthrown today-
 For mine is still the castle wall,
 The Jerall lands that shall not fall,
 His child, who shall grow strong and tall,
 And peace in Nibenay.

The writer was, without question, of just that Vorian faction that had driven Renard from the City. Yet the Lay of Erek Free-Winter lingered, in a way that songs of this Interregnum seldom did. Jean Renard had a song, too, The Sons of Gemile, lately revised for the death of Armin, Renard's purported "son of Gemile," on the straits of Niben. (That he had died of swamp fever was tactfully left out.) It was even a good tune, jaunty and inescapably memorable. But it was not a song that found itself hummed in idle snatches throughout Anvil. Erek Free-Winter was such a song; Lathenil had even caught Shasten at it. And he knew, at some level more firm than reason, that Eurian Vorius had little to do with it, that the lay would be no less beloved if Eurian Vorius and the Countess of Carvain and her true-love's son all hanged together tomorrow.

For in spite of all the pretenders and warlords could do, the men of Anvil were broken on the walls of Kvatch, and cheered Kvatch. In spite of what songs of the moment they wrote in an attempt to inflame the blood of their men, Armin, "son of Gemile," was two years crowned, six months dead, and forgotten: but Martin, "son of Gemile," was one hour crowned, twelve years dead, and immortal.

Though the Empire was broken, Cyrodiil lived all about them. It lived in its tales and songs.

A memory came to Lathenil, then, a memory never before known in words, but disquieting as the silence in a house whose corners ought to be filled with the sounds of sleep: many were the songs of Summerset, but the Thalmor had no songs at all. They had speeches, and causes, and memoranda, and treatises, and called them food. The song in their souls was extinguished.

"You're the historian," said Shasten, the day the wall was completed (kingmaking elements and all; Jean Renard had little personal interest in masonry). "How do you like Renard's chances?"

Lathenil looked back from poking at the laborers' cookfire. "If you speak of reforging the Empire – no chance at all. Renard is a man on the run – a position that has done many well in the end, of course." (But Lathenil admitted that he, himself, was not one of those.) "But he is a man on the run who has lost his point, and everyone knows it. He's on the ebb. At best, he'll be a Count under one who does reforge the Empire; or die the ruler of Anvil, if the Empire isn't reforged. But more likely, he'll end up a bloodstain on some other glory-seeker's spear."

"Who would reforge the Empire, do you think?"

"Assuming too much, Shasten. Yet it looks more and more like a possibility. It really may happen within our lifetimes – or perhaps even Maelona's. There is a palpable feeling in the air, you can sense it – we want to be united again. They," he amended, appalled at himself.

"You don't want that?" Shasten's grin was knowing.

"Most assuredly, I do. But I am not of Cyrodiil and should not speak as though I were." He set himself to chopping the turnips. He had not only as good as called himself a Heartlander, but he had said, dispassionately, that there was no guarantee of stability within Maelona's lifetime – three decades. What could he do that would matter to the fate of Summerset, after three decades?

After a minute or so, Shasten pointedly cleared his throat.

"Er – what were we discussing?"

"The reforger."

"Yes, him. He would have to be one who can maintain the peace, and maintain it from one city to the next without being there in person. One far more magnetic than is required of a simple hereditary ruler, but one who remembers his own legacy."

"Thank you," said Shasten, and clapped him on the shoulder. "That settles it. Let's go to Hammerfell."

Lathenil's knife slipped and pierced his thumb. "What?"

"You've left only two possible Emperors. Vorius in Nibenay – I don't know how magnetic he is, but I'll trust you that the Thalmor aren't trying very hard to shake him, so he's probably not ideal. And then Mede in Hammerfell. They're saying now he got rid of Umbacano."

"And on the assumption that Mede in Hammerfell is capable to become the Emperor of a new dynasty in Tamriel." Lathenil held up his thumb to let the blood dry. "Will we do him more good in territory he has already claimed – or at Kingmaker Wall?"

"I'm thinking more of the good he would do us," said Shasten. "That is how kings are supposed to work."

"Then we no longer strive to do what we might. We abandon Summerset by physical necessity, but now we abandon the Empire despite being in it? Relinquish the only reason we are here? Shasten – should I depart, and anything befall Maelona, Kingmaker Wall will be only a wall. And if anything did befall her, I swore to care for Lessa."

"So much for not being a part of Cyrodiil,"

"O, Phynaster!" shouted Lathenil. "Think of Fiorana – if ever a ship from Summerset comes to the mainland again, she will be looking for us in..." He paused: so far as Fiorana last knew, Lathenil was in the Imperial City, conferring in the White-Gold Tower. "She'll be looking for you in Anvil. Nor will she expect communiques from Stros M'kai. What you speak of, Shasten, is desertion."

"I'm talking about what all decent fights are for, Lathenil. I'm talking about living the rest of my days in peace. With Analucia, who's already decided to take Galen to Hammerfell. And you've mentioned only your own responsibility. I am going with her."

"Analucia..." He loved her, then, enough to follow her straight out from the cabal. He had to be reminded of the obvious. "Shasten, you'll see her grow old and die."

Shasten nodded stiffly. "In Hammerfell, I probably will get to do that, yes."

He then turned on his heel, humming of peace in Nibenay.

"Shasten," he said.

"Hm?"

"I know you think song ought to be social. But don't let that stop you. Wherever you go - please - sing the songs we knew, the songs of Sunhold. No one else will know them."

For Lathenil knew the state he, and Shasten, would soon be in: the plight a lone exile of Summerset, without one kinsman to understand him at first hearing.

And he knew, too, that Shasten was quite right about the proper end purpose of a struggle. And he knew, still, that he must stay, and actually wage it.

By 4E15, Titus Mede, as Colovian scion of an esteemed Crown line, had solidified his control of Hammerfell. Despite latter-day efforts to soften his legacy, this was chiefly accomplished with much the same raw force as the other self-styled Emperors of the time. However, unlike other self-styled Emperors, he knew that means of acquisition to be one that would not last him forever, and so made an agreement with the regional Amirs (of whom the surviving were retained in an advisory capacity) that they would enjoy more sovereignty than ever before, if they would first aid Mede in the acquisition of a broader Empire. Contemporary documents strongly imply that all parties on the peninsula had assassins at the ready should Mede have broken his word. But he never intended to do so.

The final agreement, known as the Treaty, or First Treaty, of Stros M'kai, introduced two crucial mandates: firstly, that an Amir's creed would be the basis of the law of the Amirate, but secondly, that peaceful emigration between Amirates was never to be impeded. This balance struck a grudging peace within Hammerfell's borders, which has lasted for the remainder of the Fourth Era to date – a peace which, since the Siege of Hegathe, has been forged into perhaps the deepest unity any of the Tamrielic nations can boast.

It was this foresight and eye to governance that would characterize Titus Mede in his ventures to come, and would see the rebirth of an Empire to lasting completion.

-Giraud Gemaine, The Short Interregnum